Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Morphological convergence in a Mexican garter snake associated with the ingestion of a novel prey

Abstract Morphological convergence is expected when organisms which differ in phenotype experience similar functional demands, which lead to similar associations between resource utilization and performance. To consume prey with hard exoskeletons, snakes require either specialized head morphology, or to deal with them when they are vulnerable, for example, during molting. Such attributes may in turn reduce the efficiency with which they prey on soft‐bodied, slippery animals such as fish. Snakes which consume a range of prey may present intermediate morphology, such as that of Thamnophiine (Natricinae), which may be classified morphometrically across the soft–hard prey dietary boundary. In this study, we compared the dentition and head structure of populations of Thamnophis melanogaster that have entered the arthropod–crustacean (crayfish)‐eating niche and those that have not, and tested for convergence between the former and two distantly related crayfish specialists of the genus Regina (R. septemvittata and R. grahamii). As a control, we included the congener T. eques. Multivariate analysis of jaw length, head length, head width, and number of maxillary teeth yielded three significant canonical variables that together explained 98.8% of the variance in the size‐corrected morphological data. The first canonical variable significantly discriminated between the three species. The results show that head dimensions and number of teeth of the two Regina species are more similar to those of crayfish‐eating T. melanogaster than to non‐crayfish‐eating snakes or of T. eques. It is unclear how particular head proportions or teeth number facilitates capture of crayfish, but our results and the rarity of soft crayfish ingestion by T. melanogaster may reflect the novelty of this niche expansion, and are consistent with the hypothesis that some populations of T. melanogaster have converged in their head morphology with the two soft crayfish‐eating Regina species, although we cannot rule out the possibility of a morphological pre‐adaptation to ingest crayfish.
Spatiotemporal Variability of Land Surface Phenology in China from 2001-2014

Land surface phenology is a highly sensitive and simple indicator of vegetation dynamics and climate change. However, few studies on spatiotemporal distribution patterns and trends in land surface phenology across different climate and vegetation types in China have been conducted since 2000, a period during which China has experienced remarkably strong El Nino events. In addition, even fewer studies have focused on changes of the end of season (EOS) and length of season (LOS) despite their importance. In this study, we used four methods to reconstruct Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) dataset and chose the best smoothing result to estimate land surface phenology. Then, the phenophase trends were analyzed via the Mann-Kendall method. We aimed to assess whether trends in land surface phenology have continued since 2000 in China at both national and regional levels. We also sought to determine whether trends in land surface phenology in subtropical or high altitude areas are the same as those observed in high latitude areas and whether those trends are uniform among different vegetation types. The result indicated that the start of season (SOS) was progressively delayed with increasing latitude and altitude. In contrast, EOS exhibited an opposite trend in its spatial distribution, and LOS showed clear spatial patterns over this region that decreased from south to north and from east to west at a national scale. The trend of SOS was advanced at a national level, while the trend in Southern China and the Tibetan Plateau was opposite to that in Northern China. The transaction zone of the SOS within Northern China and Southern China occurred approximately between 31.4°N and 35.2°N. The trend in EOS and LOS were delayed and extended, respectively, at both national and regional levels except that of LOS in the Tibetan Plateau, which was shortened by delayed SOS onset more than by delayed EOS onset. The absolute magnitude of SOS was decreased after 2000 compared with previous studies, and the phenophase trends are species specific.
Can Marketing Data Aid Survey Research? Examining Accuracy and Completeness in Consumer-File Data

Survey research depends crucially on its ability to collect data from a targeted sample and for that sample to mirror the population of interest. Increasingly, survey firms are using data purchased from marketing firms such as Experian and Acxiom (consumer-file marketing data) as a means to improve correspondence between survey respondents and the general public. These data hold tremendous promise, not only for sampling at a reduced cost, but also for allowing researchers to adjust biases that often occur across groups in traditional survey research. Though these new techniques are gaining momentum and currency, there is to date no published research comparing marketing data to more traditionally sampled data. The benefits from using marketing data depend in part on whether the data are both accurate and complete. This paper is the first to systematically assess the quality of one source of consumer-file marketing data. Using a unique data set compiled by GfK KnowledgePanel®, we compare this source of ancillary marketing data with self-report data on the same respondents to determine the correspondence between the two. We also evaluate conditions under which consumer-file data are missing to determine whether patterns in missing data might introduce systematic biases when data are analyzed. Results indicate that the ancillary data differ from self-reported data on a variety of demographic factors. Further, data were missing in patterns that could not be easily addressed. The findings urge caution for those who hope to improve survey administration and design using currently available consumer-file data.
Selective Age Effects on Visual Attention and Motor Attention during a Cued Saccade Task

Objective. Visual information is often used to guide purposeful movement. However, older adults have impaired responses to visual information, leading to increased risk for injuries and potential loss of independence. We evaluated distinct visual and motor attention contributions to a cued saccade task to determine the extent to which aging selectively affects these processes. Methods. Nineteen healthy young (18–28 years) and 20 older (60–90 years) participants performed a cued saccade task under two conditions. We challenged motor attention by changing the number of possible saccade targets (1 or 6). Results. Older adults had difficulty in inhibiting unwanted eye movements and had greater eye movement inaccuracy in the hard condition when compared to the younger adults and to the easy condition. Also, an inverse relation existed between performance on the visual and motor components of the task in older adults, unlike younger adults. Conclusions. Older adults demonstrated difficulty in both inhibiting irrelevant saccade targets and selecting correct saccade endpoints during more complex tasks. The shift in relations among attention measures between the younger and older participants may indicate a need to prioritize attentional resources with age. These changes may impact an older adult's ability to function in complex environments.
Of Two Minds About Two Visual Systems

Milner and Goodale's work stands squarely at the centre of the debate on 'two cortical visual systems', and is often seen as offering a reinterpretation of the classic Ungerleider and Mishkin (1982) account of visual specialisation. Several 'problems' with this original account are presented, including reviewing the work in the context of the history of human neuropsychology. However, is argued that Milner and Goodale's reinterpretation offers much that is advantagous to our understanding of extra-striate cortical specialisation. In particular, the possible role of the '3rd stream' is reviewed, including discussion of work which casts doubt the claim that object recognition is restricted exclusively to the ventral stream. Rather, the 3rd stream (the inferior parietal lobule) is presented as offering an optional visuo-spatial resource - which would be used for object recognition under non-optimal circumstances. Such an interpretation might offer a compromise between the two competing 'two visual systems' accounts. Milner and Goodale's (1995) book stands squarely at the centre of the debate on 'two cortical visual systems' - the term used in the original Ungerleider and Mishkin (1982) article to carve up much of the neural basis of vision. The core of their argument was, of course, that visual information arrives in the primary visual areas, and is then parcelled out to two extra-striate regions: an occipito-temporal system concerned with object recognition (the ventral, or 'what' stream) and an occipito-parietal system concerned with spatial abilities (the dorsal, or 'where' stream). This 'two visual systems' model has become the catch-phrase in visual neuroscience for the last dozen-or-so years - and has its staunch adherents and vociferous opponents. I must confess that, strangely, I am both an
The impact of language ability and text variables on sixth-grade students' comprehension

ABSTRACT This study examined differences between normally achieving students and learning-disabled students with specific problems in reading comprehension (i.e., poor comprehenders) on measures of language ability, including overall ability, auditory processing, receptive and expressive language, and syntactic ability related to text retellings. Differences were related to performance on free and probed comprehension of expository passages varying in syntactic structure and discourse type. Poor comprehending students differed from normally achieving students on all language measures and in the manner in which reader-related and text-related variables predicted comprehension. Results support the positive role of syntactic ability in text comprehension, differences in free and probed recall responses, and the facilitating effect of structured text on recall.
Deliberative democracy, the public sphere and the internet

The internet could be an efficient political instrument if it were seen as part of a democracy where free and open discourse within a vital public sphere plays a decisive role. The model of deliberative democracy, as developed by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, serves this concept of democracy best. The paper explores first the model of deliberative democracy as a ‘two-track model’ in which representative democracy is backed by the public sphere and a developing civil society. Secondly, it outlines the normative concept of the public sphere and its basic ideas, namely the uncoerced communication of equal participants with equal access and equal rights to intervene or propose themes. The third part for discussion shows how the internet could fit into this concept of public sphere and influence the quality of political debates, and emphasizes the important role it can play in the political process.
Cultural Diversity: Students’ Perspectives

This article is the result of the interest of several faculty members in obtaining information from students about their experiences with cultural diversity. Faculty identified a need for baseline information from the student population to assess the impact of diversity programs on campus. A small, volunteer group of 7 nursing students met for one focus group to share their experiences. The discussion supported the need for ongoing faculty-student interactions to promote cultural sensitivity and knowledge development about diversity within this university population.
FeaBoost: Joint Feature and Label Refinement for Semantic Segmentation

We propose a novel approach, called FeaBoost, to image semantic segmentation with only image-level labels taken as weakly-supervised constraints. Our approach is motivated from two evidences: 1) each superpixel can be represented as a linear combination of basic components (e.g., predefined classes); 2) visually similar superpixels have high probability to share the same set of labels, i.e., they tend to have common combination of predefined classes. By taking these two evidences into consideration, semantic segmentation is formulated as joint feature and label refinement over superpixels. Furthermore, we develop an efficient FeaBoost algorithm to solve such optimization problem. Extensive experiments on the MSRC and LabelMe datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our FeaBoost approach in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods, especially when noisy labels are provided for semantic segmentation.
Nurturing the Spiritual in Children's Sexual Development

Drawing on data from a small-scale study into the developing sexual values and attitudes of 35 nine and ten year-old children, this article examines evidence for and against the existence of a spiritual dimension to the sexual understanding of preadolescent children. The study identifies interesting connections between spiritual and sexual development, highlights significant gender differences and draws attention to the central role of adults as guides to children's developing values. The findings are thus rich in implications for both policy and practice in sex education.
Use of Bacterial Quorum-Sensing Components to Regulate Gene Expression in Plants1[W]

We describe an efficient inducible system to regulate gene expression in plants based on quorum-sensing components found in Gram-negative bacteria such as Agrobacterium tumefaciens. These bacteria monitor their own population density by utilizing members of the N-acyl homoserine lactone family as inducers and a transcriptional activator as its receptor. In our study, we utilize the components from A. tumefaciens (i.e. 3-oxooctanyl-l-homoserine lactone [OOHL]) synthesized by the TraI protein and its receptor, TraR. When OOHL binds to TraR, it recognizes its specific cis-element, the tra box. We translationally fused the eukaryotic VP16 activation domain to the N terminus of TraR. In the presence of OOHL, the chimeric VP16:TraR transcriptional regulator induces reporter gene expression in moss (Physcomitrella patens), barley (Hordeum vulgare), and carrot (Daucus carota) cells, as well as in transgenic Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) seedlings. The inducible system shows a low level of reporter gene expression in the absence of the inducer. Foliar application and a floating-leaf assay in the presence of the inducer shows a 30- and 200-fold induction, respectively. Induction by foliar application of the inducer to whole seedlings is achieved within 8 h. The VP16:TraR activator also shows specificity for binding to its cognate inducer, OOHL. Based on microarray analyses, endogenous gene expression is not significantly affected due to overexpression of the TraR protein or presence of OOHL in either wild-type or lactone-inducible transgenic plants.
Family Instability and Young Children's School Adjustment: Callousness and Negative Internal Representations as Mediators.

This study examined the mediating roles of children's callousness and negative internal representations of family relationships in associations between family instability and children's adjustment to school in early childhood. Participants in this multimethod (i.e., survey, observations), multiinformant (i.e., parent, teacher, observer), longitudinal study included 243 preschool children (Mage = 4.60 years) and their families. Findings from the lagged, autoregressive tests of the mediational paths indicated that both children's callousness and negative internal representations of family relationships mediated longitudinal associations between family instability and children's school adjustment problems over a 2-year period (i.e., the transition from preschool to first grade). Findings are discussed in relation to the attenuation hypothesis (E. J. Susman, 2006) and emotional security theory (EST; P. T. Davies, M. A. Winter, & D. Cicchetti, 2006).
Texture Segmentation Using Sequential Kernel Density Approximation

In this paper, we present a scheme for texture segmentation using sequential kernel density approximation. For sequential kernel density approximation, every texture region's intensity distribution can be described to a mixture Gaussian model, and the number of mixture model need not be set in advance. Exploiting intensity distributions directly leads to a region based measure for well-suited texture discrimination. Together with the mean of image intensity, a novel texture discrimination method is obtained. A demonstration of the performance of the scheme in this paper is given in the scope of texture segmentation.
Developing support for siblings of young people with disabilities.

In the USA and UK, at least one in ten children and young people have special health, developmental and mental health concerns. Most of these people have typically developing brothers and sisters. As the people who, over the course of their lifetimes together, will be most involved with their siblings with special needs, it is important that typically developing brothers and sisters are involved and empowered in their growing relationship with their sibling. This article discusses the importance of providing relevant support for siblings and recognising, validating and including their unique perspectives. It presents the Sibshop model of sibling support, pioneered and directed by Donald Meyer at the Sibling Support Project in Seattle, USA, followed by Sally Conway's description of Sunsibs, a sibling participation model from Sunfield School in the UK adapted from Sibshops.
Charge transport effects in field emission from carbon nanotube-polymer composites

Electron field emission measurements have been made on multiwall arc discharge carbon nanotubes embedded in a conjugated polymer host. Electron emission at low nanotube content is observed and attributed to an enhancement of the applied electric field at the polymer/nanotube/vacuum interface where the electron supply through the film is attributed to fluctuation induced tunneling in a disordered percolation network. A high network resistance is attributed to a polymer coating surrounding each nanotube, resulting in high resistance nanotube-polymer-nanotube tunnel junctions. The potential use of carbon nanotube-polymer composites for field emission based displays is also discussed.
On Global Well-Posedness of the Lagrangian Averaged Euler Equations

We study the global well-posedness of the Lagrangian averaged Euler equations in three dimensions. We show that a necessary and sufficient condition for the global existence is that the bounded mean oscillation of the stream function is integrable in time. We also derive a sufficient condition in terms of the total variation of certain level set functions, which guarantees the global existence. Furthermore, we obtain the global existence of the averaged two-dimensional (2D) Boussinesq equations and the Lagrangian averaged 2D quasi-geostrophic equations in finite Sobolev space in the absence of viscosity or dissipation.
Calculation of activities in some gallium-based systems with a miscibility gap

The calculations of thermodynamic properties in some gallium-based systems with a miscibility gap - Ga-Tl, Ga-Hg and Ga-Pb are presented in this paper. The determi- nation of the gallium activities in the mentioned liquid alloys was based on their known phase diagrams using the Zhang-Chou method for calculating activities from phase dia- grams involving two liquid or solid coexisting phases. The activities of gallium in Ga-Tl, Ga-Hg and Ga-Pb system were calculated in the 973-1273 K, 573-873 K and 1000-1100 K, temperature ranges, respectively. The activities of the other component in all the investi- gated systems were obtained by the Gibbs-Duhem equation. The results of the calculations are compared with literature data.
Review of Research: When Girls and Boys Play: What Research Tells Us

Research on play suggests that children of all ages benefit from engaging in play activities (Bergen, 2004). With the recent emphasis on standards and testing, however, many teachers have felt the increased pressure to spend time on s t ructured learning events, leaving few moments of relaxation in a child’s day (Chenfeld, 2006). Many elementary schools have even reduced or eliminated recess times in an effort to give children more time to work on academics (Clements, 2000). That is unfortunate, as findings from studies of play indicate that play helps children to develop social, language, and physical skills. While beneficial for both, play often differs for girls and boys (see Gallas, 1998; Gurian & Stevens, 2005). This article reviews research related to the differences found between the genders as they play and the benefits that elementary children can gain from play. In addition, the authors include suggestions for educators regarding children’s play at school. SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Mapping Educational Inequality: Concentrations of Poverty among Poor and Minority Students in Public Schools

We examine high concentrations of poverty in public schools by comparing economic segregation in schools and in their corresponding attendance boundaries. To do this, we assign poverty rates from the 2000 census to maps of school attendance boundaries for 21 of the largest school districts and link this with data enumerating the number of poor children enrolled in each school. Results show that percentages of poor children in neighborhood schools is greater than in their corresponding catchment areas and this difference is greater when the majority of children living in a neighborhood are racial minorities. These patterns reflect the withdrawal of wealthier children from public schools and into private, charter and magnet schools. The result is that poor and minority children are much more concentrated in high-poverty public schools than they would be if all children attended their local schools.
The Vaccinia Virus E8R Gene Product: a Viral Membrane Protein That Is Made Early in Infection and Packaged into the Virions' Core

ABSTRACT Vaccinia virus (VV), a member of the poxvirus family, is unique among most other DNA viruses in that both transcription and DNA replication occur in the cytoplasm of the host cell. It was recently shown by electron microscopy (EM) that soon after viral DNA synthesis is initiated in HeLa cells, the replication sites become enwrapped by the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). In the same study, a novel VV membrane protein, the E8R gene product, that may play a role in the ER wrapping process was identified (N. Tolonen, L. Doglio, S. Schleich, and J. Krijnse Locker, Mol. Biol. Cell 12:2031-2046, 2001). In the present study, the gene product of E8R was characterized both biochemically and morphologically. We show that E8R is made predominantly early in infection but is packaged into the virion. On two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, the protein appeared as a single spot throughout the VV life cycle; however, in the assembled virion, the protein underwent several modifications which resulted in a change in its molecular weight and its isoelectric point. EM of labeled cryosections of infected HeLa cells showed that the protein localized to the ER and to membranes located on one side of the Golgi complex as early as 1 h postinfection. Late in infection, E8R was additionally associated with membranes of immature virions and with intracellular mature viruses. Although E8R is predominantly associated with membranes, we show that the protein is associated with viral cores; the protein is present in cores made with NP-40-dithiothreitol as well as in incoming cores, the result of the viral entry process, early in infection. Finally, we show that E8R can be phosphorylated in vitro by the viral kinase F10L. It is able to bind DNA in vitro, and this binding may be modulated by phosphorylation by F10L. A putative role of the E8R gene product throughout the VV life cycle is discussed.