Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combining Stochastic Competitive Scheme and Hysteresis Quantized Neuron for Reliability Optimization

System reliability is an important design measure in many systems engineering fields. In this paper, we propose a new neural network method combining stochastic competitive scheme and hysteresis quantized neuron for the reliability optimization. In the proposed algorithm, the neurons are divided into two classes: One is binary neurons with stochastic competitive scheme and the other is quantized neuron with hysteresis. The competitive scheme always provides a feasible solution and search space is greatly reduced without a burden on the parameter tuning. Furthermore, the stochastic dynamics and hysteresis can help the neural network escape from local minima, and therefore the proposed algorithm can get better results than other neural network method.
Consensus and experience trump leadership, suppressing individual personality during social foraging

A variety of mechanisms express and suppress individual behavioral tendencies during group decision-making in fish. Whether individual behavior in social settings correlates with behavior when individuals are alone is a fundamental question in collective behavior. However, evidence for whether behavior correlates across asocial and social settings is mixed, and no study has linked observed trends with underlying mechanisms. Consistent differences between individuals in boldness, which describes willingness to accept reward over risk, are likely to be under strong selection pressure. By testing three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) in a risky foraging task alone and repeatedly in shoals, we demonstrate that the expression of boldness in groups is context-specific. Whereas personality is repeatable in a low-risk behavior (leaving a refuge), the collectively made consensus decision to then cross the arena outweighs leadership by bolder individuals, explaining the suppression of personality in this context. However, despite this social coordination, bolder individuals were still more likely to feed. Habituation and satiation over repeated trials degrade the effect of personality on leaving the refuge and also whether crossing the arena is a collective decision. The suppression of personality in groups suggests that individual risk-taking tendency may rarely represent actual risk in social settings, with implications for the evolution and ecology of personality variation.
Incidental emotions have a greater impact on the logicality of less proficient reasoners

ABSTRACT Previous research shows differences in reasoning about emotional and neutral stimuli. A common explanation hypothesised for this effect is that emotion incurs an additional cognitive load. If this is the case, incidental emotion should have a greater impact on the reasoning of less proficient reasoners, and when items are more difficult, because a greater proportion of available cognitive resources must be allocated to the task. We manipulated the emotional value of reasoning stimuli using conditioning and with the simultaneous presentation of images. The deleterious effect of emotion on logicality was greater for less proficient reasoners. There was also some indication that the effect of emotion may be more pronounced for more difficult items. Physiological responses and affective evaluations of the stimuli were similar across groups, irrespective of reasoning proficiency. Results provide some support for the hypothesis that the impact of emotion occurs through increased cognitive load.
An implicit measure of undetected change.

Several paradigms (e.g. change blindness, inattentional blindness, transsaccadic integration) indicate that observers are often very poor at reporting changes to their visual environment. Such evidence has been used to suggest that the spatio-temporal coherence needed to represent change can only occur in the presence of focused attention. However, those studies almost always rely on explicit reports. It remains a possibility that the visual system can implicitly detect change, but that in the absence of focused attention, the change does not reach awareness and consequently is not reported. To test this possibility, we used a simple change detection paradigm coupled with a speeded orientation discrimination task. Even when observers reported being unaware of a change in an item's orientation, its final orientation effectively biased their response in the orientation discrimination task. Both in aware and unaware trials, errors were most frequent when the changed item and the probe had incongruent orientations. These results demonstrate that the nature of the change can be represented in the absence of awareness.
DIAGNOSTIC LINE EMISSION FROM EXTREME ULTRAVIOLET AND X-RAY-ILLUMINATED DISKS AND SHOCKS AROUND LOW-MASS STARS

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV; 13.6 eV <hν ≲ 100 eV) and X-rays in the 0.1–2 keV band can heat the surfaces of disks around young, low-mass stars to thousands of degrees and ionize species with ionization potentials greater than 13.6 eV. Shocks generated by protostellar winds can also heat and ionize the same species close to the star/disk system. These processes produce diagnostic lines (e.g., [Ne ii] 12.8 μm and [O i] 6300 Å) that we model as functions of key parameters such as EUV luminosity and spectral shape, X-ray luminosity and spectral shape, and wind mass loss rate and shock speed. Comparing our models with observations, we conclude that either internal shocks in the winds or X-rays incident on the disk surfaces often produce the observed [Ne ii] line, although there are cases where EUV may dominate. Shocks created by the oblique interaction of winds with disks are unlikely [Ne ii] sources because these shocks are too weak to ionize Ne. Even if [Ne ii] is mainly produced by X-rays or internal wind shocks, the neon observations typically place upper limits of ≲1042 s−1 on the EUV photon luminosity of these young low-mass stars. The observed [O i] 6300 Å line has both a low velocity component (LVC) and a high velocity component. The latter likely arises in internal wind shocks. For the former we find that X-rays likely produce more [O i] luminosity than either the EUV layer, the transition layer between the EUV and X-ray layer, or the shear layer where the protostellar wind shocks and entrains disk material in a radial flow across the surface of the disk. Our soft X-ray models produce [O i] LVCs with luminosities up to 10−4 L☉, but may not be able to explain the most luminous LVCs.
Influence of ENSO and the NAO on terrestrial carbon uptake in the Texas‐northern Mexico region

Climate extremes such as drought and heat waves can cause substantial reductions in terrestrial carbon uptake. Advancing projections of the carbon uptake response to future climate extremes depends on (1) identifying mechanistic links between the carbon cycle and atmospheric drivers, (2) detecting and attributing uptake changes, and (3) evaluating models of land response and atmospheric forcing. Here, we combine model simulations, remote sensing products, and ground observations to investigate the impact of climate variability on carbon uptake in the Texas‐northern Mexico region. Specifically, we (1) examine the relationship between drought, carbon uptake, and variability of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) using the Joint UK Land‐Environment Simulator (JULES) biosphere simulations from 1950–2012, (2) quantify changes in carbon uptake during record drought conditions in 2011, and (3) evaluate JULES carbon uptake and soil moisture in 2011 using observations from remote sensing and a network of flux towers in the region. Long‐term simulations reveal systematic decreases in regional‐scale carbon uptake during negative phases of ENSO and NAO, including amplified reductions of gross primary production (GPP) (−0.42 ± 0.18 Pg C yr−1) and net ecosystem production (NEP) (−0.14 ± 0.11 Pg C yr−1) during strong La Niña years. The 2011 megadrought caused some of the largest declines of GPP (−0.50 Pg C yr−1) and NEP (−0.23 Pg C yr−1) in our simulations. In 2011, consistent declines were found in observations, including high correlation of GPP and surface soil moisture (r = 0.82 ± 0.23, p = 0.012) in remote sensing‐based products. These results suggest a large‐scale response of carbon uptake to ENSO and NAO, and highlight a need to improve model predictions of ENSO and NAO in order to improve predictions of future impacts on the carbon cycle and the associated feedbacks to climate change.
Functional network alterations and their structural substrate in drug-resistant epilepsy

The advent of MRI has revolutionized the evaluation and management of drug-resistant epilepsy by allowing the detection of the lesion associated with the region that gives rise to seizures. Recent evidence indicates marked chronic alterations in the functional organization of lesional tissue and large-scale cortico-subcortical networks. In this review, we focus on recent methodological developments in functional MRI (fMRI) analysis techniques and their application to the two most common drug-resistant focal epilepsies, i.e., temporal lobe epilepsy related to mesial temporal sclerosis and extra-temporal lobe epilepsy related to focal cortical dysplasia. We put particular emphasis on methodological developments in the analysis of task-free or “resting-state” fMRI to probe the integrity of intrinsic networks on a regional, inter-regional, and connectome-wide level. In temporal lobe epilepsy, these techniques have revealed disrupted connectivity of the ipsilateral mesiotemporal lobe, together with contralateral compensatory reorganization and striking reconfigurations of large-scale networks. In cortical dysplasia, initial observations indicate functional alterations in lesional, peri-lesional, and remote neocortical regions. While future research is needed to critically evaluate the reliability, sensitivity, and specificity, fMRI mapping promises to lend distinct biomarkers for diagnosis, presurgical planning, and outcome prediction.
COMPUTER BASED MATHEMATICS USING CONTINUOUS SPEECH RECOGNITION

We describeCamMath, a novel software-based application which allows the creation and manipulation of mathematical equations using purely continuous speech recognition. A new system of spoken language commands was developed that is highly suited to efficiently creating and manipulating mathematics. Combined with a computer-based mathematics editor and computer algebra system (CAS), our results indicate that using continuous speech recognition for this purpose is a viable and useful alternative to handwritten math. Such an application is ideally suited to a student or professional scientist, engineer, or mathematician who is unable to use standard human computer interfaces such as a mouse and keyboard (due to either tendinitis or any other motor impairment).
Introspecting Agent-Oriented Design Patterns

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity over traditional ones for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by today’s corporate IT applications such as eBusiness systems, web services or enterprise knowledge bases. Since the fundamental concepts of multi-agent systems are social and intentional rather than object, functional, or implementation-oriented, the design of MAS architectures can be eased by using social patterns. They are detailed agent-oriented design idioms to describe MAS architectures as composed of autonomous agents that interact and coordinate to achieve their intentions, like actors in human organizations. This paper presents social patterns and focuses on a framework aimed to gain insight into these patterns. The framework can be integrated into agent-oriented software engineering methodologies used to build MAS. We consider the Broker social pattern to illustrate the framework. The mapping from system architectural design (through organizational architectural styles), to system detailed design (through social patterns), is overviewed with a data integration case study. The automation of patterns design is also overviewed.
Effect of local anaesthetic infiltration on chronic postsurgical pain after total hip and knee replacement: the APEX randomised controlled trials

Abstract Total hip replacement (THR) and total knee replacement (TKR) are usually effective at relieving pain; however, 7% to 23% of patients experience chronic postsurgical pain. These trials aimed to investigate the effect of local anaesthetic wound infiltration on pain severity at 12 months after primary THR or TKR for osteoarthritis. Between November 2009 and February 2012, 322 patients listed for THR and 316 listed for TKR were recruited into a single-centre double-blind randomised controlled trial. Participants were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive local anaesthetic infiltration and standard care or standard care alone. Participants and outcomes assessors were masked to group allocation. The primary outcome was pain severity on the WOMAC Pain Scale at 12 months after surgery. Analyses were conducted using intention-to-treat and per-protocol approaches. In the hip trial, patients in the intervention group had significantly less pain at 12 months postoperative than patients in the standard care group (differences in means: 4.74; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.95-8.54; P = 0.015), although the difference was not clinically significant. Post hoc analysis found that patients in the intervention group were more likely to have none to moderate pain than severe pain at 12 months than those in the standard care group (odds ratio: 10.19; 95% CI: 2.10-49.55; P = 0.004). In the knee trial, there was no strong evidence that the intervention influenced pain severity at 12 months postoperative (difference in means: 3.83; 95% CI: −0.83 to 8.49; P = 0.107). In conclusion, routine use of infiltration could be beneficial in improving long-term pain relief for some patients after THR.
On the Effectiveness of Contracts as Test Oracles in the Detection and Diagnosis of Faults in Concurrent Object- Oriented Software

Design by Contract (DbC) is a software development methodology that focuses on clearly defining the interfaces between components to produce better quality object-oriented software. The idea behind DbC is that a method defines a contract stating the requirements a client needs to fulfill to use it, the precondition, and the properties it ensures after its execution, the postcondition. Though there exists ample support for DbC for sequential programs, applying DbC to concurrent programs presents several challenges. Using Java as the target programming language, this paper tackles such challenges by augmenting the Java Modelling Language (JML) and modifying the JML compiler to generate Runtime Assertion Checking (RAC) code to support DbC in concurrent programs. We applied our solution in a carefully designed case study on a highly concurrent industrial software system from the telecommunications domain to assess the effectiveness of contracts as test oracles in detecting and diagnosing functional faults in concurrent software. Based on these results, clear and objective requirements are defined for contracts to be effective test oracles for concurrent programs whilst balancing the effort to design them. Main results include that contracts of a realistic level of completeness and complexity can detect around 76% of faults and reduce the diagnosis effort for such faults by at least ten times. We, therefore, show that DbC can not only be applied to concurrent software but can also be a valuable tool to improve the economics of software engineering.
Ethics, Performance Measure Choice, and Accounting Manipulation

We examine whether embedding ethical values within t e ‘fiber’ of the firm influences performance measure choices and whether accounting manipulation is more or less severe depending on these ethical values. Based on a sampl e of 550 managers our findings show that ethical values prevalent in a work unit affect perf ormance measure choice, namely ethical values that “focus on self” increase the use of costly agg re ated performance measures that capture the joint performance of multiple work units to promote b tween-unit cooperation. We estimate that the effect of ethical values on the use of aggregat e measures is almost twice as large as the effect o f within-firm interdependencies, which have been cons idered the main determinant of their use in prior literature. We also demonstrate that an ethic al work climate with a lower “focus on self” reduces the incidence of accounting manipulation.
Thermal degradation of bending properties of structural wood and wood-based composites

Abstract Wood and wood-based composites are being used extensi-vely in single-family residential dwellings. Therefore, it is important to categorize their response when exposed to elevated temperatures for a sustained period of time. In fire-resistant design for wood structures, the main goal is to ensure that enough structural integrity is maintained, during and after a fire, to prevent collapse and to maintain means of egress. Another goal is an ability to assess post-fire structural integrity and residual strength of an existing structure. The objectives of this study are: (a) to study the effect of temperature and exposure time on bending strength (MOR) and stiffness (MOE) of solid sawn lumber (SSL), laminated veneer lumber (LVL), oriented strand board (OSB) and plywood; and (b) to develop predictive relations between different temperatures and times of exposure and the thermal degradation of strength. A total of 1080 samples were tested in static bending under various heat treatments. The results indicated that exposure to elevated temperature caused significant degradation of bending strength and stiffness. A statistical regression-based model and a kinetics-based model were developed and evaluated for predicting the strength loss of wood and wood-based composites as a function of thermal exposure temperature and exposure time. The kinetics-based model fit the data better and predictions consistently matched the observed values, making the model preferred over the regression approach.
Promoting reflection through annotations in formal online learning

Verpoorten, D. , Westera, W. , & Specht, M. (2011). Prompting reflection through annotations in formal online learning. In W. Reinhardt, T. D. Ullmann, P. Scott, V. Pammer, O. Conlan, & A. J. Berlanga (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st European Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Learning Networks (ARNets11). In conjunction with the 6th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2011): Towards Ubiquitous Learning 2011 (pp. 90-96). September, 21, 2011, Palermo, Italy: CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-790/
Effects of Fat and Protein Levels on Foraging Preferences of Tannin in Scatter-Hoarding Rodents

Both as consumers and dispersers of seeds, scatter-hoarding rodents often play an important role in the reproductive ecology of many plant species. However, the seeds of many plant species contain tannins, which are a diverse group of water-soluble phenolic compounds that have a high affinity for proteins. The amount of tannins in seeds is expected to affect rodent foraging preferences because of their major impact on rodent physiology and survival. However, variable results have been obtained in studies that evaluated the effects of tannin on rodent foraging behavior. Hence, in this study, we aimed to explain these inconsistent results and proposed that a combination of seed traits might be important in rodent foraging behavior, because it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of individual traits on rodent foraging behavior and the interactions among them. By using a novel artificial seed system, we manipulated seed tannin and fat/protein levels to examine directly the univariate effects of each component on the seed preferences of free-ranging forest rats (Apodemus latronum and Apodemus chevrieri) during the behavioral process of scatter hoarding. Our results showed that both tannin and fat/protein had significant effects on rodent foraging behavior. Although only a few interactive effects of tannin and fat/protein were recorded, higher concentrations of both fat and protein could attenuate the exclusion of seeds with higher tannin concentrations by rodents, thus influencing seed fate. Furthermore, aside from the concentrations of tannin, fat, and protein, numerous other traits of plant seeds may also influence rodent foraging behavior. We suggest that by clarifying rodent foraging preferences, a better understanding of the evolution of plant seed traits may be obtained because of their strong potential for selective pressure.
PRODUCTION OF RECOMBINANT SHEEP PRION PROTEIN (RecShPrPC) AND ITS DETECTION IN MUSCLE FOOD USING WESTERN BLOTTING

The objectives of this study were to over-express the sheep prion protein (RecShPrP) using a bacterial vector fused with a C-terminal 6XHis-tagged fusion protein for large-scale purification using a Nickel-Nitrilotriacetate column chromatography. The prion protein gene was PCR amplified using sheep genomic DNA and only the functional prion polypeptide (PrP 25-234) was sub-cloned into pET102/DTOPO plasmid after removing the sequences corresponding to the signal peptides from both N-terminal and C-terminal ends. The integrity of the cloned PCR product as well as the His-tagged fusion protein and its orientation within the vector was determined by DNA sequencing and upon confirmation was induced with isopropyl-beta-Dthiogalactopyranoside for protein expression. The expressed proteins were solubilized by addition of 8M guanidinium chloride in lysis buffer and purified using adsorption to a Nickel-Nitriloacetic metal affinity resin. Purified proteins were detected at levels as low as 10μg using Western Blotting. Immuno – PCR is a recently described method for ultra-sensitive antigen assay, which was able to detect the RecShPrP as low as 200 femto-grams. Production of RecShPrP protein by this method could be used to study solubilization processes that fractionate muscle proteins. Successful separation of myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic proteins from abnormal prion proteins may enhance the
Targeting of Locus Ceruleus Noradrenergic Neurons Expressing Human Interleukin-2 Receptor α-Subunit in Transgenic Mice by a Recombinant Immunotoxin anti-Tac(Fv)-PE38: A Study for Exploring Noradrenergic Influence upon Anxiety-Like and Depression-Like Behaviors

The noradrenergic (NA) neurons in the locus ceruleus (LC) were ablated with a high degree of selectivity by immunotoxin-mediated neuronal targeting. Transgenic mice were used in which the human interleukin-2 receptor-α subunit (hIL-2Rα; Tac) is expressed under the promoter of dopamine β-hydroxylase. The recombinant immunotoxin, which is composed of the Fv fragment of an anti-hIL-2Rα monoclonal antibody fused to a truncated form of Pseudomonas exotoxin [anti-Tac(Fv)-PE38], was injected bilaterally into the LC of the mouse. As a result, the LC-NA neurons disappeared almost completely, and tissue noradrenaline was depleted in brain regions that receive NA inputs from the LC. The decrement of tissue noradrenaline content was more profound compared with that in mice treated with N-(2-chloroethyl)-N-ethyl-2-bromobenzylamine (DSP-4), a neurotoxin capable of ablating axons originating from the LC-NA neurons. Mice treated with either the immunotoxin or DSP-4 presented increased anxiety-like behaviors; in contrast, only the immunotoxin-treated mice, and not the DSP-4-treated mice, showed increased depression-like behavior. The immunotoxin-mediated neuronal targeting may provide a means for further unraveling the links between the LC and pathological manifestations of neurological disorders.