Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
English Speakers Learning Spanish: Perception Issues Regarding Vowels and Stress

The present pilot study examines both the perception of Spanish vowels /a, e, o/ in word – final position and the perception of final and penultimate stress of words ending in those vowels by beginner American English learners of Spanish. Seventeen English speakers and seven native Spanish speakers participated in this study. The English speakers were exposed to 90 hours of Spanish lessons during a three–week course in Mar del Plata, Argentina, a Spanish speaking country. Participants’ perception was assessed by pretest and posttest, which consisted of identification tasks with nonce words. The study yielded these results: (a) native English-speaking participants perceived Spanish vowels like native Spanish-speaking participants after a three-week language course; (b) Initially, English speakers received lower scores in the perception of stress than did Spanish speakers who served as a comparison (control) group; c) Three weeks after exposure to the language, the English speaking students performed like Spanish speakers in the perception of penultimate stress but not in the perception of final stress. The article concludes that vowel perception is not a problem for English speakers learning Spanish while the perception of stress contrasts is a difficult challenge. More emphasis should be given to stress perception in Spanish programs for English speakers, as stress contrasts, together with vowels, are key to interpreting the meaning of a verb in the Spanish verbal morphology system.
The Effects of Urban Sprawl on Birds at Multiple Levels of Biological Organization

Urban sprawl affects the environment in myriad ways and at multiple levels of biological organization. In this paper I explore the effects of sprawl on native bird communities by comparing the occurrence of birds along gradients of urban land use in southwestern Ohio and northern California and by examining patterns at the individual, species, community, landscape, and continental levels. I do this by assessing the distribution and abundance of all bird species occupying sites of differing land-use intensity in Ohio and California. Additionally, I conducted predation experiments using artificial nests, tracked the nest fate of American Robins and Northern Cardinals, and assessed land cover in these sites. At the individual level, predation on artificial nests decreased with urbanization; however, this trend was not reflected in the nesting success of robins and cardinals, which did not increase with urbanization. At the species level, sprawl affected local patterns of extinction and invasion; the density of different species peaked at different levels of urbanization. At the community level, species richness and diversity peaked at moderate levels of urbanization, and the number of low-nesting species and of species with multiple broods increased with urbanization. The community-level results may reflect both the species-level patterns of local extinction and invasion as well as broader landscape-level patterns. At the landscape level, a linear combination of spatial heterogeneity and density of woody patches accurately predicted both species richness and Shannon Diversity. At the continental level, local extinction of endemic species, followed by the invasion of ubiquitous weedy species, leads to faunal homogenization between ecoregions.
Pharmacological Inhibition of Voltage-gated Ca2+ Channels for Chronic Pain Relief

: Chronic pain is a major therapeutic problem as the current treatment options are unsatisfactory with low efficacy and deleterious side effects. Voltage-gated Ca 2+ channels (VGCCs), which are multi-complex proteins consisting of (cid:2)1, (cid:3), (cid:4), and (cid:2)2(cid:5) subunits, play an important role in pain signaling. These channels are involved in neurogenic inflammation, excitability, and neurotransmitter release in nociceptors. It has been previously shown that N-type VGCCs (Ca v 2.2) are a major pain target. U.S. FDA approval of three Ca v 2.2 antagonists, gabapentin, pregabalin, and ziconotide, for chronic pain underlies the importance of this channel subtype. Also, there has been increasing evidence that L-type (Ca v 1.2) or T-type (Ca v 3.2) VGCCs may be involved in pain signaling and chronic pain. In order to develop novel pain therapeutics and to understand the role of VGCC subtypes, discovering subtype selective VGCC inhibitors or methods that selectively target the inhibitor into nociceptors would be essential. This review describes the various VGCC subtype inhibitors and the potential of utilizing VGCC subtypes as targets of chronic pain. Development of VGCC subtype inhibitors and targeting them into nociceptors will contribute to a better understanding of the roles of VGCC subtypes in pain at a spinal level as well as development of a novel class of analgesics for chronic pain. 2+ channels, Pain, Targeting, T-type Ca 2+ channels, Voltage-gated Ca 2+ channels.
An Analysis of Eye Movement Based Authentication Systems

No matter how sophisticated an authentication system has been devised, human is often considered as the weakest link in the security chain. Security problems can stem from bad interactions between humans and systems. Eye movement is a natural interaction modality. The application of eye tracking technology in authentication offers a promising and feasible solution to the tradeoff between the usability and the security of an authentication system. This paper presents a comprehensive study on existing Eye Movement Based Authentication (EMBA) methodologies and systems, and briefly outlines the technical and methodological aspects of EMBA systems. We decompose the EMBA technique into three fundamental aspects: (1) eye movement input modality, (2) eye movement interaction mechanism, and (3) eye movement pattern recognition. The features and functions of the EMBA modules are further analyzed. Emphasis is given on the interrelationship among the modules and their general impacts on the formation and function of the EMBA framework. The paper attempts to provide a systemic treatment on the state of the art technology and also to outline some potential future development directions in eye movement based interaction and security
Low temperature induced alterations in certain biochemical constituents of 5th instar larvae of Philosamia ricini (Lepidoptera: Satunidae)

Studies on cold acclimation of insects including silkworms have shown significant variations in the levels of various biomolecules to cope with heat-shock. The present study has been carried out on cold-stressed 5th instar Philosamia ricini Hutt larvae to assess the physiological strategy adopted by this silkworm species for its survival at low temperatures. In this study, various biochemical assays have been performed in hemolymph, silk gland, and fat body of the larvae. The results revealed that exposure to low temperatures (10°C ± 1°C) leads to the accumulation of high levels of glycerol content in hemolymph, silk gland, and fat body of larvae in comparison with control group reared at ambient temperature conditions (25°C ± 3°C). The treatment of P. ricini larvae with low temperatures resulted in decreased trehalose content in all 3 insect tissues tested. The activities of phosphatases (acid and alkaline) were found to be significantly increased. However, the activities of aminotransferases (L-alanine-2-oxoglutarate aminotransferase (GPT, EC: 2.6.1.2) and L-aspartate-2-oxoglutarate aminotransferase (GOT, EC: 2.6.1.1)) were significantly inhibited in the hemolymph. The data indicated that trehalose could function as the major carbohydrate source of energy in acclimated 5th instar P. ricini larvae, whereas glycerol appears to confer cryoprotection.
- 09-04 Apoptosis in HEp-2 cells infected with Ureaplasma diversum Biological

Background: Bacterial pathogens have many strategies for infecting and persisting in host cells. Adhesion, invasion and intracellular life are important features in the biology of mollicutes. The intracellular location of Ureaplasma diversum may trigger disturbances in the host cell. This includes activation or inhibition of pro and anti-apoptotic factors, which facilitate the development of host damage. The aim of the present study was to associate U. diversum infection in HEp-2 cells and apoptosis induction. Cells were infected for 72hs with four U. diversum clinical isolates and an ATCC strain. The U. diversum invasion was analyzed by Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy and gentamicin invasion assay. The apoptosis was evaluated using pro-apoptotic and anti-apoptotic gene expression, and FITC Annexin V/Dead Cell Apoptosis Kit. Results: The number of internalized ureaplasma in HEp-2 cells increased significantly throughout the infection. The flow cytometry analysis with fluorochromes to detect membrane depolarization and gene expression for caspase 2, 3 and 9 increased in infected cells after 24 hours. However, after 72 hours a considerable decrease of apoptotic cells was observed. Conclusions: The data suggests that apoptosis may be initially induced by some isolates in association with HEp-2 cells, but over time, there was no evidence of apoptosis in the presence of ureaplasma and HEp-2 cells. The initial increase and then decrease in apoptosis could be related to bacterial pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMPS). Moreover, the isolates of U. diversum presented differences in the studied parameters for apoptosis. It was also observed that the amount of microorganisms was not proportional to the induction of apoptosis in HEp-2 cells.
Schistosomiasis: Setting Routes for Drug Discovery

Schistosomiasis is the second most prevalent parasitic disease in the world. Currently, the treatment of this disease relies on a single drug, praziquantel, and due to the identification of resistant parasites, the development of new drugs is urged. The demand for the development of robust high‐throughput parasite screening techniques is increasing as drug discovery research in schistosomiasis gains significance. Here, we review the most common methods used for compound screening in the parasites life stages and also summarize some of the methods that have been recently developed. In addition, we reviewed the methods most commonly implemented to search for promising targets and how they have been used to validate new targets against the parasite Schistosoma mansoni. We also review some promising targets in this parasite and show the main approaches and the major advances that have been achieved by those studies. Moreover, we share our experiences in schistosomiasis drug discovery attained with our S. mansoni drug screening platform establishment.
Tectonic effects of climate change on Venus

Venusian plains regions are commonly crossed by small-strain deformation features such as wrinkle ridges, polygonal terrains, and gridded terrains. Of these, polygonal terrains are observed to have a relatively uniform spacing and are widely distributed on plains that formed during global resurfacing. Models of Venusian climate that assume resurfacing occurred through massive volcanic events suggest that surface temperatures could have dramatically changed over nearly a billion years, propagating thermal stresses into the surface and potentially causing small-strain features. We investigate this hypothesis by approximating the temperatures predicted by climate models as a step function and employ a fixed plate and strength envelope model to predict the resulting depth of failure and amount of strain. Our calculations indicate that strains due to temperature changes of 50–100 K, which are favored for volcanic resurfacing events of 1–10 km thickness, are consistent with the observed spacing of polygonal and gridded terrains as well as some wrinkle ridges. The global nature of the climate change event is consistent with the global distribution and uniformity of such features and implies that such terrains may be a global stratigraphic marker.
ZnO Thin-Film Transistors With Carrier Mobility Over 50 cm 2 / Vs

Polycrystalline zinc oxide (ZnO) thin-film transistors with a Ta2O5 high-k gate dielectric layer are fabricated by radio-frequency magnetron sputtering at room temperature. Under the optimal deposition conditions, the devices show saturation mobility values over 50 cm2/Vs, an ON/OFF ratio of > 105, and a subthreshold voltage swing of 0.29 V/decade at a low operating voltage of 4 V. This is, to the best of our knowledge, one of the highest field-effect mobility values achieved in ZnO-based thin-film transistors by room-temperature sputtering. The stability of the devices is also examined and the sensitive dependence of the carrier mobility on the deposition conditions is discussed.
Supplementary material to “ Jammed frictional tetrahedra are hyperstatic ”

A typical reconstructed volume dataset consists of 1152x1152x1076 voxels with a spatial resolution of 100μm per voxel. Figure 1 shows a cut through the central x-z-plane, where the region of interest (ROI) is marked with a rectangle. Note that the particles outside this region are detected as well, but only particles inside the ROI are used in further analysis. The first step is a radially varying binarization using Otsu’s threshold [3], which accounts for the radial brightness decay typically observed in our tomograms. The second step removes shrinkage cavities, which are inherent to injection molding, as follows:
GPU-accelerated Large Scale Analytics using MapReduce Model

Analysis and clustering of very large scale data set has been a complex problem. It becomes increasingly difficult to compute the results in a reasonable amount of time as data amount increases and with its feature dimensions. The GPU (graphics processing unit) has been a point of attraction in a last few years for its ability to compute highlyparallel and semi-parallel problems way faster than any traditional sequential processor. This paper explores the capability of GPU with MapReduce Model. This highly scalable model for distributed programming can be scaled upto thousands of machines. This was developed by Google’s developers Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and has been implemented in many programming languages and frameworks like Apache Hadoop, Hive, and Pig etc. For this paper we’ll mainly focus on Hadoop framework. First two sections present the introduction and background. The working mechanism of this combination has been shown in section 3. Then further we explore frameworks present to implement MapReduce on GPU. In section 5, a comparative experiment was performed on GPU and CPU, both implementing MapReduce Model. The paper ends conclusion. Keyword: Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), Hadoop, large Scale Analytics, Map Reduce Model, Java Compute Unified Device Architecture (JCUDA)
Plant Existence as a Main Factor Affecting Water Availability in Deserts

Deserts occupy about ninety percent of the area of Egypt. In deserts, water rarely exists, and is quickly lost if found. So, the most important parameters, to study, are soil water holding capacity (WHC) and plant available water (AW), which strongly affect and control irrigation interval and its requirement. Looking for soil with the highest WHC and AW to start with it, in reclamation, should reduce cultivation costs and increase water saving and agricultural production. A remarkable observation is the heterogeneity of deserts especially in their naturally grown or wild plants, which appear in some areas and disappear in other areas at the same location. The research is aiming to study the effect of the existence of wild plants on WHC and AW. To reach the research objective, field study was carried out in Eastern Egyptian desert. Soil samples were collected from plant covered areas and bare ones at different sites. The obtained results indicate significant improvement in both WHC and AW at plant covered areas. The study recommends starting with wild plants covered areas and conducts further studies of the special effects of specific plants to be cultivated in bare desert lands to improve their soil water status for the purpose of further reclamation.
Consciousness: Introduction

The phenomenon of consciousness is at once exceedingly familiar and notoriously difficult to define or explain. Once largely neglected by philosophers, it has received increasing attention since 1974, when Thomas Nagel posed it as the chief challenge to physicalism in his article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat? ” Recent years have seen the publication of numerous books on consciousness and the founding of three journals devoted exclusively to this topic: Consciousness and Cognition (1992–), Psyche: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness (1993–), and the Journal of Consciousness Studies (1994–). “Consciousness” can mean many things, but philosophical discussion has focused on “phenomenal” consciousness—the feeling of “what it is like” to be in a conscious mental state, the first-person experience of the distinctive qualitative character of such a state. The four papers in this issue of Essays in Philosophy explore various aspects of phenomenal consciousness.
Traffic Panels Detection using Text Detection Algorithm for Text Identification Ms

www.ijeebs. com 196 | Page Traffic Panels Detection using Text Detection Algorithm for Text Identification Ms.Shrutika Tingne Computer Science and Engg. ,Priyadarshini Institute of Engineering and Technology ,India) Abstract :Traffic Panel detection and recognition has been studied from long time. Traffic panel detection and recognition still remains a challenge in computer vision because of different types of information depicted in them. In this system we studied a method which detects traffic panels and to recognize the information contained in them. The system is used to help for road support and traffic panel maintenance and assist drivers The main purpose of development of system is to make an automatic inventory of traffic panel. In our propose system, images are represented as a “bag of visual words”. For text detection where a traffic panel has been detected Optical Character Recognition (OCR) algorithm is used. Efficiency of algorithm is proved by the experimental results on real images.
Agrammatism in Greek: aspects of production and comprehension

The present paper addresses the question of whether the deficient production and comprehension patterns exhibited by Broca’s aphasics is an indication of competence or performance limitations, an issue that has recently become a central focus of cross-linguistic studies of agrammatism. The study presented in this paper investigates the language production of one agrammatic patient involving a range of linguistic impairments co-occurring with a less extended comprehension deficit. With respect to the performance/competence dilemma set from the beginning of this paper, the evidence suggests that the deficit in agrammatism cannot be described in terms of a structural account but rather by means of difficulties in the implementation of grammatical knowledge.
The population problem: theory and evidence.

This study is concerned with the relationships among population growth poverty and environmental degradation with particular focus on the situation in developing countries. The author rejects the concept of a general theory of fertility behavior in favor of an interpretation of these relationships which might be applicable to certain situations in the poorest parts of the Indian subcontinent and Sub-Saharan Africa; such situations include unacceptable risks of maternal death for poor illiterate women and a condemnation to extreme poverty in conditions of the deterioration of local resources and of the environment. The author concludes that population growth rates are too high in certain specific areas and that an appropriate policy reaction to such conditions would be to try to change the options that men and women face so that their reasoned choice would be to lower their fertility.
Experimental Evaluation of Robust Swing-Leg Placement Controls in Robotic Limb Testbeds

Variable swing-leg placement is crucial for robust and stable locomotion. While appropriate leg placement is generated in humanoid robotics by tracking pre-planned swing motions, this approach is not suitable for controlling powered limbs like prostheses, which form only part of the human-robot locomotor system. In recent work, we proposed swing controls for a double pendulum leg model that predicts variable and robust leg placement in the presence of large gait disturbances. Here we evaluate the performance of these novel controls on robotic leg testbeds. In hardware experiments we find that the control achieves robust foot placement of anthropomorphic robotic limbs within a range of landing leg angles observed in human gait. We further observe that a version of this control that conforms with the constraints of neuromuscular dynamics generates a more human-like leg behavior at the cost of placement precision. The results suggest that the proposed controls transfer well to robotic limb systems; in particular, they may enable improved balance recovery in amputee locomotion with powered leg prostheses.
Biocontrol of Escherichia Coli O126:H7 in Skim Milk Using Bacteriophages

Escherichia coli (E. coli) is currently one of the most predominant human food-borne pathogens. In the dairy industry, recently, attention has been drawn to the potential use of bacteriophages (phages) to control bacteria in dairy products. In this study, a cocktail of three Escherichia coli bacteriophages (EcoM-AG2, EcoM-AG3 and EcoM-AG10) was tested to evaluate its ability to control Escherichia coli O126:H7 in experimentally contaminated skim milk. In Tryptic Soy Broth (TSB), there was an E. coli growth suppression of 1.8, 5.7 and 8.9 logs in phage treatments compared to controls over 8 days, at 4, 10 and 25Â°C, respectively. While in skim milk, the phage cocktail reduced E. coli populations by 1.2, 1.0 and 8.3 log compared to control samples over 15 days, at 4, 10 and 25Â°C, respectively. The phage population was relatively stable in skim milk during the experiments. The overall results in this study indicate that phages may be useful in the control of E. coli in dairy products by preventing growth and significant reducing of bacterial numbers. However, the phages didnât eliminate all the E. coli in skim milk tested at 4 and 10Â°C, but complete elimination of E. coli was verified after 3 days of phage treatment at 25Â°C. Therefore they are more likely to be used as a hurdle approach, incorporated to other treatments without compromising food quality. Future research about phage-bacteria interaction in milk is required.
Cálculo Integral en Varias Variables

Bruzual, Ramon y Dominguez Marisela (2016) Calculo Intregral en Varias Variables. Segunda revision: ano 2016.Laboratorio de Formas en Grupos Centro de Analisis Escuela de Matematica Facultad de Ciencias Universidad Central de Venezuela
Submorphemic Processing in Reading Chinese

Three experiments are reported here to address the question of whether submorphemic information is involved in the recognition of Chinese characters. A character decision task was used in which frequency characteristics of the radicals within a character and radical status of the components within a noncharacter were manipulated. The frexlueney of the fight-hand radical affected responses to 2-radical characters, whereas the radical status of both left and right components affected noncharaeter responses. Furthermore, the impact of radical frequency was shown to be sensitive to radical position. For 3-radical characters, it appeared that the frequency of a compound radical (composed of 2 subradicals) had no effect on responses, whereas the frequency of the subradicals did. It is concluded that all simple radicals are independently activated in the process of character recognition. Compound radicals are not activated in this way despite their common occurrence. The results are considered within a multilevel interactive-activation framework incorporating position sensitivity.