Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phylogenetic Position of a Copper Age Sheep (Ovis aries) Mitochondrial DNA

Background Sheep (Ovis aries) were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent region about 9,000-8,000 years ago. Currently, few mitochondrial (mt) DNA studies are available on archaeological sheep. In particular, no data on archaeological European sheep are available. Methodology/Principal Findings Here we describe the first portion of mtDNA sequence of a Copper Age European sheep. DNA was extracted from hair shafts which were part of the clothes of the so-called Tyrolean Iceman or Ötzi (5,350 - 5,100 years before present). Mitochondrial DNA (a total of 2,429 base pairs, encompassing a portion of the control region, tRNAPhe, a portion of the 12S rRNA gene, and the whole cytochrome B gene) was sequenced using a mixed sequencing procedure based on PCR amplification and 454 sequencing of pooled amplification products. We have compared the sequence with the corresponding sequence of 334 extant lineages. Conclusions/Significance A phylogenetic network based on a new cladistic notation for the mitochondrial diversity of domestic sheep shows that the Ötzi's sheep falls within haplogroup B, thus demonstrating that sheep belonging to this haplogroup were already present in the Alps more than 5,000 years ago. On the other hand, the lineage of the Ötzi's sheep is defined by two transitions (16147, and 16440) which, assembled together, define a motif that has not yet been identified in modern sheep populations.
Inward Foreign Direct Investment and U.S. Public Opinion on Immigration

I investigate how the direct investment of foreign firms in the United States affects public opinion on immigration. On one hand, when foreign firms invest in the United States, local residents may have job opportunities and a better understanding of foreign cultures following social and work-related interactions with foreign employees at multinationals. As a result, American workers may have a positive attitude toward immigration. On the other hand, when local residents see foreign investment as a foreign acquisition of American assets, or if they experience any unpleasant interactions with foreign nationals at multinationals, foreign investment may result in a negative impact on public perception on immigration. My empirical test of inward investment’s impact on public opinion demonstrates the aforementioned contrasting impacts: While more local employees working at foreign multinationals lead to positive sentiments on immigration, the existence of more local affiliates of foreign firms has a negative impact on public opinion of immigration.
Sharp Oracle Inequalities for Aggregation of Affine Estimators

We consider the problem of combining a (possibly uncountably infinite) set of affine estimators in non-parametric regression model with heteroscedastic Gaussian noise. Focusing on the exponentially weighted aggregate, we prove a PAC-Bayesian type inequality that leads to sharp oracle inequalities in discrete but also in continuous settings. The framework is general enough to cover the combinations of various procedures such as least square regression, kernel ridge regression, shrinking estimators and many other estimators used in the literature on statistical inverse problems. As a consequence, we show that the proposed aggregate provides an adaptive estimator in the exact minimax sense without neither discretizing the range of tuning parameters nor splitting the set of observations. We also illustrate numerically the good performance achieved by the exponentially weighted aggregate.
Accurate fitting of measured reflectances using a Shifted Gamma micro‐facet distribution

Material models are essential to the production of photo‐realistic images. Measured BRDFs provide accurate representation with complex visual appearance, but have larger storage cost. Analytical BRDFs such as Cook‐Torrance provide a compact representation but fail to represent the effects we observe with measured appearance. Accurately fitting an analytical BRDF to measured data remains a challenging problem. In this paper we introduce the SGD micro‐facet distribution for Cook‐Torrance BRDF. This distribution accurately models the behavior of most materials. As a consequence, we accurately represent all measured BRDFs using a single lobe. Our fitting procedure is stable and robust, and does not require manual tweaking of the parameters.
Long-tem Effects of Multiple Disturbances on Soil Properties and Regeneration in a Colorado Subalpine Forest

3 Introduction: 4 Background 5 Methods 9 Study Site: 9 Figure 1: 11 Field Measurements: 11 Laboratory Analysis: 12 Statistical Analysis 13 Results 14 Soil Properties 14 Table 1: 17 Figure 2: 18 Figure 3: 18 Figure 4: 19 Regeneration Characteristics 19 Ground Cover Properties 20 Table 2: 21 Figure 5: 22 Figure 6: 22 Figure 7: 23 Table 3: 23 Figure 8: 24 Discussion 24 Limitations 28 Conclusions 29 Acknowledgements 30 References 31
Maternal mental health in Amhara region, Ethiopia: a cross-sectional survey

Poor mental health, including suicidal thoughts, affects a substantial proportion of surveyed women who are up to 2 years postpartum in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Opportunities for integrating basic psychosocial mental health services into maternal and child health services should be explored. Poor mental health, including suicidal thoughts, affects a substantial proportion of surveyed women who are up to 2 years postpartum in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Opportunities for integrating basic psychosocial mental health services into maternal and child health services should be explored. ABSTRACT Background: Postpartum common mental disorders (CMD) such as depression and anxiety are increasingly recognized for their burden in low-resource countries such as Ethiopia. However, the magnitude of postpartum CMD in Ethiopia is not well-established. This short report describes the mental health status of women who had given birth in the last 24 months in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 1,319 women aged 15–49 years old who had a delivery in the previous 24 months from 30 randomly selected kebeles (smallest administrative unit in Ethiopia) across Amhara region. The survey included the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20) developed by the World Health Organization—a CMD screening instrument that includes 20 yes/no questions on depression, anxiety, and somatic symptoms experienced in the last 30 days. We used 2 cutoff scores to determine probable cases of mental disorder: (1) 4/5 (≤ 4 “yes” responses = non-case, ≥ 5 “yes” responses = case) based on a study that validated the SRQ-20 against a diagnostic tool in Butajira, Ethiopia, and (2) a more conservative and commonly used 7/8 cutoff. Results: Among the 1,294 women who completed the full survey including the SRQ-20, 32.8% had probable CMD using the 4/5 cutoff score versus 19.8% using the more conservative 7/8 cutoff. About 15% of the women responded affirmatively that they had had suicidal thoughts. Conclusion: Poor mental health was common among the surveyed women who had given birth in the past 24 months in Amhara region, Ethiopia. Integrating mental health care into maternal and child health services could potentially alleviate the burden of CMD among women in the extended postpartum period.
Human serum paraoxonases (PON1) Q and R selectively decrease lipid peroxides in human coronary and carotid atherosclerotic lesions: PON1 esterase and peroxidase-like activities.

BACKGROUND Human serum paraoxonase (PON1) exists in two polymorphic forms: one that differs in the amino acid at position 192 (glutamine and arginine, Q and R, respectively) and the second one that differs in the amino acid at position 55 (methionine and leucine, M and L, respectively). PON1 protects LDL from oxidation, and during LDL oxidation, PON1 is inactivated. METHODS AND RESULTS The present study compared PON1 isoforms Q and R for their effect on lipid peroxide content in human coronary and carotid lesions. After 24 hours of incubation with PON1Q or PON1R (10 arylesterase units/mL), lipid peroxides content in both coronary and carotid lesion homogenates (0.1 g/mL) was reduced up to 27% and 16%, respectively. The above incubation was associated with inactivation of PON1Q and PON1R by 15% and 45%, respectively. Lesion cholesteryl linoleate hydroperoxides and cholesteryl linoleate hydroxides were hydrolyzed by PON1 to yield linoleic acid hydroperoxides and linoleic acid hydroxides. Furthermore, lesion and pure linoleic acid hydroperoxides were reduced to yield linoleic acid hydroxides. These results thus indicate that PON1 demonstrates esterase-like and peroxidase-like activities. Recombinant PON1 mutants in which the PON1-free sulfhydryl group at cysteine-284 was replaced with either alanine or serine were no longer able to reduce lipid peroxide content in carotid lesions. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that PON1 may be antiatherogenic because it hydrolyzes lipid peroxides in human atherosclerotic lesions.
System T and the Product of Selection Functions

We show that the finite product of selection functions (for all finite types) is primitive recursively equivalent to Goedel's higher-type recursor (for all finite types). The correspondence is shown to hold for similar restricted fragments of both systems: The recursor for type level n+1 is primitive recursively equivalent to the finite product of selection functions of type level n. Whereas the recursor directly interprets induction, we show that other classical arithmetical principles such as bounded collection and finite choice are more naturally interpreted via the product of selection functions.
The CFTR M470V, Intron 8 Poly-T, and 8 TG-Repeats Detection in Chinese Males with Congenital Bilateral Absence of the Vas Deferens

Purpose. To evaluate the significance of molecular detection of cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) M470V, intron 8 poly-T, and intron 8 TG-repeats in congenital bilateral absence of the vas deferens (CBAVD). Methods. Eighty-nine male patients with CBAVD and 103 healthy males were included in this study. Polymerase chain reaction was performed to amplify the polymorphic regions using primers from conserved regions. M470V was genotyped using real-time PCR by cycling probe. The exon 9 DNA sequence was determined using an automated sequencer. TG-repeats and poly-T were identified by direct sequencing analysis. Results. The 5T allele distribution was 0.32, 0.66 for 7T, and 0.02 for 9T in CBAVD males, respectively. In contrast, the 5T allele distribution was 0.03, 0.96 for 7T, and 0.01 for 9T in healthy control. Study of the polymorphisms of the upstream of exon 9 revealed a higher frequency of 5T allele in the CBAVD males. All cases with TG13T5 haplotype and TG12T5 homozygous led to CBAVD. The CFTR TG12T5-V470 variant haplotype was associated with CBAVD. Conclusion. The 5T allele of intron 8 of CFTR has clinically significant association with CBAVD. TG13T5 and TG12T5 homozygously led to CBAVD, and TG12T5-V470 may also lead to CBAVD.
Comparing the pulses of categorical hot events in Twitter and Weibo

The fragility and interconnectivity of the planet argue compellingly for a greater understanding of how different communities make sense of their world. One of such critical demands relies on comparing the Chinese and the rest of the world (e.g., Americans), where communities' ideological and cultural backgrounds can be significantly different. While traditional studies aim to learn the similarities and differences between these communities via high-cost user studies, in this paper we propose a much more efficient method to compare different communities by utilizing social media. Specifically, Weibo and Twitter, the two largest microblogging systems, are employed to represent the target communities, i.e. China and the Western world (mainly United States), respectively. Meanwhile, through the analysis of the Wikipedia page-click log, we identify a set of categorical `hot events' for one month in 2012 and search those hot events in Weibo and Twitter corpora along with timestamps via information retrieval methods. We further quantitatively and qualitatively compare users' responses to those events in Twitter and Weibo in terms of three aspects: popularity, temporal dynamic, and information diffusion. The comparative results show that although the popularity ranking of those events are very similar, the patterns of temporal dynamics and information diffusion can be quite different.
Understanding Processing Overheads of Network Coding-Based Content Distribution in VANETs

Content distribution in vehicular networks, such as multimedia file sharing and software updates, poses a great challenge due to network dynamics and high-speed mobility. In recent years, network coding has been shown to efficiently support distribution of content in such dynamic environments, thereby considerably enhancing the performance. However, the related work in the literature has mostly focused on theoretic or algorithmic aspects of network coding so far. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis on the implementation issues of network coding in wireless networks. In particular, we study the impact of resource constraints (namely CPU, disk, memory, and bandwidth) on the performance of network coding in the content distribution application. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we develop an abstract model of a general network coding process and evaluate the validity of the model via several experiments on real systems. This model enables us to find the key resource constraints that influence the network coding strategy and thus to efficiently configure network coding parameters in wireless networks. Second, we propose schemes that considerably improve the performance of network coding under resource constrained environments. We implement our overhead model in the QualNet network simulator and evaluate these schemes in a large-scale vehicular network. Our results show that the proposed schemes can significantly improve the network coding performance by reducing the coding overhead.
The Mediating Role of Prospective Teachers’ Teaching Self-Efficacy between Self-Efficacy Sources and Attitude towards Teaching Profession

The purpose of this study was to investigate a predictive power of prospective teachers’ self-efficacy sources on their teaching self-efficacy and attitude towards the teaching profession. Design of the study was the correlational research. The study was conducted on 315 prospective teachers studying pedagogical formation education in a 2017-18 academic year. Instruments were “Prospective Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Sources Scale”, “Teaching Self-Efficacy Scale” and “Attitude Scale of Teaching Profession”. Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient and PATH analysis methods were used to analyze the data. Results indicated that emotional states, mastery experience, and verbal persuasion were significant predictors of prospective teachers’ teaching self-efficacy and attitudes towards teaching profession.
Nagata-Assouad dimension via Lipschitz extensions

In the first part of the paper we show how to relate several dimension theories (asymptotic dimension with Higson property, asymptotic dimension of Gromov, and capacity dimension of Buyalo \cite{Buyalo1}) to Nagata-Assouad dimension. This is done by applying two functors on the Lipschitz category of metric spaces: microscopic and macroscopic. In the second part we identify (among spaces of finite Nagata-Assouad dimension) spaces of Nagata-Assouad dimension at most $n$ as those for which the $n$-sphere $S^n$ is a Lipschitz extensor. Large scale and small scale analogs of that result are given.
Comparative Analysis of DES, AES, RSA Encryption Algorithms

As the increasing growth of the computing technology and network technology,it also increases data storage demands. Data Security has become a crucial issue in electronic communication. Secret writing has come up as a solution, and plays a vital role in data security system. It uses some algorithms to scramble data into unreadable text which might be only being decrypted by party those having the associated key. These algorithms consume a major amount of computing resources such as memory and battery power and computation time. This paper accomplishes comparative analysis of encryption standardsDES, AES and RSA considering various parameters such as computation time, memory usages. A cryptographic tool is used for performing experiments. Experiments results are given to analyses the effectiveness ofsymmetric andasymmetricalgorithms.
The Right Stuff: Preschoolers Generalize Reliability Across Communicative Domains When Informants Show Semantic (Not Episodic) Knowledge

ABSTRACT Although preschoolers have strong expectations about the pedagogical nature of pointing gestures (Csibra & Gergely, 2006), more recent work has shown that preschoolers prefer to use informants’ spoken language, not their pointing gestures, to make judgments about their reliability (Palmquist & Jaswal, 2015). Here, we explored children’s inferences about pointers using a standard selective trust paradigm. Specifically, we asked whether 4- and 5-year-olds generalize reliability across communicative domains (from pointing ability to speaking ability). We found that children preferred to make generalizations about pointers’ reliability when they had conveyed semantic, but not episodic, knowledge. Individual differences in theory of mind also predicted children’s willingness to make generalizations about pointers’ reliability. Both sets of results suggest that multiple factors (i.e., the type of knowledge an informant shares and individual differences in children’s cognitive development) affect whether preschoolers generalize others’ reliability across domains.
DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGE IN SENSITIVITY TO AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH CONGRUENCY AND ITS RELATION TO LANGUAGE IN INFANTS

In this study, we used eye-tracking to investigate selective visual attention paid to congruent and incongruent audiovisual speech of Japanese infants (6 to 12 months old) and adults. Infants’ receptive and expressive language abilities at 12 months were measured through a questionnaire completed by their caregivers. We found that 6-month-olds looked at the mouth longer in the audiovisual congruent condition than in the incongruent condition, whereas 12-month-olds did not show any significant differences in time spent in looking at the mouth. Furthermore, the time spent looking at the mouth among 6-month-olds, in both the audiovisual congruent and incongruent conditions, was positively correlated with receptive language abilities with 12 month olds. These findings suggest that sensitivity to congruent and incongruent audiovisual speech changes during the first year, and attention to the speaker’s mouth at 6 months are good predictors of later receptive language abilities.
Towards a developing construct in dance education – exploring the relation of emotional intelligence to teacher’s sense of efficacy and teaching experience among dance education student teachers in the United Kingdom

Abstract Theories of emotional intelligence (EI) have already been applied successfully in the field of education, and EI has been found to predict different aspects of teaching such as influencing teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs (TSEB). This study aims to explore potential associations between EI, TSEB, and length of teaching experience amongst dance education student teachers (DEST), enrolled on a dance science and education (DSE) Master programme in the United Kingdom (UK). A sequential mixed-methods design was applied, including both qualitative and quantitative methods to capture examples of emotional intelligent dance education students. Assessments through the trait emotional intelligence questionnaire (TEIQue) and the teacher sense of efficacy scale (TSES) were administered to a sample of eight DEST. The results suggest a positive association between trait emotional intelligence, its subscales and teachers self-efficacy, and between the TEIQue total score and the length of teaching experience. Qualitative data were collected via a multiple case study, evaluating four cases among the participants. Three main themes have been investigated: dance background, teaching experience and self-efficacy beliefs, exploring further the findings from the preliminary analysis. Specific dance education student teacher development programmes have been suggested to enhance dance teachers’ emotional intelligence.
The role of music-based parent-child play activities in supporting social engagement with children on the autism spectrum: A content analysis of parent interviews

ABSTRACT Play skills in children on the autism spectrum have been observed to be different to their typically developing peers ever since autism was first formally identified. While the importance of play in child development is well recognised, there is limited research exploring the developmental benefits of different modes of play. This study aimed to explore parents’ perspectives of the quality of their child’s social engagement in music-play compared to block-play. Nine mothers participated in five, weekly, 45-minute play sessions with their child (male child, n = 5), as part of a multiple case study design. Each play session consisted of two alternating protocols comprising music-play and block-play parent-child activities that were facilitated by a music therapist. Mothers participated in a structured interview at the end of each play session to explore their perceptions of the child’s social engagement. Results of a content analysis revealed several differences in mothers’ experience of their child’s social engagement during music-play compared to block-play. In favour of music-play, mothers perceived high levels of child enjoyment, mutual enjoyment, and described using music-play strategies in the home environment. Block-play was perceived as a solitary play activity that did not readily support social engagement. The mothers’ perception that their child wanted to interact with them more in the music-play compared to the block-play may have provided motivation to continue to use these activities in the home.
Risk stratification in chronic heart failure.

Despite advances in medical and surgical management, the prognosis of chronic heart failure remains poor. Few patients with chronic heart failure can be considered to have a good prognosis, but different trials have indicated a 6 month mortality between 5% and 60% depending on the severity of heart failure; identifying patients at truly low risk is difficult. A host of factors have been identified that predict outcome, at least in univariate analyses. Cohn wrote an article entitled ‘Poverty Amidst a Wealth of Variables’ some years ago, describing the difficulties in choosing which prognostic variables to use for clinical purposes in heart failure. This article reviews in a systematic fashion those peer-reviewed papers that have assessed the utility of prognostic variables in heart failure. This summary of existing knowledge should determine those prognostic factors that have proved most reliable so far, indicate which of the many new potential factors are most promising for further research and suggests ways in which the interpretation and reporting of such information might be improved.