Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Mechanism Design Approach for Energy Allocation

In this work we deploy a mechanism design approach for allocating a divisible commodity (electricity in our example) among consumers. We consider to have an energy availability function and for each consumer an associated personal valuation function of the energy resource during a certain time interval. We aim to select the optimal consumption profile for every user avoiding consumption peaks when the total required energy could exceed the energy production. Initially, we apply a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, we show its properties and we discuss its weakness. Then, we describe our future works, developing a mechanism with verification. Our aim is to guarantee the maximization of social welfare (efficiency) and satisfy the budget balance property (the distributor’s income must remain stable). So, we evaluate to define a cost-sharing mechanism in which for each tick of time if we exceed the amount of available energy the cost of exceeding energy provided by the distributor will be shared among users, deploying the Shapley value.
The relationship between mild cognitive impairment and mood in older people

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has received increasing attention since the early 1990s. However, considerable controversy exists over exactly how the concept of MCI is defined and measured, and the implications of assigning or receiving a diagnosis of MCI. There is evidence of a link between MCI and mood, but empirical work remains conflicted and inconclusive. The first chapter provides an overview of the MCI concept and highlights some of the issues surrounding its definition. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of the methodology and background to the empirical work presented in Chapters 4-6. A systematic review of the literature forms the third chapter of this thesis and establishes the need for further study into the relationship between MCI and mood. Chapter 4 makes use of data from the first Cognitive Function and Ageing Study (MRC-CFAS I) to investigate the role of subjective memory complaints (SMC) in the relationship between MCI and mood over a two year period. The results indicated that SMC may be related more strongly to mood than to objective cognitive performance, which raises questions about whether SMC should be included as a criterion in the MCI definition. Chapter 5 clarifies these findings using data from a contemporary cohort in the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study Wales (CFAS Wales). Chapter 6 investigates the role of health in the relationship between MCI and mood, again using data from CFAS Wales. The findings suggest that health problems constitute a risk factor for developing depression and anxiety, which may in turn affect cognitive functioning. This presents a useful opportunity for intervention to improve the quality of life for older people by improving their physical health, or improving the management of long-term conditions. Social networks were investigated as an influential factor in the relationship between MCI and mood, using data from CFAS Wales. Whilst increases in social network size were associated with fewer mood problems and increased cognitive functioning, they did not moderate the relationship between the two. However, this finding still showed that having more social contacts is beneficial and important to the quality of life of older people. The last chapter presents a discussion of the findings in relation to each of the research questions outlined in Chapter 1. The chapter also includes a commentary on the methodological considerations that were faced when developing this thesis, the implications of the findings and directions for future research.
Acculturative stress, religious coping and wellbeing amongst New Zealand Muslims

Situated within a wider context of Islamophobia, this study explored the role of religious coping in influencing the relationship between acculturative stress and wellbeing amongst 167 New Zealand Muslims. A Muslim Religious Coping (MRC) scale was adapted for the purposes of this study, measuring religious coping across three domains of Cognitive, Behavioural, and Social MRC. Two specific hypotheses were posited to explore the research question. Firstly, both Acculturative Stress and Religious Coping were predicted to significantly influence wellbeing (as measured by Life Satisfaction and Psychological Symptoms). Secondly, Religious Coping was expected to moderate the relationship between Acculturative Stress and wellbeing. Consistent with hypotheses, it was found that Acculturative Stress predicted poorer Life Satisfaction and greater Psychological Symptoms. Additionally, Cognitive, Behavioural and Social facets of Muslim Religious Coping (MRC) predicted greater Life Satisfaction, and Behavioural MRC buffered the negative effects of Acculturative Stress on Life Satisfaction. Contrary to hypotheses, however, no direct or moderational relationships were found between MRC and Psychological Symptoms of distress. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the importance of promoting religious maintenance for minority Muslims, and the place of an Indigenous Islamic psychology within cross-cultural research.
Probabilistic Forecasting of (Severe) Thunderstorms in the Netherlands Using Model Output Statistics

Abstract The derivation and verification of logistic regression equations for the (conditional) probability of (severe) thunderstorms in the warm half-year (from mid-April to mid-October) in the Netherlands is described. For 12 regions of about 90 km × 80 km each, and for projections out to 48 h in advance (with 6-h periods), these equations have been derived using model output statistics (MOS). As a source for the predictands, lightning data from the Surveillance et d’Alerte Foudre par Interferometrie Radioelectrique (SAFIR) network have been used. The potential predictor dataset mainly consisted of the combined (postprocessed) output from two numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. It contained 15 traditional thunderstorm indices, computed from the High-Resolution Limited-Area Model (HIRLAM), and (postprocessed) output from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model. The most important predictor in the thunderstorm forecast system is the square root of the ECMWF 6-h convecti.
Structural Change, Fundamentals, and Growth: A Framework and Case Studies

The volume consists of an overview and seven country studies, written by leading scholars from both developed and developing countries. The overview lays out a unifying framework for thinking about economic growth as a combination of two challenges. The “structural change challenge” is focused on moving resources from traditional low-productivity activities into modern, more productive industries. The “fundamentals challenge” faced by policy makers in the developing world is about how best to develop broad capabilities such as human capital and infrastructure. While the two are inextricably linked, they are conceptually different, and making this distinction is one of the contributions of this book. The overview also includes a description of the common methodology used in the country studies, a discussion of data and measurement issues, and a synthesis of the findings.
DNA as an Adhesin: Bacillus cereus Requires Extracellular DNA To Form Biofilms

ABSTRACT The soil saprophyte Bacillus cereus forms biofilms at solid-liquid interfaces. The composition of the extracellular polymeric matrix is not known, but biofilms of other bacteria are encased in polysaccharides, protein, and also extracellular DNA (eDNA). A Tn917 screen for strains impaired in biofilm formation at a solid-liquid interface yielded several mutants. Three mutants deficient in the purine biosynthesis genes purA, purC, and purL were biofilm impaired, but they grew planktonically like the wild type in Luria-Bertani broth. Biofilm populations had higher purA, purC, and purL transcript ratios than planktonic cultures, as measured by real-time PCR. Laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM) of BacLight-stained samples indicated that there were nucleic acids in the cell-associated matrix. This eDNA could be mobilized off the biofilm into an agarose gel matrix through electrophoresis, and it was a substrate for DNase. Glass surfaces exposed to exponentially growing populations acquired a DNA-containing conditioning film, as indicated by LSCM. Planktonic exponential-phase cells released DNA into an agarose gel matrix through electrophoresis, while stationary-phase populations did not do this. DNase treatment of planktonic exponential-phase populations rendered cells more susceptible than control populations to the DNA-interacting antibiotic actinomycin D. Exponential-phase purA cells did not contain detectable eDNA, nor did they convey a DNA-containing conditioning film to the glass surface. These results indicate that exponential-phase cells of B. cereus ATCC 14579 are decorated with eDNA and that biofilm formation requires DNA as part of the extracellular polymeric matrix.
Fasciatherapy and Reflexology compared to Hypnosis and Music Therapy in Daily Stress Management

Background Patients suffering from stress symptoms due to every-day life who are looking for a non-pharmacological response to their relief expectation are many. Furthermore, early reckoning of the day-to-day stress which may lead to clinical diagnosis is the best way of preventing the stress-related diseases. Among the many alternative medicinal options, there is little evidence that fasciatherapy (Fs) and reflexology (Rf) are effective in this field. Purpose assess incidence of fasciatherapy Danis Bois Method (DBM) and of reflexology on patients’ stress level in everyday-life, and provide a more informed choice among the numerous mind and body techniques by comparing them with hypnosis (Hp) and music therapy (Mt). Settings Specialized Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) centres for outpatients. Participants 308 individuals (average age = 50.53 SD 14.37, 93 males, 215 females) going to the centres for health care, but free from serious diseases and not heavily medicated respecting the inclusion criteria and providing valid forms. Research Design Four armed, non-randomized observational pragmatic trial with pretest–posttest repeated measures, on separate samples of natural groups. Intervention According to the centre participants where they used to be treated, they were exposed to a single semi-standardized session of a technique of their choice: Fs, Rf, Hp, Mt. Volunteers had a controlled non-intervention resting (Rt) session. Main Outcome Measures Mean STAI-Y assessing anxiety as reflecting the stress level: MANCOVA and ANCOVA performed with Tukey’s HSD. Results MANCOVA indicates a significant reduction of anxiety (p < .01) in each condition, resting included. ANCOVA performance adjusting on stress level in T0 (41.73) and on the mean sumscore of the trait (44.89), Fs (−13.92), Rf (−15.92), and Hp (−15.88) were equally effective on the stress level decrease. Mt (−10.0) and Rt (−6.38) showed the same level of effectiveness. Conclusions The results suggest fasciatherapy DBM, hypnosis, and reflexology could be used as non-pharmacological and safe interventions in stress management. Though showing a lesser efficiency, music therapy could be useful in different circumstances.
Research in Acute Lung Injury and Pulmonary Fibrosis IPF lung ﬁbroblasts have a senescent phenotype

lung ﬁbroblasts have a senescent phenotype. Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol 313: L1164–L1173, mechanisms of aging that are involved in the development of idiopathic pulmonary ﬁbrosis (IPF) are still unclear. Although it has been hypothesized that the proliferation and activation of human lung ﬁbroblasts (hLFs) are essential in IPF, no studies have assessed how this process works in an aging lung. Our goal was to elucidate if there were age-related changes on primary hLFs isolated from IPF lungs compared with age-matched controls. We investigated several hallmarks of aging in hLFs from IPF patients and age-matched controls. IPF hLFs have increased cellular senescence with higher expression of (cid:2) -galactosidase, p21, p16, p53, and cytokines related to the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) as well as decreased proliferation/apoptosis compared with age-matched controls. Additionally, we observed shorter telomeres, mitochondrial dysfunction, and upon transforming growth factor- (cid:2) stimulation, increased markers of endoplasmic reticulum stress. Our data suggest that IPF hLFs develop senescence resulting in a decreased apoptosis and that the development of SASP may be an important contributor to the ﬁbrotic process observed in IPF. These results might change the existing paradigm, which describes ﬁbroblasts as aberrantly activated cells, to a cell with a senescence phenotype. conﬂuence was reached, cells were ﬁxed with 1% paraformaldehyde. Subsequently, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP-mediated nick-end labeling assay was performed according to the manufacturer’s instructions (Millipore). Finally, using a ﬂuorescence microscope, photos were taken at (cid:3) 20 magniﬁcation and percentage of apoptotic cells was calculated using Excel. Statistical analysis. Two-way ANOVA, mixed model analysis, Mann-Whitney test, and t -test were used for the statistical analysis as appropriate. Signiﬁcance was calculated when P (cid:8) 0.05.
Supervised Methods for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

In this paper, we present our contribution in SemEval2014 ABSA task, some supervised methods for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis of restaurant and laptop reviews are proposed, implemented and evaluated. We focus on determining the aspect terms existing in each sentence, finding out their polarities, detecting the categories of the sentence and the polarity of each category. The evaluation results of our proposed methods exhibit a significant improvement in terms of accuracy and f-measure over all four subtasks regarding to the baseline proposed by SemEval organisers.
The Arab Spring and Online Protests in Iraq

textabstractThis article traces the influence of the Arab Spring on Iraq as activists staged fervent protests against the corruption, sectarianism, and favoritism of Nouri Maliki's government. A group of young Iraqi intellectuals, journalists, students, government employees, and unemployed youth posted their plan to organize demonstrations against the government using social media in February 2011. This study investigates the use of Facebook and YouTube, which bypassed the government's attempt to limit the coverage of these protests. Indeed, the events during the Arab Spring in Iraq crossed sectarian lines and united Iraqis against the Shiite-dominated government. I examine the five most popular Facebook pages and more than 806 YouTube clips and their 2,839 comments related to the Iraqi Arab Spring. The study reveals that young Iraqi men between the ages of 25 and 30 were the most active bloggers, while those between the ages of 20 and 24 were the most active commentators during the protests. Iraqis living in the United States and Canada played an important role by posting YouTube clips and comments. A gender disparity was evident; Iraqi men posted more video clips and comments than women.
Explaining Deindustrialization: Globalization, Failure, Or Success?

Although sociologists have expressed growing interest in globalization, they have devoted little sustained empirical attention to the many claims made in its name. I focus on the link that has been drawn between globalization and the deindustrialization of the advanced industrial societies. To examine this, I employ a pooled time-series of cross-sections data set that combines observations on 18 OECD nations across the 1968–1992 period. Fixed-effects regression models that control for unmeasured country-specific effects reveal support for arguments that implicate foreign direct investment and North-South trade in the declining percentage of the labor force employed in manufacturing in the OECD countries. Regression results also show that deindustrialization across this period is largely explained by a model that combines an attention to the post-Golden Age “troubles” of northern manufacturing with classic generalizations of the process of development. Interpretation of the empirical findings is tempered by an exercise in counterfactual history, which reveals that deindustrialization would have been considerable in these countries even if the upswings in direct investment and southern imports had not occurred or if the performance of the manufacturing sector had been stronger.
The Value of Creativity

With the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida in 2002, the â€˜creative cityâ€™ became the new hot topic among urban policymakers, planners and economists. Florida has developed one of three path-breaking theories about the relationship between creative individuals and urban environments. The economist A¥ke E. Andersson and the psychologist Dean Simonton are the other members of this â€˜creative troikaâ€™. In the Handbook of Creative Cities, Florida, Andersson and Simonton appear in the same volume for the first time. The expert contributors in this timely Handbook extend their insights with a varied set of theoretical and empirical tools. The diversity of the contributions reflect the multidisciplinary nature of creative city theorizing, which encompasses urban economics, economic geography, social psychology, urban sociology, and urban planning. The stated policy implications are equally diverse, ranging from libertarian to social democratic visions of our shared creative and urban future.
Nucleated and Ribbon Components of the Urban Retail System in Britain

There is considerable preoccupation amongst urban planners at the present time with the potential impact of new forms of suburban shopping centres, especially those which involve large supermarkets or hypermarkets. However, the future pattern of commercial activity inside the city is likely to remain heavily dominated by an existing legacy of retail distributions. So far, outside the central area, only relatively small-scale changes have been taking place mainly in the clearance and redevelopment of outworn properties in the inner city and the extension of fewer but rather traditional kinds of localized centres to new housing estates. Essentially, these changes represent an attempt to adjust the overall retail system to modern consumer requirements without the upheaval that more dramatic innovations might bring. While the results of such small-scale changes may often appear to be inconsequential, the cumulative effects may be quite far reaching. It remains crucial to have an organizational framework within which developments can be controlled. The framework will need to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate new ventures in retailing but must also clearly relate to the major components of the system that exist at present. The traditional and still greatly preferred genesis for this at the urban scale is a classification of shopping centres, mainly in the form of a hierarchy of size orders.1 Though the hierarchy remains a powerful methodological construct for describing the structure of certain kinds of shopping centres in British towns the generality involved in classifications based on size criteria alone makes these insufficient for identifying those particular retail features which will undergo most change. This study explores the utility of an alternative classificatory approach that distinguishes between systematic variations in types of retail conformations, mainly nucleated shopping centres and ribbon developments. While there has been much attention given to these distinctions in American literature,2 because ribbon developments in particular are much more pronounced in that country than here, in Britain there has been virtually no attempt to disaggregate the urban retail system and define its constituent parts. The case of Coventry is examined, where the city planning authorities have recently been reformulating a shopping policy as part of their new structure plan.3
Health promotion in primary care: evaluation of a systematic procedure and stage specific information for physical activity counseling.

PRINCIPLES Given the demographic development, healthy aging becomes more and more relevant. However, physical activity as an important health resource lacks dissemination in persons of older age in Switzerland. Thus, the present study aimed to develop and evaluate a feasible approach for physical activity promotion in the promising primary care setting. METHOD An expert panel developed two procedures for physical activity counselling in the primary care setting. The first complete procedure consisted of a written assessment and personal counselling by physicians. It was evaluated by focus groups with primary care physicians. The second modified procedure consisted of mailings to inactive patients selected by physicians. It was evaluated by a written questionnaire sent to participants. RESULTS The study demonstrated that physical activity promotion through primary care has a high potential. However, core issues such as dealing with time pressure on physicians, applying screening instruments on a broad basis beyond high risk patients, expanding physicians' roles towards primary prevention as well as providing intervention materials actually comprehensible to patients need to be well considered. CONCLUSION To facilitate large scale implementation of physical activity promotion, a range of flexible procedures should be provided so the physician can select and adapt them to his needs and desired role in health promotion. Further, physical activity promotion should be integrated into multidimensional health promotion to meet the diverse health needs of patients. The presented multi-stakeholder approach is generally recommended for future development of health promotion interventions.
Using Video to Enhance Reflective Practice: Student Teachers’ Dialogic Examination of Their Own Teaching

ABSTRACT In this qualitative study, five student teachers engaged in dialogic viewing of video of their own teaching with their university supervisor. The questions guiding this research included: (1) What do teacher candidates notice as they watch videos of themselves teaching in the company of their university supervisor? ; (2) How does dialogic viewing affect teacher candidates’ noticing? ; and (3) What are teacher candidates’ attitudes towards watching themselves teach, independently and in the company of their university supervisor? The findings reveal an increase in the depth and shift in the focus of student teachers’ reflections on their own teaching, and positive attitudes toward the process. Additionally, it points to potential implications for practice and future research around the use of dialogic viewing.
An Interactive Algorithm for the Complete Discovery of Chronicles Research Report

Chronicles are temporal patterns with numerical constraints extracted from a sequence of events. The representation formalism of chronicles is very expressive compared to classical sequential patterns like serial and parallel episodes. Due to this expressiveness, any complete discovery process of chronicles has a very high time complexity. In this article, we propose an interactive approach and an algorithm for a complete discovery of chronicles. The algorithm has been designed in order to provide heuristic-search facilities and to allow users to define their own constraints. The interactive discovery approach combines these two features thus taking into account the user’s knowledge when exploring the space of candidate chronicles. Thanks to this approach, the most interesting chronicles from the user’s point of view are expected to be extracted first and in an acceptable time thus avoiding the user to wait for the complete set of frequent chronicles to be extracted. 1 This research is supported by the french National Research Agency (ANR) as a contribution to the project Procogec (see www.procogec.com), in collaboration with members of the project SharedLife from DFKI (www.dfki.de/sharedlife).