Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spittlebug invisibility cloak: experimental tests on the antipredatory effect of the froth of Philaenus spumarius

In Europe, the meadow spittlebug Philaenus spumarius (L.) (Hemiptera Aphrophoridae) is the main vector of the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa Wells et al. , the etiological agent of the Olive Quick Decline Syndrome. The froth produced by spittlebug nymphs has a primary function in protecting the insect from dehydration and thermal stress. It is also accepted that the froth protects nymphs from predators, although the underlying mechanism is not completely clear. We investigated such a process using the crab spider Synema globosum (F.) and the ant Crematogaster scutellaris (Olivier) as model species. Nymphs of P. spumarius were divided into two groups, one whose froth was left and one whose froth was removed. The nymphs were then exposed to predators and their survival recorded. The survival of defrothed nymphs was considerably lower than controls with both spiders and ants, though this could be due to increased motility of defrothed nymphs. Moreover, to test the chemical properties of the froth and exclude any physical hindrance effect, P. spumarius nymphs and dead Sarcophaga carnaria (L.) larvae (maggots) under three different conditions (de-frothed, water-coated, and centrifuged froth-coated) were offered to workers of C. scutellaris . The survival of the nymphs and ants’ bites to both preys were recorded. Again, defrothed nymphs showed a lower survival probability compared to those moistened with water and froth, while no differences were found between these two treatments, suggesting a chemical deterrence or mimicry of the froth. The highest number of ants’ bites towards nymphs and maggots was recorded in the defrothed group, while the lowest in the froth-coated nymphs. A significant difference between the water- and froth-coated treatments was only found in nymphs and not in maggots, suggesting the presence of some residu al substances on the nymph’s integument that could have a deterrent or masking effect. Additionally, our direct observations of ants drinking the froth reinforce chemical mimicry as a more plausible explanation than deterrence. In conclusion, our findings suggest that the froth plays an antipredatory role, at least for predators that use mainly olfactory cues to localise their preys, through a chemical mimicry mechanism.
A Stability Analysis of Neural Networks and Its Application to Tsunami Early Warning

Neural networks (NNs) enable precise modeling of complicated geophysical phenomena but are sensitive to small input changes. In this work, we present a new method for analyzing this instability in NNs. We focus our analysis on adversarial examples, test-time inputs with carefully-crafted human-imperceptible perturbations that expose the worst-case instability in a model’s predictions. Our stability analysis is based on a low-rank expansion of NNs on a fixed input, and we apply our analysis to a NN model for tsunami early warning which takes geodetic measurements as the input and fore-casts tsunami waveforms. The result is an improved description of local stability that explains adversarial examples generated by a standard gradient-based algorithm, and allows the generation of even worse examples. Our analysis can predict whether noise in the geodetic input will produce an unstable output, and identifies a simple approach to filtering the input that enables more robust forecasting from noisy input.
Factors Affecting Intention on Whistleblowing: An Analysis on Moderated Model of Legal Protection

--- The purpose of this study is to examine and provide empirical evidence of the effect of personal cost, professional commitment, and seriousness of wrongdoing on whistleblowing intention, as well as the impact of legal protection in influencing as a moderating variable. The populations of this study are civil servants (ASN) from the Directorate of Construction Services Procurement, the Directorate General Of Construction Development in Ministry of Public Works and Housing (MPWH). The sample of this study are 90 respondents, obtained using a saturated sampling technique. The questionnaire data of this study are analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The result shows that civil servants consider their personal cost and the seriousness of wrongdoing as they intend to blow the whistle. Yet, the study finds that professional commitment does not affect civil servant’s whistleblowing intention. The study also finds that legal protection is only able to moderate the effect of personal cost and professional commitment on whistleblowing intention and is unable to moderate the seriousness of wrongdoing. These findings help to obtain insight regarding the policy that can improve whistleblowing intention.
Influence of clinical and subclinical pregnancy toxemia on the energy and hormonal profiles of dairy goats during the transitional period

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of clinical and subclinical pregnancy toxemia (PT) on blood metabolites of dairy goats in the peripartum period. 111 multiparous goats were divided into three groups on the basis of cut- off blood concentrations of β -hydroxybutyric acid and clinical symptoms of PT. The control group (n=40, βHB ≤ 0.8 mmol/L), whereas the subclinical group (n=39, βHB between 0.8 and 1.6 mmol/L) and the clinical group (n=32, βHB ≥ 1.6 mmol/L). The evaluations were performed on the -30, -20, -10, 0, +10, +20, and +30 day in relation to parturition. βHB, non -esterified fatty acid, glucose, fructosamine, cholesterol, triglycerides, insulin, cortisol, and free T3 and free T4 were measured. The ANOVA was performed to investigate the effects and interactions between groups and assessment times using the SAS. A higher occurrence of clinical PT was observed during late pregnancy, whereas subclinical PT was more frequently in early lactation. Clinical and subclinical PT during the transitional period resulted in raising the βHB, NEFA, and cortisol (P<0.05). Meanwhile, a decrease was observed in fructosamine, triglycerides and insulin (P<0.05). The occurrence of subclinical PT was higher than the clinical form during peripartum. The βHB validated the possibility of detecting goats that are at a high risk of developing PT approximately three weeks before parturition. Clinical and subclinical PT triggered marked changes in serum concentrations of βHB, NEFA, insulin, and cortisol, being those biomarkers in potential of PT.
Rheological behavior of asphalt binders modified with fourth generation rubber

Editor in charge: Jorge Barbosa Soares ABSTRACT Among the materials used as asphalt binder modifiers, waste tire granulated rubber has shown good results in terms of improving resistance to permanent deformation, fatigue cracking and aging. The 4th generation rubber-asphalts are sold in the form of pellets. This configuration facilitates the process of mixing the pellets with binder and mineral aggregates, making the process of obtaining rubber-asphalt faster and sustainable technology with low pollutant emissions. The 4th generation of asphalt-rubber is related to the production of mixtures and not asphalt binders. However, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the asphalt-rubber behavior in the laboratory, using the criteria and tests required by the ASTM 8239/21 specification, in addition to fatigue resistance tests (LAS) and storage stability. A comparison was made between the rheological properties of a sample of commercial asphalt-rubber AB-08 and the properties of two 4th generation modifiers (PelletPAVE-Plus and PelletPAV) with CAP 50/70 in proportions of 20% and 30%, with respect to the binder’s total mass. The results obtained showed that the properties of the modified binders are superior to those of conventional asphalt, but inferior to those of conventional AB-08 asphalt rubber.
Modeling and Computations of Cellular Dynamics Using Complex-fluid Models

Cells are fundamental units in all living organisms as all living organisms are made up of cells of different varieties. The study of cells is therefore an essential part of research in life science. Cells can be classified into two basic types: prokaryotic cells and eukaryotic cells. One typical organisms of prokaryotes is bacterium. And eukaryotes mainly consist of animal cells. In this thesis, we focus on developing predictive models mathematically to study bacteria colonies and animal cell mitotic dynamics. Instead of living alone, bacteria usually survive in a biofilm, which is a microorganism where bacteria stick together by extracellular matrix primarily made up of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) that the bacteria excrete. By treating the biofilm and solvent as a fluid mixture, we have developed a mathematical modeling framework and computational tool to investigate the mechanisms of biofilm formation and function. The bacteria in biofilms can be categorized into various types either by their persistence to antimicrobial treatments or by their reactions to quorum sensing molecules. We have studied dynamics of 3D heterogeneous biofilm formation under hydrodynamic stress, investigated the pros and cons of quorum sensing mechanism in an aqueous environment subject to hydrodynamic impact, explored the mechanism of antimicrobial persistence, looked into optimal dosing strategies, and examined the impact of cell motility on the development of biofilm morphology. As an integral part of the study, we have also validated our model of biofilm persistence to antimicrobial treatment against the experimental results obtained in our collaborators’ laboratory. Using the validated model, we then have probed the scenario of biofilm relapse after
Severity and hospitalization time of non-critical patients with Acute Kidney Injury

Objective: To assess severity and hospitalization time of non-critical patients with Acute Kidney Injury (AKI). Methods: A prospective and observational study conducted with 137 patients, with data collected by means of a structured questionnaire. The chi-square, Fisher’s exact and Mann-Whitney tests were used for statistical analysis and results were considered significant with p≤0.05. The research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee. Results: Oxygen therapy by macro-nebulization resulted in higher mortality both during hospitalization ( p =0.001) and after discharge ( p =0.02), as well as in high sodium levels ( p =0.0001 vs. p =0.005) and occurrence of kidney injury or failure ( p =0.02 vs. p =0.02). The need for ventilatory support increased the hospitalization time by 3.02 times ( p =0.02). Conclusion: Acute Kidney Injury was frequent in more than half of the patients, with KDIGO 2 and 3 severity levels, which were associated with in-hospital and post-discharge mortality. The most severe patients (KDIGO 3) remained hospitalized for longer periods of time. Macro-nebulization in patients with tracheostomy tripled the hospitalization time.
Erratum: “On the Existence of the Kolmogorov Inertial Range in the Terrestrial Magnetosheath Turbulence” (2017, ApJL, 836, L10)

In the published article, an earlier version and the caption of Figure 7 were shown in error. The correct version and caption are shown below. The corresponding main text of “Three distinct profiles were evidenced: rising (a), falling (b), and steady (c) tones, based on the integrated value of the magnetic compressibility in the frequency bandwidth 0.00015–0.003 Hz. ” on page 7 should be corrected as follows. “Three distinct profiles were evidenced: rising (a), falling (b), and steady (c) tones, based on the integrated value of the magnetic compressibility in the frequency bandwidth 0.0015–0.003 Hz. ” The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 837:L31 (1pp), 2017 March 10 https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/aa633c
Adaptive Robust Evidential Optimization For Open Set Detection from Imbalanced Data

Open set detection (OSD) aims at identifying data samples of an unknown class ( i.e., open set) from those of known classes ( i.e., closed set) based on a model trained from closed set samples. However, a closed set may involve a highly imbalanced class distribution. Accurately differentiating open set samples and those from a minority class in the closed set poses a fundamental challenge as the model may be equally uncertain when recognizing samples from the minority class. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Robust Evidential Optimization (AREO) that offers a principled way to quantify sample uncertainty through evidential learning while optimally balancing the model training over all classes in the closed set through adaptive distributively robust optimization (DRO). To avoid the model to primarily focus on the most difficult samples by following the standard DRO, adaptive DRO training is performed, which is governed by a novel multi-scheduler learning mechanism to ensure an optimal model training behavior that gives sufficient attention to the difficult samples and the minority class while capable of learning common patterns from the majority classes. Our experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outputs uncertainty scores that can clearly separate samples from closed and open sets, respectively, and the detection results outperform the competitive baselines.
Framing Categorization of Domestic Violence on Hulondalo.id

The purpose of this article is to investigate the construction of domestic violence news in the Hulondalo.id cybermedia, the categorization patterns that emerge, and the media’s ideological position in responding to domestic violence cases. A qualitative approach with a constructivist paradigm is used in this study. Murray Edelman’s framing theory is used in data analysis. This theory focuses on the classification or categorization of media for a reported event. According to the findings, domestic violence news on the Hulondalo.id was classified as Headline and Crime. Physical, sexual, and economic violence are the three types of violence in news construction. The pattern of news categorization shapes the opposing perspectives of domestic violence perpetrators and victims. Sub-categories include aggressive (coercive) powerless (forced) sub-categories, offender (challenger) versus victim (accuser) rivalry, drunken, sadistic and savage, stingy-hardy, and sub-category bad husband-poor woman. Factors domestic violence news content produced by local cyber media Hulondalo.id was influenced by individuals of the media crew, media routines, and media organizations. This study’s discovery of subcategories aided in identifying forms of categorization in news text.
ESL Teachers’ Approaches towards the Acceptance of Educational Technology Integration in Non-Formal Education: A Case from Kenya

Aim. In efforts to handle the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, language schools in Kenya were forced to organise a smooth transition from physical to virtual classroom by incorporating educational technologies in virtual learning and teaching processes. Such a shift was new to teachers and required additional efforts to master the peculiarities of organising virtual English classes. Thus, this study aims to explore Kenyan ESL teachers’ perspectives towards the acceptance of educational technology integration in non-formal education. Methods. A qualitative approach was adopted in this study. Eleven teachers from two private foreign language schools participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews, where they answered questions based on the elements of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Results. The findings showed that most teachers’ approaches towards the accep - tance of educational technologies were mainly positive and they intend to integrate them in their ESL classroom. The results of the qualitative data analysis also demonstrated that age is one of those personal characteristics that might hinder teachers’ willingness to adopt educational technologies while teaching ESL. Conclusions. This study also found that the variety of adopted educational technologies was not extensive. Therefore, teachers’ awareness, interest, and digital competences should be further developed. Practical application. The herein presented research findings are of a signifi - cant importance for the enhancement of teachers’ competences to apply educational technologies while teaching ESL in Kenya. It also has implications for the practice that is relevant for ESL teachers in non-formal education as well as curriculum organisers.
Below the Surface: Summarizing Event Sequences with Generalized Sequential Patterns

We study the problem of succinctly summarizing a database of event sequences in terms of generalized sequential patterns. That is, we are interested in patterns that are not exclusively defined over observed surface-level events, as is usual, but rather may additionally include generalized events that can match a set of events. To avoid spurious and redundant results we define the problem in terms of the Minimum Description Length principle, by which we are after that set of patterns and generalizations that together best compress the data without loss. The resulting optimization problem does not lend itself for exact search, which is why we propose the heuristic Flock algorithm to efficiently find high-quality models in practice. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that Flock results in compact and easily interpretable models that accurately recover the ground truth, including rare instances of generalized patterns. Additionally Flock recovers how generalized events within patterns depend on each other, and overall provides clearer insight into the data-generating process than using state of the art algorithms that only consider surface-level patterns.
Is Adverse Selection Progressive? Theory and Evidence from Health Insurance Choices *

Choice is a hallmark of many types of social insurance programs. Yet the possibility of adverse selection can limit the social beneﬁts of choice. Existing research on selection in public insurance programs focuses on the welfare losses (the misallocation of insurance products across people) from adverse selection due to prices being distorted upwards, ig-noring the distributional consequences of who pays those higher prices. This paper instead studies the implicit transfers caused by selection. We modify the standard framework of Einav, Finkelstein, and Cullen (2010) to show that the distributional incidence of selection depends on its direction (adverse or advantageous) and the correlation between income and demand for insurance. Using data from a large employer as a case study, we establish the key observable correlations that are sufﬁcient to imply a progressive distortion: higher-income employees are more likely to choose generous health insurance plans, and that these plans are adversely selected. In an insurance demand model calibrated to our setting, we ﬁnd that the implicit transfers from adverse selection by income level are economically large. We discuss implications for the design of common policies like subsidies and mandates when policymakers value both equity and efﬁciency. If the incidence of selection is progressive—as in our case study—then the typical corrective subsidies are regressive.
Shaping Factor of the Normative Behavior of the Catholic Believers

The research aimed to examine the effect of Jesus’ communication, attitude, and action on the perception and normative behavior of Catholics. The level of interpretation and observance of the Canon Law by Catholic believers was relatively low. The Bible told about Jesus conveying His teaching by putting it down into communication, His way of having an attitude, and His example in taking action. The research was based on the cognitive-affective-conative model. Cognitive referred to knowledge or information conveyed commonly in communication, affective was related to emotion or feeling manifested in attitude, and conative was about doing or action. Normative behavior was the way people behave, taking the basis of their understanding and feeling in accordance with the Canon Law. The novelty of research on the application of the concept of consumer behavior in the life of the Church was based on the teachings of Jesus. Data collection was carried out by non-probability with purposive sampling. The questionnaires were distributed using G-form via WhatsApp, and 297 respondents participated. The data were then processed using Structural Equation Modeling with the Smart PLS 3.0 application to test the reliability, validity, and hypotheses. The results of the hypothesis test show that all are rejected. The variables of communication, attitude, action, believer’s perception, and normative behavior on the object of religion show that the theory of behavior on these variables does not support previous research.
Descriptive properties of the type of an irrational number

The type $\tau$($\alpha$) of an irrational number $\alpha$ measures the extent to which rational numbers can closely approximate $\alpha$. More precisely, $\tau$($\alpha$) is the infimum over those t$\in$R for which |$\alpha$--h/k|0. In this paper, we regard the type as a function $\tau$:R\Q$\rightarrow$[1,$\infty$] and explore its descriptive properties. We show that $\tau$ is invariant under the natural action of GL2(Q) on R\Q. We show that $\tau$ is densely onto, and we compute the descriptive complexity of the pre-image of the singletons and of certain intervals. Finally, we show that the function $\tau$ is [1,$\infty$]-upper semi-Baire class 1 complete.
Event segmentation and expertise

EVENT SEGMENTATION AND EXPERTISE Daniel P. Feller, M.A. Department of Psychology Northern Illinois University, 2018 Dr. Joseph P. Magliano, Thesis Director Events are composed of component parts (i.e., sub-events) and humans naturally recognize shifts between events and sub-events. The process of chunking continuous spatiotemporal information into meaningful discrete parts during encoding is known as event segmentation. Research suggests that segmentation is driven by perceptual change, in a bottomup fashion, rather than by background knowledge, in a top-down fashion. However, much of the previous work has focused on segmentation in contexts where there is likely to be minimal variation in one’s level of background knowledge (e.g., washing the dishes). The goal of the present study was to explore the extent to which domain knowledge affects the segmentation and interpretation of events. In Experiment 1, participants watched basketball clips that were more or less structured in nature and provided ratings on the extent to which gameplay was structured, unstructured, strategic, and contained plays. In Experiment 2, participants watched clips from Experiment 1 and engaged in a segmentation task followed by an event description task. Domain knowledge did not appear to affect event segmentation but did affect video ratings in Experiment 1 and event descriptions in Experiment 2. Results suggest that segmentation is largely driven by perceptual change with knowledge affecting later processing. While results are consistent with prior research, they are not definitive. The issue of whether or not prior knowledge affects early encoding processes and segmentation remains an open question and further research is needed to explore this issue. Implications, potential limitations, and suggestions for future work are discussed at length. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DEKALB, ILLINOIS