Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Comparison of Bottlenose Dolphin Whistles in the Atlantic Ocean: Factors Promoting Whistle Variation

Abstract Whistles are narrowband, frequency-modulated sounds produced by many cetaceans. Whistles are extensively studied in delphinids, where several factors have been proposed to explain between- and within-species variation. We examined factors associated with geographic variation in whistles of common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) by assessing the role of ambient noise, noise from boats, and sympatry with other dolphin species, and reviewing and comparing whistle structure across populations in the western and eastern Atlantic Ocean. Whistles of adjacent populations differed, particularly in frequency parameters. A combination of factors may contribute to microgeographic whistle variation, including differences in ambient noise levels (dolphins produced relatively higher frequency whistles in the noisiest habitat), and differences in number of boats present (when multiple boats were present, dolphins whistled with greater frequency modulation and whistles were higher in maximum frequency and longer than when a single boat was present). Whistles produced by adjacent populations were relatively similar in structure. However, for clearly separated populations, the distance between them did not relate directly to whistle structure. We propose that plasticity in bottlenose dolphin whistles facilitates adaptation to local and changing conditions of their habitat, thus promoting variation between populations at different geographic scales.
Reassessment of the Limiting Efficiency for Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells

Recently, several parameters relevant for modeling crystalline silicon solar cells were improved or revised, e.g., the international standard solar spectrum or properties of silicon such as the intrinsic recombination rate and the intrinsic carrier concentration. In this study, we analyzed the influence of these improved state-of-the-art parameters on the limiting efficiency for crystalline silicon solar cells under 1-sun illumination at 25°C, by following the narrow-base approximation to model ideal solar cells. We also considered bandgap narrowing, which was not addressed so far with respect to efficiency limitation. The new calculations that are presented in this study result in a maximum theoretical efficiency of 29.43% for a 110-μm-thick solar cell made of undoped silicon. A systematic calculation of the I-V parameters as a function of the doping concentration and the cell thickness together with an analysis of the loss current at maximum power point provides further insight into the intrinsic limitations of silicon solar cells.
Spying on Spammers: Tracking Like Farm Accounts on Facebook

The increasing reliance on online social networks for user engagement motivates the need to understand and counter reputation manipulation activities, such as boosting the number of likes of a Facebook page. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of Facebook accounts used by a few Like Farms. We crawl their timelines and compare their activities to a baseline sample of normal users. Then, we retrieve the pages they like and cluster their activity. We find that, compared to normal users, posts from Like Farms' accounts often consist of re-shared content, have fewer words and poor vocabulary, are targeted to a limited number of topics and generate more comments and likes. Profiles used by Like Farms are also more likely to be tagged or tag their friends and their likes are concentrated toward specific pages. While we highlight the difficulty of currently deployed anti-fraud tools to detect stealthy behavior, our analysis provides important insights that can be incorporated in clustering algorithms to detect Like Farms networks.
Biology of the human malignant lymphomas III. Intracranial heterotransplantation in the nude, athymic mouse

Intracranial heterotransplantation in the nude, athymic mouse has been found to be an effective method for the experimental growth of human malignant lymphomas. Transplants of 11 primary lymphomas and six derived cell lines yielded a high take rate (90%) and a low mean latent period (36 days). Relatively small inocula produced extensive intracerebral infiltrates which could be identified as human in origin by immunofluorescence. Although confined to the central nervous system and meninges, the tumors were highly invasive and displayed morphologic features strikingly similar to those of the original primary tumors. Heterotransplantation of the lymphomas to extracranial sites was only rarely successful. Nude mice previously grafted with isologous neonatal thymuses failed to develop intracerebral tumors. Secondary cell cultures successfully established from several of the intracranial heterotransplants were found to be infected with NIH type‐C xenotropic virus. The distinctive growth patterns and other neuropathologic features of the heterotransplants are described, and the relevance of these observations to the development of intracerebral lymphomas in immunosuppressed organ transplant recipients is noted. This method of studying human malignant lymphomas in vivo may permit better histopathologic characterization of the tumors, and may serve as a basis for further experimental lines of investigation, including viral, immunologic, and therapeutic studies.
The stability of an mRNA is influenced by its concentration: a potential physical mechanism to regulate gene expression

Abstract Changing mRNA stability is a major post-transcriptional way of controlling gene expression, particularly in newly encountered conditions. As the concentration of mRNA is the result of an equilibrium between transcription and degradation, it is generally assumed that at constant transcription, any change in mRNA concentration is the consequence of mRNA stabilization or destabilization. However, the literature reports many cases of opposite variations in mRNA concentration and stability in bacteria. Here, we analyzed the causal link between the concentration and stability of mRNA in two phylogenetically distant bacteria Escherichia coli and Lactococcus lactis. Using reporter mRNAs, we showed that modifying the stability of an mRNA had unpredictable effects, either higher or lower, on its concentration, whereas increasing its concentration systematically reduced stability. This inverse relationship between the concentration and stability of mRNA was generalized to native genes at the genome scale in both bacteria. Higher mRNA turnover in the case of higher concentrations appears to be a simple physical mechanism to regulate gene expression in the bacterial kingdom. The consequences for bacterial adaptation of this control of the stability of an mRNA by its concentration are discussed.
Fine-grained test case prioritization for integration testing of delta-oriented software product lines

Software product line (SPL) testing is a challenging task, due to the huge number of variants sharing common functionalities to be taken into account for efficient testing. By adopting the concept of regression testing, incremental SPL testing strategies cope with this challenge by exploiting the reuse potential of test artifacts between subsequent variants under test. In previous work, we proposed delta-oriented test case prioritization for incremental SPL integration testing, where differences between architecture test model variants allow for reasoning about the order of reusable test cases to be executed. However, the prioritization left two issues open, namely (1) changes to component behavior are ignored, which may also influence component interactions and, (2) the weighting and ordering of similar test cases result in an unintended clustering of test cases. In this paper, we extend the test case prioritization technique by (1) incorporating changes to component behavior allowing for a more fine-grained analysis and (2) defining a dissimilarity measure to avoid clustered test case orders. We prototyped our test case prioritization technique and evaluated its applicability and effectiveness by means of a case study from the automotive domain showing positive results.
LAP: A Human-in-the-loop Adaptation Approach for Industrial Robots

In the last few years, a shift from mass production to mass customisation is observed in the industry. Easily reprogrammable robots that can perform a wide variety of tasks are desired to keep up with the trend of mass customisation while saving costs and development time. Learning by Demonstration (LfD) is an easy way to program the robots in an intuitive manner and provides a solution to this problem. In this work, we discuss and evaluate LAP, a three-stage LfD method that conforms to the criteria for the high-mix-low-volume (HMLV) industrial settings. The algorithm learns a trajectory in the task space after which small segments can be adapted on-the-fly by using a human-in-the-loop approach. The human operator acts as a high-level adaptation, correction and evaluation mechanism to guide the robot. This way, no sensors or complex feedback algorithms are needed to improve robot behaviour, so errors and inaccuracies induced by these subsystems are avoided. After the system performs at a satisfactory level after the adaptation, the operator will be removed from the loop. The robot will then proceed in a feed-forward fashion to optimise for speed. We demonstrate this method by simulating an industrial painting application. A KUKA LBR iiwa is taught how to draw an eight figure which is reshaped by the operator during adaptation.
Computational Tools for Accelerating Carbon Capture Process Development

INTRODUCTION The U.S. Department of Energy’s Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative (CCSI) was initiated in 2010 to develop and deploy state-of-the-art computational modeling and simulation tools to accelerate the development of carbon capture technology. Recently, the first components of the CCSI Toolset have been deployed and demonstrated for the design and optimization of postcombustion solid sorbent capture systems. These computational tools provide new capabilities for integrating multi-scale modeling, optimization and uncertainty quantification to rapidly screen new concepts and, ultimately, enable smarter, more focused pilot and demonstration scale projects. The components of the CCSI Toolset that enable initial screening consist of a set of detailed process models coupled with a process synthesis and design framework to facilitate development of complete, integrated carbon capture processes using advanced optimization techniques.
A rank-rewrite framework for summarizing XML documents

With XML becoming a standard for data representation and exchange, we can expect to see large scale repositories and warehouses of XML data. In order for users to understand and explore these large collections, a summarized, bird's eye view of the available data is a necessity. In this paper, we are interested in semantic XML document summaries which present the "important" information available in an XML document to the user. In the best case, such a summary is a concise replacement for the original document itself. At the other extreme, it should at least help the user make an informed choice as to the relevance of the document to his needs. In this paper, we address the three main issues which arise in producing such meaningful and concise summaries: (i) which tags or text units are important and should be included in the summary, (ii) how can the selected tags and text be presented in a concise and coherent manner? and (iii) how to generate a semantic summary for different memory budgets? We conduct user studies with different real-life datasets and show that our methods are useful and effective in practice.
Ownership, Family Control, LBOs, and Country Effects: An Analysis of European Going-Private Transactions

We investigate how ownership structures affect going-private transactions in Europe. We examine both market reactions around the acquisition announcements and post-transaction performance, and we find that CARs around going-private announcements are negatively related to the stake held by its largest shareholder. The market reaction around the going-private announcement is also negatively related to the company's stock price performance before the announcement, supporting the undervaluation hypothesis. The existence of large controlling shareholders allows us to investigate deals initiated by the company's controlling shareholder. When the largest shareholder, particularly a family, takes a firm private, post-transaction operating performances are better than those of firms taken private by new owners, which experience significant worsening in profitability. We also compare the U.K. to non-U.K. going private: U.K. deals have higher returns for target shareholders, but worse post-transaction performance. We find that using an LBO to delist the company impacts neither abnormal returns nor operating performance. Finally, firms go private to restructure their workforce, in terms of both employee number and cost. This has a positive impact on the firm's productivity and efficiency, increasing the profit for employees. We thank Francesca Fariello of Bureau Van Dijk for kindly providing us some of the data used in this study. We also thank Lorenzo Caprio for insightful comments.
Nucleation barriers at corners for a cubic-to-tetragonal phase transformation

We are interested in the energetic cost of a martensitic inclusion of volume V in austenite for the cubic-to-tetragonal phase transformation. In contrast with the work of Knüpfer, Kohn and Otto (Commun. Pure Appl. Math.66 (2013), 867–904), we consider a domain with a corner and obtain a better scaling law for the minimal energy (Emin ∼ min(V2/3, V7/9)). Our predictions are in good agreement with physical experiments where nucleation of martensite is usually observed near the corners of the specimen.
Effect of the Angiotensin II Blocker 1‐Sar‐8‐Ala‐Angiotensin II on Renal Artery Clip Hypertension in the Rat

Twenty-four conscious male Wistar rats, with hypertension induced by left renal artery clipping (two-kidney hypertension) were infused intravenously with l-Sar-8-Ala-angio-tensin II a competitive angiotensin II antagonist. The spectrum of responses was wide, ranging from a mild elevation in blood pressure to a marked fall in blood pressure, despite effective and specific angiotensin blockade in all cases. The change in blood pressure during l-Sar-8-Ala-AII infusion activity showed a significant correlation with the level of plasma renin prevailing immediately before the infusion (r = −0.78, P < 0.01) but not with the prevailing blood urea level (r = 0.27, 0.1 > P> 0.05), the degree of hypertension (r = 0.42, 0.1 > P > 0.05), or the time since clipping (r = 0.02, P > 0.05). There was no significant correlation between the degree of hypertension and the plasma renin activity (r = 0.42, 0.1 > P > 0.05). In rats with blood pressure drops > 20 mm Hg in response to l-Sar-8-Ala-AII, the final blood pressure level was still above the normotensive range. Excision of the clipped kidney reduced blood pressure to normal or to near normal within 24 hours in all of the rats tested. It is concluded that the degree of dependence of renal hypertension on the renin-angiotensin system is directly related to the increase in circulating angiotensin itself and not to an increase in sensitivity to angiotensin. Other factors appear to be involved in renal clip hypertension in addition to circulating renin and angiotensin, especially when the measured activity of plasma renin is normal.
Recent advances in invariance principles for stationary sequences

In this paper we survey some recent results on the central limit theorem and its weak invariance principle for stationary sequences. We also describe several maximal inequalities that are the main tool for obtaining the invariance principles, and also they have interest in themselves. The classes of dependent random variables considered will be martingale-like sequences, mixing sequences, linear processes, additive functionals of ergodic Markov chains.
Health-related quality of life in patients with ankylosing spondylitis: a comprehensive review

Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a complex systemic rheumatological disease which often causes severe disability and impaired quality of life (QoL). We searched the PubMed/MEDLINE electronic database for available literature on QoL and its predictors in patients with AS. Recent evidence indicates that AS patients have poorer QoL compared to the general population, but similar to that of patients with other rheumatological disorders. Disease activity is one of the most powerful predictors of QoL, however latest advances in pharmacological treatment (namely, anti-TNF-α) along with physical exercise can minimize the effects of AS on QoL. Psychological distress symptoms contribute to impaired QoL both directly and indirectly by influencing disease activity. The impact of other psychosocial variables, however, is less studied and more prospective investigations are necessary, which could eventually lead to the development of psychosocial interventions that are personalized to this patient population.
Selected Mapping Technique with Magnitude Extension for PAPR Reduction of an OFDM Signal

High peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmit signal is a major drawback of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). Selected mapping (SLM) technique is an efficient PAPR reduction technique for OFDM. In the SLM technique, many data blocks are generated from an OFDM data block using a set of phase sequences, and then the one with the lowest PAPR is chosen and transmitted. In this paper, an SLM technique with magnitude extension is proposed. In the proposed SLM technique, it is not needed to transmit side information from transmitter to receiver. The proposed technique achieves significant reduction in PAPR with only a small increase in transmit signal power.
The two actin-interacting protein 1 genes have overlapping and essential function for embryonic development in Caenorhabditis elegans

AIP1 is a conserved enhancer of ADF/cofilin-dependent actin dynamics. Caenorhabditis elegans has two AIP1 genes. They have overlapping functions, and ablation of both AIP1 isoforms causes embryonic lethality with strong defects in the assembly of muscle sarcomeres.
Task Context Influences Brain Activation during Music Listening

In this paper, we examined brain activation in subjects during two music listening conditions: listening while simultaneously rating the musical piece being played [Listening and Rating (LR)] and listening to the musical pieces unconstrained [Listening (L)]. Using these two conditions, we tested whether the sequence in which the two conditions were fulfilled influenced the brain activation observable during the L condition (LR → L or L → LR). We recorded high-density EEG during the playing of four well-known positively experienced soundtracks in two subject groups. One group started with the L condition and continued with the LR condition (L → LR); the second group performed this experiment in reversed order (LR → L). We computed from the recorded EEG the power for different frequency bands (theta, lower alpha, upper alpha, lower beta, and upper beta). Statistical analysis revealed that the power in all examined frequency bands increased during the L condition but only when the subjects had not had previous experience with the LR condition (i.e., L → LR). For the subjects who began with the LR condition, there were no power increases during the L condition. Thus, the previous experience with the LR condition prevented subjects from developing the particular mental state associated with the typical power increase in all frequency bands. The subjects without previous experience of the LR condition listened to the musical pieces in an unconstrained and undisturbed manner and showed a general power increase in all frequency bands. We interpret the fact that unconstrained music listening was associated with increased power in all examined frequency bands as a neural indicator of a mental state that can best be described as a mind-wandering state during which the subjects are “drawn into” the music.
Patient Perception , Preference and Participation Provider communication quality : Influence of patients ’ weight and race

Objective: To examine the relationship between patient weight and provider communication quality and determine whether patient race/ethnicity modifies this association. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis with 2009–2010 medical expenditures panel survey– household component (N = 25,971). Our dependent variables were patient report of providers explaining well, listening, showing respect, and spending time. Our independent variables were patient weight status and patient weight-race/ethnicity groups. Using survey weights, we performed multivariate logistic regression to examine the adjusted association between patient weight and patient–provider communication measures, and whether patient race/ethnicity modifies this relationship. Results: Compared to healthy weight whites, obese blacks were less likely to report that their providers explained things well (OR 0.78; p = 0.02) or spent enough time with them (OR 0.81; p = 0.04), and overweight blacks were also less likely to report that providers spent enough time with them (OR 0.78; p = 0.02). Healthy weight Hispanics were also less likely to report adequate provider explanations (OR 0.74; p = 0.04). Conclusion: Our study provides preliminary evidence that overweight/obese black and healthy weight Hispanic patients experience disparities in provider communication quality. Practice Implication: Curricula on weight bias and cultural competency might improve communication between providers and their overweight/obese black and healthy weight Hispanic patients. 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
Multiplicity of X-Ray-selected T Tauri Stars in Chamaeleon

We report on a multiplicity survey of a sample of X-ray–selected young stars in the Chamaeleon association. We used speckle interferometry and direct imaging to find companions in the separation range 0. ″13–6″. After correction for chance alignment with background stars, we find a multiplicity (number of binaries or multiples divided by number of systems) of 14.0% ± 4.3% and a companion-star frequency (number of companions divided by number of systems) of 14.7% ± 5.1%. Compared with solar-type main-sequence stars, the companion-star frequency is lower by a factor of 0.61 ± 0.27. This is remarkably different from the high multiplicity found in the Taurus-Auriga star-forming region and for T Tauri stars in Chamaeleon known before ROSAT. We find only a few binaries with projected separations of more than 70 AU, also in contrast to the results for stars known before ROSAT. This indicates that the X-ray–selected stars belong to a different population than the stars known before ROSAT, a hypothesis further supported by their Hipparcos distances and proper motions.