Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of marker choice and thermal cycling protocol on zooplankton DNA metabarcoding studies

Abstract DNA metabarcoding is a promising approach for rapidly surveying biodiversity and is likely to become an important tool for measuring ecosystem responses to environmental change. Metabarcoding markers need sufficient taxonomic coverage to detect groups of interest, sufficient sequence divergence to resolve species, and will ideally indicate relative abundance of taxa present. We characterized zooplankton assemblages with three different metabarcoding markers (nuclear 18S rDNA, mitochondrial COI, and mitochondrial 16S rDNA) to compare their performance in terms of taxonomic coverage, taxonomic resolution, and correspondence between morphology‐ and DNA‐based identification. COI amplicons sequenced on separate runs showed that operational taxonomic units representing >0.1% of reads per sample were highly reproducible, although slightly more taxa were detected using a lower annealing temperature. Mitochondrial COI and nuclear 18S showed similar taxonomic coverage across zooplankton phyla. However, mitochondrial COI resolved up to threefold more taxa to species compared to 18S. All markers revealed similar patterns of beta‐diversity, although different taxa were identified as the greatest contributors to these patterns for 18S. For calanoid copepod families, all markers displayed a positive relationship between biomass and sequence reads, although the relationship was typically strongest for 18S. The use of COI for metabarcoding has been questioned due to lack of conserved primer‐binding sites. However, our results show the taxonomic coverage and resolution provided by degenerate COI primers, combined with a comparatively well‐developed reference sequence database, make them valuable metabarcoding markers for biodiversity assessment.
Adaptive Template Block-Based Block Matching for Object Tracking

This paper proposes an adaptive template block for object tracking in typical block matching algorithms. The bounding box of moving object would have different scales while the object moves from near to far or from far to near. Therefore, the typical block matching algorithms using the fixed template block would obtain inaccurate object tracking and object recognition. The proposed adaptive template block is used in block matching algorithm to obtain accurate and reliable tracking of object with different scales. Experimental results demonstrate that the typical block matching algorithm using proposed adaptive template block have better performance than one using the fixed template block in object tracking.
Diagnosing Femoroacetabular Impingement From Plain Radiographs

Background: A diagnosis of femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) requires careful history and physical examination, as well as an accurate and reliable radiologic evaluation using plain radiographs as a screening modality. Radiographic markers in the diagnosis of FAI are numerous and not fully validated. In particular, reliability in their assessment across health care providers is unclear. Purpose: To determine inter- and intraobserver reliability between orthopaedic surgeons and musculoskeletal radiologists. Study Design: Cohort study (diagnosis); Level of evidence, 3. Methods: Six physicians (3 orthopaedic surgeons, 3 musculoskeletal radiologists) independently evaluated a broad spectrum of FAI pathologies across 51 hip radiographs on 2 occasions separated by at least 4 weeks. Reviewers used 8 common criteria to diagnose FAI, including (1) pistol-grip deformity, (2) size of alpha angle, (3) femoral head-neck offset, (4) posterior wall sign abnormality, (5) ischial spine sign abnormality, (6) coxa profunda abnormality, (7) crossover sign abnormality, and (8) acetabular protrusion. Agreement was calculated using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Results: When establishing an FAI diagnosis, there was poor interobserver reliability between the surgeons and radiologists (ICC batch 1 = 0.33; ICC batch 2 = 0.15). In contrast, there was higher interobserver reliability within each specialty, ranging from fair to good (surgeons: ICC batch 1 = 0.72; ICC batch 2 = 0.70 vs radiologists: ICC batch 1 = 0.59; ICC batch 2 = 0.74). Orthopaedic surgeons had the highest interobserver reliability when identifying pistol-grip deformities (ICC = 0.81) or abnormal alpha angles (ICC = 0.81). Similarly, radiologists had the highest agreement for detecting pistol-grip deformities (ICC = 0.75). Conclusion: These results suggest that surgeons and radiologists agree among themselves, but there is a need to improve the reliability of radiographic interpretations for FAI between the 2 specialties. The observed degree of low reliability may ultimately lead to missed, delayed, or inappropriate treatments for patients with symptomatic FAI.
The prime factorization property of entangled quantum states

Completely entangled quantum states are shown to factorize into tensor products of entangled states whose dimensions are powers of prime numbers. The entangled states of each prime-power dimension transform among themselves under a finite Heisenberg group. We are thus led to examine processes in which factors are exchanged between entangled states and so consider canonical ensembles in which these processes occur. It is shown that the Riemann zeta function is the appropriate partition function and that the Riemann hypothesis makes a prediction about the high temperature contribution of modes of large dimension.
Feature-Enhanced Visualization of Multidimensional, Multivariate Volume Data Using Non-photorealistic Rendering Techniques

Author(s): Lum, Eric; Ma, Kwan-Liu | Abstract: This paper presents a set of feature enhancement techniques coupled with hardware-accelerated nonphotorealistic rendering for generating more perceptually effective visualization of multidimensional, multivariate volume data, such as those obtained from typical computational fluid dynamics simulations. For time-invariant data, one or more variables are used to either highlight important features in another variable, or add contextural information to the visualization. For time-varying data, rendering of each time step also takes into account the values at neighboring time steps to reinforce the perception of the changing features in the data over time. With hardware-accelerated rendering, interactive visualization becomes possible leading to increased explorability and comprehension of the data.
Biology of sea turtles under risk from tiger sharks at a foraging ground

It is important to understand the population structure and space use of sea turtles because of their potential effects on the dynamics of nearshore ecosystems. Much of our current understanding is skewed because the ecology of sea turtles on their foraging grounds is known best from areas where there are, or have been, major human impacts. We studied green Chelonia mydas and loggerhead Caretta caretta sea turtles on the relatively pristine feeding ground of Shark Bay, Western Australia, where tiger sharks Galeocerdo cuvier are a major mortality agent. Recapture rates were lower for green than for loggerhead turtles, possibly reflecting a larger population rather than low site fidelity for greens. The sex ratio of loggerhead turtles was not significantly different from 1:1, whereas green turtles showed a strong female bias. Size distributions of both species were skewed towards larger (and presumably older) individuals relative to a human-impacted feeding ground in eastern Australia. Body condition varied temporally for green turtles, but not for loggerhead turtles, possibly due to longer distances traveled to nesting beaches by green turtles. Rates of shark-inflicted injuries were higher for loggerhead turtles, especially males, than for greens. Sublethal effects of these injuries were not evident. There are notable differences between sea turtles threatened primar- ily by tiger sharks in Shark Bay and populations on feeding grounds where historical and current mortality causes are anthropogenic. We conclude that without baseline data from relatively pristine habitats our understanding of human impacts on sea turtle populations suffers from a limited scope.
Association of body surface area and body composition with heart structural characteristics of female swimmers

In healthy nonathletic populations, some left ventricle (LV) parameters such as LV mass (LVM) and LV end diastolic dimension (LVEDD) can be predicted by some of body size parameters such as body surface area (BSA), fat-free mass (FFM), and height (H). These body size parameters use to remove covariate influence of body size from cardiac dimension variables and allow comparisons to be made between individuals and groups of different body size. Endurance exercise has been associated with changes in LV size and body composition of athletes. The aim of this study was to evaluate in 30 trained female swimmers (12–17 y) possible correlations between BSA, FFM, fat mass (FM) determined by bioelectrical impedance analyzer(BIA); and a range of cardiac dimensions derived by echocardiography. Univariate correlations were studied between left ventricular and body size variables. Stepwise multiple linear regression was performed to determine the best determinants of LV variables. LVM and LVEDD had a significant relation with FFM (P<0.001) and BSA (p<0.05). Left ventricle posterior wall thickness (PWT) had a significant relation with BSA (p<0.001) and FFM (p<0.005). No relation was found between heart’s structural variable (LVM, LVEDD, LVESD and PWT) and FM. Using a multivariate regression analysis, FFM was the only independent predictor of both LVM (R2=0.541, P<0.001) and LVEDD (R2=0.189, P<0.05). These results suggest that Correction of LVM and LVEDD by FFM in athletes may be more appropriate than other measures of body size for indexing absolute amounts of LV dimension. Yet further researches in other athletes are required to confirm these findings.
Immune Network for Classifying Heterogeneous Data

In the previous AIS research, most of the AIS classifiers use clonal selection and require the data to be in numerical or categorical data types prior to processing. These classifiers ignore the network feature of the immune system that is suitable for classification. Furthermore, the transformation of data into any other specific types from their original form can degrade the originality of the data and consume more space and pre processing time. This paper introduces resource limited immune network model with hybrid affinity measurement for classifying heterogeneous data in its original types. The model is able to process the data with the types as represented in the database. The paper shows comparisons between the model and the selected existing immune algorithms that also uses the same set of data and parameters. The experimental results show that the immune network model produces a better accuracy rate with shorter classifier on most of the heterogeneous data from University of California, Irvive (UCI) machine learning repository (MLR).
Dynamic hierarchical mobility management strategy for mobile IP networks

One of the major challenges for the wireless network design is the efficient mobility management, which can be addressed globally (macromobility) and locally (micromobility). Mobile Internet protocol (IP) is a commonly accepted standard to address global mobility of mobile hosts (MHs). It requires the MHs to register with the home agents (HAs) whenever their care-of addresses change. However, such registrations may cause excessive signaling traffic and long service delay. To solve this problem, the hierarchical mobile IP (HMIP) protocol was proposed to employ the hierarchy of foreign agents (FAs) and the gateway FAs (GFAs) to localize registration operations. However, the system performance is critically affected by the selection of GFAs and their reliability. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic hierarchical mobility management strategy for mobile IP networks, in which different hierarchies are dynamically set up for different users and the signaling burden is evenly distributed among the network. To justify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the signaling cost. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed dynamic hierarchical mobility management strategy can significantly reduce the system signaling cost under various scenarios and the system robustness is greatly enhanced. Our analysis also shows that the new scheme can outperform the Internet Engineering Task Force mobile IP hierarchical registration scheme in terms of the overall signaling cost. The more important contribution is the novel analytical approach in evaluating the performance of mobile IP networks.
Structural Basis for the Inhibition of Helicobacter pylori α-Carbonic Anhydrase by Sulfonamides

Periplasmic α-carbonic anhydrase of Helicobacter pylori (HpαCA), an oncogenic bacterium in the human stomach, is essential for its acclimation to low pH. It catalyses the conversion of carbon dioxide to bicarbonate using Zn(II) as the cofactor. In H. pylori, Neisseria spp. , Brucella suis and Streptococcus pneumoniae this enzyme is the target for sulfonamide antibacterial agents. We present structural analysis correlated with inhibition data, on the complexes of HpαCA with two pharmacological inhibitors of human carbonic anhydrases, acetazolamide and methazolamide. This analysis reveals that two sulfonamide oxygen atoms of the inhibitors are positioned proximal to the putative location of the oxygens of the CO2 substrate in the Michaelis complex, whilst the zinc-coordinating sulfonamide nitrogen occupies the position of the catalytic water molecule. The structures are consistent with acetazolamide acting as site-directed, nanomolar inhibitors of the enzyme by mimicking its reaction transition state. Additionally, inhibitor binding provides insights into the channel for substrate entry and product exit. This analysis has implications for the structure-based design of inhibitors of bacterial carbonic anhydrases.
School choice for the poor? The limits of marketisation of primary education in rural India

In recent years India has seen an explosion in low-fee private (LFP) schooling aimed at the poorer strata of society. This marketisation of primary education, around which there is much contentious debate, is a reflexive reaction to the well-documented failings of the government system. LFP schooling, initially an urban phenomenon, has over the past decade experienced considerable growth in rural areas, and it is the rural setting, home to the majority of Indians, which is the least researched. It is argued by some that an effective policy response would be to rely increasingly on market-based competition involving LFPs, as these schools are purported to be affordable and accessible to the poor. Based primarily on a thirteen-village survey of 250 households and visits to 26 private and government schools in one rural district of Uttar Pradesh, India, this paper explores whether LFPs are in fact affordable to the rural poor and marginalised by examining the key factors in parental decision making and ultimately discovering whether equity considerations are served. Based on a detailed conceptual analysis of different poverty indicators, the paper adopts multivariate analysis to determine whether poverty is a major deciding factor in school choice, once other possible determinants associated with child and family characteristics are taken into account. The interpretation of the quantitative evidence was supported and triangulated by the qualitative evidence from focus group discussions.
ESB: Ext2 Split Block Device

Solid State Disks (SSDs) start to replace rotating media (hard disks, HDD) in many areas, but are still not as cost efficient concerning capacity to completely replace them. One approach to use their superior performance properties is to use them as a cache for magnetic disks to speed up overall storage operations. In this paper, we present and evaluate a file system level optimization based on ext2. We split metadata and data and store the metadata on a SDD while the data remains on a common HDD. We evaluate our system with filebench under a file server, web server, and web proxy scenario and compare the results with flashcache. We find that many of the scenarios do not contain enough metadata operations to reasonably speed up IO performance.
Parcel Size, Location and Commercial Land Values

The concept of a peak in value or a "100% location" is so well established in real estate that there is no reference to the term in recent real estate principles and appraisal texts. However, the land value section in appraisals of a regional shopping center did not apply the concept when adjusting comparables for location, which resulted in a substantial underestimation of site value. A regression model that included a distance variable to control for location produced a value estimate that was more than double the values in the appraisals. The empirical results illustrate that the subject site represented a distinct peak in land value as well as reemphasizing the importance of making careful location adjustments in situations where there is a distinct peak in land value.
A 10GHz With Low Power And Low Noise Figure Amplifier Using 0.18/spl mu/m CMOS Technology

The purpose of this work is to explore the optimum LNA design that input impedance match, gain, noise figure, linearity, and power consumption, in this LNA design operating at the 10GHz has been simulated based on a TSMC 0.18-mum RF CMOS process. This paper presents a 10 GHz operation is designed and implemented in a standard cascode LNA technology for an 802.16a application. The LNA exhibits a noise figure of 2.4dB, power gain of 15.8-dB, input return loss of 15.7dB, 1dB compression point of -20.3dBm The power consumption is 18.9mW at Vcc = 1.8 V
Quantitative Relationships between Huntingtin Levels, Polyglutamine Length, Inclusion Body Formation, and Neuronal Death Provide Novel Insight into Huntington's Disease Molecular Pathogenesis

An expanded polyglutamine (polyQ) stretch in the protein huntingtin (htt) induces self-aggregation into inclusion bodies (IBs) and causes Huntington's disease (HD). Defining precise relationships between early observable variables and neuronal death at the molecular and cellular levels should improve our understanding of HD pathogenesis. Here, we used an automated microscope that tracks thousands of neurons individually over their entire lifetime to quantify interconnected relationships between early variables, such as htt levels, polyQ length, and IB formation, and neuronal death in a primary striatal model of HD. The resulting model revealed that mutant htt increases the risk of death by tonically interfering with homeostatic coping mechanisms rather than producing accumulated damage to the neuron, htt toxicity is saturable, the rate-limiting steps for inclusion body formation and death can be traced to different conformational changes in monomeric htt, and IB formation reduces the impact of the starting levels of htt of a neuron on its risk of death. Finally, the model that emerges from our quantitative measurements places critical limits on the potential mechanisms by which mutant htt might induce neurodegeneration, which should help direct future research.
Electromagnetic Scattering by a General Rotationally Symmetric Inhomogeneous Anisotropic Sphere

In this work, the electromagnetic scattering in general rotationally symmetric inhomogeneous anisotropic spheres is investigated. A rigorous full-wave solution is presented based on the volume integral equation. The solution is achieved by expanding the unknown fields in fully orthogonal Dini-type spherical vector wave functions. This formulation allows the study of general rotationally symmetric gyrotropic spheres with varying permittivity and permeability tensors. We investigate the validity of the developed method, which is next applied on the computation of the scattering cross sections of inhomogeneous rotationally symmetric gyroelectric and gyromagnetic spheres.
An isopropanolic extract of black cohosh does not increase mammographic breast density or breast cell proliferation in postmenopausal women

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the effects of the isopropanolic extract of black cohosh (Remifemin) on mammographic breast density and breast epithelial proliferation in healthy, naturally postmenopausal women with climacteric symptoms. Design: This was a prospective, open, uncontrolled drug safety study in which baseline status was compared with status after 6 months of treatment by blinded observers. A total of 74 women were treated with 40 mg black cohosh daily, and 65 women completed the study. Mammograms were performed, and breast cells were collected by percutaneous fine needle aspiration biopsies at baseline and after 6 months. Mammographic density was quantified according to the Wolfe classification or a percentage scale. Breast cell proliferation was assessed using the Ki-67/MIB-1 monoclonal antibody. Safety was monitored by adverse event reporting, laboratory assessments, and measurement of the endometrium by vaginal ultrasound. Results: None of the women showed any increase in mammographic breast density. Furthermore, there was no increase in breast cell proliferation. The mean change ± SD in proportion of Ki-67-positive cells was −0.5% ± 2.4% (median, 0.0; 95% CI = −1.32 to 0.34) for paired samples. The mean change in endometrial thickness ± SD was 0.0 ± 0.9 mm (median, 0.0). A modest number of adverse events were possibly related to treatment, but none of these were serious. Laboratory findings and vital signs were normal. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the isopropanolic extract of black cohosh does not cause adverse effects on breast tissue. Furthermore, our data do not indicate to any endometrial or general safety concerns during 6 months of treatment.
Arbitrage and Endogenous Market Integration

We analyse a general equilibrium model of strategic arbitraging and intermediation. Arbitrageurs take advantage of mispricings, market frictions and manipulation opportunities in order to maximise profits. We analyse the effects of increased competition among arbitrageurs due to lower entry costs. Typically, markets become more liquid and integrated, and Cournot-Walas equilibria converge to Walrasian equilibria, though not uniformly: mispricings persist longer on shallow markets. We also provide a class of economies where the limiting equilibria are neither integrated nor Walrasian. Furthermore, we show that the asset pricing implications for financial innovations are quite different from standard models.
PhoneTouch : Seamless Cross-Device Interaction

Mobile devices (e.g., smart phones) and interactive surfaces (e.g., digital tabletops) represent two distinct device classes: One is personal and portable, the other shared and stationary. They excel at different tasks, and are less suited for others. Combining their distinct characteristics can realize various synergies. In doing so, we recently introduced PhoneTouch, a system that allows users to directly touch a digital surface with their phones, much like a stylus, for immediate cross-device interaction. The purpose might be to seamlessly transfer photos in both directions, for example. We developed a series of compelling interaction techniques and applications to illustrate the fluidity of our approach. Throughout our design iterations, all test users exposed to the system were enthused by the nature and simplicity of interaction. Figure 1. A novel cross-device interaction style that seamlessly bridges the gap between handheld devices and interactive surfaces.