Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vertical distribution of Galactic disk stars - I. Kinematics and metallicity

Nearly 400 Tycho-2 stars have been observed in a 720 square degree field in the direction of the North Galactic Pole with the high resolution echelle spectrograph ELODIE. Absolute magnitudes, effective temperatures, gravities and metallicities have been estimated, as well as distances and 3D velocities. Most of these stars are clump giants and span typical distances from 200 pc to 800 pc to the galactic mid-plane. This new sample. free of any kinematical and metallicity bias, is used to investigate the vertical distribution of disk stars. The old thin disk and thick disk populations are deconvolved from the velocity-metallicity distribution of the sample and their parameters are determined. The thick disk is found to have a moderate rotational lag of -51 ′5 km s - 1 with respect to the Sun with velocity ellipsoid (σ U , σ V , σ W ) = (63 ′ 6.39 ′ 4,39 ′ 4)km s - 1 , mean metallicity of [Fe/H] = -0.48 ′ 0.05 and a high local normalization of 15 ′ 7%. Combining this NGP sample with a local sample of giant stars from the Hipparcos catalogue, the orientation of the velocity ellipsoid is investigated as a function of distance to the plane and metallicity. We find no vertex deviation for old stars, consistent with an axisymmetric Galaxy. Paper II is devoted to the dynamical analysis of the sample, puting new constraints on the vertical force perpendicular to the galactic plane and on the total mass density in the galactic plane.
A Double-Pulsed Set-Conditional-Reset Flip-Flop

A new flip-flop design using a double-pulsed static latch is presented. The flip-flop has only a single stage of logic in the critical path and as a result is up to three times faster than the fastest previously known flip-flops, while consuming approximately the same energy as the lowestpower flip-flops. The flip-flop has asymmetric timing properties which make it a good match to skewed logic styles. A novel dual-pulse generator further reduces power requirements.
The effects of compression garments on intermittent exercise performance and recovery on consecutive days.

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to determine whether compression garments improve intermittent-sprint performance and aid performance or self-reported recovery from high-intensity efforts on consecutive days. METHODS Following familiarization, 14 male rugby players performed two randomized testing conditions (with or without garments) involving consecutive days of a simulated team sport exercise protocol, separated by 24 h of recovery within each condition and 2 weeks between conditions. Each day involved an 80-min high-intensity exercise circuit, with exercise performance determined by repeated 20-m sprints and peak power on a cart dynamometer (single-man scrum machine). Measures of nude mass, heart rate, skin and tympanic temperature, and blood lactate (La-) were recorded throughout each day; also, creatine kinase (CK) and muscle soreness were recorded each day and 48 h following exercise. RESULTS No differences (P=.20 to 0.40) were present between conditions on either day of the exercise protocol for repeated 20-m sprint efforts or peak power on a cart dynamometer. Heart rate, tympanic temperature, and body mass did not significantly differ between conditions; however, skin temperature was higher under the compression garments. Although no differences (P=.50) in La- or CK were present, participants felt reduced levels of perceived muscle soreness in the ensuing 48 h postexercise when wearing the garments (2.5+/-1.7 vs 3.5+/-2.1 for garment and control; P=.01). CONCLUSIONS The use of compression garments did not improve or hamper simulated team-sport activity on consecutive days. Despite benefits of reduced self-reported muscle soreness when wearing garments during and following exercise each day, no improvements in performance or recovery were apparent.
Potential-density pairs and vertical tilt of the stellar velocity ellipsoid

We define new potential-density pairs and examine the impact of the potential flattening on the vertical velocity ellipsoid tilt, δ . B y means of numerical integrations and analytical calculations, we estimate δ in a variety of galactic potentials. We show that at 1 kpc above the Galactic plane at the solar radius, δ can differ by 5 degrees, depending on whether the dark matter halo is flat or spherical. This result excludes the possibility of an extremely flattened Galactic dark halo.
Kleptoplast photoacclimation state modulates the photobehaviour of the solar-powered sea slug Elysia viridis

ABSTRACT Some sacoglossan sea slugs incorporate intracellular functional algal chloroplasts (kleptoplasty) for periods ranging from a few days to several months. Whether this association modulates the photobehaviour of solar-powered sea slugs is unknown. In this study, the long-term kleptoplast retention species Elysia viridis showed avoidance of dark independently of light acclimation state. In contrast, Placida dendritica, which shows non-functional retention of kleptoplasts, showed no preference over dark, low or high light. High light-acclimated (HLac) E. viridis showed a higher preference for high light than low light-acclimated (LLac) conspecifics. The position of the lateral folds (parapodia) was modulated by irradiance, with increasing light levels leading to a closure of parapodia and protection of kleptoplasts from high light exposure. Furthermore, closure of parapodia occurred at higher irradiance in HLac E. viridis. Our results strongly indicate that kleptoplast photoacclimation state modulates the photobehaviour of the solar-powered sea slug E. viridis. Summary: Light preference and the position of the lateral folds (parapodia) of the solar-powered sea slug Elysia viridis are modulated by the light history of chloroplasts acquired from macroalgae.
Angiotensin II Stimulation of Neuritogenesis Involves Protein Kinase B in Brain Neurons

Stimulation of PI-3 kinase (PI3K)-protein kinase B (PKB) signal transduction pathway has been linked to the neuromodulatory action of angiotensin II (Ang II) in the brain neurons of the spontaneously hypertensive rat (Yang and Raizada J Neurosci 19:2413-2423,1999). The cellular consequences of this signaling pathway, however, remain unknown in the brain neurons from the normotensive rat. The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that the PI3K-PKB signaling cascade activates an angiotensin II (Ang II)-mediated neuritogenic action by stimulating cellular Growth Associated Protein-43(GAP-43) and neurite extension in Wistar Kyoto rat brain neurons. Angiotensin II activation of the Ang II type 1 receptor caused increases in PKB activity, cellular GAP-43 levels and neurite extension in a timeand dosedependent manner. Depletion of PKB by specific antisense oligonucleotides attenuated Ang II stimulation of both GAP-43 and neurite extension. PKB involvement in neuritogenic action is further supported by the observation that neurons that overexpress PKB develop extensive neuronal processes in the absence of Ang II. These observations demonstrate that PKB is directly involved in Ang IImediated effects and may recruit both nuclear and cytoplasmic signaling systems for this action.
Two-photon excitation of channelrhodopsin-2 at saturation

We demonstrate that channelrhodopsin-2 (CR), a light-gated ion channel that is conventionally activated by using visible-light excitation, can also be activated by using IR two-photon excitation (TPE). An empirical estimate of CR's two-photon absorption cross-section at λ = 920 nm is presented, with a value (260 ± 20 GM) indicating that TPE stimulation of CR photocurrents is not typically limited by intrinsic molecular excitability [1 GM = 10−50(cm4 s)/photon]. By using direct physiological measurements of CR photocurrents and a model of ground-state depletion, we evaluate how saturation of CR's current-conducting state influences the spatial resolution of focused TPE photostimulation, and how photocurrents stimulated by using low-power scanning TPE temporally summate. We show that TPE, like visible-light excitation, can be used to stimulate action potentials in cultured CR-expressing neurons.
Collaborative manipulation and transport of passive pieces using the self-reconfigurable modular robots roombots

Manipulation and transport of objects using mobile robotic platforms is a well studied field with several successful approaches. The main difficulty while using such platforms is the lack of adaptation capabilities to changes in the environment and the restriction to flat working areas. In this paper, we present a novel manipulation and transport framework using the self-reconfigurable modular robots Roombots to collaboratively carry arbitrarily shaped passive elements in a non-regular 3D environment equipped with passive connectors. A hierarchical planner based on the notion of virtual kinematic chain is used to generate collision-free and hardware-friendly paths as well as sequences of collaborative manipulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of manipulation of fully passive elements in an arbitrary 3D environment using mobile self-reconfigurable robots. The simulated results show that the planner is robust to arbitrary complex environments with randomly distributed connectors. In addition to simulation results, a proof of concept of the manipulation of one passive element with two real Roombots meta-modules is described.
Expressive array constructs in an embedded GPU kernel programming language

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are powerful computing devices that with the advent of CUDA/OpenCL are becomming useful for general purpose computations. Obsidian is an embedded domain specific language that generates CUDA kernels from functional descriptions. A symbolic array construction allows us to guarantee that intermediate arrays are fused away. However, the current array construction has some drawbacks; in particular, arrays cannot be combined efficiently. We add a new type of push arrays to the existing Obsidian system in order to solve this problem. The two array types complement each other, and enable the definition of combinators that both take apart and combine arrays, and that result in efficient generated code. This extension to Obsidian is demonstrated on a sequence of sorting kernels, with good results. The case study also illustrates the use of combinators for expressing the structure of parallel algorithms. The work presented is preliminary, and the combinators presented must be generalised. However, the raw speed of the generated kernels bodes well.
A Dimensional Emotion Model Driven Multi-stage Classification of Emotional Speech

— This paper deals with speech emotion analysis within the context of increasing awareness on wide application potential of affective computing. Unlike the most of works in the literature which mainly rely on classical frequency and energy based features along with a single global classifier for emotion recognition, we propose in this paper some new harmonic and Zipf based features for better speech emotion characterization in terms of timbre, rhythm and prosody and a dimensional emotion model driven multi-stage classification scheme for a better emotional class discrimination. Experimented on Berlin dataset [1] with 68 features and six emotion states, our approach shows its effectiveness, displaying a 68.60% classification rate and reaching a 71.52% classification rate when a gender classification is first applied . Using DES dataset having five emotion states, our approach achieves an 81% recognition rate when the best performance in the literature to our knowledge is 66% on the same dataset [2].
In the service of justice

To hold perpetrators of domestic violence accountable and punish them for their offences has been an important goal in the political rhetoric concerning domestic violence in Sweden. Through new legislation, media campaigns and collaboration projects between the police and the social services, women who have been victims of domestic violence have been urged to report to the police and remain in the criminal investigation process. The purpose of this study is to examine whether social support given at police stations will result in more prosecutions. The study is based on data collected from police investigations and analysed by a multivariate regression method. The results show that strong evidence for prosecution, such as the presence of witnesses and documented injuries, and also the offender’s position on the allegations and whether or not the woman hesitates to participate in the criminal investigation, are the most important factors for a decision to prosecute. Support to the victim from the social services also increases the probability of prosecution, but the impact is smaller and uncertain. It is concluded that this form of support should not be based on the requirement that the woman has made a police report, but rather be given to all victims of domestic violence.
Theory of Threading Edge and Screw Dislocations in GaN

The atomic structures, electrical properties, and line energies for threading screw and threading edge dislocations of wurtzite GaN are calculated within the local-density approximation. Both dislocations are electrically inactive with a band gap free from deep levels. These results are understood to arise from relaxed core structures which are similar to (1010) surfaces.
SJMR: Parallelizing spatial join with MapReduce on clusters

MapReduce is a widely used parallel programming model and computing platform. With MapReduce, it is very easy to develop scalable parallel programs to process data-intensive applications on clusters of commodity machines. However, it does not directly support heterogeneous related data sets processing, which is common in operations like spatial joins. This paper presents SJMR (Spatial Join with MapReduce), a novel parallel algorithm to relieve the problem. The strategies include strip-based plane sweeping algorithm, tile-based spatial partitioning function and duplication avoidance technology. We evalauted the performance of SJMR algorithm in various situations with the real world data sets. It demonstrates the applicability of computing-intensive spatial applications with MapReduce on small scale clusters.
Convergence of temperate and tropical stream fish assemblages

The hypothesis of convergence takes the deterministic view that community (or assemblage) structure can be predicted from the environment, and that the environment is expected to drive evolution in a predictable direction. Here we present results of a comparative study of freshwater fish assemblages from headwater streams in four continents (Europe, North America, Africa and South America), with the general objective of testing whether these assemblages display convergent structures under comparable environmental conditions (i.e. assemblage position in the stream longitudinal continuum). We tested this hypothesis by comparing species richness and trophic guilds of those stream fish assemblages represented in available data from multiple sites on each continent. Independent of phylogenetic and historical constraints, fish assemblage richness and trophic structure in the four continents converged along the stream continua to a substantial degree. For the four continents, assemblage richness increased, the proportion of invertivorous species decreased, and the proportion of omnivorous species increased from upstream to downstream, supporting theoretical predictions of the river continuum concept. However, the herbivore/detritivore and piscivore guilds were virtually absent from our small European and North American stream sites, unlike our African and South American stream sites. This divergence can be linked to differences in energy availability between temperate and tropical systems.
Care leavers’ involvement in research: An ethnographic case study on impact

Introduction Reporting data from a case study of a collaborative systematic review, this paper discusses the impact service user involvement might have on research, and how research might benefit from this. Methods This was a qualitative case study. The researcher analysed process data on the collaboration in the form of meeting transcripts and minutes, reflective interviews and the researchers’ own field diary. The review was also compared with two systematic reviews on a similar topic, using the AMSTAR checklist. Results The young people had influence at all stages of the review, but most importantly shifted its focus from healthcare to education, emphasising education as an important determinant of health. Conclusion Young people involved in this review influenced the researcher’s reviewing as well as the review, which shows that involving service users in research is important in order to reduce researcher bias in social care research.
Running head : HEALTHY INTERPRETATIONS WITH HEALTHY AGING 1 Healthy Interpretations with Healthy Aging

This study examined the moderating roles of threat-salience and physical health on the relationship between age and threat interpretations. During an online study, participants (N=1352, ages 18-91) rated the likelihood of neutral and negative explanations of ambiguous physical (older adult-relevant), social (younger adult-relevant) and general (age-neutral) scenarios. Results were consistent with the hypothesis; with increasing age, individuals interpreted the physical threat as relatively more negative and the social threat as relatively less negative. For healthy individuals (defined as individuals not on medication), a significant correlation was found between increasing age and making less negative general scenario interpretations. In contrast, for unhealthy adults (defined as individuals taking medication) there was a nonsignificant trend between increasing age and making more negative interpretations of the general scenario. Results are discussed in light of the importance of the relationship between interpretation biases and anxiety, as well as theories of optimized emotional processing with age. HEALTHY INTERPRETATIONS WITH HEALTHY AGING
Pricing and Trust

We experimentally examine the effects of flexible and fixed prices in markets for experience goods in which demand is driven by trust. With flexible prices, we observe low prices and high quality in competitive (oligopolistic) markets, and high prices coupled with low quality in non-competitive (monopolistic) markets. We then introduce a regulated intermediate price above the oligopoly price and below the monopoly price. In monopolies volume increases and so does quality, such that overall efficiency is raised by 50%. Somewhat surprisingly, the same pattern emerges in oligopolies. In fact, across all market forms transaction volume and traded quality are maximal in regulated oligopolies.
Synthetic Phonics and Learning to Read: A Cross‐language Perspective

Arguments about how to teach initial reading are once more in the news. Proponents of “synthetic phonics” argue that there is only one effective way to teach a child to read. In this anniversary issue, it is worth taking a step back from the polarisation of the “synthetic” versus “analytic” phonics debate, to consider the evidence base for reading acquisition across languages. Most children will eventually become competent, indeed skilled, readers of their languages, but in some languages this happens much faster than in others. There appear to be two key factors. One is the phonological complexity of the spoken language, and the other is the spelling consistency of the written language. A thorough understanding of cross‐language similarities and differences in the key developmental processes for literacy acquisition is required if teaching strategies are to be optimised in different languages.
Hybrid curation of gene–mutation relations combining automated extraction and crowdsourcing

Background: This article describes capture of biological information using a hybrid approach that combines natural language processing to extract biological entities and crowdsourcing with annotators recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk to judge correctness of candidate biological relations. These techniques were applied to extract gene– mutation relations from biomedical abstracts with the goal of supporting production scale capture of gene–mutation–disease findings as an open source resource for personalized medicine. Results: The hybrid system could be configured to provide good performance for gene–mutation extraction (precision ∼82%; recall ∼70% against an expert-generated gold standard) at a cost of $0.76 per abstract. This demonstrates that crowd labor platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk can be used to recruit quality annotators, even in an application requiring subject matter expertise; aggregated Turker judgments for gene–mutation relations exceeded 90% accuracy. Over half of the precision errors were due to mismatches against the gold standard hidden from annotator view (e.g. incorrect EntrezGene identifier or incorrect mutation position extracted), or incomplete task instructions (e.g. the need to exclude nonhuman mutations). Conclusions: The hybrid curation model provides a readily scalable cost-effective approach to curation, particularly if coupled with expert human review to filter precision errors. We plan to generalize the framework and make it available as open source software. Database URL: http://www.mitre. org/publications/technical-papers/hybrid-curation-of-gene-mutation-relations-combining-automated
Effects of Gene × Attachment Interaction on Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation and Aggressive Hostile Behavior Towards their Mothers during a Computer Game

Adolescence is a time of increased emotionality and major changes in emotion regulation often elicited in autonomy-relevant situations. Both genetic as well as social factors may lead to inter-individual differences in emotional processes in adolescence. We investigated whether both 5-HTTLPR and attachment security influence adolescents’ observed emotionality, emotional dysregulation, and their aggressive hostile autonomy while interacting with their mothers. Eighty-eight adolescents at age 12 were observed in interaction with their mothers during a standardized, emotion eliciting computer game task. They were genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR, a repeat polymorphism in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene. Concurrent attachment quality was assessed by the Late Childhood Attachment Interview (LCAI). Results revealed a significant gene × attachment effect showing that ss/sl carriers of 5-HTTLPR show increased emotional dysregulation and aggressive hostile autonomy towards their mothers. The results of the study suggest that secure attachment in adolescence moderates the genetically based higher tendency for emotional dysregulation and aggressive reactions to restrictions of autonomy during emotional social interactions with their mothers.