Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mangrove Methane Biogeochemistry in the Indian Sundarbans: A Proposed Budget

Biogeochemical cycling of CH4 was investigated at Lothian Island, one of the relatively pristine islands of Indian Sundarbans and its adjacent Saptamukhi estuary, during June 2010 to December 2012. Intertidal mangrove sediments were highly anoxic and rich in organic carbon. Mean rates of methanogenesis were 3547 and 48.88 µmol m-3 wet sediment d-1, for intertidal (up to 25 cm depth) and sub-tidal sediments (first 5 cm depth), respectively. CH4 in pore-water was 53.4 times more supersaturated than in adjacent estuarine waters. This resulted in significant CH4 efflux from sediments to estuarine waters - via advective and diffusive transport. About 8.2% of the total CH4 produced in intertidal mangrove sediments was transported to the adjacent estuary through advective flux, which was 20 times higher than diffusive CH4 flux. Mean CH4 concentrations in estuarine surface and sub-surface waters were 69.9 and 56.1 nM, respectively, with a dissolved CH4 oxidation rate in estuarine surface waters of 20.5 nmol L-1 d-1. An estimated 0.09 Gg yr-1 of CH4 is released from estuaries of Sundarbans to the regional atmosphere. The mean CH4 mixing ratio over the forest atmosphere was 2 ppmv. On annual basis, only 2.75% of total supplied CH4 to the forest atmosphere was transported to the upper atmosphere via biosphere-atmosphere exchange. Mean CH4 photo-oxidation rate over the forest atmosphere was 3.25 x 10-9 mg cm-3 d-1. Using new and and previously published data we present for the first time, a CH4 budget for Sundarbans mangrove ecosystem which in part, revealed the existence of anaerobic CH4 oxidation in the mangrove sediment column.
THREE ESSAYS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IMPLICIT ATTITUDES AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOR

OF THE DISSERTATION Three Essays on the Relationship between Implicit Attitudes and Political Behavior by Vincent Greco Dissertation Director: Richard Lau Considerable evidence supports the view that information processing often operates in an automatic, less conscious mode of cognition (Lodge & Taber, 2013). Such automatic or “implicit attitudes” have been shown to be a strong predictor of a variety of political outcomes (Perez, 2013). Despite such evidence, it remains unclear the mechanism linking implicit attitudes to political decision-making. This dissertation project attempts to shed light on this issue by examining the impact of implicit attitudes on political information search and candidate evaluation. In my experimental design, I use both the implicit association test (IAT) and the dynamic information board methodology (Lau & Redlawsk, 2006) to directly assess the effect of implicit racial attitudes on how subjects search for information and evaluate political candidates in the context of a mock presidential campaign. I also address a key criticism in this literature by exploring under what conditions implicit attitudes are likely to have stronger and weaker effects on political behavior. To do this, I include a set of manipulations that vary a key feature of the information environment (high vs. low cognitive load) and subjects’ emotional state (positive vs. negative). The results from this project provide a direct assessment of both implicit attitudes’ impact on information search and candidate evaluation as well as potential moderating factors. Turning to the results, my main finding is that implicit
Mining Sandboxes

We present sandbox mining, a technique to confine an application to resources accessed during automatic testing. Sandbox mining first explores software behavior by means of automatic test generation, and extracts the set of resources accessed during these tests. This set is then used as a sandbox, blocking access to resources not used during testing. The mined sandbox thus protects against behavior changes such as the activation of latent malware, infections, targeted attacks, or malicious updates. The use of test generation makes sandbox mining a fully automatic process that can be run by vendors and end users alike. Our BOXMATE prototype requires less than one hour to extract a sandbox from an Android app, with few to no confirmations required for frequently used functionality.
The Fast Spiking Subpopulation of Striatal Neurons Coding for Temporal Cognition of Movements

Background: Timing dysfunctions occur in a number of neurological and psychiatric disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism and attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder. Several lines of evidence show that disrupted timing processing is involved in specific fronto-striatal abnormalities. The striatum encodes reinforcement learning and procedural motion, and consequently is required to represent temporal information precisely, which then guides actions in proper sequence. Previous studies highlighted the temporal scaling property of timing-relevant striatal neurons; however, it is still unknown how this is accomplished over short temporal latencies, such as the sub-seconds to seconds range. Methods: We designed a task with a series of timing behaviors that required rats to reproduce a fixed duration with robust action. Using chronic multichannel electrode arrays, we recorded neural activity from dorso-medial striatum in 4 rats performing the task and identified modulation response of each neuron to different events. Cell type classification was performed according to a multi-criteria clustering analysis. Results: Dorso-medial striatal neurons (n = 557) were recorded, of which 113 single units were considered as timing-relevant neurons, especially the fast-spiking subpopulation that had trial–to–trial ramping up or ramping down firing modulation during the time estimation period. Furthermore, these timing-relevant striatal neurons had to calibrate the spread of their firing pattern by rewarded experience to express the timing behavior accurately. Conclusion: Our data suggests that the dynamic activities of timing-relevant units encode information about the current duration and recent outcomes, which is needed to predict and drive the following action. These results reveal the potential mechanism of time calibration in a short temporal resolution, which may help to explain the neural basis of motor coordination affected by certain physiological or pathological conditions.
Matching Task and Technology Characteristics to Predict mHealth Tool Use and User Performance - A Study of Community Health Workers in the Kenyan Context

Equipping Community Health Workers (CHWs) in resource-constrained settings with mobile-health or âmHealthâ tools has the potential to improve healthcare service delivery. mHealth tool functionality must however match CHW task needs before these tools are likely to have any significant impacts on CHW performance. This paper contributes by drawing on Task-Technology Fit theory to test the extent to which a match between CHW tasks and mHealth technology characteristics influences the performance of 201 CHWs using an mHealth tool in the counties of Siaya, Nandi, and Kilifi in Kenya. Results showed that the interaction of paired task and technology characteristics did not always impact mHealth tool use and user performance in the manner expected. When mHealth tool functions matched the task interdependence and information dependency needs of the CHWs then CHW performance increased but CHW performance decreased for some CHWs when mHealth functionality for time criticality and mobility was high. Moreover, while information dependency had an independent positive effect on mHealth tool use, CHWs came to depend less on the mHealth tool to support time criticality, interdependence, and mobility needs when functional support was high. These findings have implications for the design and deployment of mHealth tools.
IMPLEMENTING A CONTEXT-SENSITIVE MOBILE LEARNING SYSTEM

As learning moves beyond the classroom and into everyday life, the supporting technology must be able to adapt, not only to the situations in which learners wish to learn but also their particular style of learning. Modern learning paradigms, such as mobile and ambient learning embrace adaptation through context-sensitivity. Context-sensitivity allows systems to carry out their main functions, whilst still adapting their behaviour. A user’s idiosyncrasies are important contextual information that must be handled. The work presented here demonstrates how Dreyfus’ level of competence, Gardner’s multiple intelligences and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions can be used as a basis for modelling users through stereotypes, and further how a context-sensitive mobile learning systems can use this to adapt its behaviour when assisting learners. It shows how an implementation of such stereotypes and details initial functionality testing.
Dietary Behavior and Influential Factor Analysis among Urban Adolescents in Shandong Province

Objective To analyze the dietary behavior and influencing factors among urban adolescents in Shandong Province,and to provide the scientific basis for nutrition health education and the formulation of nutrition intervention measures.Methods Totally 11 148 urban adolescents were analyzed from the data of Shandong "2008 national survey of adolescent health risk behavior". Results The rate of eating breakfast and drinking milk every day in the past 7 days was 67.23% and 26.88%,respectively.The rate of self-reported unhealthy behavior was 2.17% for drinking soft drinks frequently,17.79% for eating sweet dessert frequently,0.83% for eating fast-food frequently,and 39.62% were picky about food.Each kind of dietary behavior report rate had significant difference by gender,school type and family type.Conclusion The present dietary behavior of urban adolescent among Shandong is not satisfactory.The popularization and education of reasonable diet knowledge should be strengthened,and pay more attention to the prevention unhealthy behavior to help forming healthy behavior.
Interferons, interferon‐like cytokines, and their receptors

Summary: Recombinant interferon‐α (IFN‐α) was approved by regulatory agencies in many countries in 1986. As the first biotherapeutic approved, IFN‐α paved the way for the development of many other cytokines and growth factors. Nevertheless, understanding the functions of the multitude of human IFNs and IFN‐like cytokines has just touched the surface. This review summarizes the history of the purification of human IFNs and the key aspects of our current state of knowledge of human IFN genes, proteins, and receptors. All the known IFNs and IFN‐like cytokines are described [IFN‐α, IFN‐β, IFN‐ε, IFN‐κ, IFN‐ω, IFN‐δ, IFN‐τ, IFN‐γ, limitin, interleukin‐28A (IL‐28A), IL‐28B, and IL‐29] as well as their receptors and signal transduction pathways. The biological activities and clinical applications of the proteins are discussed. An extensive section on the evolution of these molecules provides some new insights into the development of these proteins as major elements of innate immunity. The overall structure of the IFNs is put into perspective in relation to their receptors and functions.
Texture classification using relative phase and Gaussian mixture models in the complex wavelet domain

The importance of phase features for texture analysis has been earlier established for many image processing applications. However, the modeling of the phase data faces some difficulties as its information gathers data with rotating values and thus highly sensitive to distortions. Motivated by its ability to capture different shapes of histograms, in this communication, we propose the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to characterize the behavior of relative phase. The Maximum-likelihood Estimator (MLE) is used to estimate the GMM parameters. To investigate the relevance of the GMM model for relative phase data, a feature vector incorporating the estimated parameters is proposed for a multiclass classification task. Experiments are conducted on textures from VisTex and Brodatz databases. Results demonstrate that the GMM model fit well relative phase data. In addition, higher rates of accuracy, precision and recall, 95.35%, 95.50% and 95.40%, respectively, were achieved for Brodatz textures using the proposed feature vector. This suggests the potential usefulness of the probabilistic proprieties for texture analysis.
Social Gaming as an Experimental Platform

past few years, there have been many examples showing the use of game environments as experimental platforms to advance science research. For some scientific research questions, specifically pertaining to social psychology, social believability and structure of the game environment and the characters inhabiting this environment is important. In the past year, we have started a collaborative project with psychology researchers utilizing game environments to investigate the relationship between non-verbal behaviors and trust. This study was motivated by psychological findings uncovering evidence suggesting that older adults appear to be less likely to differentiate trustworthy from untrustworthy nonverbal cues. In order to conduct such studies within a virtual environment, the environment needs to have virtual characters that are socially believable, behaviorally consistent yet controllable. This paper discusses a work in progress developing a novel gaming architecture composed of a set of semi-autonomous socially believable characters with different personalities, a scenario system, and a Wizard of Oz interface for psychologists to manipulate characters' behaviors. The paper discusses the current state of the art of the system and future directions of its use.
How much variability can designers tolerate?

Designers hate large variations in a gate's critical dimensions (CDs) because large variations imply large guardbanding in design. Lithographers hate small variations in CD numbers because they imply impossible process windows. With the publication of the 2003 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (1TRS), gate CD control requirements for lithography and front-end (etching) processes will doubtless receive intense scrutiny.
Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps by John J. Michalczyk (review)

problem restricted WJC successes to “only” a few thousand children saved, he sheds light on the variety of rescue methods employed in Portugal, Denmark, and Bulgaria. In particular, he documents the many initiatives by which rank-and-file members saved thousands more lives. As Segev observes, “secrecy created the impression that the WJC had done nothing whatsoever. ”However, his attribution of this secrecy exclusively to the policy of restraint that dictated much of WJC strategy during the war is too simplistic: many factors influenced the WJC’s inability to publicize its rescue efforts, for instance, having to deal with often-hostile governments that did not necessarily want their Jews to be saved, or the realities of coordinating rescue operations under wartime conditions. Another interesting side of Segev’s work is his discussion of Zionism. Though this section does not connect clearly to the stated goal of the work, Segev traces WJC attitudes on Palestine. Leaders of the organization did not see Palestine as a haven for every Jew; instead they advocated a strong Diaspora and worked on behalf of Jews who wanted to return to their home countries after the war. Although the majority of the WJC leadership did consider themselves Zionists, the WJC, focused on civil rights at home, was not a Zionist organization. While some of Segev’s research supports his thesis, the lack of cohesiveness, the inadequate editing, and the fact that the author contradicts himself several times, make his book a difficult read. The author uses important materials from (among other repositories) the Central Zionist Archive, the Yad Vashem Archive, and the archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Though he promises new information about the World Jewish Congress during the Holocaust, Segev does not contribute substantially to the historiography beyond specific detail on certain rescue operations. This book has interesting points, but Segev could have bolstered his argumentation and marshalled more detail in support of the main themes.
Thymidylate synthase (TS) gene expression in primary lung cancer patients: a large-scale study in Japanese population.

BACKGROUND Previous small-sized studies showed lower thymidylate synthase (TS) expression in adenocarcinoma of the lung, which may explain higher antitumor activity of TS-inhibiting agents such as pemetrexed. PATIENTS AND METHODS To quantitatively measure TS gene expression in a large-scale Japanese population (n = 2621) with primary lung cancer, laser-captured microdissected sections were cut from primary tumors, surrounding normal lung tissues and involved nodes. RESULTS TS gene expression level in primary tumor was significantly higher than that in normal lung tissue (mean TS/β-actin, 3.4 and 1.0, respectively; P < 0.01), and TS gene expression level was further higher in involved node (mean TS/β-actin, 7.7; P < 0.01). Analyses of TS gene expression levels in primary tumor according to histologic cell type revealed that small-cell carcinoma showed highest TS expression (mean TS/β-actin, 13.8) and that squamous cell carcinoma showed higher TS expression as compared with adenocarcinoma (mean TS/β-actin, 4.3 and 2.3, respectively; P < 0.01); TS gene expression was significantly increased along with a decrease in the grade of tumor cell differentiation. There was no significant difference in TS gene expression according to any other patient characteristics including tumor progression. CONCLUSION Lower TS expression in adenocarcinoma of the lung was confirmed in a large-scale study.
Incremental unsupervised topological place discovery

This paper describes an online place discovery and recognition engine that fuses information over time to create topologically distinct places. A key motivation is the recognition that a single image may be a poor exemplar of what constitutes a place. Images are not `places' nor are they `documents'. Instead, by treating image-sequences as a multimodal distribution over topics - and by discovering topics incrementally and online - it is possible to both reduce the memory footprint of place recognition systems, and to improve precision and recall. Distinctive key-places are represented by a cluster topics found from the covisibility graph of a relative simultaneous localization and mapping engine - key-places inherently span many images. A dynamic vocabulary of visual words and density based clustering is used to continually estimate a set of visual topics, changes in which drive the place-recognition process. The system is evaluated using an indoor robot sequence, a standard outdoor robot sequence and a long-term sequence from a static camera. Experiments demonstrate qualitatively distinct themes associated with discovered places - from common place types such as `hallway', or `desk-area', to temporal concepts such as `dusk', `dawn' or `mid-day'. Compared to traditional image-based place-recognition, this reduces the information that must be stored without reducing place-recognition performance.
Sleep hygiene behaviors among midlife women with insomnia or sleep-disordered breathing: the SWAN sleep study.

BACKGROUND Insomnia and sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) are the most common sleep disorders among midlife women. Although promoting sleep hygiene behaviors may be a useful behavioral approach for the management of insomnia or SDB, the frequency with which women engage in these behaviors is unclear. METHODS Participants were from the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN) Sleep Study (N=321; age range=48-58 years). Out of the full sample, 10.3% (n=33) met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition diagnostic criteria for insomnia, 15.3% (n=49) had clinically significant SDB (apnea-hypopnea index ≥15), and 4.7% (n=15) met criteria for both insomnia and SDB, resulting in an overall prevalence of 15.0% (n=48) for insomnia and 19.9% (n=64) for SDB. Participants provided diary-based assessments of sleep hygiene behaviors for 14-35 days. Two positive behaviors (sufficient exercise, regular morning out-of-bed time) and four negative behaviors (taking long daytime naps, caffeine consumption near bedtime, alcohol consumption near bedtime, smoking) were examined. These behaviors were compared between women with and without insomnia or SDB following adjustment for sociodemographic factors and mental and physical health indices. RESULTS Women with insomnia engaged in significantly fewer negative sleep hygiene behaviors than women without insomnia (1.61±0.15 vs. 2.09±0.09 behaviors; p<0.01); specifically, women with insomnia were less likely to take long naps (odds ratio [OR]=0.30, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.12-0.74) or consume caffeine near bedtime (OR=0.44, 95% CI: 0.20-0.98). In contrast, women with SDB were less likely to be physically active than women without SDB (OR=0.52, 95% CI: 0.27-0.98), but no other differences in sleep hygiene behaviors were observed. CONCLUSIONS These data suggest that insomnia in midlife women is not associated with poor sleep hygiene. Increasing physical activity may be a valuable recommendation for midlife women with SDB.
Acute retinal ischemia inhibits endothelium-dependent nitric oxide-mediated dilation of retinal arterioles via enhanced superoxide production.

PURPOSE Because retinal vascular disease is associated with ischemia and increased oxidative stress, the vasodilator function of retinal arterioles was examined after retinal ischemia induced by elevated intraocular pressure (IOP). The role of superoxide anions in the development of vascular dysfunction was assessed. METHODS IOP was increased and maintained at 80 to 90 mm Hg for 30, 60, or 90 minutes by infusing saline into the anterior chamber of a porcine eye. The fellow eye with normal IOP (10-20 mm Hg) served as control. In some pigs, superoxide dismutase mimetic TEMPOL (1 mM) or vehicle (saline) was injected intravitreally before IOP elevation. After enucleation, retinal arterioles were isolated and pressurized without flow for functional analysis by recording diameter changes using videomicroscopic techniques. Dihydroethidium (DHE) was used to detect superoxide production in isolated retinal arterioles. RESULTS Isolated retinal arterioles developed stable basal tone and the vasodilations to endothelium-dependent nitric oxide (NO)-mediated agonists bradykinin and L-lactate were significantly reduced only by 90 minutes of ischemia. However, vasodilation to endothelium-independent NO donor sodium nitroprusside was unaffected after all time periods of ischemia. DHE staining showed that 90 minutes of ischemia significantly increased superoxide levels in retinal arterioles. Intravitreal injection of membrane-permeable radical scavenger but not vehicle before ischemia prevented elevation of vascular superoxide and preserved bradykinin-induced dilation. CONCLUSIONS Endothelium-dependent NO-mediated dilation of retinal arterioles is impaired by 90 minutes of ischemia induced by elevated IOP. The inhibitory effect appears to be mediated by the alteration of NO signaling via vascular superoxide.