Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chapter 1 Computing Aesthetics with Image Judgment Systems

The ability of human or artificial agents to evaluate their works, as well as the works of others, is an important aspect of creative behaviour, possibly even a requirement. In artistic fields such as visual arts and music, this evaluation capacity relies, at least partially, on aesthetic judgment. This chapter analyses issues regarding the development of computational systems that perform aesthetic judgments focusing on their validation. We present several alternatives, as follows: the use of psychological tests related to aesthetic judgment; the testing of these systems in style recognition tasks; and the assessment of the system’s ability to predict the users’ valuations or the popularity of a given work. An adaptive system is presented and its performance assessed using the above-mentioned validation methodologies.
Evaluation of the Importance of VlsE Antigenic Variation for the Enzootic Cycle of Borrelia burgdorferi

Efficient acquisition and transmission of Borrelia burgdorferi by the tick vector, and the ability to persistently infect both vector and host, are important elements for the life cycle of the Lyme disease pathogen. Previous work has provided strong evidence implicating the significance of the vls locus for B. burgdorferi persistence. However, studies involving vls mutant clones have thus far only utilized in vitro-grown or host-adapted spirochetes and laboratory strains of mice. Additionally, the effects of vls mutation on tick acquisition and transmission has not yet been tested. Thus, the importance of VlsE antigenic variation for persistent infection of the natural reservoir host, and for the B. burgdorferi enzootic life cycle in general, has not been examined to date. In the current work, Ixodes scapularis and Peromyscus maniculatus were infected with different vls mutant clones to study the importance of the vls locus for the enzootic cycle of the Lyme disease pathogen. The findings highlight the significance of the vls system for long-term infection of the natural reservoir host, and show that VlsE antigenic variability is advantageous for efficient tick acquisition of B. burgdorferi from the mammalian reservoir. The data also indicate that the adaptation state of infecting spirochetes influences B. burgdorferi avoidance from host antibodies, which may be in part due to its respective VlsE expression levels. Overall, the current findings provide the most direct evidence on the importance of VlsE for the enzootic cycle of Lyme disease spirochetes, and underscore the significance of VlsE antigenic variation for maintaining B. burgdorferi in nature.
Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography

In recent years there has been a turn within cartographic theory from a representational to a processual understanding of mapping. Maps have been re-conceptualised as mappings that ceaselessly unfold through contingent, citational, habitual, negotiated, reflexive and playful practices, embedded within relational contexts. In this paper, we explore what this rethinking means for cartographic epistemology, contending that attention needs to be focused on understanding cartography through the lens of practices – how mappings are (re)made in diverse ways (technically, socially, bodily, aesthetically and politically) by people within particular contexts and cultures as solutions to everyday tasks. We detail how these practices can be profitably examined using a suite of methods – genealogies, ethnographies, ethnomethodology, participant observation, observant participation and deconstruction – that are sensitive to capturing and distilling the unfolding and contextual nature of mapping. To illustrate our argument we narrate the unfolding production and consumption of a set of mappings of so-called ‘ghost estates’ in Ireland, a public geography project that has been covered over 300 times in local, national and international media and that has contributed to Irish public discourse and policy debates.
ACCOUNTING WORKSHOP “ Business Model Shocks and Abnormal Accrual Models ”

Economics challenge the specification of discretionary accrual models. Since rent seeking firms pursue differentiated business strategies, firms in the same industry have heterogeneous accrual generating processes. Moreover, Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” forces existing firms to revise their extant business models. We present evidence that such business model shocks are widespread, propagate through multiple years of financial statements, reduce accrual models’ goodness of fit, and result in unrealistically large unsigned “abnormal” accruals. Further, there is a spillover effect among firms in the same industry in that one firm’s abnormal accrual is affected by business model shocks experienced by the other firms in the industry. We show that business model shocks not only add noise to abnormal accruals, but can also introduce biases into both unsigned and signed discretionary accruals. Our results suggest that removing observations with business model shocks leads to better specified accrual models, and reduces both Type I and Type II errors in tests of earnings management.
Use of calcium‐binding proteins to map inputs in vestibular nuclei of the gerbil

We wished to determine whether calbindin and/or calretinin are appropriate markers for vestibular afferents, a population of neurons in the vestibular nuclear complex, or cerebellar Purkinje inputs. To accomplish this goal, immunocytochemical staining was observed in gerbils after lesions of the vestibular nerve central to the ganglion, the cerebellum, or both. Eleven to fourteen days after recovery, the brain was processed for immunocytochemical identification of calretinin and calbindin. After lesion of the vestibular nerve, no calretinin staining was seen in any of the vestibular nuclei except for a population of intrinsic neurons, which showed no obvious change in number or staining pattern. Calbindin staining was reduced in all nuclei except the dorsal part of the lateral vestibular nuclei. The density of staining of each marker, measured in the magnocellular medial vestibular nucleus, was significantly reduced. After the cerebellar lesion, no differences in calretinin staining were noted. However, calbindin staining was greatly reduced in all nuclei. The density of staining, measured in the caudal medial vestibular nucleus, was significantly lower. After a combined lesion of the cerebellum and vestibular nerve, the distribution and density of calretinin staining resembled that after vestibular nerve section alone, whereas calbindin staining was no longer seen. This study demonstrates that calretinin and calbindin are effective markers for the identification of vestibular afferents. J. Comp. Neurol. 386:317–327, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Testing for Main Random Effects in Two-Way Random and MixedEffects Models: Modifying the Statistic

A procedure for testing the significance of the main random effect is proposed under a model which does not require the traditional assumptions of symmetry, homoscedasticity, and normality for the error term and random effects. To accommodate this level of model generality, and also unbalanced designs, suitable adjustments to the F-test are made. The extensive simulations performed under the random effects model, and the unrestricted and restricted versions of the mixed effects model, indicate that the classical F procedure is extremely liberal under heteroscedasticity and unbalancedness. The proposed test procedure performs well in all settings and is comparable to the classical F-test when the classical assumptions are met. An analysis of a dataset from the Mussel Watch Project is presented.
Trust Metrics on Controversial Users: Balancing Between Tyranny of the Majority

In todayâ€™s connected world, it is possible and indeed quite common to interact with un-known people whose reliability is unknown. Trust metrics are a technique for answering questions such as â€œShould I trust this person? â€ However, most of the current research assumes that every user has a global quality score everyone agrees on and the goal of the technique is just to predict this correct value. We show on data from a real and large user community, Epinions.com, that such an assumption is not realistic because there is a significant portion of what we call controversial users, users who are trusted by many and distrusted by many: a global agreement about the trustworthiness value of these users does not exist. We argue, using computational experiments, that the existence of controversial users (a normal phenomenon in complex societies) demands local trust metrics, techniques able to predict the trustworthiness of a user in a personalized way, depending on the very personal views of the judging user as opposed to most commonly used global trust metrics, which assume a unique value of reputation for every single user. The implications of such an analysis deal with the very foundations of what we call society and culture and we conclude discussing this point by comparing the two extremes of culture that can be induced by the two different kinds of trust metrics: tyranny of the majority and echo chambers.
What explains the growth of Global Equity Markets ?

the world have experienced phenomenal expansion. The aggregated market capitalization of all national equity markets has grown from less than US$1 trillion in 1974 to over US$16 trillion by the end of 1997. Exhibit 1 presents evidence of the increase in market capitalization experienced by both developed and emerging markets. The process of growth in global equity markets is still imperfectly understood. One view points to improved macroeconomic and financial fundamentals as the source of the growth. Others who are more skeptical of efficiently functioning capital markets, suggest that investors in their “exuberance” may have been buying up stocks, disregarding the historical relationship between market fundamentals and equity valuation. In this paper, I adopt a modelling framework leading to the identification of sources of equity market growth. Specifically, I start with a valuation model where the dependent variable is the market capitalization of a country’s equity market relative to GDP. The model is a generalization of stochastic production frontier models which assume that comparable economic agents operate according to a common technology or production frontier (“frontier” here meaning the maximum technically feasible output given inputs). In this paper, I view countries as producers of their equity market capitalization (an output) given macroeconomic and financial characteristics (valuation inputs). Accordingly, countries can be thought of as operating either on or within the valuation frontier, and deviation from the frontier reflects market inefficiency (i.e., market discount or underpricing as in my particular application). Over time, due to government policy changes such as capital markets liberalization in emerging economies, improved legal systems and better institutions, a country’s equity market can become more highly valued and “catch up” to the valuation frontier. That is, the distance from a country’s equity market capitalization to its maximum possible value—the frontier assuming no market discount—could become smaller over time. Or investors could simply become more upbeat about the
Inhibition of Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Erk1/2 Promotes Protein Degradation of ATP Binding Cassette Transporters A1 and G1 in CHO and HuH7 Cells

Signal transduction modulates expression and activity of cholesterol transporters. We recently demonstrated that the Ras/mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling cascade regulates protein stability of Scavenger Receptor BI (SR-BI) through Proliferator Activator Receptor (PPARα) -dependent degradation pathways. In addition, MAPK (Mek/Erk 1/2) inhibition has been shown to influence liver X receptor (LXR) -inducible ATP Binding Cassette (ABC) transporter ABCA1 expression in macrophages. Here we investigated if Ras/MAPK signaling could alter expression and activity of ABCA1 and ABCG1 in steroidogenic and hepatic cell lines. We demonstrate that in Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells and human hepatic HuH7 cells, extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 (Erk1/2) inhibition reduces PPARα-inducible ABCA1 protein levels, while ectopic expression of constitutively active H-Ras, K-Ras and MAPK/Erk kinase 1 (Mek1) increases ABCA1 protein expression, respectively. Furthermore, Mek1/2 inhibitors reduce ABCG1 protein levels in ABCG1 overexpressing CHO cells (CHO-ABCG1) and human embryonic kidney 293 (HEK293) cells treated with LXR agonist. This correlates with Mek1/2 inhibition reducing ABCG1 cell surface expression and decreasing cholesterol efflux onto High Density Lipoproteins (HDL). Real Time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and protein turnover studies reveal that Mek1/2 inhibitors do not target transcriptional regulation of ABCA1 and ABCG1, but promote ABCA1 and ABCG1 protein degradation in HuH7 and CHO cells, respectively. In line with published data from mouse macrophages, blocking Mek1/2 activity upregulates ABCA1 and ABCG1 protein levels in human THP1 macrophages, indicating opposite roles for the Ras/MAPK pathway in the regulation of ABC transporter activity in macrophages compared to steroidogenic and hepatic cell types. In summary, this study suggests that Ras/MAPK signaling modulates PPARα- and LXR-dependent protein degradation pathways in a cell-specific manner to regulate the expression levels of ABCA1 and ABCG1 transporters.
Strategy for Compiling Parallel Matlab for General Distributions

Executing applications in parallel can produce significant performance gains, yet the time and expertise needed for the low-level details of parallelism is often prohibitive. Additionally, many applications rely heavily on domain-specific libraries, while it is not practical to write an optimizing compiler each time a domain-specific library is developed. In order to obtain high performance parallelism from a high-level, domain-specific scripting language, we are developing a parallel Matlab compiler, called the Matlab D compiler, using a telescoping languages framework [6, 2] to generate Fortran with MPI from Matlab scripts. The goal of telescoping languages is to automatically generate high performance compilers for domainspecific languages written in the form of libraries. Before user-script compilation, the domain-specific library routines are precompiled and optimized to form specialized variants, which are substituted into the user script during user-script compilation. With this strategy, user scripts are compiled quickly, and the compiler produces applications with the same high performance as if the user’s application were available at library compile time. To create a parallel Matlab, we augmented the language with array distribution types to create Matlab D. When declaring an array intended to be used in a parallel computation, the user specifies the desired distribution for the array. Our Matlab D compiler, leveraging HPF compiler technology, generates the data movement operations and partitions the computations automatically to obtain the parallelism implied by the distributions. Thus, users can develop applications in a high-level scripting language and obtain the high performance necessary without incurring the cost of low-level programming. This paper presents the framework of the Matlab D compiler from a telescoping languages perspective and our preliminary work on the project.
A Preliminary Examination of Neurocognitive Performance and Symptoms Following a Bout of Soccer Heading in Athletes Wearing Protective Soccer Headbands

This study compared changes in neurocognitive performance and symptom reports following an acute bout of soccer heading among athletes with and without protective soccer headgear. A total of 25 participants headed a soccer ball 15 times over a 15-minute period, using a proper linear heading technique. Participants in the experimental group completed the heading exercise while wearing a protective soccer headband and controls performed the heading exercise without wearing the soccer headband. Neurocognitive performance and symptom reports were assessed before and after the acute bout of heading. Participants wearing the headband showed significant decreases on verbal memory (p = 0.02) compared with the no headband group, while the no headband group demonstrated significantly faster reaction time (p = 0.03) than the headband group following the heading exercise. These findings suggest that protective soccer headgear likely does not mitigate the subtle neurocognitive effects of acute soccer heading.
Academic Emotions in Students' Self-Regulated Learning and Achievement: A Program of Qualitative and Quantitative Research

Academic emotions have largely been neglected by educational psychology, with the exception of test anxiety. In 5 qualitative studies, it was found that students experience a rich diversity of emotions in academic settings. Anxiety was reported most often, but overall, positive emotions were described no less frequently than negative emotions. Based on the studies in this article, taxonomies of different academic emotions and a self-report instrument measuring students' enjoyment, hope, pride, relief, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom (Academic Emotions Questionnaire [AEQ]) were developed. Using the AEQ, assumptions of a cognitive-motivational model of the achievement effects of emotions, and of a control/value theory of their antecedents (Pekrun, 1992b, 2000), were tested in 7 cross-sectional, 3 longitudinal, and 1 diary study using samples of university and school students. Results showed that academic emotions are significantly related to students' motivation, learning strategies, cognitive resources, self-regulation, and academic achievement, as well as to personality and classroom antecedents. The findings indicate that affective research in educational psychology should acknowledge emotional diversity in academic settings by addressing the full range of emotions experienced by students at school and university.
Cementing techniques in hip resurfacing

Abstract The subject of the cementing technique in hip resurfacing has been poorly studied to date. The hip resurfacing prosthesis is unique in the family of cemented prostheses because the cement mantle is blind (hidden underneath the implant) and is radiographically obscured. This presents an immediate challenge to the surgeon at the time of surgery, but also has a longer-term implication in terms of lack of post-operative clinical observation. This should be compared with total hip replacement or total knee replacement where the cement mantle can at least be partially observed both intra- and post-operatively. With this in mind, the objective of this review is, firstly, to understand the cement mantles typically achieved in current clinical practice and, secondly, to identify those factors affecting the cement mantle and to consolidate them into an improved and reproducible cementing technique. The outcome of this work shows that the low-viscosity technique can commonly lead to excessive cement penetration in the proximal femoral head and an incompletely seated component, whereas a more consistent controlled cement mantle can be achieved with a high-viscosity cementing technique. Consequently, it is recommended that a high-viscosity technique should be used to minimize the build-up of excessive cement, to reduce the temperature created by the exothermic polymerization, and to help to ensure correct seating of the prosthesis. A combination of these factors is potentially critical to the clinical success of some articular surface replacement (ASR) procedures. It is important to note that we specifically studied the DePuy ASR system; therefore only the general principles (and not the specifics) of the cementing technique may apply to other resurfacing prostheses, because of differences in internal geometry, clearance, and surgical technique.
A study of SAR pattern in biological tissues due to RF exposure

Due to the frequent usage of mobile phones these days, its harmful effects on biological systems has become a rising concern. Various international organizations like International Commission on Non-ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have set safety guidelines on portable devices to limit the harmful effects of Radio Frequency (RF) radiations. Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) is a quantity that has been used by researchers to evaluate these safety limits on mobile phones. Exceeding these limits, leads to detrimental effects in biological systems. This paper discusses effects of RF radiations emitted by mobile phones on human body in terms of their SAR values. The SAR values are computed on human models to evaluate their effect on various body organs. Parameters affecting SAR values like age-related differences in RF absorption in human head models, mobile antenna tilt angle with respect to head and effect of using mobile phones inside elevators have been discussed. Moreover, methods for SAR reduction to limit RF exposure have also been analyzed.
Forecasting inflation with consumer survey data – application of multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to elimination of the general sentiment factor

This paper (1) examines the properties of survey based households’ inflation expectations and investigates their forecasting performance. With application of the individual data from the State of the Households’ Survey (50 quarters between 1997Q4 and 2010Q1) it was shown that inflation expectations were affected by the consumer sentiment. Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA) was employed to verify whether a set of proxies provides a reliable basis for measurement of two latent phenomena – consumer sentiment and inflation expectations. Following the steps proposed by Davidov (2008) and Steenkamp and Baumgartner (1998), it appeared that it was possible to specify and estimate a MGCFA model with partial measurement invariance. Thus it was possible to eliminate the influence of consumer sentiment on inflation expectations and at the same time to obtain individually corrected answers concerning the inflation expectations. Additionally, it was shown that the linear relation between consumer sentiment and inflation expectations was stable over time. As a by-product of analysis, it was possible to show that respondents during the financial crisis were much less consistent in their answers to the questions of the consumer questionnaire. In the next step of the analysis, data on inflation expectations were applied to modelling and forecasting inflation. It was shown that with respect to standard ARIMA processes, inclusion of the information on the inflation expectations significantly improved the in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting performance of the time-series models. Especially out-of-sample performance was significantly better as the average absolute error in forecasts of headline and core inflation was reduced by half. It was also shown that models with inflation expectations based on the CFA method (after elimination of the consumer sentiment factor) provided better in-sample forecasts of inflation. Nevertheless, it was not confirmed for the out-of-sample forecasts. (1) Project financed by the National Bank of Poland. Polish title of the project: "Prognozowanie inflacji na podstawie danych koniunktury gospodarstw domowych. Zastosowanie konfirmacyjnej analizy czynnikowej dla wielu grup do oczyszczenia prognoz inflacji z czynnika ogolnego nastroju gospodarczego. "