Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Myths in funding ocean research at the National Science Foundation

Every 3 years the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), through its Advisory Committee on Geosciences, forms a Committee of Visitors (COV) to review different aspects of the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO). This year a COV was formed to review the Biological Oceanography (BO), Chemical Oceanography (CO), and Physical Oceanography (PO) programs in the Ocean Section; the Marine Geology and Geophysics (MGG) and Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) science programs in the Marine Geosciences Section; and the Ocean Education and Ocean Technology and Interdisciplinary Coordination (OTIC) programs in the Integrative Programs Section of the Ocean Sciences Division (OCE). The 2012 COV assessed the proposal review process for fiscal year (FY) 2009–2011, when 3843 proposal actions were considered, resulting in 1141 awards. To do this, COV evaluated the documents associated with 206 projects that were randomly selected from the following categories: low-rated proposals that were funded, high-rated proposals that were funded, low-rated proposals that were declined, high-rated proposals that were declined, some in the middle (53 awarded, 106 declined), and all (47) proposals submitted to the Rapid Response Research (RAPID) funding mechanism. NSF provided additional data as requested by the COV in the form of graphs and tables. The full COV report, including graphs and tables, is available at http://www.nsf. gov/geo/acgeo_cov. jsp.
Novel method for extracting exosomes of hepatocellular carcinoma cells.

AIM To develop a novel method for the rapid and efficient extraction of exosomes secreted by tumor cells. METHODS Unlike the traditional extraction method, the supernatants of cell cultures were concentrated, and the exosomes were isolated promptly and effectively using a novel nanomaterial called ExoQuick. Coomassie brilliant blue staining was used for protein quantification, and the morphology of the exosomes extracted by both methods was visualized by transmission electron microscopy. Exosome marker proteins were detected by Western blot analysis. Two potential hepatoma-associated proteins, tissue transglutaminase 2 (TGM2) and annexin A2, were analyzed. RESULTS The exosomes separated by the new extraction assay based on the nanomaterial were disc-shaped, intact vesicles with lipid bilayer membranes. They were approximately 30-100 nm in diameter, which is similar to the diameter of exosomes isolated by the traditional method. The protein concentration of exosomes extracted by the new method was approximately 780 μg/10(8) cells, and therefore, it was 19 times higher than that of exosomes extracted in the traditional manner. There were differences between the total proteins of Huh-7 cells and the exosomal proteins. Typical exosome proteins, such as the transmembrane protein CD63 and heat shock protein 70, were confirmed. Two potential hepatoma-associated proteins were also identified. TGM2 was first found to exist in the exosomes of human liver cancer cells, but annexin A2 was not secreted into exosomes. CONCLUSION The new extraction method based on the nanomaterial is quick and efficient. The cancer-associated protein TGM2 can be secreted through an exosome-mediated non-classical secretion pathway, and it may be a valuable tumor marker.
Estimation of Significant Wave Heights Using Numerical and Neural Techniques and Comparison with Buoy and Satellite Observations

Short term significant wave heights have been evaluated using the numerical WAM model and the results are compared with satellite (Jason-2) and moored buoy measurements. Additionally artificial neural network (ANN) is used to predict significant wave heights over a future time step and such predictions are also compared with corresponding satellite and buoy measurements. The observations from moored buoys monitored by India's National Institute of Ocean Technology for a period of about four and a half years at three locations in the Arabian Sea and three in Bay of Bengal covering the west as well as east coast of India are involved. The buoy recorded largest waves during the cyclonic condition, and this was confirmed at a location code named: BD11 by the satellite measurements as well as the WAM and ANN based evaluations. The evaluation accuracy reflected in the coefficient of correlation is found to be high in the Arabian Sea than the Bay of Bengal.
Structured Specification of Communicating Systems

Specification methods for distributed systems is the underlying theme of this paper. A model of communicating processes with rendezvous interactions is assumed as a basis for the discussion. The possible interactions by a process, and the interconnection between several subprocesses within a process are specified using the concept of ports, which are specified separately. Step-wise refinement of process specifications and associated verification rules are considered. The step-wise refinement of port specifications and associated interactions is considered as well. After the presentation of an introductory example, the paper discusses the basic concepts of the specification method. They are then applied to more complex examples. The step-wise wefinement of ports and interactions is demonstrated by a hardware interface for which an abstract specification and a more detailed implementation is given. Proof rules for verifying the consistency of detailed and more abstract specifications are discussed in some detail.
A centralized evolutionary clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks

The energy of all sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks is limited. For this reason, providing a method of communication between nodes and network administrator to manage energy consumption is crucial. In this paper, a centralized evolutionary clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks is proposed. The proposed protocol selects the appropriate nodes as CHs according to three criteria that ultimately increases the network life time. This paper investigates the genetic algorithm (GA) as a dynamic technique to find optimum CHs. Furthermore, an innovative fitness function is proposed. Each chromosome which minimizes fitness function is selected by base station (BS) and its nodes are introduced to the whole network as proper CHs. Simulation results show that the implementation of the proposed method using GA, has done significant improvement in terms of the number of nodes alive and the network lifetime.
SPARK: A service personalisation architecture

The current model of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) does not directly support possible scenarios for pervasive environments where services can be offered to/from the smart personal devices carried around by different users. Service description technologies such as WSDL provide descriptions of what a service is and what it can do, however with these kinds of descriptions machines still cannot easily interpret different concepts described through technical attributes. If more expressive technologies are used to describe a service, machines become able to identify different components describing a service. In pervasive environments users move around with Personal Agents operating on their portable devices and as mobile devices become more powerful, users are becoming able to host services on their mobile devices too. This project proposes a Service Personalization Architecture that will enable machines to understand the functionality provided by different services and use this knowledge together with the attributes provided by the users' smart devices in order to provide service recommendation, service composition, and service personalisation to the users.
MULTISCALE MODELING OF BLAST INDUCED TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY : FROM WHOLE BODY RESPONSES TO BRAIN MICRODAMAGE

The blast induced Traumatic Brain Injury (bTBI) has become a signature wound of therecent military operations. In spite of immense clinical and preclinical research on TBI, current understanding of injury mechanisms is limited and little is known about the short and long-term outcomes. Unlike the impact-related brain injury, the mechanisms involved in blast induced mild TBI (mTBI) have not been clearly understood. Mathematical models of human body, head and brain responses to a blast wave may provide capabilities to study brain injury mechanisms, perhaps accelerating the development of neuroprotective strategies and aiding in the development of improved personal protective equipment. The paper presents a novel multiscale, multiphysics simulation framework for modeling blast induced brain injury. We identify modeling components needed for detailed analysis of blast wave threat characterization, human body loading, body biodynamic response and body/brain biomechanics leading to potential primary injury. The paper also discusses the need for coupled modeling of primary injury biomechanics, secondary injury mechanobiology and model based assessment of injury severity scores.
Arctic chlorine monoxide observations during spring 1993 over Thule, Greenland, and implications for ozone depletion

The authors have determined the vertical distribution of chlorine monoxide (ClO), from measurements of pressure-broadened molecular-emission spectra made over Thule, Greenland, during the 1993 Arctic spring. The measurements show a weak lower stratospheric layer of chlorine monoxide inside the vortex in late February, which was, however, significantly greater in mixing ratio than that seen in observations the authors made in the spring of 1992. ClO was also observed in much smaller quantities in early to mid-March 1993 when Thule was outside the vortex. The amount of ClO within the vortex was severely reduced by the time it returned over Thule in late March. This reduction occurred several weeks earlier relative to the winter solstice than the decline of ClO inside the Antarctic vortex in 1993. The enhanced Arctic lower stratospheric layer seen in late February 1993 had a peak mixing ratio of about 0.5 parts per billion by volume (ppbv), slightly less than a factor of 3 smaller than that observed in the Antarctic in 1993 at a nearly equivalent photochemical period, and beyond. The authors have calculated daily ozone loss rates, due primarily to the dimer chlorine catalytic cycle, from both sets of measurements. The vertical integral of themore » Arctic daily percentage ozone loss when the largest ClO levels were present, at the end of February, is found to be approximately one quarter of that in the Antarctic at a photochemical period only 1 week later. The relative weakness of daily ozone depletion, combined with the early disappearance of ClO in the Arctic, suggests that hemispheric dilution by ozone-poor air from within the Arctic vortex is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the historically extreme loss of midlatitude northern hemisphere ozone which began in 1992 and persisted throughout 1993. 19 refs., 6 figs., 1 tab. « less
Estimation of Transformations for Microarray Data Using Maximum Likelihood and Related Methods

Motivation and Results Durbin et al (2002), Huber et al (2002) and Munson (2001) independently introduced a family of transformations (the generalized-log family) which stabilizes the variance of microarray data up to the first order. We introduce a method for estimating the transformation parameter in tandem with a linear model based on the procedure outlined in Box and Cox (1964). We also discuss means of finding transformations within the generalized-log family which are optimal under other criteria, such as minimum residual skewness and minimum mean-variance dependency. Contact. bpdurbin@wald.ucdavis. edu
Effects of photoperiod and feeding level on adipose tissue and muscle lipoprotein lipase activity and mRNA level in dry non-pregnant sheep

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of photoperiod and feeding level on lipid metabolism in ovine perirenal and subcutaneous adipose tissues (AT) and in skeletal and cardiac muscles. Twenty dry non-pregnant ovariectomised ewes were divided into two groups and subjected to either 8 h or 16 h light/d, and underfed at 22 % energy requirements for 7 d. Half of the ewes in each group were slaughtered and the remaining ewes were refed at 190 % energy requirements for 14 d, until slaughtering. Refeeding increased (2.6–4.3-fold) malic enzyme (ME), fatty acid synthase (FAS), glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PDH) and glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (G3PDH) activities in subcutaneous AT as well as lipoprotein lipase (LPL) activity in perirenal (3.5-fold) and subcutaneous (10-fold) AT and to a lesser extent (1.4-fold) in the skeletal longissimus thoracis and cardiac muscles. Moreover, variations of LPL mRNA level followed variations of LPL activity: refeeding increased perirenal AT- and cardiac muscle-mRNA levels (7.4- and 2-fold respectively). The main finding of this study is that, for a given level of food intake, long days (compared with short days) increased the LPL activity in the longissimus thoracis muscle and, in refed ewes, the activities of LPL and ME in subcutaneous AT. Furthermore, long days increased LPL mRNA level in cardiac muscle and perirenal AT. Thus, our results show that there are direct effects of photoperiod on sheep AT lipogenic potential, as well as on muscle LPL activity, which are not caused by changes in nutrient availability.
A cutting-plane method for Mixed-Logical Semidefinite Programs with an application to multi-vehicle robust path planning

The usual approach to dealing with Mixed Logical Semidefinite Programs (MLSDPs) is through the “Big-M” or the convex hull reformulation. The Big-M approach is appealing for its ease of modeling, but it leads to weak convex relaxations when used in a Branch & Bound framework. The convex hull reformulation, on the other hand, introduces a significant number of auxiliary variables and constraints and is only applicable if the feasible region consists of several disjunctive bounded polyhedra. This paper aims to circumvent these shortcomings by leveraging on Combinatorial Benders Cuts due to Codato & Fischetti and by constructing linear cuts based on a Farkas Lemma for Semidefinite Programming (SDP) within a Cutting-Plane framework. We employ the resulting Cutting-Plane algorithm in a Robust Model Predictive Control (RMPC) test application for multi-vehicle robust path planning with obstacle and inter-vehicle collision avoidance, taking into consideration exogenous (eg external wind gusts) and endogenous (eg internal noise in the system gain) uncertainty. We formulate this problem as an MLSDP model using minimax approaches by Löfberg and by El Ghaoui et al. and Big-M formulations due to Richards & How.
Magnetic guidance of organisms.

Human beings have used magnetic compasses as navigation aids since at least the eleventh century AD (55, 63). The magnetic compass facilitated long-distance navigation on the'high seas and was one of the technological advances that led to the great European voyages of discovery in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The invention of the magnetic compass is usually credited to the Chinese (55), who discovered over 2000 years ago that certain pieces of naturally occurring magnetite (Fe.On), a common mineral, would orient in astronomically significant directions when allowed to rotate by flotation or pivoting. How the magnetic compass worked was not explained until 1600, when William Gilbert of Colchester published his theory, based on his study of magnetized needles and small spheres of magnetite, that the earth itself is a giant magnetic dipole (27). Evidence has accumulated that the earth's magnetic dipolar field may also play a role in the orientation, navigation, and homing of a wide variety of organisms including bacteria (7, 8), algae (46), snails (13), planaria (14), honey bees (28, 50), salmon (60), salamanders (57), homing pigeons (28, 68), robins (74), mice (51), and possibly humans (2, 3, 30). In addition, training experiments on pigeons (12), skates (36), and tuna (M. M. Walker and J. Kirschvink, private communication) have demonstrated the ability of these organisms to sense magnetic fields. Two interaction mechanisms have been elucidated: (a)detection by the organism o[the electric field induced by the Faraday effect as the organism moves through the magnetic field: (b) interaction of the magnetic field with magnetic material in the organism.
Human-object interaction recognition by learning the distances between the object and the skeleton joints

In this paper we present a fully automatic approach for human-object interaction recognition from depth sensors. Towards that goal, we extract relevant frame-level features such as inter-joint distances and joint-object distances that are suitable for real time action recognition. These features are insensitive to position and pose variation. Experiments conducted on ORGBD dataset following state-of-the-art settings show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Aerosol optical properties over Delhi and Manora Peak during a rare dust event in early April 2005

Dust storm events are annual phenomena observed over the Indo-Gangetic plain (IGP) during the pre-monsoon period (May–June). These dust storms affect the air quality, weather conditions and radiation budget of the region. In this paper we characterize the aerosol optical parameters associated with a rare dust storm event that hit the IGP during early April 2005. This event was considered rare as it occurred much earlier than the general occurrence of dust storms in India (May–June), and in the year 2005, the warmest year in the span of the previous hundred years. In this study we considered the optical aerosol parameters for two places in the IGP: Delhi (28.5° N, 77.2° E, 325 m asl) and the high altitude station, Manora Peak (29.4° N, 79.5° E, 1958 m asl). Of the two selected stations, Delhi represents a highly populated and polluted location whereas Manora Peak represents a cleaner location in the central Himalayan region. During this dust storm event, the aerosol optical depth (AOD) was observed to increase considerably. The increment was 2.6–4.6 times over Delhi and 1.6–3.2 times over Manora Peak at wavelengths 380 and 1020 nm, respectively, with respect to the background values, whereas the Ångström exponent (α) for both the stations remained close to zero during the event. The effect shows a considerable increase in direct dust radiative forcing in terms of a reduction in the broadband global irradiance for Delhi as well as for Manora Peak stations. The direct aerosol radiative forcing thus obtained was about 34% in the 400–1100 nm wavelength band at Manora Peak.
Dynamically Scalable Architectures for E-Commerce

1 Motivation E-commerce became an important economic factor during the last years. Approximately 38.5 million customers in Germany have already bought goods or services online. Furthermore the total revenue in Germany is expected to rise from 46 billion Euro in 2006 to 145 billion in 2010. Increasing mobile web usage and the trading firms' expanding international activities boost this development even further (Stahl et al. 2009). This growing acceptance of e-commerce will result in an increasing number of both transactions and customers. Considering the extensive and increasing usage of search agents, web-crawlers and interactive elements in addition, workloads in e-commerce will rise significantly. Moreover, the advancing integration with other systems, like other shops requesting catalogue data, causes additional requests to handle. At the same time, intense competition among retailers tends to result in more demanding requirements with respect to functionality, usability, availability and performance. Rising workloads and more demanding requirements are nowadays handled with statically scaled systems, where the capacity is determined by the expected maximum workload. This results in low resource utilization in data centers conflicting with rising energy costs and CO2 emissions. Fluctuation in workloads impairs the situation even further. After Microsoft released Windows 7, various news channels and blogs reported that many online shops had serious performance problems and some servers broke down completely (Computerbase, 2009; Chronicle, 2009). This highlights the problem that workload forecasts are difficult and that surges of visitors can exceed the expected maximum workload significantly. An examination of a B2B shop system showed
Intergrowth of prehnite and biotite

implication is that the rocks had not been previously involved in metamorphism or else they would have been previously dehydrated and this would not promote a high P1a,oI f the Sittampundi complex is Archaean in emplacement and part of an early anorthositic episode as seen in Greenland, the Limpopo orogenic belt of Africa, Malagasy, and elsewhere (Windley, I973) then it becomes important to date the age of the metamorphism as it will enable the time by which the crust in this part of India had assumed a minimum thickness of about 3o km to be estimated.
Dirichlet Process Mixtures for Density Estimation in Dynamic Nonlinear Modeling: Application to GPS Positioning in Urban Canyons

In global positioning systems (GPS), classical localization algorithms assume, when the signal is received from the satellite in line-of-sight (LOS) environment, that the pseudorange error distribution is Gaussian. Such assumption is in some way very restrictive since a random error in the pseudorange measure with an unknown distribution form is always induced in constrained environments especially in urban canyons due to multipath/masking effects. In order to ensure high accuracy positioning, a good estimation of the observation error in these cases is required. To address this, an attractive flexible Bayesian nonparametric noise model based on Dirichlet process mixtures (DPM) is introduced. Since the considered positioning problem involves elements of non-Gaussianity and nonlinearity and besides, it should be processed on-line, the suitability of the proposed modeling scheme in a joint state/parameter estimation problem is handled by an efficient Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF). Our approach is illustrated on a data analysis task dealing with joint estimation of vehicles positions and pseudorange errors in a global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based localization context where the GPS information may be inaccurate because of hard reception conditions.
An iterative approach for deterministic beamformer design

An iterative method for designing the quiescent response which closely matches a prespecified desired response in the passband while simultaneously minimizing the sidelobe levels in the stopband is discussed. The method is based on the use of eigenvector constraints in the array and searches for a set of coefficients which combine the constraints to generate the quiescent response. Using this method, the sidelobe levels in the stopband are reduced from one iteration to another; the search continues until the maximum ripple in the passband reaches a prespecified level. Both min-max and least-squares criteria, which are used to specify the ripple levels in the passband, are discussed. <<ETX>>