Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Epigraphical Projection and Proximal Tools for Solving Constrained Convex Optimization Problems: Part I

We propose a proximal approach to deal with a class of convex variational problems involving nonlinear constraints. A large family of constraints, proven to be effective in the solution of inverse problems, can be expressed as the lower level set of a sum of convex functions evaluated over different, but possibly overlapping, blocks of the signal. For such constraints, the associated projection operator generally does not have a simple form. We circumvent this difficulty by splitting the lower level set into as many epigraphs as functions involved in the sum. A closed half-space constraint is also enforced, in order to limit the sum of the introduced epigraphical variables to the upper bound of the original lower level set. In this paper, we focus on a family of constraints involving linear transforms of distance functions to a convex set or $\ell_{1,p}$ norms with $p\in \{1,2,\infty\}$. In these cases, the projection onto the epigraph of the involved function has a closed form expression. The proposed approach is validated in the context of image restoration with missing samples, by making use of constraints based on Non-Local Total Variation. Experiments show that our method leads to significant improvements in term of convergence speed over existing algorithms for solving similar constrained problems. A second application to a pulse shape design problem is provided in order to illustrate the flexibility of the proposed approach.
Ego Development in Fundamentalist and Nonfundamentalist Protestants

This study was designed to investigate the comparative ego development, religious orientation, and doctrinal beliefs of three Protestant groups: life-long fundamentalists (n=25), fundamentalist converts (n=25), and nonfundamentalist converts (n=25). Subjects from the Southern Baptist Church (fundamentalists) and United Methodist Church (nonfundamentalists) were used. Three instruments were employed: the Wiggins Content Scale of Religious Fundamentalism from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Loevinger's Washington University Sentence Completion Test of Ego Development, and Allport's Religious Orientation Scale. The fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist groups were doctrinally different; however, the groups did not differ in levels of ego development. The two fundamentalist groups scored higher on Allport's measure of intrinsic religious orientation. Methodological suggestions were made for future research of fundamentalists.
Public Information, IPO Price Formation, and Long-Run Returns: Japanese Evidence

We use a sample of JASDAQ IPOs to study the effects of public information on offer price formation, initial returns, and long-run returns. Underwriters begin reporting anticipated offer prices of Japanese IPOs at an earlier point than in the US. The observable portion of the price formation process begins with an original price that is established before the roadshow, continues through establishment of the filing range, and concludes with the offer price. Neither price adjustment--from the original price to the midpoint of the range, or from the midpoint to the offer price--fully reflects public information from as long as four months before the IPO. As in the US, price adjustments are asymmetric. Prices adjust more fully in response to negative than to positive public information. It appears that adjustments are limited by an implicit agreement between the issuer and the underwriter that originates before marketing of the offer begins. The agreement reflects an expectation that the offer price will be based on the relative market values of public companies up to four months before the IPO. We find that one-year aftermarket returns are significantly lower when initial returns are high. Initial returns under-adjust relative to public information that is revealed before the IPO and the under-adjustment is substantially reversed in the aftermarket. The evidence connects the implicit contracting theory with the argument that offer prices are based partly on expected value at the time of early price discussions. As a result, it can explain episodes of substantial underpricing that are sustained over periods of several months. The paper also documents that over-allotment options affect price formation by enabling issuers to select significantly narrower filing ranges and to price more fully, so that initial returns are lower.
HUBUNGAN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT DAN TURNOVER INTENTION PADA PERAWAT

Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui hubungan antara organizational commitment dengan turnover intention. Teori organizational commitment dikemukakan oleh Meyer dan Allen. Teori turnover intention dikemukakan oleh Tett dan Meyer. Organizational commitment merupakan usaha mendefinisikan dan melibatkan diri dalam organsasi dan tidak ada keinginan meninggalkannya. Turnover intention dapat dipahami sebagai niat secara sadar dan disengaja untuk meninggalkan organisasi. Penelitian ini melibatkan 64 responden. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kuantitatif. Hasil penelitian menunjukan bahwa terdapat hubungan negatif antara dimensi organizational commitment (continuance commitment, normative commitment, affective commitment) dengan turnover intention meliputi : continuance commitment dengan turnover intention (r = -0,362), normative commitment dengan turnover intention (r = -0,714), dan affective commitment dengan turnover intention (r = - 0,720).
A Qualitative Analysis of Participant Learning and Growth Using a New Outward Bound Outcomes Instrument

Despite the mental and physical benefits of visiting natural areas, and increases in outdoor activity participation among U.S. youth overall in the past decade, outdoor access is skewed toward nonurban, nonminority populations. This environmental justice issue is particularly pronounced for minority youth in urban areas, such as the Los Angeles Basin. While decreased contact with nature has been associated with increased technology use, the popularity of new technologies and social media outlets presents novel opportunities to connect underserved urban youth with natural areas. Seven focus groups with 42 urban youth in the L.A. Basin explored underserved youth perspectives on connecting with nature, social media, and how social media can deliver nature-related messages of interest to this population. Content analysis revealed commonly preferred social media platforms and Web-based activities, and six themes related to participants’ perceptions of nature: unique experiences, escape, social connections, challenge, adventure, and accessibility.
Relation Extraction from Web Contents with Linguistic and Web Features

報告番号: 甲26214 ; 学位授与年月日: 2010-03-24 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(情報理工学) ; 学位記番号: 博情第281号 ; 研究科・専攻: 情報理工学系研究科電子情報学専攻
Building a more robust conception of early career researcher experience: what might we be overlooking?

ABSTRACT Two decades of research into early career researchers has highlighted the interaction of a constellation of influences in making sense of their experiences. Such research largely draws on either quantitative or qualitative traditions. While both traditions explore similar phenomena, research questions are often framed differently and use different methods. Interestingly, there are few studies in which design integrates quantitative and qualitative processes. In this paper, we describe such a design in which we examined post-PhD researcher agency, social support and intention to remain in or leave the academy. The quantitative analysis highlighted two profiles representing variation in intention to remain based on the interaction of community and supervisory support. The qualitative analysis, while supporting this finding, suggested other influences as well. Examining these other influences in-depth led to a more robust representation of the interplay of personal life and work in relation to intention to remain. We concluded work-related factors are insufficient to explain intention to remain. We suggest future research in this area should explore what other factors may be overlooked in understanding (a) intention to remain and (b) early career researcher experience more broadly. Finally, we propose research designs integrating both quantitative and qualitative processes may prove fruitful in future research, not just in this area but more broadly.
A Genetic-Algorithm Solution for Designing Optimal Forwarding Tables

An anti-glare device for a transmission screen includes a layer of transparent material having a front surface and a back surface. The front surface is provided with a saw-toothed profile, while the back surface is bonded to a circular polarizer. By mounting the anti-glare device a predetermined distance in front of a transmission screen, glare due to ambient light can be substantially eliminated without producing echo images.
Deciphering the modulation of gene expression by type I and II interferons combining 4sU-tagging, translational arrest and in silico promoter analysis

Interferons (IFN) play a pivotal role in innate immunity, orchestrating a cell-intrinsic anti-pathogenic state and stimulating adaptive immune responses. The complex interplay between the primary response to IFNs and its modulation by positive and negative feedback loops is incompletely understood. Here, we implement the combination of high-resolution gene-expression profiling of nascent RNA with translational inhibition of secondary feedback by cycloheximide. Unexpectedly, this approach revealed a prominent role of negative feedback mechanisms during the immediate (≤60 min) IFNα response. In contrast, a more complex picture involving both negative and positive feedback loops was observed on IFNγ treatment. IFNγ-induced repression of genes associated with regulation of gene expression, cellular development, apoptosis and cell growth resulted from cycloheximide-resistant primary IFNγ signalling. In silico promoter analysis revealed significant overrepresentation of SP1/SP3-binding sites and/or GC-rich stretches. Although signal transducer and activator of transcription 1 (STAT1)-binding sites were not overrepresented, repression was lost in absence of STAT1. Interestingly, basal expression of the majority of these IFNγ-repressed genes was dependent on STAT1 in IFN-naïve fibroblasts. Finally, IFNγ-mediated repression was also found to be evident in primary murine macrophages. IFN-repressed genes include negative regulators of innate and stress response, and their decrease may thus aid the establishment of a signalling perceptive milieu.
An Innovative Method to Enhance the Modified DOTS for TB Patients

Background: Nowadays establishing communication and educating patients to enhance their knowledge regarding disease and treatment process at home is one of the most important principles in providing patient care. Materials and Methods: A semi-experimental study was done on 57 patients with active pulmonary tuberculosis in two care groups namely professional – family mix directly observed treatment short- course (PFM-DOTS) and family based-DOTS (FB-DOTS). The patients were referred to the tuberculosis and lung diseases research center for diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis. Both the patient and a family supervisor were evaluated regarding their level of knowledge of the disease and the treatment regimen. Results: A significant difference between the degree of knowledge of groups of patients and the groups of family relatives before and after the intervention was indicated, with a higher increase in PFM-DOTS group than in F-B-DOTS group (P< 0.001). In PFM- DOTS group 100% of the patients, and in the FB-DOTS group 86.8% of the patients followed the recommended drug regimen (P<0.001). Conclusion: According to the treatment recommendations by the World Health Organization (WHO) for appropriate implementation of DOTS project combating TB, it seems the PFM-DOTS implementation is a more suitable method with greater effects on correct care and treatment of tuberculosis patients.
Stroke prevention in Asian patients with atrial fibrillation.

See related article, p 1739. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a global problem, contributing to a significant burden of mortality and morbidity, particularly from stroke and systemic thromboembolism.1,2 Effective stroke prevention requires oral anticoagulation (OAC), and until recently our options were limited to the vitamin K antagonist (VKA; eg, warfarin) class of drugs. VKAs were an inconvenient drug that required regular monitoring to keep within a relatively narrow therapeutic range, and the efficacy and safety were dependent on treatment adherence and good quality anticoagulation control (as reflected by a time in therapeutic range [TTR]). 3,4 In Asian patients, the VKAs have additional issues, when compared with non-Asians, they have a higher risk for intracranial bleeding, major hemorrhage, and stroke, as well as difficulties in maintaining a high TTR.5 There was also uncertainty over what was the optimal target international normalized ratio (INR) range in Asians, which was perceived to be lower than the range recommended in non-Asians (ie, INR, 2.0–3.0). The availability of the non-VKA OACs (NOACs; previously referred to as new or novel OACs)6 has resulted in a major change in the landscape for stroke prevention, given that these drugs offer relative efficacy, safety, and convenience when compared with the VKAs. Trials in Asian patients7,8 and ancillary publications from the large Phase 3 clinical trials comparing Asian versus non-Asian patients all consistently show that NOACs offer effective and safe options for stroke prevention when compared with VKAs.9–11 Expectations are, therefore, …
Angry Anglos and aspirational Asians: everyday multiculturalism in the selective school system in Sydney

ABSTRACT ‘Asian whiz kids’ perfect test scores. ’ ‘Selective schools and tiger parents. ’ These types of headlines highlight the increased visibility of academically successful students from Asian migrant backgrounds, in Australia and other Western countries. They also point to anxiety about the perceived aggressive ‘tiger’ parenting often associated with Asian academic success. This paper focuses on the forms of everyday multiculturalism found in and around high-performing selective schools and classes in Sydney, Australia, almost all of which are dominated by Asian-Australian students. Drawing on interviews with parents and students from Anglo- and Asian-Australian backgrounds, it documents the different positionalities adopted by participants within these culturally diverse settings, including anger, aspiration and cosmopolitanism. This potentially volatile combination of approaches to diversity reveals some of the social consequences of neoliberal migration and education policies.
Asynchronous organizations for multi-algorithm problems

A Multi-Algorithm Problem (MAP) is a problem with many approximate algorithms available to solve it. Examples of MAPs are most of the combinatorial optimization problems and the multi-criterion problems with conflicting objectives. Since a MAP has no single algorithm able to solve it optimally in reasonable time, and each available algorithm for a MAP has its own approach to solving a problem, there exists the possibility of combining these algorithms in order to take advantage of their strengths. This thesis demonstrates that by using an Asynchronous Team, a software organization characterized by cyclic, iterative data flow and autonomous agents which communicate asynchronously through shared memories, one can synergistically combine many algorithms in order to reach better results than each algorithm can do by itself. As an example of a MAP, we chose the Euclidean version of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which is a difficult combinatorial problem and has many heuristic algorithms that only provide approximate solutions for it. Asynchronous Teams with a few algorithms were able to reach optimal solutions for all the TSP instances tackled whereas, individual algorithms could not. Moreover, parallel execution of Asynchronous Teams on a computer network presented linear speed up. We also observed that Asynchronous Teams for solving TSP are scale efficient; that is, the more algorithms an Asynchronous Team uses, the better it performs. We tested and analyzed several design parameters for Asynchronous Teams such as selection and destruction policies (how agents select and destroy data from shared memories,) initialization policies (how to initiate shared memories,) memory sizes, and the influence of data flows on the performance of Asynchronous Teams. We also present some specially developed algorithms to be exclusively executed in Asynchronous Teams. Finally, we present a Markov-based model that not only explains the behavior, but also helps in designing Asynchronous Teams by giving insights about expected value of final solutions, optimal relative execution frequencies of algorithms, and convergence of Asynchronous Teams.
Tradução e adaptação cultural de uma medida de avaliação da sabedoria: a 3D-WS-19

Partindo do compromisso da Gerontologia Social de tentar explicar as diferencas interindividuais que se amplificam com o aumento da idade, e no sentido de melhorar a compreensao e intervencao gerontologica, o presente estudo assumiu como objetivo avaliar as qualidades psicometricas da Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS; Ardelt, 2003), enquanto medida de avaliacao das caracteristicas associadas a sabedoria. Os resultados sugerem uma nova solucao fatorial, a 3D-WS-19, que se apresenta como um instrumento de medida valido, fiavel e adequado a populacao adulta portuguesa. Palavras-chave: Sabedoria; Validacao; Analise fatorial confirmatoria.
Air-sea CO 2 fluxes on the Bering Sea shelf

Abstract. There have been few previous studies of surface seawater CO2 partial pressure (pCO2) variability and air-sea CO2 gas exchange rates for the Bering Sea shelf. In 2008, spring and summertime observations were collected in the Bering Sea shelf as part of the Bering Sea Ecological Study (BEST). Our results indicate that the Bering Sea shelf was close to neutral in terms of CO2 sink-source status in springtime due to relatively small air-sea CO2 gradients (i.e., ΔpCO2 and sea-ice cover. However, by summertime, very low seawater pCO2 values were observed and much of the Bering Sea shelf became strongly undersaturated with respect to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Thus the Bering Sea shelf transitions seasonally from mostly neutral conditions to a strong oceanic sink for atmospheric CO2 particularly in the "green belt" region of the Bering Sea where there are high rates of phytoplankton primary production (PP)and net community production (NCP). Ocean biological processes dominate the seasonal drawdown of seawater pCO2 for large areas of the Bering Sea shelf, with the effect partly countered by seasonal warming. In small areas of the Bering Sea shelf south of the Pribilof Islands and in the SE Bering Sea, seasonal warming is the dominant influence on seawater pCO2, shifting localized areas of the shelf from minor/neutral CO2 sink status to neutral/minor CO2 source status, in contrast to much of the Bering Sea shelf. Overall, we compute that the Bering Sea shelf CO2 sink in 2008 was 157 ± 35 Tg C yr−1 (Tg = 1012 g C) and thus a strong sink for CO2.
The Influences of Facebook on Romantic Relationship Development: Facebook Activities and Perception of the Person of interest

Social networking sites (SNSs) have become a significant medium for communicating with others interpersonally and socially. Facebook usage has grown rapidly worldwide with estimated 1,679 million users (Internet World Stats, 2016). An extensive use of Facebook plays a crucial role in daily interactions between people globally and, definitely, in relationship enactment and development. Previous studies indicated a significant impact of Facebook on romantic relationships, both in positive and negative ways. Facebook usage fosters jealousy and suspicion (Fox, Osborn, & Warber, 2014; Ruedar, Lindsay, & Williams, 2015) and is a threat to romantic relationships (Cohen, Bowman, & Borchert, 2014). However, some reported that Facebook increases partners’ self-expansion (Carpenter & Spottswood, 2013) and level of commitment through Facebook Official (FBO) (Fox, Warber, & Makstaller, 2013). The main purposes of this study were to investigate (1) how people used Facebook to access information of and learned about the person of interest, and (2) how this information affected perception of the person they were dating during relationship enactment. Participants were 154 undergraduate students who completed a selfadministered questionnaire. The results showed that people were more likely to use passive activities to learn more about the person of interest. Passive activities were the strongest predictors of relationship development. However, Facebook use did not predict trust in the person. Thematic analysis also revealed Facebook activities of the person of interest that made the other feel good and worst. Feeling-good activities were responsiveness and positive self-expression; feeling-worst activities were unresponsiveness and negative self-expression.
First Stellar Abundances in the Dwarf Irregular Galaxy Sextans A

We present the abundance analyses of three isolated A-type supergiant stars in the dwarf irregular galaxy Sextans A (=DDO 75) from high-resolution spectra obtained with the Ultraviolet-Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) on the Kueyen telescope (UT2) of the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). Detailed model atmosphere analyses have been used to determine the stellar atmospheric parameters and the elemental abundances of the stars. The mean iron-group abundance was determined from these three stars to be ⟨[(Fe II, Cr II)/H]⟩ = -0.99 ± 0.04 ± 0.06. This is the first determination of the present-day iron-group abundances in Sextans A. These three stars now represent the most metal-poor massive stars for which detailed abundance analyses have been carried out. The mean stellar α-element abundance was determined from the α-element magnesium as ⟨[α(Mg I)/H]⟩ = -1.09 ± 0.02 ± 0.19. This is in excellent agreement with the nebular α-element abundances as determined from oxygen in the H II regions. These results are consistent from star to star, with no significant spatial variations over a length of 0.8 kpc in Sextans A. This supports the nebular abundance studies of dwarf irregular galaxies, where homogeneous oxygen abundances are found throughout, and argues against in situ ("on the spot") enrichment. The α/Fe abundance ratio is ⟨[α(Mg I)/Fe II, Cr II]⟩ = -0.11 ± 0.02 ± 0.10, which is slightly lower but consistent with the solar ratio. This is consistent with the results from A-supergiant analyses in other Local Group dwarf irregular galaxies, NGC 6822 and WLM. The results of near-solar [α/Fe] ratios in dwarf galaxies is in stark contrast with the high [α/Fe] results from metal-poor stars in the Galaxy (which plateau at values near +0.4 dex) and is most clearly seen from these three stars in Sextans A because of their lower metallicities. The low [α/Fe] ratios are consistent with the slow chemical evolution expected for dwarf galaxies from analyses of their stellar populations.
Energy efficient DVS schedule for fixed-priority real-time systems

Energy consumption has become an increasingly important consideration in designing many real-time embedded systems. Variable voltage processors, if used properly, can dramatically reduce such system energy consumption. In this paper, we present a technique to determine voltage settings for a variable voltage processor that utilizes a fixed-priority assignment to schedule jobs. By exploiting more efficiently the processor slack time, our approach can be more effective in reducing the execution speed for real-time tasks when necessary. Our approach also produces the minimum constant voltage needed to feasibly schedule the entire job set. With both randomly generated and practical examples, our heuristic approach can achieve the dynamic energy reduction very close to the theoretically optimal one (within 2%) with much less computation cost.