Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Top-predators as biodiversity regulators: Contemporary issues affecting knowledge and management of dingoes in Australia

Large predators have an indispensable role in structuring food webs and maintaining ecological processes for the benefit of biodiversity at lower trophic levels. Such roles are widely evident in marine and terrestrial systems [1, 2]. Large predators can indirectly alleviate predation on smaller (and often threatened) fauna and promote vegetation growth by interacting strongly with sympatric carnivore and herbivore species (e.g. [3-5]). The local extinction of large predators can therefore have detrimental effects on biodiversity [6], and their subsequent restoration has been observed to produce positive biodiversity outcomes in many cases [7]. Perhaps the most well-known example of this is the restoration of gray wolves Canis lupus to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of North America. Since the reintroduction of 66 wolves in 1995 [8], wolf numbers in the area have climbed to ~2000, some large herbivores and mesopredators have substantially declined, and some fauna and flora at lower trophic levels have increased (see [4], and references therein). Similar experiences with some other large predators mean that they are now considered to be of high conservation value in many parts of the world [1, 2, 7], and exploring their roles and functions has arguably been one of the most prominent fields of biodiversity conservation research in the last 10–15 years.
Acquiring Strongly-related Events using Predicate-argument Co-occurring Statistics and Case Frames

This paper proposes a method for automatically acquiring strongly-related events from a large corpus using predicateargument co-occurring statistics and case frames. The strongly-related events are acquired in the form of strongly-related two predicates with their relevant arguments. First, strongly-related events are acquired from predicate-argument cooccurring statistics. Then, the remaining argument alignment is performed by using case frames. We conducted experiments using a Web corpus consisting of 1.6G sentences. The accuracy for the extracted event pairs was 96%, and the accuracy of the argument alignment was 79%. The number of acquired event pairs was about 20 thousands.
The meaning of additive reaction-time effects: some misconceptions

FIGURE 1 | Mean RT data from Stafford et al. (2011, Experiment 1) and fitted additive model. Standard errors (SEs) shown (with mean 5.0 ms), which can be used to assess goodness of fit, are based on deviations from additive models plus linear interactions fitted to the 15 mean RTs from each of the 20 subjects. The SE based on the residual mean square (114 df) in an anova, after removing the effects of subject, saturation, congruence, their two-way interactions, and the interaction with subjects of the linear interaction of saturation and congruence, is 8.2 ms. color to be named, and congruence of the word with the color name. Such additivity is consistent with the RT being generated by two stages (successive processes), C: color discrimination, whose duration is influenced by saturation but not congruence, and N: retrieval and pronunciation of the color name, whose duration is influenced by congruence but not saturation. (There must also be another process, W: word recognition, in which the word is identified, which perhaps ends before N and may operate in parallel with C.) SG Sternberg, 1969, 1984, 1998, 2001, 2011) to be associated with the idea that the additivity of the effects of two factors implies two stages, they conclude that the assumptions of the AFM are “untenable. ”
Inflatable antenna for cubesat: fabrication, deployment and results of experimental tests

CubeSats and small satellites have potential to provide means to explore space and to perform science in a more affordable way. As the goals for these spacecraft become more ambitious in space exploration, moving from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) or further, the communication systems currently implemented will not be able to support those missions. One of the bottlenecks is the antennas' size, due to the close relation between antenna gain and dimensions. Current antennas for CubeSats are mostly dipole or patch antennas with limited gain. Deployable (not inflatable) antennas for CubeSats are currently being investigated, but these solutions are affected by the challenge of packaging the whole deployable structure in a small spacecraft. The work that we propose represents the first attempt to develop an inflatable antenna for CubeSats. Inflatable structures and antennas can be packaged efficiently, occupying a small amount of space, and they can provide, once deployed, large dish dimension and correspondent gain. Inflatable antennas have been previously tested in space (Inflatable Antenna Experiment, STS-77). However they have never been developed for small spacecraft such as CubeSats, where the packaging efficiency, the deployment, and the inflation represent a challenge. Previous works developed by the authors described trade-off analysis, preliminary design and radiation model for the antenna. The research presented in this paper is focused specifically on implementation and testing. Details of the antenna's fabrication and related issues are illustrated as well as the mechanism to fold and deploy the antenna in space. Finally, results of the experimental tests (vacuum chamber and anechoic chamber) are described. Future work in the development of the antenna will include the improvement of the fabrication process and the design of a 3U CubeSat mission to be proposed as a technical demonstration.
Low Doses of Scopolamine Increase Cardiac Vagal Tone in the Acute Phase of Myocardial Infarction

BackgroundReduced cardiac vagal tone in patients with myocardial infarction (MI) is associated with a high risk of sudden death. Muscarinic blocking agents in small doses induce a paradoxical increase in cardiac vagal activity in normal subjects. We tested whether low doses of scopolamine delivered transdermally enhance tonic and reflex cardiac vagal activity in patients in the acute phase of MI. Methods and ResultsPatients were randomized to a scopolamine (n=17) or a placebo patch (n= 19) in a double-blind fashion 4.20 ± 0.18 days after acute MI. Cardiac vagal activity was assessed by testing the arterial baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) using the phenylephrine method and by power spectral analysis of the RR interval variability. Twenty-four hours after scopolamine, we found a significant increase in BRS (from 7.05 ± +1.21 to 13.99 ± 2.33 ms/mm Hg, p<.05) and in RR variability, expressed as the mean standard deviation of 512 normal consecutive RR intervals (from 18.09 ± 2.64 to 31.16 ± 4.16 milliseconds, p<.05). The amplitude of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, measured by the absolute power of the high-frequency spectral component, was also enhanced (from 62.55+21.49 to 305.33 ± 95.68 milliseconds squared, p<.05), whereas the power in the low-frequency spectral component of the RR variability, which results from the interaction between cardiac sympathetic and vagal activity, did not change significantly (from 73.12 ± 24.44 to 126.46 ± 44.29 milliseconds squared, P=.93). ConclusionIn patients in the acute phase of MI, low doses of scopolamine cause a sustained increase in cardiac vagal tone and improve the autonomic indices associated with mortality.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Blood Brain/Nerve Barrier Dysfunction and Leukocyte Infiltration: Closely Related or Discordant?

Unlike other organs the nervous system is secluded from the rest of the organism by the blood brain barrier (BBB) or blood nerve barrier (BNB) preventing passive influx of fluids from the circulation. Similarly, leukocyte entry to the nervous system is tightly controlled. Breakdown of these barriers and cellular inflammation are hallmarks of inflammatory as well as ischemic neurological diseases and thus represent potential therapeutic targets. The spatiotemporal relationship between BBB/BNB disruption and leukocyte infiltration has been a matter of debate. We here review contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as a non-invasive tool to depict barrier dysfunction and its relation to macrophage infiltration in the central and peripheral nervous system under pathological conditions. Novel experimental contrast agents like Gadofluorine M (Gf) allow more sensitive assessment of BBB dysfunction than conventional Gadolinium (Gd)-DTPA enhanced MRI. In addition, Gf facilitates visualization of functional and transient alterations of the BBB remote from lesions. Cellular contrast agents such as superparamagnetic iron oxide particles (SPIO) and perfluorocarbons enable assessment of leukocyte (mainly macrophage) infiltration by MR technology. Combined use of these MR contrast agents disclosed that leukocytes can enter the nervous system independent from a disturbance of the BBB, and vice versa, a dysfunctional BBB/BNB by itself is not sufficient to attract inflammatory cells from the circulation. We will illustrate these basic imaging findings in animal models of multiple sclerosis, cerebral ischemia, and traumatic nerve injury and review corresponding findings in patients.
The Directional Tuning of the Barber-Pole Illusion

In order to study the integration of local motion signals in the human visual system, we measured directional tuning curves for the barber-pole illusion by varying two crucial aspects of the stimulus layout independently across a wide a range in the same experiment. These were the orientation of the grating presented behind the rectangular aperture and the aspect ratio of the aperture, which in combination determine the relative contributions of local motion signals perpendicular to the gratings and parallel to the aperture borders, respectively. The strength of the illusion, ie the tendency to perceive motion along the major axis of the aperture, obviously depends on the spatial layout of the aperture, but also on grating orientation. Subjects were asked which direction they perceived and how compelling their motion percept was, revealing different strategies of the visual system to deal with the barber-pole stimulus. Some individuals respond strongly to the unambiguous motion information at the boundaries, leading to multistable percepts and multimodal distributions of responses. Others tend to report intermediate directions, apparently being less influenced by the actual boundaries. The general pattern of deviations from the motion direction perpendicular to grating orientation-a decrease with aspect ratio approaching unity (ie square-shaped apertures) and with gratings approaching parallel orientation to the shorter aperture boundary—is discussed in the context of simple phenomenological models of motion integration. The best fit between model predictions and experimental data is found for an interaction between two stimulus parameters: (i) cycle ratio, which is the sine-wave gratings equivalent of the terminator ratio for line gratings, describing the effects from the aperture boundaries, and (ii) the grating orientation, responsible for perpendicular motion components, which describes the influence of motion signals from inside the aperture. This suggests that the most simple cycle (terminator) ratio explanation cannot fully account for the quantitative properties of the barber-pole illusion.
Comparison bewteen multi-task and single-task oracle risks in kernel ridge regression

In this paper we study multi-task kernel ridge regression and try to understand when the multi-task procedure performs better than the single-task one, in terms of averaged quadratic risk. In order to do so, we compare the risks of the estimators with perfect calibration, the \emph{oracle risk}. We are able to give explicit settings, favorable to the multi-task procedure, where the multi-task oracle performs better than the single-task one. In situations where the multi-task procedure is conjectured to perform badly, we also show the oracle does so. We then complete our study with simulated examples, where we can compare both oracle risks in more natural situations. A consequence of our result is that the multi-task ridge estimator has a lower risk than any single-task estimator, in favorable situations.
Integrated Hospital Information System

Summary form only given. The target was to construct an information system addressed to target the clinical and research needs in hospitals. The system integrates imaging as well as text. Furthermore, more it allows processing of data which are important for clinical research as well as for hospital administration. The requirements for such a system in terms of hardware, software and networking will be presented.
Dynamic regulation of heart rate during acute hypotension: new insight into baroreflex function.

UNLABELLED To examine the dynamic properties of baroreflex function, we measured beat-to-beat changes in arterial blood pressure (ABP) and heart rate (HR) during acute hypotension induced by thigh cuff deflation in 10 healthy subjects under supine resting conditions and during progressive lower body negative pressure (LBNP). The quantitative, temporal relationship between ABP and HR was fitted by a second-order autoregressive (AR) model. The frequency response was evaluated by transfer function analysis. RESULTS HR changes during acute hypotension appear to be controlled by an ABP error signal between baseline and induced hypotension. The quantitative relationship between changes in ABP and HR is characterized by a second-order AR model with a pure time delay of 0.75 s containing low-pass filter properties. During LBNP, the change in HR/change in ABP during induced hypotension significantly decreased, as did the numerator coefficients of the AR model and transfer function gain. CONCLUSIONS 1) Beat-to-beat HR responses to dynamic changes in ABP may be controlled by an error signal rather than directional changes in pressure, suggesting a "set point" mechanism in short-term ABP control. 2) The quantitative relationship between dynamic changes in ABP and HR can be described by a second-order AR model with a pure time delay. 3) The ability of the baroreflex to evoke a HR response to transient changes in pressure was reduced during LBNP, which was due primarily to a reduction of the static gain of the baroreflex.
Performance comparison of collision resolution algorithms with amount of feedback information

This paper presents the performance comparison of eight collision resolution algorithms. It can be systematically applied for random access protocols under different feedback information which includes binary, ternary and feedback of the number of accessing packets. Each algorithm is derived from the combination of uniform selection algorithm and three effective strategies, including splitting, adaptive frame size, and skipped slot. This paper aims to investigate which one strategy in these three strategies is the best effective to improve the system performance. Based on simulation results, when the information about number of accessing packets is available, significant improvement in mean access delay can be achieved. We found that the splitting strategy is the most effective strategy, following by adaptive frame size and skipped slot.
Recognizing noun phrases in biomedical text : An evaluation of lab prototypes and commercial chunkers

In the biomedical domain, many systems for text mining and information extraction rely on basic morphological and syntactic analysis such as part-of-speech tagging or noun phrase (NP) chunking. Due to the lack of sufficient in-domain resources these systems often make use of NLP tools trained and evaluated on newspaper-language training sets. Scientific texts in the life sciences, however, differ from general language in the structure and complexity of noun phrases. Therefore, we tested the effects this domain change has on the performance of these systems. For this purpose, we compared three prototype chunking systems developed in research labs (all based on statistical learning methods) and one chunking system which is part of a commercial information extraction toolkit (based on manually supplied grammar specifications). Trained on PENN TREEBANK tagging and chunking annotations for newspapers, we ran these systems on the GENIA treebank which contains such annotations for biological abstracts taken from MEDLINE. We, first, observed a significant over-all loss in performance (on the order of 4%) and, second, found (with the exception of the SVM-based system) no significant difference between the performance of lab prototypes and the commerical chunker on GENIA data. Fortunately, the performance loss can also be partly remedied by few biomedical domain-specific adapta-
Perception of French audio-visual prosodic attitudes

Experimental studies are required to understand the contribution of audio and visual modalities during affective communication. This paper presents a perception study of the audio-visual expression of six French attitudes. The relative importance of each modality in the decoding of these expressions is analysed, as a first step toward a deeper comprehension of their influence on social affects expression. Two speakers are evaluated, in order to test the influence of speaker’s performances on listeners’ perception.
Accommodating data heterogeneity in ULS systems

Ultra-Large Scale (ULS) systems comprise numerous software elements designed and implemented by independent stakeholders whose requirements may vary widely. Consequently, elements in a ULS system may use different data formats, which complicates integration of elements. Writing code to robustly convert data from one format to another requires time and skills that some programmers may lack. Worse, the stakeholders who control a software element may change the element's data format at any point in the future without warning, causing format incompatibility not foreseen during the ULS system's construction. To address heterogeneity of data formats, we present a new abstraction called "topes". Each tope describes one kind of data, including known formats of that data and rules for transforming values among formats. Labeling the inputs and outputs of software elements with topes raises the level of abstraction so that elements produce and consume certain kinds of data, rather than particular formats.
Interference-induced DCO spur mitigation for digital phase locked loop in 65-nm CMOS

This work proposes a DSP technique to mitigate the interference-induced spurious tones coupled to the digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) of a digital phase locked loop (DPLL). We leverage the digitized phase information at the time-to-digital converter (TDC) output, and formulate an adaptive algorithm to identify the interference pattern from any electrical or magnetic coupling path, and inject the cancellation signal accordingly. The proposed algorithm also keeps track of the magnitude and phase variation in the background. We experiment with the algorithm in a 65nm 3-5 GHz DPLL prototype and observe 10 ~ 30 dB spur reduction from different coupling paths to the DCO over various interference frequencies. Additionally, the prototype measures reference spur of <;-110dBc and phase noise of - 129dBc/Hz at 3MHz offset frequency.
Spatiotemporal chaos in terms of unstable recurrent patterns

Spatiotemporally chaotic dynamics of a Kuramoto - Sivashinsky system is described by means of an infinite hierarchy of its unstable spatiotemporally periodic solutions. An intrinsic parametrization of the corresponding invariant set serves as an accurate guide to the high-dimensional dynamics, and the periodic orbit theory yields several global averages characterizing the chaotic dynamics.
Optimal exploratory paths for a mobile rover

We consider the problem of maximizing the localization accuracy of a mobile vehicle, based on triangulation measurements derived from optical data. The problem is intrinsically nonlinear, as the linear approximation of the system is not observable. This implies that the choice of inputs (i.e., the path followed) may affect the quality of observations made, and ultimately the localization accuracy. We consider the problem of finding the most informative exploratory path of the given length for a rover (modeled as a point in the plane) with optical triangulation information.
Understanding mental toughness in Australian soccer: Perceptions of players, parents, and coaches

Abstract We explored mental toughness in soccer using a triangulation of data capture involving players (n = 6), coaches (n = 4), and parents (n = 5). Semi-structured interviews, based on a personal construct psychology (Kelly, 1955/1991) framework, were conducted to elicit participants' perspectives on the key characteristics and their contrasts, situations demanding mental toughness, and the behaviours displayed and cognitions employed by mentally tough soccer players. The results from the research provided further evidence that mental toughness is conceptually distinct from other psychological constructs such as hardiness. The findings also supported Gucciardi, Gordon, and Dimmock's (2009) process model of mental toughness. A winning mentality and desire was identified as a key attribute of mentally tough soccer players in addition to other previously reported qualities such as self-belief, physical toughness, work ethic/motivation, and resilience. Key cognitions reported by mentally tough soccer players enabled them to remain focused and competitive during training and matches and highlighted the adoption of several forms of self-talk in dealing with challenging situations. Minor revisions to Gucciardi and colleagues' definition of mental toughness are proposed.
An interactive approach for CBIR using a network of radial basis functions

An important requirement for constructing effective content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems is accurate characterization of visual information. Conventional nonadaptive models, which are usually adopted for this task in simple CBIR systems, do not adequately capture all aspects of the characteristics of the human visual system. An effective way of addressing this problem is to adopt a "human-computer" interactive approach, where the users directly teach the system about what they regard as being significant image features and their own notions of image similarity. We propose a machine learning approach for this task, which allows users to directly modify query characteristics by specifying their attributes in the form of training examples. Specifically, we apply a radial-basis function (RBF) network for implementing an adaptive metric which progressively models the notion of image similarity through continual relevance feedback from users. Experimental results show that the proposed methods not only outperform conventional CBIR systems in terms of both accuracy and robustness, but also previously proposed interactive systems.
Review of Clustering Techniques for Finding the Similarity in Articles

Clustering is an important technique in data mining. It is a technique in which grouping of item taken place into the clusters in such a way that items of same cluster have more similarity than the items into another cluster, but is very dissimilar to the item in other clusters. The aim of document clustering is to make a set of clusters of given documents in such a way that document of each cluster have more similarity than the documents of other clusters. This paper reviews various techniques of clustering which can be divided mainly into two groups that are hierarchical and partitional clustering.