Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
IMPROVING THE PRECISION OF TIME-DELAY COSMOGRAPHY WITH OBSERVATIONS OF GALAXIES ALONG THE LINE OF SIGHT

In order to use strong gravitational lens time delays to measure precise and accurate cosmological parameters the effects of mass along the line of sight must be taken into account. We present a method to achieve this by constraining the probability distribution function of the effective line-of-sight convergence κext. The method is based on matching the observed overdensity in the weighted number of galaxies to that found in mock catalogs with κext obtained by ray-tracing through structure formation simulations. We explore weighting schemes based on projected distance, mass, luminosity, and redshift. This additional information reduces the uncertainty of κext from σκ ∼ 0.06 to ∼0.04 for very overdense LOSs like that of the system B1608+656. For more common LOSs, σκ is reduced to ≲0.03, corresponding to an uncertainty of ≲ 3% on distance. This uncertainty has comparable effects on cosmological parameters to that arising from the mass model of the deflector and its immediate environment. Photometric redshifts based on g, r, i and K photometries are sufficient to constrain κext almost as well as with spectroscopic redshifts. As an illustration, we apply our method to the system B1608+656. Our most reliable κext estimator gives σκ = 0.047 down from 0.065 using only galaxy counts. Although deeper multiband observations of the field of B1608+656 are necessary to obtain a more precise estimate, we conclude that griK photometry, in addition to spectroscopy to characterize the immediate environment, is an effective way to increase the precision of time-delay cosmography.
Rainbow Arithmetic Progressions and Anti-Ramsey Results

The van der Waerden theorem in Ramsey theory states that, for every k and t and sufficiently large N, every k-colouring of [N] contains a monochromatic arithmetic progression of length t. Motivated by this result, Radoičić conjectured that every equinumerous 3-colouring of [3n] contains a 3-term rainbow arithmetic progression, i.e., an arithmetic progression whose terms are coloured with distinct colours. In this paper, we prove that every 3-colouring of the set of natural numbers for which each colour class has density more than 1/6, contains a 3-term rainbow arithmetic progression. We also prove similar results for colourings of . Finally, we give a general perspective on other anti-Ramsey-type problems that can be considered.
An Exploratory Study of Data Sketching for Visual Representation

Hand‐drawn sketching on napkins or whiteboards is a common, accessible method for generating visual representations. This practice is shared by experts and non‐experts and is probably one of the faster and more expressive ways to draft a visual representation of data. In order to better understand the types of and variations in what people produce when sketching data, we conducted a qualitative study. We asked people with varying degrees of visualization expertise, from novices to experts, to manually sketch representations of a small, easily understandable dataset using pencils and paper and to report on what they learned or found interesting about the data. From this study, we extract a data sketching representation continuum from numeracy to abstraction; a data report spectrum from individual data items to speculative data hypothesis; and show the correspondence between the representation types and the data reports from our results set. From these observations we discuss the participants’ representations in relation to their data reports, indicating implications for design and potentially fruitful directions for research.
Effect of Ovarian Cyclic Status on In Vitro Embryo Production in Cattle

Background The relationship between cyclic status of cattle ovaries on in vitro embryo development up to the blastocyst stage was investigated. Materials and Methods Cattle ovaries were collected immediately after slaughter and divided into three categories based on their cyclic status, which included: 1. the presence of a large follicle (LF), 2. the presence of a corpus luteum (CL) and 3. ovaries without LF or CL (WLCF). Oocytes of these ovaries were obtained and used for in vitro maturation and fertilization. Presumptive zygotes were then cultured up to the blastocyst stage in synthetic oviductal fluid culture medium. Results There were no significant differences between cleavage rates of the three groups. The rate of embryos in the compact morula stage for the CL group was 48.2% which was significantly higher than the related rate of the LF group (36.6%), but non-significantly higher than that of the ST group (45.7%). The highest blastocyst rate belonged to the CL group (54.6%) which was significantly greater than the WLCF group (32.9%) and non-significantly higher than the LF group (52.4%). There was no significant difference in blastocyst rates in the CL and LF groups. Conclusion Preselection of oocyte donor ovaries containing a CL or LF can be used as a feasible and non- invasive criterion to obtain the most competent oocytes capable of development to the blastocyst stage.
Melanocortin-1 Receptor (MC1R) Gene Variants and Dysplastic Nevi Modify Penetrance of CDKN2A Mutations in French Melanoma-Prone Pedigrees

Germline mutations in CDKN2A gene predispose to melanoma with high but incomplete penetrance. Penetrance of CDKN2A gene was found to be significantly influenced by host factors (nevus phenotypes and sunburn) on one hand and by variants of MC1R gene (RHC variants consistently associated with red hair and fair skin) on the other hand. Our goal was to examine the joint effects of MC1R variants and other potential risk factors [total nevi, dysplastic nevi, pigmentary traits (skin, hair and eye color), skin reactions to sunlight, and degree of sun exposure] on CDKN2A penetrance. Clinical, genetic, and covariate data were recorded in 20 French melanoma-prone families with cosegregating CDKN2A mutations. Analysis of the cotransmission of melanoma and CDKN2A mutations was conducted by likelihood-based methods using the regressive logistic models, which can account for a variation of disease risk with age and can include the aforementioned risk factors as covariates. RHC variants, considered either alone or in the presence of pigmentation and nevus phenotypes, were found to increase significantly CDKN2A penetrance. Multivariate analysis, using a stepwise selection procedure, showed significant effects of two factors on melanoma risk in CDKN2A mutations carriers: RHC variants [odds ratio of hazard function (OR), 2.21; P = 0.03] and dysplastic nevi (OR, 2.93; P < 0.01). Such results may have important consequences to improve the prediction of melanoma risk in families.
Biological activities of peptides and peptide analogues derived from common sequences present in thrombospondin, properdin, and malarial proteins

Thrombospondin (TSP), a major platelet-secreted protein, has recently been shown to have activity in tumor cell metastasis, cell adhesion, and platelet aggregation. The type 1 repeats of TSP contain two copies of CSVTCG and one copy of CSTSCG, per each of the three polypeptide chains of TSP and show homology with peptide sequences found in a number of other proteins including properdin, malarial circumsporozoite, and a blood-stage antigen of Plasmodium falciparum. To investigate whether these common sequences functioned as a cell adhesive domain in TSP, we assessed the effect of peptides corresponding to these sequences and an antibody raised against one of these sequences, CSTSCG, in three biological assays which depend, in part, on the cell adhesive activity of TSP. These assays were TSP- dependent cell adhesion, platelet aggregation, and tumor cell metastasis. We found that a number of peptides homologous to CSVTCG promoted the adhesion of a variety of cells including mouse B16-F10 melanoma cells, inhibited platelet aggregation and tumor cell metastasis, whereas control peptides had no effect. Anti-CSTSCG, which specifically recognized TSP, inhibited TSP-dependent cell adhesion, platelet aggregation, and tumor cell metastasis, whereas control IgG had no effect. These results suggest that CSVTCG and CSTSCG present in the type I repeats function in the adhesive interactions of TSP that mediate cell adhesion, platelet aggregation, and tumor cell metastasis. Peptides, based on the structure of these repeats, may find wide application in the treatment of thrombosis and in the prevention of cancer spread.
Effect of Psychological Well-Being and Mental Health on the Student’s Educational Achievement with the Mediating Role of Resiliency

One of the concerns of parents and education today is students' educational achievement since it is believed that success in education can partially predict individual success in the future. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of psychological well-being and mental health on high school students' educational achievement with the mediating role of resilience. The study population consisted of all high school students in Urmia city in 2015-2016 school year. The samples included 320 individuals who were selected using convenient random sampling method. Four questionnaires were employed for data collection, including Reef's psychological well-being questionnaire (1980), General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28), Connor-Davidson's Resilience Questionnaire (2003) and the students' achievement scores. The results indicated the fitness of conceptual model and its approval for public high school students in Urmia city. The direct effect of psychological well-being variable on resiliency (.68) considering the t-value (t = 6.42) at the confidence level of . 01 is significant. The direct effect of Mental health on resiliency (.69) considering the t-value (t = 7.12) at the confidence level of 0.00 is significant. The direct effect of resiliency on the educational achievement (.54) and considering the t-value (t = 5.27) at the confidence level of . 02 is significant. The indirect effect of psychological well-being on educational achievement with the value of . 29 and the indirect effect of mental health on educational achievement with the value of . 37 are significant. It is recommended that the findings of this study, which are indicative of paying more attention to meet the students' mental health in many ways than ever before, be used to identify the students at risk for clinical evaluation and also more comprehensive and better intervention programs be designed and implemented to decrease students' psychological and educational achievement problems.
Observed extinction by clouds at 95 GHz

Measurements were made in maritime stratus with a 95 GHz pulsed Doppler radar mounted on an aircraft. The aircraft also carried in situ probes for characterization of the cloud composition in terms of liquid water content (LWC) and size distribution of the hydrometeors. Flight segments of 5-10 km length were selected for analysis over which the LWC was relatively uniform. Mean values of LWC ranged from 0.05 to 0.8 g/m/sup 3/. The dominant part of the LWC came from droplets smaller than 50 /spl mu/m diameter. The temperature was near +10/spl deg/C for all cases, and the pressure was near 900 mb. After correcting for extinction by water vapor, the observations yielded an extinction coefficient of 4.6 dB/km per g/m/sup 3/ of cloud water. This result agrees with theoretical values and constitutes the first direct test of those calculations.
ROLE OF MICRO FINANCE IN WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT (An Empirical study in Pondicherry region rural SHG's)

Microfinance is a type of banking service that is provided to unemployed or low-income individuals or groups who would otherwise have no other means of gaining financial services. Micro finance through Self Help Group (SHG) has been recognized internationally as the modern tool to combat poverty and for rural development. Micro finance and SHGs are effective in reducing poverty, empowering women and creating awareness which finally results in sustainable development of the nation. The main aim of microfinance is to empower women. In this paper the role played by Microfinance in women’s empowerment are considered into three dimensions namely psychological, social and economical. The objectives of the study is i) to understand the performance of SHG’s in Pondicherry region, ii) to analyze the freedom women members get in SHG’s, iii) to study the problems women members face in SHG’s, iv) to analyze the empowerment of the women psychologically, economically and socially and v) to offer suggestions for the betterment of women’s empowerment in SHG’s. The study is undertaken in rural areas of Pondicherry region. Both primary and secondary data’s are used. Primary data is enumerated from a field survey in the study region. Secondary data is collected from NGOs’ reports and other documents. The researcher has used percentage method, simple correlation coefficient, paired t test and cross tabulation for analysis purpose. Analysis showed that there is a gradual increase in the all the three factors among rural women’s. From the interaction among the respondents it is noticed that some members are expecting the NGO to come up with more training sessions in income generating activities. All they need is a way to develop their skills and talents by participating in various training programs. There is a definite improvement in psychological well being and social empowerment among rural women as a result of participating in micro finance through SHG program.
Boosterism or Audience Interest?: An Examination of Self-Promotion on Sports-Network Highlight Shows

In sports broadcasting, a dichotomy exists between a network’s financial interests and its journalism responsibilities. Many sports networks enter contractual agreements into the billions of dollars for the rights to broadcast live sporting events as part of their network programming. Typically, these live events produce high ratings and generate significant profit for the networks. However, this conflict between a sports network’s business and journalistic affairs raises a compelling ethical debate. Working under the theoretical model of hybrid messages—the assumption that news networks include promotional themes in their journalism programming that aren’t easily recognizable to the viewer—this introductory study analyzed 168 broadcasts from the two most prominent nightly sports-news programs, SportsCenter and FOX Sports Live , to examine whether sports networks more heavily promote leagues with which they are contractually affiliated. The study yielded the existence of hybrid messaging in newscasts, specifically finding that sports networks self-promote by showing more in-depth coverage of games and leagues with which they have a financial interest, while also filling a significant portion of the news program’s most prominent block with programming that serves their interests. However, the relationship extant between sports networks and sports leagues makes it difficult to ascertain whether the sports networks are self-promoting in their journalism programming or simply following journalistic practices.
Would You Trust a (Faulty) Robot? Effects of Error, Task Type and Personality on Human-Robot Cooperation and Trust

How do mistakes made by a robot affect its trustworthiness and acceptance in human-robot collaboration? We investigate how the perception of erroneous robot behavior may influence human interaction choices and the willingness to cooperate with the robot by following a number of itsunusual requests. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in which participants interacted with a home companion robot in one of two experimental conditions: (1) the correct modeor (2) the faulty mode. Our findings reveal that, while significantly affecting subjective perceptions of the robot and assessments of its reliability and trustworthiness, the robot’s performance does not seem to substantially influence participants’ decisions to (not) comply with its requests. However, our results further suggest that the nature of the task requested by the robot, e.g. whether its effects are revocable as opposed to irrevocable, has a significant impact on participants’ willingness to follow its instructions.
A computational investigation of the relationships between single-neuron and network dynamics in the cerebral cortex

Functions of brain areas in complex animals are believed to rely on the dynamics of networks of neurons rather than on single neurons. On the other hand, the network dynamics reflect and arise from the integration and coordination of the activity of populations of single neurons. Understanding how single-neurons and neural-circuits dynamics complement each other to produce brain functions is thus of paramount importance. LFPs and EEGs are good indicators of the dynamics of mesoscopic and macroscopic populations of neurons, while microscopic-level activities can be documented by measuring the membrane potential, the synaptic currents or the spiking activity of individual neurons. In this thesis we develop mathematical modelling and mathematical analysis tools that can help the interpretation of joint measures of neural activity at microscopic and mesoscopic or macroscopic scales. In particular, we develop network models of recurrent cortical circuits that can clarify the impact of several aspects of single-neuron (i.e., microscopic-level) dynamics on the activity of the whole neural population (as measured by LFP). We then develop statistical tools to characterize the relationship between the action potential firing of single neurons and mass signals. We apply these latter analysis techniques to joint recordings of the firing activity of individual cell-type identified neurons and mesoscopic (i.e., LFP) and macroscopic (i.e., EEG) signals in the mouse neocortex. We identified several general aspects of the relationship between cell-specific neural firing and mass circuit activity, providing for example general and robust mathematical rules which infer single-neuron firing activity from mass measures such as the LFP and the EEG.
Optimizing 3 D Multigrid to be Comparable with the FFT

Multigrid is an iterative algorithm that uses nearestneighbor computations to solve PDEs on a regular mesh. Although multigrid is an algorithm, on problem sizes of interest it generally does not run as fast as the highly optimized FFT, which is an algorithm. This paper examines several optimizations to the multigrid approach for solving PDEs on a three-dimensional grid. The NAS Multigrid (NASMG) benchmark, a recognized standard, serves as a baseline for our performance analysis. We present a performance model for 3D multigrid that incorporates architectural parameters for the processor and memory system. Benchmark results for potential optimizations are optained on multiple architectures. The Performance Application Programming Interface (PAPI) library is used to examine hardware behavior in detail. We compare these results with the predictions of our performance model and discuss the architectural requirements for further improving the speed of 3D multigrid.
Recombinant Lipidated HPV E7 Induces a Th-1-Biased Immune Response and Protective Immunity against Cervical Cancer in a Mouse Model

The E7 oncoprotein of human papillomavirus (HPV) is an ideal target for developing immunotherapeutic strategies against HPV-associated tumors. However, because protein-based immunogens alone are poor elicitors of the cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) responses, they have been difficult to exploit for therapeutic purposes. In this study, we report that a recombinant lipoprotein consisting of inactive E7 (E7m) biologically linked to a bacterial lipid moiety (rlipo-E7m) induces the maturation of mouse bone marrow-derived dendritic cells through toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2), skews the immune responses toward the Th1 responses and induces E7-specific CTL responses. We further studied the ability of rlipo-E7m to provide protection against a TC-1 tumor cell challenge in an animal model. Mice prophylactically immunized with two 10-µg doses of rlipo-E7m were found to be free of TC-1 tumor growth. Experiments in a therapeutic immunization model showed that the tumor volume in mice receiving a single dose of rlipo-E7m was less than 0.01 cm3 on day 40, whereas the tumor volume in mice treated with rE7m was 2.28±1.21 cm3. The tumor volume of the entire control group was over 3 cm3. In addition, we demonstrated that the CD8+ T cells play a major role in anti-tumor immunity when administration of rlipo-E7m. These results demonstrate that rlipo-E7m could be a promising candidate for treating HPV-associated tumors.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Advanced information access to parliamentary debates

Parliamentary debates are highly structured transcripts of meetings of politicians in parliament. These debates are an important part of the cultural heritage of many countries; they are often free of copy-right; citizens often have a legal right to inspect them; and several countries make great effort to digitize their entire historical collection and make it available to the general public. This provides many opportunities for the Information Retrieval community. In this paper, we analyze the structure of parliamentary proceedings and sketch a widely applicable DTD. We show how proceedings in PDF format can be transformed into deeply nested XML. Having the proceedings in XML makes a wide range of applications possible. We elaborate on five applications: entry point retrieval, advanced content and structure search; automatic creation of tables of contents and hyperlinked navigation menus; graphical result aggregation; large savings on storage space and bandwidth for scanned documents.
Diverse Suppressive Influences in Area MT and Selectivity to Complex Motion Features

Neuronal selectivity results from both excitatory and suppressive inputs to a given neuron. Suppressive influences can often significantly modulate neuronal responses and impart novel selectivity in the context of behaviorally relevant stimuli. In this work, we use a naturalistic optic flow stimulus to explore the responses of neurons in the middle temporal area (MT) of the alert macaque monkey; these responses are interpreted using a hierarchical model that incorporates relevant nonlinear properties of upstream processing in the primary visual cortex (V1). In this stimulus context, MT neuron responses can be predicted from distinct excitatory and suppressive components. Excitation is spatially localized and matches the measured preferred direction of each neuron. Suppression is typically composed of two distinct components: (1) a directionally untuned component, which appears to play the role of surround suppression and normalization; and (2) a direction-selective component, with comparable tuning width as excitation and a distinct spatial footprint that is usually partially overlapping with excitation. The direction preference of this direction-tuned suppression varies widely across MT neurons: approximately one-third have overlapping suppression in the opposite direction as excitation, and many other neurons have suppression with similar direction preferences to excitation. There is also a population of MT neurons with orthogonally oriented suppression. We demonstrate that direction-selective suppression can impart selectivity of MT neurons to more complex velocity fields and that it can be used for improved estimation of the three-dimensional velocity of moving objects. Thus, considering MT neurons in a complex stimulus context reveals a diverse set of computations likely relevant for visual processing in natural visual contexts.