Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A LARGE STELLAR EVOLUTION DATABASE FOR POPULATION SYNTHESIS STUDIES. IV. INTEGRATED PROPERTIES AND SPECTRA

This paper is the fourth in a series describing the latest additions to the BaSTI stellar evolution database, which consists of a large set of homogeneous models and tools for population synthesis studies, covering ages between 30 Myr and ∼20 Gyr and 11 values of Z (total metallicity). Here we present a new set of low- and high-resolution synthetic spectra based on the BaSTI stellar models, covering a large range of simple stellar populations (SSPs) for both scaled-solar and α-enhanced metal mixtures. This enables a completely consistent study of the photometric and spectroscopic properties of both resolved and unresolved stellar populations, and allows us to make detailed tests on specific factors which can affect their integrated properties. Our low-resolution spectra are suitable for deriving broadband magnitudes and colors in any photometric system. These spectra cover the full wavelength range (9–160,000 nm) and include all evolutionary stages up to the end of asymptotic giant branch evolution. Our high-resolution spectra are suitable for studying the behavior of line indices and we have tested them against a large sample of Galactic globular clusters (GCs). We find that the range of ages, iron abundances [Fe/H], and degree of α-enhancement predicted by the models matches the observed values very well. We have also tested the global consistency of the BaSTI models by making detailed comparisons between ages and metallicities derived from isochrone fitting to observed color–magnitude diagrams, and from line-index strengths, for the Galactic GC 47 Tuc and the open cluster M67. For 47 Tuc we find reasonable agreement between the two methods, within the estimated errors. From the comparison with M67 we find non-negligible effects on derived line indices caused by statistical fluctuations, which are a result of the specific method used to populate an isochrone and assign appropriate spectra to individual stars.
Predicting nonstationary processes using reversible MCMC

Spatial processes for air pollutants defined over large geographic areas rarely exhibit stationary behavior. We propose a non-stationary spatial covariance model that is a mixture of stationary processes. The number of stationary processes and their parameters are estimated using a Reversible Jump MCMC approach in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. We also introduce methods for an efficient implementation and fast computation. We apply this method to the modeling, prediction of ambient ozone in the Eastern US.
Trends in ischaemic heart disease hospitalisation and case fatality in the Hong Kong Chinese population 2000–2009: a secondary analysis

Objectives This study examines the recent trends in ischaemic heart disease (IHD) incidence and case fatality in Hong Kong and explores the possible risk factors. Design Retrospective observational study. Setting All public hospitals in Hong Kong. Outcome measures Incidence rate was defined as the number of IHD inpatient episodes divided by the size of the corresponding population. Short-term and long-term case fatality rate was defined as deaths from all causes occurring within 30 and 31–365 days, respectively, divided by the number of IHD inpatient episodes among the corresponding population. Methods Poisson and logistic regression models were used to examine the IHD incidence and short-term/long-term case fatality trends, respectively, for different age and sex groups. Results IHD incidence was stable in most age groups. However, the incidence in men aged 15–24, 35–44 and ≥85 years showed increasing trends, whereas the incidence in men aged 55–64 years and women aged 35–74 years showed decreasing trends. Overall, the short-term/long-term case fatality rates were unchanged over time for both sexes. Short-term case fatality showed increasing trends in women aged 65–74 and ≥85 years, while long-term case fatality in men aged 55–64 and 75–84 years and women aged ≥75 years showed increasing trends. Conclusions Hong Kong trends resembled those in the USA, England and Wales, showing stable or slow decline in the IHD rates, while increasing trends were observed for some age groups, particularly young adults. Public health promotion efforts should focus on reducing cardiovascular risk factors, such as hypertension prevalence.
Accelerating Convolutional Neural Networks using General Purpose Processing on Graphical Processing Unit

General purpose processing is relatively new approach, which has recently become much more widely adopted, thanks to GPU manufacturers providing programming solutions and very recently thanks to OpenCL standard provided by Khronos group. CUDA used in the experiment described in this article is an extension of C programming language, enables programming heterogeneous systems. Convolutional Neural Networks are biologically inspired. They are based on the concept of “simple” and “complex” neuron cells[9]. CNNs are designed with multiple layers of neurons, use weight sharing to reduce the number of free parameters[3]. They exhibit convolution which occurs between layers[4]
Stability of gene rankings from RNAi screens

MOTIVATION Genome-wide RNA interference (RNAi) experiments are becoming a widely used approach for identifying intracellular molecular pathways of specific functions. However, detecting all relevant genes involved in a biological process is challenging, because typically only few samples per gene knock-down are available and readouts tend to be very noisy. We investigate the reliability of top scoring hit lists obtained from RNAi screens, compare the performance of different ranking methods, and propose a new ranking method to improve the reproducibility of gene selection. RESULTS The performance of different ranking methods is assessed by the size of the stable sets they produce, i.e. the subsets of genes which are estimated to be re-selected with high probability in independent validation experiments. Using stability selection, we also define a new ranking method, called stability ranking, to improve the stability of any given base ranking method. Ranking methods based on mean, median, t-test and rank-sum test, and their stability-augmented counterparts are compared in simulation studies and on three microscopy image RNAi datasets. We find that the rank-sum test offers the most favorable trade-off between ranking stability and accuracy and that stability ranking improves the reproducibility of all and the accuracy of several ranking methods. AVAILABILITY Stability ranking is freely available as the R/Bioconductor package staRank at http://www.cbg. ethz.ch/software/staRank.
Comparative Analysis of Relevance for SVM-Based Interactive Document Retrieval

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were applied to interactive document retrieval that uses active learning. In such a retrieval system, the degree of relevance is evaluated by using a signed distance from the optimal hyperplane. It is not clear, however, how the signed distance in SVMs has characteristics of vector space model. We therefore formulated the degree of relevance by using the signed distance in SVMs and comparatively analyzed it with a conventional Rocchio-based method. Although vector normalization has been utilized as preprocessing for document retrieval, few studies explained why vector normalization was effective. Based on our comparative analysis, we theoretically show the effectiveness of normalizing document vectors in SVM-based interactive document retrieval. We then propose a cosine kernel that is suitable for SVM-based interactive document retrieval. The effectiveness of the method was compared experimentally with conventional relevance feedback for Boolean, Term Frequency and Term FrequencyInverse Document Frequency representations of document vectors. Experimental results for a Text REtrieval Conference data set showed that the cosine kernel is effective for all document representations, especially Term Frequency representation.
Anomaly detection in complex environments: Evaluation of the inter-and intra-method consistency

Many anomaly detection methods, depending on various parameters, have been proposed in literature. Given the diversity of available anomaly detectors, froman operational viewpoint it is interesting to determine an efficient strategy to find the best suited detector for a given application. This is not obvious, especially in scenes with a highly structured background. The work presented here proposes a generic approach to the problem by examining the following questions: How different are the results of the various anomaly detectors ? Are the parameters influencing the results significantly ? Are there classes of methods sufficiently similar so that one can test only one of each class and see which results are most adequate for a given application ? What are the spectral/spatial characteristics of the differences between methods ? Can one predict which detector will give the best results for a given application ? The current paper tries to answer the first three questions by comparing results of different types of anomaly detectors applied to different complex (urban, industrial and harbor) scenes. The comparison is not in absolute terms because it does not rely on a priori ground truth. In stead the detectors are compared relative to one another, the aim being to evaluate the similarities between the performance of the detectors and the dependency of their results on the used parameters, i.e. the inter- and intra method consistency.
Performance Analysis of Mobility Based Routing Protocols in MANET

Most routing protocols in MANET adopt the popular Random Waypoint model for its simplicity and suitability for theoretical study and analysis. Recently, several entity, group and scenario based mobility models and frameworks have been proposed to model much more realistic and practical movements of mobile nodes in real scenarios. Although some work exists in evaluating routing protocols based on such specific scenarios, and some effort in adapting a protocol to suit mobility has been made, there does not exist any protocol that makes direct use of mobility information to route packets within a MANET. In this work, we first develop a practical mobility model that recognizes an orbital pattern in the sociological movement of mobile users, and then propose a novel Orbit Based Routing (OBR) protocol, that leverages the underlying orbital mobility to accurately determine a set of likely regions containing any node in the MANET. By forming a distributed location database among acquaintances and employing a scalable geographic routing to forward packets among nodes, OBR emerges as a clear choice for MANET routing in the face of practical mobility. We propose three different schemes of OBR and compare their performance against an Acquaintance Based Soft Location Management (ABSoLoM) protocol.
Improving WSN Simulation and Analysis Accuracy Using Two-Tier Channel Models

Accurate simulation and analysis of wireless protocols and systems is inherently dependent on an accurate model of the underlying channel. In this paper, we show that residual MAC layer wireless sensor network (WSN) channels cannot be characterized using the commonly-used high-order Markov channel models. Instead, we demonstrate that 2-Tier models, in which a high-level (tier 1) frame-level model excites a lower-level (tier 2) bit-error model, are needed to accurately characterize WSN residual channels. We compare the modeling accuracy of 1-Tier and 2-Tier models using residual bit-error traces collected over an operational 802.15. 4 network. We first analyze error traces collected over different setups to investigate the amount of bit-level memory present in wireless sensor network channels. We then validate the accuracy of the proposed models using information divergence measures. We show that 2- Tier models have significantly and consistently better accuracy than 1-Tier models. Finally, we demonstrate that the wrong choice of a channel model can result in grossly inaccurate simulation results. This claim is substantiated by simulating three important metrics: (i) recovery ratio for an abstract Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme, (ii) frame goodput of an unreliable protocol over a multihop network, and (Hi) number of retransmissions per packet for a reliable protocol.
N-(7-Methyl-1,8-naphthyridin-2-yl)acetamide–acetic acid (1/1)

In the title adduct, C11H11N3O·C2H4O2, all non-H atoms of the acetamide molecule are roughly coplanar, with an r.m.s. deviation of 0.0720 Å. The dihedral angle between the ring plane and the acetamide group is 8.5 (2)°. In the crystal, O—H⋯N and N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the acetamide and acetic acid molecules.
Improving the Readability of Class Lecture Automatic Speech Recognition Results using Multiple Hypotheses

This paper presents a method for improving the readability of class lecture Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) results, which hitherto have been difficult for humans to understand, even in the absence of recognition errors. This is because the speech in a class lecture is relatively casual and contains many ill-formed utterances with filled pauses, restarts, and so on. Recently there has been extensive research on paraphrasing and correcting recognition results. However, research on improving the readability of recognition results has focused mainly on manually transcribed texts, but not ASR results. Due to the presence of many kinds of specific words and the casual style, even state-ofthe-art recognizers can only achieve a 30-50% word error rate (WER) for the speech in class lectures. In this paper, we propose a novel method that utilizes multiple hypotheses of the ASR results to improve readability of the recognition results. Experimental results show the proposed method resemble the manually paraphrased text the most and subjective test show the proposed method improve the readability of the ASR results under erroneous conditions where WER is high and 37.7%.
Large scale analysis of signal reachability

Motivation: Major disorders, such as leukemia, have been shown to alter the transcription of genes. Understanding how gene regulation is affected by such aberrations is of utmost importance. One promising strategy toward this objective is to compute whether signals can reach to the transcription factors through the transcription regulatory network (TRN). Due to the uncertainty of the regulatory interactions, this is a #P-complete problem and thus solving it for very large TRNs remains to be a challenge. Results: We develop a novel and scalable method to compute the probability that a signal originating at any given set of source genes can arrive at any given set of target genes (i.e., transcription factors) when the topology of the underlying signaling network is uncertain. Our method tackles this problem for large networks while providing a provably accurate result. Our method follows a divide-and-conquer strategy. We break down the given network into a sequence of non-overlapping subnetworks such that reachability can be computed autonomously and sequentially on each subnetwork. We represent each interaction using a small polynomial. The product of these polynomials express different scenarios when a signal can or cannot reach to target genes from the source genes. We introduce polynomial collapsing operators for each subnetwork. These operators reduce the size of the resulting polynomial and thus the computational complexity dramatically. We show that our method scales to entire human regulatory networks in only seconds, while the existing methods fail beyond a few tens of genes and interactions. We demonstrate that our method can successfully characterize key reachability characteristics of the entire transcriptions regulatory networks of patients affected by eight different subtypes of leukemia, as well as those from healthy control samples. Availability: All the datasets and code used in this article are available at bioinformatics.cise.ufl.edu/PReach/scalable.htm. Contact: atodor@cise.ufl.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
On time-memory trade-off for collision detection

Future collision avoidance systems, which are capable of fully controlling the vehicle, have to make critical decisions in a very short time. To do this, they need to check constantly if their own vehicle's occupancy collides with the other traffic participants' occupancy. Those collision checks consume a substantial amount of time and consequently, the collision avoidance systems could fail to intervene in complex scenarios. We propose a new approach to reduce the computation time for collision checks significantly. Instead of using geometric methods, we store finitely many possible collision scenarios between two objects in a table and thus collision checks become a matter of lookup table queries. To ensure that the finite number of configurations cover all possible scenarios, we use a novel abstraction technique which guarantees that every collision will be detected. The approach works for arbitrarily many traffic participants by applying the approach pairwise (own vehicle and other object) to each traffic participant. Randomly generated scenarios show that the new approach can be several times faster than geometric intersection techniques thanks to the trade-off between memory consumption and computation time.
A Simple Algorithm for Image Denoising Based on MS Segmentation

Image Denoising & Segmentation are the key issues in all image processing researchers. The first step in image processing is segmentation. This can be done by using MS (Mean Shift) segmentation. After segmentation the image, the overall system quality can be improved by using the bilateral filter. The proposed method improves the bilateral filter through decomposing a signal into its frequency components. In this way, noise in different frequency component can be eliminated. Experimental results shown that our algorithm outperforms the other algorithms.
Performance analysis and comparison of MRC and optimal combining in antenna array systems

We examine the statistical properties of the output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of a spatial combiner where the spatial weights used are either the Maximal Ratio Combiner (MRC) weights or the Optimal Combining (Wiener Hopf) weights. The channels are modeled as slow flat Rayleigh fading channels and multiple interferers are assumed present. In particular, the modified F-distribution is introduced to provide an exact characterization of a MRC receiver and to bound the performance of the OC receiver. Simulation results are provided to support the analytical results and to provide insight.
Practice versus politics in Danish day-care centres: how to bridge the gap in early learning?

It is essential that early educators in day-care services possess adequate pedagogical tools for supporting children’s communicative development. Early literacy programmes (ELPs) are potential tools. However, studies investigating the effects of ELPs seldom address implementation processes or the programme users’ perspectives. This study sheds light on the practices of Danish pedagogues when engaging in shared book reading with children with the aim of: (1) foreseeing the success of the implementation of the first Danish ELP; and (2) comparing day-care centres’ practices to Danish ‘New Nordic School’ (NNS) political statements on early learning. This study presents results from 18 pre-programme interviews with pedagogues and illustrates their daily practices prior to the ELP implementation. Results suggest that: (1) there is a potential gap between practice and politics concerning Danish practices for promoting early learning; and (2) certain aspects related to existing pedagogical practices may be foreseen as potential challenges for the implementation of structured ELPs.
Compression effects and perceptual asymmetries

This paper reports the results of two English experiments on timing and perception. The finding is that temporal patterns in production correspond to asymmetries in perception. We argue that these phenomena are best described in terms of auditory rather than articulatory representations. The production data concern compression effects, whereby, in syllables with a greater number of segments, each one of the segments is shorter than in syllables with fewer segments. The first experiment demonstrates that the amount of vowel compression found in English monosyllabic words depends in part on which consonants occur adjacent to the vowel in that word: words with liquids generally allow more vowel compression than words with nasals or obstruents. To explain these asymmetries, we posit a recoverability target for vowels that can be partially satisfied by information about the vowel contained in the surrounding context; differences in compression, then, can be explained by differences in how much vowel information is contained in adjacent segments and transitions. A second study shows that the perceptual assumptions required to make this analysis work are indeed found in English; timing asymmetries in production mirror perceptual asymmetries. The results favor a theory of timing that includes auditory representations over one that includes only articulatory representations.
Nutrient Addition Dramatically Accelerates Microbial Community Succession

The ecological mechanisms driving community succession are widely debated, particularly for microorganisms. While successional soil microbial communities are known to undergo predictable changes in structure concomitant with shifts in a variety of edaphic properties, the causal mechanisms underlying these patterns are poorly understood. Thus, to specifically isolate how nutrients – important drivers of plant succession – affect soil microbial succession, we established a full factorial nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertilization plot experiment in recently deglaciated (∼3 years since exposure), unvegetated soils of the Puca Glacier forefield in Southeastern Peru. We evaluated soil properties and examined bacterial community composition in plots before and one year after fertilization. Fertilized soils were then compared to samples from three reference successional transects representing advancing stages of soil development ranging from 5 years to 85 years since exposure. We found that a single application of +NP fertilizer caused the soil bacterial community structure of the three-year old soils to most resemble the 85-year old soils after one year. Despite differences in a variety of soil edaphic properties between fertilizer plots and late successional soils, bacterial community composition of +NP plots converged with late successional communities. Thus, our work suggests a mechanism for microbial succession whereby changes in resource availability drive shifts in community composition, supporting a role for nutrient colimitation in primary succession. These results suggest that nutrients alone, independent of other edaphic factors that change with succession, act as an important control over soil microbial community development, greatly accelerating the rate of succession.