Escape Velocity Dance Company Presents: Emerge

Escape Velocity is a student run dance company that provides students the opportunity to choreograph for, dance in, and/or produce performances for the Ursinus College community throughout the year. This program, Emerge, consists of ten individual pieces. Firelight was choreographed by Elizabeth Kandler and performed by Elizabeth Kandler, Kalina Witkowska, and Alexa Alessandrini. Always was choreographed by Kathryn Bjorklund and performed by Bailey Hann, Sarah Bell, Kathryn Bjorklund, Jackie Henigan, Megan DePaul and Rileigh Klein. Movement was choreographed by Kalina Witkowska and performed by Angelina Mazza, Elizabeth Kandler, Samirah Deshields, Taylor Tobin and Kalina Witkowska. Everybody was choreographed by Mo’Dayna Hercules and performed by Mo’Dayna Hercules and Azari. Bruises was choreographed by Jackie Henigan and Raeann Risko and performed by Raeann Risko, Jackie Henigan, Bailey Hann, Sarah Bell, Carly Rodriguez, Rileigh Klein, Elizabeth Kandler and Maia Michalashvili. Childhood Theme Song Mashup was choreographed by the Escape Velocity Executive Board and performed by Amanda Paul, Emmy Selfridge, Gabby DeMelfi, Jess Doorly, Mariah Lesh, Carly Rodriguez, Angelina Mazza, Mary Fuchs, Shira Levin, Raeann Risko, Jackie Henigan, Rileigh Klein and Megan D. Cannon in D was choreographed by Chelsea Stitt and performed by Jackie Henigan, Raeann Risko, Kathryn Bjorklund and Elizabeth Kandler. One with the Wind was choreographed by Kevin Harris II and performed by Kalina Witkowska. When I was Older was choreographed by Shira Levin and performed by Jackie Henigan, Taylor Tobin and Raeann Risko. Closing Time was choreographed by Jackie Henigan and performed by Angelina Mazza, Megan DePaul, Rileigh Klein, Raeann Risko, Kathryn Bjorklund, Jackie Henigan and Elizabeth Kandler.https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/dance_videos/1000/thumbnail.jp

On Retrieval Augmentation and the Limitations of Language Model Training

Augmenting a language model (LM) with $k$-nearest neighbors ($k$NN) retrieval on its training data alone can decrease its perplexity, though the underlying reasons for this remain elusive. In this work, we rule out one previously posited possibility -- the "softmax bottleneck." We then create a new dataset to evaluate LM generalization ability in the setting where training data contains additional information that is not causally relevant. This task is challenging even for GPT-3.5 Turbo. We show that, for both GPT-2 and Mistral 7B, $k$NN retrieval augmentation consistently improves performance in this setting. Finally, to make $k$NN retrieval more accessible, we propose using a multi-layer perceptron model that maps datastore keys to values as a drop-in replacement for traditional retrieval. This reduces storage costs by over 25x.Comment: Accepted to NAACL 202

CodeRAG-Bench: Can Retrieval Augment Code Generation?

While language models (LMs) have proven remarkably adept at generating code, many programs are challenging for LMs to generate using their parametric knowledge alone. Providing external contexts such as library documentation can facilitate generating accurate and functional code. Despite the success of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in various text-oriented tasks, its potential for improving code generation remains under-explored. In this work, we conduct a systematic, large-scale analysis by asking: in what scenarios can retrieval benefit code generation models? and what challenges remain? We first curate a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, CodeRAG-Bench, encompassing three categories of code generation tasks, including basic programming, open-domain, and repository-level problems. We aggregate documents from five sources for models to retrieve contexts: competition solutions, online tutorials, library documentation, StackOverflow posts, and GitHub repositories. We examine top-performing models on CodeRAG-Bench by providing contexts retrieved from one or multiple sources. While notable gains are made in final code generation by retrieving high-quality contexts across various settings, our analysis reveals room for improvement -- current retrievers still struggle to fetch useful contexts especially with limited lexical overlap, and generators fail to improve with limited context lengths or abilities to integrate additional contexts. We hope CodeRAG-Bench serves as an effective testbed to encourage further development of advanced code-oriented RAG methods

Global distributions of age- and sex-related arterial stiffness: systematic review and meta-analysis of 167 studies with 509,743 participants

Background: Arterial stiffening is central to the vascular ageing process and a powerful predictor and cause of diverse vascular pathologies and mortality. We investigated age and sex trajectories, regional differences, and global reference values of arterial stiffness as assessed by pulse wave velocity (PWV). // Methods: Measurements of brachial-ankle or carotid-femoral PWV (baPWV or cfPWV) in generally healthy participants published in three electronic databases between database inception and August 24th, 2020 were included, either as individual participant-level or summary data received from collaborators (n = 248,196) or by extraction from published reports (n = 274,629). Quality was appraised using the Joanna Briggs Instrument. Variation in PWV was estimated using mixed-effects meta-regression and Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale, and Shape. // Findings: The search yielded 8920 studies, and 167 studies with 509,743 participants from 34 countries were included. PWV depended on age, sex, and country. Global age-standardised means were 12.5 m/s (95% confidence interval: 12.1–12.8 m/s) for baPWV and 7.45 m/s (95% CI: 7.11–7.79 m/s) for cfPWV. Males had higher global levels than females of 0.77 m/s for baPWV (95% CI: 0.75–0.78 m/s) and 0.35 m/s for cfPWV (95% CI: 0.33–0.37 m/s), but sex differences in baPWV diminished with advancing age. Compared to Europe, baPWV was substantially higher in the Asian region (+1.83 m/s, P = 0.0014), whereas cfPWV was higher in the African region (+0.41 m/s, P < 0.0001) and differed more by country (highest in Poland, Russia, Iceland, France, and China; lowest in Spain, Belgium, Canada, Finland, and Argentina). High vs. other country income was associated with lower baPWV (−0.55 m/s, P = 0.048) and cfPWV (−0.41 m/s, P < 0.0001). // Interpretation: China and other Asian countries featured high PWV, which by known associations with central blood pressure and pulse pressure may partly explain higher Asian risk for intracerebral haemorrhage and small vessel stroke. Reference values provided may facilitate use of PWV as a marker of vascular ageing, for prediction of vascular risk and death, and for designing future therapeutic interventions. // Funding: This study was supported by the excellence initiative VASCage funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, by the National Science Foundation of China, and the Science and Technology Planning Project of Hunan Province. Detailed funding information is provided as part of the Acknowledgments after the main text

BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer

Despite remarkable advancements in few-shot generalization in natural language processing, most models are developed and evaluated primarily in English. To facilitate research on few-shot cross-lingual transfer, we introduce a new benchmark, called BUFFET, which unifies 15 diverse tasks across 54 languages in a sequence-to-sequence format and provides a fixed set of few-shot examples and instructions. BUFFET is designed to establish a rigorous and equitable evaluation framework for few-shot cross-lingual transfer across a broad range of tasks and languages. Using BUFFET, we perform thorough evaluations of state-of-the-art multilingual large language models with different transfer methods, namely in-context learning and fine-tuning. Our findings reveal significant room for improvement in few-shot in-context cross-lingual transfer. In particular, ChatGPT with in-context learning often performs worse than much smaller mT5-base models fine-tuned on English task data and few-shot in-language examples. Our analysis suggests various avenues for future research in few-shot cross-lingual transfer, such as improved pretraining, understanding, and future evaluations.Comment: The data and code is available at https://buffetfs.github.io

Global distributions of age- and sex-related arterial stiffness: systematic review and meta-analysis of 167 studies with 509,743 participants

Background: Arterial stiffening is central to the vascular ageing process and a powerful predictor and cause of diverse vascular pathologies and mortality. We investigated age and sex trajectories, regional differences, and global reference values of arterial stiffness as assessed by pulse wave velocity (PWV). Methods: Measurements of brachial-ankle or carotid-femoral PWV (baPWV or cfPWV) in generally healthy participants published in three electronic databases between database inception and August 24th, 2020 were included, either as individual participant-level or summary data received from collaborators (n = 248,196) or by extraction from published reports (n = 274,629). Quality was appraised using the Joanna Briggs Instrument. Variation in PWV was estimated using mixed-effects meta-regression and Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale, and Shape. Findings: The search yielded 8920 studies, and 167 studies with 509,743 participants from 34 countries were included. PWV depended on age, sex, and country. Global age-standardised means were 12.5 m/s (95% confidence interval: 12.1-12.8 m/s) for baPWV and 7.45 m/s (95% CI: 7.11-7.79 m/s) for cfPWV. Males had higher global levels than females of 0.77 m/s for baPWV (95% CI: 0.75-0.78 m/s) and 0.35 m/s for cfPWV (95% CI: 0.33-0.37 m/s), but sex differences in baPWV diminished with advancing age. Compared to Europe, baPWV was substantially higher in the Asian region (+1.83 m/s, P = 0.0014), whereas cfPWV was higher in the African region (+0.41 m/s, P &lt; 0.0001) and differed more by country (highest in Poland, Russia, Iceland, France, and China; lowest in Spain, Belgium, Canada, Finland, and Argentina). High vs. other country income was associated with lower baPWV (-0.55 m/s, P = 0.048) and cfPWV (-0.41 m/s, P &lt; 0.0001). Interpretation: China and other Asian countries featured high PWV, which by known associations with central blood pressure and pulse pressure may partly explain higher Asian risk for intracerebral haemorrhage and small vessel stroke. Reference values provided may facilitate use of PWV as a marker of vascular ageing, for prediction of vascular risk and death, and for designing future therapeutic interventions. Funding: This study was supported by the excellence initiative VASCage funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, by the National Science Foundation of China, and the Science and Technology Planning Project of Hunan Province. Detailed funding information is provided as part of the Acknowledgments after the main text

Study on Pressure Oscillation Characteristic of Steam Low-velocity Jet under Seawater Condition

In order to address the research gap in steam-seawater interactions and evaluate the feasibility of using seawater as a coolant in marine nuclear power systems, the pressure oscillation characteristics of steam low-velocity jet in seawater have been investigated. The motivation stems from the fact that seawater, covering 70% of the Earth’s surface, offers practical advantages over freshwater for long-term maritime operations, yet its impact on steam jet dynamics remains poorly understood. The experiments focus on comparing pressure oscillations in seawater and freshwater under varying steam mass flow rates (20, 40, 60 kg/(m²·s)) and water temperatures (30-90 ℃), with the goal of assessing system safety and performance. The experimental setup consisted of a steam supply system, a stainless-steel water tank, and instrumented nozzles equipped with high-frequency dynamic pressure sensors (sampling rate: 20 kHz). Steam was injected into seawater or freshwater-filled tanks, and pressure oscillations in both the nozzle and tank were measured. Time-domain and frequency-domain analyses, including fast Fourier transform (FFT), were applied to characterize oscillation intensity and frequency. Repeatability tests confirmed data reliability. Key findings reveal that steam-seawater jets exhibit pressure oscillation behaviors similar to freshwater jets but with notable differences. At low steam mass flow rate (20 kg/(m²·s)) and temperatures below 60 ℃, seawater jets produce stronger oscillations due to higher density, which reduce pressure wave attenuation. In contrast, at higher mass flow rates (40-60 kg/(m²·s)), nozzle pressure oscillations converge between seawater and freshwater, while tank oscillations in seawater show nonlinear trends—initially stronger but weaker at elevated temperatures. This shift is attributed to smaller, denser bubbles in seawater, which enhance pressure wave scattering. Frequency analyses show that both systems share similar dominant frequencies (10-200 Hz), decreasing with rising temperature due to slower bubble collapse. The study concludes that seawater can alter pressure oscillation intensity but does not significantly affect frequency patterns. For marine applications, seawater’s higher density may amplify low-flux oscillations, but its bubble-suppressing properties could mitigate high-temperature effects. These insights advance the understanding of steam-seawater jet dynamics and support safer design options for marine nuclear cooling systems

Phenotypic plasticity in cell elongation among closely related bacterial species

Cell elongation in bacteria has been studied over many decades, in part because its underlying mechanisms are targets of numerous antibiotics. While multiple elongation modes have been described, little is known about how these strategies vary across species and in response to evolutionary and environmental influences. Here, we use fluorescent D-amino acids to track the spatiotemporal dynamics of bacterial cell elongation, revealing unsuspected diversity of elongation modes among closely related species of the family Caulobacteraceae. We identify species-specific combinations of dispersed, midcell and polar elongation that can be either unidirectional or bidirectional. Using genetic, cell biology, and phylogenetic approaches, we demonstrate that evolution of unidirectional-midcell elongation is accompanied by changes in the localization of the peptidoglycan synthase PBP2. Our findings reveal high phenotypic plasticity in elongation mechanisms, with implications for our understanding of bacterial growth and evolution. </br