Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impacts of the Aleutian-Icelandic low seesaw on surface climate during the 20 th century

An interannual seesaw between the Icelandic and Aleutian lows and its impact on surface climate observed during the 20th century are investigated. In a recent period from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, their seesaw relationship was particularly apparent in late winter. The associated anomalies in surface air temperature were significant in many regions over the extratropical Northern Hemisphere except in central portions of the continents. The seesaw also modified the ocean-atmosphere exchange of heat and moisture extensively over the North Atlantic and North Pacific by changing evaporation and precipitation. Since the seesaw formation was triggered by eastward propagation of stationary Rossby wave trains from the North Pacific into the North Atlantic, anomalous circulation over the North Pacific in January was identified as a good precursor for February surface air temperatures in the Euro-Atlantic sector during that period. Suffering from multidecadal modulations, the seesaw relationship between the two lows was weak in the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, but it was particularly strong during the preceding period from the 1920s to the 1940s with its impact on surface temperatures as extensive as in the recent period. Although its maturity was in January, the precursory signal of the seesaw in that early period was also found in the North Pacific one month earlier, which suggests that the formation was through essentially the same mechanisms as in the recent period.
Optimization of an M/M/1/N feedback queue with retention of reneged customers

Customer impatience has become a threat to the business world. Firms employ various customer retention strategies to retain their impatient (or reneged) customers. Customer retention mechanisms may help to retain some or all impatient customers. Further, due to unsatisfactory service, customers may rejoin a queue immediately after departure. Such cases are referred to as feedback customers. Kumar and Sharma [7] take this situation into account and study an M/M/1/N feedback queuing system with retention of reneged customers. They obtain only the steady-state solution for this model. In this paper we extend the work in [7] by performing an economic analysis of the model. We develop a model for the costs incurred and perform the appropriate optimization. The optimum system capacity and optimum service rate are obtained.
Isolation and Optimization of Lipase Producing Bacteria

The demand for industrial enzymes of microbial origin is ever increasing due to their applications in a wide variety of industrial processes. Enzyme mediated reactions are attractive alternatives of existing tedious and expensive chemical methods. Enzymes such as Lipase find their great use in a large number of industries such as food, dairy, detergent, textile, and cosmetic. However, with the realization of the biocatalytic potential of microbial lipases in both aqueous and nonaqueous media in the last one and a half decades, industrial fronts have shifted towards utilizing this enzyme for a variety of reactions of immense importance. This work describe about the isolation and optimization of Lipase producing bacteria.
Innovation Clusters and Public Policy—The Case of a Research-Driven Cluster in Germany

Regional innovation clusters are spatial concentrations of interconnected firms, suppliers, service providers, state institutions, and research organisation in a particular field of innovation. The stimulation and support of clusters are important agendas for governments and other public actors. Cluster development initiatives are actually an important direction in economic policy, building on earlier efforts in macroeconomic stabilization, privatisation, and market opening, and reducing the costs of doing business. The purpose of this paper is to look on a specific type of innovative clusters in Germany, which are supported by the Fraunhofer Society, one of the leading, partly public-funded organisations for application-oriented research in Europe. Based on an overview over current issues in cluster literature—beginning with Porter 1990 to the point of actual global-value-chain-approach and the concept of knowledge hubs—the particular cluster approach of the German Fraunhofer Society is classified with regard to the academic literature. Fraunhofer clusters are, in the first instance, project clusters compared to simple communication networks. The case study presented in this paper is a valid example for a long-term and well-established industry cluster, which actually opens out in a project-oriented cluster approach. Finally, it is possible to draw practical implications for policy makers and industry regarding the support of regional innovation clusters.
Toxicity and Genotoxicity in HeLa and E. coli Cells Caused by a Helium Plasma Needle

The aim of this study is to determine the toxic and genotoxic damages produced by a helium plasma needle upon HeLa and E. coli (OG100 and PQ30) cell cultures. For HeLa cells survival (MTT) and microelectrophoresis comet) assays were performed; meanwhile in E. coli, viable count and genotoxicity by the chromotest were evaluated. The outcomes indicate that the plasma exposures on HeLa cells undergo more toxicity and genotoxicity as treatment time increases. With respect to E. coli , plasma exposure generated toxicity, but no genotoxicity could be detected with this system. In the strain OG100, defective in a protection mechanism to oxidizing agents, there was a reduction in the survival of one order of magnitude compared to the wild type strain PQ30. It suggests that such reduction is due to the plasma by means of the reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS) generated during atmospheric air interaction.
Synthesis and characterization of porous zinc oxide nano-flakes film in alkaline media

In this study, porous zinc oxide nano-flakes were successfully synthesized by anodization method on zinc substrate in a 0.025 M NaOH and 0.05 M NH4Cl solution with the voltage of 10 V at room temperature. The field emission scanning electron microscopy’s (FESEM) images show the structural evolution during 90 min of the anodization process. They also demonstrate the dependency of growth of ZnO flakes on the grains of the zinc substrate. Regarding FESEM images and possible chemical reactions taking place during the anodization process, a growth mechanism and sequences for the formation of ZnO have proposed. The Pourbaix diagram also confirmed this possible mechanism. The elemental and phase analysis conducted on films proved the formation of the ZnO after the anodization process. The cyclic voltammetry showed the oxidation of zinc into zinc oxide is related to the -1.28 V peak and the peak of zinc oxide reduction is situated at -1.48 V. The band gap of anodized zinc foil was calculated to be 3.24 eV. The photocatalytic activity of synthesized thin films also was studied and the ImageJ software analysis showed a strong correlation between the photocatalytic activity and the portion of porosity in the synthesized films.
Reconstructions of biomass burning from sediment-charcoal records to improve data–model comparisons

Abstract. The location, timing, spatial extent, and frequency of wildfires are changing rapidly in many parts of the world, producing substantial impacts on ecosystems, people, and potentially climate. Paleofire records based on charcoal accumulation in sediments enable modern changes in biomass burning to be considered in their long-term context. Paleofire records also provide insights into the causes and impacts of past wildfires and emissions when analyzed in conjunction with other paleoenvironmental data and with fire models. Here we present new 1000-year and 22 000-year trends and gridded biomass burning reconstructions based on the Global Charcoal Database version 3 (GCDv3), which includes 736 charcoal records (57 more than in version 2). The new gridded reconstructions reveal the spatial patterns underlying the temporal trends in the data, allowing insights into likely controls on biomass burning at regional to global scales. In the most recent few decades, biomass burning has sharply increased in both hemispheres but especially in the north, where charcoal fluxes are now higher than at any other time during the past 22 000 years. We also discuss methodological issues relevant to data–model comparisons and identify areas for future research. Spatially gridded versions of the global data set from GCDv3 are provided to facilitate comparison with and validation of global fire simulations.
The Netherlands as a winter refuge for Light-bellied Brent Geese Branta bernicla hrota

From 1978/79 onwards, eleven influxes of East Atlantic Light-bellied Brent Geese Branta bernicla hrota were recorded in the Netherlands, to the south of their regular wintering areas in northern Denmark and northeast England. During most influxes, c. 3–6% of the total population occurred in the Netherlands, but large influxes in 1995/96 and 2010/11 involved as many as 800–907 individuals, i.e. 18% and 11% of the flyway population respectively. Core wintering sites within the Netherlands were in the southwest Wadden Sea, in the northern part of Noord-Holland and in the Delta area in the southwest of the country. The first two of these areas are thought to have been more regular wintering areas for Light-bellied Brent Geese in the first part of the 20th century, although good documentation on numbers is lacking. The highest number recorded at a single site was 245 birds in Polder Kimswerd/Eendracht, Friesland, in December 2010. The distribution pattern was similar during all influxes, indicating traditional site use by the wintering flocks. Winters with peak numbers in the Netherlands show a significant, negative correlation with average daily temperatures at the Danish wintering sites. During prolonged and/or heavy cold spells, feeding conditions in Denmark deteriorate due to ice- or snow cover, making both aquatic and agricultural food resources unavailable and forcing birds to depart; this was confirmed by count data from Denmark. In 1995/96, phenological patterns and sightings of marked birds also indicated an influx from birds from the wintering site at Lindisfarne in the UK, but this could not be confirmed for more recent winters. Sightings of marked birds showed that at least some birds (eight out of 34 observed individuals) were involved in successive influxes; in non-influx years they were seen regularly at wintering sites further up the flyway as well as on breeding sites at Svalbard. The regular patterns of influxes, the traditional use of particular sites during influx years and repeated observations of the same individuals at these sites (which may transfer knowledge of alternative wintering sites in the Netherlands to their offspring, indicated by ringed birds being seen with their goslings) illustrates that the Netherlands should be considered as a regular hard weather winter refuge for the sub-species. Appropriate measures therefore should be taken to include these sites within the national Natura 2000 network.
Tracking microbial growth and evolution at high-throughput

In modern biology, large scale is not just a slogan but a very active area of research. By parallelizing trials, new kinds of questions can be asked and questions examined with greater accuracy. For example, if you hope that a rare mutation will occur, you need a lot of time or luck to find it if you do not massively parallelize the experiment. My contribution to this area is the development of a new method for monitoring growth in a large number of microbial colonies in parallel. In itself, this is not new, but we believe that the quality of the data we collect is higher than comparable technologies, while the cost of setting up the system is kept relatively low. The development of this platform, Scan-o-matic, is described in articles one and two. However, a technique is only relevant if it is used, and in article three we are using the large scale and the quality of measurement to determine what types of interactions between genes explain complex traits in yeast growth using an advanced breeding system. In article four we test, on a smaller scale, how yeast can evolve to withstand arsenite and how stable such adaptation is after it has been achieved if the yeast is allowed to live without arsenic for a while. 1. High throughput phenotyping 3 2. Genotypes and Phenotypes 4
Musical Deep Learning: Stylistic Melodic Generation with Complexity Based Similarity

The wide-ranging impact of deep learning models implies significant application in music analysis, retrieval, and generation. Initial findings from musical application of a conditional restricted Boltzmann machine (CRBM) show promise towards informing creative computation. Taking advantage of the CRBM’s ability to model temporal dependencies full reconstructions of pieces are achievable given a few starting seed notes. The generation of new material using figuration from the training corpus requires restrictions on the size and memory space of the CRBM, forcing associative rather than perfect recall. Musical analysis and information complexity measures show the musical encoding to be the primary determinant of the nature of the generated results.
Blood Biochemical and Immunological Responses to Garlic Oil Administration in Growing Rabbits Diet

The effect of dietary supplementation garlic oil on performance and blood parameters of New Zealand White rabbits has been studied. The garlic oil was added at graded levels of 0.0, 0.25, 0.5 and 0.75 g/kg for T1 (control), T2, T3 and T4, respectively. A total of thirty six male rabbits, 7 weeks of age and with an initial weigh of 950 g were used. There were four treatments, each with three replicates (n = 3) in randomly divided design. The parameters investigated were growth performance, carcass yield, glucose, plasma lipids profile, immunoglobulin’s G (IgG, IgA and IgM), antioxidant status and testosterone hormone. The results showed that feeding diet supplemented with garlic oil had insignificant effect on body weight, body weight gain, feed intake, feed conversion ratio, triglycerides, cholesterol, LDL and HDL. Rabbits fed the 0.5 g/kg garlic oil diet had significantly increased IgG level, hence improved immune responses and Testosterone hormone of rabbits. The colony forming units of coliform bacteria showed a significantly lower number compared with control. The present results indicate that supplemented of garlic oil at 0.5 g/kg of diet has a positive effect on HDL, immunoglobulin’s G, antioxidant status and testosterone hormone in addition to its antibacterial effect.
The role of subsidence in a weakly unstable marine boundary layer: a case study

The diurnal evolution of a cloud free, marine boundary layer is studied by means of experimental measure- ments and numerical simulations. Experimental data belong to an investigation of the mixing height over inner Danish waters. The mixed-layer height measured over the sea is gen- erally nearly constant, and does not exhibit the diurnal cy- cle characteristic of boundary layers over land. A case study, during summer, showing an anomalous development of the mixed layer under unstable and nearly neutral atmospheric conditions, is selected in the campaign. Subsidence is iden- tified as the main physical mechanism causing the sudden decrease in the mixing layer height. This is quantified by comparing radiosounding profiles with data from numerical simulations of a mesoscale model, and a large-eddy simu- lation model. Subsidence not only affects the mixing layer height, but also the turbulent fluctuations within it. By ana- lyzing wind and scalar spectra, the role of subsidence is fur- ther investigated and a more complete interpretation of the experimental results emerges.
Stylised fact or situated messiness? The diverse effects of increasing debt on national economic growth

This article reanalyses data used by Reinhart and Rogoff (2010c, American Economic Review, 100: 573–78—RR), and later Herndon et al. (2013, Cambridge Journal of Economics, online, doi: 10.1093/cje/bet075) to consider the relationship between growth and debt in developed countries. The consistency over countries and the causal direction of RR’s so called ‘stylised fact’ is considered. Using multilevel models, we find that when the effect of debt on growth is allowed to vary, and linear time trends are fully controlled for, the average effect of debt on growth disappears, whilst country-specific debt relations vary significantly. Additionally, countries with high debt levels appear more volatile in their growth rates. Regarding causality, we develop a new method extending distributed lag models to multilevel situations. These models suggest the causal direction is predominantly growth-to-debt, and is consistent (with some exceptions) across countries. We argue that RR’s findings are too simplistic, with limited policy relevance, whilst demonstrating how multilevel models can explicate realistically complex scenarios.
Integration of Sugar Markets between Swaziland and its Major Trading Partners

The study was designed to examine the extent of market integration between Swaziland sugar markets and its major trading partners (i.e., South Africa, EU and USA) using monthly export sugar price data from January 2001 to December 2013. Price series were tested for stationarity with the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test and it was found that all prices were integrated of order one I (1). Zivot and Andrews test was used to determine the structural break in the price series and it revealed that the Swaziland and USA price break was in August, 2009 while for the EU price break was in October, 2008. Price relationships were examined in one period (entire period) and two sub-periods (before structural break and after structural break). The Johansen’s cointegration test revealed long-run integration for almost all the pairs of sugar markets, except for the USA in the full sample period. The integrations between the markets shows a significant improvement after the structural break. The Vector Error Correction model (VECM) estimates showed that the Swaziland’s export market prices adjust significantly to the short-run shocks that appeared in the South African’s and EU’s sugar market for the entire period while when the structural breaks period was allowed it adjusts significantly before the break for the South African’s market. Swaziland’s market only adjusts significantly to the EU and USA market shocks after the structural break. The overall coefficient of the adjustment parameter has been very low due to high government interventions in the sugar sector by the Swaziland trading partners which is an impediment to the efficient market functioning. It is therefore suggested that interventions of the respective governments should be reduced for efficient functioning of the markets Keywords: sugar, trading partners, cointegration, stationarity, structural break
Climate change impact on meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological drought in central Illinois

This paper investigates the impact of climate change on drought by addressing two questions: (1) How reliable is the assessment of climate change impact on drought based on state‐of‐the‐art climate change projections and downscaling techniques? and (2) Will the impact be at the same level from meteorological, agricultural, and hydrologic perspectives? Regional climate change projections based on dynamical downscaling through regional climate models (RCMs) are used to assess drought frequency, intensity, and duration, and the impact propagation from meteorological to agricultural to hydrological systems. The impact on a meteorological drought index (standardized precipitation index, SPI) is first assessed on the basis of daily climate inputs from RCMs driven by three general circulation models (GCMs). Two periods and two emission scenarios, i.e., 1991–2000 and 2091–2100 under B1 and A1Fi for Parallel Climate Model (PCM), 1990–1999 and 2090–2099 under A1B and A1Fi for Community Climate System Model, version 3.0 (CCSM3), 1980–1989 and 2090–2099 under B2 and A2 for Hadley Centre CGCM (HadCM3), are undertaken and dynamically downscaled through the RCMs. The climate projections are fed to a calibrated hydro‐agronomic model at the watershed scale in Central Illinois, and agricultural drought indexed by the standardized soil water index (SSWI) and hydrological drought by the standardized runoff index (SRI) and crop yield impacts are assessed. SSWI, in particular with extreme droughts, is more sensitive to climate change than either SPI or SRI. The climate change impact on drought in terms of intensity, frequency, and duration grows from meteorological to agricultural to hydrological drought, especially for CCSM3‐RCM. Significant changes of SSWI and SRI are found because of the temperature increase and precipitation decrease during the crop season, as well as the nonlinear hydrological response to precipitation and temperature change.
Billion particle linac simulations for future light sources

In this paper we report on multi-physics, multi-billion macroparticle simulation of beam transport in a free electron laser (FEL) linac for future light source applications. The simulation includes a self-consistent calculation of 3D space-charge effects, short-range geometry wakefields, longitudinal coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) wakefields, and detailed modeling of RF acceleration and focusing. We discuss the need for and the challenges associated with such large-scale simulation. Applications to the study of the microbunching instability in an FEL linac are also presented.