Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Decoherent Histories Approach to the Arrival Time Problem

What is the probability of a particle entering a given region of space at any time between ${t}_{1}$ and ${t}_{2}? $ Standard quantum theory assigns probabilities to alternatives at a fixed moment of time and is not immediately suited to questions of this type. We use the decoherent histories approach to quantum theory to compute the probability of a nonrelativistic particle crossing $x=0$ during an interval of time. For a system consisting of a single nonrelativistic particle, histories coarse grained according to whether or not they pass through spacetime regions are generally not decoherent, except for very special initial states, and thus probabilities cannot be assigned. Decoherence may, however, be achieved by coupling the particle to an environment consisting of a set of harmonic oscillators in a thermal bath. Probabilities for spacetime coarse grainings are thus calculated by considering restricted density operator propagators of the quantum Brownian motion model. We also show how to achieve decoherence by replicating the system $N$ times and then projecting onto the number density of particles that cross during a given time interval, and this gives an alternative expression for the crossing probability. The latter approach shows that the relative frequency for histories is approximately decoherent for sufficiently large $N,$ a result related to the Finkelstein-Graham-Hartle theorem.
Trust as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Mentoring and Knowledge Transfer

To be effective, organizations must facilitate knowledge transfer between employees. Mentoring has long been viewed as a vehicle for effective knowledge transfer. The authors break new ground in examining the role of trust as a moderator of the relationship between mentoring and knowledge transfer. Results of a study conducted among employees of a hospital who indicated they had mentors show main effects for both mentoring and trust as well as a significant interaction effect. Implications of these findings for knowledge transfer are discussed.
A comparison of voltage collapse proximity indicators

This paper reviews some important voltage stability indices and presents a new classification of them. These indices can be divided into two categories. The one which is based on the load flow Jacobian matrix can be used to predict the voltage collapse point. The indices in the second category use the elements of the admittance matrix and some system variables such as bus voltages and power flow through lines. These indices require less amount of computing time and are suitable for a fast diagnosis of system condition and contingency ranking, but can not predict the voltage collapse point. The performance of the studied indices is analyzed in IEEE 14-bus test system.
Modeling of natural human-robot encounters

For a person to feel comfortable when approaching a robot it is necessary for the robot to behave in an expected way. Peoplepsilas behavior around a robot not being aware of them were observed during a preliminary experiment. Based on those observations people were classified into four groups depending on their interest in the robot. People were tracked with a laser range finder based system, and their positions, directions and velocities were estimated. A second classification based on that information was made and the relation between the two classifications were mapped. Different actions were created for the robot to be able to react naturally to different human behaviors. In this paper we evaluate three different robot behaviors with respect to how natural they appear. One behavior that actively tries to engage people, one that passively indicates that people have been noticed and a third that makes random gestures. During an experiment test subjects were instructed to act according to the groups from the classification based on interest, and the robotpsilas performance with regard to naturalness was evaluated. Both first and third person evaluation made clear that the active and passive behavior were considered equally natural, while a robot randomly making gestures was considered much less natural.
SspA is required for acid resistance in stationary phase by downregulation of H‐NS in Escherichia coli

The stringent starvation protein A (SspA) is a RNA polymerase‐associated protein and is required for transcriptional activation of bacteriophage P1 late promoters. However, the role of SspA in gene expression in Escherichia coli is essentially unknown. In this work, we show that SspA is essential for cell survival during acid‐induced stress. Apparently, SspA inhibits stationary‐phase accumulation of H‐NS, a global regulator which functions mostly as a repressor, thereby derepressing multiple stress defence systems including those for acid stress and nutrient starvation. Consequently, the gene expression pattern of the H‐NS regulon is altered in the sspA mutant, leading to acid‐sensitive and hypermotile phenotypes. Thus, our study indicates that SspA is a global regulator, which acts upstream of H‐NS, and thereby plays an important role in the stress response of E. coli during stationary phase. In addition, our results indicate that the expression of the H‐NS regulon is sensitive to small changes in the cellular level of H‐NS, enabling the cell to response rapidly to environment cues. As SspA and H‐NS are highly conserved among Gram‐negative bacteria, of which many are pathogenic, the global role of SspA in the stress response and pathogenesis is discussed.
Impliciete en expliciete cognities als voorspellers van drinkgedrag in de vroege adolescentie.

Introductie: Alcoholgebruik onder adolescenten wordt vaak verklaard vanuit een duaal model van impliciete en expliciete cognities. In deze studie is gekeken naar de relatie tussen impliciete cognities (attentional bias en approach tendencies) en expliciete cognities (drinking motives) enerzijds en drinkgedrag anderzijds. Methoden: Data zijn afgenomen over twee meetmomenten (zes maanden uit elkaar) onder 381 Nederlandse jongeren in cluster 4 speciaal onderwijs (gemiddelde leeftijd: 13.57 jaar, 87.9% mannelijk). Er is multipele lineaire regressie gebruikt om wekelijks drinkgedrag te voorspellen aan de hand van impliciete en expliciete cognities op T1. Er is zowel cross-sectioneel als longitudinaal naar deze relaties gekeken. Tevens zijn de voorspellers beoordeeld op hun unieke bijdrage aan het voorspellen van drinkgedrag. Resultaten: Uit de lineaire regressies is gebleken dat approach tendencies, social drinking motives en enhancement drinking motives een positieve cross-sectionele relatie hebben met drinkgedrag. Er bleek geen effect van attentional bias te zijn. Longitudinaal werden geen relaties gevonden tussen de voorspellers en drinkgedrag. Ook werd er cross-sectioneel en longitudinaal geen interactie-effect gevonden tussen attentional bias en approach tendencies. Conclusies: Approach tendencies, social en enhancement drinking motives bleken een crosssectionele samenhang te hebben met drinkgedrag. Longitudinaal werden echter geen effecten gevonden. Verklaringen voor de bevindingen worden besproken.
A Morphometric Comparison of Island and Mainland Boas (Boa Constrictor) in Belize

Abstract Relative to mainland Boa constrictor, boas from islands off the coast of Belize are described as being smaller, having longer tails, more elongate snouts, and proportionately larger eyes. However, no systematic confirmation of these patterns has been made. A morphometric study was initiated to investigate the body size and head shape variation between island and mainland boas in Belize. One hundred twenty-nine boas from five islands and the mainland were caught and measured. Univariate and multivariate analyses indicated that, in general, previous descriptions are accurate. Island boas are about half the length and one-fifth the mass of mainland boas. In contrast to mainland boas, no sexual size dimorphism is evident in island boas. The head shape of island boas differs from that of mainland boas but this divergence is not consistent among populations. Some island boas have more attenuate snouts compared to mainland boas whereas other island boas have larger eyes and narrower heads. Male island boas have longer tails compared to males from the mainland, but such a difference is not found in females from the two localities. The morphology of island boas is consistent with an arboreal habit and reduced prey size. Because these changes have occurred over an extremely short time interval, this may be another example of the speed and magnitude of adaptation that is possible in squamates.
Vulnerability, Locus of Control, and Worry About Crime

The concept of vulnerability has been widely used to explain the empirical relationship between certain sociodemographic characteristics and anxieties about criminal victimization. Building upon this conceptual base, the present study proposes a psychological operationalization of vulnerability. Specifically, the relationship between locus of control and worry about crime is explored through an analysis of data generated from a survey of urban residents. Attention is focused upon two particular issues. The first concerns the extent to which locus of control scores mediate the relationships involving sociodemographic indicators of vulnerability and worry about crime. The second issue relates to an investigation of the mechanisms that provide the theoretical and empirical linkage between locus of control and worry.
Mobile Publish/Subscribe System for Intelligent Transport Systems over a Cloud Environment

With the advent of Smart Cities, public transport authorities are more and more interested in Intelligent Transport System (ITS) applications that allow to process a large amount of static and real time data in order to make public transport smarter. However, deploying such applications in a large scale distributed environment is challenging and requires an automated, scalable, flexible, elastic, loosely-coupled communication models in order to dynamically link information providers and consumers. To this end, Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) systems offer an asynchronous, dynamic, decoupled interaction scheme that is perfectly suitable for developing up-to-date, large-scale distributed applications within the ITS domain. In addition, cloud computing offers computational resources as services to utility driven model regardless of considering geographical locations in a scalable, elastic, fault tolerant and cost-effective way. In this work, we build an ITS application "Real-time Public Transit Tracking" on top of a Mobile Pub/Sub System (MoPS), and deploy it over an open source cloud platform, Open Stack, in order to achieve high performance and flexible management. We conduct a set of experiments to evaluate the performance of the implemented ITS application in terms of scalability, resource usage, and efficiency of the underlying matching algorithm under automated mobility of the subscribers. Our experimental results show that the ITS application can handle a large number of subscribers and publishers with proper reliability and negligible notification delay under real-time constraints. Further, we present a measurement study to characterize the impact of different workloads on the performance of Open Stack.
An Ontology Mapping Algorithm between Heterogeneous Product Classification Taxonomies

Research on ontology merging and mapping is one of the most important issues in the Semantic Web because ontologies are developed and used by various sites and organizations respectively. Electronic commerce is the area that require ontology mapping on product comparison over different product classification taxonomies of various shopping malls. But, a strict mapping strategy may lead a customer's configuration to search failure. Therefore we suggest a mapping algorithm for product matching that can provide more products by increasing sensitivity with reasonable decrease of specificity. We performed a comparative evaluation between our algorithm and PROMPT with 6 experimental sets.
Structure-activity relationships of isothiocyanates as mechanism-based inhibitors of 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone-induced lung tumorigenesis in A/J mice.

A structure-activity relationship study was carried out to identify structural features in arylalkyl and alkyl isothiocyanates that are associated with the inhibitory potency of these compounds against lung tumorigenesis induced in A/J mice by the tobacco-specific nitrosamine 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone (NNK). These features include the alkyl chain length, phenyl substitution, and secondary isothiocyanates. The naturally occurring allyl isothiocyanate, phenethyl isothiocyanate, and the synthetic analogues such as 6-phenylhexyl isothiocyanate, 8-phenyloctyl isothiocyanate, 10-phenyldecyl isothiocyanate, 1,2-diphenylethyl isothiocyanate, 2,2-diphenylethyl isothiocyanate, and alkyl isothiocyanates (with 1-hexyl, 2-hexyl, and 1-dodecyl as alkyl moieties) were assayed in mice for their tumor inhibitory potential. The isothiocyanates were given in corn oil by gavage at doses of either 0.04, 0.1, and 0.2 mumol or 1 and 5 mumol 2 h prior to a single i.p. injection of 10 mumol NNK. Mice were sacrificed 16 weeks later and lung adenomas were counted. At 0.2 mumol, 8-phenyloctyl isothiocyanate and 10-phenyldecyl isothiocyanate were stronger inhibitors than the previously tested 6-phenylhexyl isothiocyanate, but the difference in potency was not obvious at the lower doses. At both 1 and 5 mumol, allyl isothiocyanate was inactive, while the other five synthetic isothiocyanates were considerably more potent than phenethyl isothiocyanate. In the alkyl isothiocyanate series, 2-hexyl isothiocyanate was more potent than 1-hexyl isothiocyanate, while 1-dodecyl isothiocyanate was the most potent at 1 mumol, reducing tumor multiplicity in the group treated with NNK alone from 11.1 to the background level. Also, 1,2-diphenylethyl isothiocyanate appeared to be a stronger inhibitor than 2,2-diphenylethyl isothiocyanate. In this study we have shown that the phenyl moiety is not essential for the inhibitory activity since alkyl isothiocyanates exhibit strong inhibitory effects against lung tumorigenesis. We have also shown that secondary isothiocyanates possess a higher potency than their structural isomers bearing a primary isothiocyanate. From results of this study and of seven previously studied isothiocyanates, we conclude that the observed inhibitory potency of isothiocyanates in the A/J mouse lung tumor model is correlated with their partition coefficients (log P) and the pseudo first order rate constants for the reaction of isothiocyanates toward glutathione (kobs). These results reveal that both high lipophilicity and low reactivity of isothiocyanates are important for inhibitory activity toward NNK-induced lung tumorigenesis. These observations provide a structural basis for the discovery of more effective chemopreventive agents.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RESILIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF OPTIMISM

The present study was carried out in order to predict psychological well-being via resiliency and test the mediating role of optimism in the relationship between psychological well-being and resilience. To this end, a sample of 414 students of medicine (213 boys and 191 girls) was selected through multistage cluster sampling. They were asked to complete Resiliency Scale (Connor & Davidsons, 2003), Optimism Scale (Scheier and Carver, 1995) and Well-being Scale (Ryff, 1989). The results indicated that resilience can predict psychological well-being. The results showed that correlation of optimism with predictive variable (resilience) is positive and significant (P<0.01, r=0.38) and with the criterion variable (psychological well-being) is also positive and significant (P<0.01, r= 0.45). According to the results of hierarchical regression, it may be concluded that optimism plays a partial mediating (and not full) role in the relationship between resiliency and psychological well-being. Based on the findings, it can be said that part of the effect of resiliency on psychological well-being could be applied through optimism. The findings showed that regardless of the level of resilience, optimism can, to some extent, facilitate psychological well-being. All correlations were significant in the level of 0.01.
Is co-scheduling too expensive for SMP VMs?

Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) virtual machines (VMs) allow users to take advantage of a multiprocessor infrastructure. Despite the advantage, SMP VMs can cause synchronization latency to increase significantly, depending on task scheduling. In this paper, we show that even if a SMP VM runs non-concurrent applications, the synchronization latency problem can still occur due to synchronization in the VM kernel. Our experiments show that both of the widely used open source hypervisors, Xen and KVM, with the default schedulers are susceptible to the synchronization latency problem. To remediate this problem, previous works propose a co-scheduling solution where virtual CPUs (vCPUs) of a SMP VM are scheduled simultaneously. However, the co-scheduling approach can cause CPU fragmentation that reduces CPU utilization, priority inversion that degrades I/O performance, and execution delay, leading to deployment impediment. We propose a balance scheduling algorithm which simply balances vCPU siblings on different physical CPUs without forcing the vCPUs to be scheduled simultaneously. Balance scheduling can achieve similar or (up to 8%) better application performance than co-scheduling without the co-scheduling drawbacks, thereby benefiting various SMP VMs. The evaluation is thoroughly conducted against both concurrent and non-concurrent applications with CPU-bound, I/O-bound, and network-bound workloads in KVM. For empirical comparison, we also implement the co-scheduling algorithm on top of KVM's Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS). Compared to the synchronization-unaware CFS, balance scheduling can significantly improve application performance in a SMP VM (e.g. reduce the average TPC-W response time by up to 85%).
The Beta-Glucan Receptor Dectin-1 Recognizes Specific Morphologies of Aspergillus fumigatus

Alveolar macrophages represent a first-line innate host defense mechanism for clearing inhaled Aspergillus fumigatus from the lungs, yet contradictory data exist as to which alveolar macrophage recognition receptor is critical for innate immunity to A. fumigatus. Acknowledging that the A. fumigatus cell wall contains a high beta-1,3–glucan content, we questioned whether the beta-glucan receptor dectin-1 played a role in this recognition process. Monoclonal antibody, soluble receptor, and competitive carbohydrate blockage indicated that the alveolar macrophage inflammatory response, specifically the production of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin-1α (IL-1α), IL-1β, IL-6, CXCL2/macrophage inflammatory protein-2 (MIP-2), CCL3/macrophage inflammatory protein-1α (MIP-1α), granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF), and granulocyte monocyte–CSF (GM-CSF), to live A. fumigatus was dependent on recognition via the beta-glucan receptor dectin-1. The inflammatory response was triggered at the highest level by A. fumigatus swollen conidia and early germlings and correlated to the levels of surface-exposed beta glucans, indicating that dectin-1 preferentially recognizes specific morphological forms of A. fumigatus. Intratracheal administration of A. fumigatus conidia to mice in the presence of a soluble dectin-Fc fusion protein reduced both lung proinflammatory cytokine/chemokine levels and cellular recruitment while modestly increasing the A. fumigatus fungal burden, illustrating the importance of beta-glucan–initiated dectin-1 signaling in defense against this pathogen. Collectively, these data show that dectin-1 is centrally required for the generation of alveolar macrophage proinflammatory responses to A. fumigatus and to our knowledge provides the first in vivo evidence for the role of dectin-1 in fungal innate defense.
Multiple Pseudomonas species secrete exolysin‐like toxins and provoke Caspase‐1‐dependent macrophage death

Pathogenic bacteria secrete protein toxins that provoke apoptosis or necrosis of eukaryotic cells. Here, we developed a live-imaging method, based on incorporation of a DNA-intercalating dye into membrane-damaged host cells, to study the kinetics of primary bone marrow-derived macrophages (BMDMs) mortality induced by opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa expressing either Type III Secretion System (T3SS) toxins or the pore-forming toxin, Exolysin (ExlA). We found that ExlA promotes the activation of Caspase-1 and maturation of interleukin-1β. BMDMs deficient for Caspase-1 and Caspase-11 were resistant to ExlA-induced death. Furthermore, by using KO BMDMs, we determined that the upstream NLRP3/ASC complex leads to the Caspase-1 activation. We also demonstrated that Pseudomonas putida and Pseudomonas protegens and the Drosophila pathogen Pseudomonas entomophila, which naturally express ExlA-like toxins, are cytotoxic toward macrophages and provoke the same type of pro-inflammatory death as does ExlA+ P. aeruginosa. These results demonstrate that ExlA-like toxins of two-partner secretion systems from diverse Pseudomonas species activate the NLRP3 inflammasome and provoke inflammatory pyroptotic death of macrophages.
Online learning system with logical and intuitive processings using fuzzy Q-learning and neural network

This research tries to construct a new architecture of intelligent information processing imitating that of human thought and having ability of autonomous learning. Its processing is divided into logical and intuitive processing, which are selected flexibly and properly for the changing situation. To investigate its effectiveness, it is applied to a robot playing a Tetris game, which is regarded as a symbol of human intellectual behavior. The robot consists of three elements: recognition part, thinking part, and action part. The thinking part consists of logical and intuitive processing. Logical processing has the ability of accurate and slow processing, and intuitive processing has the ability of rough and quick processing. The learning method of logical processing consists of fuzzy Q-learning with neural network and intuitive processing consists of neural network, which is trained by empirical knowledge of logical processing. The combination of logical and intuitive processing leads to the improvement of game playing results for the reason that intuitive and logical processing built along with playing time becomes more applicable. As a result, it is shown that the proposed method is a useful approach.