Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ediacaran Discs from the Jodhpur Sandstone, Marwar Supergroup, India: A Biological Diversification or Taphonomic Interplay?

The noncarbonaceous Ediacaran discs of variable morphologies from the Jodhpur Sandstone Formation of the Marwar Supergroup, western Rajasthan, suggest different biologic affinities of plant and animal kingdom. These discs are commonly preserved on the bedding surfaces of siliciclastic sandstone and shale in strong positive relief and appear to possess a flexible to rigid body. Discs assignable to Aspidella, Cyclomedusa, Nimbia and Heimalora; all possibly inclining towards cnidarian affinity are being reported from the sandstone beds in Sursagar area. Variable morphologies among discs preserved in siliciclastic shale beds from the Artiya Kalan area support scyphozoan affinity (earlier named Marsonia from the same locality) and cnidarian affinity for small discs comparable with Funisia (considered being the first animals having sexual reproduction). Disc’s morphologies also suggest ephyra stage of Aurilia (a cnidarian form) or budding stages of some fungi, like Germinosphaera (multicellular benthic fungal fossils) and noncarbonaceous discs with well preserved wrinkles and folds like in Chuaria. Discs from the Jodhpur Sandstone, may at times display taphonomic interplay, but consistency and repetition in morphology support variable biological affinities representing diverse assemblage and advance ecosystem prevailing during Ediacaran period. A degree of genetic variability can be expected within any taxa, and this may be compounded by preservation factors affecting the Jodhpur Ediacaran discs. Sudden increase in size or gigantism is a common feature of Ediacaran life, which is evident in case of Jodhpur discs also. On the basis of fossil assemblage, the Jodhpur Group (the Marwar Supergroup) is regionally correlated with the Bhander Group of the Vindhyan Supergroup and Krol Group of Lesser Himalaya. Globally, the assemblage is comparable with the Long Mynd Group, Shropshire, UK, Fermuse Formation Newfoundland, South Australia, Russia and Norway.
The analysis of logistics outsourcing risk: A system dynamics approach

Logistics outsourcing risk is emerging as a key challenge to logistics management in supply chain. The risk analysis is a critical first step in managing logistics outsourcing risk. The main purpose of this paper is to study the risk associated with logistics outsourcing using system dynamics theory. Firstly, we analyze the logistics outsourcing risk from the system thinking perspective. Secondly, based on the analysis of logistics outsourcing risk system's structure, inner mechanisms and relationships, a system dynamic model including input subsystem, risk subsystem, performance subsystem and benefit subsystem is built. Finally a detailed description of the model is presented from the viewpoint of system theory
Speedups from executing critical software segments to coarse-grain reconfigurable logic

In this paper, we propose a hardware/software partitioning method for improving applications' performance in embedded systems. Critical software parts are accelerated on hardware of a single-chip generic system comprised by an embedded processor and coarse-grain reconfigurable hardware. The reconfigurable hardware is realized by a 2-Dimensional array of Processing Elements. A list-based mapping algorithm has been developed for estimating the execution cycles of kernels on Coarse-Grain Reconfigurable Arrays. The proposed partitioning flow has been largely automated for a program description in C language. Extensive hardware/software experiments on five real-life applications are presented. The results illustrate that by mapping critical code on coarse-grain reconfigurable hardware, speedups ranging from 1.2 to 3.7, with an average value of 2.2, are achieved.
The effects of question-generation training on metacognitive knowledge, self regulation and learning approaches in science.

BACKGROUND Although much research has examined the impact of question generation on students' reading comprehension and learning from lectures, far less research has analysed its influence on how students learn and study science. The present study aims to bridge this knowledge gap. METHOD Using a quasi-experimental design, three complete ninth-grade science classes, with a total of 72 students, were randomly assigned to three conditions (groups): (G1) questioning-training by providing prompts; (G2) question-generation without any explicit instruction; and (G3) no question control. Participants' pre-test and post-test self-reported measures of metacognitive knowledge, self-regulation and learning approaches were collected and data analysed with multivariate and univariate analyses of covariance. RESULTS (a) MANCOVA revealed a significant effect for group; (b) ANCOVAs showed the highest average gains for G1 and statistically significant between-group differences in the two components of metacognition: metacognitive knowledge and self-regulation; and (c) the direction of these differences seemed to vary in each of these components. CONCLUSIONS Question-generation training influenced how students learned and studied, specifically their metacognition, and it had a medium to large effect size, which was somewhat related to the prompts used.
So Many Plasminogen Receptors: Why?

Plasminogen and plasmin tether to cell surfaces through ubiquitously expressed and structurally quite dissimilar family of proteins, as well as some nonproteins, that are collectively referred to as plasminogen receptors. Of the more than one dozen plasminogen receptors that have been identified, many have been shown to facilitate plasminogen activation to plasmin and to protect bound plasmin from inactivation by inhibitors. The generation of such localized and sustained protease activity is utilized to facilitate numerous cellular responses, including responses that depend on cellular migration. However, many cells express multiple plasminogen receptors and numerous plasminogen receptors are expressed on many different cell types. Furthermore, several different plasminogen receptors can be used to support the same cellular response, such as inflammatory cell migration. Here, we discuss the perplexing issue: why are there so many different Plg-Rs?
Integrins Are the Necessary Links to Hypertrophic Growth in Cardiomyocytes

To compensate for hemodynamic overload of the heart, an event which stretches the myocardium, growth and survival signaling are activated in cardiac muscle cells (cardiomyocytes). Integrins serve as the signaling receptors of cardiomyocytes responsible for mechanotransduction toward intracellular signaling. The main integrin heterodimers on the cardiomyocyte surface are α 5 β 1 and α v β 3, and elimination of either β 1 or β 3 integrins impedes pressure-induced hypertrophic signaling and leads to increased mortality. The growth signaling pathways downstream of β 1 and β 3 integrins are well characterized. However, new integrin pathways responsible for inhibiting apoptosis induced by hemodynamic overload are emerging. β 1 and β 3 integrins activate differential survival signaling, yet both integrins initiate survival signaling downstream of ubiquitination and the kinase pathway including phosphoinositol-3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt. Further characterization of these integrin-signaling mechanisms may lead to drug targets to prevent decompensation to heart failure.
On the ability of CDMA to combat log-normal fading

In contrast to the common opinion, that CDMA offers only advantages to overcome frequency-selective fading, it is shown that CDMA can combat log-normal fading (long-term fading), too. This statement holds under the following two conditions. First, equal transmission rates for all users are presupposed. Second, interference cancellation is applied to combat multiple access interference. Including channel coding close to the capacity limit, CDMA may even outperform orthogonal multiple-access in this case.
Improved Reconstruction of Global Precipitation since 1900

An improved land‐ocean global monthly precipitation anomaly reconstruction is developed for the period beginning in 1900. Reconstructions use the available historical data and statistics developed from the modern satellite-sampled period to analyze variations over the historical presatellite period. This paper documents the latest in a series of precipitation reconstructions developed by the authors. Although the reconstruction principleisstilltheminimizationofmean-squarederror,thislatestreconstructionincludesthefollowingthree major improvements over previous reconstructions: (i) an improvedmethod thatfirst produces an annualfirst guess, which is then adjusted using a monthly increment analysis; (ii) improved use of oceanic observations in the annual first guess using a canonical correlation analysis; and (iii) reinjection of gauge data where those data areavailable.Theseimprovements allowmoreconfidentanalysesandevaluationsofglobalprecipitation variations over the reconstruction period. Quantitative error estimates for the reconstruction are being developed and will be documented in a later paper.
The Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff of Linear MIMO Receivers

While most literature on MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) multiantenna communications and space-time coding has considered optimal decoding, or bounded-distance approximations thereof, the current standardization trend in wireless local area network (WLAN) systems such as IEEE 802.11n, that will use MIMO as an integral component of their physical layer, focuses on simpler schemes, where a linear space-time equalizer is used to separate the signals from the M transmit antennas, thus creating a set of M "virtual" parallel channels. The output of these parallel channels is then fed to a standard SISO (single-input, single-output) decoder. Surprisingly, the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of this simple scheme has not been fully characterized before. We provide such characterization in this work, where we show that both linear zero-forcing (ZF) and linear minimum mean-square error (MMSE) receivers achieve the same DMT, which is equal to that of *one* of the parallel channels, even though coding and decoding is performed across the antennas. Hence, linear receivers incur a dramatic loss of diversity gain with respect to other non-linear schemes. Furthermore, we comment on the different behavior of the MMSE and ZF receivers at finite rate (zero multiplexing gain).
Hidden Markov model decomposition of speech and noise

The problem of automatic speech recognition in the presence of interfering signals and noise with statistical characteristics ranging from stationary to fast changing and impulsive is discussed. A technique of signal decomposition using hidden Markov models is described. This is a generalization of conventional hidden Markov modeling that provides an optimal method of decomposing simultaneous processes. The technique exploits the ability of hidden Markov models to model dynamically varying signals in order to accommodate concurrent processes, including interfering signals as complex as speech. This form of signal decomposition has wide implications for signal separation in general and improved speech modeling in particular. The application of decomposition to the problem of recognition of speech contaminated with noise is emphasized. <<ETX>>
When Suppliers Climb the Value Chain: A Theory of Value Distribution in Vertical Relationships

Although offshore outsourcing has become an important strategy to lower production costs among Western firms, it gives rise to the phenomenon of value chain climbing—suppliers in emerging markets can develop capabilities by supplying, with aspirations to compete with the buyers in the product market. We build an analytical model to study the impact of value chain climbing on value distribution in vertical relationships. The analysis identifies a set of dominant relationships, characterizes how the buyer’s optimal choice among these relationships depends on firms’ relative competitiveness in the product market and the supplier’s speed of capability development, and shows how the optimal choice evolves with the dynamics of the supplier’s capability development. The results provide new insights into our understanding of value distribution in vertical relationships across different contexts and over time. By endogenizing the supplier’s entry into the product market, our study enriches the literatures on verti.
String Kernels for Native Language Identification: Insights from Behind the Curtains

The most common approach in text mining classification tasks is to rely on features like words, part-of-speech tags, stems, or some other high-level linguistic features. Recently, an approach that uses only character p-grams as features has been proposed for the task of native language identification (NLI). The approach obtained state-of-the-art results by combining several string kernels using multiple kernel learning. Despite the fact that the approach based on string kernels performs so well, several questions about this method remain unanswered. First, it is not clear why such a simple approach can compete with far more complex approaches that take words, lemmas, syntactic information, or even semantics into account. Second, although the approach is designed to be language independent, all experiments to date have been on English. This work is an extensive study that aims to systematically present the string kernel approach and to clarify the open questions mentioned above.A broad set of native language identification experiments were conducted to compare the string kernels approach with other state-of-the-art methods. The empirical results obtained in all of the experiments conducted in this work indicate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in NLI, reaching an accuracy that is 1.7% above the top scoring system of the 2013 NLI Shared Task. Furthermore, the results obtained on both the Arabic and the Norwegian corpora demonstrate that the proposed approach is language independent. In the Arabic native language identification task, string kernels show an increase of more than 17% over the best accuracy reported so far. The results of string kernels on Norwegian native language identification are also significantly better than the state-of-the-art approach. In addition, in a cross-corpus experiment, the proposed approach shows that it can also be topic independent, improving the state-of-the-art system by 32.3%. To gain additional insights about the string kernels approach, the features selected by the classifier as being more discriminating are analyzed in this work. The analysis also offers information about localized language transfer effects, since the features used by the proposed model are p-grams of various lengths. The features captured by the model typically include stems, function words, and word prefixes and suffixes, which have the potential to generalize over purely word-based features. By analyzing the discriminating features, this article offers insights into two kinds of language transfer effects, namely, word choice (lexical transfer) and morphological differences. The goal of the current study is to give a full view of the string kernels approach and shed some light on why this approach works so well.
DEVELOPMENT OF A SUICIDAL INTENT QUESTIONNAIRE

Inspite of the fact that the study of suicidal behaviour has been the subject of an ever increasing body of li terature, re catch in the field of communication of suicidal intent has somehow not received due attention. Quite often pntient 's suicidal ideas may remain unnoticed during clinical interview in an overcrowded psychiatric outpatient and at times this inadvertent neglect might result in loss of a precious life. Perhaps the problem could be effectively handled if we had some reliable technique to detect the potentially suicidal individual. Besides, there a re different types of suicidal behaviour involving varying degrees of ri.sk; for instance, in a case of hysteric the gravity of risk may be much less as compaied to a truly depiessed. According to Stengel (1964), talking about suicide intent serves as a warning to other people and as such irrespective of the level of conscious awaieness every suicidal at tempt has a powerful "appeal for h e l p " . Similarly, Farberow and Schneidman (1965) and Schneidman (1967) regarded both verbal and nonverbal expression of suicidal ideas as a call for help. Abhough several attempts have been made to investigate suicidal intent through projective tests especially Rorschach InkBlot Test (Appclbaum and Colso i , 1968; Appelbanm and Holzman, 1962; Daston & Sakheim, 1960; Mar t in , 1951; Piotrowski, 1968; Stpolsky, 1963; Wciner, 1961), considerable amount of disagreement still exists with regard to their applicabil i ty in a clinical setting. Administration as well as interpretation of these psychological tests no! only require cx:civive experience but a re also considerably time consuming. Hence , development of a quest ionnaire to elicit sviicidal behaviour has been a long felt need. I t is hoped that a tool which may discriminate suicidal and non-suicidal pa t ients and easy to administer should go a long way in providing effective psychiatric treatment and to some extent, lessening the incidence of suicidal morbidity.
Peripheral Attentional Targets under Covert Attention Lead to Paradoxically Enhanced Alpha Desynchronization in Neurofibromatosis Type 1

The limited capacity of the human brain to process the full extent of visual information reaching the visual cortex requires the recruitment of mechanisms of information selection through attention. Neurofibromatosis type-1 (NF1) is a neurodevelopmental disease often exhibiting attentional deficits and learning disabilities, and is considered to model similar impairments common in other neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. In a previous study, we found that patients with NF1 are more prone to miss targets under overt attention conditions. This finding was interpreted as a result of increased occipito-parietal alpha oscillations. In the present study, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to study alpha power modulations and the performance of patients with NF1 in a covert attention task. Covert attention was required in order to perceive changes (target offset) of a peripherally presented stimulus. Interestingly, alpha oscillations were found to undergo greater desynchronization under this task in the NF1 group compared with control subjects. A similar pattern of desynchronization was found for beta frequencies while no changes in gamma oscillations could be identified. These results are consistent with the notion that different attentional states and task demands generate different patterns of abnormal modulation of alpha oscillatory processes in NF1. Under covert attention conditions and while target offset was reported with relatively high accuracy (over 90% correct responses), excessive desynchronization was found. These findings suggest an abnormal modulation of oscillatory activity and attentional processes in NF1. Given the known role of alpha in modulating attention, we suggest that alpha patterns can show both abnormal increases and decreases that are task and performance dependent, in a way that enhanced alpha desynchronization may reflect a compensatory mechanism to keep performance at normal levels. These results suggest that dysregulation of alpha oscillations may occur in NF1 both in terms of excessive or diminished activation patterns.
Scaling supply rates of ISS systems for stability of feedback interconnected nonlinear systems

This paper focuses on global stability analysis problems for interconnected nonlinear systems. The main purpose is to introduce a useful parameterization into supply rates of dissipative nonlinear systems for establishing global stability via the input-to-state stable(ISS) small-gain condition. Supply rates which are parameterized by state-dependent scaling provide us with convenient flexibility to determine a proper function that matches a system and leads us to desired stability. Stability criteria proposed in this paper are more advantageous to uncertain systems analysis and design than the primary versions of state-dependent scaling criteria presented in previous papers.
Segregation, Discrimination, and Firm Entry: Evidence from Post-war African-American Movie Theaters

Segregation in public accommodation was an important feature of African-American life prior to the civil rights movement and among other things adversely affected minority access to business and culture. In this paper we study so-called Negro movie theaters in the post-war era, documenting the effects of racial discrimination and other forces on theater location. The predicted effects of racial bias on entry by theaters is ambiguous. It reduces entry of black-owned theaters by limiting the access to key inputs, while at the same time driving black customers away from white theaters and toward African-American theaters. We find that the effects of racial bias appear to be nonlinear. For much of the country, a greater degree of racial bias is associated with more African-American theaters, though the region with the strongest negative racial attitudes saw far fewer theaters. While Southern states both score higher on quantitative measures of racial bias and had a greater concentration of theaters, our structural estimates of firm entry suggest that the greater number of African-American theaters in the region is due to lower fixed costs in Southern states. Further evidence comes from the effect of competition from white theaters. In general, the presence of white theaters has little impact on African-American theater entry, however as a county’s education rises, the presence of white theaters crowds out African-American theaters. This suggests that white theaters are a closer substitute in more racially tolerant areas. From these results, we draw implications for the effect of discrimination and segregation on business enterprise and minority consumption of differentiated products. Carey School of Business, John Hopkins University. ricard.gil@jhu.edu. University of California, Santa Cruz. marion@ucsc.edu
A computational model for spatial expression resolution

This paper presents a computational model for the interpretation of linguistic spatial propositions in the restricted realm of a 2D puzzle game. Based on an experiment aimed at analyzing human judgment of spatial expressions, we establish a set of criteria that explain human preference for certain interpretations over others. For each of these criteria, we define a metric that combines the semantic and pragmatic contextual information regarding the game as well as the utterance being resolved. Each metric gives rise to a potential field that characterizes the degree of likelihood for carrying out the instruction at a specific hypothesized location. We resort to machine learning techniques to determine a model of spatial relationships from the data collected during the experiment. Sentence interpretation occurs by matching the potential field of each of its possible interpretations to the model at hand. The system's explanation capabilities lead to the correct assessment of ambiguous situated utterances for a large percentage of the collected expressions.
Enabling Virtual Organizations with an Agent-Mediated Service Framework

In this paper, an agent-mediated service framework is proposed to ease the construction of virtual organizations of standalone applications. Using this framework, on one hand, service providers can control the usage of their own services, and on the other hand, an agent representing certain stakeholders can dynamically search for capable partners and negotiate with their agents to dynamically form a virtual organization. Incorporating business level service composition language - VINCA into the framework further promotes the participation of business level users in constructing virtual organizations