Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ecogeographical rules and the macroecology of food webs

Author(s): Baiser, B; Gravel, D; Cirtwill, AR; Dunne, JA; Fahimipour, AK; Gilarranz, LJ; Grochow, JA; Li, D; Martinez, ND; McGrew, A; Poisot, T; Romanuk, TN; Stouffer, DB; Trotta, LB; Valdovinos, FS; Williams, RJ; Wood, SA; Yeakel, JD | Abstract: © 2019 John Wiley a Sons Ltd Aim: How do factors such as space, time, climate and other ecological drivers influence food web structure and dynamics? Collections of well-studied food webs and replicate food webs from the same system that span biogeographical and ecological gradients now enable detailed, quantitative investigation of such questions and help integrate food web ecology and macroecology. Here, we integrate macroecology and food web ecology by focusing on how ecogeographical rules [the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG), Bergmann's rule, the island rule and Rapoport's rule] are associated with the architecture of food webs. Location: Global. Time period: Current. Major taxa studied: All taxa. Methods: We discuss the implications of each ecogeographical rule for food webs, present predictions for how food web structure will vary with each rule, assess empirical support where available, and discuss how food webs may influence ecogeographical rules. Finally, we recommend systems and approaches for further advancing this research agenda. Results: We derived testable predictions for some ecogeographical rules (e.g. LDG, Rapoport's rule), while for others (e.g., Bergmann's and island rules) it is less clear how we would expect food webs to change over macroecological scales. Based on the LDG, we found weak support for both positive and negative relationships between food chain length and latitude and for increased generality and linkage density at higher latitudes. Based on Rapoport's rule, we found support for the prediction that species turnover in food webs is inversely related to latitude. Main conclusions: The macroecology of food webs goes beyond traditional approaches to biodiversity at macroecological scales by focusing on trophic interactions among species. The collection of food web data for different types of ecosystems across biogeographical gradients is key to advance this research agenda. Further, considering food web interactions as a selection pressure that drives or disrupts ecogeographical rules has the potential to address both mechanisms of and deviations from these macroecological relationships. For these reasons, further integration of macroecology and food webs will help ecologists better understand the assembly, maintenance and change of ecosystems across space and time.
Bluff to peace: How economic dependence promotes peace despite increasing deception and uncertainty

Trade–conflict studies have shown that economic dependence can promote peace by costly signaling resolve. However, with higher economic integration, targets also become more vulnerable to coercion and potential challengers are incentivized to bluff. In return, target states may resist more, raising the question of whether trade still promotes peace. I theorize that bluffing does not stoke conflict in this context because the bargaining environment allows states to inform and coerce simultaneously: the factor that renders a threat less credible also restrains states from further escalation. I test this theory’s implications with a structural estimation method and find supporting results.
Institutional Determinants of Economic Growth in Georgia and in Other Post-Communist Economies

The institutional development is one of the actual topics in economics science. New trends and directions of institutional development mostly depend on its structure and framework. Transformation of institutions is an important problem for every economy, especially for developing countries. The first research goal is to determine the importance and interactions between different institutions in Georgia. Using World Governance Indicators and Economic Freedom indexes it can be calculated the size for each institutional group. The second aim of this research is to evaluate Georgian institutional backwardness in comparison to other postcommunist economies. We use statistical and econometric methods to evaluate the difference between the levels of institutional development in Georgia and in leading post-communist economies. Within the scope of this research, major findings are coefficients which are an assessment of their deviation (i.e. lag) of institutional indicators between Georgia and leading post-communist country which should be compared. The last part of the article includes analysis around the selected coefficients. Keywords—Post-communist transition, institutions, economic growth, institutional development.
Antibacterial and Cytotoxic Potential of a Brazilian Red Propolis

Objective: To evaluate in vitro the effect of a red propolis ethanolic extract (RPE) in the prevention of growth of a cariogenic biofilm and its cytotoxic potential. Material and Methods: Minimum inhibitory and bactericidal concentrations (MIC and MBC) of RPE against Streptococcus mutans and Lactobacillus casei were determined. The cytotoxic potential of 0.4% RPE in oral fibroblasts was observed after 1, 3 and 5 min of contact. Cellulose membrane disks (13 mm, N=12) were used for biofilm formation (24 h) of S. mutans and L. casei , which were treated (1 min) with 0.4% RPE or 0.12% Chlorhexidine (CHX). The control group of biofilm formation was not submitted to any treatment. Serial dilutions were then made to evaluate microbial viability. Descriptive data analysis and, for microbial viability, Mann Whitney test were performed (p≤0.05). Results: RPE showed similar MIC and MBC (4.46 mg/mL) against S. mutans and, for L. casei , they were 8.92 mg/mL (MIC) and 17.85 mg/mL (MBC). CHX presented MIC and MBC 0.05). Regarding the total number of viable bacteria (Log 10 CFU/mL), the RPE (6.55) and CHX (6.87) presented similar efficacy (p>0.05). Conclusion: Red propolis extract showed antibacterial activity against the tested strains, exhibited acceptable cytotoxicity and reduced the colonization of S. mutans and L. casei in a biofilm membrane model.
Rereading industrial districts through the lens of entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the link between industrial districts and entrepreneurship, building a bridge between the literature on entrepreneurship and the literature on industrial districts. Drawing a distinction between generic entrepreneurship and selective entrepreneurship leads us to acknowledge that a close association between industrial districts as a whole and entrepreneurship is only well-founded if we are speaking of the generic definition of the latter. Burt's theory of structural holes and its application to industrial districts enables us to identify two different types of industrial district, one featuring a high degree of density or closure (P-clusters), the other a high degree of brokerage or (selective) entrepreneurship (SV-clusters). The framework proposed here also suggests a novel interpretation of the transformations that industrial districts of the first type have undergone under the pressure of globalization.
DEVELOPING A SUSTAINABLE URBAN TOURISM

This paper aims to explain the importance of creating sustainable urban tourism. The method used is library research. Tourism is a useful activity that can preserve cultural and historical heritage and can prosper society. Throughout history, the city has become the focus of tourism activities, providing accommodation, entertainment and other facilities for tourists. Achieving sustainable urban development requires the preservation of historical sites and cultural structures. By preserving a cultural heritage, and reviving it in a new way, is one form of realization of effective sustainable development.
In vitro treatments to improve the germination response in orophytic-boreal species from the northern Apennines - Casentine Forest National Park

The Botanic Garden of Modena and the Casentine Forest National Park recently promoted an integrated in situ/ex situ conservation project. Researchers aimed to propagate certain plant species that grow in the Park, which have specific protection requirements on account of their phyto-geographic importance. These species are: Hieracium villosum L. , Saxifraga oppositifolia L. , Saxifraga paniculata Miller, Saxifraga moschata Wulfen. In this work, we present some useful treatments for bypassing the natural dormancy of the seeds/achenes and for improving in vitro germination and growth.
ChatEval: A Tool for Chatbot Evaluation

Open-domain dialog systems (i.e. chatbots) are difficult to evaluate. The current best practice for analyzing and comparing these dialog systems is the use of human judgments. However, the lack of standardization in evaluation procedures, and the fact that model parameters and code are rarely published hinder systematic human evaluation experiments. We introduce a unified framework for human evaluation of chatbots that augments existing tools and provides a web-based hub for researchers to share and compare their dialog systems. Researchers can submit their trained models to the ChatEval web interface and obtain comparisons with baselines and prior work. The evaluation code is open-source to ensure standardization and transparency. In addition, we introduce open-source baseline models and evaluation datasets. ChatEval can be found at https://chateval.org.
Impact des anticorps antiphospholipides sur l’hypertension artérielle et le devenir rénal dans la néphropathie lupique classe III/IV

Objectif : determiner dans la nephropathie lupique (NL) classe III/IV l’incidence de l’hypertension arterielle (HTA) et le devenir renal en cas de syndrome des antiphospholipides secondaire (SAPL) sans nephropathie aux antiphospholipides (NAPL). Methodes : une etude retrospective monocentrique a ete realisee sur la periode de 1999 a 2017. Tous les patients (n=124) avec une nephropathie lupique classe III/IV prouvee par biopsie etaient inclus, 4 NAPL ont ete exclus et 3 groupes ont ete definis : sans anticorps antiphospholipides (aPL) (NL), avec aPL mais sans manifestation clinique (NL+aPL), et avec un SAPL (NL+APS). Les donnees relatives a la tension arterielle (TA), aux traitements antihypertenseurs, le debit estime de filtration glomerulaire (DFG), la pente de DFG et la necessite d'un traitement de suppleance renale ont ete recueillies a l'inclusion, a 1 an, 5 ans et a la fin du suivi. Resultats : notre cohorte etait composee de 78 NL (61 %), 23 NL+aPL (18,5 %) and 23 NL+APS (18,5 %). Le temps de suivi moyen etait de 7.5 ±4.5 annees pour les NL, 7.6 ±4.7 annees pour les NL+aPL et 8.8 ±4.6 annees pour les NL+APS (p=0.4). Il n'y avait pas de difference significative de TA entre les 3 groupes a tous les temps de l'etude. A la fin du suivi, la proportion de patients sans traitement antihypertenseur etait significativement moins importante dans le groupe NL+APS (41 %, 42 %, et 24 %, p=0.02), mais le DFG, la pente de DFG et le taux d'insuffisance renale stade V etaient similaires dans les 3 groupes. (DFG [p=0.9], pente de DFG [p=0.06], traitement de suppleance [p=0.5]. Conclusion : parmi les patients atteints de NL, ceux presentant un SAPL necessitent plus de traitements antihypertenseurs afin d'obtenir un controle tensionnel adequate. Le pronostic renal est similaire aux autres NL.
The impact of the systrust's framework as an internal control of AIS process upon business performance via the mediating role of financial quality reporting: an integrated model

II Declaration . III ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . IV Dedications . V AUTHOR's PUBLICATIONS . VI TABLE OF CONTENTS . VII LIST OF FIGURES . XI LIST OF TABLES . XII List of Abbreviations . XV CHAPTER ONE .
Parallel current‐controlled synchronverters for voltage and frequency regulation in weak grids

The emulation of synchronous machines is becoming an attractive solution to provide virtual inertia and voltage support to weak grids and microgrids, representing an alternative to conventional current-injection control strategies. However, synchronverters operate as voltage sources and this makes it difficult to limit the current when an event like voltage sag takes place. Here, a method to limit the output current of synchronverters in parallel connection is proposed. First of all, a fictitious reference current is generated, and its value is then followed by an internal current controller. A method to avoid the loss of synchronism when the current saturates is proposed and studied in detail. Also, the implementation of the controller is addressed carefully. All the control system improvements are tested on a prototype consisting of two 15 kVA synchronverters connected in parallel to a configurable weak grid.
Detecting subsidence spatial risk distribution of ground deformation induced by urban hidden streams

Abstract A plethora of subsidence events has been repeatedly reported in high density urban environments. The purpose of this study is to introduce specific areas around the riverbeds of the urban hidden streams in the city of Athens presenting high risk in terms of ground subsidence. The study area comprises the centre of Athens and more specifically the Municipalities of Athens, Tavros, Kallithea, Daphne, Hymettus and Ilisia where the ancient rivers of Ilissos and Eridanus naturally flow through a heavily populated city. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that the two rivers were completely channelled and partly covered along their course during the urbanization process which allowed the construction of the modern boulevards, roads, recreation and open space areas as long as parking areas. The route of today's concealed rivers and streams poses a serious risk of potential ground subsidence concerning the erosion of streams’ bank permeable soil formations. Following this approach, areas of influence (buffer zones) were determined on each side of the subterranean urban rivers Ilissos and Eridanus. In particular, an inventory of literature and references such as, historical maps and drawings, technical studies as well as modern topographic and geological maps, land use/land cover maps were created and collected in a geospatial database. It is worth mentioning that a main part of this study was the utilization and analysis of satellite radar data of the time period 2012–2016, in order to detect vertical displacements (mm/year) and correlate these with the above-mentioned spatial data of Athens city.
Theoretical Investigation of Intracellular Transport by Molecular Motors

Molecular motors are protein nanomachines that organize the internal order of all eukaryotic cells by shuttling intracellular cargos. Kinesins, dyneins, and myosins are three identified superfamilies of molecular motors which often function together within the cells. All of these motors power cellular motility using energy derived from adenosine triphosphate (ATP) hydrolysis. Molecular biology has revealed that the functional impairments of molecular motors would contribute to various human diseases, such as Alzheimer and cancer. Engineering developments have also emerged regarding the utilization of molecular motors in nanorobotics with a variety of missions, such as molecular communications. Despite this progress, the properties of intracellular cargo transport are not well understood. Motivated by the recent experimental findings, this thesis proposes computational and mathematical frameworks to investigate two different modes of intracellular cargo transport driven by (i) a single motor and by (ii) an assembly of two coupled identical motors. We focus on the cargo transport by kinesins because kinesin stepping kinetic scheme has been developed previously, and recent experiments have further measured input parameters for our theory. Nevertheless, our models are rather general and can be applied to other types of cytoskeletal molecular motors.
Antennae and the role of olfaction and contact stimulation in mate recognition by males of the pollinating fig wasp Ceratosolen gravelyi (Hymenoptera: Agaonidae)

ABSTRACT Finding a mate is a crucial step in sexual reproduction. The mutualism between figs and their pollinators is exploited by many figwasps that develop within their galls and attain sexual maturity simultaneously. Male pollinators carry the specific burden of detecting and opening mating holes in galls containing conspecific females before mating with them. The mating behaviourand antennal sensilla of male pollinators associated with Ficus semicordata was investigated to understand mate recognition. Male Ceratosolen gravelyi located female-containing galls from a distance, but only attempted to chew a mating hole after antennal contact with the gall surface was made. They showed similar responses to females and body extracts but failed to respond to washed female bodies. This behaviour indicates that unidentified chemicals present on the body surfaces of females are sufficient to elicit olfactory attraction and tactile confirmation. Multiporous plate sensilla are candidates for olfactory reception from a distance while basiconic sensilla may be involved in contact chemoreceptor. All of the sensilla are highly localised, on the distal part of the terminal flagellomere, suggesting a response to selection for strong directionality in the complex odour environment of the fig in which messages produced by hundreds of females may confuse precise mate localisation.
Detection and Mitigation of Selfish Node in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN’s)-A Review

Wireless Mesh networks (WMN’s) are prone to a number of attacks & these attacks compromise the security of these networks. Attaining security in these networks is a challenging task. In this paper, our point is that the virus is present in the internet and the authors are coming up with the methodology to fix it. In this paper, the authors will work on the Application layer, which contains a number of protocols. In this paper the authors have come up with a methodology to first detect the selfish node in the network & later on provided a technique for mitigation of the same.NS2 simulator has been used to simulate & analyze the performance of our proposed methodology for Open Shortest Path First(OSPF) protocol in WMN’s.
Adaptivity in Distributed Machine Learning Systems

My research goal is to build adaptive big data and cloud systems that can meet a spectrum of user requirements expressed using service level agreements (SLA) and service level objectives (SLO). During my PhD, I have worked on several angles of tracking and enforcing SLA/SLO guarantees in cloud systems, including in Mapreduce clusters, and NoSQL key-value storage systems. My future research goal is to incorporate adaptivity and SLA/SLOs as first class citizens for a wider spectrum of cloud systems including distributed graph processing and machine learning systems, and distributed transactional systems. Today cloud users have to fine-tune and manually manage every distributed cloud system they deploy, ranging from distributed storage systems to distributed computation systems. There are few ways of allowing users to specify their requirements and having the system adapt automatically to meet these, no matter what the workload and environmental behavior. My research aims at incorporating user requirements, specified as SLAs or SLOs into cloud systems. In a storage system like a NoSQL/key-value store, these SLAs/SLOs might specify conflicting latency and consistency requirements. In a computation system like Hadoop, they might entail job priorities and deadlines. In my work, I have designed adaptive query routers and schedulers that change the system behavior to meet these SLAs/SLOs at all times. My PhD research has evolved around incorporating adaptivity and SLA/SLOs into Big Data storage, computation and recovery systems. In my PCAP project, we replaced the traditional CAP theorem [4] binary choice between consistency (C) and availability (A) under partitions (P) with probabilistic tradeoffs which characterize the unachievable envelope among C, A, and P for a distributed storage system using probabilistic parameters [19]. We then use this result to design and implement adaptive variants of NoSQL databases that (1) perform close to the optimal envelope, and (2) adaptively satisfy probabilistic consistency and latency SLAs under arbitrary network variations. Our Natjam system [5] supports SLOs in terms of arbitrary job priorities and deadlines for resource-constrained Mapreduce computation clusters. To enable flexible tradeoff between the cost of data loss and checkpointing overhead, I proposed a practical scalable software-defined mechanism for taking crash-consistent snapshots of a group of virtual machines [18]. Finally in my current project I am incorporating adaptivity into graph computation systems to meet deadline and resource SLOs. Besides my main dissertation research I have also worked on: (1) multiple frameworks for formal modeling and verification of distributed systems [11, 12, 13, 14], (2) new distributed storage abstractions for social sensing [2],(3) resource allocation algorithms for network virtualization and software-defined networking [6, 7, 15, 16], and (4) metrics for quantifying consistency for eventually consistent storage systems [9, 10, 17]. Next I will elaborate more on my main PhD research projects and future research interests.
Multilingual Ranking of Wikipedia Articles with Quality and Popularity Assessment in Different Topics

On Wikipedia, articles about various topics can be created and edited independently in each language version. Therefore, the quality of information about the same topic depends on the language. Any interested user can improve an article and that improvement may depend on the popularity of the article. The goal of this study is to show what topics are best represented in different language versions of Wikipedia using results of quality assessment for over 39 million articles in 55 languages. In this paper, we also analyze how popular selected topics are among readers and authors in various languages. We used two approaches to assign articles to various topics. First, we selected 27 main multilingual categories and analyzed all their connections with sub-categories based on information extracted from over 10 million categories in 55 language versions. To classify the articles to one of the 27 main categories, we took into account over 400 million links from articles to over 10 million categories and over 26 million links between categories. In the second approach, we used data from DBpedia and Wikidata. We also showed how the results of the study can be used to build local and global rankings of the Wikipedia content.
Study on channel prediction for automated guided vehicle using a probabilistic neural network

This paper describes a technique for predicting the received signal strength from a transmitter mounted on an automated guided vehicle (AGV). The predictor is part of a factory-based wireless communications anomaly detection system. We have proposed training a probabilistic neural network (PNN) to learn sliding-window sequences of the received fading signal. After training, the PNN conducts pattern matching between trained and observed sequences and returns an index to the closest matching set. Future deep-fading is predicted by adding an index offset to a fading lookup-table memory. We further propose to improve the performance by combining the predicted indices from multiple receivers. Performance results from ray-traced channels show that the mean squared error is reduced by almost two orders of magnitude by employing four receivers at 10 dB SNR.