Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The aridity index governs the variation of vegetation characteristics in alpine grassland, Northern Tibet Plateau

The vegetation dynamic (e.g., community productivity) is an important index used to evaluate the ecosystem function of grassland ecosystem. However, the critical factors that affect vegetation biomass are disputed continuously, and most of the debates focus on mean annual precipitation (MAP) or temperature (MAT). This article integrated these two factors, used the aridity index (AI) to describe the dynamics of MAP and MAT, and tested the hypothesis that vegetation traits are influenced primarily by the AI. We sampled 275 plots at 55 sites (five plots at each site, including alpine steppe and meadow) across an alpine grassland of the northern Tibet Plateau, used correlation analysis and redundancy analysis (RDA) to explore which key factors determine the biomass dynamic, and explained the mechanism by which they affect the vegetation biomass in different vegetation types via structural equation modelling (SEM). The results supported our hypothesis, in all of the environmental factors collected, the AI made the greatest contribution to biomass variations in RDA , and the correlation between the AI and biomass was the largest (R = 0.85, p < 0.05). The final SEM also validated our hypothesis that the AI explained 79.3% and 84.4% of the biomass variations in the alpine steppe and the meadow, respectively. Furthermore, we found that the soils with higher carbon to nitrogen ratio and soil total nitrogen had larger biomass, whereas soil organic carbon had a negative effect on biomass in alpine steppe; however, opposite effects of soil factors on biomass were observed in an alpine meadow. The findings demonstrated that the AI was the most critical factor affecting biomass in the alpine grasslands, and different reaction mechanisms of biomass response to the AI existed in the alpine steppe and alpine meadow.
Intergenerational Wealth Mobility: Evidence from Danish Wealth Records of Three Generations∗

We provide empirical evidence on the intergenerational mobility of wealth using administrative wealth records of three generations of Danes. Our preferred estimate for the intergenerational wealth elasticity (IWE) is 0.2 (and 0.27 when limiting attention to those with positive wealth only). We construct a theoretical framework that allows for understanding the variability of the IWE across time, samples, and countries. Our framework highlights that the IWE can be interpreted as the weighted average of elasticities corresponding to different sources of intergenerational correlation that may in principle vary in importance across different contexts. However, we find that the IWE is surprisingly stable when estimated for different age groups, when using parents-grandparents pairs instead of children and parents, when eliminating bequests, and when explicitly shutting down many of the potential channels behind intergenerational wealth mobility, including income and education. This suggests that parental wealth is a suffi cient statistic for the channels that we control for and those that vary across different samples, that is, the effect of these parental characteristics on wealth of children can be summarized by their effect on wealth of parents. By exploiting information for three generations we find that the standard child-parents elasticity severely underestimates the long-term persistence in the formation of wealth across generations. We show that either the true elasticity is significantly underestimated or that grandparental characteristics matter beyond information incorporated in parental characteristics. We also find evidence supporting the presence of a persistent dynastic component. ∗We thank Søren Leth-Petersen for helpful discussion. Benjamin Ly Serena provided excellent research assistance. Financial support from WEST is gratefully acknowledged. Contact information: simon.h. boserup@econ.ku. dk, wojciech.kopczuk@columbia.edu, ctk@econ.ku. dk.
Immune Cells in Renal Disease : Regulatory T Cells in Nephrocalcinosis and TH 9 Cells in Nephrotoxic Serum Nephritis submitted

3 GENERAL INTRODUCTION . 5 THE IMMUNE SYSTEM – AN OVERVIEW. 5 Innate immunity . 5 Soluble players in innate immunity . 6 The adaptive immunity . 9 RENAL DISEASE . 12 Epidemiology and impact of chronic kidney disease . 12 Disturbances in phosphorus metabolism in chronic kidney disease: pathogenesis and impact . 13 Glomerular disease . 15 Anti-glomerular basement membrane disease . 18 PART 1 REGULATORY T CELLS IMPROVE NEPHROCALCINOSIS BUT NOT DYSTROPHIC CARDIAC CALCINOSIS IN DBA/2 MICE . 2
Rapid Assessment of Speci ® c Leaf Area and Leaf Nitrogen in Peanut ( Arachis hypogaea L . ) using a Chlorophyll

The present study investigates the potential use of a hand-held portable SPAD chlorophyll meter for rapid assessment of speci®c leaf area (SLA) and speci®c leaf nitrogen (SLN), which are surrogate measures of transpiration eciency (TE) in peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.). The eects of sampling (leaf position, time of sampling and leaf water status) and climatic factors (solar radiation and vapour pressure de®cit, VPD) on SLA and SPAD chlorophyll meter reading (SCMR) were studied in a range of peanut genotypes grown under ®eld and greenhouse conditions. The correlation between SLA and SCMR was signi®cant (r)0.77, P < 0.01) for the second leaf from the apex but the correlation declined for leaves sampled from lower nodal positions. The diurnal ̄uctuation in SLA ranged from )20 % to +10 %, whereas SCMR was relatively unaected by these diurnal changes. Solar radiation and VPD during the sampling period had a signi®cant in ̄uence on the relationship between SLA and SCMR, largely through their eects on SLA. However, standardization of SLA for these environmental factors signi®cantly improved the relationship between SLA and SCMR from )0.50 to )0.80 (P < 0.01), suggesting that, when protocols for leaf sampling and SLA measurements are followed, SCMR can be a surrogate measure of SLA. There were signi®cant relationships between SLN and SCMR (r 0.84, P < 0.01) and SLN and SLA (r)0.81, P < 0.01). These signi®cant interrelationships amongst SLA, SLN and SCMR suggested that SCMR could be used as a reliable and rapid measure to identify genotypes with low SLA or high SLN (and hence high TE) in
A Low Latency cross Layer based Scheduling Technique for Wireless Mesh Networks

The growth of smart phone technology have resulted in increased number of multimedia application which requires low latency service delivery and coverage which the existing wireless technology could not handle due to power limitation imposed by Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) regulatory body. To address this wireless mesh networks (WMNs) was standardized by task group S to support multihop based communication. Reducing packet delivery latency in existing multihop WMN is one of key issues that need to be addressed. The existing methodology induces high data delivery latency due to inability to address the hidden and exposed node problem in multihop WMN environment. Many approaches have been developed to optimize the Medium Access Control (MAC), hidden node and exposed node detection algorithm in recent time to better utilize slot and reduce latency. The existing method adopts contention based method to address the collision caused by the hidden node problems which result in improper utilization of slot, which result in bandwidth wastages. Node classification technique for reutilizing slot will aid in improving network performance by reducing latency. As it is seen the latency plays a significant part in improving the performance overall throughput of a network. This work proposes an efficient device classification based MAC scheduler by adopting a cross layer design to reduce the data delivery latency. The experiments are conducted to evaluate mean network latency and data delivery latency by varying depth of tree for varied network size and density. The outcome shows that the proposed approach perform better than existing CSMA/OCA in term of network data delivery latency.
Chapter 4 Plant Growth-Promoting Microbes from Herbal Vermicompost

Overreliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers has resulted in problems including safety risks, outbreaks of secondary pests normally held in check by natural enemies, insecticide resistance, environmental contamination, and decrease in biodiversity (Lacey and Shapiro-Ilan 2008). The increasing costs and negative effects of pesticides and fertilizers necessitate the idea of biological options of crop protection and production. This includes the use of animal manure, crop residues, microbial inoculum (Rhizobium, Azotobacter, Azospirillum, and blue green algae), and composts. They provide natural nutrition, reduce the use of inorganic fertilizers, develop biodiversity, increase soil biological activity, maintain soil physical properties, and improve environmental health (Hue and Silva 2000; Vessey 2003). On the other hand, a progressive increase in world’s population, intensive industrialization of food and beverage processing, and animal husbandry production leads to the generation of large volumes of organic wastes. As per the estimation of World Bank, municipal solid waste alone from the urban areas of Asia is projected to be 1.8 million tonnes/day in 2025 (Chandrappa and Das 2012). These can be disposed by landfilling, pelletization, incineration, biomethanization, and composting. Organic wastes act as a major source of environmental pollution and create serious disposal problem, release odor and ammonia into air, contaminate groundwater, and thereby pose health risks (Inbar et al. 1993). This problem can be solved by vermicomposting, a process of decomposing organic wastes into a valuable product of organic fertilizer and soil conditioner by the use of earthworms.
Advances in Voltage-Controlled-Oscillator-Based ΔΣ ADCs

Ring voltage-controlled-oscillators (VCOs) are increasingly being used to design ΔΣ ADCs. They have the merits of simple, highly digital and low-voltage tolerant, making them attractive alternatives for the classic scaling-unfriendly operational-amplifier-based methodology. This paper aims to provide a summary on the advancement of VCObased ΔΣ ADCs. The scope of this paper includes the basics and motivations behind the VCO-based ADCs, followed by a survey covering a wide range of architectures and circuit techniques in both continuous-time (CT) and discrete-time (DT) implementation, and will discuss the key insights behind the contributions and drawbacks of these architectures. key words: voltage-controlled-oscillator, ring oscillator, analog-to-digital converter, time-domain signal processing, VCO-based ADC, ΔΣ ADC
Effect of urinary excretion on radiation dose in patients having PET/CT scans

Objectives: 18 Fluorine-fluorodeoxyglucose ( 18 F-FDG) positron emission tomography/ computed tomography (PET/CT) is commonly used for diagnosis, staging and re-staging of cancers and for determining the effectiveness of treatment. Because of renal, ureteral and urinary involvement of 18 F-FDG radiopharmaceutical after its injection, patients subject to radioactivity during its effective half-life. The aim of the present study was to determine the degree of association between effective dose levels of patients and bladder emptying of patients having PET/CT scans. Methods: The present retrospective study included 108 patients (43 females and 65 males, average age: 60.9 ± 12.7 years). Effective dose level as mSv/h was determined from a distance of 1 m in all patients before and after bladder emptying at the first hour following 18 F-FDG injection. Radioactivity excretion amounts were compared based on gender, age, body mass index, fasting blood sugar level and clinical diagnosis. Results: Amount of radioactivity decreased by 22.75% ± 14.77% after bladder emptying. No association was found between urinary excretion level and age, gender, fasting blood sugar and body mass index ( p > 0.05). Conclusions: Active emptying of bladder in patients having PET/CT scans where 18 F-FDG radiopharmaceutical is involved is an effective method for the radiation safety of both health workers and patients.
DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS WITH SUPPORTED CLUSTERS PRECLASSIFICATION PROCEDURE FOR ACOUSTIC SCENE RECOGNITION Technical Report

In this technical report, we presented a system for acoustic scene classification focuses on deeper analysis of data. We made an impact analysis of various combinations of arguments for short time Fourier transform (STFT) and Mel filter bank. We also used the harmonic and percussive source separation (HPSS) algorithm as an additional features extractor. Finally, next to common spectrograms divided and non-overlap classification neural networks, we decided to present an out-of-the-box solution with one main neural network trained on clustered labels and a few supporting neural network to distinguish between most difficult scenes, e.g. street pedestrian and public square.
A Bio-Inspired Transportation Network for Scalable Swarm Foraging: Extended Abstract

A scalable foraging system should be effective in swarms ranging from tens to thousands of robots without reducing foraging performance per robot. In Central Place Foraging (CPF), robots search for dispersed resources from a foraging arena and consolidate them in a centrally-placed collection zone [1]–[3]. Two major problems limit the scalability of CPF. First, larger swarms produce more inter-robot collisions. Second, large foraging arenas require that robots travel further distances to find resources and transport them which leads to “diminishing returns” [4]. The Multiple Place Foraging Algorithm (MPFA) [5]–[7] improves scalability using multiple collection zones dispersed in a foraging arena. However, it still has diminishing returns when the arena size is very large. Here we propose the bio-inspired hierarchical branching transportation network (MPFAT) based on resource transportation networks in plants and animals. We derive scaling relationships for a 2D foraging area (rather than a 3D animal volume). We use this scaling law to predict the transportation infrastructure required to maintain constant per-robot foraging rate with increasing swarm and arena size.
Effect of L-Carnitine and Niacin addition on some blood parameters of fry Common Carp Cyprinus

02 Effect of L-Carnitine and Niacin addition on some blood parameters of fry Common Carp Cyprinus carpio N. A. M. Al-Muslimawi and S. A. Al-Shawi Department of Animal Resources, College of Agriculture, Baghdad University, Iraq. E-mail: nadiaazeez2014@gmail.com Accepted: 25/5/2015 Summary The present study was conducted in order to focus on the effect of the addition of Carnitine and Niacin on some blood serum parameters of Common Carp Cyprinus Carpio. 48 fish carp mean weight 44.13 gm were distributed randomly on four feeding treatments (12 fish each) with replicates (6 fish each) in 8 glass aquaria. Treatments were as follows: fish were fed on basic diet without any addition and conducted as control (T1); addition of 200 mg Carnitine/ Kg diet, (T2) addition of 28 mg Niacin/Kg diet (T3), addition of a mixture of 200 mg Carnitine and 28 mg Niacin/ Kg diet as (T4). The experiment was conducted for 70 days and the results showed an increase in the Cholesterol concentration of T1 (187.6 mg/ 100 ml) and differed significantly (P<0.05) from T2 (163.95 mg / 100 ml), T3 (157.6 mg/ 100 ml) and T4 (162.43 mg / 100 ml) where they did not differ between them. Total protein Serum concentrations of T2 (5.11 mg/ dl), T3 (5.00 mg / dl) and T4 (5.07mg/dl) were not differ significantly but all differed significantly (P≤0.05) with T1 (4.07mg/ dl). Conclusion showed that fish fed on (200 mg Carnitine and 28 mg Niacin) had low serum cholesterol concentrations and high serum total protein
Distributed Dynamic Reference Governor for Constrained Semi-Autonomous Robotic Swarms with Communication Delays and Experimental Verification

This paper investigates constrained semi-autonomous robotic swarms in the presence of inter-robot communication delays. The objective is that all robots converge to the optimal point related to the reference given by a human operator without violating the constraints. In the presence of constraints, directly applying the human reference may make the system violate constraints. We thus apply a reference governor which suitably modifies the reference to avoid constraint violations. Due to the limited access of the global information, we present a passivity-based distributed reference governor scheme. However, the presence of the communication delays could cause instability of the system. To integrate communication delays into the passivity paradigm, a passivation technique using the scattering transformation is implemented in the communication path. Based on passivity theory, we prove convergence of the estimated states of the reference governor to the optimal solution. The simulations and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches Xavier Rival Domaines Abstraits pour l ’ Analyse Statique de Programmes Manipulant des Structures de Données Complexes Abstract Domains for the Static Analysis of Programs Manipulating Complex Data Structures

Domains for the Static Analysis of Programs Manipulating Complex Data Structures Soutenue le 24 juin 2011 à l’École Normale Supérieure, devant un jury composé de : Président : Xavier Leroy Directeur de Recherche, INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt Rapporteurs : Roberto Giacobazzi Professor, Università degli Studi di Verona Manuel Hermenegildo Professor, IMDEA Madrid, Spain Peter O’Hearn Professor, Queen Mary University of London, UK Examinateurs : Mooly Sagiv Professor, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israël Éric Goubault Professeur, École Polytechnique, Paris Patrick Cousot Professeur, École Normale Supérieure, Paris École Normale Supérieure de Paris, Département d’Informatique
FPGA implementation of a real-time human detector

With the development of new technologies that are increasingly aware of their surroundings, such as autonomous vehicles, human detection assumes an unprecedented relevance. Computer vision algorithms often apply identical operations over large sets of data (SIMD). Therefore, they are unsuitable for common processors (CPUs) where parallelism is limited. More suitable architectures, such as dedicated processors or general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), have other drawbacks. Dedicated processors, which frequently do not reuse resources, lead to solutions with high area requirements. GPGPUs, due to their complexity, have high power requirements. The CoreWorks heterogeneous platform, which combines reconfigurable hardware accelerators with an embedded processor, delivers competitive performance while requiring only a fraction of the resources. In this thesis, a human detection algorithm, based on Histograms of Oriented Gradients, was implemented in this platform. This process involved the adaptation of the algorithm to fixed-point arithmetic, allowing its efficient execution in the embedded platform. The resultant algorithm was accelerated through a SideWorks co-processor responsible for the main stages of the detection, namely the calculation of the gradients, votes and histograms in addition to the normalization and classification. It was then implemented and tested on a FPGA, resulting in runtimes over seven times smaller than the equivalent algorithm executed on the embedded processor.
TMUNLP System at the NTCIR-14 STC 3 Task

This paper presents our approach to the Chinese emotional conversation generation (CECG) subtask in the short text conversation (STC) task at NTCIR-14. The official training data contains 600,000 pairs of post and response from Weibo, from which we remove noisy data and train our model. The proposed methods to generate responses mainly include retrieval-based and generation-based approaches. We construct a sequence-to-sequence-based model, which is commonly used in generation-based methods, to generate responses that contain emotions of our choosing. Besides, we also propose a refined distributed emotion vector (RDEV) representation model, which is an emotion detection method based on valence and arousal, to improve the responses so that they would contain appropriate content as well as adequate emotion. RDEV combines convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and performs remarkably well on the dataset of emotion analysis in Chinese weibo texts task in NLPCC 2014. Our final evaluation results achieve an average score of 0.32 from three annotators. The performance of our system is very promising, although not the best among the competing teams in this challenge.
RADA PROGRAMOWA / PROGRAM COUNCIL PRZEWODNICZ CY / CHAIRMAN:

Dynamic equipments, in their vast majority, have rolling bearings in their components. Measurement and analysis of the values of rolling bearings vibration, on time, represent a safe and effective measure for identifying the state of wear of bearings, and to predict the evolution of their technical condition and of the entire equipment. This paper presents the detection of causes which lead to the damage of rolling bearing by using FFT (Fast Fourier Transformation) and BCS (Bearing Condition Signature) spectrums, by measuring its housing vibrations (self-aligning ball bearing, ZKL 1205K type) mounted in a test rig. The results presents the analysis mode of FFT and BCS spectrums in order to obtain beneficial information for the detection of that unbalance caused by loading, of the implemented defect on rolling bearing raceway and of bearing damage mode under the action of these causes.
DESIGN AND HERITAGE IN BUSINESS WORLD

Creative industry involves the exploration of intellectual properties such as knowledge and tangible products which have potential of creating wealth and job. Therefore, design and heritage that makes-up the creative industry is believed to have great influence on the economy wellbeing of businesses. In the light of this, this paper seeks the knowledge regarding design and heritage areas where they have been widely used, and also the kind of brain needed to be good creative people. Finally, the paper illustrates the involvement of creative industry in business world, using the tourism and hospitality business as the case study.