Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Top predators as indicators for species richness? Prey species are just as useful

1. The use of surrogates to identify protected areas is a common practice in conservation biology. The use of top predators as surrogates has been criticized but recently a strong positive relationship was found between the presence of top predators and species diversity of several taxa. As mentioned by the authors, these striking results need to be assessed on a larger scale. 2. We used data from the Swiss Biodiversity Monitoring Programme and the Swiss breeding bird survey to analyse the use of raptor species as a surrogate for plant, butterfly and bird species richness. For each raptor species, we compared species richness in sites where a raptor species was recorded and compared these sites with the remaining sites in which the raptor species was not recorded. For comparison we conducted the same analyses using tits Parus spp. Tits are common prey species of some raptor species and were the most species-rich generalist genus in our data. 3. We found little justification for a focus on top predators when identifying conservation areas. For bird and plant species richness, raptors were reasonable surrogates for high species richness but no raptor species predicted sites with above-average butterfly species richness. 4. The presence of tit species performed equally as well as the presence of raptor species to predict sites with high species richness of birds and plants, and performed even better for predicting high butterfly species richness. 5. Synthesis and applications. Conservation planners using indicator species should be aware that relationships among higher taxa are complex and depend on the species group and the scale of analysis. As shown with the case of raptors, the usefulness of a biodiversity indicator can vary between adjacent areas even if the same species groups are analysed. We recommend the use of more than one indicator species from different taxonomic groups when identifying areas of high biodiversity.
Evaluation of Methane Emissions from Urban Wetlands in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh

Methane is produced in urban wetlands by anaerobic decomposition of the in-flowed terrestrial bound organic residues and native aquatic organic matter. Intensification of human settlement in wetland catchments often affects the carbon dynamics in lake ecosystems enhancing emission of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. In the current study an attempt was made to quantitatively estimate the emission of methane from lake Lakshmi and Antiya, the two important urban wetlands in Jhansi city. The average methane flux from the Antiya ranged between 271.57 ± 21.48 and 510.00 ± 24.44 mg m -2 d -1 , with an average emission rate of 358.62 ± 19.04 mg m -2 d -1 . The recorded average value of methane flux in the drainage inlets, periphery and middle of the lake were 292.51 ± 19.78, 394.46 ± 19.66 and 510.00 ± 24.44 mg m -2 d -1 , respectively. In contrast to Antiya lake where sewage channels and solid wastes were directly disposed into the lake, the lake water in Lakshmi with controlled catchments carbon influx, was found cleaner. Correspondingly, methane fluxes in Lakshmi lake were found to be lesser compared to Antiya. The average methane flux in the Lakshmi was 296.05 ± 19.45 mg m -2 d -1 . The flux from the drainage inlet, periphery and middle of the lake were 264.61 ± 21.86, 326.10 ± 19.51 and 241.57 ± 15.66 mg m -2 d -1 , respectively. There was a positive correlation between the water temperatures and the
Strategic Alliances and Firm Performance in the South Moravian Region During the Financial Crisis: The Analysis of the Results of Pilot Research

Purpose of the article: The objective of the article is to determine the impact of the financial crisis on South Moravian firms’ performance and find evidences of inter-firm alliances between firms. Methodology/methods: The article is based on primary research conducted among SMEs in the South Moravian Region and secondary data acquired from firm database Amadeus and expertise literature. The methods are applied within the framework of pilot research. Scientific aim: The scientific aim of the article is to investigate the effect of financial and economic crisis on firm performance and explore the relevance of alliance formation during the period of 2007–2012. Findings: Current results show that in spite of the sharp decrease in firm revenue during the crisis, the creation of value added on contrary, after stagnation in the most difficult period, rose slightly. Despite the crisis, 71% of firms claim that they are following growth strategy and the half of these firms is engaged in cooperation in a form of strategic alliance. Conclusions: Strategic alliances are present in the South Moravian manufacturing firms’ practise and – according to findings of earlier research papers – their impact on firm performance is of great importance. This research is a first step toward systematic investigation of firm performance in relation to inter-firm alliances in the South Moravian Region. In order to assess the impact of strategic alliances on firm performance, more comprehensive further research is needed. The findings conclude that alliance formation is a strategy for sustaining firm performance in extraordinary economic conditions.
CROSS-COMPARISON OF INDICES OF RISK ATTITUDE FROM TWO DISTINCT EXPERIMENTAL PARADIGMS, IN ADULTS AND ADOLESCENTS.

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has been used to characterize adolescents’ decision making under uncertainty. A conclusion often drawn is that, like ventromedial patients, adolescents tend to go on choosing disadvantageous (risky) card decks. In this study, the IGT and a classic paradigm of choice between lotteries were employed with both adolescents and adults. In the lotteries task, probabilities were also initially unknown to the participants. The lotteries paradigm allowed, moreover, estimating specific parameters of attitude toward risk as well as of attention allocated to negative and positive outcomes. Comparison of the results obtained from both paradigms provide a more nuanced and less contrasted view of adolescent's decision making as regards adults.
Prevalence of Glaucoma among High Myopia

Glaucoma is an optic neuropathy that is characterized by the selective loss of retinal ganglion cells and their axons, which manifests as the loss of the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL). Numerous studies have shown that the extent of RNFL damage correlates with the severity of functional deficit in the visual field (VF), and that RNFL measurement by optical coherence tomography (OCT) has good sensitivity for the detection of glaucoma. To assess the prevalence of glaucoma among high myopic patients and the association between them using standard automated perimetry (SAP) and optical coherence tomography (OCT). A prospective observational randomized cross sectional study included a total of 80 eyes with high myopia, in the period from November 2017 to April 2018. This cross sectional study included 44 subjects with 80 eyes regarding high myopia using the outpatient services of the Qlawoon Hospital, Cairo, who satisfied the inclusion and exclusion criteria between November 2017 and April 2018 aiming to determine the prevalence of glaucoma in high myopic patients. In our study, we depended on the following highly significant parameters in detection of prevalence of glaucoma among high myopic patients: Spherical equivalent median is -12, Vertical cup/disc ratio mean is 0.55, MD median of visual field is – 5.38, PSD mean of visual field is 3.53, GHT is 64.7% outside normal limits, 17.6% border line and 17.6% general reduction of sensitivity and RNFL thickness mean is; for average thickness is 86.37, for superior thickness is 90.06 and for inferior thickness is 82.68 a highly significant P-value. Prevalence of glaucoma among our study group is 42.5% depending on Spherical equivalent median, Vertical cup/disc ratio mean, MD median of visual field, PSD mean of visual field, GHT and RNFL thickness.
Cluster observations of ELF/VLF signals generated by modulated heating of the lower ionosphere with the HAARP HF transmitter

Abstract. It is now well known that amplitude modulated HF transmissions into the ionosphere can be used to generate ELF/VLF signals using the so-called "electrojet antenna". Although most observations of the generated ELF/VLF signals have been made on the ground, several low and high-altitude satellite observations have also been reported (James et al., 1990). One of the important unknowns in the physics of ELF/VLF wave generation by ionospheric heating is the volume of the magnetosphere illuminated by the ELF/VLF waves. In an attempt to investigate this question further, ground-satellite conjunction experiments have recently been conducted using the four Cluster satellites and the HF heater of the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Gakona, Alaska. Being located on largely closed field lines at L≈4.9, HAARP is currently also being used for ground-to-ground type of ELF/VLF wave-injection experiments, and will be increasingly used for this purpose as it is now being upgraded for higher power operation. In this paper, we describe the HAARP installation and present recent results of the HAARP-Cluster experiments. We give an overview of the detected ELF/VLF signals at Cluster, and a possible explanation of the spectral signature detected, as well as the determination of the location of the point of injection of the HAARP ELF/VLF signals into the magnetosphere using ray tracing.
Central Banking by Committee

There is a small, but growing, economics literature on the importance and effects of having monetary policy made by a committee, rather than by an individual. Complimenting this is an older and larger body of literature on groups in the other social sciences, particular in social psychology. This paper provides a review of some of this work, focussing on two important features of committees: the effect of their size on performance and whether or not they are more moderate than the members who make them up. The results of the literature on committee size and committee polarization suggest that the ideal monetary policy committee may not have many more than five members. It should have a well-defined objective and it should publish the votes of its members. It should be structured so that members do not act as part of a group, perhaps by having short terms in office and members from outside the central bank. External scrutiny of the decision-making process should be encouraged.
Early resumption of sexual intercourse and its determinants among postpartum Iban mothers

Introduction: Recurrent pregnancy with close child spacing can result from early resumption of sexual intercourse during the postpartum period. This would expose mothers to complications such as unsafe abortion, postpartum depression and premature birth. The aim of this study is to identify the factors associated with early resumption of sexual intercourse among postpartum Iban mothers. Methods: This is a cross sectional study conducted in Sri Aman Division, Sarawak between 1st July and 31st August 2006. A total of 265 Iban mothers agreed to participate in this study. They were interviewed face-to-face using structured questionnaire. Any postpartum sexual intercourse at 6 weeks or less is considered an early resumption of sexual intercourse. Results: Univariable analyses showed significant association between early sexual intercourse and use of contraceptive; mothers’ and husbands’ income; mothers who believed their husbands were sexually abstinent during their confinement period; mothers who stayed with their spouse after delivery; and those with high libido. Multivariable analysis showed only mothers’ and husbands’ income, use of contraceptive and those who believed their husbands practiced sexual abstinence during their confinement period were significantly associated with early resumption of sexual intercourse. Conclusions: Counselling on postpartum resumption of sexual intercourse among Iban mothers should focus on these determinants to ensure a more effective counselling outcome among Iban mothers.
Introducing a Mathematical Model to Determine the Optimum Combination for the Customers of Tejarat Bank to Minimize the Cost of Outstanding Claims

Outstanding claims are the very underlying resource of banks, but their occurrence creates many problems and leads to the banks’ losses, because the process of outstanding claims collection is costly and time consuming. The objective of this paper is to determine the optimum combination of banking facilities to minimize the cost of outstanding claims for Tejarat Bank using a multi-objective model and applying it for Zanjan Tejarat Bank during a period of 5 years. A list of 6 questions was designed for the purpose of the research, answering which the desired results were obtained. The customers were categorized in 4 groups (Mine & Industry, Agriculture, Housing & Construction, and Commerce, Services, and miscellaneous) and 3 types (Natural, legal, Duty). Customers cause the outstanding claims, based on the type and nature of the economic sector they receive facilities for. 4 types of major costs that lead to the bank’s loss were identified and prioritized by 6 bank experts, including opportunity cost, benefit reduction cost, liquidity reduction cost, and the claims collection cost. Regarding the methods given for reduction of claims, some strategies were proposed according which banks may considerably reduce the claims. In this research we prioritized the economic sectors for resource allocation using FTOPSIS method, resulting in a preference order such as: Housing & Construction, Mine & Industry, Commerce and Services, and Agriculture. Linear multi-objective model to determine the optimum combination for the customers to minimize the cost of outstanding claims was presented. Based on the model solution for a period of 4 years, the maximum and minimum values were calculated for the payment of each group. The ways for reduction of the cost of outstanding claims used in the model are: participation contracts, getting easy collaterals, selecting the most qualified customers, using short-term facilities, and increasing the number of committed customers.
Rapid ultrasonic inspection of ageing aircraft

The requirement for rapidly detecting corrosion and disbands in large areas of lap joints in transport aircraft has prompted the development of various new NDT methods and large-area imaging systems. QinetiQ has developedultrasonic array technology in collaboration with Diagnostic Sonar Ltd and evaluated the inspection performance and the potential speed of inspection. The crucial factors in this development were the achievement of high speed as well as high spatial and depth resolution to allow interrogation of sealant and adhesive layers and the characterisation of corrosion. A highly-innovative ultrasonic array probe has been developed that is capable of the high frequency response and broad bandwidth required for lap-joint inspection of ageing aircraft. The array covers a 124 mm swathe and scans at a speed of 4 m (13 ft) per minute with a I mm scan pitch. Scanning software was developed to allow scanning at the maximum pulse-repetition frequency allowed by the ultrasonic flaw detector. Another critical issue was the coupling of a long array into the structure. Data on the latest focused array will be presented, with images scanned on real aircraft structure. Technology transfer of the array has been a successful part of this project. The ultrasonic array is commercially available front Diagnostic Sonar Ltd, an NDT manufacturer in the UK, and the software to control it is available as an upgrade of current commercially-available equipment.
Quercetin And Curcumin Prevent Decreasing Of LDL-Cholesterol And Increasing Of HDL-Cholesterol In High Fat Diet Rats

Cardiovascular disease is number one killer disease in the world. The most common etiology is atherosclerosis. LDL and HDL-cholesterol are often associated with atherosclerosis which are affected by diet. Quercetin and curcumin considered have influence d to LDL and HDL. They are antioxidant that protect against LDL oxidation and raised HDL-cholesterol. In this study, we invest about comparison effect of prevention in LDL and HDL level change, after giving quercetin and curcumin. 20 males Rattus novergicus rats in 200-300 grams divided into 4 groups. Group B, C, D were given high-fat diet for 4 weeks, while group A (negative control) was given standard woof. Group B was positive control and no treatment, C was given quercetin, D was given curcumin. The treatment and giving high-fat diet was done simultaneously to detect prevention effect. HDL and LDL-cholesterol evaluated two times, pre and post-treatment. Result showed the increase prevention level of LDL-cholesterol and decrease prevention level of HDL-cholesterol in group C and D significantly. The best prevention effect is quercetin, p=0.000. Furthermore, we showed there was no significant correlation between DLDL and DHDL-cholesterol level. In conclusion, quercetin and curcumin have a good effect in preventing hypercholesterolemia, however quercetin have better effect than curcumin. Keywords: quercetin curcumin, HDL-cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol
Macroalgae may mitigate ocean acidification effects on mussel calcification by increasing pH and its fluctuations

Ocean acidification (OA) is generally assumed to negatively impact calcification rates of marine organisms. At a local scale however, biological activity of macrophytes may generate pH fluctuations with rates of change that are orders of magnitude larger than the long‐term trend predicted for the open ocean. These fluctuations may in turn impact benthic calcifiers in the vicinity. Combining laboratory, mesocosm and field studies, such interactions between OA, the brown alga Fucus vesiculosus, the sea grass Zostera marina and the blue mussel Mytilus edulis were investigated at spatial scales from decimetres to 100s of meters in the western Baltic. Macrophytes increased the overall mean pH of the habitat by up to 0.3 units relative to macrophyte‐free, but otherwise similar, habitats and imposed diurnal pH fluctuations with amplitudes ranging from 0.3 to more than 1 pH unit. These amplitudes and their impact on mussel calcification tended to increase with increasing macrophyte biomass to bulk water ratio. At the laboratory and mesocosm scales, biogenic pH fluctuations allowed mussels to maintain calcification even under acidified conditions by shifting most of their calcification activity into the daytime when biogenic fluctuations caused by macrophyte activity offered temporal refuge from OA stress. In natural habitats with a low biomass to water body ratio, the impact of biogenic pH fluctuations on mean calcification rates of M. edulis was less pronounced. Thus, in dense algae or seagrass habitats, macrophytes may mitigate OA impact on mussel calcification by raising mean pH and providing temporal refuge from acidification stress.
A short review on Applications of Deep learning for Cyber security

Deep learning is an advanced model of traditional machine learning. This has the capability to extract optimal feature representation from raw input samples. This has been applied towards various use cases in cyber security such as intrusion detection, malware classification, android malware detection, spam and phishing detection and binary analysis. This paper outlines the survey of all the works related to deep learning based solutions for various cyber security use cases. Keywords: Deep learning, intrusion detection, malware detection, Android malware detection, spam & phishing detection, traffic analysis, binary analysis.
A Fuzzy Logic Vector Control of Asynchroneous Machine

Increasingly, the fuzzy control replaces the conventional control methods, when it appears useful for controlling the processes are very difficult to analyze conventional techniques. The present work proposes the ambition to give a more or less general vision on the contribution brought by the fuzzy logic control field in an asynchronous machine, and to highlight the various beneficial aspects of this contribution. For this, we applied a fuzzy algorithm MAMDANI type for the control of MAS in order to highlight the achievements of several test results, and compare the two PI controllers and fuzzy PI. Moreover, the passage of the standard model to the model in the Park reference, facilitates the handling of equations and reduces the number of variables in the model. In order to evaluate the performance setting, the tested robustness relative to reference inputs, disturbances and parametric variations were considered.
A Novel Information Fusion Method for Redundant Rotational Inertial Navigation Systems Based on Reduced-Order Kalman Filter

The redundant rotational inertial navigation systems can satisfy not only the high-accuracy but also the high-reliability demands of underwater vehicle on navigation system. However, different systems are usually independent, and lack of information fusion. A reduced-order Kalman filter is designed to fuse the navigation information output of redundant rotational navigation systems which usually include a dual-axis rotational inertial navigation system being master system and a single-axis rotational inertial navigation system being hot-backup system. The azimuth gyro drift of single-axis rotational inertial navigation system can be estimated by the designed filter, whereby the position error caused by that can be compensated with the aid of designed position error prediction model. As a result, the improved performance of single-axis rotational inertial navigation system can guarantee the position accuracy in the case of dual-axis system failure. Semi-physical simulation and experiment verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Open source software peer review practices

Peer review is seen as an important quality assurance mechanism in both industrial development and the open source software (OSS) community. The techniques for performing inspections have been well studied in industry; in OSS development, peer reviews are less well understood. We examine the two peer review techniques used by the successful, mature Apache server project: review-then-commit and commit-then-review. Using archival records of email discussion and version control repositories, we construct a series of metrics that produces measures similar to those used in traditional inspection experiments. Specifically, we measure the frequency of review, the level of participation in reviews, the size of the artifact under review, the calendar time to perform a review, and the number of reviews that find defects. We provide a comparison of the two Apache review techniques as well as a comparison of Apache review to inspection in an industrial project. We conclude that Apache reviews can be described as (1) early, frequent reviews (2) of small, independent, complete contributions (3) conducted asynchronously by a potentially large, but actually small, group of self-selected experts (4) leading to an efficient and effective peer review technique.