Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Test Case Reduction Technique for Semantic Based Web Services

—Web Services (WS) are the basic building blocks for every e-business applications. They provide efficient reusability mechanism, thereby reducing the development time and cost. Web services can be identified by Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The interfaces and bindings of Web Services can be discovered, defined and described as XML artifacts according to Web Service Description Language (WSDL). WSDL can be used to describe web service operations including input, output and exceptions. It cannot identify pre and post conditions of web services. But Semantic WSDL (WSDL-S) identifies the pre and post conditions of web services to generate optimal number of test cases. This paper presents an approach for generating web service test cases using WSDL-S and Object Constraint Language (OCL), while the test case generation technique is Orthogonal Array Testing (OAT). We have developed a prototype namely Semantic Web Services Test Case Generator (SWSTCG) which can be viewed in the web site http://www.tcetesting. webs.com. We have generated WSDL of web service to be tested using NetBeans IDE and converted into WSDL-S by giving OCL references, where pre and post conditions are defined. Test data, using OAT, with different factors, levels and strengths are generated and documented in XML based test files called Web Service Test Specifications (WSTS) and executed. The proposed method is compared with the Pair-Wise Testing (PWT) method. We have conducted testing on various web service applications and the results have shown that the proposed method is effective in generating minimal test cases with maximum test case effectiveness.
Biologically inspired neural networks for the control of embodied agents

This paper reviews models of neural networks suitable for the control of artificial intelligent agents interacting continuously with an environment. We first define the characteristics needed by those neural networks. We review several classes of neural models and compare them in respect of their suitability for embodied agent control. Among the classes of neural network models amenable to large scale computer simulation, recurrent spiking neural networks result to be the most suited for this task. We present next several models of spiking neural networks and review models of unsupervised learning for them. Finally, we review current implementations of spiking neural networks as controllers for embodied agents.
Increased Prevalence of Carotid Atherosclerosis in Hepatitis B Virus Carriers

Background—Recent experimental and epidemiological findings suggest that some infectious agents play a role in the development and promotion of atherosclerosis. We have investigated the possible association between hepatitis B virus surface antigen (HBsAg) positivity and carotid arteriosclerosis. Methods and Results—In this cross-sectional cohort study, we analyzed data from subjects undergoing general health-screening tests, including both high-resolution B-mode carotid ultrasound and assessment of HBsAg status, between 1994 and 2001 at our institute. Of the 4686 study subjects (3137 men and 1549 women; age 22 to 88 years), 1294 (28%) had carotid artery plaque and 40 (0.9%) were positive for HBsAg, indicating they were hepatitis B virus carriers. No HBsAg-positive subjects were positive either for antibodies against the hepatitis C virus (HCV) or for HCV core proteins. Univariate analysis revealed HBsAg positivity was associated with carotid plaque with an odds ratio of 1.58 (95% CI, 1.14 to 2.19, P <0.05). When other confounding risk factors for atherosclerosis were included as covariates in the statistical analysis, HBsAg positivity was still positively associated with carotid plaque with an odds ratio of 1.57 (95% CI, 1.10 to 2.24, P <0.05). Conclusions—These findings suggest a possible role of chronic hepatitis B infection in the pathogenesis of carotid arteriosclerosis.
Backdrivability analysis of Electro-Hydrostatic Actuator and series dissipative actuation model

Although backdrivability is recognized as an important property of actuators, this term is often used without clear definition. In order to design mechanisms with advanced controllability, it is important to understand the fundamental mechanism of backdrivability. In this paper, we introduced idea of series elasticity and series dissipation of actuators. Based on this idea, total / output backdrivability and their fundamental properties are stated. EHA was shown to be series dissipative and it was confirmed from the model of the actuator. Utilizing the backdrivability of EHA, position based impedance control was implemented and evaluated. Application of this EHA in a robot hand is also reported.
Unraveling the Mystery of New Technology Use: An Investigation into the Interplay of Desire for Control, Computer Self-efficacy, and Personal Innovativeness

In this paper, we examine how intrinsically motivated competence and autonomy (two basic psychological needs derived from self-determination theory) in concert with personal innovativeness in IT motivate individuals to try new information technologies. In a study with 202 participants we found 1) competence, operationalized as general computer self-efficacy (GCSE), and 2) autonomy, operationalized as desire for control over information technology (DCIT), to positively influence individuals' intention to use new or unfamiliar technologies. Further, we hypothesize and find evidence of an interaction effect that suggests there may be a tradeoff between these constructs. That is, individuals may be inclined to use new technologies because they perceive themselves as having high levels of ability or because they have high levels of desire; they are either competence-driven or desire-driven users. Therefore, correctly identifying potential users into the appropriate user category and providing the necessary training or control mechanisms will likely increase an individual's intention to try new and innovative IT products.
Working paper: Forecasting Tourist Arrivals in Greece: A Comprehensive Survey (1978-2009)

This paper reviews and critiques the modelling frameworks and empirical measurement paradigms used to obtain willingness to pay (WTP) for improved travel time reliability, suggesting new directions for ongoing research. We also estimate models to derive values of reliability, scheduling costs and reliability ratios in the context of Australian toll roads and use the new evidence to highlight the important influence of the way that trip time variability is included in stated preference studies in deriving WTP estimates of reliability in absolute terms, and relative to the value of travel time savings.
Alcohol and Relatively Pure Cannabis Use, but Not Schizotypy, are Associated with Cognitive Attenuations

Elevated schizotypy relates to similar cognitive attenuations as seen in psychosis and cannabis/polydrug use. Also, in schizotypal populations cannabis and polydrug (including licit drug) use are enhanced. These cognitive attenuations may therefore either be a behavioral marker of psychotic (-like) symptoms or the consequence of enhanced drug use in schizotypal populations. To elucidate this, we investigated the link between cognitive attenuation and cannabis use in largely pure cannabis users (35) and non-using controls (48), accounting for the potential additional influence of both schizotypy and licit drug use (alcohol, nicotine). Cognitive attenuations commonly seen in psychosis were associated with cannabis and alcohol use, but not schizotypy. Future studies should therefore consider (i) non-excessive licit substance use (e.g., alcohol) in studies investigating the effect of cannabis use on cognition and (ii) both enhanced illicit and licit substance use in studies investigating cognition in schizotypal populations.
The association between impaired glucose tolerance and birth weight among black and white women in central North Carolina.

OBJECTIVE This study examines the relationship of glucose intolerance during pregnancy to birth weight among black and white participants of the Pregnancy, Infection, and Nutrition Study. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This prospective cohort study recruited women from prenatal clinics in central North Carolina at 24-29 weeks' gestation. A 1-h 50-g glucose challenge test (GCT) and 100-g oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) were conducted. Impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) was defined as one high value on the OGTT, gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) as two or more high values, and normal glucose tolerance (NGT) was defined as a low or high value on the GCT screen but no high values on the OGTT. Women with known glucose status and birth outcome information were included in this analysis (n = 2055). RESULTS Black women with IGT had higher rates of both macrosomia (38.5%) and large for gestational age (LGA) (53.9%) compared with white women (10.0% and 13.2%). Black infants' birth weights (3800 g) and prevalence of macrosomia and LGA were significantly higher among mothers with IGT compared with NGT women (birth weight, 3184 g; macrosomia, 7.0%; LGA, 11.6%). In contrast, among white infants, there was no significant increase in birth weight, macrosomia, or LGA associated with the mother's glucose tolerance status. In addition, there was no effect of GDM on birth weight in either group. CONCLUSIONS This study suggests that, independent of maternal prepregnant weight, there may be significant increased risk of macrosomia among black IGT women but not among white IGT women. Further investigations into factors that may contribute to the observed results are needed.
Evidence that the Density of Self Peptide-MHC Ligands Regulates T-Cell Receptor Signaling

Noncognate or self peptide-MHC (pMHC) ligands productively interact with T-cell receptor (TCR) and are always in a large access over the cognate pMHC on the surface of antigen presenting cells. We assembled soluble cognate and noncognate pMHC class I (pMHC-I) ligands at designated ratios on various scaffolds into oligomers that mimic pMHC clustering and examined how multivalency and density of the pMHCs in model clusters influences the binding to live CD8 T cells and the kinetics of TCR signaling. Our data demonstrate that the density of self pMHC-I proteins promotes their interaction with CD8 co-receptor, which plays a critical role in recognition of a small number of cognate pMHC-I ligands. This suggests that MHC clustering on live target cells could be utilized as a sensitive mechanism to regulate T cell responsiveness.
Saliency Based on Information Maximization

A model of bottom-up overt attention is proposed based on the principle of maximizing information sampled from a scene. The proposed operation is based on Shannon's self-information measure and is achieved in a neural circuit, which is demonstrated as having close ties with the circuitry existent in die primate visual cortex. It is further shown that the proposed salicney measure may be extended to address issues that currently elude explanation in the domain of saliency based models. Results on natural images are compared with experimental eye tracking data revealing the efficacy of the model in predicting the deployment of overt attention as compared with existing efforts.
Effect of Octreotide Injection on Postoperative Drainage After Neck Dissection: A Preliminary Report of a Prospective, Matched Case-Control Study

Objectives Somatostatin inhibits lymph production and reduces lymph flow into the lymphatic duct. We hypothesized that octreotide, a long-acting somatostatin analog, would reduce drainage after neck dissection (ND) by reducing the overall lymphatic flow in the neck as well as thoracic duct flow. Methods From 2012 to 2014, total 123 patients who had undergone left-sided comprehensive ND, were divided into an octreotide group (49 patients) and a control group (74 patients). Seventeen patients from the octreotide group and 17 from the control group were individually matched by age (±10 years), sex, body mass index (±1 kg/m2), type of cancer, surgeon, and the extent of surgery. These 34 patients were finally included in the study. Results The total fluid drainage volume (540.9 mL vs. 707.9 mL) and drainage volume during the period of octreotide use (the first 5 postoperative days) (461.1 mL vs. 676.4 mL) were significantly lower in the octreotide group. The duration of drain placement (6.3 days vs. 9.4 days) was also shorter in the octreotide group. In the octreotide group, the mean triglyceride concentration in the drainage fluid was significantly lower than that in the control group (43.1 mg/dL vs. 88.8 mg/dL). There was no complication associated with the use of octreotide. Conclusion Our study has shown that postoperative octreotide injections reduce postoperative drainage and the duration of drain placement. Further studies with larger patient populations are warranted to confirm these results and to evaluate the clinical benefits for patients.
The Adjusted Present Value: The Combined Impact of Growth and the Tax Shield of Debt on the Cost of Capital and Systematic Risk

Despite the widespread use of Myers’ (1974) Adjusted Present Value (APV) approach, the finance literature does not specify within the context of APV the combined impact of both growth and the tax shield of debt on the cost of capital, the cost of equity, and systematic risk. This paper fills that gap in the literature. Our results demonstrate that the widely used models of Modigliani and Miller (M&M) (1963) and Hamada (1972) are inappropriate for a growing firm and lead to economically significant errors when used to estimate the cost of capital, the cost of equity, and systematic risk. We explore a general version of Myers’ APV in which the firm is allowed to grow and the discount rate for the tax shield can be any value. Special cases of this model are the M&M/Hamada models and the Compressed APV (CAPV) of Kaplan and Ruback (1995). The M&M/Hamada models assume zero growth and discount the tax shield at the cost of debt while the CAPV allows for non-zero growth and discounts the tax shield at the unlevered cost of equity. Despite these different assumptions, we show that the CAPV expressions for the cost of equity and systematic risk for arbitrary growth rates and arbitrary tax rates are identical to the zero-tax, zero growth expressions of M&M/Hamada. In other words, if tax shields are discounted at the unlevered cost of equity, then neither the growth rate nor the tax rate affects the cost of equity and systematic risk. We show that if tax shields of a growing firm are discounted at a rate less than the unlevered cost of equity, then two unusual results are likely to occur. First, the levered cost of equity can actually be smaller than the unlevered cost of equity! Second, the cost of capital decreases as growth increases, implying that high growth firms should have large amounts of debt in their capital structures. These two results are inconsistent with intuition and observation of actual practices, and suggest that the CAPV is the appropriate model with tax shields being discounted at the unlevered cost of equity.
DONet: A Data-Driven Overlay Network For Efficient Live Media Streaming

This paper presents DONet, a Data-driven Overlay Network for live media streaming. The core operations in DONet are very simple: every node periodically exchanges data availability information with a set of partners, and retrieves unavailable data from one or more partners, or supplies available data to partners. We emphasize three salient features of this data-driven design: 1) easy to implement, as it does not have to construct and maintain a complex global structure; 2) efficient, as data forwarding is dynamically determined according to data availability while not restricted by specific directions; and 3) robust and resilient, as the partnerships enable adaptive and quick switching among multi-suppliers. We show through analysis that DONet is scalable with bounded delay. We also address a set of practical challenges for realizing DONet, and propose an efficient memberand partnership management algorithm, together with an intelligent scheduling algorithm that achieves real-time and continuous distribution of streaming contents. We have extensively evaluated the performance of DONet over the PlanetLab. Our experiments, involving almost all the active PlanetLab nodes, demonstrate that DONet achieves quite good streaming quality even under formidable network conditions. Moreover, its control overhead and transmission delay are both kept at low levels. An Internet-based DONet implementation, called CoolStreaming v.0. 9, was released on May 30, 2004, which has attracted over 30000 distinct users with more than 4000 simultaneously being online at some peak times. We discuss the key issues toward designing CoolStreaming in this paper, and present several interesting observations from these large-scale tests; in particular, the larger the overlay size, the better the streaming quality it can deliver.
Glutathione S-Transferase M1 Gene Polymorphism and Laryngeal Cancer Risk: A Meta-Analysis

Background and Objectives Studies investigating the association between glutathione S-transferase M1 (GSTM1) gene polymorphism and laryngeal cancer risk have reported conflicting results. The aim of the present study was to conduct a meta-analysis assessing the possible associations of GSTM1 gene polymorphism with laryngeal cancer risk. Methods The relevant studies were identified through a search of PubMed, Embase, ISI Web of Knowledge and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure until May 2011 and selected on the basis of the established inclusion criteria for publications, then a meta-analysis was performed to quantitatively summarize association of GSTM1 polymorphism with laryngeal cancer susceptibility. Results Seventeen studies were included in the present meta-analysis (2,180 cases and 2,868 controls). The combined results based on all studies showed that GSTM1 null genotype was associated with increased laryngeal cancer risk (OR = 1.17, 95% CI = 1.04∼1.31). When stratifying for race, GSTM1 null genotype exhibited increased laryngeal cancer risk in Caucasians (OR = 1.15, 95% CI = 1.01∼1.31), while no significant association was detected in Asians (OR = 1.25, 95% CI = 0.80∼1.96). In the subgroup analysis based on source of controls, significant associations were observed in the population-based studies (OR = 1.15, 95% CI = 1.01∼1.31) yet not in the hospital-based studies (OR = 1.25, 95% CI = 0.93∼1.67). Furthermore, in the subgroup analysis based on sample size, significant associations were also found in studies with at least 50 cases and 50 controls (OR = 1.15, 95% CI = 1.02∼1.30) but not in studies with fewer than 50 cases or 50 controls (OR = 1.46, 95% CI = 0.87∼2.46). Conclusions This meta-analysis supported that the GSTM1 gene polymorphism was associated with laryngeal cancer, particularly in Caucasians, and these associations varied in different subgroup, which indicated that population-based study with larger sample size was more appropriate in design of future study.
High-Frequency Financial Econometrics

High-frequency trading is an algorithm-based computerized trading practice that allows firms to trade stocks in milliseconds. Over the last fifteen years, the use of statistical and econometric methods for analyzing high-frequency financial data has grown exponentially. This growth has been driven by the increasing availability of such data, the technological advancements that make high-frequency trading strategies possible, and the need of practitioners to analyze these data. This comprehensive book introduces readers to these emerging methods and tools of analysis. Yacine Ait-Sahalia and Jean Jacod cover the mathematical foundations of stochastic processes, describe the primary characteristics of high-frequency financial data, and present the asymptotic concepts that their analysis relies on. Ait-Sahalia and Jacod also deal with estimation of the volatility portion of the model, including methods that are robust to market microstructure noise, and address estimation and testing questions involving the jump part of the model. As they demonstrate, the practical importance and relevance of jumps in financial data are universally recognized, but only recently have econometric methods become available to rigorously analyze jump processes. Ait-Sahalia and Jacod approach high-frequency econometrics with a distinct focus on the financial side of matters while maintaining technical rigor, which makes this book invaluable to researchers and practitioners alike.
Airborne Nanoparticles Filtration by Means of Cellulose Nanofibril Based Materials

Nanoparticles in air are of particular concern for public health and employee exposure in work-places. Therefore, it is very important to prepare effective filters for their removal. In this work filters were prepared from nanocellulose, i.e. cellulose nanofibrils (CNF). CNF was produced using two methods giving two different qualities of CNF. One quality had negative charges on the fibril surfaces while the other was neutral, and had in addition thinner fibrils compared to the other qualities. Filter samples were produced from water dispersions of CNF, by removal of the water by freeze drying. The performance of the CNF based filters was assessed and compared with filters based on synthetic polymer fibres. The ability to collect NaCl particles with a broad size distribution, ranging from nanometer to micrometer scale, was determined. CNF filters showed quality values comparable with the synthetic polymer based filters. Filters based on both the two CNF qualities had very good filtration efficiency for a given pressure drop across the filter.
Transcription Factor Sp1 Promotes the Expression of Porcine ROCK1 Gene

Rho-associated, coiled-coil containing protein kinase 1 (ROCK1) gene plays a crucial role in maintaining genomic stability, tumorigenesis and myogenesis. However, little is known about the regulatory elements governing the transcription of porcine ROCK1 gene. In the current study, the transcription start site (TSS) was identified by 5’-RACE, and was found to differ from the predicted one. The region in ROCK1 promoter which is critical for promoter activity was investigated via progressive deletions. Site-directed mutagenesis indicated that the region from −604 to −554 bp contains responsive elements for Sp1. Subsequent experiments showed that ROCK1 promoter activity is enhanced by Sp1 in a dose-dependent manner, whereas treatment with specific siRNA repressed ROCK1 promoter activity. Electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA), DNA pull down and chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays revealed Sp1 can bind to this region. qRT-PCR and Western blotting research followed by overexpression or inhibition of Sp1 indicate that Sp1 can affect endogenous ROCK1 expression at both mRNA and protein levels. Overexpression of Sp1 can promote the expression of myogenic differentiation 1(MyoD), myogenin (MyoG), myosin heavy chain (MyHC). Taken together, we conclude that Sp1 positively regulates ROCK1 transcription by directly binding to the ROCK1 promoter region (from −604 to −532 bp) and may affect the process of myogenesis.