Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Persistence of Positive Carryover Effects in the Oyster, Saccostrea glomerata, following Transgenerational Exposure to Ocean Acidification

Ocean acidification (OA) is predicted to have widespread implications for marine organisms, yet the capacity for species to acclimate or adapt over this century remains unknown. Recent transgenerational studies have shown that for some marine species, exposure of adults to OA can facilitate positive carryover effects to their larval and juvenile offspring that help them to survive in acidifying oceanic conditions. But whether these positive carryover effects can persist into adulthood or the next generation is unknown. Here we tested whether positive carryover effects found in larvae of the oyster, Saccostrea glomerata following transgenerational exposure to elevated CO2, could persist into adulthood and whether subsequent transgenerational exposure of adults to elevated CO2 would facilitate similar adaptive responses in the next generation of larvae and juveniles. Following our previous transgenerational exposure of parental adults and first generation (F1) larvae to ambient (385 μatm) and elevated (856 μatm) CO2, newly settled F1 juveniles were transferred to the field at ambient CO2 for 14 months, until they reached reproductive maturity. At this time, the F1 adults were returned to the laboratory and the previous transgenerational CO2 exposure was repeated to produce F2 offspring. We found that the capacity of adults to regulate extracellular pH at elevated CO2 was improved if they had a prior history of transgenerational exposure to elevated CO2. In addition, subsequent transgenerational exposure of these adults led to an increase in the resilience of their larval and juvenile offspring. Offspring with a history of transgenerational exposure to elevated CO2 had a lower percentage abnormality, faster development rate, faster shell growth and increased heart rate at elevated CO2 compared with F2 offspring with no prior history of exposure to elevated CO2. Our results suggest that positive carryover effects originating during parental and larval exposure will be important in mediating some of the impacts of OA for later life-history stages and generations.
Oxytocin Regulates Neurosteroid Modulation of GABAAReceptors in Supraoptic Nucleus around Parturition

In this study, we investigate how neurosteroid sensitivity of GABAA receptors (GABAARs) is regulated. We examined this issue in neurons of the supraoptic nucleus (SON) of the rat and found that, during parturition, the GABAARs become insensitive to the neurosteroid allopregnanolone attributable to a shift in the balance between the activities of endogenous Ser/Thr phosphatase and PKC. In particular, a constitutive endogenous tone of oxytocin within the SON after parturition suppressed neurosteroid sensitivity of GABAARs via activation of PKC. Vice versa before parturition, during late pregnancy, application of exogenous oxytocin brings the GABAARs from a neurosteroid-sensitive mode toward a condition in which the receptors are not sensitive. This indicates that there may be an inverse causal relationship between the extent to which the GABAAR or one of its interacting proteins is phosphorylated and the neurosteroid sensitivity of the GABAAR. Neurosteroid sensitivity was not affected by changes in subunit composition of GABAARs known to occur concurrently in these cells.
Lifetime Optimization for Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks with Rate Distortion Constraints

In this paper we address a sensor network lifetime optimization problem, where the network is given a task of reconstructing a Gaussian source with a specified rate-distortion constraint. The multiple agents observing the source relay their information through a multihop network to a sink or a base station. Although this problem has been addressed by other authors recently, only upper and lower bounds were obtained to the optimal lifetime as the nonlinear optimization problem was approximated by linearized constraints. We show that by a clever variable substitution, the original nonlinear optimization problem can be reformulated as a convex optimization problem and can be solved by sophisticated convex optimization tools. We provide numerical results comparing our optimal lifetime with the upper and lower bounds obtained in previous work and demonstrate that those bounds are not very tight. Some possible future research directions are mentioned in the concluding remarks
Gesture frequency is linked to story-telling style: evidence from bilinguals

abstract Individuals differ in how frequently they gesture. It is not clear whether gesture frequency is related to culture, since varied results have been reported. The purpose of this study was to test whether the frequency of representational gestures is linked with story-telling style. Previous research showed individual and cross-cultural differences in story-telling style, some preferring to tell a chronicle (how it happened) or an evaluative story (why it happened). We hypothesized that high gesture frequency might be strongly associated with using a chronicle style, since both rely on visuospatial imagery. Four groups of bilinguals, English as their second language (L2) participated. Their first language (L1) was one of: Mandarin, Hindi, French, or Spanish. Participants watched a cartoon and told the story, once in English, once in L1. The results showed group differences in the rate of gesture use: the Chinese and Hindi L1 participants gestured less frequently than the French and Spanish L1 participants. The participants from Asian cultures were more likely to tell an evaluative story and the Romance-language L1 participants a chronicle. We conclude that these culture/language groups differ in story-telling style. A chronicle style is associated with more gesture production than an evaluative style.
An Information Theory Framework for the Analysis of Scene Complexity

In this paper we present a new framework for the analysis of scene visibility and radiosity complexity. We introduce a number of complexity measures from information theory quantifying how difficult it is to compute with accuracy the visibility and radiosity in a scene. We define the continuous mutual information as a complexity measure of a scene, independent of whatever discretisation, and discrete mutual information as the complexity of a discretised scene. Mutual information can be understood as the degree of correlation or dependence between all the points or patches of a scene. Thus, low complexity corresponds to low correlation and vice versa. Experiments illustrating that the best mesh of a given scene among a number of alternatives corresponds to the one with the highest discrete mutual information, indicate the feasibility of the approach. Unlike continuous mutual information, which is very cheap to compute, the computation of discrete mutual information can however be quite demanding. We will develop cheap complexity measure estimates and derive practical algorithms from this framework in future work.
Supporting the Future Air Traffic Control Projection Process

In air traffic control, projecting what the air traffic situation will be over the next 30 seconds to 30 minutes is a key process in identifying conflicts that may arise so that evasive action can be taken upon discovery of these conflicts. A series of field visits in the Boston and New York terminal radar approach control (TRACON) facilities and in the oceanic air traffic control facilities in New York and Reykjavik, Iceland were conducted to investigate the projection process in two different ATC domains. The results from the site visits suggest that two types of projection are currently used in ATC tasks, depending on the type of separation minima and/or traffic restriction and information display used by the controller. As technologies improve and procedures change, care should be taken by designers to support projection through displays, automation, and procedures. It is critical to prevent time/space mismatches between interfaces and restrictions. Existing structure in traffic dynamics could be utilized to provide controllers with useful behavioral models on which to build projections. Subtle structure that the controllers are unable to internalize could be incorporated into an ATC projection aid.
What can readability measures really tell us about text complexity

This study presents the results of an initial phase of a project seeking to convert texts into a more accessible form for people with autism spectrum disorders by means of text simplification technologies. Random samples of Simple Wikipedia articles are compared with texts from News, Health, and Fiction genres using four standard readability indices (Kincaid, Flesch, Fog and SMOG) and sixteen linguistically motivated features. The comparison of readability indices across the four genres indicated that the Fiction genre was relatively easy whereas the News genre was relatively difficult to read. The correlation of four readability indices was measured, revealing that they are almost perfectly linearly correlated and that this correlation is not genre dependent. The correlation of the sixteen linguistic features to the readability indices was also measured. The results of these experiments indicate that some of the linguistic features are well correlated with the readability measures and that these correlations are genre dependent. The maximum correlation was observed for fiction.
Yield Enhancement Techniques for Content-Addressable Memories

In this paper, block-level reconfiguration techniques are proposed for content-addressable memories. The CAM words and redundant words are divided into blocks and reconfiguration is performed at the block level instead of the conventional word level. The reconfiguration mechanism used to implement our technique requires negligible hardware overhead. According to simulation results, the hardware overhead is 3.92% for a 1-Mb CAM array. It also shows that our approach can improve fabrication yield significantly.
Nsmia . . . One Year Later: The States' Response

The National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996 (NSMIA) represents the most comprehensive reallocation of authority amongst state and federal government for regulation of financial services in the United States since Congress passed seminal federal securities legislation in the 1930s and 1940. In the year since NSMIA was passed, the states, through the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), have responded quickly by adopting uniform amendments to state securities laws to accommodate NSMIA provisions, developing a comprehensive set of standards for the regulation of investment advisers subject to state authority and introducing a coordinated review system for public offerings of corporate equity securities subject to state review. These state actions are consistent with the predicate underlying NSMIA that there is an essential regulatory role for the states, and this role is most effective when states operate in coordination with each other and operate under similar rules and procedures.
Social Support in America: Stratification and Trends in Access over Two Decades

Abstract:Social networks of family and friends are key resources that individuals turn to in times of need. When family and friends can provide assistance, they constitute a form of social capital that individuals may draw on for social support. Although a large body of research has examined the use of social support in its own right and as a predictor or moderator of other outcomes, few studies have explored differentials in access to social support for the general population or how these access levels have changed over time. There are many open questions. Is access to social support broadly distributed in the population or does it differ by demographic subgroups? Have levels of access remained constant? We compare levels of access to social support through both family and friends across population subgroups and describe the changing contours of access to it in the general population. Using repeated cross-sectional measurements that we compile from nearly two decades of surveys conducted as part of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we expand on a literature that has, to date, focused almost exclusively on the use of social support as a predictor of other outcomes using non-representative data. This article presents, to our knowledge, the first nationally representative study of stratification and trends in access to social support for individuals in the United States.
Handling Datatypes in MPI-3 One Sided

With the rise of modern interconnects offering direct remote memory access (RDMA), one sided programming becomes increasingly popular. The MPI-3.0 one sided chapter specifies a programming interface that leverages these features directly. foMPI (fast one-sided MPI, [3]) was introduced as a reference implementation to provide highest performance and minimal overheads. Many applications have to communicate non-consecutive data. In message passing each partner specifies their own MPI datatype (a memory layout), while for one sided communication one process defines both types (for the origin and the target process), which requires different kinds of optimizations for truly one sided implementations. In this work three different strategies are proposed to handle the combination of those MPI datatypes and implement them in foMPI. Those strategies were evaluated with DDTBench, a set of data access pattern micro-applications, which were extended to handle one sided communication. Some cases improved up to a magnitude.
Access Control Solution for Command and Control Systems Integration

Service oriented architecture is being commonly used in systems integration, including command and control applications, providing many advantages. But the blind adoption of SOA brings together other concerns, especially when applying an access control mechanism. This paper reviews commonly adopted concepts used in access control in the context of SOA environments and considers some access control proposed solutions found in the literature to present an architectural access control solution addressed to agile and decoupled integrations.
Determination of protein and amino acid digestibility in foods including implications of gut microbial amino acid synthesis

To meet the protein and amino acid requirements of individuals and of populations requires information not only about their requirements but also about the capacity of available foods to meet those requirements. Most of our current knowledge of the digestibility of food proteins and the methods to estimate it has been derived from work with animals. Because the microbiota of the large intestine alter the amino acid composition of the digesta, and because only trivial quantities of amino acids are absorbed intact from the large intestine, the current method of choice for assessing amino acid digestibility is ileal digestibility corrected for basal endogenous losses, that is, standardized ileal digestibility. For protein as a whole, however, because nitrogen absorbed in forms other than as amino acids can contribute to the nitrogen economy, the absorption of nitrogen over the whole digestive tract is the more appropriate measure. Most of the methods developed for estimating ileal amino acid outflow in animals are not directly applicable to man: the exception is the use of volunteers with an ileostomy. The flow and composition of ileal digesta in human subjects can also be measured by the infusion of a marker and withdrawal of samples through a naso-intestinal tube. However, this method is too demanding for routine use and is likely to be restricted to validating the application to humans of digestibility data obtained either from animals, of which the pig seems most suitable, or in vitro methods. Microbial activity in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract is not confined to the large intestine: the numbers and metabolic activity of the upper GI microbiota lead to substantial amounts of microbial protein leaving the ileum. It appears however that a large proportion of the amino acids used by the upper GI microbiota are preformed - from the diet or from endogenous materials - rather than from de novo synthesis. Although there are still uncertainties about the impact of microbial activity in the upper GI tract, the amino acid composition of ileal digesta provides the best available basis for estimating the proportion of dietary amino acids available for metabolism.
A group attack detecter for collaborative filtering recommendation

Collaborative filtering recommender systems are now popular both commercially and in the research community. However, they are vulnerable to manipulation by malicious users, where attackers inject into some fake user profiles in order to bias the recommendation results to their benefits. To solve the problem, a lots of methods have been proposed but mainly focus on identification the attacker at the individual level, i.e., to find the fake user one by one, while do not consider the similarity between attack users. In this paper, we present an algorithm to detect the attackers in group level. It works based on an effective algorithm for detecting individual malicious user and an effective clustering algorithm. More precisely, we cluster all users into group, and then find the group characters of attacked items, finally we find the attack user group. We test the algorithm on a benchmark dataset using four kinds of typical attack models, the results show that our solution is both efficient and effective, particularly in the popular attack model and the segment attack model, and the performance is significant in the segment attack model with large attack size.
Applications pratiques de la théorie des coûts de transaction

Cette etude est consacree aux applications pratiques de la theorie des couts de transaction. Elle commence par traiter les raisons de l'existence de cette theorie et rappelle ses principaux concepts. Deux types d'applications pratiques seront traitees : d'abord celles utilisees par les entreprises, ensuite les applications par les Etats.
A novel role for dp115 in the organization of tER sites in Drosophila

Here, we describe that depletion of the Drosophila homologue of p115 (dp115) by RNA interference in Drosophila S2 cells led to important morphological changes in the Golgi stack morphology and the transitional ER (tER) organization. Using conventional and immunoelectron microscopy and confocal immunofluorescence microscopy, we show that Golgi stacks were converted into clusters of vesicles and tubules, and that the tERs (marked by Sec23p) lost their focused organization and were now dispersed throughout the cytoplasm. However, we found that this morphologically altered exocytic pathway was nevertheless largely competent in anterograde protein transport using two different assays. The effects were specific for dp115. Depletion of the Drosophila homologues of GM130 and syntaxin 5 (dSed5p) did not lead to an effect on the tER organization, though the Golgi stacks were greatly vesiculated in the cells depleted of dSed5p. Taken together, these studies suggest that dp115 could be implicated in the architecture of both the Golgi stacks and the tER sites.
DUAL CIRCULARLY POLARIZED RADIAL LINE SLOT ANTENNA

A dual circularly polarized radial line slot antenna (RLSA), built up on a very thin parallel-plate waveguide cavity, is here proposed and analyzed. The antenna radiating surface consists of several concentric arrays of crossed slots etched on the upper waveguide plate. This configuration allows to radiate both a symmetric left-hand (LHCP) and right-hand (RHCP) circularly polarized wave by properly exciting corresponding rotational field inside the cavity. The exciting fields are launched through a concentric annular slot cut on the lower waveguide plate and fed by four microstrip lines with identical amplitudes and 90° rotating phases. A simple planar network provides the required clockwise/anticlockwise phasing at the four microstrip ports. Input S-parameters behavior and antenna radiation performances have been simulated in the 9.5 to 10.5 GHz frequency range.
Some Results on Monotonicity of Volume and Surface Area of Objects in K Dimensions

Hypergeometry of objects in K dimensions is considered. In particular, the K dimensional sphere, polytope, cube, scaled polytope and the scaled cube are studied. The volume and the surface area of these objects are shown to reach a maximum for a particular value of dimension. The dimension corresponding to the maximum volume and to the maximum surface area is derived as a function of the radius. Furthermore, the p-norm in K dimensions is shown to be monotonically increasing in K, and monotonically decreasing in p.
Limit cycle running of telescopic-legged rimless wheel

This paper investigates active dynamic running of a planar telescopic-legged rimless wheel. Unlike the most dynamic runners with compliant legs, our model achieves stable limit-cycle running only by a simple extension control of the stance leg. We first generate a stable running gait by adjusting the desired settling time for the leg-extension control. We then analyze the gait efficiency with respect to the change of the desired settling time. Furthermore, several extensions, comparison with walking gait and running up slopes, are discussed.
Wine Tasting and a Novel Approach to Cluster Analysis

This paper proposes an alternate view for understanding clusters and for determination of the variables that play a significant role in cluster makeup. We explore the creation of a new categorical variable from a given set of variables by means of the output of a clustering algorithm. We postulate that this new variable can be seen as being comprised of a few “important” variables and explore how this new variable relates to the original variables. Sensitivity analysis and discriminant analysis are used to confirm the selection of important variables. Then we show that this method is able to identify those key variables which vary most significantly throughout the clusters.
Measures of physical functioning after hip fracture: construct validity and responsiveness of performance-based and self-reported measures.

OBJECTIVES this study aimed to investigate the construct validity and responsiveness of performance-based and self-reported measures of strength, mobility and balance after hip fracture. DESIGN secondary analysis of clinical trial data. SUBJECTS a total of 148 older people undergoing hip fracture rehabilitation. METHODS correlation coefficients assessed construct validity. Internal responsiveness was assessed by calculating effect sizes (ES) I and II. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) assessed external responsiveness with change in EuroQol as the reference. RESULTS correlations between performance-based and self-reported measures were small to medium (strength r = 0.17, mobility r = 0.45 and balance r = 0.37). The most responsive performance-based measures included walking speed (ESI 1.7, ESII 1.2), Physical Performance and Mobility Examination (ESI 1.3, ESII 1.0) and chair-rise test (ESI 1.1, ESII 0.8). Self-reported mobility (ESI 0.8, ESII 0.6) and strength (ESI 0.8, ESII 0.6) were more responsive than self-reported balance (ESI 0.3, ESII 0.2). External responsiveness (AUC) was greatest for walking speed (0.72) and lowest for the measures of body sway (0.53). CONCLUSION self-reported and performance-based indices appear to assess different constructs and may provide complementary information about physical functioning in people after hip fracture. Measures of strength and mobility showed greater ability to detect change than measures of balance.