Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Host preferences of tsetse (Diptera: Glossinidae) based on bloodmeal identifications

An enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was developed to identify the origin of vertebrate blood in the guts of 29 245 wild‐caught flies of eleven Glossina species from various ecological zones of Africa. Depending on the quality of the bloodmeal samples, 62.8% of the samples were identified and could be assigned to a host‐group (e.g. ruminant), family (e.g. Bovidae) or species (e.g. Bos spp.). A total of 13 145 samples (44.9%) was identifiable up to the species level. With a few exceptions, the present results are in agreement with earlier published reports. Glossina austeni and G. fuscipleuris seemed to have a distinct feeding preference for Suidae (mainly bushpig). Glossina morsitans ssp. fed mainly on Suidae (mainly warthog), although local variations were observed and in some areas hippopotamus or ruminants replaced the warthog as the main host. Bushbuck seemed to be the principal food source for G. longipalpis and G. fusca. Glossina pallidipes fed mainly on ruminants (buffalo, bushbuck and cattle) but, depending on host availability and location, Suidae were also important hosts. Hippopotamus was identified as the main source of blood‐meals for G. brevipalpis. The main hosts for G. longipennis were Suidae (mainly bushpig) and not rhinoceros as had been reported 40 years earlier. The opportunistic feeding behaviour of the palpalis tsetse group was confirmed. The results showed that changes in environment, fauna and host availability may result in modification of tsetse feeding patterns.
The Interplay between Environmental Filtering and Spatial Processes in Structuring Communities: The Case of Neotropical Snake Communities

Both habitat filters and spatial processes can influence community structure. Space alone affects species immigration from the regional species pool, whereas habitat filters affect species distribution and inter-specific interactions. This study aimed to understand how the interplay between environmental and geographical processes influenced the structure of Neotropical snake communities in different habitat types. We selected six studies that sampled snakes in forests, four conducted in savannas and two in grasslands (the latter two are grouped in a non-forest category). We used the net relatedness and nearest taxon indices to assess phylogenetic structure within forest and non-forest areas. We also used the phylogenetic fuzzy-weighting algorithm to characterize phylogenetic structure across communities and the relation of phylogenetic composition patterns to habitat type, structure, and latitude. Finally, we tested for morphological trait convergence and phylogenetic niche conservatism using four forest and four non-forest areas for which morphological data were available. Community phylogenetic composition changed across forest and non-forest areas suggesting that environmental filtering influences community structure. Species traits were affected by habitat type, indicating convergence at the metacommunity level. Tail length, robustness, and number of ventral scales maximized community convergence among forest and non-forest areas. The observed patterns suggested environmental filtering, indicating that less vertically structured habitats represent a strong filter. Despite the fact that phylogenetic structure was not detected individually for each community, we observed a trend towards communities composed by more closely related species in higher latitudes and more overdispersed compositions in lower latitudes. Such pattern suggests that the limited distribution of major snake lineages constrained species distributions. Structure indices for each community were also related to habitat type, showing that communities from non-forest areas tend to be more clustered. Our study showed that both environmental filtering and spatial gradients play important roles in shaping the composition of Neotropical snake communities.
A 'Gibbs-Newton' Technique for Enhanced Inference of Multivariate Polya Parameters and Topic Models

Hyper-parameters play a major role in the learning and inference process of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). In order to begin the LDA latent variables learning process, these hyper-parameters values need to be pre-determined. We propose an extension for LDA that we call 'Latent Dirichlet allocation Gibbs Newton' (LDA-GN), which places non-informative priors over these hyper-parameters and uses Gibbs sampling to learn appropriate values for them. At the heart of LDA-GN is our proposed 'Gibbs-Newton' algorithm, which is a new technique for learning the parameters of multivariate Polya distributions. We report Gibbs-Newton performance results compared with two prominent existing approaches to the latter task: Minka's fixed-point iteration method and the Moments method. We then evaluate LDA-GN in two ways: (i) by comparing it with standard LDA in terms of the ability of the resulting topic models to generalize to unseen documents; (ii) by comparing it with standard LDA in its performance on a binary classification task.
The effects of gender and marital status on burnout of English teachers in Iran

Teacher burnout is a world-wide phenomenon that draws the attention of educational psychologists and stimulates efforts in construct elaboration and measurement. Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of personal accomplishments are three dimensions that constitute the burnout syndrome. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of gender and marital status on burnout of English teacher among 100 English teachers in Tehran, Iran. This paper describes the quantitative data obtained from the study. All the participants of the study were Iranian citizens who were working at secondary schools in Tehran. In order to determine the level of burnout experienced by English teachers, the Maslach Burnout Inventory test (MBI) was conducted. Based on the findings, the gender of English teacher seemed to have influenced the teacher’s responses on each of the sub-scales of the Maslach Burnout Inventory so there was a significant difference between the gender and burnout. The study also found that there was no significant difference between marital status and the English teacher’s score on the MBI.
The mechanism of exercise-induced asthma is ...

Exercise-induced asthma (EIA) refers to the transient narrowing of the airways that follows vigorous exercise. The mechanism whereby EIA occurs is thought to relate to the consequences of heating and humidifying large volumes of air during exercise. In 1978 airway cooling was identified as an important stimulus for EIA; however, severe EIA also occurred when hot dry air was inspired, and there was no abnormal cooling of the airways. In 1986 the thermal hypothesis proposed that cooling of the airways needed to be followed by rapid rewarming and that these two events caused a vasoconstriction and a reactive hyperemia of the bronchial microcirculation, together with edema of the airway wall, causing the airways to narrow after exercise. The osmotic, or airway-drying, hypothesis developed from 1982-1992 because neither airway cooling nor rewarming appeared to be necessary for EIA to occur. As water is evaporated from the airway surface liquid, it becomes hyperosmolar and provides an osmotic stimulus for water to move from any cell nearby, resulting in cell volume loss. It is proposed that the regulatory volume increase, after cell shrinkage, is the key event resulting in release of inflammatory mediators that cause airway smooth muscle to contract and the airways of asthmatic subjects to narrow. This event may or may not be associated with airway edema. The osmotic and thermal theories come together by considering that inspiration of cold air not only cools the airways but also increases the numbers of airway generations becoming dehydrated in the humidifying process.
Arterial and Venous Angiotensin II in Normal Subjects: Relation to Plasma Renin Activity and Plasma Aldosterone Concentration, and Response to Posture and Volume Changes

Plasma renin activity, arterial and venous angiotensin II (A II) concentrations, and plasma aldosterone concentration were measured in 16 normal subjects (mean age = 34 years) after 8 hours of recumbency, following 2 hours of ambulation, and again 30 minutes after administration of furosemide intravenously. Measurement s were obtained during periods of sodium restriction and again during sodium surfeit. Both arterial and venous A II exhibited a 3-fold increase from low values of 8.8 ± 2.5 and 8.6 ± 2.5 pg/ml of plasma, respectively, during recumbency on high sodium intake to values of 23.9 ±4.1 and 26.5 ± 6.2 pg/ml, respectively, following intravenous furosemide during sodium restriction. Corresponding values for aldosterone exhibited a 5-fold rise from 5.6 ng/100 ml to 32.0 ng/100 ml, whereas plasma renin activity (PRA) measured by an in vitro assay exhibited a 20-fold rise from 0.6 ± 0.2 ng of angiotensin I (AI) generated per ml per hour to 13.1 ng/ml per hour. Despite the disparity in the magnitude of these increases, significant correlations were identified between all four of the measured parameters, indicating a major role of the renin-angiotensin system in regulating aldosterone output in response to volume and posture-related stimuli. Values of arterial and venous immunoreactive A 11 were closely correlated (r = +0.72, P <0.005), but significant differences were demonstrated between low and high salt periods, suggesting that changes in metabolism of A II in the peripheral circulation may occur during sodium restriction.
Fast, Scalable, Bayesian Spike Identification for Multi-Electrode Arrays

We present an algorithm to identify individual neural spikes observed on high-density multi-electrode arrays (MEAs). Our method can distinguish large numbers of distinct neural units, even when spikes overlap, and accounts for intrinsic variability of spikes from each unit. As MEAs grow larger, it is important to find spike-identification methods that are scalable, that is, the computational cost of spike fitting should scale well with the number of units observed. Our algorithm accomplishes this goal, and is fast, because it exploits the spatial locality of each unit and the basic biophysics of extracellular signal propagation. Human interaction plays a key role in our method; but effort is minimized and streamlined via a graphical interface. We illustrate our method on data from guinea pig retinal ganglion cells and document its performance on simulated data consisting of spikes added to experimentally measured background noise. We present several tests demonstrating that the algorithm is highly accurate: it exhibits low error rates on fits to synthetic data, low refractory violation rates, good receptive field coverage, and consistency across users.
Compact Multiview Representation of Documents Based on the Total Variability Space

Mapping text documents in an LDA-based topic-space is a classical way to extract high-level representation of text documents. Unfortunately, LDA is highly sensitive to hyper-parameters related to the number of classes, or word and topic distribution, and there is no systematic way to pre-estimate optimal configurations. Moreover, various hyper-parameter configurations offer complementary views on the document. In this paper, we propose a method based on a two-step process that, first, expands the representation space by using a set of topic spaces and, second, compacts the representation space by removing poorly relevant dimensions. These two steps are based respectively on multi-view LDA-based representation spaces and factor-analysis models. This model provides a view-independent representation of documents while extracting complementary information from a massive multi-view representation. Experiments are conducted on the DECODA conversation corpus and the Reuters-21578 textual dataset. Results show the efficiency of the proposed multiview compact representation paradigm. The proposed categorization system reaches an accuracy of 86.5% with automatic transcriptions of conversations from DECODA corpus and a Macro-F1 of 80% during a classification task of the well-known Reuters-21578 corpus, with a significant gain compared to the baseline (best single topic space configuration), as well as methods and document representations previously studied.
RNALOSS: a web server for RNA locally optimal secondary structures

RNAomics, analogous to proteomics, concerns aspects of the secondary and tertiary structure, folding pathway, kinetics, comparison, function and regulation of all RNA in a living organism. Given recently discovered roles played by micro RNA, small interfering RNA, riboswitches, ribozymes, etc., it is important to gain insight into the folding process of RNA sequences. We describe the web server RNALOSS, which provides information about the distribution of locally optimal secondary structures, that possibly form kinetic traps in the folding process. The tool RNALOSS may be useful in designing RNA sequences which not only have low folding energy, but whose distribution of locally optimal secondary structures would suggest rapid and robust folding. Website: .
Robot Path Planning in High Risk Fire Front Environments

Most path planning approaches for mobile robot navigation have concentrated on discovering obstacle-free paths which minimise distance, time or energy. Here we show how variations adapted for Covert Robotics, where visibility from various (or all) points in the environment is built into the cost structures, can be further adapted to provide robot navigation paths which minimise risk of fire heat exposure in high risk fire front environments. Both escape routes and fire extinguishing forays can be planned using this methodology. A wide range of simulation results are presented to illustrate the power and scope of this approach. The work reported is related to an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant project entitled 'Robotic Vehicles for Fire Fighting and Emergency Services Support'.
The Perception of Visual UncertaintyRepresentation by Non-Experts

We tested how non-experts judge point probability for seven different visual representations of uncertainty, using a case from an unfamiliar domain. Participants (n = 140) rated the probability that the boundary between two earth layers passed through a given point, for seven different visualizations of the positional uncertainty of the boundary. For all types of visualizations, most observers appear to construct an internal model of the uncertainty distribution that closely resembles a normal distribution. However, the visual form of the uncertainty range (i.e., the visualization type) affects this internal model and the internal model relates to participants' numeracy. We conclude that perceived certainty is affected by its visual representation. In a follow-up experiment we found no indications that the absence (or presence) of a prominent center line in the visualization affects the internal model. We discuss if and how our results inform which visual representation is most suitable for representing uncertainty and make suggestions for future work.
Pomegranate exerts chemoprevention of experimentally induced mammary tumorigenesis by suppression of cell proliferation and induction of apoptosis

abstract Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in women in the United States and discovery and development of safe chemopreventive drugs is urgently needed. The fruit pomegranate (Punica granatum) is gaining importance because of its various health benefits. This study was initiated to investigate chemopreventive potential of a pomegranate emulsion (PE) against 7,12-dimethylbenz(a)anthracene (DMBA) rat mammary carcinogenesis. The animals were orally administered with PE (0.2–5.0 g/kg), starting 2 wk before and 16 wk following DMBA treatment. PE exhibited a striking reduction of DMBA-induced mammary tumor incidence, total tumor burden, and reversed histopathological changes. PE dose-dependently suppressed cell proliferation and induced apoptosis in mammary tumors. Immunohistochemical studies showed that PE increased intratumor Bax, decreased Bcl2 and manifested a proapoptotic shift in Bax/Bcl2 ratio. In addition, our gene expression study showed PE-mediated upregulation of Bad, caspase-3, caspase-7, caspase-9, poly (ADP ribose) polymerase and cytochrome c in mammary tumors. Thus, PE exerts chemoprevention of mammary carcinogenesis by suppressing cell proliferation and inducing apoptosis mediated through upregulation of Bax and downregulation of Bcl2 in concert with caspase cascades. Pomegranate bioactive phytoconstituents could be developed as a chemopreventive drug to reduce the risk of breast cancer.
Kinetic, dynamic, and pathway studies of glycerol metabolism by Klebsiella pneumoniae in anaerobic continuous culture: III. Enzymes and fluxes of glycerol dissimilation and 1,3-propanediol formation.

The initial steps of glycerol dissimilation and 1,3-propanediol (1, 3-PD) formation by Klebsiella pneumoniae anaerobically grown on glycerol were studied by quantifying the in vitro and in vivo activities of enzymes in continuous culture under conditions of steady state and oscillation and during transient phases. The enzymes studied included glycerol dehydrogenase (GDH), glycerol dehydratase (GDHt), and 1,3-propanediol oxidoreductase (PDOR). Three conclusions can be drawn from the steady-state results. First, glycerol concentration in the culture is a key parameter that inversely affects the in vitro activities (concentrations) of all three enzymes, but has a positive effect on their in vivo activities. Growth rate significantly affects the ratio of in vitro and in vivo enzyme activities under low glycerol concentrations, but not under glycerol excess. Second, whereas the flux through the oxidative pathway of glycerol dissimilation is governed mainly by the regulation of in vivo enzyme activity on a metabolic level, the flux through the reductive pathway is largely controlled by the synthesis of enzymes. Third, GDHt is a major rate-liming enzyme for the consumption of glycerol and the formation of 1,3-PD in K. pneumoniae at high glycerol concentrations. Results from oscillating cultures revealed that both in vitro and in vivo activities of the enzymes oscillated. The average values of the in vitro activities during an oscillation cycle agreed well with their corresponding values for nonoscillating cultures under similar environmental conditions. Experiments with step changes in the feed concentration of glycerol demonstrated that growth and product formation are very sensitive to changes of substrate concentration in the culture. This sensitivity is due to the dynamic responses of the genetic and metabolic networks. They should be considered when modeling the dynamics of the culture and attempting to improve the formation of 1,3-PD.
No Evidence of Attentional Bias in Statistics Anxiety

The role of attentional bias in statistics anxiety was explored through cognitive and affective tasks. Participants consisted of 76 (73.7% females) students in the James Cook University Psychology programs at the Australia (35.5%) and Singapore campuses (64.5%). Participants completed the emotional Stroop task and the dot probe task, and measures of statistics anxiety and social desirability. No evidence of attentional bias was found. This could be due several methodological reasons. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.
Better Evaluation of ASR in Speech Translation Context Using Word Embeddings

This paper investigates the evaluation of ASR in spoken language translation context. More precisely, we propose a simple extension of WER metric in order to penalize differently substitution errors according to their context using word embeddings. For instance, the proposed metric should catch near matches (mainly morphological variants) and penalize less this kind of error which has a more limited impact on translation performance. Our experiments show that the correlation of the new proposed metric with SLT performance is better than the one of WER. Oracle experiments are also conducted and show the ability of our metric to find better hypotheses (to be translated) in the ASR N-best. Finally, a preliminary experiment where ASR tuning is based on our new metric shows encouraging results. For reproductible experiments, the code allowing to call our modified WER and the corpora used are made available to the research community.
The Complex Model of City Centre Retailing: An Historical Application

Despite its conceptual significance, R. L. Davies' complex model of city centre retailing has received relatively few empirical airings.This is largely attributable to its reliance upon the free play of market forces,a state of affairs which rarely pertains in today's highly planned retail environment. The concept, however,may provide a useful insight into the spatial structure of the city centre in periods prior to the present. This paper examines the relevance of the complex model to the heart of a major British city, Belfast at several periods.
RED-T: utilizing the Ratios of Evolutionary Distances for determination of alternative phylogenetic events

SUMMARY RED-T is a Java application for phylogenetic analysis based on a unique method, RED, that utilizes the ratios of evolutionary distances E(d) to distinguish between alternative evolutionary histories. RED-T allows the user to examine if any given experimental gene shares the same evolutionary history as the designated control gene(s). Moreover, the tool detects any differences in evolutionary history and allows the user to examine comparisons of E(d) for a likely explanation. Lateral gene transfer, which may have a significant influence in organismal evolution is one mechanism that could explain the findings of these RED-T analyses. AVAILABILITY The application is available online at http://www.arches. uga.edu/~whitman/RED.
Estimation of maximal aerobic power using stairclimbing--a simple method suitable for industry.

Data on the energy cost and heart rate of diverse Indian and U.S. subjects for stair-climbing, with or without external loads in both paced and unpaced manners, have been used to establish relations between metabolic costs, speeds of ascent and heart rates. A technique for estimating the maximum metabolic capacity from the heart rate of an indvidual climbing stairs at his own free pace has been presented. Formulae for deriving the maximum work capacity from the heart rate for different age groups are given.
New product portfolio selection using fuzzy logic

Limited by the resources a company requires to strategically allocating resources in a set of new product projects. A portfolio management decision is usually made on the basis of product value, project risk and business strategies. Due to both the nature and timing of new product development, portfolio selection is associated with uncertainty and complexity, and conventional evaluation methods not can handle such decisions suitably and effectively. However, fuzzy logic is well suited for decision making with uncertainty. Thus, a method for portfolio selection decision using fuzzy logic is proposed. As an illustration, an IT new product portfolio selection in Taiwan's company is cited to demonstrate the evaluation procedure can be used in new product portfolio.