Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Census of seafloor sediments in the world’s ocean

Knowing the patterns of distribution of sediments in the global ocean is critical for understanding biogeochemical cycles and how deep-sea deposits respond to environmental change at the sea surface. We present the first digital map of seafloor lithologies based on descriptions of nearly 14,500 samples from original cruise reports, interpolated using a support vector machine algorithm. We show that sediment distribution is more complex, with significant deviations from earlier hand-drawn maps, and that major lithologies occur in drastically different proportions globally. By coupling our digital map to oceanographic data sets, we find that the global occurrence of biogenic oozes is strongly linked to specific ranges in seasurface parameters. In particular, by using recent computations of diatom distributions from pigment-calibrated chlorophyll-a satellite data, we show that, contrary to a widely held view, diatom oozes are not a reliable proxy for surface productivity. Their global accumulation is instead strongly dependent on low surface temperature (0.9–5.7 °C) and salinity (33.8–34.0 PSS, Practical Salinity Scale 1978) and high concentrations of nutrients. Under these conditions, diatom oozes will accumulate on the seafloor regardless of surface productivity as long as there is limited competition from biogenous and detrital components, and diatom frustules are not significantly dissolved prior to preservation. Quantifying the link between the seafloor and the sea surface through the use of large digital data sets will ultimately lead to more robust reconstructions and predictions of climate change and its impact on the ocean environment.
Consumer Preferences for Cheese with Focus on Food Safety—A Segmentation Analysis

This research work analyzes Albanian urban consumer preferences and purchasing behavior related to cheese, focusing on food safety and related attributes, including origin, packaging, and certification. This paper is based on a structured survey targeting urban consumers. The analysis consists of a two-step cluster and descriptive statistics. The clustering was based on key sociodemographic variables, namely, gender, education, and age. The results show that the local cheese is preferred to imported cheese, and the main sources of food safety guarantee are the producer name/brand and knowing the seller. Most consumers across all five identified clusters preferred buying unpacked cheese to packed cheese. The cluster of educated female consumers preferred to buy cheese mainly in supermarkets compared to other clusters that preferred convenience shops. Consumer clusters with a university education appeared to be more informed about both HACCP and ISO compared to other (less educated) consumer clusters. Low trust in state institutions to guarantee food safety calls for the need to strengthen their capacities, professionalism, and awareness engagement with consumers.
Topologically mixing hypercyclic operators

Let X be a separable Frechet space. We prove that a linear operator T : X → X satisfying a special case of the Hypercyclicity Criterion is topologically mixing, i.e. for any given open sets U, V there exists a positive integer N such that T n (U)∩V ¬= 0 for any n > N. We also characterize those weighted backward shift operators that are topologically mixing.
Broadcasting Winter Wheat Can Increase Grain Yield without Reducing the Kernels per Spike and the Kernel Weight

In North China, row spacing is the most common planting pattern used for winter wheat. Currently, there are three sowing and tillage methods for row spacing: rotary tillage sowing with straw return (RTS), subsoil tillage sowing with straw return (DTS), and no-tillage sowing with straw return (NTS). Recently, Hao proposed a new sowing pattern called uniform broadcast sowing with straw return (BSS) which could increase winter wheat yield. In this research, a field experiment was conducted during the growing seasons in 2011–2012 and 2012–2013. The winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) variety Jimai 22 was sowed with the four seeding and tillage methods—RTS, DTS, NTS, and BSS—at the China Agriculture University Wuqiao experimental station in the North China Plain. After tillage sowing and determining the sowing efficiency, the effective cover ratio of the seeds was measured, and the emergence ratio was calculated after emergence. In the two growing seasons, the growth and development stages were recorded. The dry matter accumulation (DMA), the yield, and the yield components (spikes per hectare, kernels per spike, and kernel weight) were also determined. We also measured the canopy structure leaf area index (LAI) and the stand uniformity. The results showed that BSS had the lowest emergence rate and lowest plant stands when compared with the other treatments. However, BSS had the highest grain yield at 7599.0 kg·ha−1 and 9763.3 kg·ha−1, which was 11.55, 16.17, 20.16% and 13.01, 15.68, 21.88% higher than DTS, RTS, and NTS in the 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 growing seasons, respectively. The improved grain yield of BSS was due to the increased productive tillers per hectometer-squared, which was attributed to the higher stand uniformity. More importantly, the increased tillers per hectare and grain yield were not accompanied by a reduction in grain number per spike or grain weight. The stand uniformity could facilitate canopy construction and population architecture and result in more even sunlight distribution, increased leaf area index (LAI) and sunlight interception, and enhanced photosynthetic activity. The stand uniformity also could increase both the pre-anthesis and post-anthesis DMA and promote the harvest index (HI). This study indicates that BSS is the most suitable sowing method for winter wheat production in North China.
The Predictive Power of Students’ Perceptions of Classroom Assessment Environment for Their Mathematics Anxiety

In this study, it was aimed to determine the predictive power of students’ perceptions of classroom assessment environment for their mathematics anxiety. A correlational model was employed in this study, which was carried out with 410 high school students in the provinces of Diyarbakir in Turkey in the fall of 2014–2015. The Mathematics Anxiety Scale which was developed by Bindak (2005) was employed in the study to measure the students’ math anxiety. Then, in order to determine the students’ perceptions of the classroom assessment environment, the Classroom Assessment Environment Scale, which was developed by Ilhan and Cetin (2014a), was used. The relationships between students’ mathematics anxiety and their perceptions of the classroom assessment environment were investigated via correlation and multiple regression analysis. The results obtained from the correlation analysis demonstrated that learning oriented assessment environment was negatively related to mathematics anxiety. In contrary, performance oriented assessment environment was positively related to mathematics anxiety. As a result of regression analysis, it was determined that students’ perceptions of the classroom assessment environment explain 18% of the total variance on their mathematics anxiety.
P 38 a MAPK underlies muscular dystrophy and myofiberdeaththroughaBax-dependentmechanism

Department of Pediatrics, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, 240 Albert Sabin Way, Cincinnati, OH 45229, USA, Department of Medicine, Section of Cardiology, University of Chicago, 5841 S.Maryland,MC6088,Chicago, IL60637,USA, CardiovascularDivision,King’sCollegeLondon,125ColdharbourLane, London SE5 9NU, UK and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, 240 Albert Sabin Way, Cincinnati, OH 45229, USA
Comparable Number of Genes Having Experienced Positive Selection among Great Ape Species

Simple Summary It is of great interest to quantify adaptive evolution in human lineage by studying genes under positive selection, since these genes could reveal insights into our own adaptive evolutionary history compared to our closely related species and often these genes are functionally important. We used the great apes as the subjects to detect gene-level adaptive evolution signals in all the great ape lineages and investigated the evolutionary patterns and functional relevance of these adaptive evolution signals. Even the differences in population size among these closely related great apes have resulted in differences in their ability to remove deleterious alleles and to adapt to changing environments, we found that they experienced comparable numbers of positive selection. Notably, we identified several genes that offer insights into great ape and human evolution. For example, SOD1, a gene associated with aging in humans, experienced positive selection in the common ancestor of the great ape and this positive selection may contribute to the aging evolution in great apes. Overall, an updated list of positively selected genes reported by this study not only informs us of adaptive evolution during great ape evolution, but is also helpful to the further study of non-human primate models for disease and other fields. Abstract Alleles that cause advantageous phenotypes with positive selection contribute to adaptive evolution. Investigations of positive selection in protein-coding genes rely on the accuracy of orthology, models, the quality of assemblies, and alignment. Here, based on the latest genome assemblies and gene annotations, we present a comparative analysis on positive selection in four great ape species and identify 211 high-confidence positively selected genes (PSGs). Even the differences in population size among these closely related great apes have resulted in differences in their ability to remove deleterious alleles and to adapt to changing environments, we found that they experienced comparable numbers of positive selection. We also uncovered that more than half of multigene families exhibited signals of positive selection, suggesting that imbalanced positive selection resulted in the functional divergence of duplicates. Moreover, at the expression level, although positive selection led to a more non-uniform pattern across tissues, the correlation between positive selection and expression patterns is diverse. Overall, this updated list of PSGs is of great significance for the further study of the phenotypic evolution in great apes.
Meltwater flow through a rapidly deglaciating glacier and foreland catchment system: Virkisjökull, SE Iceland

Virkisjokull is a rapidly retreating glacier in south-east Iceland. A proglacial lake has formed in the last ten years underlain by buried ice. In this study we estimate water velocities through the glacier, proglacial foreland and proglacial river using tracer tests and continuous meltwater flow measurements. Tracer testing from a glacial moulin to the glacier outlet in September 2013 demonstrated a rapid velocity of 0.58 m s −1 . This was comparable to the velocity within the proglacial river, also estimated from tracer testing. A subsequent tracer test from the same glacial moulin under low flow conditions in May 2014 demonstrated a slower velocity of 0.07 m s −1 . The glacier outlet river sinks back into the buried ice, and a tracer test from this sink point through the proglacial foreland to the meltwater river beyond the lake indicated a velocity of 0.03 m s −1 , suggesting that an ice conduit system within the buried ice is transferring water rapidly beneath the lake. Ground penetrating radar profiles confirm the presence of this buried conduit system. This study provides an example of rapid deglaciation being associated with extensive conduit systems that enable rapid meltwater transfer from glaciers through the proglacial area to meltwater rivers.
Popcorn: Human-in-the-loop Popularity Debiasing in Conversational Recommender Systems

Recent conversational recommender systems (CRS) provide a promising solution to accurately capture a user's preferences by communicating with users in natural language to interactively guide them while pro-actively eliciting their current interests. Previous research on this mainly focused on either learning a supervised model with semantic features extracted from the user's responses, or training a policy network to control the dialogue state. However, none of them has considered the issue of popularity bias in a CRS. This paper proposes a human-in-the-loop popularity debiasing framework that integrates real-time semantic understanding of open-ended user utterances as well as historical records, while also effectively managing the dialogue with the user. This allows the CRS to balance the recommendation performance as well as the item popularity so as to avoid the well-known "long-tail'' effect. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach via experiments on two conversational recommendation datasets, and the results confirm that our proposed approach achieves high-accuracy recommendation while mitigating popularity bias.
The Health Effects of Workforce Involvement and Transitions for Europeans 50–75 Years of Age: Heterogeneity by Financial Difficulties and Gender

Abstract A prominent demographic trend throughout the industrialized world is population aging. Concerns about economic growth and labour force shortages have led many European nations to enact policies aimed at prolonging working life. Understanding how paid work among late-middle-aged and senior adults is associated with health is therefore important. Using a sample of persons who were 50–75 years of age in 2015 from waves six (2015) and seven (2017) of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (n = 38,884), this study shows how a comprehensive set of six workforce involvement/transitions patterns are associated with health. The results show benefits of paid work, especially among respondents having financial difficulties. There is further heterogeneity by gender. The more fragmented employment histories of 50–75-year-old women are associated with stable paid work being of less benefit for addressing financial difficulties and with their health being especially vulnerable to unemployment while they are undergoing financial troubles.
Foundations of computational geometric mechanics

Geometric mechanics involves the study of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics using geometric and symmetry techniques. Computational algorithms obtained from a discrete Hamilton's principle yield a discrete analogue of Lagrangian mechanics, and they exhibit excellent structure-preserving properties that can be ascribed to their variational derivation. We construct discrete analogues of the geometric and symmetry methods underlying geometric mechanics to enable the systematic development of computational geometric mechanics. In particular, we develop discrete theories of reduction by symmetry, exterior calculus, connections on principal bundles, as well as generalizations of variational integrators. Discrete Routh reduction is developed for abelian symmetries, and extended to systems with constraints and forcing. Variational Runge-Kutta discretizations are considered in detail, including the extent to which symmetry reduction and discretization commute. In addition, we obtain the Reduced Symplectic Runge-Kutta algorithm, which is a discrete analogue of cotangent bundle reduction. Discrete exterior calculus is modeled on a primal simplicial complex, and a dual circumcentric cell complex. Discrete notions of differential forms, exterior derivatives, Hodge stars, codifferentials, sharps, flats, wedge products, contraction, Lie derivative, and the Poincare lemma are introduced, and their discrete properties are analyzed. In examples such as harmonic maps and electromagnetism, discretizations arising from discrete exterior calculus commute with taking variations in Hamilton's principle, which implies that directly discretizing these equations yield numerical schemes that have the structure-preserving properties associated with variational schemes. Discrete connections on principal bundles are obtained by introducing the discrete Atiyah sequence, and considering splittings of the sequence. Equivalent representations of a discrete connection are considered, and an extension of the pair groupoid composition that takes into account the principal bundle structure is introduced. Discrete connections provide an intrinsic coordinatization of the reduced discrete space, and the necessary discrete geometry to develop more general discrete symmetry reduction techniques. Generalized Galerkin variational integrators are obtained by discretizing the action integral through appropriate choices of finite-dimensional function space and numerical quadrature. Explicit expressions for Lie group, higher-order Euler-Poincare, higher-order symplectic-energy-momentum, and pseudospectral variational integrators are presented, and extensions such as spatio-temporally adaptive and multiscale variational integrators are briefly described.
ON REPRESENTATIONS OF THE GROUP OF LISTING'S KNOT BY SUBGROUPS OF SL(2, C)

The subgroups G of SL(2, C) which represent the group of Listing's knot are characterized by the traces of A, B and AB, where A and B are matrices which generate G. From this it follows that there exist finitely generated nondiscrete subgroups of SL(2, R) which are not isomorphic to any Fuchsian group.
Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Container-enabled Mobile Edge Computing

A growing number of mobile services demand intensive computation resources and high energy consumption. Traditional cloud-based task offloading incurs excessive transmission delay. With mobile edge computing, we can offload tasks to the nearby edge servers, thus mitigating long data transmission latency. Current task offloading and resource allocation approaches ignore the extra overhead brought by container instance startup. This naturally leads to a long overall latency and high energy consumption. Motivated by the limitations of existing literature, we address task offloading and resource allocation problem considering container instance startup time. We first examine the startup latency of containers started from different types of images, and present its impact on overall performance. Then, we formulate the problem as optimization problem. The problem is hard to address because mutual effects of offloading decision, resource allocation decision and container instance startup contribute to the overall performance. We resort to Gibbs sampling to decouple offloading decision and resource allocation. Finally, taking into account all potential conditions brought up by container instance startup, an optimal computation resource allocation and uplink power assignment scheme are derived through bisection, and Karush-Kuhn-Tucher (KKT) conditions. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed approach, and demonstrate its superiority over current notable solutions.
Day-Night Differences, Seasonal Variations and Source Apportionment of PM10-Bound PAHs over Xi’an, Northwest China

Day-night PM10-bound PAHs were studied at an urban site of Xi’an from 20 December 2006 to 28 October 2007. The annual mean concentration of nighttime PAHs (285.0 ng m−3) was higher than that in daytime (239.4 ng m−3). A significant difference of PAH concentrations between daytime and nighttime was found in autumn with a coefficient of divergence (CD) of 0.23 (significant level 0.2). However, no distinct difference was observed in other seasons (with CD values < 0.2), although the difference of PAHs partition capacity in PM10 between daytime and nighttime was significant in the four seasons. Remarkable seasonal variations were observed in the total PAH levels, with a highest mean concentration of 344.6 ng m−3 in winter and a lowest mean concentration of 177 ng m−3 in summer. Positive matrix factorization results revealed that residential emission for heating is the major contributor of the elevated PAH levels in winter, accounting for 49% of the total PAH levels. The coal combustion including industrial and residential usage, contributed over 40% of the PAH emissions in PM10 of Xi’an during the one-year sampling period. These results can provide guidance for taking measures in reducing PAHs levels in the air.
SoK: Off The Chain Transactions

—Blockchains have the potential to revolutionize mar- kets and services, yet, currently exhibit high latencies and fail to handle loads comparable to those managed by traditional custodian ﬁnancial systems. Layer-two protocols, built on top of ( layer-one ) blockchains, avoid disseminating every transaction to the whole network by sending transactions off-chain and instead utilize the blockchain only as a recourse for disputes. The promise of layer-two protocols is to complete transactions in sub-seconds, reduce fees, and allow blockchains to scale. With this Systematization of Knowledge, we are the ﬁrst to structure the complete rich and multifaceted body of research on layer-two transactions. Categorizing the research into payment and state channels as well as commit-chains, we provide a comparison of the protocols and their properties. We contribute a systematization of the associated synchronization and routing protocols along with their privacy and security aspects. Contrary to common belief in the blockchain community, we show that layer-two can scale blockchains; that layer-two protocols are secure without full collateralization; that privacy of layer-two transaction is not granted by default; and that fees depend on the transmitted transaction value. The SoK clears the layer-two fog, highlights the potential of layer-two solutions and identiﬁes their unsolved challenges and promising avenues of future work.
The economic and environmental impacts of removing ionophore coccidiostats from the UK broiler sector

SUMMARY Ionophore coccidiostats are widely used in the UK broiler sector at present but their future use has been questioned. A review of published and technical literature has been undertaken to assess the likely impacts of removing ionophore coccidiostats from UK broiler production. Expert opinion from two poultry veterinarians has been used to establish the probable approach and interventions that would be needed in a ‘no-ionophore’ programme and the likely impacts. Comparisons have been made between ‘standard’ and ‘no-ionophore’ programmes, covering farm production costs and environmental impacts. Key performance assumptions for the ‘no-ionophore’ programme include one extra day of growing time to achieve target average liveweight of 2.26 kg and a five point increase in feed conversion ratio (FCR) from 1.58 to 1.63. Any increase in mortality is considered marginal if other interventions are adopted and therefore this study has assumed no differences. Veterinary opinion considers that a reduction in stocking density of 4 kg of liveweight per square metre would be needed to maintain good health in a ‘no-ionophore’ programme; a 2-day increase in house turnaround time between flocks is also recommended. Changes to feed specifications would be expected, together with the use of a coccidiosis vaccine. Based on stated assumptions, farm production costs are calculated to be 5.7% higher for the ‘no-ionophore’ programme than a standard programme. Optimistic and pessimistic scenarios indicate cost increases ranging between 3.3% and 10.8%. The ‘no-ionophore’ programme was also found to result in a 3.9% increase in greenhouse gas emissions per bird and to require 3.3% more land to grow crops for poultry feed. Increased production cycle length and reduced stocking density in the ‘no-ionophore’ programme would mean that a 19% increase in UK broiler growing space is required, to maintain current chicken meat output levels.