Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Opinions Towards Sexual Partners with a Large Age Difference

ABSTRACT Attitudes towards heterosexual sexual relationships, where there is a large age difference between the partners, were investigated. The media assumption that public opinion objects to large age-different relationships and that this objection is more pronounced for relationships where the female is considerably older was examined. One hundred and twenty-two participants completed a questionnaire comprising one scenario of an age-different relationship and seven categories of opinion on which the respondents had to rate their own attitude on a 6-point scale. These seven categories included the ‘acceptability,’ ‘happiness,’ ‘length’ and ‘unrealistic nature’ of a relationship, and also how much respondents thought a couple had in common and whether they considered one member of a couple to be looking for ‘resources’ or a ‘parental figure. ’ Large age differences in relationships were found to be significantly less acceptable as the age-difference increased and there was significantly stronger opposition to female-older relationships than to male-older ones.
CHURN PREDICTION IN MOBILE TELECOM SYSTEM USING DATA MINING TECHNIQUES

At present situation, telecommunication department plays vital role in our day today human life. At the same time telecommunication area attains a rapid growth in very short period of years. Due to this fact, Telecom department is one of the senses deciding factor in world market. Because of this reason, this field turned out to be a most profitable area for investment. At the mean time competition between telecom industries is also there in the market. So churn prediction is very essential in telecom industries to retain their customers. This study focuses on data mining techniques for reducing customer churn and also likely to reduce error ratio.
Applying Bayesian learning to multi-robot patrol

Performing a patrolling mission with multiple mobile robots is a challenging task that requires effective coordination between agents. While predefined patrol circuits may lead to suitable routing performance, their deterministic nature eases the task of potential intruders. Therefore, the need to propose probabilistic strategies becomes evident. In this paper, a new multi-robot patrolling strategy is proposed, in which concurrent learning agents adapt their moves to the state of the system at the time, using Bayesian decision. When patrolling a given site, each agent evaluates the context and adopts a reward-based learning technique that influences future moves. Experiments show the potential of the approach, which outperforms several other state-of-the-art strategies.
Effect of Vaccination with Refined Components of the Organism on Infection of Mice with Mycobacterium leprae

ABSTRACT Only native products of Mycobacterium leprae, whether cell wall, cytosol, or membrane derived, can confer protective immunity against challenge in the mouse footpad. Previously, recombinant proteins were shown to be ineffective. The cell wall skeleton—the mycolyl-arabinogalactan-peptidoglycan complex—devoid of proteins is not protective.
Response of Posidonia oceanica seagrass and its epibiont communities to ocean acidification

The unprecedented rate of CO2 increase in our atmosphere and subsequent ocean acidification (OA) threatens coastal ecosystems. To forecast the functioning of coastal seagrass ecosystems in acidified oceans, more knowledge on the long-term adaptive capacities of seagrass species and their epibionts is needed. Therefore we studied morphological characteristics of Posidonia oceanica and the structure of its epibiont communities at a Mediterranean volcanic CO2 vent off Panarea Island (Italy) and performed a laboratory experiment to test the effect of OA on P. oceanica photosynthesis and its potential buffering capacity. At the study site east of Basiluzzo Islet, venting of CO2 gas was controlled by tides, resulting in an average pH difference of 0.1 between the vent and reference site. P. oceanica shoot and leaf density was unaffected by these levels of OA, although shorter leaves at the vent site suggest increased susceptibility to erosion, potentially by herbivores. The community of sessile epibionts differed in composition and was characterized by a higher species richness at the vent site, though net epiphytic calcium carbonate concentration was similar. These findings suggest a higher ecosystem complexity at the vent site, which may have facilitated the higher diversity of copepods in the otherwise unaffected motile epibiont community. In the laboratory experiment, P. oceanica photosynthesis increased with decreasing pHT (7.6, 6.6, 5.5), which induced an elevated pH at the leaf surfaces of up to 0.5 units compared to the ambient seawater pHT of 6.6. This suggests a temporary pH buffering in the diffusive boundary layer of leaves, which could be favorable for epibiont organisms. The results of this multispecies study contribute to understanding community-level responses and underlying processes in long-term acidified conditions. Increased replication and monitoring of physico-chemical parameters on an annual scale are, however, recommended to assure that the biological responses observed during a short period reflect long-term dynamics of these parameters.
Linear inverse problems on Erdős-Rényi graphs: Information-theoretic limits and efficient recovery

This paper considers the inverse problem with observed variables Y = BGX ⊕ Z, where BG is the incidence matrix of a graph G, X is the vector of unknown vertex variables with a uniform prior, and Z is a noise vector with Bernoulli(ε) i.i. d. entries. All variables and operations are Boolean. This model is motivated by coding, synchronization, and community detection problems. In particular, it corresponds to a stochastic block model or a correlation clustering problem with two communities and censored edges. Without noise, exact recovery of X is possible if and only the graph G is connected, with a sharp threshold at the edge probability log(n)=n for Erdös-Rényi random graphs. The first goal of this paper is to determine how the edge probability p needs to scale to allow exact recovery in the presence of noise. Defining the degree (oversampling) rate of the graph by α = np= log(n), it is shown that exact recovery is possible if and only if α > 2/(1-2ε)2+o(1/(1-2ε)2). In other words, 2/(1-2ε)2 is the information theoretic threshold for exact recovery at low-SNR. In addition, an efficient recovery algorithm based on semidefinite programming is proposed and shown to succeed in the threshold regime up to twice the optimal rate. Full version available in [1].
Regulation of Intracellular Calcium Levels and Urokinase Activity in MDA MB 231 Cells by Quercetin

Background: The common plant bioflavonoid, quercetin, is cytotoxic to various tumor cell lines, particularly breast cancer, by affecting the protein-kinase-C-dependent signal pathways and by cell cycle regulation. However, its role in breast cancer metastasis has not been studied so far. Increased uPA activity is evident in highly metastatic breast cancer, which is calcium dependent. Methods: MDA MB 231 cells were treated with various concentrations of quercetin (15–45 µg/ml). The cytotoxic effect of quercetin was assessed by MTT assay and DNA fragmentation analysis. Intracellular calcium levels were measured using Fura-2, a specific Ca2+ fluorescence indicator. Calcium uptake and release in cells treated with quercetin were measured using radioactive 45Ca2+. Urokinase enzyme activity was assayed by a casein zymogram. Results: Quercetin elicited dose- and time-dependent cytotoxicity as evidenced by the MTT assay. The maximum effect was observed at 48 h with a quercetin concentration of (45 µg/ml). DNA agarose gel electrophoresis showed dose-dependent DNA fragmentation on quercetin treatment. Quercetin caused significant depletion of cytosolic calcium levels and decreased calcium uptake from the intracellular stores. Casein zymogram showed a marked reduction of urokinase activity as evident by clear lysis bands on a dark background on treatment with quercetin. Conclusion: Quercetin was found to exhibit cytotoxicity in the highly invasive breast cancer cell line MDA MB 231 in a dose- and time-dependent manner. Quercetin inhibited calcium dependent urokinase activity and hence may prove to be an effective antimetastatic agent.
Sitagliptin attenuates cardiomyopathy by modulating the JAK/STAT signaling pathway in experimental diabetic rats

Sitagliptin, a dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitor, has been reported to promote cardioprotection in diabetic hearts by limiting hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia. However, little is known about the involvement of the Janus kinase/signal transducer and activator of transcription (JAK/STAT) pathway modulation in the cardioprotective effects of sitagliptin. The current study aimed to investigate the protective effects of sitagliptin against diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM), focusing on the modulation of the JAK/STAT pathway. Diabetes was induced by streptozotocin injection, and rats received sitagliptin orally and daily for 90 days. Diabetic rats exhibited hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, and a significant increase in heart-to-body weight (HW/BW) ratio. Serum troponin I and creatine kinase MB, cardiac interleukin-6 (IL-6), lipid peroxidation, and nitric oxide levels showed significant increase in diabetic rats. In contrast, both enzymatic and nonenzymatic antioxidant defenses were significantly declined in the heart of diabetic rats. Histopathological study revealed degenerations, increased collagen deposition in the heart of diabetic rats. Sitagliptin alleviated hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, HW/BW ratio, histological architecture, oxidative stress, and inflammation, and rejuvenated the antioxidant defenses. In addition, cardiac levels of pJAK2 and pSTAT3 were increased in diabetic rats, an effect which was remarkably decreased after sitagliptin treatment. In conclusion, these results confer an evidence that sitagliptin has great therapeutic potential on DCM through down-regulation of the JAK/STAT signaling pathway.
Corporate social responsibility organizational identification and motivation

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement on employee motivation, job satisfaction and organizational identification as well as employee citizenship in voluntary community activities. Design/methodology/approach - Employees (n=224) of a major airline carrier participated in the study based on a 54-item questionnaire, containing four different sets of items related to volunteering, motivation, job satisfaction and organizational identification. The employee sample consisted of two sub-samples drawn randomly from the company pool of employees, differentiating between active participants in the company's CSR programs (APs) and non participants (NAPs). Findings - Significant differences were found between APs and NAPs on organizational identification and motivation, but not for job satisfaction. In addition, positive significant correlations between organizational identification, volunteering, job satisfaction, and motivation were obtained. These results are interpreted within the broader context that ties social identity theory (SIT) and organizational identification increase. Practical implications - The paper contributes to the understanding of the interrelations between CSR and other organizational behavior constructs. Practitioners can learn from this study how to increase job satisfaction and organizational identification. Both are extremely important for an organization's sustainability. Originality/value - This is a first attempt to investigate the relationship between CSR, organizational identification and motivation, comparing two groups from the same organization. The paper discusses the questions: “Are there potential gains at the intra-organizational level in terms of enhanced motivation and organizational attitudes on the part of employees? ” and “Does volunteering or active participation in CSR yield greater benefits for involved employees in terms of their motivation, job satisfaction and identification? ”.
GPU Accelerated Parallel Occupancy Voxel Based ICP for Position Tracking

Tracking the position of a robot in an un- known environment is an important problem in robotics. Iterative closest point algorithms us- ing range data are commonly used for position tracking, but can be computationally intensive. We describe a highly parallel occupancy grid iterative closest point position tracking algo- rithm designed for use on a GPU, that uses an Extended Kalman Filter to estimate motion between scans to increase the convergence rate. By exploiting the hardware structure of GPUs to rapidly nd corresponding points and by us- ing an occupancy map structure that can be safely modied in parallel with little synchro- nisation, our algorithm can run substantially faster than CPU based occupancy grid position tracking. We reduce the runtime from an aver- age of 33ms to just 3ms on a commodity GPU, allowing our algorithm to use more dense and more frequent data, resulting in improved accu- racy. Additionally, our solution can use a much larger occupancy grid without signicantly im- pacting runtime.
Scene discrimination by recalling with visual neural system

In this paper, a neural system based on human visual perceptive model for scene discrimination is proposed. The scenery represented by color image is memorized by the neural network based system as perceptually simplified scene image. A blurred and noisy uncertain scene image is recognized as the original image by recurrent processing with parallel Hopfield-type neural networks. In order to reduce color information naturally, quantization and segmentation in L*a*b space is executed in the preceding step. Several input images such as slightly shifted, noisy, partial or mixed scenes are used in the discrimination. It is shown that the blurred images are effectively discriminated by recalling process with the proposed visual neural system. Effectiveness of quantized segmentation for original color scene images is also examined in the simulations.
Apical Accumulation of the Sevenless Receptor Tyrosine Kinase During Drosophila Eye Development Is Promoted by the Small GTPase Rap1

The Ras/MAPK-signaling pathway plays pivotal roles during development of metazoans by controlling cell proliferation and cell differentiation elicited, in several instances, by receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs). While the internal mechanism of RTK-driven Ras/MAPK signaling is well understood, far less is known regarding its interplay with other corequired signaling events involved in developmental decisions. In a genetic screen designed to identify new regulators of RTK/Ras/MAPK signaling during Drosophila eye development, we identified the small GTPase Rap1, PDZ-GEF, and Canoe as components contributing to Ras/MAPK-mediated R7 cell differentiation. Rap1 signaling has recently been found to participate in assembling cadherin-based adherens junctions in various fly epithelial tissues. Here, we show that Rap1 activity is required for the integrity of the apical domains of developing photoreceptor cells and that reduced Rap1 signaling hampers the apical accumulation of the Sevenless RTK in presumptive R7 cells. It thus appears that, in addition to its role in cell–cell adhesion, Rap1 signaling controls the partitioning of the epithelial cell membrane, which in turn influences signaling events that rely on apico-basal cell polarity.
Combining discriminative appearance and segmentation cues for articulated human pose estimation

We address the problem of articulated 2-D human pose estimation in unconstrained natural images. In previous work the Pictorial Structure Model approach has proven particularly successful, and is appealing because of its moderate computational cost. However, the accuracy of resulting pose estimates has been limited by the use of simple representations of limb appearance. We propose strong discriminatively trained limb detectors combining gradient and color segmentation cues. Our main contribution is a novel method for capturing coherent appearance properties of a limb using efficient color segmentation applied to every limb hypothesis during inference. The approach gives state-of-the-art results improving significantly on the “iterative image parsing” method, and shows significant promise for combination with other models of pose and appearance.
Reasoning About Web-Site Structure

Building large Web sites is similar in many ways to building knowledge and database systems. In particular, by providing a declarative, logical view of a Web site’s data and structure, many of a site builder’s tasks, such as creating complex sites, modifying a site’s structure, and creating multiple versions of a site, are simplified significantly. New systems, such aS STRUDEL, support logical views of Web sites by allowing site builders to construct a site declaratively. In this paper, we address an important problem for site builders: verifying that a Web site’s structure conforms to certain constraints. Specifically, we consider the problem of verifying that a Web site created declaratively by STRUDEL satisfies certain integrity constraints, such as ’all pages are reachable from the root’ and ’every organization page points to its suborganizations’, etc. Our contributions are (1) formulating the verification problem as an entailment problem in a logical setting, and (2) presenting a sound and complete algorithm for verifying large classes of integrity constraints that occur in practice. Our algorithm uses a novel data structure, the site schema, which enables us to identify cases in which the general reasoning problem reduces to a decidable problem.
Joint estimation-detection of cyber attacks in smart grids: Bayesian and non-Bayesian formulations

Smart grid operations face a significant threat from the presence of cyber attacks or bad data that may contaminate the system observations. Therefore, in this paper, we are interested in introducing a new strategy for detecting the presence of bad data in smart grids and we also try to simultaneously estimate it in order to be able to separate the bad data from the system observations. We aim to obtain the attack free observations which reflect the true state of the smart grid. This can be done by defining a joint detection-estimation strategy based on Bayesian and non-Bayesian settings where the costs in general will be functions of the observation. We start with Bayes approach and derive the detector (which, in general, may not be a LRT) and then we set the problem by defining some maximum constraint under the null hypothesis based on the derived detector and minimize certain cost under the alternative hypothesis. Our results reveal that the proposed model is applicable on some cases that other models reported in previous works failed to deal with.
Ego Identity Status and Identity Processing Orientation: The Moderating Role of Commitment

Abstract This study was designed to investigate differences in the ways in which late adolescents with different identity statuses process self-relevant information and negotiate identity issues. Late adolescents with a foreclosed identity status were found to rely on a normative approach to personal problem solving and decision making, whereas identity diffusions were most apt to avoid dealing with identity issues and conflicts. Individuals in self-exploratory identity statuses were most likely to employ an informational orientation. However, as hypothesized, Status × Processing Orientation relationships were moderated by the strength of identity commitments. Results are discussed in terms of a process view of identity development.
Residential segregation of Jews in Amsterdam on the eve of the Shoah

ABSTRACT While previous studies showed a drop in residential segregation over time, calculated dissimilarity and isolation indices for 1941 show a halt in the decreasing segregation among Jews in Amsterdam. Furthermore, persons of Jewish origin who had left Judaism appear to have lived mainly in different districts from those who belonged to Jewish congregations, indicating that district of residence can serve as a reflection of the assimilation process. Moreover, analyses of life histories of about 700 Jewish persons show that being born outside the Jewish neighbourhood increased the likelihood that an individual would leave Judaism, while living outside the Jewish neighbourhood during adolescence increased the likelihood of marrying a Gentile; these results refine our understanding of the impact of residential segregation. La ségrégation résidentielle des Juifs d'Amsterdam à la veille de la Shoah Alors que les études antérieures ont montré, pour les Juifs d'Amsterdam, une baisse de la ségrégation résidentielle avec le temps, les indices de différenciation et d'isolation que nous avons calculés pour 1941 montrent que la ségrégation a cessé de diminuer. En outre, les personnes d'origine juive qui avait quitté le judaïsme semblent alors vivre principalement dans des districts différents de ceux qui appartiennent à des congrégations juives, ce qui indique que le quartier de résidence peut être considéré comme reflétant le processus d'assimilation. En outre, les analyses des histoires de vie d'environ 700 personnes juives montrent que le fait d'être né en dehors du quartier juif a augmenté la probabilité, pour un individu, d'abandonner le judaïsme, et que le fait de vivre son adolescence en dehors du quartier juif a augmenté la probabilité d'épouser un non juif. Ces résultats permettent d'affiner notre compréhension de l'impact de la ségrégation résidentielle. Residenzielle Segregation von Juden in Amsterdam am Vorabend der Shoah Während frühere Untersuchungen davon ausgingen, dass die residenzielle Segregation im Laufe der Zeit zurückging, zeigt eine Berechnung von Verschiedenheits- und Isolationsindizes für das Jahr 1941, dass die Abnahme der Segregation unter Juden in Amsterdam zum Stillstand kam. Außerdem scheinen Personen jüdischer Herkunft, die ihr Judentum aufgegeben hatten, weitgehend in anderen Wohngebieten als diejenigen gelebt zu haben, die noch jüdischen Gemeinden angehörten, was darauf hindeutet, dass das Wohngebiet den Prozess der Assimilation widerspiegelt. Ferner zeigt eine Analyse der Lebensläufe von etwa 700 jüdischen Personen, dass jemand, der außerhalb einer jüdischen Nachbarschaft geboren wurde, mit größerer Wahrscheinlichkeit den jüdischen Glauben ablegte, und dass jemand, der seine Jugend außerhalb einer jüdischen Nachbarschaft verbrachte, mit größerer Wahrscheinlichkeit einen Nichtjuden heiratete. Diese Ergebnisse verfeinern unser Verständnis der Auswirkungen von residenzieller Segregation.