Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Robust Graph Mode Seeking by Graph Shift

In this paper, we study how to robustly compute the modes of a graph, namely the dense subgraphs, which characterize the underlying compact patterns and are thus useful for many applications. We first define the modes based on graph density function, then propose the graph shift algorithm, which starts from each vertex and iteratively shifts towards the nearest mode of the graph along a certain trajectory. Both theoretic analysis and experiments show that graph shift algorithm is very efficient and robust, especially when there exist large amount of noises and outliers.
Women, Work, and the Economy:Macroeconomic Gains from Gender Equity

The proposed SDN discusses the specific macro-critical aspects of women’s participation in the labor market and the constraints that prevent women from developing their full economic potential. Building on earlier Fund analysis, work undertaken by other organizations and academic research, the SDN presents possible policies to overcome these obstacles in different types of countries.
Estimating the Variance of Wages in the Presence of Selection and Unobserved Heterogeneity

Identification of potential wage distributions by education is important to the study of the causal links between education, inequality, and uncertainty. Potential wage inequality within an educational group (that is, the variance in wages if all workers had the same education) exceeds the observed statistics because self-selected education truncates wage distributions. Decomposing potential wage inequality into heterogeneity (known to the agent making the educational choice) and uncertainty (unknown to the agent) suggests that wage uncertainty does not necessarily rise with education. It is unobserved heterogeneity, not uncertainty, that explains the observed relationship between college graduation and higher wage inequality.
DERMI: a decentralized peer-to-peer event-based object middleware

We present DERMI, a decentralized wide-area event-based object middleware built on top of a peer-to-peer substrate. Its main building block is the underlying publish/subscribe event notification system provided by the peer-to-peer layer. By using this methodology, innovative benefits like distributed interception, high performance synchronous/asynchronous one-to-one/one-to-many notifications and decentralized object location services are provided. Moreover, new programming abstractions (anycall and manycall) are introduced, which allow the programmer to make calls to groups of objects without taking care of which of them responds until a determinate condition is met. We believe that such middleware is a solid building block for future wide-area distributed component infrastructures.
Financial Synergies and the Optimal Scope of the Firm: Implications for Mergers, Spinoffs, and Structured Finance

Multiple activities may be separated financially, allowing each to optimize its financial structure, or combined in a firm with a single optimal financial structure. We consider activities with nonsynergistic operational cash flows, and examine the purely financial benefits of separation versus merger. The magnitude of financial synergies depends upon tax rates, default costs, relative size, and the riskiness and correlation of cash flows. Contrary to accepted wisdom, financial synergies from mergers can be negative if firms have quite different risks or default costs. The results provide a rationale for structured finance techniques such as asset securitization and project finance. Copyright 2007 by The American Finance Association.
Angiogenesis and inflammation in invasive carcinoma of the breast.

AIM: To investigate the relation between angiogenesis and inflammation in invasive carcinoma of the breast. METHODS: Sections from 75 invasive carcinomas of the breast were stained using immunohistochemistry for von Willebrand factor, CD3, CD8, CD45RO, CD45RA, CD20, CD68, and c-erbB-2. Tumour vascularity was assessed by counting vessels in the three most vascular areas, and calculating the average (x 400 magnification, field 0.168 mm2). Each pattern of inflammation was scored semiquantitatively. RESULTS: The main pattern of inflammation was a diffuse infiltrate of macrophages, and to a lesser extent T cells. Perivascular and perilobular clusters of B and T cells were noted at the edge of the carcinomas, but were less prominent than the diffuse inflammation. Diffuse inflammation, particularly macrophages, was associated with high tumour grade, tumour necrosis, large tumour size, and c-erbB-2 expression. Perivascular and perilobular inflammation also increased with tumour grade. Tumour vascularity increased slightly with intensity of diffuse inflammation (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient rs = 0.17, p = 0.08), and was inversely related to perilobular inflammation (rs = -0.23, p = 0.03). CONCLUSIONS: The correlations between inflammation and vascularity were weak in this study (r2 about 0.04) and thus there was no evidence of an important relation. Discrepancies between this and other studies may be resolved by studying expression of angiogenic cytokines and proteolytic enzymes by tumour infiltrating inflammatory cells, and their relation to tumour vascularity.
Arc sensitivity to cluster ellipticity, asymmetries, and substructures

Aims. We investigate how ellipticity, asymmetries and substructures separately affect the ability of galaxy clusters to produce strong lensing events, i.e. gravitational arcs, and how they influence the a rc morphologies and fluxes. This is important for those studi es aiming, for example, at constraining cosmological parameters from statistical lensing, or at determining the inner structure of galaxy clu sters through gravitational arcs. Methods. We do so by creating two-dimensional smoothed, differently elliptical and asymmetric versions of some numerical models. By subtracting these smoothed mass distributions from the corresponding numerical maps and by gradually smoothing the residuals before readding them to the clusters, we are able to see how the lensing properties of the clusters react to even small modification o f the cluster morphology. We study in particular by how much ellipticity, asymmetries and substructures contribute to the strong lensing cross sections of clusters. We also investigate how cluster substructures affect the morphological properties of gravitational arcs, th eir positions and fluxes. Results. On average, we find that the contributions of ellipticity, as ymmetries and substructures amount to∼ 40%,∼ 10% and∼ 30% of the total strong lensing cross section, respectively. However, our analysis shows that substructures play a more important role in less elliptical and asymmetric clusters, even if located at large distances fro m the cluster centres (∼ 1h −1 Mpc). Conversely, their effect is less important in highly asymmetric lenses. The morphology, position and flux of indi vidual arcs are strongly affected by the presence of substructures in the clusters. Removing substructures on spatial scales . 50h −1 kpc, roughly corresponding to mass scales . 5× 10 10 h −1 M⊙, alters the image multiplicity of∼ 35% of the sources used in the simulations and causes position shifts larger than 5 ′′ for∼ 40% of the arcs longer than 5 ′′ . Conclusions. We conclude that any model for cluster lens cannot neglect the effects of ellipticity, asymmetries and substructures. On the other hand, the high sensitivity of gravitational arcs to de viations from regular, smooth and symmetric mass distributions suggests that strong gravitational lensing is potentially a powerful tool to mea sure the level of substructures and asymmetries in clusters.
Lossless Data Hiding Scheme Based on VQ Index Coding

Lossless data hiding can restore the original status of cover media after embedded secret data are extracted. In 2010, Wang et al. proposed a lossless data hiding scheme which hides secret data in vector quantization (VQ) indices, but the encoding strategies adopted by their scheme expand the final codestream. This paper designs four embedding and encoding strategies to improve Wang et al.'s scheme. The experiment result of the proposed scheme compared with that of the Wang et al.'s scheme reduces the bit rates of the final codestream by 4.6% and raises the payload by 1.09% on average.
Rare Mutations of CACNB2 Found in Autism Spectrum Disease-Affected Families Alter Calcium Channel Function

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are complex neurodevelopmental diseases clinically defined by dysfunction of social interaction. Dysregulation of cellular calcium homeostasis might be involved in ASD pathogenesis, and genes coding for the L-type calcium channel subunits CaV1.2 (CACNA1C) and CaVβ2 (CACNB2) were recently identified as risk loci for psychiatric diseases. Here, we present three rare missense mutations of CACNB2 (G167S, S197F, and F240L) found in ASD-affected families, two of them described here for the first time (G167S and F240L). All these mutations affect highly conserved regions while being absent in a sample of ethnically matched controls. We suggest the mutations to be of physiological relevance since they modulate whole-cell Ba2+ currents through calcium channels when expressed in a recombinant system (HEK-293 cells). Two mutations displayed significantly decelerated time-dependent inactivation as well as increased sensitivity of voltage-dependent inactivation. In contrast, the third mutation (F240L) showed significantly accelerated time-dependent inactivation. By altering the kinetic parameters, the mutations are reminiscent of the CACNA1C mutation causing Timothy Syndrome, a Mendelian disease presenting with ASD. In conclusion, the results of our first-time biophysical characterization of these three rare CACNB2 missense mutations identified in ASD patients support the hypothesis that calcium channel dysfunction may contribute to autism.
Flow-mediated and reflex changes in large peripheral artery tone in humans.

Studies of peripheral blood vessels in humans have focused primarily on regulation of blood flow and vascular resistance, which are thought to reflect small vessel caliber. Recent studies in animals have identified flow-mediated and neurogenic changes in large artery diameter. This study tested for flow-mediated dilatation and reflex constriction of the brachial artery in humans. A dual-crystal pulsed Doppler system was used to measure brachial artery diameter and blood flow proximal to the antecubital fossa. To test for flow-mediated dilatation, flow through the brachial artery was altered by an occluding cuff placed on the forearm distal to the site of brachial artery flow and diameter measurement. Control blood flow was 123 +/- 20 ml/min, and brachial artery diameter was 4.74 +/- 0.17 mm (mean +/- SEM). By inflating the distal occluding cuff (distal circulatory arrest), flow was reduced through the brachial artery to 21 +/- 5 ml/min (p less than 0.005), and brachial artery diameter was reduced to 4.35 +/- 0.20 mm (p less than 0.001). By deflating the distal occluding cuff after 10 minutes (reactive hyperemia), brachial artery flow was increased to 358 +/- 55 ml/min (p less than 0.001), and diameter was increased to 5.6 +/- 0.19 mm (p less than 0.001). These interventions did not change systemic arterial pressure and, as measured in three subjects, caused only small changes in local brachial artery distending pressure. Thus, both increased and decreased brachial artery blood flow produced significant changes in brachial artery diameter without altering arterial distending pressure. These data provide evidence for flow-mediated dilatation in humans. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Software Defect Prediction Using Semi-Supervised Learning with Change Burst Information

Software defect prediction is an important software quality assurance technique. It utilizes historical project data and previously discovered defects to predict potential defects. However, most of existing methods assume that large amounts of labeled historical data are available for prediction, while in the early stage of the life cycle, projects may lack the data needed for building such predictors. In addition, most of existing techniques use static code metrics as predictors, while they omit change information that may introduce risks into software development. In this paper, we take these two issues into consideration, and propose a semi-supervised based defect prediction approach - extRF. extRF extends the classical supervised Random Forest algorithm by self-training paradigm. It also employs change burst information for improving accuracy of software defect prediction. We also conduct an experiment to evaluate extRF against three other supervised machine learners (i.e. Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Random Forest) and compare the effectiveness of code metrics, change burst metrics, and a combination of them. Experimental results show that extRF trained with a small size of labeled dataset achieves comparable performance to some supervised learning approaches trained with a larger size of labeled dataset. When only 2% of Eclipse 2.0 data are used for training, extRF can achieve F-measure about 0.562, approximate to that of LR (a supervised learning approach) at labeled sampling rate of 50%. Besides, change burst metrics outperform code metrics in that F-measure rises to a peak value of 0.75 for Eclipse 3.0 and JDT.Core.
Outcomes in Patients with Acute and Stable Coronary Syndromes; Insights from the Prospective NOBORI-2 Study

Background Contemporary data remains limited regarding mortality and major adverse cardiac events (MACE) outcomes in patients undergoing PCI for different manifestations of coronary artery disease. Objectives We evaluated mortality and MACE outcomes in patients treated with PCI for STEMI (ST-elevation myocardial infarction), NSTEMI (non ST-elevation myocardial infarction) and stable angina through analysis of data derived from the Nobori-2 study. Methods Clinical endpoints were cardiac mortality and MACE (a composite of cardiac death, myocardial infarction and target vessel revascularization). Results 1909 patients who underwent PCI were studied; 1332 with stable angina, 248 with STEMI and 329 with NSTEMI. Age-adjusted Charlson co-morbidity index was greatest in the NSTEMI cohort (3.78±1.91) and lowest in the stable angina cohort (3.00±1.69); P<0.0001. Following Cox multivariate analysis cardiac mortality was independently worse in the NSTEMI vs the stable angina cohort (HR 2.31 (1.10–4.87), p = 0.028) but not significantly different for STEMI vs stable angina cohort (HR 0.72 (0.16–3.19), p = 0.67). Similar observations were recorded for MACE (<180 days) (NSTEMI vs stable angina: HR 2.34 (1.21–4.55), p = 0.012; STEMI vs stable angina: HR 2.19 (0.97–4.98), p = 0.061. Conclusions The longer-term Cardiac mortality and MACE were significantly worse for patients following PCI for NSTEMI even after adjustment of clinical demographics and Charlson co-morbidity index whilst the longer-term prognosis of patients following PCI STEMI was favorable, with similar outcomes as those patients with stable angina following PCI.
Additive Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Missing Data

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has previously been shown to be a useful decomposition for multivariate data. We interpret the factorization in a new way and use it to generate missing attributes from test data. We provide a joint optimization scheme for the missing attributes as well as the NMF factors. We prove the monotonic convergence of our algorithms. We present classification results for cases with missing attributes.
Physiological and morphological identification of somatostatin- or vasoactive intestinal polypeptide-containing cells among GABAergic cell subtypes in rat frontal cortex

Physiological and morphological characteristics of GABAergic nonpyramidal cells in frontal cortex of young rats identified immunohistochemically as containing somatostatin or vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP) were studied in vitro by whole-cell recording and biocytin injection. We have found that most somatostatin- or VIP-containing neurons were different from two other types of GABAergic cells, the parvalbumin-containing fast-spiking cells and the late-spiking cells (neurogliaform cells). In response to injected currents, somatostatin- or VIP-containing nonpyramidal cells showed either bursts of a few spikes on a slow-depolarizing hump, burst- spiking nonpyramidal cells, or single spikes only on depolarization, regular-spiking nonpyramidal cells. Morphologically, both somatostatin- and VIP-containing cells had vertical axonal arbors terminating in symmetrical synapses that were immunoreactive for GABA in electron micrographs. Somatostatin cells included neurons with main ascending axons sending collaterals into layer I (Martinotti cells in deep layers). Some of the Martinotti cells in layer V also contained calbindin D 28k. VIP cells included neurons the main descending axons of which had more descending than ascending collaterals (bipolar cells and double bouquet cells). Two other morphological forms of the VIP cells were those with short descending axons with collaterals bearing multiple boutons on other cell bodies (small basket cells) or with short ascending main axons with collaterals forming arcades (arcade cells). Some of these neurons also contained calretinin. From these results, it appears that the GABAergic neurons controlling circuits in the neocortical layers may be characterized further based on whether they contain somatostatin or VIP.
Pseudospectral Components and the Distance to Uncontrollability

We show that 2-norm pseudospectra of m-by-n matrices have no more than 2m(4m - 1) connected components. Such bounds are pertinent for computing the distance to uncontrollability of a control system, since this distance is the minimum value of a function whose level sets are pseudospectra. We also discuss algorithms for computing this distance, including a trisection variant of Gu's recent algorithm, and we show how these may be used to locally maximize the distance to uncontrollability for a parameterized system.
Performance evaluation of RESTful web services and AMQP protocol

Web services appeared as a promising technology for Web environments independent of technologies, services, and applications. Currently, there are some issues related with this approach that should be studied. For instance, if massive quantities of data are sent to databases it can influence significantly the performance of the whole system. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMPQ) appears as a promising solution to address this problem. Then, in order to evaluate the performance of this approach, this paper presents a performance comparison study of RESTful Web services and the AMQP Protocol considering exchanging messages between client and server. The study is based on the averaged exchanged messages for a period of time. It was observed and concluded that, for large quantities of messages exchange, the best results comes from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol.
Planning in belief space with a labelled uncertainty graph

Planning in belief space with a Labelled Uncertainty Graph, LUG, is an approach that uses a very compact planning graph to guide search in the space of belief states to construct conformant and contingent plans. A conformant plan is a plan that transitions (without sensing) all possible initial states through possibly non-deterministic actions to a goal state. A contingent plan adds the ability to observe state variables and branch execution. The LUG provides heuristics to guide a regression belief space planner, CAltAlt, and a progression belief space planner, PBSP . The key innovation of the LUG is to compactly represent the optimistic projection of several states (those in a belief state) within a single planning graph. Labels on the actions and literals denote the state projections that include them. We show the improvements of using a LUG by comparing it with a multiple planning graphs (one for each possible world) approach within CAltAlt. We also compare the approach to other conformant planners. Lastly, we outline an algorithm that can adapt the approach to stochastic planning.
Two color QCD beyond the BEC regime.

We present results of simulations of Two Color QCD using two a vors of Wilson quark in the fundamental representation, at non-zero quark chemical potential μ, on an 8 3 16 lattice. Results for the quark number density, quark and gluon energy densities, and superuid condensate are qualitatively distinct from the behaviour expected on the assumption that the dominant degrees of freedom are tightly bound scalar diquarks which Bose condense; rather the scaling with μ is more suggestive of a Fermi surface disrupted by a Cooper pair condensate. We also present evidence both for screening of the static potential, and color deconnement, arising solely as a result of a non-zero quark density.
Conflict, Peace and Security in Africa: An Assessment and New Questions after 50 Years of African Independence

Since the independence processes in the African continent, armed conflicts, peace and security have raised concern and attention both at the domestic level and at the international scale. In recent years, all aspects have undergone significant changes which have given rise to intense debate. The end of some historical conflicts has taken place in a context of slight decrease in the number of armed conflicts and the consolidation of post-conflict reconstruction processes. Moreover, African regional organizations have staged an increasingly more active internal shift in matters related to peace and security, encouraged by the idea of promoting “African solutions to African problems”. This new scenario, has been accompanied by new uncertainties at the security level and major challenges at the operational level, especially for the African Union. This article aims to ascertain the state of affairs on all these issues and raise some key questions to consider.
Brain Tissue Volumes and Perfusion Change with the Number of Optic Neuritis Attacks in Relapsing Neuromyelitis Optica: A Voxel-Based Correlation Study

Recent neuroimaging studies show that brain abnormalities in neuromyelitis optica (NMO) are more frequent than earlier described. Yet, more research considering multiple aspects of NMO is necessary to better understand these abnormalities. A clinical feature of relapsing NMO (RNMO) is that the incremental disability is attack-related. Therefore, association between the attack-related process and neuroimaging might be expected. On the other hand, the immunopathological analysis of NMO lesions has suggested that CNS microvasculature could be an early disease target, which could alter brain perfusion. Brain tissue volume changes accompanying perfusion alteration could also be expected throughout the attack-related process. The aim of this study was to investigate in RNMO patients, by voxel-based correlation analysis, the assumed associations between regional brain white (WMV) and grey matter volumes (GMV) and/or perfusion on one side, and the number of optic neuritis (ON) attacks, myelitis attacks and/or total attacks on the other side. For this purpose, high resolution T1-weighted MRI and perfusion SPECT imaging were obtained in 15 RNMO patients. The results showed negative regional correlations of WMV, GMV and perfusion with the number of ON attacks, involving important components of the visual system, which could be relevant for the comprehension of incremental visual disability in RNMO. We also found positive regional correlation of perfusion with the number of ON attacks, mostly overlapping the brain area where the WMV showed negative correlation. This provides evidence that brain microvasculature is an early disease target and suggests that perfusion alteration could be important in the development of brain structural abnormalities in RNMO.