Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Observational evidence for a connection between supermassive black holes and dark matter haloes

We present new velocity dispersion measurements of a sample of 12 spiral galaxies for which extended rotation curves are available. These data are used to refine a recently discovered correlation between the circular velocity and the central velocity dispersion of spiral galaxies. We find a slightly steeper slope for our larger sample, confirm the negligible intrinsic scatter on this correlation and find a striking agreement with the corresponding relation for elliptical galaxies. We combine this correlation with the well-known M B H -σ relation to obtain a tight correlation between the circular velocities of galaxies and the masses of the supermassive black holes they host. This correlation is the observational evidence for an intimate link between dark matter haloes and supermassive black holes. Apart from being an important ingredient for theoretical models of galaxy formation and evolution, the relation between M B H and circular velocity can serve as a practical tool to estimate black hole masses in spiral galaxies.
ROBUST BLIND DWT BASED DIGITAL IMAGE WATERMARKING USING SINGULAR VALUE DECOMPOSITION

This paper presents a robust and blind digital image watermarking scheme for copyright protection based on discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition (SVD). The basic idea of the proposed method is to embed the singular values (SVs) of the watermark image into the specific values of the SVs of the transformed host image. At the first step, the host image is transformed to wavelet domain and then SVD transform is applied to each sub-band. In the next stage, the SVs of each sub-band and the SVs of the watermark image are converted to new semi-binary arrays form. Finally, using the semi-binary arrays, the values of SVs of the watermark image are inserted into the selected values of SVs of the decomposed host image’s sub-bands. The experimental results show clearly high transparency of the watermarked images as well as strong robustness of the proposed watermarking scheme against different geometric and non geometric attacks.
Interleaved multi-bank scratchpad memories: A probabilistic description of access conflicts

Shared on-chip memory is common on state-of-the-art multi-core platforms. In a number of designs, memory throughput is enhanced by providing multiple independent memory banks and spreading consecutive memory addresses to these (interleaving). This can reduce, but not eliminate, the number of access conflicts. In this paper, we statically analyse the probabilities and frequencies of these access conflicts and calculate the expected throughput for various hardware configurations and software applications. Using two techniques - the classic occupancy distribution and a Markov model - we are able to explain most of the underlying conflict mechanisms and to provide accurate estimations. We present the practical consequences for hardware and software design and establish an intuitive understanding of the characteristics of interleaved memory architectures.
Illumination Normalization Based on Weber's Law With Application to Face Recognition

Weber's law suggests that for a stimulus, the ratio between the smallest perceptual change and the background is a constant, which implies stimuli are perceived not in absolute terms but in relative terms. Inspired from this, we exploit and analyze a novel illumination insensitive representation of face images under varying illuminations via a ratio image, called “Weber-face,” where a ratio between local intensity variation and the background is computed. Experimental results on both CMU-PIE and Yale B face databases show that Weber-face performs better than the existing representative approaches.
Multi-view object matching and tracking using canonical correlation analysis

Multi-view tracking of objects in video surveillance consists in segmenting and automatically following them through different camera views. This may be achieved using geometric methods, e.g. by calibrating camera sensors and using their transformation matrices. However, in practice the precision of calibration is a major issue when trying to achieve this task robustly. In this paper, we present an alternative framework for multi-view object matching and tracking based on canonical correlation analysis. Our method is purely statistical and encodes intrinsic object appearances while being view-point invariant. We will show that our technique is (i) easy-to-set (ii) theoretically well grounded and (iii) provides robust matching and tracking results for traffic surveillance.
Does school quality affect neighborhood development? Evidence from a redistricting reform

This paper studies the effect of school quality on residential and commer­ cial building construction and development. I exploit a redistricting reform in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, in which the district redrew a large number of residence-based school assignment zones. Redistricting leads to the abrupt creation of school quality discontinuities along new assignment boundaries. Using a regression discontinuity design along new boundaries, I find relatively minor and insignificant differences in the size and building quality of housing construction before the reform, but once school quality differences go into ef­ fect, housing construction on the high test score side of a new boundary is larger and higher quality.
Credit Risk Measurement and Procyclicality

This paper examines the two-way linkages between credit risk measurement and the macroeconomy. It first discusses the issue of whether credit risk is low or high in economic booms. It then reviews how macroeconomic considerations are incorporated into credit risk models and the risk measurement approach that underlies the New Basel Capital Accord. Finally, it asks what effect these measurement approaches are likely to have on the macroeconomy, particularly through their role in influencing the level of bank capital. The paper argues that much remains to be done in integrating macroeconomic considerations into risk measurement, particularly during the upswing of business cycles that are characterised by rapid increases in credit and asset prices. It also suggests that a system of risk-based capital requirements is likely to deliver large changes in minimum requirements over the business cycle, particularly if risk measurement is based on market prices. This has the potential to increase the financial amplification of business cycles, although other aspects of risk-based capital requirements are likely to work in the other direction. Further work on evaluating the net effects is important for both supervisory and monetary authorities.
Insights into Aurora-A Kinase Activation Using Unnatural Amino Acids Incorporated by Chemical Modification

Most protein kinases are regulated through activation loop phosphorylation, but the contributions of individual sites are largely unresolved due to insufficient control over sample phosphorylation. Aurora-A is a mitotic Ser/Thr protein kinase that has two regulatory phosphorylation sites on its activation loop, T287 and T288. While phosphorylation of T288 is known to activate the kinase, the function of T287 phosphorylation is unclear. We applied site-directed mutagenesis and selective chemical modification to specifically introduce bioisosteres for phospho-threonine and other unnatural amino acids at these positions. Modified Aurora-A proteins were characterized using a biochemical assay measuring substrate phosphorylation. Replacement of T288 with glutamate and aspartate weakly stimulated activity. Phospho-cysteine, installed by chemical synthesis from a corresponding cysteine residue introduced at position 288, showed catalytic activity approaching that of the comparable phospho-serine protein. Unnatural amino acid residues, with longer side chains, inserted at position 288 were autophosphorylated and supported substrate phosphorylation. Aurora-A activity is enhanced by phosphorylation at position 287 alone but is suppressed when position 288 is also phosphorylated. This is rationalized by competition between phosphorylated T287 and T288 for a binding site composed of arginines, based on a structure of Aurora-A in which phospho-T287 occupies this site. This is, to our knowledge, the first example of a Ser/Thr kinase whose activity is controlled by the phosphorylation state of adjacent residues in its activation loop. Overall we demonstrate an approach that combines mutagenesis and selective chemical modification of selected cysteine residues to investigate otherwise impenetrable aspects of kinase regulation.
Vulnerabilities to Temperature Effects on Acute Myocardial Infarction Hospital Admissions in South Korea

Most previous studies have focused on the association between acute myocardial function (AMI) and temperature by gender and age. Recently, however, concern has also arisen about those most susceptible to the effects of temperature according to socioeconomic status (SES). The objective of this study was to determine the effect of heat and cold on hospital admissions for AMI by subpopulations (gender, age, living area, and individual SES) in South Korea. The Korea National Health Insurance (KNHI) database was used to examine the effect of heat and cold on hospital admissions for AMI during 2004–2012. We analyzed the increase in AMI hospital admissions both above and below a threshold temperature using Poisson generalized additive models (GAMs) for hot, cold, and warm weather. The Medicaid group, the lowest SES group, had a significantly higher RR of 1.37 (95% CI: 1.07–1.76) for heat and 1.11 (95% CI: 1.04–1.20) for cold among subgroups, while also showing distinctly higher risk curves than NHI for both hot and cold weather. In additions, females, older age group, and those living in urban areas had higher risks from hot and cold temperatures than males, younger age group, and those living in rural areas.
Diagnostic value of computerized tomography venography in detecting stenosis and occlusion of subclavian vein and superior vena in chronic renal failure patients

Introduction Currently, venography is the standard diagnostic method to examine veins before implementing access, which is invasive in nature. Computerized tomography venography (CTV) can simultaneously indicate deep and superficial venous systems in the upper extremity and their relation to the surrounding anatomical structures; however, its diagnostic value in the detection of central venous disease has yet to be defined. The aim of this study was to determine the diagnostic value of CT venography compared to venography in the diagnosis of stenosis and the occlusion of subclavian veins and the superior vena in renal failure patients. Methods This cross-sectional study was conducted from January to September 2015 on patients with chronic renal failure undergoing upper extremity venography at the Radiology Department of Imam Reza Hospital in Mashhad, Iran. We excluded patients with catheters in their jugular and subclavian vein routes, venous hypertension with reverse-function fistula, or sensitivity to contrast agents. Several factors, including age, gender, catheterization record in jugular and subclavian veins, and fistula record in the upper extremity, as well as clinical symptoms consisting of edema, dermatitis, and ulcers in these organs, were recorded in the corresponding form. Then, the patients consecutively underwent indirect venography and CT venography and traces of stenosis (more than 50%) or complete occlusion in the subclavian vein and superior vena were recorded. The data were analyzed using SPSS software by the chi-squared test, and sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values were calculated by means of MedCalc Online, version 16.2. Results The study was conducted on 40 patients (26 males and 14 females) with a mean age of 46.7 ± 10.4 years. In this study, 58 subclavian veins, as well as 32 superior vena cava, were studied. The results showed that the diagnostic value of CTV in the detection of subclavian stenosis had a sensitivity and a specificity of 88.2 and 97.5%, respectively. Moreover, in the superior vena cava, the greatest CTV diagnostic sensitivity and specificity was related to vein stenosis detection (sensitivity = 88.8%; specificity = 100%). Conclusion It seems that the CTV, based on its high sensitivity, specificity, and predictive value, can be used as an efficient tool in the study of stenosis in subclavian veins and superior vena in patients undergoing venography
THE IMPACT OF FISCAL PROBITY ON PUBLIC FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT IN LIBERIA

This study was conducted to establish the impact of fiscal probity on public financial management in Liberia. A self-administered questionnaire was used as a sole means of collecting data from a targeted sample of forty four line ministries and agencies in Monrovia. However, the data was collected from thirty respondents giving a response rate of seventy one percent. Qualitative data was analyzed using quantitative analysis. Budget variance was used as the dependent variable for the study. Ethics, Legality, and Transparency were used as the independent variables. The researcher predicted there was a strong positive relationship between fiscal probity and public financial management in Liberia. A regression analysis was performed to establish the impact of ethics, legality and transparency on budget variance. The study also sought trend analysis on the budget variance of line ministries and agencies over the period of five years, and this showed a positive trend of the budget variance for most of the period. The study concluded that fiscal probity has a strong positive impact on public financial management in Liberia. Line Ministries and Agencies in Monrovia utilize fiscal probity to enhance public financial management. The study also established that the utilization of fiscal probity by line ministries and agencies has brought about economic growth and development, reduce unemployment and poverty. Most of the line ministries and agencies in Monrovia do not exercise transparency. Notwithstanding, transparency enables line ministries and agencies to execute their objectives well thus, resulting in a positive impact on public financial management. The regression analysis conducted established that the independent variables have a positive strong correlation with the dependent variable. Each of the independent variables: ethics, legality and transparency contribute positively to budget variance. It is also evident from the study that without the utilization of fiscal probity by government most line ministries and agencies would struggle with their objectives of fiscal discipline or eventually collapse.
Evolution equations for maximal monotone operators: asymptotic analysis in continuous and discrete time

This survey is devoted to the asymptotic behavior of solutions of evolution equations generated by maximal monotone operators in Hilbert spaces. The emphasis is in the comparison of the continuous time trajectories to sequences generated by implicit or explicit discrete time schemes. The analysis covers weak convergence for the average process, for the process itself and strong convergence and aims at highlighting the main ideas and unifying the proofs. We further make the connection with the analysis in terms of almost orbits that allows for a broader scope.
Gestation and breastfeeding in schistosomotic mothers differently modulate the immune response of adult offspring to postnatal Schistosoma mansoni infection

Schistosoma mansoni antigens in the early life alter homologous and heterologous immunity during postnatal infections. We evaluate the immunity to parasite antigens and ovalbumin (OA) in adult mice born/suckled by schistosomotic mothers. Newborns were divided into: born (BIM), suckled (SIM) or born/suckled (BSIM) in schistosomotic mothers, and animals from noninfected mothers (control). When adults, the mice were infected and compared the hepatic granuloma size and cellularity. Some animals were OA + adjuvant immunised. We evaluated hypersensitivity reactions (HR), antibodies levels (IgG1/IgG2a) anti-soluble egg antigen and anti-soluble worm antigen preparation, and anti-OA, cytokine production, and CD4+FoxP3+T-cells by splenocytes. Compared to control group, BIM mice showed a greater quantity of granulomas and collagen deposition, whereas SIM and BSIM presented smaller granulomas. BSIM group exhibited the lowest levels of anti-parasite antibodies. For anti-OA immunity, immediate HR was suppressed in all groups, with greater intensity in SIM mice accompanied of the remarkable level of basal CD4+FoxP3+T-cells. BIM and SIM groups produced less interleukin (IL)-4 and interferon (IFN)-g. In BSIM, there was higher production of IL-10 and IFN-g, but lower levels of IL-4 and CD4+FoxP3+T-cells. Thus, pregnancy in schistosomotic mothers intensified hepatic fibrosis, whereas breastfeeding diminished granulomas in descendants. Separately, pregnancy and breastfeeding could suppress heterologous immunity; however, when combined, the responses could be partially restored in infected descendants.
Logarithmic relaxations in a random-field lattice gas subject to gravity

A simple lattice-gas model with random fields and gravity is introduced to describe a system of grains moving in a disordered environment. Off-equilibrium relaxations of bulk density and its two time correlation functions are numerically found to show logarithmic time dependences and ``aging'' effects. Similarities with dry granular media are stressed. The connections with off-equilibrium dynamics in other kinds of ``frustrated'' lattice models in the presence of a directional driving force (gravity) are discussed to single out the appearance of universal features in the relaxation process.
Autonomous economic operation of grid connected DC microgrid

This paper presents an autonomous power sharing scheme for economic operation of grid-connected DC microgrid. Autonomous economic operation approach has already been tested for standalone AC microgrids to reduce the overall generation cost and proven a simple and easier to realize compared with the centralized management approach. In this paper, the same concept has been extended to grid-connected DC microgrid. The proposed economic droop scheme takes into consideration the power generation cost of Distributed Generators (DGs) and utility grid tariff and adaptively tunes their respective droop curves. The scheme can be realized with the local information (terminal voltages and currents) without centralized controller and high bandwidth communication links. Microgrid voltage can be maintained within the define limit (±5%), which, if required, can be restored back to the nominal value through the proposed secondary control. The performance of the proposed scheme has been verified for the example grid-connected DC microgrid.
Rural-Urban Migration and the Skill Wage Premium in Brazil: 1980-2000

We use a production function approach to determine the impact of increased labour supply of different skill level on the skill wage premium. In particular, we use data the Brazilian Population Census for 1980 to 2000, for which we have consistent data on cities, to estimate the elasticity of substitution between high and low-skill workers. Unlike the international migration literature, we can estimate the response of out migration from rural areas in response to exogenous shocks, such as rainfall shocks and changes in transportation costs, and use the predicted value from these shocks to construct our instrumental variable. We nd an elasticity of substitution between high and low-skill workers of 0.56, much lower than what has been found in the international migration literature. Our simulations show that migration between 1991 and 2000 had only a small impact of the skill wage gap, a 1.1% decrease in the wage gap between high and low-skill workers in Brazil, explaining only 5% of the changes in relative wages between high and low-skill workers seen in the data during this time period. Though this impact is small is it is 2.5 times larger than what we would have found using the elasticity of substitution between high and low-skill of developed countries.
Recognizing prosody from the lips: Is it possible to extract prosodic focus from lip features?

The aim of this chapter is to examine the possibility of extracting prosodic information from lip features. We used two measurement techniques enabling automatic lip feature extraction to evaluate the “lip pattern” of prosodic focus in French. Two corpora with Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentences were designed. Four focus conditions (S, V, O or neutral) were elicited in a natural dialogue situation. In a first set of experiments, we recorded two speakers of French with front and profile video cameras. The speakers wore blue make-up and facial markers. In a second set we recorded five speakers with a 3D optical tracker. An analysis of the lip features showed that visible articulatory lip correlates of focus exist for all speakers. Two types of patterns were observed: absolute and differential. A potential outcome of this study is to provide criteria for automatic visual detection of prosodic focus from lip data.
New Approaches for Extracting Arabic Keyphrases

Keyphrases extraction has a considerable importance in many applications such as search engine optimization, clustering, summarization, and sentiment analysis. The importance of keyphrases comes from the semantic meaning they provide as they can be used as descriptors for the documents. In this paper we compare four approaches for extracting keyphrases from Arabic documents. The first method uses the KP-Miner keyphrase extraction system. The second method uses Arabic natural language processing tools (stemmer and part of speech tagger) in order to filter some patterns that can be weighted by token frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) algorithm. The third method uses Google'sWord2Vec library to calculate the weighting of the resulting patterns by measuring the similarity of the candidate pattern and the document title. The fourth method combines the weightings result from the second and the third method.
Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt : The politics of order and myth

1. Introduction: Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, and Three Conceptions of Politics Johan Tralau 2. Schmitt's Behemoth Toma Mastnak 3. Hobbes and Schmitt on the Name and Nature of Leviathan Revisited Patricia Springborg 4. Re-Imagining Leviathan: Schmitt and Oakeshott on Hobbes and the Problem of Political Order Jan-Werner Muller 5. Hobbes's Paradox Redux Roberto Farneti 6. The Liberal Slip of Thomas Hobbes's Authoritarian Pen Gabriella Slomp 7. Does Hobbes have a Concept of the Enemy? Stephen Holmes 8. From Roman Catholicism to Mechanized Oppression: On Political-Theological Disjunctures in Schmitt's Weimar Thought John P. McCormick 9. Hobbes, Schmitt, and the Paradox of Religious Liberality Karsten Fischer 10. The Significance of Hobbes's Conception of Power John Dunn 11. Order, the Ocean, and Satan: Schmitt's Hobbes, National Socialism, and the Enigmatic Ambiguity of Friend and Foe Johan Tralau
Use of Kolmogorov distance identification of web page authorship , topic and domain

Recently there has been an upsurge in interest in the use of information entropy measures for identification of similarities and differences between strings. Strings include text document languages, computer programs and biological sequences. This work deals with the use of this technique for author identification in online postings and the identification of WebPages that are related to each other. This approach appears to offer benefits in analysis of web documents without the need for domain specific parsing or document modeling.