Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Do women really like taken men? Results from a large questionnaire study.

Nonindependent mate choice occurs when a female (focal female) is influenced in her mate choice by the choices of other females (model females), though sometimes male choice can be similarly influenced. In humans the study of this phenomenon has been almost exclusively experimental, with the perceived level of attractiveness of opposite-sex faces being influenced by manipulation of the attractiveness of their putative partner. As useful as these experimental studies are, the question of how validly they capture real-life social processes has not been addressed. Here we present the results of a questionnaire study which analyzed responses from 206 male and 175 female participants, both singles and people in a relationship. As predicted, paired men reported more opposite-sex interest than paired women, whereas the opposite was true for single respondents. Furthermore, the amount of opposite-sex interest reported by paired men correlated with the attractiveness of their partner, whereas this correlation between partner attractiveness and opposite-sex interest did not hold for female respondents. We suggest that this contrast is related to sex differences in benefits of nonindependent mate choice arising from sexspecific reproductive constraints. Our results are consistent with the kinds of effects recorded in laboratory studies, and provide evidence that non-independent mate choice plays at least some role in actual relationship dynamics.
Salt Effect on the Antioxidant Activity of Red Microalgal Sulfated Polysaccharides in Soy-Bean Formula

Sulfated polysaccharides produced by microalgae, which are known to exhibit various biological activities, may potentially serve as natural antioxidant sources. To date, only a few studies have examined the antioxidant bioactivity of red microalgal polysaccharides. In this research, the effect of different salts on the antioxidant activities of two red microalgal sulfated polysaccharides derived from Porphyridium sp. and Porphyridium aerugineum were studied in a soy bean-based infant milk formula. Salt composition and concentration were both shown to affect the polysaccharides’ antioxidant activity. It can be postulated that the salt ions intefer with the polysaccharide chains’ interactions and alter their structure, leading to a new three-dimensional structure that better exposes antiooxidant sites in comparison to the polysaccharide without salt supplement. Among the cations that were studied, Ca2+ had the strongest enhancement effect on antioxidant activities of both polysaccharides. Understanding the effect of salts on polysaccharides’ stucture, in addition to furthering knowledge on polysaccharide bioactivities, may also shed light on the position of the antioxidant active sites.
The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History

Despite significant losses in the 2006 midterm elections, the Republican Right remains a powerful and defining force in American politics. Donald Critchlow, a leading historian of American conservatism, shows that time and again the GOP Right appeared defeated, only to rebound with explosive force. The ascendancy of the GOP Right was not preordained, nor was its political triumph inevitable. Rather, the history of the post-war Right was one of fierce political warfare as moderate Republicans battled right-wing Republicans for control of their party, and conservatives battled liberals for control of government. In the struggle against the dominant New Deal state, conservatives gained control of the Republican party, but their advance against liberalism and the Democratic party proved less steady. At each point the accident of historical circumstance precluded a predictable outcome.In this provocative history of the Right in modern America, Critchlow finds a deep dilemma inherent in how conservative Republicans expressed their anti-statist ideology in an age of mass democracy and Cold War hostilities. As the Right moved forward with its political program, partisanship intensified and ideological division widened - both between the parties and across the electorate. This intensified partisanship reflects the vibrancy of a mature democracy, Critchlow argues, and a new level of political engagement despite its disquieting effect on American political debate. "The Conservative Ascendancy" boldly captures the twists and turns of the GOP Right over the last sixty years, offering a story of how deeply held beliefs about the nature of the individual and the good society are translated into political power.
ADAPTIVE MODELING OF SYNTHETIC NONSTATIONARY SINUSOIDS

Nonstationary oscillations are ubiquitous in music and speech, ranging from the fast transients in the attack of musical instruments and consonants to amplitude and frequency modulations in expressive variations present in vibrato and prosodic contours. Modeling nonstationary oscillations with sinusoids remains one of the most challenging problems in signal processing because the fit also depends on the nature of the underlying sinusoidal model. For example, frequency modulated sinusoids are more appropriate to model vibrato than fast transitions. In this paper, we propose to model nonstationary oscillations with adaptive sinusoids from the extended adaptive quasi-harmonic model (eaQHM). We generated synthetic nonstationary sinusoids with different amplitude and frequency modulations and compared the modeling performance of adaptive sinusoids estimated with eaQHM, exponentially damped sinusoids estimated with ESPRIT, and log-linear-amplitude quadratic-phase sinusoids estimated with frequency reassignment. The adaptive sinusoids from eaQHM outperformed frequency reassignment for all nonstationary sinusoids tested and presented performance comparable to exponentially damped sinusoids.
Poverty lines in theory and practice

A poverty line helps focus the attention of governments and civil society on the living conditions of the poor. This paper offers a critical overview of alternative approaches to setting poverty lines. In reviewing the methods found in practice, the paper tries to throw light on, and go some way toward resolving, ongoing debates about poverty measurement, emphasizing those debates which would appear to have greatest bearing on policy discussions.
DEXTERITY THROUGH ROLLING : TOWARDSMANIPULATION OF UNKNOWN

The nonholonomy exhibited by kinematic systems consisting of bodies rolling on top of each other can be used to the purpose of building dexterous mechanisms with a minimum hardware complication. Such desirable an engineering feature can be fully exploited, however, only if the capability of planning and controlling rolling motions of arbitrary objects is achieved. In this paper we present some results on the description of the set of reachable positions and orientations of manipulated objects of diierent shapes, along with some advances in realizing a robot hand system for manipulation of objects whose shape is not known a priori, but is reconstructed as manipulation proceeds.
Characterization of an Alcohol Dehydrogenase from the Cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. Strain PCC 6803 That Responds to Environmental Stress Conditions via the Hik34-Rre1 Two-Component System

ABSTRACT The slr1192 (adhA) gene from Synechocystis sp. strain PCC 6803 encodes a member of the medium-chain alcohol dehydrogenase/reductase family. The gene product AdhA exhibits NADP-dependent alcohol dehydrogenase activity, acting on a broad variety of aromatic and aliphatic primary alcohols and aldehydes but not on secondary alcohols or ketones. It exhibits superior catalytic efficiency for aldehyde reduction compared to that for alcohol oxidation. The enzyme is a cytosolic protein present in photoautotrophically grown Synechocystis cells. The expression of AdhA is enhanced upon the exposure of cells to different environmental stresses, although it is not essential for survival even under such stress conditions. The induction of the expression of the adhA gene is dependent on the Hik34-Rre1 two-component system, as it is severely impaired in mutant strains lacking either the histidine kinase Hik34 or the response regulator Rre1. In vitro DNA-protein interaction analysis reveals that the response regulator Rre1 binds specifically to the promoter region of the adhA gene.
Charting the Influences on the Judicial Mind: An Empirical Study of Judicial Reasoning

In 1988, hundreds of federal district judges were suddenly confronted with the need to render a decision on the constitutionality of the Sentencing Reform Act and the newly promulgated criminal Sentencing Guidelines. Never before has a question of such importance and involving such significant issues of constitutional law mandated the immediate and simultaneous attention of such a large segment of the federal trial bench. Accordingly, this event provides an archetypal model for exploring the influence of social background, ideology, judicial role and institution, and other factors on judicial decisionmaking. Based upon a unique set of written decisions involving an identical legal problem, the authors have produced an unprecedented empirical study of judicial reasoning in action. By exploiting this treasure trove of data, the authors have looked deeper into the judicial mind and observed the emergence of influences upon the manner in which a judge examined the constitutional issues, adopted a constitutional theory, and engaged in legal reasoning.
Characterizing intimate mixtures of materials in hyperspectral imagery with albedo-based and kernel-based approaches

Linear mixtures of materials in a scene often occur because the pixel size of a sensor is relatively large and consequently they contain patches of different materials within them. This type of mixing can be thought of as areal mixing and modeled by a linear mixture model with certain constraints on the abundances. The solution to these models has received a lot of attention. However, there are more complex situations, such as scattering that occurs in mixtures of vegetation and soil, or intimate mixing of granular materials like soils. Such multiple scattering and microscopic mixtures within pixels have varying degrees of non-linearity. In such cases, a linear model is not sufficient. Furthermore, often enough, scenes may contain cases of both linear and non-linear mixing on a pixel-by-pixel basis. This study considers two approaches for use as generalized methods for un-mixing pixels in a scene that may be linear (areal mixed) or non-linear (intimately mixed). The first method is based on earlier studies that indicate non-linear mixtures in reflectance space are approximately linear in albedo space. The method converts reflectance to singlescattering albedo (SSA) according to Hapke theory assuming bidirectional scattering at nadir look angles and uses a constrained linear model on the computed albedo values. The second method is motivated by the same idea, but uses a kernel that seeks to capture the linear behavior of albedo in non-linear mixtures of materials. The behavior of the kernel method is dependent on the value of a parameter, gamma. Furthermore, both methods are dependent on the choice of endmembers, and also on RMSE (root mean square error) as a performance metric. This study compares the two approaches and pays particular attention to these dependencies. Both laboratory and aerial collections of hyperspectral imagery are used to validate the methods.
Study of Bubble Size Distribution for Breaking Wave Propagates over a Submerged Dike

Breaking wave plays an important role in air-sea, wave-wave, wave-current, current- current interaction. Wave breaking not only disturbs communication of sound chie∞y because of the transient noise of the air-entrained bubbles. A useful analytical method, Gabor trans- formation, is applied due to its advantages over nonsymmetric and abrupt transition signals in breaking events. Numbers of bubbles and size distribution in a speciflc wave condition is analyzed in laboratory experiments. DOI: 10.2529/PIERS060906120020 Protective structures like sea walls, breakwaters, submerged dikes are popularly deployed in nearshore ocean engineering. Formation of propagating wave will deform due to the wind drafting force, to- pography variation and release the accumulated wave energy. Breaking of water waves plays an important factor in many ocean studies, such as air-sea interaction, remote sensing, wave dynamics, and gas transfer to the atmosphere. Breaking wave always results in severe destructions no matter if it happens on the wide open ocean or nearshore coast; vessels, mariners and creatures sufiered for that. Distortion of a periodic wave starts to collapse when the front of wave crest is onset to break beneath downstream, dubbed as an active phase (1). The collapse wave front will entrain air volume into the surface water layer in a very short time, say whitcapping process and which will produce dense plumes of difierent sizes air bubbles. Breaking attracts more and more attentions with its speciflcally characteristics. Various methods and techniques such as acoustic methods, photography method (5,7) and remote sensing method (4) are presented in order to detect bubble sizes at the breaking region. Bubble clouds are distributed underlying propagating waves, the mainly disturb source of the underwater communication (2). Estimation of the bubble size and numbers from the breaking event is normally very hard to obtain. Stokes (1993) used the photographic method to obtain the bubble size spectrum. As a result of fragmentation of turbulence, that dominates the production of larger bubble distribution. In terms of acoustic, Minnaert (1933) proved the noise produced by bubbles is related to the simple radial pulsation of bubbles and derived the resonance frequency of bubbles. Friedlander (1995) derived a representation lead for those signals with behavior of nonsymmetric and abrupt transitions, such as bubble emission noise. Application of Gabor coe-cient is adapted in this study and got satisfled results of the distribution of bubble size when wave propagates through a rectangular submerged dike. The resonant frequency of the bubble and the radius is expressed as ! 0 = 1 R0
Heterogeneous NoC Design for Efficient Broadcast-based Coherence Protocol Support

Chip Multiprocessor Systems (CMPs) rely on a cache coherency protocol to maintain memory access coherence between cached data and main memory. The Hammer coherency protocol is appealing as it eliminates most of the space overhead when compared to a directory protocol. However, it generates much more traffic, thus stressing the NoC and having worse performance in terms of power consumption. When using a NoC with built-in broadcast support network utilization is lowered but does not solve completely the problem as acknowledgment messages are still sent from each core to the memory access requestor. In this paper we propose a simple control network that collects the acknowledgement messages and delivers them with a bounded and fixed latency, thus relieving the NoC from a large amount of messages. Experimental results demonstrate on a 16-tile system with the control network that execution time improves up to 17%, with an average improvement of about 7.5%. The control network has negligible impact on area when compared to the switches.
Correlation Based Approach to Mobile Robot Pose Tracking in Unknown Environments

The usage of mobile robots in service sector is increasing in the past decade. There are already mobile robots as night guards, tourist guides, transportation units, etc. In order to efficiently perform its task, a mobile robot has to know precisely its current pose. Also to simplify the commissioning of a mobile robot system various algorithms for map building without a human intervention have been developed. In both cases a reliable and robust pose tracking module that can compensate the influence of systematic and non-systematic localization errors in real time is crucial. This paper presents a mobile robot pose tracking approach based on subsequent laser scan readings processed by usage of histograms and correlation comparison. Results obtained with a differential drive mobile robot are given to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach.
An efficient debugging method for message-based parallel programs using static analysis information

Guaranteeing reproducibility and minimizing probe effects are major issues in the parallel program debugging. The paper suggests a new debugging method, called the Detect and Reproduce method, for message-based parallel programs. The proposed method is designed to guarantee the reproducible behaviors of a target program and to alleviate probe effects by reducing both the number of the probes to be inserted into a program and the amount of information gathered by those probes. The proposed method achieves such effects by employing a static analysis technique to detect nondeterminacy. By detecting nondeterminacy before running the program, only a small number of probes are required to assure reproducibility. To analyze message-based programs statically, an MHB (minimal happened before) model is designed to catch the synchronization structures and algorithms have been developed to locate nondeterminacy based on the MHB model. Utilizing the analysis results, probes are inserted only into the places where nondeterminacy is likely to take place.
Superelliptical laws for complex networks

All dynamical systems of biological interest--be they food webs, regulation of genes, or contacts between healthy and infectious individuals--have complex network structure. Wigner's semicircular law and Girko's circular law describe the eigenvalues of systems whose structure is a fully connected network. However, these laws fail for systems with complex network structure. Here we show that in these cases the eigenvalues are described by superellipses. We also develop a new method to analytically estimate the dominant eigenvalue of complex networks.
Rule scheduling methods in active database systems: A brief survey

Traditional database management systems (DBMS) have static nature. This means that the operations such as query, update, etc. is performed only when asked by the user and DBMS doesn't act initiative in the specific condition. But many applications need to have automated monitoring, till in the occurrence specific event database management system will perform suitable reaction automatically. For this reason, active database systems (ADBS) were designed. One of the key issues in the active database management system is rules scheduling. This paper first introduces active database system and then will be investigated different methods of rules scheduling in the ADBS. Finally, scheduling methods is evaluated using active database system simulator (ADSS).
Chapter 5 Deletion of MEN 1 does not affect formation of functional synapses in cultured hippocampal neurons

Synaptogenesis requires the expression and delivery of hundreds of proteins, but the transcriptional control of this process is poorly understood. Based on studies in invertebrates, the tumor suppressor gene MEN1 was suggested to be an essential transcription factor for synaptogenesis. Here, we investigated the role of menin in synaptogenesis in cultured hippocampal neurons, using MEN1-lox mice. Deletion of MEN1 with had no effect on the number of synapses, synaptic VAMP intensity or dendrite length in autaptic neurons. In addition, no differences were detected in spontaneous vesicle release, presynaptic strength or short-term presynaptic plasticity. Finally, the response to glutamate application was unaltered after removal of MEN1. Thus, menin does not seem to have an unique role in the formation of functional synapses in mouse hippocampal neurons.
Randomly Generated Test Problems for Positive Definite Quadratic Programming

A procedure is described for randomly generating positive definite quadratic programming test problems. The test problems are constructed in the form of linear least squares problems subject to linear constraints. The probability measure for the problems so generated is invariant under orthogonal transformations. The procedure allows the user to specify the size of the least squares problem (number of unknown parameters, number of observations, and number of constraints); the relative magnitude of the residuals; the condition number of the Hessian matrix of the objective function; and the structure of the feasible region (number of equality constraints and the number of inequalities which will be active at the feasible starting point and at the optimal solution). An example is given illustrating how these problems can be used to evaluate the performance of a software package.
Time-Varying Nature of Risk Factors for the Longitudinal Development of Disability in Older Adults with Arthritis

Background To investigate changes over time in risk factors for the development of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) disabilities in older adults with arthritis. Methods The data were obtained from the Longitudinal Survey of Health and Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan (1989–1999). The major analytic cohort comprised 977 older adults (458 men and 519 women) with arthritis and without ADL limitation at study baseline. A generalized estimating equations (GEE) model was used to analyze all temporally correlated errors, population-averaged estimates, and longitudinal relationships. Results Overall, the cumulative incidence of ADL disability in the analytic cohort was 17.4% during an observation period of 11 years. With respect to baseline risk, ADL disability was associated with older age, presence of comorbid chronic conditions, and poor self-rated health. However, the findings changed after accounting for the time-varying nature of risk factors and the temporal sequence of possible cause-and-effect relationships. In addition to the baseline predictors, a high score on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, lack of regular exercise, and becoming widowed were associated with an increased risk of ADL disability and a decreased chance of recovery. Conclusions An understanding of the time-varying nature of risk factors for the disabling process is essential for the development of effective interventions that aim to maintain functional ability and prevent limitations among older adults with arthritis.
Perceived Musculoskeletal Loading during use of a Force-Feedback Computer Mouse

With 30 to 80 percent of computer work involving the use of a pointing device, engineers are constantly exploring new and better interface designs. The introduction of a force-feedback mouse, which provides high fidelity tactile cues via force output, may represent such a long-awaited technological breakthrough. However, force may also be a risk factor for musculoskeletal disorders of the upper extremity, especially those associated with the use of computer input devices. For a point-and-click task, we hypothesize that both the performance and the self-reported task difficulty and comfort (i.e. pain and discomfort) improve with the application of an attractive basin force field (gravity sink like effect) around the target in comparison to a typical mouse with no force field. Fifteen adult subjects performed a point-and-click task 520 times with and without an attractive force basin around the target. The movements varied in direction and distance, and the order of presentation was randomized. Movement times were significantly shorter (p < 0.0001) with the attractive force basin than without it. Perceived user discomfort and pain as measured through a questionnaire were also smaller with the attractive basin than with none. For the given task, the results suggest that the use of an attractive force-feedback basin may reduce the musculoskeletal loading during computer mouse use.