Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial competition in retail markets: movie theaters

Retail markets are extremely important, but economists have few practical tools for analyzing the way dispersed buyers and sellers affect the properties of markets. I develop an econometric model of retail demand in which products are location specific and consumers have preferences over both geographic proximity and other store and product characteristics. The model uses data on the observed geographic distribution of consumers within a market to (1) help explain observed variation in market shares and (2) affect predicted substitution patterns between stores. Using data from the U.S. cinema industry, I use the estimated model to evaluate the form of consumer transport costs, the effect of a theater's price and quality choices on rivals, the effects of geographic differentiation, and the nature and extent of market power.
The KLE's Subtopic Mining System for the NTCIR-10 INTENT-2 Task

This paper describes our subtopic mining system for the NTCIR10 INTENT-2 task. We propose a method that mines subtopics using simple patterns and the hierarchical structure of candidate strings based on the clusters of relevant documents using the provided web documents and official query suggestions. We extracted various candidate strings using simple patterns based on new query-types and POS tags. We constructed the hierarchical structure of the candidate strings according to the proposed process, and ranked them as subtopics using the document coverage and frequency information for each group of the candidate strings in the area satisfying the diversity requirement of the hierarchical structure.
Small-signal model of V/sup 2/ control technique with compensation

The small signal models of V/sup 2/ control without/with slope compensation are derived. It is verified that the loop with compensation can keep stable, even though the duty factor is higher than 0.5. The paper compares V/sup 2/ control with current-mode control. The analysis shows that V/sup 2/ control has much higher DC gain than current-mode control, and, by careful design, V/sup 2/ control can have larger bandwidth than current-mode control. This is why the V/sup 2/ control technique has a faster transient response than current-mode control with load current step change.
The impact of link arbitration on switch performance

Switch design for interconnection networks plays an important role in the overall performance of multiprocessors and computer networks. In this paper we study the impact of one parameter in the switch design space, link arbitration. We demonstrate that link arbitration can be a determining factor in the performance of current networks. Moreover, we expect increased research focus on arbitration techniques to become a trend in the future, as switch architectures evolve towards increasing the number of virtual channels and input ports. In the context of a state-of-the-art switch design we use both synthetic workload and execution driven simulations to compare several arbitration policies. Furthermore, we devise a new arbitration method, Look-Ahead arbitration. Under heavy traffic conditions the Look-Ahead policy provides important improvements over traditional arbitration schemes without a significant increase in hardware complexity. Also, we propose a priority based policy that is capable of reducing the execution time of parallel applications. Lastly, we enhance the arbitration policies by a supplemental mechanism, virtual channel reservation, intended to alleviate the hot-spot problem.
Using Speech Recognition Technology to Enhance Literacy Instruction for Emerging Readers

In this paper, we describe advances that make it possible to realize the potential of speech recognition to support emerging readers. These advances include improvements in the technology itself and in the design of Watch Me! Read, a tutor that uses this technology to support young readers. In addition, we evaluate Watch Me! Read using a framework for thinking about issues of learning involved in any attempt to implement new technologies. In most discussions of technology implementations, the learning issues remain relatively tacit. By making them explicit, it is possible to assess their coherence as a system (see Brown & Campione, 1996) and their correspondence with what is known about human learning.
Document Summarization Using Conditional Random Fields

Many methods, including supervised and unsupervised algorithms, have been developed for extractive document summarization. Most supervised methods consider the summarization task as a two-class classification problem and classify each sentence individually without leveraging the relationship among sentences. The unsupervised methods use heuristic rules to select the most informative sentences into a summary directly, which are hard to generalize. In this paper, we present a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) based framework to keep the merits of the above two kinds of approaches while avoiding their disadvantages. What is more, the proposed framework can take the outcomes of previous methods as features and seamlessly integrate them. The key idea of our approach is to treat the summarization task as a sequence labeling problem. In this view, each document is a sequence of sentences and the summarization procedure labels the sentences by 1 and 0. The label of a sentence depends on the assignment of labels of others. We compared our proposed approach with eight existing methods on an open benchmark data set. The results show that our approach can improve the performance by more than 7.1% and 12.1% over the best supervised baseline and unsupervised baseline respectively in terms of two popular metrics F1 and ROUGE-2. Detailed analysis of the improvement is presented as well.
cvpaper.challenge in 2015 - A review of CVPR2015 and DeepSurvey

The "cvpaper.challenge" is a group composed of members from AIST, Tokyo Denki Univ. (TDU), and Univ. of Tsukuba that aims to systematically summarize papers on computer vision, pattern recognition, and related fields. For this particular review, we focused on reading the ALL 602 conference papers presented at the CVPR2015, the premier annual computer vision event held in June 2015, in order to grasp the trends in the field. Further, we are proposing "DeepSurvey" as a mechanism embodying the entire process from the reading through all the papers, the generation of ideas, and to the writing of paper.
A Choline Oxidase Amperometric Bioassay for the Detection of Mustard Agents Based on Screen-Printed Electrodes Modified with Prussian Blue Nanoparticles

In this work a novel bioassay for mustard agent detection was proposed. The bioassay is based on the capability of these compounds to inhibit the enzyme choline oxidase. The enzymatic activity, which is correlated to the mustard agents, was electrochemically monitored measuring the enzymatic product, hydrogen peroxide, by means of a screen-printed electrode modified with Prussian Blue nanoparticles. Prussian Blue nanoparticles are able to electrocatalyse the hydrogen peroxide concentration reduction at low applied potential (−50 mV vs. Ag/AgCl), thus allowing the detection of the mustard agents with no electrochemical interferences. The suitability of this novel bioassay was tested with the nitrogen mustard simulant bis(2-chloroethyl)amine and the sulfur mustard simulants 2-chloroethyl ethyl sulfide and 2-chloroethyl phenyl sulfide. The bioassay proposed in this work allowed the detection of mustard agent simulants with good sensitivity and fast response, which are excellent premises for the development of a miniaturised sensor well suited for an alarm system in case of terrorist attacks.
Quantization of cepstral parameters for speech recognition over the World Wide Web

We examine alternative architectures for a client-server model of speech-enabled applications over the World Wide Web. We compare a server-only processing model, where the client encodes and transmits the speech signal to the server, to a model where the recognition front end, implemented as a Java applet runs locally at the client and encodes and transmits the cepstral coefficients to the recognition server over the Internet. We follow a novel encoding paradigm, trying to maximize the recognition performance instead of perceptual reproduction, and we find that by transmitting the cepstral coefficients we can achieve significantly higher recognition performance at a fraction of the bit rate required when encoding the speech signal directly.
Relationships between oceanic epizooplankton distributions and the seasonal deep chlorophyll maximum in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean

The potential significance of the Deep Chlorophyll Maximum (DCM) as a food resource for pelagic food chains was studied in three hydrographic regimes of the Northwestern Atlantic Ocean: the Slope Water, the Northern Sargasso Sea and a Gulf Stream cold core ring. Samples for phytoplankton species, chlorophyll and related water chemistry were obtained with a series of water bottle casts from the upper 200 m; microzooplankton and macrozooplankton were also obtained in the upper 200 m with Clarke Bumpus (67 m mesh) and MOCNESS (333 m mesh) net systems. Samples were obtained in the summer when the DCM was well developed and in the fall when mixing had erased the DCM in most areas. Total zooplankton biomass was significantly enhanced within depth intervals including or adjacent to the seasonal thermocline in the three hydrographic areas. Hydrocast data show the DCM in these regions was predictably associated with the seasonal thermocline. Thus these data indicate zooplankton biomass was enhanced about the DCM when it was present. In some cases, the zooplankton assemblage at DCM depths was distinguishable from those both at deeper and more shallow depths and its composition appeared related to the food available at DCM depths. Overall, in environments ranging from moderately rich near-shore Slope Waters to the more oligotrophic open-ocean Sargasso Sea, our data suggest that the DCM signals a depth zone of particularly intense trophic activity.
Enhanced Expression of a Specific Hyperpolarization-Activated Cyclic Nucleotide-Gated Cation Channel (HCN) in Surviving Dentate Gyrus Granule Cells of Human and Experimental Epileptic Hippocampus

Changes in the expression of ion channels, contributing to altered neuronal excitability, are emerging as possible mechanisms in the development of certain human epilepsies. In previous immature rodent studies of experimental prolonged febrile seizures, isoform-specific changes in the expression of hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated cation channels (HCNs) correlated with long-lasting hippocampal hyperexcitability and enhanced seizure susceptibility. Prolonged early-life seizures commonly precede human temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), suggesting that transcriptional dysregulation of HCNs might contribute to the epileptogenic process. Therefore, we determined whether HCN isoform expression was modified in hippocampi of individuals with TLE. HCN1 and HCN2 expression were measured using in situ hybridization and immunocytochemistry in hippocampi from three groups: TLE with hippocampal sclerosis (HS; n = 17), epileptic hippocampi without HS, or non-HS (NHS; n = 10), and autopsy material (n = 10). The results obtained in chronic human epilepsy were validated by examining hippocampi from the pilocarpine model of chronic TLE. In autopsy and most NHS hippocampi, HCN1 mRNA expression was substantial in pyramidal cell layers and lower in dentate gyrus granule cells (GCs). In contrast, HCN1 mRNA expression over the GC layer and in individual GCs from epileptic hippocampus was markedly increased once GC neuronal density was reduced by >50%. HCN1 mRNA changes were accompanied by enhanced immunoreactivity in the GC dendritic fields and more modest changes in HCN2 mRNA expression. Furthermore, similar robust and isoform-selective augmentation of HCN1 mRNA expression was evident also in the pilocarpine animal model of TLE. These findings indicate that the expression of HCN isoforms is dynamically regulated in human as well as in experimental hippocampal epilepsy. After experimental febrile seizures (i.e., early in the epileptogenic process), the preserved and augmented inhibition onto principal cells may lead to reduced HCN1 expression. In contrast, in chronic epileptic HS hippocampus studied here, the profound loss of interneuronal and principal cell populations and consequent reduced inhibition, coupled with increased dendritic excitation of surviving GCs, might provoke a “compensatory” enhancement of HCN1 mRNA and protein expression.
Plectin sidearms mediate interaction of intermediate filaments with microtubules and other components of the cytoskeleton

By immunogold labeling, we demonstrate that "millipede-like" structures seen previously in mammalian cell cytoskeletons after removal of actin by treatment with gelsolin are composed of the cores of vimentin IFs with sidearms containing plectin. These plectin sidearms connect IFs to microtubules, the actin-based cytoskeleton and possibly membrane components. Plectin binding to microtubules was significantly increased in cells from transgenic mice lacking IFs and was reversed by microinjection of exogenous vimentin. These results suggest the existence of a pool of plectin which preferentially associates with IFs but may also be competed for by microtubules. The association of IFs with microtubules did not show a preference for Glu-tubulin. Nor did it depend upon the presence of MAP4 since plectin links were retained after specific immunodepletion of MAP4. The association of IFs with stress fibers survived actin depletion by gelsolin suggesting that myosin II minifilaments or components closely associated with them may play a role as plectin targets. Our results provide direct structural evidence for the hypothesis that plectin cross-links elements of the cytoskeleton thus leading to integration of the cytoplasm.
Satisficing and bounded optimality A position paper

Since the early days of artificial intelligence there has been a constant search for useful techniques to tackle the computational complexity of decision making. By now, it is widely accepted that optimal decision making is in most cases beyond our reach. Herbert Simon’s approach based on saris]icing offers a more realistic alternative, but it says little on how to construct satisficing algorithms or systems. In practice, satisficing comes in many different flavors, one of which, bounded optimality, restores a weak form of optimality. This paper demonstrates this form of satisficing in the area of anytime problem-solving and argues that it is a viable approach to formalize the notion of satisficing.
PySense: Python Decorators for Wireless Sensor Macroprogramming

PySense aims at bringing wireless sensor (and "internet of things") macroprogramming to the audience of Python programmers. WSN macroprogramming is an emerging approach where the network is seen as a whole and the programmer focuses only on the application logic. The PySense runtime environment partitions the code and transmits code snippets to the right nodes finding a balance between energy consumption and computing performances.
Bilingual dictionaries for all EU languages

Bilingual dictionaries can be automatically generated using the GIZA++ tool. However, these dictionaries contain a lot of noise, because of which the quality of outputs of tools relying on the dictionaries are negatively affected. In this work we present three different methods for cleaning noise from automatically generated bilingual dictionaries: LLR, pivot and translation based approach. We have applied these approaches on the GIZA++ dictionaries -- dictionaries covering official EU languages -- in order to remove noise. Our evaluation showed that all methods help to reduce noise. However, the best performance is achieved using the transliteration based approach. We provide all bilingual dictionaries (the original GIZA++ dictionaries and the cleaned ones) free for download. We also provide the cleaning tools and scripts for free download.
Dynamics of Mitochondrial Proteome and Acetylome in Glioblastoma Cells with Contrasting Metabolic Phenotypes

Glioblastoma, a type of cancer affecting the central nervous system, is characterized by its poor prognosis and the dynamic alteration of its metabolic phenotype to fuel development and progression. Critical to cellular metabolism, mitochondria play a pivotal role, where the acetylation of lysine residues on mitochondrial enzymes emerges as a crucial regulatory mechanism of protein function. This post-translational modification, which negatively impacts the mitochondrial proteome’s functionality, is modulated by the enzyme sirtuin 3 (SIRT3). Aiming to elucidate the regulatory role of SIRT3 in mitochondrial metabolism within glioblastoma, we employed high-resolution mass spectrometry to analyze the proteome and acetylome of two glioblastoma cell lines, each exhibiting distinct metabolic behaviors, following the chemical inhibition of SIRT3. Our findings reveal that the protein synthesis machinery, regulated by lysine acetylation, significantly influences the metabolic phenotype of these cells. Moreover, we have shed light on potential novel SIRT3 targets, thereby unveiling new avenues for future investigations. This research highlights the critical function of SIRT3 in mitochondrial metabolism and its broader implications for cellular energetics. It also provides a comparative analysis of the proteome and acetylome across glioblastoma cell lines with opposing metabolic phenotypes.
A Motion Capture based Planner for Virtual Characters Navigating in 3D Environments

In this work, a strategy to automatically generate eye-believable motions for a virtual character that navigates in a 3D environment is presented. The overall approach consists of four components as follows. (1) A state-of-the-art path planner that computes a collision-free reference path for the character's center of mass (COM). For this planner, a simplified model that bounds the character's geometry is proposed. (2) A segmentation algorithm that divides the path into behaviors. (3) A classifier that compares each behavior with the corresponding motion capture segments previously analyzed and stored in a database. (4) A whole-body motion generator that synthesizes the appropriate behavior determined by the classifier. The main contribution of this work is to produce a sampling-based global motion planner that generates different behaviors (in addition to locomotion) issued from environmental constraints. Several results of our algorithm in different environments are shown and its current limitations are discussed.
Lipid Droplet Accumulation and Impaired Fat Efflux in Polarized Hepatic Cells: Consequences of Ethanol Metabolism

Steatosis, an early manifestation in alcoholic liver disease, is associated with the accumulation of hepatocellular lipid droplets (LDs). However, the role ethanol metabolism has in LD formation and turnover remains undefined. Here, we assessed LD dynamics following ethanol and oleic acid treatment to ethanol-metabolizing WIF-B cells (a hybrid of human fibroblasts (WI 38) and Fao rat hepatoma cells). An OA dose-dependent increase in triglyceride and stained lipids was identified which doubled (P < 0.05) in the presence of ethanol. This effect was blunted with the inclusion of an alcohol metabolism inhibitor. The ethanol/ OA combination also induced adipophilin, LD coat protein involved in the attenuation of lipolysis. Additionally, ethanol treatment resulted in a significant reduction in lipid efflux. These data demonstrate that the metabolism of ethanol in hepatic cells is related to LD accumulation, impaired fat efflux, and enhancements in LD-associated proteins. These alterations in LD dynamics may contribute to ethanol-mediated defects in hepatocellular LD regulation and the formation of steatosis.
Modeled Postglacial Landscape Evolution at the Southern Margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet: Hydrological Connection of Uplands Controls the Pace and Style of Fluvial Network Expansion

Landscapes of the U.S. Central Lowland were repeatedly affected by the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Glacial processes diminished relief and disrupted drainage networks. Deep valleys carved by meltwater were disconnected from the surrounding uplands. The upland area lacking surface water connection to the drainage network is referred to as noncontributing area (NCA). Decreasing fractions of NCA on older surfaces suggest that NCA becomes drained over time. We propose that the integration could occur via (1) capture of NCA as channels propagate into the upland or (2) subsurface or intermittent surface connection of NCA to external drainage networks providing increased discharge to promote channel incision. We refer the two cases as “disconnected” and “connected” since the crucial difference between them is the hydrological connection of the upland to external drainage. We investigate the differences in evolution and morphology of channel networks in low‐relief landscapes under disconnected and connected regimes using numerical simulations. We observe substantially faster rates of erosion and integration of the channel network in the connected case. The connected case also creates longer, more sinuous channels than the disconnected case. Sensitivity tests indicate that hillslope diffusivity has little influence on the evolution and morphology. The fluvial erosion coefficient has significant impact on the rate of evolution, and it influences the morphology to a lesser extent. Our results and a qualitative comparison with landscapes of the glaciated U.S. Central Lowland suggest that connection of NCAs is a potential control on the evolution and morphology of postglacial landscapes.
Restrain the Linkage to Malicious Web Pages though Negative Link Weight

Currently, the search engine is mainly based on the Web content-identifying technique to deal with malicious Web pages. As long as the malicious content is identified, it is common to simply filter out the malicious pages or give some security warnings. They donpsilat distinguish the linkage to malicious pages from others during the pagepsilas rank. This paper mainly researches on the impact of the malicious Web pages on userpsilas surfing action and present a new surfing action model. Under the new surfing model, we put forward a new page rank algorithm with negative link weight penalty to restrain the linkage to malicious pages, in which the Web pages which link to malicious pages are punished. Subsidiary nodes are introduced to ensure the correctness and effectiveness of the algorithm under different conditions. Both theoretic analysis and simulation result show authority values of the pages linking to malicious pages will be reduced. It effectively restrains the linkage to malicious Web pages from the perspective of link analysis.
COMPARATIVE STUDY OF FREEZING AND CHILLING EFFECTS ON SURVIVAL AND OXIDATIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF FUNAAB ALPHA (NORMAL FEATHER) CHICKEN SPERM

The impact of freezing and chilling on the semen of FUNAAB Alpha (Normal feather) chickens was examined in this study. Pooled semen collected from ten FUNAAB Alpha (Normal feather) chicken were diluted with Tris –based extender. Diluted semen was divided into two fraction, the first fraction was subjected to chilling at 4oC and the second fraction was subjected to freezing at 1oC for 24hrs. Thereafter semen were evaluated for viability, functional integrity and oxidative stress (Malondialdehyde concentrations MDA and seminal leukocytes). The result showed a consistent variation in the viability and functional integrity. However, Sperm motility and livability preserved at 4oC was significantly higher (p<0.05) than those preserved at 1oC. Abnormal sperm (head, mid piece and tail) recorded for those preserved at 4oC was significantly lower (p<0.05) than those preserved at 1oC. The findings indicate that sperm viability, functional integrities and oxidative stress parameters of FUNAAB alpha (Normal feather) were better preserved by chilling compared to freezing method.