Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Business Model Representation Incorporating Real Options: An Extension of e3-Value

Business models are not typically doomed to remain as they are, rather, they may contain a variety of options to be changed or extended. Nevertheless, current approaches for business model representation cannot handle such options, because no appropriate modeling constructs are available. This substantially inhibits the qualitative consideration of options in business model design. Also, it inhibits the integration of options into subsequent quantitative analysis. Our contributions in this context are twofold: at a 'macro-level', we combine business model representations with real options theory from finance. At a 'micro-level', we extend one widely established and applied business model representation, namely e3-value, for handling real options. We develop the graphical notation necessary for option modeling and a corresponding extension of the formal e3-value ontology. Finally, we illustrate in a case study how the proposed extensions can support options reasoning and also serve as a basis for the correct financial analysis of a business model.
The effects of extra-articular suture tension on contact mechanics of the lateral compartment of cadaveric stifles treated with the TightRope CCL or lateral suture technique.

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of suture tension on contact pressures in the lateral compartment of the stifle for the TightRope CCL((R)) (TR) and circumfabellar-tibial suture (LS) techniques. STUDY DESIGN Ex vivo biomechanical study. SAMPLE POPULATION Pelvic limbs (n=12) from dogs weighing 21-24 kg. METHODS A pressure sensor was used to record peak contact pressure (PCP) and mean contact pressure (MCP) and contact area (CA) in limbs mounted in a materials testing machine. Stifles were stabilized using either a TR or LS technique and the prosthesis was tensioned increasingly from 25 to 70 N. PCP, MCP, and CA were collected at each applied tension before and after applying an axial load of 150 N. RESULTS In the unloaded condition, LS stabilization resulted in a significant increase (P=.034) in PCP at >or=40 N tensions, whereas TR stabilization resulted in a significant increase (P=.047) in PCP at 70 N tension. There was a significant increase in CA at tensions >or=60 N in the LS group. No effect on MCP was noted. No significant differences in contact pressures were observed in the loaded condition. There were no significant differences in normalized PCP and CA between stabilization groups at any of the tension increment. CONCLUSIONS The application of high tension to the extra-articular prosthesis alters lateral compartment contact pressures in the unloaded stifle in this ex vivo model. CLINICAL RELEVANCE Over tightening of an extra-articular prosthesis may increase lateral compartment pressure at the time of surgery. The clinical implications of this finding are unknown, as weight bearing may negate any detrimental effect of high prosthesis tension.
Can Ethograms Be Automatically Generated Using Body Acceleration Data from Free-Ranging Birds?

An ethogram is a catalogue of discrete behaviors typically employed by a species. Traditionally animal behavior has been recorded by observing study individuals directly. However, this approach is difficult, often impossible, in the case of behaviors which occur in remote areas and/or at great depth or altitude. The recent development of increasingly sophisticated, animal-borne data loggers, has started to overcome this problem. Accelerometers are particularly useful in this respect because they can record the dynamic motion of a body in e.g. flight, walking, or swimming. However, classifying behavior using body acceleration characteristics typically requires prior knowledge of the behavior of free-ranging animals. Here, we demonstrate an automated procedure to categorize behavior from body acceleration, together with the release of a user-friendly computer application, “Ethographer”. We evaluated its performance using longitudinal acceleration data collected from a foot-propelled diving seabird, the European shag, Phalacrocorax aristotelis. The time series data were converted into a spectrum by continuous wavelet transformation. Then, each second of the spectrum was categorized into one of 20 behavior groups by unsupervised cluster analysis, using k-means methods. The typical behaviors extracted were characterized by the periodicities of body acceleration. Each categorized behavior was assumed to correspond to when the bird was on land, in flight, on the sea surface, diving and so on. The behaviors classified by the procedures accorded well with those independently defined from depth profiles. Because our approach is performed by unsupervised computation of the data, it has the potential to detect previously unknown types of behavior and unknown sequences of some behaviors.
Title Unmixed spectrum clustering for template composition in lung soundclassification

In this paper, we propose a method for composing templates of lung sound classification. First, we obtain a sequence of power spectra by FFT for each given lung sound and compute a small number of component spectra by ICA for each of the overlapping sets of tens of consecutive power spectra. Second, we put component spectra obtained from various lung sounds into a single set and conduct clustering a large number of times. When component spectra belong to the same cluster in all clustering results, these spectra show robust similarity. Therefore, we can use such spectra to compose a template of lung sound classification.
Early visual processing for low spatial frequency fearful face is correlated with cortical volume in patients with schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia present with dysfunction of the magnocellular pathway, which might impair their early visual processing. We explored the relationship between functional abnormality of early visual processing and brain volumetric changes in schizophrenia. Eighteen patients and 16 healthy controls underwent electroencephalographic recordings and high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging. During electroencephalographic recordings, participants passively viewed neutral or fearful faces with broad, high, or low spatial frequency characteristics. Voxel-based morphometry was performed to investigate brain volume correlates of visual processing deficits. Event related potential analysis suggested that patients with schizophrenia had relatively impaired P100 processing of low spatial frequency fearful face stimuli compared with healthy controls; patients’ gray-matter volumes in the dorsolateral and medial prefrontal cortices positively correlated with this amplitude. In addition, patients’ gray-matter volume in the right cuneus positively correlated with the P100 amplitude in the left hemisphere for the high spatial frequency neutral face condition and that in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex negatively correlated with the negative score of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. No significant correlations were observed in healthy controls. This study suggests that the cuneus and prefrontal cortex are significantly involved with the early visual processing of magnocellular input in patients with schizophrenia.
UIO approach for estimation of nonlinear components behavior

The main purpose of this paper is to present a method for estimating nonlinear parameters of dynamical systems using the concept of unknown input observer dedicated to linear systems. The bond graph approach is used due to its structural and causal properties and since each component can be precisely isolated using Fault detection and Isolation step. Three main points are developed and applied to a flexible joint robot link: modeling of a nonlinear component as a linear one with one unknown input, application of an unknown input observer with estimation of the nonlinear component behavior and estimation of variables of the model with application of a flat control.
Bacteriophage-insensitive mutants for high quality Crescenza manufacture

Streptococcus thermophilus is a thermophilic lactic acid bacterium used as starter culture for the manufacture of fermented dairy products. For the production of Crescenza and other soft cheeses, Sacco has developed and provides dairies with three different defined blends of S. thermophilus strains. Each blend contains two different S. thermophilus strains. The strains were selected based on their unique technological properties as well as different phage profiles. Analysis of 133 whey samples collected in 2009–2010 from Italian dairies showed a high prevalence (about 50%) of bacteriophage attacks on the blend ST020. More specifically, the strain S. thermophilus ST1A was found to be the preferred target of the bacteriophages. A bacteriophage insensitive mutant (BIM5) of the phage-sensitive strain ST1A was successfully developed and used to substitute strain ST1A in the Crescenza starter culture ST020. The strain BIM5 showed identical technological and industrial traits as those of the phage-sensitive strain ST1A. The improved resistance of the modified Crescenza starter culture ST020R was confirmed at Italian dairies, and its effectiveness monitored on 122 whey samples collected in 2011–2012. Compared to the previous values (2009–2010), the use of the phage-hardened blend ST020R allowed reducing of frequency of phage attacks from about 50 to less than 5% of the whey samples investigated.
DARPA: Device Attestation Resilient to Physical Attacks

As embedded devices (under the guise of "smart-whatever") rapidly proliferate into many domains, they become attractive targets for malware. Protecting them from software and physical attacks becomes both important and challenging. Remote attestation is a basic tool for mitigating such attacks. It allows a trusted party (verifier) to remotely assess software integrity of a remote, untrusted, and possibly compromised, embedded device (prover). Prior remote attestation methods focus on software (malware) attacks in a one-verifier/one-prover setting. Physical attacks on provers are generally ruled out as being either unrealistic or impossible to mitigate. In this paper, we argue that physical attacks must be considered, particularly, in the context of many provers, e.g., a network, of devices. As- suming that physical attacks require capture and subsequent temporary disablement of the victim device(s), we propose DARPA, a light-weight protocol that takes advantage of absence detection to identify suspected devices. DARPA is resilient against a very strong adversary and imposes minimal additional hardware requirements. We justify and identify DARPA's design goals and evaluate its security and costs.
Towards a Framework for Adaptive Faceted Search on Twitter

In the last few years, Twitter has become a powerful tool for publishing and discussing information. Yet, content exploration in Twitter requires substantial efforts and users often have to scan information streams by hand. In this paper, we approach this problem by means of faceted search. We propose strategies for inferring facets and facet values on Twitter by enriching the semantics of individual Twitter messages and present different methods, including personalized and context-adaptive methods, for making faceted search on Twitter more effective. We conduct a preliminary analysis that shows that semantic enrichment of tweets is essential for faceted search on Twitter and that there is essential need for adaptive faceted search on Twitter. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation methodology that allows us to automatically evaluate the quality of adaptive faceted search on Twitter without requiring expensive user studies.
Hypernets: a class of hierarchical petri nets

The interest of this thesis is on modeling systems of mobile agents, systems composed of several open and autonomous components which can interact and move inside one or more environments. Several proposal for modeling mobility have been introduced. They can be roughly divided in two categories: Petri net based formalisms, and process algebra based formalisms. In this thesis, Petri net formalisms will mostly be considered, with particular care to formalisms which use the nets-within-nets paradigm. In models compliant to this paradigm the tokens of a Petri net can be nets themselves. Since systems of mobile agents exhibit a nesting structure, it seems natural to use this paradigm. In particular, the focus of this dissertation is on the hypernet model, whose main characteristic is that it has a limited state space, characteristic that make it suitable to be analyzed using well known Petri net techniques. The thesis topics range from theoretical aspects of the model to more practical issues. From a theoretical point of view an extension of the model is introduced. It is proved that this extension preserves all the good properties of the basic model. It is also studied how to apply the well known unfolding technique to this model. From a practical point of view is is shown how the nets-within nets paradigm can be used to model systems based on the Grid infrastructure. Moreover, a tool which allow to draw and to analyze an hypernet is discussed.
Morphological and mechanical determinants of bite force in bats: do muscles matter?

SUMMARY Bats are one of the most diverse groups of mammals and have radiated into a wide variety of trophic niches. Accordingly, the cranial structure in bats is unusually variable among mammals and thought to reflect specializations for feeding and echolocation. However, recent analyses of cranial structure, feeding behavior and bite force across a wide range of bats suggest that correlations between morphology and performance and/or ecology are not as clearcut as previously thought. For example, most of the variation in bite force across a wide range of phyllostomid bats was explained by differences in body size rather than specific cranial traits. However, remarkably little is known about the muscular components that are responsible for generating the actual bite forces. We have tested which aspects of the cranial muscular system are good predictors of bite force across a wide range of species using a modeling approach. Model calculations of bite force show good correspondence with in vivo data suggesting that they can be used to estimate performance of the cranial system. Moreover, our data show that bite force is strikingly well explained by differences in temporalis muscle mass, temporalis fiber length and masseter muscle mass. Moreover, our data show that evolutionary changes in bite force capacity in bats are associated with evolutionary changes in relative m. temporalis mass and absolute skull length.
Outer membrane porins are important in maintenance of the surface structure of Escherichia coli cells

Escherichia coli cells lacking the OmpF and OmpC proteins, porin proteins of the outer membrane, are often unstable and easily revert to strains which either have regained one or both of these proteins or contain a new outer membrane protein. The structural importance of porin proteins in the cell surface was studied in the present work. Tris-hydrochloride buffer at a concentration of 120 mM caused deformation of the cell surface of a strain lacking these porins; the undulated appearance of the negatively stained cell surface changed to a smooth and expanded form. The Tris-induced deformation was seldom observed with either the wild-type strain or a pseudorevertant that possessed the OmpF protein. The role of the OmpF protein in stabilizing the cell surface against Tris treatment could be slightly taken over by the LamB protein, which shares a number of unique properties with the former proteins. The deformation of the cell surface by Tris-hydrochloride buffer was accompanied by a loss of viability, the lethal damage being especially significant when the cells lacked porins. Upon induction with maltose, cells with the undulated appearance could absorb lambda phages, whereas the deformed cells could not. These results suggest that the instability of cells lacking porins is primarily due to a structural defect of the outer membrane.
An extended RBAC profile of XACML

Nowadays many organizations use security policies to control access to sensitive resources. Moreover, exchanging or sharing services and resources is essential for these organizations to achieve their business objectives. Since the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) was standardized by the OASIS community, it has been widely deployed, making it easier to interoperate with other applications using the same standard language. The OASIS has defined an RBAC profile of XACML that illustrates how organizations that would like to use the RBAC model can express their access control policy within this standard language. This work analyzes the RBAC profile of XACML, showing its limitations to respond to all the requirements for access control. We then suggest adding some functionalities within an extended RBAC profile of XACML. This new profile is expected to respond to more advanced access control requirements such as user-user delegation, access elements abstractions and contextual applicability of the policies.
Depressive Symptoms in Patients Scheduled for Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy With Cytoreductive Surgery: Prospective Associations With Morbidity and Mortality.

PURPOSE The current study examined prospective relationships between preoperative depressive symptoms and short-term (30-day morbidity and readmission) and long-term (overall survival) outcomes after hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy with cytoreductive surgery (HIPEC + CS). METHODS Ninety-eight patients scheduled for HIPEC + CS completed the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale before surgery. Demographic and disease-specific factors and information about morbidity and readmission within 30 days after discharge were gathered from medical records. Survival was measured from date of surgery to death. RESULTS Twenty-eight percent of patients had CES-D scores indicative of clinically significant depressive symptoms. Thirty-day morbidity occurred in 31.9% of patients and readmission in 22.2%. At the time of analysis (median follow-up of 49 months), 71.6% of patients were deceased, with median survival time of 11 months for those who died. After adjusting for relevant preoperative demographic and disease-specific factors, depressive symptoms were associated with greater odds of 30-day morbidity (n = 68; odds ratio, 5.50; 95% CI, 1.23 to 24.73; P = .03) and greater likelihood of 30-day readmission (n = 72; odds ratio, 5.92; 95% CI, 1.27 to 27.64; P = .02). Depressive symptoms were associated with shorter survival after adjustment for preoperative demographic and disease-specific factors (n = 87; hazard ratio, 1.88; 95% CI, 1.07 to 3.31; P = .03). This association was no longer significant when intraoperative/postoperative prognostic variables were added to the statistical model (n = 87; hazard ratio, 1.31; 95% CI, 0.72 to 2.37; P = .37). CONCLUSION Patients with clinically significant levels of preoperative depressive symptoms are at risk for poor clinical outcomes after HIPEC + CS, including greater risk of 30-day morbidity and readmission. Further research is warranted to determine biobehavioral mechanisms and examine whether effective interventions targeting preoperative depressive symptoms can reduce postoperative risk in this patient population.
Organic geochemical investigation of far‐field tsunami deposits of the Kahana Valley, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i

Far‐field tsunami deposits observed in the Kahana Valley, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i (USA), were investigated for their organic‐geochemical content. During short high‐energy events, (tsunamis and storms) organic and chemical components are transported with sediment from marine to terrestrial areas. This study investigates the use of anthropogenic based organic geochemical compounds (such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, pesticides and organochlorides) as a means to identify tsunami deposits. Samples were processed by solid–liquid extraction and analyzed using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. A total of 21 anthropogenic marker compounds were identified, of which 11 compounds were selected for detailed analysis. Although the tsunami deposits pre‐date industrial activity in Hawai‘i by several hundred years, distinct changes were found in the concentrations of anthropogenic marker compounds between sandy tsunami deposits and the surrounding mud/peat layers, which may help in identifying tsunami deposits within cores. As expected, low overall concentrations of anthropogenic markers and pollutants were observed due to the lack of industrial input‐sources and little anthropogenic environmental impact at the study site. This geochemical characterization of tsunami deposits shows that anthropogenic markers have significant potential as another high‐resolution, multi‐proxy method for identifying tsunamis in the sedimentary record.
A comparison of training approaches for discriminative segmental models

Segmental models such as segmental conditional random fields have had some recent success in lattice rescoring for speech recognition. They provide a flexible framework for incorporating a wide range of features across different levels of units, such as phones and words. However, such models have mainly been trained by maximizing conditional likelihood, which may not be the best proxy for the task loss of speech recognition. In addition, there has been little work on designing cost functions as surrogates for the word error rate. In this paper, we investigate various losses and introduce a new cost function for training segmental models. We compare lattice rescoring results for multiple tasks and also study the impact of several choices required when optimizing these losses.
Identification of a carbenicillin-hydrolyzing beta-lactamase in Alcaligenes denitrificans subsp. xylosoxydans

Eleven strains of Alcaligenes denitrificans subsp. xylosoxydans produced a beta-lactamase with a pI of 5.7 with kinetic data characteristic of a PSE-1-type enzyme. A CARB-type enzyme was identified by using an intragenic DNA probe of blaCARB. Hybridization of genomic DNA after XbaI restriction and pulsed-field electrophoresis suggested a chromosomal location for the gene.
Effect of starch on the cariogenic potential of sucrose

Since in vitro and animal studies suggest that the combination of starch with sucrose may be more cariogenic than sucrose alone, the study assessed in situ the effects of this association applied in vitro on the acidogenicity, biochemical and microbiological composition of dental biofilm, as well as on enamel demineralization. During two phases of 14 d each, fifteen volunteers wore palatal appliances containing blocks of human deciduous enamel, which were extra-orally submitted to four groups of treatments: water (negative control, T1); 2 % starch (T2); 10 % sucrose (T3); and 2 % starch+10 % sucrose (T4). The solutions were dripped onto the blocks eight times per day. The biofilm formed on the blocks was analysed with regard to amylase activity, acidogenicity, and biochemical and microbiological composition. Demineralization was determined on enamel by cross-sectional microhardness. The greatest mineral loss was observed for the association starch+sucrose (P<0·05). Also, this association resulted in the highest lactobacillus count in the biofilm formed (P<0·05). In conclusion, the findings suggest that a small amount of added starch increases the cariogenic potential of sucrose.