Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Land Use Explains the Distribution of Threatened New World Amphibians Better than Climate

Background We evaluated the direct and indirect influence of climate, land use, phylogenetic structure, species richness and endemism on the distribution of New World threatened amphibians. Methodology/Principal Findings We used the WWF’s New World ecoregions, the WWFs amphibian distributional data and the IUCN Red List Categories to obtain the number of threatened species per ecoregion. We analyzed three different scenarios urgent, moderate, and the most inclusive scenario. Using path analysis we evaluated the direct and indirect effects of climate, type of land use, phylogenetic structure, richness and endemism on the number of threatened amphibians in New World ecoregions. In all scenarios we found strong support for direct influences of endemism, the cover of villages and species richness on the number of threatened species in each ecoregion. The proportion of wild area had indirect effects in the moderate and the most inclusive scenario. Phylogenetic composition was important in determining the species richness and endemism in each ecoregion. Climate variables had complex and indirect effects on the number of threatened species. Conclusion/Significance Land use has a more direct influence than climate in determining the distribution of New World threatened amphibians. Independently of the scenario analyzed, the main variables influencing the distribution of threatened amphibians were consistent, with endemism having the largest magnitude path coefficient. The importance of phylogenetic composition could indicate that some clades may be more threatened than others, and their presence increases the number of threatened species. Our results highlight the importance of man-made land transformation, which is a local variable, as a critical factor underlying the distribution of threatened amphibians at a biogeographic scale.
Before and after the earthquake: a case study of attrition from the HIV antiretroviral therapy program in Haiti

Background On January 12, 2010, a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the West Department of Haiti, killing more than 200,000 people and injuring or displacing many more. This disaster threatened continuity of HIV care and treatment services. Objectives This case study examined the effect of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti on attrition from the HIV antiretroviral therapy (ART) program. Design The study triangulated retrospective data from existing sources, including: 1) individual-level longitudinal patient data from an electronic medical record for ART patients at two large public sector departmental hospitals differently affected by the earthquake; and 2) aggregate data on the volume of HIV-related services delivered at the two hospitals before and after the earthquake. Methods The study compared ART attrition and service delivery in Jacmel, a site in the ‘very strong’ zone of earthquake impact, and in Jérémie, a site in the ‘light’ zone of earthquake impact. The analysis used time-to-event analysis methods for the individual-level patient data, and descriptive statistical methods for the aggregate service delivery data. Results Adjusted ART attrition risk was lower at the hospital in Jacmel after vs. before the earthquake (HR=0.51; p=0.03), and was lower in Jacmel vs. Jérémie both before (HR=0.55; p=0.01) and after the earthquake (HR=0.35; p=0.001). The number of new ART patient enrollments, new HIV patient registrations, and HIV clinical visits dropped notably in Jacmel immediately after the earthquake, but then rapidly rebounded. On average, there was no change in new ART enrollments per month after vs. before the earthquake at either site. Conclusion These findings underscore the resilience of Haitian ART providers and patients, and contribute evidence that it is possible to maintain continuity of ART services even in the context of a complex humanitarian crisis.
Markovian process based reputation mechanisms for detecting selfish nodes in MANETs: A survey

Reputation is considered to be an important aspect for enabling reliable data communication among the mobile nodes present in a multihop network like mobile ad hoc network. But, the presence of the selfish nodes could wreak considerable damage to the network performance. Reputation based models were mainly formulated for enforcing cooperation and at the same time for punishing misbehaving nodes like selfish nodes. At the same time, vast numbers of mechanisms proposed for detecting selfish nodes were greatly based on the consistent history of interactions between the mobile nodes existing in an ad hoc environment. In this paper, we survey and classify notable works contributed for detecting selfish nodes based on Markovian processes. These Markov based mechanisms detects the selfish nodes based on the present behavior of nodes determined in discrete or continuous time rather than considering their past history. Finally, we discuss on the merits and demerits of the existing Markovian models available in the literature.
Probabilistic models of genetic variation in structured populations applied to global human studies

Abstract Motivation: Modern population genetics studies typically involve genome-wide genotyping of individuals from a diverse network of ancestries. An important problem is how to formulate and estimate probabilistic models of observed genotypes that account for complex population structure. The most prominent work on this problem has focused on estimating a model of admixture proportions of ancestral populations for each individual. Here, we instead focus on modeling variation of the genotypes without requiring a higher-level admixture interpretation. Results: We formulate two general probabilistic models, and we propose computationally efficient algorithms to estimate them. First, we show how principal component analysis can be utilized to estimate a general model that includes the well-known Pritchard–Stephens–Donnelly admixture model as a special case. Noting some drawbacks of this approach, we introduce a new ‘logistic factor analysis’ framework that seeks to directly model the logit transformation of probabilities underlying observed genotypes in terms of latent variables that capture population structure. We demonstrate these advances on data from the Human Genome Diversity Panel and 1000 Genomes Project, where we are able to identify SNPs that are highly differentiated with respect to structure while making minimal modeling assumptions. Availability and Implementation: A Bioconductor R package called lfa is available at http://www.bioconductor. org/packages/release/bioc/html/lfa.html. Contact: jstorey@princeton.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Investigating Conservation of the Cell-Cycle-Regulated Transcriptional Program in the Fungal Pathogen, Cryptococcus neoformans

The pathogenic yeast Cryptococcus neoformans causes fungal meningitis in immune-compromised patients. Cell proliferation in the budding yeast form is required for C. neoformans to infect human hosts, and virulence factors such as capsule formation and melanin production are affected by cell-cycle perturbation. Thus, understanding cell-cycle regulation is critical for a full understanding of virulence factors for disease. Our group and others have demonstrated that a large fraction of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is expressed periodically during the cell cycle, and that proper regulation of this transcriptional program is important for proper cell division. Despite the evolutionary divergence of the two budding yeasts, we found that a similar percentage of all genes (~20%) is periodically expressed during the cell cycle in both yeasts. However, the temporal ordering of periodic expression has diverged for some orthologous cell-cycle genes, especially those related to bud emergence and bud growth. Genes regulating DNA replication and mitosis exhibited a conserved ordering in both yeasts, suggesting that essential cell-cycle processes are conserved in periodicity and in timing of expression (i.e. duplication before division). In S. cerevisiae cells, we have proposed that an interconnected network of periodic transcription factors (TFs) controls the bulk of the cell-cycle transcriptional program. We found that temporal ordering of orthologous network TFs was not always maintained; however, the TF network topology at cell-cycle commitment appears to be conserved in C. neoformans. During the C. neoformans cell cycle, DNA replication genes, mitosis genes, and 40 genes involved in virulence are periodically expressed. Future work toward understanding the gene regulatory network that controls cell-cycle genes is critical for developing novel antifungals to inhibit pathogen proliferation.
On Purely Automated Attacks and Click-Based Graphical Passwords

We present and evaluate various methods for purely automated attacks against click-based graphical passwords. Our purely automated methods combine click-order heuristics with focus-of-attention scan-paths generated from a computational model of visual attention. Our method results in a significantly better automated attack than previous work, guessing 8-15% of passwords for two representative images using dictionaries of less than 224.6 entries, and about 16% of passwords on each of these images using dictionaries of less than 231.4 entries (where the full password space is 243). Relaxing our click-order pattern substantially increased the efficacy of our attack albeit with larger dictionaries of 234.7 entries, allowing attacks that guessed 48-54% of passwords (compared to previous results of 0.9% and 9.1% on the same two images with 235 guesses). These latter automated attacks are independent of focus-of-attention models, and are based on image-independent guessing patterns. Our results show that automated attacks, which are easier to arrange than human-seeded attacks and are more scalable to systems that use multiple images, pose a significant threat.
Rescripting criminal identity: A “close reading” of contemporary biographies of British criminals as entrepreneurship discourse

Purpose - – This research paper aims to examine how organized criminals rescript their identities to engage with entrepreneurship discourse when authoring their biographies. From a sociological perspective, stereotypes and social constructs of the entrepreneur and the criminal are subjects of recurring interest. Yet, despite the prevalence of the stereotype of the entrepreneur as a hero-figure in the entrepreneurship literature and the conflation of the entrepreneur with the stereotype of the businessman, notions of entrepreneurial identity are not fixed with constructions of the entrepreneur as a rascal, rogue or villain being accepted as alternative social constructs. Design/methodology/approach - – The qualitative approaches of “biographical analysis” and “close reading” adopted help us draw out discursive strategies. Findings - – The main finding is that a particular genre of criminal biographies can be re-read as entrepreneur stories. The theme of nuanced entrepreneurial identities and in particular gangster discourse is under researched. In this study, by conducting a close reading of contemporary biographies of British criminals, the paper encounters self-representations of criminals who seek to author an alternative and more appealing social identity as entrepreneurs. That this re-scripting of personal biographies to make gangster stories conform to the genre of entrepreneur stories is of particular interest. Research limitations/implications - – This study points to similarities and differences between criminal and entrepreneurial biographies. It also presents sociological insights into an alternative version of entrepreneurial identity and sociological constructions of the criminal as entrepreneur. Practical implications - – This research provides an insight into how criminals seek to legitimise their life-stories. Originality/value - – This research paper is of value in that it is the first to consider contemporary biographies of British criminals as entrepreneurship discourse. Understanding how criminal biographies and entrepreneur stories share similar socially constructed themes, storylines and epistemologies contribute to the development of entrepreneurship and sociological research by examining entrepreneurship in an unusual social setting.
Enhancing Diversity-Accuracy Technique on User-Based Top-N Recommendation Algorithms

In this paper we demonstrate how each item in top-N recommendation list has an impact on total diversity of the list in recommender systems. We proposed a new recommendation ranking method, namely "Total Diversity Effect Ranking", based on the total diversity effect of each item. Typically, diversity and accuracy in recommender systems are conversely. The finding shows that the proposed ranking method can guarantee the improvement of diversity quality in top-N recommendations. We proposed two new hybrid ranking approaches to make them more balance and designed experiments to evaluate their performance in comparison with the standard ranking approaches. To make results of our experiments more reliable, we apply the 5-fold cross validation technique to the MovieLens dataset provided by the GroupLens Research Project. In an evaluation process, we suggest using harmonic mean to measure the quality of recommendation approaches. The findings show that the proposed approaches give better performance than the standard approaches.
EKSTRAKSI FITUR MIRIP HAAR UNTUK PENDETEKSIAN OBYEK PADA REAL-TIME VIDEO MENGGUNAKAN OPENCV DAN IMPLEMENTASINYA PADA SISTEM TERTANAM BEAGLEBOARD XM

Robot memerlukan aksi yang tepat untuk menanggapi suatu keadaan lingkungan. Kondisi lingkungan dapat diperoleh dari sensor-sensor yang terhubung dengan suatu unit pemroses, salah satu sensor yang dapat digunakan adalah sensor visual. Aksi terhadap obyek yang hanya dapat dikenali secara visual sangat bergantung pada kemampuan robot dalam mengolah informasi warna atau bentuk obyek. Dalam penelitian ini digunakan pendeteksian obyek berdasarkan ekstraksi fitur yang banyak diterapkan pada pengenalan wajah otomatis. Fitur-fitur ini kemudian diolah menggunakan metode pembelajaran terarah ( supervised learning ) AdaBoost untuk melakukan pembelajaran terhadap suatu obyek tertentu. Tahap pembelajaran dilakukan menggunakan rasio sampel positif dan negatif sebesar 5:3 untuk membuat tabel look-up . Tiga set tabel training dibuat dengan jumlah sampel dan stage training yang berbeda. Tiga set tabel yang dibu-at telah diuji menggunakan 2 buah berkas video suatu lingkungan yang diambil dari dua sudut pandang yang berbeda. Telah didapatkan dalam penelitian ini rasio pendeteksian pada kedua video memberikan kecenderungan yang sama. Suatu aturan yang sederhana ditunjukkan dalam penelitian ini untuk meningkatkan akurasi tabel look-up . Pustaka OpenCV digunakan dalam penelitian ini karena kemampuannya yang dapat ditanamkan pada bermacam-macam perangkat keras, termasuk piranti-piranti bergerak dan sistem tertanam. Kecepatan pendeteksian obyek menggunakan sistem tertanam Beagleboard XM juga dijelaskan dalam penelitian ini.
The 5200-Å flux depression of chemically peculiar stars — I. Synthetic Δa photometry: the normality line

The Δa photometric system provides an efficient observational method to identify and distinguish magnetic and several other types of chemically peculiar (CP) stars of spectral types B to F from other classes of stars in the same range of effective temperatures. We have developed a synthetic photometric system that can be used to explore the capability of model atmospheres with individual element abundances to predict photometric Δa magnitudes, which measure the extent of the flux depression around 5200 A found in different types of CP stars. In this first paper, we confirm the observed dependency of the a index as a function of various colour indices sensitive to the effective temperature of stars as well as its average scatter expected from surface gravity variations within the main-sequence band. The behaviour of the so-called 'normality line' of Δa systems used in photometric observations of CP stars is well reproduced. The metallicity dependence of the normality line of the Δa system was computed for several grids of model atmospheres where the abundances of elements heavier than He had been scaled ′0.5 dex with respect to the solar value. We estimate a lowering of Δa magnitudes for CP stars within the Magellanic Clouds by ∼-3 mmag relative to those in the solar neighbourhood assuming an average metallicity of [Fe/H] = -0.5 dex. Using these results on the metallicity bias of the Δa system we find the observational systems in use suitable to identify CP stars in other galaxies or distant regions of our own Galaxy and capable to provide data samples on a statistically meaningful basis. In turn, the synthetic system is suitable to test the performance of model atmospheres for CP stars. This work will be presented in follow-up papers of this series.
Adaptive Feedback Bit Allocation for Coordinated Multi-Point Transmission Systems

The problem of adaptive feedback bit allocation for two different Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission schemes, namely Joint Transmission (JT) and Coordinated Beamforming (CBF), is studied here. We formulate the average rate maximization problem in which channel information to the serving and interfering base stations is quantized with different resolution. Unlike previously proposed solutions, we show that it is possible to solve the optimization problem without decomposing it in two terms (desired signal and interference). The proposed adaptive bit allocation algorithm is evaluated through simulations for a realistic cellular layout, where users are placed exclusively in the cell edge, and results are averaged over different positions to avoid placement biasing. The gains of the proposed method vary from 5% to 50% showing that adaptive feedback allocation is an effective method to improve throughput performance in CoMP systems.
The Diagnostic Performance of Anterior Knee Pain and Activity-related Pain in Identifying Knees with Structural Damage in the Patellofemoral Joint: The Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study

Objective. To determine the diagnostic test performance of location of pain and activity-related pain in identifying knees with patellofemoral joint (PFJ) structural damage. Methods. The Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study is a US National Institutes of Health-funded cohort study of older adults with or at risk of knee osteoarthritis. Subjects identified painful areas around the knee on a knee pain map and the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index was used to assess pain with stairs and walking on level ground. Cartilage damage and bone marrow lesions were assessed from knee magnetic resonance imaging. We determined the sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values for presence of anterior knee pain (AKP), pain with stairs, absence of pain while walking on level ground, and combinations of tests in discriminating knees with isolated PFJ structural damage from those with isolated tibiofemoral joint (TFJ) or no structural damage. Knees with mixed PFJ/TFJ damage were removed from our analyses because of the inability to determine which compartment was causing pain. Results. There were 407 knees that met our inclusion criteria. “Any” AKP had a sensitivity of 60% and specificity of 53%; and if AKP was the only area of pain, the sensitivity dropped to 27% but specificity rose to 81%. Absence of moderate pain with walking on level ground had the greatest sensitivity (93%) but poor specificity (13%). The combination of “isolated” AKP and moderate pain with stairs had poor sensitivity (9%) but the greatest specificity (97%) of strategies tested. Conclusion. Commonly used questions purported to identify knees with PFJ structural damage do not identify this condition with great accuracy.
Characteristics of Type 2 Diabetes in Terms of Insulin Resistance in Korea

The aim of this study was to assess the implications of insulin resistance on the clinical and biochemical profiles of Korean type 2 diabetic patients. 122 patients with type 2 diabetes underwent a short insulin tolerance test to assess insulin resistance. Subjects were classified in tertiles according to ISI (insulin sensitivity index), and the tertile I (the insulin-resistant group) and tertile III (the insulin-sensitive group) clinical and biochemical parameters were compared. Age, waist circumference (WC), systolic blood pressure (SBP), HbA1c, body fat content, and fasting plasma glucose were significantly higher in tertile I than tertile III (all p < 0.05). The frequency of hypertension and family history of cerebrovascular disease (CVD) were greater in tertile I than III (p < 0.05). To evaluate the factors affecting ISI, multiple regression was performed, and age, WC, SBP, HbA1c, and body fat content were found to be independently related to insulin resistance (p < 0.05). Old age, hypertension, central obesity, and poor glycemic control were identified as clinical parameters of insulin resistance in Korean type 2 diabetic patients.
Determinants of Student Performance in an Undergraduate Financial Accounting Class

This study investigates the effects of class size, high school accounting, aptitude and attitude on learning , measured by the difference between post-test and pre-test scores, in an undergraduate financial accounting class, after controlling for students' major and semester level. Statistical analysis showed that scores of students in small classes improved by 48%, while scores of students in the large classes improved by 6% percent, implying a decline in learning by 88% by shifting to larger classes. High school accounting was found to improve pre- and post-test scores but the improvement on their post-test scores was significantly lower, implying a diminishing effect of high school accounting on performance as the complexity of the course material increases. We also found that midterm grade (aptitude) and changes in perception about the relevance of the class on business-related issues (attitude) motivate learning.
An Anatomy of Humor

Humor permeates every aspect of society and has done so for thousands of years. People experience it daily through television, newspapers, literature, and contact with others. Rarely do social researchers analyze humor or try to determine what makes it such a dominating force in our lives. The types of jokes a person enjoys contribute significantly to the definition of that person as well as to the character of a given society. Arthur Asa Berger explores these and other related topics in An Anatomy of Humor. He shows how humor can range from the simple pun to complex plots in Elizabethan plays. Berger examines a number of topics--ethnicity, race, gender, politics--each with its own comic dimension. Laughter is beneficial to both our physical and mental health, according to Berger. He discerns a multiplicity of ironies that are intrinsic to the analysis of humor. He discovers as much complexity and ambiguity in a cartoon, such as Mickey Mouse, as he finds in an important piece of literature, such as Huckleberry Finn. An Anatomy of Humor is an intriguing and enjoyable read for people interested in humor and the impact of popular and mass culture on society. It will also be of interest to professionals in communication and psychologists concerned with the creative process.