nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Adaptive dynamics of saturated polymorphisms

We study the joint adaptive dynamics of n scalar-valued strategies in ecosystems where n is the maximum number of coexisting strategies permitted by the (generalized) competitive exclusion principle. The adaptive dynamics of such saturated systems exhibits special characteristics, which we first demonstrate in a simple example of a host–pathogen–predator model. The main part of the paper characterizes the adaptive dynamics of saturated polymorphisms in general. In order to investigate convergence stability, we give a new sufficient condition for absolute stability of an arbitrary (not necessarily saturated) polymorphic singularity and show that saturated evolutionarily stable polymorphisms satisfy it. For the case $$n=2$$n=2, we also introduce a method to construct different pairwise invasibility plots of the monomorphic population without changing the selection gradients of the saturated dimorphism.

Field of study: Biology, Mathematics
Benign Misleading Permissible Deception in Clinical Practice? *

This article considers the ethics of delayed disclosure of the limits of health care to a client. Specifically, it considers the current practice of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, which imitate abortion providers’ advertising techniques, so as to attract abortion-minded clients. I argue that such advertising is within the limits of truthfulness, and that it may be maintained as a legitimate response to a crisis of terminology in the abortion debate. This conclusion validates similar techniques of “benign misleading” as used by NFP-only or abstinence-only health-care providers.

Field of study: Medicine, Philosophy
A Numerical Study on the Effect of Debris Layer on Fretting Wear

Fretting wear is the material damage of two contact surfaces caused by micro relative displacement. Its characteristic is that debris is trapped on the contact surfaces. Depending on the material properties, the shapes of the debris, and the dominant wear mechanisms, debris can play different roles that either protect or harm interfaces. Due to the micro scale of the debris, it is difficult to obtain instantaneous information and investigate debris behavior in experiments. The Finite Element Method (FEM) has been used to model the process of fretting wear and calculate contact variables, such as contact stress and relative slip during the fretting wear process. In this research, a 2D fretting wear model with a debris layer was developed to investigate the influence of debris on fretting wear. Effects of different factors such as thickness of the debris layer, Young’s modulus of the debris layer, and the time of importing the layer into the FE model were considered in this study. Based on FE results, here we report that: (a) the effect of Young’s modulus of the debris layer on the contact pressure is not significant; (b) the contact pressure between the debris layer and the flat specimen decreases with increasing thickness of the layer and (c) by importing the debris layer in different fretting wear cycles, the debris layer shows different roles in the wear process. At the beginning of the wear cycle, the debris layer protects the contact surfaces of the first bodies (cylindrical pad and flat specimen). However, in the final cycle, the wear volumes of the debris layers exhibit slightly higher damage compared to the model without the debris layer in all considered cases.

Field of study: Materials science
Higgs inflation is still alive after the results from BICEP2.

The observed value of the Higgs boson mass indicates that the Higgs potential becomes small and flat at the scale around 10(17)  GeV. Having this fact in mind, we reconsider the Higgs inflation scenario proposed by Bezrukov and Shaposhnikov. It turns out that the nonminimal coupling ξ of the Higgs squared to the Ricci scalar can be smaller than 10. For example, ξ=7 corresponds to the tensor-to-scalar ratio r≃0.2, which is consistent with the recent observation by BICEP2.

Field of study: Physics
The Nature of Difficulties in Learning English by t he students at Secondary School level in Pakistan

This study was a comparative investigation into the nature of difficulties in learning English by the secondary school students of Provincial and Federal governmen t schools in N.W.F.P (Khyber Pukhtunkhwa). The objectives of the study were (1)To find out the lev el of difficulties of secondary school students of Provincial and Federal government schools of N.W.F.P (Khyber Pukhtunkhwa) in tenses, active and passives voices, direct and indirect narrations, conjunctions, prepo sitions, articles, construction of sentences and re ading with comprehension and (2)To compare the level of diffic ulties in learning English as a second language at secondary level of Provincial and Federal government schools in N.W.F.P (Khyber Pukhtunkhwa). The sample of the study was comprised of 654 randomly selected students from twenty four Provincial government schools and twenty two Federal government schools located in twenty four districts of N.W.F .P. (Khyber Pukhtunkhwa). An English language achievement test for secondary classes was administered to t he sample students of the study. The data obtained wer e tabulated and analyzed through SPSS 17.0 software to compute mean, standard deviation, t-value and p-val ue (significance) level. The main findings of the s tudy were; the students of Provincial government schools faced more difficulties in learning of verb forms, narration, conjunctions, prepositions, articles, se ntence arrangements and reading comprehension. The students of both types of schools systems faced sam e difficulties in learning voices.

Field of study: Education
U–Pb zircon ages from the eastern Savant Lake – Crow Lake metavolcanic–metasedimentary belt, northwest Ontario

Five rocks from three areas in the eastern part of the Savant Lake - Crow Lake metavolcanic-metasedimentary belt have been dated by U-Pb analysis of zircons. The Sioux Lookout area is composed of a sequence of generally fault-bounded metavolcanic and metasedirnentary belts. The age of a felsic tuff in the Central volcanic belt is 2732.72;:; Ma. This is possibly the youngest sequence in the area. The Savant Lake volcanic belt comprises the Jutten volcanic unit at its base separated by an angular unconforrnity from the Handy Lake volcanic sequence. The age of a dacitic tuff near the base of the Handy Lake volcanic sequence is 2745.22  Ma. The South Sturgeon Lake volcanic belt is composed of four volcanic cycles. The age of a felsic tuff from the top of the uppermost cycle is  Ma. The felsic Beidelman Bay pluton and the mafic Pike Lake pluton, which both intruded the lower art of the sequence, give ages of 2733.82;:; and 2732.721.; ~a, respectively. This establishes a minimum time span of 15.921): Ma for deposition of the sequence. This interval, along with the 27 Ma span between the ages of the Handy Lake sample and the volcanic sample from the South Sturgeon Lake area, suggests that the sequences were laid down by a series of discrete volcanic episodes. For samples subjected to multistage lead loss, the reliability of ages has been greatly enhanced by air abrasion of zircons. Several cases of suspected biasing of analyses by the air abrasion process have been encountered. It appears that this biasing problem can be overcome by selection and abrasion of low uranium grains that are free of imperfections.

Field of study: Environmental science
Amperometric Immunosensor for Clenbuterol Based on Enzyme-Antibody Coimmobilized ZrO_2 Nano Probes as Signal Tag

A novel amperometic immunosensor for clenbuterol(CLB) detection based on enzyme-antibody co-immobilized zirconium dioxide(ZrO2) nanoprobes for signal amplification was developed.First,ZrO2 nanoparticles(ZNPs) were used to adsorb glucose oxidase(GOD) enzyme and CLB antibody(anti-CLB) to prepare the signal tag(ZNPs/GOD-anti CLB).Poly(diallyldimethylammonium chloride)(PDDA),hemin and Au nanoparticles(AuNPs) were assembled layer by layer on the surface of multi-walled carbon nanotubes(MWCNTs),which was modified by screen-printed electrodes(SPCE).By this means,the sensor(SPCE │ WCNTs/PDDA/hemin/AuNPs),which could catalyze H2O2 into generate reduction current,was obtained.When CLB was detected,samples and ZNPG were embedded to the bottom of the 96-well plate in advance.Based on the reaction mechanism of competitive enzyme-linked immunoassay,CLB in samples would compete with slab CLB for the combination with the nanoprobe ZNPG.After reaction,glucose(Glu) was added to the 96-well plate,then the GOD catalyzed Glu to generate H2O2,which could be detected by the immunosensor for quantification.Current decline in value(ΔI) was inversely proportional to a certain concentration range of CLB and under the optimal conditions(pH 7.0,incubation at 37 ℃ for 30 min),the immunosensor provided an excellent response for CLB ranging from 0.003 μg/L to 100 μg/L with a detection limit of 1 ng/L(3σ).The sensitivity of this method was 2 orders of magnitude higher than that of the ELISA method due to the high density of GOD on the signal tag,which greatly amplify the detection signal.The average recovery of the standard addition was 93.6% and the relative standard deviation was less than 2.5%,which confirmed that prepared had a high precision.The results showed that the amperometic immunosensor was reusable,sensitive and rapid for on-the site determination of ultra trace amounts of CLB in food samples.

Field of study: Chemistry
Rising Maternal Mortality in Mumbai Metropolitan Region: Need for Action

Data from the past suggest that maternal deaths mostly occurred due to obstetric complications, like postpartum hemorrhage, sepsis or maternal morbidities, like eclampsia and cardiac diseases. This trend, however, has changed over a period of time in developing countries, like India where increasing number of maternal deaths have been attributed in recent years to preventable infectious causes, such as hepatitis, tuberculosis and malaria. Rising maternal mortality ratio (MMR) due to infections indicates there are several loop holes in the basic healthcare system at various levels in their prevention and control. Although maternal mortality worldwide is decreasing progressively, curbing maternal deaths in certain developing regions of the World including few parts of India and Mumbai Metropolitan Region at a faster rate is essential in order to achieve the United Nations Fifth Millennium Development Goal of 2015.

Field of study: Medicine
Spectral Overlap and a Comparison of Parameter-Free, Dimensionality Reduction Quality Metrics

Nonlinear dimensionality reduction methods are a popular tool for data scientists and researchers to visualize complex, high dimensional data. However, while these methods continue to improve and grow in number, it is often difficult to evaluate the quality of a visualization due to a variety of factors such as lack of information about the intrinsic dimension of the data and additional tuning required for many evaluation metrics. In this paper, we seek to provide a systematic comparison of dimensionality reduction quality metrics using datasets where we know the ground truth manifold. We utilize each metric for hyperparameter optimization in popular dimensionality reduction methods used for visualization and provide quantitative metrics to objectively compare visualizations to their original manifold. In our results, we find a few methods that appear to consistently do well and propose the best performer as a benchmark for evaluating dimensionality reduction based visualizations.

Field of study: Computer science
Detection of Pathogenic Microbe Composition Using Next-Generation Sequencing Data

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have provided great opportunities to analyze pathogenic microbes with high-resolution data. The main goal is to accurately detect microbial composition and abundances in a sample. However, high similarity among sequences from different species and the existence of sequencing errors pose various challenges. Numerous methods have been developed for quantifying microbial composition and abundance, but they are not versatile enough for the analysis of samples with mixtures of noise. In this paper, we propose a new computational method, PGMicroD, for the detection of pathogenic microbial composition in a sample using NGS data. The method first filters the potentially mistakenly mapped reads and extracts multiple species-related features from the sequencing reads of 16S rRNA. Then it trains an Support Vector Machine classifier to predict the microbial composition. Finally, it groups all multiple-mapped sequencing reads into the references of the predicted species to estimate the abundance for each kind of species. The performance of PGMicroD is evaluated based on both simulation and real sequencing data and is compared with several existing methods. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance. The software package of PGMicroD is available at

Field of study: Biology
Mathematical Achievement of Third- and Fourth-Grade Students in Compensatory Education When Using Two Types of Calculators

An earlier study by the authors showed conventional handheld calculators to be generally superior to both programmed-feedback calculators and conventional instruction in promoting mathematical achievement in normally achieving third-grade students. The present study compared those same groups among third- and fourth-grade students in compensatory education. Measures of mathematical achievement were acquisition and retention of mathematical concepts, computation, and total achievement. Among fourth-grade compensatory students, hand-held calculators again proved to be superior on most measures of acquisition and retention. Among third-grade compensatory students, however, the programmed-feedback calculator produced generally superior retention of mathematical gains. Programmed-feedback calculators then seem to be beneficial with low-achieving students who have not yet acquired basic mathematical competencies.

Field of study: Psychology
Structural and lithological controls on large Quaternary rock avalanches (sturzstroms) in arid northwestern Argentina

Landsat thematic mapper (TM) analysis, aerial photograph interpretation, and field studies of the semiarid Puna Plateau, adjacent Eastern Cordillera, and Sierras Pampeanas of Argentina (lat 24°–28°S) have revealed the existence of at least 55 rock-avalanche deposits with volumes larger than 10 6 m 3 that formed by the collapse of entire mountain fronts. The spatial distribution of landslide deposits is not random, but it clusters along mountain fronts bounded by active faults. Inspection in the field reveals five principal controls on the distribution of these events. The source area of the rock avalanches has two topographic constraints: (1) vertical relief contrasts between the breakaway zone and the mountain front must exceed a threshold of 400 m, and (2) the slope inclinations must be steeper than 20°. Rock avalanches are restricted to three types of lithology: granites, low-grade metamorphic rocks, and coarse clastic sediments. Structural controls are very important. Rock avalanches are controlled by planar structures such as bedding planes, exfoliation joints, minor faults, and cleavage that all dip toward the valley. In addition, major slide clusters occur along mountain fronts that underwent Quaternary reverse-fault reactivation of former transfer faults with strike-slip kinematics. The trigger mechanism for the majority of these landslides is interpreted to be seismic, although the ages of some major slides are about 30 ka, and they may correspond to a more humid interval in southern South America.

Field of study: Geology
On Combining Information in Generally Balanced Nested Block Designs

Explicit formulae for analyzing an experiment carried out in a nested block design having the general balance property of some desirable pattern are presented. They follow from a randomization-derived mixed model, decomposed into stratum submodels. Attention is confined here to the combined analysis allowing the information from different strata to be joined together. This article is an extension of some results presented in Caliński and Kageyama (2000), where the theory underlying the considered analysis is given.

Field of study: Mathematics
Enhancement of heterologous polypeptide expression by alterations in the ribosome-binding-site sequence

In our studies to improve the expression of bovine growth hormone in E. coli , we have observed that the production of the hormone can be greatly increased by three similar AT-rich ribosome-binding-site sequences. Thus the low level expression of the hormone at less than 1% of the total cellular protein can be enhanced to about 15–30% by simply enriching the sequence flanking the Shine-Dalgarno site with adenine- and thymine-containing deoxyribonucleotides. These AT-rich ribosome-binding-site sequences enhance the expression of porcine growth hormone in a similar manner. These sequences also increase the moderate expression (about 5%) of tumour necrosis factor to high levels of about 30%.

Field of study: Biology, Engineering
Rotational kernels for conformal therapy.

Conformal therapy treatment planning involves determining an irradiation strategy to deliver a dose distribution which is optimized for a given tumor volume. A technique proposed by Brahme restricts the search for the optimal treatment strategy to x-ray distributions in which points within the target volume are irradiated uniformly under rotation of the beam source around the patient. The dose distribution in this case may be calculated as a convolution of an irradiation weighting distribution with an invariant kernel. A procedure is described for calculating three-dimensional kernels to be used for clinical treatment planning with x rays produced by an electron accelerator. The convolution kernel is calculated as the sum of pencil beams irradiating the center of a cylindrical phantom uniformly from all angles. The shape of the kernel at points off the center of the phantom is investigated by means of numerical calculations which support the assumption that the kernel is invariant with respect to position within the phantom. The calculated kernels are verified by comparison with experimentally measured rotational arc dose distributions.

Field of study: Medicine, Physics
IoT-networks group-based model that uses AI for workgroup allocation

This paper presents a centralized management architecture model for designing workgroup-based Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything (IoE) networks. The architecture establishes the organization of an object according to its functions and capacities in layers. From its model, it is derived the design of the algorithms that give the network operation. These algorithms include the multi-protocol communication and interconnectivity algorithm, the routing algorithm, the resource sharing algorithm, and the grouping algorithm, all controlled by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The grouping algorithm consists of creating collaborative workgroups based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques that use the objects’ features to allocating these within a workgroup that attends a type of service and within an architecture layer according to its capabilities. The model was tested with a simulation that shows the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interaction between the devices involved in providing a service to a user within a Smart Home. This simulation uses an AI hosted within an IoT-Gateway to collect data on the features that define a connected object's functions and services. The extraction of the features is done using the Discovery of Functions and Services Protocol (DFSP) transported through an IoT-Protocol. With this information, the AI assigns a layer and a workgroup to a new object when it enters the network. The result of these tests can be used to know which ML technique has better accuracy.

Field of study: Computer science
MOLECULAR ENVIRONMENT AND THERMAL X-RAY SPECTROSCOPY OF THE SEMICIRCULAR YOUNG COMPOSITE SUPERNOVA REMNANT 3C 396

We have investigated the molecular environment of the semicircular composite supernova remnant (SNR) 3C 396 and performed a Chandra spatially resolved thermal X-ray spectroscopic study of this young SNR. With our CO millimeter observations, we find that the molecular clouds (MCs) at V-LSR similar to 84 km s(-1) can better explain the multiwavelength properties of the remnant than the V-LSR = 67-72 km s(-1) MCs that are suggested by Lee et al. At around 84 km s-1, the western boundary of the SNR is perfectly confined by the western molecular wall. The CO emission fades out from west to east, indicating that the eastern region is of low gas density. In particular, an intruding finger/pillar-like MC, which may be shocked at the tip, can well explain the X-ray and radio enhancement in the southwest and some infrared filaments there. The SNR-MC interaction is also favored by the relatively elevated (CO)-C-12 J = 2-1/J = 1-0 line ratios in the southwestern "pillar tip" and the molecular patch on the northwestern boundary. The redshifted (CO)-C-12 (J = 1-0 and J = 2-1) wings (86-90 km s(-1)) of an eastern 81 km s(-1) molecular patch may be the kinematic evidence for shock-MC interaction. We suggest that the 69 km s(-1) MCs are in the foreground based on Hi self-absorption while the 84 km s(-1) MCs at a distance of 6.2 kpc (the tangent point) are in physical contact with SNR 3C 396. The X-ray spectral analysis suggests an SNR age of similar to 3 kyr. The metal enrichment of the X-ray emitting gas in the north and south implies a 13-15M(circle dot) B1-B2 progenitor star.

Field of study: Physics
Ultra-trace level determination of neonicotinoids in honey as a tool for assessing environmental contamination.

Neonicotinoids and the closely related insecticide classes sulfoximines and butenolides have recently attracted growing concerns regarding their potential negative effects on non-target organisms, including pollinators such as bees. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that these effects may occur at much lower levels than those considered to be safe for humans. To properly assess the ecological and environmental risks posed by neonicotinoids, appropriate sampling and analytical procedures are needed. Here, we used honey as reliable environmental sampler and developed an unprecedentedly sensitive method based on QuEChERS and UHPLC-MS/MS for the simultaneous determination of the nine neonicotinoids and related molecules currently present on the market (acetamiprid, clothianidin, dinotefuran, flupyradifurone, imidacloprid, nitenpyram, sulfoxaflor, thiacloprid and thiamethoxam). The method was validated and provided excellent levels of precision and accuracy over a wide concentration range of 3-4 orders of magnitude. Lowest limits of quantification (LLOQs) as low as 2-20 pg/g of honey depending on the analytes were reached. The method was then applied to the analysis of 36 honey samples from various regions of the World which had already been analysed for the five most common neonicotinoids (acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, thiacloprid and thiamethoxam) in a previous study. This allowed us to determine the long-term stability (i.e. up to 40 months) of these molecules in honey, both at room temperature and -20 °C. We found that the five pesticides were stable over a period of several years at -20 °C, but that acetamiprid and thiacloprid partially degraded at room temperature. Finally, we also measured the levels of dinotefuran, nitenpyram, sulfoxaflor and flupyradifurone and found that 28% of the samples were contaminated by at least one of these pesticides.

Field of study: Environmental science