Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A systems approach to animal communication

Why animal communication displays are so complex and how they have evolved are active foci of research with a long and rich history. Progress towards an evolutionary analysis of signal complexity, however, has been constrained by a lack of hypotheses to explain similarities and/or differences in signalling systems across taxa. To address this, we advocate incorporating a systems approach into studies of animal communication—an approach that includes comprehensive experimental designs and data collection in combination with the implementation of systems concepts and tools. A systems approach evaluates overall display architecture, including how components interact to alter function, and how function varies in different states of the system. We provide a brief overview of the current state of the field, including a focus on select studies that highlight the dynamic nature of animal signalling. We then introduce core concepts from systems biology (redundancy, degeneracy, pluripotentiality, and modularity) and discuss their relationships with system properties (e.g. robustness, flexibility, evolvability). We translate systems concepts into an animal communication framework and accentuate their utility through a case study. Finally, we demonstrate how consideration of the system-level organization of animal communication poses new practical research questions that will aid our understanding of how and why animal displays are so complex.
Cross-Cultural Agreement in Perceptions of Babyfaced Adults

Two studies investigated Korean college students' perceptions of babyfaced adults. The first study replicated McArthur and Apatow's (1983-1984) investigation of U.S. students' impressions of schematic adult male and female faces. The second study replicated Berry and McArthur's (1985) investigation of U.S. students' impressions of 20 young adult Caucasian male faces. The studies revealed near perfect agreement between U.S. and Korean subjects regarding the relative babyfacedness of the stimulus persons as well as very strong agreement regarding their traits. The same facial characteristics that were correlated with U.S. subjects' ratings of babyfacedness were also correlated with Koreans' ratings. In addition, like U.S. subjects, Koreans perceived babyfaced stimulus persons to possess more childlike psychological attributes than their mature-faced counterparts. The results are discussed within a theoretical framework that argues that perceptions of babyfaced adults derive from the specieswide adaptive value of analogous reactions to real babies.
An unusual presentation of LCAT deficiency as nephrotic syndrome with normal serum HDL-C level

Clinical and biochemical manifestations of lecithin-cholesterol acyltransferase (LCAT) deficiency include an abnormal lipid profile (characterized by hypercholesterolemia with markedly decreased high-density lipoprotein cholesterol [HDL-C] and hypertriglyceridemia), corneal opacities, hematologic abnormalities (normochromic anemia of varying intensity), splenomegaly, variable early coronary artery disease and nephropathy (initially proteinuria followed by progressive deterioration of renal function). We presented a patient with nephrotic syndrome, which renal biopsy revealed classic features of LCAT deficiency. To our knowledge, the present case is the first reported case of LCAT deficiency presenting with symptoms related to nephrotic syndrome in a patient with no obvious family history without any corneal deposits and normal HDL-C levels.
From Knockouts to Networks: Establishing Direct Cause-Effect Relationships through Graph Analysis

Background Reverse-engineering gene networks from expression profiles is a difficult problem for which a multitude of techniques have been developed over the last decade. The yearly organized DREAM challenges allow for a fair evaluation and unbiased comparison of these methods. Results We propose an inference algorithm that combines confidence matrices, computed as the standard scores from single-gene knockout data, with the down-ranking of feed-forward edges. Substantial improvements on the predictions can be obtained after the execution of this second step. Conclusions Our algorithm was awarded the best overall performance at the DREAM4 In Silico 100-gene network sub-challenge, proving to be effective in inferring medium-size gene regulatory networks. This success demonstrates once again the decisive importance of gene expression data obtained after systematic gene perturbations and highlights the usefulness of graph analysis to increase the reliability of inference.
Basic concepts and methods for keeping autonomous ground vehicle formations

A desirable basic behavior of a group of autonomous vehicles while in motion is to keep a predefined formation. Normally units are trained to move in formation according to an operational status. Past experience determines the formation for given situations. In this paper, we discuss concepts pertinent to the theory and design of autonomous vehicles moving in formation. Specifically: 1) we present the basic idea of controlling the behavior of autonomous vehicles to keep them in prespecified formation, 2) we examine difficulties in keeping the formation caused by path shapes and obstacles in the path of the vehicles and due to the kinematics and dynamics of the individual vehicle, and 3) we discuss concepts relevant to reformation transitions following temporary changes in the formation caused by the terrain properties and the presence of obstacles.
DNA in Antibiotic Preparations: Absence of Intact Resistance Genes

ABSTRACT Fragments of erm(E2), otrA, and aph(6) shorter than 400 bp and producer strain-specific rRNA genes were amplified from various antibiotics. The amount of genetic material and the sizes of amplicons recovered from murine feces after oral administration of a β-lactamase-encoding plasmid indicated substantial DNA degradation in the mammalian gastrointestinal tract. These observations imply that antibiotics are no major source for horizontal resistance gene transfer in clinical settings.
Randomised factorial trial of falls prevention among older people living in their own homes

Abstract Objective: To test the effectiveness of, and explore interactions between, three interventions to prevent falls among older people. Design: A randomised controlled trial with a full factorial design. Setting: Urban community in Melbourne, Australia. Participants: 1090 aged 70 years and over and living at home. Most were Australian born and rated their health as good to excellent; just over half lived alone. Interventions: Three interventions (group based exercise, home hazard management, and vision improvement) delivered to eight groups defined by the presence or absence of each intervention. Main outcome measure: Time to first fall ascertained by an 18 month falls calendar and analysed with survival analysis techniques. Changes to targeted risk factors were assessed by using measures of quadriceps strength, balance, vision, and number of hazards in the home. Results: The rate ratio for exercise was 0.82 (95% confidence interval 0.70 to 0.97, P=0.02), and a significant effect (P<0.05) was observed for the combinations of interventions that involved exercise. Balance measures improved significantly among the exercise group. Neither home hazard management nor treatment of poor vision showed a significant effect. The strongest effect was observed for all three interventions combined (rate ratio 0.67 (0.51 to 0.88, P=0.004)), producing an estimated 14.0% reduction in the annual fall rate. The number of people needed to be treated to prevent one fall a year ranged from 32 for home hazard management to 7 for all three interventions combined. Conclusions: Group based exercise was the most potent single intervention tested, and the reduction in falls among this group seems to have been associated with improved balance. Falls were further reduced by the addition of home hazard management or reduced vision management, or both of these. Cost effectiveness is yet to be examined. These findings are most applicable to Australian born adults aged 70–84 years living at home who rate their health as good.
The Relationship Between Marriage and Psychological Well-being

This study examined the relationship between marriage and psychological well-being using a sample from the National Survey of Families and Households panel data. Eight different marital status groups were identified and used to test two competing perspectives explaining the relationship between marriage and individual psychological well-being (protection vs. selection). Findings confirmed the strong effects of marital status on psychological well-being, supporting the protection perspective. The effect of the quality of marital (cohabiting) relationship on psychological well-being was significant, but the strong effect of marital status remained unchanged after controlling for relationship quality. Findings also indicated that the transition to cohabiting did not have the same beneficial effects as marriage for psychological well-being, suggesting that the protective effects of marriage are greater than those of cohabiting relationships. The selection effects of psychological well-being were found to be weak and inconsistent. The findings generally did not vary by gender.
The Non‐Productive Role of the Artist: The Creative Industries in Canada

Abstract The televised parliamentary leaders' debate of 2008 provided an indication of what cultural policies are imaginable at the level of Canadian federal politics. Now that governments and business are interested in the commercial potential of art and culture, artists find themselves in a curious position. This essay argues that what is required for a critical articulation of culture is not only a progressive approach to the links between culture, technology and the global economy, but a critique of the political economy of neoliberal cultural production that is able to politicise culture rather than culturalise politics. In the Canadian context, the near absence of any serious discussion of the creative industries is partly due to the emphasis on cultural identity and cultural nationalism. Identity, however, figures as part of a transnational process of symbolic production in which it has become seemingly impossible for the designers of cultural policy to construct a meaningful view of art's social function.
Optimized Schwarz Methods without Overlap for the Helmholtz Equation

The classical Schwarz method is a domain decomposition method to solve elliptic partial differential equations in parallel. Convergence is achieved through overlap of the subdomains. We study in this paper a variant of the Schwarz method which converges without overlap for the Helmholtz equation. We show that the key ingredients for such an algorithm are the transmission conditions. We derive optimal transmission conditions which lead to convergence of the algorithm in a finite number of steps. These conditions are, however, nonlocal in nature, and we introduce local approximations which we optimize for performance of the Schwarz method. This leads to an algorithm in the class of optimized Schwarz methods. We present an asymptotic analysis of the optimized Schwarz method for two types of transmission conditions, Robin conditions and transmission conditions with second order tangential derivatives. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the optimized Schwarz method on a model problem and on a problem from industry.
The Niche City Idea: How a Declining Manufacturing Center Exploited the Opportunities of Globalization

This article examines a small city that forged a global service industry niche. Its leaders aligned the temporality of its historic downtown with that of the international furniture industry to make it the world's primary furniture merchandising node. This article overviews the radical transformation of the downtown, describes the 'choreography' of the area, and considers what the author feels are the important wider implications of what is, on the surface, a deceptively odd case. The author suggests that, in engaging this specific strategy, this very unique city portends a more general type of post-industrial "Niche City", a city that forges global centrality by creating an economic specialization in a specific segment of the global service economy. Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation(c) 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
A Lower Bound on the Partition Function of Attractive Graphical Models in the Continuous Case

Computing the partition function of an arbitrary graphical model is generally intractable. As a result, approximate inference techniques such as loopy belief propagation and expectation propagation are used to compute an approximation to the true partition function. However, due to general issues of intractability in the continuous case, our understanding of these approximations is relatively limited. In particular, a number of theoretical results known for these approximations in the discrete case are missing in the continuous case. In this work, we use graph covers to extend several such results from the discrete case to the continuous case. Specifically, we provide a graph cover based upper bound for continuous graphical models, and we use this characterization (along with a continuous analog of a discrete correlationtype inequality) to show that the Bethe partition function also provides a lower bound on the true partition function of attractive graphical models in the continuous case.
Animals Do Not Induce or Reduce Attentional Blinking, But They Are Reported More Accurately in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Task

Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that modern humans have evolved to automatically direct their attention toward animal stimuli. Although this suggestion has found support in several attentional paradigms, it is not without controversy. Recently, a study employing methods customary to studying the attentional blink has shown inconclusive support for the prioritization of animals in attention. This showed an advantage for reporting animals as second targets within the typical window of the attentional blink, but it remained unclear whether this advantage was really due to a reduction of the attentional blink. We reassessed for the presence of a reduced attentional blink for animals compared with artifacts by using three disparate stimuli sets. A general advantage for animals was found but no indication of a reduction of the attentional blink for animals. There was no support for the prediction that animal distractors should lead to spontaneous inductions of attentional blinks when presented as critical distractors before single targets. Another experiment with single targets still showed that animals were reported more accurately than artifacts. A final experiment showed that when animals were first target, they did not generate stronger attentional blinks. In summary, we did find a general advantage for animal images in the rapid serial visual presentation task, but animal images did not either induce or reduce attentional blinks. This set of results is in line with conclusions from previous research showing no evidence for a special role of animals in attention.
Neuroprotective properties of cannabinoids against oxidative stress: role of the cannabinoid receptor CB1

Neuroprotective effects have been described for many can‐nabinoids in several neurotoxicity models. However, the exact mechanisms have not been clearly understood yet. In the present study, antioxidant neuroprotective effects of cannabinoids and the involvement of the cannabinoid receptor 1 (CB1) were analysed in detail employing cell‐free biochemical assays and cultured cells. As it was reported for oestrogens that the phenolic group is a lead structure for antioxidant neuroprotective effects, eight compounds were classified into three groups. Group A: phenolic compounds that do not bind to CB1. Group B: non‐phenolic compounds that bind to CB1. Group C: phenolic compounds that bind to CB1. In the biochemical assays employed, a requirement of the phenolic lead structure for antioxidant activity was shown. The effects paralleled the protective potential of group A and C compounds against oxidative neuronal cell death using the mouse hippocampal HT22 cell line and rat primary cerebellar cell cultures. To elucidate the role of CB1 in neuroprotection, we established stably transfected HT22 cells containing CB1 and compared the protective potential of cannabinoids with that observed in the control transfected HT22 cell line. Furthermore, oxidative stress experiments were performed in cultured cerebellar granule cells, which were derived either from CB1 knock‐out mice or from control wild‐type littermates. The results strongly suggest that CB1 is not involved in the cellular antioxidant neuroprotective effects of cannabinoids.
Impact of process variations on computers used for image processing

Manufacturing process variations (PV) of transistors in the deep-submicron regime present the single biggest design challenge for large die size VLSI circuits such as processor arrays, GPUs, and FPGAs. However, there are a few applications in signal processing, such as image processing, and speech processing, where errors in computation by the underlying hardware could be tolerated or corrected off-line with readily available image restoration algorithms. In this paper, we qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the effect of process variation in the underlying hardware (for different technology nodes) on a high level application program such as image processing. We rely on gate level simulation, of the data-path of an image processor comprising of a dedicated multiply-accumulate (MAC) array of size 256 × 256, with individual gate delays of the processor sampled from a delay distribution as appropriate for each technology node. Our results show that processing images with PV degraded hardware in technologies beyond 65nm is discernible to the human eye; image quality degrades further at 45nm, and is of unacceptable quality at 32nm and beyond. We also use image restoration algorithms to restore the images corrupted due to processing on PV degraded hardware. Our results show that with standard restoration algorithms, even images processed with high levels of PV (as in 32nm) can be restored to almost the same quality as the image processed on fault-free hardware.
Proxy placement in coordinated en-route transcoding caching for tree networks

This paper addresses the problem of transcoding proxy placement for coordinated en-route Web caching for tree networks. We propose a model for this problem by considering all the nodes among the network in a coordinated way and formulate this problem as an optimization problem. We implement our dynamic programming-based algorithm and evaluate our model on different performance metrics through extensive simulation experiments. The implementation results show that our model outperforms the placement model for linear topology.
Lesotho's students' achievement in mathematics and their teachers' background and professional development

The study sought to obtain information on the relationship, if any, between students’ achievement and teacher background as well as between students’ achievement and professional development. The respective correlation coefficient showed that there was a significant relationship between students’ achievement and teacher background and an insignificant relationship between students’ achievement and the extent of professional development. Of the three components of teacher background (viz., qualification, subject major and teaching experience), teacher qualification showed the strongest significant relationship with students’ achievement, followed by level of subject major. But teaching experience displayed a curvilinear significant relationship with students’ achievement. It was concluded that quality qualifications and deep subject content knowledge tend to make teachers more effective while teachers improve and develop when they are exposed
The Pharmacology of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: A Review

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was synthesized in 1938 and its psychoactive effects discovered in 1943. It was used during the 1950s and 1960s as an experimental drug in psychiatric research for producing so‐called “experimental psychosis” by altering neurotransmitter system and in psychotherapeutic procedures (“psycholytic” and “psychedelic” therapy). From the mid 1960s, it became an illegal drug of abuse with widespread use that continues today. With the entry of new methods of research and better study oversight, scientific interest in LSD has resumed for brain research and experimental treatments. Due to the lack of any comprehensive review since the 1950s and the widely dispersed experimental literature, the present review focuses on all aspects of the pharmacology and psychopharmacology of LSD. A thorough search of the experimental literature regarding the pharmacology of LSD was performed and the extracted results are given in this review. (Psycho‐) pharmacological research on LSD was extensive and produced nearly 10,000 scientific papers. The pharmacology of LSD is complex and its mechanisms of action are still not completely understood. LSD is physiologically well tolerated and psychological reactions can be controlled in a medically supervised setting, but complications may easily result from uncontrolled use by layman. Actually there is new interest in LSD as an experimental tool for elucidating neural mechanisms of (states of) consciousness and there are recently discovered treatment options with LSD in cluster headache and with the terminally ill.