Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fully Bayesian spline smoothing and intrinsic autoregressive priors

There is a well-known Bayesian interpretation for function estimation by spline smoothing using a limit of proper normal priors. The limiting prior and the conditional and intrinsic autoregressive priors popular for spatial modelling have a common form, which we call partially informative normal. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the propriety of the posterior for this class of partially informative normal priors with noninformative priors on the variance components, a condition crucial for successful implementation of the Gibbs sampler. The results apply for fully Bayesian smoothing splines, thin-plate splines and L-splines, as well as models using intrinsic autoregressive priors. Copyright Biometrika Trust 2003, Oxford University Press.
The Regulation of Labor and the Relevance of Legal Origin

This paper critiques The Regulation of Labor, an empirical study recently published by Juan C. Botero, Simeon Djankov, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The Regulation of Labor extends these authors' comparative research to the realm of employment, collective-relations, and social-security laws, and finds that legal origin is a stronger predictor of all of these than political or economic variables, with common law associated with the lowest levels of regulation. While these findings are suggestive and help deepen the case for regulatory complementarity, the methodological weaknesses are severe. This paper explores the limits of The Regulation of Labor's dataset and econometric approach, and suggests some implications for the authors' larger project.
A Multilingual Metadata Schema Registry Based on RDF Schema

This paper describes a multilingual metadata schema registry which has been developed at the University of Library and Information Science in Tsukuba, Japan. The registry currently has reference translations of Dublin Core Metadata Element Set written in 22 languages, DC Qualifiers and the DCMI Type Vocabulary written in English and Japanese, along with descriptive elements of the Nippon Cataloging Rules. The registry is realized using XML technologies; metadata schemas are expressed in the RDF Schema language, the RDF description is handled by a Java servlet using XSLT stylesheet. This paper shows the functions and the architecture of the registry.
Microbial Community Structure and Arsenic Biogeochemistry in an Acid Vapor-Formed Spring in Tengchong Geothermal Area, China

Arsenic biogeochemistry has been studied extensively in acid sulfate-chloride hot springs, but not in acid sulfate hot springs with low chloride. In this study, Zhenzhuquan in Tengchong geothermal area, a representative acid sulfate hot spring with low chloride, was chosen to study arsenic geochemistry and microbial community structure using Illumina MiSeq sequencing. Over 0.3 million 16S rRNA sequence reads were obtained from 6-paired parallel water and sediment samples along its outflow channel. Arsenic oxidation occurred in the Zhenxhuquan pool, with distinctly high ratios of arsenate to total dissolved arsenic (0.73–0.86). Coupled with iron and sulfur oxidation along the outflow channel, arsenic accumulated in downstream sediments with concentrations up to 16.44 g/kg and appeared to significantly constrain their microbial community diversity. These oxidations might be correlated with the appearance of some putative functional microbial populations, such as Aquificae and Pseudomonas (arsenic oxidation), Sulfolobus (sulfur and iron oxidation), Metallosphaera and Acidicaldus (iron oxidation). Temperature, total organic carbon and dissolved oxygen significantly shaped the microbial community structure of upstream and downstream samples. In the upstream outflow channel region, most microbial populations were microaerophilic/anaerobic thermophiles and hyperthermophiles, such as Sulfolobus, Nocardia, Fervidicoccus, Delftia, and Ralstonia. In the downstream region, aerobic heterotrophic mesophiles and thermophiles were identified, including Ktedonobacteria, Acidicaldus, Chthonomonas and Sphingobacteria. A total of 72.41–95.91% unassigned-genus sequences were derived from the downstream high arsenic sediments 16S rRNA clone libraries. This study could enable us to achieve an integrated understanding on arsenic biogeochemistry in acid hot springs.
Comparative Analysis of the 5S rRNA and Its Associated Proteins Reveals Unique Primitive Rather Than Parasitic Features in Giardia lamblia

Background 5S rRNA is a highly conserved ribosomal component. Eukaryotic 5S rRNA and its associated proteins (5S rRNA system) have become very well understood. Giardia lamblia was thought by some researchers to be the most primitive extant eukaryote while others considered it a highly evolved parasite. Previous reports have indicated that some aspects of its 5S rRNA system are simpler than that of common eukaryotes. We here explore whether this is true to its entire system, and whether this simplicity is a primitive or parasitic feature. Methodology/Principal Findings By collecting and confirming pre-existing data and identifying new data, we obtained almost complete datasets of the system of three isolates of G. lamblia, two other parasitic excavates (Trichomonas vaginalis, Trypanosoma cruzi), and one free-living one (Naegleria gruberi). After comprehensively comparing each aspect of the system among these excavates and also with those of archaea and common eukaryotes, we found all the three Giardia isolates to harbor a same simplified 5S rRNA system, which is not only much simpler than that of common eukaryotes but also the simplest one among those of these excavates, and is surprisingly very similar to that of archaea; we also found among these excavates the system in parasitic species is not necessarily simpler than that in free-living species, conversely, the system of free-living species is even simpler in some respects than those of parasitic ones. Conclusion/Significance The simplicity of Giardia 5S rRNA system should be considered a primitive rather than parasitically-degenerated feature. Therefore, Giardia 5S rRNA system might be a primitive system that is intermediate between that of archaea and the common eukaryotic model system, and it may reflect the evolutionary history of the eukaryotic 5S rRNA system from the archaeal form. Our results also imply G. lamblia might be a primitive eukaryote with secondary parasitically-degenerated features.
Time Series Forecasting using Boosting Technique with Correlation Coefficient Luzia

Time series forecasting has been widely used to support decisions, in this context a highly accurate prediction is essential to ensure the quality of the decisions. Ensembles of machines currently receive a lot of attention; they combine predictions from different forecasting methods as a procedure to improve the accuracy. This paper explores Genetic Programming (GP) and Boosting technique to obtain an ensemble of regressors and proposes a new formula for the final hypothesis. This new formula is based on the correlation coefficient instead of the geometric median used traditionally by the boosting algorithm. To validate this method, experiments were accomplished using real, financial and artificial series generated by Monte Carlo Simulation. The mean squared error (MSE) has been used to compare the accuracy of the proposed method against another ones, the ”t” test and ANOVA test were used too. The results obtained by using this new methodology was compared with the results obtained from GP, GPBoost and the traditional statistical methodology (ARMA). The results show advantages in the use of the proposed approach.
Probability and Mathematical Genetics: Heavy traffic on a controlled motorway

Unlimited access to a motorway network can, in overloaded conditions, cause a loss of capacity. Ramp metering (signals on slip roads to control access to the motorway) can help avoid this loss of capacity. The design of ramp metering strategies has several features in common with the design of access control mechanisms in communication networks. Inspired by models and rate control mechanisms developed for Internet congestion control, we propose a Brownian network model as an approximate model for a controlled motorway and consider it operating under a proportionally fair ramp metering policy.We present an analysis of the performance of this model.
DISCRETE MARKOV CHAIN MODEL FOR REPUTATION ESTIMATION OF UNSTRUCTURE P 2 P NETWORK

Building trust relationships between peers is an important and difficult part in the security needs of P2P network without a central server. P2P reputation system has been introduced which collects locally generated peer feedbacks and aggregates them to yield global reputation scores. Most P2P applications on the Internet are unstructured, without fast hashing and searching mechanisms, how to perform efficient reputation estimation is a major challenge on unstructured P2P computing. This work thus proposes a twostep reputation estimation approach for the unstructured P2P network. First, a Markov chain model is proposed to determine the reputation value for each one-hop neighbors. A peer’s reputation value (RV) is analyzed from its previous trust manner in this group. The proposed trust model is proven as an ergodic Continuous-Time Markov Chain model. Second, a peer with the highest RV of a group will be selected as the central authentication(CA) server. For increasing reliability, the peer with the second highest RV will be selected as the backup group leaser(BCA) that will take over CA when CA fails. The procedures of the peer’s RV are detailed. Numerical results indicate that the analytical RV of each peer is very close to that of simulation under various situations.
Optimal Treatment for Complicated Intra-abdominal Infections in the Era of Antibiotic Resistance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy and Safety of Combined Therapy With Metronidazole

A meta-analysis of 8 clinical trials revealed that combined therapy with metronidazole is as effective and safe as carbapenem monotherapy in treating cIAIs. With a rise of Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, combined therapy with metronidazole can be an alternative therapy for cIAIs.
Studying Lagrangian dynamics of turbulence using on-demand fluid particle tracking in a public turbulence database

A recently developed public turbulence database system (http://turbulence.pha.jhu.edu) provides new ways to access large datasets generated from high-performance computer simulations of turbulent flows to perform numerical experiments. The database archives 10244 (spatial and time) data points obtained from a pseudo-spectral direct numerical simulation (DNS) of forced isotropic turbulence. The flow's Taylor-scale Reynolds number is Re λ=443, and the simulation output spans about one large-scale eddy turnover time. Besides the stored velocity and pressure fields, built-in first- and second-order space differentiation, as well as spatial and temporal interpolations are implemented on the database. The resulting 27 terabytes of data are public and can be accessed remotely through an interface based on a modern Web-services model. Users may write and execute analysis programs on their host computers, while the programs make subroutine-like calls (getFunctions) requesting desired variables (velocity and pressu.
Routing in the Airborne Internet

The Airborne Internet is envisioned to be a large scale multihop wireless mesh network of civil aviation aircraft connected via long range highly directional air-to-air radio links. We propose a novel geographic load share routing metric to mitigate congestion in this network, taking into account the underlying link scheduling constraints with directional antennas. When forwarding packets for a given destination, a node considers not one but a set of next hop candidates, and spreads traffic among them based on queue dynamics. Our simulations show that introducing this flexibility in the routing function can greatly increase a node's ability to satisfy its bandwidth demands during link scheduling, yielding significant performance improvements in terms of network throughput and average packet delay. The ability to exploit this flexibility depends on the spatial reuse of the underlying network. For the simulated scenario, an increase in network throughput of 200% on average is shown, compared to a state-of-the-art geographic routing algorithm.
Implementation of P2P Computing in Design of MANET Routing Protocol

The study of peer-to-peer network and mobile ad hoc network (MANET) are currently two hotspots in distributed computing and mobile communication researching domain. By building up a P2P overlay network on top of MANET's physical infrastructure, we effectively integrated P2P network's advantage on sustaining highly dynamic network into the design of MANET routing protocol. By deploying passive MANET routing algorithms with innovative P2P routing mechanisms, we propose a new kind of MANET routing protocol named peer computing based dynamic source routing (PDSR). A detailed description of the P2P decentralized naming, route discovering, route querying and updating algorithm used in PDSR is presented in this paper. The simulation results indicate that PDSR has an improved routing performance in comparison with the popularly used DSR protocol
comPetencia Y estabiLidad en La banca

Este articulo revisa el estado del conocimiento en la literatura academica, teorica y empirica, sobre el posible dilema entre competencia y estabilidad en la banca. La competencia puede aumentar la inestabilidad a traves de dos canales elementales: por un lado, exacerbando el problema de coordinacion de depositantes e inversionistas por el lado del pasivo, y fomentando corridas o panicos; por otro, generando mayores incentivos a tomar riesgos y en consecuencia aumentando la probabilidad de fracaso. Se caracteriza el dilema entre competencia y estabilidad, y se revisan las implicancias del analisis de las politicas de regulacion y competencia. La regulacion optima puede depender de la intensidad de la competencia.
Thinking about the processes used when organisations select and evaluate software: Operationalising ICT Evaluation theory

This paper looks at the contemporary research and theory on ICT evaluation, as well as other areas of IS theory and aspects of ICT, which may also be relevant to the evaluation of ICT. The purpose of the research being proposed is to gain a deeper understanding of the processes which are used by organisations, when they are evaluating software. The current literature lists methods which are used when the processes have finished being ranked and a single number or a small series of ratings is given, but there seems to be little explaining the manner in which these numbers are reached. Another aspect where there also seems to be little work is contemporary research in testing the available literature on evaluation methods. Part of the argument being made is not that there is a problem with the methods, but that literature also is available which discusses the importance of ICT alignment, Governance, Security, Architecture, best practice frameworks, and existing ICT, which is not fully considered in the ICT evaluation literature. The purpose of looking at these areas of literature is that while these aspects of ICT theory have been developing and the areas of ICT evaluation have also been developing, to a large extent they seem to have been developing independently The paper then looks at the gaps in knowledge of the evaluation of compromise, between the need to evaluate in a timely manner and due diligence, against a depth of looking into the evaluation process. The political and reactionary measures affecting ICT evaluation are also considered. Finally a research methodology is proposed for the research.
Photodegradation of o-cresol by ZnO under UV irradiation

The effective removal of o-cresol is currently both an environmental problem. This paper shows how degradation of o-cresol was carried out, in the presence of UV; by ZnO as photocatalyst. To measure the efficiency of photodegradation, the different variables studied included amount of photocatalyst, concentration of o-cresol and pH. The results showed photodegradation was favorable in the pH 6-9 range with amount of photocatalyst 2.5g/L, and o-cresol concentration 100ppm. The detected intermediates were 2-methylresorcinol, 2.5-hydroxybenzaldehyde and salicylaldehyde. TOC studies show that 94% of total organic carbon is removed from solution during irradiation time. This study indicates the great potential of ZnO to remove aqueous o-cresol under UV irradiation. [Yadollah Abdollahi, Abdul Halim Abdullah, Zulkarnain Zainal, Nor Azah Yusof. Photodegradation of o-cresol by ZnO under UV irradiation. Journal of American Science 2011;7(8):165-170]. (ISSN: 1545-1003). http://www.americanscience. org.
Why co-evolution beats temporal difference learning at Backgammon for a linear architecture, but not a non-linear architecture

No Free Lunch theorems show that the algorithm must suit the problem. This does not answer the novice's question: for a given problem, which algorithm to use? This paper compares co-evolutionary learning and temporal difference learning on the game of Backgammon, which (like many real-world tasks) has an element of random uncertainty. Unfortunately, to fully evaluate a single strategy using undirected sampling of board positions, using only random dice rolls, requires a great deal of computation. Evolution's all-or-nothing replacement of entire solutions needs accurate evaluation, but relatively rare board positions are needed to train above a certain level. Temporal difference learning, with its incremental changes, does not use such an all-or-nothing approach. These results have relevance to a variety of real-world tasks with uncertainty, such as schedule optimization.
Interleukin-1β in Immune Cells of the Abdominal Vagus Nerve: a Link between the Immune and Nervous Systems?

Intraperitoneal administration of the cytokine interleukin-1β (IL-1β) induces brain-mediated sickness symptoms that can be blocked by subdiaphragmatic vagotomy. Intraperitoneal IL-1β also induces expression of the activation marker c-fos in vagal primary afferent neurons, suggesting that IL-1β is a key component of vagally mediated immune-to-brain communication. The cellular sources of IL-1β activating the vagus are unknown, but may reside in either blood or in the vagus nerve itself. We assayed IL-1β protein after intraperitoneal endotoxin [lipopolysaccharide (LPS)] injection in abdominal vagus nerve, using both an ELISA and immunohistochemistry, and in blood plasma using ELISA. IL-1β levels in abdominal vagus nerve increased by 45 min after LPS administration and were robust by 60 min. Plasma IL-1β levels increased by 60 min, whereas little IL-1β was detected in cervical vagus or sciatic nerve. IL-1β-immunoreactivity (IR) was expressed in dendritic cells and macrophages within connective tissues associated with the abdominal vagus by 45 min after intraperitoneal LPS injection. By 60 min, some immune cells located within the nerve and vagal paraganglia also expressed IL-1β-IR. Thus, intraperitoneal LPS induced IL-1β protein within the vagus in a time-frame consistent with signaling of immune activation. These results suggest a novel mechanism by which IL-1β may serve as a molecular link between the immune system and vagus nerve, and thus the CNS.
Adaptive Sampling using Non-linear EKF with Mobile Robotic Wireless Sensor Nodes

The use of robotics in distributed monitoring applications requires mobile wireless sensors that are deployed efficiently. Efficiency can be defined in multiple ways, such as in terms of the amount of energy expenditure, communication bandwidth or information content. A very important aspect of mobile sensor deployment includes sampling algorithms at location most likely to yield useful information about a field variable of interest. In this paper, we use inexpensive mobile robot nodes built in our lab (ARRI-Bots) as wireless sensor deployment agents, and we use them to demonstrate information efficient algorithms (e.g., "adaptive sampling"). Each mobile robot node is characterized by sensor measurement noise in addition to localization uncertainty. We use the extended Kalman filter (EKF) to derive quantitative information measures for sampling locations most likely to yield optimal information about the sampled field distribution. We present simulation and experimental results using this approach
ERPs Reflect Lexical Identification in Word Fragment Priming

Behavioral evidence suggests that spoken word recognition involves the temporary activation of multiple entries in a listener's mental lexicon. This phenomenon can be demonstrated in cross-modal word fragment priming (CMWP). In CMWP, an auditory word fragment (prime) is immediately followed by a visual word or pseudoword (target). Experiment 1 investigated ERPs for targets presented in this paradigm. Half of the targets were congruent with the prime (e.g., in the prime-target pair: AM-AMBOSS [anvil]), half were not (e.g., AM-PENSUM [pensum]). Lexical entries of the congruent targets should receive activation from the prime. Thus, lexical identification of these targets should be facilitated. An ERP effect named P350, two frontal negative ERP deflections, and the N400 were sensitive to prime-target congruency. In Experiment 2, the relation of the formerly observed ERP effects to processes in a modality-independent mental lexicon was investigated by presenting primes visually. Only the P350 effect could be replicated across different fragment lengths. Therefore, the P350 is discussed as a correlate of lexical identification in a modality-independent mental lexicon.
Finding middle ground? Multi-objective Natural Language Generation from time-series data

A Natural Language Generation (NLG) system is able to generate text from nonlinguistic data, ideally personalising the content to a user’s specific needs. In some cases, however, there are multiple stakeholders with their own individual goals, needs and preferences. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of combining the preferences of two different user groups, lecturers and students, when generating summaries in the context of student feedback generation. The preferences of each user group are modelled as a multivariate optimisation function, therefore the task of generation is seen as a multi-objective (MO) optimisation task, where the two functions are combined into one. This initial study shows that treating the preferences of each user group equally smooths the weights of the MO function, in a way that preferred content of the user groups is not presented in the generated summary.