Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comparison of the bacterial microflora found on the surface of American kestrel and House Wren eggs

It is generally accepted that avian eggs acquire a microflora during ovipositioning. The goal of this study was to identify and compare the eggshell microflora of two avian species, House Wrens and American Kestrels. Differences in the nesting habitats and incubation behavior of these species suggest that their eggshell microfloras also should differ. Culture-dependent techniques were combined with sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene to identify bacteria in samples taken from American Kestrel eggs during late incubation. These data were compared to previously collected data from House Wren eggs. In both studies, bacteria were isolated from three different phyla, Actinobacteria, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria. The eggshell microflora of Kestrels was dominated by bacteria in the Actinobacteria and Firmicutes phyla during late incubation, whereas the eggshell microflora of House Wrens was dominated by bacteria in the Gamma-Proteobacteria subphylum during preand late-incubation and bacteria within the Fimicutes phylum during early incubation. Actinobacteria genera on House Wren and American Kestrel eggshells differed, but the prominent genera in the GammaProteobacteria and Firmicutes phyla, Pseudomonas and Staphylococcus, respectively, were similar between bird species. Thus, our results suggest that the microflora of avian eggshells have both variable (i.e., phyla) and conserved (i.e., specific genera) aspects of bacterial diversity.
The Structure of Causal Chains

Sociologists are increasingly attentive to the mechanisms responsible for cause-and-effect relationships in the social world. But an aspect of mechanistic causality has not been sufficiently considered. It is well recognized that most phenomena of interest to social science result from multiple mechanisms operating in sequence. However, causal chains—sequentially linked mechanisms and their enabling background conditions—vary not just substantively, by the kind of causal work they do, but also structurally, by their formal properties. In this article, the author examines the nature of causal chains, identifies major structural dimensions along which they differ, and makes a case that a mechanism-based explanation would be enhanced if causal chains and their structures were brought to the analytical forefront.
Reliability measure for propagation-based stereo matching

Seed propagation-based stereo matching can help to reduce ambiguity occuring when a pixel from one image has different putative correspondents in the other one due to difficult areas (repetitive patterns, homogeneous areas, occlusions and depth discontinuities). They rely on previously computed matches (seeds) to reduce the size of the search area, and thus the number of candidates. One approach of these iterative methods selects the “best” seed at each iteration to prevent the propagation of errors. However, little attention has been brought to this best-first selection criterion for which a correlation score is usually employed. This value itself does not consider any ambiguity and is not well-suited to select the most reliable seed. Therefore, in this paper we introduce a reliability measure. It has the advantage of taking into account information from the other candidates, and leads, according to the provided experimental evaluation, to better results than the correlation score alone.
Social Construction of Nuclear Risks: Analysis of Institutional Communicative Discourses on Astravets Nuclear Power Plant

The paper is located within scholarly fields of risk sociology and nuclear risk communication. It employs the Belarusian Astravets Nuclear Power Plant (BelNPP) case to show how political entities discursively construct the understanding of nuclear risks. The BelNPP is an important case in a broader European region, and especially – for Belarus and Lithuania, due to its debated safety and impacts. The analysis of political institutional communicative discourses, as taking place in the national governments and parliaments in Belarus and Lithuania, was performed as part of the master thesis research. The empirical basis consisted of 132 texts, published during 2012–2017 and defined as official institutional press releases. The theoretical explanatory model included theories of discursive institutionalism, agenda-setting and issue-framing. The results show that the discourse is dominated by the ‘safety’ topic. The Belarusian discourse more frequently communicates BelNPP in a detailed technical manner and dominant frames attenuate the associated risks. The Lithuanian discourse focuses on political aspects and uses issue frames that amplify the socially constructed risk.
Improved Fusion of Permanent Magnet Temperature Estimation Techniques for Synchronous Motors Using a Kalman Filter

In this paper, a new temperature observer topology is presented which overcomes the shortcomings of previous ones and achieves a higher accuracy, and a more robust disturbance rejection. It makes use of the Gopinath-style flux observer and combines a lumped-parameter thermal network operating at low speeds and a flux-based permanent magnet temperature observer operating at medium and high speeds. Simulation and experimental results on a 50 kW permanent magnet motor show a performance enhancement over standard topologies; particularly, a superior disturbance rejection to voltage estimation errors. A detailed analysis of the optimal controller tuning is also presented. Furthermore, a Kalman filter is incorporated to account for sensor noise and model uncertainties. Experimental results show an effective fusion of independent temperature estimation methods leading to a superior accuracy compared to the previously investigated approaches. Moreover, the Kalman filter-based fusion offers the capability of detecting temperature-related system failures, e.g., cooling circuit malfunctions.
Parallel Implementation of Hybrid Direct-Iterative Algorithm for Multibody Dynamics via Krylov Subspace Methods on IBM 1350 Cluster

—In this paper, a new hybrid direct-iterative algorithm for multibody dynamics is discussed. The implementation of the algorithm on IBM 1350 cluster is then presented. Some Krylov subspace methods available in Aztec library are utilized to solve constraint equations for real parallel implementation using MPI. The parallel simulation results are further compared with the results produced from different iterative solvers. Integration between the new algorithm and Aztec will make the algorithm accommodate various multibody systems easily while keeping its high simulation speed.
Over- and Under-Perceiving Social Support from One’s Partner and Relationship Quality Over Time

Abstract Using dyadic data from a national longitudinal survey in Germany (N = 3,674 couples), we tested associations between congruence/discrepancy in partners’ reports of providing and receiving social support (i.e., whether a recipient reports more or less than the provider) and relationship quality. All participants reported how much social support they provided to, and received from, their partner. Latent Congruence Modeling was used to enhance the reliability of difference scores between one partner’s reported provision and the other's reported receipt. In most instances, perceiving more support than one’s partner reported giving (over-perception) and extensive support reported jointly by providers and recipients were positively associated with recipients’ and providers’ relationship quality. Conceptual, methodological, and possible clinical issues are discussed.
GABA-cAMP Response Element-Binding Protein Signaling Regulates Maturation and Survival of Newly Generated Neurons in the Adult Hippocampus

Survival and integration of new neurons in the hippocampal circuit are rate-limiting steps in adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Neuronal network activity is a major regulator of these processes, yet little is known about the respective downstream signaling pathways. Here, we investigate the role of cAMP response element-binding protein (CREB) signaling in adult hippocampal neurogenesis. CREB is activated in new granule neurons during a distinct developmental period. Loss of CREB function in a cell-autonomous manner impairs dendritic development, decreases the expression of the neurogenic transcription factor NeuroD and of the neuronal microtubule-associated protein, doublecortin (DCX), and compromises the survival of newborn neurons. In addition, GABA-mediated excitation regulates CREB activation at early developmental stages. Importantly, developmental defects after loss of GABA-mediated excitation can be compensated by enhanced CREB signaling. These results indicate that CREB signaling is a central pathway in adult hippocampal neurogenesis, regulating the development and survival of new hippocampal neurons downstream of GABA-mediated excitation.
Reactive‐diffusive phenomena in two‐dimensional, anisotropic media

Non‐linear reaction‐diffusion processes with cross‐diffusion in two‐dimensional, anisotropic media are analyzed by means of an implicit, iterative, time‐linearized approximate factorization technique as functions of the anisotropy of the heat and species diffusivity tensors, the Soret and Dufour cross‐diffusion effects, and five types of boundary conditions. It is shown that anisotropy and cross‐diffusion deform the reaction front and affect the front velocity, and the magnitude of these effects increases as the magnitude of the off‐diagonal components of the heat and species diffusivity tensors is increased. It is also shown that the five types of boundary conditions employed in this study produce similar results except when there is either strong anisotropy in the species or heat diffusivity tensors and there are no Soret and Dufour effects, or the species and heat diffusivity tensors are isotropic, but the anisotropy of the Soret and Dufour effects is important. If the species and heat diffusivity tensors are isotropic, the effects of either the Soret or the Dufour cross‐diffusion effects are small for the cases considered in this study. The time required to achieve steady state depends on the anisotropy of the heat and diffusivity tensors, the cross‐diffusion effects, and the boundary conditions.
Highly Efficient Dimension Reduction for Text-Independent Speaker Verification Based on Relieff Algorithm and Support Vector Machines

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems are among the biometric systems used in security and telephone-based remote control applications. Recent years have witnessed an increasing trend in research on such systems. These systems usually use high dimension feature vectors and therefore involve high complexity. However, there is a general belief that many of the features used in such systems are irrelevant and redundant. So far, many methods for feature dimension reduction in these systems have been proposed, most of which are wrapper-based and thus computationally expensive since system performance is used for feature subset evaluation. This involves system training and performance evaluation for each feature subset, which is a time consuming task. In this paper, we propose a feature selection approach based on Relieff algorithm for ASV systems using support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. This method is wrapper-based but makes use of Relieff weights in order to have a lower using of system performance. Thus this method has lower complexity compared to other wrapper-based methods, can lead to 69% feature dimension reduction and has a 1.25% of Equal Error Rate (EER) for the best case that appeared in RBF kernel of SVM. The proposed method has been compared with Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) methods for feature selection task. Results show that the EER, number of selected features and time complexity of the proposed method is lower than these methods for different kernels of SVM.
Robust video hashing based on radial projections of key frames

Robust signal hashing defines a feature vector that characterizes the signal, independently of "nonsignificant" distortions of its content. When dealing with images, the considered distortions are typically due to compression or small geometrical manipulations. In other words, robustness means that images that are visually indistinguishable should produce equal or similar hash values. To discriminate image contents, a hash function should produce distinct outputs for different images. Our paper first proposes a robust hashing algorithm for still images. It is based on radial projection of the image pixels and is denoted the Radial hASHing (RASH) algorithm. Experimental results provided on the USC-SIPI dataset reveal that the proposed RASH feature vector is more robust and provides much stronger discrimination than a conventional histogram-based feature vector. The RASH vector appears to be a good candidate to build indexing algorithms, copy-detection systems, or content-based authentication mechanisms. To take benefit from the RASH vector capabilities, video content is summarized into key frames, each of them characterizing a video shot and described by its RASH vector. The resulting video hashing system works in real time and supports most distortions due to common spatial and temporal video distortions.
What Do We Know about Knowledge Management? Practical Implications for Software Engineering

There have been many claims about knowledge management's benefits in software engineering, such as decreased time and cost for development, increased quality, and better decision-making abilities. Although we can find some success stories illustrating these claims, particularly on aspects related to the systems and engineering schools, more research is necessary to explore the intersection between each school and the software engineering field. Researchers should continue to emphasize the need for a broad focus across multiple KM schools to suceed in improving KM's practical application in software engineering.
The replica-symmetric prediction for compressed sensing with Gaussian matrices is exact

This paper considers the fundamental limit of compressed sensing for i.i. d. signal distributions and i.i. d. Gaussian measurement matrices. Its main contribution is a rigorous characterization of the asymptotic mutual information (MI) and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) in this setting. Under mild technical conditions, our results show that the limiting MI and MMSE are equal to the values predicted by the replica method from statistical physics. This resolves a well-known problem that has remained open for over a decade.
Cancellation of the signal fading for 60 GHz subcarrier multiplexed optical DSB signal transmission in nondispersion shifted fiber using midway optical phase conjugation

In millimeter-wave (mm-wave) optical double sideband (DSB) signal transmission systems, the received radio frequency (RF) power fades periodically because of the group velocity dispersion (GVD) and the self-phase modulation (SPM) of optical fibers. In this paper, cancellation of the signal fading by using midway optical phase conjugation in mm-wave subcarrier multiplexed (SCM) optical DSB signal is analyzed. Fading-free 60 GHz mm-wave optical DSB signal transmission over 100 km-long nondispersion shifted single-mode fiber at 1550 nm by using a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) optical phase conjugator (OPC) in the midway of optical link is experimentally demonstrated for the first time. Finally, the degradation factor of the OPC system is also discussed.
Towards plug-and-play functionality in low-cost sensor network

Plug-and-play functionality in sensor networks is becoming inevitable to make network configuration and reconfiguration flexible and cost effective. The IEEE 1451 standard brings forward the concept of Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS), which is a memory device attached to the transducer, storing detailed information to configure the corresponding transducer. In this paper we share our experiences of using TEDS to enable plug-and-play functionality within a low-cost sensor network.
Higher Diet Quality Does Not Predict Lower Medicare Costs but Does Predict Number of Claims in Mid-Aged Australian Women

Optimal dietary quality, indicated by higher diet quality index scores, reflects greater adherence to National dietary recommendations and is also associated with lower morbidity and mortality from chronic disease. Whether this is reflected in lower health care cost over time has rarely been examined. The aim of this study was to examine whether higher diet quality, as measured by the Australian Recommended Food Score (ARFS), was associated with lower health care costs within the mid-aged cohort of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health. We found that there was a statistically significant association between five year cumulative costs and ARFS, but in the opposite direction to that predicted, with those in the highest quintiles of ARFS having higher health care costs. However the number of Medicare claims over the six year period (2002–2007) was lower for those in the highest compared with the lowest quintile, p = 0.002. There is a need to monitor both costs and claims over time to examine health care usage in the longer term in order to determine whether savings are eventually obtained for those with the dietary patterns that adhere more closely to National recommendations.
CENTRAL EXTENSIONS OF WORD HYPERBOLIC GROUPS

perbolic groups by finitely generated abelian groups are automatic. We show that they are in fact biautomatic. Further, we show that every 2-dimensional cohomology class on a word hyperbolic group can be represented by a bounded 2-cocycle. This lends weight to the claim of Gromov that for a word hyperbolic group, the cohomology in every dimension > 2 is bounded. Our results apply more generally to virtually central extensions. We build on the ideas presented in [4], where the general problem was reduced to the case of central extensions by Z and was solved for Fuchsian groups. Some special cases of automaticity or biautomaticity in this case had previously been proved in [1], [2], and [7]. The new ingredient is a maximising technique inspired by work of Epstein and Fujiwara. Beginning with an arbitrary finite generating set for a central extension by 2, this maximising process is used to obtain a section which, in the language of [4], corresponds to a "regular 2-cocycle" on the hyperbolic group G, and can be used to obtain a biautomatic structure for the extension. Since central extensions correspond to 2-dimensional cohomology classes, it follows that every such class can be represented by a regular 2-cocycle. Using the geometric properties of G, we then further modify this cocycle to obtain a bounded representative for the original cohomology class. We also discuss the relations between various concepts of "weak boundedness" of a 2-cocycle on an arbitrary finitely generated group, related to quasi-isometry properties of central extensions. For cohomology classes, these weak boundedness concepts are shown to be equivalent to each other. We do not know if a weakly bounded cohomology class must be bounded.
Near-atomic resolution using electron cryomicroscopy and single-particle reconstruction

Electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) yields images of macromolecular assemblies and their components, from which 3D structures can be determined, by using an image processing method commonly known as “single-particle reconstruction. ” During the past two decades, this technique has become an important tool for 3D structure determination, but it generally has not been possible to determine atomic models. In principle, individual molecular images contain high-resolution information contaminated by a much higher level of noise. In practice, it has been unclear whether current averaging methods are adequate to extract this information from the background. We present here a reconstruction, obtained by using recently developed image processing methods, of the rotavirus inner capsid particle (“double-layer particle” or DLP) at a resolution suitable for interpretation by an atomic model. The result establishes single-particle reconstruction as a high-resolution technique. We show by direct comparison that the cryo-EM reconstruction of viral protein 6 (VP6) of the rotavirus DLP is similar in clarity to a 3.8-Å resolution map obtained from x-ray crystallography. At this resolution, most of the amino acid side chains produce recognizable density. The icosahedral symmetry of the particle was an important factor in achieving this resolution in the cryo-EM analysis, but as the size of recordable datasets increases, single-particle reconstruction also is likely to yield structures at comparable resolution from samples of much lower symmetry. This potential has broad implications for structural cell biology.
Brainstem auditory evoked potential in diabetes mellitus.

Peripheral and autonomic neuropathy is known to develop in diabetes mellitus but central nervous system involvement in diabetes mellitus has received little attention so far. There are few reports which document central nervous system dysfunction in diabetes mellitus suggesting central neuropathy or derangement of higher nervous functions 0-3). However, experimental evidence in support of this is rather limited, as procedures for early diagnosis of CNS involvement have been lacking. Some authors have submitted that CNS conduction failure could be detected by monitoring brainstem auditory evoked potentials in diabetic patients (4-7). The present study is an attempt to ascertain the presence of subclin.ical lesions in the CNS of diabetic patients and to find out their site by evaluating brainstem auditory evoked potentials. The proposed study was conducted on 40 consecutive diabetic patients attending diabetic clinic of Indira Gandhi Medical College Shimla. Their age ranged from 30 to 60 years with a mean of 48.4 ± 7.68 years. Twenty two patients were male and eighteen were females. Duration of illness ranged from 2 years to 18 years with a mean duration of 9.93 ± 4.8 years. Their diabetic state was controlled with oral hypoglyecaemic agents. Patients were excluded if they suffered from any intercurrent disease which might affect the nervous system such as stroke, seizure, hypertension or uraemia due to nephropathy. No patient in this group was being treated with anticonvulsants, methyldopa, reserpine, nitrofurantoin or any medication which might be expected to interfere with functioning of CNS. Any history of hypoglycaemic episode was ruled out. All reported normal hearing and none was taking any medication which could be expected to affect cortical functioning. Patients having hearing loss and hypoglycaemis were excluded from the study. Neuropathy and pregnancy were also ruled out. Normal hearing in the both the groups was ascertained by clinical evaluation including pure tone audiometry. Brainstem auditory evoked responses (BEAR): At the time of BAER Recording, hypoglycaemia was ruled out by doing concomitant blood glucose test. The recording of the brainstem auditory evoked responses (BEAR) was conducted in both groups by Nicolet Compact IV 2000 system. The study was carried out in a quite and dimly lit room with the subject in a comfortable supine position. Percutaneous Ag/Ag Cl disc electrodes were applied. Active (+) electrode was placed at vertex (Cz) and reference (at at ipsilateral mastoid process 376 Letter to the Editor and at contralateral mastoid proces ground electrode …