Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chronic malaria infections increase family inequalities and reduce parental fitness: experimental evidence from a wild bird population

Avian malaria parasites (Plasmodium) occur commonly in wild birds and are an increasingly popular model system for understanding host–parasite co‐evolution. However, whether these parasites have fitness consequences for hosts in endemic areas is much debated, particularly since wild‐caught individuals almost always harbour chronic infections of very low parasite density. We used the anti‐malarial drug MalaroneTM to test experimentally for fitness effects of chronic malaria infection in a wild population of breeding blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus). Medication caused a pronounced reduction in Plasmodium infection intensity, usually resulting in complete clearance of these parasites from the blood, as revealed by quantitative PCR. Positive effects of medication on malaria‐infected birds were found at multiple stages during breeding, with medicated females showing higher hatching success, provisioning rates and fledging success compared to controls. Most strikingly, we found that treatment of maternal malaria infections strongly altered within‐family differences, with reduced inequality in hatching probability and fledging mass within broods reared by medicated females. These within‐brood effects appear to explain higher fledging success among medicated females and are consistent with a model of parental optimism in which smaller (marginal) offspring can be successfully raised to independence if additional resources become available during the breeding attempt. Overall, these results demonstrate that chronic avian malaria infections, far from being benign, can have significant effects on host fitness and may thus constitute an important selection pressure in wild bird populations.
Parse Tree Fragmentation of Ungrammatical Sentences

Ungrammatical sentences present challenges for statistical parsers because the well-formed trees they produce may not be appropriate for these sentences. We introduce a framework for reviewing the parses of ungrammatical sentences and extracting the coherent parts whose syntactic analyses make sense. We call this task parse tree fragmentation. In this paper, we propose a training methodology for fragmenting parse trees without using a task-specific annotated corpus. We also propose some fragmentation strategies and compare their performance on an extrinsic task - fluency judgments in two domains: English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) and machine translation (MT). Experimental results show that the proposed fragmentation strategies are competitive with existing methods for making fluency judgments; they also suggest that the overall framework is a promising way to handle syntactically unusual sentences.
Elevated Serum Cytokines Correlated with Altered Behavior, Serum Cortisol Rhythm, and Dampened 24-Hour Rest-Activity Patterns in Patients with Metastatic Colorectal Cancer

Purpose: Incapacitating symptom burden in cancer patients contributes to poor quality of life (QOL) and can influence treatment outcomes because of poor tolerance to therapy. In this study, the role of circulating cytokines in the production symptoms in cancer patients is evaluated. Experimental Design: Eighty patients with metastatic colorectal cancer with either normal (group I, n = 40) or dampened (group II, n = 40) 24-hour rest/activity patterns measured by actigraphy were identified. Actigraphy patterns were correlated with QOL indices, serum cortisol obtained at 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. and with serum levels of transforming growth factor-α, tumor necrosis factor-α, and interleukin 6 (IL-6) obtained at 8:00 a.m. and analyzed in duplicate by ELISA. Cytokine levels and survival were also correlated. Results: Group II patients had significantly higher pre treatment levels of all three cytokines, displayed significantly poorer emotional and social functioning, had higher fatigue, more appetite loss, and poorer performance status compared with group I patients. Transforming growth factor-α (TGF-α) and IL-6 were significantly increased in the patients with WHO performance status >1 and in those with appetite loss. Fatigue was significantly associated with elevated TGF-α only. IL-6 was increased in those patients with extensive liver involvement and multiple organ replacement, and it was significantly correlated with dampened cortisol rhythm. In a multivariate analysis, IL-6 was correlated with poor treatment outcome. Conclusions: Significant correlations were found between serum levels of TGF-α and IL-6, circadian patterns in wrist activity and serum cortisol and tumor-related symptoms in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. These data support the hypothesis that some cancer patient's symptoms of fatigue, poor QOL, and treatment outcome are related to tumor or host generated cytokines and could reflect cytokine effects on the circadian timing system. This interplay between cytokine signaling pathways, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the autonomic nervous system, and efferent pathways of the suprachiasmatic nucleus that control circadian physiology, opens the way to new rational interventions for symptom management in cancer patients.
Image Segmentation Using Fuzzy Region Competition and Spatial/Frequency Information

This paper presents a multiphase fuzzy region competition model that takes into account spatial and frequency information for image segmentation. In the proposed energy functional, each region is represented by a fuzzy membership function and a data fidelity term that measures the conformity of spatial and frequency data within each region to (generalized) Gaussian densities whose parameters are determined jointly with the segmentation process. Compared with the classical region competition model, our approach gives soft segmentation results via the fuzzy membership functions, and moreover, the use of frequency data provides additional region information that can improve the overall segmentation result. To efficiently solve the minimization of the energy functional, we adopt an alternate minimization procedure and make use of Chambolle's fast duality projection algorithm. We apply the proposed method to synthetic and natural textures as well as real-world natural images. Experimental results show that our proposed method has very promising segmentation performance compared with the current state-of-the-art approaches.
First automatic fongbe continuous speech recognition system: Development of acoustic models and language models

This paper reports our efforts toward an ASR system for a new under-resourced language (Fongbe). The aim of this work is to build acoustic models and language models for continuous speech decoding in Fongbe. The problem encountered with Fongbe (an African language spoken especially in Benin, Togo, and Nigeria) is that it does not have any language resources for an ASR system. As part of this work, we have first collected Fongbe text and speech corpora that are described in the following sections. Acoustic modeling has been worked out at a graphemic level and language modeling has provided two language models for performance comparison purposes. We also performed a vowel simplification by removing tones diacritics in order to investigate their impact on the language models.
Hereditary disorders of platelet function.

The most common hereditary disorders of platelet function are those in which there is decreased platelet aggregation in response to more than one of the commonly used aggregating agents, collagen, ADP, adrenaline and arachidonic acid. When measured, there is usually also a reduction in the extent of the platelet release reaction and often also thromboxane production. In a proportion of these cases it is possible to demonstrate that there is a decrease in or absence of the contents of the dense storage granules which accounts for the decrease in platelet responsiveness. In most other cases the primary cause of the decreased responsiveness has not been determined, although in some cases deficiency of cyclooxygenase or thromboxane synthetase has been demonstrated. Investigation of patients with these disorders is often difficult because the tests involved are difficult to subject to adequate quality control, their sensitivity and specificity has not been adequately defined, and lack of reproducibility renders it difficult in less severe cases to be certain of abnormality even after repeat tests. Much less common but of great interest are the disorders in which the primary abnormality is in one of the glycoproteins on the platelet surface. In Glanzmann's thrombasthenia glycoprotein IIb.IIIa is absent or greatly decreased leading to failure of activated platelets to bind fibrinogen to their surface. In contrast to the decrease in aggregation seen in the above disorders, the platelets do not aggregate at all in response to the usual aggregating agents. In Bernard-Soulier syndrome there are severe deficiencies of three glycoproteins, particularly lb, leading to inability to bind von Willebrand's factor and consequent inability of the platelets to aggregate in response to ristocetin. Study of the disorders of platelet function will continue to contribute to our ability to detect and treat these disorders and to our knowledge of platelet physiology and biochemistry.
Non-critical Heterotic Superstrings in Various Dimensions

We construct heterotic string theories on spacetimes of the form Rd−1,1 × = 2 linear dilaton, where d = 6,4,2,0. There are two lines of supersymmetric theories descending from the two supersymmetric ten-dimensional heterotic theories. These have gauge groups which are lower rank subgroups of E8 × E8 and SO(32). On turning on a (2,2) deformation which makes the two dimensional part a smooth SL2()/U(1) supercoset, the gauge groups get broken further. In the deformed theories, there are non-trivial moduli which are charged under the surviving gauge group in the case of d = 6. We construct the marginal operators on the worldsheet corresponding to these moduli.
Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast

THIS paper presents results of analyses of the forecasting efforts of 45 professional agencies which have attempted, either to select specific common stocks which should prove superior in investment merit to the general run of equities, or to predict the future movements of the stock market itself. The paper falls into two main parts. The first deals with the attempts of two groups, 20 fire insurance companies and 16 financial services, to foretell which specific securities would prove most profitable. The second part deals with the efforts of 25 financial publications to foretell the future course of the stock market. Various statistical tests of these results are given. These investigations were instituted five years ago as a means of testing the success of applied economics in the investment field. It seemed a plausible assumption that if we could demonstrate the existence in individuals or organizations of the ability to foretell the elusive fluctuations, either of particular stocks, or of stocks in general, this might lead to the identification of economic theories or statistical practices whose soundness had been established by successful prediction. The forecasters include well-known organizations in the different fields represented, many of which are large and well financed, employing economists and statisticians of unquestioned ability. The names of these organizations are omitted, since their publication would be likely to invite wholesale controversy over the interpretation of their records. Some of the forecasters seem to have taken a page from the book of the Delphic Oracle, expressing their prophecies in terms susceptible of more than one construction. It would frequently be possible, therefore, for an editor, after the event, to present a plausible challenge of our interpretation. Most of the forecasts appear through the medium of weekly publications and each of these has been read and recorded on the day it became available to us, which in practically every case was before the event. In this way certain possible elements of bias have been eliminated. It was impossible that hindsight could influence our judgment, either in the selection of publications for analysis or in the interpretations placed on their forecasts. In the case of the fire insurance companies, however, the analyses were made annually, based on the transactions reported in Kimber's Record of Insurance Company Security Purchases. The companies were selected as fairly representa-
Textual and Pictorial Glosses: Effectiveness on Incidental Vocabulary Growth When Reading in a Foreign Language.

ABSTRACT The present study investigates the effects of pictorial and textual glosses and a combination thereof on incidental vocabulary growth of foreign language learners. Subjects from second-semester German classes read a narrative text passage under one of three marginal gloss conditions: textual gloss (English translation); pictorial gloss; and text and pictures in the gloss. Subjects were tested on production as well as recognition of fourteen target words both immediately following and two weeks after the reading. Support was found for the hypothesis that subjects utilizing a combination of text and pictures in the gloss would outperform subjects under the other two gloss conditions on the recognition of target words on both short-term memory and retention.
Age at Menopause in Puebla, Mexico

Comparisons of age at menopause are made difficult by the different methodologies applied across populations. This study extended an opportunity to apply different methodologies to the same data to draw some preliminary conclusions about age at menopause in Puebla, Mexico. Among 755 women aged 28 to 70 interviewed in the capital city of Puebla, Mexico, 447 (59.6%) were naturally or surgically postmenopausal. Mean recalled age at natural menopause in Puebla (46.7 years) appears to be similar to mean recalled age at menopause in Mexico City (46.5 years), suggesting that age at menopause is similar in urban Mexican populations. However, median age at menopause computed by probit analysis was later in the city of Puebla (49.6 years) compared to the median age computed by the same method in the capital city of León, Guanajuato, Mexico (48.2 years). Median age at menopause computed by Kaplan-Meier survival analysis suggests that age at menopause in Puebla (50.0 years) is older still, and close to that of the United States (51.1 years). The differences in median ages at menopause in Puebla are solely due to methodological choices and highlight the difficulty inherent in making inferences across studies of age at menopause between biological and/or cultural groups. Factors associated with age at menopause offer another avenue for comparing and understanding variation in this basic biological process. In Puebla, smoking, low levels of education, and nulliparity are associated with an earlier age at menopause.
A Secure and Lightweight Data Access Control Scheme for Mobile Cloud Computing

By moving data storage and processing from lightweight mobile devices to powerful and centralized computing platforms located in clouds, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) can greatly enhance the capability of mobile devices. However, when data owners outsource sensitive data to mobile cloud for sharing, the data is outside of their trusted domain and can potentially be granted to untrusted parties which include the service providers. Data security and flexible access control have become the most pressing demands for MCC. To address this issue, we design a secure and lightweight data access control scheme based on Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm, which can protect the confidentiality of outsourced data and provide fine-grained data access control in MCC. The scheme can obviously improve the overall system performance by greatly reducing the computation overheads in encryption and decryption operations, provide flexible and expressive data access control policy, and meanwhile enable data owners to securely outsource most of the computation overheads at mobile devices to cloud servers. The security and performance evaluation show that our scheme is secure, highly efficient and well suited for lightweight mobile devices.
Performance Limits of Online Energy Harvesting Communications With Noisy Channel State Information at the Transmitter

In energy harvesting communications, the transceivers have to adjust the data transmission to the energy scavenged during the course of communication. The performance of the transmission depends on the channel conditions, which vary randomly due to mobility and environmental changes. In this paper, we consider the problem of power allocation, considering the energy arrivals over time and the quality of channel state information (CSI) measured at the transmitter, in order to maximize the throughput. Differently from previous work, we focus on energy harvesting communications where the CSI at the transmitter is not perfect and may include estimation errors. In this paper, we introduce a Markov process that models the energy arrival process. Indeed, we solve the throughput maximization problem with respect to energy harvesting constraints. We show that the optimal online power policy can be found using dynamic programming. Furthermore, we study the asymptotic behavior of the communication system at low and high average recharge rate regime. Selected numerical results are provided to support our analysis.
Primary clear cell carcinoma in the liver: CT and MRI findings.

AIM To retrospectively analyze the computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) appearances of primary clear cell carcinoma of the liver (PCCCL) and compare the imaging appearances of PCCCL and common type hepatocellular carcinoma (CHCC) to determine whether any differences exist between the two groups. METHODS Twenty cases with pathologically proven PCCCL and 127 cases with CHCC in the Second Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University were included in this study. CT or MRI images from these patients were retrospectively analyzed. The following imaging findings were reviewed: the presence of liver cirrhosis, tumor size, the enhancement pattern on dynamic contrast scanning, the presence of pseudo capsules, tumor rupture, portal vein thrombosis and lymph node metastasis. RESULTS Both PCCCL and CHCC were prone to occur in patients with liver cirrhosis, the association rate of liver cirrhosis was 80.0% and 78.7%, respectively (P > 0.05). The mean sizes of PCCCL and CHCC tumors were (7.28 ± 4.25) cm and (6.96 ± 3.98) cm, respectively. Small HCCs were found in 25.0% (5/20) of PCCCL and 19.7% (25/127) of CHCC cases. No significant differences in mean size and ratio of small HCCs were found between the two groups (P = 0.658 and 0.803, respectively). Compared with CHCC patients, PCCCL patients were more prone to form pseudo capsules (49.6% vs 75.0%, P = 0.034). Tumor rupture, typical HCC enhancement patterns and portal vein tumor thrombosis were detected in 15.0% (3/20), 72.2% (13/18) and 20.0% (4/20) of patients with PCCCL and 3.1% (4/127), 83.6% (97/116) and 17.3% (22/127) of patients with CHCC, respectively. There were no significant differences between the two groups (all P > 0.05). No patients with PCCCL and 2.4% (3/127) of patients with CHCC showed signs of lymph node metastasis (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION The imaging characteristics of PCCCL are similar to those of CHCC and could be useful for differentiating these from other liver tumors (such as hemangioma and hepatic metastases). PCCCLs are more prone than CHCCs to form pseudo capsules.
Computationally-efficient constrained control of the state-of-charge of a Li-ion battery cell

This paper presents a control strategy to perform healthy fast charging of a lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery cell. The control law is based on a two-step approach. First, the battery cell is controlled using an aggressive pre-stabilization loop. Then, constraint satisfaction is ensured by augmenting the resulting system with an explicit reference governor able to handle the (possibly nonlinear) constraints arising from the physics of the battery. The control law is designed using a reduced model of the battery dynamics and is then validated on a highly accurate simulator of the battery cell. Comparisons with existing strategies show that the proposed control scheme exhibits better performances while maintaining a low computational cost.
Effects of LO harmonics and overlap shunting on N-phase passive mixer based receivers

This paper presents an overview of two loss mechanisms in multi-path passive mixers: 1) the up-conversion of harmonic images due to the square shape of the LO sampling pulses, and 2) the overlap between LO pulses. Both these mechanisms can be modeled by a shunting impedance on the mixer input and we explore two methods to mitigate their effects. We expanded a passive-mixer first receiver to N>;8 phases and characterized gain, noise and input impedance tuning range. Additionally, we included hardware to directly measure the effect of overlapping LO pulses on the gain and input impedance of these receivers. Finally, we propose a method to use integrated inductors to suppress the currents which flow when two mixer switches are on at the same time, alleviating this loss mechanism.
Contraintes pour modèle et langage multidimensionnels

This paper defines a constraint-based model dedicated to multidimensional databases. The model we define represents data through a constellation of facts (subjects of analyse) associated to dimensions (axis of analyse), which are possibly shared. Each dimension is organised according to several hierarchies (views of analyse) integrating several levels of data granularity. In order to insure data consistency, we introduce 5 semantic constraints (exclusion, inclusion, partition, simultaneity, totality) which can be intra-dimension or inter-dimensions; the intra-dimension constraints allow the expression of constraints between hierarchies within a same dimension whereas the inter-dimensions constraints focus on hierarchies of distinct dimensions. We also study repercussions of these constraints on multidimensional manipulations and we provide extensions of the multidimensional operators.
Value Priorities and Behavior: Applying a Theory of Integrated Value Systems

A major goal of research on values has been to relate individual differences in value priorities to differences in attitudes, behavior and background variables. Past research most commonly adopted one of two approaches. Much research has selected a few single target values whose priorities were postulated to associate with the attitude, behavior and background variable of interest and then examined empirical relationships. Other research has been more exploratory.It has related lists of values to various other variables and then discussed the significant associations that emerge. The focus on relationships with single values make both these approaches insatisfying. My work has sought to overcome those approaches.It has derived what may be a nearly comprehensive set of different motivational types of values, recognized across cultures. Each value type is represented by a number of single values that are combined to form relatively reliable indexes of values priorities. Value systems can be treated as integrated wholes in their relations with behaviors and, thereby, encourages researches to abandom the prevailing single-values approaches.