Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neural Mechanisms Associated with Semantic and Basic Self-Oriented Memory Processes Interact to Modulate Self-Esteem

Individuals constantly encounter feedback from others and process this feedback in various ways to maintain positive situational state self-esteem (SSE) in relation to semantic-based or trait self-esteem (TSE). Individuals may utilize a data-driven, or episodic-based process that encodes positive, but not negative, self-relevant information automatically, or employ a semantic-driven process that manipulates encoded negative feedback post-hoc. It’s unclear, however, how these processes work either alone or in concert while individuals receive positive and negative feedback to modulate feedback encoding and subsequent SSE. Utilizing neural regions associated with semantic self-oriented and basic encoding processes (mPFC and PCC respectively), and time-frequency and Granger causality analyses to assess mPFC and PCC interactions, this study examined how encoding of positive and negative self-relevant feedback modulated individuals’ post-task SSE in relation to their TSE while continuous EEG was recorded. Among those with higher levels of TSE, the encoding of positive or negative feedback was not associated with SSE. Rather, higher SSE was associated with mPFC activity to all feedback and higher TSE. The relationship between TSE and SSE was moderated by mPFC-PCC communication such that increases in mPFC-PCC communication led to SSE levels that were consistent with TSE levels. Furthermore, Granger causality analyses indicated that individuals exhibited higher SSE to the extent mPFC influenced PCC in response to positive and negative feedback. Findings highlight the dynamic interplay between semantic self-oriented and basic encoding processes that modulate SSE in relation to TSE, to maintain more positive global selfperceptions in the moment and over time.
Lie groupoids in information geometry

We demonstrate that the proper general setting for contrast (potential) functions in statistical and information geometry is the one provided by Lie groupoids and Lie algebroids. The contrast functions are defined on Lie groupoids and give rise to two-forms and three-forms on the corresponding Lie algebroid. If the two-form is non-degenerate, it defines a ‘pseudo-Riemannian’ metric on the Lie algebroid and a family of Lie algebroid torsion-free connections, including the Levi-Civita connection of the metric. In this framework, the two-point functions are just functions on the pair groupoid with the ‘standard’ metric and affine connection on the Lie algebroid . We study also reductions of such systems and infinite-dimensional examples. In particular, we find a contrast function defining the Fubini-Study metric on the Hilbert projective space.
Microbiological quality of different dried insects sold at Thohoyandou open
market, South Africa

Edible insects have long been consumed as part of the diet of many Asian, African and South American cultures. The study sought to determine the microbial quality of dried insects (mopane worms, termites and stink bugs) sold around Thohoyandou markets, South Africa. For the study, 45 samples of dried mopane worms, termites and stink bugs were purchased from street vendors. About fifteen samples for each dried set of insects were randomly purchased and subjected to microbial analyses such as coliforms, Escherichia coli, Salmonella spp. , Staphylococcus aureus, total plate count, yeasts and moulds count. The results revealed that street vendors were not following good standards of food safety and hygiene. They need training and awareness on how to handle the food products sold at the open market. During the study, we found that the mopane worms had the highest coliforms count of 1.9964±0.02 log10 CFU/g. Termites had the highest E. coli, S. aureus and total plate count of 1.9907±0.05, 2.2562±0.02 and 6.3564±1.10 log10 CFU/ g. Termites and stink bugs had the highest amount of Salmonella spp. (1.9827±0.03 log10 CFU/g). Stink bugs had the highest yeast and mould count ranging from 1.9804±0.14 to 1.9491±0.56 log10 CFU/g as compared to other insects. The outcome of this study will be used to teach vendors about good food safety and hygiene measures. The study results are also useful in determining whether these edible insects sold at the market are microbiologically safe for human consumption.
The Evolution of the Quenching of Star Formation in Cluster Galaxies since z ∼ 1

We study the star-forming (SF) population of galaxies within a sample of 209 IR-selected galaxy clusters at 0.3 ≤ z ≤ 1.1 in the ELAIS-N1 and XMM-LSS fields, exploiting the first HSC-SSP data release. The large area and depth of these data allow us to analyze the dependence of the SF fraction, fSF, on stellar mass and environment separately. Using R/R200 to trace environment, we observe a decrease in fSF from the field toward the cluster core, which strongly depends on stellar mass and redshift. The data show an accelerated growth of the quiescent population within the cluster environment: the fSF versus stellar mass relation of the cluster core (R/R200 ≤ 0.4) is always below that of the field (4 ≤ R/R200 < 6). Finally, we find that environmental and mass quenching efficiencies depend on galaxy stellar mass and distance to the center of the cluster, demonstrating that the two effects are not separable in the cluster environment. We suggest that the increase of the mass quenching efficiency in the cluster core may emerge from an initial population of galaxies formed “in situ. ” The dependence of the environmental quenching efficiency on stellar mass favors models in which galaxies exhaust their reservoir of gas through star formation and outflows, after new gas supply is truncated when galaxies enter the cluster.
Sensing of Bacterial Peptidoglycan by Peptidoglycan Recognition Molecules

Peptidoglycan is an essential component of bacteria that provide structure and integrity of the cell. The main goal of this thesis has been to study the innate immune molecules that recognize bacterial peptidoglycan. In particular, the first three data chapters focus mainly on Nod1 and Nod2, the intracellular innate immune receptors critical for peptidoglycan recognition. First, the contribution of Rip2, the adaptor protein downstream of both Nod1 and Nod2 signaling, in innate and adaptive immunity was investigated in vivo using Rip2-deficient mice. I demonstrated that Rip2 was required and critical for triggering Nod1and Nod2-driven Th2 immunity in vivo. Second, the mechanism by which Nod1 and Nod2 ligands enter into epithelial cells was investigated. Using biochemical approaches and molecular biology techniques in vitro, I determined that the entry of these Nod1 and Nod2 ligands was mediated through clathrindependent endocytosis, and the internalization of the ligands was dependent on pH. More importantly, I identified a role for SLC15A4, an oligopeptide transporter expressed in early endosomes, in Nod1-dependent signaling. The last chapter of this thesis focused on delineating the role of the poorly characterized peptidoglycan binding and amidase protein PGLYRP2 in innate immune responses to Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium infection. Although PGLYRP2 did not seem to modulate Nod1and Nod2-dependent early Th17 inflammatory iii responses during Salmonella colitis in vivo, the protein was shown to have a protective role in the host defense against S. Typhimurium, and this role appeared to be independent of its amidase activity. All together, the work presented in this thesis provides novel insights into various aspects of signaling mechanisms dependent on Nod1, Nod2, as well as the poorly characterized mammalian PGLYRP2 in mucosal innate immunity.
The Extended Disc Galaxy Exploration Science Survey: description and surface brightness profile properties

The survey description and near-infrared properties for 92 galaxies are presented for the Extended Disc Galaxy Exploration Science (EDGES) Survey, along with an investigation into the properties of the stellar haloes of these galaxies. EDGES is a Spitzer Space Telescope Warm Mission program designed to reach the surface brightness limit (∼0.5 kJy sr−1 or 29 AB mag arcsec−2) of the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) 3.6 and 4.5 ${\rm \mu}$m bands for a wide range of galaxy types found within the local volume. The surface brightness profiles exhibit a large range in disc scale length, with breaks more frequently seen than in previous studies, owing in large part to the extremely deep near-infrared imaging. A number of these surface brightness profile breaks may be due to stellar haloes, up to seven galaxies out of the full sample of 92 galaxies, and we explore these implications in relation to current cosmological models. We also report the discovery of a new tidal stream near NGC 3953.
Age-specific variation in relationship between moult and pre-migratory fuelling in Wood Sandpipers Tringa glareola in southern Africa

Trans-equatorial avian migrants tend to breed, moult and migrate – the main energy-requiring events in their lifecycle – at different times. Little is known about the relationship between wing moult and pre-migratory fuelling in waders on their non-breeding grounds, where time is less constrained than during their brief high-latitude breeding season. We determined age-related strategies of Wood Sandpipers Tringa glareola to balance the energetic demands of primary moult against pre-migratory fuelling in southern Africa by analysing body mass and primary moult at first capture of 1721 birds mist-netted in 1972–96 at waterbodies in Zimbabwe. Adults moulted all their primaries in August–December, but immatures underwent a supplemental moult of varying numbers of outer primaries in December–April, close to departure. We used locally weighted linear regression to estimate trends in Wood Sandpiper body mass from 1 July to 1 May. They maintained low mass from arrival in July–September to February–early March. Adults fuelled from 10 February to 1 May at a mean rate of 0.25 g/day (sd = 0.16). Most adults (98%) began fuelling 10–75 days after completing primary moult. Immatures fuelled from 4 March to 13 April at 0.24 g/day (sd = 0.14). They used varying strategies depending on their condition: a brief gap between moult and fuelling; an overlap of these processes near departure, leading to slower fuelling; or skipping fuelling altogether and staying in southern Africa for a ‘gap year’. Immatures moulting three or five outer primaries fuelled more slowly than post-moult birds. Immatures moulting four outer primaries started fuelling 3 weeks later but at a higher rate than did post-moult birds of this group. In post-moult immatures, the later they ended moult, the later and faster they fuelled. The heaviest adults and immatures using all moult patterns accumulated fuel loads of c. 50% of lean body mass, and could potentially cross 2397–4490 km to reach the Great Rift Valley in one non-stop flight. Immatures were more flexible in the timing and extent of moult and in the timing and rate of fuelling than adults. This flexibility enables inexperienced Wood Sandpipers to cope with inter-annual differences in feeding conditions at Africa's ephemeral inland waterbodies.
The Functional Significance of Structural Novelty in the Locomotor Apparatus of Turtles

Movements of the pelvic girdle facilitate terrestrial locomotor performance in a wide range of vertebrates by increasing hind limb excursion and stride length. The extent to which pelvic movements might contribute to limb excursion in turtles is unclear, because the bony shell surrounding the body presents a major obstacle to their visualization. In cryptodires, one of the two major lineages of turtles, pelvic anatomy indicates the potential for rotation inside the shell. However, in pleurodires, the other major lineage of turtles, the pelvis shows a derived fusion to the shell, likely preventing pelvic motion. In addition, most turtles use their hind limbs for propulsion during swimming as well as
The Mass of Stirring Bodies in the AU Mic Debris Disk Inferred from Resolved Vertical Structure

The vertical distribution of dust in debris disks is sensitive to the number and size of large planetesimals dynamically stirring the disk, and is therefore well-suited for constraining the prevalence of otherwise unobservable Uranus and Neptune analogs. Information regarding stirring bodies has previously been inferred from infrared and optical observations of debris disk vertical structure, but theoretical works predict that the small particles traced by short-wavelength observations will be “puffed up” by radiation pressure, yielding only upper limits. The large grains that dominate the disk emission at millimeter wavelengths are much less sensitive to the effects of stellar radiation or stellar winds, and therefore trace the underlying mass distribution more directly. Here we present ALMA 1.3 mm dust continuum observations of the debris disk around the nearby M star AU Mic. The 3 au spatial resolution of the observations, combined with the favorable edge-on geometry of the system, allows us to measure the vertical thickness of the disk. We report a scale height-to-radius aspect ratio of between radii of ∼23 au and ∼41 au. Comparing this aspect ratio to a theoretical model of size-dependent velocity distributions in the collisional cascade, we find that the perturbing bodies embedded in the local disk must be larger than about 400 km, and the largest perturbing body must be smaller than roughly 1.8 M⊕. These measurements rule out the presence of a gas giant or Neptune analog near the ∼40 au outer edge of the debris ring, but are suggestive of large planetesimals or an Earth-sized planet stirring the dust distribution.
Population genetic differentiation, mating system, and effective population size of the tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera L.) in the Mid-Atlantic United States

Continuous natural habitats are increasingly transformed into anthropogenic landscapes—mosaics of natural habitats fragments surrounded by heterogeneous mixtures of different land use. Anthropogenic habitat transformation is particularly evident in the clearing of forests. Forests that have reached a great age with little or no anthropogenic disturbance (oldgrowth) are increasingly rare. At the same time, urbanization—one of the most readily apparent human-mediated effects on the landscape—continues to expand, and as a result, an increasing percentage of forests are becoming part of urban landscapes and ecosystems. The goal of this thesis is to investigate population genetic effects of anthropogenic landscapes on long-lived forest trees at different time scales: immediate, through the estimation of the mating system; short-time, through the estimation of effective population size using linkage disequilibrium based methods; and long-time, through the estimation of population genetic differentiation. To accomplish this goal, I researched the tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera L.), a tree in the family Magnoliaceae native to Eastern North America that has a wide geographic distribution in the
Guided Meta-Policy Search

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated promising results on complex tasks, yet often require impractical numbers of samples because they learn from scratch. Meta-RL aims to address this challenge by leveraging experience from previous tasks in order to more quickly solve new tasks. However, in practice, these algorithms generally also require large amounts of on-policy experience during the meta-training process, making them impractical for use in many problems. To this end, we propose to learn a reinforcement learning procedure through imitation of expert policies that solve previously-seen tasks. This involves a nested optimization, with RL in the inner loop and supervised imitation learning in the outer loop. Because the outer loop imitation learning can be done with off-policy data, we can achieve significant gains in meta-learning sample efficiency. In this paper, we show how this general idea can be used both for meta-reinforcement learning and for learning fast RL procedures from multi-task demonstration data. The former results in an approach that can leverage policies learned for previous tasks without significant amounts of on-policy data during meta-training, whereas the latter is particularly useful in cases where demonstrations are easy for a person to provide. Across a number of continuous control meta-RL problems, we demonstrate significant improvements in meta-RL sample efficiency in comparison to prior work as well as the ability to scale to domains with visual observations.
Protective effects of Ca2+ against NaCl induced salt stress in two lentil (Lens culinaris) cultivars

Salinity affects ~ 950 million ha of the world’s land area. More importantly, this worldwide problem is gradually increasing and limiting productivity. The aim of the present study was to investigate the protective effects of Ca 2+ against NaCl induced salt stress in Lens culinaris. We comparatively analyzed growth, oxidative stress, photosynthetic potential and antioxidant enzyme activities in red and green lentils. Plants were allowed to germinate and then treated with or without NaCl (50, 200 mM) and/or CaCl2 (5, 10 mM) for seven days. NaCl treatment decreased growth, chlorophyll content, carotenoid content and the activities of CAT and Ascorbate peroxidase (APX in both tested plants. Moreover MDA, H2O2 and proline levels were increased by NaCl treatment in red and green lentils, indicating that antioxidant system was disrupted by salinity. This study indicated that Ca 2+ ameliorated the inhibitory effects of NaCl on growth and photosynthesis by regulating the activities of pivotal antioxidant enzymes such as superoxide dismutase (SOD), APX and catalase (CAT) in red and green lentils. Further studies are needed to investigate the underlying molecular mechanisms of Ca 2+ dependent protective effects under salt stress.
Dynamic Evolution of Current Sheets, Ideal Tearing, Plasmoid Formation and Generalized Fractal Reconnection Scaling Relations

Magnetic reconnection may be the fundamental process allowing energy stored in magnetic fields to be released abruptly, with solar flares and coronal mass ejection being archetypal natural plasma examples. Magnetic reconnection is much too slow of a process to be efficient on the large scales, but accelerates once small enough scales are formed in the system. For this reason, the fractal reconnection scenario was introduced to explain explosive events in the solar atmosphere; it was based on the recursive triggering and collapse via tearing instability of a current sheet originally thinned during the rise of a filament in the solar corona. Here we compare the different fractal reconnection scenarios that have been proposed, and derive generalized scaling relations for the recursive triggering of fast, “ideal” —i.e., Lundquist number independent—tearing in collapsing current sheet configurations with arbitrary current profile shapes. An important result is that the Sweet–Parker scaling with Lundquist number, if interpreted as the aspect ratio of the singular layer in an ideally unstable sheet, is universal and does not depend on the details of the current profile in the sheet. Such a scaling, however, must not be interpreted in terms of stationary reconnection, rather it defines a step in the accelerating sequence of events of the ideal tearing mediated fractal cascade. We calculate scalings for the expected number of plasmoids for such generic profiles and realistic Lundquist numbers, showing that in ideal tearing scenarios a smaller number of plasmoids, by orders of magnitude, is generated compared to the original fractal model.
Boundedness of Conjunctive Regular Path Queries

We study the boundedness problem for unions of conjunctive regular path queries with inverses (UC2RPQs). This is the problem of, given a UC2RPQ, checking whether it is equivalent to a union of conjunctive queries (UCQ). We show the problem to be ExpSpace-complete, thus coinciding with the complexity of containment for UC2RPQs. As a corollary, when a UC2RPQ is bounded, it is equivalent to a UCQ of at most triple-exponential size, and in fact we show that this bound is optimal. We also study better behaved classes of UC2RPQs, namely acyclic UC2RPQs of bounded thickness, and strongly connected UCRPQs, whose boundedness problem are, respectively, PSpace-complete and $\Pi^p_2$-complete. Most upper bounds exploit results on limitedness for distance automata, in particular extending the model with alternation and two-wayness, which may be of independent interest.
Comment on "Is a Trineutron Resonance Lower in Energy than a Tetraneutron Resonance?"

A Comment on the Letter by S. Gandolfi, H. -W. Hammer, P. Klos, J. E. Lynn, and A. Schwenk, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 232501 (2017). PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.118. 232501 The authors of the Letter offer a Reply.
Dance Dance Generation: Motion Transfer for Internet Videos

This work presents computational methods for transferring body movements from one person to another with videos collected in the wild. Specifically, we train a personalized model on a single video from the Internet which can generate videos of this target person driven by the motions of other people. Our model is built on two generative networks: a human (foreground) synthesis net which generates photo-realistic imagery of the target person in a novel pose, and a fusion net which combines the generated foreground with the scene (background), adding shadows or reflections as needed to enhance realism. We validate the the efficacy of our proposed models over baselines with qualitative and quantitative evaluations as well as a subjective test.
Decomposition and Modeling in the Non-Manifold domain

The problem of decomposing non-manifold object has already been studied in solid modeling. However, the few proposed solutions are limited to the problem of decomposing solids described through their boundaries. In this thesis we study the problem of decomposing an arbitrary non-manifold simplicial complex into more regular components. A formal notion of decomposition is developed using combinatorial topology. The proposed decomposition is unique, for a given complex, and is computable for complexes of any dimension. A decomposition algorithm is proposed that is linear w.r. t. the size of the input. In three or higher dimensions a decomposition into manifold parts is not always possible. Thus, in higher dimensions, we decompose a non-manifold into a decidable super class of manifolds, that we call, Initial-Quasi-Manifolds. We also defined a two-layered data structure, the Extended Winged data structure. This data structure is a dimension independent data structure conceived to model non-manifolds through their decomposition into initial-quasi-manifold parts. Our two layered data structure describes the structure of the decomposition and each component separately. In the second layer we encode the connectivity structure of the decomposition. We analyze the space requirements of the Extended Winged data structure and give algorithms to build and navigate it. Finally, we discuss time requirements for the computation of topological relations and show that, for surfaces and tetrahedralizations, embedded in real 3D space, all topological relations can be extracted in optimal time. This approach offers a compact, dimension independent, representation for non-manifolds that can be useful whenever the modeled object has few non-manifold singularities.