Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Event Classification and Relationship Labeling in Affiliation Networks

Many domains are best described as an affiliation network in which there are entities such as actors, events and organizations linked together in a variety of relationships. Relational classification in these domains requires the collective classification of both entities and relationships. In this paper, we investigate the use of relational Markov networks (RMN) for relational classification in affiliation networks. We study two tasks, event classification and relationship labeling, and discuss general issues in constructing an appropriate RMN from an affiliation network. We evaluate our methods on a novel dataset describing terrorist affiliation networks which includes data about actors (terrorists), events (terrorist attacks) and organizations (terrorist organizations). Our results highlight several important issues concerning the effectiveness of relational classification and our experiments show that the relational structure significantly helps relationship labeling.
Activated and inactivated PPARs-γ modulate experimentally induced colitis in rats

Summary Background This study sought to define the mechanism by which PPAR-γ ligands affect the course of experimentally induced colitis in rats. Material/Methods Inflammation was induced in Wistar rats by a single rectal administration of 2,4,6,-trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS). The antagonist of PPARγ antagonist, bisphenol A diglycidyl ether (BADGE), was administrated intraperitoneally 120 mg/kg 4 times every other day. Rosiglitazone 8 mg/kg was administrated by gastric tube 4 times. Body weight was measured daily. After killing, the large intestinal tissue was weighed and collected for histopathologic and immunoenzymatic tests. Levels of IL-6, IL-10, and myeloperoxidase (MPO) were determined in serum and in intestinal homogenates. Results Rats receiving rosiglitazone had higher body weight, whereas large intestine weight/length ratio was lower; histology showed fewer inflammatory markers. Rats receiving TNBS and TNBS along with BADGE had more intensive inflammatory changes. Rosiglitazone alone decreased expression of IL-6; used with TNBS it decreased expression of MPO in intestinal tissue, yet did not increase the expression of IL-10. Decreased levels of MPO indicate reduced neutrophil-dependent immune response. The antagonist of PPAR-γ increased IL-6 in serum and decreased IL-10 in intestinal homogenates. Bisphenol A diglycidyl ether administrated to healthy animals increases serum IL-6 levels. Conclusions Rosiglitazone inhibits experimental inflammation; administration of its selective antagonist abolishes this protective influence. Rosiglitazone inhibits expression of proinflammatory IL-6 and does not affect IL-10. Agonists of PPARs-γ are possibilities for inflammatory bowel disease prevention. Exogenous substances blocking PPARs-γ may contribute to development or relapse of nonspecific inflammatory bowel diseases.
Effect of the microstructure closed pore content on the acoustic behavior of polyurethane foams

The present paper proposes to investigate the links between the microstructure of polyurethane foams and their sound absorbing efficiency, and more specifically the effect of membranes closing the cells. This study is based on the complete characterization of 15 polyurethane foam with various cell sizes and reticulation rates (i.e., open pore content): (i) characterization of the microstructure properties (cell size Cs, strut thickness t, reticulation rate Rw…) from SEM pictures, (ii) characterization of nonacoustic parameters (porosity Φ, airflow resistivity σ, tortuosity α∞…) from direct and indirect methods. Existing analytical links between microstructure properties and nonacoustic parameters are first applied to fully reticulated materials. Then, they are improved empirically to account for the presence of the closed pore content. The proposed expressions associated to the Johnson-Champoux-Allard porous model allow a good estimation of the sound absorbing behavior of all polyurethane foams, fully ret.
Discussion of Determinants of Agricultural and Mineral Commodity Prices

It is a pleasure to be invited to discuss this rich paper by Jeffrey Frankel and Andrew Rose. After the events of the past few years, with a range of commodity prices exhibiting great volatility, it is not hard to motivate Frankel and Rose’s choice of topic, seen from either a longor medium-term perspective. The authors use annual data, mainly in a panel context, to examine the relationship between real commodity prices and a number of macro and microeconomic series. What they are trying to do, I believe, is to adopt an eclectic approach that combines a classic model of short-run dynamics (articulated in, for example, Frankel 1986) with other considerations that may affect both shortand medium-term movements. Meanwhile, the very long run is relegated to essentially un-modelled trends. The empirical analysis is conducted using a variety of methods that, it is argued, allow us to conclude that the results are relatively robust.
Propofol Selectively Attenuates Endothelium-dependent Pulmonary Vasodilation in Chronically Instrumented Dogs

Background The objective was to investigate the effects of propofol anesthesia on the pulmonary vascular response to endothelium-dependent and -independent vasodilators, compared with the responses measured in the conscious state. Methods Twenty-six conditioned, male, mongrel dogs were instrumented long-term to measure the left pulmonary vascular pressure–flow relation. Pressure–flow plots were measured on separate days in conscious and propofol-anesthetized (5.0 mg/kg plus 0.5 mg · kg−1 · min−1 intravenously) dogs at baseline, after preconstriction with the thromboxane mimetic U46619, and during the cumulative intravenous administration of endothelium-dependent (acetylcholine and bradykinin) and -independent (proline–nitric oxide) vasodilators. Results Propofol had no effect on the baseline pressure–flow relation compared with the conscious state. A lower (P < 0.05) dose of U46619 was necessary to achieve the same degree of preconstriction during propofol anesthesia. The pulmonary vasodilator responses to bradykinin and proline–nitric oxide were similar in the conscious and propofol-anesthetized states. In contrast, the pulmonary vasodilator response to acetylcholine was markedly attenuated (P < 0.01) during propofol anesthesia. The intralipid vehicle for propofol had no effect on the acetylcholine dose–response relation. Conclusion These results suggest that propofol causes a specific defect in the signal transduction pathway for acetylcholine-induced pulmonary vasodilation. This defect involves the endothelial and not the vascular smooth muscle component of the response.
Di-(2-ethylhexyl) Phthalate-Induced Hippocampus-Derived Neural Stem Cells Proliferation

The brain and spinal cord have a limited capacity for self-repair under damaged conditions. One of the best options to overcome these limitations involves the use of phytochemicals as potential therapeutic agents. In this study, we have aimed to investigate the effects of di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) on hippocampus-derived neural stem cells (NSCs) proliferation to search phytochemical candidates for possible treatment of neurological diseases using endogenous capacity. In this experimental study, neonatal rat hippocampus-derived NSCs were cultured and treated with various concentrations of DEHP (0, 100, 200, 400 and 600 µM) and Cirsium vulgare (C. vulgare) hydroethanolic extract (0, 200, 400, 600, 800 and 1000 µg/ml) for 48 hours under in vitro conditions. Cell proliferation rates and quantitative Sox2 gene expression were evaluated using MTT assay and real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). We observed the highest average growth rate in the 400 µM DEHP and 800 µg/ml C. vulgare extract treated groups. Sox2 expression in the DEHP-treated NSCs significantly increased compared to the control group. Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/ MS) results demonstrated that the active ingredients that naturally occurred in the C. vulgare hydroethanolic extract were 2-ethyl-1-hexanamine, n-heptacosane, 1-cyclopentanecarboxylic acid, 1-heptadecanamine, 2,6-octadien-1-ol,2,6,10,14,18,22-tetracosahexaene, and DEHP. DEHP profoundly stimulated NSCs proliferation through Sox2 gene overexpression. These results provide and opportunity for further use of the C. vulgure phytochemicals for prevention and/or treatment of neurological diseases via phytochemical mediated-proliferation of endogenous adult NSCs.
Assessing the Relevance of Organizational Culture in Software Process Improvement Initiatives

This study describes a survey carried out among researchers and practitioners in the software industry, aiming to determine which organizational values are most relevant to a software organization involved with a SPI initiative. Organizational values define the organizational culture of a company and they were extracted from typological models published in the technical literature by a secondary study (systematic literature review). The results of the survey indicate that the main organizational values for a software organization to be successful in the adoption/maintenance of an SPI initiative are: (1) being committed to the quality policy for products, services, and processes; (2) having the vision and goals well defined and established; and (3) imposing responsibilities on the team members for meeting deadlines and achieving goals. Also, it indicates the level of commitment and responsibilities of three different profiles of professionals as a factor for success in the adoption/maintenance of an SPI initiative.
Appropriability, patents, and rates of innovation in complex products industries

The economic theory of intellectual property rights is based on a rather narrow view of both competition and technological knowledge. We suggest some ways of enriching this framework with a more empirically grounded view of both and, by means of a simulation model, we analyse the impact of different property right regimes on the dynamics of a complex product industry, that is an industry where products are complex multi-component objects and competition takes place mainly through differentiation and component innovation. We show that, as the complexity of the product spaces increases, stronger patent regimes yield lower rates of innovation, lower product quality, and lower consumers’ welfare.
Automatic Acquisition of Semantic Elements Based on Statistical Decomposition

The implement of machine translation system based on semantic element (SE) requires a large scale semantic element base. An automatic acquisition method for SEs based on statistical decomposition was proposed in this paper. Firstly, . analogical decomposition was applied to decompose abandonable SE and two conditions are found to assure the correctness of decomposition. Secondly, three statistics were designed, namely parameter index, translation index and language model index, to measure the rationality of analogical decomposition. Finally, multi-attribute decision making values for the above three statistics were prioritized to choose the best decomposition. Abandonable SE could be decomposed iteratively thereafter. Experimental results show that the accuracy has reached around 60%.
Weighted fairness in buffered crossbar scheduling

The crossbar is the most popular packet switch architecture. By adding small buffers at the crosspoints, important advantages can be obtained: (1) crossbar scheduling is simplified; (2) high throughput is achievable; (3) weighted scheduling becomes feasible. We study the fairness properties of a buffered crossbar with weighted fair schedulers. We show by means of simulation that, under heavy demand, the system allocates throughput in a weighted max-min fair manner. We study the impact of the size of the crosspoint buffers in approximating the weighted max-min fair rates and we find that a small amount of buffering per crosspoint (3-8 cells) suffices for the maximum percentage discrepancy to fall below 5% for 32/spl times/32 switches.
The Structure of Intelligent Grid Based on Cloud Computing and Risk Analysis

As a new commercial computing model, cloud computing make hardware and software on the internet fully used. Therefore, the implementation of intelligent grid based on cloud computing solve the problem of poor computing and storage capacity of electric system computing platform, which also improved the efficiency of data collection and environment perception in the existing system. The development of electric system based on computing and its composition was firstly presented in the paper, highlighting the importance of cloud computing in the development of intelligent grid. According to the characteristics of intelligent gird, the key technology and research point is illustrated in the paper lately. In the last place, the paper gives the risk analysis on mass data security in intelligent grid.
Organic Peer Assessment

We present a web-based tool for a type of peer assessment we dubbed organic. In organic peer assessment there are no upper or lower limits on the number of assignments each peer has to review, avoiding the common issue of prematurely coercing students into activities they might fear and dislike. Instead, peer assessment occurs as a side effect of activities students find intrinsically motivating. We outline the basic set of functionality required for the implementation of our vision for peer assessment in an online environment and present the results of a preliminary study we conducted in a flipped classroom. We found that the quality of the summative assessment produced by the peers matched that of experts, and we encountered strong evidence that our peer assessment implementation had positive effects on achievement. We conclude with a discussion arguing that organic peer assessment is a valuable technique—distinct from formal peer assessment—for deployment in MOOCs.
Comparative Analysis of the Efficiency of R-tree Based Indexing Strategies for Information Retrieval

Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is a flexible approach to access modern image database with large data size, whereby the actual images are described by multi-dimensional feature vectors. These are then indexed in the database to provide low retrieval latency. Currently, many different structures have been proposed, among them, the structures of the R-tree family, especially the R-tree, R*-tree, SS-tree and SR-tree are the most referenced. However, by now no comparison and analysis of the query performance, dynamic operations and file storage of these indexing strategies has been provided. This shortcoming is addressed in this paper and a detailed performance comparison provided.
Treatment of Spinal Tuberculosis by Debridement, Interbody Fusion and Internal Fixation via Posterior Approach Only

Surgical treatment for spinal tuberculosis includes focal tuberculosis debridement, segmental stability reconstruction, neural decompression and kyphotic deformity correction. For the lesions mainly involved anterior and middle column of the spine, anterior operation of debridement and fusion with internal fixation has been becoming the most frequently used surgical technique for the spinal tuberculosis. However, high risk of structural damage might relate with anterior surgery, such as damage in lungs, heart, kidney, ureter and bowel, and the deformity correction is also limited. Due to the organs are in the front of spine, there are less complications in posterior approach. Spinal pedicle screw passes through the spinal three‐column structure, which provides more powerful orthopedic forces compared with the vertebral body screw, and the kyphotic deformity correction effect is better in posterior approach. In this paper, we report a 68‐year‐old male patient with thoracic tuberculosis who underwent surgical treatment by debridement, interbody fusion and internal fixation via posterior approach only. The patient was placed in prone position under general anesthesia. Posterior midline incision was performed, and the posterior spinal construction was exposed. Then place pedicle screw, and fix one side rod temporarily. Make the side of more bone destruction and larger abscess as lesion debridement side. Resect the unilateral facet joint, and retain contralateral structure integrity. Protect the spinal cord, nerve root. Clear sequestrum, necrotic tissue, abscess of paravertebral and intervertebral space. Specially designed titanium mesh cages or bone blocks were implanted into interbody. Fix both side rods and compress both sides to make the mesh cages and bone blocks tight. Reconstruct posterior column structure with allogeneic bone and autologous bone. Using this technique, the procedures of debridement, spinal cord decompression, deformity correction, bone grafting, and internal fixation can be completed with only one incision and surgical position, and the deformity correction efficiency is higher than anterior surgery.
On a New Class of Pulsing Denial-of-Service Attacks and the Defense

In this paper we analyze a new class of pulsing denialof-service (PDoS) attacks that could seriously degrade the throughput of TCP flows. During a PDoS attack, periodic pulses of attack packets are sent to a victim. The magnitude of each pulse should be significant enough to cause packet losses. We describe two specific attack models according to the timing of the attack pulses with respect to the TCP’s congestion window movement: timeout-based and AIMD (additive-increasemultiplicative-decrease)-based. We show through an analysis that even a small number of attack pulses can cause significant throughput degradation. The second part of this paper is a novel two-stage scheme to detect PDoS attacks on a victim network. The first stage is based on a wavelet transform used to extract the desired frequency components of the data traffic and ACK traffic. The second stage is to detect change points in the extracted components. Through both simulation and testbed experiments, we verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the detection scheme.
Copy mode for static screen content coding with HEVC

Screen content largely consists of static parts, e.g. static background. However, none of the available screen content coding tools fully employs this characteristic. In this paper we present the copy mode, a new coding mode specifically aiming at increased coding efficiency for static screen content. The basic principle of the copy mode is the direct copy of the collocated block from the reference frame. Mean weighted BD-Rate gains of 2.4% are achieved for JCT-VC test sequences compared to SCM-2.0. For sequences containing lots of static background, coding gains as high as 7.6% are observed. The new coding mode is further enhanced by several encoder optimizations, among them an early skip mechanism. Thereby, the encoder runtime complexity is reduced by up to 39%.
On the multiway relay channel with direct links

This paper studies the extension of the multiway relay channel model with restricted encoders (introduced by Gündüz et al.) by adding unit-gain intra-cluster links. In this model, multiple clusters of users communicate with the help of one relay and the users within a cluster wish to exchange messages among themselves. We obtain achievable rates and gaps to the cut-set bound as a function of the number of users and the cluster-to-relay gain g.
Educational differences in chronic conditions and their role in the educational differences in overall mortality

Educational differentials in the prevalence (∆P) of any given condition can be simulated and decomposed as the outcome of differentials on incidence and mortality rates. The exact same methodology also decomposes the role of the chronic condition on the overall mortality (∆OM), but this analysis is not conducted in the literature. Chronic conditions, first cause of death in the US, are studied here using US elderly follow up data about mortality and diagnosed diseases, including Hypertension, Hearth attack, Diabetes, Lung disease, Cancer and Stroke. On each case, all individuals are assumed to experience a baseline mortality, while the presence of a chronic conditions is associated with an “excess mortality” rate; along this lines, ∆P and ∆OM are decomposed as the outcome of educational differences on baseline mortality, incidence and excess mortality. I found that for most chronic conditions a) educational differences on the base line mortality explain most of ∆OM but not much of ∆P , b) differences on incidence are more important than differences on excess mortality, but only with regard to ∆P, not to ∆OM; furthermore, in the case of Hypertension and Hearth attack, excess mortality rates explain most of the ∆OM associated the chronic condition. In the case of Cancer, the lower incidence and higher excess mortality of individuals in the low education group predicts a relatively lower prevalence of Cancer but also a relatively higher overall mortality in this group. In terms of policy, this idea highlights that the relative importance of differentials on incidence and mortality rates depends on the target of interest, prevalence or overall mortality
Design and performance of selected classes of Tanner codes

We study the design of structured Tanner codes with low error-rate floors on the binary additive white Gaussian noise channel (BAWGNC) and the binary erasure channel (BEC). The design technique involves the “doping" of standard LDPC protographs, meaning Hamming or recursive systematic convolutional (RSC) code constraints are used together with singleparity-check (SPC) constraints to construct a code’s protograph. We show that the doping of a “good" graph with Hamming or RSC codes is a pragmatic approach that frequently results in a code with a good threshold and very low error-rate floor. We focus on low-rate Tanner codes, in part because the design of low-rate, low-floor LDPC codes is particularly difficult.
Spatio-temporal structure extraction and denoising of geophysical fluid image sequences using 3D curvelet transforms

Since several decades many satellites have been launched for the observation of the Earth for a better knowledge of the atmosphere and of the ocean. The sequences of images that such satellites provide show the evolution of some large scale structures such as vortices and fronts. It is obvious that the dynamic of these structures may have a strong predictive potential. Extracting these structures and tracking their evolution automatically is then essential for future forecast systems. In this paper we consider extraction of spatio-temporal geometric structures from image sequences of geophysical fluid flow using three-dimensional (3D) curvelet transform and total variation minimization. Numerical experiments on simulated geophysical fluids and real video data by remote sensing show good performances of the proposed method in terms of denoising and edge structural extraction. This work is partially motivated by a sequent application to image sequence assimilation of geophysical fluids.