Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Game-theoretic models of water allocation in transboundary river basins

Onderzoeksvragen zijn hoe samenwerking in waterverdeling kan worden verbeterd, en hoe internationale verdragen zo kunnen worden ontworpen dat ze niet worden verbroken. Onderliggende onderwerpen zijn de aanwezigheid van betwiste eigendomsrechten op water en het ontwerp van aantrekkelijke verdeelregels voor rivierwater. Het doel van dit proefschrift is het analyseren van waterverdeling in grensoverschrijdende rivieren met behulp van speltheoretische modellen. Dit type modellen is geschikt voor het analyseren van strategische interactie tussen landen die een rivier delen, in hun beslissingen omtrent watergebruik.
Building Topic Models to Predict Author Attributes from Twitter Messages

We use the topic modeling software package MALLET [10] to construct models of 100 topics each for the four languages in the scope of the PAN’15 Author Profiling task. The topics in these models are essentially groups of words that may be semantically related and are frequently observed near each other in a collection of training documents. To ensure we had a sufficiently large body of examples to build such models, we collected our own corpora of Twitter messages in English, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. We also use MALLET to infer the most likely distribution over the generated topics that could have produced any given tweet instance, allowing us to represent tweets as concise 100-element document-topic distribution vectors. These representations serve as inputs to a set of classifiers that make predictions for unknown authors’ age, gender, extroversion, stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.
Supporting data-driven I/O on GPUs using GPUfs

Using discrete GPUs for processing very large datasets is challenging, in particular when an algorithm exhibit unpredictable, data-driven access patterns. In this paper we investigate the utility of GPUfs, a library that provides direct access to files from GPU programs, to implement such algorithms. We analyze the system's bottlenecks, and suggest several modifications to the GPUfs design, including new concurrent hash table for the buffer cache and a highly parallel memory allocator. We also show that by implementing the workload in a warp-centric manner we can improve the performance even further. We evaluate our changes by implementing a real image processing application which creates collages from a dataset of 10 Million images. The enhanced GPUfs design improves the application performance by 5.6× on average over the original GPUfs, and outperforms both 12-core parallel CPU which uses the AVX instruction set, and a standard CUDA-based GPU implementation by up to 2.5× and 3× respectively, while significantly enhancing system programmability and simplifying the application design and implementation.
Anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction grafts: MR imaging features at long-term follow-up--correlation with functional and clinical evaluation.

PURPOSE To assess the presence of increased intrasubstance signal intensity within anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) grafts and to assess whether such signal intensity changes are correlated to clinical assessments of graft instability and patient function 4-12 years after ACL reconstruction. MATERIALS AND METHODS Ethical permission and written informed patient consent were obtained. The study was HIPAA compliant. Forty-seven patients were included and underwent 1.5-T magnetic resonance (MR) imaging of the knee that was treated surgically. Signal intensity characteristics of the ACL graft were evaluated on sagittal intermediate-weighted and sagittal and axial T2-weighted fast spin-echo MR images. The amount of signal intensity change, femoral and tibial graft tunnel position, and orientation of ACL graft in the coronal plane were assessed. Objective index of graft stability or laxity was performed with arthrometric testing, and subjective function was assessed by using International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) scoring. RESULTS Increased intrasubstance graft signal intensity was found in 70 % (33 of 47) and in 64% (30 of 47) of patients on intermediate-weighted MR images and T2-weighted MR images, respectively. When present, intrasubstance graft signal intensity changes involved less than 25% of the maximal cross-sectional area of the graft in 70% (23 of 33) of cases on intermediate-weighted acquisitions and in 70% (21 of 30) of cases on T2-weighted acquisitions. No significant association was seen between graft signal intensity changes on intermediate-weighted and T2-weighted images and IKDC score (P = .667 and .698, respectively), arthrometric testing (P = .045-.99), and time since surgery (P = .592 and .610, respectively). CONCLUSION Small amounts of increased intrasubstance graft signal intensity on intermediate- and T2-weighted images can be seen after ACL reconstruction at long-term follow-up of 4 years or longer and do not necessarily correlate with findings of joint instability or functional limitations in patients after ACL repair.
FPGA based optimization for masked AES implementation

Masking methods are popularly used to defend against power analysis attacks in embedded systems. Apart from power analysis attack, there also exists glitch attack when porting the design to gate level. In this paper, we firstly divided the existing masking methods into different types according to their functions, masking value and applications. Secondly, we compared different masked S-box hardware implementation. Finally, we proposed the masked AES encryption with 32-bit and 128-bit data path hardware implementation. The experimental results show that our proposed design takes up less hardware resources and has the ability to defend against differential power analysis(DPA) and glitch attacks.
Specific B-cell Epitope of Per a 1: A Major Allergen of American Cockroach (Periplaneta americana) and Anatomical Localization

Purpose Cockroach (CR) is a common source of indoor allergens, and Per a 1 is a major American CR (Periplaneta americana) allergen; however, several attributes of this protein remain unknown. This study identifies a novel specific B cell epitope and anatomical locations of Per a 1.0105. Methods Recombinant Per a 1.0105 (rPer a 1.0105) was used as BALB/c mouse immunogen for the production of monoclonal antibodies (MAb). The MAb specific B cell epitope was identified by determining phage mimotopic peptides and pair-wise alignment of the peptides with the rPer a 1.0105 amino acid sequence. Locations of the Per a 1.0105 in P. americana were investigated by immunohistochemical staining. Results The rPer a 1.0105 (~13 kDa) had 100%, 98% and ≥90% identity to Per a 1.0105, Per a 1.0101, and Cr-PII, respectively. The B-cell epitope of the Per a 1.0105 specific-MAb was located at residues99 QDLLLQLRDKGV110 contained in all 5 Per a 1.01 isoforms and Per a 1.02. The epitope was analogous to the Bla g 1.02 epitope; however, this B-cell epitope was not an IgE inducer. Per a 1.0105 was found in the midgut and intestinal content of American CR but not in the other organs. The amount of the Per a 1 was ~544 ℃g per gram of feces. Conclusions The novel Per a 1 B-cell epitope described in this study is a useful target for allergen quantification in samples; however, the specific MAb can be used as an allergen detection reagent. The MAb based-affinity resin can be made for allergen purification, and the so-purified protein can serve as a standard and diagnostic allergen as well as a therapeutic vaccine component. The finding that the Per a 1 is contained in the midgut and feces is useful to increase yield and purity when preparing this allergen.
Estimation of the relative amount of hemoglobin in the cup and neuroretinal rim using stereoscopic color fundus images.

PURPOSE To calculate the relative amount of hemoglobin (Hb) in sectors of the optic nerve head (ONH) from stereoscopic color fundus images using the Laguna ONhE method and compare the results with the visual field evaluation and optical coherence tomography (OCT). METHODS Healthy eyes (n = 87) and glaucoma eyes (n = 71) underwent reliable Oculus Spark perimetry and Cirrus OCT. Optical nerve head color images were acquired with a nonmydriatic stereoscopic Wx Kowa fundus camera. Laguna ONhE program was applied to these images to calculate the relative Hb amount in the cup and six sectors of the rim. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and correlations between parameters were calculated. RESULTS We did not observe any variations in the relative amount of Hb in relation to age in healthy subjects (R(2) = 0.033, P > 0.05). Maximum ROC area confidence intervals were observed for a combination between perimetric indices and the Laguna ONhE Glaucoma discriminant function (0.970-0.899) followed by rim area (0.960-0.883), and mean deviation (MD; 0.944-0.857). In glaucoma cases, relative Hb amount presented significant reduction in all rim sectors, especially 231° to 270° and 81° to 120° (P < 0.001), except in the temporal 311° to 40° (P = 0.11). Perimetry mean sensitivity by sectors was better correlated with respective Hb levels than with rim areas or the corresponding nerve fiber thickness, especially the superior and inferior sectors (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Visual field sensitivity was better correlated with Hb levels than with rim sector areas or the corresponding nerve fiber thickness. In many cases the remaining rim show low perfusion, especially in the superior and inferior sectors.
Roving Reporter

One of the themes that has emerged very strongly for me in the Roving Reports of this issue is the conduct of research into the educational uses of information and communications technologies (ICTs). When the everchanging  eld has hardly yet been traversed by research investigators , there are potential vantage points from the well-cultivated terrain of educational research and possible traps, left by gaping holes in our focus. As Robert McCormick argues from his attendance at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, there is some danger of impoverishment when theories and principles for mainstream learning are not utilised, or drawn on accurately, for analyses of ICT-based teaching; or when the in uence of the teacher is omitted from evaluations of the role of ICTs in students’ learning. These strictures evidently do not apply to the research reported on by Szücs (European Distance Education Network Conference), Kárpáti (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Project on the Quality of Learning), and Wegerif (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction Conference [EARLI]). While Szücs argues for the need to extend basic and applied research into the reciprocal in uences of ICTs and pedagogy, the papers he summarises show that this is well under way in some quarters. And it is certainly demonstrated in Kárpáti’s account of the competing hypotheses emerging from research undertaken in Hungary. These point variously to the complexity of all the interwoven components in ICT-mediated learning. Taking this complexity into account is necessary if we are to understand the change processes in which ICTs play a part, as catalyst or resource. As Rupert Wegerif reminds us, the particular contribution the EMILE group of EARLI has to make is to foreground the cultural factors in the introduction of ICTs into education and to undertake comparative
Psychometric Properties of the BASIS-ALt: Lithuanian Version

Before conducting an empirical study, researchers need to consider the psychometric properties of each instrument used. In particular, researchers who wish to translate an existing instrument into a different language must address reliability and validity issues, appropriateness of the norming group, and the methodology related to the back-forward translation procedures. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Lithuanian version of the Basic Adlerian Scales for Interpersonal Success–Adult Form (BASIS-A). The sample consisted of 1,100 Lithuanian-speaking participants who completed the Lithuanian BASIS-A Inventory, a demographic sheet, and the Big Five instrument. Construct validity was addressed through exploratory factor analysis. The internal and external reliability was supported. Correlation analysis with the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) by Gosling, Rantfrow, & Swann (2003) was conducted to test the convergent validity. The various statistical analyses supported the use of the Lithuanian version of the BASIS-A as a valid instrument for use in research on the Lithuanian population.
Relationship between maternal environment and DNA methylation patterns of estrogen receptor alpha in wild Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) nestlings: a pilot study

Abstract There is mounting evidence that, across taxa, females breeding in competitive environments tend to allocate more testosterone to their offspring prenatally and these offspring typically have more aggressive and faster‐growing phenotypes. To date, no study has determined the mechanisms mediating this maternal effect's influence on offspring phenotype. However, levels of estrogen receptor alpha (ER α) gene expression are linked to differences in early growth and aggression; thus, maternal hormones may alter gene regulation, perhaps via DNA methylation, of ER α in offspring during prenatal development. We performed a pilot study to examine natural variation in testosterone allocation to offspring through egg yolks in wild Eastern Bluebirds (Sialia sialis) in varying breeding densities and percent DNA methylation of CG dinucleotides in the ER α promoter in offspring brain regions associated with growth and behavior. We hypothesized that breeding density would be positively correlated with yolk testosterone, and prenatal exposure to maternal‐derived yolk testosterone would be associated with greater offspring growth and decreased ER α promoter methylation. Yolk testosterone concentration was positively correlated with breeding density, nestling growth rate, and percent DNA methylation of one out of five investigated CpG sites (site 3) in the diencephalon ER α promoter, but none in the telencephalon (n = 10). Percent DNA methylation of diencephalon CpG site 3 was positively correlated with growth rate. These data suggest a possible role for epigenetics in mediating the effects of the maternal environment on offspring phenotype. Experimentally examining this mechanism with a larger sample size in future studies may help elucidate a prominent way in which animals respond to their environment. Further, by determining the mechanisms that mediate maternal effects, we can begin to understand the potential for the heritability of these mechanisms and the impact that maternal effects are capable of producing at an evolutionary scale.
Parsing Swedish

CG is a reductionistic constraint rule formalism whose input is lexically analysed ambiguous text and whose output is disambiguated text. Disambiguation is carried out by constraints on lemmas and tags that discard alternative analyses on the basis of contextual information, typically coded by a linguist. The ENGCG morphosyntactic tagger was introduced in 1992 (Voutilainen & al.) and compared with a state-of-the-art statistical tagger in 1997 (Samuelsson & Voutilainen). CG was successful in word-class tagging but not adequate for full-scale parsing. A considerable effort on finite-state parsing was made by Koskenniemi, Tapanainen and Voutilainen (see their articles in Roche & Schabes, eds., 1997). A more successful effort was made by Tapanainen and Järvinen, who extended CG into a functional dependency grammar formalism and interpreter/compiler capable of introducing explicit functional dependencies and of applying large grammars efficiently.
The Mobile Scenario Presenter: integrating contextual inquiry and structured walkthroughs

Rapid advances in the capabilities of mobile computing devices provide new opportunities to overcome limitations with existing desktop-based requirements engineering tools. In particular mobile tools allow analysts to take acquisition, analysis and modelling tools to the stakeholders in their workplace, with potential benefits for requirements completeness and correctness. In this paper we describe the Mobile Scenario Presenter, an extension to the ART-SCENE environment designed to undertake scenario walkthroughs in the workplace using mobile computing devices, report some lessons learned during the design of the tool, and discuss future research directions.
On Discovering Feasible Periodic Patterns in Large Database

In real applications, there are two problems for the periodic patterns mining task: finding the frequent pattern(s) and determining their periodicity. In this paper, we propose a new method to investigate the periodic patterns form common frequent patterns. First, all the candidates patterns are generated by general frequent pattern mining algorithm. Then, for each pattern, all the time (order) attributes are extracted form its support records. Finally, all these time (order) attributes are partitioned into suitable n periods to obtain the feasible periodicity. To this end, two new parameters of per and fea are introduced to measure the periodicity and feasibility of the candidate patterns. The experiment results show that the method can be used to explore feasible periodic patterns efficiently and find some interesting patterns in business database.
Resting Energy Expenditure in Insulin Resistance Falls with Decompensation of Insulin Secretion in Obese Children

BACKGROUND Low resting energy expenditure (REE) and respiratory quotient (RQ) have been shown in adults to predispose to obesity and diabetes mellitus. AIM To correlate REE and RQ in 73 obese children and young adults (body mass index [BMI] 37 +/- 10 kg/m2) with measures of insulin secretion and resistance (IR) indices, percent carbohydrate and fat oxidation, and prolactin and leptin levels. DESIGN During a 3-day admission, REE and RQ were determined by indirect calorimetry. Blood chemistries and oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) were obtained, and intravenous glucose tolerance test (IVGTT) modified by tolbutamide was conducted after an overnight fast, permitting calculation of acute insulin response (AIR), insulin resistance (SiIVGTT), and disposition index (DI). RESULTS Patients fell into two groups according to their SiIVGTT: those with normal insulin sensitivity (NIS) and those with insulin resistance (IR). IR patients were subdivided on the basis of DI (cut-off value 0.13 min(-1)) into compensated (CIR) or decompensated (DIR) groups. CIR patients had higher RQ, REE corrected by BMI, AIR, and carbohydrate oxidation and lower fat oxidation than NIS and DIR patients. REE correlated positively with BMI, leptin, and AIR, and negatively with SiIVGTT. CONCLUSIONS Findings in the CIR and DIR groups support the correlation of REE with metabolic changes consistent with an increased risk of diabetes mellitus.
An Improved Proportional Fair Scheduling in Downlink Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access System

For the next-generation mobile communication system, enlarging the system capacity by allowing the use of non-orthogonal user multiplexing has been suggested. In a downlink multicarrier non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, single or multiple users are allocated to each subband. In NOMA scheduling, a proportional fair (PF) algorithm, where users with few allocated resources are selected on a priority basis, is generally used. However, to reduce the calculation complexity, only the fairness up to the previous transmitted frames is taken into account. Therefore, to improve the performance, we propose an improved downlink NOMA scheduling scheme that takes the fairness of the target frame into consideration, and orders the allocation subband based on the instantaneous fairness. Through this scheme, a user having little resource allocation may be assigned a good subband. Numerical results show an improved performance in the average user throughput and fairness.
The Journal of Systems and Software

Accurate classiﬁcation of software changes as corrective, adaptive and perfective can enhance software decision making activities. However, a major challenge which remains is how to automatically classify multi-category changes. This paper presents a discriminative Probability Latent Semantic Analysis (DPLSA) model with a novel initialization method which initializes the word distributions for different topics us-ing labeled samples. This method creates a one-to-one correspondence between the discovered topics and the change categories. As a result, the discriminative semantic representation of the software change messages whose largest topic entry directly corresponds to the category label of the change message which is directly used to perform single-category and multi-category change classiﬁcation. In the evaluation on ﬁve open source projects, the experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves a more accurate performance than the four baseline methods. Especially with the multi-category classiﬁcation task which improves the recall rate. Moreover, the different projects share the same vocabulary and the estimated model so that DPLSA is well applicable to cross-project software change message analysis.
Pregnancy Increases Norbuprenorphine Clearance in Mice by Induction of Hepatic Glucuronidation

Norbuprenorphine (NBUP) is the major active metabolite of buprenorphine (BUP) that is commonly used to treat opiate addiction during pregnancy; it possesses 25% of BUP’s analgesic activity and 10 times BUP’s respiratory depression effect. To optimize BUP’s dosing regimen during pregnancy with better efficacy and safety, it is important to understand how pregnancy affects NBUP disposition. In this study, we examined the pharmacokinetics of NBUP in pregnant and nonpregnant mice by administering the same amount of NBUP through retro-orbital injection. We demonstrated that the systemic clearance (CL) of NBUP in pregnant mice increased ∼2.5-fold compared with nonpregnant mice. Intrinsic CL of NBUP by glucuronidation in mouse liver microsomes from pregnant mice was ∼2 times greater than that from nonpregnant mice. Targeted liquid chromatography tandem-mass spectrometry proteomics quantification revealed that hepatic Ugt1a1 and Ugt2b1 protein levels in the same amount of total liver membrane proteins were significantly increased by ∼50% in pregnant mice versus nonpregnant mice. After scaling to the whole liver with consideration of the increase in liver protein content and liver weight, we found that the amounts of Ugt1a1, Ugt1a10, Ugt2b1, and Ugt2b35 protein in the whole liver of pregnant mice were significantly increased ∼2-fold compared with nonpregnant mice. These data suggest that the increased systemic CL of NBUP in pregnant mice is likely caused by an induction of hepatic Ugt expression and activity. The data provide a basis for further mechanistic analysis of pregnancy-induced changes in the disposition of NBUP and drugs that are predominately and extensively metabolized by Ugts.
Visual Perception, Integrative Functions and Academic Learning

Because intelligent behavior depends on the development of all psychological functions and upon their integration, remedial training, although it may focus upon one area, must take into account all areas. Specific examples are given as to how visual perceptual exercises may also be used to enhance the child's development in language, sensory-motor functions, higher thought processes, integrative abilities, and social and emotional growth. Principles of teaching, such as over-learning, directing attention, individualization, and personalization apply to ability training as well as to teaching of academics. Facilitation of transfer of initial visual perceptual training to academic skills is discussed and illustrated,