Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Mandelbrot Set, Theme and Variations: Local connectivity of Julia sets: expository lectures

The following notes provide an introduction to recent work of Branner, Hubbard and Yoccoz on the geometry of polynomial Julia sets. They are an expanded version of lectures given in Stony Brook in Spring 1992. I am indebted to help from the audience. Section 1 describes unpublished work by J.-C. Yoccoz on local connectivity of quadratic Julia sets. It presents only the "easy" part of his work, in the sense that it considers only non-renormalizable polynomials, and makes no effort to describe the much more difficult arguments which are needed to deal with local connectivity in parameter space. It is based on second hand sources, namely Hubbard together with lectures by Branner and Douady. Hence the presentation is surely quite different from that of Yoccoz. Section 2 describes the analogous arguments used by Branner and Hubbard to study higher degree polynomials for which all but one of the critical orbits escape to infinity. In this case, the associated Julia set J is never locally connected. The basic problem is rather to decide when J is totally disconnected. This Branner-Hubbard work came before Yoccoz, and its technical details are not as difficult. However, in these notes their work is presented simply as another application of the same geometric ideas. Chapter 3 complements the Yoccoz results by describing a family of examples, due to Douady and Hubbard (unpublished), showing that an infinitely renormalizable quadratic polynomial may have non-locally-connected Julia set. An Appendix describes needed tools from complex analysis, including the Gr\"otzsch inequality.
Characterization of four new monoclonal antibodies against the distal N-terminal region of 1 PrP c 2

19 Prion diseases are a group of fatal neurodegenerative disorders that affect humans and animals. 20 They are characterized by the accumulation in the central nervous system of a pathological form of 21 the host-encoded prion protein (PrP C ). The prion protein is a membrane glycoprotein that consists 22 of two domains: a globular, structured C-terminus and an unstructured N-terminus. The N-terminal 23 part of the protein is involved in different functions in both health and disease. 24 In the present work we discuss the production and biochemical characterization of a panel of four 25 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) against the distal N-terminus of PrP C using a well-established 26 methodology based on the immunization of Prnp 0/0 mice. Additionally, we show their ability to 27 block prion (PrP Sc ) replication at nanomolar concentrations in a cell culture model of prion 28 infection. 29 These mAbs represent a promising tool for prion diagnostics Aliquots were centrifuged use (5 5000 x g). Samples were loaded on 12% polyacrylamide gels and SDS-PAGE was performed. Proteins were blotted on 0.2  m nitrocellulose membranes (Bio- Rad) at 200 mA for 90 min. Membranes were then blocked with 5% (w/v) non-fat milk in Tris- buffered saline/0.05% Tween-20 (TBS-T) at 4 °C overnight, washed in TBS-T and incubated with the four monoclonal antibodies (5  g/mL in 1% non-fat milk/TBS-T) for 60 min by shaking at room Membranes were washed again and incubated for 60 min with secondary, goat anti-mouse antibodies, conjugated with HRP (Jackson Immunoresearch), in 1% non-fat milk/TBS- T, at temperature (RT). Chemiluminescence was detected by ECL kit (Amersham). Films were exposed for 10 min.
A method for actuator comparison for a stable humanoid robot

A humanoid robot is being developed, intended to operate robustly in a typical day-to-day human environment. Its ability to react quickly to stochastic disturbances, especially its ability to avoid falling, termed stability in this context, is of prime importance. The choosing of a suitable actuator that affords such stability is seen as a challenge in the current stage of the humanoid project. A novel method for comparing various actuators in terms of humanoid stability is investigated, to aid with this choice. A common method for comparing actuators is the use of low-level actuator parameters, e.g. power density. With a low-level parameter, a specific actuator property can be compared between multiple actuators. To incorporate relevant properties of all actuators, a large set of actuator parameters is required. This becomes even more challenging when comparing a heterogeneous collection of actuators, e.g. muscle and hydraulics. Besides subjectiveness in parameter definitions and comparisons, the multidimensional set of actuator parameters needs to be related to a one-dimensional measure of humanoid stability. As low-level parameters and high-level humanoid stability are not directly relatable, subjective weighting factors are traditionally employed to reduce dimensionality. Step time is introduced as a one-dimensional criterion for comparing different actuators. The ability to make fast movements is a critical component in defining humanoid stability. Therefore, by comparing step times of different actuators in a fixed test case, a measure of humanoid stability is obtained. The step movement represents a simplified motion of the lifting of a foot, in which essential elements of humanoid motion are incorporated. A framework is developed, with which step times of Human Muscle (HM), ElectroMechanical Actuators (EMAs) and Hydraulic Actuators (HAs) are computed. While EMAs are often thought to have limited potential for humanoid applications, step times are similar to those of muscle. Supplemented with recent examples of successful EMA implementations, step time demonstrates the potential of EMAs. Furthermore, HA capability is also demonstrated, as step times can obtain lower values than those of HM and EMA. Step time as developed in this thesis appears to be a powerful tool for comparing vastly different actuators. It provides a one-dimensional measure related to humanoid stability, evaluated directly for each specific actuator.
CLEPS: A new protocol for cloud aqueous phase oxidation of VOC mechanisms

Organic compounds of both anthropogenic and natural origin are ubiquitous in the multiphasic atmospheric 20 medium. Their transformation in the atmosphere affects air quality and the global climate. Modelling provides a useful tool to investigate the chemistry of organic compounds in the tropospheric multiphase system. While several comprehensive explicit mechanisms exist in the gas phase, explicit mechanisms are much more limited in the aqueous phase. Recently, new empirical methods have been developed to estimate HO reaction rates in the aqueous phase: structure-activity relationships (SARs) provide global rate constants and branching ratios for HO abstraction from and addition to atmospheric 25 organic compounds. Based on these SARs, a new detailed aqueous-phase mechanism, named the cloud explicit physicochemical scheme (CLEPS), to describe the oxidation of hydrosoluble organic compounds resulting from isoprene oxidation is proposed. In this paper, a protocol based on reviewed experimental data and evaluated prediction methods is described in detail. The current version of the mechanism includes approximately 850 aqueous reactions and 465 equilibria. Inorganic reactivity is described for 67 chemical species (e.g., transition metal ions, HxOy, sulphur species, nitrogen species, and 30 chlorine). For organic compounds, 87 chemical species are considered in the mechanism, corresponding to 657 chemical forms that are individually followed (e.g., hydrated forms, anionic forms). This new aqueous-phase mechanism is coupled with the detailed gas phase mechanism MCM v3.3. 1 through mass transfer parameterization for the exchange between the gas phase and aqueous phase. The GROMHE SAR enables the evaluation of the Henry's law constants for undocumented organic compounds. The resulting multiphase mechanism is implemented in a model based on the Dynamically Simple 35 Model for Atmospheric Chemical Complexity (DSMACC) using the Kinetic PreProcessor (KPP). This model allows simulation of the time evolution of the concentrations of each individual chemical species in addition to detailed timeresolved flux analyses. The variable photolysis in both phases is calculated using the TUV 4.5 radiative transfer model. To evaluate our chemical mechanism, an idealized cloud event with fixed microphysical cloud parameters is simulated. The simulation is performed for a low-NOx situation. The results indicate the formation of oxidized monoand diacids in the 40 aqueous phase, as well as a significant influence on the gas phase chemistry and composition. For this particular simulation, the aqueous phase mechanism is responsible for the efficient fragmentation and functionalization of organic compounds. This new cloud chemistry model allows for the analysis of individual aqueous sub systems and can be used to analyze the results from cloud chamber experiments and field campaigns. Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss. , doi:10.5194/gmd-2016-250, 2016 Manuscript under review for journal Geosci. Model Dev. Published: 17 October 2016 c © Author(s) 2016. CC-BY 3.0 License.
Thom polynomials and Schur funcions: the singularities $A_3(-)$

Combining the "method of restriction equations" of Rim\'anyi et al. with the techniques of symmetric functions, we establish the Schur function expansions of the Thom polynomials for the Morin singularities $A_3: ({\bf C}^{\bullet},0)\to ({\bf C}^{\bullet + k},0)$ for any nonnegative integer $k$.
Child safety and children in the education system : Prioritizing the need for statewide anti-bullying policies

This study was conducted to explore the responses of 380 students enrolled at Michigan State University who had experienced bullying in high school as victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. Findings included significant predictors of bullying behavior. For example, male students were more likely to bully than their female counterparts; and bystanders who witnessed bullying incidents were more likely to become both victims and/or perpetrators of bullying. The MSU students offered recommendations for policymakers to create anti-bullying legislation with enforcement guidelines and other methods of improving school culture to reduce future bullying incidents. Introduction/Background Across the State of Michigan, considerable academic, social and political attention has turned to the development of policies that promote human rights. Prevention of bullying and being harassed in school is one of the most important rights for children. The experience of being bullied has important psychosocial, behavioral, and health consequences with an immediate impact on school achievement and social development. There is also a potential for long-term negative effects that persist into adulthood (Fitzpatrick, Dulin & Piko, 2007). Bullying creates a climate of fear and disrespect for youth who are bullied. They are more likely to be depressed, lonely, anxious, experience low selfesteem, feel ill, and have suicidal ideations or, in some cases, commit suicide (HRSA, 2005). Previous researchers have reported that victimization does the most damage to those who felt isolated during high school (Newman, Holden, & Delville, 2004). The perpetrators of bullying behaviors are more likely than others to get into frequent fights, vandalize or steal property, drink alcohol, smoke, be truant from school, drop out of school, and carry a weapon (HRSA, 2005). Other characteristics of bullies include impulsiveness, lack of empathy, lack of conformity to rules, and positive attitudes toward violence (HRSA, 2005). The bystanders, both directly and indirectly involved, may suffer from emotional turmoil related to the bullying incidents they observed or heard about from their peers (Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA, 2008; NASW, 2003) In Michigan, during the past four consecutive legislative cycles, bullying legislation has been introduced and received limited action in various committees, with all efforts ending in dead bills. In 2003, The Michigan Child Death Review Team investigated the deaths of three adolescents who were residents in the State of Michigan and had committed suicide as a direct result of significant struggles with bullying at their schools (MDHS, 2005). It is most unfortunate that the deaths of these young people were unable to have an impact and to prompt meaningful legislative action. Regrettably, bullying has not gained support for legislative action as has other “. I was bullied a lot, and often cried and hated going to school. ” Undergraduate Student, Michigan State University [a reflection on her experience in high school]
Strategic Personality and the Effectiveness of Nuclear Deterrence

Abstract : Changes in the international system since the end of the Cold War has necessitated the reevaluation of the theoretical assumptions that have underlay nuclear deterrence strategies for the past half-century. In light of the emergence of new nuclear-armed states and the breakdown of the bipolar balance-of-power, the old one-size-fits-all deterrence approaches may not reflect the realities of the new security environment. This study suggests how Strategic Personality Typing can provide useful insights into how to approach the problem of forging more effective and supple deterrence strategies in the future. It includes a series of historical case studies to illustrate the kinds of insights the Strategic Personality methodology can provide.
Stories of the Twentieth Century for the Twenty-first †

I n September 1976, Britain's Labour government announced that it would seek a rescue loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Italy, Portugal, and Spain also had stand-by arrangements with the IMF around that time, and even the United States, facing a weakening dollar, drew down its reserves at the IMF and exchanged Special Drawing Rights for foreign currencies. 1 But after Portugal's subsequent approach to the IMF in 1983, a quarter century would pass before another high-income country sought the institution's support—a period during which the Fund lent exclusively to crisis-stricken countries in the developing world. Iceland's application to the Fund in the autumn of 2008 was, however, soon followed by sovereign debt crises in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal virulent enough to force them, too, to seek ofcial external support. At the time of writing (July 2011), the governments of other high-income countries such as Spain and Italy face credible threats of losing access to credit. Of course, these startling recent developments arose in part as collateral damage from the much broader global nancial crisis that began in 2007 in the nancial markets of the United States. The nancial and economic collapse in advanced countries caught most academic , business, and policy economists off guard. and data. We beneted also from the comments of the editors and three anonymous referees. A key precursor of twentieth-century nancial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-rst century's rst global crisis. A discrete-choice panel analysis using 1973–2010 data suggests that domestic credit expansion and real currency appreciation have been the most robust and signicant pre-dictors of nancial crises, regardless of whether a country is emerging or advanced. For emerging economies, however, higher foreign exchange reserves predict a sharply reduced probability of a subsequent crisis.
Description of some Iguanodon-remains indicating a new Species, I. Seelyi

Although a very large number of Iguanodon-remains are now to be found in the public and private collections in this country, they consist, for the most part, of dissociated bones. Discoveries of several bones of this Dinosaur under such circumstances as warrant the belief that they formed part of one skeleton have been extremely rare, on which account our knowledge of the proportions of the several parts of the skeleton has remained very incomplete. The announcement of the discovery of a very large series of Iguanodon fossils at Bernissart in 1878 raised the expectation that before long a complete osteology of Iguanodon would issue under the auspices of the Belgian government. An examination of some of these remarkable fossils, which the obliging director of the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle at Brussels allowed me to make in Aug. 1879, showed me that their importance had not been exaggerated, and it led me to defer the completion of this communication, which I had begun some time before. Having, however, recently been told by M. Boulenger, to whom their description is intrusted, that no exhaustive memoir on them is to be expected for several years, I no longer hesitate to present to the Society an account of some fossils obtained by myself in the Isle of Wight in 1870, which afford, in particular, very considerable information respecting the form and proportions of the several members of the hind limb.
Distribution and occupancy of introduced species: a baseline inventory from Phase 3 plots across the country

Invasive plant species have significant negative impacts in many ecosystems and are found in many forests around the world. Although not all introduced species become invasive, there are numerous examples of species escaping cultivation and invading natural ecosystems years or even decades after their initial introduction. Regional distributions of invasive species are influenced by climatic and physical conditions; within the landscape, fragmentation, disturbance, and surrounding land use are important factors. Inventory data can help describe the distribution (reported as constancy) and occupancy, (reported as relative richness and cover of introduced species) in forested ecosystems. Vegetation data from 1690 Phase 3 forest inventory plots collected by the U.S. Forest Service's Northern and Pacific Northwest Research Stations' FIA units are used to examine and compare the distribution and occupancy of introduced species. Introduced species were common in forests; 388 species were recorded and 61 percent of all plots had at least one introduced species. Where introduced species occurred, their mean relative richness was 10.7 percent and mean relative cover was 8 percent. However, this varied across regions, level of fragmentation, and distance from roads. Regions with high proportions of forest edge plots had higher overall constancy and occupancy of introduced species. The most commonly recorded introduced species in our analysis was multiflora rose, however, common species varied by ecological region. The most commonly recorded species are highlighted by region, with examples of how these results can inform managers who have limited budgets for invasive plant control.
A hybrid multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) procedure for developing strategies to enhance students’ satisfaction of university hostels

This paper offers a new, hybrid multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) procedure which can be employed to quantitatively develop the optimal strategies for inflating students’ satisfaction of university hostels.The procedure uses: the systematic random stratified sampling approach for data collection purpose as students dwelling in hostels are ‘naturally’ grouped by block and gender, factor analysis to extract a large set of hostel attributes into independent factors, the Sugeno measure for characterizing the type of interaction shared by the hostel attributes within each extracted factor, the Delphi method for obtaining a well-agreed importance ranking on the extracted factors and finally, a non-linear fuzzy prioritization (NLFP) method for determining the weights of the independent hostel factors.The feasibility of the proposed procedure is illustrated by conducting a real evaluation involving Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) hostels. The proposed procedure has the ability to identify the actual factors influencing students’ satisfaction along with the weights of the factors and the type of interaction shared by the attributes within each of these factors and thus enable the management of a university to make better-informed decisions pertaining to the strategies.
Experimental Assessment of Connectionist Regular Inference from Positive and Negative Examples

In this paper, the ability of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for regular inference (RI) from positive and negative examples is investigated. As in some previous works 1, 2], RNNs were trained to learn the string classiication task from samples of some target regular languages. In addition, an automaton extraction method 3] was applied to each one of the trained nets to obtain a description of the inference outcome. For comparison purposes, a symbolic RI method, the RPNI algorithm 4], was also run on the same data. Although the automaton extraction step improved the generalization performance of the nets, the inference quality using RNNs was not so good as the one shown by the RPNI algorithm.
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years

BACKGROUND The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30 years. We performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic. METHODS We evaluated a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. The body-mass index was available for all subjects. We used longitudinal statistical models to examine whether weight gain in one person was associated with weight gain in his or her friends, siblings, spouse, and neighbors. RESULTS Discernible clusters of obese persons (body-mass index [the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters], > or =30) were present in the network at all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective formation of social ties among obese persons. A person's chances of becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6 to 123) if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI, 21 to 60). If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37% (95% CI, 7 to 73). These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the same sex had relatively greater influence on each other than those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account for the spread of obesity in the network. CONCLUSIONS Network phenomena appear to be relevant to the biologic and behavioral trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties. These findings have implications for clinical and public health interventions.