Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Power of Socialization: Engaging the Diamond Industry in the Kimberley Process

Research on conflict in resource-rich countries suggests that resource extraction companies contribute to tension but not development. In recent times, public-private partnerships (PPPs) have flourished, in which set up regulation is not against business but in joint cooperation with corporate actors. Yet PPPs are criticized for serving business self-interest and increasing business power rather than the common good. The paper takes the Kimberley Process and the diamond industry as an example to examine the multi-faceted nature of business power when this PPP was negotiated. The core of the argument is that realist-informed perspectives about business power in PPPs and constructivist accounts emphasizing socialization and social learning processes only tell one part of the story. While demonstrating that the diamond industry acted as a both a socializing and socialized agent, the analysis of the different facets of power shows that structural and discursive power were crucial elements in making socialization happen in the first place.
Expression Patterns of Micro-RNAs 146a, 181a, and 155 in Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis

Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis is caused by persistent brain infection of mutated virus, showing inflammation, neurodegeneration, and demyelination. Although many factors are emphasized in the pathogenesis of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, the exact mechanism of neurodegeneration remains unknown. Micro-RNAs are small, noncoding RNAs that regulate gene expression at the posttranscriptional levels. Micro-RNAs are essential for normal immune system development; besides they are also implicated in the pathogenesis of many chronic inflammatory disorders. The aim of this study is to investigate the expression patterns of micro-RNAs 146a, 181a, and 155 in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of patients with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. We enrolled 39 patients with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis and 41 healthy controls. Quantitative analysis of micro-RNAs 146a, 181a, and 155 were performed using specific stem-loop primers followed by real-time polymerase chain reaction. All of 3 micro-RNAs were upregulated in subacute sclerosing panencephalitis patients. In addition, the level of micro-RNA 155 expression was higher in stage 3 patients. But, micro-RNA 146a and 181a expression levels showed no association or correlation with clinically relevant data. Alteration of peripheral blood mononuclear cell micro-RNAs in subacute sclerosing panencephalitis may shed new light on the pathogenesis of disease and may contribute to the aberrant systemic rise in mRNA levels in subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.
Author ' s personal copy Wave energy converter control by wave prediction and dynamic programming

We demonstrate that deterministic sea wave prediction (DSWP) combined with constrained optimal control can dramatically improve the efficiency of sea wave energy converters (WECs), while maintaining their safe operation. We focus on a point absorber WEC employing a hydraulic/electric power take-off system. Maximizing energy take-off while minimizing the risk of damage is formulated as an optimal control problem with a disturbance input (the sea elevation) and with both state and input constraints. This optimal control problem is non-convex, which prevents us from using quadratic programming algorithms for the optimal solution. We demonstrate that the optimum can be achieved by bangebang control. This paves the way to adopt a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm to resolve the on-line optimization problem efficiently. Simulation results show that this approach is very effective, yielding at least a two-fold increase in energy output as compared with control schemes which do not exploit DSWP. This level of improvement is possible even using relatively low precision DSWP over short time horizons. A key finding is that only about 1 second of prediction horizon is required, however, the technical difficulties involved in obtaining good estimates necessitate a DSWP system capable of prediction over tens of seconds. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Temporally coherent video de-anaglyph

For a long time, stereoscopic 3D videos were usually encoded and shown in the anaglyph format. This format combines the two stereo views into a single color image by splitting its color spectrum and assigning each view to one half of the spectrum, for example red for the left and cyan (blue+green) for the right view. Glasses with matching color filters then separate the color channels again to provide the appropriate view to each eye. This simplicity made anaglyph stereo a popular choice for showing stereoscopic content, as it works with existing screens, projectors and print media. However, modern stereo displays and projectors natively support two full-color views, and avoid the viewing discomfort associated with anaglyph videos. Our work investigates how to convert existing anaglyph videos to the full-color stereo format used by modern displays. Anaglyph videos only contain half the color information compared to the full-color videos, and the missing color channels need to be reconstructed from the existing ones in a plausible and temporally coherent fashion. Joulin and Kang [2013] propose an approach that works well for images, but their extension to video is limited by the heavy computational complexity of their approach. Other techniques only support single images and when applied to each frame of a video generally produce flickering results. In our approach, we put the temporal coherence of the stereo results front and center by expressing Joulin and Kang’s approach within the practical temporal consistency framework of Lang et al. [2012]. As a result, our approach is both efficient and temporally coherent. In addition, it computes temporally coherent optical flow and disparity maps that can be used for various post-processing tasks.
Comparative Methods for Association Studies: A Case Study on Metabolite Variation in a Brassica rapa Core Collection

Background Association mapping is a statistical approach combining phenotypic traits and genetic diversity in natural populations with the goal of correlating the variation present at phenotypic and allelic levels. It is essential to separate the true effect of genetic variation from other confounding factors, such as adaptation to different uses and geographical locations. The rapid availability of large datasets makes it necessary to explore statistical methods that can be computationally less intensive and more flexible for data exploration. Methodology/Principal Findings A core collection of 168 Brassica rapa accessions of different morphotypes and origins was explored to find genetic association between markers and metabolites: tocopherols, carotenoids, chlorophylls and folate. A widely used linear model with modifications to account for population structure and kinship was followed for association mapping. In addition, a machine learning algorithm called Random Forest (RF) was used as a comparison. Comparison of results across methods resulted in the selection of a set of significant markers as promising candidates for further work. This set of markers associated to the metabolites can potentially be applied for the selection of genotypes with elevated levels of these metabolites. Conclusions/Significance The incorporation of the kinship correction into the association model did not reduce the number of significantly associated markers. However incorporation of the STRUCTURE correction (Q matrix) in the linear regression model greatly reduced the number of significantly associated markers. Additionally, our results demonstrate that RF is an interesting complementary method with added value in association studies in plants, which is illustrated by the overlap in markers identified using RF and a linear mixed model with correction for kinship and population structure. Several markers that were selected in RF and in the models with correction for kinship, but not for population structure, were also identified as QTLs in two bi-parental DH populations.
Two years of experience with the French genetic evaluation of dairy bulls on production-adjusted longevity of their daughters

Four runs of the routine genetic evaluation of French dairy bulls on production-adjusted length of productive life of their daughters have been released since June 1997. This paper describes the current model of evaluation and how and why it has changed over the past two years. The computation of reliabilities is explained in details and the use of an approximation of the heritability of length of productive life on the observed scale is justified. Main results for fixed effects and relationships of sire effects with other traits are presented. A recurrent problem is the existence of strong upward biases in the evaluation of top proven sires with young batches of second daughters. This phenomenon, combined with the absence of reliable evaluations for young sires, explain a certain lack of concern for the new evaluation on behalf of breeders. Ways of improvements are indicated.
Surgeon-performed point-of-care ultrasound in severe eye trauma: Report of two cases

The indications of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) in the management of multiple trauma patients have been expanding. Although computed tomography (CT) scan of the orbit remains the gold standard for imaging orbital trauma, ultrasound is a quick, safe, and portable tool that can be performed bedside. Here we report two patients who had severe eye injuries with major visual impairment where surgeon-performed POCUS was very useful. One had a foreign body injury while the other had blunt trauma. POCUS was done using a linear probe under sterile conditions with minimum pressure on the eyes. Ultrasound showed a foreign body at the back of the left eye globe touching the eye globe in the first patient, and was normal in the second patient. Workup using CT scan, fundsocopy, optical coherence tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging of the orbits confirmed these findings. The first patient had vitreous and sub retinal haemorrhage and a full thickness macular hole of the left eye, while the second had traumatic optic neuropathy. POCUS gave accurate information concerning severe eye injuries. Trauma surgeons and emergency physicians should be trained in performing ocular ultrasound for eye injuries.
Retail Warehouse Loading Dock Coordination by Core-selecting Package Auctions

Congestions at loading docks can cause severe delays in logistics processes and cause increasing bottlenecks for truck routes. For warehouses, uncoordinated arrivals of trucks make appropriate staffing difficult and congestions can interfere with other processes at the facility. To mitigate congestions at loading docks, we propose package auctions to allocate time slots to trucks. The contribution of this research is the application of core-selecting package auctions to address the loading dock congestion problem. We propose a bidding language and a core-selecting package auction for this setting based on existing literature. Core-selecting payment rules can avoid drawbacks of the Vickrey‐Clarke‐Groves (VCG) mechanism with Clarke pivot rule, e.g., low perceived fairness of prices. We evaluate our proposal by means of simulation and assess (i) the potential for waiting time reduction compared to uncoordinated arrivals as well as sharing of historical waiting times, (ii) the empirical complexity of the computational problem for scenarios of varying complexity, and (iii) the relation of VCG and bidder-Pareto-optimal core payments. Our findings provide evidence that loading dock auctions can alleviate congestion substantially and that the core-pricing rule is well-suited to address the price fairness and low seller revenue problems in this setting.
On Privacy-aware Delegation of Personal Data using Digital Watermarking

Privacy in business processes for providing person- alized services is currently a matter of trust. Business processes require the disclosure of personal data to third parties and users are not able to control their usage and so their further disclosure. Existing privacy-enhancing technologies consider access control but not usage control of personal data. The current work on usage control mainly considers formalization of usage rules, i.e. obligations, and their enforcement by using the mechanisms of digital rights management, secure logging of access requests for ex post enforcement, and non-linkable delegation of access rights to personal data. However, either these enforcement mechanisms do not consider a disclosure of personal data to third parties or they assume trustworthy data consumers or data providers. We investigated digital watermarking as a way of enforcing obliga- tions for further disclosure of personal data without mandatory trust in service providers.
Some Computational Complexity Results for Synchronous Context-Free Grammars

This paper investigates some computational problems associated with probabilistic translation models that have recently been adopted in the literature on machine translation. These models can be viewed as pairs of probabilistic context-free grammars working in a 'synchronous' way. Two hardness results for the class NP are reported, along with an exponential time lower-bound for certain classes of algorithms that are currently used in the literature.
LEVERAGING FROM CUSTOMIZATION TO INFORM GENERIC SOFTWARE SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT : DHIS TRACKER AND ITS INTRODUCTION IN

The World Health Organization indicates that the lack of reliable data on several health related issues is what will hinder most developing countries not to meet the Millennium Development Goals. YEAGER (2012), for instance, argues that the lack of post-partum haemorrhage and preeclampsia/eclampsia data, together with the lack of skilled personnel hinders the accurate identification of gaps in service coverage. To this situation, it is also coupled the inability of health information systems to effectively provide reliable data.
LCS efficiency methods of a mobile terminal in monitoring system applications

Two efficiency methods for a location service (LCS) by use the wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) interface, in the frequency division duplex (FDD) mode, are outlined. The LCS in the WCDMA/FDD technique is based on the actual relative time differences (RTDs) between base stations of the monitoring cellular network. The proposed methods enable calculation of the geographical position of a mobile station (MS) without knowledge of the RTDs. The first method is supported by round trip time (RTT), and in the second case, an elimination process of RTDs is based on idle period downlink (IPDL) mode. The elimination of the RTD parameters significantly simplifies the localization process in the 3G (3rd Generation) real-life monitoring cellular networks. The comparison and usefulness of the methods for the location service implementation are analyzed. The simulation model and results of the proposed methods are presented. These results show that in the studied radio environment, the proposed algorithms fulfill the requirements for emergency calls from cellular phones in relation to accuracy of MS position calculation.
Why Question Machine Learning Evaluation Methods ? ( An illustrative review of the shortcomings of current methods )

The evaluation of classifiers or learning algorithms is not a topic that has, generally, been given much thought in the fields of Machine Learning and Data Mining. More often than not, common off-the-shelf metrics such as Accuracy, Precision/Recall and ROC Analysis as well as confidence estimation methods, such as the t-test, are applied without much attention being paid to their meaning. The purpose of this paper is to give the reader an intuitive idea of what could go wrong with our commonly used evaluation methods. In particular, we show, through examples, that since evaluation metrics and confidence estimation methods summarize the system’s performance, they can, at times, obscure important behaviors of the hypotheses or algorithms under consideration. We hope that this very simple review of some of the problems surrounding evaluation will sensitize Machine Learning and Data Mining researchers to the issue and encourage us to think twice, prior to selecting and applying an evaluation method.
Schooling as a Wage Depressant

We investigate the relationship between current schooling and current wage rates. Casual observation seems to reflect a discontinuity in wage rate growth which occurs when an individual completes school and joins the labor force as a permanent member. This suggests that the time spent in work while attending school is in some sense secondary. Here, the marginal value of the individual's time is considerably lower than the average value of his time. The problem is essentially one of "anti-complementarities" between the production of human capital through formal schooling and working in the primary occupation. More generally, the productivity of an individual's time in one endeavor is not independent of how the rest of his time is spent. If this is the case, students will be willing to accept lower paying jobs which do not greatly diminish the productivity of school time in lieu of jobs offering higher wages at the cost of a greater reduction in school time productivity. The wages of students, other things constant, are about 12% lower than those of non-students. The magnitude of this wage differential is surprisingly large and warrants investigation on empirical grounds alone. This paper explores the empirical relationship and examines various explanations for it. Finally, implications of the analyses are discussed.
Solution of Elastoplastic Problems based on Moreau-Yosida Theorem

The quasi-static problem of elastoplasticity with isotropic hardening is considered, with particular emphasis on its numerical solution by means of a Newton-like method. The smoothness properties necessary for such method can be ensured by Moreau-Yosida’s theorem. After time discretization, the classical formulation of the elastoplastic problem is transformed to a minimization problem. The convex minimization functional depends on the displacement smoothly and on the plastic part of the strain non-smoothly. The minimization problem implicitly defines the plastic part of the strain as a function depending on the total strain tensor. Furthermore, this function may be calculated analytically. That way, the minimization problem depends on the displacement only. The Moreau-Yosida theorem, well-known in convex analysis, states that the minimization functional is smooth and also provides the Fréchet derivative of the functional. Hence, a method of the field of smooth optimization may be applied. After discretization in space, a Newton-like method is used to solve the discrete minimization problem. This method requires the Hesse matrix of the discrete minimization functional, which may be calculated in all material points apart from the elastoplastic interface. Numerical experiments in two dimensions show super-linear convergence of the Newton-like method. From the moment that elastic and plastic zones freeze, even quadratic convergence can be observed.
Kirchhoff imaging beyond aliasing

Crucial image resolution may be lost when spatially aliased data are imaged with Kirchhoff algorithms that employ standard antialiasing methods. To maximize resolution, I introduce a method that enables the proper imaging of some aliased components in the data, while avoiding aliasing artifacts. The proposed method is based on a detailed analysis of the different types of aliasing that affect Kirchhoff imaging. In particular, it is based on the observation that operator aliasing depends on the dip spectrum of the data. A priori knowledge on the characteristics of the dip spectrum of the data, in particular on its asymmetry, can thus be exploited to enable “imaging beyond aliasing. ” The method is not of general applicability, but it successfully improves the image resolution when a priori assumptions on the data dips are realistic. The imaging of salt‐dome flanks in the Gulf of Mexico has been enhanced by the application of the proposed method.
Polarity and lipid raft association of the components of the ciliary neurotrophic factor receptor complex in Madin-Darby canine kidney cells

Ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) signals via a tripartite receptor complex consisting of the glycosyl-phosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored CNTF receptor (CNTF-R), the leukaemia inhibitory factor receptor (LIF-R) and the interleukin-6 (IL-6) signal transducer gp130. We have recently reported that gp130 is endogenously expressed in the polarised epithelial model cell line Madin-Darby canine kidney (MDCK) and we have demonstrated a preferential basolateral localisation of this protein. In the present study we show that MDCK cells also express the LIF-R and respond to stimulation with human LIF by activation of tyrosine phosphorylation of signal transducer and activator of transcription-3 (STAT3), both however in an unpolarised fashion. This suggests that MDCK cells may be target cells for LIF. We have furthermore stably expressed the human CNTF-R in MDCK cells and by two different assays we found an apical localisation. Consistent with these findings, stimulation of CNTF-R-positive cells resulted only in an activation of STAT3 when CNTF was added apically. These data demonstrate that each subunit of the CNTF receptor complex has a distinct distribution in polarised cells which may reflect the different roles the respective cytokines play in vivo. Since it is currently believed that lipid rafts are involved in signal transduction as well as protein sorting we studied the association of the three receptor complex components with membrane rafts using different protocols. Whereas the CNTF-R cofractionated quantitatively with lipid rafts independently of the method used, gp130 and the LIF-R were found to associate with lipid rafts only partially when detergents were used for isolation. These findings could indicate that either the three receptor complex subunits are localised to the same kind of raft but with different affinities to the liquid-ordered environment, or that they are localised to different types of rafts. CNTF-, LIF-, and IL-6-dependent STAT3 activation was sensitive to the cholesterol-depleting drug methyl-β-cyclodextrin (MCD) suggesting that the integrity of lipid rafts is important for IL-6-type cytokine-induced STAT activation.
Self-configuring multipath intra-mesh infrastructure QoS based routing

Multi-path routing concept was largely exploited in wireless networks to provide benefits such as fault tolerance, load balancing, performance improvement in terms of latency, etc. In this paper, we propose a multi-path routing based protocol named MP-IMRR (Multi-path Intra-Mesh infrastructure Routing protocol) to improve our previously defined QoS based routing protocol for wireless mesh networks (i.e. IMRR). MP-IMRR is defined in order to achieve better reactivity and faster recovery from eventual route failures than the IMRR protocol by adopting the backup routes concept. Besides, given the complexity increase while considering network management systems, we adopt the autonomic computing paradigm to provide the IMRR routing protocol with self-configuring capabilities. We describe and analyze the simulation results of different scenarios conducted on the network simulator ns-3 to demonstrate the effectiveness of IMRR self-configuring scheme and MP-IMRR routing protocol in case of route failures.