Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microbial Transformations of Nitrogen, Sulfur, and Iron Dictate Vegetation Composition in Wetlands: A Review

The majority of studies on rhizospheric interactions focus on pathogens, mycorrhizal symbiosis, or carbon transformations. Although the biogeochemical transformations of N, S, and Fe have profound effects on vegetation, these effects have received far less attention. This review, meant for microbiologists, biogeochemists, and plant scientists includes a call for interdisciplinary research by providing a number of challenging topics for future ecosystem research. Firstly, all three elements are plant nutrients, and microbial activity significantly changes their availability. Secondly, microbial oxidation with oxygen supplied by radial oxygen loss from roots in wetlands causes acidification, while reduction using alternative electron acceptors leads to generation of alkalinity, affecting pH in the rhizosphere, and hence plant composition. Thirdly, reduced species of all three elements may become phytotoxic. In addition, Fe cycling is tightly linked to that of S and P. As water level fluctuations are very common in wetlands, rapid changes in the availability of oxygen and alternative terminal electron acceptors will result in strong changes in the prevalent microbial redox reactions, with significant effects on plant growth. Depending on geological and hydrological settings, these interacting microbial transformations change the conditions and resource availability for plants, which are both strong drivers of vegetation development and composition by changing relative competitive strengths. Conversely, microbial composition is strongly driven by vegetation composition. Therefore, the combination of microbiological and plant ecological knowledge is essential to understand the biogeochemical and biological key factors driving heterogeneity and total (i.e., microorganisms and vegetation) community composition at different spatial and temporal scales.
Effect of preventive supplementation on young children in Niger.

To the Editor: In their randomized controlled trial, Ms Isanaka and colleagues found that providing children younger than 5 years with ready-to-use therapeutic food during periods of food insecurity can prevent cases of malnutrition. However, their study presents 2 important methodological difficulties. First, the authors used different reference distributions to define malnutrition at inclusion in the study (National Center for Health Statistics/World Health Organization [NCHS/ WHO], 1978) and at inclusion in the analysis (WHO Child Growth Standards, 2006). A proportion of participants were thusexcluded fromtheanalysison thegrounds that theywere already malnourished at recruitment according to the WHO reference. This proportion was likely substantial and would be expected to consist mainly of children younger than 24 monthsbecause the2referencesyielddifferentdiagnosesprincipally in that age range. Unfortunately, this age rangehas the highest risk of malnutrition. This compromises the internal validity of the study, and extrapolation of results to children aged 6 to 60 months requires caution. The problem could be amplified by the interaction of the intervention with child age atbaseline (P=.07), a resultnot fullydiscussedby theauthors. Second, the authors chose purposively a small number of villages that experienced a high prevalence of wasting during the 2005 food crisis. This crisis was an extreme manifestation of a long-term problem, including weak markets, land degradation, and poor access to health services. As a result, the study villages were likely to differ from other villages by a number of key characteristics, putting the external validity of the study in question. In addition, it indicates that without addressing the causal complexity of malnutrition any intervention will have limited impact on malnutrition. The intervention in the study by Isanaka et al reduced the rate of wasting by only 36%.
Quantum fingerprints that keep secrets

We introduce a new type of cryptographic primitive that we call hiding fingerprinting. A (quantum) fingerprinting scheme translates a binary string of length $n$ to $d$ (qu)bits, typically $d\ll n$, such that given any string $y$ and a fingerprint of $x$, one can decide with high accuracy whether $x=y$. Classical fingerprinting schemes cannot hide information very well: a classical fingerprint of $x$ that guarantees error at most $\epsilon$ necessarily reveals $\Omega(\log(1/\ epsilon))$ bits about $x$. We call a scheme hiding if it reveals $o(\log(1/\epsilon))$ bits; accordingly, no classical scheme is hiding. For any constant $c$, we construct two kinds of hiding fingerprinting schemes, both mapping $n$-bit strings to $O(\log n)$ qubits and guaranteeing one-sided error probability at most $1/n^c$. The first kind uses pure states and leaks at most $O(1)$ bits, and the second kind uses mixed states and leaks at most $1/n^c$ bits, where the "leakage" is bounded via accessible information. The schemes are computationally efficient. Our mixed-state scheme is optimal, as shown via a generic strategy that extracts $1/\poly(n)$ bits from any fingerprint over $O(\log n)$ qubits.
Analysis of Cultured Neuronal Networks Using Intraburst Firing Characteristics

It is an open question whether neuronal networks, cultured on multielectrode arrays, retain any capability to usefully process information (learning and memory). A necessary prerequisite for learning is that stimulation can induce lasting changes in the network. To observe these changes, one needs a method to describe the network in sufficient detail, while stable in normal circumstances. We analyzed the spontaneous bursting activity that is encountered in dissociated cultures of rat neocortical cells. Burst profiles (BPs) were made by estimating the instantaneous array-wide firing frequency. The shape of the BPs was found to be stable on a time scale of hours. Spatiotemporal detail is provided by analyzing the instantaneous firing frequency per electrode. The resulting phase profiles (PPs) were estimated by aligning BPs to their peak spiking rate over a period of 15 min. The PPs reveal a stable spatiotemporal pattern of activity during bursts over a period of several hours, making them useful for plasticity and learning studies. We also show that PPs can be used to estimate conditional firing probabilities. Doing so, yields an approach in which network bursting behavior and functional connectivity can be studied.
Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy

Opinion statementTreatment of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) in a patient with exogenous immunosuppression starts with discontinuation of immunosuppressive medication. The restored host immunity will clear JC virus, the cause of PML, from the brain via cell-mediated immune mechanisms. Patients with solid-organ transplants will lose the transplanted organ, however, and patients who have auto-immune disorders may experience exacerbation of their underlying disease. These factors need to be weighed against the potentially fatal nature of PML.If the patient’s immunosupression is AIDS-related, highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) should be initiated if it has not previously been used. If the patient is already receiving HAART, the therapy should be changed to optimize treatment, with the goals of a nondetectable HIV viral load and normalization or near normalization of the CD4 count.For non-AIDS PML patients, daily intravenous cytosine arabinoside for 5 days can be offered if the patient is not pancytopenic and can tolerate a chemotherapeutic agent. For AIDS patients with PML or failing non-AIDS patients with neurologic deterioration, cidofovir can be considered. These therapies can be offered if neurologic stabilization satisfies the quality-of-life goals for the patient.For patients intolerant of other therapies or unsuited to them, oral mirtazapine or risperidone can be considered. The safety of these agents has been established in the treatment of psychiatric disease, but their efficacy has not yet been proven. Small interfering RNA (siRNA) therapy holds the promise of specific antiviral therapy, but delivery methods, safety, and efficacy are yet to be established.
Persian text classification based on topic models

With the extensive growth in information, text classification as one of the text mining methods, plays a vital role in organizing and management information. Most text classification methods represent a documents collection as a Bag of Words (BOW) model and then use the histogram of words as the classification features. But in this way, the number of features is very large; therefore performing text classification faces serious computational cost problems. Moreover, the BOW representation is unable to recognize semantic relations between words. Recently, topic-model approaches have been successfully applied for text classification to overcome the problems of BOW. Our main goal in this paper is to investigate the possibility of applying the topic models for Persian text classification and compare between the feature processing techniques of BOW and the topic model based approaches. The experimental results show that the topic-model approach for representing the Persian documents yields at least 9% accuracy improvement compared to the BOW based algorithm.
ECNU at 2016 LiveQA Track: A Parameter Sharing Long Short Term Memory Model for Learning Question Similarity

In this paper, we present our system which is evaluated in the TREC 2016 LiveQA Challenge. Same as the last year, the TREC 2016 LiveQA track focuses on “live” question answering for the real-user questions from Yahoo! Answer. In this year, we ﬁrst apply a parameter sharing Long Short Term Memory(LSTM) network to learn a high embedding of question representation. Then we combine the question representation with the key words information to strengthen the representation of semantic-similar questions, followed by calculating the question similarity with a simple metric function. Our approach outperforms the average score of all submitted runs.
RETROSPENIAL CORTICAL DEACTIVATION DURING PAINFUL STIMULATION OF FIBROMYALGIC PATIENTS

To study fibromyalgic pain this article contrasts positron emission tomographic measures of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) during externally induced acute pain and rest in eight fibromyalgia syndrome patients. An expected pattern of frontal and parietal cortical activation during acute pain as compared to rest was observed. However, reduced rCBF was additionally found in the retrosplenial cortex during acute pain as compared to rest. This may reflect that externally induced pain inhibits fibromyalgic pain and syndrome-related evaluative processes located in the retrosplenial cortex, and that fibromyalgic pain results from exaggerated attention to sub-noxious pain signaling, that is, secondary hyperalgesia.
To Catch a Ratter: Monitoring the Behavior of Amateur DarkComet RAT Operators in the Wild

Remote Access Trojans (RATs) give remote attackers interactive control over a compromised machine. Unlike large-scale malware such as botnets, a RAT is controlled individually by a human operator interacting with the compromised machine remotely. The versatility of RATs makes them attractive to actors of all levels of sophistication: they've been used for espionage, information theft, voyeurism and extortion. Despite their increasing use, there are still major gaps in our understanding of RATs and their operators, including motives, intentions, procedures, and weak points where defenses might be most effective. In this work we study the use of DarkComet, a popular commercial RAT. We collected 19,109 samples of DarkComet malware found in the wild, and in the course of two, several-week-long experiments, ran as many samples as possible in our honeypot environment. By monitoring a sample's behavior in our system, we are able to reconstruct the sequence of operator actions, giving us a unique view into operator behavior. We report on the results of 2,747 interactive sessions captured in the course of the experiment. During these sessions operators frequently attempted to interact with victims via remote desktop, to capture video, audio, and keystrokes, and to exfiltrate files and credentials. To our knowledge, we are the first large-scale systematic study of RAT use.
Dielectric Discharging processes in RF-MEMS Capacitive Switches

The discharging processes in silicon nitride dielectric film of RF-MEMS capacitive switches are investigated for the first time. The study includes the dependence of discharging as a function of temperature that allows the detection of thermally activated mechanisms. The discharging time constants were found to depend only on temperature and not on the actuation bias polarity.
Methodology for ontology development in support to the MPS model for software

This paper proposes the use of enterprise ontologies as a complementary tool to support the adoption of software process quality models. The model selected for this work was the Reference Model MPS for software development (RM-MPSSW), which is part of the Brazilian Software Process Improvement Program (MPS.BR). The RM-MPS-SW was developed focusing micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), although it is completely suited to large organizations. In this context, this work presents a methodology for the ontology development on the levels G and F of the RMMPS-SW. Concepts of the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) are included to support adherence to its principle by software companies. The inclusion of BSC (Balanced Scorecard) indicators approximates the model with the strategic planning of the company. The intention is that this methodology can be used as a basis for the representation of the other MPSSW levels and other software process models. Keywords—Software process model, Quality model, Enterprise ontology, MPME, MPS.BR, MPS-SW, PMBOK, BSC
iOSDC : A Novel Autonomous Intelligent OSD Cluster

As the requirement for Peta-scale massive storage system, Object-based Storage Device (OSD) protocol has already been the mainstream in the next generation storage technology. However, in recent research, most actions in OSD remain the passive way, because of the request-driven model. As partial storage management functions are offloaded to OSD, the construction of an intelligent OSD has caught the fancy of most researchers. In this paper, we propose a novel autonomous intelligent OSD Cluster (iOSDC). In iOSDC, every OSD is intelligent, called intelligent OSD (iOSD) and all the objects are intelligent, called intelligent OBJECT (iOBJECT). Methods, rules, trigger and feed back mechanism are introduced into object defined in OSD-2 draft, so an object is comprised of data, attributes, methods, rules, trigger and feedback mechanism. After the relationship among these six components is built up, the object is no longer passive, but active. Furthermore, some specific objects are introduced into OSDs, these specific objects can enhance the intelligence of OSD. Collaboration of all the iOSDs gives birth to the intelligent OSD Cluster. Based on the requirements of iOSDC, some enhancements have been performed onto the T10 OSD- 2 draft.
Maitrise de la salinité des eaux d'irrigation pour la viticulture

Même si la vigne reste parmi les plantes cultivées une des plus économes en eau, se pose maintenant la question de la disponibilité et de l'accessibilité à la ressource en eau naturelle de qualité: eaux souterraines (infiltration, nappes), eaux de surface stagnantes (lacs, retenues de barrages) ou en écoulement (rivières, fleuves), eaux de mer, eaux usées traitées (REUT). Certaines de ces eaux peuvent contenir des composés d'intérêts nutritionnels pour les plantes, mais aussi être riches en sels dissous. L'objet de cette communication est d'étudier les technologies permettant d'affiner la teneur en sel de l'eau d'irrigation pour la vigne, quel que soit son origine et son niveau initial. Les techniques membranaires, osmose inverse, nanofiltration et électrodialyse sont ainsi comparées techniquement et évaluées économiquement. Les unes, nanofiltration et osmose inverse, à partir de membranes poreuses ou denses sous pression, consiste en une séparation de quasi tous les éléments dissous de l'eau (anions, cations, mais y compris les nutriments azotés, et minéraux) et ce quel que soit, pour l'osmose inverse, la salinité de l'eau initiale (e.g. eau de mer). L'autre l'électrodialyse, à partir de membranes denses ne filtre pas l'eau, mais extrait une quantité pilotable en ligne, de sels dissous (Na+ et Cl− en particulier sélectionnables) sous l'effet d'un champ électrique, afin de l'adapter aux sols ou plantes concernés
Hybrid Scheduling for Heterogeneous Asymmetric Mobile Communication

Rapid development in wireless communication technology has paved a path for the increase in mobile users to access the information from anywhere and at anytime. Data broadcasting plays a vital role in asymmetrical communication environment. Here server disseminates the information required by the mobile users at a faster rate as the bandwidth of the downlink channel is much more than the uplink. In data broadcasting, the mobile users put their request for the required data item and continuously listen for the response upon the channel from the server. In order to save the precious battery power of the mobile clients it should be that they have to be served quickly by the server. That is the access time of the requested data item should be minimized. This paper focus on the lengths of the data items which uses stretch as the metric to devise a server broadcasting algorithm in order to achieve optimal results. Simulation results are obtained to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Towards formalised end-user participation in information systems development process: bridging the gap between participatory design and ISD methodologies

Creating requirements specifications is one of the most challenging tasks in the systems development. For a complete specification, different kinds of information are gathered. This includes information about the domain and context specific technical issues, and about multifaceted cultural, political, communicational, motivational, and personal issues. As there is no information systems development (ISD) method that would yield such information comprehensively, it could be achieved by user-oriented approaches, for instance by participatory design (PD). Reciprocally, unfortunately those do not provide detailed instructions for the systems development. In this paper, we will present our experiences from two research projects where user participation was emphasised in the ISD process. We argue that a multi-methodological ISD approach that utilises prototyping and a set of different communication means for gathering and elucidating requirements in a workplace would produce better systems from the end-users point of view. Further, these experiences can be used when developing a formalised user-oriented ISD method.
Predicting the Evolution of Taxonomy Restructuring in Collective Web Catalogues

Collectively maintained Web catalogues organize links to interesting Web sites into topic hierarchies, based on community input and editorial decisions. These taxonomic systems reflect the interests and diversity of ongoing societal discourses. Catalogues evolve by adding new topics, splitting topics, and other restructuring, in order to capture newly emerging concepts of long-lasting interest. In this paper, we investigate these changes in taxonomies and develop models for predicting such structural changes. Our approach identifies newly emerging latent concepts by analyzing news articles (or social media), by means of a temporal term relatedness graph. We predict the addition of new topics to the catalogue based on statistical measures associated with the identified latent concepts. Experiments with a large news archive corpus demonstrate the high precision of our method, and its suitability for Web-scale application.
Mechanics Modeling of Multisegment Rod-Driven Continuum Robots

This paper presents a novel modeling approach for the mechanics of multisegment, roddriven continuum robots. This modeling approach utilizes a high-fidelity lumped parameter model that captures the variation in curvature along the robot while simultaneously defined by a discrete set of variables and utilizes the principle of virtual power to formulate the statics and dynamics of the continuum robot as a set of algebraic equations for the static model and as a set of coupled ordinary differential equations (ODEs) in time for the dynamic model. The actuation loading on the robot by the actuation rods is formulated based on the calculation of contact forces that result in rod equilibrium. Numerical optimization calculates the magnitudes of these forces, and an iterative solver simultaneously estimates the robot’s friction and contact forces. In addition, modeling considerations including variable elastic loading among segments and mutual segment loading due to rods terminating at different disks are presented. The resulting static and dynamic models have been compared to dynamic finite element analyses and experimental results to validate their accuracy. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4027235]
Interannual relationships between the tropical sea surface temperature and summertime subtropical anticyclone over the western North Pacific

[1] The interannual variability of the Western North Pacific Subtropical High (WNPSH) in boreal summer is investigated with the use of the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis Data. The most significant change of the 500 hPa geopotential height field appears at the western edge of the WNPSH, with dominant 2–3 year and 3–5 year power spectrum peaks. The 2–3 year oscillation of the WNPSH and associated circulation and sea surface temperature (SST) patterns possess a coherent eastward propagating feature, with a warm SST anomaly (SSTA) and anomalous ascending motion migrating from the tropical Indian Ocean in the preceding autumn to the maritime continent in the concurrent summer of a strong WNPSH. A strong WNPSH is characterized by anomalous anticyclonic circulation and maximum subsidence in the western North Pacific (WNP). The anomalous WNPSH circulation has an equivalent barotropic vertical structure and resides in the sinking branch of the local Hadley circulation, triggered by enhanced convection over the maritime continent. A heat budget analysis reveals that the WNPSH is maintained by radiative cooling. The 3–5 year oscillation of the WNPSH exhibits a quasi-stationary feature, with a warm SSTA (anomalous ascending motion) located in the equatorial central eastern Pacific and Indian Ocean and a cold SSTA (anomalous descending motion) located in the western Pacific. The anomaly pattern persists from the preceding winter to the concurrent summer of a high WNPSH. The greatest descent is located to the southeast of the anomalous anticyclone center, where a baroclinic vertical structure is identified. The zonal phase difference and the baroclinic vertical structure suggest that the anomalous anticyclone on this timescale is a Rossby wave response to a negative latent heating associated with the persistent local cold SSTA. ECHAM4 model experiments further confirm that the 2–3 year mode is driven by the SSTA forcing over the maritime continent, while the 3–5 year mode is driven by the local SSTA in the WNP.
Principle and applications of terahertz molecular imaging

The principle, characteristics and applications of molecular imaging with terahertz electromagnetic waves are reviewed herein. The terahertz molecular imaging (TMI) technique uses nanoparticle probes to achieve dramatically enhanced sensitivity compared with that of conventional terahertz imaging. Surface plasmons, induced around the nanoparticles, raise the temperature of water in biological cells, and the temperature-dependent changes in the optical properties of water, which are large in the terahertz range, are measured differentially by terahertz waves. TMI has been applied to cancer diagnosis and nanoparticle drug delivery imaging. The technique is also compared with magnetic resonance imaging by using a dual-modality nanoparticle probe.