Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prospects for the Development of Odour Baits to Control the Tsetse Flies Glossina tachinoides and G. palpalis s.l.

Field studies were done of the responses of Glossina palpalis palpalis in Côte d'Ivoire, and G. p. gambiensis and G. tachinoides in Burkina Faso, to odours from humans, cattle and pigs. Responses were measured either by baiting (1.) biconical traps or (2.) electrocuting black targets with natural host odours. The catch of G. tachinoides from traps was significantly enhanced (∼5×) by odour from cattle but not humans. In contrast, catches from electric targets showed inconsistent results. For G. p. gambiensis both human and cattle odour increased (>2×) the trap catch significantly but not the catch from electric targets. For G. p. palpalis, odours from pigs and humans increased (∼5×) the numbers of tsetse attracted to the vicinity of the odour source but had little effect on landing or trap-entry. For G. tachinoides a blend of POCA (P = 3-n-propylphenol; O = 1-octen-3-ol; C = 4-methylphenol; A = acetone) alone or synthetic cattle odour (acetone, 1-octen-3-ol, 4-methylphenol and 3-n-propylphenol with carbon dioxide) consistently caught more tsetse than natural cattle odour. For G. p. gambiensis, POCA consistently increased catches from both traps and targets. For G. p. palpalis, doses of carbon dioxide similar to those produced by a host resulted in similar increases in attraction. Baiting traps with super-normal (∼500 mg/h) doses of acetone also consistently produced significant but slight (∼1.6×) increases in catches of male flies. The results suggest that odour-baited traps and insecticide-treated targets could assist the AU-Pan African Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis Eradication Campaign (PATTEC) in its current efforts to monitor and control Palpalis group tsetse in West Africa. For all three species, only ∼50% of the flies attracted to the vicinity of the trap were actually caught by it, suggesting that better traps might be developed by an analysis of the visual responses and identification of any semiochemicals involved in short-range interaction.
Survey of biometric authentication for e-assessment

Problems of impersonation and other malpractices of various degrees have continued to mar the electronic-assessment (e-assessment) of students at various levels. The use of traditional methods of password and token passing for identity management and control has failed to provide acceptable solution to these problems, due to their susceptibility to theft and various forms of violations. The failure of these and other methods in identity management has propelled the emergence of different biometric-based systems as solutions. The biometric systems use naturally endowed traits which include fingerprint, face, iris, voice, etc. for more reliable human identification and authentication. In this paper, various biometric modes are discussed along with their application within the domain of eassessment. The results in this paper show that the need for multimodal biometrics and transparent authentication in an e-assessment is still an open issue.
Autonomy support, implicit beliefs of ability and achievement goals in basketball players in training

The main objective of the study was to analyze the relationship between support for the autonomy of coaches, teammates, parents, implicit ability beliefs and goals achievement 2 x 2 of a group of female basketball players. The sample consisted of 57 basketball players from the quarry of a basketball team of Huelva. These players were between 10 and 17 years (M = 13.02, SD = 1.90). The climate of support for the autonomy of the coach, the companions of parents perceived by the players, the implicit beliefs of skill and achievement goals 2x2 was measured. The results of linear regression analysis show that the climate of autonomy support generated by the coach predicts the performance approach goal and incremental skill. In turn, the ability predicts incremental approach goals and avoidance to mastery. This highlights the importance of creating climates support the autonomy of basketball players during their training, as they adopt more adaptive goals achievement.
Dynamic demand-side management with user's privacy concern in residential community

In smart grids, demand-side management (DSM) plays an important role between customers and utility company, since it can reduce the total electricity cost of each customer meanwhile alleviate the aggregate peak-to-average ratio (PAR) of utility of a community of customers subject to real-time pricing (RTP) policy. Moreover, a good DSM system should also be able to react quickly when users do not take its advice or when the environment state changes. This works aims at making the DSM system dynamic, which means that the proposed DSM can reschedule the order of activities in nearly real-time whenever original schedule is no longer feasible due to the aforementioned situations. In our problem formulation, each home is assumed to connect to a renewable energy resource, say, photovoltaic (PV) system, and equipped with an energy storage device so that the scheduling can be made more flexible. Thus, besides the case where the original recommended schedule is not followed by the user, another case where the solar power distribution changes from what was predicted also initiates the rescheduling under the dynamic DSM. In addition, for a residential community composed of multiple homes, keeping the privacy of lifestyle for each home is also an issue as important as the energy saving, and therefore a cooperative game is also formulated so as to transfer only the necessary information but hide all the details of power consumption of each home. The simulation results show that the proposed DSM system not only reduce the cost in individual home but also reschedule quickly whenever there is a need, while make a tradeoff between cost and PAR with privacy concern in a residential community.
A green fluorescent protein screen for identification of well‐expressed membrane proteins from a cohort of extremophilic organisms

Green fluorescent protein (GFP) fusion proteins provide a potentially facile tool for identification of well expressed, properly behaved membrane proteins for biochemical and structural study. Here, we present a GFP‐expression survey of >300 membrane proteins from 18 bacterial and archaeal extremophiles, organisms expected to be rich sources of membrane proteins having robust biophysical properties. We find that GFP‐fusion fluorescence intensity is an excellent indicator of over‐expression potential. By employing a follow‐up optimization protocol using a suite of non‐GFP constructs and different expression temperatures, we obtain 0.5–15 mg L−1 expression levels for 90% of the tested candidate proteins that pass the GFP screen. Evaluation of the results suggests that certain organisms may serve as better sources of well‐expressed membrane proteins than others, that the degree to which codon usage matches the expression host is uncorrelated with success rate, and that the combination of GFP screening and expression optimization is essential for producing biochemically tractable quantities of material.
Calcium Carbonate Storage in Amorphous Form and Its Template-Induced Crystallization†

Calcium carbonate crystallization in organisms often occurs through the transformation from the amorphous precursor. It is believed that the amorphous phase could be temporarily stabilized and stored, until its templated transition to the crystalline form is induced. Here we develop a bioinspired crystallization strategy that is based on the above mechanism. Amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) spherulitic particles are induced to form on a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) of hydroxyl-terminated alkanethiols on a gold surface. The ACC can then be stored in a dry atmosphere as a reservoir for ions and be induced to crystallize on command by the introduction of water and a secondary surface that is functionalized with carboxylic acid-terminated SAM. This secondary surface acts as a template for oriented and patterned nucleation. Various oriented crystalline arrays and micropatterned films are formed. We also show that the ACC phase can be doped with foreign ions (e.g., magnesium) and organic molecules (e.g., dye.
A multi-step Gaussian filtering approach to reduce the effect of non-Gaussian distribution in aerial localization of an RF source in NLOS condition

The hybrid localization using Angle of Arrival (AOA) and Received Strength Signal Indicator (RSSI) of an RF source, such as a cell phone in a search and rescue mission, with unknown power and None Line Of Sight (NLOS) condition have been proven to be advantageous compared to using each method separately. The hybrid approach has been proposed to benefit from both RSSI and AOA measurements. In this paper, the initial hybrid method, which was implemented using particle filters due to the multi-modal/non-Gaussian nature of localization in NLOS condition, has been replaced by a multi-step Gaussian filtering approach which provides nearly similar accuracy with better performance. The proposed method has been implemented using extended Kalman filter and Unscented Kalman filter. The simulation results show that the multi-step Gaussian filtering is comparable to particle filter in all cases with better performance. For further evaluation, the effects of uncertainty in the propagation parameters have been studied to show the robustness of each filter to these uncertainties.
Impact of Software Components Characteristics above Decision-making Factors Asunción

During the software project planning phase, software engineers face the dilemma of deciding which of several software components to reuse, all of which meet appropriate requirements. The first thing they have to do in order to decide which is the best suited is to prioritize requirements. If the component is to undergo a process of adaptation for integration into the project, an evaluation has to be made. Software engineers must assess several characteristics and factors to select a component examining its relevant features, which will affect to their decision with different ratio, depending on company make-up or project peculiarities. This paper provides a guide as an aid for making these decisions, describing the relevant characteristics and factors of software components which will influence each decision-making issue.
Gain-based Exploration: From Multi-armed Bandits to Partially Observable Environments

We introduce gain-based policies for exploration in active learning problems. For exploration in multi-armed bandits with the knowledge of reward variances, an ideal gain-maximization exploration policy is described in a unified framework which also includes error-based and counter-based exploration. For realistic situations without prior knowledge of reward variances, we establish an upper bound on the gain function, resulting in a realistic gain- maximization exploration policy which achieves the optimal exploration asymptotically. Finally, we extend the gain- maximization exploration scheme towards partially observable environments. Approximating the environment by a set of local bandits, the agent actively selects its actions by maximizing discounted gain in learning local bandits. The resulting gain-based exploration not only outperforms random exploration, but also produces curiosity-driven behavior which is observed in natural agents.
Converting Continuous-Space Language Models into N-Gram Language Models for Statistical Machine Translation

Neural network language models, or continuous-space language models (CSLMs), have been shown to improve the performance of statistical machine translation (SMT) when they are used for reranking n-best translations. However, CSLMs have not been used in the first pass decoding of SMT, because using CSLMs in decoding takes a lot of time. In contrast, we propose a method for converting CSLMs into back-off n-gram language models (BNLMs) so that we can use converted CSLMs in decoding. We show that they outperform the original BNLMs and are comparable with the traditional use of CSLMs in reranking.
Nanoparticles co-encapsulating hVEGF and hAng-1 can induce mitotic and antiapoptotic effect on vascular endothelial cells

The study demonstrates the combined effect of the angiogenic proteins, hVEGF and hAng-1, coencapsulated in human serum albumin (HSA) nanoparticles (NPs), towards Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells (HUVECs) and evaluation of the potential application of this delivery system towards therapeutic angiogenesis. The size of the NPs crosslinked with glutaraldehyde varied between 101.0 nm and the zeta potential was found to be -18 mV. The NPs were incubated for 2 weeks to study the release profiles of the proteins and it was observed that 49 % of hAng-1 and 59 % of hVEGF had been released from the NPs. In addition, HUVEC proliferation and percent apoptosis in response to the proteins released from the HSA NPs was observed. Both the angiogenic proteins, hVEGF and hAng-1were biologically active and the combined application demonstrated a significantly high proliferative and anti-apoptotic effect on HUVECs.
Theory of Constraint Solvers 2 . 1 Constraint Satisfaction Problems

We develop a basic mathematical framework for specifying and formally designing highperformance constraint solving algorithms. The framework is based on concepts from abstract interpretation which generalizes earlier work on a Galois Connection-based model of Global Search algorithms. The main focus is on how to use the framework to automate the calculations necessary to construct a correct, high-performance solver. We present here the foundations for generating customized/native solvers for specified constraint satisfaction problems. Our thesis is that a native solver can always be generated for a constraint problem that outperforms a reduction to an existing solver.
Coupled Autoencoder Network with Joint Regularizations for image super-resolution

This paper aims at building a sparse deep autoencoder network with joint regularizations for image super-resolution. A map is learned from the low-resolution feature space to high-resolution feature space. In the training stage, two autoencoder networks are built for image representation for low resolution images and their high resolution counterparts, respectively. A neural network is constructed to learn a map between the features of low resolution images and high resolution images. Furthermore, due to the local smoothness and the redundancy of an image, the joint variation regularizations are unified with the coupled autoencoder network (CAN). For the local smoothness, steerable kernel variation regularization is designed. For redundancy, non-local variation regularization is designed. The joint regularizations improve the quality of the super resolution image. Experimental results on Set5 demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
A Subjective Distance Between Stimuli: Quantifying the Metric Structure of Representations

As subjects perceive the sensory world, different stimuli elicit a number of neural representations. Here, a subjective distance between stimuli is defined, measuring the degree of similarity between the underlying representations. As an example, the subjective distance between different locations in space is calculated from the activity of rodent's hippocampal place cells and lateral septal cells. Such a distance is compared to the real distance between locations. As the number of sampled neurons increases, the subjective distance shows a tendency to resemble the metrics of real space.
Activators of adenylate cyclase and cyclic AMP prolong calcium- dependent action potentials of mouse sensory neurons in culture by reducing a voltage-dependent potassium conductance

The effects of compounds that activate adenylate cyclase and of cAMP on calcium-dependent action potentials recorded from mouse dorsal root ganglion neurons were assessed. Application of compounds that stimulate the adenylate cyclase system (forskolin, cholera toxin, and prostaglandin E1) increased action potential duration with an associated decrease in afterhyperpolarization. An adenylate cyclase inhibitor, 2′,5′-dideoxyadenosine, partially inhibited the responses to forskolin and cholera toxin. cAMP analogs mimicked the effect of forskolin, and the phosphodiesterase inhibitor theophylline enhanced the response to forskolin. Following intracellular injection of the potassium channel blocker cesium, the forskolin response was reduced. Forskolin did not significantly alter resting membrane potential or conductance. The action potential responses to forskolin were voltage dependent, being reduced when the membrane was held at less negative (less than -50 mV) potentials. The data suggest that activators of adenylate cyclase and cAMP prolong calcium-dependent action potentials by blocking a voltage-dependent potassium conductance that is responsible, in part, for action potential repolarization and that inactivates at membrane potentials less negative than -50 mV.
Genetic control of cell interactions in nematode development.

INTRODUCTION 411 SUMMARY OF DEVELOPMENT OF C. ELEGANS 412 CELL INTERACTIONS 413 Identification of cell interactions 413 Distal tip cell control of germline proliferation 414 Cell interactions that control vulval development 415 Interactions in the lateral hypodermis 417 Other cell interactions 418 GENETIC ONTROL FCELL INTERACTIONS 419 glp-1 and lin-12 419 Genes regulating the VH/SH decision 426 pal-1 429 Other genetic pathways 430 CONCLUSIONS, SPECULATIONS AND PROSPECTS 431
The evolving beta coalescent

In mathematical population genetics, it is well known that one can represent the genealogy of a population by a tree, which indicates how the ancestral lines of individuals in the population coalesce as they are traced back in time. As the population evolves over time, the tree that represents the genealogy of the population also changes, leading to a tree-valued stochastic process known as the evolving coalescent. Here we will consider the evolving coalescent for populations whose genealogy can be described by a beta coalescent, which is known to give the genealogy of populations with very large family sizes. We show that as the size of the population tends to infinity, the evolution of certain functionals of the beta coalescent, such as the total number of mergers, the total branch length, and the total length of external branches, converges to a stationary stable process. Our methods also lead to new proofs of known asymptotic results for certain functionals of the non-evolving beta coalescent.
Comparisons of Cluster Mass Determinations by X-Ray Observations and Gravitational Lensing

Gravitational lensing by clusters of galaxies has been detected on scales ranging from ~10-1 Mpc to ~10 Mpc, namely, arcs/arclets, weak lensing, and quasar-cluster associations. This allows us to derive an overall radius matter distribution of clusters of galaxies. While the dynamical analysis of the X-ray observations has yielded a great number of data for the virial cluster masses, it becomes possible to compare the cluster mass determinations statistically by these two independent methods. In this Letter we show that as compared with gravitational lensing, the dynamical analysis under the assumption of isothermal and hydrostatic equilibrium has systematically underestimated the cluster masses inside the Abell radius by a factor of ~2 with scatter between 0.7 and 5. Because the same correction factor should be applicable to the gas baryon fraction of clusters of galaxies obtained from the X-ray data, it is probably too premature to claim a baryon crisis in today's cosmology.
Secured Virtual Diffused File System for the cloud

One of the major concerns for users of public cloud storage is data confidentiality, integrity and availability. Secured Virtual Diffused File System (SVDFS) is a distributed file system which aims to address this concern by allowing users to transparently layer a secured virtual file system on top of existing public cloud infrastructure. SVDFS uses Information Dispersal Algorithm (IDA) to slice up data into multiple unrecognizable slices and “diffuse” them across multiple storage servers in one or more cloud providers. With IDA, the adversary is required to obtain a minimum number of slices as well as the information on the transform matrix to be able to reconstruct the information. IDA also provides availability of data without requiring full replication. This helps to mitigate the loss of information in case a storage server or a specific storage medium is corrupted or compromised. The proposed architecture supports a clear separation of storage owner and information owner. Unlike other IDA-based storage systems, SDVFS supports file system semantics by providing dynamic reading and writing of files which have been dispersed using IDA.
Atrial Natriuretic Peptide Stimulates Dopamine Tubular Transport by Organic Cation Transporters: A Novel Mechanism to Enhance Renal Sodium Excretion

The aim of this study was to demonstrate the effects of atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) on organic cation transporters (OCTs) expression and activity, and its consequences on dopamine urinary levels, Na+, K+-ATPase activity and renal function. Male Sprague Dawley rats were infused with isotonic saline solution during 120 minutes and randomized in nine different groups: control, pargyline plus tolcapone (P+T), ANP, dopamine (DA), D-22, DA+D-22, ANP+D-22, ANP+DA and ANP+DA+D-22. Renal functional parameters were determined and urinary dopamine concentration was quantified by HPLC. Expression of OCTs and D1-receptor in membrane preparations from renal cortex tissues were determined by western blot and Na+, K+-ATPase activity was determined using in vitro enzyme assay. 3H-DA renal uptake was determined in vitro. Compared to P+T group, ANP and dopamine infusion increased diuresis, urinary sodium and dopamine excretion significantly. These effects were more pronounced in ANP+DA group and reversed by OCTs blockade by D-22, demonstrating that OCTs are implied in ANP stimulated-DA uptake and transport in renal tissues. The activity of Na+, K+-ATPase exhibited a similar fashion when it was measured in the same experimental groups. Although OCTs and D1-receptor protein expression were not modified by ANP, OCTs-dependent-dopamine tubular uptake was increased by ANP through activation of NPR-A receptor and protein kinase G as signaling pathway. This effect was reflected by an increase in urinary dopamine excretion, natriuresis, diuresis and decreased Na+, K+-ATPase activity. OCTs represent a novel target that links the activity of ANP and dopamine together in a common mechanism to enhance their natriuretic and diuretic effects.
The automated classification of astronomical light curves using Kohonen self-organizing maps

We apply the technique of self-organizing maps to the automated classification of singly periodic astronomical light curves. We find that our maps readily distinguish between light curve types in both synthetic and real data sets, and that the resulting maps do not depend sensitively on the chosen learning parameters. Automated data analysis techniques are likely to be become increasingly important as the size of astronomical data sets continues to increase, particularly with the advent of ultra-wide-field survey telescopes such as WASP, RAPTOR and ASAS.