Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ecologie et typologie de quelques mares temporaires à Isoètes d’une région aride du Maroc occidental

Les auteurs ont etudie pendant un an et demi quatre mares temporaires ou "dayas" situees dans une region de climat aride, proche de Marrakech. La vegetation des mares, tres variable au cours de l’annee, est caracterisee par la presence de ceintures a ephemerophytes . Elle represente un facies local de 1'Isoetion decrit par des phytosociologues dans d’autres pays mediterraneens . La composition et la structure des zoocenoses est ensuite presentee pour trois dayas, d’une facon comparative et evolutive. En exceptant la microfaune (Protozoaires et Rotiferes) non etudiee ici, le peuplement animal est caracterise par la dualite entre le groupe des Crustaces, pauvre en especes mais dominant par le nombre des individus, et celui des Insectes, represente par des populations plus nombreuses a effectifs reduits. Enfin l’observation comparative des caracteristiques geomorphologiques et hydrologiques des quatre mares et de leurs biocenoses conduit les auteurs a proposer une hypothese concernant l’evolution des mares temporaires de la region .
Dendrochronological analysis of baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) responses to climate and contrasting flood regimes

Baldcypress (Taxodium distichum (L.) Rich. ) has been used extensively for dendrochronological reconstruction of climate and is a key species in globally important wetlands with complex, poorly understood relationships between hydrological and ecological processes. To better understand ecosystem responses to changing climate and hydrology and to test whether hydrological or climatological variables are most reflected in chronologies, we developed tree-ring chronologies for six stagnant or riverine swamps in the Mississippi River deltaic plain and modeled growth responses to historical hydrology (51 years of data) and climate (111 years of data). Decoupled flooding and local climate in this deltaic setting allowed for relatively independent assessments of the roles of hydrology and climate in baldcypress growth. Depth of annual flooding was positively correlated with growth that year but negatively correlated with growth in the ensuing year for both riverine and stagnant swamps. Depth of 10-year mean floodi.
Study on the genetic polymorphisms of human GSTT1 and GSTM1 in healthy population of HeBei province

Objective To investigate the distribution of genetic polymorphisms of human GSTT1 and GSTM1 in healthy population of HeBei province. Methods DNA fragments were amplified by interal control allele specific polymerase chain reaction(PCR), agarose-gel electrophoresis were used to identify the genotypes of GSTT1 and GSTM1 gene and the data were analyzed with SAS v8 software. Results In this studied population, the frequencies of GSTT1 null and GSTM1 null genotype were 48.6% and 59.0% respectively, and the frequencies of the individuals with combination of GSTT1 null and GSTM1 null genotype were 31.9%. Conclusion The GSTT1 and GSTM1 genes existed polymorphisms in healthy population of HeBei province. There were no significant difference in the GSTT1 and GSTM1 genetic polymorphisms among the different groups of age or gender. There were also no significant differrence in the GSTT1 and GSTM1 genetic polymorphisms between smokers and nonsmokers, the same result was found between drinkers and non-drinkers. Genetic polymorphisms distribution is different in different ethnic, national and regional population.
Automated identification of thoracic pathology from chest radiographs with enhanced training pipeline

Chest x-rays are the most common radiology studies for diagnosing lung and heart disease. Hence, a system for automated pre-reporting of pathologic findings on chest x-rays would greatly enhance radiologists’ productivity. To this end, we investigate a deep-learning framework with novel training schemes for classification of different thoracic pathology labels from chest x-rays. We use the currently largest publicly available annotated dataset ChestX-ray14 of 112,120 chest radiographs of 30,805 patients. Each image was annotated with either a 'NoFinding' class, or one or more of 14 thoracic pathology labels. Subjects can have multiple pathologies, resulting in a multi-class, multi-label problem. We encoded labels as binary vectors using k-hot encoding. We study the ResNet34 architecture, pre-trained on ImageNet, where two key modifications were incorporated into the training framework: (1) Stochastic gradient descent with momentum and with restarts using cosine annealing, (2) Variable image sizes for fine-tuning to prevent overfitting. Additionally, we use a heuristic algorithm to select a good learning rate. Learning with restarts was used to avoid local minima. Area Under receiver operating characteristics Curve (AUC) was used to quantitatively evaluate diagnostic quality. Our results are comparable to, or outperform the best results of current state-of-the-art methods with AUCs as follows: Atelectasis:0.81, Cardiomegaly:0.91, Consolidation:0.81, Edema:0.92, Effusion:0.89, Emphysema: 0.92, Fibrosis:0.81, Hernia:0.84, Infiltration:0.73, Mass:0.85, Nodule:0.76, Pleural Thickening:0.81, Pneumonia:0.77, Pneumothorax:0.89 and NoFinding:0.79. Our results suggest that, in addition to using sophisticated network architectures, a good learning rate, scheduler and a robust optimizer can boost performance.
Digenean metacercariae (Timoniella spp., Labratrema minimus and Cryptocotyle concava) from the flounder, platichthys flesus, in the tidal Thames

A detailed examination of the abundant flatfish species Platichthys flesus, the flounder, in the tidal Thames has revealed the presence of four digenean metacercarial parasites, Cryptocotyle concava (Creplin, 1825), Timoniella imbutiforme (Molin, 1859), T. praeterita (Looss, 1901) and Labratrema minimus (Stossich, 1887). Flounders were recorded as a new second intermediate host for T. praeterita and L. minimus. They were also recorded as second intermediate hosts for the first time in British waters for T. imbutiforme. The temporal and spatial characteristics of these infections were examined and were believed to provide indirect parasitological evidence of the movement patterns of flounders during their utilization of the Thames Estuary as a nursery ground. From these data it was also surmised that the first intermediate host of T. imbutiforme, T. praeterita and C. concava was probably the molluscan species Hydrobia ulvae in the lower Thames Estuary, whereas L. minimus was most likely to occur in the molluscan host Cerastoderma edule, also present in the lower estuary.
THE NUMERICAL TREATMENT OF ADVECTION: A PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF CURRENT METHODS

A new “test problem ” for evaluating numerical models of advection is introduced, which exhibits many of the features encountered in practical advection-diffusion problems such as streamline curvature and steep variations in the advected variable. The problem was devised for the Third Meeting of the International Association for Hydraulic Research Working Group on Refined Modeling of Flow. At the meeting solutions of the problem generated by more than 20 different methods were reported. These methods are presented here and their relative performances compared and analyzed. No single method emerges as best, although some clearly perform better than others. It seems that advection modeling remains the art of compromise between diffusive and oscillatory errors.
Effects of Population Density on Prodenia litura (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)

In comparison with solitary individuals reared in isolation, larvae reared under crowded conditions had a shorter larval period, developed darker coloration, and gave rise to smaller pupae in which dry-matter, fat, and water contents all were reduced. Similarly, the adults emerging from these pupae weighed less than those developing from isolated larvae. Their body length, fore wing, and hind femur were smaller, their costa/femur ratio larger, their pupal and adult periods were prolonged, and their females laid larger numbers of eggs.
PCR-RFLP analysis of bacteria 16S rDNA in marine sediment of Beidaihe

The microbial community in marine sediment is one of the important functional groups in the marine ecosystem.In the study,the total DNA of the microorganisms was extracted by an indirect method from marine sediment of Beidaihe region,Hebei Province.The DNA extracted were amplified using a bacterial universal primers 27F and 1492R.PCR products were legated into the pMD 18-T Vector and transformed into Escherichia coli DH5α to construct a 16S rDNA clone library of microbes in the marine sediment.A total of 131 clones from the library were screened and their 16S rDNA fragments were re-amplified.The PCR products were digested with Hha I and Rsa I,respectively,and their fingerprints were analyzed.The results showed that the library includes 41 Hha I and Rsa I restriction endonnuclease types and the coverage(C value) of the clone library is 74.81%. The number of genotypes digested either by Hha I or Rsa I is only 30 and 22 although it has a high coverage.There is one main restriction types accounting for 23%of the total 16S rDNA clones.It is suggested by the analysis of Phylogenetic that the dominant bacteria in this marine sediment belong to α-proteobacteria and γ-proteobacteria.
Temporal and Spatial Variability of the Calf Sex Ratio in Scandinavian Moose Alces Alces

Sex distribution among 160911 moose calves, harvested in 22 Swedish counties during the period 1970-1978, was subjected to statistical analysis. Sex ratio heterogeneity was highly significant in both time and space. The proportion of males within single combinations of county and year varied between 51% and 69% and the weighted mean proportion decreased almost linearly from 60% in 1970 to 55.5% in 1978. The high intrinsic growth rates characteristic for the Scandinavian moose make it vital that management decisions are based on a thorough knowledge of the calf sex ratio. If the calf sex proportion is assumed to be five percentage points above the true value, a harvesting regime aimed at maintaining constant population numbers may result in the population actually being doubled in less than ten years; if assumed to be five percentage points below, the same population may instead be reduced to half its original size within the same period.
Stability Analysis in Breadwheat (Triticum Aestivum L.)

Out of the 19 varieties of breadwheat (Triticum aestirum Linn.) evaluated in tarai soils of West Bengal under four different environments, variety HD 2278 showed average stability for four traits including yield. Further, varieties HD 2314, HW 135 and HD 2329 were found suitable for highly favourable environment.
End-to-End Synthetic Data Generation for Domain Adaptation of Question Answering Systems

We propose an end-to-end approach for synthetic QA data generation. Our model comprises a single transformer-based encoder-decoder network that is trained end-to-end to generate both answers and questions. In a nutshell, we feed a passage to the encoder and ask the decoder to generate a question and an answer token-by-token. The likelihood produced in the generation process is used as a filtering score, which avoids the need for a separate filtering model. Our generator is trained by fine-tuning a pretrained LM using maximum likelihood estimation. The experimental results indicate significant improvements in the domain adaptation of QA models outperforming current state-of-the-art methods.
Frame decompositions of bounded linear operators in Hilbert spaces with applications in tomography

We consider the decomposition of bounded linear operators on Hilbert spaces in terms of functions forming frames. Similar to the singular-value decomposition, the resulting frame decompositions encode information on the structure and ill-posedness of the problem and can be used as the basis for the design and implementation of efficient numerical solution methods. In contrast to the singular-value decomposition, the presented frame decompositions can be derived explicitly for a wide class of operators, in particular for those satisfying a certain stability condition. In order to show the usefulness of this approach, we consider different examples from the field of tomography.
Direct Federated Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a collection of methods to craft the way neural networks are built. We apply this idea to Federated Learning (FL), wherein predefined neural network models are trained on the client/device data. This approach is not optimal as the model developers can't observe the local data, and hence, are unable to build highly accurate and efficient models. NAS is promising for FL which can search for global and personalized models automatically for the non-IID data. Most NAS methods are computationally expensive and require fine-tuning after the search, making it a two-stage complex process with possible human intervention. Thus there is a need for end-to-end NAS which can run on the heterogeneous data and resource distribution typically seen in the FL scenario. In this paper, we present an effective approach for direct federated NAS which is hardware agnostic, computationally lightweight, and a one-stage method to search for ready-to-deploy neural network models. Our results show an order of magnitude reduction in resource consumption while edging out prior art in accuracy. This opens up a window of opportunity to create optimized and computationally efficient federated learning systems.
2-Cluster fixed-point analysis of mean-coupled Stuart–Landau oscillators in the center manifold

We reduce the dynamics of an ensemble of mean-coupled Stuart–Landau oscillators close to the synchronized solution. In particular, we map the system onto the center manifold of the Benjamin–Feir instability, the bifurcation destabilizing the synchronized oscillation. Using symmetry arguments, we describe the structure of the dynamics on this center manifold up to cubic order, and derive expressions for its parameters. This allows us to investigate phenomena described by the Stuart–Landau ensemble, such as clustering and cluster singularities, in the lower-dimensional center manifold, providing further insights into the symmetry-broken dynamics of coupled oscillators. We show that cluster singularities in the Stuart–Landau ensemble correspond to vanishing quadratic terms in the center manifold dynamics. In addition, they act as organizing centers for the saddle-node bifurcations creating unbalanced cluster states as well for the transverse bifurcations altering the cluster stability. Furthermore, we show that bistability of different solutions with the same cluster-size distribution can only occur when either cluster contains at least 1/3 of the oscillators, independent of the system parameters.
Adapting to Delays and Data in Adversarial Multi-Armed Bandits

We consider the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem under delayed feedback. We analyze variants of the Exp3 algorithm that tune their step-size using only information (about the losses and delays) available at the time of the decisions, and obtain regret guarantees that adapt to the observed (rather than the worst-case) sequences of delays and/or losses. First, through a remarkably simple proof technique, we show that with proper tuning of the step size, the algorithm achieves an optimal (up to logarithmic factors) regret of order $\sqrt{\log(K)(TK + D)}$ both in expectation and in high probability, where $K$ is the number of arms, $T$ is the time horizon, and $D$ is the cumulative delay. The high-probability version of the bound, which is the first high-probability delay-adaptive bound in the literature, crucially depends on the use of implicit exploration in estimating the losses. Then, following Zimmert and Seldin [2019], we extend these results so that the algorithm can "skip" rounds with large delays, resulting in regret bounds of order $\sqrt{TK\log(K)} + |R| + \sqrt{D_{\bar{R}}\log(K)}$, where $R$ is an arbitrary set of rounds (which are skipped) and $D_{\bar{R}}$ is the cumulative delay of the feedback for other rounds. Finally, we present another, data-adaptive (AdaGrad-style) version of the algorithm for which the regret adapts to the observed (delayed) losses instead of only adapting to the cumulative delay (this algorithm requires an a priori upper bound on the maximum delay, or the advance knowledge of the delay for each decision when it is made). The resulting bound can be orders of magnitude smaller on benign problems, and it can be shown that the delay only affects the regret through the loss of the best arm.
Effects of Pycnonuclear Reactions on White Dwarf Stellar Evolution

This document presents a numerical study of the effects of high density nuclear reactions, pycnonuclear reactions, on the evolution of white dwarfs that accrete matter from a companion star. Primarily we seek observable properties that might be different when we include these nuclear reactions with varying microphysical assumptions. These different assumptions include effective nucleon-nucleon interactions, lattice structures and crystal polarization characteristics. Our results indicate that, although we find some significant differences in pycnonuclear reaction rates, the differences do not result in observable differences in the white dwarf evolution. Secondarily we examine the differences in observable properties when pycnonuclear reactions are assumed to happen and when they are assumed to not happen. In this case, our calculations indicate there can be observable differences in the radius, $R$, and the effective temperature, $T_{eff}$, at the stopping condition we use for our simulations, $L_{nuc} > 10^{8}\thinspace \rm{L}_{\odot}$, that is the total rate of energy released by nuclear fusion is greater than $10^{8}$ solar luminosities. Thirdly we explore the often neglected effect of temperature enhancement to pycnonuclear rates.
3DMolNet: A Generative Network for Molecular Structures

With the recent advances in machine learning for quantum chemistry, it is now possible to predict the chemical properties of compounds and to generate novel molecules. Existing generative models mostly use a string- or graph-based representation, but the precise three-dimensional coordinates of the atoms are usually not encoded. First attempts in this direction have been proposed, where autoregressive or GAN-based models generate atom coordinates. Those either lack a latent space in the autoregressive setting, such that a smooth exploration of the compound space is not possible, or cannot generalize to varying chemical compositions. We propose a new approach to efficiently generate molecular structures that are not restricted to a fixed size or composition. Our model is based on the variational autoencoder which learns a translation-, rotation-, and permutation-invariant low-dimensional representation of molecules. Our experiments yield a mean reconstruction error below 0.05 Angstrom, outperforming the current state-of-the-art methods by a factor of four, and which is even lower than the spatial quantization error of most chemical descriptors. The compositional and structural validity of newly generated molecules has been confirmed by quantum chemical methods in a set of experiments.
Transcranial Bipolar Direct Current Stimulation of the Frontoparietal Cortex Reduces Ketamine-Induced Oscillopathies: A Pilot Study in the Sedated Rat

During the prodromal phase of schizophrenia with its complex and insidious clinical picture, electroencephalographic recordings detect widespread oscillation disturbances (or oscillopathies). Neural oscillations are electro-biomarkers of the connectivity state within systems. A single systemic administration of ketamine, a non-competitive NMDA glutamate receptor antagonist, transiently reproduces the oscillopathies with a clinical picture reminiscent of the psychosis prodrome. This acute pharmacological model may help the research and development of innovative treatments against the psychotic transition. Transcranial electrical stimulation is recognized as an appropriate non-invasive therapeutic modality since it can increase cognitive performance and modulate neural oscillations with little or no side effects. Therefore, our objective was to set up, in the sedated adult rat, a stimulation method able to normalize the ketamine-induced oscillopathies. Unilateral transcranial frontoparietal anodal stimulation by direct current (<+1 mA) was applied in ketamine-treated rats. A concomitant electroencephalographic recording of the parietal cortex measured the stimulation effects on its spontaneously-occurring oscillations. A 5-min bipolar anodal tDCS immediately and quickly reduced, significantly with an intensity-effect relationship, the ketamine-induced oscillopathies at least in the bilateral parietal cortex. A duration effect was also recorded. These preliminary neurophysiological findings are promising for developing a therapeutic proof-of-concept against neuropsychiatric disorders.
The analysis on BMP4 gene polymorphism and litter size in different population of sheep

Bone morphogenetic protein 4(BMP4)gene was detected in both Small Tailed Han sheep,Dorset sheep,F1 generation sheep(Small Tailed Han sheep×Dorset sheep) and F2 generation sheep(F1 generation sheep×Dorset sheep)by PCR-SSCP as a candidate gene for the prolificacy of sheep,analyzed the relationship between the sites of different genotypes and litter size.The results indicated that the genotype frequencies of BB,B+ and ++ of Small Tailed Han sheep were 1.0%,29.7% and 69.2% respectively;the genotype frequencies of B+ and ++ of Dorset sheep were 80.8% and 19.2% respectively;the genotype frequencies of BB,B+ and ++ of F1 generation sheep were 5.3%,39.4% and 55.3% respectively;the genotype frequencies of BB,B+ and ++ of F2 generation sheep were 0,5.0% and 95.0%. The average litter size of the genotype of ++,B+ and BB were(1.00±0.00),(1.67±0.11) and(2.40±0.13),and the difference was extremely significant tested by χ2 analysis(P0.01). the genotype of ++,B+ and BB of F1 generation were(2.00±0.00),(2.45±0.53) and(2.00±0.00),and the difference of ++,BB and B+ was extremely significant(P0.01);gene B can't increase the litter size of Dorset sheep.
The Extraordinary Failure of Complement Coercion Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has eased and scaled up the collection of linguistic annotation in recent years. In this work, we follow known methodologies of collecting labeled data for the complement coercion phenomenon. These are constructions with an implied action — e.g., “I started a new book I bought last week”, where the implied action is reading. We aim to collect annotated data for this phenomenon by reducing it to either of two known tasks: Explicit Completion and Natural Language Inference. However, in both cases, crowdsourcing resulted in low agreement scores, even though we followed the same methodologies as in previous work. Why does the same process fail to yield high agreement scores? We specify our modeling schemes, highlight the differences with previous work and provide some insights about the task and possible explanations for the failure. We conclude that specific phenomena require tailored solutions, not only in specialized algorithms, but also in data collection methods.