Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Resolving the Stellar Populations in the Circumnuclear Ring of NGC 7469

We investigate the stellar populations in the star-forming ring of the luminous infrared galaxy NGC 7469. We use HST multiwavelength (UV through NIR) imaging complemented with new K-band ground-based long-slit spectroscopy, and mid-IR and radio maps from the literature. SEDs and evolutionary synthesis models have been used to characterize the star formation at different scales, from those of individual star clusters (tens of pc) to that of the entire star-forming ring (kpc scale). At the smallest scales two different populations of massive (1-10 × 106 M☉) clusters are identified. About 25% of the clusters are young (1-3 Myr) and extincted (AV ≈ 3 mag), whereas the vast majority are of intermediate age (~9-20 Myr) and less obscured (AV ≈ 1 mag). At larger (hundreds of pc) scale, an analysis of the integrated SED and spectroscopic data of the ring indicates the presence of two stellar populations. The young (5-6 Myr) and obscured stellar population accounts for the Brγ emission and most of the IR luminosity, and for about one-third of the stellar mass of the ring. The much less obscured intermediate-age population has properties similar to those of the majority of the (older) 1.1 μm-selected star clusters. The distribution of these two populations is clearly different and even spatially anticorrelated. The UV-optical-NIR continuum (including the majority of the clusters) of the ring traces mostly the mildly obscured intermediate-age population, while the MIR and radio peaks mark the location of the youngest and obscured star-forming regions. Moreover, the two brightest MIR and radio peaks are spatially coincident with the ends of the nuclear molecular gas bar. This study emphasizes the need for multiwavelength, high angular resolution observations to characterize the star formation in the dust-obscured regions commonly present in LIRGs.
Supply Chain Risk Management Enablers - A Framework Development Through Systematic Review of the Literature from 2000 to 2015

The present paper delivers a robust and systematic literature review (SLR) on supply chain risk management (SCRM) with the purpose to a) review and analyse the literature concerning definitions and research methodologies applied, to b) develop a classificatory framework which clusters existing enablers on SCRM, and to c) examine the linkage between SCRM and performance. The findings reveal that not only is SCRM loosely defined, but that there are various fragmented supply chain risks enablers and that there is a strong need for a clear terminology for its building enablers. In addition to that, the review points to a lack of empirical confirmation concerning the connection between SCRM and performance. This paper contributes an overview of 80 peer-reviewed journal articles on SCRM from 2000 to the beginning of 2015. We offer an overarching definition of SCRM, synthesise and assemble the numerous enablers into preventive and responsive strategies by means of a conceptual framework. Moreover, indicating the social network theory (SNT) as a potential theoretical foundation for SCRM, we further contribute to the supply chain management (SCM) literature by providing propositions that guide future research.
From Distributed Resources to Limited Slots in Multiple-Item Working Memory: A Spiking Network Model with Normalization

Recent behavioral studies have given rise to two contrasting models for limited working memory capacity: a “discrete-slot” model in which memory items are stored in a limited number of slots, and a “shared-resource” model in which the neural representation of items is distributed across a limited pool of resources. To elucidate the underlying neural processes, we investigated a continuous network model for working memory of an analog feature. Our model network fundamentally operates with a shared resource mechanism, and stimuli in cue arrays are encoded by a distributed neural population. On the other hand, the network dynamics and performance are also consistent with the discrete-slot model, because multiple objects are maintained by distinct localized population persistent activity patterns (bump attractors). We identified two phenomena of recurrent circuit dynamics that give rise to limited working memory capacity. As the working memory load increases, a localized persistent activity bump may either fade out (so the memory of the corresponding item is lost) or merge with another nearby bump (hence the resolution of mnemonic representation for the merged items becomes blurred). We identified specific dependences of these two phenomena on the strength and tuning of recurrent synaptic excitation, as well as network normalization: the overall population activity is invariant to set size and delay duration; therefore, a constant neural resource is shared by and dynamically allocated to the memorized items. We demonstrate that the model reproduces salient observations predicted by both discrete-slot and shared-resource models, and propose testable predictions of the merging phenomenon.
Infrequent Breakfast Consumption Is Associated with Higher Body Adiposity and Abdominal Obesity in Malaysian School-Aged Adolescents

Unhealthy dietary pattern increases the risk of obesity and metabolic disorders in growing children and adolescents. However, the way the habitual pattern of breakfast consumption influences body composition and risk of obesity in adolescents is not well defined. Thus, the aim of the present study was to assess any associations between breakfast consumption practices and body composition profiles in 236 apparently healthy adolescents aged 12 to 19 years. A self-administered questionnaire on dietary behaviour and lifestyle practices and a dietary food frequency questionnaire were used. Body composition and adiposity indices were determined using standard anthropometric measurement protocols and dual energy χ-ray absorptiometry (DXA). Mean age of the participants was 15.3±1.9 years. The majority of participants (71.2%) fell in the normal body mass index (BMI) ranges. Breakfast consumption patterns showed that only half of the participants (50%) were consuming breakfast daily. Gender-specific multivariate analyses (ANCOVA) showed that in both boys and girls, those eating breakfast at least 5 times a week had significantly lower body weight, body mass index (BMI), BMI z-scores, waist circumference, body fat mass and percent body fat (%BF) compared to infrequent breakfast eaters, after adjustment for age, household income, pubertal status, eating-out and snacking practices, daily energy intakes, and daily physical activity levels. The present findings indicate that infrequent breakfast consumption is associated with higher body adiposity and abdominal obesity. Therefore, daily breakfast consumption with healthy food choices should be encouraged in growing children and adolescents to prevent adiposity during these critical years of growth.
Copy-move image forgery detection based on SIFT descriptors and SVD-matching

In recent years, more data are created in digital form allowing easy control over storage and manipulation due to the technology progress. Unfortunately, this progress may have dragged along a lot of risks, especially the ones related to the security of digital files. In particular, digital forgery becomes a worry for many organizations because it has become easier to create fake images without leaving any obvious perceptual traces of tampering. A specific form of image forgery operation called “copy-move” is considered one of the most difficult problems in the case of forgery detection. For this case, a part of the image is copied and pasted on another location of the same image to conceal undesirable objects in the scene. In this paper, we propose a method that automatically detects duplicated regions in the same image. Duplicated detection is performed by identifying the local characteristics of the images (points of interest) using the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) method and by matching between identical features using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) method. Obtained results show that our proposed hybrid method is robust to geometrical transformations and is able to detect with high performance duplicated regions.
Characterization of global flow and local fluctuations in 3D SPH simulations of protoplanetary discs

A complete and detailed knowledge of the structure of the gaseous component in protoplanetary discs is essential to the study of dust evolution during the early phases of pre-planetesimal formation. The aim of this paper is to determine if three-dimensional accretion discs simulated by the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method can reproduce the observational data now available and the expected turbulent nature of protoplanetary discs. The investigation is carried out by setting up a suite of diagnostic tools specifically designed to characterise both the global flow and the fluctuations of the gaseous disc. The main result concerns the role of the artificial viscosity implementation in the SPH method: in addition to the already known ability of SPH artificial viscosity to mimic a physical-like viscosity under specific conditions, we show how the same artificial viscosity prescription behaves like an implicit turbulence model. In fact, we identify a threshold for the parameters in the standard artificial viscosity above which SPH disc models present a cascade in the power spectrum of velocity fluctuations, turbulent diffusion and a mass accretion rate of the same order of magnitude as measured in observations. Furthermore, the turbulence properties observed locally in SPH disc models are accompanied by meridional circulation in the global flow of the gas, proving that the two mechanisms can coexist.
Automatic Identification of Facts in Real Internet Texts in Spanish Using Lightweight Syntactic Constraints : Problems , Their Causes , and Ways for Improvement

By a “fact” in a given text we understand a triple <first argument, relation, second argument>, where all three components are fragments of the text. For example, in the text “The policeman saw a boy who crossed the street” two facts can be identified: <The policeman, saw, a boy> and <a boy, crossed, the street>. While humans identify these facts in a text easily, for a computer such a task is far from straightforward. Existing approaches to this task based on deep automatic linguistic analysis are too slow when processing web-size corpora, and too fragile to be of practical use when dealing with real Internet texts, while machine learning approaches are too computationally complex and imprecise. It was previously shown that a very simple and fast approach based on lightweight syntactic constraints can achieve comparable performance with much lower computational and implementation complexity. However, it is prone to certain errors that are specific to this approach. These errors have not been analyzed previously. In this paper, we analyze and classify the main types of errors in fact extractions performed by the system ExtrHech, a state-of-the-art fact extraction system for Spanish based on lightweight syntactic constraints. We also identify their causes and suggest ways of possible solutions with corresponding analysis of their cost and scale of impact.
Neural substrates of envisioning the future

The ability to envision specific future episodes is a ubiquitous mental phenomenon that has seldom been discussed in the neuroscience literature. In this study, subjects underwent functional MRI while using event cues (e.g., Birthday) as a guide to vividly envision a personal future event, remember a personal memory, or imagine an event involving a familiar individual. Two basic patterns of data emerged. One set of regions (e.g., within left lateral premotor cortex; left precuneus; right posterior cerebellum) was more active while envisioning the future than while recollecting the past (and more active in both of these conditions than in the task involving imagining another person). These regions appear similar to those emerging from the literature on imagined (simulated) bodily movements. A second set of regions (e.g., bilateral posterior cingulate; bilateral parahippocampal gyrus; left occipital cortex) demonstrated indistinguishable activity during the future and past tasks (but greater activity in both tasks than the imagery control task); similar regions have been shown to be important for remembering previously encountered visual-spatial contexts. Hence, differences between the future and past tasks are attributed to differences in the demands placed on regions that underlie motor imagery of bodily movements, and similarities in activity for these two tasks are attributed to the reactivation of previously experienced visual–spatial contexts. That is, subjects appear to place their future scenarios in well known visual–spatial contexts. Our results offer insight into the fundamental and little-studied capacity of vivid mental projection of oneself in the future.
Thermodynamic Field Theory with the Iso-Entropic Formalism

Abstract A new formulation of the thermodynamic field theory (TFT) is presented. In this new version, one of the basic restriction in the old theory, namely a closed-form solution for the thermodynamic field strength, has been removed. In addition, the general covariance principle is replaced by Prigogine’s thermodynamic covariance principle (TCP). The introduction of TCP required the application of an appropriate mathematical formalism, which has been referred to as the isoentropic formalism. The validity of the Glansdorff-Prigogine Universal Criterion of Evolution, via geometrical arguments, is proven. A new set of thermodynamic field equations, able to determine the nonlinear corrections to the linear (”Onsager”) transport coefficients, is also derived. The geometry of the thermodynamic space is non-Riemannian tending to be Riemannian for hight values of the entropy production. In this limit, we obtain again the same thermodynamic field equations found by the old theory. Applications of the theory, such as transport in magnetically confined plasmas, materials submitted to temperature and electric potential gradients or to unimolecular triangular chemical reactions can be found at references cited herein.
Experimental Realization of Teleporting an Unknown Pure Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels

We report on a quantum optical experimental implementation of teleportation of unknown pure quantum states. This realizes all of the nonlocal aspects of the original scheme proposed by Bennett et al. and is equivalent to it up to a local operation. We exhibit results for the teleportation of a linearly polarized state and of an elliptically polarized state. We show that the experimental results cannot be explained in terms of a classical channel alone. The Bell measurement in our experiment can distinguish between all four Bell states simultaneously allowing, in the ideal case, a 100% success rate of teleportation. [S0031-9007(97)05275-7]
A spatial-temporal approach for video caption detection and recognition

We present a video caption detection and recognition system based on a fuzzy-clustering neural network (FCNN) classifier. Using a novel caption-transition detection scheme we locate both spatial and temporal positions of video captions with high precision and efficiency. Then employing several new character segmentation and binarization techniques, we improve the Chinese video-caption recognition accuracy from 13% to 86% on a set of news video captions. As the first attempt on Chinese video-caption recognition, our experiment results are very encouraging.
Gendered participation, well-being, and representations in political violence: An introduction

Since the October 2000 adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security, scholarly study and policy attention on the inclusion of women and gender into peace and conflict processes has grown tremendously. Although UNSCR 1325 advocates presumed that incorporating women and gender issues into peace processes would improve the prospects of peace and security around the globe, critics point to its core tenets’ reliance on an essentialist view of women (e.g. Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007). All the articles in this collection question the assumption that ‘‘women’’ constitute a monolithic group. The authors see, examine, and query variation in the impacts of war and conflict on women’s statuses and lives as well as in the effect women have on war, conflict, and post-conflict environments. Research on women and politics similarly focuses on disaggregating women’s experiences and interactions with politics, because women are rarely a cohesive group with a single unifying set of political priorities or preferences (e.g. Childs and Krook, 2009; Htun, 2004). This collection’s authors critique and challenge both the portrayals and the empirical reality of women’s involvements in conflict and peace, focusing on the differentiated ways that institutions, agency, and conflict dynamics condition how women are affected by and affect conflict and the post-conflict setting. In particular, the articles examine the diverse ways in which women participate and are portrayed participating in conflict and war (e.g. as victims, perpetrators, and as variously positioned in hierarchies), how conflict and the threat of conflict affects women’s security and welfare, and how the integration of gender into security and legal frameworks influences the post-conflict environment. The first article investigates the social contexts of how women participate in conflict. In ‘‘The social origins of female combatants,’’ Jakana Thomas and Reed Wood focus on the social gender norms and economic conditions that create opportunities for women to be recruited by and join rebel organizations, not only in supportive roles but also as combatants. The authors conclude that societal gender expectations and equality condition the
Combinatorics and topology of straightening maps II: Discontinuity

We continue the study of straightening maps for the family of polynomials of degree $d \ge 3$. The notion of straightening map is originally introduced by Douady and Hubbard to study relationship between polynomial-like renormalizations and self-similarity of the Mandelbrot set. In the quadratic case, straightening maps are always continuous, and this is one of the critical steps to prove the Mandelbrot set has small copies in itself. On the other hand, for higher degree case, we do not have such a nice self-similar property: As expected from an example of a cubic-like family with discontinuous straightening map by Douady and Hubbard, we prove that the straightening map is discontinuous unless it is of disjoint type.
Massive Stars and Globular Cluster Formation

We first present chemodynamical simulations to investigate how stellar winds of massive stars influence early dynamical and chemical evolution of forming globular clusters (GCs). In our numerical models, GCs form in turbulent, high-density giant molecular clouds (GMCs), which are embedded in a massive dark matter halo at high redshifts. We show how high-density, compact stellar systems are formed from GMCs influenced both by physical processes associated with star formation and by tidal fields of their host halos. We also show that chemical pollution of GC-forming GMCs by stellar winds from massive stars can result in star-to-star abundance inhomogeneities among light elements (e.g., C, N, and O) of stars in GCs. The present model with a canonical initial mass function (IMF) also shows a C-N anticorrelation that stars with smaller [C/Fe] have larger [N/Fe] in a GC. Although these results imply that ``self-pollution'' of GC-forming GMCs by stellar winds from massive stars can cause abundance inhomogeneities of GCs, the present models with different parameters and canonical IMFs cannot show N-rich stars with [N/Fe] ~ 0.8 observed in some GCs (e.g., NGC 6752). We discuss this apparent failure in the context of massive star formation preceding low-mass ones within GC-forming GMCs (``bimodal star formation scenario''). We also show that, although almost all stars (~97%) show normal He abundances (Y) of ~0.24, some stars later formed in GMCs can have Y as high as ~0.3 in some models. The number fraction of He-rich stars with Y > 0.26 is, however, found to be small (~10-3) for most models. We discuss this result in the context of the possibly large Y-values observed in a few Galactic GCs.
Cannabidiol: Pharmacology and potential therapeutic role in epilepsy and other neuropsychiatric disorders

To present a summary of current scientific evidence about the cannabinoid, cannabidiol (CBD) with regard to its relevance to epilepsy and other selected neuropsychiatric disorders. We summarize the presentations from a conference in which invited participants reviewed relevant aspects of the physiology, mechanisms of action, pharmacology, and data from studies with animal models and human subjects. Cannabis has been used to treat disease since ancient times. Δ9‐Tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ9‐THC) is the major psychoactive ingredient and CBD is the major nonpsychoactive ingredient in cannabis. Cannabis and Δ9‐THC are anticonvulsant in most animal models but can be proconvulsant in some healthy animals. The psychotropic effects of Δ9‐THC limit tolerability. CBD is anticonvulsant in many acute animal models, but there are limited data in chronic models. The antiepileptic mechanisms of CBD are not known, but may include effects on the equilibrative nucleoside transporter; the orphan G‐protein‐coupled receptor GPR55; the transient receptor potential of vanilloid type‐1 channel; the 5‐HT1a receptor; and the α3 and α1 glycine receptors. CBD has neuroprotective and antiinflammatory effects, and it appears to be well tolerated in humans, but small and methodologically limited studies of CBD in human epilepsy have been inconclusive. More recent anecdotal reports of high‐ratio CBD:Δ9‐THC medical marijuana have claimed efficacy, but studies were not controlled. CBD bears investigation in epilepsy and other neuropsychiatric disorders, including anxiety, schizophrenia, addiction, and neonatal hypoxic‐ischemic encephalopathy. However, we lack data from well‐powered double‐blind randomized, controlled studies on the efficacy of pure CBD for any disorder. Initial dose‐tolerability and double‐blind randomized, controlled studies focusing on target intractable epilepsy populations such as patients with Dravet and Lennox‐Gastaut syndromes are being planned. Trials in other treatment‐resistant epilepsies may also be warranted.
Improving the Instructional Effectiveness of University Teaching Assistants: Report II

Soixante-sept assistants-professeurs venant des facult6s d'art, de sciences et des 6tudes interdisciplinaires de l'Universit6 Simon Fraser ont particip6 t une 6tude exp6rimentale d'un programme pr6vu pour initier les assistants aux principes de base et aux techniques de la p6dagogie. Trois groupes d'assistants-professeurs ont reu la formation en question tandis qu'un autre groupe, approximativement assorti au premier selon l'exp6rience d'enseignement et le d6partement auquel les assistants appartenaient, 6tait utilis6 comme contr6le. Les mesures des attitudes et des perceptions des assistants-professeurs et des 6tudiants, bien que ne montrant pas un r6sultat efficace du traitement, ont confirm6 de fagon cohdrente, la faveur envers les groupes ayant regu une formation p6dagogique. C'est la premiere d'une sirie d'exp6riences actuellement en cours de r6alisation i l'Universit6 Simon Fraser et le document d6termine les grandes lignes de la strat6gie g6ndrale de ces 6tudes et traite des implications at consid6rer pour r6ussir des programmes de recherche.