Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Beyond Russophobia

The article offers a practice-based analysis of Finland’s relationships with Russia. It works on the basis of ideas that have been presented in conjunction with the so-called practice and pragmatist turns in international relations. After identifying three key schools of thought in previous research on Finnish–Russian relations – primordialist, instrumentalist and identity-based – the article moves on to give a practice turn inspired account of the ways in which the proximity of Russia was dealt with in Finland during the inter-war period. Combining insights from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Charles S. Peirce, it introduces a research design built with the help of such analytical tools as the doubt-belief model of social action, relational properties and fields. These tools are then applied on research materials that comprise Finnish parliamentary documents and political cartoons. The materials are argued to be particularly well suited for attempts to apply practice insights in actual research, as they simultaneously function as embodiments of meaningful patterns of social and political activity and actively correlate with the urgencies of the contexts in which they appear.
Regulated expression of microinjected DNA in adult Aedes aegypti mosquitoes

We have developed a novel molecular genetic approach to investigating gene regulation in adult mosquitoes called whole body transfection (WBT). This DNA microinjection method allows for both constitutive and regulated expression of plasmid vectors in the fat body and midgut of adult mosquitoes within 24 h of injection. Using a luciferase reporter gene containing the Aedes aegypti heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70) promoter, we optimized the WBT protocol at various times post‐injection and used these parameters to measure the expression of a vitellogenin‐luciferase reporter gene in response to blood meal feeding. These studies showed that a 843 bp fragment of the Ae. aegypti vitellogenin‐C (VgC) promoter caused a greater than 200‐fold induction of luciferase activity in a strict tissue‐specific manner, and only in response to feeding. Functional mapping of the VgC promoter by WBT identified essential upstream regulatory elements in the region spanning −780 to −182 bp from the transcriptional start site. We also constructed a lipopolysaccharide‐regulated expression vector using a 1096 bp genomic fragment of the Ae. aegypti cecropin B (CecB) promoter. Our data show that four days after WBT injection, the CecB‐luciferase reporter gene could be induced more than 100‐fold in the fat body following lipopolysaccharide injection. Moreover, we found that lipopolysaccharide‐induction of the CecB reporter gene occurred up to 28 days post‐WBT injection. These data suggest that WBT could provide a novel strategy to express recombinant proteins and RNAi constructs in adult mosquitoes using conventional microinjection methods.
Social Construction of Cultural Identity: An Ethnographic Study of Korean American Students

Identity is regarded as a cultural and historical product of constant negotiation processes influenced by specific social and cultural contexts. This study examines Korean American students' ethnic identities in terms of peer group, family, and media influences. A "thick analysis" based on 6-month participant observations and interviews in two Korean American communities was undertaken. Although they were born and grew up in the United States, most of the interviewees at both universities expressed that they were Korean (or Korean American) rather than American. Specifically, it was found that their family played an important role in teaching them the Korean language and customs in the early period of identity construction. Following, Korean videos, mobile phones, and the Internet were the main media through which these Korean Americans learned about Korean culture and society, and increased intra-ethnic communication within the diasporic Korean American community context.
VU Research Portal Research interests: their dynamics, structures and applications in unifying search and reasoning

Most scientific publication information, which may reflects scientists’ research interests, is publicly available on the Web. Understanding the characteristics of research interests from previous publications may help to provide better services for scientists in the Web age. In this paper, we introduce some parameters to track the evolution process of research interests, we analyze their structural and dynamic characteristics. According to the observed characteristics of research interests, under the framework of unifying search and reasoning (ReaSearch), we propose interests-based unification of search and reasoning (I-ReaSearch). Under the proposed I-ReaSearch method, we illustrate how research interests can be used to improve literature search on the Web. According to the relationship between an author’s own interests and his/her co-authors interests, social group interests are also used to refine the literature search process. Evaluation from both the user satisfaction and the scalability point of view show that the proposed I-ReaSearch method provides a user centered and practical way to problem solving on the Web. The efforts provide some hints and various methods to support personalized search, and can be considered as a step forward user centric knowledge retrieval on the Web. From the standpoint of the Active Media Technology (AMT) on the Wisdom Web, in this paper, the study on the characteristics of research interests is based on complex networks and human
60-dB SNDR 100-MS/s SAR ADCs With Threshold Reconfigurable Reference Error Calibration

This paper presents a reference error calibration scheme for successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) verified with two prototypes. Such a reference error often occurs in high-speed SAR ADCs due to the signal dependent fast switching transient, and leads to a large differential nonlinearity and missing codes, eventually degrading conversion accuracy. The calibration concept aims to differentiate the error outputs and correct them by simply performing a subtraction in the digital domain. It runs in the background with a little hardware overhead, and does not depend on the type of the input signal or reduce the dynamic range. Two prototypes were measured which are made up of different reference generation circuits. Design #1 has the reference voltage from off-chip and a 3-pF decoupling capacitor on-chip, while design #2 includes an on-chip reference buffer. Both designs were fabricated in 65-nm CMOS and achieve at least 9-dB improvement on signal-to-(Noise + Distortion) ratio (SNDR) after calibration. The total core area is around 0.012 mm2 for both chips and the Nyquist SNDR of designs #1 and #2 is 59.03 and 57.93 dB, respectively.
On the problem of spurious eigenvalues in the approximation of linear elliptic problems in mixed form

In the approximation of linear elliptic operators in mixed form, it is well known that the so-called inf-sup and ellipticity in the kernel properties are sufficient (and, in a sense to be made precise, necessary) in order to have good approximation properties and optimal error bounds. One might think, in the spirit of Mercier-Osborn-Rappaz-Raviart and in consideration of the good behavior of commonly used mixed elements (like Raviart-Thomas or Brezzi-Douglas-Marini elements), that these conditions are also sufficient to ensure good convergence properties for eigenvalues. In this paper we show that this is not the case. In particular we present examples of mixed finite element approximations that satisfy the above properties but exhibit spurious eigenvalues. Such bad behavior is proved analytically and demonstrated in numerical experiments. We also present additional assumptions (fulfilled by the commonly used mixed methods already mentioned) which guarantee optimal error bounds for eigenvalue approximations as well.
The Development of the Spanish Version of the Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning-Third Edition (DIAL-3)

The procedure for developing the Spanish version of the Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning-Third Edition (DIAL-3) is described. The procedure involved both content development and psychometric investigations. Content development entailed translation and adaptation of testing materials, taking into account the differences in the phonological, semantic, and syntactic characteristics between the English and Spanish languages as well as the different cultural experiences and expectations that influence children's development. Psychometric investigations involved establishment of construct and measurement unit equivalency. Separate monolingual groups were used to collect data for linking the two language versions onto a common scale. Tasks/items with the same content and similar psychometric characteristics were used as common tasks/items for equating. The samples included 605 Spanish-speaking children and 1,560 English-speaking children. Raw score equating based on equal ability estimates was used to link scores on the two language versions and place them onto the same measurement scale. A single set of norms was developed. Analyses of differential task functioning and reliabilities were carried out to examine the equivalency between the two versions. Results showed that the common tasks/items behaved similarly in both samples and the reliabilities were quite comparable across the two language versions.
A BIL Population Derived from G. hirsutum and G. barbadense Provides a Resource for Cotton Genetics and Breeding

To provide a resource for cotton genetics and breeding, an interspecific hybridization between Gossypium hirsutum cv. Emian22 and G. barbadense acc. 3–79 was made. A population of 54 BILs (backcross inbred lines, BC1F8) was developed with the aim of transferring G. barbadense genes into G. hirsutum in order to genetically analyze these genes’ function in a G. hirsutum background and create new germplasms for breeding. Preliminary investigation of the morphological traits showed that the BILs had diverse variations in plant architecture, seed size, and fuzz color; the related traits of yield and fiber quality evaluated in 4 environments also showed abundant phenotypic variation. In order to explore the molecular diversity of the BIL population, 446 SSR markers selected at an average genetic distance of 10 cM from our interspecific linkage map were used to genotype the BIL population. A total of 393 polymorphic loci accounting for 84.4% MAF (major allele frequency) > 0.05 and 922 allele loci were detected, and the Shannon diversity index (I) was 0.417 per locus. The average introgression segment length was 16.24 cM, and an average of 29.53 segments were introgressed in each BIL line with an average background recovery of 79.8%. QTL mapping revealed 58 QTL associated with fiber quality and yield traits, and 47 favored alleles derived from the donor parent were discovered. This study demonstrated that the interspecific BIL population was enriched with much phenotypic and molecular variation which could be a resource for cotton genetics and breeding.
Can mtDNA barcodes be used to delimit species? A response to Pons et al. (2006).

The question of how DNA barcodes can and should be used in taxonomy has been debated for some time (Lipscomb et al. 2003; Tautz et al. 2003; Blaxter 2004; Vogler and Monaghan 2007; Wiens 2007). Although few doubt that they are a valuable molecular tool for match ing unidentified specimens to described taxa, this has little to do with the question of whether barcodes can be used to delimit species in the first place. The most radi cal turn in this debate has been the plea for a DNA-based taxonomy (Tautz et al. 2003; Blaxter 2004; Pons et al. 2006; Vogler and Monaghan 2007). Its proponents ar gue that "the vast majority of sequence variation in na ture is partitioned into clearly defined clusters" (Vogler and Monaghan 2007, p. 4), which " [. ] broadly mirror the species category" (Papadopoulou et al. 2008, p. 1) and could thus serve as basic taxonomic units. Initial attempts to employ this "barcoding gap" have relied on defining cutoff values of sequence divergence a pri ori (e.g., Blaxter 2004). Considering that the amount of genetic diversity within species can vary by orders of magnitude, it is clear that such an approach is arbi trary at best. Pons et al. (2006) have recently proposed a likelihood method that circumvents this problem by testing for clustering in ultrametric trees. They argue that "these new quantitative approaches can infer the elusive species boundary directly from the transition in branching rate and constitute an exciting possibility to define species from sequence variation [. ]" (Vogler and Monaghan 2007, p. 6). Given such claims, it is not surprising that this method enjoys increasing popular ity, having been applied to a number of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data sets (e.g., Pons et al. 2006; Ahrens et al. 2007; Fontaneto et al. 2007; Papadopoulou et al. 2008).
Branch-and-Price and Improved Bounds to the Traveling Umpire Problem

The present paper proposes a branch-and-price approach to the Traveling Umpire Problem (TUP). In this hard combinatorial optimization problem, umpires (or referees) have to be assigned to games in a double round robin tournament. The objective is to obtain a solution with minimum total travel distance over all umpires, while respecting several hard constraints. Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition is applied to an existing Integer Programming formulation to be used in a branch-and-price framework. The pricing problems are solved using a specialized branch-and-bound algorithm, which applies multiple pruning techniques. Two branching strategies (best-first and depth-first) were employed and result in many improved lower bounds compared to the previous best known. In addition, five new best solutions were found and four instances with 16 teams were proven to be infeasible.
Numerical field calculations considering the human subject for engineering and safety assurance in MRI

Numerical calculations of static, switched, and radiofrequency (RF) electromagnetic (EM) fields considering the geometry and EM properties of the human body are used increasingly in MRI to explain observed phenomena, explore the limitations of various approaches, engineer improved techniques and technology, and assure safety. As the static field strengths and RF field frequencies in MRI have increased in recent years, the value of these methods has become more pronounced and their use has become more widespread. With the recent growth in parallel reception techniques and the advent of transmit RF arrays, the utility of these calculations will become only more critical to continued progress of MRI. Proper relation of field calculation results to the MRI experiment can require significant understanding of MRI physics, EM field principles, MRI coil hardware, and EM field safety. Here some fundamental principles are reviewed and current approaches and applications are catalogued to aid the reader in finding resources valuable in beginning field calculations for their own applications in MR, with an eye to the current needs and future utility of numerical field calculations in MRI. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Sensitivity enhancement of an intensity-based photonic crystal biosensor using a laser excitation source

Photonic Crystal Slabs (PCSs) are nanostructured, dielectric waveguides that feature resonances with small bandwidths and very high reflectivity in the visible spectrum. As refractive index-sensitive transducers, PCSs have been studied for biosensing applications in the past decades [1]. Incident light can couple to and from quasi-guided modes at resonance wavelengths. Due to the evanescent field of the guided mode, the resonance wavelength is sensitive to changes of refractive index in the surrounding media. Intensity-based refractive index sensing offers the opportunity for miniaturized and inexpensive readout systems for point-of-care applications. A system of the size of a microtiter plate for the readout of label-free cellular essays has recently been published and shows the high potential of this approach [2].
Data Partitioning for Parallel Entity Matching

matching is an important and difficult step for integrating web data. To reduce the typically high execution time for match- ing we investigate how we can perform entity matching in parallel on a distributed infrastructure. We propose different strategies to partition the input data and generate multiple match tasks that can be independently executed. One of our strategies supports both, blocking to reduce the search space for matching and parallel matching to improve efficiency. Special attention is given to the number and size of data partitions as they impact the overall communication overhead and memory requirements of individual match tasks. We have developed a service-based distributed infra- structure for the parallel execution of match workflows. We eva- luate our approach in detail for different match strategies for matching real-world product data of different web shops. We also consider caching of input entities and affinity-based scheduling of match tasks.
Spanish University Business Chairs used to increase the deployment of Action Research in Operations Management: A case study and analysis

This research identifies Action Research as a methodology that can play an important role in enhancing the contribution of universities to the improvement of business competitiveness through Operations Management research. We propose that a Business Chair, defined as an agreement between a university and a business organization, can be a useful tool in research projects based on Action Research methodology. We analyze a set of Business Chairs in the field of Operations Management in Spanish universities. We draw up a set of research questions aiming to determine the degree to which Action Research methodology is used in the Chairs analyzed, and to define the key factors for the successful implementation of Action Research projects.
Dynamic Switching-Based Data Forwarding for Low-Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

In this work, we introduce the concept of Dynamic Switch-based Forwarding (DSF) that optimizes the 1) expected data delivery ratio, 2) expected communication delay, or 3) expected energy consumption for low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks under unreliable communication links. DSF is designed for networks with possibly unreliable communication links and predetermined node communication schedules. To our knowledge, these are the most encouraging results to date in this new research direction. In this paper, DSF is evaluated with a theoretical analysis, extensive simulation, and physical testbed consisting of 20 MicaZ motes. Results reveal the remarkable advantage of DSF in extremely low-duty-cycle sensor networks in comparison to three well-known solutions (ETX [1], PRR × D [2], and DESS [3]). We also demonstrate our solution defaults into ETX in always-awake networks and DESS in perfect-link networks.
BBN VISER TRECVID 2011 Multimedia Event Detection System

We describe the Raytheon BBN (BBN) VISER system that is designed to detect events of interest in multimedia data. We also present a comprehensive analysis of the different modules of that system in the context of the MED 2011 task. The VISER system incorporates a large set of low-level features that capture appearance, color, motion, audio, and audio-visual cooccurrence patterns in videos. For the low-level features, we rigorously analyzed several coding and pooling strategies, and also used state-of-the-art spatio-temporal pooling strategies to model relationships between different features. The system also uses high-level (i.e., semantic) visual information obtained from detecting scene, object, and action concepts. Furthermore, the VISER system exploits multimodal information by analyzing available spoken and videotext content using BBN's state-of-the-art Byblos automatic speech recognition (ASR) and video text recognition systems. These diverse streams of information are combined into a single, fixed dimensional vector for each video. We explored two different combination strategies: early fusion and late fusion. Early fusion was implemented through a fast kernel-based fusion framework and late fusion was performed using both Bayesian model combination (BAYCOM) as well as an innovative a weighted-average framework. Consistent with the previous MED’10 evaluation, low-level visual features exhibit strong performance and form the basis of our system. However, high-level information from speech, video-text, and object detection provide consistent and significant performance improvements. Overall, BBN’s VISER system exhibited the best performance among all the submitted systems with an average ANDC score of 0.46 across the 10 MED’11 test events when the threshold was optimized for the NDC score, and <30% missed detection rate when the threshold was optimized to minimize missed detections at 6% false alarm rate.
Emulating design by contract in C++

To date, much of the software written in computational physics has been produced with little regard paid to modern software engineering techniques. The paper documents experiences in beginning to address this shortcoming for Config, a component of the Graphical R-Matrix Atomic Collision Environment (GRACE). The work is based around a formal specification of the Config component. The principal focus of the paper will be on a non-intrusive mechanism for monitoring constraints such as class invariants, preconditions and postconditions for highly structured data types based on the containers and algorithms of the Standard Template Library (STL), a mechanism which can be extended to handle structured object update and display prototyping.
Syllables and segments in speech production

Speech error data are used to investigate the role in speech production of phonological segments such as syllables, phones, and syllable-constituents. It is argued that the construction of articulatory programs involves the accessing of a library of articulatory routines. These routines correspond to syllables, while their addresses in the library are expressed in a form analogous to classical phonemic representation. The instructions employed in accessing the library involve the transfer of phonological information from the lexicon. This transfer takes place syllable-constituent by syllableconstituent. It is shown how this model accounts for a variety of speech errors.
Narratives of satisfying and unsatisfying experiences of current mobile augmented reality applications

Over the last few years, mobile applications demonstrating Augmented Reality (AR) - such as Layar, Junaio and Google Goggles - have been introduced to consumers. We conducted an online survey to explore the user experience (UX) of early stage mobile AR applications available in the market in spring 2011, covering both location-based AR browsers and image recognition AR applications for object-based interaction. We identify various types of experiences such applications have evoked by qualitatively analyzing 84 users' narratives of their most satisfying and unsatisfying experiences. The results highlight, for example, experiences of awareness of surroundings, empowerment, positive surprise, amazement and fascination from the novelty value, as well as some examples of immersion and social connectivity. The analysis indicates that the applications have not yet reached their potential in evoking a multifaceted user experience that is characteristic especially to AR. This work helps in understanding the experiential design potential in mobile AR and points out UX issues to further focus on in design.