Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Food and habitat of four Xenotilapia species (Teleostei, Cichlidae) in a sandy bay of northern Lake Tanganyika (Burundi)

The feeding ecology of four species of Xenotilapia (Teleostei, Cichlidae) from Lake Tanganyika was investigated by examining their intestine contents in three different habitats from two 24-h catch cycles. The fish were caught in a sandy bay 4 km north-west of Bujumbura (Burundi) during the dry season, from August until October 1993. Three different habitats were sampled: an area 600 m offshore at a depth of 15 m, a littoral zone near a reed bed (depth, 0–5 m), and an area near a sandy beach (depth, 5 m). The fish were most active in the early morning and at night, except for X. caudafasciata which was the most diurnal. X. ochrogenys was confined to the vicinity of the reeds, where few individuals of the other species were found, and prey comprised mainly ostracods, copepods and chironomid larvae (Tanytarsini). X. ornatipinnis and X. longispinis occurred in large numbers both at a depth of 15 m and near the sandy beach. X. ornatipinnis preyed mainly on copepods, oligochaetes, diatoms and chironomid larvae. X. longispinis had a wider range of temporal and spatial distribution compared with the other species and fed on copepods, ostracods and chironomid larvae (mainly Microchironomus spp.). X. caudafasciata (only caught at 15 m) fed mostly on profundal chironomid larvae (Tanypodinae and Microchironomus spp.). Trophic niche overlap between X. longispinis and X. caudafasciata appeared to be reduced through different activity patterns. Few intraspecific differences in food diet were found between sex and age groups.
Evaluation of different methods for gap filling of long‐term actual evapotranspiration time series measured by lysimeters

Terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) is the second largest water flux in the global water cycle. It can be measured with different techniques; weighable lysimeters can provide very accurate measurements, and some very long‐term time series exist. However, these lysimeter time series are affected by data gaps that must be filled to estimate actual ET totals and long‐term trends. In this paper, we explore four different gap‐filling methods: the potential ET‐method, the ratio method, the FAO‐based water balance method, and HYDRUS modeling. These gap‐filling methods were evaluated for three time series of actual ET measured by lysimeters and meteorological data of three European sites. Separate evaluations were made for the five driest and five wettest April–October periods to investigate whether the performance of the gap‐filling methods was affected by hydrological conditions. Series of random gaps were artificially created for the three time series, including gaps of four different lengths. Actual ET was estimated for these gaps with the gap‐filling methods, which were evaluated based on RMSE and mean bias error. The results show that the ratio method outperformed other methods for gap filling of lysimeter data for Basel (Switzerland), whereas the HYDRUS method outperformed other methods for Rheindahlen (Germany). For Rietholzbach (Switzerland), the different methods performed very similarly, except that the FAO method gives slightly larger RMSEs. The gap‐filling methods do not perform very differently for dry and wet conditions. The ratio method is recommended for filling smaller gaps, and the HYDRUS method is recommended for longer gaps of 30 d.
Prototyping of Axial Flux Permanent Magnet Motors

Axial flux motors have many advantages according to conventional motors. But, as it's known in general, the most important reason not to use axial flux motors as much as radial flux motors, is fabrication difficulties. In this paper, it's shown how to prototype an axial flux permanent magnet motor. Because of that, the difficulties are identified after prototyping job of the axial flux motor. Results that are caused by these difficulties are written. Physical advantages of axial flux motor type is established with this application. A single rotor, single stator axial flux permanent magnet brushless dc motor is produced to prove all of these.
COVID-19 AND PATIENTS UNDERGOING PHARMACOLOGICAL TREATMENTS FOR IMMUNE-MEDIATED INFLAMMATORY DISEASES: PROTOCOL FOR A RAPID LIVING SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE: We propose to systematically review the available evidence to evaluate if patients with immune mediated inflammatory diseases under pharmacological treatment with immunosuppressants, immunobiologics, Disease-Modifying Anti-Rheumatic Drugs (DMARD) or targeted synthetic DMARDs have better or worse outcomes when infected by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). This study is a protocol for our rapid living systematic review. METHODS: Protocol for a rapid living systematic review methodology following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) guidance. To conduct the rapid systematic review, we will employ abbreviated systematic review methods, including: not performing independent screens of abstracts and not searching grey literature. As this will be a living review, it will be continuously updated.
Physiological and biochemical characterization of metal-phytosiderophore transport in graminaceous species

Abstract Physiological studies on the uptake of metal-phytosiderophores in strategy II plants indicated that besides iron-phytosiderophores also other phytosiderophore-chelated metals can be taken up. To verify whether this reflects a property of the recently isolated Fe(Ill)-phytosiderophore transporter ZmYS1, a biochemical study was undertaken using growth complementation of yeast mutants and two-electrode voltage clamp in Xenopus oocytes. These approaches allowed to show that ZmYS1 indeed transports other phytosiderophore-chelated metals, such as Cu, Zn, Co, or Ni, as well as nicotianamine-complexes with Fe(II), Fe(III), and Ni(II). Moreover, it was shown that Fe(III)-DMA is cotransported with protons by ZmYS1, thus allowing substrate transport to be driven by the negative membrane potential. Despite the transport of a broad range of phytosiderophore-chelated heavy metals, neither Zn nor Mn or Cu deficiency led to an upregulation of ZmYS1 transcript levels in leaves or roots of maize. It is therefore concluded that the transporter ZmYS1 itself does not represent a component of the stress response to Zn-, Mn-, or Cu-limiting growth conditions, but that transport of these metal-phytosiderophores represents rather a side activity of ZmYS1.
Average Memory Access Time ReductionVia Adding Victim Cache

Memory hierarchy performance, specifically cache memory performance, is an increasingly important factor in the performance of modern computers. Victim caching is an improvement to miss caching by placing a small fully-associative cache between a cache and its refill path [1]. This paper presents simulation results of two level cache memory using victim caching, and examines the impact of using the victim cache in improving system performance. Many experiments were conducted and results were recorded, and the performance was illustrated using the percentage of reduction of the average memory access time (AMAT) metric. Experiments indicated that significant performance advantages can be gained through the use of victim caching.
Melanin plumage ornaments in both sexes of Northern Flicker are associated with body condition and predict reproductive output independent of age

ABSTRACT Melanin is a common pigment in the plumage of birds, but the extent to which its deposition in feathers is condition dependent and can be used as a reliable signal of quality and reproductive performance is still much debated. In addition, the existence and function of melanin ornaments in female birds or in birds of different age classes has rarely been addressed. We studied the size and color of 4 melanin ornaments in the Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus), a woodpecker, and found that the plumage patches became larger or darker with age class in both sexes. Consistent with the partly reversed sex roles of Northern Flickers and sexual selection in both sexes, several melanin ornaments were the same size in males and females and were correlated with body size or body condition. There was assortative pairing according to melanin ornaments when controlling for age, and 1 or more ornaments predicted laying date or clutch size of the pair independent of age. The results suggest that melanin ornaments in Northern Flickers may contain multiple messages and be used as cues of quality.
A Matrix Factorisation based Algorithm for Decentralised Personalisation

Nowadays Internet services are personalised by so-called recommender systems, which filter relevant content for a user. When user profiles and content are decentralised in order to enhance privacy, the recommender system has to work distributed as well. In this thesis, we evaluate a distributed recommender algorithm for decentralised Online Social Networks, where preferences of users are only shared between two parties at a time and without a central storage. Our results show that the quality of the recommendations is only 5% worse than recommendations by centralised recommender algorithms, thus the trade-off between accuracy and privacy through distribution is acceptable.
Extending Knowledge Bases Using Images

In this paper, we show how images can be converted to a structured semantic representation of their content. We achieve this by designing a mutual embedding space for images and knowledge graphs. From this mutual embedding space we can then obtain relationships between an image and known entities in a knowledge graph. Based on these obtained relationships, we show how labeled images can be used to add new concepts to the knowledge base. Furthermore, this mutual embedding helps visual recognition systems generalize better to unknown object classes.
Automatic estimation of cognitive load during robot-assisted gait training

Robot-assisted gait rehabilitation is becoming more and more common in patients with neurological impairments. Active patient participation in cognitively challenging t raining sessions are considered essential for the success of gai t rehabilitation [2], although objective assessments of cog nitive load are difficult to obtain during training. Questionnaires can be used to assess cognitive load, but only at discrete time points, often after training has ceased. Psychophysiological measurements have previously been used to infer to the psychological state of subjects, as every chang e in the psychological state has a physiological response [1] . Our objective was to determine if measurable physiological responses could be used to provide a continuous estimate of a subject’s cognitive load during robot-assisted gait training. We provided subjects with a virtual task during robot-assisted gait therapy to induce different levels of cognitive load. Physiological measurements in combination with machine learning techniques were used to objectively quantify the current cognitive load of the subject pe rforming the task in the virtual environment.
Enhancing e-learning with an interactive gamification analytics tool

Gamification is the application of game elements in non-game contexts. Current research shows that this approach has the potential to compensate low motivation and engagement in many areas, including e-learning. However, it is currently not clear in which way game elements should be applied to be effective. Gamification analytics is a discipline that deals with monitoring users’ interaction with gamification elements to evaluate and improve gamification implementations. Methods from this field can help to address open questions regarding the design of effective gamification applications. Besides supporting research in this area, gamification analytics can also support teachers and students in the e-learning context, as it provides insights into the influence of game elements on the learning process. Despite this potential, gamification analytics is rarely considered in the e-learning context. To bridge this gap, this thesis presents a gamification analytics tool for the Moodle LMS. This involves developing suitable metrics and designing a dashboard for presenting the analytics results. The tool has been applied in an online course with 38 participants and was evaluated with students, teachers and researchers. Manuel Gottschlich Enhancing E-Learning with an Interactice Gamification Analytics Tool 1
Dimensions and Effects of a Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement Between the EU and US

On behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, the Ifo Institute has conducted a study on the dimensions and effects of a free trade agreement between the EU and the US. This document presents an overview of the most important results. To anticipate the key findings: The study predicts that a comprehensive free trade agreement, which lowers non-tariff barriers (NTBs) significantly, increases German exports to the US. This is driven by a substantial boost to sales of medium-sized firms. Trade liberalization increases the average real wage by about 1.6%, while it leads to a marginally lower unemployment rate. The study does not expect a lasting negative impact on the international trading regime.
Scaling of Supportive Tissue Mass

The allometric relationship between supportive tissue mass and total body mass has been investigated in spiders, freshwater mollusks, and bird eggs. These results were compared with data available for birds, land mammals, whales, and a rattlesnake. The comparison indicates that the change in supportive tissue mass as a function of change in total body mass is surprisingly similar in all the organisms considered: a ten-fold change in total body mass is accompanied by a thirteen-fold change in supportive tissue mass. Supportive tissue makes up a larger fraction of the total mass in organisms with external skeletons than in those with internal skeletons. Within the latter group, the vertebrates, the amount of total mass is similar, except for the whales. When corrected for true body mass, whales contain smaller amounts of bone (16-26%) than do land mammals, a difference much less than previously reported. In no case did support tissue mass exceed 20 per cent of total body mass for mobile organisms.
Discourse as a Function of Event: Profiling Discourse Structure in News Articles around the Main Event

Understanding discourse structures of news articles is vital to effectively contextualize the occurrence of a news event. To enable computational modeling of news structures, we apply an existing theory of functional discourse structure for news articles that revolves around the main event and create a human-annotated corpus of 802 documents spanning over four domains and three media sources. Next, we propose several document-level neural-network models to automatically construct news content structures. Finally, we demonstrate that incorporating system predicted news structures yields new state-of-the-art performance for event coreference resolution. The news documents we annotated are openly available and the annotations are publicly released for future research.
How to Arrange Icons on Smartwatches? Investigating the Effect of Hexagonal Layouts on Menu Search

With small devices such as smartwatches emerging icons need to fit on smaller displays while users still need to be able to locate icons quickly. A way of arranging circular icons more space-efficiently is the hexagonal layout. This study investigated visual search performance of hexagonal icon arrangements at different density levels. Twenty-four participants performed known-item searches on icon menus in an online experiment using their own smartphone. These menus varied along four dimensions: (1) whether icons were arranged in hexagonal or in a grid layout, (2) the amount of space between icons, (3) the number of colour distractors, and (4) whether the menu stayed the same or changed with every trial. Results show that the effect of layout depends on the icon density and number of colour distractors. Hexagonal layouts perform better than grid layouts when the space between icons is zero and five colour distractors are present. When icons were further apart and one colour distractor was present no difference between layouts was found. Besides, the study confirmed previous findings on the effects of colour distractors and location learning. Participants were faster when fewer icons in the menu had the same colour as the target. With more practice with the same menu participants became increasingly faster finding icons. The findings imply that icons on small devices such as smartwatches should be arranged in a hexagonal layout.
Diurnal variations in absorption and translocation of a ferrated phytosiderophore in barley as affected by iron deficiency

Abstract The release of phytosiderophore (PS) from roots of Fe-deficient graminaceous plants follows a distinct diurnal rhythm with maximum release rates occurring usually 3 to 4 hours after the onset of light. However, it remains to be determined whether absorption of the PS-Fe3+ complex shows a diurnal rhythmicity similar to that of PS release, Barley plants grown with or without 10 µM FeEDTA for 7 days were fed with ferreted PS (10 µM labelled with 59Fe) at 4-h intervals to study the diurnal variations in the absorption and transloca tion of 59Fe, The absorption of 59Fe, irrespective of the Fe nutritional status of the plants, was higher during the day and lower during the night but did not show any peak throughout the day-night cycle. On the other hand, the translocation of 59Fe into shoots of Fe-deficient plants was lower than that of Fe-sufficient plants, while the Fe nutritional status of the plants did not affect the absorption of 59Fe by roots, The formation of root apoplastic 59Fe was lower during the day and higher during the night, regardless of the Fe nutritional status of plants. Our results showed that the absorption of the PS-Fe3+ complex by roots did not follow the PS release pattern.
Do Partisans Make Riskier Financial Decisions When their Party is in Power?

This article studies the effect of an electoral victory or loss on partisans’ economic behaviors. Using a novel dataset of searches for cars, houses, and stock among over 50,000 searchers with known partisanship and demographics, as well as New York car registration data, we investigate the consequences of the 2016 election on partisan purchasing behavior. We find that Democrats were significantly less likely to search for cars and houses after Trump’s victory, and they registered fewer new cars than did Republicans. These findings were not explained by broader changes in search patterns, nor were they the result of differential partisan concerns about their personal losses from the Republican administration’s economic or healthcare policies. These findings show that partisans are likely to engage in partisan motivated reasoning about the economy following an electoral loss, with significant behavioral consequences.
Evaluating Inverted Files for Visual Compact Codes on a Large Scale

The Bag-of-Words (BoW) or bag-of-features approach is the most widely adopted method for ﬁnding images that represent the same object or location given an image as a query and a large set of images as dataset. One of the reasons for the BoW success is that oﬀ-the-shelf text search engines can be used to build a distributed and robust system. Very recently, Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) have been shown to yield higher eﬀectiveness than BoW. However, VLAD cannot be used in place of BoW on top of text search engines given that it is not a sparse vector of occurrence counts. In this paper, we propose combining a Surrogate Text Representation (SRT) approach with VLAD allowing indexing with traditional text search engines. While previous comparisons between VLAD and BoW were conducted using distinct indexing techniques, we show that the VLAD-SRT combination signiﬁcantly outperforms BoW on the very same hardware and software infrastructure. The experiments show that VLAD-SRT outperforms BoW and that SRT does not signiﬁcantly reduce the eﬀectiveness of VLAD.
WHISPER: A Tool for Run-Time Detection of Side-Channel Attacks

High resolution and stealthy attacks and their variants such as Flush+Reload, Flush+Flush, Prime+Probe, Spectre and Meltdown have completely exposed the vulnerabilities in Intel’s computing architecture over the past few years. Mitigation techniques against such attacks are not very effective for two reasons: 1) Most mitigation techniques protect against a specific vulnerability and do not take a system-wide approach, and 2) they either completely remove or greatly reduce the performance benefits of resource sharing. In this work, we argue in favor of detection-based protection, which would help apply mitigation only after successful detection of the attack at runtime. As such, detection would serve as the first line of defense against such attacks. However, for a detection based protection strategy to be effective, detection needs to be highly accurate, to incur minimum system overhead at runtime, should cover a large set of attacks and be capable of early stage detection, i.e., at the very least before the attack is completed. We propose a machine learning based side-channel attack (SCA) detection tool, called WHISPER that satisfies the above mentioned design constraints. WHISPER uses multiple machine learning models in an Ensemble fashion to detect SCAs at runtime using behavioral data of concurrent processes, that are collected through hardware performance counters (HPCs). Through extensive experiments with different variants of state-of-the-art attacks, we demonstrate that the proposed tool is capable of detecting a large set of known attacks that target both computational and storage parts in computing systems. We present experimental evaluation of WHISPER against Flush+Reload, Flush+Flush, Prime+Probe, Spectre and Meltdown attacks. The results are provided under variable system load conditions and stringent evaluation metrics comprising detection accuracy, speed, system-wide performance overhead and distribution of error (i.e., False Positives & False Negatives). Our experiments show that WHISPER can detect a large and diverse attack vector with more than 99% accuracy at a reasonably low performance overhead.
Intuition comes with experience

Intuitive interaction utilizes stored experiential knowledge (Blackler et al., 2007a). Several theorists focus on the impact of prior knowledge on intuitive interaction (e.g. Hurtienne & Israel, 2007; Baylor, 2001). However, most empirical investigations look at experiential knowledge that was gained through past experience of some product features under investigation (e.g. Blackler et al., 2010). Hence these experiments do not assure that subjects in the non-experiential group cannot build upon some prior knowledge that was not manipulated in the experiment. In the present empirical investigation this paradigm was extended. Now three groups were tested on a simple multi-touch interface: adult participants with and without prior experience and children as absolutely naive users. Results show that children are generally slower in performance compared to adults. Hence, in line with other research (e.g. Blackler et al., 2010) it can be concluded that prior experience alters intuitive behaviour. In contrast to these studies we claim that there might be different types of prior knowledge, maybe even different types of intuition (see also Baylor, 2001).