Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neutral theory and the species abundance distribution: recent developments and prospects for unifying niche and neutral perspectives

Published in 2001, The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography (UNTB) emphasizes the importance of stochastic processes in ecological community structure, and has challenged the traditional niche-based view of ecology. While neutral models have since been applied to a broad range of ecological and macroecological phenomena, the majority of research relating to neutral theory has focused exclusively on the species abundance distribution (SAD). Here, we synthesize the large body of work on neutral theory in the context of the species abundance distribution, with a particular focus on integrating ideas from neutral theory with traditional niche theory. First, we summarize the basic tenets of neutral theory; both in general and in the context of SADs. Second, we explore the issues associated with neutral theory and the SAD, such as complications with fitting and model comparison, the underlying assumptions of neutral models, and the difficultly of linking pattern to process. Third, we highlight the advances in understanding of SADs that have resulted from neutral theory and models. Finally, we focus consideration on recent developments aimed at unifying neutral- and niche-based approaches to ecology, with a particular emphasis on what this means for SAD theory, embracing, for instance, ideas of emergent neutrality and stochastic niche theory. We put forward the argument that the prospect of the unification of niche and neutral perspectives represents one of the most promising future avenues of neutral theory research.
Mindfulness and Mothering: Reclaiming Feminine Voice

Little is known about working mothers who practice mindfulness. This dissertation is a phenomenological investigation using body mapping as a way to understand how mindfulness works in the lives of six women who work in health and social care while parenting young children. This dissertation is comprised of five integrated articles. Chapter 1 and 7 are included as an Introduction and Discussion/Conclusion to the five separate though related manuscript chapters. The main research questions that framed this research include, ‘What is the work of mindfulness in the lives of working professional mothers? ’ and ‘In what ways might a mindfulness practice help women navigate their role as a working mother with young children? ’. Each of the five manuscripts offer something unique to this work. The first manuscript, Chapter 2, uses literature to explore how mindfulness can support early years practitioners in developing a more critical and nuanced understanding of how social constructions of motherhood shape practice. In the second manuscript, chapter 3, I again use literature to explore mindfulness as a construct and how it has the potential to enhance professional practices. The third manuscript, Chapter 4, is more theoretical and philosophical and explores how phenomenology can fruitfully pair with mindfulness in a qualitative study such as this one. The fourth manuscript, chapter 5, is the first of two manuscripts that originate from the empirical study. The six women’s constructed body maps where analyzed to better understand how mindfulness works in their lives. The fifth manuscript, chapter 6, explores body mapping as a method and what it can contribute to social research. Findings include an appreciation for how mindfulness may help mothers critically ii reflect on normative expectations for working women. This thesis contributes to the growing body of work that appreciates the work of mindfulness. Specifically I suggest that mindfulness may inspire professional mothers to rethink practices and beliefs that may ultimately advance the position of women and children. The research seeks to ignite conversations that have implications for Canadian families, and health and social care professional education practices.
Omnidirectional walking based on preview control for biped robots

The zero moment point (ZMP) control method is usually used in stable biped walking. A novel preview control of ZMP is proposed in the paper. First, the dynamics of a biped robot is modeled as a running cart on the table which gives a convenient representation to treat ZMP. Second, the walking pattern generation process is describes in details and a presented preview controller is introduced to reduce zero steady-state error significantly. Third, several patterns in the omnidirectional walking including support-foot and swing-foot are discussed respectively. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, the proposed approach is validated via simulations and experiments on a NAO humanoid robot. The webots simulation results verify the feasibility of the proposed control scheme in the stable and robust walking.
User-perceptions of embedded software quality

Many researchers and practitioners have recognised that the perception of 'quality' is largely influenced by personal view and application context. Depending on personal goals, interests and background, the interpretation of the quality concept is different per individual. In this paper, an approach is suggested by which the different user perceptions on quality are modelled, and can be addressed. This Multi-party Chain model supports the explanation of the various views on product quality of all users. Discussion among the parties involved is therefore enabled. Based on concensus the appropriate measures can be selected. The model should operationalise the basic relation between process and product, it enables the definition of metrics to evaluate process improvements, and links engineering activities to user requirements. The usefulness of the model is validated in a case-study.
Microtubules in Dendritic Spine Development

It is generally believed that only the actin cytoskeleton resides in dendritic spines and controls spine morphology and plasticity. Here, we report that microtubules (MTs) are present in spines and that shRNA knockdown of the MT plus-end-binding protein EB3 significantly reduces spine formation. Furthermore, stabilization and inhibition of MTs by low doses of taxol and nocodazole enhance and impair spine formation elicited by BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), respectively. Therefore, MTs play an important role in the control and regulation of dendritic spine development and plasticity.
The asymptotic distributions of the largest entries of sample correlation matrices

Let X_n=(x_{ij}) be an n by p data matrix, where the n rows form a random sample of size n from a certain p-dimensional population distribution. Let R_n=(\rho_{ij}) be the p\times p sample correlation matrix of X_n; that is, the entry \rho_{ij} is the usual Pearson's correlation coefficient between the ith column of X_n and jth column of X_n. For contemporary data both n and p are large. When the population is a multivariate normal we study the test that H_0: the p variates of the population are uncorrelated. A test statistic is chosen as L_n=max_{i\ne j}|\rho_{ij}|. The asymptotic distribution of L_n is derived by using the Chen-Stein Poisson approximation method. Similar results for the non-Gaussian case are also derived.
A framework for good SAT translations, with applications to CNF representations of XOR constraints

We present a general framework for good CNF-representations of boolean constraints, to be used for translating decision problems into SAT problems (i.e., deciding satisfiability for conjunctive normal forms). We apply it to the representation of systems of XOR-constraints, also known as systems of linear equations over the two-element field, or systems of parity constraints. The general framework defines the notion of "representation", and provides several methods to measure the quality of the representation by the complexity ("hardness") needed for making implicit "knowledge" of the representation explicit (to a SAT-solving mechanism). We obtain general upper and lower bounds. Applied to systems of XOR-constraints, we show a super-polynomial lower bound on "good" representations under very general circumstances. A corresponding upper bound shows fixed-parameter tractability in the number of constraints. The measurement underlying this upper bound ignores the auxiliary variables needed for shorter representations of XOR-constraints. Improved upper bounds (for special cases) take them into account, and a rich picture begins to emerge, under the various hardness measurements.
Large-scale urban vehicular mobility for networking research

Simulation is the tool of choice for the large-scale performance evaluation of upcoming telecommunication networking paradigms that involve users aboard vehicles, such as next-generation cellular networks for vehicular access, pure vehicular ad hoc networks, and opportunistic disruption-tolerant networks. The single most distinguishing feature of vehicular networks simulation lies in the mobility of users, which is the result of the interaction of complex macroscopic and microscopic dynamics. Notwithstanding the improvements that vehicular mobility modeling has undergone during the past few years, no car traffic trace is available today that captures both macroscopic and microscopic behaviors of drivers over a large urban region, and does so with the level of detail required for networking research. In this paper, we present a realistic synthetic dataset of the car traffic over a typical 24 hours in a 400-km2 region around the city of Köln, in Germany. We outline how our mobility description improves today's existing traces and show the potential impact that a comprehensive representation of vehicular mobility can have one the evaluation of networking technologies.
UNIZA System for the "Emotion in Music" task at MediaEval 2015

working notes paper, we present the UNIZA s ystem for the recognition of dynamic music emotional dimensions arousal and valence. The developed system is based on Support Vector Regression with Radial Basis kernel function. We selected 2 sets of features using stochastic evolutionary optimizat ion algorithms namely Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Algorithm. The models score the average Root Mean Square Error 0.3605 for the valence dimension and 0.2540 for the arousal dimension. 1. INTRODUCTION The objective of the Emotion in Music task at MediaEval 2015 is to automatically determine temporal dynamics in emotion as a sequence of numerical values in two dimensions : valence and arousal (AV). The task comprises three scenarios: 1 ) Given a set of baseline audio features, the participants are t o return AV scores obtained by machine learning method of their choice; 2) The participants are required to submit their own s et of features, they believe that are most discriminative in term o f emotion determination; 3) The participants may return AV sc ores obtained by using any combination of the features and machin e learning method. For more details about the task and data set, see the
View of Nature of Science (VNOS) Form B: an Instrument for Assessing Preservice Teachers View of Nature of Science at Borneo University Tarakan

VNOS form B is an instrument that has been developed and revised to assess the view of nature of science of preservice science teachers through nature of science aspects.Indeed, students and teachers have to have the view of nature of science to avoid misconceptions of science concepts. Unfortunately, research on the view of Nature of Science is less conducted in Indonesia. This is a qualitative research that was conducted in Borneo University Tarakan. Respondents are preservice biology teachers in the sixth semester. The first step of this research is translating and adapting the VNOS form B into Bahasa Indonesia to make sure that the instrument is culturally fit to Indonesian and the transadapted instrument then given to the respondents. The result shows that the VNOS form B can be applied to assess the view of nature of science of preservice biology teachers. However, the result also shows that most of preservice biology teachers have few understanding on aspects of nature of scince.
Range Thresholding on Streams

This paper studies a type of continuous queries called range thresholding on streams (RTS). Imagine the stream as an unbounded sequence of elements each of which is a real value. A query registers an interval, and must be notified as soon as a certain number of incoming elements fall into the interval. The system needs to support multiple queries simultaneously, and aims to minimize the space consumption and computation time. Currently, all the solutions to this problem entail quadratic time O(nm) to process n stream elements and m queries, which severely limits their applicability to only a small number of queries. We propose the first algorithm that breaks the quadratic barrier, by reducing the computation cost dramatically to O(n + m), subject only to a polylogarithmic factor. The algorithm is general enough to guarantee the same on weighted versions of the queries even in d-dimensional space of any constant d. Its vast advantage over the previous methods in practical environments has been confirmed through extensive experimentation.
Constructing Personal Networks Through Communication History

This study aims to predict a user’s relationships with his or her contacts based solely on the words used in electronic communications between them. Software was created that reads in bulk exported email data and builds a comprehensive graph database of people, the words communicated between them, and their relationships to each other. Several stages of preprocessing and feature selection were applied, and then various classifiers were shown to effectively predict relationships using 10-fold cross validation. Logistic regression showed 5.9% testing error on a sample set of 3000 emails and 309 contacts. The study shows promising results and suggests future work that incorporates message meta-data, other mediums of communication like text messaging, and larger data sets would only improve upon our results.
Firing Patterns and Correlations of Spontaneous Discharge of Pallidal Neurons in the Normal and the Tremulous 1-Methyl-4-Phenyl-1,2,3,6-Tetrahydropyridine Vervet Model of Parkinsonism

To investigate the role of the basal ganglia in parkinsonian tremor, we recorded hand tremor and simultaneous activity of several neurons in the external and internal segments of the globus pallidus (GPe and GPi) in two vervet monkeys, before and after systemic treatment with 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) and development of parkinsonism with tremor of 5 and 11 Hz. In healthy monkeys, only 11% (20/174) of the GPe cells and 3% (1/29) of the GPi cells displayed significant 3–19 Hz oscillations. After MPTP treatment, 39% (107/271) of the GPe cells and 43% (26/61) of the GPi cells developed significant oscillations. Oscillation frequencies of single cells after MPTP treatment were bimodally distributed around 7 and 13 Hz. For 10% of the oscillatory cells that were recorded during tremor periods, there was a significant tendency for the tremor and neuronal oscillations to appear simultaneously. Cross-correlation analysis revealed a very low level of correlated activity between pallidal neurons in the normal state; 95.6% (477/499) of the pairs were not correlated, and oscillatory cross-correlograms were found in only 1% (5/499) of the pairs. After MPTP treatment, the correlations increased dramatically, and 40% (432/1080) of the cross-correlograms had significant oscillations, centered around 13–14 Hz. Phase shifts of the cross-correlograms of GPe pairs, but not of GPi, were clustered around 0°. The results illustrate that MPTP treatment changes the pattern of activity and synchronization in the GPe and GPi. These changes are related to the symptoms of Parkinson's disease and especially to the parkinsonian tremor.
Gross Motion Analysis of Fingertip-Based Within-Hand Manipulation

Fingertip-based within-hand manipulation, also called precision manipulation, refers to the repositioning of a grasped object within the workspace of a multifingered robot hand without breaking or changing the contact type between each fingertip and the object. Given a robot hand architecture and a set of assumed contact models, this paper presents a method to perform a gross motion analysis of its precision manipulation capabilities, regardless of the particularities of the object being manipulated. In particular, the technique allows the composition of the displacement manifold of the grasped object relative to the palm of the robot hand to be determined as well as the displacements that can be controlled-useful for high-level design and classification of hand function. The effects of a fingertip contacting a body in this analysis are modeled as kinematic chains composed of passive and resistant revolute joints; what permits the introduction of a general framework for the definition and classification of nonfrictional and frictional contact types. Examples of the application of the proposed method in several architectures of multifingered hands with different contact assumptions are discussed; they illustrate how inappropriate contact conditions may lead to uncontrollable displacements of the grasped object.
Genetic Diversity of the Black Mangrove Avicennia germinans (L.) Stearn in Northwestern Mexico

Mangrove forests of Mexico have been threatened by the effects of anthropogenic activities during the last decades, mostly related to aquaculture, agriculture, livestock and urban development. Genetic diversity and fine-scale genetic structure of two generations of the black mangrove Avicennia germinans (L.) Stearn were investigated in perturbed and preserved sites from three lagoon systems in Sinaloa, Mexico. Genetic diversity and overall genetic structure were similar between perturbed and preserved sites. However, lower levels of fine-scale spatial genetic structure were observed in two of the younger (sapling) generations. We attribute this to differences in local dynamics of each lagoon system, their status of conservation and levels of fragmentation. Also, low connectivity and the effects of disturbance could restrict the movement of pollinators and seed dispersal capabilities, resulting in low levels of genetic diversity and signs of inbreeding. Perturbed populations of A. germinans may play an important role in in situ conservation of this complex ecosystem.
Parsing Long English Sentences with Pattern Rules

In machine translation, parsing of long English sentences still causes some problems, whereas for short sentences a good machine translation system usually can generate readable translations. In this paper a practical method is presented for parsing long English sentences of some patterns. The rules for the patterns are treated separately from the augmented context free grammar, where each context free grammar rule is augmented by some syntactic functions and semantic functions. The rules for patterns and augmented context free grammar are complimentary to each other. In this way long English sentences covered by the patterns can be parsed efficiently.
Discrete Differential-Geometry Operators in n D

This paper provides a consistent set of flexible tools to approximate important geometric attributes, including normal vectors and curvatures, on arbitrary 2D and 3D meshes embedded in n dimensions. We present a consistent derivation of these first and second order differential properties using Voronoi cells and the mixed FiniteElement/Finite-Volume method. The new operators are closely related to the continuous case, guaranteeing an appropriate extension from the continuous to the discrete setting: they respect the intrinsic properties of the continuous differential operators. We show that these estimates are optimal in accuracy under mild smoothness conditions, and demonstrate their numerical quality. We finally present applications of these operators, such as mesh smoothing and enhancement, quality checking, and denoising of arbitrary vectors fields, such as flow fields or tensor images.
Sensor Fusion-Oriented Fall Detection for Assistive Technologies Applications

A new trend in modern Assistive Technologies implies making extensive use of ICT to develop efficient and reliable "Ambient Intelligence" applications dedicated to disabled, elderly or frail people. In this paper we describe two fall detectors, based on bio-inspired algorithms. Such devices can either operate independently or be part of a modular and easily extensible architecture, able to manage different areas of an intelligent environment. In this case, effective data fusion can be achieved, thanks to the complementary nature of the sensors on which the detectors are based. One device is based on vision and can be implemented on a standard FPGA programmable logic. It relies on a simplified version of the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. The other device under consideration is a wearable accelerometer-based fall detector, which relies on a recent soft-computing paradigm called Hierarchical Temporal Memories (HTMs).
Dependence of the vertical distribution of bromine monoxide in the lower troposphere on meteorological factors such as wind speed and stability

Abstract. Multiple axis differential absorption spectroscopy (MAX-DOAS) measurements of bromine monoxide (BrO) probed the vertical structure of halogen activation events during March–May 2012 at Barrow, Alaska. An analysis of the BrO averaging kernels and degrees of freedom obtained by optimal-estimation-based inversions from raw MAX-DOAS measurements reveals the information is best represented by reducing the retrieved BrO profile to two quantities: the integrated column from the surface through 200 m (VCD200 m), and the lower tropospheric vertical column density (LT-VCD), which represents the integrated column of BrO from the surface through 2 km. The percentage of lower tropospheric BrO in the lowest 200 m was found to be highly variable ranging from shallow layer events, where BrO is present primarily in the lowest 200 m, to distributed column events where BrO is observed at higher altitudes. The highest observed LT-VCD events occurred when BrO was distributed throughout the lower troposphere, rather than concentrated near the surface. Atmospheric stability in the lowest 200 m influenced the percentage of LT-VCD that is in the lowest 200 m, with inverted temperature structures having a first-to-third quartile range (Q1–Q3) of VCD200 m/LT-VCD from 15–39%, while near-neutral-temperature structures had a Q1–Q3 range of 7–13%. Data from this campaign show no clear influence of wind speed on either lower tropospheric bromine activation (LT-VCD) or the vertical distribution of BrO, while examination of seasonal trends and the temperature dependence of the vertical distribution supported the conclusion that the atmospheric stability affects the vertical distribution of BrO.
Sialic Acid and Sialidase Activity in Acute Stroke

Stroke is a heterogeneous syndrome caused by multiple disease mechanisms, resulting in a disruption of cerebral blood flow with subsequent tissue damage. It is well known that erythrocytes have a large amount of sialic acid and could represent a model to investigate changes occurring in a pathology like stroke. The aim of this study was to investigate a possible relationship among erythrocyte membrane, plasma and sialic acid content. The possible impact of the sialic acid content and the activity of sialidase on stroke severity was also evaluated. The study population consisted of 54 patients with a first stroke and of 53 age-and sex matched healthy volunteers. The total bound sialic acid was substantially decreased in patients. There was a significant correlation between the sialidase activity values and the severity of the neurological deficit defined by the National Institute of Health Stroke Scale. This study shows that low sialic acid erythrocyte concentrations with contemporary high sialic acid plasma levels and elevated sialidase activity can be considered as markers of ischemic stroke. Further investigations are needed to clarify the possible role of these biochemical changes in producing and sustaining cerebral ischemic damage.