Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Urbanization on Body Size, Condition, and Physiology in an Urban Exploiter: A Multi-Component Approach

Consistent expanding urbanization dramatically transforms natural habitats and exposes organisms to novel environmental challenges, often leading to reduced species richness and diversity in cities. However, it remains unclear how individuals are affected by the urban environment and how they can or cannot adjust to the specific characteristics of urban life (e.g. food availability). In this study, we used an integrative multi-component approach to investigate the effects of urbanization on the nutritional status of house sparrows (Passer domesticus). We assessed several morphological and physiological indices of body condition in both juveniles (early post-fledging) and breeding adults from four sites with different levels of urbanization in France, Western Europe. We found that sparrows in more urbanized habitats have reduced body size and body mass compared to their rural conspecifics. However, we did not find any consistent differences in a number of complementary indices of condition (scaled mass index, muscle score, hematocrit, baseline and stress-induced corticosterone levels) between urban and rural birds, indicating that urban sparrows may not be suffering nutritional stress. Our results suggest that the urban environment is unlikely to energetically constrain adult sparrows, although other urban-related variables may constrain them. On the other hand, we found significant difference in juvenile fat scores, suggesting that food types provided to young sparrows differed highly between habitats. In addition to the observed smaller size of urban sparrows, these results suggest that the urban environment is inadequate to satisfy early-life sparrows’ nutritional requirements, growth, and development. The urban environment may therefore have life-long consequences for developing birds.
Thermal Aggregation of Recombinant Protective Antigen: Aggregate Morphology and Growth Rate

The thermal aggregation of the biopharmaceutical protein recombinant protective antigen (rPA) has been explored, and the associated kinetics and thermodynamic parameters have been extracted using optical and environmental scanning electron microscopies (ESEMs) and ultraviolet light scattering spectroscopy (UV-LSS). Visual observations and turbidity measurements provided an overall picture of the aggregation process, suggesting a two-step mechanism. Microscopy was used to examine the structure of aggregates, revealing an open morphology formed by the clustering of the microscopic aggregate particles. UV-LSS was used and developed to elucidate the growth rate of these particles, which formed in the first stage of the aggregation process. Their growth rate is observed to be high initially, before falling to converge on a final size that correlates with the ESEM data. The results suggest that the particle growth rate is limited by rPA monomer concentration, and by obtaining data over a range of incubation temperatures, an approach was developed to model the aggregation kinetics and extract the rate constants and the temperature dependence of aggregation. In doing so, we quantified the susceptibility of rPA aggregation under different temperature and environmental conditions and moreover demonstrated a novel use of UV spectrometry to monitor the particle aggregation quantitatively, in situ, in a nondestructive and time-resolved manner.
Should the threshold for a generalised HIV epidemic be 1% or 5%?

The differential spread of an infectious disease provides important clues as to the underlying determinants of the spread of that disease. As an example, John Snow elegantly demonstrated how one’s probability of contracting cholera in London in 1849 was heavily influenced by the water company that supplied water to one’s house. HIV’s spread around the world has been highly varied. As shown in Figure 1, the peak HIV prevalence in most countries has never gone above 1% but in 20 countries it is greater than or equal to 5%. What can these differences in HIV spread teach us? UNAIDS and others make a cogent case that there are two kinds of drivers of higher national HIV prevalence. In concentrated epidemics, HIV is primarily restricted to subpopulations such as injecting drug users, men who have sex with men and sex workers. In generalised HIV epidemics (GHEs), HIV is:
Tuning Your Priors to the World

The idea that perceptual and cognitive systems must incorporate knowledge about the structure of the environment has become a central dogma of cognitive theory. In a Bayesian context, this idea is often realized in terms of "tuning the prior"-widely assumed to mean adjusting prior probabilities so that they match the frequencies of events in the world. This kind of "ecological" tuning has often been held up as an ideal of inference, in fact defining an "ideal observer. " But widespread as this viewpoint is, it directly contradicts Bayesian philosophy of probability, which views probabilities as degrees of belief rather than relative frequencies, and explicitly denies that they are objective characteristics of the world. Moreover, tuning the prior to observed environmental frequencies is subject to overfitting, meaning in this context overtuning to the environment, which leads (ironically) to poor performance in future encounters with the same environment. Whenever there is uncertainty about the environment-which there almost always is-an agent's prior should be biased away from ecological relative frequencies and toward simpler and more entropic priors.
Association between alcohol-induced osteonecrosis of femoral head and risk variants of MMPS in Han population based on a case-control study

The study aimed to evaluate the association between MMP gene superfamily and alcohol-induced osteonecrosis of femoral head (alcohol-induced ONFH) risk given its high prevalence, poor therapeutic effect, and serious clinical prognosis. 308 subjects (mean age, 49.47 years; males, 64.0%) who participated in our control group and 300 alcohol-induced ONFH patients (mean age, 43.29 years; males, 99.7%) formed the case group was enrolled to estimate by statistical analysis. We selected 23 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from MMPs, and performed the chi-squared test, Fisher's exact test, t-test and genetic model analyses. From the result, rs243849 which located in MMP2 were 1.355 (1.014-1.811), 1.34 (1.01-1.78) in allele model and log-addictive model, respectively. And the p-value of rs243849 in Cochran-Armitage trend test is 0.044. Unfortunately, the similar results of these SNPs were not observed when adjusted by gender and age. Our study is not enough to supply a positive result to benefit for alcohol-induced ONFH clinical prevention, but guide out a new direction for further experiment.
State and Class in Africa: A Case for Extending Analyses of the Form and Functions of the National State to the Urban Local State

Four alternative theoretical approaches to analysing the form of the national state are outlined, their use in studies of African countries noted, and their appropriateness assessed, to provide background for a consideration of the possible utility of the concept of a local state in analysing African urban situations. Instrumentalist views of the national state In Africa are now less widely used than structuralist approaches, and so structuralist approaches have been considered in more detail, A review is presented of the findings of recent studies with respect to the form of the state and the class structure and processes of class formation in developmentalist African states, with particular reference to urban areas. The functions of the state in general terms at national and local levels are discussed, by use of Sandbrook's categorisation of development strategies in Africa. In the absence of studies of urban local government in Africa within the theoretical framework provided by debates on the form and functions of the state, some work on the functions of the local state in the United Kingdom is reviewed, and an initial assessment made of the extent to which the local state in Africa fulfils the same functions and has a similar, albeit limited, degree of autonomy from the national state. It is concluded that there is a case for focusing enquiry on subnational levels of the state in Africa, including the urban local state, and that structuralist views of the form and functions of the national state may be extended to providing a theoretical analysis at the local level, providing that the continuously changing nature and functions of the state, the dynamism and ambiguity of evolving class structures, and the importance of nonclass interests and identities are recognised.
Security and performance of continuous-variable quantum key distribution systems. (Performance et sécurité de dispositifs de distribution quantique de clés à variables continues)

This thesis focuses on a cryptographic primitive that allows two distant parties to generate an arbitrary amount of secret key even in the presence of an eavesdropper, provided that they share a short initial secret message. We focus our study on continuous-variable protocols and demonstrate experimentally an all-fiber system that performs distribution of secret keys at 80 km on a dedicated fiber link while taking into account all known imperfections. We could extract secret keys at such a distance bydesigning specific error correcting codes that perform very close to Shannon’s bound for low signal to noise ratios. We also consider side-channel attacks that are not taken into account into the system security proof and propose some countermeasures. Finally, we study our system compability with intense communication channels that propagate on the same optical fiber.
Living on the Edge: Demography of the Slender-Billed Gull in the Western Mediterranean

Small and peripheral populations are typically vulnerable to local extinction processes but important for the metapopulation dynamics of species. The Slender-billed gull (Chroicocephalus genei) is a long-lived species breeding in unstable ephemeral coastal habitats. Their Western Mediterranean populations are relatively small and represent the edge of their global geographical distribution. At a local scale, using long-term data (14 years) on annual breeding success and capture-resights of marked individuals, we estimated and compared the vital rates and evaluated the connectivity of two Spanish populations (Ebro Delta and Doñana) varying in their local environmental conditions. At a metapopulation scale, we analyzed 22 years of data on breeding numbers to predict their future prospects by means of population demographic models. Local survival and breeding success of gulls from the Ebro Delta was lower than those from Doñana, which is likely the result of higher permanent emigration and/or winter mortality in the former. Gulls from the Ebro Delta wintered mostly in Mediterranean areas whereas those from Doñana did so in Atlantic coasts, where food availability is higher. Whereas adult local survival was constant, juvenile local survival showed temporal parallel variations between colonies, probably related to natal dispersal to other breeding colonies. Our results suggested that dispersal was higher at the Ebro Delta and gulls emigrating from their natal colonies settled preferentially in close patches. We found large fluctuations in breeding numbers among local populations probably related to the fact that the Slender-billed gull is a species adapted to unstable and unpredictable habitats with high abilities to disperse between suitable patches depending on environmental stochastic conditions during breeding.
Phonetic imitation, accent, and the learner

This work is concerned with the acquisition of the phonetic characteristics of languages and dialects, and with the issue of learner talent or individual achievement in learning second languages. Following a survey of the literature on language learning limits, it is argued that the concentration on group trends in most of the existing literature, whilst convenient, serves more to obscure the reasons for the difficulties experienced by most non-child language learners than to explain them. A model of acquisition and communication combining both acquisition and sociolinguistic theory is presented. The central argument of the model is the view that most acquisition and use of the phonetic and phonological characteristics of a language occurs within an imitative (modelling and response) framework. The development of language skills in the infant and child and the acquisition of the first language is discussed. The interaction of established perceptual and productional representations with new phonetic input is also examined in terms of bilingualism, accent mixing and accent change. The concept of foreign accent is described in light of cultural and scientific differences in definition. It is argued that foreign accent is very much in the ear of the beholder, as listeners impose expectations and pronunciation or stylistic norms which the non-native speaker (or other native speakers) may not have been exposed to, or have mastered. It is also observed that listeners’ judgements of accent are susceptible to the influence of other factors such as information about the speaker, the experimental task, or the presence of specific errors or other accents. Current theories of sound learning (SLM, PAM) are presented and the evidence for or against is examined. A survey of experimental data leads to the conclusion that the models, whilst providing useful information and attractive approaches to explaining some learning behaviour, are insufficient, as they assume that age and experience are the only important determiners of achievement. A model is then proposed which incorporates attentional, feedback, modelling, and representational mechanisms as a framework for learner behaviour, and emphasises the learner-specific potential of these mechanisms. In the experimental section, a group of phonetically talented subjects imitated first language (Swedish) dialects and second languages with both immediate and delayed models. These imitations were assessed by native listeners and their accent judgements and comments are presented. It is observed that, contrary to claims in the literature, some subjects can learn to pronounce languages and dialects with no perceptible foreign accent, although there is wide variation in the data, both in terms of listener agreement, and with regard to degree of accent in the imitators’ productions. A number of observations are made regarding sound learning, the perception of accent, and the measures and norms which can reasonably be applied to learner performance and competence.
Comparing Classroom Enactments of an Inquiry Curriculum: Lessons Learned From Two Teachers

Abstract Examining how teachers structure the activities in a unit and how they facilitate classroom discussion is important to understand how innovative technology-rich curricula work in the context of classroom instruction. This study compared 2 enactments of an inquiry curriculum, then examined students' learning outcomes in classes taught by 2 teachers. The quantitative data show that there were significant differences in the learning outcomes of students in classes of the 2 teachers. This study then examined classroom enactments by the 2 teachers to understand the differences in the learning outcomes. This research specifically focused on how teacher-led discussions (a) helped connect the activities within a curriculum unit and (b) enabled deeper conceptual understanding by helping students make connections between science concepts and principles. This study examined the role that teacher facilitation played in helping students focus on the relations between the various activities in the unit and the concepts that they were learning. The results point to important differences in the 2 enactments, helping to understand better what strategies might enable a deeper conceptual understanding of the science content.
Pilot contamination is not a fundamental asymptotic limitation in massive MIMO

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) provides great improvements in spectral efficiency over legacy cellular networks, by coherent combining of the signals over a large antenna array and by spatial multiplexing of many users. Since its inception, the coherent interference caused by pilot contamination has been believed to be an impairment that does not vanish, even with an unlimited number of antennas. In this work, we show that this belief is incorrect and an artifact from using simplistic channel models and suboptimal signal processing schemes. We focus on the uplink and prove that with multicell MMSE combining, the spectral efficiency grows without bound as the number of antennas increases, even under pilot contamination, under a condition of linear independence between the channel covariance matrices. This condition is generally satisfied, except in special cases that are hardly found in practice.
On the construction of maximum-quality aggregation trees in deadline-constrained WSNs

In deadline-constrained data aggregation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the imposed sink deadline in an interference-limited network hinders participation of all sensor nodes in data aggregation. Thus, a subset of nodes can contribute in aggregation and quality of aggregation (QoA) increases with the growth of the number of participating nodes. Scheduling the nodes' transmissions is a central problem, which aims to maximize the QoA, while satisfying the sink deadline, i.e., on-time delivery of the sensed data to the sink node. Although the previous studies have proposed optimal scheduling algorithms to this problem given a particular aggregation tree, there is no work on constructing optimal tree in this context. The underlying aggregation tree can make a big difference on QoA since we demonstrate that the ratio between the maximum achievable QoAs of different trees could be as large as O(2D), where D is the sink deadline. In this paper, we cast an optimization problem to address optimal tree construction for deadline-constrained data aggregation in WSNs. The problem is combinatorial in nature and difficult to solve as we prove its NP-hardness. We employ Markov approximation framework and devise two distributed algorithms with different computation overheads to find bounded close-to-optimal solutions. Simulation experiments in a set of representative randomly-generated scenarios show that the proposed algorithms significantly improve QoA by 101% and 93% on average compared to the best, to our knowledge, existing alternative methods.
Russian Orthodoxy Under the Old Regime

Interestingly, russian orthodoxy under the old regime that you really wait for now is coming. It's significant to wait for the representative and beneficial books to read. Every book that is provided in better way and utterance will be expected by many peoples. Even you are a good reader or not, feeling to read this book will always appear when you find it. But, when you feel hard to find it as yours, what to do? Borrow to your friends and don't know when to give back it to her or him.
Human perception based color image quantization

We present a new algorithm for color image quantization based on human color perception properties. We construct two kinds of map by analyzing the spatial color distributions to take account of the human visual system: homogeneity map (H-map) and distinctiveness map (D-map). Then, we assign weight value to all color vectors by combining these maps to consider two factors at the same time. To extract representative colors, we define a new cost function and use the LKMA (local k-means algorithm) with weighted color vectors. In this stage, we utilize an incremental splitting scheme with a penalty term to determine optimal number of clusters adaptively. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reproduces an image preserving significant local features while removing unimportant details of an original image from the viewpoint of human.
Learning a Predictive Model for Music Using PULSE

Predictive models for music are studied by researchers of algorithmic composition, the cognitive sciences and machine learning. They serve as base models for composition, can simulate human prediction and provide a multidisciplinary application domain for learning algorithms. A particularly well established and constantly advanced subtask is the prediction of monophonic melodies. As melodies typically involve non-Markovian dependencies their prediction requires a capable learning algorithm. In this thesis, I apply the recent feature discovery and learning method PULSE to the realm of symbolic music modeling. PULSE is comprised of a feature generating operation and L1-regularized optimization. These are used to iteratively expand and cull the feature set, effectively exploring feature spaces that are too large for common feature selection approaches. I design a general Python framework for PULSE, propose task-optimized feature generating operations and various music-theoretically motivated features that are evaluated on a standard corpus of monophonic folk and chorale melodies. The proposed method significantly outperforms comparable state-of-the-art models. I further discuss the free parameters of the learning algorithm and analyze the feature composition of the learned models. The models learned by PULSE afford an easy inspection and are musicologically interpreted for the first time.
Extraction and Analysis of Structural Features of Lateral Ventricle in Brain Medical Images

Structural characteristics of lateral ventricle in brain medical images from CT scan can be helpful for distinguishing between normal brain structure and abnormal brain structure. This paper presents image processing algorithms for automatic segmentation and measurement of structural features of lateral ventricle in brain medical images. the effectiveness of such features on brain structure discrimination is also examined. Experimental results show that structural features of lateral ventricle in brain medical images, including Frontal Horn Radius and Ventricular Index, are useful for discriminating between normal and abnormal brain structure.
Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware

As main memory grows, query performance is more and more determined by the raw CPU costs of query processing itself. The classical iterator style query processing technique is very simple and exible, but shows poor performance on modern CPUs due to lack of locality and frequent instruction mispredictions. Several techniques like batch oriented processing or vectorized tuple processing have been proposed in the past to improve this situation, but even these techniques are frequently out-performed by hand-written execution plans. In this work we present a novel compilation strategy that translates a query into compact and efficient machine code using the LLVM compiler framework. By aiming at good code and data locality and predictable branch layout the resulting code frequently rivals the performance of hand-written C++ code. We integrated these techniques into the HyPer main memory database system and show that this results in excellent query performance while requiring only modest compilation time.