Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Florística e aspectos ecológicos de samambaias e licófitas em um parque urbano do Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil

A survey of fern and lycophyte species was conducted in the urban park (Parque Natural Municipal da Ronda-PNMR), located in the municipality of Sao Francisco de Paula, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Trimonthly field trips between 2006 and 2008 were made to record the species and to analyse its life-forms, substrates and preferential environments. Eighty-one species, 40 genera and 19 families were found, five of which were lycophytes. Polypodiaceae showed higher species richness (14 species, 17%). The hemicryptophytes had the highest species richness (41 species, 51%), 24 of which were repent, and 17, rosulate. Most species were found in terrestrial substrates (50 species, 62%) and inside the forest (70 species, 86%). Species richness in the PNMR corresponded to 22% of the total fern and lycophyte species listed for the Rio Grande do Sul and demonstrates the importance of inclusion these plants, besides trees, when assessing alpha diversity for the preparation of conservation proposals in urban parks
Immunocytochemical localization of γ‐aminobutyric acid in the hypoglossal nucleus of the macaque monkey, Macaca fuscata: A light and electron microscopic study

The hypoglossal nucleus of the macaque monkey Macaca fuscata was investigated with light and electron microscopic immunocytochemistry with an antibody directed against γ‐aminobutyric acid (GABA). At the light microscopic level, GABA immunoreactivity was present in small neurons, punctate structures, and thin, fiberlike structures. These GABA‐positive elements were distributed throughout the hypoglossal nucleus at rostrocaudal levels. There was no immunoreactivity in the hypoglossal motoneurons. The GABA‐positive small neurons, were fusiform or ovoid (15 × 9 μm) and extended a few proximal dendrites from both poles. At the ultrastructural level, there small neurons were characterized by a markedly invaginated nucleus and a scanty cytoplasm in which cisternae of rough endoplasmic reticulum were not organized into extensive lamellar arrays as seen in the motorneurons. The GABA‐positive punctate structures at the light microscopic level were identified as vesicle‐containing axon boutons at the electron microscopic level. These GABA‐positive axon terminals made synaptic contacts mainly with the dendrites of the motoneurons and infrequently with the somata. The majority of them made symmetric synapses and they contained pleomorphic synaptic vesicles. However, a small number of GABA‐positive terminals (7%) formed asymmetric synapses with the dendrites of motoneurons, and these contacts exhibited postsynaptic dense bars or Taxi bodies lying beneath the postsynaptic membranes. There were no GABA‐positive boutons that contacted the cell bodies of the small neurons. Although GABA‐positive myelinated and unmyelinated axons were seen as thin, fiberlike structures, these myelinated and unmyelinated axons rarely gave rise to boutons on the motoneurons.
Advanced Carrier Based Pulse Width Modulation in Asymmetric Cascaded Multilevel Inverter 1 / 8 / 2011 22 : 21

This paper proposes a new scheme Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to overcome low performances of conventional PWM control strategy in Cascaded Multilevel Inverter (ACMLI). This scheme advance conventional Carrier-Based PWM (CBPWM) using triangle carrier in different amplitudes. By this scheme ACMLI can control by PWM that according to dc voltage amplitude used and finally the Total Harmonics Distortions (THD) can reduce to the settle standard. Simulation using Matlab Simulink used to verify the performance and result simulation shown than this proposed scheme can reach the goals. Key wordasymmetric cascaded multilevel inverter, multi carrier pulse width modulation, power quality, total harmonic distortion.
Blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) optimize foraging efficiency by balancing oxygen use and energy gain as a function of prey density

The world’s largest predators, blue whales, switch strategies to maximize foraging efficiency as a function of prey density and depth. Terrestrial predators can modulate the energy used for prey capture to maximize efficiency, but diving animals face the conflicting metabolic demands of energy intake and the minimization of oxygen depletion during a breath hold. It is thought that diving predators optimize their foraging success when oxygen use and energy gain act as competing currencies, but this hypothesis has not been rigorously tested because it has been difficult to measure the quality of prey that is targeted by free-ranging animals. We used high-resolution multisensor digital tags attached to foraging blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) with concurrent acoustic prey measurements to quantify foraging performance across depth and prey density gradients. We parameterized two competing physiological models to estimate energy gain and expenditure based on foraging decisions. Our analyses show that at low prey densities, blue whale feeding rates and energy intake were low to minimize oxygen use, but at higher prey densities feeding frequency increased to maximize energy intake. Contrary to previous paradigms, we demonstrate that blue whales are not indiscriminate grazers but instead switch foraging strategies in response to variation in prey density and depth to maximize energetic efficiency.
Quantitative Results

We provide results of a comparison between the speculatively redundant continued logarithms and some other representations based on linear fractional transformations (LFTs). Its objective was to quantify differences in certain parameters among the considered representations. The measured figures indicate that no representation has substantial advantages over the others. We admit, however, that the performed comparison was too simple to generalize its conclusions. This document accompanies the manuscript [1] that proposes a computable extension of the continued logarithm representation. Our aim is to provide some experimental results that would support a rather theoretical discussion in section “Practical Effects of Redundancy” of the manuscript. Another reason for running the experiments was to find out how the proposed representation compares to some other related representations. The comparison focused on parameters discussed in the referred section of [1]; Section 3 provides the details. The measurement happened on three simple algorithms (benchmarks, Section 2) that can be computed by the operator of BLFT (bi-linear fractional transformation), which is central to any LFT-based arithmetic. Representations considered in the experiments are described in Section 1. The results were measured by an automated framework. As the framework is presently in development, the results shall be considered with care and for illustrative purposes only. Implementations of individual representations are stable, but some of them may be better optimized than others. Different stage of optimization could have affected some of the results, especially the performance.
THE STABLE MARRIAGE PROBLEM –

“The Stable marriage problem (SMP) is basically the problem of finding a stable matching between two sets of persons, the men and the women, where each person in every group has a list containing every person that belongs to other group ordered by preference. The first ones to discover a stable solution for the problem were D. Gale and G.S. Shapley. Today the problem and most of its variations have been studied by many researchers, and for most of them polynomial time algorithms do not exist. Lately genetic algorithms have been used to solve such problems and have often produced better solutions than specialized polynomial algorithms. In this thesis we study and show that the Stable marriage problem has a number of important real-world applications. It the experimentation, we model the original problem and one of its variations and show the benefits of using genetic algorithms for solving the SMP. ”
Serving kinship families During COVID: Pivotal moments

Abstract Kinship caregivers, who are relatives or non-family members providing care to children when biological parents are unable to do so, comprise over 2.5 million adults in the United States. The vast majority are grandparent caregivers. The 7.8 million children in their care make up approximately 10.5 percent of all children in the United States under the age of 18 (Generations United, 2017: State of Grandfamilies). Navigating daily life is often challenging. Kinship caregivers routinely face difficulties in multiple aspects of their lives, including finances, physical health, mental health, education, employment, parenting, and family relationships. The COVID pandemic heightened existing challenges and stimulated new issues for many kinship providers and the children in their care. This poster will highlight actions taken by one Family Service agency, annually serving approximately 225 kinship families, to meet the unprecedented needs of family members and kinship program staff during COVID. A timeline of decision-related rationales, specific actions taken and results related to these actions will be presented. Data summarizing results for kinship families (n =32) related to COVID-impacted programmatic responses and changes, including level of involvement with group services, recidivism, perceived isolation, and efficacy related to their caregiving roles will be presented. Results summarizing the impact of the agency's COVID-related responses on kinship staff (n = 6) will also be presented, including data on staff members' level of stress, perceived support, perceptions of programmatic effectiveness, and prioritized importance of changes will also be shared.
Revision of the scaleworm genera Arctonoe Chamberlin and Gastrolepidia Schmarda (Polychaeta: Polynoidae) with the erection of a new subfamily Arctonoinae

A new subfamily Arctonoinae is erected for several genera of polynoid scaleworms. Descriptions of Arctonoe vittata (Grube), A. fragilis (Baird), A. pulchra (Johnson) and Gastrolepidia clavigera Schmarda are provided. Harmothoe tuberculata Treadwell, 1906 is referred to Bathynoe Ditlevsen. A new genus and species Asterophilia carlae from Fiji and Indonesian waters is described.
Towards Object Detection and Pose Estimation in Clutter using only Synthetic Depth Data for Training

Object pose estimation is an important problem in robotics because it supports scene understanding and enables subsequent grasping and manipulation. Many methods, including modern deep learning approaches, exploit known object models, however, in industry these are difficult and expensive to obtain. 3D CAD models, on the other hand, are often readily available. Consequently, training a deep architecture for pose estimation exclusively from CAD models leads to a considerable decrease of the data creation effort. While this has been shown to work well for featureand template-based approaches, real-world data is still required for pose estimation in clutter using deep learning. We use synthetically created depth data with domain-relevant background and randomized augmentation to train an end-to-end, multi-task network to detect and estimate poses of texture-less objects in cluttered real-world depth images of an arbitrary amount of objects. We present experiments and ablation studies on the architectural design choices and data representation with the LineMOD dataset.
Elevation of Transforming Growth Factor α and Its Relationship to the Epidermal Growth Factor and α-Fetoprotein Levels in Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma

: A radioimmunoassay for transforming growth factor alpha (TGF-alpha) using synthetic rat sarcoma transforming growth factor and its rabbit polyclonal antibody has been developed. Using radioimmunoassays, the urinary TGF-alpha and epidermal growth factor (EGF) concentrations in 31 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), 15 probable HCC, four metastatic liver cancer, and 33 age, sex-matched healthy controls were determined. For the first time, we have shown that the average TGF-alpha concentration for HCC patients was 21.5 +/- 20.3 micrograms per g creatinine, significantly higher than that of healthy subjects, 4.9 +/- 2.8 micrograms per g creatinine (P less than 0.001). There was no statistical difference in the level of EGF between HCC patients and controls (40.9 +/- 29.3 versus 46.2 +/- 16.6 micrograms per g creatinine; P greater than 0.05). The ratio of EGF/TGF-alpha between HCC patients (3.37 +/- 4.42) and controls (15.5 +/- 13.0) was significantly different (P less than 0.001). Among patients, 65% (20 of 31) of HCC cases and 87% (13 of 15) of probable HCC cases showed a marked elevation of TGF-alpha levels. We found only 16% (five of 31) of HCC cases with increased EGF level. EGF excretion was inversely age related. Serum total protein concentration and alkaline phosphatase activity were positively correlated to EGF concentration (r = 0.522, P less than 0.01 and rt = 0.393, P less than 0.05, respectively). There was no correlation between biochemical functions of liver and TGF-alpha concentration in HCC patients. Our results also suggested that TGF-alpha may be a useful complementary tumor marker for management of patients with clinical manifestation of HCC who have low alpha-fetoprotein levels.
Assesment Of Antibacterial Activities Crude Leaf Extracts Of Selected Medicinal Plants From Ezza North Ebonyi State Nigeria Against Staphylococcus Aureus , Klebsiella Pneumoniae , Pseudomonas Aeruginosa . Escherichia Coli , And Streptococcus Mutans

Aim :Medicinal plants have been used for ages as remedies for human diseases because they contain bioactive components of therapeutic value . This work was undertaken to investigate the in vitro antibacterial efficacy of six herbal extracts namely : Alstonia boonie,Morinda lucida, Parkia biglobosa,Olax subscopedia ,Anthocleista djolensis and Cusoniaspicataon six medicinally important bacterial strains (Klesbsiella spp, ,Staphylococcus, Streptococcus mutants, Pseudomonas aeruginosa,Salmonella spp, and E.coli ) . Method: Agar well diffusion method, with varying concentrations of each extract (100,50,25, and 12.5 mg/ml ) were used. Results : Alstonia boonei,showed no inhibition,Morindalucida showed maximum zone of inhibition against Klebsiella at 100mg/ml and 50mg/ml only, Parkia biglobosa exhibited inhibition from 25 mg/ml and maximum inhibitionwas recorded at 100mg/ml against E. coli,50 mg/ml against Staphylococcus whereas Cussoniaspicata showed maximum inhibition against E. coli and Pseudomonas at 100mg/ml only and no inhibition was observed against other isolates.Based on the present evaluationthis work suggest thatMorinda lucida,Parkia biglobosa,,Anthocleista adjolensis,and Cusonia spicata has inhibitory effects against some of the tested organisms and can be used in management of diseases caused by them while Alstonia boonie, and Olax may not be used. Conclusion: However, it may be inferred that these plants can be used as therapeutic natural agents that may serve as lead for development of new pharmaceuticals addressing the major therapeutic needs.
Extreme programming from a CMM perspective - IEEE Software

The Software CMM The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University developed the SW-CMM as a model for building organizational capability, and it has been widely adopted in the software community and beyond. As Table 1 shows, the SW-CMM is a five-level model that describes good engineering and management practices and prescribes improvement priorities for software organizations. Although the SW-CMM is described in a book of nearly 500 pages, the requirements for becoming a Level 5 organization are concisely stated in 52 sentences—the 52 goals of the model’s 18 key process areas (KPAs). The practices, subpractices, and examples that flesh out the model can guide software professionals in making reasonable, informed decisions about a broad range of process implementations. The SW-CMM informative materials focus primarily on large projects and large organizations. With minor tailoring and common sense, however, the model can be applied in radically different environments, ranging from twoto three-person projects in small start-up companies to 500-person projects building hard real-time, life-critical systems.2,3 The SW-CMM’s rating components are intentionally abstract, capturing “universal truths” about high-performance software organizations. As a glance at Table 2 shows, the KPAs are clearly important to all types of software organizations. With the exception of software subcontract management, which applies only to organizations that do subcontracting, the KPAs and their goals can apply to any software organization. Companies that focus on innovation more than operational excellence might downplay the role of consisExtreme Programming from a CMM Perspective
Realising Redd+: National strategy and policy options

Performance-based payments are key, yet limited. Payments based on performance directly incentivise and compensate forest owners and users. But schemes such as payments for environmental services (PES) depend on conditions, such as secure tenure, solid carbon data and transparent governance, that are often lacking and take time to change. This constraint reinforces the need for broad institutional and policy reforms.
On automatic differentiation

In comparison to symbolic diierentiation and numerical diierencing, the chain rule based technique of automatic diierentiation is shown to evaluate partial derivatives accurately and cheaply. In particular it is demonstrated that the reverse mode of automatic diierentiation yields any gradient vector at no more than ve times the cost of evaluating the underlying scalar function. After developing the basic mathematics we describe several software implementations and brieey discuss the ramiications for optimization.
The Risk of Reported Cryptosporidiosis in Children Aged <5 Years in Australia is Highest in Very Remote Regions

The incidence of cryptosporidiosis is highest in children <5 years, yet little is known about disease patterns across urban and rural areas of Australia. In this study, we examine whether the risk of reported cryptosporidiosis in children <5 years varies across an urban-rural gradient, after controlling for season and gender. Using Australian data on reported cryptosporidiosis from 2001 to 2012, we spatially linked disease data to an index of geographic remoteness to examine the geographic variation in cryptosporidiosis risk using negative binomial regression. The Incidence Risk Ratio (IRR) of reported cryptosporidiosis was higher in inner regional (IRR 1.4 95% CI 1.2–1.7, p < 0.001), and outer regional areas (IRR 2.4 95% CI 2.2–2.9, p < 0.001), and in remote (IRR 5.2 95% CI 4.3–6.2, p < 0.001) and very remote (IRR 8.2 95% CI 6.9–9.8, p < 0.001) areas, compared to major cities. A linear test for trend showed a statistically significant trend with increasing remoteness. Remote communities need to be a priority for future targeted health promotion and disease prevention interventions to reduce cryptosporidiosis in children <5 years.
Modeling spatial covariation of summer temperatures and bio-indicators in an Arctic coastal area

In the Arctic, temperature is a major environmental factor controlling the occurrence, abundance and distribution of plants at regional and local scales alike. This means that statistical models of temperature distribution can predict the distribution of plant species or communities. Conversely, certain plant taxa make good bio-indicators reflecting long-term thermal conditions in a given habitat. Both these assumptions were taken into account when modelling the spatial relationship between plants and temperature. This work continues a previous preliminary 1 yr study based on correlations between a plant-based index of thermophily (It) and different synthetic temperature distribution characteristics. To strengthen confidence in the results and conclusions, more temperature data were collected through a field campaign conducted over a further 5 yr period (2001 to 2005). The goals here were (1) to establish an accurate interpolation model capable of restoring, at local scale, the continuous summertime thermal raster surface, (2) to evaluate the capacity of the temperature values obtained from the model to predict the distribution of It, and (3) to extrapolate temperature surfaces from this It. The results show that the mutual predictive power between temperature and It is satisfactory and that the model can be applied to neighbouring areas, although the present study area is too small to define the geographical limits of extrapolation. This predictive power declines where local landscape structures are heterogeneous. Correlations between It and growing degree day (GDD) values derived from the modelled temperature layers were systematically analysed in order to identify conditions in which this covariation works or fails.
Dynamics of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers in the short external cavity regime : Pulse packages and polarization mode competition

Andrzej Tabaka, Michael Peil, Marc Sciamanna, Ingo Fischer, Wolfgang Elsäßer, Hugo Thienpont, Irina Veretennicoff, and Krassimir Panajotov* Department of Applied Physics and Photonics (TW-TONA), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), B-1050 Brussels, Belgium Institute of Applied Physics, Darmstadt University of Technology, Schloßgartenstraße 7, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany Laboratoire Matériaux Optiques, Photonique et Systèmes (LMOPS), CNRS UMR-7132, Supélec, 2 Rue Edouard Belin, F-57070 Metz, France Received 8 July 2005; revised manuscript received 26 September 2005; published 10 January 2006