Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phenotypic Divergence among West European Populations of Reed Bunting Emberiza schoeniclus: The Effects of Migratory and Foraging Behaviours

Divergent selection and local adaptation are responsible for many phenotypic differences between populations, potentially leading to speciation through the evolution of reproductive barriers. Here we evaluated the morphometric divergence among west European populations of Reed Bunting in order to determine the extent of local adaptation relative to two important selection pressures often associated with speciation in birds: migration and diet. We show that, as expected by theory, migratory E. s. schoeniclus had longer and more pointed wings and a slightly smaller body mass than the resident subspecies, with the exception of E. s. lusitanica, which despite having rounder wings was the smallest of all subspecies. Tail length, however, did not vary according to the expectation (shorter tails in migrants) probably because it is strongly correlated with wing length and might take longer to evolve. E. s. witherbyi, which feed on insects hiding inside reed stems during the winter, had a very thick, stubby bill. In contrast, northern populations, which feed on seeds, had thinner bills. Despite being much smaller, the southern E. s. lusitanica had a significantly thicker, longer bill than migratory E. s. schoeniclus, whereas birds from the UK population had significantly shorter, thinner bills. Geometric morphometric analyses revealed that the southern subspecies have a more convex culmen than E. s. schoeniclus, and E. s. lusitanica differs from the nominate subspecies in bill shape to a greater extent than in linear bill measurements, especially in males. Birds with a more convex culmen are thought to exert a greater strength at the bill tip, which is in agreement with their feeding technique. Overall, the three subspecies occurring in Western Europe differ in a variety of traits following the patterns predicted from their migratory and foraging behaviours, strongly suggesting that these birds have became locally adapted through natural selection.
Turing's model for biological pattern formation and the robustness problem

One of the fundamental questions in developmental biology is how the vast range of pattern and structure we observe in nature emerges from an almost uniformly homogeneous fertilized egg. In particular, the mechanisms by which biological systems maintain robustness, despite being subject to numerous sources of noise, are shrouded in mystery. Postulating plausible theoretical models of biological heterogeneity is not only difficult, but it is also further complicated by the problem of generating robustness, i.e. once we can generate a pattern, how do we ensure that this pattern is consistently reproducible in the face of perturbations to the domain, reaction time scale, boundary conditions and so forth. In this paper, not only do we review the basic properties of Turing's theory, we highlight the successes and pitfalls of using it as a model for biological systems, and discuss emerging developments in the area.
Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal Dysfunction inApoe−/− Mice: Possible Role in Behavioral and Metabolic Alterations

Several neurological diseases are frequently accompanied by dysregulation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis. The HPA axis regulates the secretion of glucocorticoids (GCs), which play important roles in diverse brain functions, including cognition, emotion, and feeding. Under physiological conditions, GCs are adaptive and beneficial; however, prolonged elevations in GC levels may contribute to neurodegeneration and brain dysfunction. In the current study, we demonstrate that apolipoprotein E (apoE) deficiency results in age-dependent dysregulation of the HPA axis through a mechanism affecting primarily the adrenal gland.Apoe−/− mice, which develop neurodegenerative alterations as they age, had an age-dependent increase in basal adrenal corticosterone content and abnormally increased plasma corticosterone levels after restraint stress, whereas their plasma and pituitary adrenocorticotropin levels were either unchanged or lower than those in controls. HPA axis dysregulation was associated with behavioral and metabolic alterations. When anxiety levels were assessed in the elevated plus maze,Apoe−/− mice showed more anxiety than wild-type controls. Apoe−/−mice also showed reduced activity in the open field. Finally,Apoe−/− mice showed age-dependent increases in food and water intake, stomach and body weights, and decreases in brown and white adipose tissues. These results support a key role for apoE in the tonic inhibition of steroidogenesis and HPA axis activity and have important implications for the behavioral analysis of Apoe−/− mice.
Are Octogenarians With End-Stage Renal Disease Candidates for Renal Transplantation?

Background Elderly patients are the fastest-growing group in need of renal transplantation. This study puts focus on renal transplant recipients in their 80th year or longer at time of engraftment. Is there evidence to support an absolute upper age limit for renal transplantation? Methods Recipients in their 80th year or longer, transplanted between 1983 and 2015, were included. Data were retrieved from the Norwegian Renal Registry in the end of October 2015. Graft and patient survivals were compared with recipients aged 70 to 79 years at transplantation. Results Forty-seven patients older than 79 years were transplanted in the defined period. Median age 80.1 years, 81% were men. Median time on dialysis before transplantation was 18.5 months. All patients received an allograft from a deceased donor (median donor age, 61.8 years). In the death-censored graft survival model, there was no statistical difference between the groups. We found improved patient and graft survivals after introduction of mycophenolate mofetil and induction with basiliximab. Patients transplanted before 2000 had increased risk of death compared with those transplanted after 2000 (hazard ratio, 3.2; 95% confidence interval, 1.2-8.7). Median uncensored graft survival for patients transplanted after the year 2000 was 5.0 year (95% confidence interval, 2.4-7.6). Median patient survival was 5.0 years (3.1-6.9) and 5-year patient survival was 55%. Conclusions Age by itself should not be an absolute contraindication against renal transplantation. An estimated 5-year survival rate of 55% post-engraftment for an 80-year-old patient is in our opinion more than acceptable.
Pre-Ipo Financial Performance and Aftermarket Survival

Many commentators have portrayed the tech boom of the late 1990s as an era of unprecedented deterioration in the quality of firms undertaking initial public offerings. But as far back as the early 1980s, firms seeking to go public were displaying signs of financial weakness, and the failure rate of issuers was on the rise. An analysis of the likelihood of failure among IPO firms in 1980-2000 suggests that pre-issue profitability is a good predictor of aftermarket survival.
A Role for the Chemokine RANTES in Regulating CD8 T Cell Responses during Chronic Viral Infection

RANTES (CCL5) is a chemokine expressed by many hematopoietic and non-hematopoietic cell types that plays an important role in homing and migration of effector and memory T cells during acute infections. The RANTES receptor, CCR5, is a major target of anti-HIV drugs based on blocking viral entry. However, defects in RANTES or RANTES receptors including CCR5 can compromise immunity to acute infections in animal models and lead to more severe disease in humans infected with west Nile virus (WNV). In contrast, the role of the RANTES pathway in regulating T cell responses and immunity during chronic infection remains unclear. In this study, we demonstrate a crucial role for RANTES in the control of systemic chronic LCMV infection. In RANTES−/− mice, virus-specific CD8 T cells had poor cytokine production. These RANTES−/− CD8 T cells also expressed higher amounts of inhibitory receptors consistent with more severe exhaustion. Moreover, the cytotoxic ability of CD8 T cells from RANTES−/− mice was reduced. Consequently, viral load was higher in the absence of RANTES. The dysfunction of T cells in the absence of RANTES was as severe as CD8 T cell responses generated in the absence of CD4 T cell help. Our results demonstrate an important role for RANTES in sustaining CD8 T cell responses during a systemic chronic viral infection.
Climate Change: Believing and Seeing Implies Adapting

Knowledge of factors that trigger human response to climate change is crucial for effective climate change policy communication. Climate change has been claimed to have low salience as a risk issue because it cannot be directly experienced. Still, personal factors such as strength of belief in local effects of climate change have been shown to correlate strongly with responses to climate change and there is a growing literature on the hypothesis that personal experience of climate change (and/or its effects) explains responses to climate change. Here we provide, using survey data from 845 private forest owners operating in a wide range of bio-climatic as well as economic-social-political structures in a latitudinal gradient across Europe, the first evidence that the personal strength of belief and perception of local effects of climate change, highly significantly explain human responses to climate change. A logistic regression model was fitted to the two variables, estimating expected probabilities ranging from 0.07 (SD ±0.01) to 0.81 (SD ±0.03) for self-reported adaptive measures taken. Adding socio-demographic variables improved the fit, estimating expected probabilities ranging from 0.022 (SD ±0.008) to 0.91 (SD ±0.02). We conclude that to explain and predict adaptation to climate change, the combination of personal experience and belief must be considered.
Abnormalities of ocular motility in myotonic dystrophy.

Are the oculomotor disturbances in myotonic dystrophy (MD), i.e. reduced smooth pursuit (SP) gain and reduced saccadic peak velocity (PV), of muscular or central origin? To answer this question the following two approaches were used. (i) The performance of SP was compared with the patient's ability to suppress the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) visually (VOR suppression; VOR-S). In the latter task the SP system is involved, but the eyes hardly move within the orbits. A parallel impairment of SP and VOR-S would indicate a central dysfunction. (ii) Peak saccadic velocity was compared between two saccades performed to and fro in rapid succession. The intention was to measure any myotonic effect which might build up after the first saccade and slow down the second saccade. We studied 15 MD patients and 15 age-matched controls. Stimuli for slow eye responses consisted of sinusoidal horizontal rotations of the SP target and/or the vestibular rotation chair at frequencies between 0.1 and 0.8 Hz. Saccades were analysed in terms of PV. accuracy, duration and latency, comparing centripetal versus centrifugal saccades at short and long intersaccadic intervals (ISI; 400 ms and 900 ms, respectively). The SP gain was reduced in patients compared with the controls, the effect being most pronounced (32% less) at the highest stimulus frequency. Whereas VOR was normal in the patients, VOR-S was clearly impaired (50% worse at 0.8 Hz). Despite normal saccadic accuracy, peak saccadic velocity was significantly lower in the patient group (23% less for saccades of 12 degrees amplitude), similarly for centrifugal and centripetal saccades; all these differences were independent of the ISI. Latency was normal with centrifugal saccades, but was considerably increased with centripetal saccades at short ISI (67% longer compared with controls). The observation of a parallel degradation of SP and VOR-S in the patients is interpreted in terms of a central deficit in the SP pathways. Thus, it appears that slow eye movements were not impaired by muscle dystrophy and myotonia to a considerable degree in our patients. The increase in saccadic latency for centripetal saccades at the short ISI also reflects a central deficit. However, the observed slowing of saccades might have a myopathic or neural origin; a distinction was not possible at present. A myotonic origin of the saccade slowing seems unlikely, because the effect was independent of the presaccadic activation of the relaxing (antagonistic) eye muscle.
Claiming Place: Biracial Young Adults of the Post-Civil Rights Era

Preface Biracial American Experience in Post-Civil Rights Era Biracial Americans Biracial Americans and Their Families Biracial American Identity Choices Racial Realities in Adult Biracial American Lives Biracial American Life Themes Biracial American Voices Development of Racial Identities Childhood Memories of Race Family Relationships Remembered Assessments of Biracial American Experiences Epilogue Bibliography
Genomics-enabled research in marine ecology : challenges , risks and payoffs

Genomics-enabled applications are becoming increasingly common in conjunction with research in marine ecology. In this Theme Section, we review the success of cases where techniques used to profile gene expression have been used to gain new insight into 3 areas of research: symbioses in marine invertebrates, physiological responses to environmental conditions, and examining the determinants of species-range boundaries in marine ecosystems. In addition, we briefly discuss the challenges facing new practitioners of these techniques, including an overview of essential equipment to conduct research in ecological genomics.
Fixed-Smoothing Asymptotics in a Two-Step GMM Framework

The paper develops the …xed-smoothing asymptotics in a two-step GMM framework. Under this type of asymptotics, the weighting matrix in the second-step GMM criterion function converges weakly to a random matrix and the two-step GMM estimator is asymptotically mixed normal. Nevertheless, the Wald statistic, the GMM criterion function statistic and the LM statistic remain asymptotically pivotal. It is shown that critical values from the …xedsmoothing asymptotic distribution are high order correct under the conventional increasingsmoothing asymptotics. When an orthonormal series covariance estimator is used, the critical values can be approximated very well by the quantiles of a noncentral F distribution. A simulation study shows that the new statistical tests based on the …xed-smoothing critical values are much more accurate in size than the conventional chi-square test.
“RegionCut” — Interactive multi-label segmentation utilizing cellular automaton

This paper addresses the problem of interactive image segmentation. We propose an extension of the GrowCut framework which follows Cellular Automaton theory and is comparable to a label propagation algorithm. Therefore, user labels are propagated according to Cellular Automaton until convergency. A common problem of GrowCut is the time consuming user initialization which requires distributed seeds. Our main contribution focuses on determining such an initialization utilizing GMMs and spherical coordinates. Furthermore we propose a new weight function based on the mean image gradient. According to our evaluation, our extensions result in a simplified user interaction and in better results in terms of accuracy and running time. Our experiments show that our method can compete with state-of-the-art energy minimization frameworks.
Media and Politics in Sweden

Modern politics is mediated politics, and the media constitute the most important source of information and channel of communication between the governors and the governed. Media and politics are thus inextricable linked together, with the media playing an important role in contemporary democracies and for political processes. While this is true for virtually all advanced democracies, there are still important differences between countries depending on, for example, their media systems and political systems. The purpose of Communicating Politics: Political Communication in the Nordic Countries is consequently to de-scribe and analyze both the political communication systems and cases of political communication processes in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Taken together, the chapters explore differences as well as similarities between the Nordic countries, and provide a broad view of political communication systems, practices and research perspectives in the Nordic countries.
Video classification using spatial-temporal features and PCA

We investigate the problem of automated video classification by analysing the low-level audio-visual signal patterns along the time course in a holistic manner. Five popular TV broadcast genre are studied including sports, cartoon, news, commercial and music. A novel statistically based approach is proposed comprising two important ingredients designed for implicit semantic content characterisation and class identities modelling. First, a spatial-temporal audio-visual "concatenated" feature vector is composed, aiming to capture crucial clip-level video structure information inherent in a video genre. Second, the feature vector is further processed using principal component analysis to reduce the spatial-temporal redundancy while exploiting the correlations between feature elements. This gives rise to a compact representation fro effective probabilistic modelling of each video genre. Extensive experiments are conducted assessing various aspects of the approach and their influence on the overall system performance.
The Revealed Preferences of a Government Bureaucracy: Empirical Evidence

This paper develops a method for inferring, from the consequences or outcomes of organizational decisions, an implicit choice criterion such that the organization behaves as if it were following this decision rule. The method is quantified for the case of a public bureaucracy facing discrete alternatives, and is applied in a study of the decision rules underlying freeway route selection by the California Division of Highways. The author tests the form of benefit-cost calculus utilized by the bureaucracy, the implicit evaluation of the indirect benefits and costs, and the influence of political factors on routing decisions.
Tree size and its relationship with flowering phenology and reproductive output in Wild Nutmeg trees

Reproductive strategies, sexual selection, and their relationship with the phenotype of individuals are topics widely studied in animals, but this information is less abundant for plants. Variability in flowering phenology among individuals has direct impact on their fitness, but how reproductive phenology is affected by the size of the individuals needs further study. We quantified the flowering intensity, length, and reproductive synchronization of two sympatric dioecious Wild Nutmeg tree species (Virola, Myristicaceae) in the Brazilian Atlantic forest, and analyzed its relationships with tree size. Two distinct strategies in flowering timing and intensity were found between species (annual versus biennial flowering), and among individuals in the annual flowering species (extended versus peak flowering). Only for the annual flowering species the reproductive output is related to tree size and large trees present proportionally higher flower coverage, and lower synchronization than smaller ones. Flowering is massive and highly synchronized in the biennial species. Sex ratios are not different from 1:1 in the two species, and in the two segregated reproductive subgroups in the biennial flowering species. The biennial flowering at individual level is a novelty among reproductive patterns in plants, separating the population in two reproductive subgroups. A proportional increase in the reproductive output with size exists only for the annual flowering species. A biennial flowering can allow resource storage favouring massive flowering for all the individuals diluting their relationship with size.
Teacher Career Paths, Teacher Quality, and Persistence in the Classroom: Are Public Schools Keeping Their Best? CEDR Working Paper No. 2010-2.0.

This paper examines the mobility of early-career teachers of varying qualityâ€”measured using value-added methodsâ€”and focuses on the variation in these effects across the effectiveness distribution. On average, more effective teachers remain in the profession and stay in their initial schools. But there appears to be heterogeneity in mobility behavior across the performance distribution and evidence that student demographics and achievement levels affect teacher mobility.
On forecasting Exchange Rate Volatility

In an efficient market, foreign exchange rates have to guarantee absence of triangular arbitrage. This note shows that the no-arbitrage condition can be exploited for forecasting the volatility of a single rate by using the information contained in the other rates. Linearly transforming the volatility forecasts of a bivariate model is shown to be more efficient than using a univariate model for the cross-rate.
Eliciting Taxpayer Preferences Increases Tax Compliance

Two experiments show that eliciting taxpayer preferences on government spending—providing taxpayer agency--increases tax compliance. We first create an income and taxation environment in a laboratory setting to test for compliance with a lab tax. Allowing a treatment group to express nonbinding preferences over tax spending priorities, leads to a 16% increase in tax compliance. A followup online study tests this treatment with a simulation of paying US federal taxes. Allowing taxpayers to signal their preferences on the distribution of government spending, results in a 15% reduction in the stated take-up rate of a questionable tax loophole. Providing taxpayer agency recouples tax payments with the public services obtained in return, reduces general anti-tax sentiment, and holds satisfaction with tax payment stable despite increased compliance with tax dues. With tax noncompliance costing the US government $385billion annually, providing taxpayer agency could have meaningful economic impact. At the same time, giving taxpayers a voice may act as a two-way "nudge," transforming tax payment from a passive experience to a channel of communication between taxpayers and government.
Perceived usability evaluation of learning management systems: Empirical evaluation of the System Usability Scale

Perceived usability affects greatly student’s learning effectiveness and overall learning experience, and thus is an important requirement of educational software. The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a well-researched and widely used questionnaire for perceived usability evaluation. However, surprisingly few studies have used SUS to evaluate the perceived usability of learning management systems (LMSs). This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the SUS questionnaire in the context of LMSs’ perceived usability evaluation. Eleven studies involving 769 students were conducted, in which participants evaluated the usability of two LMSs (eClass and Moodle) used within courses of their curriculum. It was found that the perceived usability of the evaluated LMSs is at a satisfactory level (mean SUS score 76.27). Analysis of the results also demonstrated the validity and reliability of SUS for LMSs’ evaluation, and that it remains robust even for small sample sizes. Moreover, the following SUS attributes were investigated in the context of LMSs evaluation: gender, age, prior experience with the LMS, Internet self-efficacy, attitude towards the Internet and usage frequency of the LMS.