Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Qingjiang biota—A Burgess Shale–type fossil Lagerstätte from the early Cambrian of South China

A treasure trove of Cambrian secrets Animal life exploded in diversity and form during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago. Fu et al. describe an early Cambrian fossil site in China that contains a variety of specimens, more than half of which are previously undescribed (see the Perspective by Daley). The site rivals previously described Cambrian sites, such as the Burgess Shale, and should help to elucidate biological innovation and diversification during this period. Science, this issue p. 1338; see also p. 1284 A newly described Cambrian site, the Qingjiang, rivals the Burgess Shale for fossil diversity. Burgess Shale–type fossil Lagerstätten provide the best evidence for deciphering the biotic patterns and magnitude of the Cambrian explosion. Here, we report a Lagerstätte from South China, the Qingjiang biota (~518 million years old), which is dominated by soft-bodied taxa from a distal shelf setting. The Qingjiang biota is distinguished by pristine carbonaceous preservation of labile organic features, a very high proportion of new taxa (~53%), and preliminary taxonomic diversity that suggests it could rival the Chengjiang and Burgess Shale biotas. Defining aspects of the Qingjiang biota include a high abundance of cnidarians, including both medusoid and polypoid forms; new taxa resembling extant kinorhynchs; and abundant larval or juvenile forms. This distinctive composition holds promise for providing insights into the evolution of Cambrian ecosystems across environmental gradients.
Rye plant parameters in the Westsik crop rotation experiment

Our research work was carried out in the Westsik crop rotation field experiment in 2018. The main research purpose was to analyse the effect of the different organic and chemical fertilizers on parameters of rye. Our results revealed some differences between the different fertilization methods. One spike weight, grain weight of one spike, rye plant height, rye plant weight per m2 and 1000 seed weight in crop rotations VII, XV and VIII were different from the data of all crop rotations. This finding can be explained by the fact that crop rotations VII and XV were non-fertilized, only 23.3 t ha-1 straw manure (VII) or green lupine manure was applied as a second crop (XV). In addition, crop rotation VIII consists of four parts where we apply chemical fertilization with green lupine manure as a main and second crop. There is a positive close correlation between rye plant height and other studied characters (rye plant weight per m2, spike length, weight of one spike, grain weight per spike, spike weight per m2, grain weight per m2 and 1000 seed weight).
Nicotine self-administration is not increased in the MAM rodent model of schizophrenia.

INTRODUCTION Patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) smoke at a rate 4-5 times higher than the general population, contributing to negative health consequences in this group. One possible explanation for this increased smoking is that individuals with SCZ find nicotine more reinforcing. However, data supporting this possibility are limited. METHODS The present experiments examined self-administration of nicotine, alone or in combination with other reinforcers, across a range of doses in the methylazoxymethanol acetate (MAM) rodent model of SCZ. RESULTS MAM and control animals did not differ in nicotine self-administration across a range of doses and schedules of reinforcement, in both standard 1-hr self-administration sessions and 23-hr extended access sessions. However, MAM animals responded less for sucrose or reinforcing visual stimuli alone or when paired with nicotine. CONCLUSIONS To the extent that MAM-treated rats are a valid model of SCZ, these results suggest that increased nicotine reinforcement does not account for increased smoking in SCZ patients. IMPLICATIONS This study is the first to utilize nicotine self-administration, the gold standard for studying nicotine reinforcement, in the MAM model of schizophrenia, which is arguably the most comprehensive animal model of the disease currently available. Our assessment found no evidence of increased nicotine reinforcement in MAM animals, suggesting that increased reinforcement may not perpetuate increased smoking in schizophrenia patients.
The Role of Organizational Citizenship Behavior as a Mediator on The Effect of Employee Engagement and Organizational Culture on Employee Perfomance in BPJS Ketenagakerjaan

The study aims to find out and analyze the relationship between employee engagement, organizational culture, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and employee performance. The author administered 224 participants employee engagement scale, organizational culture scale, OCB scale, and employee performance scale in BPJS Ketenagakerjaan East Java area. The data is analyzed by path analysis method in SPSS program. The result indicated that employee engagement and organizational culture affects positive significantly on OCB. Employee engagement, organizational culture and OCB also affects positive significantly on employee performance.
Assessment of Design-driven Innovation within Botswana’s Small Creative Industries

Richie Moalosi is an Associate Professor and Head of Department of the Department of Industrial Design & Technology at the University of Botswana. He obtained his PhD from Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His research interests include culture-centred design, design-driven innovation and co-creation sustainable product/services with local communities. Contact: moalosi@mopipi.ub. bw Richie MOALOSI, Oantata SEALETSA, Olefile MOLWANE, Paulson LETSHOLO, Shorn MOLOKWANE, Chinandu MWENDAPOLE, and Matlhogonolo LETSATSI
On the continuum approximation of the on-ando ff signal control on dynamic tra ffi c networks

In the modeling of traffic networks, a signalized junction is typically treated using a binary variable to model the on-and-off nature of signal operation. While accurate, the use of binary variables can cause problems when studying large networks with many intersections. Instead, the signal control can be approximated through a continuum approach where the on-and-off control variable is replaced by a priority parameter. Advantages of such approximation include elimination of the need for binary variables, lower time resolution requirements, and more flexibility and robustness in a decision environment. It also resolves the issue of discontinuous travel time functions arising from the context of dynamic traffic assignment. Despite these advantages in application, it is not clear from a theoretical point of view how accurate is such continuum approach; i.e., to what extent is this a valid approximation for the on-and-off case. The goal of this paper is to answer these basic research questions and provide further guidance for the application of such continuum signal model. In particular, by employing the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards model (Lighthill and Whitham, 1955; Richards, 1956) on a traffic network, we investigate the convergence of the on-and-off signal model to the continuum model in regimes of diminishing signal cycles. We also provide numerical analyses on the continuum approximation error when the signal cycles are not infinitesimal. As we explain, such convergence results and error estimates depend on the type of fundamental diagram assumed and whether or not vehicle spillback occurs in a network. Finally, a traffic signal optimization problem is presented and solved which illustrates the unique advantages of applying the continuum signal model instead of the on-and-off one.
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): galaxy environments and star formation rate variations

We present a detailed investigation into the effects of galaxy environment on their star formation rates (SFRs) using galaxies observed in the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. We use three independent volume-limited samples of galaxies within z < 0.2 and Mr < −17.8. We investigate the known SFR–density relationship and explore in detail the dependence of SFR on stellar mass and density. We show that the SFR–density trend is only visible when we include the passive galaxy population along with the star-forming population. This SFR–density relation is absent when we consider only the star-forming population of galaxies, consistent with previous work. While there is a strong dependence of the EWHα on density we find, as in previous studies, that these trends are largely due to the passive galaxy population and this relationship is absent when considering a ‘star-forming’ sample of galaxies. We find that stellar mass has the strongest influence on SFR and EWHα with the environment having no significant effect on the star formation properties of the star-forming population. We also show that the SFR–density relationship is absent for both early- and late-type star-forming galaxies. We conclude that the stellar mass has the largest impact on the current SFR of a galaxy, and any environmental effect is not detectable. The observation that the trends with density are due to the changing morphology fraction with density implies that the time-scales must be very short for any quenching of the SFR in infalling galaxies. Alternatively, galaxies may in fact undergo predominantly in situ evolution where the infall and quenching of galaxies from the field into dense environments is not the dominant evolutionary mode.
CODRAW: COLLABORATIVE DRAWING

In this work, we propose a goal-driven collaborative task that contains language, vision, and action in a virtual environment as its core components. Specifically, we develop a Collaborative image-Drawing game between two agents, called CoDraw. Our game is grounded in a virtual world that contains movable clip art objects. The game involves two players: a Teller and a Drawer. The Teller sees an abstract scene containing multiple clip art pieces in a semantically meaningful configuration, while the Drawer tries to reconstruct the scene on an empty canvas using available clip art pieces. The two players communicate via two-way communication using natural language. We collect the CoDraw dataset of ∼10K dialogs consisting of ∼138K messages exchanged between human agents. We define protocols and metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of learned agents on this testbed, highlighting the need for a novel crosstalk condition which pairs agents trained independently on disjoint subsets of the training data for evaluation. We present models for our task, including simple but effective nearest-neighbor techniques and neural network approaches trained using a combination of imitation learning and goal-driven training. All models are benchmarked using both fully automated evaluation and by playing the game with live human agents.
Interannual to diurnal variability in the near-surface scattering layer in Drake Passage

Backscattering strength was estimated from 127 shipboard surveys with an acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) made during Drake Passage transits from 1999 to 2004. The backscattering strength is used to determine the characteristics of the near-surface scattering layer, which south of the Southern Antarctic Circumpolar Current Front (SACCF) is dominated by Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba). Diel vertical migration in the upper 150 m was the dominant variability observed in any single transect. When averaged over depth, there was a well-defined annual cycle in backscattering strength, with a factor of four increase from a late-winter minimum to a spring-summer maximum over a period of four months, followed by a more gentle decline during late summer and autumn. In addition, there were significant differences in scattering strength north and south of the Polar Front (PF) on both seasonal and interannnual time-scales. The average summer maximum to the north of the PF was more than twice the maximum to the south, but the winter minima were about the same. On interannual time-scales, scattering strength south of the PF displayed a negative linear trend primarily attributable to a fourfold decrease in backscattering strength south of the SACCF. No significant long-term trend in the scattering strength north of the SACCF was observed.
Class matters: the sociolinguistics of goose and goat in Manchester English

Abstract This paper reports on patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change in Manchester's goose and goat vowels on the basis of the acoustic analysis of 122 speakers, stratified by age, gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. Goose fronting is an internal change showing little social differentiation, except before /l/ as in school and pool, where, in contrast to most other dialects of English, goose shows advanced fronting inversely correlated with socioeconomic status. Goat fronting, on the other hand, is a change brought from outside the dialect by the highest status groups, displaying a pattern of monotonic social stratification, a female lead, and a strong effect of ethnicity. The role of attitudes toward the community in the realization of the vowels is compared with the effect of social class construed in terms of distances between social groups. Social class turns out to be a better predictor, suggesting that the role of attitudes and identity may be overestimated in research eschewing a systematic exploration of social class at the same time.
MixUp as Directional Adversarial Training: A Unifying Understanding of MixUp and Adversarial Training

This thesis aims to contribute to the field of neural networks by improving upon the performance of a state-of-the-art regularization scheme called MixUp, and by contributing to the conceptual understanding of MixUp. MixUp is a data augmentation scheme in which pairs of training samples and their corresponding labels are mixed using linear coefficients. Without label mixing, MixUp becomes a more conventional scheme: input samples are moved but their original labels are retained. Because samples are preferentially moved in the direction of other classes we refer to this method as directional adversarial training, or DAT. We show that under two mild conditions, MixUp asymptotically convergences to a subset of DAT. We define untied MixUp (UMixUp), a superset of MixUp wherein training labels are mixed with different linear coefficients to those of their corresponding samples. We show that under the same mild conditions, untied MixUp converges to the entire class of DAT schemes. Motivated by the understanding that UMixUp is both a generalization of MixUp and a scheme possessing adversarial-training properties, we experiment with different datasets and loss functions to show that UMixUp provides improves performance over MixUp. In short, we present a novel interpretation of MixUp as belonging to a class highly analogous to adversarial training, and on this basis we introduce a simple generalization which outperforms MixUp.
G Genetic Relatedness

A classical approach to natural selection tells us that only traits which confer a heritable fitness (reproductive) advantage to their bearer will evolve by natural selection. For instance, suppose a population of organisms which vary in height and in which the taller an organism is the higher its reproductive output. We could imagine that the organisms are giraffes and that giraffes which are taller have access to leaves on the top of trees while smaller giraffes do not. Because of this access to more resources, taller giraffes can produce more offspring than smaller ones. If taller giraffes produce taller offspring, everything else being equal, so that height is heritable, then tallness will evolve by natural selection. Under this picture of evolution by natural selection, following the three conditions of variation, difference in fitness, and heritability (Lewontin 1970), only traits that are beneficial to the individual bearer of these traits can evolve by natural selection. Following this Darwinian scheme, we should thus expect to see only traits that confer a fitness advantage to their bearer in nature, since every time a mutation conferring a disadvantage emerges in the population it should be eliminated by natural selection (assuming what is known as genetic drift can be ignored). Thus, in our example, we should not expect giraffes to get smaller over time on average, because small giraffes have a lower probability to reproduce than tall giraffes. Although this Darwinian scheme seems
Object Tracking Combined Spatio-temporal Context Learning with Illumination Invariant Feature

For improving the accuracy, robustness and real-time in object tracking such as surveillance and human actions recognition, this paper presents a novel object tracking method which combines the spatio-temporal context learning (STC) with the illumination invariant feature (IIF). We cast the object appearance model based on the locality sensitive histogram (LSH) and the IIF, and then matched the similarity between the target and the template by the STC algorithm which models the statistical correlation between the target and its surrounding regions. The proposed method makes full use of the advantages of the STC algorithm and the IIF, and it can diminish the influence of illumination change, pose variation and rotation. The experimental results demonstrate that the tracking precision and robustness is obviously improved when the proposed method is used in the two classic object tracking video databases. Extensive experimental results show that this method can be applied to the recognition of humans or vehicles.
In Our Shoes or the Protagonist’s? Knowledge, Justification, and Projection

Sackris and Beebe show that many people seem willing to attribute knowledge in the absence of justification. Their results provide some reason to claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. This chapter provides some support for this claim. It does so by addressing an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the observed knowledge attributions stemmed from protagonist projection, a linguistic phenomenon in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. That said, caution is recommended. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before much confidence is given to the claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not take justification to be necessary for its use.
Fair or Not: Effects of Gamification Elements on Crowdsourcing Participation

Fairness perceptions have been found to be a critical driving factor for solvers’ engagement in crowdsourcing. However, the literature still lacks on how to design crowdsourcing platform to enhance solvers’ fairness perceptions. By integrating organizational justice theory with the gamification literature, we conceptualize solvers’ perceptions of two typical gamification elements: the point-rewarding perception and the feedback-giving perception. We develop model to explain the effects of gamification perceptions on both distributive and interpersonal justice perceptions, which are conducive to solvers’ participation. Based on a survey of 295 solvers, we apply the partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach to test the research model. Results show that both point-rewarding perception and feedback-giving perception can enhance the distributive and interpersonal justice perceptions which, in turn, foster solvers’ crowdsourcing participation. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.
Tracking the footprint of pesticides in Alzheimer’s disease

Several studies have indicated that exposure to pesticides is one of the main environmental factors that are associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Indeed, even the chronic exposure to low dosages of pesticides could be associated with some neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this review, we have discussed the mechanisms associated between exposure to pesticides and AD. We particularly concentrate on the impacts of pesticides on the oxidative stress, mitochondrial malfunction, formation of Aβ plaques, and hyper-phosphorylation of Tau proteins, which are important factors in the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. Correspondence to: Mahdi Tondar, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology, School of Medicine, Georgetown University, Washington, District of Columbia, USA, Tel: 001-310-933-7558, E-mail: mt969@georgetown.edu
The role of intuition in executive strategic decision making

The current thesis examines the role of intuition in the strategic decision making process of executives. Limited applied research has been conducted on the field of intuitive processes in strategic decision making of top managers, therefore this paper attempts to shed more light on this specific topic. The purpose of this study is to investigate how and to what extent intuition affects executives in the process of strategic decision making. Furthermore, it aims to investigate under which conditions it is more probable for an executive to utilize intuition in the strategic decision making process. In order to accomplish the aforementioned purpose, the authors conducted a series of qualitative personal interviews with five executives, structuring them on the basis of the three strategic decision making dimensions; intuition, rationality and political behaviour. The research was conducted with an abductive approach, since the researchers had to move back and forth, between data and theory, combining deduction and induction in a sense. The collected data were analyzed through the moderating lenses of three decision-specific characteristics and three company characteristics. Following a thorough and extensive analysis of the data, the research supports that intuition has a prominent role in the managerial strategic decision making, being present in all the executives who were interviewed, regardless of their position in the rationality-intuition spectrum. The study indicates that in multiple situations, for instance when information was scarce, the environment was volatile, the situation was highly complex, or an immediate decision was of the essence, managers employed intuitive processes when making crucial decisions that affected the future of their organization. Moreover, the study concluded that managers favoured intuition in strategic decision making in cases of high decision uncertainty and unstable environments, verifying already existing theories on the field.
Intermittency , Fractals , and β-model Lecture

An essential assumption of Kolmogorov 1941 theory is that eddies of any generation are space filling at inertial-range scales. It assumes that energy transfer to small scale fluctuations is uniform, i.e. ε is independent of space and time. However, the energy dissipation rate per unit mass of a turbulent fluid, ε, is a random function of x and t, which fluctuates with the random velocity field v(x, t). These small scale fluctuations are observed to be highly nonuniform in space and time, which is denoted as intermittent. The word intermittency suggests the small scale turbulence tend to concentrate into small and isolated regions or time intervals surrounded by smoother large scale flows. As the scale decreases, or the Reynolds number increases, the intermittency effects should become more and more important. In this sense the K41 theory is incomplete. Geometrically speaking, the intermittency indicates that the dimension of the dissipative structures is smaller than the space dimension, i.e. Deff < Dspace, which reminds us of the fractals. In fact, fractals have been used in intermittency models. In following sections, we will briefly review the properties of fractals first, and then introduce the fractal model of intermittency.