Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Floral miniaturisation and autogamy in boreal-arctic plants are epitomised by Iceland’s most frequent orchid, Platanthera hyperborea

Background and Aims. This paper concludes our series of publications comparing island and mainland speciation in European butterfly-orchids, by studying the morphology, phylogenetics and reproductive biology of the controversial circum-arctic species Platanthera (Limnorchis) hyperborea—the most frequent of seven Icelandic orchids. We draw particular attention to its phylogenetic placement, remarkable reproductive biology and morphological convergence on other Platanthera lineages through floral miniaturisation. Methods. Five populations of P. hyperborea in southwest Iceland were measured for 33 morphological characters and subjected to detailed multivariate and univariate analyses, supported by light and scanning electron microscopy of selected flowers. Representative samples from six populations were sequenced for nrITS and placed in a taxonomically broader phylogenetic matrix derived from previous studies. Key Results . Section Limnorchis consists of three distinct ITS-delimited clades based on P. stricta, P. sparsifolia–limosa–aquilonis and P. dilatata–hyperborea. Within the latter group, supposed species boundaries overlap; instead, the data indicate a crude stepwise series of ribotypic transitions extending eastward from North America to Iceland. Morphometric data failed to identify any taxonomically meaningful partitions among Icelandic P. hyperborea populations, despite the presence of a distinct and apparently plesiomorphic ribotype at the most glacially influenced habitat sampled. Microscopic study of the flowers revealed several distinguishing features (some not previously reported), including resupinate lateral sepals, toothed bract margins, club-shaped papillae shared by both the interior of the labellar spur and the stigmatic surface, and an exceptionally adhesive stigma that is reliably covered in disaggregated pollen masses prior to anthesis; auricles are absent. Conclusions. Ribotypes suggest that Icelandic P. hyperborea represents the terminus of a migration route that may have begun in East Asia before passing through North America and presumably Greenland. The incohesive pollinia, rapidly desiccating anther locules, weakly developed rostellum, exceptionally adhesive stigma and the close juxtaposition of compact male and female reproductive organs together conspire to cause routine autogamy and frequent cleistogamy, despite the continued production of substantial nectar reservoirs in the spur and consequent ongoing attraction to the flowers of insects, including mosquitoes. When considered in combination with independently derived lineages of Platanthera on the Azorean and Hawaiian archipelagos also bearing small green flowers, our observations show allometric and paedomorphic reductions in flower size as the primary evolutionary driver, but also indicate strong developmental and functional constraints.
No . 08 / 49 Exchange Rate , Employment and Hours : What Firm-Level Data

Using a representative panel of manufacturing firms, we estimate the response of job and hours worked to currency swings, showing that it depends primarily on the firm’s exposure to foreign sales and its reliance on imported inputs. Further, we show that, for given international orientation, the response to exchange rate fluctuations is magnified when firms exhibit a lower monopoly power and when they face foreign pressure in the domestic market through import penetration. The degree of substitutability between imported and other inputs and the distribution of workers by type introduce additional degrees of specificity in the employment sensitivity to exchange rate swings. Further, wage adjustments are also shown to provide a channel through which firms react to currency shocks. Finally, gross job flows within the firm are found to depend on exchange rate fluctuations, although the effect on job creation is predominant. JEL classifications: E24; F16; F31.
Combinatorial Identification in Multi-Armed Bandits

In this thesis we study the problem of combinatorial identiﬁcation in a multi-armed bandit game. Our proposed solutions rely on extensions of work by Audibert et al., 2010 and Bubeck et al., 2013. Speciﬁcally, we propose two parameter free algorithms, Combinatorial SAR & SR, to the problem of ﬁnding a combinatorial structure with maximal mean given a ﬁnite number of evalutions. We discuss theoretical aspects of the algorithms and run experiments on the speciﬁc problem of ﬁnding a maximum weighted spanning tree. Ultimately, we show that our algorithmic contributions do not prove to be a natural framework to solve the combinatorial identiﬁcation problem.
An Innovative Approach to Development of Social Abilities in Individuals with Autism: A Pilot Study

Recent evidence suggests that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) show a significant impairment in social abilities. There are no treatments that have demonstrated evidence of being effective at improving social skills and promoting independence. The transition to adulthood, which often involves loss of school support and child and adolescent mental health services, is a challenge in the rehabilitation field. Our pilot study is the first that describes a novel approach to involving young adults with ASD in metacognitive exercise focused on social cognition. In treatment proposed, participants with ASD help each other to create software aimed at improving children with ASD’s understanding of emotions. Our results showed an qualitative and quantitative improvement of their cognitive empathic abilities, as witnessed by parents and of the post- treatment assessment. This pilot study highlights the importance to help individuals with ASD to fulfil their potential in areas of strength.
Probabilistic Description Logics for the Semantic Web Probabilistic Description Logics for the Semantic Web

The work in this paper is directed towards sophisticated formalisms for reasoning under probabilistic uncertainty in ontologies in the Semantic Web. Ontologies play a central role in the development of the Semantic Web, since they provide a precise definition of shared terms in web resources. They are expressed in the standardized web ontology language OWL, which consists of the three increasingly expressive sublanguages OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. The sublanguages OWL Lite and OWL DL have a formal semantics and a reasoning support through a mapping to the expressive description logics SHIF(D) and SHOIN (D), respectively. In this paper, we present the expressive probabilistic description logics P-SHIF(D) and P-SHOIN (D), which are probabilistic extensions of these description logics. They allow for expressing rich terminological probabilistic knowledge about concepts and roles as well as assertional probabilistic knowledge about instances of concepts and roles. They are semantically based on the notion of probabilistic lexicographic entailment from probabilistic default reasoning, which naturally interprets this terminological and assertional probabilistic knowledge as knowledge about random and concrete instances, respectively. As an important additional feature, they also allow for expressing terminological default knowledge, which is semantically interpreted as in Lehmann’s lexicographic entailment in default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases. We then present sound and complete algorithms for the main reasoning problems in the new probabilistic description logics, which are based on reductions to reasoning in their classical counterparts, and to solving linear optimization problems. In particular, this shows the important result that reasoning in the new probabilistic description logics is decidable / computable. Furthermore, we also analyze the computational complexity of the main reasoning problems in the new probabilistic description logics in the general as well as restricted cases. Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Salaria 113, I-00198 Rome, Italy; e-mail: lukasiewicz@dis.uniroma1. it. Institut für Informationssysteme, Technische Universität Wien, Favoritenstraße 9-11, A-1040 Vienna, Austria; e-mail: lukasiewicz@kr.tuwien. ac.at. Acknowledgements: This paper is a significantly extended and revised version of a paper that appeared in: Proceedings JELIA-2002, volume 2424 of LNCS, pp. 86–97. Springer, 2002 [30]. This work was supported by a Heisenberg Professorship of the German Research Foundation (DFG). I am very grateful to Rosalba Giugno for her contributions to the JELIA-2002 abstract of this paper. Copyright c © 2007 by the authors INFSYS RR 1843-06-05 I
Pay for Performance: Environmental Disasters and Accounting Scandals

We explore the relationship between equity compensation and the failure of risky projects, …nding a non-monotonic relationship. However, for those settings where failures are high-stakes— e.g., environmental disasters and accounting scandals— the relationship is positive. We test these predictions for environmental and accounting failures of large US …rms from 1996 through 2011 and …nd that changing CEO equity compensation from 100% stocks to 100% options can increases law breaking and incidence rates 40-80% and
DESIGNING 3 D AUDIO AND HAPTIC INTERFACES FOR TRAINING THE SOUND LOCALIZATION ABILITY OF THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE

An assistive device, based on an alternate sensory modality, such as hearing or touch, can help the blind individuals to gain spatial awareness, to enhance their navigational skills and to improve their life quality. The purpose of our research is to develop a navigational system that would enable the visually impaired people to travel and orient in space by substituting the visual sense with relevant auditory information and haptic cues. As the proposed visual-substitution system will employ 3D binaural sounds synthesized from non-individualized Head Related Transfer Functions which offer an ambiguous spatial acoustic perception, we identified the need for training the visually impaired subjects’ sound localization abilities through a perceptual feedback based learning approach. This paper outlines the design and implementation of the 3D audio and haptic interfaces that we used for training and testing the spatial acoustic perception of the visuallyimpaired subjects who participated in our experiment.
CoPe_it!: argumentative collaboration towards learning

This paper presents CoPe_it! , an innovative web-based tool that supports collaboration and augments learning among members of diverse communities. The tool fosters the means to manage individual and collective knowledge during a sense-making or a decision-making session. We demonstrate its applicability for Communities of Practice (CoPs) by examining it from both a learning and an argumentative collaboration perspective. Arguing that argumentation is an essential element of the learning process, we comment on related design issues. Through a use case, we discuss how the proposed tool makes it easier for users to follow the evolution of collaboration and comprehend it in its entirety.
Infrared Absorption Spectra, Radiative Efficiencies, and Global Warming Potentials of Newly-Detected Halogenated Compounds: CFC-113a, CFC-112 and HCFC-133a

CFC-113a (CF3CCl3), CFC-112 (CFCl2CFCl2) and HCFC-133a (CF3CH2Cl) are three newly detected molecules in the atmosphere that are almost certainly emitted as a result of human activity. It is important to characterise the possible contribution of these gases to radiative forcing of climate change and also to provide information on the CO2-equivalence of their emissions. We report new laboratory measurements of absorption cross-sections of these three compounds at a resolution of 0.01 cm−1 for two temperatures 250 K and 295 K in the spectral range of 600–1730 cm−1. These spectra are then used to calculate the radiative efficiencies and global warming potentials (GWP). The radiative efficiencies are found to be between 0.15 and 0.3 W∙m−2∙ppbv−1. The GWP for a 100 year time horizon, relative to carbon dioxide, ranges from 340 for the relatively short-lived HCFC-133a to 3840 for the longer-lived CFC-112. At current (2012) concentrations, these gases make a trivial contribution to total radiative forcing; however, the concentrations of CFC-113a and HCFC-133a are continuing to increase. The 2012 CO2-equivalent emissions, using the GWP (100), are estimated to be about 4% of the current global CO2-equivalent emissions of HFC-134a.
Real-time classification in tracking human using segmental feature and particle filter

This paper propose the efficient method concerning verifying and tracking of human face. Recently, there has been much interest in automatically face recognition and tracking in many areas such as intelligent robotics, military, smart device applications and automatic surveillance system. Though there have been many demands about real-time face verification and tracking at the same time, however it is insufficient to research algorithm which accomplish tracking and verification simultaneously. Our goal is to solve these two problems at the same time to save computation time and elevate the performance. This algorithm is consisted of segmental feature and particle filter. It is theoretically based on discriminative common vector method and Fisher's LDA. The algorithm trains segmented and shift face image to obtain new segmental features, then we take orthogonal projection matrix using Gram-Schmidt orthogonal-ization. To solve tracking problem, particle filter algorithm is used.
The index theorem of regular variation and its applications

We develop further the topological theory of regular variation of [BOst13]. There we established the uniform convergence theorem (UCT) in the setting of topological dynamics (i.e. with a group T acting on a homogenous space X), thereby unifying and extending the multivariate regular variation literature. Here, working with realtime topological ‡ows on homogeneous spaces, we identify an index of regular variation, which in a normed-vector space context may be speci…ed using the Riesz representation theorem, and in a locally compact group setting may be connected with Haar measure.
The tandem-L mission proposal: Monitoring earth's dynamics with high resolution SAR interferometry

Tandem-L is a proposal for an innovative interferometric and polarimetric radar mission that enables the systematic monitoring of dynamic processes on the Earth surface. Important mission objectives are global forest height and biomass inventories, large scale measurements of millimetric displacements due to tectonic shifts, and systematic observations of glacier movements. The innovative mission concept and the high data acquisition capacity of Tandem-L provide a unique data source to observe, analyze and quantify the dynamics of a wide range of mutually interacting processes in the bio-, litho-, hydro- and cryosphere. By this, Tandem-L will be an essential step to advance our understanding of the Earth system and its intricate dynamics. This paper provides an overview of the Tandem-L mission concept and its main application areas. Performance predictions show the great potential of Tandem-L to acquire a wide range of bio- and geophysical parameters with high accuracy on a global scale. Innovative aspects like the employment of advanced digital beamforming techniques to improve performance and coverage are discussed in detail.
Decentralized structure for fault diagnosis of a class of hybrid dynamic systems

In this paper, a decentralized model-based approach for fault diagnosis of hybrid dynamic systems, in particular discretely controlled continuous system is proposed. The goal is to construct a decentralized hybrid diagnoser, able to diagnose parametric and discrete faults. This approach considers the system as composed of a set of continuous components interacting with several discrete components. The goal is to exploit the system modularity in order to be adapted to the diagnosis of large scale hybrid dynamic systems. In order to take into account the interactions between continuous and discrete components, local diagnosis decisions are merged using a coordinator. The latter issues a final decision about the origin of the fault and identifies its parameters.
EXAMINATION OF CONTEXT-BASED PROBLEM-SOLVING ABILITIES OF PRE-SERVICE PHYSICS TEACHERS

As a science, physics examines the complexity underlying the order in nature and in the environment, and also examines the logical implications of this complexity. From this point of view, information is born of some sort of complexity and the thoughts of problems. In fact, problems are one of the basic elements that provide communication in the learning environment (Bilen, 2006). One of the main objectives of science education is to train scientifically literate individuals who follow the technological and scientific developments. Science literacy as a general term is a combination of science-related skills, attitudes, values, insights and knowledge necessary for individuals to develop research-questioning, critical thinking, problem solving and decision-making skills, being lifelong learners, and maintaining curiosity about the world around them (Kavak, Tufan and Demirelli, 2006). The quality of science education needs to be increased in order to be able to raise scientific literate individuals. To this end, a special emphasis has been placed on concept teaching and the identification of existing alternative concepts of students in recent years because students often come to science lectures with their own theories and ideas that do not overlap with scientific ones (Hewson and Hewson, 1984; Posner, Strike, Hewson and Gertzog 1982; Roth, 1985). These concepts, which each individual has developed, differ from the scientific meanings accepted by the scientific world. This is named “misconception” by Helm (1980); “alternative frameworks” by Driver (1981); Gilbert, Osborne and Fensham (1982) have named it “children’s science”. According to Disessa (1993), misconception is that the knowledge taught is understood in a wrong way, while the alternative conception spontaneously evolves in the student. In recent years, countries have reorganized science curricula and put up-to-date teaching approaches and learning theories into practice. One of these learning theories is constructivist learning theory. The most important thought that this learning theory focuses on is the current knowledge of the student. Constructivist learning theory is essentially the building of new eXAMInAtIon oF ConteXtBAseD PRoBLeM-soLVInG ABILItIes oF PRe-seRVICe PHYsICs teACHeRs
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Fairness, Errors and the Power of Competition

In this paper, we investigate the effects of competition on bargained outcomes. We show that the neglect of either fairness concerns or decision errors will prevent a satisfactory understanding of how competition affects bargaining. We conducted experiments which demonstrate that introducing a small amount of competition to a bilateral ultimatum game – by adding just one competitor – induces large behavioral changes among responders and proposers, causing large changes in accepted offers. Models that assume that all people are self-interested and fully rational do not adequately explain these changes. We show that a model which combines heterogeneous fairness concerns with decision errors correctly predicts the comparative static effects of changes in competition. Moreover, the combined model is remarkably good at predicting the entire distribution of offers in many different competitive situations.
Predicting high cost patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus using hospital databases in a multi-ethnic Asian population

Data analytics is playing an important role in health care because of the potential actionable insights that can be derived from individual-level medical records in the electronic health records (EHRs). This paper explores the utilization of EHR data for predictive analytics at an academic health system in Singapore to facilitate patient stratification for intensive case management among individuals with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Though a multidisciplinary team approach, we developed a risk score for high health care utilizers with EHRs. A backward stepwise variable selection model building approach was performed to develop a risk score using the multiple logistic regression model and Akaike Information Criterion where the variables from 2010 was used to predict the top 10% health care spenders in 2011. The list of predictors in the risk score included sociodemographic, biochemistry, comorbidity and healthcare utilization variables. The Area under the Curve (AUC) of the risk score was 0.708, which was higher than having total cost in 2010 as the only predictor (AUC = 0.658). The absence of biochemistry measurements could either be a proxy of no regular follow-up for managing T2DM condition if their regular measurements were part of the clinical practice for T2DM, or be a proxy of a favorable perception of patient's medical condition otherwise. A close collaboration across multiple disciplines is important to ensure a holistic interpretation of a risk score.
The exocyst component Sec5 is present on endocytic vesicles in the oocyte of Drosophila melanogaster

The exocyst is an octameric complex required for polarized secretion. Some components of the exocyst are found on the plasma membrane, whereas others are recruited to Golgi membranes, suggesting that exocyst assembly tethers vesicles to their site of fusion. We have found that in Drosophila melanogaster oocytes the majority of the exocyst component Sec5 is unexpectedly present in clathrin-coated pits and vesicles at the plasma membrane. In oocytes, the major substrate for clathrin-dependent endocytosis is the vitellogenin receptor Yolkless. A truncation mutant of Sec5 (sec5 E13) allows the formation of normally sized oocytes but with greatly reduced yolk uptake. We find that in sec5 E13 oocytes Yolkless accumulates aberrantly in late endocytic compartments, indicating a defect in the endocytic cycling of the receptor. An analogous truncation of the yeast SEC5 gene results in normal secretion but a temperature-sensitive defect in endocytic recycling. Thus, the exocyst may act in both Golgi to plasma membrane traffic and endocytic cycling, and hence in oocytes is recruited to clathrin-coated pits to facilitate the rapid recycling of Yolkless.
Stepwise Feature Selection by Cross Validation for EEG-based Brain Computer Interface

The potential of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) in serving a useful purpose, e.g., supporting communication in paralyzed patients, hinges on the quality of the classification of the brain waves. This paper proposes a novel method to construct a classifier with improved generalization performance. A feature selection method is applied to features calculated from the EEG signals so that unnecessary or redundant features can be removed and only effective features are left for the classification task. Kernel support vector machines (kernel SVM) were used as a classifier and the best combinations of features were searched by backward stepwise selection, i.e., by eliminating unnecessary features one by one, and by evaluating the resulting generalization performance through cross validation. Experiments showed that the generalization performance of the classifier constructed from the best set of features was higher than that of the classifier using all features.