Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Habitat-Use Patterns among Migrant and Resident Landbirds of Contrasting Dietary Habits in a Southern Mexican Wetland

Summary. The distribution of resident and migratory bird abundance across mangrove and marsh patches can produce dynamic and guild-specific habitat-use patterns. Using 32 consecutive months of point counts in a coastal landscape in Oaxaca, Mexico, we studied the annual cycle, non-breeding season (October to March) and breeding season (May to August) of terrestrial birds. For broad trophic guilds of plant-consumers and insectivores, we disclosed seasonal dynamics and assessed the spread of non-breeding season abundance across migratory habit categories and habitat types. To test for habitat-use patterns derived from hypotheses concerning specific trophic resources, we focused on subsets within trophic guilds: frugivores (plant-consumers that mainly eat fruit) and invertebrate gleaners (insectivores that mainly eat terrestrial leaf and stem invertebrates). Drawing on a resourcecentred dietary requirement hypothesis, we predicted lower abundance of migrant frugivores in mangrove, where palatable fruit availability was expected to be low and resident frugivores probably exploited invertebrates to feed nestlings. Based on the competition-oriented nest predation hypothesis, we anticipated a higher proportion of migrant invertebrate gleaners in marsh. We recorded migrant birds in every month of the year. For 20 plant-consumer species, the non-breeding season density was highest among residents in mangrove (> 5 individuals per hectare). For 46 insectivore species, densities were > 5 and > 9 individuals per hectare for migrants and residents, respectively. Comparable average abundances in trophic guilds suggested both migrant and resident species were equally important. For 14 frugivore species, a higher proportion of migrants in marsh (0.90) than mangrove (0.03) resulted from reciprocal between-habitat changes in migrant and resident abundances, as predicted by the dietary requirement hypothesis. For 22 invertebrate gleaners, proportions of migrants in mangrove (0.45) and marsh (0.55) were comparable, as were abundances. Contrary to the nest predation hypothesis, any between-habitat variation in invertebrate gleaner nesting activity did not markedly influence non-breeding season abundance. —Ruiz, M.D.M. , León-Cortés, J.L. , Enríquez, P.L. , García-Estrada, C. & Rangel Salazar, J.L. (2019). Habitat-use patterns among migrant and resident landbirds of contrasting dietary habits in a southern Mexican wetland. Ardeola, 66: 291-310.
Multi-physics simulation of thermoelectric generators through numerically modeling

The governing equations taken from the assumption of local equilibrium and the heat transfer rate form of Onsager flux have been compared with those based on classical heat transfer formulation by a simplified one dimensional (1-D) thermoelectric generator (TEG) model. In this paper, the simulation of coupled multi-physics effects in a TEG is realized in a three dimensional (3-D) way, based on the heat transfer formulation, through finite-difference numerical method and PSPICE computational tool. The feature to take the real temperature dependence of the materials properties into account is included in the computation.
Contractual Dualism, Market Power and Informality

Two stylized representations are often found in the academic and policy literature on informality and formality in developing countries. The first is that the informal (or unregulated) sector is more competitive than the formal (or regulated) sector. The second is that contract enforcement is easier in the formal sector than in the informal sector, precisely because the formal sector comes under the purview of state regulation. The basic contention of this paper is that these two representations are not compatible with each other. We develop a search-theoretic model of contractual dualism in the labor market where the inability to commit to contracts in the informal sector leads to employer market power in equilibrium, while an enforced minimum wage in the formal sector provides employers with a commitment technology but which reduces their market power in equilibrium. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. It (i) provides the micro-underpinnings for endogenous determination of employer market power in the formal and informal sectors due to contractual dualism in the two sectors, (ii) offers a unified and coherent setup whereby a host of salient features of developing country labor markets can be explained together, and (iii) places the original Stiglerian prescription of the optimal (unemployment minimizing) minimum wage in the broader context of labor markets where formal job creation is costly, and where formal employment, informal employment, and unemployment co-exist.
Tail-Assisted Mobility and Stability Enhancement in Yaw and Pitch Motions of a Water-Running Robot

Water-running robots have been developed inspired by a basilisk lizard, which demonstrates highly agile, stable, and energy-efficient locomotion on water surfaces. Current water-running robots are not as stable and agile as their biological counterparts. This study shows how the stability of a water-running robot in the pitch direction can be improved by using an active tail to enable increased propulsion. The mobility of the robot is also increased. To generate force in the pitch and yaw directions, a two-degrees-of-freedom tail is implemented with two circular plates to provide drag. We developed two types of dynamic models for pitch and yaw behavior, and the results are recursively calculated by considering the correlation between the models. The relationship between pitch motion and propulsion was analyzed by simulations. The steering behavior of the robot is also validated while considering the pitch behavior. Experiments were conducted to verify the simulation results.
A systematic video analysis of 69 injury cases in World Cup alpine skiing

We have limited insight into how injuries occur in professional ski racing. The aim of this study was to describe the injury situations in World Cup alpine skiing. Injuries reported through the International Ski Federation Injury Surveillance System for three consecutive World Cup seasons (2006–2009) were obtained on video. In total, 69 injuries and 124 runs of matched controls were analysed by five experts to evaluate the skiing situation, skier behavior, as well as piste‐related factors. A chi‐square test (95% CI, P ≤ 0.05) was used to examine whether there was a difference between course sections regarding where the injury situation occurred. The skier was most frequently turning (n = 55) or landing from a jump (n = 13) at the time of injury. Most of the injuries to the head and upper body (96%) resulted from crashes, while the majority of knee injuries (83%) occurred while the skier was still skiing. Gate contact contributed to 30% of the injuries, while 9% occurred at contact with safety nets/material. Almost half of the injuries (46%) occurred in the final fourth of the course. A particular concern was the high contribution of inappropriate gate contact and the high‐energy impacts to the body when crashing.
Association of Isolated Polyhydramnios at or Beyond 34 Weeks of Gestation and Pregnancy Outcome

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate pregnancy outcome among women with isolated polyhydramnios at admission for labor at or beyond 34 weeks of gestation. METHODS: Retrospective cohort study at a tertiary medical center between 2007 and 2012. Isolated polyhydramnios was defined as amniotic fluid index (AFI) greater than 25 cm at admission in the absence of gestational or pregestational diabetes mellitus or fetal structural or chromosomal anomalies. Women with isolated polyhydramnios were compared with women with a normal AFI (5–25 cm). RESULTS: Overall, 31,376 women were eligible for analysis, of whom 215 (0.7%) had isolated polyhydramnios and 31,161 normal AFI. Women with isolated polyhydramnios had higher rates of labor induction (7.9% compared with 4.8%, P=.04) and cesarean delivery (12.1% compared with 5.1%, P<.001). They also had higher rates of placental abruption (0.9% compared with 0.2%, P=.02), abnormal or intermediate fetal heart rate (FHR) tracings (7.0% compared with 3.2%, P=.002), and prolonged first stage of delivery (6.0% compared with 1.4%, P<.001). Isolated polyhydramnios was also associated with higher rates of shoulder dystocia (1.9% compared with 0.3%, P<.001) and respiratory distress syndrome (0.5% compared with 0.03%, P=.001). On a multiple logistic regression model, isolated polyhydramnios was an independent risk factor for labor induction (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 1.7, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.01–2.8), cesarean delivery (adjusted OR 2.6, 95% CI 1.7–4.0), prolonged first stage of delivery (adjusted OR 3.6, 95% CI 1.97–6.7), abnormal or intermediate FHR tracings (adjusted OR 2.6, 95% CI 1.6–4.5), placental abruption (adjusted OR 8.4, 95% CI 2.00–35.4), shoulder dystocia (adjusted OR 3.4, 95% CI 1.2–9.7), and respiratory distress syndrome (adjusted OR 38.9, 95% CI 4.6–332.6). Mild isolated polyhydramnios (AFI 25.1–30.0) was independently associated with cesarean delivery, prolonged first stage of delivery, placental abruption, abnormal or intermediate FHR tracings, and shoulder dystocia. CONCLUSION: Isolated polyhydramnios at admission for labor at or beyond 34 weeks of gestation is associated with adverse obstetric and neonatal outcomes. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: II
Peptide-mediated Gene Transfer of Cationic Lipid/Plasmid DNA Complexes to Endothelial Cells

The purpose of this research is to develop ligand-targeted plasmid based gene delivery systems for gene transfer to tumor endothelium. Cell adhesion assays were used to test the peptide inhibition of human endothelial cell adsorption to vitronectin-treated tissue culture plates. A series of RGD containing peptides were tested in linear form and with one and two disulfide bonds. The linear and two disulfide bond peptides yielded similar IC50 (≈1 × 10-7 M). Substitution of two methionines for cysteines yielded a single disulfide bond that increased the IC50 by 10-fold. The single and double disulfide peptides were derivatized to N-succinyl-dioleoylphopsphatidylethanolamine and incorporated into 100 nm liposomes radiolabeled with 3H-cholesterylhexadecylether. Liposome uptake by human umbilical vein endothelial cells was tested as a function of lipopeptide surface density. Increase in membrane surface density from 5 to 20 mol% increased human umbilical derived endothelial cell (HUVEC) uptake of the liposomes for both the single and double disulfide peptides. Liposome uptake by HUVECs was 3-fold greater for the double disulfide compared to the single disulfide. The single and double disulfide lipopeptides were then tested for gene transfer to HUVECs using DOTMA:Cholesterol cationic liposomes. The polyplexes were formed by rapidly mixing plasmid DNA with DOTMA:CHOL liposomes at a 3:1 charge ratio in 2% ethanol, 10% lactose. The ethanol was removed by lyophilization and upon rehydration, the lipoplexes had a mean diameter of approximately 100 nm. HUVEC transfection studies showed that increasing the mol% of the single disulfide RGD lipopeptide to 20 mol% increased gene transfer by 10-fold. This increase in transfection could be reduced to that obtained in the absence of lipopeptide by co-incubating the HUVECs with a 100-fold excess of the single disulfide RGD peptide, thus demonstrating lipopeptide mediated gene transfer to endothelial cells.
Scene Graph Generation from Objects, Phrases and Region Captions

Object detection, scene graph generation and region captioning, which are three scene understanding tasks at different semantic levels, are tied together: scene graphs are generated on top of objects detected in an image with their pairwise relationship predicted, while region captioning gives a language description of the objects, their attributes, relations and other context information. In this work, to leverage the mutual connections across semantic levels, we propose a novel neural network model, termed as Multi-level Scene Description Network (denoted as MSDN), to solve the three vision tasks jointly in an end-to-end manner. Object, phrase, and caption regions are first aligned with a dynamic graph based on their spatial and semantic connections. Then a feature refining structure is used to pass messages across the three levels of semantic tasks through the graph. We benchmark the learned model on three tasks, and show the joint learning across three tasks with our proposed method can bring mutual improvements over previous models. Particularly, on the scene graph generation task, our proposed method outperforms the stateof- art method with more than 3% margin. Code has been made publicly available.
Face illumination invariant feature extraction based on edge detection operator

A new method of face illumination invariant feature extraction based on edge detection operator is proposed in this paper. The input face image is calculated by edge enhancement with edge operator. And then, original face image is divided by the sharpened image to eliminate the illumination component to get the quotient image which is the illumination invariant feature of face image. Finally, the arctangent transform is employed to do nonlinear compression. The experiment results of face recognition on Extended Yale B and CMU PIE face database show that the method is robust to face non-uniform illumination.
Power system stability assessment using sub-Gramian technique

We present the results of comparison of two methods used for examination of the small-signal stability in power systems. One of the methods is based on investigation of behavior of the eigenvalues. Another one is based on the so-called sub-Gramians that represent the eigen-parts in the spectral decomposition of a square H2 norm of the transfer function. The analysis of behavior of the individual eigen-components allows earlier identification of arising conditions for possible power system instability. The comparison was made using the MATLAB software for two test systems: 1) a well-known model of transmission system proposed by P. Kundur, and 2) a model of power network on Russky Island.
Analysis of Recoverable Residual Image Characteristics of Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Diode Displays Using Polyimide Substrates

Recoverable residual image characteristics for n- and p-type low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) thin-film transistor (TFT)-based organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays using polyimide substrates were investigated. Unlike OLED displays using glass substrates, the n-type LTPS TFT-based OLED displays using a polyimide substrate showed inferior recoverable residual image characteristics compared to the p-type LTPS TFT-based OLED displays. By the analysis of the brightness relaxation characteristics of the residual image and technology computer-aided design (TCAD) simulations, an additional explanation for the recoverable residual image, related to the substrate, was identified. In the polyimide substrate, internal electric fields vary depending on the operation of the driving TFTs. Particularly, in the n-type LTPS driving TFTs, the direction of electric fields changes dramatically with brightness conditions. This can result in a drastic variation in charge behavior inside the polyimide substrate. Consequently, we found that when using a polyimide substrate rather than a glass substrate, the recoverable residual image characteristics of the OLED displays arise due to both the hysteresis characteristics of the LTPS TFTs and the charge generation and distribution in the polyimide substrate.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of submaximal exercise-based equations to predict maximal oxygen uptake in young people.

Many equations to predict maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max) from submaximal exercise tests have been proposed for young people, but the composition and accuracy of these equations vary greatly. The purpose of this systematic review was to analyze all submaximal exercise-based equations to predict VO2max measured via direct gas analysis for use with young people. Five databases were systematically searched in February 2013. Studies were included if they used a submaximal, exercise-based method to predict VO2max; the actual VO2max was gas analyzed; participants were younger than 18 years; and equations included at least one submaximal exercise-based variable. A meta-analysis and narrative synthesis were conducted. Sixteen studies were included. The mean equation validity statistic was strong, r = . 786 (95% CI 0.747-0.819). Subgroup meta-analysis suggests exercise mode may contribute to the overall model, with running- and walking-based predictive equations reporting the highest mean r values (running r = .880; walking r = .821) and cycling the weakest (r = .743). Selection of the most appropriate equation should be guided by factors such as purpose, logistic limitations, appropriateness of the validation sample, the level of study bias, and the degree of accuracy. Suggestions regarding the most accurate equation for each exercise mode are provided.
Social Support in Children With Cancer: A Review of the Literature

Families experiencing childhood cancer are confronted with many stressors throughout the course of illness. For children with cancer, such stressors may be especially challenging. The extent to which they are able to deal with such challenges appears to be partly contingent on the support available from others. Positive social relations are considered to improve the quality of life of individuals in general and to help protect or buffer them from stressful life events such as cancer. This article presents a critical review and synthesis of research examining social support in children with cancer. Recommendations for research that will provide a foundation for understanding social support in children with cancer are outlined. These recommendations include the need to investigate (a) social support as a guiding, central construct, (b) social support from a family socio-cultural perspective, (c) social support from a developmental perspective, and (d) social support as a process. Implications for pediatric oncology nursing practice are discussed.
Detection of Human Papillomavirus DNA and p53 Gene Mutations in Esophageal Cancer Samples and Adjacent Normal Mucosa

Background/Aim: There is evidence of a possible etiological role of human papillomaviruses (HPVs) in the development of esophageal tumors. Loss of function of the wild-type p53 tumor suppressor gene product by binding to E6 oncoproteins of high-risk HPVs is considered an important event in tumor development. The aim of this study was to verify the prevalence of HPV infection and p53 mutation in esophageal tumor tissue samples and in the adjacent normal mucosa in patients from a high-risk area in Italy. Methods: DNA from 33 biopsy specimens (17 tumor sample biopsies and 16 samples of adjacent normal mucosa) was screened for HPV DNA using two polymerase chain reaction based procedures. Restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis was used for typing. Screening of p53 mutations was performed with polymerase chain reaction-single strand conformation polymorphism analysis and DNA sequencing. Results: Overall, 8 of 17 patients presented HPV DNA; HPV 16 was detected in 4 of 8 samples. Samples from tumors and adjacent mucosa were positive for mucosal HPVs in 7 of 17 and 4 of 16 cases, respectively. In 1 case, HPV DNA was detected in the normal mucosa only. None of the samples contained HPVs of the epidermodysplasia verruciformis or cutaneous groups. Mutations of p53 were detected in two HPV DNA negative samples. In both cases, the mutation was present in the tumor only. Conclusions: Our results are in favor of the involvement of both aberrant p53 expression and HPV infection in the development of esophageal tumors. The high HPV infection rate in patients from a high-risk region suggests that subjects harboring HPVs (in particular HPV 16) in the esophagus should be considered at risk of esophageal malignancies.
Pricing Financial Derivatives by Gram-Charlier Expansions

In this paper we provide several applications of Gram-Charlier expansions in financial derivative pricing. We first give an exposition on how to calculate swaption prices under a two-factor Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (CIR2) model. Then we apply this method to an extended version of the model (CIR2++). We also develop a procedure to calculate European call options under Hestonâ€™s model of stochastic volatility by the Gram-Charlier Expansions.
IT Consumerization and New IT Practices: Discriminating, Firefighting and Innovating

This paper investigates the impact of IT consumerization on the internal IT department faced with managing it. IT consumerization is employees wanting to use their consumer devices (e.g., iPads, iPhone, SurfacePros) and applications (e.g., iCloud, LinkedIn) for work purposes. Using case studies of organizations in three different stages of consumerizing the workplace, the study highlights the different practices that internal IT departments deploy in each stage. In the conversion stage IT departments discriminate; in the use stage they firefight; and in the competitive stage they innovate. The study offers implications to the IT literature, much of which focuses on a top-down approach to IT implementation. In contrast, our study takes a bottom up approach where end-users introduce new technology to the organization. This bottom up approach likely explains some IT practices uncovered in this research like internal IT departments getting out of the support business, testing less and embracing failure.
Evoked potentials research

The signal measuring methodology, stimuli, and signal processing methodology used in evoked potentials research are described. The typical method of measuring evoked potentials is to attach Ag-AgCL electrodes to the scalp at specific locations. Visual, auditory and somatosensory stimuli are used. Signal averaging remains one of the most widely used processing tools. <<ETX>>
Education and How It Impacts Arrest Rates

This study investigates the relationship between education and the number of arrests. This study looks at how education or lack of an education impacts the rates of arrests, using data from the San Luis Obispo County. It looks at different contributing factors such as income, race and police profiling while also looking at the environment of the individuals and how these factors play a part in the relationship between education and arrest rates. Education is a big factor in one’s life and can help reduce arrest rates, especially in youth because if they are involved in a positive recreational activity or program, they are less likely to commit a crime. This study aims to determine how education impacts the number of arrests being made if education was high.