Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Black hole growth and stellar assembly at high-z

Context. Observations indicate a strong link between star formation and black hole (BH) growth, but some questions remain unanswered: whether both activities are coeval or whether one precedes the other, what their characteristic timescales are, and what kinds of physical processes are responsible for this interplay. Aims. We examine stellar and BH masses ($M_{*}$ and M BH ) in $z \sim2$ active systems at the peak of their AGN or star formation activity to investigate how they are linked and whether AGN radiative or else radio power provides a feedback mechanism that regulates the stellar growth in these systems. Methods. We analyze the infrared (IR) spectral energy distributions of radio, sub-millimeter and mid-IR selected AGNs at $z\sim1{-}3$ and constrain their stellar and AGN luminosities using AGN and host-galaxy templates. Results. We find evidence of increasing stellar light, thereby decreasing the AGN mid-IR power going from mid-IR selected AGNs, to radio galaxies, and to sub-millimeter AGNs. This trend can be explained by either decreasing Eddington ratios or increasing offsets from the local $M_{\rm BH}{-}M_{*}$ relation. All systems are characterized by high star formation rates regardless of their different AGN powers, thus neither AGN radiative power nor AGN-driven radio activity seems to influence the star formation rate in the selected AGNs. We discuss two possible evolutionary scenarios that might link these three AGN classes.
Gender, Teaching Evaluations, and Professional Success in Political Science

ABSTRACT Evaluations of teaching effectiveness rely heavily on student evaluations of teaching. However, an accumulating body of evidence shows that these evaluations are subject to gender bias. Theories of leadership and role incongruity suggest that this bias should be especially prominent in large courses. This article examines publicly available data from two large political science departments and finds that female instructors receive substantively and significantly lower ratings than male instructors in large courses. The author discusses the implications of apparent gender bias in teaching evaluations for the professional success of female faculty. Findings of gender bias in evaluations in other fields also hold in political science and are particularly problematic in the evaluation of large courses.
Determinants of Left Atrial Appendage Volume in Stroke Patients without Chronic Atrial Fibrillation

Background Left atrial appendage (LAA) volume has been shown to be increased in patients with acute cryptogenic stroke. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a well-recognized risk factor but it is not the only one associated with LAA enlargement. The aim of the study was to clarify the multifactorial etiology of LAA enlargement in cardiogenic stroke/TIA patients without AF. Methods Altogether 149 patients with suspected cardioembolic stroke/TIA (47 females; mean age 61 years) underwent cardiac CT. Diagnosed AF on admittance was an exclusion criteria but 24-hour Holter ambulatory ECG revealed paroxysmal AF (PAF) in 20 patients. Body surface area adjusted LAA volume was evaluated. Eighteen different variables were registered including general characteristics, definite and potential causal risk factors for ischemic stroke/TIA, clinical echoparameters and CT based cardiac volumetric and adipose tissue measurements. A stepwise linear regression analysis was performed to achieve a model adjusted for the number of predictors of LAA volume increase. Results In linear regression analysis, the best model accounted for 30% of the variability in LAA volume, including PAF (19%) and enlarged left atrial volume (6%), enlarged left ventricle end-systolic diameter (3%) and decreased pericardial adipose tissue (2%). No multi-colinearity between variables was observed. In addition to PAF, no other definitive or potential causal risk factors could account for the LAA volume in these patients. Conclusions LAA volume increase seems to be poorly associated with currently known stroke/TIA risk factors, except for AF. Targeting more comprehensive ECG monitoring for stroke patients with increased LAA volume should be considered.
The Galaxy Luminosity Function at z ≤ 0.05: Dependence on Morphology

We investigate the dependence of the local galaxy luminosity function on morphology using 5404 galaxies from the recently enlarged Second Southern Sky Redshift Survey (SSRS2). Over the range -22 ≤ MB ≤ -14 (H0 = 100 km s-1 Mpc-1), the luminosity function of early-type galaxies is well fitted by a Schechter function with parameters M*=-19.37−0.11+0.10, α=-1.00−0.09+0.09, and ϕ* = 4.4 ± 0.8 × 10-3 Mpc-3. The spiral luminosity function is very similar and is well fitted by the parameters M*=-19.43−0.08+0.08, α=-1.11−0.06+0.07, and ϕ* = 8.0 ± 1.4 × 10-3 Mpc-3 over the same range in absolute magnitude. The flat faint end of the early-type luminosity function is consistent with earlier measurements from the CfA Redshift Survey (Marzke et al.) but is significantly steeper than the slope measured in the Stromlo-APM survey (Loveday et al.). Combined with the increased normalization of the overall LF measured from intermediate-redshift surveys, the flat faint-end slope of the E/S0 LF produces no-evolution models that reproduce the deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) counts of early-type galaxies remarkably well. However, the observed normalization of the SSRS2 LF is consistent with the low value measured in other local redshift surveys. The cause of this low-redshift anomaly remains unknown. The luminosity function of irregular and peculiar galaxies in the SSRS2 is very steep: M*=-19.78−0.50+0.40, α=-1.81−0.24+0.24, and ϕ* = 0.2 ± 0.08 × 10-3 Mpc-3. The steep slope at the faint end is consistent with the LFs measured for Sm-Im galaxies in the CfA survey, UV-selected galaxies (Treyer et al.), star-forming field galaxies (Bromley et al.), and the bluest galaxies in the SSRS2 (Marzke & da Costa). As shown by Driver, Windhorst, & Griffiths, the steep LF reduces the observed excess of faint irregulars over no-evolution predictions but cannot explain it entirely.
Psychometric Properties of the Dutch Depression Stigma Scale (DSS) and Associations with Personal and Perceived Stigma in a Depressed and Community Sample

Background Research on depression stigma is needed to gain more insight into the underlying construct and to reduce the level of stigma in the community. However, few validated measurements of depression stigma are available in the Netherlands. Therefore, this study first sought to examine the psychometric properties of the Dutch translation of the Depression Stigma Scale (DSS). Second, we examined which demographic (gender, age, education, partner status) and other variables (anxiety and knowledge of depression) are associated with personal and perceived stigma within these samples. Methods The study population consisted of an adult convenience sample (n = 253) (study 1) and a community adult sample with elevated depressive symptoms (n = 264) (study 2). Factor structure, internal consistency, and validity were assessed. The associations between stigma, demographic variables and anxiety level were examined with regression analyses. Results Confirmatory factor analysis supported the validity and internal consistency of the DSS personal stigma scale. Internal consistency was sufficient (Cronbach’s alpha = .70 (study 1) and . 77 (study 2)). The results regarding the perceived stigma scale revealed no clear factor structure. Regression analyses showed that personal stigma was higher in younger people, those with no experience with depression, and those with lower education. Conclusions This study established the validity and internal consistency of the DSS personal scale in the Netherlands, in a community sample and in people with elevated depressive symptoms. However, additional research is needed to examine the factor structure of the DSS perceived scale and its use in other samples.
Sustainable Tourism, Environmental Protection and Natural Resource Management: Paradise on Earth?*

Tourism is one of the largest and fastest growing industries in the world. It is an increasingly important source of income, employment and wealth in many countries. International tourism now accounts for a larger share of foreign exchange receipts and export earnings than any other industry in the world. But, while tourism provides considerable economic benefits for many countries, regions and communities, its rapid expansion has also had detrimental environmental and socio-cultural impacts. Natural resource depletion and environmental degradation associated with tourism, for example, are often serious problems in tourism-rich regions. The paper argues that the promotion of sustainable tourism development is essential for maximizing its socio-economic benefits and minimizing its environmental impact.
Fifth-generation digital immunoassay for prostate-specific antigen by single molecule array technology.

BACKGROUND Measurement of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in prostate cancer patients following radical prostatectomy (RP) has been hindered by the limit of quantification of available assays. Because radical prostatectomy removes the tissue responsible for PSA production, postsurgical PSA is typically undetectable with current assay methods. Evidence suggests, however, that more sensitive determination of PSA status following RP could improve assessment of patient prognosis and response to treatment and better target secondary therapy for those who may benefit most. We developed an investigational digital immunoassay with a limit of quantification 2 logs lower than current ultrasensitive third-generation PSA assays. METHODS We developed reagents for a bead-based ELISA for use with high-density arrays of femtoliter-volume wells. Anti-PSA capture beads with immunocomplexes and associated enzyme labels were singulated within the wells of the arrays and interrogated for the presence of enzymatic product. We characterized analytical performance, compared its accuracy with a commercially available test, and analyzed longitudinal serum samples from a pilot study of 33 RP patients. RESULTS The assay exhibited a functional sensitivity (20% interassay CV) <0.05 pg/mL, total imprecision <10% from 1 to 50 pg/mL, and excellent agreement with the comparator method. All RP samples were well within the assay measurement capability. PSA concentrations following surgery were found to be predictive of prostate cancer recurrence risk over 5 years. CONCLUSIONS The robust 2-log improvement in limit of quantification relative to current ultrasensitive assays and the validated analytical performance of the assay allow for accurate assessment of PSA status after RP.
THE CHANDRA SOURCE CATALOG

The Chandra Source Catalog (CSC) is a general purpose virtual X-ray astrophysics facility that provides access to a carefully selected set of generally useful quantities for individual X-ray sources, and is designed to satisfy the needs of a broad-based group of scientists, including those who may be less familiar with astronomical data analysis in the X-ray regime. The first release of the CSC includes information about 94,676 distinct X-ray sources detected in a subset of public Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer imaging observations from roughly the first eight years of the Chandra mission. This release of the catalog includes point and compact sources with observed spatial extents ≲30″. The catalog (1) provides access to the best estimates of the X-ray source properties for detected sources, with good scientific fidelity, and directly supports scientific analysis using the individual source data; (2) facilitates analysis of a wide range of statistical properties for classes of X-ray sources; and (3) provides efficient access to calibrated observational data and ancillary data products for individual X-ray sources, so that users can perform detailed further analysis using existing tools. The catalog includes real X-ray sources detected with flux estimates that are at least 3 times their estimated 1σ uncertainties in at least one energy band, while maintaining the number of spurious sources at a level of ≲1 false source per field for a 100 ks observation. For each detected source, the CSC provides commonly tabulated quantities, including source position, extent, multi-band fluxes, hardness ratios, and variability statistics, derived from the observations in which the source is detected. In addition to these traditional catalog elements, for each X-ray source the CSC includes an extensive set of file-based data products that can be manipulated interactively, including source images, event lists, light curves, and spectra from each observation in which a source is detected.
Shotgun microbial profiling of fossil remains

Millions to billions of DNA sequences can now be generated from ancient skeletal remains thanks to the massive throughput of next‐generation sequencing platforms. Except in cases of exceptional endogenous DNA preservation, most of the sequences isolated from fossil material do not originate from the specimen of interest, but instead reflect environmental organisms that colonized the specimen after death. Here, we characterize the microbial diversity recovered from seven c. 200‐ to 13 000‐year‐old horse bones collected from northern Siberia. We use a robust, taxonomy‐based assignment approach to identify the microorganisms present in ancient DNA extracts and quantify their relative abundance. Our results suggest that molecular preservation niches exist within ancient samples that can potentially be used to characterize the environments from which the remains are recovered. In addition, microbial community profiling of the seven specimens revealed site‐specific environmental signatures. These microbial communities appear to comprise mainly organisms that colonized the fossils recently. Our approach significantly extends the amount of useful data that can be recovered from ancient specimens using a shotgun sequencing approach. In future, it may be possible to correlate, for example, the accumulation of postmortem DNA damage with the presence and/or abundance of particular microbes.
Factors influencing public perception of drinking water quality.

A better understanding of the processes that influence public perception can contribute to improvements in water management, consumer services, acceptability of water reuse and risk communication, among other areas. This paper discusses some of the main variables involved in public perception of drinking water quality. Research on this topic suggests that perceptions of water quality result from a complex interaction of diverse factors. In many circumstances, the estimation of water quality is mostly influenced by organoleptic properties, in particular flavour. In addition, a variety of other factors also have an influence on perceptions of quality. These include risk perception, attitudes towards water chemicals, contextual cues provided by the supply system, familiarity with specific water properties, trust in suppliers, past problems attributed to water quality and information provided by the mass media and interpersonal sources. The role and relevance of these factors are discussed in detail.
Impact of Combined Clenbuterol and Metoprolol Therapy on Reverse Remodelling during Mechanical Unloading

Background Clenbuterol (Cl), a β2 agonist, is associated with enhanced myocardial recovery during left ventricular assist device (LVAD) support, and exerts beneficial remodelling effects during mechanical unloading (MU) in rodent heart failure (HF). However, the specific effects of combined Cl+β1 blockade during MU are unknown. Methods and Results We studied the chronic effects (4 weeks) of β2-adrenoceptor (AR) stimulation via Cl (2 mg/kg/day) alone, and in combination with β1-AR blockade using metoprolol ((Met), 250 mg/kg/day), on whole heart/cell structure, function and excitation-contraction (EC) coupling in failing (induced by left coronary artery (LCA) ligation), and unloaded (induced by heterotopic abdominal heart transplantation (HATx)) failing rat hearts. Combined Cl+Met therapy displayed favourable effects in HF: Met enhanced Cl's improvement in ejection fraction (EF) whilst preventing Cl-induced hypertrophy and tachycardia. During MU combined therapy was less beneficial than either mono-therapy. Met, not Cl, prevented MU-induced myocardial atrophy, with increased atrophy occurring during combined therapy. MU-induced recovery of Ca2+ transient amplitude, speed of Ca2+ release and sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ content was enhanced equally by Cl or Met mono-therapy, but these benefits, together with Cl's enhancement of sarcomeric contraction speed, and MU-induced recovery of Ca2+ spark frequency, disappeared during combined therapy. Conclusions Combined Cl+Met therapy shows superior functional effects to mono-therapy in rodent HF, but appears inferior to either mono-therapy in enhancing MU-induced recovery of EC coupling. These results suggest that combined β2-AR simulation +β1-AR blockade therapy is likely to be a safe and beneficial therapeutic HF strategy, but is not as effective as mono-therapy in enhancing myocardial recovery during LVAD support.
“Leaky” Rationality: How Research on Behavioral Decision Making Challenges Normative Standards of Rationality

For more than 30 years, decision-making research has documented that people often violate various principles of rationality, some of which are so fundamental that theorists of rationality rarely bother to state them. We take these characteristics of decision making as a given but argue that it is problematic to conclude that they typically represent departures from rationality. The very psychological processes that lead to “irrational” decisions (e.g., framing, mental accounting) continue to exert their influence when one experiences the results of the decisions. That is, psychological processes that affect decisions may be said also to “leak” into one's experience. The implication is that formal principles of rationality do not provide a good enough normative standard against which to assess decision making. Instead, what is needed is a substantive theory of rationality—one that takes subjective experience seriously, considers both direct and indirect consequences of particular decisions, considers how particular decisions fit into life as a whole, and considers the effects of decisions on others. Formal principles may play a role as approximations of the substantive theory that can be used by theorists and decision makers in cases in which the formal principles can capture most of the relevant considerations and leakage into experience is negligible.
irror D escent in S addle-P oint P roblems : G oing the E xtra ( G radient )

Owing to their connection with generative adversarial networks (GANs), saddlepoint problems have recently attracted considerable interest in machine learning and beyond. By necessity, most theoretical guarantees revolve around convexconcave (or even linear) problems; however, making theoretical inroads towards efficient GAN training depends crucially on moving beyond this classic framework. To make piecemeal progress along these lines, we analyze the behavior of mirror descent (MD) in a class of non-monotone problems whose solutions coincide with those of a naturally associated variational inequality – a property which we call coherence. We first show that ordinary, “vanilla” MD converges under a strict version of this condition, but not otherwise; in particular, it may fail to converge even in bilinear models with a unique solution. We then show that this deficiency is mitigated by optimism: by taking an “extra-gradient” step, optimistic mirror descent (OMD) converges in all coherent problems. Our analysis generalizes and extends the results of Daskalakis et al. [2018] for optimistic gradient descent (OGD) in bilinear problems, and makes concrete headway for provable convergence beyond convex-concave games. We also provide stochastic analogues of these results, and we validate our analysis by numerical experiments in a wide array of GAN models (including Gaussian mixture models, and the CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets). Figure 1: Mirror descent (MD) in the non-monotone saddle-point problem f (x1, x2) = (x1 − 1/2)(x2 − 1/2) + 1 3 exp(−(x1 − 1/4)2 − (x2 − 3/4)2). Left: vanilla MD spirals outwards; right: optimistic MD converges.
Molecular Analysis of Bacterial Microbiota on Brazilian Currency Note Surfaces

Currency notes have been implicated as a vehicle for transmitting community-acquired bacterial infections. However, the overall diversity of the bacterial population residing on banknotes is still unknown in Brazil. In this study, we aimed to investigate the overall bacterial population from 150 different Brazilian Rial (R$) notes in circulation using a culture-independent Illumina massively parallel sequencing approach of the 16S rRNA genes. Samples were randomly collected from three different street markets or “feiras” in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. Taxonomical composition revealed the abundance of Proteobacteria phyla, followed by Firmicutes and Streptophyta, with a total of 1193 bacterial families and 3310 bacterial genera. Most of these bacterial genera are of human, animal, and environmental origins. Also, our analysis revealed the presence of some potential pathogenic bacterial genera including Salmonella, Staphylococcus, and Klebsiella. The results demonstrate that there is a tremendous diversity of bacterial contamination on currency notes, including organisms known to be opportunistic pathogens. One of the factors that may contribute to the richness of bacterial diversity in currency notes is personal hygiene. Thus, our results underscore the need to increase public awareness of the importance of personal hygiene of money handlers who also handle food.
Domain-Specific Batch Normalization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

We propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework based on domain-specific batch normalization in deep neural networks. We aim to adapt to both domains by specializing batch normalization layers in convolutional neural networks while allowing them to share all other model parameters, which is realized by a two-stage algorithm. In the first stage, we estimate pseudo-labels for the examples in the target domain using an external unsupervised domain adaptation algorithm---for example, MSTN or CPUA---integrating the proposed domain-specific batch normalization. The second stage learns the final models using a multi-task classification loss for the source and target domains. Note that the two domains have separate batch normalization layers in both stages. Our framework can be easily incorporated into the domain adaptation techniques based on deep neural networks with batch normalization layers. We also present that our approach can be extended to the problem with multiple source domains. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets and achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy in the standard setting and the multi-source domain adaption scenario.