Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic algorithms for energy efficient virtualized data centers

Avast majority of servers in classical data centers of all scales are underutilized for a significant amount of time. These servers operate at a very low rate of efficiency and consume huge amounts of energy. In this work, we investigate how dynamic consolidation and workload forecasting can be exploited to increase the energy efficiency of a virtualized, heterogeneous server infrastructure. We base our evaluation on real utilization traces of a production system operated by the University of Vienna's central IT department. The traces contain the CPU utilization of more than 30 VMs over a period of four weeks. These VMs offer all kinds of services to students, staff and other visitors. We use these traces to investigate a business infrastructure scenario, where energy costs are just one of several parts of operational costs. We present a novel cost model using configurable penalties for the most important operational cost categories. We compare the total costs of a bin-packing related heuristic and a new genetic VM mapping algorithm used for dynamic consolidation (GA) and load balancing (LB). We tradeoff forecasting against resource reserves in combination with shorter measurement intervals. We demonstrate the flexibility of a genetic algorithm. The GA and LB approaches are directly influenced by penalizing cost parameters. Our cost model allows easy adaption by infrastructure operators to implement custom priorities and optimization goals.
Research design and data analysis in realism research

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to apply principles of the realism paradigm within qualitative research projects.Design/methodology/approach – The paper starts by establishing the usefulness of realism research for investigating marketing management phenomena, and then considers the implications of the realism paradigm for research design.Findings – Issues such as the level of prior theory required, the use of replication logic and triangulation are discussed. In addition, guidelines for realism data analysis and reporting are developed.Originality/value – This paper provides an explicit set of principles for realism research design and data analysis that is different from those in other types of research.
Near-optimal practical power control schemes for D2D communications in cellular networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication has the potential of increasing the system capacity, energy efficiency and achievable peak rates while reducing the end-to-end latency. To realize these gains, recent works have proposed resource allocation (RA) and power control (PC) approaches that show near optimal performance in terms of spectral or energy efficiency. However, the proposed schemes either consider a single cell environment or assume instantaneous channel state information (CSI) and/or rely on iterative algorithms that require excessive inter-node message exchange and suffer from slow convergence time. For D2D user equipment (UE), we propose a distributed utility optimization based PC scheme that relies on locally available measurement data and is made practical by constraining the number of iterations and the interference caused to the cellular receiver, while legacy UEs employ the standard Long Term Evolution (LTE) PC. We investigate the performance of the proposed PC scheme when combined with two RA schemes that differ in terms of the required channel state information. We find that when properly tuned, this practical PC scheme combined with a RA algorithm that requires limited channel knowledge, not only shows near optimal performance, but it also constraints the impact of D2D communications on the cellular layer.
Preliminary development of the Brief–California School Climate Survey: dimensionality and measurement invariance across teachers and administrators

A brief 15-item version of the California School Climate Scale (Brief-CSCS) is presented to fill a need for a measure that could be used for periodic monitoring of school personnel's general perception of the climate of their school campus. From a sample of 81,261 California school personnel, random subsamples of 2,400 teachers and 2,400 administrators were used in the analyses. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a model in which general school climate was a second-order latent factor composed of 2 first-order latent traits, organizational supports and relational supports. Measurement invariance of factor loadings for teachers and administrators was found. Additional analyses revealed that administrators held more positive perceptions of school climate than teachers, with this difference increasing from primary through high school. The implications for these findings for educational research and policy reform are outlined.
International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity the Application of a Social Cognition Model in Explaining Fruit Intake in Austrian, Norwegian and Spanish Schoolchildren Using Structural Equation Modelling

Background: The aim of this paper was to test the goodness of fit of the Attitude – Social influence – self-Efficacy (ASE) model in explaining schoolchildren's intentions to eat fruit and their actual fruit intake in Austria, Norway and Spain; to assess how well the model could explain the observed variance in intention to eat fruit and in reported fruit intake and to investigate whether the same model would fit data from all three countries.
Increased Cell Proliferation and Gene Expression of Genes Related to Bone Remodeling, Cell Adhesion and Collagen Metabolism in the Periodontal Ligament of Unopposed Molars in Growing Rats

Tooth eruption, the process by which teeth emerge from within the alveolar bone into the oral cavity, is poorly understood. The post-emergent phase of tooth eruption continues throughout life, in particular, if teeth are not opposed by antagonists. The aim of the present study was to better understand the molecular processes underlying post-emergent tooth eruption. Toward this goal, we removed the crowns of the maxillary molars on one side of the mouth of 14 young rats and examined gene expression patterns in the periodontal ligaments (PDLs) of the ipsilateral and contralateral mandibular molars, 3 and 15 days later. Nine untreated rats served as controls. Expression of six genes, Adamts18, Ostn, P4ha3, Panx3, Pth1r, and Tnmd, was upregulated in unopposed molars relative to molars with antagonists. These genes function in osteoblast differentiation and proliferation, cell adhesion and collagen metabolism. Proliferation of PDL cells also increased following loss of the antagonist teeth. Interestingly, mutations in PTH1R have been linked to defects in the post-emergent phase of tooth eruption in humans. We conclude that post-emergent eruption of unopposed teeth is associated with gene expression patterns conducive to alveolar bone formation and PDL remodeling.
Gradient‐Preserving Color Transfer

Color transfer is an image processing technique which can produce a new image combining one source image's contents with another image's color style. While being able to produce convincing results, however, Reinhard et al.'s pioneering work has two problems—mixing up of colors in different regions and the fidelity problem. Many local color transfer algorithms have been proposed to resolve the first problem, but the second problem was paid few attentions.
A Toolkit for Ethical and Culturally Sensitive Research: An Application with Indigenous Communities

Given the complex historical context of research with indigenous communities, there is an ethical imperative to ensure cultural sensitivity in research with these populations. Despite this need, there is a lack of practical guidance based on empirical results to conduct culturally sensitive research. The purpose of this qualitative inquiry is twofold. First, Part 1 identifies strategies for culturally sensitive research with indigenous communities in the USA. Second, Part 2 applies culturally sensitive strategies to a specific research setting with an indigenous community. Part 1 uses a qualitative descriptive study with 13 indigenous and non-indigenous researchers to identify strategies for cultural sensitivity in research. Part 2 applies identified strategies to a rigorous critical ethnography with indigenous communities. Emergent themes from Part 1 include the impact of history, relational research, incorporating cultural sensitivity and strengths, demonstrating patience, and negotiating multiple perspectives. These themes inform a researcher's toolkit for cultural sensitivity, which is applied to a localized setting in Part 2. Cultural sensitivity enhances the quality and usefulness of research, which is better able to address the pressing problems experienced by some indigenous communities.
Formal Verification for Fault-Tolerant Architectures: Prolegomena to the Design of PVS

PVS is the most recent in a series of verification systems developed at SRI. Its design was strongly influenced, and later refined, by our experiences in developing formal specifications and mechanically checked verifications for the fault-tolerant architecture, algorithms, and implementations of a model "reliable computing platform" (RCP) for life-critical digital flight-control applications, and by a collaborative project to formally verify the design of a commercial avionics processor called AAMP5. Several of the formal specifications and verifications performed in support of RCP and AAMP5 are individually of considerable complexity and difficulty. But in order to contribute to the overall goal, it has often been necessary to modify completed verifications to accommodate changed assumptions or requirements, and people other than the original developer have often needed to understand, review, build on, modify, or extract part of an intricate verification. We outline the verifications performed, present the lessons learned, and describe some of the design decisions taken in PVS to better support these large, difficult, iterative, and collaborative verifications. >
Physicochemical inactivation of Lassa, Ebola, and Marburg viruses and effect on clinical laboratory analyses

Clinical specimens from patients infected with Lassa, Ebola, or Marburg virus may present a serious biohazard to laboratory workers. We have examined the effects of heat, alteration of pH, and gamma radiation on these viruses in human blood and on the electrolytes, enzymes, and coagulation factors measured in laboratory tests that are important in the care of an infected patient. Heating serum at 60 degrees C for 1 h reduced high titers of these viruses to noninfectious levels without altering the serum levels of glucose, blood urea nitrogen, and electrolytes. Dilution of blood in 3% acetic acid, diluent for a leukocyte count, inactivated all of these viruses. All of the methods tested for viral inactivation markedly altered certain serum proteins, making these methods unsuitable for samples that are to be tested for certain enzyme levels and coagulation factors.
Fostering Energy-Awareness in Simulations behind Scientific Workflow Management Systems

Scientific workflow management systems face a new challenge in the era of cloud computing. The past availability of rich information regarding the state of the used infrastructures is gone. Thus, organising virtual infrastructures so that they not only support the workflow being executed, but also optimise for several service level objectives (e.g., Maximum energy consumption limit, cost, reliability, availability) become dependent on good infrastructure modelling and prediction techniques. While simulators have been successfully used in the past to aid research on such workflow management systems, the currently available cloud related simulation toolkits suffer form several issues (e.g., Scalability, narrow scope) that hinder their applicability. To address this need, this paper introduces techniques for unifying two existing simulation toolkits by first analysing the problems with the current simulators, and then by illustrating the problems faced by workflow systems through the example of the ASKALON environment. Finally, we show how the unification of the selected simulators improve on the the discussed problems.
Identification of Nominal Multiword Expressions in Bengali using CRF

One of the key issues in both natural language understanding and generation is the appropriate processing of Multiword Expressions (MWEs). MWEs pose a huge problem to a precise language processing due to their idiosyncratic nature and diversity in lexical, syntactical and semantic properties. The semantic of a MWE can be expressed transparently or opaquely after combining the semantic of its constituents. This paper deals with the identification of Nominal Multiword Expressions in the Bengali text using Conditional Random Field (CRF) machine learning technique. Bengali is highly agglutinative and morphologically rich language. Thus the selection of features such as surrounding words, POS tag, prefix, suffix, length etc are proved to be very effective for running the CRF tool for the identification of Nominal MWEs. Compared to the statistical system built in Bengali language for compound noun MWEs identification, our proposed system shows higher accuracy in terms of precision, recall and F-score. We also conclude that with the identification of Reduplicated MWEs (RMWEs) and considering it as a feature makes reasonable improvement compared to the earlier system.
Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor and the Adaptor Protein p 52 Shc Are Specific Substrates of T-Cell Protein Tyrosine Phosphatase

T-cell protein tyrosine phosphatase (TCPTP) exists as two forms generated by alternative splicing: a 48-kDa endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-associated form (TC48) and a 45-kDa nuclear form (TC45). To identify TCPTP substrates, we have generated substrate-trapping mutants, in which the invariant catalytic acid of TCPTP (D182) is mutated to alanine. The TCPTP D182A substrate-trapping mutants were transiently overexpressed in COS cells, and their ability to form complexes with tyrosine-phosphorylated (pTyr) proteins was assessed. No pTyr proteins formed complexes with wild-type TCPTP. In contrast, TC48-D182A formed a complex in the ER with pTyr epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). In response to EGF, TC45-D182A exited the nucleus and accumulated in the cytoplasm, where it bound pTyr proteins of ;50, 57, 64, and 180 kDa. Complex formation was disrupted by vanadate, highlighting the importance of the PTP active site in the interaction and supporting the characterization of these proteins as substrates. Of these TC45 substrates, the ;57and 180-kDa proteins were identified as p52 and EGFR, respectively. We examined the effects of TC45 on EGFR signaling and observed that it did not modulate EGF-induced activation of p42. However, TC45 inhibited the EGF-induced association of p52 with Grb2, which was attributed to the ability of the PTP to recognize specifically p52 phosphorylated on Y239. These results indicate that TC45 recognizes not only selected substrates in a cellular context but also specific sites within substrates and thus may regulate discrete signaling events.
Rural Myths and Urban Ideologies

The argument of this paper is grounded in the contention that the traditional city/bush, urban/rural distinctions made of Australian society represent a false dichotomy. Rather, it is suggested that this distinction serves an ideological purpose in opposing, for example, rural and urban workers, rural and urban owners/managers etc. The rhetoric and the reality of Australian cultural mythologies is analysed with the aim of demonstrating the ways in which images of Australia and Australians are exemplified and enacted in the daily life of country towns. To this end, the paper offers an examination of (a) mass media and (b) some 'urban' aspects of the rural economy, particularly the control of rural industries by urban and transnational interests.
Multi-agent pursuit with decision-making and formation control

This article is concerned with pursuit of multiple evaders with a group of mobile robots. We address this problem from a novel stochastic point of view. Objective of the pursuit is to track and eventually capture the evaders. The evaders possess certain level of intelligence in the way of changing their motion pattern. This necessitates group decision making and coordination of the pursuers. A decision-making scheme of formation changing for the pursuers is proposed in this paper. The pursuers track the targets using a leader-following strategy with the state of the evaders being estimated with distributed Kalman filtering. When the motion pattern of the evaders varies, the pursuers change their formation accordingly based on the Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (DEC-POMDP). Decisions are made according to the pursuers' confidence of their estimation on the evaders and seek to approach maximal reward. Simulation results show the feasibility and validity of the proposed scheme.
The sea urchin major yolk protein is synthesized mainly in the gut inner epithelium and the gonadal nutritive phagocytes before and during gametogenesis

Major yolk protein (MYP), the predominant component of yolk granules in sea urchin eggs, is also contained in the coelomic fluid and nutritive phagocytes of the gonad in both sexes. MYP is stored in ovarian and testicular nutritive phagocytes prior to gametogenesis and is used during gametogenesis as material for synthesizing proteins and other components necessary for eggs and sperm. To reveal the expression profile and the main production site of MYP, we analyzed MYP mRNA expression in immature and maturing Pseudocentrotus depressus. Real‐time reverse‐transcribed polymerase chain reaction analysis showed that MYP mRNA was expressed predominantly in the digestive tract (stomach, intestine and rectum) and the gonad of both sexes. The total amounts of MYP mRNA in the whole digestive tract and in the whole gonad were at similar levels in both immature and maturing sea urchins. MYP mRNA was also detected in white morula cells and vibratile cells separated from the coelomic fluid by density gradient centrifugation, but the expression levels in these cells were very low compared with those in the digestive tract and the gonad. Using in situ hybridization analysis, MYP mRNA was detected in the inner epithelium of the digestive tract and in nutritive phagocytes of the ovary and testis, but was not detected in the germ cells. We conclude that the adult sea urchin has two predominant production sites for MYP regardless of sex and reproductive stage: the inner epithelium of the digestive tract and the nutritive phagocytes of the gonad. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 77: 59–68, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Three groups of teachers' views, learning experiences, and understandings of teaching games for understanding

Background: The Physical Education (PE) curriculum has already been reformed in most countries across the world. Problem solving, lifelong learning, and health issues have become major concerns of PE curricula. With the innovation of PE curricula, a variety of teaching approaches based on the constructivism learning theory have been designed and tested. Bunker and Thorpe, in an attempt to shift from the teacher-centred and skill-based learning to a student-centred approach, initially developed teaching games for understanding (TGfU), which links tactics and skills within a game context. This approach has attracted increasing attention from researchers and PE teachers, with a large body of literature examining the attitude of PE teachers and their implementation of TGfU. However, the differences in the perspective of TGfU among pre-service teachers, cooperating teachers, and university supervisors remain unexplored. Purpose: The present study aimed to examine the views, learning experiences, and understandings of pre-service PE teachers, cooperating teachers, and university supervisors of TGfU in Hong Kong. Context: Comprehensive PE curriculum reformation programmes were conducted in Hong Kong in 2002 and 2007 to promote student generic skills. The new PE curriculum has challenged teachers to introduce new strategies that promote students' generic skills, such as TGfU. Participants and settings: Ten pre-service teachers and their mentors, including nine cooperating teachers and three university supervisors were involved in the present study, which was conducted during the teaching practicum of pre-service teachers. Data collection: A semi-structured interview was conducted with each participant. Data analysis: Interview data were analysed through deductive content analysis to identify meaningful pieces of information comprising the comprehensive text segment. Findings: Three groups of teachers have positive views on TGfU although the reason behind their positive views varies. On the other hand, the three groups of teachers had learning experience of TGfU, but the university supervisors appeared to be the most proactive group because they seek more approaches in learning TGfU. In terms of the understanding of TGfU, although the three groups of teachers demonstrated constructivist views regarding TGfU, cooperating teachers had more consideration for student skill level and skill development compared with university supervisors and pre-service teachers.
Convergence Properties of the Nelder-Mead Simplex Method in Low Dimensions

The Nelder--Mead simplex algorithm, first published in 1965, is an enormously popular direct search method for multidimensional unconstrained minimization. Despite its widespread use, essentially no theoretical results have been proved explicitly for the Nelder--Mead algorithm. This paper presents convergence properties of the Nelder--Mead algorithm applied to strictly convex functions in dimensions 1 and 2. We prove convergence to a minimizer for dimension 1, and various limited convergence results for dimension 2. A counterexample of McKinnon gives a family of strictly convex functions in two dimensions and a set of initial conditions for which the Nelder--Mead algorithm converges to a nonminimizer. It is not yet known whether the Nelder--Mead method can be proved to converge to a minimizer for a more specialized class of convex functions in two dimensions.
Audiences for crime media 1946–91: A historical approach to reception studies

The present paper argues that audience reception studies have tended to be ahistorical, neglecting consideration of the ways in which audiences’ orientation to media may have changed over the decades. The paper explores the potential of combining oral history methods with reception studies, and addresses some of the difficulties which arise. An apparently simple way to introduce a historical perspective is attempted by including audience age as a central part of an empirical research design. By analysing a series of focus group discussions in which people respond to crime media from different points over the postwar period, the concept of age is unpacked in terms of generation and life course factors, and these are shown to influence reception of crime media from both the present and the past. Generation and life course, together with gender, also affect people's positioning in society in relation to real‐world crime, and this too affects the reception of crime media. The paper concludes by suggesting three ways in which audiences may have changed over the postwar period in terms of their interpretive frames for making sense of crime media, namely the frames of personal relevance, realism and moral relativism.