Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding Evolutionary Potential in Virtual CPU Instruction Set Architectures

We investigate fundamental decisions in the design of instruction set architectures for linear genetic programs that are used as both model systems in evolutionary biology and underlying solution representations in evolutionary computation. We subjected digital organisms with each tested architecture to seven different computational environments designed to present a range of evolutionary challenges. Our goal was to engineer a general purpose architecture that would be effective under a broad range of evolutionary conditions. We evaluated six different types of architectural features for the virtual CPUs: (1) genetic flexibility: we allowed digital organisms to more precisely modify the function of genetic instructions, (2) memory: we provided an increased number of registers in the virtual CPUs, (3) decoupled sensors and actuators: we separated input and output operations to enable greater control over data flow. We also tested a variety of methods to regulate expression: (4) explicit labels that allow programs to dynamically refer to specific genome positions, (5) position-relative search instructions, and (6) multiple new flow control instructions, including conditionals and jumps. Each of these features also adds complication to the instruction set and risks slowing evolution due to epistatic interactions. Two features (multiple argument specification and separated I/O) demonstrated substantial improvements in the majority of test environments, along with versions of each of the remaining architecture modifications that show significant improvements in multiple environments. However, some tested modifications were detrimental, though most exhibit no systematic effects on evolutionary potential, highlighting the robustness of digital evolution. Combined, these observations enhance our understanding of how instruction architecture impacts evolutionary potential, enabling the creation of architectures that support more rapid evolution of complex solutions to a broad range of challenges.
A reactively learning neural network that decides behaviours for an artificial life system with homogeneous agents

Artificial life has been a subject of much debate over the years, the subject tackles defining life and simulating aspects of it based on those definitions. This work hopes to explore the implementation of self-organising systems, evolution and machine learning approaches for reactive decision making. The project implements agents with predetermined behaviours which are guided by a simple blackboard-like entity that chooses the main tasks for the agent cluster via a neural network. The results show that a reactive learning neural network is marginally better at guiding the agent cluster during points of stagnation than a random selection of decisions at a point of stagnation. The paper highlights issues with the neural network approach and shows that stagnation detection has a reasonable impact on self-organization and autopoiesis of the system.
PlantLoc: an accurate web server for predicting plant protein subcellular localization by substantiality motif

Knowledge of subcellular localizations (SCLs) of plant proteins relates to their functions and aids in understanding the regulation of biological processes at the cellular level. We present PlantLoc, a highly accurate and fast webserver for predicting the multi-label SCLs of plant proteins. The PlantLoc server has two innovative characters: building localization motif libraries by a recursive method without alignment and Gene Ontology information; and establishing simple architecture for rapidly and accurately identifying plant protein SCLs without a machine learning algorithm. PlantLoc provides predicted SCLs results, confidence estimates and which is the substantiality motif and where it is located on the sequence. PlantLoc achieved the highest accuracy (overall accuracy of 80.8%) of identification of plant protein SCLs as benchmarked by using a new test dataset compared other plant SCL prediction webservers. The ability of PlantLoc to predict multiple sites was also significantly higher than for any other webserver. The predicted substantiality motifs of queries also have great potential for analysis of relationships with protein functional regions. The PlantLoc server is available at http://cal.tongji. edu.cn/PlantLoc/.
Large-Scale Linear Support Vector Ordinal Regression Solver

In multiple classification, there is a type of commonproblems where each instance is associated with an ordinal label, which arises in various settings such as text mining, visual recognition and other information retrieval tasks. The support vectorordinal regression (SVOR) is a good model widely used for ordinalregression. In some applications such as document classification, data usually appears in a high dimensional feature space andlinear SVOR becomes a good choice. In this work, we developan efficient solver for training large-scale linear SVOR basedon alternating direction method of multipliers(ADMM). Whencompared empirically on benchmark data sets, the proposedsolver enjoys advantages in terms of both training speed andgeneralization performance over the method based on SMO, which invalidate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm.
Kohäsionsfragebogen für Individual- und Teamsport - Leistungssport (KIT-L): A German-language instrument for measuring group cohesion in individual and team sports

No German language questionnaire exists that is able to measure group cohesion in all types of interactive and coactive sports. On this note, a translation and adaptation of the Group Environment Questionnaire by Carron and colleagues was conducted. The first stage included a translation of all items, bilingual tests, and interviews regarding comprehensibility. In the second stage, the external validity of the questionnaire was assessed with mood state as external criterion. Reliability analysis showed satisfactory internal consistency. A confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the underlying four-factor model of cohesion as proposed by Carron and colleagues. Analyses for the second stage revealed medium size correlations between factors of mood state and cohesion. The final questionnaire named “Kohäsionsfragebogen für Individual- und Teamsport - Leistungssport” (KIT-L) is a psychometrically sound questionnaire that is able to measure group cohesion in the German language independent of the type of sport.
Meta-Analysis of Pragmatic and Theoretical Research: A Critique

Meta-analysis refers to a set of statistical procedures used to summarize and integrate many empirical studies that focus on one issue. This numerical method of integrating research findings is said to be superior to the narrative type of reviews because it is more objective, reliable, and rigorous. Moreover, the meta-analytic approach is supposedly capable of resolving research controversies, strengthening empirical hypotheses, and discovering new relationships among variables. In this study, these claims are examined and found to be wanting. Some objections to the use of meta-analysis as a means of substantiating theoretical assertions are raised with reference to the rationale of experimentation and to how knowledge evolves. It is concluded that it is inappropriate to apply meta-analysis to integrate theoretical research.
Determination of the redox properties of the Rieske [2Fe-2S] cluster of bovine heart bc1 complex by direct electrochemistry of a water-soluble fragment.

The redox potential of the Rieske [2Fe-2S] cluster of the bc1 complex from bovine heart mitochondria was determined by cyclic voltammetry of a water-soluble fragment of the iron/sulfur protein. At the nitric-acid-treated bare glassy-carbon electrode, the fragment gave an immediate and stable quasireversible response. The midpoint potential at pH 7.2, 25 degrees C and I of 0.01 M was Em = +312 +/- 3 mV. This value corresponds within 20 mV to results of an EPR-monitored dye-mediated redox titration. With increasing ionic strength, the midpoint potential decreased linearly with square root of I up to I = 2.5 M. From the cathodic-to-anodic peak separation, the heterogeneous rate constant, k degrees, was calculated to be approximately 2 x 10(-3) cm/s at low ionic strength; the rate constant increased with increasing ionic strength. From the temperature dependence of the midpoint potential, the standard reaction entropy was calculated as delta S degrees = -155 J.K-1.mol-1. The pH dependence of the midpoint potential was followed over pH 5.5-10. Above pH 7, redox-state-dependent pK changes were observed. The slope of the curve, -120 mV/pH above pH9, indicated two deprotonations of the oxidized protein. The pKa values of the oxidized protein, obtained by curve fitting, were 7.6 and 9.2, respectively. A group with a pKa,ox of approximately 7.5 could also be observed in the optical spectrum of the oxidized protein. Redox-dependent pK values of the iron/sulfur protein are considered to be essential for semiquinone oxidation at the Qo center of the bc1 complex.
Average-atom interatomic potential for random alloys

An average-atom (A-atom) embedded-atom-method potential for random multicomponent alloys at any composition is derived analytically and validated by comparing A-atom and true random alloys bulk and defect properties, in model Fe-Ni-Cr systems. The A-atom can be mixed with the individual alloying-element potentials, thus enabling computation of defect/defect interactions. Its use provides quantitative insight into the physical role of the fluctuations, and has many applications, such as in atomistic/continuum modeling of random alloys and the development of new potentials with controlled properties.
A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town

Michael Herzfeld describes what happens when a bureaucracy charged with historic conservation clashes with a local populace hostile to the state and suspicious of tourism. Focusing on the Cretan town of Rethemnos, once a center of learning under Venetian rule and later inhabited by the Turks, he examines major questions confronting conservators and citizens as they negotiate the "ownership" of history: Who defines the past? To whom does the past belong? What is "traditional" and how is this determined? Exploring the meanings of the built environment for Rethemnos's inhabitants, Herzfeld finds that their interest in it has more to do with personal histories and the immediate social context than with the formal history that attracts the conservators. He also investigates the inhabitants' social practices from the standpoints of household and kin group, political association, neighborhood, gender ideology, and the effects of these on attitudes toward home ownership. In the face of modernity, where tradition is an object of both reverence and commercialism, Rethemnos emerges as an important ethnographic window onto the ambiguous cultural fortunes of Greece.
Performance of the verification for binary memoryless channels

We consider the verification problem when the verifier receives a pair of binary vectors (a, b) and makes the acceptance or the rejection decision. The acceptance decision has to be made if the vector b is the result of transmission of the vector a over a known memoryless channel. An attacker substitutes a vector b generated by a stationary Bernoulli source. We design the verification algorithm with the metric depending on the weight of the vector a. The attacker knows the weight of the vector a and the verification algorithm, but we can restrict his possibilities in such a way that the best strategy becomes the flipping of a fair coin. The performance of the algorithm is essentially better than the performance of the scheme, which is based on the maximum likelihood decision for the known channel. We also show that the algorithm is a special case of a general verification scheme for an arbitrary memoryless channel. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Distributed Context Reasoning for Proactive Systems

Current research on context-aware systems concentrates often on the optimal use of the large amounts of context information that is available, especially on mobile devices. While the focus is typically on the process of reasoning about the context data, the architectures of these systems often do not take into account the communication capabilities and the resulting advantages, provided by mobile terminals. Based on the Framework for Context Reasoning Systems, introduced in [PNF05], the mechanisms described in this paper are designed to improve this situation, by using the communication mechanisms in order to provide the user of a wireless information device with proactive applications that can take into account high-level context information regarding potential future situations, as well as inferred activities and goals of the user.
Arabinogalactan Proteins Are Required for Apical Cell Extension in the Moss Physcomitrella patens

Cell biological, structural, and genetic approaches have demonstrated the presence of arabinogalactan proteins (AGPs) in the moss Physcomitrella patens and provided evidence for their function in cell expansion and specifically in the extension of apical tip-growing cells. Inhibitor studies indicated that apical cell expansion in P. patens is blocked by synthetic AGP binding β-glucosyl Yariv reagent (βGlcYR). The anti-(1→5)-α-l-arabinan monoclonal antibody LM6 binds to some AGPs in P. patens, to all plasma membranes, and to the cell wall surface at the most apical region of growing protonemal filaments. Moreover, LM6 labeling of cell walls at the tips of apical cells of P. patens was abolished in the presence of βGlcYR, suggesting that the localized movement of AGPs from the plasma membrane to the cell wall is a component of the mechanism of tip growth. Biochemical and bioinformatic analyses were used to identify seven P. patens ESTs encoding putative AGP core proteins from homology with Arabidopsis thaliana, Brassica napus, and Oryza sativa sequences and from peptide fragments isolated from βGlcYR-precipitated AGPs. Gene knockout by homologous recombination of one of these genes, P. patens AGP1, encoding a classical AGP core protein, resulted in reduced cell lengths in protonemal filaments, indicating a role for AGP1 in apical cell expansion in P. patens.
Impact of gender on the response and tolerance to abatacept in patients with rheumatoid arthritis: results from the ‘ORA’ registry

Objective The impact of gender on the response and tolerance to abatacept was assessed in a large prospective cohort during 2 years of follow-up. Methods From the 1017 patients included in the Orencia and Rheumatoid Arthritis registry, disease activity was assessed at baseline, 6, 12 and 24 months. The relationship between the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) response, Disease Activity Score 28 (DAS28) remission, rate of adverse events and gender was explored in multivariate analysis. Results 990 patients, 79.3%female, with at least one follow-up visit were analysed. At baseline, women had longer disease duration, higher disease activity and more often received antitumour necrosis factor (TNF) drugs. The remission was not different between men and women during the follow-up after adjustment on age, disease duration and activity, rheumatoid factor and anti-cyclic citrullinated pyeptide (CCP) positivity, and current disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs), previous TNF blockers and corticosteroids use. The proportion of men and women achieving EULAR good-or-moderate response at any endpoints was similar (52.4% vs 55.5%), as well as time to achieving EULAR response (5.4±4.9 vs 5.6±5.2 months). Moderate EULAR response was more frequent in women at 6 months (OR=1.80, p=0.02) but was no longer significant at 12 or 24 months. During the follow-up, the DAS28, the tender joint count score and the patient global assessment remained higher in women (p=0.001, 0.04 and 0.06, respectively). Drug retention and safety were comparable. Conclusion In this large daily practice cohort of established rheumatoid arthritis treated with abatacept, women achieved similar remission and EULAR response than men despite higher disease activity and tender joint count during the treatment course.
Real Options, Irreversible Investment and Firm Uncertainty: New Evidence from U.S. Firms

This paper investigates real options behavior in capital budgeting decisions using a firm-level panel data set of U.S. companies in the manufacturing sector. Specifically, this paper looks are the relationship between the firm's investment to capital ratio and total firm uncertainty, measured as the volatility of the firm's equity returns. Total firm uncertainty is decomposed into its market, industry and firm-specific components. Given that the irreversibility of capital is derived from asset-specificity at the industry level, increased industry uncertainty displays a pronounced negative effect on firm investment consistent with real options behavior. Increased firm-specific uncertainty is also found to depress firm investment - a result that can be attributed to real options behavior and not just managerial risk aversion. The results are robust to various specifications that control for the firm's investment opportunities that are captured by Tobin's q, cash flow, marginal profitability of capital and firm leverage.
Practical equivalent control in 2-sliding controls applied to an anthropomorphic robot arm

Driving an anthropomorphic robot arm driven by pneumatic artificial rubber muscles (PARMs) with a direct transmission is quite delicate. PARMs present complex nonlin-earities and robust control tools are unevitable. Among them, those applied are the twisting and super twisting algorithms, which belong to the 2-higher order sliding mode control set. In this paper it is studied the effect of the equivalent control in sliding mode controller based on variable structure systems (VSS) theory. It will be shown when to use the equivalent control, and the effects of a noisy sensor signal on control performance. Experimental results are presented and discussed.
A Measurement-Based Approach to Performance Prediction in NoSQL Systems

In this paper we evaluate a measurement-based approach to performance prediction of data-intensive applications over NoSQL systems. While the use of systematic measurements for building performance prediction models is a well studied topic, little attention has been paid so far on the application space of data-intensive systems using NoSQL databases. Measurement-based performance prediction approaches are often limited by a relatively narrow range of hardware characteristics available within each organization's private infrastructure. An opportunity to change this fact is the emergence of federated, publicly-accessible, large-scale research infrastructures, such as Fed4FIRE and GENI, featuring a variety of heterogeneous hardware. This paper demonstrates accurate measurement-based performance prediction modeling for NoSQL systems over such public infrastructures. We consider three prominent regression techniques: Multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), support vector regression (SVR), and artificial neural network (ANN) regression, applied to the YCSB data-intensive benchmark over the MongoDB NoSQL data store. Our measurements are drawn from 1-, 3-, and 5-node clusters of four node types. Performance prediction using MARS yields the best results with an average accuracy of 97.85% vs. 94.16% and 90.39% with SVR and ANN respectively. The approach can seamlessly extend to a wider range of hardware specifications available in federated research infrastructures.
School Teacher Perceptions of Barriers That Limit the Participation of African American Males in Public School Gifted Programs

This study used data from questionnaires completed by teachers employed in North Carolina schools (N = 370) to determine if teachers felt that non-school-related or school-related factors served as barriers that limited the number of African American male children from participating in gifted programs. The majority of the teachers taught 3rd- to 5th-grade students. African American, Hispanic, and other minority teachers accounted for 29.8% of the teachers. White teachers identified barriers that were not related to school personnel, practices, or policies. Minority teachers identified both school-related and non-school-related factors as major barriers. No differences were found on barriers identified by teachers who had exposure to gifted development activities and those who did not. Recommendations for engaging teachers' commitment to African American male student learning through professional development programming are described.
An external consensus protocol design for heterogenous multiply processes with predictive control scheme

This paper provides prediction method to solve the external consensus problem for heterogeneous networked multi agent system (NMAS) with network delay. The proposed prediction strategy is based on transfer function and designed by adopting the recursive equation on the proposed consensus protocol. The consensus protocol developed in this work does not rely on the initial value of the agents' output but totally depends on the external input given to one of the agents in NMAS. By considering low-order multi process control system agents, the proposed strategy is simulated and validated through experimental work via intranet networked controller board with constant network delay.
COMMUNITY-COLLEGE LEADERSHIP: AN ART TO BE PRACTICED: 2010 AND BEYOND

ABSTRACT Current research indicates that a mass exodus of community-college leadership will occur within the next few years. When combining this research with additional research indicating that the number of degrees conferred by universities in community-college administration decreased 78% between 1983 and 1997, the challenge of meeting the needs of community-college leaders for 2010 becomes evident. Additionally, the old assumptions made about leadership cannot be held sacrosanct in a technological, fast-paced environment, with a growing ethnically diverse population. The questions that must be asked by today's leaders are these: 1) What skills are needed by community college leaders in 2010 and beyond? 2) How are these skills developed? This article suggests 9 essential skills: 1) learning from the past while embracing the future, 2) enriching the inward journey, 3) leading from the center: values, 4) making connections: vision, 5) looking broadly for talent, 6) providing continual leadership opportunities through succession planning, 7) keeping faculty in the mix, 8) forging business and industry connections, and 9) not forgetting students: preparing the future workforce. Thinking, caring community-college leaders have for a number of years read and taken to heart the sagacious admonitions of leadership theorists and practitioners such as Drucker (2001), Lipman-Blumen (1996), Palmer (2000), Senge (1990), and Greenleaf (1996)—along with others writing and practicing in the field of leadership. These caring leaders have impacted the people within their organizations who, in turn, have made positive differences in their own particular units. Yet, in a world of constant change, continual technological revolution, and ever-increasing population diversity, it is imperative that leaders (a) constantly analyze what leadership not only should be but must be if community colleges are to meet the challenges facing them, (b) continually grow leaders within their own organizations, and (c) proactively assist in national efforts to expand the leadership pool.