Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The cover time of sparse random graphs

We study the cover time of a random walk on graphs G ∈ Gn,p when $p={c\log n \over n}, c>1$. We prove that whp, the cover time, is asymptotic to $c\log({c \over c-1})n\log n$. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg. , 2007
Satellite-based hyperspectral imaging and cartographic visualization of bark beetle forest damage for the city of Čabar

After enormous amount of ice rain during 2014 huge damage was done in forests in Croatia, especially in the city of Čabar area. Damage of forests is reflected in wide spread of bark beetle. Bark beetle damaged forest have different spectral range from healthy forest. Copernicus satellite land monitoring imagery enables distinguishing healthy from unhealthy forest. In this paper, the width of bark beetle infection spread in forests in the city of Čabar area using satellite images and semi-automatic classification will be determined.
Psychology Research and Behavior Management Dovepress Expectant Parents' Experiences of Parental Education within the Antenatal Health Service

Being an expectant parent is a life changing event and it is something that most people will experience in their lifetime. Many people who are parents for the first time will participate in parenting education. Most of the previous studies associated with parenting education focus on subjects such as birth outcome and breastfeeding. The purpose of this study is to focus on the less investigated aspect of the parents' experience of participating in parenting education with Maternal Healthcare Services (MVC). A qualitative, phenomenological, hermeneutical method was selected to be used to analyze our findings and we used the statements of twenty participants to accumulate enough material to develop it into twelve sub-themes and five themes. The results of this study show that these expectant parents had few or no expectations of the parenting education that they were going to participate in. Generally speaking the parents seemed to be satisfied with the program. They described their reasons for participating as a chance to get together with other people in similar circumstances and to share information and they found a midwife to be a trustworthy professional person to confirm the information that was available to them from other sources.
Sm-Like Protein-Mediated RNA Metabolism Is Required for Heat Stress Tolerance in Arabidopsis

Sm-like proteins play multiple functions in RNA metabolism, which is essential for biological processes such as stress responses in eukaryotes. The Arabidopsis thaliana sad1 mutant has a mutation of sm-like protein 5 (LSM5) and shows impaired drought and salt stress tolerances. The lsm5/sad1 mutant also showed hypersensitivity to heat stress. GFP-fused LSM5/SAD1 was localized in the nucleus under optimal growth conditions. After heat stress treatment, GFP-fused LSM5/SAD1 fluorescence was also observed as small cytoplasmic dots, in addition to nuclear localization. Whole genome transcriptome analysis revealed that many genes in Arabidopsis were drastically changed in response to heat stress. More heat-responsive genes were highly expressed in lsm5/sad1 mutant at both 2 and 6 h after heat stress treatment. Additionally, intron-retained and capped transcripts accumulated in the lsm5/sad1 mutant after heat stress treatment. In this study, we also identified non-Arabidopsis Genome Initiative transcripts that were expressed from unannotated regions. Most of these transcripts were antisense transcripts, and many capped non-AGI transcripts accumulated in the lsm5/sad1 mutant during heat stress treatment. These results indicated that LSM5/SAD1 functions to degrade aberrant transcripts through appropriate mRNA splicing and decapping, and precise RNA metabolic machinery is required for heat stress tolerance.
Testing the Distributional Hypothesis 3 Testing the Distributional Hypothesis : The Influence of Context on Judgments of Semantic Similarity The Distributional Hypothesis

Distributional information has recently been implicated as playing an important role in several aspects of language ability. Learning the meaning of a word is thought to be dependent, at least in part, on exposure to the word in its linguistic contexts of use. In two experiments, we manipulated subjects’ contextual experience with marginally familiar and nonce words. Results showed that similarity judgments involving these words were affected by the distributional properties of the contexts in which they were read. The accrual of contextual experience was simulated in a semantic space model, by successively adding larger amounts of experience in the form of item-in-context exemplars sampled from the British National Corpus. The experiments and the simulation provide support for the role of distributional information in developing representations of word meaning. Testing the Distributional Hypothesis 3 Testing the Distributional Hypothesis: The Influence of Context on Judgments of
Low Complexity Resource Allocation for Massive Carrier Aggregation

Optimal resource allocation (RA) in massive carrier aggregation scenarios is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem whose dimension is proportional to the number of users, component carriers (CCs), and OFDMA resource blocks per CC. Toward scalable, near-optimal RA in massive CA settings, an iterative RA algorithm is proposed for joint assignment of CCs and OFDMA resource blocks to users. The algorithm is based on the principle of successive geometric programming approximations and has a complexity that scales only linearly with the problem dimension. Although its derivation is based on a relaxed formulation of the RA problem, the algorithm is shown to converge to integer-valued RA variables with probability 1 under mild assumptions on the distribution of user utilities. Simulations demonstrate improved performance of the proposed algorithm compared to commonly considered heuristic RA procedures of comparable complexity.
IDIOTYPIC SPECIFICITY OF RABBIT ANTIBODIES TO STREPTOCOCCAL GROUP POLYSACCHARIDES

Anti-idiotypic antisera against six restricted rabbit streptococcal group specific antibodies have been raised in rabbits matched for allotypes. All these antisera reacted specifically with their homologous idiotypes on double-diffusion tests in agarose gel. In addition, they showed a high incidence of cross-specificities with group-specific hyperimmune sera induced in both closely related and unrelated individuals. These precipitating cross-specificities could be explained for two systems by the interference of rheumatoid factor. Two idiotypic antibody systems have been analyzed in detail; these were restricted antibodies produced in a father and in one of his offspring. The methods employed included binding inhibition of radio-labeled homologous Fab fragments and hemagglutination inhibition with homologous idiotypic coat. The data demonstrated that only related rabbits produced, besides non-cross-reacting antibodies, idiotypically similar antibodies raised to the same antigen. About one-third of the cross-reactive idiotypes showed binding inhibition between 31 and 92%. Inhibition of binding above 50% in the paternal idiotypic system was only achieved by one offspring antibody whereas the F1 progeny idiotypic system was inhibited to this extent by seven antibodies of related rabbits. In contrast, 87.5% and 91.7% of antibodies of unrelated rabbits were less than 20% inhibitory. Within this study two idiotypically identical antibodies have not been found. This implies that A-variant-specific antibodies of related rabbits which produced antipolysaccharide antibodies were structurally different. Cross-reaction, even if greater than 90% by binding inhibition, appears to involve only part and not all of the variable regions.
The Joint Signature and Encryption Revisited

We study the Sign_then_Encrypt, Commit_then_Encrypt_and_Sign, and Encrypt_then_Sign paradigms in the context of two cryptographic primitives, namely designated confirmer signatures and signcryption. Our study identifies weaknesses in those paradigms which impose the use of expensive encryption (as a building block) in order to meet a reasonable security level. Next, we propose some optimizations which annihilate the found weaknesses and allow consequently cheap encryption without compromising the overall security. Our optimizations further enjoy verifiability, a property profoundly needed in many real-life applications of the studied primitives.
Doing R & D in Countries with Weak IPR Protection : Can Corporate Management Substitute for Legal Institutions ?

Multinationals are increasingly conducting R&D in countries such as India and China, where intellectual property rights (IPR) protection is still very weak. This paper examines this puzzle. The argument is that weak IPR leads to low returns to innovation and thus low prices of innovative talents. Multinational firms who possess not only the capabilities to utilize these talents, but also the internal organizational structures to protect the intellectual properties will therefore find it attractive to conduct R&D at those locations. Following a series of interviews in major multinational R&D centers in China, a stylized model of the above is presented to capture the interaction between firm strategies and institutional environment. Empirical findings from a sample of 1567 US-headquartered innovating firms are consistent with the hypotheses that (i) technologies developed in weak IPR countries are used more internally, and (ii) firms doing R&D in weak IPR countries have tighter internal technology structures. The results suggest that firms are using strong internal linkages to substitute for the inadequate external institutions. And by doing so, they can take advantage of the arbitrage opportunities presented by the institutional gaps across countries.
Implementing federal health reform in the States: who is included and excluded and what are their characteristics?

OBJECTIVE To estimate the characteristics and number of nonelderly adults eligible and ineligible for Affordable Care Act (ACA) expansions. DATA SOURCES AND SETTINGS Two secondary data sources are used in this analysis: the 2008 Panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the 2009 American Community Survey (ACS). STUDY DESIGN We use multiple imputation to incorporate model-based uncertainty into the prediction of immigration status into the ACS from the SIPP. Key variables include place of birth, year of entry to the U.S., and health insurance coverage. DATA COLLECTION/EXTRACTING METHODS No primary data are used in this study. PRINCIPLE FINDINGS We estimate that potentially 3.5 million nonelderly adults will be excluded from the ACA Medicaid Expansion and 2 million from the health insurance exchanges because of their immigration status. We also find significant differences in estimates of excluded nonelderly adults across states. CONCLUSIONS Over 15 percent of income-eligible uninsured nonelderly adults will be potentially excluded from the ACA coverage expansions due to their immigration status. Policy makers must be careful to exclude ineligible nonelderly adults before estimating the impact of the ACA on coverage rates.
Long-Term Single Cell Analysis of S. pombe on a Microfluidic Microchemostat Array

Although Schyzosaccharomyces pombe is one of the principal model organisms for studying the cell cycle, surprisingly few methods have characterized S. pombe growth on the single cell level, and no methods exist capable of analyzing thousands of cells and tens of thousands of cell division events. We developed an automated microfluidic platform permitting S. pombe to be grown on-chip for several days under defined and changeable conditions. We developed an image processing pipeline to extract and quantitate several physiological parameters including cell length, time to division, and elongation rate without requiring synchronization of the culture. Over a period of 50 hours our platform analyzed over 100000 cell division events and reconstructed single cell lineages up to 10 generations in length. We characterized cell lengths and division times in a temperature shift experiment in which cells were initially grown at 30°C and transitioned to 25°C. Although cell length was identical at both temperatures at steady-state, we observed transient changes in cell length if the temperature shift took place during a critical phase of the cell cycle. We further show that cells born with normal length do divide over a wide range of cell lengths and that cell length appears to be controlled in the second generation, were large newly born cells have a tendency to divide more rapidly and thus at a normalized cell size. The platform is thus applicable to measure fine-details in cell cycle dynamics, should be a useful tool to decipher the molecular mechanism underlying size homeostasis, and will be generally applicable to study processes on the single cell level that require large numbers of precision measurements and single cell lineages.
A Language for Opponent Modeling in Repeated Games

Traditional game-theoretic formalisms, commonly used in multi-agent systems, invoke the assumption of common knowledge of rationality to justify a Nash equilibrium solution. It is assumed that all agents know a correct model of the game and are completely rational, and that this is common knowledge. However, real-life agents are partially irrational, they may use models other than the real world to make decisions, and they may be uncertain about their opponents’ decision making processes. For modeling boundedly-rational agents, a descriptive approach to game theory is needed, in which agents model their opponents and attempt to predict their behavior using their model. We present Networks of Inuence Diagrams (NID), a language for descriptive decision and game theory that is based on graphical models. This paper describes NIDs and their syntax, and provides algorithms for solving NIDs and learning NID parameters. Through an example, we also show that NIDs provide an elegant framework for opponent modeling that is more expressive than current approaches, leads to a better outcome than the Nash equilibrium strategy and is able to capture non-stationary distributions of opponents.
Application of sliding mode control to the design of a buck-based sinusoidal generator

This work is devoted to the design of a sliding feedback control scheme for a buck-based AC generator where amplitude, frequency and offset can be externally adjusted. A sliding control law over an autonomous switching surface is proposed. As a result, the control scheme is found to be robust with respect to parameters variations and external disturbances. Simulation and experimental results validating the design are also presented.
Ad-Hoc and sensor networks: worst-case vs. average-case

Ad-hoc and sensor networks are rapidly growing areas of research which study the problems arising when small and feeble devices build a communication infrastructure. A vast majority of researchers in the field make strong average-case assumptions about these networks, for example that the devices are distributed uniformly at random. To system builders on the other hand many of these assumptions appear suspicious. In this paper we advocate an algorithmic (worst-case) approach to ad-hoc and sensor networking. We survey a few also worst-case efficient algorithms for topology control, clustering, and routing.
A comparative study of quality of life and disability among schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder patients in remission

Background: Persons with long-term psychiatric disorders have greater deficits in living skills as well as greater problems in employment and relationship to their social environment. Thus, chronic psychiatric illnesses have psychosocial consequences such as disability and impaired quality of life (QOL) due to their symptomatology and chronic course. Objectives: Assessment and comparison of disability and QOL of patients suffering from schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in remission phase. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study carried out in the psychiatry outpatient Department of Mental Health Institute, S.C. B. Medical College and Neuropsychiatric Consultation Centre, Cuttack. The study sample consisted of fifty cases of each groups (schizophrenia and OCD), which included both males and females. All of them were assessed through the World Health Organization-QOL BREF and Indian Disability Evaluation and Assessment Scale. Results: Results revealed that schizophrenics have poor QOL and greater disability burden than patients of OCD. Conclusion: These psychiatric illnesses, i.e. schizophrenia and OCD, affect all areas of daily functioning leading to greater disability, and thus increasing the burden on the family, imposing greater challenges for the rehabilitation of these patients and their inclusion in the mainstream of the family and society.
MYC-IG rearrangements are negative predictors of survival in DLBCL patients treated with immunochemotherapy: a GELA/LYSA study.

Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) with MYC rearrangement (MYC-R) carries an unfavorable outcome. We explored the prognostic value of the MYC translocation partner gene in a series of MYC-R de novo DLBCL patients enrolled in first-line prospective clinical trials (Groupe d'Etudes des Lymphomes de l'Adulte/Lymphoma Study Association) and treated with rituximab-anthracycline-based chemotherapy. A total of 774 DLBCL cases characterized for cell of origin by the Hans classifier were analyzed using fluorescence in situ hybridization with BCL2, BCL6, MYC, immunoglobulin (IG)K, and IGL break-apart and IGH/MYC, IGK/MYC, and IGL/MYC fusion probes. MYC-R was observed in 51/574 (8.9%) evaluable DLBCL cases. MYC-R cases were predominantly of the germinal center B-cell-like subtype 37/51 (74%) with no distinctive morphologic and phenotypic features. Nineteen cases were MYC single-hit and 32 cases were MYC double-hit (MYC plus BCL2 and/or BCL6) DLBCL. MYC translocation partner was an IG gene in 24 cases (MYC-IG) and a non-IG gene (MYC-non-IG) in 26 of 50 evaluable cases. Noteworthy, MYC-IG patients had shorter overall survival (OS) (P = .0002) compared with MYC-negative patients, whereas no survival difference was observed between MYC-non-IG and MYC-negative patients. In multivariate analyses, MYC-IG predicted poor progression-free survival (P = .0051) and OS (P = .0006) independently from the International Prognostic Index and the Hans classifier. In conclusion, we show in this prospective randomized trial that the adverse prognostic impact of MYC-R is correlated to the MYC-IG translocation partner gene in DLBCL patients treated with immunochemotherapy. These results may have an important impact on the clinical management of DLBCL patients with MYC-R who should be routinely characterized according to MYC partner gene. These trials are individually registered at www.clinicaltrials. gov as #NCT00144807, #NCT01087424, #NCT00169143, #NCT00144755, #NCT00140660, #NCT00140595, and #NCT00135499.
Context aware observation of human activities

Interactive environments combine perception, action and communication to extend human-computer interaction. We believe that a fundamental challenge for interactive environments is developing models and methods for "context awareness". We present an ontology for context awareness for interactive environments. We show how the elements of this ontology correspond to the elements of a software architecture for observing situation and context. Within this framework, context predicts the evolution of the situation, and provides "meaning" for objects and events. Context also provides a specification for assembling federations of processes to measure properties, determine relations and detect events.
CONNECTIONS AND GENERALIZED GAUGE TRANSFORMATIONS

The derivation of the standard model from a higher-dimensional action suggests a further study of the fiber bundle formulation of gauge theories to determine the variations in the choice of structure group that are allowed in this geometrical setting. The action of transformations on the projection of fibers to their submanifolds are characteristic of theories with fewer gauge vector bosons, and specific examples are given, which may have phenomenological relevance. The spinor space for the three generations of fermions in the standard model is described algebraically.
Effect of hand paddles and parachute on butterfly coordination

Abstract This study investigated the effects of hand paddles, parachute and hand paddles plus parachute on the inter-limb coordination of butterfly swimming. Thirteen male swimmers were evaluated in four random maximal intensity conditions: without equipment, with hand paddles, with parachute and with hand paddles + parachute. Arm and leg stroke phases were identified by 2D video analysis to calculate the total time gap (T1: time between hands’ entry in the water and high break-even point of the first undulation; T2: time between the beginning of the hand’s backward movement and low break-even point of the first undulation; T3: time between the hand’s arrival in a vertical plane to the shoulders and high break-even point of the second undulation; T4: time between the hand’s release from the water and low break-even point of the second undulation). The swimming velocity was reduced and T1, T2 and T3 increased in parachute and hand paddles + parachute. No changes were observed in T4. Total time gap decreased in parachute and hand paddles + parachute. It is concluded that hand paddles do not influence the arm-to-leg coordination in butterfly, while parachute and hand paddles + parachute do change it, providing a greater propulsive continuity.
A hybrid LOD based rendering approach for dynamic scenes

In this paper we present a novel LOD based rendering approach that integrates geometry based and image based LOD mechanisms in one system. We assume that every LOD object in the scene is represented by a textured polygonal mesh. In a preprocess we generate a continuous multiresolution model for all LOD objects. During runtime we first check for every LOD object if an appropriate cached approximation generated for former frames is available. If not, we extract a new suitable approximation out of the objects continuous multiresolution model depending on view-dependent criteria. After that, we replace this adaptive geometry-based approximation by an image-based impostor if this is reasonable and efficient. The selected approximations of LOD objects are used for rendering the next frame
Security aspects of Internet voting

Voting via the Internet has become a feasible option for political as well as non-political ballots. However, there are many obstacles which have to be overcome, especially legal restrictions have to be transformed into technical and security solutions. The article starts with a brief presentation of advantages and disadvantages of Internet ballots and presents application fields and pilot schemes. Then, technological security aspects are derived due to democratic basic principles. Especially the applied voting procedures are critical in security terms. Hence, the most relevant cryptographic protocols are presented and their drawbacks and shortcomings are identified. However, this article does not propose a new voting protocol. Beyond fixing cryptographic procedures for ballots, more elements are to be specified, e.g. responsibilities and rights of involved authorities or security precautions regarding hardware and software. For this reason, a structural security framework for electronic voting systems is presented which can be used for their composition and analysis.