Varias de las especies silvestres de la familia Felidae se encuentran en riesgo y el tamaño poblacional es uno de los parámetros ecológicos más importantes para determinar acciones efectivas de conservación. El tamaño poblacional está determinado por diferentes factores, tanto bióticos como abióticos, que en conjunto satisfacen los requerimientos de los individuos para sobrevivir y reproducirse, permitiendo la permanencia de las especies a través del tiempo. Debido a que el tamaño poblacional de una especie no es homogéneo a lo largo de su distribución, se han formulado varias hipótesis para explicar sus variaciones. Una propuesta considera que las poblaciones más grandes se ubican en las regiones con mayor idoneidad ambiental y el número de individuos decrece hacia las menos favorables. Otra hipótesis considera que el tamaño poblacional está relacionado con la estructura interna del nicho ecológico, en donde las poblaciones más grandes están ubicadas en el centroide del nicho y el tamaño declina conforme aumenta la distancia a éste. El objetivo de este estudio fue evaluar la relación de la abundancia poblacional con la idoneidad ambiental y el nicho ecológico en cuatro especies de felinos silvestres de América. La densidad del lince Lynx rufus se correlacionó positivamente con el índice de idoneidad ambiental, la mayor densidad de jaguar Panthera onca se ubicó en regiones cercanas al centroide del nicho, mientras que las densidades poblacionales del ocelote Leopardus pardalis y del puma Puma concolor no se ajustaron a las predicciones de ninguna de las dos hipótesis. La relación entre densidad de felinos con las características ambientales puede ser de manera especie-específica y no como un patrón generalizado.

A wide range of variation has been observed in sampling techniques of pervious concrete specimen in terms of compressive strength, porosity and void ratio. Though, mix design play an important role for such variation, compaction method and energy supplied to mixture is also one of the reason that influence the performance of pervious concrete. The objective of this study was to evaluate the influence of compaction on performance of pervious concrete samples, so as to produce consistent specimen of desired porosity and strength. Specimens were prepared with a constant water-cement ratio (W/C) of 0.3 and three types of aggregate-cement (A/C) ratios 3.5, 4.0 & 4.5. All the mixtures were designed as per ACI guidelines with three different compaction methods namely rodding, static load and pneumatic vibration. Effects of compaction methods on mechanical as well as hydrological performance of pervious concrete were studied. Results demonstrate the influence of compaction methods on different pervious concrete specimen.

This study discusses the issue of bullying related to ethnic-racial issues in the workplace. The objective was to understand the subjective meanings of the perception of black and white men and women with an interpretivist and social constructivist view, considering intolerance and violence in the companies where the subjects work. The chosen method was qualitative, supplemented by simple statistical analysis with an exploratory and descriptive character. Semi-structured interviews were applied to black workers linked to different companies, with different hierarchical levels and randomly selected by accessibility criterion. The data collected, analyzed and inductively interpreted demonstrated that workers perceive racial intolerance and violence in the workplace, and suffer frequently and constantly from this type of behavior. The results of the research contribute to the debate on bullying and indicate the possibility of future research related to the matter, given its social, academic and organizational relevance.

In the modern world sustained growth in demand and supply of rare earth metals is preserved according to directives of progress in science and technology. Rare earth elements are becoming increasingly integrated in new technologies, especially within the clean energy, military and consumer electronics sectors. At the same time, the world market of rare earth raw materials is monopolized by China, and this fact causes the volatility of international prices. One of the most significant component of modern innovative rare earth mineral resource potential of Russia is techogenic raw materials sources, which is associated with the processing of phosphogypsum, the waste of production of apatite concentrate. The processing of phosphogypsum with the extraction of rare earth oxides is not carried out in commercial size due to undervaluation of economical efficiency of capital investment project.\nThe traditional positions of valuation of economical assets, which involve the calculation of measures of efficiency, are described in the article. The project implementation of recycling, in addition to economic benefits, also has a significant impact on social and ecological well-being. This increases the value of projects and should be taken into account when making investment decisions. For comprehensive assessment of these projects authors propose to use Cost-Benefit Analysis, which involves the calculation of two components of the net present value of the project - financial and economical. In such a way, the economical net present value reflects the monetization of the environmental effect from reducing the harmful environmental impact of waste, thereby enabling the project to be more efficient.

—This paper proposes a method to control the mouse\ncursor by means of pupil-position co-ordinates. Currently, the\nmouse control with pupil is possible with either dedicated\nhardware or infrared cameras. There is no available method\nto control the mouse by using an ordinary web camera so that\neveryone can afford it. We have worked upon a method that\nenables us to control mouse with pupil without any dedicated\nhardware or infrared camera.\nOur method involves the movement of cursor by the point\nof gaze on the screen. The point of gaze is calculated by\nestablishing a complex relationship between the current and\nprevious positions of left & right pupil, the screen resolution\nand the resolution of camera. The left and right clicks of the\nmouse control are implemented by using gaze dwell time. The\nleft click is enabled for a smaller dwell time and the right click\nis enabled for a little longer dwell time. This paper thus attempts\nto challenge the conventional mouse control so as to enable the\nphysically disabled to be able to use the computer.\nThe results show us an accurate detection of pupils of both\neyes in different head positions. Once the pupil is detected, the\nmouse cursor moves smoothly and covers entire screen area. The\nleft and right clicks using the gaze dwell time are also in place\nand works well in all areas of the screen.

This article analyses the architecture of economic governance designed in the EMU prior to the crisis and the new elements introduced into the framework of economic intervention while facing the crisis. After comparing the Economic policy for official and alternative exit strategies, we use econometric regression to show the clear correlation between the intensity of austerity plans (estimated by the changes in the structural balance introduced by discretional fiscal policy since 2009) and the trend in output in euro area countries. This article concludes asserting that the architecture of economic governance in the EU has demonstrated serious failings in its ideological and institutional aspects and that more and bolder policy action is needed.

Background: The aim of the study is to investigate whether Human Papilloma Virus (HPV)\nDNA has any role in fibrous hyperplasia (DIFH) caused by the prosthesis.\nMethods: Oral samples of 32 patients with DIFH and 20 patients without DIFH were collected.\nThe samples were investigated using Anyplex TMII HPV28 kit, which was capable of 28 HPV\ngenotypes in terms of HPV DNA presence. Amplifications were performed by using CFX96\nreal time PCR instrument\nResults: No statistically significant difference was observed between DIFH and without DIFH\ngroup in terms of the gender (p>0.05). Three (5.76%) of 32 samples (2 female and 1 male)\nshowed HPV DNA positivity. HPV genotypes were found in three patients which were HPV33,\nHPV 39 and HPV 42 genotypes. The control patients did not show HPV DNA presence.\nConclusion: In our study, only DIFH group demonstrated the presence of HPV. The dentists\nare suggested to be aware of possible HPV genotype associations with high or low risk in DIFH. \nLarge-scale prospective human studies are needed for clarification of the role of HPV presence\nin DIFH.

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence and role of Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) and Cytomegalovirus (CMV) in Radicular Cysts (RCs) and odontogenic keratocysts (OKCs) fluid specimens. \nMethods: We randomly selected 54 patients with odontogenic cysts (OCs), of these patients 34 had OKCs and 20 had RCs. All samples were investigated for the presence of EBV and CMV-DNA by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). \nResults: There was a significant gender difference between OKCs and RCs (p<0.05). The levels for EBV and CMV were similar in patients with OKCs (59% vs 65%, p>0.05) and RCs (41% vs 30%, p>0.05). Considering the coexistence of both viruses, no statistically significant difference was detected between both cyst groups (p>0.05). The presence of both viruses separately was detected at higher levels in patients with OKCs compared to those with RCs (47% vs. 35%). EBV positivity in RC group was higher than CMV (p≤0.05). \nConclusions: The higher presence of EBV in both cyst groups detected in our study suggests that EBV may be explained as an etiologic co-factor in OCs derived from odontogenic epithelial residues. Furthermore, prevelance of higher EBV positivity in the RC group suggests that RC may be a reservoir for systemic EBV infection for periapical lesions.

The overall aim of this paper is to investigate the benefits of a corrective method of electric system overloading provided that the wind farm is integrated in the distribution system. There have been observed significant impacts, congestion in system branches, overloaded transmission lines and weak elements appearance. Overloading of any transmission line for an extended period of time may lead to a cascade failure and if the N-1 reliability is not satisfied the total system can fall in a blackout. In this work we attempted to mitigate the overload and to monitor flow over transmission lines using a combination of two techniques: an economic load dispatch ED based on automatic generation control AGC and Unified power flow controller UPFC device insertion. The fundamental point of this study is the transmission line alleviation. In addition, other targets are realized: the load shedding avoidance, keeping frequency at its nominal value, and minimization of the operation cost and losses. This study is designed to utilize Power World Simulator software to demonstrate methods for relieving transmission overloads and conducting power transactions between interconnected systems. We tested this combined technique on IEEE 7 bus test system. Obtained results showed an improvement in the power system behavior. Simulation results are exposed, discussed and compared at the end of this paper.

Aim: Providing precise calculation of the Cartesian coordinates of the operator\'s hand joints when working with copy-style master devices of an exoskeleton-type anthropomorphic manipulator.\nMethodology / approach: The article proposes a method for calculating the Cartesian coordinates of the operator\'s hand joints, for the purposes of controlling the anthropomorphic manipulator using the exoskeleton of the upper limb. The kinematic diagram of the exoskeleton is similar to the structure of the human hand and has a rigid coupling with the operator in the shoulder and wrist joints. Between the elbow joint of the operator and the elbow articulations of the exoskeleton there is a flexible coupling. The input data for the calculations are the generalized coordinates of the exoskeleton. Coordinates of the shoulder and radiocarpal articulations, as well as those of the operator’s hand, are calculated by solving the direct kinematics problem. An approximate method based on empirical results has been developed to calculate the coordinates of the elbow joint. To evaluate the effectiveness of the developed method a numerical experiment was performed. Simulation was carried out in the technical computing problems solving software MATLAB (v.2016) using the Simscape Multibody add-on.\nConclusions: The article proposes a method for determining the relative position in the space of the shoulder and wrist joints of the operator\'s hand and corresponding articulations of the copy-style master device based on solving a direct kinematics problem using homogeneous transformation matrices.\nInnovation / Significance: The method, suggested in the article will allow precise low computational complexity calculation of the coordinates of the operator\'s hand articulations with in the control systems of the anthropomorphic manipulator using the mastering device of the copying type. As a result, the synchronism of the movements of the operator and the manipulator increases which leads to a reduction in the time spent on fulfilling the target tasks.

In the modern world, including in Russian society, the discussions caused by the escalation of various types of discriminatory practices do not subside. Traditionally, labor, professional, gender, age discrimination is considered, and violations, infringements of the rights of people belonging to different social and ethnic groups are discussed. Recently, a special type of discrimination is emerging, the emergence of which is due to the existence in society of integrated, generalized notations of ethno-cultural groups.\nThey are presented in the form of word combinations: \"persons of Caucasian nationality\", \"persons of Slavic appearance\". These designations of ethno-cultural groups, emphasizing the type of external appearance, penetrate into various spheres of life, leading to the formation of negative attitudes, the \"language of enmity.\" They become a kind of \"ethnic labels and nicknames\" that have offensive potential, \"insulting\" content.\nThus, the relevance of the chosen research topic is determined, firstly, by the growth of ethnic tension caused by the spread of \"ethno-anthropo-Lukaism\" as discriminatory practices; secondly, the need to study the manifestation of \"ethno-anthropo-lukism\" in the South of Russia, where representatives of the Slavic, Caucasian and Asian peoples traditionally live, the differences between which are established in everyday interaction on the basis of the type of appearance; thirdly, the practical knowledge of the influence of socio-ethno-psychological factors on the relation to the discriminatory behavior of the Other, aimed at the representatives of ethnic groups.\nAs is known, non-verbal communication components, non-verbal rituals, non-verbal taboos play a big role in the status-role, in the age-old communication of the peoples of the North Caucasus.

Language is closely connected with reality, with the life of society; language preserves cultural values - in vocabulary, in idiom, in proverbs, sayings, in folklore, in artistic and scientific literature, in the forms of written and spoken language.\nToday the Internet is an integral part of the culture of society, one of the main elements of the development of civilization. Its specificity lies in the fact that it is not just a significant technical invention, but also an important social phenomenon. Today the Internet ceases to be a purely technical professional sphere, all members of the society are somehow involved in this activity, the language of the Internet quickly enters the speech repertoire of all members of the society. Moreover, most of these terms immediately come into general use, do not constitute lexical units of specialized use only within the framework of professional employment. Today we can talk about a new concept for linguistics - Internet discourse and / or virtual discourse, and even about a new direction in linguistics - Internet linguistics.\nThe relevance of this study is determined by the need for a systematic description of how a certain part of the modern socio-cultural picture of the world is reflected in linguistic phenomena, systematization and a detailed description of a new phenomenon for modern linguistics - virtual discourse.

The conducted study allowed to substantiate institutional independence of outstripping and catching-up types of innovative development of the manufacturing industry and the need for a differentiated approach to their organization. The methodology is based on the analysis of the role of the high-, medium-, low-technology branches in innovative development of manufacturing industry. The logical processing of the results allowed to (a) substantiate the need to the indicator of the innovative load on the basic industries of outstripping innovative development in state policymaking; (b) to propose the relation model of tasks allocation depending on the innovative development type. The authors show that if the Russian Federation is oriented towards achieving economic sovereignty, the state innovation policy should be based on the effective correlation between the basic industries of the outstripping innovative development type and those of the catching-up one.

Feature extraction plays a vital role for extracting speaker related attributes like pitch,\nformant, energy etc. The environmental mismatch between training and testing data leads to\nperformance degradation of the authentication system. Research under various feature extraction\ntechniques are tested under different environment setup which indicates that lot of fluctuation\noccurs due to presence of background noise in matching process of the enrolled speaker.\nComparative study on LPCC, MFCC and PLP are tested with clear and noisy speech\nenvironment with TIMIT and Switchboard Dataset which shows Mel frequency cepstral\ncoefficients (MFCCs) outperforms in both noisy and noiseless environment and as from the\nliterature review from various authors in recent years suggested that MFCC is considered as a\nwidely used feature extraction techniques especially for human voice based verification system\nwhich motives to compress information about the vocal track of the individual. From the\nevaluation of the experimental results it is indicated that MFCC are sensitive to additive noise\nwhich degrades the performance of the system. Background noise and channel distortion leads to\nmismatch occurrence between training and testing environment. The robustness of the speaker\nverification techniques can be achieved by extracting the robust parameters of speech signals to\nminimize the effect of environment degradation.\nThe present work illustrates the evaluation of speaker verification for different speech\nfeature extraction techniques experimentally. Voice based biometric is a challenging field under\nrestricted data condition. The present work gives a comparative analysis of the popularly used\nfeature extraction techniques in speaker verification like Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients\nSujiya Sreedharan,\nPhD Research Scholar,\nDepartment of Computer Science,\nBharathiar University, Coimbatore, India\nChandra Eswaran,\nProfessor & Head,\nDepartment of Computer Science,\nBharathiar University, Coimbatore, India\n(MFCC), Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficient (LPCC), and Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP)\nwhich are tested under noiseless and noisy condition with 100 speech data constraints. The\nexperiments are conducted using two benchmarking database namely TIMIT and Switchboard\ndatabase to evaluate the techniques with different environment setup condition. The result shows\nthat MFCC outperforms for extracting speaker related attributes which are used to classify the\nspeaker by using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classification technique.

In the present work, filamentous fungi collected directly from mezcal fermentations,\nspecifically from the Etúcuaro region, were studied. Throughout the last decades, the use of\ntechniques related to molecular biology has been increasing, since these techniques are able\nto identify organisms in a fast and reliable way.\nFrom the samples collected, it was possible to isolate 5 filamentous fungi, which underwent\ndifferent processes to extract their DNA, the extracted DNA was subjected to the\npolymerase chain reaction (PCR), using the oligonucleotides to amplify the conserved\nsequences ITS1 and ITS4. Once obtained these amplified fragments, they were sequenced\nin the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO) of the Center for\nResearch and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV), these\nsequences were analyzed by using the online service of the National Center for\nBiotechnology Information (NCBI), these analyzes showed that the filamentous fungi\nanalyzed were of the genus Aspergillus, once the identity of the organisms belonging to the\nsequences was known, the alignment of the sequences was carried out, followed by the\nconstruction of the phylogenetic tree, with the help of the free use program MEGA6.