Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Alu-Based Phylogeny of Lemurs (Infraorder: Lemuriformes)

Lemurs (infraorder: Lemuriformes) are a radiation of strepsirrhine primates endemic to the island of Madagascar. As of 2012, 101 lemur species, divided among five families, have been described. Genetic and morphological evidence indicates all species are descended from a common ancestor that arrived in Madagascar ∼55–60 million years ago (mya). Phylogenetic relationships in this species-rich infraorder have been the subject of debate. Here we use Alu elements, a family of primate-specific Short INterspersed Elements (SINEs), to construct a phylogeny of infraorder Lemuriformes. Alu elements are particularly useful SINEs for the purpose of phylogeny reconstruction because they are identical by descent and confounding events between loci are easily resolved by sequencing. The genome of the grey mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus) was computationally assayed for synapomorphic Alu elements. Those that were identified as Lemuriformes-specific were analyzed against other available primate genomes for orthologous sequence in which to design primers for PCR (polymerase chain reaction) verification. A primate phylogenetic panel of 24 species, including 22 lemur species from all five families, was examined for the presence/absence of 138 Alu elements via PCR to establish relationships among species. Of these, 111 were phylogenetically informative. A phylogenetic tree was generated based on the results of this analysis. We demonstrate strong support for the monophyly of Lemuriformes to the exclusion of other primates, with Daubentoniidae, the aye-aye, as the basal lineage within the infraorder. Our results also suggest Lepilemuridae as a sister lineage to Cheirogaleidae, and Indriidae as sister to Lemuridae. Among the Cheirogaleidae, we show strong support for Microcebus and Mirza as sister genera, with Cheirogaleus the sister lineage to both. Our results also support the monophyly of the Lemuridae. Within Lemuridae we place Lemur and Hapalemur together to the exclusion of Eulemur and Varecia, with Varecia the sister lineage to the other three genera.
Over- and underestimation in different product domains

This paper investigates the effects of over and underestimation on the perceived Effectiveness (helpfulness) of recommender systems. We consider four different product along two dimensions, degree of objectivity and investment. Overestimation was considered more severely than underestimation with regard to perceived Effectiveness. Overestimation was also considered more severely in high investment domains compared to low investment domains. In addition, we surveyed the effect of different gaps between initial (initial impression) and final ratings (true estimate). We found that for gaps which remained in the negative half of the scale were considered less Effective than gaps which crossed over from good to bad (or from bad to good), and gaps which remained in the positive half of the scale.
On the Limits of Planning over Belief States under Strict Uncertainty

A recent trend in planning with incomplete information is to model the actions of a planning problem as non-deterministic transitions over the belief states of a planner, and to search for a plan that terminates in a desired goal state no matter how these transitions turn out. We show that this view of planning is fundamentally limited. Any plan that is successful by this criteria has an upper bound on the number of actions it can execute. Specifically, the account will not work when iterative plans are needed. We also show that by modifying the definition slightly, we obtain another account of planning that does work properly even for iterative plans. Although the argument is presented in an abstract form, we illustrate the issues using a simple concrete example.
Dynamical rearrangement of the theta parameter in the presence of a mixed Chern-Simons term

We study the five-dimensional SU(3){sub c}xU(1){sub C} gauge theory on the orbifold S{sup 1}/Z{sub 2} with a mixed Chern-Simons term. We particularly pay attention to the realization of the dynamical rearrangement of the theta parameter for SU(3){sub c}. It is shown that the physics remains invariant under a large gauge transformation which even changes the action, completely removing the theta parameter, because of the Hosotani mechanism for the U(1){sub C} gauge interactions. In other words, we show that the theta parameter can be regarded as a boundary condition for the orbifolding in light of the dynamical rearrangement.
Benchlearning as professional development of school leaders in Norway and Sweden

Abstract In this paper, we investigate a new national collaborative Benchlearning program for principals in Norway and Sweden. Four process leaders have been running the program. The aim is to give the participants the knowledge to develop a leadership practice and school environment that are more innovative. The program includes theoretical inputs, sharing experiences, school visits, training, and trialing of new leadership practices. Drawing on data from surveys, participants’ reflections, and the leaders’ descriptions of new leadership practice, we examine and identify successful and critical aspects of the learning process. The findings show that principals’ motivation and willingness to start change processes can be created in a synergy between structured school visits, work in learning groups, and a theoretical foundation. Working in groups across schools in two countries seems to enhance principals’ sense of efficacy, which in turn is shown to have a positive effect on their willingness to trial new practices. Two implications of the study are suggested. First, in the design of principal programs, systematic and critical reflection about authentic practice should be the basis. Second, educators should be trained to be process leaders who can support principals’ learning during a critical and social construction of a new practice.
Resource Descriptions for Job Scheduling in DISCWorld

The DISCWorld system requires the description and mapping of data, software and computational resources to allow user queries or requests to be scheduled. We review the distributed scheduling problem and discuss mechanisms for expressing and operating upon the necessary distributed job control information. We focus upon techniques that can be expressed in a portable fashion using Java and a World Wide Web software infrastructure, constraining the problem to deal with the well characterised high-level service applications employed in DISCWorld.
Towards (Semi-) Automatic Moderation of Social Web Annotations

With the rapid growth of social web, users' ability to publish content (e.g., annotating the multimedia resources in Youtube or Facebook) has created active electronic communities that provide a wealth of information. Subsequently mining and analyzing information content generated by the users are important research topics. Many existing researches have focussed on extraction, transformation, and summarization of information from annotated resources with the objective to classify the content of the annotations (e.g., how many percent of users agree/disagree on a specific topic). However, evaluating the content quality of the annotations is an important issue, which is not being taken into consideration by many of these researches. Unusualness in the sense of remarkable, vulgar, contrastive, unreliable or low-quality content of the social web annotations is not sufficiently analyzed in an automatic way. Therefore the task of (semi-)automatic, semantic moderation of social web annotations becomes increasingly important to identify unusualness among annotations. One of the current technologies, that provides a new framework for modeling and reasoning on social web relations and semantics in machine-processable structures, is the semantic web technology. This paper analyzes different dimensions of social web annotation and defines moderation requirements. Based on this analysis and the semantic web technology, a methodology for (semi-)automatic social web annotation moderation is proposed, which is an efficient extension and mash up of the previously mentioned approaches.
3 D CROSS-SECTIONAL SHAPE MEASUREMENT OF THE FOOT WHILE WALKING

PRINCIPLE Most of the existing 3D shape measurement systems use laser scanning[2], and requires a time (several seconds, typically) for measurement. The principle of laser scanning measurement is triangulation between camera and laser projector. In the field of computer vision, 3D shape of the target object is reconstructed from multiple images using triangulation between multiple cameras (stereo matching)[1]. Theoretically, this method can measure an object as accurate as the laser scanning. Actually, it could not because of difficulties in preprocess calibration and in finding accurate matching points in multiple images
Radar Target Recognition Based on Kernel Projection Vector Space Using High-resolution Range Profile

In this paper, a novel approach, namely kernel projection vector space (KPVS), is proposed for radar target recognition using high-resolution range profile (HRRP). First, the HRRP samples are mapped into a high-dimensional feature space using nonlinear mapping. Second, the kernel projection vectors, are obtained by kernel discriminant analysis. Then, for each class, the kernel projection vector space is formed using all the training kernel projection vectors of class. Finally, the minimum hyper plane distance classifier (MHDC) is used for classification. The aim of KPVS method is to represent the feature area of target using kernel projection vector space, and effectively measure the distance between the test HRRP and feature area via minimum hyper plane distance (MHD) metric. The experimental results of measured data show that the proposed method has better performance of recognition than KPCA and KFDA.
Analyzing the Impact of Incentive Structure on the Diffusion of Mobile Social Games : A Randomized Field Experiment

The massive growth in online social networking has revitalized academic interest in the power of social contagion as a force for individual and collective action. Recent literature (Aral and Walker 2011a, Bapna and Umyarov 2015) has causally established that peer-effects are ‘atwork’ in the general population of users of online social networks. Having established the causal existence of peer effects, it becomes natural to evolve towards asking how can we create, perhaps even maximize, social contagion using specific mechanisms that may be at work in spreading peer influence. To answer this question, we conduct a randomized filed experiment to examine how one such important mechanism of social contagion – offline word-of-mouth – can be triggered using economic incentives. Our research design involves manipulations of how the monetary reward is shared between the inviter and the invitee of the referral: selfish reward (inviter gets all), equal reward (50-50 split), and generous reward (invitee gets all). The unique context of our experiment, mobile social gaming, allows us to measure offline WOM as a driver for the adoption of digital goods. Our results show that in the aggregate general population, the generous pro-social referral reward schemes dominate purely selfish schemes in creating offline word-of-mouth. Further heterogeneity analysis help establish that while the generous reward scheme increases the number of adopters in general, the equal split reward scheme increases the number of adopters only for new users. Selfish reward schemes did not perform well among any user group, which lends support to metaperception theory that predicts that guilt accumulation in social contexts can inhibit referrals. The results can help in designing effective referral reward schemes for viral adoption in the digital world.
Semantic Segmentation of Radio Programs using Social Network Analysis and Duration Distribution Modeling

This work presents and compare two approaches for the semantic segmentation of broadcast news: the first is based on social network analysis, the second is based on Poisson stochastic processes. The experiments are performed over 27 hours of material: preliminary results are obtained by addressing the problem of splitting different episodes of the same program into two parts corresponding to a news bulletin and a talk-show respectively. The results show that the transition point between the two parts can be detected with an average error of around three minutes, i.e. roughly 5 percent of each episode duration.
Dynamic control strategy of a biped inspired from human walking

In this paper, we show that a biped robot can walk dynamically using a simple control technique inspired from human locomotion. We introduce four critical angles that affect robot speed and step length. Our control approach consists in tuning the PID parameters of each joint in each walking phase for introducing active compliance and then to increase stability of the walk. We validated the control approach to a dynamic simulation of our 14DOF biped called ROBIAN. A comparison with human walking is presented and discussed. We prove that we can maintain robot stability and walk cyclepsilas repetition without referencing a predefined trajectory or detecting the center of pressure. Results show that the walk of the biped is very similar to human one. A power consumption analysis confirms that our approach could be implemented on the real robot ROBIAN.
A Review of Breast Thermography

The following is not a comprehensive review of the literature. Over 30 years of research compiling over 800 studies in the index-medicus exist. What follows is a pertinent sample review of the research concerning the clinical application of diagnostic infrared imaging (thermography) for use in breast cancer screening. All the citations are taken from the index-medicus peer-reviewed research literature or medical textbooks. The authors are either PhD's with their doctorate in a representative field, or physicians primarily in the specialties of oncology, radiology, gynecology, and internal medicine.
The Fanconi anemia associated protein FAAP24 uses two substrate specific binding surfaces for DNA recognition

To maintain the integrity of the genome, multiple DNA repair systems exist to repair damaged DNA. Recognition of altered DNA, including bulky adducts, pyrimidine dimers and interstrand crosslinks (ICL), partially depends on proteins containing helix-hairpin-helix (HhH) domains. To understand how ICL is specifically recognized by the Fanconi anemia proteins FANCM and FAAP24, we determined the structure of the HhH domain of FAAP24. Although it resembles other HhH domains, the FAAP24 domain contains a canonical hairpin motif followed by distorted motif. The HhH domain can bind various DNA substrates; using nuclear magnetic resonance titration experiments, we demonstrate that the canonical HhH motif is required for double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) binding, whereas the unstructured N-terminus can interact with single-stranded DNA. Both DNA binding surfaces are used for binding to ICL-like single/double-strand junction-containing DNA substrates. A structural model for FAAP24 bound to dsDNA has been made based on homology with the translesion polymerase iota. Site-directed mutagenesis, sequence conservation and charge distribution support the dsDNA-binding model. Analogous to other HhH domain-containing proteins, we suggest that multiple FAAP24 regions together contribute to binding to single/double-strand junction, which could contribute to specificity in ICL DNA recognition.
Analog Simulation Meets Digital Verification – A Formal Assertion Approach for Mixed-Signal Verification

Functional and formal verification are important methodologies for complex mixed-signal designs. But there exists a verification gap between the analog and digital blocks of a mixed-signal system. Our approach improves the verification process by creating mixed-signal assertions which are described by a combination of digital assertions and analog properties. The proposed method is a new assertion-based verification flow for designing mixed-signal circuits. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on a Σ/∆-
Soil microbial responses to experimental warming and clipping in a tallgrass prairie

Global surface temperature is predicted to increase by 1.4–5.8°C by the end of this century. However, the impacts of this projected warming on soil C balance and the C budget of terrestrial ecosystems are not clear. One major source of uncertainty stems from warming effects on soil microbes, which exert a dominant influence on the net C balance of terrestrial ecosystems by controlling organic matter decomposition and plant nutrient availability. We, therefore, conducted an experiment in a tallgrass prairie ecosystem at the Great Plain Apiaries (near Norman, OK) to study soil microbial responses to temperature elevation of about 2°C through artificial heating in clipped and unclipped field plots. While warming did not induce significant changes in net N mineralization, soil microbial biomass and respiration rate, it tended to reduce extractable inorganic N during the second and third warming years, likely through increasing plant uptake. In addition, microbial substrate utilization patterns and the profiles of microbial phospholipid fatty acids (PLFAs) showed that warming caused a shift in the soil microbial community structure in unclipped subplots, leading to the relative dominance of fungi as evidenced by the increased ratio of fungal to bacterial PLFAs. However, no warming effect on soil microbial community structure was found in clipped subplots where a similar scale of temperature increase occurred. Clipping also significantly reduced soil microbial biomass and respiration rate in both warmed and unwarmed plots. These results indicated that warming‐led enhancement of plant growth rather than the temperature increase itself may primarily regulate soil microbial response. Our observations show that warming may increase the relative contribution of fungi to the soil microbial community, suggesting that shifts in the microbial community structure may constitute a major mechanism underlying warming acclimatization of soil respiration.
Feature Based Rule Learner in Noisy Environment Using Neighbourhood Rough Set Model

From the perspective of cognitive informatics, cognition can be viewed as the acquisition of knowledge. In real-world applications, information systems usually contain some degree of noisy data. A new model proposed to deal with the hybrid-feature selection problem combines the neighbourhood approximation and variable precision rough set models. Then rule induction algorithm can learn from selected features in order to reduce the complexity of rule sets. Through proposed integration, the knowledge acquisition process becomes insensitive to the dimensionality of data with a pre-defined tolerance degree of noise and uncertainty for misclassification. When the authors apply the method to a Chinese diabetic diagnosis problem, the hybrid-attribute reduction method selected only five attributes from totally thirty-four measurements. Rule learner produced eight rules with average two attributes in the left part of an IF-THEN rule form, which is a manageable set of rules. The demonstrated experiment shows that the present approach is effective in handling real-world problems.
Ho-Po Key: Leveraging Physical Constraints on Human Motion to Authentically Exchange Information in a Group (CMU-CyLab-11-004)

Establishing a secure communication channel among a group of people is highly desirable. Such a secure channel can be boostrapped by physically meeting and authentically exchanging public keys. Recently, a new class of group key exchange protocols [8,21] that leverage physical constraints on human mobility was proposed. In this paper, we present HoPo Key, a new protocol for the authentic exchange of information within a physically collocated group of people. HoPo Key introduces a novel technique for the verification of the security properties of the information collected by group members. Group members physically form a ring. The position in the ring of each member is randomly assigned based on the information collected from all members. While standing in the ring, members compare short word lists with their neighbors. The verification technique in Ho-Po Key detects attacks by both outsider and insider adversaries. Outsiders are detected by group members if they physically stand in the ring with other members. Similarly, attacks by insiders are detected since an insider is unable to stand simultaneously in two positions in the ring. We demonstrated that the verification within the ring is surprisingly easy and fast via user-studies. We implemented Ho-Po Key on Motorola A855 Droid and Apple iPhone 3GS smartphones. The iPhone application is submitted to the iPhone application store and is waiting for approval, whereas the Android application is freely available on the Android market store.
Prisoners co-infected with tuberculosis and HIV: a systematic review

Almost from the beginning of the HIV epidemic in 1981, an association with tuberculosis (TB) was recognized. This association between HIV and TB co‐infection has been particularly evident amongst prisoners. However, despite this, few studies of TB in prisons have stratified results by HIV status. Given the high prevalence of HIV‐positive persons and TB‐infected persons in prisons and the documented risk of TB in those infected with HIV, it is of interest to determine how co‐infection varies amongst prison populations worldwide. For this reason we have undertaken a systematic review of studies of co‐infected prisoners to determine the incidence and/or prevalence of HIV/TB co‐infection in prisons, as well as outcomes in this group, measured as treatment success or death.