Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developmental feedbacks and the emergence of individuality

Behavioural individuality is a hallmark of animal life, with major consequences for fitness, ecology, and evolution. One of the most widely invoked explanations for this variation is that feedback loops between an animal's behaviour and its state (e.g. physiology, informational state, social rank, etc.) trigger and shape the development of individuality. Despite their often-cited importance, however, little is known about the ultimate causes of such feedbacks. Expanding on a previously employed model of adaptive behavioural development under uncertainty, we find that (i) behaviour-state feedbacks emerge as a direct consequence of adaptive behavioural development in particular selective environments and (ii) that the sign of these feedbacks, and thus the consequences for the development of behavioural individuality, can be directly predicted by the shape of the fitness function, with increasing fitness benefits giving rise to positive feedbacks and trait divergence and decreasing fitness benefits leading to negative feedbacks and trait convergence. Our findings provide a testable explanatory framework for the emergence of developmental feedbacks driving individuality and suggest that such feedbacks and their associated patterns of behavioural diversity are a direct consequence of adaptive behavioural development in particular selective environments.
Estimating Zika virus attack rates and risk of Zika virus-associated neurological complications in Colombian capital cities with a Bayesian model

Zika virus (ZIKV) is a mosquito-borne pathogen that caused a major epidemic in the Americas in 2015–2017. Although the majority of ZIKV infections are asymptomatic, the virus has been associated with congenital birth defects and neurological complications (NC) in adults. We combined multiple data sources to improve estimates of ZIKV infection attack rates (IARs), reporting rates of Zika virus disease (ZVD) and the risk of ZIKV-associated NC for 28 capital cities in Colombia. ZVD surveillance data were combined with post-epidemic seroprevalence data and a dataset on ZIKV-associated NC in a Bayesian hierarchical model. We found substantial heterogeneity in ZIKV IARs across cities. The overall estimated ZIKV IAR across the 28 cities was 0.38 (95% CrI: 0.17–0.92). The estimated ZVD reporting rate was 0.013 (95% CrI: 0.004–0.024), and 0.51 (95% CrI: 0.17–0.92) cases of ZIKV-associated NC were estimated to be reported per 10 000 ZIKV infections. When we assumed the same ZIKV IAR across sex or age group, we found important spatial heterogeneities in ZVD reporting rates and the risk of being reported as a ZVD case with NC. Our results highlight how additional data sources can be used to overcome biases in surveillance data and estimate key epidemiological parameters.
Temperature regime during embryogenesis alters subsequent behavioural phenotypes of juvenile brown trout

Climate warming imposes a serious threat, especially to freshwater ecosystems in temperate and (sub)polar regions, which are often dominated by cold-adapted ectotherms. Although relatively intense warming during winter is common across the climatic regions, comparably little focus has been put on the organismal impacts of winter warming. Embryonic development, which is exceptionally susceptible to ambient temperature, occurs during winter in various freshwater ectotherms. Yet, our knowledge of the effects of increased temperature during embryogenesis on later life stages is limited. Using brown trout (Salmo trutta), we examined how a 1.5°C temperature increase from fertilization to hatching affects various traits at the onset of the free-swimming stage (i.e. a comparison between 3.5 and 5.0°C treatments). Although all hatchlings were kept at the same temperature (7.0°C) from hatching to the onset of the free-swimming stage for about two months, the temperature increase during embryogenesis substantially reduced key ecological behaviours, i.e. activity and exploration levels, at the onset of the free-swimming stage despite only marginal temperature effects on morphological and physiological traits at this stage. Given the importance of behavioural traits in early growth and survival, our study suggests a likely pathway through which subtle changes in mean winter temperature affect early fitness.
Classification of brain states that predicts future performance in visual tasks based on co-integration analysis of EEG data

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a popular tool for studying brain activity. Numerous statistical techniques exist to enhance understanding of the complex dynamics underlying the EEG recordings. Inferring the functional network connectivity between EEG channels is of interest, and non-parametric inference methods are typically applied. We propose a fully parametric model-based approach via cointegration analysis. It not only estimates the network but also provides further insight through cointegration vectors, which characterize equilibrium states, and the corresponding loadings, which describe the mechanism of how the EEG dynamics is drawn to the equilibrium. We outline the estimation procedure in the context of EEG data, which faces specific challenges compared with the common econometric problems, for which cointegration analysis was originally conceived. In particular, the dimension is higher, typically around 64; there is usually access to repeated trials; and the data are artificially linearly dependent through the normalization done in EEG recordings. Finally, we illustrate the method on EEG data from a visual task experiment and show how brain states identified via cointegration analysis can be utilized in further investigations of determinants playing roles in sensory identifications.
Transport and magnetic properties of carbon doped EuB6

We report resistivity, magnetoresistance, Hall effect, specific heat, and magnetic measurements on small single crystals having the nominal compositions EuB5.97C0. 03(ao = 4.183 A) and EuB5.95C0. 05(ao = 4.182 A). We find that these materials are degenerate semiconductors in which both the carrier concentration and antiferromagnetic interactions increase with increasing carbon content. These results agree qualitatively with earlier work and confirm that pressure and chemical doping have opposite effects on the magnetic behavior of EuB6.
The Significance of Status: What It Is and How It Shapes Inequality

Status, a form of inequality based on esteem, respect, and honor, pervades social life but is poorly understood and underestimated in terms of significance. We offer a new look at status as a dynamic relationship between the shared views of others and the self that organizes behavior at the micro, meso, and macro levels of society. The status process is governed by a taken-for-granted sociocultural schema consisting of implicit norms for allocating status based on the perceived value of the individual to the group, as well as on historically changing status beliefs about what types of people are more worthy and competent than others. Status plays a role as a powerful motive for individual and group action and in the construction of durable patterns of inequality based on social differences such as race and gender. The pernicious effects of status processes can be mitigated by undermining status beliefs, stereotypes, and norms.
Status and Development: How Social Hierarchy Undermines Well-Being

Although social status has been shown to be a fundamental motive for individuals, theories of development have largely overlooked the role of status in shaping economic and social outcomes. In tracing the historical roots of social hierarchy through the cases of race, colonialism, and caste, this article outlines the specific mechanisms through which status inequality exacerbates economic disparity between groups and challenges redistributive politics. Whereas mainstream scholarship on identity has focused on cultural representation, I argue that status is fundamentally tied to economic systems and connects cultural injustice to economic exploitation. I propose that representation of low-status groups in public institutions can reduce the real and imagined social distance between groups, which can in turn have positive implications for redistributive politics.
To Forgive Is Divine? Morality and the Status Value of Intergroup Revenge and Forgiveness

Intergroup conflict is a costly and persistent aspect of social life, and one that often carries great moral significance for those who participate in it. Ostensibly moral behaviors can provide a path to social status in groups, as when self-sacrificing in-group members gain respect and prestige relative to their peers. This article bridges these two ideas to examine the perceived morality and status worthiness of intergroup revenge and forgiveness, and the moral accounts used to justify them. Using an original survey experiment conducted on a national probability sample in the United States, we examine everyday intergroup conflicts across national, sports, and political identities. We find forgiveness is perceived as more moral, and in turn more status worthy, than revenge. Justifications for moral judgments typically drew on accounts of harm/care, reciprocity, and avoiding chaos and disorder. This contributes to research on conflict, group dynamics, status, and morality.
Racial and Ethnic Status Distinctions and Discrimination: The Effects of Prior Contact and Group Interaction

Although racial and ethnic inequalities are consistently reproduced on both macro and micro levels, intergroup contact theory (ICT) and status characteristics and expectation states theory (SC-EST) identify opportunities for intervention. SC-EST most often limits its scope to examining deferential behavior and attitudes toward out-group members in specific interactions; ICT has a broader scope, including measures of attitudes, affect, and behavioral intentions toward out-group members. In two experiments with differing racial-ethnic compositions, we examine the effect of contact and the inconsistent complexity manipulation (from SC-EST) on attitudes and behavior toward specific out-group members within the working groups. We find that both intergroup contact and the inconsistent complexity intervention are effective at reducing some but not all forms of inequality. We discuss the potential for future integrations of the two theories.
Green Coordinates for Triquad Cages in 3D

We introduce Green coordinates for triquad cages in 3D. Based on Green’s third identity, Green coordinates allow defining the harmonic deformation of a 3D point inside a cage as a linear combination of its vertices and face normals. Using appropriate Neumann boundary conditions, the resulting deformations are quasi-conformal in 3D, and thus best-preserve the local deformed geometry, in that volumetric conformal 3D deformations do not exist unless rigid. Most coordinate systems use cages made of triangles, yet quads are in general favored by artists as those align naturally onto important geometric features of the 3D shapes, such as the limbs of a character, without introducing arbitrary asymmetric deformations and representation. While triangle cages admit per-face constant normals and result in a single Green normal-coordinate per triangle, the case of quad cages is at the same time more involved (as the normal varies along non-planar quads) and more flexible (as many different mathematical models allow defining the smooth geometry of a quad interpolating its four edges). We consider bilinear quads, and we introduce a new Neumann boundary condition resulting in a simple set of four additional normal-coordinates per quad. Our coordinates remain quasi-conformal in 3D, and we demonstrate their superior behavior under non-trivial deformations of realistic triquad cages.
PADL: Language-Directed Physics-Based Character Control

Developing systems that can synthesize natural and life-like motions for simulated characters has long been a focus for computer animation. But in order for these systems to be useful for downstream applications, they need not only produce high-quality motions, but must also provide an accessible and versatile interface through which users can direct a character’s behaviors. Natural language provides a simple-to-use and expressive medium for specifying a user’s intent. Recent breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) have demonstrated effective use of language-based interfaces for applications such as image generation and program synthesis. In this work, we present PADL, which leverages recent innovations in NLP in order to take steps towards developing language-directed controllers for physics-based character animation. PADL allows users to issue natural language commands for specifying both high-level tasks and low-level skills that a character should perform. We present an adversarial imitation learning approach for training policies to map high-level language commands to low-level controls that enable a character to perform the desired task and skill specified by a user’s commands. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task aggregation method that leverages a language-based multiple-choice question-answering approach to determine high-level task objectives from language commands. We show that our framework can be applied to effectively direct a simulated humanoid character to perform a diverse array of complex motor skills.
Performance Interference of Virtual Machines: A Survey

The rapid development of cloud computing with virtualization technology has benefited both academia and industry. For any cloud data center at scale, one of the primary challenges is how to effectively orchestrate a large number of virtual machines (VMs) in a performance-aware and cost-effective manner. A key problem here is that the performance interference between VMs can significantly undermine the efficiency of cloud data centers, leading to performance degradation and additional operation cost. To address this issue, extensive studies have been conducted to investigate the problem from different aspects. In this survey, we make a comprehensive investigation into the causes of VM interference and provide an in-depth review of existing research and solutions in the literature. We first categorize existing studies on interference models according to their modeling objectives, metrics used, and modeling methods. Then we revisit interference-aware strategies for scheduling optimization as well as co-optimization-based approaches. Finally, the survey identifies open challenges with respect to VM interference in data centers and discusses possible research directions to provide insights for future research in the area.
Continuous deformation based panelization for design rationalization

Design rationalization is the process of simplifying a 3D shape to enable cost-efficient manufacturing. A common approach is to approximate the input shape by a collection of simple units, such as flat or spherical panels, that are easy to manufacture and simple to assemble. This panelization process typically involves a segmentation step, with each surface patch intended to be replaced by a single unit, followed by an approximation stage, where the final shapes and locations of the units are determined. While optimal panel parameters for given segments are readily determined, the discrete nature of segmentation—assigning surface elements to segments—prevents a continuous design optimization workflow. In this work, we propose a differentiable reformulation of panelization that enables its use in gradient-based design optimization. Our approach is to treat panelization as a smooth optimization problem, whose objective function encourages the surface to locally deform towards best-matching units. This formulation enables a fully-differentiable rationalization process with implicit segmentation in which panels emerge automatically. We integrate our rationalization process in a simple user interface allowing the designer to guide the optimization towards desired panelizations. We demonstrate the potential of our approach on a diverse set of complex shapes and different panel types.
An Attention-Based View on Environmental Management: The Influence of Entrepreneurial Orientation, Environmental Sustainability Orientation, and Competitive Intensity on Green Product Innovation in Swedish Small Manufacturing Firms

Green product innovation (GPI) is a cornerstone of environmental management. Recent reviews on GPI have shown that research on GPI antecedents has mainly focused on identifying specific factors influencing the use of GPI. However, most studies lack a comprehensive theoretical explanation of the findings. In this study, which is based on a sample of 303 Swedish small manufacturing firms, antecedents to GPI are examined using the attention-based view of the firm. Two attentional perspectives, namely, entrepreneurial orientation and environmental sustainability orientation, were found to positively influence the use of GPI. Moreover, situated attention, in terms of competitive intensity, strengthens the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and GPI. The study highlights the usefulness of an attention-based view on GPI and environmental management in small firms.
Do Destination Identity, Memorable Experiences and Perceived Risks Matter to Revisit a Destination in the Age of Global Pandemic?

COVID-19 pandemic affected businesses and sectors across the world. The worst affected sector was hospitality, as the people could not travel because of government restrictions. Since travel and tourism constitute a significant portion of GDP across nations, it will be a matter of concern for businesses to know if tourists would be keen to revisit their choice destinations, especially the ones affected by COVID-19. The study used the ‘theory of reasoned action’ and ‘perceived risk theory’ to examine 282 Indian tourists’ revisit intention for destination identity, memorable experiences and subjective norms. SPSS Amos 25 and SPSS PROCESS macro were used to verify the proposed conceptual model and test hypotheses. The results display a positive relationship among destination identity, memorable experience, subjective norms and revisit intention. The association was found to be mediated by the attitude towards revisit intention and moderated by perceived risk, both of which were also found to be significant. Earlier studies have neither been conclusive nor the models very comprehensive; hence, this study makes a substantial contribution in this regard.
Switching and electrical properties of ferro‐ and antiferroelectric phases of MOPB(H)PBC

Switching and dielectric relaxation phenomena were investigated for an antiferroelectric liquid crystal, 4,4‐(1‐methyloctyloxycarbonyl)phenyl]‐4′‐[3‐(butanoyloxy)prop‐1‐oxy]biphenyl carboxylate, exhibiting chiral smectic A (SmA*), smectic C (SmC*) and antiferroelectric (SmCA*) phases. Spontaneous polarisations, rotational viscosities, relaxation frequencies, dielectric strengths and distribution parameters were determined as a function of temperature. The electric field required for saturation of the spontaneous polarisation increased with a decrease in temperature. In the SmA* phase, only one relaxation mechanism was observed that behaves as soft mode. Two relaxation processes were detected in the SmC* phase. A high‐frequency relaxation process invariant at 2.2 kHz was due to a Goldstone mode, but the origin of low‐frequency relaxation process (1–20 Hz) is unclear; however, it may belong to an X‐mode. The dielectric spectrum of the SmCA* phase exhibits two absorption peaks separated by two decades of frequency. The low‐frequency peak is related to the antiferroelectric Goldstone mode, whereas the high‐frequency peak originates from the anti‐phase fluctuation of the directors in the anti‐tilt pairs of the SmCA* phase.
Earth-like planets: science performance predictions for future nulling interferometry missions

With the launch of planet-transit missions such as CoRoT and Kepler, it is expected that Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars will be detected soon. This milestone will open the path towards the definition of missions able to study the atmosphere of Earth-sized extrasolar planets, with the identification of bio-signatures as one of the main objectives. In that respect, both the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have identified nulling interferometry as one of the most promising techniques. Trying to minimize the cost and the technological risks while maximizing the scientific return, ESA and NASA recently converged towards a single mission architecture, the Emma X-array. In this paper, we present the expected science performance of this concept computed with two independent mission simulators. The impact of different observational parameters such as planet radius and exozodiacal cloud density is specifically addressed.
Seasonal elevational patterns and the underlying mechanisms of avian diversity and community structure on the eastern slope of Mt. Gongga

Mountain ecosystems harbour significant biodiversity across elevations and seasons. This biodiversity, however, is increasingly under threat from climate change and human land use. While much work has been done to characterize biodiversity in tropical mountains, far less is known about the environmental, seasonal and spatial factors that impact diversity and community structure in subtropical and temperate regions.