Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficient multivariate entropy estimation via $k$-nearest neighbour distances

Many statistical procedures, including goodness-of-fit tests and methods for independent component analysis, rely critically on the estimation of the entropy of a distribution. In this paper, we seek entropy estimators that are efficient and achieve the local asymptotic minimax lower bound with respect to squared error loss. To this end, we study weighted averages of the estimators originally proposed by Kozachenko and Leonenko (1987), based on the $k$-nearest neighbour distances of a sample of $n$ independent and identically distributed random vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$. A careful choice of weights enables us to obtain an efficient estimator in arbitrary dimensions, given sufficient smoothness, while the original unweighted estimator is typically only efficient when $d \leq 3$. In addition to the new estimator proposed and theoretical understanding provided, our results facilitate the construction of asymptotically valid confidence intervals for the entropy of asymptotically minimal width.
Conservation of sex chromosomes in lacertid lizards

Sex chromosomes are believed to be stable in endotherms, but young and evolutionary unstable in most ectothermic vertebrates. Within lacertids, the widely radiated lizard group, sex chromosomes have been reported to vary in morphology and heterochromatinization, which may suggest turnovers during the evolution of the group. We compared the partial gene content of the Z‐specific part of sex chromosomes across major lineages of lacertids and discovered a strong evolutionary stability of sex chromosomes. We can conclude that the common ancestor of lacertids, living around 70 million years ago (Mya), already had the same highly differentiated sex chromosomes. Molecular data demonstrating an evolutionary conservation of sex chromosomes have also been documented for iguanas and caenophidian snakes. It seems that differences in the evolutionary conservation of sex chromosomes in vertebrates do not reflect the distinction between endotherms and ectotherms, but rather between amniotes and anamniotes, or generally, the differences in the life history of particular lineages.
Cues-of-Being-Watched Paradigm Revisited

Bateson, Nettle, and Roberts (2006) provided an intriguing experimental paradigm for investigating the effects of social cues on cooperative behavior in a real-world setting. By placing an image of a pair of eyes on a cupboard door above an "honesty box" for hot beverages, they induced substantially higher amounts of contributions. As this finding has a significant impact on the social sciences and assumptions concerning the meaning of social cues for human behavior, we systematically reanalyzed their procedure and statistical analyses and tried to replicate the results while taking personality factors into account. The overall results of our analysis and replication efforts do not unequivocally support conclusions about the effects of eyes as social cues for cooperative behavior. Problems start with the definition of cooperative behavior, underspecified methods, confounding variables, invalid statistical analyses, and a lack of insight into the factors - including personality factors - that modulate the expected effect. A follow-up experiment with 138 participants showed no effect of eyes on socially relevant concepts and attitudes. Furthermore, none of the personality factors that, according to Bateson et al.'s explanation of reputational concerns, might be a source of effects interacted with any of the measures we used to operationalize these socially relevant concepts and attitudes.
Mitochondrial genetic variations in natural house fly (Musca domestica L.) populations from the western and southern parts of Turkey

Abstract The house fly Musca domestica Linnaeus (Diptera) is one of the most studied species that is globally distributed and well known to everyone. In order to ensure baseline knowledge for the genetic resources of the species, genetic variation in M. domestica populations from western and southern parts of Turkey was investigated using nucleotide sequence analysis of 348 base pairs (bp) in the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene (COI). Samples of 192 individuals were collected from 16 localities of Turkey. There were 10 variable sites defining two haplotypes of COI in this species. There was no difference in geographical distribution frequency between the two regions of Turkey. Overall, haplotype diversity (h) was low, ranging from 0 to 0.5606 with the average overall value of 0.178 ± 0.04 and nucleotide diversity (π), ranged from 0 to 0.0056 with the overall mean of 0.0016. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) indicated that genetic differentiation within individuals and populations was low and significant (p < 0.05). Except Afyon population, conventional population statistic FST showed no significant genetic structure along the range of M. domestica populations. Sixteen populations clustered under six haplotypes and two of them are unique to Turkey. Haplotype networks suggested that house fly populations in Turkey are grouped with the Palearctic region, which is the most probable place for the origin of this species.
Determination of the Optimum Muscle Temperature for Maintaining Work Performance with Attenuation of Heat Stress in Human

The purpose of this study was to investigate the optimum muscle temperature required to maintain work performance with attenuation of heat stress. Nine male subjects (23±0.36 year) performed eight 8-sec bouts of maximal cycling exercise at a load intensity of 60% of their peak power output, with a 40-sec resting period between bouts, in a room maintained at 24.8±0.2°C and 52±1% relative humidity. The subjects worn trousers lined with tubes perfused water at 6°C, 17°C, 30°C or 44°C, and the target thigh muscle temperatures were 32°C (32.4±0.2°C), 34°C (34.4±0.2°C), 36°C (36.3±0.1°C) and 38°C (37.5±0.2°C), respectively. The peak power output from first to fourth bouts and the total work output during eight bouts were significantly greater at the 36°C and 38°C conditions than at the 32°C and 34°C conditions (p<;0.01), while there were no remarkable differences between the 36°C and 38°C conditions. After 10 minutes of the eight bouts of exercise, the tympanic temperature (Tty) was significantly elevated at the 38°C condition, but fell at the 32°C and 34°C conditions compared to that at baseline (p <; 0.01), while the Tty remained constant at the 36°C condition. The heart rate and rating of perceived exertion during eight bouts and the total sweat loss from the start to the end of experiment were significantly greater for the 38°C condition than for the 32°C and 34°C conditions. These results suggest that thigh temperature of approximately 36°C may be optimal to maintain repeated maximal cycling exercise performance with the attenuation of heat stress.
A moving least squares material point method with displacement discontinuity and two-way rigid body coupling

In this paper, we introduce the Moving Least Squares Material Point Method (MLS-MPM). MLS-MPM naturally leads to the formulation of Affine Particle-In-Cell (APIC) [Jiang et al. 2015] and Polynomial Particle-In-Cell [Fu et al. 2017] in a way that is consistent with a Galerkin-style weak form discretization of the governing equations. Additionally, it enables a new stress divergence discretization that effortlessly allows all MPM simulations to run two times faster than before. We also develop a Compatible Particle-In-Cell (CPIC) algorithm on top of MLS-MPM. Utilizing a colored distance field representation and a novel compatibility condition for particles and grid nodes, our framework enables the simulation of various new phenomena that are not previously supported by MPM, including material cutting, dynamic open boundaries, and two-way coupling with rigid bodies. MLS-MPM with CPIC is easy to implement and friendly to performance optimization.
Quorum Sensing by Super Bugs and their Resistance to Antibiotics, a Short Review

Bacteria’s are the primitive form of the organisms that evolved millions of years ago and still, exist in our society. Like other animals, bacteria’s have the power of sensing or adaptation. It can detect odd, harsh environment and survive accordingly. Quorum sensing is a well-known field that scientists have explored for long years. Bacteria’s flagella can touch and sense odd molecules and escape the harsh living areas. In the adverse situation, they produce spores to survive from drought or any other natural calamities. The cell membrane is a unique part of a bacterial body that protects the nucleic acid from destruction. The nucleic acid is pH sensitive, temperature sensitive and it degrades when cell wall or membrane is absent. Like plants, bacteria also have pores in their membranes. Through these pores, they exchange gas, ions and nutrients and genetic materials. In the adverse situation, they close most of the pores and keep one or two pores open to gather nutrients or to transfer genetic materials. This is how they developed horizontal gene transfer mechanism. Cell fusion is the basic idea of horizontal gene transfer. This is also called asexual reproduction. Bacteria’s developed resistance against quorum quencher molecules too. The mobile genes or the genes in plasmid those are associated with sensory organelles like flagella helps bacteria to develop resistance against molecules. Natural and artificial chemicals have used against quorum sensing and people found success with it.
Identifying Subgroups of Patients With Chronic Nonspecific Low Back Pain Based on a Multifactorial Approach: Protocol For a Prospective Study

Background Low back pain, especially nonspecific chronic low back pain (LBP), the leading cause of disability worldwide, represents both social and economic problems. Different therapeutic management techniques can be used, but their effects vary. Clinicians and researchers attribute the variation in the efficacy of therapeutic and management techniques to the heterogeneity of the nonspecific chronic low back pain population, and they agree that nonspecific chronic LBP must be subgrouped. Objective This study aims to identify nonspecific chronic LBP subgroups based on a multifactorial approach, including biomechanical, physical, and psychosocial data. Methods A total of 100 nonspecific chronic LBP patients and 30 healthy participants aged between 18 and 60 years will be recruited for this prospective study. A psychosocial profile will be established using questionnaires on anxiety, depression, functional disability, pain, fear of pain, avoidance belief, and physical activity. A physical capacity evaluation will be conducted. It will evaluate flexibility of the hips, lumbar spine, and lateral thoracolumbar segment, as well as trunk (extensor and flexor) muscle endurance. The subjects will perform functional daily life activities, such as walking, object lifting, forward bending, sit-to-stand, stand-to-sit, balance, and usual postures. Full body kinematics, kinetics, and surface electromyography of the trunk and hip muscles will be assessed during these tasks. The clustering classification methods for the statistical analysis will be determined according to the data and will be used to identify the subgroups of nonspecific chronic LBP patients. Results Data collection started in September 2017 and will be completed with the inclusion of all the participants (100 nonspecific chronic LBP and 30 control). The study results will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at relevant international conferences. Conclusions Numerous studies have showed that the therapeutic management of nonspecific chronic LBP is difficult and has inconstant effects caused by the complexity and heterogeneity of nonspecific chronic LBP. Identifying subgroups with a multifactorial approach is more comprehensive and closer to the pathophysiology of nonspecific chronic LBP. It also represents benefit interests and a challenge both clinically and socially. The perspective of this study is expected to support clinicians for a more adapted therapeutic management for each subgroup.
How does power corrupt ? : the way individual and institutional support of social hierarchies influences unethical behavior

This article uses social dominance theory (SDT) to explore the systemic nature of the initiation and maintenance of organizational corruption. Rooted in the definition of organizational corruption as the misuse of power or position for personal or organizational gain, this work suggests that organizational corruption is driven by the individual and institutional tendency to structure societies as group-based social hierarchies. SDT describes a series of factors and processes across multiple levels of analysis that systemically contribute to the initiation and maintenance of social hierarchies and associated power inequalities, favoritism, and discrimination. I posit that the same factors and processes also contribute to individuals’ lower awareness of the misuse of power and position within the social hierarchies, leading to the initiation and maintenance of organizational corruption. Specifically, members of the dominant groups supporting group-based hierarchies are likely to be less aware of corruption because of their feeling of entitlement to larger amounts of power and their desire to maintain dominant status, even if that requires exploiting others. Members of the subordinate groups supporting group-based hierarchies are also likely to have lower awareness of corruption if they show more favoritism toward dominant group members in order to enhance their sense of worth and preserve social order. Institutions contribute to lower awareness of corruption by developing and enforcing structures, norms, and practices that promote informational ambiguity and maximize focus on dominance. The coordination among individuals and institutions is ensured through the processes of personenvironment fit and legitimizing myths. Understanding how the individual and institutional support of social hierarchies and inequalities contribute to lower ethical awareness, managers may configure organizations in ways that curtail corruption.
Potential Contributions of Antioxidants to Cancer Therapy: Immunomodulation and Radiosensitization

Antioxidants play important roles in the maintenance of cellular integrity and thus are critical in maintaining the homeostasis of the host immune system. A balance between the levels of pro-oxidants and antioxidants defines the cellular fate of genomic integrity via maintaining the redox status of the cells. An aberration in this balance modulates host immunity that affects normal cellular signaling pathways resulting in uncontrolled proliferation of cells leading to neocarcinogenesis. For decades, there have been scientific debates on the use of antioxidants for the treatment of human cancers. This review is focused on current updates on the implications of antioxidant use as adjuncts in cancer therapy with an emphasis on immunomodulation and radiosensitization.
Investigation of the synergistic effects of haloperidol combined with Calculus Bovis Sativus in treating MK-801-induced schizophrenia in rats

Clinical studies that focused on treating schizophrenia showed that Calculus Bovis Sativus (CBS), a substitute of Calculus Bovis, when used in combination with haloperidol could significantly lower the dosage of haloperidol compared with treatment with haloperidol alone, whereas efficacy was maintained. The aim of this study was to investigate the synergetic anti-schizophrenia effects in rats using CBS in combination with haloperidol. An open field test was conducted to verify the pharmacodynamic effects of a combination treatment of CBS and haloperidol on MK-801-induced schizophrenic rats. Rat plasma concentrations of intragastric haloperidol and intravenous haloperidol were determined after oral administration of a single dose or 1-week of pretreatment with CBS (50 mg/kg). The pharmacodynamic data showed a significant decrease in locomotor activity and an increase in the percentage of the central distance when haloperidol was concomitantly administered with CBS compared with haloperidol administration alone. The AUC0-∞ and Cmax of haloperidol in the orally coadministered groups were significantly higher compared with the oral treatment with haloperidol alone. In conclusion, oral coadministration of CBS with haloperidol resulted in a synergistic effect in rats. The enhanced oral bioavailability of haloperidol when combined with CBS might be attributed to the interaction between them.
The Anatomy of Influence: Decision-Making in International Organization. By Robert W. Cox, Harold K. Jacobson, Gerard and Victoria Curzon, Joseph S. Nye, Lawrence Scheinman, James P. Sewell, and Susan Strange. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. Pp. 497. $15.00.)

strengthened the Soviet position in international affairs (p. 35); otherwise it was opposed, the Biafran case being the prime example. Although the Eastern Nigerian leaders had earlier been praised as the progressive forces who were resisting "the feudalists and comprador bourgeoisie of the Northern and Western regions" (p. 169), in the Biafran rebellion the Soviet Union supported the stronger Federal Government against the weaker Ibo rebels in order to secure access to Nigerian markets, to displace British dominance, to impress the OAU and many black African governments, and for other pragmatic reasons. The author points out that the death of I. I. Potekhin (the leading Soviet Africanist) in September 1964, and the deposition of Khrushchev in October made possible a flourishing debate on the applicability of the Soviet nation-building model to Africa. The 1966 declaration of the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime that the domestic development of the Soviet Union was its primary internationalist duty, was accompanied by a consequent waning of official interest in Africa, which freed the academic community from some of its earlier constraints. The analysis of the ensuing debate on national integration in Africa is the heart of Professor Cohn's book. The Soviet model on nation building had emphasized a dominant nationality group, universal education, a single national language, and the eradication of religion and traditional cultural values. The inapplicability of this model to most African countries was already apparent to Soviet scholars who, toward the end of the Khrushchev era, had begun to urge a gradual approach toward social reform. Now the Soviet Africanists, somewhat like those in the United States, began to acknowledge the progressiveness of some of Africa's military leaders. Soviet scholars pointed out that the vanguard parties used in the integration of the U.S.S.R. could degenerate in Africa into institutions with little contact with the masses. The development of socialist economies and political parties would therefore be a slow process.
Learning representations for multivariate time series with missing data using Temporal Kernelized Autoencoders

Learning compressed representations of multivariate time series (MTS) facilitate the analysis and process of the data in presence of noise, redundant information, and large amount of variables and time steps. However, classic dimensionality reduction approaches are not designed to process sequential data, especially in the presence of missing values. In this work, we propose a novel autoencoder architecture based on recurrent neural networks to generate compressed representations of MTS, which may contain missing values and have variable lengths. Our autoencoder learns fixed-length vectorial representations, whose pairwise similarities are aligned with a kernel function that operates in input space and handles missing values. This, allows to preserve relationships in the low-dimensional vector space even in presence of missing values. To highlight the main features of the proposed autoencoder, we first investigate its performance in controlled experiments. Successively, we show how the learned representations can be exploited both in several benchmark and real-world classification tasks on medical data. Finally, based on the proposed architecture, we conceive a framework for one-class classification and imputation of missing data in time series extracted from ECG signals.
Effect of Shift Work on Sleep, Health, and Quality of Life of Health-care Workers

Background: Shift work is associated with sleep disruption, impaired quality of life, and is a risk factor for several health conditions. Aim of this study was to investigate the impact of shift work on sleep and quality of life of health-care workers (HCW). Settings: Tertiary University hospital in Greece. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Materials and Methods: Included were HCW, working either in an irregular shift system or exclusively in morning shifts. All participants answered the WHO-5 Well-Being Index (WHO-5) and a questionnaire on demographics and medical history. Shift workers filled the Shift Work Disorders Screening Questionnaire (SWDSQ). Statistical Analysis: Descriptive statistics, Student's t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), Pearson's r correlation coefficient, and multivariate stepwise linear regression analysis were applied. Results: Included were 312 employees (87.9% females), 194 working in irregular shift system and 118 in morning shifts. Most shift-workers (58.2%) were somehow or totally dissatisfied with their sleep quality. Regression analysis revealed the following independent determinants for sleep impairment: parenthood (P < 0.001), age 36–45 years (P < 0.001), >3 night shifts/week (P < 0.001), work >5 years in an irregular shift system (P < 0.001). Diabetes mellitus was the most common medical condition reported by shift workers (P = 0.008). Comparison between the two groups revealed a significantly impairment in WHO-5 total score, as well as in 4 of 5 of its items (P < 0.001). Conclusion: Shift-work impairs quality of life, whereas its duration and frequency, along with age and family status of employees can have adverse effects on sleep.