Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of soil microbial communities inhabiting vineyards and native sclerophyllous forests in central Chile

Abstract Natural ecosystems provide services to agriculture such as pest control, soil nutrients, and key microbial components. These services and others in turn provide essential elements that fuel biomass productivity. Responsible agricultural management and conservation of natural habitats can enhance these ecosystem services. Vineyards are currently driving land‐use changes in many Mediterranean ecosystems. These land‐use changes could have important effects on the supporting ecosystems services related to the soil properties and the microbial communities associated with forests and vineyard soils. Here, we explore soil bacterial and fungal communities present in sclerophyllous forests and organic vineyards from three different wine growing areas in central Chile. We employed terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms (T‐RFLP) to describe the soil microbial communities inhabiting native forests and vineyards in central Chile. We found that the bacterial community changed between the sampled growing areas; however, the fungal community did not differ. At the local scale, our findings show that fungal communities differed between habitats because fungi species might be more sensitive to land‐use change compared to bacterial species, as bacterial communities did not change between forests and vineyards. We discuss these findings based on the sensitivity of microbial communities to soil properties and land‐use change. Finally, we focus our conclusions on the importance of naturally derived ecosystem services to vineyards.
A Note on the CR Cohomology of Levi-Flat Minimal Orbits in Complex Flag Manifolds

We prove a relation between the $\bar\partial_M$ cohomology of a minimal orbit $M$ of a real form $G_0$ of a complex semisimple Lie group $G$ in a flag manifold $G/Q$ and the Dolbeault cohomology of the Matsuki dual open orbit $X$ of the complexification $K$ of a maximal compact subgroup $K_0$ of $G_0$, under the assumption that $M$ is Levi-flat.
Geography and Export Performance: External Market Access and Internal Supply Capacity

This paper investigates the determinants of countries' export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries' exports into the contribution from increases in external demand and from improved internal supply-side conditions. Building on the results of this decomposition we move on to an econometric analysis of the determinants of export performance. Results include the finding that poor external geography, poor internal geography, and poor institutional quality contribute in approximately equal measure to explaining Sub-Saharan Africa's poor export performance.
Syndecan-1 in Cancer: Implications for Cell Signaling, Differentiation, and Prognostication

Syndecan-1, a cell surface heparan sulfate proteoglycan, is critically involved in the differentiation and prognosis of various tumors. In this review, we highlight the synthesis, cellular interactions, and the signalling pathways regulated by syndecan-1. The basal syndecan-1 level is also crucial for understanding the sequential changes involving malignant transformation, tumor progression, and advanced or disseminated cancer stages. Moreover, we focus on the cellular localization of this proteoglycan as cell membrane anchored and/or shed, soluble syndecan-1 with stromal or nuclear accumulation and how this may carry different, highly tissue specific prognostic information for individual tumor types.
Identification of Oxygenated Fatty Acid as a Side Chain of Lipo-Alkaloids in Aconitum carmichaelii by UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS and a Database

Lipo-alkaloid is a kind of C19-norditerpenoid alkaloid usually found in Aconitum species. Structurally, they contain an aconitane skeleton and one or two fatty acid moieties of 3–25 carbon chains with 1–6 unsaturated degrees. Analysis of the lipo-alkaloids in roots of Aconitum carmichaelii resulted in the isolation of six known pure lipo-alkaloids (A1–A6) and a lipo-alkaloid mixture (A7). The mixture shared the same aconitane skeleton of 14-benzoylmesaconine, but their side chains were determined to be 9-hydroxy-octadecadienoic acid, 13-hydroxy-octadecadienoic acid and 10-hydroxy-octadecadienoic acid, respectively, by MS/MS analysis after alkaline hydrolysis. To our knowledge, this is the first time of the reporting of the oxygenated fatty acids as the side chains in naturally-occurring lipo-alkaloids. In order to identify more lipo-alkaloids, a compound database was established based on various combinations between the aconitane skeleton and the fatty acid chain, and then, the identification of lipo-alkaloids was conducted using the database, UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS and MS/MS. Finally, 148 lipo-alkaloids were identified from A. carmichaelii after intensive MS/MS analysis, including 93 potential new compounds and 38 compounds with oxygenated fatty acid moieties.
Detection of Propagating Cracks in Rotors Using Neural Networks

This paper presents the application of neural networks for rotor cracks detection. The basic working principles of neural networks are presented. Experimental vibration signals of rotors with and without a propagating crack were used to train the Multi-layer Feed-forward Neural Networks using back-propagation algorithm. The trained neural networks were tested with other set of vibration data. A simple two-layer feed-forward neural network with two neurons in the input layer and one neuron in the output layer trained with the signals of a cracked rotor and a normal rotor without a crack was found to be satisfactory in detecting a propagating crack. Trained three-layer networks were able to detect both the propagating and non-propagating cracks. The FFT of the vibration signals showing variation in amplitude of the harmonics as time progresses are also presented for comparison.Copyright © 2002 by ASME
Adaptive Energy-Efficient Resource Sharing for Multi-threaded Workloads in Virtualized Systems Can

Computational demand on today’s data centers is continuously increasing, as computing trends are shifting towards the cloud. The corresponding increases in energy consumption and and management complexity remain as major challenges for data centers. Server virtualization provides opportunities to improve energy efficiency by reducing the number of physical servers through workload consolidation. Efficient consolidation of multi-threaded workloads requires a detailed understanding of various application characteristics such as performance scaling, inter-thread communications and memory access patterns. This paper proposes an efficient consolidation technique for multithreaded workloads through adaptive resource sharing on virtual environments. We present a virtual machine reconfiguration algorithm that improves the overall throughput-per-watt of a real-life multicore system by up to 25% in comparison to existing consolidation methods.
From AOP to UML: Towards an Aspect-Oriented Architectural Modeling Approach

Capturing concerns that crosscut the boundaries of multiple components in software architecture descriptions is problematic. Standard description languages, such as UML, do not provide adequate means to understand and modularize such concerns, but aspect-oriented programming techniques do. This paper explores and analyzes the suitability of UML for aspect-oriented architectural modeling. It takes a bottom-up approach, starting from the code level to the level of software architecture description, via aspect-oriented design, using standard UML.
From the lateral edge to the center of the cortex: The development of the human insula

Abstract The human insula is a key node in a neuronal network which integrates interoceptive stimuli from the own body, and exteroceptive stimuli from the environment, and thus maintains the autonomic, emotional and socio-cognitive homeostasis of the body. In the last years, the insula has come into the focus of attention. Comparative anatomical studies showed that in many species the insula forms the lateral edge of the cortex. Very little is known about the prenatal development of the human insula, which is the first cortical region to mature. The origin of the pyramidal neurons for the insula is a small sector of the proliferating ventricular/subventricular zone at the cortico-striatal boundary (CSB). The CSB contains the radial glia cells, which are stem cells and give rise to a dense fascicle of radial glia processes. This fascicle traverses the external capsule and serves as a migration substrate for the neuroblasts on their way from the CSB into the insula. Around the 10/11th week of gestation, the lateral ventricle and its adjacent structures including the CSB bend in a C-shaped fashion. The insula now develops between a dorsal, fronto-parietal and a ventral, temporal CSB, which provide descending and ascending streams of neuroblasts, respectively, migrating along the radial glia fascicle. As a consequence of the ventricular rotation during ontogenesis, the human insula changes its initial position at the lateral edge of the cortex to its final central location, which reflects its integrative functions in brain activity.
Depth map estimation in light fields using an stereo-like taxonomy

The light field or LF is a function that describes the amount of light traveling in every direction (angular) through every point (spatial) in a scene, this LF can be captured in several ways, using arrays of cameras, or more recently using a single camera with an special lens, that allows the capture of angular and spatial information of light rays of a scene (LF). This recent camera implementation gives a different approach to find the dept of a scene using only a single camera. In order to estimate the depth, we describe a taxonomy, similar to the one used in stereo Depth-map algorithms. That consist in the creation of a cost tensor to represent the matching cost between different disparities, then, using a support weight window, aggregate the cost tensor, finally, using a winner-takes-all optimization algorithm, search for the best disparities. This paper explains in detail the several changes made to an stereo-like taxonomy, to be applied in a light field, and evaluate this algorithm using a recent database that for the first time, provides several ground-truth light fields, with a respective ground-truth depth map.
Subspace projection and QR decomposition applied to ellipse fitting

Subspace projection is a very effective technique extensively applied to various fields of modern signal processing. But, how to apply it to ellipse fitting is still a problem to be answered. In traditional ellipse fitting algorithms, the tightly couplings between 3 subspaces of ellipse data matrix with greatly different energies can significantly increase the condition number so as to greatly degrade its numerical performance. By means of twice of subspace projections, the couplings are thoroughly eliminated and 3 components of the ellipse parameter vector are optimally estimated or directly computed progressively. Therefore, after combined QR decomposition, it obviously improves the practical performance. It is proved that the suggested technique is essentially a constrained global optimization procedure that minimizes the norm of an orthogonal component of fitting error vector under constrains that the other two orthogonal components of fitting error vector are equal to zero. The theoretical analysis and experimental demonstration have proved that the new algorithm is fast and exact, its anti-noise ability is strong and its fitting success rate is high
An observation on time-storage trade off

Recently there have been several attempts to prove that every set of strings in @@@@ (i.e., recognizable in deterministic polynomial time) can be recognized in deterministic storage (log n)2. The methods used in the attempts were based on that of [1], in which it is shown that every context free language can be accepted in storage (log n)2 Our thesis in the present paper is that these attempts must fail. We define a specific set SP of strings which is clearly in @@@@, but in a certain well-defined sense cannot be recognized in storage (log n)2 using the techniques in [1]. We conjecture that no Turing machine recognizes SP within storage (log n)2, and show that if this conjecture is false, then in fact every member of @@@@ can be recognized within storage (log n)2.
Inactivation of Gating Currents of L-Type Calcium Channels

In studies of gating currents of rabbit cardiac Ca channels expressed as α1C/β2a or α1C/β2a/α2δ subunit combinations in tsA201 cells, we found that long-lasting depolarization shifted the distribution of mobile charge to very negative potentials. The phenomenon has been termed charge interconversion in native skeletal muscle (Brum, G., and E. Ríos. 1987. J. Physiol. (Camb.). 387:489–517) and cardiac Ca channels (Shirokov, R., R. Levis, N. Shirokova, and E. Ríos. 1992. J. Gen. Physiol. 99:863–895). Charge 1 (voltage of half-maximal transfer, V1/2 ≃ 0 mV) gates noninactivated channels, while charge 2 (V1/2 ≃ −90 mV) is generated in inactivated channels. In α1C/β2a cells, the available charge 1 decreased upon inactivating depolarization with a time constant τ ≃ 8, while the available charge 2 decreased upon recovery from inactivation (at −200 mV) with τ ≃ 0.3 s. These processes therefore are much slower than charge movement, which takes <50 ms. This separation between the time scale of measurable charge movement and that of changes in their availability, which was even wider in the presence of α2δ, implies that charges 1 and 2 originate from separate channel modes. Because clear modal separation characterizes slow (C-type) inactivation of Na and K channels, this observation establishes the nature of voltage-dependent inactivation of L-type Ca channels as slow or C-type. The presence of the α2δ subunit did not change the V1/2 of charge 2, but sped up the reduction of charge 1 upon inactivation at 40 mV (to τ ≃ 2 s), while slowing the reduction of charge 2 upon recovery (τ ≃ 2 s). The observations were well simulated with a model that describes activation as continuous electrodiffusion (Levitt, D. 1989. Biophys. J. 55:489–498) and inactivation as discrete modal change. The effects of α2δ are reproduced assuming that the subunit lowers the free energy of the inactivated mode.
The Lessac Technologies System for Blizzard Challenge 2010

For Blizzard Challenge 2010, Lessac Technologies built its first British English voice from the provided full database. To enhance methods for target cost calculation and unit selection, instead of traditional phonetic symbols, we used a more finegrained set of Lessemes to label units and applied the Hierarchical Mixture of Experts model to map linguistic features to acoustic parameters. The evaluation results show that we performed relatively well on similarity to the original speaker, and comparable to most systems with respect to naturalness. The high word error rate suggests that we need to improve on signal processing for concatenation. Index Terms : speech synthesis, Blizzard Challenge, Lesseme
A polynomial complexity algorithm to decide the liveness for a class of Petri nets

In this paper, we extend the liveness characterization results on a subclass of Petri nets, L-S/sup 3/PR. A polynomial algorithm is developed to decide whether a more general class of Petri nets, S/sup 3/PR, has potential deadlock, which can model a wide class of flexible manufacturing systems. First, the definitions of L-S/sup 3/PR and S/sup 3/PR are presented with illustrations. Then the concept of resource circuits and the way to find them from a net structure are proposed. We show the approach to obtain a minimal siphon S from a resource circuit. It is also proved that if a minimal siphon derived from a resource circuit does not contain the support of any P-invariant, it is not a potential deadlock. A minimal siphon that can be emptied is the real cause of the non-liveness in an S/sup 3/PR. Finally, an example is given to illustrate our results.
Robust control and model and controller reduction of linear parameter varying systems

In this paper we develop and demonstrate a linear parameter varying (LPV) stabilisation technique. The method systematically obtains a controller of a gain-scheduling nature that exhibits a certain level of robustness and performance for the LPV system. We propose a global approach to simultaneously design a robust controller as well as devise a procedure which uses the solution to the controller problem to both reduce the order of the plant and the order of the controller. The balancing method suggested has been proven to be suitable for both stable and unstable plants and the truncation procedure is shown to be directly related to the closed-loop performance level obtained. The solution employs convex optimisation solvers. To illustrate the design method, an unstable, high order, parameter driven Tokamak design example is presented where the aim is to robustly stabilise the plant as it varies along operating points.
On the use of DCT based activity measure in MPEG-2 rate control model TM5

In this paper, a novel modification in the step 3 of the rate control test Model 5 (TM5) of MPEG-2 video encoder is proposed. TM5 uses variance based activity measure to adapt the quantization parameter for each macroblock. It is found that if DCT coefficients are used instead of variance, the PSNR quality of the reconstructed image improves by 0.5 to 2 dB. In addition the computational complexity of the new approach is significantly lesser than that of TM5.
Workspace investigation of a 3 DOF compliant micro-motion stage

This paper investigates the workspace of a three degree-of-freedom (DOF) compliant micro-motion stage with flexure hinges. This micro-motion stage has parallel structure for better stiffness and accuracy than serial structures and is driven by three PZT stack actuators. This kind of micro-motion stage can be used in applications including micro system assembly, biological cell manipulation and microsurgery. Nevertheless, workspace is fundamental. When selecting or designing micro-motion stage(s) for a particular application, its workspace must be studied to ensure the end-effector can reach the desired points with required orientations. In this paper the workspace of the presented micro-motion stage is investigated and presented, both mathematically and empirically.
Optimal Properties of Stimulus-Response Learning Models*

Abstract A procedure is a specific way of making this association; a procedure is optimal if the sequence of choices it generates converges to the action that maximizes the expected payoff. The information available to the agent has crucial importance. An individual learning in isolation has partial information, because he can only observe the payoff to the action he has chosen; in social learning, he has full information, because he can learn from the action of the others. Linear procedures always converge to optimal action in the case of partial information, and do not in the case of full information. Exactly the opposite is true in the case of exponential procedures. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D1, D8, D9.
Satisfying Test Preconditions through Guided Object Selection

A random testing strategy can be effective at finding faults, but may leave some routines entirely untested if it never gets to call them on objects satisfying their preconditions. This limitation is particularly frustrating if the object pool does contain some precondition-satisfying objects but the strategy, which selects objects at random, does not use them. The extension of random testing described in this article addresses the problem. Experimentally, the resulting strategy succeeds in testing 56% of the routines that the pure random strategy missed; it tests hard routines 3.6 times more often; although it misses some of the faults detected by the original strategy, it finds 9.5% more faults overall; and it causes negligible overhead.
Magnetic cellular automata coplanar cross wire systems

Quantum cellular automata has proposed an exclusive architecture where two coplanar perpendicular wires have the ability to intersect one another without signal degradation. The physical realization of cross wire architectures has yet to be implemented and researchers share concerns over the reliability of such a system. Here we have designed a coplanar cross wire layout for magnetic cellular automata (MCA) and have fabricated two different systems. The first system was implemented via two ferromagnetic coupled coplanar crossing wires and demonstrated all possible logic combinations. The second more complex cross wire system consisted of nine junctions and one hundred and twenty single domain nanomagnets. The complex system’s ability to reach an energy minimum combined with the demonstration of all combinations of the smaller system leads us to conclude that a cross wire system is physically feasible and reliable in MCA.
Survey on Auto-Calibration of Beacon Nodes in Indoor Location Computing

— Knowing the location of devices and persons in indoor environments is a luring technology. Indoor localization using GPS signals is limited as GPS signals are obstructed in indoor areas. Therefore, various technologies have been developed to locate devices indoors where GPS signals can’t penetrate. One such technology uses beacon nodes as reference for location. The initial step for this includes deploying and finding out the co-ordinates of beacon nodes. This survey deals with ways in which beacon node coordinates are assigned starting from the traditional odometric ways to the existing GPS assisted indoor localization to various auto-configuration algorithms which is under research and development.
Curcumin Generates Oxidative Stress and Induces Apoptosis in Adult Schistosoma mansoni Worms

Inducing apoptosis is an interesting therapeutic approach to develop drugs that act against helminthic parasites. Researchers have investigated how curcumin (CUR), a biologically active compound extracted from rhizomes of Curcuma longa, affects Schistosoma mansoni and several cancer cell lines. This study evaluates how CUR influences the induction of apoptosis and oxidative stress in couples of adult S. mansoni worms. CUR decreased the viability of adult worms and killed them. The tegument of the parasite suffered morphological changes, the mitochondria underwent alterations, and chromatin condensed. Different apoptotic parameters were determined in an attempt to understand how CUR affected adult S. mansoni worms. CUR induced DNA damage and fragmentation and increased the expression of SmCASP3/7 transcripts and the activity of Caspase 3 in female and male worms. However, CUR did not intensify the activity of Caspase 8 in female or male worms. Evaluation of the superoxide anion and different antioxidant enzymes helped to explore the mechanism of parasite death further. The level of superoxide anion and the activity of Superoxide Dismutase (SOD) increased, whereas the activity of Glutathione-S-Transferase (GST), Glutathione reductase (GR), and Glutathione peroxidase (GPX) decreased, which culminated in the oxidation of proteins in adult female and male worms incubated with CUR. In conclusion, CUR generated oxidative stress followed by apoptotic-like-events in both adult female and male S. mansoni worms, ultimately killing them.