Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exit Times of Diffusions with Incompressible Drift

Let $\Omega\subset\mathbb R^n$ be a bounded domain and for $x\in\Omega$ let $\tau(x)$ be the expected exit time from $\Omega$ of a diffusing particle starting at $x$ and advected by an incompressible flow $u$. We are interested in the question which flows maximize $\|\tau\|_{L^\infty(\Omega)}$, that is, they are most efficient in the creation of hotspots inside $\Omega$. Surprisingly, among all simply connected domains in two dimensions, the discs are the only ones for which the zero flow $u\equiv 0$ maximises $\|\tau\|_{L^\infty(\Omega)}$. We also show that in any dimension, among all domains with a fixed volume and all incompressible flows on them, $\|\tau\|_{L^\infty(\Omega)}$ is maximized by the zero flow on the ball.
What Is Planning in the Presence of Sensing?

Despite the existence of programs that are able to generate so-called conditional plans, there has yet to emerge a clear and general specification of what it is these programs are looking for: what exactly is a plan in this setting, and when is it correct? In this paper, we develop and motivate a specification within the situation calculus of conditional and iterative plans over domains that include binary sensing actions. The account is built on an existing theory of action which includes a solution to the frame problem, and an extension to it that handles sensing actions and the effect they have on the knowledge of a robot. Plans are taken to be programs in a new simple robot program language, and the planning task is to find a program that would be known by the robot at the outset to lead to a final situation where the goal is satisfied. This specification is used to analyze the correctness of a small example plan, as well as variants that have redundant or missing sensing actions. We also investigate whether the proposed robot program language is powerful enough to serve for any intuitively achievable goal.
A Comparison of the Effectiveness of School-Based Sex Education Programs: A Meta- Analysis by

The purpose of this meta-analytic review was to examine the most effective school-based sexual education approach to reduce adolescent risky sexual behaviors and its subsequent health consequences. Past research studies have shown that the health and social consequences of unprotected sexual activities among adolescents have led to increased rates of unintended teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the United States and has become a major public health concern. Many theories have been used to develop intervention methods to reduce these rates. The primary socialization theory (PST) looks at family, peer groups, and schools as primary sources to obtain behavioral norms for adolescents. The theory proposes that these early associations can be influential to adolescent sexual behavior patterns. It emphasizes the importance of school programs to establishing social and sexual norms among adolescents. The research questions in this study were developed to examine the efficiency of existing school-based programs, in response to the theory and extant knowledge. Several studies that examined the effects of different school interventions were analyzed and a number of independent variables were examined in connection to the findings. Results suggested that school intervention programs, examined for this paper, had no effect on the sexual activities of adolescents. Comprehensive sex education appeared to be more effective in decreasing adolescent pregnancy, birth, and STD rates. It was recommended that future studies examine the role early social constructs play in developing behavior norms and values in adolescents. Combined efforts that include modification to education, legislation, and social norms will be required to address this multi-factorial health issue.
A Fast Broadcast Tree Construction in Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks

One of the wireless mesh network's important features is each node can support more than one transmission rate. However, few previous literatures on the broadcast tree construction take this into account. Some researchers proposed to reduce the network wide broadcast transmission latency by taking advantage of the multi-rate nature. However, it suffers from a long construction time as analyzed in this paper, which brings in a long start-up delay. This paper proposes a fast broadcast tree construction algorithm (called rate first) by exploiting the relationship between the transmission rate and its range. Simulation results show that it does not only keep the broadcast transmission latency at the same level with the state- of-the-art work, but also accomplishes in a significantly short time.
Quantifying Security Issues in Reusable JavaScript Actions in GitHub Workflows

GitHub’s integrated automated workflow mechanism called GitHub Actions promotes the use of Actions as reusable building blocks in workflows. The majority of those Actions are developed in JavaScript and depend on packages distributed through the npm package manager. Those packages can suffer from security vulnerabilities, potentially affecting the Actions that rely on them. Using a dataset of 8,107 JavaScript Actions, we analysed to which extent dependencies on npm packages expose these Actions to vulnerabilities. We observed that JavaScript Actions tend to rely on dozens of npm packages, and that the vast majority of them depend on npm package releases with known vulnerabilities. Most of these vulnerabilities are caused by indirect dependencies, making it difficult for Actions maintainers to analyse their exposure to security vulnerabilities. Moreover, indirect dependencies are more likely to suffer from vulnerabilities of higher severity. We also studied to which extent security weaknesses occur in the source code of JavaScript Actions. To do so, we used CodeQL to detect security weaknesses, revealing that more than 54% of the studied JavaScript Actions contain at least one security weakness, and a small subset of these weaknesses recur frequently in their code. This justifies the need for further studies and more advanced tool support for addressing security issues in the GitHub Actions ecosystem.
Development of a Global River Water Temperature Model Considering Fluvial Dynamics and Seasonal Freeze‐Thaw Cycle

In this study, we developed a global river water temperature model that explicitly represents water and heat budgets. The model considers fluvial dynamics such as floodplain inundation and as well simulates seasonal freeze‐thaw cycles for temperate and arctic rivers, and it was found that proposed physically based parameterizations appropriately reproduced in situ observed seasonal variations in 12 global rivers. Theoretically, floodplain inundation has two major effects on water temperature variability: (1) “broadening” of water surfaces, which increases heat exchange with the atmosphere and friction with river bed, and (2) “shallowing” mean water depth, which increases the absorption rate of shortwave radiation per unit volume. In contrast to the broadening which affects both warming and cooling processes, the shallowing causes warming only and has dominant impacts mainly during the ice melting season in Arctic regions and the rainy season in the tropics. Furthermore, it was revealed that lateral mixing between channel and floodplain has a significant impact on determination of river water temperature. Although water temperature plays an important role in water quality and riverine material circulation linking terrestrial and coastal environments, it has not been considered in most Earth system models. The improvements in global‐scale river water temperature modeling demonstrated in this study will benefit for future Earth systems research.
Sequential Effects of Increasing Propofol Sedation on Frontal and Temporal Cortices as Indexed by Auditory Event-related Potentials

BackgroundIt is an open question whether cognitive processes of auditory perception that are mediated by functionally different cortices exhibit the same sensitivity to sedation. The auditory event-related potentials P1, mismatch negativity (MMN), and early right anterior negativity (ERAN) originate from different cortical areas and reflect different stages of auditory processing. The P1 originates mainly from the primary auditory cortex. The MMN is generated in or in the close vicinity of the primary auditory cortex but is also dependent on frontal sources. The ERAN mainly originates from frontal generators. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of increasing propofol sedation on different stages of auditory processing as reflected in P1, MMN, and ERAN. MethodsThe P1, the MMN, and the ERAN were recorded preoperatively in 18 patients during four levels of anesthesia adjusted with target-controlled infusion: awake state (target concentration of propofol 0.0 &mgr;g/ml), light sedation (0.5 &mgr;g/ml), deep sedation (1.5 &mgr;g/ml), and unconsciousness (2.5–3.0 &mgr;g/ml). Simultaneously, propofol anesthesia was assessed using the Bispectral Index. ResultsPropofol sedation resulted in a progressive decrease in amplitudes and an increase of latencies with a similar pattern for MMN and ERAN. MMN and ERAN were elicited during sedation but were abolished during unconsciousness. In contrast, the amplitude of the P1 was unchanged by sedation but markedly decreased during unconsciousness. ConclusionThe results indicate differential effects of propofol sedation on cognitive functions that involve mainly the auditory cortices and cognitive functions that involve the frontal cortices.
The Arabidopsis C3H2C3-Type RING E3 Ubiquitin Ligase AtAIRP1 Is a Positive Regulator of an Abscisic Acid-Dependent Response to Drought Stress1[C][W][OA]

Ubiquitination is a eukaryotic posttranslational protein modification that is mediated by the cascade of E1, E2, and E3 ubiquitin (Ub) ligases and is involved in regulating numerous cellular functions. In this study, we obtained 100 different Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) T-DNA insertion mutant plants in which RING E3 Ub ligase genes were suppressed and monitored their phenotypes in the presence of exogenous abscisic acid (ABA), a plant stress hormone. One of these loss-of-function mutants displayed ABA-insensitive phenotypes at the germination stage and was named atairp1 (for Arabidopsis ABA-insensitive RING protein 1). AtAIRP1 encodes a cytosolic protein containing a single C3H2C3-type RING motif with in vitro E3 Ub ligase activity. AtAIRP1 was significantly induced by ABA and drought stress. In contrast to atairp1 mutant plants, AtAIRP1-overexpressing transgenic plants (35S:AtAIRP1-sGFP) were hypersensitive to exogenous ABA in terms of radicle emergence, cotyledon development, root elongation, and stomatal closure. Ectopic expression of AtAIRP1-sGFP in atairp1 effectively rescued the loss-of-function ABA-insensitive phenotype. Both 35S:AtAIRP1-sGFP and atairp1/35S:AtAIRP1-sGFP plants accumulated higher amounts of hydrogen peroxide in response to exogenous ABA than did wild-type and atairp1 mutant plants. AtAIRP1 overexpressors were markedly tolerant to severe drought stress, as opposed to atairp1, which was highly susceptible. The levels of drought stress-related genes and basic leucine zipper transcription factor genes were up-regulated in the 35S:AtAIRP1-sGFP lines relative to wild-type and atairp1 mutant plants in response to ABA. Overall, these results suggest that AtAIRP1, a C3H2C3-type RING E3 Ub ligase, is a positive regulator in the Arabidopsis ABA-dependent drought response.
Is there a justification for differential a priori weighting in coding sequences? A case study from rbcL and Apocynaceae s.l.

Functional constraints are often assumed to influence the performance of nucleotide characters in phylogenetic analysis: First and second codon positions and sites of structural importance are considered to show less homoplasy. We investigate the performance of rbcL characters with differential functional constraints in a cladistic analysis of the plant family Apocynaceae s.l. (Sennblad and Bremer, in prep.). Performance is measured as rescaled consistency indices (rc). We show there is no significant difference in performance between parsimony-informative sites constrained by function in the enzyme, and sites that are not. Furthermore, the substitutions in third-codon position performed significantly better than those in first and second. The variation of rc within the different classes was high, however. Consequently, there is no support for routinely applied a priori differential weighting, neither of codon positions, nor of different functional classes from the present analysis of rbcL data in the Apocynaceae s.l.
Cell Death of Rice Roots under Salt Stress May Be Mediated by Cyanide-Resistant Respiration

Treatment with solutions containing high concentrations of NaCl (200 or 300 mM) induced cell death in rice (Oryza sativa L.) roots, as well as the application of exogenous hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). Moreover, the pretreatment with dimethylthiourea (DMTU), a scavenger of H2O2, partially alleviated the root cell death induced by 200 mM NaCl. These observations suggest that the cell death of rice roots under high salt stress is linked to H2O2 accumulation in vivo. NaCl stress increased the level of cyanide-resistant respiration to some extent and enhanced the transcript levels of the alternative oxidase (AOX) genes AOX1a and AOX1b in rice roots. High-salt-stressed (200 mM NaCl) rice roots pretreated with 1 mM salicylhydroxamic acid (SHAM), a specifi c inhibitor of alternative oxidase, exhibited higher levels of cell death and H2O2 production than roots subjected to either 200 mM NaCl stress or SHAM treatment alone. These results suggest that cyanide-resistant respiration could play a role in mediating root cell death under high salt stress. Furthermore, this function of cyanideresistant respiration could relate to its ability to reduce the generation of H2O2
Self-Views in Twenty Young Men Who Were Identified as Sexual Offenders in Adolescence: A Mixed-Method Study

Background/Aim: A positive view of oneself is important for most people, whereas a negative view can have serious consequences. For those who have committed acts that hurt their view of themselves it might be difficult to develop a positive self-view. Here, self-views in 20 men identified as adolescent sexual offenders were explored in a mixed methods study using interviews and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES). Methods: The interviews were coded by content analysis to find all utterances reflecting participants' views of themselves. These utterances were then grouped to indicate either positive or negative self-views; each group included seven sub-categories. Total scores for the RSES, and for its two sub-scales self-competence (assessment of qualities), and self-liking (personal value based on self-understanding and acceptance) were calculated. Results: Results showed that 19 participants rated themselves within or above the normative range and generally rated their self-competence higher than their self-liking. The men seemed to rate their self-esteem based on who they hoped they were now, but contradictory views of themselves arose in the interviews. Conclusions: The findings from this study support the idea that using both a questionnaire and an interview provide more information than any of these approaches on their own. For this reason we suggest that self-ratings need to be complemented by interviews, especially in clinical groups. Also, clinicians need to be aware of the discrepancy between self-rated capability and narrated self-worth when treating those who have been identified as sexual offenders.
Green Domino Incentives: Impact of Energy-aware Adaptive Link Rate Policies in Routers

To reduce energy consumption of lightly loaded routers, operators are increasingly incentivized to use Adaptive Link Rate (ALR) policies and techniques. These techniques typically save energy by adapting link service rates or by identifying opportune times to put interfaces into low-power sleep/idle modes. In this paper, we present a trace-based analysis of the impact that a router implementing these techniques has on the neighboring routers. We show that policies adapting the service rate at larger time scales, either by changing the service rate of the link interface itself or by changing which redundant heterogeneous link is active, typically have large positive effects on neighboring routers, with the downstream routers being able to achieve up-to 30% additional energy savings due to the upstream routers implementing ALR policies. Policies that save energy by temporarily placing the interface in a low-power sleep/idle mode, typically has smaller, but positive, impact on neighboring routers. Best are hybrid policies that use a combination of these two techniques. The hybrid policies consistently achieve the biggest energy savings, and have positive cascading effects on surrounding routers. Our results show that implementation of ALR policies can contribute to large-scale positive domino incentive effects, as they further increase the potential energy savings seen by those neighboring routers that consider implementing ALR techniques, while satisfying performance guarantees on the routers themselves.
Evidence for Ecological Speciation and Its Alternative

and the anonymous reviewers for useful comments. Supported by the NSF (grant DEB-0519777) and the NIH (grant GM56693). Natural selection commonly drives the origin of species, as Darwin initially claimed. Mechanisms of speciation by selection fall into two broad categories: ecological and mutation-order. Under ecological speciation, divergence is driven by divergent natural selection between environments, whereas under mutation-order speciation, divergence occurs when different mutations arise and are fixed in separate populations adapting to similar selection pressures. Tests of parallel evolution of reproductive isolation, trait-based assortative mating, and reproductive isolation by active selection have demonstrated that ecological speciation is a common means by which new species arise. Evidence for mutation-order speciation by natural selection is more limited and has been best documented by instances of reproductive isolation resulting from intragenomic conflict. However, we still have not identified all aspects of selection, and identifying the underlying genes for reproductive isolation remains challenging. I t took evolutionary biologists nearly 150 years, but at last we can agree with Darwin that the origin of species, " that mystery of mysteries " (1), really does occur by means of natural selection (2–5). Not all species appear to evolve by selection, but the evidence suggests that most of them do. The effort leading up to this conclusion involved many experimental and conceptual advances , including a revision of the notion of speciation itself, 80 years after publication of On the Origin of the Species, to a definition based on reproductive isolation instead of morphological differences (6, 7). The main question today is how does selection lead to speciation? What are the mechanisms of natural selection, what genes are affected, and how do changes at these genes yield the habitat, behavioral, mechanical, chemical, physiological, and other incompatibilities that are the reproductive barriers between new species? As a start, the many ways by which new species might arise by selection can be grouped into two broad categories: ecological speciation and mutation-order speciation. Ecological speciation refers to the evolution of reproductive isolation between populations or subsets of a single population by adaptation to different environments or ecological niches (2, 8, 9). Natural selection is divergent, acting in contrasting directions between environments , which drives the fixation of different alleles, each advantageous in one environment but not in the other. Following G. S. Mani and B. C. Clarke (10), I define mutation-order specia-tion as the evolution of reproductive isolation by …
Selectively Grouping Neurons in Recurrent Networks of Lateral Inhibition

Winner-take-all networks have been proposed to underlie many of the brain's fundamental computational abilities. However, notmuchisknown about how to extend the grouping of potential winners in these networks beyond single neuron or uniformly arranged groups of neurons. We show that competition between arbitrary groups of neurons can be realized by organizing lateral inhibition in linear threshold networks. Given a collection of potentially overlapping groups (with the exception of some degenerate cases), the lateral inhibition results in network dynamics such that any permitted set of neurons that can be coactivated by some input at a stable steady state is contained in one of the groups. The information about the input is preserved in this operation. The activity level of a neuron in a permitted set corresponds to its stimulus strength, amplified by some constant. Sets of neurons that are not part of a group cannot be coactivated by any input at a stable steady state. We analyze the storage capacity of such a network for random groupsthe number of random groups the network can store as permitted sets without creating too many spurious ones. In this framework, we calculate the optimal sparsity of the groups (maximizing group entropy). We find that for dense inputs, the optimal sparsity is unphysiologically small. However, when the inputs and the groups are equally sparse, we derive a more plausible optimal sparsity. We believe our results are the first steps toward attractor theories in hybrid analog-digital networks.
Phenotypic and genotypic characterization of coagulase negative staphylococci (CoNS) other than Staphylococcus epidermidis isolated from ocular infections.

PURPOSE The clinical significance of many species belonging to coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS) other than Staphylococcus epidermidis has been increasingly recognized. The present study attempted the characterization of non-S. epidermidis CoNS isolates of ocular origin. METHODS The isolates were characterized phenotypically by analytical profile index (API) and genotypically by fluorescent amplified fragment length polymorphism (FAFLP). In addition, the presence of genes that are likely to enhance virulence such as biofilm related genes (icaA and icaB) and methicillin resistance (mecA) were detected. RESULTS API identified seven different species with an identification score varying from 44% to 99%. S. haemolyticus and S. xylosus species identified by API showed good API scores when compared with all other species identified. FAFLP generated 12 clusters from all the isolates and appeared to be more discriminatory. API identification results corresponded well with the FAFLP results only in six clusters. Nearly 40% of isolates showed the presence of mecA and icaAB genes. CONCLUSIONS Identification results of these two methods corresponded only in 48.4% of the isolates suggesting that the battery of tests using API were not sufficient enough to identify all the species of CoNS. Therefore, it is sensible to rely on two or more identification methods particularly when API species identification has a lower score. FAFLP genotyping appears to be a reliable and rapid alternative identification method for CoNS that can be used in conjunction with any other phenotypic method.