Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Condition‐dependent ejaculate production affects male mating behavior in the common bedbug Cimex lectularius

Abstract Food availability in the environment is often low and variable, constraining organisms in their resource allocation to different life‐history traits. For example, variation in food availability is likely to induce condition‐dependent investment in reproduction. Further, diet has been shown to affect ejaculate size, composition and quality. How these effects translate into male reproductive success or change male mating behavior is still largely unknown. Here, we concentrated on the effect of meal size on ejaculate production, male reproductive success and mating behavior in the common bedbug Cimex lectularius. We analyzed the production of sperm and seminal fluid within three different feeding regimes in six different populations. Males receiving large meals produced significantly more sperm and seminal fluid than males receiving small meals or no meals at all. While such condition‐dependent ejaculate production did not affect the number of offspring produced after a single mating, food‐restricted males could perform significantly fewer matings than fully fed males. Therefore, in a multiple mating context food‐restricted males paid a fitness cost and might have to adjust their mating strategy according to the ejaculate available to them. Our results indicate that meal size has no direct effect on ejaculate quality, but food availability forces a condition‐dependent mating rate on males. Environmental variation translating into variation in male reproductive traits reveals that natural selection can interact with sexual selection and shape reproductive traits. As males can modulate their ejaculate size depending on the mating situation, future studies are needed to elucidate whether environmental variation affecting the amount of ejaculate available might induce different mating strategies.
Density Gradient calibration for 2D quantum confinement: Tri-Gate SOI transistor application

This article presents a Density-Gradient (DG) calibration for 2D quantum confinement on Tri-Gate Silicon on insulator cross section for which the top gate interface is <;100>-oriented and the lateral gate interfaces are <;110>-oriented. To calibrate the DG model, we use self-consistent Poisson-Schrödinger calculations and fit the capacitance vs gate voltage (C-V) curves. We first calibrate DG model for one-dimensional quantum confinement (1D) on planar devices cross section for both crystal orientations. Then, we check the validity of the parameters obtained for the two-dimensional (2D) quantum confinement on tri-gate architecture cross-section. The DG model allows a good description of the C-V curves in the case of 2D quantum confinement and the parameters are still valid when we reduce the Tri-Gate cross section up to 4 nm by side.
Ja n 20 01 The inner nebula and central binary of the symbiotic star HM

We present contemporaneous HST WFPC2 and VLA observations of the symbiotic nova HM Sge. We identify a number of discreet features at spatial scales smaller than ∼ 0.1 arcsec embedded in the extended nebula, with radio and optical emission well correlated in the inner 1 arcsec. For the first time we measure the positions of the binary components of a symbiotic star directly. We estimate the projected angular binary separation to be 40±9 milli–arcsec, with the binary axis at position angle 130 • ±10 •. The latter is consistent with previous estimates made by indirect methods. The binary separation is consistent with a previous estimate of 50 au if the distance is 1250±280 pc. Temperature and density diagnostics show two distinct regions in the surrounding nebula, with a cool wedge to the south–west. An extinction map indicates the true interstellar extinction to be no more than E(B–V) = 0.35. This is consistent with a minimum distance of ∼700 pc, but this would be reduced if there is a circumstellar contribution to the minimum in the extinction map. The extinction map also suggests a patchy dust distribution. We suggest that a southern concentration of dust and the south–west wedge are associated with the cool component wind. Alternatively, the southern dust concentration is the cause of the cool wedge, as it shields part of the nebula from the hot component radiation field. Subject headings: binaries: symbiotic – stars: individual (HM Sge) – circumstellar matter – radio continuum: stars
Percolation and roughness in ballistic deposition of complex shapes

This paper investigates how the measurement of geometrical features of structures obtained from ballistic deposition of objects with complex shapes, particularly neuronal cells, can be used for characterization and analysis of the shapes involved. The experiments were performed on both synthetic (prototypes) and natural shapes. Two measurements were considered, namely the surface roughness and the critical percolation density, with the former providing better discrimination of shape characteristics for alpha and beta neuronal cells of cat retina.
Constrained Simulations of the Real Universe. II. Observational Signatures of Intergalactic Gas in the Local Supercluster Region

We present results of gasdynamics+N-body constrained cosmological simulations of the Local Supercluster region (LSC; about 30 h-1 Mpc around the Virgo cluster), which closely mimic the real universe within 100 Mpc, by imposing constraints from the MARK III catalog of galaxy peculiar velocities. The simulations are used to study the properties and possible observational signatures of intergalactic medium in the LSC region. We find that in agreement with previous unconstrained simulations, ≈30% of the gas in this region is in the warm/hot phase at T ~ 105-107 K and ≈40% in the diffuse phase at T < 105 K in low-density regions. The X-ray emission from the warm/hot gas may represent a small (~5%-10%) but important contribution to the X-ray background observed by the ROSAT All-Sky Survey at energies around 1 keV. The best prospects for detection of the warm/hot intergalactic medium of the LSC located in filaments and in the vicinity of virialized regions of groups and clusters are through absorption in resonant lines of O VII and O VIII in soft X-rays and in the O VI doublet in UV. If intergalactic gas in filaments (ρ/⟨ρ⟩ ~ 1-10) is enriched to typical metallicities of ≳0.05, the column densities of O VI, O VII, and O VIII along a random line of sight near the north Galactic pole, especially near the supergalactic plane, have a significant probability to be in the range detectable by current (FUSE, XMM) and future (Constellation-X) instruments.
Learning Driver Behavior Models from Traffic Observations for Decision Making and Planning

Estimating and predicting traffic situations over time is an essential capability for sophisticated driver assistance systems and autonomous driving. When longer prediction horizons are needed, e.g., in decision making or motion planning, the uncertainty induced by incomplete environment perception and stochastic situation development over time cannot be neglected without sacrificing robustness and safety. Building consistent probabilistic models of drivers interactions with the environment, the road network and other traffic participants poses a complex problem. In this paper, we model the decision making process of drivers by building a hierarchical Dynamic Bayesian Model that describes physical relationships as well as the driver's behaviors and plans. This way, the uncertainties in the process on all abstraction levels can be handled in a mathematically consistent way. As drivers behaviors are difficult to model, we present an approach for learning continuous, non-linear, context-dependent models for the behavior of traffic participants. We propose an Expectation Maximization (EM) approach for learning the models integrated in the DBN from unlabeled observations. Experiments show a significant improvement in estimation and prediction accuracy over standard models which only consider vehicle dynamics. Finally, a novel approach to tactical decision making for autonomous driving is outlined. It is based on a continuous Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) that uses the presented model for prediction.
Primary Metaphors Describe Standard Meanings of Topological Arrangements

Primary metaphors are basic mental representations that arise from repeatedly experiencing the co-occurrence of physical properties and abstract judgements. At the example of ethnographic studies several spatial/topological primary metaphors are reviewed and their usefulness for designing ubicomp systems is discussed along with some caveats that concern the application of these metaphors to predict human behaviour. Author
Study on 3D CT image reconstruction and interactive clipping

It is necessary to incise a 3D object to obtain detail structure information inside in the process of developing 3D medical visualization system. VC++6.0 with VTK toolbox are used to reconstruct 3D images using the CT slice sequence in DICOM format. Cuboids that can be controlled to zoom, move or circumrotate by mouse and used for clipping the object of 3D object. The technique can realize the real time interaction clipping of the reconstruction object.
Humility challenges and facilitating factors among religious leaders: A qualitative study

ABSTRACT Previous research suggests that humility is important for religious leaders’ mental health and for the health of the communities they lead. There is evidence, however, that humility is particularly difficult for some leaders, and numerous dynamics within the role of religious leadership may run counter to humility. This qualitative study asked 273 diverse religious leaders to identify factors within their roles that challenged and facilitated humility for them. Thematic analysis of the responses revealed ways that religious leaders can cultivate humility within and despite complex pressures against it. Practical implications for the care and support of religious leaders are discussed.
Quantification of Protein Copy Number in Yeast: The NAD+ Metabolome

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is calorie-restricted by lowering glucose from 2% to 0.5%. Under low glucose conditions, replicative lifespan is extended in a manner that depends on the NAD+-dependent protein lysine deacetylase Sir2 and NAD+ salvage enzymes. Because NAD+ is required for glucose utilization and Sir2 function, it was postulated that glucose levels alter the levels of NAD+ metabolites that tune Sir2 function. Though NAD+ precursor vitamins, which increase the levels of all NAD+ metabolites, can extend yeast replicative lifespan, glucose restriction does not significantly change the levels or ratios of intracellular NAD+ metabolites. To test whether glucose restriction affects protein copy numbers, we developed a technology that combines the measurement of Urh1 specific activity and quantification of relative expression between Urh1 and any other protein. The technology was applied to obtain the protein copy numbers of enzymes involved in NAD+ metabolism in rich and synthetic yeast media. Our data indicated that Sir2 and Pnc1, two enzymes that sequentially convert NAD+ to nicotinamide and then to nicotinic acid, are up-regulated by glucose restriction in rich media, and that Pnc1 alone is up-regulated in synthetic media while levels of all other enzymes are unchanged. These data suggest that production or export of nicotinic acid might be a connection between NAD+ and calorie restriction-mediated lifespan extension in yeast.
Weight-Space Viterbi Decoding Based Spectral Subtraction for Reverberant Speech Recognition

A single-channel blind dereverberation algorithm is proposed in this letter for distant-talking speech recognition. The proposed method is based on spectral subtraction (SS) method, in which the spectrum of a late reverberant signal is estimated using a delayed and attenuated version of the reverberant signal. Through some assumptions, the conventional SS method regards the attenuation weight as a constant that is a function of reverberation time. However, these assumptions are not valid in real situations, and the ideal weight varies with the frame. Therefore, in the proposed method, the variable weight sequence is estimated using Viterbi decoding scheme based on the reverberation model. This weight sequence is then substituted for the fixed weight in the conventional SS method without explicitly estimating the reverberation time. The proposed method performs better than the conventional SS method in both isolated word recognition and connected digit recognition experiments in reverberant environments.
Control signal scheduling for active noise control systems

This paper presents a preliminary study of a control signal scheduling strategy to reduce the adaptive controller dimensionality for active noise control systems. Under the assumption that the system response to a disturbance is well characterized by a small set of measurable quantities, the optimal control signal will also be determined by these same quantities. If this optimal control signal is determined a priori, the actuator control signal can be scheduled from these optimal values on the characterizing quantities. The sensitivity of the system to errors in the optimal controls is studied. It is shown that appropriate actuator weighting reduces this sensitivity to acceptable levels. One practical issue of this actuator scheduling method is the storage, recollection and interpolation of the optimal control. A neural network can be used to perform this function. The performance of a control system with a neural network is compared with one using linear interpolation between stored values of the actuator groups. The comparison is made through an analytical model of an active sound control system in a three-dimensional enclosure. Both methods are shown to be effective, but neural networks offer the advantage of data compression. The present study is in the frequency domain. Subsequent work will focus on neural actuator signal scheduling in the time domain.
Role of 1,25-Dihydroxy Vitamin D3 and Parathyroid Hormone in Urinary Calcium Excretion in Calcium Stone Formers

Purpose To find out the possible role of 1,25(OH)2 vitamin D3 [1,25(OH)2D3] and parathyroid hormone (PTH) as intrinsic factors in urinary calcium stone formers (SFs), we investigated their relationship with serum and urinary biochemical parameters. Materials and Methods A total of 326 calcium SFs (male: 204, female: 122) were enrolled and underwent outpatient metabolic evaluations including 1,25(OH)2D3 and PTH as well as serum and 24-hour urinary biochemical parameters. As control, 163 age- and sex-matched (2:1) individuals (non-SFs) who have never urinary stone episode were included. Results 1,25(OH)2D3 level was positively correlated with urinary calcium excretion (r=0.347, p<0.001). The hypercalciuric group and recurrent SFs had higher serum 1,25(OH)2D3 levels than the normocalciuric group (p<0.001) and first SFs (p=0.050). In the adjusted multiple linear regression analysis, serum 1,25(OH)2D3 level (β=0.259, p<0.001) and serum PTH level (β=-0.160, p<0.001) were significantly correlated with urinary calcium excretion. The patients in highest tertile of 1,25(OH)2D3 had a more than 3.1 fold risk of hypercalciuria than those in the lowest tertile (odds ratio=3.14, 95% confidence interval: 1.431-6.888, p=0.004). No correlation was observed between PTH and 1,25(OH)2D3 (R=0.005, p=0.929) in calcium SFs, while a negative correlation was found in controls (R=-0.269, p=0.001). Conclusion 1,25(OH)2D3 was closely correlated with urinary calcium excretion, and high 1,25(OH)2D3 levels were detected in the hypercalciuric group and in recurrent SFs. However, 1,25(OH)2D3 was not correlated with PTH in calcium SFs. These findings suggest that 1,25(OH)2D3 might be important intrinsic factor for altered calcium regulation in SFs.
Practical Fault Attacks on Authenticated Encryption Modes for AES

Since the first demonstration of fault attacks by Boneh et al. on RSA, a multitude of fault attack techniques on various cryptosystems have been proposed. Most of these techniques, like Differential Fault Analysis, Safe Error Attack, and Collision Fault Analysis have the requirement to process two inputs that are either identical or related, in order to generate pairs of correct/faulty ciphertexts. In practice, this requirement is usually precluded by the uniqueness of the nonce used in most authenticated encryption schemes. In this work, we present the first practical fault attacks on several noncebased authenticated encryption modes for AES. This includes attacks on the ISO/IEC standards GCM, CCM, EAX, and OCB, as well as several second-round candidates of the ongoing CAESAR competition. All attacks are based on statistical fault attacks by Fuhr et al. that use a biased fault model and just operate on collections of faulty ciphertexts. Hereby, we put effort in reducing the assumptions made regarding the capabilities of an attacker as much as possible. In the attacks, we only assume that one is able to influence some byte (or a larger structure) of the internal AES state before the last application of MixColumns, so that the value of this byte is afterwards non-uniformly distributed. In order to show the practical relevance of statistical fault attacks and for evaluating our assumptions on the capabilities of an attacker, we perform several fault-injection experiments targeting real hardware. For instance, laser fault injections targeting an AES co-processor of a smartcard microcontroller, which is used to implement modes like GCM or CCM, show that 4 bytes (resp. all 16 bytes) of the last round key can be revealed with a small number of faulty ciphertexts. To our knowledge this is the first work showing the practicability of statistical fault attacks.
Overview of the power minimization techniques employed in the IBM PowerPC 4xx embedded controllers

The need for power efficient embedded controllers became obvious when the explosion in portable communications and consumer segments began. While the IBM PowerPC TM 4xx 1 embedded controller family addresses a wide variety of market segments, its low power consumption makes it particularly attractive for the consumer electronics and portable communications market segments. While low power consumption is most often thought of as being important to extend battery life, there are other advantages of using a power-efficient embedded controller:
Albedo Reduction by Black Carbon in Snow: Measurements and Implications

Albedo Reduction by Black Carbon in Snow: Measurements and Implications Charles S. Zender, Jean-Charles Gallet, Florent Domine, Ghislain Picard, and Mark G. Flanner Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Geophysique de l’Environnement, Grenoble, France Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado Department of Earth System Science zender@uci.edu University of California, Irvine Voice: (949) 824-2987 Irvine, CA 92697-3100 Fax: (949) 824-3256 Abstract 1
Efficient fair queueing algorithms for packet-switched networks

Although weighted fair queueing (WFQ) has been regarded as an ideal scheduling algorithm in terms of its combined delay bound and proportional fairness properties, its asymptotic time complexity increases linearly with the number of sessions serviced by the scheduler, thus limiting its use in high-speed networks. An algorithm that combines the delay and fairness bounds of WFQ with O(1) timestamp computations had remained elusive so far. In this paper we present two novel scheduling algorithms that have O(1) complexity for timestamp computations and provide the same bounds on end-to-end delay and buffer requirements as those of WFQ. The first algorithm, frame-based fair queueing (FFQ), uses a framing mechanism to periodically recalibrate a global variable tracking the progress of work in the system, limiting any short-term unfairness to within a frame period. The second algorithm, starting potential based fair queueing (SPFQ), performs the recalibration at packet boundaries, resulting in improved fairness while still maintaining the O(1) timestamp computations. Both algorithms are based on the general framework of rate-proportional servers (RPSs) introduced by Stiliadis and Varma (see ibid., vol.6, no.2, p.164-74, 1998). The algorithms may be used in both general packet networks with variable packet sizes and in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks.
A Formula for Radiation Loss in Substrate Integrated Waveguide

Substrate integrated waveguide, an emerging technology for microwave and millimeter-wave circuits, is affected by three loss mechanisms: ohmic and dielectric losses, standard waveguides, and radiation leakage. While ohmic and dielectric losses can be accurately determined by the analytical formulas of the equivalent rectangular waveguide, no equations are available for radiation leakage. This paper presents the derivation of a formula to calculate the attenuation constant due to radiation leakage in substrate integrated waveguide interconnects.
Streptococcus suis Serotype 2 Interactions with Human Brain Microvascular Endothelial Cells

ABSTRACT Streptococcus suis serotype 2 is a worldwide causative agent of many forms of swine infection and is also recognized as a zoonotic agent causing human disease, including meningitis. The pathogenesis of S. suis infections is poorly understood. Bacteria circulate in the bloodstream in the nonimmune host until they come in contact with brain microvascular endothelial cells (BMEC) forming the blood-brain barrier. The bacterial polysaccharide capsule confers antiphagocytic properties. It is known that group B streptococci (GBS) invade and damage BMEC, which may be a primary step in the pathogenesis of neonatal meningitis. Interactions betweenS. suis and human endothelial cells were studied to determine if they differ from those between GBS and endothelial cells. Invasion assays performed with BMEC and human umbilical vein endothelial cells demonstrated that unlike GBS, S. suisserotype 2 could not invade either type of cell. Adherence assays showed that S. suis adhered only to BMEC, whereas GBS adhered to both types of cell. These interactions were not affected by the presence of a capsule, since acapsular mutants from both bacterial species adhered similarly compared to the wild-type strains. Lactate dehydrogenase release measurements indicated that some S. suis strains were highly cytotoxic for BMEC, even more than GBS, whereas others were not toxic at all. Cell damage was related to suilysin (S. suis hemolysin) production, since only suilysin-producing strains were cytotoxic and cytotoxicity could be inhibited by cholesterol and antisuilysin antibodies. It is possible that hemolysin-positive S. suis strains use adherence and suilysin-induced BMEC injury, as opposed to direct cellular invasion, to proceed from the circulation to the central nervous system.