Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Colonization and population growth of Yellow‐legged Gull Larus cachinnans in southeastern Poland: causes and influence on native species

The Yellow-legged Gull Larus cachinnans was first recorded in Poland in the 1980s. We analysed the probable factors responsible for its successful colonization of new areas. We also expected that such a large species should affect populations of other colonial waterbirds. We studied the breeding and feeding ecology in the largest inland colony of the Yellowlegged Gull in Poland, located in a sedimentation basin near Tarnow (southeastern Poland). The first breeding pair was recorded in 1992 and the population reached 177 pairs in 2001. The population growth rate in this colony, of about 58% per year, fits an exponential model. Nine localities with breeding pairs have been found recently in southern Poland and we now estimate the total population size to be 200‐250 pairs. The large clutch size, and high hatching and breeding success in the Tarnow colony suggest that food was plentiful. Food items were frequently found at the nests. Fish, mainly Carp Cyprinus carpio , were the predominant food items delivered to chicks; however, there was more refuse brought to nests during the incubation stage. Immigration probably caused the growth of the colony studied, although our calculations have shown that natal productivity alone is sufficient to maintain this population. The study showed that the growing population of Yellow-legged Gull might cause considerable reduction in the population sizes of some of the native waterbird species. Many hypotheses attempt to explain the range size and distribution of species (Lawton 1993, Brown et al . 1996, Gaston 1996, Kirkpatrick & Barton 1997, Sagarin & Gaines 2002). It is believed that populations in the centre of the range occupy habitat of better quality and have a higher intrinsic rate of growth than those at the range margin (Lawton 1993). However, as populations of some species have increased rapidly, others have become vulnerable to extinction, and this is often associated with boundary range changes. Finding the factors that affect these changes is important in understanding the processes occurring in populations at a species’ geographical boundary; this may be crucial for predicting the effects of population growth in invasive species, and may be
New Aryl-1,3-thiazole-4-carbohydrazides, Their 1,3,4-Oxadiazole-2- thione, 1,2,4-Triazole, Isatin-3-ylidene and Carboxamide Derivatives. Synthesis and Anti-HIV Activity

A series of isatin-3-ylidene (6a-i) and arylthiazolyl-1,3,4-oxadiazole-2-thione derivatives 7a-i derived from arylthiazolyl carbohydrazide analogs 4a-i were synthesized. Analogously, coupling of 4f with various amino acid methyl esters in the presence of HOBt/DCC reagents afforded the carboxamide derivatives 9a-d. The newly synthesized compounds were assayed against HIV-1 and HIV-2 in MT-4 cells. All compounds are inactive, except compounds 9b and 9c which showed inhibition of HIV-1 with EC50 = 2:34 μg mL-1, and 1.12 μg mL-1 with therapeutic indexes (SI) of 9 and <1, respectively. Graphical Abstract New Aryl-1,3-thiazole-4-carbohydrazides, Their 1,3,4-Oxadiazole-2- thione, 1,2,4-Triazole, Isatin-3-ylidene and Carboxamide Derivatives. Synthesis and Anti-HIV Activity
Practical fog computing with seattle

In this paper we present Seattle, a practical and publicly accessible fog computing platform with a deployment history going back to 2009. Seattle's cross-platform portable sandbox implementation tackles the widely-recognized issue of node heterogeneity. Its componentized architecture supports a number of approaches to operating a Seattle-based fog system, from isolated, standalone and peer-to-peer operations, to full-fledged provisioning by a dedicated operator, or federations of many operators. Seattle's components and interfaces are designed for compatibility and reuse, and may be aligned with existing trust boundaries between different stakeholders. Seattle comprises implementations of all components discussed in this paper. Its free, open-source software stack has been used for teaching and research; outside groups have used existing Seattle components and constructed new components with compatible interfaces in order to adapt the platform to their needs.
Límites de la regulación: competencia y oportunismo

En las paginas que siguen el lector tendra acceso a un analisis profundo de dos limites a ser tomados en cuenta al momento de propugnar modificaciones en las reglas de regulacion y las funciones de los organismos reguladores: la competencia y el oportunismo.Ambos factores son piezas claves para determinar el grado de eficiencia de los cambios propuestos y asi evaluar su capacidad de generar bienestar social ysalvaguardar el interes publico, a traves de decisiones equilibradas que no afecten significativamente a los consumidores ni a las empresas involucradas.
Demystifying the Role of a State Ownership in Corporate Governance and Firm Performance: Evidence from the Manufacturing Sector in Malaysia

The aim of this research is to examine the role of state ownership in corporate governance and firm performance. We employed ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares regressions to analyze the effects of state ownership on firm performance. We go beyond existing research on state ownership by carefully disentangle investment objectives of state-controlled financial institutions. Such state ownership can be classified as profit-oriented and non-profit-oriented, in which the former consider return on investment to be the primary investment objective, whereas the latter prioritizes socio-economic development. We found that profit-oriented state ownership is an effective corporate governance mechanism and provides political patronage to the firm in the form of firm’s specific resources and credit financing. Although nonprofit-oriented state ownership firms also receive similar political patronage, they tend to be associated with inefficiencies such as the free-rider problems, bureaucracies and political intervention in firm management. We conclude that state ownership consists of heterogeneous entities with respect to corporate governance and firm performance.
Structural study of the coherent dehydration of wadsleyite

Abstract The coherent dehydration of pure-Mg wadsleyite has been investigated by single-crystal X‑ray diffraction at high temperature and room pressure. Hydrous wadsleyite with 2.8 wt% H2O has monoclinic unit-cell parameters of a = 5.6693(4), b = 11.571(1), c = 8.2407(5) Å, b = 90.209(3)°, and V = 540.59(7) Å3. Dehydration begins at 635 K with an abrupt increase in the a-axis and decrease in b. After dehydration is complete, the dehydrated sample is orthorhombic with a = 5.6995(3), b = 11.4589(8), c = 8.2556(5) Å, and V = 539.17(6) Å3 at ambient conditions. Atom position and displacement parameters have been refined for both hydrous and dehydrated wadsleyite samples from intensity measurements conducted at high temperatures. The most significant changes during dehydration are systematic decreases in M2-O1 and M3-O1 bond lengths. After dehydration, M2-O1 and M3-O1 bonds decrease by 3% and 2.5%, respectively. While the length changes of the other M-O bonds are no more than 1%, consistent with the hydration mechanism being protonation of O1. For the monoclinic structure, the average thermal expansion coefficient is 38.4(3) × 10-6 K-1 before dehydration and 28.1(8) × 10-6 K-1 for the dehydrated sample. The volumetric thermal expansion coefficients for MgO6 octahedra in the hydrous sample, a0(V), are 36(4), 41(4), 49(5), and 35(4) (10-6 K-1) for M1, M2, M3A, and M3B, respectively. In the dehydrated sample, they are 35(5), 34(4), and 36(2) (10-6 K-1) for M1, M2, and M3, respectively. No significant thermal expansion is observed for SiO4 tetrahedra of either the hydrous or dehydrated sample.
ANTI-PYRETIC ACTIVITY OF ETHANOLIC EXTRACT OF MERREMIA EMARGINATA (BURM. F) HALLIER F. IN RAT

Pyrexia is the increase of body temperature than the normal due to metabolic disturbances. Antipyretic drugs are widely used in the treatement of fever and pain. But the greatest disadvantage in presently available synthetic drugs is that they cause gastrointestinal irritation and reappearance of symptoms after discontinuation. Merremia emarginata (Burm. f) Hallier f. (Convolvulaceae) is a perennial, much branched herb. In the indigenous system of medicine, Merremia emarginata has been claimed to be useful for cough, headache, neuralgia, rheumatism, diuretic, treatment of inflammation, epilepsy, troubles of nose etc. The ethanolic extract of the plant was prepared and screened for antipyretic activity. The acute toxicity studies also carried out. pyrexia was induced using cow’s milk 2ml/kg i.p. The test drug M.emarginata at a dose of 200mg/kg i.p. possessed significant antipyretic activity. The activity was very comparable to standard drug paracetamol 150 mg/kg i.p.
Flexible 3P4W system using UPQC with combination of SRF and P-Q theory based control strategy

In this paper a three-phase four-wire (3P4W) unified power quality conditioner (UPQC) under distorted load conditions, the power quality problems are compensate through a new synchronous reference frame (SRF) and hysteresis controller based control method. The proposed UPQC system can improve the power quality at the point of common coupling (PCC). The simulation results based on MATLAB Simulink are discussed in detail to support the SRF and hysteresis controller based control method presented in the paper.
tScale: A Contention-Aware Multithreaded Framework for Multicore Multiprocessor Systems

On the multicore and multiprocessor system, multithreaded applications which are kernel-intensive usually suffer from two kinds of performance issues, first one is frequent context switch between kernel/user mode. Another one is lock contention caused by non-scalable synchronization primitives (e.g., ticket spin lock) and may even result in performance degradation under heavy contention level. Unfortunately, current Linux threading model (i.e., NPTL) which adopts exception-based system call mechanism fails to reduce the excessive system call cost. Besides, conventional threading scheduler which is unconscious of lock contention also lacks the ability to limit the number of system-wide contending parallel threads. Both of them impede the application's throughput increment and may lead to the performance breakdown eventually. In this paper we propose a contention-aware threading framework to alleviate these two problems. Our proposed design is composed of two tightly contected components: system call batching via user-level thread library and a contention-aware scheduler based on non-work-conserving scheduling policy. The user-level threading library gathers multiple system call invocations transparently and deliverys these requests to the underlaying kernel working threads. Therefore, tScale improves application performance by reducing massive context switch cost. Then through continuing monitoring system-wide lock contention level and application's total throughput increment, tScale can quickly adjust the number of contending threads in order to sustain the maximum throughput. The prototype system is implemented on Linux 3.18. 30 and Glibc 2.23. In microbenchmarks on a 32-core machine, experiment results show that our approach can not only improve the application throughput by up to 20% but also address the lock contention efficiently.
On the potentials of passive, multistatic, low frequency radars to counter stealth and detect low flying targets

The potentials of passive, multi-static radars as covert sensors for the detection of low flying, stealth air targets are illustrated by multi-static RCS analysis, coverage simulations for low flight levels and measurement results obtained with an experimental passive radar using digital audio broadcast signals (DAB). The measurement sensor is described and future perspectives are pointed out.
Performance analysis of Union and CoW File Systems with Docker

One of the biggest challenges that we face today in file systems is balancing performance, durability and consistency. With data growing beyond what was anticipated a decade ago, we need solutions and better file system. The new applications, platforms and systems currently built depend heavily on the file system for performance. One of such new platform is Docker, which is an open source project that enables Linux applications to be packaged as containers without typical overheads of virtual machines. This paper gives performance analysis and comparison of a file systems called as Unioning File Systems and Copy-onwrite File Systems. These file systems are used to provide core features of Docker storage. Docker follows a pluggable architecture which allows user to select the storage driver according to their need. This paper will give a clear picture and help the users in selecting the Docker storage driver according to the use case they are planning to implement in production.
Development of an online radiative module for the computation of aerosol optical properties in 3-D atmospheric models: validation during the EUCAARI campaign

Obtaining a good description of aerosol optical properties for a physically and chemically complex evolving aerosol is computationally very expensive at present. The goal of this work is to propose a new numerical module computing the optical properties for complex aerosol particles at low numerical cost so that it can be implemented in atmospheric models. This method aims to compute the optical properties online as a function of a given complex refractive index deduced from the aerosol chemical composition and the size parameters corresponding to the particles. The construction of look-up tables from the imaginary and the real part of the complex refractive index and size parameters will also be explained. This approach is validated for observations acquired during the EUCAARI (European integrated project on aerosol cloud climate air quality interactions) campaign on the Cabauw tower during May 2008 and its computing cost is also estimated. These comparisons show that the module manages to reproduce the scattering and absorbing behaviour of the aerosol during most of the fifteen-day period of observation with a very cheap computationally cost.
A game theoretic malicious nodes detection model in MANETs

Network security will face tougher challenges for MANETs due to emerging purposive strategic attacks conducted by smart malicious nodes. All these purposive strategic attacks eventually run out of the throughput which results in network crashes. In this paper, we have proposed a two-level dynamic Bayesian game model to recognize these purposive strategic attacks in MANETs and establish a malicious nodes detection system isolating such attacks. The simulation results have demonstrated that the detection method can effectively enhance cooperation performance and maintain packet forwarding rate under the purposive strategic attacks. Besides, through two-level decision, the system performs well in reducing the missing/false alarming rate, especially suitable for large proportion of malicious nodes in MANETs.
Chapter 1 History of Social Psychology : Insights , Challenges , and Contributions to Theory and Application

In his classic Handbook of Social Psychology chapter, Jones (1985) offered a particularly comprehensive account of five decades of social psychology, beginning with the late 1930s. His treatment of the contributions of Kurt Lewin, whom he rightly identified as the most important shaper of modern experimental social psychology—and the groundbreaking work of Leon Festinger, whose discrepancy reduction model (borrowed from Lewin’s tension-system concept) was applied to both pressures toward uniformity within groups and consonant versus dissonant cognitions of actors—remains essential reading for aspiring researchers who want to understand what social psychologists study, how they study it, and the “middlerange” level of theorizing they find most comfortable. Jones also offered balanced assessments of the most provocative debates that had taken place within the field and a clear-eyed account of the waxing and waning of specific research programs (which he characterized as “bandwagons” and “sinking ships”). Although we generally refrain from summarizing these debates and contributions, we do try to build upon them—not only with some updating, but also with further consideration of the challenges confronting our discipline, and the various ways in which those challenges have been met. Any history of a field of study reflects particular values and tastes. Ours include a fondness for studies that employ consequential behavioral measures and an appreciation of social psychology’s potential to speak to applied problems in the real world. In short, this chapter represents a history, rather than the history of social psychology, an account of contributions, problems, insights, and events seen through the particular interpretive lenses of its authors. The chapter includes five sections, each of which includes various subsections:
9 Insulin Therapy and Hypoglycemia-Present and Future

Over the last few decades the prevalence of diabetes has dramatically grown in most regions of the world. In 2010, 285 million people had diabetes and it is estimated that the number will increase to 438 million in 2030 (1). About 5-10% of them have type 1 diabetes. Both types of diabetes are characterized by a progressive decline of pancreatic beta cell function and mass. In type 1 diabetes, the chronic autoimmune process causes the selective destruction of insulin-producing beta cells by the auto-reactive T cells in genetically predisposed individuals. There is a continuous loss of functional C-peptide responses and at the time of clinical presentation the beta cell mass is reduced by 70–90 %, as suggested by anatomic studies (2, 3). This results in an inability to secrete sufficient amounts of insulin and loss of metabolic control. As a consequence, exogenous insulin replacement in the form of multiple subcutaneous injections or continuous subcutaneous insulin infusions (CSII) is essential for patients with type 1 diabetes. It prevents death from acute metabolic complications and assures normal growth and development, maintenance of normoglycemia and prevention of end-organ complications. Type 2 diabetes results from an entirely different pathophysiological process. It is characterized by an increased resistance to insulin action in the peripheral tissues with decreased glucose uptake and enhanced hepatic glucose output associated with impaired insulin-secretory capacity caused by a progressive decline of beta cell function over time. Studies indicate a substantial loss of beta cell mass (of about 25-60 %) by the time of diagnosis, mainly secondary to increased apoptosis and impaired augmentation of cell mass through neogenesis (4, 5). The clinical onset is due to the reduction of beta cell mass per se and to a concomitant dysfunction of residual beta cells (6, 7). The beta cell failure, which seems to occur much earlier during the natural history of the disease than previously thought, results in significant insulin deficiency and by then, insulin administration is required in order to achieve glycemic control (8, 9).
THE ALHAMBRA SURVEY: EVOLUTION OF GALAXY SPECTRAL SEGREGATION

We study the clustering of galaxies as a function of spectral type and redshift in the range 0.35 < z < 1.1 using data from the Advanced Large Homogeneous Area Medium Band Redshift Astronomical (ALHAMBRA) survey. The data cover 2.381 deg2 in 7 fields, after applying a detailed angular selection mask, with accurate photometric redshifts [ &sgr; z < 0.014 ( 1 + z ) ] ? > down to IAB < 24. From this catalog we draw five fixed number density redshift-limited bins. We estimate the clustering evolution for two different spectral populations selected using the ALHAMBRA-based photometric templates: quiescent and star-forming galaxies. For each sample we measure the real-space clustering using the projected correlation function. Our calculations are performed over the range [0.03, 10.0] h−1 Mpc, allowing us to find a steeper trend for r p ≲ 0.2 h − 1 ? > Mpc, which is especially clear for star-forming galaxies. Our analysis also shows a clear early differentiation in the clustering properties of both populations: star-forming galaxies show weaker clustering with evolution in the correlation length over the analyzed redshift range, while quiescent galaxies show stronger clustering already at high redshifts and no appreciable evolution. We also perform the bias calculation where similar segregation is found, but now it is among the quiescent galaxies where a growing evolution with redshift is clearer (abrigatted). These findings clearly corroborate the well-known color–density relation, confirming that quiescent galaxies are mainly located in dark matter halos that are more massive than those typically populated by star-forming galaxies.
Optimized structure for next-to-next balancing of series-connected lithium-ion cells

Voltage balancing between series-connected cells of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries is important for battery life, autonomy and security. Active balancing is the designated choice for applications that are sensitive to energy losses. A well-known next-to-next balancing technique is presented and its design and operating limitations are analyzed. This paper then presents a new technique for next-to-next balancing that improves on the conventional technique by offering better performances while being simpler to implement. Experimental results show an important reduction of the size of the magnetic coupler while maintaining efficiency at a level above 90%.
Membrane-bound Proline Dehydrogenase from Escherichia coli

Proline dehydrogenase was solubilized from Escherichia coli membranes and purified to near homogeneity. A value of 124,000 was determined for the molecular weight of the reduced, denatured protein by gel electrophoresis in the presence of sodium dodecyl sulfate. The native enzyme as isolated may exist as a dimer since estimates of 260,000 and 200,000 were obtained for the molecular weight by gel filtration and glycerol gradient centrifugation, respectively. The preparation contained about 0.24 eq of FAD/polypeptide chain. Additional FAD was required to achieve a maximal reaction velocity. The product of the reaction catalyzed by the purified enzyme was identified as A’-pyrroline-5-carboxylate. Its generation was more than 99% dependent on an artificial electron transport system consisting of phenazine methosulfate and p-iodonitrotetrazolium. Although the crude membrane fraction oxidized proline to glutamate in the presence of FAD, NAD, and electron acceptors, the isolated enzyme yielded only A’-pyrroline-5-carboxylate under identical conditions. The enzyme catalyzed oxidation of hydroxy-L-proline at a rate of 3% that found for proline, whereas D-prOlint? , 17 common L-amino acids, and L-azetidine-2-carboxylate did not function as substrates, although the latter was a competitive inhibitor (Ki, 20 mM). L-Lactate (Ki, 1.4 mM), o-lactate (Ki, 2.1 mM), and pyruvate (Ki, 3.3 mM) were also competitive inhibitors which were not oxidized, whereas succinate was neither an inhibitor nor a substrate. Rabbit antibody developed against the purified enzyme was used in a competition radioimmunoassay to demonstrate correlation of induced enzyme activity with de nouo formation of competing antigen. The purified enzyme was considerably more sensitive to inhibition by antibody than was the membrane-bound activity.