Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Topological Monodromy of an Integrable Heisenberg Spin Chain

We investigate topological properties of a completely integrable system on S 2 S 2 S 2 which was recently shown to have a Lagrangian fiber diffeomorphic to RP 3 not displaceable by a Hamiltonian isotopy (Oakley J., Ph.D. Thesis, University of Georgia, 2014). This system can be viewed as integrating the determinant, or alternatively, as integrating a classical Heisenberg spin chain. We show that the system has non-trivial topological monodromy and relate this to the geometric interpretation of its integrals.
A Methodology for the Use of the Teleo-Reactive Programming Technique in Autonomic Computing

Previous work on the use of the Teleo-Reactive technique in high level software development has shown it to be a viable approach for autonomic systems. A T-R program can recover from unexpected events without knowing the underlying source or cause of the problem and thus reduces the maintenance costs of software projects where unexpected events are a likely and frequent occurrence. Previous work has also highlighted the difficult nature of designing and structuring the high level logic in a T-R program and so this work aims to reduce the problem by providing a software engineering strategy that will both drive the program development and reduce the occurrence of logic problems.
Negative regulation of Bmi-1 by AMPK and implication in cancer progression

Bmi-1 is a transcriptional regulator that promotes tumor cell self-renewal and epithelial to mesenchymal transition and its upregulation is associated with tumor progression, AMPK is an intracellular fuel-sensing enzyme and plays important roles in tumor cell growth and progression. Thus, the present study aims to examine the regulation of Bmi-1 by AMPK. First, our data revealed that, as compared to adjacent normal tissue, Bmi-1 was highly expressed in gastric cancer, whereas phosphorylation of AMPK (p-AMPK) was reduced. Similar findings were observed in lung adenocarcinomas and appeared that the expression of Bmi-1 was correlated with pathological grades of the cancer, where opposite changes were found in p-AMPK. Second, Metformin, a pharmacological AMPK activator and anti-diabetic drug, or ectopic expression of LKB1, diminished expression of Bmi-1 in cancer cells, an event that was reversed by silencing LKB1. Third, knockdown of LITAF, previously identified as a downstream target of AMPK, upregulated Bmi-1, associated with increased cell viability, colony formation, and migration of cancer cells in vitro. Fourth, metformin increased the abundance of miR-15a, miR-128, miR-192, and miR-194, which was prevented by knockdown of LITAF. Accordingly, transfection of these individual miRNAs downregulated Bmi-1. Altogether, our data for the first time suggest a regulatory axis in cancer cells: AMPK upregulates LITAF, which in turn increases miRNAs, leading to attenuation of Bmi-1 expression.
How is participation related to well-being of homeless people? An explorative qualitative study in a Dutch homeless shelter facility

ABSTRACT The majority of homeless people is socially excluded which negatively affects their well-being. Therefore, participation-based programs are needed. The current research is conducted within a Dutch homeless shelter facility that offers educational, recreational, and labor activities to clients in an environment which is designed to feel safe (an enabling niche). The main aim of these activities is to facilitate social participation. We conducted two qualitative studies consisting of 16 semi-structured interviews, to explore clients’ experiences with participation in activities in relation to their well-being. The findings showed that clients experienced that participation had led to an improvement of physical, social, and mental well-being. In general, clients reported that due to participation in activities they have strengthened their social support network, improved their (mental and physical) health, self-esteem and personal growth. We concluded that in order to facilitate long-term positive outcomes of participation in practice, it is necessary to focus on group cohesion, and on the social worker’s behavior and attitude.
Capabilities for strategic flexibility: a cognitive content framework

Different forms of strategic flexibility allow for reactive adaptation to different changing environments and the proactive driving of change. It is therefore becoming increasingly important for decision makers to not only possess marketing capabilities, but also the capabilities for strategic flexibility in its various forms. However, our knowledge of the relationships between decision makers' different ways of thinking and their capabilities for strategic flexibility is limited. This limitation is constraining research and understanding. In this article we develop a theoretical cognitive content framework that postulates relationships between different ways of thinking about strategy and different information‐processing demands. We then outline how the contrasting beliefs of decision makers may influence their capabilities to generate different hybrid forms of strategic flexibility at the cognitive level. Theoretically, the framework is embedded in resource‐based theory, personal construct theory and schema theory. The implications for research and theory are discussed.
Early adversity, psychosis risk and brain response to faces

Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders are severe and disabling mental disorders that break out during early adulthood, often when a person is in his/her early 20s. Furthermore, functional decline in many cognitive areas, including the ability to communicate in social interactions and impaired facial expression recognition, is typical to patients with schizophrenia. Understanding the risk factors of psychosis is essential as these disorders may be more amenable to treatment in their early stages. However, recognition of those at the highest risk of psychosis is challenging as no definitive biomarkers are available. Functional MRI is a promising tool that can potentially identify neural signals relating to the individual’s risk of psychosis onset. Psychotic disorders are etiologically heterogeneous disorders — both environmental and genetic factors have been linked to the onset of psychotic disorders. The most influential risk factor for a psychotic disorder is familial risk with genetic loading. The present study examines whether familial risk of psychosis (FR), the polygenic risk score for schizophrenia (PRS) and early adversity associate with brain response to faces. We used fMRI to measure blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response to faces. Our study showed that FR associated with deviant prefrontal cortex BOLD responses. In addition, we detected that interregional BOLD signal and grey matter volume varied as a function of PRS; the lowest functional and structural covariance was detected in individuals with high PRS. We also detected that early adversities associated with brain response to faces and that this association varied as a function of glucocorticoid receptor gene expression. Our findings indicate that the above risk factors of psychosis associate with brain response to faces.
Substance use preferences and sexually transmitted infections among Canadian post-secondary students

Background In Canada, substance use is one of the key predisposing factors that may lead to risky sexual behaviors among post-secondary students. There is considerable economic burden and significant public health concern posed by substance use and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The purpose of this study was to examine the prevalence of substance use preferences (alcohol, cannabis, and other drugs) and its association with STIs among Canadian post-secondary students. Materials and methods This is a cross-sectional study using data from the National College Health Assessment II, Spring 2016 survey conducted by the American College Health Association. There were 31,642 sexually active participants, representing 41 post-secondary institutions in Canada. Descriptive analysis and logistic regression were conducted to estimate the effect of substance use preferences on STIs. Results This study found that participants reported being current users of alcohol (80%), cannabis (23%), and other drugs (8%). Additionally, 3.96% of the participants self-reported being diagnosed or treated for an STI in the last 12 months. Multivariate logistic analysis revealed current cannabis use to be significantly associated with self-reported STIs (aOR, 1.34; 95% CI, 1.12–1.6). There was a significant association between current drug use and STIs among male (aOR, 3.04; 95% CI, 2.27–4.06) and female participants (aOR, 1.87; 95% CI, 1.52–2.30). Having multiple sexual partners, a history of sexual assault, being homosexual, Black, and >21 years old were also found to have a significant association with self-reported STIs (P-value <0.001). Conclusion In this study, significant associations were found between cannabis and other drug use and STIs among post-secondary students in Canada. The results of this study can help inform institutions of higher learning and public health professionals in the design, implementation, and evaluation of substance use and STI policies and effective school-based health programming.
An Empirical Study of Test Case Filtering Techniques Based on Exercising Information Flows

Some software defects trigger failures only when certain local or nonlocal program interactions occur. Such interactions are modeled by the closely related concepts of information flows, program dependences, and program slices. The latter concepts underlie a 78 variety of proposed test data adequacy criteria, and they form a potentially important basis for filtering existing test cases. We report the results of an empirical study of several test case filtering techniques that are based on exercising information flows. Both coverage-based and profile-distribution-based filtering techniques are considered. They are compared to filtering techniques based on exercising simpler program elements, such as basic blocks, branches, function calls, and call pairs, with respect to their effectiveness for revealing defects.
Impact of Supply Voltage Variations on Full Adder Delay: Analysis and Comparison

In this paper, some of the most practically interesting full adder topologies are analyzed in terms of their delay dependence on the supply voltage fluctuations, which are a major contribution to the delay uncertainty, which in turn limits the speed performance of current VLSI circuits. Analytical models of the delay sensitivity with respect to supply variations are derived by following a simplified circuit analysis, and the resulting expressions are simple enough to afford a deeper insight into the impact of supply voltage variations on each topology. The models are shown to be sufficiently accurate through simulations with CMOS technologies having a minimum feature size ranging from 90 nm to 0.35 mum. Several interesting properties and design considerations are derived from these models, and the effect of the supply voltage scaling, technology scaling, transistor sizing, and input transition time is discussed. Strategies to evaluate the delay sensitivity since the early design phases (e.g., from ring oscillator measurements) are also introduced. As a fundamental result, it is shown that the delay sensitivity to supply variations will increase in the next technology nodes, thus, it is expected that controlling the supply variations will be an increasingly important issue in the design of the next generation VLSI circuits. The proposed methodology is also analyzed in the case of more general digital circuits, and is used to estimate the impact of the inter-die threshold voltage variations on the delay of the considered full adder topologies
Rapists and Child Abusers Share Low Levels in Executive Updating, but Do not in Fluid Reasoning

Research findings suggest that sex offenders worse performance than the general population in neuropsychological tests. Nevertheless, moderators such as age of the victim, use of antisocial control groups, and characteristics of administered measures have been highlighted. Here, 100 participants completed a battery of cognitive measures tapping fluid reasoning, verbal ability, and three basic executive processes (inhibition, switching, and updating). They were matched by educational level and classified in four groups: controls, non-sex offenders, rapists, and child abusers. The analyses revealed that rapists showed lower fluid reasoning scores than controls and child abusers. Furthermore, rapists and child abusers showed lower executive updating performance than controls and non-sex offenders. Importantly, child abusers did fluid reasoning scores on a par with controls (controlling for updating differences), but their executive updating performance was equivalent to the one revealed by rapists (controlling for fluid intelligence differences). Implications of these findings for the design of efficient intervention programs are discussed.
Helicobacter pylori status and associated gastroscopic diagnoses in a tertiary hospital endoscopy population in Rwanda

Background The study was undertaken to document the prevalence of Helicobacter pylori and endoscopic diagnoses in Rwandans presenting for gastroscopy. Methods We studied an endoscopic database containing 961 consecutive gastroscopy patients at the University Teaching Hospital, Butare, over 12 months. Patient characteristics, endoscopic diagnoses and H. pylori status (by modified rapid urease testing) were analysed. Results and conclusion The overall H. pylori positivity rate was 75% (n=825), similar to that found elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Common endoscopic diagnoses included duodenal ulceration (20%), duodenitis (9%), benign gastric outlet obstruction (6%) and malignancy (5%). Duodenal ulceration was strongly associated with H. pylori infection (OR 6.2 [3.1–12.6]; p<0.001).
Sustainable Luxury Marketing: A Synthesis and Research Agenda

Sustainability has become a pervasive issue for the luxury sector, gaining traction with brand managers, scholars, policy-makers, the media, and academia. The purpose of this article is to examine the state of sustainable luxury research in marketing and consumer behaviour by critically reviewing and synthesizing the growing but fragmented body of scholarly work on sustainable-luxury marketing. The article critically assesses where, how, and by whom research on sustainable luxury is being conducted, and it identifies gaps for future investigation. The article reviews research published between 2007 and 2018 within major peer-reviewed English-language scholarly publications in business, marketing, ethics, fashion, food and tourism journals. The research is identified using the keywords sustainable luxury, green luxury, eco-luxury, and organic luxury. Three core themes emerge from this review: (1) consumer concerns and practices; (2) organizational concerns and practices; and (3) international and cross-cultural issues. The review confirms that research on sustainable luxury is significantly under-developed. This article provides the first critical and comprehensive assessment and categorization of the emergent literature streams on sustainable luxury. The authors argue for a broader, deeper, and more critical research agenda on the relationship between sustainability and luxury. Potential avenues for future research on sustainable luxury are proposed, with calls for theoretical and cross-cultural reflections that tackle broader systemic and institutional issues within the field.
Compreensão de leitura e motivação para aprendizagem de alunos do ensino fundamental

Resumo O presente estudo teve como proposito identificar a relacao existente entre compreensao de leitura e motivacao para aprender de estudantes do ensino fundamental. Foram aplicados o Teste de Cloze e a Escala da Avaliacao da Motivacao para a Aprendizagem. Para tal, participaram da pesquisa 169 adolescentes do 6o ao 9o ano do ensino fundamental, de oito turmas diferentes, de uma unica escola publica do interior do estado de Sao Paulo. Dentre os alunos 49,1 % sao do sexo masculino e 50,9 % do sexo feminino, com idades entre 11 e 17 anos. Os resultados indicaram uma correlacao positiva e significativa entre os escores do Teste de Cloze e os da meta aprender, e negativa significativa no que diz respeito as metas performance, aproximacao e evitacao. Os dados sao discutidos a luz da literatura sobre o tema.
A Multi-agent Based Interactive System Towards Child&#146;s Emotion Performances Quantified Through Affective Body Gestures

Studies in cognitive science have found that interactive robots, interactive games, etc., may help the emotional development of children with mental-health problems (e.g. autistic children). It is very important with these children to show empathic behaviors and to take into account their emotion when relating to them. Current technology cannot do this because it cannot recognize the emotion of the children. Few studies are directed toward this goal by categorizing affective behavior of the child into a set of discrete categories. But still two problems exist: gesture is not yet a concern as channel of affective communication in interactive technology, and existing systems only model discrete categories, but not affective dimensions, e.g., intensity. In this work, we propose a multi-agent based interactive system that can quantify child'sperformance (emotion with intensity of emotion) in real time
Optimizing Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm has become more popular recently. It has been shown to be an effective optimization tool in most of the applications. In this paper, we have applied the PSO algorithm to a sample Artificial Neural Network (ANN) application, measured the improvement, and optimized the PSO parameters to improve results as much as possible. The application is character recognition of English numbers. Two indicators of accuracy of the results and processing time are taken in to account. The objective of this paper is to show that we can empirically adjust the PSO parameters to optimize PSO for the best results. Through several iterative processes of extracting improvements and adjusting the PSO parameters, we have recorded optimized PSO parameters and respective variances for similar applications. Indeed, the method can also be extended to alphabetic characters by just providing the input training patterns of each character. The details of the proposed approach and the simulation results are recorded in this paper.
RSB-Topo: A Topology Adaptation Algorithm for Unstructured P2P Networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has been widely applied in today's Internet. Unstructured P2P systems, where peers connect with each other to form dynamic, flexible and scalable networks, are commonly used for resource sharing. Resource location in unstructured P2P systems tends to use "blind search" strategies (i.e. flooding and random walk) for its simplicity and low maintenance cost. However, due to lack of location information, the performance of "blind search" is heavily relied on the network topology. Topology adaptation, by properly adjusting the topology of the P2P overlay network, is a promising approach to improve the search performance. In this paper, we use Relative Search Betweenness (RSB) to estimate nodes' search ability. A RSB-based topology adaptation algorithm (RSB-Topo) is proposed, where peers spontaneously adjust their connections to achieve better performance. Simulation results show that our algorithm could greatly increase search success rate and search coverage, and also decrease response delay to improve the search performance in unstructured P2P networks.
Bar instability in cosmological halos

Aims. We want to investigate the growth of bar instability in stell ar disks embedded in a suitable dark matter halo evolving in a fully consistent cosmological framework. Methods. We perform seven cosmological simulations to emphasise the role of both the disk-to-halo mass ratio and of the Toomre parameter, Q, on the evolution of the disk.We also compare our fully cosmological cases with corresponding isolated simulations where the same halo, is extracted from the cosmological scenario and evolved in physical coordinates. Results. A long living bar, lasting about 10 Gyr, appears in all our simulations. In particular, disks expected to be stable accord ing to classical criteria, form indeed weak bars. We argue that such a result is due to the dynamical properties of our cosmological halo which is far from stability and isotropy, typical of the classical halos used in literature; it is dynamically active, endowed of substru ctures and infall. Conclusions. At least for mild self-gravitating disks, the study of the ba r instability using isolated isotropic halos, in gravitati onal equilibrium, can lead to misleading results. Furthermore, the cosmological framework is needed for quantitatively investigating such an instability.
Emergence of Complex-Like Cells in a Temporal Product Network with Local Receptive Fields

We introduce a new neural architecture and an unsupervised algorithm for learning invariant representations from temporal sequence of images. The system uses two groups of complex cells whose outputs are combined multiplicatively: one that represents the content of the image, constrained to be constant over several consecutive frames, and one that represents the precise location of features, which is allowed to vary over time but constrained to be sparse. The architecture uses an encoder to extract features, and a decoder to reconstruct the input from the features. The method was applied to patches extracted from consecutive movie frames and produces orientation and frequency selective units analogous to the complex cells in V1. An extension of the method is proposed to train a network composed of units with local receptive field spread over a large image of arbitrary size. A layer of complex cells, subject to sparsity constraints, pool feature units over overlapping local neighborhoods, which causes the feature units to organize themselves into pinwheel patterns of orientation-selective receptive fields, similar to those observed in the mammalian visual cortex. A feed-forward encoder efficiently computes the feature representation of full images.
Heterogeneous Impacts of Concentrated Poverty During Adolescence on College Outcomes

Abstract:This research analyzes how living in concentrated poverty during adolescence affects future college outcomes. Using Add Health data and propensity score methods to explore effect heterogeneity, I find that concentrated poverty has little direct impact on college matriculation. It does, however, strongly reduce the odds of graduating from college for adolescents least likely to reside in concentrated poverty. This indicates an advantage-leveling model in which individuals with prior advantages have the most to lose from neighborhood disadvantage during adolescence. I assess neighborhood socialization, school effects, and peer effects as potential explanations for the neighborhood effect. Supporting collective socialization theory, neighborhood economic opportunity and resource deprivation are key aspects of poverty-saturated neighborhoods that influence college graduation odds. Schools also play an important role in the relationship between neighborhoods and college outcomes. Main effects are likely to be causal as they are highly robust to unobserved confounding.