Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A least action principle for steepest descent in a non-convex landscape

1. IntroductionPhysical dynamics interpolate naturally between the dissipative and conservative extremes,in which friction either dominates or can be neglected. Gradient ows and Hamiltonian systemsrepresent the archetypal examples of these two extremes. The orbits of a Hamiltonian systemcorrespond to the critical paths of an action functional, but variational characterizations for thetrajectories of a gradient ow are less familiar. For steepest descent into a convex valley sucha characterization was formulated by Brezis-Ekeland [4], but their principle was not amenableto deducing existence of solutions. Later, Auchmuty [2] used min-max methods to establish theexistence of solutions variationally, but under certain growth conditions on the convex potential.Recently, Ghoussoub and Tzou [8] deduced the existence of semigroup ows in full generality(for convex lower semicontinuous potentials) using a modi ed Brezis-Ekeland principle which isinvariantunder Bolzaduality [12]. Forconvexgradientows, their method nowprovidesa directalternative to proving existence by maximal monotone accretive operator theoretic semigroupmethods or by time-step approximation; recent references for the latter techniques include [3][7] [10] [1]. In a forthcoming paper [9], the rst-named author develops further the scope ofthe duality method and proposes a general framework for a variational formulation of manyequations which do not normally t into standard Euler-Lagrange theory. This approach isbased on a concept of anti-self dual Lagrangians which seems to be inherent in many importantdi erential equations.In the present article we streamline and broaden the scope of the Ghoussoub-Tzou approachto gradient ows, showing how it can be adapted to characterizethe path of steepest descent of anon-convex potential as the global minimum of a convex action. This is achieved by dynamicallyrescaling space, to convert the energy landscape on which our descent takes place from a staticbut non-convex pro le to a contracting convex one. This approach is inspired by the time-dependent change of coordinates used to nd similarity variables in nonlinear partial di erentialequations, especially as employed by Otto to quantify long-time behaviour of porous mediumows [11]. Although that descent takes place on the ‘Riemannian’ manifold of probabilitymeasures metrized by Wasserstein distance, our present considerations will be restricted to themore traditional setting of a Hilbert space H with norm juj = hu;ui
Studies on the transmission of hypostome inhibition in hydra.

SUMMARY The inhibition of hypostome formation in hydra has been investigated using isolation and transplantation techniques. The transmission of inhibition does not seem to be polarized; a hypostome situated at the proximal end of the digestive zone can inhibit distal regeneration with no change in regeneration polarity. The time required for the proximal hypostome to establish an effective inhibitory 'field' is about 4-7 h. The results confirm that inhibition and polarity are quite separate factors. The transmission of inhibition by a digestive zone is impaired by treating the region with media containing reduced concentrations of Ca 2+ and Mg 2+ . This treatment has no effect on the inhibitory activity of the hypostome, nor on the resistance of the tissue to inhibition. The effect of divalent cations on the transmission of inhibition does not seem to be due to an effect on cell adhesion. There is an effect on general cell permeability but this is not temporally correlated with the effect on transmission. It is suggested that transmission of inhibition is dependent upon contact-mediated intercellular communication, possibly involving functional coupling between cells.
Kinematically optimal catching a flying ball with a hand-arm-system

A robotic ball-catching system built from a multi-purpose 7-DOF lightweight arm (DLR-LWR-III) and a 12 DOF four-fingered hand (DLR-Hand-II) is presented. Other than in previous work a mechatronically complex dexterous hand is used for grasping the ball and the decision of where, when and how to catch the ball, while obeying joint, speed and work cell limits, is formulated as an unified nonlinear optimization problem with nonlinear constraints. Three different objective functions are implemented, leading to significantly different robot movements. The high computational demands of an online realtime optimization are met by parallel computation on distributed computing resources (a cluster with 32 CPU cores). The system achieves a catch rate of > 80% and is regularly shown as a live demo at our institute.
Evaluation of {model-based} testing techniques selection approaches: An external replication

The selection of software technologies represents a risk factor to a software project. Therefore, using tailored software technologies to support this task can contribute to reduce the risk of inadequate choices made by software engineers. This paper presents the results of an experimental study conducted to evaluate if three dependent variables (selection time, % of correct choices, and used information) can be significantly affected by two different approaches to support the selection of Model-Based Testing techniques. This study consists of an external replication of an experiment conducted to evaluate two approaches for the selection of testing techniques. Therefore, we present the adaptations performed in the planning and design of the experiment and the challenges observed in conducting a study replication. The results indicated that the time spent to select MBT techniques and the percentage of right selections can be affected by the approach used to select MBT techniques for different software project categories.
Broadband Trailing-Edge Noise Predictions| Overview of BANC-III Results

The Third Workshop on Benchmark Problems for Airframe Noise Computations, BANC-III, was held on 14-15 June 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The objective of this workshop was to assess the present computational capability in the area of physics-based prediction of different types of airframe noise problems and to advance the state-of-the-art via a combined effort. This documentation summarizes the results from workshop category 1 (BANC-III-1) which focuses on the prediction of broadband turbulent boundary-layer trailing-edge noise and related source quantities. Since the forerunner BANC-II workshop identified some room for improvements in the achieved prediction quality, BANC-III-1 relies on the same test cases, namely 2D NACA0012 and DU96-W-180 airfoil sections in a uniform flow. Compared to BANC-II particularly the scatter among predictions for the DU96-W- 180 test case could be significantly reduced. However, proposed adaptations of previously applied computational methods did not systematically improve the prediction quality for all requested parameters. The category 1 workshop problem remains a challenging simulation task due to its high requirements on resolving and modeling of turbulent boundary-layer source quantities.
Combining Content-Based and Collaborative Filters in an Online Newspaper

The explosive growth of mailing lists, Web sites and Usenet news demands eeective ltering solutions. Collaborative l-tering combines the informed opinions of humans to make personalized, accurate predictions. Content-based ltering uses the speed of computers to make complete, fast predictions. In this work, we present a new ltering approach that combines the coverage and speed of content-lters with the depth of collaborative ltering. We apply our research approach to an online newspaper, an as yet untapped opportunity for lters useful to the widespread news reading populace. We present the design of our ltering system and describe the results from preliminary experiments that suggest merits to our approach. 1 Introduction That we are in the age of information is evident quite clearly in newspapers as an information source. Nearly everywhere in North America you can have 1/2 dozen newspapers delivered to your doorstep, each with hundreds of new articles each day. Nearly everywhere in the world via the World Wide Web, you can access more than 2500 daily newspapers through their online Web sites 27], providing tens of thousands of news articles of potential interest. We need information lters to help us prioritize news articles so that we may spend more of our time reading articles of interest. Newspaper lters present the additional opportunity for personalization, which has been shown to have a strong appeal to newspaper readers 5]. Practical considerations have prevented hardcopy newspapers from obtaining any degree of personal customization, but online newspapers are not subject to the same constraints as printed matter. Online newspaper presentation can be personalized in terms of contents , layout, media (text only, text with pictures, text with video, etc.), advertisements and more. While there have been attempts at customization of newspapers and ltering of newspapers 16, 25], these attempts have not completely countered the weaknesses of human and computer lters. Both humans and computers need help in ltering infor
Naked Cities - Struggle in the Global Slums

According to UN research data, by 2030 half of the world's population will be living in slums. Meanwhile, in Durban, residents of Forman and Kennedy Road settlements risk arrest and police violence to protest forced eviction and demand clean drinking water and sanitation. The statistics are not supposed to talk back. This issue of Mute, largely sparked by Mike Davis' claim that in the megaslums Muhammad and the Holy Ghost have superceded Marx, considers another view of the world's burgeoning 'naked cities'. Where the populace are refugees without rights or basic amenities, are new forms of political action emerging? Texts by: Amita Baviskar, Iain Boal, Anna Dezeuze, Michael Edwards, Melanie Gilligan, Anthony Iles, Demetra Kotouza, Penny Koutrolikou, Josaphat Robert Large, Felix Morisseau-Leroy, Kevin Pina, Richard Pithouse, Benedict Seymour and Rachel Weber
Report on the TREC-8 Experiment: Searching on the Web and in Distributed Collections

The Internet paradigm permits information searches to be made across wide-area networks where information is contained in web pages and/or whole document collections such as digital libraries. These new distributed information environments reveal new and challenging problems for the IR community. Consequently, in this TREC experiment we investigated two questions related to information searches on the web or in digital libraries: (1) an analysis of the impact of hyperlinks in improving retrieval performance, and (2) a study of techniques useful in selecting more appropriate text databases (database selection problem encountered when faced with multiple collections), including an evaluation of certain merging strategies effective in producing, single, ranked lists to be presented to the user (database merging problem).
Weight Status and Psychological Distress in a Mediterranean Spanish Population: A Symmetric U-Shaped Relationship

Psychological disorders in people with extreme weight (low weight or obesity) should be taken into consideration by health professionals in order to practice an effective treatment to these patients. This study evaluates the association between body mass index (BMI) and psychological distress in 563 inhabitants of Málaga (South of Spain). Participants were classified in four categories of BMI: Underweight (BMI <18.5 Kg/m2), Normal weight (BMI 18.5–24.99 Kg/m2), Overweight (BMI 25.0–29.99 Kg/m2) and Obesity (BMI >30 Kg/m2). Psychological distress was measured with the Spanish version of the Derogatis’ Symptoms Checklist Revised (SCL-90-R). We observed a symmetric U-shaped relationship between weight status and psychological distress in all SCL-90-R dimensions (p for quadratic trend <0.001) for both men and women. Participants with extreme weight showed the worst psychological status, and participants with normal weight exhibited the best. We found no statistically significant differences between underweight and obese participants in 9 of the 10 SCL-90-R dimensions analyzed among men, and in 8 of the 10 dimensions among women. Underweight and obese participants showed no gender differences in psychological distress levels. Psychological treatment of Mediterranean people with extreme weight, should consider underweight and obese patients at the same level of psychological distress.
Institutional Shareholders and Corporate Governance: the Case of Uk Pension Funds Institutional Shareholders and Corporate Governance: the Case of Uk Pension Funds Institutional Shareholders and Corporate Governance: the Case of Uk Pension Funds

We analyze the monitoring role of occupational pension funds, the largest category of shareholders in the UK. Our hypothesis is that, unlike other financial institutions, occupational pension funds are expected to monitor companies in which they hold large stakes because of their objectives, structure and overall share holding. After controlling for size and industry, we find that the value added by these funds is negligible and their holdings do not lead companies to comply with the Code of Best Practice or outperform their industry counterparts despite their long-term holding strategies. an anonimous referee, and seminar participants at Brunel University and the 1998 European Financial Management Association meeting in Lisbon for valuable insights and helpful comments. Faccio acknwledges a research grant from City University. All errors remain our responsibility. Abstract We analyze the monitoring role of occupational pension funds, the largest category of shareholders in the UK. Our hypothesis is that, unlike other financial institutions, occupational pension funds are expected to monitor companies in which they hold large stakes because of their objectives, structure and overall share holding. After controlling for size and industry, we find that the value added by these funds is negligible and their holdings do not lead companies to comply with the Code of Best Practice or outperform their industry counterparts despite their long-term holding strategies. 1. Introduction Under the agency setting large block holding is considered to be one of the mechanisms for controlling the agency problems which arise whenever managers have incentives to pursue their own interests at the expense of those of shareholders. However, the primarily US empirical evidence provided to date on the role and effectiveness of blockholders is mixed. (See Shleifer and Vishny (1997) for a review). The purpose of this paper is to analyze the monitoring role of occupational pension funds, the largest category of shareholders in the UK. We focus specifically on these funds because of the large dimension of their overall stakes in the UK market, the particular structure of their portfolios and their investment objectives. We consider these funds to be pressure-resistant institutions as opposed to other institutions, such as banks, investment and unit trusts and insurance companies, which are pressure-sensitive (e.g., Brickley, Lease and Smith, 1994). By comparing companies in which occupational pension funds hold large stakes against a control group of companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, we test the hypotheses that monitoring increases with …
Using Dynamic Programming for Solving Variational Problems in Vision

Dynamic programming is discussed as an approach to solving variational problems in vision. Dynamic programming ensures global optimality of the solution, is numerically stable, and allows for hard constraints to be enforced on the behavior of the solution within a natural and straightforward structure. As a specific example of the approach's efficacy, applying dynamic programming to the energy-minimizing active contours is described. The optimization problem is set up as a discrete multistage decision process and is solved by a time-delayed discrete dynamic programming algorithm. A parallel procedure for decreasing computational costs is discussed. >
Adaptive mutation of biochemical reaction constants: Fisher's geometrical model without pleiotropy

The distribution of tness eects of adaptive mutations remains poorly understood, both empirically and theoretically. We study this distribution using a version of Fisher’s geometrical model without pleiotropy, such that each mutation aects only a single trait. We are motivated by the notion of an organism’s chemotype, the set of biochemical reaction constants that govern its molecular constituents. From physical considerations, we expect the chemotype to be of high dimension and to exhibit very little pleiotropy. Our model generically predicts striking cusps in the distribution of the tness eects of arising and xed mutations. It further predicts that a single element of the chemotype should comprise all mutations at the high-tness ends of these distributions. Using extreme value theory, we show that the two cusps with the highest tnesses are typically well-separated, even when the chemotype possesses thousands of elements; this suggests a means to observe these cusps experimentally. More broadly, our work demonstrates that new insights into evolution can arise from the chemotype perspective, a perspective between the genotype and the phenotype.
Sexual Trauma and the Premenstrual Syndrome

The present study explored differences between women who have been sexually traumatized and those who have not on: level of severity and symptomatology with regard to the premenstrual syndrome, life stressors, gynecological and psychological histories, and demographic characteristics. A total of 968 women ranging from 12 to 56 years of age participated in this study. Recruitment was through public announcement for nonpaying voluntary participation in a research study on women who have menstrual cycles. Hypothesis was that sexually traumatized women would be significantly different than non-sexually-traumatized women in level of severity and symptomatology with regard to premenstrual syndrome, life stressors, and gynecological and psychological histories. The hypothesis was tested by analysis of variance and chi-squares, and was supported.
Balancing Boundaries: Using Multiple Devices to Manage Work-Life Balance

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to give us increased flexibility about when and where we choose to work and the freedom to deal with home tasks whilst at work. However more use of ICT for work during non-work time has been linked with negative outcomes including lower work and life satisfaction and increased stress. Previous work has suggested that in order to reduce some of these negative effects, people should adopt technology use strategies that aid separation of their home and work lives. In this paper we report the results of a questionnaire study investigating work-life balance boundary behaviours and technology use. We find that people use multiple devices as a way of creating boundaries between home and work, and the extent to which they do this relates to their boundary behaviour style. These findings have particular relevance given the increasing trend for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.
Generating High-Performance General Size Linear Transform Libraries Using Spiral

Developing numerical libraries that achieve highest perfo rmance on modern computer architectures became an extremely difficult task due to the increasingly complicated microarchitectures, deep cache hierarchies, and different f orms of on-chip parallelism, such as multiple processor cores an d SIMD short vector instruction sets. The difficulty of library development led to interest in automated tools that simplify the development of numerical high-performance libraries, without sacrificing performa nce. Program generator Spiral [2] is an example of such tool for the domain of linear transforms, such as the discrete Fourie r transform (DFT), FIR filters, and others. Spiral automatica lly generates the optimized and platform-adapted implementation given only the transforms specification (e.g. DFT1024) and a high-level description of the divide-and-conquer rec u sive algorithm in the domain-specific language called SPL (Signal Processing Language). Spiral performs optimizati ons such as vectorization and parallelization using rewriting on the high-level of abstraction provided by SPL, and also lowe rlevel representations. To exploit the potential offered by the development automation tools, Intel Integrated Performance Primitives ( IPP) library, which provides a wide number of optimized linear transform functions, starting with version 6.0, will inclu de a special domain for the functions automatically generated b y Spiral. To date Spiral was restricted to generating code for transforms of fixed size, known at generation time. In this paper we overview our latest research results [3] that enable gene rating full general size libraries, for which the transform s ize is only known at runtime.
Participative Decision Making: Sinop University Sample, Turkey / SKUPNO DONOŠENJE ODLUKA: PRIMJER SVEUČILIŠTA U SINOPU

Abstract This study aims at understanding the relationship between participative decision making (organizational culture, organizational power, organizational effectiveness and organizational loyalty) and gender, taking into consideration age variables. In addition, it has attempted to determine if there is an inter-relation between the four subscales of participative decision making. 80 academicians working at Sinop University participated in the study. The obtained data was analyzed in SPSS program package. The results of the analysis have shown that there is no relation between demographic variables (age and gender) and the four subscales of participative decision making: organizational effectiveness, organizational power, organizational loyalty and organizational culture.Key words: organizational culture; organizational effectiveness; organizational loyalty and organizational power. ---Ovo istraživanje pokušava doprinijeti razumijevanju veza između skupnoga donošenja odluka (organizacijske kulture, organizacijske moći, organizacijske učinkovitosti i odanosti organizaciji) i spola, uzimajući u obzir varijablu dobi. Nadalje, pokušava ustanoviti postoji li međusobna veza između četiriju razina procesa skupnoga donošenja odluka. Osamdeset akademika koji rade na Sveučilištu u Sinopu sudjelovalo je u ovome istraživanju. Dobiveni podatci analizirani su SPSS računalnim programskim paketom. Rezultati dobiveni analizom pokazali su da ne postoji veza između demografskih varijabli (dobi i spola) i četiriju razina skupnoga donošenja odluka: organizacijske učinkovitosti, organizacijske moći, odanosti organizaciji i organizacijske kulture. Ključne riječi: odanost organizaciji i organizacijska moć; organizacijska kultura; organizacijska učinkovitost.
INFLUENCE OF DIETARY MAGNESIUM ON CARDIAC AND RENAL LESIONS OF YOUNG RATS FED AN ATHEROGENIC DIET

Young male rats fed an atherogenic diet for 24 to 26 days developed magnesium deficiency. The renal lesions, calcium deposition in tubular lumens in the outer zona intermedia, are morphologically consistent with those seen in animals fed magnesium-free diets. It was necessary to feed 8 to 16 times the normal requirement of magnesium to prevent completely these lesions. The limitations in the pathogenesis of these renal lesions are discussed. The addition of 2 mg. per cent of thyroxine to the diet markedly lowered or abolished deposition of calcium in the kidney; it also lowered atherogenesis to a minimum but did not abolish it. Early lesions of atherosclerosis of the cardiac valves and of the aorta were observed. These were more prominent in animals on a 10 per cent than in those on a 20 per cent protein diet. The atherosclerosis was diminished but not abolished by exceedingly high dietary levels of magnesium in the 10 per cent protein group. Such a decrease was not noted in the 20 per cent protein group. There did not appear to be significant variation in the morphology of the fatty livers in and between the various groups and subgroups as judged by staining with Sudan IV.