Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cultural Landscapes and Adaptation: Identifying the Role of Civic Engagement and Cultural Heritage in Coastal Adaptation Planning

Recognizing climate change associated threats to coastal environments, civic leaders and policymakers are developing and implementing local adaptation and resilience strategies. Largely absent from this conversation is, however, the cultural heritage of the coast-the places of local identity, meaning and history. To address this shortcoming, the following study assesses the role of cultural heritage in coastal adaptation planning. The integration of cultural heritage in adaptation planning leads to more holistic, place-based and effective adaptive efforts, and contributes to long-term resilience. Civic engagement is one mechanism for identifying, evaluating and promoting cultural heritage in the coastal planning process. This thesis establishes a theoretical framework relevant to adaptation planning, resilience, place, and civic engagement (Section 2) and evaluates four case studies, featuring communities that have successfully integrated adaptation, resilience, place and civic engagement (Section 3). Establishing a better understanding of how civic engagement is integrated into coastal planning practice today, Section 4 analyzes methods, adaptation planning and civic engagement in 40 coastal municipalities in New Jersey. To conclude, barriers to civic engagement in adaptation planning are identified and recommendations are proposed for developing coastal adaptation planning practices that successfully integrate community vision, local values and cultural heritage.
Neoplastic Transformation of T Lymphocytes through Transgenic Expression of a Virus Host Modification Protein

Virus host evasion genes are ready-made tools for gene manipulation and therapy. In this work we have assessed the impact in vivo of the evasion gene A238L of the African Swine Fever Virus, a gene which inhibits transcription mediated by both NF-κB and NFAT. The A238L gene has been selectively expressed in mouse T lymphocytes using tissue specific promoter, enhancer and locus control region sequences for CD2. The resulting two independently derived transgenic mice expressed the transgene and developed a metastasic, angiogenic and transplantable CD4+CD8+CD69– lymphoma. The CD4+CD8+CD69– cells also grew vigorously in vitro. The absence of CD69 from the tumour cells suggests that they were derived from T cells at a stage prior to positive selection. In contrast, transgenic mice similarly expressing a mutant A238L, solely inhibiting transcription mediated by NF-κB, were indistinguishable from wild type mice. Expression of Rag1, Rag2, TCRβ-V8.2, CD25, FoxP3, Bcl3, Bcl2 l14, Myc, IL-2, NFAT1 and Itk, by purified CD4+CD8+CD69– thymocytes from A238L transgenic mice was consistent with the phenotype. Similarly evaluated expression profiles of CD4+CD8+ CD69– thymocytes from the mutant A238L transgenic mice were comparable to those of wild type mice. These features, together with the demonstration of (mono-)oligoclonality, suggest a transgene-NFAT-dependent transformation yielding a lymphoma with a phenotype reminiscent of some acute lymphoblastic lymphomas.
Flux de carbone à l'échelle de l'écosystème avant et après scarifiage au sein d'un parterre de coupe en forêt boréale dans l'est du Canada

CO2 fluxes between the atmosphere and a recently-harvested site located in Québec’s boreal forest, Fluxnet-Canada Research Network’s HBS00 site, were studied using the eddy covariance technique for one year before application of a scarification treatment and one year after treatment. Carbon emissions were greater after scarification, rising from 111 to 175 g m year, because of the destruction of part of the living aboveground vegetation on the site. Ecosystem respiration rates showed little variation between years. Carbon fluxes were also influenced by environmental conditions. Analysis of the residuals of the light response curves indicated that before scarification soil water content was, after light, the factor having the most influence on carbon fluxes. Following scarification, water vapor pressure deficit was the second most important factor.
Evaluation and inter-comparison of high-resolution multi-satellite rainfall products over India for the southwest monsoon period

ABSTRACT Rainfall is one of the key drivers of the global hydrological cycle and has large socio-economic impacts. Tropical rainfall accounts for two-thirds of the global rainfall and is primarily associated with the monsoon. Multi-satellite rainfall products provide rainfall with high temporal and spatial resolutions; however, they exhibit regional and seasonal biases. Evaluation of these products against ground-based observations can improve the accuracy of the estimated rainfall. With the launch of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, two advanced high-resolution multi-satellite precipitation products namely; Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) and Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP) are released. In the present study the spatial and temporal structures of rainfall in near real time and research versions of IMERG-V4 (near real-time (NRT) & Final (FNL)), GSMaP-V6 (NRT & moving vector with Kalman filter (MVK)), INSAT3D (Indian National Satellite System (INSAT) Multispectral Rainfall Algorithm (IMR) & Hydro-Estimator method (HEM)) and Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) – National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) Merged product have been evaluated against gridded gauge-based IMD rainfall data on daily, monthly and seasonal scales. All the datasets show noticeable bias in producing rainfall over orographic regions (i.e. Western Ghats and foothills of Himalayas) and North-East India, though there exists significant difference among the satellite measurements. Different skill scores are computed for GSMaP, IMERG and INSAT3D data products to evaluate the performance of these satellite estimates. However in terms of biases IMD-NCMRWF Merged, GSMaP (NRT & MVK) and IMERG (NRT & FNL) underestimates rainfall (about 11%, 17%, 23%, 18% and 3%, respectively) and INSAT3D (IMR & HEM) overestimates (about 49% and 33%, respectively), for the India region as a whole. In a similar way, HEM product shows 15% better performance than IMR product in INSAT3D category. However, both NRT and MVK products of GSMaP show similar variations compared to observe rainfall. Overall IMD–NCMRWF merged and IMERG-FNL data products show better agreement with the gauge-based IMD data compared to GSMaP. The GPM-based products (IMERG and GSMaP) estimate rainfall much better than INSAT3D estimation.
Aggregating and Curating Semantic Web Data

Shortipedia is a Web-based knowledge repository, pulling together a growing number of sources in order to provide a comprehensive, diversified view on entities of interest. Contributors to Shortipedia can easily add claims to the knowledge base, provide sources for their claims, and find links to knowledge already available on the Semantic Web.
Data Aggregation , Query Processing and Routing in Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consists of battery powered, small computing devices called sensor nodes. They are used for a wide range of application ranging from millitary applications to many scientific, research and statistical applications. They are constrained with energy, memory and computing power and hence efficient techniques are required for data aggregation, query processing and routing in sensor networks. We present a breadth wise coverage of the variety of protocols developed for aggregation and routing for query processing in sensor networks.
Characterization of QTLs for Root Traits of Wheat Grown under Different Nitrogen and Phosphorus Supply Levels

Root is important in acquiring nutrients from soils. Developing marker-assisted selection for wheat root traits can help wheat breeders to select roots desirable for efficient acquisition of nutrients. A recombinant inbred line (RIL) population derived from wheat varieties Xiaoyan 54 and Jing 411 was used to detect QTLs for maximum root length and root dry weight (RDW) under control, low nitrogen and low phosphorus conditions in hydrophobic culture (HC). We totally detected 17 QTLs for the investigated root traits located at 13 loci on 11 chromosomes. These loci differentially expressed under different nutrient supplying levels. The RILs simultaneously harboring positive alleles or negative alleles of the most significant three QTLs for RDW, qRDW.CK-2A, qRDW.CK-2D, and qRDW.CK-3B, were selected for soil column culture (SC) trial to verify the effects of these QTLs under soil conditions. The RILs pyramiding the positive alleles not only had significantly higher shoot dry weight, RDW, nitrogen and phosphorus uptake in all the three treatments of the HC trial, but also had significantly higher RDW distribution in both the top- and sub-soils in the SC trial than those pyramiding the negative alleles. These results suggested that QTL analysis based on hydroponic culture can provide useful information for molecular design of wheat with large and deep root system.
Transcriptome Analysis Reveals Crosstalk of Responsive Genes to Multiple Abiotic Stresses in Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.)

Abiotic stress is a major environmental factor that limits cotton growth and yield, moreover, this problem has become more and more serious recently, as multiple stresses often occur simultaneously due to the global climate change and environmental pollution. In this study, we sought to identify genes involved in diverse stresses including abscisic acid (ABA), cold, drought, salinity and alkalinity by comparative microarray analysis. Our result showed that 5790, 3067, 5608, 778 and 6148 transcripts, were differentially expressed in cotton seedlings under treatment of ABA (1μM ABA), cold (4°C), drought (200mM mannitol), salinity (200mM NaCl) and alkalinity (pH=11) respectively. Among the induced or suppressed genes, 126 transcripts were shared by all of the five kinds of abiotic stresses, with 64 up-regulated and 62 down-regulated. These common members are grouped as stress signal transduction, transcription factors (TFs), stress response/defense proteins, metabolism, transport facilitation, as well as cell wall/structure, according to the function annotation. We also noticed that large proportion of significant differentially expressed genes specifically regulated in response to different stress. Nine of the common transcripts of multiple stresses were selected for further validation with quantitative real time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR). Furthermore, several well characterized TF families, for example, WRKY, MYB, NAC, AP2/ERF and zinc finger were shown to be involved in different stresses. As an original report using comparative microarray to analyze transcriptome of cotton under five abiotic stresses, valuable information about functional genes and related pathways of anti-stress, and/or stress tolerance in cotton seedlings was unveiled in our result. Besides this, some important common factors were focused for detailed identification and characterization. According to our analysis, it suggested that there was crosstalk of responsive genes or pathways to multiple abiotic or even biotic stresses, in cotton. These candidate genes will be worthy of functional study under diverse stresses.
Panda: A System for Provenance and Data

Panda (for Provenance and Data) is a new project whose goal is to develop a general-purpose system that unifies concepts from existing provenance systems and overcomes some limitations in them. Panda is designed for "data-oriented workflows," fully integrating data-based and process-based provenance. Panda's provenance model will support a full range from fine-grained to coarse-grained provenance. Panda will provide a set of built-in operators for exploiting provenance after it has been captured, and an ad-hoc query language over provenance together with data. The processing nodes in Panda's workflows can vary from well-understood relational transformations, to "semi-opaque" transformations with a few known properties, to fully-opaque "black boxes. " A theme in Panda is to take advantage of transformation knowledge when present, but to degrade gracefully when less information is available. Panda yields interesting optimization problems, including data caching decisions and eager vs. lazy provenance capture. This paper is largely an overview of motivation and plans for the project, with some material on current progress and results.
Child Marriage in the United States and Its Association With Mental Health in Women

OBJECTIVE: Despite the devastating impact of child marriage (marriage before the age of 18 years) on health, no study has yet evaluated its impact on mental health in the general adult population. This article presents nationally representative data on the prevalence, sociodemographic correlates, and psychiatric comorbidity of child marriage among women in the United States. METHODS: Data were drawn from the 2001–2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. We limited our analyses to the sample of women (N = 24 575) with a known age at first marriage, of whom 18 645 had been or were presently married. RESULTS: The prevalence of child marriage among women was 8.9%. Demographic factors associated with child marriage were black and American Indian/Alaska Native ethnicities, age at interview of >45 years, low educational level, low income, and living in the South and rural areas of the United States. The overall lifetime and 12-month rates of psychiatric disorders were higher for women who married as children, compared with women who married as adults. In addition, women who married as children were more likely to seek and access health services, compared with women who married in adulthood. CONCLUSIONS: Child marriage increases the risk of lifetime and current psychiatric disorders in the United States. Support for psychiatric vulnerabilities among women married in childhood is required.
Single- and multi-wall carbon nanotube field-effect transistors

We fabricated field-effect transistors based on individual single- and multi-wall carbon nanotubes and analyzed their performance. Transport through the nanotubes is dominated by holes and, at room temperature, it appears to be diffusive rather than ballistic. By varying the gate voltage, we successfully modulated the conductance of a single-wall device by more than 5 orders of magnitude. Multi-wall nanotubes show typically no gate effect, but structural deformations—in our case a collapsed tube—can make them operate as field-effect transistors.
Comparing methods for automatic extraction of voice source parameters from continuous speech

Two methods (cid:10)are presented for automatic calculation of the voice source parameters from continuous speech. Both methods are used to calculate the voice source parameters for natural speech. However, for natural speech no objective (cid:10)test proce dure seems available. Therefore, both methods were also tested on synthetic speech.
Quantitation of Antibody to Non-Hemagglutinating Viruses by Single Radial Hemolysis: Serological Test for Human Coronaviruses

A single radial hemolysis test was developed for quantitation of specific antibody to non-hemagglutinating viruses. With the human coronaviruses as models, this test utilizes the binding properties of the chromic cation to attach viruses to glutaraldehyde-treated sheep erythrocytes. The most satisfactory system consisted of stabilizing washed sheep erythrocytes with 0.0073% glutaraldehyde for 15 min at 23°C, binding a high concentration of virus to a 25% erythrocyte suspension with 0.0016% chromic chloride for 20 min at 23°C, stopping the reaction with phosphate-saline, and finally mixing the treated, rewashed cells with complement and agarose at 45°C to prepare a slide gel. The gel mix, which was dispensed in plastic plates (23 by 73 mm) in 3-ml volumes, consisted of 1% agarose, 0.1% sodium azide, 5% reconstituted complement, and 0.82% treated cells. Wells 2 mm in diameter were loaded with 5 μl of antiserum, incubated for 18 h at 4°C for diffusion of antiserum and fixation of complement, and then incubated for 8 to 24 h at 37°C for development of hemolysis zones. The diameter of a zone was linearly related to antibody concentration, as determined by conventional serological tests. This single radial hemolysis test was applicable to human and animal coronaviruses and to selected serotypes of the adenovirus, picornavirus, rhabdovirus, and rotavirus groups.
ASU at TREC 2006 Genomics Track

This paper describes our experiments in the TREC 2006 Genomics track submitted by the ASU BioAI group, as well as experiments based on the improvements made after our submission. Some of the major issues we tried to address in our experiments are how to (1) extract keywords from natural language questions in the biomedical domain and (2) determine the relevancy of passages.
Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval System

With the advances in storage technology and the advent of the World Wide Web, there has been an explosion in the amount and complexity of digital information being generated, analyzed, stored, accessed and transmitted. Most of this data is multimedia in nature, including digital images, video, audio and simple text data. To make use of this vast amount of multimedia data, we need to develop techniques to e ciently retrieve information over large multimedia repositories based on their content. Due to the di culty in capturing the content of multimedia objects using textual annotations and the non-scalability of the approach to large data sets (due to a high degree of manual e ort required in de ning the annotations), the approach based on supporting content-based retrieval over visual features has become a promising research direction. This is evidenced by several prototypes[15, 8, 6, 4] and commercial systems[3, 2] that have been built recently.
Research and development of pulsed plasma thruster systems for nano-satellites at Osaka Institute of Technology

In the Project of Osaka Institute of Technology Electric-Rocket-Engine onboard Small Space Ship (PROITERES), a nano-satellite with electrothermal pulsed plasma thrusters (PPTs) will be launched in the end of 2012, because the launching was delayed due to change of schedule of Indian PSLV launcher. The main mission is powered flight of small/nano satellite by electric thruster. This study aims at improvement in discharge stability by changing detailed configuration of PPT system. As a result, a new PPT head Flight-Model (FM), i.e., a nearly-optimized PPT head with high discharge stability was designed. From endurance tests with the two PPT head FMs connecting the PPU FM, the total impulse of each PPT head reached 5.0 Ns with no miss-firing. Finally, all interfaces among the PPT system, the onboard computer and the satellite electric-power BUS unit were completely accepted. An unsteady numerical simulation was also carried out to investigate physical phenomena in the discharge system including plasma and discharge electric circuit and to predict performance characteristics for electrothermal PPTs. Both the calculated impulse bit and mass shot agreed well with the measured ones. The calculated results of 40,000-shot endurance test agreed with the measured ones. Furthermore, the research and development of the 2nd PROITERES satellite with high-power and large-total-impulse PPT system are also introduced.
A Mobile Object-Based Secret Key Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Security is a paramount requirement in any modern technology. This also applies to wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where sensor nodes have severe resources scarcity. Recently the presence of mobile object (e.g., moving robot, vehicle, etc) has shown their great impact on WSNs. However, as the low-cost sensor networks become wide-spread, secret key distribution to the sensor nodes is a challenging task in such unattended WSNs. In this regards, this paper presents a mobile object-based secret key distribution scheme for resource hungry sensor nodes. The key idea is that a mobile object should visit all the sensor nodes along its pre-defined path and distribute secret keys within its broadcasting range. The proposed scheme exploits the symmetric cryptographic approach. The feasibility of proposed scheme is advocated using real test bed experiments. The analysis reveals that the proposed scheme attains high efficiency (in terms of computation and communication costs), and provides strong security.
The effects of race/ethnicity, income, and family structure on adolescent risk behaviors.

OBJECTIVES The study examined the unique and combined contributions of race/ethnicity, income, and family structure to adolescent cigarette smoking, alcohol use, involvement with violence, suicidal thoughts or attempts, and sexual intercourse. METHODS Analyses were based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. A nationally representative sample of 7th to 12th graders participated in in-home interviews, as did a resident parent for 85.6% of the adolescent subjects. The final sample included 10,803 White, Black, and Hispanic 7th to 12th graders. RESULTS White adolescents were more likely to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and attempt suicide in the younger years than were Black and Hispanic youths. Black youths were more likely to have had sexual intercourse; both Black and Hispanic youths were more likely than White teens to engage in violence. Controlling for gender, race/ethnicity, income, and family structure together explained no more than 10% of the variance in each of the 5 risk behaviors among younger adolescents and no more than 7% among older youths. CONCLUSIONS Findings suggest that when taken together, race/ethnicity, income, and family structure provide only limited understanding of adolescent risk behaviors.