Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Contrasting Plasticity in Ovariole Number Induced by A Dietary Effect of the Host Plants between Cactophilic Drosophila Species

Under the preference-performance hypothesis, natural selection will favor females that choose oviposition sites that optimize the fitness of their offspring. Such a preference-performance relationship may entail important consequences mainly on fitness-related traits. We used the well-characterized cactus-Drosophila system to investigate the reproductive capacity in the pair of sibling species D. buzzatii and D. koepferae reared in two alternative host plants. According to our hypothesis, ovariole number (as a proxy of reproductive capacity) depends on host plant selection. Our results indicate that the capacity of D. buzzatii showed to be mild, only increasing the number of ovarioles by as much as 10% when reared in its preferred host. In contrast, D. koepferae exhibited a similar reproductive capacity across host cacti, even though it showed a preference for its primary host cactus. Our study also revealed that D. buzzatii has a larger genetic variation for phenotypic plasticity than its sibling, although ovariole number did not show clear-cut differences between species. We will discuss the weak preference-performance pattern observed in these cactophilic species in the light of nutritional and toxicological differences found between the natural host plants.
Law Versus Regulation: A Political Economy Model of Instrument Choice in Environmental Policy

We analyze the conditions under which a legal intervention can be compared to a regulatory framework in the context of a political economy model of environmental policy. The first part of the paper describes the characteristics of the different instruments we want to compare: first, an assignment of legal liability, focusing on the case of extended lender liability, and second, an incentive regulation framework. We briefly describe the application of those instruments in the United States and Europe. In the second part a formal economy model is presented where the possibility of capture of the regulatory agency is modeled in a reduced-form fashion through an overvaluation of the social value of the informational rent of the firms. We show that compared with an extended, strict, joint and several liability system, a regulatory system may perform better or worse from a welfare point of view. Three factors underlying this comparison are discussed in some depth, namely the differential cost between low and high levels of environmental protection activities, the social cost of public funds and the overvaluation factor. Nous analysons les conditions sous lesquelles les approches legale et reglementaire peuvent etre comparees dans le cadre d'un modele d'economie politique de l'implementation de la politique environnementale. La premiere partie de l'article decrit les caracteristiques essentielles des divers instruments a comparer, a savoir un regime de responsabilite legale elargie aux preteurs et un regime de reglementation incitative, instruments typiquement utilises aux Etats-Unis et en Europe. Dans la deuxieme partie, un modele formel d'economie politique est developpe. La possibilite d'une capture de l'agence de reglementation est introduite sous forme reduite par la surevaluation de la valeur sociale de la rente informationnelle des entreprises. Nous montrons qu'un regime de reglementation incitative peut etre plus ou moins performant en termes de bien-etre qu'un regime de responsabilite elargie, stricte et solidaire. Nous analysons en profondeur trois facteurs principaux de cette comparaison, a savoir le differentiel de cout entre les niveaux faible et eleve de la protection environnementale, le cout social des fonds publics et le facteur de surevaluation.
Predicting Sentiment on IMDB using ML and DL Techniques

Sentiment classification holds significant importance in the field of nlp as it focuses on determining the sentiment polarity of text, namely positive, negative, or neutral. The widespread usage of IMDB as a platform for expressing opinions and emotions has made it a valuable source of data for sentiment classification. Here, we present a comparative analysis of diverse ML and DL approaches applied to sentiment classification using IMDB data. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of Bayesian classifier, Log. Regression, SVM, Recurrent Neural Systems (RNNS), and Transfer Learning with BERT. Through our experimentation, we find that while Bayesian classifier and Log. Regression exhibit reasonable accuracy in this task, SVM and RNNS surpass them, with Transfer Learning using BERT achieving the highest level of accuracy. This study offers valuable insights into the efficacy of different ML and DL techniques when applied to sentiment classification on IMDB data, serving as a valuable resource for both researchers and industry practitioners in this domain.
The Two PPX-GppA Homologues from Mycobacterium tuberculosis Have Distinct Biochemical Activities

Inorganic polyphosphate (poly-P), guanosine pentaphosphate (pppGpp) and guanosine tetraphosphate (ppGpp) are ubiquitous in bacteria. These molecules play a variety of important physiological roles associated with stress resistance, persistence, and virulence. In the bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the identities of the proteins responsible for the metabolism of polyphosphate and (p)ppGpp remain to be fully established. M. tuberculosis encodes two PPX-GppA homologues, Rv0496 (MTB-PPX1) and Rv1026, which share significant sequence similarity with bacterial exopolyphosphatase (PPX) and guanosine pentaphosphate 5′-phosphohydrolase (GPP) proteins. Here we delineate the respective biochemical activities of the Rv0496 and Rv1026 proteins and benchmark these against the activities of the PPX and GPP proteins from Escherichia coli. We demonstrate that Rv0496 functions as an exopolyphosphatase, showing a distinct preference for relatively short-chain poly-P substrates. In contrast, Rv1026 has no detectable exopolyphosphatase activities. Analogous to the E. coli PPX and GPP enzymes, the exopolyphosphatase activities of Rv0496 are inhibited by pppGpp and, to a lesser extent, by ppGpp alarmones, which are produced during the bacterial stringent response. However, neither Rv0496 nor Rv1026 have the ability to hydrolyze pppGpp to ppGpp; a reaction catalyzed by E. coli PPX and GPP. Both the Rv0496 and Rv1026 proteins have modest ATPase and to a lesser extent ADPase activities. pppGpp alarmones inhibit the ATPase activities of Rv1026 and, to a lesser extent, the ATPase activities of Rv0496. We conclude that PPX-GppA family proteins may not possess all the catalytic activities implied by their name and may play distinct biochemical roles involved in polyphosphate and (p)ppGpp metabolic pathways.
Face detection in colour images using fuzzy Hough transform

Novel, fast, accurate, and low complexity face localisation algorithm is presented. It is robust for hard scene conditions, such as complex background, different lighting, and face poses. It exploits spatial masking of face colour areas in normalised perceptually plausible tint-saturation-luminance (TSL) space where Canny filter is applied. Then, facial areas are approximated by ellipses of constrained proportions using fuzzy Hough transform on detected edges. Finally eye localisation technique is applied in Cr-Cb colour space in order to determine face pose, confirm face presence, and it enables us normalisation of face recognition.
The discourse ethics of sports print journalism

Relationships between sport, nationalism, militarism and violence have often been alluded to by exponents of various social-scientific disciplines. Faure, for example, defines sport as 'the euphemistic representation of the latent violence of the Western mind' and sport's role as a socializing agent is viewed as the creation of 'agonistic personalities' whereby: 'It does not create the conditions for war, but it does maintain the possibility of those conditions, and adds its own efficiency to the other forces which produce a social order in which trials of strength are seen as part of the natural course of things. ' Particularly since the 1985 Heysel Stadium soccer massacre, even some sports journalists have begun to view violence in sport as problematical. Dwyre, for example, reflecting on a long career as a reporter of sporting events in the US, concluded: 'Sportswriters tend to view sports-related violence such as fights between opposing team members, vicious boxing matches, and assaults on players as part of the game rather than an intolerable and offensive incident. Violence in sports should not be so easily tolerated'. Writing in Sports Illustrated, Wulf, in similar vein, lambasted the president of the US national ice-hockey league for denying that the league was too prone to violence while at the same time marketing videos with titles like: 'Brand New. Part 4. Hockey's Bloodiest Fights and Knockouts', or '165 Hours of Good Quality Hockey Fights'. Likewise, Weisman referred to American professional football in the title of an article as 'The Maiming Game', which goes on to report two studies: one by academics which estimated that 66 per cent of National Football League players who played after 1970 retired with some form of debilitating injury, and another by an actuarial consultant who found in a survey of 1,800 players who spent at least five years in the same league between 1921 and 1959 that their group life expectancy was 12 years below the national average for men. Such expressions of disquiet and ethical concern remain, however, relatively rare. In particular, the linguistic medium itself of sports reporting has been largely ignored.
Children's and parents' perspectives on risks and safety in three Belgrade neighbourhoods

The article examines children's and parents' perspectives on risks and safety in the neighbourhood in the context of Serbian society undergoing turbulent transformation. The evidence for the analysis comes from a small-scale survey with parents and 13–14-year-old schoolchildren and eight group interviews with the children in three Belgrade urban settings. The data show that the main difference between children's and parents' perspective is situated along the axis general risks in broader society vs. particular knowledge of risks and coping strategies embedded in the neighbourhoods. Such difference is related to different social positions of adults and children but is also significantly marked by specific social context. Bearing in mind recent brutalisation of Serbian society, risk anxiety in general is lower than might be expected. Due to weak institutions parents still rely considerably on social safety nets within the neighbourhoods. Their practices are generally more instructive than restrictive, thus implicitly supporting the practices through which children exercise significant agency in using places. Different spatial characteristics of the studied neighbourhoods emerged as an important contextual variable in both children's and parents' perspective on risks. The under-urbanised suburban locations are perceived as more risky, contrary to experience in the West.
Perceptions of desirable graduate competencies for science and technology new graduates

Work‐integrated learning (WIL) programmes that combine on‐campus classroom‐based study with off‐campus authentic work experience are a growing area of interest internationally. Despite widespread practice of WIL, there are few reports that shed light on appropriate pedagogies for the work experience in particular. As with any form of education, providers hold certain views as to desirable outcomes in terms of graduate profiles and of desirable graduate competencies. A complication for multi‐party WIL programmes is that educational stakeholders (e.g., staff working in tertiary education provider institutions and employers) may hold different views as to desirable graduate competencies. Here we argue that an understanding of stakeholder views of desirable graduate competencies is an essential prerequisite of pedagogical design. The research reported here is an intrinsic case study and comprised an investigation of perceptions of 24 desirable graduate competencies for new science and technology graduates entering the workforce both today, and in ten years’ time. Stakeholders for four sector stakeholder groups (n = 458): undergraduate students (n = 71), recent graduates (n = 143), employers of graduates (n = 172), and faculty (n = 72), were surveyed using a previously reported and validated instrument. The research findings suggest that science and technology stakeholders see all 24 competencies as desirable, and see the importance of all skills and some skills in particular as likely to increase in ten years’ time. Despite emphasis on cognitive and technical skills (often termed ‘hard’ skills), the single most desirable skill is ability and willingness to learn, a behavioural skill (often termed ‘soft’ skills). It is proposed that classroom‐based instruction is unlikely to produce graduates with the desired skills, and that work‐integrated learning may have a role to play in the development of graduate competencies.
A Convolutional Neural Network Based Device-Free Indoor Localization Using CSI

Device-free indoor localization has gained significant attention in recent years in the fields of wireless sensing and machine learning. This paper proposes an improved CSI-based device-free indoor localization (DFIL) system using a machine learning-based classification approach. The proposed system exploits the variations in wireless signals reflected from objects in the environment to locate and track targets without requiring any device to be carried by them. The system uses machine learning techniques such as random forest and support vector machines to classify the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) data into different target zones. The classification accuracy is improved by using channel state information (CSI) data alongside RSSI data. The experimental results show that the proposed system achieves higher accuracy than existing DFIL systems, with an average accuracy of 94% depending on the number of training samples. This enhanced localization method can be used in real-world settings like smart house automation systems, security, and the healthcare industry.
Positive autobiographical memory retrieval reduces temporal discounting

Abstract People generally prefer rewards sooner rather than later. This phenomenon, temporal discounting, underlies many societal problems, including addiction and obesity. One way to reduce temporal discounting is to imagine positive future experiences. Since there is overlap in the neural circuitry associated with imagining future experiences and remembering past events, here we investigate whether recalling positive memories can also promote more patient choice. We found that participants were more patient after retrieving positive autobiographical memories, but not when they recalled negative memories. Moreover, individuals were more impulsive after imagining novel positive scenes that were not related to their memories, showing that positive imagery alone does not drive this effect. Activity in the striatum and temporo parietal junction during memory retrieval predicted more patient choice, suggesting that to the extent that memory recall is rewarding and involves perspective-taking, it influences decision-making. Furthermore, representational similarity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex between memory recall and decision phases correlated with the behavioral effect across participants. Thus, we have identified a novel manipulation for reducing temporal discounting—remembering the positive past—and have begun to characterize the psychological and neural mechanisms behind it.
Query-focused multi-document summarization: automatic data annotations and supervised learning approaches

Abstract In this paper, we apply different supervised learning techniques to build query-focused multi-document summarization systems, where the task is to produce automatic summaries in response to a given query or specific information request stated by the user. A huge amount of labeled data is a prerequisite for supervised training. It is expensive and time-consuming when humans perform the labeling task manually. Automatic labeling can be a good remedy to this problem. We employ five different automatic annotation techniques to build extracts from human abstracts using ROUGE, Basic Element overlap, syntactic similarity measure, semantic similarity measure, and Extended String Subsequence Kernel. The supervised methods we use are Support Vector Machines, Conditional Random Fields, Hidden Markov Models, Maximum Entropy, and two ensemble-based approaches. During different experiments, we analyze the impact of automatic labeling methods on the performance of the applied supervised methods. To our knowledge, no other study has deeply investigated and compared the effects of using different automatic annotation techniques on different supervised learning approaches in the domain of query-focused multi-document summarization.
A Novel Adaptive Graph Transformer For Point Cloud Object Detection

With the advancement of autonomous driving technology, Lidar-driven 3D object detection has become a focal point of research. However, many existing point-driven approaches face challenges due to rigid local dependencies and entangled foreground-background points. The direct utilization of point clouds for 3D object detection is also complicated by the inherent sparsity and irregularities of Lidar data. To counter these challenges, we propose AGT-SSD a single-stage graph-based 3D detector to improve object performance especially for small objects. Which comprises two critical modules adaptive graph feature convolution module (AGF) and a point cloud transformer layer with self-attention mechanism (TSA). AGF module utilizes an adaptive graph kernel to process graph features, facilitating feature interactions within the feature domain to help detect small objects. Non-local transformer layer incorporates self-attention module, designed to capture long-range dependencies to encode global sematic and spatial feature to improve detection performance. This enhancement is attributed to the geometric structure refinement through graph convolution methods and the use of a self-attention mechanism to grasp long-range dependencies. Both modules employ non-local operations, adapt at discerning long-range correlations. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrated that our detector is not flexible and plug and play for other detectors but also highlight the superior accuracy of our method compared to other state-of-the-art detectors.
External tufted cells in the main olfactory bulb form two distinct subpopulations

The glomeruli of the main olfactory bulb are the first processing station of the olfactory pathway, where complex interactions occur between sensory axons, mitral cells and a variety of juxtaglomerular neurons, including external tufted cells (ETCs). Despite a number of studies characterizing ETCs, little is known about how their morphological and functional properties correspond to each other. Here we determined the active and passive electrical properties of ETCs using in vitro whole‐cell recordings, and correlated them with their dendritic arborization patterns. Principal component followed by cluster analysis revealed two distinct subpopulations of ETCs based on their electrophysiological properties. Eight out of 12 measured physiological parameters exhibited significant difference between the two subpopulations, including the membrane time constant, amplitude of spike afterhyperpolarization, variance in the interspike interval distribution and subthreshold resonance. Cluster analysis of the morphological properties of the cells also revealed two subpopulations, the most prominent dissimilarity between the groups being the presence or absence of secondary, basal dendrites. Finally, clustering the cells taking all measured properties into account also indicated the presence of two subpopulations that mapped in an almost perfect one‐to‐one fashion to both the physiologically and the morphologically derived groups. Our results demonstrate that a number of functional and structural properties of ETCs are highly predictive of one another. However, cells within each subpopulation exhibit pronounced variability, suggesting a large degree of specialization evolved to fulfil specific functional requirements in olfactory information processing.
Caring for the ethical ideal: Nel Noddings on moral education

Nel Noddings is arguably one of the premier philosophers of moral education in the English‐speaking world today. Although she is outside the mainstream theory, research, and practice traditions of cognitive‐developmentalism (the Kohlberg legacy) and of character education (which is in public ascendancy), her body of work is unrivalled for originality of insight, comprehensiveness and coherence. Whilst Carol Gilligan's In a different voice (1982) introduced the ethic of caring into academic and public discourse, it is Noddings ‘who has done most to outline a specific feminist position on moral education’ (McClellan, 1999, p. 104), and whose influence extends to educational practice. This essay explicates Noddings's vision in sufficient depth to make the foregoing claims credible. Thematic focus is given to her attention to the ethical self or ethical ideal. The paper also examines Noddings's perspective on character education and the need to incorporate a morality of evil into any serious educational philo.
Preservice Counselors' Initial Perceptions of Client Grief Style

This analogue study examined the influence of client grief style (intuitive or instrumental) on initial preservice counselor perceptions of the client. Three hypotheses were tested: (a) that counselors would initially rate the global functioning of intuitive grievers as higher than that of instrumental grievers; (b) that counselors would rate their initial expectations about the therapeutic bond with intuitive grievers higher than instrumental grievers; and (c) that counselors would be more likely to encourage emotional catharsis with instrumental grievers, even though this technique may be contraindicated for this group. Results supported the second hypothesis but not the first and third; however, for the first and third hypotheses, significant differences were found in the opposite direction. Of particular clinical significance was the fact that 66% of participants reported being very likely to encourage emotional catharsis with instrumental grievers, suggesting a potential need for further training regarding interventions appropriate to this client group.