Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Continuous low-maintenance CO 2 /CH 4 /H 2 O measurements at the Zotino Tall Tower Observatory (ZOTTO) in Central Siberia

Abstract. To monitor the continental carbon cycle, a fully automated low maintenance measurement system is installed at the Zotino Tall Tower Observatory in Central Siberia (ZOTTO, 60°48' N, 89°21' E) since April 2009. A cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS) analyzer continuously measures carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) from six heights up to 301 m a.g. l. Buffer volumes in each air line remove short term CO2 and CH4 mixing ratio fluctuations associated with turbulence, and allow continuous, near-concurrent measurements from all tower levels. Instead of drying the air sample, the simultaneously measured water vapor is used to correct the dilution and pressure-broadening effects for the accurate determination of dry air CO2 and CH4 mixing ratios. The stability of the water vapor correction was demonstrated by repeated laboratory and field tests. The effect of molecular adsorption in the wet air lines was shown to be negligible. The low consumption of four calibration tanks that need recalibration only on decadal timescale further reduces maintenance. The measurement precision (accuracy) of 0.04 ppm (0.09 ppm) for CO2 and 0.3 ppb (1.5 ppb) for CH4 is compliant with the WMO recommendations. The data collected so far (until April 2010) reveals a seasonal cycle amplitude for CO2 of 30.4 ppm at the 301 m level.
Haptoglobin and serum amyloid a in subacute ruminal acidosis in goats

Ruminal acidosis is a frequent disorder that occurs in goats as a consequence of feeding mistakes in animals not adapted to a diet of easily fermentable carbohydrates. The subacute form of the disease is difficult to diagnose because no apparent signs are shown and the acid-base parameters may remain within the normal range. The present study aimed at testing the hypothesis that haptoglobin (Hp) and serum amyloid A (SAA), the two major acute phase proteins in ruminants, may be useful as markers of subacute acidosis in goats. A subacute acidosis was induced in six Murciano-Granadina goats through a diet of 60% mixed feed-40% alfalfa hay offered during 5 days to goats not adapted to eat mixed feed. Two goats were rumen-fistulated to investigate the effect of feeding on ruminal pH. Sampling of blood and urine of all animals was done before the induction of the acidosis, during 5 days after the onset of induction and for 18 days after the induction (recovery period). Ruminal pH in the fistulated goats dropped to less than 5.5 during the induction period, and half of the goats had diarrhea on the third day after the induction of acidosis. Acid-base parameters showed that the acid-base compensatory mechanisms were efficient in maintaining the equilibrium. Serum Hp had a moderate increase during the induction period, while SAA did not change. These results suggest that Hp might be a potential marker for ruminal acidosis in goats.
Binarization of Degraded Historical Document Images

Document images often suffer from different types of degradation that renders the document image binarization a challenging task. In this paper, a new binarization algorithm for degraded document images is presented. The method is based on active contours evolving according to intrinsic geometric measures of the document image; Niblack’s thresholding is also used to control the active contours propagation. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated on both recent and historical document images including different types of degradations, the results are compared with a number of known techniques in the literature. Keywords—Document image; binarization; active contours; level sets method; Niblack’s thresholding.
Design Scheme Considering Memory Cell Array Noise for Stacked Type MRAM with NAND Structured Cell

In this paper design scheme considering memory cell array noise for stacked type NAND MRAM has been newly described. Memory cell array noise which is inherent to stacked type NAND MRAM is newly analyzed. This noise for read operation of 48mV is almost equal to the signal to selected WL of 50mV during read operation. 3 kinds of design method, the increase in distance between adjacent WLs, introduction of high-k insulating layer, and air gap, which can reduce the memory cell array noise has been newly proposed. Furthermore, the novel design method which uses the memory cell array noise caused by the conventional scheme for generating the signal of 50mV has been newly proposed. These proposed schemes are promising candidates for realizing stable operation of stacked type NAND MRAM.
Current Work in Corpus Linguistics : Working with Traditionally-conceived Corpora and Beyond ( CILC 2015 ) Syntactic ngrams as keystructures reflecting typical syntactic patterns of corpora in Finnish

This article studies syntactic ngrams, i.e. little subtrees of dependency syntax analyses, as keystructures reflecting syntactic characteristics of corpora. While traditional keywords correspond to statistically more or less frequent words of a corpus and are often informative on the corpus topic and style, unlexicalized syntactic ngrams applied in this study extend the level of description beyond individual words to sequences of syntactic elements. The article analyzes the utility of these sequences in corpus description and gives first results on the structural characteristics reflected by them in the studied texts, including Finnish literature, Internet forum discussions from the major Finnish social networking website and Internet discussions following the news and editorials of the major Finnish newspaper’s website. The syntactic ngrams are produced with the freely available Finnish Dependency Parser and Ngram Builder and the keystructures analyzed with a linear classifier. The results suggest that syntactic ngrams illustrate both topical features, such as names and Internet urls discussed in the corpora, as well as structural characteristics, such as subject-verb combinations, negations and informal sentence structures, thus both generalizing the information given by traditional keywords from individual words to concepts and providing new knowledge about typical constructions not reached by lexemes. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of Universidad de Valladolid, Facultad de Comercio.
Exploring Genetically Modified Animals for Development of New Atherosclerosis Treatments in NHLBI

Development of New Animal Models of Atherosclerosis Atherosclerosis and complications associated with this pathology, such as coronary artery disease, remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the world [1]. Dyslipidemia is one of the main risk factors leading to development of the atherosclerosis [2,3]. Peripheral (non-hepatic) cells, including arterial and aortic cells, obtain cholesterol from either de novo synthesis or from uptake of plasma lipoproteins. To prevent atherosclerosis, excess cholesterol must be removed from cells. This process takes place through the reverse cholesterol transport pathway [4,5], a process whereby cells efflux excess cholesterol to HDL, which subsequently delivers cholesterol to the liver for excretion into the bile.
Relationship between Death Anxiety and Spiritual Well-Being in Patients with Gynecologic Cancer

Introduction: Concerns about death may negatively affect the health-related quality of life. The relationship between death anxiety and spiritual well-being in lifethreatening diseases is still a matter that needs to be addressed, especially in patients with gynecologic cancer. This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between death anxiety and spiritual well-being in patients with the gynecologic cancer. Methods: This descriptive-correlational study was conducted on 230 women with gynecologic cancer selected through convenience sampling from Shohada-e Tajrish Hospital, affiliated to Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, in Tehran, Iran, from April to May 2016. The data collection instruments included a demographic questionnaire, the 15-item Templer Death Anxiety Scale and the Spiritual Well-Being Scale. The data were analyzed using descriptive (mean, standard deviation, frequency and percentage) and inferential (Pearson’s correlation coefficient and the linear regression model) statistics by the SPSS 22 software Results: The mean scores of death anxiety and spiritual well-being were 48.57 ± 12.55 and 95.27 ± 14.40. There was a significant relationship between death anxiety and spiritual well-being (r = -0.35, P = 0.001). The results of the regression analysis showed that age (b = -0.23, P = 0.001) and stage of cancer (b = -5.176, P = 0.001) are the only significant predictors of death anxiety. This model explained 40.3% of the variance in death anxiety. In this model, age (b = 0.220, P = 0.021), marital status (b = 2.985, P = 0.043) and stage of cancer (b = 2.649, P = 0.001) were significant predictors of spiritual well-being. The model explained 18% of the variance in spiritual well-being
Object tracking Based on Local Structure Orientation

In order to solve the poor robustness resulted from the pose variances, occlusion or clutter in some challenging videos, we propose a robust particle filter tracking method based on a new similarity measure SPBRLSO (spatio-bin-ratio based on the local structure orientation). First, the object tracked is represented by a histogram of the local structure orientation, and then the observation likelihood function is constructed using a spatial-bin-ratio similarity. Finally, the tracker is formed by the he observation likelihood function in the frame of the traditional particle filter tracking. Many experimental results show that the proposed method is able to robustly track the objects in visible videos and infrared videos from some challenging videos including pose variances, occlusion or clutter. Furthermore, our tracking performance is superior to other tracking methods including the VTD tracker, conventional particle filter tracker and the spatiogram tracker.
Technology and Space in Innovation Performance of Polish Regions

Technology and Space in Innovation Performance of Polish Regions Space and technology are key determinant of innovation performance in industry not only in Poland, but also in developed economies. This research proved that space, time, technology and size of industrial enterprises are important elements of every regional innovation system. For this reason, those factors should be given appropriate attention while developing innovation strategies.
Analysis of structural patterns in highly disaggregated bioeconomy sectors by EU Member States using SAM/IO multipliers

This report characterises and profiles the biobased sectors in terms of their wealth generation characteristics for the entire EU region. To this end, Backward and Forward Linkages multipliers are calculated from a brand new set of EU Member States (MS) Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) benchmarked to 2010 with a large coverage of biobased activities.
Effect of wind speed on the size distribution of gel particles in the sea surface microlayer: insights from a wind–wave channel experiment

Abstract. Gel particles, such as transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) and Coomassie stainable particles (CSP), are important organic components in the sea surface microlayer (SML). Here, we present results on the effect of different wind speeds on the accumulation and size distribution of TEP and CSP during a wind wave channel experiment in the Aeolotron. Total areas of TEP (TEPSML) and CSP (CSPSML) in the surface microlayer were exponentially related to wind speed. At wind speeds < 6 m s−1, accumulation of TEPSML and CSPSML occurred, decreasing at wind speeds of > 8 m s−1. Wind speeds > 8 m s−1 also significantly altered the size distribution of TEPSML in the 2–16 µm size range towards smaller sizes. The response of the CSPSML size distribution to wind speed varied through time depending on the biogenic source of gels. Wind speeds > 8 m s−1 decreased the slope of CSPSML size distribution significantly in the absence of autotrophic growth. For the slopes of TEP and CSP size distribution in the bulk water, no significant difference was observed between high and low wind speeds. Changes in spectral slopes between high and low wind speed were higher for TEPSML than for CSPSML, indicating that the impact of wind speed on size distribution of gel particles in the SML may be more pronounced for TEP than for CSP, and that CSPSML are less prone to aggregation during the low wind speeds. Addition of an E. huxleyi culture resulted in a higher contribution of submicron gels (0.4–1 µm) in the SML at higher wind speed (> 6 m s−1), indicating that phytoplankton growth may potentially support the emission of submicron gels with sea spray aerosol.
Optimization of a Complex Simulation Model

In this paper we describe techniques utilised in the development of a scheme for identifying the regions in an 8-dimensional parameter space that gave optimal (or near-optimal) performance in a computational simulation of a real-world system. The system model, developed by Dexcel Ltd, attempts a detailed representation of pastoral dairying scenarios. It incorporates sub-models, themselves complex in many cases, of pasture growth, animal metabolism etc. Each evaluation of the objective function, a composite 'farm performance index', requires simulation of at least a one-year period of farm operation with a daily time-step and hence is computationally expensive. Since similar situations are likely to arise in other practical optimisation exercises, the results presented should have some quite general applicability.Two quite different methods of optimisation Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Lipschitz Branch-and-Bound (LBB) algorithm are investigated and contrasted. Practical issues related to their efficient implementation in a Linux cluster parallel processing environment are discussed and their performance on the above problem is compared. The problem of visualisation of the objective function (response surface) in high-dimensional spaces is also considered in the context of the farm optimisation problem (where from a practical viewpoint knowledge of its behaviour in the region of optima is actually more important than the precise positions or values of the optima themselves). An adaption of the Parallel Coordinates visualization is described which helps visualise some important properties of the model’s output topography.
Quasinormal-Mode Expansion of the Scattering Matrix

It is well known that the quasinormal modes (or resonant states) of photonic structures can be associated with the poles of the scattering matrix of the system in the complex-frequency plane. In this work, the inverse problem, i.e., the reconstruction of the scattering matrix from the knowledge of the quasinormal modes, is addressed. We develop a general and scalable quasinormal-mode expansion of the scattering matrix, requiring only the complex eigenfrequencies and the far-field properties of the eigenmodes. The theory is validated by applying it to illustrative nanophotonic systems with multiple overlapping electromagnetic modes. The examples demonstrate that our theory provides an accurate first-principles prediction of the scattering properties, without the need for postulating ad hoc nonresonant channels.
Do Institutional Investors Alleviate Agency Problems by Influencing Payout Policy in Firms with Poor Investment Opportunities

This paper seeks to determine if institutional investors influence corporate payout policies. Specifically, this study tests whether institutional investors encourage higher payouts in firms with higher free cash flow and poor growth opportunities. Firm and year fixed effect regressions examining the effect of changes in institutional investor levels to subsequent changes in payout levels are used. For robustness, difference-GMM regressions and regressions for different time periods are performed on the same relationship. Increased institutional ownership leads to increases in total payouts, especially in firms with high free cash flow and poor investment opportunities (low q). According to agency-based free cash flow theory, stockholders should prefer that the management of firms with higher free cash flow and poor investment opportunities increase payouts to shareholders. The results indicate that institutional shareholders reduce agency costs by encouraging management to raise payouts, thus benefiting institutional investors and non-institutional shareholders.
Management Of Hypertension In Renal Disease: Results From The Imperial Study

THE IMPERIAL (Indian Medical Practitioners Expressions Regarding Drug Intervention In All Aspects of MetaboLic Syndrome) study, which assessed Indian physicians’ prescribing habits related to metabolic syndrome, also assessed their preferred management strategies in hypertension associated with renal disease, This paper reviews the results related to renal disease, obtained from the IMPERIAL study. There is a clear consensus for the use of angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, followed by angiotensin receptor blockers, as first line antihypertensive therapy in patients with nephropathy. In ESRD, calcium channel blockers, and diuretics are recommended as first – line therapy by 2/3 and 1⁄2 of physician respectively. It is hoped that these results stimulate discussion, research, and final consensus on the management of hypertension in renal disorders, especially ESRD, while encouraging doctors to follow existing rational guidelines .
Evaluation of antioxidant and antimicrobial activity of the Indian clove Syzygium aromaticum L. Merr. & Perr.

Copyright: © Author(s), This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is noncommercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Syzygium aromaticum (Synonym; Eugenia aromatica Kuntz.) belongs to family Myrtaceae is a small medium evergreen tree, 2-6 m tall. Generally, plant found medium sized, crown base low, branches semi erect and numerous. Leaves glabrous, with numerous oil glands on lower surface. Flowers small, in terminal cymose cluster, each peduncle bear three four stalked flowers at the end while sepals minute with triangular projection. Fruits found typically olive shaped, one seeded popularly referred to as mother of clove with distinct aroma. The brown, dried, unopened flower buds called cloves, a name coming from French word “clou” meaning nail. Plant distributed in south-west and central Indian subcontinent and under cultivation in large since ancient time. Mostly, the aromatic or spices plants contain compounds that possess confirmed strong or potent anti-oxidative properties. Antioxidants are very important to human health, including lowering the risk of cancer. Antioxidant combats the effect of free radicals. More danger of free radicals, plants produces more antioxidant. Antioxidant system prevents these reactive oxygen species from being formed at optimum level. They act as scavengers to neutralize effect of free radicals. In present investigation, evaluation of few antioxidants carried out from the fresh plant material and studied. Considering the potent medicinal value of the plant its antimicrobial sensitivity test also carried out against few human pathogenic bacteria like gram positive Staphylococcus aureus MTCC -96, gram negative, Salmonella typhi MTCC98, Klebsiella pneumoniae MTCC -661, Proteus vulgar MTCC 744, and Shigella flexneri MTCC1457 along with fungus Candida albicans-183, were used with disc diffusion method. The results of antimicrobial sensitivity compared with the standard antibiotic like Ampicillin and Nystatin (10 μg/ml)
Ethnic minority enterprise: policy in practice.

Aims This project reviews recent research on ethnic minorities in business, focusing in particular on implications for policy. The more specific objectives were to: • Assess existing approaches towards supporting ethnic minority businesses • Identify examples of ‘good practice’ • Map out a research and policy agenda Methodology The methodology involved the following elements: • A review of studies of EMBs from academic sources and grey literature • Telephone interviews with 53 separate Business Links to examine the scope and dimensions of policies towards EMBs. • Where examples of ‘good practice’ policies were identified in these initial interviews, a second interview was conducted with the individual best positioned to describe the initiative. Fifteen such cases are presented in the report.
Effects of cadmium on morphological structure of sperm in Caspiomyzon wagneri (Kessler, 1870) (Petromyzontiformes : Petromyzontidae)

The present study aimed to investigate effects of the heavy metal Cd on the sperm morphological indices of Caspimyzon wagneri. The sperm were exposed to 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100 and 1000 mg.L‑1 Cd for three minutes, three and 36 hours. The sperms exposed to Cd showed an increase in the length, width and surface of the head, flagella degradation and slightly flagella breakage. With increase of Cd concentration or the exposure duration, the damages found in sperms increased. But when exposure to contaminant exceeds than certain period of time, damage effects caused changes in the sperm structure as head length reduction and head width increasing and thereby reducing the sperm’s head surface, complete cutting of flagella at all samples and deformation of the sperm’s head from oval to circular, which these changes became visible during 36 hours of exposure to cadmium. Therefore, the results revealed that the arrival of pollutants including cadmium to the natural reproduction ground of this species due to induction the harmful effects on sperm morphology factors will have adverse effects on sperm function and fertilization rate and reduce them, and as such will be considered a serious threat to the survival generation of this rare species.
Applications of Molecular Diagnostic Techniques for Infectious Diseases

Diagnosis is concerned with identifying the cause of a disease or precise and consistent outcomes that are results of direct or indirect actions, reactions and interactions between the cause of a disease and the host. That outcome, if accurate, would help the clinician in disease management, or the epidemiologist in identifying trends of diseases or the administrator in policy and decision making. Traditionally, infectious disease diagnosis involves identifying the causative agents of infectious diseases through the direct examination, culture and often immunological tests on clinical specimens. The traditional diagnostic techniques have varied sensitivities and specificities which influence their choice and applicability in a particular setting for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. However, the limitations of many traditional techniques particularly low specificity and long turnaround time often necessitate initiation of treatment before results are made available. Molecular diagnostic techniques involve a variety of techniques that explore the use of nucleic acid molecules for the identification of a particular pathogenic organism. These techniques include nucleic acid-based typing system, nucleic acid analysis without amplification, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and other nucleic acid amplification techniques. Applications of molecular detection methods for infectious diseases have resolved many of the problems of the traditional diagnostic techniques, due to their exquisite sensitivity and specificity that allow the accurate and timely detection of very small numbers of organisms. This paper examines the principles and applications of molecular biology techniques in the identification of the causative agents of infectious diseases either in a routine setting or as research tools. Keywords: Infectious diseases, Molecular diagnosis, Polymerase Chain Reaction