Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mesocosm experiments on nutrient and fish effects on shallow lake food webs in a Mediterranean climate

Summary 1. Nutrient and fish manipulations in mesocosms were carried out on food-web interactions in a Mediterranean shallow lake in south-east Spain. Nutrients controlled biomass of phytoplankton and periphyton, while zooplankton, regulated by planktivorous fish, influenced the relative percentages of the dominant phytoplankton species. 2. Phytoplankton species diversity decreased with increasing nutrient concentration and planktivorous fish density. Cyanobacteria grew well in both turbid and clear-water states. 3. Planktivorous fish increased concentrations of soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP). Larger zooplankters (mostly Ceriodaphnia and copepods) were significantly reduced when fish were present, whereas rotifers increased, after fish removal of cyclopoid predators and other filter feeders (cladocerans, nauplii). The greatest biomass and diversity of zooplankton was found at intermediate nutrient levels, in mesocosms without fish and in the presence of macrophytes. 4. Water level decrease improved underwater light conditions and favoured macrophyte persistence. Submerged macrophytes (Chara spp.) outcompeted algae up to an experimental nutrient loading equivalent to added concentrations of 0.06 mg L−1 PO4-P and 0.6 mg L−1 NO3-N, above which an exponential increase in periphyton biomass and algal turbidity caused characean biomass to decline. 5. Declining water levels during summer favoured plant-associated rotifer species and chroococcal cyanobacteria. High densities of chroococcal cyanobacteria were related to intermediate nutrient enrichment and the presence of small zooplankton taxa, while filamentous cyanobacteria were relatively more abundant in fishless mesocosms, in which Crustacea were more abundant, and favoured by dim underwater light. 6. Benthic macroinvertebrates increased significantly at intermediate nutrient levels but there was no relationship with planktivorous fish density. 7. The thresholds of nutrient loading and in-lake P required to avoid a turbid state and maintain submerged macrophytes were lower than those reported from temperate shallow lakes. Mediterranean shallow lakes may remain turbid with little control of zooplankton on algal biomass, as observed in tropical and subtropical lakes. Nutrient loading control and macrophyte conservation appear to be especially important in these systems to maintain high water quality.
Bio-swale column experiments and simulation of hydrologic impacts on urban road stormwater runoff

The acceleration of urbanization has resulted in the increase of urban surface runoff. Bio-swale is a promising stormwater control measure that has been proven to be hydrologically effective on urban surface runoff. Column studies were conducted to determine the optimal bio-swale composition. Results demonstrated that water reduction was proportional to inflow decrease. Columns that planted border privet and Ophiopogon japonicus showed a larger water quantity reduction compared with that of planted boxwood and ryegrass, glossy privet and Chlorophytum comosum ‘Variegatum’ in vegetation tests, which was the same as the order of measured transpiration capacity of the plants. Water reduction rate increases dramatically with decreasing planting soil thickness. By contrast, no significant change occurs once the thickness of the artificial filler layer is altered. The bio-swale column with a high-infiltration rate artificial filler produced a good hydrological control effect. Sand was found to be the optimal media among the selected media compositions. Although the inclusion of an additional ponding depth affected total water reduction, it produced a stable outflow. SPSS software was used to assess the relationship between water reduction rate and its influence. On the one hand, water reduction rate increased linearly with increasing water inflow, soil thickness, and ponding depth. On the other, water reduction rate grew linearly with increasing plant factor and artificial filler infiltration rate. The multiple linear regression model revealing the relationship between the water reduction effect, and its influencing factors were obtained via the stepwise regression method in the SPSS software.
Uma arquitetura de personalização de conteúdo baseada em anotações do usuário

The extraction of semantic information from digital video is important to be used on personalization services because the content is adapted according to each user’s preferences. However, although it is possible to find several approaches in the literature, automatic indexing techniques are able to generate semantic metadata only when the content’s domain is restricted. Alternatively, this information can be created manually by professionals, but this activity is time-consuming and error-prone. A possible solution would be to explore collaborative users’ annotations, but such approach has the disadvantage of lacking the individuality of annotations, hampering the extraction of user’s preferences from the interaction. This work has the objective of proposing a generic personalization architecture that allows multimedia indexing procedures to be accomplished in a cheap and unrestricted way. Such architecture uses collaborative annotations, but keeps the individuality of the data in order to augment the user’s profile with relevant concepts. The multimodality of metadata and user’s preferences is also explored in this work, which provides robustness during the extraction of semantic information, bringing benefits to applications. This work also presents two personalization services that explore the proposed architecture, along with evaluations that compare the obtained results with previously proposed approaches.
DISCUSSION NOTES Some Major Features of the International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet is nearly 100 years old, and there is no doubt that it would be appropriate to revise it so as to bring it more in line with contemporary linguistic thought.1 But unfortunately this is not a simple task, as there are two conflicting requirements that need to be considered. On the one hand it seems advisable to retain the practical nature of the IPA symbols. Much of the utility of these symbols rests on the fact that they are based on the familiar Roman alphabet. Any radical revision that undermined this would make the symbols less useful as mnemonic devices. On the other hand, a fairly large-scale revision is called for if it is going to take into account the advances that have been made in the study of phonetics during the last hundred years or so. It seems to us that the most fundamental insight gained during the last century has been the realization that it is the features rather than the sounds that are the basic building blocks of spoken language. The idea that sounds are composed of features has been understood-more or less-at least since the seventeenth century (Fromkin & Ladefoged 1981), and is certainly implicit in the organic alphabets devised by Bell 1867 and by Sweet 1881, who noted that the set of iconic symbols represent 'the elementary actions by which all sounds are formed'. However, this insight was not made explicit until the work of the Prague school, notably as presented by Jakobson 1938; and it is to this day not fully considered in all phonetic work. The failure to take this basic truth into account is in our view one of the major inadequacies of the IPA alphabet. We are thus faced with a dilemma: an alphabet, particularly one based on the familiar symbols of the Roman alphabet, almost inevitably emphasizes the segmental nature of speech; but we want a set of symbols that reflect the features that are necessary for understanding linguistic processes. This paper will attempt to resolve this dilemma by emphasizing the symbolic nature of the elements of the alphabet. A symbol is something that stands for somethingin this case an intersection of feature values. The aspect of the IPA alphabet that we are most concerned with here is not the symbols themselves, but the organization of the set of categories-the features-which the symbols represent. The IPA alphabet is defined in terms of a series of charts. With their column
The History of Discovery of Adult Neurogenesis

The scientific community's understanding of neuronal plasticity has evolved considerably over recent decades, thanks largely to Josef Altman. Altman's findings laid the groundwork for an entire subfield of neuroscience research dedicated to exploring the potential of the adult brain to create new neurons, which until then had been considered impossible. From the formative years of this field until the 1990s, when adult neurogenesis was finally accepted as a legitimate topic of study, Altman's work was followed by a series of pivotal discoveries by a handful of other dedicated neuroscientists such as Shirley Bayer, Michael Kaplan, and Fernando Nottebohm. In any sphere of activity, some wish to maintain the status quo when change occurs; science is no different. For many years, influential figures in neuroscience dismissed and marginalized the concept of adult neurogenesis, sometimes going so far as to censor the studies and launch personal attacks against their proponents. Nevertheless, despite obstacles to their research, these scientists persisted and built upon one another's work. During the 1970s, Kaplan confirmed neurogenesis in the adult mammalian neocortex and also performed some of the first neurogenesis studies on primates. During the 1980s, Nottebohm drew on his fascination with the songs of canaries and finches to show that neurogenesis happens on a grand scale in the avian brain as well, regardless of age. Today, more than half a century after Altman's discovery, the adult neurogenesis field is growing rapidly and new research is realizing its potential to revolutionize treatment for neurodegenerative disorders and brain injuries. Clin. Anat. 32:41–55, 2019. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Low-temperature phase transitions and the role of hydrogen bonds in lawsonite

The structure of lawsonite, CaAlr(SirO? )(OH)r'HrO, was refined from X-ray singlecrystal data at six temperatures between I l0 and 500 K. Two reversible phase transitions were found to occur: (l) Below 273(5) K the space group changes from Cmcm to Pmcn, accompanied by the loss of Ihe --m mirror plane because of rotation of both HrO and OH groups. This transition was monitored by the appearance of C-centering forbidden reflections (i + k : 2n + l) and by nonlinear changes of cell constants and optical birefringence values vs. temperature. (2) Below 155(5) K the space group symmetry is further reduced to P2,cn, accompanied by the loss of the m-mirror plane because of unidirectional shifts of the x coordinates of the H atoms of the HrO and OH groups, thus resulting in a polar stnrcture. The driving force of both transitions is apparently the development of cooperative hydrogen bonds. At elevated temperatures the OH and HrO groups are constrained by strong librations to occupy sites with high point symmetry. At low temperatures and reduced thermal vibration the H atoms are allowed to shift towards neighboring O atoms, building up strong hydrogen bonds. Consequently, the HrO and OH goups are shifted off their highly symmetric positions in an ordered fashion, thus lowering the space group symmetry in two steps. The present structural data allow reinterpretation of previously published, low-temperature, infrared-spectroscopic and thermodynamic measurements on lawsonite.
Query Rewriting and Stored Queries for XACML Policy Enforcement Master Thesis

In the last decades, the world has witnessed an exponential growth in data volumes. Thanks to the Internet, this information is exchanged everywhere and then saved in systems which storing capacities are increasing accordingly. A significant part of this data is classified as sensitive or concerning the privacy of a subject. For this reason, confidentiality, integrity, and availability have become essential properties that databases need to provide in order to protect users’ information. Consequently, access control with regard to data and databases gained a central role as a mean to address the problem of data security. In this scenario, the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) proposed XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language), a standard for the specification and enforcement of access control policies. XACML uses a declarative approach that separates the constraints of access control from the data and the database, in favor of compatibility with different systems and ease of policy management over time. On the other hand, the lack of direct integration with database systems entails lower efficiency when querying the database and enforcing access control. In particular, the implementation model of a system employing XACML for access control, as proposed by the OASIS, can be modified in order to improve it in terms of efficiency. The enhancements would be significant especially in situations where the data involved in the security enforcement is massive, since the current implementation performs badly with large datasets. In this context, search engines which employ access control using XACML policies are a scenario of application for an improved security enforcement mechanism. In this work, we discuss possible alternatives to the model recommended by the OASIS and we propose a new solution that makes use of query rewriting and stored queries to enforce the security constraints expressed in XACML. All the alternative approaches aim to improve the performance of the current XACML implementation by enforcing the security restrictions in the database but still keeping the policy definition and management separated from both the database and the application querying it. We describe and compare possible options to design and implement the structure of the new solution we propose. Then, we evaluate the performances achieved by executing experiments using our approach, a simplified (and more efficient) version of the implementation suggested by the OASIS and other existing alternatives. In conclusion, we summarize the results achieved in the experiments. In particular, we describe how our solution performs better than the other alternatives especially when large volumes of data or complex security restrictions are involved during access control enforcement. Query Rewriting and Stored Queries for XACML Policy Enforcement iii
Um Sistema Multinível de Distribuição de Identidades em Névoas Computacionais

As névoas computacionais atuam em conjunto com as tradicionais nuvens para entregar serviços de forma mais eficiente. As névoas replicam os serviços e os dados em estruturas mais próximas aos usuários com o objetivo de aumentar a eficiência de serviços ofertados. No entanto, tal replicação traz problemas relacionados a, por exemplo, serviços de gestão e o armazenamento de identidades. De fato, este tipo de serviço foi proposto como um serviço centralizado nas nuvens. Assim, a replicação de identidades não é um problema trivial, pois as atuais técnicas de replicação de identidades ou geram uma replicação indiscriminada ou pouco reduzem a latência de recuperação dessas. Neste estudo, nós investigamos a relação entre número de réplicas e a distância de seu usuário em sistemas de distribuição de identidades com replicação probabilística. Os resultados de simulação mostram que, quando comparado a outros sistemas de distribuição, a distribuição probabilística reduz em 25% o número de saltos necessários para recuperar a identidade e em 30% o número de réplicas pela rede.
Self-Similarity Properties of the Probability Distribution Function of Turbulence-Induced Particle Fluxes at the Plasma Edge

From the Langmuir probe measurements in low-power Ohmically heated or electron cyclotron heated plasma discharges and for several types of confinement devices, we have concluded that the electrostatic potential and density fluctuations at the plasma edge are self-similar over a broad range of time scales [1,2]. The selfsimilarity range is, in general, for time scales longer than the turbulence decorrelation times up to times of the order of confinement time, the mesoscale range. The upper bound of the self-similarity range is difficult to determine because of the lengths of time records available and the varying plasma conditions on these longer time scales. It was found that for fluctuation measurements within the plasma confinement region the self-similarity parameter [3] varies between H 0.62 and H 0.75, a relatively small range of variation given the diversity of plasma confinement devices considered. To find out whether these properties of the plasma fluctuations have any bearing on the dynamics of plasma transport, we must investigate the properties of their induced fluxes. The relative phase between density and potential fluctuations could be such that the induced particle flux does not share the self-similarity properties. The problem with studying fluxes is the scarcity of experimental measurements. Flux measurements for core plasmas are practically nonexistent. At the plasma edge, the turbulence-induced particle flux can be inferred from the simultaneous measurement of the density and potential fluctuations. By measuring the density fluctuations at one point in the plasma, ˜ n1 ˜
IDENTIFYING PREDICTORS OF BLOOD PRESSURE CONTROL IN THE JORDANIAN POPULATION: A NATIONAL, MULTICENTRIC SURVEY.

* Mohamad A Ghneimat 1 , George Akijian 2 and Yousef Nijmeh 3 . 1. Ibn Alnafees Medical Center, Amman – Jordan. 2. North Marka, Main Marka Street, Amman – Jordan. 3. Hanania Medical Center, Amman – Jordan. Manuscript Info Abstract . Manuscript History
Review Paper Small molecules targeting mitochondria: applications for cancer and neurodegenerative disease therapeutics

Mitochondria are known to play an important role in cellular physiology and homeostasis. Over the last ten years, we have witnessed a growin g appreciation by scientific community of mitochondrial involvement in cellular processes. A mitochondrion appears to be a very vulnerable organelle, which is subject to far more aggressive environment than the other cellular components. The accumulation of various types of damage in mitochondria including mtDNA lesions and modifications on the membrane leads to the development of a number of disorders and aging. These findings prompt many researchers around the world to investigate the pro cesses in mitochondria that may lead to cellular malfunction. One of the major processes known to be regulated by mitochondria is cellular apoptosis. Certain conformational changes of the proteins loca ted on the inner membrane trigger the swelling of t he matrix and the outer membrane opening, which in turn leads to the release of the apoptotic proteins fr om the mitochondrial matrix into the cellular cytoplas m. The overregulation of membrane opening leads to the accelerated apoptosis and consequently to the d evelopment of neurodegenerative diseases. On the other hand, slow down in apoptosis causes the proli feration of cancer cells. One of the most popular w ays of medicinal intervention into the apoptotic pathwa ys is chemical targeting of the proteins involved i n these pathways. In this review, we discuss the role of mitochondria in the development of diseases and present molecules found to target key proteins asso ciated with mitochondrial membranes and involved in the regulation of apoptosis and necrosis. We also e xamine the methods of molecular design and discovery as well as the mechanisms underlying the drugs' int erference with the selected biochemical pathways linked to mitochondrial membranes.
Pathways for phospholipid deacylation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and their impact on fatty acid trafficking and equilibrium

The phospholipid (PL) class and species composition is a fundamental characteristic of membranes, essential to their proper function. The PL species distribution of cellular lipids is only partly achieved through de novo synthesis; PL degradation and PL remodeling are known to occur extensively and to be fundamental in the establishment of the steady state lipid composition. In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae the pathways for PL deacylation, leading to PL degradation or PL remodeling, remained, until now, unidentified. The difficulty in the identification of the enzymatic activities involved lies, partly, in the fact that free fatty acids (FFA), lysophospholipids and glycerophosphodiesters (GPD), the direct products of PL deacylation, are rapidly metabolized and are therefore inaccessible to accurate experimental detection and quantification.In the case of FFA, metabolization is necessarily initiated by activation through conversion to acyl-CoA, a reaction catalyzed by acyl-CoA synthetases (ACS). The S. cerevisiae strain YB526, in which the genes coding for the ACS enzymes Faa1p, Faa2p, Faa3p and Faa4p have been deleted, is unable to activate, and therefore to metabolize, FFA. In consequence, FFA derived from lipid deacylation accumulate in this strain and can be quantified. An analysis of the effect that the interference with specific enzymatic activities and metabolic processes has on the FFA content of YB526 cells, reveals the role of those activities and processes in lipid deacylation and in the homeostasis of fatty acids (FA) and acyl-ester pools in general.This approach has revealed that phospholipases B are not involved in PL remodeling or other constitutive forms of PL deacylation. Autophagic degradation, in contrast, was identified as the quantitatively most prominent mechanism for PL deacylation. Despite the fact that autophagy constitutes a mechanism for bulk degradation, its role in the regulation of the cellular PL content appears to be not only quantitative, but also qualitative. Neutral lipid (NL) metabolism was identified as well as a central element in the regulation of PL species composition. NL metabolism as a whole, mediates FA trafficking to a quantitatively similar extent than autophagy. Within NL metabolism, the phospholipid:DAG acyltransferase (PDAT) Lro1p makes a substantial contribution to PL deacylation, and is suggested by our results as the most likely mediator in PL remodeling. The acyl-CoA dependant biosynthetic activities of NL metabolism appear to be involved as well in the establishment of PL species composition through a modulation of the substrate available for PL synthesis. Furthermore, we established that impaired NL synthesis leads to augmented autophagic degradation of PL, while impaired sequestration of substrate for autophagic degradation leads to enhanced NL synthesis.