Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Conceptualization of Body Image for Asian American Women

The present study explored racial and cultural factors that influence body image development with a sample of 10 heterosexual Asian American women through in-person, semistructured interviews. Data were analyzed via the consensual qualitative research methodology (Hill, 2012; Hill et al., 2005) and highlighted several factors shaping body image for Asian American women: (a) interpersonal influences, (b) Asian and American body ideals, (c) thin-ideal internalization, and (d) protective behaviors and attitudes. The findings specifically identify the most frequently reported categories as male gazing, nonfamilial close relationships, and standards of body/beauty established by both Asian and American cultures. Limitations of findings and future research directions are provided.
Study and field test of power line communication for an electric-vehicle charging system

A battery-charged electric-vehicle (EV) technology has recently been developing fast due to energy efficiency and environmental problems. To commercialize these EVs, the EV charging infrastructure should be completely installed. Power line communication (PLC) is a technology designed to use the existing power lines and support communications. As such, its application is under study in diverse fields such as in the outdoor, in-home, in-plane, in-ship, and in-vehicle scenarios. An ISO/IEC 15118 standard is pushing to standardize PLC as a technology that supports EV charging systems. To apply PLC to the EV charging system, this paper investigates the EV and EV charging structures and analyzes requirements for applying PLC. The PLC modem performance was also tested with the charged EV.
SURTRAC: Scalable Urban Traffic Control

This paper defines and evaluates a pilot implementation of a recently developed approach to real-time, adaptive traffic signal control. The pilot system, which is called SURTRAC (Scalable Urban Traffic Control), integrates concepts from traffic control theory with recent work in the field of multi-agent planning and has several important distinguishing characteristics. First, to promote scalability and reliability, SURTRAC operates in a totally decentralized manner; each intersection independently and asynchronously allocates its green time, based on current incoming vehicle flows. Second, SURTRAC aims at managing urban (grid-like) road networks with multiple (competing) traffic flows; network-level coordination is accomplished by communicating projected outflows to downstream neighbors, which gives these intersections a more informed basis for locally balancing competing inflows while simultaneously promoting establishment of larger "green corridors". Third, SURTRAC truly operates in real-time; each intersection recomputes its allocation plan and re-communicates projected outflows every 1-2 seconds in rolling horizon fashion, enabling both effective operation in tightly spaced signal networks and responsiveness to sudden changes in traffic conditions. After describing our basic approach to adaptive traffic signal control and the pilot implementation of SURTRAC, we present the results of a field test conducted on a nine-intersection road network in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In this pilot test, SURTRAC is seen to achieve major reductions in travel times and vehicle emissions over pre-existing signal control.
Analysis and experimental evaluation of the Intrinsically Passive Controller (IPC) for multifingered hands

The object level control of a dexterous robot hand provides an intuitive high-level interface to solve fine manipulation tasks. In the past, many algorithms were proposed based on a weighted pseudoinverse of the grasp map. In a different approach Stramigioli introduces a virtual object - called "intrinsically passive controller (IPC)". This controller distributes the generalized object forces using coupling springs whose weighting have an intuitive physical meaning. Even though this controller has been known for several years we will present the first experimental results for a four-fingered hand. Furthermore, the term virtual grasp map is introduced and a method to parameterize the stiffness parameters in order to obtain an effective object level stiffness and a damping design is proposed. An implementation of the IPC is tested on the DLR Hand II and its performance is analyzed by manipulating soft and stiff objects.
Potential of Poka-Yoke Devices to Reduce Variability in Construction

This paper discusses the application poka-yoke devices to reduce variability in construction sites. Initially it presents the main pressures for improving production practices in the sector and then it describes the main aspects of reduction of variability. Subsequently, it presents poka-yoke as one of the basic heuristic approaches to implement this principle in practice. The researchers investigated the application of poka-yoke in construction through six case studies carried out in Brazil and England. The pattern-matching approach, supported by quantitative and qualitative data, has confirmed the usefulness of this approach in construction practice. However, the empirical evidences revealed that the sector makes little use of this approach at the present moment. In this sense, there is great scope for developing mechanic and electronic mistake-proof devices to adapt into existing construction machinery. Construction suppliers should reflect on the idea of building poka-yoke devices in their products in order to guarantee the correct use of their products on site.
Implicit learning of predictable sound sequences modulates human brain responses at different levels of the auditory hierarchy

Deviant stimuli, violating regularities in a sensory environment, elicit the mismatch negativity (MMN), largely described in the Event-Related Potential literature. While it is widely accepted that the MMN reflects more than basic change detection, a comprehensive description of mental processes modulating this response is still lacking. Within the framework of predictive coding, deviance processing is part of an inference process where prediction errors (the mismatch between incoming sensations and predictions established through experience) are minimized. In this view, the MMN is a measure of prediction error, which yields specific expectations regarding its modulations by various experimental factors. In particular, it predicts that the MMN should decrease as the occurrence of a deviance becomes more predictable. We conducted a passive oddball EEG study and manipulated the predictability of sound sequences by means of different temporal structures. Importantly, our design allows comparing mismatch responses elicited by predictable and unpredictable violations of a simple repetition rule and therefore departs from previous studies that investigate violations of different time-scale regularities. We observed a decrease of the MMN with predictability and interestingly, a similar effect at earlier latencies, within 70 ms after deviance onset. Following these pre-attentive responses, a reduced P3a was measured in the case of predictable deviants. We conclude that early and late deviance responses reflect prediction errors, triggering belief updating within the auditory hierarchy. Beside, in this passive study, such perceptual inference appears to be modulated by higher-level implicit learning of sequence statistical structures. Our findings argue for a hierarchical model of auditory processing where predictive coding enables implicit extraction of environmental regularities.
Combining metaheuristics and constraint programming to solve a scheduling problem

In this paper we present a hybrid method, named Quasi Local Search, which combines Simulated Annealing augmented with a type of Tabu List to guide the search globally with Constraint Programming to search locally the optimal solution. The method can also be seen as an integration framework, once the Local Search module is independent of the Constraint Programming one and either can be worked independently. The method is used to solve a Generator Maintenance Scheduling Problem with promising results. We also present a study about the se-lection of certain parameters and neighbourhood structure. The result allows us to conclude about their influence on the method's performance.
Catfish Binary Particle Swarm Optimization for Feature Selection

The feature selection process constitutes a commonly encountered problem of global combin- atorial optimization. This process reduces the number of features by removing irrelevant, noisy, and redundant data, thus resulting in acceptable classification accuracy. Feature selection is a preprocessing technique with great importance in the fields of data analysis and information retrieval processing, pattern classification, and data mining applications. This paper presents a novel optimization algorithm called catfish binary particle swarm optimization (CatfishBPSO), in which the so-called catfish effect is applied to improve the performance of binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO). This effect is the result of the introduction of new particles into the search space ("catfish particles"), which replace particles with the worst fitness by the initialized at extreme points of the search space when the fitness of the global best particle has not improved for a number of consecutive iterations. In this study, the K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) method with leave-one- out cross-validation (LOOCV) was used to evaluate the quality of the solutions. CatfishBPSO was applied and compared to six classification problems taken from the literature. Experimental results show that CatfishBPSO simplifies the feature selection process effectively, and either obtains higher classification accuracy or uses fewer features than other feature selection methods.
Expanding Horizons: environmental and cultural values within natural boundaries

Indigenous communities have much to teach heritage professionals about the identification and management of cultural heritage values. A holistic approach to cultural heritage has long been promoted by indigenous communities; recent discussions in the professional heritage world about social and aesthetic value and debates about cultural landscapes all have precursors in indigenous concepts of cultural heritage. Since 1992 some states in Australia have been engaged in regional assessments of the environmental, heritage, social and economic values of forests. These assessments aim at providing expert advice upon which decisions about the future use of these forests will be made. The inclusion of cultural heritage assessments as part of the overall resource assessment is notable. Regional resource studies such as the Regional Forest Agreement process (incorporating assessments of natural, cultural, social and economic values) provide an opportunity to adopt a more holistic approach to cultural heritage management. In this as in other matters, indigenous communities appear to be leading the way, with the development of catchment resource management models and co-management strategies. As part of the Regional Forest Agreement process in Southeast Queensland (SEQ), two projects have identified principles and protocols concerning the management of cultural heritage values in the forests.
Further Cryptanalysis of a CRT-RSA Algorithm at CCS 2003

At CCS 2003, Blomer, Otto, and Seifert proposed a new CRT-RSA signature algorithm, which was claimed to be secure against hardware fault attack. Unfortunately, one year later, Wagner presented a simple and practical fault attack on the so-called BOS algorithm. In this paper, we give a further cryptanalysis of the BOS algorithm and can completely break the security of it with a probability at least 25%. Compared to Wagner's attack, the new attack is much simpler and requires fewer faulty signatures. We further conclude that the BOS algorithm is not safe for use in its present form.
A Fast Fixed Point Iteration Algorithm for Sparse Channel Estimation

Channels with a long but sparse impulse response arise in a variety of wireless communication applications, such as high definition television (HDTV) terrestrial transmission and underwater acoustic communications. By adopting the $\ell_1$-norm as the sparsity metric of the channel response, the channel estimation is formulated as a complex-valued convex optimization problem. A fast fixed point iteration algorithm is developed to solve the resultant complex-valued $\ell_1$-minimization problem. The proposed fast channel estimation algorithm is easy to implement and has a low computational complexity of $O(N\log N)$ per iteration with $N$ the signal length. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed fixed point algorithm.
Intraluminal Blockade of Cell-Surface CD74 and Glucose Regulated Protein 78 Prevents Substance P-Induced Bladder Inflammatory Changes in the Rat

Background Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) is a pro-inflammatory cytokine constitutively expressed by urothelial cells. During inflammatory stimuli, MIF is released into the lumen complexed to other proteins and these complexes can bind to urothelial cell-surface receptors to activate signaling pathways. Since MIF is complexed to α1-inhibitor III (A1-I3; a member of the α2-macroglubulin family) and glucose regulated protein 78 (GRP78) is a receptor for A1-I3 the goals of this study were to determine if substance P elicits urothelial cell-surface expression of GRP78 and to assess the functional role of CD74 (receptor for MIF) or GRP78 in substance P-induced bladder inflammatory changes. Methodology/Principal Findings Anesthetized male Sprague-Dawley rats received either saline or substance P (s.c.), bladders were collected 1 hour after treatment and processed for histology or protein/mRNA. The expression of GRP78 at urothelial cell-surface was determined by performing in vivo biotinylation of urothelial cell-surface proteins. Finally, in order to determine the effects of receptor blockade on substance P-induced MIF release and inflammatory changes, rats received either intraluminal antibodies to CD74, GRP78, both, or non-specific IgG (as a control). GRP78 and MIF immunostaining was simultaneously visualized in umbrella cells only after substance P treatment. Immunoprecipitation studies showed GRP78-MIF complexes increased after substance P while in vivo biotinylation confirmed substance P-induced GRP78 cell-surface expression in urothelial cells. Intraluminal blockade of CD74 and/or GRP78 prevented substance P-induced changes, including bladder edema, intraluminal MIF release by urothelial cells and production of inflammatory cytokines by urothelial cells. Conclusions/Significance GRP78 is expressed on the surface of urothelial cells after substance P treatment where it can bind MIF complexes. Blocking CD74 (receptor for MIF) and/or GRP78 prevented substance P-induced inflammatory changes in bladder and urothelium, indicating that these urothelial receptors are effective targets for disrupting MIF-mediated bladder inflammation.
Plurality in environmental supply chain mechanisms: differential effects on triple bottom line outcomes

Purpose The environmental management of supply chains has become increasingly relevant in the recent era. Extant research proposes two main forms of mechanisms – collaboration and evaluation – for environmental supply chain management. Despite the wide use of these mechanisms and the empirical insight into the fact that they could be adopted simultaneously, it is unknown if, and, at which levels, environmental collaboration (EC) and environmental evaluation (EE) could be complementary or substitutionary in nature. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to gain a clear understanding into the plural forms of these mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach The transaction cost economics and relational exchange theory are used to ground the research hypotheses. The results are based on survey data collected from 145 US manufacturing firms. The authors employ polynomial regression as well as the response surface methodology to test the proposed hypotheses. Findings The results suggest that EC and EE can have an intriguing effect depending on the outcome measure. Specifically, the authors find the effects in the economic and the environmental/social domains to be significantly different. Originality/value While scholars acknowledge that collaboration and evaluation could act as complements, extant research does not propose and test models that specifically capture complementary and substitutionary nature of these mechanisms. Accordingly, the study makes the first attempt to empirically test for the effects of the simultaneous pursuit of EC and EE.
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) Summer 10-6-2011 ANALYSIS OF TECHNIQUES FOR BUSINESS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

This paper is about identifying and analyzing techniques that can be used in a business process improvement (BPI) situation. To determine suitable techniques, the term BPI is defined and criteria are derived to analyze the usability of the selected techniques. Over 300 techniques from various improvement methods were reduced to those techniques which can be applied to help improve business processes and, in particular, to support the act of improvement. Identifying these techniques is helpful, because in most cases the act of improvement is a black box that lacks guidelines or structured procedures. In our research we developed an evaluation scheme to analyze the usability of BPI techniques and give hints about how to select a suitable technique for a certain improvement situation.
Locality-Based Code Offloading for Active On-Chip Memories

We propose an active cache to be employed in chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) and a locality-based technique to decide which code segments should be offloaded to the active cache. The low-temporal data is accessed by the active cache, also called the Data Filtering Engine. By processing the low-temporal data on the active cache, the system bus accesses are significantly reduced, resulting in a better performance and reduced power consumption by the memory subsystem. Although the proposed method can be applied to a wide variety of multi-processor systems including MPPs, SMPs and any type of single-chip multiprocessor, we particularly concentrate on Network Processors. The Data Filtering Engine is placed between the shared on-chip memory and the system bus. At this position, it processes data with low temporal locality before it is placed on the system bus. The execution cores use a locality detection table to decide which load instructions have low spatial or temporal locality and which portion of the surrounding code should be off-loaded to the Data Filtering Engine. Our technique reduces the power consumption and increases the execution efficiency of the processor, because a) the low temporal data is processed on the Data Filtering Engine before it is placed onto the high capacitance system bus, and b) the conflict misses caused by low temporal data are reduced resulting in fewer accesses to the L2 cache. Specifically, we show that our technique reduces the on-chip system bus accesses in representative applications by as much as 46.8% (26.5% on average) and reduces the overall power by as much as 15.6% (8.6% on average) on a single-core processor. We have implemented a simulation engine to measure the effects of the Data Filtering Engine in a multi-core environment. The simulation results reveal that the Data Filtering Engine improves the performance by as much as 76.7% (29.7% on average) for a processor with 16 execution cores. These results motivate the usage of active memory structures for reducing power consumption in high-end microprocessors as well as the usage of locality-oriented code offloading for active memories.
Ambler: an autonomous rover for planetary exploration

The authors are building a prototype legged rover, called the Ambler (loosely an acronym for autonomous mobile exploration robot) and testing it on full-scale, rugged terrain of the sort that might be encountered on the Martian surface. They present an overview of their research program, focusing on locomotion, perception, planning, and control. They summarize some of the most important goals and requirements of a rover design and describe how locomotion, perception, and planning systems can satisfy these requirements. Since the program is relatively young (one year old at the time of writing) they identify issues and approaches and describe work in progress rather than report results. It is expected that many of the technologies developed will be applicable to other planetary bodies and to terrestrial concerns such as hazardous waste assessment and remediation, ocean floor exploration, and mining. <<ETX>>
An Online Learning Algorithm for Neuromorphic Hardware Implementation

We propose a sign-based online learning (SOL) algorithm for a neuromorphic hardware framework called Trainable Analogue Block (TAB). The TAB framework utilises the principles of neural population coding, implying that it encodes the input stimulus using a large pool of nonlinear neurons. The SOL algorithm is a simple weight update rule that employs the sign of the hidden layer activation and the sign of the output error, which is the difference between the target output and the predicted output. The SOL algorithm is easily implementable in hardware, and can be used in any artificial neural network framework that learns weights by minimising a convex cost function. We show that the TAB framework can be trained for various regression tasks using the SOL algorithm.
The Effect of Lifelong Bilingualism on Adulthood Cognitive Control

The present study has examined the effects of the magnitude of lifelong balance between the first and second language, and the speed of first and second language processing on the bilinguals' later age cognitive control. In order to investigate these effects, the bilinguals’ lifelong first and second language experience was explored using a semi-structured questionnaire. The participants’ speed of lexical and speech processing in both languages was assessed by using picture naming reaction time and by computing the number and duration of pauses in the participants’ free speech. Simon task was administered to measure the participants' degree of cognitive control. The effects of the magnitude of language balance and of the speed of language processing on the bilinguals’ later age cognitive control were analyzed using series of linear mixed effect models. According to the results of the analysis, no significant association was found between the bilinguals' lifelong magnitude of balance and cognitive control. Likewise, no strong relationship was identified between the magnitude of balance at different ages of the bilinguals and cognitive control. Moreover, the association between the speed of language processing and later age cognitive control was not significant. The absences of relationship between the amount of the first and second language used and cognitive control is explained in terms of the lack of consistency in the bilinguals' lifelong two language experiences.
RBAC-MAS & SODA: Experimenting RBAC in AOSE

Role-Based Access Control models are currently considered as the most effective approach for engineering access control systems. In this paper we experiment their application in the context of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), by discussing the design of an access control system with an agent-oriented methodology such as SODA. In particular, we show how a clear separation between mechanisms and policies can be achieved by organising the access control system along two layered subsystems, and discuss the advantages of such an approach.