Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testing the Cognitive and Cultural Niche Theories of Human Evolution

The cognitive niche and the cultural niche are two competing theories of human evolution. One point over which they disagree is the importance of gene-culture interactions. Here, I use three models to evaluate this disagreement: (i) an asocial baseline model; (ii) a model of the cognitive niche, which includes a form of social learning that prevents gene-culture coevolution; and (iii) a model of the cultural niche, which allows gene-culture coevolution. Intelligence can evolve in all three models, and social transmission increases the range of conditions under which it can do so. However, only the model of the cultural niche (i) produces periods of evolutionary stasis, (ii) produces a positive relationship between population size and the rate of cultural and genetic evolution, and (iii) results in behaviors that are difficult to discover dominating the population. I review the available evidence for such patterns in human evolution and conclude that the cultural niche provides a more comprehensive explanation for human evolution than does the cognitive niche.
The role of social support in the relationship between mental health and posttraumatic stress disorder amongst orthopaedic patients.

BACKGROUND Some life-event experiences such as injuries in car accidents, gun shots and the like, can be life changing and traumatic. OBJECTIVES The article investigated the relationship between mental health and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms after orthopaedic trauma, and attempted to understand whether social support moderates the relationship between mental health and PTSD. METHOD A cross-sectional research model was used. Two hundred participants were selected using simple randomisation within a hospital complex in Gauteng, South Africa. The sample consisted of 110 men and 90 women (x̄=37.8 years, s.d.=12.9 years). Data were collected using the Revised Civilian Mississippi Scale for PTSD, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), and the General Health Questionnaire version 28. RESULTS The findings of the study indicated that there is a statistically significant relationship between mental health and PTSD after orthopaedic trauma, and a positive correlation between poor mental health and PTSD (r=0.52, n=200, p<0.05). However, perceived social support did not moderate mental health or PTSD, indicating that perceived social support did not significantly influence mental health or PTSD, (MSPSS B=0.07, p=0.66). Those with high scores on social support had a lower regression coefficient (B=0.19) for mental health and PTSD than those who reported low social support (B=0.26). CONCLUSION There is a significant relationship between mental health and PTSD of orthopaedic patients, and social support did not moderate the relationship between mental health and PTSD.
The Emergence of L2 Phonological Contrast in Perception: The Case of Korean Sibilant Fricatives.

The perception of non-native speech sounds is heavily influenced by the acoustic cues that are relevant for differentiating members of a listener’s native (L1) phonological contrasts. Many studies of both (naı̈ve) non-native and (not naı̈ve) second language (L2) speech perception implicitly assume continuity in a listener’s habits of perceptual attention to acoustic cues both before and after L2 instruction begins. In this dissertation we argue that while the ability to attend to familiar acoustic cues may not change as a listener begins to learn an L2, whether and how the acoustic cues will be attended to is the result of an interaction between L1-influenced bottom-up habits of perceptual attention and top-down information about the L2. This top-down information about the L2 is totally unavailable to a non-native listener but cannot be avoided by an L2 learner, as it is typically introduced at the earliest stages of L2 instruction. In this dissertation we look specifically at the emergence of the Korean /sh/-/s*/ perceptual contrast in L1 Mandarin and Japanese learners of Korean. Our results show that while naı̈ve L1 Mandarin listeners (but not L1 Japanese listeners) are sensitive to differences in aspiration when perceiving Korean /sh/ and /s*/, L1 Mandarin learners of L2 Korean fail to demonstrate such sensitivity and perform as poorly as L1 Japanese listeners. Even after one year of intensive Korean instruction for four hours per day, L1 Mandarin listeners show very little improvement, if any at all. We reconcile these differences between non-native
Autobiographical Experience and Vocabulary Production in Spontaneous Speech

In our earlier article, we proposed that recent episodic experiences in patients with semantic dementia support the production of nongeneralisable, autobiographically constrained, “semantic-like” facts (Graham, Lambon Ralph, & Hodges, 1997). We argued that this type of “semantic-like” knowledge was distinguishable from true semantic information because our two patients with semantic dementia showed no facilitatory effect of recent autobiographical experiences on their knowledge of golf and bowls; information which was presumably learnt prior to the onset of their disease. In this paper, we discuss the implications of these results for current views relating to the nature and organisation of long-term memory.
A jitter model for OFDM systems

Multicarrier systems represent the most common modulation format for data transmission. In particular OFDM, employing orthogonal sub-carriers, has been shown to be one of the most efficient system from a spectral point of view. We examined the effects of timing jitter in an OFDM receiver when the receiver oscillator sampling time is affected by random errors. A new compact matrix formulation to study this problem is presented. The timing jitter is considered as the effect of a convolution product between the samples of the received signal and two time-variant impulses. These impulses are modeled as Gaussian random variables having non zero, time-invariant, mean. The effects on the signal's constellations and the performance are also presented.
Toxic fibrillar oligomers of amyloid-β have cross-β structure

Although amyloid fibers are found in neurodegenerative diseases, evidence points to soluble oligomers of amyloid-forming proteins as the cytotoxic species. Here, we establish that our preparation of toxic amyloid-β1–42 (Abeta42) fibrillar oligomers (TABFOs) shares with mature amyloid fibrils the cross-β structure, in which adjacent β-sheets adhere by interpenetration of protein side chains. We study the structure and properties of TABFOs by powder X-ray diffraction, EM, circular dichroism, FTIR spectroscopy, chromatography, conformational antibodies, and celluar toxicity. In TABFOs, Abeta42 molecules stack into short protofilaments consisting of pairs of helical β-sheets that wrap around each other to form a superhelix. Wrapping results in a hole along the superhelix axis, providing insight into how Abeta may form pathogenic amyloid pores. Our model is consistent with numerous properties of Abeta42 fibrillar oligomers, including heterogenous size, ability to seed new populations of fibrillar oligomers, and fiber-like morphology.
Thompson Sampling for Combinatorial Bandits and its Application to Online Feature Selection

In this work, we address the combinatorial optimization problem in the stochastic bandit setting with bandit feedback. We propose to use the seminal Thompson Sampling algorithm under an assumption on rewards expectations. More specifically, we tackle the online feature selection problem where results show that Thompson Sampling performs well. Additionnally, we discuss the challenges associated with online feature selection and highlight relevant future work directions.
Rationale behind the virtual sensors and their applications

Every physical sensor is pre-defined to act on purpose. On the other hand, a virtual sensor is destined to act on application needs, perhaps can perform more even in case of a single sensor device. The basic objective of this paper is to explore the conceptual form of virtual sensor with proper explanation. This paper substantiates the theory of the virtual sensor with implementation, algorithms and use cases. The paper presents a taxonomy of virtual sensors depending on their capabilities and deployment layer. The paper also presents some case studies along with experimental results of the virtual sensors in eHealth and environment monitoring domains.
Multipolar Spindle Pole Coalescence Is a Major Source of Kinetochore Mis-Attachment and Chromosome Mis-Segregation in Cancer Cells

Many cancer cells display a CIN (Chromosome Instability) phenotype, by which they exhibit high rates of chromosome loss or gain at each cell cycle. Over the years, a number of different mechanisms, including mitotic spindle multipolarity, cytokinesis failure, and merotelic kinetochore orientation, have been proposed as causes of CIN. However, a comprehensive theory of how CIN is perpetuated is still lacking. We used CIN colorectal cancer cells as a model system to investigate the possible cellular mechanism(s) underlying CIN. We found that CIN cells frequently assembled multipolar spindles in early mitosis. However, multipolar anaphase cells were very rare, and live-cell experiments showed that almost all CIN cells divided in a bipolar fashion. Moreover, fixed-cell analysis showed high frequencies of merotelically attached lagging chromosomes in bipolar anaphase CIN cells, and higher frequencies of merotelic attachments in multipolar vs. bipolar prometaphases. Finally, we found that multipolar CIN prometaphases typically possessed γ-tubulin at all spindle poles, and that a significant fraction of bipolar metaphase/early anaphase CIN cells possessed more than one centrosome at a single spindle pole. Taken together, our data suggest a model by which merotelic kinetochore attachments can easily be established in multipolar prometaphases. Most of these multipolar prometaphase cells would then bi-polarize before anaphase onset, and the residual merotelic attachments would produce chromosome mis-segregation due to anaphase lagging chromosomes. We propose this spindle pole coalescence mechanism as a major contributor to chromosome instability in cancer cells.
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Cécile FAUVELOT, Francesca BERTOZZI, Federica COSTANTINI, Laura AIROLDI, Marco 1 ABBIATI 2 3 Lower genetic diversity in the limpet Patella caerulea on urban coastal structures compared to 4 natural rocky habitats 5 6 7 1 Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerca per le Scienze Ambientali and Dipartimento di Biologia 8 Evoluzionistica Sperimentale, University of Bologna, Via S. Alberto 163, I – 48100 Ravenna, Italy 9 10 2 Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) – UR128, Centre de Biologie et d'Ecologie 11 Tropicale et Méditerranéenne, Université de Perpignan, 52 Av. Paul Alduy, F 66860 Perpignan 12 cedex, France. 13 14 Corresponding author: 15 Dr. Cécile Fauvelot 16 IRD – UR128 17 Centre de Biologie et d'Ecologie Tropicale et Méditerranéenne 18 Université de Perpignan 19 52 Av. Paul Alduy 20 F 66860 Perpignan cedex, France 21 Tel : +33 4 68 66 20 55 22 Fax: +33 4 68 50 36 86 23 E-mail: cecile.fauvelot@univ-perp.fr 24 25
Radiation from early black holes – I. Effects on the neutral intergalactic medium

In the pre-reionization Universe, the regions of the intergalactic medium (IGM) which are far from luminous sources are the last to undergo reionization. Until then, they should be scarcely affected by stellar radiation; instead, the X-ray emission from an early black hole (BH) population can have much larger influence. We investigate the effects of such emission, looking at a number of BH model populations (differing for the cosmological density evolution of BHs, the BH properties, and the spectral energy distribution of the BH emission). We find that BH radiation can easily heat the IGM to 10(3)-10(4) K, while achieving partial ionization. The most interesting consequence of this heating is that BHs are expected to induce a 21-cm signal (delta T(b) similar to 20-30mK at z less than or similar to 12) which should be observable with forthcoming experiments (e. g. LOFAR). We also find that at z less than or similar to 10 BH emission strongly increases the critical mass separating star-forming and non-star-forming haloes.
Norms of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders in Chinese Urban Children

Objective: To develop the norms of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders(SCARED )in Chinese urban children. Methods:A total of 2019 subjects( 1012 males and 1007 females) from 14 cities of China with the mean age 11.29±2.34 completed the scale. Results: The test-retest coefficients ranged from 0.57～0.61,and the Cronbach α coefficients were 0.43～0.89. Significant correlations were found among the total scores, the anxiety index of SCARED and CBCL and PH. The scores of children with anxiety disorders were higher than that of normal subjects. Conclusion: SCARED was found to have aceptable psychometrics properties, and was applicable to assess anxiety syndrome of Chinese children.
Implementation design and analysis of coded and un-coded multi- user IDMA system

Wireless communication system is desired to be bandwidth and power efficient, allow for low complexity transceivers, should be flexible with respect to data rate and provide mitigation against fading. Unlike previous schemes like CDMA and OFDM, a very recent scheme is interleave- division-multiple-access (IDMA) that claims to fulfill all the above requirements. In this paper a multi-user coded and un-coded IDMA communication system is analyzed. Turbo encoder is use as a coding scheme. Estimation is incorporated in the system for improvement performance of channel gains and multi-path delays.
SINGLE-MACHINE MULTIPLE-RECIPE PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE

This paper studies a multiple-recipe predictive maintenance problem with M/G/1 queueing effects. The server degrades according to a discrete-time Markov chain and we assume that the controller knows both the machine status and the current number of jobs in the system. The controller's objective is to minimize total discounted costs or long-run average costs which include preventative and corrective maintenance costs, holdings costs, and possibly production costs. An optimal policy determines both when to perform maintenance and which type of job to process. Since the policy takes into account the machine's degradation status, such control decisions are known as predictive maintenance policies. In the single-recipe case, we prove that the optimal policy is monotone in the machine status, but not in the number of jobs in the system. A similar monotonicity result holds in the two-recipe case. Finally, we provide computational results indicating that significant savings can be realized when implementing a predictive maintenance policies instead of a traditional job-based threshold policy for preventive maintenances.
Hysteresis in the Voltage Dependence of HCN Channels

Hyperpolarization-activated, cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) ion channels are important for rhythmic activity in the brain and in the heart. In this study, using ionic and gating current measurements, we show that cloned spHCN channels undergo a hysteresis in their voltage dependence during normal gating. For example, both the gating charge versus voltage curve, Q(V), and the conductance versus voltage curve, G(V), are shifted by about +60 mV when measured from a hyperpolarized holding potential compared with a depolarized holding potential. In addition, the kinetics of the tail current and the activation current change in parallel to the voltage shifts of the Q(V) and G(V) curves. Mammalian HCN1 channels display similar effects in their ionic currents, suggesting that the mammalian HCN channels also undergo voltage hysteresis. We propose a model in which HCN channels transit between two modes. The voltage dependence in the two modes is shifted relative to each other, and the occupancy of the two modes depends on the previous activation of the channel. The shifts in the voltage dependence are fast (τ ≈ 100 ms) and are not accompanied by any apparent inactivation. In HCN1 channels, the shift in voltage dependence is slower in a 100 mM K extracellular solution compared with a 1 mM K solution. Based on these findings, we suggest that molecular conformations similar to slow (C-type) inactivation of K channels underlie voltage hysteresis in HCN channels. The voltage hysteresis results in HCN channels displaying different voltage dependences during different phases in the pacemaker cycle. Computer simulations suggest that voltage hysteresis in HCN channels decreases the risk of arrhythmia in pacemaker cells.
Neural Correlates of Unsuccessful Memory Performance in MCI

People with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are at an elevated risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. Although the neural correlates of successful memory performance in MCI have been widely investigated, the neural mechanisms involved in unsuccessful memory performance remain unknown. The current study examines the differences between patients suffering from stable amnestic MCI with multiple deficit syndromes and healthy elderly controls in relation to the neural correlates of both successful and unsuccessful encoding and recognition. Forty-six subjects (27 controls, 19 MCI) from the HelMA (Helmholtz Alliance for Mental Health in an Aging Society) completed a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery and participated in an fMRI experiment for associative face-name memory. In patients, the areas of frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices were less involved during unsuccessful encoding and recognition. A temporary dysfunction of the top-down control of frontal or parietal (or both) areas is likely to result in a non-selective propagation of task-related information to memory.
Sea Surface Salinity and Temperature Budgets in the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre during SPURS Experiment: August 2012-August 2013

Variability at large to meso-scale in sea surface salinity (SSS) and sea surface temperature (SST) is investigated in the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean during the Subtropical Atlantic Surface Salinity Experiment Strasse/SPURS in August 2012 - August 2013. The products of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission corrected from large scale systematic errors are tested and used to retrieve meso-scale salinity features, while OSTIA products, resolving meso-scale temperature features are used for SST. The comparison of corrected SMOS SSS data with drifter's in situ measurements from SPURS experiment shows a reasonable agreement, especially during winter time with RMS differences on the order of 0.15 pss (for 10 days, 75 km resolution SMOS product). The analysis of SSS (SST) variability reveals that the meso-scale eddies contribute to a substantial freshening (cooling) in the central high salinity region of the subtropical gyre, albeit smaller than Ekman and atmospheric freshwater (heat) seasonal flux, which are the leading terms in SSS (SST) budget. An error is estimated along with SSS and SST budgets; as well as sensitivity to the different products in use and residuals are discussed. The residuals in the SSS budget are large and can arise from errors in the advection fields and freshwater flux, from neglected small scale or unresolved local processes (salt fingering, vertical mixing and small scale subduction, etc.). However, their magnitude is similar to what is often parameterized as eddy horizontal diffusion to close large scale budgets.
Exploiting graph regularized nonnegative matrix factorization for extractive speech summarization

Extractive summarization systems attempt to automatically pick out representative sentences from a source text or spoken document and concatenate them into a concise summary so as to help people grasp salient information effectively and efficiently. Recent advances in applying nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) on various tasks including summarization motivate us to extend this line of research and provide the following contributions. First, we propose to employ graph-regularized nonnegative matrix factorization (GNMF), in which an affinity graph with its similarity measure tailored to the evaluation metric of summarization is constructed and in turn serves as a neighborhood preserving constraint of NMF, so as to better represent the semantic space of sentences in the document to be summarized. Second, we further consider sparsity and orthogonality constraints on NMF and GNMF for better selection of representative sentences to form a summary. Extensive experiments conducted on a Mandarin broadcast news speech dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed unsupervised summarization models, in relation to several widely-used state-of-the-art methods compared in the paper.
Phenotypic Evolution: The Ongoing Synthesis

I explore the proposition that evolutionary biology is currently in the midst of its greatest period of synthesis. This period, which I call the Ongoing Synthesis, began in 1963 and continues at the present time. I use analysis of citations, conduct, and content to compare the Ongoing Synthesis to widely recognized periods of synthesis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To compare content, I focus on phenotypic evolution and compare current efforts with George Gaylord Simpson’s struggle to understand evolution in deep geological time. The essence of current effort is captured by the question, What is the best model for phenotypic evolution? Although many investigators are actively engaged in answering this question, I single out two examples of my own collaborative work for emphasis here. These two studies share three important characteristics: diagnosis of evolutionary pattern using massive data sets, validation of model parameter values using compilations of estimates (e.g., heritability, stabilizing selection, distance to an intermediate optimum), and identification of evolutionary process using alternative models of stochastic evolution. Our primary findings (discovery of the blunderbuss pattern and the result that rare bursts of evolution carry lineages out of established adaptive zones) compare favorably with important insights from the Modern Synthesis.
Patchy intergalactic He II absorption in HE 2347-4342. II. The possible discovery of the epoch of He-reionization

We report on observations of redshifted Heii303.8 A absorption in the high-redshift QSO HE2347 4342 (z =2 :885, V =1 6 :1) with the God- dard High Resolution Spectrograph on board HST in its low resolution mode (4 =0 : 7A). With f =3 : 61 0 15 ergcm 2 s 1 A 1 at the expected position of Heii304 A ab- sorption it is the most UV-bright high redshift QSO discovered so far. We show that the Heii opacity as a function of redshift is patchyshowingspectralregionswithlowHeiiopacity(\voids") andregionswithhighHeiiopacity(blacked-out\troughs")and no detectable flux. Combination with high-resolution optical spectra of the Ly forest using CASPEC at the 3.6m telescope shows that the voids can be explained either exclusively by Ly forest cloud absorption with a moderate NHeii=NHi ratio 100 and turbulent line broadening or by a combination of Ly forestwith=45andthermalbroadeningplusadiffusemedium with Heii GP 0.3. Since the latter is a minimum assumption for the Ly forest, a strict upper limit to a diffuse medium is diff < 0:02 h 1:5 50 at z =2 :8.