Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Integrating gross morphology and bone histology to assess skeletal maturity in early dinosauromorphs: new insights from Dromomeron (Archosauria: Dinosauromorpha)

Understanding growth patterns is central to properly interpreting paleobiological signals in tetrapods, but assessing skeletal maturity in some extinct clades may be difficult when growth patterns are poorly constrained by a lack of ontogenetic series. To overcome this difficulty in assessing the maturity of extinct archosaurian reptiles—crocodylians, birds and their extinct relatives—many studies employ bone histology to observe indicators of the developmental stage reached by a given individual. However, the relationship between gross morphological and histological indicators of maturity has not been examined in most archosaurian groups. In this study, we examined the gross morphology of a hypothesized growth series of Dromomeron romeri femora (96.6–144.4 mm long), the first series of a non-dinosauriform dinosauromorph available for such a study. We also histologically sampled several individuals in this growth series. Previous studies reported that D. romeri lacks well-developed rugose muscle scars that appear during ontogeny in closely related dinosauromorph taxa, so integrating gross morphology and histological signal is needed to determine reliable maturity indicators for early bird-line archosaurs. We found that, although there are small, linear scars indicating muscle attachment sites across the femur, the only rugose muscle scar that appears during ontogeny is the attachment of the M. caudofemoralis longus, and only in the largest-sampled individual. This individual is also the only femur with histological indicators that asymptotic size had been reached, although smaller individuals possess some signal of decreasing growth rates (e.g., decreasing vascular density). The overall femoral bone histology of D. romeri is similar to that of other early bird-line archosaurs (e.g., woven-bone tissue, moderately to well-vascularized, longitudinal vascular canals). All these data indicate that the lack of well-developed femoral scars is autapomorphic for this species, not simply an indication of skeletal immaturity. We found no evidence of the high intraspecific variation present in early dinosaurs and other dinosauriforms, but a limited sample size of other early bird-line archosaur growth series make this tentative. The evolutionary history and phylogenetic signal of gross morphological features must be considered when assessing maturity in extinct archosaurs and their close relatives, and in some groups corroboration with bone histology or with better-known morphological characters is necessary.
High rates of apoptosis visualized in the symbiont-bearing gills of deep-sea Bathymodiolus mussels

Symbiosis between Bathymodiolus and Gammaproteobacteria enables these deep-sea mussels to live in toxic environments like hydrothermal vents and cold seeps. The quantity of endosymbionts within the gill-bacteriocytes appears to vary according to the hosts environment. We investigated the hypothesis of a control of the endosymbionts density by apoptosis, a programmed cell death. We used fluorometric TUNEL-method and active Caspase-3-targeting antibodies to visualize and quantify apoptotic cells in mussel gills. To avoid artefacts due to depressurization upon specimen recovery from the deep-sea, we compared the apoptotic rates between mussels recovered unpressurised, versus mussels recovered in a pressure-maintaining device, in two species from hydrothermal vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge: Bathymodiolus azoricus and B. puteoserpentis. Our results show that pressurized recovery had no significant effect on the apoptotic rate in the gill filaments. Apoptotic levels were highest in the ciliated zone and in the circulating hemocytes, compared to the bacteriocyte zone. Apoptotic gill-cells in B. aff. boomerang from the pockmarks off the Gulf of Guinea, show similar distribution patterns. Deep-sea symbiotic mussels have much higher rates of apoptosis in their gills than the coastal mussel Mytilus edulis without chemolithoautotrophic symbionts. We discuss how apoptosis might be one of the mechanisms that contribute to the adaptation of deep-sea mussels to toxic environments and/or to symbiosis.
A Comparison of Moves and the Sequence of Moves in Research Abstracts in Standard and Predatory Journals

The purpose of the recent study was to compare rhetorical moves and move sequences in scientific research articles published by standard and predatory journals. The corpus consisted of 100 research abstracts (50 standard and 50 predatory abstracts) published between 2011 and 2015. The abstracts were analyzed based on Santos’s (1996) move model consisting of five main moves: ‘Situating the research’, ‘Presenting the research’, ‘Describing the methodology’, ‘Summarizing the results’, and ‘Discussing the research’. To increase the reliability of the analysis, three inter-raters were invited to verify the data. The findings show five moves in two corpora. All moves in the standard corpus occurred more than 60% of the time and are considered as conventional moves. However, four moves in the predatory journal abstracts [Move 3 or ‘Describing the methodology’ (94%), Move 4 or ‘Summarizing the results’ (82%), Move 2 or ‘Presenting the research’ (68%), and Move 5 or ‘Discussing the research’ (64%)] occurred as conventional moves; Move 1, or ‘Situating the research’,which occurred in only 48% of cases, was an exception. In addition, 50 abstracts in the standard corpus exhibited 26 move sequences; on the contrary, in the predatory corpus of 50 abstracts, 41 move sequenceswere found. The findings reveal that moves and move sequences of predatory abstracts are varied and do not conform to those found instandard journals. Thus, it can be concluded that move analysis may be used to distinguish between standard (peer-reviewed) journals and predatory (non-peer-reviewed) journals. Keywords: Move analysis, research abstract, scientific research article, predatory journals
Learning to de-anonymize social networks

Releasing anonymized social network data for analysis has been a popular idea among data providers. Despite evidence to the contrary the belief that anonymization will solve the privacy problem in practice refuses to die. This dissertation contributes to the field of social graph de-anonymization by demonstrating that even automated models can be quite successful in breaching the privacy of such datasets. We propose novel machine-learning based techniques to learn the identities of nodes in social graphs, thereby automating manual, heuristic-based attacks. Our work extends the vast literature of social graph de-anonymization attacks by systematizing them. We present a random-forests based classifier which uses structural node features based on neighborhood degree distribution to predict their similarity. Using these simple and efficient features we design versatile and expressive learning models which can learn the de-anonymization task just from a few examples. Our evaluation establishes their efficacy in transforming de-anonymization to a learning problem. The learning is transferable in that the model can be trained to attack one graph when trained on another. Moving on, we demonstrate the versatility and greater applicability of the proposed model by using it to solve the long-standing problem of benchmarking social graph anonymization schemes. Our framework bridges a fundamental research gap by making cheap, quick and automated analysis of anonymization schemes possible, without even requiring their full description. The benchmark is based on comparison of structural information leakage vs. utility preservation. We study the trade-off of anonymity vs. utility for six popular anonymization schemes including those promising k-anonymity. Our analysis shows that none of the schemes are fit for the purpose. Finally, we present an end-to-end social graph de-anonymization attack which uses the proposed machine learning techniques to recover node mappings across intersecting graphs. Our attack enhances the state of art in graph de-anonymization by demonstrating better performance than all the other attacks including those that use seed knowledge. The attack is seedless and heuristic free, which demonstrates the superiority of machine learning techniques as compared to hand-selected parametric attacks. 3 4 Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Ross Anderson without whom this dissertation would have not been possible. He helped me at critical junctures, provided encouragement and valuable feedback, I owe him much gratitude for whatever I managed to achieve at Cambridge. I thank George Danezis for mentoring me during the initial stages of my PhD and teaching me how to …
Approximating Explicitly the Mean-Reverting CEV Process

We are interested in the numerical solution of mean-reverting CEV processes that appear in financial mathematics models and are described as nonnegative solutions of certain stochastic differential equations with sublinear diffusion coefficients of the form where . Our goal is to construct explicit numerical schemes that preserve positivity. We prove convergence of the proposed SD scheme with rate depending on the parameter . Furthermore, we verify our findings through numerical experiments and compare with other positivity preserving schemes. Finally, we show how to treat the two-dimensional stochastic volatility model with instantaneous variance process given by the above mean-reverting CEV process.
Sources of information for urban vegetable farmers in Accra, Ghana

This study assesses sources of information for vegetable farmers in urban part of Accra, Ghana. One hundred vegetable farmers in the study area were sampled and interviewed using structured questionnaires. Findings revealed that urban vegetable farming is regarded as the business of men. Most of the urban vegetable farmers use radio as a source of agricultural information. Farmers use information on agrochemicals acquired in applying fertilizer, weedicides and pest control. A challenge to the urban vegetable farmers in Accra is poor public relations on the part of agricultural extension agents. The study recommends that the Ministry of Food and Agriculture roll out a programme to educate urban vegetable farmers on the various sources of agricultural information and sponsor adult education programmes in the local languages on national radio and television for farmers to help them make use of different sources of agricultural information effectively.
GradientBased Learning Applied to Document Recognition

Multilayer Neural Networks trained with the backpropagation algorithm constitute the best example of a successful Gradient-Based Learning technique. Given an appropriate network architecture, Gradient-Based Learning algorithms can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns such as handwritten characters, with minimal preprocessing. This paper reviews various methods applied to handwritten character recognition and compares them on a standard handwritten digit recognition task. Convolutional Neural Networks, that are specifically designed to deal with the variability of 2D shapes, are shown to outperform all other techniques. Real-life document recognition systems are composed of multiple modules including field extraction, segmentation, recognition, and language modeling. A new learning paradigm, called Graph Transformer Networks (GTN), allows such multi-module systems to be trained globally using Gradient-Based methods so as to minimize an overall performance measure. Two systems for on-line handwriting recognition are described. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of global training, and the flexibility of Graph Transformer Networks. A Graph Transformer Network for reading bank check is also described. It uses Convolutional Neural Network character recognizers combined with global training techniques to provides record accuracy on business and personal checks. It is deployed commercially and reads several million checks per day.
The ACTN3 Gene is a Potential Biomarker for the Risk of Non-Contact Sports Injury in Female Athletes

Sports injuries can become serious impairments for all athletes. Most notably, female athletes are at higher risk than men for sports injury, for example, anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) disorder. However, there is currently no genetic marker to determine if a female athlete harbors a predisposition for muscle trauma. Hence, we performed single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping of the α-actinin-3 (ACTN3), angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE), and uncoupling proteins (UCP1, UCP2, and UCP3) in 99 young female athletes who had been injured during a sports activity, and we compared the occurrence of muscle traumas with the genotypes using the chi-square test. For the ACTN3 577R allele, the subjects who had non-contact muscle injury had a marked increase in frequency (p-value=0.0015; odds ratio=2.52). The significant increase in non-contact muscle injury related to ACTN3 577R alleles suggests that ACTN3 is likely to be involved in muscle strain and that non-contact muscle injury might occur due to the presence of this allele. It is crucially important for young female athletes to understand their risk for injury, as they might be able to modify their training program to avoid injury, depending on their specific genetic markers.
Potential Functions of Lemon Grass Cymbopogon citratus in Health and Disease

Plants are utilized as therapeutic agents since time immemorial in both organized (Ayurveda, Unani) and unorganized (folk, tribal, native) form. Plants have been identified as the potent therapeutic agent, due to the presence of nutritional (minerals and vitamins) and non-nutritional (fibres, active phytochemicals, including the flavonoids, terpenoids, lignans, sulfides, polyphenolics, carotenoids, coumarins, saponins, plant sterols, curcumins, and phthalides) component, hence promoted as “functional food”. The present paper highlights the functional properties of Lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus), which has been consumed in various forms such in Thai, Vietnamese and South East Asian cuisines. It is a highly rated folk medicine in Brazil and have been associated with health claims such as treatment in coughs, constipation, elephantiasis flu, gingivitis, headache leprosy, malaria, ophthalmia, pneumonia, vascular disorders, diarrhoea and stomach ache. It has been claimed to be anti-inflammatory, vasorelaxing, diuretic, remedy in treating ringworm infestation, for nervous, gastrointestinal disturbances, fevers and hypertension. Lemon grass has high antioxidant levels. However, though it has obtained a GRAS status, clinical trials on humans are warranted.
A translucent interstellar cloud at z = 2.69 - CO, H2, and HD in the line-of-sight to SDSS J123714.60 + 064759.5

We present the analysis of a sub-damped Lyman-α system with neutral hydrogen column density, log N(H 0 ) (cm -2 ) = 20.0 ± 0.15 at z abs = 2.69 toward SDSSJ123714.60 + 064759.5 (z em = 2.78). Using the VLT/UVES and X-shooter spectrographs, we detect H 2 , HD, and CO molecules in absorption with log N(H 2 , HD, CO) (cm -2 ) = 19.21 +0.13 -0.12 , 14.48 ± 0.05 and 14.17 ± 0.09 respectively. The overall metallicity of the system is super-solar ([Zn/H] = +0.34 relative to solar) and iron is highly depleted ([Fe/Zn] = -1.39), revealing metal-rich and dusty gas. Three H 2 velocity components spanning ∼125 km s -1 are detected. The strongest H 2 component, at z abs = 2.68955, with logN(H 2 ) = 19.20, does not coincide with the centre of the HI absorption. This implies that the molecular fraction in this component, ƒ H2 = 2N(H 2 )/(2N(H 2 ) +N(H 0 )), is higher than the mean molecular fraction fH 2 = ¼ in the system. We also found the Cl 0 associated with this H 2 component to have N(Cl 0 )/N(Cl+) > 0.4, which points in the same direction. Cl 0 is tied to H 2 by charge exchange reactions, this means that the molecular fraction in this component is not far from unity. The kinetic temperature derived from the J = 0 and 1 rotational levels of H 2 is T = 108 +84 -33 K and the particle density derived from the C 0 ground-state fine structure level populations is n H0 ∼ 50-60 cm -3 . We derive an electronic density -3 for a UV field similar to the Galactic one and show that the carbon-to-sulphur ratio in the cloud is close to the solar ratio. The size of the molecular cloud is probably smaller than 1 pc. Both the CO/H 2 = 10 -5 and CO/C 0 ∼ 1 ratios for ƒ H 2 > 0.24 indicate that the cloud classifies as translucent, i.e., a regime where carbon is found both in atomic and molecular form. The corresponding extinction, A V = 0.14, albeit lower than the definition of a translucent sightline (based on extinction properties), is high for the observed H0 column density. This means that intervening clouds with similar local properties but with higher column densities (i.e. larger physical extent) could be missed by current magnitude-limited QSO surveys. The excitation of CO is dominated by radiative interaction with the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and we derive T ex (CO) = 10.5 +0.8 -0.6 K when T CMBR (z = 2.69) = 10.05 K is expected. We measure N(HD) / 2N(H 2 ) = 10 -5 . This is about 10 times higher than what is measured in the Galactic ISM for ƒ H 2 = ¼ but similar to what is measured in the Galactic ISM for higher molecular fractions. The astration factor of deuterium with respect to the primordial D/H ratio is only about 3. This can be the consequence of accretion ofunprocessed gas from the intergalactic medium onto the associated galaxy. In the future, it will be possible to search efficiently for molecular-rich DLAs/sub-DLAs with X-shooter, but detailed studies of the physical state of the gas will still need UVES observations.
Modeling Software Risk Assessment Based on Multi-Vulnerability Lifecycle

A software security vulnerability, which has been discovered but not patched, could threaten the security of an entire organization. That is because frequently an equipment is controlled by a software system connected to the Internet which is a playground for malicious users. Fortunately, finding out characteristics of the vulnerability related to its lifecycle helps us for prioritizing patch developments and optimal resource allocations. Until now, researchers mainly consider a lifecycle for a single vulnerability due to its simplicity. In reality, however, multiple vulnerabilities could be acting simultaneously. In order to understand risk and flow of the security vulnerabilities more accurately, we need to investigate lifecycle based on multiple vulnerabilities. In this paper, we try to build up a multi-vulnerability lifecycle. We also try to come up with a risk evaluation formula for a given software system. The proposed approach could allow comparison of alternative software systems and optimization of risk mitigation strategies.
Cultural adaptation to Brazil and psychometric performance of the “Evidence-Based Practice Questionnaire”

Objectives To culturally adapt the instrument “Evidence-Based Practice Questionnaire” (EBPQ) to the Portuguese language and assess its psychometric qualities. Methods The steps of cultural adaptation of measurement instruments were followed. Reliability was verified through internal consistency, stability by test-retest, and construct validity by the contrasted groups approach. Results High Cronbach’s alpha (0.91 to 0.68) and satisfactory Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (0.90) were obtained in all domains. In assessing construct validity, significant differences were found between groups of nurses with different backgrounds. Conclusion The steps of cultural adaptation of measurement instruments have been successfully completed. The Brazilian version obtained presents reliable psychometric properties for its use in this population.
A PRRSV GP5-Mosaic vaccine: Protection of pigs from challenge and ex vivo detection of IFNγ responses against several genotype 2 strains

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV), is a highly mutable RNA virus that affects swine worldwide and its control is very challenging due to its formidable heterogeneity in the field. In the present study, DNA vaccines constructed with PRRSV GP5-Mosaic sequences were complexed to cationic liposomes and administered to experimental pigs by intradermal and intramuscular injection, followed by three boosters 14, 28 and 42 days later. The GP5-Mosaic vaccine thus formulated was immunogenic and induced protection from challenge in vaccinated pigs comparable to that induced by a wild type (VR2332) GP5 DNA vaccine (GP5-WT). Periodic sampling of blood and testing of vaccine-induced responses followed. Interferon-γ (IFN-γ) mRNA expression by virus-stimulated peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of GP5-Mosaic-vaccinated pigs was significantly higher compared to pigs vaccinated with either GP5-WT or empty vector at 21, 35 and 48 days after vaccination. Cross-reactive cellular responses were also demonstrated in GP5-Mosaic vaccinated pigs after stimulation of PBMCs with divergent strains of PRRSV. Thus, significantly higher levels of IFN-γ mRNA were detected when PBMCs from GP5-Mosaic-vaccinated pigs were stimulated by four Genotype 2 strains (VR2332, NADC9, NADC30 and SDSU73), which have at least 10% difference in GP5 amino acid sequences, while such responses were recorded only upon VR2332 stimulation in GP5-WT-vaccinated pigs. In addition, the levels of virus-specific neutralizing antibodies were higher in GP5-Mosaic or GP5-WT vaccinated pigs than those in vector-control pigs. The experimental pigs vaccinated with either the GP5-Mosaic vaccine or the GP5-WT vaccine were partially protected from challenge with VR2332, as measured by significantly lower viral loads in sera and tissues and lower lung lesion scores than the vector control group. These data demonstrate that the GP5-Mosaic vaccine can induce cross-reactive cellular responses to diverse strains, neutralizing antibodies, and protection in pigs.