Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
COMPARATIVE PHYLOGEOGRAPHY OF THREE CODISTRIBUTED STOMATOPODS: ORIGINS AND TIMING OF REGIONAL LINEAGE DIVERSIFICATION IN THE CORAL TRIANGLE

Abstract The Indonesian-Australian Archipelago is the center of the world's marine biodiversity. Although many biogeographers have suggested that this region is a “center of origin,” criticism of this theory has focused on the absence of processes promoting lineage diversification in the center. In this study we compare patterns of phylogeographic structure and gene flow in three codistributed, ecologically similar Indo-West Pacific stomatopod (mantis shrimp) species. All three taxa show evidence for limited gene flow across the Maluku Sea with deep genetic breaks between populations from Papua and Northern Indonesia, suggesting that limited water transport across the Maluku Sea may limit larval dispersal and gene flow across this region. All three taxa also show moderate to strong genetic structure between populations from Northern and Southern Indonesia, indicating limited gene flow across the Flores and Java Seas. Despite the similarities in phylogeographic structure, results indicate varied ages of the genetic discontinuities, ranging from the middle Pleistocene to the Pliocene. Concordance of genetic structure across multiple taxa combined with temporal discordance suggests that regional genetic structures have arisen from the action of common physical processes operating over extended time periods. The presence in all three species of both intraspecific genetic structure as well as deeply divergent lineages that likely represent cryptic species suggests that these processes may promote lineage diversification within the Indonesian-Australian Archipelago, providing a potential mechanism for the center of origin. Efforts to conserve biodiversity in the Coral Triangle should work to preserve both existing biodiversity as well as the processes creating the biodiversity.
Conflicting views on quality: interpretations of ‘a good university’ by representatives of the state, the market and academia

This article presents the results of research conducted over the period 2010–2012 in Estonia with the aim of identifying the expectations for the quality of higher education by principal parties in higher education, the state, the market and academia, as well as describing the differences and similarities in their expectations. The findings show that the interpretations and expectations of different parties in higher education differ noticeably. It became evident that the market has the most balanced view valuing almost equally input, process and output characteristics, although the greatest emphasis is placed on inputs. The state and academia also emphasise processes and inputs but somewhat less outputs. Students focus on process and input characteristics only. The article details the approaches to ‘a good university’ by different stakeholders and discusses possibilities of considering the different expectations when further developing the external quality evaluation system.
Compact and efficient encryption/decryption module for FPGA implementation of the AES Rijndael very well suited for small embedded applications

Hardware implementations of the advanced encryption standard (AES) Rijndael algorithm have recently been the object of an intensive evaluation. Several papers describe efficient architectures for ASICs and FPGAs. In this context, the highest effort was devoted to high throughput (up to 20 Gbps) encryption-only designs, fewer works studied low area encryption-only architectures and only a few papers have investigated low area encryption/decryption structures. However, in practice, only a few applications need throughput up to 20 Gbps while flexible and low cost encryption/decryption solutions are needed to protect sensible data, especially for embedded hardware applications. We purpose an efficient solution to combine Rijndael encryption and decryption in one FPGA design, with a strong focus on low area constraints. The proposed design fits into the smallest Xilinx FPGAs, deals with data streams of 208 Mbps, uses 163 slices and 3 RAM blocks and improves by 68% the best-known similar designs in terms of ratio Throughput/Area. We also propose implementations in other FPGA Families (Xilinx Virtex-II) and comparisons with similar DES, triple-DES and AES implementations.
What you know and who you know: “successful” women’s experiences of accessing board positions

While women have continued to increase their representation in the paid workforce, their representation in the most senior ranks of management in Australia remains very low. In this paper, the backgrounds and experiences of women board members of publicly‐listed companies in Australia are explored to identify the factors they perceive as important to their nomination and selection to boards. It seems that these “successful” women have overcome the resistance to including women on boards by not only being well‐educated and able to demonstrate a strong track record in their field to be nominated to a board position, but also having valuable business contacts. For women seeking to access this most privileged level of management, the importance of networks should not be overlooked.
Bipartite consensus for multiple two-time scales agents over the signed digraph

The bipartite consensus problem of multiple two-time scales agents over the signed digraph, where both cooperative and competitive interactions exist among the agents, is considered with a new distributed protocol. Sufficient conditions for bipartite consensus is presented in terms of easily checkable algebraic Riccati equation (ARE). Compared with the existing result on consensus of multiple two-time scales agents, the communication topology here is more generic. Moreover, the upper bound of the singular perturbation parameter is also presented. Simulation examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed results.
Iris: a scalable cloud file system with efficient integrity checks

We present Iris, a practical, authenticated file system designed to support workloads from large enterprises storing data in the cloud and be resilient against potentially untrustworthy service providers. As a transparent layer enforcing strong integrity guarantees, Iris lets an enterprise tenant maintain a large file system in the cloud. In Iris, tenants obtain strong assurance not just on data integrity, but also on data freshness, as well as data retrievability in case of accidental or adversarial cloud failures. Iris offers an architecture scalable to many clients (on the order of hundreds or even thousands) issuing operations on the file system in parallel. Iris includes new optimization and enterprise-side caching techniques specifically designed to overcome the high network latency typically experienced when accessing cloud storage. Iris also includes novel erasure coding techniques for the first efficient construction of a dynamic Proofs of Retrievability (PoR) protocol over the entire file system. We describe our architecture and experimental results on a prototype version of Iris. Iris achieves end-to-end throughput of up to 260MB per second for 100 clients issuing simultaneous requests on the file system. (This limit is dictated by the available network bandwidth and maximum hard drive throughput.) We demonstrate that strong integrity protection in the cloud can be achieved with minimal performance degradation.
Receiver operating characteristic for array-based GNSS acquisition

This paper investigates the application of the antenna array Maximum Likelihood (ML) Doppler shift and code delay estimator to the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) acquisition problem, considering an unstructured channel model and Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). We propose an acquisition test function based on the ML estimator and we derive the theoretical false alarm and detection probabilities. Furthermore, this work analyzes the effect of the acquisition bandwidth on the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC). Finally, we propose an implementation scheme including a baseband filter to improve the acquisition ROC. The simulation results validate the theoretical analysis.
Atherosclerosis: cell biology and lipoproteins focus on epigenetic modification and macrophage biology.

Institute for Cardiovascular Prevention (IPEK), LMU Munich, Munich, Germany, Department of Medical Biochemistry, Academic Medical Center (AMC), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, DZHK (German Centre for Cardiovascular Research), Partner Site Munich Heart Alliances, Munich and Cardiovascular Research Laboratory, Division of Cardiology, Pulmonology, and Vascular Medicine, Medical Faculty, University Hospital Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF BLOOD MONOCYTES AND FIXED MACROPHAGES TO THE EXPRESSION OF CELL-MEDIATED IMMUNITY TO INFECTION

Infection in mice with Listeria monocytogenes results in a substantial accumulation of migrant macrophages in the liver. The immigrant cells populate both the infective foci and intervening sinusoids. They have the labeling characteristics of blood monocytes, and their appearance in infective foci in the liver corresponds to the expression of a high level of antimicrobial immunity in this organ. The infected liver acquires additional new macrophages by Kupffer-cell division. The proliferation of these cells, however, is not essential for the expression of immunity in the liver. The results indicate that the macrophages which express immunity to a primary infection with L. monocytogenes are those derived from circulating monocytes. Most of these cells are quickly lost once the parasite is eliminated from the tissues.
Literary tourism

Tourism and cultural geography have often made much of how visitors use and appropriate tourist sites as a means of cultural identity and distinction. This article looks at how, in a globalized world where access to such once high-cultural geographic sites becomes more democratized, certain tourist groups have to resort to alternative strategies in order to maintain their high-cultural requirements for the touristic experience. The article presents an account of how one particular tourist party utilized the cultural value of authorship to legitimate and authenticate their experience. Drawing on Bourdieu, Benjamin and Althusser, this article examines how a series of lectures by authors is commissioned by the group leader to create a sense of aura, distinction and uniqueness around the geographical tourist sites themselves.
Teacher Value Added as a Measure of Program Quality

Many states now possess the data and statistical methods that can produce teacher value-added scores and link them to preparation programs. It is important to understand the limitations of these measures and the inferences that they do and do not support. These limitations fall into three categories. First, value-added measures (VAM) provide information about only one of several important dimensions of teacher preparation program quality, focusing on one outcome measure, but not addressing other program characteristics, including the quality of program resources, the appropriateness of program content, and the contributions programs make to teacher learning. Second, comparing programs on the average VAM scores begs the question of whether mean performance is the most appropriate way to look at program quality. Third, the measurement of program graduates’ VAM is strongly affected by the labor market for teachers, which weakens the inferences from VAM scores to the quality of preparation programs.
Abnormalities in color vision and contrast sensitivity in Parkinson's disease

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter found in the retina. Delays in the visual evoked responses and abnormalities in contrast sensitivity occur in patients with Parkinson's disease. Improvement in the P100 has followed L-dopa therapy. Suspected abnormalities at the retinal level in Parkinson's disease are observed in reductions in photopic, scotopic, and pattern-derived electroretinograms. We studied 35 patients with Parkinson's disease and 26 controls of comparable age and visual acuities using visual evoked responses, color vision, and contrast sensitivity testing. Contrast sensitivity thresholds were significantly different at most frequencies tested, using both stationary and temporally modulated sinusoidal gratings. The total error score of the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test revealed significant differences between the patients and controls. The contrast thresholds derived from certain spatial frequencies and the total error in color score were significantly related to the duration of disease. A stepwise discriminant analysis correctly identified 94% of the patients and 94% of the controls. The significant error in chromatic discrimination observed in Parkinson's disease patients may be due to altered intraretinal dopaminergic synaptic activity in these patients.
An In Vivo Polymicrobial Biofilm Wound Infection Model to Study Interspecies Interactions

Chronic wound infections are typically polymicrobial; however, most in vivo studies have focused on monospecies infections. This project was designed to develop an in vivo, polymicrobial, biofilm-related, infected wound model in order to study multispecies biofilm dynamics and in relation to wound chronicity. Multispecies biofilms consisting of both Gram negative and Gram positive strains, as well as aerobes and anaerobes, were grown in vitro and then transplanted onto the wounds of mice. These in vitro-to-in vivo multi-species biofilm transplants generated polymicrobial wound infections, which remained heterogeneous with four bacterial species throughout the experiment. We observed that wounded mice given multispecies biofilm infections displayed a wound healing impairment over mice infected with a single-species of bacteria. In addition, the bacteria in the polymicrobial wound infections displayed increased antimicrobial tolerance in comparison to those in single species infections. These data suggest that synergistic interactions between different bacterial species in wounds may contribute to healing delays and/or antibiotic tolerance.
Examining the Use of Restorative Justice Practices in Domestic Violence Cases

Restorative Justice is a way of looking at crime that focuses on identifying and healing the harm to the victim, holding the offender accountable, and involving the community of people affected by the crime. Despite the fact that restorative justice practices have proven quite beneficial to victims who choose to participate, advocates against domestic violence have been justifiably wary about their use with victims/survivors. This Comment will explore the use of restorative justice practices in domestic violence situations and argues that at least some of these practices can be safely and beneficially used given an understanding of the dynamics of domestic violence, careful planning, and responsiveness to the needs of domestic violence victims/survivors. Sections II and III provide an overview of restorative justice principles and practices while Section IV examines how these principles and practices apply to victims and Section V explains why victims might want to engage in restorative justice practices. Section VI covers those special considerations that should be taken into account when using restorative justice in domestic violence cases because of the particular dynamics of domestic violence. Section VII describes how practices that account for these considerations should be constructed. Section VIII describes actual practices that have successfully taken these
Women abroad: getting the best results from women managers

Abstract This study explores the work environment of expatriate women managers in American corporations and investigates the determinants of their job satisfaction. The strategic importance of global assignments has increased over the years. The real cost of unsuccessful expatriates extends beyond the monetary expenses. As the number of women managers working overseas increases, so does the importance of this topic. Additionally, because women in expatriate positions are relatively new, their needs for job satisfaction and career aspirations are not known to most organizations. This research intends to fill this gap. The study concentrates on four major areas that are considered important for obtaining job satisfaction: (1) the way in which organizations design their overseas jobs, (2) women's skills and characteristics, (3) international human resource policies of companies and (4) the cultural environment of host countries. The applied research covers two phases: a study of expatriate managers during their assignments overseas and the evaluation of overseas experience upon their return. The results indicate that women in overseas assignments are satisfied overall with their jobs. However, organizational variables are more strongly related to job satisfaction. The nature of job design in overseas postings has the greatest impact on women's job satisfaction. When the jobs are enriched, women gain intrinsic rewards and have high job satisfaction. Organizational support also contributes to the satisfaction of women expatriates. Training, mentoring and repatriation preparations have high impact on women's success and satisfaction. Women expatriates are more concerned with their repatriation and future advancement than their present assignments. The findings are important for theoretical and practical reasons. Theoretically, the achievement and satisfaction of women managers overseas cannot be simplified without taking into account organizational, personal and cultural factors. Practically, companies need to respond to the individual needs of expatriate women managers and then decide on their assignments and their repatriation accordingly.
Worries and problems of young carers: issues for mental health

This paper reports on a research study which explored the worries and problems of young carers in Edinburgh. Sixty-one young carers took part in the study, conducted between April and June 2002. Findings indicate that young carers identify significant worries and problems in relation to their well-being, and that these come over and above any ‘normal’ adolescent difficulties. It is suggested that these findings may have important implications for young carers’ mental health, now and in the future, and contain important lessons for child and family social work in general.
Multi-class segmentation for traffic scenarios at over 50 FPS

Multi-class segmentation assigns a class label to each pixel in an image. It represents a significant task for the semantic understanding of images and has received plentiful attention over the last years. The current state of art is dominated by conditional random field based approaches, defined over pixels or image segments. However, high accuracy segmentation comes at a high computational cost. The best performing methods can barely run at few frames per second and are far from real-time applications. Our goal is to bridge the gap between current state of the art segmentation approaches and real-time applications. In this paper we propose an efficient approach for individual pixel classification. Multiple local descriptors are computed densely and then quantized using visual codebooks. Joint boosting is used to classify each pixel based on the quantized local descriptors. We show that using careful design choices and GPU optimization we can achieve sate of the art segmentation results at over 50 FPS. We also propose a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model defined over superpixels that uses the proposed pixel classifier for the estimation of unary potentials. The CRF based multi-class segmentation can run at over 30 FPS. The proposed approach is validated on the MSRC21 and CamVid multi-class segmentation benchmarks, the former one consisting of urban traffic sequences.
A Review on Subspace Methods for Face Image Recognition

Pattern recognition systems have recently attained significant attention in the field of image processing. Image recognition becomes a challenging issue in real world applications because of the high dimensional images. Curse of dimensionality is a major issue in pattern recognition systems. This higher dimensionality causes a degradation of the classification accuracy of the classifier. By providing better dimensionality reduction as well as higher class discrimination prior to the classification process, a classifier can provide higher classification accuracy. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the various pattern recognition methods and its relevance to improve the classification accuracy of the existing face recognition systems. Keywords—PCA, LDA, SVM, Nearest Neighbour, Neural Network
Economic discrimination and societal homicide rates: further evidence on the cost of inequality.

This research examines the effects of economic discrimination against social groups on national rates of homicide.I hypothesize that nations with intense and pervasive discrimination will exhibit comparatively high levels of homicide and that the effects of discrimination will exceed those of income inequality. Regression analyses using both INTERPOL and World Health Organization homicide data support both hypotheses. Indicators of economic discrimination against social groups are significantly and positively related to homicide rates despite fairly extensive controls for other theoretically relevant national characteristics.These results suggest that the structuring of economic inequality on the basis of ascribed characteristics is a particularly important source of lethal violence in contemporary societies. (EXCERPT)
Safety and Immunogenicity of a Malaria Vaccine, Plasmodium falciparum AMA-1/MSP-1 Chimeric Protein Formulated in Montanide ISA 720 in Healthy Adults

Background The P. falciparum chimeric protein 2.9 (PfCP-2.9) consisting of the sequences of MSP1-19 and AMA-1 (III) is a malaria vaccine candidate that was found to induce inhibitory antibodies in rabbits and monkeys. This was a phase I randomized, single-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-escalation study to evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of the PfCP-2.9 formulated with a novel adjuvant Montanide ISA720. Fifty-two subjects were randomly assigned to 4 dose groups of 10 participants, each receiving the test vaccine of 20, 50, 100, or 200 µg respectively, and 1 placebo group of 12 participants receiving the adjuvant only. Methods and Findings The vaccine formulation was shown to be safe and well-tolerated, and none of the participants withdrew. The total incidence of local adverse events (AEs) was 75%, distributed among 58% of the placebo group and 80% of those vaccinated. Among the vaccinated, 65% had events that were mild and 15% experienced moderate AEs. Almost all systemic adverse reactions observed in this study were graded as mild and required no therapy. The participants receiving the test vaccine developed detectable antibody responses which were boosted by the repeated vaccinations. Sixty percent of the vaccinated participants had high ELISA titers (>1∶10,000) of antigen-specific antibodies which could also recognize native parasite proteins in an immunofluorescence assay (IFA). Conclusion This study is the first clinical trial for this candidate and builds on previous investigations supporting PfCP-2.9/ISA720 as a promising blood-stage malaria vaccine. Results demonstrate safety, tolerability (particularly at the lower doses tested) and immunogenicity of the formulation. Further clinical development is ongoing to explore optimizing the dose and schedule of the formulation to decrease reactogenicity without compromising immunogenicity. Trial Registration Chinese State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) 2002SL0046; Controlled-Trials.com ISRCTN66850051 [66850051]