Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Supersymmetric String Solitons

These notes are based on lectures given by C. Callan and J. Harvey at the 1991 Trieste Spring School on String Theory and Quantum Gravity. The subject is the construction of supersymmetric soliton solutions to superstring theory. A brief review of solitons and instantons in supersymmetric theories is presented. Yang-Mills instantons are then used to construct soliton solutions to heterotic string theory of various types. The structure of these solutions is discussed using low-energy field theory, sigma-model arguments, and in one case an exact construction of the underlying superconformal field theory.
Pilot feasibility study to detect mesenchymal stem cell biomarkers of bronchopulmonary dysplasia in the tracheal aspirate fluid of preterm infants.

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to detect novel mesenchymal stem cell peptides/biomarkers of bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) in the tracheal aspirate fluid (TAF) of preterm infants. STUDY DESIGN Participants included infants less than 32 weeks' gestational age or birth weight under 1500 grams who required endotracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation within first 24 hours of life. TAF sample collection was performed at the time of the first clinically indicated routine suctioning. Standardization curves for human levels of osteopontin (Opn), macrophage colony stimulating factor 1 (Csf1), transforming growth factor beta 1 (TGF-β1), and secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA) were generated for 15 enrolled participants. RESULTS We demonstrated that stem cell biomarkers are secreted into the TAF of preterm infants and their concentrations can be easily measured during the first week of life. CONCLUSIONS Further studies are warranted to determine a causal relationship between these biomarkers and BPD development and severity.
On beauty, usefulness, and holiness: attitudes towards languages in the Habad community

ABSTRACT This paper studies one ultra-Orthodox group – Habad community, exploring its members’ attitudes towards four languages: Hebrew, Loshen Koydesh (LK), English, and Yiddish, and focusing on usage, affection for the language, ascribed importance, and holiness. Research questions were: (1) What are the attitudes of Habad members towards these languages? (2) Are there individual differences according to gender and/or age in the attitudes towards these languages within the group? One hundred forty-eight questionnaires were distributed to members of the community, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 participants. Attitudes towards the four languages revealed significant differences, showing, by and large, a preference for Hebrew, LK, and English over Yiddish in all dimensions, yet yielding a range of specific gender and age differences reflecting the sociocultural milieu’s influence on the development of these perceptions. Habad’s unique features came forth in its members’ linguistic choices and attitudes, providing further evidence of language as both reflecting and directing issues of identity, belongingness, ideology, and intergroup relations.
Automated Surgical-Phase Recognition Using Rapidly-Deployable Sensors

Surgical-phase recognition is important to many future applications in clinical care, from building context-aware operating rooms to automatically providing feedback to surgeons in training. In this work, we focus on learning-based phase recognition in laparoscopic gallbladder removals (cholescystectomies). Using data from 15 sensors across 42 surgeries, we 1) compare performance using support vector machines, hidden Markov models, and conditional random fields and 2) demonstrate that it is possible to achieve 74% accuracy using only 8 rapidly-deployable sensors.
Improved inherited peripheral neuropathy genetic diagnosis by whole-exome sequencing

Inherited peripheral neuropathies (IPNs) are a group of related diseases primarily affecting the peripheral motor and sensory neurons. They include the hereditary sensory neuropathies (HSN), hereditary motor neuropathies (HMN), and Charcot‐Marie‐Tooth disease (CMT). Using whole‐exome sequencing (WES) to achieve a genetic diagnosis is particularly suited to IPNs, where over 80 genes are involved with weak genotype–phenotype correlations beyond the most common genes. We performed WES for 110 index patients with IPN where the genetic cause was undetermined after previous screening for mutations in common genes selected by phenotype and mode of inheritance. We identified 41 missense sequence variants in the known IPN genes in our cohort of 110 index patients. Nine variants (8%), identified in the genes MFN2, GJB1, BSCL2, and SETX, are previously reported mutations and considered to be pathogenic in these families. Twelve novel variants (11%) in the genes NEFL, TRPV4, KIF1B, BICD2, and SETX are implicated in the disease but require further evidence of pathogenicity. The remaining 20 variants were confirmed as polymorphisms (not causing the disease) and are detailed here to help interpret sequence variants identified in other family studies. Validation using segregation, normal controls, and bioinformatics tools was valuable as supporting evidence for sequence variants implicated in disease. In addition, we identified one SETX sequence variant (c.7640T>C), previously reported as a putative mutation, which we have confirmed as a nonpathogenic rare polymorphism. This study highlights the advantage of using WES for genetic diagnosis in highly heterogeneous diseases such as IPNs and has been particularly powerful in this cohort where genetic diagnosis could not be achieved due to phenotype and mode of inheritance not being previously obvious. However, first tier testing for common genes in clinically well‐defined cases remains important and will account for most positive results.
Building CPU Stubs to Optimize CPU Bound Systems: An Application of Dynamic Performance Stubs

Dynamic performance stubs provide a framework for the simulation of the performance behavior of software modules and functions. Hence, they can be used as an exten- sion to software performance engineering methodologies. The methodology of dynamic performance stubs can be used for a gain oriented performance improvement. It is also possible to identify "hidden" bottlenecks and to prioritize optimization possibilities. Nowadays, the processing power of CPUs is mainly increased by adding more cores to the architecture. To have benefits from this, new software is mostly designed for parallel processing, especially, in large software projects. As software performance optimizations can be difficult in these environments, new methodologies have to be defined. This paper evaluates a possibility to simulate the functional behavior of software algorithms by the use of the simulated software functionality. These can be used by the dynamic performance stub framework, e.g., to build a CPU stub, to replace the algorithm. Thus, it describes a methodology as well as an implementation and evaluates both in an industrial case study. Moreover, it presents an extension to the CPU stubs by applying these stubs to simulate multi-threaded applications. The extension is evaluated by a case study as well. We show show that the functionality of software algorithms can be replaced by software simulation functions. This stubbing approach can be used to create dynamic performance stubs, such as CPU stubs. Additionally, we show that the concept of CPU stubs can be applied to multi-threaded applications. Keywords-software performance optimization; CPU bound sys- tems; simulated software functionality; stubs; multi-core; multi- threaded
Opinion Expression , and Activism Unpacking the Use of Social Media for Protest Behavior : The Roles of

Recent studies have shown a positive link between frequency of social media use and political participation. However, there has been no clear elaboration of how using social media translates into increased political activity. The current study examines three explanations for this relationship in the context of citizens’ protest behavior: information (social media as a source for news), opinion expression (using social media to express political opinions), and activism (joining causes and finding mobilizing information through social media). To test these relationships, the study uses survey data collected in Chile in 2011, amid massive demonstrations demanding wholesale changes in education and energy policy. Findings suggest that using social media for opinion expression and activism mediates the relationship between overall social media use and protest behavior. These findings deepen our knowledge of the uses and effects of social media and provide new evidence on the role of digital platforms as facilitators of direct political action.
Why Python Rocks for Research

T HE FOLLOWING IS an account of my own experience with Python. Because that experience was so positive, this is an unabashed attempt to promote the use of Python for general scientific research and development. About four years ago, I dropped MATLAB in favor of Python as my primary language for coding research projects. This article is a personal account of how rewarding I found that experience to be. As I describe in the next sections, the variety and quality of Python's features have spoiled me. Even in small scripts, I now rely on Python's numerous data structures, classes, nested functions, iterators, the flexible function calling syntax, an extensive kitchen-sink-included standard library, great scientific libraries, and outstanding documentation. To clarify, I am not advocating just Python as the perfect scientific programming environment; I am advocating Python plus a handful of mature 3rd-party open source libraries, namely Numpy/Scipy for numerical operations, Cython for low-level optimization, IPython for interactive work, and MatPlotLib for plotting. Later, I describe these and others in more detail, but I introduce these four here so I can weave discussion of them throughout this article. Given these libraries, many features in MATLAB that enable one to quickly write code for machine learning and artificial intelligence – my primary area of research – are essentially a small subset of those found in Python. After a day learning Python, I was able to still use most of the matrix tricks I had learned in MATLAB, but also utilize more powerful data structures and design patterns when needed. I once believed that the perfect language for research was one that allowed concise and direct translation from notepad scrib-blings to code. On the surface, this is reasonable. The more barriers between generating ideas and trying them out, the slower research progresses. In other words, the less one has to think about the actual coding, the better. I now believe, however, that this attitude is misguided. MATLAB's language design is focused on matrix and linear algebra operations; for turning such equations into one-liners, it is pretty much unsurpassed. However, move beyond these operations and it often becomes an exercise in frustration. R is beautiful for interactive data analysis, and its open library of statistical packages is amazing. However, the language design can be unnatural, and even maddening, for larger development projects. While Mathematica is perfect for interactive work with pure math, it is …
Safe-Driving-Trainings - A way to enhance driving expertise for young drivers?

A concept for Safe-Driving-Trainings with a focus on risky behavior and safety related attitudes has been evaluated. 519 participants have been tested before and after the training by means of a questionnaire with the topics: technical driving competence, awareness of risks, and propensity for anticipation. A control group (131 subjects) was used to check for the possibility of response artifacts. Three months later, 92 members of the treatment group and 25 members of the control group have been tested again. The results show significant positive changes in driving competence, risk awareness, and safety related attitudes, especially anticipation, due to the training. Compared to the control group the participants have become more risk aware and they regard risk avoiding behavior as more important. The results show that this concept for Safe-Driving-Trainings has not only short-term but, more importantly, long-term positive effects on the safety-relevant attitudes and cognitions of young drivers. (A) Paper to the session "Accident Causation and Prevention" of the 5th International Conference on ESAR "Expert Symposium on Accident Research", 7th to 8th September 2012 in Hannover.
A Proposal for using Web 2.0 Technologies in Scrum

One of the challenges in Project Management (PM) is the introduction of information technology in PM methodologies. To deal with this issue, the use of Web 2.0 technologies to support virtual work and virtual management of projects has gained attention in recent years. At the same time, the adoption of agile methodologies has grown to better assist mainly the management of information technology projects. This paper proposes a conceptual contribution through the use of Web 2.0 technologies in Scrum methodology. It suggests Web 2.0 tools to fit each artifact and event Scrum, which provide an environment for virtual management of projects. Such tools support meetings and knowledge sharing. It also presents the research questions (RQ) and methods that will be used to conduct this work. RQ1 is “How can Web 2.0 technologies be integrated into Scrum methodology to monitor projects and store and share knowledge generated in the meetings? ” and RQ2 is “To what extent do Web 2.0 technologies improve the performance of Scrum teams? ” To address RQ1 and RQ2, we will use multiple case study and action research methods, respectively.
Vision-Based Recognition of Mice Home-Cage Behaviors

We describe a trainable computer vision system enabling the automated analysis of complex mouse behaviors. We also collect and manually annotate a very large video database used for training and testing the system. Our system performs on par with human scoring, as measured from the ground-truth manual annotations. Our video-based software should complement existing sensor based automated approaches and help develop an adaptable, comprehensive, high-throughput, fine-grained, automated analysis of mouse behavior.
Enabling Change Exploration: Vision Paper

Data and metadata suffer many different kinds of change: values are inserted, deleted or updated; entities appear and disappear; properties are added or re-purposed, etc. Explicitly recognizing, exploring, and evaluating such change can alert to changes in data ingestion procedures, can help assess data quality, and can improve the general understanding of the dataset and its behavior over time. We propose a data model-independent framework to formalize such change. Our change-cube enables exploration and discovery of such changes to reveal dataset behavior over time.
Flood Relevance Estimation from Visual and Textual Content in Social Media Streams

Disaster monitoring based on social media posts has raised a lot of interest in the domain of computer science the last decade, mainly due to the wide area of applications in public safety and security and due to the pervasiveness not solely on daily communication but also in life-threating situations. Social media can be used as a valuable source for producing early warnings of eminent disasters. This paper presents a framework to analyse social media multimodal content, in order to decide if the content is relevant to flooding. This is very important since it enhances the crisis situational awareness and supports various crisis management procedures such as preparedness. Evaluation on a benchmark dataset shows very good performance in both text and image classification modules.
Selecting a Networked Virtual Environment Platform and the Design of a Collaborative e-Learning Environment

Our goal was to create a 3D virtual environment which could be used to carry out online lectures and which would offer the most popular features of current CVEs. This paper initially discusses the potential of 3D networked virtual environments for supporting collaborative learning and presents the assets of such systems. Furthermore, the paper reviews the features of five such software applications, through the comparison of the tools and services they offer. These include tools for supporting communication, sharing applications, organizing and coordinating the teaching process and for interacting with the virtual environment through an avatar. Based on that comparison, we justify our choice of platform and discuss design and implementation issues. Finally, future work regarding the assessment of the virtual environment is discussed.
Are flood-driven turbidity currents hot spots for priming effect in lakes?

Abstract. In deep stratified lakes, such as Lake Geneva, flood-driven turbidity currents are thought to contribute to the replenishment of deep oxygen by significant transport of river waters saturated with oxygen into the hypolimnion. The overarching aim of this study was to test this long-standing hypothesis directly. It combines direct observational data collected during an extreme flooding event that occurred in May 2015 with dark bioassays designed to evaluate the consequences of river-borne inputs for the hypolimnetic respiration. The exceptional precipitation events of May 2015 caused floods with an annual return time for the Rhone River, the dominant tributary of Lake Geneva, and with 50-year return time for the Dranse River, the second-most important tributary. Sediment-loaded river flows generated turbidity currents plunging into the lake hypolimnion. The observed river intrusions contributed to the redistribution of dissolved oxygen, with no net gain, when occurring in the lowermost hypolimnetic layer. In the uppermost hypolimnion above the last deep-mixing event, the intrusions coincided with a net oxygen deficit. Consistent with field observations, dark bioassays showed that 1 to 50 % substitution of riverine organic matter to deep (
Basic investigations of electrostatic turbulence and its interaction with plasma and suprathermal ions in a simple magnetized toroidal plasma

Progress in basic understanding of turbulence and its influence on the transport both of the plasma bulk and of suprathermal components is achieved in the TORPEX simple magnetized torus. This configuration combines a microwave plasma production scheme with a quasi-equilibrium generated by a toroidal magnetic field, onto which a small vertical component is superimposed, simulating a simplified form of tokamak scrape-off layers. After having clarified the formation of blobs in ideal interchange turbulence, TORPEX experiments elucidated the mechanisms behind the blob motion, with a general scaling law relating their size and speed. The parallel currents associated with the blobs, responsible for the damping of the charge separation that develops inside them, hence determining their cross-field velocity, have been measured. The blob dynamics is influenced by creating convective cells with biased electrodes, arranged in an array on a metal limiter. Depending on the biasing scheme, radial and vertical blob velocities can be varied. Suprathermal ion transport in small-scale turbulence is also investigated on TORPEX. Suprathermal ions are generated by a miniaturized lithium source, and are detected using a movable double-gridded energy analyser. We characterize vertical and radial spreading of the ion beam, associated with the ideal interchange-dominated plasma turbulence, as a function of the suprathermal ion energy and the plasma temperature. Experimental results are in good agreement with global fluid simulations, including in cases of non-diffusive behaviour. To investigate the interaction of plasma and suprathermal particles with instabilities and turbulence in magnetic configurations of increasing complexity, a closed field line configuration has recently been implemented on TORPEX, based on a current-carrying wire suspended in the vacuum chamber. First measurements indicate the creation of circular symmetric profiles centred on the magnetic axis, and instabilities driven in the region of strong gradients, with a strong ballooning character.
A Logical Framework for Modularity of Ontologies

Modularity is a key requirement for collaborative ontology engineering and for distributed ontology reuse on the Web. Modern ontology languages, such as OWL, are logic-based, and thus a useful notion of modularity needs to take the semantics of ontologies and their implications into account. We propose a logic-based notion of modularity that allows the modeler to specify the external signature of their ontology, whose symbols are assumed to be defined in some other ontology. We define two restrictions on the usage of the external signature, a syntactic and a slightly less restrictive, semantic one, each of which is decidable and guarantees a certain kind of "black-box" behavior, which enables the controlled merging of ontologies. Analysis of real-world ontologies suggests that these restrictions are not too onerous.
Instructors’ Attitudes towards the Reflection of Critical Thinking in Course Syllabi: Evidence from an Expanding Circle

This study investigated Iranian EFL university instructors’ familiarity with critical thinking, and its use in their course syllabi. To this end, 103 instructors completed an attitude questionnaire. The results revealed that the differences between EFL instructors were significant across their level of education in terms of their preparation of course syllabi, and their familiarity with CT and official syllabi. Besides, TEFL instructors were significantly superior to their linguistics and literature colleagues in terms of their familiarity with CT and its perceived importance. The results revealed that the relationships between the participants’ teaching experience on the one hand and their preparation of syllabi, their familiarity with CT and official syllabi and the consideration of CT in their course syllabi on the other hand were statistically significant. The study suggests that teacher training programs and in-service training courses should aim at educating instructors continually and systematically and help them keep abreast of the recent pedagogical innovations to enhance learning outcomes.
A Field of Small Pitted Cones on the Floor of Coprates Chasma, Mars: Volcanism Inside Valles Marineris?

We present observations of a field of >100 pitted cones and mounds situated on the floor of Coprates Chasma (part of Valles Marineris (VM); Fig. 1), which display similarities to terrestrial and martian scoria cones. If these cones are indeed volcanic in origin, they will significantly expand our knowledge about the morphometry of pyroclastic cones on Mars. Moreover, a magmatic origin, which would necessarily post-date the opening of the main VM troughs, would contribute to our understanding of the volcano-tectonic evolution of VM. Figure 1: Location of investigated cones (triangles) and mounds (circles) in eastern Coprates Chasma (CTX mosaic). The edifices are spread over the entire trough.