Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distribution of the Tnt1 retrotransposon family in the amphidiploid tobacco ( Nicotiana tabacum ) and its wild Nicotiana relatives

Transposable elements can generate considerable genetic diversity. Here we examine the distribution of the Tnt1 retrotransposon family in representative species of the genus Nicotiana . We show that multiple Tnt1 insertions are found in all Nicotiana species. However, Tnt1 insertions are too polymorphic to reveal species relationships. This indicates that Tnt1 has amplified rapidly and independently after Nicotiana speciation. We compare patterns of Tnt1 insertion in allotetraploid tobacco ( N. tabacum ) with those in the diploid species that are most closely related to the progenitors of tobacco, N. sylvestris (S-genome donor) and N. tomentosiformis (T-genome donor). We found no evidence for Tnt1 insertion sites of N. otophora origin in tobacco. Nicotiana sylvestris has a higher Tnt1 content than N. tomentosiformis and the elements are distributed more uniformly across the genome. This is reflected in tobacco where there is a higher Tnt1 content in S-genome chromosomes. However, the total Tnt1 content of tobacco is not the sum of the two modern-day parental species. We also observed tobacco-specific Tnt1 insertions and an absence of tobacco Tnt1 insertion sites in the diploid relatives. These data indicate Tnt1 evolution subsequent to allopolyploidy. We explore the possibility that fast evolution of Tnt1 is associated with ‘genomic-shock’ arising out of interspecific hybridization and allopolyploidy. © 2004 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society , 2004, 82 , 639‐649.
Particle lifting at the soil‐air interface by atmospheric pressure excursions in dust devils

Dust devils, small‐scale convective vortices found on Earth and on Mars, can transfer substantial quantities of dust from the ground into the atmosphere. It has been proposed that the low‐pressure region found at the center of dust devil vortices provides a lift (the ‘ΔP’ effect) that ‘sucks up’ material from the surface. Two simple models are compared to investigate the physics behind the ΔP effect and the relevance of competing processes. The first considers an impermeable bed of particles where lifting is by vertical pressure gradients, the second considers a permeable bed where lifting is by drag forces on the particles as gas is sucked from the bed. Pressure gradient lifting appears to be far more efficient than drag force lifting. We describe conditions that favor lifting by the ΔP effect and make qualitative predictions that might be tested in the laboratory, the field, or through observations from Mars Landers.
Learning and Evaluating Possibilistic Decision Trees using Information Affinity

—This paper investigates the issue of building decision trees from data with imprecise class values where imprecision is encoded in the form of possibility distributions. The Information Afﬁnity similarity measure is introduced into the well-known gain ratio criterion in order to assess the homogeneity of a set of possibility distributions representing instances’s classes belonging to a given training partition. For the experimental study, we proposed an information afﬁnity based performance criterion which we have used in order to show the performance of the approach on well-known benchmarks.
Likes attract: Students self-sort in a classroom by gender, demography, and academic characteristics

Although a growing literature has documented the effectiveness of informal group work during class sessions, virtually no data exist on which students are collaborating. As a result, instructors rarely know whether students are self-sorting in ways that maximize learning. This article explores which undergraduate students worked together on each of five exercises scheduled throughout the term, in a large-enrollment course for majors that emphasized intensive peer interaction. Pairwise logistic regression models were used to assess the likelihood that students collaborated based on shared demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status, and academic performance. In almost all cases, students self-sorted by ethnicity and gender. In addition, students who were predicted to do well in the course, based on their academic history, worked together initially; students who actually did well in the course, based on their final grade, were working together at the end; and students who were predicted to struggle in the course began collaborating late in the term.
A Domain Specific Strategy for Complex Dynamic Processes

This chapter identifies the issues that might create orthogonal complexities for process dynamism, and decouples the components implementing them in a “domain specific” way. Authors believe that traditional process management techniques for modeling and executing the processes still fall short to improve the dynamism of an enterprise. Some of the reasons are: using too “generic” techniques and tools for process management that are not scalable enough for typical business cases, having lack of architectural coverage to manage the tradeoffs between dynamism and other business quality issues, insufficient support for integrating legacy business processes, and unbalanced guidance between “primary” and “supportive” processes. In order to improve the business agility particularly with dynamic processes, effective abstraction and composition techniques are needed for the systematic design of primary and supportive processes in an organization. Authors bring in the “Domain Specific Kit” abstraction as a way to improve the dynamism of complex processes.
Scheduling the finnish major ice hockey league

Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is an extremely demanding task. Good schedules have many benefits for the league, such as higher incomes, lower costs and more interesting and fairer seasons. This paper presents a successful way to schedule the Finnish major ice hockey league. The method is a combination of local search heuristics and evolutionary methods. The generated schedule is currently in use for the 2008-2009 season.
A novel method of formant analysis and glottal inverse filtering

This paper presents a class of methods for automatically extracting formant parameters from speech. The methods rely on an iterative optimization algorithm. It was found that formant parameter data derived with these methods was less prone to discontinuity errors than conventional methods. Also, experiments were conducted that demonstrated that these methods are capable of better accuracy in formant estimation than LPC, especially for the first formant. In some cases, the analytic (non-iterative) solution has been derived, making real time applications feasible. The main target that we have been pursuing is text-to-speech (TTS) conversion. These methods are being used to automatically analyze a concatenation database, without the need for a tuning phase to fix errors. In addition, they are instrumental in realizing high quality pitch tracking, and pitch epoch marking.
Emergence of Shared Intentionality Is Coupled to the Advance of Cumulative Culture

There is evidence that the sharing of intentions was an important factor in the evolution of humans’ unique cognitive abilities. Here, for the first time, we formally model the coevolution of jointly intentional behavior and cumulative culture, showing that rapid techno-cultural advance goes hand in hand with the emergence of the ability to participate in jointly intentional behavior. Conversely, in the absence of opportunities for significant techno-cultural improvement, the ability to undertake jointly intentional behavior is selected against. Thus, we provide a unified mechanism for the suppression or emergence of shared intentions and collaborative behavior in humans, as well as a potential cause of inter-species diversity in the prevalence of such behavior.
The Role of Affect on the Acceptance of Web 2.0 as Organizational Knowledge Sharing Systems

Web 2.0 has changed the landscape of collaborative and broadcast communications among users in organizations. Enterprise 2.0 and KM 2.0 are derivations of Web 2.0. The deployments of Web 2.0 have created lot of impacts on enterprise KM sharing and reuse. Web 2.0 is used as platforms to improve ties in social networks as well as knowledge sharing and reuse activities in organizations. Many studies have shown that adoption of technologies in organizations is not the only success factor for enterprises knowledge creation and sharing among employees. Other factors such as organizational culture, man power, benefit schemes, budget and policy [33] in organizations are equally important. They should be considered to ensure the implementation of knowledge creation and sharing in organization is a successful one. This research intends to propose a Web 2.0 Affectivity model that focuses on the role of a Affect which may be able to improve the acceptance of Web 2.0 as tools for organizational knowledge sharing and reuse. The ultimate goal of the study is to improve on the enterprise knowledge creation, sharing and reuse in the organizations. The proposed model is supported by theories and many past research works on the use of affection construct in areas such as commitment toward organizations, knowledge sharing, decision making and adoption of enterprise systems. The paper presents the proposed model, discusses the research framework and research subjects, and presents on the justifications of the proposed model.
Öğretmen Adayları İçin Mesleki Dayanıklılık İnancı Ölçeğinin Geliştirilmesi

Bu arastirmada Ogretmenler icin Mesleki Dayaniklilik Inanci Olcegi (OMDO) gelistirilerek gecerlilik ve guvenilirlik calismasi yapilmistir. OMDO 26 maddeden olusan tek boyutlu bir olcektir. Olcegin gecerlik ve guvenirlik calismalari Mehmet Akif Ersoy Universitesi Egitim Fakultesi’nde ogrenim goren 168’i (%61.8) kiz, 104’u (%38.2) erkek olmak uzere 272 universite ogrencisi uzerinde gerceklestirilmistir. Yapi gecerliligi icin aciklayici ve dogrulayici faktor analizi kullanilmistir. Yapilan dogrulayici faktor analizinde tek faktorlu yapi sinanmis ve sinanan modelin oldukca iyi uyum indekslerine sahip oldugu saptanmistir. Olcegin guvenirlik calismalarinda ise Cronbach alfa ic tutarlilik katsayisi . 93 bulunmustur. Test tekrar test guvenirlik calismasinda ise 78 ogrenci ile uc hafta arayla gerceklestirilen iki uygulama arasinda elde edilen puanlar arasindaki Pearson korelasyon katsayisi “r =. 76” olarak bulunmustur. Elde edilen veriler dikkate alindiginda Ogretmenler icin gelistirilen Mesleki Dayaniklilik Inanci Olceginin gecerli ve guvenilir bir arac oldugu gorulmustur.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY APPLIED TO ENGINEERING GEOLOGY

This keynote paper describes the application of Information Technology to various aspects of Engineering Geology, from data requirements, data handling and processing to numerical and GIS modelling and visualization. It is illustrated with a number of practical examples developed in The Netherlands. RESUME: Cet article decrit l'application de technologie de l'information a des aspects d'ingenierie geologique, depuis la demande des donnees, l'arrangement et le traitement des donnees, jusqu'a la modelisation numerique et la modelisation en SIG, ainsi que la presentation des resultats. L'article est illustre a l'aide de quelques exemples pratiques developpes aux Pays Bas.
Dual harm: an exploration of the presence and characteristics for dual violence and self-harm behaviour in prison

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to quantify the characteristics of dual-harm behaviour in prison in comparison with sole self-harm or assault behaviour in prison, with an analysis of the distinguishing features. Design/methodology/approach Official data on in-prison incidents, demographic and offending information were analysed for 326 prisoners in two prisons in England. Findings Proportions of up to 42 per cent of offenders who assault others in prison will also engage in self-harm and vice versa. Dual-harm prisoners will engage in a broader and greater frequency of prison incidents than either sole group; with dual-harm prisoners reflecting greater proportions of damage to property and fire-setting. There were no differences in their time in prison or presence of serious violent current conviction, however, an index offence of drug supply was less likely in the dual-harm group, with minor violence slightly more likely in longer sentence prisoners. There was no difference for the dual-harm prisoners whether the first incident was self-harm or violence, with mean duration from sole to dual harm of less than three months. Practical implications In-prison behaviour can assist in the identification of prisoners at dual risk of harm. Greater inclusion of in-prison behaviour and awareness of dual harm in research methodologies may assist in improving risk management. A wider use of joint risk assessment and single case management approach is suggested for prisoners with dual-harm profile. Originality/value This is the first study on dual-harm behaviour in UK prisons and to evaluate their wider prison behaviour and offending characteristics.
Benefits and Drivers of Nonprofit Revenue Concentration

Nonprofit organizations (NPO) rely on a diverse mix of revenue sources. The existing literature mainly supports diversification among different revenue sources as desirable because it enables organizational stability. Using a new data set of over 200 Swiss fundraising charities, we prove the opposite to be true: organizations that displayed a higher degree of revenue concentration grew stronger between 2005 and 2012. We identify factors influencing the organization’s capital and revenue structure. These factors can be divided into “nature” and “nurture” factors, which allows us to demonstrate which of them may be actively influenced by an organization’s management and which stem from conditions of the organization that cannot be readily overcome by managerial interventions (such as age, size, and legal form). Revenue concentration is positively influenced both by an organization’s geographical range of activity and dependence on its primary revenue source, and negatively influenced by board size and diversity.
Validation of ALADIN-Climate/CZ Present Climate Simulations

Regional climate models (RCMs) are the state-of-the-art tools employed for downscaling of information from the coarse resolution global circulation models on a local scale. Due to RCMs' increasing popularity for regional climate change studies, their validation is becoming more important. Two present climate simulations performed with the regional climate model ALADIN-Climate/CZ within a framework of the EU FP6 project CECILIA were taken to assess the model's ability to reproduce the main patterns of the climate in Central Europe. To allow a direct comparison of high-resolution model outputs with the station data over the territory of the Czech Republic a new gridded dataset with the same, 10 km, resolution was created. Some results of the first evaluation dealing with the model's performance during the control period 1961-1990 are presented here.
Not-Aligned Optical Cell Switching Paradigm

Most existing all-optical switching paradigms assume that different wavelengths are switched independently, which limits the scalability of core switches. In the optical cell switching (OCS) paradigm, time is divided into time slots of fixed size by time-division multiplexing, and the wavelengths in a time slot are all bundled. Thus, each OCS core switch (OCX) requires a single switching plane and performs mere time-space switching. In OCS, each OCX requires optical slot synchronizers (OSYNs) at all inputs for the arrival slots to be aligned so that cells can be simultaneously forwarded. We propose a new OCS paradigm-not-aligned OCS-where the alignment process takes place inside the OCXs. In not-aligned OCS, no OSYNs are required, and the alignment resources are shared between all input fibers. Therefore, the proposal fulfills diverse objectives: the total number of fiber delay loops and the hardware cost are reduced, and the number of switching operations is also lower than in aligned OCS. Moreover, cell arrival time at the switch is not critical, and the network becomes simpler and more flexible. We also propose a new scheduling algorithm for not-aligned OCS networks. We provide simulation results that show that the not-aligned OCS schema takes the connection blocking probability to reasonable values.
The Probabilistic Method

The use of randomness is now an accepted tool in Theoretical Computer Science but not everyone is aware of the underpinnings of this methodology in Combinatorics - particularly, in what is now called the probabilistic Method as developed primarily by Paul Erdoős over the past half century. Here I will explore a particular set of problems - all dealing with “good” colorings of an underlying set of points relative to a given family of sets. A central point will be the evolution of these problems from the purely existential proofs of Erdős to the algorithmic aspects of much interest to this audience.
Nonisotropy in the CMB power spectrum in single field inflation

Contaldi et al. [1] have suggested that an initial period of kinetic energy domination in single field inflation may explain the lack of CMB power at large angular scales. We note that in this situation it is natural that there also be a spatial gradient in the initial value of the inflaton field, and that this can provide a spatial asymmetry in the observed CMB power spectrum, manifest at low values of l. We investigate the nature of this asymmetry and comment on its relation to possible anomalies at low l.
MUBench: A Benchmark for API-Misuse Detectors

Over the last few years, researchers proposed a multitude of automated bug-detection approaches that mine a class of bugs that we call API misuses. Evaluations on a variety of software products show both the omnipresence of such misuses and the ability of the approaches to detect them. This work presents MuBench, a dataset of 89 API misuses that we collected from 33 real-world projects and a survey. With the dataset we empirically analyze the prevalence of API misuses compared to other types of bugs, finding that they are rare, but almost always cause crashes. Furthermore, we discuss how to use it to benchmark and compare API-misuse detectors.
A Continuous Model for Multi-Store Competitive Location

This article presents a simple model to determine the location strategies of two retail firms planning to open a number of stores in a geographical market. Firms try to maximize their profit under a leader-follower type competition in which the number of stores is made endogenous by the introduction of fixed costs. A novel methodology is developed, in which firms’ strategies are defined in terms of their location densities. This methodology leads to a model that is solvable analytically and to several results on competitive location strategies. First, it is shown that if the follower decides to enter a market, he enters at least as strongly as the leader. Second, the leader can effectively deter entry even if she is severely cost disadvantaged. However, in some cases the leader is better off by allowing the follower to enter the market. Third, the leader may also let the follower enter the market in some situations where she has a cost advantage. It is also shown that in situations where both firms enter the market, their location strategies are quite insensitive to model parameters. Subject Classification: Facilities/equipment planning, location; continuous ∗ Corresponding author.
Fault diagnosis based on EEMD-IGSA-IPNN for motor bearing

To improve the accuracy of fault diagnosis for motor bearing, an ensemble approach for fault diagnosis based on Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD), Improved Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) and Incremental Probabilistic Neural Network (IPNN), called EEMD-IGSA-IPNN, is presented. Firstly, EEMD is used to extract the fault feature from the data of the motor bearing, then IGSA optimizes the thresholds of IPNN to classify the type of fault signal, and finally the goal of fault diagnosis is achieved. The experiment shows that the proposed method can improve the accuracy for motor bearing fault diagnosis.
Enhancing Health-Conscious Behaviors Among Clients in Substance Abuse Treatment Programs

The physical health of substance abuse clients significantly deteriorates because of the client’s prolonged abuse of alcohol and other drugs and accompanying behaviors. The purposes of this study are (a) to understand how substance abuse clinicians think about the health needs of their clients, (b) to identify the mechanisms through which clinicians seek to enhance health-conscious behaviors among their clients, and (c) to identify how substance abuse clinicians view their role in enhancing health-conscious behaviors among their clients. A qualitative study was conducted using in-depth, semistructured interviews with substance abuse clinicians (N = 16) from 4 substance abuse treatment centers. Using the theory of planned behavior as a framework for understanding the promotion of health-conscious behaviors in substance abuse treatment, the findings suggest that substance abuse clinicians are capable of enhancing health-conscious behaviors among clients in substance abuse programs.
Hippocampal Dendritic Spines Are Segregated Depending on Their Actin Polymerization

Dendritic spines are mushroom-shaped protrusions of the postsynaptic membrane. Spines receive the majority of glutamatergic synaptic inputs. Their morphology, dynamics, and density have been related to synaptic plasticity and learning. The main determinant of spine shape is filamentous actin. Using FRAP, we have reexamined the actin dynamics of individual spines from pyramidal hippocampal neurons, both in cultures and in hippocampal organotypic slices. Our results indicate that, in cultures, the actin mobile fraction is independently regulated at the individual spine level, and mobile fraction values do not correlate with either age or distance from the soma. The most significant factor regulating actin mobile fraction was the presence of astrocytes in the culture substrate. Spines from neurons growing in the virtual absence of astrocytes have a more stable actin cytoskeleton, while spines from neurons growing in close contact with astrocytes show a more dynamic cytoskeleton. According to their recovery time, spines were distributed into two populations with slower and faster recovery times, while spines from slice cultures were grouped into one population. Finally, employing fast lineal acquisition protocols, we confirmed the existence of loci with high polymerization rates within the spine.
Large Bodies in the Kuiper Belt

We present a survey for bright Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and Centaurs, conducted at the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) 0.9 m telescope with the KPNO 8K Mosaic CCD. The survey imaged 164 deg2 near opposition to a limiting red magnitude of 21.1. Three bright KBOs and one Centaur were found, the brightest KBO having red magnitude 19.7, about 700 km in diameter, assuming a dark Centaur-like 4% albedo. We estimate the power-law differential size distribution of the classical KBOs to have index q = 4.2, with the total number of classical KBOs with diameters larger than 100 km equal to 4.7 × 104. Additionally, we find that if there is a maximum object size in the Kuiper Belt, it must be larger than 1000 km in diameter. By extending our model to larger size bodies, we estimate that 30 Charon-sized and 3.2 Pluto-sized classical KBOs remain undiscovered.