Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An algorithm for computing the capacity of arbitrary discrete memoryless channels

A systematic and iterative method of computing the capacity of arbitrary discrete memoryless channels is presented. The algorithm is very simple and involves only logarithms and exponentials in addition to elementary arithmetical operations. It has also the property of monotonic convergence to the capacity. In general, the approximation error is at least inversely proportional to the number of iterations; in certain circumstances, it is exponentially decreasing. Finally, a few inequalities that give upper and lower bounds on the capacity are derived.
Causality relationship between energy industrial consumption and economic growth: Application on Tunisian country

Following the importance of energy in the agrarian economies, the investigation of the causal relationship between energy consumption in industrial sector and industrial GDP has a fundamental role in implementing adequate policies. This paper aims to study the causal relationship between per capita industrial GDP and per capita energy consumption in Tunisia for the period 1980-2007. The relationship is investigated using aggregated as well as disaggregate categories of energy consumption, including gas, oil and electricity. Using Johansen's cointegration approach and Granger causality, we find that, in both the short and long-run, industrial GDP cause total energy consumption with no feedback. The results indicate also a uni-directional causality running from electricity consumption and gas consumption to industrial GDP in long-run, but the neutrality hypothesis is supported in both short and long-run between oil consumption and industrial GDP. The neutrality hypothesis is supported also between electricity consumption and industrial GDP in the short run. Therefore, conservation policies regarding aggregated and disaggregated energy consumption would harm future industrial performance in Tunisia. Moreover, gas and electrical energy which currently represents a small proportion of total energy consumption will constitute an important input to industrial production growth.
Perceived barriers to organizational creativity: A cross-cultural study of British and Egyptian future marketing managers

Purpose – The overall purpose of this research is to further the understanding of how future marketing managers in Egypt and the UK perceive creativity barriers. The paper also examines the construct validity of the barriers to creativity scale in an Arab non‐Western context.Design/methodology/approach – A sample of 125 respondents was used to achieve the research purpose. Respondents completed a 17‐item instrument designed to assess barriers to creativity in business organizations.Findings – Discriminant analysis results showed that Egyptians differ from British with respect to their attitudes towards organizational creativity barriers. t‐test procedure confirmed also that gender and age have significant effects on the attitudes towards creativity barriers.Originality/value – This study has provided some insights into the factors associated with organizational creativity barriers in Egypt and the UK. The more is known of how future managers perceive creativity barriers, the more quickly and efficiently c.
A Rolling Horizon Based Algorithm for Solving Integrated Airline Schedule Recovery Problem

Airline disruption incurred huge cost for airlines and serious inconvenience for travelers. In this paper, we study the integrated airline schedule recovery problem, which considers flight recovery, aircraft recovery and crew recovery simultaneously. First we built an integer programming model which is based on traditional set partitioning model but including flight copy decision variables. Then a rolling horizon based algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve the model. Our algorithm decomposes the whole problem into smaller sub-problems by restricting swapping opportunities within each rolling period. All the flights are considered in each sub-problem to circumvent ‘myopic’ of traditional rolling horizon algorithm. Experimental results show that our method can provide competitive recovery solution in both solution quality and
The elicitation of key performance indicators of e-government providers: A bottom-up approach

Delivering an adequate e-Government service (e-service) is becoming more of a necessity in today's digital world. In order to improve e-services and increase the engagement of both users' and providers' side, studies on the performance evaluation of such provided e-services are taking places. However a clear identification of the key performance indicators from the eGovernment providers’ side is not well explored. This shortcoming hampers the conduct of a holistic evaluation of an e-service provision from the perspective of its stakeholders in order to improve e-services as well as to increase e-services take-ups. In this paper, a systematic process to identify indicators is implemented based on a bottom-up approach. The process used three focus-group meetings with providers, users, and academics in Qatar, Lebanon and UK to collect, identify and validate key indicators from the perspective of e-services’ providers. The approach resulted in the identification of five factors levels (service, technology, employees, policy and management and social responsibilities) with fifteen sub-categories of SMART variables. Hence, leading to the development of a new model, STEPS, that can fully explain and predict e-government success from the providers’ point of view. It will work as a strategic management tool to align various stakeholders on common goal and values based on evidence based evaluation of e-services using smart measurable indicators for the improvement of an eservice at the engagement level in the field of e-government. In addition, other fields can benefit from the outcome of this work, such as logistics service providers, who make their services available across new and existing relationships between the Internet commerce firms, their customers, and their vendors.
Aptamers as Theranostic Agents: Modifications, Serum Stability and Functionalisation

Aptamers, and the selection process known as Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SELEX) used to generate them, were first described more than twenty years ago. Since then, there have been numerous modifications to the selection procedures. This review discusses the use of modified bases as a means of enhancing serum stability and producing effective therapeutic tools, as well as functionalising these nucleic acids to be used as potential diagnostic agents.
Specific lung mucosal and systemic immune responses after oral immunization of mice with Salmonella typhimurium aroA, Salmonella typhi Ty21a, and invasive Escherichia coli expressing recombinant pertussis toxin S1 subunit

Pertussis toxin (PT) is considered an essential protective component for incorporation into new generation vaccines against Bordetella pertussis, the causative agent of whooping cough. Traditionally, antipertussis vaccination has employed an intramuscular route. An alternative to this approach is to stimulate mucosal and systemic immune responses by oral immunization with live vaccine carrier strains of Salmonella spp. or Escherichia coli. Recombinant S1 subunit of pertussis toxin was expressed in the attenuated aroA mutant of Salmonella typhimurium, SL3261, in the human typhoid vaccine strain Salmonella typhi Ty21a, and in E. coli CAG629 containing the Shigella flexneri plasmid pWR110, which encodes bacterial invasiveness of epithelial cells. Expression of recombinant PT S1 subunit (rPT-S1) did not affect in vitro invasiveness of the tested strains, which retained the ability to adhere to and invade the embryonic human intestinal cell line HI-407. Following oral immunization of mice with the live vaccine strains expressing rPT-S1, immunoglobulin G (IgG), IgA, and IgM responses were monitored. IgG specific to PT was detected in serum samples of mice, while IgG and IgA specific to PT were detected in lung washes after oral immunization with living Salmonella spp. or E. coli (pWR110) expressing rPT-S1. Utilization of live oral vaccines expressing B. pertussis antigens, which stimulate both a systemic and lung mucosal response, may provide an attractive alternative to purified component vaccines against whooping cough.
Efficacy of dioctahedral smectite in acute watery diarrhea in Indian children: a randomized clinical trial.

OBJECTIVE To determine the effects and safety of dioctahedral smectite (DS) on the duration of acute watery diarrhea in children. METHODS A Randomized, open labeled, clinical controlled trial in a tertiary care hospital outpatient department (OPD) and emergency department. Participants were one hundred and seventeen children without any chronic illness between 2 and 5 years presenting to OPD, having acute watery diarrhea for <48 h with mild to moderate dehydration, not on antibiotics and requiring oral rehydration therapy. Intervention done was DS with a dose of 1.5 g thrice daily. RESULTS Freshly dissolved DS in a dose of 1.5 g thrice daily for 5 days significantly shortened the duration of acute watery diarrhea in children aged 2-5 years. There were no adverse effects on the use of DS. DS was acceptable to the children, and its administration was not accompanied with any side effects. CONCLUSION DS reduces the duration of diarrhea in Indian children and prevents a prolonged course, and therefore, may consistently reduce the costs in treatment of acute watery diarrhea.
Missing Links in Multiple Trade Networks

In this paper we develop a network model of international trade which is able to replicate the concentrated and sparse nature of trade data. Our model extends the preferential attachment (PA) growth model to the case of multiple networks. Countries trade a variety of goods of different complexity. Every country progressively evolves from trading less sophisticated to high-tech goods. The probability to capture more trade opportunities at a given level of complexity and to start trading more complex goods are both proportional to the number of existing trade links. We provide a set of theoretical predictions and simulative results. A calibration exercise shows that our model replicates the same concentration level of world trade as well as the sparsity pattern of the trade matrix. Moreover, we find a lower bound for the share of genuine missing trade links. We also discuss a set of numerical solutions to deal with large multiple networks.
PENELOPE: weaving threads to expose atomicity violations

Testing concurrent programs is challenged by the interleaving explosion problem--- the problem of exploring the large number of interleavings a program exhibits, even under a single test input. Rather than try all interleavings, we propose to test wisely: to exercise only those schedules that lead to interleavings that are typical error patterns. In particular, in this paper we select schedules that exercise patterns of interaction that correspond to atomicity violations. Given an execution of a program under a test harness, our technique is to algorithmically mine from the execution a small set of alternate schedules that cause atomicity violations. The program is then re-executed under these predicted atomicity-violating schedules, and verified by the test harness. The salient feature of our tool is the efficient algorithmic prediction and synthesis of alternate schedules that cover all possible atomicity violations at program locations. We implement the tool PENELOPE that realizes this testing framework and show that the monitoring, prediction, and rescheduling (with precise repro) are efficient and effective in finding bugs related to atomicity violations.
Prosodic typology : the phonology of intonation and phrasing

1. Introduction 2. The Intonational Phonology of European Portuguese 3. The Intonational Phonology of Catalan 4. The Intonational Phonology of Bangladeshi Standard Bengali 5. The Intonational Phonology of Tamil 6. An Autosegmental-Metrical Analysis of Georgian Intonation 7. The Intonational Phonology of Mongolian 8. Prosodic Structure and Focus Realization in West Greenlandic 9. Intonation and Prosody in Dalabon 10. Aspects of the Intonational Phonology of Jamaican Creole 11. The marked accentuation pattern of Curacao Papiamentu 12. Complex Intonation Near the Tonal isogloss in the Netherlands 13. The Intonation of Lebanese and Egyptian Arabic 14. Intonation in Basque 15. Typology of Intonational Phrasing in Japanese Dialects 16. Methodology of Studying Intonation: From Data Collection to Data Analysis 17. Prosodic Typology: By Prominence Type, Word prosody, and Macro-rhythm
Semantic preprocessing

Many preprocessor systems exist to transform a program from an augmented language to the particular language expected by a processor. Historically these have been capable of only simple lexical or syntactic substitutions (macro processors). This paper discusses the potential of semantic preprocessing—where the function of a program is “understood” as a basis for transformation—and describes experiments with a prototype system.
Likely to stop? Predicting Stopout in Massive Open Online Courses

Understanding why students stopout will help in understanding how students learn in MOOCs. In this report, part of a 3 unit compendium, we describe how we build accurate predictive models of MOOC student stopout. We document a scalable, stopout prediction methodology, end to end, from raw source data to model analysis. We attempted to predict stopout for the Fall 2012 offering of 6.002x. This involved the meticulous and crowd-sourced engineering of over 25 predictive features extracted for thousands of students, the creation of temporal and non-temporal data representations for use in predictive modeling, the derivation of over 10 thousand models with a variety of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and the analysis of feature importance by examining over 70000 models. We found that stop out prediction is a tractable problem. Our models achieved an AUC (receiver operating characteristic area-under-the-curve) as high as 0.95 (and generally 0.88) when predicting one week in advance. Even with more difficult prediction problems, such as predicting stop out at the end of the course with only one weeks' data, the models attained AUCs of 0.7.
Retinoid‐modulated MAT1 ubiquitination and CAK activity

Human cyclin‐dependent kinase (CDK)‐activating kinase (CAK) has a dual function in cross‐regulation of cell cycle and differentiation, whereas ménage à trois 1 (MAT1) assembles CAK and determines CAK's substrate specificity. Although the dynamic state of MAT1 protein levels is found to modulate CAK activity, how intracellular regulation of MAT1 controls CAK activity is unknown. Recent studies demonstrate that retinoic acid (RA)‐induced human HL60 cell proliferation/differentiation (P/D) transition is accompanied by MAT1 degradation and decreased CAK phosphorylation of retinoic acid receptor α (RARa). Thus, we investigated the biochemical pathway of MAT1 degradation and its relationship with CAK phosphorylation of RARa. We find that RA induces ubiquitination‐proteolysis of MAT1 and that ubiquitin‐proteasome targets CAK‐free MAT1 only. RA‐induced MAT1 ubiquitination reduces CAK abundance and decreases CAK phosphorylation of RARα, whereas inhibition of MAT1 ubiquitination resists this RA‐effect. These findings reveal that RA induces MAT1 ubiquitination to decrease CAK phosphorylation of RARα, suggesting a novel mechanism of RA‐mediated P/D transition in which MAT1 ubiquitination may act as an integral part of RA‐effect to decrease CAK activity in the switch from proliferation to differentiation.
The Feeling Theory of Emotion and the Object‐Directed Emotions

Abstract: The ‘feeling theory of emotion’ holds that emotions are to be identified with feelings. An objection commonly made to that theory of emotion has it that emotions cannot be feelings only, as emotions have intentional objects. Jack does not just feel fear, but he feels fear-of-something. To explain this property of emotion we will have to ascribe to emotion a representational structure, and feelings do not have the sought after representational structure. In this paper I seek to defend the feeling theory of emotion against the challenge from the object-directed emotions.
Object Oriented Analysis using Natural Language Processing concepts: A Review

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) starts with eliciting requirements of the customers in the form of Software Requirement Specification (SRS). SRS document needed for software development is mostly written in Natural Language(NL) convenient for the client. From the SRS document only, the class name, its attributes and the functions incorporated in the body of the class are traced based on pre-knowledge of analyst. The paper intends to present a review on Object Oriented (OO) analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. This analysis can be manual where domain expert helps to generate the required diagram or automated system, where the system generates the required diagram, from the input in the form of SRS.
Multi-layer phase analysis: quantifying the elastic properties of soft tissues and live cells with ultra-high-frequency scanning acoustic microscopy

Scanning acoustic microscopy is potentially a powerful tool for characterizing the elastic properties of soft biological tissues and cells. In this paper, we present a method, multi-layer phase analysis (MLPA), which can be used to extract local speed of sound values, for both thin tissue sections mounted on glass slides and cultured cells grown on cell culture plastic, with a resolution close to 1 μm. The method exploits the phase information that is preserved in the interference between the acoustic wave reflected from the substrate surface and internal reflections from the acoustic lens. In practice, a stack of acoustic images are captured beginning with the acoustic focal point 4 μm above the substrate surface and moving down in 0.1-μm increments. Scanning parameters, such as acoustic wave frequency and gate position, were adjusted to obtain optimal phase and lateral resolution. The data were processed offline to extract the phase information with the contribution of any inclination in the substrate removed before the calculation of sound speed. Here, we apply this approach to both skin sections and fibroblast cells, and compare our data with the V(f) (voltage versus frequency) method that has previously been used for characterization of soft tissues and cells. Compared with the V(f) method, the MPLA method not only reduces signal noise but can be implemented without making a priori assumptions with regards to tissue or cell parameters.
Early events in immune evasion by the lentivirus maedi-visna occurring within infected lymphoid tissue

Infections caused by lentiviruses, including human immunodeficiency virus, are characterized by slowly progressive disease in the presence of a virus-specific immune response. The earliest events in the virus-host interaction are likely to be important in determining disease establishment and progression, and the kinetics of these early events following lentiviral infection are described here. Lymphatic cannulation in the sheep has been used to monitor both the virus and the immune response in efferent lymph after infection of the node with maedi-visna virus (MVV). Viral replication and dissemination could be detected and consisted of a wave of MVV-infected cells leaving the node around 9 to 18 days postinfection. No cell-free virus was recovered despite the fact that soluble MVV p25 was detected in lymph plasma. The maximum frequency of MVV-infected cells was only 11 in 10(6) but over the first 20 days of infection amounted to greater than 10(4) virus-infected cells leaving the node. There was a profound increase in the output of activated lymphoblast from the lymph nodes of infected sheep, characterized by an increased percentage of CD8+ lymphoblasts. All of the CD8+ lymphoblasts at the peak of the response expressed both major histocompatibility complex class II DR and DQ molecules but not interleukin-2 receptor (CD25). The in vitro proliferative response of efferent lymph cells existing the node after challenge with MVV to both recombinant human interleukin-2 and the mitogen concanavalin A was decreased between days 8 and 16 postinfection, and a specific proliferative response to MVV was not detected until after day 15. Despite the high level of CD8+ lymphoblasts in efferent lymph, direct MVV-specific cytotoxic activity was demonstrated in only one of the five MVV-challenged sheep. MVV-specific antibody responses, including neutralization and MVV p25 immune complexes in efferent lymph, were detectable during the major period of virus dissemination. The relationship of these findings to the evasion of the host's acute immune response by MVV is discussed.
Genetic Susceptibility on CagA-Interacting Molecules and Gene-Environment Interaction with Phytoestrogens: A Putative Risk Factor for Gastric Cancer

Objectives To evaluate whether genes that encode CagA-interacting molecules (SRC, PTPN11, CRK, CRKL, CSK, c-MET and GRB2) are associated with gastric cancer risk and whether an interaction between these genes and phytoestrogens modify gastric cancer risk. Methods In the discovery phase, 137 candidate SNPs in seven genes were analyzed in 76 incident gastric cancer cases and 322 matched controls from the Korean Multi-Center Cancer Cohort. Five significant SNPs in three genes (SRC, c-MET and CRK) were re-evaluated in 386 cases and 348 controls in the extension phase. Odds ratios (ORs) for gastric cancer risk were estimated adjusted for age, smoking, H. pylori seropositivity and CagA strain positivity. Summarized ORs in the total study population (462 cases and 670 controls) were presented using pooled- and meta-analysis. Plasma concentrations of phytoestrogens (genistein, daidzein, equol and enterolactone) were measured using the time-resolved fluoroimmunoassay. Results SRC rs6122566, rs6124914, c-MET rs41739, and CRK rs7208768 showed significant genetic effects for gastric cancer in both the pooled and meta-analysis without heterogeneity (pooled OR = 3.96 [95% CI 2.05–7.65], 1.24 [95% CI = 1.01–1.53], 1.19 [95% CI = 1.01–1.41], and 1.37 [95% CI = 1.15–1.62], respectively; meta OR = 4.59 [95% CI 2.74–7.70], 1.36 [95% CI = 1.09–1.70], 1.20 [95% CI = 1.00–1.44], and 1.32 [95% CI = 1.10–1.57], respectively). Risk allele of CRK rs7208768 had a significantly increased risk for gastric cancer at low phytoestrogen levels (p interaction<0.05). Conclusions Our findings suggest that SRC, c-MET and CRK play a key role in gastric carcinogenesis by modulating CagA signal transductions and interaction between CRK gene and phytoestrogens modify gastric cancer risk.
The A -buffer, an antialiased hidden surface method

The A-buffer (anti-aliased, area-averaged, accumulation buffer) is a general hidden surface mechanism suited to medium scale virtual memory computers. It resolves visibility among an arbitrary collection of opaque, transparent, and intersecting objects. Using an easy to compute Fourier window (box filter), it increases the effective image resolution many times over the Z-buffer, with a moderate increase in cost. The A-buffer is incorporated into the REYES 3-D rendering system at Lucasfilm and was used successfully in the “Genesis Demo” sequence in Star Trek II.