Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Water resource management in a variable and changing climate: hypothetical case study to explore decision making under uncertainty

This paper investigates what information water resource managers think they need to make decisions on climate change adaptation. This is achieved through a hypothetical case study where participants, all actual water resource managers or in research, practitioner or administration roles linked to Australian water resources management, were given theoretical future climate scenarios and asked to make decisions based on the available information. The case study provided useful insights into why there is little evidence of effective climate change adaptation being implemented despite significant advances in climate impacts and adaptation science over the last decade. It was found that in order to bridge the gap between climate change adaptation recommendations and successful implementation at practitioner level there is a demand for: improved translation, communication and packaging of existing climate science information into sector- and location-specific impacts (e.g. hydrological interpretation of climate model rainfall projections and the associated uncertainties); attribution of historical and future hydroclimatic changes (e.g. not just what has happened or is going to happen but why and the confidence and likelihoods surrounding that); quantification of costs and benefits of any decision; and understanding of the social, political, and environmental contexts and level of acceptance associated with any decision.
Adeno-Associated Virus Replication Induces a DNA Damage Response Coordinated by DNA-Dependent Protein Kinase

ABSTRACT The parvovirus adeno-associated virus (AAV) contains a small single-stranded DNA genome with inverted terminal repeats that form hairpin structures. In order to propagate, AAV relies on the cellular replication machinery together with functions supplied by coinfecting helper viruses such as adenovirus (Ad). Here, we examined the host cell response to AAV replication in the context of Ad or Ad helper proteins. We show that AAV and Ad coinfection activates a DNA damage response (DDR) that is distinct from that seen during Ad or AAV infection alone. The DDR was also triggered when AAV replicated in the presence of minimal Ad helper proteins. We detected autophosphorylation of the kinases ataxia telangiectasia mutated (ATM) and DNA-dependent protein kinase catalytic subunit (DNA-PKcs) and signaling to downstream targets SMC1, Chk1, Chk2, H2AX, and XRCC4 and multiple sites on RPA32. The Mre11 complex was not required for activation of the DDR to AAV infection. Additionally, we found that DNA-PKcs was the primary mediator of damage signaling in response to AAV replication. Immunofluorescence revealed that some activated damage proteins were found in a pan-nuclear pattern (phosphorylated ATM, SMC1, and H2AX), while others such as DNA-PK components (DNA-PKcs, Ku70, and Ku86) and RPA32 accumulated at AAV replication centers. Although expression of the large viral Rep proteins contributed to some damage signaling, we observed that the full response required replication of the AAV genome. Our results demonstrate that AAV replication in the presence of Ad helper functions elicits a unique damage response controlled by DNA-PK.
Online signature verification system for mobile devices with multilevel pressure sensor

The aim of this work is to increase reliability of personal biometric authentication systems deployed on mobile devices. Particularly considered is authentication via handwriting. Proposed approach is based on usage of devices with multilevel pressure sensor considering pressure power while handwriting. Implemented algorithms apply neural networks. As a result obtained reliability of signatures online verification is increased due to reduction of errors of the first and second types. Developed system is going to be used for access and security control in many areas when personal identification shall be performed with minimal time delay and high capacity of the system.
GENDER, MEDIA AND POLITICS: A CASE STUDY OF NIGERIA

Gender has become one of the "fault-lines' running through the political landscape of Nigeria. Since independence in 1960, Nigerian women have been challenging their role in society. The formation of women movement in the country has lent an impetus to the struggle of women and helps put women issues in the forefront. Consequently, a few Nigerian women have been appointed to important position and pocket of them have won election. The elections of 2003 in the country have not given a push to women; rather the elections have served as dividing lines between women and men. Consequently, "gender politics" has polarized Nigerian political landscape into two camps. The first camp is predominantly dominated by those who want to maintain societal traditions. The second camp is populated by women who are in pursuit of dismantling the patriarchal structure of society. It is against this backdrop that this paper examines the involvement of women in Nigerian politics and their degree of acceptance by the menfolk.
Minimizing uncertainty in determinants and ratios of determinants for invariant relationships employed in SAR imagery pattern recognition

Invariant relationships involving ratios of determinants have been proposed for the classification of an object in SAR imagery. The target detection decision-making process depends on the uncertainty involved in the measurements. At fixed experimental resolution, some determinants are simply better than others because they are much less sensitive to uncertainty. A geometrical interpretation of determinants is applied to assess the minimum relative uncertainty expected for a determinant employed in invariant relationships. Because much larger relative uncertainties can occur in some determinants, a method based on the perturbation of eigenvalues is proposed to identify determinants that are less sensitive to element errors. Symmetric alpha-stable probability distribution functions are employed to characterize error distributions in ratios of determinants.
High density and fully compatible embedded DRAM cell with 45nm CMOS technology (CMOS6)

For the first time, a deep trench based embedded DRAM cell for 45nm node system on a chip (SoC) applications is presented. We achieve both high data retention time and full compatibility with logic process, while scaling eDRAM cell down to 0.069/spl mu/m/sup 2/ size. In order to compensate the loss of capacitance in aggressively scaled deep trench, high enhancement of storage node capacitance up to 60% is achieved by introducing the bottle etching process with LOCOS collar structure and the high-k node dielectric material (Al/sub 2/O/sub 3/). Hybrid STI structure is applied for void free gap filling, and high improvement of retention time is obtained by reduction of induced stress. Ultra shallow buried strap (USBS) structure without silicide block process realizes the integration without any extra process after deep trench formation and extremely low strap resistance. No degradation of retention characteristics is observed by introducing Ni silicide on the top of storage node junction. Disposable sidewall spacer and flash lamp anneal, which are key technologies of logic transistor, are also applied to eDRAM cell successfully. In addition, high functional test yield up to 61 % has been obtained for 256Kb ADM.
The Neddylation Inhibitor Pevonedistat (MLN4924) Suppresses and Radiosensitizes Head and Neck Squamous Carcinoma Cells and Tumors

The cullin RING E3 ubiquitin ligase 4 (CRL4) with its substrate receptor CDT2 (CRL4-CDT2) is emerging as a critical regulator of DNA replication through targeting CDT1, SET8, and p21 for ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis. The aberrant increased stability of these proteins in cells with inactivated CRL4-CDT2 results in DNA rereplication, which is deleterious to cells due to the accumulation of replication intermediates and stalled replication forks. Here, we demonstrate that CDT2 is overexpressed in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), and its depletion by siRNA inhibits the proliferation of human papilloma virus–negative (HPV-ve) HNSCC cells primarily through the induction of rereplication. Treatment of HNSCC with the NEDD8-activating enzyme inhibitor pevonedistat (MLN4924), which inhibits all cullin-based ligases, induces significant rereplication and inhibits HNSCC cell proliferation in culture and HNSCC xenografts in mice. Pevonedistat additionally sensitizes HNSCC cells to ionizing radiation (IR) and enhances IR-induced suppression of xenografts in mice. Induction of rereplication via CDT2 depletion, or via the stabilization or activation of CDT1, also radiosensitizes HNSCC cells. Collectively, these results demonstrate that induction of rereplication represents a novel approach to treating radioresistant HNSCC tumors and suggest that pevonedistat may be considered as an adjuvant for IR-based treatments. Mol Cancer Ther; 17(2); 368–80. ©2017 AACR. See all articles in this MCT Focus section, “Developmental Therapeutics in Radiation Oncology. ”
Effect of moving dawn, dusk, or both on oviposition time in domestic laying hens

1. Lohmann Brown pullets were reared on 8-h photoperiods and transferred to 12 h at 15 weeks by either advancing dawn or delaying dusk by 4 h. At 25 weeks, half of each group was transferred to 16 h by advancing dawn or delaying dusk and, 10 d later, each photoperiod-group was advanced or delayed 4 h by moving both dawn and dusk. Individual oviposition times were recorded over 48 h at 25 weeks and 8–10 d after each lighting change. 2. At 25 weeks, there were no differences in mean time of oviposition, eggs laid in the modal 8 h, or in the proportion of eggs laid before dawn between pullets that had been given a 4-h increase in daylength at 15 weeks by advancing dawn and those photostimulated by delaying dusk. 3. Extensions of the daylength from 12 to 16 h at 25 weeks, whether by advancing dawn or by delaying dusk, delayed mean oviposition time by 2 h and virtually eliminated egg-laying before dawn. All groups laid ≥94% of eggs in the modal 8 h. 4. Moving the complete 12- or 16-h photoperiod forwards by 4 h delayed egg-laying by 0·5 h (relative to dawn), whilst moving them backwards advanced it by 0·7 h. Pullets given 16 h of light laid very few eggs before lights-on, but the divergent movements in oviposition time, relative to dawn, resulted in more eggs being laid before lights-on when the 12-h photoperiod was moved backwards and fewer eggs when it was moved forwards. However, a slower adjustment to the new times of dawn and dusk by the pullets whose day had been moved forward, as indicated by fewer eggs being laid in the modal 8 h and poorer rates of lay compared with pullets that had their photoperiod moved backwards, may explain these differences. It is doubtful that the differences would have persisted after all birds had adjusted their ovulatory cycle, and so any reduction in pre-dawn egg-laying is likely to have been transitory. 5. The only permanent way to minimise pre-dawn egg-laying in brown-egg hybrids is to provide a photoperiod of at least 16 h, though 14–15 h may be long enough for white-egg hybrids and 12–13 h sufficient for broiler breeders.
Determinantes do Comportamento Ambiental em Brasília

The growing concern about the environment has been changing the people's behaviour, leading to questions about the origin of products and the damage they cause to the environment, resulting in a new type of consumer, known as "green consumer". The purpose is to identify the influence of socio-demographic and psychographic factors on the environmental behaviour of individuals in the city of Brasilia and to provide information for the planning of environmental marketing strategies. Data were collected through a questionnaire and by way of logistic regression as analytical tools.The results indicated that the environmentally conscious individuals are those with higher levels of education and, especially, those who perceive the effectiveness of their environmental actions, however small or isolated.
NIVAnalyzer: A Tool for Automatically Detecting and Verifying Next-Intent Vulnerabilities in Android Apps

In the Android system design, any app can start another app's public components to facilitate code reuse by sending an asynchronous message called Intent. In addition, Android also allows an app to have private components that should only be visible to the app itself. However, malicious apps can bypass this system protection and directly invoke private components in vulnerable apps through a class of newly discovered vulnerability, which is called next-intent vulnerability. In this paper, we design an intent flow analysis strategy which accurately tracks the intent in smali code to statically detect next-intent vulnerabilities efficiently and effectively on a large scale. We further propose an automated approach to dynamically verify the discovered vulnerabilities by generating exploit apps. Then we implement a tool named NIVAnalyzer and evaluate it on 20,000 apps downloaded from Google Play. As the result, we successfully confirms 190 vulnerable apps, some of which even have millions of downloads. We also confirmed that an open-source project and a third-party SDK, which are still used by other apps, have next intent vulnerabilities.
Effects of DBS, premotor rTMS, and levodopa on motor function and silent period in advanced Parkinson's disease

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is a widely used and highly effective treatment for patients with advanced Parkinson's disease (PD). Repetitive TMS (rTMS) applied to motor cortical areas has also been shown to improve symptoms in PD and modulate motor cortical excitability. Here, we compared clinical and neurophysiological effects of STN stimulation with those of 1 Hz rTMS given to the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) and those following intake of levodopa in a group of PD patients with advanced disease. Ten PD patients were studied on 2 consecutive days before and after surgery. Clinical effects were determined using the UPDRS motor score. Motor thresholds, motor‐evoked potential (MEP) amplitudes during slight voluntary contraction, and the cortical silent periods (SP) were measured using TMS. Before surgery effects of levodopa and 1 Hz PMd rTMS and after surgery those of STN stimulation with or without additional levodopa were determined. Levodopa significantly improved clinical symptoms and increased the SP duration. STN stimulation improved clinical symptoms without changing the SP duration. In contrast, 1 Hz PMd rTMS was not effective clinically but normalized the SP duration. Whereas levodopa had widespread effects at different levels of an abnormally active motor network in PD, STN stimulation and PMd rTMS led to either clinical improvement or SP normalization, i.e., only partially reversed abnormal motor network activity. © 2009 Movement Disorder Society
Bayesian Word Learning in Multiple Language Environments.

Infant language learners are faced with the difficult inductive problem of determining how new words map to novel or known objects in their environment. Bayesian inference models have been successful at using the sparse information available in natural child-directed speech to build candidate lexicons and infer speakers' referential intentions. We begin by asking how a Bayesian model optimized for monolingual input (the Intentional Model; Frank et al., 2009) generalizes to new monolingual or bilingual corpora and find that, especially in the case of the bilingual input, the model shows a significant decrease in performance. In the next experiment, we propose the ME Model, a modified Bayesian model, which approximates infants' mutual exclusivity bias to support the differential demands of monolingual and bilingual learning situations. The extended model is assessed using the same corpora of real child-directed speech, showing that its performance is more robust against varying input and less dependent than the Intentional Model on optimization of its parsimony parameter. We argue that both monolingual and bilingual demands on word learning are important considerations for a computational model, as they can yield significantly different results than when only one such context is considered.
Free and clear: national origins and progress toward unencumbered homeownership among post-civil rights era immigrants in the US

ABSTRACT Homeownership has been a central part of community and wealth building strategies in the US, and prior research demonstrates that Post-Civil Rights Era immigrants have employed these strategies with remarkable success. However, research on immigrant homeownership does not differentiate that which is encumbered by mortgage debt and that which is ‘free and clear’ or unencumbered. This is an important distinction since wealth held in the form of encumbered home equity can be fleeting. I use US Census and American Community Survey data to chart progress toward unencumbered homeownership among immigrants born in the 1950s who immigrated to the US in the 1970s. Observing this cohort across a 25 year period (1990–2015), I uncover a robust pattern of unencumbered home equity accumulation as they approach their retirement ages. By the end of the period, this small cohort had amassed more than 66 billion dollars in unencumbered home equity, and some immigrant groups exhibited higher rates of free and clear homeownership than their US-born White counterparts. Other immigrant groups lagged in ways that cannot be explained by compositional differences between groups. I address the theoretical implications of these findings and offer suggestions for a new research agenda on immigrant advancement toward free and clear homeownership.
Fluorescence intensity decay shape analysis microscopy (FIDSAM) for quantitative and sensitive live-cell imaging

Fluorescence microscopy became an invaluable tool in cell biology in the past 20 years. However, the information that lies in these studies is often corrupted by a cellular fluorescence background known as autofluorescence. Since the unspecific background often overlaps with most commonly used labels in terms of fluorescence spectra and fluorescence lifetime, the use of spectral filters in the emission beampath or timegating in fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) is often no appropriate means for distinction between signal and background. Despite the prevalence of fluorescence techniques only little progress has been reported in techniques that specifically suppress autofluorescence or that clearly discriminate autofluorescence from label fluorescence. Fluorescence intensity decay shape analysis microscopy (FIDSAM) is a novel technique which is based on the image acquisition protocol of FLIM. Whereas FLIM spatially resolved maps the average fluorescence lifetime distribution in a heterogeneous sample such as a cell, FIDSAM enhances the dynamic image contrast by determination of the autofluorescence contribution by comparing the fluorescence decay shape to a reference function. The technique therefore makes use of the key difference between label and autofluorescence, i.e. that for label fluorescence only one emitting species contributes to fluorescence intensity decay curves whereas many different species of minor intensity contribute to autofluorescence. That way, we were able to suppress autofluorescence contributions from chloroplasts in Arabidopsis stoma cells and from cell walls in Arabidopsis hypocotyl cells to background level. Furthermore, we could extend the method to more challenging labels such as the cyan fluorescent protein CFP in human fibroblasts.
Ready or Not? How Citizens and Public Officials Perceive Risk and Preparedness

The more prepared people are, the less harm they will suffer when disaster strikes. Yet anecdotal and empirical evidence shows that people overestimate their preparedness and are underprepared. While a robust literature has matured around hazards, risk, and vulnerability, and disaster policy, politics, and management, the literature about individual preparedness is much more limited and inconsistent. We know little about why people prepare (or why they do not), and what would make them prepare more. As a result, public managers are at a loss about how to design effective preparedness programs. In this paper, we survey the literature on preparedness to crystallize the gaps in our understanding of when and how citizens react to the threat of disaster. We then examine and compare the views of risk and preparedness held by individuals and government officials drawing on insights from a 4-year study that involved three national surveys and intensive studies in two communities. We use this analysis to address two questions: What do citizens think and do about risks and preparedness, and why? How do local government officials understand what citizens think and do about risks and preparedness?
Phytochemical screening and isolation of triterpenes and sterols from leaves of Clusia minor L.

Introduction: Clusia is one of the most widely studied genera in the Clusiaseae family. Clusia minor L. is a wild shrub with scant phytochemical studies. The latex and leaves from this species are used in traditional medicine to treat warts and sores, respectively. Objective: Evaluate the chemical composition of extracts obtained from leaves of Clusia minor L. Methods: The leaves were selected and dried before the extraction process. The extracts were prepared by maceration using solvents of varying polarity (hexane, ethyl acetate and methanol) and by direct extraction with ethanol. All the extracts underwent phytochemical screening. The ethyl acetate extract was fractionated by column chromatography with silica gel. Structural elucidation of the compounds isolated was based on spectroscopic methods and comparison with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data reported for these compounds in the literature. Results: The following secondary metabolites were identified in the extracts: anthraquinones, triterpenes, steroids, reducing sugars, phenolic compounds and flavonoids. Phytochemical analysis of hexane and ethyl acetate extracts led to isolation of pentacyclic triterpenes, friedelin and betulinic acid, as well as a mixture of the sterols β-sitosterol and stigmasterol. Conclusions: Phytochemical screening revealed the presence of mainly phenolic compounds in all the extracts. The ethanolic extract was found to contain the greatest variety of secondary metabolites. This was the first time that betulinic acid was isolated from this species. Key words: Clusia minor L. , phenolic compounds, sterols, flavonoids, pentacyclic triterpenes.