Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mitochondrial DNA and morphological identification of Crassostrea zhanjiangensis sp. nov. (Bivalvia: Ostreidae): a new species in Zhanjiang, China

Cupped oysters (Ostreidae, genus Crassostrea) occupy nearshore marine and estuarine habitats worldwide, providing many ecosystem goods and services as well as being a commercially important group of bivalves. In this study, the species identification of an "adulterant" oyster with small body size, which is often misidentified as a "young individual" of other sympatric species, including C. sikamea and C. hongkongensis, was determined for the first time, based on molecular markers (partial mitochondrial cox1 and rrnL genes), phylogenetic analysis, and morphometric approaches. This novel species, C. zhanjiangensis, commonly known as the "cat ear oyster" in Guandu (a famous estuarine oyster farming region of Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, China), appears to potentially influence the efficiency of C. hongkongensis spat collection due to niche competition on spat collection devices. Phylogenetic analyses confirm its status as the most basal taxon of the Indo-Pacific Crassostrea. A comparative study of the shell characteristics of C. zhanjiangensis, and other Crassostrea species revealed several distinctive morphological traits, including a generally smaller body size, a deeply cupped left valve, and a right valve that is convex in adults but flat in young individuals. Other distinctive features of the new species include life cycle traits that are unique compared with the sympatric C. hongkongensis and C. sikamea species, such as a higher growth rate in the fast growth phase after settlement, followed by a significantly slower growth rate and mass mortality during subsequent life stages. This study provides the basic information necessary for further ecological and population genetic studies on this new species.
Up and Down: Regents' Costs Rise, Funding Drops in Iowa

For decades, general recognition of broad societal dividends from public higher education has driven higher education policy and funding. Generally, those dividends have been thought of in exclusively economic terms: higher individual earnings, increased income tax revenues and the like. Research suggests that the dividends of public higher education spill over into the social sphere as well: Higher education is correlated with robust democracies and civic engagement.
A possible contribution of mRNA secondary structure to translation initiation efficiency in Lactococcus lactis

Gene expression signals derived from Lactococcus lactis were linked to lacZ-fused genes with different 5'-nucleotide sequences. Computer predictions of mRNA secondary structure were combined with lacZ expression studies to direct base-substitutions that could possibly influence gene expression. Mutations were made such that the DNA sequence upstream of the ATG start codon was not changed. Moreover, care was taken that the substitutions, which were all within the first six codons, neither affected the amino acid sequence of the gene product nor introduced codons rarely used in L. lactis. The results suggest that mRNA secondary structure contributes to the efficiency of translation initiation in L. lactis.
Research on network invulnerability based on DWS model considering cascading failure in power data network

With the analysis of the actual structure property of data network in power grid, a network model based on a layered structure named DWS is introduced in this paper. In this DWS layered network featured with the tree structure, aiming to meet the requirements of network operation reliability, we combine the relative access distance with node degree for the nodes for lower levels to add redundant connections correspondingly. In order to evaluate the network invulnerability under the change of weight factor for relative access distance, the load redistribution and the impact of different node capacity redundancy are also considered to illustrate the typical cascading failure process. To note that, the scale in the remaining effective connected components after the deliberate attack is the major measurement of structural invulnerability. In the simulation, it has been illustrated that, with the improvement in the weight of relative access distance and in the capacity redundancy, the cascading failure impact on the layered network structure in the condition of heavy load is decreased obviously, which shows the better structural invulnerability and ensures the applicability of the data network model which we proposed.
Cardiac imaging: Part 1, MR pulse sequences, imaging planes, and basic anatomy.

OBJECTIVE MRI is a well-established modality for evaluating congenital and acquired cardiac diseases. This article reviews the latest pulse sequences used for cardiac MRI. In addition, the standard cardiac imaging planes and corresponding anatomy are described and illustrated. CONCLUSION Familiarity with the basic pulse sequences, imaging planes, and anatomy pertaining to cardiac MRI is essential to formulate optimal protocols and interpretations.
Supply and Demand for Terrorism Insurance: Lessons from Germany

In our article we consider insurance as a means of allocating terrorism risk. Terrorism poses a significant challenge for insurers worldwide. In terms of possible losses it fits into the same category as earthquakes and hurricanes. Yet as a result of the uncertainty surrounding these risks private markets face significant difficulties in providing insurance for it. In the insurance industry costly risk bearing can explain the supply of capacity risks. Corporate risk management theory provides reasons why transaction costs can motivate firms to purchase insurance. In the context of these tightly connected theories we derive models for both the supply of terrorism reinsurance and the demand for terrorism insurance. Using two datasets from the German terrorism insurer we estimate models on how corporations in Germany employ government sponsored insurance to manage their terrorism risk and on the factors that determine the supply for private market terrorism reinsurance.
Bank Leverage Cycles and the External Finance Premium

By combining the approaches of Gertler and Karadi (2011) and Bernanke et al. (1999), I develop a DSGE model with leverage constraints both in the banking and in the non-financial firm sector. I calibrate this full model to US data. In a world with only a monetary policy and a productivity shock, the full model matches the relative volatility of the external finance premium, while a BGG model generates too low volatility. The full model also matches the procyclicality of bank leverage, unlike the GK model. For a reasonably calibrated combination shocks to the net worth of banks and non-financial firms, the model reproduces a substantial share of the contraction (increase) of investment (the external finance premium) observed during the Great Recession.
Motor performance in Prader-Willi syndrome patients and its potential influence on caregiver’s quality of life

Background Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) is a complex, multisystem genetic disorder characterized by a variety of physical, cognitive, and behavioral impairments. PWS is a unique sarcopenia model characterized by an abnormal increase in body fat mass and a decrease in muscle mass that predisposes patients to reduced physical activity, functional limitations, and disability. These manifestations may require both symptomatic and supportive management, thus negatively influencing their lifelong family caregiver’s quality of life. The aim of this study was to examine the functional motor performance of adults with PWS in Taiwan and to measure the quality of life of their primary family caregivers. Methods The functional motor tests consisted of the following: (1) 30-s sit-to-stand test, (2) timed up-and-go test, (3) hand grip and lateral pinch strength tests, and (4) Berg Balance Scale. The World Health Organization Quality of Life-short form (WHOQOL-BREF) and the Short-Form 36 Health Survey Questionnaire (SF-36) were used to evaluate health-related quality of life, and the parenting stress index was used to assess the magnitude of stress within the parent-child system. Results The participants included seven adults (two females and five males) with genetically confirmed PWS and their respective main caregivers. The mean age of the adults with PWS was 25.28 years; range 18–31 years, SD 5.10; the mean BMI was 29.2 kg/m2, SD 6.43. All adults with PWS showed lower hand grip and lateral pinch strengths, fewer sit-to-stand cycles during the 30-s chair stand test, and greater average time during the timed up-and-go test when compared to the normative data on healthy adults. Balance was negatively correlated with the caregiver’s health concepts of social functioning (rs −0.879, P = 0.009) and with role limitations due to physical problems (rs −0.899, P = 0.006) and emotional problems (rs −0.794, P = 0.033); hand grip strength was negatively correlated with bodily pain (rs −0.800, P = 0.031), as assessed using the SF-36 questionnaire. The timed up-and-go test was positively correlated with the social relationship domain (rs 0.831, P = 0.021), as assessed using the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire. The parenting stress index showed no association with the PWS patient’s physical activities. Conclusions All adults with PWS showed decreased upper and lower limb strength and functional mobility when compared to healthy adults. Some of their motor performance might have negative effects on their primary family members in terms of social participation and physical and emotional role limitations. Future research should explore the relationship between physical performances, psychological difficulties of PWS and caregiver’s QOL.
A differentiated DBN model based on CRBM for time series forecasting

Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machine (CRBM) which adds connections from the last few time-steps to latent and visible variables has been successfully applied for modeling high-dimensional temporal sequences. Considering that the past time-steps observations are more important due to their certainty, in this paper, a differentiated Deep Belief Nets (DBN) model based on CRBM is proposed by introducing two differentiated parameters to improve the importance of past time-steps to achieve higher forecasting accuracy. Based on the proposed model, the energy function of CRBM is reformulated and the update rules of model parameters are induced correspondingly. The experiments verify the influence of differentiated parameters on the forecasting accuracy and illustrate that the proposed model using optimal differentiated parameters can achieve better forecasting performance.
Multi-Scale Analysis of the Web of Data: a Challenge to the Complex System's Community

The Web of Data (WoD) is an Internet-based network of data resources and their relations. It has recently taken flight and combines over a hundred interlinked data sources with more than 15 billion edges. A consequence of this recent success is that a paradigm shift has taken place: up to now the Web of Data could be studied, searched and maintained like a classical database; nowadays it has turned into a Complex System and needs to be studied as such. In this paper, we introduce the Web of Data as a challenging object of study and provide initial results on two network scales: the pure data-layer, and the global connection between groups data items. In this analysis, we show that the "official" abstract representation of the WoD does not fit the real distribution we derive from the lower scale. As interesting as these results are, bigger challenges for analysis await in the form of the highly dynamic character of the WoD, and the typed, and implicit, character of the edges which is, to the best of our knowledge, hitherto unstudied.
Weighted Least Squares Approximation by Orthogonal Polynomials with a Regularization Term

In this paper we consider weighted least squares approximation by orthogonal polynomials with a regularization term on $[-1,1]$. The models are better than classical least squares even most regularized least squares due to their lead to closed-form solutions. The closed-form solution for models with $\ell_2$-regularization term derive the closed-form expression of the Lebesgue constant for such an approximation. Moreover, we give bounds for the number of nonzero elements of the solution for models with $\ell_1$-regularization term, which shows the sparsity of the solution.
eveloping effective professional bus driver health programs : An investigation of elf-rated health

The health of professional bus drivers is a critical factor in their driving performance; any impairment may lead to undesired consequences. In an attempt to develop and prioritize health and wellness programs, this study investigates the factors significantly affecting the health conditions of professional bus drivers, as well as the strength of these factors. This study uses self-rated health as the examination measurement. This simple assessment is an inclusive measure of health status for judging health trajectory, and is highly associated with changes in functional ability, including perceived control over driving. This study evaluates driver responses of self-rated health with ordered response models that consider factors such as the driver reported health problems, physical and psychological conditions, demographic factors, driving experience, and working environment. Analysis of a sample of 785 drivers shows that age, body mass index, depression, daily working hours, perceived company safety culture, and health problems are the factors significantly affecting self-rated health. Depression has the greatest effect among all factors except health problems. Unlike the linear relationships for the other factors, the relationships between depression levels and perceived health are S-shaped. The results of ordered response models suggest that these influential factors have distinct effects on the self-rated health of individual drivers and on the different levels of self-rated health.
Blind image deconvolution using the Gaussian scale mixture fields of experts prior

In this paper, a blind image deconvolution method which is derived from Bayesian probabilistic framework is proposed. A robust prior named Gaussian Scale Mixture Fields of Experts (GSM FoE) and a prior that is constructed with the lp-norm (p ≈ 1.5) are adopted to regularize the latent image and the point spread function (PSF) respectively. We use a two phase optimization approach to solve the resulted maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimation problem, and a simple gradient selecting method is incorporated into the alternating minimization to improve the accuracy of the estimated PSF. Experiments on both synthetic and real world blurred images show that our method can achieve results with high quality.
UniMorph 2.0: Universal Morphology

The Universal Morphology UniMorph project is a collaborative effort to improve how NLP handles complex morphology across the world's languages. The project releases annotated morphological data using a universal tagset, the UniMorph schema. Each inflected form is associated with a lemma, which typically carries its underlying lexical meaning, and a bundle of morphological features from our schema. Additional supporting data and tools are also released on a per-language basis when available. UniMorph is based at the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and is sponsored by the DARPA LORELEI program. This paper details advances made to the collection, annotation, and dissemination of project resources since the initial UniMorph release described at LREC 2016. lexical resources} }
A Prolific Principle for Highly Immune E-VOTING conformity by using mixed cryptographic approach

: The paper proposes a secure internet voting protocol. The scheme ensures the voter‟s privacy and anonymity. The protocol integrates blind signature scheme, secret sharing technique and homomorphic encryption to ensure fair and fraud less voting. The voter identification and anonymity is solved by using public proxy server. The cryptographic approach securely transmits the vote of each voter in a high security lane. In the final phase of our protocol that begins with collection of votes; by using homomorphic encryption we have secretly processed all the ballots in an encrypted form only. Due to this approach only the final computed result is revealed in encrypted form which is intelligible by using Secret sharing scheme.
Image Enhancement Techniques

Image quality can be improved using different image enhancement techniques. It include different types of operations like image segmentation, smoothing, etc. Image segmentation is a process in which features having homogenous characteristics are identified. Here input is color image. The image gets converted into horizontal and vertical histogram. Then color clusters are formed using hill climbing technique and k means clustering. K Means clustering consider colour intensity as a feature. Sequential probability ratio test is use to check similarity of regions. Merging of region follows the nearest neighbor graph and dynamic region merging algorithm. Depending on homogenous properties partitions are merged. This merging will give the enhanced segmented image which is the final output. Nearest neighbour graph is used to increase the speed and efficiency of above process. This improved image is useful in the field of medical and security purpose.
Direct Vector Switching Control Technique for 3 Φ VSC for PFC

In the present Scenario the Reactive power in Transmission System is more because of which the operating effeciency is very less. Therefore in the Proposed Concept the design of SVPWM Control for a three-phase voltage source converter (VSC) which act as a Static Synchronous Compensators to provide reactive power compensation. SVPWM technique is provided with άβ frame. The VSC as STATCOM provide efficient damping for sub synchronous resonance that enhances the Power System Stability in addition to RPC. The different Pulse width modulation techniques like SPWM, THIPWM and SVPWM. Among the different PWM techniques SVPWM is implemented so as to achieve better digital realization and DC bus Utilization. The space vector control algorithm in VSC provides different functions such as reactive power compensation for Power factor correction, Harmonic Elimination, Load balancing for both linear and non-linear loads. The proposed method relies on nonlinear model of the VSC that accounts for uncertainty in three system parameters. The design ensures asymptotic tracking of q-axis current and dc-voltage reference trajectories. Modeling, Simulation and experimental results are done in MATLAB to verify the performance of the controller with respect to the vector control method.
Decomposition of Methyl Tert-Butyl Ether by Adding Hydrogen in a Cold Plasma Reactor

ABSTRACTMethyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) is extensively used as an oxygenate and octane enhancer in gasoline. Its release to the environment has generated great public and governmental concern. In this study, we give a brief review of the decomposition of air toxics by the application of radio frequency (RF) plasma reactors and then present our study on decomposition of methyl tert-butyl ether by adding hydrogen in a cold plasma reactor. Based on our references, there are four types of the application in the RF plasma reactors are discussed, including: (i) Application I. : Converting methane, decomposing carbon dioxide, ethoxyethane, and ethylene oxide; (ii) Application II. : Decomposing methyl chloride, 1,1-C2H2Cl2, and CH2Cl2; (iii) Application III. : Decomposing dichlorodifluoromethane, CHF3, CH2F2, CCl2F2, and BF3; (iv) Application IV. : Decomposing dichlorodifluoromethane, CH3SH, CS2, SF6, and SF6 + H2S mixture. Moreover, this study demonstrates the feasibility of applying a radio frequency (RF) plasma reactor for decomposing and converting MTBE. Experimental results indicate that the decomposition efficiency (ηMTBE) and the fraction of total input carbon converted into CH4, C2H2 and C2H4 (FCH4+C2H2+ C2H4) increased with the input power and decreased as both the H2/MTBE ratio and the MTBE influent concentration in the MTBE/H2/Ar plasma environment increased. Interestingly, applying radio frequency plasma to the decomposition of MTBE while adding hydrogen constitutes alternative method of decomposing and converting MTBE into CH4, C2H4, C2H2, iso-butane and iso-butene.
Enhancing Biometric Liveness Detection Using Trait Randomization Technique

Biometric Authentication Systems (BAS) have several security benefits over traditional password and token authentication including an inherent difficulty to copy, clone and share or distribute authentication credentials (biometric traits). Spoofing or presentation attack remains a major weakness of biometric systems and tackling it at the trait level is still challenging with several different approaches and methods applied in existing systems. In this paper, we focus on the well-known approach of Suspicious Presentation Detection (SPD) and present the Multi-Modal Random Trait Biometric Liveness Detection System (MMRTBLDS) that further mitigates spoofing or presentations attacks using randomization and combination of several different SPD detection techniques across three different modalities during trait capture. We discuss the detection of life using five distinct properties each from finger, face and eye modalities and present results from a simulation that highlights the improved security based on an impostor’s inability to accurately predict the combination of trait liveness properties the system might prompt and test for during capture.
Using AI to Hack IA: A New Stealthy Spyware Against Voice Assistance Functions in Smart Phones

Intelligent Personal Assistant (IA), also known as Voice Assistant (VA), has become increasingly popular as a human-computer interaction mechanism. Most smartphones have built-in voice assistants that are granted high privilege, which is able to access system resources and private information. Thus, once the voice assistants are exploited by attackers, they become the stepping stones for the attackers to hack into the smartphones. Prior work shows that the voice assistant can be activated by inter-component communication mechanism, through an official Android API. However, this attack method is only effective on Google Assistant, which is the official voice assistant developed by Google. Voice assistants in other operating systems, even custom Android systems, cannot be activated by this mechanism. Prior work also shows that the attacking voice commands can be inaudible, but it requires additional instruments to launch the attack, making it unrealistic for real-world attack. We propose an attacking framework, which records the activation voice of the user, and launch the attack by playing the activation voice and attack commands via the built-in speaker. An intelligent stealthy module is designed to decide on the suitable occasion to launch the attack, preventing the attack being noticed by the user. We demonstrate proof-of-concept attacks on Google Assistant, showing the feasibility and stealthiness of the proposed attack scheme. We suggest to revise the activation logic of voice assistant to be resilient to the speaker based attack.