Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Family attitudes and gender opinions of cohabiting and married mothers in Switzerland

A regular increase of nonmarital births has been observed in Switzerland since the middle of the 1990s. This article aims first to investigate whether childbearing within cohabitation reflects a new living arrangement that replaces marriage or whether it is favored by poor economic circumstances. The second aim of this article is to examine whether married or cohabitant women can be distinguished based on their levels of subjective well-being (SWB), family attitudes, and gender opinions. Using a subsample of married and cohabitant mothers from the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), multilevel models reveal that childbearing within cohabitation in Switzerland does not reflect a pattern of disadvantage and that married and cohabitant mothers differ. Cohabitant mothers tend to be less satisfied with life in general, and tend to share a less traditional perspective on family, than married mothers. The research concludes that cohabitation could be considered an avant-garde family style that exhibits more equal division of tasks within the household.
WTP and WTA in competitive and non-competitive environments

Theoretical equivalence exists among various auction mechanisms, specifically the Second-Price-Auction (SPA), a competitive environment, and the BDM mechanism, a non-competitive environment. Yet, empirical studies suggest that behavior in these mechanisms may diverge. Our experimental study examines the WTP and the WTA of individuals by analyzing buying and selling bidding patterns both for a physical product (mugs) and for two types of lotteries (regular lotteries and extreme lotteries) in these two auctions mechanism: SPA and BDM. We found that the WTP in the SPA is higher than the WTP in the BDM for mugs and for regular lotteries, while the mechanisms do not differ significantly for extreme lotteries. In addition, the WTA in the SPA is lower than in the BDM for regular lotteries only. These results indicate that the WTP and WTA, as well as the WTA-WTP gap, tend to differ in the SPA and in the BDM as a result of the interaction between the competitiveness effect and other psychological effects on bidding patterns for riskless and risky assets. In addition, the current study suggests that the competitiveness effect depends not only on the type of mechanism (SPA), but also on the type of item (physical assets or lotteries) and the type of lottery. In addition, the influence of the competitiveness effect may vary between buying and selling positions.
Analysis of MLEM and OSEM Reconstruction Algorithms for Different Geometries of PET Scanners

At the experimental heavy ion tumor therapy facility at the GSI Darmstadt in-beam PET is operated. The in-beam PET data should be reconstructed as fast as possible (ideally, in real time), because they allow monitoring irregularities in beam delivery. To find a fast reconstruction algorithm with acceptable quality, MLEM [1] and OSEM [2] algorithms were compared for full-ring and dual-head geometries of the PET scanner with different parameters of reconstruction. An activity distribution to be reconstructed was generated by the simulation routine. Quality assurance of reconstructions was performed by numerical and visual comparison of the reconstructed and generated activity distributions. The simulated activity was homogeneously distributed within a hollow sphere. Then it was reconstructed using the projection data by means of MLEM and OSEM algorithms. Results of these reconstructions were compared using the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) [3]. For the OSEM algorithm projection data were grouped into different number of subsets. Reconstructions with OSEM 6, 8, 10 and 12 subsets were compared with the reconstruction result after 50 iterations of MLEM for a full-ring PET scanner (see Fig. 1). Best result in terms of MAE showed the reconstruction with OSEM 8 subsets. It achieved the quality after 50 iterations of MLEM in 9 iterations.
Integrated Adaptive QoS Management in Middleware: An Empirical Case Study

Distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems in which application requirements and environmental conditions may not be known a priori—or which may vary at run-time—can benefit from an adaptive approach to management of quality-of-service (QoS) to meet key constraints, such as end-to-end timeliness. Moreover, coordinated management of multiple QoS capabilities across multiple layers of applications and their supporting middleware can help to achieve necessary assurances of meeting
An Autonomous Data Structure for Brute Force Calculations in the Cloud

Commercial cloud systems allow massively parallel execution of a computing task for little money. We want to exploit this economic opportunity by solving classical problems in Operations Research through complete enumeration, especially if these problems can be expressed as integer programming problems. We propose and evaluate here a data structure, Scalable Virtual Distributed Hashing, that autonomously extends the computing task over as many nodes as are needed in order return a result within a time limit set by the user. Our data structure deals with varying and changing node capacities and the effects of node failures. It is modeled after Scalable Distributed Data Structures and Extendible Hashing in particular.
Purification and properties of extracellular glucosyltransferases from Streptococcus mutans serotype a.

Extracellular glucosyltransferases (sucrose: 1,6-alpha-D-glucan 3-alpha- and 6-alpha-glucosyltransferase) of Streptococcus mutans HS6 (serotype a) were purified from the culture supernatant by DEAE-Sepharose chromatography, ConA-Sepharose chromatography and chromatofocusing. The enzymes I and II with specific activities of 6.20 and 5.86 i.u. mg-1, respectively, exhibited slightly different isoelectric points (pI 4.5 and 4.2) and the molecular weights were estimated to be 161000 and 174000, respectively, by SDS-PAGE. The enzymes had the same optimum pH of 5.5 and the same Km values of 1.3 mM for sucrose and of 83 microM-glucose equivalent for dextran T10. By double immunodiffusion test on agar, these enzymes were immunologically identical to each other. Analysis by GLC of the glucans synthesized de novo from sucrose by the enzymes (I and II) established that they were 1,6-alpha-D-glucans with 20 and 24.5 mol% 1,3,6-branch points, respectively. Both are therefore bifunctional enzymes.
A system level perspective on branch architecture performance

Current compilers for VLIW and superscalar machines increase the instruction level parallelism of an application by merging several basic blocks into an enlarged predicated block, resulting in higher performance code but increased register requirements. We present a framework that computes precisely the interferences among virtual registers in the presence of predicated operations. Graph-coloring biased register allocators can directly use the resulting interference graph. For interval-graph based register allocators, and others, we propose a technique that reduces the register requirements by allowing non-interfering virtual registers that overlap in time to share a common virtual register. Preliminary measurements on a benchmark of loops from the Perfect Club, SPEC-89, and the Livermore Fortran Kernels indicate the effectiveness of this technique.
Multiple Measurements and Joint Dimensionality Reduction for Large Scale Image Search with Short Vectors

This paper addresses the construction of a short-vector (128D) image representation for large-scale image and particular object retrieval. In particular, the method of joint dimensionality reduction of multiple vocabularies is considered. We study a variety of vocabulary generation techniques: different k-means initializations, different descriptor transformations, different measurement regions for descriptor extraction. Our extensive evaluation shows that different combinations of vocabularies, each partitioning the descriptor space in a different yet complementary manner, results in a significant performance improvement, which exceeds the state-of-the-art.
Leibniz: An Introduction to His Philosophy

Leibniz' life and works God and possibility three fundamental principles the theory of contingence possible worlds relations and incompossibility some key principles of the contingent sphere the realm of monads and its creation well founding and monadic aggregation space and time - motion and infinity monadic hierarchies human knowledge moral philosophy theodicy.
Effects of Luminosity Contrast and Stimulus Duration on User Performance and Preference in a P300-Based Brain–Computer Interface

Brain–computer interfaces (BCI) have potential to provide a new channel of communication and control for people with severe motor disabilities. Although many empirical studies exist, few have specifically evaluated the impact of contributing factors on user performance and perception in BCI applications, especially for users with motor disabilities. This article reports the effects of luminosity contrast and stimulus duration on user performance and usage preference in a P300-based BCI application, P300 Speller. Ten participants with neuromuscular disabilities (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and cerebral palsy) and 10 able-bodied participants were asked to spell six 10-character phrases in the P300 Speller. The overall accuracy was 76.5% for the able-bodied participants and 26.8% for participants with motor disabilities. The results showed that luminosity contrast and stimulus duration have significant effects on user performance. In addition, participants preferred high luminosity contrast with middle or short stimulus duration. However, these effects on user performance and preference varied for participants with and without motor disabilities. The results also indicated that although most participants with motor disabilities can establish BCI control, BCI illiteracy does exist. These results of the study should provide insights into the future research of the BCI systems, especially the real-world applicability of the BCI applications as a nonmuscular communication and control system for people with severe motor disabilities.
Web Analytics for Security Informatics

An enormous volume of security-relevant information is present on the Web, for instance in the content produced each day by millions of bloggers worldwide, but discovering and making sense of these data is very challenging. This paper considers the problem of exploring and analyzing the Web to realize three fundamental objectives: 1. ) security-relevant information is covery, 2. ) target situational awareness, typically by making (near) real-time inferences concerning events and activities from available observations, and 3. ) predictive analysis, to include providing early warning for crises and forming predictions regarding likely outcomes of emerging issues and contemplated interventions. The proposed approach involves collecting and integrating three types of Web data -- textual, relational, and temporal -- to perform assessments and generate insights that would be difficult or impossible to obtain using standard methods. We demonstrate the efficacy of the framework by summarizing a number of successful real-world deployments of the methodology.
Cross-Cultural Differences in Cognitive Emotion Regulation Strategies: a Comparison Between six European Countries

Background: Use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies (CERS) in response to stressful life events varies by country, though research has been limited to Americans and Asians. We aimed to compare six European countries to investigate cross-cultural differences in the use of CERS and test if the relationship between specific strategies and psychopathology varies across countries. Methods: Participants were recruited from the Netherlands, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Germany (N=1553) and completed cross-cultural measures of cognitive emotion regulation using the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ), depression and anxiety. Results: We found significant differences on all the subscales of the CERQ: northern European countries made less use of strategies related to maladjustment than southern European countries. The direction of the relationships between specific strategies and symptoms of psychopathology was consistent across countries. Discussion: Although there were culture-related differences in the use of CERS, the consistent relationship between strategies and psychopathology supports the idea of a transdiagnostic approach to treating psychopathology.
Smoking uptake is associated with increased psychological distress: results of a national longitudinal study

Background There is evidence that smoking is associated with poorer mental health. However, the underlying mechanisms for this remain unclear. We used longitudinal data to assess whether smoking uptake, or failed quit attempts, are associated with increased psychological distress. Methods Data were used from Waves 3 (2004/05), 5 (2006/07) and 7 (2008/09) of the longitudinal New Zealand Survey of Family, Income and Employment. Fixed-effects linear regression analyses were performed to model the impact of changes in smoking status and quit status (exposure variables) on changes in psychological distress (Kessler 10 (K10)). Results After adjusting for time-varying demographic and socioeconomic covariates, smoking uptake was associated with an increase in psychological distress (K10: 0.22, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.43). The associations around quitting and distress were in the expected directions, but were not statistically significant. That is, smokers who successfully quit between waves had no meaningful change in psychological distress (K10: −0.05, 95% CI −0.34 to 0.23), whereas those who tried but failed to quit, experienced an increase in psychological distress (K10: 0.18, 95% CI −0.05 to 0.40). Conclusions The findings provide some support for a modest association between smoking uptake and a subsequent increase in psychological distress, but more research is needed before such information is considered for inclusion in public health messages.
Early diagnosis of dementia based on intersubject whole-brain dissimilarities

This article studies the possibility of detecting dementia in an early stage, using nonrigid registration of MR brain scans in combination with dissimilarity-based pattern recognition techniques. Instead of focussing on the shape of a single brain structure, we take into account the shape differences within the entire brain. Imaging data was obtained from a longitudinal, population based study of the elderly. A set of 29 subjects was identified, who were asymptomatic at the time of scanning, but were diagnosed as having dementia within 0.7 to 5 years after the scan, and a set of 29 age and gender matched healthy controls were selected. Each subject was registered to all other subjects, using a nonrigid registration algorithm. Based on statistics of the deformation field in the brain, a dissimilarity measure was calculated between each pair of subjects, yielding a 58×58 dissimilarity matrix. A kNN classifier was trained on the dissimilarity matrix and the performance was tested in a leave-one-out experiment. A classification accuracy of 81% was attained (spec. 83%, sens. 79%). This demonstrates the potential of whole-brain intersubject dissimilarities to aid in early diagnosis of dementia.
Fuzzy Index to Evaluate Edge Detection in Digital Images

In literature, we can find different metrics to evaluate the detected edges in digital images, like Pratt's figure of merit (FOM), Jaccard’s index (JI) and Dice’s coefficient (DC). These metrics compare two images, the first one is the reference edges image, and the second one is the detected edges image. It is important to mention that all existing metrics must binarize images before their evaluation. Binarization step causes information to be lost because an incomplete image is being evaluated. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy index (FI) for edge evaluation that does not use a binarization step. In order to process all detected edges, images are represented in their fuzzy form and all calculations are made with fuzzy sets operators and fuzzy Euclidean distance between both images. Our proposed index is compared to the most used metrics using synthetic images, with good results.
Cell wall synthesis is necessary for membrane dynamics during sporulation of Bacillus subtilis

During Bacillus subtilis sporulation, an endocytic‐like process called engulfment results in one cell being entirely encased in the cytoplasm of another cell. The driving force underlying this process of membrane movement has remained unclear, although components of the machinery have been characterized. Here we provide evidence that synthesis of peptidoglycan, the rigid, strength bearing extracellular polymer of bacteria, is a key part of the missing force‐generating mechanism for engulfment. We observed that sites of peptidoglycan synthesis initially coincide with the engulfing membrane and later with the site of engulfment membrane fission. Furthermore, compounds that block muropeptide synthesis or polymerization prevented membrane migration in cells lacking a component of the engulfment machinery (SpoIIQ), and blocked the membrane fission event at the completion of engulfment in all cells. In addition, these compounds inhibited bulge and vesicle formation that occur in spoIID mutant cells unable to initiate engulfment, as did genetic ablation of a protein that polymerizes muropeptides. This is the first report to our knowledge that peptidoglycan synthesis is necessary for membrane movements in bacterial cells and has implications for the mechanism of force generation during cytokinesis.
Available and Stabilizing 2-3 Trees

Transient faults corrupt the content and organization of data structures. A recovery technique dealing with such faults is stabilization, which guarantees, following some number of operations on the data structure, that content of the data structure is legitimate. Another notion of fault tolerance is availability, which is the property that operations continue to be applied during the period of recovery after a fault, and successful updates are not lost while the data structure stabilizes to a legitimate state. The available, stabilizing 2-3 tree supports find, insert, and delete operations, each with O(lg n) complexity when the tree’s state is legitimate and contains n items. For an illegitimate state, these operations have O(lg K) complexity where K is the maximum capacity of the tree. Within O(t) operations, the state of the tree is guaranteed to be legitimate, where t is the number of nodes accessible via some path from the tree’s root at the initial state. This paper resolves, for the first time, issues of dynamic allocation and pointer organization in a stabilizing data structure.
Modeling a professional driver in ultra-high performance maneuvers with a hybrid cost MPC

During racing or vehicle performance evaluation, a professional driver looks ahead and chooses the vehicle controls to best maneuver the circuit or track in minimum time. This process is carried out in a receding horizon fashion around the circuit or track in a process that closely resembles Model Predictive Control (MPC). Professional drivers quickly build mental models of the circuit or track of how best to exploit its features in order to negotiate the full maneuver in minimum time. In this article, we implement a method for exploiting future preview information into a local solution of a MPC which indirectly models a driver learning a particular circuit or track. A hybrid cost MPC structure that is capable of switching between two different driving styles is used to achieve the incorporation of this future preview information. It will be shown that this future preview information (beyond the local MPC horizon) can help to alleviate some of the sub-optimal behavior inherent in MPC. The concept is then demonstrated on a chicane maneuver. The proposed scheme is compared against the exact time-optimal control solution for this maneuver.
Deferred methods: accelerating dynamic program analysis on multicores

Parallelization is attractive for speeding up dynamic program analysis on multicores. However, inter-thread communication overhead may outweigh any benefit from parallel execution. We propose deferred methods, a high-level Java framework to accelerate dynamic analysis on multicores. To minimize inter-thread communication overhead, invocations to analysis methods are automatically aggregated in thread-local buffers that are processed when full. In contrast to other approaches, our framework supports custom buffer processing strategies, eases pre-processing of buffers to reduce contention on shared data structures, and offers a synchronization mechanism to wait for the completion of previously invoked deferred methods. We also present a novel adaptive buffer processing strategy that parallelizes the analysis only when the observed workload leaves some CPU cores under-utilized. Using a profiler as case study, we show that deferred methods with the adaptive buffer processing strategy yield an average speedup of factor 4.09 on a quad-core machine. The speedup stems both from parallelization and from reduced contention.
Assessing affective commitment in the three-component model and the two factor theory : a comparison between the theories of Meyer and Allen and Herzberg, Mausner and Snyderman

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the empirical evidence concerning affective commitment by assessing the three-component model (Meyer & Allen, 1991) and the two factor theory (Herzberg, Mausner & Snyderman, 1959). Using survey data from 167 stores and 4112 employees from Poland and 191 stores and 6136 employees from the Czech Republic it is found that the three-component model predicts the simple and mediating effects reasonably well. Especially work experiences appear to have a large influence on affective commitment. The interaction effects from both theories were found antagonistic using this data. The model does not fit the data when all confirmed hypotheses are combined to one model. There were no higher order effects, neither from supermarket nor country. For future research a conceptual model with better defined constructs and sub constructs, that are more compatible with the hygiene and comfort factors, would be fruitful.
Computation Methods for the Diagnosis and Prognosis of Heart Disease

Medical data mining is the application of machine learning to highly voluminous medical database. The mining process aims at exploring the patterns and relationships within the medical data that could be exploited for the diagnosis and prognosis of the disease. Since medical databases are humongous in nature, feature selection is done using pre-processing, in order to reduce the dimensionality without compromising the accuracy, by removing immaterial data present in the database. Health care organizations are challenged to provide high quality and cost-effective care to patients. Heart disease prognosis is considered to be one of the tiresome and complicated tasks in medical field. Heart disease has given primary importance because of its exponential rise in recent years. It has been estimated that, by the year 2016, most important cause of mortality in India will be due to heart diseases. Hence an efficient heart disease prediction system is crucial. Different heart disease prediction systems have been introduced for the prognosis of heart disease. Through this paper, we propose an amalgamation of different algorithms such as Support Vector Machine, Random Forest and Naive Bayes. For feature extraction and dimensionality reduction, Principle Component Analysis is used along with Firefly algorithm for the optimization of output.