Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Universal Darwinism As a Process of Bayesian Inference

Many of the mathematical frameworks describing natural selection are equivalent to Bayes' Theorem, also known as Bayesian updating. By definition, a process of Bayesian Inference is one which involves a Bayesian update, so we may conclude that these frameworks describe natural selection as a process of Bayesian inference. Thus, natural selection serves as a counter example to a widely-held interpretation that restricts Bayesian Inference to human mental processes (including the endeavors of statisticians). As Bayesian inference can always be cast in terms of (variational) free energy minimization, natural selection can be viewed as comprising two components: a generative model of an “experiment” in the external world environment, and the results of that “experiment” or the “surprise” entailed by predicted and actual outcomes of the “experiment. ” Minimization of free energy implies that the implicit measure of “surprise” experienced serves to update the generative model in a Bayesian manner. This description closely accords with the mechanisms of generalized Darwinian process proposed both by Dawkins, in terms of replicators and vehicles, and Campbell, in terms of inferential systems. Bayesian inference is an algorithm for the accumulation of evidence-based knowledge. This algorithm is now seen to operate over a wide range of evolutionary processes, including natural selection, the evolution of mental models and cultural evolutionary processes, notably including science itself. The variational principle of free energy minimization may thus serve as a unifying mathematical framework for universal Darwinism, the study of evolutionary processes operating throughout nature.
Journeys into the genome of cancer cells

I come from a family in which there have been no scientists or doctors. I was interested, however, in biology at school and started my scientific career by training in medicine at Oxford University and Guys Hospital, London. Practising as a doctor reinforced my curiosity about the biological processes underlying human disease. As a consequence, I pursued a clinical vocation in histopathology, a discipline that couples exposure to the sights and smells of the autopsy room with a daily journey into the often beautiful, sometimes ugly world of healthy and diseased human tissues under the microscope. After an introduction to general histopathology in Nick Wright's department at the Hammersmith Hospital, London, I completed my postgraduate medical training in neuropathology with Peter Lantos at the Maudsley Hospital, London.Peering at the nuclei of cancer cells under the microscope, for me it was a matter of fascination that hidden within them were the key events converting normal cells into cancer cells, and frustration because they were out of reach. Many of the tissue samples examined by pathologists are from cancers. The clonal theory of cancer development and the general role of DNA mutations in generating cancer cell clones had been established by 1986 when I was working as a junior pathologist. Indeed, the first mutated cancer gene, HRAS , had recently been identified through application of the, then new, technologies of recombinant DNA technology. Peering at the nuclei of cancer cells under the microscope, for me it was a matter of fascination that hidden within them were the key events converting normal cells into cancer cells, and frustration because they were out of reach. So, I took 3 years break from medicine to study for a PhD, learning the methods and thinking of molecular oncology in Colin Cooper's laboratory at the Institute …
Supersymmetric moduli of the SU(2) × ℝϕ linear dilaton background and NS5-branes

We study several classes of marginal deformations of the conformal field theory SU(2)k × R�. This theory describes the near-horizon region of a stack of parallel and coin- cident NS5-branes and is related holographically to little string theory. We investigate the supersymmetry properties of these deformations and we elucidate their role in the context of holography. The conformal field theory moduli space contains "non-holographic" opera- tors that do not seem to have a simple interpretation in little string theory. Subsequently, we analyze several NS5-brane configurations in terms of SU(2)k × Rdeformations. We discuss in detail interesting phenomena, like the excision of the strong coupling region as- sociated with the linear dilaton and the manifestation of the symmetries of an NS5-brane setup in the deforming operators. Finally, we present a class of conformally hyperkahler geometries that arise as "non-holographic" deformations of SU(2)k × R�.
The relationship of self-efficacy expectancies to relapse among alcohol dependent men and women: a prospective study.

OBJECTIVE We studied the relationship of self-efficacy expectancies measured during inpatient alcohol treatment and time to first drink and time to relapse following hospitalization. We also examined whether the relationship of in-hospital self-efficacy and posttreatment drinking outcome differed by gender. METHOD We measured self-efficacy expectancies using the Situational Confidence Questionnaire (SCQ) in 100 subjects (59 men) during inpatient treatment for alcohol dependence. We followed subjects monthly for 1 year and examined the relationship of their in-hospital SCQ scores to posttreatment drinking behavior, as measured by time to first drink, time to relapse and percent abstinent days. RESULTS Self-efficacy during hospitalization was related to relapse during the 12 months following hospitalization. Survival analysis demonstrated that in-hospital SCQ scores greater than 45 were predictive of better drinking outcomes. The median number of days to relapse after treatment were 30 and 135, respectively, in those with in-hospital SCQ scores less than or equal to 45 compared with those with SCQ scores greater than 45. There were no gender differences in self-efficacy measured during hospitalization, nor were there gender differences in the relationship of self-efficacy to time to relapse. However, men with SCQ scores less than or equal to 45 had fewer abstinent days during follow-up. CONCLUSIONS Among both men and women being treated for alcohol dependence, a cut-off score of 45 on the SCQ may be especially important in helping clinicians assess patients who are at high risk for more rapid return to drinking after hospitalization.
Geographical and temporal flexibility in the response to crosswinds by migrating raptors

Wind and ocean currents may potentially have important effects on travelling animals, as an animal which does not respond to lateral flow will be drifted from its intended direction of movement. By analysing daily movements of migrating ospreys Pandion haliaetus and marsh harriers Circus aeruginosus, as recorded by satellite telemetry, in relation to global wind data, we showed that these raptors allow on average 47 per cent drift. Furthermore, our analyses revealed significant geographical and temporal variation in the response to crosswinds. During some parts of the migration, the birds drifted and in other parts they compensated or even overcompensated. In some regions, the response of marsh harriers depended on the wind direction. They drifted when the wind came from one side and (over)compensated when the wind came from the opposite side, and this flexible response was different in different geographical regions. These results suggest that migrating raptors modulate their response to crosswinds at different places and times during their travels and show that individual birds use a much more varied repertoire of behavioural responses to wind than hitherto assumed. Our results may also explain why contrasting and variable results have been obtained in previous studies of the effect of wind on bird migration.
Who's Calling? Demographics of Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda

We describe how new sources of data can be used to better understand the demographic structure of the population of Rwandan mobile phone users. After combining anonymous call data records with follow-up phone interviews, we detect significant differences in phone usage among different social and economic subgroups of the population. However, initial experiments suggest that predicting demographics from call usage, and vice-versa, is quite difficult.
Integrating Classification and Association Rule Mining

Classification rule mining aims to discover a small set of rules in the database that forms an accurate classifier. Association rule mining finds all the rules existing in the database that satisfy some minimum support and minimum confidence constraints. For association rule mining, the target of discovery is not pre-determined, while for classification rule mining there is one and only one predetermined target. In this paper, we propose to integrate these two mining techniques. The integration is done by focusing on mining a special subset of association rules, called class association rules (CARs). An efficient algorithm is also given for building a classifier based on the set of discovered CARs. Experimental results show that the classifier built this way is, in general, more accurate than that produced by the state-of-the-art classification system C4.5. In addition, this integration helps to solve a number of problems that exist in the current classification systems.
Suitability of Surface Water for Domestic Water Use

The Arab Region is currently challenged by securing sufficient water resources for sustainable development. Although, Lebanon is considered relatively “the reservoir of water in the Middle East”, still, the provision of adequate, sustainable safe domestic water remains a major challenge to be met. The city of Beirut hosts one third of the Lebanese population due to progressive urbanization, resulting mostly from centralization of services and economic activities. Faced with this challenge, the tendency is to reduce dependency on groundwater resources and supplement it by surface water. The Awali River is among the 16 perennial flowing water resources, at a relatively convenient distance from the Capital (Beirut). The objective of this work is to evaluate the river water basin to determine the optimal extraction points, water quality variability and the need to develop and sustain proper river basin management and quality control programs. Accordingly, water samples were collected throughout the year from identified sampling locations. Complete physical, chemical, microbiological (pH, Conductivity, TDS, TOC, Ca, Mg, HCO3, SO4, NO3, Na, K, Fe, Zn, Cu, Pb, Cd, Mo, Co, Total Coliform, Ecoli ) quality profile based on standard methods and procedures were conducted. Further data was analysed using SigmaStat statistical package and water modelling software AquaChem. Preliminary results reflect on minimal exposure to sources of pollution other than domestic sewage. This further emphasizes the need to meet the water and sustainable goals of the water for life decade 2005-2015. Moreover, promoting and sustaining water and sanitation projects becomes a real challenge.
Towards a grammar of spoken language: incorporating paralinguistic information

This paper reports on recent developments for the creation and analysis of very large databases of emotional and attitudinallymarked speech for the support of research into concatenative methods for producing synthesised speech which is capable of expressing the range of prosody and phonation styles to emulate human spoken interactions. It addresses the problems of ensuring high spontaneity in the speech corpus while at the same time collecting data that is of high enough audio quality to allow signal analysis by automatic processing techniques. The paper suggests that in order to describe such speech adequately, a new grammar for spoken language will be required.
AN IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS OF DENGUE MOSQUITO DYNAMICS IN LAHORE: UNRAVELING THE IMPACT OF DENGUE OUTBREAKS AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

Dengue fever, caused by the Aedes mosquito-borne dengue virus, is still a major public health concern in many parts of the world, including Lahore, Pakistan. Lahore region is regarded as a dengue fever hotspot due to the large number of cases reported each year. The purpose of this research is to give an in-depth analysis of dengue mosquito dynamics in Lahore, with a particular emphasis on determining the influence of dengue epidemics and environmental factors. The current study was based on survey comprising 240 individuals from Lahore. In the study findings, 82.08% were positive cases and 17.91% were negative cases. The majority of respondents, were aware of the symptoms of dengue infection (62.33%), its transmission (90.83%), the cause of dengue (61%), safety precautions (73.33%), and the organ infected by the dengue virus (66.25). However, the majority of people are still clueless. 70% of participants indicate that television is their primary information source. Dengue fever cases have been found to have a seasonal pattern, peaking during the monsoon season (45.41%) when mosquito breeding conditions are perfect. The study's findings revealed that Aedes mosquitos, particularly Aedes aegypti, were widespread and identified as the primary vectors (61.66%) of dengue transmission in Lahore. It was revealed that temperature (49.58%), and rainfall all affected the number of Aedes mosquitoes. Overall, 81.6% were satisfied with Governmental efforts against the spread of dengue fever. Improved public knowledge is necessary to reduce dengue virus incidence. The findings of this study can assist public health professionals and legislators in developing targeted measures to mitigate the consequences of dengue epidemics and protect the public from this terrible infection.
Image Fusion in Remote Sensing and Quality Evaluation of Fused Images

In remote sensing, acquired optical images of high spectral resolution have usually a lower spatial resolution than images of lower spectral resolution. This is due to physical, cost and complexity constraints. To make the most of the available imagery, many image fusion techniques have been developed to address this problem. Image fusion is an ill-posed inverse problem where an image of low spatial resolution and high spectral resolution is enhanced in spatial-resolution by using an auxiliary image of high spatial resolution and low spectral resolution. It is assumed that both images display the same scene and are properly co-registered. Thus, the problem is essentially to transfer details from the higher spatial resolution auxiliary image to the upscaled lower resolution image in a manner that minimizes the spatial and spectral distortion of the fused image. The most common image fusion problem is pansharpening, where a multispectral (MS) image is enhanced using wide-band panchromatic (PAN) image. A similar problem is the enhancement of a hyperspectral (HS) image by either a PAN image or an MS image. As there is no reference image available, the reliable quantitative evaluation of the quality of the fused image is a difficult problem. This thesis addresses the image fusion problem in three different ways and also addresses the problem of quantitative quality evaluation. The contributions of the thesis are the following. A method for the general fusion problem. It based on developing a pixel-wise maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator, which is derived using a forward model for the image to be enhanced, and the assumption of the joint Gaussianity of the estimated image and the auxiliary image. By employing principal component analysis (PCA), the dimensionality of the problem can be reduced significantly, enabling efficient and robust estimation. A pre-processing method to enhance the fusion quality of the two largest classes of pansharpening methods, i.e., the component substitution (CS) methods and the multi-resolution analysis (MRA) methods. These methods can be described using general detail-injection schemes where details obtained from a PAN image are modulated and added to the interpolated bands of the MS image. By using a Wiener filter based deblurring on the interpolated bands, the fusion quality of CS methods, in particular, can be enhanced. A method based on training a three dimensional convolution neural network (3D-CNN) to fuse MS and HS images. To make the problem computationally feasible, dimensionality reduction of the HS image using PCA is a key ingredient in the method. Finally, the problem of quantitative quality evaluation is addressed. It is shown that the verification of the consistency property of the fused image can be used instead of the conventional synthesis at reduced resolution protocol that is widely used. The main argument for using consistency is that when using the synthesis protocol, the fusion of images of reduced resolution does not give a good estimate of the fusion at the full resolution scale.
The conjugate gradient approach to solve two dimensions linear elliptic boundary value equations as a prototype of the reaction diffusion system

This paper presents a numerical approach to solve the 2-dimensional reaction-diffusion problem, a crucial model in physics and chemistry, with applications ranging from pattern formation to material science. Focusing on addressing a stationary linear elliptic problem within a rectangular domain, boundary conditions are determined through a finite-difference formulation. The Conjugate-Gradient Method is employed for the numerical solution, facilitating efficient computation. Key findings are elucidated: Firstly, the grid size for the symmetric matrix A is intricately linked to a bijective function, enabling the transition of indices to grid points. Notably, the solution to this elliptic problem exhibits a concave-up profile. Secondly, various solvers such as the Conjugate Gradient, Gauss-Seidel, and Jacobi techniques are viable, with the Conjugate Gradient method chosen for its superior accuracy, especially when considering computational efficiency. Moreover, the relationship between grid size and solution accuracy is explored, revealing a proportional dependence. Refinement of the grid leads to increased iteration counts but reduced implementation time, owing to the linearity of the function . The convergence criterion ensures high accuracy in solutions, as demonstrated in the provided figures.
Automatic Expansion of Equivalent Sentence Set Based on Syntactic Substitution

In this paper, we propose an automatic quantitative expansion method for a sentence set that contains sentences of the same meaning (called an equivalent sentence set). This task is regarded as paraphrasing. The features of our method are: 1) The paraphrasing rules are dynamically acquired by Hierarchical Phrase Alignment from the equivalent sentence set, and 2) A large equivalent sentence set is generated by substituting source syntactic structures. Our experiments show that 561 sentences on average are correctly generated from 8.48 equivalent sentences.
Convergence rates of posterior distributions for non-i.i.d. observations

We consider the asymptotic behavior of posterior distributions and Bayes estimators based on observations which are required to be neither independent nor identically distributed. We give general results on the rate of convergence of the posterior measure relative to distances derived from a testing criterion. We then specialize our results to independent, nonidentically distributed observations, Markov processes, stationary Gaussian time series and the white noise model. We apply our general results to several examples of infinite-dimensional statistical models including nonparametric regression with normal errors, binary regression, Poisson regression, an interval censoring model, Whittle estimation of the spectral density of a time series and a nonlinear autoregressive model. © Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2007.
Prediksi Kadar Particulate Matter (PM10) untuk Pemantauan Kualitas Udara Menggunakan Jaringan Syaraf Tiruan Studi Kasus Kota Pontianak

Pada penelitian ini telah dilakukan prediksi Particulate Matter (PM10) menggunakan jaringan syaraf tiruan propagasi balik. Prediksi pencemaran Particulate Matter (PM10) ini dilakukan sebagai langkah antisipatif untuk mendeteksi pencemaran udara terutama jika alat ukur mengalami kerusakan. Data yang digunakan yaitu parameter cuaca seperti curah hujan, penyinaran matahari, kelembaban udara, kecepatan angin dan suhu udara sebagai masukan jaringan sedangkan target jaringan ialah kadar PM10. Arsitektur jaringan syaraf tiruan (JST) yang digunakan tersusun dari neuron sebanyak 20-20-15-15-10-1 dan menggunakan fungsi tansig-logsig-tansig-logsig-tansig-purelin pada setiap lapisan jaringan. Pelatihan jaringan menghasilkan koefisien korelasi 0,9999 dengan MSE 0,00003, sedangkan pengujian jaringan menghasilkan koefisien korelasi 0,9673 dengan MSE 0,491 dan koefisien determinasi 0,9334. Hasil tersebut menunjukkan bahwa sebesar 93,34% parameter cuaca dapat digunakan sebagai parameter masukan pada JST untuk memprediksi kadar PM10 di Kota Pontianak.
Lack of interaction between alpha(2)-autoreceptors and prejunctional receptors mediating a facilitatory effect on noradrenaline release.

The present study was undertaken to investigate the effect of alpha(2)-autoreceptor blockade on the facilitatory influence exerted by activation of beta -, A(2A)-adenosine- and angiotensin II receptors. Segments of a rat-tail artery, previously incubated with(3)H-noradrenaline, were subjected to electrical stimulation. The influence of isoprenaline, the compound CGS21680 and angiotensin II on the overflow of tritium evoked by electrical stimulation was checked before and after alpha(2)-adrenoceptor blockade. All the agonists used caused concentration-dependent increases of tritium overflow, the maximal effect representing increases of 44.2, 27.4 and 41.2% for isoprenaline, CGS21680 and angiotensin II, respectively. In the presence of alpha(2)-adrenoceptor blockade by phenoxybenzamine ( 1 microm) or yohimbine (33 or 100 nm), the facilitatory influence of isoprenaline, CGS21680 and angiotensin II was not significantly changed. Since this facilitatory influence, which involves the activation of G(s)- or G(q)-proteins, was not enhanced by alpha(2)-adrenoceptor blockade, it is concluded that the enhancement of the negative modulation resulting from activation of A(1)-adenosine-, muscarine- and kappa -receptors, as previously shown, should be due to the fact that the involved systems share signal transduction mechanisms, or at least G-proteins.