Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Collaborations to Encapsulate Features? An Explorative Study

A feature is a program characteristic visible to an end-user. Current research strives to encapsulate the implementation of a feature in a module. Jak is a language extension to Java that allows programmers to encapsulate implementations of features in the form of a collaboration. In prior work, we and others faced problems when using collaborations in Jak and alike languages with too high expectations, e.g., to encapsulate widely scattered code of features such as transaction management in data bases. In this paper, we explore which criteria feature implementations must fulfill so that they can be encapsulated in Jak. The criteria that we found decisive are: granularity of code elements that should be encapsulated in a collaboration, objectlevel extension by features, and object-oriented connections of a feature’s code elements. We finally present a general guideline when to encapsulate a feature with a collaboration in Jak. Practitioners can now evaluate in advance whether Jak collaborations are suited to encapsulate their feature or not.
Unsupervised Spatial–Spectral Feature Learning by 3D Convolutional Autoencoder for Hyperspectral Classification

Feature learning technologies using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown superior performance over traditional hand-crafted feature extraction algorithms. However, a large number of labeled samples are generally required for CNN to learn effective features under classification task, which are hard to be obtained for hyperspectral remote sensing images. Therefore, in this paper, an unsupervised spatial–spectral feature learning strategy is proposed for hyperspectral images using 3-Dimensional (3D) convolutional autoencoder (3D-CAE). The proposed 3D-CAE consists of 3D or elementwise operations only, such as 3D convolution, 3D pooling, and 3D batch normalization, to maximally explore spatial–spectral structure information for feature extraction. A companion 3D convolutional decoder network is also designed to reconstruct the input patterns to the proposed 3D-CAE, by which all the parameters involved in the network can be trained without labeled training samples. As a result, effective features are learned in an unsupervised mode that label information of pixels is not required. Experimental results on several benchmark hyperspectral data sets have demonstrated that our proposed 3D-CAE is very effective in extracting spatial–spectral features and outperforms not only traditional unsupervised feature extraction algorithms but also many supervised feature extraction algorithms in classification application.
Affine invariant for 2D image representation: a wavelet approach

The aim of this paper is to propose a method for 2D shape representation under affine transform using the discrete dyadic wavelet transform invariant to translation known as stationary wavelet transform or SWT. The main problem of this transform is its dependence to the signal starting point i.e (the same signal may have several representations depending on the starting point). The choice of the starting point is then necessary to match two descriptors. The method we propose is developed in three steps, a) the contour is first parameterized by enclosed area, b) the affine invariant feature is then calculated to finally c) determine the natural axis which enable to fix the starting point. The knowledge of the orientation of the natural axis enables to adjust the starting point on the contour between the query and the models given in the database. Furthermore, the method can select a subset of useful invariant features for the matching step. The method is tested on a database of 5000 fish species and the results are very probate.
Variation in neuronal differentiation of a newly isolated mouse embryonic stem cell line: a detailed immunocytochemistry study

Neural precursor differentiation from mouse ES (embryonic stem) cells have been demonstrated using EB (embryoid body), co-culture on stromal feeder layers, and in the absence of external inducing signals. Most of available mouse ES cell original research articles have worked with only six different cell lines. Our goals were to isolate one new mouse ES lineage, and perform a detailed immunocytochemistry study during neural differentiation, making use of an EB strategy protocol following the generation of neural progenitors, glial cells and postmitotic neurons. The dynamics of differentiation of ES cell derived neuronal precursors into differentiated glia cells and neurons were followed in vitro and correlated to exposure to specific elements of feeder medium. Morphological aspects of generated cellular types, including its immunocytochemical expression of differentiation markers were studied. Immuno-positivity against β-III tubulin, PGP and TH (tyrosine hydroxylase) was observed from stage I. Approximately 80% of cells were positive for TH at stage I. The first glial cell type appears in stage III. TH, PGP or β-III tubulin-positive cells with neuronal typical morphology only being seen in stage III when TH-positive cells corresponded to approximately 12% of total cells. Variations among other literature findings can be explained by the choice we made to use a newly isolated ES cell line. As colonies may behave differently during neuronal differentiation, it reinforces the necessity of studying original ES cell lines.
Numerical Framing and Emotional Arousal as Moderators of Review Valence and Consumer Choices

NUMERICAL FRAMING AND EMOTIONAL AROUSAL AS MODERATORS OF REVIEW VALENCE AND CONSUMER CHOICES Anh Dang Old Dominion University, 2018 Director: Yuping Liu-Thompkins Online reviews are gaining importance in determining consumers’ purchase decisions since many consumers trust them as much as personal word-of-mouth. One aspect of reviews that has received great research attention is valence. Valence refers to consumers’ positive or negative evaluations of products. It can be reflected by star ratings or dichotomous choices such as recommendation rates and thumbs up or down rates. The effects of valence reported in previous studies have been equivocal at best. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation is to identify factors that help reconcile these inconclusive findings. The first essay examined emotional arousal (e.g., sad versus angry) as a moderator of the relationship between valence and consumer decisions. Through two lab experiments and one field study utilizing the browsing and purchasing data from a major online retailer, I find that the effect of emotional arousal can be different along the consumer purchase journey. During the search stage, consumers use emotional arousal as a heuristic to make their choices. Extreme reviews (e.g., five-star or one-star rating) with high emotional arousal indicate reviewers’ bias and lack of selfcontrol and are deemed less informative about product performance. Therefore, emotional arousal weakens the effect of valence on consumers’ consideration choices. However, when consumers are at the purchase stage, a more complex cognitive process emerges. Even though they believe that extremely negative reviews with high emotional arousal are uninformative, their anticipated regret leads them to reject products associated with those reviews. The second essay suggests that how consumers process valence and volume (i.e., the total number of a product’s reviews) depends on the framing of the numeric information, which subsequently determines the importance of valence in relation to that of volume in consumers’ purchase decisions. Specifically, consumers will utilize different approaches to processing valence and volume information when valence is framed as a percentage of volume (60% of 500 customers recommend) versus when it is represented as an absolute number (e.g., 300 out of 500 customers recommend). Through five lab experiments (including an eye-tracking study), I find that due to the fundamental differences between these approaches, consumers are likely to tradeoff valence for high volume if the valence information is expressed as percentages. However, the dominant effect of review volume diminishes if the absolute number format is applied. The effect of numerical framing thus helps newly introduced high-quality products overcome their disadvantage due to low review volume.
Pan-sharpening with multi-scale wavelet dictionary

In satellite image processing, pan-sharpening is the fusion process in which a low resolution (LR) multi-spectral (MS) image is sharpened using the corresponding high resolution (HR) panchromatic (Pan) image to obtain a HR MS image. In this paper we propose a novel pan-sharpening method which combines the ideas of classical wavelet-based pan-sharpening with recently developed dictionary learning (DL) methods. The HR MS image is generated using wavelet-based pan-sharpening, regulated by promoting sparsity with respect to a dictionary. The dictionary is obtained using DL on the multi-scale wavelet tree vectors of the image to be pan-sharpened. A significant advantage of our approach compared to most DL-based approaches is that it does not require a large database of images on which to train the dictionary. Experiments on degraded satellite images demonstrate that our method significantly reduces color distortions and wavelet artifacts compared to the state of the art.
The subjective and objective violence of terrorism: analysing “British values” in newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack

ABSTRACT This article examines how Žižek’s analysis of “subjective” violence can be used to explore the ways in which media coverage of a terrorist attack is contoured and shaped by less noticeable forms of “objective” (symbolic and systemic) violence. Drawing upon newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack, it is noted how examples of “subjective” violence were grounded in the externalisation of a clearly identifiable “other”, which symbolically framed the terrorists and the attack as tied to and representative of the UK Muslim community. Examples of “systematic” violence were most notable in the ideological edifice that underpinned this framing but also in the ways in which newspaper reports served to draw upon British values in the aftermath of the attack. This directed attention away from the contradictions within the UK, towards narratives that sought to “fix” these contradictions through eradicating the problem of “the other” and/or by violently protecting the British values “they” seek to undermine. As a consequence, newspaper coverage worked to uphold the illusion that “peace” could be achieved by eradicating terrorism through further forms of objective violence, including, internment without trial; the “ripping up” of human rights; and closer surveillance of Muslim communities. Indeed, it was this unacknowledged violence that worked to maintain British values in the press' coverage.
Overloading vulnerability of VoIP networks

Internet is vulnerable to overloading caused by flash crowds and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Recently vo ice over IP (VoIP), an Internet-based service is experiencing a phenomenal growth. As its deployment spreads, VoIP systems are likely to become attack targets, of which flooding lists high, perhaps due to its simplicity and the abundance of tool support. The DDoS attacks and flash crowds degrade the performance of call processing server to the point where it becomes sluggish and even unresponsive. The network administrator's dilemma is that how to give a differential treatment to malicious and legitimate call requests that differ in intent, but not in content. In this paper, we show that DDoS attacks and flash crowds, while similar in the message structure and the number of INVITEs they generate, exhibit different traffic patterns and hence making them distinguishable. We also introduce a new entropy-based approach to detect those DDoS attacks that masquerade as flash crowds. Our approach is based on an observation that the creation of malicious sessions has certain effects on entropy of the call durations; hence, a change in the entropy provides an important clue for mimicry attack detection. As an overloading preventive measure, we exploit the SIP protocol's inbuilt reliability mechanism and exponential backoff timer values to regulate and distinguish legitimates call requests from the spoofed ones.
Normalized Cumulative Spectral Distribution in Music

As the remedy used music becomes active and meditation effect through the music is verified, people take a growing interest about psychological balance or remedy given by music. From traditional studies, it is verified that the music of which spectral envelop varies approximately as 1/f (f is frequency) down to a frequency of low frequency bandwidth gives psychological balance. In this paper, we researched signal properties of music which gives psychological balance. In order to find this, we derived the property from voice. Music composed by voice shows large value in NCSD. We confirmed the degree of deference between music by curvature of normalized cumulative spectral distribution. In the music that gives psychological balance, the curvature shows high value, otherwise, the curvature shows low value. Keywords—Cognitive Psychology, Normalized Cumulative Spectral Distribution, Curvature.
Investigating Facial Electromyography as an Indicator of Cognitive Workload

Facial electromyography (fEMG) is an electromyographic measurement technique that has primarily been used as a tool for measuring affect, but previous experiments suggest that it also has the potential to help quantify cognitive workload. In the current study, two task-irrelevant facial muscles, corrugator supercilli and lateral frontalis, were monitored in real-time to determine whether they were sensitive to workload changes in a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) task environment. Real-time signal processing techniques were applied to derive the median amplitude and zero-crossing rate from windowed fEMG data. Statistical analysis of these features determined that both muscles were sensitive to variations in specific workload manipulations. This research suggests that real-time fEMG features extracted from the aforementioned muscles possess the potential to serve as, or contribute to, an index of cognitive workload. Future work aims to refine fEMG data collection techniques to produce a more responsive and representative measure suitable for workload assessment.
History and current use of mild therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest

In spite of many years of development and implementation of pre-hospital advanced life support programmes, the survival rate of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) used to be very poor. Neurologic injury from cerebral hypoxia is the most common cause of death in patients with OHCA. In the past two decades, post-resuscitation care has developed many new concepts aimed at improving the neurological outcome and survival rate of patients after cardiac arrest. Systematic post-cardiac arrest care after the return of spontaneous circulation, including induced mild therapeutic hypothermia (TH) in selected patients, is aimed at significantly improving rates of long-term neurologically intact survival. This review summarises the history and current knowledge in the field of mild TH after OHCA.
Emerging Insights into Antibiotic-Associated Diarrhea and Clostridium difficile Infection through the Lens of Microbial Ecology

Antibiotics are the main, and often only, clinical intervention for prophylactic and active treatment of bacterial infections in humans. Perhaps it is not surprising that these drugs also shift the composition of commensal bacteria inside our bodies, especially those within the gut microbial community (microbiota). How these dynamics ultimately affect the function of the gut microbiota, however, is not fully appreciated. Likewise, how antibiotic induced changes facilitate the outgrowth and pathogenicity of certain bacterial strains remains largely enigmatic. Here, we discuss the merits of a microbial ecology approach toward understanding a common side effect of antibiotic use, antibiotic-associated diarrhea (AAD), and the opportunistic bacterial infections that sometimes underlie it. As an example, we discuss how this approach is being used to address complex disease dynamics during Clostridium difficile infection.
Oligodendroglial Argonaute protein Ago2 associates with molecules of the Mbp mRNA localization machinery and is a downstream target of Fyn kinase

Oligodendrocytes myelinate neuronal axons in the central nervous system (CNS) facilitating rapid transmission of action potentials by saltatory conduction. Myelin basic protein (MBP) is an essential component of myelin and its absence results in severe hypomyelination in the CNS of rodents. Mbp mRNA is not translated immediately after exit from the nucleus in the cytoplasm, but is transported to the plasma membrane in RNA transport granules in a translationally silenced state. We have previously identified the small non-coding RNA 715 (sncRNA715) as an inhibitor of Mbp translation associated with RNA granules. Argonaute (Ago) proteins and small RNAs form the minimal core of the RNA induced silencing complex and together recognize target mRNAs to be translationally inhibited or degraded. Recently, tyrosine phosphorylation of Ago2 was reported to be a regulator of small RNA binding. The oligodendroglial non-receptor tyrosine kinase Fyn is activated by neuronal signals and stimulates the translation of Mbp mRNA at the axon-glial contact site. Here we analyzed the expression of Ago proteins in oligodendrocytes, if they associate with Mbp mRNA transport granules and are tyrosine phosphorylated by Fyn. We show that all Ago proteins (Ago1-4) are expressed by oligodendrocytes and that Ago2 colocalizes with hnRNP A2 in granular cytoplasmic structures. Ago2 associates with hnRNP A2, Mbp mRNA, sncRNA715 and Fyn kinase and is tyrosine phosphorylated in response to Fyn activity. Our findings suggest an involvement of Ago2 in the translational regulation of Mbp. The identification of Ago proteins as Fyn targets will foster further research to understand in more molecular detail how Fyn activity regulates Mbp translation.
Managerial Pay and Executive Turnover in the Czech and Slovak Republics

Despite the crucial role played by managers in changing the functioning of labour markets in transition economies, research on the determinants of executive pay and CEO turnover in these countries is almost non-existent. The current paper aims at adding to this minuscule literature. For this purpose I make use of a unique data set containing relevant firm-manager information from the Czech and Slovak Republics in the late nineties. This allows me to examine the influence of individual and in particular firm characteristics, such as, size, ownership type, industry and region, as well as corporate performance on chief executive compensation levels and changes therein and on the probability of the executive being turned over.
A High Spectral Efficient Non-Binary TTCM-assisted G2 STBC-OFDM for 4G Systems

paper deals with the MIMO-OFDM technique that candidate with the fourth generation (4G) of the wireless communication systems, this technique can provide high data rate transmission without increasing transmit power and expanding bandwidth, also it can efficiently use space resources and has a bright future. This paper presents the channel coding assisted STBC-OFDM systems, and employs the Coded Modulation techniques (CM), since the signal bandwidth available for wireless communications is limited. Furthermore, a non-binary Turbo Trellis Coded Modulation (TTCM) decoder-based multidimensional MAP algorithm- assisted G2 STBC-OFDM is design and implemented. The idea of Non-binary codes has been extended for symbols defined over rings of integers, which outperform binary codes with only a small increase in decoding complexity. The simulation results show that the performance of the TTCM decoding algorithm outperforms the binary decoding methods and suitable to deal with error control coding of the STBC- OFDM schemes. Keywordscodes, TTCM, non-binary error correcting codes, Rings
Theories and Models in Metaphysics

METAPHYSICS Peter Godfrey-Smith is professor of philosophy at Harvard University. He works primarily in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. He also has a more general interest in the philosophy of science, and makes excursions into metaphysics and epistemology. He has published two books so far: Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (1996) and Theory and Reality (2003). He is currently working on one book about natural selection and another about John Dewey. §1. Introduction METAPHYSICS IS ONCE AGAIN A THRIVING SUBDISCIPLINE WITHIN PHILOSOPHY, DESPITE A long tradition of challenges to the very viability of the metaphysical enterprise. The criticisms have not so much been satisfactorily answered as shouldered aside by the vigorous development of the field. Some focused meta-theoretic discussion has recently arisen within mainstream metaphysics. 1 The present paper is written more from an outsider's vantage point. I attempt to give a new meta-theory for some parts of metaphysics. The central claim is that much metaphysical work, especially of the contemporary systematic kind, might best be understood as model-building, in a specific sense of this term that draws on recent philosophy of science. Such a claim faces meta-theoretic problems of its own. If metaphysicians are engaged in model-building, surely they know this already, or at least can be easily induced to recognize it once the framework and terminology are introduced. But the account I offer is quite far from the usual self-conception seen in contemporary metaphysics. 2 Indeed, most metaphysicians to whom this view has been presented so far have actively resisted the analysis. So what status is the analysis supposed to have? Is it a " rational reconstruction " of metaphysical work, or something more like a psychological hypothesis? I see the analysis developed here as having several possible roles. First, metaphysicians might be trying to do something impossible, but succeeding in doing useful model-building despite themselves. In that sense, I offer something like a rational reconstruction. Those who find the usual arguments against the viability of metaphysical inquiry convincing might see the analysis as a way to salvage some useful content from metaphysical work. But there is also a psychological interpretation of the analysis that is more adventurous. Here we see metaphysicians as actually engaged in a form of modeling, despite their ideology, in virtue of the constructs they produce
Speech enhancement based on auditory masking properties and log-spectral distance

This paper studies on auditory masking properties and redefines log-spectral distance. Combined with the minimum mean-square error log-spectral amplitude estimator, a speech enhancement algorithm using the auditory masking properties and the log-spectral distance is proposed. This algorithm capitalizes the log-spectral distance to detect voice activity, and updates the noise estimator in real time according to the presence or absence of speech. In speech section, the residual noise is suppressed by auditory masking properties. In non-speech section, the ratio between the log-spectral distance and the distance threshold is used to suppress the residual noise. The experimental results show that this algorithm can effectively suppress the residual noise, and protect the weak voice.