Development and evaluation of a prototype global volcano surveillance system utilizing the ERTS-1 satellite data collection system

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Searching and fixating: scale-invariance vs. characteristic timescales in attentional processes

In an experiment involving semantic search, the visual movements of sample populations subjected to visual and aural input were tracked in a taskless paradigm. The probability distributions of saccades and fixations were obtained and analyzed. Scale-invariance was observed in the saccadic distributions, while the fixation distributions revealed the presence of a characteristic (attentional) time scale for literate subjects. A detailed analysis of our results suggests that saccadic eye motions are an example of Levy, rather than Brownian, dynamics.Comment: Accepted to Europhysics Letters (2011

Regional-scale effects override the influence of fine-scale landscape heterogeneity on rice arthropod communities

© 2017 The Authors Irrigated rice croplands are among the most biologically diverse agroecosystems globally; however, intensification and simplification of farmed areas into homogeneous monocultures can lead to biodiversity loss and a reduction of associated ecosystem services such as natural pest regulation. Understanding how landscape heterogeneity affects the diversity of arthropod communities is therefore crucial for the sustainable management of rice agroecosystems. Here, we examine the influence of fine-scale landscape heterogeneity and regional-scale effects on the arthropod communities of three rice-production regions in the Philippines. Our analysis of 213 arthropod morphospecies (37,339 individuals) collected using two sampling methods at 28 field sites indicated that the rice agroecosystems in each study region had unique arthropod assemblages, likely reflecting region-specific environmental and land-use conditions. For all sites together, we found no effect of fine-scale landscape context (classified as rather high or low heterogeneity sites) on assemblage structure (arthropod abundance, species richness or diversity). When assemblages were analyzed separately, significant effects of fine-scale landscape context were only detected in one region and for two functional groups (predators and detritivores). Elevation gradient, used as a proxy for regional-scale effects in the study regions, explained more than 60% of variance in assemblage structure. Total arthropod abundance and rarefied species richness were negatively related to elevation, suggesting that regional-scale effects rather than fine-scale landscape heterogeneity explained the composition of rice-arthropod communities in landscapes. To further disentangle the complex effects of broad-scale environmental drivers versus fine-scale landscape complexity on arthropod communities and biocontrol services, future research in rice agroecosystems should focus on a more detailed quantification of landscape heterogeneity and examine its effect at multiple spatial scales

Hypocholesterolemic and Hepatoprotective Effects of “Triguero” Asparagus from Andalusia in Rats Fed a High Cholesterol Diet

The cultivated species of the wild autochthonous Asparagus officinalis in Andalusia in Spain is commonly called “triguero” asparagus. This vegetable has traditionally been very much appreciated for its organoleptic and nutritional characteristics. This study has been designed to evaluate the potential effect of different concentrations of freeze-dried asparagus (500, 250, and 125 mg/Kg of body weight/day) on oxidative status and lipid profile in rats fed a cholesterol-rich diet. After five weeks of treatment, doses of 250 and 500 mg/Kg of asparagus were able to significantly reduce total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol levels. Atherogenic index was also significantly reduced in a dose-dependent manner by administrating freeze-dried asparagus. A beneficial effect was observed in the HDL cholesterol levels in asparagus-fed groups although the increase was not significant. Consumption of asparagus also improved antioxidant status, assayed superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) enzymes, and protected against lipid peroxidation. These results show that the intake of green asparagus from Andalusia (Spain) helps to regulate plasma lipid levels and prevents oxidative damage in hypercholesterolemic conditions

Intermediate phase, network demixing, boson and floppy modes, and compositional trends in glass transition temperatures of binary AsxS1-x system

The structure of binary As_xS_{1-x} glasses is elucidated using modulated-DSC, Raman scattering, IR reflectance and molar volume experiments over a wide range (8%<x<41%) of compositions. We observe a reversibility window in the calorimetric experiments, which permits fixing the three elastic phases; flexible at x<22.5%, intermediate phase (IP) in the 22.5%<x<29.5% range, and stressed-rigid at x>29.5%. Raman scattering supported by first principles cluster calculations reveal existence of both pyramidal (PYR, As(S1/2)3) and quasi-tetrahedral(QT, S=As(S1/2)3) local structures. The QT unit concentrations show a global maximum in the IP, while the concentration of PYR units becomes comparable to those of QT units in the phase, suggesting that both these local structures contribute to the width of the IP. The IP centroid in the sulfides is significantly shifted to lower As content x than in corresponding selenides, a feature identified with excess chalcogen partially segregating from the backbone in the sulfides, but forming part of the backbone in selenides. These ideas are corroborated by the proportionately larger free volumes of sulfides than selenides, and the absence of chemical bond strength scaling of Tgs between As-sulfides and As-selenides. Low-frequency Raman modes increase in scattering strength linearly as As content x of glasses decreases from x = 20% to 8%, with a slope that is close to the floppy mode fraction in flexible glasses predicted by rigidity theory. These results show that floppy modes contribute to the excess vibrations observed at low frequency. In the intermediate and stressed rigid elastic phases low-frequency Raman modes persist and are identified as boson modes. Some consequences of the present findings on the optoelectronic properties of these glasses is commented upon.Comment: Accepted for PR

Magnetic Properties of MBE Grown La0.6Sr0.4MnO3 Thin Films

Honorable Mention Winner This project investigates the magnetic properties of a La1-xSrxMnO3 (x = 0.40) sample of high quality. This sample was grown one atomic layer at a time by Prof. Warusawithana using UNF’s Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) machine. These magnetic properties are investigated over a range of temperatures from 5 to 400 K in fields up to 7 T. We make use of the techniques to analyze the sample to determine to a high degree of precision the critical temperature of the sample, we determined it to be 252 K. We further identified the saturated magnetization, remnant magnetization, and coercive field at 5 K to be 0.00733 emu/g, 0.00563 emu/g and 0.0090 T respectivel

Overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims. Task 1: Check-Worthiness

We present an overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims, with focus on Task 1: Check-Worthiness. The task asks to predict which claims in a political debate should be prioritized for fact-checking. In particular, given a debate or a political speech, the goal was to produce a ranked list of its sentences based on their worthiness for fact checking. We offered the task in both English and Arabic, based on debates from the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, as well as on some speeches during and after the campaign. A total of 30 teams registered to participate in the Lab and seven teams actually submitted systems for Task 1. The most successful approaches used by the participants relied on recurrent and multi-layer neural networks, as well as on combinations of distributional representations, on matchings claims' vocabulary against lexicons, and on measures of syntactic dependency. The best systems achieved mean average precision of 0.18 and 0.15 on the English and on the Arabic test datasets, respectively. This leaves large room for further improvement, and thus we release all datasets and the scoring scripts, which should enable further research in check-worthiness estimation

Overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims. Task 2: Factuality

We present an overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims, with focus on Task 2: Factuality. The task asked to assess whether a given check-worthy claim made by a politician in the context of a debate/speech is factually true, half-true, or false. In terms of data, we focused on debates from the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, as well as on some speeches during and after the campaign (we also provided translations in Arabic), and we relied on comments and factuality judgments from factcheck.org and snopes.com, which we further refined manually. A total of 30 teams registered to participate in the lab, and five of them actually submitted runs. The most successful approaches used by the participants relied on the automatic retrieval of evidence from the Web. Similarities and other relationships between the claim and the retrieved documents were used as input to classifiers in order to make a decision. The best-performing official submissions achieved mean absolute error of .705 and .658 for the English and for the Arabic test sets, respectively. This leaves plenty of room for further improvement, and thus we release all datasets and the scoring scripts, which should enable further research in fact-checking

Overview of the CLEF-2018 checkthat! lab on automatic identification and verification of political claims

We present an overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims. In its starting year, the lab featured two tasks. Task 1 asked to predict which (potential) claims in a political debate should be prioritized for fact-checking; in particular, given a debate or a political speech, the goal was to produce a ranked list of its sentences based on their worthiness for fact-checking. Task 2 asked to assess whether a given check-worthy claim made by a politician in the context of a debate/speech is factually true, half-true, or false. We offered both tasks in English and in Arabic. In terms of data, for both tasks, we focused on debates from the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, as well as on some speeches during and after the campaign (we also provided translations in Arabic), and we relied on comments and factuality judgments from factcheck.org and snopes.com, which we further refined manually. A total of 30 teams registered to participate in the lab, and 9 of them actually submitted runs. The evaluation results show that the most successful approaches used various neural networks (esp. for Task 1) and evidence retrieval from the Web (esp. for Task 2). We release all datasets, the evaluation scripts, and the submissions by the participants, which should enable further research in both check-worthiness estimation and automatic claim verification

Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Activities of Neplanocin A, 3-Deazaneplanocin A, and Their 5'-Nor Derivatives

The neplanocin A analogs, 3-deazaneplanocin A, 9-(trans-2',trans-3'-dihydroxycyclopent-4'-enyl)adenine (DHCA), and 9-(trans-2',trans-3'-dihydroxycyclopent-4'-enyl)-3-deazaadenine (DHCDA), all potent inhibitors of S-adenosylhomocysteine (AdoHcy) hydrolase, were studied for their broad-spectrum antiviral potential. 3-Deazaneplanocin A, DHCA, and DHCDA proved specifically effective against vesicular stomatitis virus, vaccinia virus, parainfluenza virus, reovirus, and rotavirus. Their selectivity was greater than that of neplanocin A, particularly against vesicular stomatitis virus and rotavirus. As could be expected from adenosine analogs that are directly targeted at AdoHcy hydrolase, 3-deazaneplanocin A, DHCA, and DHCDA were fully active in adenosine kinase-deficient cells, implying that their activity did not depend on phosphorylation by adenosine kinase. None of the AdoHcy hydrolase inhibitors showed selective activity against human immunodeficiency virus (type 1). 3-Deazaneplanocin A at a dose of 0.5 mg/kg per day conferred marked protection against a lethal infection of newborn mice with vesicular stomatitis virus.This work was supported by the Belgian Fonds voor Geneeskundig Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (project no. 3.0040.83) and the Belgian Geconcerteerde Onderzoeksacties (project no. 85/90-79). We thank Anita Van Lierde, Frieda De Meyer, Ria Van Berwaer, Ann Absillis, Etsuko Nitanai, and Willy Zeegers for excellent technical assistance and Christiane Callebaut for fine editorial help