Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
solarius : an R interface to SOLAR enabling variance component analysis in pedigrees with effortless data manipulation and parallel computing

Summary: The open source environment R is one of the most widely used software for statistical computing. It provides a variety of applications including statistical genetics. Most of the powerful tools for population-based genetic analyses are stand-alone free programs developed by researchers in academics. SOLAR is the de facto standard software program to perform linkage and association mappings of the quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in pedigrees of arbitrary size and complexity. solarius allows the user to exploit the variance component methods implemented in SOLAR. It automates such routine operations as formatting pedigree and phenotype data. It also parses the model output and contains summary and plot functions for exploration of the results. In addition, solarius enables parallel computing of the linkage and association analyses, that makes the calculation of genome-wide scans more efficient. Availability and implementation: solarius is available on CRAN and on GitHub https://github.com/ugcd/solarius. Contact: aziyatdinov@santpau.cat Supplementary information: Supplementary material is available at Bioinformatics online.
Phylogenetic utility of ribosomal genes for reconstructing the phylogeny of five Chinese satyrine tribes (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae)

Abstract Satyrinae is one of twelve subfamilies of the butterfly family Nymphalidae, which currently includes nine tribes. However, phylogenetic relationships among them remain largely unresolved, though different researches have been conducted based on both morphological and molecular data. However, ribosomal genes have never been used in tribe level phylogenetic analyses of Satyrinae. In this study we investigate for the first time the phylogenetic relationships among the tribes Elymniini, Amathusiini, Zetherini and Melanitini which are indicated to be a monophyletic group, and the Satyrini, using two ribosomal genes (28s rDNA and 16s rDNA) and four protein-coding genes (EF-1α, COI, COII and Cytb). We mainly aim to assess the phylogenetic informativeness of the ribosomal genes as well as clarify the relationships among different tribes. Our results show the two ribosomal genes generally have the same high phylogenetic informativeness compared with EF-1α; and we infer the 28s rDNA would show better informativeness if the 28s rDNA sequence data for each sampling taxon are obtained in this study. The placement of the monotypic genus Callarge Leech in Zetherini is confirmed for the first time based on molecular evidence. In addition, our maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian inference (BI) trees consistently show that the involved Satyrinae including the Amathusiini is monophyletic with high support values. Although the relationships among the five tribes are identical among ML and BI analyses and are mostly strongly-supported in BI analysis, those in ML analysis are lowly- or moderately- supported. Therefore, the relationships among the related five tribes recovered herein need further verification based on more sampling taxa.
PHAST Library — Enabling Single-Source and High Performance Code for GPUs and Multi-cores

The simulation of parallel heterogeneous architectures such as multi-cores and GPUs sets new challenges in the programming language/framework domain. Applications for simulators need to be expressed in a way that can be easily adapted for the specific architectures, effectively tuned for on each of them while preventing from introducing biases due to non-uniform hand-made optimizations. The most common heterogeneous programming frameworks are too low-level, so we propose PHAST, a high-level heterogeneous C++ library targetable on multi-cores and Nvidia GPUs. It permits to write code at a high level of abstraction, to reach good performance while allowing for fine parameter tuning and not shielding code from low-level optimizations. We evaluate PHAST in the case of DCT8x8 on both supported architectures. On multi-cores, we found that PHAST implementation is around ten times faster than OpenCL (AMD vendor) implementation, but up to about 4x slower than OpenCL (Intel vendor) one, which effectively leverages auto-vectorization. On Nvidia GPUs, PHAST code performs up to 55.14% better than CUDA SDK reference version.
Le psychodrame psychanalytique de groupe à médiation en psychiatrie infanto-juvénile

L’adaptation de la technique psychodramatique psychanalytique (ppdg) pour les etats autistiques et psychotiques chez l’enfant, permet de developper l’intersubjectivite en differenciant les espaces primaire et secondaire et de creer l’espace transitionnel a l’origine du jeu, confrontant le patient a la separation d’avec l’objet. L’ajout de deux regles et d’un mediateur, le deguisement, contient les processus archaiques et les transforme en processus primaires, voire secondaires.
Serum sCD163 Levels Are Associated with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and Are Influenced by Coffee and Wine Consumption: Results of the Di@bet.es Study

Objective Serum levels of soluble TNF-like weak inducer of apoptosis (sTWEAK) and its scavenger receptor CD163 (sCD163) have been linked to insulin resistance. We analysed the usefulness of these cytokines as biomarkers of type 2 diabetes in a Spanish cohort, together with their relationship to food consumption in the setting of the Di@bet.es study. Research Design and Methods This is a cross-sectional, matched case-control study of 514 type 2 diabetes subjects and 517 controls with a Normal Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (NOGTT), using data from the Di@bet.es study. Study variables included clinical and demographic structured survey, food frequency questionnaire and physical examination. Serum concentrations of sTWEAK and sCD163 were measured by ELISA. Linear regression analysis determined which variables were related to sTWEAK and sCD163 levels. Logistic regression analysis was used to estimate odd ratios of presenting type 2 diabetes. Results sCD163 concentrations and sCD163/sTWEAK ratio were 11.0% and 15.0% higher, respectively, (P<0.001) in type 2 diabetes than in controls. Following adjustment for various confounders, the OR for presenting type 2 diabetes in subjects in the highest vs the lowest tertile of sCD163 was [(OR), 2,01 (95%CI, 1,46–2,97); P for trend <0.001]. Coffee and red wine consumption was negatively associated with serum levels of sCD163 (P = 0.0001 and; P = 0.002 for coffee and red wine intake, respectively). Conclusions High circulating levels of sCD163 are associated with type 2 diabetes in the Spanish population. The association between coffee and red wine intake and these biomarkers deserves further study to confirm its potential role in type 2 diabetes.
Guided Learning of Control Graphs for Physics-Based Characters

The difficulty of developing control strategies has been a primary bottleneck in the adoption of physics-based simulations of human motion. We present a method for learning robust feedback strategies around given motion capture clips as well as the transition paths between clips. The output is a control graph that supports real-time physics-based simulation of multiple characters, each capable of a diverse range of robust movement skills, such as walking, running, sharp turns, cartwheels, spin-kicks, and flips. The control fragments that compose the control graph are developed using guided learning. This leverages the results of open-loop sampling-based reconstruction in order to produce state-action pairs that are then transformed into a linear feedback policy for each control fragment using linear regression. Our synthesis framework allows for the development of robust controllers with a minimal amount of prior knowledge.
SIFT-based ear recognition by fusion of detected keypoints from color similarity slice regions

Ear biometric is considered as one of the most reliable and invariant biometrics characteristics in line with iris and fingerprint characteristics. In many cases, ear biometrics can be compared with face biometrics regarding many physiological and texture characteristics. In this paper, a robust and efficient ear recognition system is presented, which uses Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) as feature descriptor for structural representation of ear images. In order to make it more robust to user authentication, only the regions having color probabilities in a certain ranges are considered for invariant SIFT feature extraction, where the K-L divergence is used for keeping color consistency. Ear skin color model is formed by Gaussian mixture model and clustering the ear color pattern using vector quantization. Finally, K-L divergence is applied to the GMM framework for recording the color similarity in the specified ranges by comparing color similarity between a pair of reference model and probe ear images. After segmentation of ear images in some color slice regions, SIFT keypoints are extracted and an augmented vector of extracted SIFT features are created for matching, which is accomplished between a pair of reference model and probe ear images. The proposed technique has been tested on the IITK Ear database and the experimental results show improvements in recognition accuracy while invariant features are extracted from color slice regions to maintain the robustness of the system.
Activation and modulation of recombinant glycine and GABAA receptors by 4‐halogenated analogues of propofol

Glycine receptors are important players in pain perception and movement disorders and therefore important therapeutic targets. Glycine receptors can be modulated by the intravenous anaesthetic propofol (2,6‐diisopropylphenol). However, the drug is more potent, by at least one order of magnitude, on GABAA receptors. It has been proposed that halogenation of the propofol molecule generates compounds with selective enhancement of glycinergic modulatory properties.
Equity/Equality Issues of Gender, Race, and Class

Concerns with equity issues in education have largely given way to concerns about quality and excellence. Bell and Chase (1993) argue that from the beginning of the 1980s, federal policies have focused on the establishment and enforcement of performance standards rather than on equity standards. And even when the focus was on equity, apart from affirmative action policies in some arenas, what was really targeted was equality. Talking of gender equity, in particular, Stromquist (1997) points out that although the U.S. government describes both Title XI of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 and the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA) passed in 1975 as legisla tion for equity, the laws, at best, offer equality of opportunity in terms of access and resources. “To provide equity would be to give greater support to women in order to ensure that they ultimately reach a condition of equality with men” (p. 55). Odden (1995) agrees: “Despite our rhetoric about equal outcomes, our equity orientation has been one primarily of access” (p. 12). Thus, when Charol Shakeshaft poses the question: “Are women repre sented in administration in equal proportions to their representation in teach ing? ” she is not referring to any extra efforts that have been made on behalf of women to enable their entry into administration that would provide equity. She is looking simply at the numbers, unreliable as they are, to determine if there is equality of representation. The answer is no. “Females are overrepre sented in teaching and underrepresented in administration” (p. 100). Beyond
Adequacy of Bounded Exhaustive Testing and Incomplete Oracles for Elusive Bug Detection

Elusive bugs (EB) are not reliably discovered using standard methods such as black and white box testing. Bounded exhaustive testing (BET) is a promising approach for their detection. A generic EB fault model is introduced which is used to consider the adequacy of BET for EB detection. BET requires the use of an automatic oracle. Situations in which automation may only be practical with the use of an incomplete oracle are considered. Failure models are used to evaluate effectiveness of incomplete oracles.
Charge States of Solar Energetic Iron: Nonequilibrium Calculation with Shock-induced Acceleration

Observed charge states of solar energetic ions by Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer and Advanced Composition Explorer from recent large solar events in 1992 and 1997 show an energy-dependent feature that apparently has not been seen in earlier events, e.g., in 1978-1979. The mean charge state of iron, and to a lesser extent other heavy ions, was observed to increase with energy from ~0.5 to ~50 MeV nucleon-1. We present a possible explanation for this new feature and discuss potential implications for models of particle acceleration. Our calculation suggests that this energy-dependent feature is a result of the charge-changing and energy-changing processes taking place concurrently and can be absent when the processes act over different timescales.
Transparent process migration: Design alternatives and the sprite implementation

The Sprite operating system allows executing processes to be moved between hosts at any time. We use this process migration mechanism to offload work onto idle machines, and also to evict migrated processes when idle workstations are reclaimed by their owners. Sprite's migration mechanism provides a high degree of transparency both for migrated processes and for users. Idle machines are identified, and eviction is invoked, automatically by daemon processes. On Sprite it takes up to a few hundred milliseconds on SPARCstation 1 workstations to perform a remote exec, whereas evictions typically occur in a few seconds. The pmake program uses remote invocation to invoke tasks concurrently. Compilations commonly obtain speed‐up factors in the range of three to six; they are limited primarily by contention for centralized resources such as file servers. CPU‐bound tasks such as simulations can make more effective use of idle hosts, obtaining as much as eight‐fold speed‐up over a period of hours. Process migration has been in regular service for over two years.
Pharmacological Properties of a New Antimalarial Bisthiazolium Salt, T3, and a Corresponding Prodrug, TE3

ABSTRACT A new approach to malarial chemotherapy based on quaternary ammonium that targets membrane biogenesis during intraerythrocytic Plasmodium falciparum development has recently been developed. To increase the bioavailability, nonionic chemically modified prodrugs were synthesized. In this paper, the pharmacological properties of a bisthiazolium salt (T3) and its bioprecursor (TE3) were studied. Their antimalarial activities were determined in vitro against the growth of P. falciparum and in vivo against the growth of P. vinckei in mice. Pharmacokinetic evaluations were performed after T3 (1.3 and 3 mg/kg of body weight administered intravenously; 6.4 mg/kg administered intraperitoneally) and TE3 (1.5 and 3 mg/kg administered intravenously; 12 mg/kg administered orally) administrations to rats. After intraperitoneal administration, very low doses offer protection in a murine model of malaria (50% efficient dose [ED50] of 0.2 to 0.25 mg/kg). After oral administration, the ED50 values were 13 and 5 mg/kg for T3 and TE3, respectively. Both compounds exerted antimalarial activity in the low nanomolar range. After TE3 administration, rapid prodrug-drug conversion occurred; the mean values of the pharmacokinetic parameters for T3 were as follows: total clearance, 1 liter/h/kg; steady-state volume of distribution, 14.8 liters/kg; and elimination half-life, 12 h. After intravenous administration, T3 plasma concentrations increased in proportion to the dose. The absolute bioavailability was 72% after intraperitoneal administration (T3); it was 15% after oral administration (TE3). T3 plasma concentrations (8 nM) 24 h following oral administration of TE3 were higher than the 50% inhibitory concentrations for the most chloroquine-resistant strains of P. falciparum (6.3 nM).
The small hydropower plant operating regime optimization by the income maximization

The problem of regime management of small-scale hydro power plant (SHPP) is considered from the point of view of getting the maximum income during the 24 hours. Statement of the problem and its solution using a non-linear programming solver is made. In addition to the input data of SHPP Nord Pool Spot market price changing graph for the considered period is used. The SHPP operating options are compared under various conditions of water resources amount. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of the use of common opportunities of SHPP control system intellectualization for the optimization of their regime by the income amount.
A Tree-Position Kernel for Document Compression

We describe our entry into the DUC 2004 automatic document summarization competition. We competed only in the single document, headline generation task. Our system is based on a novel kernel dubbed the tree position kernel, combined with two other well-known kernels. Our system performs well on white-box evaluations, but does very poorly in the overall DUC evaluation. However, the latter results are offset by the fact that baseline systems consistently outperform well engineered systems.
Assessment criteria for 2D shape transformations in animation

The assessment of 2D shape transformations (or morphing) for animation is a difficult task because it is a multi-dimensional problem. Existing morphing techniques pay most attention to shape information interactive control and mathematical simplicity. This paper shows that it is not enough to use shape information alone, and we should consider other factors such as structure, dynamics, timing, etc. The paper also shows that an overall objective assessment of morphing is impossible because factors such as timing are related to subjective judgement, yet local objective assessment criteria, e.g. based on shape, are available. We propose using "area preservation" as the shape criterion for the 2D case as an acceptable approximation to "volume preservation" in reality, and use it to establish cases in which a number of existing techniques give clearly incorrect results. The possibility of deriving objective assessment criteria for dynamics simulations and timing under certain conditions is discussed.
Mentoring Functions: A Contemporary View of the Perceptions of Mentees and Mentors

The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument for assessing mentoring based in contemporary organizational life. In the first phase of the study, 24 mentees and 24 mentors were interviewed about their mentoring experience. In-depth analysis of the interview data resulted in the development of an instrument to measure mentoring functions. In the second phase of the study, the instrument was tested for its factor structure using a large sample of 272 mentees and 228 mentors. A two-phase statistical analysis, principal components analysis with one sample followed by confirmatory factor analysis with the other, revealed eight distinct functions of mentoring. Mentees and mentors were found to share similar perceptions about the mentoring functions that occur in their relationships. The results represent a thorough attempt to define and describe mentoring in a contemporary organizational environment.
The rice RING finger E3 ligase, OsHCI1, drives nuclear export of multiple substrate proteins and its heterogeneous overexpression enhances acquired thermotolerance

Thermotolerance is very important for plant survival when plants are subjected to lethally high temperature. However, thus far little is known about the functions of RING E3 ligase in response to heat shock in plants. This study found that one rice gene encoding the RING finger protein was specifically induced by heat and cold stress treatments but not by salinity or dehydration and named it OsHCI1 (Oryza sativa heat and cold induced 1). Subcellular localization results showed that OsHCI1 was mainly associated with the Golgi apparatus and moved rapidly and extensively along the cytoskeleton. In contrast, OsHCI1 may have accumulated in the nucleus under high temperatures. OsHCI1 physically interacted with nuclear substrate proteins including a basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor. Transient co-overexpression of OsHCI1 and each of three nuclear proteins showed that their fluorescent signals moved into the cytoplasm as punctuate formations. Heterogeneous overexpression of OsHCI1 in Arabidopsis highly increased survival rate through acquired thermotolerance. It is proposed that OsHCI1 mediates nuclear–cytoplasmic trafficking of nuclear substrate proteins via monoubiquitination and drives an inactivation device for the nuclear proteins under heat shock.
An Ant Colony Optimization-based Load Balancing Routing Algorithm for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks(WMSNs) have the characteristics of limited resources, variable channel capacities and high data redundancy, which pose great challenges to the QoS routing of WMSNs. Addressing these issues, an Ant Colony Optimization-based Load Balancing Routing Algorithm (ACOLBR) is proposed. Firstly, the intra-cluster routing is built by the minimum spanning tree. And then the inter-cluster routing is built by the improved ant colony optimization algorithm to find an optimal path and some suboptimal paths. Simulation experiments demonstrate that ACOLBR has better scalability, adaptability, load balancing and end-to-end delay compared with AGRA and M-IAR. Therefore ACOLBR can effectively prolong the network lifetime and guarantee the QoS of data transmission.
Bitcoin Message: Data Insertion on a Proof-of-Work Cryptocurrency System

The Bit coin currency is steadily growing in popularity as an alternative to physical currencies. This paper presents an approach for utilizing the Bit coin system for creating permanent messages that are located on computers worldwide. By manipulating the amount field of Bit coin transactions, messages can be embedded into the Bit coin block chain. This approach was implemented by extending the Bit coin-Qt v0.7. 2 application and the source code is freely available.
Increasing Story-Writing Ability through Self-Regulated Strategy Development: Effects on Young Writers with Learning Disabilities

In this replication study, supplemental writing instruction in strategic planning was used to improve the story writing ability of young writers with learning disabilities (LD) and poor writing skills. Six 2nd-grade students with learning disabilities who experienced difficulty with story writing were taught a strategy for planning and writing stories using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development approach. The effects of the strategy were assessed through a multiple-baseline-across-subjects design. After learning the strategy the stories written by the students at post-instruction and maintenance became more complete, longer, and qualitatively better. In addition, planning time at post-instruction and maintenance increased. Limitations of the study and implications for practice are discussed.