Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Early patterning of the mouse embryo — contributions of sperm and egg

The first cleavage of the fertilised mouse egg divides the zygote into two cells that have a tendency to follow distinguishable fates. One divides first and contributes its progeny predominantly to the embryonic part of the blastocyst, while the other, later dividing cell, contributes mainly to the abembryonic part. We have previously observed that both the plane of this first cleavage and the subsequent order of blastomere division tend to correlate with the position of the fertilisation cone that forms after sperm entry. But does sperm entry contribute to assigning the distinguishable fates to the first two blastomeres or is their fate an intrinsic property of the egg itself? To answer this question we examined the distribution of the progeny of early blastomeres in embryos never penetrated by sperm — parthenogenetic embryos. In contrast to fertilised eggs, we found there is no tendency for the first two parthenogenetic blastomeres to follow different fates. This outcome is independent of whether parthenogenetic eggs are haploid or diploid. Also unlike fertilised eggs, the first 2-cell blastomere to divide in parthenogenetic embryo does not necessarily contribute more cells to the blastocyst. However, even when descendants of the first dividing blastomere do predominate, they show no strong predisposition to occupy the embryonic part. Thus blastomere fate does not appear to be decided by differential cell division alone. Finally, when the cortical cytoplasm at the site of sperm entry is removed, the first cleavage plane no longer tends to divide the embryo into embryonic and abembryonic parts. Together these results indicate that in normal development fertilisation contributes to setting up embryonic patterning, alongside the role of the egg.
Power transmission investment under uncertainty: A Real Option framework

Transmission power system plays a critical role in competitive electricity markets. It promotes competition among generators, mitigates market power of generators and allows an efficient and sustainable use of the primary energy resources. Currently, decision making on building new grid infrastructure is affected by many uncertainties. Under these circumstances, the efficient and timely expansion of electrical systems is a challenging task. This work presents a methodology for evaluating transmission investments in an environment of great uncertainty considering flexibility in decision-making. It incorporates real options analysis to evaluate flexible assets. The main focus is to shows some application of real options analysis in the assessments of transmission capacity investment in competitive electricity markets. Flexibility embedded in transmission projects, such as the option to defer, the option to expand and compound options, is appraised. The results of the study emphasize the importance of considering the flexibility value in transmission investment projects. Finally, the use of real options to design compensation mechanisms that encourage the efficient expansion of the transmission system is shown.
Schizophrenia: from Epidemiology to Rehabilitation

Purpose/Objective: We discuss recent evidences about schizophrenia (frequency, onset, course, risk factors and genetics) and their influences to some epidemiological myths about schizophrenia diffuse between psychiatric and psychopathology clinicians. The scope is to evaluate if the new acquisitions may change the rehabilitation approaches to schizophrenia modifying the balance about the neurodevelopmental hypothesis of schizophrenia accepting that the cognitive deficits are produced by errors during the normal development of the brain (neurodevelopmental hypothesis) that remains stable in the course of illness and the neurodegenerative hypothesis according of which they derived from a degenerative process that goes on inexorably. Research Method/Design: A review of the literature about epidemiology of schizophrenia has been performed and the contributions of some of these evidence to neurodevelopmental hypothesis and to rehabilitation has been described. Results: It cannot be definitively concluded for or against the neurodevelopmental or degenerative hypothesis, but efforts in understanding basis of schizophrenia must go on. Until now, rehabilitation programs are based on the vulnerability-stress model: supposing an early deficit that go on stable during the life under favorable circumstances. So, rehabilitation approaches (as neuro-cognitive approaches, social skill training, cognitive-emotional training) are focused on the individual and micro-group coping skills, aiming to help people with schizophrenia to cope with environmental stress factors. Conclusions/Implications: Coping of cognitive deficits in schizophrenia may represents the starting-point for further research on schizophrenia, cohort studies and randomized trials are necessary to defined the range of effectiveness and the outcome of the treatments.
Classical to Quantum Crossover in High-Current Noise of One-Dimensional Ballistic Wires

Microscopic current fluctuations and conductance are inseparable. We present a unified kinetic theory of both quantized conductance and nonequilibrium noise in one-dimensional ballistic wires. We show that high-current ballistic fluctuations depend, directly and robustly, on carrier statistics. This is dramatically evident in the large noise peaks predicted to coincide with the quantized steps in the two-probe conductance. The outstanding features of nonlinear ballistic fluctuations are: (i) their observability by standard experimental techniques; (ii) their strong suppression by electron degenercy; (iii) their divergence in any model that ignores the explicit dynamics of dissipative scattering in the macroscopic leads; (iv) their numerical dominance over the noise predictions of the Landauer-Buttiker model. The nonequilibrium noise of hot ballistic carriers is strikingly sensitive to their inelastic energy loss on entering the leads. Uniquely and quantitatively, it characterizes the observed nonideality of quantized conductance.
Degradation of rubisco and other chloroplast proteins under abiotic stress

Abiotic stress (e.g. drought, heat, hypoxia, heavy metal pollution) can strongly affect senescence and the degradation of chloroplast proteins. In general, such a stress causes an earlier or accelerated senescence. Amino acids deriving from protein catabolism may be redistributed within the plant via the phloem and serve as a basis for protein synthesis in other plant parts. Under certain conditions amino acids may accumulate to high levels in leaves. Besides the onset and the velocity of senescence, the sequence of events may be altered under abiotic stress. Chloroplasts are dismantled in an early phase of senescence, while other subcellular compartments (e.g. mitochondria) are still functional. Rubisco is the most abundant protein on earth and contributes up to 50 % of the soluble proteins and up to 30 % of total leaf nitrogen in leaves of C 3 plants. Therefore, the degradation of Rubisco and the reutilization of the amino acids liberated are important for the nitrogen budget of plants. During natural senescence, often only the bands representing the intact large and small subunits (but no fragments) are visible on stained gels or immunoblots. However, under abiotic stress inducing a rapid net degradation of Rubisco fragments of the large subunit may become detectable on immunoblots. Site-specific 6 Feller et al.
Models for Hypertext : How Many Words is a Single Link Worth ?

Latent topic models have been successfully applied as an uns upervised learning technique on various types of data such as text documents, im ages and biological data. In recent years, with the rapid growth of the Internet, these models have also been adapted to hypertext data. Explicitly modeling th e generation of both words and links has been shown to improve inferred topics and open a new range of applications for topic models. However, it remains uncle ar how to balance the information contributed by links with the information cont ributed by words. In this paper we enrich the Latent Topic Hypertext Model [7] w ith a parameter that stands for importance of links in the model. Specifically, we quantitatively explore whether a single link is more indicative of the topic mixture in the document it points to than a single word. We show that putting an emphasis on the topics associated with links leads to better link prediction resul ts.
The European Business Cycle

This paper deals with the existence and identification of a common European Growth Cycle. It has recently been argued that the formation of a monetary union creates in itself a tendency for business cycle symmetry to emerge. If this holds for the European monetary Union and the quasi-union of the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System, then we might already expect to be able to find an emergent 'European cycle' which will become more dominant in future years. Univariate Markov switching autoregressions (MS-AR) are used for individual countries in order to detect changes in the mean growth rate of industrial production. The smoothed probabilities obtained from these models give support to the possibility of inferring a common European cycle by jointly modelling the industrial production indices of the nine countries under study. An MS-VAR model is then used to identify the common cycle in Europe and the results confirm the existence of such a cycle. The European business cycle is dated on the basis of the regime probabilities. Two further issues are investigated. First we investigate the contribution of the European Business Cycle to the individual country cycles. Second, we undertake an impulse response analysis where we investigate the response of each individual country to European expansions and recessions. We analyze the response of industrial production in each country due to a change in regime. We focus mainly on two types of shocks, the response of industrial production in individual countries due to a European recession and the effect of an expansionary period in Europe. An appendix includes a similar analysis for GDP.
CONTROL OF CHAOS IN DRIVEN FITZHUGH-NAGUMO CIRCUIT BY MEANS OF FILTERED FEEDBACK

We report on the feedback control of a periodically driven FitzHugh-Nagumo system displaying various dynamical regimes, regular and chaotic, including chaotic spiking. The feedback term is composed of a high-pass or an all-pass filter. We provide a characterization of the efficiency of the filters in controlling the dynamical state of the system, both experimentally (electronic circuit) and numerically (model equations). We demonstrate the better efficiency of the all-pass filter as we change the coupling strength of the feedback. Moreover, we show that both filters change the appearance of bifurcations, that is the main result of the controlling effect. However, all-pass filter revealed to have a stronger efficiency in the bifurcation control. Finally, we discuss the relation of the feedback method based on filters with the delayed feedback control scheme.
To collect or not to collect: Just-in-time garbage collection for high-performance SSDs with long lifetimes

For NAND flash-based storage systems, managing garbage collection (GC) efficiently is a critical requirement to achieve both high performance and long lifetimes. In this paper, we propose a just-in-time GC technique, called JIT-GC, which invokes background GC operations only when necessary depending on future write demands. JIT-GC was motivated by our measurement study, which strongly suggested that deciding when to invoke background GC operations is a key parameter for efficient GC. By accurately estimating the amount of future SSD writes, JIT-GC can choose the best time to invoke a background GC operation. JIT-GC reserves necessary free space in advance so that high write performance can be achieved while it extends the SSD lifetime by preventing premature block erasures. Our evaluations on real SSDs show that JIT-GC can achieve both high performance and long lifetimes, thus overcoming the shortcomings of existing background GC invocation heuristics.
Dropping The Transmission Rate Using Distributed Broadcasting Algorithm In Wireless Ad-hoc Network

–In this paper, a distributed broadcast algorithm for wireless ad hoc network is proposed. In wireless ad hoc network which supports the application that enables the wireless communication among variety of devices. The communication in mobile ad hoc network that comprises two approaches and two broadcast algorithms those are stated as static and dynamic. In the static approach, it determines the status of each node using the broadcast algorithm based on local topology information and known priority function that are declared globally. In static broadcast algorithm cannot achieve an approximation factor to the level of optimum solution which determines the non-deterministic polynomial time. Even though there are certain issues proved the constant approximation factor is achievable if the position information is relatively available. On the other hand dynamic approach, broadcast algorithm does not require position information to guarantee a constant approximation factor. It determines the status of each node based on wireless topology information and broadcast state information. It’s proved that the dynamic broadcast algorithm that can achieve a constant approximation factor to the optimum solution. By using the position information that simplifies the problem where as in some application it’s not applicable to have the position information practically. Therefore, the broadcast algorithm based on dynamic approach cannot require the position information to achieve constant approximation solution. Keywords––Broadcasting, distributed broadcasting algorithms, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), constant approximation, mobility.
The Propaganda of the Deed: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Mobilization

Many terrorist factions care about the level of popular support they enjoy within a population they claim to represent. Empirically, this level of support can either rise or fall in the aftermath of a campaign of terrorist violence. Under what circumstances is the use of terror an effective tactic for mobilizing political support for an extremist group? This article models a scenario in which an extremist faction considers attacking a government in the hopes of provoking a counterterror response that will radicalize the population, increasing the extremists' support at the expense of a more moderate faction. In our scenario, such radicalization can result either from the economic damage caused by counterterror operations or by the way in which such operations change the population's assessment of the government's motivations. We demonstrate that such attempts at mobilizing public support can be, but need not be, successful, discuss factors that make both the initiation of a terror campaign and successful mobilization more or less likely, and relate our results to several empirical cases. I t is often argued, by scholars and " practitioners " alike, that terrorism is a powerful tool for generating support for a violent extremist movement. 1 A central intuition underlying this idea is that terrorists use violence to provoke governments into harsh and indiscriminate counterterrorism responses in order to radicalize and mobilize a population whose interests the terrorists claim to represent. Examples abound both from history and the current day. Bell (1971) argues that the first successful use of guerrilla tactics in the twentieth century was by Irish Catholics during the " Rising " in Dublin in 1916. The British responded with harsh countermeasures. Several scholars , however, argue that the British response ultimately strengthened the republican cause. English writes, " The British response to republican subversion frequently involved punishing the wider population for IRA activities: this had the unintended—indeed, counterproductive— effect of strengthening the IRA that it was intended to undermine " (2003, 17). And Bell notes, 1 Pape (2003) provides a detailed discussion of the strategic uses of terrorism. the British repression. Although the Easter Republic of 1916 had been apparently buried in the smoking ruins of central Dublin, by 1918 the idea had been resurrected as 75 of the 103 newly elected members of the Westminster parliament pronounced themselves in Dublin the new Dáil of an independent Irish Republic. " (1971, 64) Early Basque separatist …
Interobserver and intraobserver reliability of a classification scheme for corneal topographic patterns

AIMS To determine the interobserver and the intraobserver reliability of a published classification scheme for corneal topography in normal subjects using the absolute scale. METHOD A prospective observational study was done in which 195 TMS-1 corneal topography maps in the absolute scale were independently classified twice by three classifiers—a cornea fellow, an ophthalmic technician, and an optometrist. From these observations the interobserver reliability for each category and the intraobserver reliability for each observer were determined in terms of the median weighted kappa statistic for each category and for each observer. RESULTS For interobserver reliability, the median weighted kappa statistic for each category varied from 0.72 to 0.97 and for intraobserver reliability the range was 0.79 to 0.98. CONCLUSION This classification scheme is extremely robust and even in the hands of less experienced observers with minimal training it can be relied upon to provide consistent results.
Tree SSA - A New High-Level Optimization Framework for the GNU Compiler Collection

In this paper we introduce Tree SSA, a new optimization framework for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) based on the Static Single Assignment form. The paper provides a brief historical perspective on GCC’s development, the rationale behind the new framework and its potential applications. We will also discuss some of the analyses and optimizations that are being designed and implemented on top of Tree SSA.
Choroid Plexus Calcification in a Case of very Early onset Schizophrenia: Coincidental or a Marker

Background: Early-onset schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder and its etiology is not entirely elucidated. Choroid plexus, contains serotonin namely 5 hydroxy tryptamine (5-HT) neurons, and the choroid plexus calcification seen in schizophrenia can be associated with altered 5-HT innervation patterns. Case presentation: This paper presents an association with bilateral choroid plexus calcification in a 16-year-old female patient diagnosed with very early onset schizophrenia. Conclusion: Choroid plexus calcification seen in schizophrenia can be associated with altered 5-HT innervation patterns.
A Morphological Analyzer to Enable English to Sinhala Machine Translation

Morphological analysis plays a key role in effective functioning of a parser of any machine translation system. Further, morphological analyzers are useful as supportive software tools to coin terms for a given language. This paper reports on the first morphological analysis system for Sinhala language. This comes out as a major step in the development of a Sinhala parser for machine translation from English to Sinhala. The paper describes how the morphological analyzer can detect grammatical information of a given Sinhala word, and generation of all possible forms of the given word. It is also presented how a language specialist can use our system to device Sinhala terms that are agreeable with Sinhala grammar. The system has been developed with the use of SWI-Prolog, and to runs on Windows and Linux.
Poster: Source Code Authorship Attribution

As information becomes widely available and easily accessible through the Internet and other sources, the trend of plagiarism has been increasing. Plagiarism and copyright infringement are issues that come up in both academic and corporate environments. We need author classification techniques to inhibit such unethical violations. Source code is also intellectual property and reflects individual style. It is important to be able to identify the author of source code. Building a tool to detect the author of a program in an automated way aids in resolving copyleft, copyright and plagiarism issues in the programming fields. Making authorship attribution tools available to the public will also raise consciousness and decrease any possible tendency to plagiarize. Code stylometry methods can also attribute authors to malware or malicious code. De-anonymization techniques could be used to identify where the malware originates and link collaborating authors of malicious code. Obtaining this information will enable us to analyze the interaction graphs of malware authors. We could infer which author holds certain tools and how malware spreads and evolves. In this project, I perform authorship attribution on source code that is written in C. I investigate how well we can classify authors within and across projects. How much source code, which machine learning classifier and which features are required for an accurate analysis of this specific problem? Answering these questions could provide proof of authorship in court or automate the process of finding a cyber criminal from the source code left in an infected system. II. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK Stylometry is a field that relies on linguistic information found in a document to perform authorship recognition. Authorship attribution is the problem of determining a text's author , which could be accomplished using stylometric analysis. A classifier is trained with the necessary features to detect the authors' footprints to attribute an author to anonymous text. Source code authorship attribution could be called code stylometry and performed in a similar manner. There has been a great amount of work done on authorship attribution of unstructured or semi-structured text. In this research, we are interested in structured text, source code in particular. Burrows and Tahaghoghi [1] classified source code authors by looking at n-grams. Burrows et al. [2] also investigated C code of 1,597 student programming assignments. Their most successful approach reached 76.78% classification accuracy in a 10 class problem, which we outperform in this work. Rosenblum et al. …
Detection of Freezing of Gait in Parkinson Disease: Preliminary Results

Freezing of gait (FOG) is a common symptom in Parkinsonism, which affects the gait pattern and is associated to a fall risk. Automatized FOG episode detection would allow systematic assessment of patient state and objective evaluation of the clinical effects of treatments. Techniques have been proposed in the literature to identify FOG episodes based on the frequency properties of inertial sensor signals. Our objective here is to adapt and extend these FOG detectors in order to include other associated gait pattern changes, like festination. The proposed approach is based on a single wireless inertial sensor placed on the patient's lower limbs. The preliminary experimental results show that existing frequency-based freezing detectors are not sufficient to detect all FOG and festination episodes and that the observation of some gait parameters such as stride length and cadence are valuable inputs to anticipate the occurrence of upcoming FOG events.
Developing an Evaluation Habit of Mind

Abstract: In this article, we use the psychological lens of motivation to argue that mandated evaluation requirements can serve as the impetus for accountability to become synonymous with organizational improvement. We offer evidence of how the processes and practices surrounding the use of data for wise decisionmaking find intrinsically derived sustainability and become consolidated in an “evaluation habit of mind. ” Though exploratory in intent and not designed to be definitive, illustrations are provided from Canada’s Manitoba School Improvement Program Inc. (MSIP), an initiative designed to improve the learning experiences and outcomes of secondary school students through capacity building.