Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diet composition of batoids on the continental shelf off Nayarit and Sinaloa, Mexico

Since elasmobranchs are frequently apex predators in marine ecosystems, information on their diet is essential for understanding trophic relationships in these systems. Trophic similarity between six batoid species (Rhinoptera steindachneri, Rhinobatos glaucostigma, Dasyatis dipterura, Urotrygon aspidura, U. nana, and U. rogersi) was examined by analyzing the stomach contents of 140 individuals. Specimens were caught by the commercial shrimp fishery in the central Mexican Pacific. In total, 88.6% of the stomachs were completely to partially full, allowing the identification of 77 types of prey. The primary dietary components were crustaceans, followed by annelids and mollusks. Values of diet breadth for the six species indicated low diversity in prey items. Diet similarity suggested two trophic guilds: R. glaucostigma, U. nana, and U. aspidura belong to the cancritrophic guild (P < 0.05) and U. rogersi and D. dipterura to the annelidcrustacean guild. Rhinoptera steindachneri showed no evident pattern of association (feeding primarily on ophiuroids). In light of these results, we argue that a distribution of alimentary resources (niche partitioning) between the six species favors their coexistence. Dado que los elasmobranquios son frecuentemente depredadores tope en los ecosistemas marinos, la informacion sobre su dieta es esencial para entender las relaciones troficas en estos sistemas. La similitud trofica entre seis especies de batoideos (Rhinoptera steindachneri, Rhinobatos glaucostigma, Dasyatis dipterura, Urotrygon aspidura, U. nana y U. rogersi) fue examinada por medio del analisis de contenidos estomacales de 140 individuos. Los especimenes fueron capturados en la pesqueria comercial de camaron en el Pacifico central mexicano. En total, el 88.6% de los estomagos analizados estaban parcial o completamente llenos, permitiendo la identificacion de 77 tipos de presa. Los principales componentes en la dieta fueron los crustaceos, seguidos por anelidos y moluscos. Los valores de amplitud de dieta en las seis especies indicaron baja diversidad en los items presa. El analisis de similitud de dietas sugirio dos grupos funcionales: R. glaucostigma, U. nana y U. aspidura pertenecen al grupo “cancritrofico” (P < 0.05) y U. rogersi y D. dipterura al grupo de anelidos y crustaceos. Para R. steindachneri no hubo un patron evidente de asociacion (se alimenta principalmente de ofiuros). Con base en estos resultados, se argumenta que la distribucion de recursos alimenticios (particion del nicho) entre las seis especies favorece su coexistencia.
Growth of Bacillus cereus in a Gel-stabilized Nutrient Gradient System

SUMMARY: Bacillus cereus consistently formed multiple growth bands in gel-stabilized gradient systems. The development of inoculated and uninoculated systems was followed by gel scanning and by measuring physico-chemical parameters. Factors which influenced band formation included the availability of oxygen and the presence of a glucose gradient. The relative position of bands was dependent on the glucose concentration in the source layer and the strength of the basal medium. Other factors such as agar type and concentration were relatively unimportant. The generation of steep pH gradients in the gel profoundly affected band formation. Thus, in the presence of a high buffering capacity changes in band pattern and pH profile occurred. No bands and no pH gradient were observed in gels incubated anaerobically. Addition of an alkaline overlayer, however, resulted in a pH gradient and band formation. Although pH gradients were responsible for sub-surface bands, it was not clear what caused the ‘chopping’ of growth into discrete bands. Computer simulations suggested that an asymmetric activation threshold may be responsible, and the mechanism may involve sporulation and germination.
Runtime Reconfigurable Hardware Co-processing Architecture

The constant desire for increased performance in microprocessor systems has led to the need for speicalized hardware cores to accelerate specific computational tasks. In this thesis, we explore the potential of using FPGA partial reconfiguration to create a platform for customized hardware cores that may be loaded on demand, at runtime, and replaced when not in use. We implement two new software tools, bitparse and bitrender, to demonstrate the bitstream relocation technique. Further, we present a functional microprocessor system coupled with a runtime reprogrammable peripheral synthesized on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA and discuss its performance implications. Thesis Supervisor: Christopher J. Terman Title: Senior Lecturer
Preprint typeset in JHEP style-HYPER VERSION ( Light ) Stop Signs

Stop squarks with a mass just above the top’s and which decay to a nearly massless LSP are difficult to probe because of the large SM di-top background. Here we discuss search strategies which could be used to set more stringent bounds in this difficult region. In particular, we note that both the rapidity difference ∆y(t, t̄) and spin correlations (inferred from, for example, ∆φ(`+, `−)) are sensitive to the presence of stops. We emphasize that systematic uncertainties in top quark production can confound analyses looking for stops, making theoretical and experimental progress on the understanding of Standard Model top production at high precision a very important task. We estimate that spin correlation alone, which is relatively robust against such systematic uncertainties, can exclude a 200 GeV stop at 95% confidence with 20 fb−1 at the 8 TeV LHC.
Savings and investments in the OECD, 1970-2007: a panel cointegration test with breaks

In this paper we test for the existence of a long-run relationship between investment and savings (the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle) in a panel of 18 OECD countries, 1970-2007, allowing for het- erogenous breaks in the coe¢ cients. For this purpose we develop a bootstrap panel cointegration test with breaks robust to cross-section dependence. The test suggests that, even allowing for breaks in the countries where capital control regulations changed in the sample period, there is no evidence of an investment-savings long-run relationship for the panel as a whole.
Using a cognitive load theory to account for the enhancement of high school learners’ mathematical problem solving skills

This paper reports on a context-based problem solving instruction implemented to a group of high school mathematics learners to promote their problem solving skills. Participants consisted of a convenient sample (n = 57) of grade 10 learners who were of a disadvantaged socio-economic status and were low-performing in mathematics. Results from the achievement test suggested that the context-based problem solving instruction was effective in accelerating learners’ problem solving performance (p < 0.05). Using a cognitive load theory, it is possible to explain aspects of learners’ problem solving performance in terms of human cognitive architecture.
Interactive comment on “ Global fatal landslide occurrence 2004 to 2016 ” by

The article “Global fatal landslide occurrence 2004 to 2016” presents a spatio-temporal analysis of a global dataset included in a continuously updated database. Several information are provided, also focusing on some hot spots and on some specific events. The description of the dataset is very detailed, while the description of the structure of the database could be improved. The theoretical background and the methodological approach are sufficiently explained. Figures are clear and explanatory, in particular the
A Study of the Thermal Properties of Textured Knitted Fabrics

ture cause the material to have good insulation properties and change the density of the material. A disorganised or less organised yarn surface gives dispersed light reflections, which in turn give a desirable matte appearance. The sponge-like structure is felt to be softer than the lean twisted ‘flat’ yarn, and the crimped or coiled filament structure gives a lower effective modulus of elasticity to the structure when compared to that of a flat yarn [3]. There are a number of approaches to texturing yarn. The methods currently employed by the industry include air-jet, steam-jet and
Wilderness and Baseline Experiences BY CHAD

By way of three visitor surveys, we evaluated the effectiveness of visitor use of food storage canisters in deterring bear-human interactions in Yosemite National Park. We found that although 87% of respondents reported using a canister on their trip, only 62% reported full compliance by fitting all their food, trash, and toiletries into their canisters on every night of the trip. The main issues are overflow and inadvertently leaving items sitting out or in packs or tents, which led to incidents in which bears obtained food. The overflow issue is largely due to backpackers not realizing how much space their food will take up, or conversely underestimating the actual capacity of a food storage canister. Although the rate of carrying canisters is high, the actual rate of full compliance with food storage regulations is much lower. Bear-human conflicts are likely to continue as long as ineffective canister use and practices such as hanging, hiding or guarding food continue, even at low levels, especially in highly visited backcountry sites. SCIENCE and RESEARCH PEER REVIEWED Kate McCurdy Steven R. Martin
Neighborhood Pixels Weights-A New Feature Extractor

 Abstract—In OCR applications, the feature extraction methods used to recognize document images play an important role. The feature extraction methods may be statistical, structural or transforms and series expansion. The structural features are very difficult to extract particularly in handwritten applications. The structural behavior of the strokes existing in the handwritten expressions can be estimated through statistical methods too. In this paper, a feature extraction method is proposed that measures the distribution of black and white pixels representing various strokes in a character image by computing the weights on all the four corners on a pixel due to its neighboring black pixels. The feature is named as Neighborhood Pixels Weights (NPW). Its recognition performance is compared with some feature extraction methods, which have been generally used as secondary feature extraction methods for the recognition of many scripts in literature, on noisy and non-noisy handwritten character images. The experiments have been conducted using 17000 Devanagari handwritten character images. The experiments have been made using two classifiers i.e. Probabilistic Neural Network and k-Nearest Neighbor Classifier. NPW feature is better as compared to other features, studied here, in noisy and noise-less situation. considered. The structural features are based on the geometrical and topological properties of a character under consideration and these properties may be local or global (1). A character is composed of number of components in the form of strokes. These strokes may be lines, arcs, curves, etc and may or may not be connected to each other depending upon the structure of a character. These components are also called as stroke primitives and can be extracted from either skeleton or contour of a character image. In structural based recognition process, the various stroke primitives of a character are extracted and approximated. The relationships between various stroke components are established. It is somewhat difficult to extract and approximate the various stroke primitives existing in a character image as in some cases the strokes may not touch where touching is required and strokes may unnecessarily touch where touching is not required in the basic structure of a character while printing or writing. This approach also requires matching an approximated stroke primitive with stored prototypes which is not only complex to model but also requires multi-level heuristics. Moreover, these features are extracted from binary images only. The problems faced with structural features can be easily overcome with statistical features which are based on statistical distribution of black and white pixels in a character image. These features may be extracted from binary or gray scale images and are invariant to character distortions and writing styles to some extent. The features are easy to extract and can be computed with high speed as at a given pixel only some arithmetic or logic operations are required to perform which take less computational time and are not difficult to
Serie Documentos de Trabajo N 241 Fertility trends in Chile 1960-2003

The objective of this study is to characterize the fertility trends in Chile in recent decades, and identify the main factors underlying them. This study is based on an in-depth analysis of the available data: the population censuses of 1992 and 2002, socioeconomic household surveys, and data provided by the Civil Registry regarding demographic and vital statistics of the population. The fertility rate has significant effects on aspects such as economic growth, the demands on the education and health systems, the funding of pensions systems, etc. On a micro level, family characteristics depend crucially on the number of children per mother. A household with five children faces very different opportunities and restrictions to one with two children, holding other factors constant.
COMPUTATIONAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF ENGINE CHARACTERISTICS USING N-BUTANOL GASOLINE BLENDS

This study investigates the effect of blending of n-butanol with gasoline in a fourstroke spark ignited MPI engine. AVL BOOST was used as a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation tool to analyze the performance and emission characteristics for different blends of n-butanol and gasoline (0%, 10%, 20% and 30% of butanol by volume). The study was carried out at full load conditions for different engine speeds. CFD results are always approximate due to truncation errors. An experiment was conducted on a four-cylinder spark ignited MPI engine to validate the results obtained from AVL Boost. AVL simulation and experimental results showed a considerable decrease in Hydro-Carbon (HC) Emissions and the percentage of Carbon Monoxide (CO) emitted remained constant. However, an increase in emissions of Oxides of Nitrogen (NOx) was observed in both cases.
Development and Validation of the Sport Emotion Questionnaire

The present paper outlines the development of a sport-specific measure of precompetitive emotion to assess anger, anxiety, dejection, excitement, and happiness. Face, content, factorial, and concurrent validity were examined over four stages. Stage 1 had 264 athletes complete an open-ended questionnaire to identify emotions experienced in sport. The item pool was extended through the inclusion of additional items taken from the literature. In Stage 2 a total of 148 athletes verified the item pool while a separate sample of 49 athletes indicated the extent to which items were representative of the emotions anger, anxiety, dejection, excitement, and happiness. Stage 3 had 518 athletes complete a provisional Sport Emotion Questionnaire (SEQ) before competition. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a 22-item and 5-factor structure provided acceptable model fit. Results from Stage 4 supported the criterion validity of the SEQ. The SEQ is proposed as a valid measure of precompetitive emotion for use in sport settings.
Overview of the Talisman Version 5 Software Engineering Meta-Environment

This report presents an overview of Talisman's version 5 functionality. Talisman is a computer aided software engineering meta-environment. It focuses strongly on model driven tools. It provides means to build software development and maintenance environments composed of a harmonious collection of representation languages and tools. The set of representation languages and tools may cover a very wide variety of development and maintenance activities. Talisman operates on a net of workstations, each containing an environment instance providing tools to support some of the activities of a specific software development and maintenance process. The collection of environment instances supports a large portion of the activities of a given development process. Talisman stores fine grained objects in a distributed repository. The base schema and meta-schema of this repository as well as the definition of user interfaces, representation languages and tools are kept in a definition base. Definition bases are derived from an environment base which contains all facts about supported representation languages and tools. The environment base is used by the environment builder to create and maintain representation languages and to adapt tools to the specific needs of a particular project. One of the basic aims of Talisman is to compose and maintain code and other artifacts from high level specifications relying heavily on model driven activities. The result of the development using Talisman is a hyper-document interrelating all artifacts that constitute the target system. The construction and maintenance of this hyper-document is achieved by successive transformations, modifications and verifications of a variety of models. To define and fine-tune these tools, Talisman uses an internal programming language, which specializes tools and activities, such as editors, code composers, representation transformers, representation verifiers and hyper-document navigation control.
Exercise dependence among Hungarian fitness center users - premilinary results

Regular physical activity plays an important role in the healthy life. However, excessive exercising might lead to addictive behavior. Exercise dependence (ED) is an extreme commitment to sports that was identified as a behavioral addiction. The objective of the present study is to explore the prevalence of ED in a sample of fitness center users (n=1743) recruited from 17 fitness and welness centers in Budapest. A questonnaire-based survey was carried out to measure ED. Two standardized scales, the Exercise Dependence Scale (EDS) and the Exercise addiction Inventory were used. Results revealed thet 2,2% (on EDS) and 7% (on EAI) of subjects belonged to the dependent group and 69,3% (on EDS) and 76,5% (on EAI) showed ED-related symptoms. It is surmised that due to their sport activities, these groups are at elevated risk for ED. Moreover, younger people with decreased self-esteem tend to have higher likehood and to have problems with excessive sport behaviour. Therefore it is important to raise the awareness of the harmful and risky patterns of exercise behaviour. The here adopted two instruments, EDS and EAI, might be utilized for to early detection of ED and prevention of the disorder.
Podolian cattle: reproductive activity, milk and future prospects

In the present study, an original article about Podolian cattle and its milk was performed. In detail, the following factors on reproductive career of Podolian cattle in semi-extensive and extensive rearing were analysed: age of calving, gestation lenght, calving interval length, abortions percentage, conception and calving period. Chemical and phisycal parameters (protein, fat and lactose), somatic cell count, lisozyme content and antiradical activity, with ABTS and DPPH assays, of Podolian milk in semiextensive and extensive rearing were evaluated. Finally, suggestions on future prospects of Podolian milk use were proposed: the preparation of hand soap with 5 percentage of podolian milk and the potential role of this breed for prevention and propagation of fire. The data concerning the reproductive career, milk and envinromental role of 677 cows registered in the Herdbook were analysed. The results showed that the 58.56% of the cows manifested a calving interval of 11-14 months. The reproductive activity occurred in spring; over 70% of the cows calved in the period February-April. The chemical-physical aspects of milk are in agreement with literature. It presents an high antioxidant activity values for each group (97.03% and 97.50% for ABTS and 52.09% and 52.60% for DPPH, semiextensive and extensive system respectively). The consumer test shows that the subjects appreciated the soap containing 5% of Podolian milk for different aspect. The data about environmental role were obtained from Podolian cows reared in fifteen grazing areas were monitored for five years during the summer pasture, when the Podolian cattle graze on green grazing areas located in Basilicata region (South of Italy). Therefore, an efficient management of grazing by Podolian cattle could be an important tool to prevent the fire propagation.
Analytic study of hostile aggression between rural and urban sportswomen

The study was an attempt to compare hostile aggression between rural and urban sportswomen. One hundred sportswomen acted as subjects in this study (50 from both the group) from Bilaspur University, Bilaspur & Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya, Bilaspur. Age of subject was ranged from 22 to 28 years. Eight dimensional aggression inventory prepared by Sultania (2006) was administered for collecting the data. On analyzing the data it was found that significant difference existed between urban sportswomen and rural sportswomen in their Hostile Aggression.
Comparative evaluation of green shanked indigenous chicken for production and egg quality traits

A study was undertaken at Sokoine University of Agriculture to investigate the influence of shank colour on egg quality traits and production performance. The study involved green shanked Indigenous (GSI) chickens, yellow shanked Indigenous (YSI) chickens and Rhode Island Red (RIR) genetic groups. The genetic groups were reared under the same environment and management. A total of 240 blood plasma samples were used in assessment of plasma cholesterol content while, 120 egg samples were used to assess egg yolk cholesterol and other egg quality traits. RIR differed significantly (P≤0.05) from GSI and YSI genetic groups in terms of egg number, egg weight, egg mass, laying intensity, yolk ratio and yolk albumin ratio. However, there was no significant difference between the indigenous genetic groups for these parameters as well as fertility, hatchability, growth rate and survival rate. The mean egg weights were 40.1 ± 0.8, 42.3 ± 0.9 and 52.0 ± 0.7 gm while the laying intensities were 46.7 ± 1.76, 46.8 ± 1.7 and 76.7 ± 1.7% for GSI, YSI and RIR genetic groups, respectively. There was no significant difference in egg yolk cholesterol, whilst plasma cholesterol differed significantly between RIR and indigenous types. The mean egg yolk cholesterol were 196.2 ± 7.2, 210.1 ± 7.2 and 201.8 ± 7.2 mg/dl for GSI, YSI and RIR respectively, while the blood plasma cholesterol were 210.4 ± 7.5, 196.5 ± 7.5 and 152.1 ± 7.5 mg/dl for GSI, YSI and RIR, respectively. Furthermore, the study revealed that, egg yolk cholesterol increased gradually with age while plasma cholesterol decreased with age in all genetic groups of this study. Total blood plasma cholesterol level increased when ndigenous types entered into brooding stage resulting in cyclic pattern between laying and brooding.
n efficient procedure to design passive LCL-filters for active power filters

Variable high switching frequencies in grid-connected active power filters could lead to low harmonic performance and expose power systems to EMI issues too. A low-pass passive LCL-filter is usually used to interconnect a power electronic converter to a grid system. (This can also be done by using a passive L-filter.) Nevertheless, designing an LCL-filter is not simple because of high compensating bandwidth and variable frequency modulations involved in active filters. This paper examines various effective condi-