Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tensor-Jet: A tensorial representation of Local Binary Gaussian Jet maps

In this paper we present a new robust method for recognizing face images using a robust tensorial representation of binary gaussian jet maps (Tensor-Jet). This tensorial representation captures local appearance while retaining information about the spatial structure. During the tensors construction, each Gaussian Jet map is calculated with a Half Octave Gaussian Pyramid using a linear complexity algorithm. A Local Binary Pattern (LBP) operator is then applied and the results are accumulated in a local histogram. Local histograms are concatenated to form a tensorial representation that captures the spatial structure. The local correlation of neighboring histogram is removed by applying multi-linear principal components analysis. Finally a Kernel Discriminative Common vector is trained with the output of the MPCA to improve the overall recognition. We compare two different algorithms to recognize face images with this representation. Experimental results using the FERET database and Extended Yale Database show that this method compares favorably with the state-of-the-art methods in face recognition.
Learning Through Reinforcement and Replicator Dynamics

This paper considers a version of Bush and Mosteller's stochastic learning theory in the context of games. We compare this model of learning to a model of biological evolution. The purpose is to investigate analogies between learning and evolution. We and that in the continuous time limit the biological model coincides with the deterministic, continuous time replicator process. We give conditions under which the same is true for the learning model. For the case that these conditions do not hold, we show that the replicator process continues to play an important role in characterising the continuous time limit of the learning model, but that a di®erent e®ect (\Probability Matching") enters as well. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Nutritional Composition and Protein Quality of the Edible Beetle Holotrichia parallela

ABSTRACT. The adult edible beetle Holotrichia parallela Motschulsky (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea) represents a traditional food source in China. Based on nutritional analyses, adult H. parallela is high in protein (70%) and minerals and low in fat. H. parallela contained approximately 10% chitin; the corrected protein content was 66%. Oleic acid and linoleic acid were the most abundant fatty acids. Of the total amino acids in H. parallela, 47.4% were essential amino acids. The amino acid scores were 87 and 100, based on the corrected crude and net protein contents, respectively; threonine was the limiting amino acid. In vitro protein digestibility was 78%, and the protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score was 89 based on the net protein content. Adult H. parallela may be a potential source of proteins and minerals for humans and animals.
SPONTANEOUS MUTATION ACCUMULATION IN MULTIPLE STRAINS OF THE GREEN ALGA, CHLAMYDOMONAS REINHARDTII

Estimates of mutational parameters, such as the average fitness effect of a new mutation and the rate at which new genetic variation for fitness is created by mutation, are important for the understanding of many biological processes. However, the causes of interspecific variation in mutational parameters and the extent to which they vary within species remain largely unknown. We maintained multiple strains of the unicellular eukaryote Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, for approximately 1000 generations under relaxed selection by transferring a single cell every ∼10 generations. Mean fitness of the lines tended to decline with generations of mutation accumulation whereas mutational variance increased. We did not find any evidence for differences among strains in any of the mutational parameters estimated. The overall change in mean fitness per cell division and rate of input of mutational variance per cell division were more similar to values observed in multicellular organisms than to those in other single‐celled microbes. However, after taking into account differences in genome size among species, estimates from multicellular organisms and microbes, including our new estimates from C. reinhardtii, become substantially more similar. Thus, we suggest that variation in genome size is an important determinant of interspecific variation in mutational parameters.
Teaching social education with and through groups

ABSTRACT This article presents a teaching model applied in the training of social educators under the principles of experiential learning and group work. The model is the result of an innovative teaching experience that took place with students of a bachelor’s degree program in social education at a Spanish university. In addition to providing an education and training paradigm in social education with groups, the model promotes learning through groups and shows positive results that can be extended to other subjects in higher education in the social field both in Spain and in other international contexts.
Coordinating Virtual Machine Migrations in Enterprise Data Centers and Clouds

Virtual machine(VM) migration usually requires a considerable amount of system resources such as the network bandwidth. In the case of multiple simultaneous migrations, which happens regularly in data center operations, such resource demands will increase dramatically and are difficult to be satisfied immediately. In this paper we propose a scheduling method for multiple VM migrations to guarantee the fast completion of those tasks and hence the reduced impacts on system performance. We consider two aspects to achieve that. Firstly we analyze the VM migration behavior and build a simulation tool to predict the time of multiple migrations under different links conditions and VM characteristics. By analyzing the simulation outputs, we can discover the best bandwidth sharing policy for each network link, i.e., the number of concurrent migrations that can lead to the shortest completion time. Based on the link sharing policy, we further propose a bin-packing algorithm to organize bandwidth resources from all the network links, and allocate them to different migration tasks. As a result of our global resource assignment, the migration tasks can fully utilize available resources in the whole network to achieve the fast completion. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our migration scheduling approach. Keywords-resource scheduling; optimization
Bees in the miombo: buzzing toward the Millennium Development Goals

Beekeeping has a long history in the miombo woodlands. Since pre-colonial times woodland bee products have been traded locally in urban markets and exported (Kadale Consultants 2005; MickelsKokwe 2006; Match Maker Associates 2007). The importance attributed to the sector by national governments in the region is demonstrated by the implementation of national beekeeping policies such as that developed in Tanzania in 1998 and the one currently under development in Zambia. Beekeeping is mentioned as a viable activity in joint forest management schemes in several forest policies and beekeeping extension is one of the key responsibilities of forestry departments across the region. Poverty levels in the region are amongst Bees in the miombo Buzzing toward the Millennium Development Goals
Effectiveness of frenectomy for ankyloglossia correction in terms of breastfeeding and maternal outcomes: A critically appraised topic

ABSTRACT A critically appraised topic (CAT) is one form of rapid review that can be particularly useful for informing practice (White, Raghavendra, & McAllister, 2017). The purpose of this CAT was to determine whether lingual frenectomy is effective in improving breastfeeding outcomes (compared with no surgical intervention) in infants with tongue tie under the age of 4 months. The effectiveness of lingual frenectomy (frenotomy) in improving breastfeeding outcomes was considered through the critical appraisal of three systematic reviews. In addition to the methodology, the authors present and discuss the findings of this CAT. The authors propose an update to this CAT in January 2021.
Internal Finance and Investment: Another Look

One of the best documented empirical facts in economic research has been the positive relationship between internal finance and cash flows and capital expenditures and investment. But disputes about the analytical basis for the cash flow theory have been largely unresolved. There are two distinct approaches to the cash flow theory of investments: the managerial (managers are primarily interested in maximizing the firm's growth rate) and information theoretic (managers try to maximize shareholder value). Using a panel of US manufacturing firms (1972-90), the author tries to distinguish between the approaches. The results suggest that firms rely on internal finance for capital expenditures because of managerial considerations. The principal shortcoming of the information-theoretic approach is its reliance on dividend practices as a decisive criterion for studying firm heterogeneity. Dividend practices are incapable of distinguishing between managerial and information-theoretic approaches. But one can distinguish between managerial and information-theoretic approaches using such variables as size, exchange listings and the ratio of R&D to sales and make contrasting predictions about the firm's reliance on internal finance for capital expenditures. The evidence shows that the firm's observed reliance of capital expenditures on internal finance is driven by managerial rather than information-theoretic considerations. While no current research directly distinguishes between managerial and information theoretic approaches, preliminary evidence seems to favor the managerial approach. And even though the stock market may play a limited role as a source of finance, policy initiatives to reform the financial sector and develop capital markets are likely to enhance the overall efficiency of the resources allocation process in the economy.
Are Fishermen Rational? A Fishing Expedition

Uncertainty is a defining characteristic of fisheries. Fishermen make decisions affecting their livelihood daily and even hourly, often with scant information on which to evaluate alternatives. Cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists have shown that decisions involving uncertainty often diverge substantially from what would be predicted by expected utility theory. I review relevant findings from the literature on decision making under uncertainty and previous empirical modeling of fishing decisions, and explore the implications of a number of different behavioral theories on fishing decisions of various types. Excerpts from ethnographic interviews of groundfish fishermen in New England are used to illustrate how these fishermen deal with uncertainty in decisions they make about when, where, how, and how long to fish. The interviews provide anecdotal evidence in support of prospect theory and other behavioral hypotheses that appear to contrast with what would be considered rational behavior from a neoclassical economics perspective.
Advances and Issues on Dynamic Balancing of Parallel Mechanisms

In this paper, recent advances and theories in dynamic balancing of mechanisms and synthesizing of parallel robots by using reactionless mechanisms are discussed in detail. How to design reactionless mechanisms with minimum increase of mass and inertia and synthesize parallel mechanisms based on decomposition and integration concept to improve the overall performance of parallel robots are the main issues that many authors and researchers are facing nowadays. The advances and problems on dynamic balancing of mechanisms will be discussed based on different research families in order to summarize and evaluate recent dynamic balancing methods in order to provide guidelines for the future research direction, and finally new 3DOF planar 3-2RRR and 4-2RRR reactionless parallel manipulators and spatial 3DOF 3-2RRR and 4-2RRR reactionless parallel manipulators are derived.
Disclosure quality and corporate governance: Evidence from the French Stock Market

This paper examines a combined set of corporate governance features that influence disclosure quality in a context of ownership concentration. Agency theory presents a theoretical framework linking disclosure decision to corporate governance mechanisms. Using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), we find that firms with poor disclosure quality have higher ownership concentration, are family controlled, have a low proportion of outside directors in the board, little presence of institutional investors in the capital shares, no executive stock options plans, and present dual class shares. The MCA results also show that firms with good disclosure are not controlled by families and are characterised by a high proportion of outside directors in the board, ownership dispersion and a significant presence of institutional investors in the capital shares. As a confirmatory analysis, we use a binary LOGIT. After controlling for size, multiple listing and CAC40 membership, the results confirm a negative association between disclosure quality and family control, double voting shares grant, and ownership concentration. The results also show a positive relationship between disclosure quality and the presence of executive stock options plans, and the proportion of independent directors in the board. These findings shed the light on corporate governance features that enhance incentives for good disclosure under high ownership concentration.
Fabrication of Low Noise Borosilicate Glass Nanopores for Single Molecule Sensing

We show low-cost fabrication and characterization of borosilicate glass nanopores for single molecule sensing. Nanopores with diameters of ~100 nm were fabricated in borosilicate glass capillaries using laser assisted glass puller. We further achieve controlled reduction and nanometer-size control in pore diameter by sculpting them under constant electron beam exposure. We successfully fabricate pore diameters down to 6 nm. We next show electrical characterization and low-noise behavior of these borosilicate nanopores and compare their taper geometries. We show, for the first time, a comprehensive characterization of glass nanopore conductance across six-orders of magnitude (1M-1μM) of salt conditions, highlighting the role of buffer conditions. Finally, we demonstrate single molecule sensing capabilities of these devices with real-time translocation experiments of individual λ-DNA molecules. We observe distinct current blockage signatures of linear as well as folded DNA molecules as they undergo voltage-driven translocation through the glass nanopores. We find increased signal to noise for single molecule detection for higher trans-nanopore driving voltages. We propose these nanopores will expand the realm of applications for nanopore platform.
MeshGit

This paper presents MeshGit, a practical algorithm for diffing and merging polygonal meshes typically used in subdivision modeling workflows. Inspired by version control for text editing, we introduce the mesh edit distance as a measure of the dissimilarity between meshes. This distance is defined as the minimum cost of matching the vertices and faces of one mesh to those of another. We propose an iterative greedy algorithm to approximate the mesh edit distance, which scales well with model complexity, providing a practical solution to our problem. We translate the mesh correspondence into a set of mesh editing operations that transforms the first mesh into the second. The editing operations can be displayed directly to provide a meaningful visual difference between meshes. For merging, we compute the difference between two versions and their common ancestor, as sets of editing operations. We robustly detect conflicting operations, automatically apply non-conflicting edits, and allow the user to choose how to merge the conflicting edits. We evaluate MeshGit by diffing and merging a variety of meshes and find it to work well for all.
Assessing Variable Levels of Platform Commonality Within a Product Family Using a Multiobjective Genetic Algorithm

Many companies are using product families and platform-based product development to reduce development costs and lead-time while increasing product variety and customization. Multiobjective optimization is experiencing new found use in the field of product family design to facilitate product platform design and help resolve the inherent tradeoff between commonality and distinctiveness that exists within a product family. After discussing the uses of multiobjective optimization in product family design and the limitations of current approaches, we introduce a genetic algorithm-based approach for product family design that has been developed to overcome these challenges. The proposed genetic algorithm (GA) modifications enable it to simultaneously design the product platform and its corresponding family of products while considering varying levels of platform commonality within the product family. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through the design of a family of General Aviation Aircraft and comparison against previous results. The impact of seeding the proposed GA with two product families, one with all products common and one with all products unique, is studied and shown to yield a richer Pareto set in fewer generations.
Hermitian Categories, Extension Of Scalars And Systems Of Sesquilinear Forms

We prove that the category of systems of sesquilinear forms over a given hermitian category is equivalent to the category of unimodular 1-hermitian forms over another hermitian category. The sesquilinear forms are not required to be unimodular or defined on a reflexive object (i.e., the standard map from the object to its double dual is not assumed to be bijective), and the forms in the system can be defined with respect to different hermitian structures on the given category. This extends an earlier result of the first and third authors. We use the equivalence to define a Witt group of sesquilinear forms over a hermitian category and to generalize results such as Witt's cancellation theorem, Springer's theorem, the weak Hasse principle, and finiteness of genus to systems of sesquilinear forms over hermitian categories.
InTraBase: integrated traffic analysis based on a database management system

Internet traffic analysis as a research area has attracted lots of interest over the last decade. The traffic data collected for analysis are usually stored in plain files and the analysis tools consist of customized scripts each tailored for a specific task. As data are often collected over a longer period of time or from different vantage points, it is important to keep metadata that describe the data collected. The use of separate files to store the data, the metadata, and the analysis scripts provides an abstraction that is much too primitive. The information that "glues" these different files together is not made explicit but is solely in the heads of the people involved in the activity. As a consequence, manipulating the data is very cumbersome, does not scale, and severely limits the way these data can be analyzed. We propose to use a database management system (DBMS) that provides the infrastructure for the analysis and management of data from measurements, related metadata, and obtained results. We discuss the problems and limitations with today's approaches, describe our ideas, and demonstrate how our DBMS-based solution, called InTraBase, addresses these problems and limitations. We present the first version of our prototype and preliminary performance analysis results.
Probabilistic opinion models based on subjective sources

This article describes approaches for searching opinionated documents for a given query from a standard data collection. To detect if a text is opinionated (i.e., contain subjective information) or not, we propose two methods: the first method is based on lexicons of subjective words (i.e., SentiWordNet) supported by the assumption that more a document contains the subjective terms more it has the tendency of being an opinionated document while the second method is based on probabilistic model supporting the idea that given a document having a strong similarity with a reference opinionated text is more likely to be opinionated. In the second method, we take support of language modeling approach to compute this similarity. Experiments are conducted with TREC Blog06 as the test collection and the IMDB data collection as being the reference data collection. The experimental results report effectiveness of both methods.
Is Taiwan's Lowest-low Fertility Reversible Via Socio-economic Development? +

In this study, we assume that socio-economic development is the underlying mechanism for population changes. In the past 50 years, Taiwan has experienced drastic socio-economic changes and rapid population change. Simultaneous equations are thus used to integrate the effect of Taiwan's socio-economic factors on the projection of its age-specific fertility rate (ASFR). The estimated ASFR is then used to make population projections for Taiwan in the period 2004-2033. The results of our low and medium projections are close to the official (CEPD) medium-high projection for the same time period. The results of the high projection for both studies are rather similar too. Specifically, if Taiwan's socio-economic development grows at a high variant, its fertility would rebound to replacement level by 2033. If it follows the medium variant, fertility would rise to 1.6 births per woman. But if Taiwan's future socio-economic development grows sluggishly as in the assumed low variant case, Taiwan's fertility would remain at a lowest-low level.
Combined i.v. bolus and infusion of pancuronium bromide.

An i.v. bolus and concomitant infusion of pancuronium is proposed for use in prolonged anaesthesia. Plasma concentrations of pancuronium were measured in 16 patients receiving this regime. The desired steady-state concentration of 0.2 μg ml−1 was achieved in most instances at approximately 45 min. Following the bolus, the neuromuscular twitch response decreased to low values or was abolished completely. Thereafter the response remained relatively constant or increased in intensity consistent with the mean steady-state plasma concentrations of 0.214 μg ml−1 (SEM 0.012) maintained by the infusion. When the infusion was stopped, the mean twitch height was 23% of control and increased thereafter at approximately 1 % per min, while plasma concentrations decreased by half in 69 min. One patient with renal artery stenoses exhibited complete neuromuscular blockade at a steady-state plasma concentration of 0.29 μg ml−1; following cessation of infusion the twitch response was detected after 30 min (plasma concentration 0.20 μg ml−1) and recovery was uneventful. Plasma clearance and apparent volume of distribution of pancuronium used to calculate the dosage regime were found not to differ significantly from those reported for a single dose. Following cessation of infusion, plasma concentrations declined in either a mono- or bi-exponential form depending on the ratio of the hybrid disposition rate constants (β/α). In all instances a two-compartment open model was used to describe the time course of the plasma concentrations.