Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biogeochemical factors contributing to enhanced carbon storage following afforestation of a semi-arid shrubland

Abstract. Ecosystems in dry regions are generally low in productivity and carbon (C) storage. We report, however, large increases in C sequestration following afforestation of a semi-arid shrubland with Pinus halepensis trees. Using C and nitrogen (N) inventories, based in part on site-specific allometric equations, we measured an increase in the standing ecosystem C stock from 2380 g C m−2 in the shrubland to 5840 g C m−2 in the forest after 35 years, with no significant change in N stocks. Carbon sequestration following afforestation was associated with increased N use efficiency as reflected by an overall increase in C/N ratio from 7.6 in the shrubland to 16.6 in the forest. The C accumulation rate in the forest was particularly high for soil organic C (SOC; increase of 1760 g C m−2 or 50 g C m−2 yr−1), which was associated with the following factors: 1) Analysis of a small 13C signal within this pure C3 system combined with size fractionation of soil organic matter indicated a significant addition of new SOC derived from forest vegetation (68% of total forest SOC) and a considerable portion of the old original shrubland SOC (53%) still remaining in the forest. 2) A large part of both new and old SOC appeared to be protected from decomposition as about 60% of SOC under both land-use types were in mineral-associated fractions. 3) A short-term decomposition study indicated decreased decomposition of lower-quality litter and SOC in the forest, based on reduced decay rates of up to 90% for forest compared to shrubland litter. 4) Forest soil included a significant component of live and dead roots (12% of total SOC). Our results suggest a role for increased N use efficiency, enhanced SOC protection and reduced decomposition rates in the large C sequestration potential following afforestation in semi-arid regions. These results are particularly relevant in light of persistent predictions of drying trends in the Mediterranean and other regions.
Conillon: A lightweight distributed computing platform for desktop grids

We describe a novel, lightweight platform for distributed computing called Conillon. This platform allows regular workstations to function as compute nodes in a desktop grid. Conillon runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and computational resources from any architecture for which the JVM is implemented can thus be used. Many existing distributed computing platforms are either complex or only allow for one type of job to be deployed. Conillon is lightweight and simple to use and yet allows any number of different jobs to be deployed and executed in parallel. Entirely new jobs can, in fact, be added dynamically. In this paper, we discuss the architecture and features of Conillon. We report on a series of experiments in which we test scalability, fault tolerance, and computation of different types of jobs on the same compute nodes.
Automated ontology selection based on description logic

With the widespread use of Ontology and extension of Ontology repositories, there come deficiencies on Ontology Selection. The deficiencies are mainly low automated level and absence of Ontological knowledge in the selection criteria. To fill the gaps, we propose a Description Logic based Automated Ontology Selection Framework (DL-AOSF), which consists of automated components and is designed to be suitable for various application scenarios. The core algorithm of DL-AOSF adopts dual criteria, viz. topic coverage and knowledge richness, to comprehensively assess the satisfaction of candidates with concrete application information need. Distinguishing from other Ontology selections, DL- AOSF implements the knowledge richness criteria on semantic level, by using knowledge-driven Ontology modularization technique and DL reasoning. The preliminary experimental results indicate DL-AOSF is valid and promising.
The architecture of the global climate regime: a top-down perspective

This article argues that a legally binding, multilateral agreement is a necessary condition for achieving the highest levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions consistent with limiting warming to below either 2°C or below 1.5°C. Clear legally binding commitments within a multilaterally agreed process with strong legal and institutional characteristics are needed to give countries the confidence that their economic interests are being fairly and equally treated. Common accounting rules are needed for comparability of effort, and in order to protect environmental integrity, to demonstrate transparency, for effective monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of emissions and actions, and to facilitate and support a strong international carbon market. Securing full implementation will depend, in part, on the strength of an agreement's compliance mechanism. The Copenhagen Accord, by itself, represents a quintessential ‘bottom-up’/‘pledge and review’ approach. It is open to interpretation whether the Accord can become a stepping stone on the way to strengthening the legally binding, multilateral framework to fight climate change, building on both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, or whether it will lead to the unravelling and fragmentation of all that has been built up to date. Legal architecture choices made in 2010 and beyond are likely to be determinative.
DataTweet: An architecture enabling data-centric IoT services

This work proposes a data driven IoT architecture to mitigate the fragmentation and data silos in consumer IoT ecosystem. IoT data cycle is explored to understand data transformation from generation to processing, storage and dissemination. We have developed a framework called DataTweet focusing on data cycle based IoT services. The DataTweet architecture is presented along with its subsystems, services, requirements and common service functions necessary to implement the services. The main novelty of DataTweet is in creating a ubiquitous consumer data service for transmitting short messages to any computing platforms to generate actionable intelligence that is disseminated to consumers.
An Energetic Variational Approach to Mathematical Modeling of Charged Fluids: Charge Phases, Simulation and Well Posedness

In thesis we propose a mathematical model of electrolyte fluid and interface systems. The model is based on a coupling between the Navier-Stokes equations of an incompressible fluid, the Nernst-Plank-Poisson equations of a diffuse, binary electrolyte, and the phase field Allen-Cahn equation. The coupling is derived in the energetic variational framework and guarantees the consistent exchange of the kinetic energy of the fluid, entropic and electric energy of the charge carriers and the surface area of the interface. Using the phase field as a topological labeling of the interface, we introduce a “short range” barrier potential which selectively blocks charge migration across the interface. The model is able to capture the dynamics of both charge induced flow and selection by the interface. This is demonstrated by simulation of the coalesence of two charge selective vesicles by charge induced motion. We also develope the existence theory for global classical solutions of the NPP equations with smooth data in space dimension d ≤ 3, global weak solutions to the NPP equations coupled with the NS equations for d ≤ 3 and global weak solutions for small initial data with the additional phase field Allen Cahn equation in space dimension d ≤ 2. The NPP equations are a system of second order, divergence form, semilinear, nonlocal parabolic equations. We elucidate many of the special features of the NPP equations which are nonstandard in complex fluid systems.
Section Ii-exercise Physiology & Sports Medicine Effects of Regular Recreational Exercise Training on Serum Angptl3-like Protein and Lipid Profile in Young Healthy Adults

Evidence of the role of ANGPTL3, a liver-secreted glycoprotein, in serum lipid turnover, led us to hypothesize that this protein may be involved in modification of the lipid profile induced by exercise-training. Given the lack of data regarding this issue, the main goal of the present study was to investigate the effects of regular participation in a recreational physical activity program on serum ANGPTL3 and selected lipid profile measures in young, apparently healthy female and male adults. We compared serum ANGPTL3, lipid profile measures, common lipid ratios, the Atherogenic Index of Plasma (AIP) and glucose in fasting blood samples derived from 22 active physical education students including active females (AF, N=6) and males (AM, N=16) with samples from 28 relatively sedentary age-matched peers, including female (SF, N=9) and male (SM, N=19) individuals not involved in any regular physical conditioning program. Despite high inter-individual variability of serum ANGPTL3, there was a general tendency toward higher serum ANGPTL3 and HDL-C in women compared to men, but without significant differences related to their physical activity status. Based on both routine lipid profile measures and lipid ratios, all participants had normal lipid profiles, normal glycemia, as well as favorable anthropometric indices not suggesting increased cardiometabolic risk. However, lower levels of the TG/HDL-C ratio and AIP in physically active compared to relatively sedentary participants, reflecting the predominance of large, buoyant LDL particles, strongly support the view of beneficial health-promoting effects of regular participation in recreational sport activities.
Molecular architecture of membranes involved in excitation-contraction coupling of cardiac muscle

Peripheral couplings are junctions between the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) and the surface membrane (SM). Feet occupy the SR/SM junctional gap and are identified as the SR calcium release channels, or ryanodine receptors (RyRs). In cardiac muscle, the activation of RyRs during excitation-contraction (e-c) coupling is initiated by surface membrane depolarization, followed by the opening of surface membrane calcium channels, the dihydropyridine receptors (DHPRs). We have studied the disposition of DHPRs and RyRs, and the structure of peripheral couplings in chick myocardium, a muscle that has no transverse tubules. Immunolabeling shows colocalization of RyRs and DHPRs in clusters at the fiber's periphery. The positions of DHPR and RyR clusters change coincidentally during development. Freeze-fracture of the surface membrane reveals the presence of domains (junctional domains) occupied by clusters of large particles. Junctional domains in the surface membrane and arrays of feet in the junctional gap have similar sizes and corresponding positions during development, suggesting that both are components of peripheral couplings. As opposed to skeletal muscle, membrane particles in junctional domains of cardiac muscle do not form tetrads. Thus, despite their proximity to the feet, they do not appear to be specifically associated with them. Two observations establish the identify of the structurally identified feet arrays/junctional domain complexes with the immunocytochemically defined RyRs/DHPRs coclusters: the concomitant changes during development and the identification of feet as the cytoplasmic domains of RyRs. We suggest that the large particles in junctional domains of the surface membrane represent DHPRs. These observations have two important functional consequences. First, the apposition of DHPRs and RyRs indicates that most of the inward calcium current flows into the restricted space where feet are located. Secondly, contrary to skeletal muscle, presumptive DHPRs do not show a specific association with the feet, which is consistent with a less direct role of charge movement in cardiac than in skeletal e-c coupling.
Poster: HORIBALFRE: Higher Order Residue Interactions Based ALgorithm for Fold REcognition

In an attempt to enhance the potential based fold - recognition methods of remote homologs, we propose a new approach “Higher Order Residue Interaction Based ALgorithm for Fold REcognition (HORIBALFRE)”, where we incorporated the potential contributions not just from one-body and two-body terms, but from three body (triplet interactions) and four-body (quadruple interaction) interactions, to implement a new fold recognition method. Core of HORIBALFRE includes the potentials generated from a structure library derived from CAMPASS database of structure based sequence alignment. Currently, the algorithm is applied to the Fischer's dataset. Our preliminary result indicates that inclusion of higher order residue interaction (quadruple) potentials increases the prediction performance.
Irradiance gradients

A new method for improving the accuracy of a diffuse interreflection calculation is introduced in a ray tracing context. The information from a hemispherical sampling of the luminous environment is interpreted in a new way to predict the change in irradiance as a function of position and surface orientation. The additional computation involved is modest and the benefit is substantial. An improved interpolation of irradiance resulting from the gradient calculation produces smoother, more accurate renderings. This result is achieved through better utilization of ray samples rather than additional samples or alternate sampling strategies. Thus, the technique is applicable to a variety of global illumination algorithms that use hemicubes or Monte Carlo sampling techniques.
Computer aided detection of bleeding in capsule endoscopy images

The capsule endoscopy (CE) has been widely used to diagnose the diseases in human digestive tract because of its great breakthrough that it can view the entire small bowel without invasiveness. However, a tough problem associated with this new technology is that too many images to be examined by eyes cause a huge burden to physicians, so it is very useful to help the physician do diagnosis using computerized methods. In this paper, a new method aimed for bleeding region detection in CE images is proposed. This new approach mainly focuses on color texture feature, also a very important clue for the physicians to judge the status of the gastrointestinal tract. We propose a new idea of chromaticity moment as the color feature, which make full use of the Tchebichef polynomials and the illumination invariant of the HSI color space. Then, combined with the uniform local binary pattern (LBP), a traditional texture representation model, it can be used to discriminate normal regions and bleeding regions. Classification of bleeding regions with multilayer perceptron neural network is then deployed to verify the performance of the proposed new color texture features. Experimental results on our present bleeding image data sets show that this new scheme is promising in detecting bleeding regions.
Morbidity and Mortality in Preterm Infants following Antacid Use: A Retrospective Audit

Background and Objectives. Antacids are often prescribed to preterm infants due to misdiagnosis of gastro-oesophageal reflux. This suppresses gastric acidity, a major defence mechanism against infection. This study aims to determine if ranitidine and omeprazole use in very low birth weight (VLBW) neonates, <1500 grams, is associated with increased risk of late onset sepsis, necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), and mortality. Methods. Retrospective analysis was conducted on neonates, <1500 grams, born and admitted into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at The Canberra Hospital during the period from January 2008 to December 2012. Information regarding late onset sepsis, NEC, mortality, ranitidine/omeprazole use, and other neonatal/hospital factors was collected for each neonate. Results. 360 neonates were evaluated, 64 received ranitidine and/or omeprazole, and 296 had not. There were no statistically significant differences in incidence of late onset sepsis (OR = 0.52, CI = 0.24–1.1, and p = 0.117), NEC Stage 2 and above (OR = 0.4, CI = 0.05–3.2, and p = 0.7), or mortality (OR = 0.35, CI = 0.08–1.5, and p = 0.19) between the two groups. After adjusting significant differences in neonatal and hospital factors, risk of late onset sepsis was significantly lower in those that received ranitidine/omeprazole (OR = 0.28, CI = 0.13–0.65, and p = 0.003). Conclusions. Ranitidine and omeprazole use in VLBW preterm infants may not be associated with an increased risk of infection, NEC, and mortality.
Fast Distributed Correlation Discovery Over Streaming Time-Series Data

The dramatic rise of time-series data in a variety of contexts, such as social networks, mobile sensing, data centre monitoring, etc., has fuelled interest in obtaining real-time insights from such data using distributed stream processing systems. One such extremely valuable insight is the discovery of correlations in real-time from large-scale time-series data. A key challenge in discovering correlations is that the number of time-series pairs that have to be analyzed grows quadratically in the number of time-series, giving rise to a quadratic increase in both computation cost and communication cost between the cluster nodes in a distributed environment. To tackle the challenge, we propose a framework called AEGIS. AEGIS exploits well-established statistical properties to dramatically prune the number of time-series pairs that have to be evaluated for detecting interesting correlations. Our extensive experimental evaluations on real and synthetic datasets establish the efficacy of AEGIS over baselines.
Identification of Hydroxyanthraquinones as Novel Inhibitors of Hepatitis C Virus NS3 Helicase

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is an important etiological agent of severe liver diseases, including cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. The HCV genome encodes nonstructural protein 3 (NS3) helicase, which is a potential anti-HCV drug target because its enzymatic activity is essential for viral replication. Some anthracyclines are known to be NS3 helicase inhibitors and have a hydroxyanthraquinone moiety in their structures; mitoxantrone, a hydroxyanthraquinone analogue, is also known to inhibit NS3 helicase. Therefore, we hypothesized that the hydroxyanthraquinone moiety alone could also inhibit NS3 helicase. Here, we performed a structure–activity relationship study on a series of hydroxyanthraquinones by using a fluorescence-based helicase assay. Hydroxyanthraquinones inhibited NS3 helicase with IC50 values in the micromolar range. The inhibitory activity varied depending on the number and position of the phenolic hydroxyl groups, and among different hydroxyanthraquinones examined, 1,4,5,8-tetrahydroxyanthraquinone strongly inhibited NS3 helicase with an IC50 value of 6 µM. Furthermore, hypericin and sennidin A, which both have two hydroxyanthraquinone-like moieties, were found to exert even stronger inhibition with IC50 values of 3 and 0.8 µM, respectively. These results indicate that the hydroxyanthraquinone moiety can inhibit NS3 helicase and suggest that several key chemical structures are important for the inhibition.
Transactional sex and risk for HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Young women aged 15 to 24 years in sub‐Saharan Africa continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV. A growing number of studies have suggested that the practice of transactional sex may in part explain women's heightened risk, but evidence on the association between transactional sex and HIV has not yet been synthesized. We set out to systematically review studies that assess the relationship between transactional sex and HIV among men and women in sub‐Saharan Africa and to summarize the findings through a meta‐analysis.
Understanding the Determinants of Big Data Analytics Adoption

This article aims to empirically investigate the factors that affects the adoption of big data analytics by firms (adopters and non-adopters). The current study is based on three feature that influence BDA adoption: technological context (relative advantage, complexity, compatibility), organizational context (top management support, technology readiness, organizational data environment), and environmental context (competitive pressure, and trading partner pressure). A structured questionnaire-based survey method was used to collect data from 231 firm managers. Relevant hypotheses were derived and tested by partial least squares. The results indicated that technology, organization and environment contexts impact firms' adoption of big data analytics. The findings also revealed that relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, top management support, technology readiness, organizational data environment and competitive pressure have a significant influence on the adopters of big data analytics, whereas relative advantage, complexity and competitive pressure have a significant influence on the non-adopters of big data analytics.
Proximity, interpenetration, and sympatry networks: a reply to Dos Santos et al.

To overcome those "methodological problems," they propose a new method that uses as data the individual records because "in the process of obtaining the ranges, either with grids or vectorial alternatives, the informa tion provided by direct evidence (punctual records) is masked" (Dos Santos et al. 2008, p. 446). They claim (Dos Santos et al. 2008, p. 447) that their method "yields results strictly adjusted to a notion of endemism in the sense of species restricted to an area. " Whereas the criticisms to some of the methods they cite may be valid, others are hardly relevant or con stitute only misrepresentations. In addition, their new techniques are? as we discuss below? based on sub stantial alterations to the traditional notion of endemism
How to improve the statistical power of the 10-fold cross validation scheme in recommender systems

At this stage development of recommender systems (RS), an evaluation of competing approaches (methods) yielding similar performances in terms of experiment reproduction is of crucial importance in order to direct the further development toward the most promising direction. These comparisons are usually based on the 10-fold cross validation scheme. Since the compared performances are often similar to each other, the application of statistical significance testing is inevitable in order to not to get misled by randomly caused differences of achieved performances. For the same reason, to reproduce experiments on a different set of experimental data, the most powerful significance testing should be applied. In this work we provide guidelines on how to achieve the highest power in the comparison of RS and we demonstrate them on a comparison of RS performances when different variables are contextualized.
A class of numerical methods for the solution of fourth-order nonlinear ordinary differential equations on a graded mesh with boundary conditions of first kind

Abstract We propose difference schemes of order 2 and 3 on a graded mesh for fourth-order nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The values of u and (du/dx) are prescribed at two boundary points. Our methods involve only 3-grid points. A graded mesh is generated by introducing a mesh ratio parameter σ. Numerical values of (du/dx) are obtained as a by-product of the proposed methods. The stability and convergence analysis are discussed in brief. The modified version of the method works well for singular problems. We have tested our methods on seven benchmark problems to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed methods.
The Challenge and Promise of Predictive Coding for Privilege

Manfred Gabriel Chris Paskach David Sharpe Principal Partner Manager Forensic Technology Forensic Technology E-Discovery Services KPMG LLP (US) KPMG LLP (US) KPMG LLP (Canada) 345 Park Avenue 6032 Katella Avenue 333 Bay Street, Suite 4600 New York, NY 10154 Cypress, CA 90630 Toronto, ON M5H 2S1 USA USA Canada +1 (212) 954-3656 +1 (714) 934-5442 +1 (416) 777-3738 mjgabriel@kpmg.com cpaskach@kpmg.com davidsharpe@kpmg.ca