Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Explicitly representing soil microbial processes in Earth system models

Microbes influence soil organic matter decomposition and the long‐term stabilization of carbon (C) in soils. We contend that by revising the representation of microbial processes and their interactions with the physicochemical soil environment, Earth system models (ESMs) will make more realistic global C cycle projections. Explicit representation of microbial processes presents considerable challenges due to the scale at which these processes occur. Thus, applying microbial theory in ESMs requires a framework to link micro‐scale process‐level understanding and measurements to macro‐scale models used to make decadal‐ to century‐long projections. Here we review the diversity, advantages, and pitfalls of simulating soil biogeochemical cycles using microbial‐explicit modeling approaches. We present a roadmap for how to begin building, applying, and evaluating reliable microbial‐explicit model formulations that can be applied in ESMs. Drawing from experience with traditional decomposition models, we suggest the following: (1) guidelines for common model parameters and output that can facilitate future model intercomparisons; (2) development of benchmarking and model‐data integration frameworks that can be used to effectively guide, inform, and evaluate model parameterizations with data from well‐curated repositories; and (3) the application of scaling methods to integrate microbial‐explicit soil biogeochemistry modules within ESMs. With contributions across scientific disciplines, we feel this roadmap can advance our fundamental understanding of soil biogeochemical dynamics and more realistically project likely soil C response to environmental change at global scales.
Analyzing limits of one type of disturbance observer based PI control by the performance portrait method

This paper deals with a performance portrait based robustness and performance analysis of one of the first disturbance observer (DO) based PI controllers applied to the first order plants. The chosen structure has been established as a PI control augmented by a DO with the aim to improve the disturbance response and to increase the loop robustness. Thereby, three possible DO filters have been introduced, which should guarantee a gradually increasing loop robustness. This expectation will be discussed in dealing with control loops under high performance requirements on the step responses shapes. A special attention is paid to the unmodelled dynamics limiting significantly the achievable control performance.
: Macroeconomic dependence on demographics: a key to better forecasting

the year 2010 is set to place a major strain on the Swedish economy, and similar problems are anticipated throughout the industrialised world at around the same time. However, the picture of the future painted by the current age distribution of the population is more multifaceted and valuable than this: inflationary factors, the current account balance and other macroeconomic variables are also affected. In Sweden we can use empirical estimations of the relationships between demographics and the macroeconomy to predict that, despite a shortage of labour, the next ten years will be a decade of strong growth and low inflationary pressure that can be used to prevent and prepare for the stresses on the economy after 2010 when the macroeconomic climate takes a turn for the worse.
High-quality depth map up-sampling robust to edge noise of range sensors

A new method to up-sample low-resolution depth maps to high quality and high resolution is proposed. Range sensors such as time-of-flight cameras yield low-resolution depth maps and the output includes heavy noise at the edges of objects. Recently, many techniques have been proposed to up-sample low-resolution depth maps. However, there is no effective countermeasure to the edge noise problem. The proposed up-sampling method is based on Markov random fields and addresses this edge noise using newly designed confidence weights. The performance of our method is evaluated using error rate and mean absolute error through comparison with existing methods, and results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods.
Extraction of Document Structure for Genomics Documents

We are taking as our foundational assumption that effective information retrieval tasks in the broad domain of biomedical literature must address the singular nature of scholarly communication and the effect this has upon a document corpus. The corpus for a typical TREC task is comprised of a temporal sequence of news documents exhibiting little, if any, internal structure. Reduction of a document to a single term vector is viable because of that document’s inherent aboutness regarding the story being reported. A scholarly paper, on the other hand, has distinct components, each fulfilling a specific function and exhibiting a correspondingly specific syntactic structure. A query to retrieve documents reporting new results regarding a particular biological organism should not retrieve candidates that mention that organism in the references or background sections, but rather ones that mention the organism in the results and discussion sections.
Γ-CONVERGENCE OF GRAPH GINZBURG–LANDAU FUNCTIONALS

We study Γ-convergence of graph-based Ginzburg–Landau functionals, both the limit for zero diffusive interface parameter ε → 0 and the limit for infinite nodes in the graph m→∞. For general graphs we prove that in the limit ε → 0 the graph cut objective function is recovered. We show that the continuum limit of this objective function on 4-regular graphs is related to the total variation seminorm and compare it with the limit of the discretized Ginzburg–Landau functional. For both functionals we also study the simultaneous limit ε → 0 and m → ∞, by expressing ε as a power of m and taking m → ∞. Finally we investigate the continuum limit for a nonlocal means-type functional on a completely connected graph.
Modelling Food and Population Dynamics in Honey Bee Colonies

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are increasingly in demand as pollinators for various key agricultural food crops, but globally honey bee populations are in decline, and honey bee colony failure rates have increased. This scenario highlights a need to understand the conditions in which colonies flourish and in which colonies fail. To aid this investigation we present a compartment model of bee population dynamics to explore how food availability and bee death rates interact to determine colony growth and development. Our model uses simple differential equations to represent the transitions of eggs laid by the queen to brood, then hive bees and finally forager bees, and the process of social inhibition that regulates the rate at which hive bees begin to forage. We assume that food availability can influence both the number of brood successfully reared to adulthood and the rate at which bees transition from hive duties to foraging. The model predicts complex interactions between food availability and forager death rates in shaping colony fate. Low death rates and high food availability results in stable bee populations at equilibrium (with population size strongly determined by forager death rate) but consistently increasing food reserves. At higher death rates food stores in a colony settle at a finite equilibrium reflecting the balance of food collection and food use. When forager death rates exceed a critical threshold the colony fails but residual food remains. Our model presents a simple mathematical framework for exploring the interactions of food and forager mortality on colony fate, and provides the mathematical basis for more involved simulation models of hive performance.
The Crosstalk between Myeloid Derived Suppressor Cells and Immune Cells: To Establish Immune Tolerance in Transplantation

Myeloid derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) are a heterogeneous population of myeloid precursor and progenitor cells and endowed with a robust immunosuppressive activity in multiple pathophysiological conditions. Recent studies have uncovered the crosstalk between MDSCs and immune cells (i.e., natural killer cells, dendritic cells, macrophages, natural killer T cells, and regulatory T cells) and its role in the establishment and maintenance of immune tolerant microenvironment in transplantation. Considering their strong immunosuppressive capability, MDSCs could become a prospective clinical regimen during transplantation tolerance induction, resulting in long-term graft survival with decreased or without immunosuppressive drugs. The review summarized recent research advances in this field and looked ahead at the research directions in the future.
The transformation of Australian industrial relations

Introduction Objectives Key Concepts Outline The Changing Face of Australian Industrial Relations (with Anne Hawke) A Decade of Change The Impetus for Change Responses to Change Summary The Significance and Nature of Collective Agreements The Scope and Significance of Agreements The Motivation for Agreement-making Explaining Differences Across Workplaces in the Use of Enterprise Agreements Informal Agreement-making Non-union Collective Agreements Pattern Bargaining Summary The Significance and Nature of Individual Agreements Defining Individual Agreements Incidence, Coverage and Trends Factors Motivating and Inhibiting the Use of Individual Agreements Features of Individual Agreements Summary Enterprise Bargaining and Trade Unions (with Robert Drago) Evidence from the AWIRS Evidence from the 1998 NILS Workplace Management Survey Summary The Changing Nature of Work and the Implications for Workers Job Insecurity Longer Working Hours Earnings Inequality Summary The Productivity Question How Can Enterprise Bargaining Promote Higher Productivity? The Macro Evidence Changing Bargaining Structures and Productivity Catch-up The Micro Evidence Summary The Future of Australian Industrial Relations The Coalition Agenda Is Industrial Relations Reform Beyond Politics? Management Expectations The Final Word Appendix A: Data Sources Appendix B: Results from Multivariate Analysis References/ Index Published with the assistance of: National Institute of Labour Studies Business Council of Australia Committee for Economic Development of Australia
Life Insurance Inadequacy - Evidence from a Sample of Older Widows

This paper studies the changes in income experienced by older women when their husbands die. The data used are the Retirement History Survey. The six waves of this survey provide information on roughly 1300 women who became widowed during the ten year period of the survey, 1960-1979. The findings indicate that about one third of new widows experience a substantial reduction (25 percent or greater) in their living standards when their husbands die. The reduction in living standard associated with the husband's death is more severe for younger widows and widows with greater income pre-widowhood. Couples could insure against severe reductions in income of widows by purchasing more life insurance. These findings lead, therefore, to the conclusion reached in previous studies by the authors and other researchers, namely that many couples fail to purchase enough life insurance to prevent a sharp drop in the wife's consumption if her husband dies. This conclusion raises the question of the role of the government in requiring the purchase of life insurance by couples, through the social security system's survivor insurance. The strong and uniform evidence on the pattern and level of life insurance purchases has implications for the scale of social security survivor benefits and the appropriate mix of total social security benefits between survivor and nonsurvivor benefits.
Maternal Rat Diabetes Mellitus Deleteriously Affects Insulin Sensitivity and Beta-Cell Function in the Offspring

This study was designed to assess the effect of maternal diabetes in rats on serum glucose and insulin concentrations, insulin resistance, histological architecture of pancreas and glycogen content in liver of offspring. The pregnant rat females were allocated into two main groups: normal control group and streptozotocin-induced diabetic group. After birth, the surviving offspring were subjected to biochemical and histological examination immediately after delivery and at the end of the 1st and 2nd postnatal weeks. In comparison with the offspring of normal control dams, the fasting serum glucose level of offspring of diabetic mothers was significantly increased at the end of the 1st and 2nd postnatal weeks. Serum insulin level of offspring of diabetic dams was significantly higher at birth and decreased significantly during the following 2 postnatal weeks, while in normal rat offspring, it was significantly increased with progress of time. HOMA Insulin Resistance (HOMA-IR) was significantly increased in the offspring of diabetic dams at birth and after 1 week than in normal rat offspring, while HOMA insulin sensitivity (HOMA-IS) was significantly decreased. HOMA beta-cell function was significantly decreased at all-time intervals in offspring of diabetic dams. At birth, islets of Langerhans as well as beta cells in offspring of diabetic dams were hypertrophied. The cells constituting islets seemed to have a high division rate. However, beta-cells were degenerated during the following 2 post-natal weeks and smaller insulin secreting cells predominated. Vacuolation and necrosis of the islets of Langerhans were also observed throughout the experimental period. The carbohydrate content in liver of offspring of diabetic dams was at all-time intervals lower than that in control. The granule distribution was more random. Overall, the preexisting maternal diabetes leads to glucose intolerance, insulin resistance, and impaired insulin sensitivity and β-cell function in the offspring at different postnatal periods.
Speech synthesis techniques. A survey

The goal of this paper is to provide a short but a comprehensive overview of Text-To-Speech synthesis by highlighting its digital signal processing component. First two rule-based synthesis techniques (formant synthesis and articulatory synthesis) are explained then the concatenative synthesis is explored. Concatenative synthesis is simpler than rule-based synthesis, since there is no need to determine speech production rules. However, it introduces the challenges of prosodic modification to speech units and resolving discontinuities at unit boundaries. Prosodic modification results in artifacts in the speech that make the speech sound unnatural. Unit selection synthesis, which is a kind of concatenative synthesis, solves this problem by storing numerous instances for each unit with varying prosodies. The unit that best matches the target prosody is selected and concatenated. To resolve mismatches speech synthesis system combines the unit-selection method with Harmonic plus Noise Model (HNM). This model represents speech signal as a sum of a harmonic and noise part. The decomposition of speech signal into these two parts enables more natural sounding modifications of the signal. Finally Hidden Markov model(HMM) synthesis combined with an HNM model is introduced in order to obtain a Text-To-Speech system that requires smaller development time and cost.
Space-time Tradeoos in Memory Hierarchies Space-time Tradeoos in Memory Hierarchies

The speed of CPUs is accelerating rapidly, outstripping that of peripheral storage devices and making it increasingly di cult to keep CPUs busy. Multilevel memory hierarchies, scaled to simulate single-level memories, are increasing in importance. In this paper we introduce the Memory Hierarchy Game, a multi-level pebble game simulating data movement in memory hierarchies for straight-line computations. This game provides a framework for deriving upper and lower bounds on computation time and the I/O time at each level in a memory hierarchy. We apply this framework to a representative set of problems including matrix multiplication and the Fourier transform. We also discuss conditions on hierarchies under which they act as fast at memories. 2
Distributed aggregation control of mobile robotic network

This paper addresses distributed control of mobile robotic network with fixed communication topology and limited sensing ability for its aggregation behavior. The communication and mutual sensing among mobile nodes are modeled by two undirected graphs, respectively. We propose a design of distributed control laws by using two kinds of pairwise potential functions defined over undirected graphs: an extended Morse potential to make robots aggregate and keep them in formation with a crystal-like shape and a repulsive potential responsible for avoiding collisions between neighbors. The gradient of total potential is used to derive a switching control law running locally on each nonholonomic robot with limited velocity considered. Finally, nontrival simulated experiments verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the methodology and show that the scaling of the resulted crystal shape can be manipulated by changing only one parameter.
The use of internal nitrogen stores in the rhizomatous grass Calamagrostis epigejos during regrowth after defoliation.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The regrowth dynamics after defoliation of the invasive grass Calamagrostis epigejos were studied. As nitrogen (N) reserves have been shown to play an important role during plant regrowth, the identity, location and relative importance for regrowth of N stores were determined in this rhizomatous grass. METHODS Plant growth, nitrate uptake and root respiration were followed during recovery from defoliation. Water soluble carbohydrates, nitrate, free amino acids and soluble proteins were analysed in the remaining organs. KEY RESULTS Nitrate uptake and root respiration were severely reduced during the first days of regrowth. Roots were the main net source of mobilized N. The quantitatively dominant N storage compounds were free amino acids. Free amino acids and soluble proteins in the roots decreased by 55 and 50%, respectively, and a substantial (approximately 38%) decrease in stubble protein was also observed. Although the relative abundance of several soluble proteins in roots decreased during the initial recovery from defoliation, no evidence was found for vegetative storage protein (VSP). Furthermore, rhizomes did not act as a N storage compartment. CONCLUSIONS Production of new leaf area was entirely reliant, during the first week after defoliation, on N stores present in the plant. Mobilized N originated mainly from free amino acids and soluble proteins located in roots, and less so from proteins in stubble. Presence of VSP in the roots was not confirmed. The data suggest that rhizomes played an important role in N transport but not in N storage.
Defining a fall and reasons for falling: comparisons among the views of seniors, health care providers, and the research literature.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was (a) to obtain information about the perceptions held by seniors and health care providers concerning what constitutes a fall and potential reasons for falling, and (b) to compare these perceptions to the research literature. DESIGN AND METHODS As part of a larger telephone survey, interviewers asked 477 community-dwelling seniors to define a fall and to provide reasons for falling. In addition, we interviewed 31 health care providers from the community on the same topics. In order to capture patterns in conceptualized thinking, we used content analysis to develop codes and categories for a fall definition and reasons for falling. We reviewed selected articles in order to obtain a comprehensive overview of fall definitions currently used in the research and prevention literature. RESULTS A fall had different meanings for different groups. Seniors and health care providers focused mainly on antecedents and consequences of falling, whereas researchers described the fall event itself. There were substantial differences between the reasons for falling as reported by seniors and the risk factors as identified in the research literature. IMPLICATIONS If not provided with an appropriate definition, seniors can interpret the meaning of a fall in many different ways. This has the potential to reduce the validity in studies comparing fallers to nonfallers. Research reports and prevention programs should always provide an operational definition of a fall. In communication between health care providers and seniors, an appropriate definition increases the possibility for early detection of seniors in greater need of care and services.
Estimation of elbow joint angle by NARX model using EMG data

Myoelectric control has a key role in human-machine interface applications such as orthosis control and teleoperation. Myoelectric signals are bio signals that are detectable from surface of the skin, and contain useful information about user's moving intention. This paper presents a methodology to estimate elbow joint angle from muscle's data using neural network (NN). Proposed methodology can be expanded to estimate any joint angle by recording muscle activities concerning with the joint. In addition, Nonlinear Auto-Regressive eXogenous-NN (NARX-NN) model is selected to estimate joint angle. Several data sets are recorded and processed to train and test the NN. The trained network is used to predict elbow angles for individual data sets. Results show that trained network can estimate joint angle with an acceptable performance.
International Journal of Hospitality Management Duration of Advertising Effect: Considering Franchising in the Restaurant Industry

Keywords: Advertising Duration Sales growth Intangible value enhancement Long-term effect Short-term effect Error correction model (ECM) a b s t r a c t How long do the effects of advertising actually last? This issue has received increased attention in the fields of marketing, accounting, and finance. However, despite the importance of advertising for firm management , research on the effective duration of advertising costs still remains in the exploratory stage. To address this research need, this study investigated how long advertising costs function to increase sales and intangible value in association with franchising in the restaurant industry. The results of this study showed that advertising expenditures had a positive short-term effect on sales growth, whereas advertising did not significantly impact sales growth in the long run. However, when advertising expenditures were considered together with franchising, the long-term interaction effect was positively significant. The results suggest that advertising has long-term positive effects on sales growth only in restaurant firms using a franchising system. This implies that advertising costs should be recognized as investment-like assets only in franchising restaurant firms. On the other hand, advertising ratio had both positive short-term and long-term effects on intangible value. In addition, once the advertising ratio was associated with franchising, the long-term interaction effect was negatively significant. More detailed explanations and implications are included in the conclusion.