Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Household Production in an Egalitarian Society

Abstract:Norwegian national policies strongly incentivize double-earner households and gender equality, but various gender gaps persist both at work and at home. In these seemingly contradictory situations, what are the mechanisms under which Norwegian households allocate their market and domestic labor? Drawing on both a large set of administrative data and a representative survey, this question is examined from two perspectives. First, we focus on the micro-economic processes and investigate if Norwegian households act according to economic rationality or if they still follow the gender norm "A man should earn more than his wife. " Second, we focus on how Norway's contextual factors may influence the household experiences when a wife has better market productivity. We find that a wife with better market productivity, who is thereby facing the risk of outearning her husband, works more hours and earns more than her husband, while doing less chores—behavior consistent with economic rationality. Further analyses show that women's "higher" relative market productivity is mainly a consequence of having low-income husbands, and "higher" and "lower" market productivity women are surprisingly similar in other sociodemographic aspects. Norwegian redistribution policies, through progressive taxation and benefit transfers, seem to mitigate the income differences and promote gender neutrality in a sense that if couples wish to pursue an untraditional division, by preference or by necessity, they seem to be able to do so without being held back by the traditional gender expectations or being very poor.
Pricing-to-Market in a Ricardian Model of International Trade

We study the implications for international relative prices of a simple Ricardian model of international trade with imperfect competition and variable markups, providing a tractable account of firm-level and aggregate prices. We show that both trade costs and imperfect competition with variable markups are needed to account for pricing-to-market at the firm and aggregate levels. We also show that international trade costs are essential, but pricing-to-market is not, to account for a high volatility of tradeable consumer prices relative to the overall CPI-based real-exchange rate.
Document Representation with Statistical Word Senses in Cross-Lingual Document Clustering

Cross-lingual document clustering is the task of automatically organizing a large collection of multi-lingual documents into a few clusters, depending on their content or topic. It is well known that language barrier and translation ambiguity are two challenging issues for cross-lingual document representation. To this end, we propose to represent cross-lingual documents through statistical word senses, which are automatically discovered from a parallel corpus through a novel cross-lingual word sense induction model and a sense clustering method. In particular, the former consists in a sense-based vector space model and the latter leverages on a sense-based latent Dirichlet allocation. Evaluation on the benchmarking datasets shows that the proposed models outperform two state-of-the-art methods for cross-lingual document clustering.
Ex Vivo Thermoacoustic Imaging Over Large Fields of View With 108 MHz Irradiation

Thermoacoustic signals are generated over a large field of view by 900 ns TE10 pulses with 108 MHz carrier frequency. Test specimens selectively absorb the TE10 pulse energy producing rapid thermal expansions that generate ultrasonic pulses. 108 MHz irradiation provides excellent depth penetration in soft tissue, allowing blood and physiologic saline to generate strong signals. Thermoacoustic signal generation from a depth of several cm is well above our system's noise floor. Rotating the test specimen provides single-slice tomographic signal encoding. Filtered back-projection reconstruction yields images over a 6.4 cm field of view. Reconstructions of tissue mimicking prostate phantoms and fresh porcine kidney tissue are presented.
Development and experimental validation of a reorientation algorithm for a free-floating serial manipulator

This paper presents a method to reorient a free-floating serial manipulator using internal motion based on a path planning algorithm using a dynamic model of the manipulator and a potential function. Simulations with the proposed algorithm are performed using a nonlinear optimization technique in order to determine the actuator's velocity trajectories that achieve the reorientation. An example trajectory is presented in which a three-link planar robot starts from a pose in which all the links are aligned and ends with the same joint configuration but with the robot having completed a 180 degrees rotation. For this example, the algorithm finds trajectories that allow the robot to complete approximately 94% of the reorientation. To verify the simulation results against a real robot, a prototype of a planar robot with three bodies and two revolute joints is built. The experiments conducted show that the prototype is able to achieve the prescribed reorientation, even though the control of the orientation was implemented in an open-loop mode.
The Dynamics of Technological Adoption in Hardware/Software Systems: The Case of Compact Disc Players

In this paper we exmine the dynamic resolution of technological adoption in "hardware/software" systems. We are interested in determinig to what extent software availability affects hardware sales and/or vice-versa. We fi rst develop a dynamic model for estimating demand when costs (and hence prices) are declining over time. When then estimate it empirically for the case of compact disc players.
Reversible epigenetic down-regulation of MHC molecules by devil facial tumour disease illustrates immune escape by a contagious cancer

Contagious cancers that pass between individuals as an infectious cell line are highly unusual pathogens. Devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) is one such contagious cancer that emerged 16 y ago and is driving the Tasmanian devil to extinction. As both a pathogen and an allograft, DFTD cells should be rejected by the host–immune response, yet DFTD causes 100% mortality among infected devils with no apparent rejection of tumor cells. Why DFTD cells are not rejected has been a question of considerable confusion. Here, we show that DFTD cells do not express cell surface MHC molecules in vitro or in vivo, due to down-regulation of genes essential to the antigen-processing pathway, such as β2-microglobulin and transporters associated with antigen processing. Loss of gene expression is not due to structural mutations, but to regulatory changes including epigenetic deacetylation of histones. Consequently, MHC class I molecules can be restored to the surface of DFTD cells in vitro by using recombinant devil IFN-γ, which is associated with up-regulation of the MHC class II transactivator, a key transcription factor with deacetylase activity. Further, expression of MHC class I molecules by DFTD cells can occur in vivo during lymphocyte infiltration. These results explain why T cells do not target DFTD cells. We propose that MHC-positive or epigenetically modified DFTD cells may provide a vaccine to DFTD. In addition, we suggest that down-regulation of MHC molecules using regulatory mechanisms allows evolvability of transmissible cancers and could affect the evolutionary trajectory of DFTD.
Functional significance of the electrocorticographic auditory responses in the premotor cortex

Other than well-known motor activities in the precentral gyrus, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have found that the ventral part of the precentral gyrus is activated in response to linguistic auditory stimuli. It has been proposed that the premotor cortex in the precentral gyrus is responsible for the comprehension of speech, but the precise function of this area is still debated because patients with frontal lesions that include the precentral gyrus do not exhibit disturbances in speech comprehension. We report on a patient who underwent resection of the tumor in the precentral gyrus with electrocorticographic recordings while she performed the verb generation task during awake brain craniotomy. Consistent with previous fMRI studies, high-gamma band auditory activity was observed in the precentral gyrus. Due to the location of the tumor, the patient underwent resection of the auditory responsive precentral area which resulted in the post-operative expression of a characteristic articulatory disturbance known as apraxia of speech (AOS). The language function of the patient was otherwise preserved and she exhibited intact comprehension of both spoken and written language. The present findings demonstrated that a lesion restricted to the ventral precentral gyrus is sufficient for the expression of AOS and suggest that the auditory-responsive area plays an important role in the execution of fluent speech rather than the comprehension of speech. These findings also confirm that the function of the premotor area is predominantly motor in nature and its sensory responses is more consistent with the “sensory theory of speech production,” in which it was proposed that sensory representations are used to guide motor-articulatory processes.
Ontology merging and matching using ontology abstract machine

Ontology mediation is enabled through interoperability of semantic data sources.It helps data sharing between heterogeneous knowledgebase and reuse by semantic applications.Ontology mediation includes operations such as, mapping, alignment, matching, merging and integration.This paper aims at discussing a new approach of ontology merging and matching using ontology abstract machine with an illustration from a health care domain.
An Improved Method for Privacy Preserving Data Mining

In the light of developments in technology to analyze personal data, public concerns regarding privacy are rising. Often a data holder, such as a hospital or bank needs to share person specific records in such a way that the identities of the individuals who are the subjects of data cannot be determined. The generalization techniques such as K-anonymous, L-diverse and t-closeness were given as solutions to solve the problem of privacy breach, at the cost of information loss. Also, a very few papers dealt with personalized generalization. But, all these methods were developed to solve the external linkage problem resulting in sensitive attribute disclosure. It is very easy to prevent sensitive attribute disclosure by simply not publishing quasi-identifiers and sensitive attributes together. But the only reason to publish generalized quasi identifiers and sensitive attributes together is to support data mining tasks that consider both types of attributes in the database. Our goal in this paper is to eliminate the privacy breach (how much an adversary learn from the published data) and increase utility (accuracy of data mining task) of a released database. This is achieved by transforming a part of quasi-identifier and personalizing the sensitive attribute values. Our experiment conducted on the datasets from the UCI machine repository demonstrates that there is incremental gain in data mining utility while preserving the privacy to a great extend.
Extracting Latent Weblog Communities-A Partitioning Algorithm for Bipartite Graphs -

Abstract: I propose the concept of a latent weblog community (LBC), as a means to promote the autonomous organization of knowledge on the Internet. Such communities can be illustrated in terms of bipartite graphs based on weblog update information, and they can effectively function to create meeting spaces for bloggers who write about similar or closely related topics but do not know each other. To extract these communities from blogspace, I developed a partitioning algorithm known as the Weakest Pair (WP) algorithm, which separates the weakest pairs of bloggers and webpages, respectively, using co-citation information. As a result of numerical evaluation, the WP algorithm is more effective than the Shortest Path Betweenness (SPB) algorithm in terms of information loss and completeness of bipartite graphs. I will provide three examples of LBC extracted using the WP algorithm and report its secondary effects, i.e. personae detection, the detection of a set of weblogs owned by a single blogger.
Characteristics optimization via compressed sensing in quantum state estimation

Compressed sensing (CS) has been proved efficiently in reducing the required number of measurements in the quantum state estimation. In this paper, the relationship between the optimal number of measurement settings and the error of quantum state estimation via compressed sensing are studied by means of analyzing the lower bound of measurement settings and upper bound of error of quantum state estimation. Based on the results obtained by the CS theory, we analyze the above mentioned characteristics of three observation matrices and give the performance comparisons through the numerical simulations. The obtained optimal conditions and error bounds in the state estimation process can provide theoretical instructions for the selection of the minimum number of measurement settings in the quantum state estimation.
Increased oxygen load in the prefrontal cortex from mouth breathing: a vector-based near-infrared spectroscopy study

Individuals who habitually breathe through the mouth are more likely than nasal breathers to have sleep disorders and attention deficit hyperactive disorder. We hypothesized that brain hemodynamic responses in the prefrontal cortex might be different for mouth and nasal breathing. To test this hypothesis, we measured changes in oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin in the prefrontal cortex during mouth breathing and nasal breathing in healthy adults (n=9) using vector-based near-infrared spectroscopy. The angle k, calculated from changes in oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin and indicating the degree of oxygen exchange, was significantly higher during mouth breathing (P<0.05), indicating an increased oxygen load. Mouth breathing also caused a significant increase in deoxyhemoglobin, but oxyhemoglobin did not increase. This difference in oxygen load in the brain arising from different breathing routes can be evaluated quantitatively using vector-based near-infrared spectroscopy. Phase responses could help to provide an earlier and more reliable diagnosis of a patient’s habitual breathing route than a patient interview.
Classifying Non-manual Markers in American Sign Language

Facial expressions and other non-manual markers are the primary means by which American Sign Language (ASL) users signal sentence and clause type, negation, and a variety of adverbs. Work in the area of non-manual marker recognition has the potential to make ASL-toEnglish translation available in contexts where interpreters and human relay services are currently rare, such as events with non-signing family members. It also promises to generate scientific insights into signed languages, an area of linguistics of which we know relatively little. Despite the potential for work in the area of signed language recognition, there is only limited research investigating how to automatically identify non-manual markers from video streams. We contribute to the field by evaluating the performance of three feature extraction methods at the binary classification problem of identifying the presence of a wh-question in streaming RGB video. Unlike previous work that attempts to classify utterance types as units, we focus on feature selection for identifying the presence/absence of a non-manual marker at different times in an utterance, in order to lay a foundation for machine translation work. With theory-based feature tracking, we achieve approximately 80% frame-level accuracy and 76% accuracy on sequences. Despite limited data, our attempt to use abstract features through neural networks resulted in close to 72% frame-level accuracy and 80% accuracy on sequences. A third approach using the ScaleInvariant Feature Transform algorithm was unimpressive, with 59% accuracy.
Human Face Reconstruction Using Bayesian Deformable Models

This paper presents a Bayesian framework for 3D facial reconstruction. The framework iteratively deforms a generic face mesh to fit a set of range points representing a face. The generic mesh is generated from the extensive FRGC database of face images. The deformation process is conducted within a Bayesian framework and is driven by a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler which uses information from the likelihood and prior distributions of the generic face mesh. The paper presents results on the construction of a generic face model, the deformation framework and fitting results to both synthetic and real data. The results verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique, accurately deforming a generic face mesh to captured 3D data points of human faces.
A composite data Prefetcher framework for multilevel caches

The increasing difference between the Processor speed and the DRAM performance have led to the assertive need to hide memory latency and reduce memory access time. It is noticed that the Processor remains stalled on memory references. Data Prefetching is a technique that fetches that next instruction's data parallel to the current instruction execution in a typical Processor-Cache-DRAM system. A Prefetcher anticipates a cache miss that might take place in the next instruction and fetches the data before the actual memory reference. The goal of prefetching is to reduce as many cache misses as possible. In this paper we present a detailed summary of the different prefetching techniques, and implement a composite prefetcher prototype that employs the techniques of Sequential, Stride and Distance Prefetching.
Cellular Networks with α-Ginibre Configurated Base Stations

We consider a cellular network model with base stations configurated according to the α-Ginibre point process with α ∈ (0, 1], which is one of the determinantal point processes. In this model, we focus on the asymptotic behavior of the so-called coverage probability (or link success probability) as the threshold value tends to 0 and ∞, and discuss the Padé approximation of the coverage probability at 0 and the dependence on α ∈ (0, 1] of the asymptotic constant at ∞ both numerically and theoretically.
Morphometry of eyes, antennae and wings in three species of Siagona(Coleoptera, Carabidae)

Abstract In carabid beetles, physiological and behavioural characteristics reflect specific habitat demands and there is a strong correlation between body form and habit in species with different life style. In this study, we compared the morphometry and compound eye characteristics of three species of the genus Siagona: Siagona jenissoni, Siagona dejeani and Siagona europaea. These carabids have a stenotopic lifestyle in Mediterranean clayey soils, inhabiting the ground fissure system formed during the dry season. All species have a Mediterranean distribution and are nocturnal olfactory hunters, and are strict ant predators. For morphometric measurements, we considered body length (mm), wing length (mm), antenna length (mm), head width (mm), trochanter length (mm), number of ommatidia, eye surface area (mm2), ommatidia density (number of ommatidia/mm2 of eye surface area), head height (mm), thorax height (mm) and abdomen height (mm). The data revealed intersexual and interspecific differences. The three species differ in relative length of the antennae, density and number of ommatidia and relative trochanter length. Significant differences occurred in wing sizes, which are well developed in Siagona europaea, the only species capable of flight. When eye size is compared with other ground beetles of various lifestyles, Siagona shows pronounced “microphthalmy” an adaptation to subterranean life in clayey crevices of tropical and subtropical climates with a marked dry season.
Trm112, a Protein Activator of Methyltransferases Modifying Actors of the Eukaryotic Translational Apparatus

Post-transcriptional and post-translational modifications are very important for the control and optimal efficiency of messenger RNA (mRNA) translation. Among these, methylation is the most widespread modification, as it is found in all domains of life. These methyl groups can be grafted either on nucleic acids (transfer RNA (tRNA), ribosomal RNA (rRNA), mRNA, etc.) or on protein translation factors. This review focuses on Trm112, a small protein interacting with and activating at least four different eukaryotic methyltransferase (MTase) enzymes modifying factors involved in translation. The Trm112-Trm9 and Trm112-Trm11 complexes modify tRNAs, while the Trm112-Mtq2 complex targets translation termination factor eRF1, which is a tRNA mimic. The last complex formed between Trm112 and Bud23 proteins modifies 18S rRNA and participates in the 40S biogenesis pathway. In this review, we present the functions of these eukaryotic Trm112-MTase complexes, the molecular bases responsible for complex formation and substrate recognition, as well as their implications in human diseases. Moreover, as Trm112 orthologs are found in bacterial and archaeal genomes, the conservation of this Trm112 network beyond eukaryotic organisms is also discussed.
A Human Mitochondrial Transcription Factor Is Related to RNA Adenine Methyltransferases and Binds S-Adenosylmethionine

ABSTRACT A critical step toward understanding mitochondrial genetics and its impact on human disease is to identify and characterize the full complement of nucleus-encoded factors required for mitochondrial gene expression and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) replication. Two factors required for transcription initiation from a human mitochondrial promoter are h-mtRNA polymerase and the DNA binding transcription factor, h-mtTFA. However, based on studies in model systems, the existence of a second human mitochondrial transcription factor has been postulated. Here we report the isolation of a cDNA encoding h-mtTFB, the human homolog of Saccharomyces cerevisiae mitochondrial transcription factor B (sc-mtTFB) and the first metazoan member of this class of transcription factors to which a gene has been assigned. Recombinant h-mtTFB is capable of binding mtDNA in a non-sequence-specific fashion and activates transcription from the human mitochondrial light-strand promoter in the presence of h-mtTFA in vitro. Remarkably, h-mtTFB and its fungal homologs are related in primary sequence to a superfamily of N6 adenine RNA methyltransferases. This observation, coupled with the ability of recombinant h-mtTFB to bind S-adenosylmethionine in vitro, suggests that a structural, and perhaps functional, relationship exists between this class of transcription factors and this family of RNA modification enzymes and that h-mtTFB may perform dual functions during mitochondrial gene expression.