Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Bayesian Approach to Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning

Generative adversarial training for imitation learning has shown promising results on high-dimensional and continuous control tasks. This paradigm is based on reducing the imitation learning problem to the density matching problem, where the agent iteratively refines the policy to match the empirical state-action visitation frequency of the expert demonstration. Although this approach has shown to robustly learn to imitate even with scarce demonstration, one must still address the inherent challenge that collecting trajectory samples in each iteration is a costly operation. To address this issue, we first propose a Bayesian formulation of generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL), where the imitation policy and the cost function are represented as stochastic neural networks. Then, we show that we can significantly enhance the sample efficiency of GAIL leveraging the predictive density of the cost, on an extensive set of imitation learning tasks with high-dimensional states and actions.
Qualitative analysis of hexane flour extract of spelt

Gas chromatography with mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was used for performing a qualitative analysis of the hexane flour extract of three samples of spelt. All the three samples were first treated with hexane and the obtained extracts were used for the analy- sis of the fatty acid lipid components. The transesterification reaction was performed using TMSH (trimethylsulfonium hydroxide, 0.2M in methanol), and the fatty acids were esterified from acylglycerol to methyl-esters. In all analyzed extracts, the predominant component was methyl linoleate, followed by methyl oleate and methyl palmitate. The subsequent tests, performed by cluster analysis, were used to compare the hexane flour extracts of different types of spelt.
arXiv : New results on heavy-flavour in heavy-ion collisions with LHCb

Heavy-flavour quarks are important to probe Quark-Gluon Plasma(QGP) properties. Cold Nuclear Matter(CNM) effects can be accessed by $p$Pb collisions. LHCb is a heavy-flavour precision experiment and has collected large collision data samples. Production cross-section measurements of prompt $D^{0}$ at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}}$= 5 TeV and $J/\psi$ at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}}$= 8.16 TeV are presented.
Bayesian Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent

We introduce Bayesian distributed stochastic gradient descent (BDSGD), a high-throughput algorithm for training deep neural networks on parallel clusters. This algorithm uses amortized inference in a deep generative model to perform joint posterior predictive inference of mini-batch gradient computation times in a compute cluster specific manner. Specifically, our algorithm mitigates the straggler effect in synchronous, gradient-based optimization by choosing an optimal cutoff beyond which mini-batch gradient messages from slow workers are ignored. In our experiments, we show that eagerly discarding the mini-batch gradient computations of stragglers not only increases throughput but actually increases the overall rate of convergence as a function of wall-clock time by virtue of eliminating idleness. The principal novel contribution and finding of this work goes beyond this by demonstrating that using the predicted run-times from a generative model of cluster worker performance improves substantially over the static-cutoff prior art, leading to reduced deep neural net training times on large computer clusters.
Retraction Retracted : The Antioxidant and Starch Hydrolase Inhibitory Activity of Ten Spices in an In Vitro Model of Digestion : Bioaccessibility of Anthocyanins and Carotenoids Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine has retracted the article titled “The Antioxidant and Starch Hydrolase Inhibitory Activity of Ten Spices in an In Vitro Model of Digestion: Bioaccessibility of Anthocyanins and Carotenoids” [1], as the High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) results were questioned and it was found that the underlying data for this study are not available, and thus the results of the article are questionable.
A do re mi encore: A closer look at the personality correlates of music preferences.

Abstract. Through the development of the Short Test of Musical Preferences (STOMP) and a larger theory of music preferences, Rentfrow and Gosling (2003, 2006) have helped guide the way toward understanding the role of music in people's lives, and the relationship between music preferences and personality. The four music dimensions they established in their 2003 study provide a broad-brush look at some of the relationships between music preferences and personality. This study of 83 undergraduates at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, used the NEO-PI, rather than the Big Five Inventory, which allowed us to examine the six facets that make up each of the Big Five traits as well as those traits themselves, and it looked separately at the music genres that make up the four music dimensions identified by Rentfrow and Gosling (2003). The findings provide general support for Rentfrow and Gosling's work, but they also demonstrate that the personality patterns for the specific music genres differ considerably from.
Factors Associated with Reproductive Behavior of Low Income Mothers in Kiandutu Slum in Thika Municipality, Kenya

The purpose of this study was to investigate maternal factors associated with reproductive behavior of low income mothers in Kiandutu slum in Thika Municipality, Kenya. The family resource management model and the safe motherhood theoretical framework guided the study. A survey of 120 randomly selected mothers was conducted using simple random sampling. Data was collected using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Results showed that the level of education (p=0.000), occupation (p=0.037), income levels (p=0.040), religious affiliation (p=0.007) and attitude towards contraception (p=0.000) had significant relationship with mothers’ reproductive behavior. However, age, marital status, ethnicity contraceptive knowledge and use were not significantly related to reproductive behavior. Implications for fertility, family size, family planning, and involvement of males in reproductive health are included in the discussion. The study recommends that reproductive and sexual health education be made available to women and girls of childbearing age. This will help to empower them to take control of their own fertility.
Effects of superheated steam on the drying of rubberwood

Yamsaengsung, R. and Buaphud, K. Effects of superheated steam on the drying of rubberwood Songklanakarin J. Sci. Technol. , 2006, 28(4) : 803-816 Rubberwood drying is the most time and energy consuming step in the processing of wood product. This research studied the effect of superheated steam drying on the drying time required and the physical and mechanical properties of rubberwood after drying. In this study, a cylindrical drying chamber with a length of 1.2 m and a diameter of 0.5 m was constructed and injected with superheated steam. The dimensions of the wood lumber were 1 m × 7.62 cm × 2.54 cm. The wood samples were impinged with alternating cycles of superheated steam and hot air at ratios of 6:1, 4:1 and 1:6 hours until the moisture content was less than 15% dry basis. The conditions inside the chamber were 110oC and ambient pressure. Continuous superheated steam and continuous hot air were also used for comparisons. The drying rate and the temperature profile for each process were determined. Initial acceptability of the dried wood was conducted using the prong test and visual inspection. Results showed that if the drying rate was too fast, the dried wood did not pass the prong test due to stress buildup. Therefore, an optimum drying condition was developed based on minimizing defects and reducing the drying time. For the optimum condition, the following schedule was carried out: (1) saturated steam at 100oC was used during the first 4 hours of drying to prevent the wood surface from drying too quickly which ORIGINAL ARTICLE 1Ph.D. (Agricultural Engineering), Asst. Prof., 2M.Eng. student in Chemical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Prince of Songkla University, Hat Yai, Songkhla, 90112 Thailand. Corresponding e-mail: ram.y@psu.ac. th Received, 20 December 2005 Accepted, 8 March 2006 Songklanakarin J. Sci. Technol. Vol.28 No.4 Jul. Aug. 2006 804 Effects of superheated steam on the drying of rubberwood Yamsaengsung, R. and Buaphud, K. would minimize the moisture gradient between the center and wood surface, (2) superheated steam at 105oC and 110oC was used in alternating cycle with hot air (80oC) during the main drying stages to rapidly remove the free water and majority of the bound water inside the wood, and (3) hot air was used continuously during the final stages of drying to reduce the relative humidity inside the chamber making it possible for the removal of the residual bound water. This process successfully reduced the drying time to less than 2 days without causing any defects which compared favorably to the conventional hot air drying process of 7-8 days. Moreover, results of the mechanical properties for the optimum condition showed that the shear-parallel-to-grain was 13.46 MPa and the compression strength parallel-to-grain was 37.73 MPa, both of which were higher than the literature values. Thus, using superheated steam in conjunction with hot air presents a substantial saving in operating time and energy consumption compared to the conventional method while retaining the desired mechanical properties of the wood.
Coupling of surface air and sea surface temperatures in the CERA‐20C reanalysis

ECMWF has recently produced its first ocean‐atmosphere coupled twentieth century reanalysis CERA‐20C, with ten ensemble members. CERA‐20C is based on a coupled climate model with data assimilation implemented individually for the atmosphere and ocean components. This article focuses on the relationships between 2 m air temperature (T2m) and sea surface temperature (SST) in this new coupled climate reanalysis from the perspective of ensemble statistics. The results show where the atmosphere or the ocean are driving the ensemble variability of temperature at the air–sea interface on varying time‐scales.
Biosorption of lead(II) and chromium(VI) on groundnut hull: Equilibrium, kinetics and thermodynamics study

The biosorption of lead(II) and chromium(VI) on groundnut hull was investigated. Batch biosorption experiments were conducted to find the equilibrium time and biosorption capacity. Effect of parameters like pH, temperature and initial metal concentration was studied. The maximum biosorption capacity of lead(II) and chromium(VI) was found to be 31.54 ± 0.63 and 30.21 ± 0.74 mg g -1 , respectively. The optimum pH for lead(II) and chromium(VI) removal was 5 ± 0.1 and 2 ± 0.1, respectively. The temperature change, in the range of 20 - 45oC affected the biosorption capacity. The maximum removal of lead(II) was achieved at 20 ± 2oC, where as maximum uptake of chromium(VI) was observed at 40 ± 2oC. The biosorption data was fitted to the Langmuir and the Freundlich isotherm models. The Langmuir model showed better representation of data, with correlation coefficient greater than 0.98. The kinetics of biosorption followed the pseudo second order kinetics model. The thermodynamics parameters were evaluated from the experimental data.
The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This study uses postings by divorced fathers to an unmoderated Internet chat room to sound and analyze their voices. The findings show that the posters expressed an acute sense of powerlessness with respect to their status as non-residential fathers, the impo-sition of child support, the mothers of their children, the family courts, and lawyers and helping professionals. Although most of their grievances have already been reported in the literature on non-custodial post-divorce parenting, the anonymous postings allow us to hear an intensity of feeling that comes through much more faintly in studies based on interviews or focus groups. Since the posters seem to be a particularly aggrieved and angry group of men who are unlikely to seek professional counseling, the authors suggest professional intervention via the Internet. The challenges that chat room data poses to research are noted.
Leakage-Resilient Secret Sharing

In this work, we consider the natural goal of designing secret sharing schemes that ensure security against a powerful adaptive adversary who may learn some “leaked” information about all the shares. We say that a secret sharing scheme is p-party leakage-resilient , if the secret remains statistically hidden even after an adversary learns a bounded amount of leakage, where each bit of leakage can depend jointly on the shares of an adaptively chosen subset of p parties. A lot of works have focused on designing secret sharing schemes that handle individual and (mostly) non-adaptive leakage for (some) threshold secret sharing schemes ( [DP07, DDV10, LL12,ADKO15,GK18a,BDIR18]). • We give an unconditional compiler that transforms any standard secret sharing scheme with arbitrary access structure into a p-party leakage-resilient one for p logarithmic in the number of parties. This yields the first secret sharing schemes secure against adaptive and joint leakage for more than two parties. • As a natural extension, we initiate the study of leakage-resilient non-malleable secret sharing and build such schemes for general access structures. We empower the computationally unbounded adversary to adaptively leak from the shares and then use the leakage to tamper with each of the shares arbitrarily and independently. Leveraging our p-party leakage-resilient schemes, we also construct such non-malleable secret sharing schemes: any such tampering either preserves the secret or completely ‘destroys’ it. This improves upon the non-malleable secret sharing scheme of Goyal and Kumar (CRYPTO 2018) where no leakage was permitted. Leakage-resilient non-malleable codes can be seen as 2-out-of-2 schemes satisfying our guarantee and have already found several applications in cryptography [LL12,ADKO15,GKP18,GK18a,CL18,OPVV18]. • Our constructions rely on a clean connection we draw to communication complexity in the well-studied number-on-forehead (NOF) model and rely on functions that have strong communication-complexity lower bounds in the NOF model (in a black-box way). We get efficient p-party leakage-resilient schemes for p upto O(log n) as our share sizes have exponential dependence on p. We observe that improving this dependence from 2 to 2 will lead to progress on longstanding open problems in complexity theory. ∗UCLA. a@ashutoshk.com †UCLA. raghum@cs.ucla. edu ‡UCLA. sahai@cs.ucla. edu ISSN 1433-8092 Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, Report No. 200 (2018)
Differential effects of suspended sediments on larval survival and settlement of New Zealand urchins Evechinus chloroticus and abalone Haliotis iris

Larvae of marine organisms play an important role in the dynamics of populations, are generally sensitive to environmental stressors, and vary dramatically among species in life history traits. We examined the effects of suspended sediments from terrestrial runoff on larval development, survival, and settlement of New Zealand sea urchins Evechinus chloroticus and abalone Haliotis iris. Larval urchins and abalone were reared under 5 suspended sediment regimes (variable concentrations and timing of exposure, benchmarked against nearby field conditions), and in the absence of sediments. Stage specific per capita mortality rates of urchin larvae increased with concentrations of suspended sediments, and generally, these rates (and the sensitivity of urchin larvae to sediments) decreased with age. Mortality rates of abalone similarly increased in response to sediment concentrations, although older larvae continued to incur high losses when exposed to sediments. Mortality rates of both abalone and urchins increased in response to acute exposure to sediments early in development. For urchins, this effect was immediate and coincident only with exposure to sediments, whereas elevated mortality rates persisted well after the removal of sediments for abalone. Cumulative survival to competency was similar among species and generally decreased with exposure time and/or concentration of sediments. Urchins were twice as likely to settle and metamorphose as abalone but patterns were not related to larval sediment regime for either species. The strong species specific responses to suspended sediments we observe may greatly alter patterns of larval connectivity in marine meta-communities. © Inter-Research 2006.
A classification of flows on AFD factors with faithful Connes–Takesaki modules

We classify flows on AFD factors with faithful Connes-Takesaki modules. This is a generalization of classification of trace-scaling flows on the AFD $\mathrm{II}_\infty$ factor, which is equivalent to the uniqueness of the AFD $\mathrm{III}_1$ factor. In order to do this, we show that a flow on an AFD factor with faithful Connes-Takesaki module has the Rohlin property, which gives a partial answer to a characterization problem of the Rohlin property posed by Masuda-Tomatsu. It is also possible to think of this result as an $\mathbf{R}$-version of Izumi's result about compact group actions on type III factors with faithful Connes-Takesaki modules.
Geothermobarometry of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption: New constraints on Icelandic magma plumbing systems

The 2010 Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland produced mildly alkaline basalt that was emitted during the initial flank eruptive phase, whereas tephra predominately of benmorite composition was erupted during the second explosive phase from the summit of the volcano. These latter magmas show pervasive magma mingling between basalts and silicic magma. Glass and coexisting equilibrium mineral analyses have been used to define pressure-temperature crystallization paths for the eruption based on melt, clinopyroxene-melt and plagioclase-melt thermobarometry. Temperature calculations show that the early basaltic eruptions from the flank eruption have magmatic temperatures of around 1170°C (±25°C) and a narrow temperature range (<30°C) at any given depth. In contrast, benmoritic products crystallized at lower temperatures (1000-1060°C). Pressure estimates yield an average pressure of 5.6-6.4 kbar (±1.5 kbar) for the basaltic tephra and variable but lower pressures for the benmoritic samples ranging down to 0.6 kbar. The mafic magma mainly crystallized in the deeper crust (16-18 km), whereas mingled magma from the summit eruption crystallized at more shallow crustal levels (2-5 km) suggesting multistage magma ascent. Magmatic water concentrations were estimated with plagioclase-melt hygrometry. The maximum average water content of 1.8 wt % H2O, obtained in one of the summit samples, is in agreement with melt inclusion observations. Water concentration of this or lower levels is demonstrated to only have limited effect on the pressure-temperature calculations.
An Endogenous Growth Model of a Financially Repressed Small Open Economy

The paper develops a monetary endogenous growth model of a financially repressed small open economy, characterized by curb markets, capital mobility, transaction costs in domestic and foreign capital markets, and a flexible exchange rate system, to analyze the impact of financial liberalization – interest rate deregulation and lower multiple reserve requirements – on growth and inflation. When the model is calibrated to match world figures, we find that interest rate deregulation enhances growth and reduces inflation in steady-state. For relatively smaller transaction costs in the curb market, the above result is, however, reversed. Under such circumstances, lowering the transaction costs in the foreign capital market tends to restore the growth-enhancing (inflation-reducing) capabilities of interest rate deregulation. Lower reserve requirements, though, always ensures lower (higher) steady-state inflation (growth).
Analyses of selected heavy metals and Aflatoxin M1 in milk for human consumption in Jhang City, Pakistan

Chemical contaminants in milk affect public health and levels above permissible limits can constrain exports under sanitary and phyto-sanitary agreements. A screening survey was conducted during 2012-2013 to determine concentrations of Copper (Cu), Lead (Pb), Cadmium (Cd), Chromium (Cr), and Aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) in unprocessed, non-branded liquid milk available at conventional milk shops in Jhang city of Punjab. For the heavy metals men-tioned above, samples were also collected directly from dairy herds near a wastewater drain in suburbs of the city. Concentrations of the studied contaminants were compared between winter and summer samples.
Long run economic development in Latin America in a comparative perspective : proximate and ultimate causes

Abstract This paper describes trends in economic growth and its causes in several Latin American countries in the 20th century. In the explanatory scheme, a distinction is made between 'proximate' and 'ultimate' causes of economic growth. Proximate causes are those areas of causality where models and quantification is possible, whereas ultimate causes are much more difficult to quantify. Some elements in the realm of the ultimate causes (like institutions and income distribution) will be analysed in an historical perspective and others, especially total factor productivity and growth accounting, in the proximate scheme. Latin America's performance is also compared to developed and other developing countries. The paper provides a quantitative assessment of Latin American economic growth performance in the twentieth century in a comparative perspective. Within the region it was found that heterogeneity has not decreased and no clear tendencies of convergence can be detected. The reform process of the late 1980s and 1990s was implemented because of the profound crisis of the 1980s and the detection of some structural weaknesses in the Latin American economies. Some aggressive and early reformers show impressive growth results (e.g. Chile) but on the whole, the growth performance in the 1990s has been rather disappointing. The paper stresses the fact that the proximate causes are not independent of the ultimate causes of growth as to a significant degree, proximate causes are dimensions through which ultimate causes can be seen to operate. At the proximate level, the interaction between capital accumulation and technological progress is an example of this interdependence. At the ultimate level, there exists interaction between the institutional framework of a society and the implementation of economic policy. An example of interdependence between the ultimate and proximate levels is the relationship between technological progress and the institutional context. The paper concludes with a description of some of the most important characteristics of Latin America in the realm of the ultimate causes. The interdependence between proximate and ultimate is mainly analysed in terms of growth. Besides the unsatisfactory growth performance, equity aspects are another worrying characteristic of contemporary trends in the region and institutional factors are probably key determinants in explaining the weak relationship between growth and equity.