Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Revisiting the cost of carnivory in mammals

Predator–prey relationships play a key role in the evolution and ecology of carnivores. An understanding of predator–prey relationships and how this differs across species and environments provides information on how carnivorous strategies have evolved and how they may change in response to environmental change. We aim to determine how mammals overcame the challenges of living within the marine environment; specifically, how this altered predator–prey body mass relationships relative to terrestrial mammals. Using predator and prey mass data collected from the literature, we applied phylogenetic piecewise regressions to investigate the relationship between predator and prey size across carnivorous mammals (51 terrestrial and 56 marine mammals). We demonstrate that carnivorous mammals have four broad dietary groups: small marine carnivores (< 11 000 kg) and small terrestrial carnivores (< 11 kg) feed on prey less than 5 kg and 2 kg, respectively. On average, large marine carnivores (> 11 000 kg) feed on prey equal to 0.01% of the carnivore's body size, compared to 45% or greater in large terrestrial carnivores (> 11 kg). We propose that differences in prey availability, and the relative ease of processing large prey in the terrestrial environment and small prey in marine environment, have led to the evolution of these novel foraging behaviours. Our results provide important insights into the selection pressures that may have been faced by early marine mammals and ultimately led to the evolution of a range of feeding strategies and predatory behaviours.
Factors Affecting Patient Adherence to Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy

OBJECTIVE: To determine the clinical and demographic variables related to adherence to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in patients treated in our hospital and identify the characteristics of nonadherent patients. METHODS: Outpatients receiving treatment with HAART (n = 283) were asked about variables related to adherence and to complete the APGAR (family support), State-Trait Anxiety questionnaire (STAI) (emotional situation), and IAS (social support) questionnaires. Patients were classified in 2 groups depending on whether adherence was ≥95% or <95%. Adherence was defined as the percentage of dosage forms prescribed that were obtained by the patient at the hospital pharmacy. A multivariate analysis was created to analyze how each significant variable affected adherence. RESULTS: Our data showed significant nonadherence for patients with the following factors: low level of education, unemployed, emotional situation, and abuse of substances including intravenous drugs. All significant variables were included in a logistic regression model to optimize the results. This model considered 4 variables: age (95% CI 0.89 to 0.99), number of antiretroviral drugs (95% CI 1.05 to 2.11), STAI Anxiety/Trait test (95% CI 2.02 to 6.02), and abuse of drugs (95% CI 1.20 to 3.95). CONCLUSIONS: We recommended special intervention to reinforce adherence for younger patients, patients taking a high number of antiretroviral drugs, those who have a history of intravenous drug use, and those with high anxiety status.
The Thickness of Musical Pitch

Do people who speak different languages think differently, even when they are not using language? To find out, we used nonlinguistic psychophysical tasks to compare mental representations of musical pitch in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as high (hoog) or low (laag), whereas Farsi speakers describe pitches as thin (na-zok) or thick (koloft). Differences in language were reflected in differences in performance on two pitch-reproduction tasks, even though the tasks used simple, nonlinguistic stimuli and responses. To test whether experience using language influences mental representations of pitch, we trained native Dutch speakers to describe pitch in terms of thickness, as Farsi speakers do. After the training, Dutch speakers’ performance on a nonlinguistic psychophysical task resembled the performance of native Farsi speakers. People who use different linguistic space-pitch metaphors also think about pitch differently. Language can play a causal role in shaping nonlinguistic representations of musical pitch.
Resource Allocation in Dynamic Environments

Abstract : This technical report examines two challenges related to resource allocation that can negatively affect system operation in a dynamic environment, where warfighter needs for resources, resource availability, environmental effects, and mission conditions can change from moment to moment. The first challenge occurs when warfighters overstate their individual needs of a shared resource, leading to inefficient allocation. Overstatement may bring local optimization; however, it can cause global inefficiencies that result in a detriment to overall mission success. This challenge is addressed by using computational mechanism design, more specifically, the dynamic Vickrey- Clark-Groves allocation mechanism. The second challenge involves resource availability that may change frequently. Such is the case in a wireless mesh network where routes and bandwidth may vary over even small intervals of time. In such a case, an adaptive quality of service (AQoS) approach is used, and the available resource is allocated using the Dynamic QoS-based Resource Allocation Model (DQ- RAM). Computational mechanism design is used to allocate sensors, and the AQoS approach allocates the available network bandwidth in a way consistent with the sensor allocation, providing an approach for dealing with resource allocation and adaptation in a dynamic environment. Initial experimental results of applying the approach are reported.
Rare case of combined factor V and factor X deficiency in pregnancy: presenting as secondary postpartum haemorrhage in first pregnancy and successful outcome in second pregnancy

Isolated factor V and factor X deficiency is a very rare condition affecting 1 in 500,000–1,000,000 persons worldwide. We present a rare first reported case of combined deficiency of factor V and factor X where the patient developed secondary postpartum haemorrhage in first pregnancy, after which she was diagnosed to have this rare disorder and her subsequent pregnancy was then successfully managed.
Manganese-enhanced MRI of human choroidal melanoma xenografts.

PURPOSE To test the hypothesis that the structure and function of an experimental human choroidal melanoma xenograft and neighboring non-tumor-bearing retina can be simultaneously assessed by using manganese-enhanced MRI (MEMRI). METHODS Spheroids grown from the human choroidal melanoma cell line C918 were implanted in the superior suprachoroidal space of 11 WAG/Nij-rnu nude rats. Two weeks later, MRI data were collected 4 hours after intraperitoneal injection of saline or MnCl(2), an MRI contrast agent that can act as a biomarker of cellular demand for ions, such as calcium. The following parameters were measured: (1) tumor signal intensity, (2) inner and outer retinal signal intensity in non-tumor-bearing inferior retina, and (3) whole and inner retinal thickness of inferior retina. Separate MEMRI experiments were performed on spheroids in vitro after MnCl(2) exposure and washing. RESULTS In vitro, spheroids exposed to MnCl(2) retained sufficient Mn(2+) to demonstrate contrast enhancement during MEMRI. In vivo, injection of MnCl(2) resulted in a 30% increase in tumor signal intensity compared with tumors in rats injected with saline (P < 0.05). In inferior retina of tumor-bearing eyes, outer retinal signal intensity increased by 17% relative to a similar region in control eyes (P < 0.05), but there was no change in the inferior inner retinal intensity. Total retinal thickness of the inferior retina in the tumor-bearing eyes increased by 8%, compared with that in the non-tumor-bearing eyes (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS The present identification of regions of enhanced Mn(2+) uptake in choroidal melanoma and a somewhat unexpected edema and increased outer retinal ion demand in neighboring non-tumor-bearing retina highlights MEMRI as a potentially powerful method for noninvasively monitoring tumor progression and treatment response and efficacy.
Creating An Educational Epistemology In The Multi-Media Narratives Of Living Educational Theories And Living Theory Methodologies.

Recent issues of Research Intelligence (102, 103, 104, 105, 107 & 109) have raised questions about limitations of printed, text base media such as BERJ for communicating the meanings of a relationally dynamic educational epistemology. There has also been much discussion in the AERA publication Educational Researcher (2009) about discourses on narrative research and about what constitutes educational research as distinct from education research. Schon (1995) called for the development of a new epistemology for the scholarship of teaching and Snow (2001) called for the development of methodologies for making public the professional knowledge of teachers. In a BERA 09 keynote symposium on an educational epistemology for educational knowledge, practitioner-researchers provided evidence-based narratives to justify their claims that the educational knowledge they generated, as distinct from researchers form the disciplines of education, had created and legitimated, within their doctoral enquiries, a relationally dynamic epistemology for educational knowledge.
Habitual pelvic posture and time spent sitting: Measurement test–retest reliability for the LUMOback device and preliminary evidence for slouched posture in individuals with low back pain

Objectives: It has been difficult to monitor the pelvic position during actual daily life. However, recent developments in wearable device technologies, such as the LUMOback device, provide the possibility to evaluate habitual pelvic posture and time spent sitting during daily life. The current study aimed (1) to investigate test–retest reliability for habitual pelvic posture and time spent sitting with the LUMOback in individuals with prolonged low back pain (low back pain group) and without low back pain (control group), and (2) to preliminarily investigate differences in those measures between groups. Methods: Fifteen individuals in each group wore the LUMOback daily for 2 weeks. Intraclass correlation coefficients were calculated in each group by comparing the mean from the first week with the mean from the second week: (1) for the posture score, which is a proportion of time with neutral posture, and (2) for time spent sitting. The two measures for the first week were compared between the low back pain and control groups. Results: The intraclass correlation coefficients for the posture score were . 82 in the low back pain group and . 91 in the control group. The intraclass correlation coefficients for time spent sitting were . 75 in the low back pain group and . 85 in the control group. The posture score in the low back pain group (mean ± SD: 37.5% ± 10.3%) was less than that in the control group (49.6% ± 6.0%; p < .001), but there was no difference in time spent sitting between the groups (p > .05). Conclusions: The current study found (1) acceptable test–retest reliability for the posture score and time spent sitting evaluated by the LUMOback device, and (2) preliminary evidence of a difference in the posture score, indicating a more slouched lumbopelvic posture in individuals with prolonged low back pain than those without low back pain.
Neuroendocrine Regulation of Fluid and Electrolyte Balance By Ovarian Steroids: Contributions From Central Oestrogen Receptors

Like other hormonally mediated mechanisms, maintenance of body fluid osmolality requires integrated responses from multiple signals at various tissue locales, a large number of which are open to modulation by circulating endocrine factors including the ovarian steroid, oestrogens (E2). However, the precise mechanism and the site of action of E2 in regulating fluid osmolality are not properly understood. More importantly, the biological significance of this action is not clear and the physiological circumstances in which this modulation is engaged remain incomplete. The demonstration of oestrogen receptors (ER) in neural tissues that bear no direct relation to reproduction led us to examine and characterise the expression of ER in brain nuclei that are critical for the maintenance of fluid osmolality. In the rat, ERβ is prominently expressed in the vasopressin magnocellular neuroendocrine cells of the hypothalamus, whereas ERα is localised extensively in the sensory circumventricular organ neurones in the basal forebrain. These nuclei are the primary brain sites that are engaged in defense of fluid perturbation, thus providing a neuroendocrine basis for oestrogenic influence on body fluid regulation. Plasticity in receptor expression that accompanies fluid disturbances at these central loci suggests the functional importance of the receptors and implicates E2 as one of the fluid regulating hormones in water homeostasis.
Stability boundaries of roll and square convection in binary fluid mixtures with positive separation ratio

Rayleigh–Bénard convection in horizontal layers of binary fluid mixtures heated from below with realistic horizontal boundary conditions is studied theoretically using multi-mode Galerkin expansions. For positive separation ratios the main difference between the mixtures and pure fluids lies in the existence of stable three-dimensional patterns near onset in a wide range of the parameter space. We evaluated the stationary solutions of roll, crossroll, and square convection and we determined the location of the stability boundaries for many parameter combinations thereby obtaining the Busse balloon for roll and square patterns.
Statistics of Core Lifetimes in Numerical Simulations of Turbulent, Magnetically Supercritical Molecular Clouds

We present measurements of the mean dense core lifetimes in numerical simulations of magnetically supercritical, turbulent, isothermal molecular clouds, in order to compare with observational determinations. "Prestellar" lifetimes are consistent with observationally reported values, ranging from a few to several free-fall times. We also present estimates of the fraction of cores in the "prestellar," "stellar," and "failed" (those cores that redisperse back into the environment) stages as a function of the threshold density used to define them, nthr. The number ratios are measured indirectly in the simulations, due to resolution limitations. Our approach contains one free parameter, the lifetime of a protostellar object, τyso (Class 0 + Class I stages), that is outside the realm of the simulations. Assuming a value of τyso = 0.46 Myr, we obtain number ratios of starless to stellar cores ranging from 4-5 at nthr = 1.5 × 104 cm-3 to ~1 at nthr = 1.2 × 105 cm-3, again in good agreement with observational determinations. We also find that the mass in the failed cores is comparable to that in stellar cores at nthr = 1.5 × 104 cm-3, but becomes negligible at nthr = 1.2 × 105 cm-3, in agreement with recent observational suggestions that at the latter densities the cores are in general gravitationally dominated. We conclude by noting that the timescale for core contraction and collapse is virtually the same in the subcritical, ambipolar diffusion-mediated model of star formation, in the model of star formation in turbulent supercritical clouds, and in a model intermediate between the previous two for currently accepted values of the clouds' magnetic criticality.
Global scheduling independent of control dependencies based on condition vectors

The authors present a global scheduling method based on condition vectors. The proposed method exploits global parallelism. The technique can schedule operations independent of control dependencies. It transforms the control structure of the given behavior drastically, while preserving semantics to minimize the number of states in final schedule. The method can parallelize multiple nests of conditional branches and optimize across the boundaries of basic blocks. It can also optimize all possible execution paths. An algorithm is proposed which generates a single finite state machine controller from parallel individual control sequences derived in the global parallelization process. Experimental results prove that the global parallelization is very effective. <<ETX>>
NeuroQuant® revealed hippocampal atrophy in a patient with traumatic brain injury.

Case Report At the time of the accident, he hit his occiput and suffered whiplash. He was dazed but did not lose consciousness. He had posttraumatic amnesia, headache, neck pain, and dizziness. In the emergency room, his Glasgow Coma Scale score was 15/15. Over the following days and weeks, he had multiple persistent neuropsychiatric symptoms, including distractibility, impaired short-term and long-term memory, impaired visuospatial abilities, insomnia, fatigue, and blurry vision. Neuropsychological testing confirmed impairments in memory and other cognitive abilities. Nine months after the accident, an MRI of the brain was interpreted in the traditional manner (that is, by visual inspection of the images) by the radiologist as showing two nonspecific T2 hyperintensities in the left frontal lobe. NeuroQuant volumetric analysis of the same MRI data revealed that total hippocampal volume was 4.37 cm, which was 0.29% of intracranial volume, falling below the first percentile, as compared with an age-matched normal-control group. The patient continued to work full-time at a job he had held for many years; however, his functioning was significantly impaired.
Three essays in the economics of information technology

The first chapter is to investigate the impact of a free on-line repository of research articles on the diffusion of their ideas measured by the citation counts. The key questions that this chapter answers are as following: 1) does a free on-line repository of research articles increase the diffusion of their scholarly ideas measured by their citations? ; 2) who benefits from the free access? By using a dataset from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), an open repository of research articles, and employing a natural experiment that allows the effect of free access separate from other confounding factors, this study identifies the causal effect of free access on the citation counts as well as shows a heterogeneous effect of free access on both supply and demand side. The second chapter is to study the correlation between CEO pay and information technology. The hypothesis is that IT increases "effective size" of the firm that a top manager controls and thus her marginal productivity. In turn, in an efficient market, the firms with a higher degree of information technology will reward their CEOs with a higher compensation. The third chapter is to examine whether firms that emphasize decision making based on data and business analytics ("data driven decision making" or DDD) show higher performance. Using detailed survey data on the business practices and information technology investments of 179 large publicly traded firms, this study finds that firms that adopt DDD have output and productivity that is 5-6% higher than what would be expected given their other investments and information technology usage. Furthermore, the relationship between DDD and performance also appears in other performance measures such as asset utilization, return on equity and market value. Using instrumental variables methods, this study finds evidence that the effect of DDD on the productivity do not appear to be due to reverse causality. These results provide some of the first large scale data on the direct connection between data-driven decision making and firm performance. Thesis Supervisor: Erik Brynjolfsson Title: Schussel Family Professor of Management Science, Professor of Information Technology, Director, The MIT Center for Digital Business
Recovery of Low Rank Symmetric Matrices via Schatten p Norm Minimization

In this paper, we give an application of the perturbation inequality to the low rank matrix recovery problem and provide a condition on the linear map of underdetermined linear system that every minimal rank symmetric matrix X ∈ ℝm×n can be exactly recovered from the linear measurement b = 𝒜(X) ∈ ℝq via some Schatten p0 norm minimization. Moreover it is shown that the explicit bound on exponent p0 in the Schatten p0 norm minimization can be exactly extracted.
The Family Pictures Test as a Measure of Impaired Feature Binding in Schizophrenia

We investigated the use of the Family Pictures test from the Wechsler Memory Scale III as a measure of the ability to bind the multiple features of a complex visual scene in a study group of 77 patients with schizophrenia and 44 healthy controls. Patients demonstrated impaired recall of all scene features as well as a reduction in the number of features recalled for each remembered character. Secondary analyses using patients and controls matched for character recall also showed reduced feature binding in the patient group. Such feature binding deficits likely implicate hippocampal dysfunction, consistent with neuroimaging evidence of structural and functional compromise of the medial temporal lobe in schizophrenia.
Expanding Training Data for Facial Image Super-Resolution

The quality of training data is very important for learning-based facial image super-resolution (SR). The more similarity between training data and testing input is, the better SR results we can have. To generate a better training set of low/high resolution training facial images for a particular testing input, this paper is the first work that proposes expanding the training data for improving facial image SR. To this end, observing that facial images are highly structured, we propose three constraints, i.e., the local structure constraint, the correspondence constraint and the similarity constraint, to generate new training data, where local patches are expanded with different expansion parameters. The expanded training data can be used for both patch-based facial SR methods and global facial SR methods. Extensive testings on benchmark databases and real world images validate the effectiveness of training data expansion on improving the SR quality.