Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Aging to Visually Uncover Evolutionary Processes on Networks

Networks are widely used to describe many natural and technological systems. Understanding how these evolve over time poses a challenge for existing visualization techniques originally developed for fixed network structures. We describe a method of incorporating the concept of aging into evolving networks, where nodes and edges store information related to the amount of local evolutionary change they have experienced. This property is used to generate visualizations that ensure stable substructures maintain relatively fixed spatial positions, allowing them to act as visual markers and providing context for evolutionary change elsewhere. By further supplementing these visualizations with color cues, the resultant animations enable a clearer portrayal of the underlying evolutionary process.
One Constraint to Rule Them All : How to simplify optimizations under constant variable sum , with applications for maximum likelihood

We begin by considering the general problem of optimizing a function of non-negative real variables subject to a set of constant-sum constraints on a disjoint partitioning of the variable set. Such problems are widely applicable, and in particular subsume global maximum likelihood estimation problems over one or more sets of multinomial parameters. We will give an intuitive interpretation of how the Lagrangian constrains the partial derivatives at stationary points, and derive a function we call the Ψ-mapping, the fixed points of which are exactly the stationary points under a set of reasonable assumptions. Next we will demonstrate a number of interesting properties of this mapping, including the fact that its codomain composes convexly under addition and multiplication of two objective functions. Finally, we will show how this mapping simplifies in common polynomial-like and homogeneous cases, and what these simplified forms tell us about the space of candidate stationary points. Specific applications will also be explored for the haplotype phasing problem, in which the resulting Ψ coincides will the known iterative equation for the Expectation Maximization algorithm.
Specific and General Knowledge and Organizational Structure

This paper analyzes the relations between knowledge, control and organizational structure both in the market system as a whole and in private organizations. Limitations on the mental capacity of the human mind and the costs of producing and transferring knowledge means that knowledge relevant to all decisions can never be collected in the mind of a single individual or a small body of experts. This means that if the knowledge valuable to a particular decision is to be used in making that decision, there must be a system for partitioning out decision rights to individuals who already have the relevant knowledge and abilities or who can acquire or produce them at the lowest cost. Self interest on the part of individual decision-makers means a control system is required to motivate individuals with the decision rights and the relevant knowledge to use those decision rights appropriately. This control problem is solved in a capitalist economy by a system of alienable property rights.Alienable rights cannot generally solve the control problem in firms, and the assignment of decision rights in firms does not generally include the assignment of alienability. Indeed, this is one of the major distinctions between firms and markets. The inalienability of rights within an organization means control problems must be solved by alternative means. Organizations solve these problems by establishing what we define to be the Organizational Rules of the Game that provide:(1) a system for partitioning decision rights out to agents in the organization,(2) a performance measurement and evaluation system, and (3) a reward and punishment systemThe inherent inefficiency of organizational control systems as compared to alienability means firms cannot survive unless they provide other offsetting advantages such as economies of scale, scope or riskbearing.
Philosophical Naturalism and Intuitional Methodology

1. Intuitions in Philosophy: What's the Controversy? A debate is raging over philosophical methodology. It is a debate between philosophical traditionalists and science-oriented philosophical naturalists concerning the legitimacy of the widespread use of intuitions in philosophy. Not everyone finds the term "intuition" the best label for what philosophers rely upon in the relevant sector of their practice. Instead of "intuitions" some prefer to talk of intuitive judgments, thought experiments, or what have you. Nonetheless, "intuition" is the most commonly used term in the territory, so I shall not abandon it, though other terms will be used as well. Described fairly neutrally, the philosophical activity in question consists of specifying a hypothetical scenario and rendering an intuitive judgment about the correctness or incorrectness of classifying it under a stipulated heading. Does a given predicate 'F' apply to an event, an individual, a pair of objects, etc. in the scenario? Putting the question less linguistically, is a certain property or relation exemplified in the scenario? The central question in the debate is whether, when intuitions or intuitive judgments are formed about such cases, they provide good evidence for some type of philosophical conclusion. For instance, are they good evidence for a conclusion of the form "Case C is/is not an instance of F"? Philosophers' ultimate interest is not in cases per se. Cases are examined as a means to determining the content or composition of the referent of T' (where the referent may be a property, a kind, a meaning, or a concept). But this further determination is not in the foreground? though it definitely cannot be ignored. That case intuitions sometimes have a powerful impact on philosophical thinking is evident from historically salient cases. Gettier's famous paper of 1963 is a prime example. It was concurring intuitive judgments about his counterexamples to the justified true belief analysis of knowledge that propelled major changes in our theory of knowledge, or the analysis of knowledge. Today the JTB analysis is a dead letter. So the impact of intuitive judgments in philosophy cannot be underestimated.
Clustering of muscle acetylcholine receptors requires motoneurons in live embryos, but not in cell culture

Previous culture studies have demonstrated that muscle cells autonomously express and cluster ACh receptors (AChRs) and that contact by neurites induces a reorganization of these clusters. We studied these phenomena in zebrafish embryos where the same cells could be examined in vivo and in vitro, and where contacts between cells could be viewed repeatedly. Receptor clusters first appeared when the pioneer growth cones emerged from the spinal cord, were always associated with labeled branches, and developed normally in the presence of neuromuscular transmission blockers. When motoneurons were removed, the muscles failed to cluster receptors. In contrast, muscle cells grown in cell culture uncontacted by nerves clustered AChRs. Our results suggest that clustering of AChRs in living embryos is induced by the presence of neurites and does not occur in the absence of neuronal contact. We suggest that conditions in cell culture, which differ from those in the intact embryo, induce clusters on isolated muscle cells. Moreover, our results demonstrate that receptors cluster without binding transmitter and in the absence of neuronal activity.
A Six-Month Randomized Controlled Trial of Whole Soy and Isoflavones Daidzein on Body Composition in Equol-Producing Postmenopausal Women with Prehypertension

Objectives. This paper reported the effects of commonly used whole soy foods (soy flour) and purified daidzein (one of the major isoflavones and the precursor of equol) on changes in anthropometric measurements and body composition in a 6-month double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial among prehypertensive postmenopausal women who are also equol producers. Methods. 270 eligible women were randomized to either one of the three treatments: 40 g soy flour (whole soy group), 40 g low-fat milk powder + 63 mg daidzein (daidzein group), or 40 g low-fat milk powder (placebo group) daily each for 6 months. Anthropometric indicators and body composition were measured before and after intervention. Results. 253 subjects completed the study with good compliance. Urinary isoflavones levels suggested good compliance of subjects with supplementation. Whole soy and purified daidzein had no significant effect on body weight, body mass index (BMI), waist and hip circumferences, waist to hip ratio (WHR), body fat percentage, fat mass, and free fat mass. Conclusion. Six-month consumption of whole soy and purified daidzein at provided dosage had no improvement on body weight and composition compared with isocaloric milk placebo among prehypertensive equol-producing postmenopausal women. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01270737.
Design and control of an anthropomorphic prosthetic hand with a cosmesis

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the design and control performance of a modular biomechatronic prosthetic hand especially with an anthropomorphic cosmesis. The hand has a total of 11 joints actuated by six motors. Each digit (2 joints, DIP and MCP, coupled) is integrated with the actuator, the transmission mechanism, the sensors and the controller as a modular unit easily to be installed, removed, maintained and applied to the partial upper-limb amputees. To improve the grasping performance, the thumb is configured with an extra DOF to abduct or adduct to the digits. Integrated with multiple sensors, the prosthetic hand can feel the environment like a human hand. As an important and applicable part, the cosmetic design is detailed and the relative performance experiments of the hand-cosmesis system are made including output force, grasping capability, position and force control capabilities. The results show that the prosthetic hand with a cosmesis has a remarkably improved appearance without comprising the control performance.
Biginelli Reaction Catalyzed by Copper Nanoparticles

We recently reported a novel synthesis of copper nanoparticles from copper sulphate utilizing the charge-compensatory effect of ionic liquid [bmim]BF4 and ethylene glycol. The nanoparticles were characterized and found to be stable for one year. Here we hypothesize that the stabilized nanoparticles should be able to catalyze one-pot multicomponent organic reactions. We show that the nanoparticles catalyzed Biginelli reaction at room temperature to give the product 3,4-dihydopyrimidinone (>90% yield in ∼15 minutes) from aldehydes, β-diketoester (ethylacetoacetate) and urea (or thiourea). ). Remarkably, such high yields and rapid kinetics was found to be independent of the electronic density on the reactant aryl-aldehyde. This was probably because even the surface-active particles reacted faster in the presence of ionic liquid as compared to conventional methods. The heterocyclic dihydropyrimidinones (DHPMs) and their derivatives are widely used in natural and synthetic organic chemistry due to their wide spectrum of biological and therapeutic properties (resulting from their antibacterial, antiviral, antitumor and anti-inflammatory activities. Our method has an easy work-up procedure and the nanoparticles could be recycled with minimal loss of efficiency.
Adapting Chart Realization to CCG

We describe a bottom-up chart realization algorithm adapted for use with Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), and show how it can be used to efficiently realize a wide range of coordination phenomena, including argument cluster coordination and gapping. The algorithm has been implemented as an extension to the OpenNLP open source CCG parser. As an avenue for future exploration, we also suggest how the realizer could be used to simplify the treatment of aggregation in conjunction with higher level content planning components.
Interpersonal Relations as a Tool to Film Directing

This work seeks to indicate how psychology can assist art by denoting the importance of interpersonal relations in the process of artistic production, specifically film directing. A model of an ideal director is introduced, which is composed of personal qualities and fields of study that must be mastered. The profession’s specific phenomena are explored: empathy, objectivity and assertiveness, feedback, living the moment, and personality issues the director brings to the set. It is proposed that knowledge in these subjects can provide benefits to the director’s relationship with his/her team, thus making professional development possible.
Generalizing to a zero-data task : a computational chemistry case study

We investigate the problem of learning several tasks simultaneously in order to transfer the acquired knowledge to a completely new task for which no training data are available. Assuming that the tasks share some representation that we can discover efficiently, such a scenario should lead to a better model of the new task, as compared to the model that is learned by only using the knowledge of the new task. We have evaluated several supervised learning algorithms in order to discover shared representations among the tasks defined in a computational chemistry/drug discovery problem. We have cast the problem from a statistical learning point of view and set up the general hypotheses that have to be tested in order to validate the multi-task learning approach. We have then evaluated the performance of the learning algorithms and showed that it is indeed possible to learn a shared representation of the tasks that allows to generalize to a new task for which no training data are available. From a theoretical point of view, our contribution also comprises a modification to the Support Vector Machine algorithm, which can produce state-of-the-art results using multi-task learning concepts at its core. From a practical point of view, our contribution is that this algorithm can be readily used by pharmaceutical companies for virtual screening campaigns.
Constrained Multipoint Aerodynamic Shape Optimization Using an Adjoint Formulation and Parallel Computers

An aerodynamic shape optimization method that treats the design of complex aircraft configurations subject to high fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD), geometric constraints and multiple design points is described. The design process will be greatly accelerated through the use of both control theory and distributed memory computer architectures. Control theory is employed to derive the adjoint differential equations whose solution allows for the evaluation of design gradient information at a fraction of the computational cost required by previous design methods. The resulting problem is implemented on parallel distributed memory architectures using a domain decomposition approach, an optimized communication schedule, and the MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard for portability and efficiency. The final result achieves very rapid aerodynamic design based on a higher order CFD method. In order to facilitate the integration of these high fidelity CFD approaches into future multi-disciplinary optimization (NW) applications, new methods must be developed which are capable of simultaneously addressing complex geometries, multiple objective functions, and geometric design constraints. In our earlier studies, we coupled the adjoint based design formulations with unconstrained optimization algorithms and showed that the approach was effective for the aerodynamic design of airfoils, wings, wing-bodies, and complex aircraft configurations. In many of the results presented in these earlier works, geometric constraints were satisfied either by a projection into feasible space or by posing the design space parameterization such that it automatically satisfied constraints. Furthermore, with the exception of reference 9 where the second author initially explored the use of multipoint design in conjunction with adjoint formulations, our earlier works have focused on single point design efforts. Here we demonstrate that the same methodology may be extended to treat complete configuration designs subject to multiple design points and geometric constraints. Examples are presented for both transonic and supersonic configurations ranging from wing alone designs to complex configuration designs involving wing, fuselage, nacelles and pylons.
Designing Marketing Channels for Business Products in Emerging Markets : A Comparison of Practices in Argentina and the United States Jaqueline

The Pennsylvania State University is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to programs, facilities, admission, and employment without regard to personal characteristics not related to ability, performance, or qualifications as determined by Universitypolicy or by state or federal authorities. The Pennsylvania State Universitydoes not discriminate against any person because Executive Summary In this initial and qualitative market research study, we sought to compare certain marketing practices in an emerging marketplace, Argentina, with a more established one, the United States (U.S.). We set three specific objectives for the study. First, we wanted to learn how global businesses designed and implemented marketing channels in both marketplaces. Second, we sought to discern how firms constructed and delivered their " core bundle of value " to targeted customers in each market. In particular, we wanted to determine under what conditions firms would introduce " state of the art " products and services in an emerging nation and when they would sell a " naked solution " at the lowest profitable price. Third, we hoped to discover how to conduct " academic marketing research " in an emerging country. As with most academic projects, we formally stated our objectives in the form of five propositions. To evaluate the viability of these propositions, we conducted case studies at two major international companies – SkyTel  Communications and Microsoft . We selected these firms because they are in relatively new high tech industries that are still in the process of refining their global marketing strategies. Most importantly, senior management of both firms was willing to cooperate fully with us, sharing considerable insights and market information. We are very grateful for their assistance! As part of the case study process, Profesora Pels interviewed and interacted with key managers of both firms over a period of a year. Professor Narus telephoned managers of both companies in the U.S. and met with Argentine managers in October 1999. During that month, we interviewed several managers from four other companies in Buenos Aires – AT&T, COMSAT, Johnson & Johnson, TRAVELPASS, and Xerox – to corroborate insights from our case studies. Based on our research efforts, we offer the following insights as our primary " results ". As this is a qualitative research study, we point out that our findings cannot be generalized to all industries and firms. Moreover, we cannot test our academic propositions in the scientific …
Design of a switched-capacitor-based serial DC-DC converter using clean energy power supplies

For mobile back-lighting applications, a switched-capacitor-based serial DC-DC converter using solar power supplies is proposed in this paper. Unlike conventional switched-capacitor DC-DC converters, the proposed converter pushes up the output voltage of a switched-capacitor-based circuit by the voltage of solar cells. For this reason, the proposed converter can realize not only long battery runtime but also small hardware-cost and wide input-range. Concretely, in comparison with the conventional parallel converter using 1.5× step-up SC converters, the proposed converter can achieve 20% reduction of hardware cost and 16% extension of input range. The characteristics of the proposed converter are clarified by theoretical analyses. Furthermore, SPICE simulations and experiments show the validity of circuit design, where theoretical results correspond well with simulation results.
Frequency-Selective Link Adaptation using Duo-Binary Turbo Codes in OFDM Systems

This paper is devoted to a novel frequency-selective link adaptation (LA) strategy developed in the WINNER Integrated Project, which aims to provide a new radio interface for future 4G wireless communication systems. For a single-user adaptation of modulation and code rate in a coded OFDM system, the presented bit-loading algorithm offers performance results very close to the optimum solution of the well-known Hughes-Hartogs bit and power loading algorithm, which is verified by simulations. Efficient rate-compatible punctured duo-binary turbo codes (DBTC) have been used in evaluations. The adaptation is performed in two steps: first, adaptive QAM mapping is done on subcarrier groups in frequency direction, according to a short-term channel quality information. Then, an average code rate is calculated for the entire set of used subcarriers with heterogeneous modulation alphabets. This method results in moderate system complexity while offering excellent performance.
Multi-channel integrated neural interfaces for distributed electro-chemical sensing

Distributed monitoring of electro-chemical activity facilitates understanding various neurophysiological phenomena. Single-chip neural interfaces offer a small-size, low-power, low-noise and cost-effective alternative to commercial bench-top instruments. They present an opportunity to enhance implantable microsystems functionality with multi-site simultaneous distributed recording capability. We present two integrated neural interfaces, for chemical and electrical sensing. The first integrated neural interface performs simultaneous current-mode acquisition of 16 independent channels of redox currents ranging five orders of magnitude in dynamic range over four scales down to hundreds of picoamperes. The second neural interface acquires neural field potentials in microvolts to millivolts range on a 16times16-electrode microarray in voltage mode. Each microsystem features programmable gain amplifiers, tunable band filters, configurable sample-and-hold circuits, and is ready for external analog-to-digital conversion. Side-by-side quantitative comparison of the two neural interface technologies is given
Individual power profile estimation of residential appliances using low frequency smart meter data

We propose a new Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) approach for appliances power profile/signal estimation at low sampling rate (1 s or greater). The proposed method relay on two main phases: identification of turned on appliance combination in a given time period and estimation of the active power consumption signal of each individual appliances in that combination. Unlike most existing NILM method that rely on multiple measurement at high sampling rates, appliances identification of this paper rely on a Karhunen Loéve (KL) expansion based spectral signature approach which only need active power measurements at a low sampling rate. Then the estimation of the power signal of the identified appliances is newly presented in this paper based on modified version of mean-shift clustering algorithm and Bayesian classification. The proposed method was validated by using two public databases: tracebase and REDD. The presented results demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to accurately estimate individual active power signal of turned on appliance combinations in real households.