Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Sheltered Genetic Load Linked to the S Locus in Plants: New Insights From Theoretical and Empirical Approaches in Sporophytic Self-Incompatibility

Inbreeding depression and mating systems evolution are closely linked, because the purging of deleterious mutations and the fitness of individuals may depend on outcrossing vs. selfing rates. Further, the accumulation of deleterious mutations may vary among genomic regions, especially for genes closely linked to loci under balancing selection. Sporophytic self-incompatibility (SSI) is a common genetic mechanism in angiosperm that enables hermaphrodite plants to avoid selfing and promote outcrossing. The SSI phenotype is determined by the S locus and may depend on dominance relationships among alleles. Since most individuals are heterozygous at the S locus and recombination is suppressed in the S-locus region, it has been suggested that deleterious mutations could accumulate at genes linked to the S locus, generating a “sheltered load. ” In this article, we first theoretically investigate the conditions generating sheltered load in SSI. We show that deleterious mutations can accumulate in linkage with specific S alleles, and particularly if those S alleles are dominant. Second, we looked for the presence of sheltered load in Arabidopsis halleri using CO2 gas treatment to overcome self-incompatibility. By examining the segregation of S alleles and measuring the relative fitness of progeny, we found significant sheltered load associated with the most dominant S allele (S15) of three S alleles tested. This sheltered load seems to be expressed at several stages of the life cycle and to have a larger effect than genomic inbreeding depression.
Cloud computing service value : a message to the board

This paper aims to alert the board to their duty of adding value to the organizations they represent by recognizing opportunities presented by new developments in information technology. Cloud computing is one such development, which is associated with opportunities and benefits. The service value that can be achieved by using this computing model will be influential in the adoption of cloud computing services. Service value is determined by the warranty and utility associated with that service. Thus, if an organization can associate itself with the utility and warranty on offer via cloud computing, it should consider the adoption of these services. Cloud computing is discussed in terms of service value. This promotes an understanding of factors to be considered when making decisions about the adoption of cloud computing.
Physiological mechanisms for fundamental frequency control in standard Chinese

This paper ﬁrst presents the physiological and physical properties of the vocal fold and the laryngeal structure that support a model for the generation process of F 0 contour with global components and positive local components. It then takes up Standard Chinese as an example of languages that use both positive and negative local components to express tones, and explains the mechanism involving extrinsic laryngeal muscles that is responsible for the generation of negative local components.
Design and Implementation of WPF-based Mini OA System

In order to build a practical mini OA system for small and medium enterprise, key business, overall requirement, functional requirements and non-functional requirements of Yardi Kooboo (Xiamen) Technology Co. Ltd. Are analyzed after understanding the company's specific workflow and management processes. Following software engineering, the entire progress of building a WPF-based OA system includes functional module design, database design, achievement of three-tier architecture, achievement of mail cache and so on. Deployment of this new OA system improves the level of information management and obtains good application effect. The development process provides good reference value for the development and research of similar systems.
HACBPS : A Hierarchical Access Control-Based Proxy Signature

In this paper, we propose a new security protocol which is styled hierarchical access control-based proxy signature (HACBPS). In hierarchical access control, upper security level users can access some secret information hold by lower security level users, but reverse is not allowed. Whereas in proxy signature, on behalf of the original signer, proxy signer can generate the signature on an arbitrary message. In our protocol, an upper security level user (considered as original signer) can delegate his signing right for signature generation on an arbitrary message to a lower security level user (considered as proxy signer) and the proxy signer can generate proxy signature on behalf of the original signer. In HACBPS, each user in a hierarchy holds two secret keys: one key can be accessed by upper security level users and other one is not accessible to any other user.
Viewpoint Dependent Facial Expression Recognition Japanese Noh Masks and the Human Face

With certain masks used in Japanese Noh drama the apparent facial expression is a function of the vertical viewing angle. Rotation in depth produces changes in the retinal image of the face which viewers may confound with the distortion of features due to muscular action. In particular, as the mask is tilted forward it appears to smile, and as it is tilted backwards it appears sad. We explored this effect in two experiments with a Noh mask and one with a 3-D model of a laser-scanned human face. Separate British and Japanese subject pools were used to investigate cross-cultural effects. The results conﬁrmed a systematic relationship between vertical angle of view and judged affect. For the Noh mask the effect was culturally moderated, whereas for the human face there was no signiﬁcant effect of of culture. These results are discussed and interpreted in terms of perceptual strategies for processing familiar and unfamiliar faces.
Institutions and Growth in OECD Countries

The institutional characteristics of economies affect economic growth. Economists and policy makers alike are interested in the specific institutional determinants that best foster growth. In 2007, the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich developed an Institutions Climate Index that assesses institutional quality across OECD countries and its relationship to economic growth.This article highlights some important developments that have come to light after the most recent update of the index.The index is used to understand the institutional drivers that affect countries growth prospects.We have found that the index’s ability to track growth is undiminished.At the country level we have examined the drivers of the recent decline in the OECD institutions climate and identified countries that have advanced and declined in recent years in the institutions ranking. (For detailed results and the complete dataset, the interested reader is referred to the CESifo DICE Database [see Box].) The institutional climate and economic growth
Examining the performance of topic modeling techniques in Twitter trends extraction

It is very important to extract the Twitter trends since it reflects the personal view over 645 million of its users. We examine the effectiveness of two topic modeling techniques i.e., standard Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and semantic-based Joint Multi-grain Topic-Sentiment (JMTS) in Twitter trends extraction. In addition, we also examine the frequent phrase method. Our finding reveals that JMTS significantly outperforms frequent phrase method and LDA by 54% and 24%, respectively.
Microarray subgrid detection: a novel algorithm

A novel algorithm for detecting microarray subgrids is proposed. The only input to the algorithm is the raw microarray image, which can be of any resolution, and the subgrid detection is performed with no prior assumptions. The algorithm consists of a series of methods of spot shape detection, spot filtering, spot spacing estimation, and subgrid shape detection. It is shown to be able to divide images of varying quality into subgrid regions with no manual interaction. The algorithm is robust against high levels of noise and high percentages of poorly expressed or missing spots. In addition, it is proved to be effective in locating regular groupings of primitives in a set of non-microarray images, suggesting potential application in the general area of image processing.
Importance of Genetic Studies in Consanguineous Populations for the Characterization of Novel Human Gene Functions

Consanguineous offspring have elevated levels of homozygosity. Autozygous stretches within their genome are likely to harbour loss of function (LoF) mutations which will lead to complete inactivation or dysfunction of genes. Studying consanguineous offspring with clinical phenotypes has been very useful for identifying disease causal mutations. However, at present, most of the genes in the human genome have no disorder associated with them or have unknown function. This is presumably mostly due to the fact that homozygous LoF variants are not observed in outbred populations which are the main focus of large sequencing projects. However, another reason may be that many genes in the genome—even when completely “knocked out,” do not cause a distinct or defined phenotype. Here, we discuss the benefits and implications of studying consanguineous populations, as opposed to the traditional approach of analysing a subset of consanguineous families or individuals with disease. We suggest that studying consanguineous populations “as a whole” can speed up the characterisation of novel gene functions as well as indicating nonessential genes and/or regions in the human genome. We also suggest designing a single nucleotide variant (SNV) array to make the process more efficient.
Exploit Every Bit: Effective Caching for High-Dimensional Nearest Neighbor Search

High-dimensional <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="tang-ieq1-2515603.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> nearest neighbor (kNN) search has a wide range of applications in multimedia information retrieval. Existing disk-based <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX"> $k$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="tang-ieq2-2515603.gif"/></alternatives> </inline-formula>NN search methods incur significant I/O costs in the candidate refinement phase. In this paper, we propose to cache compact approximate representations of data points in main memory in order to reduce the candidate refinement time during <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="tang-ieq3-2515603.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>NN search. This problem raises two challenging issues: (i) which is the most effective encoding scheme for data points to support <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="tang-ieq4-2515603.gif"/></alternatives> </inline-formula>NN search? and (ii) what is the optimal number of bits for encoding a data point? For (i), we formulate and solve a novel histogram optimization problem that decides the most effective encoding scheme. For (ii), we develop a cost model for automatically tuning the optimal number of bits for encoding points. In addition, our approach is generic and applicable to exact / approximate <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math> <alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="tang-ieq5-2515603.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>NN search methods. Extensive experimental results on real datasets demonstrate that our proposal can accelerate the candidate refinement time of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="tang-ieq6-2515603.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>NN search by at least an order of magnitude.
Near-End Listening Enhancement in the Presence of Bandpass Noises

When using a mobile phone in acoustical background noise, the near-end listener perceives not only the (clean) far-end speech but also the ambient noise and thus experiences an increased listening effort and a possibly reduced speech intelligibility. Near-end listening enhancement processes the received far-end speech signal depending on the near-end background noise to improve intelligibility. However, in mobile phones it is often not possible to increase the audio power. In a previous contribution, the authors developed a recursive closed-form solution, which maximizes the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) under the constraint of an unchanged average power of the audio signal. This solution, however, shows in bandpass noise environments a disadvantageous narrow bandpass characteristic of the processed speech even though the SII is optimal. Therefore, in this contribution, we analyze this algorithm and propose a new spectral weighting rule which prevents the narrow bandpass effect with only a marginal reduction in SII.
A 5-GHz Differential Low-Noise Amplifier With High Pin-to-Pin ESD Robustness in a 130-nm CMOS Process

Two electrostatic discharge (ESD)-protected 5-GHz differential low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) are presented with consideration of pin-to-pin ESD protection. The pin-to-pin ESD issue for differential LNAs is addressed for the first time in the literature. Fabricated in a 130-nm CMOS process, both ESD-protected LNAs consume 10.3 mW under 1.2-V power supply. The first LNA with double-diode ESD protection scheme exhibits the power gain of 17.9 dB and noise figure of 2.43 dB at 5 GHz. Its human-body-model (HBM) and machine-model (MM) ESD levels are 2.5 kV and 200 V, respectively. With the same total parasitic capacitance from ESD protection devices, the second LNA with the proposed double silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR) ESD protection scheme has 6.5-kV HBM and 500-V MM ESD robustness, 17.9-dB power gain, and 2.54-dB noise figure at 5 GHz. The ESD test results have shown that the pin-to-pin ESD test is the most critical ESD-test pin combination for the conventional double-diode ESD protection scheme. With the proposed double-SCR ESD protection scheme, the pin-to-pin ESD robustness can be significantly improved without degrading RF performance. Experimental results have shown that the ESD protection circuit for LNA can be co-designed with the input matching network to simultaneously achieve excellent ESD robustness and RF performance.
Stained Glass Photo Collages

We developed a novel technique for creating visually pleasing collages from photo regions. The technique is called “stained glass” because the resulting collage with irregular shapes is reminiscent of a stained glass window. The collages reuse photos in novel ways to present photos with faces that can be printed, included in Web pages, or shared via email. The poster describes the requirements for creating stained glass visualizations from photos of faces, our approach for creating face stained glass, and techniques used to improve the aesthetics and flexibility of the stained glass generation. Early user feedback with face stained glass have been very positive.
Verifying Security Protocols with Timestamps via Translation to Timed Automata ⋆

In this paper we show a general method of proving authentication and integrity of time dependent security protocols by applying powerful model checking tools originally developed for verifying properties of timed automata. Our approach consists in specifying a security protocol, possibly with timestamps, in a higher-level language and translating automatically the specification to a timed automaton (or their networks). So, it can be combined with any tool, which accepts as an input a network ot timed automata. As a case study we discuss time authentication and integrity of KERBEROS and the Wide Mouthed Frog
Interseismic deformation above the Sunda Megathrust recorded in coral microatolls of the Mentawai islands, West Sumatra

past half century vary from 2 to 14 mm yr 1 and increase southwestward, toward the subduction trench. The pattern is consistent with rates of subsidence measured by a sparse network of continuously recording Global Positioning System (cGPS) stations and with locking of a 400-km-long section of the underlying subduction megathrust, between about 1S and 4S. This record of subsidence and tilting, extending nearly a century into the past, implies that the region is advancing toward the occurrence of another giant earthquake. However, evidence of episodic rather than steady subsidence reflects a behavior that is more complex than simple elastic strain accumulation and relief. Most prominent of these episodes is an extensive emergence/subsidence couplet in about 1962, which may be the result of rapid, aseismic slip on the megathrust, between the islands and the trench. Lower subsidence rates recorded by the corals since about 1985 may reflect failure on many small patches within the locked section of the megathrust.
The International Health Policy Program: An Internal Assessment

The International Health Policy Program was established in 1986 by the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the Pew Charitable Trusts to improve access to health services for the most disadvantaged people in developing countries. This volume reviews the program, assessing whether IHPP has fostered institutional and individual research on health policy in developing countries and helped policymakers effectively use resources. Published for the International Health Policy Program under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York
Meaning, Evolution, and the Structure of Society

Leading models of language evolution seek to explain key properties of language as emerging from repeated interactions of language-using agents. This paper will explore some of the consequences that integrating a more realistic social interaction structure into established models of language evolution in terms of evolutionary game theory has and reflects on prospective applications. Leading models of language evolution seek to explain key properties of language as emerging from repeated goal-oriented interactions of language-using agents [26, 32, 4, 2, 31]. Models of meaning evolution delineate exact conditions under which semantic meaningfulness can emerge, by imitation of others or by rationally responding to the behavior of one’s environment. It is obvious that the psychology of language users plays a pivotal role here: among other things, the particulars of agents’ perception and memory, their disposition to adapt their behavior, including the extent to which they make rational choices will heavily influence the way linguistic behavior evolves over time. Consequently, there has been a lot of research into the impact of different agent-based learning dynamics [18, 17, 3, 21, 8, 13]. Moreover, the sociology of language-using populations plays a role in determining the time course and outcome of evolutionary processes. Many evolutionary models make explicit assumptions about the interaction patterns within a population of language users, such as who interacts with whom [25]. Different interaction structures may give different predictions about uniformity or diversity of language [37, 34, 23]: if everybody in a large population were to interact with everybody else equally, language uniformity is to be expected; but given a tendency to interact mostly with nearby kinsmen, we expect dialects and regional variations. Further obvious consequences of different social interaction structures are the readiness and speed with which new innovations may spread in a population [16, 6], or the social standing of the innovators [6, 24]. The aim of this paper is to highlight where and how psychological and sociological constraints interact and influence the outcome of evolutionary processes relevant for the evolution of meaning. Our goal is to communicate ideas, not mathematical detail. Section 1 introduces basic notions of evolutionary game theory and formal network theory. Section 2 demonstrates how restrictions on social interaction patterns influence the equilibrium outcomes for a simple game that has been used frequently in the literature to study structural iconicity in language [5]. We show that more realistic interaction structures make it more likely that iconic language use evolves. Section 3 recaps the conditions under which simple signaling game models of meaning evolution give rise to regional variability, and Section 4 zooms in on the global and local network properties that characterize, among others, language boundaries or origins of conventionalization.
Beyond Knowledge Transfer: A Typology of Knowledge Sharing Behavior in Virtual Teams

The ability to mobilize knowledge from different parts of an organization is central to organizational success in changeable and competitive, global environments. Although there is much research on knowledge transfer in organizations, it focuses predominantly on organizational units as a level of analysis, and attends primarily to the outcomes rather than the processes of knowledge mobilization and use. We build on the more fine-grained concept of knowledge sharing focused at the interpersonal and group level of analysis, which offers a complement to studies of knowledge transfer and can yield valuable additional insights into the phenomenon of how organizational members use others’ knowledge successfully for organizational ends. This study contributes a more nuanced understanding of how knowledge is mobilized in practice by empirically identifying three distinct but complementary knowledge sharing practices used by globally dispersed new product development teams. We discuss implications for group and organizational learning. (146)
How Crawlers Aid Regression Testing in Web Applications: The State of the Art

today's world web applications have increasingly become very popular, and with the same speed they are been upgraded frequently. This poses a big challenge for web application testing. To ensure web application quality, we must perform adequate testing for the new features as well as regression testing the web application in each of iteration. This requires us to systematically identify/locate changes introduced in the new iteration. This paper surveys various tools which identify/locate new changes, which greatly facilitates web application testing in short release cycles. Also we will describe what are web crawler's and show how crawlers can aid in regression testing of web applications.