Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Flow-mediated plasticity in the expression of stickleback nesting glue genes

Nest construction is an essential component of the reproductive behavior of many species, and attributes of nests – including their location and structure – have implications for both their functional capacity as incubators for developing offspring, and their attractiveness to potential mates. To maximize reproductive success, nests must therefore be suited to local environmental conditions. Male three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) build nests from collected materials and use an endogenous, glue-like multimeric protein – “spiggin” – as an adhesive. Spiggin is encoded by a multigene family, and differential expression of spiggin genes potentially allows plasticity in nest construction in response to variable environments. Here, we show that the expression of spiggin genes is affected significantly by both the flow regime experienced by a fish and its nesting status. Further, we show the effects of flow on expression patterns are gene-specific. Nest-building fish exhibited consistently higher expression levels of the three genes under investigation (Spg-a,Spg-1, and Spg-2) than non-nesting controls, irrespective of rearing flow treatment. Fish reared under flowing-water conditions showed significantly increased levels of spiggin gene expression compared to those reared in still water, but this effect was far stronger for Spg-a than for Spg-1 or Spg-2. The strong effect of flowing water on Spg-a expression, even among non-nesters, suggests that the increased production of spiggin – or of spiggin rich in the component contributed by Spg-a – may allow more rapid and/or effective nest construction under challenging high flow conditions.
Elucidating the native sources of an invasive tree species, Acacia pycnantha, reveals unexpected native range diversity and structure.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Understanding the introduction history of invasive plant species is important for their management and identifying effective host-specific biological control agents. However, uncertain taxonomy, intra- and interspecific hybridization, and cryptic speciation may obscure introduction histories, making it difficult to identify native regions to explore for host-specific agents. The overall aim of this study was to identify the native source populations of Acacia pycnantha, a tree native to south-eastern Australia and invasive in South Africa, Western Australia and Portugal. Using a phylogeographical approach also allowed an exploration of the historical processes that have shaped the genetic structure of A. pycnantha in its native range. METHODS Nuclear (nDNA) and plastid DNA sequence data were used in network and tree-building analyses to reconstruct phylogeographical relationships between native and invasive A. pycnantha populations. In addition, mismatch distributions, relative rates and Bayesian analyses were used to infer recent demographic processes and timing of events in Australia that led to population structure and diversification. KEY RESULTS The plastid network indicated that Australian populations of A. pycnantha are geographically structured into two informally recognized lineages, the wetland and dryland forms, whereas the nuclear phylogeny showed little geographical structure between these two forms. Moreover, the dryland form of A. pycnantha showed close genetic similarity to the wetland form based on nDNA sequence data. Hybrid zones may explain these findings, supported here by incongruent phylogenetic placement of some of these taxa between nuclear and plastid genealogies. CONCLUSIONS It is hypothesized that habitat fragmentation due to cycles of aridity inter-dispersed with periods of abundant rainfall during the Pleistocene (approx. 100 kya) probably gave rise to native dryland and wetland forms of A. pycnantha. Although the different lineages were confined to different ecological regions, we also found evidence for intraspecific hybridization in Victoria. The invasive populations in Portugal and South Africa represent wetland forms, whereas some South African populations resemble the Victorian dryland form. The success of the biological control programme for A. pycnantha in South Africa may therefore be attributed to the fact that the gall-forming wasp Trichilogaster signiventris was sourced from South Australian populations, which closely match most of the invasive populations in South Africa.
Managing Deteriorating Patients: Registered Nurses’ Performance in a Simulated Setting

Aim: To examine, in a simulated environment, rural nurses’ ability to assess and manage patient deterioration using measures of knowledge, situation awareness and skill performance. Background: Nurses’ ability to manage deterioration and ‘failure to rescue’ are of significant concern with questions over knowledge and clinical skills. Simulated emergencies may help to identify and develop core skills. Methods: An exploratory quantitative performance review. Thirty five nurses from a single ward completed a knowledge questionnaire and two video recorded simulated scenarios in a rural hospital setting. Patient actors simulated deteriorating patients with an Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) as the primary diagnosis. How aware individuals were of the situation (levels of situation awareness) were measured at the end of each scenario. Results: Knowledge of deterioration management varied considerably (range: 27%-91%) with a mean score of 67%. Average situation awareness scores and skill scores across the two scenarios (AMI and COPD) were low (50%) with many important observations and actions missed. Participants did identify that ‘patients’ were deteriorating but as each patient deteriorated staff performance declined with a reduction in all observational records and actions. In many cases, performance decrements appeared to be related to high anxiety levels. Participants tended to focus on single signs and symptoms and failed to use a systematic approach to patient assessment. Conclusion: Knowledge and skills were generally low in this rural hospital sample with notable performance decrements as patients acutely declined. Educational models that incorporate high fidelity simulation and feedback techniques are likely to have a significant positive impact on performance.
Exploring the relationships among instructional leadership, professional learning communities and teacher self-efficacy in China

The study explored the relationships among instructional leadership, professional learning community components, and teacher self-efficacy in the context of mainland China. Study subjects were 1082 elementary school teachers participating in a questionnaire survey. The results showed that instructional leadership had significant effects on the five professional learning community components, four of which, collaborative activity, collective focus on student learning, de-privatized practice, and reflective dialogue, positively predicted teacher self-efficacy. Analysis showed that collaborative activity, de-privatized practice, and reflective dialogue significantly mediated the effects of instructional leadership on teacher self-efficacy. Implications for school leadership and teacher learning are discussed.
Nonuniform Cardiac Denervation Observed by 11C-meta-Hydroxyephedrine PET in 6-OHDA-Treated Monkeys

Parkinson's disease presents nonmotor complications such as autonomic dysfunction that do not respond to traditional anti-parkinsonian therapies. The lack of established preclinical monkey models of Parkinson's disease with cardiac dysfunction hampers development and testing of new treatments to alleviate or prevent this feature. This study aimed to assess the feasibility of developing a model of cardiac dysautonomia in nonhuman primates and preclinical evaluations tools. Five rhesus monkeys received intravenous injections of 6-hydroxydopamine (total dose: 50 mg/kg). The animals were evaluated before and after with a battery of tests, including positron emission tomography with the norepinephrine analog 11C-meta-hydroxyephedrine. Imaging 1 week after neurotoxin treatment revealed nearly complete loss of specific radioligand uptake. Partial progressive recovery of cardiac uptake found between 1 and 10 weeks remained stable between 10 and 14 weeks. In all five animals, examination of the pattern of uptake (using Logan plot analysis to create distribution volume maps) revealed a persistent region-specific significant loss in the inferior wall of the left ventricle at 10 (P<0.001) and 14 weeks (P<0.01) relative to the anterior wall. Blood levels of dopamine, norepinephrine (P<0.05), epinephrine, and 3,4-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid (P<0.01) were notably decreased after 6-hydroxydopamine at all time points. These results demonstrate that systemic injection of 6-hydroxydopamine in nonhuman primates creates a nonuniform but reproducible pattern of cardiac denervation as well as a persistent loss of circulating catecholamines, supporting the use of this method to further develop a monkey model of cardiac dysautonomia.
A Novel Technique for Automated Linguistic Quality Assessment of Students' Essays Using Automatic Summarizers

In this paper, experiments have addressed the calculation of inter-annotator inconsistency in selecting the content in both manual and automatic summarization of sample TOEFL essays. A new finding is that the linguistic quality of source essay has a very strong correlation with the degree of disagreement among human assessors to what should be included in a summary. This leads to a fully automated essay evaluation technique based on degree of disagreement among automated summarizes. ROUGE evaluation is used to measure the degree of inconsistency among the participants (human summarizers and automatic summarizers). This automated essay evaluation technique is potentially an important contribution with wider significance.
Regional ventilation distribution in the first 6 months of life

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) has been used to study regional ventilation distribution in neonatal and paediatric lung disease; however, little information has been obtained in healthy newborns and infants. Data on regional ventilation distribution and regional filling characteristics were obtained using EIT in the neonatal period, at 3 and 6 months of age, in spontaneously breathing infants during non-rapid eye movement sleep. Regional ventilation distribution was described using regional end-expiratory and end-inspiratory impedance amplitudes, and geometric centre of ventilation. Regional filling characteristics were described with the phase lag or lead of the regional impedance change in comparison to global impedance change. 32 infants were measured in the supine position. Regional impedance amplitudes increased with age but regional ventilation distribution remained unchanged in all infants at any age, with the dependent (posterior) lung always better ventilated. Regional filling characteristics showed that the dependent lung filled during inspiration before the nondependent lung during all follow-up measurements. Regional ventilation distribution and regional filling characteristics remained unchanged over the first 6 months of life, and the results obtained on regional ventilation distribution are very similar to those in adult subjects.
On the transformation of children at-risk into an investment proposition: A study of Social Impact Bonds as an anti-market device

Following the financial crisis of 2008, the UK government accelerated a number of market-based interventions into public problems. Experimenting with new forms of intervention provided a moment to effectively problematize the public sector as a whole and its budgets, opening up for discussion the basis for making an intervention, and the methods and costs involved. Questions were posed of the apparently irreducible costs associated with supposedly intractable problems of government (such as homelessness, vulnerable children or crime). In particular, crisis and austerity became a means to give new momentum to a series of experimental ways to shape the social investment market that had been under discussion in various forms since at least 2000. Social Impact Bonds form one particular type of intervention. They involve drawing together investors with delivery agencies, the third sector and national and local government, coordinated by a commissioner. In the recent move by the UK government to set up and use Social Impact Bonds, much has been made of the opportunity they represent to introduce competition, efficiency, efficacy, private sector thinking and investment to a range of different social problems. As the first results of these experiments are now emerging, this article reports on a study conducted into a market-based intervention that experiments with the transformation of ‘children at-risk’ into an investment proposition through a Social Impact Bond. The article suggests that the Social Impact Bond can be usefully explored by drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) treatments of markets as collective, heterogeneous assemblages. However, in contrast to scholars who focus on market devices, the article argues that the Social Impact Bond in practice operates as something akin to an anti-market device. The article begins with an introduction to Social Impact Bonds. It then explores the means through which market-based competition and an investment proposition were anticipated, but did not emerge through the composition and enactment of the Bond. It concludes with an assessment of the anti-market device and the future of Social Impact Bonds.
VLT observations of metal-rich extra galactic HIIregions: I. Massive star populations and the upper end of the IMF

We have obtained high quality FORS1/VLT optical spectra of 85 disk H ii regions in the nearby spiral galaxies NGC 3351, NGC 3521, NGC 4254, NGC 4303, and NGC 4321. Our sample of metal-rich H ii regions with metallicities close to solar and higher reveal the presence of Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars in 27 objects from the blue WR bump (4680 A) and 15 additional candidate WR regions. This provides for the first time a large set of metal-rich WR regions. Approximately half (14) of the WR regions also show broad C iv5808 emission attributed to WR stars of the WC subtype. The simultaneous detection of C iii5696 emission in 8 of them allows us to determine an average late WC subtype compatible with expectations for high metallicities. Combined with literature data, the metallicity trends of WR features and the WC/WN number ratio are discussed. The WR regions show quite clear trends between their observed WR features and the H emission line. Detailed synthesis models are presented to understand/interpret these observations. In contrast with earlier studies of low metallicity WR galaxies, both W(WR) and I(WR)=I(H) are here found to be smaller than "standard" predictions from appropriate evolutionary synthesis models at corresponding metallicities. Various possibilities which could explain this discrepancy are discussed. The most likely solution is found with an improved prescription to predict the line emission from WN stars in synthesis models. The availability of a fairly large sample of metal-rich WR regions allows us to improve existing estimates of the upper mass cut-o of the IMF in a robust way and independently of detailed modeling: from the observed maximum H equivalent width of the WR regions we derive a lower limit for Mup of 60-90 M in the case of a Salpeter slope and larger values for steeper IMF slopes. This constitutes a lower limit on Mup as all observational eects known to aect potentially the H equivalent width can only reduce the observed W(H). From our direct probe of the massive star content we conclude that there is at present no evidence for systematic variations of the upper mass cut-o of the IMF in metal-rich environments, in contrast to some claims based on indirect nebular diagnostics.
Suction sampling as a significant source of error in molecular analysis of predator diets

Abstract The molecular detection of predation is a fast growing field, allowing highly specific and sensitive detection of prey DNA within the gut contents or faeces of a predator. Like all molecular methods, this technique is prone to potential sources of error that can result in both false positive and false negative results. Here, we test the hypothesis that the use of suction samplers to collect predators from the field for later molecular analysis of predation will lead to high numbers of false positive results. We show that, contrary to previous published work, the use of suction samplers resulted in previously starved predators testing positive for aphid and collembolan DNA, either as a results of ectopic contamination or active predation in the collecting cup/bag. The contradictory evidence for false positive results, across different sampling protocols, sampling devices and different predator-prey systems, highlights the need for experimentation prior to mass field collections of predators to find techniques that minimise the risk of false positives.
Hotels vs. Peer-to-Peer Accommodation Rentals: Text Analytics of Consumer Reviews in Portland, Oregon

Peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation rentals continue to grow at a phenomenal rate. Examining how this business model affects the competitive landscape of accommodation services is of strategic importance to hotels and tourism destinations. This study explores the competitive edge of P2P accommodation in comparison to hotels by extracting key content and themes from online reviews to explain the key service attributes sought by guests. The results from text analytics using terminology extraction and word co-occurrence networks indicate that even though guests expect similar core services such as clean rooms and comfortable beds, different attributes support the competitive advantage of hotels and P2P rentals. While conveniences offered by hotels are unparalleled by P2P accommodation, the latter appeal to consumers driven by experiential and social motivations. Managerial implications for hotels and P2P accommodation are provided.
ASIC Architecture for Implementing Blackman Windowing for Real Time Spectral Analysis

Onus of this work is to propose a hardware efficient and flexible ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) architecture for Blackman windowing using CORDIC (co-ordinate rotation digital computer) as building block to minimize the spectral leakage and picket fence effect which are usual phenomena during spectral analysis by truncating input signals for finite length of FFT processor. A purely pipelined architecture has been adopted for the present design to ensure high throughput for real time applications with the latency equal to twice of the number of CORDIC stages plus two. The magnificence of this architecture is that window length can be changed by users for their specific applications and can be updated online for real time applications. The synthesized result of this 16 bit word size architecture with commercially available 0.18 mum CMOS technology using Synopsys Design Analyzer, shows that total estimated dynamic power to be 152 mW with an operating frequency of 125 MHz and total core area 8 mm2 (approx.)
Class Size Effect on Homework Engagement and its Change *

and Science Study 2003 (TIMSS2003), students in both smaller schools and smaller classes performed higher in the fourth grade (Hojo, 2013), but no differences derived from class size were observed in the eighth grade (Niki, 2013). Moreover, Akabayashi and Nakamura (2014) analyzed coupling data with the National Assessment of Academic Ability and the local assessment tests of sixth and ninth graders. It was indicated that This study investigated the effects of three class sizes (33 or smaller, smaller than 37, 37 and larger) on 8th grade students’ engagement in homework and its change in half a year. The repeated survey on students’ teacher-assigned and self-directed homework engagement was conducted among homeroom teachers in 48 junior high schools in a particular prefecture, and it included 6793 students. The class size effect on inter-school difference of both initial level of engagement and subsequent change was examined, using a multilevel growth model. The results indicated that the three class sizes caused no difference of the initial level of engagement. It was also found that no subsequent change of students’ homework engagement in middle and large class schools, however, the students’ teacher-assigned and self-directed homework engagement in small class schools was in an upward trend.
A Survey on Internal Validity Measure for Cluster Validation

Data Clustering is a technique of finding similar characteristics among the data set which are always hidden in nature and grouping them into groups, called as clusters. Different clustering algorithms exhibit different results, since they are very sensitive to the characteristics of original data set especially noise and dimension. The quality of such clustering process determines the purity of cluster and hence it is very important to evaluate the results of the clustering algorithm. Due to this, Cluster validation activity had been a major and challenging task. The major factor which influences cluster validation is the internal cluster validity measure of choosing the optimal number of clusters. The main objective of this article is to present a detailed description of the mathematical working of few cluster validity indices and not all, to classify these indices and to explore the ideas for the future promotion of the work in the domain of cluster validation. In addition to this, a maximization objective function is defined assuming to provide a cluster validation activity.
Experiments with multifractal analysis for fabric wrinkledness assessment

Objective assessment of fabric wrinkledness using multifractal methodology is addressed in the paper. As a first experiment with this methodology in this application field, AATCC standard durable press rating replicas, which are used by textile experts worldwide, were photographed and then segmented using common image processing methods. The resulting skeleton images were then analyzed using the multifractal methodology.
Effects of different Gabor filters parameters on image retrieval by texture

Gabor filter is widely used to extract texture features from images for image retrieval. A number of parameters (number of scales and orientations and filter mask size) are used in the Gabor filter. In the reported work so far, these parameters seem to be chosen without proper explanations. In this paper, we investigate the effects of different Gabor filter parameters on texture retrieval.
Stray Capacitance Between Magnetic Resonance Imaging Coil Elements: Models and Application to Array Decoupling

The role of capacitive coupling between RF coil elements of MRI arrays is studied extensively in this paper and comprehensive models are obtained. At higher MRI frequencies, capacitive coupling greatly impacts coil coupling and therefore cannot be neglected. We compare lumped and distributed capacitance models and show that they correctly predict impedance variations due to stray and intentional mutual capacitance. The distributed model takes into account the dispersed nature of the mutual impedance, and it is more accurate than the lumped model. The value of stray capacitance obtained by fitting simulated results is shown to depend strongly on substrate and phantom permittivity, while being mostly invariant to changes in frequency. A novel result of this investigation is a method of completely eliminating mutual impedance between adjacent coils, including the mutual resistance. Until recently it was believed that only mutual reactance could be eliminated with lossless passive circuits. The SNR performance of two and four coil arrays with varying degrees of coupling is compared, showing that there is no SNR degradation when the mutual resistance is eliminated in addition to mutual reactance. This result has applications in arrays used in transmission, where mutual resistance leads to losses that degrade transmit efficiency.