Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evolution and market share of wireless community networks

Wireless community networks that operate in the unlicensed spectrum have emerged as a low-cost alternative for providing high-speed wireless data services. By using WiFi access points that are provided and managed by community members, wireless community networks can offer high-speed data services at a much lower cost compared with traditional licensed band operators. However, depending on the number of members, the quality-of-service in terms of coverage and data rates provided by wireless community networks can be significantly lower compared with traditional licensed band operators. As a result, it is not clear whether wireless community networks will be able to capture a significant share of the market for wireless data services. In this paper we use a game-theoretic approach to model and study the evolution, and potential market share, of wireless community networks. We also study whether it is profitable for a licensed band provider to complement its licensed band data service with a low-cost service based on a wireless community network.
Imaginary Companions and Impersonated Characters: Sex Differences in Children's Fantasy Play

We compared the incidence of imaginary companions and impersonated characters in 152 three- and four-year-old children (75 males and 77 females). Children and their parents were interviewed about role play in two sessions. Although there were no sex differences in verbal ability or fantasy predisposition, there was a significant difference in the form of children's imaginary characters: girls were more likely to create imaginary companions, whereas boys were more likely than girls to actively impersonate their characters. There were no significant sex differences in the competence ratings of imaginary companions or impersonated characters. These results suggest that it is important to examine the form and function of children's pretense to understand sex differences in fantasy play.
Video-based Face Recognition: A Survey

Video-based face recognition has been one of the hot topics in the field of image processing in the last several decades. Face recognition in video has received significant attention. Not only the wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications, but also the availability of feasible technologies after several decades of research contributes to the trend. Although current face recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their development is still limited by the conditions brought about by many real applications. For example, recognition images of video sequence acquired in an open environment with changes in illumination and/or pose and/or facial occlusion and/or low resolution of acquired image remains a largely unsolved problem. In other words, current algorithms are yet to be developed. This paper provides an up-to-date survey of video-based face recognition research.
Global Climate Talks from Failure to Cooperation and Hope: Swedish News Framings of COP15 and COP21

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to offer an analysis of how two UN Conferences of Parties, COP15 in Copenhagen 2009 and COP21 in Paris 2015, were covered and debated in Swedish newspapers. Two national and two regional newspapers were selected for the study, and a qualitative frame analysis was conducted on 309 articles. A typology of frames applicable to science-related policy and climate change debates was used and its relevance for global climate summit context was discussed. Having territory in the Arctic region, indigenous populations affected by climate change measures, and political and public sensitivity to environmental issues, the climate debate has particular significance in the Swedish case. Findings indicate a trust in the role of national and supra-national governance to address climate change problems, but also that newspapers in Sweden maintained a focus on the global aspects of the two meetings, rather than framing them as surrogate battlefields for domestic politics.
Microbial Ecology of Mid‐Ocean Ridges and Back‐Arc Basins

Over the past two decades, microbiologists have gained significant insights into the diversity and physiology of microbial communities associated with deep-sea hydrothermal systems. Much of the initial research focused on mid-ocean ridge (MOR) systems; however, because of the greater heterogeneity of vent fluid chemistry and sulfide structures from back-arc basin (BAB) systems, recent studies have begun to explore the linkages between geochemistry and microbial diversity in these systems. The impact of microbes on local fluid chemistry and mineralogy has been recognized, and local fluid physical-geochemical states and mineralogical properties have significant impacts on the formation and composition of local microbial communities. Data are being accumulated that enable microbiologists not only to link phylogenetic and physiological diversity of microbial communities to geological and geochemical settings within a hydrothermal field, but also to review microbial ecosystems in global deep-sea hydrothermal systems with comparison of representative MOR and BAB systems. In this review, we briefly outline methods in microbial ecology and microbial ecophysiology at vents and discuss the patterns of diversity (phylogenetic and physiological) emerging from studies in the global hydrothermal systems. As this volume is dedicated to BABs, we highlight several case studies on hydrothermal vent microbial communities in BAB systems that are comparable to the communities in MOR systems.
On sofic groups

Abstract Answering some questions of Weiss in [B. Weiss. Sofic groups and dynamical systems. (Ergodic theory and harmonic analysis, Mumbai, 1999.) Sankhya Ser. A. 62 (2000), 350-359. ], we prove that a free product of sofic groups is sofic and that amenable extensions of sofic groups are sofic. We also give an example of a finitely generated sofic group that is not residually amenable.
γδ T cells protect against lung fibrosis via IL-22

Inflammation-induced pulmonary fibrosis (PF) leads to irreversible loss of lung function and is a predictor of mortality in numerous lung diseases. Why some subjects with lung inflammation but not others develop PF is unclear. In a mouse model of hypersensitivity pneumonitis that progresses to lung fibrosis upon repeated exposure to the ubiquitous microorganism Bacillus subtilis, γδ T cells expand in the lung and inhibit collagen deposition. We show that a subset of these γδ cells represents the predominant source of the Th17 cytokine IL-22 in this model. Preventing expression of IL-22, either by mutating the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) or inhibiting AhR signaling, accelerated lung fibrosis. Direct blockade of IL-22 also enhanced collagen deposition in the lung, whereas administration of recombinant IL-22 inhibited lung fibrosis. Moreover, the presence of protective γδ T cells and IL-22 diminished recruitment of CD4+ T cells to lung. These data reveal a protective pathway that involves the inhibition of αβ T cells by regulatory IL-22–secreting γδ T cells.
RecX Facilitates Homologous Recombination by Modulating RecA Activities

The Bacillus subtilis recH342 strain, which decreases interspecies recombination without significantly affecting the frequency of transformation with homogamic DNA, carried a point mutation in the putative recX (yfhG) gene, and the mutation was renamed as recX342. We show that RecX (264 residues long), which shares partial identity with the Proteobacterial RecX (<180 residues), is a genuine recombination protein, and its primary function is to modulate the SOS response and to facilitate RecA-mediated recombinational repair and genetic recombination. RecX-YFP formed discrete foci on the nucleoid, which were coincident in time with RecF, in response to DNA damage, and on the poles and/or the nucleoid upon stochastic induction of programmed natural competence. When DNA was damaged, the RecX foci co-localized with RecA threads that persisted for a longer time in the recX context. The absence of RecX severely impaired natural transformation both with plasmid and chromosomal DNA. We show that RecX suppresses the negative effect exerted by RecA during plasmid transformation, prevents RecA mis-sensing of single-stranded DNA tracts, and modulates DNA strand exchange. RecX, by modulating the “length or packing” of a RecA filament, facilitates the initiation of recombination and increases recombination across species.
International Trade and Core Labor Standards A Survey of the Recent Literature

This paper reviews some recent literature that concerns the background, establishment and enforcement of international labor standards. Topics include (1) the selection and justification of core labor standards, (2) the economic events that have driven a demand for international labor standards, particularly growing wage inequality and unemployment in developed countries, (3) evidence on poor protection of core labor standards and export performance, (4) other motivations for internationally imposed core labor standards, (5) the economic effects of core labor standards including the effects of international sanctions imposed on countries with poor labor standards, and (6) the empirical evidence on core labor standards and overall economic growth. Kewords: core labor standards, child labor, discrimination, wage inequality, trade policy, economic growth. JEL codes: F1, F10, J13 Address correspondence to: Drusilla K. Brown Department of Economics Tufts University Medford, MA 02155 U.S.A. Phone: 617-627-3096 Fax: 617-627-317 e-mail: dbrown04@emerald.tufts. edu
Varieties of Moral Emotional Experience

Although much research on emotion and morality has treated emotion as a relatively undifferentiated construct, recent work shows that moral transgressions can evoke a variety of distinct emotions. To accommodate these results, we propose a multiple-appraisal model in which distinct appraisals lead to different moral emotions. The implications of this model for our understanding of the relationship between appraisals, emotions and judgments are discussed. The complexity of moral emotional experience presents a methodological challenge to researchers, but we submit that a complete understanding of human morality must acknowledge the differentiated nature of moral emotions.
Employable, committed, and thus well-performing: a matter of interdependent forward-looking social exchange

ABSTRACT This study probes the relationship between perceived external employability (i.e., the individual’s perception of available jobs on the external labour market) and affective commitment and performance within the framework of social exchange. An innovative feature is that we advance perceived external employability as a commodity of interdependent forward-looking exchange: employees who perceive themselves as externally employable anticipate successful exchange, which drives further responses, both relational (i.e., affective organizational commitment) and behavioural (i.e., performance). Strong features of this study are that we include (a) both the organization and the workgroup as foci of affective commitment, and (b) task, helping, and counterproductive behaviour as indicators of performance. Results from cross-lagged, structural equation modelling (SEM) analyses on two-wave survey data (N = 458 Belgian employees) largely align with our idea: perceived external employability has a positive cross-lagged effect on affective organizational and workgroup commitment. The two foci of commitment in turn have a cross-lagged effect on performance, positive in the case of helping behaviour and negative in the case of counterproductive behaviour. No significant cross-lagged effects were found in relation to task behaviour. We discuss these results in the light of Social Exchange Theory and potential routes for future research.
Molecular Determinants of KCNQ (Kv7) K+ Channel Sensitivity to the Anticonvulsant Retigabine

Epilepsy is caused by an electrical hyperexcitability in the CNS. Because K+ channels are critical for establishing and stabilizing the resting potential of neurons, a loss of K+ channels could support neuronal hyperexcitability. Indeed, benign familial neonatal convulsions, an autosomal dominant epilepsy of infancy, is caused by mutations in KCNQ2 or KCNQ3 K+ channel genes. Because these channels contribute to the native muscarinic-sensitive K+ current (M current) that regulates excitability of numerous types of neurons, KCNQ (Kv7) channel activators would be effective in epilepsy treatment. A compound exhibiting anticonvulsant activity in animal seizure models is retigabine. It specifically acts on the neuronally expressed KCNQ2-KCNQ5 (Kv7.2-Kv7.5) channels, whereas KCNQ1 (Kv7.1) is not affected. Using the differential sensitivity of KCNQ3 and KCNQ1 to retigabine, we constructed chimeras to identify minimal segments required for sensitivity to the drug. We identified a single tryptophan residue within the S5 segment of KCNQ3 and also KCNQ2, KCNQ4, and KCNQ5 as crucial for the effect of retigabine. Furthermore, heteromeric KCNQ channels comprising KCNQ2 and KCNQ1 transmembrane domains (attributable to transfer of assembly properties from KCNQ3 to KCNQ1) are retigabine insensitive. Transfer of the tryptophan into the KCNQ1 scaffold resulted in retigabine-sensitive heteromers, suggesting that the tryptophan is necessary in all KCNQ subunits forming a functional tetramer to confer drug sensitivity.
Multimodal-first or pantomime-first?: Communicating events through pantomime with and without vocalization

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A "dialectic" solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start, and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual (only body movement), and multimodal (body movement accompanied by nonlinguistic vocalization). Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional pro les of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenario. (Less)
Atrial Natriuretic Peptide Induces Postprandial Lipid Oxidation in Humans

OBJECTIVE—Atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) regulates arterial blood pressure. In addition, ANP has recently been shown to promote human adipose tissue lipolysis through cGMP-mediated hormone-sensitive lipase activation. We hypothesized that ANP increases postprandial free fatty acid (FFA) availability and energy expenditure while decreasing arterial blood pressure. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—We infused human ANP (25 ng · kg−1 · min−1) in 12 men (age 32 ± 0.8 years, BMI 23.3 ± 0.4 kg/m2) before, during, and 2 h after ingestion of a standardized high-fat test meal in a randomized, double-blind, cross-over fashion. Cardiovascular changes were monitored by continuous electrocardiogram and beat-by-beat blood pressure recordings. Metabolism was monitored through venous blood sampling, intramuscular and subcutaneous abdominal adipose tissue microdialysis, and indirect calorimetry. RESULTS—ANP infusion decreased mean arterial blood pressure by 4 mmHg during the postprandial phase (P < 0.01 vs. placebo). At the same time, ANP induced lipolysis systemically (P < 0.05 vs. placebo) and locally in subcutaneous abdominal adipose tissue (P < 0.0001 vs. placebo), leading to a 50% increase in venous glycerol (P < 0.01) and FFA (P < 0.05) concentrations compared with placebo. The increase in FFA availability with ANP was paralleled by a 15% increase in lipid oxidation rates (P < 0.05 vs. placebo), driving a substantial increase in postprandial energy expenditure (P < 0.05 vs. placebo). CONCLUSIONS—Our data identify the ANP system as a novel pathway regulating postprandial lipid oxidation, energy expenditure, and concomitantly arterial blood pressure. The findings could have therapeutic implications.
Pareto Region Characterization for Rate Control in MIMO Interference Systems and Nash Bargaining

In this note, the problem of rate control in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference systems is formulated as a multicriteria optimization (MCO) problem. The Pareto rate region of the MCO problem is first characterized by giving a sufficient condition for the convexity of the Pareto rate region. Second, various rate region convexification approaches including a multistage interference cancellation and a full projection (FP)-based interference avoidance scheme are analyzed. An achievable rate region based on FP is also given for MIMO interference systems. Third, Nash bargaining (NB) is applied to transform the MCO problem into a single-objective problem. The characteristics of the NB over MIMO interference systems such as the uniqueness and optimality of different type NB solutions are investigated. A method to determine the optimality of FP- and time-division multiplexing-based NB solutions is presented as well. Finally, the convexity of the rate region and the existence of the FP-based NB solution for MIMO interference systems are examined numerically.
On the Hadamard Product of Hopf Monoids

Abstract Combinatorial structures that compose and decompose give rise to Hopf monoids in Joyal's category of species. The Hadamard product of two Hopf monoids is another Hopf monoid. We prove two main results regarding freeness of Hadamard products. The first one states that if one factor is connected and the other is free as a monoid, their Hadamard product is free (and connected). The second provides an explicit basis for the Hadamard product when both factors are free. The first main result is obtained by showing the existence of a one-parameter deformation of the comonoid structure and appealing to a rigidity result of Loday and Ronco that applies when the parameter is set to zero. To obtain the second result, we introduce an operation on species that is intertwined by the free monoid functor with the Hadamard product. As an application of the first result, we deduce that the Boolean transform of the dimension sequence of a connected Hopf monoid is nonnegative.
University of Birmingham Implied between-object actions affect response selection without knowledge about object functionality

: Potential interactions between objects affect response selection in action-related object pairs. The present paper aimed to examine whether this effect is conditional on the knowledge about object functionality, or whether action-related structures such as handles are sufficient. This issue was investigated by utilizing a paradigm established by Xu, Humphreys and Heinke (2015). They presented imperative central targets which overlapped with task-irrelevant object pairs and required speeded left/right responses to the targets. With this paradigm, Xu et al. (2015) have identified two stable effects of implied actions between objects on response selection: an inhibitory effect on responses aligned with the passive object (e.g. a bowl in a bowl-spoon pair) and an advantage associated with responses aligned with the active objects (e.g. a spoon). The present paper utilized these two effects as the indexes of response selection in paired-object scenarios, and found that active-passive object pairs without established functionality (e.g. a saw and a bowl, Experiment 1) generated the same effects, suggesting that response selection does not rely on functionality knowledge of given object pairs. Further, the two effects were also observed in passive-passive object pairs with handles (e.g. a cup-nail pair), but not in those without a handle (e.g. a bowl-nail pair, Experiment 2), and remained when the active objects were replaced by novel objects with handle but no known functionality (Experiment 3), suggesting that the action-related structures of objects are sufficient to affect response selection. The present study empirically illustrated the automaticity and directness of the extraction of potential interaction between objects, probably based on the relative location of action-related structure of objects.
Constructing Skeletons in Clean The Bare Bones

Skeletons are well-suited to structure parallel pro gramming. They allow the easy use of some well-known parallel programming paradigms to construct portable, efficient programs. Much research has been focused on the use of skeletons in functional pro g amming languages, because they can be expressed elegantly as higher order functions. On the other hand, little attention has been paid to an elementary weakness of skeletons: how to implement them. In this paper we will show that functional languages with some low level constructs for parallelism can be used to efficiently implement a range of high level skeletons. We will construct skeletons for data parallelism, for parallel I/O, and for stream process ing. Our experiments demonstrate that no performance penalty needs to be paid, compared to more restrictive solutions.
Lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 activity is a marker of small, dense LDL particles in human plasma.

BACKGROUND Recent clinical studies showed that lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A(2) (Lp-PLA(2)) is a predictor for incident atherosclerotic disease. We have previously shown that among the LDL subfractions, Lp-PLA(2) activity is preferentially associated with the atherogenic small, dense (sdLDL) particles in vitro. We investigated whether Lp-PLA(2) could be a marker of sdLDL in human plasma. METHODS One hundred and seventy-six individuals participated in the study. LDL subclass analysis was performed by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Lp-PLA(2) activity and mass were determined in total plasma and in apolipoprotein B-depleted plasma (HDL-Lp-PLA(2)). Non-HDL-Lp-PLA(2) activity and mass were calculated by subtracting the HDL-Lp-PLA(2) from total plasma Lp-PLA(2). RESULTS On the basis of the LDL subclass analysis, participants were categorized into phenotype A and non-A (total cholesterol mass of the sdLDL subfractions < or =0.155 and >0.155 mmol/L, respectively). Unlike total plasma Lp-PLA(2) mass, total plasma Lp-PLA(2) activity and non-HDL-Lp-PLA(2) activity and mass were significantly higher in persons with phenotype non-A compared with persons with phenotype A, whereas HDL-Lp-PLA(2) activity and mass were lower in persons with phenotype non-A compared with phenotype A. Total plasma activity and non-HDL-Lp-PLA(2) activity and mass, but not Lp-PLA(2) mass, were correlated with sdLDL-cholesterol mass, proportion, and mean LDL particle size. In multiple regression analysis, total plasma and non-HDL-Lp-PLA(2) activities were the second best predictors of the presence of sdLDL particles in human plasma after serum triglyceride concentrations. At serum triglyceride concentrations >1.356 mmol/L, total plasma and non-HDL-Lp-PLA(2) activity added significantly to the prediction of the presence of sdLDL in plasma. CONCLUSIONS Lp-PLA(2) activity, but not the enzyme mass, is a marker of sdLDL in human plasma.