Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preparing Data for Urban Traffic Simulation using SUMO

The ever increasing world population, added to the always present need of human transportation, makes road traffic in the big cities a huge and urgent issue, and, consequently, the target of substantial investigation. This paper introduces the first task of a larger project called COSMO. Using the city of Coimbra as the base, the goal of this project is to simulate the city traffic using a microtraffic simulator. For that, the SUMO platform was used and different experiments were conducted varying the number of cars being simulated, as well as other variables. At the end, the results show that the selected simulator was capable of simulating the Coimbra urban traffic in a realistic fashion, using an origindestination matrix based on real data and routing algorithms. These results show that the simulator can be used in future works related to urban traffic, namely in road network management.
Body mass and 26-year risk of mortality among women who never smoked: findings from the Adventist Mortality Study.

The authors have examined the relation between the Quetelet body mass index (BMI) and 26-year risk of all-cause mortality in a population of 12,576 non-Hispanic while, Seventh-day Adventist women (ages 30-74 years) who never smoked. Mortality risk for each BMI quintile (I, < 21.3 kg/m2; II, 21.3-22.9 kg/m2; III, 23.0-24.8 kg/m2; IV, 24.9-27.4 kg/m2; and V, > 27.4 kg/m2) was determined from a proportional hazard regression with adjustment for age and other covariables. In this population, the overall BMI-mortality relation showed dependence on age, duration of follow-up, and baseline indicators of preexisting illness (weight fluctuation, history of major chronic disease, and severe physical complaints). Therefore, the analysis focused on women with no indicators of preexisting illness, and risk estimates were stratified by age at baseline and duration of follow-up. Among middle-aged women (ages 30-54 years), the authors found a weak linear relation during years 1-8 (median attained age, 51 years), a significant linear relation during years 9-14 (median attained age, 57 years), and a significant nonlinear (U-shaped) relation during years 15-26 (median attained age, 68 years). Among older women (ages 55-74 years), they found a significant nonlinear (U-shaped) relation during years 1-8 (median attained age, 71 years) and significant linear relations during years 9-14 (median attained age, 77 years) and years 15-26 (median attained age, 87 years). These findings implicate overweight as a risk factor for fatal disease among women throughout adulthood and raise the possibility that lean, apparently healthy, middle-aged women may experience a higher risk of death during old age due to their lower body weight.
Technical diagnostics and monitoring based on capabilities of wavelet transforms and relaxation neural networks

A technology for technical diagnostics based on the multivariate analysis of system status is under consideration. It combines the capabilities of wavelet transforms and relaxation neural networks. Important practical advantages of the proposed technique include the capability to recognise damage using only a few training patterns and the possibility to apply the method for non-stationary input diagnostic signals. Recognition of damage in dynamic suppressors attached to an aircraft panel is presented as an example.
Managing Complex Educational Change: Large Scale Reorganisation of Schools

Why is educational change becoming more complex? Are there patterns in this complexity? How may managers cope effectively with complex educational change? This book investigates initiatives to reorganise school systems, involving highly emotive closures and mergers. It reveals how reorganisation was a complex change to manage because it was large-scale, componential, systematic, differentially impacting and context dependent. These characteristics affected management tasks, generating ambiguity in the change process that limited managers' capacity to control it. The authors offer four management themes as realistic strategies for coping with complex educational change: orchestration flexible planning and coordination culture building and communication differentiated support Managing Complex Educational Change is essential reading for all concerned with educational change - managers in schools and colleges, students on advanced courses, trainers, local and regional administrators, academics and policy makers. The research has general implications for the theory and practice of managing complex change.
Association of gut inflammation with increased serum IgA class Klebsiella antibody concentrations in patients with axial ankylosing spondylitis (AS): implication for different aetiopathogenetic mechanisms for axial and peripheral AS?

OBJECTIVES A role for Klebsiella pneumoniaein ankylosing spondylitis (AS) has been suggested because faecal carriage of Klebsiella and serum Klebsiella specific antibodies may be increased in this disease. This study has extended the earlier findings by comparing Klebsiella specific serum IgA class antibodies with inflammatory changes in the gut. METHODS IgA antibodies to K pneumoniae, Escherichia coli, and Proteus mirabilis in serum samples of 25 patients with AS, of eight control patients, and of 100 healthy blood donors were measured by enzyme immunoassay. Gut inflammation of the patients was studied by ileocolonoscopy. RESULTS Increased IgA antibody concentrations toK pneumoniae associated with gut inflammation in patients with axial form of AS. Such association was not seen in patients with peripheral form of AS. CONCLUSIONS These findings may provide further evidence for the role of K pneumoniae in the pathogenesis of AS. However, at least some of the patients with axial AS without gut inflammation, as well as patients with peripheral AS did not have increased K pneumoniae antibody concentrations, which may be regarded as evidence against the direct role of K pneumoniae in the pathogenesis. The aetiopathogenetic mechanisms in the axial and peripheral form of AS may be different.
Duality in Perceptual Organization: Grouping vs. Shape Decompostion

Bounding contours of physical objects are often fragmented by other occluding objects. This creates the need for perceptual grouping, or the association of those fragments corresponding to the same object. Our guiding principle suggests that those fragments should be grouped whose fragmentation can be accounted for by a virtual occluder, and we de ne the gap skeleton as a representation of this occluder. A di erent perspective on gap skeleton is then obtained in the domain of shape decomposition, where ligature emerges as the analog to gap skeleton. This leads to a new de nition of a limb as a formal part, and suggests that both grouping and shape decomposition share a common basis.
Communicating risks to the public : international perspectives

Risk communication: the evolution of attempts. - I: Risk Communication Practices. - 1. Risk communication in Europe: Ways of implementing art. 8 of the post-Seveso directive. - 2. Active and passive provision of risk information in the Netherlands. - 3. Developing communications about risks of major industrial accidents in the Netherlands. - 4. Rights and duties concerning the availability of environmental risk information to the public. - 5. Risk comparisons and risk communication: Issues and problems in comparing health and environmental risks. - II: Research Perspectives on Risk Communication Practices. - 6. Contaminated soil: public reactions, policy decisions, and risk communication. - 7. Prior knowledge and risk communication: The case of nuclear radiation and X-rays. - 8. The role of the media in risk communication. - 9. Credibility and trust in risk communication. - 10. How people might process medical information: A 'mental model' perspective on the use of package inserts. - 11. Communicating about pesticides in drinking water. - 12. The time dimension in perception and communication of risk. - 13. Risk communication and the social amplification of risk. - III: New Approaches and Methods. - 14. Hazard images, evaluations and political action: The case of toxic waste incineration. - 15. The danger culture of industrial society. - 16. Risk communication in emergencies. - 17. Risk communication: The need for a broader perspective. - 18. Small group studies of regulatory decision making for power-frequency electric and magnetic fields. - 19. Strategies of risk communication: Observations from two participatory experiments.
The tangled nature model as an evolving quasi-species model

We show that the tangled nature model can be interpreted as a general formulation of the quasi-species model by Eigen et al in a frequency-dependent fitness landscape. We present a detailed theoretical derivation of the mutation threshold, consistent with the simulation results, that provides a valuable insight into how the microscopic dynamics of the model determines the observed macroscopic phenomena published previously. The dynamics of the tangled nature model is defined on the microevolutionary time scale via reproduction, with heredity, variation and natural selection. Each organism reproduces at a rate that is linked to the individuals' genetic sequence and depends on the composition of the population in genotype space. Thus the microevolutionary dynamics of the fitness landscape is regulated by, and regulates, the evolution of the species by means of the mutual interactions. At low mutation rate, the macroevolutionary pattern mimics the fossil data: periods of stasis, where the population is concentrated in a network of coexisting species, are interrupted by bursts of activity. As the mutation rate increases, the duration and the frequency of bursts increase. Eventually, when the mutation rate reaches a certain threshold, the population is spread evenly throughout the genotype space showing that natural selection only leads to multiple distinct species if adaptation is allowed time to cause fixation.
Robust volume minimization-based matrix factorization via alternating optimization

This paper focuses on volume minimization (VolMin)-based structured matrix factorization (SMF), which factors a data matrix into a full-column rank basis and a coefficient matrix whose columns reside in the unit simplex. The VolMin criterion achieves this goal via finding a minimum-volume enclosing convex hull of the data. Recent works showed that VolMin guarantees the identifiability of the factor matrices under mild and realistic conditions, which suit many applications in signal processing and machine learning. However, the existing VolMin algorithms are sensitive to outliers or lack efficiency in dealing with volume-associated cost functions. In this work, we propose a new VolMin-based matrix factorization criterion and algorithm that take outliers into consideration. The proposed algorithm detects outliers and suppress them automatically, and it does so in an algorithmically very simple way. Simulations are used to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Estimating a Wage Curve for Britain 1973-1990

Following Phillip's original work on the UK, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper adopts a different approach. It uses microeconomic data on 175,000 British workers from 1973-1990 to provide evidence for the existence of a negatively sloped relationship linking the level of pay to the local rate of unemployment. This 'wage curve' is found to have an elasticity of approximately -0.1. Contrary to the Phillips Curve, no autoregression is found in wages. The paper casts doubt on standard ideas in macroeconomics, regional economics and labour economics.
Shaken, Not Stirred: The Re‐combinatorial Capacity of High‐Tech Regions

This paper examines the re‐combinatorial capacity (RCC) of regional high‐tech economies. Empirically the paper studies the emergence and development of new firms derived in various forms from a downsizing lead pharmaceutical firm (Pharmacia). A model is developed conceptualizing RCC of regions by the levels of business creation obtained at different levels of asset complexity for given levels of decomposition of available resources. RCC of Pharmacia's home region (Stockholm–Uppsala) is characterized by mapping all 75 new firms derived from Pharmacia onto the RCC space, revealing low RCC particularly for resources released from Pharmacia in highly decomposed form. Recombinations whereby managers from Pharmacia and other related incumbents become founders of new bio drug discovery firms (DDFs) come out as particularly scarce when benchmarked against the simultaneous emergence of a DDF sector in the otherwise comparable Copenhagen region. Venture capital is argued to be a key mechanism in RCC affecting high‐tech entrepreneurship. We test and confirm that compared to their Copenhagen counterpart, DDFs in the Stockholm–Uppsala region received much less early stage venture financing which therefore provided notable disincentives for re‐combinatorial manager‐to‐founder transitions.
Licking and C-Fos Expression in the Dorsal Horn of the Spinal Cord After the Formalin Test

We investigated whether c-fos expression in the dorsal horn is affected by licking in the formalin test. Thirty adult Sprague-Dawley rats were divided into 5 groups of 6 rats each: a free condition control (Free Cont) group, formalin test under free condition (Free F-test) group, scrub stimulation under free condition (Free Scrub) group, restrained condition control (Restricted Cont) group, and formalin test under restrained condition (Restricted F-test) group. Animals in the three free condition groups and two restricted groups were put in a clear plastic chamber and a restraining chamber, respectively. Ten percent formalin was injected into the left rear paw in the Free and Restricted F-test groups. Animals in the Free Scrub group were scrubbed on the left rear paw with a wet cotton swab. The Free Cont, Restricted Cont, and Free Scrub groups showed little c-fos expression. The number of c-fos positive cells in the ipsilateral surface dorsal horn of the Restricted F-test group was significantly less than that of the Free F-test group (P < 0.05). The results indicated that the licking action increased c-fos expression of the lumbar dorsal horn in the formalin test.
The World of the Policy Analyst: Rationality, Values, and Politics

Introduction 1. The Emergence of a Field The Historical Background From Technique to Policy Analysis The Analyst in the Policy Process 2. Rationality and Decision Making Policy Analysis: A Thumbnail Sketch Ideology and Policy Analysis How Policy Analysis Is Used Policy Analysis: Techniques, Values, and Effects The Policy Process Policy Analysis and the Policy Process 3. The Cultural Setting of Policy Analysis Liberty and Equality: The Politics of Conscience and the Politics of Interest Conscience and Interest in Ethical Theory The Politics of Conscience Today The Politics of Interest Equality and Public Policy Cleavage within the Politics of Conscience 4. Ethics and Public Policy Analysis Deontology and Utilitarianism Casuistry Some Cases 5. American Democracy and the Fragmentation of Consensus The "New Class" and Postmaterial Values What Have You Done for Me Lately? Realignment, Dealignment, or What? The Party Organization: Resurrection or Requiem? The Policy Process 6. Policy Analysis and the Political Arena An Incremental Policy Process A Fragmented Congress: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same The Presidency: The Problem of Fragmentation in the "Leadership" Branch The Crisis of Fragmented Government: The Loss of Fiscal Discipline Policy Analysis and Political Uncertainty 7. Policy Devolution and Policy Analysis A National Policy Focus Increasing State Influence The 1994 Elections State Policy Initiatives Private-Sector Policy Groups Think Tanks and Policy Analysis The Policy Analyst in the Private Sector An Expanded Policy Arena: Prospects and Concerns 8. Policy Analysis in the Judicial Process The Judicial Process Approaches to Legal Reasoning Sources of Judicial Activism Examples of Judicial Activism: Social and Technological Change The Limits of Judicial Power 9. Conclusion Structural Reform Anticipating the Policy Process Moving Toward the Public Good
Information and Food Prices

This paper uses a model of search to derive testable hypotheses about the relationships among the distributions of prices which prevail in areas whose residents have different income levels. The hypotheses are examined by using data obtained from a comprehensive survey of food prices conducted in New York City during the summer of 1967. As expected on the basis of the theoretical analysis the partial elasticity of search for lower prices of the ith commodity by residents of the jth regions with respect to the income of the residents of region j was found to be an increasing function of the income elasticities of the various commodities, even when search activity is approximated by the means and standard deviations of prevailing prices.
Tax Aggressiveness and Accounting Fraud

There are competing arguments and mixed prior evidence on whether firms that are aggressive in their financial reporting exhibit more or less tax aggressiveness. Our research contributes to resolving this issue by examining the association between aggressive tax reporting and the incidence of alleged accounting fraud. Relying on several proxies for tax aggressiveness to triangulate our evidence, we generally find that tax aggressive U.S. public firms are less likely to commit accounting fraud. However, we caution that our results are sensitive to how tax aggressiveness is measured. More specifically, four (two) of the five (three) proxies for firms’ effective tax rates (book-tax differences) load positively (negatively) during the 1981-2001 period, implying that fraud firms are less tax aggressiveness. Our inferences persist when we isolate the 1995-2001 period in which accounting impropriety steeply rose and corporate tax compliance steeply fell. Moreover, we continue to find that tax aggressive firms are less apt to fraudulently manipulate their financial statements when we apply factor analysis to identify tax avoidance with a common factor extracted from the underlying proxies and match on propensity scores to ensure that the fraud and non-fraud samples have very similar non-tax characteristics.
Performance Evaluation of Edge Detection Techniques for Images in Spatial Domain

Abstract —Edges characterize boundaries and are therefore considered for prime importance in image processing. Edge detection filters out useless data, noise and frequencies while preserving the important structural properties in an image. Since edge detection is in the forefront of image processing for object detection, it is crucial to have a good understanding of edge detection methods. In this paper the comparative analysis of various Image Edge Detection methods is presented. The evidence for the best detector type is judged by studying the edge maps relative to each other through statistical evaluation. Upon this evaluation, an edge detection method can be employed to characterize edges to represent the image for further analysis and implementation. It has been shown that the Canny’s edge detection algorithm performs better than all these operators under almost all scenarios. Index Terms —About four key words or phrases in alphabetical order, separated by commas. I. I NTRODUCTION
Large deviations for random projections of $\ell^p$ balls

Let $p\in[1,\infty]$. Consider the projection of a uniform random vector from a suitably normalized $\ell^p$ ball in $\mathbb{R}^n$ onto an independent random vector from the unit sphere. We show that sequences of such random projections, when suitably normalized, satisfy a large deviation principle (LDP) as the dimension $n$ goes to $\infty$, which can be viewed as an annealed LDP. We also establish a quenched LDP (conditioned on a fixed sequence of projection directions) and show that for $p\in(1,\infty]$ (but not for $p=1$), the corresponding rate function is "universal", in the sense that it coincides for "almost every" sequence of projection directions. We also analyze some exceptional sequences of directions in the "measure zero" set, including the directions corresponding to the classical Cram\'er's theorem, and show that those directions yield LDPs with rate functions that are distinct from the universal rate function of the quenched LDP. Lastly, we identify a variational formula that relates the annealed and quenched LDPs, and analyze the minimizer of this variational formula. These large deviation results complement the central limit theorem for convex sets, specialized to the case of sequences of $\ell^p$ balls.
HDFS Scalability: The Limits to Growth

The Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) is an open source system currently being used in situations where massive amounts of data need to be processed. Based on experience with the largest deployment of HDFS, I provide an analysis of how the amount of RAM of a single namespace server correlates with the storage capacity of Hadoop clusters, outline the advantages of the single-node namespace server architecture for linear performance scaling, and establish practical limits of growth for this architecture. This study may be applicable to issues with other distributed file systems.
Upregulation of APP, ADAM10 and ADAM17 in the Denervated Mouse Dentate Gyrus

The disintegrin and metalloproteinases ADAM10 and ADAM17 are regarded as the most important α-secretases involved in the physiological processing of amyloid precursor protein (APP) in brain. Since it has been suggested that processing of APP by α-secretases could be involved in the reorganization of the brain following injury, we studied mRNA expression of the two α-secretases Adam10 and Adam17, the ß-secretase Bace1, and the App-gene family (App, Aplp1, Aplp2) in the dentate gyrus of the mouse following entorhinal denervation. Using laser microdissection, tissue was harvested from the outer molecular layer and the granule cell layer of the denervated dentate gyrus. Expression levels of candidate genes were assessed using Affymetrix GeneChip Mouse Gene 1.0 ST arrays and reverse transcription-quantitative PCR, revealing an upregulation of Adam10 mRNA and Adam17 mRNA in the denervated outer molecular layer and an upregulation of Adam10 mRNA and App mRNA in the dentate granule cell layer. Immunolabeling for ADAM10 or ADAM17 in combination with markers for astro- and microglia revealed an increased labeling of ADAM10 and ADAM17 in the denervated outer molecular layer that was associated with reactive astrocytes but not with microglia. Collectively, these data show that denervation affects the expression level of APP and its two most important α-secretases. This suggests that APP-processing could be shifted towards the non-amyloidogenic pathway in denervated areas of the brain and, thus, towards the formation of neuroprotective APP cleavage products, such as APPsα.
Measurement of bandgap energies in low-k organosilicates

In this work, experimental measurements of the electronic band gap of low-k organosilicate dielectrics will be presented and discussed. The measurement of bandgap energies of organosilicates will be made by examining the onset of inelastic energy loss in core-level atomic spectra using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. This energy serves as a reference point from which many other facets of the material can be understood, such as the location and presence of defect states in the bulk or at the interface. A comparison with other measurement techniques reported in the literature is presented.