Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accelerating Matrix Processing with GPUs

Matrix operations are common and expensive computations in a variety of applications. They occur frequently in high-performance computing, graphics, graph processing, and machine learning applications. This paper discusses how to map a variety of important matrix computations, including sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV), sparse triangle solve (SpTS), graph processing, and dense matrix-matrix multiplication, to GPUs. Since many emerging systems will use heterogeneous architectures (e.g. CPUs and GPUs) to attain the desired performance targets under strict power constraints, this paper discusses implications and future research for matrix processing with heterogeneous designs.
A hybrid architecture for integrating Mobile ad hoc network and the internet using Fixed and Mobile Gateways

The integration of wired and wireless networks is gaining popularity due to its usefulness and practical use. Internet connectivity would benefit users from mobility offered by mobile ad hoc networks and connectivity provided by the Internet. This integration however faces problem due to architectural differences in terms of infrastructure, topology, and mobility mechanisms. A number of integration strategies have been proposed so far. Few strategies use fixed gateways, others use mobile gateways. Some strategies are based on mobile IPv4 while others are based on mobile IPv6. The ad hoc routing protocols deployed in the framework are also different. In this paper, we propose a framework for integrating mobile ad hoc network and the Internet using both fixed and mobile gateways. The ad hoc mobile nodes can access the Internet using either fixed or mobile gateway, based on criteria of distance, load on the gateway. We use an extended version of AODV routing protocol in the framework. The objective behind using both fixed and mobile gateways is to increase the reliability of the Internet access, scalability, providing transparent Internet access to the ad hoc hosts and in general improve the performance of the integrated framework. The proposed framework is a hybrid approach involving two-layer and three layer approaches of integration.
The “Overpaid Bureaucrat”

Compensation of public employees is a contentious issue for politicians and the general public in the United States. However, there is little empirical evidence in the literature to address claims that public servants are over-paid compared to their private sector counterparts. This research compares salaries of private sector, state, and municipal workers in Mississippi. A central hypothesis in this study is that municipal pay levels will be more competitive in core governmental functions. A second is that large municipalities will have more core functions and therefore be competitive across a broader range of job categories. This research indicates that municipal and state workers are indeed underpaid in certain occupations, but salaries are competitive in some occupational fields. However, only large cities appear to be more competitive with wages in their core functions.
A mixed-methods exploration of the quality of life of Chinese breast cancer survivors

ABSTRACT Quality of life (QOL) in cancer survivorship is a multidimensional and subjective concept, which represents the personal sense of the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual consequences of cancer diagnosis and its treatment. This mixed method study aimed to explore the QOL of Chinese breast cancer survivors. Participants were recruited from a cancer self-help organization in the central area of China. QOL was assessed using the QOL–Cancer Survivor Scale and subsequently elicited by in-depth interviews. Results showed that participants had good overall QOL but with unfavorable aspects in psychological and social well-being. Interview data revealed that participants seldom attended spiritual activities. Instead, they actively reconnected with their “self” to create a positive meaning from their cancer experience. Understanding how Chinese breast cancer survivors perceive QOL is important for health professionals to address survivorship in this population.
A PROCESS STUDY OF NEW TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION IN SMALLER MANUFACTURING FIRMS

Based on longitudinal case studies of new technology adoption in five smaller Canadian manufacturing firms, this article develops an inductive process model that views the technology adoption process as a partially nested set of three parallel and interacting sub-processes that are different in nature: the strategic commitment process, the technology choice process and the financial justification process. These processes are themselves intertwined with other strategic decision processes in the firm, and influenced by a dynamic set of contextual elements that interact with one another over time. the study underlines the problems associated with a narrow conception of technology adoption as a ‘decision’while showing how various process models from the literature are useful in understanding different parts of the overall process of adoption
Small-signal modeling and control of an integrated bridgeless boost — Half-bridge converter for LED driving

This paper presents the small-signal modeling of a novel LED driver topology. The converter comprises the integration between a bridgeless boost power factor correction (PFC) stage and a half-bridge series resonant converter. The goals of the proposed converter are reduction in the filtering capacitances due to the presence of two conversion semistages and increased conversion efficiency (low conduction losses in the PFC and low switching losses due to soft-switching) to compensate for the power reprocessing by each semistage. The modeling methodology presented in this paper is intended for the design of current controllers in closed-loop operation of the integrated LED driver.
The Stable-Law Model of Stock Returns

This study investigates the tail shapes of empirical distributions of returns on an extensive group of common stocks. The tails of the return distributions are found to be thinner than those of infinite variance stable distributions. Therefore, although homogeneity is evident in general, economic and statistical inferences drawn from stable-law parameters estimated from samples of stock returns may be misleading. This is in spite of the apparent overall similarity (in shape) between empirical and stable distributions.
Using improved imaging sensor pattern noise for source camera identification

The imaging sensor (e.g., CCD) pattern noise is a noise-like spread-spectrum signal inherently cast onto every digital image by each imaging device. It has been recognized as a reliable device fingerprint for source camera/scanner identification and image origin verification. However, one weakness of current sensor pattern noise-based camera fingerprints is that their construction only uses information from single color channel images. The resultant fingerprint can not comprehensively reflect characteristics of the camera sensor array. Taking into account the characteristics of the CFA (color filter array) structure, this work proposes a new way to construct camera fingerprints using information from all of the three single color channel images. Good detection results have been achieved on different camera models.
Cold Hands, Warm Hearth?: Climate, Net Takeback, and Household Comfort*

Insulation reduces marginal heating cost and may lead to a takeback effect of higher wintertime thermostat settings, with a consequent dilution of energy savings. Alternatively, additional insulation could permit a lower thermostat setting by reducing drafts and radiation while increasing moisture retention, thereby enhancing comfort. This paper evaluates thermostat net takeback, the difference between takeback and enhanced comfort. Evidence supports the existence of both effects, with net takeback at the low end of literature estimates. Net thermostat takeback is on the order of 0.05 degrees F, leading to an energy takeback that ranges from 1-3% of potential energy savings, depending on climate and house size. Other significant determinants of thermostat are heating energy price and the presence of elderly or young occupants.
Power perceptions and modes of complaining in higher education

This study examines the relationship between student perceptions of different types of educator power and different modes of student complaining behaviour in the case of university education. A large sample of marketing students in the business school responded to the study from a state university in Northeastern United States. Factor analysis and canonical correlation analysis are used to explore the relationships between five bases of power perceptions (referent, expert, reward, legitimate, and punishment) and four modes of complaining behaviour (voice, negative word of mouth, third party, and exit). The results indicate that students engage in different modes of complaining as they perceive different types of educator power. The predominant complaining mode is found to be voice under referent or expert power, third party under legitimate power, and exit under reward or punishment power. Our findings offer important implications for student satisfaction, retention, and completion rates in higher education.
Control of the Diadenylate Cyclase CdaS in Bacillus subtilis

Background: Bacillus subtilis CdaS is a sporulation-specific diadenylate cyclase. Results: Activity of CdaS is regulated by its N-terminal autoinhibitory domain. Conclusion: The synthesis of c-di-AMP is under tight control in B. subtilis. Significance: The activity of CdaS is governed by a hexamer/dimer transition. The Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis encodes three diadenylate cyclases that synthesize the essential signaling nucleotide cyclic di-AMP. The activities of the vegetative enzymes DisA and CdaA are controlled by protein-protein interactions with their conserved partner proteins. Here, we have analyzed the regulation of the unique sporulation-specific diadenylate cyclase CdaS. Very low expression of CdaS as the single diadenylate cyclase resulted in the appearance of spontaneous suppressor mutations. Several of these mutations in the cdaS gene affected the N-terminal domain of CdaS. The corresponding CdaS mutant proteins exhibited a significantly increased enzymatic activity. The N-terminal domain of CdaS consists of two α-helices and is attached to the C-terminal catalytically active diadenylate cyclase (DAC) domain. Deletion of the first or both helices resulted also in strongly increased activity indicating that the N-terminal domain serves to limit the enzyme activity of the DAC domain. The structure of YojJ, a protein highly similar to CdaS, indicates that the protein forms hexamers that are incompatible with enzymatic activity of the DAC domains. In contrast, the mutations and the deletions of the N-terminal domain result in conformational changes that lead to highly increased enzymatic activity. Although the full-length CdaS protein was found to form hexamers, a truncated version with a deletion of the first N-terminal helix formed dimers with high enzyme activity. To assess the role of CdaS in sporulation, we assayed the germination of wild type and cdaS mutant spores. The results indicate that cyclic di-AMP formed by CdaS is required for efficient germination.
Decomposing the Rural-Urban Differentials in Childhood Malnutrition in India, 1992–2006

Using data from multi-waves of the National Family Health Survey conducted in India between 1992 and 2006, this study examines the pattern of rural–urban differentials in childhood malnutrition in India over time. Furthermore, it identifies the factors responsible for the rural–urban gap in childhood malnutrition and quantifies their contribution. The result shows a considerable and widening gap in childhood malnutrition across rural–urban residence in the country over the study period. The rural–urban gap in childhood malnutrition has narrowed in a few states whereas it widened in most states over time. The economic status of the household and parental education was the most significant contributors to the rural–urban gap in childhood malnutrition in India. Based on the findings, this study suggests that to reduce the rural–urban gap in childhood malnutrition, focus should be given to the rural poor.
International Macroeconomic Interdependence

Dynamic latent variable models, coherences and correlation analysis applied to real and nominal aggregates are used to compare wide sense cyclical interdependence between OECD economies across exchange rate regimes. The results indicate that while there are important domestic components in the fluctuations of national macroeconomic aggregates, international elements have attained greater importance in these fluctuations under flexible exchange rates. The nature of interdependence has shifted toward greater synchronization of national cyclical activity, underscoring the greater incidence of common shocks in an increasingly integrated world economy. Our results are in contrast to the traditional theory of transmission under floating rates, and lend support to the notion that national economic activity is increasingly subjected to an underlying world business cycle, with an overlying domestic cycle.
Beamformer-aided processing of EEG signals for analysing epileptic seizures

Automatic detection of epileptic seizures, by means of online or offline procedures, is a matter of continuous research that commits many research groups. Electroencephalographic (EEG) detection is affected by interference due to specific electrode interference that can be removed by different techniques, namely, beamforming, proposed in this paper. This technique allows improving epilepsy identification technique without performing a precise selecting of higher-order spectra. This is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Medical Measurements and Applications, 9 10 May 2008, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
The Impact of Management on Administrative and Survey Measures of Organizational Performance

Abstract We review ninety-two studies of public service performance, and analyse in detail those that model the impact of management on both administrative and survey measures of performance. Our review indicates that administrative data typically reflect the performance judgements of government and regulators, while survey data reflect those of citizens, service users and public managers. Analysis of the eleven articles that use administrative and survey performance measures reveals limited differences in the impact of management variables on both types of performance measure. However, management variables appear to have a stronger link with the performance judgements of service consumers than managers themselves.
A comparison of strategies to dampen nervousness in MRP systems

This research examines the effectiveness of alternative strategies for dealing with the problem of order instability, or nervousness, which occurs in Material Requirements Planning systems. Nervousness can be particularly disruptive in multi-level production processes where a change in order size or timing at one level can result in changes at other levels. This study proposes and evaluates five different strategies for treating nervousness caused by the interaction of lot-sizing decisions and the planning horizon. Not evaluated here are the effects on order instability caused by demand uncertainty or supply and lead-time uncertainty. The five strategies examined are: 1 Freezing the schedule within the planning horizon, 2 Lot-for-Lot after stage 1, 3 Safety stocks, 4 Forecast beyond the planning horizon, and 5 Change cost procedure. A series of simulation experiments was conducted to test the effectiveness of the five strategies on schedule stability and system costs. The experiments were constructed to evaluate the impacts of various lot-sizing methods, the length of the planning horizon, setup and holding cost parameters and product assembly structure. The results indicate that when the source of nervousness is due to changes in decisions caused by a rolling planning horizon, safety stock and lot-for-lot approaches are not cost effective. Under most conditions, the strategies of incorporating a change cost to discourage schedule changes or freezing the schedule within the planning horizon appear to be dominant.
Liquidity and Valuation in East African Securities Markets

This study estimates liquidity premiums using the recently developed Liu measure within a multifactor capital asset pricing model including size premiums and a time-varying parameter model for the East African emerging markets of Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya together with London and South Africa. The evidence suggests that while size and liquidity effects are significant in the smaller emerging markets of Uganda and Kenya, they are less important in explaining returns in South Africa and London. Costs of equity are highest in Uganda followed by Kenya, with industrial and consumer non-cyclical sectors being lowest, and then South Africa and London. Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal compilation (c) 2009 Economic Society of South Africa.
Price Behavior in a Dynamic Oligopsony: Washington Processing Potatoes

Punishment strategies are necessary to sustain a collusive oligopsony in a repeated game context when demand is uncertain and only market variables are observable. This article proposes a test for tacit collusion among potato processors in Washington state using a dynamic regime-switching model estimated with a finite mixture method. The results support the existence of punishment and collusive regimes and show the welfare losses due to anti-competitive behavior on the part of processors to be significant. Processors' oligopsony power is enhanced by higher domestic production, imports, and existing stocks, but it is ameliorated by high capacity utilization rates and exports. Copyright 2001, Oxford University Press.
On characterization of a class of convex operators for pricing insurance risks

The properties of risk measures or insurance premium principles have been extensively studied in actuarial literature. We propose an axiomatic description of a particular class of coherent risk measures defined in Artzner, Delbaen, Eber, and Heath (1999). The considered risk measures are obtained by expansion of TVar measures, consequently they look like very interesting in insurance pricing where TVar measures is frequently used to value tail risks.
Combining Bootstrapping and Feature Selection for Improving a Distributional Thesaurus

Work about distributional thesauri has now widely shown that the relations in these thesauri are mainly reliable for high frequency words and for capturing semantic relatedness rather than strict semantic similarity. In this article, we propose a method for improving such a thesaurus through its re-balancing in favor of middle and low frequency words. This method is based on a bootstrapping mechanism: a set of positive and negative examples of semantically related words are selected in a unsupervised way from the results of the initial measure and used for training a supervised classifier. This classifier is then applied for reranking the initial semantic neighbors. We evaluate the interest of this reranking for a large set of English nouns with various frequencies.
Agriculture comparée et développement agricole

Ingenieur agronome et docteur en geographie, Marc DUFUMIER a d’abord ete expert de la cooperation technique agricole a Madagascar, au Venezuela et au Laos. Devenu enseignant-chercheur a l’Institut national agronomique de Paris, il succede a Rene DUMONT et a Marcel MAZOYER a la tete de l’unite de formation et de recherche « Agriculture comparee et developpement agricole » dont l’objectif est d’expliquer les transformations des diverses agricultures en concurrence sur le marche mondial. Au sein de l’Institut de recherches et d’applications des methodes de developpement (IRAM), M. DUFUMIER apporte son expertise en matiere de developpement agricole et rural en Asie du Sud-Est, en Afrique subsaharienne et en Amerique latine. Parmi ses plus recents ouvrages figure une etude comparative sur Les agricultures et paysanneries des tiers-mondes (2004).
The Enabling Local State and Urban Development: Resources, Rhetoric and Planning in East London

Current literature on the new urban governance highlights the changes in patterns of relationships between actors at the local level, but also emphasises the continuing or even increasing importance of central government; in urban policy in particular there has been notable centralisation. Using a case study of urban regeneration within the Thames Gateway area of London, the paper examines the locus of power in the relationships between central and local government and the key economic interests; this allows a reappraisal of the claims of the local authority to be enabling development. The paper then turns to the language of enabling as found in policy and academic literature and argues both that changes in the language of policy have been distinctive and that this is actively contributing to the new urban governance. This analysis is grounded in a framework for considering the relationship of language to the policy process, proposing a rhetorical methodology of policy discourse analysis.
Methodological Issues in Internet-Mediated Research: A Randomized Comparison of Internet Versus Mailed Questionnaires

Background The majority of Internet-mediated studies use measures developed as paper-and-pencil measures or face-to-face-delivered material. Previous research suggests that the equivalence between online and offline measures must be demonstrated rather than assumed. Objective The objective of this study was to explore the equivalence 4 measures completed in an online or offline setting. Methods A sample of students (n = 1969) was randomly assigned to complete 4 popular scales (the SF-12v2, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), the Fatigue Symptom Inventory, and a single-item fatigue measure) either online or by mail survey (pencil and paper). The response rate was 52.51% (n = 1034) and comparable between the online and offline groups. Results Significant differences were noted in fatigue levels between the online and offline group (P = .01) as measured by the Fatigue Symptom Inventory, with the online sample demonstrating higher levels of fatigue. Equivalency was noted for the SF-12v2, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, and the single-item fatigue measure. Internal consistency was high except for the SF-12v2. The SF-12v2 may not be an ideal measure to use for remote administration. Conclusions Equivalency of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and the Physical Component Score and Mental Component Score of the SF-12v2 for online and offline data were demonstrated. Equivalency was not demonstrated for the Fatigue Symptom Inventory. Explanations for the difference in fatigue score between the online and offline samples are unclear. Research that seeks to match samples and control for extraneous online and offline variables is called for, along with exploration of factors that may mediate the completion of questionnaires or alter the respondents’ relationship with the same, to enhance progress in this area.
Un modello dei conti economici per il sistema bancario italiano

This paper analyzes the linkages between banksi? ½ profitability and the main real and financial indicators. The results, derived by means of a reduced-form model for the period 1984-2002, highlight a strict relation between all income and cost components and the evolution of the economic cycle. Net interest income shows a high correlation with nominal GDP and the interest rate term structure; income from services and trading are also influenced by the trend and volatility of stock and financial markets. Operating expenses depend on wage dynamics and changes in a banki? ½s organizational structure. Simulations performed for the period 2001-02 show a good predictive power of the model.