Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Temporary Employment, Job Flows and Productivity: A Tale of Two Reforms

We investigate the effects of two reforms of temporary employment using panel data on Italian firms. We exploit variation in their implementation across regions and sectors for identification. Our results show that the reform of apprenticeship contracts increased job turnover and induced the substitution of external staff with firms' apprentices, with an overall productivity-enhancing effect. The reform of fixed-term contracts instead did not produce the intended results: it induced a substitution of temporary employees in favour of external staff and reduced capital intensity, generating productivity losses. We estimate substitution elasticities across various types of temporary contracts that are consistent with this interpretation.
Feasibility, safety and preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of a home-based exercise programme for older people with Alzheimer’s disease: a pilot randomized controlled trial

Objective: To evaluate the feasibility and safety of a home-based exercise programme for people with Alzheimer’s disease, and to provide preliminary evidence of programme effectiveness in improving balance and mobility and reducing falls risk. Design: A randomized controlled trial. Setting: Community. Participants: Forty people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease (mean age 81.9, SD 5.72; 62.5% female). Interventions: Participants were randomized to a six-month home-based individually tailored balance, strengthening and walking exercise programme (physiotherapist) or a six-month home-based education programme (control) (occupational therapist). Both programmes provided six home-visits and five follow-up phone calls. Main measures: Balance, mobility, falls and falls risk were measured at baseline and programme completion. Intention-to-treat analysis using a generalized linear model with group allocation as a predictor variable was performed to evaluate programme effectiveness. Feasibility and adverse events were systematically recorded at each contact. Results: Fifty-eight per cent of the exercise group finished the programme, completing an average of 83% of prescribed sessions, with no adverse events reported. Functional Reach improved significantly (P = 0.002) in the exercise group (mean (SD), 2.28 (4.36)) compared to the control group (–2.99 (4.87)). Significant improvement was also observed for the Falls Risk for Older People – Community score (P = 0.008) and trends for improvement on several other balance, mobility, falls and falls risk measures for the exercise group compared to the control group. Conclusions: The exercise programme was feasible and safe and may help improve balance and mobility performance and reduce falls risk in people with Alzheimer’s disease.
σB Modulates Virulence Determinant Expression and Stress Resistance: Characterization of a Functional rsbU Strain Derived from Staphylococcus aureus 8325-4

ABSTRACT The accessory sigma factor σB controls a general stress response that is thought to be important for Staphylococcus aureus survival and may contribute to virulence. The strain of choice for genetic studies, 8325-4, carries a small deletion in rsbU, which encodes a positive regulator of σB activity. Consequently, to enable the role of σB in virulence to be addressed, we constructed an rsbU+ derivative, SH1000, using a method that does not leave behind an antibiotic resistance marker. The phenotypic properties of SH1000 (8325-4 rsbU+) were characterized and compared to those of 8325-4, the rsbU mutant, parent strain. A recognition site for σB was located in the promoter region of katA, the gene encoding the sole catalase of S. aureus, by primer extension analysis. However, catalase expression and activity were similar in SH1000 (8325-4 rsbU+), suggesting that this promoter may have a minor role in catalase expression under normal conditions. Restoration of σB activity in SH1000 (8325-4 rsbU+) resulted in a marked decrease in the levels of the exoproteins SspA and Hla, and this is likely to be mediated by reduced expression of agr in this strain. By using Western blotting and a sarA-lacZ reporter assay, the levels of SarA were found to be similar in strains 8325-4 and SH1000 (8325-4 rsbU+) and sigB mutant derivatives of these strains. This finding contrasts with previous reports that suggested that SarA expression levels are altered when they are measured transcriptionally. Inactivation of sarA in each of these strains resulted in an expected decrease in agr expression; however, the relative level of agr in SH1000 (8325-4 rsbU+) remained less than the relative levels in 8325-4 and the sigB mutant derivatives. We suggest that SarA is not likely to be the effector in the overall σB-mediated effect on agr expression.
Acquisition and expression of memories of distance and direction in navigating wood ants

ABSTRACT Wood ants, like other central place foragers, rely on route memories to guide them to and from a reliable food source. They use visual memories of the surrounding scene and probably compass information to control their direction. Do they also remember the length of their route and do they link memories of direction and distance? To answer these questions, we trained wood ant (Formica rufa) foragers in a channel to perform either a single short foraging route or two foraging routes in opposite directions. By shifting the starting position of the route within the channel, but keeping the direction and distance fixed, we tried to ensure that the ants would rely upon vector memories rather than visual memories to decide when to stop. The homeward memories that the ants formed were revealed by placing fed or unfed ants directly into a channel and assessing the direction and distance that they walked without prior performance of the food-ward leg of the journey. This procedure prevented the distance and direction walked being affected by a home vector derived from path integration. Ants that were unfed walked in the feeder direction. Fed ants walked in the opposite direction for a distance related to the separation between start and feeder. Vector memories of a return route can thus be primed by the ants’ feeding state and expressed even when the ants have not performed the food-ward route. Tests on ants that have acquired two routes indicate that memories of the direction and distance of the return routes are linked, suggesting that they may be encoded by a common neural population within the ant brain. Summary: Wood ants form linked memories of the distance and direction of their homeward foraging route.
Effect of Hormone Replacement Therapy on Ocular Hemodynamics in Postmenopausal Women

Purpose To evaluate the effect of hormone replacement therapy on ocular hemodynamics in postmenopausal women. Methods Ocular Doppler ultrasonography was performed in 20 postmenopausal women on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and in 20 women without treatment, as the control group. Central retinal artery (CRA), posterior ciliary artery (PCA) and ophthalmic artery (OA) flow velocities and vascular resistances were measured prospectively by a radiologist blinded to the therapy. There were no associated systemic or ocular diseases or any medication history. Results The mean age of the patients on HRT was 50.05 ± 4.5 yrs (range 44 - 62). The mean age of the control group was 52.8 ± 4.09 yrs (range 46 - 65). The mean duration of HRT was 1.6 ± 1.4 yrs (range 3 months - 5 years). There were no differences between the groups in terms of flow velocities, vascular resistivities or pulsatility indices of OA, CRA and PCA (p>0.05). Conclusions HRT is essential in postmenopausal women for relief of vasomotor symptoms, cardioprotection and prevention of osteoporosis. Even though vaso-occlusive complications of hormone preparations have been reported, we did not observe any changes in ocular hemodynamics detectable with Doppler ultrasonography.
Chapter 11 TOWARDS HIGH-LEVEL ANALOG AND MIXED-SIGNAL SYNTHESIS FROM VHDL-AMS SPECIFICATIONS A Case Study for a Sigma-Delta Analog-Digital Converter

This paper presents our experience on high-level synthesis of Σ − ∆ analog to digital converters (ADC) from VHDL-AMS descriptions. The proposed VHDL-AMS subset for synthesis is discussed. The subset has the composition semantics, so that specifications offer enough insight into the system structure for automated architecture generation and optimization. A case study for the synthesis of a fourth order Σ − ∆ ADC is detailed. Compared to similar work, the method is more flexible in tackling new designs, and more tolerant to layout parasitic.
Loaded: Server Load Balancing for IPv6

With the next generation Internet protocol IPv6 at the horizon, it is time to think about how applications can migrate to IPv6. Web traffic is currently one of the most important applications in the Internet. The increasing popularity of dynamically generated content on the World Wide Web, has created the need for fast Web servers. Server clustering together with server load balancing has emerged as a promising technique to build scalable Web servers. The paper gives a short overview over the new features of IPv6 and different server load balancing technologies. Further, we present and evaluate Loaded, a user-space server load balancer for IPv4 and IPv6 based on Linux
Statistical profiling-based techniques for effective power provisioning in data centers

Current capacity planning practices based on heavy over-provisioning of power infrastructure hurt (i) the operational costs of data centers as well as (ii) the computational work they can support. We explore a combination of statistical multiplexing techniques to improve the utilization of the power hierarchy within a data center. At the highest level of the power hierarchy, we employ controlled underprovisioning and over-booking of power needs of hosted workloads. At the lower levels, we introduce the novel notion of soft fuses to flexibly distribute provisioned power among hosted workloads based on their needs. Our techniques are built upon a measurement-driven profiling and prediction framework to characterize key statistical properties of the power needs of hosted workloads and their aggregates. We characterize the gains in terms of the amount of computational work (CPU cycles) per provisioned unit of power Computation per Provisioned Watt (CPW). Our technique is able to double the CPWoffered by a Power Distribution Unit (PDU) running the e-commerce benchmark TPC-W compared to conventional provisioning practices. Over-booking the PDU by 10% based on tails of power profiles yields a further improvement of 20%. Reactive techniques implemented on our Xen VMM-based servers dynamically modulate CPU DVFS states to ensure power draw below the limits imposed by soft fuses. Finally, information captured in our profiles also provide ways of controlling application performance degradation despite overbooking. The 95th percentile of TPC-W session response time only grew from 1.59 sec to 1.78 sec--a degradation of 12%.
Validating the Performance of Haptic Motor Skill Training

The effect of haptic interfaces on motor skill training has been widely studied. However, relatively little is known about whether haptic training can promote long-term motor skill acquisition. In this paper, we report two experimental studies that investigated the effectiveness of visuohaptic (visual + haptic) interfaces in helping people develop short-term and long-term motor skills. Our first study compared training outcomes of visuohaptic training, visual training, and no-assistance training. We found that the training outcomes for the tested methods were similar when helping participants develop short-term motor skills. Our second experiment assessed the potential of visual training and visuohaptic training in promoting the development of long-term motor skills. Participants were trained during a four-day-long period. The results showed that the participants gained long-term skills through both training methods, and that the training outcomes for both methods were similar. The results also showed that visuohaptic training is a promising method, but that it needs to be further developed to be useful.
Continuous Analysis of Collaborative Design

In collaborative design, architects' individual design decisions may conflict and, when joined, may violate system consistency rules or non-functional requirements. These design conflicts can hinder collaboration and result in wasted effort. Proactive detection of code-level conflicts has been shown to improve collaborative productivity, however, the computational resource requirements for proactively computing design conflicts have hindered its applicability in practice. Our survey and interviews of 50 architects from six large software companies find that 60% of their projects involve collaborative design, that architects consider integration costly, and that design conflicts are frequent and lead to lost work. To aid collaborative design, we re-engineer FLAME, our prior design conflict detection technique, to use cloud resources and a novel prioritization algorithm that, together, achieve efficient and nonintrusive conflict detection, and guarantee a bound on the time before a conflict is discovered. Two controlled experiments with 90 students trained in software architecture in a professional graduate program, demonstrate that architects using FLAME design more efficiently, produce higher-quality designs, repair conflicts faster, and prefer using FLAME. An empirical performance evaluation demonstrates FLAME's scalability and verifies its time-bound guarantees.
Localization of Sarcomeric Proteins During Myofibril Assembly in Cultured Mouse Primary Skeletal Myotubes

It is important to understand how muscle forms normally in order to understand muscle diseases that result in abnormal muscle formation. Although the structure of myofibrils is well understood, the process through which the myofibril components form organized contractile units is not clear. Based on the staining of muscle proteins in avian embryonic cardiomyocytes, we previously proposed that myofibrils formation occurred in steps that began with premyofibrils followed by nascent myofibrils and ending with mature myofibrils. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the premyofibril model of myofibrillogenesis developed from studies developed from studies in avian cardiomyocytes was supported by our current studies of myofibril assembly in mouse skeletal muscle. Emphasis was on establishing how the key sarcomeric proteins, F‐actin, nonmuscle myosin II, muscle myosin II, and α‐actinin were organized in the three stages of myofibril assembly. The results also test previous reports that nonmuscle myosins II A and B are components of the Z‐bands of mature myofibrils, data that are inconsistent with the premyofibril model. We have also determined that in mouse muscle cells, telethonin is a late assembling protein that is present only in the Z‐bands of mature myofibrils. This result of using specific telethonin antibodies supports the approach of using YFP‐tagged proteins to determine where and when these YFP‐sarcomeric fusion proteins are localized. The data presented in this study on cultures of primary mouse skeletal myocytes are consistent with the premyofibril model of myofibrillogenesis previously proposed for both avian cardiac and skeletal muscle cells. Anat Rec, 297:1571–1584, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
HIMALIS-C-ITS: Fast and secure mobility management scheme based on HIMALIS for cooperative ITS service in future networks

In order to realize the future networks, it is required to consider the characteristics of their services and applications as well as the research on the basic architecture. The Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System (C-ITS) service belongs to representative ones since it can prevent vehicular accidents, increase the efficiency of transportation system and reduce environmental pollution, while improving passengers convenience. The C-ITS services requires not only continuous network access but also the secure communication regardless of vehicle's mobility since the services are tightly connected to the safety and life of passengers and pedestrians. In order to provide the continuous network access and secure communication to moving vehicles in the future networks based on the ID/locator split approach, authentication and location update of moving vehicles should be performed frequently, which result in significant signaling overheads. Therefore, in this paper, in order to integrate the C-ITS services with the ID/locator split approach based on HIMALIS architecture, we propose a novel mobility management scheme, named HIMALIS-C-ITS, which can contribute to reducing the delay in authentication and mitigating handover procedure at the mobile hosts as well as at the network entities in the edge network.
Ageing, Shocks and Wear Mechanisms in ZTA and the Long-Term Performance of Hip Joint Materials

The surface morphologies and microstructures of Zirconia Toughened Alumina (ZTA) femoral heads were analyzed following in vitro tests aiming to simulate in vivo degradation. Three phenomena potentially leading to degradation were investigated: shocks, friction and hydrothermal ageing. Shocks due to micro-separation created the main damage with the formation of wear stripes on the femoral head surfaces. Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) images suggested the release of wear debris of various shapes and sizes through inter- and intra-granular cracks; some debris may have a size lower than 100 nm. A decrease in hardness and Young’s modulus was measured within the wear stripes by nanoindentation technique and was attributed to the presence of surface and sub-surface micro-cracks. Such micro-cracks mechanically triggered the zirconia phase transformation in those worn areas, which in return presumably reduced further crack propagation. In comparison with shocks, friction caused little wear degradation as observed from AFM images by scarce pullout of grains. The long-term resistance of the ZTA composite material against hydrothermal ageing is confirmed by the present observations.
Answering math queries with search engines

Conventional search engines such as Bing and Google provide a user with a short answer to some queries as well as a ranked list of documents, in order to better meet her information needs. In this paper we study a class of such queries that we call math. Calculations (e.g. "12% of 24$ ", "square root of 120"), unit conversions (e.g. "convert 10 meter to feet"), and symbolic computations (e.g. "plot x^2+x+1") are examples of math queries. Among the queries that should be answered, math queries are special because of the infinite combinations of numbers and symbols, and rather few keywords that form them. Answering math queries must be done through real time computations rather than keyword searches or database look ups. The lack of a formal definition for the entire range of math queries makes it hard to automatically identify them all. We propose a novel approach for recognizing and classifying math queries using large scale search logs, and investigate its accuracy through empirical experiments and statistical analysis. It allows us to discover classes of math queries even if we do not know their structures in advance. It also helps to identify queries that are not math even though they might look like math queries. We also evaluate the usefulness of math answers based on the implicit feedback from users. Traditional approaches for evaluating the quality of search results mostly rely on the click information and interpret a click on a link as a sign of satisfaction. Answers to math queries do not contain links, therefore such metrics are not applicable to them. In this paper we describe two evaluation metrics that can be applied for math queries, and present the results on a large collection of math queries taken from Bing's search logs.
Total respiratory system, lung, and chest wall mechanics in sedated-paralyzed postoperative morbidly obese patients.

OBJECTIVE To study the relative contribution of the lung and the chest wall on the total respiratory system mechanics, gas exchange, and work of breathing in sedated-paralyzed normal subjects and morbidly obese patients, in the postoperative period. SETTING Policlinico Hospital, University of Milan, Italy. METHODS In ten normal subjects (normal) and ten morbidly obese patients (obese), we partitioned the total respiratory mechanics (rs) into its lung (L) and chest wall (w) components using the esophageal balloon technique together with airway occlusion technique, during constant flow inflation. We measured, after abdominal surgery, static respiratory system compliance (Cst,rs), lung compliance (Cst,L), chest wall compliance (Cst,w), total lung (Rmax,L) and chest wall (Rmax,w) resistance. Rmax,L includes airway (Rmin,L) and "additional" lung resistance (DR,L). DR,L represents the component due to viscoelastic phenomena of the lung tissue and time constant inequalities (pendelluft). Functional residual capacity (FRC) was measured by helium dilution technique. RESULTS We found that morbidly obese patients compared with normal subjects are characterized by the following: (1) reduced Cst,rs (p < 0.01), due to lower Cst,L (55.3 +/- 15.3 mL x cm H2O-1 vs 106.6 +/- 31.7 mL x cm H2O-1; p < 0.01) and Cst,w (112.4 +/- 47.4 mL x cm H2O-1 vs 190.7 +/- 45.1 mL x cm H2O-1; p < 0.01); (2) increased Rmin,L (4.7 +/- 3.1 mL x cm H2O x L-1 x s; vs 1.0 +/- 0.8 mL x cm H2O x L-1 x s; p < 0.01) and DR,L (4.9 +/- 2.6 mL x cm H2O x L-1 x s; vs 1.5 +/- 0.8 mL x cm H2O x L-1 x s; p < 0.01); (3) reduced FRC (0.665 +/- 0.191 L vs 1.691 +/- 0.325 L; p < 0.01); (4) increased work performed to inflate both the lung (0.91 +/- 0.25 J/L vs 0.34 +/- 0.08 J/L; p < 0.01) and the chest wall (0.39 +/- 0.13 J/L vs 0.18 +/- 0.04 J/L; p < 0.01); and (5) a reduced pulmonary oxygenation index (PaO2/PAO2 ratio). CONCLUSION Sedated-paralyzed morbidly obese patients, compared with normal subjects, are characterized by marked derangements in lung and chest wall mechanics and reduced lung volume after abdominal surgery. These alterations may account for impaired arterial oxygenation in the postoperative period.
CyberTwitter: Using Twitter to generate alerts for cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities

In order to secure vital personal and organizational system we require timely intelligence on cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. Intelligence about these threats is generally available in both overt and covert sources like the National Vulnerability Database, CERT alerts, blog posts, social media, and dark web resources. Intelligence updates about cybersecurity can be viewed as temporal events that a security analyst must keep up with so as to secure a computer system. We describe CyberTwitter, a system to discover and analyze cybersecurity intelligence on Twitter and serve as a OSINT (Open-source intelligence) source. We analyze real time information updates, in form of tweets, to extract intelligence about various possible threats. We use the Semantic Web RDF to represent the intelligence gathered and SWRL rules to reason over extracted intelligence to issue alerts for security analysts.