Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is there a role for the adverse outcome pathway framework to support radiation protection?

Abstract Purpose: In 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) formally launched the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) Programme. The AOP framework has the potential for predictive utility in identifying early biological endpoints linked to adverse effects. It uses the weight of correlative evidence to identify a minimal set of measurable key events that link molecular initiating events to an adverse outcome. AOPs have the capability to identify knowledge gaps and priority areas for future research based on relevance to an adverse outcome. In addition, AOPs can identify pathways that are common among multiple stressors, thereby allowing for the possibility of refined risk assessments based on co-exposure considerations. The AOP framework is increasingly being used in chemical and ecological risk assessment; however, its use in the development of radiation-specific pathways has yet to be fully explored. To bring awareness of the AOP framework to the Canadian radiation community, a workshop was held in Canada in June 2018 that brought together radiation experts from Health Canada, the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Methods: The purpose of the workshop was to share knowledge on the AOP framework, specifically (1) to introduce the concept of the AOP framework and its possible utility to Canadian radiation experts; (2) to provide examples on how it has advanced risk assessment; (3) to discuss an illustrative example specific to ionizing radiation; and lastly (4) to identify the broad benefits and challenges of the AOP framework to the radiation community. Results: The participants showed interest in the framework, case examples were described and areas of challenge were identified. Herein, we summarize the outcomes of the workshop. Conclusions: Overall, participants agreed that by building AOPs in the radiation field, a network of data-sharing initiatives will enhance our interpretation of existing knowledge where current scientific evidence is minimal. They would provide new avenues to understand effects at low-dose and dose-rates and help to quantify the combined effect of multiple stressors on shared mechanistic pathways.
Caste-specific development of the dopaminergic system during metamorphosis in female honey bees

Caste-specific differences in the dopaminergic systems of social insects assist in maintaining caste-specific behavior. To determine how caste differences in the honey bee occur during metamorphosis, a number of comparative analyses between castes were performed including comprehensive quantification of: levels of dopamine and its metabolite in the brain, the gene expression levels of enzymes involved in dopamine biosynthesis and conversion as well as expression levels of dopamine receptors and a dopamine transporter. Dopamine levels standardized to the protein contents of a whole brain at the day of eclosion in queens were 3.6-fold higher than those in workers. Dopamine levels increased until eclosion (7 days) in queens, whereas those in workers increased until 5–6 days before eclosion and then maintained until eclosion (10 days). These caste-specific dopamine dynamics in the brain were supported by the higher expression of genes (Amddc and Amth) encoding enzymes involved in dopamine synthesis in queens. The distribution of cells expressing Amddc in the brain revealed that soma clusters of dopaminergic cells were similar between castes at 7–8 days after pupation, suggesting the upregulation of Amddc expression in some cells in queens rather than addition of cell clusters. In contrast, genes encoding dopamine receptors were downregulated in queens or showed similar expression levels between castes. The expression of genes encoding dopamine transporters did not differ between castes. These results reveal the developmental process of caste-specific dopaminergic systems during metamorphosis in the honey bee, suggesting caste-specific behavior and division of reproduction in this highly eusocial species.
High Incidence of Lysogeny in the Oxygen Minimum Zones of the Arabian Sea (Southwest Coast of India)

Though microbial processes in the oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) of the Arabian Sea (AS) are well documented, prokaryote-virus interactions are less known. The present study was carried out to determine the potential physico-chemical factors influencing viral abundances and their life strategies (lytic and lysogenic) along the vertical gradient in the OMZ of the AS (southwest coast of India). Water samples were collected during the southwest monsoon (SWM) season in two consecutive years (2015 and 2016) from different depths, namely, the surface layer, secondary chlorophyll a maxima (~30–40 m), oxycline (~70–80 m), and hypoxic/suboxic layers (~200–350 m). The high viral abundances observed in oxygenated surface waters (mean ± SD = 6.1 ± 3.4 × 106 viral-like particles (VLPs) mL−1), drastically decreased with depth in the oxycline region (1.2 ± 0.5 × 106 VLPs mL−1) and hypoxic/suboxic waters (0.3 ± 0.3 × 106 VLPs mL−1). Virus to prokaryote ratio fluctuated in the mixed layer (~10) and declined significantly (p < 0.001) to 1 in the hypoxic layer. Viral production (VP) and frequency of virus infected cells (FIC) were maximum in the surface and minimum in the oxycline layer, whereas the viral lysis was undetectable in the suboxic/hypoxic layer. The detection of a high percentage of lysogeny in suboxic (48%) and oxycline zones (9–24%), accompanied by undetectable rates of lytic viral infection support the hypothesis that lysogeny may represent the major survival strategy for viruses in unproductive or harsh nutrient/host conditions in deoxygenated waters.
Basal glucosuria in cats

Abstract Objective of this study was to demonstrate the ubiquitous presence of glucose in urine of euglycemic cats by a highly sensitive glucose assay. The local electronic database was searched for results of quantitative urine glucose measurements in cats. A total of 325 feline urine glucose measurements were identified, of which 303 (93%) had been submitted by one of the co‐authors working in a near‐by small animal practice. After the exclusion of patients with kidney disease (n = 60), hyperthyroidism (n = 15), diabetes mellitus (n = 11), multiple diseases (n = 9) or steroid treatment (n = 3), as well as serial measurements (n = 87) and outliers (n = 8), the final study population consisted of 132 cats. Urine creatinine concentration was unavailable in five patients. Whereas all but one cat had glucose concentrations above the detection limit of the assay (0.11 mmol/L, Gluco‐quant Enzyme Kit/Roche Diagnostics), no positive glucose dipstick test result (Combur 9‐Test, Roche Diagnostics) was observed. The median (range) of urinary glucose concentration and the glucose‐to‐creatinine ratio (UGCR) was 0.389 (<0.11–1.665) mmol/L and 0.0258 (0.007–0.517) respectively. The UGCR was not affected by age, gender, breed or leukocyturia, whereas cats with hematuria had slightly higher values. Data show that so‐called “basal glucosuria” is present in the majority of cats and by no means diagnostic for diabetes mellitus or renal glucosuria. This has to be considered when using bio‐analytical methods with a low limit of quantification.
CAVBench: A Benchmark Suite for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have recently attracted a significant amount of attention both from researchers and industry. Numerous studies targeting algorithms, software frameworks, and applications on the CAVs scenario have emerged. Meanwhile, several pioneer efforts have focused on the edge computing system and architecture design for the CAVs scenario and provided various heterogeneous platform prototypes for CAVs. However, a standard and comprehensive application benchmark for CAVs is missing, hindering the study of these emerging computing systems. To address this challenging problem, we present CAVBench, the first benchmark suite for the edge computing system in the CAVs scenario. CAVBench is comprised of six typical applications covering four dominate CAVs scenarios and takes four datasets as standard input. CAVBench provides quantitative evaluation results via application and system perspective output metrics. We perform a series of experiments and acquire three systemic characteristics of the applications in CAVBench. First, the operation intensity of the applications is polarized, which explains why heterogeneous hardware is important for a CAVs computing system. Second, all applications in CAVBench consume high memory bandwidth, so the system should be equipped with high bandwidth memory or leverage good memory bandwidth management to avoid the performance degradation caused by memory bandwidth competition. Third, some applications have worse data/instruction locality based on the cache miss observation, so the computing system targeting these applications should optimize the cache architecture. Last, we use the CAVBench to evaluate a typical edge computing platform and present the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the benchmarking results.
Do Sexual Minorities Receive Appropriate Sexual and Reproductive Health Care and Counseling?

CONTEXT Sexual minority women (SMW) are less likely to use sexual and reproductive health care services and receive contraceptive counseling than their heterosexual peers. The role of recent sexual partners and the type of information provided when SMW access health services are unclear. METHODS The National Survey of Family Growth 2006-2015 was used to document sexual orientation disparities in the use of sexual and reproductive health services and counseling in clinical settings among 20,703 women. We incorporate data on sexual partners in the past 12 months to investigate whether recent sex with men was associated with health care seeking behavior and reproductive counseling. RESULTS Eight-seven percent of the sample reported a male partner in the past 12 months, including 83% of bisexual women and 17% of lesbian women. In clinical settings, 48% of women reported birth control counseling at pregnancy or Pap tests, 49% reported a condom consult at an sexually transmitted diseases (STD) screening, and 9% reported emergency contraception counseling at a Pap test. Logistic regression models show that lesbian women were less likely than heterosexual women to have been given a contraceptive prescription or received contraceptive counseling, but were more likely to have received an STD test. In clinical settings, lesbian women were less likely to receive contraceptive counseling at pregnancy tests, and lesbian women without male partners were less likely to have a counseling about condom use at STD-related visits compared with heterosexual women. CONCLUSIONS At least some women and providers adjust health care seeking behaviors and information provided to women based upon recent sexual behavior histories. More work is needed to understand why disparities in reproductive health services and contraceptive use persist among SMW who engage in sex with men.
Compressively Sensed Image Recognition

Compressive Sensing (CS) theory asserts that sparse signal reconstruction is possible from a small number of linear measurements. Although CS enables low-cost linear sampling, it requires non-linear and costly reconstruction. Recent literature works show that compressive image classification is possible in CS domain without reconstruction of the signal. In this work, we introduce a DCT base method that extracts binary discriminative features directly from CS measurements. These CS measurements can be obtained by using (i) a random or a pseudorandom measurement matrix, or (ii) a measurement matrix whose elements are learned from the training data to optimize the given classification task. We further introduce feature fusion by concatenating Bag of Words (BoW) representation of our binary features with one of the two state-of-the-art CNN-based feature vectors. We show that our fused feature outperforms the state-of-the-art in both cases.
Prosodic entrainment in dialog acts

We examined prosodic entrainment in spoken dialogs separately for several dialog acts in cooperative and competitive games. Entrainment was measured for intonation features derived from a superpositional intonation stylization as well as for rhythm features. The found differences can be related to the cooperative or competitive nature of the game, as well as to dialog act properties as its intrinsic authority, supportiveness and distributional characteristics. In cooperative games dialog acts with a high authority given by knowledge and with a high frequency showed the most entrainment. The results are discussed amongst others with respect to the degree of active entrainment control in cooperative behavior.
Remote Welfare Monitoring of Rodents Using Thermal Imaging

Animal research has always played a crucial role in various medical and scientific breakthroughs. They offer, inter alia, insights into diseases mechanisms, genetic predisposition to a disease, and drug therapy. However, the use of animals for medical research is a cause of major controversies and debates in modern science. To warrant high bioethical standards, new directives have been being adopted to replace animal research whenever possible, to reduce the number of animals, and to refine the procedures to minimize stress and pain. Here, we present two new approaches, based on thermal imaging (a remote and passive technology), to assess respiratory rate (RR) as well as exploratory behavior and general activity in rodents. In animal research, these parameters are gold standards for welfare assessment. The approaches were validated in a study conducted with both rats and mice. To test the feasibility of our algorithm to estimate RR, thermal videos from anesthetized rodents were acquired. The capability of the second approach to monitor activity was tested with videos of Open Field tests. Regarding RR, a high agreement between thermal imaging and gold standard (electrocardiography-derived RR) was achieved. The mean relative error averaged 0.50 ± 0.15 breaths/min and 4.55 ± 2.94 breaths/min for rats and mice, respectively. The second approach was capable of monitoring and tracking the activity of the rodents very well. This paper demonstrates that thermal imaging is a promising and relevant alternative for monitoring of RR and activity in rodents, thus contributing to the remote assessment of animal welfare.
EXPECTED EMISSION FROM MERCURY'S EXOSPHERIC SPECIES, AND THEIR ULTRAVIOLET–VISIBLE SIGNATURES

Solar photon scattering probabilities (g values) have been calculated for discrete transitions in 12 species, in a format designed primarily to allow analysis of spacecraft observations from MESSENGER and BepiColombo at Mercury. The results support observations using the MESSENGER Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer spectrograph experiment operating over the spectral range 1150–6000 Å and the BepiColombo spectrograph in the range 550–3150 Å. Significant radial velocity dependence is shown for most of the emission lines, a critical factor for interpretation of the observed spectra. The g values have general application for solar system emission sources dominated by scattering of the solar flux.
Kitchen Russian: Cross-linguistic differences and first-language object naming by Russian–English bilinguals*

We examined first language (L1) naming of common household objects in three groups of Russian–English bilinguals: early, childhood and late bilinguals. Their naming patterns were compared with those of native speakers of Russian and English, in order to detect possible second language (L2) English influence on L1 Russian naming patterns. We investigated whether such influence is modulated by the speaker's linguistic trajectory, specifically, their age of arrival in the L2 environment, which in turn influences their relative proficiency and dominance in the two languages. We also examined whether the potential for L2 shifts can be linked to specific characteristics of the categories in the L1 or L2. L2 influence was evident in the data, increasing with earlier age of arrival but most pronounced with lowest L1 proficiency. The changes entailed both narrowing and broadening of linguistic categories. These findings indicate that L1 word use is susceptible to L2 influence even for concrete nouns referring to familiar objects, and the nature of the shift for a given word appears to be driven by several factors.
Development and Validation of an 18-Item Medium Form of the Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices

The Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) is a widely used measure of general intelligence (g), both across settings and cultures. Due to its lengthy 40-min administration time, several researchers have developed short-form scales, yet these forms typically yield a significantly lower reliability. This article describes the creation of an 18-item short form (APM-18) and its validation in three samples of Southwestern U.S. university students (total N = 633). The APM-18 shows similar psychometric properties to both the previously published 36-item long form and 12-item short form, but retains a reliability estimate closer to the original APM. This, plus the shorter administration time (25 min) relative to the complete APM (40-60 min), makes it useful for time-constrained or mass-testing situations.
Conflict Management Styles: The Iranian General Preference Compared to the Swedish

Conflict occurs when needs and desires of two individuals or parties are contradicting, consciously or unconsciously. In other words, conflict happens when parties are not getting what they want. Consequently, proper resolution is inevitable to avoid tensions and stresses that conflict may cause. Awareness of how people generally prefer to deal with conflict in an organization seems extremely crucial for leaders to play their leading role properly. Thomas-Killman Conflict Mode Instrument is broadly implemented to evaluate how people deal with conflict. Assertiveness and cooperation are two key parameters that are used by this instrument to assess people's preference for how to deal with conflict, resulting in five distinguishable modes: avoiding, compromising, accommodating, competing and collaborating. 36 engineering students and 21 experienced engineers from Iran along with 25 Swedish students answered questions of this instrument. Results imply both Iranian naive engineers and experienced engineers mostly prefer to avoid conflict. Similarly, both of them generally showed a lack of interest in competing mode. However, the results indicate that gaining experience intensifies the interest to avoid and disinterest to competing mode. On the other hand, the general preference of Swedish students for dealing conflict purports a profound contradiction with Iranian case showing a great sense of assertiveness rather than cooperativeness. The difference between the Iranian and the Swedish public preference is justified by their cultural dimensions. Index Terms—Conflict Management style, Thomas-Kilmann Instrument
School of Accounting and Finance 2009-0101 Hedging : Scaling and the Investor Horizon

This paper examines the volatility and covariance dynamics of cash and futures contracts that underlie the Optimal Hedge Ratio (OHR) across different hedging time horizons. We examine whether hedge ratios calculated over a short term hedging horizon can be scaled and successfully applied to longer term horizons. We also test the equivalence of scaled hedge ratios with those calculated directly from lower frequency data and compare them in terms of hedging effectiveness. Our findings show that the volatility and covariance dynamics may differ considerably depending on the hedging horizon and this gives rise to significant differences between short term and longer term hedges. Despite this, scaling provides good hedging outcomes in terms of risk reduction which are comparable to those based on direct estimation.
ASTRAM : Measuring the Trustworthiness of Computer-based Systems 1

Various system metrics have been proposed for measuring the quality of computer-based systems, such as dependability and security metrics for estimating their performance and security characteristics. As computer-based systems grow in complexity with many sub-systems or components, measuring their quality in multiple dimensions is a challenging task. In this work, we tackle the problem of measuring the quality of computer-based systems based on the four key attributes of trustworthiness we developed, namely security, trust, resilience and agility. In addition to conducting a systematic survey on metrics, measurements, attributes of metrics and associated ontologies, we propose a system-level trustwothiness metric framework that accommodates four submetrics, called STRAM (Security, Trust, Resilience, and Agility Metrics). The proposed STRAM framework offers a hierarchical ontology structure where each submetric is defined as a sub-ontology. Moreover, this work proposes developing and incorporating metrics describing key assessment tools, including Vulnerability Assessment, Risk Assessment and Red Teaming, to provide additional evidence into the measurement and quality of trustworthy systems. We further discuss how assessment tools are related to measuring the quality of computer-based systems and the limitations of the state-of-the-art metrics and measurements. Finally, we suggest future research directions for system-level metrics research towards measuring fundamental attributes of the quality of computer-based systems and improving the current metric and measurement methodologies. CCS Concepts: rSecurity and privacy → Systems security;
It's All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation

Intersectionality has attracted substantial scholarly attention in the 1990s. Rather than examining gender, race, class, and nation as distinctive social hierarchies, intersectionality examines how they mutually construct one another. I explore how the traditional family ideal functions as a privileged exemplar of intersectionality in the United States. Each of its six dimensions demonstrates specific connections between family as a gendered system of social organization, racial ideas and practices, and constructions of U.S. national identity.