Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Lower Bound of Confidence Coefficients for a Confidence Interval on Variance Components

Consider the one-factor nested components-of-variance model Yij = A + ai + eij, where a2 and eij are jointly independent normal random variables with zero means and variances 2 and a2, respectively, for i = 1, 2, . , I; and j = 1, 2, . , J. The confidence interval on the among variance component a2 is of interest to the investigators. Except for an "artificial" method (see Healy, 1961) that uses a set of random numbers which is of no use in practical situations, an exact-size confidence interval on a 2 has not yet been derived. Several approximate procedures are available for obtaining a confidence interval on 2. Satterthwaite (1946) approximates the distribution of the estimate of a linear combination of variances by a chi-squared distribution times a constant. Satterthwaite urges caution in using the method when any of the coefficients of the linear combination are negative, as is the case when estimating a2. Gaylor and Hopper (1969) provide a criterion based on the F-statistics from the ANOVA table for determining when Satterthwaite's procedure may be safely used for setting confidence limits on the among variance components. Welch (1956) offers a series approximation, using the Cornish-Fisher (1937) expansion, for setting approximate confidence intervals on the linear combinations of several variances. Another approximation is given by Moriguti (1954) and repeated by Bulmer (1957). They derive a confidence interval on a2 by assuming the confidence limit is of certain form and solving for it by forcing the confidence coefficient to be exact under certain limiting conditions. Williams (1962) constructed an approximate confidence interval with a guaranteed lower confidence coefficient of 1 2a by a geometrical projection. This confidence interval is identical to the one proposed by Tukey (1951). Howe (1974) also derives confidence limits on a2 through a modified Cornish-Fisher expansion. Boardman (1974) presents a simulation study that investigates the actual probability coverage of the Satterthwaite, Welch, Moriguti-Bulmer, and Tukey-Williams intervals. The results of the study show that the Moriguti-Bulmer and Tukey-Williams procedures give adequate coverage at the nominal 95% confidence coefficient. Both Satterthwaite and Welch procedures behaved poorly in the simulation, giving inadequate coverage at the nominal 95% level. Although Howe's interval was not included in the study, the method
Comparison study of protective effects of porcine bile acids and sheep bile acids against heat stress in chickens.

BACKGROUND Heat stress (HS) is known to exert negative effects on the poultry and breeding industry, resulting in severe economic losses. Bile acids (BAs), an important component of bile, play a crucial role in improving the production performance of livestock and poultry, alleviating stress injury, and ensuring the health of livestock and poultry. At present, porcine BAs are widely used because of their therapeutic effects on HS; however, it remains unclear whether the same effects are exerted by sheep BAs, which are different from porcine BAs and have different compositions. In this study, we compared the anti-HS effects of porcine BAs and sheep BAs in the diet by establishing an HS model of chicks and investigating the chicken performance, HS-related genes' expression, oxidative stress markers, jejunal histoarchitecture, inflammatory cytokines' expression, jejunal SIgA concentration, and cecal bacterial flora. RESULTS The results showed that the addition of sheep BAs to the diet increased the average daily weight gain and the feed conversion ratio of chicks. Under HS, sheep BAs was more effective than porcine BAs in improving the activities of LDH and ALT in serum and the content / activity of MDA, SOD and GSH in serum and tissue, reducing the mRNA expression of heat shock proteins (HSP60, HSP70, and HSP90) in the liver and jejunum, and improving the histological structure and the expression of tight junction proteins (Occludin and ZO-1), and enriching intestinal bacterial flora. However, porcine BAs was significantly lower than sheep BAs in reducing the mRNA expression of inflammatory factors (IL-6, IL-1 β and TNF- α). CONCLUSION The effect of sheep BAs was more significant in alleviating HS injury in chicks than porcine BAs, suggesting that sheep BAs have great potential as new feed nutrition and health additive to improve poultry production performance and prevent HS. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Escaping ESKAPE resistance: in vitro and in silico studies of multifunctional carbamimidoyl-tethered indoles against antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Combining the hybridization and repurposing strategies, six compounds from our in-house library and having a designed hybrid structure of MBX-1162, pentamidine and MMV688271 were repurposed as potential antibacterial agents. Among, compounds 1a and 1d elicited potential sub-µg ml−1 activity against the high-priority antibiotic-resistant Gram-positive members of ESKAPE bacteria as well as antibiotic-susceptible Gram-positive bacteria. Furthermore, they showed potential low µg ml−1 activity against the explored critical-priority antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative members of ESKAPE bacteria. In time–kill assay, compound 1a has effective 0.5 and 0.25 µg ml−1 antibacterial lethal concentrations against MRSA in exponential growth phase. In silico investigations predicted compounds 1a and 1d as inhibitors of the open conformation of undecaprenyl diphosphate synthase involved in bacterial isoprenoid synthesis. In addition, compounds 1a and 1d were predicted as inhibitors of NADPH-free but not NADPH-bound form of ketol-acid reductoisomerase and may also serve as potential B-DNA minor groove binders with possible differences in the molecular sequence recognition. Overall, compounds 1a and 1d are presented as multifunctional potential antibacterial agents for further development against high- and critical-priority Gram-positive and Gram-negative antibiotic-resistant ESKAPE bacterial pathogens as well as antibiotic-susceptible Gram-positive bacterial pathogens.
Three-dimensional morphology of the biramous appendages in Isoxys from the early Cambrian of South China, and its implications for early euarthropod evolution

Early euarthropod evolution involved a major transition from lobopodian-like taxa to organisms featuring a segmented, well-sclerotized trunk (arthrodization) and limbs (arthropodization). However, the precise origin of a completely arthrodized trunk and arthropodized ventral biramous appendages remain controversial, as well as the early onset of anterior–posterior limb differentiation in stem-group euarthropods. New fossil material and micro-computed tomography inform the detailed morphology of the arthropodized biramous appendages in the carapace-bearing euarthropod Isoxys curvirostratus from the early Cambrian Chengjiang biota. In addition to well-developed grasping frontal appendages, I. curvirostratus possesses two batches of morphologically and functionally distinct biramous limbs. The first batch consists of four pairs of short cephalic appendages with robust endites with a feeding function, whereas the second batch has more elongate trunk appendages for locomotion. Critically, our new material shows that the trunk of I. curvirostratus was not arthrodized. The results of our phylogenetic analyses recover isoxyids as some of the earliest branching sclerotized euarthropods, and strengthens the hypothesis that arthropodized biramous appendages evolved before full body arthrodization.
Ongoing over-exploitation and delayed responses to environmental change highlight the urgency for action to promote vertebrate recoveries by 2030

To safeguard nature, we must understand the drivers of biodiversity loss. Time-delayed biodiversity responses to environmental changes (ecological lags) are often absent from models of biodiversity change, despite their well-documented existence. We quantify how lagged responses to climate and land-use change have influenced mammal and bird populations around the world, while incorporating effects of direct exploitation and conservation interventions. Ecological lag duration varies between drivers, vertebrate classes and body size groupings—e.g. lags linked to climate-change impacts are 13 years for small birds, rising to 40 years for larger species. Past warming and land conversion generally combine to predict population declines; however, such conditions are associated with population increases for small mammals. Positive effects of management (>+4% annually for large mammals) and protected areas (>+6% annually for large birds) on population trends contrast with the negative impact of exploitation (<−7% annually for birds), highlighting the need to promote sustainable use. Model projections suggest a future with winners (e.g. large birds) and losers (e.g. medium-sized birds), with current/recent environmental change substantially influencing abundance trends to 2050. Without urgent action, including effective conservation interventions and promoting sustainable use, ambitious targets to stop declines by 2030 may already be slipping out of reach.
Deployment of biologging tags on free swimming large whales using uncrewed aerial systems

Suction-cup-attached biologging tags have led to major advances in our understanding of large whale behaviour. Getting close enough to a whale at sea to safely attach a tag is a major limiting factor when deploying these systems. Here we present an uncrewed aerial system (UAS)-based tagging technique for free-swimming large whales and provide data on efficacy from field testing on blue (Balaenoptera musculus) and fin (B. physalus) whales. Rapid transit speed and the bird's-eye view of the animal during UAS tagging contributed to the technique's success. During 8 days of field testing, we had 29 occasions when a focal animal was identified for attempted tagging and tags were successfully attached 21 times. The technique was efficient, with mean flight time of 2 min 45 s from launch to deployment and a mean distance of 490 m from the launch vessel to tagged animal, reducing potential adverse effects resulting from close approaches for tagging. These data indicate that UAS are capable of attaching biologging tags to free-swimming large whales quickly and from large distances, potentially increasing success rates, decreasing attempt times, and reducing animal disruption during tagging.
The effect of point-of-care ultrasound on length of stay and mortality in patients with chest pain/dyspnea

Abstract Purpose This study aims to investigate the effects of point-of-care ultrasound (PoCUS) on length of stay (LOS) and mortality in hemodynamically stable patients with chest pain/dyspnea. Materials and Methods The prospective study was conducted from June 2020 to May 2021. A convenience sample of adult non-traumatic patients with chest pain/dyspnea was included and evaluated by PoCUS. The primary outcome was the relationship between the door-to-PoCUS time and LOS/mortality categorized by the ST-segment elevation (STE) and non-STE on the initial electrocardiogram. The diagnostic accuracy of PoCUS was computed, compared to the final diagnosis. Results A total of 465 patients were included. 3 of 18 patients with STE had unexpected cardiac tamponade and 1 had myocarditis with pulmonary edema. PoCUS had a minimal effect on LOS and mortality in patients with STE. In the non-STE group, the shorter door-to-PoCUS time was associated with a shorter LOS (coefficient, 1.26±0.47, p=0.008). After categorizing the timing of PoCUS as 30, 60, 90, and 120 minutes, PoCUS had a positive effect, especially when performed within 90 minutes of arrival, on LOS of less than 360 minutes (OR, 2.42, 95% CI, 1.61–3.64) and patient survival (OR, 3.32, 95% CI, 1.14–9.71). The overall diagnostic performance of PoCUS was 96.6% (95% CI, 94.9–98.2%), but lower efficacy occurred in pulmonary embolism and myocardial infarction. Conclusion The use of PoCUS was associated with a shorter LOS and less mortality in patients with non-STE, especially when performed within 90 minutes of arrival. Although the effect on patients with STE was minimal, PoCUS played a role in discovering unexpected diagnoses.
Best Practice Guideline – Empfehlungen der DEGUM zur Durchführung und Beurteilung der Mammasonografie

Zusammenfassung Die Mammasonografie hat sich seit vielen Jahren neben der Mammografie als wichtige Methode zur Abklärung von Brustbefunden etabliert. Der Arbeitskreis Mammasonografie der DEGUM beabsichtigt mit der „Best Practice Guideline“ den senologisch tätigen Kolleginnen und Kollegen neben dem in Teil I publizierten aktuellen Dignitätskriterien- und Befundungskatalog in dem vorliegenden Teil II die additiven und fakultativen Anwendungsmodalitäten zur Abklärung von Brustbefunden zu beschreiben und dazu DEGUM-Empfehlungen zu äußern, um die Differenzialdiagnose von unklaren Läsionen zu erleichtern. Die vorliegende „Best Practice Guideline“ hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, den Anforderungen zur Qualitätssicherung und der Gewährleistung einer qualitätskontrollierten Durchführung der Mammasonografie nachzukommen. Die wichtigsten Aspekte der Qualitätssicherung werden in diesem Teil II der Best Practice Guideline erläutert.
Social network analysis of character interaction in the Stargate and Star Trek television series

This paper undertakes a social network analysis of two science fiction television series, Stargate and Star Trek. Television series convey stories in the form of character interaction, which can be represented as “character networks”. We connect each pair of characters that exchanged spoken dialogue in any given scene demarcated in the television series transcripts. These networks are then used to characterize the overall structure and topology of each series. We find that the character networks of both series have similar structure and topology to that found in previous work on mythological and fictional networks. The character networks exhibit the small-world effects but found no significant support for power-law. Since the progression of an episode depends to a large extent on the interaction between each of its characters, the underlying network structure tells us something about the complexity of that episode’s storyline. We assessed the complexity using techniques from spectral graph theory. We found that the episode networks are structured either as (1) closed networks, (2) those containing bottlenecks that connect otherwise disconnected clusters or (3) a mixture of both.
Same as it Ever Was

Silicon Valley contains multitudes. There is, of course, the physical place—the leafy office parks surrounded by parking lots and, beyond those, the sprawling suburbs of Santa Clara County and elsewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, many of them largely unchanged for decades, despite the ever-growing influx ofworkers. Less visibly, there are also the Superfund sites left over fromdecades of largely unregulated silicon-chip manufacturing—where Silicon Valley got its name—as well as the redlined neighborhoods marginalized from the tech world’s wealth, even as they must contend with its gentrification.1 Also central to Silicon Valley are, of course, the workers whose labor constitutes the technology industry, many of whom live in those sprawling Bay Area suburbs. They come from all over the country and the world for these jobs, and while they are united by their draw to this industry and by the way of life its wealth enables, their backgrounds, worldviews, motivations, and lived experiences are as heterogeneous as the many cultures from which they hail. Then there is the imaginary of Silicon Valley—the lavish high-paying jobs where work and play intermingle, where employees are encouraged to “bring their whole selves towork” (as long as their whole selves are also a “good culturefit” and donot rock the boat or affect the bottom line), and where massive wealth is amassed and squandered by scruffy guys (and, unfortunately, men are still a majority) in t-shirts and hoodies. This imaginary has spread far beyond the bounds of the physical office parks and suburbs: it has animated hit television shows and movies that dwell on its prosperity and quirks, and it has inspired a profusion of other “Silicon X” places around the world, all trying to capture the same elusive alchemy. Finally, there is the ideological frame within the “Valley” itself, which often becomes invisible to many of the technology workers who perpetuate it, resist it, or simply exist within it. This one is the most slippery to understand and describe (as ideological frames tend to be) and the most prone to totalizing, neglecting that worker
NIM: Generative Neural Networks for Automated Modeling and Generation of Simulation Inputs

Fitting stochastic input-process models to data and then sampling from them are key steps in a simulation study but highly challenging to non-experts. We present Neural Input Modeling (NIM), a Generative Neural Network (GNN) framework that exploits modern data-rich environments to automatically capture simulation input processes and then generate samples from them. The basic GNN that we develop, called NIM-VL, comprises (i) a variational autoencoder architecture that learns the probability distribution of the input data while avoiding overfitting and (ii) long short-term memory components that concisely capture statistical dependencies across time. We show how the basic GNN architecture can be modified to exploit known distributional properties—such as independent and identically distributed structure, nonnegativity, and multimodality—to increase accuracy and speed, as well as to handle multivariate processes, categorical-valued processes, and extrapolation beyond the training data for certain nonstationary processes. We also introduce an extension to NIM called Conditional Neural Input Modeling (CNIM), which can learn from training data obtained under various realizations of a (possibly time series valued) stochastic “condition,” such as temperature or inflation rate, and then generate sample paths given a value of the condition not seen in the training data. This enables users to simulate a system under a specific working condition by customizing a pre-trained model; CNIM also facilitates what-if analysis. Extensive experiments show the efficacy of our approach. NIM can thus help overcome one of the key barriers to simulation for non-experts.
Securing Network-on-chips Against Fault-injection and Crypto-analysis Attacks via Stochastic Anonymous Routing

Network-on-chip (NoC) is widely used as an efficient communication architecture in multi-core and many-core System-on-chips (SoCs). However, the shared communication resources in an NoC platform, e.g., channels, buffers, and routers, might be used to conduct attacks compromising the security of NoC-based SoCs. Most of the proposed encryption-based protection methods in the literature require leaving some parts of the packet unencrypted to allow the routers to process/forward packets accordingly. This reveals the source/destination information of the packet to malicious routers, which can be exploited in various attacks. For the first time, we propose the idea of secure, anonymous routing with minimal hardware overhead to encrypt the entire packet while exchanging secure information over the network. We have designed and implemented a new NoC architecture that works with encrypted addresses. The proposed method can manage malicious and benign failures at NoC channels and buffers by bypassing failed components with a situation-driven stochastic path diversification approach. Hardware evaluations show that the proposed security solution combats the security threats at the affordable cost of 1.5% area and 20% power overheads chip-wide.
Cycle indices of an automaton

Abstract The notion of cycle indices of an automaton is introduced as a pair of positive parameters (b, q) effectively evaluated by the automaton. It is shown that the totality of periods of constant automata which may be represented as superpositions of a given automaton, Boolean functions, and the delay element, coincides with the variety of divisors of the members of the geometric progression b, bq, bq2,. This suggests an algorithm for checking the expressibility of constant automata, as well as a theorem on the verification of the expressibility of the totality of all automata with a limited number of states.
The smartphone as a tool for mobile communication research: Assessing mobile campaign perceptions and effects with experience sampling

Mobile communication differs from other forms of mediated communication in terms of connectedness, dynamics, omnipresence, and interactivity. Consequently, it can be difficult for scholars to investigate mobile communication using traditional research methods. The main goal of this article is to show how the mobile experience sampling method (MESM), in combination with data donations, can be useful for addressing the challenges of mobile communication research. We explicate the design using an experience-sampling study that was conducted on mobile campaigning during the Dutch 2021 national election. Using this case, we discuss how MESM can be extended and combined with other data sources, such as tracking data, GPS, and sensory data, to address the challenges of mobile communication effects research and facilitate future studies.
mHealth and social mediation: Mobile support among stigmatized people living with HIV and substance use disorder

The social mediation role of mobile technology is typified by mHealth apps designed to connect individuals to others and support substance use disorder (SUD) recovery. In this study, we examined the use and utility of one such app designed to support people living with HIV (PLWH) and SUD. Drawing on Ling’s emphasis on reciprocity and micro-coordination in mobile telephony as a social mediation technology, we gathered digital trace data from app logs to construct two metrics, initiation (i.e. whether a particular feature is engaged on a given day) and intensity (i.e. degree of involvement in the activity when engaged on that day), at three levels of communication—networked (one-to-many), dyadic (one-to-one), and intraindividual (self-to-self). We consider these system features alongside use of information resources, games and relaxation links, a meeting and events calendar, and support tools to address use urges. We found few differences in patterns of use by race, sex, and age, though African Americans were less likely to engage in intraindividual expression, whereas women and older users were more likely to make use of this feature. The initiation and intensity of network and dyadic reception, as well as the intensity of network expression, predicts recovery outcomes as measured on a weekly “check-in” survey, suggesting the utility of mobile log data for digital phenotyping in mHealth. By implementing this app during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study also found the disruption caused by national lockdown was negatively related to the app use.
ESTIMATED STATE FEEDBACK FUZZY CONTROL FOR PASSIVE DISCRETE TIME-DELAY MULTIPLICATIVE NOISED PENDULUM SYSTEMS

This paper develops a fuzzy controller design method via estimated state feedback scheme for discrete-time nonlinear stochastic time-delay systems which are presented by Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model with multiplicative noises. The proposed design method is accomplished by the concept of parallel distributed compensation. Using the Lyapunov-Krasovskii function and passivity theory, the stability conditions are derived to guarantee the stability and attenuation performance. An algorithm is proposed in this paper to solve the derived stability conditions that belong to non-strict linear matrix inequality problems. Moreover, the discrete Jensen inequality and free-weighting matrix technique are employed to decrease the conservatism of the proposed design method. Finally, the control of a nonlinear time-delay pendulum system is provided to illustrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed fuzzy control method.