Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Climate Response to Soil Dust Aerosols

Abstract The effect of radiative forcing by soil dust aerosols upon climate is calculated. Two atmospheric GCM (AGCM) simulations are compared, one containing a prescribed seasonally varying concentration of dust aerosols, and the other omitting dust. Each simulation includes a mixed layer ocean model, which allows SST to change in response to the reduction in surface net radiation by dust. Dust aerosols reduce the surface net radiation both by absorbing and reflecting sunlight. For the optical properties of the dust particles assumed here, the reflection of sunlight is largely offset by the trapping of upwelling longwave radiation, so that the perturbation by dust to the net radiation gain at the top of the atmosphere is small in comparison to the surface reduction. Consequently, the radiative effect of soil dust aerosols is to redistribute heating from the surface to within the dust layer. Beneath the dust layer, surface temperature is reduced on the order of 1 K, typically in regions where deep convect.
Gila topminnow interactions with western mosquitofish: An update

Western mosquitofish Gambusia affinis has major impacts on Gila topminnow Poeciliopsis occidentalis. Thirteen years have passed since information on negative impacts has been published. I will list and discuss additional examples where mosquitofish have impacted topminnow. In addition, it appears that long-term drought has a synergistic and negative effect on this relationship. Since the last publications detailing the loss of Gila topminnow populations to mosquitofish, two natural topminnow populations have been lost in the Santa Cruz River basin: Redrock Canyon and Sharp Spring. Drought and climate change likely exacerbated the impacts of mosquitofish on these two populations, speeding the decline and disappearance of topminnow from both. Dynamic conservation actions are required to conserve and recover the Gila topminnow.
This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation

Low-latency online services have strict Service Level Ob-jectives (SLOs) that require datacenter systems to support high throughput at microsecond-scale tail latency. Dataplane operating systems have been designed to scale up multi-core servers with minimal overhead for such SLOs. However, as application demands continue to increase, scaling up is not enough, and serving larger demands requires these systems to scale out to multiple servers in a rack. We present RackSched, the ﬁrst rack-level microsecond-scale scheduler that provides the abstraction of a rack-scale computer (i.e., a huge server with hundreds to thousands of cores) to an external service with network-system co-design. The core of RackSched is a two-layer scheduling framework that integrates inter-server scheduling in the top-of-rack (ToR) switch with intra-server scheduling in each server. We use a combination of analytical results and simulations to show that it provides near-optimal performance as centralized scheduling policies, and is robust for both low-dispersion and high-dispersion workloads. We design a custom switch data plane for the inter-server scheduler, which realizes power-of-k-choices, ensures request afﬁnity, and tracks server loads accurately and efﬁciently. We implement a RackSched prototype on a cluster of commodity servers connected by a Barefoot Toﬁno switch. End-to-end experiments on a twelve-server testbed show that RackSched improves the throughput by up to 1.44 × , and scales out the throughput near linearly, while maintaining the same tail latency as one server until the system is saturated.
This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 17th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation.

Distributed on-disk database systems could either use an expensive commit protocol like two-phase commit (2PC) to guarantee atomicity, and suffer from slow distributed transactions, or forgo 2PC, which lead to weaker semantics, limitations to the programming model, or constrained scalability, making the system less general . We argue this compromise is no longer necessary within modern datacenters. Low latency 2PC ( ∼ 150 µs on Azure for 2PC over Paxos) can be achieved using low-latency storage for the relatively small transaction logs, fast RPCs, and careful protocol design. With fast 2PC, the data contention bottleneck for many transactions shifts from 2PC to reading the data itself from the relatively slow storage while holding transaction locks. We present Chardonnay, a scalable, on-disk, multi-versioned transactional key-value store optimized for single datacenter deployments with fast 2PC. Chardon-nay has a general interface supporting point reads, scans, and writes within multi-step strictly serializable ACID transactions. The key mechanism underlying Chardon-nay’s design is strongly consistent snapshot reads on commodity hardware, using a novel lock-free read protocol. Chardonnay uses this protocol to cheaply determine the read-write sets of queries, enabling Chardonnay to transparently prefetch data needed for a transaction prior to the execution of the transaction and the acquisition of locks. This enables Chardonnay to achieve fast transactions by minimizing contention, and avoids aborts due to deadlocks by ordering lock requests.
This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium.

We study the computation and communication costs and their possible trade-offs in various constructions for private information retrieval (PIR), including schemes based on homomorphic encryption and the Gentry–Ramzan PIR (ICALP’05). We improve over the construction of SealPIR (S&P’18) using compression techniques and a new oblivious expansion, which reduce the communication bandwidth by 80% while preserving essentially the same computation cost. We then present MulPIR, a PIR protocol additionally leveraging multiplicative homomorphism to implement the recursion steps in PIR. While using the multiplicative homomorphism has been considered in prior work, we observe that in combination with our other techniques, it introduces a meaningful tradeoff by signiﬁcantly reducing communication, at the cost of an increased computational cost for the server, when the databases have large entries. For some applications, we show that this could reduce the total monetary server cost by up to 35%. On the other end of the communication–computation spectrum, we take a closer look at Gentry–Ramzan PIR, a scheme with asymptotically optimal communication rate. Here, the bottleneck is the server’s computation, which we manage to reduce signiﬁcantly. Our optimizations enable a tunable trade-off between communication and computation, which allows us to reduce server computation by as much as 85%, at the cost of an increased query size. Finally, we introduce new ways to handle PIR over sparse databases (keyword PIR), based on different hashing techniques. We implement all of our constructions, and compare their communication and computation overheads with respect to each other for several application scenarios.
Mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 1-dependent Golgi unlinking occurs in G 2 phase and promotes the G 2 / M cell cycle transition

INTRODUCTION Mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase (MEK)1 belongs to the p42/p44 mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase pathway , whose canonical role is to transduce cellular responses to mitogenic signals (Roovers and Assoian, 2000). GTP-bound Ras activates Raf1 kinase and assembles Raf, the dual specificity kinases MEK1/2 and the p42/p44 MAP kinases extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK)1/2 into a membrane bound phosphorylation cascade in which Raf1 phos-phorylates MEK1/2, which in turn activate ERK, which is then released from the complex and translocates to the nucleus and other cellular sites (Besson et al., 2001; Lou et al., 2004; Torii et al., 2004b). Active nuclear ERK promotes the transcription of D-type cyclins and the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p21Cip1, constituting a necessary step in G 1 exit and S-phase entry. MEK1 also functions during mitosis. In mitotic Xenopus egg extracts, MEK is active and required for normal mitotic progression (Abrieu et al. Roberts et al., 2002). Activation is independent of extracellu-lar growth factor input (Dangi and Shapiro, 2005), and inhibition causes spindle defects (Horne and Guadagno, 2003). Additionally, interfering with MEK1 signaling via expression of dominant-negative mutants, use of chemical inhibi-tors, or RNA interference (RNAi) significantly delays mitotic entry (Wright et al. suggesting the existence of a novel mitotic target of MEK-mediated signaling that promotes mitotic entry. Surprisingly, one apparent mitotic target of MEK1 is the mammalian Golgi apparatus (Acharya et al., 1998). The Golgi consists of a contiguous network of laterally linked ministacks positioned at the microtubule-organizing center. During mitosis the Golgi reversibly disassembles. First, lateral connections between ministacks become disrupted, and then the unlinked ministacks undergo extensive vesiculation Reassembly is initiated in daughter cells at about the time of cytokinesis. Mitotic Golgi disassembly can be induced in permeabilized cells by using mitotic cytosol, and, under these conditions, MEK1 and Raf1 are required components (Acharya et al., 1998; Kano et al., 2000; Colanzi et al., 2003b). Active MEK/ERK complexes are in fact present on the Golgi due to their association with Golgi-localized Sef (Torii et al., 2004a). Furthermore, at least one Golgi-localized MEK pathway substrate has been identified, the putative Golgi structural protein GRASP55, and its phosphorylation occurs specifically at mitosis (Jesch et al., 2001a). Importantly , however, confirmation of the in vivo role of MEK1 in mitotic Golgi disassembly is lacking and its role has been challenged by several observations. In intact cells, mitotic Golgi disassembly seems normal after inhibiting the ability of MEK to …
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in aquatic ecosystem exposed to the 2020 Baghjan oil spill in upper Assam, India: Short-term toxicity and ecological risk assessment

This study focuses on the short-term contamination and associated risks arising from the release of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) due to the 2020 Baghjan oil blowout in upper Assam, India. Shortly after the Baghjan oil blowout, samples were collected from water, sediment, and fish species and examined for PAHs contents. The results of the analysis revealed ΣPAHs concentrations ranged between 0.21–691.31 μg L-1 (water); 37.6–395.8 μg Kg-1 (sediment); 104.3–7829.6 μg Kg-1 (fish). The prevalence of 3–4 ring low molecular weight PAHs compounds in water (87.17%), sediment (100%), and fish samples (93.17%) validate the petrogenic source of origin (oil spill). The geographic vicinity of the oil blowout is rich in wildlife; thus, leading to a significant mass mortality of several eco-sensitive species like fish, plants, microbes, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals including the Gangetic River dolphin. The initial ecological risk assessment suggested moderate to high-risk values (RQ >1) of majority PAHs concerning fish, daphnia, and algae species. This study highlights the need for recognizing the potential for short-term exposure to local species. To safeguard local ecosystems from potential future environmental disasters, it is imperative for the government to adopt a precautionary strategy.
Capabilities and Limitations of the

Quasi-simultaneous radar images can be produced by a low cost system using a set of passive receivers onboard a con- stellation of microsatellites in a special orbital configuration. The combination of these images can improve the final resolution in range and azimuth and systematically produce across-track and along-track interferometric data. Here we review some of the tech- nical particularities of these systems linked to 1) the system, such as the pulse scheduling, the orbital geometry, and the required pointing and positioning, and 2) the image quality, such as the am- biguity level, the required clock stability, the effect of varying base- lines at various scales, focusing to higher resolution, and geometric limitations, mainly the behavior of the coherent combinations over terrain with high slopes. We illustrate three applications of the concept in cooperation with the radar onboard the Japanese ALOS satellite, the ASAR instrument onboard the European ENVISAT, and as a study-case for defense applications of the concept. We envision even more in- novative applications of the concept, for instance in simultaneous polarimetry and interferometry. Index Terms—Antenna arrays, cooperative satellites, jamming, multistatic scattering, superresolution, synchronization, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), terrain mapping, vegetation, velocity mea- surement.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Structure of Act-report Data: Is the Five-factor Model of Personality Recaptured?

We examined the correspondence between the structure of act-report data and 5-factor models emerging from trait-rating data. Twenty categories were selected as markers for the 5-factor model and retrospective act reports were constructed for the target categories: One hundred eighteen men and women comprising 59 dating couples completed self-based and observer-based act reports. Several factor analyses tested different assumptions. Retaining total act performance (TAP) produced a blend of the traditional 5 factors. Removing TAP closely reproduced the 5-factor model in both principal-components and procrustes analyses. Correlations between the derived act factors and trait ratings from 6 data sources support a reinterpretation of the traditional trait labels. Discussion fo-cuses on the implications of different assumptions on the formulation of a basic model of personality structure. Identifying a basic set of individual differences has been a central concern of personality psychology for decades There are important advantages to discovering a common taxonomic structure of personality: Such a discovery could offer a framework for integrating diverse research programs, offer a sound basis for selecting important variables for inclusion in research programs , alert investigators to gaps in current coverage, and provide a foundation for cumulative and integrated advances. A consensus appears to be forming on precisely such a structure. Different investigations, most based on trait-rating data, have been converging on a five-factor model of personality Although there is some disagreement about labels and precise meanings, these five factors have been named Sur-gency, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness (Will to Achieve), Emotional Stability, and Culture (Intellectance, Openness). Ifa structure of personality is to be comprehensive and gener-alizable, it should emerge from, and be anchored in, data bases originating from a variety of sources and methodologies. Structures unique to particular methods or data sources may be re-ren Norman deserve special thanks for many data-analytic suggestions and for commenting extensively on several earlier versions of this article. vealing; however, they do not provide a sound basis for organizing and integrating the field of personality psychology. With several exceptions, the five-factor models to which we refer have emerged from factor analyses of trait-descriptive adjectives (see John, Angleitner, & Ostendorf, 1988, for a historical review of the topic). These adjectives are typically east in the form of a series of bipolar rating scales such as dominant-submissive, timid-bold, and intelligent-stupid. Although observer judgments have been the primary data source, the five factors also emerge from factor analyses of self-report ratings (1986) factor-analyzed …
Shallow Parsing for South Asian Languages

As part of the IJCAI workshop on ”Shallow Parsing for South Asian Languages”, a contest was held in which the participants trained and tested their shallow parsing systems for Hindi, Bengali and Telugu. This paper gives the complete account of the contest in terms of how the data for the three languages was released, the performances of the participating systems and an overview of the approaches followed for POS tagging and chunking. We finally give an analysis of the systems which gives insights to directions for future research on shallow parsing for South Asian languages.
Automatic detection and characterization of the ML on polarimetric RHI scans

The melting layer (ML) is an important feature of precipitation, frequently occurring during stratiform rainfall. It is associated with the melting of snowflakes/ice crystals below the freezing level. It can be seen on meteorological radar RHIs as a thin nearly horizontal layer with a high reflectivity factor and low values of ρhv (copolar correlation coefficient). The high reflectivity is due to the fact that ice crystals with liquid water at their surface behave as huge water drops in terms of reflectivity, which depends on the sixth power of the drop diameter. The height of the ML gives an indication of the maximal height of the stratiform rain and the altitude of the 0◦C isotherm.
Health impact assessment of exposure to inhalable particles in Lisbon Metropolitan Area

This study is focused on the assessment of potential health benefits in Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Portugal, using the limit values defined by the new European Directive (2008/50/CE) for short and long-term exposure to PM10. For this purpose, the methodology of the WHO for Health Impact Assessment and Apheis guidelines for data collection was applied. The time series of PM10 concentrations measured within the study area at urban background stations together with demographic data and health indicators were considered. An improved methodology using population mobility data that describes daily average Origin-Destination trips is proposed in this work to analyse the number of persons exposed. The results provide quantitative information on the number of attributable cases potentially prevented annually by reducing PM10 concentration to the levels established by the Air Quality Directive and proposed by WHO guidelines for this pollutant. An intercomparison of two approaches to process input data for the health risk analysis provides information on the sensitivity of the applied methodology.
Spinal Muscular Atrophy: An Evolving Scenario through New Perspectives in Diagnosis and Advances in Therapies

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) linked to 5q is a recessive motor neuron disease characterized by progressive and diffuse weakness and muscular atrophy. SMA is the most common neurodegenerative disease in childhood with an incidence of approximately 1 in 6000–10,000 live births, being long considered a leading cause of hereditary mortality in infancy, worldwide. The classification of SMA is based on the natural history of the disease, with a wide clinical spectrum of onset and severity. We are currently in a new therapeutic era, that, thanks to the widespread use of the newly approved disease-modifying therapies and the possibility of an early administration, should lead to a deep change in the clinical scenario and, thus, in the history of SMA. With the aim to achieve a new view of SMA, in this review we consider different aspects of this neuromuscular disease: the historical perspective, the clinical features, the diagnostic process, the psychological outcome, innovation in treatments and therapies, the possibility of an early identification of affected infants in the pre-symptomatic phase through newborn screening programs.
Problems of Combining NOMA with MIMO

This article reviews existing methods for combining non-orthogonal access technology (NOMA) and multiple input – multiple output (MIMO), and analyzes the results of current research in this area. Developing new MIMO-NOMA systems brings new signal processing and formation challenges such as grouping of users’ signals and complexity of their joint processing. Along with MIMO-NOMA multi-cluster systems, open loop and closed loop systems are considered. Simulation results are presented to compare the noise immunity of users with different type of modulation scheme selected in one cluster of closed loop and open loop MIMO-NOMA system for independent Raleigh fading channel. The main problems associated with the development of methods and algorithms for combining NOMA and MIMO technologies are also formulated.
Digital Commons @ University of South Florida Digital Commons @ University of South Florida

Background: Acute lung injury (ALI) is characterized by alveolar damage, increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines and impaired alveolar fluid clearance. Recently, we showed that the deletion of Apoptosis signal-regulating kinase 1 (ASK1) protects against hyperoxia-induced acute lung injury (HALI) by suppressing IL-1β and TNF-α. Previously, our data revealed that the suppressor of cytokine signaling-1 (SOCS-1) overexpression restores alveolar fluid clearance in HALI by inhibiting ASK-1 and suppressing IL-1β levels. Furthermore, IL-1β is known to inhibit the expression of epithelial sodium channel α-subunit (ENaC) via a p38 MAPK signaling pathway. Objective: To determine whether SOCS-1 overexpression in MLE-12 cells would protect against IL-1β-mediated depletion of αENaC by suppressing ASK-1 expression. Methods: We co-transfected MLE-12 cells with SOCS-1 overexpressing plasmid with or without IL-1β in the presence or absence of sodium channel inhibitor, amiloride. We measured potential difference, transepithelial current, resistance, and sodium uptake levels across MLE-12 cells. We studied the effect of ASK-1 depletion, as well as ASK-1 and SOCS-1 overexpression on αENaC expression. Results: SOCS-1 overexpression sufficiently restored transepithelial current and resistance in MLE-12 cells treated with either IL-1β or amiloride. The αENaC mRNA levels and sodium transport were increased in SOCS-1 overexpressing MLE-12 cells exposed to IL-1β. Depletion of ASK-1 in MLE-12 cells increased αENaC mRNA levels. Interestingly, SOCS-1 overexpression restored αENaC expression in MLE-12 cells in the presence of ASK-1 overexpression. Conclusion: Collectively, these findings suggest that SOCS-1 may exert its protective effect by rescuing αENaC expression via suppression of ASK-1.
Spatiotemporal patterns of evapotranspiration along the North American east coast as influenced by multiple environmental changes

The North American east coast has experienced significant land‐use and climate changes since the beginning of the 20th century. In this study, using the Dynamic Land Ecosystem Model 2.0 driven by time‐series input data of land use, climate and atmospheric CO2, we examined how these driving forces have affected the spatiotemporal trends and variability of evapotranspiration (ET) in this region during 1901–2008. Annual ET in the North American east coast during this period was 648.3 ± 38.6 mm/year and demonstrated an increasing trend. Factorial model simulations indicated that climate variability explained 76% of the inter‐annual ET variability. Although land‐use change only explained 16% of the ET temporal variability, afforestation induced the upward trend of ET and increased annual ET by 12.8 mm/year. Elevated atmospheric CO2 reduced annual ET by 0.84 mm, and its potential impacts under future atmospheric CO2 levels could be much larger than estimates for the historical 1901–2008 period. Climate change determined the spatial pattern of ET changes across the entire study area, whereas land‐use changes dramatically affected ET in watersheds with significant land conversions. In spite of the multiple benefits from afforestation, its impacts on water resources should be considered in future land‐use policy making. Elevated ET may also affect fresh water availability for the increasing social and economic water demands. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.