Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ON DESIGN-WEIGHTED LOCAL FITTING AND ITS RELATION TO THE HORVITZ-THOMPSON ESTIMATOR

Weighting is a widely used concept in many fields of statistics and has frequently caused controversies on its justification and benefit. In this paper, we analyze design-weighted versions of the well-known local polynomial regression esti- mators, derive their asymptotic bias and variance, and observe that the asymptoti- cally optimal weights are in conflict with (practically motivated) weighting schemes previously proposed in the literature. We investigate this conflict using theory and simulation, and find that the problem has a surprising counterpart in sampling theory, leading us back to the discussion on the Horvitz-Thompson estimator and Basu's (1971) elephants. In this light one might consider our results as an asymp- totic and nonparametric version of the Horvitz-Thompson theorem. The crucial point is that bias-minimizing weights can make estimators extremely vulnerable to outliers in the design space and have therefore to be used with particular care.
A Frequency Domain State-Space Approach to LS Estimation and Its Application in Turbo Equalization

A frequency domain state-space approach to the least squares (LS) estimation for finite impulse response (FIR) system identification is proposed by exploiting the Toeplitz structure of the data matrix, leading to two low-complexity FFT (fast Fourier transform)-based unbiased recursive estimators. The proposed recursive estimators are applied to the smoothing estimation of time-varying frequency selective channels in turbo equalization systems, and channel estimation approaches with complexity O(logL) per symbol are developed, where L is the number of channel taps.
Mutualism favours higher host specificity than does antagonism in plant–herbivore interaction

Coevolved mutualisms often exhibit high levels of partner specificity. Obligate pollination mutualisms, such as the fig–fig wasp and yucca–yucca moth systems, represent remarkable examples of such highly species-specific associations; however, the evolutionary processes underlying these patterns are poorly understood. The prevailing hypothesis suggests that the high degree of specificity in pollinating seed parasites is the fortuitous result of specialization in their ancestors because these insects are derived from endophytic herbivores that are themselves highly host-specific. Conversely, we show that in the Glochidion–Epicephala obligate pollination mutualism, pollinators are more host-specific than are closely related endophytic leaf-feeding taxa, which co-occur with Epicephala on the same Glochidion hosts. This difference is probably not because of shifts in larval diet (i.e. from leaf- to seed-feeding), because seed-eating lepidopterans other than Epicephala do not show the same degree of host specificity as Epicephala. Species of a tentative sister group of Epicephala each attack several distantly related plants, suggesting that the evolution of strict host specificity is tied to the evolution of pollinator habit. These results suggest that mutualists can attain higher host specificity than that of their parasitic ancestors and that coevolutionary selection can be a strong promoter of extreme reciprocal specialization in mutualisms.
The Effect of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy Program on Stress, Self-esteem and Depression of Nursing Students

The purpose of this study was to identify the effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy(MBCT) program on stress, self-esteem and depression of nursing college students. Thirty-eight students were enrolled by convenience sampling in this study and allocated to control (n=20) and experimental group (n=18). In the intervention group, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy program was applied over 8 sessions, while the control group received material of MBCT program. The data were analyzed using the Independent ttest, Chi-square test and Fisher‘s exact test. There was significant difference in stress and depression between the groups, but the self-esteem did not show any significant effect. The results showed that MBCT program is effective to regulate stress and depression of nursing college students and a further study is needed to explore the effect of MBCT program on stress and depression of nursing college students. ■ keyword :∣Nursing Student∣MBCT∣Stress∣Self-esteem∣Depression∣ 접수일자 : 2018년 11월 27일 수정일자 : 2018년 12월 27일 심사완료일 : 2019년 01월 09일 교신저자 : 김명아, e-mail : myungahk@cha.ac. kr 마음챙김기반 인지치료(MBCT) 프로그램이 간호대학생의 스트레스, 자아존중감 및 우울에 미치는 영향 211
Siamese neural network based gait recognition for human identification

As the remarkable characteristics of remote accessed, robust and security, gait recognition has gained significant attention in the biometrics based human identification task. However, the existed methods mainly employ the handcrafted gait features, which cannot well handle the indistinctive inter-class differences and large intra-class variations of human gait in real-world situation. In this paper, we have developed a Siamese neural network based gait recognition framework to automatically extract robust and discriminative gait features for human identification. Different from conventional deep neural network, the Siamese network can employ distance metric learning to drive the similarity metric to be small for pairs of gait from the same person, and large for pairs from different persons. In particular, to further learn effective model with limited training data, we composite the gait energy images instead of raw sequence of gaits. Consequently, the experiments on the world's largest gait database show our framework impressively outperforms state-of-the-arts.
Smallholder Commercialization Trends as Affected by Land Constraints in Zambia: What Are the Policy Implications?

Though Zambia has considerable agricultural potential, the sector’s contribution to growth and poverty reduction has been limited. The sector remains one of the most important employers of labour and remains the main source of livelihood for most rural households in Zambia. Thus key development challenge facing Zambian agriculture over the past two decades has been how it can effectively contribute to poverty reduction and broad-based economic growth. Agricultural commercialisation and surplus production, as revealed by nationally representative farm surveys, in the country has remained concentrated with only about 5% of Zambia’s small- and medium-scale farmers produce half of the marketed surplus. Meanwhile at least half of the smallholder farms sell little or no crops and hence derive virtually no cash income from agriculture.
Repeatability, Reproducibility, Separative Power and Subjectivity of Different Fish Morphometric Analysis Methods

We compared the repeatability, reproducibility (intra- and inter-measurer similarity), separative power and subjectivity (measurer effect on results) of four morphometric methods frequently used in ichthyological research, the “traditional” caliper-based (TRA) and truss-network (TRU) distance methods and two geometric methods that compare landmark coordinates on the body (GMB) and scales (GMS). In each case, measurements were performed three times by three measurers on the same specimen of three common cyprinid species (roach Rutilus rutilus (Linnaeus, 1758), bleak Alburnus alburnus (Linnaeus, 1758) and Prussian carp Carassius gibelio (Bloch, 1782)) collected from three closely-situated sites in the Lake Balaton catchment (Hungary) in 2014. TRA measurements were made on conserved specimens using a digital caliper, while TRU, GMB and GMS measurements were undertaken on digital images of the bodies and scales. In most cases, intra-measurer repeatability was similar. While all four methods were able to differentiate the source populations, significant differences were observed in their repeatability, reproducibility and subjectivity. GMB displayed highest overall repeatability and reproducibility and was least burdened by measurer effect. While GMS showed similar repeatability to GMB when fish scales had a characteristic shape, it showed significantly lower reproducability (compared with its repeatability) for each species than the other methods. TRU showed similar repeatability as the GMS. TRA was the least applicable method as measurements were obtained from the fish itself, resulting in poor repeatability and reproducibility. Although all four methods showed some degree of subjectivity, TRA was the only method where population-level detachment was entirely overwritten by measurer effect. Based on these results, we recommend a) avoidance of aggregating different measurer’s datasets when using TRA and GMS methods; and b) use of image-based methods for morphometric surveys. Automation of the morphometric workflow would also reduce any measurer effect and eliminate measurement and data-input errors.
Impact of Oil on Bacterial Community Structure in Bioturbated Sediments

Oil spills threaten coastlines where biological processes supply essential ecosystem services. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how oil influences the microbial communities in sediments that play key roles in ecosystem functioning. Ecosystems such as sediments are characterized by intensive bioturbation due to burrowing macrofauna that may modify the microbial metabolisms. It is thus essential to consider the bioturbation when determining the impact of oil on microbial communities. In this study, an experimental laboratory device maintaining pristine collected mudflat sediments in microcosms closer to true environmental conditions – with tidal cycles and natural seawater – was used to simulate an oil spill under bioturbation conditions. Different conditions were applied to the microcosms including an addition of: standardized oil (Blend Arabian Light crude oil, 25.6 mg.g−1 wet sediment), the common burrowing organism Hediste (Nereis) diversicolor and both the oil and H. diversicolor. The addition of H. diversicolor and its associated bioturbation did not affect the removal of petroleum hydrocarbons. After 270 days, 60% of hydrocarbons had been removed in all microcosms irrespective of the H. diversicolor addition. However, 16S-rRNA gene and 16S-cDNA T-RFLP and RT-PCR-amplicon libraries analysis showed an effect of the condition on the bacterial community structure, composition, and dynamics, supported by PerMANOVA analysis. The 16S-cDNA libraries from microcosms where H. diversicolor was added (oiled and un-oiled) showed a marked dominance of sequences related to Gammaproteobacteria. However, in the oiled-library sequences associated to Deltaproteobacteria and Bacteroidetes were also highly represented. The 16S-cDNA libraries from oiled-microcosms (with and without H. diversicolor addition) revealed two distinct microbial communities characterized by different phylotypes associated to known hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria and dominated by Gammaproteobacteria and Deltaproteobacteria. In the oiled-microcosms, the addition of H. diversicolor reduced the phylotype-richness, sequences associated to Actinobacteria, Firmicutes and Plantomycetes were not detected. These observations highlight the influence of the bioturbation on the bacterial community structure without affecting the biodegradation capacities.
Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Dark Matter Halos and Their Substructure

We use the "Via Lactea" simulation to study the co-evolution of a Milky Way-sized ΛCDM halo and its subhalo population. While most of the host halo mass is accreted over the first 6 Gyr in a series of major mergers, the physical mass distribution [not Mvir(z)] remains practically constant since z = 1. The same is true in a large sample of ΛCDM galaxy halos. Subhalo mass loss peaks between the turnaround and virialization epochs of a given mass shell, and the abundance of substructure within the shell freezes afterward. Of the z = 1 subhalos, 97% have a surviving bound remnant at the present epoch. The retained mass fraction is larger for initially lighter subhalos: today satellites with maximum circular velocities Vmax = 10 km s-1 at z = 1 have about 40% of the mass they had back then. At the first pericenter passage a larger average mass fraction is lost than during each following orbit. Tides remove mass in the substructure from the outside in, leading to higher concentrations compared to field halos of the same mass. This effect, combined with the earlier formation epoch of the inner satellites, results in strongly increasing subhalo concentrations toward the Galactic center. We present individual evolutionary tracks and present-day properties of the likely hosts of the dwarf satellites around the Milky Way. The formation histories of "field halos" that lie beyond the Via Lactea host today are found to strongly depend on the density of their environment. This is caused by tidal mass loss that affects many field halos on eccentric orbits.
Trying to improve communication and collaboration with information technology: An action research project which failed

Discusses the use of information technology to facilitate communication and collaboration. In this action research project a groupware product called Lotus NotesTM was implemented to facilitate communication and collaboration amongst the senior management team. Although there was a real need for change, and the project received strong support from senior management on the basis that it would enable radical changes in coordination within the workgroup, these radical changes did not occur. The authors analyse the reasons for failure, and suggest that the project failed because of institutional forces which inhibited dramatic changes in work habits.
Influence of Ethical Leadership Practices in Developing Trust in Leaders: a Pilot Study on Malaysian Secondary Schools

Significant school leadership involves the ability to influence, motivate and; change teacher work behavior patterns towards achieving positive work place attitude and organizational goals. This quantitative correlational case study, aims at identifying the level of ethical leadership and trust in leader practiced by leaders, presenting facts and figures that determines the influence of ethical leadership practices in developing trust in leader that is presumed to lead to better work place behaviours. This cross-sectional study is a pilot survey which collected 31 national secondary school teachers’ perception on their school principal’s ethical leadership practices and their trust on their leaders through an on-line survey. The Ethical Leadership at Work and Trust in Leader questionnaire used in this study were strongly reliable with Cronbach Alpha values of 0.965 and 0.981 respectively. Results showed level of ethical leadership practiced among secondary school principals and trust in their principal are both at high level. Findings also shows that ethical leadership correlated positively in the development of trust in leaders. The two practices of ethical leadership that showed very strong significant impact on developing trust in leaders were integrity and people orientation. The results encourage other researchers to explore the practice of ethical leadership with a larger sample, different variables and aims with the goal of improving leadership roles and teacher work performance.
Time to Reframe Politics and Practices in Correctional Education

There is a compelling logic to provide expansive education and training programs for adults under correctional supervision. In theory, these programs can prepare an underused pool of workers at a time when the nation is facing significant labor shortages. Uniquely, correctional education programs hold the promise of addressing the poor education and literacy skills of a significant percentage of individuals, particularly young, black, and Hispanic adult males. By improving the opportunity for these individuals to secure and retain employment in better-paying jobs, society could reap huge long-term benefits in terms of greater family stability, lower rates of child poverty, reduced welfare payments, lowered crime rates, improved civic life, along with many social indicators of well-being. Correctional education programs have found advocates in such distinctly different leaders as Warren Burger, the conservative former chief justice of the Supreme Court, and Malcolm X, the militant civil rights leader, but the logic of offering these programs remains captive to the ever-changing and unpredictable forces of politics.1 Page 1 of 35 NCSALL: Printable page
Extraction of Blood Droplet Flight Trajectories from Videos for Forensic Analysis

We present a method for extracting three-dimensional flight trajectories of liquid droplets from video data. A high-speed stereo camera pair records videos of experimental reconstructions of projectile impacts and ensuing droplet scattering. After background removal and segmentation of individual droplets in each video frame, we introduce a model-based matching technique to accumulate image paths for individual droplets. Our motion detection algorithm is designed to deal gracefully with the lack of feature points, with the similarity of droplets in shape, size, and color, and with incomplete droplet paths due to noise, occlusions, etc. The final reconstruction algorithm pairs two-dimensional paths accumulated from each of the two cameras’ videos to reconstruct trajectories in three dimensions. The reconstructed droplet trajectories constitute a starting point for a physically accurate model of blood droplet flight for forensic bloodstain pattern analysis.
Pseudo-Reverse Approach in Genetic Evolution: An Empirical Study with Enzymes

A pseudo-reverse approach is presented in this paper to analyze the evolutionary behaviour of enzymes. It employs the standard model of Nei and Gojobori [1] in a generalized form for determining the nucleotide substitutions and Jukes and Cantor’s [2] model for finding the out their rates. Comparative genomics is also embedded in this model to calculate the lineages among the species like human, mouse and rat for these enzyme proteins. It is predicted from this study that the mutation for the enzymes are comparatively slower than ordinary proteins and the time of divergence for these enzymes with human and mouse or rat is almost five times more, around 400 Million years. Hence, this paper describes the methodology and the findings in details.
An Investigation of the Perceptions and Practices of Nursing Students Regarding Spirituality and Spiritual Care

The aim of this research was to determine Turkish nursing students’ knowledge, practices and perceptions of spirituality and spiritual care and to investigate the relationship between their perceptions and their demographics. This study was a descriptive survey conducted at a nursing school providing degree-level education in the city of Manisa, in the western part of Turkey. The sample of the study consisted of the 400 nursing students. A nursing student sociodemographic form, a form on nursing students’ knowledge and practices of spirituality and spiritual care, and the Spirituality and Spiritual Care Rating Scale were used to collect the data. Half of the students could meet patients’ or individuals’ spiritual needs, and the spiritual care that they gave was most frequently listening, empathy, and psychological support. The research findings were that nursing students’ perceptions of spirituality and spiritual care were “sufficiently” although not “very sufficiently” defined. Being female, being in the second year of education and seeing spiritual care education as necessary were determinants of their perceptions of spirituality and spiritual care.
Progress and Poverty in Early Modern Europe

An econometric model of economic development is estimated with data from leading European countries between 1300 and 1800. The model explores the impact of population, enclosure, empire, representative government, technology, and literacy on urbanization, agricultural productivity, proto-industry, and the real wage. Simulations show that the main factors leading to economic success in north-western Europe were the growth of American and Asian commerce and, especially, the innovations underlying the export of the new draperies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The enclosure of the open fields, representative government, and the spread of literacy did not play major roles.
Plastic deformations in mechanically strained single-walled carbon nanotubes

Antiferromagnetic manipulation was used to controllably stretch individual metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes ~SWNT’s! We have found that SWNT’s can sustain elongations as great as 30% without breaking. Scanned gate microscopy and transport measurements were used to probe the effects of the mechanical strain on the SWNT electronic properties, which revealed a strain-induced increase in intra-tube electronic scattering above a threshold strain of ;5‐10 %. These findings are consistent with theoretical calculations predicting the onset of plastic deformation and defect formation in carbon nanotubes.
METABOLIC AND ULTRASTRUCTURAL CHANGES INDUCED IN ADIPOSE TISSUE BY INSULIN

The addition in vitro of insulin to rat adipose tissue (epididymal) produces marked metabolic changes which may be followed by measurement of the net gas exchange of the tissue. Using this method to monitor the metabolic action of insulin, concomitant observations with the electron microscope on the tissue have been made. These reveal that pronounced morphological changes are induced by insulin. The plasma membranes of the adipose cells become invaginated at many sites to form minute finger-like indentations. Numerous tiny, membrane-bounded vesicles are also present and arranged in relationship to the plasma membrane in such a way as to suggest that their formation occurred when a recessed fold was pinched off. Deeper in the cytoplasm, especially in specimens that had been incubated a longer time, numerous large, smooth, membrane-limited vesicles are seen. Finally, in these incubated specimens the cytoplasmic matrix has lost much of its granular nature, small lipid droplets are frequently found in the cytoplasm and suggestive changes have occurred in mitochondria. In control specimens, incubated without insulin for identical periods of time, indentations and vesicles in the plasma membrane are sparse at best and no vesicles or membrane-bound spaces appear deeper in the cytoplasm. The metabolic and morphologic changes induced by insulin seem to be interdependent events. Both changes appear to be initiated rapidly and concomitantly in the tissue. Both processes are initiated by insulin at concentrations considered to be physiological, 0.004 µg. (100 µunits) per ml. Insulin treated with alkali fails to initiate either process. It is concluded that insulin initiates pinocytosis in rat adipose tissue and the possible significance of this process in the mode of action of insulin is discussed.
The fraction of quiescent massive galaxies in the early Universe

Aims. We attempt to compile a complete, mass‐selected sample of galaxies with low specific star‐formation rates, and compare t heir properties with theoretical model predictions. Methods. We use the f (24µm)/ f (K) flux ratio and the SED fitting to the 0 . 35− 8. 0µm spectral distribution, to select quiescent galaxies from z ≃ 0.4 to z ≃ 4 in the GOODS‐MUSIC sample. Our observational selection can be translated into thresholds in specific star‐formation rate ˙ M/M∗, which can be compared with theoretical predictions. Results. In the framework of the well-known global decline in quiescent galaxy fraction with redshift, we find that a non-negligib le fraction≃ 15− 20% of massive galaxies with low specific star‐formation rat e exists up to z≃ 4, including a tail of “red and dead” galaxies with ˙ M/M∗ < 10 −11 yr −1 . Theoretical models vary to a large extent in their predicti ons for the fraction of galaxies with low