Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pratiques cynégétiques et nouveaux discours écologiques chez les Nahuas du Balsas (Mexique)

D'apres Victor Toledo, pionnier de l'ethnoecologie au Mexique, les peuples indiens de ce pays auraient une connaissance plus approfondie de la flore et de l'usage agricole des sols que de la faune. Dans cet article, nous nous proposons d'analyser les pratiques cynegetiques des Nahuas du bassin du fleuve Balsas, pour lesquels la chasse est avant tout l'affaire de paysans qui defendent leurs milpa (champs de mais et plantes associees) contre les predateurs (coyotes, pecaris, coatis). Des battues sont egalement organisees contre les animaux sauvages (sangliers, felins) dans leur propre territoire, appele le monte (les collines et les espaces hors des villages) bien que les grands predateurs capables de s'affronter a l'homme, tel les jaguars appeles "tigre" (tecuani : F elis onca), ont pratiquement disparu. La chasse reste plus une expression du rapport au sauvage qu'un besoin alimentaire, meme si le gibier est apprecie. Le Balsas etait aussi repute pour etre l'une des niches ecologique du cerf a queue blanche (masatl ; Odocoileus virginianus) espece qui s'est actuellement beaucoup rarefiee. Nous analyserons quels sont, pour les villageois, les nouveaux aspects des rapports aux animaux et a la chasse, depuis leur adoption d'un discours "ecologique" et la mise en place de projets de reintroduction du cerf a queue blanche avec des ONG partenaires. La prise en charge de son elevage amene egalement les villageois a traiter cet animal comme une bete domestique et entraine une modification de leurs representations du sauvage.
Teleseismic Pn arrivals: influence of mantle velocity gradient and crustal scattering

Teleseismic P n phases with a long, high-amplitude coda, are observed to offsets >3000 km along the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion seismic profiles Quartz and Ruby. For the high-frequency (> 5 Hz) part of the Quartz data, which is shown here, coda lengths of more than 10 s can be visually observed in the seismic sections. We interpret the teleseismic P n arrivals as multiple sub-Moho refractions (whispering-gallery phases), which travel over large distances due to a positive upper-mantle velocity gradient. The coda of these arrivals is explained by lower crustal scattering of the whispering-gallery phases from the mantle. The modelling is based on calculation of reflectivity and 2-D visco-elastic finite-difference synthetic seismograms. Our models are in agreement with other deep seismic data from continental areas, which typically show a reflective lower crust and an almost transparent uppermost mantle. The lower crustal heterogeneity is described by von Karman distribution with a standard deviation of 0.5 km s - 1 for the P-wave velocity and correlation lengths of 2.4 km (horizontally) and 0.6 km (vertically). The positive vertical upper-mantle velocity gradient of ∼0.004 km s - 1 km - 1 , which is characteristic for profile Quartz, forms a waveguide which gives rise to the teleseismic P n . It is not necessary to include upper-mantle heterogeneity in order to explain the characteristics of this arrival.
Seasonal and Geographical Distribution of Tabanus Abactor Philip and Associated Species in the Texas Rolling Plains

The sampling for Tabanidae in a three county area of the Texas Rolling Plains was done in 1978 and 1979 to determine the seasonal distribution of Tabanus abactor Philip. Environmental data were gathered as well to show correlation between environmental abiotic factors and the population fluctuations of this species. Geographical distribution studies were conducted within boundaries of the Texas Rolling Plains for this two year period also. Tabanus abactor was shown to be present from mid-June to mid-September in the three county area and was found inhabiting forty-six of the sixty-two counties within this geographical region.
Evolving brain and behaviour changes in rats following repetitive subconcussive head impacts

Abstract There is growing concern that repetitive subconcussive head impacts, independent of concussion, alter brain structure and function, and may disproportionately affect the developing brain. Animal studies of repetitive subconcussive head impacts are needed to begin to characterize the pathological basis and mechanisms underlying imaging and functional effects of repetitive subconcussive head impacts seen in humans. Since repetitive subconcussive head impacts have been largely unexplored in animals, we aimed to characterize the evolution of imaging, behavioural and pathological effects of repetitive subconcussive head impacts in awake adolescent rodents. Awake male and female Sprague Dawley rats (postnatal Day 35) received 140 closed-head impacts over the course of a week. Impacted and sham-impacted animals were restrained in a plastic cone, and unrestrained control animals were included to account for effects of restraint and normal development. Animals (n = 43) underwent repeated diffusion tensor imaging prior to and over 1 month following the final impact. A separate cohort (n = 53) was assessed behaviourally for fine motor control, emotional-affective behaviour and memory at acute and chronic time points. Histological and immunohistochemical analyses, which were exploratory in nature due to smaller sample sizes, were completed at 1 month following the final impact. All animals tolerated the protocol with no overt changes in behaviour or stigmata of traumatic brain injury, such as alteration of consciousness, intracranial haemorrhage or skull fracture. We detected longitudinal, sex-dependent diffusion tensor imaging changes (fractional anisotropy and axial diffusivity decline) in corpus callosum and external capsule of repetitive subconcussive head impact animals, which diverged from both sham and control. Compared to sham animals, repetitive subconcussive head impact animals exhibited acute but transient mild motor deficits. Repetitive subconcussive head impact animals also exhibited chronic anxiety and spatial memory impairment that differed from the control animals, but these effects were not different from those seen in the sham condition. We observed trends in the data for thinning of the corpus callosum as well as regions with elevated Iba-1 in the corpus callosum and cerebral white matter among repetitive subconcussive head impact animals. While replication with larger study samples is needed, our findings suggest that subconcussive head impacts cause microstructural tissue changes in the developing rat brain, which are detectable with diffusion tensor imaging, with suggestion of correlates in tissue pathology and behaviour. The results point to potential mechanisms underpinning consequences of subconcussive head impacts that have been described in humans. The congruence of our imaging findings with human subconcussive head impacts suggests that neuroimaging could serve as a translational bridge to advance study of injury mechanisms and development of interventions.
Separated Twins or Just Siblings? A Multiplanet System around an M Dwarf Including a Cool Sub-Neptune

We report the discovery of two TESS sub-Neptunes orbiting the early M dwarf TOI-904 (TIC 261257684). Both exoplanets, TOI-904 b and c, were initially observed in TESS Sector 12 with twin sizes of 2.426−0.157+0.163 and 2.167−0.118+0.130 R ⊕, respectively. Through observations in five additional sectors in the TESS primary mission and the first and second extended missions, the orbital periods of the planets were measured to be 10.887 ± 0.001 and 83.999 ± 0.001 days, respectively. Reconnaissance radial velocity measurements (taken with EULER/CORALIE and SMARTS/CHIRON) and high-resolution speckle imaging with adaptive optics (obtained from SOAR/HRCAM and Gemini South/ZORRO) show no evidence of an eclipsing binary or a nearby companion, which, together with the low false-positive probabilities calculated with the statistical validation software TRICERATOPS, establishes the planetary nature of these candidates. The outer planet, TOI-904 c, is the longest-period M dwarf exoplanet found by TESS, with an estimated equilibrium temperature of 217 K. As the three other validated planets with comparable host stars and orbital periods were observed by Kepler around much dimmer stars (J mag > 12), TOI-904 c, orbiting a brighter star (J mag = 9.6), is the coldest M dwarf planet easily accessible for atmospheric follow-up. Future mass measurements and transmission spectroscopy of the similar-sized planets in this system could determine whether they are also similar in density and composition, suggesting a common formation pathway, or whether they have distinct origins.
Enabling Efficient, Reliable Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Approximate Physics-Based Models

We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation. However, these approaches often remain too data inefficient or unreliable to train on real robotic hardware. In this paper we introduce a novel policy gradient-based policy optimization framework which systematically leverages a (possibly highly simplified) first-principles model and enables learning precise control policies with limited amounts of real-world data. Our approach $1)$ uses the derivatives of the model to produce sample-efficient estimates of the policy gradient and $2)$ uses the model to design a low-level tracking controller, which is embedded in the policy class. Theoretical analysis provides insight into how the presence of this feedback controller overcomes key limitations of stand-alone policy gradient methods, while hardware experiments with a small car and quadruped demonstrate that our approach can learn precise control strategies reliably and with only minutes of real-world data.
Efficient Estimation of Average Treatment Effects Using the Estimated Propensity Score

We are interested in estimating the average effect of a binary treatment on a scalar outcome. If assignment to the treatment is independent of the potential outcomes given pre-treatment variables, biases associated with simple treatment-control average comparisons can be removed by adjusting for differences in the pre-treatment variables. Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983, 1984) show that adjusting solely for differences between treated and control units in a scalar function of the pre-treatment variables, the propensity score, also removes the entire bias associated with differences in pre-treatment variables. Thus it is possible to obtain unbiased estimates of the treatment effect without conditioning on a possibly high-dimensional vector of pre-treatment variables. Although adjusting for the propensity score removes all the bias, this can come at the expense of efficiency. We show that weighting with the inverse of a nonparametric estimate of the propensity score, rather than the true propensity score, leads to an efficient estimate of the population average treatment effect. This result holds whether the pre-treatment variables have discrete or continuous distributions. We provide intuition for this result in a number of ways. First we show that with discrete covariates exact adjustment for the estimated propensity score is identical to adjustment for the pre-treatment variables. Second, we show that weighting by the inverse of the estimated propensity score can be interpreted as an empirical likelihood estimator that efficiently incorporates the information about the propensity score. Finally we connect our results to other results on efficient estimation through weighting.
Fully Composable and Adequate Verified Compilation with Direct Refinements between Open Modules

Verified compilation of open modules (i.e., modules whose functionality depends on other modules) provides a foundation for end-to-end verification of modular programs ubiquitous in contemporary software. However, despite intensive investigation in this topic for decades,the proposed approaches are still difficult to use in practice as they rely on assumptions about the internal working of compilers which make it difficult for external users to apply the verification results. We propose an approach to verified compositional compilation without such assumptions in the setting of verifying compilation of heterogeneous modules written in first-order languages supporting global memory and pointers. Our approach is based on the memory model of CompCert and a new discovery that a Kripke relation with a notion of memory protection can serve as a uniform and composable semantic interface for the compiler passes. By absorbing the rely-guarantee conditions on memory evolution for all compiler passes into this Kripke Memory Relation and by piggybacking requirements on compiler optimizations onto it, we get compositional correctness theorems for realistic optimizing compilers as refinements that directly relate native semantics of open modules and that are ignorant of intermediate compilation processes. Such direct refinements support all the compositionality and adequacy properties essential for verified compilation of open modules. We have applied this approach to the full compilation chain of CompCert with its Clight source language and demonstrated that our compiler correctness theorem is open to composition and intuitive to use with reduced verification complexity through end-to-end verification of non-trivial heterogeneous modules that may freely invoke each other (e.g.,mutually recursively).
Controlling an Invasive Species through Consumption: Private and Public Values of Eating Lionfish

The rapidly growing population of lionfish – an invasive species in the United States and Caribbean waters – is stressing the already fragile coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico and is threatening local commercial and recreational fisheries. One potential strategy of controlling population growth is through consumption, which has direct private benefits but also contributes to the broader public good of invasive species management. The viability of this strategy depends in part on the values consumers place on eating lionfish. As an established market for lionfish does not yet exist, we estimate consumers’ valuation for eating lionfish using framed-field experiments. Our design allows us to separate consumers’ direct private value with their indirect public value of helping to control population growth. Without information about the invasive nature of lionfish and the need for population control, consumers, on average, are willing to pay $6.28 for a three-ounce prepared fillet. The average bid increases by $0.71 when consumers learn about the harmful impacts lionfish have on the environment and that consuming them can help curb population growth. Finally, the average bid increases by $1.66 when consumers also learn about the possibility of localized extinction of valuable commercial species if the lionfish population is left unchecked. Key Words:
Classifying three-character RCFTs with Wronskian index equalling 3 or 4

In the Mathur-Mukhi-Sen (MMS) classification scheme for rational conformal field theories (RCFTs), a RCFT is identified by a pair of non-negative integers $\mathbf{[n, \ell]}$, with $\mathbf{n}$ being the number of characters and $\mathbf{\ell}$ the Wronskian index. The modular linear differential equation (MLDE) that the characters of a RCFT solve are labelled similarly. All RCFTs with a given $\mathbf{[n, \ell]}$ solve the modular linear differential equation (MLDE) labelled by the same $\mathbf{[n, \ell]}$. With the goal of classifying $\mathbf{[3,3]}$ and $\mathbf{[3,4]}$ CFTs, we set-up and solve those MLDEs, each of which is a three-parameter non-rigid MLDE, for character-like solutions. In the former case, we obtain four infinite families and a discrete set of $15$ solutions, all in the range $0<c \leq 32$. Amongst these $\mathbf{[3,3]}$ character-like solutions, we find pairs of them that form coset-bilinear relations with meromorphic CFTs/characters of central charges $16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64$. There are six families of coset-bilinear relations where both the RCFTs of the pair are drawn from the infinite families of solutions. There are an additional $23$ coset-bilinear relations between character-like solutions of the discrete set. The coset-bilinear relations should help in identifying the $\mathbf{[3,3]}$ CFTs. In the $\mathbf{[3,4]}$ case, we obtain nine character-like solutions each of which is a $\mathbf{[2,2]}$ character-like solution adjoined with a constant character.
Nematic phases and elastoresistivity from a multiorbital strange metal

We propose and study a two-orbital lattice extension of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model in the large- N limit. The phase diagram of this model features a high temperature isotropic strange metal which undergoes a ﬁrst-order thermal transition into a nematic insulator or a continuous thermal transition into nematic metal phase, separated by a tunable tricritical point. These phases arise from spontaneous partial orbital polarization of the multiorbital non-Fermi liquid. We explore the spectral and transport properties of this model, including the d.c. elastoresistivity, which exhibits a peak near the nematic transition, as well as the nonzero frequency elastoconductivity. Our work oﬀers a useful perspective on nematic phases and transport in correlated multiorbital systems.
Revenue Maximization for Buyers with Costly Participation

We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This substantially changes the revenue maximization problem, which becomes non-convex in the presence of participation costs. For multiple buyers, we show how to construct a $(2+\epsilon)$-approximately revenue-optimal mechanism in polynomial time. Our approach makes use of a many-buyers-to-single-buyer reduction, and in the single-buyer case our mechanism improves to an FPTAS. We also bound the menu size and the sample complexity for the optimal single-buyer mechanism. Moreover, we show that posting a single price in the single-buyer case is in fact optimal under the assumption that either (1) the participation cost is independent of the value, and the value distribution has decreasing marginal revenue or monotone hazard rate; or (2) the participation cost is a concave function of the value. When there are multiple buyers, we show that sequential posted pricing guarantees a large fraction of the optimal revenue under similar conditions.
Investigating the Role of Attribute Context in Vision-Language Models for Object Recognition and Detection

Vision-language alignment learned from image-caption pairs has been shown to benefit tasks like object recognition and detection. Methods are mostly evaluated in terms of how well object class names are learned, but captions also contain rich attribute context that should be considered when learning object alignment. It is unclear how methods use this context in learning, as well as whether models succeed when tasks require attribute and object understanding. To address this gap, we conduct extensive analysis of the role of attributes in vision-language models. We specifically measure model sensitivity to the presence and meaning of attribute context, gauging influence on object embeddings through unsupervised phrase grounding and classification via description methods. We further evaluate the utility of attribute context in training for open-vocabulary object detection, fine-grained text-region retrieval, and attribution tasks. Our results show that attribute context can be wasted when learning alignment for detection, attribute meaning is not adequately considered in embeddings, and describing classes by only their attributes is ineffective. A viable strategy that we find to increase benefits from attributes is contrastive training with adjective-based negative captions.
Cap2Aug: Caption guided Image to Image data Augmentation

Visual recognition in a low-data regime is challenging and often prone to overfitting. To mitigate this issue, several data augmentation strategies have been proposed. However, standard transformations, e.g., rotation, cropping, and flipping provide limited semantic variations. To this end, we propose Cap2Aug, an image-to-image diffusion model-based data augmentation strategy using image captions as text prompts. We generate captions from the limited training images and using these captions edit the training images using an image-to-image stable diffusion model to generate semantically meaningful augmentations. This strategy generates augmented versions of images similar to the training images yet provides semantic diversity across the samples. We show that the variations within the class can be captured by the captions and then translated to generate diverse samples using the image-to-image diffusion model guided by the captions. However, naive learning on synthetic images is not adequate due to the domain gap between real and synthetic images. Thus, we employ a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) loss to align the synthetic images to the real images for minimizing the domain gap. We evaluate our method on few-shot and long-tail classification tasks and obtain performance improvements over state-of-the-art, especially in the low-data regimes.
Potential effects of altered hydrology on floodplain forests of the Savannah River

OF THE SAVANNAH RIVER by LINDA S. LEE (Under the Direction of Rebecca R. Sharitz) ABSTRACT Two studies investigated floodplain forest vegetation composition with respect to hydrology. The first study compared floodplain vegetation on the Savannah River below Thurmond Dam with vegetation on the minimally regulated Altamaha River. Some vegetation differences were present between rivers, but did not appear to have been caused by dam construction. The second study analyzed longitudinal patterns in floodplain forests. The proportion of wetland to upland vegetation generally increased downstream in the Savannah and Altamaha watersheds. A literature review revealed similar patterns in other watersheds, but found no relationship between vegetation and streamflow across studies.
Hecke Algebra-valued Poincar\'e Series and Geometric Factorization of Affine Weyl Groups

This paper explores affine Weyl groups and their associated Hecke algebras, concentrating on the Poincar\'e series with coefficients in Hecke algebra. We investigate its relationship with zeta functions on complexes and extend existing research on geodesic tubes to encompass higher dimensions. Our main findings confirm a conjecture that elucidates the connection between the Poincar\'e series and geodesic tubes. Additionally, we provide partial evidence for another conjecture related to the zeta identity for simply connected groups. These contributions deepen our understanding of the interactions among algebraic groups, Hecke algebras, and the geometry of related complexes.