Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evidence for the Higher Importance of Signal Size Over Body Size in Aposematic Signaling in Insects

Abstract To understand the evolution of warning coloration, it is important to distinguish between different aspects of conspicuous color patterns. As an example, both pattern element size and body size of prey have been shown to enhance the effectiveness of warning signals. However, it is unclear whether the effect of body size is merely a side effect of proportionally increasing pattern elements, or if there is an effect of body size per se. These possibilities were evaluated by offering different sized artificial caterpillars with either fixed or proportionally increasing aposematic color signal elements to wild great tits, Parus major L. (Passeriformes: Paridae). The birds' hesitation time to attack each “caterpillar” was used as a measure of the warning effect. The hesitation time showed a significant, positive size-dependence with the caterpillars whose pattern elements increased proportionally with their body size. In contrast, no size dependence was found in the larvae with fixed-size signal elements. Such a difference in mortality curves is consistent with the idea that pattern element size is a more important aspect than body size in enhancing a warning signal. Since no evidence of an effect of body size per se on signal efficiency was found, this study does not support the hypothesis that aposematic insects gain more from large size than cryptic ones.
The role and role context of the Lebanese school principal

This study provides empirical data about the role and work context of the school principal in the Lebanon. The study applied grounded theory methods in collecting and analysing the data. The data were collected through a series of open-ended interviews with 53 secondary school principals, and focus group interviews with 8 principals from public as well as private schools. The results show that Lebanese school principals, despite a wide variety of backgrounds, share a core set of role expectations. Discussion of the results compares the role and role demands of the Lebanese school principal to what has been reported in empirical studies of principals in Western countries. While the results reveal many role similarities, it is also clear that the socio-political and cultural conditions in Lebanon shape the role and role demands of Lebanese school principalship. In contrast to their Western counterparts, principals in Lebanon: (1) give limited attention to the instructional dimension of the role; (2) assume limited responsibilities as the agent for school change and improvement; (3) adopt an authoritarian orientation in enacting the role; and (4) hold a highly idiosyncratic ‘craft’ conception of the work of the principal. The study’s results reinforce the need for more in-depth cross-cultural comparative studies of education professionals.
The interplay of possible language teacher selves in professional development choices

Empirical research on possible selves proliferates in the literature on psychology, yet it is only in the latter half of the 2000s that possible selves were exploited in applied linguistics fields. Kubanyiova’s (2007, 2009) recent mixed-methods study introduced the concept of ‘possible language teacher selves’ as a construct through which to explore language teacher development. Aiming to add to empirical findings in the area, this qualitative study was conducted to investigate the roles that possible language teacher selves play in the teacher development choices of seven in-service Korean English teachers. Findings highlighted clearly constructed actual and possible language teachers selves. Lack of language self-efficacy was found to be near synonymous to lack of teaching self-efficacy for these participants, and the negative affect surrounding this lack of language self-efficacy emerged as the primary drive to engage in teacher development in this context. Two key motivational patterns of the participants’ possible language teacher selves emerged: teachers were either guided by a central need to repair perceived inadequacies of the self, or to enhance the self. A third motive, adhering to normative obligations, was found to be the least significant in driving choices for teacher development.
Detection of Epstein-Barr virus in invasive breast cancers.

BACKGROUND Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) may be a cofactor in the development of different malignancies, including several types of carcinomas. In this study, we investigated the presence of EBV in human breast cancers. METHODS We used tissues from 100 consecutive primary invasive breast carcinomas, as well as 30 healthy tissues adjacent to a subset of the tumors. DNA was amplified by use of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), with the primers covering three different regions of the EBV genome. Southern blot analysis was performed by use of a labeled EBV BamHI W restriction fragment as the probe. Infected cells were identified by means of immunohistochemical staining, using monoclonal antibodies directed against the EBV nuclear protein EBNA-1. RESULTS We were able to detect the EBV genome by PCR in 51% of the tumors, whereas, in 90% of the cases studied, the virus was not detected in healthy tissue adjacent to the tumor (P<.001). The presence of the EBV genome in breast tumors was confirmed by Southern blot analysis. The observed EBNA-1 expression was restricted to a fraction (5%-30%) of tumor epithelial cells. Moreover, no immunohistochemical staining was observed in tumors that were negative for EBV by PCR. EBV was detected more frequently in breast tumors that were hormone-receptor negative (P =.01) and those of high histologic grade (P =.03). EBV detection in primary tumors varied by nodal status (P =.01), largely because of the difference between subjects with more than three lymph nodes versus less than or equal to three lymph nodes involved (72% versus 44%). CONCLUSIONS Our results demonstrated the presence of the EBV genome in a large subset of breast cancers. The virus was restricted to tumor cells and was more frequently associated with the most aggressive tumors. EBV may be a cofactor in the development of some breast cancers.
A Promoter Polymorphism in the CD59 Complement Regulatory Protein Gene in Donor Lungs Correlates With a Higher Risk for Chronic Rejection After Lung Transplantation

Complement activation leads primarily to membrane attack complex formation and subsequent target cell lysis. Protection against self‐damage is regulated by complement regulatory proteins, including CD46, CD55, and CD59. Within their promoter regions, single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are present that could influence transcription. We analyzed these SNPs and investigated their influence on protein expression levels. A single SNP configuration in the promoter region of CD59 was found correlating with lower CD59 expression on lung endothelial cells (p = 0.016) and monocytes (p = 0.013). Lung endothelial cells with this SNP configuration secreted more profibrotic cytokine IL‐6 (p = 0.047) and fibroblast growth factor β (p = 0.036) on exposure to sublytic complement activation than cells with the opposing configuration, whereas monocytes were more susceptible to antibody‐mediated complement lysis (p < 0.0001). Analysis of 137 lung transplant donors indicated that this CD59 SNP configuration correlates with impaired long‐term survival (p = 0.094) and a significantly higher incidence of bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (p = 0.046) in the recipient. These findings support a role for complement in the pathogenesis of this posttransplant complication and are the first to show a deleterious association of a donor CD59 promoter polymorphism in lung transplantation.
Field analysis of a novel interaction structure for high power sub-THz wave coaxial cavity gyrotrons

In this paper, a novel interaction structure for high power sub-THz wave coaxial cavity gyrotrons has been field-analyzed and mathematical formulation for its characteristic equation is presented. The proposed coaxial structure consists of an open-ended cavity resonator with a coaxial insert consisting triangular slots or corrugations. Surface Impedance Approach is followed for analysis purpose owing to its simplicity. Analysis has been done assuming the field inside the slots to be homogenous, which occurs when the number of slots is much higher than the azimuthal index of the mode. The presence of corrugations on the insert(inner rod) significantly alters the eigenvalues of the structure, which depends on the ratio of outer to inner radii(C=R0/Ri) and by incorporating a tapered inner rod, quality factor of the desired and competing modes can be controlled which leads to better mode selection with reduced competition.
The Peaceful Co-existence of Input Frequency and Structural Intervention Effects on the Comprehension of Complex Sentences in German-Speaking Children

The predictions of two contrasting approaches to the acquisition of transitive relative clauses were tested within the same groups of German-speaking participants aged from 3 to 5 years old. The input frequency approach predicts that object relative clauses with inanimate heads (e.g., the pullover that the man is scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with an animate head (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). In contrast, the structural intervention approach predicts that object relative clauses with two full NP arguments mismatching in number (e.g., the man that the boys are scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with number-matching NPs (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). These approaches were tested in two steps. First, we ran a corpus analysis to ensure that object relative clauses with number-mismatching NPs are not more frequent than object relative clauses with number-matching NPs in child directed speech. Next, the comprehension of these structures was tested experimentally in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds respectively by means of a color naming task. By comparing the predictions of the two approaches within the same participant groups, we were able to uncover that the effects predicted by the input frequency and by the structural intervention approaches co-exist and that they both influence the performance of children on transitive relative clauses, but in a manner that is modulated by age. These results reveal a sensitivity to animacy mismatch already being demonstrated by 3-year-olds and show that animacy is initially deployed more reliably than number to interpret relative clauses correctly. In all age groups, the animacy mismatch appears to explain the performance of children, thus, showing that the comprehension of frequent object relative clauses is enhanced compared to the other conditions. Starting with 4-year-olds but especially in 5-year-olds, the number mismatch supported comprehension—a facilitation that is unlikely to be driven by input frequency. Once children fine-tune their sensitivity to verb agreement information around the age of four, they are also able to deploy number marking to overcome the intervention effects. This study highlights the importance of testing experimentally contrasting theoretical approaches in order to characterize the multifaceted, developmental nature of language acquisition.
Criminal Career Research: A Review of Recent Evidence

A criminal career may consist of a single, undiscovered, venial lapse or a high level of sustained involvement in serious crime. Modern criminal career research derives largely from policy concerns about the likely crime preventive effects of incapacitative sanctions. Consequently, criminal career research tends to be more concerned with sustained than with venial criminal careers. If a small number of individuals commits a disproportionate number of serious criminal acts and if they can be identified and confined early in their careers, the argument goes, significant numbers of serious criminal offenses could be prevented. The leading criminal career research, much of it unpublished, has produced useful results, but cannot give much guidance on sanctions use to policy makers. Less than 15 percent of the general population will be arrested for commission of a felony and about one-half of these will never be arrested for another. Very roughly, only 5 percent of the population will demonstrate the beginnings of a sustained criminal career, but once three contacts with the police have been recorded, the probability of another will be very high. Criminal careers preponderantly begin early in life, commonly between the ages of fourteen and seventeen and often for expressive reasons. Serious criminal careers are often continued for instrumental reasons. Repetitive offenders tend not to specialize narrowly; the mix of offenses may shift from one stage of a sustained criminal career to the next, often increasing in seriousness, but not as a consistent rule. Offense rates depend on the offender's age, his criminal record, and the offense type committed. Arrest, conviction, and incarceration rates increase as the career advances, unlike offense rates, which tend to decline. Continuing criminal careers are not necessarily marked by a growth in sophistication and income or of geographic range. Although it is clear that a small portion of the universe of known offenders commits a disproportionate number of offenses, the data accumulated to date on criminal careers do not permit us, with acceptable confidence, to identify career criminals prospectively or to predict the crime reduction effects of alternative sentencing policies.
Gaussian processes for flexible robot learning

As robotic systems are becoming more complex and as they are developed for increasingly realistic environments, the role of machine learning within robotics becomes even more central than it has been. Robot learning tasks typically raise a number of hard requirements for learning methods including accurate estimation of uncertainty, dealing with inhomogeneously sampled data, computational efficiency, and high modeling accuracy. We show in this thesis that Gaussian processes as a machine learning method have the potential to address these issues. Gaussian processes are a Bayesian approach to function regression, that is, they allow to place a prior distribution over the space of functions. The approach has become one of the standard tools for solving non-linear regression problems, which are central to many machine learning problems. While the modeling capabilities of Gaussian processes are as high as for state-of-the-art alternatives, the basic concept is exceptionally clear and easy to implement. We present Gaussian process-based solutions to a wide variety of problems encountered in robotics. This includes the modeling of laser and gas sensors, the interpretation of camera images, the detection of failures during mobile robot navigation, and the estimation of probabilistic terrain maps from noisy range measurements. Furthermore, we introduce an approach that allows a robot to learn a model of its own body from scratch using only visual self-observation. In each of the studied problem domains, our solutions have been evaluated empirically using real and simulated data. As a contribution to machine learning in general, we study and improve extensions of the standard Gaussian process model, which can be used flexibly to solve non-robotics learning tasks also. This includes an approach to dealing with spatially-varying observation noise and one for adapting the function smoothness locally. We furthermore derive sparse approximations for these extensions to be able to apply the models to large data sets and in online settings.
Using text mining to locate concepts in execution traces

Concept location is a key activity during software modernization since it allows maintainers to exactly determine what pieces of source code support a specific concept. When concepts supported by an information system are getting outdated or misaligned, concept location becomes a time-consuming and error-prone task. Moreover, information systems embed significant business knowledge over time that is neither present nor documented anywhere else. For this reason, this paper proposes an approach to locate concepts in execution traces, which contain the actual and current information derived from the execution of the existing code. This approach, based on text segmentation tools, first retrieves and depicts relevant information from the execution traces, and then, it provides a mapping between such information and particular pieces of source code. The main idea of the approach is to take the file of the trace as text where the content of each function (i.e., method) appearing in the trace is a sentence composing the text and then applying the C99 algorithm to segment the text to a thematically coherent segments. The C99 is the state of the art algorithm proposed in text mining community to segment natural text. Each produced segment is composed by a set of functions or methods and bears a concept. Also, under this idea all techniques, proposed by text mining community, for text segmentation will be accessible to the software evolution community. We evaluated our approach on different execution scenarios of JHotDraw and ArgoUML.
MAX-DOAS observations of aerosols, formaldehyde and nitrogen dioxide in the Beijing area: comparison of two profile retrieval approaches

Abstract. A 4-year data set of MAX-DOAS observations in the Beijing area (2008–2012) is analysed with a focus on NO2, HCHO and aerosols. Two very different retrieval methods are applied. Method A describes the tropospheric profile with 13 layers and makes use of the optimal estimation method. Method B uses 2–4 parameters to describe the tropospheric profile and an inversion based on a least-squares fit. For each constituent (NO2, HCHO and aerosols) the retrieval outcomes are compared in terms of tropospheric column densities, surface concentrations and "characteristic profile heights" (i.e. the height below which 75% of the vertically integrated tropospheric column density resides). We find best agreement between the two methods for tropospheric NO2 column densities, with a standard deviation of relative differences below 10%, a correlation of 0.99 and a linear regression with a slope of 1.03. For tropospheric HCHO column densities we find a similar slope, but also a systematic bias of almost 10% which is likely related to differences in profile height. Aerosol optical depths (AODs) retrieved with method B are 20% high compared to method A. They are more in agreement with AERONET measurements, which are on average only 5% lower, however with considerable relative differences (standard deviation ~ 25%). With respect to near-surface volume mixing ratios and aerosol extinction we find considerably larger relative differences: 10 ± 30, −23 ± 28 and −8 ± 33% for aerosols, HCHO and NO2 respectively. The frequency distributions of these near-surface concentrations show however a quite good agreement, and this indicates that near-surface concentrations derived from MAX-DOAS are certainly useful in a climatological sense. A major difference between the two methods is the dynamic range of retrieved characteristic profile heights which is larger for method B than for method A. This effect is most pronounced for HCHO, where retrieved profile shapes with method A are very close to the a priori, and moderate for NO2 and aerosol extinction which on average show quite good agreement for characteristic profile heights below 1.5 km. One of the main advantages of method A is the stability, even under suboptimal conditions (e.g. in the presence of clouds). Method B is generally more unstable and this explains probably a substantial part of the quite large relative differences between the two methods. However, despite a relatively low precision for individual profile retrievals it appears as if seasonally averaged profile heights retrieved with method B are less biased towards a priori assumptions than those retrieved with method A. This gives confidence in the result obtained with method B, namely that aerosol extinction profiles tend on average to be higher than NO2 profiles in spring and summer, whereas they seem on average to be of the same height in winter, a result which is especially relevant in relation to the validation of satellite retrievals.
The environmental and evolutionary history of Lake Ohrid (FYROM/Albania): Interim results from the SCOPSCO deep drilling project

This study reviews and synthesises existing information generated within the SCOPSCO (Scientific Collaboration on Past Speciation Conditions in Lake Ohrid) deep drilling project. The four main aims of the project are to infer (i) the age and origin of Lake Ohrid (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia/Republic of Albania), (ii) its regional seismotectonic history, (iii) volcanic activity and climate change in the central northern Mediterranean region, and (iv) the influence of major geological events on the evolution of its endemic species. The Ohrid basin formed by transtension during the Miocene, opened during the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and the lake established de novo in the still relatively narrow valley between 1.9 and 1.3 Ma. The lake history is recorded in a 584 m long sediment sequence, which was recovered within the framework of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) from the central part (DEEP site) of the lake in spring 2013. To date, 54 tephra and cryptotephra horizons have been found in the upper 460 m of this sequence. Tephrochronology and tuning biogeochemical proxy data to orbital parameters revealed that the upper 247.8 m represent the last 637 kyr. The multi-proxy data set covering these 637 kyr indicates long-term variability. Some proxies show a change from generally cooler and wetter to drier and warmer glacial and interglacial periods around 300 ka. Short-term environmental change caused, for example, by tephra deposition or the climatic impact of millennial-scale Dansgaard–Oeschger and Heinrich events are superimposed on the long-term trends. Evolutionary studies on the extant fauna indicate that Lake Ohrid was not a refugial area for regional freshwater animals. This differs from the surrounding catchment, where the mountainous setting with relatively high water availability provided a refuge for temperate and montane trees during the relatively cold and dry glacial periods. Although Lake Ohrid experienced significant environmental change over the last 637 kyr, preliminary molecular data from extant microgastropod species do not indicate significant changes in diversification rate during this period. The reasons for this constant rate remain largely unknown, but a possible lack of environmentally induced extinction events in Lake Ohrid and/or the high resilience of the ecosystems may have played a role.
Current-dependent block of endplate channels by guanidine derivatives

Methyl- and ethylguanidine block the endplate current in frog muscle. Both derivatives blocked inward-going endplate currents without affecting outward endplate currents. Repetitive stimulation that evoked several inward endplate currents enhanced the block, which suggests that these agents interact with open endplate channels. The relative conductance vs. potential curve exhibited a transition from a low to a high value near the reversal potential for the endplate current, both in normal and in 50% Na solution. In the latter solution, the reversal potential for endplate current was shifted by a mean value of 16 mV in the direction of hyperpolarization. The results suggest that methyl- and ethylguanidine block open endplate channels in a manner dependent on the direction of current flow rather than on the membrane potential.