Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Infrared Signatures of Protoplanetary Disk Evolution

We investigate the observational signatures of a straightforward evolutionary scenario for protoplanetary disks, in which the disk mass of small (≲50 μm) particles decreases homologously with time, but the disk structure and stellar parameters do not change. Our goal is to identify optimal infrared spectral indicators of the existence of disks, their structure, and mass evolution that may be tested with the upcoming SIRTF mission. We present simulated spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and colors over a wide range of masses, 10-8 M☉ ≤ Mdisk ≤ 10-1 M☉. Our Monte Carlo radiative equilibrium techniques enable us to explore the wide range of optical depths of these disks and incorporate multiple, anisotropic dust scattering. The SED is most sensitive to disk mass in the far-IR and longer wavelengths, as is already known from millimeter and radio observations. As the disk mass decreases, the excess emission of the disk over the stellar photosphere diminishes more rapidly at the longest than at short wavelengths. At near-infrared wavelengths, the disk remains optically thick to stellar radiation over a wide range of disk masses, resulting in a slower decline in the SED in this spectral regime. Therefore, near-IR excesses (K-L) provide a robust means of detecting disks in star clusters down to Mdisk ~ 10-7 M☉, while the far-IR excess probes the disk mass, the caveat being that large inner-disk holes can decrease the near-IR disk emission. Various other disk parameters (outer radius, flaring, and dust size distribution) alter the SED quantitatively, but do not change our general conclusions on the evolution of SEDs and colors with the mass of small particles in the disk. Reducing the disk mass results in a clear progression in color-color diagrams, with low-mass disks displaying the bluest colors. We interpret color-color diagrams for Taurus-Auriga sources in the context of decreasing disk mass. Different viewing angles yield degeneracies in the color-mass relationship, but highly inclined disks are very faint and red and are readily identified in color-magnitude diagrams.
What Determines Corporate Transparency?

We investigate corporate transparency, defined as the availability of firm‐specific information to those outside publicly traded firms. We conceptualize corporate transparency within a country as output from a multifaceted system whose components collectively produce, gather, validate, and disseminate information. We factor analyze a range of measures capturing countries' firm‐specific information environments, isolating two distinct factors. The first factor, interpreted as financial transparency, captures the intensity and timeliness of financial disclosures, and their interpretation and dissemination by analysts and the media. The second factor, interpreted as governance transparency, captures the intensity of governance disclosures used by outside investors to hold officers and directors accountable. We investigate whether these factors vary with countries' legal/judicial regimes and political economies. Our main multivariate result is that the governance transparency factor is primarily related to a country's legal/judicial regime, whereas the financial transparency factor is primarily related to political economy.
Dynamic Topology Control for WSNs in Critical Environments

Plant automation and control are mission-critical applications and require timely and reliable data delivery, which is difficult to provide using a wireless technology. This is especially more difficult in industrial environments with harsh radio conditions. In this paper we present a dynamic and distributed topology control algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks for use in performance critical environments. This topology control algorithm assumes a small number of sensor nodes connected to a single sink and communicating using a TDMA-based MAC protocol designed with the application requirements in mind. Our solution was implemented and evaluated in real testbed inside an oil refinery. Evaluation results demonstrating the self-organizing properties of the proposed mechanism, as well as its operational performance are included. The results show that the system reliability is high and that data are delivered on time to the control center.
Liquidity Efficiency and Distribution in the LVTS: Non-Neutrality of System Changes under Network Asymmetry

The authors consider the liquidity efficiency of Tranche 2 of the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS T2) by examining, through an empirical analysis, some plausible strategic reactions of individual participants to a systemwide shock to available liquidity in the system. The network structure of the LVTS T2 is found to be asymmetric in terms of the patterns of out-payment flows. It is composed of three subgroups, in which participants within a subgroup are more strongly linked with each other than with participants in other subgroups. Three possible network equilibria are proposed. The equilibria are defined in terms of participant-specific collateral needs and out-payment delays, and result from different relative cost structures involving collateral costs, queuing costs, and payment delay penalties. Each of the conjectural equilibria relate to a dominant strategy for at least those participants most central in the network with respect to liquidity transfer adopted network-wide as a common strategy.
Ordinary vertical urbanisms: City apartments and the everyday geographies of high-rise families

In many new world cities, inner city apartment development proceeds at unprecedented rates. In dominant urban planning and property development discourses, new inner city dwellers are consumption-orientated young professionals and “empty nesters”—all similarly childless. Nonetheless, families make their homes in city apartments, and their experiences are not well understood. Meanwhile, within urban and political geography, new interest in verticality has directed attention to the changing urban topography and volumetric profile of cities. However, a topographic bias occludes the mundane, intensive relations that enervate these everyday lived spaces (i.e. ordinary topologies), while a fascination with spectacular urbanisms and cities in conflict neglects other “ordinary” vertical urbanisms. Drawing on a qualitative study of high-rise families in inner city Melbourne (Australia), this article responds both to calls for a more topological rendering of vertical urbanisms and the neglected experiences of vertical urban families. We detail the intimate and material geographies of high-rise family living and highlight how the topologies of high-rise living and the topographies of urban intensification projects intersect, including with benign and hopeful prospects for the contemporary city.
Equating multidimensional tests under a random groups design: A comparison of various equating procedures

The purpose of this research was to compare the performance of various equating procedures for multidimensional tests. To examine the various equat­ ing procedures, simulated data sets were used that were generated based on a multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) framework. Specifically, the performance of the following six equating procedures under the random groups design was compared: (1) unidimensional IRT observed score equating, (2) uni­ dimensional IRT true score equating, (3) full MIRT observed score equating, (4) unidimensionalized MIRT observed score equating, (5) unidimensionalized MIRT true score equating, and (6) equipercentile equating. A total of four factors (test length, sample size, form difficulty differences, and correlations be­ tween dimensions) were expected to impact equating performance, and their impacts were investigated by creating two conditions per each factor: long vs. short test; large vs. small sample size; some vs. no form differences; and high vs. low correlation between dimensions. To evaluate the performance of each equating procedure, the population equating relationships are defined in two ways: the FMIRT result and the identity equating. The conditional and overall equating relationships are evaluated in terms of bias, standard error, and overall error. The following findings are notable: (1) the full MIRT procedure provided more accurate equating results than other equating procedures especially when the correlation between dimensions was low; (2) the equipercentile procedure was more likely than the IRT methods to yield a larger amount of random error and overall error across all the conditions; (3) equating for multidimensional tests was more accurate when form differences were small, sample size was large, and test length was long; (4) even when multidimensional tests were used (i.e., the unidimensionality assumptions were violated), the unidimensional IRT procedures were found to yield quite accurate equating results; and (5) whether an observed or a true score equating procedure was used did not seem to yield any differences in equating results.
OpAL: A System for Mining Opinion from Text for Business Applications

The past years have marked the birth and development of the Social Web, where people freely express and search for opinions on all possible topics. This phenomenon has been proven to have a great impact on many business sectors globally. Given the proven importance of the subjective data on the Web, but bearing in mind the difficulties inherent to their textual peculiarities and large volume, efficient techniques must be employed to process this data, so that it can be fully exploited to the benefit of potential users and companies. We present the OpAL system, which implements an efficient approach to mine, classify and statistically summarize opinions, grounded on the feature-based Opinion Mining paradigm. In this approach, all components are studied, implemented and optimized using different NLP techniques. Results of different in-house and competition evaluations show that the system components have a good performance and that the techniques considered are efficient. We finally complete the proposed approach by presenting a method for opinion retrieval, which is robust and multilingual. Thus, we offer an integrated solution to build a system that is able to fully respond to user needs, from the querying to the summarized output stage. Implemented at a large scale, such systems can benefit the business environment and its customers everywhere.
Yield of screening for atrial fibrillation in primary care with a hand-held, single-lead electrocardiogram device during influenza vaccination

Abstract Aims To assess the yield of screening for atrial fibrillation (AF) with a hand-held single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) device during influenza vaccination in primary care in the Netherlands. Methods and results We used the MyDiagnostick to screen for AF in persons who participated in influenza vaccination sessions of ten Dutch primary care practices. In case of suspected AF detection by the stick, the recorded 1-min ECG registrations were analysed by a cardiologist. We scrutinized electronic medical files of the general practitioners to obtain information about the cases screened. Multivariable logistic regression analysis was performed to predict the relation between patient characteristics and a new screen-detected diagnosis of AF. In total, 3269 persons were screened for AF during the influenza vaccination sessions of 10 general practitioner practices. As a result, 37 (1.1%) new cases of AF were detected. Prior transient ischeamic attack or stroke (OR 6.05; 95%CI 1.93–19.0), and age (OR 1.09 per year; 95% CI 1.05–1.14) were independent predictors for such newly screen-detected AF. Of the 37 screen-detected AF cases, 2.7% had a CHA2DS2-VASc of 0, 18.9% a score of 1, and 78.4% a score of 2 or more. The majority needed oral anticoagulant therapy. Conclusions Screening seems feasible with an easy to use single-lead, hand-held ECG device with automatic AF detection during influenza vaccination in primary care and results in a ‘1-day’ yield of 1.1% new cases of AF. Trial registration clinicaltrials.gov NCT02006524.
Dyon Spectrum in Generic N=4 Supersymmetric Z_N Orbifolds

We find the exact spectrum of a class of quarter BPS dyons in a generic N=4 supersymmetric Z_N orbifold of type IIA string theory on K3\times T^2 or T^6. We also find the asymptotic expansion of the statistical entropy to first non-leading order in inverse power of charges and show that it agrees with the entropy of a black hole carrying same set of charges after taking into account the effect of the four derivative Gauss-Bonnet term in the effective action of the theory.
Consumer adoption of mobile technologies: a literature review

Although the total number of mobile subscriptions reached 6.8 billion worldwide ITU, 2013 confirming in the process that mobile technology is widespread, academic literature has so far focused only on explaining adoption of mobile technology and services. This literature review analyses 67 studies from the period 2005-2013 and finds the following: a most studies are quantitative in nature and come from Asia; b the Technology Acceptance Model is the most used theory; c future research should also utilise qualitative methods and examine the behavioural outcomes of mobile adoption instead of simply adoption in consumer markets.
Star Cluster Demographics. I. A General Framework and Application to the Antennae Galaxies

We present a framework for understanding the demographics of star cluster systems and develop a toy model that incorporates a universal initial power-law mass function, selected formation histories, selected disruption laws, and a convolution with common artifacts and selection effects found in observational data. A wide variety of observations can be explained by this simple model, including the observed correlation between the brightest young cluster in a galaxy and the total number of young clusters. The model confirms that this can be understood as a statistical size-of-sample effect rather than a difference in the physical process responsible for the formation of the clusters, suggesting that active mergers have the brightest clusters simply because they have the most clusters. A comparison is made of different cluster disruption laws, and it is shown that the break in the dN/dτ diagram used to determine the parameters in the Boutloukos & Lamers model may be produced by incompleteness near the break point. A model of the Antennae galaxies is developed and compared with the observational data; this extends the mass-age range for cluster comparison over previous studies. An important component of our model is the use of a "two-stage" disruption process, with a very high "infant mortality" rate for the clusters with ages less than ∼108 yr (i.e., roughly 80%- 90% are lost each factor of 10 in time, τ, independent of mass), and two-body relaxation, which becomes the dominant disruption mechanism at older ages, preferentially removing the lower mass clusters. Hence, in our model, stars from the dissolved clusters form the field population. We note that a 90% infant mortality rate for each factor of 10 in τ (i.e., dN/dτ ∝ τ-1) is consistent with all measured young cluster populations, including those in the Antennae, the Small Magellanic Cloud, and the Milky Way. In fact, the population of clusters in the Antennae can be viewed as a scaled-up version of the Milky Way in many respects, with a scale factor of roughly 1000 times the Lada & Lada sample of embedded star clusters in the local Milky Way. We find no evidence for a truncation of the Antennae cluster mass function at the high-mass end.
Measuring the Visual Salience of 3D Printed Objects

In an effort to validate the assumption that the saliency found in flat stimuli can be related to a 3D scene, the authors set up an experiment that examines if visually salient features exist for genuine 3D stimuli. They then validate computational models for the visual saliency of 3D objects.
Deformations of Toric Varieties via Minkowski Sum Decompositions of Polyhedral Complexes

We generalized the construction of deformations of affine toric varieties of K. Altmann and our previous construction of deformations of weak Fano toric varieties to the case of arbitrary toric varieties by introducing the notion of Minkowski sum decompositions of polyhedral complexes. Our construction embeds the original toric variety into a higher dimensional toric variety where the image is given by a prime binomial complete intersection ideal in Cox homogeneous coordinates. The deformations are realized by families of complete intersections. For compact simplicial toric varieties with at worst Gorenstein terminal singularities, we show that our deformations span the infinitesimal space of deformations by Kodaira-Spencer map. For Fano toric varieties, we show that their deformations can be constructed in higher-dimensional Fano toric varieties related to the Batyrev-Borisov mirror symmetry construction.
Analysis of lysine recognition and specificity of the Bacillus subtilis L box riboswitch

The ever-changing environment of a bacterial cell requires sophisticated mechanisms to adjust gene expression in response to changes in nutrient availability. L box riboswitch RNAs regulate gene expression in response to cellular lysine (lys) concentrations in the absence of additional regulatory factors. In Bacillus subtilis, binding of lysine (lys) to the L box RNA causes premature transcription termination in the leader region upstream of the lysC coding sequence. To date, little is known about the specific RNA–lys interactions required for transcription termination. In this study, we characterize features of the B. subtilis lysC leader RNA responsible for lys specificity, and structural elements of the lys molecule required for recognition. The wild-type lysC leader RNA can recognize and discriminate between lys and lys analogs. We identified leader RNA variants with mutations in the lys-binding pocket that exhibit changes in the specificity of ligand recognition. These data demonstrate that lysC leader RNA specificity is the result of recognition of ligand features through a series of distinct interactions between lys and nucleotides that comprise the lys-binding pocket, and provide insight into the molecular mechanisms employed by L box riboswitch RNAs to bind and recognize lys.
Spectra of winner-take-all stochastic neural networks

During the recent few years, in response to empirical findings suggesting scale-free self-organisation phenomena emerging in complex nervous systems at a mesoscale level, there has been significant search for suitable models and theoretical explanations in neuroscientific literature, see the recent survey by Bullmore and Sporns (2009). In Piekniewski and Schreiber (2008) we have developed a simple and tractable mathematical model shedding some light on a particular class of the afore-mentioned phenomena, namely on mesoscopic level self-organisation of functional brain networks under fMRI imaging, where we have achieved a high degree of agreement with existing empirical reports. Being addressed to the neuroscientific community, our work Piekniewski and Schreiber (2008) relied on semi-rigorous study of information flow structure in a class of recurrent neural networks exhibiting asymptotic scale-free behaviour and admitting a description in terms of the so-called winner-take-all dynamics. The purpose of the present paper is to define and study these winner-take-all networks with full mathematical rigour in context of their asymptotic spectral properties, well known to be of interest for neuroscientific community. Our main result is a limit theorem for spectra of the spike-flow graphs induced by the winner-take-all dynamics. We provide an explicit characterisation of the limit spectral measure expressed in terms of zeros of Bessel's J-function.
Increase in medical knowledge during the final year of undergraduate medical education in Germany

Aims: In Germany, the final year of undergraduate medical education (‘practice year’) consists of three 16-week clinical attachments, two of which are internal medicine and surgery. Students can choose a specific specialty for their third 16-week attachment. Practice year students do not receive specific teaching to prepare them for the National Licensing Examination. It is unknown whether knowledge levels increase during this year. This study aimed at assessing knowledge at the beginning and the end of the final year of medical school. Methods: Three hundred pre-selected United States Medical Licensing Examination type items from ten medical disciplines were reviewed by ten recent medical graduates from the Netherlands and Germany. The resulting test included 150 items and was taken by 77 and 79 final year medical students from Göttingen and Hamburg at the beginning and the end of their practice year, respectively. Results: Cronbach’s α of the pre- and post-test was 0.75 and 0.68, respectively. Mean percent scores in the pre- and post-test were 63.9±6.9 and 69.4±5.7, respectively (p<0.001; effect size calculated as Cohen’s d: 0.87). In individual students, post-test scores were particularly high for items related to their specific chosen specialty. Conclusion: The knowledge test used in this study provides a suitable external tool to assess progress of undergraduate medical students in their knowledge during the practice year. The pre-test may be used to guide individual learning behaviour during this final year of undergraduate education.
Large-Scale Categorization of Japanese Product Titles Using Neural Attention Models

We propose a variant of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, the Attention CNN (ACNN); for large-scale categorization of millions of Japanese items into thirty-five product categories. Compared to a state-of-the-art Gradient Boosted Tree (GBT) classifier, the proposed model reduces training time from three weeks to three days while maintaining more than 96% accuracy. Additionally, our proposed model characterizes products by imputing attentive focus on word tokens in a language agnostic way. The attention words have been observed to be semantically highly correlated with the predicted categories and give us a choice of automatic feature extraction for downstream processing.
Molecular Pathways Molecular Pathways : Targeting ETS Gene Fusions in Cancer

Rearrangements, or gene fusions, involving the ETS family of transcription factors are common driving events in both prostate cancer and Ewing sarcoma. These rearrangements result in pathogenic expression of the ETS genes and trigger activation of transcriptional programs enriched for invasion and other oncogenic features. Although ETS gene fusions represent intriguing therapeutic targets, transcription factors, such as those comprising the ETS family, have been notoriously difficult to target. Recently, preclinical studies have demonstrated an association between ETS gene fusions and components of the DNA damage response pathway, such as PARP1, the catalytic subunit of DNA protein kinase (DNAPK), and histone deactylase 1 (HDAC1), and have suggested that ETS fusions may confer sensitivity to inhibitors of these DNA repair proteins. In this review,wediscuss the role of ETS fusions in cancer, the preclinical rationale for targeting ETS fusions with inhibitors of PARP1, DNAPK, and HDAC1, as well as ongoing clinical trials targeting ETS gene fusions. Clin Cancer Res; 20(17); 4442–8. 2014 AACR.