Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Cattle Grazing on Diversity in Ephemeral Wetlands

Abstract: Cattle are usually thought of as a threat to biodiversity. In regions threatened by exotic species invasion and lacking native wild grazers, however, cattle may produce the type of disturbance that helps maintain diverse communities. Across 72 vernal pools, I examined the effect of different grazing treatments (ungrazed, continuously grazed, wet‐season grazed and dry‐season grazed) on vernal‐pool plant and aquatic faunal diversity in the Central Valley of California. After 3 years of treatment, ungrazed pools had 88% higher cover of exotic annual grasses and 47% lower relative cover of native species than pools grazed at historical levels (continuously grazed). Species richness of native plants declined by 25% and aquatic invertebrate richness was 28% lower in the ungrazed compared with the continuously grazed treatments. Release from grazing reduced pool inundation period by 50 to 80%, making it difficult for some vernal‐pool endemic species to complete their life cycle. My results show that one should not assume livestock and ranching operations are necessarily damaging to native communities. In my central California study site, grazing helped maintain native plant and aquatic diversity in vernal pools.
Assessment and Characterization of Physical Habitat, Water Quality, and Biotic Assemblages of the Tyronza River, Arkansas

Few studies within the last few decades have addressed water quality and biotic assemblages within Arkansas’s large channel-altered deltaic rivers. The Tyronza River is located in northeast Arkansas and its watershed has a heavy agricultural presence that drastically affects habitat quality. Meanwhile, the Tyronza River hosts one of the more recent documented range extensions of the federally endangered fat pocketbook mussel [Potamilus capax (Green, 1832)]. The purpose of this study was to assess physical habitat, water quality, and biotic assemblages of the Tyronza River using the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality’s (ADEQ) regional biometrics. Water samples were collected at 9 stations across 4 seasonal intervals. Physical habitat, fish, and macroinvertebrates were collected at 9 stations during summer and fall. U.S. EPA Rapid Bioassessment Protocols for habitat indicated that habitat quality was suboptimal. Distinct seasonal differences were observed among all water chemistry parameters; however, seasonality was not as clear among nutrient constituents. Macroinvertebrate assemblages varied drastically among sites: taxa richness ranged from 3 to 14 and the Arkansas Macroinvertebrate Index for Small Watersheds values ranged from 16 to 28 (poor to very good condition). Fish Community Structure Indices were less variable among sites ranging from 6 to 16 (Not Similar to Somewhat Similar). The lack of instream habitat and habitat richness is likely resulting in low taxa richness in the biotic communities. Results from this study will provide managers and scientists with valuable information on seasonal variation of select water quality parameters and into the integrity of aquatic assemblages of the Tyronza River.
Back to Nature: The Relationship Between Nature Relatedness on Empathy and Narcissism in the Millennial Generation

Researchers suggest that the current generation of college students, who fall within the broader generational group known as “Millennials,” demonstrate lower levels of empathy, higher levels of narcissism, increased use of technology, and decreased time spent outdoors, which may impact the overall functioning of these individuals. This correlational design study of 140 undergraduates explores the relationship between the constructs of empathy, narcissism, and nature relatedness among the Millennial generation. Data analysis suggests that there is a statistically significant relationship between nature relatedness and empathy, which offers an empirical rationale for the use of community-based and nature-oriented approaches among clinical mental health counselors who work with Millennials.
CO2 decomposition using electrochemical process in molten salts

The electrochemical decomposition of CO2 gas to carbon and oxygen gas in LiCl-Li2O and CaCl2-CaO molten salts was studied. This process consists of electrochemical reduction of Li2O and CaO, as well as the thermal reduction of CO2 gas by the respective metallic Li and Ca. Two kinds of ZrO2 solid electrolytes were tested as an oxygen ion conductor, and the electrolytes removed oxygen ions from the molten salts to the outside of the reactor. After electrolysis in both salts, the aggregations of nanometer-scale amorphous carbon and rod-like graphite crystals were observed by transmission electron microscopy. When 9.7 %CO2-Ar mixed gas was blown into LiCl-Li2O and CaCl2-CaO molten salts, the current efficiency was evaluated to be 89.7 % and 78.5 %, respectively, by the exhaust gas analysis and the supplied charge. When a solid electrolyte with higher ionic conductivity was used, the current and carbon production became larger. It was found that the rate determining step is the diffusion of oxygen ions into the ZrO2 solid electrolyte.
Realization of an extraordinary transmission window for a seamless Ag film based on metal-insulator-metal structures

A polarization-sensitive, wide-angle operating antireflection coating based on a metal-insulator-metal structure is investigated. In both visible and near-infrared regions, it dramatically reduces the reflection and enhances the transmission through a seamless Ag film near a specifically designed frequency due to the surface plasmon resonance. By achieving above 70% transmission through a 20 nm-thickness Ag film theoretically, this antireflection coating is able to open an extraordinary transmission window for a metallic layer without any slits or holes.
FROM REQUIREMENTS CAPTURE TO SILICON: A MODEL-DRIVEN SYSTEMS ENGINEERING APPROACH TO RAPID DESIGN, PROTOTYPING AND DEVELOPMENT USED IN THE OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY'S COGNITIVE RADIO PROGRAM

The performance and complexity of the signal processing hardware accessible to SDR/CR/RADAR designers has quickly out-paced the available design tools. The advances in Digital Signal Processors (DSP) both fixed- and floatingpoint, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), and multicore processors have enabled rapid prototyping and deployment of platforms that can be dynamically reconfigured in the field to implement a variety of SDR/CR/RADAR waveforms. Until recently the process of creating waveforms meant starting with high-level mathematical models and simulations and then creating production quality code that can operate on this variety of specialized hardware using either hand coding or vendor specific tools, which are typically limited to single processor solutions. This paper discusses an integrated model-driven design process and tool-flow used in ORNL's Cognitive Radio Program. It describes how the process and tool-flow are used on a variety of SDR and CR projects and in the development of a software-defined RADAR environment simulator. It describes how, from a single Simulink® model, a single deadlock free real-time multiprocessor application is created and executed on a network of heterogeneous processors. We also describe recent progress on extending the process/tool-flow to design digital ASICs and our plans for future extensions. We close by highlighting the benefits being realized from applying this design flow to SDR/CR/RADAR projects at ORNL: 1) a significant reduction in the time required to develop, prototype, implement and test SDR/CR/RADAR waveforms, 2) increased reusability/retargetabilty of SDR/CR/RADAR designs and signal processing library components, 3) the ability to quickly port SDR/CR/RADAR waveforms to different hardware systems and processor types, 4) improvements in documentation, and 5) traceability of system components back to original requirements.
The Effect of Balance Training on Agility in Young Cricketers

Studies of cricket injuries show an increasing incidence, varying from2.6 to 333/10 000 athlete hours played, 2–4 with 28.4– 71.6% of cricketers2 sustaining between 1.61 and 1.91 injuries per season. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of 6week balance training on agility in young cricketers. 66 young cricket players between the age group of 12-16 yrs were selected and randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control group. T agility test, Hexagonal agility test, Single limb stance test, Multidirectional reach test were used as outcome measures. The experimental group underwent 6 week balance training in addition to regular routine exercises. Experimental group showed significant improvement in balance and agility. T agility test performance improved from 13.36+ 1.34 sec to 12.5+ 1.35 sec. Hexagonal agility test performance improved from 20.25 +3.08 to 17.52+ 2.26. Thus it can be concluded that 6 weeks balance training programme improves agility in young cricketers.
A Survey of Friendbook Recommendation Services

: In this paper, we have presented a literature review of the modern friend recommendation services. Existing social networking services recommend friends to users based on their social graphs, which may not be the most appropriate to reflect a user’s preferences on friend selection in real life. In this paper, we present Friendbook, a novel semantic-based friend recommendation system for social networks, which recommends friends to users based on their life styles instead of social graphs. By taking advantage of sensor-rich smartphone, Friendbook discovers life styles of users from user-centric sensor data, measures the similarity of life styles between users, and recommends friends to users if their life styles have high similarity. Inspired by text mining, we model a user’s daily life as life documents, from which his/her life styles are extracted by using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm. We further propose a similarity metric to measure the similarity of life styles between users, and calculate users’ impact in terms of life styles with a friend-matching graph. Upon receiving a request, Friendbook returns a list of people with highest recommendation scores to the query user. Finally, Friendbook integrates a feedback mechanism to further improve the recommendation accuracy.
Solubility of Bioactive, Inorganic and Polymeric Solids in Ionic Liquids — Experimental and Prediction Perspectives

This work was supported by Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia through projects (PEstC/LA0006/2013, PTDC/CTM/103664/2008, EXPL/QEQ ERQ/2243/2013) one contract under Investigador FCT (L.C. Branco); two Postdoctoral fellowships (G.V.S.M. Carrera - SFRH/BPD/72095/2010 and A. V. M. Nunes - SFRH/BPD/74994/2010) and one doctoral fellowship (M. E.Zakrzewska SFRH/BD/74929/2010).
DETERMINATION OF ANTIOXIDANT ACTIVITY AND VITAMIN C OF SOME WILD FRUITS OF MANIPUR

Fruits are excellent sources of natural antioxidant and vitamins, especially ascorbic acid or vitamin C and fruits having very rich vitamin C are known to have very strong antioxidant properties. Vitamin C was estimated by using 2, 6-dichlorophenol indophenol reagent and antioxidant activity by DPPH (2, 2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl). The wild fruits of Manipur on analysis reveal that Emblica officinalist (amla) has very high amount of vitamin C (379.7 mg/100g) and simultaneously its antioxidant activity was also maximum (IC 50 181μg/mL) from among the selected samples. The present work is a brief screening of these wild fruits to explore their significant values as nutrition for mankind. KEY WORDS Antioxidant Vitamin C Wild fruits
Manfred Risk factors and prevention of aggressive behavior in children and adolescents

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Compensation and Rewards for Environmental Services in the Developing World: Framing Pan-Tropical Analysis and Comparison

This is the first of a series of papers that review the state of knowledge and practice regarding compensation and rewards for environmental services in the developing world. The paper begins with an assessment of the historical development of compensation and reward mechanisms within a broader context of changing approaches to nature conservation and environmental policy. The assessment shows that greater interest in compensation and reward mechanisms has emerged within a policy context of changing approaches to nature conservation and flexible multi-stakeholder approaches to environmental management. In the developing world, an even greater variety of perspectives has emerged on the opportunities and threats for using compensation and rewards for environmental services. Within that background, the paper clarifies key concepts—including the distinction between compensation and reward —and presents a conceptual framework for typifying and characterizing different types of mechanisms that link ecosystem stewards, ecosystem service beneficiaries, and intermediaries.
Multifunctional laser noninvasive spectroscopic system for medical diagnostics and some metrological provisions for that

This paper describes a new multifunctional laser noninvasive diagnostic system (MLNDS) for medicine. In a single hardware MLNDS combines 3 different in vivo laser diagnostic techniques: Laser Doppler Flowmetry, Laser Fluorescent Diagnostics and Reflectance Tissue Oximetry. All these methods together allow a doctor to evaluate more exactly and in vivo a functional condition of soft tissues, especially to study the finenesses of respiratory and blood microcirculation processes in a skin and mucosa. The complex complementary diagnostics turns out to be more powerful than a trivial sum of isolated one. To produce more precise measurements a number of problems of metrological providing for that have been studied as well as a set of simple, reproducible and photostable calibration gauges with tissue-like optical properties has been created.
Agricultural Land Allocation to the Major Crops through Linear Programming Model

Linear Programming technique is applied to determine the optimum land allocation to fourteen major crops using agriculture data with respect to various factors like land utilization, labour in mandays, seeds, fertilizes, yields for crops for the period 2010 -2011. The problem is solved by LINDO software. The study is carried out in the Patan district of Gujarat, India. The aim of the study is to get more production there for more profit for the marginal and small farm holders. The proposed linear programming model is appropriate for finding the optimal land allocation to the major crops of the study area.
Purification and crystallization of the two major coat proteins of bacteriophage P23-77 for x-ray crystallography

Knowledge of virus protein structures can shed light to various questions about the evolutionary origin and function of viruses. Prevailing method for structural analysis of biological macromolecules is X-ray crystallography. The method has demanding requirements, since the target protein has to be highly concentrated, pure and crystallized under the exact correct conditions to produce diffracting crystals. In this study we expressed and purified VP16 (20 kDa) and VP17 (32 kDa), the two major coat proteins of bacteriophage P2377. Protein VP16 was also crystallized. P23-77 is a tailless bacteriophage infecting high temperature extremophile bacterium Thermus thermophilus. The virus has an icosahedral capsid consisting mainly of VP16 and VP17, and a circular dsDNA genome enclosed by an internal lipid membrane. P23-77 was discovered in 2005 from the hot springs of New Zealand, and has since been found to exhibit surprising reminiscence to other viruses. Most notably, P23-77 utilizes an ATPase similar to the PRD1-adenoviral lineage and has capsomer structure much alike that of an archaeal virus SH1. None of the proteins of P23-77 have been purified or crystallized before. The proteins composing the viral coat are of special interest because their structures are most likely to be conserved and thus of evolutionary value. Given the similarities between P23-77 and other viruses, it is suggested that P23-77 could represent an unknown ancestral branch to the diverse double β-barrel lineage of viruses. VP16 and VP17 were expressed as recombinant proteins in Escherichia coli. The proteins were purified using ion exchangeand size exclusion chromatography. Concentrated extract (7 mg/ml) of purified native VP16 was deployed for crystallization with hanging drop vapor diffusion technique. VP16 builds cuboid crystals when the crystallizing conditions contain polyethylene glycol in low concentrations.
ANALISIS KONSEPSI SISWA KONSEP DINAMIKA GERAK

Abstract This research is a kind of qualitative descriptive research that aims to determine the level of misconception and understanding of students' concepts on the subject of motion dynamics in one of the State High Schools in West Aceh District Day. This study was conducted on 40 students of class XII majoring in Natural Sciences with sampling techniques carried out by purposive random. Data retrieval is done by means of diagnostic tests and interviews, to distinguish students who experience misconceptions, misconceptions, and concepts that are in accordance with scientific concepts used the CRI (Certain Respondent Index) method. The results showed that the average level of physics misconception of students in the concept of style was 41.64%, 18.36% answers were in accordance with scientific concepts, and as many as 40% of students lacked knowledge. From the results of the study it can be said that the average level of physical misconception of students is high compared to the answers of students who answer questions according to scientific concepts. The high percentage of students who experience misconceptions and students who lack knowledge shows that students' conceptual understanding is still very low. It is expected that the teachers and lecturers can analyze the students' initial conception so that misconceptions can be overcome from the beginning. Kata kunci: Miskonsepsi, Dinamika Gerak, Certain Responden Index)
Overlapping Communication with Computation in MPI Applications

In High Performance Computing (HPC), minimizing communication overhead is one of the most important goals in order to get high performance. This is more than ever important on exascale platforms, where there will be a much higher degree of parallelism compared to petascale platforms, resulting in increased communication overhead with considerable impact on application execution time and energy expenses. A good strategy for containing this overhead is to hide communication costs by overlapping them with computation. Despite the increasing interest in achieving computation/communication overlapping, details about the reasons that prevent it from succeeding are not easy to find, leading to confusion and poor application optimization. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) library, a de-facto standard in the HPC world, has always provided non-blocking communication routines able, in theory, to achieve communication/computation overlapping. Unfortunately, several factors related with the MPI independent progress and offload capability of the underlying network, make this overlap hard do achieve. With the introduction of one-sided communication routines, providing high quality MPI implementations, able to progress communication independently, is becoming as important as providing low latency and high bandwidth communication. In this paper, we gather the most significant contributions about computation/communication overlapping and provide technical explanation of how such overlap can be achieved on modern supercomputers.
Physiological and developmental responses to temperature by the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis

Environmental temperature and an organism's ability to respond to it are critical determinants of the geographic distribution of species. Nematostella vectensis is a burrowing sea anemone that inhabits estuaries along the Atlantic coast of North America from Nova Scotia (45° N) to Georgia (31° N). Like other estuarine species, N. vectensis is exposed to large daily (>20°C) and seasonal (>25°C) fluctuations in temperature, requiring wide temperature tolerances. At the same time, the natural distribution of this species spans a pronounced thermal cline, which may promote the evolution of different temperature optima and tolerances in populations. We tested the thermal tolerance of N. vectensis adult and developmental stages, which showed all life cycle stages had critical temperatures within 1°C (lethal temperature 39.5 to 40.5°C). When tem- perature tolerance values were compared with recorded field data, N. vectensis is living in envi- ronments very close to their physiological limit. We utilized common garden experiments (13, 21, and 29°C) to test for temperature-specific growth and regeneration rates in N. vectensis from dif- ferent portions of this species' range. Temperature had a significant effect on growth and regen- eration rate in all clonal lines, with a significant negative relationship between latitude of origin and growth rate at 29°C. Individuals from higher latitudes did not exhibit higher growth rates at cooler temperatures. Together, our results show a combination of broad thermal tolerances for developmental and adult stages and evidence for local adaptation to higher temperatures in pop- ulations living in lower latitude locations that would be physiologically compromised with future warming.