Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characteristics of ambient seismic noise as a source for surface wave tomography

Interstation cross correlations of ambient seismic noise from 1 year of continuous data at periods between 6 and 50 s are used to study the origin of the ambient noise using stations located in Europe, southern Africa, Asia, and three regions within North America. The signal‐to‐noise ratios (SNR) of Rayleigh waves for positive and negative correlation time lags at periods of 8, 14, 25 and 50 s are used to determine the azimuthal distribution of strong ambient noise sources. Ambient noise in both the primary (10–20 s) and secondary microseism bands (5–10 s) comes dominantly from the directions of relatively nearby coastlines with stronger noise occurring in the Northern Hemisphere in northern winter and in the Southern Hemisphere in southern winter, consistent with the hypothesis that oceanic microseisms are generating this noise. The observed differences in the directivity of noise in the primary and secondary microseism bands are the consequence of propagation and attenuation, rather than the location of generation. At intermediate and long periods (>20 s), there is much less seasonal variation in both signal strength and directivity. We argue that our results are explained most simply by near‐coastal sources rather than deep ocean sources at all periods. Although the dominant ambient noise sources are distributed inhomogeneously in azimuth, strong ambient noise emerges from most directions when using recordings that are 1 year in duration. Simulations illustrate that this is what ensures the accuracy of the empirical Green's functions and ambient noise tomography.
American Slaughterhouses and the Need for Speed: An Examination of the Meatpacking-Methamphetamine Hypothesis

In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser argues that slaughterhouse workers use methamphetamines to manage the harsh physical and emotional demands of the meatpacking industry. Similar ideas have been raised elsewhere; however, empirical tests of this hypothesis are in short supply. In this article, we elaborate on theoretical mechanisms that may explain why the meatpacking industry encourages methamphetamine use and provide a macro-level test of the meatpacking–methamphetamine hypothesis using 11 years (2001-2012) of hospital admission data and information from annual livestock slaughter reports. Decomposition modeling is used to examine variations across states and within states over time. Results show only modest support for the hypothesis. Specifically, a combined measure of meat is positively and statistically significantly associated with methamphetamine use both within and across states. However, the relationships are not consistently positive or statistically significant across all types of meat. In other words, the meatpacking–methamphetamine relationship is varying and complex.
Imprints of primordial non-Gaussianities in X-ray and SZ signals from galaxy clusters

Several inflationary models predict the possibility that the primordial perturbations of the density field may contain a degree of non-Gaussianity which would influence the subsequent evolution of cosmic structures at large scales. In order to study their impact, we use a set of three cosmological dark-matter-only simulations starting from initial conditions with different levels of non-Gaussianity: f NL = 0, ±100. More specifically, we focus on the distribution of galaxy clusters at different redshifts and, using suitable scaling relations, we determine their X-ray and Sunyaev―Zel'dovich signals. Our analysis allows us to estimate the differences in log N― log S and log N―log Y due to the different initial conditions and to predict the cluster counts at different redshifts expected for future surveys (eROSITA and SPT). We also use a second set of simulations assuming a different cosmological scenario to estimate how the dependence on f NL is degenerate with respect to other parameters. Our results indicate that the effects introduced by a realistic amount of primordial non-Gaussianity are small when compared to the ones connected with current uncertainties in cosmological parameters, particularly with σ 8 . However, if future surveys will be associated with optical follow-up campaigns to determine the cluster redshift, an analysis of the samples at z > 1 can provide significant constraints on f NL . In particular, we predict that the SPT cluster survey will be able to detect ∼1000 clusters at z > 1 for the Gaussian case, with a difference of 15-20 per cent associated with f NL = ±100.
Effect of Multimodal Training on the Perception of French Nasal Vowels

This study investigates the effects of multimodal training and the contribution of facial cues on the perception of French nasal vowels by learners of French. Sixty American English learners of French participated in the study. Forty were assigned to an experimental training group (either Audio‐visual or Audio‐only training) and 20 served as controls. All participants completed a perception pretest and a perception posttest presented within three modalities and with two counterbalanced orders: AV, A, V or A, AV, V. During the three weeks between the pre‐ and posttests, the AV and A groups received six sessions of perception training with immediate feedback. Results show significant improvement for the training groups in the perception of the three vowels at the posttest and generalization test, but the AV training was not better than the A training. As for the vowels, the greatest improvement was obtained for [ɛ
Calmodulin-controlled spatial decoding of oscillatory Ca2+ signals by calcineurin

Calcineurin is responsible for mediating a wide variety of cellular processes in response to dynamic calcium (Ca2+) signals, yet the precise mechanisms involved in the spatiotemporal control of calcineurin signaling are poorly understood. Here, we use genetically encoded fluorescent biosensors to directly probe the role of cytosolic Ca2+ oscillations in modulating calcineurin activity dynamics in insulin-secreting MIN6 β-cells. We show that Ca2+ oscillations induce distinct temporal patterns of calcineurin activity in the cytosol and plasma membrane vs at the ER and mitochondria in these cells. Furthermore, we found that these differential calcineurin activity patterns are determined by variations in the subcellular distribution of calmodulin (CaM), indicating that CaM plays an active role in shaping both the spatial and temporal aspects of calcineurin signaling. Together, our findings provide new insights into the mechanisms by which oscillatory signals are decoded to generate specific functional outputs within different cellular compartments. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.03765. 001
Singularity formation in a class of stretched solutions of the equations for ideal magneto-hydrodynamics

A class of stretched solutions of the equations for three-dimensional, incompressible, ideal magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD) is studied. In Elsasser variables, V ± = U ± B, these solutions have the form V ± = v ± ,v ± 3 where v ± = v ± (x, y, t)and v ± 3 (x, y, z, t)= zγ ± (x, y, t)+ β ± (x, y, t) . T wodimensional partial differential equations for γ ± , v ± and β ± are obtained that are valid in a tubular domain which is infinite in the z-direction with periodic cross section. Pseudo-spectral computations of these equations provide evidence for a blow-up in finite time in the above variables. This apparent blow-up is an infinite energy process that gives rise to certain subtleties; while all the variables appear to blow-up simultaneously, the two-dimensional part of the magnetic field b = 1 v + − v − blows up at a very late stage. This singularity in b is hard to detect numerically but supporting analytical evidence of a Lagrangian nature is provided for its existence. In three dimensions these solutions correspond to magnetic vortices developing along the axis of the tube prior to breakdown.
Automatic generation of natural language summaries

Automatic text summarization has gained much interest in the last few years, since it could, at least in principle, make the process of information seeking in large document collections less tedious and time-consuming. Most existing summarization methods generate summaries by initially extracting the sentences that are most relevant to the user’s query from documents returned by an information retrieval engine. In this thesis, we present a new competitive sentence extraction method that assigns relevance scores to the sentences of the texts to be summarized. Coupled with a simple method to avoid selecting redundant sentences, the resulting summarization system achieves state-of-the-art results on widely used benchmark datasets. Moreover, we propose two novel sentence compression methods, which rewrite a source sentence in a shorter form, retaining the most important information. The first method produces extractive compressions, i.e., it only deletes words, whereas the second one produces abstractive compressions, i.e., it also uses paraphrasing. Experiments show that the extractive method generates compressions better or comparable, in terms of grammaticality and meaning preservation, to those produced by state-of-theart systems. On the other hand, the abstractive method produces more varied (due to paraphrasing) and slightly shorter compressions than the extractive one. In terms of grammaticality and meaning preservation, the two methods have similar scores. Finally, we propose an optimization model that generates summaries by jointly se-
A preliminary study on EDAs for permutation problems based on marginal-based models

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms are a class of evolutionary algorithms characterized by the use of probabilistic models. These algorithms have been applied successfully to a wide set of artificial and real-world problems, achieving competitive results in most scenarios. Nevertheless, there are some problems whose solutions can be naturally represented as a permutation, for which EDAs have not been extensively developed. Although some work has been done in this area, most of the approaches are adaptations of EDAs designed for problems based on integer or real domains, and only a few algorithms have been specifically designed to deal with permutation-based problems. In this paper, we present an EDA that learns probability distributions over permutations. Particularly, our approach is based on the use of k-order marginals. In addition, we carry out some preliminary experiments over classical permutation-based problems in order to study the performance of the proposed k-order marginals EDA.
The misdirection of public policy: comparing and combining standardised effect sizes

Abstract Increased attention on ‘what works’ in education has led to an emphasis on developing policy from evidence based on comparing and combining a particular statistical summary of intervention studies: the standardised effect size. It is assumed that this statistical summary provides an estimate of the educational impact of interventions and combining these through meta-analyses and meta-meta-analyses results in more precise estimates of this impact which can then be ranked. From these, it is claimed, educational policy decisions can be driven. This paper will demonstrate that these assumptions are false: standardised effect size is open to researcher manipulations which violate the assumptions required for legitimately comparing and combining studies in all but the most restricted circumstances. League tables of types of intervention, which governments point to as an evidence base for effective practice may, instead, be hierarchies of openness to research design manipulations. The paper concludes that public policy and resources are in danger of being misdirected.
Inferring Traffic Signal Phases From Turning Movement Counters Using Hidden Markov Models

This work poses the problem of estimating traffic signal phases from a sequence of maneuvers. We model the problem as an inference problem on a discrete-time hidden Markov model (HMM) in which maneuvers are observations and signal phases are hidden states. The model is calibrated from maneuver observations using either the classical Baum-Welch algorithm or a Bayesian learning algorithm. The trained model is then used to infer the traffic signal phases on the data set via the Viterbi algorithm. When training with the Bayesian learning algorithm, we set the prior distribution as a Dirichlet distribution. We identify the best parameters of the prior distribution for both fixed-time and sensor-actuated signals using numerical simulations and employ them in the field experiments. It is shown that when the model is trained by the Bayesian learning method with appropriate prior parameters from the Dirichlet distribution, the inferred phases are more accurate in both numerical and field experiments. Because the best set of prior parameters for a fixed-time intersection is different from those for sensor-actuated signals, a classification strategy to distinguish between these two types of signals is proposed. The supporting source code and data are available for download at https://github.com/reisiga2/TrafficSignalPhaseEstimation.
Compared with usual sodium intake, low- and excessive-sodium diets are associated with increased mortality: a meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND The effect of sodium intake on population health remains controversial. The objective was to investigate the incidence of all-cause mortality (ACM) and cardiovascular disease events (CVDEs) in populations exposed to dietary intakes of low sodium (<115 mmol), usual sodium (low usual sodium: 115-165 mmol; high usual sodium: 166-215 mmol), and high sodium (>215 mmol). METHODS The relationship between individual measures of dietary sodium intake vs. outcome in cohort studies and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) measured as hazard ratios (HRs) were integrated in meta-analyses. RESULTS No RCTs in healthy population samples were identified. Data from 23 cohort studies and 2 follow-up studies of RCTs (n = 274,683) showed that the risks of ACM and CVDEs were decreased in usual sodium vs. low sodium intake (ACM: HR = 0.91, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.82-0.99; CVDEs: HR = 0.90, 95% CI = 0.82-0.99) and increased in high sodium vs. usual sodium intake (ACM: HR = 1.16, 95% CI = 1.03-1.30; CVDEs: HR = 1.12, 95% CI = 1.02-1.24). In population representative samples adjusted for multiple confounders, the HR for ACM was consistently decreased in usual sodium vs. low sodium intake (HR = 0.86; 95% CI = 0.81-0.92), but not increased in high sodium vs. usual sodium intake (HR = 1.04; 95% CI = 0.91-1.18). Within the usual sodium intake range, the number of events was stable (high usual sodium vs. low usual sodium: HR = 0.98; 95% CI = 0.92-1.03). CONCLUSIONS Both low sodium intakes and high sodium intakes are associated with increased mortality, consistent with a U-shaped association between sodium intake and health outcomes.
AGAL : A Seamless Handoff Between Ad-Hoc 802 . 11 and GSM / GPRS

The explosive increase in the number of mobile users in the present day scenario has made it increasingly tough from the provider’s point of view to provide each of the users with a bandwidth high enough for high quality support of services such as multimedia, gaming etc. In this paper we propose Adhoc/GPRS Alternate Link (AGAL) protocol which aims at shifting as many as possible mobile users to high-speed , inexpensive ad-hoc mode whenever they are in range of each other. In AGAL, a mulithomed mobile client has both a GPRS/GSM and 802.11 ad-hoc link. Whenever the communicating mobile users are able to detect each other through their ad-hoc interface, they shift over to the higher quality ad-hoc link which also helps ease up the load on the WWAN network. Through simulation we show that AGAL greatly improves user throughput without significant increase of overhead.
A virtual cycle: theory and experiment converge on the exit from mitosis

The cell division cycle can be modelled as a series of quantitative thresholds of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) activity. DNA synthesis has a lower threshold requirement for CDK than does entry into mitosis, and mitotic exit and re-setting of replication origins occur upon collapse of CDK activity below both thresholds, so that the simple rise and fall of CDK with each cell cycle might suffice to ensure repeated alternation of chromosome duplication and segregation. Recent experimental dissections of mitotic exit, which have both guided and been informed by computational modelling, suggest a more complicated mechanism, in which unidirectional progression is ensured by systems-level control of CDK function and the balance between mitotic CDK and phosphatase activities.
Properties of mEPSCs recorded in layer II neurones of rat barrel cortex

Voltage‐clamp recordings from layer II neurones in somatosensory cortex of rats aged between 12 and 17 days showed a high frequency of spontaneous postsynaptic currents (sPSCs), which on average was 33 ± 13 Hz (s.d.). sPSCs were mediated largely by glutamatergic AMPA receptors. Their rates and amplitudes were independent of blocking sodium channels with 1 μm tetrodotoxin (TTX). Most of them, therefore, represent genuine miniature excitatory postsynaptic currents (mEPSCs). The rise time of the fastest (10 %) mEPSCs was 288 ± 86 μs (10‐90 %) and the half‐width was 1073 ± 532 μs. The amplitude was −5.9 ± 1.1 pA with a coefficient of variation (CV) of 0.44 ± 0.14. The rate of mEPSCs was very temperature sensitive with a Q10 (33‐37 °C) of 8.9 ± 0.9. Due to this temperature sensitivity, we estimated that the microscope lamp contributed an increase in temperature of about 4 °C to the tissue in the focal volume of the condenser. Cell‐type differences in the rate of mEPSCs were found between pyramidal/multipolar and bipolar cells. The latter had a frequency of about a third of that seen in the other cell groups. Recordings in layer II are ideally suited to investigate mechanisms of spontaneous transmitter release.
INFLUENCE OF FLOOD DURATION AND TIMING ON QUERCUS LOBATA GERMINATION

Recent work in riparian restoration has focused on the importance of restoration of physical processes. The assumption behind this is that if rivers are reconnected to their natural floodplain desired vegetation will quickly colonize. This dissertation consists of three studies conducted to test this assumption. The study site is series of former agricultural fields that were separated from the Cosumnes River by high levees until 1985, 1995, and 1998 when the levees were breached and the fields were allowed to flood at moderately high flows (Figure 2.1). The first two studies result from the observation that natural recruitment of Quercus lobata, the dominant late successional riparian tree species, is almost completely limited to the oldest sand splay that was created when water flowed through the 1985 breach and dropped its sediment load. First, an experiment was conducted to determine the impact of inundation timing and duration on acorn germination. The results showed that the lower elevation areas, without new sand deposition, maybe be unsuitable for Quercus lobata establishment in all but the driest years. The second study tested the idea that existing forest may facilitate Quercus lobata growth or survivorship and looked at the impact of flooding on growth. We found that oaks actually grow faster on the open floodplain than they did in either an early successional cottonwood willow forest or an existing oak forest. On the open floodplain there was a significant negative relationship between inundation and growth rate, but we did not observe any mortality in the three years of the study. The final study looked at community assembly in the herbaceous wetland communities on the open floodplain. 260 permanent plots were installed along
Neighborhood Structure and Fear of Crime in Urban China: Disorder As a Neighborhood Process

Summary Fear of crime has always been a major topic in the popular media and for public policy. Consequences of fear of crime are salient for citizens' and the community's quality of life. Since the late 1970s, there has been a much scholarly attention paid to the role of disorder in producing fear of crime and further producing adverse community consequences. Particularly influential works were Wilson and Kelling's paper (1982) and Skogan's work (1990); these works greatly influenced public policy in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Greene and Taylor 1988; Ferraro 1994). The salient feature of this research is its emphasis on the role of community context, analyzing how disorder generates fear of crime and leads to community decline at the street block and neighborhood level. The impact of fear of crime extends beyond the victims of the crimes, and indicates the salience of the social aspect of fear of crime. Therefore, neighborhood effects are highly relevant to the understanding of fear of crime. Scholars have recognized that individuals' fear is better understood within a neighborhood or community context. The purpose of the present study is to build upon prior work to address critical questions of neighborhood effects on fear of crime under context of contemporary urban China. Using multilevel analyses of data from Tianjing, China, this paper found that neighborhood context variables have effect on fear of crime independent of individual characteristics.
CDS0 (Intercellular Adhesion Molecule 3) Stimulation Induces Calcium Mobilization and Tyrmine Phosphorylation through p59b and p56 in Jurkat T Cell Line By Manel Juan, Odette Vifias, M. Rosa Pino-Otin, Lourdes Places,

Summary The leukocyte differentiation antigen, CDS0, has been recently identified as the intercellular adhesion molecule 3 (ICAM-3), the third counter-receptor oflenkocyte function-associated antigen 1 (LFA-1). This molecule seems to be specially involved in the adhesion events of the initial phases of the immune response. To characterize the role of CD50 in leukocyte interactions, the different molecular events induced after cross-linking of CDS0 on T cell-derived Jurkat cell line have been analyzed. When cells were incubated with anti-CDS0 mAbs and cross-linked with polyclonal goat anti-mouse immunoglobulins, a rise in intracellular calcium concentration ([CaZ+]i) was observed. This increase in [Ca2+]i was mainly due to the uptake of extracellular C# + . This Ca 2+ flux involved tyrosine phosphorylations and was further increased by CD3 costimulation. These data, together with those obtained by phosphotyrosine (P-Tyr) immunoprecipitation and in vitro kinase assays, suggested the involvement of protein-tyrosine kinases (PTK) in CD50 transduction pathways. By using specific antisera, the presence of p56 ld' and p59 ryn protein tyrosine kinases (FTK) was dearly demonstrated in the CD50 immunoprecipitates. These findings suggest that the interaction of CD50 with its natural ligand (LFA-1) may result in T lymphocyte activation events, in which CDS0 could play a very active role after antigen triggering.