Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Repeatability and correlation of physiological traits: Do ectotherms have a “thermal type”?

Abstract Across a range of taxa, individuals within a species differ in suites of correlated traits. These trait complexes, known as syndromes, can have dramatic evolutionary consequences as they do not evolve independently but rather as a unit. Current research focuses primarily on syndromes relating to aspects of behavior and life history. What is less clear is whether physiological traits also form a syndrome. We measured 10 thermal traits in the delicate skink, Lampropholis delicata, to test this idea. Repeatability was calculated and their across‐context correlations evaluated. Our results were in alignment with our predictions in that individual thermal traits varied consistently and were structured into a physiological syndrome, which we are referring to as the thermal behavior syndrome (TBS). Within this syndrome, lizards exhibited a “thermal type” with each being ranked along a cold–hot continuum. Hot types had faster sprint speeds and higher preferred body temperatures, whereas the opposite was true for cold types. We conclude that physiological traits may evolve as a single unit driven by the need to maintain optimal temperatures that enable fitness‐related behaviors to be maximized.
AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE DISSIPATIVE STOCHASTIC MECHANICS BASED NEURON MODEL UNDER NOISY INPUT CURRENTS

In this paper, it is attempted to look into the dissipative stochastic mechanics based neuron model under noisy input currents. Spe- cifically, it is concentrated on the role of input noise with reference to the renormalization terms in the model. The investigation shows that the use of noise in the inputs can improve the spiking rates and the spike coherence values, especially in the presence of the renormalization terms.
Gaze-based interaction for semi-automatic photo cropping

We present an interactive method for cropping photographs given minimal information about important content location, provided by eye tracking. Cropping is formulated in a general optimization framework that facilitates adding new composition rules, and adapting the system to particular applications. Our system uses fixation data</ to identify important image content and compute the best crop for any given aspect ratio or size, enabling applications such as automatic snapshot recomposition, adaptive documents, and thumbnailing. We validate our approach with studies in which users compare our crops to ones produced by hand and by a completely automatic approach. Experiments show that viewers prefer our gaze-based crops to uncropped images and fully automatic crops.
A population-based study of cognitive decline and peripheral inflammatory gene expression

Neuroinflammation has a key role in the pathology of cognitive decline. This study sought to determine whether peripherally expressed inflammatory transcripts had significant associations with cognitive performance or cognitive decline, using genome-wide and focussed candidate gene analyses. The study used data from 691 participants from the InCHIANTI study of ageing. Participants had undertaken Mini-Mental State Examinations at enrolment and at year 9 of follow-up, and provided peripheral whole blood samples for RNA extraction at year 9. Global gene expression data was generated using the Illumina Human HT12 BeadChip microarray. The study analysed global and inflammatory-focussed gene expression associations with cognitive performance and decline, and gene pathway associations with cognitive performance/decline. A candidate-driven RT-PCR expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) analysis was also performed to determine whether genetic variants associated with cognitive decline affected gene expression abundance in association with phenotypic variation. Raised expression of a single transcript, C-C chemokine receptor 2 (CCR2), had a significant association with poor cognitive performance at global expression analysis and with both cognitive performance and cognitive decline in focussed inflammatory subset analysis. Expression of CCR2 in transgenic animals has previously been associated with both cortical Alzheimer disease pathology and peripheral vascular disease. eQTL analysis identified five significant eQTLs for local genes but no significant associations between peripheral expression of these genes and cognitive decline. This study’s analyses present little evidence that peripheral inflammatory gene expression is playing a significant role in cognitive impairment or preceding 9-year cognitive decline in this cohort. Only one inflammatory transcript (CCR2) was significantly associated with cognitive impairment at genome-wide analysis. The CCR2 knockout mouse has been shown to have Alzheimer’s-like pathology; results of this study indicate that the mouse model may have relevance for the human population.
About automatic learning for advanced sensing, monitoring and control of electric power systems

The paper considers the possible uses of automatic learning for improving power system performance by software methodologies. Automatic learning per se is first reviewed and recent developements of the field are highlighted. Then the authors’ views of its main actual or potential applications related to power system operation and control are described, and in each application present status and needs for further developments are discussed.
Genome-Wide Association Study of Orthostatic Hypotension and Supine-Standing Blood Pressure Changes in Two Korean Populations

Orthostatic hypotension (OH) is defined by a 20-mm Hg difference of systolic blood pressure (dtSBP) and/or a 10-mm Hg difference of diastolic blood pressure (dtDBP) between supine and standing, and OH is associated with a failure of the cardiovascular reflex to maintain blood pressure on standing from a supine position. To understand the underlying genetic factors for OH traits (OH, dtSBP, and dtDBP), genome-wide association studies (GWASs) using 333,651 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were conducted separately for two population-based cohorts, Ansung (n = 3,173) and Ansan (n = 3,255). We identified 8 SNPs (5 SNPs for dtSBP and 3 SNPs for dtDBP) that were repeatedly associated in both the Ansung and Ansan cohorts and had p-values of <1 × 10-5 in the meta-analysis. Unfortunately, the SNPs of the OH case control GWAS did not pass our p-value criteria. Four of 8 SNPs were located in the intergenic region of chromosome 2, and the nearest gene (CTNNA2) was located at 1 Mb of distance. CTNNA2 is a linker between cadherin adhesion receptors and the actin cytoskeleton and is essential for stabilizing dendritic spines in rodent hippocampal neurons. Although there is no report about the function in blood pressure regulation, hippocampal neurons interact primarily with the autonomic nervous system and might be related to OH. The remaining SNPs, rs7098785 of dtSBP trait and rs6892553, rs16887217, and rs4959677 of dtDBP trait were located in the PIK3AP1 intron, ACTBL2-3' flanking, STAR intron, and intergenic region, respectively, but there was no clear functional link to blood pressure regulation.
Demystifying Spasticity: Reply to Dietz.

reply: I was glad to read Dr. Volker Dietz's recent letter to the editor ([Dietz 2007][1]) comparing his work on spasticity in humans to my studies of spasticity in the sacral spinal rat ([Bennett et al. 2004][2]). His comments highlight many of the confusions that have shrouded the study of
The effect of smoothing in language models for novelty detection

The novelty task consists of finding relevant and novel sentences in a ranking of documents given a query. In the literature, different techniques have been applied to address this problem. Nevertheless, little is known about Language Models for novelty detection and, especially, the effect of smoothing on the selection of novel sentences. Language Models can be used to study novelty and relevance in a principled way. These statistical models have been shown to perform well empirically in many Information Retrieval tasks. In this work we study formally the effects of smoothing on novelty detection. To this aim, we compare different techniques based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence and we analyze the sensitivity of retrieval performance to the smoothing parameters. The ability of Language Modeling estimation methods to handle quantitatively the uncertainty associated to the use of natural language is a powerful tool that can drive the future development of novelty-based mechanisms.
Parallel Quantum Computation and Quantum Codes

We study the class QNC of efficient parallel quantum circuits, the quantum analog of NC. We exhibit several useful gadgets and prove that various classes of circuits can be parallelized to logarithmic depth, including circuits for encoding and decoding standard quantum error-correcting codes, or, more generally, any circuit consisting of controlled-not gates, controlled $\pi$-shifts, and Hadamard gates. Finally, while we note the exact quantum Fourier transform can be parallelized to linear depth, we conjecture that neither it nor a simpler "staircase" circuit can be parallelized to less than this.
Assessing Hidden Bias in the Estimation of Causal Effect in Longitudinal Data by Using a Matching Estimator with

Some social, economic, and behavioral outcomes are affected by natural experiments, or treatments that take place not by design but by natural occurrences. Treatment effects in natural experimental settings or observational studies are difficult to assess because there may be potential selection bias generated by hidden confounders and because counterfactuals are unobservable, regardless of how many control variables the analyst includes in the model. Whilst panel data in general allow the researcher to better gauge causal effects and factor into individual heterogeneity, they are not immune to possible hidden bias. This paper attempts to assess such potential hidden bias of teenage births, a natural " treatment " event, on an outcome variable such as the mother's postnatal mental wellbeing. When there is no hidden bias, propensity score matching provides an estimate of the treatment effect on an outcome variable. However, matching methods are not robust against hidden bias arising from unobserved variables simultaneously affecting assignment to treatment and the outcome variable. A viable strategy to deal with the problem is the Rosenbaum bounds approach, which provides a " worst-case " scenario. The bounds convey important information about the level of uncertainty contained in matching estimators by showing just how large the influence of a hidden confounder must be to undermine the conclusions of an analysis based on matched data. The first 10 waves of the British Household Panel Survey data are used to estimate the bounds, thus the sensitivity, of the " treatment " effects of teenage motherhood on postnatal mental wellbeing to see how robust these effects are in various years from births.
An Experimental Analysis of Ending Rules in Internet Auctions

A great deal of late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as eBay, which employ a second price auction with a fixed deadline. Much less late bidding has been observed on internet auctions such as those run by Amazon, which employ similar auction rules, but use an ending rule that automatically extends the auction if necessary after the scheduled close until ten minutes have passed without a bid. This paper reports an experiment that allows us to examine the effect of the different ending rules under controlled conditions, without the other differences between internet auction houses that prevent unambiguous interpretation of the field data. We find that the difference in auction ending rules is sufficient by itself to produce the differences in late bidding observed in the field data. The experimental data also allow us to examine how individuals bid in relation to their private values, and how this behavior is shaped by the different opportunities for learning provided in the auction conditions.
Graph-based Semantic Relatedness for Named Entity Disambiguation

Natural Language is a mean to express and discuss about concepts, objects, events, i.e. it carries semantic contents. The Semantic Web aims at tightly coupling contents with their precise meanings. One of the ultimate roles of Natural Language Processing techniques is identifying the meaning of the text, providing effective ways to make a proper linkage between textual references and real world objects. This work adresses the problem of giving a sense to proper names in a text, that is automatically associating words representing Named Entities with their identities. The proposed methodology for Named Entity Disambiguation is based on Semantic Relatedness Scores obtained with a graph based model over Wikipedia. We show that, without building a Bag of Words representation of text, but only considering named entities within the text, the proposed paradigm achieves results competitive with the state of the art on a news story dataset.
Key Processes for Fabrication of the MIT Microengine

These lecture notes address issues of the processes required to fabricate the MIT microengine. Three key process steps are examined: Deep reactive ion etching, silicon direct wafer bonding and the fabrication process chain for Si/SiC hybrid structures. A design of experiments approach was taken to characterize the deep reactive ion etching process. A mechanics framework was established for wafer bonding. Key factors in the fabrication of Si/SiC hybrid structures have been identified as: deposition of low residual stress SiC, planarization by polishing processes, and use of a SiO2 interlayer to permit bonding.
MEASUREMENT OF USER SATISFACTION WITH ENTERPRISE PORTALS : AN EMPIRICAL STUDY 1

Advances in new information technology have considerably changed the end user computer environment. Therefore, it is appropriate to revalidate existing user satisfaction measurement instruments. Doll and Torkzadeh (1988) developed an instrument that measured end user satisfaction with, now 20year old, information systems and which has been widely cited and used. This pilot study revalidates their measurement instrument on a novel, searchdriven enterprise portal.
Lyapunov stability analysis of linear time-invariant systems: Convex optimization approach

Theorem of alternatives based on the separation theorems are proposed to provide systematic and unified proofs of necessary and sufficient conditions for solvability of Lyapunov inequality on P. As an application of the theorem of alternatives, we investigate the conditions for the existence of feasible solutions to Lyapunov inequality on P and obtain a restatement of the celebrated Lyapunov stability theorem for linear time-invariant systems.
Analyzing DNA Microarrays with Undergraduate Statisticians

With advances in technology, biologists have been saddled with high dimensional data that need modern statistical methodology for analysis. DNA microarrays are able to simultaneously measure thousands of genes (and the activity of those genes) in a single sample. Biologists use microarrays to trace connections between pathways or to identify all genes that respond to a signal. The statistical tools we usually teach our undergraduates are inadequate for analyzing thousands of measurements on tens of samples. The project materials include readings on microarrays as well as computer lab activities. The topics covered include image analysis, filtering and normalization techniques, and statistical methods. The course materials are designed for someone with little or no statistical background, but due to the novel concepts covered, they could easily be adjusted to accommodate students with practically any background. BACKGROUND It is apparent from headlines in national newspapers and magazines that recent discoveries in genetics and molecular biology are changing the way we think about medicine, health, pharmaceuticals, and human life. The results of the human genome project have allowed biologists to study the way different organisms work at the genetic level. One recent technological innovation is the microarray: a laboratory chip designed to simultaneously measure activity of thousands of genes in a single sample simultaneously. By comparing multiple samples, we can identify which genes act differently between types of samples (e.g., which genes are different in healthy vs. cancerous tissue samples.) Measuring thousands of genes on tens or hundreds of samples, however, induces statistical and computational difficulties with which biologists (or statisticians, to some extent) have not previously had to deal. New statistical techniques are constantly being developed to address the issues associated with microarrays, but there is still a gap in the implementation of such techniques by biologists. In particular, there is little or no work being done on educating undergraduate students of statistics in topics such as microarray analysis or bioinformatics. It seems as though biologists are aware of the need for quantitative methods, and they are working toward educating themselves and their students. Hack and Kendall (2005) report, “If
Heart failure mortality compared between elderly and non-elderly Thai patients

Objective To investigate heart failure mortality compared between elderly and non-elderly Thai patients. Methods This study included patients at least 18 years of age who were admitted to the hospital with a primary diagnosis of heart failure (ICD-10-TM code: 150.9) during 2008–2012 according to three major Thailand reimbursement systems (civil servant, social security, and universal coverage systems). Patients were categorized into either the elderly group (age > 65 years) or the non-elderly group (age ≤ 65 years). Mortality rate and survival analysis were compared between groups. Demographic, underlying disease and comorbid condition data were collected. Cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular death was also analyzed. Results A total of 201,709 patients were included. The average age of patients was 64.9 ± 14.8 years, and the gender proportion breakdown was 84,155 (41.7%) males and 117,554 (58.3%) females. Just over half of patients (107,325 patients; 53.2%) were elderly. Overall mortality rate was 50.8%. The mortality rate at one month, six months, one year, and three years was 11.0%, 24.5%, 32.5%, and 46.3%, respectively. Elderly patients had a higher rate of mortality compared to non-elderly patients with an adjusted odds ratio (OR) of 1.47 (95% CI: 1.46–1.49) for all-cause mortality, an OR of 1.25 (95% CI: 1.23–1.27) for cardiovascular death, and an OR of 1.72 (95% CI: 1.68–1.75) for non-cardiovascular death (all P < 0.001). After adjusting for potential confounders, elderly status remained the second strongest factor associated with increased risk of mortality after heart failure hospitalization following chronic kidney disease. Conclusions The overall mortality rate after heart failure hospitalization was a very high 50.8%. Multivariate analysis revealed elderly status to be an independent predictor of mortality after hospitalization. This finding suggests that improvements are needed related to the quality of care and follow-up given to elderly Thai heart failure patients.
Social Construction of Knowledge and Authority in Business Communities and Organizations *

Interviews were conducted with executives from twenty corporations regarding knowledge management needs. This paper used selected concepts from grounded theory, to analyze the interview reports as secondary sources. Four models were derived, describing how knowledge is originated, refined, authored, and authorized in business organizations. Crucial roles in these models include gatekeepers, knowledge-originators, knowledge users, and (most importantly) an emerging knowledge/authority staff whose responsibility is, in part, to define knowledge for others’ origination and use. These models were contrasted with three previously published models derived from more academic or non-hierarchical community structures. The paper also describes three models of how knowledge, once defined, is distributed in business organizations. The paper concludes with a critique of its own method.
If estimation of multicomponent chirp signal in impulsive α-stable noise environment using parametric and non-parametric approaches

In this paper we address the problem of instantaneous frequency (IF) estimation of multicomponent chirp signals in impulsive α-stable noise environment. Three new parametric techniques are introduced first based on robust versions of the MUSIC algorithm using truncated data (TRUNC-MUSIC), robust covariance estimate (ROCOV-MUSIC) and generalized covariation coefficients which are a fractional lower order statistics (FLOS-MUSIC), respectively. These methods are compared with a new proposed method based on “robust” time-frequency signal analysis.
A manifesto for the performative development of ubiquitous media

This paper addresses design agendas in Human-Computer Interaction and neighbouring fields motivated by the mixing of areas that were mostly kept separate until recently, such as media studies, performing arts, computing, and ubiquitous or tangible interfaces. Referring to new developments in this interdisciplinary research area, and moving from three specific design cases, this paper proposes a critical design agenda that pragmatically joins: concepts from media studies, tangible or ubiquitous media design concerns, anthropological perspectives to performance and practices of theatre performance.
Subdivision Schemes for Variational Splines

The original theory of splines grew out of the study of simple variational problems. A spline was a function that minimized some notion of energy subject to a set of interpolation constraints. A more recent method for creating splines is subdivision. In this framework, a spline is the limit of a sequence of functions, each related by some simple averaging rule. This paper shows that the two ideas are intrinsically related. Specifically, the solution space to a wide range of variational problems can be captured as spline spaces defined through subdivision.
Applications of genotyping by sequencing in aquaculture breeding and genetics

Abstract Selective breeding is increasingly recognized as a key component of sustainable production of aquaculture species. The uptake of genomic technology in aquaculture breeding has traditionally lagged behind terrestrial farmed animals. However, the rapid development and application of sequencing technologies has allowed aquaculture to narrow the gap, leading to substantial genomic resources for all major aquaculture species. While high‐density single‐nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays for some species have been developed recently, direct genotyping by sequencing (GBS) techniques have underpinned many of the advances in aquaculture genetics and breeding to date. In particular, restriction‐site associated DNA sequencing (RAD‐Seq) and subsequent variations have been extensively applied to generate population‐level SNP genotype data. These GBS techniques are not dependent on prior genomic information such as a reference genome assembly for the species of interest. As such, they have been widely utilized by researchers and companies focussing on nonmodel aquaculture species with relatively small research communities. Applications of RAD‐Seq techniques have included generation of genetic linkage maps, performing genome‐wide association studies, improvements of reference genome assemblies and, more recently, genomic selection for traits of interest to aquaculture like growth, sex determination or disease resistance. In this review, we briefly discuss the history of GBS, the nuances of the various GBS techniques, bioinformatics approaches and application of these techniques to various aquaculture species.