Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Primordial black holes in non-Gaussian regimes

Primordial black holes (PBHs) can form in the early Universe from the collapse of rare, large density fluctuations. They have never been observed, but this fact is enough to constrain the amplitude of fluctuations on very small scales which cannot be otherwise probed. Because PBHs form only in very rare large fluctuations, the number of PBHs formed is extremely sensitive to changes in the shape of the tail of the fluctuation distribution - which depends on the amount of non-Gaussianity present. We first study how local non-Gaussianity of arbitrary size up to fifth order affects the abundance and constraints from PBHs, finding that they depend strongly on even small amounts of non-Gaussianity and the upper bound on the allowed amplitude of the power spectrum can vary by several orders of magnitude. The sign of the non-linearity parameters (f_{NL}, g_{NL}, etc) are particularly important. We also study the abundance and constraints from PBHs in the curvaton scenario, in which case the complete non-linear probability distribution is known, and find that truncating to any given order (i.e. to order f_{NL} or g_{NL}, etc) does not give accurate results.
Pinning Complex Networks by a Single Controller

In this paper, without assuming symmetry, irreducibility, or linearity of the couplings, we prove that a single controller can pin a coupled complex network to a homogenous solution. Sufficient conditions are presented to guarantee the convergence of the pinning process locally and globally. An effective approach to adapt the coupling strength is proposed. Several numerical simulations are given to verify our theoretical analysis.
Reconceptualizing Physical Sex as a Continuum: Are There Sex Differences in Video Game Preference?

With video games representing a rapidly growing media platform, recent events have highlighted conflicts surrounding gender and games. Previous research has established sex-typed cognitive advantages and game genre preference. Potential explanations of how these align have been inconclusive. Concurrently, research on sex development has suggested that binary categorizations of sex (physical sex; male or female) don’t capture the full variation of individuals and are thus inferior measures of sex. Two studies (one replication study) were conducted which use two continuous markers of physical sex (hormonal 2D:4D finger ratio, and continuous skill-based performance) to predict game preference and playing. Using both statistical effect- and equivalence tests, we present a series of p-curves and several possible interpretations based on meta-analytical cutoffs. In general, we find that binary markers of sex significantly predict game preference, while continuous markers significantly do not. These findings challenge the notion of binary sex differences and suggest a more complex relationship between physical sex and video game preferences. Implications for future research on video game playing and sex are discussed.
Three‐dimensional multifluid simulation of the plasma interaction at Titan

[1] Using a three-dimensional multifluid simulation, we demonstrate the importance of ion gyroradius and heavy ion effects when characterizing Titan's plasma interaction with the Kronian magnetosphere. Ion gyroradius and heavy ion effects drastically change the mass loading and magnetic field draping at Titan. We find that the large ion gyroradius of picked up ionospheric species results in an extension of the ionosphere and therefore the mass loading and magnetic pileup region on the anti-Saturn side of Titan. Also, the additional thermal pressure provided by heavy ion cyclotron motion near Titan causes boundary layer currents to form at higher altitudes. The Saturn-facing side of Titan's ionosphere experiences both magnetic shielding from the incident plasma at lower altitudes and additional heating due to the acceleration of heavy ions in the ionosphere. Finally, we find that well-confined heavy ion beams form on the anti-Saturn side of Titan's magnetosphere and extend more than three Titan radii from Titan's main ion tail. The location of this ion beam is dependent on the Kronian field orientation, and we find that during the TA, TB, and T3 encounters, the bulk of the ion beam was located below Titan's equatorial plane. We also find that for a single set of incident conditions, good agreement with Cassini magnetometer data from the TA, TB, and T3 encounters is obtained with the ion loss rate similar to that measured by Cassini during the TA encounter.
Common variants underlying cognitive ability: further evidence for association between the SNAP‐25 gene and cognition using a family‐based study in two independent Dutch cohorts

The synaptosomal associated protein of 25 kDa (SNAP‐25) gene, located on chromosome 20 p12‐12p11.2 encodes a presynaptic terminal protein. SNAP‐25 is differentially expressed in the brain, and primarily present in the neocortex, hippocampus, anterior thalamic nuclei, substantia nigra and cerebellar granular cells. Recently, a family‐based genetic association was reported between variation in intelligence quotient (IQ) phenotypes and two intronic variants on the SNAP‐25 gene. The present study is a follow‐up association study in two Dutch cohorts of 371 children (mean age 12.4 years) and 391 adults (mean age 36.2 years). It examines the complete genomic region of the SNAP‐25 gene to narrow down the location of causative genetic variant underlying the association. Two new variants in intron 1 (rs363043 and rs353016), close to the two previous reported variants (rs363039 and rs363050) showed association with variation in IQ phenotypes across both cohorts. All four single nucleotide polymorphisms were located in intron 1, within a region of about 13.8 kbp, and are known to affect transcription factor‐binding sites. Contrary to what is expected in monogenic traits, subtle changes are postulated to influence the phenotypic outcome of complex (common) traits. As a result, functional polymorphisms in (non)coding regulatory sequences may affect spatial and temporal regulation of gene expression underlying normal cognitive variation.
Comparison of Skeleton and Non-Skeleton Shape Descriptors for 3D Video

This paper presents a performance evaluation of shape similarity metrics for 3D video sequences of people with unknown temporal correspondence. Previous evaluation focuses on non-skeletal similarity metrics. Since the human motion is essentially an articulated motion, it is also interesting to investigate skeletal-based similarity metrics. In this paper, we extend previous evaluation of non-skeletal similarity metrics to skeletal-based similarity metrics. A quantitative evaluation based on the Receiver-Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve for the descriptors using a ground-truth dataset for synthetic motion sequences is presented. Reeb Graph, Multi-Dimensional Scaling and Shape Histograms are compared with and without a temporal filter. Reeb Graph and Shape Histograms achieve comparable ROC performance, both outperform MDS in the task of finding similar poses of the same person in 3D video. Finally, temporal Reeb Graph and Shape Histograms are applied to a public database of 3D video of people to identify optimal transitions and synthesise 3D character animation. Results demonstrate the accurate matching of surface shape and motion.
OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT USING FUZZY AND ARTIFICIAL BEE COLONY ALGORITHM FOR MAXIMUM LOSS REDUCTION

This paper presents a new methodology using fuzzy and Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABCA) for the placement of capacitors on the primary feeders of the radial distribution systems to reduce the power losses and to improve the voltage profile. A two-stage methodology is used for the optimal capacitor placement problem. In the first stage, fuzzy approach is used to find the optimal capacitor locations and in the second stage, Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm is used to find the sizes of the capacitors. The sizes of the capacitors corresponding to maximum loss reduction are determined. The proposed method is tested on 15-bus, 34-bus and 69-bus test systems and the results are presented.
The HicAB cassette, a putative novel, RNA-targeting toxin-antitoxin system in archaea and bacteria

Toxin-antitoxin systems (TAS) are abundant, diverse, horizontally mobile gene modules that encode powerful resistance mechanisms in prokaryotes. We use the comparative-genomic approach to predict a new TAS that consists of a two-gene cassette encoding uncharacterized HicA and HicB proteins. Numerous bacterial and archaeal genomes encode from one to eight HicAB modules which appear to be highly prone to horizontal gene transfer. The HicB protein (COG1598/COG4226) has a partially degraded RNAse H fold, whereas HicA (COG1724) contains a double-stranded RNA-binding domain. The stable combination of these two domains suggests a link to RNA metabolism, possibly, via an RNA interference-type mechanism. In most HicB proteins, the RNAse H-like domain is fused to a DNA-binding domain, either of the ribbon-helix-helix or of the helix-turn-helix class; in other TAS, proteins containing these DNA-binding domains function as antitoxins. Thus, the HicAB module is predicted to be a novel TAS whose mechanism involves RNA-binding and, possibly, cleavage.
Love of God, others, and self and their association with satisfaction with life and mental health for Christians

ABSTRACT This study explored whether the Christian themes of love of God, love of others, and love of self were associated with improved well-being. An online questionnaire was completed by 323 Christians. A structural equation model was developed to explain the relationships between church attendance, love of God, love of others, love of self, presence of meaning, satisfaction with life, depression, anxiety, and physical health. Key findings were that church attendance was beneficial only when mediated by love of God, and that love of God and others improved satisfaction with life only when mediated by meaning in life.
Out of wedlock: migrant-police partnerships in East Kalimantan

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva. nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.
Unconstrained On-line Handwriting Recognition with Recurrent Neural Networks

In online handwriting recognition the trajectory of the pen is recorded during writing. Although the trajectory provides a compact and complete representation of the written output, it is hard to transcribe directly, because each letter is spread over many pen locations. Most recognition systems therefore employ sophisticated preprocessing techniques to put the inputs into a more localised form. However these techniques require considerable human effort, and are specific to particular languages and alphabets. This paper describes a system capable of directly transcribing raw online handwriting data. The system consists of an advanced recurrent neural network with an output layer designed for sequence labelling, combined with a probabilistic language model. In experiments on an unconstrained online database, we record excellent results using either raw or preprocessed data, well outperforming a state-of-the-art HMM based system in both cases.
A far UV study of interstellar gas towards HD 34078: High excitation H2 and small scale structure

To investigate the presence of small scale structure in the spatial distribution of H2 molecules we have undertaken repeated FUSE UV observations of the runaway O9.5V star, HD 34078. In this paper we present five spectra obtained between January 2000 and October 2002. These observations reveal an unexpectedly large amount of highly excited H2. Column densi- ties for H2 levels from (v = 0, J = 0) up to (v = 0, J = 11) and for several v = 1a ndv = 2 levels are determined. These results are interpreted in the frame of a model involving essentially two components: i) a foreground cloud (unaffected by HD 34078) responsible for the H2 (J = 0, 1), CI, CH, CH + and CO absorptions; ii) a dense layer of gas (n � 10 4 cm −3 ) close to the O star and strongly illuminated by its UV flux which accounts for the presence of highly excited H2. Our model successfully reproduces the H2 excitation, the CI fine-structure level populations as well as the CH, CH + and CO column densities. We also examine the time variability of H2 absorption lines tracing each of these two components. From the stability of the J = 0, 1 and 2 damped H2 profiles we infer a 3σ upper limit on column density variations ∆N(H2)/N(H2) of 5% over scales ranging from 5 to 50 AU. This result clearly rules out any pronounced ubiquitous small scale density structure of the kind apparently seen in HI. The lines from highly excited gas are also quite stable (equivalent to ∆N/N ≤ 30%) indicating i) that the ambient gas through which HD 34078 is moving is relatively uniform and ii) that the gas flow along the shocked layer is not subject to marked instabilities.
Binocular Neurons in V1 of Awake Monkeys Are Selective for Absolute, Not Relative, Disparity

Most neurophysiological accounts of disparity selectivity in neurons of the primary visual cortex (V1) imply that they are selective for absolute retinal disparities. By contrast, a number of psychophysical observations indicate that relative disparities play a more important role in depth perception. During recordings from disparity selective neurons in area V1 of awake behaving monkeys, we used a disparity feedback loop (Rashbass and Westheimer, 1961) to add controlled amounts of absolute disparity to a display containing both absolute and relative disparities. This manipulation changed the absolute disparity of all the visible features in the display but left unchanged the relative disparities signalled by these features. The addition of absolute disparities produced clear changes in the neural responses to unchanged external stimuli, which were well predicted by the measured change in absolute disparity: in 45/53 cases, the neuron maintained a consistent firing pattern with respect to absolute disparity so that the manipulation created no significant change in the absolute disparity preferred by the neuron. No neuron in V1 maintained a consistent relationship with relative disparity. We conclude that the relative disparity signals used in primate depth perception are constructed outside area V1.
CERTAIN SUBCLASSES OF BI-UNIVALENT FUNCTIONS SATISFYING SUBORDINATE CONDITIONS

In this paper, we introduce and investigate each of the following subclasses: SΣ(λ,γ;ϕ), HS Σ(α), RΣ(η,γ;ϕ) and BΣ(μ;ϕ) (0 λ 1; γ ∈ C� {0}; α ∈ C ;0 η 0, and ϕ(D) is symmetric with respect to the real axis. We obtain coefficient bounds involving the Taylor-Maclaurin coefficients |a2| and |a3| of the function f when f is in these classes. The various results, which are presented in this paper, would generalize and improve those in related works of several earlier authors.
Brain-Inspired Deep Networks for Image Aesthetics Assessment

Image aesthetics assessment has been challenging due to its subjective nature. Inspired by the scientific advances in the human visual perception and neuroaesthetics, we design Brain-Inspired Deep Networks (BDN) for this task. BDN first learns attributes through the parallel supervised pathways, on a variety of selected feature dimensions. A high-level synthesis network is trained to associate and transform those attributes into the overall aesthetics rating. We then extend BDN to predicting the distribution of human ratings, since aesthetics ratings are often subjective. Another highlight is our first-of-its-kind study of label-preserving transformations in the context of aesthetics assessment, which leads to an effective data augmentation approach. Experimental results on the AVA dataset show that our biological inspired and task-specific BDN model gains significantly performance improvement, compared to other state-of-the-art models with the same or higher parameter capacity.
NOBUHIRO KIYOTAKI ALEXANDER MICHAELIDES KALIN NIKOLOV Winners and Losers in Housing Markets

This paper is a quantitatively oriented theoretical study into the interaction between housing prices, aggregate production, and household behavior over a lifetime. We develop a life-cycle model of a production economy in which land and capital are used to build residential and commercial real estates. We find that in an economy where the share of land in the value of real estates is large, housing prices react more to an exogenous change in expected productivity or the world interest rate, causing a large redistribution between net buyers and net sellers of houses. Changing financing constraints, however, has limited effects on housing prices.
Caffeine Induces Dopamine and Glutamate Release in the Shell of the Nucleus Accumbens

An increase in the extracellular concentration of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is believed to be one of the main mechanisms involved in the rewarding and motor-activating properties of psychostimulants such as amphetamines and cocaine. Using in vivo microdialysis in freely moving rats, we demonstrate that systemic administration of behaviorally relevant doses of caffeine can preferentially increase extracellular levels of dopamine and glutamate in the shell of the NAc. These effects could be reproduced by the administration of a selective adenosine A1 receptor antagonist but not by a selective adenosine A2A receptor antagonist. This suggests that caffeine, because of its ability to block adenosine A1 receptors, shares neurochemical properties with other psychostimulants, which could contribute to the widespread consumption of caffeine-containing beverages.
The Mathematics of GPS

World featuring discussions on recent advances in GPS technology and its applications as well as on the fundamentals of GPS positioning. This month we look at some of the mathematics involved in determining a position using GPS pseudorange measurements. We also examine some of the ways of gauging the accuracy of GPS positions. This column is coordinated by Richard Langley and Alfred Kleusberg of the Department of Surveying Engineering at the University of New Brunswick. We very much welcome your comments and suggestions of topics for future columns.
Connections on non-abelian Gerbes and their Holonomy

We introduce an axiomatic framework for the parallel transport of connections on gerbes. It incorporates parallel transport along curves and along surfaces, and is formulated in terms of gluing axioms and smoothness conditions. The smoothness conditions are imposed with respect to a strict Lie 2-group, which plays the role of a band, or structure 2-group. Upon choosing certain examples of Lie 2-groups, our axiomatic framework reproduces in a systematical way several known concepts of gerbes with connection: non-abelian differential cocycles, Breen-Messing gerbes, abelian and non-abelian bundle gerbes. These relationships convey a well-defined notion of surface holonomy from our axiomatic framework to each of these concrete models. Till now, holonomy was only known for abelian gerbes; our approach reproduces that known concept and extends it to non-abelian gerbes. Several new features of surface holonomy are exposed under its extension to non-abelian gerbes; for example, it carries an action of the mapping class group of the surface.
The Economic Value of Controlling for Large Losses in Portfolio Selection

Research on asset pricing has shown that investor preferences include asymmetry and tail heaviness which affects the composition of optimal portfolios. This article investigates the out-of-sample economic value of introducing the risk of very large losses in portfolio selection. We combine mean–variance analysis with conditional Value-at-Risk using the subadditivity property of conditional Value-at-Risk, and we introduce a two stage method that preserves diversification while controlling for large losses. We find that strategies that account both for variance and the probability of large losses outperform efficient mean–variance portfolios, during and after the global financial crisis.
Group Identity and Social Preferences

We present a laboratory experiment that measures the effects of induced group identity on social preferences. We find that when participants are matched with an ingroup member, they show a 47 percent increase in charity concerns and a 93 percent decrease in envy. Likewise, participants are 19 percent more likely to reward an ingroup match for good behavior, but 13 percent less likely to punish an ingroup match for misbehavior. Furthermore, participants are significantly more likely to choose social-welfare-maximizing actions when matched with an ingroup member. All results are consistent with the hypothesis that participants are more altruistic toward an ingroup match. (JEL C91, D03, Z13)
Assessing environmental literacy of university students: A case study of Shahid Beheshti University in Iran

ABSTRACT As a reflective activity at niche scale in transition management for system-wide changes in universities for sustainable societies, this study aimed to evaluate student environmental literacy (EL) and assess the effects of sociodemographic variables on the level of EL among students at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. A total of 1,068 students took the EL test. The test had four parts: knowledge, attitude, sensitivity, and concern. The findings indicated that students had a positive attitude and a high degree of concern and showed sensitivity to the environment, but they had only low-to-moderate levels of knowledge. The sociodemographic variables of gender, age, and environmental experience had a significant effect on EL and mass media served as the main source of environmental information. Finally, recommendations are made regarding the cultivation of the results into effective content (what) and ways of teaching and learning (how) EL at niche level of universities.
On Hessian Measures for Non-Commuting Vector Fields

Previous results on Hessian measures by Trudinger and Wang are extended to the subelliptic case. Specifically we prove the weak continuity of the 2-Hessian operator, with respect to local L1 convergence, for a system of m vector fields of step 2 and derive gradient estimates for the corresponding k-convex functions, k=1,2.m, for arbitrary step.
Age and web access: the next generation

When today's young adults become 'older adults' will they exhibit difficulties with technology that appear to characterize the current older generation? This paper is intended to begin a discussion of technology experience as related to aging. The goal is to challenge some existing characterizations of older Web users and consider the implications for the future. Are technology difficulties an inescapable fact of aging? Or are there factors that will serve to equip future generations of older adults with skills that will erase or lessen these difficulties?