Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Weighted Bellman Equations and their Applications in Approximate Dynamic Programming ∗

We consider approximation methods for Markov decision processes in the learning and simulation context. For policy evaluation based on solving approximate versions of a Bellman equation, we propose the use of weighted Bellman mappings. Such mappings comprise weighted sums of one-step and multistep Bellman mappings, where the weights depend on both the step and the state. For projected versions of the associated Bellman equations, we show that their solutions have the same nature and essential approximation properties as the commonly used approximate solutions from TD(λ). The most important feature of our framework is that each state can be associated with a different type of mapping. Compared with the standard TD(λ) framework, this gives a more flexible way to combine multistage costs and state transition probabilities in approximate policy evaluation, and provides alternative means for bias-variance control. With weighted Bellman mappings, there is also greater flexibility to design learning and simulation-based algorithms. We demonstrate this with examples, including new TD-type algorithms with state-dependent λ parameters, as well as block versions of the algorithms. Weighted Bellman mappings can also be applied in approximate policy iteration: we provide several examples, including some new optimistic policy iteration schemes. Another major feature of our framework is that the projection need not be based on a norm, but rather can use a semi-norm. This allows us to establish a close connection between projected equation and aggregation methods, and to develop for the first time multistep aggregation methods, including some of the TD(λ)-type. Oct 2012 ∗Work supported by the Air Force Grant FA9550-10-1-0412. †Lab. for Information and Decision Systems, M.I. T. janey yu@mit.edu ‡Lab. for Information and Decision Systems, M.I. T. dimitrib@mit.edu
Compact steep-spectrum sources from the S4 sample

We present the results of 5-GHz observations with the VLA A-array of a sample of candidate compact steep-spectrum (CSS) sources selected from the S4 survey. We also estimate the symmetry parameters of high-luminosity CSS sources selected from different samples of radio sources, and compare these with the larger sources of similar luminosity to understand their evolution and the consistency of the CSS sources with the unified scheme for radio galaxies and quasars. The majority of CSS sources are likely to be young sources advancing outwards through a dense asymmetric environment. The radio properties of CSS sources are found to be consistent with the unified scheme, in which the axes of the quasars are observed close to the line of sight, while radio galaxies are observed close to the plane of the sky.
Cystalysin, a 46-kDa L-cysteine desulfhydrase from Treponema denticola: biochemical and biophysical characterization.

A 46-kDa hemolytic protein referred to as cystalysin, from Treponema denticola ATCC 35404, was characterized and overexpressed in Escherichia coli LC-67. Cystalysin lysed erythrocytes, hemoxidized hemoglobin to sulfhemoglobin and methemoglobin, and removed the sulfhydryl and amino group from selected S-containing compounds (e.g., cysteine) producing H2S, NH3, and pyruvate. With L-cysteine as substrate, cystalysin obeys Michaelis-Menten kinetics. Cystathionine and s-aminoethyl-L-cysteine were also substrates. Several of the small alpha amino acids were found to be competitive inhibitors of cystalysin. The enzymatic activity was increased by beta-mercaptoethanol and was not inhibited by the proteinase inhibitor TLCK (N alpha-p-tosyl-L-lysine chloromethyl ketone), pronase, or proteinase K, suggesting the functional site was physically protected or located in a small fragment of the polypeptide. We hypothesize that cystalysin is a pyridoxal-5-phosphate-containing enzyme with the activity of an alphaC-N and betaC-S lyase (cystathionase). Since high amounts of H2S have been reported in deep periodontal pockets, this metabolic enzyme from T. denticola may also function in vivo as an important virulence molecule.
L1521E: the first starless core with no molecular depletion

L1521E seems unique among starless cores. It stands out in a distribution of a ratio (R) that we define to asses core evolution, and which compares the emission of the easily-depleted C18O molecule with that of the hard to deplete, late-time species N2H+. While all cores we have studied so far have R ratio lower than 1, L1521E has an R value of 3.4, which is 8 times the mean of the other cores. To understand this difference, we have modeled the C18O and N2H+ abundance profiles in L1521E using a density distribution derived from 1.2mm continuum data. Our model shows that the C18O emission in this core is consistent with constant abundance, and this makes L1521E the first core with no C18O depletion. Our model also derives an unusually low N2H+ abundance. These two chemical peculiarities suggest that L1521E has contracted to its present density very recently, and it is therefore an extremely young starless core. Comparing our derived abundances with a chemical model, we estimate a tentative age of 1.5 x 10^5 yr, which is too short for ambipolar diffusion models.
SPECTRUM OF BENIGN BREAST DISEASES

Objective: To determine the frequencies of various benign breast diseases (BBD) in female patients in three private hospitals of Hyderabad. Methodology: This is a prospective cohort study of all female patients visiting the surgical clinic with breast problems. This study was conducted at Isra University Hospital Hyderabad and two other private hospitals of Hyderabad over a period of about three years starting from March 2004 to February 2007. All female patients visiting the surgical clinic with breast problems were included in the study. Patients with obvious clinical features of malignancy or those who on work up were diagnosed as carcinoma were excluded from the study. Results: A total of 275 patients were included in the study. About 44% (120/275) patients belonged to 3 rd decade of life (age between: 21-30 years) followed by 33% from 4 th decade (age between: 31 – 40 years). Fibroadenoma was the most common benign breast disease, seen in 27% (75/275) of patients, followed by fibrocystic disease seen in about 21% (57/275) patients. Conclusion: Benign Breast Diseases (BBD) are common problems in females of reproductive age. Fibroadenoma is the commonest of all benign breast disease in our set up mostly seen in 2 nd and 3 rd decade of life. Fibrocystic disease of the breast is the next common BBD whose incidence
Resource Letter TF-1: Turbulence in fluids

This Resource Letter provides a guide to the literature on fully developed turbulence in fluids. It is restricted to mechanically driven turbulence in an incompressible fluid described by the Navier–Stokes equations of hydrodynamics, and places greatest emphasis on fundamental physical questions. Journal articles and books are cited for the following topics: the Navier–Stokes equations, qualitative aspects of turbulence, the 1941 Kolmogorov theory, intermittency and small scale structure, time correlations and pressure; with brief mention of two-dimensional turbulence, passive scalars in turbulence, and the turbulent boundary layer. Turbulent fluid flows are ubiquitous in the atmosphere, the oceans, and the stars. They also occur in a wide variety of engineering applications. Most studies of turbulence have an applied objective, whether this application be to engineering, to geophysics, to astrophysics, or to weather predicition. But there is a basic problem in physics underlying all of these applications.
Stability analysis of switched time-delay systems

This paper addresses the asymptotic stability of switched time delay systems with heterogenous time invariant time delays. Piecewise Lyapunov-Razumikhin functions are introduced for the switching candidate systems to investigate the stability in the presence of infinite number of switchings. We provide sufficient conditions in terms of the minimum dwell time to guarantee asymptotic stability under the assumptions that each switching candidate is delay-independently or delay-dependently stable. Conservatism analysis is also provided by comparing with the dwell time conditions for switched delay free systems.
Power of grit and impulsiveness: a study of adolescent academic motivation using the theory of planned behaviour

The purpose of this research is to explore the Intentions of adolescents to study and how study behaviour may be influenced by the internal variables of Azjen's Theory of Planned Behaviour, Attitudes to study, Perceived Behavioural Control (PBC) and Subjective Norms. The external variables of Impulsiveness and Grit were also investigated, with a view to discovering any gender differences. A correlational design, using purposive sampling, measured academic motivation through the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Ajzen, 1990), secondly, Grit using the 8 item Grit Scale for children (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009) and thirdly, Impulsiveness using the 15-item short version for adolescents of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (Fossati, Barratt, Acquarini, & Di Ceglie, 2002). This study found no gender differences between variables, with the exception of Indirect Attitude. Grit, measured was not found to be significantly correlated with Academic intentions, contrary to previous research. A significant correlation was found between academic intentions and Impulsiveness.
Dynamic Self-Protection and Tamperproofing for Android Apps Using Native Code

With over one billion sold devices, representing 80% market share, Android remains the most popular platform for mobile devices. Application piracy on this platform is a major concern and a cause of significant losses: about 97% of the top 100 paid apps were found to be hacked in terms of repackaging or the distribution of clones. Therefore new and stronger methods aiming to increase the burden on reverse engineering and modification of proprietary mobile software are required. In this paper, we propose an application of the Android native code component to implement strong software self-protection for apps. Within this scope, we present three dynamic obfuscation techniques, namely dynamic code loading, dynamic re-encryption, and tamper proofing. We provide a practical evaluation of this approach, assessing both the cost and efficiency of its achieved protection level. Our results indicate that with the proposed methods one can reach significant complication of the reverse-engineering process, while being affordable in terms of execution time and application size.
Saving Children in the Age of Big Brother: Moral and Ethical Issues in the Identification of Deviance

Thirty-six years ago George Orwell's novel 1984 popularized the spectre of behavior control by a totalitarian state. His small volume has now sensitized generations to the horror of control that is destructive of the human spirit. In this year that served as the title of Orwell's story, educators will do well to consider how totalitarianism could be related to the problems and needs of emotionally disturbed children, their families, and their teachers. A totalitarian state manipulates the behavior of its citizens in an immoral or unethical way. All states control the behavior of their citizens, of course, but totalitarian states control people through coercion and the denial of rights and freedoms that we consider inviolable. As agents of the state, teachers and other school personnel obviously are in the business of controlling children's behavior. The issue for us as special educators is the extent to which our control techniques are morally and ethically defensible. We would like to control children's behavior in the interest of their individual happiness and self-realization in a humane society, not only in the interest of the state.
Molecular recognition of RNA: challenges for modelling interactions and plasticity

There is growing interest in molecular recognition processes of RNA because of RNA's widespread involvement in biological processes. Computational approaches are increasingly used for analysing and predicting binding to RNA, fuelled by encouraging progress in developing simulation, free energy and docking methods for nucleic acids. These developments take into account challenges regarding the energetics of RNA–ligand binding, RNA plasticity, and the presence of water molecules and ions in the binding interface. Accordingly, we will detail advances in force field and scoring function development for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, free energy computations and docking calculations of nucleic acid complexes. Furthermore, we present methods that can detect moving parts within RNA structures based on graph‐theoretical approaches or normal mode analysis (NMA). As an example of the successful use of these developments, we will discuss recent structure‐based drug design approaches that focus on the bacterial ribosomal A‐site RNA as a drug target. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The construction of the risk of falling among and by older people

Risk is frequently invoked in contemporary accounts of ill health, but its construction is often constrained by a rationalist perspective that focuses on physical causes and functional outcomes, and that presents risk as external to the self and predictable. This paper describes an empirical study of the ways in which risk was realised and managed in a day hospital for older people. An ethnographic approach, with participant observation and semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis were used to explore these issues with the staff and fifteen users. Whilst the service providers were orientated to the management of physical risk, as through the regimes for administering medication and their attention to risk reduction in the physical environment, the service users were more concerned with the risk to their personal and social identities, and they more frequently described its manifestations in inter-personal exchanges, sometimes as infantalisation and stereotyping. The paper develops this understanding of the potential for falls among older people to elucidate a broader interpretation of risk, and reveals that it is commonly constructed as a challenge to a person's self-image and identity. Such constructions help to explain older people's responses to complex health problems and to the services and treatments that attempt to solve them.
Deletion of the Toll-Like Receptor 5 Gene Per Se Does Not Determine the Gut Microbiome Profile That Induces Metabolic Syndrome: Environment Trumps Genotype

Over the past decade, emerging evidence has linked alterations in the gut microbial composition to a wide range of diseases including obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are the major mediators for the interactions between gut microbiota and host innate immune system, which is involved in the localization and structuring of host gut microbiota. A previous study found that TLR5 deficient mice (TLR5KO1) had altered gut microbial composition which led to the development of metabolic syndrome including hyperlipidemia, hypertension, insulin resistance and increased adiposity. In the current study, a second TLR5-deficient mouse model was studied (TLR5KO2). TLR5 deficient mice did not manifest metabolic abnormalities related to the metabolic syndrome compared with littermate controls maintained on normal chow or after feeding a high fat diet. Analysis of the gut microbial composition of littermate TLR5KO2 and wild type mice revealed no significant difference in the overall microbiota structure between genotypes. However, the TLR5KO2 microbiota was distinctly different from that previously reported for TLR5KO1 mice with metabolic syndrome. We conclude that an altered composition of the microbiota in a given environment can result in metabolic syndrome, but it is not a consequence of TLR5 deficiency per se.
Secure computation offloading based on social trust in mobile networks

In recent years, the researches on computation offloading have received significant attention. However, due to the long transmission distance, it could increase the network latency and energy consumption. Thus, several researchers proposed the computation offloading in mobile networks. That is, a mobile device could offload a time or energy consuming computation to other nearby mobile devices. However, the security issue in mobile networks becomes more difficult because there is no trust information between any two mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a secure computation offloading approach based on social trust in mobile networks. Moreover, the secure computation offloading based on social trust (SCOST) system is proposed to realize and evaluate the proposed approach.
Spoken Word Memory Traces within the Human Auditory Cortex Revealed by Repetition Priming and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Previous neuroimaging studies in the visual domain have shown that neurons along the perceptual processing pathway retain the physical properties of written words, faces, and objects. The aim of this study was to reveal the existence of similar neuronal properties within the human auditory cortex. Brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a repetition priming paradigm, with words and pseudowords heard in an acoustically degraded format. Both the amplitude and peak latency of the hemodynamic response (HR) were assessed to determine the nature of the neuronal signature of spoken word priming. A statistically significant stimulus type by repetition interaction was found in various bilateral auditory cortical areas, demonstrating either HR suppression and enhancement for repeated spoken words and pseudowords, respectively, or word-specific repetition suppression without any significant effects for pseudowords. Repetition latency shift only occurred with word-specific repetition suppression in the right middle/posterior superior temporal sulcus. In this region, both repetition suppression and latency shift were related to behavioral priming. Our findings highlight for the first time the existence of long-term spoken word memory traces within the human auditory cortex. The timescale of auditory information integration and the neuronal mechanisms underlying priming both appear to differ according to the level of representations coded by neurons. Repetition may “sharpen” word-nonspecific representations coding short temporal variations, whereas a complex interaction between the activation strength and temporal integration of neuronal activity may occur in neuronal populations coding word-specific representations within longer temporal windows.
An ergodic result for queue length processes of state-dependent queueing networks in the heavy-traffic diffusion limit

We consider state-dependent queueing networks in the heavy-traffic diffusion limit. Specifically, we consider queue length processes jointly satisfying a reflecting stochastic differential equation in the non-negative orthant with state-dependent drift vector and state-dependent diffusion and reflection matrices. Such state-dependence arises in queueing networks when the subjacent network parameters, such as arrival and service rates and routing probabilities, depend on the states of other queues in the network. For this class of networks, we provide a useful ergodicity criterium characterizing the main stability properties in such diffusion limit regime.
Anxiety, Stress-Related Factors, and Blood Pressure in Young Adults

Hypertension (HT) is a long-term medical condition characterized by persistently elevated blood pressure (BP) in the arterial vessels. Although HT initially is an asymptomatic condition, it chronically evolves into a major risk factor for cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and renal diseases that, in turn, represent crucial causes of morbidity and mortality in industrialized countries. HT is a complex disorder that is estimated to affect more than a quarter of the world’s adult population. It is classified on the basis of both its pathophysiology (primary and secondary HT) and on the resting BP values (elevated systolic, diastolic, and pulse pressure). It originates from a complicated interaction of genes and several environmental risk factors including aging, smoking, lack of exercise, overweight and obesity, elevated salt intake, stress, depression, and anxiety. Anxiety and depressive disorders are the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders, affecting millions of people each year and impairing every aspect of everyday life, both of them characterized by affective, cognitive, psychomotor, and neurovegetative symptoms. Moreover, work-related stress has been considered as an important risk factor for HT and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Although different authors have investigated and suggested possible relations between HT, stress, anxiety, and depression during the last decades, a full understanding of the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms has not been satisfactorily achieved, especially in young adults. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of anxiety and work-related stress in the development of HT amongst young health care profession students and the possible related consequences of early CVDs.
Shaogang Gong Part I Features and Representations 1 Discriminative Image Descriptors for Person Re-identification . . . . . 25 7 One-shot Person Re-identification with a Consumer Depth Camera . 163 List of Contributors the Re-identification Challenge

For making sense of the vast quantity of visual data generated by the rapid expansion of large scale distributed multi-camera systems, automated person re-identification is essential. However, it poses a significant challenge to computer vision systems. Fundamentally, person re-identification requires to solve two difficult problems of ‘finding needles in haystacks’ and ‘connecting the dots’ by identifying instances and associating the whereabouts of targeted people travelling across large distributed space-time locations in often crowded environments. This capability would enable the discovery of, and reasoning about, individual-specific long-term structured activities and behaviours. Solving the person re-identification problem is inherently challenging but promises enormous potential for a wide range of practical applications, ranging from security and surveillance to retail and healthcare. As a result, the field has drawn growing and wide interest from academic researchers and industrial developers. This chapter introduces the re-identification problem, highlights the difficulties in building person re-identification systems, and presents an overview of recent progress and the state-of-the-art approaches to solving some of the fundamental challenges in person re-identification, benefiting from research in computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning, and drawing insights from video analytics system design considerations for engineering practical solutions. It also provides an introduction to the contributing chapters of this book. The chapter ends by posing some open questions for the re-identification challenge arising from emerging and future applications. Shaogang Gong Queen Mary University of London. e-mail: sgg@eecs.qmul. ac.uk Marco Cristani University of Verona and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. e-mail: marco.cristani@univr.it Chen Change Loy The Chinese University of Hong Kong. e-mail: ccloy@ie.cuhk. edu.hk Timothy M. Hospedales Queen Mary University of London. e-mail: tmh@eecs.qmul. ac.uk