Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SÃO CARLOS CENTRO DE CIÊNCIAS BIOLÓGICAS E SAÚDE DEPARTAMENTO DE BOTÂNICA

Herbivory is expected to promote an overdispersed distribution of traits in co-occurring plant species, since similar plants are more vulnerable to specialised herbivores. As long as conservatism of traits is usually observed in lineages of plant species, phylogenetic relatedness may also be related to spatial distribution. Thus, we expected that defense traits against herbivory were conserved and that phylogenetic distances of co-occurring species were higher than expected by chance. In a cerrado site in southeastern Brazil, we analysed 100 quadrats, with 25 m 2 each, and sampled all woody individuals. For each species, we measured defense traits against herbivory and answered whether the degree of co-occurrence of species was correlated with both functional differences and phylogenetic distances. We also tested whether the defense traits were phylogenetically conserved. On the one hand, we did not find significant correlation between species co-occurrence and neither defense traits nor phylogenetic distances. On the other hand, we found phylogenetic signal for four out of nine defense traits. The absence of correlations may be due to (1) herbivory not being as strong as we expected in cerrado vegetation or (2) the presence of environmental filters, such as drought and nutrient-poor soil, promoting phylogenetic clustering, counteracting phylogenetic overdispersion by herbivory. Key-words: Cerrado. Defense traits. Herbivory. Phylogeny. Spatial distribution.
Concentration Inequalities for the Empirical Distribution

We study concentration inequalities for the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence between the empirical distribution and the true distribution. Applying a recursion technique, we improve over the method of types bound uniformly in all regimes of sample size $n$ and alphabet size $k$, and the improvement becomes more significant when $k$ is large. We discuss the applications of our results in obtaining tighter concentration inequalities for $L_1$ deviations of the empirical distribution from the true distribution, and the difference between concentration around the expectation or zero. We also obtain asymptotically tight bounds on the variance of the KL divergence between the empirical and true distribution, and demonstrate their quantitatively different behaviours between small and large sample sizes compared to the alphabet size.
Finite element analysis on the surface characteristics of acoustic resonators with thermal and viscous boundary layers

The thermal and viscous boundary layers (TVBL) around a resonator’s neck play important roles in the absorption, particularly when there is no porous material near the neck. This paper presents a simple implementation of a TVBL boundary condition for the three-dimensional finite element analysis of Helmholtz equation. The implementation is verified by comparing normal incidence absorption coefficients calculated and measured for slit-type resonators. Good agreement can be observed under the appropriate calculation setting. Subsequently, a detailed investigation is conducted on surface impedances of Helmholtz resonators composed of circular holes and square baffles. Numerical values are compared with analytical values based on the classical models such as Maa, Allard–Ingard and so on. It is demonstrated that the presented method convincingly captures the surface impedance on an acoustic resonator unless the TVBL thicknesses are much larger than the perforation diameter.
Retina Autofluorescence Lifetimes in Geographic Atrophy in Patients With Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Citation: Dysli C, Wolf S, Zinkernagel MS. Autofluorescence lifetimes in geographic atrophy in patients with agerelated macular degeneration. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2016;57:2479– 2487. DOI:10.1167/iovs.15-18381 PURPOSE. To investigate fluorescence lifetime characteristics in patients with geographic atrophy (GA) in eyes with age-related macular degeneration and to correlate the measurements with clinical data and optical coherence tomography (OCT) findings.
Visual recalibration of auditory spatial perception decays at different time scales

In human observers, exposure to audiovisual stimuli with a consistent spatial disparity results in an adjustment of auditory spatial representations that corrects for the mismatch between auditory and visual input (known as the ventriloquism aftereffect). Our recent findings suggest that such adjustments occur in parallel at multiple time scales. However, it is not clear if recalibration of auditory space, once emerged, remains stable until new audiovisual evidence is encountered, or would decay over time. Here we reanalyzed data from a previous study to answer this question. In this study, human participants localized sounds in complete darkness, immediately before and after they were exposed to 200 audiovisual stimuli in which the visual stimulus was consistently displaced to the right of the sound source. A trial-by-trial analysis of the localization responses in the auditory localization posttest suggested that the size of the ventriloquism aftereffect was strongest at the beginning and decreased over the course of the 96 unimodal localization trials. Thus, cross-modal recalibration decayed although participants did not experience any new audiovisual evidence. Despite this rapid decay, a stable carryover effect on sound localization was observed on the next day, suggesting distinct underlying mechanisms for immediate and sustained cross-modal recalibration effects.
Two new species in the spike-fin fairy-wrasse species complex (Teleostei: Labridae: Cirrhilabrus ) from the Indian Ocean

The western and central Indian Ocean population of the fairy wrasse, Cirrhilabrus rubriventralis , is here split into three allopatric species: the type species from the Red Sea; C. rubeus , n. sp. , a new central Indian Ocean species from Sri Lanka and the Maldives; and C. africanus n. sp. , a new east African coastal species. The three species are mainly differentiated by the color patterns of terminal-phase (TP) males. The two new species diverge from C. rubriventralis in the sequence of the barcode-mtDNA COI marker by 2.6% and 0.5%, respectively (pairwise distance; 2.7% and 0.5% K2P distance) . The Indian Ocean species complex made up of the 8 spike-fin species allied with C. rubriventralis is now one of the larger species complexes among labrid reef fishes, showing an interesting pattern of allopatric sibling species dividing up the region, as well as the occurrence of localized microendemic species in Indonesia and the Timor Sea. The species complex includes some species that share mtDNA lineages (phenovariant species), as well as others up to 2.9% divergent in sequence. A neighbor-joining tree and genetic distance matrix is presented for 7 of the 8 known species in the complex.
Anchor and adjustment detection on empirical forecast series

Human involvement in forecasting processes can lead to predictions being influenced by cognitive biases. Anchoring and Adjustment is a cognitive bias that typically reduces the accuracy of forecasts. Considering the influence of forecasts in corporate processes, improving forecast accuracy can be of crucial importance. This study aims to use the newly developed Bandwidth Model to improve forecast accuracy and to detect Anchoring and Adjustment effects in forecasting processes. We demonstrate the potential of the Bandwidth Model by the regression of Anchoring and Adjustment effects on forecast errors, which exhibit higher explanatory power than standard volatility metrics. The results suggest that a forecast support system can use the Bandwidth Model to improve forecast accuracy in enterprises.
The Dynamics of Retraction in Epistemic Networks

Sometimes retracted or refuted scientific information is used and propagated long after it is understood to be misleading. Likewise, retracted news items may spread and persist, despite being publicly established as false. In this article, we explore the dynamics of retraction using agent-based models of epistemic networks, to see why false beliefs might persist despite retraction. We find that, often, those who received false information simply fail to receive retractions because of social dynamics. Surprisingly, delaying retraction can increase its impact. Further, retractions are most successful when issued by the original source of misinformation, rather than a separate source.
Norwegian Method of Tunnelling – A Singapore Experience

Tunnelling is a complex process encompassing many work activities. Tunnelling needs a multi-disciplinary effort and involves many professions. The Norwegian Method of Tunnelling (NMT) originated in Norway, where the tunneling industry has played an important role for more than a century [8]; first for hydropower development, then for transport and water supply, and later for oil development. The term NMT was introduced by Barton et al (1992) [2] and they considered that this method, which permits rapid and safe excavation at low cost, as the most appropriate for the design, construction and support of underground openings in rock.
Smart Farm : Automated Classifying and Grading System of Tomatoes using Fuzzy Logic

Manual operation is considered as a big factor in a low production and the Smart Farm System is one way that can address this problem by improving and increasing the quality and quantity of production by making farms more intelligent and more connected through the precision agriculture. With that, the proponents will develop a system through smart farm system that is capable of classifying and grading the tomatoes. This process will be done automatically using image processing and fuzzy logic. There will be a Fuzzy Inference Systems to be established using MATLAB software to classify and grade the tomato fruit. In classifying, system will determine if tomato is damaged or not. On the other hand, system will distinguish if a specific fruit or crop is under ripe, ripe or overripe in grading. It is believed that this study is of great help to farmers for high yield and productive plant harvests.
Nervo óptico: medida do diâmetro de sua bainha para detectar hipertensão intracraniana

Objective: This work had the objective of reviewing the literature on the evaluation and detection of intracranial hypertension through optical nerve ultrasound. Method: literature review based on a bibliographic survey in the electronic databases: PubMed, LILACS, SCIELO and CINAHL, using the following descriptors: Intracranial Hypertension.Optic Nerve. Ultrasonography, its correspondents in Portuguese and their intersections. We selected 27 articles published in the period of 1998-2017. Results: the articles indicated that ultrasonography of the diameter of the optic nerve sheath (ONSD) is useful in the detection of intracranial hypertension. Conclusion: The increase in ONSD is a highly accurate change to diagnose increased intracranial pressure in critically ill patients.
Exploration One-Note-Samba Approach to Cosmology

Inspired by One Note Samba, a standard jazz repertoire, we present an outline of Bose-Einstein Condensate Cosmology. Although this approach seems awkward and a bit off the wall at first glance, it is not impossible to connect altogether BEC, Scalar Field Cosmology and Feshbach Resonance with Ermakov-Pinney equation. We also briefly discuss possible link with our previous paper which describes Newtonian Universe with Vortex in terms of Ermakov equation.
Master ’ s Project : Futhark Autotuners for Incremental Flattening Svend Lund Breddam-QNB 705 Supervisors : Cosmin

This thesis details an automatic tuning strategy for threshold values in Futhark’s incremental flattening compilation scheme. Incremental flattening is a compiler technique in which multiple semantically equivalent code versions representing differing code optimisation strategies are combined into one program. This allows individual input datasets to choose the optimisation strategy that best suits its characteristics given a particular hardware configuration. This flexible choice can be very useful in practice, but requires the tuning of a set of threshold values before the code is used in production. The thesis at hand considers two cases of tuning strategies. The first one yields optimal threshold assignments with solid guarantees in a simplified setting. For the second one, four different optimisation strategies are employed and evaluated, including binary search, evolutionary strategies, active learning, and an experimental program instrumentation tuner. Each option provides its own benefits and problems, but they all show that tuning thresholds to improve the runtime performance is possible, with the best tuner yielding a 3.07x-speedup over the standard Futhark compilation into OpenCL code.
Question Answering on SQuAD 2 . 0 Dataset

The complex interactions between context and question makes it difficult for machines to perform good on question answering(QA) tasks. In this study, we explore the performance difference of the task-specific Bi-Directional Attention Flow model(BiDAF) and the pretrained BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) QA model on SQuAD 2.0. We propose three self-designed model structures built on the BERT embeddings. The baseline BiDAF model achieves 60.5% F1 and 57.4% EM on the validation set. Our modified fine-tuned model on BERT achieves F1 and EM scores up to 76.6% and 73.6%. The best performed BERT QA + Classifier ensemble model further improves the F1 and EM scores to 78.1% and 75.3%.
ON IMPLEMENTATION OF SMALL BUSINESS WITH TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE

Keeping corporate sustainability is a business topic that always accompanies the company in carrying out its activities, including small companies. The concept of sustainability is accepted as true and is believed to be applied by the company include the concept of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), which harmonizes economic needs with care for the environment and surrounding communities. Large company can implement this concept without obstacles, however not the case with smaller companies. Theoretically, this paper aims to provide a framework TBL concept that can be run by small companies, whereas the empirical aims to provide an understanding of how to implement the concept of TBL for smaller companies.
Steady-State Kinetics of the Autocatalytic Zymogen Activation: A Comparison with the Michaelis-Menten Reaction Mechanism

A zymogen is an inactive precursor of an enzyme, which needs to go through a chemical change to become an active enzyme. The general intermolecular mechanism for the autocatalytic activation of zymogens is governed by the single-enzyme, single-substrate catalyzed reaction following the Michaelis-Menten mechanism of enzyme action, where the substrate is the zymogen and product is the same enzyme catalyzing the reaction. In this article we investigate the nonlinear chemical dynamics of the intermolecular autocatalytic zymogen activation reaction mechanism, and compare it to that of the Michaelis-Menten reaction mechanism. We show that the intermolecular autocatalytic zymogen activation exhibits significant changes in reaction dynamics relative to the Michaelis-Menten reaction mechanism. These changes include differences in the number of conservation laws, number and stability of equilibrium states, altered structure of the invariant set that influences the long-time rate of the reaction, and qualitative evolution of the reaction depending strictly on the choice of initial conditions. We find a rate law, homologous to the Michaelis-Menten equation, to estimate the kinetic parameters of the intermolecular autocatalytic zymogen activation reaction mechanism, and derive the conditions for the validity for this rate law. Finally, we derive analytical expressions to estimate the timescale for the completion of the zymogen activation, which could have a practical application to calculate the molar enthalpy of the autocatalytic zymogen reaction in calorimetry assays.
Automated Droplet Manipulation through Electrowetting on Dielectric for Solid-Phase Oligonucleotide Synthesis

36th Annual Microelectronic Engineering Conference Rochester Institute of Technology April 2018 Design an electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) device that supports droplet manipulation and is also compatible with common cleanroom fabrication methods Perform and automate droplet manipulation with key functions such as droplet creation at reservoirs and merges at filters Characterize particle filtration performance
New vision for the dignity: understanding the meaning of patient dignity in Iran.

Aim: Respect for human dignity right has been accepted as a fundamental human need in the world, but its meaning is complex. The present research aimed to understand the meaning of patient dignity in Iran. Study Design: The study was a qualitative study using content analysis. Place and Duration of Study: The study was performed in Kerman, Iran in 2014. Methodology: The study was conducted among patients with Heart diseases. The purposive sampling technique was used to select the participants. Participants were 16 heart patients admitted from two hospitals affiliated with the Kerman University of Medical Sciences. Twenty semi-structured interviews were constructed. Data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis Results: The analyzed data were made into two main themes and ten sub-themes. The two main themes that emerged were 1- Basic dignity with subthemes (Human security, Comprehensive care, Education and awareness, Respect, Effective communication and Privacy), 2- Transcendent dignity with subthemes (Trust, Gratitude, Satisfaction, Spiritual growth). In the basic dignity, the focus was on physical and psychological needs and in the transcendent dignity; the focus was on spiritual dimension. The results of this study may help health care professionals in understanding patient dignity in Iran.
Does group exercise program add anything more to patients with ankylosing spondylitis

Objective: To compare group exercise program performed at hospital with home exercise pogram in patients with ankylosing spondylitis and to observe the efficacy of type of exercises. Patients and method: Forty-six patients with ankylosing spondylitis were enrolled into this prospective, randomized, comparative, open clinical trial. The first group performed instructed exercises at home for 6 months whereas the second group did the same exercises at the hospital for 2 hours weekly under the observation of a physiotherapist for 3 months. Three and 6 months after; pain at rest (VAS) and during activity, spinal mobility, functional capacity were evaluated. Results: In group 1 significant improvement was observed at rest and during activity pain ( p< 0.005). Functinal improvement was better in the second group within 3 months. Since group 1 had a good range of cervical rotation, group 2 improved better ( p< 0.01). Conclusion: Spinal ranges of motion, functional status, depression and quality of life improved in group 2 patients remarkably. Group exercise had a decreasing effect on pain, activity of disease and fatigue. While home exercises improved spinal activity, it had no effect on functional status, disease activity, depression and fatigue.
Modeling nanocarbon structures using adaptive remeshing

This work seeks to evaluate the quality of a remeshing algorithm in its use for the generation of carbon nanostructures. The algorithm represents nanocarbon molecules as a 2-manifold mesh. Starting from geometric models of arbitrary shape, the method performs an iterative and adaptive remeshing in order to achieve a model that presents the features for which its physics simulations should be stable. In order to verify its effectiveness, this work proposes to evaluate the quality of the resulting structures with molecular dynamics simulations. The REBO2 potential is used to calculate the attraction and repulsion forces between the atoms.
Operating Hedge and Gross Profitability Premium

We show theoretically that variable production costs reduce systematic risk of firms' cash flows if capital and variable inputs are complementary in firms' production and input prices are procyclical. In our dynamic model, this operating hedge effect is weaker for more profitable firms, giving rise to a gross profitability premium. Moreover, gross profitability and value factors are distinct and negatively correlated, and their premia are not captured by the CAPM. We estimate the model by simulated method of moments, and find that its main implications for stock returns and cash flow dynamics are quantitatively consistent with the data.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
Question Answering on SQuAD

The Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) is a task for machine reading comprehension. An updated version of the task was recently released, SQuAD 2.0, which adds unanswerable questions to the original dataset. In this paper, I present an implementation of the QANet model [6] for SQuAD 2.0. On the hidden test set, the model obtained an F1 score of 66.9 and an EM score of 63.3.
Large scale magnetic field of the Milky Way from WMAP 3 data

We report on initial results from a project to constrain the l arge-scale and turbulent magnetic fields of the Milky Way galaxy, which eventually will incorpo rate all of the relevant observational data. The initial work is based on the WMAP3 polarization maps. Pre liminary results on the large scale Galactic magnetic field will be presented.