Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The derivation of sink functions of wheat organs using the GREENLAB model.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS In traditional crop growth models assimilate production and partitioning are described with empirical equations. In the GREENLAB functional-structural model, however, allocation of carbon to different kinds of organs depends on the number and relative sink strengths of growing organs present in the crop architecture. The aim of this study is to generate sink functions of wheat (Triticum aestivum) organs by calibrating the GREENLAB model using a dedicated data set, consisting of time series on the mass of individual organs (the 'target data'). METHODS An experiment was conducted on spring wheat (Triticum aestivum, 'Minaret'), in a growth chamber from, 2004 to, 2005. Four harvests were made of six plants each to determine the size and mass of individual organs, including the root system, leaf blades, sheaths, internodes and ears of the main stem and different tillers. Leaf status (appearance, expansion, maturity and death) of these 24 plants was recorded. With the structures and mass of organs of four individual sample plants, the GREENLAB model was calibrated using a non-linear least-square-root fitting method, the aim of which was to minimize the difference in mass of the organs between measured data and model output, and to provide the parameter values of the model (the sink strengths of organs of each type, age and tiller order, and two empirical parameters linked to biomass production). KEY RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS The masses of all measured organs from one plant from each harvest were fitted simultaneously. With estimated parameters for sink and source functions, the model predicted the mass and size of individual organs at each position of the wheat structure in a mechanistic way. In addition, there was close agreement between experimentally observed and simulated values of leaf area index.
Statins and the Risk of Diabetes: Evidence From a Large Population-Based Cohort Study

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between adherence with statin therapy and the risk of developing diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The cohort comprised 115,709 residents of the Italian Lombardy region who were newly treated with statins during 2003 and 2004. Patients were followed from the index prescription until 2010. During this period, patients who began therapy with an antidiabetic agent or were hospitalized for a main diagnosis of type 2 diabetes were identified (outcome). Adherence was measured by the proportion of days covered (PDC) with statins (exposure). A proportional hazards model was fitted to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs for the exposure-outcome association, after adjusting for several covariates. A set of sensitivity analyses was performed to account for sources of systematic uncertainty. RESULTS During follow-up, 11,154 cohort members experienced the outcome. Compared with patients with very-low adherence (PDC <25%), those with low (26–50%), intermediate (51–75%), and high (≥75%) adherence to statin therapy had HRs (95% CIs) of 1.12 (1.06–1.18), 1.22 (1.14–1.27), and 1.32 (1.26–1.39), respectively. CONCLUSIONS In a real-world setting, the risk of new-onset diabetes rises as adherence with statin therapy increases. Benefits of statins in reducing cardiovascular events clearly overwhelm the diabetes risk.
Beyond Pheromones : An integrated ant-inspired approach to swarm robotics

Can we translate a small repertoire of ant behaviors into robotic foraging algorithms that are adaptable to different environments, robust to noise and error, and scalable to large numbers of robots? This work focuses on how ants and robots can balance exploration and exploitation in foraging tasks using both individually remembered information and socially communicated information. The approach exploits spatial information without building maps, balances exploration and exploitation without explicit planning or task allocation, and leverages stochasticity to improve search. Decentralized decision-making allows robots to quickly adapt to environmental changes and individual failures, and it naturally scales to large numbers.
Downlink beamforming and power control with per-antenna power constraints

We study a system where a base station (BS) with an antenna array serves multiple users. Each user has a single antenna. Due to practical limitations, each antenna of the BS has an individual power constraint. Assume that only long-term channel state information (CSI) is available. The objective is to minimize the downlink transmission power under the users' signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints and the per-antenna power constraints. Mathematically, the objective is to find the optimal solution of a non-convex optimization problem. With dual decomposition, the problem is decomposed into two levels. For the lower level problem, we propose a novel iterative method based on the theory of matrix pencils. For the higher level problem, we propose a subgradient method and prove its convergence. Assembling all the computation methods, we obtain a beamforming and power control algorithm. At last, numerical results are provided to illustrate the performance of the algorithm.
Automatic detection and counting of circular shaped overlapped objects using circular hough transform and contour detection

It is an important task to count the number of the objects in the image automatically. Because the objects in the image are sometimes overlapped with each other and even covered with different shaped objects, it is very difficult to detach these objects before counting them. Circular Hough transform has been used extensively to detect and count overlapped objects with circular shapes. However it can not detach the overlapping circular objects efficiently, and the counting task will provide inaccurate results when the circular objects are covered with random shaped objects. To deal with this problem, an integrated method is proposed based on the Hough Transform and Contour Detection methods. Furthermore, a software is implemented using the open source computer vision library Opencv 3.0 with visual studio 2012. The experimental results show that the proposed method can detach and count the objects accurately.
Capturing behavioral changes of elderly people through unobtruisive sensing technologies

The behavioral analysis of individuals is an important science, especially if it is conducted on the elderly population, aiming to prevent Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and frailty problems. A fundamental aspect in this context is to explore the use of innovative technologies enabling the Internet of Things (IoT), above all sensors, to unobtrusively capture personal data for automatically recognizing behavioral changes in elderly people. This is done with the aim to timely identify risks of MCI and frailty before they escalate into more serious conditions such as Alzheimer Disease. This paper aims to briefly describe the overall goal of the City4Age project, funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission, in particular focusing on the IoT-based personal data capturing system.
New Functional Characterizations and Optimal Structural Results for Assemble-to-Order Generalized M-Systems

We consider an assemble-to-order generalized M -system with multiple components and multiple products, batch ordering of components, random lead times, and lost sales. We model the system as an infinite-horizon Markov decision process and seek an optimal control policy, which specifies when a batch of components should be produced and whether an arriving demand for each product should be satisfied. To facilitate our analysis, we introduce new functional characterizations for convexity and submodularity with respect to certain non-unitary directions. These help us characterize optimal inventory replenishment and allocation policies under a mild condition on component batch sizes via a new type of policy: lattice-dependent base-stock and lattice-dependent rationing.
SIP Service Providers and The Spam Problem

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is used for managing multimedia sessions in the Internet. As an emerging standard gaining more and more acceptance within the IT community, SIP will probably be the target of spammers. We propose, in this paper, a reputation-based mechanism that builds trust between users within a SIP community and prevents spammers to carry out attacks. Our technique uses a social networks approach enhanced with some reputation ratings. A metric for computing reputation is defined and an algorithm allowing the users to evaluate each other is also presented.
Europe's New Social Reality: the Case Against Universal Basic Income

If one factor explains Benoit Hamon’s insurgent victory in France’s Socialist party presidential primary it is the attention and support he gained by enthusiastically placing the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) at the centre of his campaign. Indeed, as the centre left searches for a big idea that can capture the public imagination, UBI has rapidly become widely fashionable. Experiments in different form of a basic income are also either running or being considered in Finland, the Netherlands and Scotland. In the UK, Labour recently announced a plan to ‘investigate’ basic income. What has for centuries been an outpost of radical, even obscure, philosophical and economic debates could soon become a reality. So has the time finally come for a universal basic income? In their latest Policy Network paper on ‘Europe’s new social reality’, produced with the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (Feps), Daniel Sage and Patrick Diamond make a determined argument that as policy answer to profound challenges around the future of both work and welfare UBI is in fact unclear and unpersuasive.
Hybrid 3D feature description and matching for multi-modal data registration

We propose a robust 3D feature description and registration method for 3D models reconstructed from various sensor devices. General 3D feature detectors and descriptors generally show low distinctiveness and repeatability for matching between different data modalities due to differences in noise and errors in geometry. The proposed method considers not only local 3D points but also neighbouring 3D keypoints to improve keypoint matching. The proposed method is tested on various multi-modal datasets including LIDAR scans, multiple photos, spherical images and RGBD videos to evaluate the performance against existing methods.
A time-sharing remote laboratory for hardware design and experiment with shared resources and service management

A new remote laboratory system for learning hardware designs and experiment of digital circuits has been developed. Wide use of the Internet motivated us to develop seamless remote and actual hardware laboratories for hardware design laboratory course. Unlike existing virtual laboratories, the proposed remote laboratory utilizes actual hardware and actual measurement tools in a time sharing fashion. Hardware experimental environment is usually treated as an exclusive resource, for single user usage. However, the actual test run time is rather short and most of the time is wasted leaving those precious resources idle. To make those resources operate more efficiently, it employs shared resources and enhanced service management scheme based on the Web services. It finds an available service site and schedules the executable processing. The combinatorial use of FPGA/PC connected test hardware and PC based measurement equipments such as logic analyzer or pattern generator has make it possible to develop a remote multi-user time sharing hardware experiment system, where students at remote sites can perform actual experiments using actual hardware equipments and tools concurrently. As all students are equipped with high performance laptop PCs, CPU intensive tasks such as development of the digital circuits for FPGA can be off-loaded from the server host and can be performed by each student's client PC. A floating license scheme allows students through the Internet to utilize commercial FPGA development tools. Thus, we created virtual private network to access the floating license server over firewalls. Such a rich client configuration allows the server to concentrate on the service management tasks, such as hardware resource managements. The prototype system is scheduled to be used for the third grade CS students from year 2005.
An extended relational algebra with control over duplicate elimination

In the pure relational model, duplicate tuples are automatically eliminated. Some real world languages such as DAPLEX, however, give users control over duplicate elimination. This paper extends the relational model to include multiset relations, i.e., relations with duplicate tuples. It considers three formalisms for expressing queries in this model: extended relational algebra, tableaux, and DAPLEX. It shows that, as in the original algebra, the equivalence problem for conjunctive expressions in the extended algebra can be solved using tableaux, and is NP-complete. Finally, it demonstrates that the extended algebra and DAPLEX have essentially the same expressiveness relative to conjunctive expressions.
HotDataTrap: a sampling-based hot data identification scheme for flash memory

Hot data identification is an issue of paramount importance in flash-based storage devices since it has a great impact on their overall performance as well as retains a big potential to be applicable to many other fields. However, it has been least investigated. HotDataTrap is a novel on-line hot data identification scheme adopting a sampling mechanism. This sampling-based algorithm enables HotDataTrap to early discard some of the cold items so that it can reduce runtime overheads and a waste of memory spaces. Moreover, its two-level hierarchical hash indexing scheme helps HotDataTrap directly look up a requested item in the cache and save a memory space further by exploiting spatial localities. Both our sampling approach and hierarchical hash indexing scheme empower HotDataTrap to precisely and efficiently identify hot data with a very limited memory space. Our extensive experiments with various realistic workloads demonstrate that our HotDataTrap outperforms the state-of-the-art scheme by an average of 335% and and our two-level hash indexing scheme considerably improves further HotDataTrap performance up to 50.8%.
A Web Search Contextual Crawler Using Ontology Relation Mining

In order to increase the correctness and the recall of vertical web search system, a novel web crawler ORC is proposed in this paper. By introducing ontologies, the semantic concepts are defined. The relations between ontologies are exploited to evaluate the importance of web documents' context. These ontologies are organized by a network structure that is updated periodically. Thanking to the ontology relation mining, the crawling space is expanded and focused more. A primitive vertical search system is built based on ORC at the end of this paper.
Personal Authentication System using Hand Vein Biometric

With an increasing emphasis on security, automated personal identification using hand vein biometric feature is becoming a very active topic in both research and practical applications. The objective of this work is to present a biometric authentication system for high security physical access control based on hand vein pattern. Hand vein biometric is selected, as it is foolproof, offers higher security and reliable for identification. The feature extraction stage consists of removal of the noise inherent using various filtering techniques and extraction of the most discriminating information present in the images using Discrete Wavelet Transform and Adaptive Thresholding techniques. The proposed recognition system makes use of hausdorff distance as matching parameter. The biometric system developed was tested on WASET hand vein image database of Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation is used and the system is implemented in MATLAB. The proposed approach found to report higher verification accuracy of 99.5%. KeywordsHand vein, Discrete Wavelet Transform, Filtering, Adaptive Thresholding, Hausdorff Distance, WASET
SUICIDAL IDEATION AND BIOGENIC AMINES IN DEPRESSION*

SUMMARY This report is based on the study of 40 depressives in an attempt to explore the possible association between the suicidal ideas and the biogenic amines. The severity of suicidal ideas was measured on Hamilton Depressive Rating Scale and their amine metabolites were measured (MHFG, HVA and 5 HIAA) in urine and C.S. F. It was observed that the level of 5 HIAA, and Serotonin (5 HT) was more related to suicidal ideas and was inversely related. The probable associations between these are discussed.
A calibration framework for industrial robotic work cells

In this paper, a robot accuracy enhancement framework is proposed where localization and calibration techniques are seamlessly integrated and targeted at industrial robotic work cells. The framework focuses on capitalizing on the strengths of one process to compensate for the inherent weakness of the other. Specifically, localization approaches can improve the robot accuracy locally around the compensation pose to high levels via sensor feedback, while calibration improves the nominal robot kinematic model thereby extending the effects of localization to a larger working envelope. In addition, the proposed framework uses localization results as training data for the calibration process without incurring additional measurement costs. A simulation study is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
High-resolution X-ray computed microtomography: A holistic approach to metamorphic fabric analyses

An intrinsic limitation of studying microstructures in thin section is that their spatial (three-dimensional, 3-D) distribution, shape, and orientation have to be inferred by combining 2-D data from different sections. This procedure always involves some degree of interpretation that in some cases can be ambiguous. Recent advances in high-resolution X-ray computed microtomography have made possible the direct imaging in 3-D of volumes of rock to centimeter scale. This rapidly evolving technology is nondestructive and provides a holistic approach of microstructural analysis that eliminates interpretative procedures associated with 2-D methods. Spatial images can be generated through any part of the rock sample and used as virtual petrographic sections. Our application of this technique to an oriented drill core sample from the classic Orijarvi metamorphic region of southern Finland reveals a number of in situ 3-D aspects, including: (1) the spatial distribution and shape of andalusite porphyroblasts, (2) the geometry of a matrix foliation anastomosing around the porphyroblasts, (3) a millimeter-scale compositional layering that controlled the oscillation of porphyroblasts and sulfide mineralization, and (4) distinct inclusion trail patterns characterizing porphyroblast core versus rim zones. The combined data indicate that the steeply dipping bedding-subparallel foliation that characterizes the Orijarvi area formed by bulk north-south crustal shortening and associated vertical stretching.
Divergent Means and Convergent Inequality of Incomes among the Provinces and Cities of Urban China

Two precisely comparable national household surveys relating to 1988 and 1995 are used to analyse changes in the inequality of income in urban China. Over those seven years province mean income per capita grew rapidly but diverged across provinces, whereas intra-province income inequality grew rapidly but converged across provinces. The reasons for these trends are explored by means of various forms of decomposition analysis. Comparisons are also made between the coastal provinces and the inland provinces.
Diferencias de la felicidad según sexo y edad en universitarios peruanos

The study, comparative descriptive, describes the differences of happiness in Peruvian youth and adults based on sex and age using the Lima Happiness Scale (Alarcon, 2006). 402 people, male (50 %) and women (50 %), between 16 and 35 years old (average = 19.59, SD = 3.75) of the city of Lima participated in the study. The results show that women are more likely to experience some degree of happiness; while people of the older age group have higher happiness scores than the younger age group. The results contribute to a better understanding of happiness and its relation to sociodemographic variables related to health and well-being. This provides important empirical information for the implementation of actions to promote the development of positive variables
Cyclical and Alternating Infusions of Glucose and Intralipid in Rats Inhibit Insulin Gene Expression and Pdx-1 Binding in Islets

OBJECTIVE—Prolonged exposure of isolated islets of Langerhans to elevated levels of fatty acids, in the presence of high glucose, impairs insulin gene expression via a transcriptional mechanism involving nuclear exclusion of pancreas-duodenum homeobox-1 (Pdx-1) and loss of MafA expression. Whether such a phenomenon also occurs in vivo is unknown. Our objective was therefore to ascertain whether chronic nutrient oversupply inhibits insulin gene expression in vivo. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—Wistar rats received alternating 4-h infusions of glucose and Intralipid for a total of 72 h. Control groups received alternating infusions of glucose and saline, saline and Intralipid, or saline only. Insulin and C-peptide secretion were measured under hyperglycemic clamps. Insulin secretion and gene expression were assessed in isolated islets, and β-cell mass was quantified by morphometric analysis. RESULTS—Neither C-peptide secretion nor insulin sensitivity was different among infusion regimens. Insulin content and insulin mRNA levels were lower in islets isolated from rats infused with glucose plus Intralipid. This was associated with reduced Pdx-1 binding to the endogenous insulin promoter, and an increased proportion of Pdx-1 localized in the cytoplasm versus the nucleus. In contrast, MafA mRNA and protein levels and β-cell mass and proliferation were unchanged. CONCLUSIONS—Cyclical and alternating infusions of glucose and Intralipid in normal rats inhibit insulin gene expression without affecting insulin secretion or β-cell mass. We conclude that fatty acid inhibition of insulin gene expression, in the presence of high glucose, is an early functional defect that may contribute to β-cell failure in type 2 diabetes.
Designing annotation tools based on properties of annotation problems

The creation of richly annotated, extendable and reusable corpora of multimodal interactions is an expensive and time-consuming task. Support from tools to create annotations is indispensable. This paper argues that annotation tools should be focused on specific classes of annotation problems to make the annotation process more efficient. The central part of the paper discusses how the properties of an annotation problem influence the design of the specialized tools used to manually create the annotations. Two existing tools, developed at the University of Twente, are used as examples.
A Double-Filter Structure Based Scheme for Scalable Port Scan Detection

Port scan detection is very important to predict network intrusions and prevent viruses from spreading. Many networks deploy Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) to detect port scans in real-time. However, most NIDS are perflow based. They are not scalable on high speed links since it is infeasible to maintain the states of numerous flows. In this paper, we propose a scalable scheme for real-time port scan detection without keeping any per-flow state. We use a doublefilter structure to find out <SIP, SP> pairs which connect to more than N <DIP, DP> pairs in T time. The experimental results on real network traces show that our scheme can find out those over-threshold <SIP, SP> pairs with high accuracy. It is easy to scale our scheme to high speed environments due to its little memory consumption and fast processing pipeline.