Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Streaming Real-time Video Using Hybrid Transport Layer Protocols in Sim-real-sim Environment

Research in streaming real-time video is gaining popularity, with the advent applications like Google Video Chat, Skype, Vsee etc. Most of the studies have utilized video traces or online movies as sources of real-time video. This paper presents the design of Sim-real-sim environment, to capture real-time video in a wireless environment. OPNET Modeler’s, System-in-the-Loop module is used to create real-sim-real scenarios to implement video streaming using hybrid transport layer protocols. Performance metrics are measured in mobile clients, one being a laptop receiving the real-time video. Result shows that the performance of this novel approach reduces delay and packet loss in the network. It ensures rich user experience in terms of lip-sync maintenance, smooth-motion video and good resolution using the available bandwidth. This work does not intends to cure congestion using adaptive mechanisms, but rather survive congestion . The scope of this work is limited to multicast of H.264 encoded real-time video in with Mobile WiMAX in the last mile.
On a $p$-Laplacian type of evolution system and applications to the Bean model in the type-II superconductivity theory

We study the Cauchy problem for an $p$-Laplacian type of evolution system ${\mathbf H}_{t}+\g [ | \g {\mathbf H}|^{p-2} \g {\mathbf H}|]={\mathbf F}$. This system governs the evolution of a magnetic field ${\bf H}$, where the current displacement is neglected and the electrical resistivity is assumed to be some power of the current density. The existence, uniqueness and regularity of solutions to the system are established. Furthermore, it is shown that the limit solution as the power $p\rightarrow \infty$ solves the problem of Bean's model in the type-II superconductivity theory. The result provides us information about how the superconductor material under the external force to become the normal conductor and vice visa. It also provides an effective method to find numerical solutions to Bean's model.
Social Capital and College-Going Culture in High Schools: the Effects of College Expectations and College Talk on Students' Postsecondary Attendance

Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, we examined the probability of students attending college by taking into account their 10th- and 12th-grade exposure to college expectations from and college-related interactions with school staff. Our results suggest that college expectations and college-related interactions with their school counselors, teachers, and coaches had a modest impact on students' odds of enrolling in college, considering the large impact of taking advanced courses and completing college admissions tests.
Genetic Deletion of gadd45b, a Regulator of Active DNA Demethylation, Enhances Long-Term Memory and Synaptic Plasticity

Dynamic epigenetic mechanisms including histone and DNA modifications regulate animal behavior and memory. While numerous enzymes regulating these mechanisms have been linked to memory formation, the regulation of active DNA demethylation (i.e., cytosine-5 demethylation) has only recently been investigated. New discoveries aim toward the Growth arrest and DNA damage-inducible 45 (Gadd45) family, particularly Gadd45b, in activity-dependent demethylation in the adult CNS. This study found memory-associated expression of gadd45b in the hippocampus and characterized the behavioral phenotype of gadd45b−/− mice. Results indicate normal baseline behaviors and initial learning but enhanced persisting memory in mutants in tasks of motor performance, aversive conditioning and spatial navigation. Furthermore, we showed facilitation of hippocampal long-term potentiation in mutants. These results implicate Gadd45b as a learning-induced gene and a regulator of memory formation and are consistent with its potential role in active DNA demethylation in memory.
Measuring Organizational Legitimacy in Social Media: Assessing Citizens’ Judgments With Sentiment Analysis

Conventional quantitative methods for the measurement of organizational legitimacy consider mainly three sources that make judgments about organizations visible: news media, accreditation bodies, and surveys. Over the last decade, however, social media have enabled ordinary citizens to bypass the gatekeeping function of these institutional evaluators and autonomously make individual judgments public. This inclusion of voices beyond functional and formally organized stakeholder groups potentially pluralizes the ongoing discussions about organizations. The individual judgments in blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts give indication about the broader fit between an organization’s perceived behavior and heterogeneous social norms and therefore constitute an indicator of organizational legitimacy that can be accessed and measured. We propose the use of social media data and sentiment analysis to study the affect-based responses to organizational actions by citizens. We critically discuss and compare the method with existing quantitative methods for legitimacy measurement and apply them to a recent case in the banking industry. We discuss the value of the method for studying the process of legitimacy construction as the expression and negotiation of normative judgments about organizations by various evaluators.
Roadside Advertisements: Effects of Valence and Arousal on Driver Performance

ROADSIDE ADVERTISEMENTS: EFFECTS OF VALENCE AND AROUSAL ON DRIVER PERFORMANCE Heather Elizabeth Kaitlin Rodd Advisor: University of Guelph, 2017 Professor Lana M. Trick Billboards attract attention by using images that evoke an emotional reaction. Three experiments were conducted to determine if driving performance was impaired by emotional billboard content. Participants were tested in a driving simulator, and drove on simulated roadways with customized billboards placed at regular intervals. Four categories of images were chosen from the International Affective Picture System: positive/high arousal, positive/low arousal, negative/high arousal, and negative/low arousal. Also included were control signs (blank images in the pilot/Experiment 1, and scrambled images in Experiment 2). Data were collected on average speeds, steering performance, and reaction time to hazards, with image recall and recognition being tested afterwards. Analyses revealed faster speeds around positive images, more variable steering around positive and low arousal images, longer reaction times around negative images, and better memory for positive/low arousal and negative/high arousal images. These findings have implications for theoretical and applied research on attention, emotions, and driving.
Adjuvants that enhance priming of cytotoxic T cells to a Kb-restricted epitope processed from exogenous but not endogenous hepatitis B surface antigen.

Intramuscular (i.m.) or s.c. injection of plasmid DNA encoding hepatitis B small surface antigen (HBsAg) primes potent MHC I-restricted cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses in H-2(d) (BALB/c) and H-2(b) (C57BL/6) mice. In contrast, i.m. or s.c. injection of exogenous HBsAg particles without adjuvants primes CTL responses in 'high responder' H-2(d) but not 'low responder' H-2(b) mice. We have shown that processing of exogenous but not endogenous HBsAg generates the Kb-binding S208-215 peptide ILSPFLPL. This system allowed us to optimize conditions for stimulating murine CTL responses to exogenous antigen by identifying adjuvants that facilitate priming of Kb-restricted CTL by injecting recombinant HBsAg particles into 'low responder' H-2(b) mice. Synthetic oligodeoxynucleotides with immunostimulating sequences or the recombinant cytokine IL-12 efficiently enhanced priming of CTL to exogenous HBsAg. Hence, the adjuvanticity of DNA sequences that induce Th1 cytokines facilitate priming of MHC I-restricted T cell responses to exogenous antigen and are therefore of potential value in formulating vaccines designed to enhance CTL priming to exogenous antigen.
Zinc and mechanical prowess in the jaws of Nereis, a marine worm

Higher animals typically rely on calcification to harden certain tissues such as bones and teeth. Some notable exceptions can be found in invertebrates: The fangs, teeth, and mandibles of diverse arthropod species have been reported to contain high levels of zinc. Considerable quantities of zinc also occur in the jaws of the marine polychaete worm Nereis sp. High copper levels in the polychaete worm Glycera dibranchiata recently were attributed to a copper-based biomineral reinforcing the jaws. In the present article, we attempt to unravel the role of zinc in Nereis limbata jaws, using a combination of position-resolved state-of-the-art techniques. It is shown that the local hardness and stiffness of the jaws correlate with the local zinc concentration, pointing toward a structural role for zinc. Zinc always is detected in tight correlation with chlorine, suggesting the presence of a zinc–chlorine compound. No crystalline inorganic phase was found, however, and results from x-ray absorption spectroscopy further exclude the presence of simple inorganic zinc–chlorine compounds in amorphous form. The correlation of local histidine levels in the protein matrix and zinc concentration leads us to hypothesize a direct coordination of zinc and chlorine to the protein. A comparison of the role of the transition metals zinc and copper in the jaws of two polychaete worm species Nereis and Glycera, respectively, is presented.
The perceptions of acceptance by new academics to a Higher Education Institution

Abstract The aim of this study was to gain a perspective of new members of staff who attempt to gain entry into an existing community of practice, to ascertain how this process occurs, and to explore new ways of inducting teams into established communities of practice. This research is situated, while demonstrating uniqueness, against a critique of Lave and Wenger’s Community of Practice theory, to analyse its applicability to the current Higher Education world. A qualitative, phenomenological study was conducted in a UK Higher Education Institution Faculty. Semi-structured interviews with eight members of academic staff, consisting of nursing and non-nursing lecturers who were all within two years of joining the institution, provided the data for this research. Data were examined using Miles and Huberman’s qualitative data-analysis model.This research argues that the community of practice notion does not fully correlate in this context with participant experiences. Results demonstrated that participants were exposed to varying levels of incivility, with differing levels of acceptance to the community of practice. There was a dissonance between participants attempting to enter the nursing and non-nursing community of practice. Conclusions made demonstrate how gaining entry to the nursing community of practice posed hostility compared with the non-nursing community of practice. The difficulties may have implications for all levels of the academic institution, although this would need to be tested against a larger sample for general applicability.
Murine macrophages differentially produce proinflammatory cytokines after infection with virulent vs. avirulent Legionella pneumophila

Virulent Legionella pneumophila replicate readily in thioglycollate‐elicited peritoneal macrophages from genetically permissive A/J mice, but avirulent L. pneumophila do not. The production of cytokines by macrophages infected with L. pneumophila has been studied, but the correlation of bacterial virulence with immune responses of macrophages, such as proinflammatory cytokine production, is not well understood. In this regard, production of the cytokines tumor necrosis factor α (TNF‐α), interleukin (IL)‐1α, IL‐1β, and IL‐6 were examined in macrophage cultures infected in vitro with virulent vs. avirulent L. pneumophila. Infection of macrophages from A/J mice with the virulent L. pneumophila up‐regulated mRNA expression for these cytokines, whereas avirulent bacteria resulted in only a slight or no detectable increase in cytokine mRNA. Similarly, virulent L. pneumophila induced the macrophages to produce relatively high levels of TNF‐α, IL‐1α, IL‐1β, and IL‐6 proteins as measured by enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assays, whereas avirulent bacteria induced only low or often undetectable amounts of these cytokines. Thus, these results show the murine macrophages from susceptible A/J mice are readily infected with virulent L. pneumophila in vitro and stimulated to produce the proinflammatory acute‐phase cytokines TNF‐α, IL‐1α, IL‐1β, and IL‐6, but avirulent L. pneumophila did not. Such differences in induction of these proinflammatory cytokines by macrophages in response to virulent vs. avirulent L. pneumophila infections may be an important factor in the pathogenesis induced by these intracellular bacteria. J. Leukoc. Biol. 67: 863–868; 2000.
An Energy-Efficient and Reliable Storage Mechanism for Data-Intensive Academic Archive Systems

Previous studies proposed energy-efficient solutions, such as multispeed disks and disk spin-down methods, to conserve power in their respective storage systems. However, in most cases, the authors did not analyze the reliability of their solutions. According to research conducted by Google and the IDEMA standard, frequently setting the disk status to standby mode will increase the disk’s Annual Failure Rate and reduce its lifespan. To resolve the issue, we propose an evaluation function called E3SaRC (Economic Evaluation of Energy Saving with Reliability Constraint), which considers the cost of hardware failure when applying energy-saving schemes. We also present an adaptive write cache mechanism called CacheRAID. The mechanism tries to mitigate the random access problems that implicitly exist in RAID techniques and thereby reduce the energy consumption of RAID disks. CacheRAID also addresses the issue of system reliability by applying a control mechanism to the spin-down algorithm. Our experimental results show that the CacheRAID storage system can reduce the power consumption of the conventional software RAID 5 system by 65% to 80%. Moreover, according to the E3SaRC measurement, the overall saved cost of CacheRAID is the largest among the systems that we compared.
Analyzing, Detecting, and Exploiting Sentiment in Web Queries

The Web contains an increasing amount of biased and opinionated documents on politics, products, and polarizing events. In this article, we present an indepth analysis of Web search queries for controversial topics, focusing on query sentiment. To this end, we conduct extensive user assessments and discriminative term analyses, as well as a sentiment analysis using the SentiWordNet thesaurus, a lexical resource containing sentiment annotations. Furthermore, in order to detect the sentiment expressed in queries, we build different classifiers based on query texts, query result titles, and snippets. We demonstrate the virtue of query sentiment detection in two different use cases. First, we define a query recommendation scenario that employs sentiment detection of results to recommend additional queries for polarized queries issued by search engine users. The second application scenario is controversial topic discovery, where query sentiment classifiers are employed to discover previously unknown topics that trigger both highly positive and negative opinions among the users of a search engine. For both use cases, the results of our evaluations on real-world data are promising and show the viability and potential of query sentiment analysis in practical scenarios.
Reproductive success of captively bred and naturally spawned Chinook salmon colonizing newly accessible habitat

Captively reared animals can provide an immediate demographic boost in reintroduction programs, but may also reduce the fitness of colonizing populations. Construction of a fish passage facility at Landsburg Diversion Dam on the Cedar River, WA, USA, provided a unique opportunity to explore this trade‐off. We thoroughly sampled adult Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) at the onset of colonization (2003–2009), constructed a pedigree from genotypes at 10 microsatellite loci, and calculated reproductive success (RS) as the total number of returning adult offspring. Hatchery males were consistently but not significantly less productive than naturally spawned males (range in relative RS: 0.70–0.90), but the pattern for females varied between years. The sex ratio was heavily biased toward males; therefore, inclusion of the hatchery males increased the risk of a genetic fitness cost with little demographic benefit. Measurements of natural selection indicated that larger salmon had higher RS than smaller fish. Fish that arrived early to the spawning grounds tended to be more productive than later fish, although in some years, RS was maximized at intermediate dates. Our results underscore the importance of natural and sexual selection in promoting adaptation during reintroductions.
Enriched Lawvere Theories

We deene the notion of enriched Lawvere theory, for enrichment over a monoidal biclosed category V that is locally nitely presentable as a closed category. We prove that the category of enriched Lawvere theories is equivalent to the category of nitary monads on V. Morever, the V-category of models of a Lawvere V-theory is equivalent to the V-category of algebras for the corresponding V-monad. This all extends routinely to local presentability with respect to any regular cardinal. We nally consider the special case where V is Cat, and explain how the correspondence extends to pseudo maps of algebras.
Elaboration of the Coale-McNeil Nuptiality Model as the Generalized Log Gamma Distribution: A New Identity and Empirical Enhancements

The Coale-McNeil nuptiality model is a particular case of the generalized log gamma distribution model. In this paper, we demonstrate that recognition of this connection allows an expansion of the possible applications of the Coale-McNeil model. As examples, we propose a procedure to develop country specific standard schedules, and illustrate the utility in regression analysis (directly and via the competing risk framework). In addition, we employ this identification to enhance the ability of the models with empirical adjustment to trace the trajectory of the lifetime schedule for cohorts which have not completed the process. We illustrate an application to Japanese female cohorts. We also propose an application to fertility projection by modeling the fertility schedule by birth order.
The social impact investment race: toward an interpretative framework

Purpose This paper aims to develop an interpretative framework of the evolution of social impact investment (SII) in different countries. SII is a strategy of asset allocation, which combines financial profitability with a measurable social and environmental impact. Design/methodology/approach Through a thematic analysis of 75 documents, i.e. reports, experts’ considerations, reflections on practitioners’ experience, meetings’ minutes, written by the SII Taskforce of the Group of Eight and the relative National Advisory Boards, the authors identify the main themes connected to the topic of SII development and recognize four main elements useful to segment the market, namely, information asymmetry, financial instruments, source of capital and market intermediation. Findings They map the ongoing practices in the Group of Eight’s members and distinguish two speeds in the evolution of SII: on one hand, there is a group of roadrunners, which pave the way to SII and in which SII activities have being institutionalized; on the other hand, there is a wider group of chasers, where the SII infrastructures lack any systematization. Originality/value Although some authors provide preliminary interpretations of the SII evolution, they mainly focus on the national level and do not provide any cross-countries analysis. The findings of the present work contribute to overcome the lack of evidence characterizing the SII field and the absence of comparable and consistent data at the global level by filling the academic literature about SII, through a structured interpretative framework.
Black Petes & Black Crooks? Racial stereotyping and offending in the Netherlands

Abstract In the popular Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas, the caricature of his helper ‘Zwarte Piet’ [Black Pete] is often of a black-faced white person. The representation of this character has been surrounded by controversy in Europe and abroad. The following paper discusses these recent controversial media stories in the Netherlands and Western Europe along with the historical context of this character. We also make an argument about how the pervasive imagery in news, television, and theatre of people of color in the Netherlands may be influencing crime statistics by creating and encouraging negative views of ‘the other’. In the Netherlands, Dutch Caribbean and Surinamese first-generation immigrants compared to white, native Dutch are over-represented in official arrest and prison statistics. We theorize that the reasons for this noticeable overrepresentation in crime statistic is it at least in part due to a societal stigma of ‘the other’ and racial profiling of black ethnic minorities.
INTRAMODAL FEATURE FUSION BASED ON PSO FOR PALMPRINT AUTHENTICATION

Palmprint recognition has attracted various researchers in recent years due to its richness in amount of features. In feature extraction, the single feature has become bottleneck in producing high performance. To solve this we propose an intramodal feature fusion for palmprint authentication. The proposed system extracts multiple features like Texture (Gabor), and Line features from the preprocessed palmprint images. The feature vectors obtained from different approaches are incompatible and also the features from same image may be redundant. Therefore, we propose a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based technique to perform feature fusion on extracted features. Being an iterative technique that randomly optimizes the fused feature space, it overcomes the problems of feature fusion. Finally the feature vector is further reduced using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and matched with stored template using NN classifier. The proposed approach is validated for their efficiency on PolyU palmprint database of 200 users. The experimental results illustrates that the feature level fusion improves the recognition accuracy significantly.