Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-Level Hashed Grids for Ray Tracing

Grids have some of the lowest ray tracing acceleration structure build times. This is because acceleration structure construction is analogous to a sorting algorithm. The ideal behavior for a sorting algorithm is to have O(N) time complexity regarding the number of elements. Grids also have O(N) construction time complexity regarding the number of primitives unlike other commonly used acceleration structures, such as kd-trees or bounding volume hierarchies, which have an O(N logN) lower bound. This trait makes grid ray tracing interesting for many applications including animation. Recent algorithmic developments have also made it possible to achieve one-level grid construction, with low memory requirements, by compressing empty grid cells. Unfortunately one-level grids achieve lower render time performance than recursive structures such as multi-level grids. We present a method for rapidly building a grid with similarly good render time performance and using less memory than classic multi-level grids. We demonstrate that this method is a remarkably effective solution for interactive ray tracing of large scanned models. CR Categories: I.3. 7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Raytracing; I.3. 6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques—Graphics data structures and data types;
Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics

List of Figures. List of Tables. Prologue. 1. Beginning Concepts. 2. The Nature of Linguistic Competence. 3. The Biological Basis of Language. 4. The Acquisition of Language. 5. The Speaker: Producing Speech. 6. The Hearer: Speech Perception and Lexical Access. 7. The Hearer: Structural Processing. 8. Remembering Sentences, Processing Discourse, and Having Conversations. Epilogue. Appendix: Experimental Designs in Psycholinguistics. References. Name Index. Subject Index.
Monte Carlo simulations of black hole mergers in AGN discs: Low χeff mergers and predictions for LIGO

Accretion discs around supermassive black holes are promising sites for stellar mass black hole mergers detectable with LIGO. Here we present the results of Monte Carlo simulations of black hole mergers within 1-d AGN disc models. For the spin distribution in the disc bulk, key findings are: (1) The distribution of χeff is naturally centred around $\tilde{\chi }_{\rm eff} \approx 0.0$, (2) the width of the χeff distribution is narrow for low natal spins. For the mass distribution in the disc bulk, key findings are: (3) mass ratios $\tilde{q} \sim 0.5\! -\! 0.7$, (4) the maximum merger mass in the bulk is $\sim 100\! -\! 200\, \mathrm{M}_{\odot }$, (5) $\sim 1{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of bulk mergers involve BH $\gt 50\, \mathrm{M}_{\odot }$ with (6) $\simeq 80{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of bulk mergers are pairs of first generation BH. Additionally, mergers at a migration trap grow an IMBH with typical merger mass ratios $\tilde{q}\sim 0.1$. Ongoing LIGO non-detections of black holes $\gt 10^{2}\, \mathrm{M}_{\odot }$ puts strong limits on the presence of migration traps in AGN discs (and therefore AGN disc density and structure) as well as median AGN disc lifetime. The highest merger rate occurs for this channel if AGN discs are relatively short-lived (≤1 Myr) so multiple AGN episodes can happen per Galactic nucleus in a Hubble time.
An Exploratory Study of the Use of Two Algebra Progress Monitoring Measures to Evaluate Student Growth

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Microenvironmental Regulation of Tumor Progression and Therapeutic Response in Brain Metastasis

Cellular and non-cellular components of the tumor microenvironment (TME) are emerging as key regulators of primary tumor progression, organ-specific metastasis, and therapeutic response. In the era of TME-targeted- and immunotherapies, cancer-associated inflammation has gained increasing attention. In this regard, the brain represents a unique and highly specialized organ. It has long been regarded as an immunological sanctuary site where the presence of the blood brain barrier (BBB) and blood cerebrospinal fluid barrier (BCB) restricts the entry of immune cells from the periphery. Consequently, tumor cells that metastasize to the brain were thought to be shielded from systemic immune surveillance and destruction. However, the detailed characterization of the immune landscape within border-associated areas of the central nervous system (CNS), such as the meninges and the choroid plexus, as well as the discovery of lymphatics and channels that connect the CNS with the periphery, have recently challenged the dogma of the immune privileged status of the brain. Moreover, the presence of brain metastases (BrM) disrupts the integrity of the BBB and BCB. Indeed, BrM induce the recruitment of different immune cells from the myeloid and lymphoid lineage to the CNS. Blood-borne immune cells together with brain-resident cell-types, such as astrocytes, microglia, and neurons, form a highly complex and dynamic TME that affects tumor cell survival and modulates the mode of immune responses that are elicited by brain metastatic tumor cells. In this review, we will summarize recent findings on heterotypic interactions within the brain metastatic TME and highlight specific functions of brain-resident and recruited cells at different rate-limiting steps of the metastatic cascade. Based on the insight from recent studies, we will discuss new opportunities and challenges for TME-targeted and immunotherapies for BrM.
Algorithmic Bias: From Discrimination Discovery to Fairness-aware Data Mining

Algorithms and decision making based on Big Data have become pervasive in all aspects of our daily lives lives (offline and online), as they have become essential tools in personal finance, health care, hiring, housing, education, and policies. It is therefore of societal and ethical importance to ask whether these algorithms can be discriminative on grounds such as gender, ethnicity, or health status. It turns out that the answer is positive: for instance, recent studies in the context of online advertising show that ads for high-income jobs are presented to men much more often than to women [Datta et al., 2015]; and ads for arrest records are significantly more likely to show up on searches for distinctively black names [Sweeney, 2013]. This algorithmic bias exists even when there is no discrimination intention in the developer of the algorithm. Sometimes it may be inherent to the data sources used (software making decisions based on data can reflect, or even amplify, the results of historical discrimination), but even when the sensitive attributes have been suppressed from the input, a well trained machine learning algorithm may still discriminate on the basis of such sensitive attributes because of correlations existing in the data. These considerations call for the development of data mining systems which are discrimination-conscious by-design. This is a novel and challenging research area for the data mining community. The aim of this tutorial is to survey algorithmic bias, presenting its most common variants, with an emphasis on the algorithmic techniques and key ideas developed to derive efficient solutions. The tutorial covers two main complementary approaches: algorithms for discrimination discovery and discrimination prevention by means of fairness-aware data mining. We conclude by summarizing promising paths for future research.
Anti-Angiogenic Therapy Combined with Chemoradiotherapy for Patients with Localized Advanced Rectal Cancer

In the last decade, major advances have been achieved in the treatment of rectal cancer. Results of randomized controlled trials have led to the introduction of total mesorectal excision and preoperative (chemo) radiotherapy as a standard multimodal treatment approach. By combining these different treatment modalities, patients are less likely to suffer local recurrence and are more likely to maintain sphincter function and retain a reasonably good quality of life. To further improve the treatment response, many efforts have been made to integrate targeted biological agents into the conventional therapy. Anti-angiogenic treatment has been shown in preclinical and clinical studies to possibly potentiate chemoradiosensitivity. The researchers present an overview of the mechanisms of action and a summary of published results of chemoradiotherapy with anti-angiogenic drugs in the treatment of locally advanced rectal carcinoma. At present, many obstacles still have to be conquered to use this combination in daily clinical routine. Problems of resistance, invasion and metastasis as well as timing and dosing of the combination therapy when using anti-angiogenic compounds are discussed in this review. Also, attention for better response prediction and better understanding of the complexity of anti-angiogenic therapy in combination with chemoradiation is needed to lead to future improvements in the use of these agents in the clinic.
Performance of Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems With Interference Decoding

We consider a multi-cell massive MIMO system where a time-division duplex protocol is used to estimate the channel state information via uplink pilots. When maximum ratio combining (MRC) is used at the BSs, the re-use of pilots across cells causes the pilot contamination effect which yields interference components that do not vanish as the number of base-station (BS) antennas <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M \rightarrow \infty $ </tex-math></inline-formula>. When treating interference as noise (TIN), this phenomenon limits the performance of multi-cell massive MIMO systems. In this paper, we analyze more advanced schemes based on simultaneous unique decoding (SD) as well as simultaneous non-unique decoding (SND) of the interference that can provide unbounded rate as <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M \rightarrow \infty $ </tex-math></inline-formula>. We also establish a worst-case uncorrelated noise technique for multiple-access channels to derive achievable rate expressions for finite <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Furthermore, we study a much simpler subset of SND (called S-SND) which provides a lower bound to SND and achieves unbounded rate as <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M \rightarrow \infty $ </tex-math></inline-formula>, and also outperforms SD for finite <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. For the special cases of two-cell and three-cell systems, using a maximum symmetric rate allocation policy we compare the performance of different interference decoding schemes with that of TIN. Finally, we numerically illustrate the improved performance of the proposed schemes.
Liver Transcriptome Changes of Hyla Rabbit in Response to Chronic Heat Stress

Simple Summary It has been widely acknowledged in farm animals that environmental heat stress would have comprehensive influences on many kinds of physiological aspects, including the metabolic characteristics, production performances, welfare concerns, etc. The rabbit is a small herbivore and needs to regulate the body temperature in a fine mechanism. Little is known, however, about the genes and pathways that are involved in the regulatory responses under chronic heat stress conditions. In the present study, we investigated the liver transcriptome changes in response to chronic heat stress for Hyla rabbit, that is a commercial meat breed recently introduced into China. We successfully revealed the differentially expressed genes that were significantly enriched in heat stress related biological processes. The results would help us for better understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying physiological responses against heat stress in rabbits. Abstract Rabbit is an economically important farm animal in China and also is a widely used animal model in biological researches. Rabbits are very sensitive to the environmental conditions, therefore we investigated the liver transcriptome changes in response to chronic heat stress in the present study. Six Hyla rabbits were randomly divided into two groups: chronic heat stress (HS) and controls without heat stress (CN). Six RNA-Seq libraries totally yielded 380 million clean reads after the quality filtering. Approximately 85.07% of reads were mapped to the reference genome. After assembling transcripts and quantifying gene expression levels, we detected 51 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between HS and CN groups with thresholds of the adjusted p-value < 0.05 and |log2(FoldChange)| > 1. Among them, 33 and 18 genes were upregulated and downregulated, respectively. Gene ontology analyses further revealed that these DEGs were mainly associated with metabolism of lipids, thyroid hormone metabolic process, and cellular modified amino acid catabolic process. The upregulated ACACB, ACLY, LSS, and CYP7A1 genes were found to be inter-related through biological processes of thioester biosynthetic process, acyl-CoA biosynthetic process, acetyl-CoA metabolic process, and others. Six DEGs were further validated by quantitative real-time PCR analysis. The results revealed the candidate genes and biological processes that will potentially be considered as important regulatory factors involved in the heat stress response in rabbits.
Match-Prevention Technique Against Denial-of-Service Attack on Address Resolution and Duplicate Address Detection Processes in IPv6 Link-Local Network

Address Resolution (AR) and Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) are considered the most important processes in Neighbour Discovery Protocol (NDP), which occurs frequently from each Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) host communicating with other neighbouring hosts. Two NDP messages are used during AR and DAD to communicate with one another in the same IPv6 link-local network, namely Neighbour Solicitation (NS) and Neighbour Advertisement (NA) messages. However, NDP messages have non-secure designs and lack verification mechanisms for authenticating whether incoming messages originate from a legitimate or illegitimate node. Therefore, any node in the same link can manipulate NS or NA messages and then launch a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. Techniques proposed to secure AR and DAD include Secure NDP (SeND) and Trust-NDP (Trust-ND); however, these techniques either entail high processing time and bandwidth consumption or are vulnerable to DoS attacks because of their designs. Therefore, to secure AR and DAD, this study aims to introduce a prevention technique called Match-Prevention, which secures target IP addresses and exchange messages (i.e. NS and NA). The processing time, bandwidth consumption and DoS prevention success rate of Match-Prevention in different scenarios are evaluated, and its performance is compared with those of existing techniques, including Standard-Process (i.e., Standard-AR and Standard-DAD), SeND and Trust-ND. Results show that Match-Prevention requires less processing time during AR and DAD processes and less bandwidth consumption compared with other existing techniques. In terms of DoS prevention success rate, the experiments show that Standard-Process and Trust-ND are unable to secure AR and DAD from DoS attacks, whilst SeND is vulnerable to flooding attacks. By contrast, Match-Prevention allows IPv6 nodes to verify the incoming message, discard the fake message before further processing and prevent a DoS attack during AR and DAD in an IPv6 link-local network.
WET WEIGHT-DRY WEIGHT RELATIONSHIP OF Oreochromis niloticus (Tilapia) IN EGAH RIVER AT IDAH L.G.A. OF KOGI STATE, NIGERIA.

Oreochromis niloticus is a species native to Africa; it is tolerant of lower temperatures than many other species. As it is the major species used for Tilapia production around the world (Treswavas, 1983). Oreochromis niloticus is a fast growing species that can live in many different types of waters; from lakes and rivers to sewage and canals. Pauly (1983) noted the importance of length –weight relationships (LWR) in the calculation of an equation of growth in length into an equation of growth in weight. Another researcher; Arslan et al (2004) stated that it is usually easier to measure length than weight, and weight can be predicted later on using the length –weight relationship which helps among other things predict the weight of a fish given its definite length but only little work has been done to determine the relationship between the wet weight and the dry weight of a giving fish that will help determine the weight of a giving dry(smoked) fish giving its wet (fresh) weight even though smoking time is highly dependent on weather, temperature, wind, humidity and length of storage. The smoking of fish at different standard temperatures and length of time to determine their dry weight if given a definite wet weight have not been thoroughly researched into; this prompted the research work to dry (smoke) Oreochromis niloticus (Tilapia) fish at a temperature range of 75 o c to 85 o c with a time range of 4 to 5 hours, thus the objective of this research is to determine the dry (smoked) weight of Oreochromis niloticus given a definite wet weight. Abstract: The relationships between wet weightdry weights measurements of Oreochromis niloticus subjected to smoking at a temperature range of 75 o c to 85 o c with a time range of 4 to 5 hours using a drum-type smoking kiln were determined. Weight reductions for fish after smoking were >50%. The maximum dry weight losses ranged from 28.50g to 60.00g for males, 53.10g to 117.3g for females and 53.10g to 117.3g for the pooled sexes. Regression analyses were performed on the wet Oreochromis niloticus weight-wet body weight and smoked Oreochromis niloticus weight-smoked dry body weight. Significant relationships were found in all cases at (p < 0.05) with correlation coefficients for males, females and pooled sexes at 0.9241, 0.9632 and 0.9586 respectively.
Cytological Studies on Some Indian Members of Commelinaceae

The family Commelinaceae forms a very natural assemblage, with mostly well defined genera under the present systems of classification. However the positions of these genera and their interrelationships still present controversial aspects. Earlier monographers like Clarke (1881), Bruckner (1930), Woodson (1942) and Rohweder (1956) have divided the genera into two major groups, based on either the stamen character or the inflorescence, the Tradescantieae and the Commeli nieae. Clarke (l. c.) included a third tribe Pollieae as well. Pichon (1946) and Brenan (1966), however grouped the genera into ten and fifteen groups respectively, though on the basis of completely different characteristics. The cytological studies have helped in understanding the different species complexes in Commelina, Cyanotis and the other common genera, though the data on Murdannia, Aneilema, Floscopa, Streptolirion etc. have not given such a clear indication regarding their delimitations and positions. Different populations col lected from different habitats indicated differences in karyotype within members of the same species. Widespread polyploidy amongst the Indian members has also been recorded. The present work was undertaken on the members available in order to apply the cytological findings obtained i) to clarify the taxonomic controversies in the genera involved, ii) to indicate the lines of evolution within them if possible and iii) to observe the effects of factors like polyploidy and structural and numerical altera tions of chromosomes in speciation within them.
Genetic transformation of the C4 plant, Flaveria bidentis

Summary An efficient and rapid transformation system for the dicotyledonous C4 plant, Flaverla bidentis has been developed. The method involves Agrobacterium tumefaciens infection of explants followed by regen- eration of shoots from kanamycin-resistsnt callus. Shoots first appear on callus 3-4 weeks after Agrobacterium infection, with plants in soil after another 12-15 weeks. Transformation has been verified by measuring the activity of the gusA and npt- II transgenes and by genomic Southern blots to show the stable integration of T-DNA. Most regenerated plants show normal morphology, are self-fertile and transgenes show expected Mendelian segregations in the next generation. This system allows one to test a number of gone constructions rapidly and should accelerate progress in studies of the cell-specific expression of genes coding for C4 enzymes and the mechanisms regulating the activities of C4 enzymes. Introduction Photosynthesis in C4 plants involves a cooperative inter- action between two cell types, mesophyll and bundle sheath. The mesophyll cells contain a specialized group of enzymes which constitute a biochemical 'pump', con- centrating CO2 in the bundle sheath cells where Rubisco is located (reviewed Hatch, 1987). This biochemical com- partmentation is achieved by the cell-specific expression of the nuclear gene encoding each enzyme (Langdale
Interactions of chronic exposure to elevated CO2 and O3 levels in the photosynthetic light and dark reactions of European beech (Fagus sylvatica)

summary Young trees of European beech (Fagus sylvatica) acclimated for one growing season to ambient (c. 367 l ll ’" )o r elevated CO # levels (c. 660 l ll ’") were exposed during the subsequent year to combinations of the same CO # regimes and ambient or twice-ambient ozone (O $ ) levels (generated from the database of a rural site). By the end of June, before the development of macroscopic leaf injury, the raised O $ levels had not aected the light and dark reactions of photosynthesis. However, acclimation to elevated CO # had resulted in lowered chlorophyll and nitrogen concentrations, whereas photosynthetic performance, examined over a wide range of parameters from light and dark reactions, remained unchanged or showed only slight reductions (e.g. apparent electron transport rate, ETR; apparent quantum yield of CO # gas exchange, U CO# ; apparent carboxylation eciency, CE; and photosynthetic capacity at light and CO # saturation, PC). In August, after the appearance of leaf necroses, plants grown under ambient CO # and twice-ambient O $ conditions declined in both the photosynthetic light reactions (optimum electron quantum yield, F v }F m , non-photochemical energy quenching, NPQ, reduction state of Q A , apparent electron quantum yield, U PSI I, maximum electron transport rates) and the dark reactions as reflected by CE, U CO# , as well as the maximum CO # uptake rate (i.e. PC). CE, U CO# and PC were reduced by c. 75, 40 and 75%, respectively, relative to plants exposed to ambient CO # and O $ levels. By contrast, plants exposed to twice-ambient O $ and elevated CO # levels maintained a photosynthetic performance similar to individuals grown either under ambient CO # and ambient O $ , or elevated CO # and ambient O $ conditions. The long-term exposure to elevated CO # therefore tended to counteract adverse chronic eects of enhanced O $ levels on photosynthesis. Possible reasons for this compensatory eect in F. sylvatica are discussed.