Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Controls Over Foliar N:P Ratios in Tropical Rain Forests

Correlations between foliar nutrient concentrations and soil nutrient availability have been found in multiple ecosystems. These relationships have led to the use of foliar nutrients as an index of nutrient status and to the prediction of broadscale patterns in ecosystem processes. More recently, a growing interest in ecological stoichiometry has fueled multiple analyses of foliar nitrogen : phosphorus (N:P) ratios within and across ecosystems. These studies have observed that N:P values are generally elevated in tropical forests when compared to higher latitude ecosystems, adding weight to a common belief that tropical forests are generally N rich and P poor. However, while these broad generalizations may have merit, their simplicity masks the enormous environmental heterogeneity that exists within the tropics; such variation includes large ranges in soil fertility and climate, as well as the highest plant species diversity of any biome. Here we present original data on foliar N and P concentrations from 150 mature canopy tree species in Costa Rica and Brazil, and combine those data with a comprehensive new literature synthesis to explore the major sources of variation in foliar N:P values within the tropics. We found no relationship between N:P ratios and either latitude or mean annual precipitation within the tropics alone. There is, however, evidence of seasonal controls; in our Costa Rica sites, foliar N:P values differed by 25% between wet and dry seasons. The N:P ratios do vary with soil P availability and/or soil order, but there is substantial overlap across coarse divisions in soil type, and perhaps the most striking feature of the data set is variation at the species level. Taken as a whole, our results imply that the dominant influence on foliar N:P ratios in the tropics is species variability and that, unlike marine systems and perhaps many other terrestrial biomes, the N:P stoichiometry of tropical forests is not well constrained. Thus any use of N:P ratios in the tropics to infer larger-scale ecosystem processes must comprehensively account for the diversity of any given site and recognize the broad range in nutrient requirements, even at the local scale.
Salary Increase And Employee Productivity In Cement Manufacturing Companies In South-South, Nigeria

The organizational approach on salary increase has been a tool that triggers better employee performance in any given manufacturing organization that operates in a dynamic and competitive environment. The study examined the extent to which salary increase as independent variable (x) influences employee productivity in cement manufacturing firms in South-South, Nigeria. A study adopted survey design and questionnaire were distributed. A sample size of 310 was determined from a population of 1,381 staff, using Taro Yamane sample size determination formula. The questionnaires collated were analyzed using Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient. Findings revealed that salary increase has significant relationship with employee productivity in cement manufacturing firms in South-South, Nigeria. Further findings revealed that employees are motivated by monetary rewards and they are induced to expend greater effort in a task if those efforts are rewarded directly through performance-related pay. It was concluded that employee salary should be determined and increase based on productivity of the employee as this will help to create competition among the employees to attain the set goals of the firm. The study therefore recommended that cement manufacturing firms in South-South, Nigeria should improve in the salary level given to employees and increase employee salary as at when due in order to be more productive. Key word: Salary increase, employee productivity, employee motivation -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date of Submission: 04-10-2018 Date of acceptance: 19-10-2018 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Glaucoma Detection Using Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Texture Features

The retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) is one of the most affected parts of the eye retina by glaucoma disease. Progression of this disease results in RNFL texture changes and can be observed from the fundus images and RNFL thickness; thus, the glaucoma is one of the ocular diseases contributing to most of the blindness worldwide. There are increasing demands for medical image–based computer-aided diagnosis system based on fundus image for glaucoma detection. Thus, the RNFL thickness changes can be assessed by optical coherence tomography. However, an examination using the optical coherence tomography device is rather expensive and still not widely available in resource-poor countries. On the other hand, a fundus camera is a fundamental diagnostic device and can be used for diagnosing other diseases. In this article, we introduce glaucoma detection using fundus images. This algorithm uses texture analysis based on co-occurrence matrix and Tamara features. The texture measures are extracted from the RNFL segmented part. The method was tested on a set of 158 images composed of 118 healthy retina images and 40 glaucomatous images and achieved an area under the curve of 93% and accuracy of 89.5%.
Non-destructive Characterization of Fibre Reinforced Thermoplastic Components with embedded Piezoceramic Modules

Fibre-reinforced polymers (FRP) show a high potential for innovative function-integrating lightweight constructions. In the case of textile-reinforced composites the textile structure, the layered build-up, and the associated specific production processes offer the possibility for the integration of functional elements, like sensors, actuators or even electronic circuit boards [1, 2]. This integration can be done already during the manufacturing process of the composite structures. Such components can be used for e.g. ultrasonic based radiation or measuring tasks, condition monitoring or structural health monitoring [3, 4]. The contribution presents a manufacturing technology for the integration of piezoceramic modules in fibre-reinforced thermoplastic parts ready for series production. In regard to the assessment of the integration quality and the damage of the piezoceramic modules non-destructive testing methods like computed tomography and ultrasonic microscopy were used. In the case of acoustic microscopy, a novel 3D-scanning measuring system is introduced, which enables the scanning of curved surface structures. Commercial acoustic microscopes are only designed for the investigation of plane surfaces. In order to achieve sufficient results in the image, the ultrasound transducer axis has to be orientated orthogonally to the specimen surface for every scan position [5]. For this purpose, a 6DoF hexapod robot system was used to perform a matched angle adjustment. Acoustic microscopy is suitable for high-density materials and provides 3D data of the investigated area. The results show that a precise detection of cracks in the piezoceramic layers, trapped air between the fibre reinforced composite and the piezoceramic modules as well as the localization of conductive paths and electrodes are possible. Furthermore, the ultrasound imaging data show a good accordance to those of the computed tomography. REFERENCES [1] Dumstorff, G. ; Paul, S. ; Lang, W. : Integration without disruption: The basic challenge of sensor integration. Sens. J. IEEE 2014, 14, 2102–2111 [2] Zysset, C. ; Kinkeldei, T.W. ; Münzenrieder, N. ; Cherenack, K. ; Tröster, G. : Integration method for electronics in woven textiles. Compon. Packag. Manuf. Technol. IEEE Trans. 2012, 2, 1107–1117 [3] Holeczek, K. ; Starke, E. ; Winkler, A. ; Dannemann, M. ; Modler, N. : Numerical and Experimental Characterization of Fiber-Reinforced Thermoplastic Composite Structures with Embedded Piezoelectric Sensor-Actuator Arrays for Ultrasonic Applications. Appl. Sci. 2016, 6, 55; doi:10.3390/app6020055 [4] Kostka, P.; Holeczek, K. ; Hufenbach, W. : Structure-integrated active damping system: Integral strain-based design strategy for the optimal placement of functional elements. Int. J. Compos. Mater. 2013, 3, 53–58 [5] Wüst, M. ; Eisenhart, J.; Rief, A. ; Rupitsch, S.J.: System for acoustic microscopy measurements of curved structures. tm – Technisches Messen, vol. 84, iss. 3/2017
Biodegradable Implants in Orthopaedics and Traumatology

Biodegradable implants are an alternative to metallic implants and have the advantage of not being necessary to remove once the fracture has healed. Twenty-two patients with fractures were treated with biodegradable implants. There were osteolysis in eleven patients; however, no serious complication was encountered. Although biodegradable implants are expensive, a second surgical procedure to remove the implants is not necessary, relieving the patient of the related costs and risks.
The effect of season, muscle and breed on total cholesterol, β-carotene and vitamin E contents in Alentejana, Arouquesa, Barrosã and Mertolenga bovine breeds reared under the PDO certification system

The objective of this study was to assess the effect of season, breed and muscle on total cholesterol and major lipid-soluble antioxidants (α-tocopherol, γ-tocopherol and β-carotene) contents. This study embraces 4 Portuguese bovine native breeds slaughtered as beef (Alentejana and Mertolenga) and veal (Arouquesa and Barrosã), all raised in accordance with the certification of Protected Denomination of Origin (PDO). Sampling was performed in two different seasons (spring and autumn), each animal was sampled in 3 muscles (longissimus thoracis, longissimus lumborum and semitendinosus). The total cholesterol content ranged between 37.1-52.8 mg/100 g of meat and showed significant differences between different breeds, different muscles and even in the same breed slaughtered at different seasons. Arouquesa veal was the only breed associated with seasonal significant differences of both α-tocopherol and β-carotene, and it was also the breed displaying the highest values of α-tocopherol and β-carotene (5.2 and 0.26 μg/g of meat, respectively) which were significantly higher than the contents displayed by all other breeds. Arouquesa veal was the only meat displaying, in both seasons, an α-tocopherol content above the threshold necessary to delay lipid and myoglobin oxidation (3.5 μg/g of meat). Conversely, and despite the absence of significant seasonal differences, the meat α-tocopherol content of Mertolenga and Barrosã was below the threshold in one season, while the α-tocopherol content of Alentejana breed was below the threshold in both seasons (averaging 1.9 μg/g of meat). Therefore, Arouquesa veal was the only breed displaying the essential antioxidant protection to preserve meat nutritional quality.
Development and Fabrication of a Microfuidic Device for Future Applications in Cell Injection Experiments

1 Sammanfattning på svenska . 2 Acknowledgements . 3 Abbreviations . 4 1. Objectives . 6 2. Background to the field . 7 3. Fabrication and characterization tools . 9 3.1 Nanowire and III-V material growth . 9 3.2 Patterning techniques . 9 3.3 Deposition of thin films . 10 3.4 Etching techniques . 12 3.5 Soft Lithography . 13 3.6 Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) . 14 3.7 Profilometry. 14 3.8 Fluorescence microscopy . 14 3.9 COMSOL modeling. 15 4 Device fabrication and testing . 16 4.1 Overview of the fluidic device . 16 4.2 Fabrication Method . 17 4.3 Fluidic tests . 20 5 Results . 22 5.1 Fluidic device . 22 5.2 Fluidic tests . 28 5.3 COMSOL . 29 6 Discussion . 30 7 Conclusion . 31 8 Summary. 31 9 References . 32 10 Article.34
Enroute flight planning: Evaluating design concepts for the development of cooperative problem-solving concepts

The goals of this research were to develop design concepts to support the task of enroute flight planning. And within this context, to explore and evaluate general design concepts and principles to guide the development of cooperative problem solving systems. A detailed model is to be developed of the cognitive processes involved in flight planning. Included in this model will be the identification of individual differences of subjects. Of particular interest will be differences between pilots and dispatchers. The effect will be studied of the effect on performance of tools that support planning at different levels of abstraction. In order to conduct this research, the Flight Planning Testbed (FPT) was developed, a fully functional testbed environment for studying advanced design concepts for tools to aid in flight planning.
A modified hybrid algorithm for solving a composite minimization problem in Banach spaces

The purpose of this paper is to use a modified hybrid algorithm for finding a minimizer of a non-smooth composite minimization problem in Banach spaces. Without the assumptions that the potential function is Fréchet differentiable and its gradient is L-Lipschitz continuous, we prove that the iterative sequence generated by the hybrid algorithm converges strongly to a minimizer of the composite optimization problem in Banach spaces.
Isokinetic profile of patient with anterior cruciate ligament tear

The objective of this study was to analyze the performance of knee muscles in the affected and nonaffected sides of ACL patients as well as with healthy asymptomatic subjects. Fifty-four males, 27 with asymptomatic knees and 27 patients with tear in ACL were included in the study. Subjects performed concentric knee extension and flexion efforts at 60°/s and 180°/s on a Biodex isokinetic dynamometer. Isokinetic peak torque, angle to peak moment of quadriceps (Q) and hamstring (H), and hamstrings/quadriceps ratio (HQR) were measured. There was a significant decline in the mean strength of Q at 60°/s for the involved side compared with either the uninvolved side or with that of the healthy subjects, but not in H. There was also a significant decrease in mean Q strength at 180°/s of the involved side of ACL patients compared with the healthy young males. There was a significant difference in mean angle to peak moment of Q at 180°/s in the healthy group compared with the involved side of the patients and a significant difference for the same parameter in H at 60°/s in the involved compared with the healthy group and uninvolved sides of the ACL patients. There was no significant difference in hamstrings/quadriceps ratio between the groups. It was concluded that the effect of ACL tear on H strength is significantly less than that on the Q one year post-injury. Angle to peak moment offers original and practical information for the determination of individual performance in post ACL injury patients.
SANDRIANA DOS RAMOS SILVA ESTUDO COMPARATIVO DA REGIÃO Fc DE ANTICORPOS MURINOS IgG1

SILVA, S.R. Comparative study of the Fc region from murine IgG1 anaphylactic and non anaphylactic antibodies. 2010. 137 p. Ph.D. Thesis (Immunology) – Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2010. It is well established that the glycosylation process is essential for the structural conformation and effector function of the antibodies. However, it is quite clear how differences in the carbohydrates attached to the antibodies may interfere with their biological activities. It was previously reported that murine IgG1 antibodies can be divided into anaphylactic or nonanaphylactic according to their ability to induce anaphylaxis. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the oligosaccharide chain N-linked to the IgG1 is essential for its conformation and biological activity. The objective of this work is to study structural differences between these subtypes of murine IgG1 that could determine their biological activity. The sequencing of the nucleotides encoding the CH2 and CH3 domains of these two subtypes of IgG1 showed 100% of homology in the Fc regions of these molecules. In contrast, the analysis of the carbohydrates N-linked to the IgG1 antibodies demonstrated higher sialic acid and fucose contents in the chain attached to the anaphylactic antibody than in the nonanaphylactic IgG1. However, the removal of sialic acid residues by enzymatic treatment of anaphylactic IgG1 antibody resulted in the abrogation of its ability to induce mast cells degranulation in vitro and anaphylactic reaction in vivo as observed to deglycosylated IgG1 antibody. On the other hand, the removal of fucose did not change the anaphylactic activity. The analysis by real time PCR of the gene expression of enzymes that are involved in the protein glycosylation showed lower gene expression of some glycosyltransferases, mainly sialyltransferases, in the hybridoma and B lymphocytes that produce the non-anaphylactic IgG1 compared to those verified in the hybridoma and B cells producer of the anaphylactic IgG1. Furthermore, it was verified lower enzymatic activity of sialyltransferases purified from the hybridoma producer of the non-anaphylactic IgG1 in relation to the hybridoma producer of the anaphylactic antibody. Together, these results prove that the ability of murine IgG1 to induce anaphylaxis is directly dependent of the sialic acid content in the carbohydrate core attached to the antibody Fc region. It is also strongly suggested that this higher sialylation observed in the anaphylactic IgG1 may be resultant of the higher gene expression and enzymatic activity of some sialyltransferases during the antibody synthesis.
Benefits of point-of-care testing in the Emergency Department

This article explores the potential benefits of pointof-care testing in the ED. Price and St. John provide a detailed description on how to approach four common aspects of point-of-care testing (POCT) in the ED, specifically, the challenges of adopting POCT, the impact of POCT on clinical decisions, the impact of POCT on operational decision making and outcomes and the impact of POCT on resource allocation decisions.
Research on virtual simulation design of mathematics education game based on web cloud architecture

The paper constructed the digital instructional game design framework of teaching based on Web cloud architecture. This study integrated the game design theory, instructional design theory and related theory of computational thinking, from the goal of learning, learner characteristics, tasks and game design processes such as learning situation, combining the teaching of digital game design, the process of thought and problem solving to build a digital game framework to promote the development of computational thinking. The paper presents the software design model of educational game. From the perspective of the software system design, based on this study, we propose the teaching game design framework to construct the teaching game of the software design mode, the game system is divided into game function and support module, provided the supporting for the development of educational games. The paper developed a digital teaching game for promoting the development of computational thinking. The experiment result shows the proposed method can improve the overall performance substantially.
Developing the use of satellite fishing Vessel Monitoring System data in spatial management. ICES CM 2004/Y:05

Fishing effort data, derived from Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data and overflight observations, were used to quantify the relative intensity of demersal trawling on different seabed habitats in UK parts of the Irish Sea, based on 100% coverage vector maps of coastal and offshore marine landscapes. VMS data are used throughout European waters to track the location of fishing vessels >24m in length using GPS, and contribute to the monitoring, control and surveillance of fisheries. This paper describes the processing methods of VMS data used to identify the locations where fishing activity (rather than steaming) occurs, and to calculate fishing effort distributions using kernel density estimation in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Complimentary data obtained from the observations of fishery protection aircraft were used to infer the distribution of the inshore fleets. Results suggest that vessel activity in the Irish Sea by >24m trawlers is most intense on extensive coarse sediment plains and in deep-water mud basins, and that some smaller features, particularly mud basins, sea mounds and gravel banks, are fished intensively by smaller vessels. The implications of these results for the selection and protection of habitats and species of nature conservation interest are discussed.
On the Error Rates of Space-time Codes for Millimeter-wave Communication

The Nakagami-m distribution captures better the multitude of fading scenarios experienced by millimeter-wave (mmWave) signals than the Rayleigh and Rician distributions. Moreover, mmWave signals are particularly sensitive to blockage. But, the widely accepted design criteria for space-time codes (STCs) were developed for the Rayleigh and Rician fading channels and underestimate the impact of blockage on the error rates. STCs designed based on such guidelines achieve suboptimal diversity and coding gains over the Nakagami-m fading channel. Hence, we derive tight upper and lower bounds on the diversity and coding gains of any STC over the Nakagami-m fading channel. We then identify necessary and sufficient properties of STCs that achieve the upper bounds, which leads to a fundamental trade-off between maximizing the diversity and coding gains, i.e., achieving the upper bound for one automatically leads to achieving the lower bound on the other. We also investigate the effect of blockage on the error rates using stochastic geometry. We show that blockage reduces the coding gain but not the diversity gain. Numerical simulations show that the STCs that satisfy that derived conditions achieve full diversity, whereas codes that are otherwise optimal for Rayleigh and Rician channels do not. Furthermore, in a typical indoor environment, blockage reduces the coding gain by 1.5 dB for BERs less than 10−3.
A FUZZY LOGIC REASONING BASED REAL TIME ENERGY PRICE REGULATION APPROACH FOR SMART GRIDS

Intelligent technologies have become pioneer force to provide flexible, dynamic and efficient energy generation and management. Thus, smart algorithms such as fuzzy logic, artificial neural network, machine learning, soft computing techniques are sole remedy against growing diverse and numerous distributed generations that make more complicated power system. Real time closed loop controlling requires energy price as a featured variable to procure supply demand equilibrium point for stable and reliable power system operation, where several dynamic models and estimation software are introduced in the literature. In this study, a fuzzy logic reasoning based price regulator (FLR-PR) is designed and simulated on MATLAB/Simulink environment using 2018 hourly data of a summer day taken from annual energy report of Turkey. Proposed model has been compared based on performance indexes to Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) price controller in the constituted simulation cases. FLR-PR tracks instant reference demand signal changes with minimum steady state error and fast transient response with respect to PID controller.
Functionality of the Release of the Real-Time Solver

This deliverable provides an overview of DPsim and its correspondent library. DPsim is a dynamic phasor solver for real-time simulation. The solver computes the solution of a network consisting of models defined in the dynamic phasor domain for every simulation step. This first version of the solver has been implemented in C++ and will be delivered as an open source solution. This deliverable describes the reference implementation of the solver along with the main algorithms adopted for the simulation and the models implemented in the framework. This deliverable also describes how the DPsim reference implementation is going to be shared among all the partners of the consortium.