Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bidirectional sex change in mushroom stony corals

Sex change occurs when an individual changes from one functional sex to another. The direction of sex change occurs mainly from male to female (protandry) or vice versa (protogyny), but sometimes may be bidirectional (repetitive). Here, for the first time in stony corals, we report on a protandrous sex change exhibited by two mushroom corals, Fungia repanda and Ctenactis echinata, with the latter also exhibiting bidirectional sex change. Compared with C. echinata, F. repanda exhibited relatively earlier sex change, significantly slower growth and higher mortality rates, in accordance with sex-allocation theory. Sex ratio in both the species was biased towards the first sex. The bidirectional sex change displayed by C. echinata greatly resembles that of dioecious plants that display labile sexuality in response to energetic and/or environmental constraints. We posit that, similar to these plants, in the studied corals, sex change increases their overall fitness, reinforcing the important role of reproductive plasticity in scleractinian corals in determining their evolutionary success.
Publish/subscribe scheme for mobile networks

The information dissemination in mobile networks is an important but complex and challenging problem. Designing suitable communication primitives for these systems is critical. One of these primitives is the publish/subscribe paradigm. The publish/subscribe is a strategy to establish communication between the information providers (publishers) and information consumers (subscribers) in a distributed system. Our work focuses on an appropriate distributed infrastructure suitable for a scalable implementation of a publish/subscribe system. We present a formal model which is adapted for the peer-based particular subscription criteria of publish/subscribe systems. Moreover, we propose a general deterministic information diffusion scheme for mobile systems. The three main features of our communication scheme are the following: First, our scheme is well-adapted to scalable systems without compromising any subscription criteria or network reorganization. Second, we maintain the anonymity of the distributed system --- in order to maintain the network structure, we need only local information. Third, our solution is fully decentralized and modular, thus making it appropriate for practical implementations.
On the Work of Madhu Sudan

Madhu Sudan is the recipient of the 2002 Nevanlinna Prize. Sudan has made fundamental contributions to two major areas of research, the connections between them, and their applications. The first area is Coding Theory. Established by Shannon and Hamming over 50 years ago, it is the mathematical study of the possibility of and the limits on reliable communication over noisy media. The second area is Probabilistically Checkable Proofs (PCPs). By contrast, it is only 10 years old. It studies the minimal resources required for probabilistic verification of standard mathematical proofs. My plan is to briefly introduce these areas, their motivation and foundational questions, and then to explain Sudan’s main contributions to each. Before we get to the specific works of Madhu Sudan, let us start with a couple of comments that will set up the context of his work.
Phonological processing in the auditory system: a new class of stimuli and advances in fmri techniques

It is commonly assumed that, in the cochlea and the brainstem, the auditory system processes speech sounds without differentiating them from any other sounds. At some stage, however, it must treat speech and non-speech sounds differently. In broad terms, the purpose of this paper is to consider where this speech specific processing begins in the auditory pathway. Specifically, the paper is concerned with extrapolating the concepts of an auditory model to the point where we can define matched sets of speech and non-speech sounds that can be used in a brain-imaging experiment to delimit where phonological processing of vowel sounds begins in the auditory system. Pilot results suggest that phonological processing of vowels may begin just outside auditory cortex in Brodmann area 21.
Glycaemic potency of breakfast predicts cognitive function and mood in adolescent schoolchildren

The potential influences of nutritional factors on cognitive function (CF) and mood are of major importance, given that adolescence is a crucial period for the development and maturation of both body and mind. Breakfast skipping, as a short-term change in nutritional status, has been shown to have adverse effects on memory and learning. Despite the wealth of studies that have been conducted in this area, the macronutrient composition of breakfast that could selectively facilitate CF after an overnight fast remains unclear. It has been suggested that glucose may be mediating the memory-enhancing effects of breakfast, since it is the major source of energy for the central nervous system. As pure glucose will be rarely consumed as part of a balanced diet, the interest nowadays is in low-glycaemic index (GI; LGI) meals, and whether they can facilitate performance by minimizing glycaemia fluctuations. The findings from recent studies differ, because of variations in design, especially in relation to the cognitive domains affected. The underlying mechanism remains unclear; it has been recently suggested that perhaps an interaction between glucoregulatory processes, arousal and cortisol could be responsible for any observed effects. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of the blood glucose (BG)-raising potential (i.e. glycaemic potency) of breakfast meals on CF and mood in adolescent children. The study is the first of its kind to: take into account both the GI and the glycaemic load (GL), as the latter is a stronger predictor of the glycaemic response; to use breakfast meals that have been tested in relation to their glycaemic and insulinaemic responses; to measure capillary BG and salivary cortisol (SC) levels; to assess mood both as a predictor of CF and as an outcome of the meals; to report findings in adolescents. Seventy-four schoolchildren (thirty-seven girls and thirty-seven boys) aged 11–14 years were recruited for the study. All participants were habitual breakfast eaters, had normal BMI-for-age and had no known diseases or learning disabilities. Participants were matched and allocated either to the high-GL (HGL) or the low-GL (LGL) group. So, if one participant was allocated to the high-GL group, their match was allocated to the low-GL group. Within each GL group children were given high-GI (HGI) and LGI breakfasts. The children were matched in pairs for gender, form, age ( 6 months), height ( 0.05 m) and BMI centile. The HGL and the LGL meals were not isoenergetic.
Is Web 2.0 Providing a Voice for Outsiders? A Comparison of Personal Web Site and Social Media Use by Candidates at the 2010 UK General Election

ABSTRACT The apparent success of President Obama’s online election campaigns in the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections and the rapid growth in use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter by British voters since the last election has led to much speculation that 2010 would be a “watershed” moment for UK politicians and parties in their adoption of digital tools. This article seeks to measure the precise extent of online campaigning during the 2010 general election campaign and explain the patterns of adoption observed. It does so by using an extensive and original data set that measures the adoption of Web sites by candidates from six parties in all constituencies in England, and measures adoption and use of four types of social media for a smaller group of more competitive constituencies. It aims to test one of the leading theories in the field of online campaigning, the normalization thesis, using the most comprehensive and rigorous data collected in the United Kingdom to date. The normalization thesis states that actors who already have the most influence will be the ones most likely to benefit from new online campaign methods. This paper finds that although patterns of Web site adoption among candidates do support normalization overall, adoption and use of certain types of social media refute normalization on some measures, some to a strong degree.
Active Admittance Control with Iterative Learning for General-Purpose Contact-Rich Manipulation

Force interaction is inevitable when robots face multiple operation scenarios. How to make the robot competent in force control for generalized operations such as multi-tasks still remains a challenging problem. Aiming at the reproducibility of interaction tasks and the lack of a generalized force control framework for multi-task scenarios, this paper proposes a novel hybrid control framework based on active admittance control with iterative learning parameters-tunning mechanism. The method adopts admittance control as the underlying algorithm to ensure flexibility, and iterative learning as the high-level algorithm to regulate the parameters of the admittance model. The whole algorithm has flexibility and learning ability, which is capable of achieving the goal of excellent versatility. Four representative interactive robot manipulation tasks are chosen to investigate the consistency and generalisability of the proposed method. Experiments are designed to verify the effectiveness of the whole framework, and an average of 98.21% and 91.52% improvement of RMSE is obtained relative to the traditional admittance control as well as the model-free adaptive control, respectively.
From pole parameters to line shapes and branching ratios

Resonances are uniquely characterized by their complex pole locations and the corresponding residues. In practice, however, resonances are typically identified experimentally as structures in invariant mass distributions, with branching fractions of resonances determined as ratios of count rates. To make contact between these quantities it is necessary to connect line shapes and resonance parameters. In this work we propose such a connection and illustrate the formalism with detailed studies of the $\rho(770)$ and $f_0(500)$ resonances. Based on the line shapes inferred from the resonance parameters along these lines, expressions for partial widths and branching ratios are derived and compared to other approaches in the literature.
Culture and the Politics of Alternative Food Networks

Abstract Much of the existing research on emerging alternative food networks has not sufficiently recognized the importance of culture and we seek to address this omission. Through two case studies of global and local forms of alternative food networks respectively, we demonstrate the centrality and complexity of the workings of culture in the places, practices and politics of alternative food networks. Firstly, a study of Slow Food's Terra Madre forum illustrates the negotiation that occurs between cultural formations and global flows in an attempt to deploy cultural values to protect and enhance alternative food networks. Secondly, the Otago Farmers' Market is examined as an instance of an affective cultural space which can engender the formation of ethical subjectivity and political potential. In each case, our analysis is motivated by a desire to explore the political possibilities of alternative food networks.
LOW MORBIDITY ASSOCIATED WITH THE USE OF NBCA LIQUID ADHESIVE FOR PREOPERATIVE TRANSARTERIAL EMBOLIZATION OF CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM TUMORS

OBJECTIVETo determine the safety and efficacy of preoperative embolization of central nervous system (CNS) tumors with n-butyl cyanoacrylate (NBCA) liquid adhesive. METHODSOver a 6-yr period, 35 consecutive patients (12 women, 23 men; mean age, 42 yr; range, 6 mo to 75 yr) with a CNS tumor underwent preoperative embolization with NBCA. Tumor type, location, endovascular and surgical treatment, percent of tumor embolization, estimated blood loss, and neurological deficits related to embolization were evaluated retrospectively. RESULTSOne hundred feeding arteries were embolized (mean, 3 vessels/patient). In only one case (3%) a normal artery was inadvertently occluded by the embolization. During follow-up the resulting neurological deficit resolved completely. There were no neurological deficits or inadvertent embolization events in the remaining 34 cases. The mean percent of tumor embolized was 68%, but did not significantly correlate with operative blood loss (Pearson's correlation coefficient, r = 0.049). CONCLUSIONIn experienced hands, CNS tumors can be embolized with NBCA liquid adhesive with a high degree of safety and efficacy. We believe that adroit embolization technique with NBCA and other embolisates should be part of the contemporary neuroendovascular armamentarium.
Predicting opponent team activity in a RoboCup environment

The goal of this project is to predict the opponent's configuration in a RoboCup SSL environment. For simplicity, a Markov model assumption is made such that the predicted formation of the opponent team only depends on its current formation. The field is divided into a grid and a robot state per player is created with information about its position and its velocity. To gather a more general sense of what the opposing team is doing, the state also incorporates the team's average position (centroid). All possible state transitions are stored in a hash table that requires minimum storage space. The table is populated with transition probabilities that are learned by reading vision packages and counting the state transitions regardless of the specific robot player. Therefore, the computation during the game is reduced to interpreting a given vision package to assign each player to a state, and looking for the most likely state it will transition to. The confidence of the predicted team's formation is the product of each individual player's probability. The project is noteworthy in that it minimizes the time and space complexity requirements for opponent's moves prediction.
CellMate : A Responsive and Accurate Vision-based Appliance Identification System

Identifying and interacting with smart appliances has been challenging in the burgeoning smart building era. Existing identification methods require either cumbersome query statements or the deployment of additional infrastructure. There is no platform that abstracts sophisticated computer vision technologies to provide an easy visual identification interface, which is the most intuitive way for a human. We introduce CellMate, an responsive and accurate visionbased appliance identification system using smartphone cameras. We innovate on optimizing and combining the advantages of several of the latest computer vision technologies based on our unique constraints of accuracy, latency, and scalability. To evaluate CellMate, we collected 4008 images from 39 room-size areas across five campus buildings, making the size one order of magnitude greater than prior work. We also collected 1526 human-labeled images and tested them on different groups of areas. With existing indoor localization technologies, we can easily narrow down the location to ten areas and achieve a success rate of more than 96% within less than 60 ms server processing time. We optimized average local network latency to 84 ms and therefore expect around 144 ms total identification time on the smartphone end.
Novel Power Loss Limit Analysis Method for High-speed, Ultra-low Loss Power Converter

Novel power loss limit analysis method has been developed for designing future high-speed, ultra-low loss converters. The concept of the method is consisted by 3 parts. They are (1) power loss measurement with a circuit stray parameter adjustable circuit board, (2) separation of power loss into power loss factors by using measurement results and (3) parameter extraction of power loss factors. Advantages of the proposed method are power loss limit estimation under practically operating conditions and a high OPD converter design including influences of circuit stray parameters. To verify an effectiveness of the method, power device loss in a high-speed switching chopper circuit constructed with a Si-MOSFET and a SiC-SBD has been analyzed. The method has successfully extracted power loss factors. Characteristics of power loss factors are modeled by using analysis results. A power device loss limit model is newly established based on power loss factors. Power device losses have been predicted by using the power device loss model. The predicted power device losses are in good agreement with the power losses measured by experiments
A Speech Prosthesis Employing a Speech Synthesizer-Vowel Discrimination from Perioral Muscle Activities and Vowel Production

A speech prosthesis has been developed based on the following idea. When a handicapped person such as a laryngectomee tries to speak in vain, the movements of the mouth, tongue, etc., are elicited. By detecting the movements, what he or she is trying to say can be determined. Then a speech synthesizer is driven to produce a voice of good quality.
Thermal Analysis for NVIDIA GTX480 Fermi GPU Architecture

In this project, we design a four-layer (Silicon|TIM|Silicon|TIM), 3D floor plan for NVIDIA GTX480 Fermi GPU architecture and compare heat dissipation and power trends for matrix multiplication and Needleman-Wunsch kernels. First, cuda kernels for the two algorithms are written. These kernels are compiled and executed with the GPGPU Simulator to extract power logs for varying tensor sizes. These power logs are converted to ptrace files with an automation script written in Python. The 3D floor plan, along with the generated ptrace files are given to HotSpot, which generates thermal heat maps to show heat dissipation for various components of the Fermi architecture. These heat dissipation trends for both the kernels are observed for multiple tensor sizes to draw qualitative conclusions. The behavioral and execution patterns of both kernels are also observed with these varying heat dissipation trends. With this project, we observe that an increase in tensor size results in an increase of heat dissipation in components of the Fermi Architecture. However, the temperature of the chip remains saturated after a particular tensor size and remains constant thereafter. Heat dissipation is non-uniform with smaller tensor sizes, and becomes more uniform after a certain tensor size. This means, that after a particular tensor size, more cores of the architecture get activated in the computations, thereby resulting in an almost constant temperature. We also observe that Needleman Wunsch uses more data movement between DRAM and caches, thereby showing higher heat dissipation patterns in DRAMs when compared to Matrix multiplication for the same tensor size. Our observations are in accordance with the theoretical concepts behind the working of the two algorithms, thereby making our results consistent.
From “Home” to “Second Home”: Emotional Dilemmas on Norwegian Smallholdings

This paper examines emotional dilemmas occurring when Norwegian smallholdings are converted from permanent to second homes. These are properties that might have been in the family for generations as permanent homes, and which successors often feel obliged to take over and maintain by having them as second homes. Second homes are usually associated with “leisure and pleasure”, a retreat to “recharge the batteries”. However, this paper argues that having a smallholding which used to be your permanent home as a second home might involve emotional dilemmas, and it discusses relations between on the one hand, aspects of idyll and comfort and on the other hand, aspects of duty and responsibility. Further, the paper examines how emotional and social property relations influence how smallholdings as second homes become enacted.
Exogenous arachidonic acid mediates permeability of human brain microvessel endothelial cells through prostaglandin E2 activation of EP3 and EP4 receptors

The blood–brain barrier, formed by microvessel endothelial cells, is the restrictive barrier between the brain parenchyma and the circulating blood. Arachidonic acid (ARA; 5,8,11,14‐cis‐eicosatetraenoic acid) is a conditionally essential polyunsaturated fatty acid [20:4(n − 6)] and is a major constituent of brain lipids. The current study examined the transport processes for ARA in confluent monolayers of human brain microvascular endothelial cells (HBMEC). Addition of radioactive ARA to the apical compartment of HBMEC cultured on Transwell® inserts resulted in rapid incorporation of radioactivity into the basolateral medium. Knock down of fatty acid transport proteins did not alter ARA passage into the basolateral medium as a result of the rapid generation of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), an eicosanoid known to facilitate opening of the blood–brain barrier. Permeability following ARA or PGE2 exposure was confirmed by an increased movement of fluorescein‐labeled dextran from apical to basolateral medium. ARA‐mediated permeability was attenuated by specific cyclooxygenase‐2 inhibitors. EP3 and EP4 receptor antagonists attenuated the ARA‐mediated permeability of HBMEC. The results indicate that ARA increases permeability of HBMEC monolayers likely via increased production of PGE2 which acts upon EP3 and EP4 receptors to mediate permeability. These observations may explain the rapid influx of ARA into the brain previously observed upon plasma infusion with ARA. The blood–brain barrier, formed by microvessel endothelial cells, is a restrictive barrier between the brain parenchyma and the circulating blood. Radiolabeled arachidonic acid (ARA) movement across, and monolayer permeability in the presence of ARA, was examined in confluent monolayers of primary human brain microvessel endothelial cells (HBMECs) cultured on Transwell® plates. Incubation of HBMECs with ARA resulted in a rapid increase in HBMEC monolayer permeability. The mechanism was mediated, in part, through increased prostaglandin E2 production from ARA which acted upon EP3 and EP4 receptors to increase HBMEC monolayer permeability.
Human papillomavirus and breast cancer in Iran: a meta- analysis

Objective(s): This study aims to investigate the relationship between human papillomavirus (HPV) and breast cancer using meta- analysis. Materials and Methods: Relevant studies were identified reviewing the national and international databases. We also increased the search sensitivity by investigating the references as well as interview with research centers and experts. Finally, quality assessment and implementation of inclusion/exclusion criteria determined the eligible articles for meta-analysis. Based on the heterogeneity observed among the results of the primary studies, random effects model was used to estimate the pooled prevalence of HPV infection and also pooled odds ratio between HPV and developing breast cancer using Stata SE V. 11 software. Results: This meta- analysis included 11 primary studies investigating the HPV infection prevalence among 1539 Iranian women. Pooled prevalence (95% confidence interval) of HPV infection among Iranian women with breast cancer was estimated as of 23.6% (6.7- 40.5), while, the odds ratio (95% confidence interval) between HPV infection and developing breast cancer was estimated as of 5.7% (0.7- 46.8). Conclusion: This meta- analysis showed a high prevalence of HPV infection among women with breast cancer. We also found that the odds of developing breast cancer among women with breast cancer was more than that of women without breast cancer.