Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does the grey mouse lemur use agonistic vocalisations to recognise kin?

Frequent kin-biased coalitionary behaviour is a hallmark of mammalian social complexity. Furthermore, selection to understand complex social dynamics is believed to underlie the co-evolution of social complexity and large brains. Vocalisations have been shown to be an important mechanism with which large-brained mammals living in complex social groups recognise and recruit kin for coalitionary support during agonistic conflicts. We test whether kin recognition via agonistic calls occurs in a small-brained solitary foraging primate living in a dispersed social network, the grey mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus, Miller JF, 1777). As mouse lemurs are frequent models for ancestral solitary foraging mammals, this study examines whether kin recognition via agonistic calls could be the foundation from which more complex, kin-based coalitionary behaviour evolved. We test whether female wild mouse lemurs in Ankarafantsika National Park, Madagascar, react differently to agonistic calls from kin and nonkin and to calls from familiar and unfamiliar individuals during playback experiments. Subjects showed no significant differences in reactions to the different stimuli; thus they did not react differently based upon kinship or familiarity. Results suggest that this solitary foraging species does not use agonistic calls to recognise kin and monitor agonistic interactions involving kin, unlike several species of Old World monkeys and hyenas. Thus, kin recognition via agonistic calls may have evolved independently in these lineages in parallel with greater social complexity and frequent coalitionary behaviour.
Inference on Directionally Differentiable Functions Supplemental Appendix

This Supplemental Appendix to “Inference on Directionally Differentiable Functions” is organized as follows. Section S.1 derives a generalization of the local analysis in Section 3.4 in the main text that allows the data to be dependent. In turn, Section S.2 contains the proofs of the main results in the text, while Section S.3 collects auxiliary results that are employed in the proofs of Section S.2. Finally, Section S.4 illustrates how to verify our assumptions in Examples 2.1 and 2.2, as well as two additional Examples based on Andrews and Shi (2013) and Linton et al. (2010).
Seroprevalence of C-Reactive Protein in Rheumatoid Arthritis Cases : A Retrospective Study in a Tertiary Care Hospital in South India

DOI: 10.21276/sjams.2018. 6.11. 9 Abstract: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, systemic, autoimmune inflammatory disease that affects mainly the small joints of the hands and feet. It is one of the most common inflammatory joint diseases that compromise quality of life, cause disability and even premature mortality. RA is widely prevalent throughout the world, mainly affecting older women. Clinical manifestations consist of pain, swelling and tenderness of the small joints of the hands. Since RA is a systemic disease, patients may have accompanying constitutional symptoms such as fever, weight loss and fatigue. At initial patient evaluation complete blood count including ESR, liver function tests, kidney function tests, and CRP should be done. CRP (C-reactive protein) is an important biomarker of inflammation in RA which can help to monitor disease progression. Rheumatoid factor (RF) is detectable during the course of disease in approximately 75% to 85% of patients with RA. High titres of RF are associated with aggressive, destructive joint disease and extra-articular complications such as interstitial lung disease and rheumatoid vasculitis. The present study was undertaken to retrospectively analyse the prevalence of RF and association with CRP in patients presenting to a tertiary care hospital in South India. Of the 631 sera specimens submitted for RF test, 34 were positive i.e. there was 5.4% seroprevalence of RF in the study population. Majority of the cases i.e. 73% were females; 44% of RF positive patients were in the age group of 21-40 years, followed by 35% in the 41-60 years age group. Among the RF seropositive patients, elevated CRP levels were found in 41% of the cases. Thus the role of CRP as an acute inflammatory marker and important diagnostic indicator in RA is confirmed by the results of our study.
FOR MULTI-SPEAKER CONVERSATIONS USING X-VECTORS

Recently, deep neural networks that map utterances to fixeddimensional embeddings have emerged as the state-of-the-art in speaker recognition. Our prior work introduced x-vectors, an embedding that is very effective for both speaker recognition and diarization. This paper combines our previous work and applies it to the problem of speaker recognition on multi-speaker conversations. We measure performance on Speakers in the Wild and report what we believe are the best published error rates on this dataset. Moreover, we find that diarization substantially reduces error rate when there are multiple speakers, while maintaining excellent performance on single-speaker recordings. Finally, we introduce an easily implemented method to remove the domain-sensitive threshold typically used in the clustering stage of a diarization system. The proposed method is more robust to domain shifts, and achieves similar results to those obtained using a well-tuned threshold.
The Continuity of Care: From Admission to the Recovery at Home

The treatment and support patients receive in their transition from the Emergency Department (ED) to the patient care unit (PCU), and eventually, the community, have clinical consequences, psycho-social outcomes, and financial ramifications. This quality improvement report provides recommendations intended to improve patient experiences and outcomes, in the context of ED crowding. The recommendations provided are informed by the findings of a master's project that examined the transfer of patients from admission in a crowded ED, to a select PCU, and then to the community using process mapping and patient surveys. The purpose of this project was to examine the sequence of care beyond the walls of the ED and include the PCU (McHugh et al., 2011) using a systems approach (Villa, Prenestini, & Giusepi. 2014). We believe that by understanding process successes and failures, between EDs and PCUs, we can make improvements to ensure efficient, effective, and streamlined transitions to promote continuity of care.
A Strengthened Dominance Relation Considering Convergence and Diversity for Evolutionary Many-Objective Optimization

Both convergence and diversity are crucial to evolutionary many-objective optimization, whereas most existing dominance relations show poor performance in balancing them, thus easily leading to a set of solutions concentrating on a small region of the Pareto fronts. In this paper, a novel dominance relation is proposed to better balance convergence and diversity for evolutionary many-objective optimization. In the proposed dominance relation, an adaptive niching technique is developed based on the angles between the candidate solutions, where only the best converged candidate solution is identified to be nondominated in each niche. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed dominance relation outperforms existing dominance relations in balancing convergence and diversity. A modified NSGA-II is suggested based on the proposed dominance relation, which shows competitiveness against the state-of-the-art algorithms in solving many-objective optimization problems. The effectiveness of the proposed dominance relation is also verified on several other existing multi- and many-objective evolutionary algorithms.
Fairlearn: A toolkit for assessing and improving fairness in AI

We introduce Fairlearn, an open source toolkit that empowers data scientists and developers to assess and improve the fairness of their AI systems. Fairlearn has two components: an interactive visualization dashboard and unfairness mitigation algorithms. These components are designed to help with navigating trade-offs between fairness and model performance. We emphasize that prioritizing fairness in AI systems is a sociotechnical challenge. Because there are many complex sources of unfairness—some societal and some technical—it is not possible to fully “debias” a system or to guarantee fairness; the goal is to mitigate fairness-related harms as much as possible. As Fairlearn grows to include additional fairness metrics, unfairness mitigation algorithms, and visualization capabilities, we hope that it will be shaped by a diverse community of stakeholders, ranging from data scientists, developers, and business decision makers to the people whose lives may be affected by the predictions of AI systems.
The Templeton Crocker Expedition. XII. Sergestidae (Crustacea Decapoda) from the Lower Californian Region, with Descriptions of Two New Species and Some Remarks on the Organs of Pesta

MARTIN D . BURKENROAD Bingham, Oceanographic Laboratory, Yale University (Text-figures 1-12). [Note: This is the twelfth of a series of papers dealing with the specimens collected on the Twenty-fourth or Templeton Crocker Expedition of the Department of Tropical Research of the New York Zoological Society; William Beebe, Director. For data on dredges, localities, dates, etc., concerning the capture of specimens treated in this paper, refer to the present volume of Zoologiea, No. 2, pp. 33 to 46. ]
Timber import and the risk of forest pest introductions

Summary 1 Many invasive species are introduced by trade, and there is a need for studies of pre-emptive measures to lower the risk of introductions, as post-establishment management is often extremely costly or nearly impossible. 2 In this study, we present a generic model for the first step of the invasion process for trade-imported pests, and further develop this model for potentially harmful bark beetles to assess the risk of introductions and alternative management options. 3 Our results suggest that introductions of bark beetles are likely, given present timber import practices, and that immigration may often go undetected by pheromone traps. 4 The most effective measures for reducing introduction risk were those aimed at isolating the storage from forest (storage enclosure, location) followed by those reducing the available resources for forest pests (debarking, timber irrigation, rapid processing), whereas delayed import was least effective. 5 Synthesis and applications: The generic model framework of species introductions presented here may easily be adapted to other import systems. The submodels of population dynamics and dispersal are also quite general, and we expect our qualitative results to hold in many cases, although the models were parameterized for bark beetles in this study. Our results suggest that detection of dispersal from storage to forests will be difficult, which implies that management actions should not be deferred until after detection in nature, as the pest species may then already be established and eradication may be too late. However, pre-emptive measures reducing propagule pressure at one or several stages of the introduction process, in particular isolation measures, may strongly reduce introduction risk.
Critical appraisal and meta-analysis of biological variation studies on glycosylated albumin, glucose and HbA1c

Abstract Objectives Numerous biological variation (BV) studies have been performed over the years, but the quality of these studies vary. The objectives of this study were to perform a systematic review and critical appraisal of BV studies on glycosylated albumin and to deliver updated BV estimates for glucose and HbA1c, including recently published high-quality studies such as the European Biological Variation study (EuBIVAS). Methods Systematic literature searches were performed to identify BV studies. Nine publications not included in a previous review were identified; four for glycosylated albumin, three for glucose, and three for HbA1c. Relevant studies were appraised by the Biological Variation Data Critical Appraisal Checklist (BIVAC). Global BV estimates were derived by meta-analysis of BIVAC-compliant studies in healthy subjects with similar study design. Results One study received BIVAC grade A, 2B, and 6C. In most cases, the C-grade was associated with deficiencies in statistical analysis. BV estimates for glycosylated albumin were: CVI=1.4% (1.2–2.1) and CVG=5.7% (4.7–10.6), whereas estimates for HbA1c, CVI=1.2% (0.3–2.5), CVG=5.4% (3.3–7.3), and glucose, CVI=5.0% (4.1–12.0), CVG=8.1% (2.7–10.8) did not differ from previously published global estimates. Conclusions The critical appraisal and rating of BV studies according to their methodological quality, followed by a meta-analysis, generate robust, and reliable BV estimates. This study delivers updated and evidence-based BV estimates for glycosylated albumin, glucose and HbA1c.
Interfacial Precipitation of Phosphate on Hematite and Goethite

Adsorption and subsequent precipitation of dissolved phosphates on iron oxides, such as hematite and goethite, is of considerable importance in predicting the bioavailability of phosphates. We used in situ atomic force microscopy (AFM) to image the kinetic processes of phosphate-bearing solutions interacting with hematite or goethite surfaces. The nucleation of nanoparticles (1.0–4.0 nm in height) of iron phosphate (Fe(III)-P) phases, possibly an amorphous phase at the initial stages, was observed during the dissolution of both hematite and goethite at the earliest crystallization stages. This was followed by a subsequent aggregation stage where larger particles and layered precipitates are formed under different pH values, ionic strengths, and organic additives. Kinetic analysis of the surface nucleation of Fe-P phases in 50 mM NH4H2PO4 at pH 4.5 showed the nucleation rate was greater on goethite than hematite. Enhanced goethite and hematite dissolution in the presence of 10 mM AlCl3 resulted in a rapid increase in Fe-P nucleation rates. A low concentration of citrate promoted the nucleation, whereas nucleation was inhibited at higher concentrations of citrate. By modeling using PHREEQC, calculated saturation indices (SI) showed that the three Fe(III)-P phases of cacoxenite, tinticite, and strengite may be supersaturated in the reacted solutions. Cacoxenite is predicted to be more thermodynamically favorable in all the phosphate solutions if equilibrium is reached with respect to hematite or goethite, although possibly only amorphous precipitates were observed at the earliest stages. These direct observations at the nanoscale may improve our understanding of phosphate immobilization in iron oxide-rich acid soils.
A self-cleaning device for pole mounted solar PV installations

*1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Mirpur University of Science and Technology (MUST), Mirpur-10250 (AJK), Pakistan 2 Department of Electrical (Power) Engineering, Mirpur University of Science and Technology, (MUST), Mirpur-10250 (AJK), Pakistan 3 Department of Computer System Engineering, Mirpur University of Science and Technology, (MUST), Mirpur-10250 (AJK), Pakistan *anser_engr@yahoo.com
Integrated strategy for puri fi cation of esterase from Aureobasidium pullulans Ailton

Esterases catalyze the cleavage and formation of ester bonds of a broad range of substrates presenting a widespread spectrum of industrial applications. This work aimed to partially purify and characterize an esterase from Aureobasidium pullulans LABIOTEC 01 produced in a culture medium containing olive mill wastewater. Esterase purification was evaluated using different strategies, namely the enzyme recovery by PEG-salt aqueous twophase systems (ATPSs); and the enzyme precipitation with ammonium sulfate, acetone, and ethanol. The best purification factor (18 ± 2) was obtained when the ATPS composed of 20% (w/w) polyethylene glycol (PEG) 6000 and 5.8% (w/w) potassium phosphate buffer (PPB) pH 8.0 was combined with acetone precipitation. The partially purified enzyme presented an optimum pH of 5.0, although it remained active in the pH range of 4.5 to 7.5 (≥ 50% relative activity). The optimum temperature was found to be 60 °C. Furthermore, the addition of salts such as FeCl3, CuSO4 and MnCl2 promoted an increase in the enzymatic activity (above 100%). The enzyme was found to be stable and showed high activity when exposed to polar solvents such as dimethyl sulfoxide, dimethylformamide, and methanol. The use of an integrated strategy of purification combining simple purification methods such as ATPS and precipitation was herein reported for the first time for esterase. This strategy proved to be an interesting approach to partially purify the esterase produced under submerged fermentation by A. pullulans. Furthermore, the enzyme showed potential to be applied in industrial biocatalytic processes using high temperature and different salts or solvents. Also, the production of esterase using olive mill wastewater as substrate demonstrated to be a suitable alternative to reduce and valorize agro-industrial residues.
Towards a Research-Led Approach to the Teaching of Arabic Pronunciation

This paper attempts to reverse‐engineer recent research‐led recommendations which have been made for the priorities to be adopted in the teaching of English pronunciation. The goal of this enterprise is to lay the initial groundwork for a parallel set of recommendations for practitioners engaged in teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL). The paper starts by setting out the rationale and evidence‐base which underpins the proposals made for English, then gathers together equivalent information for Arabic, based on a review of relevant primary research literature. A set of preliminary recommendations regarding which aspects of Arabic pronunciation should be prioritised in the AFL classroom is made, and is shown to differ to a greater or lesser extent from the aspects of pronunciation highlighted in published textbooks for different types of AFL learner. The paper closes by suggesting avenues of future research which could further inform pronunciation teaching in Arabic and, potentially also, in other non‐global languages. The goal of this paper is to adapt research‐led approaches proposed for teaching English pronunciation (Fraser, 2001; Jenkins, 2002; Derwing & Munro, 2005) for use by practitioners engaged in teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL). In order to do so, the paper identifies the types
An Introduction: Changing Perspectives on Corporate Law and Economics

This book includes the proceedings of the conference on ‘Changing Perspectives on Corporate Law and Economics’, held in Rotterdam on 6 November 2008 in honour of one of the founders of the economic analysis of law, Guido Calabresi. The collection is made up of six main contributions and six shorter comments by the speakers who acted as discussants. The subject matter of the book – corporate governance – is one of the most heated topics in the economic analysis of law. In the aftermath of the largest global fi nancial crisis after the 1930s, the negative consequences of which we are still experiencing, the connection between law and corporate fi nance has been evident from the news. More generally, this connection is extremely important for the governance of enterprises, which aff ects not only the fi nancial markets, but also the effi ciency of production, economic growth, and the overall wellbeing of our societies. In addressing the above issues, this book takes an interdisciplinary perspective. Economic analysis of law is a fruitful intellectual challenge for economists and lawyers alike. It off ers new views on legal and economic theory, questioning or reinforcing the traditional ones. It enhances the quality of counselling available to individuals and businesses. It allows policymakers to design better rules for society. Above all, in corporate governance, research, practice, and lawmaking are all based on the interaction of economics with the law. The present collection of chapters is an exemplary illustration of the virtues of this approach. Within law and economics, corporate governance can be approached from diff erent angles. The contributions to this book perform indepth theoretical and empirical analyses from which diff erent regulatory implications are derived. Some provide fresh empirical evidence on controversial theories of corporate law. Others attempt to develop new theoretical insights for addressing unresolved problems of corporate governance. They all analyse the economics of corporate governance with a view to
Light elements and Li isotopes across the northern portion of the Central American subduction zone

Quaternary mafic rocks have been erupted from volcanoes both on and behind the volcanic front in southeastern Guatemala and western El Salvador. Behind‐the‐front volcanism extends almost continuously some 110 km from the front. B and Li contents, as well as B/Nb and Li/Yb ratios, are generally higher in the mafic volcanic rocks of the volcanic front and lower in those behind the front. Beryllium concentrations show the opposite relationships, with generally higher values behind the front. In addition, many behind‐the‐front samples have lower δ7Li (2–3‰ versus 4–6‰ for the volcanic front). Guatemalan volcanic rocks, in general, have lower δ7Li than those found along the remainder of the Central American margin. The light element variations across northern Central America clearly indicate that the volcanic front receives a much more pronounced fluid contribution from dehydrating, subducting Cocos lithosphere than the behind‐the‐front region. This dehydration pulse occurs at slab depths between 85 and 105 km, and selective enrichments of B, Cs, and Cl in volcanic rocks of the volcanic front suggest that the source of this pulse is dehydrating serpentinite. In addition, the dehydration pulse from subducted serpentinite is likely superimposed on a continuous dehydration signal provided by subducting oceanic crust which continues behind the volcanic front to slab depths >200 km. The enhanced fluid contributions at the front produce higher degrees of wedge melting, thus explaining the lower Be contents of front samples. There are two possible explanations of the lower δ7Li of many behind‐the‐front volcanic rocks from southeastern Guatemala/western El Salvador: selective loss of 7Li during progressive dehydration of subducting Cocos lithosphere or diffusive fractionation accompanying late stage, selective crustal contamination. Since the slightly lower δ7Li of Guatemalan volcanic rocks in general is consistent with a minor crustal overprint, the second explanation is favored and could be relevant to the few subduction zones where lower Li isotopic values characterize back‐arc regions. Light element variation across southeastern Guatemala and western El Salvador is consistent with the operation of decompression melting behind the volcanic front. Be/Zr ratios across the northern portion of the Central American subduction zone may indicate some mobility of Be.
Agreeing and Impacting: The Effect of the Shareholders' Agreement on Firms' Market Value

Some countries admit the presence of pacts that allow to change the relations and balance of power control exercised by the shareholders. Known as shareholder agreements, these pacts are contracts between two or more partners whose goal is to agree on the direction of the relationship between its members. Empirical results suggest that shareholder’ agreements play an important role in low legal protection markets because they inhibit the ability of the majority shareholder to extract benefits in detriment of minority shareholder. This paper aims to analyze the effect of shareholders' agreements in the market value of Brazilian companies from 1999 to 2013. The sample is composed by 472 companies, including 86 companies with shareholder’ agreements. The empirical strategy comprises the fixed effects method on a panel data model. The results show that the effect on firm value is positive as the degree of protection of minority shareholders is higher. However, the regressions tested with the indirect ownership structure have not been able to provide evidence to that effect.