Search results for "Lability"

Food availability and the male's role in parental care in double-brooded TreecreepersCerthia familiaris

1996

The aim of this work was to examine differences in paternal and maternal care in a double-brooded, monogamous species, the Treecreeper Certhia familiaris, in relation to food availability. As a measure of parental care, we recorded the hourly feeding activity of parents when the nestlings from their first and second breeding attempts were 7 and 12 days old. Feeding frequency of the first brood increased with the age of the nestlings and also with the brood size when 12 days old. While the feeding activities of the females were similar with respect to the first and second broods, the males were less active and failed to provide any food to their nestlings in 15 cases out of 28 second broods.…

Effect of lactoferrin addition on the dialysability of iron from infant formulas

2003

A possible enhancing effect of lactoferrin (Lf) on iron absorption by breast-fed infants has been suggested, however the available results failed to confirm this hypothesis. Nevertheless, Lf could be useful in protecting the lipid fraction of infant formulas against oxidation. Concerning the possibility of adding Lf to infant formulas with this aim, we considered it necessary to evaluate the effect of this addition on iron dialysability, which was used as a parameter indicator of bioavailability. An in vitro dialysability method was applied to three types of infant formulas, with and without Lf added, respectively. In none of the analysed formulas did the added Lf have a negative effect on …

Effects of heavy metals on earthworms along contamination gradients in organic rich soils.

2003

Earthworm communities and metal (bio)availability to earthworms along contamination gradients was studied in order to support chemical analyses in risk assessment of metal contaminated soils. Earthworms were sampled in three metal contaminated areas with different habitat and soil properties in Finland. Earthworm and soil samples were collected at three distances (1, 2, and 4 km) from the emission sources. Earthworms were identified as to species and analyzed for heavy metals. Total soil metal concentrations were analyzed using an ultrasound-assisted extraction method and bioavailable metal fraction was estimated by acetic acid extraction. In two of the three areas studied, heavy metal conc…

The fate aspects of pharmaceuticals in the environment : biotransformation, sedimentation and exposure of fish

2012

Fast 3D Ray Tracing for Indoor Coverage Solutions

2016

Optimal wireless indoor network planning requires huge number of iterations and evaluations of indoor coverage for each antenna location until an optimal solution is reached. Consequently, accurate and scalable calculation of power strength for indoor scenarios becomes necessary. The contribution in this paper is to reduce the complexity of 3D ray tracing for deterministic indoor power prediction. In order to achieve that while preserving the accuracy, image theory with feasible reflection volume as preprocessing approach is introduced. This proposed algorithm stores the image, its feasible reflection volume and valid area of receiving points. Significant complexity reduction is achieved by…

Psychological Influence of Double-Bind Situations in Human-Agent Interaction

2007

This paper presents a new approach to integrate artificial intelligence in virtual environments. The system presented deals in a separated way the visualization and intelligence modules, applying in this last case a distributed approach (multi-agent systems) so that scalable applications may be built. Therefore, it is necessary to define agent architectures that allow agents to be integrated in the VW. Thus, a designer is abstracted from the peculiarities of interacting with a virtual environment. There is a first prototype of the framework using JADE as the supporting multi-agent systems platform.

Face Processing on Low-Power Devices

2009

The research on embedded vision-based techniques is considered nowadays as one of the most interesting matters of computer vision. In this work we address the scenario in which a real-time face processing system is needed to monitor people walking through some locations. Some face detection (e.g., Viola-Jones face detector) and face recognition (e.g., eigenfaces) approaches have reached a certain level of maturity, so we focused on the development of such techniques on embedded systems taking into account both hardware and software constraints. Our goal is to detect the presence of some known individuals inside some sensitive areas producing a compact description of the observed people. Cap…

A Novel Approach for Accelerating Bitstream Relocation in Many-core Partially Reconfigurable Applications

2013

International audience; Partial Bitstream Relocation (PBR) has been introduced in recent years, as a means to overcome the limitations of the traditional Xilinx Partial Reconfiguration flow, particularly in terms of the limited module placement, a fact that can greatly reduce the memory footprint of applications which require multiple implementations of the same module... However, PBR consumes scarce resources in hardware implementations, and introduces a prohibitive time overhead when done in software. This is particularly true in applications such as large scalable systems, which typically require multiple copies of the same module to accelerate a task, but in which the relocation time ov…

A new inter-cloud service-level guarantee protocol applied to space missions

2017

Nowadays, the term cloud computing often falsely assumes the availability of an unlimited pool of resources. On the contrary, if a cloud provider reaches its limits, it may pose the risk of breaking their service level agreement (SLA). Space agencies could start using the cloud computing model within their IT infrastructure with multiple ground control points around the world to reduce the cost. An inter-cloud communication protocol with a guarantee of the service level will significantly reduce the cost if each ground control segment is considered as a cloud provider. This paper outlines a new protocol that was developed to take into consideration the end-to-end service-level guarantee. Th…

Locality-sensitive hashing enables signal classification in high-throughput mass spectrometry raw data at scale

2021

Mass spectrometry is an important experimental technique in the field of proteomics. However, analysis of certain mass spectrometry data faces a combination of two challenges: First, even a single experiment produces a large amount of multi-dimensional raw data and, second, signals of interest are not single peaks but patterns of peaks that span along the different dimensions. The rapidly growing amount of mass spectrometry data increases the demand for scalable solutions. Existing approaches for signal detection are usually not well suited for processing large amounts of data in parallel or rely on strong assumptions concerning the signals properties. In this study, it is shown that locali…