Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
UPDATE ON BUN AND MUN AS A GUIDE FOR PROTEIN SUPPLEMENTATION IN CATTLE

At the 3rd Annual Ruminant Nutrition Symposium (Hammond, 1992), I reviewed the use of blood urea nitrogen (BUN) concentration for monitoring protein status in beef cattle, and discussed the potential for using milk urea nitrogen (MUN) as a noninvasive tool for monitoring protein status in dairy cattle. The purpose of this discussion is to review the basic concepts involved in urea nitrogen as an indicator of protein-energy status and to review new information published during the last five years.
Optimizing F-Measures by Cost-Sensitive Classification

We present a theoretical analysis of F-measures for binary, multiclass and multilabel classification. These performance measures are non-linear, but in many scenarios they are pseudo-linear functions of the per-class false negative/false positive rate. Based on this observation, we present a general reduction of F-measure maximization to cost-sensitive classification with unknown costs. We then propose an algorithm with provable guarantees to obtain an approximately optimal classifier for the F-measure by solving a series of cost-sensitive classification problems. The strength of our analysis is to be valid on any dataset and any class of classifiers, extending the existing theoretical results on F-measures, which are asymptotic in nature. We present numerical experiments to illustrate the relative importance of cost asymmetry and thresholding when learning linear classifiers on various F-measure optimization tasks.
A Feminist Critique of Marketing Theory: Toward Agentic-Communal Balance

"The feminist perspective holds that the epistemologies, metaphysics, ethics, and politics of the dominant forms of science are androcentric . Despite the deeply ingrained Western cultural belief in science's intn'nsic progressiveness, science today se~~~"pri"2. '! :! 2! J3.gre. -S.SilLeJJ}ci. '! J._£~,! _~feS--:::-I'he social structure of science, many ofTl§ applications and technologies, its modes of defining research problems, . its ways of constructing and confemng meanings are'! :? ton~sexist but also racist, classist and culturallY cD'erclve~ ';""-- Harding, 1986, p. 9
General envelope-transient formulation of phase-locked loops using three time scales

In this paper, a novel time-frequency method for the analysis of phase-locked loops (PLLs) has been developed. It enables an efficient and realistic simulation, taking into account the spurious frequency components generated at the phase detectors and intrinsic to their nonlinear performance. The variables of the loop equations are expanded in a Fourier series, at these spurious frequencies, with time-varying phasors. This generalizes the envelope-transient analysis to loops containing three different time scales, provided by the frequency of the voltage-controlled oscillator, external signals, and noise or modulations, respectively. The new technique substantially reduces the computational cost in the simulation of transients and acquisition times in the common case of a narrow-band loop. It also allows considering low-frequency noise perturbations, while taking into account the spurious frequency components. In the absence of modulation, the harmonic-balance (HB) formulation of the loop equations enables an efficient analysis of the variation of the PLL solution versus any parameter of interest. In addition, the conversion matrix approach, based on this HB formulation, can be used to determine the output noise spectrum from frequency-domain descriptions of the input noise sources, while taking the spurious content into account. To show the generality of application of the techniques, two different PLLs have been considered here: a frequency synthesizer with a tri-state comparator and charge pump, and an automatic frequency-control loop. In each case, the results have been successfully compared with time-domain simulations and measurements.
Large-Scale Evidence for the Effect of the COLIA1 Sp1 Polymorphism on Osteoporosis Outcomes: The GENOMOS Study

Background Osteoporosis and fracture risk are considered to be under genetic control. Extensive work is being performed to identify the exact genetic variants that determine this risk. Previous work has suggested that a G/T polymorphism affecting an Sp1 binding site in the COLIA1 gene is a genetic marker for low bone mineral density (BMD) and osteoporotic fracture, but there have been no very-large-scale studies of COLIA1 alleles in relation to these phenotypes. Methods and Findings Here we evaluated the role of COLIA1 Sp1 alleles as a predictor of BMD and fracture in a multicenter study involving 20,786 individuals from several European countries. At the femoral neck, the average (95% confidence interval [CI]) BMD values were 25 mg/cm 2 (CI, 16 to 34 mg/cm 2) lower in TT homozygotes than the other genotype groups ( p < 0.001), and a similar difference was observed at the lumbar spine; 21 mg/cm 2 (CI, 1 to 42 mg/cm 2), ( p = 0.039). These associations were unaltered after adjustment for potential confounding factors. There was no association with fracture overall (odds ratio [OR] = 1.01 [CI, 0.95 to 1.08]) in either unadjusted or adjusted analyses, but there was a non-significant trend for association with vertebral fracture and a nominally significant association with incident vertebral fractures in females (OR = 1.33 [CI, 1.00 to 1.77]) that was independent of BMD, and unaltered in adjusted analyses. Conclusions Allowing for the inevitable heterogeneity between participating teams, this study—which to our knowledge is the largest ever performed in the field of osteoporosis genetics for a single gene—demonstrates that the COLIA1 Sp1 polymorphism is associated with reduced BMD and could predispose to incident vertebral fractures in women, independent of BMD. The associations we observed were modest however, demonstrating the importance of conducting studies that are adequately powered to detect and quantify the effects of common genetic variants on complex diseases.
Contracting for Government Services: Theory and Evidence from U.S. Cities

Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset of service provision choices by U.S. cities and identify a range of service and city characteristics as significant determinants of contracting decisions. Our analysis suggests an important role for economic efficiency concerns, as well as politics, in contracting for government services.
Time Series Classification under More Realistic Assumptions

Most literature on time series classification assumes that the beginning and ending points of the pattern of interest can be correctly identified, both during the training phase and later deployment. In this work, we argue that this assumption is unjustified, and this has in many cases led to unwarranted optimism about the performance of the proposed algorithms. As we shall show, the task of correctly extracting individual gait cycles, heartbeats, gestures, behaviors, etc., is generally much more difficult than the task of actually classifying those patterns. We propose to mitigate this problem by introducing an alignment-free time series classification framework. The framework requires only very weakly annotated data, such as “in this ten minutes of data, we see mostly normal heartbeats. ,” and by generalizing the classic machine learning idea of data editing to streaming/continuous data, allows us to build robust, fast and accurate classifiers. We demonstrate on several diverse real-world problems that beyond removing unwarranted assumptions and requiring essentially no human intervention, our framework is both significantly faster and significantly more accurate than current state-of-the-art approaches.
Reading approach and strategy use across languages in an assessment context: does one-size fit all?

ABSTRACT This paper explores the approaches and strategies used by secondary school learners of different languages in England completing Asset Languages reading tasks at levels A1 and A2 of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Assessments across languages at the same level of proficiency were designed to a common specification and at comparable levels of functional difficulty following the CEFR. However, as the majority of research in this area has focused on learners of English, little is known about the impact of having a common framework on learners of non-European languages. Does one-size fit all? Findings from think-aloud protocols reveal that different approaches and strategies were used by learners of different languages. In particular, the study shows the impact of learning a new writing system and the variation in ability of community language learners, highlighting limitations in adopting a framework designed for ‘typical’ foreign language learners for learners of all languages.
Physical training ameliorates chronic alcohol-induced hypertension and aortic reactivity in rats.

AIMS The aim of this study was to investigate the interactive effect of physical training and chronic ethanol ingestion on changes in blood pressure (BP) and aortic reactivity response in rats. METHODS Male Fisher rats were divided into four groups of seven animals each and treated as follows: (i) control (5% sucrose, orally) daily for 12 weeks; (ii) ethanol (4 g kg(-1), orally) daily for 12 weeks; (iii) exercise training on treadmill followed by sucrose daily for 12 weeks; (iv) exercise training on treadmill followed by ethanol daily for 12 weeks. The body weight and BP were recorded every week. The animals were anaesthetized with pentobarbital after 12 weeks; blood and thoracic aorta were isolated and analysed for ethanol and reactivity response using tissue bath technique, respectively. RESULTS The data show that exercise training significantly lowered the weight gain 6-12 weeks in ethanol-treated rats compared to ethanol alone or control rats. The systolic and mean BP significantly elevated 6-12 weeks, whereas diastolic BP elevated 8-12 weeks after ethanol ingestion. Exercise training lowered the BP close to the normal control values in ethanol fed rats. Blood ethanol level significantly elevated in ethanol group but decreased in exercise plus alcohol group. Aortic contractile response to phenylephrine in ethanol or control groups was attenuated by training with or without intact endothelium. Ethanol significantly reduced the aortic relaxation response to acetylcholine whereas training enhanced the relaxation response with intact endothelium. The relaxation responses to adenosine and sodium nitroprusside in the aortic ring segments of rats with or without endothelium were decreased in ethanol group which were attenuated by exercise training. CONCLUSIONS Physical training attenuates the chronic ethanol-induced hypertension via reduction of body weight, clearance of ethanol, and augmentation of the aortic endothelial relaxation response in rats.
Therapeutic Implications for the Induced Levels of Chk1 in Myc-Expressing Cancer Cells

Purpose: The transcription factor c-Myc (or “Myc”) is a master regulator of pathways driving cell growth and proliferation. MYC is deregulated in many human cancers, making its downstream target genes attractive candidates for drug development. We report the unexpected finding that B-cell lymphomas from mice and patients exhibit a striking correlation between high levels of Myc and checkpoint kinase 1 (Chk1). Experimental Design: By in vitro cell biology studies as well as preclinical studies using a genetically engineered mouse model, we evaluated the role of Chk1 in Myc-overexpressing cells. Results: We show that Myc indirectly induces Chek1 transcript and protein expression, independently of DNA damage response proteins such as ATM and p53. Importantly, we show that inhibition of Chk1, by either RNA interference or a novel highly selective small molecule inhibitor, results in caspase-dependent apoptosis that affects Myc-overexpressing cells in both in vitro and in vivo mouse models of B-cell lymphoma. Conclusion: Our data suggest that Chk1 inhibitors should be further evaluated as potential drugs against Myc-driven malignancies such as certain B-cell lymphoma/leukemia, neuroblastoma, and some breast and lung cancers. Clin Cancer Res; 17(22); 7067–79. ©2011 AACR.
Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics Turbulent Thermal Diffusion of Aerosols in Geophysics and in Laboratory Experiments

We discuss a new phenomenon of turbulent thermal diffusion associated with turbulent transport of aerosols in the atmosphere and in laboratory experiments. The essence of this phenomenon is the appearance of a nondif-fusive mean flux of particles in the direction of the mean heat flux, which results in the formation of large-scale in-homogeneities in the spatial distribution of aerosols that accumulate in regions of minimum mean temperature of the surrounding fluid. This effect of turbulent thermal diffusion was detected experimentally. In experiments turbulence was generated by two oscillating grids in two directions of the imposed vertical mean temperature gradient. We used Particle Image Velocimetry to determine the turbulent velocity field, and an Image Processing Technique based on an analysis of the intensity of Mie scattering to determine the spatial distribution of aerosols. Analysis of the intensity of laser light Mie scattering by aerosols showed that aerosols accumulate in the vicinity of the minimum mean temperature due to the effect of turbulent thermal diffusion.
Recent Progress in Image Deblurring

This paper comprehensively reviews the recent development of image deblurring, including nonblind/blind, spatially invariant/variant deblurring techniques. Indeed, these techniques share the same objective of inferring a latent sharp image from one or several corresponding blurry images, while the blind deblurring techniques are also required to derive an accurate blur kernel. Considering the critical role of image restoration in modern imaging systems to provide high-quality images under complex environments such as motion, undesirable lighting conditions, and imperfect system components, image deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint of how to handle the illposedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring tasks, existing methods can be grouped into ve categories: Bayesian inference framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods, homographybased modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also presented.
Mitophagy switches cell death from apoptosis to necrosis in NSCLC cells treated with oncolytic measles virus

Although apoptotic phenomena have been observed in malignant cells infected by measles virus vaccine strain Edmonston B (MV-Edm), the precise oncolytic mechanisms are poorly defined. In this study we found that MV-Edm induced autophagy and sequestosome 1-mediated mitophagy leading to decreased cytochrome c release, which blocked the pro-apoptotic cascade in non-small cell lung cancer cells (NSCLCs). The decrease of apoptosis by mitophagy favored viral replication. Persistent viral replication sustained by autophagy ultimately resulted in necrotic cell death due to ATP depletion. Importantly, when autophagy was impaired in NSCLCs MV-Edm-induced cell death was significantly abrogated despite of increased apoptosis. Taken together, our results define a novel oncolytic mechanism by which mitophagy switches cell death from apoptosis to more efficient necrosis in NSCLCs following MV-Edm infection. This provides a foundation for future improvement of oncolytic virotherapy or antiviral therapy.
Dynamic analysis of multiagent Q-learning with ε-greedy exploration

The development of mechanisms to understand and model the expected behaviour of multiagent learners is becoming increasingly important as the area rapidly find application in a variety of domains. In this paper we present a framework to model the behaviour of Q-learning agents using the ε-greedy exploration mechanism. For this, we analyse a continuous-time version of the Q-learning update rule and study how the presence of other agents and the ε-greedy mechanism affect it. We then model the problem as a system of difference equations which is used to theoretically analyse the expected behaviour of the agents. The applicability of the framework is tested through experiments in typical games selected from the literature.
Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons

Stochastic neurons can be useful for a number of reasons in deep learning models, but in many cases they pose a challenging problem: how to estimate the gradient of a loss function with respect to the input of such s tochastic neurons, i.e., can we “back-propagate” through these stochastic neurons? We examine this question, existing approaches, and present two novel families of solutions, applicable in different settings. In particular, it is demonstrate d that a simple biologically plausible formula gives rise to an an unbiased (but noisy) estimator of the gradient with respect to a binary stochastic neuron firing proba bility. Unlike other estimators which view the noise as a small perturbation in order to estimate gradients by finite differences, this estimator is unbiased even w ithout assuming that the stochastic perturbation is small. This estimator is also in teresting because it can be applied in very general settings which do not allow gradient back-propagation, including the estimation of the gradient with respect to futur e rewards, as required in reinforcement learning setups. We also propose an approach to approximating this unbiased but high-variance estimator by learning to predict it using a biased estimator. The second approach we propose assumes that an estimator of the gradient can be back-propagated and it provides an unbiased estimator of the gradient, but can only work with non-linearities unlike the hard threshold, but like the rectifier, that are not flat for all of their range. This is similar to trad itional sigmoidal units but has the advantage that for many inputs, a hard decision (e.g., a 0 output) can be produced, which would be convenient for conditional computation and achieving sparse representations and sparse gradients.
Mainland Chinese Canadian Immigrants' Leisure Satisfaction and Subjective Well-Being: Results of a Two-Year Longitudinal Study

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine whether recent Chinese Canadian immigrants' (a) leisure satisfaction, happiness, and life satisfaction changed over a two-year period and (b) if leisure satisfaction affected their subjective well-being (SWB) over this same period. Participants completed an initial, trilingual telephone questionnaire (N = 220) and then were recontacted every six months for two years. Hierarchical linear modeling indicated that leisure satisfaction decreased over the two-year period, likely because of “leisure shock,” employment of a “withdrawn” strategy, or both. The results also showed that leisure satisfaction significantly and positively affected happiness and life satisfaction. Study limitations are identified, theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and future research recommendations are outlined.
Cultural and institutional drivers of basic psychological needs satisfaction

This paper provides a framework for why institutions and cultural values affect the happiness of nations. In doing so, we lean on what is known in the psychology literature as self-determination theory (SDT) which predicts that satisfaction of three basic psychological needs (autonomy, relatedness and competence) drive subjective well-being. By exploiting European country level data, we assess if and to what extent institutional quality and cultural values influence the Europeans’ satisfaction of these needs, controlling for GDP and education. While we find mixed results for institutions we find a robust and positive impact of the cultural trait “generalized morality” (i.e. high trust and respect and low obedience). This feature has a strong impact on all three needs satisfaction indicators.
Precision Time Synchronization Using IEEE 1588 for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are evolving from relatively undemanding applications to applications which have stronger requirements. The coordination of distributed entities and events requires time synchronization. Although a number of methods have been studied for WSNs, some applications require high precision time synchronization. Precision time synchronization enables a variety of extensions of applications. The IEEE 1588 precision time protocol (PTP) provides a standard method to synchronize devices in a network with sub-microsecond precision. This paper deals with precision time synchronization using IEEE 1588 over wireless sensor networks. Precision time synchronization using IEEE 1588 provides compatibility between heterogeneous systems in WSNs. This paper also presents experiments and performance evaluation of precision time synchronization in WSNs. Our result established a method for nodes in a network to maintain their clocks to within a 200 nanosecond offset from the reference clock of a master node.
The metallicity distribution of G dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood

We derive a new metallicity distribution of G dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood, using uvby photometry and up-to-date parallaxes. Our distribution comprises 287 G dwarfs within 25 pc from the Sun, and differs considerably from the classic solar neighbourhood distribution of Pagel & Patchett and Pagel by having a prominent single peak around [Fe/H] = -0.20 dex. The raw data are corrected for observational errors and cosmic scatter assuming a deviation of 0.1. In order to obtain the true abundance distribution, we use the correction factors given by Sommer-Larsen, which take into account the stellar scale heights. The distribution confirms the G dwarf problem, that is, the paucity of metal-poor stars relative to the predictions of the simple model of chemical evolution. Another feature of this distribution, which was already apparent in previous ones, is the small number of metal-rich stars again in comparison with the simple model. Our results indicate that it is very difficult to fit the simple model to this distribution, even with the definition of an `effective yield'. A comparison with several models from the literature is made. We find that models with infall are the most appropriate to explain the new metallicity distribution. We also show that the metallicity distribution is compatible with a major era of star formation occurring 5 to 8 Gyr ago, similar to results found by several authors.
Search with Wage Posting under Sticky Prices

We consider the macroeconomic implications of the interaction between nominal rigidities and labor market frictions in a framework where …rms jointly make pricing and hiring decisions. In our New Keynesian model, workers randomly search for jobs and are matched with …rms that post take-it-or-leave-it contracts and are subject to sticky prices. Relative to the typical model that separates search frictions and nominal frictions into wholesale and retail …rms, respectively, our model implies smoother wages because …rms can affect their marginal costs by adjusting prices. A consequence of smoother wages is that the vacancy-to-unemployment ratio responds much more than under the standard model.