Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intensive monitoring of forest ecosystems.

Pollution inputs and their impact on Irish forests are intensively monitored at four forest ecosystems. The sites, in Cork (Ballyhooly), Mayo (Brackloon), Galway (Cloosh) and Wicklow (Roundwood), supply stand and other environmental data to assist in interpretation of forest health surveys. They also contribute to research on the effects of plantations on freshwater stream ecosystems. The chemical composition of water, from the incoming rain, through the forest ecosystem and out through the soil is monitored. Results here are for three years for Ballyhooly and one year for the others. There is significant pollution at Roundwood. At Ballyhooly, ammonium, apparently much of it from local dairy farms, has a potentially damaging long-term impact. Rain at the western sites is relatively clean, although there is evidence of a small but significant pollution influence in the region. The marine influence is strong at all sites, with very high inputs of the main marine ions, sodium and chloride, at Brackloon and Cloosh. The forest intercepts substances in the atmosphere and by this and other processes, deposition of ions on the forest floor (and consequently to forest soils and adjoining ecosystems) is generally greater than on open, non-forested land. This process is clearly seen at Roundwood where nitrogen inputs are augmented to the point where degradation of the ecosystem is likely to occur. Nitrogen inputs at the western sites are very low, but high salt inputs here may acidify adjoining freshwater ecosystems. Long-term support for intensive monitoring is needed. There is a real risk of damage to forest ecosystems, and via forests to other ecosystems. Deposition and its impacts vary greatly with weather conditions, and, as with climatological monitoring, good evidence for effects which take many years must be based on several years' continuous monitoring.
Barriers to hospital births: why do many Bolivian women give birth at home?

OBJECTIVES This study investigated the low rates of hospital/health center births recorded in Yapacaní, Bolivia, that persist despite the national maternal-infant insurance program designed to ensure equitable access to free center-based health care services for pregnant women. The purpose of this study was to identify the multilevel factors inhibiting access to and utilization of public health centers for labor and delivery. METHODS Qualitative research methods were used, including participant observation, semistructured interviews of 62 community members, and key informant interviews with eight regional experts. Data were coded and analyzed using the grounded theory approach. RESULTS From the semistructured interview data, five reasons for the low rate of institutional births and their frequency were identified: (1) fear or embarrassment related to receiving care at a public health care center (37%); (2) poor quality of care available at the health care centers (22%); (3) distance from or other geographic issues preventing timely travel to health care services (21%); (4) economic constraints preventing travel to or utilization of health care services (14%); and (5) the perception that health care services are not necessary due to the experience of "easy birth" (6%). CONCLUSIONS The reasons for the low rate of births in public health centers exist within the context of deficient resources, politics, and cultural differences that all influence the experience of women and their partners at the time of birth. These large scale, contextual issues must be taken into account to improve access to quality health care services for all Bolivian women at the time of birth. Resources at the national level must be carefully targeted to ensure that governmental services will successfully instill confidence in Bolivian women and facilitate their overcoming the cultural, geographic, economic, and logistical barriers to accessing "free" services.
Teaching in a Wireless Learning Environment: A Case Study

Although wireless and mobile technology is regarded as a useful tool for enhancing student-centered learning, few studies have explored the factors that may affect the application of this emerging technology in classroom situations. Accordingly, this study selects three factors (instructional belief, instructional routine, and features of wireless and mobile technology) via literature review, then utilizes a case-study method with a focus class and teacher to explore the effects of these factors on teaching in wireless environments. The main study results are summarized as follows: first, the case teacher held positive beliefs regarding student-centered instruction and innovative technology, but the teacher’s instructional practices were significantly restricted by the teachercentered approach. This inconsistency between instructional beliefs and practices resulted in the teacher being willing to apply wireless technology but unable to bring it into full play. Second, the strong stress and misgivings about changes in instructional methods prevented the teacher from altering instructional routines. The contrast between student expectations regarding technological applications and the practical application of technology by teachers caused negative reciprocal effects. Finally, the workshop that adopted top-down dissemination and did not use on-site support in this study cannot encourage changes in instruction methods used by teachers. It is recommended that effective learning communities and teacher development programs be developed.
Bioreduction with Efficient Recycling of NADPH by Coupled Permeabilized Microorganisms

ABSTRACT The glucose dehydrogenase (GDH) from Bacillus subtilis BGSC 1A1 was cloned and functionally expressed in Escherichia coli BL21(pGDH1) and XL-1 Blue(pGDH1). Controlled permeabilization of recombinant E. coli BL21 and XL-1 Blue with EDTA-toluene under optimized conditions resulted in permeabilized cells with specific activities of 61 and 14 U/g (dry weight) of cells, respectively, for the conversion of NADP+ to NADPH upon oxidation of glucose. The permeabilized recombinant strains were more active than permeabilized B. subtilis BGSC 1A1, did not exhibit NADPH/NADH oxidase activity, and were useful for regeneration of both NADH and NADPH. Coupling of permeabilized cells of Bacillus pumilus Phe-C3 containing an NADPH-dependent ketoreductase and an E. coli recombinant expressing GDH as a novel biocatalytic system allowed enantioselective reduction of ethyl 3-keto-4,4,4-trifluorobutyrate with efficient recycling of NADPH; a total turnover number (TTN) of 4,200 mol/mol was obtained by using E. coli BL21(pGDH1) as the cofactor-regenerating microorganism with initial addition of 0.005 mM NADP+. The high TTN obtained is in the practical range for producing fine chemicals. Long-term stability of the permeabilized cell couple and a higher product concentration were demonstrated by 68 h of bioreduction of ethyl 3-keto-4,4,4-trifluorobutyrate with addition of 0.005 mM NADP+ three times; 50.5 mM (R)-ethyl 3-hydroxy-4,4,4-trifluorobutyrate was obtained with 95% enantiomeric excess, 84% conversion, and an overall TTN of 3,400 mol/mol. Our method results in practical synthesis of (R)-ethyl 3-hydroxy-4,4,4-trifluorobutyrate, and the principle described here is generally applicable to other microbial reductions with cofactor recycling.
Social anxiety and difficulty disengaging threat: Evidence from eye-tracking

Theoretical models of social phobia propose that biased attention contributes to the maintenance of symptoms; however these theoretical models make opposing predictions. Specifically, whereas Rapee and Heimberg (1997) suggested the biases are characterised by hypervigilance to threat cues and difficulty disengaging attention from threat, Clark and Wells (1995) suggested that threat cues are largely avoided. Previous research has been limited by the almost exclusive reliance on behavioural response times to experimental tasks to provide an index of attentional biases. The current study evaluated the relationship between the time-course of attention and symptoms of social anxiety and depression. Forty-two young adults completed a dot-probe task with emotional faces while eye-movement data were collected. The results revealed that increased social anxiety was associated with attention to emotional (rather than neutral) faces over time as well as difficulty disengaging attention from angry expressions; some evidence was found for a relationship between heightened depressive symptoms and increased attention to fear faces.
CrowdAdapt: enabling crowdsourced web page adaptation for individual viewing conditions and preferences

The range and growing diversity of new devices makes it increasingly difficult to design suitable web interfaces for every browsing client. We present CrowdAdapt - a context-aware web design tool that supports developers in the creation of adaptive layout solutions for a wide variety of use contexts by crowdsourcing web site adaptations designed for individual viewing conditions and preferences. We focus on one experiment we conducted for an existing news web site using CrowdAdapt (i) to explore the design space in terms of layout alternatives created by the crowd, (ii) to identify adaptation preferences with respect to different viewing situations, and (iii) to assess the perceived quality of crowd-generated layouts in terms of reading comfort and efficiency. The results suggest that crowdsourced adaptation could lead to very flexible web interfaces informed by individual end-user requirements. In particular, scenarios such as the adaptation to large-screen contexts that the majority of web sites fail to address could be supported with relatively little effort.
Robust Scale Adaptive and Real-Time Visual Tracking with Correlation Filters

Visual tracking has been studied for several decades but continues to draw significant attention because of its critical role in many applications. Recent years have seen greater interest in the use of correlation filters in visual tracking systems, owing to their extremely compelling results in different competitions and benchmarks. However, there is still a need to improve the overall tracking capability to counter various tracking issues, including large scale variation, occlusion, and deformation. This paper presents an appealing tracker with robust scale estimation, which can handle the problem of fixed template size in Kernelized Correlation Filter (KCF) tracker with no significant decrease in the speed. We apply the discriminative correlation filter for scale estimation as an independent part after finding the optimal translation based on the KCF tracker. Compared to an exhaustive scale space search scheme, our approach provides improved performance while being computationally efficient. In order to reveal the effectiveness of our approach, we use benchmark sequences annotated with 11 attributes to evaluate how well the tracker handles different attributes. Numerous experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against several state-of-the-art algorithms. Appealing results both in accuracy and robustness are also achieved on all 51 benchmark sequences, which proves the efficiency of our tracker. key words: correlation filters, kernel methods, scale estimation, visual tracking
Early Loaded Single Implant Reinforced Mandibular Overdenture

Rehabilitating atrophied mandible with two-implant supported denture is a common treatment modality for implant retained removable overdenture in mandible. This paper aims to design a treatment modality where single implant reinforced overdenture is fabricated for a severely atrophied mandibular ridge with early loading protocol. Results of studies have shown that a single implant mandibular overdenture significantly increases the satisfaction and quality of life of patients with edentulism. Midline fracture of the prosthesis is the most common complication related to single implant and two-implant retained mandibular overdentures. To manage such complication, a thin metal mesh is used to reinforce the overdenture and also to make the prostheses lighter and cost effective as compared to conventional cast metal framework.
Ocular alignment and refraction in preterm children at 1 and 6 years old

Purpose To investigate cycloplegic refraction and ocular alignment in a population of preterm children at 1 and 6 years old. Patients and methods We included 261 preterm infants with a birth weight ≤1,500 g and a gestational age ≤32 weeks; there were 217 preterm infants (group 1), 28 preterm infants with mild retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) (group 2), and 16 preterm infants affected by severe ROP (group 3). Each patient underwent retinoscopy, ocular alignment assessment, and fundus examination at 1 and 6 years old. Results The prevalence of refractive errors and ocular alignment abnormalities at 1 year old in groups 2 and 3 compared to group 1 were, respectively (P<0.05): myopia 18% and 40.6% versus 6.9%; hyperopia 28.6% and 22% versus 39.2%; astigmatism 53.4% and 37.4% versus 53.9%; and strabismus 12.5% and 38% versus 5.3%. At 6 years old, they were, respectively (P<0.05): myopia 10.8% and 28.4% versus 7.4%; hyperopia 48.3% and 40.5% versus 62%; astigmatism 40.9% and 31.1% versus 30.6%; and strabismus 25% and 56.25% versus 11.5%. Conclusion At 6 years old, we observed increased rates of both hyperopia and strabismus in all groups compared to 1-year-old children. In preterm children with mild and severe ROP, we recorded increased rates of myopia and strabismus versus preterm children without ROP, and the risk of developing these disorders increased significantly with ROP severity. Astigmatism at 1 year old is not predictive of further development during growth. Patients born prematurely should be informed of the possible risks of ocular alterations due to refractive and ocular component changes.
Pegylated Liposomal Doxorubicin Is an Active Agent for Chemotherapy-Resistant Choriocarcinoma: A Report of Two Cases.

BACKGROUND Despite advances in chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and supportive treatments, a significant proportion of high-risk metastatic gestational trophoblastic disease patients develop resistant disease and die. Of those cured, protracted treatments can lead to long-term morbidity or later toxicity and death. Here we describe 2 patients with brain metastases who failed multiple lines of standard chemotherapy and radiation but had complete response to pegylated liposomal doxorubicin (PLD). CASE 1 A 35-year-old woman presented with choriocarcinoma in the brain, lungs, and subcutaneous tissues 11 months after full-term delivery. Her FIGO risk score was 14. Over 3 years she was treated with EMA-CO, EMA-CE, Taxol, gemcitabine, brain radiation, and excisional craniotomy for recurrent choriocarcinoma. She showed complete response of choriocarcinoma brain metastases following 2 cycles of PLD. She was choriocarcinoma free until her death 9 months later from acute myelogenous leukemia. CASE 2 A 52-year-old multigravid woman presented with choriocarcinoma 3 years following miscarriage. Her FIGO score was 16. Over 18 months she was treated with EMA-CO, TP/TE and IT MTX, and radiation. Her disease proved resistant and midbrain tumor unresectable. She showed complete response to PLD following 3 cycles but ultimately died from neurologic complications. CONCLUSION PLD is an active agent in the treatment of high-risk choriocarcinoma.
Snap-DAS: A vision-based driver assistance system on a SnapdragonTM embedded platform

In the recent years, mobile computing platforms are becoming increasingly cheaper and yet more powerful in terms of computational resources. Automobiles provide a suitable environment to deploy such mobile platforms in order to provide low cost driver assistance systems. In this paper, we propose Snap-DAS which is a vision-based driver assistance system that is implemented on a SnapdragonTM embedded platform. A forward facing camera combined with the SnapdragonTM platform constitute Snap-DAS. The compute efficient implementation of the LASeR lane estimation algorithm in [1] is exploited to implement a set of lane related functions on Snap-DAS, which include lane drift warning and lane change event detection. A detailed evaluation is performed on live data and Snap-DAS is also field tested on freeways. Furthermore, we explore the possibility of using Snap-DAS for analyzing drives for online naturalistic driving studies.
Cognitive Inspired WOR Framework to Reveal Image Semantics, for Efficient Content Based Image Retrieval

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) involves the process of searching and retrieving relevant images from a database. Most CBIR systems rely on the global content of the image but the desired content in an image is often localized, demanding the need for an object-centric CBIR. We propose a cognitive inspired framework WOR (What Object to Retrieve), to solve the problem of an object-centric CBIR. The key contributions in the proposed approach are: (i) Automatic creation of class dendogram in kernel feature space, for an efficient object recognition task; (ii) Integration of information from "What" and "Where" channels in an iterative feedback mechanism, to filter erroneous contents in the outputs of individual modules. Finally, our system extracts HOG feature descriptor from the output of Where channel, for detecting similarity and rank-order the retrieved samples. Experimentations are done with real-life datasets (including PASCAL VOC) exhibits the superior performance.
HEDC: a histogram estimator for data in the cloud

With increasing popularity of cloud based data management, improving the performance of queries in the cloud is an urgent issue to solve. Summary of data distribution and statistical information has been commonly used in traditional database to support query optimization, and histograms are of particular interest. Naturally, histograms could be used to support query optimization and efficient utilization of computing resources in the cloud. Histograms could provide helpful reference information for generating optimal query plan, and generate basic statistics useful for guaranteeing the load balance of query processing in the cloud. Since it is too expensive to construct the exact histogram on massive data, building the approximate histogram is a more feasible solution. This problem, however, is challenging to solve in the cloud environment because of the special data organization and processing mode in the cloud. In this paper, we present HEDC, a Histogram Estimator for Data in the Cloud. We design a histogram estimate workflow based on an extended MapReduce framework, and propose novel sampling mechanisms to leverage the sampling efficiency and estimate accuracy. We experimentally validate our techniques on Hadoop and the results demonstrate that HEDC can provide promising histogram estimate for massive data in the cloud.
THE EFFECTS OF SURFACTANTS ON THE POTENTIAL, SHORT-CIRCUIT CURRENT, AND ION FLUXES ACROSS THE ISOLATED FROG SKIN.

It has been shown previously that ionic surface active agents (surfactants) depolarize nerve and muscle membranes and the isolated frog skin. The isolated frog skin was used in the present studies. Measurements of skin potential, short circuit current, and of Na, K, and Cl fluxes were made to determine the relative roles of inhibition of active Na transport and increases in passive ion permeability in producing the depolarization. The electrical data were in agreement with the flux data in demonstrating that lower concentrations of ionic surfactants (0.5 mM) generally inhibit the active Na transport process but have little effect on passive ion permeability. At higher concentrations (2 mM or more) surfactants produce an increase in permeability in addition to inhibiting the“Na pump”. The outside surface of the frog skin was more sensitive to the surfactants than was the inside.
Static and Dynamic cues in vowel production: a cross dialectal study in Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic

Theaimofthispaperistoexaminetheroleof� dynamiccues�(i.e.�formantslopesobtainedfroma� linearregressionanalysis)� incomparisonwith� staticone�(i.e.�voweltargets)�intheclassificati on� ofJordanianandMoroccanvowels,� using� DiscriminantAnalysis. � 10� speakersperdialect� producedalistofvowelsinC 1VC 2,�C1VC 2V,�or� C1VC 2VCwords,�whereC 1�andC 2�wereeither�/ b/,� /d/,�/d�/�or�/ k/,�andV,�eachvowel. �Resultsshowthe� possibilityofvowelseparationbetweenboth� dialectsforaspecificconsonantalenvironment. � Usingdynamiccuesimprovesthecorrect� classificationratesofabout� 5%� forMoroccan� Arabicand�13%�forJordanianArabic. �
Joint map estimation and localization using distance measurements to landmarks with unknown location

In this paper the problem of joint localization and map estimation is studied. The objective is to determine the location of a set of fixed nodes, e.g. access-points or base-stations in a wireless network using only distance measurements acquired by a node moving in the vicinity of the fixed nodes. It is assumed, that no prior information about locations of any of the nodes (fixed or mobile) is available, i.e. no anchor nodes exist. It is shown that, under some mild conditions on the distribution and the number of nodes, the map of the fixed nodes as well as the locations of the mobile node(s) in this map can be identified unambiguously from ranging measurements. A closed form algorithm is derived to estimate the map. Furthermore, the performance of the derived estimator is compared in Monte-Carlo simulations with (i) the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and (ii) with the performance of an iterative maximum-likelihood estimator. The derived closed form estimator for the node locations is consistent, but doesn't achieve the CRLB. The ML-estimator achieves the bound if the number of fixed nodes is at least four, and the distance measurements have been obtained at a minimum of six locations.
Value Chain Model in Knowledge Management

Knowledge is a complex and fluid concept to people, so knowledge management focuses on knowledge arrival; also it is considered as strategic activity help organizations to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Value chain analysis is one of the analysis tools which satisfy continuous competitive advantage on organizations. This paper summarizes the value chain analysis in strategic management field to be applied on the knowledge organizations in knowledge management field which is called Knowledge Value Chain.