Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comment on "Abrupt transition in the structural formation of interconnected networks", F. Radicchi and A. Arenas, Nature Phys. 9, 717 (2013)

A recent paper [F. Radicchi and A. Arenas, Nature Phys. 9, 717 (2013)] presented the finding of an abrupt transition in the structure of interconnected networks. This transition was said to be generic and to occur even in networks of finite size. Furthermore, it was remarked that this singular behaviour could be understood in the spirit of a first-order phase transition. We show here that the generic singularity found in that paper is a trivial consequence of the reducibility of the "supra-Laplacian" operator studied. The singular changes observed are therefore not related to any collective abrupt structural transformation in the interconnected networks.
Physical Fitness of Police Cadets: Baseline Characteristics and Changes during A 16-Week Academy

Physical ﬁtness of police academy cadets: baseline characteristics and changes during a 16-week academy. J Strength Cond Res 30(5): 1416–1424, 2016—Police academies traditionally emphasize the importance of being physically ﬁt. The purpose of this research was to determine cadet baseline physical ﬁtness characteristics and assess effectiveness of a 16-week training program. Sixty-eight cadets (61 men, 7 women) volunteered to have baseline physical ﬁtness characteristics assessed, and 55 cadets (49 men, 6 women) completed further testing at weeks 8 and 16. The testing comprised hand grip (strength), arm crank (upper-body power), 30 seconds Wingate (lower body power), sum of skinfolds and percentage body fat (body composition), 40-yard dash (sprint speed), 1 repetition maximum bench press (strength), T-test (agility), and sit-and-reach (ﬂexibility). In addition, cadets completed standardized state testing (push-ups, sit-ups, vertical jump, and half-mile shuttle run). The training program consisted of 1 hour sessions, 3 d $ wk 2 1 , including aerobic, plyometrics, body weight, and resistance exercise. Signiﬁcant changes were found in agility ( p , 0.01), upper-body and lower-body peak power ( p # 0.05), sit-ups ( p , 0.01), push-ups ( p # 0.05) the ﬁrst 8 weeks, and in agility ( p # 0.05), lower-body peak power p sit-ups ( p , push-ups ( p # 0.05), half-mile shuttle ( p , signiﬁcant across the of (weeks A of individual parameters of physical ﬁtness showed evidence of improvement in the ﬁrst weeks, whereas none of the variables showed signiﬁcant improvement in the second 8 weeks. suggests modiﬁcations could be made to increase overall effectiveness of cadet physical training speciﬁcally after the 8-week
Scaling of Ghosts and Quantitative Bifurcations

The scaling of the time delay near a “bottleneck” of a generic saddle-node bifurcation is wellknown to be given by an inverse square-root law. We extend the analysis to several non-generic cases for smooth vector fields. We proceed to investigate C vector fields and demonstrate that parameter nonlinearities and phase-space nonlinearities have distinct effects. Our main result is a new phenomenon, which we call “quantitative bifurcation” in two-parameter families having a saddle-node bifurcation upon changing the first parameter. We find distinct scalings for different values of the second parameter ranging from power laws with exponents in (0, 1) to scalings given by O(1). We illustrate the quantitative bifurcation by a an overdamped pendulum with varying length.
Palm Vein Authentication

Nowadays Personal identification is one of the major problems in our society. The most common form of personal identification is usually involves a Personal Identification Number (PIN), password, and an ID card etc. Consequently there is a problem faced by people by loosing, stealing and sharing or even for getting the codes and cards. Biometric authentication has been widely accepted, safest and popular technique. The people prove their identity with unique biological characteristics such as fingerprint, iris, voice, face, gesture and hand geometry. Our approach is to design effective and secure contact less palm vein. Contact less design is more preferred as it offers more hygienic one. Our palm vein authentication system uses the vascular vein patterns as a personal identification factor which provides contact less and a very high level of accuracy. The proposed technology uses user’s palm vein pattern to ensure security and authentication of user information.
DeepVisInterests : Deep data analysis for topics of interests prediction

Deep data analysis for latent information prediction has been an important research area. Many of the existing solutions have used the textual data and have obtained an accurate results for predicting users' interests and other latent attributes. However, little attention has been paid to visual data that is becoming increasingly popular in recent times. In this paper, we addresses the problem of discovering the attributed interest and of analyzing the performance of the automatic prediction using a comparison with the self assessed topics of interest (topics of interest provided by the user in a proposed questionnaire) based on data analysis techniques applied on the users visual data. We analyze the content of each user's images to aggregate the image-level users' interests distribution in order to obtain the user-level users' interest distribution. To do this, we employ the pretrained ImageNet convolutional neural networks architectures for the feature extraction step and to construct the ontology, as the users' interests model, in order to learn the semantic representation for the popular topics of interests defined by social networks (e.g., Facebook). Our experimental studies show that this analysis, on the most relevant features, enhances the performance of the prediction framework. In order to improve our framework's robustness and generalization with unknown users' profiles, we propose a novel database evaluation. Our proposed framework provided promising results which are competitive to state-of-the-art techniques with an accuracy of 0.80.
Regulation of Orange Carotenoid Protein activity in cyanobacterial 12 photoprotection

Plants, algae and cyanobacteria have developed mechanisms to decrease the energy arriving 50 at reaction centers to protect themselves from high irradiance. In cyanobacteria, the 51 photoactive Orange Carotenoid Protein (OCP) and the Fluorescence Recovery Protein (FRP) 52 are essential elements in this mechanism. Absorption of strong blue-green light by the OCP 53 induces carotenoid and protein conformational changes converting the orange (inactive) 54 OCP (OCP o ) into a red (active) OCP. Only the red OCP (OCP r ) is able to bind to 55 phycobilisomes, the cyanobacterial antenna, and quench excess energy. In this work, we 56 have constructed and characterized several OCP mutants, focused on the role of the OCP N- 57 terminal arm in photoactivation and excitation energy dissipation. The N-terminal arm 58 largely stabilizes the closed OCP o structure by interacting with its C-terminal domain. This 59 avoids photoactivation at low irradiance. In addition, it slows the OCP detachment from 60 phycobilisomes by hindering FRP interaction with bound OCP r . This maintains thermal 61 dissipation of excess energy for longer time. P22, at the beginning of the N-terminal arm, has 62 a key role in the correct positioning of the arm in OCP r , enabling strong OCP binding to 63 phycobilisomes but is not essential for photoactivation. Our results also show that the 64 opening of the OCP during photoactivation is caused by the movement of the C-terminal 65 domain with respect to the N-terminal domain and the N-terminal arm. with PBS: In vitro induced PBS fluorescence quenching.
Microbiomes in extremely acidic environments Current Opinion in Microbiology

Extremely acidic environments have global distribution and can have natural or, increasingly, anthropogenic origins. Extreme acidophiles grow optimally at pH 3 or less, have multiple strategies for tolerating stresses that accompany high levels of acidity and are scattered in all three domains of the tree of life. Metagenomic studies have expanded knowledge of the diversity of extreme acidophile communities, their ecological networks and their metabolic potentials, both conﬁrmed and inferred. High resolution compositional and functional proﬁling of these microbiomes have begun to reveal spatial diversity patterns at global, regional, local, zonal and micro-scales. Future integration of genomic and other meta-omic data will offer new opportunities to utilize acidic microbiomes and to engineer beneﬁcial interactions within them in biotechnologies. challenges in acidic microbiomes studies. High-throughput analyses (center) performed on extreme acidophiles and their microbiomes are heavily biased towards genome- and metagenome-based
International of Modern Trends in Engineering and Research Need for Energy Conservation for Sustainability

— This paper outlines the present scenario of fossil fuels in India and need for study of different alternatives for fossil fuels for conservat ion of energy and also focuses the effects of fossil fuels on environment and sustainability. As tremendous amount of energy is required for manufacturing , transportation and maintenance of construction materials so we need to focus on alternative building materials having low embodied energy so that impact of development will not effect the environment.
Splitting for ROI for Finger Print Recognition Using MATLab

—This paper is a study and implementation of a fingerprint recognition system based on Minutiae based matching quite frequently used in various fingerprint algorithms and techniques. The approach mainly involves extraction of minutiae points from the sample fingerprint images and then performing fingerprint matching based on the number of minutiae pairings among two fingerprints in question.
Depth Compensated Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography via Digital Compensation

Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SD-OCT) is a well-known imaging modality which allows for \textit{in-vivo} visualization of the morphology of different biological tissues at cellular level resolutions. The overall SD-OCT imaging quality in terms of axial resolution and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) degrades with imaging depth, while the lateral resolution degrades with distance from the focal plane. This image quality degradation is due both to the design of the SD-OCT imaging system and the optical properties of the imaged object. Here, we present a novel Depth Compensated SD-OCT (DC-OCT) system that integrates a Depth Compensating Digital Signal Processing (DC-DSP) module to improve the overall imaging quality via digital compensation. The designed DC-DSP module can be integrated to any SD-OCT system and is able to simultaneously compensate for the depth-dependent loss of axial and lateral resolutions, depth-varying SNR, as well as sidelobe artifact for improved imaging quality. The integrated DC-DSP module is based on a unified Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) framework which incorporates a Stochastically Fully-connected Conditional Random Field (SF-CRF) model to produce tomograms with reduced speckle noise and artifact, as well as higher spatial resolution. The performance of our proposed DC-OCT system was tested on a USAF resolution target as well as different biological tissue samples, and the results demonstrate the potential of the proposed DC-OCT system for improving spatial resolution, contrast, and SNR.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Could consumption of insects, cultured meat or imitation meat reduce global agricultural land use?

Animal products, i.e. meat, milk and eggs, provide an important component in global diets, but livestock dominate agricultural land use by area and are a major source of greenhouse gases. Cultural and personal associations with animal product consumption create barriers to moderating consumption, and hence reduced environmental impacts. Here we review alternatives to conventional animal products, including cultured meat, imitation meat and insects (i.e. entomophagy), and explore the potential change in global agricultural land requirements associated with each alternative. Stylised transformative consumption scenarios where half of current conventional animal products are substituted to provide at least equal protein and calories are considered. The analysis also considers and compares the agricultural land area given shifts between conventional animal product consumption. The results suggest that imitation meat and insects have the highest land use e ﬃ ciency, but the land use requirements are only slightly greater for eggs and poultry meat. The e ﬃ ciency of insects and their ability to convert agricultural by-products and food waste into food, suggests further research into insect production is warranted. Cultured meat does not appear to o ﬀ er substantial bene ﬁ ts over poultry meat or eggs, with similar conversion e ﬃ ciency, but higher direct energy requirements. Comparison with the land use savings from reduced consumer waste, including over-consumption, suggests greater bene ﬁ ts could be achieved from alternative dietary transformations considered. We conclude that although a diet with lower rates of animal product consumption is likely to create the greatest reduction in agricultural land, a mix of smaller changes in consumer behaviour, such as replacing beef with chicken, reducing food waste and potentially introducing insects more commonly into diets, would also achieve land savings and a more sustainable food system.
Restoration of $hc/2e$ Magnetic Flux Periodicity in a Hollow $d$-Wave Superconducting Cylinder

The magnetic flux dependence of order parameter and supercurrent is studied in a hollow d-wave superconducting cylinder. It is shown that the existence of line nodal quasiparticles in a pure $d_{x^2-y^2}$ pairing state gives rise to an $hc/e$ periodicity in the order parameter and a first-order quantum phase transition for a large system size. We demonstrate that the flux periodicity in the supercurrent is sensitive to the detailed electronic band structure and electron filling factor. In particular, we find that, in cooperation with the increase of the cylinder circumference, the $hc/2e$ periodicity can be restored significantly in the supercurrent by avoiding the particle-hole symmetry point. A similar study of a $d_{x^2-y^2}+id_{xy}$ pairing state verifies the peculiarity of unconventional superconductors with nodal structure.
Antioxidant and Anticancer Activities and Protein Interaction of the Oxidovanadium(IV) Naringin Complex

: The complex of oxidovanadium(IV) with naringin (Narg) [VO(Narg) 2 ] 8H 2 O (VONarg) was prepared according to the literature improving the synthetic procedure and physicochemical characterization. In addition, biological activities (cytotoxic, antioxidant, and BSA interaction) were determined. The metal coordinated through the 5-hydroxy and 4-carbonyl groups of rings A and C of naringin, respectively. The antioxidant activity of VONarg, determined in vitro, was higher than those of the ﬂavonoid against superoxide and peroxyl reactive oxygen species (ROS) and DPPH radical. The cytotoxic properties were determined by a MTT assay on adenocarcinoma human alveolar basal epithelial cells (A549). VONarg exerted a 20% decrease in cancer cells viability at 24 h incubation, while naringin and oxidovanadium(IV) cation did not show cytotoxicity. Measurements with the normal HEK293 cell line showed that the inhibitory action of the complex is selective. VONarg generated intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS), depletion of reduced glutathione and depolarization of mitochondrial membrane potential, typical for apoptotic pathway, producing cell death by oxidative stress mechanism. Moreover, naringin interacted with bovine serum albumin (BSA) through hydrophobic interactions in a spontaneous process, and VONarg showed greater afﬁnity for the protein but can still be transported and delivered by it (K a 10 4 L · mol − 1 order).
Chemical abundances of planetary nebulae from optical recombination lines – II. The neon abundance of NGC 7009

We present high-quality observations of Ne ii optical recombination lines (ORLs) for the bright Saturn Nebula NGC 7009. The measured line fluxes are used to determine Ne2+/H+ abundance ratios. The results derived from individual multiplets of the 3s–3p and 3p–3d configurations agree reasonably well, although values derived from the 3d–4f transitions, for which only preliminary effective recombination coefficients are available, tend to be higher by a factor of 2 than those derived from the 3–3 transitions – a pattern also seen in other nebulae analysed by us previously. The ORL Ne2+/H+ abundance ratios of NGC 7009 are found to be higher by a factor of 4 than those derived from the optical collisionally excited lines [Ne iii] λλ3868, 3967 and from the infrared fine-structure lines [Ne iii] 15.5 and 36 μm, similar to the patterns found for C, N and O, analysed previously by Liu et al. The result is in line with the general conclusion that while the ratios of heavy-element abundances, derived from ORLs on the one hand and from CELs on the other hand, vary from target to target and cover a wide range from unity to more than an order of magnitude, the discrepancy factor for the individual elements, C, N, O and Ne, is found to be approximately the same magnitude for a given nebula, a result which may have a fundamental implication for understanding the underlying physical cause(s) of the large discrepancies between heavy-element abundances derived from these two types of emission line. The result also indicates that while the absolute abundances of heavy elements relative to hydrogen remain uncertain, the abundance ratios of heavy elements, such as C/O, N/O and Ne/O, are probably secure, provided that the same type of emission line, i.e. ORLs or CELs, is used to determine the abundances of both heavy elements involved in the ratio. For NGC 7009, the total neon abundances derived from the CELs and ORLs, on a logarithmic scale where H=12.0, are 8.24±0.08 and 8.84±0.25, respectively. The latter is about a factor of 5.5 higher than the solar neon abundance.
Isometric embeddings of 2-spheres by embedding flow for applications in numerical relativity

We present a numerical method for solving Weyl’s embedding problem which consists in finding a global isometric embedding of a positively curved and positive-definite spherical 2-metric into the Euclidean 3-space. The method is based on a construction introduced by Weingarten and was used in Nirenberg’s proof of Weyl’s conjecture. The target embedding results as the endpoint of an embedding flow in R3 beginning at the unit sphere’s embedding. We employ spectral methods to handle functions on the surface and to solve various (non)linear elliptic PDEs. The code requires no additional input or steering from the operator and its convergence is guaranteed by the Nirenberg arguments. Possible applications in 3 + 1 numerical relativity range from quasi-local mass and momentum measures to coarse-graining in inhomogeneous cosmological models.
Simulation-Based Exact Tests For Structural Discontinuities With Unidentified Nuisance Parameters: An Application To Commodities Spot Prices

In this paper, we propose to use the Monte-Carlo (MC) test technique to obtain valid p-values when investigating the presence of discontinuities in jump-diffusion models. Indeed, the LR statistic used to test for discontinuities has typically a complex non-standard distribution, for at least two reasons: the jump frequency parameter lies on the boundary of its domain, and unidentified nuisance parameters intervene under the null hypothesis. We show that, if no other (identified) nuisance parameters are present (e.g. the geometric Brownian motion case), the proposed p-value is finite sample exact. Otherwise, we derive nuisance-parameter free bounds on the null distribution of the LR and obtain exact bounds p-values. We illustrate our approach with four classes of jump diffusion models (geometric Brownian motion and logarithmic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck, with and without a GARCH(1,1) error structure), which we apply to weekly and monthly spot prices of non-precious metals, gold, and crude oil. We find significant jumps in all weekly time series, while the monthly data illustrates the usefulness of the bounds MC tests.
On the effect of architecture on deep learning based features for homography estimation

Keypoint detection and description is the first step of homography and essential matrix estimation, which in turn is used in Visual Odometry and Visual SLAM. This work explores the effect (in terms of speed and accuracy) of using different deep learning architectures for such keypoints. The fully convolutional networks — with heads for both the detector and descriptor — are trained through an existing self-supervised method, where correspondences are obtained through known randomly sampled homographies. A new strategy for choosing negative correspondences for the descriptor loss is presented, which enables more flexibility in the architecture design. The new strategy turns out to be essential as it enables networks that outperform the learnt baseline at no cost in inference time. Varying the model size leads to a trade-off in speed and accuracy, and while all models outperform ORB in homography estimation, only the larger models approach SIFT’s performance; performing about 1-7% worse. Training for longer and with additional types of data might give the push needed to outperform SIFT. While the smallest models are 3× faster and use 50× fewer parameters than the learnt baseline, they still require 3× as much time as SIFT while performing about 10-30% worse. However, there is still room for improvement through optimization methods that go beyond architecture modification, e.g. quantization, which might make the method faster than SIFT.
Aerobic Exercise Training Reduces Epicardial Fat in Obese Men 1

1 The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of exercise training on 2 ventricular epicardial fat thickness in obese men and to investigate the relationship 3 between the changes in epicardial fat thickness to the abdominal fat tissue following 4 exercise training. Twenty-four obese middle-aged men (age, 49.4 ± 9.6 years; weight, 5 87.7 ± 11.2 kg; body mass index (BMI), 30.7 ± 3.3; peak oxygen consumption, 28.4 ± 6 7.2 mL/kg/min; mean ± SD) participated in this study. Each participant completed a 7 12-week supervised exercise training program (60–70% of the maximal heart rate; 60 8 min/d; 3 d/week) and underwent a transthoracic echocardiography. The epicardial fat 9 thickness on the free wall of the right ventricle was measured from both parasternal 10 long- and short-axis views. The visceral adipose tissue (VAT) and subcutaneous adipose 11 tissues were measured by computed tomography. Following exercise training, the 12 epicardial fat thickness was significantly decreased ( P < 0.001). The percentage change 13 of epicardial fat thickness was twice as high compared with those of waist, BMI, and 14 body weight of original values ( P <0.05). There was a significant relationship (r = 0.525, 15 P = 0.008) between changes in the epicardial fat thickness and visceral adipose tissue 16 with exercise training. Stepwise multiple regression analysis revealed that Δ VAT, Δ SBP, 17 and Δ QUICKI were independently related to Δ epicardial fat thickness ( P <0.05). The 18 ventricular epicardial fat thickness is reduced significantly after aerobic exercise 19 training and is associated with a decrease in VAT. These results suggest that aerobic 20 exercise training may be an effective nonpharmacological strategy for decreasing the 21 ventricular epicardial fat thickness and visceral fat area in obese middle-aged men.