Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Community ecology Latitudinal gradients in intraspecific ecological diversity

The increase in the number of species with decreasing latitude is a striking pattern of global biodiversity. An important feature of studies of this pattern up to now has been the focus on species as the fundamental unit of interest, neglecting potential within-species ecological diversity. Here, we took a new perspective on this topic by measuring the degree to which individuals within populations differ in niche attributes across a latitudinal gradient (range: 54.018 S to 69.128 N). We show that 156 populations of 76 species across a wide range of vertebrate and invertebrate animal taxa contain more ecologically diverse assemblages of individuals towards lower latitudes. Our results add a new level of complexity to our understanding of global patterns of biodiversity and suggest the possibility that niche variation is partly responsible for the latitudinal gradients of species diversity.
Mechanism for Worsening Gas Exchange at Increased Cardiac Output: It's Time for an Occam's Razor

Previous investigators reported that gas exchange consistently worsened when cardiac output (Qt) was increased under normal and pathological conditions. The aim of the present paper is to offer an alternative explanation, besides the one previously proposed that was based on some attenuation of hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction. The new concept emphases the inherent heterogeneity of regional blood flow (Q), as well as the skewed relationship between ventilation perfusion ratio (V/Q) and arterial oxygen tension (PaO2). Namely, PaO2 is exquisitely sensitive to any change of V/Q ratio from 0 to 1, which is many times more than that from 1 to 100. As Qt is increased, the additional pulmonary flow is by no means uniformly distributed. Thus, either ventilation (V) remains stable or even becomes more variable, V/Q heterogeneity increases at increased Qt. The higher Q in most regions reduces their corresponding V/Q ratios from the previously normal value of about 0.8 to 1, precipitously into the hypoxic range towards true shunt (V/Q = 0) and increases the V/Q mismatch. In contrary, the simultaneously created higher V/Q units cannot mitigate these adverse changes because of the sigmoid shape of hemoglobin oxygen dissociation curve. By this mechanism, diseased lungs are more susceptible to hypoxemia when Qt is increased due to their pre-existing V/Q abnormalities.
CASE-BASED PLAN RECOGNITION FOR REAL-TIME STRATEGY GAMES

The current game industry around the world is one of the fastest growing industries. One gaming genre that is very popular is the real-time strategy games. However, current implementations of games apply extensive usage of FSM that makes them highly predictable and provides less replayability. Thus, this paper looks at the possibility of employing case-based plan recognition for NPCs so as to minimize their predictability. The paper also looks into possible representation adaptions to minimize the resource requirement to maintain the possibility of deployment in mobile devices.
An atomistic study of cracks in diamond-structure crystals

The structure of atomically sharp equilibrium cracks in diamond, silicon and germanium is calculated. The treatment considers a long plane crack formed by bond rupture across the (111) cleavage plane, critically loaded in tension. Within a small ‘core’ region immediately surrounding the crack tip the interatomic interactions are represented by a potential function specially constructed to match macroscopic fracture parameters. Anisotropic linear elastic theory is invoked to provide boundary conditions for the core region, and a first approximation for lattice-point displacements within. The core atoms are then relaxed to a configuration of minimum potential energy by computer. The results indicate that continuum theory is capable of giving remarkably accurate predictions of the crack-tip displacement field, except within about three atom spacings from the tip, despite marked nonlinearity in the interatomic force function. These results are discussed in terms of existing continuum models of crack-tip structure: in particular, Barenblatt’s model of a cusp-shaped tip region is found to be inapplicable to diamond-structure crystals. The crack-tip geometry is better pictured as a narrow slit terminated by a single line of bonds close to the rupture point. Brief reference is made to the possible extension of the treatment to other classes of highly brittle solid, especially glassy materials, and to the relevance of the results to some fracture problems of practical importance.
Structure and function in mammalian societies

Traditional interpretations of the evolution of animal societies have suggested that their structure is a consequence of attempts by individuals to maximize their inclusive fitness within constraints imposed by their social and physical environments. In contrast, some recent re-interpretations have argued that many aspects of social organization should be interpreted as group-level adaptations maintained by selection operating between groups or populations. Here, I review our current understanding of the evolution of mammalian societies, focusing, in particular, on the evolution of reproductive strategies in societies where one dominant female monopolizes reproduction in each group and her offspring are reared by other group members. Recent studies of the life histories of females in these species show that dispersing females often have little chance of establishing new breeding groups and so are likely to maximize their inclusive fitness by helping related dominants to rear their offspring. As in eusocial insects, increasing group size can lead to a progressive divergence in the selection pressures operating on breeders and helpers and to increasing specialization in their behaviour and life histories. As yet, there is little need to invoke group-level adaptations in order to account for the behaviour of individuals or the structure of mammalian groups.
Power and performance evaluation of globally asynchronous locally synchronous processors

We use a cycle-accurate simulation environment to study the impact of asynchrony in a superscalar processor architecture. Our results show that as expected, going from a synchronous to a globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) design causes a drop in performance, but elimination of the global clock does not lead to drastic power reductions. From a power perspective, GALS designs are inherently less efficient when compared to synchronous architectures. However, the flexibility offered by the independently controllable local clocks enables the effective use of other energy conservation techniques like dynamic voltage scaling. Our results show that for a 5-clock domain GALS processor, the drop in performance ranges between 5-15%, while power consumption is reduced by 10% on the average. Fine-grained voltage scaling reduces the gap between fully synchronous and GALS implementations, allowing for better power efficiency.
Recommendations with a Purpose

The purpose of recommenders is often summarized as "help the users find relevant items", and the predominant operationalization of this goal has been to focus on the ability to numerically estimate the users' preferences for unseen items or to provide users with item lists ranked in accordance to the estimated preferences. This dominant, albeit narrow, view of the recommendation problem has been tremendously helpful in advancing research in different ways, e.g., through the establishment of standardized evaluation procedures and metrics. In reality, recommender systems can serve a variety of purposes from the point of view of both consumers and providers. Most of the purposes, however, are significantly underexplored, even though many of them are arguably more aligned with the real-world expectations for recommenders than our current predominant paradigm. Therefore, it is important to revisit our conceptualizations of the potential goals of recommenders and their operationalization as research problems. In this paper, we discuss a framework of recommendation goals and purposes and highlight possible future directions and challenges related to the operationalization of such alternative problem formulations.
Ultralow loss and large effective area fiber for long haul systems

The rapid growth of multi-media and data rich applications has driven the bandwidth demand for long-haul fiberoptic links at unprecedented rates. At the same time, growing capacity demands also imposes challenges on bandwidth and interconnects in data centers. Optical fibers are continuing improving their performance to meet the bandwidth demand in both long haul and short reach applications. While continuing improvements in conventional fiber optic technologies will increase the system capacity further in a short term, recent studies show that the transmission capacity over single-mode optical fibers is rapidly approaching its fundamental Shannon limit. To overcome this limit, new technologies using space division multiplexing are needed to provide a solution to the future capacity growth. In this paper, we discuss novel optical fibers for increasing capacity for transmission systems. For conventional fibers for long haul transmission, because transmission impairments such as chromatic dispersion, polarization-mode dispersion can be perfectly compensated for by digital signal processing, the only fiber parameters that can be optimized further are fiber attenuation and effective area. We will discuss system figure of merit for the two parameters and present recent results on ultra-low loss and large effective area fibers. For short reach applications, we will review the current efforts in improving multimode fiber bandwidth and discuss new trends in multimode fibers to meet future bandwidth demand. For next generation fibers, we will focus on multicore and few mode fibers for space division multiplexing, which has the potential to increase the capacity by an order of magnitude. We will present fiber design considerations and review recent progress on multicore and few mode fibers. Finally, we will discuss major challenges in space division multiplexing applications using multicore and few mode fibers.
Gene Expression Analysis in Multi-Agent Environment

This paper presents a multi-agent approach to gene expression analysis and illustrates the working steps using real dataset produced from a microarray experiment. The analysis can be conducted in a multi-agent environment with majority of the workload automated by agents at different stages of processing. Conceptually, the analysis process can be divided into three distinct steps: (1) data preprocessing, (2) statistical analysis, and (3) biological inference. In addition, each step involves different stages of processing. We implement a multi-agent system that provides process automation within each step using agents with different abilities. We also explore the parallelism of data processing using multi-agent system. The strength of our system is in its ability to support concurrent processing of gene data and the modular structural design that tailors to biologists’ demands. We also discuss the possibility of applying Machine Learning technique to analyze gene expression data in a multi-agent environment.
Swaddling After Heel Lance: Age‐Specific Effects on Behavioral Recovery in Preterm Infants

We examined responses of preterm infants to swaddling after a heel lance. Fifteen preterm infants from two postconceptional age (PCA) groups (Group 1: n = 7, PCA < 31 wk; Group 2: n = 8, PCA ≥ 31 wk) were observed for 30 minutes during blood sampling followed by routine care; blood sampling followed by swaddling; and no blood sampling and routine care. In both groups, blood sampling resulted in concurrent increases in heart rate and state of arousal, in negative facial displays, and in reductions in blood oxygen-saturation. After the blood was drawn, infants less than 31 weeks PCA exhibited an immediate and spontaneous return to behavioral patterns similar to those observed during the no-blood-sample condition, regardless of treatment condition. Infants 31 weeks PCA or older exhibited protracted behavioral disturbance that was significantly reduced by the use of swaddling. We discuss the significance of these findings.
A Bi-Directional DC/DC Converter for an Energy Storage System

This paper addresses a bi-directional dc/dc converter suitable for an energy storage system with an additional function of galvanic isolation. An energy storage device such as an electric double layer capacitor is directly connected to one of the dc buses of the dc/dc converter without any chopper circuit. Nevertheless, the dc/dc converter can continue operating when the voltage across the energy storage device droops along with its discharge. Theoretical calculation and experimental measurement reveal that power loss and peak current impose limitations on a permissible dc-voltage range. This information may be useful in design of the dc/dc converter. A laboratory model of the energy storage system rated at 200 V and 2.6 kJ designed and constructed in this paper verifies that the dc/dc converter can charge and discharge the capacitor bank properly. Moreover, the dc/dc converter can charge the capacitor bank from zero to the rated voltage without any external precharging circuit.
Political Economy Determinants of Public Investment Decision-making in Agriculture : Lessons from and for Africa

ublic investments in agriculture in Africa can have pro‐ found effects on productivity in the sector. It is therefore important to understand how budgetary allocation decisions are made. For example, what are the reasons for persistent underin‐ vestment in agricultural research on the African continent? A mere reference to ignorance of policymakers about the demon‐ strated contributions of agricultural R&D is not only inadequate by way of an explanation, but likely plain wrong in most cases. Acemoglu (2012) eloquently discusses the “ignorance hy‐ pothesis” as an explanation for bad policies in developing coun‐ tries. It is critical to determine how various forces, incentive struc‐ tures, and characteristics of different actors, as well as political and economic institutions, shape the public resource allocation process. This paper addresses the question of what determines agri‐ cultural public expenditure policies in Africa. Specifically, it dis‐ cusses what drives allocation to agriculture (as opposed to other sectors), as well as how resources are allocated within agriculture. The framework underlying this question considers how four key drivers affect the prioritization of public investments: (i) the budget process; (ii) the various incentives and attributes of ac‐ tors—including politicians, bureaucrats, interest groups, and do‐ nors; (iii) characteristics of publicly provided goods and services themselves; and (iv) features of political and economic govern‐ ance environments. Figure 1 summarizes the framework in an illustrative way. This paper will focus on the first three of the four drivers of public investment decisionmaking.
FEDRR: Fast, Exhaustive Detection of Redundant Hierarchical Relations in Large Biomedical Ontologies

Redundant hierarchical relations refer to such patterns as two paths from one concept to another, one with length one (direct) and the other with length greater than one (indirect). This paper intro- duces a novel and scalable approach, called FEDRR { Fast, Exhaustive Detection of Redundant Relations { for quality assurance work during ontological evolution. FEDRR combines the algorithm ideas of Dynamic Programming with Topological Sort, for exhaustive mining of all redun- dant hierarchical relations in ontological hierarchies, in O(cj Vj +jEj) time, where jVj is the number of concepts, jEj is the number of the relations, and c is a constant in practice. Using FEDRR, we performed exhaustive search of all redundant is-a relations in two of the largest onto- logical systems in biomedicine: SNOMED CT and Gene Ontology (GO). 235 and 1609 redundant is-a relations were found in the 2015-03-01 ver- sion of SNOMED CT and 2015-05-01 version of GO, respectively. Each redundant relation represents a possibly unintended defect that needs to be corrected in the ontology quality assurance process. FEDRR provides a generally applicable, eective tool for systematic detecting redundant relations in large ontological systems for quality improvement.
A population‐based study of genotypic and phenotypic variability in children with spinal muscular atrophy

Aims: To describe the occurrence of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) in childhood; to evaluate if any of the genes in the SMA region on chromosome 5q13 correlates with disease severity; to make genotype–phenotype correlations; to evaluate the variability of different disease alleles in carriers and the sensitivity of multiplex ligation‐dependent probe amplification (MLPA) for detecting carriers.
μ Synthesis Applied to the Compliance Minimization of an Active Magnetic Bearing HSM Spindle's Thrust Axis

Many practical problems in magnetic bearing control concern essentially the minimization (maximization) of the dynamic compliance (stiffness) of the rotor. In this paper, the problem of minimizing the peak compliance of a high speed machining (HSM) spindle's thrust axis is examined. Experimental results are presented which demonstrate that μ synthesis provides an excellent tool for tackling this problem. Both complex μ and mixed μ synthesis are used to design controllers. The performance of the μ controllers is compared to that of an optimized PID controller. Under μ control, the dynamic stiffness of the system was increased by more than a factor of two over that obtained with the optimal PID controller. Careful attention was given to developing an accurate system model and uncertainty description, especially related to the transfer function of the magnetic actuators with solid stators and thrust disk.
A Multimodal Adaptive Genetic Clustering Algorithm

Clustering is widely used in a variety of fields to find structures among data and extract useful knowledge. Recently, there has been an emergent need for robust and efficient techniques that can manage the exploding volume of data available in the World Wide Web or gathered from devices and sensors. However, clustering such data is challenging, due to the multimodal nature of this information. In this work, we introduce a novel Multimodal Adaptive Genetic Clustering (MAGC) algorithm that clusters information based on multiple features. Our approach adds feature weights as an extension to the chromosome, which represents a clustering solution, such that feature weights are also evolved and optimized alongside the original clustering solution. The number of clusters is also adaptive and is optimized during the search.
Epidemiology, Pathology and Treatment of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in Taif Region of Saudi Arabia

Background Cutaneous leishmaniasis is an annoying and disfiguring disease affecting around 1,500,000 individuals globally. There are endemic pockets of this disease in Taif region. In some patients, lesion often weeps and leads to scar formation. The study was conducted to see the efficacy of fluconazole and itraconazole in the patients of cutaneous leishmaniasis and the effect of these drugs on liver enzymes and kidney markers. Methods Positivity of Leishmania was recorded by microscopic examinations of smears. Specific diagnosis for Leishmania major and L. tropica was made with the help of nested polymerase chain reaction. Fluconazole was given at the rate of 200mg/day while itraconazole was given at 150mg/day for six weeks. AST, ALT, creatinine and urea were estimated during medication. Results Leishmania major and L. tropica were the species responsible for cutaneous leishmaniasis in Taif region. 81% patients had single lesions, mostly on face followed by hands and legs. 15% of the lesions had bacterial contamination. In terms of efficacy, fluconazole gave slightly better results compared to itraconazole. After 6 weeks of medications, slightly elevated values were recorded for liver enzymes and creatinine. Conclusion Transmission of leishmaniasis in Taif region is probably because of poor coverage of residual insecticides spraying at hiding places in pile-ups of rocks and abandoned houses from where sand flies visit nearby houses and cattle sheds during night. Fluconazole and itraconazole may be used for the treatment of cutaneous leishmaniasis with good recovery rate and fewer side effects.
Oestrogen receptor alpha in female fetal, infant, and child mammary tissue.

Oestrogen receptor alpha (ER alpha) expression was studied in female mammary tissue from a series of 35 samples obtained post-mortem, ranging from fetuses of 13 weeks' gestation to prepubertal children of 12 years. Immunocytochemistry was performed on formalin-fixed tissue after microwave antigen retrieval. ER alpha was present in epithelial cell nuclei from the 30th week of gestation onwards and was markedly up-regulated shortly after birth. For up to 3 months thereafter, progesterone receptor was also expressed, indicative that the ER alpha was functional. During this period, ER alpha was also present in epithelial cell cytoplasm. From this perspective of the developing breast, it is suggested that an early postnatal component should be added to the prenatal oestrogen hypothesis; further, the significance of ER alpha cytoplasmic staining in the adult breast also merits review.
XClean in Action A Demonstration of Declarative XML Data Cleaning

We demonstrate XClean, a data cleaning system specifically g eared towards cleaning XML data. XClean’s approach is based on a se t of cleaning operators. Users may specify cleaning programs by combining operators using the declarative XClean/PL language , which is then compiled into XQuery. We plan to show XClean in action on several scenarios based on real-world data. A graphical u ser interface supports users in writing XClean/PL programs and gu i es them through the process to obtain the clean data.
Influence of SiH4 Flow Rate on GaN Films with In Situ SiNx Mask on Sapphire Surface

Sapphire substrate was treated by SiH4 under NH3 atmosphere before GaN growth and nanosize islands SiNx mask was formed on the substrate. Properties of GaN films were investigated by high resolution X-ray diffraction, photoluminescence and transmission electron microscopy. The results indicated that the SiH4 flow rate is an important factor affecting the size and density of SiNx mask besides SiH4 treatment time.The GaN films grown on the SiNx-patterned sapphire substrate revealed an epitaxial lateral overgrowth mode, which affected 3D to 2D growth time and the microstructures of GaN films. The lowest FWHM value of (102) rocking curve was 286 arcsec. as the SiH4 flow rate of 0.5sccm, with the calcultated edge-type dislocations density of 4.28×109cm-2.
Column Address Selection in Optical RAMs With Positive and Negative Logic Row Access

An optical RAM row access gate followed by a column address selector for wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM)-formatted words employing a single semiconductor optical amplifier-Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI) is presented. RAM row access is performed by the SOA-MZI that grants random access to a 4-bit WDM-formatted optical word employing multiwavelength cross-phase-modulation (XPM) phenomena, whereas column decoding is carried out in a completely passive way using arrayed waveguide grating. Proof-of-concept experimental verification for both positive and negative logic access is demonstrated for 4 × 10 Gb/s optical words, showing error-free operation with only 0.4-dB-peak-power penalty and requiring a power value of 25 mW/Gb/s.