Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ontological Help for a Lexical Semantics of Basic English

This paper began as an exercise to see how lexicon and ontology might combine to help underpin human-agent communication, using Ogdens Basic English as a case study [11]. It became an attempt to clarify, through exempliﬁcation in Basic English, the relationships between ontology, lexical semantics, and common sense reasoning, reporting some tentative steps towards an executable semantics.
Recent progress in SDM amplifiers

Space division multiplexing (SDM) utilizing few-mode fibers or multicore fibers supporting multiple spatial channels, is currently under intense investigation as an efficient approach to overcome the current capacity limit of high-speed long-haul transmission systems based on single mode optical fibers. In order to realize the potential energy and cost savings offered by SDM systems, the individual spatial channels should be simultaneously multiplexed, transmitted, amplified and switched with associated SDM components and subsystems. In this paper, recent progress on the implementation of various SDM amplifiers and its related SDM components is presented.
An Antagonist IL-15/Fc Protein Prevents Costimulation Blockade-Resistant Rejection1

IL-15 is a powerful T cell growth factor (TCGF) with particular importance for the maintenance of CD8+ T cells. Because costimulation blockade does not result in universal tolerance, we hypothesized that “escape” from costimulation blockade might represent a CD8+ and IL-15/IL-15R+-dependent process. For this analysis, we have used an IL-15 mutant/Fcγ2a protein, a potentially cytolytic protein that is also a high-affinity receptor site specific antagonist for the IL-15Rα receptor protein, as a therapeutic agent. The IL-15-related fusion protein was used as monotherapy or in combination with CTLA4/Fc in murine islet allograft models. As monotherapies, CTLA4/Fc and an IL-15 mutant/Fcγ2a were comparably effective in a semiallogeneic model system, and combined treatment with IL-15 mutant/Fcγ2a plus CTLA4/Fc produced universal permanent engraftment. In a fully MHC-mismatched strain combination known to be refractory to costimulation blockade treatment, combined treatment with both fusion proteins proved to be highly effective; >70% of recipients were tolerized. The analysis revealed that the IL-15 mutant/Fc treatment confers partial protection from both CD4+ and CD8+ T cell graft infiltration. In rejections occurring despite CTLA4/Fc treatment, concomitant treatment with the IL-15 mutant/Fcγ2a protein blocked a CD8+ T cell-dominated rejection processes. This protection was linked to a blunted proliferative response of alloreactive T cells as well silencing of CTL-related gene expression events. Hence, we have demonstrated that targeting the IL-15/IL-15R pathway represents a new and potent strategy to prevent costimulation blockade-resistant CD8+ T cell-driven rejection.
Adult sex ratio variation: implications for breeding system evolution

Adult sex ratio (ASR) exhibits immense variation in nature, although neither the causes nor the implications of this variation are fully understood. According to theory, the ASR is expected to influence sex roles and breeding systems, as the rarer sex in the population has more potential partners to mate with than the more common sex. Changes in mate choice, mating systems and parental care suggest that the ASR does influence breeding behaviour, although there is a need for more tests, especially experimental ones. In the context of breeding system evolution, the focus is currently on operational sex ratios (OSRs). We argue that the ASR plays a role of similar importance and urge researchers to study the ASR and the OSR side by side. Finally, we plead for a dynamic view of breeding system evolution with feedbacks between mating, parenting, OSR and ASR on both ecological and evolutionary time scales.
"You May Also Like" Results in Relational Databases

In this position paper, we consider extending relational database systems with a recommendation functionality. In particular, we propose that, along with the results of each query, the user gets additional recommended results that we call “You May Also Like” or Ymal results. We discuss a suite of different approaches to computing Ymal results and exploit one that uses only the database content and the query results. Some preliminary evaluation results are also provided.
Improved Captcha Method

CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to differentiate between the bots (automated program) and the human. The main motive behind using the CAPTCHA is to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. The CAPTCHA basically uses images in distorted form that is difficult to read by the bots but they can be read by the human being easily. The websites which provide free services to the users some anonymous user can make false enrollment on the websites with the help of automated computer program. CAPTCAHS are used to prevent the false enrollment. One of the CAPTCHA methods is Collage CAPTCHA. In this method some shapes are shown with distortion and the user is asked to choose a specific object In this paper we increase the resistance of this method to attacks. For this purpose, we show some objects on the left of the screen and some of the objects on the right side of the screen which contain the name corresponding to the images shown on the left side of the screen. Now we ask the user to choose object on the left side and a specific image (containing word) on the right side of the screen. The image on the right side of the screen contains the name of the image. After this user is asked to enter the name of the image in a text box shown below the two images. The user will be passed the test if he chooses the two similar objects correctly and then he/she has entered the name of the image correctly in the text box. In this method because the computer program should also recognize the similar object on the right side and need to enter the name of the image in text box ,the possibility of passing the test by computer is more reduced.
EMOTIONS AND THEIR IMPACT ON CONSUMER COMMITMENT TO A WEBSITE : A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

An increasing number of consumers use the Web to buy products and services. Five years ago, the amount of retail products purchased online in the U.S.A. represented less than 1% of all purchases; today, this percentage is 7% and it is expected to top 8% by 2014 [13]. According to ecommerce experts, the increase is due to the growing number of Web managers who have taken measures not only to facilitate browsing and broaden the spectrum of available information but also to reduce the negative perceptions of transaction security and privacy [8]. Nevertheless, it is widely agreed that the rate of e-shopping is still low and that other incentives should be investigated.
Trauma: Contemporary Directions in Theory, Practice, and Research

Overview Cognitive-Behavioral Theory Psychoanalytic Theory (Part I) Psychoanalytic Theory (Part II) Attachment Theory, Infant Research, and Neurobiology Art Therapy with Traumatically Bereaved Children Military Bereavement and Combat Trauma The Trauma of Bullying Experiences Traumas of Development in the Gay Male Cultural and Historical Trauma Among Native Americans The Effects of Trauma Treatment on the Therapist
Reactivity to Stress: When Does a History of Medical Adversity Foster Resilience Versus Vulnerability?

Young adults with (or without) a history of medical or physical disorders (MPDs) were exposed to repeated laboratory stress. The effects of MPD status on habituation (as measured by changing levels of cortisol) were found to be moderated by the extent to which respondents reported “attachment feelings” in their relationships (as measured by the Social Provisions Scale). Students in the MPD group who reported attachment feelings showed (a) cortisol increases during their first exposure to a laboratory stressor; and (b) cortisol decreases during a second exposure to the same stressor 1 week later. No equivalent benefit was found for students who lacked this medical history. Findings suggest the extent to which medical adversity—under the right interpersonal circumstances—promotes resilience.
Neuroanatomical differences in brain areas implicated in perceptual and other core features of autism revealed by cortical thickness analysis and voxel‐based morphometry

Autism spectrum disorder is a complex neurodevelopmental variant thought to affect 1 in 166 [Fombonne ( 2003 ): J Autism Dev Disord 33:365–382]. Individuals with autism demonstrate atypical social interaction, communication, and repetitive behaviors, but can also present enhanced abilities, particularly in auditory and visual perception and nonverbal reasoning. Structural brain differences have been reported in autism, in terms of increased total brain volume (particularly in young children with autism), and regional gray/white matter differences in both adults and children with autism, but the reports are inconsistent [Amaral et al. (2008): Trends Neurosci 31:137–145]. These inconsistencies may be due to differences in diagnostic/inclusion criteria, and age and Intelligence Quotient of participants. Here, for the first time, we used two complementary magnetic resonance imaging techniques, cortical thickness analyses, and voxel‐based morphometry (VBM), to investigate the neuroanatomical differences between a homogenous group of young adults with autism of average intelligence but delayed or atypical language development (often referred to as “high‐functioning autism”), relative to a closely matched group of typically developing controls. The cortical thickness and VBM techniques both revealed regional structural brain differences (mostly in terms of gray matter increases) in brain areas implicated in social cognition, communication, and repetitive behaviors, and thus in each of the core atypical features of autism. Gray matter increases were also found in auditory and visual primary and associative perceptual areas. We interpret these results as the first structural brain correlates of atypical auditory and visual perception in autism, in support of the enhanced perceptual functioning model [Mottron et al. (2006): J Autism Dev Disord 36:27–43]. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Turning the postal system into a generic digital communication mechanism

The phenomenon that rural residents and people with low incomes lag behind in Internet access is known as the "digital divide. " This problem is particularly acute in developing countries, where most of the world's population lives. Bridging this digital divide, especially by attempting to increase the accessibility of broadband connectivity, can be challenging. The improvement of wide-area connectivity is constrained by factors such as how quickly we can dig ditches to bury fibers in the ground; and the cost of furnishing "last-mile" wiring can be prohibitively high.In this paper, we explore the use of digital storage media transported by the postal system as a general digital communication mechanism. While some companies have used the postal system to deliver software and movies, none of them has turned the postal system into a truly generic digital communication medium supporting a wide variety of applications. We call such a generic system a Postmanet. Compared to traditional wide-area connectivity options, the Postmanet has several important advantages, including wide global reach, great bandwidth potential and low cost.Manually preparing mobile storage devices for shipment may appear deceptively simple, but with many applications, communicating parties and messages, manual management becomes infeasible, and systems support at several levels becomes necessary. We explore the simultaneous exploitation of the Internet and the Postmanet, so we can combine their latency and bandwidth advantages to enable sophisticated bandwidth-intensive applications.
Creative Teaching and Learning

This book provides a comprehensive account of teaching for creativity. It is based on the views of over one thousand teachers and further education lecturers in the United Kingdom (working in a wide range of subject areas with young people from 5 to 18x years) about creativity development and its relation to everyday classroom life. It is set in the context of the most relevant research on which the author, a qualified teacher, lecturer and psychologist, offers her individual perspective. Suggestions for future educational practice and creativity research are offered. The book explores what is involved in creativity, how this can be assessed, and how to recognize creative behaviour and understand the creative process. The teachers' and lecturers' views on every aspect of developing creativity are included, together with practical guidelines for developing appropriate problem-solving skills. Attention is drawn to the landmark work of key creativity development practitioners. The author argues that creativity and innovation need to be taken as seriously in education as in successful modern organizations, to enable young people to deal effectively with the accelerating rate of technological, social and economic change.
A Genetic Algorithm Approach for TOC-based Supply Chain Coordination

A supply chain is a network of retailers, distributors, manufacturers, and suppliers cooperating to satisfy customers demands. In traditional business environments, each business tries to minimize its costs based on its own cost structure, regardless of other SC participants. However, most decisions made by each SC members are based on the profitability of their own. In this paper, we consider a two-level supply chain in which retailer orders exceeds the suppliers capacity. To balance supply and demand, we proposed a coordination mechanism based on Theory of Constraints (TOC) in face of meeting peak demand in certain period for the whole system, and Genetic algorithm(GA) has been selected in solving the optimal model. Furthermore, a numerical example has been implemented to demonstrate the efficiency of our method.
Using targeted paraphrasing and monolingual crowdsourcing to improve translation

Targeted paraphrasing is a new approach to the problem of obtaining cost-effective, reasonable quality translation, which makes use of simple and inexpensive human computations by monolingual speakers in combination with machine translation. The key insight behind the process is that it is possible to spot likely translation errors with only monolingual knowledge of the target language, and it is possible to generate alternative ways to say the same thing (i.e., paraphrases) with only monolingual knowledge of the source language. Formal evaluation demonstrates that this approach can yield substantial improvements in translation quality, and the idea has been integrated into a broader framework for monolingual collaborative translation that produces fully accurate, fully fluent translations for a majority of sentences in a real-world translation task, with no involvement of human bilingual speakers.
Analysis and efficient simulation of queueing models of telecommunications systems

In modern packet-switched telecommunication systems, information (such as email, sound, pictures) is transported in the form of small packets (or cells) of data through a network of links and routers. The Quality of Service provided by such a network can suffer from phenomena such as loss of packets (due to buffer overflow) and excessive delays. These aspects of the system are adequately described by queueing models, so the study of such models is of great relevance for designing systems such that they provide the required QoS. This thesis contributes methods for the efficient estimation of several loss probabilities in various queueing models of communications systems. The focus is on rare-event simulation using importance sampling, but some analytical, asymptotic and numerical results are also provided.
Capturing Missing Tuples and Missing Values

Databases in real life are often neither entirely closed-world nor entirely open-world. Databases in an enterprise are typically partially closed, in which a part of the data is constrained by master data that contains complete information about the enterprise in certain aspects. It has been shown that, despite missing tuples, such a database may turn out to have complete information for answering a query. This article studies partially closed databases from which both tuples and attribute values may be missing. We specify such a database in terms of conditional tables constrained by master data, referred to as c-instances. We first propose three models to characterize whether a c-instance T is complete for a query Q relative to master data. That is, depending on how missing values in T are instantiated, the answer to Q in T remains unchanged when new tuples are added. We then investigate three problems, to determine (a) whether a given c-instance is complete for a query Q, (b) whether there exists a c-instance that is complete for Q relative to master data available, and (c) whether a c-instance is a minimal-size database that is complete for Q. We establish matching lower and upper bounds on these problems for queries expressed in a variety of languages in each of the three models for specifying relative completeness.
Untangling the fear of crime

Abstract The fear of crime is something that we – academics, policy makers and practitioners (not to mention the public) – are well and truly stuck with. Many academics have come to regret the fear of crime becoming one of the key organising concepts of research (Lee, 2008). Some have even called for it to be abandoned as a body of inquiry (and since the heady days of the 1980s and 1990s, academic research into the fear of crime in the UK has waned considerably). Policy makers also find the topic an irritant: it raises the emotional temperature of debates about criminal justice policies; and all too often, it leads to increasingly punitive but no more effective policies. For practitioners the fear of crime draws attention away from the very tangible reductions in crime which the UK has enjoyed since the mid to late 1990s and appears at once both a pressing concern and almost impossible to do very much about.
BlindDate: A Neighbor Discovery Protocol

Many wireless applications urgently demand an efficient neighbor discovery protocol to build up a bridge connecting users to service providers or to other users. However, due to intrinsic constraints of wireless devices, e.g., limited energy and error of clock synchronization, there is still absence of effective and efficient neighbor discovery protocols in the literature. In this work, we propose neighbor discovery protocols for the following two problems. We first study Asynchronous Symmetry Neighbor Discovery problem, in which potential neighbor devices with asynchronous time clock but the same duty cycle aim to find each other. We further propose an efficient protocol (using Bouncing strategy) named Blind Date with guaranteed worst-case performance 9/10(1 + δ)2x2 where δ is a small fraction of the length of time slot unit and 1/x is the duty cycle. Next, we extend this design to address Asynchronous Asymmetry Neighbor Discovery problem, in which both time clock and the duty cycles of potential neighbors are considered to be heterogeneous. We conduct extensive simulations to examine the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed protocols. Results show that Blind Date protocol outperforms existing approaches in average-case. We conclude that, compared with known protocols, Blind Date achieves a better worst-case discovery latency bound (e.g., 10% performance gain comparing with Searchlight [1]).
The Growth Effects of Current Account Reversals: The Role of Macroeconomic Policies

This paper assesses empirically whether or not current account reversals have permanent growth effects and the role of macroeconomic policies in this process. The methodology developed in de Mello, Padoan and Rousova (2010) to identify a chronology of current account reversals is applied to the real growth rate of GDP of more than 100 countries during the period 1971-2007. We use ordered probit models to show that current account reversals associated with improvements in external positions increase the probability of a sustained rise in the rate of growth of GDP (growth acceleration) beyond those generated by real exchange rate effects. Current account reversals associated with a deterioration of external positions make impending GDP accelerations less likely. The macroeconomic policy stance prevailing at the time of current account reversals also matters. High budget deficits thwart the positive effect of a current account improvement on the probability of a growth acceleration. By contrast, a monetary tightening in association with a current account deterioration makes an impending growth acceleration more likely. This paper improves our understanding of how macroeconomic policies help countries maximise the growth payoff of current account improvements. Effet sur la croissance des inversions de balance courante : le role des politiques macroeconomiques Ce document examine de maniere empirique si les inversions de balance courante ont ou non des effets permanents sur la croissance et quel role les politiques macroeconomiques jouent dans ce processus. La methodologie developpee par de Mello, Padoan et Rousova (2010) pour determiner une chronologie des inversions de balance courante est appliquee aux taux de croissance reelle du PIB de plus de 100 pays sur la periode 1971-2007. Des modeles probit sont utilises pour montrer que les inversions de balance courante associees a des ameliorations des positions exterieures augmentent la probabilite d’une hausse soutenue du taux de croissance du PIB (acceleration de la croissance). Des inversions de balance courante associees a une degradation des positions exterieures rendent moins probable une acceleration imminente du PIB. L’orientation des politiques macroeconomiques au moment des inversions est egalement importante. Des deficits budgetaires eleves neutralisent l’effet positif d’un redressement de la balance courante sur la probabilite d’une acceleration de la croissance. A l’inverse, un durcissement monetaire associe a une degradation de la balance courante rend plus probable une acceleration imminente de la croissance. Cette etude permet de mieux comprendre comment les politiques macroeconomiques peuvent aider les pays a maximiser les gains de croissance decoulant d’ameliorations de la balance courante.
Policy instruments for sustainability-oriented organizational learning

The concept of sustainable development implies the need for organizational learning in business corporations to find innovative solutions. In this context, the paper analyzes the requirements and options for environmental policy to induce sustainability-related learning processes in corporations. It discusses the impacts of different policy instruments on these processes. Initially, the particular challenges of organizational learning for sustainability are being sketched out. Drawing on organizational learning studies, a subsequent section of the paper addresses fundamental elements and drivers for organizational learning processes on different levels in business corporations. The particular nodes where public policy can influence corporate learning processes are the central focus of these considerations. On this basis, we examine existing policy instruments frequently used in environmental policy with regard to their potential to foster learning processes towards sustainability. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.