Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generation and Suppression of Radiation by Solitary Pulses

The description of the spatio-temporal dynamics of an extended active/dispersive medium, such as wave dynamics on a falling film, can be simplified considerably if the dynamics is dominated by a fixed number of solitary pulses separated by radiation-free flat substrates. Radiation is generated in a noise-free environment when excess mass drains out of a nonequilibrium (excited) pulse in the form of a spreading shelf and the radiation grows rapidly by feeding on the active substrate. However, this growth can be suppressed if the localized radiation packet is absorbed by a second pulse. It is shown that both the generation and suppression mechanisms can be quantitatively understood by analyzing the essential spectrum of the equilibrium pulse that determines how it attenuates an absorbed radiation wavepacket and a peculiar resonance pole that captures the drainage dynamics of an excited pulse. The instantaneous speed of a decaying pulse is shown to scale linearly with respect to its instantaneous amplitude a.
Immunogenic, but Not Steady-State, Antigen Presentation Permits Regulatory T-Cells To Control CD8+ T-Cell Effector Differentiation by IL-2 Modulation

Absorption of IL-2 is one proposed mechanism of CD4+CD25+FoxP3+ regulatory T cell (Treg) suppression. Direct in vivo experimental evidence for this has recently been obtained. While modulation of IL-2 bioavailability controls CD8+ T-cell effector differentiation under strongly immunogenic conditions it is not known whether Treg modulate CD8+ T cell responses through this mechanism under steady-state conditions. Here we assess this using a mouse model in which dendritic cells (DC) are manipulated to present cognate antigen to CD8+ T cells either in the steady-state or after activation. Our observations show that Treg exert a check on expansion and effector differentiation of CD8+ T cells under strongly immunogenic conditions associated with TLR ligand activation of DC, and this is mediated by limiting IL-2 availability. In contrast, when DC remain unactivated, depletion of Treg has little apparent effect on effector differentiation or IL-2 homeostasis. We conclude that while modulation of IL-2 homeostasis is an important mechanism through which Treg control CD8+ effector differentiation under immunogenic conditions, this mechanism plays little role in modulating CD8+ T-cell differentiation under steady-state conditions.
Quantization of presymplectic manifolds and circle actions

We prove several versions of "quantization commutes with reduction" for circle actions on manifolds that are not symplectic. Instead, these manifolds possess a weaker structure, such as a spinc structure. Our theorems work whenever the quantization data and the reduction data are compatible; this condition always holds if we start from a presymplectic (in particular, symplectic) manifold.
Three Essays on the Role of Teacher Working Conditions in Shaping Human Capital

Title of Document: THREE ESSAYS ON THE ROLE OF TEACHER WORKING CONDITIONS IN SHAPING HUMAN CAPITAL Cara Jackson, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professor Robert G. Croninger, Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership In recent years, education policy has increasingly focused on improving human capital as a strategy for school improvement. Many recent efforts to enhance the stock of human capital in schools have focused on holding individual teachers accountable for student outcomes, with little regard to the role of teachers’ working conditions in shaping human capital. Yet prior research by labor economists, organizational sociologists, and educational researchers indicates that working conditions can influence teachers’ choices about where to work, and some evidence suggests that aspects of the school environment may foster or inhibit effective teaching. In this dissertation I report the results of three studies that explore the relationship between working conditions in schools and three different expressions of human capital. I explore similar notions of working conditions across these studies to peruse how these working conditions relate to both educational opportunities, such as student access to quality high school mathematics teachers, and educational outcomes, including elementary school teachers’ effectiveness and novice teachers’ gains in effectiveness. In the first study, I use multilevel logistic regression to explore students’ access to quality teachers based on a nationally representative sample of ninth grade mathematics students. I find that ninth graders in schools with greater collegial support are more likely to have quality mathematics teachers. In the second study, I explore data on teachers of fourth and fifth grade students nested in schools in a large urban district and employ a two-level hierarchical model to examine the relationship between working conditions and teacher effectiveness. Average teacher effectiveness is higher, on average, in schools with strong data use and strategic decision-making and in which teachers perceive high level of collegial support. In the final study, I use the same data but limit the sample to early career teachers to examine how working conditions facilitate or impede gains in early career teachers’ effectiveness. I find that novice teachers have greater gains in effectiveness in English language arts in schools that are perceived by teachers as having strong learning communities. Novice teachers’ gains in effectiveness in mathematics are greater in schools with greater collegial support and data use. THREE ESSAYS ON THE ROLE OF TEACHER WORKING CONDITIONS IN SHAPING HUMAN CAPITAL
Dissecting German Grammar and Swiss Passports: Open-Domain Decomposition of Compositional Entries in Large-Scale Knowledge Repositories

This paper presents a weakly supervised method that decomposes potentially compositional topics (Swiss passport) into zero or more constituent topics (Switzerland, Passport), where all topics are entries in a knowledge repository. The method increases the connectivity of the knowledge repository and, more importantly, identifies the constituent topics whose meaning can be later aggregated into the meaning of the compositional topics. By exploiting evidence within Wikipedia articles, the method acquires constituent topics of Freebase topics at precision and recall above 0.60, over multiple human-annotated evaluation sets.
Forming the first planetary systems: debris around Galactic thick disc stars

The thick disc contains stars formed within the first Gyr of Galactic history, and little is known about their planetary systems. The Spitzer MIPS instrument was used to search 11 of the closest of these old low-metal stars for circumstellar debris, as a signpost that bodies at least as large as planetesimals were formed. A total of 22 thick disc stars has now been observed, after including archival data, but dust is not found in any of the systems. The data rule out a high incidence of debris among star systems from early in the Galaxy's formation. However, some stars of this very old population do host giant planets, at possibly more than the general incidence among low-metal Sun-like stars. As the Solar system contains gas giants but little cometary dust, the thick disc could host analogue systems that formed many Gyr before the Sun.
Inter-rater reliability of the Berg Balance Scale, 30 s chair stand test and 6 m walking test, and construct validity of the Berg Balance Scale in nursing home residents with mild-to-moderate dementia

Objective When testing physical function, patients must be alert and have the capacity to understand and respond to instructions. Patients with dementia may have difficulties fulfilling these requirements and, therefore, the reliability of the measures may be compromised. We aimed to assess the inter-rater reliability between pairs of observers independently rating the participant in the Berg Balance Scale (BBS), 30 s chair stand test (CST) and 6 m walking test. We also wanted to investigate the internal consistency of the BBS. Design Cross-sectional study. Setting We included 33 nursing home patients with a mild-to-moderate degree of dementia and tested them once with two evaluators present. One evaluator gave instructions and both evaluators scored the patients’ performance. Weighted κ, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) model 2.1 with 95% CIs and minimal detectable change (MDC) were used to measure inter-rater reliability. Cronbach's α was calculated to evaluate the internal consistency of the BBS sum score. Results The mean values of the BBS scored by the two evaluators were 38±13.7 and 38.0±13.8, respectively. Weighted κ scores for the BBS items varied from 0.83 to 1.0. ICC for the BBS's sum score was 0.99, and the MDC was 2.7% and 7%, respectively. The Cronbach’s α of the BBS's sum score was 0.9. The ICC of the CST and 6 m walking test was 1 and 0.97, respectively. The MDC on the 6 m walking test was 0.08% and 15.2%, respectively. Conclusions The results reveal an excellent relative inter-rater reliability of the BBS, CST and 6 m walking test as well as high internal consistency for the BBS in a population of nursing home residents with mild-to-moderate dementia. The absolute reliability was 2.7 on the BBS and 0.08 on the 6 m walking test.
Nucleation Parameters for Discrete Threshold Growth on Z2

Threshold Growth is a cellular automaton on an integer lattice in which the occupied set grows according to a simple local rule: a site becomes occupied if and only if it sees at least a threshold number of previously occupied sites in its prescribed neighborhood. We study the minimal number of sites that these dynamics need for persistent growth in two dimensions.
Microwave Assisted Suzuki-Miyaura and Ullmann Type Homocoupling Reactions of 2- and 3-Halopyridines Using a Pd(OAc)2/Benzimidazolium Salt and Base Catalyst System

A number of novel benzimidazole derivatives 1–4 were synthesized and the catalytic activity of these compounds in a catalytic system consisting of a benzimidazolium salt/Pd(OAc)2/K2CO3 were investigated in the Suzuki-Miyaura and Ullmann type homocoupling reactions under microwave irradiation. We obtained both cross coupling and homocoupling products of pyridine and some side products such as dimethylaminopyridine and unsubstituted pyridine.
Reducing the Risks of Spotted Wilt Virus in Tobacco with Selected Thrips (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) Control Practices 1

Tomato spotted wilt tospovirus (TSWV) is a major economic threat to tobacco production in Georgia. Several thrips species are reported as vectors of TSWV, and three of these species are observed on Georgia tobacco, Frankliniella fusca (Hinds), F. occidentalis (Pergande), and F. bispinosa (Mor- gan). This study evaluated several thrips control practices for efficacy and suppressing the incidence of TSWV. Five replicated field trials were conducted in 1999 and 2000 to examine acephate, imidacloprid, acibenzolar-S-methyl, spinosad, dichloropropene, chlorpyrifos, thiamethoxan, alone, and in various combinations, applied as preplant incorporated, tray drench, transplant water, or foliar treatments. The insecticides imidacloprid and thiamethoxan applied as a greenhouse tray drench or as a transplant water treatment, were effective in reducing the seasonal incidence of TSWV and imidacloprid was also effec- tive in reducing thrips populations. The plant activator, acibenzolar-S-methyl, was effective in suppressing TSWV symptoms, but had little effect on thrips. The combination of acibenzolar-S-methyl with imidacloprid provided better suppression of TSWV than either product alone. Early-season foliar spray so f acephate also was effective in reducing thrips numbers and TSWV. Dichloro- propene, chlorpyrifos and spinosad were not effective for thrips control or TSWV suppression. F. fusca was the predominate thrips species on tobacco foliage, ranging from 82.7-94.9% of the thrips complex. Only 4.6% and 1.2% of the thrips specimen were confirmed as vectors of TSWV in 1999 and 2000, respectively, based on enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay test results. Imi- dacloprid, thiamethoxan, acibenzolar-S-methyl, and acephate do provide thrips control options that can reduce TSWV in tobacco, and these materials are labeled for tobacco.
Adaptive Indexing over Encrypted Numeric Data

Today, outsourcing query processing tasks to remote cloud servers becomes a viable option; such outsourcing calls for encrypting data stored at the server so as to render it secure against eavesdropping adversaries and/or an honest-but-curious server itself. At the same time, to be efficiently managed, outsourced data should be indexed, and even adaptively so, as a side-effect of query processing. Computationally heavy encryption schemes render such outsourcing unattractive; an alternative, Order-Preserving Encryption Scheme (OPES), intentionally preserves and reveals the order in the data, hence is unattractive from the security viewpoint. In this paper, we propose and analyze a scheme for lightweight and indexable encryption, based on linear-algebra operations. Our scheme provides higher security than OPES and allows for range and point queries to be efficiently evaluated over encrypted numeric data, with decryption performed at the client side. We implement a prototype that performs incremental, query-triggered adaptive indexing over encrypted numeric data based on this scheme, without leaking order information in advance, and without prohibitive overhead, as our extensive experimental study demonstrates.
Bubble clusters: an interface for manipulating spatial aggregation of graphical objects

Spatial layout is frequently used for managing loosely organized information, such as desktop icons and digital ink. To help users organize this type of information efficiently, we propose an interface for manipulating spatial aggregations of objects. The aggregated objects are automatically recognized as a group, and the group structure is visualized as a two-dimensional bubble surface that surrounds the objects. Users can drag, copy, or delete a group by operating on the bubble. Furthermore, to help pick out individual objects in a dense aggregation, the system spreads the objects to avoid overlapping when requested. This paper describes the design of this interface and its implementation. We tested our technique in icon grouping and ink relocation tasks and observed improvements in user performance.
Foil-Level Inkjet-Printed pyroMEMS Balloon Actuators: Fabrication, Modeling, and Validation

A cleanroom-free fabrication process adapted to microfluidic devices is presented for pyrotechnical microelectromechanical systems balloon actuators. The actuators are intended for on-chip pumping and fluid ejection to replace tabletop pumping solutions in low-cost portable single-use microfluidic devices. The fabrication process leveraged polymeric foils (polyethylene terephthalate, SU-8, polydimethylsiloxane) for the structure, directly bonded using surface treatments, heat and pressure, and inkjet printing and electroplating for the igniter. This paper also presents a semianalytical model that successfully predicted the inflation height of the balloon for a given device geometry and propellant loading.
JShield: towards real-time and vulnerability-based detection of polluted drive-by download attacks

Drive-by download attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities of web browsers to control client computers, have become a major venue for attackers. To detect such attacks, researchers have proposed many approaches such as anomaly-based [22, 23] and vulnerability-based [44, 50] detections. However, anomaly-based approaches are vulnerable to data pollution, and existing vulnerability-based approaches cannot accurately describe the vulnerability condition of all the drive-by download attacks. In this paper, we propose a vulnerability-based approach, namely JShield, which uses novel opcode vulnerability signature, a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) with a variable pool at opcode level, to match drive-by download vulnerabilities. We investigate all the JavaScript engine vulnerabilities of web browsers from 2009 to 2014, as well as those of portable document files (PDF) readers from 2007 to 2014. JShield is able to match all of those vulnerabilities; furthermore, the overall evaluation shows that JShield is so lightweight that it only adds 2.39 percent of overhead to original execution as the median among top 500 Alexa web sites.
A Nonlinear Downlink Multiuser MIMO-OFDM Systems

This letter analyzes the impact of transmitter nonlinearity on a multiuser (MU) multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. A single value decomposition-based multiuser decomposition technique has been used to mitigate the interference between different users. It has been shown that the nonlinear distortion caused due to transmitter nonlinearity considerably degrades the performance of MU-MIMO-OFDM system and is a function of number of users. Further, this nonlinear distortion also introduces an irreducible error floor thus limiting the gains of MU-MIMO-OFDM system as compared to single user MIMO-OFDM system.
Video microblogging: your 12 seconds of fame

Microblogging is a recently popular phenomenon and with the increasing trend for video cameras to be built into mobile phones, a new type of microblogging has entered the arena of electronic communication: video microblogging. In this study we examine video microblogging, which is the broadcasting of short videos. A series of semi-structured interviews offers an understanding of why and how video microblogging is used and what the users post and broadcast.
Atorvastatin-related thrombocytopenic purpura

A 44-year-old male patient with a single vessel ischaemic heart disease was referred to the lipid clinic for management of hypercholesterolaemia after an episode of admission with thrombocytopenic purpura secondary to atorvastatin. Atorvastatin was discontinued and his platelet counts improved gradually with steroids. He is now established on a different statin with no further episodes of thrombocytopenia. Though a drug challenge was never done, an idiosyncratic reaction to the initial statin seems to be the most likely cause.
Fertility expectations and residential mobility in Britain

BACKGROUND It is plausible that people take into account anticipated changes in family size in choosing where to live. But estimation of the impact of anticipated events on current transitions in an event history framework is challenging because expectations must be measured in some way and, like indicators of past childbearing, expected future childbearing may be endogenous with respect to housing decisions. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study is to estimate how expected changes in family size affect residential movement in Great Britain in a way which addresses these challenges. METHODS We use longitudinal data from a mature 18-wave panel survey, the British Household Panel Survey, which incorporates a direct measure of fertility expectations. The statistical methods allow for the potential endogeneity of expectations in our estimation and testing framework. RESULTS We produce evidence consistent with the idea that past childbearing mainly affects residential mobility through expectations of future childbearing, not directly through the number of children in the household. But there is heterogeneity in response. In particular, fertility expectations have a much greater effect on mobility among women who face lower costs of mobility, such as private tenants. CONCLUSIONS Our estimates indicate that expecting to have a(nother) child in the future increases the probability of moving by about 0.036 on average, relative to an average mobility rate of 0.14 per annum in our sample. Contribution: Our contribution is to incorporate anticipation of future events into an empirical model of residential mobility. We also shed light on how childbearing affects mobility.
Skeleton boxes: Solving skeleton based action detection with a single deep convolutional neural network

Action recognition from well-segmented 3D skeleton video has been intensively studied. However, due to the difficulty in representing the 3D skeleton video and the lack of training data, action detection from streaming 3D skeleton video still lags far behind its recognition counterpart and image-based object detection. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for this problem, which leverages both effective skeleton video encoding and deep regression based object detection from images. Our framework consists of two parts: skeleton-based video image mapping, which encodes a skeleton video to a color image in a temporal preserving way, and an end-to-end trainable fast skeleton action detector (Skeleton Boxes) based on image detection. Experimental results on the latest and largest PKU-MMD benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with a large margin. We believe our idea would inspire and benefit future research in this important area.
Modeling Passenger Travel and Delays in the National Air Transportation System

Many of the existing methods for evaluating an airline's on-time performance are based on flight-centric measures of delay. However, recent research has demonstrated that passenger delays depend on many factors in addition to flight delays. For instance, significant passenger delays result from flight cancellations and missed connections, which themselves depend on a significant number of factors. Unfortunately, lack of publicly available passenger travel data has made it difficult for researchers to explore the nature of these relationships. In this paper, we develop methodologies to model historical travel and delays for U.S. domestic passengers. We develop a multinomial logit model for estimating historical passenger travel and extend a previously developed greedy reaccommodation heuristic for estimating the resulting passenger delays. We report and analyze the estimated passenger delays for calendar year 2007, developing insights into factors that affect the performance of the National Air Transportat.
Information-theoretic analysis and prediction of protein atomic burials: on the search for an informational intermediate between sequence and structure

MOTIVATION It has been recently suggested that atomic burials, as expressed by molecular central distances, contain sufficient information to determine the tertiary structure of small globular proteins. A possible approach to structural determination from sequence could therefore involve a sequence-to-burial intermediate prediction step whose accuracy, however, is theoretically limited by the mutual information between these two variables. We use a non-redundant set of globular protein structures to estimate the mutual information between local amino acid sequence and atomic burials. Discretizing central distances of or atoms in equiprobable burial levels, we estimate relevant mutual information measures that are compared with actual predictions obtained from a Naive Bayesian Classifier (NBC) and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). RESULTS Mutual information density for 20 amino acids and two or three burial levels were estimated to be roughly 15% of the unconditional burial entropy density. Lower estimates for the mutual information between local amino acid sequence and burial of a single residue indicated an increase in mutual information with the number of burial levels up to at least five or six levels. Prediction schemes were found to efficiently extract the available burial information from local sequence. Lower estimates for the mutual information involving single burials are consistently approached by predictions from the NBC and actually surpassed by predictions from the HMM. Near-optimal prediction for the HMM is indicated by the agreement between its density of prediction information and the corresponding density of mutual information between input and output representations. AVAILABILITY The dataset of protein structures and the prediction implementations are available at http://www.btc. unb.br/ (in 'Software').