Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring the evolution of environmental sex determination, especially in reptiles

Environmental sex determination has been documented in a variety of organisms for many decades and the adaptive significance of this unusual sex‐determining mechanism has been clarified empirically in most cases. In contrast, temperature‐dependent sex determination (TSD) in amniote vertebrates, first noted 40 years ago in a lizard, has defied a general satisfactory evolutionary explanation despite considerable research effort. After briefly reviewing relevant theory and prior empirical work, we draw attention to recent comparative analyses that illuminate the evolutionary history of TSD in amniote vertebrates and point to clear avenues for future research on this challenging topic. To that end, we then highlight the latest empirical findings in lizards and turtles, as well as promising experimental results from a model organism, that portend an exciting future of progress in finally elucidating the evolutionary cause(s) and significance of TSD.
Preparing network confi gurations for IPv 6 renumbering

The diffi culty of renumbering a network—i.e., adding and removing an Internet Protocol (IP) prefi x due to a provider change or a network merger—is a real issue for most network administrators. In this paper, we propose a set of macros that can be used in confi guration fi les. These allow network administrators to write generic confi gurations that are independent of the public IPv6 prefi xes allocated to their network. We explain how to apply our macros to key confi guration fi les, namely fi rewall access lists, Domain Name Service and Dynamic Host Confi guration Protocol, and how to use this mechanism in a full renumbering process. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Acetaminophen and the U.S. acute liver failure study group: Lowering the risks of hepatic failure

Acetaminophen overdose is the leading cause for calls to Poison Control Centers (>100,000/year) and accounts for more than 56,000 emergency room visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and an estimated 458 deaths due to acute liver failure each year. Data from the U.S. Acute Liver Failure Study Group registry of more than 700 patients with acute liver failure across the United States implicates acetaminophen poisoning in nearly 50% of all acute liver failure in this country. Available in many single or combination products, acetaminophen produces more than $1 billion dollars in annual sales for Tylenol products alone. It is heavily marketed for its safety compared to nonsteroidal analgesics. By enabling self‐diagnosis and treatment of minor aches and pains, its benefits are said by the Food and Drug Administration to outweigh its risks. It still must be asked: Is this amount of injury and death really acceptable for an over‐the‐counter pain reliever? (HEPATOLOGY 2004;40:6–9.)
Automatic Detection of Cow’s Oestrus in Audio Surveillance System

Early detection of anomalies is an important issue in the management of group-housed livestock. In particular, failure to detect oestrus in a timely and accurate way can become a limiting factor in achieving efficient reproductive performance. Although a rich variety of methods has been introduced for the detection of oestrus, a more accurate and practical method is still required. In this paper, we propose an efficient data mining solution for the detection of oestrus, using the sound data of Korean native cows (Bos taurus coreanea). In this method, we extracted the mel frequency cepstrum coefficients from sound data with a feature dimension reduction, and use the support vector data description as an early anomaly detector. Our experimental results show that this method can be used to detect oestrus both economically (even a cheap microphone) and accurately (over 94% accuracy), either as a standalone solution or to complement known methods.
Discrete Dirac operators on Riemann surfaces and Kasteleyn matrices

Let S be a flat surface of genus g with cone type singularities. Given a bipartite graph G isoradially embedded in S, we define discrete analogs of the 2^{2g} Dirac operators on S. These discrete objects are then shown to converge to the continuous ones, in some appropriate sense. Finally, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions on the pair (S,G) for these discrete Dirac operators to be Kasteleyn matrices of the graph G. As a consequence, if these conditions are met, the partition function of the dimer model on G can be explicitly written as an alternating sum of the determinants of these 2^{2g} discrete Dirac operators.
A merging approach for authority records

The process of merging two or more authority databases is considered in this paper. We study the problem of duplicate detection and merging authority records, created in accordance with Russian Cataloguing Rules and format RUSMARC/RUSMARC Authorities. The toolbox Cflib has been developed by us for solving this problem. It's based on standard principles of record linkage and has quite simple architecture.
Vanishing moments and the approximation power of wavelet expansions

The order of a wavelet transform is typically given by the number of vanishing moments of the analysis wavelet. The Strang-Fix (1971) conditions imply that the error for an orthogonal wavelet approximation at scale a=2/sup -i/ globally decays as a/sup L/, where L is the order of the transform. This is why, for a given number of scales, higher order wavelet transforms usually result in better signal approximations. We show that this result carries over for the general biorthogonal case and that the rate of decay of the error is determined by the order properties of the synthesis scaling function alone. We also derive asymptotic error formulas and show that biorthogonal wavelet transforms are equivalent to their corresponding orthogonal projector as the scale goes to zero. These results strengthen Sweldens (see Numer. Math., vol.68, no.3, p.377-401, 1994) earlier analysis and confirm that the approximation power of biorthogonal and (semi-)orthogonal wavelet expansions is essentially the same. Finally, we compare the asymptotic performance of various wavelet transforms and briefly discuss the advantages of splines. We also indicate how the smoothness of the basis functions is beneficial in reducing the approximation error.
Communicating facial affect: it's not the realism, it's the motion

Designers of video-mediated communication and affective computing applications must make tradeoffs to deal with limited bandwidth. Typically spatial resolution and color are preserved at the expense of temporal resolution and accuracy. Our data suggest that this may not be the appropriate tradeoff for communicating facial affect; preserving motion is critical and may even compensate for major losses in image realism.
Game theoretical analysis of wireless multiview video multicast using cooperative peer-to-peer repair

Receivers of wireless video broadcast can suffer catastrophic decoding errors when experiencing heavy packet losses due to transmission channel fades. Cooperative repair schemes, exploiting the “uncorrelatedness” in wireless channels of peers physically located more than one transmission wavelength apart, call for neighboring peers listening to the same video stream to locally share received packets via a secondary network. Since the likelihood of the entire peer group suffering fades in statistically independent channels at the same time is very small, cooperative peers can collectively recover lost packets via local packet sharing with high probability. For interactive multiview video streaming (IMVS), where a client receives and watches only one periodically selected view out of N available, the packet recovery problem is more challenging, since the likelihood of a neighboring cooperative peer watching the same view as a channel-corrupted peer is now 1/N. To enable cooperative recovery even when neighboring peers are watching different but correlated video views, cleverly designed redundantly coded information (RCI) such as Distributed Source Coded (DSC) frames are inserted into streams of different views. On one hand, RCI in the video streams promotes cooperative repair among peers watching different views; on the other, it leaves fewer available bits for channel coding, given a fixed transmission budget, to combat channel noise. In this paper, using game theoretical analysis, we search for the optimal amount of RCI in the video streams to foster the right balance between cooperation among peers and leftover bits for channel coding to maximize decoding success. Experimental results show that expected video decoding probability can be increased noticeably compared to non-optimized resource allocation schemes.
Cytosolic Calmodulin Is Increased in SK‐N‐SH Human Neuroblastoma Cells Due to Release of Calcium from Intracellular Stores

Abstract: Muscarinic receptor stimulation elicits a redistribution of calmodulin (CaM) from the membrane fraction to cytosol in the human neuroblastoma cell line SK‐N‐SH. Increasing the intracellular Ca2+ concentration with ionomycin also elevates cytosolic CaM. The aim of this study was to investigate the roles of extracellular and intracellular Ca2+ pools in the muscarinic receptor‐mediated increases in cytosolic CaM in SK‐N‐SH cells. Stimulus‐mediated changes in intracellular Ca2+ were monitored in fura‐2‐loaded cells, and CaM was measured by radioimmunoassay in the 100,000‐g cytosol and membrane fractions. The influx of extracellular Ca2+ normally seen with carbachol treatment in SK‐N‐SH cells was eliminated by pretreatment with the nonspecific Ca2+ channel blocker Ni2+. Blocking the influx of extracellular Ca2+ had no effect on carbachol‐mediated increases in cytosolic CaM (168 ± 18% of control values for carbachol treatment alone vs. 163 ± 28% for Ni2+ and carbachol) or decreases in membrane CaM. Similarly, removal of extracellular Ca2+ from the medium did not affect carbachol‐mediated increases in cytosolic CaM (168 ± 26% of control). On the other hand, prevention of the carbachol‐mediated increase of intracellular free Ca2+ by pretreatment with the cell‐permeant Ca2+ chelator BAPTA/AM did attenuate the carbachol‐mediated increase in cytosolic CaM (221 ± 37% of control without BAPTA/AM vs. 136 ± 13% with BAPTA/AM). The effect of direct entry of extracellular Ca2+ into the cell by K+ depolarization was assessed. Incubation of SK‐N‐SH cells with 60 mM K+ elicited an immediate and persistent increase in intracellular free Ca2+ concentration, but there was no corresponding alteration in CaM localization. On the contrary, in cells where intracellular Ca2+ was directly elevated by thapsigargin treatment, cytosolic CaM was elevated for at least 30 min while particulate CaM was decreased. In addition, treatment with ionomycin in the absence of extracellular Ca2+, which releases Ca2+ from intracellular stores, induced an increase in cytosolic CaM (203 ± 30% of control). The mechanism for the CaM release may involve activation of the α isozyme of protein kinase C, which was translocated from cytosol to membranes much more profoundly by thapsigargin than by K+ depolarization. These data demonstrate that release of Ca2+ from the intracellular store is important for the carbachol‐mediated redistribution of CaM in human neuroblastoma SK‐N‐SH cells.
Combination treatment with an erythropoiesis-stimulating agent and intravenous iron alleviates anaemia in patients with hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia

Abstract Background. Patients with hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) suffer from recurrent epistaxis and bleeding from gastrointestinal telangiectasias that occur despite otherwise normal haemostasis and result in iron deficiency anaemia with increasing severity. In advanced disease, anaemia may be severe, be irresponsive to iron supplementation, and may lead to red blood cell transfusion dependency. Methods. We conducted a retrospective study at our Centre for Osler’s Disease to evaluate the effectiveness of adding an erythropoiesis-stimulating agent (ESA) to intravenous iron supplementation in the management of anaemic HHT patients. Blood values and treatment parameters were collected for nine months before combination therapy (iron supplementation only) and 12 months during combination therapy (iron supplementation plus ESA). Results. Four patients received intravenous iron and an ESA with mean weekly doses of 126 mg and 17,300 units (U), respectively. Mean haemoglobin improved significantly during combination therapy, from 106 g/L to 119 g/L (p < 0.001). Conclusion. Anaemia can be alleviated in patients with HHT who are irresponsive to intravenous iron supplementation, by addition of an ESA. The proposed mechanism behind the iron irresponsiveness is that the anaemia is caused by a combination of recurrent haemorrhage and anaemia of chronic disease.
Forecasting with Judgment and Models Preliminary and incomplete

This paper proposes a parsimonious and model-consistent method for combining forecasts generated by structural micro-founded models and judgmental forecasts. The goal is to produce forecasts that are model-based, and therefore disciplined by the rigor of the economic model, but that can also incorporate judgmental information. In our set-up, there are three actors: the economic agents and two types of forecasters, the purely-model based and the judgmental forecasters. They all know the true model of the economy, but their information sets differ. The economic agents observe shocks as they realize and make their decisions consequently, while the forecasters do not observe current shocks. The judgmental forecasters however have access to more timely information than the purely model-based forecasters, but their forecasts are affected by some noise (i.e. they are not perfectly rational). Thus, the idea is to extract such information from the judgmental forecasts. This method also allows interpreting the judgmental forecasts through the lens of the model. We illustrate the proposed methodology with a real-time forecasting exercise, using a stripped-to-the-bone version of an RBC model and the Survey of Professional Forecasters. ∗I am greatly indebted to Domenico Giannone, Lucrezia Reichlin and Philippe Weil for invaluable guidance and advice. I am grateful to Gunter Coenen, David De Antonio Liedo, Marco Del Negro, Andrea Ferrero, Mark Gertler, Simon Potter, Paulo Santos Monteiro, Argia Sbordone, Frank Schorfheide, Andrea Tambalotti and all seminar participants at the ECB, University of Pennsylvania, Federal Reserve Bank of NY for comments and useful discussions. The usual disclaimer applies. JEL Classification: C32, C53
Query By Image Content Using Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP)

The way people communicate is changing very fast. Few years ago, mobile phones were used exclusively for voice calls. Today the mobile terminal usage is no longer restricted to voice communication only. In Finland, it is widely accepted among youngsters to use a GSM phone for sending SMS messages, to chat with friends or to play games. Adults may be more interested in checking their stocks or paying a bill using their wireless terminal and the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). In Japan a phenomenal change in the use of mobile phones happened by the introduction of the “iMode” [1] system. The number of users since its introduction two years ago has risen to 20 millions. The third generation, or 3G [2], phones will create new opportunities for content providers, by providing a way of transmitting text, voice, images, and streamed video. Moreover, their ability to be connected to Internet all the time will provide users with an overwhelming access to a huge amount of information. Users will then face the problem of how to retrieve the information of interest to them in an efficient manner. The goal is to allow for searching and navigation in this wealth of data without the need to make text-based queries for three obvious reasons: • The user may be unable to type in commands,
Influences of Intermittent Preventive Treatment and Persistent Multiclonal Plasmodium falciparum Infections on Clinical Malaria Risk

Background Intermittent preventive treatment (IPT) of malaria involves administration of curative doses of antimalarials at specified time points to vulnerable populations in endemic areas, regardless whether a subject is known to be infected. The effect of this new intervention on the development and maintenance of protective immunity needs further understanding. We have investigated how seasonal IPT affects the genetic diversity of Plasmodium falciparum infections and the risk of subsequent clinical malaria. Material and Methods The study included 2227 Ghanaian children (3–59 months) who were given sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) bimonthly, artesunate plus amodiaquine (AS+AQ) monthly or bimonthly, or placebo monthly for six months spanning the malaria transmission season. Blood samples collected at three post-interventional surveys were analysed by genotyping of the polymorphic merozoite surface protein 2 gene. Malaria morbidity and anaemia was monitored during 12 months follow-up. Results Monthly IPT with AS+AQ resulted in a marked reduction in number of concurrent clones and only children parasite negative just after the intervention period developed clinical malaria during follow-up. In the placebo group, children without parasites as well as those infected with ≥2 clones had a reduced risk of subsequent malaria. The bimonthly SP or AS+AQ groups had similar number of clones as placebo after intervention; however, diversity and parasite negativity did not predict the risk of malaria. An interaction effect showed that multiclonal infections were only associated with protection in children without intermittent treatment. Conclusion Molecular typing revealed effects of the intervention not detected by ordinary microscopy. Effective seasonal IPT temporarily reduced the prevalence and genetic diversity of P. falciparum infections. The reduced risk of malaria in children with multiclonal infections only seen in untreated children suggests that persistence of antigenically diverse P. falciparum infections is important for the maintenance of protective malaria immunity in high transmission settings.
Decentralized feedback stabilization of multiple nonholonomic agents

This paper represents an extension of our previous work [D. Dimarogonas, et al. (2003), S. Loizou, et al. (2003)] on multiagent navigation to the case of decentralized control of multiple nonholonomic vehicles. Our main motivation comes from the field of air traffic management systems and from the field of micro robotic multiagent systems. A discontinuous feedback control scheme, based on dipolar navigation fields, is implemented and integrator backstepping is applied to suppress chattering behavior. The methodology has guaranteed global convergence and collision avoidance properties, which are verified by nontrivial computer simulations.
Classification of Natural Scenes

Humans are capable of rapidly classifying scenes by content, even when they are presented only very briefly. Classification accuracy can exceed 90%, while above-chance performance can be achieved in about 150ms. The global amplitude spectrum of an image has repeatedly been suggested to be a possible source of information for such fast classification. The aim of this thesis was to analyze the way in which humans classify images, specifically for the case of scenes which contain an animal or not. Indeed it was found that the information contained in the global amplitude spectrum, even at a rather coarse scale, is quite adequate for successful computer classification. In the first part of this thesis, a computer classifier was developed, capable of correctly classifying 75% of the images in our database. Then, 3 main characteristics of this classifier are identified and then tested against human subjects in 3 experiments: First, the sensitivity to image rotation is tested. Using a 2AFC paradigm, human subjects were asked to decide which of two displayed images contained an animal. Eye movements were recorded to measure response time and classification accuracy. A high degree of similarity to the behavior of our computer classifier was found, with better performance on cardinal image rotations (0°, 90°, 180°). Second, the order of the images in terms of classification difficulty is analyzed. We employed both a 2AFC paradigm and a Go/NoGo paradigm. In the latter subjects were asked to release a button as quickly as possible only when an animal image was shown. Here too a high degree of similarity between the results of the human visual system and those of our computer classifier was found. Third, classification without the amplitude spectrum as a primary clue is tested. We modified our images, replacing the individual amplitude spectrum of each image with the mean amplitude spectrum of its image class. The individual phase spectrum was retained, unaltered. In this case, the computer classifier was " blinded " and would not exceed chance performance, while our human subjects still achieved high classification performance. This clearly contradicts the global amplitude spectrum hypothesis. In the second part of this thesis, a different approach to computer classification is presented. The images were filtered in a way that allowed to analyze image content for different frequencies and orientations at discrete locations (as opposed to the global amplitude spectrum). The new computer classifier was able to achieve almost …
Commentary: Social Cognitive Functioning in Prodromal Psychosis: A Meta-Analysis

© 2018 Lee TY. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe and debilitating mental disorder, with the lifetime prevalence of approximately 1% of the population. It is characterized by deficits in thought processes, perceptions, and emotional responsiveness. It thus causes significant disruption in social behavior, daily activity, and decreased quality of life from its earliest stages through its chronic course. The detection of early indicators of vulnerability and development of early intervention before the onset of an overt psychotic symptom has been raised as an important issue over recent decades. In this regard, the concept of ‘clinical-high risk’ (CHR) for psychosis, also called ‘ultra-high risk’ (UHR) has been developed to reveal the pathophysiological mechanisms of schizophrenia and to come up with optimal intervention strategies in this population1,2. In schizophrenia, impairment in social cognition is one of the most common findings. Social cognition refers to how people perceive, encode, store, and apply information about other people and ourselves in social interaction contexts. Therefore, impaired social cognitive processes include difficulties in perceiving social cues, identifying and inferring emotions and thoughts of others, sharing experience and reacting appropriately to others in social situations3. Such deficits prevent patients with schizophrenia from forming social connections and are critical determinants of poor daily functioning4. Fett et al. performed a meta-analysis of the relationship between neurocognition and social cognition with functional outcomes in schizophrenia and they found that social cognition was more strongly associated with community functioning than neurocognition5. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) consensus statement on social cognition in schizophrenia identified five relevant domains: theory of mind (ToM), social perception, social knowledge, attributional bias, and emotion processing. A recent meta-analysis including 112 studies examined the average magnitude of differences between schizophrenia patients and normal controls across multiple domains of these social cognitive domains6. This analysis observed that patients with schizophrenia performed worse than normal controls across all domains, with large effects on social perception, ToM, and emotion processing.