Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reciprocal Selection at the Phenotypic Interface of Coevolution1

Abstract Coevolutionary interactions depend upon a phenotypic interface of traits in each species that mediate the outcome of interactions among individuals. These phenotypic interfaces usually involve performance traits, such as locomotion or resistance to toxins, that comprise an integrated suite of physiological, morphological and behavioral traits. The reciprocal selection from species interactions may act directly on performance, but it is ultimately the evolution of these underlying components that shape the patterns of coevolutionary adaptation in performance. Bridging the macroevolutionary patterns of coevolution to the ecological processes that build them therefore requires a way to dissect the phenotypic interface of coevolution and determine how specific components of performance in one species exert selection on complimentary components of performance in a second species. We present an approach for analyzing the strength of selection in a coevolutionary interaction where individuals interact at random, and for identifying which component traits of the phenotypic interface are critical to mediating coevolution. The approach is illustrated with data from a predator-prey arms race between garter snakes and newts that operates through the interface of tetrodotoxin (TTX) and resistance to it.
4500 volt Si/SiC hybrid module qualification for modern megawatt scale wind energy inverters

This paper discusses recent trends in wind turbine electrical architecture resulting from utility interconnect and public siting requirements. These trends together with constant need to reduce the cost-of-energy place a premium on wind turbine inverter efficiency. This need is addressed by the use of a medium voltage, three-level inverter with 4HN structure silicon carbide barrier diode located in the clamping diode location. A comparison with a conventional silicon PIN clamping diode is covered in detail.
Multimedia and Hypermedia Solutions for Promoting Metacognitive Engagement, Coherence, and Learning

Users of educational hypertext are faced with the challenge of creating meaning both within and between texts. Cohesion is an important factor contributing to whether a reader is able to capture meaning and comprehend text. When readers are required to fill in conceptual gaps in text, comprehension can fail if they do not have sufficient knowledge. Cohesion helps low-knowledge readers to create a more coherent mental representation of the text. However, text that is too cohesive can inhibit active processing, and thus reduce coherence for more knowledgeable readers. Similar patterns have been found for hypertext, which requires readers to create coherence between multiple electronic texts. Domain novices are in greater need of explicit pointers to important links between documents and gain from having less control over system navigation. Domain experts are in less need of scaffolding within the system. We discuss the use of a multimedia reading strategy training program to help low-knowledge readers better understand less cohesive text. Finally, we discuss four principles to guide hypertext development geared toward improving coherence and metacognitive engagement.
Philosophers & Futurists, Catch Up! Response to The Singularity

Responding to Chalmers' The Singularity (2010), I argue that progress towards self-improving AIs is already substantially beyond what many futurists and philosophers are aware of. Instead of rehashing well-trodden topics of the previous millennium, let us start focusing on relevant new millennium results. All indented paragraphs of this paper are quotes taken from Chalmers' paper of 2010, who mentions Good's informal speculations (1965) on ultraintelligent self-improving machines: The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. Chalmers speculates that some sort of meta-evolution could be used to build more and more intelligent machines called AI, AI+, AI++. : The process of evolution might count as an indirect example: less intel- ligent systems have the capacity to create more intelligent systems by reproduction, variation and natural selection. This version would then come to the same thing as an evolutionary path to AI and AI++. (.) If we produce an AI by machine learning, it is likely that soon after we will be able to improve the learning algorithm and extend the learning pro- cess, leading to AI+. If we produce an AI by artificial evolution, it is
Classification of Escherichia Coli Bacteria using MetaCognitive Neural Network

Abstract— The classification of data using machine learning involves different challenging tasks which depend on the learning method, selection of neurons, selection of dataset, selection of algorithm etc. This paper deals with classifying Escherichia Coli bacteria proteins from the amino acid sequence using Metacognitive learning. Different machine learning techniques are implied on the imbalanced dataset of EColi with 10 cross-fold validations to prove the performance of Meta-cognitive Neural Network (McNN) . McNN is capable of learning what –to-learn, when-to-learn and how-to-learn. Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) a batch learning algorithm, Self – adaptive Resource Allocation Network (SRAN) a sequential learning algorithm and Metacognitive Neural Network (McNN) which employs metacognition in sequential learning are applied for experimental study. This paper shows that classification of McNN performs well with respect to other machine learning algorithms. KeywordsELM, SRAN, McNN, Meta-Cognitive
The Home-School Psychological Contract: Implications for Parental Involvement in Middle Schooling

witnessed unprecedented changes in the past generation. These changes have brought with them demands for restructur ing the traditional model of schooling. At the same time, the task of parenting, once con sidered an uncomplicated matter, has been presented with new challenges and new pit falls. These have heightened the resolve by parents to build a more meaningful associa tion with those who also work with young adolescents. Both parents and teachers have a common, and highly prized, stake in such a partnership. For middle school teachers and middle school parents, the torrid pace of societal, technological, and educational changes has presented some significant challenges. Not only is the environment of middle schools changing rapidly and unpredictably, stu dents also are undergoing changes which make them difficult to understand. These
Parametrization for surfaces with arbitrary topologies

Surface parametrization is a fundamental problem in computer graphics. It is essential for operations such as texture mapping, texture synthesis, interactive 3D painting, remeshing, multi-resolution analysis and mesh compression. Conformal parameterization, which preserves angles, has many nice properties such as having no local distortion on textures, and being independent of triangulation or resolution. Existing conformal parameterization methods partition a mesh into several charts, each of which is then parametrized and packed to an atlas. These methods suffer from limitations such as difficulty in segmenting the mesh and artifacts caused by discontinuities between charts. This work presents a method that was developed with collaboration with Professor Shing-Tung Yau to compute global conformal parameterizations for triangulated surfaces with arbitrary topologies. Our method is boundary free, hence eliminating the need to chartify the mesh. We compute the natural conformal structure of the surface, which is determined solely by its geometry. The parameterization is stable in the sense that if the geometries are similar, then the parameterizations on the canonical domain are also close. The parameterization is conformal everywhere except on 2g − 2 number of points, where g is the number of genus. We prove the gradients of local conformal maps form a
Evaluation of game engines for simulated surgical training

The increasing complexity and costs of surgical training and the constant development of new surgical procedures has made virtual surgical training an essential tool in medical education. Unfortunately, commercial tools are very expensive and have a small support base. Game engines offer unique advantages for the creation of highly interactive and collaborative environments. This paper examines the suitability of currently available game engines for developing applications for medical education and simulated surgical training. We formally evaluate a list of available game engines for stability, availability, the possibility of custom content creation and the interaction of multiple users via a network. Based on these criteria, three of the highest ranked engines are used for further case studies. We found that in general it is possible to easily create scenarios with custom medical models that can be cooperatively viewed and interacted with. Limitations in physical simulation capabilities make some engines unsuitable for fully interactive applications, but they can be used in combination with predefined animations. We show that overall game engines represent a good foundation for low cost virtual surgery applications and we discuss technologies which can be used to further extend their physical simulation capabilities.
The Coming Race War: And Other Apocalyptic Tales of America after Affirmative Action and Welfare

In The Washington Post, Julius Lester praised Richard Delgado's The Rodrigo Chronicles: Conversations about America and Race as free of cant and ideology.an excellent starting place for the national discussion about race we so desperately need. The New York Times has hailed Delgado as a pioneer in the study of race and law, and the Los Angeles Times has compared his storytelling style to Plato's Dialogues. In The Coming Race War? , Delgado turns his attention to the American racial landscape in the wake of the mid-term elections in 1994. Our political and racial topography has been radically altered. Affirmative action is being rolled back, immigrants continue to be targeted as the source of economic woes, and race is increasingly downplayed as a source of the nation's problems. Legal obstacles to racial equality have long been removed, we are told, so what's the problem? And yet, the plight of the urban poor grows worse. The number of young black men in prison continues to exceed those in college. Informal racial privilege remains entrenched and systemic. Where, asks Delgado in this new volume, will this lead? Enlisting his fictional counterpart, Rodrigo Crenshaw, to untangle the complexities of America's racial future, Delgado explores merit and affirmative action; the nature of empathy and, more commonly, false empathy; and the limitations of legal change. Warning of the dangers of depriving the underprivileged of all hope and opportunity, Delgado gives us a dark future in which an indignant white America casts aside, once and for all, the spirit of the civil rights movement, with disastrous results.
Product Reliability Trends, Derating Considerations and Failure Mechanisms with Scaled CMOS

As microelectronics is scaled into the deep sub-micron regime, space and aerospace users of advanced technology CMOS are reassessing how scaling effects impact long-term product reliability. The effects of electromigration (EM), time-dependent-dielectric-breakdown (TDDB) and hot carrier degradation (HCI and NBTI) wearout mechanisms on scaled technologies and product reliability are investigated, accelerated stress testing across several technology nodes is performed, and FA is conducted to confirm the failure mechanism(s)
Structure Layout Optimization for Multithreaded Programs

Structure layout optimizations seek to improve runtime performance by improving data locality and reuse. The structure layout heuristics for single-threaded benchmarks differ from those for multi-threaded applications running on multiprocessor machines, where the effects of false sharing need to be taken into account. In this paper we propose a technique for structure layout transformations for multithreaded applications that optimizes both for improved spatial locality and reduced false sharing, simultaneously. We develop a semi-automatic tool that produces actual structure layouts for multi-threaded programs and outputs the key factors contributing to the layout decisions. We apply this tool on the HP-UX kernel and demonstrate the effects of these transformations for a variety of already highly hand-tuned key structures with different set of properties. We show that naive heuristics can result in massive performance degradations on such a highly tuned application, while our technique generally avoids those pitfalls. The improved structures produced by our tool improve performance by up to 3.2% over a highly tuned baseline
HIV Testing in Non-Traditional Settings – The HINTS Study: A Multi-Centre Observational Study of Feasibility and Acceptability

Background UK guidelines recommend routine HIV testing in healthcare settings if the local diagnosed HIV prevalence >2/1000 persons. This prospective study assessed the feasibility and acceptability, to patients and staff, of routinely offering HIV tests in four settings: Emergency Department, Acute Care Unit, Dermatology Outpatients and Primary Care. Modelling suggested the estimated prevalence of undiagnosed HIV infection in attendees would exceed 1/1000 persons. The prevalence identified prospectively was not a primary outcome. Methods Permanent staff completed questionnaires assessing attitudes towards routine HIV testing in their workplace before testing began. Subsequently, over a three-month period, patients aged 16–65 were offered an HIV test by study staff. Demographics, uptake, results, and departmental activity were collected. Subsets of patients completed questionnaires. Analyses were conducted to identify factors associated with test uptake. Findings Questionnaires were received from 144 staff. 96% supported the expansion of HIV testing, but only 54% stated that they would feel comfortable delivering testing themselves, with 72% identifying a need for training. Of 6194 patients offered a test, 4105 (66·8%) accepted (61·8–75·4% across sites). Eight individuals were diagnosed with HIV (0–10/1000 across sites) and all transferred to care. Younger people, and males, were more likely to accept an HIV test. No significant associations were found between uptake and ethnicity, or clinical site. Questionnaires were returned from 1003 patients. The offer of an HIV test was acceptable to 92%. Of respondents, individuals who had never tested for HIV before were more likely to accept a test, but no association was found between test uptake and sexual orientation. Conclusions HIV testing in these settings is acceptable, and operationally feasible. The strategy successfully identified, and transferred to care, HIV-positive individuals. However, if HIV testing is to be included as a routine part of patients’ care, additional staff training and infrastructural resources will be required.
Motion of a conducting loop in a magnetic field

The influence of Foucault losses on the motion of a conductor is investigated for the simple case of a small loop moving in the (primary) field of a magnetic dipole. Numerical data are given for the trajectory, the induced current and the magnetic force. Two types of motion are considered: a translation with assigned velocity v0 and a translation governed by the sole action of the magnetic force.
Oracle at TREC 10: Filtering and Question-Answering

Oracle's objective in TREC-10 was to study the behavior of Oracle information retrieval in previously unexplored application areas. The software used was Oracle9i Text, Oracle's full-text retrieval engine integrated with the Oracle relational database management system, and the Oracle PL/SQL procedural programming language. Runs were submitted in filtering and Q/A tracks. For the filtering track we submitted three runs, in adaptive filtering, batch filtering and routing. By comparing the TREC results, we found that the concepts (themes) extracted by Oracle Text can be used to aggregate document information content to simplify statistical processing. Oracle's Q/A system integrated information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE). The QIA system relied on a combination of document and sentence ranking in IR, named entity tagging in IE and shallow parsing based classification of questions into pre-defined categories.
From generic sentences to scripts

One way to tackle the problem of acquiring general world knowledge to support language understanding and commonsense reasoning is to derive this knowledge by direct interpretation of general statements in ordinary language. One of several problems encountered in such an effort is that general statements frequently involve “donkey anaphora”. Here a “dynamic Skolemization” approach is suggested that avoids dynamic semantics and leads naturally to scriptor frame-like representations. Introduction: Long-range goals, and the need for world knowledge A group of us at the University of Rochester are pursuing the ambitious goal of creating a broadly knowledgable dialog agent that is motivated by curiosity, by vicarious satisfaction in fulfilling user goals, and by the sheer “pleasure” (positive utility) of engaging in conversation. However, our achievements so far fall far short of this goal: we have (1) a general knowledge representation (episodic logic, or EL) intended to match the expressiveness of human languages (e.g., (Schubert and Hwang 2000; Schubert 2000)), (2) a functioning, but still incomplete inference engine for that representation, EPILOG (e.g., (Schaeffer et al. 1993; Morbini and Schubert 2008)), (3) compositional methods for generating logical forms from English parses, (4) a large base of general “factoids” (Schubert and Van Durme 2008), and (5) a self-motivated, reward-seeking agent in a small simulated world, capable of planning ahead and simple dialogs (Liu and Schubert 2009). One of the most glaring lacunae in all of this is a sizable world knowledge base. Two related bottlenecks, and the KNEXT system I believe that human-like language understanding by machines is encumbered by two varieties of the notorious “knowledge acquisition bottleneck”: a pattern acquisition bottleneck, and a world knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Copyright c © 2009, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Concerning the former, I suggest that we need to reconceptualize parsing/interpretation as a massively patternbased process, in which more specific idiomatic and semantic patterns select (and sometimes override) traditional, generic phrase structure patterns (Schubert 2009). Concerning world knowledge acquisition, we are confronted with a variety of practical and theoretical problems, some of which will be my focus here. Our approach to knowledge acquisition is text-based, i.e., we are attempting to exploit the abundant textual materials available online nowadays. Most of our efforts so far, starting about 8 years ago, have been concerned with obtaining simple general factoids from arbitrary texts (see item (4) in the opening section). For example, the sentence “The boy entered through the open door of the old man’s shack”, when processed by our KNEXT system (e.g., (Schubert 2002; Schubert and Tong 2003; Van Durme and Schubert 2008)) yields a set of EL formulas that are automatically verbalized as A BOY MAY ENTER THROUGH A DOOR OF A SHACK. A SHACK MAY HAVE A DOOR.
Functional Genomic mRNA Profiling of a large cancer data base demonstrates mesothelin overexpression in a broad range of tumor types

The membrane bound glycoprotein mesothelin (MSLN) is a highly specific tumor marker, which is currently exploited as target for drugs. There are only limited data available on MSLN expression by human tumors. Therefore we determined overexpression of MSLN across different tumor types with Functional Genomic mRNA (FGM) profiling of a large cancer database. Results were compared with data in articles reporting immunohistochemical (IHC) MSLN tumor expression. FGM profiling is a technique that allows prediction of biologically relevant overexpression of proteins from a robust data set of mRNA microarrays. This technique was used in a database comprising 19,746 tumors to identify for 41 tumor types the percentage of samples with an overexpression of MSLN compared to a normal background. A literature search was performed to compare the FGM profiling data with studies reporting IHC MSLN tumor expression. FGM profiling showed MSLN overexpression in gastrointestinal (12–36%) and gynecological tumors (20–66%), non-small cell lung cancer (21%) and synovial sarcomas (30%). The overexpression found in thyroid cancers (5%) and renal cell cancers (10%) was not yet reported with IHC analyses. We observed that MSLN amplification rate within esophageal cancer depends on the histotype (31% for adenocarcinomas versus 3% for squamous-cell carcinomas). Subset analysis in breast cancer showed MSLN amplification rates of 28% in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and 33% in basal-like breast cancer. Further subtype analysis of TNBCs showed the highest amplification rate (42%) in the basal-like 1 subtype and the lowest amplification rate (9%) in the luminal androgen receptor subtype.
Inequality at Birth: Some Causes and Consequences

Recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors, including maternal education, behaviors, and participation in social programs. In turn, endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes, and of the outcomes of future generations. Exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has received increasing attention. A large literature outside of economics advocates for "Environmental Justice," and argues that poor and minority families are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards. I provide new evidence on this question, showing that children born to less educated and minority mothers are more likely to be exposed to pollution in utero and that white, college educated mothers are particularly responsive to changes in environmental amenities. I estimate that differences in exposure to toxic releases may explain 6% of the gap in incidence of low birth weight between infants of white college educated mothers and infants of black high school dropout mothers.
Governance Life Cycle Framework for Managing Security in Public Cloud: From User Perspective

Public Cloud Computing (PCC) delivers technology "As a Service". It is widely accepted by consumers, enterprises and, even governments because it reduces financial budget for acquiring Information technology (IT) infrastructure. The major deterrence against its adoption is security and governance risks. These risks are associated with three facets, geographical location of cloud provider, change of governance level within cloud service layers and inadequacy of existing international security standards to maintain security. In this paper, these three domains are researched to formulate governance life cycle framework for managing user data security in PCC