Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of Cotton Damage from Tarnished Plant Bug (Hemiptera: Miridae) and Southern Green Stink Bug (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) Adults and Nymphs

Tarnished plant bugs (Hemiptera: Miridae) and southern green stink bugs (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) infest cotton and cause similar symptoms. To increase our understanding of the feeding preferences of these insects so that thresholds and management strategies for these species can be improved, southern green stink bug and tarnished plant bug adults and nymphs were caged on cotton plants containing both squares and bolls. At harvest, bolls were analyzed for lint yield and quality in relation to their position on the plant when infested. The five nodes immediately below the infested flower node (small bolls when infested) had fewer undamaged bolls on plants infested with southern green stink bug adults or nymphs, but infestation with tarnished plant bug adults or nymphs had no impact on the number of undamaged bolls. There were no significant differences among treatments in yield or in the number of undamaged locules from bolls above the infested flower node (squares when infested). Several cotton fiber quality measurements were reduced by southern green stink bugs, but not by tarnished plant bugs. Southern green stink bugs damaged cotton more, per insect, than did tarnished plant bugs. Southern green stink bug adults appeared to be more damaging than late instars. Most measures of damage increased linearly for increasing densities of southern green stink bug, but changes in density of tarnished plant bugs had no impact on lint yield or quality.
Methods for Measuring and Estimating Methane Emission from Ruminants

Simple Summary Knowledge about methods used in quantification of greenhouse gasses is currently needed due to international commitments to reduce the emissions. In the agricultural sector one important task is to reduce enteric methane emissions from ruminants. Different methods for quantifying these emissions are presently being used and others are under development, all with different conditions for application. For scientist and other persons working with the topic it is very important to understand the advantages and disadvantage of the different methods in use. This paper gives a brief introduction to existing methods but also a description of newer methods and model-based techniques. Abstract This paper is a brief introduction to the different methods used to quantify the enteric methane emission from ruminants. A thorough knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of these methods is very important in order to plan experiments, understand and interpret experimental results, and compare them with other studies. The aim of the paper is to describe the principles, advantages and disadvantages of different methods used to quantify the enteric methane emission from ruminants. The best-known methods: Chambers/respiration chambers, SF6 technique and in vitro gas production technique and the newer CO2 methods are described. Model estimations, which are used to calculate national budget and single cow enteric emission from intake and diet composition, are also discussed. Other methods under development such as the micrometeorological technique, combined feeder and CH4 analyzer and proxy methods are briefly mentioned. Methods of choice for estimating enteric methane emission depend on aim, equipment, knowledge, time and money available, but interpretation of results obtained with a given method can be improved if knowledge about the disadvantages and advantages are used in the planning of experiments.
A polynomial scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.15.4/ ZigBee cluster tree WSN with one collision domain and period crossing constraint

Cluster scheduling is a crucial issue in cluster-tree Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The paper presents a methodology that provides a Time Division Cluster Scheduling (TDCS) mechanism based on the shortest path problem. The objective is to meet all the flows' deadlines defined by the maximum number of crossed periods for each flow to reach its destination assuming one collision domain. Formulating the problem as the shortest path problem gives us a light exact algorithm suitable to the scarce properties of WSNs especially related to memory, power consumption and processors. Our polynomial algorithm leads to the minimization of the energy consumption and, consequently, the lifetime of the network is maximized by setting the TDCS period as long as possible. Since each cluster is active only once during the period, the given flow may span over several periods when there are flows with an opposite direction. The scheduling tool enables the system designers to efficiently configure all the required parameters of the IEEE 802.15. 4/ZigBee beacon-enabled cluster-tree WSNs in the network configuration time.
Exploiting BitTorrent For Fun

This paper assesses BitTorrent’s robustness against selfish peers, who try to download more than their fair share by abusing existing protocol mechanisms. We design and implement three selfish-peer exploits and evaluate their effectiveness on public and private torrents. In practice, BitTorrent appears quite robust against this kind of exploit: selfish peers can sometimes obtain more bandwidth, and honest peers’ download rates suffer slightly in consequence, but we observe no considerable degradation of the system’s quality of service. We identify private-torrent scenarios in which a selfish peer could benefit more significantly at the expense of honest peers, and discuss the BitTorrent protocol mechanisms that lead to robustness by rendering these scenarios infeasible.
Brief Introduction of Virtual Reality & its Challenges

— Virtual reality ( VR ) is a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer - simulated environment, whether that environment is a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world. It is the key to experiencing, feeling and touching the past, present and the future. It is the medium of creating our own world, our own customized reality. It could range from creating a video game to having a virtual stroll around the universe, from walking through our own dream house to experiencing a walk on an alien planet. With virtual reality, we can experience the most intimidating and gruelling situations by playing safe and with a learning perspective. Very few people, however, really know what VR is, what its basic principles and its open problems are. In this paper a historical overview of virtual reality is presented, basic terminology and classes of VR systems are listed. An insightful study of typical VR systems is done and finds the challenges of Virtual Reality.
Fast and accurate simulation of coaxial-fed antennas using full-wave and asymptotic computational methods

In this paper, we explain how to accurately simulate, using the method of moments (MoM) and the physical optics (PO) approximation, antennas with a coaxial probe feed. Special attention is given to properly modeling with MoM the connection between the antenna and the coaxial cable. Results were validated by comparison with measurements covering different electrical sizes of a grounded monopole antenna for airplane-satellite communication at the IEEE C-band. Good agreement, in radiation pattern and gain, is observed between MoM and PO. Equivalent circuit parameters are obtained through simulation, which allows to predict the communication system performance.
From the Cover : Condition and fate of logged forests in the Brazilian Amazon

www.pnas. org/cgi/content/full/103/34/12947#otherarticles This article has been cited by other articles: E-mail Alerts . click here at the top right corner of the article or Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article sign up in the box Subspecialty Collections www.pnas. org/cgi/collection/sustainability_sci Sustainability Science collection(s): This article, along with others on similar topics, appears in the following
Free-Form Region Description with Second-Order Pooling

Semantic segmentation and object detection are nowadays dominated by methods operating on regions obtained as a result of a bottom-up grouping process (segmentation) but use feature extractors developed for recognition on fixed-form (e.g. rectangular) patches, with full images as a special case. This is most likely suboptimal. In this paper we focus on feature extraction and description over free-form regions and study the relationship with their fixed-form counterparts. Our main contributions are novel pooling techniques that capture the second-order statistics of local descriptors inside such free-form regions. We introduce second-order generalizations of average and max-pooling that together with appropriate non-linearities, derived from the mathematical structure of their embedding space, lead to state-of-the-art recognition performance in semantic segmentation experiments without any type of local feature coding. In contrast, we show that codebook-based local feature coding is more important when feature extraction is constrained to operate over regions that include both foreground and large portions of the background, as typical in image classification settings, whereas for high-accuracy localization setups, second-order pooling over free-form regions produces results superior to those of the winning systems in the contemporary semantic segmentation challenges, with models that are much faster in both training and testing.
Elucidating the genetic basis for Escherichia coli defense against silver toxicity using mutant arrays

Bacterial adaptation and defense mechanisms against silver are poorly understood at the genetic level. A library of Escherichia coli gene‐deletion mutants was used to show that clones lacking sodB (coding for oxidative stress protection), lon (protein damage repair), or cusR (metal efflux pump) are quite sensitive to silver (with 7.3 ± 9.1%, 5.3 ± 1.8%, and 0.4 ± 0.1% of cells surviving, respectively, compared with 90.1 ± 5.4% survival for wild‐type E. coli, after 6‐h exposure to 8 mg/L AgNO3), suggesting the importance of the coded functions as defense mechanisms. Mutants lacking pgaB or wcaD, which code for production of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), also showed significant (p < 0.05) sensitivity to silver exposure (23.4 ± 16.2% and 23.1 ± 32.6% survival, respectively). Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) with scanning TEM/energy‐dispersive X‐ray spectroscopy analysis showed accumulation of silver nanoparticles within EPS, suggesting that EPS serve as a protective barrier that also immobilizes dissolved silver as silver nanoparticles. Environ Toxicol Chem 2014;33:993–997. © 2014 SETAC
Energy-Efficient Real-Time Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Because distributed micro-sensing involves direct interaction with a physical environment, data communication in wireless sensor networks often has timing constraints in the form of deadlines, which represent a new generation of real-time data communications from traditional networked systems. In this work we discuss energy problems of an existing real-time routing protocol LNA. Based on LNA, we propose an energy-efficient real-time routing (ERTR) protocol, which supports energy-efficient real-time data transmitting in wireless sensor networks. ERTR maximize the number of messages that can reach the BS where each message has its own due-date by minimizing the maximal lateness of all messages. ERTR also average the energy of node to increase the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks according to the maximum entropy principle. Detailed simulations of representative sensor network environments demonstrate that ERTR reduces the number of deadlines missed compared to LNA.
Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Multi-Robot Coordination

In this paper we introduce a framework that uses Semantic Web Technologies to facilitate multi-robots coordination. These Technologies let the creation of a Knowledge Base supporting the assignment of tasks to robots according to their capabilities. We address two problems: data sets interlinking and robots coordination. We interlink data sets to avoid repeated queries and we improve the coordination as follows. While usually a fixed coordination algorithm is used; in our approach, our Knowledge Base contains a set of algorithms and the tools able to select the most appropriate one according to the characteristics of the task.
Adolescent girls' neural response to reward mediates the relation between childhood financial disadvantage and depression.

BACKGROUND Children who experience socioeconomic disadvantage are at heightened risk for developing depression; however, little is known about neurobiological mechanisms underlying this association. Low socioeconomic status (SES) during childhood may confer risk for depression through its stress-related effects on the neural circuitry associated with processing monetary rewards. METHODS In a prospective study, we examined the relationships among the number of years of household receipt of public assistance from age 5-16 years, neural activation during monetary reward anticipation and receipt at age 16, and depression symptoms at age 16 in 123 girls. RESULTS Number of years of household receipt of public assistance was positively associated with heightened response in the medial prefrontal cortex during reward anticipation, and this heightened neural response mediated the relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage and current depression symptoms, controlling for past depression. CONCLUSIONS Chronic exposure to socioeconomic disadvantage in childhood may alter neural circuitry involved in reward anticipation in adolescence, which in turn may confer risk for depression.
A model for estimating energy consumption based on resources utilization

Over the recent years, managing the energy efficiency of ICT resources, mainly in data centers, has become a priority. Energy efficiency improvement involves numerous ICT initiatives, from the development of more efficient devices, to virtualization and resource consolidation. However, the management of energy efficiency requires dynamic information on the energy consumption, as well as a thorough understanding on how the utilization of computing resources influences energy consumption. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a computationally inexpensive method that indirectly measures energy consumption with a good accuracy. Our model estimates the dynamic energy consumption (given as the amount of watts consumed at a given time), based on information about the utilization of computing resources coming from the OS (e.g., memory, processors, I/O operations, etc). Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an accuracy of 85.23% and an average random error of 8.6 watts compared to a power meter. Our studies also show which resources have the most impact on energy consumption. Our model can be easily implemented in software, and deployed in data center machines for energy management.
Improvements in visually directed walking in virtual environments cannot be explained by changes in gait alone

A previous study indicated that peripheral visual information strongly affects the judgment of egocentric distances for users of immersive virtual environments. The experiment described in this document aimed to investigate if these effects could be explained in terms of changes in gait caused by visual information in the extreme periphery. Three conditions with varying degrees of peripheral occlusion were tested and participants' walking characteristics measured. The results indicate that the improvements in distance judgments, as peripheral information increases, can only partially be explained in terms of gait modification, but likely involve both changes in the characteristics of gait and other spatial or movement parameters.
Teacher efficacy, teacher burnout, and attitudes towards students with autism

TEACHER EFFICACY, TEACHER BURNOUT, AND ATTITUDES TOWARDS STUDENTS WITH AUTISM Joshua Benjamin Skuller March 29, 2011 Students with autism require a variety of supports to be successful in classrooms. Because of this, special education teachers need additional training to address these needs along with balancing the demands of the rest of their caseload. This daunting task can often lead to lower levels of efficacy (general teaching and personal teacher) and increased levels of burnout. The Teacher Efficacy Scale-Short Form (Hoy & Woolfolk 1993), Teacher Burnout Scale (Seidman & Zager, 1987), and Autism Attitude Scale for Teachers (Olley et aI., 1981) were chosen for this study. The Olley et al. work was modified to reflect current trends in language, remove efficacy-based questions, and add several new questions; the scale was renamed the Teachers' Attitudes about Autism Scale. The final questionnaire, Autism Education Survey (AES), consisted of the three scales plus environmental factors. The central research question reflects the purpose of this study: What is the effect ofteacher efficacy and teacher burnout on educators' attitudes towards students with autism? After human subjects approval, the survey was administered to the 684 teachers who fit the profile, those special education teachers in a large urban district in a south central state who held LBD and moderate/severe disability certificates; 267 (39%)
Researchment and design of CMOS low noise amplifier in UHF band

To overcome difficulties among power, noise figure(NF) and match in the design of low-noise amplifier(LNA), a novel approach that can realize effective compromise among them is presented through analyzing the cascade LNA configuration. Under the premise that power can be accepted, the new approach can be achieved by adopting series inductors in input port, adding capacitors between gate and source nodes and appending series inductor-resistance to the output port. Experimental results show that, with the proposed approach, a 0.18 mum CMOS LNA at 2.4 GHz could provide a maximum NF of 0.46 dB, a minimum power gain of 22 dB in 3 dB bandwidth, input and output VSWRs which are better than 1.12, the output P1dB power of 1.07 dBm and 25.02 mW whole power consume. Theory analysis agrees well with the simulation results.
Optimizing message routing and scheduling in automotive mixed-criticality time-triggered networks

Upcoming high-bandwidth protocols like Ethernet TSN feature mechanisms for redundant and deterministic (scheduled) message delivery to integrate safety- and real-time-critical applications and, thus, realize mixed-criticality systems. In existing design approaches, the message routing and system scheduling are generated in two entirely separated design steps, ignoring and/or not exploiting the distinct interrelations between routing and scheduling decisions. In this paper, we first introduce an exact approach to generate an implementation with a valid routing and a valid schedule in a single step by solving a 0–1 ILP. Second, we show that the 0–1 ILP formulation can be utilized in a design space exploration to optimize the routing and schedule with respect to, e.g., interference imposed on non-scheduled traffic or the number of configured port slots. We demonstrate the optimization potential of the proposed approach using a mixed-criticality system from the automotive domain.
Cell Therapy in Patients with Critical Limb Ischemia

Critical limb ischemia (CLI) represents the most advanced stage of peripheral arterial obstructive disease (PAOD) with a severe obstruction of the arteries which markedly reduces blood flow to the extremities and has progressed to the point of severe rest pain and/or even tissue loss. Recent therapeutic strategies have focused on restoring this balance in favor of tissue survival using exogenous molecular and cellular agents to promote regeneration of the vasculature. These are based on stimulation of angiogenesis by extracellular and cellular components. This review article carries out a systematic analysis of the most recent scientific literature on the application of stem cells in patients with CLI. The results obtained from the detailed analysis of the recent literature data have confirmed the beneficial role of cell therapy in reducing the rate of major amputations in patients with CLI and improving their quality of life.
Relationship between the response to treatment and the prognosis of patients with aggressive lymphomas treated with chemotherapy followed by involved-field radiotherapy: radiographic assessment.

OBJECTIVE We examined the relationship between the response to treatment and prognosis of patients with aggressive lymphoma. METHODS We reviewed 33 patients with aggressive lymphoma treated with chemotherapy consisting of the CHOP regimen followed by radiotherapy. Twelve patients had Stage I, 13 had Stage II, 6 had Stage III and 2 had Stage IV disease. According to the International Prognostic Index (IPI), 13 had low, 15 had low-intermediate, 2 had high-intermediate and 3 had high IPI. After three to six cycles of chemotherapy, involved-field radiotherapy was performed. We evaluated the response to treatment by computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and gallium scintigraphy (Ga-67) at the time of completion of chemotherapy and at the time of completion of radiation therapy. The median follow-up period was 48 months (4-80). RESULTS The 2-year progression-free survival rates of the patients with Ga-67 positive uptake and Ga-67 negative uptake after completion of chemotherapy were 78 and 26% (P = 0.009), respectively. However, there were no statistically significant correlations between progression-free survival and the response after completion of chemotherapy determined by CT (P = 0.75) or MRI (P = 0.19). The response to treatment at the time of completion of overall treatment was not useful for prediction of prognosis. CONCLUSIONS Ga-67 positive uptake at the completion of chemotherapy before radiotherapy may be associated with poor prognosis.
Malaria parasite pre‐erythrocytic infection: preparation meets opportunity

For those stricken with malaria, the classic clinical symptoms are caused by the parasite's cyclic infection of red blood cells. However, this erythrocytic phase of the parasite's life cycle initiates from an asymptomatic pre‐erythrocytic phase: the injection of sporozoites via the bite of a parasite‐carrying Anopheline mosquito, and the ensuing infection of the liver. With the increased capabilities of studying liver stages in mice, much progress has been made elucidating the cellular and molecular basis of the parasite's progression through this bottleneck of its life cycle. Here we review relevant findings on how sporozoites prepare for infection of the liver and factors crucial to liver stage development as well as key host/parasite interactions.
A Hybrid Model for Classification of Remote Sensing Images With Linear SVM and Support Vector Selection and Adaptation

A Linear Support Vector Machine (LSVM) is based on determining an optimum hyperplane that separates the data into two classes with a maximum margin. LSVM typically has higher classification accuracy for linearly separable data than nonlinearly separable data. For this type of data, Support Vector Selection and Adaptation (SVSA) method was developed that uses the support vectors obtained by LSVM and adapts them with respect to training dataset. However, the SVSA's classification performance may not be very satisfactory for linearly separable data in comparison to LSVM depending on the dataset used. In this paper, a hybrid model was presented that combines the results of LSVM and the SVSA efficiently. The main idea of the hybrid model is to utilize the performance of LSVM with the SVSA as LSVM model is already available during implementation of the SVSA. The method which uses the proposed hybrid model is called the Hybrid Support Vector Selection and Adaptation method (HSVSA). In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed model, one real multispectal and two hyperspectral dataset were experimented with the SVSA, LSVM, nonlinear SVM and the HSVSA in the classification. The results showed that when LSVM performs better than the SVSA, the HSVSA achieves LSVM's performance with the hybrid model, and vice versa.