Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Internalization of ISO 9001: a longitudinal survey

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of the motivation to adopt International Standards Organization (ISO) 9001 on both the internalization of the standard, namely the active day-to-day use of its main underlying practices, and the benefits obtained from its adoption. Similarly, the influence of the internalization on the benefits derived from ISO 9001 is analyzed. Design/methodology/approach – A longitudinal survey was carried out on a sample of 110 Spanish organizations that adopted the standard in its early phase of dissemination. These organizations were surveyed in 1999 and, 12 years later, in 2011. Findings – The results show that, contrary to the results of previous research work, early adopters driven by internal motives experience neither higher levels of internalization of ISO 9001 nor higher benefits from adoption of the standard. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence that in the long run a higher level of internalization leads to greater benefits from the adoption of ISO 9001. Originality/value – The adoption of ISO 9001 is a dynamic process in which certificating organizations play an important role.
Brassica database (BRAD) version 2.0: integrating and mining Brassicaceae species genomic resources

The Brassica database (BRAD) was built initially to assist users apply Brassica rapa and Arabidopsis thaliana genomic data efficiently to their research. However, many Brassicaceae genomes have been sequenced and released after its construction. These genomes are rich resources for comparative genomics, gene annotation and functional evolutionary studies of Brassica crops. Therefore, we have updated BRAD to version 2.0 (V2.0). In BRAD V2.0, 11 more Brassicaceae genomes have been integrated into the database, namely those of Arabidopsis lyrata, Aethionema arabicum, Brassica oleracea, Brassica napus, Camelina sativa, Capsella rubella, Leavenworthia alabamica, Sisymbrium irio and three extremophiles Schrenkiella parvula, Thellungiella halophila and Thellungiella salsuginea. BRAD V2.0 provides plots of syntenic genomic fragments between pairs of Brassicaceae species, from the level of chromosomes to genomic blocks. The Generic Synteny Browser (GBrowse_syn), a module of the Genome Browser (GBrowse), is used to show syntenic relationships between multiple genomes. Search functions for retrieving syntenic and non-syntenic orthologs, as well as their annotation and sequences are also provided. Furthermore, genome and annotation information have been imported into GBrowse so that all functional elements can be visualized in one frame. We plan to continually update BRAD by integrating more Brassicaceae genomes into the database. Database URL: http://brassicadb.org/brad/
Perturbed Optimization in Banach spaces I: A General Theory based on a Weak Directional Constraint Qualification

Using a directional form of constraint qualification weaker than Robinson's, we derive an implicit function theorem for inclusions and use it for first- and second-order sensitivity analyses of the value function in perturbed constrained optimization. We obtain Holder and Lipschitz properties and, under a no-gap condition, first-order expansions for exact and approximate solutions. As an application, differentiability properties of metric projections in Hilbert spaces are obtained, using a condition generalizing polyhedricity. We also present in the appendix a short proof of a generalization of the convex duality theorem in Banach spaces.
Managing Object Versioning in Geo-Distributed Object Storage Systems

Object versioning is the keystone for implementing eventual consistency in modern geo-distributed object storage systems such as Amazon S3. Despite this, the study of implementing object versioning has not been given a lot of attention in either academic or industrial communities. The selection of an implementation method is not considered as an important factor impacting the overall system performance under different workloads. In this paper, we present our study of two methods of implementing object versioning in geo-distributed object storage systems and on how these impact the performance of these systems under different workloads. We propose and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of (1) Write-Repair approach and (2) Read-Repair approach. From our experiments, we found that the choice of approach significantly impacts the performance of storage systems, which in turn impact the performance of applications built on top of these systems.
A role for FKBP52 in Tau protein function

Tau is a microtubule-associated protein, which is widely expressed in the central nervous system, predominantly in neurons, where it regulates microtubule dynamics, axonal transport, and neurite outgrowth. The aberrant assembly of Tau is the hallmark of several human neurodegenerative diseases, collectively known as tauopathies. They include Alzheimer’s disease, Pick’s disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, and frontotemporal dementia and parkinsonism linked to chromosome 17. Several abnormalities in Tau, such as hyperphosphorylation and aggregation, alter its function and are central to the pathogenic process. Here, we describe biochemical and functional interactions between FKBP52 and Tau. FKBP52 is a member of the FKBP (FK506-binding protein) family that comprises intracellular protein effectors of immunosuppressive drugs (such as FK506 and rapamycin). We found that FKBP52, which is abundant in brain, binds directly and specifically to Tau, especially in its hyperphosphorylated form. The relevance of this observation was confirmed by the colocalization of both proteins in the distal part of the axons of cortical neurons and by the antagonistic effect of FKBP52 on the ability of Tau to promote microtubule assembly. Overexpression of FKBP52 in differentiated PC12 cells prevented the accumulation of Tau and resulted in reduced neurite length. Taken together, these findings indicate a role for FKBP52 in Tau function and may help to decipher and modulate the events involved in Tau-induced neurodegeneration.
Paper Special Section on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Networking Gpu-chariot: a Programming Framework for Stream Applications Running on Multi-gpu Systems

SUMMARY This paper presents a stream programming framework, named GPU-chariot, for accelerating stream applications running on graphics processing units (GPUs). The main contribution of our framework is that it realizes efficient software pipelines on multi-GPU systems by enabling out-of-order execution of CPU functions, kernels, and data transfers. To achieve this out-of-order execution, we apply a runtime scheduler that not only maximizes the utilization of system resources but also encapsulates the number of GPUs available in the system. In addition, we implement a load-balancing capability to flow data efficiently through multiple GPUs. Furthermore, a callback interface enables overlapping execution of functions in third-party libraries. By using kernels with different performance bottlenecks, we show that our out-of-order execution is up to 20% faster than in-order execution. Finally, we conduct several case studies on a 4-GPU system and demonstrate the advantages of GPU-chariot over a manually pipelined code. We conclude that GPU-chariot can be useful when developing stream applications with software pipelines on multiple GPUs and CPUs.
Gain-scheduling-based droop control for universal operation of small wind turbine systems

Universal operation of small-power wind turbine systems (grid-connected and island mode) may increase their penetration in the power systems. This paper proposes the use of gain scheduling to adapt the droop control gains to the different operation modes. It allows to achieve fast dynamic response in grid-connected mode and small voltage and frequency variations in island mode. An energy storage system contributes to ensure power balance between the wind turbine and the loads demand in island mode. The effectiveness of the proposed control method is verified by simulation and experimental results.
SNARE Complex Proteins, Including the Cognate Pair VAMP‐2and Syntaxin‐4, Are Expressed in Cultured Oligodendrocytes

Abstract : Myelin membrane synthesis in the CNS by oligodendrocytes (OLs) involves directed intracellular transport and targeting of copious amounts of specialized lipids and proteins over a relatively short time span. As in other plasma membrane‐directed fusion, this process is expected to use specific trafficking and vesicle fusion proteins characteristic of the SNARE model. We have investigated the developmental expression of SNARE proteins in highly enriched primary cultures of OLs at discrete stages of differentiation. VAMP‐2/synaptobrevin‐2, syntaxin‐2 and ‐4, nsec‐1/munc‐18‐1, Rab3a, synaptophysin, and synapsin were expressed. During differentiation, expression of the vesicular SNARE VAMP‐2, the small GTP‐binding protein Rab3a, and the target SNARE syntaxin‐4 were up‐regulated. VAMP‐2 and Rab3 proteins detected immunocytochemically in cultured OLs were localized within the developing process network ; in situ anti‐VAMP‐2 antibody stained the perikarya of rows of cells with the distribution and appearance of OLs. We discuss the potential involvement of SNARE complex proteins in a plasma membrane‐directed transport mechanism targeting nascent myelin vesicles to the forming myelin sheath.
UNIBA: Combining Distributional Semantic Models and Word Sense Disambiguation for Textual Similarity

This paper describes the UNIBA team participation in the Cross-Level Semantic Similarity task at SemEval 2014. We propose to combine the output of different semantic similarity measures which exploit Word Sense Disambiguation and Distributional Semantic Models, among other lexical features. The integration of similarity measures is performed by means of two supervised methods based on Gaussian Process and Support Vector Machine. Our systems obtained very encouraging results, with the best one ranked 6 th out of 38 submitted systems.
Cooperative video streaming on smartphones

Video applications are increasingly popular over smartphones. However, in current cellular systems, the downlink data rate fluctuates and the loss rate can be quite high. We are interested in the scenario where a group of smartphone users, within proximity of each other, are interested in viewing the same video at the same time and are also willing to cooperate with each other. We propose a system that maximizes the video quality by appropriately using all available resources, namely the cellular connections to the phones as well as the device-to-device links that can be established via Bluetooth or WiFi. Key ingredients of our design are: (i) the cooperation among users, (ii) network coding, and (iii) exploiting broadcast in the mobile-to-mobile links. Our approach is grounded on a network utility maximization formulation of the problem. We present numerical results that demonstrate the benefit of our approach, and we implement a prototype on android phones.
An Analytical Study of Web Application Session Management Mechanisms and HTTP Session Hijacking Attacks

ABSTRACT The HTTP protocol is designed for stateless transactions, but many Web applications require a session to be maintained between a Web browser and a server creating a stateful environment. Each Web application decides how its session is managed and needs to be able to trust the session identifier. However, it is possible for sessions to be hijacked, and an intruder can gain unauthorized access to the hijacked session. The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of current session management mechanisms and examine various hijacking techniques. The primary issues that will be addressed pertain to session management and the importance of securing the creation, deletion, and transmission of a session token. We provide a broader view of the session hijacking threat environment by analyzing existing Web application implementations to help demonstrate the need for session hijacking prevention. We will identify the session management areas that are targeted by attackers and will identify and examine various attacks that can lead to a session being hijacked.
The Effect of Hyperbaric Oxygen on Persistent Postconcussion Symptoms

Background:The high incidence of persistent postconcussion symptoms in service members with combat-related mild traumatic brain injury has prompted research in the use of hyperbaric oxygen (HBO2) for management. Objective:The effects of HBO2 on persistent postconcussion symptoms in 60 military service members with at least 1 combat-related mild traumatic brain injury were examined in a single-center, double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled, prospective trial at the Naval Medicine Operational Training Center at Naval Air Station Pensacola. Methods:Over a 10-week period, subjects received a series of 40, once-daily, hyperbaric chamber compressions at 2.0 atmospheres absolute (ATA). During each session, subjects breathed 1 of 3 preassigned oxygen fractions (10.5%, 75%, or 100%) for 60 minutes, resulting in an oxygen exposure equivalent to breathing surface air, 100% oxygen at 1.5 ATA, or 100% oxygen at 2.0 ATA, respectively. Individual, subscale and total item responses on the Rivermead Postconcussion Symptom Questionnaire and individual and total Posttraumatic Disorder Checklist–Military Version were measured just prior to intervention and immediately postintervention. Results:Between-group testing of pre- and postintervention means revealed no significant differences on individual or total scores on the Posttraumatic Disorder Checklist–Military Version or Rivermead Postconcussion Symptom Questionnaire, demonstrating a successful randomization and no significant main effect for HBO2 at 1.5 or 2.0 ATA equivalent compared with the sham compression. Within-group testing of pre- and postintervention means revealed significant differences on several individual items for each group and difference in the Posttraumatic Disorder Checklist—Military Version total score for the 2.0 ATA HBO2 group. Discussion:The primary analyses of between group differences found no evidence of efficacy for HBO2. The scattered within group differences are threatened by Type 2 errors and could be explained by nonspecific effects. Conclusion:This study demonstrated that HBO2 at either 1.5 or 2.0 ATA equivalent had no effect on postconcussion symptoms after mild traumatic brain injury when compared with sham compression.
Perceived Supports and Barriers for Career Development for Second‐Year STEM Students

This study was designed to determine the effect of perceived supports and barriers on self‐efficacy beliefs and other social‐cognitive variables related to second‐year science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students' career development. Social cognitive career theory (SCCT) states that career interest is influenced by four cognitive‐person variables: self‐efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, interests, and goals. Other variables, such as social supports and barriers, also play an important role.
Improving Context Awareness Information Retrieval with Online Social Networks

There are many attempts to optimize information retrieval using various social concepts such as social annotations and social book marking. This paper explores the convergence of the information retrieval technique, the social network and the context-aware computing in order to improve information retrieval services. We propose a new ranking algorithm for the context-aware information retrieval. To do this, we get ideas from the social network, previous graph theory and the context-aware computing. Therefore, we investigate the problem of the information retrieval system in ubiquitous computing environment.
Efficient Greedy Forwarding Scheme Using Back-Off Intervals in Wireless Sensor Networks

Greedy forwarding is the main component of geographic routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). As it uses 1-hop local information for packet forwarding, it does not need to maintain routing table, having low overhead and high scalability. Early proposed greedy forwarding schemes do not consider link quality, so the schemes experience performance degradation from unreliability of links in real environment. To solve the problem other schemes have been proposed, still they have either asymmetry link problem or high overhead from the use of global information. In the paper, a Back-off Interval Greedy Forwarding scheme (BI-GF) is proposed to solve the problems while maintaining the benefits of greedy forwarding. In BI-GF, each neighbor node calculates BI using 2-hop information, and based on that, data packet is forwarded. In the simulation result, BI-GF improves delivery rate up to 46% and energy efficiency up to 37% compared with PRR×Distance greedy forwarding.
P4Well concept to empower self-management of psychophysiological wellbeing and load recovery

Chronic health problems related to mental wellbeing are rapidly growing, calling for novel solutions focusing on individual as a psychophysiological being. We describe a novel technology-based concept for empowering citizen towards holistic self-management of her wellbeing: “P4Well” (Pervasive Personal and PsychoPhysiological management of WELLness). The primary focus of the concept is on management of stress and recovery from stress caused by daily life through improved health management strategies. The P4Well concept combines modern psychological methods with personal health technologies. The technologies include a web-portal and web-based tools, mobile phone with mobile client applications, wearable health monitoring devices, and different analysis methods based on physiological models for interpretation and feedback. The concept supports secured private expert consultation and peer-support through social media. Our driving principle is to recognize that an individual is the best master of her own wellness, and we target to empower her for realizing the fact.
Scheduled Communication in Sensor Networks

This brief addresses a networked control system problem: scheduling the transmission times in a time division multiple access (TDMA) architecture with a set of sensors embedded in a distributed control application. With TDMA, collisions are avoided, delays are bounded, and with the appropriate schedule, the data rate can be reduced to a minimum required stability. To further reduce the transmitted information, a controller-side observer is implemented. Two approaches are then proposed: 1) periodic transmission schedule, for which a periodic linear system analysis is done and 2) aperiodic schedule, where optimality criteria for schedule design are found. In both cases, little feedback is required from the controllers to the sensors, just an initial configuration.
Improving TCP performance for asymmetric networks

This paper proposes a new TCP variation called Formosa that significantly improves TCP end-to-end performance in terms of high connection throughput and high degree of fairness in resource sharing among multiple competing connections in asymmetric networks. Existing TCP implementations are based on the ACK-clock, which clocks out a single data packet on receipt of an ACK. Formosa TCP pushes the frequency of ACKs per round trip time (RTT) to the lowest limit, using an ACK to cumulatively acknowledge a window's worth of data packets. The congestion window is updated to reflect the available bandwidth estimated on the forward channel, without the aid of the intermediate routers. As a result, the number of ACK packets is significantly reduced, while the principle of "conservation of packets" is still maintained. Based on "an ACK per window," Formosa estimates forward delay and implements the additive increase and multiplicative decrease algorithm for better congestion avoidance. In addition, it employs the negative acknowledgement mechanism for better congestion control during loss recovery. As compared to existing implementations, TCP Formosa demonstrates the best performance in terms of high connection throughput, high degree of fairness among connections and robustness in the face of two-way transfers in asymmetric networks.
Decomposition Into Autonomous and Comparable Blocks: A Structural Description of Music Pieces

The structure of a music piece is a concept which is often referred to in various areas of music sciences and technologies, but for which there is no commonly agreed definition. This raises a methodological issue in MIR, when designing and evaluating automatic structure inference algorithms. It also strongly limits the possibility to produce consistent large-scale annotation datasets in a cooperative manner. This article proposes an approach called decomposition into autonomous and comparable blocks, based on principles inspired from structuralism and generativism. It specifies a methodology for producing music structure annotation by human listeners based on simple criteria and resorting solely to the listening experience of the annotator. We show on a development set that the proposed approach can provide a reasonable level of concordance across annotators and we introduce a set of annotations on the RWC database, intended to be released to the MIR community.
‘LOVE YOU GUYS (NO HOMO)’

This paper explores queer discourses produced by a group of very popular professional video game players on social media, with particular focus on the impact that this has on the language and interactions of the fan community. Three data sets have been incorporated into this study, allowing for analysis of the central data, as well as consideration of the production and investigation of the reception of the discourse contained within. These include 63 YouTube videos, a corpus of 217,916 comments on these videos, and an interview with a gamer. While the majority of the discursive data in the YouTube videos features interactions between heterosexual males, the introduction of homosocial meaning and homosexual innuendo into videos gives the (largely adolescent, male) audience a unique opportunity to encounter, interpret, and experiment with queer discourse. It is found that the production of nonheteronormative discourses by prominent gamers online has contributed to the formation of a self-policing fan community that advocates acceptance and rejects bigotry.
Some thoughts on the Sense of Smell in Analogy to Language

Although chemoreception by the nose is very substance-specific, human odor perception exhibits characteristics in a way analogous to visual and auditory gestalt perception. That is, odor perception seems to result from a much more complex response than a simple one-to-one correspondence between the receptor sites and the molecular structure of the stimulant. Odor perception is considered by the author in analogy to a semantic information-conveying system. In animals, odor message interpretation is instinctive and fixed. At the human level some or all stimuli to the odor receptors have changing, contextual meaning. Their meaning can be modified by habit or by learning. The author postulates that sensory excitation due to pure chemical substances is similar to that due to words. They generally convey no meaning by themselves but only in context. This hypothesis suggests the adoption of techniques used in linguistics and cryptanalysis and the concept of olphemes, the odor perception equivalent of phonemes in language.