Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Only Half Right: Species with Female-Biased Sexual Size Dimorphism Consistently Break Rensch's Rule

Background Most animal species display Sexual Size Dimorphism (SSD): males and females consistently attain different sizes, most frequently with females being larger than males. However the selective mechanisms driving patterns of SSD remain controversial. ‘Rensch's rule’ proposes a general scaling phenomenon for all taxa, whereby SSD increases with average body size when males are larger than females, and decreases with body size when females are larger than males. Rensch's rule appears to be general in the former case, but there is little evidence for the rule when females are larger then males. Methodology/Principal Findings Using comprehensive data for 1291 species of birds across 30 families, we find strong support for Rensch's rule in families where males are typically larger than females, but no overall support for the rule in families with female-biased SSD. Reviewing previous studies of a broad range of taxa (arthropods, reptiles, fish and birds) showing predominantly female-biased SSD, we conclude that Rensch's conjecture is the exception rather than the rule in such species. Conclusions/Significance The absence of consistent scaling of SSD in taxa with female-biased SSD, the most prevalent direction of dimorphism, calls into question previous general evolutionary explanations for Rensch's rule. We propose that, unlike several other ecological scaling relationships, Rensch's rule does not exist as an independent scaling phenomenon.
Patterns of nucleotide and amino acid substitution Introduction

So I’ve just suggested that the neutral theory of molecular evolution explains quite a bit, but it also ignores quite a bit. The derivations we did assumed that all substitutions are equally likely to occur, because they are selectively neutral. That isn’t plausible. We need look no further than sickle cell anemia to see an example of a protein polymorphism in which a single amino acid difference has a very large effect on fitness. Even reasoning from first principles we can see that it doesn’t make much sense to think that all nucleotide substitutions are created equal. Just as it’s unlikely that you’ll improve the performance of your car if you pick up a sledgehammer, open its hood, close your eyes, and hit something inside, so it’s unlikely that picking a random amino acid in a protein and substituting it with a different one will improve the function of the protein.
HyWebMap documents : an collaborative e-schoolbag for E-learning

There is disclosed a novel fouling and corrosion test assembly including a metallic tube having a heating element embedded in a heat conductive material for controlled heat input and with a thermocouple to measure wall temperature of the tube, and a metallic sleeve disposed about a predetermined portion of the metallic tube whereby the fouling and corrosion test assembly is disposed within conduit and valve assemblies in fluid flow communication with a fluid to determine corrosion rate by weight loss of the metallic sleeve under controlled heat input, temperature conditions and fluid flow rates for a predetermined time period.
Whole-Genome Profiling of Mutagenesis in Caenorhabditis elegans

Deep sequencing offers an unprecedented view of an organism's genome. We describe the spectrum of mutations induced by three commonly used mutagens: ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS), N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU), and ultraviolet trimethylpsoralen (UV/TMP) in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Our analysis confirms the strong GC to AT transition bias of EMS. We found that ENU mainly produces A to T and T to A transversions, but also all possible transitions. We found no bias for any specific transition or transversion in the spectrum of UV/TMP-induced mutations. In 10 mutagenized strains we identified 2723 variants, of which 508 are expected to alter or disrupt gene function, including 21 nonsense mutations and 10 mutations predicted to affect mRNA splicing. This translates to an average of 50 informative mutations per strain. We also present evidence of genetic drift among laboratory wild-type strains derived from the Bristol N2 strain. We make several suggestions for best practice using massively parallel short read sequencing to ensure mutation detection.
Reach Out and Touch Somebody's Virtual Hand: Affectively Connected through Mediated Touch

We present the design of a haptic computer accessory that adds the experience of touch to online conversations. It enables dyads to exchange the physical experience of holding hands regardless of distance and location. Text, speech and video communication systems support the transmission of several nonverbal affective aspects of communication but not the impression of physical proximity which is essential to experience a more intimate conversation. In real life touching hands is an important empathic experience for dyads that elicits a strong sense of togetherness, while signaling trust, understanding and social support. We analyzed hand-holding behavior of parent-child dyads and classified these into five categories implemented by the device: (1) child holding parent's finger, (2) fingers on fingers (both on the inside), (3) palm on palm, (4) palm on outside of hand, and (5) child holding parent's fingers and palm. For each hand holding position there are distinct sending, receiving and neutral contact points. Adding the haptic sensation of holding hands to online conversations may foster a sense of proximity or "togetherness". Pilot user tests with prototypes support this concept and provide new insights for future developments.
A ${\hbox{70}}{\hbox{–}} {\hbox{78-}}{\hbox{GHz}}$ Integrated CMOS Frequency Synthesizer for $W$-Band Satellite Communications

A 70-78-GHz integrated frequency synthesizer is implemented in 65-nm CMOS. It has been integrated in a two-step zero-IF millimeter-wave transceiver for emerging applications, such as 81-86-GHz satellite communication, short-distance high-speed wireless link, as well as imaging and radar. The transceiver utilizes synthesizer voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) output as the first LORF and 1/8 of LORF as the second LORF to cover the desired frequency band. The proposed synthesizer adopts integer-N architecture with 50-MHz reference. It also features coarse phase rotation to provide beam-forming capability for the intended transceiver. The synthesizer phase noise (PN) has been measured at 1/8 of the VCO frequency, about -102.2 dBc/Hz @ 1-MHz offset, and the measured reference spur for LORF is less than -49 dBc. Thus, the extrapolated PN performance is better than -84 dBc/Hz @ 1 MHz at 70-78 GHz LORF. The embedded frequency synthesizer occupies 0.16-mm2 chip area, including the angular rotator and buffers, and consumes 65 mW under 1-V supply.
Equilibrium Welfare and Government Policy with Quasi-Geometric Discounting

We consider a representative-agent equilibrium model where the consumer has quasi geometric discounting and cannot commit to future actions. We restrict attention to a parametric class for preferences and technology and solve for time-consistent competitive equilibria globally and explicitly. We then characterize the welfare properties of competitive equilibria and compare them to that of a planning problem. The planner is a consumer representative who, without commitment but in a time-consistent way, maximizes his presentvalue utility subject to resource constraints. The competitive equilibrium results in strictly higher welfare than does the planning problem whenever the discounting is not geometric.
PRM : A Resource Management Framework for Policy-driven QoS Control in Enhanced Internets

The Internet has evolved from a traditional best-effort delivery data network into an enhanced Internet that can provide a certain Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms for applications. However, these QoS mechanisms usually do not take policy factors into account such as priority and time-of-day. The paper presents a Resource Management Framework for Policy-driven QoS control (PRM) in enhanced internets, which consists of four components: Domain Policy Controller (DPC) resides an administrator domain, Border Resource Manager (BRM) resides between adjacent domains, Interior Resource Manager (IRM) in each router between two BRMs within the same domain, and End-system Resource Manager (ERM) in charge of end-node/host router resources. We first introduce challenges and demands facing the enhanced internets, then give a formalized definition of policy and describe the functions and interaction of components of PRM. Specifically we take QoS-pricing policy used in a Diff-Serv environment as an example to illustrate the operational phases of PRM.
Integrating non-spatial preferences into spatial location queries

Increasing volumes of geo-referenced data are becoming available. This data includes so-called points of interest that describe businesses, tourist attractions, etc. by means of a geo-location and properties such as a textual description or ratings. We propose and study the efficient implementation of a new kind of query on points of interest that takes into account both the locations and properties of the points of interest. The query takes a result cardinality, a spatial range, and property-related preferences as parameters, and it returns a compact set of points of interest with the given cardinality and in the given range that satisfies the preferences. Specifically, the points of interest in the result set cover so-called allying preferences and are located far from points of interest that possess so-called alienating preferences. A unified result rating function integrates the two kinds of preferences with spatial distance to achieve this functionality. We provide efficient exact algorithms for this kind of query. To enable queries on large datasets, we also provide an approximate algorithm that utilizes a nearest-neighbor property to achieve scalable performance. We develop and apply lower and upper bounds that enable search-space pruning and thus improve performance. Finally, we provide a generalization of the above query and also extend the algorithms to support the generalization. We report on an experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithms using real point of interest data from Google Places for Business that offers insight into the performance of the proposed solutions.
Evolutionary History and Phylogeography of Rabies Viruses Associated with Outbreaks in Trinidad

Bat rabies is an emerging disease of public health significance in the Americas. The Caribbean island of Trinidad experiences periodic outbreaks within the livestock population. We performed molecular characterisation of Trinidad rabies virus (RABV) and used a Bayesian phylogeographic approach to investigate the extent to which outbreaks are a result of in situ evolution versus importation of virus from the nearby South American mainland. Trinidadian RABV sequences were confirmed as bat variant and clustered with Desmodus rotundus (vampire bat) related sequences. They fell into two largely temporally defined lineages designated Trinidad I and II. The Trinidad I lineage which included sequences from 1997–2000 (all but two of which were from the northeast of the island) was most closely related to RABV from Ecuador (2005, 2007), French Guiana (1990) and Venezuela (1993, 1994). Trinidad II comprised sequences from the southwest of the island, which clustered into two groups: Trinidad IIa, which included one sequence each from 2000 and 2007, and Trinidad IIb including all 2010 sequences. The Trinidad II sequences were most closely related to sequences from Brazil (1999, 2004) and Uruguay (2007, 2008). Phylogeographic analyses support three separate RABV introductions from the mainland from which each of the three Trinidadian lineages arose. The estimated dates for the introductions and subsequent lineage expansions suggest periods of in situ evolution within Trinidad following each introduction. These data also indicate co-circulation of Trinidad lineage I and IIa during 2000. In light of these findings and the likely vampire bat origin of Trinidadian RABV, further studies should be conducted to investigate the relationship between RABV spatiotemporal dynamics and vampire bat population ecology, in particular any movement between the mainland and Trinidad.
Neurophysiological markers of identifying regret by 64 channels EEG signal

Regret is a negative social affect arising from upward counterfactual thinking for adverse outcomes. The neurophysiologic markers of identifying regret based on feature extraction from EEG signal has yet to be investigated. The EEG signals were recorded while 25 subjects performed a gambling task involving feedback for the subjects' chosen selection, the alternative selection, or for both. After the preprocessing, we extracted the ApEn (Approximate entropy) as the definitive feature. Regret as the target emotion was identified by the binary-class Fisher classifier, in comparison with each of the other three nontarget affect categories (i.e., disappointment, happiness and rejoice), which are also associated with the gambling task. The results show that regret is successfully identified from the other three nontarget affects. Notably, the significant difference is mainly distributed in anteromedian region, consistent with scalp distributions of EEGs evoked by regretful affect.
An Optimization Methodology for Neural Network Weights and Architectures

This paper introduces a methodology for neural network global optimization. The aim is the simultaneous optimization of multilayer perceptron (MLP) network weights and architectures, in order to generate topologies with few connections and high classification performance for any data sets. The approach combines the advantages of simulated annealing, tabu search and the backpropagation training algorithm in order to generate an automatic process for producing networks with high classification performance and low complexity. Experimental results obtained with four classification problems and one prediction problem has shown to be better than those obtained by the most commonly used optimization techniques
Similarity matching algorithm of equipment fault diagnosis based on CBR

In view of the lack of semantic information description in commonly-used knowledge representation modes such as framework and object-oriented mode, the domain ontology of electronic protective equipment fault diagnosis is designed by analyzing and summarizing the characteristics of the equipment fault cases. Considering that the traditional VSM (vector space model) ignores the role of the position of document entries and structural elements in describing the semantic correlation between features, K-NN (K-nearest neighbor) similarity matching algorithm based on SVSM (semantic vector space model) is proposed by making full use of the advantages of ontology in semantic knowledge representation. For electronic protective equipment fault diagnosis algorithm based on CBR (case based reasoning), a detailed description is given and its feasibility and advantage in performance is proved through experiment.
HMM+KNN classifier for facial expression recognition

Facial expression is an important communication method. Facial expression recognition has been studied in many application domains. In this paper, we study HMM and KNN classifiers, and put forward a combined approach for facial expression recognition. The basic idea of this approach is to employ the classifiers of HMM and KNN in series way. First, DHMM classifier is used to calculate the probabilities of six expressions. Then, basing on the most possible two results of classification by DHMM, the KNN classifier is used to make final decision while the difference between the maximum probability and the second is greater than the average difference. The experiment show that the performance of this method exceeds that of HMM-based only method.
The MediaEval 2013 Brave New Task: Emotion in Music

is composed to be emotionally expressive. Emotional associations of music thus provide an especially natural fea- ture for music indexing and recommendation. Emotion in Music Task is a brave new task addressing emotional charac- terization of music. In addressing the difficulties of emotion annotation we have turned to crowdsourcing, using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The dataset consists entirely of Creative Commons music from the Free Music Archive, which as the name suggests, can be shared freely without restrictions. In this paper, the dataset collection, annotations, and evalua- tion criteria as well as the two required and optional runs are described.
THE DARK SIDE OF EMBEDDEDNESS : AN EXAMINATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF DIRECT AND INDIRECT

This study explores the influence of the social network of board interlocks on the creation of strategic alliances between firms. Our theoretical framework introduces the notion that board interlock ties may be heterogeneous, depending on the nature of the CEO/board relationship that underlies the tie, and examines how the influence of such ties could have either a positive or negative influence on alliance formation. The role of both direct interlocks between firms and indirect third-party ties in interlocking directorate networks were examined with a unique dataset that combines extensive archival data on board interlocks and strategic alliances with primary survey data on management-board relationships from a large sample of top managers and outside directors. We found that board interlock ties to other firms can either increase or decrease the likelihood of alliance formation, depending on the content of the particular relationships that exist between CEOs and outside directors (who serve as CEOs at other firms). CEO/board relationships characterized by independent board control appear to reduce the likelihood of alliance formation by prompting distrust between corporate leaders, while CEO/board cooperation in strategic decision making appears to promote alliance formation by enhancing trust in the relationship. The effect of direct interlock ties are further amplified by the third-party interlock ties in which they are situated. Implications of these findings for the literatures on social networks, corporate governance, and board interlocks are discussed.
Behavioural time–energy budgets of cooperatively breedingNeolamprologus pulcher(Pisces: Cichlidae)

We estimated the energy expenditures resulting from helping behaviour in the cooperatively breeding cichlid N. pulcher by measuring the metabolic rates directly associated with specific social and territory maintenance behaviours of individual pair males and females, and their helpers, in a respirometer. In pair males, pair females and helpers, routine metabolism was raised on average 4.4, 3.8 and 3.6 times, respectively, during agonistic behaviour. Helpers spent 3.3 and 6.1 times routine metabolism, respectively, on submissive behaviour (tail quivering) and digging. These estimates of energy expenditure were combined with laboratory time budgets, obtained previously, to calculate behavioural time-energy budgets for pair members and helpers. Both groups spent on average 98.5% of total metabolism on routine and standard metabolism. With regard to the energy expended on specific behaviours, pair males invested almost exclusively in intrafamily agonistic behaviour, while pair females and helpers shared the investment in territory maintenance and direct brood care. The behavioural energy budget of helpers was strongly determined by their submissive behaviour. This serves to maintain the social status of the helpers within the family hierarchy and may therefore be regarded as 'paying for staying', which may also be true for direct brood care and other helper duties. We conclude that the substantial energy expenditures associated with helping behaviours are probably partly responsible for the reduced growth rates of helpers. This is the first study in which energy expenditures associated with specific helping behaviours have been measured in brood care helpers, and it provides the first estimate of total behavioural energy expenditure in a cooperatively breeding fish. (c) 1998 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
The Role of Reactive Oxygen Species in the Pathogenesis of Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, and Huntington's Disease: A Mini Review

Neurodegenerative diseases affect not only the life quality of aging populations, but also their life spans. All forms of neurodegenerative diseases have a massive impact on the elderly. The major threat of these brain diseases includes progressive loss of memory, Alzheimer's disease (AD), impairments in the movement, Parkinson's disease (PD), and the inability to walk, talk, and think, Huntington's disease (HD). Oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction are highlighted as a central feature of brain degenerative diseases. Oxidative stress, a condition that occurs due to imbalance in oxidant and antioxidant status, has been known to play a vital role in the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases including AD, PD, and HD. A large number of studies have utilized oxidative stress biomarkers to investigate the severity of these neurodegenerative diseases and medications are available, but these only treat the symptoms. In traditional medicine, a large number of medicinal plants have been used to treat the symptoms of these neurodegenerative diseases. Extensive studies scientifically validated the beneficial effect of natural products against neurodegenerative diseases using suitable animal models. This short review focuses the role of oxidative stress in the pathogenesis of AD, PD, and HD and the protective efficacy of natural products against these diseases.
Finding high-level structures in spreadsheet programs

Spreadsheets are a common tool in end-user programming, but even while important decisions are based on spreadsheet computations, spreadsheets are poorly documented software and the differences between simple one-shot computations and large, long-living sheets are not well understood. Like other software, production spreadsheets are subject to repeated maintenance cycles. Consequently, as with conventional software, short maintenance cycles and poor documentation tend to decrease their quality. We introduce an approach to help maintainers understand the structure of large spreadsheets as well as to zoom into certain parts of the spreadsheet. To cope with large sheets, our approach features two levels of abstraction: logical areas and semantic classes. These abstractions are based on different degrees of relatedness of cells according to the formulas they contain.
Soft faults and the importance of stresses in memory testing

Memory testing in general, and DRAM testing in particular, has become greatly dependent on the modification of stresses (timing, temperature and voltages) in a way that is difficult to justify using the current understanding of memory faults. This paper introduces a new class of fault models (soft faults) based on a special classification of memory faults, that shows why it is fundamentally necessary to apply stresses. The paper calculates the relative probability of soft faults for a specific failure mechanism and compares this probability in DRAMs with that in SRAMs. In addition, the concept of soft faults is validated using defect injection and electrical simulation of a Spice DRAM model.