Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Software and Hardware in Data Processing Budgets

This paper develops a microeconomic framework for the determination of data-processing budgets over time, and, in particular, the allocation of these budgets between software and hardware. The model dynamically balances the value and cost of information services, given the prevailing cost trends. It regards software and hardware as inputs to the process of producing information services, and identifies the complementarity and substitution between them as major determinants of the efficient budget allocation. The theory provides a basis for understanding the budgeting process and for predicting future trends, and is applied to actual budget data.
Anogenital Distance and Penile Length in Infants with Hypospadias or Cryptorchidism: Comparison with Normative Data

Background: Anogenital distance (AGD) in animals is a sensitive biomarker of fetal endocrine disruption and the associated testicular dysgenesis syndrome (TDS). However, AGD in human infants with cryptorchidism and hypospadias, which are potential manifestations of TDS during childhood, is not clearly described. Objective: Our aim was to compare AGD in boys with cryptorchidism or hypospadias against normative data. Methods: Boys with isolated cryptorchidism (n = 71, age 13.4 ± 5.8 months) or hypospadias (n = 81, age 11.4 ± 6.2 months) were recruited from a tertiary center for measurement of AGD and penile length; they were compared with 487 healthy full-term boys from a birth cohort by deriving age-specific standard deviation scores (SDS). Results: Boys with cryptorchidism were older (p = 0.048) compared with boys with hypospadias. Boys with hypospadias had shorter mean AGD and penile length SDS than healthy boys (both p < 0.0001). Mean AGD and penile length SDS values in boys with cryptorchidism were longer than mean values in boys with hypospadias (both p < 0.01) and shorter than mean values in healthy boys (both p < 0.0001). Mean penile length SDS decreased as the severity of hypospadias increased (ptrend = 0.078). Conclusions: In the study population, AGD and penile length were reduced in boys with hypospadias or cryptorchidism relative to normative data derived from a longitudinal birth cohort. The findings support the use of AGD as a quantitative biomarker to examine the prenatal effects of exposure to endocrine disruptors on the development of the male reproductive tract. Citation: Thankamony A, Lek N, Carroll D, Williams M, Dunger DB, Acerini CL, Ong KK, Hughes IA. 2014. Anogenital distance and penile length in infants with hypospadias or cryptorchidism: comparison with normative data. Environ Health Perspect 122:207–211; http://dx.doi. org/10.1289/ehp.1307178
Age-dependent failure of axon regeneration in organotypic culture of gerbil auditory midbrain.

Inferior colliculus (IC) slice cultures from postnatal (P) day 6-8 gerbils exhibit axonal regeneration across a lesion site, and these regrowing processes can form synapses. To determine whether regenerative capacity is lost in older tissue, as occurs in vivo, slices from P12-21-day animals were grown under similar conditions. While these cultures displayed a near complete loss of neurons over 6 days in vitro, glutamate receptor antagonists (AP5 and/or CNQX) significantly enhanced survival, particularly at P12-15. In contrast, several growth factors or high potassium did not improve neuron survival. Therefore, axonal regeneration was assessed following complete transection of the commissure in AP5/CNQX-treated IC cultures from P12 animals. Neurofilament staining revealed that transected commissural axons survived for 6 days in vitro, but only a few processes crossed the lesion site and these axons did not extend into the contralateral lobe. In contrast, there was robust axonal sprouting and growth within one lobe of the IC, remote from the lesion site. When P6 and P12 tissue was explanted onto a coated substrate, the P6 axons grew onto the substrate, but the P12 axons were seemingly prevented from reaching the substrate by a veil of nonneuronal cells. Coculture of the IC and one of its afferent populations, the lateral superior olive, provided a similar finding, indicating that failure to regenerate was a general property at the age examined. These data show that neuron survival is not sufficient to permit axon regeneration at P12, and suggest that P12 lesion sites manufacture a prohibitive substrate since process outgrowth is blocked specifically at the commissure transection.
Making fine-grained and coarse-grained sense distinctions, both manually and automatically

In this paper we discuss a persistent problem arising from polysemy: namely the difficulty of finding consistent criteria for making fine-grained sense distinctions, either manually or automatically. We investigate sources of human annotator disagreements stemming from the tagging for the English Verb Lexical Sample Task in the SENSEVAL-2 exercise in automatic Word Sense Disambiguation. We also examine errors made by a high-performing maximum entropy Word Sense Disambiguation system we developed. Both sets of errors are at least partially reconciled by a more coarse-grained view of the senses, and we present the groupings we use for quantitative coarse-grained evaluation as well as the process by which they were created. We compare the system's performance with our human annotator performance in light of both fine-grained and coarse-grained sense distinctions and show that well-defined sense groups can be of value in improving word sense disambiguation by both humans and machines.
Proficiency in positive vs. negative emotion identification and subjective well-being among long-term married elderly couples

Evidence is accruing that positive emotions play a crucial role in shaping a healthy interpersonal climate. Inspired by this research, the current investigation sought to shed light on the link between proficiency in identifying positive vs. negative emotions and a close partner's well-being. To this end, we conducted two studies with neurologically intact elderly married couples (Study 1) and an age-matched clinical sample, comprising married couples in which one spouse had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease (Study 2), which tends to hinder emotional expressivity. To assess proficiency in identifying emotions from whole body postures, we had participants in both studies complete a pointlight walker task, featuring four actors (two male, two female) expressing one positive (i.e., happiness) and three negative (i.e., sadness, anger, fear) basic emotions. Participants also filled out measures of subjective well-being. Among Study 1's neurologically intact spouses, greater expertise in identifying positive (but not negative) emotions was linked to greater partner life satisfaction (but not hedonic balance). Spouses of PD patients exhibited increased proficiency in identifying positive emotions relative to controls, possibly reflective of compensatory mechanisms. Complementarily, relative to controls, spouses of PD patients exhibited reduced proficiency in identifying negative emotions and a tendency to underestimate their intensity. Importantly, all of these effects attenuated with longer years from PD onset. Finally, there was evidence that it was increased partner expertise in identifying negative (rather than positive) emotional states that predicted greater life satisfaction levels among the PD patients and their spouses. Our results thus suggest that positive vs. negative emotions may play distinct roles in close relationship dynamics as a function of neurological status and disability trajectory.
COW'S MILK ALLERGY IN THE POPULATION OF INFANTS AND EARLY PRESCHOOLERS FROM THE VUKOVAR – SRIJEM COUNTY

Introduction: Cow’s milk allergy is the most common allergic reaction present among infants and early preschoolers. The early diagnosis of the condition is crucial for adequate treatment of the affected child. Aim: To determine prevalence of cow’s milk allergy in the population of infants (0-1 years) and early preschoolers (1-4 years) from Vukovar–Srijem County and demographical characteristics of affected children. Materials and methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted from 1st May 2013 to 30th April 2014 in Vukovar General County Hospital and was approved by the responsible Ethical Committee. It included 59 children - suspected of having cow’s milk allergy (38/59, 64.4% boys and 21/59, 35.6% girls ; mean age 20.8±16.2 months). The serum concentrations of the specific IgE antibodies to cow’s milk protein were determined and demographic data for each patient were collected (gender, age, place of living). Standardized UniCAP fluorescence-enzyme immunoassay (Phadia AB, Uppsala, Sweden) was used to determine serum concentration of the specific IgE antibodies for cow’s milk protein. Results: In observed population there were 35.6% (21/59) of children affected with cow’s milk allergy. The allergy was more common with boys (39.5%), and children who lived in villages (56.5%). Aver¬age value of serum concentration of the specific IgE antibodies to cow’s milk protein among affected children was 9.9±23.8 kU/L, and it was higher for boys (12.6 kU/L) in comparison to girls (3.2 kU/L). Conclusion: This study indicates that the cow’s milk allergy is relatively frequent within the observed population thus there is a need for further evaluation of this issue. In addition, the study has shown that the diagnosis of cow’s milk allergy in Croatia is still relatively late and because of that there is a need to make additional efforts for earlier diagnosis of such condition that would also improve the therapeutic approach to affected children.
Large-Scale Image Retrieval with Attentive Deep Local Features

We propose an attentive local feature descriptor suitable for large-scale image retrieval, referred to as DELE (DEep Local Feature). The new feature is based on convolutional neural networks, which are trained only with image-level annotations on a landmark image dataset. To identify semantically useful local features for image retrieval, we also propose an attention mechanism for key point selection, which shares most network layers with the descriptor. This frame-work can be used for image retrieval as a drop-in replacement for other keypoint detectors and descriptors, enabling more accurate feature matching and geometric verification. Our system produces reliable confidence scores to reject false positives–in particular, it is robust against queries that have no correct match in the database. To evaluate the proposed descriptor, we introduce a new large-scale dataset, referred to as Google-Landmarks dataset, which involves challenges in both database and query such as background clutter, partial occlusion, multiple landmarks, objects in variable scales, etc. We show that DELE outperforms the state-of-the-art global and local descriptors in the large-scale setting by significant margins.
Decoupled Collaborative Ranking

We propose a new pointwise collaborative ranking approach for recommender systems, which focuses on improving ranking performance at the top of recommended list. Our approach is different from common pointwise methods in that we consider user ratings as ordinal rather than viewing them as real values or categorical labels. In addition, positively rated items (higher rating scores) are emphasized more in our method in order to improve the performance at the top of recommended list. In our method, user ratings are modeled based on an ordinal classification framework, which is made up of a sequence of binary classification problems in which one discriminates between ratings no less than a specific ordinal category c and ratings below that category ({̥ c}vs.{< c}). The results are used subsequently to generate a ranking score that puts higher weights on the output of those binary classification problems concerning high values of c so as to improve the ranking performance at the top of list. As our method crucially builds on a decomposition into binary classification problems, we call our proposed method as Decoupled Collaborative Ranking (DCR). As an extension, we impose pairwise learning on DCR, which yields further improvement with regard to the ranking performance of the proposed method. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets that our method outperforms many considered state-of-the-art collaborative ranking algorithms in terms of the NDCG metric.
Updating the US hydrologic classification: an approach to clustering and stratifying ecohydrologic data

Hydrologic classifications unveil the structure of relationships among groups of streams with differing streamflows and provide a foundation for drawing inferences about the principles that govern those relationships. Hydrologic classes provide a template to generalize hydrologic responses to disturbance and stratify research and management needs applicable to ecohydrology. We used a mixed‐modelling approach to create hydrologic classifications for the continental USA using three streamflow datasets, a reference dataset compiled under more strict traditional standards and two additional datasets compiled under more relaxed assumptions. A variety of models were applied to each dataset, and Bayes criteria were used to identify optimal models and numbers of clusters. Using only reference‐quality gauges, we classified 1715 stream gauges into 12 classes across the USA. By including more streamflow gauges (n = 2402 and 2618) of lesser reference quality in subsequent classifications, we observed minimal increases in dimensionality (i.e. multivariate space) at the expense of increasing uncertainty and outliers. Part of the utility of classification systems rests in their ability to classify new objects and stratify data by common properties. We constructed separate random forest models to predict hydrologic class membership on the basis of hydrologic indices or landscape variables. In addition, we provide an approach to assessing potential outliers due to hydrologic alteration based on class assignment. Departures from class membership due to disturbance take into account multiple hydrologic indices simultaneously; thus, classes can be used to determine if disturbed streams are functioning within the natural range of hydrologic variability. Published 2013. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.
Length-weight relationship and condition factor in puntius conchonius (Hamilton, 1822) from Dal Lake, Kashmir

The length-weight relationship and condition factor K in Puntius conchonius were investigated on samples collected from Dal Lake, Kashmir. The analysis of this fish species was based on 150 specimens ranging in size from 38mm to 84mm and in weight from 1.42g to 10.712g. The regression values obtained for male, female and for pooled sexes (2.97, 2.93 and 2.94). The regression coefficient was found to depart significantly from the cubic value. The computed value of correlation coefficient (r) for males, females and pooled ones were as r = 9.22, r = 9.36 and r =9.35 respectively, which were closer to 1 indicating that there is high positive correlation between the two variables i.e. length and weight. The paper also throws light on the changes in the ponderal index (month-wise and length-wise). The index exhibits seasonal variations in close association with the feeding intensity and gonadal development in the fish. It recorded least values during winter month especially in January and from summer season in the month of July in both the sexes as well as in combined ones, which can be attributed to low feeding intensity and spawning stress in the fish.
A CO survey of gravitationally lensed quasars with the IRAM interferometer

We present the results of a CO survey of gravitationally lensed quasars, conducted with the Plateau de Bure Interferometer over the last three years. Among the 18 objects surveyed, one was detected in CO line emission, while six were detected in the continuum at 3 mm and three in the continuum at 1 mm. The low CO detection rate may at least in part be due to uncertainties in the redshifts derived from quasar broad emission lines. The detected CO source, the z =3 :2 radio quiet quasar MG 0751+2716, is quite strong in the CO(4 3) line and in the millimeter/submillimeter continuum, the latter being emission from cool dust. The integrated CO line flux is 5:96 0:45 Jykms 1 , and the total molecular gas mass is estimated to be in the range MH2 =1 :6{3:1 10 9 M.
Ice as a Green-Structure-Directing Agent in the Synthesis of Macroporous MWCNTs and Chondroitin Sulphate Composites

The incorporation of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) into chondroitin sulphate-based scaffolds and the effect on the structural, mechanical, conductive, and thermal properties of the resulting scaffolds is investigated. Three-dimensional hierarchical materials are prepared upon the application of the ice segregation-induced self-assembly (ISISA) process. The use of ice as structure-directing agents avoids chemicals typically used for this purpose (e.g., surfactants, block copolymers, etc.), hence, emphasising the green features of this soft-templating approach. We determine the critical parameters that control the morphology of the scaffolds formed upon ice-templating (i.e., MWCNTs type, freezing conditions, polymer and MWCNT concentration). MWCNTs are surface functionalized by acidic treatment. MWCNT functionalization is characterized by Raman, Fourier transfer infrared (FTIR) and X-ray Photoelectron (XPS) spectroscopies. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis and porosity studies reveal that MWCNT content modifies the morphology of the macroporous structure, which decreases by increasing MWCNT concentration. Differences in scaffold morphology should be translated into their conductivity and mechanical properties. As a general trend, the Young’s modulus and the electrical conductivity of the scaffolds increase with the MWCNT content. Preliminary biocompatibility tests with human osteoblast-like cells also reveal the capability of these structures to support cell growth.
RACK: Automatic API Recommendation Using Crowdsourced Knowledge

Traditional code search engines often do not perform well with natural language queries since they mostly apply keyword matching. These engines thus need carefully designed queries containing information about programming APIs for code search. Unfortunately, existing studies suggest that preparing an effective code search query is both challenging and time consuming for the developers. In this paper, we propose a novel API recommendation technique -- RACK that recommends a list of relevant APIs for a natural language query for code search by exploiting keyword-API associations from the crowdsourced knowledge of Stack Overflow. We first motivate our technique using an exploratory study with 11 core Java packages and 344K Java posts from Stack Overflow. Experiments using 150 code search queries randomly chosen from three Java tutorial sites show that our technique recommends correct API classes within the top 10 results for about 79% of the queries which is highly promising. Comparison with two variants of the state-of-the-art technique also shows that RACK outperforms both of them not only in Top-K accuracy but also in mean average precision and mean recall by a large margin.
AINUR: Atlas of Images of NUclear Rings

We present the most complete atlas of nuclear rings to date. We include 113 rings found in 107 galaxies, six of which are elliptical galaxies, five are highly inclined disc galaxies, 18 are unbarred disc galaxies and 78 are barred disc galaxies. Star-forming nuclear rings occur in 20 ± 2 per cent of disc galaxies with types between T = -3 and T = 7. We aim to explore possible relationships between the size and morphology of the rings and various galactic parameters. We also aim to establish whether ultra-compact nuclear rings are a distinct population of nuclear rings or if they are merely the low-end tail of the nuclear ring size distribution. We produce colour index and structure maps, as well as Hα and Paα continuum-subtracted images from Hubble Space Telescope archival data. We derive ellipticity profiles from H-band Two-Micron All-Sky Survey images in order to detect bars and find their metric parameters. We measure the non-axisymmetric torque parameter, Q g , and search for correlations between bar and ring metric parameters, and Q g . Our atlas of nuclear rings includes star-forming and dust rings. Nuclear rings span a range from a few tens of parsecs to a few kiloparsecs in radius. Star-forming nuclear rings can be found in a wide range of morphological types, from S0 to Sd, with a peak in the distribution between Sab and Sb and without strong preference for barred galaxies. The ellipticities of rings found in disc galaxies range from ∈ r = 0 to ∈ r = 0.4, assuming that nuclear rings lie in the galactic plane. Dust nuclear rings are found in elliptical and S0 galaxies. For barred galaxies, the maximum radius that a nuclear ring can reach is a quarter of the bar radius. We found a nearly random distribution of position angle offsets between nuclear rings and bars. There is some evidence that nuclear ring ellipticity is limited by bar ellipticity. We confirm that the maximum relative size of a star-forming nuclear ring is inversely proportional to the non-axisymmetric torque parameter, Q g ('stronger bars host smaller rings') and that the origin of nuclear rings, even the ones in non-barred hosts, is closely linked to the existence of dynamical resonances. Ultra-compact nuclear rings constitute the low-radius portion of the nuclear ring size distribution. We discuss implications for the lifetimes of nuclear rings and for their origin and evolution.