Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The use of high-resolution satellite imagery in forest inventory : a case of Hans Kanyinga Community Forest - Namibia

The present study investigated double sampling with regression estimators as a quest for efficiency and effectiveness in forest inventory in Namibian woodlands. Auxiliary data used were obtained from Standard QuickBird satellite scenes (phase 1) for Hans Kanyinga Community Forest from October and November 2004 covering an area of 12,107 hectares, amplified with terrestric data (phase 2) of 2002. The relationships between auxiliary and terrestric variables are described and prediction models were constructed. According to the results of the stepwise procedure with the Mallow’s Cp statistic as the selection criteria, photogrammetric stand density and a combination of the photogrammetric crown area with photogrammetric stand density were the best candidates for predicting the stand volume. The resulting volume model explains 56% of the variation. Photogrammetric stand density was found to be highly correlated to the terrestric stand density with the resulting model explaining 81% of the variation. Photogrammetric crown diameter was found to be correlated with the diameter at breast height measured from the plots which were assessed for spatial tree positions, which enabled the derivation of the diameter distribution. The diameter distribution model explains 43% of the variation. In addition, the actual tree positions were determined using the GPS and surveying techniques (polar positions) involving distance and bearings. GPS tree positions showed a considerable shift of up to 8.67 m. However, only the distance measurements of tress from the plot centre using the infield surveying methods were more reliable. Nevertheless, the influences of the tree positional errors are not of high concern for temporary based sample plots which are normally used in Namibian forest inventories. A reduction in inventory cost was found to be 24% i.e. N$25.79 to N$19.67 per hectare. The results of this study are valid for Kavango region or any other region with similar set of physical and climatic conditions, but caution must be exercised in implementing these results elsewhere under different physical and environmental conditions.
Activation of locus coeruleus from nucleus paragigantocellularis: a new excitatory amino acid pathway in brain

Recent anatomic and physiologic experiments revealed that a major afferent to the nucleus locus coeruleus (LC) is the nucleus paragigantocellularis (PGi) in the rostral ventrolateral medulla (Aston- Jones et al., 1986). In the present studies, responses of LC neurons to electrical activation of PGi were characterized in anesthetized rats. Low-intensity stimulation of PGi synaptically activated 73% of LC neurons at short latencies (mean onset, 11.3 msec), while a smaller population (16%) of LC neurons exhibited purely inhibitory responses. The excitatory transmission from PGi to LC was pharmacologically analyzed, revealing it to be resistant to cholinergic receptor antagonism, but completely abolished by the excitatory amino acid (EAA) antagonists kynurenic acid and gamma-D-glutamylglycine. The specific N- methyl-D-aspartate antagonist 2--amino-7-phosphonoheptanoic acid (AP7) and the preferential quisqualate receptor antagonist glutamate diethyl ester (GDEE) did not block LC responses to PGi stimulation, leading us to the tentative conclusion that EAAs may operate primarily at a kainate-type receptor on LC neurons to effect excitation from PGi. In addition to their blockade of PGi-evoked activity, kynurenic acid and DGG exerted a similar, simultaneous blockade of the characteristic excitation of LC neurons evoked by electrical stimulation of the hindpaw. These and other results indicate that the proposed EAA pathway from PGi may serve as a final link in a variety of sensory inputs to LC.
Competition, Regulation, and Intellectual Property Management in Genetically Modified Foods: Evidence from Survey Data

We present survey results regarding a series of hypotheses on industry structure, regulation and patent policy towards GM food crops, focussing on the stages of the industry that generate innovations and approved products for sale to the farming sector. Licensing as a means of delegating litigation and regulatory costs comes out as one of the most consistent themes in our responses. We link this practice to a two-tiered industry structure, a weak relation between litigation threat and research trajectory, and a perception by our respondents that patents - as well as patent design - are 'one step removed' from their research decisions.
Deep Brain Stimulation Reveals a Dissociation of Consummatory and Motivated Behaviour in the Medial and Lateral Nucleus Accumbens Shell of the Rat

Following the successful application of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the treatment of Parkinson's disease and promising results in clinical trials for obsessive compulsive disorder and major depression, DBS is currently being tested in small patient-populations with eating disorders and addiction. However, in spite of its potential use in a broad spectrum of disorders, the mechanisms of action of DBS remain largely unclear and optimal neural targets for stimulation in several disorders have yet to be established. Thus, there is a great need to examine site-specific effects of DBS on a behavioural level and to understand how DBS may modulate pathological behaviour. In view of the possible application of DBS in the treatment of disorders characterized by impaired processing of reward and motivation, like addiction and eating disorders, we examined the effect of DBS of the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) on food-directed behavior. Rats were implanted with bilateral stimulation electrodes in one of three anatomically and functionally distinct sub-areas of the NAcc: the core, lateral shell (lShell) and medial shell (mShell). Subsequently, we studied the effects of DBS on food consumption, and the motivational and appetitive properties of food. The data revealed a functional dissociation between the lShell and mShell. DBS of the lShell reduced motivation to respond for sucrose under a progressive ratio schedule of reinforcement, mShell DBS, however, profoundly and selectively increased the intake of chow. DBS of the NAcc core did not alter any form of food-directed behavior studied. DBS of neither structure affected sucrose preference. These data indicate that the intake of chow and the motivation to work for palatable food can independently be modulated by DBS of subregions of the NAcc shell. As such, these findings provide important leads for the possible future application of DBS as a treatment for eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa.
Face Recognition Using Gabor Filter Bank, Kernel Principle Component Analysis and Support Vector Machine

This paper presents a novel face recognition method based on the Gabor filter bank, Kernel Principle Component Analysis (KPCA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). At first, the Gabor filter bank with 5 frequencies and 8 orientations is applied on each face image to extract robust features against local distortions caused by variance of illumination, facial expression and pose. Then, the feature reduction technique of KPCA is performed on the outputs of the filter bank to form the new low-dimensional feature vectors. Finally, SVM is used for classification of the extracted features. The proposed method is tested on the ORL face database. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method has a maximum recognition rate of 98.5% which is higher than the other related algorithms applied on the ORL database.
Comprehensive analysis of DNA polymerase III α subunits and their homologs in bacterial genomes

The analysis of ∼2000 bacterial genomes revealed that they all, without a single exception, encode one or more DNA polymerase III α-subunit (PolIIIα) homologs. Classified into C-family of DNA polymerases they come in two major forms, PolC and DnaE, related by ancient duplication. While PolC represents an evolutionary compact group, DnaE can be further subdivided into at least three groups (DnaE1-3). We performed an extensive analysis of various sequence, structure and surface properties of all four polymerase groups. Our analysis suggests a specific evolutionary pathway leading to PolC and DnaE from the last common ancestor and reveals important differences between extant polymerase groups. Among them, DnaE1 and PolC show the highest conservation of the analyzed properties. DnaE3 polymerases apparently represent an ‘impaired’ version of DnaE1. Nonessential DnaE2 polymerases, typical for oxygen-using bacteria with large GC-rich genomes, have a number of features in common with DnaE3 polymerases. The analysis of polymerase distribution in genomes revealed three major combinations: DnaE1 either alone or accompanied by one or more DnaE2s, PolC + DnaE3 and PolC + DnaE1. The first two combinations are present in Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, respectively. The third one (PolC + DnaE1), found in Clostridia, represents a novel, so far experimentally uncharacterized, set.
Clarification strategies used by four Down's syndrome children for maintaining normal conversational interaction

In the course of acquiring language, chilearliest stage of language development dren often encounter difficulties in making (mean length of utterance ranging between themselves understood. When such failures 1.00 and 2.00 morphemes per utterance). In occur children must learn to recognize the addition, the subjects met the following se cause of the miscommunication and subselection criteria: (a) a mild deficit in adaptive quently how to clarify that failure. Several behavior as measured by the AAMD Adap studies of conversational interaction have five Behavior Scale (Grossman, 1973), (b) no examined the clarification strategies that sensory deficits and no history of seizures, 1 'Ato 2-year-old nonretarded children use (c) no prior institutional placement, and (d) when the listener is not able to understand participation in a preschool program, their original message. The findings reveal that these children use a variety of contin^ , n n ,■ d j ' Data Collection Procedures gent responses to maintain mutual under standing (Gallagher, 1977; Scollon, 1976; The data that served as the basis for this Stokes, Note 1). study were videotaped in six 'A-hour ses McLean and Snyder-McLean (1978) have sions over a 4-week period. The sessions recently suggested that retarded children sampled a variety of everyday activities that may lack a basic understanding of how to included playing with familiar and unfamil formulate contingent messages in conversaiar toys, eating meals and snacks, and look tion. If substantiated, this conversational ing at picture books. This diversity was de deficit would presumably result in frequent signed to provide each child with a range of communication breakdowns. This investilinguistic and nonlinguistic experiences that gation examines the communication failure would encourage a representative use of lan of four retarded children and explores the guage. strategies they adopt for clarifying these The language samples were transcribed miscommunications in everyday conversaorthographically. Both interand intratran tional situations. scriber reliability measures were computed using a random sample of 100 consecutive utterances per child. The proportion of agreement between transcribers and within a single transcriber was 85% and 87%, re spectively. Method
PLIABILITY AS AN EXPERIENTIAL QUALITY: EXPLORING THE AESTHETICS OF INTERACTION DESIGN

Digital design materials are temporal as much as they are spatial, which means that specific concepts are needed for understanding the use experiences of digital artifacts and the aesthetics of interaction design. In this paper, the quality of pliability is introduced to characterize the degree to which interaction feels involving, malleable, and tightly coupled – and hence to what degree it facilitates exploration and serendipity in use. Three sets of contrasting artifact examples from different domains (online maps, digital-image management, and online thesauri) are analyzed with regard to pliability. It is argued that the use of everyday digital products, normally perceived as instrumental and utility oriented, has an important experiential-aesthetic dimension consisting of temporal and visuo-tactile qualities (including pliability). The paper concludes with a discussion of related work and the role of experiential qualities in interaction design.
RADIC-Towards a General Method for Integrating Reactive and Deliberative Layers

Hybrid architectures have been developed to preserve the responsiveness of reactive layers while also providing the benefits of higher-level deliberative capabilities. The challenge of hybrid architecture design is to integrate layers that operate on different time scales, use different notions of spatial relations, maintain varying degrees of state, etc. Techniques for integration, however, are typically very specific to the application or particular hybrid architecture. A general method is proposed for constructing hybrid architectures via the integration of pre-existing reactive and deliberate layers that requires minimal modifications. Its potential is demonstrated in navigation experiments on a robot, achieving performance comparable to a commonly used hybrid system with specially designed layers.
Heterogeneous VRP review and conceptual framework

The purpose of this paper is to update recent research of the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem (FSMVRP), the heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem (HFVRP), and the extensions in a form of a literature review. In this paper, four major components of the problem: classification, considerable input data characteristics, decision making approaches, and heuristic and meta-heuristics algorithms are discussed. The comprehensive overview of the heterogeneous vehicle routing problem which puts a special emphasis on robustness approach is concluded and demonstrated in a simplified structure which has never been presented before. New potential research areas resulting from the survey are suggested in the final section.
Chapter 13 OVERVIEW OF EVALUATION AND USABILITY

With the technical advances and market growth in the field, the issues of evaluation and usability of spoken dialogue systems, unimodal as well as multimodal, are as crucial as ever. This chapter discusses those issues by reviewing a series of European and US initiatives which have produced major results on evaluation and usability. Whereas significant progress has been made on unimodal spoken dialogue systems evaluation and usability, the emergence of, among others, multimodal, mobile, and non-task-oriented systems continues to pose entirely new challenges to research in evaluation and usability.
How can We Tackle Energy Efficiency in IoT Based Smart Buildings?

Nowadays, buildings are increasingly expected to meet higher and more complex performance requirements. Among these requirements, energy efficiency is recognized as an international goal to promote energy sustainability of the planet. Different approaches have been adopted to address this goal, the most recent relating consumption patterns with human occupancy. In this work, we analyze what are the main parameters that should be considered to be included in any building energy management. The goal of this analysis is to help designers to select the most relevant parameters to control the energy consumption of buildings according to their context, selecting them as input data of the management system. Following this approach, we select three reference smart buildings with different contexts, and where our automation platform for energy monitoring is deployed. We carry out some experiments in these buildings to demonstrate the influence of the parameters identified as relevant in the energy consumption of the buildings. Then, in two of these buildings are applied different control strategies to save electrical energy. We describe the experiments performed and analyze the results. The first stages of this evaluation have already resulted in energy savings of about 23% in a real scenario.
Facebook Applications' Installation and Removal: A Temporal Analysis

Facebook applications are one of the reasons for Facebook attractiveness. Unfortunately, numerous users are not aware of the fact that many malicious Facebook applications exist. To educate users, to raise users' awareness and to improve Facebook users' security and privacy, we developed a Firefox add-on that alerts users to the number of installed applications on their Facebook profiles. In this study, we present the temporal analysis of the Facebook applications' installation and removal dataset collected by our add-on. This dataset consists of information from 2,945 users, collected during a period of over a year. We used linear regression to analyze our dataset and discovered the linear connection between the average percentage change of newly installed Facebook applications and the number of days passed since the user initially installed our add-on. Additionally, we found out that users who used our Firefox add-on become more aware of their security and privacy installing on average fewer new applications. Finally, we discovered that on average 86.4% of Facebook users install an additional application every 4.2 days.
The COX-2-1195AA Genotype Is Associated with Diffuse-Type Gastric Cancer in Korea

Background/Aims The potential role of the cyclooxygenase (COX)-2 polymorphism has been reported in relation to the risk of gastrointestinal tract malignancies. Therefore, we investigated whether COX-2 polymorphisms are associated with the risk of gastric cancer (GC) in Korea, one of the areas with a high prevalence of this condition. Methods We evaluated the genotypic frequencies of COX-2-765 and -1195 in 100 peptic ulcer patients, 100 GC patients, and 100 healthy controls. The polymorphisms of the COX-2-765 and -1195 genes were analyzed by polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphisms. Results The frequencies of the COX-2-1195 GG, GA, and AA genotype were 20%, 60%, and 20% in intestinal-type GC and 8%, 48%, and 44% in diffuse-type GC, respectively (p=0.021). There were no significant differences in the frequency of COX-2-765 genotypes between intestinal-type GC and diffuse-type GC (p=0.603). Age- and sex-adjusted logistic regression analysis showed that the COX-2-1195 AA genotype was the independent risk factor of diffuse-type GC compared with the COX-2-1195 GG genotype (p=0.041; odds ratio, 6.22; 95% confidence interval, 1.077 to 35.870). Conclusions The COX-2-1195 AA genotype may render subjects more susceptible to diffuse-type GC.
Towards the efficient simulation of telecommunication systems in heterogeneous distributed execution environments

An introduction is given to the topics of the parallel and distributed simulation and of the modeling of telecommunications systems. Our practical modeling concept for simulation in heterogeneous execution environment is presented. Its logical topology is a star shaped network of homogeneous clusters. The load balancing and the coupling factor criteria are set up for building models of telecommunications systems so that the simulation may produce good speed-up in a heterogeneous distributed execution environment. A case study is given with the open source OMNeT++ discrete-event simulation system and its parallel CQN (closed queueing network) sample model executed by 64 CPU cores of four different types. Our criteria are heavily supported by the results of our experiments.
Enumerative Formulae for Unrooted Planar Maps: a Pattern

We present uniformly available simple enumerative formulae for unrooted planar $n$-edge maps (counted up to orientation-preserving isomorphism) of numerous classes including arbitrary, loopless, non-separable, eulerian maps and plane trees. All the formulae conform to a certain pattern with respect to the terms of the sum over $t\mid n,\,t\! rational function of $n$. Two simple new enumerative results are deduced for bicolored eulerian maps. A collateral aim is to briefly survey recent and old results of unrooted planar map enumeration.
A texture based approach for automatic identification of benign and malignant tumor from FNAC images

Cancer is one of the most destructive diseases which if not detected in time, will surely lead to death. About 12 million people will be died due to cancer by 2030 as per the statistics, provided by the World Health Organization (WHO). Thus a big challenge and area of research emerges in front of both the medical practitioner and scientific researcher to fight against cancers. When a patient is suspected for the presence of malignant tumor they are advised for FNAC (Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology) test where specimens of cells can be taken in minimally invasive way with, e.g., tiny needles, with or without syringes. One of the main drawbacks of cytopathological diagnosis is the time required for an expert to visually inspect a specimen under a microscope, in search of malignant or suspicious cells and manually select them for further analysis. The present work tried to device an automated computer-aided diagnostic system specifically to reduce time and provide `second opinion' for pathologists in making diagnosis. A database of 100 FNAC images were taken on which k-fold cross-validation was performed, where k varied, for the diagnosis of malignancy. Initially, elimination of cytoplasm from the images consisting of multiple cells was done by performing saturation threshold segmentation and from the segmented nucleus boundary, meaningful texture and shape describing features are calculated using GLCM and LBP algorithms. The outcome of segmentation followed by feature extraction was tested by using the Logistic classifier which is a machine learning algorithm. The achieved diagnostic accuracy is 86%, when features obtained by combining GLCM and LBP methods, are used for classification.
A collaborative routing for wireless multi-hop networks with directional antennas

In this paper we propose a collaborative routing protocol (CORP) for wireless multi-hop network with directional antennas that utilizes the wireless broadcast advantage (WBA) properties. In CORP, the neighboring nodes collaborate with each other to directionally forward the packets when an intermediate relay node is unable to perform its task due to channel/node failure. The process of collaboration is supported by the RSS value obtained from the MAC layer to form the set of collaborating nodes. The temporary link formed by the collaborating node will maintain the ongoing transmission until the old route is recovered or a fresh route is generated. We performed simulation studies using QualNet to prove that our protocol is suitable for wireless multi-hop networks that are prone to frequent node/link failure.
The Interlanguage Rhythm of Algerian EFL Undergraduates

This paper is an attempt to classify the rhythm of the interlanguage produced by third year Algerian EFL students at Constantine 1 University. The nature of speech rhythm classes has been hotly debated as to whether it should be conceived as a discrete stress-timed vs. syllable-timed dichotomy or as a continuum. The rhythm metrics measured in this study i.e. %V and ∆C, yield that the informants’ speech rhythm is rather ‘intermediate’, merging a stress-timed ∆C and a syllable-timed %V. Accordingly, the results obtained support those who believe that crosslinguistic interference in the area of phonology touches not only segments but also speech rhythm.