THEORETICAL ASPECTS ON OPTIMIZING THE QUALITY INDICES OF MACHINES FOR APPLYING PHYTOSANITARY TREATMENTS IN THE FIELD

The correct application of phytosanitary treatments depends on several parameters influencing the quality indexes when applying phyto-sanitary treatments in a culture. The paper presents a few aspects regarding the quality indices of plant protection equipment treatments applied which directly influence the uniformity of the field distributio

ASPECTS ON OPTIMIZING THE QUALITATIVE INDICES OF THE WORK OF SPRAYING FIELD CROPS

In the context of continuous development and improvement of machinery forapplying phytosanitary treatments, the increase of precision of the dose applied to crops has become a target for major manufacturers of such equipment, the solutions applied on machinery aiming to improve the application technology, using automation and control systems driven from the operator cabin. This paper presents the most important aspects to be taken into account when working with a machinery for applying phytosanitary treatments, in order to obtain an optimization of qualitative indices of the spraying work of field crops

ASPECTS REGARDING THE CONDITIONING OF HORTICULTURAL PRODUCTS IN FRESH STATE

This paper presents the conditions and equipment underlying the work processes within the flow of conditioning technologies of horticultural products, in order to prolong the life and freshness of fruits, from the time of harvest and storage, to their marketing for consumption

CONDITIONING OF HORTICULTURAL PRODUCTS FOR CONSUMPTION IN FRESH STATE USING ULTRAVIOLET NON-IONIZING RADIATION, UV-C

This paper presents the conditions and equipment underlying the work processes within the flow of conditioning technologies of horticultural products, in order to prolong the life and freshness of fruits, from the time of harvest and storage, to their marketing for consumption

Cloud-scale VM Deflation for Running Interactive Applications On Transient Servers

Transient computing has become popular in public cloud environments for running delay-insensitive batch and data processing applications at low cost. Since transient cloud servers can be revoked at any time by the cloud provider, they are considered unsuitable for running interactive application such as web services. In this paper, we present VM deflation as an alternative mechanism to server preemption for reclaiming resources from transient cloud servers under resource pressure. Using real traces from top-tier cloud providers, we show the feasibility of using VM deflation as a resource reclamation mechanism for interactive applications in public clouds. We show how current hypervisor mechanisms can be used to implement VM deflation and present cluster deflation policies for resource management of transient and on-demand cloud VMs. Experimental evaluation of our deflation system on a Linux cluster shows that microservice-based applications can be deflated by up to 50\% with negligible performance overhead. Our cluster-level deflation policies allow overcommitment levels as high as 50\%, with less than a 1\% decrease in application throughput, and can enable cloud platforms to increase revenue by 30\%.Comment: To appear at ACM HPDC 202

The second data release from the European Pulsar Timing Array IV. Search for continuous gravitational wave signals

We present the results of a search for continuous gravitational wave signals (CGWs) in the second data release (DR2) of the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) collaboration. The most significant candidate event from this search has a gravitational wave frequency of 4-5 nHz. Such a signal could be generated by a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) in the local Universe. We present the results of a follow-up analysis of this candidate using both Bayesian and frequentist methods. The Bayesian analysis gives a Bayes factor of 4 in favor of the presence of the CGW over a common uncorrelated noise process, while the frequentist analysis estimates the p-value of the candidate to be 1%, also assuming the presence of common uncorrelated red noise. However, comparing a model that includes both a CGW and a gravitational wave background (GWB) to a GWB only, the Bayes factor in favour of the CGW model is only 0.7. Therefore, we cannot conclusively determine the origin of the observed feature, but we cannot rule it out as a CGW source. We present results of simulations that demonstrate that data containing a weak gravitational wave background can be misinterpreted as data including a CGW and vice versa, providing two plausible explanations of the EPTA DR2 data. Further investigations combining data from all PTA collaborations will be needed to reveal the true origin of this feature.Comment: 12 figures, 15 pages, to be submitte

Impact of Intermediate Hyperglycemia and Diabetes on Immune Dysfunction in Tuberculosis

Supplementary Data: Supplementary materials are available at Clinical Infectious Diseases online at https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/1/69/5857148#274319223 . Consisting of data provided by the authors to benefit the reader, the posted materials are not copyedited and are the sole responsibility of the authors, so questions or comments should be addressed to the corresponding author.Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Background: People with diabetes have an increased risk of developing active tuberculosis (TB) and are more likely to have poor TB-treatment outcomes, which may impact on control of TB as the prevalence of diabetes is increasing worldwide. Blood transcriptomes are altered in patients with active TB relative to healthy individuals. The effects of diabetes and intermediate hyperglycemia (IH) on this transcriptomic signature were investigated to enhance understanding of immunological susceptibility in diabetes-TB comorbidity. Methods: Whole blood samples were collected from active TB patients with diabetes (glycated hemoglobin [HbA1c] ≥6.5%) or IH (HbA1c = 5.7% to <6.5%), TB-only patients, and healthy controls in 4 countries: South Africa, Romania, Indonesia, and Peru. Differential blood gene expression was determined by RNA-seq (n = 249). Results: Diabetes increased the magnitude of gene expression change in the host transcriptome in TB, notably showing an increase in genes associated with innate inflammatory and decrease in adaptive immune responses. Strikingly, patients with IH and TB exhibited blood transcriptomes much more similar to patients with diabetes-TB than to patients with only TB. Both diabetes-TB and IH-TB patients had a decreased type I interferon response relative to TB-only patients. Conclusions: Comorbidity in individuals with both TB and diabetes is associated with altered transcriptomes, with an expected enhanced inflammation in the presence of both conditions, but also reduced type I interferon responses in comorbid patients, suggesting an unexpected uncoupling of the TB transcriptome phenotype. These immunological dysfunctions are also present in individuals with IH, showing that altered immunity to TB may also be present in this group. The TB disease outcomes in individuals with IH diagnosed with TB should be investigated further.European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 2007-2013 - Health) under grant agreement No 305279

A Better Estimator of Population Mean with Power Transformation Based on Ranked Set Sampling

Ranked set sampling (RSS) was first suggested by McIntyre (1952) to increase the efficiency of estimate of the population mean. It has been shown that this method is highly beneficial to the estimation based on simple random sampling (SRS). There has been considerable development and many modifications were done on this method. This paper presents a modified ratio estimator using prior value of coefficient of kurtosis of an auxiliary variable x, with the intention to improve the efficiency of ratio estimator in ranked set sampling. The first order approximation to the bias and mean square error (MSE) of the proposed estimator are obtained. A generalized version of the suggested estimator by applying the Power transformation is also presented