Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regularity and other properties ofabsolutely continuous invariant measuresfor the quadratic familyMarek

In the current paper we study in more detail some properties of the absolutely continuous invariant measures constructed in the course of the proof of Jakobson's Theorem. In particular, we show that the density of the invariant measure is continuous at Misiurewicz points. From this we deduce that the Lyapunov exponent is also continuous at these points (our considerations apply just to the parameters constructed in the proof of Jakobson's Theorem). Other properties, like the positivity of the Lyapunov exponent, uniqueness of the absolutely continuous invariant measure and exactness of the corresponding dy-namical system, are also proved.
Modelling Exchange Rate Volatility in Zambia

The eight real kwacha bilateral exchange rates examined over the period 1968- 2008 in a GARCH framework are characterised by different conditional volatility dynamics. Evidence of asymmetric response to shocks suggests asymmetric central bank reaction to variations in volatility in exchange rates. An index of exchange rate volatility capturing influences specific to Zambia is constructed from the estimated conditional variance using principal components analysis for use as an alternative measure of exchange rate risk.
What can be deduced from chemical measurement in an open-field raingauge? An example in the Maures Massif, southeastern France

Abstract The deposition of chemical elements in a catchment occurs through three different processes: wet, dry and cloud deposition. Total deposition cannot be inferred from measurements made with open-field raingauges, and still constitutes a challenge to scientific method. The chemical composition of samples from an open-field raingauge (bulk precipitation) was analysed over a period of several years in a small Mediterranean catchment in the Maures Massif, France. The input of chloride measured in this way was two times lower than the output, despite the fact that this element is reputed to be conservative, which means input and output should roughly balance. This implies that input has previously been underestimated. Analysis of the bulk precipitation data was carried out taking into account both the history of rain events and of sampling. This study allowed the relative parts of the different deposition processes to be quantified. Dry deposition can provide from 20% to more than 80% of the anthropogenic and terrigenic elements (Ca2+, Mg2+, K+, NO3 −, SO4 2-, SiO2) to the rain samples. The occult deposition of marine elements on the catchment area (50% of total deposition) was found to be mostly due to cloud deposition during wet periods.
Substance Abuse and Rehabilitation Dovepress Improving the Outcomes of Children Affected by Parental Substance Abuse: a Review of Randomized Controlled Trials

Substance abuse is a major public health concern that impacts not just the user but also the user's family. The effect that parental substance abuse has on children has been given substantial attention over the years. Findings from the literature suggest that children of substance-abusing parents have a high risk of developing physical and mental health and behavioral problems. A number of intervention programs have been developed for parents who have a substance abuse problem. There have also been a number of interventions that have been developed for children who have at least one parent with a substance abuse problem. However, it remains unclear how we can best mitigate the negative effects that parental substance abuse has on children due to the scarcity of evaluations that utilize rigorous methodologies such as experimental designs. The purpose of this study is to review randomized controlled trials of intervention programs targeting parents with substance abuse problems and/or children with at least one parent with a substance abuse problem in order to identify programs that show some promise in improving the behavioral and mental health outcomes of children affected by parental substance abuse. Four randomized controlled trials that met our eligibility criteria were identified using major literature search engines. The findings from this review suggest that interventions that focus on improving parenting practices and family functioning may be effective in reducing problems in children affected by parental substance abuse. However, further research utilizing rigorous methodologies are needed in order to identify other successful interventions that can improve the outcomes of these children long after the intervention has ended.
Transportation of Berberine into HepG2, HeLa and SY5Y Cells: A Correlation to Its Anti-Cancer Effect

The anti-cancer activities of berberine (BBR) have been reported extensively in various cancer cell lines. However, the minimal inhibitory concentrations of BBR varied greatly among different cell lines and very few studies have been devoted to elucidate this aspect. In this study, we employed three cancer cell lines, HepG2, HeLa and SY5Y, to compare the transportation and distribution of BBR. HPLC results demonstrated that BBR was capable of penetrating all the cell lines whereas the cumulative concentrations were significantly different. HepG2 cells accumulated higher level of BBR for longer duration than the other two cell lines. Molecular docking studies revealed the BBR binding site on P-glycoprotein 1 (P-gp). In addition, we elucidated that BBR regulated P-gp at both mRNA and protein levels. BBR induced the transcription and translation of P-gp in HeLa and SY5Y cells, whereas BBR inhibited P-gp expression in HepG2 cells. Further study showed that BBR regulates P-gp expression depending on different mechanisms (or affected by different factors) in different cell lines. To summarize, our study has revealed several mechanistic aspects of BBR regulation on P-gp in different cancer cell lines and might shed some useful insights into the use of BBR in the anti-cancer drug development.
Gender Classification using Geometric Facial Features

ender classification has become an essential task in human computer interaction (HCI). Gender classification is used in immense number of applications like passive surveillance, control in smart buildings (restricting access to certain areas based on gender) and supermarkets, gender advertising, security investigation. So far detection of gender using facial features is done by using the methods like Gabor wavelets, artificial neural networks and support vector machine. In this work, facial distance measure is used as a progenitor to achieve the gender classification. The proposed approach performs gender classification using mathematical operations on the frontal pose face images using Matlab. This work can be further evaluated in future by using different databases with various poses other than the frontal pose. Keywordsclassification, feature extraction
The geometry of the Pareto front in biological phenotype space

When organisms perform a single task, selection leads to phenotypes that maximize performance at that task. When organisms need to perform multiple tasks, a trade-off arises because no phenotype can optimize all tasks. Recent work addressed this question, and assumed that the performance at each task decays with distance in trait space from the best phenotype at that task. Under this assumption, the best-fitness solutions (termed the Pareto front) lie on simple low-dimensional shapes in trait space: line segments, triangles and other polygons. The vertices of these polygons are specialists at a single task. Here, we generalize this finding, by considering performance functions of general form, not necessarily functions that decay monotonically with distance from their peak. We find that, except for performance functions with highly eccentric contours, simple shapes in phenotype space are still found, but with mildly curving edges instead of straight ones. In a wide range of systems, complex data on multiple quantitative traits, which might be expected to fill a high-dimensional phenotype space, is predicted instead to collapse onto low-dimensional shapes; phenotypes near the vertices of these shapes are predicted to be specialists, and can thus suggest which tasks may be at play.
PASSENGER TRIP DELAYS IN THE U.S. AIRLINE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM IN 2007

The value of the air transportation system is the transportation of light-weight, high-value cargo, and passengers. Industry and government metrics for the performance of the air transportation focus on the performance of the flights. Previous research has identified the discrepancy between flight performance and passenger trip performance, and has developed algorithms for the estimation of passenger trip performance form publicly available data. This paper describes an analysis of passenger trip delays for 5224 routes between 309 air ports in the U.S. air transportation system for 2007. The average trip delay experienced by passengers was 24.3 minutes for nationwide total of 247 Million hours. Flights delayed 15 minutes or more contributed 48% of the total delays, cancelled flights 43%, diverted flights 3%, and flights delayed less than 15 minutes contributed the remaining 6%. Passenger trip delays for oversold flights were negligible. Analysis of passenger trip delays for routes and airports, and the implications of these results are also discussed. Keywordspassenger trip delay; flight delay, airport delay.
Properties of the galaxy population in hydrodynamical simulations of clusters

We present a study of the galaxy population predicted by hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy clusters. These simulations, which are based on the GADGET-2 TREE + SPH code, include gas cooling, star formation, a detailed treatment of stellar evolution and chemical enrichment, as well as supernova energy feedback in the form of galactic winds. As such, they can be used to extract the spectrophotometric properties of the simulated galaxies, which are identified as clumps in the distribution of star particles. Simulations have been carried out for a representative set of 19 cluster-sized haloes, having mass M 200 in the range 5 x 10 13 -1.8 x 10 15 h -1 M ⊙ . All simulations have been performed for two choices of the stellar initial mass function (IMF), namely using a standard Salpeter IMF with power-law index x = 1.35, and a top-heavy IMF with x = 0.95. In general, we find that several of the observational properties of the galaxy population in nearby clusters are reproduced fairly well by simulations. A Salpeter IMF is successful in accounting for the slope and the normalization of the colour-magnitude relation for the bulk of the galaxy population. In contrast, the top-heavy IMF produces too red galaxies, as a consequence of their exceedingly large metallicity. Simulated clusters have a relation between mass and optical luminosity, which generally agrees with observations, both in normalization and in slope. Also in keeping with observational results, galaxies are generally bluer, younger and more star forming in the cluster outskirts. However, we find that our simulated clusters have a total number of galaxies which is significantly smaller than the observed one, falling short by about a factor of 2-3. We have verified that this problem does not have an obvious numerical origin, such as lack of mass and force resolution. Finally, the brightest cluster galaxies are always predicted to be too massive and too blue, when compared to observations. This is due to gas overcooling, which takes place in the core regions of simulated clusters, even in the presence of the rather efficient supernova feedback used in our simulations.
A continuous-time approach to online optimization

We consider a family of learning strategies for online optimization problems that evolve in continuous time and we show that they lead to no regret. From a more traditional, discrete-time viewpoint, this continuous-time approach allows us to derive the no-regret properties of a large class of discrete-time algorithms including as special cases the exponential weight algorithm, online mirror descent, smooth fictitious play and vanishingly smooth fictitious play. In so doing, we obtain a unified view of many classical regret bounds, and we show that they can be decomposed into a term stemming from continuous-time considerations and a term which measures the disparity between discrete and continuous time. As a result, we obtain a general class of infinite horizon learning strategies that guarantee an $\mathcal{O}(n^{-1/2})$ regret bound without having to resort to a doubling trick.
Is memory schematic

ion Information that has been selected because it is important and/or relevant to the schema is further reduced during the encoding process by abstraction. This process codes the meaning but not the format of a message (e.g., Bobrow, 1970; Bransford, Barclay, & Franks, 1972). Thus, details such as the lexical form of an individual word (e.g., Schank, 1972, 1976) and the syntactic form of a sentence (e.g., Sachs, 1967) will not be preserved in memory. Because memory for syntax appears to be particularly sparce as well as brief (e.g., J. R. Anderson, 1974; Begg & Wickelgren, 1974; Jarvella, 1971; Sachs, 1967, 1974), the abstraction process is thought to operate during encoding. Additional support for the notion that what is stored is an abstracted representation of the original stimulus comes from studies that demonstrate that after a passage is read, it takes subjects the same amount of time to verify information originally presented in a complex linguistic format as it does to verify that same information presented in a simpler format (e.g., King & Greeno, 1974; Kintsch M Bransford, et al., 1972; Brewer, 1975; Frederiksen, 1975a; Kintsch, 1974; Norman & Rumelhart, 1975; Schank, 1972, 1976). One formalized presentation of this idea is Schank's conceptual dependency theory (1972). The theory asserts that all propositions can be expressed by a small set of primitive concepts. All lexical expressions that share an identical meaning will be represented in one way (and so stored economically) regardless of their presentation format. As a result people should often incorrectly recall or misrecognize synonyms of originally presented words, and they do (e.g., Anderson & Bower, 1973; R. C. Anderson, 1974; Anisfeld & Knapp, 1968; Brewer, 1975; Graesser, 1978b; Sachs, 1974). Abstraction and memory theories. Since considerable detail is lost via the abstraction process, this process can easily account for the incompleteness that is characteristic of people's recall of complex events. In light of the abstraction process, the problem for schema theories becomes one of accounting for accurate recall. Schema theories do this by borrowing a finding from psycholinguistic research, to wit, that speakers of a language share preferred ways of expressing information. If both the creator and perceiver of a message are operating with the same preferences or under the same biases, the perceiver's reproduction of the input may appear to be accurate. The accuracy, however, is the product of recalling the semantic content of the message and imposing the preferred structure onto it. Thus, biases operate in a manner that is similar to the "probable detail" reconstruction process. Biases have been documented for both syntactic information (J. R. Anderson, 1974; Bock, 1977; Bock & Brewer, 1974; Clark & Clark, 1968; James, Thompson, & Baldwin, 1973) and lexical information (Brewer, 1975; Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1974). Distortions may result from the abstraction process if biases are not shared by the person who creates the message and the one who receives it. More importantly, the ab-
CRISPR-cas Subtype I-Fb in Acinetobacter baumannii: Evolution and Utilization for Strain Subtyping

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) are polymorphic elements found in the genome of some or all strains of particular bacterial species, providing them with a system of acquired immunity against invading bacteriophages and plasmids. Two CRISPR-Cas systems have been identified in Acinetobacter baumannii, an opportunistic pathogen with a remarkable capacity for clonal dissemination. In this study, we investigated the mode of evolution and diversity of spacers of the CRISPR-cas subtype I-Fb locus in a global collection of 76 isolates of A. baumannii obtained from 14 countries and 4 continents. The locus has basically evolved from a common ancestor following two main lineages and several pathways of vertical descent. However, this vertical passage has been interrupted by occasional events of horizontal transfer of the whole locus between distinct isolates. The isolates were assigned into 40 CRISPR-based sequence types (CST). CST1 and CST23-24 comprised 18 and 9 isolates, representing two main sub-clones of international clones CC1 and CC25, respectively. Epidemiological data showed that some of the CST1 isolates were acquired or imported from Iraq, where it has probably been endemic for more than one decade and occasionally been able to spread to USA, Canada, and Europe. CST23-24 has shown a remarkable ability to cause national outbreaks of infections in Sweden, Argentina, UAE, and USA. The three isolates of CST19 were independently imported from Thailand to Sweden and Norway, raising a concern about the prevalence of CST19 in Thailand. Our study highlights the dynamic nature of the CRISPR-cas subtype I-Fb locus in A. baumannii, and demonstrates the possibility of using a CRISPR-based approach for subtyping a significant part of the global population of A. baumannii.
Question Answering on a Case Insensitive Corpus

Most question answering (QA) systems rely on both keyword index and Named Entity (NE) tagging. The corpus from which the QA systems attempt to retrieve answers is usually mixed case text. However, there are numerous corpora that consist of case insensitive documents, e.g. speech recognition results. This paper presents a successful approach to QA on a case insensitive corpus, whereby a preprocessing module is designed to restore the case-sensitive form. The document pool with the restored case then feeds the QA system, which remains unchanged. The case restoration preprocessing is implemented as a Hidden Markov Model trained on a large raw corpus of case sensitive documents. It is demonstrated that this approach leads to very limited degradation in QA benchmarking (2.8%), mainly due to the limited degradation in the underlying information extraction support.
Cholesterol Depletion in Adipocytes Causes Caveolae Collapse Concomitant with Proteosomal Degradation of Cavin-2 in a Switch-Like Fashion

Caveolae, little caves of cell surfaces, are enriched in cholesterol, a certain level of which is required for their structural integrity. Here we show in adipocytes that cavin-2, a peripheral membrane protein and one of 3 cavin isoforms present in caveolae from non-muscle tissue, is degraded upon cholesterol depletion in a rapid fashion resulting in collapse of caveolae. We exposed 3T3-L1 adipocytes to the cholesterol depleting agent methyl-β-cyclodextrin, which results in a sudden and extensive degradation of cavin-2 by the proteasome and a concomitant movement of cavin-1 from the plasma membrane to the cytosol along with loss of caveolae. The recovery of cavin-2 at the plasma membrane is cholesterol-dependent and is required for the return of cavin-1 from the cytosol to the cell surface and caveolae restoration. Expression of shRNA directed against cavin-2 also results in a cytosolic distribution of cavin-1 and loss of caveolae. Taken together, these data demonstrate that cavin-2 functions as a cholesterol responsive component of caveolae that is required for cavin-1 localization to the plasma membrane, and caveolae structural integrity.
Extrathalamic modulation of cortical function.

Abstract : The goal of the proposed studies is to characterize the effects of noradrenergic (NA) afferents on cortical information processing. our previous studies indicate that the primate locus coeruleus (LC) system, originating in the pontine brainstem, innervates neocortex more densely than previously thought, exhibiting highly specific patterns in terms of the regional and laminar distribution of its axons. our previous neurophysiological observations suggest that this system imposes state-related modulatory effects on thalamo- cortical and cortico-cortical systems. The proposed studies have the following Specific Aims: (1) To examine, in monkeys, the effects of manipulating the LC-NA system on ERPs, EEG characteristics, and associated behaviors in operant paradigms that utilize visual or auditory cues; (2) To correlate the activities of individual monkey LC-NA neurons with cortical neuronal activity and the measures utilized in Aim 1; (3) To extend our preliminary observation that activation of the LC by local drug infusion, in halothane-anesthetized rats, produces EEG signs of cortical and hippocampal activation; (4) To examine the relationship between the intensity of LC neuronal activity and rates of norepinephrine release in neocortex and hippocampus by performing microdialysis in these forebrain terminal regions in anesthetized rats during manipulation of LC activity.
Cut detection in video sequences using phase correlation

A novel algorithm for the detection of cuts in video sequences is proposed. The algorithm uses phase correlation to obtain a measure of content similarity for temporally adjacent frames and responds very well to scene cuts. The algorithm is insensitive to the presence of global illumination changes and noise and outperforms established methods for cut detection. As the proposed scheme is implemented in the frequency domain, the availability of fast hardware makes the scheme attractive for interactive and on-line applications.
Novel Hypoxanthine Guanine Phosphoribosyltransferase Gene Mutations in Saudi Arabian Hyperuricemia Patients

Over the past decade, a steady increase in the incidence of HPRT-related hyperuricemia (HRH) has been observed in Saudi Arabia. We examined all the nine exons of HPRT gene for mutations in ten biochemically confirmed hyperuricemia patients, including one female and three normal controls. In all, we identified 13 novel mutations in Saudi Arabian HPRT-related hyperuricemia patients manifesting different levels of uric acid. The Lys103Met alteration was highly recurrent and was observed in 50% of the cases, while Ala160Thr and Lys158Asn substitutions were found in two patients. Moreover, in 70% of the patients ≥2 mutations were detected concurrently in the HPRT gene. Interestingly, one of the patients that harbored Lys103Met substitution along with two frameshift mutations at codons 85 and 160 resulting in shortened protein demonstrated unusually high serum uric acid level of 738 μmol/L. Two of the seven point mutations that resulted in amino acid change (Lys103Met and Val160Gly) were predicted to be damaging by SIFT and Polyphen and were further analyzed for their protein stability and function by molecular dynamics simulation. The identified novel mutations in the HPRT gene may prove useful in the prenatal diagnosis and genetic counseling.