Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic monogamy despite variable ecological conditions and social environment in the cooperatively breeding apostlebird

Mating strategies may be context-dependent and may vary across ecological and social contexts, demonstrating the role of these factors in driving the variation in genetic polyandry within and among species. Here, we took a longitudinal approach across 5 years (2006–2010), to study the apostlebird (Struthidea cinerea), an Australian cooperatively breeding bird, whose reproduction is affected by ecological “boom and bust” cycles. Climatic variation drives variation in the social (i.e., group sizes, proportion of males and females) and ecological (i.e., plant and insect abundance) context in which mating occurs. By quantifying variation in both social and ecological factors and characterizing the genetic mating system across multiple years using a molecular parentage analysis, we found that the genetic mating strategy did not vary among years despite significant variation in rainfall, driving primary production, and insect abundance, and corresponding variation in social parameters such as breeding group size. Group sizes in 2010, an ecologically good year, were significantly smaller (mean = 5.8 ± 0.9, n = 16) than in the drought affected years, between 2006 and 2008, (mean = 9.1 ± 0.5, n = 63). Overall, apostlebirds were consistently monogamous with few cases of multiple maternity or paternity (8 of 78 nests) across all years.
Nonlinear time-series model for VBR video traffic

Variable bit rate (VBR) H.261 encoded video traffic is modeled by a nonlinear time series process. A threshold autoregressive (TAR) process is of particular interest. The TAR model is comprised of a set of autoregressive (AR) processes that are switched according to the amplitude of bit rates of the time series. The TAR model is shown to capture accurately the statistical characteristics of multiplexed video sources. The buffer occupancy in a first-in first-out (FIFO) deterministic service queue using sources modeled by a TAR is compared with Markov chain based processes and it is shown that a TAR model of lower complexity yields comparable results.
Current strategies and findings in clinically relevant post-translational modification-specific proteomics

Mass spectrometry-based proteomics has considerably extended our knowledge about the occurrence and dynamics of protein post-translational modifications (PTMs). So far, quantitative proteomics has been mainly used to study PTM regulation in cell culture models, providing new insights into the role of aberrant PTM patterns in human disease. However, continuous technological and methodical developments have paved the way for an increasing number of PTM-specific proteomic studies using clinical samples, often limited in sample amount. Thus, quantitative proteomics holds a great potential to discover, validate and accurately quantify biomarkers in body fluids and primary tissues. A major effort will be to improve the complete integration of robust but sensitive proteomics technology to clinical environments. Here, we discuss PTMs that are relevant for clinical research, with a focus on phosphorylation, glycosylation and proteolytic cleavage; furthermore, we give an overview on the current developments and novel findings in mass spectrometry-based PTM research.
Methods for the Assessment of Historical Masonry Arches

The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the main analytical and numerical methods for the assessment of masonry arches , highlighting strengths and weaknesses. The methods are mainly three: i) the Thrust Line Analysis Method; ii) the Mechanism Method; iii) the Finite Element Method. The Thrust Line Analysis Method and the Mechanism Method are analytical methods and are based on two of the fundamental theorems of the Plastic Analysis, while the Finite Element Method is a numerical method that uses different strategies of discretization to analyze these structures. Key-Words: Masonry arch, Structural Models, Discrete limit analysis, Collapse Mechanism
How critical thinking should be at the heart of digital interactions

Abstract: In this paper, we study how to teach critical thinking at the digital era, in order to promote practitioners autonomy. A theory of interactions is proposed to identify constraints that structure digital creativity. This model helps to design a critical pedagogy, by connecting without opposing a procedural approach to a reflexive one. The paper presents an implementation of this model into a course about writing on a social network. The study of activity diaries of students shows presence of objectivity forms and reflexivity forms, which reflects the development of a critical thinking. This approach offers a way to develop critical thinking not from outside, in a course of argumentation or media analysis, but within the practice itself, in order to become aware of how interfaces structure our expression and thought. Keywords: critical thinking, pedagogical design, interactions, reflexivity, digital writing. *** Comment la pensee critique doit etre au cœur des interactions numeriques? Resume : Dans cet article, nous etudions comment enseigner la pensee critique a l'ere numerique, afin de promouvoir l'autonomie des praticiens. Une theorie des interactions est proposee pour identifier les contraintes qui structurent la creativite numerique. Ce modele aide a concevoir une pedagogie critique, en reliant sans opposer une approche procedurale a une approche reflexive. L'article presente une mise en œuvre de ce modele dans un cours d'ecriture sur un reseau social. L'etude des journaux d'activites des eleves montre la presence de formes d'objectivite et de reflexivite, ce qui reflete le developpement d'une pensee critique. Cette approche offre un moyen de developper la pensee critique non pas de l'exterieur, lors d'un cours d'argumentation ou d'analyse des medias, mais a l'interieur meme de la pratique, afin de prendre conscience a bon escient de la maniere dont les interfaces structurent notre expression et notre pensee. Mots-cles : pensee critique, design pedagogique, interactions, reflexivite, ecriture numerique.
Parenting With a Substance Abuse History: The Moderating Role of Parenting Behaviors on Obesity and Internalizing Symptoms in Adolescence

Although numerous studies have shown that child obesity is associated with internalizing symptoms, relatively few studies have examined the role of parenting behaviors on this relationship. Youth meeting obesity status may be at higher risk of psychosocial maladjustment when exposed to more vulnerable parenting contexts. The current study interviewed mothers with a history of substance abuse to assess whether parenting behaviors moderated the relationship between obesity and internalizing symptoms among adolescents (N = 160; 51% girls; M = 12.76 years). Hierarchical regression analyses identified physical discipline as a moderator; girls meeting obesity status displayed higher levels of internalizing symptoms when exposed to higher versus lower levels of physical discipline. Prevention/intervention efforts targeting mothers with substance abuse histories should aim to not only improve physical and emotional health but also highlight the connections between physical and emotional health and the influence of parenting behaviors on associations.
Toward multimodal fusion of affective cues

During face to face communication, it has been suggested that as much as 70% of what people communicate when talking directly with others is through paralanguage involving multiple modalities combined together (e.g. voice tone and volume, body language). In an attempt to render humancomputer interaction more similar to human-human communication and enhance its naturalness, research on sensory acquisition and interpretation of single modalities of human expressions have seen ongoing progress over the last decade. These progresses are rendering current research on artificial sensor fusion of multiple modalities an increasingly important research domain in order to reach better accuracy of congruent messages on the one hand, and possibly to be able to detect incongruent messages across multiple modalities (incongruency being itself a message about the nature of the information being conveyed). Accurate interpretation of emotional signals - quintessentially multimodal - would hence particularly benefit from multimodal sensor fusion and interpretation algorithms. In this paper we provide a state of the art multimodal fusion and describe one way to implement a generic framework for multimodal emotion recognition. The system is developed within the MAUI framework [31] and Scherer's Component Process Theory (CPT) [49, 50, 51, 24, 52], with the goal to be modular and adaptive. We want the designed framework to be able to accept different single and multi modality recognition systems and to automatically adapt the fusion algorithm to find optimal solutions. The system also aims to be adaptive to channel (and system) reliability.
Speeding up Reinforcement Learning with Behavior Transfer

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods (Sutton & Barto 1998) have become popular machine learning techniques in recent years. RL has had some experimental successes and has been shown to exhibit some desirable properties in theory, but it has often been found very slow in practice. In this paper we introduce behavior transfer , a novel approach to speeding up traditional RL. We present experimental results showing a learner is able learn one task and then use behavior transfer to markedly reduce the total training time for a more complex task
PACAP centrally mediates emotional stress-induced corticosterone responses in mice

Pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP) is a pleiotropic neuropeptide widely distributed in the nervous system. Recently, PACAP was shown to be involved in restraint stress-induced corticosterone release and concomitant expression of the genes involved in hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis activation. Therefore, in this study, we have addressed the types of stressors and the levels of the HPA axis in which PACAP signaling is involved using mice lacking PACAP (PACAP− / − ). Among four different types of stressors, open-field exposure, cold exposure, ether inhalation, and restraint, the corticosterone response to open-field exposure and restraint, which are categorized as emotional stressors, but not the other two, was markedly attenuated in PACAP− / − mice. Peripheral administration of corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) or adrenocorticotropic hormone induced corticosterone increase similarly in PACAP− / − and wild-type mice. In addition, the restraint stress-induced c-Fos expression was significantly decreased in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) and medial amygdala (MeA), but not the medial prefrontal cortex, in PACAP− / − mice. In the PVN of PACAP− / − mice, the stress-induced c-Fos expression was blunted in the CRF neurons. These results suggest that PACAP is critically involved in activation of the MeA and PVN CRF neurons to centrally regulate the HPA axis response to emotional stressors.
Naturally occurring mutations in intestinal sucrase-isomaltase provide evidence for the existence of an intracellular sorting signal in the isomaltase subunit [published erratum appears in J Cell Biol 1991 Dec;115(5):following 1473]

Mutations in the sucrase-isomaltase gene can lead to the synthesis of transport-incompetent or functionally altered enzyme in congenital sucrase-isomaltase deficiency (CSID) (Naim, H. Y., J. Roth, E. Sterchi, M. Lentze, P. Milla, J. Schmitz, and H. P. Hauri. J. Clin. Invest. 82:667-679). In this paper we have characterized two novel mutant phenotypes of CSID at the subcellular and protein levels. The first phenotype revealed a sucrase-isomaltase protein that is synthesized as a single chain, mannose-rich polypeptide precursor (pro-SI) and is electrophoretically indistinguishable from pro-SI in normal controls. By contrast to normal controls, however, pro-SI does not undergo terminal glycosylation in the Golgi apparatus. Subcellular localization of pro-SI by immunoelectron microscopy revealed unusual labeling of the molecule in the basolateral membrane and no labeling in the brush border membrane thus indicating that pro-SI is missorted to the basolateral membrane. Mapping of biosynthetically labeled pro-SI with four epitope- and conformation-specific monoclonal antibodies suggested that conformational and/or structural alterations in the pro-SI protein have prevented posttranslational processing of the carbohydrate chains of the mannose-rich precursor and have lead to its missorting to the basolateral membrane. The second phenotype revealed two variants of pro- SI precursors that differ in their content of mannose-rich oligosaccharides. Conversion of these forms to a complex glycosylated polypeptide occurs at a slow rate and is incomplete. Unlike its counterpart in normal controls, pro-SI in this phenotype is intracellularly cleaved. This cleavage produces an isomaltase-like subunit that is transport competent and is correctly sorted to the brush border membrane since it could be localized in the brush border membrane by anti-isomaltase mAb. The sucrase subunit is not transported to the cell surface and is most likely degraded intracellularly. We conclude that structural features in the isomaltase region of pro-SI are required for transport and sorting of the sucrase-isomaltase complex.
An overview of agent-oriented programming

1 have been working in areas related to software agents for a number of years now, together with many students and other colleagues. Recently, terms such as "(intelligent) (software) agents," "knowbots," and "softbots" have become quite popular. The work taking place under this umbrella is di verse, varying in content, style, and quality sufficiently to render terms such as "software agent" meaningless in general. I have spent a fair amount of time in the past two years trying to understand various agent-related work in industry and academia. However, in this chapter I will not attempt to put any order into this area, nor position our own work at Stanford within it. This is the topic of another paper currently in the works. The discussion here will be confined to reviewing our own work on multi-agent systems in general and agent-oriented programming in particular.
Vehicular platooning experiments with racing slot cars

The paper reports on an affordable platform for indoor experimental verification of algorithms for distributed control of platoons of vehicles. The platform is based on commercially available racing slot cars (by Carrera) equipped with an on-board 32-bit microcontroller-based control system. The assembled PCB board was provided by Freescale Semiconductor, Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, Czech Republic, within their Freescale Race Challenge 2012 competition of individual autonomous slot cars organized for student teams in Czech and Slovak republics. The documentation is freely available online. Some extra components such as an infrared range sensor and a wireless communication module have been added to the original system. The capabilities and potentials of the proposed platform are demonstrated on platooning experiments using two of the most popular platoon control schemes: predecessor following and leader following. Some technical parameters of the platform as well as design experience are shared in the report. It is hoped to encourage other teams to build a similar setup and possibly expose their new distributed control algorithms to an experimental competition.
Towards Equivalences for Federated SPARQL Queries

The most common way for exposing RDF data on the Web is by means of SPARQL endpoints. These endpoints are Web services that implement the SPARQL protocol and then allow end users and applications to query just the RDF data they want. However the servers hosting the SPARQL endpoints restrict the access to the data by limiting the amount of results returned by user queries or the amount of queries per time and client that can be issued. For addressing this problem we analysed different alternatives that shall allow to obtain complete query result sets from the SPARQL endpoints by rewriting the original query using SPARQL1.1’s federated query extension. We show that some of the commonly used SPARQL query patterns for this task provide unsound results while other patterns are more suitable for this task. We provide equivalent query patterns that help users in obtaining complete result sets circumventing the limitations imposed by servers.
SoF-SLAM: Segments-on-Floor-based monocular SLAM

In this paper, we propose a novel monocular SLAM method in corridor environment which employs Segments-on-Floor (SoF) as feature data. Given that the height of the camera and the angle between the camera and the floor are known, an image of the SoF can be efficiently distinguished from the other space-lines by a simple data-association method, deriving the line correspondence from a simplified homography matrix of two sequentially gathered images. Furthermore, use of SoF simplifies the analysis of the geometrical property of the camera projection matrix. Therefore, we can reconstruct SoF by using a one-step inverse projection. Once SoF is calculated from visual data processing, they are then used in a normal SLAM process as feature data. We employ a simple particle filter in our corridor SLAM. Experimental results show that it is sufficient for mapping a moderately sized building environment.
The Misguided Silver Bullet: What XML will and will NOT do to help Information Integration

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) offers many important benefits and improvements over its predecessor, HTML. But, articles have appeared about XML with exaggerated claims of it being a "Rosetta Stone" with "miraculuous ways" to almost automatically provide information integration. These claims are actually being believed by some executives. It is almost surprising that no one has claimed that XML can cure cancer and provide world peace! In reality, XML must face many of the same challenges that plagued Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and database integration efforts of the past. To a large extent, there are both managerial and technical challenges - much related to the difficulties of attaining universally accepted semantically-rich standards. In this paper, these challenges will be discussed with specific emphasis on the issue of dealing with a real-world with multiple "contexts. " Some promising research directions, some overlapping with the "semantic web" effort, will be presented.
Demonstrating efficient query processing in heterogeneous environments

The increasing heterogeneity in hardware systems gives developers many opportunities to add more functionality and computational power to the system. As a consequence, modern database systems will need to be able to adapt to a wide variety of heterogeneous architectures. While porting single operators to accelerator architectures is well-understood, a more generic approach is needed for the whole database system. In prior work, we presented a generic hardware-oblivious database system, where the operators can be executed on the main processor as well as on a large number of accelerator architectures. However, to achieve fully heterogeneous query processing, placement decisions are needed for the database operators. We enhance the presented system with heterogeneity-aware operator placement (HOP) to take a major step towards designing a database system that can efficiently exploit highly heterogeneous hardware environments. In this demonstration, we are focusing on the placement-integration aspect as well as presenting the resulting database system.
Optimizing Surveillance Performance of Alpha-Fetoprotein by Selection of Proper Target Population in Chronic Hepatitis B

Although alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) is the most widely used biomarker in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) surveillance, disease activity may also increase AFP levels in chronic hepatitis B (CHB). Since nucleos(t)ide analog (NA) therapy may reduce not only HBV viral loads and transaminase levels but also the falsely elevated AFP levels in CHB, we tried to determine whether exposure to NA therapy influences AFP performance and whether selective application can optimize the performance of AFP testing in CHB during HCC surveillance. A retrospective cohort of 6,453 CHB patients who received HCC surveillance was constructed from the electronic clinical data warehouse. Covariates of AFP elevation were determined from 53,137 AFP measurements, and covariate-specific receiver operating characteristics regression analysis revealed that albumin levels and exposure to NA therapy were independent determinants of AFP performance. C statistics were largest in patients with albumin levels ≥ 3.7 g/dL who were followed without NA therapy during study period, whereas AFP performance was poorest when tested in patients with NA therapy during study and albumin levels were < 3.7 g/dL (difference in C statics = 0.35, p < 0.0001). Contrary to expectation, CHB patients with current or recent exposure to NA therapy showed poorer performance of AFP during HCC surveillance. Combination of concomitant albumin levels and status of NA therapy can identify subgroup of CHB patients who will show optimized AFP performance.
Pemisahan, Isolasi, dan Identifikasi Senyawa Saponin Dari Herba Pegagan (Centella asiatica L. Urban)

Pegagan (Centella asiatica L. Urban) mengandung senyawa-senyawa metabolit sekunder seperti triterpenoid, steroid, dan saponin. Herba pegagan dimaserasi dengan etanol:akuades (70:30 v/v) menghasilkan rendemen sebesar 21,346%. Skrining fitokimia ekstrak menunjukkan hasil positif mengandung saponin. Fraksinasi dilakukan dengan kromatografi kolom lambat dan diperoleh 39 fraksi. KLT subfraksinasi dilakukan pada fraksi no. 4, 5, 8, 10 dengan nilai Rf sebesar 0,45; 0,45; 0,5; dan 0,5375. Dilanjutkan dengan KLT preparatif dengan eluen kloroform: methanol: air (65:25:4 v/v) menunjukkan adanya pita biru yang menunjukkan adanya kandungan saponin. KLT hasil subfraksinasi dilakukan dengan menggunakan eluen kloroform:metanol:akuades (65:25:4 v/v) didapatkan spot berwarna biru dengan nilai Rf sebesar 0,46. KLT Dua Dimensi dilakukan dengan menggunakan dua jenis eluen yaitu 6,9 mL kloroform, 2,7 mL metanol, 0,4 air mL dan 5,3 mL kloroform, 2,8 mL asam asetat glasial, 1,1 mL metanol dan 0,7 mL air. Spot hasil KLT dua dimensi berwarna biru dengan Rf 0,5 dan 0,71. Herba pegagan mengandung asiatic acid dan madecassic acid. Kata kunci: Centella asiatica L. Urban, saponin, triterpenoid
Incremental Redundancy, Fountain Codes and Advanced Topics

This document is written in order to establish a common base ground on which the majority of the relevant research about linear fountain codes can be analyzed and compared. As far as I am concerned, there is no unified approach that outlines and compares most of the published linear fountain codes in a single and self-contained framework. This written document has not only resulted in the review of theoretical fundamentals of efficient coding techniques for incremental redundancy and linear fountain coding, but also helped me have a comprehensive reference document and hopefully for many other graduate students who would like to have some background to pursue a research career regarding fountain codes and their various applications. Some background in information, coding, graph and probability theory is expected. Although various aspects of this topic and many other relevant research are deliberately left out, I still hope that this document shall serve researchers' need well. I have also included several exercises to warm up. The presentation style is usually informal and the presented material is not necessarily rigorous. There are many spots in the text that are product of my coauthors and myself, although some of which have not been published yet.