Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Photorespiration connects C 3 and C 4 photosynthesis

C4 plants evolved independently more than 60 times from C3 ancestors. C4 photosynthesis is a complex trait and its evolution from the ancestral C3 photosynthetic pathway involved the modification of the leaf anatomy and the leaf physiology accompanied by changes in the expression of thousands of genes. Under high temperature, high light, and the current CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the C4 pathway is more efficient than C3 photosynthesis because it increases the CO2 concentration around the major CO2 fixating enzyme Rubisco. The oxygenase reaction and, accordingly, photorespiration are largely suppressed. In the present review we describe a scenario for C4 evolution that not only includes the avoidance of photorespiration as the major driving force for C4 evolution but also highlights the relevance of changes in the expression of photorespiratory genes in inducing and establishing important phases on the path from C3 to C4.
Understanding Synthetic Gradients and Decoupled Neural Interfaces

When training neural networks, the use of Synthetic Gradients (SG) allows layers or modules to be trained without update locking - without waiting for a true error gradient to be backpropagated - resulting in Decoupled Neural Interfaces (DNIs). This unlocked ability of being able to update parts of a neural network asynchronously and with only local information was demonstrated to work empirically in Jaderberg et al (2016). However, there has been very little demonstration of what changes DNIs and SGs impose from a functional, representational, and learning dynamics point of view. In this paper, we study DNIs through the use of synthetic gradients on feed-forward networks to better understand their behaviour and elucidate their effect on optimisation. We show that the incorporation of SGs does not affect the representational strength of the learning system for a neural network, and prove the convergence of the learning system for linear and deep linear models. On practical problems we investigate the mechanism by which synthetic gradient estimators approximate the true loss, and, surprisingly, how that leads to drastically different layer-wise representations. Finally, we also expose the relationship of using synthetic gradients to other error approximation techniques and find a unifying language for discussion and comparison.
Profiling Executive Dysfunction in Adolescents with Autism

Executive Functions (EF) have been assigned a causative role in a number of disorders, including schizophrenia, Tourette syndrome, autism, obsessive compulsive disorder, violent and criminal behavior, and nearly all learning disabilities. While the term executive functions in the professional literature easily yields more than 150 references, empirical research in which executive functions are studied and linked with specific disorders, such as autism, continues to help answer long-held questions about the disorder and adds to the literature base in order to better understand and treat the disorder. The purpose of this study was to review archival data collected using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functions (BRIEF) for the purpose of profiling executive dysfunction for adolescents with autism. The sample was comprised of 76 male and female public middle and high school students with autism spectrum disorder. All participants were assessed using the BRIEF Teacher Form. This study revealed that teachers’ ratings with the BRIEF reflected a high level of executive function deficiency in the behaviors of adolescents with autism. Overall, results of the analyses revealed that most domains of the BRIEF yielded clinically significant results. Students with autism who were educated in inclusion settings appeared to exhibit fewer problem behaviors and therefore appear to be making greater use of executive functions capacities than students who were educated in self-contained settings. The executive function deficits demonstrated by students with autism necessitate involvement in educational programs that address these students’ needs for greater external prompting. This study is limited by the relatively small sample size, narrow age range of the participants, and the highly specialized nature of the programming in a single state.
Reinforced ART ( ReART ) : Adapting Fuzzy ART for online neural control

Fuzzy ART has been proposed for learning stable recognition categories for an arbitrary sequence of analogue input patterns. It uses a match based learning mechanism to categorise inputs based on similarities in their features. However, this approach does not work well for neural control, where inputs require to be categorised based on the classes which they represent, rather than by the features of the input. To address this we propose and investigate ReART, a novel extension to Fuzzy ART. ReART uses a feedback based categorisation mechanism supporting class based input categorisation, online learning, and immunity from the plasticity stability dilemma. ReART is used for online control by integrating it with a separate external function which maps each ReART category to a desired output action. We test the proposal in the context of a simulated wireless data reader intended to be carried by an autonomous mobile vehicle, and show that training time and accuracy are significantly better than Fuzzy ART and Back Propagation.
Too Much Too Late : Influence of risk communication on Android App installations – UNDER REVIEW

Transmission of personally identifiable information from smartphone apps has become ubiquitous as smartphones themselves. Privacy controls currently provided in the form of permissions warnings falls insufficient especially for communicating risk during app installation. Priming for privacy and showing easy to understand risk cues could help people make low risk app choices. Towards this, we conducted a user experiment with 480 participants who made a series of app choices with/without privacy priming and with/without risk communicating cues. Overall, presenting risk communicating cues along with app benefits has a significant effect on user app choices in terms of risk-benefit tradeoff. We found that priming for privacy would lead to increased concern while choosing apps but may not have a strong effect on final app choices when combined with certain types of risk cue framing. We conclude with recommendations for improving risk communication in Android.
A giant ornithomimosaur from the Early Cretaceous of China

Ornithomimosaurs (ostrich-mimic dinosaurs) are a common element of some Cretaceous dinosaur assemblages of Asia and North America. Here, we describe a new species of ornithomimosaur, Beishanlong grandis, from an associated, partial postcranial skeleton from the Aptian-Albian Xinminpu Group of northern Gansu, China. Beishanlong is similar to another Aptian-Albian ornithomimosaur, Harpymimus, with which it shares a phylogenetic position as more derived than the Barremian Shenzhousaurus and as sister to a Late Cretaceous clade composed of Garudimimus and the Ornithomimidae. Beishanlong is one of the largest definitive ornithomimosaurs yet described, though histological analysis shows that the holotype individual was still growing at its death. Together with the co-eval and sympatric therizinosaur Suzhousaurus and the oviraptorosaur Gigantraptor, Beishanlong provides evidence for the parallel evolution of gigantism in separate lineages of beaked and possibly herbivorous coelurosaurs within a short time span in Central Asia.
Regularization by Truncated Total Least Squares

The total least squares (TLS) method is a successful method for noise reduction in linear least squares problems in a number of applications. The TLS method is suited to problems in which both the coefficient matrix and the right-hand side are not precisely known. This paper focuses on the use of TLS for solving problems with very ill-conditioned coefficient matrices whose singular values decay gradually (so-called discrete ill-posed problems), where some regularization is necessary to stabilize the computed solution. We filter the solution by truncating the small singular values of the TLS matrix. We express our results in terms of the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the coefficient matrix rather than the augmented matrix. This leads to insight into the filtering properties of the truncated TLS method as compared to regularized least squares solutions. In addition, we propose and test an iterative algorithm based on Lanczos bidiagonalization for computing truncated TLS solutions.
Dynamic fluorescence imaging for multiparametric measurement of tumor vasculature

Angiogenesis is essential for tumor growth and a promising target for cancer therapy. Blood vessel monitoring is an indispensable tool for evaluation and development of anti-angiogenic drugs. Here, we report a new noninvasive in vivo imaging tool, named dynamic fluorescence imaging (DyFI), for the simultaneous measurement of multiple vascular parameters, such as vascular density, perfusion rate, and permeability, using spatiotemporal profiles of indocyanine green. Using DyFI in a tumor xenograft model, we quantitatively measured multiple vascular parameters in tumors and normal tissues with high spatial resolution. The multimodality of this method allowed us to find a negative spatial correlation between perfusion and permeability. Moreover, DyFI was effective for revealing the early effects of an anti-angiogenic drug; these findings were validated using two-photon microscopy. We suggest that DyFI could be a useful tool for the preclinical development of anti-angiogenic drugs.
Demokratiska värden i förskolebarns vardag

The theme of this thesis is democratic values in pre-school and how these are revealed in the children’s relations in that setting. It describes what the children take responsibility for and how they do it; how they demonstrate care in the sense of consideration, and what they show respect for and how they show it. The study was carried out within the framework of the state pre-school as portrayed in two pre-school departments in a municipality in western Sweden. The daily activity was followed in two pre-school groups comprising children aged 3-6 years, among which field studies were carried out over a total of 36 weeks. Observations focusing on the children’s behaviour and their communication both with each other and the teachers, made with the help of an open research protocol, audio-recordings and diary notes, resulted in descriptive field records, which were analysed in four stages. The understanding of domain theory was used as a conceptual tool for comprehending and explaining how values, value judgement and consensus may be distinguished and sorted. The analytical procedure has been influenced both by a perspective of positioning and power relations and interpretation based on value theory. The analysis has resulted in three thematic values, among which Responsibility is shown in the way the children behave in words and actions, meaning that the children do not speak about taking responsibility but, a fact that is central to this study, initiate responsibility. They show in different ways that they take responsibility for everyday matters both on their own behalf and on behalf of others. Care refers to the perception of others’ needs in an empathic way, and that the children demonstrate by their actions an empathic understanding of someone else. This means that care is a value that the children use in order to support each other within their cultural community as separate from adults’ perspective. In this way, their caring acts sometimes appear to be in opposition to the perspective that the teachers’ positions express. Respect is shown to be a value that means that the children, when encountering another, abstain from what they are doing or change their current position for that other person’s benefit. In certain situations, the children abstain from their self-chosen position in favour of a social convention or an opinion that is asserted, which means that respect is embedded in a complex way. Gender differences have been identified as an all-pervading theme in the empirical material. An important part of the children’s experiences takes place in the group divisions between girls and boys, which is why these affect the affinity that they develop. In the everyday structure, girls and boys participate as social actors with expectations and norms formed with the support of the gender differences that are made. Both girls and boys stress the importance of their fellowship, while at the same time a pattern can be discerned that ascribes girls and boys different degrees of agency.
Sticky Projections-A Model-Based Approach to Interactive Shader Lamps Tracking

Shader lamps can augment physical objects with projected virtual replications using a camera-projector system, provided that the physical and virtual object are well registered to each other. Precise registration and tracking has been a cumbersome and intrusive process in the past. In this paper, we present a new method for tracking complex-shaped physical objects interactively. In contrast to previous approaches our system is mobile and makes solely use of the projection of the virtual replication to track the physical object and “stick” the projection to it. Our method consists of two stages, a fast pose initialization based on structured light patterns and a non-intrusive frame-by-frame tracking based on features detected in the projection. During the tracking phase, a radiometrically corrected virtual camera view based on the current pose prediction is rendered and compared to the captured image. Matched features are triangulated providing a sparse set of surface points that is robustly aligned to the virtual model. The alignment transformation serves as an input for the new pose prediction. Detailed experiments including the evaluation of the overlay accuracy show that our approach can accurately and robustly track complex objects at interactive rates.
Patterns of Family Recreation in Families that Include Children with a Developmental Disability

Grounded in the naturalistic paradigm, the present exploratory study employed survey ( n = 65) and interview (n = 16) methods to examine patterns of family recreation in families including children with developmental disabilities. Statistical analyses were conducted on the quantitative data, while a key theme and constant comparative method was used to analyze the qualitative data. Three patterns (all family, sub-unit, and equal combination) were identified as characteristic of the family recreation of the families included in this study. The sub-unit pattern predominated and typically involved mothers in activities with their children with a developmental disability or all of their children. Furthermore, family recreation was family-initiated, informal, and occurred with equal frequency in home and community settings. Variations in patterns of family recreation associated with child (e.g., age, birth order) and family (e.g., income, employment status) specific characteristics were also presented.
Beyond the P300: target and non-target ERP components in schizophrenia

The P300 component of the auditory ERP elicited to target stimuli has been extensively investigated as a potential psychophysiological marker in schizophrenia. Theoretical and empirical evidence is presented, suggesting the earlier components (N100, P200) to both target and non-target stimuli may better capture information processing deficits currently proposed to be central to schizophrenia. The thesis comprises 4 studies. Study 1 demonstrated deficits to non-target (reduced N100 amplitude, earlier P200 latency), in addition to target stimuli (reduced and earlier N100 amplitude, increased P200 amplitude), in schizophrenia (n = 40) compared with matched normal controls. The schizophrenia group was also characterised by a lack of differentiation between ERPs elicited to target and non-target stimuli, in comparison to the normal
Understanding Cache Hierarchy Contention in CMPs to Improve Job Scheduling

In order to improve CMP performance, recent research has focused on scheduling to mitigate contention produced by the limited memory bandwidth. Nowadays, commercial CMPs implement multi-level cache hierarchies where last level caches are shared by at least two cache structures located at the immediately lower cache level. In turn, these caches can be shared by several multithreaded cores. In this microprocessor design, contention points may appear along the whole memory hierarchy. Moreover, this problem is expected to aggravate in future technologies, since the number of cores and hardware threads, and consequently the size of the shared caches increases with each microprocessor generation. In this paper we characterize the impact on performance of the different contention points that appear along the memory subsystem. Then, we propose a generic scheduling strategy for CMPs that takes into account the available bandwidth at each level of the cache hierarchy. The proposed strategy selects the processes to be co-scheduled and allocates them to cores in order to minimize contention effects. The proposal has been implemented and evaluated in a commercial single-threaded quad-core processor with a relatively small two-level cache hierarchy. Despite these potential contention limitations are less than in recent processor designs, compared to the Linux scheduler, the proposal reaches performance improvements up to 9% while these benefits (across the studied benchmark mixes) are always lower than 6% for a memory-aware scheduler that does not take into account the cache hierarchy. Moreover, in some cases the proposal doubles the speedup achieved by the memory-aware scheduler.
The early development of inferences about the visual percepts of others.

MASANGKAY, ZENAIDA S. ; McCLUSKEY, KATHLEEN A. ; MCINTYRE, CURTIS W. ; SIMS-KNIGHT, JUDITH; VAUGHN, BRIAN E. ; and FLAVELL, JOHN H. The Early Development of Inferences about the Visual Percepts of Others. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1974, 45, 357-366. 3 experiments assessed the ability of 2-5-year-old children to infer, under very simple task conditions, what another person sees when viewing something from a position other than the children's own. Some ability of this genre appears to exist by 2-3 years of age, at least. The data suggest a distinction between an earlier (Level 1) and a later (Level 2) developmental form of visual percept inference. At Level 1, S is capable of nonegocentrically inferring that O sees an object presently nonvisible to S himself. At Level 2, S is also capable of nonegocentrically inferring how an object that both currently see appears to O, that is, how it looks from his particular spatial perspective.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Studies of Sensorimotor Networks in Tourette Syndrome

Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) is a sensorimotor disorder where the sensitivity to external and internal stimuli might be increased and unwanted responses to such stimuli cannot be sufficiently suppressed. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies indicate that, at rest, axonal excitability of cortico-spinal neurons and intra-cortical inter-neurons was consistently normal in GTS. However, synaptic excitability in cortico-spinal neurons and the SICI circuit may be lower than normal. In addition, an electrophysiological marker of sensory motor integration, SAI, was reduced in the baseline state consistent with reduced efficiency of synaptic inhibition. Given the possible influence of sensory inputs in triggering the release of tics reduced SAI may be a direct physiological reflection of increased access of sensory input to motor output in GTS. Experiments examining control of voluntary movements revealed that in GTS motor cortex excitability increases less than in controls when preparing a movement even though intra-cortical inhibition (i.e. SICI) normalises. In GTS the gain of many motor circuits may be reduced and hence less sensitive to small changes in input from other areas. These cortical changes may constitute an adaptive response to abnormal basal ganglia-motor cortex inputs.
Finding document topics for improving topic segmentation

Topic segmentation and identification are often tackled as separate problems whereas they are both part of topic analysis. In this article, we study how topic identification can help to improve a topic segmenter based on word reiteration. We first present an unsupervised method for discovering the topics of a text. Then, we detail how these topics are used by segmentation for finding topical similarities between text segments. Finally, we show through the results of an evaluation done both for French and English the interest of the method we propose.
A study of Through Silicon Via impact to 3D Network-on-Chip design

The adoption of a 3D Network-on-Chip (NoC) design depends on the performance and manufacturing cost of the chip. Therefore, a study of Through Silicon Via (TSV), that connects different layers of a 3D chip, is crucial. In this paper, we analysis the impact of TSV design in 3D NoCs. A 3D NoC with five layers is modeled based on modern 2D chips. We discuss the TSV number required for a 3D NoC. Different placements of half and quarter layer-layer connections are explored. We present benchmark results using a cycle accurate full system simulator based on realistic workloads. Experiments show that under different workloads, the average network latencies in full and half layer-layer connection are reduced by 5.24% and 2.18% respectively, compared with quarter design. Our analysis and experiment results provide a guideline for designing TSVs in 3D NoCs to leverage the tradeoff between performance and manufacturing cost.
Improving positioning capabilities for indoor environments with WiFi

A framework for positioning and tracking problems in indoor environments using particle filters has been developed and applied to a WLAN location determination technique. The use of Kalman filter or particle filtering represents an interesting way to handle the variations of the signal strength measurements. The second one, being more generic, can also aggregate in a simple way different information like signal strength and the map of a building. This type of information is very useful to obtain correct trajectories without wall-crossings. In this paper, Kalman filter and particle filter are presented, with their performances in indoor environments by combining WLAN signal strength and fingerprinting.
A low cost coupled LMS adaptive algorithm with affine projection performance for autorregressive inputs: Mean weight analysis

This work presents a low cost fast convergence adaptive algorithm for autoregressive (AR) input signals. It basically consists on an NLMS adaptive algorithm coupled with a linear adaptive predictor. Mean weight theoretical analysis shows that this adaptive structure, under AR conditions, provides a performance quite similar to the well known Affine Projection algorithm. Theoretical results are supported by Monte Carlo simulations showing a very good matching for considerably correlated signals. This adaptive algorithm could be a good choice in control and filtering applications that require high adaptation speed and low computational cost.
Hometown organisations in Turkey: an overview

Hometown (hemsehri)organisations are associations and foundations regrouping people from the same place or memleket[village, town, county]. The current thematic issue also deals with organisations regrouping migrants [gocmen] from the ‘Turkish World’, mainly the Balkans and the Caucasus. In Turkey, hometown organisations have appeared in the 1940s and grown incessantly since then, even more so since the 1990’s; therefore this phenomenon cannot be treated as a mere transitional consequence of the urbanisation process. The authors not only deal with hemsehrilik as a - often ‘naturalized’ - social link, but especially with the organisations asserting it: their importance in the Turkish political – and not only social – landscape informs us about the ways of politisation, patterns of discourse and political action in contemporary Turkey.