Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficiency of Gains and Carcass Characteristics of Swine of Two Degrees of Fatness Slaughtered at Three Weights

Summary Two hundred barrows and gilts were slaughtered at 100, 113 and 127 kg live weight. The sample was comprised of 36 litters, of which six litters within each breed of sire (Duroc, Hampshire and Yorkshire) were classified as fat litters (2.36 cm) and six litters classified as lean litters (2.16 cm) on the basis of litter mean backfat probes taken at 68 kg live weight. Growth traits were evaluated from 9 weeks of age until the designated slaughter weight. Carcasses from the first replication (18 litters) were evaluated for percentage separable lean, fat and bone and those from the second replication (18 litters) were evaluated for percentage closely trimmed lean cuts. The fat and lean groups had similar carcass length, longissimus muscle area and percentage closely trimmed lean cuts. The fat group had significantly thicker backfat, lower percentage separable lean and a higher percentage separable fat than the lean group. The three weight groups tended to have similar average daily gains and feed efficiencies for the total test period. As slaughter weight increased from 100 to 127 kg there was an increase in carcass backfat thickness (P<.05) and longissimus muscle area (P<.01). Percentage separable lean, fat and bone of carcass were similar at each of the three slaughter weights. The 127 kg group tended to have lower percentages closely trimmed lean cuts
Simple Regret Optimization in Online Planning for Markov Decision Processes

We consider online planning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In online planning, the agent focuses on its current state only, deliberates about the set of possible policies from that state onwards and, when interrupted, uses the outcome of that exploratory deliberation to choose what action to perform next. Formally, the performance of algorithms for online planning is assessed in terms of simple regret, the agent's expected performance loss when the chosen action, rather than an optimal one, is followed. To date, state-of-the-art algorithms for online planning in general MDPs are either best effort, or guarantee only polynomial-rate reduction of simple regret over time. Here we introduce a new Monte-Carlo tree search algorithm, BRUE, that guarantees exponential- rate and smooth reduction of simple regret. At a high level, BRUE is based on a simple yet non-standard state-space sampling scheme, MCTS2e, in which different parts of each sample are dedicated to different exploratory objectives. We further extend BRUE with a variant of "learning by forgetting. " The resulting parametrized algorithm, BRUE(α), exhibits even more attractive formal guarantees than BRUE. Our empirical evaluation shows that both BRUE and its generalization, BRUE(α), are also very effective in practice and compare favorably to the state-of-the-art.
Activation of nuclear factor-kappaB in the rat brain after transient focal ischemia.

Nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-kappaB) becomes activated under inflammatory conditions and triggers induction of gene expression. Here, activation of NF-kappaB was studied after transient middle cerebral artery occlusion in the rat. Expression of p65 and p50, protein subunits of NF-kappaB, was examined by Western blotting, and immunohistochemistry for p65 was carried out. Double-labelling with specific markers for astroglia and microglia was used for cell type identification. Neurons located within and surrounding the ischemic core were identified during the first 24 h post-ischemia by using an antibody against 72-kDa heat shock protein. NF-kappaB binding activity was evaluated at different times post-ischemia with electrophoretic mobility gel shift assays. The results showed constitutive expression of p65 and p50, and NF-kappaB binding activity. Basal p65 was seen in certain neurons and resting astrocytes. Constitutive NF-kappaB binding activity was attributable to one main protein complex possibly formed in neurons and astrocytes, although two minor complexes were also detected. At 1 day post-ischemia selective induction of p65 was seen in neurons located in a penumbra-like area. At this time, however, no disturbances of basal NF-kappaB binding activity were found. Western blotting showed delayed induction of p65 several days after ischemia, whereas no changes were detected for p50. From 4 days post-ischemia, a substantial increase in the amount of p65 was detected due to induction in reactive astrocytes and microglia/macrophages. This was correlated with a robust enhancement of NF-kappaB binding activity with formation of three major specific complexes binding DNA. It is proposed that the highly inducible NF-kappaB complexes resulted from induction of p65 and activation of NF-kappaB in post-ischemic reactive glia.
Testing the Fit of a Model of Faculty Departure Intentions for Women Faculty in STEM and Non-STEM Disciplines

Much warranted attention over the past few decades has been devoted to the problem of retaining women faculty in academe, particularly in areas where they poorly represented such as in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This study uses descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling techniques to test an existing model of general faculty departure intentions (Zhou & Volkwein, 2004) on three samples of faculty (a) women faculty, (b) women faculty in STEM, and (c) women faculty in non-STEM fields. Findings revealed that although several significant pathways to intention to leave for women faculty in STEM and in non-STEM fields were identified, the tested model is not an overall good fit of the data for any of the three samples, implying the need for new models of faculty departure intentions specifically for women in STEM and non-STEM disciplines. Implications for practice, theory, and future research are discussed.
Value of Statistical Life and Cause of Accident: A Choice Experiment

The purpose of this study is to compare the value of statistical life (VSL) estimates for traffic, drowning, and fire accidents. Using a choice experiment in a mail survey of 5,000 Swedish respondents we estimated the willingness to pay for risk reductions in the three accidents. In the experiment respondents were asked a series of questions, whether they would choose risk reducing investments where type of accident, cost of the investment, the risk reduction acquired, and the baseline risk varied between questions. The VSLs for fire and drowning accidents were found to be about 1/3 lower than that for traffic accidents. Although respondents worry more about traffic accidents, this alone cannot explain the difference in VSL estimates. The difference between fire and drowning accidents was not found to be statistically significant.
Confronting Cold Dark Matter Cosmologies with Strong Clustering of Lyman Break Galaxies at z ~ 3

We perform a detailed analysis of the statistical significance of a concentration of Lyman break galaxies at z~3 recently discovered by Steidel et al., using a series of N-body simulations with N=2563 particles in a (100 h-1 Mpc)3 comoving box. While the observed number density of Lyman break galaxies at z~3 implies that they correspond to systems with dark matter halos of ≲1012 M☉, the resulting clustering of such objects on average is not strong enough to be reconciled with the concentration if it is fairly common; we predict one similar concentration approximately per 6-10 fields in three representative cold dark matter models. Considering the current observational uncertainty of the frequency of such clustering at z~3, it would be premature to rule out the models, but the future spectroscopic surveys in a dozen fields could definitely challenge all the existing cosmological models a posteriori fitted to the z=0 universe.
Transaction Taxes and Traders with Heterogeneous Investment Horizons in an Agent-Based Financial Market Model

Abstract This agent-based financial market model is a generalization of the model of Westerhoff (The Use of Agent-Based Financial Market Models to Test the Effectiveness of Regulatory Policies) by traders who are allowed to have different investment horizons as introduced by Demary (Who Does a Currency Transaction Tax Harm More: Short-Term Speculators or Long-Term Investors? ). Our research goals are, first, to study what consequences the introduction of heterogeneous investment horizons has for agent-based financial market models, and second, how effective transaction taxes are in stabilizing financial markets. Numerical simulations reveal that under sufficiently small tax rates traders abstain from short-term trading in favour of longer investment horizons. This change in behavior leads to less volatility and less mispricings. When the tax rate exceeds a certain threshold, however, mispricings increase as also found in Westerhoff (Heterogeneous Traders and the Tobin Tax and The Use of Agent-Based Financial Market Models to Test the Effectiveness of Regulatory Policies). This emergent property is due to the fact that taxation reduces short-term fluctuations and causes longer lasting trends in the exchange rate. As a result, the longer term fundamentalist trading rule becomes unpopular in favor of the longer term trend-chasing rule.
Hand gesture recognition with leap motion and kinect devices

The recent introduction of novel acquisition devices like the Leap Motion and the Kinect allows to obtain a very informative description of the hand pose that can be exploited for accurate gesture recognition. This paper proposes a novel hand gesture recognition scheme explicitly targeted to Leap Motion data. An ad-hoc feature set based on the positions and orientation of the fingertips is computed and fed into a multi-class SVM classifier in order to recognize the performed gestures. A set of features is also extracted from the depth computed from the Kinect and combined with the Leap Motion ones in order to improve the recognition performance. Experimental results present a comparison between the accuracy that can be obtained from the two devices on a subset of the American Manual Alphabet and show how, by combining the two features sets, it is possible to achieve a very high accuracy in real-time.
Detecting domestic objects with ensembles of view-tuned support vector machine cascades trained on Web images

This thesis develops a system, based on Web images, for the detection of domestic objects in images of indoor home environments. Images from ten different domestic object categories (apple, bottle, bowl, cup, handbag, laptop, light switch, potted plant, shoe and toaster) are downloaded and annotated from the Web. This results in complex training sets for each category, which are divided unsupervised into sub-sets according to the extracted principal views. The principal views are also employed to learn class- and view-specific, data-tuned hierarchical tessellations of the 2D image plane. The 2D tessellations are used along with a class-independent data-tuned hierarchical tessellation of a high-dimensional descriptor space to realize a view-tuned approximate partial matching kernel. A view-tuned kernel implements a fine-to-coarse matching of Bag of Words-based object parts, while paying attention to the structure of the object and the relative positions of its parts. Both the tessellation of the image plane and the high-dimensional descriptor space are learned with a hierarchical Growing Neural Gas, the lbTreeGNG. View-tuned kernels are used efficiently with Support Vector Machines in a sliding window approach to train view-tuned experts for the different sub-sets. Finally, the outputs of various experts are fused to determine a final detection result. The proposed system shows a state-of-the-art recognition performance on the image database created, and is able to detect unseen object instances in unknown environments.
Transmission of pandemic A/H1N1 2009 influenza on passenger aircraft: retrospective cohort study

Objectives To assess the risk of transmission of pandemic A/H1N1 2009 influenza (pandemic A/H1N1) from an infected high school group to other passengers on an airline flight and the effectiveness of screening and follow-up of exposed passengers. Design Retrospective cohort investigation using a questionnaire administered to passengers and laboratory investigation of those with symptoms. Setting Auckland, New Zealand, with national and international follow-up of passengers. Participants Passengers seated in the rear section of a Boeing 747-400 long haul flight that arrived on 25 April 2009, including a group of 24 students and teachers and 97 (out of 102) other passengers in the same section of the plane who agreed to be interviewed. Main outcome measures Incidence of in-flight infection with pandemic A/H1N1; sensitivity and specificity of influenza symptoms for confirmed infection; and completeness and timeliness of contact tracing. Results Nine members of the school group were laboratory confirmed cases of pandemic A/H1N1 infection and had symptoms during the flight. Two other passengers developed confirmed pandemic A/H1N1 infection, 12 and 48 hours after the flight. They reported no other potential sources of infection. Their seating was within two rows of infected passengers, implying a risk of infection of about 3.5% for the 57 passengers in those rows. All but one of the confirmed pandemic A/H1N1 infected travellers reported cough, but more complex definitions of influenza cases had relatively low sensitivity. Rigorous follow-up by public health workers located 93% of passengers, but only 52% were contacted within 72 hours of arrival. Conclusions A low but measurable risk of transmission of pandemic A/H1N1 exists during modern commercial air travel. This risk is concentrated close to infected passengers with symptoms. Follow-up and screening of exposed passengers is slow and difficult once they have left the airport.
Effect of Directed Attention on Cerebral Asymmetries in Stuttering Adults

9 stutterers and 9 nonstutterers were administered a dichotic digits test under conditions of free recall and directed attention. Analysis indicated right-ear preference for both groups and no differences between the free recall and directed listening conditions. Results are discussed in relation to previous studies in which dichotic digit-stimuli were presented to stutterers.
Learning to overcome the binding problem

The work presented in this thesis considered the binding problem; how segregated visual information becomes unified and our perception coherent. This thesis is divided into two parts, each focused on proposed binding solutions. Part 1 examined the binding processes that parse information at early stages of visual processing, perhaps prior to the engagement of attention. These grouping processes were examined in visual extinction patients, as an assay of pre-attentive processing. I demonstrated that item similarity can exacerbate as well as alleviate extinction, depending on the display conditions. Exacerbation of spatial deficits was shown when the array parameters encourage stimuli to be processed as distinct elements (Chapter 2). Where displays promote grouping of items both spatial (Chapter 2) and temporal (Chapter 3) impairments in extinction may be overcome. Part 2 considered the effects of learned associations on feature binding. I focused specifically on the processing of objects with an associated, so called ‘diagnostic’, colour. I demonstrated that for such stimuli, binding of these features is automatic (Chapter 4) and modulated performance even to ones determinant. Subsequently I examined how this binding interacts with attention in a series of visual search experiments. I found that, under conditions requiring colour-shape feature conjunction, appropriately coloured targets ‘popped-out’ whereas incorrectly coloured depictions did not (Chapter 5). Converging neuropsychological evidence from visual extinction suggested that binding of learned features might not engage serial attentive processes (Chapter 6). Finally, an fMRI study was carried out to examine brain areas sensitive to the congruency of colour-shape associations; binding consistency affects the earliest stage of processing (Chapter 7). I provide evidence for efficient conjunction coding of associated features highlighting learning as one way the brain may overcome the binding problem.
BSIM—SPICE Models Enable FinFET and UTB IC Designs

Two turn-key surface potential-based compact models are developed to simulate multigate transistors for integrated circuit (IC) designs. The BSIM-CMG (common-multigate) model is developed to simulate double-, triple-, and all-around-gate FinFETs and it is selected as the world's first industry-standard compact model for the FinFET. The BSIM-IMG (independent-multigate) model is developed for independent double-gate, ultrathin body (UTB) transistors, capturing the dynamic threshold voltage adjustment with back gate bias. Starting from long-channel devices, the basic models are first obtained using a Poisson-carrier transport approach. The basic models agree with the results of numerical two-dimensional device simulators. The real-device effects then augment the basic models. All the important real-device effects, such as short-channel effects (SCEs), quantum mechanical confinement effects, mobility degradation, and parasitics are included in the models. BSIM-CMG and BSIM-IMG have been validated with hardware silicon-based data from multiple technologies. The developed models also meet the stringent quality assurance tests expected of production level models.
Essays on Fertility, Gender Preference and Family Planning in Iran

There is a large body of economic literature that documents the existence of son preference and its negative impact on girlsr accumulation of human capital. Some studies have found that gender preference is exacerbated when fertility declines. Many studies have also looked at the impact of availability of family planning on fertility. My work contributes to this literature by linking these together and measuring the impact of fertility control policies on gender preference at birth. Also, it presents the first quantitative study of gender preference at birth in Iran.In the first essay, I provide a short history of fertility policies and population transition in Iran. In the second essay, I look at the government provided family planning program and its impact on the fertility decline in rural Iran. I estimate the association between a womanrs age of exposure to a clinic and her total number of children. I find that exposure to a health clinic at her most fertile ages (20-35) is associated with a 20% reduction in total number of children born to a woman, a significant drop (equivalent to one child). In the third essay, I examine the extent of gender preference at birth in Iran and its impact on fertility decisions, using gender composition of first two children as a random experiment. I find that parents with a first born daughter will, on average, have more children; daughters are followed more quickly with another birth; and among all gender compositions, mothers with two daughters are most likely to continue child bearing.I exploit the quasi-experimental expansion of rural health clinics providing family planning services in rural Iran. Using a difference in difference method, (with village fixed effects), I estimate the impact of access to family planning on gender biased fertility decisions. Availability of family planning is associated with a 12-17% reduction in probability of subsequent birth for mothers with two children. However, there is no difference in this probability based on gender composition of children. I find that access to family planning does not exacerbate son preference expressed through fertility in rural Iran.
Carrion fly-derived DNA metabarcoding is an effective tool for mammal surveys: evidence from a known tropical mammal community

Metabarcoding of vertebrate DNA derived from carrion flies has been proposed as a promising tool for biodiversity monitoring. To evaluate its efficacy, we conducted metabarcoding surveys of carrion flies on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, which has a well-known mammal community, and compared our results against diurnal transect counts and camera-trapping. We collected 1084 flies in 29 sampling days, which were pooled into 102 DNA extractions. We then conducted metabarcoding with mammal-specific (16S) and vertebrate-specific (12S) primers targeting mtDNA, and sequenced these amplicons on Illumina MiSeq. For taxonomic assignment, we compared BLAST with the new program PROTAX, and we found PROTAX significantly improved species identifications. We detected 20 mammal, four bird, and one lizard species from carrion fly metabarcoding, all but one of which were previously known from BCI. Fly metabarcoding detected more mammal species than concurrent transect counts (29 sampling days, 13 species) and concurrent camera-trapping (84 sampling days, 17 species), and detected 67% of the number of mammal species documented by 8 years of transect counts and camera-trapping combined, although fly metabarcoding missed several abundant species. This study demonstrates that carrion fly metabarcoding is a powerful tool for mammal biodiversity surveys, and has the potential to detect a broader range of species than more commonly used methods.
Vectors for Inhaled Gene Therapy in Lung Cancer. Application for Nano Oncology and Safety of Bio Nanotechnology

Novel aerosol therapeutic modalities have been investigated for lung cancer. Inhaled gene therapy has presented safety and effectiveness previously in cystic fibrosis. However, safety concerns have been raised regarding the safety of non-viral vectors for inhaled gene therapy in lung cancer, and therefore small steps have been made towards this multifunctional treatment modality. During the last decade, numerous new nanocomplexes have been created and investigated as a safe gene delivery nano-vehicle. These formulations are multifunctional; they can be used as either local therapy or carrier for an effective inhaled gene therapy for lung cancer. Herein, we present current and future perspectives of nanocomplexes for inhaled gene therapy treatment in lung cancer.
The Clock-Proxy Auction: A Practical Combinatorial Auction Design

We propose the clock-proxy auction as a practical means for auctioning many related items. A clock auction phase is followed by a last-and-final proxy round. The approach combines the simple and transparent price discovery of the clock auction with the efficiency of the proxy auction. Linear pricing is maintained as long as possible, but then is abandoned in the proxy round to improve efficiency and enhance seller revenues. The approach has many advantages over the simultaneous ascending auction. In particular, the clock-proxy auction has no exposure problem, eliminates incentives for demand reduction, and prevents most collusive bidding strategies.