Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distributed subgradient-push online convex optimization on time-varying directed graphs

This paper presents a class of subgradient-push algorithms for online distributed optimization over time-varying networks. In this setting, a private strongly convex objective function is revealed to each agent at each time step. In the next time step, this agent makes a decision about its state using this knowledge, along with the information gathered only from its neighboring agents, prescribed by a sequence of time-varying directed graphs. Under the assumption that this sequence is uniformly strongly connected, we design an algorithm, distributed over this time-varying topology, that guarantees that the individual regret, the difference between the accumulated cost of agents' states and the best static offline cost, grows only sublinearly. Simulations illustrate our results.
Time perspective and psychological well-being in younger and older adults

The purpose of the present study was to examine the present fatalistic time perspective as a mechanism that may partially account for age differences in purpose in life and personal growth. An additional purpose of this study was to explore the relations among age, time perspective, and psychological well-being. Seventy-five older adults (M=73.43, SD=7.91) and 77 younger adults (M=19.58, SD=1.19) completed surveys measuring time perspective (past positive, past negative, present fatalistic, present hedonistic, future) and psychological well-being (autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance). Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the present fatalistic time perspective predicted purpose in life and personal growth above and beyond age and income. Several significant correlations were found among the time perspective and psychological well-being variables. Results showed that age was positively correlated with the past negative and present fatalistic time perspectives, but negatively correlated with the future time perspective. Results showed that age negatively correlated with purpose in life and personal growth, but positively correlated with autonomy. Results are discussed in light of socioemotional selectivity theory, theory of time perspective, and implications for incorporating time perspective into mental health counseling.
Pension Scheme Asset Allocation with Taxation Arbitrage, Risk Sharing and Default Insurance

ABSTRACT The asset allocation is a crucial decision for pension funds, and this paper analyses the economic factors which determine this choice. The analysis proceeds on the basis that, in the absence of taxation, risk sharing and default insurance, the asset allocation between equities and bonds is indeterminate and governed by the risk/return preferences of the trustees and the employer. If the employing company and its shareholders are subject to taxation, there is a tax advantage in a largely bond allocation. Risk sharing between the employer and the employees often means that one group favours a high equity allocation, while the other favours a low equity allocation. Underpriced default insurance creates an incentive for a high equity allocation. When taxation, risk sharing and underpriced default insurance are all present, it is concluded that the appropriate asset allocation varies with the circumstances of the scheme; but that a high equity allocation is probably inappropriate for many private sector pension schemes.
Synoptic View of the North Atlantic Oscillation

Abstract This article investigates the synoptic characteristics of individual North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) events by examining the daily evolution of the potential temperature field on the nominal tropopause (the 2-PVU surface). This quantity is obtained from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction–National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP–NCAR) reanalysis dataset for the winter season. For both phases, the NAO is found to originate from synoptic-scale waves. As these waves evolve into the low-frequency NAO pattern, they break anticyclonically for the positive phase and cyclonically for the negative phase. The results of this analysis suggest that it is the remnants of these breaking waves that form the physical entity of the NAO. Throughout the NAO events, for both phases, the NAO is maintained by the successive breaking of upstream synoptic-scale waves. When synoptic-scale disturbances are no longer present, mixing processes play an important role in the NAO decay. As in other recent .
Control and mixing for 2D Navier-Stokes equations with space-time localised noise

We consider randomly forced 2D Navier-Stokes equations in a bounded domain with smooth boundary. It is assumed that the random perturba- tion is non-degenerate, and its law is periodic in time and has a support localised with respect to space and time. Concerning the unperturbed problem, we assume that it is approximately controllable in infinite time by an external force whose support is included in that of the random force. Under these hypotheses, we prove that the Markov process generated by the restriction of solutions to the instants of time proportional to the period possesses a unique stationary distribution, which is exponentially mixing. The proof is based on a coupling argument, a local controllability property of the Navier-Stokes system, an estimate for the total variation distance between a measure and its image under a smooth mapping, and some classical results from the theory of optimal transport.
Emerging Adults Delay Mental Illness Treatment: Another Manifestation of Experiential Avoidance?

Emerging adulthood is a term coined to recognize 18 to 25 year-olds who engage in self-exploration while not yet fully identifying as adults. Many emerging adult college students experience stress, anxiety, and depression. Although many colleges provide affordable and available mental health resources for students, many students who need help appear to not utilize these services. Gaining greater understanding of underlying processes that influence psychological treatment-seeking behavior is imperative. The current study sought to explore the role experiential avoidance (EA) plays as a treatment-seeking barrier in the context of emerging adulthood. Undergraduate students completed online measures of emerging adulthood dimensions, psychological symptoms, EA, self-stigma of, perceived public stigma of, intentions to, and attitudes and beliefs towards seeking treatment, treatment seeking behavior, and a demographics questionnaire. Binomial hierarchical logistic regressions and correlational analyses examined the relationship of EA and treatment-seeking behaviors, accounting for known barriers and emerging adult characteristics. After controlling for demographic variables, results indicated that EA was significantly positively correlated with self-stigma (r = .187), p < . 001), perceived public stigma (r = .178, p < .001), intentions (r - .207, p < .001), psychological symptoms (r = .713, p < .001), and attitudes and beliefs (r = .009, p = .003). These and other findings are discussed further, along with the study limitations and implications, as well as possible future directions for work in this area.
A Randomized, Double Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Multicenter Phase II Trial of Allisartan Isoproxil in Essential Hypertensive Population at Low-Medium Risk

Background Angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs) is a well-tolerated class of antihypertensive agents, exhibiting effective antihypertensive and cardiovascular protective function. The objective of the study was to examine the efficacy and safety of Allisartan Isoproxil, a newly developed, selective, nonpeptide blocker of the angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AT1R), in essential hypertensive patients at low-medium risk. Methods and Findings A Phase II prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicenter trial comparing Allisartan Isoproxil 240mg versus placebo was conducted in essential hypertensive patients at low-medium risk at 8 sites in China. After a 2-week placebo baseline period, 275 patients received once-daily treatment with Allisartan Isoproxil 240mg or placebo randomly for 8 weeks. Systolic/diastolic blood pressure (SBP/DBP) was measured at week 2, 4 and 8. By the end of treatment, mean reductions from baseline of SBP and DBP in Allisartan Isoproxil and placebo groups were 14.5/10.4 and 8.3/7.7 mmHg, respectively (P<0.01). The rate of effective blood pressure control in Allisartan Isoproxil group was significantly higher than in placebo group at week 4 (61.3% vs 50.0%, P<0.05) and week 8 (67.2% vs 48.6%, P<0.01). In terms of safety and tolerability, there were no report of death and serious adverse event (SAE) in all subjects. There was no difference of frequency between two groups in adverse event (AE) and adverse drug reaction (ADR) (P>0.05). No one withdraw because of an ADR in two groups. 124 patients received additional 56 weeks treatment with Allisartan Isoproxil and 84 of them completed the study. The rate of effective BP control kept up to 80% since week 24. No significant clinical change was observed and ADRs were generally mild or moderate during the long-term study. Conclusions/Significance Allisartan Isoproxil 240mg was effective and safe for essential hypertension patients at low-medium risk. Trial Registration http://www.chictr. org/cn/ ChiCTR-TRC-10000886
Field theory for biogeography: a spatially explicit model for predicting patterns of biodiversity

Predicting the variation of biodiversity across the surface of the Earth is a fundamental issue in ecology, and in this article we focus on one of the most widely studied spatial biodiversity patterns: the species–area relationship (SAR). The SAR is a central tool in conservation, being used to predict species loss following global climate change, and is striking in its universality throughout different geographical regions and across the tree of life. In this article we draw upon the methods of quantum field theory and the foundation of neutral community ecology to derive the first spatially explicit neutral prediction for the SAR. We find that the SAR has three phases, with a power law increase at intermediate scales, consistent with decades of documented empirical patterns. Our model also provides a building block for incorporating non-neutral biological variation, with the potential to bridge the gap between neutral and niche-based approaches to community assembly. Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 87–95
Behavioural Risk Factors in Mid-Life Associated with Successful Ageing, Disability, Dementia and Frailty in Later Life: A Rapid Systematic Review

Background Smoking, alcohol consumption, poor diet and low levels of physical activity significantly contribute to the burden of illness in developed countries. Whilst the links between specific and multiple risk behaviours and individual chronic conditions are well documented, the impact of these behaviours in mid-life across a range of later life outcomes has yet to be comprehensively assessed. This review aimed to provide an overview of behavioural risk factors in mid-life that are associated with successful ageing and the primary prevention or delay of disability, dementia, frailty and non-communicable chronic conditions. Methods A literature search was conducted to identify cohort studies published in English since 2000 up to Dec 2014. Multivariate analyses and a minimum follow-up of five years were required for inclusion. Two reviewers screened titles, abstracts and papers independently. Studies were assessed for quality. Evidence was synthesised by mid-life behavioural risk for a range of late life outcomes. Findings This search located 10,338 individual references, of which 164 are included in this review. Follow-up data ranged from five years to 36 years. Outcomes include dementia, frailty, disability and cardiovascular disease. There is consistent evidence of beneficial associations between mid-life physical activity, healthy ageing and disease outcomes. Across all populations studied there is consistent evidence that mid-life smoking has a detrimental effect on health. Evidence specific to alcohol consumption was mixed. Limited, but supportive, evidence was available relating specifically to mid-life diet, leisure and social activities or health inequalities. Conclusions There is consistent evidence of associations between mid-life behaviours and a range of late life outcomes. The promotion of physical activity, healthy diet and smoking cessation in all mid-life populations should be encouraged for successful ageing and the prevention of disability and chronic disease.
Outcomes of Open Subacromial Decompression after Failed Arthroscopic Acromioplasty

Aim. To prospectively assess the effectiveness of revision with open subacromial decompression in patients who had a previous unsatisfactory outcome with the arthroscopic procedure. Methods. 11 patients were identified for the study, who did not demonstrate expected improvement in symptoms after arthroscopic acromioplasty. All patients underwent structured rehabilitation. Functional evaluation was conducted using the Hospital for Special Surgery, New York, shoulder rating questionnaire. Results. M : F was 7 : 4. The mean age was 57 years. The average shoulder score improved from 49.6 preoperatively to 56 postoperatively at an average followup of 16 months. Two patients showed deterioration in their shoulder scores after revision while the rest showed only marginal improvement. All except one patient stated that they would opt for surgery again if given a second chance. Conclusion. In the group of patients that fail to benefit from the arthroscopic decompression, only a marginal improvement was noted after revision with open decompression.
A Framework-Based Approach to the Development of Network-Aware Applications

Modern networks provide a QoS (quality of service) model to go beyond best-effort services, but current QoS models are oriented towards low-level network parameters (e.g., bandwidth, latency, jitter). Application developers, on the other hand, are interested in quality models that are meaningful to the end-user and, therefore, struggle to bridge the gap between network and application QoS models. Examples of application quality models are response time, predictability or a budget (for transmission costs). Applications that can deal with changes in the network environment are called network-aware. A network-aware application attempts to adjust its resource demands in response to network performance variations. This paper presents a framework-based approach to the construction of network-aware programs. At the core of the framework is a feedback loop that controls the adjustment of the application to network properties. The framework provides the skeleton to address two fundamental challenges for the construction of network-aware applications: how to find out about dynamic changes in network service quality; and how to map application-centric quality measures (e.g., predictability) to network-centric quality measures (e.g., QoS models that focus on bandwidth or latency). Our preliminary experience with a prototype network-aware image retrieval system demonstrates the feasibility of our approach. The prototype illustrates that there is more to network-awareness than just taking network resources and protocols into account and raises questions that need to be addressed (from a software engineering point of view) to make a general approach to network-aware applications useful.
Rapid X-Ray Declines and Plateaus in Swift GRB Light Curves Explained by a Highly Radiative Blast Wave

GRB X-ray light curves display rapid declines followed by a gradual steepening or plateau phase in ≳30% of GRBs in the Swift sample. Treating the standard relativistic blast wave model in a uniform circumburst medium, it is shown that if GRBs accelerate ultra-high-energy cosmic rays through a Fermi mechanism, then the hadronic component can be rapidly depleted by means of photopion processes on timescales ~102-104 s after the GRB explosion. While discharging the hadronic energy in the form of ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray neutrals and escaping cosmic-ray ions, the blast wave goes through a strongly radiative phase, causing the steep declines observed with Swift. Following the discharge, the blast wave recovers its adiabatic behavior, forming the observed plateaus or slow declines. These effects are illustrated by calculations of model bolometric light curves. The results show that steep X-ray declines and plateau features occur when GRB sources take place in rather dense media, with n ≳ 102 cm-3 out to ≳1017 cm.
Cues to Personality and Health in the Facial Appearance of Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes)

Humans (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) can extract socially-relevant information from the static, non-expressive faces of conspecifics. In humans, the face is a valid signal of both personality and health. Recent evidence shows that, like humans, chimpanzee faces also contain personality information, and that humans can accurately judge aspects of chimpanzee personality relating to extraversion from the face alone (Kramer, King, and Ward, 2011). These findings suggest the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees share a system of personality and facial morphology for signaling socially-relevant traits from the face. We sought to test this hypothesis using a new group of chimpanzees. In two studies, we found that chimpanzee faces contained health information, as well as information of characteristics relating to extraversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness, using average judgments from pairs of individual photographs. In a third study, information relating to extraversion and health was also present in composite images of individual chimpanzees. We therefore replicate and extend previous findings using a new group of chimpanzees and demonstrate two methods for minimizing the variability associated with individual photographs. Our findings support the hypothesis that chimpanzees and humans share a personality signaling system.
Highway Networks

There is plenty of theoretical and empirical evidence that depth of neural networks is a crucial ingredient for their success. However, network training becomes more difficult with increasing depth and training of very deep networks remains an open problem. In this extended abstract, we introduce a new architecture designed to ease gradient-based training of very deep networks. We refer to networks with this architecture as highway networks, since they allow unimpeded information flow across several layers on"information highways". The architecture is characterized by the use of gating units which learn to regulate the flow of information through a network. Highway networks with hundreds of layers can be trained directly using stochastic gradient descent and with a variety of activation functions, opening up the possibility of studying extremely deep and efficient architectures.
Article Pedagogy: Encouraging Links between Linguistic Theory and Teaching Practice

It is two decades since Master (1997) published a framework for second language (L2) article pedagogy, based on several years of research into the acquisition of the English article system. Among his recommendations were a focus on intermediate level learners and a simplification of the rules presented to language learners. Since then, substantial work has been conducted to better understand the underlying reasons why English articles are difficult to acquire by learners with diverse language backgrounds (Ionin et al., 2004; Ionin et al., 2008; Ionin et al., 2009; Ionin et al., 2011; Trenkic, 2008; García Mayo, 2009; amongst others). The results of such research indicate a systematic pattern of errors amongst learners whose first language does not have an article system, with varying theoretical explanations for this systematicity. Despite some intervention studies which have explored the pedagogical implications of this work (Snape and Yusa, 2013; Sabir, 2015; Lopez, forthcoming; Umeda et al., 2017), on the whole theoretical linguistic research in this area has not influenced pedagogy. The aim of this article is to build on the work of Master (1997) by exploring whether the cumulative insights from the last 20 years of research into L2 article acquisition and instruction can help us to better understand the most effective method for teaching the complex uses of the English article system to L2 learners.
Characteristics of Part-Time Online Instructors: A Comparison of For-Profit to Nonprofit Faith-Based Institutions

ABSTRACT As the for-profit business model and a reliance on adjunct faculty continues to grow among faith-based institutions, little research exists on the differences in the characteristics of part-time online faculty in for-profit versus nonprofit environments that could provide guidance to administrators. This study utilized a descriptive, nonexperimental survey design employing the chi-squared test (χ2) as a statistical tool to analyze the categorical data. This descriptive exploratory study compares part-time online faculty in for-profit and nonprofit environments based on results from a convenience sample of 1,034 online instructors from 19 faith-based institutions in the United States. Information presented in this paper includes demographic characteristics, types of students served, religious commitment, course logistics, and student–instructor interaction. Part-time online instructors from for-profit or nonprofit faith-based institutions were similar in several personal characteristics such as age and household income, as well as in their motivation to become a part-time online instructor. However, there also were several statistically significant differences noted, most notably their religious commitment (χ2[40, N = 1,034] = 111.93, p < .001; Cramer's V = 0.329) and religious affiliation (χ2[20, N = 1,028] = 107.59, p < .001; Cramer's V = 0.324). Recommendations for faith-based institutions of higher learning by type included increasing the diversity of instructors at nonprofit institutions, screening applicants for mission fit at for-profit institutions, and increasing compensation at both types of institutions.
Data Modifications and Versioning in Trio

The field of uncertain databases has recently attracted considerable interest. Many motivating applications for uncertainty rely fundamentally on improving the quality of data over time, through modifications, as additional information becomes available, e.g., after analysis (as in scientific data management systems), with user feedback (as in {\em pay-as-you-go} data integration). Incorporating data modifications, while still serving applications' needs to access and query older data (as in hypothetical databases), necessitates light\-weight versioning for such applications. This paper presents the first DBMS for uncertain data that supports data modifications and versioning. Our work is in the context of {\em Trio}, a project at Stanford for managing data {\em uncertainty} and {\em lineage}. We introduce SQL-based language constructs for data modifications and lightweight versioning in Trio's query language. We present an extended Trio data model, {\em ULDB$^v$}, and show how primitive modifications are applied to it, yielding versioned relations with uncertainty and lineage. We show that Trio's lineage feature enables an elegant approach to query answering in ULDB$^v$. We give efficient algorithms for propagating data-modifications to materialized views. We have incorporated the data modification and versioning capabilities in the Trio system, and validate our techniques through experiments.