Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bacteroidales Diversity in Ring-Billed Gulls (Laurus delawarensis) Residing at Lake Michigan Beaches

ABSTRACT This study investigated the occurrence and diversity of Bacteroidales fecal bacteria in gulls residing in the Great Lakes region. Members of this bacterial order have been widely employed as human and bovine host-specific markers of fecal pollution; however, few studies have focused on gulls, which can be a major source of fecal indicator bacteria and pathogens at beaches. We found a low but consistent occurrence of Bacteroidales in gulls at five beaches in three different counties spanning the Wisconsin shoreline of Lake Michigan. The percentages of gulls positive for Bacteroidales were 4 to 8% at beaches in the southern part of the state and 8 to 50% at beaches in the north. Sequencing of 931 clones from seven gull Bacteroidales 16S rRNA gene libraries revealed a large amount of diversity in both individual and pooled gull fecal samples. Two libraries constructed from pooled gull fecal samples (n = 5 and n = 6) did not have a greater richness of sequences than individual samples, suggesting that even within a single gull diversity is high and an extensive sequencing effort is needed to characterize the populations. Estimates of the numbers of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) for the libraries obtained using different similarity levels revealed a large amount of microdiveristy with a limited number of OTUs at the 95% similarity level. Gull sequences were clustered by the beach from which they were collected, suggesting that there were geographic effects on the distribution of Bacteriodales. More than 53% of the 16S rRNA gene sequences from gulls at the southern beaches were associated with the family Porphyromonadaceae, primarily the genus Parabacteroides, whereas sequences from gulls at the northern beaches were comprised of Bacteroidaceae and Prevotellaceae sequences. Comparison of gull sequences with sequences from goose, canine, raccoon, and sewage sources revealed distinct clusters of closely related gull sequences; however, these sequences were widely dispersed across a dendrogram that included all other sources, including previously characterized gull Bacteroidales from other studies, suggesting that geographic influence or simply sample representation plays a greater role in the observed population structure than strictly the host gut environment.
Knowledge sharing in Chinese Service organisations: A multi case cultural perspective

Purpose – The majority of knowledge management theory and practice literature is based on, and relates to, western and Japanese business environments and related assumptions. A number of generic knowledge management cross sectional studies based on Chinese organizations have taken place; however there is a lack of in‐depth critical studies which are culturally grounded and which focus on a particular aspect or domain of knowledge management in Chinese organizations, as opposed to applying western or Japanese knowledge management models and concepts. Hence the paper seeks to make a contribution by carrying out a critical study in knowledge sharing within Chinese organizations that explores the role of culture in relation to the knowledge‐sharing process, where the people‐based aspects of knowledge sharing are likely to be influenced by the prevailing culture. The aim of the paper is to explore the role of knowledge sharing at multiple organizational levels within Chinese service‐based organizations.Design/.
Is there a prosodic difference between left-dislocated and heavy subjects? evidence from spontaneous French

This paper investigates the prosodic difference between two types of subject-NPs in spontaneous French: left-dislocated NPs (NPs followed by a coreferent pronoun in the subsequent verbal clause, as in mon marii, ili est instituteur, my husbandi hei is a teacher) and heavy NPs (NPs which are not followed by a coreferent pronoun, as in mon mari est instituteur, my husband is a teacher). In order to verify a potential prosodic difference between these two kinds of subject in spontaneous French, two instrumental analyses were conducted: (i) an automatic prominence detection determined whether a boundary tone ends the NP; (ii) a comparison of several acoustic features allowed for the acoustic estimation of the degree of prominence of the NPs of each class. We show that both types of subject-NPs cannot be statistically distinguished according to the measurements on the subject-NPs' final syllable, even if a tendency towards higher prominence values (detection and degree) for dislocated subjects clearly appears. A great variability within and in-between utterances is observed and is suggested to account for the non-significant differences.
Multivariate exponential integral approximations: a moment approach

We propose a method to approximate a class of exponential multivariate integrals using moment relaxations. Using this approach, both lower and upper bounds of the integrals are obtained and we show that these bound values asymptotically converge to the real value of the integrals when the moment degree r increases. We further demonstrate the method by calculating both hypercubic and order statistic probabilities for multivariate normal distributions.
Law without tears. Diane Kirkby (ed), Sex power and justice: historical perspectives on law in Australia

In the introduction to this collection of 17 essays, Diane Kirkby describes her scepticism about the law's potential as a mechanism for social change. Like Carol Smart warning us of the seductive power of law (Smart 1989:160) Kirkby describes her ambivalence about a reliance on law's power to right wrongs and bring about justice. But she sees the essays in this collection as sharing a commitment to social justice and expresses a hope that the collection may itself provide an impetus for change. By situating legal practice in its social and historical contexts these contributions to the historiography of law may be capable of subverting law's claims to universality and timeless validity. Kirkby sees the book as providing a resource for the new, broadened legal education in Australia and at the very least the essays, divided into the catch-all themes of Sexuality, Punishment, Family and Citizenship and the State, provide the reader with a starting point for further research or a useful overview of areas of law and legal history in Australia. The chapters that perhaps go further than this are those that articulate more clearly Kirkby's disquiet. These are the chapters that describe the uneasy alliances between feminists and moral campaigners, the difficulty feminist activists have had in dealing with the implications of intersectional identity, the inability of (legislative) reform to provide benefits for all women and the sometimes unexpected results of feminist campaigns for change. This journal article is available in Law Text Culture: http://ro.uow. edu.au/ltc/vol3/iss1/21
Distributed Load Shedding for Microgrid via Wireless Network Based on Cyber Physical Framework

Due to the limited generation, finite inertia, and distributed structure, microgrid suffers from large frequency and voltage deviation which can lead to system collapse. Thus, reliable load shedding method to keep frequency stable is required. Wireless network, benefiting from high flexibility and low deployment cost, is considered as the promising technology for microgrid management. In this paper, for maintaining the supply-demand balance and reducing the load-shedding amount, a distributed load shedding solution via wireless network is proposed. Firstly, the active power coordination of different priority loads is formulated as an optimization problem. To solve it, a distributed load shedding algorithm based on subgradient method (DLSS) is developed to shed the loads gradually. Using this method, the generator compensation can be utilized and has more time to lower the power deficit so as to reduce the load-shedding amount. Secondly, to increase the response rate and enhance the reliability of our method, a multicast metropolis schedule based on time-division multiple access (TDMA) is developed. In this protocol, the time slots are dedicatedly allocated and a checking and retransmission mechanism is utilized. Finally, the proposed solution is evaluated by NS3-Matlab co-simulator. The numerical results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our solution.
A Phenomenological Investigation of Knowing Events Among Women Headteachers of Government Schools

The main purpose of this study was to understand the nature of knowing for women headteachers in leadership and decision-making. The study was carried out through three research questions. They include: (1) what are the characteristics of knowing events for women headteachers as experienced by them? (2) what are the influences that shape women headteachers' knowing? (3) what are the specific ways of knowing that women headteachers engage in? These questions aimed to determine the characteristics, factors that influence, and structure of the knowing phenomenon among women headteachers in leadership and decision-making. The phenomenological approach was selected since it was deemed the most appropriate for the study of a phenomenon of this nature. Data were gathered from nine women headteachers in primary and secondary government schools. The participants were selected from excellent and successful women headteachers through purposeful sampling. The data collection methods employed were mainly in-depth interviews with the participants. Each interview was taped recorded, transcribed verbatim and analyzed. In addition, informal observation and review of accessible official documents were also carried out. The validity of the study was ensured through clarifying the researcher's biases at the outset of the study, triangulation, member checks, peer examination and rich, thick description of results. The reliability was furthered ensured through stating the researcher's position, triangulation and maintaining an audit trail. The findings yielded characteristics of knowing events as experienced by the women headteachers, influences that shape their knowing, ways of knowing women headteachers engaged in. The knowing events represent the phases that every woman headteacher in the study had passed through from accession or entry into headship to refocusing of values in the securely established state. The influences that shape knowing began in the formation years and occur throughout headship. In addition it also represents the development of knowing from a dependency on authorities to autonomy of self, knowledge as abstract and objective to being relative and subjective, and the cognitive process of receiving knowledge to one of generating knowledge. The study concludes that the knowing practiced among the women headteachers in leadership and decision making is unique to the participants of this study. The findings are conceptualized into a thematic portrayal of knowing. Specific recommendations for further research are also suggested.
Experiments with artificially generated noise for cleansing noisy text

Recent works show that the problem of noisy text normalization can be treated as a machine translation (MT) problem with convincing results. There have been supervised MT approaches which use noisy-regular parallel data for training an MT model, as well as unsupervised models which learn the translation probabilities in alternative ways and try to mimic the MT-based approach. While the supervised approaches suffer from data annotation and domain adaptation difficulties, the unsupervised models lack a holistic approach catering to all types of noise. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to artificially generate noisy text in a controlled way, from any regular English text. We see this approach as an alternative to the unsupervised approaches while getting the advantages of a parallel corpus based MT approach. We generate parallel noisy text from two widely used regular English datasets and test the MT-based approach for text normalization. Semi-supervised approaches were also tried to explore different ways of improving the parallel corpus (manually annotated) based MT approach by using the generated noisy text. An extensive analysis based on comparison of our approaches with both the supervised as well as unsupervised approaches is presented.
Indexing the Solution Space: A New Technique for Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Space

Similarity search in multimedia databases requires an efficient support of nearest-neighbor search on a large set of high-dimensional points as a basic operation for query processing. As recent theoretical results show, state of the art approaches to nearest-neighbor search are not efficient in higher dimensions. In our new approach, we therefore precompute the result of any nearest-neighbor search which corresponds to a computation of the Voronoi cell of each data point. In a second step, we store conservative approximations of the Voronoi cells in an index structure efficient for high-dimensional data spaces. As a result, nearest neighbor search corresponds to a simple point query on the index structure. Although our technique is based on a precomputation of the solution space, it is dynamic, i.e., it supports insertions of new data points. An extensive experimental evaluation of our technique demonstrates the high efficiency for uniformly distributed as well as real data. We obtained a significant reduction of the search time compared to nearest neighbor search in other index structures such as the X-tree.
Image Mosaic Based on SIFT and Deformation Propagation

This paper concerns the problem of automatic image stitching which mainly applies to the image sequence. Our proposed method gets the features based on scale invariant feature transform and finds the match pairs. Then we use feature deformation vectors and propagate them from the optimal partitions toward other pixels in the input images. The experiment results confirm the feasibility of our methods.
Bone turnover in children with vitamin D deficiency rickets before and during treatment

Biochemical markers of bone formation [alkaline phosphatase, osteocalcin, and carboxyterminal propeptide of type I procollagen (PICP)] and bone resorption [cross‐linked carboxyterminal telopeptide of type I collagen (ICTP) and cross‐linked N‐telopeptides of type I collagen (NTX)] were measured in 14 children aged 8.5–10.5 mo with vitamin D deficiency rickets before and longitudinally during vitamin D treatment (3000–4000 IU/daily). Forty‐four healthy children aged 8–10.5 mo were enrolled as sex‐ and age‐matched controls. Before treatment, serum levels of alkaline phosphatase, PICP, and ICTP, and urinary excretion values of NTX were significantly higher, and serum osteocalcin levels significantly lower than controls (31.4 ± 3.5 mμkat/L and 9.8 ± 2.9 μkat/L, p < 0.001; 1025 ± 89 μg/L and 952 ± 97.4 μg/L, p < 0.02; 15.6 ± 2.6 μg/L and 14.2 ± 1.3 μg/L, p< 0.01 370.7 ± 109.4 nmol BCE and 201.8 ± 69.2 nmol BCE, p < 0.001; 17.6 ± 9.1 μg/L and 22.5 ± 7.6 μg/L, p <0.05, respectively). During treatment, serum alkaline phosphatase levels progressively declined in association with the radiographic healing of the skeletal lesions. Serum levels of osteocalcin, PICP, and ICTP, and urinary excretion values of NTX showed a transient but significant (p < 0.05 to p < 0.001) increase in comparison with baseline values during the first 2–4 wk of treatment, and decreased slowly thereafter. They were within the mean 2 SD of controls before the recovery of the skeletal lesions.
Tensegric mobile controlled by pseudo forces

A tensegric mobile in virtual 3D space is introduced. An input model is a triangular mesh B-rep designed by an artist, which is allowed to have an arbitrary topology. The tensegric structure is automatically generated from a mesh model as a deforming object. After the object is set up above a virtual floor, it repeats movements: rotating, falling, flattening, and rebounding. A user can control its behavior by "pseudo forces"; attraction and repulsion forces, stiffness property, and gravity. The stiffness and gravity can also be randomly changed. By using our system, an artist can present continuous movements of an arbitrary 3D shape as a "mobile" of abstractionism.
Tachyphylaxis after Repeated Antidepressant Drug Exposure in Patients with Recurrent Major Depressive Disorder

Objective: The aim of this post hoc analysis was to examine whether tachyphylaxis occurs after repeated courses of antidepressant drug therapy. Method: 276 patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) were treated with sertraline (150–200 mg daily) for 8 weeks. Patients with persistent MDD after sertraline therapy were randomized to continuation therapy with either sertraline plus atomoxetine (n = 72) or sertraline plus placebo (n = 74) for 8 additional weeks. Logistic regression was used to test the hypothesis that an increase in prior antidepressant drug exposure is associated with a reduced responsiveness to sertraline therapy. Results: The number of prior antidepressant drug exposures was negatively associated with response to initial sertraline therapy (odds ratio = 0.81, p = 0.0035). The odds ratio indicates a 19.9% reduced likelihood of response with each prior antidepressant treatment trial. In contrast, the number of prior antidepressant treatment trials was not associated with response to continuation sertraline plus atomoxetine or sertraline plus placebo therapy. Conclusion: This observation supports the hypothesis that tachyphylaxis may develop after repeated antidepressant drug trials.
NOD/SCID IL2Rγ-null mouse xenograft model of human p53-mutated chronic lymphocytic leukemia and ATM-mutated mantle cell lymphoma using permanent cell lines

Xenograft models represent a promising tool to study the pathogenesis of hematological malignancies. To establish a reliable and appropriate in vivo model of aggressive human B-cell leukemia and lymphoma we xenotransplanted four p53-mutated cell lines and one ATM-mutated cell line into immunodeficient NOD/SCID IL2Rγ-null mice. The cell lines MEC-1, SU-DHL-4, JEKO-1, REC-1, and GRANTA-519 were transplanted intraperitoneally or subcutaneously and the engraftment was investigated using immunohistochemistry and flow cytometry. We found significant differences in engraftment efficiency. MEC-1, JEKO-1 and GRANTA-519 cell lines engrafted most efficiently, while SU-DHL-4 cells did not engraft at all. MEC-1 and GRANTA-519 massively infiltrated organs and the whole intraperitoneal cavity showing very aggressive growth. In addition, GRANTA-519 cells massively migrated to the bone marrow regardless of the transplantation route. The MEC-1 and GRANTA-519 cells can be especially recommended for in vivo study of p53-mutated chronic lymphocytic leukemia and ATM-mutated mantle cell lymphoma, respectively.
Weighing Evidence “Steampunk” Style via the Meta-Analyser

ABSTRACT The funnel plot is a graphical visualization of summary data estimates from a meta-analysis, and is a useful tool for detecting departures from the standard modeling assumptions. Although perhaps not widely appreciated, a simple extension of the funnel plot can help to facilitate an intuitive interpretation of the mathematics underlying a meta-analysis at a more fundamental level, by equating it to determining the center of mass of a physical system. We used this analogy to explain the concepts of weighing evidence and of biased evidence to a young audience at the Cambridge Science Festival, without recourse to precise definitions or statistical formulas and with a little help from Sherlock Holmes! Following on from the science fair, we have developed an interactive web-application (named the Meta-Analyser) to bring these ideas to a wider audience. We envisage that our application will be a useful tool for researchers when interpreting their data. First, to facilitate a simple understanding of fixed and random effects modeling approaches; second, to assess the importance of outliers; and third, to show the impact of adjusting for small study bias. This final aim is realized by introducing a novel graphical interpretation of the well-known method of Egger regression.
Incorporating site-level knowledge for incremental crawling of web forums: a list-wise strategy

We study in this paper the problem of incremental crawling of web forums, which is a very fundamental yet challenging step in many web applications. Traditional approaches mainly focus on scheduling the revisiting strategy of each individual page. However, simply assigning different weights for different individual pages is usually inefficient in crawling forum sites because of the different characteristics between forum sites and general websites. Instead of treating each individual page independently, we propose a list-wise strategy by taking into account the site-level knowledge. Such site-level knowledge is mined through reconstructing the linking structure, called sitemap, for a given forum site. With the sitemap, posts from the same thread but distributed on various pages can be concatenated according to their timestamps. After that, for each thread, we employ a regression model to predict the time when the next post arrives. Based on this model, we develop an efficient crawler which is 260% faster than some state-of-the-art methods in terms of fetching new generated content; and meanwhile our crawler also ensure a high coverage ratio. Experimental results show promising performance of Coverage, Bandwidth utilization, and Timeliness of our crawler on 18 various forums.
Learning and Transferring Convolutional Neural Network Knowledge to Ocean Front Recognition

In this letter, we investigated how to apply a deep learning method, in particular convolutional neural networks (CNNs), to an ocean front recognition task. Exploring deep CNNs knowledge to ocean front recognition is a challenging task, because the training data is very scarce. This letter overcomes this challenge using a sequence of transfer learning steps via fine-tuning. The core idea is to extract deep knowledge of the CNN model from a large data set and then transfer the knowledge to our ocean front recognition task on limited remote sensing (RS) images. We conducted experiments on two different RS image data sets, with different visual properties, i.e., colorful and gray-level data, which were both downloaded from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The proposed method was compared with the conventional handcraft descriptor with bag-of-visual-words, original CNN model, and last-layer fine-tuned CNN model. Our method showed a significantly higher accuracy than other methods in both datasets.
Sonel Mapping: A Stochastic Acoustical Modeling System

Modeling the acoustics of an environment is a complex and challenging task. Here we describe the sonel mapping approach to acoustical rendering. Sonel mapping is a Monte-Carlo-based approach to modeling diffuse, specular, absorption and diffraction effects in an efficient manner. The approach models many of the subtle interaction effects required for realistic acoustical modeling, and the approach is computationally efficient allowing it to be used to acoustically model interactive virtual environments