Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptation to climate change of Italian agricultural systems: the role of adaptive governance and social learning

Agriculture sustainability in the changing climate world is a difficult issue for both research and policy communities. While scientists are still struggled with CC knowledge uncertainties. Policy makers are stuck in understanding CC impacts in order to develop and implement policies to ensure an optimal level of adaptation. Several questions emerged in this context for policy makers are who and what adapts, what they adapt to and which levels they need to adapt. Through an empirical study at Oristano (Italy) with the 4 representative Italian agricultural systems, this research aimed to examine the local farmers’ adaptation capacity in the context of climate uncertainty. The research was designed flexibly in 4 phases as guided by the Grounded Theory Methodology. Participatory and bottom-up approach adopting methods such as interviews or questionnaires, meetings and workshops developed during the 3 years to trigger the interactions with/among stakeholders, engage their participation and open new space for social learning occurrence. The results provided an insight understanding about farmers’ perceptions, their knowledge, attitude and practices in coping with climate uncertainties, and importantly scenarios of adaptation to CC of Italian agricultural systems. It also highlighted several theoretical frameworks, that have significant implications for research and policy, on emerging social learning processes and forming local adaptive governance for CC adaptation at local levels.
Impact of Physical Exercise on Platelets: Focus on Its Effects in Metabolic Chronic Diseases

Chronic disorders are strongly linked to cardiovascular (CV) diseases, and it is unanimously accepted that regular exercise training is a key tool to improving CV risk factors, including diabetes, dyslipidemia, and obesity. Increased oxidative stress due to an imbalance between reactive oxygen species production and their scavenging by endogenous antioxidant capacity is the common ground among these metabolic disorders, and each of them affects platelet function. However, the correction of hyperglycemia in diabetes and lipid profile in dyslipidemia as well as the lowering of body weight in obesity all correlate with amelioration of platelet function. Habitual physical exercise triggers important mechanisms related to the exercise benefits for health improvement and protects against CV events. Platelets play an important role in many physiological and pathophysiological processes, including the development of arterial thrombosis, and physical (in)activity has been shown to interfere with platelet function. Although data reported by studies carried out on this topic show discrepancies, the current knowledge on platelet function affected by exercise mainly depends on the type of applied exercise intensity and whether acute or habitual, strenuous or moderate, thus suggesting that physical activity and exercise intensity may interfere with platelet function differently. Thus, this review is designed to cover the aspects of the relationship between physical exercise and vascular benefits, with an emphasis on the modulation of platelet function, especially in some metabolic diseases.
Quantifying Fire-Induced Surface Climate Changes in the Savanna and Rainforest Biomes of Brazil

This study uses a combined research approach based on remote-sensing and numerical modeling to quantify the effects of burned areas on the surface climate in the two Brazilian biomes most affected by fires: the tropical savanna and the Amazon rainforest. Our estimates indicate that between 2007 and 2020, approximately 6% of the savanna and 2% of the rainforest were burned on average. Non-parametric regressions based on 14-year climate model simulations indicate that latent heat flux decreases on average by approximately 0.17 W m−2 in the savanna and 0.60 W m−2 in the rainforest per each 1 km2 burned, with most of the impacts registered during the onset of the wet season. Sensible and ground heat fluxes are also impacted but at less intensity. Surface air is also warmer and drier, especially over rainforest burned sites. On average, fire reduced gross primary production in the savanna and rainforest by 12% and 10%, respectively, in our experiments.
Nanostructured Lipid Carriers to Enhance the Bioavailability and Solubility of Ranolazine: Statistical Optimization and Pharmacological Evaluations

Chronic stable angina pectoris is the primary indication for ranolazine (RZ), an anti-anginal drug. The drug has an anti-ischemic action that is unaffected by either blood pressure or heart rate. Due to the first-pass effect, the drug has a reduced bioavailability of 35 to 50%. The study emphasized developing a novel transdermal drug delivery system of nanostructured lipid carriers (NLCs) for delivering RZ. Many pharmaceutical companies employ lipid nanoparticles as biocompatible carriers for medicinal, cosmetic, and biochemical uses. These carriers are appropriate for many applications, such as topical, transdermal, parenteral, pulmonary, and oral administration, because of the large variety of lipids and surfactants that are readily available for manufacturing. RZ NLCs were made using high-pressure homogenization. Statistical analysis was utilized to find the best formula by varying the concentrations of Precirol ATO 5 (X1), oleic acid (X2), and Tween 80 (X3). Variables such as entrapment effectiveness (EE) (Y1), particle size (Y2), polydispersity index (PDI) (Y3), and zeta potential (Y4) were tested. A variety of tests were performed on the new formulation to ascertain how well it would be absorbed in the body. These tests included in vivo absorption studies, skin permeability assessments, in vitro drug release assessments, and physicochemical analyses. The particle size of RZ-NLCs was shown to be very small (118.4 ± 5.94 nm), with improved EE (88.39 ± 3.1%) and low ZP and PDI (−41.91 ± 0.38 and 0.118 ± 0.028). SEM and TEM analysis confirmed the structure of the NLCs and showed a smooth, spherical surface. Improved RZ-NLCs were used to create NLC gel, which was then tested for elasticity both physically and rheologically. The formulation’s elasticity was investigated. Optimized RZ-NLCs and NLCG were found to have transdermal fluxes of 48.369 g/cm2/h and 38.383 g/cm2/h, respectively. These results showed that the transdermal delivery of RZ distribution through NLC’s transdermal gel had more significant potential. According to in vivo experiments, the drug’s bioavailability in Wistar rats increased when it was delivered through NLCs. The findings demonstrated that NLCs loaded with RZ successfully transported the RZ to the designated site with no interruptions and that a quadratic connection existed between the independent and dependent variables.
Optimized Intelligent Driver Model for a Fluid Traffic Flow and Accidents Avoidance

With an increasing number of vehicles equipped with ACC (Adaptive Cruise Control), the impact of such vehicles on the traffic flow becomes significant. Especially in the zones where traffic safety is a concern. Here, we can mention roads where traffic is characterized by its "stop and go" particularity. One of the widely used and well-known algorithms to serve as the basis for a control algorithm of a real-world ACC system is the IDM (Intelligent Driver Model). This contribution analyzes the IDM, a CFM (Car-Following Model) governed by a system of differential equations. The model, in recent years, has been intensively studied for capturing traffic phenomena properly and making driver braking behavior safer. Despite the intensive analyses, to our knowledge, a rigorous study of comfortable braking, when an emergency occurs, has rarely been performed. Especially when vehicles' densities and speeds are in constant variation and when, in most situations, urgent braking is necessary. In this work, we modify the classic IDM to introduce the O-IDM (Optimized-Intelligent Driver Model). We increase safety distances between vehicles to prevent accident risks without permitting vehicles' velocities to become negative or to diverge to -∞ in finite time. We personalize IDM parameters for each type of vehicle and we aim to make the transition of the traffic flow from "free flow" to "stop and go" traffic more comfortable. We compare the obtained O-IDM results to the Krauss-FM (Krauss-Following Model) and to the classic IDM to prove the efficiency of our approach.
SememeASR: Boosting Performance of End-to-End Speech Recognition against Domain and Long-Tailed Data Shift with Sememe Semantic Knowledge

Recently, excellent progress has been made in speech recognition. However, pure data-driven approaches have struggled to solve the problem in domain-mismatch and long-tailed data. Considering that knowledge-driven approaches can help data-driven approaches alleviate their flaws, we introduce sememe-based semantic knowledge information to speech recognition (SememeASR). Sememe, according to the linguistic definition, is the minimum semantic unit in a language and is able to represent the implicit semantic information behind each word very well. Our experiments show that the introduction of sememe information can improve the effectiveness of speech recognition. In addition, our further experiments show that sememe knowledge can improve the model's recognition of long-tailed data and enhance the model's domain generalization ability.
Analysis of Mean Opinion Scores in Subjective Evaluation of Synthetic Speech Based on Tail Probabilities

Subjective evaluations such as mean opinion scores (MOS) are essential for evaluations of synthetic speech including automatic speech quality assessment (SQA) models. In this paper, we evaluate the confidence intervals of MOS in a listening test and the number of required samples to achieve a certain confidence interval based on various tail probability evaluation meth-ods. The tail probability is a probability representing the sample mean deviates greatly from the true mean. We use tail probability evaluations based on asymptotic and upper-bound-based approaches. In our experiments about toy data and actual listening test data, we show that achieving small confidence intervals requires huge sample volumes, and the MOS corpus for SQA has large confidence intervals due to limited sample volumes. We suggest adopting comparative scoring and online learning for more reliable subjective evaluations under limited budgets as the future direction.
SPECTRE: Visual Speech-Informed Perceptual 3D Facial Expression Reconstruction from Videos

The recent state of the art on monocular 3D face reconstruction from image data has made some impressive advancements, thanks to the advent of Deep Learning. However, it has mostly focused on input coming from a single RGB image, overlooking the following important factors: a) Nowadays, the vast majority of facial image data of interest do not originate from single images but rather from videos, which contain rich dynamic information. b) Furthermore, these videos typically capture individuals in some form of verbal communication (public talks, teleconferences, audiovisual human-computer interactions, interviews, monologues/dialogues in movies, etc). When existing 3D face reconstruction methods are applied in such videos, the artifacts in the reconstruction of the shape and motion of the mouth area are often severe, since they do not match well with the speech audio.To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we present the first method for visual speech-informed perceptual reconstruction of 3D mouth expressions. We do this by proposing a "lipreading" loss, which guides the fitting process so that the elicited perception from the 3D reconstructed talking head resembles that of the original video footage. We demonstrate that, interestingly, the lipreading loss is better suited for 3D reconstruction of mouth movements compared to traditional landmark losses, and even direct 3D supervision. Furthermore, the devised method does not rely on any text transcriptions or corresponding audio, rendering it ideal for training in unlabeled datasets. We verify the efficiency of our method through objective evaluations on three large-scale datasets, as well as subjective evaluation with two web-based user studies. Project webpage: https://filby89.github. io/spectre/
Influence of applied magnetic field in an air-breathing microwave plasma cathode

The air-breathing electric propulsion concept refers to a spacecraft in very-low Earth orbit (VLEO) ingesting upper atmospheric air as propellant for an electric thruster. This compensates atmospheric drag and allows the spacecraft to maintain its orbital altitude, removing the need for on-board propellant storage and allowing an extended mission duration which is not limited by propellant exhaustion. There is a need for development of a robust, high current density and long life cathode (or neutralizer) for air-breathing electrostatic thrusters as conventional thermionic hollow cathodes are susceptible to oxygen poisoning. An Air-breathing Microwave Plasma CAThode is proposed to overcome this issue through the use of a microwave plasma discharge, producing an extracted current in the order of 1 A with 0.1 mg s−1 of air. In this paper, the effect of varying magnetic-field strength and topology is investigated by using an electromagnet coil, which reveals a significantly different behaviour for air compared to xenon. The extracted current with xenon increases by 3.9 times from the zero-field value up to a peak around 150 mT magnetic-field strength at the antenna, whereas an applied field does not increase the extracted current with air at nominal conditions. A non-zero magnetic-field with air is however beneficial for current extraction at reduced neutral densities. A distinct increase in extracted current is identified at low bias voltages with air for a field strength of around 50 mT at the internal microwave antenna, consistent across varying field topologies. The effect of a lowered magnetic-field strength in the orifice region is investigated through the use of a secondary coil, resulting in an extracted current increase of 25% for a relaxation from 6 mT to 1 mT, and demonstrating the beneficial impact of a locally reduced field strength on electron extraction.
OPTIMAL TRACKING CONTROL FOR ROBOT MANIPULATORS WITH ASYMMETRIC SATURATION TORQUES BASED ON REINFORCEMENT LEARNING

This paper introduces an optimal tracking controller for robot manipulators with asymmetrically saturated torques and partially - unknown dynamics based on a reinforcement learning method using a neural network. Firstly, the feedforward control inputs are designed based on the backstepping technique to convert the tracking control problem into the optimal tracking control problem. Secondly, a cost function of the system with asymmetrically saturated input is defined, and the constrained Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is built, which is solved by the online reinforcement learning algorithm using only a single neural network. Then, the asymmetric saturation optimal control rule is determined. Additionally, the concurrent learning technique is used to relax the demand for the persistence of excitation conditions. The built algorithm ensures that the closed-loop system is asymptotically stable, the approximation error is uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB), and the cost function converges to the near-optimal value. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is shown through comparative simulations.
Latency Optimization for Heterogeneous Task Offloading in Cooperative MEC Network

In this paper, we consider a cooperative mobile edge computing (MEC) network where both the user equipments (UEs) and the MEC server can help with the task computing. Multiple heterogeneous tasks of different sizes for each UE are separately offloaded to the nearby UEs and MEC server’s central processing unit and graphics processing unit for processing. Tasks of the same type are transmitted sequentially so that the waiting latency is required for offloading transmission and computation. We aim to minimize the maximum latency of UEs for processing all the tasks while ensuring that all tasks are successfully transmitted and processed. To solve the formulated non-convex problem, an iterative algorithm named directed mutation process based on discrete differential evolution is proposed. Simulation results are presented to verify the performance gain provided by the proposed algorithm.
Early-Onset Aortic Dissection: Characterization of a New Pathogenic Splicing Variation in the MYH11 Gene with Several In-Frame Abnormal Transcripts

Rare pathogenic variants in the MYH11 gene are responsible for thoracic aortic aneurysms and dissections. They are usually heterozygous missense variants or in-frame deletions of several amino acids without alteration of the reading frame and mainly affect the coiled-coil domain of the protein. Variants leading to a premature stop codon have been described in patients with another phenotype, megacystis-microcolon-intestinal hypoperistalsis syndrome, with an autosomal recessive inheritance. The physiopathological mechanisms arising from the different genetic alterations affecting the MYH11 gene are still poorly understood. Consequently, variants of unknown significance are relatively frequent in this gene. We have identified a variant affecting the consensus donor splice site of exon 29 in the MYH11 gene in a patient who suddenly died from an aortic type A dissection at the age of 23 years old. A transcript analysis on cultured fibroblasts has highlighted several abnormal transcripts including two in-frame transcripts. The first one is a deletion of the last 78 nucleotides of exon 29, corresponding to the use of a cryptic alternative donor splice site; the second one corresponds to an exon 29 skipping. Familial screening has revealed that this molecular event occurred de novo in the proband. Taken together, these experiments allowed us to classify this variant as pathogenic. This case underlines the challenging aspect of the discovery of variations in the MYH11 gene for which the consequences on splicing should be systematically studied in detail.
Attitudes towards HPV Vaccination Policy Strategies to Improve Adolescent Vaccination Coverage among Pediatric Providers in New York State

Pediatric providers’ stances on HPV vaccination-related policies are largely unknown. To gain insight into pediatric providers’ perspectives and potential recommendations for directed policy, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of the American Academy of Pediatrics members in New York. Almost all providers expressed confidence in discussing the HPV vaccine with patients (98.6%, n = 72). Among common barriers to vaccination, providers listed parental safety concerns (n = 60, 82.2%), vaccination not being required for school entry (n = 59, 80.8%), and moral opposition to vaccination (n = 48, 65.8%). Among all respondents, 29 (39.7%), 13 (17.8%), and 2 (2.7%) agreed the vaccine should be required for middle, high, and tertiary school entry, respectively. Support for pharmacist-provision of the vaccine varied, with 31 (42.5%) providers expressing support. Most providers supported adolescent self-consent to vaccination, (n = 67, 91.8%). Providers continued to encounter barriers to HPV vaccination and indicated support of HPV vaccination mandates for school entry, pharmacist provision of the vaccine, and adolescent self-consent to vaccination.
Evaluation of Lens Doses among Medical Staff Involved in Nuclear Medicine: Current Eye Radiation Exposure among Nuclear-Medicine Staff

The International Commission on Radiological Protection has lowered the annual equivalent eye-lens dose to 20 mSv. Although occupational exposure can be high in nuclear medicine (NM) departments, few studies have been conducted regarding eye-lens exposure among NM staff. This study aimed to estimate the annual lens doses of staff in an NM department and identify factors contributing to lens exposure. Four nurses and six radiographers performing positron emission tomography (PET) examinations and four radiographers performing radioisotope (RI) examinations (excluding PET) were recruited for this study. A lens dosimeter was attached near the left eye to measure the 3-mm-dose equivalent; a personal dosimeter was attached to the left side of the neck to measure the 1-cm- and 70-µm-dose equivalents. Measurements were acquired over six months, and the cumulative lens dose was doubled to derive the annual dose. Correlations between the lens and personal-dosimeter doses, between the lens dose and the numbers of procedures, and between the lens dose and the amounts of PET drugs (radiopharmaceuticals) injected were examined. Wilcoxon’s signed-rank test was used to compare lens and personal-dosimeter doses. The estimated annual doses were 0.93 ± 0.13 mSv for PET nurses, 0.71 ± 0.41 mSv for PET radiographers, and 1.10 ± 0.53 mSv for RI radiographers. For PET nurses, but not for PET or RI radiographers, there was a positive correlation between the numbers of procedures and lens doses and between amounts injected and lens doses. There was a significant difference between the lens and personal-dosimeter doses of PET nurses. The use of protective measures, such as shielding, should prevent NM staff from receiving lens doses > 20 mSv/year. However, depending on the height of the protective shield, PET nurses may be unable to assess the lens dose accurately using personal dosimeters.
The Formative Period in Alabama, 1815-1828

"The Formative Period in Alabama, 1815-1828" is a beautifully crafted history of the evolution of the state written by Thomas Perkins Abernethy in 1922.The work shows how Alabama grew out of the Mississippi Territory and discusses the economic and political development during the years just before and just after Alabama became a state.Abernethy s story begins when Alabama existed as the eastern part of the Mississippi Territory, settled primarily by Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks, a few traders, and some brave but foolhardy squatters who thought to supplant the Indians and carve out a home for themselves and their descendants from Indian territory.Friction with the Creeks escalated into war and, with their defeat at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the successful move began to wrest land from the Indians for white settlement.The availability of good land, the promise of transportation of goods along the waterways, and the opening of the Federal Road brought rapid population growth to an area blessed (and cursed) with forceful leaders.Abernethy describes in detail the political maneuverings and economic strangleholds that created territorial division and turmoil in the early days of Alabama s statehood. "
A Novel Beam Domain Channel Model for Orbital Angular Momentum Communication Systems with Massive Uniform Circular Array

Spatial domain is explored to improve system performance in the sixth generation (6G) wireless communication system. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and orbital angular momentum (OAM) are key technologies to achieve this purpose. In this paper, a novel beam domain channel model (BDCM) for OAM communication systems with massive uniform circular array (UCA) is proposed. The generation of OAM waves proves feasible for UCA. Frequency invariant beamforming (FIBF) is applied to transform OAM basis to plane-wave or spherical-wave basis to make full use of the spatial domain in the multipath scenario. Furthermore, near-field characteristic and mutual coupling (MC) are considered in this model. Statistical properties like temporal autocorrelation function (TACF) and beam spread are analyzed and simulated. Complexity of the proposed BDCM is evaluated. Non-negligible impacts caused by the antenna like configuration and MC on TACF are revealed.