Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Red-cockaded Woodpecker: Surviving in a Fire-Maintained Ecosystem

433 The Red-cockaded Woodpecker: Surviving in a Fire-Maintained Ecosystem. Richard N. Conner, D. Craig Rudolph, and Jeffrey R. Walters. 2001. 363 pp. Hardcover, $60.00, ISBN 0292712340. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. The pine forest of the Southeastern United States is home to one of the more socially complex birds that have been studied, the redcockaded woodpecker. This work describes how changes in management of their ecosystem have affected survival of the woodpecker. It examines the integral role of the tree cavity home on the success of the species. Much detail is also given to the multi-level social interactions within the family groups of these birds. Additionally, topics such as forest fragmentation, population distribution, and foraging ecology are examined. An interesting book for the ornithologist or the casual birding enthusiast. A great addition to any library or book collection. L. Miller
Geocoding and Evaluation of Large Scale Imagery without GPS

Large scale imagery will be increasingly available due to the low cost of video cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles. Their use is broad: the documentation of traffic accidents, the effects of thunderstorms onto agricultural farms, the 3Dstructure of industrial plants or the monitoring of archeological excavation. The value of imagery depends on the availability of (1) information about the place and date during data capture, (2) of information about the 3D-structure of the object and (3) of information about the class or identity of the objects in the scene. Geocoding, problem (1), usually relies the availability of GPS-information, which however limits the use of imagery to outdoor applications. The paper discusses methods for geocoding and geometrical evaluation of such imagery and especially adresses the question in how far the methods can do without GPS.
A metastability immune timing error masking flip-flop for dynamic variation tolerance

In this paper, two timing error masking flip-flops have been proposed, which are immune to metastability. The proposed flipflops exploit the concept of either delayed data or pulse based approach to detect timing errors. The timing violations are masked by passing direct data instead of master latch output to slave latch. Simulation results show that the proposed flip-flops such as type-A and type-B reduce the error masking latency up to 23% and 42% respectively in typical process corners and increase the effective timing error monitoring window compared to state of the art metastable immune flip-flops [14]. The proposed flip-flops can be used in dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) applications. A 16-bit adder is implemented to evaluate the functionality of the proposed flip-flops in DVFS frame work and the simulation results show that the adder using the proposed flipflop can reduce up to 48% power consumption or improve the performance up to 50% in typical process corners compared to conventional worst case design.
Secured access to terminals and teleservices using biometrics verification

This paper presents a typical application of secured access to a terminal and/or teleservices using biometrics (speech and frontal face) verification. This application is one of the prototype developed in the European ACTS project « M2VTS » which stands for Multi Modal Verification for Teleservices and Security Applications. The primary goal of this project was to address the issue of secured access to local and centralised services in a multimedia environment. The main objective was to extend the scope of application of network-based services by adding novel and intelligent functionalities, enabled by automatic verification systems combining multimodal strategies (secured access based on speech, image or other information). The objectives of the project were also to show that limitations of individual technologies (speaker verification, frontal face authentication, profile identification,.) can be overcome by relying on multi-modal decisions (combination or fusion of these technologies). Some of the Major results of M2VTS are presented in this paper.
Quasi-LPV gain-scheduling control of a nonlinear aircraft pneumatic System

This work presents a Quasi-LPV (Linear Parameter Variation) model for a pressure regulation and shut-off valve (PRSOV) used in aircrafts and proposes a controller based on Quasi-LPV gain-scheduling theory. This Quasi-LPV model was obtained from the PRSOV validated nonlinear mathematical model. Simulation results are presented and discussed. The benefits and difficulties of applying Quasi-LPV gain-scheduling control to this type of system are analyzed.
Functional Translational Readthrough: A Systems Biology Perspective

Translational readthrough (TR) has come into renewed focus because systems biology approaches have identified the first human genes undergoing functional translational readthrough (FTR). FTR creates functional extensions to proteins by continuing translation of the mRNA downstream of the stop codon. Here we review recent developments in TR research with a focus on the identification of FTR in humans and the systems biology methods that have spurred these discoveries.
The “Norme in Rete” project: Standards and Tools for Italian Legislation

The “Norme in Rete” (NIR) project aims at establishing standards for Italian legislation and tools to promote their adoption. In this paper an overview of these standards, including their latest version features, as well as a description of the tools developed by ITTIG-CNR for their implementation are presented.
Edge-on disk around the T Tauri star (MR81) Hα 17 NE in Corona Australis

Aims. Using the speckle camera SHARP at the 3.5m ESO NTT, Kohler and collaborators found an object∼ 3.5 mag fainter in K only 1.3 '' north-east of the T Tauri star (MR81) Hα17 in the Corona Australis (CrA) star-forming region, which could be either a brown dwarf or a T Tauri star with an edge-on disk. We attempt to study this faint object in detail. Methods. We acquired deep VLT NACO near-infrared images at three epochs to determine, whether (MR81) Hα17 and the nearby faint object are comoving and to measure the infrared colors of both objects. We obtained optical and infrared spectra of both objects with the VLT using FORS and ISAAC, respectively, to determine spectral types and temperatures as well as ages and masses. Results. The T Tauri star (MR81) Hα17 and the faint nearby object have a projected separation of 1369.58 mas, i.e. 178 AU at 130 pc. They share the same proper motion (∼ 5σ), so that they most certainly form a bound binary pair. The apparently fainter component (MR81) Hα17 NE has a spectral type of M2e, while the apparently brighter component (MR81) Hα17 SW, the previously known T Tauri star, has a spectral type of M4-5e. We can identify a nearly edge-on disk around (MR81) Hα17 NE by visual inspection, which has a diameter of at least 30 to 50 AU. We are able to detect strong emission lines in (MR81) Hα17 NE, which are almost certainly due to ongoing accretion. The NE object is detectable only by means of its scattered light. Conclusions. If both objects are co-eval (2-3 Myr) and located at the same distance (∼ 130 pc as CrA), then the apparently fainter (MR81) Hα17 NE is more massive (primary) component with a nearly edge-on disk and the apparently brigther component (MR81) Hα17 SW is less massive (companion). Both are low-mass T Tauri stars with masses of∼ 0.5 and 0.23± 0.05 M⊙, respectively.
Elevated Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet activity during acute hyperglycemia and diabetes in cerebral arterial smooth muscle cells

Elevated Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet activity during acute hyperglycemia and diabetes in cerebral arterial smooth muscle cells. Am sparklets are subcellular Ca 2 (cid:1) signals produced by the opening of L-type Ca 2 (cid:1) channels (LTCCs). In cerebral arterial myocytes, Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet activity varies regionally, resulting in low and high activity, “persistent” Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet sites. Although increased Ca 2 (cid:1) inﬂux via LTCCs in arterial myocytes has been implicated in the chain of events contrib-uting to vascular dysfunction during acute hyperglycemia and diabetes, the mechanisms underlying these pathological changes remain unclear. Here, we tested the hypothesis that increased Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet activity contributes to higher Ca 2 (cid:1) inﬂux in cerebral artery smooth muscle during acute hyperglycemia and in an animal model of non-insulin-dependent, type 2 diabetes: the dB/dB mouse. Consistent with this hypothesis, acute elevation of extracellular glucose from 10 to 20 mM increased the density of low activity and persistent Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet sites as well as the amplitude of LTCC currents in wild-type cerebral arterial myocytes. Furthermore, Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet activity and LTCC currents were higher in dB/dB than in control myocytes. We found that activation of PKA contributed to higher Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet activity during hyperglycemia and diabetes. In addition, we found that the interaction between PKA and the scaffolding protein A-kinase anchoring protein was critical for the activation of persistent Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklets by PKA in cerebral arterial myocytes after hyperglycemia. Accordingly, PKA inhibition equalized Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet activity between dB/dB and wild-type cells. These ﬁndings suggest that hyperglycemia increases Ca 2 (cid:1) inﬂux by increasing Ca 2 (cid:1) sparklet activity via a PKA-dependent pathway in cerebral arterial myocytes and contributes to vascular dysfunction during diabetes.
User Experience Evaluation of Chinese Travel App Software

This study explores the user experiences of the Chinese travel apps which are widely being used in China, with the aim to identify the potential issues of the existing travel apps, further to enhance the performance qualities of such travel apps. Research findings include a checklist of criteria for assessing the travel apps based on the user requirements and satisfactions. The major requirements such as information customization, value-added information, and practical itinerary planning and balanced graphical and textual representations for the travel apps, from the perspectives of the Chinese travelers, have been highlighted in this paper. As an important outcome of this research work, the anticipated improvements for the travel apps have also been suggested to travel app developers for enhancing the ongoing development of travel apps.
The Effects of Mindfulness Training on Indices of Cognition, Stress and Immune Function in Team-Sport Athletes

Human potential is a fascinating concept. The saying, ‘you can achieve anything if you set your mind to it,’ has certainly passed through my ears on many occasion. I look at some of the greatest athletes in recent history: Michael Phelps, Kelly Slater, Roger Federer, Kobe Bryant in awe of what they have achieved and wonder: what makes them so great? How have they managed to achieve what they have? Undoubtedly, incredible natural talent, physical stature, and mental attributes such as determination, perseverance and self-belief contribute to their success. But I’ve always believed there’s more to it; they all possess the ability to achieve a superlative mental focus during competition. But how do they put their entire focus on the task at hand in such highly stressful and physically demanding situations? Could it be that they have the ability to achieve a heightened state of mindfulness? In 2014, the Seattle Seahawks achieved the unthinkable and won the 48th Super Bowl; the 2014 NFL championship. Head coach, Pete Carroll, attributed their success to the help of Michael Gervais, one of the world’s leading performance psychologists. In an interview following the Super Bowl win, Gervais was asked, ‘Obviously your end goal was winning, but what were your strategies with the Seahawks? ’ At that point, Gervais’s tone of voice changed, almost concerned, and responded: ‘See, we don’t talk about winning. The goal for us is to be fully engaged at a really rich level to figure out and explore what is possible in your own life. And, if you get enough people resonating in that space, winning just happens as a result of this. ’ Michael Gervais brought mindfulness training to the Seattle Seahawks and it has since become an integral part of their training regime.
When models cross the border: adapting IT competencies of business managers

Much of the moving beyond the bust to boom has been fuelled by the increasing internationalization of organizations. More and more businesses are becoming global in nature with several US-based firms establishing subsidiaries or partners in other countries. At the same time, information technology (IT) is becoming more ubiquitous and an integral part of business processes. As organizations become increasingly more dependent on IT to survive in competitive environments, the need increases for IT competent business managers. The intersection of these two trends leads to a vital question: how can we use concepts and guidelines related to assessing the IT-competence of business managers that are developed in one country to the context of another country In this paper, we examine this issue by adapting a model of IT competence developed and validated in Canada to the Norwegian context. Using a multi-method approach based on interviews conducted in several organizations, and a questionnaire survey, we made several changes to the model.
Adult Learner Characteristics Important for Successful Learning in Cross-Cultural Web-Based Learning Environments in Higher Education

For more than 40 years, cognitive psychological perspectives have dominated pedagogical frameworks and models for designing technology-mediated teaching and learning environments. Social learning perspectives are increasingly becoming viable or even desirable frames for research and practice as pertains to teaching and learning, particularly in web-based learning environments (WBLEs). The author considers these social learning perspectives and how they relate to the design and implementation of curricula that are delivered in web-based learning environments in higher education. The author further reviews the foundational theories of adult learning that enhance adult learners' experiences in cross-cultural web-based learning environments. This review and analysis of the research related to social learning perspectives on WBLEs have three implications for future research and practice: (1) examining learners' individual characteristics in WBLEs, (2) identifying strategies for promoting social interaction in WBLEs, and (3) developing effective design principles for WBLEs. The author presents recommendations for future research.
Resource-making controversies: Knowledge, anticipatory politics and economization of unconventional fossil fuels

Advancing relational accounts of ‘resource-making’ processes by deploying insights from science and technology studies, this article outlines crucial new lines of inquiry for geographical research on unconventional fossil fuels. The exploitation of various carbon-rich substitutes for hydrocarbons has rapidly expanded over the last two decades, to become a highly contentious issue which augments scientific dissensus and generates new collective engagements with the subsurface. The article invites geographers to examine the epistemically and politically transformative potential of such resource-making controversies in terms of reconfiguring: the production of geoscientific knowledge, anticipation of post-conventional energy systems, and temporal strategies of (de)economizing extractive futures.
Optimization of Search Results with Duplicate Page Elimination using Usage Data

—The performance and scalability of search engines are greatly affected by the presence of enormous amount of duplicate data on the World Wide Web. The flooded search results containing a large number of identical or near identical web pages affect the search efficiency and seek time of the users to find the desired information within the search results. When navigating through the results, the only information left behind by the users is the trace through the pages they accessed. This data is recorded in the query log files and usually referred to as Web Usage Data. In this paper, a novel technique for optimizing search efficiency by removing duplicate data from search results is being proposed, which utilizes the usage data stored in the query logs. The duplicate data detection is performed by the proposed Duplicate Data Detection (D3) algorithm, which works offline on the basis of favored user queries found by pre-mining the logs with query clustering. The proposed result optimization technique is supposed to enhance the search engine efficiency and effectiveness to a large scale.
Visual Vocabulary Learning and Its Application to 3D and Mobile Visual Search

In this technical report, we review related works and recent trends in visual vocabulary based web image search, object recognition, mobile visual search, and 3D object retrieval. Especial focuses would be also given for the recent trends in supervised/unsupervised vocabulary optimization, compact descriptor for visual search, as well as in multi-view based 3D object representation.
Adaptive visualization of 3D meshes according to the user's preferences and to the various device resolutions

This paper proposes a technique for compression and interactive visualization. This method introduces a progressive compression technique and an interactive visualization to detect the region selected by the user. In order to enhance the performance of the user's interactivity, we adapt the resolution of each region to visibility from the rendering viewpoint and the distance from the camera. Also, the quantization precision is adapted to each vertex during the encoding/decoding process to optimize the rate-distortion compromise. Indeed, the major goal of this work is to provide an effective consultation adapted to the user's request (preferences, levels of the requested detail, etc.) and to the various device resolutions. The experiences as well as the comparisons with the existing solutions show competitive results in terms of approximation quality, the compression ratio at each level of resolution and the quality of the experience offered to the users.
Very-High-Energy Gamma Rays from a Distant Quasar: How Transparent Is the Universe?

The atmospheric Cherenkov gamma-ray telescope MAGIC, designed for a low-energy threshold, has detected very-high-energy gamma rays from a giant flare of the distant Quasi-Stellar Radio Source (in short: radio quasar) 3C 279, at a distance of more than 5 billion light-years (a redshift of 0.536). No quasar has been observed previously in very-high-energy gamma radiation, and this is also the most distant object detected emitting gamma rays above 50 gigaelectron volts. Because high-energy gamma rays may be stopped by interacting with the diffuse background light in the universe, the observations by MAGIC imply a low amount for such light, consistent with that known from galaxy counts.
A Novel Modulo Adder for Residue Number System

Modular adder is one of the key components for the application of residue number system (RNS). Moduli set with the form of can offer excellent balance among the RNS channels for multi-channels RNS processing. In this paper, a novel algorithm and its VLSI implementation structure are proposed formodulo adder. In the proposed algorithm, parallel prefix operation and carry correction techniques are adopted to eliminate the re-computation of carries. Any existing parallel prefix structure can be used in the proposed structure. Thus, we can get flexible tradeoff between area and delay with the proposed structure. Compared with same type modular adder with traditional structures, the proposedmodulo adder offers better performance in delay and area.
Finite semiotics: A new theoretical basis for the information age

This paper argues that the arrival of the information age and its “attention economy” compels a new theoretical stance for semiotics: that semiosis is a function of the finiteness of human cognition and the allocation of that resource by the intermediating world. On this basis, and proceeding from only basic ontological commitments regarding cognition, a model is sketched that offers novel definitions of sign, semiosis, and semiotics, and develops two new analytical constructs: the semiosic field and semioformation. The new theoretical standpoint is illustrated with two related examples. Firstly, a finite semiotic examination of metacognition, exemplified by “memory”, is used to reveal a contradiction in the direction of its supposed recovery of thought and the occasion of its recovery. Secondly, such “recovery functions” are shown to be a central mechanism exploited by technology to restructure cognition and categories of the real. Their further study is proposed as an important area for semiotics.
Modelling hybrid Cephei/SPB pulsations: G Pegasi

Recent photometric and spectroscopic observations of the hybrid variable Gamma Pegasi (Handler et al. 2009, Handler 2009) revealed 6 frequencies of the SPB type and 8 of the Beta Cep type pulsations. Standard seismic models, which have been constructed with OPAL (Iglesias & Rogers 1996) and OP (Seaton 2005) opacities by fitting three frequencies (those of the radial fundamental and two dipole modes), do not reproduce the frequency range of observed pulsations and do not fit the observed individual frequencies with a satisfactory accuracy. We argue that better fitting can be achieved with opacity enhancements, over the OP data, by about 20-50 percent around the opacity bumps produced by excited ions of the iron-group elements at temperatures of about 200 000 K (Z bump) and 2 million K (Deep Opacity Bump).
Bone marrow progenitor cells contribute to repair and remodeling of the lung and heart in a rat model of progressive pulmonary hypertension

Infusion of bone marrow stem or progenitor cells may provide powerful therapies for injured tissues such as the lung and heart. We examined the potential of bone marrow‐derived (BMD) progenitor cells to contribute to repair and remodeling of lung and heart in a rat monocrotaline (MCT) model of pulmonary hypertension. Bone marrow from green fluorescent protein (GFP)‐transgenic male rats was transplanted into GFP‐negative female rats. The chi‐meric animals were injected with MCT to produce pulmonary hypertension. Significant numbers of male GFP‐positive BMD cells engrafted in the lungs of MCT‐treated rats. Microarray analyses and double‐im‐munohistochemistry demonstrated that many of the cells were interstitial fibroblasts or myofibroblasts, some of the cells were hematopoietic cells, and some were pulmonary epithelial cells (Clara cells), vascular endothelial cells, and smooth muscle cells. A few BMD cells fused with pulmonary cells from the host, but the frequency was low. In the hypertrophied hearts of MCT‐treated rats, we found a significant increase in the relative numbers of BMD cells in the right ventricle wall as compared with the left ventricle. Some of the BMD cells in the right ventricle were vascular cells and cardiomyocytes. We report BMD cardiomyocytes with a normal chromosome number, fusion of BMD cells with host cardiomyocytes, and, in some cases, nuclear fusion. Spees, J. L. , Whitney, M. J., Sullivan, D. E. , Lasky, J. A. , Laboy, M. , Ylostalo, J., Prockop, D. J. Bone marrow progenitor cells contribute to repair and remodeling of the lung and heart in a rat model of progressive pulmonary hypertension. FASEB J. 22, 1226–1236 (2008)