Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Environmental characteristics drive variation in Amazonian understorey bird assemblages

Tropical bird assemblages display patterns of high alpha and beta diversity and, as tropical birds exhibit strong habitat specificity, their spatial distributions are generally assumed to be driven primarily by environmental heterogeneity and interspecific interactions. However, spatial distributions of some Amazonian forest birds are also often restricted by large rivers and other large-scale topographic features, suggesting that dispersal limitation may also play a role in driving species’ turnover. In this study, we evaluated the effects of environmental characteristics, topographic and spatial variables on variation in local assemblage structure and diversity of birds in an old-growth forest in central Amazonia. Birds were mist-netted in 72 plots distributed systematically across a 10,000 ha reserve in each of three years. Alpha diversity remained stable through time, but species composition changed. Spatial variation in bird-assemblage structure was significantly related to environmental and topographic variables but not strongly related to spatial variables. At a broad scale, we found bird assemblages to be significantly distinct between two watersheds that are divided by a central ridgeline. We did not detect an effect of the ridgeline per se in driving these patterns, indicating that most birds are able to fly across it, and that differences in assemblage structure between watersheds may be due to unmeasured environmental variables or unique combinations of measured variables. Our study indicates that complex geography and landscape features can act together with environmental variables to drive changes in the diversity and composition of tropical bird assemblages at local scales, but highlights that we still know very little about what makes different parts of tropical forest suitable for different species.
Algorithm 338: algol procedures for the fast Fourier transform

The following procedures are based on the Cooley-Tukey algorithm [1] for computing the finite Fourier transform of a complex data vector; the dimension of the data vector is assumed here to be a power of two. Procedure COMPLEXTRANSFORM computes either the complex Fourier transform or its inverse. Procedure REALTRANSFORM computes either the Fourier coefficients of a sequence of real data points or evaluates a Fourier series with given cosine and sine coefficients. The number of arithmetic operations for either procedure is proportional to n log2 n, where n is the number of data points.
Measuring presence in virtual environments

This demonstration presents findings from two studies on presence that use a new technology for developing photo-realistic virtual environments. Our studies have used a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures, and in doing so have pointed to the importance of exploring place as part of presence. The demonstration explores issues of presence in such environments and the range of data capture methods we used and methodological issues found.
Biophysical Properties and Molecular Basis of Cardiac Rapid and Slow Delayed Rectifier Potassium Channels

Normal cardiac action potential repolarization is dependent on activation of several K+ currents, including IKr and IKs. IKr activates rapidly at positive potentials, exhibits inward rectification caused by C-type inactivation, and is potently blocked by methanesulfon-anilide antiarrhythmic drugs and several other common medications. IKs activates very slowly, does not inactivate and is blocked by some benzodiazepines and a chromanol. HERG encodes subunits that form channels that mediate IKr. KVLQT1 and minK encode subunits that coassemble to form channels that mediate IKs. Mutations in any of these genes cause long QT syndrome, a disorder of cardiac repolarization that predisposes individuals to lethal arrhythmias. In this review, we summarize recent studies of the biophysical and pharmacological properties of HERG and KvLQT1/minK K+ channels.
Social work effectiveness in two-year stroke survivors: a randomised controlled trial.

The survivors to two years, of a population-based stroke incidence study, were randomly allocated to treatment or control groups in a trial of the effectiveness of a client-centred social work service. After twelve months, no difference was discernible in the use of health or community resources by the 110 treated subjects or the 103 controls; no significant difference was present in activity-independence scores. Of the 31 deaths that occurred, 11 were in treatment subjects and 20 in control. The mortality difference was most evident in those subjects not institutionalised at the beginning of the study; overall the difference was significant at the 7% level. It is suggested that the social work service had little effectiveness in altering health resource usage but may have been a therapeutic agent in its own right.
Profiling Energy Consumption of VMs for Green Cloud Computing

The Green Clouds project in the Netherlands investigates a system-level approach towards greening High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures and clouds. In this paper we present our initial results in profiling virtual machines with respect to three power metrics, i.e. power, power efficiency and energy, under different high performance computing workloads. We built a linear power model that represents the behavior of a single work node and includes the contribution from individual components, i.e. CPU, memory and HDD, to the total power consumption of a single work node. Our results could be part of a power characterization module integrated into clusters' monitoring systems, future Green Clouds energy-savvy scheduler would use this monitoring system to support system-level optimization.
Use of the internet to study the utility values of the public

One of the most difficult tasks in cost-effectiveness analysis is the measurement of quality weights (utilities) for health states. The task is difficult because subjects often lack familiarity with health states they are asked to rate and because utilities measures such as the standard gamble, ask subjects to perform tasks that are complex and far from everyday experience. A large body of research suggests that computer methods can play an important role in explaining health states and measuring utilities. However, administering computer surveys to a "general public" sample, the most relevant sample for cost-effectiveness analysis, is logistically difficult. In this paper, we describe a software system designed to allow the study of general population preferences in a volunteer Internet survey panel. The approach, which relied on over sampling of ethnic groups and older members of the panel, produced a data set with an ethnically, chronologically and geographically diverse group of respondents, but was not successful in replicating the joint distribution of demographic patterns in the population.
Relocating a Cluster of Earthquakes Using a Single Seismic Station

Coda waves arise from scattering to form the later arriving components of a seismogram. Coda‐wave interferometry (CWI) is an emerging tool for constraining earthquake source properties from the interference pattern of coda waves between nearby events. A new earthquake location algorithm is derived which relies on coda‐wave‐based probabilistic estimates of earthquake separation. The algorithm can be used with coda waves alone or in tandem with arrival‐time data. Synthetic examples (2D and 3D) and real earthquakes on the Calaveras fault, California, are used to demonstrate the potential of coda waves for locating poorly recorded earthquakes. It is demonstrated that CWI: (a) outperforms traditional earthquake location techniques when the number of stations is small; (b) is self‐consistent across a broad range of station situations; and (c) can be used with a single station to locate earthquakes.
VoIP Fraud: Identifying a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

In today's IP telephony world, VoIP service providers and their customers are experiencing a common and rising trend of an attack where hackers compromise legitimate telephone subscriber accounts either from service provider networks, or from one of their customer sites. Once a user account has been compromised, it is used for launching various types of fraudulent activities. Ironically, both users (whose accounts are compromised) and their service providers remain oblivious of any such ongoing fraudulent activities. Generally, such attacks are detected after the fact when damage is already done, either during the call detail records analysis, customer complaints, or billing disputes. From VoIP service provider's perspective, we ask a fundamental question: Why does it remain an elusive goal to detect if a call is originating from a compromised user account? The answer to this question and a feasible solution could be proved as an essential security tool to prevent various VoIP attacks that plague IP telephony world. To this end, we introduce a new dimension to VoIP security, namely device authorization along with already existing and widely deployed user authentication. The device authorization scheme exploits two unique aspects of calling devices: 1) analog-to-digital conversion process of audio signal; and 2) implementation of SIP timers. By passive and remote observation of signaling and media streams, we establish a relationship between the two and make sure that an authenticated telephone subscriber is using an authorized device to originate calls.
Secure Self-Recovery Image Authentication Using Randomly-Sized Blocks

In this paper, a secure variable-size block-based image authentication technique is proposed that can not only localize the alteration detection but also recover the missing data. An image undergoes recursive arbitrarily-asymmetric binary tree partitioning to obtain randomly-sized blocks spanning the entire image. To enhance reliability of altered block recovery, multiple description coding (MDC) is utilized to generate two block descriptions. Block signature copies and the two block descriptions are embedded into two relatively-distant blocks making a doubly linked chain. The experimental results deposit that the proposed technique successfully both localizes and compensates the alterations. Furthermore, it is robust against the vector quantization (VQ) attack.
Darker eggs of mosquitoes resist more to dry conditions: Melanin enhances serosal cuticle contribution in egg resistance to desiccation in Aedes, Anopheles and Culex vectors

Mosquito vectors lay their white eggs in the aquatic milieu. During early embryogenesis water passes freely through the transparent eggshell, which at this moment is composed of exochorion and endochorion. Within two hours the endochorion darkens via melanization but even so eggs shrink and perish if removed from moisture. However, during mid-embryogenesis, cells of the extraembryonic serosa secrete the serosal cuticle, localized right below the endochorion, becoming the third and innermost eggshell layer. Serosal cuticle formation greatly reduces water flow and allows egg survival outside the water. The degree of egg resistance to desiccation (ERD) at late embryogenesis varies among different species: Aedes aegypti, Anopheles aquasalis and Culex quinquefasciatus eggs can survive in a dry environment for ≥ 72, 24 and 5 hours, respectively. In some adult insects, darker-body individuals show greater resistance to desiccation than lighter ones. We asked if egg melanization enhances mosquito serosal cuticle-dependent ERD. Species with higher ERD at late embryogenesis exhibit more melanized eggshells. The melanization-ERD hypothesis was confirmed employing two Anopheles quadrimaculatus strains, the wild type and the mutant GORO, with a dark-brown and a golden eggshell, respectively. In all cases, serosal cuticle formation is fundamental for the establishment of an efficient ERD but egg viability outside the water is much higher in mosquitoes with darker eggshells than in those with lighter ones. The finding that pigmentation influences egg water balance is relevant to understand the evolutionary history of insect egg coloration. Since eggshell and adult cuticle pigmentation ensure insect survivorship in some cases, they should be considered regarding species fitness and novel approaches for vector or pest insects control.
Highly Specific Neuron Loss Preserves Lateral Inhibitory Circuits in the Dentate Gyrus of Kainate-Induced Epileptic Rats

Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy display neuron loss in the hilus of the dentate gyrus. This has been proposed to be epileptogenic by a variety of different mechanisms. The present study examines the specificity and extent of neuron loss in the dentate gyrus of kainate-treated rats, a model of temporal lobe epilepsy. Kainate-treated rats lose an average of 52% of their GAD-negative hilar neurons (putative mossy cells) and 13% of their GAD-positive cells (GABAergic interneurons) in the dentate gyrus. Interneuron loss is remarkably specific; 83% of the missing GAD-positive neurons are somatostatin-immunoreactive. Of the total neuron loss in the hilus, 97% is attributed to two cell types—mossy cells and somatostatinergic interneurons. The retrograde tracer wheat germ agglutinin (WGA)-apoHRP-gold was used to identify neurons with appropriate axon projections for generating lateral inhibition. Previously, it was shown that lateral inhibition between regions separated by 1 mm persists in the dentate gyrus of kainate-treated rats with hilar neuron loss. Retrogradely labeled GABAergic interneurons are found consistently in sections extending 1 mm septotemporally from the tracer injection site in control and kainate-treated rats. Retrogradely labeled putative mossy cells are found up to 4 mm from the injection site, but kainate-treated rats have fewer than controls, and in several kainate-treated rats virtually all of these cells are missing. These findings support hypotheses of temporal lobe epileptogenesis that involve mossy cell and somatostatinergic neuron loss and suggest that lateral inhibition in the dentate gyrus does not require mossy cells but, instead, may be generated directly by GABAergic interneurons.
Helping daughters succeed: asymmetric distribution of glucose transporter mRNA

Rapidly proliferating cells growing by glucose fermentation must first transport glucose into the cell. Both budding yeast and human tumor cells utilize members of a conserved family of glucose transporters. In this issue of The EMBO Journal, Stahl et al (2019) reveal that budding yeast cells confer a growth advantage to their daughters using a novel mechanism, the asymmetric distribution to the daughter cell of the mRNA for a specific glucose transporter.
Inherited twistor-space structure of gravity amplitudes

At tree-level, gravity amplitudes are obtainable directly from gauge theory amplitudes via the Kawai, Lewellen and Tye closed-open string relations. We explain how the unitarity method allows us to use these relations to obtain coefficients of box integrals appearing in one-loop = 8 supergravity amplitudes from the recent computation of the coefficients for = 4 super-Yang-Mills non-maximally-helicity-violating amplitudes. We argue from factorisation that these box coefficients determine the one-loop = 8 supergravity amplitudes, although this remains to be proven. We also show that twistor-space properties of the = 8 supergravity amplitudes are inherited from the corresponding properties of = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory. We give a number of examples illustrating these ideas.
Identification of Differentially Expressed Genes by Serial Analysis of Gene Expression in Human Prostate Cancer 1

Prostate cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in American males. To better understand the genetic bases of this disease, we have generated a comprehensive molecular profile of human prostate. The gene expression pattern in normal and prostate cancer tissues was analyzed by serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE). A total of 133,217 transcripts were analyzed, and 35,185 distinct SAGE tags were identified representing 19,287 genes. Comparison of the transcripts in normal and tumor tissue revealed 156 differentially expressed genes (P < 0.05), of which 88 genes were up-regulated and 68 genes were down-regulated in the tumor tissue. Based on SAGE data, we estimate that the transcriptome for human prostate is approximately 37,000. Several differentially expressed genes identified by SAGE were selected for confirmation using immunohistochemistry. Some genes (e.g., E2F4) were overexpressed in tumor epithelial cells and some (e.g., Daxx) were increased in tumor stroma. Further characterization of the role of E2F4 and Daxx as well as other differentially expressed genes may provide useful insights into the mechanism of prostate cancer development.
Building the vertebrate neuromuscular synapse.

Neuromuscular synapses form following a series of complex interactions between motor neurons, muscle fibers, and Schwann cells that culminate in the formation of a highly specialized postsynaptic membrane and a highly differentiated nerve terminal (Son and Thompson, 1995; Burden, 1998; Sanes and Lichtman, 2001; Schaeffer et al., 2001). In adult muscle, motor axon terminals are situated in shallow depressions of the muscle cell membrane, which is invaginated further into deep and regular folds, termed postjunctional folds. Acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) and additional proteins are concentrated at the crests of these postjunctional folds, while other proteins, including sodium channels, are enriched in the troughs of the postjunctional folds. The genes encoding many of these muscle-derived synaptic proteins are transcribed preferentially in the myofiber nuclei that are situated near the synaptic site, resulting in an accumulation of the encoded mRNAs near synaptic nuclei. The nerve terminal is likewise spatially organized, and its substructural organization reflects that of the postsynaptic membrane. Synaptic vesicles are clustered adjacent to poorly characterized specializations of the presynaptic membrane, termed active zones, which are the sites of synaptic vesicle fusion. Active zones are organized at regular intervals and are aligned precisely with the mouths of the postjunctional folds. This precise registration of active zones and postjunctional folds insures that acetylcholine encounters a high concentration of AChRs within microseconds after release, thereby facilitating synaptic transmission. This precise organization of molecules in presynaptic and postsynaptic membranes belies the concept that the neuromuscular synapse is a simple synapse. Rather, the substructure of presynaptic and postsynaptic membranes suggests that complex mechanisms, requiring spatially restricted signaling between presynaptic and postsynaptic cells, are required to assemble the synapse and to coordinate presynaptic and postsynaptic differentiation.
Prevalence of Leishmania infantumInfection in Dogs Living in an Area of Canine Leishmaniasis Endemicity Using PCR on Several Tissues and Serology

ABSTRACT We studied and compared the prevalence of Leishmaniainfection and the seroprevalence and the prevalence of canine leishmaniasis in an area where canine leishmaniasis is endemic. One hundred dogs living on the island of Mallorca (Spain) were studied. In this study, we clinically examined each dog for the presence of symptoms compatible with leishmaniasis, determined the titer of anti-Leishmania antibodies, and investigated the presence of Leishmania DNA by PCR in skin, conjunctiva, and bone marrow samples of each dog. The prevalence of the disease and the seroprevalence were 13 and 26%, respectively. In 63% of the dogs,Leishmania DNA could be detected by PCR in at least one of the tissues studied. The results of positive PCR in the bone marrow, the conjunctiva, and the skin were 17.8, 32, and 51%, respectively. The prevalence of the infection, 67%, was calculated using all animals that were seropositive and/or positive by PCR with any tissue. The results showed that the majority of dogs living in an area where canine leishmaniasis is endemic are infected by Leishmania and that the prevalence of infection is much greater than the prevalence of overt Leishmania-related disease.
A semantic representation for spoken dialogs

This paper describes a semantic annotation scheme for spoken dialog corpora. Manual semantic annotation of large corpora is tedious, expensive, and subject to inconsistencies. Consistency is a necessityto increase the usefulness of corpus for developing and evaluating spokenunderstanding models and for linguistics studies. A semantic representation, which is based on a concept dictionary deﬁnition, has beenformalized and is described. Each utterance is divided into semantic segments and each segment is assigned with a 5-tuplets containing a mode, the underlying concept, the normalized form of the concept, the list of re-lated segments, and an optional comment about the annotation. Based on this scheme, a tool was developed which ensures that the provided annotations respect the semantic representation. The tool includes interfaces for both the formal deﬁnition of the hierarchical concept dictionary and the annotation process. An experiment was conducted to assess inter-annotator agreement using both a human-humandialog corpus and a human-machine dialog corpus. For human-human dialogs, the agreement rate, computed on the triplets (mode, concept, value) is 61%, and the agreement rate on the concepts alone is 74%. For the human-machine dialogs, the percentage of agreement on the triplet is 83% and the correct concept identiﬁcation rate is 93%.
Thyroidal dysfunction and environmental chemicals--potential impact on brain development.

Certain polyhalogenated aromatic hydrocarbons such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dibenzo-p-dioxins (dioxins, 2,3,7, 8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin) have been shown to have neurotoxic effects and to alter thyroid function during critical periods of thyroid hormone-dependent brain development. This has led to the suggestion that some of the neurotoxic effects of these compounds could be mediated through the thyroid system. Thyroid hormones are essential for normal brain development during a critical period beginning in utero and extending through the first 2 years postpartum. They regulate neuronal proliferation, migration, and differentiation in discrete regions of the brain during definitive time periods. Even transient disruption of this normal pattern can impair brain development. Thyroid hormones are necessary for normal cytoskeletal assembly and stability and the cytoskeletal system is essential for migration and neuronal outgrowth. In addition, they regulate development of cholinergic and dopaminergic systems serving the cerebral cortex and hippocampus. Animals perinatally exposed to certain environmental organohalogens such as many of the PCBs and dioxins have abnormal thyroid function and neurologic impairment. Although there are both species and congener variabilities, most reports show exposure results in thyroid enlargement and reduced serum T(4) levels with normal T(3) levels. Initial research concentrated on studying the direct actions of xenobiotics on the thyroid; however, some of these compounds bear a structural resemblance to the natural thyroid hormones and have high affinity with thyroid hormone-binding proteins such as transthyretin. These compounds could act as agonists or antagonists for receptors of the thyroid/steroid/retinoic acid superfamily. These structurally similar organohalogens could act at multiple points to alter thyroid hormone action. The similarity of the neurologic impairment seen in thyroid disorders to that seen following PCB or dioxin exposure suggests that one mechanism of neurotoxicity of these compounds could involve interaction with the thyroid system. ImagesFigure 1