Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TCP Vegas-A: solving the fairness and rerouting issues of TCP Vegas

In spite of the larger performance gain such as higher throughput and almost zero packet retransmissions compared to TCP Reno, TCP Vegas still has a few obstacles for it to be deployed in the Internet. Studies have shown unfair treatment to Vegas connections when they compete with Reno connections. Other issues identified with TCP Vegas are problems of rerouting, persistent congestion, and discrepancy in flow rate tied with starting times and link bandwidth. We reinvestigate these issues rind propose modifications to the congestion avoidance mechanism of the TCP Vegas, with the slow-start and congestion recovery algorithms of Vegas remaining untouched. Unlike the solutions proposed in the recent past to deal with some of these issues, our solution it neither dependent on any critical parameter values nor on the buffer management scheme at the routers (e.g., RED). Our experiments show that the modified TCP Vegas (Vegas-A) it able to obtain a fairer share of the network bandwidth when competing with other TCP flows. We also show that Vegas-A can tackle rerouting issues and rectify Vegas's bias against higher bandwidth flows. At the same time, our experiments prove that Vegas-A preserves the properties of Vegas that have made it a noteworthy protocol.
Fertilizability of Superovulated Eggs by Estrous Stage-independent PMSG/hCG Treatment in Adult Wistar-Imamichi Rats

We investigated the fertilization and developmental ability of superovulated eggs obtained from adult Wistar-Imamichi (WI) rats, by using pregnant mare serum gonadotropin (PMSG) and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) treatment. Female WI rats, 11–13 weeks of age, were divided into four groups by estrous stage (metestrus [ME], diestrus [DE], proestrus [PE], or estrus [E]). PMSG (150 IU/kg) and hCG (75 IU/kg) were injected at an interval of 48 or 55 h and the female rats were mated with mature male rats. The ovulated eggs were collected 20, 24, and 27 h after hCG injection. Regardless of the estrous stage at the time of PMSG injection, the treated rats mated and ovulated similar to the untreated spontaneously ovulated rats (S group). Although the proportion of fertilized eggs in the E- and PE-treated groups was less than the S group 20 h after hCG injection, the proportion was not different among all treated and S groups 24 h after hCG injection. The proportion of fertilized eggs using in vitro fertilization and the proportion of offspring obtained from 2-cell stage embryo transfer did not differ among the treated and S groups. In comparison with PMSG/hCG-treated immature rats, mating and ovulation rate of adult rats were significantly higher. The proportion of fertilized eggs obtained from mated rats did not differ between immature and adult rats. These results demonstrate that adult WI rats are good egg donors for reproductive biotechnological studies using unfertilized or fertilized eggs.
Improved Estimation of the Initial Number of Susceptible Individuals in the General Stochastic Epidemic Model Using Penalized Likelihood

The initial size of a completely susceptible population in a group of individuals plays a key role in drawing inferences for epidemic models. However, this can be difficult to obtain in practice because, in any population, there might be individuals who may not transmit the disease during the epidemic. This short note describes how to improve the maximum likelihood estimators of the infection rate and the initial number of susceptible individuals and provides their approximate Hessian matrix for the general stochastic epidemic model by using the concept of the penalized likelihood function. The simulations of major epidemics show significant improvements in performance in averages and coverage ratios for the suggested estimator of the initial number in comparison to existing methods. We applied the proposed method to the Abakaliki smallpox data.
The shapes of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We determine the underlying shapes of spiral and elliptical galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 6 (SDSS DR6) from the observed distribution of projected galaxy shapes, taking into account the effects of dust extinction and reddening. We assume that the underlying shapes of spirals and ellipticals are well approximated by triaxial ellipsoids. The elliptical galaxy data are consistent with oblate spheroids, with a correlation between luminosity and ellipticity: the mean values of minor to middle axis ratios are 0.41 ± 0.03 for M r ≈-18 ellipticals and 0.76 ± 0.04 for M r ≈-22.5 ellipticals. Ellipticals show almost no dependence of axial ratio on galaxy colour, implying a negligible dust optical depth. There is a strong variation of spiral galaxy shapes with colour indicating the presence of dust. The intrinsic shapes of spiral galaxies in the SDSS DR6 are consistent with flat discs with a mean and dispersion of thickness to diameter ratio of (21 ± 2) per cent, and a face-on ellipticity, e, of ln(e) = -2.33 ± 0.79. Not including the effects of dust in the model leads to discs that are systematically rounder by up to 60 per cent. More luminous spiral galaxies tend to have thicker and rounder discs than lower luminosity spirals. Both elliptical and spiral galaxies tend to be rounder for larger galaxies. The marginalized value of the edge-on r-band dust extinction E 0 in spiral galaxies is E 0 ≃ 0.45 mag for galaxies of median colours, increasing to E 0 = 1 mag for g - r > 0.9 and E 0 = 1.9 for the luminous and most compact galaxies, with half-light radii <2h -1 kpc.
Dynamic visual attention: searching for coding length increments

A visual attention system should respond placidly when common stimuli are presented, while at the same time keep alert to anomalous visual inputs. In this paper, a dynamic visual attention model based on the rarity of features is proposed. We introduce the Incremental Coding Length (ICL) to measure the perspective entropy gain of each feature. The objective of our model is to maximize the entropy of the sampled visual features. In order to optimize energy consumption, the limit amount of energy of the system is re-distributed amongst features according to their Incremental Coding Length. By selecting features with large coding length increments, the computational system can achieve attention selectivity in both static and dynamic scenes. We demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior accuracy in comparison to mainstream approaches in static saliency map generation. Moreover, we also show that our model captures several less-reported dynamic visual search behaviors, such as attentional swing and inhibition of return.
Evidence for pole switching in the magnetic cataclysmic variable BY Camelopardalis

An analysis of X-ray and optical light curves of the magnetic cataclysmic variable (MCV) BY Cam is presented. This system is one of three MCVs in which the spin period of the white dwarf and the binary orbital period differ by ∼1 per cent. As such these ‘BY Cam’ stars are important objects with which to probe the field structure of the magnetic white dwarf and ultimately the nature of synchronization of AM Her binaries. We confirm asynchronous rotation of the magnetic white dwarf with respect to the binary. We find evidence that the accretion stream accretes directly on to the white dwarf as in AM Her systems, but further, the stream impacts on to different magnetic poles over the course of the beat period. We present evidence that the optical and hard X-ray light curves modulate in phase, but together they are out of phase with the soft X-ray light curve. We confirm the spin down of the white dwarf which is expected to lead to the synchronization of the spin and orbital periods of BY Cam.
A Selective Cyclic Peptidic Human SIRT5 Inhibitor

In the current study, we discovered that a side chain-to-side chain cyclic pentapeptide harboring a central Nε-carboxyethyl-thiocarbamoyl-lysine residue behaved as a strong and selective (versus human SIRT1/2/3/6) inhibitor against human SIRT5-catalyzed deacylation reaction. This compound was also found to be proteolytically much more stable than its linear counterpart. This compound could be a valuable lead for developing stronger, selective, metabolically stable, and cell permeable human SIRT5 inhibitors.
Plasticity of muscle fibre number in seawater stages of Atlantic salmon in response to photoperiod manipulation

SUMMARY Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) were fed to satiety and reared from ∼60 g to 5000 g at ambient seawater temperatures. The effect of photoperiod manipulation on muscle growth was investigated from the start of the first sea winter. Continuous light treatment in winter/spring (1 November to 18 June) improved growth performance in fish, resulting in a 30% increase in mean body mass relative to the ambient photoperiod fish by 12 August, but had no effect on sexual maturation. Significant increases in body mass in the continuous light groups were observed after 126 days (P<0.01). The number of fast muscle fibres per trunk cross-section was determined in a subset of the fish and was 28.5% higher in the continuous light (799×103) than the natural day length (644×103) groups after only 40 days, corresponding to the period of decreasing natural day length. Subsequent rates of fibre recruitment were similar between treatments. At the end of the fibre recruitment phase of growth (combined June and August samples), the maximum number of fast muscle fibres was 23% higher in fish from the cages receiving continuous light (881×103±32×103; N=19) than in the ambient photoperiod cages (717×103±15×103; N=20) (P<0.001). Continuous light treatment was associated with a shift in the distribution of fibre diameters, reflecting the altered patterns of fibre recruitment. However, the mean rate of fibre hypertrophy showed no consistent difference between treatments. There was a linear relationship between the myonuclear content of isolated single fibres and fibre diameter. On average, there were 27% more myonuclei in 150 μm-diameter fibres in the continuous light (3118 myonuclei cm-1) than the ambient photoperiod (2448 myonuclei cm-1) fish. After 40 days, continuous light treatment resulted in a transient increase in the density of myogenic progenitor cells, identified using a c-met antibody, to a level 70% above that of fish exposed to natural light. It is suggested that short days inhibited the proliferation of myogenic progenitor cells and that this was overcome by transferring fish to continuous light, causing an increase in the number of times the myogenic precursor cells divided and/or a decrease in cell cycle time. The net increase in myogenic progenitor cells resulted in proportional increases in the number and myonuclear content of fibres. The subsequent hypertrophy of these additional fibres can explain the delayed increase in body mass observed with continuous light treatment.
Where Should You Attend While Driving?

Despite the advent of autonomous cars, it's likely - at least in the near future - that human attention will still maintain a central role as a guarantee in terms of legal responsibility during the driving task. In this paper we study the dynamics of the driver's gaze and use it as a proxy to understand related attentional mechanisms. First, we build our analysis upon two questions: where and what the driver is looking at? Second, we model the driver's gaze by training a coarse-to-fine convolutional network on short sequences extracted from the DR(eye)VE dataset. Experimental comparison against different baselines reveal that the driver's gaze can indeed be learnt to some extent, despite i) being highly subjective and ii) having only one driver's gaze available for each sequence due to the irreproducibility of the scene. Eventually, we advocate for a new assisted driving paradigm which suggests to the driver, with no intervention, where she should focus her attention.
Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection Outcomes with Freshly Ejaculated Sperms and Testicular or Epididymal Sperm Extraction in Patients with Idiopathic Cryptozoospermia

Background Cryptozoospermia (CO) is a situation in which spermatozoa cannot be observed in a fresh semen sample unless an extended centrifugation and microscopic search are performed. CO patients are suggested to use only intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) as infertility treatment. But still there is debate about the choice of sperm source in cryptozoospermic men candidate for ICSI. Objectives This study was conducted to evaluate fertility outcomes in men with idiopathic cryptozoospermia who were treated using ICSI with freshly ejaculated sperm and testis sperm extraction (TESE) or percutaneous epididymal sperm aspiration (PESA). Methods In this prospective cohort study carried out in an academic institution, 83 out of 92 couples with cryptozoospermia undergoing their first ICSI cycle were recruited. These patients were randomly allocated to two groups: group one (n = 42) who produced freshly ejaculated sperm and, group two (n = 41) who produced a sample by TESE or PESA. The groups were analyzed and compared in terms of fertilization rate, cleavage rate, embryo quality, implantation rate, and clinical pregnancy rate. Results There was a significant difference in fertilization rate, embryo quality, implantation rate, and pregnancy rates between the group of surgically extracted sperm and those of naturally ejaculated sperm using conventional ICSI (P < 0.05). Conclusions Sperm quality extracted by percutaneous PESA and TESE procedures increases fertility outcomes compared to naturally ejaculated sperm in men with idiopathic CO. More specifically, embryo quality, which is most relevant to fertility outcome, improved when surgically extracted sperm was used for ICSI.
A domain specific language framework for non-visual browsing of complex HTML structures

We present a general framework for navigating complex structures - specifically, tables, frames, and forms? found in web-pages. Our framework is based on an (automatically or manually created) program written in a domain specific language that captures the semantic structure of the table/frame/form as well as specifies the strategy to be used for navigating it. We describe our general framework and the domain specific language we have designed.
Do Judges Follow the Law When There Is No Fear of Reversal?

Some political scientists maintain that Supreme Court justices are more likely than other appellate court judges to vote their ideological preferences. It is argued that Supreme Court justices may vote their preferences without constraint from precedent because of a lack of electoral or political accountability, absence of ambition for higher office, and status as a member of a court of last resort that controls its own docket. While this explanation of attitudinal voting is widely accepted, it has never been tested. As a first test of the asserted institutional foundations of attitudinal voting, the voting of United States Courts of Appeals judges in tort diversity cases is examined. In such cases, appeals court judges benefit from all of the institutional features thought to advance attitudinal voting, except complete docket control. Despite these benefits, the votes of the appeals court judges appear to be highly constrained by law and precedent.
Epidemiologic Features of Inflammatory Bowel Disease in Guilan Province, North of Iran, During 2002-2012

BACKGROUND The geographical incidence of IBD varies considerably. This study aimed to survey the epidemiologic features of IBD in Guilan province, North of Iran, during ten years duration. METHODS In this retrospective cross-sectional study, we assessed the documents of 868 patients with IBD referred to private and governmental clinics of Guilan province between 2002 and 2012. Variables such as demographic data, risk factors, diagnosis, extraintestinal manifestations and type of treatment were collected. RESULTS Among 868 patients with IBD, 756 patients (87.1%) diagnosed as UC and 112 patients (12.9%) as CD. The mean age of patients with UC and CD was 46.73±15.79 and 40.15±14.27 years respectively. Male/female ratio in UC and CD was 0.92:1 and 0.75:1 respectively. The most common age of disease initiation in UC was 40-59 years and in CD 20-39 years (p<0.001). Extraintestinal manifestations were seen in 25.4 percent of patients with IBD. Most of patients were treated with combination of two drugs: salicylates and azathioprine (p<0.04). The incidence of IBD gradually increased during the past 4 years in Guilan province. CONCLUSION This study showed that CD were presented significantly more common in younger patients than UC and totally the disease was slightly more common in female.
Study of electrical equivalent model of the PMMA coated probe dipped in milk and milk adulterated with tap water

The aim of this work is to study the impedance characteristics at the electrode-electrolyte interface of the PMMA coated probe dipped in different percentages of adulterated (tap water) milk and propose a relevant equivalent circuit model for each adulteration using curve fitting program. The modeling of the probe with lumped element as well as distributed element is obtained using LEVMW software and the best-fit model is estimated. Also mathematical modeling of electrical equivalent circuit is derived and comparison of simulated data with experimental data of impedance of PMMA coated probe dipped in sample milk is done.
SOIL WATER CHARACTERISTIC 1 RETENTION OF WATER IN SOIL AND THE SOIL WATER CHARACTERISTIC CURVE ( Revised 09 / 13 / 2003 )

A soil water characteristic (SWC) curve describes the amount of water retained in a soil (expressed as mass or volume water content, θm or θv) under equilibrium at a given matric potential. A SWC is an important hydraulic property related to size and connectedness of pore spaces; hence strongly affected by soil texture and structure, and by other constituents including organic matter. Modeling water distribution and flow in partially-saturated soils requires knowledge of the SWC, therefore plays a critical role in water management and in prediction of solute and contaminant transport in the environment. Typically a SWC is highly nonlinear and is relatively difficult to obtain accurately. Because the matric potential extends over several orders of magnitude for the range of water contents commonly encountered in practical applications, the matric potential is often plotted on a logarithmic scale. Figure 1 depicts representative SWC curves for soils of different textures, demonstrating the effects of porosity (saturated water content) and the varied slopes of the relationships resulting from variable pore size distributions.
The Costs, Wealth Effects and Determinants of International Capital Raising: Evidence from Public Yankee Bonds

This paper examines the costs, wealth effects, and determinants of international capital raising for a sample of 260 public debt issues made by non-U.S. firms in the U.S. (Yankee) market. We find that investors demand economically significant premiums on bonds issued by firms that are located in countries that do not protect investors' rights and do not have a prior history of on-going disclosure. The results provide support for the literature that suggests better legal protections and more detailed information disclosure increases the price investors will pay for financial assets. We also find that the average stock price reaction to Yankee bond offerings is significantly positive and that abnormal returns are largest for first-time Yankee bond issuers. In addition, we show that foreign firms tend to issue in the Yankee market when the relative interest cost is low, indicating that potential differences in borrowing costs influence where firms choose to sell bonds.
Extra-Cellular Matrix Proteins Induce Matrix Metalloproteinase-1 (MMP-1) Activity and Increase Airway Smooth Muscle Contraction in Asthma

Airway remodelling describes the histopathological changes leading to fixed airway obstruction in patients with asthma and includes extra-cellular matrix (ECM) deposition. Matrix metalloproteinase-1 (MMP-1) is present in remodelled airways but its relationship with ECM proteins and the resulting functional consequences are unknown. We used airway smooth muscle cells (ASM) and bronchial biopsies from control donors and patients with asthma to examine the regulation of MMP-1 by ECM in ASM cells and the effect of MMP-1 on ASM contraction. Collagen-I and tenascin-C induced MMP-1 protein expression, which for tenascin-C, was greater in asthma derived ASM cells. Tenascin-C induced MMP-1 expression was dependent on ERK1/2, JNK and p38 MAPK activation and attenuated by function blocking antibodies against the β1 and β3 integrin subunits. Tenascin-C and MMP-1 were not expressed in normal airways but co-localised in the ASM bundles and reticular basement membrane of patients with asthma. Further, ECM from asthma derived ASM cells stimulated MMP-1 expression to a greater degree than ECM from normal ASM. Bradykinin induced contraction of ASM cells seeded in 3D collagen gels was reduced by the MMP inhibitor ilomastat and by siRNA knockdown of MMP-1. In summary, the induction of MMP-1 in ASM cells by tenascin-C occurs in part via integrin mediated MAPK signalling. MMP-1 and tenascin-C are co-localised in the smooth muscle bundles of patients with asthma where this interaction may contribute to enhanced airway contraction. Our findings suggest that ECM changes in airway remodelling via MMP-1 could contribute to an environment promoting greater airway narrowing in response to broncho-constrictor stimuli and worsening asthma symptoms.
The Effectiveness of Negotiation for Meaning Strategies on EFL Learners’ Oral Proficiency Development in Two-way Communication Tasks

This article investigates how Foreign Language learners’ proficiency affects meaning negotiation strategies in two-way communication tasks. First year Thai students majoring English (n = 30) participated in a 1 2 -week Listening and Speaking 1 course in the academic year 2011. The participants were placed in three groups with different based on their English placement scores: high, mid and low proficiency groups. They were trained to use five meaning negotiation strategies before taking part in three different two-way communication tasks which consisted of problem-solving task, information gap task and story-telling task. While performing the tasks, the participants’ conversations were audio-recorded and transcribed to analyze their strategies. In addition, their oral proficiency was analyzed by using authentic assessment throughout the study. The findings showed that negotiation for meaning strategies were facilitative in enhancing students’ oral proficiency development.
Introducing Scratch as the Fundamental to Study App Inventor Programming

In this paper, the experience and lessons learned from introducing Scratch as the fundamental to learn App Inventor programming for novice programmers is presented. In the first semester, eight graduate students were taught by basic programming concepts with Scratch. They then applied these concepts to learn App Inventor programming in next semester. Data including students' project codes, students' questionnaire and interviews were collected and analyzed. The results reveal that students applied many programming concepts to code implementation in projects. Furthermore, positive attitudes toward this teaching sequence of programming were found in questionnaire survey and interview results. Familiarizing Scratch not only enhanced students' experience to program in blocks-oriented visual environment in App Inventor, but also decreased the anxiety to project implementation of mobile applications. The above findings introduce future teaching to novice programmers on App Inventor programming.