Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Worker, Peasant or Entrepreneur? Analysis of the Entrepreneurial Logics and Practices of Family Farmers in Agrarian Reform Cooperatives in the Saiss (Morocco)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the emerging entrepreneurial practices and the underlying logic of family farms in two agrarian reform cooperatives in Morocco. These practices can be explained by the constant negotiation of multiple and sometimes even antagonistic logics (peasant, entrepreneurial, proletarian, capitalistic) within these farms in a context of rapid agrarian change and a juxtaposition of different farm types on the same territory. Five factors illustrate this emergence: (1) the access to credit, (2) the functioning of the farm (rotation of the crops, use of inputs, workforce), 3) the access to groundwater resources, (4) the marketing practices adopted by farmers and (5) the informational factors. The porosity of the peasant and entrepreneurial worlds is the main lesson we can draw from our study. There is a subtle process of hybridization between the peasant and entrepreneurial modes of farming, with a wide range of profiles, ranging from a pure 'peasant', to a pure 'entrepreneur' and in between the peasant-entrepreneur and the entrepreneur-peasant. If we only focus on the political discourse, the trend in the development of new modes of farming seems inescapable. Our study stresses the resistance of practices and logics of peasant modes of farming which can mix with a 'modern' vision of agriculture. However, the siren songs of entrepreneurship can lead to bankruptcy, an exit from agriculture, which could have a strong impact on the social cohesion of the Moroccan society, particularly in rural areas.
Further Understanding Incivility in the Workplace: The Effects of Gender, Agency, and Communion

Research conducted on workplace incivility—a low intensity form of deviant behavior—has generally shown that women report higher levels of incivility at work. However, to date, it is unclear as to whether women are primarily treated uncivilly by men (i.e., members of the socially dominant group/out-group) or other women (i.e., members of in-group) in organizations. In light of different theorizing surrounding gender and incivility, we examine whether women experience increased incivility from other women or men, and whether this effect is amplified for women who exhibit higher agency and less communion at work given that these traits and behaviors violate stereotypical gender norms. Across three complementary studies, results indicate that women report experiencing more incivility from other women than from men, with this effect being amplified for women who are more agentic at work. Further, agentic women who experience increased female-instigated incivility from their coworkers report lower well-being (job satisfaction, psychological vitality) and increased work withdrawal (turnover intentions). Theoretical implications tied to gender and incivility are discussed.
Semi-Markov availability model considering deliberate malicious impacts on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud

This paper describes availability model for an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud with multiple pools of physical machines (PMs). Indeed, we build monolithic mathematical model considering sudden failures of the PMs and deliberate malicious impacts on information resources of the IaaS Cloud, using stochastic Semi-Markov approach. In the model, we apply technical subsystem for monitoring states in order to solve task of determining and analysis of overall availability level for the IaaS Cloud during scope of the failures and negative impact of the malicious computer viruses. As characteristics steady state availability for the IaaS Cloud, failure rates and repair rates of the PMs were leveraged by us, too.
Precision analysis of posterior corneal topography measured by Visante Omni: repeatability, reproducibility, and agreement with Orbscan II.

PURPOSE To evaluate the repeatability and reproducibility of posterior corneal curvature and posterior corneal elevation best-fit sphere (BFS) obtained with the Visante Omni (Carl Zeiss Meditec) and to compare the results with the Orbscan II (Bausch & Lomb). METHODS Thirty eyes from 30 healthy volunteers were included in this study. All patients were examined 5 times with the Visante Omni and Orbscan II by 2 independent operators. The posterior corneal curvature (3- and 6-mm zone) and posterior corneal elevation BFS (5- and 8-mm zone) were generated for each system. Intraoperator repeatability and interoperator reproducibility and agreement between the systems were evaluated using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and the Bland-Altman method. RESULTS The repeatability of posterior corneal curvature and posterior corneal elevation BFS measured by the Visante Omni was high for all analysis zones (ICC, 0.99 to 1.00). The reproducibility also showed similar results (ICC, 0.99 to 1.00). Agreement between the Visante Omni and Orbscan II was high for posterior corneal curvature (ICC, 0.94 to 0.97) and posterior corneal elevation BFS (ICC, 0.96 to 0.98) with 95% limits of agreement at -0.26 to 0.22 diopters for posterior corneal curvature and 0.11 to 0.69 mm for posterior corneal elevation BFS. CONCLUSIONS The Visante Omni provides good repeatability and reproducibility of posterior corneal topography. Overall agreement with the Orbscan II system was high.
Fully adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits

We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely fix sequences of arm selections before observing rewards, our method adaptively changes the arm selection strategy based on past observations at each round. We show our sample complexity matches the achievable lower bound up to a constant factor in an extreme case. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of the methods by simulations based on both synthetic setting and real-world data, in which our method shows vast improvement over existing methods.
Growth and development of rats artificially reared on different milk-substitutes

1. Rat pups were artificially reared (AR) from postnatal day 4 or 5 till day 20 or 21, by fitting them with gastric cannulas through which milk-substitutes could be infused automatically. 2. Three milk-substitutes were compared: milk M, the usual diet for AR studies, which was somewhat low in protein and very high in carbohydrate; milk A, which resembled rats' milk much more closely in composition; and milk isoM, which was based on the high-energy milk M but was made isoenergetic with milk A. Pups given these diets were termet ARM, ARA and ARisoM respectively. Siblings of the AR rats were left with their mothers to form a mother-reared (MR) control group. Rats were autopsied at 20 or 21 d. 3. Growth in body-weight of all groups of AR pups lagged behind that of their MR siblings for about the first week of AR, but the ARM group showed complete catch-up and the ARA group partial catch-up in body-weight during the second week. ARisoM rats were growth-retarded throughout. 4. Inspection of organ weights expressed relative to body-weight revealed disturbances of organ growth in all AR groups compared with MR animals. ARM rats showed excessive epididymal fat pad and liver weights, but deficits in gastrocnemius muscle, heart and adrenal weights. In contrast, ARA rats usually displayed increased spleen and stomach weights, but lower weight of interscapular brown adipose tissue. ARisoM rats had high brain, liver and stomach weights and low muscle and spleen weights relative to body-weight. All AR groups had elongated small intestines. 5. Hence the patterns of abnormal organ growth differed between groups. Those shown by the ARM and ARisoM groups seemed the more seriously abnormal. The diet approximating the composition of rats' milk (milk A) appears, as intended, to be an improved milk-substitute.
Expansion for information retrieval: contribution of word sense disambiguation and semantic relatedness

Information retrieval (IR) aims at searching documents which satisfy the information need of an user. In that way, an IR system informs the user about relevant documents, that is those documents that contain the information they need as formulated in the query. Well-known search engines like Google and Yahoo are prime examples of IR systems. A perfect IR system should retrieve only, and all, the relevant documents, rejecting the non-relevant ones. However, perfect retrieval systems do not exist. One of the main problems is the so-called vocabulary mismatch problem between query and documents: some documents might be relevant to the query even if the specific terms used differ substantially, or some documents might not be relevant to the query even they have some terms in common. The former is because several words or phrases can be used to express the same idea or item (synonymy). The latter is caused by ambiguity, where one word can have more than one interpretation depending on the context. Owing to these facts, if an IR system relies only on terms occurring in both the query and the document when it comes to deciding whether a document is relevant, it might be difficult to find some of the interesting documents, and also to reject non-relevant documents. It seems fair to think that there will be more chances of successful retrieval if the meaning of the text is also taken into account. Even though the vocabulary mismatch problem has been widely discussed in the literature from the early days of IR it remains unsolved, and most search engines just ignore it. This PhD dissertation explores whether natural language processing (NLP) can be used to alleviate this problem. In a nutshell, we expand queries and documents making use of two NLP techniques, word sense disambiguation and semantic relatedness. For each of the mentioned techniques we propose an expansion strategy, in which we obtain synonyms and other related words for the words in the query and documents. We also present, for each case, a method to combine the expansions and original words effectively in an IR system. Furthermore, as the expansion technique we propose is useful for translating queries and documents, we show how a cross lingual information retrieval system could be improved using such an expansion technique. Our extensive experiments on three datasets show that the expansion methods explored in this dissertation help overcome the mismatch problem, consequently improving the effectiveness of an IR system.
Artificial Boundary Conditions for Computation of Oscillating External Flows

In this paper, we propose a new technique for the numerical treatment of external flow problems with oscillatory behavior of the solution in time. Specifically, we consider the case of unbounded compressible viscous plane flow past a finite body (airfoil). Oscillations of the flow in time may be caused, for example, by the time-periodic injection of fluid into the boundary layer, which in accordance with experimental data, may essentially increase the performance of the airfoil. To conduct the actual computations, we have to somehow restrict the original unbounded domain, that is, to introduce an artificial (external) boundary and to further consider only a finite computational domain. Consequently, we will need to formulate some artificial boundary conditions (ABCs) at the introduced external boundary. The ABCs we are aiming to obtain must meet the following fundamental requirement. One should be able to uniquely complement the solution calculated inside the finite computational domain to its infinite exterior so that the original problem is solved within the desired accuracy. Our construction of such ABCs for oscillating flows is based on an essential assumption: the Navier--Stokes equations can be linearized in the far field against the free-stream background. To actually compute the ABCs, we represent the far-field solution as a Fourier series in time and then apply the difference potentials method (DPM) of V. S. Ryaben'kii. This paper contains a general theoretical description of the algorithm for setting the DPM-based ABCs for time-periodic external flows. Based on our experience in implementing analogous ABCs for steady-state problems (a simpler case), we expect that these boundary conditions will become an effective tool for constructing robust numerical methods to calculate oscillatory flows.
Genetic Mapping of Novel Loci Affecting Canine Blood Phenotypes

Since the publication of the dog genome and the construction of high-quality genome-wide SNP arrays, thousands of dogs have been genotyped for disease studies. For many of these dogs, additional clinical phenotypes are available, such as hematological and clinical chemistry results collected during routine veterinary care. Little is known about the genetic basis of variation in blood phenotypes, but this variation may play an important role in the etiology and progression of many diseases. From a cohort of dogs that had been previously genotyped on a semi-custom Illumina CanineHD array for various genome-wide association studies (GWAS) at Cornell University Hospital for Animals, we chose 353 clinically healthy, adult dogs for our analysis of clinical pathologic test results (14 hematological tests and 25 clinical chemistry tests). After correcting for age, body weight and sex, genetic associations were identified for amylase, segmented neutrophils, urea nitrogen, glucose, and mean corpuscular hemoglobin. Additionally, a strong genetic association (P = 8.1×10−13) was evident between a region of canine chromosome 13 (CFA13) and alanine aminotransferase (ALT), explaining 23% of the variation in ALT levels. This region of CFA13 encompasses the GPT gene that encodes the transferase. Dogs homozygous for the derived allele exhibit lower ALT activity, making increased ALT activity a less useful marker of hepatic injury in these individuals. Overall, these associations provide a roadmap for identifying causal variants that could improve interpretation of clinical blood tests and understanding of genetic risk factors associated with diseases such as canine diabetes and anemia, and demonstrate the utility of holistic phenotyping of dogs genotyped for disease mapping studies.
Sensorimotor-independent development of hands and tools selectivity in the visual cortex

Significance To what extent is brain organization driven by innate genetic constraints, and how dependent is it on individual experience during early development? We show that an area of the visual system that processes both hands and tools can develop without sensorimotor experience in manipulating tools with one’s hands. People born without hands show typical hand–tool conjoined activity, in a region connected to the action network. Taken with findings from studies with people born blind, who also show intact hand and tool specialization in the visual system, these findings suggest that no specific sensory or motor experience is crucial for domain-specific organization of visual cortex. Instead, the results suggest that functional brain organization is largely innately determined. The visual occipito-temporal cortex is composed of several distinct regions specialized in the identification of different object kinds such as tools and bodies. Its organization appears to reflect not only the visual characteristics of the inputs but also the behavior that can be achieved with them. For example, there are spatially overlapping responses for viewing hands and tools, which is likely due to their common role in object-directed actions. How dependent is occipito-temporal cortex organization on object manipulation and motor experience? To investigate this question, we studied five individuals born without hands (individuals with upper limb dysplasia), who use tools with their feet. Using fMRI, we found the typical selective hand–tool overlap (HTO) not only in typically developed control participants but also in four of the five dysplasics. Functional connectivity of the HTO in the dysplasics also showed a largely similar pattern as in the controls. The preservation of functional organization in the dysplasics suggests that occipito-temporal cortex specialization is driven largely by inherited connectivity constraints that do not require sensorimotor experience. These findings complement discoveries of intact functional organization of the occipito-temporal cortex in people born blind, supporting an organization largely independent of any one specific sensory or motor experience.
A Novel Local Feature for Eye Movement Authentication

Eye movement authentication technology has been proposed as a biometric modality, which enables to authenticate a user continuously, and has the counterfeit feature because of the difficulty of the imitation. By using the eye movement authentication, it is possible to realize an automatic authentication system as long as he/she is looking at a display to operate the device. However, the authentication accuracy is still low compared to the other traditional biometric modalities, such as fingerprint, face, and iris. In this paper, we propose the novel local eye movement feature to represent local differences of the captured time-series gazing position data, and we show the proposed feature can work as a complement feature against Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients(MFCC), which is based on the local phase information of eye movement data.We show the classification rate improves from 61% to 82% in the BioEye2015 dataset by using our proposed method on the best case.
Secure Enforcement in Cognitive Internet of Vehicles

As for deployment of security strategy, corresponding forwarding rules for switches can be given in allusion to different traffic conditions. However, due to lack of global cognitive control for security strategy deployment in traditional Internet of Vehicles (IoV), it is quite difficult to realize global and optimized security strategy deployment scheme so as to meet security requirements in different traffic conditions. On basis of traditional IoV, cognitive engine is added in cognitive IoV (CIoV) to enhance the intelligence of traditional IoV. In allusion to CIoV, and in consideration of restrictions on transmission delay, the security strategy deployment for switches on core network is formulated in this paper, thus not only the safe transmission rules are met, but the transmission delay can also be the lowest. To be specific, the path selection of switches is modeled as 0-1 programming problem in this paper, and that optimization problem is proved to be a nonconvex optimization problem. Then we convert that problem into a convex optimization problem by log-det heuristic algorithm, thus to give path selection scheme to meet security requirements with the lowest delay on the whole. Experiment proves that cognitive engine-based security strategy deployment put forth in this paper is much better than other schemes.
Complementary Mechanisms for Degradation of Inulin-Type Fructans and Arabinoxylan Oligosaccharides among Bifidobacterial Strains Suggest Bacterial Cooperation

ABSTRACT Inulin-type fructans (ITF) and arabinoxylan oligosaccharides (AXOS) are broken down to different extents by various bifidobacterial strains present in the human colon. To date, phenotypic heterogeneity in the consumption of these complex oligosaccharides at the strain level remains poorly studied. To examine mechanistic variations in ITF and AXOS constituent preferences present in one individual, ITF and AXOS consumption by bifidobacterial strains isolated from the simulator of the human intestinal microbial ecosystem (SHIME) after inoculation with feces from one healthy individual was investigated. Among the 18 strains identified, four species-independent clusters displaying different ITF and AXOS degradation mechanisms and preferences were found. Bifidobacterium bifidum B46 showed limited growth on all substrates, whereas B. longum B24 and B. longum B18 could grow better on short-chain-length fractions of fructooligosaccharides (FOS) than on fructose. B. longum B24 could cleave arabinose substituents of AXOS extracellularly, without using the AXOS-derived xylose backbones, whereas B. longum B18 was able to consume oligosaccharides (up to xylotetraose) preferentially and consumed AXOS to a limited extent. B. adolescentis B72 degraded all fractions of FOS simultaneously, partially degraded inulin, and could use xylose backbones longer than xylotetraose extracellularly. The strain-specific degradation mechanisms were suggested to be complementary and indicated resource partitioning. Specialization in the degradation of complex carbohydrates by bifidobacteria present on the individual level could have in vivo implications for the successful implementation of ITF and AXOS, aiming at bifidogenic and/or butyrogenic effects. Finally, this work shows the importance of taking microbial strain-level differences into account in gut microbiota research. IMPORTANCE It is well known that bifidobacteria degrade undigestible complex polysaccharides, such as ITF and AXOS, in the human colon. However, this process has never been studied for strains coexisting in the same individual. To examine strain-dependent mechanistic variations in ITF and AXOS constituent preferences present in one individual, ITF and AXOS consumption by bifidobacterial strains isolated from the SHIME after inoculation with feces from one healthy individual was investigated. Among the 18 bifidobacterial strains identified, four species-independent clusters displaying different ITF and AXOS degradation mechanisms and preferences were found, indicating that such strains can coexist in the human colon. Such specialization in the degradation of complex carbohydrates by bifidobacteria present on the individual level could have in vivo implications for the successful implementation of ITF and AXOS, aiming at bifidogenic and/or butyrogenic effects.
Image "group-registration" based on representation theory

The general principle of a matching algorithm is to optimize a criterion that furnishes a measure of the similarity between two images for a given space of geometrical transformations. In this work, we propose a framework based on a similarity measure – the generalized correlation – built in a systematic way from the links between a features space and a group of transformations modeled by an action group. Using results from representation theory, we can extend the correlation function to any homogeneous space with a transitively acting group. When the generalized Fourier transform exists, the group-based correlation can be expressed in a spectral space and it becomes possible to implement fast algorithms for its computation. Two important examples in the field of image processing are then detailed: the similarity group (rotation and scaling) on gray-level shapes from 2D images and the 3D rigid motion group (rotation and translation) followed by a plan projection.