Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Domestication‐related variation in social preferences in chickens is affected by genotype on a growth QTL

A growth‐related QTL on chicken chromosome 1 has previously been shown to influence domestication behaviour in chickens. In this study, we used Red Junglefowl (RJF) and White Leghorn (WL) as well as the intercross between them to investigate whether stress affects the way birds allocate their time between familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics in a social preference test (‘social support seeking’), and how this is related to genotype at specific loci within the growth QTL. Red Junglefowl males spent more time with unfamiliar chickens before the stressful event compared to the other birds, whereas all birds except WL males tended to spend less time with unfamiliar ones after stress. A significant QTL locus was found to influence both social preference under undisturbed circumstances and social support seeking. The WL allele at this QTL was associated not only with a preference for unfamiliar individuals but also with a shift towards familiar ones in response to stress (social support seeking). A second, suggestive QTL also affected social support seeking, but in the opposite direction; the WL allele was associated with increased time spent with unfamiliar individuals. The region contains several possible candidate genes, and gene expression analysis of a number of them showed differential expression between RJF and WL of AVPR2 (receptor for vasotocin), and possibly AVPR1a (another vasotocin receptor) and NRCAM (involved in neural development) in the lower frontal lobes of the brains of RJF and WL animals. These three genes continue to be interesting candidates for the observed behavioural effects.
Thermal monitoring of real processors: Techniques for sensor allocation and full characterization

The increased power densities of multi-core processors and the variations within and across workloads lead to runtime thermal hot spots locations of which change across time and space. Thermal hot spots increase leakage, deteriorate timing, and reduce the mean time to failure. To manage runtime thermal variations, circuit designers embed within-die thermal sensors that acquire temperatures at few selected locations. The acquired temperatures are then used to guide runtime thermal management techniques. The capabilities of these techniques are essentially bounded by the spatial thermal resolution of the sensor measurements. In this paper we characterize temperature signals of real processors and demonstrate that on-chip thermal gradients lead to sparse signals in the frequency domain. We exploit this observation to (1) devise thermal sensor allocation techniques, and (2) devise signal reconstruction techniques that fully characterize the thermal status of the processor using the limited number of measurements from the thermal sensors. To verify the accuracy of our methods, we compare our temperature characterization results against thermal measurements acquired from a state-of-the-art infrared camera that captures the mid-band infrared emissions from the back of the die of a 45 nm dual-core processor. Our results show that our techniques are capable of accurately characterizing the temperatures of real processors.
Authoring professional teacher identities: a journey from understanding culturally responsive teaching to identifying as culturally responsive teachers

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the ways in which four elementary preservice teachers came to understand culturally responsive teaching and began authoring their professional teacher identities. It examined the influence of course work and internship at a culturally and linguistically diverse school on their understandings and developing teacher identities. The study employed ethnographic methods of data collection including formal individual interviews, focus groups, audio recordings of seminar meetings, personal documents and artifacts, and observations during intern site visits. Data were analyzed using constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) and discourse analysis (Gee, 2005; Rogers, Marshall, and Tyson, 2006). Sociocultural and dialogical theories of identity formation informed the analysis of the preservice teachers’ talk (Bakhtin, 1981; Gee, 2005; Holland, Skinner, Lachicotte, and Cain, 1998; Rogers et al., 2006). Analysis occurred in two stages; within-case analysis sought to fully understand the individual experiences and understandings of each focal participant, and cross-case analysis was used “to build abstractions across cases” (Merriam, 1998, p. 195). Study findings suggest the understandings of culturally responsive teaching that the preservice teachers came to during teacher education were complex and influenced by a variety of factors including what the students brought with them to teacher education (i.e., their life histories, constructions of race and class, and personal experience with discrimination and knowing culturally diverse individuals), their course work, and the internship experience. Their visions of teaching and their negotiation of the tensions encountered during teacher education were influenced by these understandings, ultimately influencing the trajectories of each participant as they developed professional teacher identities. This study offers insight into the complexity of developing a vision for teaching in culturally responsive ways among preservice teachers. Implications of this study suggest the importance in teacher education of developing experiences for preservice teachers to work in culturally diverse settings, reflect on and engage in meaningful dialogue about such experiences, and reflect on their emerging teacher identities.
Epidemiology of Socioeconomic Status and Health: Are Determinants Within Countries the Same as Between Countries?

Abstract: Within societies, health and ill‐health follow a social gradient: lower socioeconomic position, worse health. The slope of the gradient has varied over time. It is likely that social and economic circumstances play a role in this changing slope. Within Europe, differences in health between East and West have also varied in magnitude. The advantage in the West increased through the 1970s and 1980s. Although similar in their health trends up to 1989, the countries of central and eastern Europe have diverged quite sharply subsequently. It is again likely that changing social and economic fortunes account for these trends. There is evidence to support the role of psychosocial factors in relating to socioeconomic differences within and between countries.
Pico replication: a high availability framework for middleboxes

Middleboxes are being rearchitected to be service oriented, composable, extensible, and elastic. Yet system-level support for high availability (HA) continues to introduce significant performance overhead. In this paper, we propose Pico Replication (PR), a system-level framework for middleboxes that exploits their flow-centric structure to achieve low overhead, fully customizable HA. Unlike generic (virtual machine level) techniques, PR operates at the flow level. Individual flows can be checkpointed at very high frequencies while the middlebox continues to process other flows. Furthermore, each flow can have its own checkpoint frequency, output buffer and target for backup, enabling rich and diverse policies that balance---per-flow---performance and utilization. PR leverages OpenFlow to provide near instant flow-level failure recovery, by dynamically rerouting a flow's packets to its replication target. We have implemented PR and a flow-based HA policy. In controlled experiments, PR sustains checkpoint frequencies of 1000Hz, an order of magnitude improvement over current VM replication solutions. As a result, PR drastically reduces the overhead on end-to-end latency from 280% to 15.5% and throughput overhead from 99.5% to 3.2%.
Adaptive Load Balancing of Parallel Applications with Reinforcement Learning on Heterogeneous Networks

We report on the improvements that can be achieved by applying machine learning techniques, in particular reinforcement learning, for the dynamic load balancing of parallel applications. The applications being considered here are coarse grain data intensive applications. Such applications put high pressure on the interconnect of the hardware. Synchronization and load balancing in complex, heterogeneous networks need fast, flexible, adaptive load balancing algorithms. Using reinforcement learning it is possible to improve upon the classic job farming approach.
Body size and shape and glycemic control among Maya women in rural Yucatán

Studies on relationships between aspects of physique and glucose physiology generally focus on clinical glucose tolerance or on fasting glucose or insulin assays showing glycemic status at the time of testing. Little work has examined the associations between body variables and glycemic control, or average past glucose levels in regular living conditions. The aim of this research was to investigate connections between body size and shape and glycemic control. The sample consists of 60 nondiabetic Maya women, ages 40–85 years, residing in 16 rural villages around Mérida, Yucatán. Body morphology was assessed through anthropometric and derived measures of size and shape, including indicators of fat distribution and general adiposity. Glycemic control was measured through microvenous samples analyzed for glycated blood proteins HbA1c and fructosamine to demonstrate average circulating glucose under customary living conditions during the previous several months and weeks. Four‐variable regression models explain 17% of the variance in HbA1c and 25% of the variance in fructosamine. Arm circumference has the largest positive effect on HbA1c, while weight has the greatest positive impact on fructosamine. The predictor with the largest negative effect on both glycated blood proteins is calf circumference. In general, variables reflecting overall adiposity and central adiposity demonstrate positive associations with HbA1c and fructosamine, whereas lean body measures exhibit negative associations. Findings support the value of glycated blood proteins and of less common anthropometric measures, such as calf circumference, in population research on morphological relations with glycemia. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 15:746–757, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Aggresomes Resemble Sites Specialized for Virus Assembly

The large cytoplasmic DNA viruses such as poxviruses, iridoviruses, and African swine fever virus (ASFV) assemble in discrete perinuclear foci called viral factories. Factories exclude host proteins, suggesting that they are novel subcellular structures induced by viruses. Novel perinuclear structures, called aggresomes are also formed by cells in response to misfolded protein (Johnston, J.A., C.L. Ward, and R.R. Kopito. 1998. J. Cell Biol. 143:1883–1898; García-Mata, R., Z. Bebök, E.J. Sorscher, and E.S. Sztul. 1999. J. Cell Biol. 146:1239–1254). In this study, we have investigated whether aggresomes and viral factories are related structures. Aggresomes were compared with viral factories produced by ASFV. Aggresomes and viral factories were located close to the microtubule organizing center and required an intact microtubular network for assembly. Both structures caused rearrangement of intermediate filaments and the collapse of vimentin into characteristic cages, and both recruited mitochondria and cellular chaperones. Given that ASFV factories resemble aggresomes, it is possible that a cellular response originally designed to reduce the toxicity of misfolded proteins is exploited by cytoplasmic DNA viruses to concentrate structural proteins at virus assembly sites.
Chitin Recognition via Chitotriosidase Promotes Pathologic Type-2 Helper T Cell Responses to Cryptococcal Infection

Pulmonary mycoses are often associated with type-2 helper T (Th2) cell responses. However, mechanisms of Th2 cell accumulation are multifactorial and incompletely known. To investigate Th2 cell responses to pulmonary fungal infection, we developed a peptide-MHCII tetramer to track antigen-specific CD4+ T cells produced in response to infection with the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans. We noted massive accruement of pathologic cryptococcal antigen-specific Th2 cells in the lungs following infection that was coordinated by lung-resident CD11b+ IRF4-dependent conventional dendritic cells. Other researchers have demonstrated that this dendritic cell subset is also capable of priming protective Th17 cell responses to another pulmonary fungal infection, Aspergillus fumigatus. Thus, higher order detection of specific features of fungal infection by these dendritic cells must direct Th2 cell lineage commitment. Since chitin-containing parasites commonly elicit Th2 responses, we hypothesized that recognition of fungal chitin is an important determinant of Th2 cell-mediated mycosis. Using C. neoformans mutants or purified chitin, we found that chitin abundance impacted Th2 cell accumulation and disease. Importantly, we determined Th2 cell induction depended on cleavage of chitin via the mammalian chitinase, chitotriosidase, an enzyme that was also prevalent in humans experiencing overt cryptococcosis. The data presented herein offers a new perspective on fungal disease susceptibility, whereby chitin recognition via chitotriosidase leads to the initiation of harmful Th2 cell differentiation by CD11b+ conventional dendritic cells in response to pulmonary fungal infection.
Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation

In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with human judgments both at the segment level and at the system level. This suggests that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine translation evaluation. In particular, we show that (i) all aspects of the RST tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii) the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference RST tree is positively correlated with translation quality.
Evaluating the spatial indexing of dense point sets

In this paper, we present an evaluation of the mqr-tree as a spatial access method for handling high-density point regions, such as world co-ordinates. Although previous work in spatial access methods focused on indexing objects of arbitrary size and performing region searches on them, recent applications that require the management of co-ordinate data also require that high-density point data be managed effectively by spatial access methods. The mqr-tree has shown promise in effectively managing point data. A comparison of the mqr-tree versus the benchmark R-tree shows that the mqr-tree can index high-density point regions effectively. In addition, searching dense point regions using the mqr-tree requires far fewer disk accesses than the R-tree when point density is very high.
A-signalling and the cell density requirement for Myxococcus xanthus development

Mutations in any of three asg (A-signalling) loci cause fruiting body development of Myxococcus xanthus to arrest at about the 2-h stage. Development can be restored to asg mutants by the addition of conditioned buffer in which wild-type cells have been developing or of A-factor purified from the conditioned buffer. Two forms of A-factor have been identified: heat-stable A-factor, which is composed of amino acids and peptides, and heat-labile A-factor, which consists of at least two proteases. A-factor is found in conditioned buffer in rough proportion to the cell density. As decreasing amounts of either form of A-factor are added, the developmental response of asg cells decreases until a threshold concentration is reached, below which no response is detected. In addition, wild-type cells fail to develop when their density is decreased below the point at which the level of A-factor is predicted to fall short of this threshold. The development of low-density asg+ cells can, however, be restored by the addition of either form of A-factor. These experiments show that A-factor is important for the development of wild-type cells. Moreover, the development of an asgB mutant that produces 5 to 10% the wild-type level of A-factor can be restored when the cell density is increased 10-fold above the standard density. We propose that the A-signal is used by M. xanthus to specify the minimum cell density required for the initiation of development. Differences in the response to A-factor between different asg mutants suggest that the different asg loci govern A-factor production in diverse ways.
Relationships Between Work Environment Factors and Presenteeism Mediated by Employees' Health: A Preliminary Study

Objective: This study investigates a research framework for presenteeism, in particular, whether work environment factors are indirectly related to presenteeism via employees' health. Methods: A total of 336 employees, 107 from a manufacturing company in Europe and 229 from various locations across North America, completed a self-report survey, which measured the association between presenteeism (dependent variable) and several health and work environment factors (independent variables). These relationships were tested using path analysis with bootstrapping in Mplus. Results: Presenteeism was directly related to health burden (r = 0.77; P = 0.00) and work environment burden (r = 0.34; P = 0.00). The relationship between work environment burden and presenteeism was partially mediated by health burden (&bgr; = 0.08; 95% confidence interval, 0.002 to 0.16). Conclusions: These findings suggest both a direct and an indirect relationship between work environment factors and presenteeism at work.
Do Minimum Wages Really Increase Youth Drinking and Drunk Driving?

Adams, Blackburn, and Cotti (ABC) found that increases in minimum wages were positively related to drunk driving–related traffic fatalities for those ages 16 to 20. The hypothesized mechanism for this relationship—increased alcohol consumption caused by minimum wage–induced income gains—remains empirically unexplored. Using data from two national behavioral surveys and an identification strategy identical to ABC, we find little evidence that an increase in the minimum wage leads to increases in alcohol consumption or drunk driving among teenagers. These results suggest a much smaller set of plausible causal channels to explain ABC's findings.
A Culturally Focused Wellness Intervention for American Indian Women of a Small Southwest Community: Associations with Alcohol Use, Abstinence Self-Efficacy, Symptoms of Depression, and Self-Esteem

Purpose. This study examined the influence of a culturally focused wellness intervention on alcohol consumption, alcohol abstinence self-efficacy, depression, and self-esteem among women of a small American Indian community in the southwestern United States. Participation in two intervention approaches was compared: a curriculum-based health promotion–only approach and health promotion combined with cognitive-behavioral skills building (CBSB). Design. The wellness intervention was tested in a prospective, randomized, two-group design with repeated measures. There was no control group. Setting. An American Indian community in the Southwest. Subjects. American Indian women, ages 18 to 50 (N = 268). Intervention. A 10-session culturally focused curriculum-based health promotion intervention, with a CBSB component, was developed using a community-based participatory research process. Comparisons were made between those who attended the health promotion plus CBSB intervention and those who attended the intervention without the CBSB component. Measures. Information regarding demographics, substance use, alcohol consumption, alcohol abstinence self-efficacy, depressive symptoms, and self-esteem was collected through a structured interview. Analysis. Regression was used to evaluate the effect of the intervention on alcohol consumption, alcohol abstinence self-efficacy, depressive symptoms, and self-esteem in CBSB and non-CBSB groups. Results. Although there were no significant differences between the CBSB and non-CBSB groups, the results indicate a significant decrease in alcohol consumption and symptoms of depression, and a significant increase in alcohol abstinence self-efficacy and self-esteem, from baseline to the 6-month follow-up for both groups. Conclusion. Evidence suggests that this culturally focused health promotion intervention has a positive impact on alcohol use, alcohol abstinence self-efficacy, depressive symptoms, and self-esteem among American Indian women.
Personality, alcohol use and the mediating role of alcohol-related protective behavioural strategies among college students

The aim of this study is to determine whether the relationship between personality and alcohol use are mediated by protective behavioural strategies (PBS). Data was obtained using the PBS Scale (Martens et al., 2005) along with the Big Five Inventory (John & Srivastava, 1999) among an Irish college population. Results from a quantitative study consisting of a sample size of 125 showed that (a) gender differences do exist in relation to alcohol consumption and PBS use, and (b) that conscientiousness/ agreeableness and alcohol use are partially mediated by the use of PBS. It is anticipated that through research on PBS it may become helpful to include the concept of PBS into alcohol intervention programs with college students.
A Self-Adjustable Clock Generator With Wide Dynamic Range in 28 nm FDSOI

This work demonstrates a self-adjustable clock generator that closely tracks the voltage dependence of the critical path delay in a microprocessor. A tunable replica circuit (TRC) composed of inverter cells from the standard-cell library performs real-time frequency modulation to reduce the response time to a single cycle, and a digital controller quantizes the clock frequency by selecting appropriate phases of a delay-locked loop (DLL) that generates 16 phases of 2 GHz output. A watchdog unit continuously monitors the clock output to guard against metastability arising from the asynchronous path between the controller and the DLL. The proposed design is implemented in a 28 nm UTBB FDSOI technology and occupies an area of 1120 μm2 with 2.7 mW power consumption. The generator has a wide tuning range of 550-2260 MHz at 1 V, functions at 35 MHz at 0.4 V, and can continuously synthesize the clock signal for arbitrary voltage waveforms between 0.4 V and 1 V.