Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fishing in the Dark: A Pursuit-Diving Seabird Modifies Foraging Behaviour in Response to Nocturnal Light Levels

Visual predators tend not to hunt during periods when efficiency is compromised by low light levels. Yet common murres, a species considered a diurnal visual predator, frequently dive at night. To study foraging of murres under different light conditions, we used a combination of archival tagging methods and astronomical models to assess relationships between diving behaviour and light availability. During diurnal and crepuscular periods, murres used a wide range of the water column (2–177 m), foraging across light intensities that spanned several orders of magnitude (103–10−10 Wm−2). Through these periods, they readily dived under conditions equivalent to ambient moonlight (∼10−4 Wm−2) but rarely under conditions equivalent to starlight (∼10−8 Wm−2). At night, murres readily foraged during both moonlit and starlit periods, and diving depth and efficiency increased with nocturnal light intensity, suggesting that night diving is at least partially visually guided. Whether visually guided foraging is possible during starlit periods is less clear. Given the dense prey landscape available, random-walk simulations suggest that murres could benefit from random prey encounters. We hypothesise that murres foraging through starlit periods rely either on close-range visual or possibly nonvisual cues to acquire randomly encountered prey. This research highlights the flexibility of breeding common murres and raises questions about the strategies and mechanisms birds use to find prey under very low light conditions.
An Evolutionary Dynamic Population Size PSO Implementation

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a heuristic search method for the exploration of solution spaces of complex optimization problems. The heuristic suffers from relatively long execution times as the update step needs to be repeated many thousands of iterations to converge the swarm on the global optimum. In this work, we explore two dynamic population size improvements for classical PSO with the aim of reducing execution time. Expanding Population PSO (EP-PSO) starts with a small number of particles and iteratively increases the swarm size. Diminishing Population PSO (DP-PSO) starts with a large number of particles and iteratively reduces the swarm size. Simulation results show that both improvements produce almost 60% reduction in the execution time as compared to the classical PSO. However, the results show that EP-PSO fares quite badly when the ability to converge to the global optimum is concerned. DP-PSO performs reasonably compared to the classical PSO but at much faster convergence and execution speeds. Clearly, DP-PSO shows a lot of promise as an enhancement for the classical PSO.
Inflammatory and oxidative stress responses of healthy young adults to changes in air quality during the Beijing Olympics.

RATIONALE Unprecedented pollution control actions during the Beijing Olympics provided a quasi-experimental opportunity to examine biologic responses to drastic changes in air pollution levels. OBJECTIVES To determine whether changes in levels of biomarkers reflecting pulmonary inflammation and pulmonary and systemic oxidative stress were associated with changes in air pollution levels in healthy young adults. METHODS We measured fractional exhaled nitric oxide, a number of exhaled breath condensate markers (H(+), nitrite, nitrate, and 8-isoprostane), and urinary 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine in 125 participants twice in each of the pre- (high pollution), during- (low pollution), and post-Olympic (high pollution) periods. We measured concentrations of air pollutants near where the participants lived and worked. We used mixed-effects models to estimate changes in biomarker levels across the three periods and to examine whether changes in biomarker levels were associated with changes in pollutant concentrations, adjusting for meteorologic parameters. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS From the pre- to the during-Olympic period, we observed significant and often large decreases (ranging from -4.5% to -72.5%) in levels of all the biomarkers. From the during-Olympic to the post-Olympic period, we observed significant and larger increases (48-360%) in levels of these same biomarkers. Moreover, increased pollutant concentrations were consistently associated with statistically significant increases in biomarker levels. CONCLUSIONS These findings support the important role of oxidative stress and that of pulmonary inflammation in mediating air pollution health effects. The findings demonstrate the utility of novel and noninvasive biomarkers in the general population consisting largely of healthy individuals.
Two Knowledge-based Methods for High-Performance Sense Distribution Learning

Knowing the correct distribution of senses within a corpus can potentially boost the performance of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems by many points. We present two fully automatic and language-independent methods for computing the distribution of senses given a raw corpus of sentences. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations show that our methods outperform the current state of the art in sense distribution learning and the strongest baselines for the most frequent sense in multiple languages and on domain-specific test sets. Our sense distributions are available at http://trainomatic.org.
Reproducibility of Neurochemical Profile Quantification in Pregenual Cingulate, Anterior Midcingulate, and Bilateral Posterior Insular Subdivisions Measured at 3 Tesla

The current report assessed measurement reproducibility of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy at 3 Tesla in the left and right posterior insular, pregenual anterior cingulate, and anterior midcingulate cortices. Ten healthy male volunteers aged 21–30 years were tested at four different days, of which nine were included in the data analysis. Intra- and inter-subject variability of myo-inositol, creatine, glutamate, total-choline, total-N-acetylaspartate, and combined glutamine–glutamate were calculated considering the influence of movement parameters, age, daytime of measurements, and tissue composition. Overall mean intra-/inter-subject variability for all neurochemicals combined revealed small mean coefficients of variation across the four regions: 5.3/9.05% in anterior midcingulate, 6.6/8.84% in pregenual anterior cingulate, 7.3/10.00% in left posterior and 8.2/10.55% in right posterior insula. Head movement, tissue composition and day time revealed no significant explanatory variance contribution suggesting a negligible influence on the data. A strong correlation between Cramer–Rao Lower Bounds (a measure of fitting errors) and the mean intra-subject coefficients of variation (r = 0.799, p < 0.001) outlined the importance of low fitting errors in order to obtain robust and finally meaningful measurements. The present findings confirm proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy as a reliable tool to measure brain neurochemistry in small subregions of the human brain.
What can be learned from teachers assessing mathematical reasoning: a case study

Recently, mathematical reasoning has grown in prominence in curriculum documents and professional learning programs. However, the assessment of reasoning actions continues to be an elusive task for many teachers. Research has shown that many primary teachers focus only on explaining. This case study examines the salient behaviours of two Year 6 primary teachers employing the Assessing Mathematical Reasoning Rubric. Results indicated the teachers gained deeper insights into the diverse nature of reasoning through the employment of rubric. Therefore, it provides teachers with a vehicle for a more nuanced examination of reasoning beyond explaining and is a launching pad for lesson planning.
Lexicon propagation for learning a large-scale semantic parser

For the purpose of smooth human-robot interaction, a robot is supposed to be capable of semantically parsing the human instructions in a large scale. However, the existing supervised approaches to learning a large-scale semantic parser needs a good deal of training examples with annotations. The exhaustive cost of annotating enough sentences prevents them from learning such parser for interpreting instructions. One of the reasons is that a small number of training examples result in a parser with the lexcion having low coverage on words/phrases of a domain. Hence, we introduce a semi-supervised approach to propagating lexicon based on the assumption that similar words have similar semnatic forms. Our approach first learns a seed lexicon from annotated corpus then smoothly maps unobserved words/phrases into those having already learned. Experiments on instructions, which were collected for the tasks in domestic environment, shows that our semantic parser with lexicon propagation improves by 30.28% F1-measure over the one learned via purely supervised algorithm.
Five years of the CiPA project (2013–2018): what did we learn?

Cases of drug-induced QT prolongation and sudden cardiac deaths resulted in market withdrawal of many drugs and world-wide regulatory changes through accepting the ICH guidelines E14 and S7B. However, because the guidelines were not comprehensive enough to cover the electrophysiological changes by drug-induced cardiac ion channel blocking, CiPA was initiated by experts in governments and academia in the USA, Europe, and Japan in 2013. Five years have passed since the launch of the CiPA initiative that aimed to improve the current ICH guidelines. This report reviews the current achievements of the CiPA initiative and explores unresolved issues.
The anti-diabetic and antioxidant effects of a combination of Commiphora mukul, Commiphora myrrha and Terminalia chebula in diabetic rats

Objective: Effects of Commiphora mukul and Commiphora myrrha ethanolic extracts and Terminalia chebula hydro-ethanolic extract combination were evaluated in streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic rats. Materials and Methods: Male Wistar rats (n=48) were randomly assigned into: control; diabetic; diabetic+metformin (300 mg/kg); diabetic+dose 1 of herbal combination (438 mg/kg of C. mukul+214 mg/kg of C. myrrha+857 mg/kg of T. chebula); diabetic+dose 2 (642 mg/kg of C. mukul+214 mg/kg of C. myrrha+642 mg/kg of T. chebula); and diabetic+dose 3 (857 mg/kg of C. mukul+438 mg/kg of C. myrrha+1714 mg/kg t of T. chebula). All treatments were given orally by gavage. Diabetes was induced by STZ (60 mg/kg, i.p.). At the end of study (day 28), blood glucose, insulin and lipid profile; as well as hepatic malondialdehyde (MDA) and thiol content, and superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) activities were determined. Results: In diabetic rats, plasma glucose, triglycerides (TG), total cholesterol (TC), and LDL-C, as well as hepatic MDA levels were elevated but plasma HDL-C and insulin, and hepatic thiol content and SOD and CAT activities were reduced compared to control (p<0.01-p<0.001). In diabetic+dose 3, plasma TC, TG, and LDL-C and hepatic MDA level decreased (p<0.001), while plasma HDL-C and insulin, and hepatic thiol content, and SOD and CAT activities increased compared to diabetic (p<0.01-p<0.001). Treatment with dose 1 and 2 improved such abnormalities in diabetic rats except for insulin level (p<0.05-p<0.001). The herbal combination effects were comparable to those of metformin. Metformin did not significantly change serum insulin and HDL-C levels, and hepatic SOD activity; however, serum levels of TC, TG, and LDL-C, as well as hepatic MDA levels, thiol content and CAT activity were improved compared to diabetic (p<0.05-p<0.001). Conclusion: These results indicate that this herbal combination acts as an anti-diabetic, antioxidant and hypolipidemic agent and it may be suggested as a beneficial remedy for diabetic patients.
Ultrastructural studies on Regan and non-Regan isoenzymes of alkaline phosphatase in human ovarian cancer cells.

In order to examine the intracellular localization of the Regan isoenzyme of alkaline phosphatase in human cancer cells, ovarian cancer cells from three selected patients were studied histochemically and electron microscopically. For selection of these cases, the patients' ascites or tissue tumor cells derived from primary tumors were smeared or sectioned and stained histochemically for alkaline phosphatase by use of a simultaneous azodye coupling technique with or without amino acid inhibitors (d- and l-phenylalanine and l-homoarginine) in the incubation mixtures. These amino acids are able to distinguish the Regan isoenzyme from non-Regan alkaline phosphatases. Kaplow's scoring technique was applied for evaluation of the respective enzyme activities. Of the three representative cases selected for this paper, alkaline phosphatase of the cells from Case 1 (S. C.) revealed high sensitivity only to l-phenylalanine; Case 2 (T. C.) showed sensitivity to l-phenylalanine and l-homoarginine; Case 3 (H. F.) showed sensitivity only to l-homoarginine. The staining features appeared granular (Cases 1 and 2) and diffuse or membranous (Cases 2 and 3) on light microscopy. The tissue cancer cells obtained by surgical operation were processed for electron microscopic examination in combination with the histochemical reaction for alkaline phosphatase with the metal precipitation method of Hugon and Borgers. l-Phenylalanine-sensitive cases (Cases 1 and 2) showed enzyme activity on mitochondria of the cancer cells in most of the cells and occasionally in other organelles such as Golgi complexes, endoplasmic reticulum, and nuclear membranes, while in l-homoarginine-sensitive cases (Cases 2 and 3), especially in Case 3, deposition of the enzyme product was distinctly confined to the cell membranes. Case 2 also displayed cell membrane activities in addition to the other localizations described. From these results, there seemed to exist a likelihood that mitochondrial alkaline phosphatase is related to l-phenylalanine sensitivity, i.e. , Regan alkaline phosphatase, while the cell membrane activities are sensitive to l-homoarginine i.e. , non-Regan isoenzyme in ovarian cancer .
Urban Stormwater Characterization, Control, and Treatment

The following review presents a synthesis of 181 journal articles published during 2015 that represent progress toward better characterizing, controlling, and treating urban stormwater runoff. The review is structured by general topical areas related to (1) stormwater quality and quantity characterization; (2) engineered stormwater control and treatment practices, including erosion and sediment control, stormwater ponds, constructed stormwater wetlands, bioretention, permeable pavement, greenroofs, and rainwater harvesting systems; and (3) watershed‐scale modeling and optimization of stormwater control and treatment practices. Common research themes emerging from this collection of studies include potential to enhance hydrologic and pollutant treatment performance of stormwater practices via media amendments and the use of innovative outlet control structures, as well as development of a more mechanistic understanding of hydrologic and water‐quality functions to inform modeling and performance predictions. These studies serve to expand the field's knowledge base and will inform future efforts to further improve stormwater control and treatment at various spatial and temporal scales.
(Acetylacetonato-κ2 O,O′)[(2-bromophenyl)diphenylphosphane-κP]carbonylrhodium(I)

In the title compound, [Rh(C5H7O2)(C18H14BrP)(CO)], the RhI atom adopts a slightly distorted square-planar geometry involving two O atoms [Rh—O = 2.077 (2) and 2.033 (2) Å] of the acetylacetonate ligand, one carbonyl C atom [Rh—C = 1.813 (2) Å] and one P atom [Rh—P = 2.242 (5) Å] of the PPh2(2-BrC6H4) phosphane ligand. Difference electron density maps indicate a disorder of the Br atom over two positions in an approximate 0.95:0.05 ratio. However, this disorder could not be resolved satisfactorily with the present data.
Morphological and Molecular characterization of rhizoctonia oryzae sativae in Bangladesh

Aggregate sheath spot disease of rice caused by Rhizoctonia oryzaesativae has emerged in higher incidence in North-Western region of Bangladesh. Thirty isolates of R. oryzae-sativae were studied by using morphological and molecular marker. Isolates were confirmed using specific primer where a single band of 1200bp was amplified. Two distinct groups relatively slow and faster were found in mycelal growth. Molecular characterization was done using four primers and DNA band ranged from 0.25 to 2.21 kb. A combined dendrogram was constructed which separated the isolates into three groups at 69.6% similarity level. All isolates placed in two major clusters except isolate RA-1 placed in cluster group III but were not grouped according to their geographic origins. Fast growing isolates have been placed in Group II while slow growing isolates in cluster group I. The similarity coefficient values of the dendrogram profile ranged from 0.36 to 0.98 with an average of 0.67. Diversity of different isolate showed that significant variation was present among the isolate and were not genetically identical. SAARC J. Agri. , 16(2): 119-128 (2018)
Analysis of GDI logic for minimum energy optimal supply voltage

As technology advances towards the deep sub-micron regime, energy consumption of digital circuits is becoming more serious. Supply voltage (VDD) scaling is the effective knob to achieve minimum energy consumption. This paper aims at obtaining the minimum energy optimal VDD for the design of Gate Diffusion Input (GDI) logic circuits. A 10 transistor (10T) GDI based full adder circuit is designed for analyzing the performance of GDI logic to obtain optimal VDD. Extensive simulations were performed using different supply voltages ranging from 100mV to 1V using the cadence 45nm CMOS process technology. The simulations have shown that the operation of GDI based design at optimal VDD of 0.4V, lead to energy savings of more than 69% in comparison with the strong inversion counterparts. The expressions for energy using GDI logic have also been presented.
Detecting neural activity and connectivity by perfusion-based fMRI

This study proposes an approach to estimate the functional localization and connectivity from CBF and BOLD signals simultaneously measured by ASL (arterial spin labeling) MRI, especially using exploratory Structural Equation Modeling analysis. In a visual task experiment, the primary visual cortices were located by analyzing the perfusion data. In the resting state experiment, two structural equation models were estimated at each voxel regarding to the sensory-motor network and default-mode network. The resulting connectivity maps indicate that supplementary motor area has significant connections to left/right primary motor areas, and inferior parietal lobules link significantly with posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. The model fitting results imply that BOLD signal is more directly linked to the underlying cause of functional connectivity than CBF signal.
Real-time free viewpoint video from uncalibrated cameras using plane-sweep algorithm

In this paper, we present a new online video-based rendering (VBR) method that creates new views of a scene from uncalibrated cameras. Our method does not require information about the cameras intrinsic parameters. For obtaining a geometrical relation among the cameras, we use projective grid space (PGS) which is 3D space defined by epipolar geometry between two basis cameras. The other cameras are registered to the same 3D space by trifocal tensors between these basis cameras. We simultaneously reconstruct and render novel view using our proposed plane-sweep algorithm in PGS. To achieve real-time performance, we implemented the proposed algorithm in graphics processing unit (GPU). We succeed to create novel view images in real-time from uncalibrated cameras and the results show the efficiency of our proposed method.
Pivotal Advance: Francisella tularensis LVS evades killing by human neutrophils via inhibition of the respiratory burst and phagosome escape

Francisella tularensis is a Gram-negative bacterium and the causative agent of tularemia. Recent data indicate that F. tularensis replicates inside macrophages, but its fate in other cell types, including human neutrophils, is unclear. We now show that F. tularensis live vaccine strain (LVS), opsonized with normal human serum, was rapidly ingested by neutrophils but was not eliminated. Moreover, evasion of intracellular killing can be explained, in part, by disruption of the respiratory burst. As judged by luminol-enhanced chemiluminescence and nitroblue tetrazolium staining, neutrophils infected with live F. tularensis did not generate reactive oxygen species. Confocal microscopy demonstrated that NADPH oxidase assembly was disrupted, and LVS phagosomes did not acquire gp91/p22 or p47/p67. At the same time, F. tularensis also impaired neutrophil activation by heterologous stimuli such as phorbol esters and opsonized zymosan particles. Later in infection, LVS escaped the phagosome, and live organisms persisted in the neutrophil cytosol for at least 12 h. To our knowledge, our data are the first demonstration of a facultative intracellular pathogen, which disrupts the oxidative burst and escapes the phagosome to evade elimination inside neutrophils, and as such, our data define a novel mechanism of virulence. J. Leukoc. Biol. 80: 1224–1230; 2006.
Representation of Irrelevance Relations by Annotated Graphs

Irrelevance relations are sets of statements of the form: given that the ‘value’ of Z is known, the ‘values’ of Y can add no further information about the ‘values’ of X. Undirected Graphs (UGs), Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and Chain Graphs (CGs) were used and investigated as schemes for the purpose of representing irrelevance relations. It is known that, although all three schemes can approximate irrelevance, they are inadequate in the sense that there are relations which cannot be fully represented by anyone of them. In this paper annotated graphs are defined and suggested as a new model for graphical representation. It is shown that this new model is a proper generalization of the former models: any irrelevance relation that can be represented by either one of the previous models can also be represented by an annotated graph, and there are relations that can be represented by an annotated graph but cannot be represented by either one of the former models. The question of whether this new model is powerful enough to represent all the irrelevance relations, as well as some other related questions, is still open.
Accelerometer Based Structural Health Monitoring System on the Go: Developing Monitoring Systems with NI LabVIEW

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a very crucial part of maintenance and management of buildings and structures. The use of SHM in recent years has been increasing due to the advancement in technology and the availability of nanodevices and nanosensors which can detect damaged part or crack in a structure. In this paper, PSpice simulation was carried out to show the response of the integrated electronic piezoelectric (IEPE) with a VPWL-source. Then, practical experiment was done using Arduino Mega with the ADXL335 accelerometer in a laboratory setup. LabVIEW software was used along with Arduino IDE software to make graphical visualization of accelerometer reading to be captured. Furthermore, a web service was deployed which enabled LabVIEW data transmission to a smartphone running Data Dashboard application for real-time monitoring anywhere. Therefore, making the system an ecosystem of Internet of Things enabling the user to access monitoring system while on the move. The result of the vibration test on the accelerometer showed that the accelerometer response to small changes in the x, y and z axis of the accelerometer which can be used to detect micro-movements in a structure.