Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Symplectic partitioned Runge-Kutta methods for constrained Hamiltonian systems

This article deals with the numerical treatment of Hamiltonian systems with holonomic constraints. A class of partitioned Runge–Kutta methods, consisting of the couples of s-stage Lobatto IIIA and Lobatto IIIB methods, has been discovered to solve these problems efficiently. These methods are symplectic, preserve all un-derlying constraints, and are superconvergent with order $2s - 2$. For separable Hamiltonians of the form $H(q,p) = \frac{1}{2}p^T M^{ - 1} p + U(q)$ the Rattle algorithm based on the Verlet method was up to now the only known symplectic method preserving the constraints. In fact this method turns out to be equivalent to the 2-stage Lobatto IIIA–IIIB method of order 2. Numerical examples have been performed which illustrate the theoretical results.
An Eigenvalue Problem for the Analysis of Variable Topology Mechanical Systems

Mechanical systems with time-varying topology appear frequently in natural or human-made artificial systems, The nature of topology transitions is a key characteristic in the functioning of such systems. In this paper, we discuss a concept that can offer possibilities to gain insight and analyze topology transitions. This approach relies on the use of impulsive constraints and a formulation that makes it possible to decouple the dynamics at topology change. A key point is an eigenvalue problem that characterizes several aspects of energy and momentum transfer at the discontinuous topology transition.
A pilot characterization of quantitative time-domain fluorescence diffuse optical tomography

Quantitative measurements of fluorescent parameters have merited great interest lately for near-infrared fluorescence diffuse optical tomography - the efficient small animal imaging tool. We present a two-dimensional image reconstruction method for time-domain fluorescence diffuse optical tomography, which employs the analytical solution to the Laplace-transformed time-domain photon-diffusion equation to construct the inverse model and introduces a pair of real-domain transform-factors to effectively separate the fluorescent yield and lifetime parameters from the algebraic reconstruction technique solutions to the resultant linear inversions. By use of a specifically designed a multi-channel time-correlated single photon counting system and a normalized Born formulation for the inversion, the proposed scheme in a circular domain is experimentally validated using small-animal-sized cylindrical phantoms that embed several fluorescent targets made from 1%-Intralipid solution and differently contrasting fluorescent agents, where the time-resolved excitation and fluorescence signals are measured on the boundary. The results show that the approach retrieves the positions and shapes of the targets with a reasonable accuracy and simultaneously achieve quantitative reconstruction of the fluorescent yield and lifetime.
Modeling longitudinal binomial responses: implications from two dueling paradigms

The generalized estimating equations (GEEs) and generalized linear mixed-effects model (GLMM) are the two most popular paradigms to extend models for cross-sectional data to a longitudinal setting. Although the two approaches yield well-interpreted models for continuous outcomes, it is quite a different story when applied to binomial responses. We discuss major modeling differences between the GEE- and GLMM-derived models by presenting new results regarding the model-driven differences. Our results show that GLMM induces some artifacts in the marginal models at assessment times, making it inappropriate when applied to such responses from real study data. The different interpretations of parameters resulting from the conceptual difference between the two modeling approaches also carry quite significant implications and ramifications with respect to data and power analyses. Although a special case involving a scale difference in parameters between GEE and GLMM has been noted in the literature, its implications in real data analysis has not been thoroughly addressed. Further, this special case has a very limited covariate structure and does not apply to most real studies, especially multi-center clinical trials. The new results presented fill a substantial gap in the literature regarding the model-driven differences between the two dueling paradigms.
Supervised descent method with low rank and sparsity constraints for robust face alignment

Supervised Descent Method (SDM) learns the descent directions of nonlinear least square objective in a supervised manner, which has been efficiently used for face alignment. However, SDM still may fail in the cases of partial occlusions and serious pose variations. To deal with this issue, we present a new method for robust face alignment by utilizing the low rank prior of human face and enforcing sparse structure of the descent directions. Our approach consists of low rank face frontalization and sparse descent steps. Firstly, in terms of the low rank prior of face image, we recover such a low-rank face from its deformed image and the associated deformation despite significant distortion and corruption. Alignment of the recovered frontal face image is more simple and effective. Then, we propose a sparsity regularized supervised descent model by enforcing the sparse structure of the descent directions under the l1constraint, which makes the model more effective in computation and robust to partial occlusion. Extensive results on several benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method is robust to facial occlusions and pose variations
Caddisfly dives for oviposition: Record-shattering depths and poor life choices in a dammed river system

Oviposition is a critical step in the life cycles of aquatic insects. Adult caddisflies exhibit a variety of oviposition methods. In some species, females enter freshwaters to oviposit on submerged substrates. Here, we compile information on North American caddisflies that are known to dive and swim to oviposit and have sexually dimorphic leg characteristics that may be adaptations for swimming, diving, or both. We also report unexpected underwater captures of adult females of 3 caddisfly species in Willamette Basin reservoirs in Oregon, USA, including the deepest dive depths ever recorded for adult female caddisflies. From these captures, we note sexually dimorphic leg widening in the species Hydropsyche centra Ross, 1938 for the first time, confirm widened mesothoracic leg segments of Hydropsyche occidentalis Banks, 1900 adult females, and note fringes of long hairs on meso- and metathoracic tibiae and basal tarsal segments of Hydroptila argosa Ross, 1938 females. We also note fringes of long hairs on the meso- and metathoracic legs of Hydroptila ajax Ross, 1938 females from the banks of the Willamette River. The presumed oviposition attempts of caddisflies underwater in large, deep reservoirs suggest that these caddisflies may misinterpret oviposition cues in altered habitats and waste reproductive efforts. Greater understanding of caddisfly oviposition methods and abilities may be important for long-term conservation and restoration efforts supporting biodiversity in freshwater habitats.
Patent Automatic Classification Based on Symmetric Hierarchical Convolution Neural Network

With the rapid growth of patent applications, it has become an urgent problem to automatically classify the accepted patent application documents accurately and quickly. Most previous patent automatic classification studies are based on feature engineering and traditional machine learning methods like SVM, and some even rely on the knowledge of domain experts, hence they suffer from low accuracy problem and have poor generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a patent automatic classification method via the symmetric hierarchical convolution neural network (CNN) named PAC-HCNN. We use the title and abstract of the patent as the input data, and then apply the word embedding technique to segment and vectorize the input data. Then we design a symmetric hierarchical CNN framework to classify the patents based on the word embeddings, which is much more efficient than traditional RNN models dealing with texts, meanwhile keeping the history and future information of the input sequence. We also add gated linear units (GLUs) and residual connection to help realize the deep CNN. Additionally, we equip our model with a self attention mechanism to address the long-term dependency problem. Experiments are performed on large-scale datasets for Chinese short text patent classification. Experimental results prove our proposed model’s effectiveness, and it performs better than other state-of-the-art models significantly and consistently on both fine-grained and coarse-grained classification.
First records of Anagraphis ochracea (Araneae: Gnaphosidae) for continental Italy and Sicily with new observations on its myrmecophilous lifestyle

Abstract. In the present study we describe and discuss for the first time the peculiar myrmecophilous habits of Anagraphis ochracea (L. Koch, 1867) and its strong association with the ant species Messor ibericus Santschi, 1931. The study is based on behavioural observations carried out both in the field and in captivity, and sheds light on the lifestyle of this poorly studied and rarely observed species. We also recorded the presence of A. ochracea on continental Italy and Sicily for the first time; provide a brief overview of its taxonomical history and present photographs of adult and juvenile specimens, the egg sac and the copulatory organs of both sexes. Finally, we provide a DNA-barcode (COI) for A. ochracea, which is the first for the genus Anagraphis as well. Zusammenfassung. In der vorliegenden Studie wird zum ersten Mal das besondere myrmekophile Verhalten von Anagraphis ochracea (L. Koch, 1867) und ihre enge Bindung an die Ameisenart Messor ibericus Santschi, 1931 beschrieben und diskutiert. Die Studie basiert auf Beobachtungen zum Verhalten im natürlichen Lebensraum wie auch im Labor und gibt Aufschluss über die Lebensweise dieser wenig erforschten und selten gefundenen Art. Ebenso wird der Erstnachweis von A. ochracea für das italienische Festland und Sizilien erbracht, sowie eine Zusammenfassung der taxonomischen Historie, Bilder adulter wie auch juveniler Tiere, der Kopulationsorgane beider Geschlechter und des Eikokons präsentiert. Zusätzlich wird erstmals der genetische Barcode (COI) der Art, und auch der Gattung Anagraphis, beschrieben.
Inferred acoustic rates of solar p modes from several helioseismic instruments

Acoustic rates of excitation of solar p modes can be estimated from observations in order to place constraints on the modelling of the excitation process and the layers where it occurs in the star. For several reasons (including a poor signal to noise ratio and mode overlap), this estimation is difficult. In this work, we use three completely independent datasets to obtain robust estimates in the solar case for � = 1 modes. We also show that the height in the solar atmosphere where the modes are observed must be taken into account. Our three sets of results are shown to be consistent, particularly in the lower part of the p-mode spectrum (from 1.8 mHz to 2.8 mHz). At higher frequencies, the agreement is not as good, because of a larger dispersion of the measurements and also because of some systematic differences which might be due to observation height estimation or to a systematic influence of the noise.
The Management of Resistant Hypercalcaemia Secondary to Cancer of Unknown Primary and Presenting with Pancreatitis

We present a 31-year-old female who presented to the general surgical take with epigastric pain associated with a raised amylase and corrected calcium on admission. Computed tomography confirmed acute pancreatitis and also demonstrated a 15 cm liver tumour. She was subsequently diagnosed with cancer of unknown primary with liver metastases. The patient’s pancreatitis symptoms improved with conservative management, but her calcium proved quite resistant to basic measures. Further input was sought from the medical on-call endocrinology and oncology teams to help manage this patient’s hypercalcaemia, which included pamidronate, zolendronate, and denusomab, but ultimately it only improved significantly following chemotherapy. This case to our knowledge is the only one of its kind and highlights the importance of early multidisciplinary team involvement across specialties to help manage complex patients.
Effects of global climate changes on geographical distribution... EFFECTS OF GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGES ON GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION PATTERNS OF ECONOMICALLY IMPORTANT PLANT SPECIES IN CERRADO 1

– Different climate models, modeling methods and carbon emission scenarios were used in this paper to evaluate the effects of future climate changes on geographical distribution of species of economic and cultural importance across the Cerrado biome. As the results of several studies have shown, there are still many uncertainties associated with these projections, although bioclimatic models are still widely used and effective method to evaluate the consequences for biodiversity of these climate changes. In this article, it was found that 90% of these uncertainties are related to methods of modeling, although, regardless of the uncertainties, the results revealed that the studied species will reduce about 78% of their geographic distribution in Cerrado . For an effective work on the conservation of these species, many studies still need to be carried out, although it is already possible to observe that climate change will have a strong influence on the pattern of distribution of these species.
Formaldehyde absorption and maser emisson in galaxies

A sensitive search for the 1(10)-1(11)(6.2 cm) H2CO transition toward eight galaxies with prominent H I absorption and OH absorption or emission has resulted in the detection of three weak absorption lines (NGC 660, NGC 3079, and NGC 3628) and, in addition, of H2CO emission toward the OH megamaser galaxy IC 4553 (= Arp 220). This feature is the first extragalactic H2CO maser, and is at least 7 orders of magnitudes more powerful than the two known Galactic maser sources. The maser is likely due to amplification of the strong nonthermal radiation field from IC 4553 by foreground material with inverted level populations. In terms of a radiative transfer model, it is suggested that strong pumping between the J = 2 levels (at 14.5 GHz) causes, via the J = 2-1 millimeter transition, a population inversion in the ground-state doublet. Although the inversion processes are different for these molecules, the scenario for this maser emission is very similar to that proposed for the extragalactic OH and H2O megamasers. 37 references.
Inhomogeneous cosmology. II. Linearly polarized gravitational waves

This is the second in a series of papers whose purpose is to investigate the possible strength of a cosmic background of gravitational radiation. In this paper we present a metric which may be used to describe exact plane gravitational waves propagating over a homogeneous background spacetime, and we find solutions representing waves of linear polarization over backgrounds of Bianchi types I, III, V, and VI, as well as over a background with a smooth global inhomogeneity. In all of these cases, we find the property that inhomogeneity in the structure of the initial cosmic singularity evolves into gravitational waves propagating over a homogeneous background spacetime.
Complete Breast Cancer Detection and Monitoring System by Using Microwave Textile Based Antenna Sensors

This paper presents the development of a new complete wearable system for detecting breast tumors based on fully textile antenna-based sensors. The proposed sensor is compact and fully made of textiles so that it fits conformably and comfortably on the breasts with dimensions of 24 × 45 × 0.17 mm3 on a cotton substrate. The proposed antenna sensor is fed with a coplanar waveguide feed for easy integration with other systems. It realizes impedance bandwidth from 1.6 GHz up to 10 GHz at |S11| ≤ −6 dB (VSWR ≤ 3) and from 1.8 to 2.4 GHz and from 4 up to 10 GHz at |S11| ≤ −10 dB (VSWR ≤ 2). The proposed sensor acquires a low specific absorption rate (SAR) of 0.55 W/kg and 0.25 W/kg at 1g and 10 g, respectively, at 25 dBm power level over the operating band. Furthermore, the proposed system utilizes machine-learning algorithms (MLA) to differentiate between malignant tumor and benign breast tissues. Simulation examples have been recorded to verify and validate machine-learning algorithms in detecting tumors at different sizes of 10 mm and 20 mm, respectively. The classification accuracy reached 100% on the tested dataset when considering |S21| parameter features. The proposed system is vision as a “Smart Bra” that is capable of providing an easy interface for women who require continuous breast monitoring in the comfort of their homes.
Outdoor education toward personal & social responsibility and physical fitness level

The research aims to determine the impact of outdoor education activities on personal & social responsibility and physical fitness. The research method used was a Quasi-Experimental design Non-equivalent Control-Group design. The sample consisted of 40 students, then divided into two groups, the experimental group, and the control group. The instrument used was a questionnaire of Personal & Social Responsibility and a Bleep test. The analysis of the experimental group affects Personal & Social Responsibility and Physical Fitness. The results of analysis and calculation state that the Personal & Social Responsibility and physical fitness level experimental group increased compared to the control group and improving the physical fitness level of the experimental group increased by an average of 1.83 compared with the control group with an average of 0.055. In conclusion, the activity of Outdoor Education has increased the Personal & Social Responsibility and physical fitness of students.
Sexual conflict and the evolution of monandry: The case of the damselfly Ischnura hastata (Odonata: Coenagrionidae) in the Galápagos Islands

Sexual selection favours the evolution and maintenance of polygamy, which is the dominant reproductive strategy in insects. Monogamy can evolve in very short‐lived species due to time constraints. Here we study adult activity and mating behaviour of a population of the damselfly Ischnura hastata, a species rarely seen mating, and which has been suggested to be monandric, in wetlands of Isabela Island, Galápagos. By means of mark‐recapture methods, we estimated that the daily survival rate was low, ranging from 0.385 to 0.876, yielding average life expectancies of mature individuals of only 1.2–3.2 days. Adults showed very low activity before 7:00, indicating that mating does not occur early. The number of male–female interactions and mating attempts was extremely low, with only 44 copulations recorded on over 230 h of observations. Copulations were brief, with a mean duration of 11 min (but only two were observed from the start). Males showed clear preference to attempt to grasp in tandem females of intermediate age (in 94.3% of cases), rather than young (31.3%) or mature females (24.0%). Males were very persistent once a tandem was achieved, retaining females for up to 139 min, but most females resisted and did not copulate. We conclude that females of I. hastata show a very short time window to mate, exactly when they change colour from juvenile to mature, and live only enough to mate once. Short lifespan has selected for female monandry in I. hastata, creating an intense sexual conflict over mating rates.
CDT of Clostridioides difficile Induces MLC-Dependent Intestinal Barrier Dysfunction in HT-29/B6 Epithelial Cell Monolayers

Background: Clostridioides difficile binary toxin (CDT) defines the hypervirulence of strains in nosocomial antibiotic-induced colitis with the highest mortality. The objective of our study was to investigate the impact of CDT on the intestinal epithelial barrier and to enlighten the underlying molecular mechanisms. Methods: Functional measurements of epithelial barrier function by macromolecular permeability and electrophysiology were performed in human intestinal HT-29/B6 cell monolayers. Molecular analysis of the spatial distribution of tight junction protein and cytoskeleton was performed by super-resolution STED microscopy. Results: Sublethal concentrations of CDT-induced barrier dysfunction with decreased TER and increased permeability for 332 Da fluorescein and 4 kDa FITC-dextran. The molecular correlate to the functional barrier defect by CDT was found to be a tight junction protein subcellular redistribution with tricellulin, occludin, and claudin-4 off the tight junction domain. This redistribution was shown to be MLCK-dependent. Conclusions: CDT compromised epithelial barrier function in a human intestinal colonic cell model, even in sublethal concentrations, pointing to barrier dysfunction in the intestine and leak flux induction as a diarrheal mechanism. However, this cannot be attributed to the appearance of apoptosis and necrosis, but rather to an opening of the paracellular leak pathway as the result of epithelial tight junction alterations.
On-Device Multi-Level Signal Quality Aware Compression for Energy-Efficient Wearable PPG Sensing

On-device computing in biomedical sensors has become attractive for developing wearable health monitoring systems. The challenge is to make a compromise between the latency and complexity in a resource-constrained implementation. This article describes an on-device implementation of multi-level signal quality aware and quality controlled compression (MSQQCC) that enhances the compression factor while preserving the clinical features in a wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) sensing application. The multi-level quality assessment (QA) provides three eligible PPG qualities, viz., “excellent,” “good,” and “average,” based on which corresponding upper limits are set for further compression using a discrete wavelet transform, while the “corrupted” segments are discarded. A pretrained multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN) provides the optimal quantization level of coefficients. The residual data is separately compressed using an autoencoder (AE). MSQQCC was evaluated with 300 min of PPG data from three public data sets and 110 min of data collected at a laboratory. The end-to-end pipeline was implemented in a standalone system with an ARM Cortex A53 controller, requiring 35.51 kB of memory and 1.8 s latency to process 4 s PPG data. The on-device QA achieved 98.45% overall accuracy (Ac), which outperforms published works on PPG QA. The mean deviation of PPG clinical features by 5%, with overall compression ratio (CR) and percentage root mean squared difference (PRD) were 40.85 and 2.52, which are superior to many published works. Real-time transmission over Bluetooth shows an improvement of energy efficiency by a significant factor and a 34% extended battery life for wearable PPG sensors. The results are encouraging for the adoption of MSQQCC in wearable biomedical health monitoring.