Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Variegated tropical landscapes conserve diverse dung beetle communities

Background Conserving biodiversity in tropical landscapes is a major challenge to scientists and conservationists. Current rates of deforestation, fragmentation, and land use intensification are producing variegated landscapes with undetermined values for the conservation of biological communities and ecosystem functioning. Here, we investigate the importance of tropical variegated landscapes to biodiversity conservation, using dung beetle as focal taxa. Methods The study was carried out in 12 variegated landscapes where dung beetles were sampled using six pitfall traps, 30 m apart from each other, along a transect in each studied landscape use and cover classes—LUCC (forest fragment and corridor, coffee plantation, and pasture). We baited each pitfall trap with 30 g of human feces and left open for a 48 h period. We also measured three environmental variables reflecting structural differences among the studied classes: canopy cover, local vegetation heterogeneity and soil sand content. Results We collected 52 species and 2,695 individuals of dung beetles. We observed significant differences in the mean species richness, abundance and biomass among classes, with forest fragments presenting the highest values, forest corridors and coffee plantations presenting intermediate values, and pastures the lowest values. Regarding community structure, we also found significant differences among classes. Canopy cover was the only variable explaining variation in dung beetle species richness, abundance, biomass, and community structure. The relative importance of spatial turnover was greater than nestedness-resultant component in all studied landscapes. Discussion This study evaluated the ecological patterns of dung beetle communities in variegated tropical landscapes highlighting the importance of these landscapes for conservation of tropical biodiversity. However, we encourage variegation for the management of landscapes that have already been fragmented or as a complementary initiative of current conservation practices (e.g., protection of natural habitats and establishment of reserves).
Storied Lives on Instagram: Factors Associated With the Need for Personal-Visual Identity

This research explores how sharing photos on social networking sites contributes to an individual's identity expression. A mixed-methods survey was conducted with Instagram users to understand how they frame, annotate, and share their lives with others through digital photography. Results from a serial multiple mediator model reveal that the frequency with which individuals post on Instagram predicts their need for personal-visual identity and this relationship is mediated by self-objectification and self-confidence. Previous research supports the positive association between frequent posting of photographs on social networking sites and visual identity expression. The current study provides evidence for mechanisms that enable this relationship. Implications for impression management theory and visual communication research are discussed.
Staying online while mobile: the hidden costs

Mobile phones in the 3G/4G era enable us to stay connected not only to the voice network, but also to online services like social networks. In this paper, we study the energy and network costs of mobile applications that provide continuous online presence (e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype). By combining measurements taken on the mobile and the cellular access network, we reveal a detailed picture of the mechanisms selected to implement online presence, along with their effect on handset energy consumption and network signaling traffic. We are surprised to find that simply having idle online presence apps on a mobile (that maintain connectivity in the background, with no user interaction) can drain the handset battery nine times more quickly. This high cost is partly due to online presence apps that are excessively ``chatty'', in particular when their design philosophy stems from a similar desktop version. However, we also find that the cost of background app traffic is disproportionately large because of cross-layer interactions in which the traffic unintentionally triggers the promotion of cellular network states. Our experiments show that both of these effects can be overcome with careful implementation. We posit that a two-way push notification system, with messages being sent at a low (regular) frequency and low volume by a network-aware sender, can alleviate many of the costs.
S YSTEM D YNAMICS MODELICA LIBRARY BRIEF FEATURE AND EXAMPLE DOCUMENTATION

This text presents a new Modelica library SystemDynamics , allowing to model according to the principles of system dynamics, as originated by J.W. Forrester in the 1960’s. The field of system dynamics is not new and well established, hence, the novelty and value of this library is not to be seen in the modeling principles of system dynamics themselves, rather, in the combination of system dynamics modeling with the vast object-oriented, multi-formalism, physical modeling capabilities of Modelica. System dynamics is widespread
Mitochondrial Translocation of p53 Mediates Release of Cytochrome c and Hippocampal CA1 Neuronal Death after Transient Global Cerebral Ischemia in Rats

Although p53 is a key modulator of cellular stress responses, the mechanism of p53-mediated apoptosis is ambiguous. p53 can mediate apoptosis in response to death stimuli by transcriptional activation of proapoptotic genes and transcriptional-independent mechanisms. Recent studies have shown that the p53 protein can directly induce permeabilization of the outer mitochondrial membrane by forming a inhibitory complex with a protective Bcl-2 family protein, resulting in cytochrome c release. However, how the mitochondrial p53 pathway mediates neuronal apoptosis after cerebral ischemia remains unclear. We examined the interaction between the mitochondrial p53 pathway and vulnerable hippocampal CA1 neurons in rats using a transient global cerebral ischemia (tGCI) model. Western blot analysis and immunofluorescent staining revealed mitochondrial p53 translocation after tGCI in the hippocampal CA1 neurons. Coimmunoprecipitation revealed that translocated p53 bound to Bcl-XL in the mitochondrial fraction. To examine the effect of a specific p53 inhibitor on the mitochondrial p53 pathway and apoptotic cell death after tGCI, we intravenously administered pifithrin-α (PFT). Mitochondrial p53 translocation and interaction between p53 and Bcl-XL were prevented by treatment with PFT. Moreover, cytochrome c release from mitochondria and subsequent apoptotic CA1 neuronal death were decreased with PFT treatment. These results suggest that the mitochondrial p53 pathway is one of the novel mechanisms mediating delayed death of vulnerable hippocampal CA1 neurons after tGCI.
Frequency effects in Subject Islands

This work provides evidence that Subject Island violation effects vanish if subject-embedded gaps are made as frequent and pragmatically felicitous as non-island counterpart controls. We argue that Subject Island effects are caused by the fact that subject-embedded gaps are pragmatically unusual – as the informational focus does not usually correspond to a dependant of the subject phrase – and therefore are highly contrary to comprehenders’ expectations about the distribution of filler–gap dependencies (Chaves 2013, Hofmeister, Casasanto & Sag 2013). This not only explains why sentences with subject-embedded gaps often become more acceptable ‘parasitically’, in the presence of a second gap outside the island, but also explains why some Subject Island violations fail to exhibit any amelioration with repetition (Sprouse 2009, Crawford 2011, Goodall 2011); some ameliorate marginally (Snyder 2000, 2017) or moderately (Hiramatsu 2000, Clausen 2011, Chaves & Dery 2014), and others become fully acceptable, as in our case. This conclusion extends to self-paced reading Subject Island studies (Stowe 1986, Kurtzman & Crawford 1991, Pickering, Barton & Shillcock 1994, Phillips 2006), which sometimes find evidence of gap filling and sometimes do not.
BoBs: breakable objects

Direct redeployment of an application from one scenario to another through straightforward refactoring is difficult. Application objects need to be in a form amenable to partitioning. We propose Breakable Objects - BoBs, as a solution. We show how BoBs may be used(BoB Driven Architecture) in an application and how BoBs are favorable to splitting and redeployment.
SIGNALPLAYER-A TIME SERIES VISUALIZATION SYSTEM

Graphical presentation of long time series signals is challenging because the resolution of a computer screen in pixels is usually smaller than the length of the signal in points . However, visualizing signals at a glance is highly important because analysing data in graphical form can be much more productive than it is in numerical or written form. Visualization of complete signals is possible only when using presentative approximations of the signals. For this purpo se SignalPlayer, a time series visualization system, is devel oped and presented in this paper. SignalPlayer is a flexible tool for the basic visualization of time series. It enables t he display of the complete signal at a glance and gives the user the option to choose or implement the visualization technique for the presentation. The tool can also be used to examine the signals in detail.
Online Query Grouping With Collaborative Ranking Based On Search History

— Users are depending on the web to pursue complex tasks and to achieve broader information. Search of complex tasks usually breaks down into co-dependent steps and issue multiple queries. Query Grouping is used to collect related queries which need common information. Query groups are used to support user in their long term information search. Online query groups are created in an automated and dynamic fashion. Keyword based similarity suffers from the problem of synonymic and polysomic queries. In time based similarity, related queries may not appear close to one another in search history. In K-Means algorithm, number of cluster and cluster means are decided initially. If data increases dynamically, there is no flexibility to increase clusters in K-Means algorithm. In the proposed system, the relevance algorithm resolves problem of polysomic and synonymic queries. Also related queries appear close to each other in query group. The proposed system resolves problem of K-Means algorithm by providing facility to increase the number of clusters (groups) if data increases. Relevance algorithm is based on a query fusion graph, where each edge represents either common clicks or consecutive count. In previous methodology, queries are added randomly into related group. In proposed system collaborative ranking is applied on each query. Each newly inserted query is added into its related groups according to its ranked relevance value.
Searching and ranking researchers by keywords based on author and paper matrix rank

A novice researcher conducting research in a new field, must identify that the preeminent researchers in that field in order to obtain influential papers to refer to. Although some Internet services allow users to search for researchers, these services do not take coauthors and related papers into consideration. In this paper, we propose a new researcher search-and-ranking method that is based on a new matrix called the Author and Paper Matrix (APM). The APM allows coauthor and related-paper references to be embedded as the weight of an APM element. A preliminary evaluation of APM demonstrates that it can help to identify appropriate and influential researchers within a given field.
Effect and mechanism of resveratrol on drug resistance in human bladder cancer cells

Multidrug resistance (MDR) is a significant barrier to the effective treatment of bladder cancer. In order to improve the management of bladder cancer, it is crucial to identify strategies that may reverse MDR. The effects of three herbal medicines, ginsenoside Rh2, (−)-epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) and resveratrol (RES) on bladder cancer were determined. The effect of these three herbal medicines against the drug resistance in adriamycin (ADM)-resistant pumc-91 cells (pumc-91/ADM) was assessed using the Cell Counting Kit-8 cell proliferation assay system. Cell cycle distribution analysis was performed using flow cytometry following treatment with RES. The mRNA and protein expression levels of multidrug resistance protein 1 (MRP1), lung resistance protein (LRP), glutathione S-transferase (GST), B cell leukemia/lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) and topoisomerase-II (Topo-II) were evaluated using reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction and immunofluorescence, respectively. RES enhanced the cytotoxicity of anticancer agents on pumc-91/ADM cells; however, Rh2 and EGCG were unable to induce a similar effect. Additionally, RES treatment led to S phase cell cycle arrest accompanied by a decrease in the number of cells in the G1 phase. A significant decrease of MRP1, LRP, GST, BCL-2 levels and an increase of Topo-II levels were observed in RES groups compared with the control group. RES effectively reversed ADM resistance in pumc-91/ADM cells and the underlying molecular mechanism may be associated with the alteration of MRP1, LRP, GST, BCL-2 and Topo-II expression levels. Therefore, RES may be a potential candidate for reversing drug resistance in bladder cancer chemotherapy.
A novel architecture for IEEE 802.16m subscriber station for joint power saving class management

IEEE 802.16m amendment is being drafted to meet the 4G network requirements as an extension to 802.16e-2005. In 802.16e, a Subscriber Station (SS) can have multiple connections to a Base Station (BS) for supporting different services simultaneously. SS negotiates sleep-mode with BS by exchange of management information for one or more connections per active Power Saving Class Identifier (PSC_ID) belonging to a Power Saving Class (PSC). However, after this negotiation, SS may not be able to switch to actual sleep-mode (low power operation) as connections belonging to other PSC_ID may be in the transmission or reception mode. Moreover, this causes an overhead of management messages exchanged between the SS and BS per PSC_ID that results in excess packet delay as well as wastage of power and bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture referred as Sleep-Mode Manager Architecture to negotiate the sleep mode for the SS and to compute the sleep-mode per quality of service (QoS) class by aggregating the unavailability periods of all the active PSC_ID traffic. This architecture reduces the overhead of management messages, thereby conserving bandwidth and energy as well as supporting dynamic adaptation in sleep-mode parameters. Our simulation and analysis results reveal that the proposed architecture performs substantially better than the 802.16e standard and the relative performance improves with increasing number of active PSC_IDs which can be implemented in 802.16m. Furthermore, through analysis we find that the efficiency of device switching to sleep-mode improves from 7.1% in case of single PSC_ID to 35% in case of joint power class management for ten simultaneous connections. Simulation reveals that, the management message exchange overhead in case of proposed joint power saving class reduces to 1/5th of that in case of individual PSC_ID management in case of four simultaneous PSC_IDs.
The Role of Correlated Properties in Accessing Conceptual Memory

A fundamental question in research on conceptual structure concerns how information is represented in memory and used in tasks such as recognizing words. The present research focused on the role of correlations among semantic properties in conceptual memory. Norms were collected for 190 entities from 10 categories. Property intercorrelations influenced people's performance in both a property verification task and a short interval semantic priming experiment. Furthermore, correlated properties were more important for biological kinds than for artifacts. A connectionist model of the computation of word meaning was implemented in which property intercorrelations developed in the course of learning. The model was used to simulate the results of the two experiments. We then tested a novel prediction derived from the model: that the intercorrelational density of a concept's properties should influence the speed with which a concept is computed. This prediction was confirmed in a final experiment. We concluded that encoded knowledge of property co-occurrences plays a prominent role in the representation and computation of word meaning. ________________________ This work was supported by an FCAR (Quebec) doctoral fellowship and an NSERC (Canada) postdoctoral fellowship to the first author, an NSERC 1967 (Canada) doctoral fellowship to the second author, NIMH grant PO1MH47566 to the third author, and NIH grant HD 27206 to M. K. Tanenhaus and G. Carlson. Part of this research formed KM’s McGill University doctoral dissertation. We would also like to thank the McGill-IBM cooperative project in Science, Medicine, and Engineering for donating IBM microcomputers used in these experiments. We are also indebted to Mike Tanenhaus, Michael Spivey, and Kyunghee Koh for comments and helpful suggestions on
Insertion and querying mechanism for a distributed XML database system

XML files are ideal for describing semi structured data. The advent of native XML databases has enhanced storage of a large number of XML files preserving the hierarchical format. The challenge is to serve and access XML data from geographically distributed native XML databases. In this paper, we discuss the modus operandi for insertion and querying of data in a location transparent manner in decentralised networks. We present the design for a cluster based architecture where query processingF is achieved using distributed hash tables. A bulk insertion method has been employed for insertion of XML data. The proposed design was implemented on eXist-db, a native XML database engine. Experiments were conducted and the effectiveness of the proposed design was evaluated.
Group-caching for NoC based multicore cache coherent systems

Most CMPs use on-chip networks to connect cores and tend to integrate more simple cores on a single die. Low-radix networks, such as 2D-MESH, are widely used in tiled CMPs since they can be mapped to on-chip networks efficiently. However, low-radix networks introduce high network latency caused by long diameter. In this paper, we propose the use of group-caching design in NoC based multicore cache coherent systems. In our design, on-chip L2 banks are organized to form multiple groups. Each cache group behaves like a shared L2 cache for the cores inside cache group while the cache coherence between cache groups is maintained by coherence messages. Besides, group-caching also adopts the new cache replacement policy to improve the inefficient use of the aggregate L2 cache capacity. Compared to banked and shared L2 design, as most L2 accesses are served by local cache group, the hop count is significantly reduced. Experiment results based on full-system simulation show that for 2D-MESH, group-caching can increase the performance by 2%∼8% compared to banked and shared L2 design, with network energy consumption reduced by 11%∼13%. Experiment results also show that the communication overhead inside cache group plays an important role in the performance of groupcaching.
Resolving non-uniqueness in the acoustic-to-articulatory mapping

This paper studies the role of non-uniqueness in the Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion. It is generally believed that applying continuity constraints to the estimates of the articulatory parameters can resolve the problem of non-uniqueness. This paper tries to find out whether all instances of non-uniqueness can be resolved using continuity constraints. The investigation reveals that applying continuity constraints provides the best estimate in roughly around 50 to 53 % of the non-unique mappings. Roughly around 8 to 13 % of the non-unique mappings are best estimated by choosing discontinuous paths along the hypothetical high probability estimates of articulatory trajectories.
A blocking-based approach to protocol validation

One common approach to protocol validation is reachability analysis, which involves systematically exploring the state space of a protocol. The main challenge of reachability analysis is dealing with the state explosion problem. In this paper, we present a new reachability analysis approach, called blocking-based simultaneous reachability analysis, for protocol validation. This approach has the potential to significantly reduce the number of states that have to be explored but can still be used to detect several logical errors that are commonly found in a protocol.
Piecewise planar underwater mosaicing

A commonly ignored problem in planar mosaics, yet often present in practice, is the selection of a reference homography reprojection frame where to attach the successive image frames of the mosaic. A bad choice for the reference frame can lead to severe distortions in the mosaic and can degenerate in incorrect configurations after some sequential frame concatenations. This problem is accentuated in uncontrolled underwater acquisition setups as those provided by AUVs or ROVs due to both the noisy trajectory of the acquisition vehicle - with roll and pitch shakes - and to the non-flat nature of the seabed which tends to break the planarity assumption implicit in the mosaic construction. These scenarios can also introduce other undesired effects, such as light variations between successive frames, scattering and attenuation, vignetting, flickering and noise. This paper proposes a novel mosaicing pipeline, also including a strategy to select the best reference homography in planar mosaics from video sequences which minimizes the distortions induced on each image by the mosaic homography itself. Moreover, a new non-linear color correction scheme is incorporated to handle strong color and luminosity variations among the mosaic frames. Experimental evaluation of the proposed method on real, challenging underwater video sequences shows the validity of the approach, providing clear and visually appealing mosaics.
Application of EMMD in Modal Parameter Identification of Structures under Ambient Excitation

This paper mainly provides a modal parameter identification method based on combination of extremum field mean mode decomposition (EMMD) and random decrement technique (RDT), which is applied to structures under ambient excitation. In this method, firstly, a number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) are decomposed from acceleration response of structure under ambient excitation by using EMMD. Next, the RDT is applied to calculate response of free vibration for each IMF, and then identify the modal parameters from free vibration response. The principle and concrete steps of the method are given in this paper, and the feasibility and validity of this method are demonstrated through a emulation experiment.
Newton and Quasi-Newton Methods for a Class of Nonsmooth Equations and Related Problems

The paper presents concrete realizations of quasi-Newton methods for solving several standard problems including complementarity problems, special variational inequality problems, and the Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) system of nonlinear programming. A new approximation idea is introduced in this paper. The Q-superlinear convergence of the Newton method and the quasi-Newton method are established under suitable assumptions, in which the existence of F'(x*) is not assumed. The new algorithms only need to solve a linear equation in each step. For complementarity problems, the QR factorization on the quasi-Newton method is discussed.