Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Substratum heterogeneity and complexity influence micro-habitat selection of Balanus sp. and Tubularia crocea larvae

This exper~mental study examines the importance of active and passive processes during the settlement of the barnacle Balanus sp. and the hydrozoan Tubulana crocea larvae. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) larvae of Balanus sp. and 7 crocea exhibit settlement preferences with respect to scales of topographic heterogeneity (0, 1, 10 and 100 mm V-shaped grooves); (2) these preferences are modified by substratum complexity (combinations of scales of topographic heterogeneity); and (3) these preferences are mediated by larval behaviour directly on or near the substratum (benthic behaviour: after initial contact with the substratum). Artificial PVC panels of different scales of heterogeneity and complexity were submerged 30 cm below the surface during autumn 1992, a t Beaufort, North Carolina, USA. A companson between the final attachment sites of larvae with their initial contact sites on complex hard substrata was used to determinc the role of larval exploration following initial contact. Results indicated that, for Balanus sp. and T crocea larvae, all 3 hypotheses were confirmed. Evidence of actlve behaviour was observed at the spatial scales considered In t h ~ s tudy (entire panels and types of surfaces within panels), suggesting that active selection occurs at smaller and smaller scales. Balanus sp. larvae were rllure abundant on pancls which d ~ d not include the 1 mm scale of heterogeneity while, at the level of types of surfaces within each panel, they settled preferentially in grooves of 1 and 10 mm. T h ~ s uggests that different factors affect the competent 1a1-vae at d~fferent spatial scales. For T. crocea, the larvae selected the most complex type of panels and generally settled on the most exposed surfaces. Differences between initial larval contact sites and flnal attachment sltes confirmed the benthic behaviour hypothesis.
Directionality in translation and interpreting practice . Report on a questionnaire survey in Croatia

“Directionality” refers to whether translation or interpreting is done into or out of one’s first language (L1). In traditional, prescriptive approaches, work into one’s second language (L2) is regarded as inferior to work into L1, as evidenced by terms such as “inverse” or “reverse” translation. However, L2 translation is a regular practice in many countries around the world, particularly where “languages of limited diffusion” are used. An empirical study was designed to question prescriptive statements against L2 translation by describing the actual, real-world translation and interpreting practice. A questionnaire survey was conducted among translators and interpreters in Croatia, who were asked about their professional practice and their attitudes regarding directionality. Preliminary findings show that L2 translation is a regular practice for more than 70% of the full-time translators/interpreters in Croatia. One third of the respondents prefer L2 translation, and almost as many find this direction easier than the other. Further, 45% get better rates translating into L2. The responses also reveal that some of the traditional views concerning directionality still hold strong. Directionality in translation and interpreting
Earth Space Research Group SBDART: A Practical Tool for Plane-Parallel Radiative Transfer in the Earth's Atmosphere

Introduction SBDART (Santa Barbara DISORT Atmospheric Radiative Transfer) is a FORTRAN computer code designed for the analysis of a wide variety of radiative transfer problems encountered in satellite remote sensing and atmospheric energy budget studies. The program is based on a collection of highly developed and reliable physical models, which have been developed by the atmospheric science community over the past few decades. The following discussion is a brief introduction to the key components of the code and the models on which they are based. Cloud Model Clouds are a major modulator of the earths climate, both by reflecting visible radiation back out to space and by intercepting part of the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth and reradiating it back to the surface. The computation of radiative transfer within a cloudy atmosphere requires knowledge of the scattering efficiency, the single scattering albedo,
The role of Förster Resonance Energy Transfer in luminescent solar concentrator efficiency and color tunability

Forster-type resonance energy transfer (FRET) is demonstrated in a luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) material containing two air-stable, high quantum yield laser dyes in a PMMA matrix. The concentration regime surrounding the Forster critical distance is determined for the system. Two-dye LSC films employing FRET are shown to increase the absorption of air mass 1.5 solar irradiance without affecting the self absorption properties of the film. The impact of nonradiative transfer efficiency on LSC performance is experimentally demonstrated and evidence is presented suggesting higher concentration two-dye films are have reduced waveguide transport losses under excitation of the shorter wavelength dye when compared to less concentrated films of the same optical density. The impact of FRET efficiency and thus LSC film fluorescence spectra on LSC color determination is investigated and shown to be minimal. LSC color determination is shown to be accurate through the use of standard subtractive color schemes that consider only film absorption, and wide color tunability is shown to be achievable through the use of a subtractive color model, with as few as three appropriately absorbing dyes.
Gate Replacement Technique for Reducing Leakage current in Wallace Tree Multiplier

Leakage power has become more significant in the power dissipation of today’s CMOS circuits. This affects the portable battery operated devices directly. The multipliers are the main key for designing an energy efficient processor, where the multiplier design decides the digital signal processors efficiency. In this study gate replacement technique is used to reduce the leakage power in 4×4 Wallace tree multiplier architecture which has been designed by using one bit full adders. This technique replaces the gate which is at worst leakage state by a library gate . In this technique the actual output logic state is maintained in active mode. The main objective of our study is to calculate leakage power in 4×4 Wallace tree multiplier by applied gate replacement technique and it is compared with 4×4 Wallace tree full adder multiplier. The proposed method reduces 43% of leakage power in 4×4 Wallace tree multiplier.
Leadership and Organizational Factors as Predictors of Employees Organisational Commitment in Nigeria: An Empirical Analysis

This study examined the relationship between leadership-behaviour and organizational factors as predictors of workers organizational commitment. Ex-Post-Factor research design was employed. A total number of 504 workers selected from private and public sector organizations located in Lagos and Abuja in Nigeria participated in the study. The study was anchored on Graen and Scandura Leader-member exchange theory. It was hypothesized that job tenure, management cadre and organizational type will significantly predict workers’ organizational commitment. Also, workers who perceived their bosses to be high on interpersonal relations and emancipatory leadership behaviour will identify more with their organization, demonstrate high loyalty and show high commitment to their organizations. Results revealed a positive progression in the influence of organizational factor on organizational commitment variables. Specifically, junior workers reported more commitment compared to senior management level workers for at least 1.03 times. Interpersonal relations contributed about 19.9% of the total variance of the observed job indentification and 28.8% to workers’ job loyalty, and 19.3% to organizational commitmen respectivelyt. Emancipatory leadership-behaviour contributed 17.2% and10.2% to loyalty and organizational commitment. Autocratic/control contributed 19.3% to the observed variance in job involvement. Meanwhile, autocratic/control leadership-behavior accounted for about 15.4% of workers’ disloyalty to their organizations. Findings in the study were discussed in the light of emergent literatures on leadership and organizational research.
Breeding and genomics approaches to increase crop yield under drought stress in climate change scenario

Climate change has been a threat to food security challenges. Climate change presents an additional stress on food security challenges as it affects production of food in many ways. Among various stresses, drought is a big concern and rising at an alarming rate with climate change. Scientific approaches are being tried to understand the mechanisms of drought stress. The emergence of new molecular biology approaches and new sequencing as well as phenotyping platforms good research progress has been made in regard to drought and drought resistance mechanisms via identification of quantitative trait loci or genes responsible for drought tolerance mechanisms through Qtl mapping, Family based Qtl mapping, Linkage disequilibrium, Structural and Functional genomics approaches. Genome wide selection methods have been used for the current world concern of drought which will eventually lead to climate resilient crops and will solve the problem of food insecurity in near future. Huge data are being derived from genome wide selection (GWS) studies at the transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics levels, but how efficiently to explore and exploit these data to extract the essential functional pathways or networks for genetic improvement of drought resistance remains a significant challenge.
Systematic Calibration of Model Parameters Based on Large-Scale Experiments on Hybrid Masonry Walls

AbstractHybrid masonry is a relatively new type of structural system that benefits from the ductility and ease of construction of steel frames and from the in-plane strength and stiffness of reinforced masonry panels. Finite element analyses of hybrid masonry systems employ complex models, such as the two-scalar continuum damage model, to capture the propagation of damage through the masonry panels. Such formulations rely on several constitutive parameters but no simple experiments exist that can be used to decouple their effect and calibrate them independently. This paper proposes a method to calibrate the masonry parameters using experimental data from global system testing. Steel components are described by an elastoplastic model with kinematic hardening whose constitutive parameters are easily calibrated. A parameter calibration procedure for the damage model parameters based on the behavior of the base wall of a two-story hybrid system in global testing is proposed. In order to reduce the number of c.
Sports administrators, coaches and players perception of policies as problems influencing the Nigeria Premier League.

The main trust of this study was to investigate if policies were perceived by sports administrators, coaches and players as political problems influencing the Nigeria Premier League. To facilitate the realization of this objective, six research questions and one hypothesis were raised. Survey research design was adopted for the study. The participants for the study were 559. The proportional stratified random sampling technique was used in selecting the participants. The instrument used was a guided self constructed questionnaire. A jury of 5 experts drawn from the Department of Human kinetics and Health Education and the National institute of sports validated the instrument, while the reliability was established using the Cronbach’s Coefficient Alpha method and a reliability coefficient of 0.91 was obtained. Mean and standard deviation were used in answering the research questions while the one way analysis of variance ANOVA was used for testing the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significant. The result revealed that sports administrators, coaches and players mean perception was above criterion mean of 2.50. It implies that policies influence the Nigeria premier league . The hypothesis of no significant difference was rejected. Based on the findings of the study, recommendations were proffered . Key words: formulation, implementation, adherence, abrupt changes, policy.
A Fast Epile+Fbsa Method Combined with Adaptive Cross Approximation for the Scattering from a Target Above a Large Ocean-Like Surface

The rigorous evaluation of the NRCS (Normalized Radar Cross Section) of an object above a one-dimensional sea surface (2D case) needs to numerically solve a set of discretized integral equations involving a large number of unknowns. Thus, the direct solution of the impedance matrix equation via LU decomposition becomes the most expensive step in the MoM (Method of Moments) procedure. So, in order to minimize the computation cost, the iterative domain decomposition method called EPILE (Extended Propagation-Inside-Layer Expansion) was used and then was combined with the FBSA (Forward-Backward with Spectral Acceleration) to calculate the local interactions on the rough sea surface. The resulting fast method is called EPILE+FBSA. In this paper, we take advantage of the rank-deflcient nature of the coupling matrices, corresponding to the object-surface interactions, to further reduce the complexity of the method by using the ACA (Adaptive Cross Approximation). Thus, the coupling matrices are strongly compressed without a loss of accuracy and the memory requirement is then strongly reduced. For a cylinder above a rough sea surface, the results show the e-ciency of the accelerated EPILE+FBSA+ACA method.
Natural disturbances and interannual variability of coral reef communities on the outer slope of Tiahura (Moorea, French Polynesia): 1991 to 1997

We analysed the interannual variability of the major reef communities (algae, corals and fishes) on the outer slope of the Tiahura sector on Moorea Island between 1991 and 1997, and exam- ined the impacts of natural disturbances on these communities. Patterns of temporal variation and the response to natural perturbations were clearly different among the taxa examined. A sharp decrease in the percent cover of branching corals (Pocillopora and Acropora) followed cyclonic and bleaching events that occurred in 1991. After 1993, a slight increase in coral cover values was recorded, and can be interpreted as a sign of recovery. Despite a similar proportion of bleached colonies at the begin- ning of bleaching events in 1991 and 1994, the bleaching in 1994 had no significant impact on coral cover. This result demonstrates the importance of understanding the ecological history of reefs (i.e. the chronology of disturbances) in interpreting the specific impacts of a particular disturbance. The decline in coral cover was accompanied by an increase in the percent cover of turf algae, but sur- prisingly, the percent cover of macroalgae did not show any significant temporal variation during the 7 yr period. Thus, the decrease in the percent cover of corals, which opens up new substrate, does not always result in an increase in macroalgal cover. The temporal variation of the fish community was mainly characterized by (1) the high variability in the recruitment of juveniles, with a peak in 1991; (2) the slight increase in the density of adult species; and (3) the decrease in the density of coralli- vorous chaetodontid fishes from 1991 to 1994. Since corals were the only taxon directly affected by natural disturbances, they were consequently the cause of the indirect effects of these disturbances (i.e. increase in turf algae and decrease in chaetodontid fishes), and can therefore be regarded as the 'key component' of the outer slope reef communities in Moorea.
Impact of heavy metals on water, fish (Cyprinus carpio) and sediments from a water tank at Tumkur, India

Abstract This study was carried out to assess the concentrations of various heavy metals and their distribution in a hyper-eutrophic urban Tumkur tank system, which is being polluted from industrial, domestic and sewage effluents. Samples of water, fish and soil sediment were analyzed for the concentration of seven heavy metals (iron, zinc, copper, nickel, chromium, lead and cadmium) using atomic absorption spectrophotometry. The water-soluble (bioavailable) fractions of heavy metals correlated positively with their total concentration, exhibiting the following sequence of bioavailability: Zn > Cd > Ni > Pb > Cu > Cr > Fe. Cyprinus carpio exhibited a maximum bioaccumulation factor for copper (5500). The mean values of all types of collected samples were correlated with the corresponding mean values in a control tank (Teetha tank). The sequence of the order of the concentration of the metals in water, fish and sediment samples exhibiting higher values than those observed in the control tank was as follows: Cr > Pb > Cu ≈ Ni > Fe > Cd > Zn, Cr > Cd > Cu ≈ Zn > Pb > Fe ≈ Ni and Fe > Pb > Cr > Cu > Ni > Zn > Cd, respectively. The geoaccumulation indices of the heavy metals revealed that the tank is moderately to strongly contaminated. As Cyprinus carpio is extensively used for human consumption, there is a growing health risk that these metals could find their way into the human food chain.
Nijmegen breakage syndrome in Ukraine: diagnostics and follow-up

Nijmegen breakage syndrome (NBS) belongs to the group of chromosomal instability syndromes, is predominantly distributed in Slavic countries and is characterized by microcephaly, combined immunodeficiency and a high predisposition to lymphoid malignancies. A clinical-immunological characteristic of 21 patients with NBS from the Western Region of Ukraine is presented. Cytogenetic disorders were studied in sick children and their parents. The dominating 657del5 mutation of the NBS1 gene is found in all NBS patients in this region. An assessment algorithm for the examination of patients who are suspected of having NBS is proposed, and the main aspects of monitoring and treatment are presented in the article.
VLT-UVES analysis of two giants in the bulge metal-poor globular cluster HP-1 : Analysis of two giants in HP-1

Context. Metal-poor globular clusters in the bulge are important tracers of early chemical evolution. HP-1 is among the six metal-poor clusters within 5° of the Galactic center, and could be the one closest to the center Aims. The main purpose of this study is the determination of metallicity and elemental ratios. Methods. High resolution spectra of two giants of the bulge globular cluster HP-1 were obtained at the 8 m VLT UT2-Kueyen telescope with the UVES spectrograph. This is the second metal-poor globular cluster in the bulge for which a detailed abundance analysis is presented. Multiband $V,I,J,H,K_{\rm s}$ photometry was used to derive effective temperatures. Results. The present analysis provides a metallicity [Fe/H] = $-1.00\pm0.2$. The α -elements oxygen and silicon show [ α /Fe] ≈ +0.3, whereas magnesium, calcium and titanium show solar ratios. A proper motion analysis indicates that the two stars are cluster members. Conclusions. The metallicity is unexpected for a blue Horizontal Branch (BHB) cluster. HP-1 is the first known cluster with such a high metallicity combined with a BHB and a steep Red Giant Branch (RGB). Together with NGC 6388 and NGC 6441 of $\rm [Fe/H]\sim-0.6$ it would be third with such characteristics, but it differs from them, since these two other clusters have also a populous Red HB, and a normal slope of the RGB for their metallicity, which is not the case of HP-1.
Cartel Federalism? Antitrust Enforcement by State Attorneys General

Largely in connection with the Microsoft litigation, the antitrust enforcement authority of state attorneys general, in their parens patriae capacity, has generated acrimonious debate. Perhaps the only point of genuine agreement is the complaint over the lack of reliable empirical evidence on state antitrust enforcement. This Essay attempts to make a modest contribution to the data front and a more ambitious and provocative contribution to the theoretical debate.
Premature termination in couple therapy as a part of therapeutic process.

Aim of the study : The paper presents the qualitative study of premature termination in couple therapy. The aim of the research was to answer why couples drop-out from couple therapy at the early stage of treatment. Subject : To understand the complexity of this event the researchers decided to examine the phenomenon of early drop-out from three different perspectives, that is: from therapists and both spouses point of view. methods : The therapists and couples that ended the therapy prematurely were interviewed. Among ex-amined drop-out cases, there were selected three which fulfilled the criteria for early drop–out. Data were analyzed according to the method of cross-case analysis. Results. As a result common categories were singled out which were characteristic for those three cases of drop-out. Discussion : The distinguished categories of ‘the split of the working alliance’ and ‘the split of the therapeutic bond’ show that the conflict which the couple brought to the therapy was reflected in their experience of the therapy and the therapist. Conclusions : Premature termination in couple therapy is a part of therapeutic process.
Amlodipine/atorvastatin has an effect on vascular function and normal lipid levels

Objective: To investigate whether the use of amlodipine/atorvastatin can affect vascular endothelial function as well as blood vessel elasticity and lipid level compared with hypotensor alone. Method: There were 162 participants selected into domestic compound hypotensive tablets (Group 1), amlodipine tablets (Group 2) and amlodipine/atorvastatin group (Group 3) randomly. After 3 months, 144 participants remained. Each participant’s medical history was collected, and each participant underwent a blood biochemical examination including high-sensitivity C-Reactive Protein (hs-CRP), Flow-Mediated-Dilation (FMD) and Endothelium-Independent Dilatation (EID), and carotid-Femoral Pulse Wave Velocity (c-f PWV) before and after the 3-month follow-up period. Results: Compared with baseline, the FMD values of all groups improved significantly. Group 3 showed the greatest difference, followed by Groups 2 and 1. In contrast, no difference in EID was noted (P>0.05 in three groups). After treatment, the c-f PWV of Groups 2 and 3 turned to be significantly better (P<0.05), while that of Group 1 did not change. There was no statistical significant difference among three groups. The lipid levels of the participants in Group 3 decreased, while those in Groups 1 and 2 did not change. The hs-CRP levels of Groups 2 and 3 decreased significantly, whereas that of Group 1 did not change. Conclusions: In conclusion, we found that Amlodipine/atorvastatin combination pills can improve vascular endothelial function as well as vascular elasticity, and down-regulate the level of hs-CRP.
Predicting Click-Through Rates of New Advertisements Based on the Bayesian Network

Most classical search engines choose and rank advertisements (ads) based on their click-through rates (CTRs). To predict an ad’s CTR, historical click information is frequently concerned. To accurately predict the CTR of the new ads is challenging and critical for real world applications, since we do not have plentiful historical data about these ads. Adopting Bayesian network (BN) as the effective framework for representing and inferring dependencies and uncertainties among variables, in this paper, we establish a BN-based model to predict the CTRs of new ads. First, we built a Bayesian network of the keywords that are used to describe the ads in a certain domain, called keyword BN and abbreviated as KBN. Second, we proposed an algorithm for approximate inferences of the KBN to find similar keywords with those that describe the new ads. Finally based on the similar keywords, we obtain the similar ads and then calculate the CTR of the new ad by using the CTRs of the ads that are similar with the new ad. Experimental results show the efficiency and accuracy of our method.