Characterization of low-molecular-weight glutenin subunit genes at Glu-B3 and GluD3 loci and development of functional markers in common wheat

Tese de doutoramento em Engenharia Civil, no ramo de Urbanismo, Ordenamento do Território e Transportes, apresentada ao Departamento de Engenharia Civil da Universidade de Coimbra.O ruído provocado pelo tráfego rodoviário, pelas suas graves consequências a diferentes níveis e pelas proporções crescentes de populações afetadas, é um problema que vem sendo considerado, em cada vez mais países, como uma das prioridades na definição de políticas de garantia das condições de bem-estar e saúde pública. Historicamente, diferentes abordagens têm sido adotadas para mitigar esse problema. Entre aquelas habitualmente associadas à Engenharia Civil, pode-se dizer que a utilização de barreiras acústicas será aquela que maior divulgação tem tido. Mais recentemente vem-se observando um interesse crescente no uso, em alternativa ou em complemento às barreiras, de pavimentos rodoviários que conduzam a menores níveis de ruído na sua origem, sendo ainda de referir a aplicação de elementos com maiores capacidades de isolamento sonoro em edifícios submetidos a tal ruído, em regra como última opção. Na presente tese, após uma síntese referente a diferentes aspetos do ruído de origem rodoviária e do reconhecimento da importância da sua caracterização, no contexto das soluções de pavimentação rodoviária mais correntes a nível nacional, para poder justificar determinadas opções no sentido da sua mitigação, foi dada especial atenção à análise de barreiras acústicas de um tipo relativamente inovador, concretizadas por estruturas resultantes da utilização, numa organização geométrica periódica, de elementos cilíndricos verticais, conhecidas como ‘cristais sónicos’. Sendo uma área de estudo cujo início remonta ao final da década de 1980, a sua aplicação no contexto de barreiras acústicas rodoviárias começou a ser sugerida já no início deste século, tendo, desde então, vindo a merecer o interesse de diversos investigadores com trabalhos relativos a diferentes aspetos de tal aplicação. Tal interesse deve-se à particularidade de, em tais estruturas, a propagação de ondas sonoras poder ser afetada, e mesmo impedida, em determinadas bandas de frequência (conhecidas por ‘band gaps’), em função das propriedades físicas e geométricas dos elementos que as consubstanciam e da sua organização periódica. Na medida em que uma escolha criteriosa daquelas propriedades permitirá ajustar o desempenho acústico de barreiras deste tipo, avaliado pela atenuação sonora proporcionada, às características espectrais específicas de determinado ruído incidente, tais barreiras poderão, assim, configurar uma estratégia de atenuação seletiva do ruído de origem rodoviária. No âmbito deste trabalho, pretendeu-se estudar tal possibilidade, partindo da resolução da equação de Helmholtz de modo a analisar de que forma a propagação de ondas sonoras pode ser afetada pela presença de tais estruturas. Para o efeito, foi proposta uma metodologia de cálculo para prever o desempenho acústico de cristais sónicos, de modo a simular os fenómenos de dispersão acústica, ou outros, que determinados atributos concretos dessas estruturas poderão desencadear. O principal aspeto inovador desta tese prende-se com a utilização de uma técnica de modelação numérica, o Método das Soluções Fundamentais, aplicada à avaliação do desempenho de tais barreiras, julgando-se poder, desta forma, apresentar um contributo importante na modelação eficiente deste tipo de estruturas. A validação da modelação proposta, realizada por comparação de resultados relativos à atenuação sonora proporcionada, quer com outros métodos numéricos quer com recurso a medições experimentais num modelo reduzido, revelou um muito bom ajustamento entre os vários resultados. Tendo-se, ainda, analisado a possibilidade de otimizar o referido desempenho dos cristais sónicos enquanto soluções de barreiras acústicas rodoviárias, alterando alguns dos seus parâmetros definidores através da variação das suas características orgânicas, pôde-se concluir que os resultados obtidos sugerem que tal poderá, de facto, ser levado a cabo utilizando a modelação proposta, o que abre todo o quadro de resolução do problema do ruído rodoviário junto à ocupação humana a uma forma menos perturbadora da envolvente paisagística do que a proporcionada pelas barreiras acústicas tradicionais.Road traffic noise, due to its severe consequences at different levels and the increasing proportions of affected populations, is a problem that is being considered, at an increasing number of countries, as a priority in defining welfare and public health related policies. Historically, different approaches have been taken to mitigate this problem. Among those most commonly associated with civil engineering, the use of noise barriers is arguably the one that has seen a more widespread dissemination. More recently an increasing interest in the use of road surfaces for traffic noise control at its source, as an alternative to or together with barriers, has been witnessed, and the use of façade sound insulation solutions in dwellings affected by such noise, generally as a last resource measure, should also be mentioned. In this thesis, after an overview regarding the different aspects of road traffic noise and acknowledgment of the importance of its characterization, in the context of most commonly used road surfacing solutions at national level, in order to justify the choices of specific measures for its mitigation, special attention was given to the analysis of a somewhat innovative type of acoustic barriers, known as 'sonic crystals', attained by structures presenting periodic arrays of vertical cylindrical elements, or scatterers. Being a field of study whose beginning dates back to the late 1980s, its application as road noise barriers was suggested at the beginning of this century and, since then, it has interested many researchers, working on different aspects of such application. Such interest is due to a feature, in such structures, where the sound propagation can be affected and even prohibited, in some frequency ranges (known as "band gaps"), depending both on the physical and geometric properties of the elements which consubstantiate it and on the periodicity of the array. To the extent that a specific combination of those properties will bring up the possibility to tune the acoustical performance of sonic crystals, measured by its insertion loss, to the specific spectral characteristics of a particular incident noise, these barriers can therefore configure a strategy in order to implement a selective attenuation of road traffic noise. In this work such possibilities were studied, based on the use of the Helmholtz equation in order to analyze how the propagation of sound waves can be affected by the presence of such structures. To this end, a methodology was proposed to predict the acoustic performance of sonic crystals, in order to simulate the acoustic dispersion and other phenomena, which certain specific attributes of those structures are likely to produce. The validation of the proposed model was carried out by comparing the insertion loss results it provided, with those delivered by either other numerical methods or by experimental measurements on a scale model, which revealed a very good fit between the various results. Having also examined the prospect of optimizing the performance of such sonic crystals when used as road noise barriers solutions, changing some of its defining parameters by varying their organic characteristics, it was concluded that the obtained results suggest that this may, in fact, be carried out by using the proposed model, which opens up the whole framework of solving the problem of road noise next to human settlement at a less disruptive form of the surrounding landscape than is provided by using traditional acoustic barriers.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologi

Deep Over-sampling Framework for Classifying Imbalanced Data

Class imbalance is a challenging issue in practical classification problems for deep learning models as well as traditional models. Traditionally successful countermeasures such as synthetic over-sampling have had limited success with complex, structured data handled by deep learning models. In this paper, we propose Deep Over-sampling (DOS), a framework for extending the synthetic over-sampling method to exploit the deep feature space acquired by a convolutional neural network (CNN). Its key feature is an explicit, supervised representation learning, for which the training data presents each raw input sample with a synthetic embedding target in the deep feature space, which is sampled from the linear subspace of in-class neighbors. We implement an iterative process of training the CNN and updating the targets, which induces smaller in-class variance among the embeddings, to increase the discriminative power of the deep representation. We present an empirical study using public benchmarks, which shows that the DOS framework not only counteracts class imbalance better than the existing method, but also improves the performance of the CNN in the standard, balanced settings

Effects of Spent Cooling and Swirler Angle on a 9-point Swirl-Venturi Injector

This paper presents multipoint lean-direct-injection (LDI) emissions results for flame tube combustion tests at an inlet pressure of 1034 kPa and inlet temperatures between 835 and 865 K; these are the combustor inlet conditions that the High Speed Research (HSR) program used for supersonic cruise. It focuses on one class of LDI geometry, 9-point swirl-venturi LDI (SV-LDI). Two parameters are compared in this paper: the use of dome cooling air and the swirler blade angle. Dome cooling air is called 'spent cooling' and is at combustor inlet conditions. Three cooling variations are studied: cooling at the venturi throat, cooling at the dome face, and no cooling at all. Two swirler blade angles are studied: 45 deg and 60 deg. The HSR 9-point SV-LDI emissions are also compared to a similar 9-point SV-LDI design which was used in the later ultra-efficient engine technology (UEET) program. The HSR and UEET designs cannot be compared directly due to different UEET combustor conditions. Therefore, this paper uses previously published UEET correlation equations to make comparisons. Results show that using a 45 deg swirler produces lower NOx emissions than using a 60 deg swirler. This is consistent with the later UEET results. The effects of spent cooling depend on swirler angle, spent cooling location, and the test conditions. For the configuration with 45 deg swirlers, spent cooling delivers lower NOx emissions when it is injected at the throat. For the 60 deg swirler, spent cooling does not have much effect on NOx emissions. These results might be caused by the location and the intensity of the flame recirculation zone

Recurrent Fusion Network for Image Captioning

Recently, much advance has been made in image captioning, and an encoder-decoder framework has been adopted by all the state-of-the-art models. Under this framework, an input image is encoded by a convolutional neural network (CNN) and then translated into natural language with a recurrent neural network (RNN). The existing models counting on this framework merely employ one kind of CNNs, e.g., ResNet or Inception-X, which describe image contents from only one specific view point. Thus, the semantic meaning of an input image cannot be comprehensively understood, which restricts the performance of captioning. In this paper, in order to exploit the complementary information from multiple encoders, we propose a novel Recurrent Fusion Network (RFNet) for tackling image captioning. The fusion process in our model can exploit the interactions among the outputs of the image encoders and then generate new compact yet informative representations for the decoder. Experiments on the MSCOCO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed RFNet, which sets a new state-of-the-art for image captioning.Comment: ECCV-1

General disease resistance loci against biotrophic pathogens in wheat

Dissertação de Mestrado Integrado em Arquitectura, apresentada ao Departamento de Arquitectura da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra, sob a orientação do Prof. Doutor Walter Rossa.Um ano depois de a UNESCO inscrever a “Universidade de Coimbra - Alta e Sofia” na lista do Património Mundial da Humanidade e face ao desafio académico de Coimbra Capital Europeia da Cultura em 2027, este trabalho tem como objectivo analisar e perceber como se alterou a imagem urbana da cidade e de que maneira o branding que proponho para a mesma vai clarificar essa imagem, de forma a criar uma linguagem coerente e clara, que traga valor para Coimbra. O trabalho divide-se em quatro partes. A primeira exibe a importância do branding para as cidades, entendendo que este conceito é fundamental para que Coimbra construa uma visão de futuro, com uma melhoria no espaço público e com uma linguagem coerente entre a Universidade a tudo o que a dinamiza. A segunda parte, analisa a evolução da imagem e do sistema urbano do espaço que escolhi como exemplo de trabalho, a antiga Quinta de Santa Cruz, onde foi criado o “boulevard” da cidade, a Avenida Sá da Bandeira e a Praça da República. Na terceira parte, vou analisar criticamente estes dois espaços de maneira a perceber como alterar a imagem suja que a cidade tem hoje, clarificando-a e sabendo que esta zona tem tudo para ser o verdadeiro centro cosmopolita de Coimbra. Por último, associo a esse exemplo um de outra natureza, mas com ele coerente no compto geral do processo, a criação de um logótipo que vai qualificar a cidade e que vai estar presente na mudança do sistema urbano, ajudando a clarificar a imagem da cidade.One year later that UNESCO aggregated “Universidade de Coimbra - Alta e Sofia” at the list of World Heritage Site and the academic challenge of Coimbra European Capital of Culture in 2027, this work aims to analyze and understand how changed the image of urban city , and that way, how the branding that i’ll propose for the city, will clarify this image in order to create a coherent and clear language that bring value to Coimbra. The work is divided into four parts. A first that displays the importance of branding for cities, and how these concept is fundamental to Coimbra build a vision of future, with an improvement in public space and with identical language between the University and everything that surrounds it. The second part examines the evolution of the urban system and the image of the space that i found as an example to work, the old Quinta de Santa Cruz, where the “boulevard” of the city with the Avenue Sá da Bandeira and Republic Square was created. In the third part i will analyze and criticize these two spaces so that you can understand how to clean the soiled image that the city transpires today, in order to make clear that this space has everything to be the true cosmopolitan center of Coimbra. Finally i will associate this example to other of a diferent nature, but coherent in the overall process, the creation of a logo that will qualify the city and that will be present in the changing of urban system helping to clarify the city’s image

Loss of heterozygosity in multistage carcinogenesis of esophageal carcinoma at high-incidence area in Henan Province, China

Aim: Microsatellites are the repeated DNA sequences scattered widely within the genomes and closely linked with many important genes. This study was designed to characterize the changes of microsatellite DNA loss of heterozygosity (LOH) in esophageal carcinogenesis. Methods: Allelic deletions in 32 cases of matched precancerous, cancerous and normal tissues were examined by syringe microdissection under an anatomic microscope and microsatellite polymorphism analysis using 15 polymorphic markers on chromosomes 3p, 5q, 6p, 9p, 13q, 17p, 17q and 18q. Results: Microsatellite DNA LOH was observed in precancerous and cancerous tissues, except D9S1752. The rate of LOH increased remarkably with the lesions progressed from basal cell hyperplasia (BCH) to squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) (P60%). LOH loci were different in precancerous and cancerous tissues. LOH in D3S1234 and TP53 was the common event in different lesions from the same patients. Conclusion: Microsatellite DNA LOH occurs in early stage of human esophageal carcinogenesis, even in BCH. With the lesion progressed, gene instability increases, the accumulation of this change may be one of the important mechanisms driving precancerous lesions to cancer. © 2005 The WJG Press and Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.published_or_final_versio

Solar influenced late Holocene temperature changes on the northern Tibetan Plateau

Considerable efforts have been made to extend temperature records beyond the instrumental period through proxy reconstructions, in order to further understand the mechanisms of past climate variability. Yet, the global coverage of existing temperature records is still limited, especially for some key regions like the Tibetan Plateau and for earlier times including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Here we present decadally-resolved, alkenone-based, temperature records from two lakes on the northern Tibetan Plateau. Characterized by marked temperature variability, our records provide evidence that temperatures during the MWP were slightly higher than the modern period in this region. Further, our temperature reconstructions, within age uncertainty, can be well correlated with solar irradiance changes, suggesting a possible link between solar forcing and natural climate variability, at least on the northern Tibetan Plateau. © 2013 The Author(s).published_or_final_versio