Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How to Improve Bayesian Reasoning Without Instruction: Frequency Formats

Is the mind, by design, predisposed against performing Bayesian inference? Previous research on base rate neglect suggests that the mind lacks the appropriate cognitive algorithms. However, any claim against the existence of an algorithm, Bayesian or otherwise, is impossible to evaluate unless one specifies the information format in which it is designed to operate. The authors show that Bayesian algorithms are computationally simpler in frequency formats than in the probability formats used in previous research. Frequency formats correspond to the sequential way information is acquired in natural sampling, from animal foraging to neural networks. By analyzing several thousand solutions to Bayesian problems, the authors found that when information was presented in frequency formats, statistically naive participants derived up to 50% of all inferences by Bayesian algorithms. Non-Bayesian algorithms included simple versions of Fisherian and Neyman-Pearsonian inference. Is the mind, by design, predisposed against performing Bayesian inference? The classical probabilists of the Enlightenment, including Condorcet, Poisson, and Laplace, equated probability theory with the common sense of educated people, who were known then as "hommes eclaires. " Laplace (1814/ 1951) declared that "the theory of probability is at bottom nothing more than good sense reduced to a calculus which evaluates that which good minds know by a sort of instinct, without being able to explain how with precision" (p. 196). The available mathematical tools, in particular the theorems of Bayes and Bernoulli, were seen as descriptions of actual human judgment (Daston, 1981,1988). However, the years of political upheaval during the French Revolution prompted Laplace, unlike earlier writers such as Condorcet, to issue repeated disclaimers that probability theory, because of the interference of passion and desire, could not account for all relevant factors in human judgment. The Enlightenment view—that the laws of probability are the laws of the mind—moderated as it was through the French Revolution, had a profound influence on 19th- and 20th-century science. This view became the starting point for seminal contributions to mathematics, as when George Boole
Odd-frequency pairing in the Kondo lattice.

We discuss the possibility that heavy-fermion superconductors involve odd-frequency triplet pairing. A key technical innovation here is a Majorana representation for the local moments which avoids the use of a Gutzwiller projection. We employ the Kondo lattice model and develop a mean-field theory for odd-frequency pairing that entails pairing between local moments and conduction electrons, as described by a spinor order parameter. We confirm that the Meissner stiffness is positive and the state is stable. A residual band of gapless quasiparticles whose spin and charge coherence factors vanish linearly in energy, decouples from the condensate. The unusual energy dependence of these coherence factors leads to a ${\mathit{T}}^{3}$ NMR relaxation rate at a conduction electron site that coexists with a linear specific heat. Two verifiable predictions of the theory are (i) that a Korringa relaxation will fail to develop in heavy-fermion superconductors, even in the limit of strong pair breaking and severe gaplessness and (ii) that the hitherto unmeasured NMR relaxation rate at the actinide or rare-earth site will become exponentially activated in the superconducting phase.
The Curious Acoustic Behavior of Estuarine Snapping Shrimp: Temporal Patterns of Snapping Shrimp Sound in Sub-Tidal Oyster Reef Habitat

Ocean soundscapes convey important sensory information to marine life. Like many mid-to-low latitude coastal areas worldwide, the high-frequency (>1.5 kHz) soundscape of oyster reef habitat within the West Bay Marine Reserve (36°N, 76°W) is dominated by the impulsive, short-duration signals generated by snapping shrimp. Between June 2011 and July 2012, a single hydrophone deployed within West Bay was programmed to record 60 or 30 seconds of acoustic data every 15 or 30 minutes. Envelope correlation and amplitude information were then used to count shrimp snaps within these recordings. The observed snap rates vary from 1500–2000 snaps per minute during summer to <100 snaps per minute during winter. Sound pressure levels are positively correlated with snap rate (r = 0.71–0.92) and vary seasonally by ~15 decibels in the 1.5–20 kHz range. Snap rates are positively correlated with water temperatures (r = 0.81–0.93), as well as potentially influenced by climate-driven changes in water quality. Light availability modulates snap rate on diurnal time scales, with most days exhibiting a significant preference for either nighttime or daytime snapping, and many showing additional crepuscular increases. During mid-summer, the number of snaps occurring at night is 5–10% more than predicted by a random model; however, this pattern is reversed between August and April, with an excess of up to 25% more snaps recorded during the day in the mid-winter. Diurnal variability in sound pressure levels is largest in the mid-winter, when the overall rate of snapping is at its lowest, and the percentage difference between daytime and nighttime activity is at its highest. This work highlights our lack of knowledge regarding the ecology and acoustic behavior of one of the most dominant soniforous invertebrate species in coastal systems. It also underscores the necessity of long-duration, high-temporal-resolution sampling in efforts to understand the bioacoustics of animal behaviors and associated changes within the marine soundscape.
Distinct Subtypes of Somatostatin-Containing Neocortical Interneurons Revealed in Transgenic Mice

GABA-releasing inhibitory interneurons in the cerebral cortex can be classified by their neurochemical content, firing patterns, or axonal targets, to name the most common criteria, but whether classifications using different criteria converge on the same neuronal subtypes, and how many such subtypes exist, is a matter of much current interest and considerable debate. To address these issues, we generated transgenic mice expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) under control of the GAD67 promoter. In two of these lines, named X94 and X98, GFP expression in the barrel cortex was restricted to subsets of somatostatin-containing (SOM+) GABAergic interneurons, similar to the previously reported “GIN” line (Oliva et al., 2000), but the laminar distributions of GFP-expressing (GFP+) cell bodies in the X94, X98, and GIN lines were distinct and nearly complementary. We compared neurochemical content and axonal distribution patterns of GFP+ neurons among the three lines and analyzed in detail electrophysiological properties in a dataset of 150 neurons recorded in whole-cell, current-clamp mode. By all criteria, there was nearly perfect segregation of X94 and X98 GFP+ neurons, whereas GIN GFP+ neurons exhibited intermediate properties. In the X98 line, GFP expression was found in infragranular, calbindin-containing, layer 1-targeting (“Martinotti”) cells that had a propensity to fire low-threshold calcium spikes, whereas X94 GFP+ cells were stuttering interneurons with quasi fast-spiking properties, residing in and targeting the thalamo-recipient neocortical layers. We conclude that much of the variability previously attributed to neocortical SOM+ interneurons can be accounted for by their natural grouping into distinct subtypes.
Pointing gestures, vocalizations and gaze: two case studies

Conventional symbolic gestures like pointing appear at the end of children's first year. Gesture-word combinations can be observed in their second year as the transition towards two-word speech. But before gestures are combined with words, gaze and vocalizations complement them. These combinations might already carry pragmatic, social and semantic functions. We explore the issue of pointing/vocalization/gaze combinations with data taken from two longitudinal follow-ups of French-speaking children aged 8 to 23 months. Our analyses show that gaze alone, or prosody alone, do not seem to have a discriminating role in differentiating the traditional functions of pointing (proto-imperative versus proto-declarative). Prosody in gesture/vocal combinations seemed to be an earlier, more discriminating feature than gaze in indicating children's positioning to their interlocutor and their use of differentiated social-pragmatic functions. Our results show that no feature alone can help interpret "pointing events" but that fine-grained correlations between pointing gestures, prosody, gaze, nature and position of the target, position of the participants, interpretation of the adult could help distinguish between the different functions of "pointing events".
A Comparison of Epidural Anesthesia and Lumbar Plexus-Sciatic Nerve Blocks for Knee Surgery

OBJECTIVES The efficacy of combined lumbar plexus-sciatic nerve blocks was compared to epidural anesthesia in patients undergoing total knee surgery. PATIENTS AND METHODS The study included 80 American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) Physical Status I-III patients (age range 18 to 65) undergoing knee surgery. The patients were randomly divided into one of two groups. Epidural anesthesia was performed in the epidural anesthesia (EA) group (n=40), and the lumbar plexus and sciatic nerves were blockedin the lumbar plexus-sciatic nerve blocks (LPSB) group (n=40). For each patient, onset of sensory and motor block, degree of motor block, sign of sensory block in the contralateral lower limb for the lumbar plexus-sciatic nerve blocks group, success in providing adequate anesthesia, hemodynamic changes, time of first analgesic request, and patient and surgeon satisfaction with the anesthetic technique were recorded. RESULTS One patient in the epidural anesthesia group and three patients in the lumbar plexus-sciatic nerve blocks group required general anesthesia due to failed block. There were no significant differences between the two groups regarding the success of providing adequate anesthesia. Eight patients in the lumbar plexus-sciatic nerve blocks group developed contralateral spread. The onset of sensory-motor block and the time of the first analgesic request were significantly later in the lumbar plexus-sciatic nerve blocks group than in the epidural anesthesia group. Although there were no significant differences regarding patient satisfaction with the anesthetic technique between the two groups, surgeon satisfaction was significantly higher in the lumbar plexus-sciatic nerve blocks group than in the epidural anesthesia group. CONCLUSION The lumbar plexus -sciatic nerve blocks provide effective unilateral anesthesia and may offer a beneficial alternative to epidural anesthesia in patients undergoing total knee surgery.
Direct estimates of gear selectivity from multiple tagging experiments

A new method is introduced for estimating selectivity of fishing gear from tagging data in which data from many experiments are combined. Selectivity is modeled as a multiplicative function of length and experiment effects using a generalized linear model with a log link function and a binomial error structure. We apply this method to 137 tagging experiments on Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) conducted from 1954 to 1991. We show that the selectivity of otter trawls changed from the 1960s to the 1980s; during the earlier period the maximum probability of capture occurred at 55 cm and declined for longer fish, whereas in recent years the maximum probability is at approximately 60 cm and remains constant for longer fish. We discuss how selectivity estimates can be used to improve stock assessments. β &  23
Elementary physical education teachers' and students' perceptions of instructional alignment

ELEMENTARY PHYSICAL EDUCATION TEACHERS’ AND STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF INSTRUCTIONAL ALIGNMENT FEBRUARY 2003 ALISA R. JAMES, B.S. ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY M.S., UNIVERISTY OF ILLINOIS Ed. D. , UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Patt Dodds and Associate Professor Linda L. Griffin The purpose of the study was to examine students’ and teachers’ perceptions of instructional alignment in two different units of instruction. Participants were 24 4th grade students and two physical education teachers who turn taught the 4th grade class. Data were collected through field note observations and formal interviews using a semistructured interview guide with the physical education teachers and 13 students who had participated in both units. Document data were also collected in the form of district curriculum, assessment examples, and task cards. Interview data were analyzed qualitatively. Observational data were analyzed inductively using Cohen’s (1987) model of instructional alignment and Doyle’s (1977) ecological model. Results indicated that a misalignment existed between the teachers’ goals and what the students perceived they were to learn. The misalignment may have occurred as a result of the lack of congruence among the teachers’ goals and the fact that students’ achievement of the teachers’ goals was not tied to a grade.
Deep Residual Hashing

Hashing aims at generating highly compact similarity preserving code words which are well suited for large-scale image retrieval tasks. Most existing hashing methods first encode the images as a vector of hand-crafted features followed by a separate binarization step to generate hash codes. This two-stage process may produce sub-optimal encoding. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a deep architecture for supervised hashing through residual learning, termed Deep Residual Hashing (DRH), for an end-to-end simultaneous representation learning and hash coding. The DRH model constitutes four key elements: (1) a sub-network with multiple stacked residual blocks; (2) hashing layer for binarization; (3) supervised retrieval loss function based on neighbourhood component analysis for similarity preserving embedding; and (4) hashing related losses and regularisation to control the quantization error and improve the quality of hash coding. We present results of extensive experiments on a large public chest x-ray image database with co-morbidities and discuss the outcome showing substantial improvements over the latest state-of-the art methods.
Maternal Diet and Insulin-Like Signaling Control Intergenerational Plasticity of Progeny Size and Starvation Resistance

Maternal effects of environmental conditions produce intergenerational phenotypic plasticity. Adaptive value of these effects depends on appropriate anticipation of environmental conditions in the next generation, and mismatch between conditions may contribute to disease. However, regulation of intergenerational plasticity is poorly understood. Dietary restriction (DR) delays aging but maternal effects have not been investigated. We demonstrate maternal effects of DR in the roundworm C. elegans. Worms cultured in DR produce fewer but larger progeny. Nutrient availability is assessed in late larvae and young adults, rather than affecting a set point in young larvae, and maternal age independently affects progeny size. Reduced signaling through the insulin-like receptor daf-2/InsR in the maternal soma causes constitutively large progeny, and its effector daf-16/FoxO is required for this effect. nhr-49/Hnf4, pha-4/FoxA, and skn-1/Nrf also regulate progeny-size plasticity. Genetic analysis suggests that insulin-like signaling controls progeny size in part through regulation of nhr-49/Hnf4, and that pha-4/FoxA and skn-1/Nrf function in parallel to insulin-like signaling and nhr-49/Hnf4. Furthermore, progeny of DR worms are buffered from adverse consequences of early-larval starvation, growing faster and producing more offspring than progeny of worms fed ad libitum. These results suggest a fitness advantage when mothers and their progeny experience nutrient stress, compared to an environmental mismatch where only progeny are stressed. This work reveals maternal provisioning as an organismal response to DR, demonstrates potentially adaptive intergenerational phenotypic plasticity, and identifies conserved pathways mediating these effects.
Eindhoven University of Technology MASTER An exploratory study on the effects of multimodal feedback in bimanual interaction with active tangible interfaces

Disclaimer This document contains a student thesis (bachelor's or master's), as authored by a student at Eindhoven University of Technology. Student theses are made available in the TU/e repository upon obtaining the required degree. The grade received is not published on the document as presented in the repository. The required complexity or quality of research of student theses may vary by program, and the required minimum study period may vary in duration.
Lost in social space: Information retrieval issues in Web 1.5

This paper is concerned with the application of Web 2.0 technologies within a conventional institutional learning setting. After considering the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies vs Web 1.0 technologies and a framework for viewing social software in terms of groups, networks and collectives, we describe an instance of trying to use Elgg, a rich social application, to support a distance-taught course within a conventional face-to-face university. A number of issues are identified, some of which are related to Elgg’s interface but the biggest of which relate to the tensions between top-down and bottom-up control and the shifting contexts of personal, group, network and collective modes of engagement. These problems suggest that, in their current form, social technologies pose intractable difficulties in information organisation and retrieval when used for formal learning. We propose a range of solutions that make use of the wisdom of the crowd combined with human intervention. This paper addresses and extends themes explored in SIRTEL 07.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?

The scene: my college dorm’s basement bathroom on a Sunday morning early in my freshman year. As hungover girls crowded around the sinks, I caught a friend’s eye in the mirror. What happened when she left last night’s party with a boy neither of us had ever seen before? “Oh,” she said with a knowing look, “we hooked up. ” . They stumble home together late Saturday night, roll around in bed, then pass out. The next morning, it’s as if nothing happened.
Kinetics of binding, endocytosis, and recycling of EGF receptor mutants

This report describes analysis of factors which regulate the binding of EGF to EGF receptor, receptor internalization, and receptor recycling. Three different methods were used to inhibit high-affinity EGF binding as measured at equilibrium: treatment of cells with an active phorbol ester (PMA), binding of a mAb directed against the EGF receptor (mAb108), and truncation of most of the cytoplasmic domain of the receptor. These treatments reduced the rate at which low concentrations of EGF bound to cells, but did not affect the rate of EGF dissociation. We conclude that high-affinity EGF binding on living cells results from a difference in the apparent on rate of EGF binding. We then used these conditions and cell lines to test for the rate of EGF internalization at different concentrations of EGF. We demonstrate that internalization of the EGF receptor is stimulated roughly 50-fold at saturating concentrations of EGF, but is stimulated an additional two- to threefold at low concentrations (less than 1 nM). Four treatments reduce the rate of internalization of low concentrations of EGF to the rate seen at saturating EGF concentrations. Phorbol ester treatment and mAb108 binding to "wild type" receptor reduce this rate (and reduce high-affinity binding). Point mutation at Lys721 (kinase negative EGF receptor) and point mutation at Thr654 (removing a major site of protein kinase C phosphorylation) reduce the internalization rate, without affecting high-affinity binding. We suggest that while EGF stimulates endocytosis for all receptors, high-affinity receptors bind and are internalized more quickly than low-affinity receptors. Tyrosine kinase activity and the Thr654 region appear necessary for this response.
Topology-Aware Prediction of Virtual Network Function Resource Requirements

Network functions virtualization (NFV) continues to gain attention as a paradigm shift in the way telecommunications services are deployed and managed. By separating network function from traditional middleboxes, NFV is expected to lead to reduced capital expenditure and operating expenditure, and to more agile services. However, one of the main challenges to achieving these objectives is how physical resources can be efficiently, autonomously, and dynamically allocated to virtualized network function (VNF) whose resource requirements ebb and flow. In this paper, we propose a graph neural network-based algorithm which exploits VNF forwarding graph topology information to predict future resource requirements for each VNF component (VNFC). The topology information of each VNFC is derived from combining its past resource utilization as well as the modeled effect on the same from VNFCs in its neighborhood. Our proposal has been evaluated using a deployment of a virtualized IP multimedia subsystem, and real VoIP traffic traces, with results showing an average prediction accuracy of 90%, compared to 85% obtained while using traditional feed-forward neural networks. Moreover, compared to a scenario where resources are allocated manually and/or statically, our technique reduces the average number of dropped calls by at least 27% and improves call setup latency by over 29%.
On the Equivalence and Condition of Different Consensus Over a Random Network Generated by i.i.d. Stochastic Matrices

Our objective is to find a necessary and sufficient condition for consensus over a random network generated by i.i. d. stochastic matrices. We show that the consensus problem in all different types of convergence (almost surely, in probability, and in Lp for every p ≥ 1) are actually equivalent, thereby obtain the same necessary and sufficient condition for all of them. The main technique we used is based on the stability in a projected subspace of the concerned infinite sequences.
Serial Analysis of Gene Expression

The characteristics of an organism are determined by the genes expressed within it. A method was developed, called serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE), that allows the quantitative and simultaneous analysis of a large number of transcripts. To demonstrate this strategy, short diagnostic sequence tags were isolated from pancreas, concatenated, and cloned. Manual sequencing of 1000 tags revealed a gene expression pattern characteristic of pancreatic function. New pancreatic transcripts corresponding to novel tags were identified. SAGE should provide a broadly applicable means for the quantitative cataloging and comparison of expressed genes in a variety of normal, developmental, and disease states.
Incorporating Prior Knowledge and Previously Learned Information into Reinforcement Learning Agents

Reinforcement learning has received much attention in the past decade. The primary thrust of this research has focused on tabula rasa learning methods. That is, the learning agent is initially unaware of its environment and must learn or re-learn everything. We feel that this is neither realistic nor effective. While the agent may start out with little or no knowledge of its environment, it must be able to incorporate new information into the learning of subsequent tasks otherwise the learning effort is largely wasted. To address the shortcomings of tabula rasa learning, we present a general and intuitive approach for incorporating previously learned information and prior knowledge into the reinforcement learning process. We demonstrate the potential of this method on learning problems in the mobilerobot and grid-world domains, where results indicate that learning time can be decreased. We also demonstrate that multiple knowledge sources can be incorporated into the learning process.