Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disentangling large fire occurrence in Mediterranean forests : Management guidelines from a multiscale approach

1 Fire is one of the main disturbances in Mediterranenan ecosystems. In the recent decades, in 2 Catalonia (NE Spain), the number of fires has decreased while burnt area has increased. This is 3 related to changes in land use, climate and fire suppression policies which influenced 4 horizontal and vertical fuel continuity. From all the factors influencing fire risk only fuel load is 5 manageable by humans. For this reason it is important to understand the role of different land 6 covers and forest structure in fire occurrence. This study aimed to understand the 7 determinants of large fire occurrence at two different scales, 500m and 2000m around the 8 ignition point (local and landscape scale, respectively). A binary logistic regression model was 9 built using ignition points from the period 1989-2012 and considering 1000 control points. 10 Forest structure variables obtained through interpolation techniques throughout Catalonia and 11 land cover types were established as the independent variables at the two considered scales. A 12 risk map for large fire occurrence in Catalonia was also built. 13 Mediterranean pine forests and shrublands were the main variables influencing positively 14 large fire occurrence. Specifically, Mediterranean pine forests with intermediate values of 15 basal area and high understory increased the risk of large fires. Although large fires do not 16 usually start in mixed forests, these forests were important at the scale at the landscape scale 17 (2000m) probably because of their vertical continuity. Results showed that a multiscale 18 management would be necessary which should focus on the landscape mosaic of different 19 land cover types and less fire prone forest structures, particularly considering the uncertainty 20 associated with global change and the large fires’ risk increase throughout Catalonia. 21
OKKAM: Enabling a Web of Entities

Already in the early 14th century, the philosopher William of Ockham created the philosophical principle known as Ockham’s Razor, which can be translated from Latin as ”entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. Today, one of the big - and yet unresolved - issues in integrating information distributed over a network of accessible data is the uncontrolled ”multiplication” of identifiers which are used to refer to the same entity (e.g. a person, an event, an organization, a location, a product) across multiple heterogeneous sources. In this paper we propose a system called OKKAM that is currently under development to tackle this “Identity Crisis” on the Semantic Web; we discuss requirements, architecture, usage scenarios and services and experiments we have developed so far.
Monotone monadic SNP and constraint satisfaction

A constraint-satisfaction problem is given by a pair I (the instance) and T (the template) of finite relational structures over the same vocabulary. The problem is satisfied if there is a homomorphism from 1 to T. It is well-known that the constraintsatisfaction problem is NP-complete. In practice, however, one often encounters the situation where the template T is fixed and it is only the instance I that varies. We define CSP to be the class of constraint-satisfaction problems with respect to fixed templates. It is easy to see that CSP is contained in NP and that CSP contains both problems in P and NP-complete problems. We pose the question whether every problem in CSP is either in P or is NP-complete, and attempt to classify which problems in CSP are in P and which are NP-complete.
A causal relationship between pre-treatment matching or motor imitation skills and later acquisition of manual signing or picture exchange communication in children with ASD remains to be established

Abstracted from: Gregory, M. K. , DeLeon, I. G. , & Richman, D. M. (2009). The influence of matching and motor-imitation abilities on rapid acquisition of manual signs and exchange-based communication responses, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 42, 399–404. Source of funding: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Geometric and Arithmetic Culling Methods for Entire Ray Packets

Recent interactive ray tracing performance has been mainly derived from the use of ray packets. Larger ray packets allow for significant amortization of both computations and memory accesses; however, the majority of primitives are still intersected by each ray in a packet. This paper discusses several methods to cull entire ray packets against common primitives (box, triangle, and sphere) that allows an arbitrary number of rays to be tested by a single test. This provides cheap “all miss” or “all hit” tests and may substantially improve the performance of an interactive ray tracer. The paper surveys current methods, provides details on three particular approaches using interval arithmetic, bounding planes, and corner rays, describes how the respective bounding primitives can be easily and efficiently constructed, and points out the relation among the different fundamental concepts.
A Privacy and Price-Aware Inter-Cloud System

Cloud service selection and financial expense are two main concerns of users considering adoption of cloud computing services. In this paper, we propose a novel cloud federation that is cognitive to the dynamic prices. The cloud federation system first determines on which cloud services should the user applications be deployed. Then, when a cloud provider is charging too high for a VM, the proposed system automatically migrates user tasks to a cloud system that is charging at a lower rate. We discuss the architectural framework and platform design, provide a mathematic formulation and investigate a total service fee minimization approach with privacy constraints. Preliminary simulation results demonstrate the proposed system can lower the cost of cloud services by exploiting the advantages of different price policies provided by multiple cloud providers.
Plummeting data loss for multihop wireless broadcast using position based routing in VANET

Multihop Wireless Broadcast is an important factor in VANET. Broadcasting is the most common operation which is used by many applications. But efficiency in routing is difficult to achieve. Many other protocols consider the performance degradation based on the factors like Node density, spatial distribution pattern and channel quality. Distribution Adaptive Distance with Channel Quality (DADCQ) protocol overcomes these factors considering all the three factors. The protocol utilizes the distance method to select forwarding nodes and also the results to achieve high reachability and low bandwidth consumption in urban and highway scenarios. But there is no guaranteed packet transmission and selecting threshold value by considering all the difficult factors. This can be achieved by using Position Based Routing Protocol by put into action of GPRS Algorithm. The PBR protocol makes use of location information and suited for distributed, centralized and decentralized systems. Thus the proposed system will considerably reduce packet loss and to improve throughput.
Optimization of Spiral Inductor on Silicon using Space Mapping

We present an efficient method for the optimal design of spiral inductors used in RF circuits. The optimization process exploits the EM simulator Sonnet em and space mapping (SM) technology. A straightforward geometric programming formulation of the spiral inductor optimization is implemented in the surrogate model optimization. An EM-validated optimal spiral inductor design emerges in ten minutes
The relationships among immunoglobulin levels, allergic sensitization, and viral respiratory illnesses in early childhood

Possin ME, Morgan S, DaSilva DF, Tisler C, Pappas TE, Roberg KA, Anderson E, Evans MD, Gangnon R, Lemanske RF, Gern JE. The relationships among immunoglobulin levels, allergic sensitization, and viral respiratory illnesses in early childhood. Pediatr Allergy Immunol 2010: 21: 990–996. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons A/S
The Evolution of Virulence When Parasites Cause Host Castration and Gigantism

It has been suggested that the harm parasites cause to their hosts is an unavoidable consequence of parasite reproduction with costs not only for the host but also for the parasite. Castrating parasites are thought to minimize their costs by reducing host fecundity, which may minimize the chances of killing both host and parasite prematurely. We conducted a series of experiments to understand the evolution of virulence of a castrating bacterium in the planktonic crustacean Daphnia magna. By manipulating food levels during the infection of D. magna with the bacterium Pasteuria ramosa, we showed that both antagonists are resource‐limited and that a negative correlation between host and parasite reproduction exists, indicating resource competition among the antagonists. Pasteuria ramosa also induces enhanced growth of its hosts (gigantism), which we found to be negatively correlated with host fecundity but positively correlated with parasite reproduction. Because infected hosts never recovered from infections, we concluded that gigantism is beneficial only for the parasite. Hosts, however, have evolved counteradaptations. We showed that infected hosts have enhanced reproduction before castration. This shift to earlier reproduction increases overall host fecundity and compromises parasite reproduction. Finally, we showed that this resource conflict is subject to genetic variation among host and parasite genotypes within a population and is therefore likely to be an important force in the coevolution of virulence in this system. A verbal model is presented and suggests that the adaptive value of gigantism is to store host resources, which are liberated after parasitic castration for later use by the growing parasite. This hypothesis assumes that infections are long lasting, that is, that they have a high life expectancy.
POLITICAL INDIVIDUALIZATION

In this paper, the authors define political individualization as a form of networked individualism. This process consists of two components: social individualization and political networking. Social individualization means that people are becoming less strongly connected to traditional communities and experiencing highly differentiated sociability. Political networking refers to the shift from stable connections to formal political movements to dynamic connections to issue networks. This article attempts to investigate whether this process of political individualization is positively related to the use of new media such as the Internet and mobile telephones. There could be two arguments why these two would be positively related. First, the use of new media drives political individualization; the use of new media stimulates individualization since it creates opportunities for individuals to create social connections outside of existing communities. New media also facilitate the formation of political networks. Second, the use of new media and political individualization are both manifestations of a broader process of societal change. The process of modernization results in increasing autonomy of individuals and growing use of technology. This paper does not test these two explanations but rather investigates whether the grounds for both arguments actually exist. The authors have formulated the following research question: Do the new media create opportunities for political individualization and how are these opportunities used? Data from an international survey (918 web questionnaires) of young people in two European cities – Florence and Utrecht – has been used to investigate the research question.
Biophysical Description of Multiple Events Contributing Blood Leukocyte Arrest on Endothelium

Blood leukocytes have a remarkable capacity to bind to and stop on specific blood vessel areas. Many studies have disclosed a key role of integrin structural changes following the interaction of rolling leukocytes with surface-bound chemoattractants. However, the functional significance of structural data and mechanisms of cell arrest are incompletely understood. Recent experiments revealed the unexpected complexity of several key steps of cell-surface interaction: (i) ligand-receptor binding requires a minimum amount of time to proceed and this is influenced by forces. (ii) Also, molecular interactions at interfaces are not fully accounted for by the interaction properties of soluble molecules. (iii) Cell arrest depends on nanoscale topography and mechanical properties of the cell membrane, and these properties are highly dynamic. Here, we summarize these results and we discuss their relevance to recent functional studies of integrin-receptor association in cells from a patient with type III leukocyte adhesion deficiency. It is concluded that an accurate understanding of all physical events listed in this review is needed to unravel the precise role of the multiple molecules and biochemical pathway involved in arrest triggering.
A Backscatter Model for a Randomly Perturbed Periodic Surface

A backscatter model for a randomly perturbed periodic surface has been developed to explain backscatter measurements from a bare soil surface with row structure. It is assumed that the rowdirection effect can be included by integrating the scattering coefficient ¿ss (¿') due to the random roughness component over the underlying periodic component of the soil surface. It is found that the rowdirection effect is strongly dependent upon the rate-of-change of ¿ss (¿') with the local angle ¿' and that for sinusoidal surfaces, the maximum difference between looking parallel and perpendicular to the row direction occurs around an incidence angle whose tangent is usually smaller than the slope of the periodic surface at the inflection point.
Nucleotide sequence and functional analysis of cbbR, a positive regulator of the Calvin cycle operons of Rhodobacter sphaeroides

Structural genes encoding Calvin cycle enzymes in Rhodobacter sphaeroides are duplicated and organized within two physically distinct transcriptional units, the form I and form II cbb operons. Nucleotide sequence determination of the region upstream of the form I operon revealed a divergently transcribed open reading frame, cbbR, that showed significant similarity to the LysR family of transcriptional regulatory proteins. Mutants containing an insertionally inactivated cbbR gene were impaired in photoheterotrophic growth and completely unable to grow photolithoautotrophically with CO2 as the sole carbon source. In the cbbR strain, expression of genes within the form I operon was completely abolished and that of the form II operon was reduced to about 30% of the wild-type level. The cloned cbbR gene complemented the mutant for wild-type growth characteristics, and normal levels of ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RubisCO) were observed. However, rocket immunoelectrophoresis revealed that the wild-type level of RubisCO was due to overexpression of the form II enzyme, whereas expression of the form I RubisCO was 10% of that of the wild-type strain. The cbbR insertional inactivation did not appear to affect aerobic expression of either CO2 fixation operon, but preliminary evidence suggests that the constitutive expression of the form II operon observed in the cbbR strain may be subject to repression during aerobic growth.
Brain Death and Transplant in Islamic Countries.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate the present status regarding brain death, its consequences, and transplant activities in Islamic countries. MATERIALS AND METHODS A thorough literature survey was conducted about transplant activities in Islamic countries, and the Turkish Ministry of Health Web site was analyzed. Expert opinions about the issue were obtained. RESULTS The present status of brain death and transplant activities has shown a heterogeneous appearance in the Islamic world. Our literature survey clearly revealed that transplant is still in its early stages in many Islamic states. The legislative framework, infrastructure, and related education needs radical improvements in these states. CONCLUSION The concept of death has to be redefined and a consensus should be reached about brain death. The pioneer countries like Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. which already have considerable experience in transplant, should share their expertise and knowledge with the countries that need guidance.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH – BASIC SCIENCE: Primary dermal fibroblasts derived from sdc‐1 deficient mice migrate faster and have altered αv integrin function

The goal of this study is to determine whether dermal fibroblasts lacking syndecan‐1 (sdc1) show differences in integrin expression and function that could contribute to the delayed skin and corneal wound healing phenotypes seen in sdc‐1 null mice. Using primary dermal fibroblasts, we show that after 3 days in culture no differences in α‐smooth muscle actin were detected but sdc‐1 null cells expressed significantly more αv and β1 integrin than wildtype (wt) cells. Transforming growth factor β1 (TGFβ1) treatment at day 3 increased αv‐ and β1‐integrin expression in sdc‐1 null cells at day 5 whereas wt cells showed increased expression only of αv‐integrin. Using time‐lapse studies, we showed that the sdc‐1 null fibroblasts migrate faster than wt fibroblasts, treatment with TGFβ1 increased these migration differences, and treatment with a TGFβ1 antagonist caused sdc‐1 null fibroblasts to slow down and migrate at the same rate as untreated wt cells. Cell spreading studies on replated fibroblasts showed altered cell spreading and focal adhesion formation on vitronectin and fibronectin‐coated surfaces. Additional time lapse studies with β1‐ and αv‐integrin antibody antagonists, showed that wt fibroblasts expressing sdc‐1 had activated integrins on their surface that impeded their migration whereas the null cells expressed αv‐containing integrins which were less adhesive and enhanced cell migration. Surface expression studies showed increased surface expression of α2β1 and α3β1 on the sdc‐1 null fibroblasts compared with wt fibroblasts but no significant differences in surface expression of α5β1, αvβ3, or αvβ5. Taken together, our data indicates that sdc‐1 functions in the activation of αv‐containing integrins and support the hypothesis that impaired wound healing phenotypes seen in sdc‐1 null mice could be due to integrin‐mediated defects in fibroblast migration after injury.
Disruption of mycobactin biosynthesis leads to attenuation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis for growth and virulence.

BACKGROUND Low iron availability in the host upregulates the mbt gene cluster of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which is responsible for mycobactin biosynthesis. However, the biological significance of mycobactins in the growth of this pathogen and in disease progression has not been elucidated. METHODS We have disrupted the mbtE gene (Rv2380c) in the mbt cluster to evaluate the importance of mycobactin biosynthesis in the growth and virulence of M. tuberculosis. RESULTS The mbtE mutant (MtbΔmbtE) was unable to synthesize mycobactins, displayed an altered colony morphology, and was attenuated for growth in broth culture and in macrophages. Transmission electron microscopy revealed that MtbΔmbtE displayed an altered cell wall permeability. The growth characteristics and colony morphology of MtbΔmbtE were similar to wild type when the medium was supplemented with mycobactins or when MtbΔmbtE was genetically complemented with the mbtE gene. Moreover, guinea pigs infected with MtbΔmbtE exhibited a significantly reduced bacillary load and histopathological damage in the organs, in comparison to M. tuberculosis-infected animals. CONCLUSIONS This study highlights the importance of mycobactins in the growth and virulence of M. tuberculosis and establishes the enzymes of mycobactin biosynthesis as novel targets for the development of therapeutic interventions against tuberculosis.
Homogeneous preparation encoding (HoPE) in multislice imaging

Fast magnetization preparation techniques acquire a series of echoes after a single magnetization preparation. If these echoes are acquired from different slices using a multislice technique the change in the preparation state of the echoes due to relaxation effects leads to different contrast modification for each slice. Encoding different preparation states along the phase‐encoding direction of each slice instead of acquiring each slice in a different preparation state is introduced as a general concept to obtain images of identical contrast and point‐spread function. This can be realized either by cycling the slice excitation order several times over the total number of repetitions or by moving the point of time at which the preparation is applied within each repetition. One possible application of this method is chemical shift selective fat saturation imaging. A homogeneous fat suppression across a multislice volume could be achieved using a FLASH sequence at a repetition time of TR = 145 ms, including a single fat saturation preparation. Conventional fat saturated spin‐echo imaging at any TR can be accelerated significantly by reducing the number of applied preparations per repetition. A further application of the homogeneous preparation encoding (HoPE) method is described that encodes the spatial self‐saturation of the multislice excitation order homogeneously in all slices. Only a reduced number of slices of the total volume are excited in each repetition and the slice excitation order is continuously moved along the imaging volume. This method is applied for time of flight (TOF) imaging. Using a TONE‐like series of flip angles for the slice excitations of each repetition homogeneous TOF images can be obtained on the basis of a multislice acquisition. Magn Reson Med 48:745–752, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
How the internet affects patients' experience of cancer: a qualitative study

Objective To explore how men and women with cancer talk about using the internet. Design Qualitative study using semistructured interviews collected by maximum variation sampling. Setting Respondents recruited throughout the United Kingdom during 2001-2. Participants 175 men and women aged 19-83 years, with one of five cancers (prostate, testicular, breast, cervical, or bowel) diagnosed since 1992 and selected to include different stages of treatment and follow up. Results Internet use, either directly or via friend or family, was widespread and reported by patients at all stages of cancer care, from early investigations to follow up after treatment. Patients used the internet to find second opinions, seek support and experiential information from other patients, interpret symptoms, seek information about tests and treatments, help interpret consultations, identify questions for doctors, make anonymous private inquiries, and raise awareness of the cancer. Patients also used it to check their doctors' advice covertly and to develop an expertise in their cancer. This expertise, reflecting familiarity with computer technology and medical terms, enabled patients to present a new type of “social fitness. ” Conclusion Cancer patients used the internet for a wide range of information and support needs, many of which are unlikely to be met through conventional health care. Serious illness often undermines people's self image as a competent member of society. Cancer patients may use the internet to acquire expertise to display competence in the face of serious illness.