Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimation of feeding frequencies by periodic weighing of chicks: evaluation by video-observation of burrow-nesting Wilson's Storm-Petrels (Oceanites oceanicus)

Abstract We used video-observations of nesting burrows to determine if periodic weighing of chicks (once per day) accurately captured feeding events in Wilson's Storm-Petrel (Oceanites oceanicus). We found that, compared with video-recordings, periodic weighing and correction for metabolic loss correctly estimated whether a chick had been fed for 99.3% of all nights. It underestimated the number of feedings on 14.8% of nights and overestimated it on only 4.7%. The most common error in our study occurred in the discrimination between single and double feedings, classifying 22 (35.5%) of all double feedings as single feeding owing to their small size. However, the method gives good results at the population level, as the error rate (0.7% for fed v. unfed) is well below the variance in feeding rates observed between good and poor seasons. Thus, periodic weighing of chicks is an easy and reliable method for monitoring feeding rates, which is especially important in burrow-nesting species where a direct observation is difficult. We show that, following the establishment of a metabolic mass-loss curve by weighing chicks over short intervals, weighing of chicks once a day provides reliable results, and thus disturbance to feeding adults can be minimised. This can be especially useful in species where adults feed during a restricted time of the day, such as nocturnally.
Toxicity of Insecticides to a Coccinellid Predator of the Cereal Leaf Beetle

Laboratory tests of insecticides against the spotted lady beetle, Coleomegilla maculata lengi Timberlake, a predator of the cereal leaf beetle, Oulema melanopa (L.), indicated that carbaryl, Guthion® ( O, O -dimethyl S - (4-oxo-1,2,3-benzotriazin -3 (4 H ) -ylmethyl) phosphorodithioate), and malathion were highly toxic to the predator while Bayer 39007 ( O -isopropoxyphenyl methylcarbamate) was moderately toxic. Dieldrin, endrin, and lindane were slightly or non-toxic to the insect. Carbaryl resulted in high mortality of both the cereal leaf beetle and the spotted lady beetle while dieldrin gave a high mortality of the cereal leaf beetle but only a moderate kill of the spotted lady beetle. The results obtained with granular and spray aplications of carbaryl and dieldrin were essentially the same.
Consumer Valuations and Preference Heterogeneity for a Novel Functional Food

Recent trends in the marketing of functional foods suggest that multiple-benefit products are becoming more common. Yet it is unclear which consumers are most interested in, or best served by, such novel or new generation functional foods. With emerging scientific evidence of efficacy and more diverse products offered for sale, a broader range of consumers are likely to become interested in dietary interventions to enhance health. Consumers will likely respond based on a range of motivation, health conditions, and knowledge levels suggesting “one size will not fit all. ” Given such an evolving marketing environment, this paper presents 1 research technique exploring differences in consumer preferences and valuations for a novel functional food product—a tomato juice containing soy. A discrete choice experiment is applied to examine consumer valuation of this novel functional food. Data were collected from 1704 households in Ohio through a mail survey. The choice experiment manipulates whether or not the product is organic, whether it contains natural or fortified nutrients, and product price. Estimates of consumer willingness to pay a premium price are based on conditional logit and mixed logit models, which permit an examination of consumer preference and valuation heterogeneity for key product attributes. Results indicate that health benefits and ingredient naturalness are positively valued, but such preferences and valuations depend on an individual's education, income, and food purchase behavior. Naturally occurring nutrients are preferred over fortification. Considerable heterogeneity is found in the data suggesting that a range of market segments may exist.
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF VARIOUS TYPES OF PHOSPHATASES IN THE NUCLEI OF THE NEURONS OF SOME VERTEBRATES

A comparative study of distribution of alkaline and acid phosphatases, 5-nucleotidase and ATPase in various regions of peripheral and central nervous system of a large variety of animals i. e. in the nuclei of the neurons of olfactory lobes of rat, bat, guinea-pig, mouse, cat, rabbit, frog, chicken, turtle and uromastix, trigeminal ganglia of cat, dog and turtle, spinal ganglia of turtle, vagus ganglia of frog, primordial hippocampal region of turtle and frog, entopeduncular nucleus of frog and cerebellum of cat have presented specific patterns of distribution in the nucleolar and nuclear sites. In some cases the nuclei have revealed absence of activity for certain enzymes. The data obtained from the comparative study, encampassing such a large number of neurons, suggest that positive sites demonstrated by various methods for phosphatases i. e. by Takamatsu-Gomori technique for alkaline phosphatase, Gomori technique for acid phosphatase and Wachstein and Meisel methods for 5-nucleotidase and ATPase, do reveal real locales of enzymatic activity and are not artifactual in nature. The metabolic significance of the intranuclear distribution of phosphatases has been also discussed.
Continuous Vector Spaces for Cross-language NLP Applications

The mathematical metaphor offered by the geometric concept of distance in vector spaces with respect to semantics and meaning has been proven to be useful in many monolingual natural language processing applications. There is also some recent and strong evidence that this paradigm can also be useful in the cross-language setting. In this tutorial, we present and discuss some of the most recent advances on exploiting the vector space model paradigm in specific cross-language natural language processing applications, along with a comprehensive review of the theoretical background behind them.First, the tutorial introduces some fundamental concepts of distributional semantics and vector space models. More specifically, the concepts of distributional hypothesis and term-document matrices are revised, followed by a brief discussion on linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques and their implications to the parallel distributed approach to semantic cognition. Next, some classical examples of using vector space models in monolingual natural language processing applications are presented. Specific examples in the areas of information retrieval, related term identification and semantic compositionality are described.Then, the tutorial focuses its attention on the use of the vector space model paradigm in cross-language applications. To this end, some recent examples are presented and discussed in detail, addressing the specific problems of cross-language information retrieval, cross-language sentence matching, and machine translation. Some of the most recent developments in the area of Neural Machine Translation are also discussed.Finally, the tutorial concludes with a discussion about current and future research problems related to the use of vector space models in cross-language settings. Future avenues for scientific research are described, with major emphasis on the extension from vector and matrix representations to tensors, as well as the problem of encoding word position information into the vector-based representations.
Receptors Involved in Host Location and Feeding in Ticks

Host location and feeding among ticks involves positioning for host findings, probing, attachment, imbibing blood and thereafter detachment. Different species of ticks fulfil this sequence of events in different ways. Behavioural differences are mainly due to sensory inputs obtained by a tick and the processing of that input by the central nervous system. Tick receptors responsible for perceiving stimuli originating in the general environment and the host in particular are located on the tarsi and mouthparts. This review gives a brief account of current knowledge on sensory receptors involved in the above behavioural patterns. RésuméParmi les tiques, la recherche d’un hôte comprend quatre phases: orientation (mise en place), attachement, absorption du sang, et après, détachement. Des differentes éspèces de tique accomplissent ces étapes assez differement. Ces differences de conduites sont due, pour la plupart, à des communications sensorilles et leurs traitement par le systeme nerveux. Les recepteurs responsable pour la transmission des stimules provenant de l’environnement en general, et de l’hôte en particulier, se trouvent sur les tarse et les organes orales. Cette étude est une revue de ce qui est connue actuellement sur des récepteurs en question.
Photosynthesis of the cyanobacterial soil‐crust lichen Collema tenax from arid lands in southern Utah, USA: role of water content on light and temperature responses of CO2 exchange

1. The gelatinous cyanobacterial Collema tenax is a dominant lichen of biotic soil crusts in the western United States. In laboratory experiments, we studied CO2 exchange of this species as dependent on water content (WC), light and temperature. Results are compared with performance of green-algal lichens of the same site investigated earlier. 2. As compared with published data, photosynthetic capacity of C. tenax is higher than that of other cyanobacterial and green-algal soil-crust species studied. At all temperatures and photon flux densities of ecological relevance, net photosynthesis (NP) shows a strong depression at high degrees of hydration; maximal apparent quantum-use efficiency of CO2 fixation is also reduced. Water requirements (moisture compensation point, WC for maximal NP) are higher than that of the green-algal lichens. Collema tenax exhibits extreme ‘sun plant’ features and is adapted to high thallus temperatures. 3. Erratic rain showers are the main source of moisture for soil crusts on the Colorado Plateau, quickly saturating the lichens with liquid water. High water-holding capacity of C. tenax ensures extended phases of favourable hydration at conditions of high light and temperature after the rain for substantial photosynthetic production. Under such conditions the cyanobacterial lichen appears superior over its green-algal competitors, which seem better adapted to habitats with high air humidity, dew or fog as prevailing source of moisture.
The Impact of Economic Shocks in the Rest of the World on South Africa: Evidence from a Global VAR

Abstract The substantial change in South Africa’s trade patterns over the past two decades has affected the impact of economic shocks in major world economies on South Africa. To investigate the effect, we use a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model with time-varying trade weights to account for changing international trade linkages. We show that the long-term impact of a shock to Chinese GDP on South African GDP is much stronger in 2009 than in 1995, due to the substantial increase in South Africa’s trade with China since the mid-1990s. At the same time, the importance of the U.S. economy to South Africa diminished considerably. The results indicate one of the possible reasons why the recent global crisis did not affect South Africa as much as it affected developed economies. It also stresses the increased risk, to the South African and other economies, should China experience slower GDP growth.
Hippuric acid and benzoic acid inhibition of urine derived N2O emissions from soil

Atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) have continued to rise since the advent of the industrial era, largely because of the increase in agricultural land use. The urine deposited by grazing ruminant animals is a major global source of agricultural N2O. With the first commitment period for reducing greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol now underway, mitigation options for ruminant urine N2O emissions are urgently needed. Recent studies showed that increasing the urinary concentration of the minor urine constituent hippuric acid resulted in reduced emissions of N2O from a sandy soil treated with synthetic bovine urine, due to a reduction in denitrification. A similar effect was seen when benzoic acid, a product of hippuric acid hydrolysis, was used. This current laboratory experiment aimed to investigate these effects using real cow urine for the first time. Increased concentrations of hippuric acid or benzoic acid in the urine led to reduction of N2O emissions by 65% (from 17% to <6% N applied), with no difference between the two acid treatments. Ammonia volatilization did not increase significantly with increased hippuric acid or benzoic acid concentrations in the urine applied. Therefore, there was a net reduction in gaseous N loss from the soil with higher urinary concentrations of both hippuric acid and benzoic acid. The results show that elevating hippuric acid in the urine had a marked negative effect on both nitrification and denitrification rates and on subsequent N2O fluxes. This study indicates the potential for developing a novel mitigation strategy based on manipulation of urine composition through ruminant diet.
The Human Herpes Virus 8-Encoded Viral FLICE-inhibitory Protein Induces Cellular Transformation via NF-κB Activation*

Infection with human herpes virus 8 (HHV8) has been associated with Kaposi's sarcoma, primary effusion lymphoma, and multicentric Castleman's disease. HHV8 encodes for a viral FLICE-inhibitory protein (vFLIP), designated K13, which resembles the prodomain of caspase-8 in structure and has been shown to protect cells against death receptor-induced apoptosis in vitro and in vivo. In this report, we present evidence that HHV8 vFLIP also possesses the unique ability of transforming Rat-1 and Balb/3T3 fibroblast cells, which is not shared by other vFLIPs. Rat-1 cells expressing HHV8 vFLIP form colonies in soft agar and form tumors in nude mice. The transforming ability of HHV8 vFLIP is associated with the activation of the NF-κB pathway and is blocked by molecular and chemical inhibitors of this pathway. Our results suggest that vFLIP K13 has activity beyond its role as an inhibitor of death receptor signaling and may play a causative role in the pathogenesis of HHV8-associated malignancies. Furthermore, inhibitors of the NF-κB pathway may have a role in the treatment of malignancies linked to HHV8 infection.
Universal Graph Compression: Stochastic Block Models

Motivated by the prevalent data science applications of processing large-scale graph data such as social networks, web graphs, and biological networks, as well as the high I/O and communication costs of storing and transmitting such data, this paper investigates universal compression of data appearing in the form of a labeled graph. In particular, we consider a widely used random graph model, stochastic block model (SBM), which captures the clustering effects in social networks. A universal graph compressor is proposed, which achieves the optimal compression rate for a wide family of SBMs with edge probabilities from $O$(1) to Ω(1/$n$ 2-∊) for any 0 < ∊ < 1. Existing universal compression techniques are developed mostly for stationary ergodic one-dimensional sequences with entropy linear in the number of variables. However, the adjacency matrix of SBM has complex two-dimensional correlations and sublinear entropy in the sparse regime. These challenges are alleviated through a carefully designed transform that converts two-dimensional correlated data into almost i.i. d. blocks. The blocks are then compressed by a Krichevsky-Trofimov compressor, whose length analysis is generalized to arbitrarily correlated processes with identical marginals.
The bitter truth about gate-based quantum algorithms in the NISQ era

Implementing a gate-based quantum algorithm on an noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) device has several challenges that arise from the fact that such devices are noisy and have limited quantum resources. Thus, various factors contributing to the depth and width as well as to the noise of an implementation of a gate-based algorithm must be understood in order to assess whether an implementation will execute successfully on a given NISQ device. In this contribution, we discuss these factors and their impact on algorithm implementations. Especially, we will cover state preparation, oracle expansion, connectivity, circuit rewriting, and readout: these factors are very often ignored when presenting a gate-based algorithm but they are crucial when implementing such an algorithm on near-term quantum computers. Our contribution will help developers in charge of realizing gate-based algorithms on such machines in (i) achieving an executable implementation, and (ii) assessing the success of their implementation on a given machine.
Robust Decoding from Binary Measurements with Cardinality Constraint Least Squares

The main goal of 1-bit compressive sampling is to decode $n$ dimensional signals with sparsity level $s$ from $m$ binary measurements. This is a challenging task due to the presence of nonlinearity, noises and sign flips. In this paper, the cardinality constraint least square is proposed as a desired decoder. We prove that, up to a constant $c$, with high probability, the proposed decoder achieves a minimax estimation error as long as $m \geq \mathcal{O}( s\log n)$. Computationally, we utilize a generalized Newton algorithm (GNA) to solve the cardinality constraint minimization problem with the cost of solving a least squares problem with small size at each iteration. We prove that, with high probability, the $\ell_{\infty}$ norm of the estimation error between the output of GNA and the underlying target decays to $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\frac{\log n }{m}}) $ after at most $\mathcal{O}(\log s)$ iterations. Moreover, the underlying support can be recovered with high probability in $\mathcal{O}(\log s)$ steps provided that the target signal is detectable. Extensive numerical simulations and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods are presented to illustrate the robustness of our proposed decoder and the efficiency of the GNA algorithm.
A STUDY OF THE ASSOCIATION OF GLUCOSINOLATES TO RAPESEED MEAL-INDUCED HEMORRHAGIC LIVER IN POULTRY AND THE INFLUENCE OF SUPPLEMENTAL VITAMIN K

Diets were formulated to contain variable amounts of intact glucosinolates (IG) and various aglucones: 1-cyano-2-hydroxy-3-butene (CHB); 5-vinyloxazolidine-2-thione (OZT); isothiocyanates (NCS); and inorganic thiocyanate (SCN) to study the relation of glucosinolates to rapeseed meal (RSM)-induced hemorrhagic liver (HL) in laying hens. The influence of supplemental vitamin K in alleviating the HL effect was also studied using broiler chickens and SCWL hens of an experimental strain. The results of the various experiments confirmed the fact that RSM feeding may cause liver damage and mortality attributable to HL as well as demonstrating that the mortality rate could be reduced markedly by the addition of supplemental vitamin K to the feed or drinking water. A clear cause and effect relationship between glucosinolates and HL was not evident. There was a consistent association, however, of a high diet content of IG and CHB with HL but only if these compounds were fed together as components of RSM. Intact gluc.
Response to LiveBot: Generating Live Video Comments Based on Visual and Textual Contexts

Live video commenting systems are an emerging feature of online video sites. Recently the Chinese video sharing platform Bilibili, has popularised a novel captioning system where user comments are displayed as streams of moving subtitles overlaid on the video playback screen and broadcast to all viewers in real-time. LiveBot was recently introduced as a novel Automatic Live Video Commenting (ALVC) application. This enables the automatic generation of live video comments from both the existing video stream and existing viewers comments. In seeking to reproduce the baseline results reported in the original Livebot paper, we found differences between the reproduced results using the project codebase and the numbers reported in the paper. Further examination of this situation suggests that this may be caused by a number of small issues in the project code, including a non-obvious overlap between the training and test sets. In this paper, we study these discrepancies in detail and propose an alternative baseline implementation as a reference for other researchers in this field.
Phase transition of the energy flux in the near-inertial wave--mesoscale eddy coupled turbulence

Wind forcing injects energy into the mesoscale eddies and near-inertial waves (NIWs) in the ocean, and the NIW is believed to solve the puzzle of mesoscale energy budget by absorbing energy from mesoscale eddies followed by a forward cascade of NIW energy which finally dissipates at the ocean interior. This work studies the turbulent energy transfer in the NIW--quasigeostrophic mean mesoscale eddy coupled system based on a previously derived two-dimensional model which has a Hamiltonian structure and inherits conserved quantities in the Boussinesq equations (Xie \& Vanneste, \textit{J. Fluid Mech.}, vol. 774, 2015, pp. 147--169). Based on the conservation of energy, potential enstrophy and wave action, we propose a heuristic argument predicting the existence of phase transition with changing the relative strength between NIW and mean flow. By running forced-dissipative numerical simulations with varying parameter $R$, the ratio of the magnitude of NIW and mean-flow forcing, we justify the existence of phase transition, which is found to be second-order, around critical value $R_c$. When $0 R_c$, energy transfers downscale, wave action transfers bidirectionally, and vortex filaments are dominant. We find the catalytic wave induction (CWI) mechanism where the NIW induces a downscale energy flux of the mean flow. The CWI mechanism differs from the stimulated loss of balance by the absence of energy conversion from the mesoscale eddy to NIW, and it is found to be effective in the toy-model study, making it potentially important for ocean energetics.
Early ontogenetic ecology of sofie Chondrostoma toxostoma: an integrated approach to organism- environment relationships

The influence of early life development on the swimming performance of the endangered sofie Chondrostoma toxostoma was examined to highlight trends in organism-environment relationships. Sudden occurrences of change in integrated function were found and these were most decisive, in particular with respect to microhabitat use, between the larval and juvenile periods of development. Stabilization of relative growth, i.e. end of the remodelling process (metamorphosis), occurred well after all larval characteristics (remnants of finfold and rapid allometric growth) had disappeared and all juvenile structures had appeared (nasal septa and complete scale cover). The fact that stabilization of relative growth coincided with dramatic shifts in microhabitat use (organism needs) as well as in swimming capacity (organism skills) suggests a more ‘decisive’ type of change in organism-to-environment interaction than one purely of form, i.e. shift from nursery to adult habitat. # 2005 The Fisheries Society of the British Isles
’t Hooft surface in lattice gauge theory

We discuss the lattice formulation of the 't Hooft surface, that is, the two-dimensional surface operator of a dual variable. The 't Hooft surface describes the world sheets of topological vortices. We derive the formulas to calculate the expectation value of the 't Hooft surface in the multiple-charge lattice Abelian Higgs model and in the lattice non-Abelian Higgs model. As the first demonstration of the formula, we compute the intervortex potential in the charge-2 lattice Abelian Higgs model.