Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interacting effects of early dietary conditions and reproductive effort on the oxidative costs of reproduction

The hypothesis that oxidative damage accumulation can mediate the trade-off between reproduction and lifespan has recently been questioned. However, in captive conditions, studies reporting no evidence in support of this hypothesis have usually provided easy access to food which may have mitigated the cost of reproduction. Here, I test the hypothesis that greater investment in reproduction should lead to oxidative damage accumulation and telomere loss in domestic zebra finches Taeniopygia guttata. Moreover, since the change or fluctuation in diet composition between early and late postnatal period can impair the ability to produce antioxidant defences in zebra finches, I also tested if early nutritional conditions (constant vs fluctuating early diet) influenced the magnitude of any subsequent costs of reproduction (e.g., oxidative damage and/or telomere shortening). In comparison to pairs with reduced broods, the birds that had to feed enlarged broods showed a higher level of oxidative DNA damage (8-OHdG), but brood size had no effect on telomeres. Fluctuating early diet composition reduced the capacity to maintain the activity of endogenous antioxidants (GPx), particularly when reproductive costs were increased (enlarged brood). The decline in GPx in birds feeding enlarged broods was accompanied by a change in bill colouration. This suggests that birds with lower endogenous antioxidant defences might have strategically increased the mobilization of antioxidants previously stored in other tissues (i.e., bill and liver) and thus, preventing an excessive accumulation of damage during reproduction.
Considerations on system-level behavioural and structural modeling extensions to VHDL

This paper reviews the requirements on a language for modeling behaviour and structure at the system level, and considers possible approaches to extending VHDL to meet these requirements. Modeling issues in a system-level design language are identified, including abstraction of data, concurrency, communication and timing, and design refinement. Some system-level design languages and notations are surveyed, and previous proposals to extend VHDL for system-level design are reviewed. Specific language design issues for extending VHDL are discussed, and some alternative solutions are presented.
Predicting Individual Well-Being Through the Language of Social Media

We present the task of predicting individual well-being, as measured by a life satisfaction scale, through the language people use on social media. Well-being, which encompasses much more than emotion and mood, is linked with good mental and physical health. The ability to quickly and accurately assess it can supplement multi-million dollar national surveys as well as promote whole body health. Through crowd-sourced ratings of tweets and Facebook status updates, we create message-level predictive models for multiple components of well-being. However, well-being is ultimately attributed to people, so we perform an additional evaluation at the user-level, finding that a multi-level cascaded model, using both message-level predictions and userlevel features, performs best and outperforms popular lexicon-based happiness models. Finally, we suggest that analyses of language go beyond prediction by identifying the language that characterizes well-being.
Teaching is Performing: an alternative model of teacher education

Abstract This article argues for a redefinition of teaching as a performing art and for teacher education to be remodelled accordingly. It is based on theory generated by the author's research with pre‐service secondary teacher trainees which examined the nature of role identity, role conflict and the place of reflection in role identity resolution. It is suggested that a teacher education programme might most profitably prepare beginning teachers for the complex roles of teaching by focusing on the skills of improvisatory performance and on intra‐ and interpersonal skill development.
A future career in general practice? A longitudinal study of medical students and pre-registration house officers

Objective: To monitor the future career preferences of medical students throughout their undergraduate years and into their postgraduate career, and to evaluate which factors may influence career choice intentions, and when this happens, over time. Design: Longitudinal study. Methods: Questionnaire to all Aberdeen, United Kingdom, Medical School entrants in 1996, and five annual follow-ups (four undergraduate, one postgraduate). Results: Response rates: year 1, 100%; year 2, 78%; year 3, 70%; year 4, 64%; year 5, 65%; pre-registration house officer (PRHO), 60%. Throughout the study, females were more positive about a career in general practice. General practice was the first choice for 13% of students in year 1; year 2, 9%; year 3, 22%; year 4, 24%; year 5, 27%; PRHO, 29%. Those choosing general practice were more likely than those choosing other specialties to be female, have their family home in Scotland, rate their academic abilities lower and their non-academic abilities as average, and have decided on their future career earlier. Reasons for general practice included: working in and being part of a community; continuity of patient contact; variety of illnesses and people encountered; undergraduate teaching experiences; dislike of or disillusionment with hospital medicine; and an increasing awareness of part-time opportunities. Conclusion: As medical undergraduates progressed through the curriculum and became PRHOs, general practice became more popular as a career choice, particularly with females. This may be partly explained by the increased exposure to general practitioners and patients in the new community-based teaching programme and the increasing awareness of lifestyle advantages with the particular benefits of more regular hours and working part time.
Insight into post‐mating interactions between the sexes: relatedness suppresses productivity of singly mated female Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract Post‐mating, prefertilization inbreeding avoidance (PPIA) is well established in plants but not in animals. Support for animal PPIA comes from sperm competition studies showing success of a male's gametes declining with his relatedness to the multiply mated female; however, such studies confound female–male and male–male interaction. To avoid this problem, we investigated offspring productivity of singly mated Drosophila melanogaster females using flies from four different genetic backgrounds. Our experiments established that intrapopulation crosses using highly related parents (within‐strain) were significantly less productive than intrapopulation crosses using unrelated individuals from the same population (between‐strain). Furthermore, we showed that these effects were not due to inbreeding depression. The average decrease in offspring productivity of within‐strain crosses relative to between‐strain crosses was 18.3% [nonlaboratory populations: Zimbabwe 20.3%, Riverside 11.4%, neither of which showed inbreeding depression; and temperature‐adapted laboratory populations, uncorrected (corrected) for nonsignificant inbreeding depression: 18 °C, 26.5% (24.2%) and 29 °C, 20.1% (9.5%)]. The significant reduction of within‐cross productivity demonstrates PPIA in the absence of multiple mating.
Description of two new species and redescription of one species of agnarid terrestrial isopods (Oniscidea, Agnaridae) from western Iran

Abstract The present study reports on three species of terrestrial isopods from western Iran. The genus Mongoloniscus Verhoeff, 1930 is recorded for the first time from Iran, with description of a new species: M. persicus sp. n. Protracheoniscus ehsani sp. n. is described and P. darevskii Borutzky, 1975 is redescribed based on Iranian specimens. The diagnostic characters of these species are figured and their geographical distribution is presented on a map.
Foundations of social research

behaviors and images of others’ suffer-ing. How widespread are our own feelings and how accurate are our perceptions? What has changed because of the pandemic, and what else influenced people during the pandemic? Social research methods help us to answer these bigger questions, challenge our preexisting assumptions, and develop more confidence in our answers. Social scientists physical and social processes through multiple investigations by many different scientists who share findings at conferences and criticize and evaluate each other’s work prior to pub-lication and public release. This process has been short-circuited due to the need to develop public guidelines as quickly as possible in the midst of a deadly, rapidly spreading viral threat. Mandaville suggests that health officials need to counter the “pseudoscience and lies” spread through social media about the pandemic by correcting misunderstandings about science and clearly communicating current uncertainties when new findings are publicized.
Efficient Publish/Subscribe Through a Self-Organizing Broker Overlay and its Application to SIENA

Recently many scalable and efficient solutions for event dissemination in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems have appeared in the literature. This dissemination is usually done over an overlay network of brokers and its cost can be measured as the number of messages sent over the overlay to allow the event to reach all intended subscribers. Efficient solutions to this problem are often obtained through smart dissemination algorithms that avoid flooding events on the overlay. In this paper, we propose a complementary approach that obtains efficient event dissemination by reorganizing the overlay network topology. More specifically, this reorganization is done through a self-organizing algorithm executed by brokers whose aim is to directly connect, through overlay links, pairs of brokers matching same events. In this way, on average, the number of brokers involved in an event dissemination decreases, thus reducing its cost. Even though the paradigm of the self-organizing algorithm is general and then applicable to any overlay-based pub/sub system, its concrete implementation depends on the specific system. As a consequence, we studied the effect of the introduction of the self-organizing algorithm in the context of a specific system implementing a tree-based routing strategy, namely SIENA, showing the actual performance benefits through an extensive simulation study. In particular, performance results point out the capacity of the algorithm to converge to an overlay topology accommodating efficient event with respect to (w.r.t) dissemination a specific scenario. Moreover, the algorithm shows a significant capacity to adapt the overlay network topology to continuously changing scenarios while keeping an efficient behavior w.r. t. event dissemination.
Insulin resistance induces a segmental difference in thoracic and abdominal aorta: differential expression of AT1 and AT2 receptors

Objectives The study was pursued to understand and compare the vascular reactivity to angiotensin II (Ang II) and its receptor expression in thoracic and abdominal aorta under insulin resistance. Methods Vascular reactivity to Ang II was recorded isometrically, AT1/AT2 receptor gene and protein expression was checked by RT-PCR and western blotting, respectively, and abundance of phospho (serine-10 Ph) H3 on promoter regions of Agtr1/Agtr2 genes was done by chromatin immunoprecipitation assay in aortic rings isolated from high fat diet (HFD)-fed rats. Results Our functional studies showed an increased (Emax in mg/mm2: Con: 319 ± 29 and HFD: 1095 ± 72, P < 0.001) and unaltered (Emax in mg/mm2: Con: 299 ± 29 and HFD: 350 ± 20, mean ± SEM, n = 6) Ang II-induced contractile responses in thoracic and abdominal aorta of HFD rats, respectively, as compared to control rats. Interestingly, AT2R-mediated relaxation was increased in abdominal aorta (% relaxation: Con: 25 ± 5.3 and HFD: 76.4 ± 8.9, P < 0.001) of HFD rats but not in thoracic aorta (% relaxation: Con: 25 ± 5.2 and HFD: 32 ± 5.2, mean ± SEM, n = 6). At the molecular level, increased mRNA (∼14-folds) and protein expression (∼2.5-folds) of AT2R in abdominal aorta of HFD rats was found as compared to control rats. However, AT1R mRNA and protein expression did not show any change. Chromatin immunoprecipitation with phospho H3 showed increased abundance of ser-10 phosphorylation on Agtr1 and Agtr2 gene promoter regions in thoracic and abdominal segments, respectively. But it got decreased on Agtr2 and Agtr1 genes promoter regions in thoracic and abdominal segments, respectively. Conclusion We provide first evidence that insulin resistance induces segmental difference in thoracic and abdominal aorta and this may provide reason of heterogeneity for incidence of aneurysms.
Plant Biology

• Plant Biology, Bachelor of Arts (https://catalog.ucdavis.edu/ departments-programs-degrees/plant-biology/plant-biology-ab/) • Plant Biology, Bachelor of Science (https://catalog.ucdavis.edu/ departments-programs-degrees/plant-biology/plant-biology-bs/) • Plant Biology, Minor (https://catalog.ucdavis.edu/departmentsprograms-degrees/plant-biology/plant-biology-minor/) • Systems & Synthetic Biology, Bachelor of Science (https:// catalog.ucdavis.edu/departments-programs-degrees/plant-biology/ systems-synthetic-biology-bs/)
A Methodology for Obtaining Concept Graphs from Word Graphs

In this work, we describe a methodology based on the Stochastic Finite State Transducers paradigm for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) for obtaining concept graphs from word graphs. In the edges of these concept graphs, both semantic and lexical information are represented. This makes these graphs a very useful representation of the information for SLU. The best path in these concept graphs provides the best sequence of concepts.
Formalizing Two Problems of Realistic World-Models

An intelligent agent embedded within the real world must reason about an environment which is larger than the agent, and learn how to achieve goals in that environment. We discuss attempts to formalize two problems: one of induction, where an agent must use sensory data to infer a universe which embeds (and computes) the agent, and one of interaction, where an agent must learn to achieve complex goals in the universe. We review related problems formalized by Solomonoff and Hutter, and explore challenges that arise when attempting to formalize analogous problems in a setting where the agent is embedded within the environment.
Playing at the queer edges

Through autoethnography, queer theory and edgework, I examine Wild Ginger Witchcamp, an annual five‐day event where one hundred or so people gather to celebrate shared politics, spirituality and environmental concerns. I include narratives of lived experience, woven and layered into the text to illuminate the complex realities of leisure that extends beyond resisting the normative to one of the nurturing alternatives. The social health of a community depends on the community’s ability to publicly affirm itself, and it is critical that a community find a way to transmit and transform its culture. Queer theory, the related constructs of heteronormativity and counterpublics, along with edgework, can help us understand the importance of communal and culturally relevant leisure particularly for individuals and communities that do not see themselves reflected in the dominant culture.
Discovering Event Evolution Patterns From Document Sequences

Recent advances in information and networking technologies have contributed significantly to global connectivity and greatly facilitated and fostered information creation, distribution, and access. The resultant ever-increasing volume of online textual documents creates an urgent need for new text mining techniques that can intelligently and automatically extract implicit and potentially useful knowledge from these documents for decision support. This research focuses on identifying and discovering event episodes together with their temporal relationships that occur frequently (referred to as evolution patterns (EPs) in this paper) in sequences of documents. The discovery of such EPs can be applied in domains such as knowledge management and used to facilitate existing document management and retrieval techniques [e.g., event tracking (ET)]. Specifically, we propose and design an EP discovery technique for mining EPs from sequences of documents. We experimentally evaluate our proposed EP technique in the context of facilitating ET. Measured by miss and false alarm rates, the EP-supported ET (EPET) technique exhibits better tracking effectiveness than a traditional ET technique. The encouraging performance of the EPET technique demonstrates the potential usefulness of EPs in supporting ET and suggests that the proposed EP technique could effectively discover event episodes and EPs in sequences of documents
U-NSGA-III : A Unified Evolutionary Algorithm for Single , Multiple , and Many-Objective Optimization

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been systematically developed to solve mono-objective, multi-objective and many-objective optimization problems, in this order, over the past few decades. Despite some efforts in unifying different types of mono-objective evolutionary and non-evolutionary algorithms, there does not exist many studies to unify all three types of optimization problems together. Such a unified optimization algorithm will allow a user to work with a single code or software enabling one-time implementation of a suitable solution representation, objective and constraint function coding and operator updates, if any, to achieve optimizations with different objective dimensions. In this study, for the first time, we propose a unified evolutionary optimization algorithm U-NSGA-III, based on the recentlyproposed NSGA-III procedure, developed for solving many-objectives problems, for solving all three classes of problems specified above. Our proposed implementation is such that the U-NSGA-III algorithm degenerates to an equivalent and efficient population-based optimization procedure for each class, just from the description of the number of specified objectives of a problem. The algorithm works with usual EA parameters and no additional tunable parameters are needed. To demonstrate the working of U-NSGA-III, extensive simulations are performed on unconstrained and constrained test problems having single, two, multi and many-objectives, taken from the literature and on two engineering optimization design problems. The performance of U-NSGA-III is compared with a real-coded genetic algorithm for mono-objective problems, with well-known NSGA-II for two-objective problems, and with recently proposed NSGA-III for three to 15-objective problems. Results amply demonstrate the merit of our proposed unified approach, encourage its further application, and motivate similar studies for a richer understanding of the development of optimization algorithms.
Screen Capture and Arithmetic Coding Based on Content Increment

Aimed at solving the problem of teacher computer screen information transmission on the Internet and storage in the hard disk in the distance education, this paper analyzes the characteristic of screen capture and lossless compression in the online teaching. It proposes a novel solution for screen capture based on content increment and arithmetic coding to produce screen stream and transmit simultaneously with teacher's audio/video streams on the Internet and make multimedia courseware in the hard disk at the same time. The effectiveness and good results of this method in real-time and non-real-time learning have been testified by the real.
Multiuser detection for UTRA-TDD based on polynomial expansion

In this paper the use of the polynomial expansion (PE) detector as a multiuser detector (MUD) for UTRA-TDD is discussed. The PE detector can iteratively approximate either the decorrelating or the MMSE (minimum mean-squared error) MUD. This is possible without the computationally intense matrix inversion operation (cubic complexity in the number of users: O(K/sup 3/)), which is needed for the decorrelating and the MMSE detector. In this paper it is shown that the operations for the PE detector can be arranged such that they only have a complexity of O(K/sup 2/), in all processing levels. New simulation results for an UTRA-TDD simulation environment show that the detector achieves a performance (in terms of BER) close to that of the MUD which it approximates (decorrelating or MMSE). Additionally, it is shown how the number of iterations can be reduced significantly, while achieving the same BER performance.
Improved Principal Component Regression for Face Recognition Under Illumination Variations

The uncontrollable illumination problem is a great challenge for face recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel face recognition framework, the improved principal component regression classification (IPCRC) algorithm, which could overcome the problem of multicollinearity in linear regression. The IPCRC approach first performs principal component analysis (PCA) process to project the face images onto the face space. The first n principal components are intentionally dropped to boost the robustness against illumination changes. Then, the linear regression classification (LRC) is executed on the projected data and the identity is determined by the minimum reconstruction error. Experiments carried out on Yale B and FERET facial databases reveal that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and demonstrates promising abilities against severe illumination variation.
Major Pathophysiological Correlations of Rosacea: A Complete Clinical Appraisal

Background: Rosacea is a characteristic cutaneous disorder with a diverse clinical manifestations ranging from facial vascular hyper-reactivity to sebaceous gland hyperplasia. Many theories on pathophysiology of rosacea were proposed over the past decade, however the pathogenicity is poorly understood. Aim: To review the evidence on different pathophysiological correlations of rosacea. Methods: A literature search was conducted for studies published between 1990 to March 2014. The inclusion criteria was pathophysiology, randomized controlled trials, controlled trials on rosacea. Results: Out of 5141 articles, 14 high quality studies met all the selection criteria. Of 14 articles, 5 are randomized control trials (RCTs), 2 are controlled trial, 3 comparative trials, 2 observational trials, 1 prospective and 1 diagnostic trial. The studies were categorized into two groups: the trigger factors and sub-types & symptoms. Of 7 high quality studies, 4 provided strong evidence that immune responses causing disease triggered by external/internal factors such as sunlight, food and chemical agents, 3 trials provided significant evidence of microorganisms as causative agents. The remaining trials did not provide significant evidences on pathophysiology. Conclusion: Vasculature, chronic inflammatory responses, environmental triggers, food and chemicals ingested and microorganisms either alone or in combination are responsible for rosacea. Many promising drugs are under various phases of clinical trials and interestingly, probiotics could also possibly be used as one of the treatment option.