Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Software maintenance and evolution: a roadmap

The production of new management approaches to evolution, leading to understanding of the relationships between technology and business. How can software be designed so that it can easily be evolved? More effective tools and methods for program comprehension for both code and data A better formalism and conceptualisation of 'maintainability'; how do we measure it? The development of a service-based model of software, to replace a product view. better
Protein Ionizable Groups: pK Values and Their Contribution to Protein Stability and Solubility*

The structure, stability, solubility, and function of proteins depend on their net charge and on the ionization state of the individual residues. Consequently, biochemists are interested in the pK values of the ionizable groups in proteins and how these pK values depend on their environment. We review what has been learned about pK values of ionizable groups in proteins from experimental studies and discuss the important contributions they make to protein stability and solubility.
Role of the Renin‐Angiotensin System in the Control of Vasopressin Secretion in Conscious Dogs

The present studies were designed to evaluate the physiological significance of angiotensin II in the control of vasopressin secretion in conscious dogs. They demonstrated that exogenous angiotensin II (10 ng/kg per min) increased vasopressin secretion more when the pressor effect of angiotensin II was abolished. The fact that endogenous angiotensin II levels are normally increased without an increase in arterial pressure suggests that angiotensin II may play a greater role in the control of vasopressin secretion than was previously thought. The present study also evaluated the role of endogenous angiotensin II in the control of vasopressin secretion during sodium depletion, a state in which angiotensin II levels are elevated. Intracarotid infusion of a low dose of the angiotensin II antagonist, saralasin, decreased plasma vasopressin concentration, suggesting that endogenous angiotensin II acts in an area of the brain perfused by the carotid arteries to stimulate vasopressin secretion in sodium-deprived dogs. Finally, the present experiments evaluated the role of angiotensin II in baroreceptor reflex control of vasopressin secretion. Baroreflex function was assessed by examining the relationship between the change in blood pressure and the log of the change in vasopressin secretion over a range of blood pressure levels. Exogenous angiotensin II (10 ng/kg per min) altered baroreflex function by causing a shift of this relationship to a higher pressure level in sodium-replete dogs. In sodium-depleted dogs, inhibition of the renin-angiotensin system with saralasin or captopril produced an opposite shift. These results suggest that endogenous angiotensin II may be necessary for the maintenance of normal baroreflex control of vasopressin secretion during sodium depletion. Collectively, these results support the hypothesis that endogenous angiotensin II plays a role in the control of vasopressin secretion.
A Sub-Partitioning Method for Point Cloud Inter-prediction Coding

In recent years, 3D point clouds have gained more attention with the possibility of applications such as virtual reality, autonomous vehicles and 3D mapping of historical artifacts, among others. However, raw point clouds generate very large amounts of data. Thus, compression is essential to enable emerging 3D systems for communication and storage.This paper presents an inter prediction technique based on the ICP algorithm and variable-size macroblocks that can be used to significantly reduce the number of bits required to represent a point cloud video sequence by inter coding the geometry information. Since consecutive frames in dynamic point cloud sequences are not guaranteed to fill the exact same 3D volume, a spatial alignment step before motion estimation is required to increase the likelihood of good matchings and thus generate a high number of inter-coded macroblocks. A decision step is also included in order to select the most favorable coding mode: intra-coding, inter-coding or inter-coding with macroblock subdivision. The proposed technique was tested in the PCC MPEG reference software and four MPEG test sequences, obtaining average bitrate reductions of about 8% with PSNR gains up to 1dB.
Media Content Metadata and Mobile Picture Sharing

This paper describes two systems for picture taking with mobile phone cameras. The first system, MMM, is a platform for generating semantically rich metadata for mobile pictures at the time of image capture. The second system, MobShare, is a mobile picture sharing and discussing system that takes advantage of the temporal and social information in the camera phone. The paper also discusses combining the two approaches in designing a mobile picture sharing system that both generates and takes advantage of semantically rich metadata.
Relationship of Campylobacter Isolated from Poultry and from Darkling Beetles in New Zealand

Abstract Campylobacter, a foodborne pathogen closely associated with poultry, is considered to be an important agent of human gastroenteritis in New Zealand. The pathways involved in the contamination of poultry flocks remain unclear; however, many vectors, such as insects, rodents, and wild birds, have been implicated. Infestation of poultry houses by insects, particularly darkling beetles (Alphitobius diaperinus), is difficult to control. Furthermore, darkling beetles are known vectors for a variety of pathogens that include Salmonella, infectious bursal disease virus, Aspergillus, Escherichia coli, and Marek's disease virus. In this investigation, the relationship between darkling beetles and Campylobacter contamination of poultry flocks was investigated. A New Zealand breeder flock and four of its progeny broiler flocks were included in the study. Samples of beetles and of intestinal excreta of the birds were cultured for the presence of Campylobacter spp. A subset of the recovered isolates was subsequently genotyped using flaA short variable region (SVR) DNA sequence analysis. A large number of Campylobacter subtypes were isolated, indicating that Campylobacter colonization of poultry is likely to arise from a number of different reservoirs. However, a set of genetically distinct isolates were found to be common to the broiler flocks and to the beetles. This research provides data that indicates that Alphitobius diaperinus may serve as a source of Campylobacter contamination of poultry. A more thorough understanding of the relationship between beetle infestation and the Campylobacter status of poultry flocks should enable progress in further development of biosecurity control measures.
Tool-Supported Refactoring of Existing Object-Oriented Code into Aspects

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) provides mechanisms for the separation of crosscutting concerns - functionalities scattered through the system and tangled with the base code. Existing systems are a natural testbed for the AOP approach since they often contain several crosscutting concerns which could not be modularized using traditional programming constructs. This paper presents an automated approach to the problem of migrating systems developed according to the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm into aspect-oriented programming (AOP). A simple set of six refactorings has been defined to transform OOP to AOP and has been implemented in the AOP-migrator tool, an Eclipse plug-in. A set of enabling transformations from OOP to OOP complement the initial set of refactorings. The paper presents the results of four case studies, which use the approach to migrate selected crosscutting concerns from medium-sized Java programs (in the range of 10K to 40K lines of code) into equivalent programs in AspectJ. The case study results show the feasibility of the migration and indicate the importance of the enabling transformations as a preprocessing step
Star-contours for efficient hierarchical self-collision detection

Collision detection is a problem that has often been addressed efficiently with the use of hierarchical culling data structures. In the subproblem of self-collision detection for triangle meshes, however, such hierarchical data structures lose much of their power, because triangles adjacent to each other cannot be distinguished from actually colliding ones unless individually tested. Shape regularity of surface patches, described in terms of orientation and contour conditions, was proposed long ago as a culling criterion for hierarchical self-collision detection. However, to date, algorithms based on shape regularity had to trade conservativeness for efficiency, because there was no known algorithm for efficiently performing 2D contour self-intersection tests. In this paper, we introduce a star-contour criterion that is amenable to hierarchical computations. Together with a thorough analysis of the tree traversal process in hierarchical self-collision detection, it has led us to novel hierarchical data structures and algorithms for efficient yet conservative self-collision detection. We demonstrate the application of our algorithm to several example animations, and we show that it consistently outperforms other approaches.
Les marqueurs de l'écologie alimentaire chez le mandrill : le cas des micro-usures dentaires et des ratios d'isotopes stables

Le regime alimentaire est un element cle de l’ecologie des especes et depend a la fois des besoins nutritionnels des individus et des ressources alimentaires disponibles. Ainsi, les strategies alimentaires peuvent varier en fonction de l’âge, du sexe ou de l’etat physiologique des individus, mais egalement de parametres environnementaux et, en particulier, de la saisonnalite. Reconstruire le regime alimentaire d’especes cryptiques ou difficiles a observer en milieu naturel necessite l’emploi de marqueurs capables de detecter les variations du regime alimentaire sur le court terme. L’analyse des patrons de micro-usures dentaires et des ratios d’isotopes stables du carbone et de l’azote constitue une approche pertinente pour distinguer le regime alimentaire entre differentes especes ou entre populations. Dans le cadre de cette these, nous avons evalue le pouvoir predictif de ces deux types de marqueurs sur les variations saisonnieres et interindividuelles du regime alimentaire dans une population naturelle de mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) sur laquelle des donnees comportementales etaient disponibles. Conformement aux comportements alimentaires observes, les patrons de micro-usures dentaires et les signatures isotopiques varient en fonction de la saison, de l’âge et du sexe des individus. L’ensemble de nos resultats nous indique que la diversite importante d’aliments consommes a faible frequence par les mandrills ne peut etre detectee par les marqueurs analyses qui semblent etre, en revanche, pertinents pour identifier des changements significatifs de consommation d’aliments majoritaires tels que les fruits et les feuilles. Enfin, les signatures isotopiques varient en fonction du cycle reproducteur des femelles et de leur rang de dominance, nous indiquant que l’utilisation de tels marqueurs peut permettre la mise en evidence d’aspects de la physiologie des individus non reportes par des observations comportementales. Les resultats presentes dans cette these apportent des donnees de reference essentielles pour la reconstruction du regime alimentaire d’especes eteintes partageant des traits communs avec le mandrill, telles que des primates generalistes de forets tropicales.
Renewal of singularity sets of statistically self-similar measures

This paper investigates new properties concerning the multifractal structure of a class of statistically self-similar measures. These measures include the well-known Mandelbrot multiplicative cascades, sometimes called independent random cascades. We evaluate the scale at which the multifractal structure of these measures becomes discernible. The value of this scale is obtained through what we call the growth speed in Holder singularity sets of a Borel measure. This growth speed yields new information on the multifractal behavior of the rescaled copies involved in the structure of statistically self-similar measures. Our results are useful to understand the multifractal nature of various heterogeneous jump processes.
Efficacy of sweet solutions for analgesia in infants between 1 and 12 months of age: a systematic review

Objective To compare the efficacy of oral sweet solutions to water or no treatment in infants aged 1–12 months during immunisation. Methods Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) were retrieved through internet searches or manual searches of reference lists. Search terms included newborn, infant, pain, sucrose and alternative names for sweet solutions. Summary estimates with 95% CIs were calculated and included relative risk (RR), risk difference (RD) and number needed to treat to benefit (NNTB) for dichotomous outcomes, and weighted mean differences (WMD) for continuous outcomes. Where pooling of results was not possible, a narrative summary of study results is presented. Results Of the 695 studies identified, 14 RCTs with 1674 injections met the inclusion criteria. Sucrose or glucose, compared to water or no treatment decreased crying during or following immunisation in 13 of the 14 studies. Infants receiving 30% glucose (three trials, 243 infants) had a decreased RR in crying incidence following immunisation (typical RR 0.80, 95% CI 0.69 to 0.93; RD −0.17, 95% CI −0.29 to −0.05; NNTB 6, 95% CI 3 to 20). With sucrose or glucose, there was a 10% WMD reduction in proportion of crying time (95% CI −18 to −2) and a 12 s reduction in crying duration (95% CI −23 to −0.7 s). An optimal dose of sucrose or glucose could not be ascertained due to the varied volumes and concentrations used. Conclusion Infants aged 1–12 months administered sucrose or glucose before immunisation had moderately reduced incidence and duration of crying. Healthcare professionals should consider using sucrose or glucose before and during immunisation.
Deep Learning for Fast and Accurate Fashion Item Detection

This paper proposes fast and accurate fashion item detection model, based on deep neural networks. The model combines MultiBox and Fast R-CNN detection architectures and improves them with several modifications, intended to make object detection system faster while keep detection quality at the same or better level. The model was tested on Kuznech-Fashion-156 and Kuznech-Fashion-205 fashion item detection datasets and gave good detection results while being 10 times faster than baseline model. Image processing time for one image is 310 ms. Obtained results make it possible to use this model as a part of Kuznech Mobile Recognition system for the task of fashion item detection and recognition, followed by visual similarity search.
One extended form for negative association rules and the corresponding mining algorithm

Recently, mining negative association rules has received some attention and proved to be useful. To the best of our knowledge, three typical forms for negative association rules and three corresponding mining methods have been proposed. However, the existing forms are not general enough, and can not represent some special cases in the real world. In this paper, an extended form for negative association rules is proposed, and a corresponding mining algorithm is presented. The proposed mining algorithm is performed on two datasets. Experimental results show that the algorithm is efficient on simple and sparse datasets when minimum support is high to some degree, and it overcomes some limitations of the previous mining methods. The proposed form will extend related applications of negative association rules to a broader range.
Can bars be destroyed by a central mass concentration?— I. Simulations

We study the effect of a central mass concentration (CMC) on the secular evolution of a barred disc galaxy. Unlike previous studies, we use fully self-consistent 3D N-body simulations with live haloes, which are known to be important for bar evolution. The CMC is introduced gradually, to avoid transients. In all cases for which the mass of the CMC is of the order of, or more than, a few per cent of the mass of the disc, the strength of the bar decreases noticeably. The amount of this decrease depends strongly on the bar type. For a given CMC, bars with an exponential surface-density profile, which formed in a disc-dominated galaxy (MD-type bars), can be totally destroyed, while strong bars with a flat surface-density profile, whose evolution is significantly affected by the halo (MH-type bars), witness only a decrease of their strength. This decrease occurs simultaneously from both the innermost and outermost parts of the bar. The CMC has a stronger effect on the Fourier components of higher azimuthal wavenumber m, leading to fatter and/or less rectangular bars. Furthermore, the CMC changes the side-on outline from peanut-shaped to boxy or, for massive CMCs, to elliptical. Similarly, side-on initially boxy outlines can be destroyed. The CMC also influences the velocity dispersion profiles. Most of the decrease of the bar strength occurs while the mass of the CMC increases, and it is accompanied by an increase of the pattern speed. In all our simulations, the mass of the CMC necessary in order to destroy the bar is at least several per cent of the mass of the disc. This argues that observed supermassive black holes are not likely to destroy pre-existing bars.
Directed Technical Change and Energy Intensity Dynamics: Structural Change vs. Energy Efficiency

This paper uses a model with Directed Technical Change to theoretically analyse observable heterogeneous energy intensity developments. Based on the empirical evidence, we decompose changes in aggregate energy intensity into structural changes in the economy (structural effect) and within-sector energy efficiency improvements (efficiency effect). The relative importance of these effects is determined by energy price growth and sectoral productivities that drive the direction of technical change. When research is directed to the labour-intensive sector, the structural effect is the main driver of energy intensity dynamics. In contrast, the efficiency effect dominates energy intensity developments, when research is directed to energy-intensive industries. Increasing energy price generally leads to lower energy intensities and temporal energy price shocks might induce a permanent redirection of innovation activities. We calibrate the model to empirical data and simulate energy intensity developments across countries. The results of our very stylised model are largely consistent with empirical evidence.
Efficient learning of typical finite automata from random walks

This paper describes new and efficient algorithms for learning deterministic finite automata. Our approach is primarily distinguished by two features: (1) the adoption of an average-case setting to model the ``typical'' labeling of a finite automaton, while retaining a worst-case model for the underlying graph of the automaton, along with (2) a learning model in which the learner is not provided with the means to experiment with the machine, but rather must learn solely by observing the automaton's output behavior on a random input sequence. The main contribution of this paper is in presenting the first efficient algorithms for learning nontrivial classes of automata in an entirely passive learning model. We adopt an on-line learning model in which the learner is asked to predict the output of the next state, given the next symbol of the random input sequence; the goal of the learner is to make as few prediction mistakes as possible. Assuming the learner has a means of resetting the target machine to a fixed start state, we first present an efficient algorithm that article no. IC972648
Twenty-One at TREC7: Ad-hoc and Cross-Language Track

This paper describes the official runs of the Twenty-One group for TREC-7. The Twenty-One group participated in the ad-hoc and the cross-language track and made the following accomplishments: We developed a new weighting algorithm, which outperforms the popular Cornell version of BM25 on the ad-hoc collection. For the CLIR task we developed a fuzzy matching algorithm to recover from missing translations and spelling variants of proper names. Also for CLIR we investigated translation strategies that make extensive use of information from our dictionaries by identifying preferred translations, main translations and synonym translations, by defining weights of possible translations and by experimenting with probabilistic boolean matching strategies.
Hyperspectral Remote Sensing of the Coastal Ocean : Adaptive Sampling and Forecasting of Near-Shore In Situ Optical Properties

Water clarity is a key parameter of coastal ecology, as well as being important to some near-shore Naval operations. The clarity of the water column depends upon the depth-dependent distribution of the inherent optical properties and the geometric structure of the light field (an apparent optical property). Our long-term goal is to develop the remote sensing techniques, data analysis, and modeling capabilities to nowcast and forecast the 3-dimensional Inherent and Apparent Optical Properties (IOPs and AOPs) of the near-shore coastal environment.
A framework for benchmarking machine learning methods using linear models for univariate time series prediction

Time series prediction has been attracting interest of researchers due to its increasing importance in decision-making activities in many fields of knowledge. The demand for better accuracy in time series prediction furthered the arising of many machine learning time series prediction methods (MLM). Choosing a suitable method for a particular dataset is a challenge and demands established benchmark methods (BM) for performance assessment. Suppose a particular BM is selected, and an experimental comparison is made with a particular MLM. If the latter does not provide better prediction results for the same dataset, this indicates that some improvements are needed for the MLM. Regarding this matter, adopting a well-established, easy to interpret, and tuned BM is desirable. This paper presents a framework for systematic benchmarking some MLM against well-known Linear Methods (LM), namely Polynomial Regression and models in the ARIMA family, used as BM for univariate time series prediction. We implemented such a framework within the R-Package named TSPred. This implementation was evaluated using a wide number of datasets from past prediction competitions. The results show that fittest LM provided by TSPred are adequate BM for univariate time series predictions.
Assessing the Impact of Climatic Change in Cold Regions

In September 1983 IIASA, together with the Austrian Government, the World Resources Institute and UNESCO, supported an International Study Conference on the Sensitivity of Ecosystems and Society to Climatic Change, which was cosponsored by the World Meteorological Organization, UNEP, and the International Council of Scientific Unions. The purpose of this meeting, which was attended by scientists from 17 countries, was to evaluate the impact of climatic fluctuations on the sensitive margins of agriculture and of natural terrestrial ecosystems. The emphasis was on climatic change that might result from increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but consideration was also given to past climatic fluctuations, both short- and long-term. This report is a summary of deliberations by participants in the workshop, of the observations that emerged, and of the recommendations made.