Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Image Compression Algorithms Optimized for MATLAB

This paper describes implementation of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm to MATLAB. This approach is used in JPEG or MPEG standards for instance. The substance of these specifications is to remove the considerable correlation between adjacent picture elements. The objective of this paper is not to improve the DCT algorithm it self, but to re-write it to the preferable version for MATLAB thus allows the enumeration with insignificant delay. The method proposed in this paper allows image compression calculation almost two hundred times faster compared with the DCT definition.
Biodiversity values of remnant freshwater floodplain lagoons in agricultural catchments: evidence for fish of the Wet Tropics bioregion, northern Australia

Tropical floodplain wetlands are among the world's most threatened and poorly documented freshwater ecosystems. This paper describes patterns of fish diversity in remnant freshwater lagoons in relation to natural environmental gradients and impacts of agriculture in the Tully-Murray catchment, Queensland Wet Tropics bioregion (QWT), in north-eastern Australia. 2. Floodplain lagoons supported 21 of 29 native fish species recorded from freshwater habitats of these rivers, including three species not typically found in main river channels or tributaries, and six that require access to saline areas for spawning or larval development. Eight species favoured lagoons during their early life history, highlighting the vital role of these water bodies in providing nursery habitat. 3. Assemblage composition differed with distance from the coast, position on the floodplain, water quality and habitat. Aquatic vegetation discriminated lagoons and habitat patches within lagoons, and fish species richness was lower in patches of exotic ponded-pasture grasses. 4. Although the lagoons are surrounded by intensive agriculture, especially sugarcane plantations, they are in good ecological condition, largely because of retention of some riparian vegetation, and frequent flushing by high stream flows. They offer opportunities to conserve taxonomic and functional biodiversity that is at present poorly protected by terrestrial reserves focused mainly on forested uplands. Of the 21 native species recorded, only one has >20% of its QWT distribution protected in IUCN category II protected areas (National Parks), and nine species have <10% of their QWT distribution in protected areas. 5. Opportunities to protect tropical freshwater fish diversity may be lost if threatening processes are not held in check through maintenance of natural flow regimes and floodplain connectivity, protection of riparian vegetation and aquatic habitat structure, continued application of best management farming practices and off-reserve protection of freshwater habitats on public and private lands. Copyright # 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
TIMING OF HIBERNATION AND MOLT IN FEMALE COLUMBIAN GROUND SQUIRRELS

Abstract Timing of activity, seasonal changes in food availability, environmental fluctuations, and costs of reproduction are important determinants of an animal's life history. In mountain ground squirrels (Spermophilus), the shortness of the active season influences how they time their activities. I studied timing of the active season, reproduction, and weight loss during hibernation in Columbian ground squirrels (S. columbianus) in Alberta, Canada, from the summer of 1994 to the spring of 1998. Entry into hibernation and emergence from hibernation the following year were earlier for females that did not wean a litter compared with those that did. The active season was shorter and hibernation longer for unsuccessful females than for successful females. Molt of females was earlier when they did not wean a litter than when they did. Date of mating had no influence on success in weaning a litter, but juveniles surviving to yearling age came from litters born earlier than juveniles that did not survive to yearling age. In successfully reproducing females, early entry into hibernation was associated with early mating. Daily and total weight loss during hibernation was higher in females that weaned young than in females that did not wean young.
Fatigue life prediction models for components subjected to manufacturing induced residual stresses

The residual stresses were proven to play a relevant role in the fatigue life expectations of components and specimens. It is well established that almost every manufacturing process to some extent leads to the residual or internal stress fields formation. The challenge is to properly account for these internal stress fields in the fatigue life prediction. In this essay a comprehensive study of the mechanical fatigue subject is presented, with particular focus on the residual stresses issue, as their impact on the fatigue life expectations, the manufacturing processes behind their formation, their measurement methods and the most preforming way to account them in the fatigue life estimates. The most challenging issues in terms of the residual stress simulation in fatigue are presented through the previous works found in literature and finally in this thesis my personal contribution was given in the development of a Python program for the optimized insertion of a residual stress field on a finite element model, which will be potentially employed at FCA Automobiles for research purpose.
Re-evaluation of the diversity and distribution of diazotrophs in the South China Sea by pyrosequencing the nifH gene

Previous studies on the diversity and composition of nifH genes in the South China Sea (SCS) were mainly based on quantitative PCR and DNA clone methods. The pyrosequencing results of partial nifH gene fragments were used to study the spatiotemporal heterogeneity in composition and diversity of diazotrophs in the SCS. Seawater samples were collected throughout the upper ocean (<200-m depth) in different sites, as follows: the Pearl River Estuary; Taiwan and Luzon Straits (which are affected by the Kuroshio Current); a Trichodesmium bloom site; and two open ocean sites. Sample collection was conducted in four surveys from 2007 to 2010. A large dataset containing 217599 nifH reads from 27 samples was obtained. Putative diazotrophs in the SCS have reasonably low diversities, and the -proteobacteria and Trichodesmium were the two dominant nifH phylogenetic groups. No significant difference was observed among different regions and years. However, a significant difference existed among the samples obtained from different water depths. The results provide a broad and general view of the diversity and composition of the putative diazotrophs in the SCS.
Optoelectronic integrated circuits for growing datacenters: challenge, strategy, and evolution

Hyper scale datacenters drive amazing Ethernet volumes when thousands of servers are connected on one site, which creates high-density interconnect links between servers, switches and routers. Optical technologies are considered as possible solutions to meet the future datacenter requirements in terms of cost, power consumption, port density and performance. In this paper, evolution of optoelectronic integrated circuits technologies for reducing power consumption, improving port density and decreasing the cost of datacenter optical network, such as miniaturization of optoelectronic chips, high density optical coupling, electro-optical co-packaging and integration of nano-scale optical switch, will be outlined, as well as the progresses in research and industrial activities.
Structured low rank approaches for exponential recovery - application to MRI

Recovering a linear combination of exponential signals characterized by parameters is highly significant in many MR imaging applications such as parameter mapping and spectroscopy. The parameters carry useful clinical information and can act as biomarkers for various cardiovascular and neurological disorders. However, their accurate estimation requires a large number of high spatial resolution images, resulting in long scan time. One of the ways to reduce scan time is by acquiring undersampled measurements. The recovery of images is usually posed as an optimization problem, which is regularized by functions enforcing sparsity, smoothness or low rank structure. Recently structured matrix priors have gained prominence in many MRI applications because of their superior performance over the aforementioned conventional priors. However, none of them are designed to exploit the smooth exponential structure of the 3D dataset. In this thesis, we exploit the exponential structure of the signal at every pixel location and the spatial smoothness of the parameters to derive a 3D annihilation relation in the Fourier domain. This relation translates into a product of a Hankel/Toeplitz structured matrix, formed from the k − t samples, and a vector of filter coefficients. We show that this matrix has a low rank structure, which is exploited to recover the images from undersampled measurements. We demonstrate the proposed method on the problem of MR parameter mapping. We compare the algorithm with the state-of-the-art methods and observe that the proposed reconstructions and parameter maps have fewer artifacts and errors. We extend the structured low rank framework to correct field inhomogeneity artifacts in MR images. We introduce novel approaches for field map compensation for data acquired using Cartesian and non-Cartesian trajectories. We adopt the time segmentation approach and reformulate the artifact correction problem into a recovery of time series of images from undersampled measurements. Upon recovery,
BAYESIAN INTEGRATIVE ANALYSIS OF OMICS DATA

iii Acknowledgements . v List of Tables . xi List of Figures . xii
Characterization of Urea L-Malic Acid (ULMA) Crystals Grown in Water, Acetone and Ethanol

Urea L-malic acid (ULMA) salt was synthesized by dissolving urea and L-malic acid in the molar ratio 1:1 in de-ionized water heated at 45 ° C. The solubility of the synthesized salt was found in different solvents such as de-ionized water, ethanol and acetone in the temperature range 30-50 ° C. In accordance with the solubility data, saturated solutions for ULMA salt in different solvents were prepared and single crystals of ULMA were grown by solution method with slow evaporation technique at room temperature (30 ° C). It is noticed that the morphology of ULMA crystals is altered when they are grown in different solvents. The grown crystals were characterized by several studies such as X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies, solubility studies, UV-visible-NIR transmittance studies, microhardness studies. Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) studies reveal the Nonlinear(NLO) activity of the grown crystals. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Department of physics, Kalasalingam University, Krishnankoil-626 190, India; 2 Department of Physics, Aditanar College of Arts and Science, Tiruchendur- 628216, Tamilnadu, India. * Corresponding Author, Email: pselvarajanphy@yahoo.co.in, Tel: +91 04639 243289; Fax: +91 04639 245247 Please Cite This Article As: B. Sivasankari and P. Selvarajan. 2010. Characterization of urea L-malic acid (ULMA) crystals grown in water, acetone and ethanol . J. Exp. Sci. 1(3): 1-3.
ZebraLancer: Crowdsource Knowledge atop Open Blockchain, Privately and Anonymously

We design and implement the first private and anonymous decentralized crowdsourcing system ZebraLancer. It realizes the fair exchange (i.e. security against malicious workers and dishonest requesters) without using any third-party arbiter. More importantly, it overcomes two fundamental challenges of decentralization, i.e. data leakage and identity breach. First, our outsource-then-prove methodology resolves the critical tension between blockchain transparency and data confidentiality without sacrificing the fairness of exchange. ZebraLancer ensures: a requester will not pay more than what data deserve, according to a policy announced when her task is published through the blockchain; each worker indeed gets a payment based on the policy, if submits data to the blockchain; the above properties are realized not only without a central arbiter, but also without leaking the data to blockchain network. Furthermore, the blockchain transparency might allow one to infer private information of workers/requesters through their participation history. ZebraLancer solves the problem by allowing anonymous participations without surrendering user accountability. Specifically, workers cannot misuse anonymity to submit multiple times to reap rewards, and an anonymous requester cannot maliciously submit colluded answers to herself to repudiate payments. The idea behind is a subtle linkability: if one authenticates twice in a task, everybody can tell, or else staying anonymous. To realize such delicate linkability, we put forth a novel cryptographic notion, the common-prefix-linkable anonymous authentication. Finally, we implement our protocol for a common image annotation task and deploy it in a test net of Ethereum. The experiment results show the applicability of our protocol and highlight subtleties of tailoring the protocol to be compatible with the existing real-world open blockchain.
Herbivory in the epiphyte, Vriesea sanguinolenta Cogn. & Marchal (Bromeliaceae)

Although herbivory in ground-rooted flora is well documented, current knowledge of the herbivore pressure on vascular epiphytes remains mostly anecdotal. Here, we present the results of a 3-year study on the herbivory in a population of the epiphytic bromeliad Vriesea sanguinolenta. In different years, 26–61% of all epiphytes showed traces of herbivore attack, while up to 4.4% of the entire leaf area of the epiphyte population was consumed annually. The recorded levels of damage to photosynthetic tissue, mostly caused by the larvae of Napaea eucharilla (Riodinidae, Lepidoptera), indicate that vascular epiphytes may be regularly and sometimes even lethally attacked by insect herbivores. The level of damage is comparable to ground-rooted tropical flora, which certainly does not support the prevalent notion of low and negligible levels of herbivory in vascular epiphytes.
Phosphorus Application Affects the Soybean Root Response to Water Deficit at the Initial Flowering and Full Pod Stages

Application of phosphorus (P) fertilizer is an important factor for improving the tolerance to water deficit in many plants. A pot experiment was conducted to identify the effects of P application on soybean adaptability to water deficit at the R1 (initial flowering) and R4 (full pod) stages through the investigation of root morphological traits, plant P uptake and resultant yield in two soybean (Glycine max L. Merrill) cultivars (Dongnong 46 and Heisheng 101). The four levels of P application were 0, 7.3, 14.6 and 29.2 mg kg−2, respectively. The three water treatments were (1) 65–75% of field water capacity (FWC) as a well-watered control, (2) 30–40% of FWC at the R1 stage, and (3) 30–40% of FWC at the R4 stage. Root traits, plant uptake of P and yield were significantly reduced by water deficiency at different growth stages, especially at the R4 stage. Application of P enabled to alleviate the adverse effects of water deficit, to increase the root dry weight, root length and root surface area, and to slow root senescence after the R5 (initial pod filling) stage. The response of soybean genotypes to both water and P deficit was different. In the absence of P application, Dongnong 46 showed relatively low adaptability to water deficit at the R4 stage, whereas Heisheng 101 showed a lower reduction of root traits and yield. The beneficial effects of P application for Dongnong 46 were more pronounced than those for Heisheng 101. Based on this experiment, we suggested that P fertilizer application to soybean may be justified in low-rainfall years because of its ability to enhance the soybean adaptability to water deficit stress by improving the root morphology, P uptake and consequently yield.
Thrombolytic, cytotoxic and antidiabetic effects of Paederia foetida L. leaf extract.

study data collection, data interpretation, manuscript preparation and research grant collection. Authors MMI, MAR and MAH participated in experiments, data collection, literature search and manuscript preparation. Author MAR has provided assistance in taxonomical identification and data analysis. Author MAR also aided in data interpretation and literature search. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript. ABSTRACT Aims : This research investigated the thrombolytic, cytotoxic and antidiabetic effects of Paederia foetida leaf methanol extract. Place and Duration of Study : Department of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh, between April to December, 2012. Methodology : An in-vitro thrombolytic model was used to check the thrombolytic effect of Paederia foetida extract using streptokinase as a positive control. Cytotoxic effect was measured by Brine shrimp lethality bioassay. Antidiabetic effect of the extract was conducted in alloxan induced diabetic model of Swiss albino mice. Data were analyzed by one way ANOVA using statistical package for social science (SPSS) software. Results : In in-vitro thrombolysis, Paederia foetida extract (100µl) lysed 21.40 ± 1.39 %, Streptokinase (positive control) 81.42 ± 0.88 % and water (negative control) 4.63 ± 0.31% of the blood clots. These clot lysis values were statistically different (p<0.05) from each other. In Brine shrimp bioassay, lethal concentration (LC 50 ) of Paederia foetida extract was found 65.31 µg/mL which was statistically significant compared to Vincristine sulfate (positive control, LC 50 =0.76 µg/mL). The extract showed a significant and dose-dependent decrease in blood glucose level in alloxan induced diabetic mice. The effect of the extract was comparable to the reference antidiabetic drug metformin (150 mg/kg BW). Conclusion : The results demonstrated a moderate thrombolytic, cytotoxic and antidiabetic effect of Paederia foetida leaf extract to be analyzed further for prospective pharmaceutical preparation.
Habitat breadth and geographic range predict diversity dynamics in marine Mesozoic bivalves

Abstract Numerous environmental and intrinsic biotic factors have been sought to explain patterns in diversity and turnover. Using taxonomically vetted and sampling-standardized data sets of more than 50,000 taxonomic occurrences in the Paleobiology Database (PaleoDB) we tested whether habitat breadth predicts genus durations and diversity dynamics of marine Mesozoic bivalves, and whether this effect is independent of the well-known positive relationship between geographic range and longevity. We defined the habitat breadth of a genus as a function of its realized ranges in water depth, substrate type, and grain size of the substrate. Our analysis showed that mean values of extinction and origination rates are significantly higher for narrowly adapted genera compared to broadly adapted genera, with differences being evident in all analyzed stratigraphic intervals. Linear models showed that both geographic range and habitat breadth have an independent effect on genus durations and on diversity dynamics. These results reaffirm the role of geographic range and furthermore suggest that habitat breadth is an equally important key predictor of extinction risk and origination probability in Mesozoic marine bivalves. Habitat generalists, regardless of their geographic range, are generally less prone to extinction. Conversely, widely distributed genera that are more specialized may be more endangered than one would expect from their geographic range alone. Extinction rates tend to be higher for specialized genera in both background and mass extinctions, suggesting that wide habitat breadth universally buffers against extinction. The trajectories of origination rates through time differ from those of extinction rates. Whereas there is no pronounced ecological selectivity in origination in the Triassic and most of the Jurassic, Cretaceous origination rates are higher for specialized genera. This may best be explained by diversity-dependence. When diversity levels reach a critical point a further increase in diversity is achieved by elevated origination rates of more specialized forms.
COGNITIVE MONITORING IN AN INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION NETWORK OPERATION SYSTEM

A method for increasing the functionality of existing types of monitoring used in modern information and communication networks based on the use of cognitive technologies is proposed. Modern cognitive technologies are allowed to combine the implementation of traditional monitoring procedures with predictive procedures and the ability to recognize the upcoming changes in the state of the object. The implementation of these procedures involves the consistent implementation of the stages of short-term, situational and long-term forecasting. This allows the identification in advance of the possibility of emergency situations on the object, directly recognize the moments of their occurrence and make timely decisions about the need to reconfigure the resources of the monitoring object, thus maintaining its state in accordance with the standards of technical operation. Long-term forecasting provides the identification of the emerging trend of changes in the dynamic characteristics of an object, which makes it possible to decide in advance about the need to reconstruct the information and communication network, when the means of reconfiguring its resources are already ineffective. The listed procedures are implemented by means of statistical analysis and generally solve the problem of creating a system of preventive technical operation. The paper proposes a cognitive monitoring system architecture that mediates the interaction of existing monitoring tools and control systems and technical operation. The implementation of cognitive monitoring procedures in the functional plane of the TMN concept is shown by adding prediction functions and recognizing emergency situations. The proposed method is also interpreted in terms of the concept of TINA, the introduction of the prognostic monitoring application into the software functional plane.
The Influence of Landscape Heterogeneity and Dispersal on Survival of Neonate Insular Iguanas

Abstract The relationship between dispersal and predator–prey interactions in heterogeneous landscapes is an underappreciated factor influencing species persistence. This relationship, however, is critical for understanding population dynamics and for implementing management strategies for species. We investigated the influence of habitat heterogeneity and dispersal patterns on neonate survival for the iguana Cyclura cychlura cychlura inhabiting Andros Island in the Bahamas. Contrary to our hypothesis, there was a clear survival advantage for neonates that spent more time in open mangrove habitat than relatively more closed-canopy habitats, most likely because of fewer primary predators in mangroves relative to other habitats. Snake predation was the most significant cause of mortality for neonates dispersing away from nest sites and was highest during the first week after release. The probability of survival to 28 days ranged from 16.7 to 28.4%. Most neonates displayed rapid, nearly linear movements away from nests for a minimum of 14 to 21 days. Mean straight-line distance away from nest sites for surviving neonates was 601 m. There was a significant positive relationship between mean daily movement rates away from nests and days survived. We suspect that the initial and rapid movements away from nests reduce relative predation by dispersing neonates from a zone where predators learn to exploit them. Our results have implications for translocation programs targeting endangered insular iguanas throughout the Neotropics because historically only the presence of non-native mammalian predators was used as a metric to evaluate potential translocation sites.