Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Global budgets of oceanic and atmospheric methyl iodide: Development of methyl iodide as a tracer fo

Methyl iodide (CH 3 I) is mainly emitted to the atmosphere from the oceans, and photolyzes with a lifetime of 4 days in the tropics. It is of interest in the atmosphere as a tracer of marine convection and a source of iodine radicals. We present a global model simulation of oceanic and atmospheric CH 3 I using a box model of the oceanic mixed layer coupled to a global three-dimensional model of atmospheric transport driven by assimilated meterological observations from the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) of the NASA Data Assimilation OOce (DAO). In the oceanic mixed layer model, seawater CH 3 I(aq) is controlled by dissolved organic carbon (DOC) driven photochemical production, reaction with Cl ? , and exchange with the atmosphere. The resulting net oceanic emission of CH 3 I to the atmosphere is 214 Gg yr ? 1. Terrestrial emissions from rice paddies (71 Gg yr ? 1), biomass burning (12 Gg yr ? 1), wetlands (7 Gg yr ? 1) and wood fuel (3 Gg yr ? 1) are also included in the model. A global compilation of atmospheric and oceanic data for CH 3 I concentrations is used to constrain and evaluate the simulation. The model captures 40% of the variance in the observed seawater CH 3 I(aq) concentrations. Simulated concentrations at midlatitudes in summer are too high, perhaps because of a biological sink of CH 3 I(aq) missing from the model. There is also evidence from atmospheric observations in Asian outtow that the assumed CH 3 I source from rice paddies may be too high. Simulated and observed vertical prooles of CH 3 I in the tropical marine atmosphere indicate a gradual decrease up to the trade wind inversion (TWI) at 2-3 km, a sharp transition across the TWI, and little vertical gradient through the rest of the troposphere reeecting convective outtow at all altitudes. We deene a quantitative index of marine convection index as 3 the ratio of upper tropospheric (8-12 km) over lower tropospheric (0-2.5 km) CH 3 I concentrations averaged over coherent oceanic regions. This index in the observations ranges from 0.11 over strongly subsiding regions (southeastern subtropical Paciic) to 0.40 over strongly upwelling regions (western equatorial Paciic). The model reproduces the observed index with little global bias (+ 11%); it captures qualitatively most of the observed spatial gradients and seasonal variations in the index but accounts for only 15 % of its overall variance. …
Obligation Constraints in Access Control

We introduce the notion of obligation constraints in the context of access control systems. Such constraints requires that in order to have all permissions necessary to complete a sensitive task, the cooperation of at least a certain number of users is required. In this paper, we formally define the notion of obligation constraints, strict obligation constraints, and introduce the obligation satisfy checking problem (OSCP), which asks whether an access control state satisfies a given obligation constraint, and show that it is intractable (NP-complete). We present an improvement algorithm for OSCP, the algorithm uses preprocessing and static pruning techniques that reduce the number of users that need to be considered. Furthermore, we design and evaluate an improvement algorithm for solving OSCP.
Active segmentation with fixation

The human visual system observes and understands a scene/image by making a series of fixations. Every “fixation point” lies inside a particular region of arbitrary shape and size in the scene which can either be an object or just a part of it. We define as a basic segmentation problem the task of segmenting that region containing the “fixation point”. Segmenting this region is equivalent to finding the enclosing contour - a connected set of boundary edge fragments in the edge map of the scene - around the fixation. We present here a novel algorithm that finds this bounding contour and achieves the segmentation of one object, given the fixation. The proposed segmentation framework combines monocular cues (color/intensity/texture) with stereo and/or motion, in a cue independent manner. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm on challenging videos and stereo pairs. Although the proposed algorithm is more suitable for an active observer capable of fixating at different locations in the scene, it applies to a single image as well. In fact, we show that even with monocular cues alone, the introduced algorithm performs as well or better than a number of image segmentation algorithms, when applied to challenging inputs.
Permeant ion effects on the gating kinetics of the type L potassium channel in mouse lymphocytes

Permeant ion species was found to profoundly affect the gating kinetics of type l K+ currents in mouse T lymphocytes studied with the whole- cell or on-cell patch gigaohm-seal techniques. Replacing external K+ with Rb+ (as the sole monovalent cation, at 160 mM) shifted the peak conductance voltage (g-V) relation by approximately 20 mV to more negative potentials, while NH4+ shifted the g-V curve by 15 mV to more positive potentials. Deactivation (the tail current time constant, tau tail) was slowed by an average of 14-fold at -70 mV in external Rb+, by approximately 8-fold in Cs+, and by a factor of two to three in NH4+. Changing the external K+ concentration, [K+]o, from 4.5 to 160 mM or [Rb+]o from 10 to 160 mM had no effect on tau tail. With all the internal K+ replaced by Rb+ or Cs+ and either isotonic Rb+ or K+ in the bath, tau tail was indistinguishable from that with K+ in the cell. With the exception of NH4+, activation time constants were insensitive to permeant ion species. These results indicate that external permeant ions have stronger effects than internal permeant ions, suggesting an external modulatory site that influences K+ channel gating. However, in bi-ionic experiments with reduced external permeant ion concentrations, tau tail was sensitive to the direction of current flow, indicating that the modulatory site is either within the permeation pathway or in the outer vestibule of the channel. The latter interpretation implies that outward current through an open type l K+ channel significantly alters local ion concentrations at the modulatory site in the outer vestibule, and consequently at the mouth of the channel. Experiments with mixtures of K+ and Rb+ in the external solution reveal that deactivation kinetics are minimally affected by addition of Rb+ until the Rb+ mole fraction approaches unity. This relationship between mole fraction and tau tail, together with the concentration independence of tau tail, was hard to reconcile with simple models in which occupancy of a site within the permeation pathway prevents channel closing, but is consistent with a model in which a permeant ion binding site in the outer vestibule modulates gating depending on the species of ion occupying the site. A description of the ionic selectivity of the type l K+ channel is presented in the companion paper (Shapiro and DeCoursey, 1991b).
Compactly supported graph building for spectral clustering

In spectral clustering approaches is of great importance how is built the graph representation over a data set, being reflected in the achieved clustering performance. In this work is introduced a methodology to build a graph representation of a given data, based on compactly supported radial basis functions which enables to highlight relevant pair-wise sample relationships. To tune such functions, an objective function is proposed, which aims to find a trade-off between a similarity and a sparsity measure, allowing to achieve a suitable local and global data structure representation. Synthetic and real-world data sets are tested. Results shows how proposed method improves clustering results, specially for an image segmentation task.
An elementary state-space approach to the H2 optimal control problem

The existing approaches to the H2 optimal control problem, such as the one of converting the problem to an H2 model-matching problem and the one using change of variables and inner functions, are not ideal for pedagogical purposes because they use highly intricate mathematical tools and/or have a complicated proof structure. We here describe a new state-space approach which is elementary and conceptually simple. The key fact underlying our approach is that the linearity of the two dual H2 norm formulas in form of a Lyapunov equation and a matrix trace allows us to suitably decompose the H2 norm-square of the closed-loop system into the norm-squares of three subsystems.
Cerebellum and auditory function: An ALE meta‐analysis of functional neuroimaging studies

Over the past two decades neuroimaging data have accumulated showing that the cerebellum, traditionally viewed only as a motor structure, is also active in a wide variety of sensory and cognitive tasks. We have proposed that instead of explicit involvement in any particular motor, sensory, or cognitive task, the cerebellum performs a much more fundamental computation involving the active acquisition of sensory data. We carried out an activation likelihood estimate (ALE) meta‐analysis to determine whether neuroimaging results obtained during a wide range of auditory tasks support this proposal. Specifically, we analyzed the coordinates of 231 activation foci obtained in 15 different auditory studies selected through an extensive search of the positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) literature. The studies selected represent a wide variety of purely auditory tasks using highly controlled synthesized acoustic stimuli. The results clearly revealed that in addition to temporal auditory areas of cerebral cortex, specific regions in the cerebellum are activated consistently across studies regardless of the particular auditory task involved. In particular, one area in left lateral crus I area showed the greatest volume and ALE peak value among the extratemporal regions. A subanalysis was carried out that ruled out the specific association of this cerebellar cluster with attentional demand. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the cerebellum may play a role in purely sensory auditory processing, and are discussed in light of the broader idea of the cerebellum subserving a fundamental sensory function. Hum Brain Mapp 25:118–128, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Third Dredge-up in Low Mass Stars: Solving the LMC Carbon Star Mystery

A long standing problem with asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star models has been their inability to produce the low-luminosity carbon stars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Dredge-up must begin earlier and extend deeper. We find this for the first time in our models of LMC metallicity. Such features are not found in our models of SMC metallicity. The fully implicit and simultaneous stellar evolution code STARS has been used to calculate the evolution of AGB stars with metallicities of Z=0.008 and Z=0.004, corresponding to the observed metallicities of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, respecitively. Third dredge-up occurs in stars of 1Msol and above and carbon stars were found for models between 1Msol and 3Msol. We use the detailed models as input physics for a population synthesis code and generate carbon star luminosity functions. We now find that we are able to reproduce the carbon star luminosity function of the LMC without any manipulation of our models. The SMC carbon star luminosity function still cannot be produced from our detailed models unless the minimum core mass for third dredge-up is reduced by 0.06Msol.
Automatic Classification of the World-Wide Web using the Universal Decimal Classification

: GERHARD is a fully automatic indexing and classification system of the German World-Wide Web for integrated searching and browsing. A database-driven robot collects academically relevant documents, which are automatically classified with computer-linguistic and statistical methods using the Universal Decimal Classification. The generated metadata and the index of the documents are held in a relational database (Oracle with Context option). The user-interface is trilingual (German, English, French) and allows the user to look for “similar” documents very easily through its tight integration of searching and browsing mechanisms.
SWIM – A Framework for Semantic Desktop Search

SWIM is a Semantic Desktop framework to find and access any kind of resources identified by an URI. The current implementation is comparable to traditional desktop search engines extended by Semantic Web technology. SWIM uses stackable adapters to extract or process content and metadata, an ontology based on common standards like the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, multiple search facilities and a interactive visualization to navigate among related resources.
Character n-Gram Spotting in Document Images

In this paper, we present a novel approach to search and retrieve from document image collections, without explicit recognition. Existing recognition-free approaches such as word-spotting cannot scale to arbitrarily large vocabulary and document image collections. In this paper we put forth a framework that overcomes three issues of word-spotting: i) retrieving word images not labeled during indexing, ii) allow for query and retrieval of morphological variations of words and iii) scale the retrieval to large collections. We propose a character n-gram spotting framework, where word-images are considered as a bag of visual n-grams. The character n-grams are represented in a visual-feature space and indexed for quick retrieval. In the retrieval phase, the query word is expanded to its constituent n-grams, which are used to query the previously built index. A ranking mechanism is proposed that combines the retrieval results from the multiple lists corresponding to each n-gram. The approach is demonstrated on a size-able collection of English and Malayalam books. With a mean AP of 0.64, the performance of the retrieval system was found to be very promising.
Precautionary Savings and Self-Selection - Evidence from the German Reunification 'Experiment'

We combine particular features of the German civil service with the unique event of German reunification to test the theory of precautionary savings and to quantify the importance of self-selection into occupations due to differences in risk aversion. In the presence of self-selection, failing to control for risk aversion in empirical tests of precautionary savings results in a bias that could lead to a false rejection of the theory. We exploit the fact that for individuals from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) German reunification in 1990 caused an exogenous reassignment of income risks. Our findings suggest that self-selection of risk averse individuals into low-risk occupations is economically important and decreases aggregate precautionary wealth holdings significantly.
WHO guidelines for a healthy diet and mortality from cardiovascular disease in European and American elderly: the CHANCES project12

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) represents a leading cause of mortality worldwide, especially in the elderly. Lowering the number of CVD deaths requires preventive strategies targeted on the elderly. Objective: The objective was to generate evidence on the association between WHO dietary recommendations and mortality from CVD, coronary artery disease (CAD), and stroke in the elderly aged ≥60 y. Design: We analyzed data from 10 prospective cohort studies from Europe and the United States comprising a total sample of 281,874 men and women free from chronic diseases at baseline. Components of the Healthy Diet Indicator (HDI) included saturated fatty acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, mono- and disaccharides, protein, cholesterol, dietary fiber, and fruit and vegetables. Cohort-specific HRs adjusted for sex, education, smoking, physical activity, and energy and alcohol intakes were pooled by using a random-effects model. Results: During 3,322,768 person-years of follow-up, 12,492 people died of CVD. An increase of 10 HDI points (complete adherence to an additional WHO guideline) was, on average, not associated with CVD mortality (HR: 0.94; 95% CI: 0.86, 1.03), CAD mortality (HR: 0.99; 95% CI: 0.85, 1.14), or stroke mortality (HR: 0.95; 95% CI: 0.88, 1.03). However, after stratification of the data by geographic region, adherence to the HDI was associated with reduced CVD mortality in the southern European cohorts (HR: 0.87; 95% CI: 0.79, 0.96; I2 = 0%) and in the US cohort (HR: 0.85; 95% CI: 0.83, 0.87; I2 = not applicable). Conclusion: Overall, greater adherence to the WHO dietary guidelines was not significantly associated with CVD mortality, but the results varied across regions. Clear inverse associations were observed in elderly populations in southern Europe and the United States.
Time-Course Association Mapping of the Grain-Filling Rate in Rice (Oryza sativa L.)

Detecting quantity trait locus (QTLs) and elite alleles that are associated with grain-filling rate (GFR) in rice is essential for promoting the utilization of hybrid japonica rice and improving rice yield. Ninety-five varieties including 58 landraces and 37 elite varieties from the core germplasm collection were genotyped with 263 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. The GFR of the 95 varieties was evaluated at five stages, 7, 14, 21, 28 and 35 days after flowering (DAF) both in 2011 and 2012. We found abundant phenotypic and genetic diversity in the studied population. A population structure analysis identified seven subpopulations. A linkage disequilibrium (LD) analysis indicated that the levels of LD ranged from 60.3 cM to 84.8 cM and artificial selection had enhanced the LD. A time-course association analysis detected 31 marker-GFR associations involving 24 SSR markers located on chromosomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11 and 12 of rice at five stages. The elite alleles for high GFR at each stage were detected. Fifteen excellent parental combinations were predicted, and the best parental combination ‘Nannongjing62401×Laolaihong’ could theoretically increase 4.086 mg grain-1 d-1 at the five stages. Our results demonstrate that the time-course association mapping for GFR in rice could detect elite alleles at different filling stages and that these elite alleles could be used to improve the GFR via pyramiding breeding.
A random block-coordinate primal-dual proximal algorithm with application to 3D mesh denoising

Primal-dual proximal optimization methods have recently gained much interest for dealing with very large-scale data sets encoutered in many application fields such as machine learning, computer vision and inverse problems [1-3]. In this work, we propose a novel random block-coordinate version of such algorithms allowing us to solve a wide array of convex variational problems. One of the main advantages of the proposed algorithm is its ability to solve composite problems involving large-size matrices without requiring any inversion. In addition, the almost sure convergence to an optimal solution to the problem is guaranteed. We illustrate the good performance of our method on a mesh denoising application.
Perceptions of Group Versus Individual Service Failures and Their Effects on Customer Outcomes

A service failure and its negative effects can involve multiple customers at the same time, which suggests the need to understand the psychological mechanisms that underlie differential perceptions of group service failures (GSFs) versus individual service failures (ISFs) as well as their related outcomes. With an attributional framework, this article reports on two experiments that varied in their blame-attribution ambiguity. The results reveal that customers experience greater anger and show higher negative word-of-mouth and complaint intentions after a GSF versus an ISF. These differential effects are mediated by blame attributions, such that GSFs cause customers to blame the service provider more than ISFs. Customer entitlement also moderates the effect of the failure context (GSF vs. ISF) on blame attribution, contingent on perceptions of whether the service provider or customer violated an existing rule. Thus, we find that customers respond differently to service failures depending on the context. Managerial implications include separating customers from each other when GSFs are likely to take place, using techniques to redirect customer’s blame attributions to sources other than the service provider after a GSF and using customer scripts to minimize the occurrence of customer-induced service failures.
Non-Viral Methods For Generating Integration-Free, Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells were created from mouse fibroblasts by induced expression of Yamanaka factors, Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc. This technique has quickly resulted in an exponential increase in the amount of pluripotency studies, and has provided a valuable tool in regenerative medicine. At the same time, many methodologies to generate iPS cells have been reported, and are comprised mainly of viral methods and non-viral methods. Although viral methods may not be applicable for clinical applications, various nonviral methods have been reported in recent years, including DNA vector-based approaches, transfection of mRNA, transduction of reprogramming proteins, and use of small molecule compounds. This review summarizes and evaluates these non-viral methods.
LFRTrainer: Large-Scale Face Recognition Training System

Face recognition has been widely used in many application areas such as photo album management and information security. Rapid growth of handheld devices and social networks bring new challenges to face recognition algorithm design and system engineering. To be effective on a handheld device, the face recognition model must be simple and lightweight, and also needs to handle the large variations in background, image size, etc. This paper tries to address these two problems from a system perspective. We employ a simple linear model for face recognition, which is generated from a SVM classifier to tell whether a pair of face is from the same subject or not. And to make this classifier generalized well on all potential inter-face/intra-face variations, we train it with billions of face pairs. Many potential problems arise during the large-scale training procedure. For examples, 1) the training set is too large to fit into a single machine, 2) the computation requirement is so huge that it takes many days to complete a training which makes difficult for algorithm developers to experiment and tune the model effectively. To overcome these obstacles, this paper proposes a large-scale face recognition training system, called LFRTrainer. The system takes advantage of the massive data parallelism available in the problem and utilizes a distributed compute cluster to perform the model training. We have run this system on Intel Endeavor cluster for model development and tuning over a year. Using LFRTrainer, we train a face recognition model for embedded devices which achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and high scalability: 92.2% Face Verification Rate (FVR) at 0.1% False Accept Rate (FAR) on FRGC-204 benchmark and nearly linear scalability from tens to hundreds of nodes.