Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Potential Costs of Acclimatization to a Warmer Climate: Growth of a Reef Coral with Heat Tolerant vs. Sensitive Symbiont Types

One of the principle ways in which reef building corals are likely to cope with a warmer climate is by changing to more thermally tolerant endosymbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) genotypes. It is highly likely that hosting a more heat-tolerant algal genotype will be accompanied by tradeoffs in the physiology of the coral. To better understand one of these tradeoffs, growth was investigated in the Indo-Pacific reef-building coral Acropora millepora in both the laboratory and the field. In the Keppel Islands in the southern Great Barrier Reef this species naturally harbors nrDNA ITS1 thermally sensitive type C2 or thermally tolerant type D zooxanthellae of the genus Symbiodinium and can change dominant type following bleaching. We show that under controlled conditions, corals with type D symbionts grow 29% slower than those with type C2 symbionts. In the field, type D colonies grew 38% slower than C2 colonies. These results demonstrate the magnitude of trade-offs likely to be experienced by this species as they acclimatize to warmer conditions by changing to more thermally tolerant type D zooxanthellae. Irrespective of symbiont genotype, corals were affected to an even greater degree by the stress of a bleaching event which reduced growth by more than 50% for up to 18 months compared to pre-bleaching rates. The processes of symbiont change and acute thermal stress are likely to act in concert on coral growth as reefs acclimatize to more stressful warmer conditions, further compromising their regeneration capacity following climate change.
ASPIS: a knowledge-based CASE environment

The authors report on ESPRIT Project 401, building the Application Software Prototype Implementation System (ASPIS) for computer-aided software engineering (CASE). ASPIS uses artificial intelligence techniques in a software-development environment. The goal is to encourage a more flexible and effective software-development life cycle, smoothing the transition between user needs, analysis, and design. The focus is on a knowledge-based assistant called the analysis assistant, the primary goal of which is to provide the user with domain-dependent suggestions and advice during a particular method phase. <<ETX>>
Measuring the quality of figure/ground segmentations

Figure/Ground segmentation is of great interest within the analysis of video streams. We propose a new, continuous evaluation measure for figure/ground segmentation algorithms which allows for assessing the quality of a segmentation. The evaluation approach is based on set similarities and logic-motivated considerations. Results obtained with the new measure are shown for several well-known algorithms. Compared to existing detection rate/false alarm considerations, the proposed measure reveals advantages and shortcommings of different algorithms much better and can therefore be used as a selection criterion.
A Framework for Privacy Preferences and Data-Handling Policies

This paper presents SecPAL4P, a language for specifying both users' preferences on how their personally identifiable information (PII) should be treated by data-collecting services, and services' policies on treating collected PIIs. Preferences and policies are specified in terms of granted rights and required obligations, expressed as assertions and queries in an instance of SecPAL (a language originally developed for decentralized authorization). This paper further presents a formal definition of satisfaction between a policy and a preference, and a satisfaction checking algorithm. Based on the latter, a protocol is described for disclosing PIIs between users and services, as well as between third-party services.
Metaphors in the Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Bible and Contemporary Art

Biblical wisdom literature is a treasure-trove of powerful metaphors. This article presents a sample of these metaphors and their significant impact on contemporary artwork. The impact is characterized by both appropriation and adaptation, similitude and analogy, respectively. The highlighted metaphors are not merely catalogued but, more or less, analyzed with regard to relevant contemporary artwork. This augments the importance of contemporary biblical literacy analysis and uses it as one of the tools by which it is possible to gauge the impact and interaction, in this case, of the metaphor-world of the wisdom tradition on contemporary art. More importantly, however, this study underscores the relevance of these metaphors for biblical exegesis, hermeneutics, and theology. The analysis of the reception of these metaphors in contemporary artworks undergirds and informs the process of interpretation. The reception of these metaphors in their contemporary art contexts is best understood within the framework of imagery and imagistic language. Metaphor, as a subset of imagery and imagistic language, is foundational for the examined wisdom books, Proverbs, Job, and Qoheleth, and for the relevant contemporary artwork, alike. Moreover, metaphor also constitutes a bridge between the ancient and contemporary context. With this backdrop in mind, this article argues for the necessity of exploring the connections between these wisdom books, metaphor studies, and contemporary artwork.
Attention control using fuzzy inference system in monitoring CCTV based on crowd density estimation

One important issue in machine vision is using automatic attention control methods for monitoring CCTV cameras, in order to enhance the security of people in public. Result of automatic methods such as crowd density estimation can alert the operator in the case of risk probability increasing. In addition to overall crowd density, other parameters such as regional crowd density and the temporal and spatial criteria of each frame of video should be considered to control the operator's attention correctly. For this purpose, according to the gradual change of crowd density and risk probability in daily hours and uncertainty in our knowledge in evaluation of crowded places, we designed a fuzzy decision making system to make decisions about risk probability. The design of this system is based on the fact that the human visual system tends to direct attention to events that happen with low probability. The efficiency of this system is tested on real data and results are presented to demonstrate the practical applications of this system to aid the human operator.
Extending an Open-Source BPEL Engine with Aspect-Oriented Programming

This work presents an experience report that basically deals with the problematic of extending an existing and evolving software system. The ultimate purpose of the work is to incorporate new functionality into a base system in a maintainable way. Particularly interesting is that the efforts for developing the base system and the efforts for extending it are carried out by two unrelated teams, which have different goals and responsibilities. This document presents our experience working with Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) as the primary mechanism for adding functionality to an existing and evolving open-source project.
Competition Between Organizational Groups: Its Impact on Altruistic and Anti-Social Motivations

Firms are often organized into groups. Group membership has been shown empirically to have positive effects, in the form of increased prosocial behavior toward in-group members. This includes an enhanced willingness to engage in altruistic punishment of inefficient defection. Our paper provides evidence of a dark side of group membership. In the presence of cues of competition between groups, a taste for harming the out-group emerges: punishment ceases to serve a norm enforcement function, and instead, out-group members are punished harder and regardless of whether they cooperate or defect. Our results point to a mechanism that might help explain previous mixed results on the social value of punishment, and they contribute to understanding the sources of conflict between groups. They also point to an important trade-off for firms: introducing competition enhances within-group efficiency but also generates costly between-group conflict. This paper was accepted by Teck Ho, decision analysis.
RHETORICAL FUNCTIONS OF CITATIONS IN LINGUISTICS RESEARCH ARTICLES: A CONTRASTIVE (ENGLISH-CZECH) STUDY

This study explores the rhetorical functions of citations in a specialized corpus of linguistics English-medium research articles by Czech and Anglophone scholars. Drawing on the typologies suggested by Thompson and Tribble (2001), Petric (2007) and Lin, Chen and Chang (2013), the purpose of the investigation is to suggest a revised taxonomy and identify the rhetorical functions of citations in the corpus. The fi ndings of the contrastive analysis of variation in the functions of citations and their distribution across the generic moves of research articles by Anglophone and Czech linguists indicates that there are divergences in the strategies they use to create intertextual connections when attributing knowledge or methods to others, relating their research to the work of others and evaluating previous research. The reasons for these divergences are related to the intended readership and the linguacultural context in which Anglophone and Czech linguists strive to construct their identities as members of the global and/or local academic community.
Narrative based Topic Visualization for Chronological Data

This paper proposes several methods visualizing topics in documents, (i) Word Colony represents the dependency relationships among term occurrences in a target document. It helps users get an overview of a document. Using Word Colony with pictures gives users a more intuitive impression, (ii) topic sequence is a concatenation of Word Colonies for segmented documents. It shows plots as a story's topic transitions. (Hi) topic matrix represents relations among topics based on latent contexts within a collection of documents. Several visualization techniques enable users to visualize topics in a document in different ways. It gives variations of viewpoint and triggers the creative imagination.
A Hybrid Feature Extraction Selection Approach for High-Dimensional Non-Gaussian Data Clustering

This paper presents an unsupervised approach for feature selection and extraction in mixtures of generalized Dirichlet (GD) distributions. Our method defines a new mixture model that is able to extract independent and non-Gaussian features without loss of accuracy. The proposed model is learned using the expectation-maximization algorithm by minimizing the message length of the data set. Experimental results show the merits of the proposed methodology in the categorization of object images.
Windoro: The world's first commercialized window cleaning robot for domestic use

This paper describes the world's first commercialized window cleaning robot named windoro, which is a fully autonomous intelligent window cleaning robot. The windoro adheres to the surface of window glass by means of four permanent magnet pairs between an inner unit and an outer unit rather than using vacuum suckers for the energy efficiency and safety. An inner unit and an outer unit are in charge of navigation and cleaning, respectively. To do this, an inner unit has two driving wheels equipped with silicon tire with the big friction coefficient and an outer unit has four motorized rolling disks with a superfine fiber pad. For the convenience of user, the windoro can recognize the initial starting position and return to that position after finishing cleaning. In addition to this, an inner unit has mechanism for adjusting magnetic force according to the thickness of window glass. Due to this, the windoro is applicable to various kinds of windows. From the several severe experiments, the windoro demonstrated system stability, good mobility, cleaning performance and safety.
Emerging Adulthood and Nonlinear Dynamic Systems Theory

ABSTRACT The papers in this section on emerging adulthood exemplify the continuous interaction of the cultural surround, biology, and psychology that support a nonlinear dynamic system of development. People in their twenties move through this developmental period in individualized ways, and their ability to successfully traverse these years to adulthood can be helped or hindered by the complex interplay of their individual psychology, environment, and culture.
Fast computation of a contrast-invariant image representation

This paper sets out a new representation of an image which is contrast independent. The image is decomposed into a tree of "shapes" based on connected components of level sets, which provides a full and nonredundant representation of the image. A fast algorithm to compute the tree, the fast level lines transform (FLLT), is explained in detail. Some simple and direct applications of this representation are shown.
Processfolio: Uniting Academic Literacies and Critical Emancipatory Action Research for Practitioner-Led Inquiry Into EAP Writing Assessment

This article reports on the design and implementation of an alternative form of writing assessment in a UK English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-sessional course. The assessment, termed processfolio, was a response to research inquiry into how writing assessment in a local context negated student agency and inculcated disempowering models of teaching and learning academic writing. The project merged an Academic Literacies approach to writing (Lea and Street, 1998) with a Critical Emancipatory Action Research (Carr and Kemmis, 1986) framework and a Critical Realist (Bhaskar, 1989) perspective. Data collected from interviews with students and teachers on their experiences of the processfolio found that a small scale intervention has potential for agency to be exercised within the highly constrained context of a UK EAP pre sessional. New directions in research are proposed which can engage students and teachers to work for change in EAP within their internal and external constraints.
PhD forum: Efficient communication scheme for mobile visual sensor networks equipped with RGB-D cameras

This work presents a new method to efficiently communicate the correlated visual and depth information captured by multiple mobile RGB-D camera sensors. Our proposed scheme adopting the special properties of the depth map can extract the uncorrelated information between two images without conducting computationally heavy motion estimation. Moreover, a novel entropy coding scheme is proposed to further compress the depth data.
Cell-Autonomous β-Catenin Signaling Regulates Cortical Precursor Proliferation

Overexpression of β-catenin, a protein that functions in both cell adhesion and signaling, causes expansion of the cerebral cortical precursor population and cortical surface area enlargement. Here, we find that focal elimination of β-catenin from cortical neural precursors in vivo causes premature neuronal differentiation. Precursors within the cerebral cortical ventricular zone exhibit robust β-catenin-mediated transcriptional activation, which is downregulated as cells exit the ventricular zone. Targeted inhibition of β-catenin signaling during embryonic development causes cortical precursor cells to prematurely exit the cell cycle, differentiate into neurons, and migrate to the cortical plate. These results show that β-catenin-mediated transcriptional activation functions in the decision of cortical ventricular zone precursors to proliferate or differentiate during development, and suggest that the cell-autonomous signaling activity of β-catenin can control the production of cortical neurons and thus regulate cerebral cortical size.
The Effectiveness of Metaphor Therapy on Depression among Female Students

The present study aimed to determine the effectiveness of Metaphor therapy on depression among female students. The sample included 60 female students with depression symptoms selected by simple sampling and randomly divided into two equal groups (experimental and control groups). Beck Depression Inventory was used to measure the variables. This was an experimental study with a pre-test/post-test design with control group. Eight metaphor therapy sessions were held for the experimental group. A post-test was administered to both groups. Data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA). Results showed that the Metaphor therapy decreased depression in the experimental group compared to the control group. Keywords—Metaphor therapy, depression, female, students.
Sensitivity of Genome-Wide-Association Signals to Phenotyping Strategy: The PROP-TAS2R38 Taste Association as a Benchmark

Natural genetic variation can have a pronounced influence on human taste perception, which in turn may influence food preference and dietary choice. Genome-wide association studies represent a powerful tool to understand this influence. To help optimize the design of future genome-wide-association studies on human taste perception we have used the well-known TAS2R38-PROP association as a tool to determine the relative power and efficiency of different phenotyping and data-analysis strategies. The results show that the choice of both data collection and data processing schemes can have a very substantial impact on the power to detect genotypic variation that affects chemosensory perception. Based on these results we provide practical guidelines for the design of future GWAS studies on chemosensory phenotypes. Moreover, in addition to the TAS2R38 gene past studies have implicated a number of other genetic loci to affect taste sensitivity to PROP and the related bitter compound PTC. None of these other locations showed genome-wide significant associations in our study. To facilitate further, target-gene driven, studies on PROP taste perception we provide the genome-wide list of p-values for all SNPs genotyped in the current study.
The Ability of DfDT Structures to Operate under Variations

Recently, a new type of Design-for-Delay-Testability (DfDT) structure and associated Built-In Self-Test architecture for detecting delay faults in digital highperformance circuits has been proposed. It circumvents the requirement of an expensive high-speed tester. In this paper, the ability of the proposed structure to function correctly in an environment with processand application-induced variations has been investigated. Practical solutions to ensure proper operation of the DfDT structure will be proposed and verified by means of simulation. Due to the critical timing necessary when detecting small delay faults it is crucial to know what to expect from these variations and subsequently reduce their influence.
A Passive Refillable Intraocular MEMS Drug Delivery Device

This paper presents the first passive implantable microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) device for targeted intraocular delivery of therapeutic compounds. In particular, this device addresses the treatment of chronic, difficult to reach diseases that affect the retina including retinitis pigmentosa, age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma. The device is composed of three structural polymethyldisiloxane (PDMS) layers that are irreversibly bonded without the use of any adhesives. These layers form an integrated drug delivery device consisting of a refillable reservoir, tube, check valve, and suture tabs. This device requires a single implantation surgery and is capable of repeated delivery of multiple drugs. Characterization of the refillable reservoir and check valve performance is presented. Preliminary surgical implantation results of a mechanical test structure are also presented
Performance Analysis of System of 3D Scenes Networked Parallel Dynamic Visualization

Brief description of methods of parallelizing of dynamic 3D scenes visualization process is given. Performance analysis of experimental implementation of such system on the basis of multicomputer network was done. Theoretical estimation of performance of the system versus network bandwidth, image size, and graphics performance are done. The dependences obtained are confirmed experimentally.
Fundamental Study on the Effect of Spray Parameters on Characteristics of P3HT:PCBM Active Layers Made by Spray Coating

This paper is an attempt to elucidate the effects of the important spray characteristics on the surface morphology and light absorbance of spray-on P3HT:PCBM thin-films, used as an active layer in polymer solar cells (PSCs). Spray coating or deposition is a viable scalable technique for the large-scale, fast, and low-cost fabrication of solution-processed solar cells, and has been widely used for device fabrication, although the fundamental understanding of the underlying and controlling parameters, such as spray characteristics, droplet dynamics, and surface wettability, is still limited, making the results on device fabrication not reproducible and unreliable. In this paper, following the conventional PSC architecture, a PEDOT:PSS layer is first spin-coated on glass substrates, followed by the deposition of P3HT:PCBM using an automatic ultrasonic spray coating system, with a movable nozzle tip, to mimic an industrial manufacturing process. To gain insight, the effects of the spray carrier air pressure, the number of spray passes, the precursor flow rate, and precursor concentration are studied on the surface topography and light absorbance spectra of the spray-on films. Among the results, it is found that despite the high roughness of spray-on films, the light absorbance of the film is satisfactory. It is also found that the absorbance of spray-on films is a linear function of the number of spray passes or deposition layers, based on which an effective film thickness is defined for rough spray-on films. The effective thickness of a rough spray-on P3HT:PCBM film was found to be one-quarter of that of a flat film predicted by a simple mass balance.
The Effects of Computerized Graphic Organizers on Students' Performance in English Reading and Writing Tasks

The study investigated the effects of the intervention of a computerized graphic organizer (CGO), Inspiration, on a group of EFL college students' performance of English reading-to-write tasks. Students were given two pretests to determine their entry levels of English proficiency of reading and writing. After the CGO treatment, they were given two posttests. Both pre- and post-intervention measurement involved writing a summary of, and then a response to a source article, both being rated based on a writing rubric. The summaries were further analyzed using idea units. An evaluation questionnaire was also given to understand the participants' perceptions of the CGO treatment. With the assistance of Inspiration plus the traditional instruction, the participants' reading and response writing performance was found to have improved, also confirmed by their perceptions. The benefits of the cognitive strategy inherent in graphic organizers plus computer facilities are argued to contribute to the gains.