Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial Distributions of Picoplankton and Viruses in the Changjiang Estuary and Its Adjacent Sea Area during Summer

Simultaneous determination of picoplankton (i.e., Synechococcus spp., Prochlorococcus spp., picoeukaryotes, and heterotrophic bacteria) and viruses in the Changjiang (Yangtze) River estuary and its adjacent sea area was made using flow cytometry during a cruise in June 2006. The results show that Prochlorococcus in all samples was below detectable level. The abundances of Synechococcus, picoeukaryotes, heterotrophic bacteria, and viruses ranged from 0.00 to 1.22×108 cell L−1, 0.01×106 to 1.42×107 cells L−1, 8.40×107 to 4.29×109 cells L−1, and 1.20×107 to 1.06×1010 particles L−1, respectively. The determined picoplankton groups and viruses distinctly increased with the distance off the estuary and where the maximum abundance that occurred in these groups was different somewhat due to the individual sensitivity to environmental changes. Viral abundance showed a positive correlation with salinity and negative correlations with turbidity and inorganic nutrient concentrations. Positive linear relations were found between Synechococcus, heterotrophic bacteria, and viruses.
ACUTE EFFECT OF QUADRICEPS STRETCHING ON VERTICAL GROUND REACTION FORCE, MUSCLE ACTIVITY AND VERTICAL JUMP PERFORMANCE

The aim of this study was to analyze the acute effects of stretching on jumping performance (vertical velocity of the center of mass), vertical ground reaction force (peak force and rate of force development) and electromyography (EMG) of the vastus lateralis (VL) during the countermovement jump (CMJ). Nineteen male individuals performed the CMJ test before and after one quadriceps stretching session. This session consisted of four 20-second repetitions of passive static stretching of quadriceps. The results indicated a significant reduction in the rate of force development, a reduction in the integrated EMG during the eccentric phase and an increase in duration of the concentric phase. However, these alterations did not affect the vertical jump performance.
Effect of defoliation on grass growth. A quantitative review

The diversity of responses of individual grasses to defoliation created a controversy about 15 years ago, which still needs clarification. We quantitatively assessed the evidence of defoliation effects on individual grass growth, addressing two main questions: 1) what is the average and variability of the effect of defoliation on plant growth? and 2) what are the associated conditions accounting for the diversity of effects? Regarding the first question, the results showed a negative overall effect of defoliation on plant growth and substantial variability in the defoliation responses of different plant components. There was an intermediate negative effect on total production (which included clipped-off biomass), a large negative effect on final live biomass at harvest, and a minimal effect on root biomass. Regarding the second question (conditions accounting for the diversity of effects), defoliation intensity had no effect on the response to defoliation, but both time for recovery from the last defoliation and the period of time between defoliation events significantly decreased the negative effect of defoliation. Nitrogen availability also altered the effect of defoliation, as plants grown at highest nitrogen levels were more negatively affected by clipping than plants with no supplementary addition of nitrogen. These results indicate that the magnitude of defoliation response by an individual plant differs among plant compartments and this response is modulated by other factors, such as time for recovery after defoliation, and nutrient availability. In general, the effect of defoliation on individual plant production was more negative than reported effects of grazing on ecosystem primary production.
The Wolfe epsilon steepest descent algorithm

In this article, we study the unconstrained minimization problem (P ) min ff(x) : x 2 Rg : where f : Rn ! R is a continously di¤erentiable function. We introduce a new algorithm which accelerates the convergence of the steepest descent method. We study the global convergence of the new algorithm, named the Wolfe epsilon steepest descent algorithm, by using Wolfe inexact line search ([35],[36]). In [16], [33], Benzine, Djeghaba and Rahali studied the same problem by using exact and Armijo inexact line serachs. Numerical tests show that Wolfe Epsilon steepest descent Algorithm accelerates the convergence of the gradient method and is more successful than Armijo Epsilon Steepest descent, Exact Epsilon steepest descent algorithm and Steepest descent algorithm. Mathematics Subject Classi cation: 90C26; 65H10
Hepatoprotective Effect of Combination of Curcuma domestica Val and Phyllanthus niruri Linn Against ParacetamolInduced Liver Damage in Wistar Rats

The present study was carried out to evaluate the hepatoprotective effect of the combination of Curcuma domestica Val and Phyllanthus niruri Linn extract against paracetamol-induced liver injury in Wistar rats. The different groups of animals were administered with vehicle (Na CMC 0.5%), sylimarin (100 mg/kg BW), C. domestica (100 mg/kg BW), P. niruri (200 mg/kg BW), combination of C. domestica and P. niruri (75:50; 50:100; and 25:150 in mg/kg BW) for 7 consecutive days. Thirthy minutes after last treatment all groups were terated with paracetamol (2.5 g/kg BW). The effect of sylimarin, C.domestica, P. niruri, and its combinations on serum transaminase (ALT, AST), alkaline phosphates (ALP), bilirubin, and total protein were measured in paracetamol induced hepatotoxicity in rats. Further, the effects of the extracts or combinations of extracts on liver gluthatione content, lipid peroxidation (LPO), and catalase (CAT) were estimated. Sylimarin, C.domestica, P. niruri, and its combinations produced significant (P<0.05, P<0.01, P<0.001) hepatoprotective effect by decreasing the activity of serum enzymes, bilirubin, and lipid peroxidation and significantly (P<0.05, P<0.01, P<0.001) increased the levels of total protein, CAT, and GSH. The optimum combination dose of C. domestica and P. niruri was 75:50 in mg/kg BW compare to the extracs alone. It was suggested that the combination of C. domestica and P. niruri showed significant hepatoprotective effect in paracetamol-induced liver injury in Wistar rats.
Antimicrobial and antioxidant activities of Kingiodendron pinnatum (DC.) Harms and Humboldtia brunonis Wallich: endemic plants of the Western Ghats of India

The leaf and stem extracts of two endemic plants, Kingiodendron pinnatum (DC.) Harms and Humboldtia brunonis Wallich of the family Fabaceae were subjected to phytochemical analysis, antimicrobial and antioxidant assay. Phytochemicals such as phenols, flavonoids, tannins, glycosides and terpenes were present in both plants. The antibacterial and antifungal activity assays were carried out using the disc diffusion method. Antioxidant activity was carried out using DPPH radical scavenging and reducing power assays with ascorbic acid as the standard. The extracts inhibited six bacterial strains and one fungal strain. Among the solvent extracts, the methanol extract was the most effective against the tested microorganisms and it also exhibited the highest antioxidant activity. Total phenols and flavonoids were determined using the Folin-Ciocalteau and aluminium chloride methods and correlated with the antioxidant activity. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.4038/jnsfsr.v42i4. 7729 J.Natn. Sci.Foundation Sri Lanka 2014 42 (4): 307-313
SSVEP-Based BCIs

This chapter describes the method of flickering targets, eliciting fundamental frequency changes in the EEG signal of the subject, used to drive machine commands after interpre - tation of user’s intentions. The steady-state response of the changes in the EEG caused by events such as visual stimulus applied to the subject via a computer screen is called steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP). This feature of the EEG signal can be used to form a basis of input to assistive devices for locked in patients to improve their quality of life, as well as for performance enhancing devices for healthy subjects. The contents of this chapter describe the SSVEP stimuli; feature extraction techniques, feature classification techniques and a few applications based on SSVEP based BCI.
Content Management and Hashtag Recommendation in a P2P Social Networking Application

In this thesis focus is on developing an online social network application with a Peer-to-Peer infrastructure motivated by BestPeer++ architecture and BATON overlay structure. BestPeer++ is a data processing platform which enables data sharing between enterprise systems. BATON is an open-sourced project which implements a peer-to-peer with a topology of a balanced tree. We designed and developed the components for users to manage their accounts, maintain friend relationships, and publish their contents with privacy control and newsfeed, notification requests in this social networking application. We also developed a Hashtag Recommendation system for this social networking application. A user may invoke a recommendation procedure while writing a content. After being invoked, the recommendation procedure returns a list of candidate hashtags, and the user may select one hashtag from the list and embed it into the content. The proposed approach uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to derive the latent or hidden topics of different content. LDA topic model is a well developed data mining algorithm and generally effective in analyzing text documents with different lengths. The topic model is further used to identify the candidate hashtags that are associated with the texts in the published content through their association with the derived hidden topics. We considered different methods of recommendation approach for the procedure to select candidate hashtags from different content. Some methods consider the hashtags contained in the contents of the whole social network or of the user self. These are content-based recommendation techniques which matching user’s own profile with the profiles of items. Some methods consider the hashtags contained in contents of the friends or of the similar users. These are collaborative filtering based recommendation
Optimizing the Computation of Eigenvalues Using Graphics Processing Units

În această lucrare descriem mai întâi, pe scurt, câteva aspecte matematice referitoare la calcularea valorilor proprii, urmate de o abordare originală: un algoritm de bisecţie util în calculul valorilor proprii pentru matrici tridiagonale simetrice de dimensiuni arbitrare, folosind capabilităţile computaţionale ale celor mai noi unităţi de procesare grafică ce înglobează arhitectura de calcul paralel Compute Unified Device Architecture. Originalitatea abordării din această lucrare constă în optimizarea implementării algoritmului, bazată pe îmbunătăţirea gestionării memoriei partajate şi pe eficientizarea algoritmului de scanare. Astfel, dezvoltatorii de aplicaţii pot folosi puterea imensă de calcul paralel oferită de unităţile de procesare grafică de ultimă generaţie.
Biocomplexity in large tree mortality: interactions between elephant, fire and landscape in an African savanna

Th e vegetation dynamics of the savanna ecosystem are driven by complex interactions between biotic and abiotic factors, and thus are expected to exhibit emergent properties of biocomplexity. We explore the relative importance of static and dynamic drivers in explaining the patterns of mortality of large trees in the Kruger National Park, South Africa. Data on large trees were collected from 22 transects in April 2006, and these transects were re-sampled in November 2008. Of the 2546 individually-identifi ed trees that were re-sampled, 290 (11.4%) died in the interim. We tested several competing hypotheses with varying levels of complexity, and found that mortality of large trees was aff ected mainly by both static (geophysical and landscape characteristics) and dynamic (elephant damage and fi re) factors that were either additive or interactive in their eff ects. Elephant damage was the main predictor of tree mortality, but fi re also played an important role depending on the landscape type. Other static variables such as position-on-slope, height below canopy, and altitude had weak eff ects in explaining tree mortality. Th ese results indicate that keystone features such as large trees, show diff erential vulnerability to mortality that is landscape-specifi c. For conservation managers, this implies that the dynamic drivers (elephant and fi re) of tree mortality have to be managed at the specifi c landscape-level. We suggest that this emergent biocomplexity in the spatial and temporal patterns of large tree mortality is not unique to the African savannas, but is likely widespread across heterogeneous landscapes.
A Resonance Tunable and Durable Lspr Nano-Particle Sensor: Al 2 O 3 Capped Silver Nano-Disks

Localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) biosensors are employed to detect target biomolecules which have particular resonance wavelengths. Accordingly, tunability of the LSPR wavelength is essential in designing LSPR devices. LSPR devices employing silver nano-particles present better efficiencies than those using other noble metals such as gold; however, silver nano-particles are easily oxidized when they come in contact with liquids, which is inevitable in biosensing applications. To attain both durability and tunabilty in a LSPR biosensor, this paper proposes alumina (AL2O3) capped silver nano-disks. It is shown that through controlling the thickness of the cap, the LSPR resonance frequency can be finely tuned over a wide range; and moreover, the cap protects silver nano-particles from oxidation and high temperature.
TRANSCRIPTOMIC ANALYSIS OF MELANOMA CELLS EXTRACTED FROM DIFFERENT SITES OF THE PRIMARY TUMOR

Introduction.Intratumor heterogeneity is a characteristic feature for most malignant tumors, including cutaneous melanoma. This property represents one of the main obstacles for effective targeted therapy, due to the different sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents on various tumor cells subclones. Treatment of malignant tumors requires an individual approach to choose the most appropriate treatment regimen.The purposeof the study was to evaluate differences in melanoma tissue samples obtained from different parts of one patient’s primary tumor at the transcriptomic level.Material and Methods. Melanoma cell cultures obtained from both central and peripheral parts of the primary tumor of two patients were used in the study.Results. Subclones from different parts of the first patient’s tumor were similar, whereas the second patient demonstrated significant differences at the transcriptomic level (in 2953 transcripts out of 48226). In the cells of the central zone of the second patient’s tumor, an increase in mRNA of the genes encoding proteins associated with tumor-specific immune response, as well as ABC-family transport proteins and cytokine signaling molecules, were noted. In the cells from the peripheral area of the same tumor, a more intensive transcription of genes encoding extracellular matrix and inflammatory response proteins was observed. Taken all round, the differences between the subclones of the second patient’s cells were relevant to some signaling cascades playing a leading role in oncogenesis (MAPK, PI3K-Akt-mTOR, VEGFA-VEGFR2, etc.). Conclusion. The study allowed evaluation of differences between cancer cells within a tumor at the transcriptional level in order to search for further approaches to personalized melanoma therapy.
Temporal consciousness and confabulation: Escape from unconscious explanatory idols

‘How did your disease begin? ’ asks the doctor to patient CA ‘It started with a strong sore throat… I couldn’t swallow anything… so I couldn’t go to school… my mother called the doctor’, answers the patient. ‘How did your disease begin? ’ asks the same doctor to another patient, CD ‘It started with a strong headache… one morning I woke up with a strong headache and then I started throwing up and I remember I couldn’t keep my eyes open’, answers the patient. One of these two patients is confabulating, whereas the other one is reporting the memory of an event she has really experienced. But who is confabulating, CA or CD? As you can see, there is nothing in the patients’ reports that can help you to tell which patient is confabulating. However, if I tell you that CA is a 67-year-old woman with Korsakoff’s syndrome (Dalla Barba et al., 1990) and that CD is a 33-year-old woman reporting the onset of her Herpes meningitis, things become much more clear and these additional pieces of information allow you to identify CA as the confabulating patient. This is not much because you know that patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome confabulate, but rather because you know that it is quite unlikely that somebody who is 67-year-old goes to school and has a mother who calls the doctor for her sore throat. In addition you know that headache, vomit, and photophobia are common in the onset of Herpes meningitis, which suggests you that CD is not confabulating. Nevertheless, CA’s and CD’s reports have something in common. They are semantically appropriate (Dalla Barba, 1993), in the sense that a hypothetical observer not familiar with the patients’ history could hardly tell whether their reports are confabulatory or not. In other words, the semantic structure of CA’s and CD’s memories is internally consistent, but the content of CA’s
GENETIC CHARACTERIZATION OF SOUTH AMERICA DOMESTIC GUINEA PIG USING MOLECULAR MARKERS

Twenty specific primers were used to define the genetic diversity and structure of the domestic guinea pig (Cavia porcellus). The samples were collected from the Andean countries (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia). In addition, samples from Spain were used as an out-group for topological trees. The microsatellite markers were used and showed a high polymorphic content (PIC) 0.750, and heterozygosity values indicated microsatellites are highly informative. The genetic variability in populations of guinea pigs from Andean countries was (He: 0.791; Ho: 0.710), the average number of alleles was high (8.67). A deficit of heterozygotes (FIS: 0.153; p<0.05) was detected. Through the analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) no significant differences were found among the guinea pigs of the Andean countries (FST: 2.9%); however a genetic differentiation of 16.67% between South American populations and the population from Spain was detected. A poor genetic structure was found among the Andean countries with high genetic variability. The results suggest that it is necessary to take urgent measures to prevent further genetic erosion of native guinea pigs in the Andean countries with plans for recovery and conservation of this important genetic resource in South America.
Does Bicameralism Promote Stability? Inter-institutional Relations and Coalition Formation in the European Parliament

In the European Parliament, different coalitions form from one vote to the next. To understand the process of coalition formation it is necessary to consider the inter-institutional context in which decisions are made. This paper develops hypotheses regarding how changes in the relations between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers affect coalition formation in the European Parliament. The hypotheses are tested using roll-call data from the fifth parliamentary term. In line with expectations, it is found that coalition patterns are more consistent in relation to final decisions under the co-decision procedure (when both institutions come to an agreement) than they are under the consultation procedure. Furthermore, the closer relations between the institutions have increased the importance of the median party group on the left–right dimension in coalition formation.
Faciliter le déplacement des aveugles avec une carte numérique et une interface vocale

Le recepteur GPS permet a la personne de se localiser sous certaines conditions de visibilite des satellites et de reception de leurs signaux. Lorsque ces conditions ne sont pas remplies, il est necessaire d'utiliser d'autres capteurs pour saisir le deplacement de la personne et son orientation. Ce mecanisme est appele navigation a l'estime (Dead Reckoning).
Decision support systems to support international students: Potential for practice?

International students now comprise a significant group within Australian higher education but many must overcome difficulties related to initial acceptance by the institution of their choice and enrolment in an appropriate course. The need to extend visas to permit completion or the application process for permanent resident status may also be important to the individual student. Decision support systems (DSS) for customer relationship management (CRM) have been suggested as a means of utilising information technologies for admission procedures in higher education (McClea & Yen 2005). This paper will consider whether students may be defined as customers and reflect upon the possible introduction of a decision support system to facilitate the admission and satisfactory progress of international students through their courses. It will focus upon the experiences of international students and academic staff in the School of Computer and Information Science of Edith Cowan University.
MODELLING OF MATURATION SYSTEMS FOR PORCINE OOCYTE in vitro

A system of extracorporal maturation of growing and fully grown oocytes have been developed on the basis of research of a role of structural elements of porcine follicles in formation of mature oocytes and a preventive estimation of the functional status of oocytes (BCB-test). The cultivation of oocytes in the developed system allows to receive till 45 % of embryos at the stages of late morulae and blastocysts.