Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On Credit Scoring Estimation

Credit scoring methods became standard tool of banks and other financial institutions, direct marketing retailers and advertising companies to estimate whether an applicant for credit/goods will pay back his liabilities. In this thesis we give a short overview of credit scoring and its methods. We investigate the usage of some of these methods and their performance on a data set from a French bank. Our results indicate that the methods, namely the logistic regression, multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) neural networks give very similar results, however, the traditional logit model seems to be the best one. We also describe RBF architecture and a simple RBF program we implemented in the statistical computing environment XploRe.
Is redundancy necessary to reduce delay?

Logic optimization procedures principally attempt to optimize three criteria: performance, area, and testability. The relationship between area optimization and testability has recently been explored. As to the relationship between performance and testability, experience has shown that performance optimizations can, and do in practice, introduce single stuck-at-fault redundancies into designs. Are these redundancies necessary to increase performance or are they only an unnecessary by-product of performance optimization? The authors give a constructive resolution of this question in the form of an algorithm that takes as input a combinational circuit and returns an irredundant circuit that is as fast. They demonstrate the utility of this algorithm on a well-known circuit, the carry-skip adder, and present a novel irredundant design of that adder. As this algorithm may either increase or decrease circuit area, the authors leave unresolved the question as to whether every circuit has all irredundant circuit that is at least as fast and is of equal or lesser area. <<ETX>>
Researcher identity and childhood memories in a study of vulnerable children in Swaziland

Abstract Contrary to conventional wisdom, which construes scientific research as objective and value-free, this article foregrounds my social identity as a female, who grew up (and was schooled) in a deep rural, impoverished context of Swaziland, and my subjective childhood memories in shaping a qualitative-narrative study of six vulnerable children in a rural primary school in Swaziland. The article denotes the significance of productive remembering as a critical basis for knowledge acquisition and production. It contributes to ongoing avant-garde theorising about the centrality of researcher’s reflexivity and positionality in the scientific processes of knowledge acquisition and production. I show how subjective remembering was at the heart of the conceptual, theoretical and methodological decisions undertaken in this study, and how, almost 30 years later, the vulnerable children’s schooling experiences still mirrored my own childhood memories about schooling in this context. Therefore, highlighting the pervasive nature and, indeed, cross-generational extent of the vulnerable children’s unfavourable schooling experiences. Just like my childhood memories and identities, the vulnerable children’s schooling experiences were entangled in complex, enduring and discursively regulated power-laden social relationships. Hence, the article recommends foregrounding and addressing vulnerable children’s identities and their power positioning within social relationships in their contexts as a basis upon which strategies for improving the quality of vulnerable children’s rural schooling experiences should be founded.
Hippocampal Pathway Plasticity Is Associated with the Ability to Form Novel Memories in Older Adults

White matter deterioration in the aging human brain contributes to cognitive decline. The fornix as main efferent hippocampal pathway is one of the tracts most strongly associated with age-related memory impairment. Its deterioration may predict conversion to Alzheimer’s dementia and its precursors. However, the associations between the ability to form novel memories, fornix microstructure and plasticity in response to training have never been tested. In the present study, 25 healthy older adults (15 women; mean age (SD): 69 (6) years) underwent an object-location training on three consecutive days. Behavioral outcome measures comprised recall performance on the training days, and on 1-day and 1-month follow up assessments. MRI at 3 Tesla was assessed before and after training. Fornix microstructure was determined by fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity (MD) values from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). In addition, hippocampal volumes were extracted from high-resolution images; individual hippocampal masks were further aligned to DTI images to determine hippocampal microstructure. Using linear mixed model analysis, we found that the change in fornix FA from pre- to post-training assessment was significantly associated with training success. Neither baseline fornix microstructure nor hippocampal microstructure or volume changes were significantly associated with performance. Further, models including control task performance (auditory verbal learning) and control white matter tract microstructure (uncinate fasciculus and parahippocampal cingulum) did not yield significant associations. Our results confirm that hippocampal pathways respond to short-term cognitive training, and extend previous findings by demonstrating that the magnitude of training-induced structural changes is associated with behavioral success in older adults. This suggests that the amount of fornix plasticity may not only be behaviorally relevant, but also a potential sensitive biomarker for the success of training interventions aimed at improving memory formation in older adults, a hypothesis to be evaluated in future studies.
Comparative Analysis of Low Power 10T and 14T Full Adder using Double Gate MOSFET at 45nm Technology

Full adder is the basic block of arithmetic circuit found in microcontroller and microprocessor inside arithmetic and logic unit (ALU). Improving the performance of the adder is essential for upgrade the performance of digital electronics circuit where adder is employed. This paper described a comparative analysis of double gate 10T and double gate 14T adder at 45nm technology. In this paper we calculate the leakage current, average power and Delay of the designed circuit of 10T and 14T Full adder. 10T double gate full adder achieves 31.25% reduction in active power and 95% reduction in leakage current as compared to 14T double gate full adder. Simulation results of double gate full adder have been performed on cadence virtuoso tool with 45nm technology.
Graph Laplacian Regularization for Image Denoising: Analysis in the Continuous Domain

Inverse imaging problems are inherently underdetermined, and hence, it is important to employ appropriate image priors for regularization. One recent popular prior—the graph Laplacian regularizer—assumes that the target pixel patch is smooth with respect to an appropriately chosen graph. However, the mechanisms and implications of imposing the graph Laplacian regularizer on the original inverse problem are not well understood. To address this problem, in this paper, we interpret neighborhood graphs of pixel patches as discrete counterparts of Riemannian manifolds and perform analysis in the continuous domain, providing insights into several fundamental aspects of graph Laplacian regularization for image denoising. Specifically, we first show the convergence of the graph Laplacian regularizer to a continuous-domain functional, integrating a norm measured in a locally adaptive metric space. Focusing on image denoising, we derive an optimal metric space assuming non-local self-similarity of pixel patches, leading to an optimal graph Laplacian regularizer for denoising in the discrete domain. We then interpret graph Laplacian regularization as an anisotropic diffusion scheme to explain its behavior during iterations, e.g., its tendency to promote piecewise smooth signals under certain settings. To verify our analysis, an iterative image denoising algorithm is developed. Experimental results show that our algorithm performs competitively with state-of-the-art denoising methods, such as BM3D for natural images, and outperforms them significantly for piecewise smooth images.
Assessment of the Protection of Dopaminergic Neurons by an α7 Nicotinic Receptor Agonist, PHA 543613 Using [18F]LBT-999 in a Parkinson’s Disease Rat Model

The inverse association between nicotine intake and Parkinson’s disease (PD) is well established and suggests that this molecule could be neuroprotective through anti-inflammatory action mediated by nicotinic receptors, including the α7-subtype (α7R). The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of an agonist of α7R, PHA 543613, on striatal dopaminergic neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation in a rat model of PD induced by 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) lesion. Adult male Wistar rats were lesioned in the right striatum and assigned to either the PHA group (n = 7) or the Sham group (n = 5). PHA 543613 hydrochloride at the concentration of 6 mg/kg (PHA group) or vehicle (Sham group) was intra-peritoneally injected 2 h before 6-OHDA lesioning and then at days 2, 4, and 6 post-lesion. Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging was performed at 7 days post-lesion using [18F]LBT-999 to quantify the striatal dopamine transporter (DAT). After PET imaging, neuroinflammation was evaluated in same animals in vitro through the measurement of the microglial activation marker 18 kDa translocator protein (TSPO) by quantitative autoradiography with [3H]PK-11195. The DAT density reflecting the integrity of dopaminergic neurons was significantly decreased while the intensity of neuroinflammation measured by TSPO density was significantly increased in the lesioned compared to intact striatum in both groups. However, these both modifications were partially reversed in the PHA group compared to Sham. In addition, a significant positive correlation between the degree of lesion and the intensity of neuroinflammation was evidenced. These findings indicate that PHA 543613 exerts neuroprotective effects on the striatal dopaminergic neurons associated with a reduction in microglial activation in this model of PD. This reinforces the hypothesis that an α7R agonist could provide beneficial effects for the treatment of PD.
Site-Specific Insertion Polymorphism of the MITE Alex-1 in the Genus Coffea Suggests Interspecific Gene Flow

Miniature Inverted-repeat Transposable Elements (MITEs) are small nonautonomous class-II transposable elements distributed throughout eukaryotic genomes. We identified a novel family of MITEs (named Alex) in the Coffea canephora genome often associated with expressed sequences. The Alex-1 element is inserted in an intron of a gene at the CcEIN4 locus. Its mobility was demonstrated by sequencing the insertion site in C. canephora accessions and Coffea species. Analysis of the insertion polymorphism of Alex-1 at this locus in Coffea species and in C. canephora showed that there was no relationship between the geographical distribution of the species, their phylogenetic relationships, and insertion polymorphism. The intraspecific distribution of C. canephora revealed an original situation within the E diversity group. These results suggest possibly greater gene flow between species than previously thought. This MITE family will enable the study of the C. canephora genome evolution, phylogenetic relationships, and possible gene flows within the Coffea genus.
Oval cell proliferation in p16INK4a expressing mouse liver is triggered by chronic growth stimuli

Terminal differentiation requires molecules also involved in aging such as the cell cycle inhibitor p16INK4a.Like other organs, the adult liver represents a quiescent organ with terminal differentiated cells, hepatocytes and cholangiocytes. These cells retain the ability to proliferate in response to liver injury or reduction of liver mass. However, under conditions which prevent mitotic activation of hepatocytes, regeneration can occur instead from facultative hepatic stem cells.For therapeutic application a non‐toxic activation of this stem cell compartment is required. We have established transgenic mice with conditional overexpression of the cell cycle inhibitor p16INK4a in hepatocytes and have provoked and examined oval cell activation in adult liver in response to a range of proliferative stimuli.We could show that the liver specific expression of p16INK4a leads to a faster differentiation of hepatocytes and an activation of oval cells already in postnatal mice without negative consequences on liver function.
A Dynamic Fuzzy Logic Based Routing Scheme for Bufferless NoCs

This paper proposes a novel, adaptive routing scheme for Network-on-Chip (NoC). In particular, the proposed routing scheme decides on the output port of an incoming flit by taking into account the dynamic traffic and power consumption on neighboring router links. For that, a simple, generic, and efficient nonlinear control law is built, based on fuzzy logic control, to dynamically calculate the input links cost. Although we focus on buffer less NoCs, it can also be applied to buffered NoCs as well. The additional digital logic required for the proposed scheme is not in the router critical path, and, therefore, imposes no additional latency. We demonstrate, via simulative evaluation of light to heavy congestion conditions, that the proposed scheme outperforms representative conventional counterparts in terms of throughput and latency. Thus, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is shown, as the performance is consistently better.
Protection From Depression Following Emotional Maltreatment: The Unique Role of Positive Schemas

Much research has examined negative cognitive schemas as mediators of the established relation between emotional maltreatment (EMT) in childhood and young adult depression, yet little research has investigated the possibility of a protective function of positive schemas in this regard. In the current study, 434 young adult men (n = 112) and women (n = 312), aged 17 to 25 years (M = 18.59, SD = 1.21), completed measures of EMT, depressive symptoms, negative schemas, positive schema content, and interconnectivity. Both the content and interconnectivity of positive schemas were associated with lower depressive symptoms. Further, consistent with a protective function explanation, positive schemas significantly moderated the relation between EMT and depressive symptoms in young adulthood. Of all positive schema themes, optimism emerged as the most uniquely associated moderator of the EMT-to-depression relation. Results highlight a potential cognitive resilient process following EMT and underscore the importanc.
A Systematic Review: Non‐Suicidal Self‐injury in Australia and New Zealand's Indigenous Populations

Objective To undertake a systematic review of non‐suicidal self‐injury (NSSI) prevalence, patterns, functions, and behavioural correlates for the Indigenous populations of Australia (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders) and New Zealand (NZ; Maori). Method We searched the following electronic databases: PubMed, MedLine, Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, PsycInfo, and PsycArticles, CINAHL, and the Informit Health and Indigenous Peoples collections. Studies were included for review if they were published within the last 25 years and reported on NSSI in Australia and NZ's Indigenous populations. Results Seven studies were included, six of which came from Australia. The prevalence of NSSI in Australia ranged from 0.9% up to 22.50%; statistics varied by the different samples, types of prevalence, and relationship to alcohol. Several studies found that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had higher rates of NSSI than other Australians, but that this was not significantly higher. Two studies indicated that NSSI was linked to alcohol use, incarceration, and a younger age. The one NZ study was of injury and not specifically NSSI. Conclusions Findings are limited due to a small pool of literature. Cultural variations in NSSI presentation should be considered when working with Indigenous populations. Further research is required to help determine what cultural variations may exist.
The predictive accuracy of anti-Müllerian hormone for live birth after assisted conception: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature.

BACKGROUND Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) is an established marker of ovarian reserve and a good predictor of poor or excessive ovarian response after controlled hyperstimulation. However, it is unclear whether it can predict the ultimate outcome of assisted conception, live birth. We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine whether AMH is a predictor of live birth in women undergoing assisted conception. METHODS The study was conducted according to the PRISMA guidelines. PubMed, Embase, Medline, Web of Knowledge and the Cochrane trial register and unpublished literature were searched. Studies fulfilling the eligibility criteria were included in the systematic review and those with extractable data were included in the meta-analysis. Quality assessment was performed with the QUADAS 2 checklist. A summary estimate of diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) was derived using the random effects model for binary data. A hierarchical summary receiver operating characteristic model provided pooled estimates before and after adjusting for age and AMH assay as covariates. RESULTS Out of 361 non-duplicate studies, 47 were selected; 17 met the eligibility criteria and 13 had extractable data and thus were included in the meta-analysis. Three out of the 13 studies included only women with expected low ovarian reserve and were analysed individually from the remaining 10 to minimize heterogeneity. The DOR for women with unknown ovarian reserve (n = 5764 women) was 2.39 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.85-3.08). After adjustment for age the DOR was little changed at 2.48 (95% CI: 1.81-3.22) and the DOR adjusted for AMH assay was almost identical at 2.42 (95% CI: 1.86-3.14). For women with expected low ovarian reserve (n = 542 women) the DOR was 4.63 (95% CI: 2.75-7.81). CONCLUSIONS AMH, independently of age, has some association with predicting live birth after assisted conception and may be helpful when counselling couples before undergoing fertility treatment. However, its predictive accuracy is poor.
"Gamic Realism": Player, Perception and Action in Video Game Play

This paper explores a phenomenological approach to the video game medium, in order to argue that realism in video games is dependent on the player’s embodied experience of play as opposed to mimetic representation. My paper discusses the relation of the player, and specifically the player’s body, to the idea of realism in video games. Chris Crawford wrote in 1982 that “games represent a subset of reality”. Similarly, Jesper Juul argues in his recent book that games are “half real”. I discuss this idea of half-reality through a consideration of the terms virtual reality and telepresence. Media artist Eduardo Kac distinguishes between the two concepts thus: VR presents purely synthetic sense-data lacking physical reality, while telepresence presents sense-data that both claims to correspond to a remote physical reality, and also allows a remote user to perform a physical action and see the results. Where does such a distinction leave the video game medium? I draw upon the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to argue that the controller interface (keyboard, joypad etc.) in video game play create an experience different from the disinterested perception involved with experiencing non-interactive media. Through Merleau-Ponty’s notion that the body is our main medium for having a world, I argue that gamic realism is always body-subjective, and reliant not on depiction but on action.
Modularity-Based Query Clustering for Identifying Users Sharing a Common Condition

We present an algorithm for identifying users who share a common condition from anonymized search engine logs. Input to the algorithm is a set of seed phrases that identify users with the condition of interest with high precision albeit at a very low recall. We expand the set of seed phrases by clustering queries according to the pages users clicked following these queries and the temporal ordering of queries within sessions, emphasizing the subgraph containing seed phrases. To this end, we extend modularity-based clustering such that it uses the information in the initial seed phrases as well as other queries of users in the population of interest. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on two datasets, one of mood disorders and the other of anorexia, by classifying users according to the clusters in which they appeared and the phrases contained thereof, and show that the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) obtained by these methods exceeds 0.87. These results demonstrate the value of our algorithm for both identifying users for future research and to gain better understanding of the language associated with the condition.
A Content Recommendation System Based on Category Correlations

In Web 2.0, there is no clear distinction between users and webmasters. Many internet users are not only information consumers but also information providers. There are lots of information in the Web and most people can find what they want by searching the Web. One problem of the large number of data in the Web is that we often spend most of our time to find a correct result from search results. Thus, people start looking for a better system that can suggest relevant information instead of letting users go through all search results: We call such systems recommendation systems. A recommendation system is often based on collaborative filtering (CF). A traditional CF approach requires lots if user data so that a recommendation system can compute the similarity of user preferences and suggest items based on the computed preferences between users. This approach has two problems: sparsity and cold start. We propose a different CF approach based on the category correlation of contents. First, we show how to compute the category correlations of contents. Then, we design a new recommendation algorithm based on the category correlations to a user with certain preferences. Note that our approach does not require computing the preference similarity between users.