Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reducing the number of fish in regulatory bioconcentration testing: Identifying and overcoming the barriers to using the 1‐concentration approach

Intent. The intent of Learned Discourses is to provide a forum for open discussion. These articles reflect the professional opinions of the authors regarding scientific issues. They do not represent SETAC positions or policies. And, although they are subject to editorial review for clarity, consistency, and brevity, these articles are not peer reviewed. The Learned Discourses date from 1996 in the North America SETAC News and, when that publication was replaced by the SETAC Globe, continued there through 2005. The continued success of Learned Discourses depends on our contributors. We encourage timely submissions that will inform and stimulate discussion. We expect that many of the articles will address controversial topics, andpromise togivedissentingopinions a chance to be heard. Rules.All submissionsmustbesuccinct: no longer than1000 words, no more than 6 references, and at most 1 table or figure. Reference format must follow the journal requirement found on the Internet at http://www.setacjournals. org. Topics must fall within IEAM’s sphere of interest. Submissions.Allmanuscripts shouldbesentviaemailasWord attachments toPeterMChapman (peter@chapmanenviro.com).
FPM Post Processing: Real-Time Ray Tracing of Point Set Surfaces in OptiX

This thesis is an initial attempt to create an interactive visualization technique tailored to the Finite Pointset Method, a grid-free particle simulation method developed at Fraunhofer ITWM in Kaiserslautern. Typical applications are problems in the context of ﬂow and continuum mechanics, such as sloshing ﬂuids, refueling of tanks or the unfolding of airbags. In this thesis, a novel approach is presented by implementing a classic rendering technique on a state of the art programming architecture: Surfaces are approximated by moving least squares interpolation polynomials and rendered by means of ray tracing, as initially proposed by Adamson & Alexa. OptiX, a ray tracing acceleration engine designed by NVIDIA, is employed in order to harness the highly parallel computing capabilities of modern CUDA-enabled graphics devices. First, a context is established by summarizing and discussing the suitability of several approaches in point based graphics, i.e. triangulation, splatting-, and smooth interpolation-based techniques. The chosen iterative surface intersection algorithm is presented afterwards. Based on the construction of local polynomial approximations at several locations along each ray, convergence to the actual surface intersection is achieved. In each iteration, a local support plane is determined, serving as coordinate system for a moving least squares interpolation of the surrounding points, which are weighted using a Gaussian bell curve combined with a global smoothing parameter. The resulting quadratic or cubic polynomials are intersected by analytical or numerical means, respectively. Subsequently, a brief overview of the programmable ray tracing pipeline introduced by OptiX is provided, followed by technical details on the application structure, data management, and actual implementation. An extensive evaluation discussing various beneﬁts and shortcomings of the presented approach concludes this thesis.
A ﬁrst genetic assessment of the newly introduced Isle Royale gray wolves

The gray wolf ( Canis lupus ) population of Isle Royale National Park suffered an extreme population decline where by 2017 only two wolves that were both half-siblings and a father-daughter pair remained with low probability of producing viable young. This precipitous decline was in part due to the negative fitness consequences associated with inbreeding. To restore the Isle Royale ecosystem 19 gray wolves were translocated in 2018 and 2019. The founders were translocated from Grand Portage, MN (n = 4), western Upper Peninsula, MI (n = 4), Jostle Lake, ON (n = 3), and Michipicoten Island, ON (n = 8), and genotyped using 18 microsatellite loci. Allelic richness and heterozygosity of translocated Isle Royale founders was similar to reference populations. Population structure assigned the Isle Royale founders to gray wolves with little evidence of admixture from eastern wolves ( Canis lycaon cf ). In addition, we confirmed wolves translocated from Michipicoten Island were a single family-group. Through simulation and empirical analysis of the new Isle Royale founders we projected a loss in genetic variation over the next 50 years and an increase in inbreeding. However, varying levels of immigration may allow the retention of some genetic variation. Our findings indicate Isle Royale founders are genetically diverse and representative of the Great Lakes region, but the numerical dominance of a single family group may have negative implications for retaining genetic diversity and success of establishment for specific wolves, reinforcing the importance of continued monitoring of genetic fitness
Resident Evil: Understanding Residential IP Proxy as a Dark Service

An emerging Internet business is residential proxy (RESIP) as a service, in which a provider utilizes the hosts within residential networks (in contrast to those running in a datacenter) to relay their customers’ traffic, in an attempt to avoid server- side blocking and detection. With the prominent roles the services could play in the underground business world, little has been done to understand whether they are indeed involved in Cybercrimes and how they operate, due to the challenges in identifying their RESIPs, not to mention any in-depth analysis on them. In this paper, we report the first study on RESIPs, which sheds light on the behaviors and the ecosystem of these elusive gray services. Our research employed an infiltration framework, including our clients for RESIP services and the servers they visited, to detect 6 million RESIP IPs across 230+ countries and 52K+ ISPs. The observed addresses were analyzed and the hosts behind them were further fingerprinted using a new profiling system. Our effort led to several surprising findings about the RESIP services unknown before. Surprisingly, despite the providers’ claim that the proxy hosts are willingly joined, many proxies run on likely compromised hosts including IoT devices. Through cross-matching the hosts we discovered and labeled PUP (potentially unwanted programs) logs provided by a leading IT company, we uncovered various illicit operations RESIP hosts performed, including illegal promotion, Fast fluxing, phishing, malware hosting, and others. We also reverse engi- neered RESIP services’ internal infrastructures, uncovered their potential rebranding and reselling behaviors. Our research takes the first step toward understanding this new Internet service, contributing to the effective control of their security risks.
ON INFORMATICS

— The development of information technology occurs rapidly in almost all areas of life. All companies must immediately carry out a business transformation following the development of information technology to survive amid increasingly fierce competition. One of the keys to this business transformation's success is an enterprise architecture that is used as a reference in planning, developing, operating, and monitoring company information technology. Implementation of service management practices in state-owned enterprises needs to be translated into IT Services Management Architecture Design, that match the IT Governance Principles as mandated in PER-03/MBU/02/2018. This research focuses on preparing an enterprise architecture design in IT service management by referring to ITIL 4 best practices. The resulting solution is a target architecture design in the business domain, data, and applications arranged according to the TOGAF framework. It was carried out in four stages: scope identification, which defines practices; preliminary phase, which resulted in 11 architecture principles; architecture vision that produces a value chain for IT service provider organizations; a business architecture which resulted in a business service/function catalog consisting of 13 business functions and 43 business services; and an information system architecture that produces a conceptual data model on the three main priority processes of IT service management and an application use-case diagram that describes the relationship between the four actors (users, service managers, service desks, and support groups) with their roles in applications. The enterprise architecture has been designed following the scope of IT service management practices commonly used as a reference for all large and medium-sized companies.
Selﬁsh Mining in Proof-of-Work Blockchain with Multiple Miners: An Empirical Evaluation ⋆

Proof-of-Work blockchain, despite its numerous beneﬁts, is still not an entirely secure technology due to the existence of Selﬁsh Mining (SM) strategies that can disrupt the system and its mining economy. While the eﬀect of SM has been studied mostly in a two-miners scenario, it has not been investigated in a more practical context where there are multiple malicious miners individually performing SM. To ﬁll this gap, we carry out an empirical study that separately accounts for diﬀerent numbers of SM miners (who always perform SM) and strategic miners (who choose either SM or Nakamoto’s mining protocol depending on which maximises their individual mining reward). Our result shows that SM is generally more eﬀective as the number of SM miners increases, however its eﬀectiveness does not vary in the presence of a large number of strategic miners. Under speciﬁc mining power distributions, we also demonstrate that multiple miners can perform SM and simultaneously gain higher mining rewards than they should. Surprisingly, we also show that the more strategic miners there are, the more robust the systems become. Since blockchain miners should naturally be seen as self-interested strategic miners, our ﬁndings encourage blockchain system developers and engineers to attract as many miners as possible to prevent SM and similar behaviour.
Relay Feedback: Analysis, Identification and Control

REFERENCES [1] S. Kay, Fundamentals of Statistical Signal Processing, Volume 1, Estimation Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. [2] S. Kay, Fundamentals of Statistical Signal Processing, Volume 2, Detection Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. [3] A. Leon-Garcia, Probability and Random Processes for Electrical Engineering, 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994. [4] A. Papoulis and U. Pillai, Probability, Random Variables and Stochastic processes, 4th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2002. [5] S. Kay, Modern Spectral Estimation: Theory and Practice. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.
Disasters implied by equity index options ∗

We use equity index options to quantify the probability and magnitude of disasters: extreme negative realizations of consumption growth and stock returns. We show that option prices imply smaller probabilities of these extreme outcomes than have been estimated from international macroeconomic data. A useful byproduct is a novel characterization of departures from lognormality in asset pricing models based on high-order cumulants: skewness, excess kurtosis, and so on. JEL Classification Codes: E44, G12.
Observations on the Design of Program Planning Notations for Students

Program planning is the process of splitting a problem description into subtasks that can be solved independently, then composed into a solution. While much has been written about planning since the 1980s, little research looks at modern contexts such as programs to process data tables. Tool support for this sort of planning is even rarer. As part of a project to develop such tools, we have run two studies to try to identify steps, representations, and interactions that would support novice university students in planning and programming multi-task programs that process data tables. This experience report describes our observations so far, while also raising questions about how to make planning useful for students.
Rapid Abstraction of Spacecraft 3D Structure from Single 2D Image

This paper presents a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to simultaneously abstract the 3D structure of the target space resident object and estimate its pose from a single 2D image. Specifically, the CNN predicts from a single image of the target a unit-size assembly of superquadric primitives which can individually describe a wide range of simple 3D shapes (e.g., cuboid, ellipsoid) using only a few parameters. The proposed training pipeline employs various types of supervision in both 2D and 3D spaces to fit an assembly of superquadrics to man-made satellite structures. In order to avoid numerical instability encountered when evaluating superquadrics, this work proposes a novel, numerically stable algorithm based on dual superquadrics to evaluate a point on the surface of and inside a superquadric for all shape parameters. Furthermore, in order to train the CNN, this work also introduces a novel dataset comprising 64 different satellite models and 1,000 images, binary masks and pose labels for each model. The experimental studies reveal that the proposed CNN can be trained to reconstruct accurate superquadric assemblies when tested on unseen images of known models and capture high-level structures of the unknown models most of the time despite having been trained on an extremely small dataset.
Diﬀerences among lower leg muscles in long-term activity during ambulatory condition without any moderate to high intensity exercise

The present study aimed to investigate diﬀerences among the soleus (Sol), medial gastrocnemius (MG) and tibialis anterior (TA) in electromyogram (EMG) activities during ambulatory condition without any moderate to high intensity exercise. From 10:00 to 17:00, seven healthy graduate students participated in EMG recordings, which included the measurements during maximal voluntary eﬀorts. During the long-term EMG recoding, the subjects were instructed to perform normal daily routines, including desk work and the attendance of lectures. EMG signals from the three muscles were averaged every 0.1 s and expressed as a percentage (%MVE) of those obtained with maximal voluntary eﬀorts, averaged over 1 s. An EMG burst which had an amplitude >2%MVE and a duration >0.1 s was deﬁned as muscular activity. Regardless of muscles examined, the amplitude of the greater part of all bursts observed over the recording time was less than 30%MVE. The summed duration of all bursts over the recording time was signiﬁcantly greater in Sol than in MG and TA, without a signiﬁcant diﬀerence in the summed number of all bursts among the three muscles. The percentage of the summed duration of bursts at less than 10%MVE to that over the recording time was signiﬁcantly higher in Sol and TA than in MG, but the corresponding value at 20 5 %MVE < 30 was lower. Thus, EMG responses during ambulatory condition without any moderate to high intensity exercise diﬀered among the three muscles, even between synergists: Sol was predominantly activated with low burst amplitudes as compared to MG.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENTOMOLOGY EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENTOMOLOGY

Invasive mosquitoes are vectors of important human and animal pathogens and a serious threat to public health. Aedes albopictus (Skuse) (Diptera: Culicidae) and Culex quinquefasciatus (Say) (Diptera: Culicidae) are good examples because of their wide occurrence, host range and vector competence. An understanding of the responsiveness of mosquitoes to olfactory stimuli is essential for implementing effective surveillance and developing repellents. The present study evaluated the behavioural responses of A. albopictus and C. quinquefasciatus to CO 2 and human skin odour in an olfactometer. In addition, CO 2 synergistic effect was assessed in association with human skin odour. Mosquitoes of different ages (3–5 and 10–15 day old) were included in the study in order to determine changes in responsiveness to attractants during an insects’ lifetime. The highest numbers of mosquitoes captured associated with CO 2 were ( A. albopictus , 48/77, 62.34%; C. quinquefasciatus , 117/126, 92.86%) and hand odour ( A. albopictus , 211/232, 90.95%; C. quinquefasciatus, 320/374, 85.56%) in the “CO 2 vs blank” and “hand vs blank” treatments. Skin odour was the most attractive for both species ( A. albopictus , 279/309, 90.29%; C. quinquefasciatus , 292/306, 95.42%) in “CO 2 vs hand” experiment. The highest mosquito responsiveness was recorded in the “CO 2 + hand vs hand” bioassay ( A. albopictus , 174/265, 65.66%; C. quinquefasciatus , 231/425, 54.35%). Similar trends were recorded for 10–15 and 3–5 day old mosquitoes of both species in all the experiments. In addition, a linear mixed model was used to evaluate the interactions between species, age and attractants. Human skin odour and CO 2 were effective attractants for both A. albopictus and C. quinquefasciatus (attractant-species interaction, p-value < 0.05) . CO 2 synergistic effect was recorded for both species (species-attractant interaction, p-value < 0.05) even when CO 2 was not directly combined with skin odour (p-value < 0.05). The interaction between attractant and age revealed (p-value < 0.05) that in both species, 10–15 day old mosquitoes were more responsive to CO 2 and human skin odour, than younger (3–5 days) adults. The species-age interaction (p-value < 0.05) showed that 3–5 and 10–15 day old C. quinquefasciatus were more receptive to CO 2 and skin odour, especially when used in combination, than A. albopictus.
Implementing a Low-Cost Sawyer-Tower Circuit to Measure Ferroelectric Properties at Various Frequencies

Design specifications of a low-cost Sawyer-Tower circuit with variable frequency are discussed. In addition, a comprehensive description of the fundamentals of how and why this circuit works is given, beginning with an introductory discussion on the basic physical principles concerning ferroelectricity. Methods for deriving important values from the polarization vs. electric field plot (P-E loop) are provided and results from testing a ferroelectric sample (PZT-5H) with a low-frequency Sawyer-Tower circuit setup are shown. The results that are obtained reflect the simplicity, feasibility, and accuracy of the Sawyer-Tower circuit.
A Stochastic Analysis and Price Mechanism of Car/Ride-Share System Considering Road Congestion

: In this paper, we discuss Car/Ride-Share (CRS), a novel concept of transportation service aiming to reduce the uneven distribution of cars in traditional carsharing services and the congestion of customers and vehicles on the road. We model a scenario where CRS service is introduced between a spot (e.g., university, company, etc.) and its nearest train station by a bus company considering the road congestion. We propose an approximation model that decomposes the whole complex system into two queueing models (i.e., CRS model and Road model). The accuracy of the approximation model is verified by extensive simulations. Based on numerical experiments, we discuss the mean total required time (i.e., the sum of the waiting time and the traveling time on the road) for the customers for several road congestion levels, in other words, we discuss the optimal management policy of CRS considering the road congestion. Interestingly, it is turned out that CRS is always effective from the perspective of the required time in the case where the road is not congested. However, the effectiveness of CRS differs depending on the arrival rate of the customers in the congested case; CRS is always ineffective for the low arrival rate, and the optimal occurrence rate of CRS exists for the high arrival rate. Furthermore, we consider a price mechanism problem that gives an attractive solution for all the bus company, car providers and customers.
Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling of Growth Curve Derivatives via Sequences of Quotient Differences

Summary . Growth curve studies are typically conducted to evaluate differences among group or treatment-speciﬁc curves. Most analysis focus solely on the growth curves, but it has been argued that the derivative of growth curves can highlight differences among groups that may be masked when considering the raw curves only. Motivated by the desire to estimate derivative curves hierarchically, we introduce a new sequence of quotient differences (empirical derivatives) which, among other things, are well behaved near the boundaries compared to other sequences in the literature. Using the sequence of quotient differences, we develop a Bayesian method to estimate curve derivatives in a multi-level setting (a common scenario in growth studies) and show how the method can be used to estimate individual and group derivative curves and make comparisons. We apply the new methodology to data collected from a study conducted to explore the impact that radiation-based therapies have on growth in female children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Review of "A global, spherical, finite-element model for postseismic deformation using ABAQUS" by Nield and co-authors.

We present a finite-element model of postseismic solid Earth deformation built in the software package ABAQUS (version 2018). The model is global and spherical, and includes self-gravitation and is built for the purpose of calculating 10 postseismic deformation in the far-field (>~300km) of major earthquakes. An earthquake is simulated by prescribing slip on a fault plane in the mesh and the model relaxes under the resulting change in stress. Both linear Maxwell and biviscous (Burgers) rheological models have been implemented and the model can be easily adapted to include different rheological models and lateral variations in Earth structure, a particular advantage over existing models. We benchmark the model against an analytical coseismic solution and an existing open-source postseismic model, demonstrating good agreement for all fault geometries 15 tested. Due to the inclusion of self-gravity the model has the potential for predicting deformation in response to multiple sources of stress change, for example, changing ice thickness in tectonically active regions.
Faradˇzev Read-type enumeration of non-isomorphic CC systems

Donald Knuth introduced abstract CC systems to represent conﬁgurations of points in a plane with a given orientation (clockwise or counterclockwise) of all triples of points. We present eﬃcient enumeration of all non-isomorphic CC systems with at most 12 points. Our algorithm is based on Faradˇzev-Read type enumeration, enhanced with the homomorphism principle and SAT solving, enabling us to enumerate more than 1 . 3 · 10 12 non-isomorphic CC systems with 12 points.
Wnt signaling pathWay and its significance for melanoma development

Melanoma is characterized by its high metastatic propensity. Melanoma metastasis is associated with an activation of signaling pathways that are responsible for embryogenesis. Wnt signaling pathway is considered as one of the key signaling cascades, whose aberrant activation results in melanoma development. Wnt signaling includes a complex network of intracellular interactions. Its ligands are able to initiate at least three signal transduction pathways: canonical and two noncanonical. According to modern views, canonical branch of Wnt signaling pathway is involved in cell proliferation and differentiation. Noncanonical Wnt signaling pathways, on the contrary, control cytoskeleton organization and cell motility. Currently, canonical and noncanonical Wnt signaling cascades are supposed to affect different stages of tumor progression. Canonical Wnt signaling pathway contributes to melanoma formation, while noncanonical branches of Wnt signal transduction are involved in metastasis.