Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ConSub: Incentive-Based Content Subscribing in Selfish Opportunistic Mobile Networks

Recently, content-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub) services have become a significant research field in opportunistic mobile networks (OppNets). Pub/sub is an asynchronous messaging paradigm, in which content transmissions are guided by the interest. Since selfish behavior is common in reality, nodes often behave selfishly with an aim to maximize their own utilities without considering performance of other nodes. Therefore, how to encourage nodes to collect, store and share network content efficiently is one of the key challenges under this paradigm. In this paper, we propose an incentive-based pub/sub scheme, called ConSub, for OppNets. In ConSub, Tit-For-Tat (TFT) mechanism is employed to deal with selfish behavior. ConSub also implements a content exchange protocol between two interacting node, thus encouraging them to play as businessmen and carry contents to satisfy each other's interest. Specifically, the exchange order is determined by the content utility, which is calculated by contact probability and cooperation level between the current node and its neighbors subscribing to the interest. Extensive realistic trace-driven simulation results show that ConSub is superior to existing schemes in terms of delivered packets and transmission hops with reasonable transmission cost.
Local Effect of Intranasal Beclomethasone Dipropionate Aerosol in Hay Fever

The effect of a daily dose of 400 μg beclomethasone dipropionate aerosol intranasally has been investigated in a double-blind cross-over trial in 29 patients with hay fever. The effect on the nasal symptoms was so pronounced in 25 patients that further symptomatic treatment was unnecessary. Beclomethasone dipropionate aerosol had, on the other hand, no direct effect on itching in the eyes, which is in accordance with the fact that biochemical investigations did not show any sign of suppression of the adrenal function. It is concluded that beclomethasone dipropionate aerosol intranasally is an effective and apparently harmless way of controlling the nasal symptoms in hay fever.
Fine‐needle aspiration biopsy of salivary glands

Between January 1, 1973, and December 31, 1988, the authors or their associates performed 552 fine-needle aspiration biopsies on patients with clinically significant masses of the salivary glands. All patients presented at the Medical College of Virginia Hospitals or Clinics of Virginia Commonwealth University; they were followed for periods ranging from 1 to 16 years. When available, the fine-needle aspiration diagnoses were correlated with histologic diagnoses and long-term patient outcomes. The sensitivity for a neoplasm was 93.3%; the specificity for the absence of a neoplasm was 99%. Diagnostic efficiency was 96.4%, and predictive value of a positive aspiration for a neoplasm was 98.3%. With fine-needle aspiration, surgical excision of salivary gland masses is often unnecessary. In patients with primary and metastatic neoplasms involving the salivary glands, fine-needle aspiration aids the surgeon in mapping the extent of the surgical procedure and in preoperatively preparing the patient. The procedure is cost-effective.
Exploiting Non-Local Features for Spoken Language Understanding

In this paper, we exploit non-local features as an estimate of long-distance dependencies to improve performance on the statistical spoken language understanding (SLU) problem. The statistical natural language parsers trained on text perform unreliably to encode non-local information on spoken language. An alternative method we propose is to use trigger pairs that are automatically extracted by a feature induction algorithm. We describe a light version of the inducer in which a simple modification is efficient and successful. We evaluate our method on an SLU task and show an error reduction of up to 27% over the base local model.
Assessing posttraumatic cognitive processes: the Event Related Rumination Inventory

Abstract Cognitive processes in the aftermath of experiencing a major life stressor play an important role in the impact of the event on the person. Intrusive thoughts about the event are likely to be associated with continued distress, while deliberate rumination, aimed at understanding and problem-solving, should be predictive of posttraumatic growth (PTG). The Event Related Rumination Inventory (ERRI), designed to measure these two styles of rumination, is described and validation information is provided. Using a college student sample screened for having experienced highly stressful life events, data were obtained (N=323) to conduct an exploratory factor analysis that supported the two factors of the ERRI. Separate confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) on two additional samples (Ns=186 and 400) supported a two-factor model. The two ERRI factors were validated by comparison with related variables and by assessing their contributions to predicting distress and PTG in two samples (Ns=198 and 202) that had been combined to conduct the second CFA. Data indicate the ERRI has solid psychometric properties, captures variance not measured by stable differences in cognitive styles, and the separate factors are related to posttraumatic distress and growth as predicted by existing models of PTG.
Personalizing EEG-Based Affective Models with Transfer Learning

Individual differences across subjects and nonstationary characteristic of electroencephalography (EEG) limit the generalization of affective brain-computer interfaces in real-world applications. On the other hand, it is very time consuming and expensive to acquire a large number of subject-specific labeled data for learning subject-specific models. In this paper, we propose to build personalized EEG-based affective models without labeled target data using transfer learning techniques. We mainly explore two types of subject-to-subject transfer approaches. One is to exploit shared structure underlying source domain (source subject) and target domain (target subject). The other is to train multiple individual classifiers on source subjects and transfer knowledge about classifier parameters to target subjects, and its aim is to learn a regression function that maps the relationship between feature distribution and classifier parameters. We compare the performance of five different approaches on an EEG dataset for constructing an affective model with three affective states: positive, neutral, and negative. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed subject transfer framework achieves the mean accuracy of 76.31% in comparison with a conventional generic classifier with 56.73% in average.
The college prime time: Development of students' community involvement interests using the place attachment theory

The time students spend in college is invaluable. Students gain in-depth knowledge of various subjects, develop their career goals and learn how to socially interact with their peers. At the same time, it is important that students learn to be participating and responsible citizens of their community during their prime time in college (Giles & Eyler, 1994). This study was done to better understand how to get students involved in the communities around the school area, using the place attachment theoretical framework. It also aimed to look at the impact of actual participation in a volunteering event on students’ future intentions to help their communities. It was hypothesized that students’ actual participation in the volunteering event would increase their place attachment to the school area and their interests in volunteering for the communities in the future. A conceptual model was constructed to understand how participating in a volunteering activity affected participants’ place attachment and volunteering intentions. Specifically, it was hypothesized that students’ place attachment to their school area was predicted by their social relations in the area, their adult attachment style and their knowledge of the school area. These factors were then expected to relate to their interests in volunteering for the communities around the school area and their actual involvement in a randomly assigned volunteering event. Two-hundred-sixty-seven students from the Introduction to psychology participant pool were recruited. Two-hundred-and-nine students were asked to participate in an event, while fifty-eight other students served as a control group who did not participate in an event. The conceptual model was tested with three path models using Mplus software. Results confirmed the hypothesized models. Also, as hypothesized, volunteering intention at time 2 was higher than that of time 1 only for activity group but not control group. However, place attachment was found to be increased across time for both activity and control group. Implications for getting students involved in their communities and their development into responsible citizens were discussed.
A vector beam propagation method based on H fields

A vector beam propagation (VBM) method based on transverse magnetic fields (H-formulation) is developed and presented. By considering the vector property of the transverse differential operators, the polarizations of the propagating electromagnetic waves are modeled and simulated by the finite-difference solutions. A comparison with the vector beam propagation method based on the E fields is made and the results are found to be in excellent agreement. It is shown that the FD-VBPM based on the H formulation is equivalent to that based on the E formulation. <<ETX>>
Active Employees! Exploring the Relationship Between Job Characteristics, Perceived Constraints and Participation in Leisure-time Physical Activity

PAUL M. DUNLOP: Active Employees! Exploring the Relationship Between Job Characteristics, Perceived Constraints and Participation in Leisure-time Physical Activity (Under the direction of Dr. Diane Groff) Research has suggested that many adults do not participate in enough physical activity to achieve the associated health benefits. Compounding the problem of inactive leisure behaviors, modern workplace duties have also become less active. This study examined patterns of leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) and perceived constraints as related to job characteristics of 382 employees. Less than 8% of participants met the current physical activity recommendations. Females perceived a greater overall effect of constraints than males. Blue-collar workers perceived a greater effect of constraints than white-collar workers. A number of constraints dimensions significantly blocked participation. A number of strategies to encourage LTPA are presented, specifically including the removal or negotiation of time, individual/psychological and accessibility constraint dimensions.
The Number: One Man's Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs

On 9 June 2003, a 43-year-old coloured man named Magadien Wentzel walked out of Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. Behind him lay a lifelong career in the 28s, South Africa's oldest and most reviled prison gang, for decades rumoured to have specialised in rape and robbery. In front of him lay the prospect of a law-abiding future, and life in a household of eight adults and six children, none of whom earned a living. Jonny Steinberg met Wentzel in prison in the dying months of 2002. By the time Wentzel was released, he and Steinberg had spent over 50 hours discussing his life experiences. "The Number" is an account of their conversations and of Steinberg's journeys to the places and people of Wentzel's past. Wentzel had lived a bewilderingly schizophrenic life, wandering to and fro between three worlds: the arcane universe of prison gangs, steeped in a mythology of banditry and retribution, where he was known as JR; the fringes of South Africa's criminal economy, where he lived by a string of stolen names and learned the arts of commercial fraud; and, his scattered family which eked out a living in the coloured ghettos of the Cape Flats. "The Number" visits each of those worlds in turn. It is a tale of modern South Africa's historic events seen through the eyes of the country's underclass. Surprisingly, perhaps, it is neither a story of passivity nor despair, but of beguiling ingenuity and cool cynicism. Most of all, this book is an account of memory and identity, of Wentzel's project to make some sense of his bewildering past and something worthy of his future. When Steinberg met him, Wentzel was embarking on a quest to retrieve the name he had been given at birth. He was also beginning the daunting task of gathering together the estranged children he had sired into a nuclear family. It was an eccentric and painful venture for a man with his past, but it has led him to construct an account of himself that begs to be told.
Author's Personal Copy Biomedical Signal Processing and Control Effective Detection of Parkinson's Disease Using an Adaptive Fuzzy K-nearest Neighbor Approach

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t In this paper, we present an effective and efficient diagnosis system based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) enhanced fuzzy k-nearest neighbor (FKNN) for Parkinson's disease (PD) diagnosis. In the proposed system, named PSO–FKNN, both the continuous version and binary version of PSO were used to perform the parameter optimization and feature selection simultaneously. On the one hand, the neighborhood size k and the fuzzy strength parameter m in FKNN classifier are adaptively specified by the continuous PSO. On the other hand, binary PSO is utilized to choose the most discriminative subset of features for prediction. The effectiveness of the PSO–FKNN model has been rigorously evaluated against the PD data set in terms of classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Compared to the existing methods in previous studies, the proposed system has achieved the highest classification accuracy reported so far via 10-fold cross-validation analysis, with the mean accuracy of 97.47%. Promisingly, the proposed diagnosis system might serve as a new candidate of powerful tools for diagnosing PD with excellent performance.
Who is she and who are we? A critical essay on reflexivity in research into the rarity of women executives in accountancy

This paper proposes a critical stance on research into the rarity of women at the highest levels of accountancy. We aim to unravel the discourses produced on this topic in the accounting literature and question our own experience and perception as scholars building on Bourdieu's work on reflexivity (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Bourdieu, 2001, 2003). As a first step, we provide a review of literature, identifying four stories that account for the creation of this rarity. The first story focuses on the historical lag that women supposedly face; the second insists on personality traits that purportedly make men and women different; the third shows the organisational barriers faced by women; and the fourth considers gendered stereotyped roles infused at a social level. We argue that persistent combinations of organisational and social obstacles have structuring effects on the identity of the accountant, regardless of gender. The controversial nature of the stories developed by researchers and the numerous debates that oppose them, call for an examination of how argumentations are structured. We therefore provide an analysis of the research designs used in the corpus and discuss their levels of reflexivity. This focus on reflexivity is two-fold. First, we elaborate on the epistemological reflexivity, including issues regarding the formulation of research question and its effects on results, how methodology structures the results and how the scope of the research limits the findings. Second, building on the concept of participant objectivation (Bourdieu, 2003), we provide a reflexive analysis of our own experience dealing with doing research in this field.
Using Motion Blur to Recognize Hand Gestures in Low-light Scenes

: We propose a method for recognizing hand gestures in low-light scenes. In such scenes, hand gesture images are signiﬁcantly deteriorated because of heavy noise; therefore, previous methods may not work well. In this study, we exploit a single color image constructed by temporally integrating a hand gesture sequence. In general, the temporal integration of images improves the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio; it enables us to capture sufﬁcient appearance information of the hand gesture sequence. The key idea of this study is to exploit a motion blur, which is produced when integrating a hand gesture sequence temporally. The direction and the magnitude of motion blur are discriminative characteristics that can be used for differentiating hand gestures. In order to extract these features of motion blur, we analyze the gradient intensity and the color distributions of a single motion-blurred image. In particular, we encode such image features to self-similarity maps, which capture pairwise statistics of spatially localized features within a single image. The use of self-similarity maps allows us to represent invariant characteristics to the individual variations in the same hand gestures. Using self-similarity maps, we construct a classiﬁer for hand gesture recognition. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Studies of Aedes triseriatus oviposition attractants producted by larvae of Aedes triseriatus and Aedes atropalpus (Diptera: Culicidae).

Holding waters of 4th-instar larvae of both Aedes triseriatus (Say) and Aedes atropalpus (Coquillett) are shown contain an oviposition attractant for Ae. triseriatus adults. It is demonstrated that the attractants are contained in the volatile fraction of this material. Experiments in which physical contact with the larval holding water is prevented demonstrate the importance of olfactory mechanisms in oviposition site selection. Acetone extracts of eggs of Ae. triseriatus do not contain an oviposition attractant for this species.
Excretion and tissue distribution of radioactivity from aflatoxin B1-14-C in rats.

Excretion patterns of 14C derived from intraperitoneal doses of ring-labeled and methoxy-labeled aflatoxin B1 were investigated in male rats. It was found that 70–80% of the administered radioactivity from both compounds was excreted during the 24 hours following administration. A major excretory route of the ring-labeled material was through biliary excretion into feces, which accounted for nearly 60% of the administered 14C. A further 20% was excreted in urine, and only negligible amounts in CO2. In contrast, approximately 25% of administered radioactivity from the methoxy-labeled compound appeared in CO2 with a concomitant decrease in feces. These results indicate that O -demethylation represents a significant metabolic pathway for aflatoxin B1 in the rat. Radioactivity derived from ring-labeled compound was present at maximum levels in liver and kidneys 0.5 hour after administration, with small amounts present in other organs. The concentration of radioactivity was five to fifteen times greater in liver than in other tissues, and at the end of 24 hours, the liver contained an amount equal to the content of the remainder of the carcass. This finding is associated with the relative tissue specificity of aflatoxin B1 as a hepatotoxin.
Large system performance of second-order linear multistage CDMA receivers

We analyze the performance of a second-order linear multistage multiuser code-division multiple-access receiver. The receiver's filtered output is designed to converge to that of the linear minimum mean-squared error solution as the number of stages increase. Our analysis is based on a related second-order stationary iterative solution method. We derive the large system output signal to interference-plus-noise ratio for each stage. We use this result to perform a numerical optimization with respect to the two second-order parameters of our receiver. Within this iterative framework, we can achieve performance extremely close to the optimal linear multistage multiuser receiver.
Plasma ghrelin and pro-inflammatory markers in patients with obstructive sleep apnea and stable coronary heart disease

Background Inflammation is associated with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and coronary heart disease (CHD). Ghrelin, a multifunctional hormone, may play a key role in patients with OSA and/or CHD. The aim of this study was to investigate plasma ghrelin and pro-inflammatory cytokines in patients with OSA and/or CHD and assess the association of these cytokines with ghrelin. Material/Methods Plasma ghrelin, interleukin-6(IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) were measured in 75 patients and in 25 age-, sex-, and BMI-matched healthy control subjects. These patients were further classified into 3 groups (25 with OSA, 25 with OSA and CHD, and 25 with CHD), matched for age, sex, body mass index, and the severity of OSA or CHD. Results Plasma ghrelin levels were increased, and TNF-α and IL-6 were decreased in OSA patients with and without CHD, when compared with controls with similar CHD clinical characteristics (both P<0.05). Further, OSA patients with CHD tended to have higher plasma levels of TNF-α and IL-6, and lower plasma levels of ghrelin than OSA controls (P>0.05). Notably, plasma ghrelin levels were independently negatively correlated with plasma TNF-α and IL-6 (P<0.05). Conclusions Increased plasma ghrelin levels might constitute an independent determinant of decreased TNF-α and IL-6, suggesting that higher ghrelin level may in part represent a compensatory mechanism to overcome the pro-inflammatory effects of OSA. Further large-scale and prospective studies are needed to confirm these effects.
Breastfeeding as obesity prevention in the United States: A sibling difference model

In light of the growing prevalence of obesity in the United States, and the health risks associated with childhood obesity in particular, it is critical to identify avenues for obesity prevention. This study tests the hypothesis that breastfeeding serves as one protective factor against children's subsequent development of obesity. We used linear‐, logistic‐, and sibling fixed‐effects regression models to evaluate the association between infant feeding history and body mass index (BMI) in late childhood or adolescence (9–19 years, mean = 14 years). Complete data were available for 976 participants (488 sibling pairs) in the 2002 Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a nationally representative survey of families in the United States. In sibling pairs in which only one sibling was breastfed, the breastfed sibling had an adolescent BMI that was 0.39 standard deviations lower than his or her sibling, controlling for child‐specific factors that may have influenced parents' feeding decisions. This effect is equivalent to a difference of more than 13 pounds for a 14‐year‐old child of average height. Furthermore, fixed‐effects logistic regressions predicting overweight and obese status showed that breastfed siblings were less likely to reach those BMI thresholds. We therefore conclude that breastfeeding in infancy may be an important protective factor against the development of obesity in the United States. The application of a sibling fixed‐effects model provides stronger evidence of a causal relationship than prior research reporting similar patterns of association. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.