Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Post-zygotic sterility and cytonuclear compatibility limits in S. cerevisiae xenomitochondrial cybrids

Nucleo-mitochondrial interactions, particularly those determining the primary divergence of biological species, can be studied by means of xenomitochondrial cybrids, which are cells where the original mitochondria are substituted by their counterparts from related species. Saccharomyces cerevisiae cybrids are prepared simply by the mating of the ρ0 strain with impaired karyogamy and germinating spores from other Saccharomyces species and fall into three categories. Cybrids with compatible mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Saccharomyces paradoxus CBS 432 and Saccharomyces cariocanus CBS 7994 are metabolically and genetically similar to cybrids containing mtDNA from various S. cerevisiae. Cybrids with mtDNA from other S. paradoxus strains, S. cariocanus, Saccharomyces kudriavzevii, and Saccharomyces mikatae require a period of adaptation to establish efficient oxidative phosphorylation. They exhibit a temperature-sensitive phenotype, slower growth rate on a non-fermentable carbon source and a long lag phase after the shift from glucose. Their decreased respiration capacity and reduced cytochrome aa3 content is associated with the inefficient splicing of cox1I3β, the intron found in all Saccharomyces species but not in S. cerevisiae. The splicing defect is compensated in cybrids by nuclear gain-of-function and can be alternatively suppressed by overexpression of MRP13 gene for mitochondrial ribosomal protein or the MRS2, MRS3, and MRS4 genes involved in intron splicing. S. cerevisiae with Saccharomyces bayanus mtDNA is unable to respire and the growth on ethanol–glycerol can be restored only after mating to some mit− strains. The nucleo-mitochondrial compatibility limit of S. cerevisiae and other Saccharomyces was set between S. kudriavzevii and S. bayanus at the divergence from S. cerevisiae about 15 MYA. The MRS1-cox1 S. cerevisiae/S. paradoxus cytonuclear Dobzhansky–Muller pair has a neglible impact on the separation of species since its imperfection is compensated for by gain-of-function mutation.
Simulated and observed fluxes of sensible and latent heat and CO2 at the WLEF‐TV tower using SiB2.5

Three years of meteorological data collected at the WLEF‐TV tower were used to drive a revised version of the Simple Biosphere (SiB 2.5) Model. Physiological properties and vegetation phenology were specified from satellite imagery. Simulated fluxes of heat, moisture, and carbon were compared to eddy covariance measurements taken onsite as a means of evaluating model performance on diurnal, synoptic, seasonal, and interannual time scales. The model was very successful in simulating variations of latent heat flux when compared to observations, slightly less so in the simulation of sensible heat flux. The model overestimated peak values of sensible heat flux on both monthly and diurnal scales. There was evidence that the differences between observed and simulated fluxes might be linked to wetlands near the WLEF tower, which were not present in the SiB simulation. The model overestimated the magnitude of the net ecosystem exchange of CO2 in both summer and winter. Mid‐day maximum assimilation was well represented by the model, but late afternoon simulations showed excessive carbon uptake due to misrepresentation of within‐canopy shading in the model. Interannual variability was not well simulated because only a single year of satellite imagery was used to parameterize the model.
The STAR project: teaching as a learning experience

Knowledge and its applicability nourish each other in schools where teachers critically analyze data and, through team discussions, have the opportunity to solve the challenges that education presents every day. The premise of this model is that all participants have an active role in the function of creating praxial knowledge. This article presents a model of action learning implemented during two school years, 2007–2009, by 26 teachers, their principal and two external advisors. Four pillars composed the core of this teacher-researcher model: two-fold observation of teaching practices, critical reflection, active planning and implementation of best practices. This four-dimensional approach allowed the participants to construct the ideal of a teacher who has the skills to lengthen her/his learning experience, to widen the spectrum of its application and to deepen the content of her/his inquiry. The outcomes of this project suggest that when teachers conceptualize teaching as a learning experience that requires uninterrupted observation, reflection and action, student performance increases. Most importantly, schools become dynamic educational organizations where knowledge is constructed, rather than instructed from teachers to students.
Terahertz Folded Half-Wavelength Dipole Antenna for High Output Power

Photoconductive folded half-wavelength dipole antennas have been introduced and demonstrated successfully for high power THz applications. The pulsed terahertz signals are measured in the time-domain terahertz setup. Using the simple model, the measured THz signals were analyzed. The calculated signals are in good agreements with the measured signals. It is shown that the folded half-wavelength dipole antennas have higher antenna resistances than the full-wavelength dipole antenna and are able to achieve higher output powers.
Strategic management and accounting processes: acknowledging gender

Purpose – This paper sets out to investigate and critique the corpus of recent research into gender dimensions of strategic management and accounting processes with a view to establishing the current state of knowledge and offering both future research and policy implications.Design/methodology/approach – A literature‐based analysis and critique are employed. This is constructed from a social constructionist perspective, drawing on concepts of the variably gendered identity of discourse and of process, and a theory of absence.Findings – The study uncovers major gaps in research attention and consequent knowledge concerning gendered characteristics of managers' and accountants' approaches to, and involvement in, strategic management and accounting processes. Evidence suggests that in these processes both feminine and masculine features constitute important but at present inadequately researched and understood modes of operation.Research limitations/implications – This research suggests opportunities for an.
Spectra of G ratio, myelin sheath thickness, and axon and fiber diameter in the guinea pig optic nerve

The spectra of fiber and axon diameter, myelin sheath thickness, fiber density, and g ratio of the optic nerve were analyzed for the strain‐13 guinea pig, an animal extensively utilized in the investigation of experimental disorders of demyelination. Our detailed analytical study of the normal guinea pig optic nerve provides the basis for comparison to disease states and the morphology of other species. As in the rat, mouse, and chipmunk, fiber diameters in the guinea pig were unimodal, but dissimilar to the trimodal fiber spectra of the cat and primate. The predominance of medium‐sized fibers (0.80–2.00 μm), common to most species, contributed to the larger mean fiber diameter (1.45 μm) of the guinea pig optic nerve, in which small fibers (0.50 μm or less) were infrequent and fibers larger than 5.00 μm in diameter, seen in the cat and primate, were absent. While myelin sheath thickness increased with axon diameter in the guinea pig, as in other species, a g ratio of 0.81 in the guinea pig was greater than in most mammals. Since conduction velocity is dependent on axon size, as well as myelin properties, the relatively larger mean axon diameter of the guinea pig optic nerve (1.18 μm) may compensate for the decrease in its myelination.
Unsupervised training with directed manual transcription for recognising Mandarin broadcast audio

The performance of unsupervised discriminative training has been found to be highly dependent on the accuracy of the initial automatic transcription. This paper examines a strategy where a relatively small amount of poorly recognised data are manually transcribed to supplement the automatically transcribed data. Experiments were carried out on a Mandarin broadcast transcription task using both Broadcast News (BN) and Broadcast Conversation (BC) data. A range of experimental conditions are compared for both maximum likelihood and discriminative training using directed manual transcription. For BC data, using fully unsupervised discriminative training, only 17% of the reduction in character error rate (CER) from supervised training is obtained. By automatically selecting 18% of the data for manual transcription yields 50% of the CER gain from supervised training. The directed approach to selecting data outperforms the use of a random set of data for manual transcription.
A Cleavable N-Terminal Signal Peptide Promotes Widespread Olfactory Receptor Surface Expression in HEK293T Cells

Olfactory receptors (ORs) are G protein-coupled receptors that detect odorants in the olfactory epithelium, and comprise the largest gene family in the genome. Identification of OR ligands typically requires OR surface expression in heterologous cells; however, ORs rarely traffic to the cell surface when exogenously expressed. Therefore, most ORs are orphan receptors with no known ligands. To date, studies have utilized non-cleavable rhodopsin (Rho) tags and/or chaperones (i.e. Receptor Transporting Protein, RTP1S, Ric8b and Gαolf) to improve surface expression. However, even with these tools, many ORs still fail to reach the cell surface. We used a test set of fifteen ORs to examine the effect of a cleavable leucine-rich signal peptide sequence (Lucy tag) on OR surface expression in HEK293T cells. We report here that the addition of the Lucy tag to the N-terminus increases the number of ORs reaching the cell surface to 7 of the 15 ORs (as compared to 3/15 without Rho or Lucy tags). Moreover, when ORs tagged with both Lucy and Rho were co-expressed with previously reported chaperones (RTP1S, Ric8b and Gαolf), we observed surface expression for all 15 receptors examined. In fact, two-thirds of Lucy-tagged ORs are able to reach the cell surface synergistically with chaperones even when the Rho tag is removed (10/15 ORs), allowing for the potential assessment of OR function with only an 8-amino acid Flag tag on the mature protein. As expected for a signal peptide, the Lucy tag was cleaved from the mature protein and did not alter OR-ligand binding and signaling. Our studies demonstrate that widespread surface expression of ORs can be achieved in HEK293T cells, providing promise for future large-scale deorphanization studies.
Does Network Coding Combined With Interference Cancellation Bring Any Gain to a Wireless Network?

We investigate the achievable performance gain that network coding (NC) when combined with successive interference cancellation (SIC) brings to a multihop wireless network. While SIC enables concurrent receptions from multiple transmitters, NC reduces the transmission time-slot overhead, and each of these techniques has shown independently great benefits in improving the network performance. We present a cross-layer formulation for the joint routing and scheduling problem in a wireless network with NC (with opportunistic listening) and SIC capabilities. We use the realistic signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) interference model. To solve this combinatorially complex nonlinear problem, we decompose it (using column generation) to two linear subproblems-namely opportunistic NC aware routing and scheduling subproblems. Our scheduling subproblem consists of activating noninterfering NC components, rather than links, which do not interfere with each other and will be used to route the traffic. We further extend our design to consider a multirate multihop wireless network with interference cancellation capabilities. We use numerical evaluation to present the achieved performance gain and compare our work to three other models: a base model with no NC and SIC, a model with only NC, and a model with only SIC capabilities. The numerical results show that our proposed method (both with and without variable transmission rate selection) achieves performance gains that range between moderate and significant for the various considered scenarios. Such improvements are attributed to the joint capabilities of SIC and NC in effectively controlling the interference and improving the spatial reuse.
Omnidirectional Depth Recovery based on a Novel Stereo Sensor

Omnidirectional depth map generation is very important for mobile robot navigation and action planning. In this paper, we present design of a novel stereo sensor and an algorithm to recovery dense 3D depth map for a mobile robot. The vision system is composed of a perspective camera and two hyperbolic mirrors. Once the system has been calibrated and two image points respectively projected by upper and nether mirrors are matched, the 3D coordinate of the space point can be acquired by means of triangulation. Our method can be divided into two steps. An initial depth map can be calculated using efficient dynamic programming technique. We adopt graph cut algorithm in the second step. With a relatively good initial map, the process of graph cut converges very fast. We also show the necessary modification to handle panoramic images, including deformed matching template, adaptable template scale. Experiment shows that this proposed vision system is feasible as a practical stereo sensor for accurate 3D map generation.
The role of parental religious fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism in child-rearing goals and practices

Two studies assessed how people's religious orientation and their endorsement of right-wing authoritarian attitudes are linked to the kinds of goals they establish for their children, and their approval of corporal punishment. In Study 1, a survey of 204 undergraduate students revealed that their religious fundamentalism was linked indirectly to greater emphasis on obedience in a hypothetical child-rearing situation through the desire to keep their children in their religious faith; and to greater approval of corporal punishment through greater valuation of obedience. In Study 2, 83 mothers and 71 fathers of university students responded to a questionnaire designed to examine the hypotheses that while parents' religious fundamentalism would be negatively related to their endorsement of child autonomy, it would be positively linked to stronger desires to keep children in their religious faith, to greater emphasis on obedience and to greater approval of corporal punishment in child-rearing. Also, it was expected that parents' right-wing authoritarian attitudes would be linked to their fundamentalist religious orientation, as well as to greater emphasis on obedience and approval of corporal punishment. Results from the zero-order correlations were in keeping with the hypotheses. However, a mediation (regression) analysis indicated that parents' right-wing authoritarianism was a better predictor of their child-rearing attitudes than was religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, however, proved important in predicting parents' goal of socializing their children to accept their religious faith.
The modelling of avian visual perception predicts behavioural rejection responses to foreign egg colours

How do birds tell the colours of their own and foreign eggs apart? We demonstrate that perceptual modelling of avian visual discrimination can predict behavioural rejection responses to foreign eggs in the nest of wild birds. We use a photoreceptor noise-limited colour opponent model of visual perception to evaluate its accuracy as a predictor of behavioural rates of experimental egg discrimination in the song thrush Turdus philomelos. The visual modelling of experimental and natural eggshell colours suggests that photon capture from the ultraviolet and short wavelength-sensitive cones elicits egg rejection decisions in song thrushes, while inter-clutch variation of egg coloration provides sufficient contrasts for detecting conspecific parasitism in this species. Biologically realistic sensory models provide an important tool for relating variability of behavioural responses to perceived phenotypic variation.
Evaluation of Spatiotemporal Variations of Global Fractional Vegetation Cover Based on GIMMS NDVI Data from 1982 to 2011

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is an important biophysical parameter of terrestrial ecosystems. Variation of FVC is a major problem in research fields related to remote sensing applications. In this study, the global FVC from 1982 to 2011 was estimated by GIMMS NDVI data, USGS global land cover characteristics data and HWSD soil type data with a modified dimidiate pixel model, which considered vegetation and soil types and mixed pixels decomposition. The evaluation of the robustness and accuracy of the GIMMS FVC with MODIS FVC and Validation of Land European Remote sensing Instruments (VALERI) FVC show high reliability. Trends of the annual FVCmax and FVCmean datasets in the last 30 years were reported by the Mann-Kendall method and Sen's slope estimator. The results indicated that global FVC change was 0.20 and 0.60 in a year with obvious seasonal variability. All of the continents in the world experience a change in the annual FVCmax and FVCmean, which represents biomass production, except for Oceania, which exhibited a significant increase based on a significance level of p = 0.001 with the Student's t-test. Global annual maximum and mean FVC growth rates are 0.14%/y and 0.12%/y, respectively. The trends of the annual FVCmax and FVCmean based on pixels also illustrated that the global vegetation had turned green in the last 30 years. A significant trend on the p = 0.05 level was found for 15.36% of the GIMMS FVCmax pixels on a global scale (excluding permanent
The Relation of Self-Efficacy with Environmental Factors, Personality and Academic Achievement in Medical Students

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the relation of self-efficacy with environmental factors, personality, and academic achievement in medical students. Methods: Study subjects consisted of 141 first-year medical students at Korea University Medical School during one academic year (2003~2004). All participants completed a 24-item questionnaire on self-efficacy beliefs, a 16-item questionnaire asking demographic and socioeconomic data, and the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI). Spearman'sorrelation of selfefficacy with other variables was generated. The differences of self-efficacy scores according to the level of satisfaction with school life, total family income per month and the reasons for entering medical college were analyzed by ANOVA. Results: Age and overall satisfaction with school correlated with self-confidence and total family income per month was related to self-regulation. Students who entered medical college due to the socioeconomic stability of medicine showed significantly lower preference for task difficulty than those who had other reasons for entering medical college. The GPAs of premedical studies correlated with self-regulation and the GPAs of Med 1 and the cumulative GPAs of premedical and Med I were related to the preference for task difficulty. Conclusion: This result supports that self-efficacy beliefs were related with some environmental factors, personality and academic achievements in medical students. 󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏󰠏
Information Storage and Retrieval for Probe Storage using Optical Diffraction Patterns

A method for fast information retrieval from a probe storage device is considered. It is shown that information can be stored and retrieved using the optical diffraction patterns obtained by the illumination of a large array of cantilevers by a monochromatic light source. In thermo-mechanical probe storage, the information is stored as a sequence of indentations on the polymer medium. To retrieve the information, the array of probes is actuated by applying a bending force to the cantilevers. Probes positioned over indentations experience deflection by the depth of the indentation, probes over the flat media remain un-deflected. Thus the array of actuated probes can be viewed as an irregular optical grating, which creates a data-dependent diffraction pattern when illuminated by laser light. We develop a low complexity modulation scheme, which allows the extraction of information stored in the pattern of indentations on the media from Fourier coefficients of the intensity of the diffraction pattern. We then derive a low-complexity maximum-likelihood sequence detection algorithm for retrieving the user information from the Fourier coefficients. The derivation of both the modulation and the detection schemes is based on the Fraunhofer formula for data-dependent diffraction patterns. The applicability of Fraunhofer diffraction theory to the optical set-up relevant for probe storage is established both theoretically and experimentally. We confirm the potential of the optical readout technique by demonstrating that the impairment characteristics of probe storage channels (channel noise, global positioning errors, small indentation depth) do not lead to an unacceptable increase in data recovery error rates. We also show that for as long as the Fresnel number F ≤ 0.1, the optimal channel detector derived from Fraunhofer diffraction theory does not suffer any significant performance degradation.
Brightness enhancement of a multi-mode ribbon fiber using transmitting Bragg gratings

Increasing the dimensions of a waveguide provides the simplest means of reducing detrimental nonlinear effects, but such systems are inherently multi-mode, reducing the brightness of the system. Furthermore, using rectangular dimensions allows for improved heat extraction, as well as uniform temperature profile within the core. We propose a method of using the angular acceptance of a transmitting Bragg grating (TBG) to filter the fundamental mode of a fiber laser resonator, and as a means to increase the brightness of multi-mode fiber laser. Numerical modeling is used to calculate the diffraction losses needed to suppress the higher order modes in a laser system with saturable gain. The model is tested by constructing an external cavity resonator using an ytterbium doped ribbon fiber with core dimensions of 107. 8μm by 8. 3μm as the active medium. We show that the TBG increases the beam quality of the system from M2 = 11.3 to M2 = 1.45, while reducing the slope efficiency from 76% to 53%, overall increasing the brightness by 5.1 times.
Studying design process and example use with Macaron, a web-based vibrotactile effect editor

Examples are a critical part of any design process, but supporting their use for a haptic medium is nontrivial. Current libraries for vibrotactile (VT) effects provide neither insight into examples' construction nor capability for deconstruction and re-composition. To investigate the special requirements of example use for VT design, we studied designers as they used a web-based effect editor, Macaron, which we created as both an evaluation platform and a practical tool. We qualitatively characterized participants' design processes and observed two basic example uses: as a starting point or template for a design task, and as a learning method. We discuss how features supporting internal visibility and composition influenced these example uses, and articulate several implications for VT editing tools and libraries of VT examples. We conclude with future work, including plans to deploy Macaron online to examine examples and other aspects of VT design in situ.