Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sperm precedence in the bulb mite, Rhizoglyphus robini: context-dependent variation

Sperm precedence was studied in Rhizoglyphus robini under a range of mating situations in order to examine the generality of P2 (proportion of eggs fertilized by the second of two males to mate with the female) as a predictor of selective pressures associated with sperm competition. Paternity was estimated using the sterile male method. Number of sperm transferred by males during copulation was indirectly controlled by manipulation of male mating frequency: males that were isolated from females for 2 hr before experiments (short mating interval) transferred fewer sperm than those that were prevented from mating for 2 days (long mating interval). The second of the two female’s mates had slightly, but significantly, higher probability of fertilising her eggs when the two copulations were less than 1 hr apart, both in experiments with two males that had short mating interval (P2 = 56.5%), and with two males that had long mating interval (P2 = 61.1%). However, the last male sperm precedence held no longer when the first male’s sperm had a numerical advantage: males that had high sperm reserves due to a 2-day sexual abstinence fertilised more eggs, when they were the first to mate with females, than males that had 2 hr mating interval. Moreover, the effects of the interval between, and the number of, female’s matings on sperm precedence were studied using long mating interval males. Compared to 1 hr mating interval, P2 decreased by 11% when copulations with two consecutive males were 6 hr apart. When females mated with three males, the third fertilised on average 39.3% of eggs, and P3 was significantly lower than P2 for double-matings. Thus, sperm precedence was found to vary depending on the mating context.
The Effect of Temperature on an Insect Host‐Parasite Population

The number of a species per unit volume depends on the inherent characteristics of the species itself and on its physical and biotic environment. In temperate regions the physical environments of natural terrestrial populations usually vary irregularly from point to point and also from period to period. The magnitude of this type of variation is responsible, in large part, for rapid and irregular changes in population density, and thus the more systematic changes in the density of a species, which result from the action of density dependent factors, are somewhat obscured in nature. For this reason the ecology of a natural host and parasite population is difficult to analyze. In the laboratory, the physical environment can be standardized within a relatively small space. The interactions of a host and parasite population can then be studied with respect to the inherent characteristics of the species involved. However, when the parasite population grows more rapidly than the host population, the host is eliminated in most cases and the death of the parasite follows. The investigation of the ecology of a host and parasite population may also be carried on in a temperature-regulated greenhouse. Temperature and humidity can be controlled with little variation. Light intensities, similar to those found in nature, are sufficient for the growth of healthy host plants. Large experimental populations can be propagated under relatively constant conditions. It would appear, therefore, that the greenhouse affords an environment which combines some advantages found in the laboratory and in the field. Certain scale insects of the family Aleurodidae and their internal chalcid parasites are suitable material for the experimental investigation of the interactions of a host and parasite population. Some aspects of the three major subdivisions of population ecology, dispersion, reproduction, and mortality, can be analyzed in the laboratory. The immature stages of both host and parasite species are distributed in a single plane, the underside of the leaf of the host plant, and only the adults move appreciable distances. Since these insects occur naturally in the greenhouse in temperate regions, interspecies populations can be reared under relatively constant and therefore simplified conditions. The changes in the size of these natural populations can be analyzed with respect to the various factors which determine these changes. This paper deals with the effect of one physical factor, temperature, on the population ecology of an aleurodid, the greenhouse whitefly Trialeurodes vaporariorumt Westw. , when it is in association with its internal chalcid parasite Encarsia formosa Gahan. In the first part of the paper the variation in oviposition and development of both host and parasite, with variation in temperature, is reported. In the second part of the paper the effect of temperature, through its effect on oviposition and de-
Design and Development of Android based Multimedia Player

In today`s world, many users like to use media player in order to solve the complex functions and large memory requirement in a smart phone. With a rapid growth of network and technology, multimedia technology is used in media players. As the Android based devices are getting more popular among the people, an Android based application attracts more attention. Based on Android technology and java language the design and coding of a simple, convenient, less memory requirement as well as user friendly multimedia player is shown in this paper. The player is designed in such a way to obtain higher performance; simple operations and run on the Android based mobile devices. The papers discuss about the study of multimedia player with the help of already existing media players which are available openly in the Android market and proposed system for multimedia player that will be providing the uninterrupted enjoyment for the users. <br>
PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS ON AOMDV, OLSR &DSR

- Aims of these technologies to provide high data rates, quality of services, long range and low deployment costs to a wireless access technology on a metropolitan scale. It is tremendous to these days, there are several ways by which a Wireless Internet Service Provider can deliver broadband service. This is as an analytical comparison on wireless technology and architecture of AOMDV, OLSR&DSR. This paper explores standards and technology of AOMDV, OLSR and DSR network protocols. With the help of Simulation experiments the performance of the AOMDV, OLSR and DSR networks are analyzed. The experiments are performed using simulator NS2. With the Simulation of various network setups as per requirement and performance of the both networks by selecting parameters such as throughput, collisions, end to end delay and packet delivery ratio are analyzed.
Does the Underwriter Reputation Affect the Pricing of Local Government Bonds in China?

As the product of the combination of fiscal and financial, local government bonds should also follow the pricing mechanism of the securities market even under the special financial system in China. This paper uses Heckman's two-stage model to investigate whether the mechanism of underwriter reputation affects the pricing of local government bonds. The empirical results show that local governments tend to choose securities company underwriters with high reputation when they issue bonds with large scale, long maturity, and call right which have high degree of information asymmetry, and this tendency has an obvious time trend. However, high-reputation securities company underwriters failed to play the role of information intermediary to reduce the cost of local governments. On the contrary, implicit guarantees and government interventions induced the commercial banks to depress their quotations even leading to “interest rate upside down”, which resulted in the lack of securities company underwriters. In order to play the mechanism of underwriter reputation to promote the marketization of local government bonds pricing, this paper proposes to eliminate government interference, guide underwriters to strengthen the construction of their reputation, promote the marketization of underwriting fees and strengthen the supervision of underwriters.
Design and Simulation of Isolated Forward Buck Converter based Switched Mode Power Supply

In this paper, design and implementation of Switched mode power supply is analysed for various alterations of the supply voltage. Proper components were selected and its functionality was verified in NI-MULTISIM as a simulator. At first open loop configuration was designed, implemented and its functionality was examined in NI-MULTISIM. To examine the performance of the proposed system, PI controller is embedded using PWM based feedback network, and successfully verified in NI-MULTISIM
Inducing Hierarchical Compositional Model by Sparsifying Generator Network

This paper proposes to learn hierarchical compositional AND-OR model for interpretable image synthesis by sparsifying the generator network. The proposed method adopts the scene-objects-parts-subparts-primitives hierarchy in image representation. A scene has different types (i.e., OR) each of which consists of a number of objects (i.e., AND). This can be recursively formulated across the scene-objects-parts-subparts hierarchy and is terminated at the primitive level (e.g., wavelets-like basis). To realize this AND-OR hierarchy in image synthesis, we learn a generator network that consists of the following two components: (i) Each layer of the hierarchy is represented by an over-completed set of convolutional basis functions. Off-the-shelf convolutional neural architectures are exploited to implement the hierarchy. (ii) Sparsity-inducing constraints are introduced in end-to-end training, which induces a sparsely activated and sparsely connected AND-OR model from the initially densely connected generator network. A straightforward sparsity-inducing constraint is utilized, that is to only allow the top-$k$ basis functions to be activated at each layer (where $k$ is a hyper-parameter). The learned basis functions are also capable of image reconstruction to explain the input images. In experiments, the proposed method is tested on four benchmark datasets. The results show that meaningful and interpretable hierarchical representations are learned with better qualities of image synthesis and reconstruction obtained than baselines.
Medical Imaging – Gastroenterology- A Literature Assessment

The present day life styles are changing the food habits of the human beings by force and these food styles are leading towards problems related to health care in particular. Because of the dynamic changes, the impact of the health is being deteriorated and many diseases are therefore getting triggered to the mankind. Among the various diseases, gastroenterology related diseases are being growing exponentially because of the in healthy food styles. This indirectly leading towards diseases in particular to liver and pancreas. Many researchers and eminent practitioners in the field of domain are experimenting to compact the disease from further complications. The complications include liver cancer, enlargement of liver, shrinkage of liver, pancreas problems which eventually leads to diabetic diseases. The present article aims at bringing out the different methodologies and techniques that are developed by the eminent researchers to highlight the state of work in the present domain.
Opleiding Informatica Volumetric Ray Tracing with Vulkan

Volumetric ray tracing is since the advent of powerful general purpose graphics hardware understood to be a viable alternative to other visualization algorithms, and is preferred due to the better quality of images this method produces. In this thesis we describe an implementation of a volumetric ray tracing software using Vulkan, a new and modern graphics and compute API intended for interfacing with GPUs. Several different ray traversal algorithms are implemented: one based on uniform grids, and four on sparse voxel octrees. An empirical evaluation shows ray traversal over the uniform grid is faster in the general case due to its simplicity, however, if a sparse voxel octree is sufficiently pruned algorithms based on this datastructure can prove to be more efficient.
FRAUD PREDICTION IN BANK CREDIT ADMINISTRATION: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Any business or organization that intends to be far from bankruptcy or crime strives daily to ensure crime perpetration does not occur in the organization unabated. Traditional methods of fraud detection in credit administration are available but limited in capacity to check current sophistication in fraud perpetration; those approaches did not offer the best for time-consumption and efficiency; also, frauds are better predicted rather than a detection after the deal is done. This work presents an extensive review of literature and related works in fraud prediction in credit administration. The primary focus of this research work is to identify and dwell on the major concepts and techniques used for financial fraud prediction in credit administration as well as related works that have been done in this domain of study; while the work recommends the ensemble approach as a better alternative in this domain. The existing systematic literature reviews in this domain are not in the context of credit fraud prediction alone.
Survey protocol for the Little Owl

We offer a protocol for conducting standardized nocturnal broadcast (playback) surveys on Little Owls Athene noctua across the range of the species. Based on differing objectives of researchers, two intensity levels of survey efforts are outlined: (1) demographic and density studies, and (2) presence and general distribution surveys. Both survey programs utilize the same field method, but vary in the number of visits required across the survey area. Objectives and definitions for these survey programs, and criteria for determining occupancy, reproduction, and turnover rates to support demographic and monitoring studies are given. The recommended survey period coincides with the breeding season, and depending on the latitude (and elevation), is approximately from 1 February – 30 April in western-Europe, and 1 March – 31 May in eastern Europe, Middle East, and Asia. Surveys are to be conducted from sunset to midnight and from two hours before sunrise to sunrise. Survey stations are located 500 m apart from one another along transects, or in a grid network. The tape-recorded call sequence consists of a 2-min track played three times, with each broadcast track separated by silent periods of 1 min each. The observer listens for 5 min after the last sequence. Thus a maximum of 13 min is spent at each survey station. Positions of all responding owls are recorded on a field map. While Little Owls have a repertoire of 22 vocalizations, two calls, the hoot (“ghuk”) and the “chewing” call, are used by males in territorial contests and are the calls recommended for use in this protocol. Broadcast vocalizations should be played at volume and clarity levels consistent with that of wild owls. For demographic and density studies, we recommend 4 visits across each of the survey routes (and associated survey stations) to gain responses from >95% of the territorial owls. For nest-box programs where the objectives are demographic status and trends, and where the majority of owl territories are already known, survey efforts described in this protocol are used to fill in gaps and offer thorough and systematic coverage of the entire study area. For presence and general distributional surveys, we suggest a 1-visit survey be conducted. While a 1-visit strategy will not detect some of the owls actually present, the outcome of these surveys will illuminate general distributions of owls and highlight areas for further study. We anticipate that this protocol will be updated occasionally, following a normal scientific peer-review process. In particular, we urge additional research on the detection probability of territorial owls to provide clarification as to the number of visits needed to accurately determine the numbers of owls present in a given area. Prior observations have indicated a potential for differential responses from owls in high density populations (higher response rates) compared to owls residing in low density situations, and this needs further research.
Error-resilient Transmission of Sleep Apnea Patient Video with Sound over Mobile Network

: - Mobile video-audio transmission systems have delivered patient video with relevant snoring sound to quantify the severity of the sleep apnea patient over wireless networks, but few have optimized video-audio transmission in combination with transmission protocol over error-prone environments using wireless links. In this paper, the performance of the MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group)-4 error resilient tools with UDP(User Datagram Protocol) protocol were evaluated over a wireless network to suggest the optimum combination of MPEG-4 error resilient tools and UDP packet size suitable for real-time transmission of video-audio transmission over error-prone mobile networks. Through experimentation, it was found that the packet size should correspond to IP(Internet Protocol) datagram size minus UDP and IP header for optimal video-audio quality. Also, for error resilient tool selection, the combination of resynchronization marker and data partitioning showed the best performance.
Carotid intraplaque haemorrhage: pathogenesis, histological classification, imaging methods and clinical value

Vulnerable carotid atherosclerotic plaques are characterised by several risk factors, such as inflammation, neovascularization and intraplaque haemorrhage (IPH). Vulnerable plaques can lead to ischemic events such as stroke. Many studies reported a relationship between IPH, plaque rupture, and ischemic stroke. Histology is the gold standard to evaluate IPH, but it required carotid endarterectomy (CEA) surgery to collect the tissue sample. In this context, several imaging methods can be used as a non-invasive way to evaluate plaque vulnerability and detect IPH. Most imaging studies showed that IPH is associated with plaque vulnerability and stroke, with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) being the most sensitive and specific to detect IPH as a predictor of ischemic events. These conclusions are however still debated because of the limited number of patients included in these studies; further studies are required to better assess risks associated with different IPH stages. Moreover, IPH is implicated in plaque vulnerability with other risk factors which need to be considered to predict ischemic risk. In addition, MRI sequences standardization is required to compare results from different studies and agree on biomarkers that need to be considered to predict plaque rupture. In these circumstances, IPH detection by MRI could be an efficient clinical method to predict stroke. The goal of this review article is to first describe the pathophysiological process responsible for IPH, its histological detection in carotid plaques and its correlation with plaque rupture. The second part will discuss the benefits and limitations of imaging the carotid plaque, and finally the clinical interest of imaging IPH to predict plaque rupture, focusing on MRI-IPH.
Improving Convolutional Networks With Self-Calibrated Convolutions

Recent advances on CNNs are mostly devoted to designing more complex architectures to enhance their representation learning capacity. In this paper, we consider how to improve the basic convolutional feature transformation process of CNNs without tuning the model architectures. To this end, we present a novel self-calibrated convolutions that explicitly expand fields-of-view of each convolutional layers through internal communications and hence enrich the output features. In particular, unlike the standard convolutions that fuse spatial and channel-wise information using small kernels (e.g., 3x3), self-calibrated convolutions adaptively build long-range spatial and inter-channel dependencies around each spatial location through a novel self-calibration operation. Thus, it can help CNNs generate more discriminative representations by explicitly incorporating richer information. Our self-calibrated convolution design is simple and generic, and can be easily applied to augment standard convolutional layers without introducing extra parameters and complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that when applying self-calibrated convolutions into different backbones, our networks can significantly improve the baseline models in a variety of vision tasks, including image recognition, object detection, instance segmentation, and keypoint detection, with no need to change the network architectures. We hope this work could provide a promising way for future research in designing novel convolutional feature transformations for improving convolutional networks. Code is available on the project page.
The scaling of presence in virtual reality

Media technologies allow people to experience an environment that might only exist in the medium itself. Virtual reality is such a technology, allowing people to actually experience and walk around in a virtual environment. When immersed in virtual reality, a user can experience a sense of “being there”, a phenomenon commonly referred to as presence (Sheridan, 1992). Presence is an interesting phenomenon to research, since it may influence how people behave and react to the media technology. However, defining presence is problematic, since the concept of presence is such a fuzzy one. Also, measuring presence has proven to be problematic. Although the general consensus is that presence can actually be measured (i.e. suggesting an intermediate states theory of presence; e.g. Witmer and Singer, 1998), there is no clear consensus about what method is best at measuring presence. Firstly, we aim to address the problem in defining presence. Because this study will focus on presence in media technologies, this paper uses a definition based on the notion of transparency of those technologies, i.e. that what occurs when a user forgets that a technology is being used to create the media that is perceived (Haans & IJsselsteijn, 2012). Therefore the following definition of presence is used throughout this paper: “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation through transparency of media technology”, specifically in relation to immersive and interactive virtual reality (also in Haans, 2014). The use of this definition creates possibilities in the measurement of presence. When presence is achieved in a user of virtual reality, reactions of that user to the virtual environment are expected to be similar to reactions to the real world. Plenty of subjective measures (e.g. presence questionnaires) have been proposed in order to capture presence through self-reports. However, subjective measures introduce problems such as invariant interpretations of questionnaire items. Instead, objective methods have been proposed as alternatives such as behavioral observations and measurement of visceral reactions. Attempts have been made to compare these different methods. However, different presence measures (e.g. self-reports and behavioral observations) hardly correlate empirically, suggesting none fully captures what is means to be present in a virtual environment (e.g. Haans, 2014; Slater et al., 2009). We argue that most methods proposed might still be valid ways of measuring presence