Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High paternal diversity in the self‐incompatible herb Arabidopsis halleri despite clonal reproduction and spatially restricted pollen dispersal

The number of sires fertilizing a given dam is a key parameter of the mating system in species with spatially restricted offspring dispersal, since genetic relatedness among maternal sibs determines the intensity of sib competition. In flowering plants, the extent of multiple paternity is determined by factors such as floral biology, properties of the pollen vector, selfing rate, spatial organization of the population, and genetic compatibility between neighbours. To assess the extent of multiple paternity and identify ecological factors involved, we performed a detailed study of mating patterns in a small population of a self‐incompatible clonal herb, Arabidopsis halleri. We mapped and genotyped 364 individuals and 256 of their offspring at 12 microsatellite loci and jointly analysed the level of multiple paternity, pollen and seed dispersal, and spatial genetic structure. We found very low levels of correlated paternity among sibs (Pfull‐sib = 3.8%) indicating high multiple paternity. Our estimate of the outcrossing rate was 98.7%, suggesting functional self‐incompatibility. The pollen dispersal distribution was significantly restricted (mean effective pollen dispersal distance: 4.42 m) but long‐distance successful pollination occurred and immigrating pollen was at most 10% of all pollination events. Patterns of genetic structure indicated little extent of clonal reproduction, and a low but significant spatial genetic structure typical for a self‐incompatible species. Overall, in spite of restricted pollen dispersal, the multiple paternity in this self‐incompatible species was very high, a result that we interpret as a consequence of high plant density and high pollinator service in this population.
Invariants Feature Points Detection based on Random Sample Estimation

Feature detection is the initial step in any image analysis procedure and is essential for the performance of computer vision applications like stereo vision, object recognition, object tracking systems. Research concerning the detection of feature points for different camera motion images in efficient and fast way. In this work, techniques of corner detection, geometric moments and random sampling are presented to simply and accurately locate the important feature points in image. For each extracted feature in image, a descriptor is calculated and based on the homograph transformation the matching is done. The results of experiments conducted on images taken by handheld camera and compared with the most famous SIFT method. The results show that the proposed algorithm is accurate, fast, efficient and robust under noise, transformation and compression circumstances.
Audio scene semantic similarity computing approach

Audio in the video carries abundant semantic message. An audio scene is temporal audio segments which represented by a few basic audio effects. The semantic similarity of pair audio scenes is very useful for high-level audio semantic understanding. A computing approach for audio scene semantic similarity is proposed in this paper. Firstly, audio track is pre-segmented to audio scenes. Then, basic audio effects dominating each audio scene are recognized. Finally, the similarity of two audio scenes is calculated based on a model consist with information theoretic similarity principles and Tversky's set-theoretic similarity. The results of experiments indicate the audio scene semantic similarity computing approach could count quantitative semantic similarity of two scenes.
Like a Bolt from the Blue: Phthalocyanines in Biomedical Optics

The purpose of this review is to compile preclinical and clinical results on phthalocyanines (Pcs) as photosensitizers (PS) for Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) and contrast agents for fluorescence imaging. Indeed, Pcs are excellent candidates in these fields due to their strong absorbance in the NIR region and high chemical and photo-stability. In particular, this is mostly relevant for their in vivo activation in deeper tissular regions. However, most Pcs present two major limitations, i.e., a strong tendency to aggregate and a low water-solubility. In order to overcome these issues, both chemical tuning and pharmaceutical formulation combined with tumor targeting strategies were applied. These aspects will be developed in this review for the most extensively studied Pcs during the last 25 years, i.e., aluminium-, zinc- and silicon-based Pcs.
Lung Region Segmentation using Artificial Neural Network Hopfield Model for Cancer Diagnosis in Thorax CT Images

Lung Cancer was found to be one of the leading causes of death of human persons throughout the world. It spreads rapidly after it forms. The survival rate of patient is very low as the disease is identified in a very late stage. In this paper, we represent a fully automated and three-dimensional segmentation method for the early identification of cancerous pixels in thorax Computed Tomography database. The segmentation process is meant to be considered as the bottleneck in the Computer Aided Diagnosis system for lung cancer detection based on the Computed Tomography pixels’ values. We have formulated the segmentation problem as the optimization of a certain energy function. A special Classifier was designed using Hopfield Artificial Neural Network in order to classify or segment the set of pixels in the CT images of the Thorax into a set of user decided number of regions. A step function was designed, implemented and tested to ensure a high convergence speed of the classifier to local optimum that is close to the global optima. The lung contour was adequately located in 95% of the CT scans using a pre-segmentation process based on bit-planes’ features of the CT scans. The segmentation process was initially developed and tested on a large dataset of subjects, with normal and abnormal lung tissues at different stages, each of 150 CT scans giving very satisfactory results.
MOEA/D-DRA with two crossover operators

Different genetic operators suit different problems. Using several crossover operators should be an effective approach for improving the performance of an evolutionary algorithm. This paper studies the effect of the use of two crossover operators on MOEA/D-DRA for multi-objective optimization. It considers two crossover operators, namely, simplex crossover operator (SPX) and center of mass crossover operator (CMX). The probability of the use of each operator at each generation is updated in a adaptive way. The preliminary experimental results have indicated that this approach is promising.
A Flaring L5 Dwarf: The Nature of Hα Emission in Very Low Mass (Sub)Stellar Objects

Time series spectrophotometry of the L5 dwarf 2MASS J01443536-0716142 showed strong Hα emission that declined by nearly 75% in four consecutive exposures. The line was not detected in emission on a spectrum obtained 11 months later. This behavior contrasts with that of 2MASSI J1315309-264951, an L5 dwarf that has shown even stronger Hα emission on four separate occasions. The observational database suggests that L dwarfs can be found in such strong flares only occasionally, with a duty cycle on the order of 1%. In contrast, the few, continuously strong Hα emitters, including PC 0025+0447 and 2MASSI J1237392+652615, must either be (1) objects no older than 10–100 Myr with continuously active accretion and/or chromospheres, but which apparently formed in isolation from known young stellar clusters and associations, or (2) objects empowered by a different but unknown mechanism for the Hα energy.
Finger Vein verification using local histogram of hybrid texture descriptors

Lately, finger vein has been recognized as an efficacious biometric method for user authentication due to the uniqueness of vein patterns and its insusceptibility to forgery because the vein patterns reside inside the human body. In this work, hybrid histogram descriptor is the proposed method. This method utilizes the sign and magnitude components of the texture extracted by using Binary Gradient Contour (BGC). Subsequently, the histogram is locally computed to determine the weight distribution of the sign and magnitude value for the hybrid texture descriptors. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the overall superiority of the proposed method with the EER as low as 0.353%.
The Automatic Discovery of Violations to the Normalized Systems Design Theorems: A Feasibility Study

Evolvability is an important concern for the design and development of information systems. Recently, the Normalized Systems theory has been proposed, which aims to ensure the high evolvability of information systems. The Normalized Systems theory is based on the systems theoretic concept of stability and proposes four design theorems that act as constraints on the modular structure of software. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of building a tool that is able to automatically identify violations to these Normalized Systems design theorems in the source code of applications. We describe how a prototype of such a tool was developed and discuss the lessons that can be learned for its further development. Our results show that it is indeed feasible to automatically identify some violations to the Normalized Systems design theorems, although a manual inspection should still provide more insight into the issues identified in the analysis.
Investigating the Degree of Adequacy of the Relations in the Concept Structure of Students using the Method of Latent Semantic Analysis

The research on the effects of study is hindered by the possibilities of the techniques and methods of registering, measuring and assessing the actually formed knowledge as information represented in the memory with the appropriate correlation among its units. The problem has been solved by the use of the latent semantic analysis for comparison and assessment of scientific texts and knowledge, expressed by the students in the form of free verbal statements.
Feature-Selective Attention in Healthy Old Age: A Selective Decline in Selective Attention?

Deficient selection against irrelevant information has been proposed to underlie age-related cognitive decline. We recently reported evidence for maintained early sensory selection when older and younger adults used spatial selective attention to perform a challenging task. Here we explored age-related differences when spatial selection is not possible and feature-selective attention must be deployed. We additionally compared the integrity of feedforward processing by exploiting the well established phenomenon of suppression of visual cortical responses attributable to interstimulus competition. Electroencephalogram was measured while older and younger human adults responded to brief occurrences of coherent motion in an attended stimulus composed of randomly moving, orientation-defined, flickering bars. Attention was directed to horizontal or vertical bars by a pretrial cue, after which two orthogonally oriented, overlapping stimuli or a single stimulus were presented. Horizontal and vertical bars flickered at different frequencies and thereby elicited separable steady-state visual-evoked potentials, which were used to examine the effect of feature-based selection and the competitive influence of a second stimulus on ongoing visual processing. Age differences were found in feature-selective attentional modulation of visual responses: older adults did not show consistent modulation of magnitude or phase. In contrast, the suppressive effect of a second stimulus was robust and comparable in magnitude across age groups, suggesting that bottom-up processing of the current stimuli is essentially unchanged in healthy old age. Thus, it seems that visual processing per se is unchanged, but top-down attentional control is compromised in older adults when space cannot be used to guide selection.
Interdependent Security Risk Analysis of Hosts and Flows

Detection of high risk hosts and flows continues to be a significant problem in security monitoring of high throughput networks. A comprehensive risk assessment method should consider the risk propagation among risky hosts and flows. In this paper, this is achieved by introducing two novel concepts. First, an interdependency relationship among the risk scores of a network flow and its source and destination hosts. On the one hand, the risk score of a host depends on risky flows initiated by or terminated at the host. On the other hand, the risk score of a flow depends on the risk scores of its source and destination hosts. Second, which we call flow provenance, represents risk propagation among network flows which considers the likelihood that a particular flow is caused by the other flows. Based on these two concepts, we develop an iterative algorithm for computing the risk score of hosts and network flows. We give a rigorous proof that our algorithm rapidly converges to unique risk estimates, and provide its extensive empirical evaluation using two real-world data sets. Our evaluation shows that our method is effective in detecting high risk hosts and flows and is sufficiently efficient to be deployed in the high throughput networks.
Servant leadership, span of control, and outcomes in a municipality context

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the moderating role of span of supervision in the association between servant leadership and multiple outcomes such as job satisfaction and follower performance in a municipality context in Norway. Cross-sectional research design was applied, where data were collected from 237 respondents where leaders and their followers participated. Results showed how the positive relationship between servant leadership and job satisfaction is attenuated by a larger span of supervision, resulting in poorer follower performance. The present study contributes to the servant leadership literature by showing that servant leaders do not operate in the same manner across different degrees of span of supervision. Evidence suggests that span of supervision creates distance between leaders and followers and moderates the types of leader behaviors that may emerge or are viable, such that serving every follower’s highest priority needs becomes difficult to execute.
Children and their gadgets: A pedodontist perspective

A national survey done by the Kaiser Family Foundation (US) found that children aged 8–18 years had an average media usage time of 6 h and 21 min daily and total media exposure time for most of the children exceeded the time spent in all other activities except sleep. [1] Although data from India are limited, a significant portion of our children also has considerable TV viewing per day, i.e., >2 h/day. [2] The media has a profound impact on the psychosocial development of children. [3]
Construction of Large Period Symplectic Maps by Interpolative Methods

The goal is to construct a symplectic evolution map for a large section of an accelerator, say a full turn of a large ring or a long wiggler. We start with an accurate tracking algorithm for single particles, which is allowed to be slightly non-symplectic. By tracking many particles for a distance S one acquires sufficient data to construct the mixed-variable generator of a symplectic map for evolution over S, given in terms of interpolatory functions. Two ways to find the generator are considered: (1) Find its gradient from tracking data, then the generator itself as a line integral. (2) Compute the action integral on many orbits. A test of method (1) has been made in a difficult example: a full turn map for an electron ring with strong nonlinearity near the dynamic aperture. The method succeeds at fairly large amplitudes, but there are technical difficulties near the dynamic aperture due to oddly shaped interpolation domains. For a generally applicable algorithm we propose method (2), realized with meshless interpolation methods.
Understanding Individual Adoption of Social Networking Services: An Empirical Investigation

 Abstract—Social networking services (SNS) have become a hot topic both in Information Systems area and research community for its powerful influence among a large number of users. People are curious about the reasons why SNS users are so passionate with SNS sites. In this study, the decision to continually use SNS is examined under an extended Technology Acceptance Model. Renren (renren.com) is the largest SNS sites in China and becomes the research object of this paper. An empirical study of Renren users (n=183) found that behavioral intention to use SNS is determined by both perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment. Perceived enjoyment and information sharing impact perceived usefulness directly while social connection and self presentation impact perceived enjoyment directly. Some implications for theories and practice are given and limitations with directions for future research are also listed.
Genome-wide identification and analysis of the eQTL lncRNAs in multiple sclerosis based on RNA-seq data

The pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis (MS) is significantly regulated by long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), the expression of which is substantially influenced by a number of MS-associated risk single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). It is thus hypothesized that the dysregulation of lncRNA induced by genomic variants may be one of the key molecular mechanisms for the pathology of MS. However, due to the lack of sufficient data on lncRNA expression and SNP genotypes of the same MS patients, such molecular mechanisms underlying the pathology of MS remain elusive. In this study, a bioinformatics strategy was applied to obtain lncRNA expression and SNP genotype data simultaneously from 142 samples (51 MS patients and 91 controls) based on RNA-seq data, and an expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) analysis was conducted. In total, 2383 differentially expressed lncRNAs were identified as specifically expressing in brain-related tissues, and 517 of them were affected by SNPs. Then, the functional characterization, secondary structure changes and tissue and disease specificity of the cis-eQTL SNPs and lncRNA were assessed. The cis-eQTL SNPs were substantially and specifically enriched in neurological disease and intergenic region, and the secondary structure was altered in 17.6% of all lncRNAs in MS. Finally, the weighted gene coexpression network and gene set enrichment analyses were used to investigate how the influence of SNPs on lncRNAs contributed to the pathogenesis of MS. As a result, the regulation of lncRNAs by SNPs was found to mainly influence the antigen processing/presentation and mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPK) signaling pathway in MS. These results revealed the effectiveness of the strategy proposed in this study and give insight into the mechanism (SNP-mediated modulation of lncRNAs) underlying the pathology of MS.
An automated routine for menu structure optimization

We propose an automated routine for hierarchical menu structure optimization. A computer advice-giving system founded on the mathematical model of menu navigation directs the designer-driven process of sequential enhancement, while menu designer caters for the semantic quality of menu labels and groupings used. The mathematical model employs the frequencies of functions' usage and the estimates of navigation time delays to calculate the average search time for the current and optimal menu structure, to show the "bottleneck" panels of the current menu, and to suggest the direction of their improvement. The model covers the variety of menu types and allows choosing the best type to meet requirements of specific application or user category. The approach is illustrated by the optimization of a mobile phone command menu.
Serum and Urine Blastomyces Antigen Concentrations as Markers of Clinical Remission in Dogs Treated for Systemic Blastomycosis

Background Serum and urine Blastomyces antigen concentrations can be used to diagnose blastomycosis in dogs. Objectives Blastomyces antigen concentrations correlate with clinical remission in dogs during antifungal treatment, and detect disease relapse after treatment discontinuation. Animals 21 dogs with newly diagnosed blastomycosis monitored until clinical remission (Treatment Phase), and 27 dogs monitored over 1 year from the time of antifungal discontinuation or until clinical relapse (After Treatment Phase). Methods Prospective study. Dogs were monitored monthly during treatment and every 3 months after treatment discontinuation, with a complete history, physical exam, chest radiographs, and ocular exam. Urine and serum Blastomyces antigen concentrations were measured at each visit using a quantitative enzyme immunoassay. Results At enrollment in the Treatment Phase, Blastomyces antigen was positive in all 21 urine samples (100% sensitivity; 95% CI 85–100%), and in 18 of 20 serum samples (90% sensitivity; 95% CI 70–97%). At 2–4 months of treatment, urine antigen was more sensitive for clinically detectable disease (82%; CI 60–94%) than serum antigen (18%; CI 6–41%). The sensitivity of the urine test for clinical relapse was 71% (CI 36–92%), with close to 100% specificity (CI 84–100%) during after treatment surveillance in this population. Conclusions Urine Blastomyces antigen testing has high sensitivity for active disease at the time of diagnosis and during treatment, and moderate sensitivity but high specificity for clinical relapse. Urine testing should be useful at the time of diagnosis, when treatment discontinuation is being considered, and anytime there is poor clinical response or suspicion of relapse.
A Novel Method of Single Phase Quasi Z-Source Converter

AC-AC converter convert fixed ACinput voltage in to variable ac output voltage by using ac voltage controllers. The single-phase zsource PWM ac-ac converter in this the converter works in a discontinuous current mode and do not share the same ground. Due to this output voltage does not provides continuous sine wave. And another is single phase ac-ac converter based on quasi-zsource technology. This converter shares the same ground but commutation technique is not safe commutation technique and it uses the snubber circuit. Due to this harmonics are occurs and voltage, power factor will comes low. In order to overcome the above problems in the traditional ACAC converters a new technology of AC-AC converter is proposed by using a Z-source converter with this new technology, the proposed converter offers the advantages over traditional AC-AC converter which operates in continuous current mode, safe commutation technique is used and no snubber circuit is used which provides good voltage regulation, improves power factor and provides less harmonics.