Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Image and Video Quality Assessment Using LCD: Comparisons with CRT Conditions

In this paper, the impact of display on quality assessment is addressed. Subjective quality assessment experiments have been performed on both LCD and CRT displays. Two sets of still images and two sets of moving pictures have been assessed using either an ACR or a SAMVIQ protocol. Altogether, eight experiments have been led. Results are presented and discussed, some differences are pointed out. Concerning moving pictures, these differences seem to be mainly due to LCD moving artefacts such as motion blur. LCD motion blur has been measured objectively and with psycho-physics experiments. A motion-blur metric based on the temporal characteristics of LCD can be defined. A prediction model have been then designed which predict the differences of perceived quality between CRT and LCD. This motion-blur-based model enables the estimation of perceived quality on LCD with respect to the perceived quality on CRT. Technical solutions to LCD motion blur can thus be evaluated on natural contents by this mean.
Class of quantum error-correcting codes saturating the quantum Hamming bound.

I develop methods for analyzing quantum error-correcting codes, and use these methods to construct an infinite class of codes saturating the quantum Hamming bound. These codes encode {ital k}={ital n}{minus}{ital j}{minus}2 quantum bits (qubits) in {ital n}=2{sup {ital j}} qubits and correct {ital t}=1 error. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Physical Society. }
Bioinformatics Applications Note Data and Text Mining Ess++: a C++ Objected-oriented Algorithm for Bayesian Stochastic Search Model Exploration

ESS++ is a C++ implementation of a fully Bayesian variable selection approach for single and multiple response linear regression. ESS++ works well both when the number of observations is larger than the number of predictors and in the 'large p, small n' case. In the current version, ESS++ can handle several hundred observations, thousands of predictors and a few responses simultaneously. The core engine of ESS++ for the selection of relevant predictors is based on Evolutionary Monte Carlo. Our implementation is open source, allowing community-based alterations and improvements. Availability: C++ source code and documentation including compilation instructions are available under GNU licence at
Mining opinions from messenger

Increasing Internet users has created enormous important information of users in Internet. Opinion mining is technology that extracts meaningful opinions from that huge information. Becoming a hot research area, opinion mining has been studied in many different ways. These studies are mostly based on reviews, blogs. However, this paper focuses on messenger which generates many messages containing opinions of users. As messages may contain many opinions unrelated to our purpose, our aim is to extract only related opinions and features. Our approach initially collects messages from messengers and employs localized linguistic technique to extract candidate messages, opinions and features. Thereafter, we extract features from candidate features using association rule mining. Finally we summarize extracted opinions and features.
Opportunistic Enterprises in Invention

This paper identifies goal handling processes that begin to account for the kind of processes involved in invention. We identify new goal properties and mechanisms for processing goals, as well as means of integrating opportunism, deliberation, and social interaction into goal/plan processes. We focus on enterprise goals, which extend traditional design goals and knowledge goals to address significant enterprises associated with an inventor. Enterprise goals represent “seed” goals of an expert, around which the whole knowledge of an expert gets reorganized and grows more or less opportunistically. Enterprise goals reflect the idiosyncrasy of thematic goals among experts. They constantly increase the sensitivity of individuals for particular events that might contribute to their satisfaction. Our exploration is based on a well-documented example: the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. We propose mechanisms to explain: (1) how Bell’s early thematic goals gave rise to the new goals to invent the multiple telegraph and the telephone, and (2) how the new goals interacted opportunistically. Finally we describe our implemented computational model, ALEC (Analogical Learning by Explaining Creatively), that accounts for the role of enterprise goals in
Molecular composition of an antigen-specific, Ly-1 T suppressor inducer factor. One molecule binds antigen and is I-J-; another is I-J+, does not bind antigen, and imparts an Igh-variable region-linked restriction

Immunized Ly-1+2-T cells (Ly-1 cells) make an antigen-specific soluble suppressor product (Lyl-1 TsiF) that will induce Ly-2+ cells to express suppressive activity but only if the Ly-2+ and the Ly-1 producer cell share genetic polymorphisms that are linked to the Igh locus and in particular that part where the Igh-V (or VH) is encoded. Ly-1 TsiF can be separated into entities, one binds antigen and does not express I-J determinants, and the other is I-J+ and does not bind antigen. Neither of these "subfactors" has biological activity, but a 50:50 mixture of them reconstitutes biological activity that expresses the antigen specificity of the antigen-binding molecule. Any of the three heterologous erythrocytes (antigens) studied can be used for immunization to produce the I-J+ nonantigen-binding factor, i.e., the I- J+ moiety makes no contribution to the factor's specificity. It does, however, determine the intact factor's Igh-V linked restriction. Thus, the antigen combining site of the factor is irrelevant to the factor's Igh-V restriction but crucial for its specificity. The I-J+ molecule does not bind antigen nor influence the factor's antigen specificity but expresses the Igh-V polymorphism (or anti-Igh-V polymorphism) that is required for the transmission of an inductive signal to the factor's Ly-2+ acceptor cell.
Pathogenic mutations in TULP1 responsible for retinitis pigmentosa identified in consanguineous familial cases

Purpose To identify pathogenic mutations responsible for autosomal recessive retinitis pigmentosa (arRP) in consanguineous familial cases. Methods Seven large familial cases with multiple individuals diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa were included in the study. Affected individuals in these families underwent ophthalmic examinations to document the symptoms and confirm the initial diagnosis. Blood samples were collected from all participating members, and genomic DNA was extracted. An exclusion analysis with microsatellite markers spanning the TULP1 locus on chromosome 6p was performed, and two-point logarithm of odds (LOD) scores were calculated. All coding exons along with the exon–intron boundaries of TULP1 were sequenced bidirectionally. We constructed a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) haplotype for the four familial cases harboring the K489R allele and estimated the likelihood of a founder effect. Results The ophthalmic examinations of the affected individuals in these familial cases were suggestive of RP. Exclusion analyses confirmed linkage to chromosome 6p harboring TULP1 with positive two-point LOD scores. Subsequent Sanger sequencing identified the single base pair substitution in exon14, c.1466A>G (p.K489R), in four families. Additionally, we identified a two-base deletion in exon 4, c. 286_287delGA (p.E96Gfs77*); a homozygous splice site variant in intron 14, c.1495+4A>C; and a novel missense variation in exon 15, c.1561C>T (p.P521S). All mutations segregated with the disease phenotype in the respective families and were absent in ethnically matched control chromosomes. Haplotype analysis suggested (p<10−6) that affected individuals inherited the causal mutation from a common ancestor. Conclusions Pathogenic mutations in TULP1 are responsible for the RP phenotype in seven familial cases with a common ancestral mutation responsible for the disease phenotype in four of the seven families.
Using Iddt current degradation to monitor ageing in CMOS circuits

This paper presents an alternative means for mea­suring the Iddt current degradation with circuit ageing. MOS devices for CMOS process technologies below 45nm are known to be susceptible to ageing effects such as BTI and HCI. The correlation between the supply current degradation and the propagation delay degradation is shown to provide crucial information in monitoring circuit ageing. Ageing analysis were conducted for various CMOS circuits and the ALU of OpenRisc 1200 processor using 32nm process technology. Results showed that the Iddt current degradation may vary up to −11.97% compared to delay degradation of 7.15% of the same critical path. A significant Iddt current degradation of −23.34% can be observed for the ALU circuit block. Evaluating the Iddt current degradation in a wider perspective provides not only a better percentage change, it also provides a much bigger absolute current.
Assessment of the Effect of Organizational Support and Investment in Employee Development on Affective Commitment

The purpose of this research is to identify factors and conditions that improve the affective commitment of employees so as to increase the chances of organizations to retain their employees. This research took the form of a multiple regression analysis and assessed the ability of Perceived Investment in Employee Development and Perceived Organizational Support to predict Affective Commitment controlling nationality. The Perceived Investment in Employee Development questionnaire, Perceived Organizational Support assessment tool, and Affective Commitment survey have been utilized as instruments to collect data and a nonprobability purposive sampling technique involving 250 full-time employees in the service industry in Shanghai was carried out. It was observed that Perceived Investment in Employee Development and Perceived Organizational Support are significant predictors of Affective Commitment among various categories of employees that were distinguished in this study. It was found that employees welcome developmental programs where Perceived Organizational Support is high. It was suggested that endeavors to retain employees in China should not just implement observations made in Western countries but consider the socio-economic realties of the country so as to be effective. More light needs to be thrown on the predictors of Affective Commitment in China and this research recommended areas that require further investigations.
AndroSimilar: robust statistical feature signature for Android malware detection

Android Smartphone popularity has increased malware threats forcing security researchers and AntiVirus (AV) industry to carve out smart methods to defend Smartphone against malicious apps. Robust signature based solutions to mitigate threats become necessary to protect the Smartphone and confidential user data. In this paper we present AndroSimilar, a robust approach which generates signature by extracting statistically improbable features, to detect malicious Android apps. Proposed method is effective against code obfuscation and repackaging, widely used techniques to evade AV signature and to propagate unseen variants of known malware. AndroSimilar is a syntactic foot-printing mechanism that finds regions of statistical similarity with known malware to detect those unknown, zero day samples. Syntactic file similarity of whole file is considered instead of just opcodes for faster detection compared to known fuzzy hashing approaches. Results demonstrate robust detection of variants of known malware families. Proposed approach can be refined to deploy as Smartphone AV.
Perceptibility and utility of sticky targets

Researchers have suggested that dynamically increasing control-to-display (CD) gain can assist in targeting, by increasing the effective width of targets in motor space, which makes targets feel sticky. Although this method has been shown to be effective, there are several unexplored issues that could affect its use in real-world interfaces. One of these is perceptibility: in particular, the difference between the perceptibility and the utility of the technique. If CD gain changes are highly noticeable even at levels that are not helpful, the technique could be seen as overly intrusive. If CD gain changes are more useful than noticeable, however, the technique could be applied more widely. To explore this issue, we carried out a study that tested both the utility and the perceptibility of CD gain in single-target selection tasks. We found that although even small amounts of gain reduction significantly improved targeting times, participants did not consistently notice the effect until the gain difference was much higher. Our results provide new understanding of how changes in CD gain are experienced by users, and provide initial evidence to suggest that sticky targets can benefit users without a high perceptual cost.
Four Projection Streams from Primate V1 to the Cytochrome Oxidase Stripes of V2

In the primate visual system, areas V1 and V2 distribute information they receive from the retina to all higher cortical areas, sorting this information into dorsal and ventral streams. Therefore, knowledge of the organization of projections between V1 and V2 is crucial to understand how the cortex processes visual information. In primates, parallel output pathways from V1 project to distinct V2 stripes. The traditional tripartite division of V1-to-V2 projections was recently replaced by a bipartite scheme, in which thin stripes receive V1 inputs from blob columns, and thick and pale stripes receive common input from interblob columns. Here, we demonstrate that thick and pale stripes, instead, receive spatially segregated V1 inputs and that the interblob is partitioned into two compartments: the middle of the interblob projecting to pale stripes and the blob/interblob border region projecting to thick stripes. Double-labeling experiments further demonstrate that V1 cells project to either thick or pale stripes, but rarely to both. We also find laminar specialization of V1 outputs, with layer 4B contributing projections mainly to thick stripes, and no projections to one set of pale stripes. These laminar differences suggest different contribution of magno, parvo, and konio inputs to each V1 output pathway. These results provide a new foundation for parallel processing models of the visual system by demonstrating four V1-to-V2 pathways: blob columns-to-thin stripes, blob/interblob border columns-to-thick stripes, interblob columns-to-palelateral stripes, layer 2/3–4A interblobs-to-palemedial stripes.
Optimizing Hadoop Framework for Solid State Drives

Solid state drives (SSDs) have been widely used in Hadoop clusters ever since their introduction to the big data industry. However, the current Hadoop framework is not optimized to take full advantage of SSDs. In this paper, we introduce architectural improvements in the core Hadoop components to fully exploit the performance benefits of SSDs for data-and compute-intensive workloads. The improved architecture features: a simplified data handling algorithm that utilizes SSD's high random IOPS to store and shuffle the map output data, an accurate pre-read model for HDFS based on libaio to reduce read latency and improve request parallelism, a record size based reduce scheduler to overcome the data skew problem in the reduce phase, and a new block placement policy of HDFS based on the disk wear information to manage SSDs' lifetime. The simplified map output collector and the pre-read model of HDFS show 30% and 18% of performance improvement with Terasort and DFSIO benchmarks, respectively. The modified reduce scheduler shows 12% faster execution time with a real MapReduce application. To extend these results, we affirm that the modified structure also achieves 21% performance improvement on Samsung's MicroBrick-based hyperscale system.
An XMM-Newton view of the X-ray flat radio-quiet quasar PG 1416-129

Aims. The radio-quiet quasar PG 1416-129 ($z=0.129$) exhibits atypical optical and X-ray properties. Between 1990 and 2000, in response to its optical continuum decrease, the “classical” broad component of H β almost completely disappeared, with a factor of 10 decrease in the line flux. In addition, the width of the broad component of the H β line decreased significantly from 4000 km s -1 to 1450 km s -1 . In the X-ray band, this object was observed by Ginga in 1988 to have the hardest quasar photon index, with $\Gamma=1.1 \pm 0.1$. We present an XMM-Newton /EPIC observation of PG 1416-129 performed in July 2004. Methods. We analyze the time-averaged pn spectrum of this quasar, as well as perform time-resolved spectroscopy. Results. We find that during the present XMM-Newton observation, PG 1416-129 still has a rather hard photon index, both in the soft (0.2–2 keV) and hard (2–12 keV) energy ranges, compared to radio-quiet quasars (BLS1 and NLS1) but compatible with the photon index value found for radio-loud quasars. This object also shows long-term luminosity variability over 16 years by a factor of three with a variation of photon index from ~1.2 to ~1.8. In the soft energy band (0.2–2 keV), we found a very weak soft X-ray excess compared to other RQ quasars. The whole time averaged spectrum is fit very well either by X-ray ionized reflection from the accretion disk surface, by a warm absorber-emitter plus power-law, or by a smeared absorption/emission from a relativistic outflow. While no constant narrow Fe K line at 6.4 keV is observed, we find the possible presence of two non-simultaneous transient iron lines: a redshifted narrow iron line at about 5.5 keV (96.4% confidence level according to multi-trial Monte-Carlo simulations) at the beginning of this observation and the appearance of a line at 6.3–6.4 keV (99.1% c.l.) at the end of the observation. These variable lines could be generated by discrete hot-spots on the accretion disk surface.
Enhanced fingerprinting in WLAN-based indoor positioning using hybrid search techniques

Selective matching between the received signal strength (RSS) measured by the target and the pre-stored fingerprints can improve fingerprinting algorithms by reducing their computational requirements. This is achieved by minimizing the number of search points needed to find the best match between the target RSS and the pre-stored fingerprints. Therefore, in this paper we propose a hybrid solution of clustering and fast search techniques to reduce the computational requirements of fingerprinting. The performance of the proposed method is quantified by evaluating the positioning accuracy, precision and the required number of search points. Our results show that the proposed hybrid technique can drastically reduce the number of search points, at a tolerable reduction of accuracy and precision.
Analyzing Knowledge Management Systems: A Veritistic Approach

Knowledge management systems (KMS) are increasingly becoming popular and important in managing organizational knowledge. This motivates a closer inspection of the degree of usability of various types of KMS. This paper is an analysis of KMS from a philosophical angle: with the help of veritistic social epistemology we analyze which KMS are likely to be used more in comparison to others. Veritistic social epistemology is oriented towards truth determination; it seeks to evaluate actual and prospective multi-person practices in terms of their tendency to produce true beliefs (versus false beliefs or no belief) in their users. We distinguish between KMS that manage structured knowledge and those that manage unstructured knowledge. It is argued that structured knowledge is more credible to the users than unstructured knowledge and that, because of this, KMS that manage structured knowledge bring more veritistic gains than those that manage unstructured knowledge.
Translucent Shadow Maps

Shadow maps are a very efficient means to add shadows to arbitrary scenes. In this paper, we introduce Translucent Shadow Maps, an extension to shadow maps which allows very efficient rendering of sub-surface scattering. Translucent Shadow Maps contain depth and incident light information. Sub-surface scattering is computed on-the-fly during rendering by filtering the shadow map neighborhood. This filtering is done efficiently using a hierarchical approach. We describe optimizations for an implementation of Translucent Shadow Maps on contemporary graphics hardware, that can render complex translucent objects with varying light and material properties in real-time.
A dual‐level state‐specific time‐dependent density‐functional theory

A highly efficient new algorithm for time‐dependent density‐functional theory (TDDFT) calculations is presented. In this algorithm, a dual‐level approach to speed up DFT calculations (Nakajima and Hirao, J Chem Phys 2006, 124, 184108) is combined with a state‐specific (SS) algorithm for TDDFT (Chiba et al., Chem Phys Lett 2006, 420, 391). The dual‐level SS‐TDDFT algorithm was applied to excitation energy calculations of typical small molecules, the Q bands of the chlorophyll A molecule, the charge‐transfer energy of the zincbacteriochlorin–bacteriochlorin model system, and the lowest‐lying excitation of the circumcoronene molecule. As a result, it was found that the dual‐level SS‐TDDFT gave correct excitation energies with errors of 0.2–0.3 eV from the standard TDDFT approach, with much lower CPU times for various types of excitation energies of large‐scale molecules. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2008
Sensitivity Analysis in Large-Scale of Metabolic Network of E. Coli

In this work, we have performed sensitivity analysis on a large-scale dynamic metabolic network through MATLAB program. Time profile for sensitivity indices have been calculated for each kinetic parameters, based on percentage. The sensitivity analysis has been carried out on dynamic model for Glycolysis, Pentose Phosphate, TCA cycle, Gluconeogenesis, Glycoxylate pathways and Acetate formation of E. coli. The model implicates twenty four dynamic mass balance equations for extracellular glucose and intracellular, thirty kinetic rate expressions represent concentration profiles for whole a model. Each parameter has been scald one by one into 20% for the steady state condition. The former analysis has allowed identification of eight kinetic parameters as the most effective's ones on the complex metabolic network under study.