Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In the Shadows of Time: A Case Study of Flexibility Behaviors in an Interorganizational Project

We use a longitudinal examination of the production of a complex vessel to develop theory concerning operational flexibility behaviors within interorganizational projects. We find that operational flexibility behaviors are enabled by trust between project participants, sense of urgency, and the availability of resources. These enablers are in turn positively influenced by positive experiences in previous interactions (“shadow of the past”) and expectations of possible future collaboration (“shadow of the future”), the temporary nature of interorganizational projects and slack in project tasks, respectively. The positive effect of enablers on operational flexibility is weakened by the time pressure project participants experience. The latter is also caused by the temporariness of interorganizational projects. Based on our findings, we propose that the different time dimensions play a crucial role in explaining flexibility behaviors in interorganizational projects: the temporariness that is an essential characteristic of interorganizational projects has two potentially opposite effects on the behavior of its participants, and we argue that shadows of the past and future play a decisive role in which of the two effects will dominate. The theoretical framework based on our case study suggests that the temporariness of interorganizational projects is indeed important—as acknowledged in the literature—but that its effect is contingent on shadows of past and future.
Parental characteristics as predictors of birthweight.

BACKGROUND Previous studies provided conflicting results on the relevance of parental characteristics for offspring's size at birth. The objective of this study was to investigate parental predictors of birthweight. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, 34,063 women in the Nurses' Mother's Cohort were queried about parental characteristics during the pregnancy with and birthweight of their nurse daughter. RESULTS The predictive linear regression model of birthweight included 13 factors and the majority of the predictive power came from parental anthropometric factors. In the adjusted analysis, daily consumption of each additional glass of milk was associated with an increase of approximately 6 g in birthweight (P for trend = 0.01) and daily consumption of each additional cup of coffee was associated with a decrease of approximately 10 g in birthweight (P for trend < 0.0001). Drinking 1-2, 3-4 and 5+ cups of coffee daily was associated with a 28% [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.12, 0.47], 30% (95% CI 0.10, 0.55) and 63% (95% CI 0.25, 1.12) increase, respectively, in the odds of intrauterine growth restriction when compared with non-drinkers. CONCLUSIONS The present study confirmed several previously reported determinants of birthweight. Maternal dietary intake of milk and coffee during pregnancy may influence fetal growth.
Restoration scheme issues in fiber to the home Ethernet passive optical network (FTTH-EPON)

The smart and intelligent system of FTTH is expected to be a key element which provides centralized monitoring, survivability and instantly maintenance of FTTH customer access network. A challenging task for network planners is to reduce network protection costs while maintaining an acceptable level of survivability. In this paper, we implement a cost effective restoration scheme for a novel tree-based EPON architecture for Intermediate Split Structure (ISS) in the drop region section. The protection mechanism for tree based optical switch will have capability to divert the signal onto protection line according to the types of failure condition and location of failures in access network. This will ensure the data flow continuously due to breakdown occur in the network and instantly repair operation before it cause any major problem later. We employ the dedicated and shared protection in our design. Four faulty conditions are considered in this article and OptiSystem, Inc. software is used to prove the solution feasibility.
Ver 2 . 0 ) , January 2010 P a g e | 2 Scheme ( Orthogonal Milstein Scheme ) , a Better Numerical Approximation for Multi-dimensional SDEs

Today, better numerical approximations are required for multidimensional SDEs to improve on the poor performance of the standard Monte Carlo integration. Usually in finance, it is the weak convergence property of numerical discretizations, which is most important, because with financial applications, one is mostly concerned with the accurate estimation of expected payoffs. However, recent studies for hedging, portfolio optimization, and the valuation of exotic options show that the strong convergence property plays a crucial role. When one prices an exotic option or wants to approximate a portfolio, the SDEs used are not important. What really matters is that the SDEs approximate correctly the real distribution of the process. Using this principle, this research suggests that, instead of considering a given no-commutative multi-dimensional SDE that represents our process, we consider another SDE that has the same distribution but with a different strong convergence order. Manipulating the new SDE, which has an extra process it becomes commutative and we avoid the simulation of the Lévy Area (extremely expensive with respect to the computational time). The new SDE obtains solutions that in a weak sense, which is in a distributional sense, coincide with those of the original SDE. If certain conditions are satisfied, scheme gives a first order strong convergence without the simulation of the Lévy Area. Conversely, for the original nocommutative SDE, the Milstein scheme, neglecting the Lévy Area, has 0.5 order strong convergence. If the conditions are not satisfied, this study confirms experimentally that scheme has a better strong approximation than using the standard Milstein scheme in the original SDEs (both schemes neglecting the simulation of the Lévy Area). AMS subject classifications: 60G20, 65CXX, 65C20, 37H10, 41A25. KeywordsDiscrete time approximation, stochastic schemes, stochastic volatility models, Milstein Scheme, Lévy Area, scheme, Orthogonal Milstein Scheme, orthogonal transformation, strong convergence.
From Arterial Stiffness to Heart Failure: Still a Long Way to Go

Arterial stiffness has re‐emerged over the past 20 years as an important predictor of cardiovascular outcomes. [1][1] However, the evidence on the role of arterial stiffness in the development of heart failure (HF) is limited to 2 large studies with some conflicting resulting. [2][2]–[3][3]
FORMATION OF CLOSE IN SUPER-EARTHS AND MINI-NEPTUNES: REQUIRED DISK MASSES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

Recent observations by the Kepler space telescope have led to the discovery of more than 4000 exoplanet candidates consisting of many systems with Earth- to Neptune-sized objects that reside well inside the orbit of Mercury around their respective host stars. How and where these close-in planets formed is one of the major unanswered questions in planet formation. Here, we calculate the required disk masses for in situ formation of the Kepler planets. We find that if close-in planets formed as isolation masses, then standard gas-to-dust ratios yield corresponding gas disks that are gravitationally unstable for a significant fraction of systems, ruling out such a scenario. We show that the maximum width of a planet's accretion region in the absence of any migration is 2vesc/Ω, where vesc is the escape velocity of the planet and Ω is the Keplerian frequency, and we use it to calculate the required disk masses for in situ formation with giant impacts. Even with giant impacts, formation without migration requires disk surface densities in solids at semi-major axes of less than 0.1 AU of 103–105 g cm−2, implying typical enhancements above the minimum-mass solar nebular (MMSN) by at least a factor of 20. Corresponding gas disks are below but not far from the gravitational stability limit. In contrast, formation beyond a few AU is consistent with MMSN disk masses. This suggests that the migration of either solids or fully assembled planets is likely to have played a major role in the formation of close-in super-Earths and mini-Neptunes.
Pose Estimation with Geometric Algebra

A novel method which entirely resides inside conformal geometric algebra (CGA) is presented estimating the pose of a camera from one image of a known object. At first, subproblems covering only three feature points are solved and globally assessed. The object model is accordingly pruned and rigidly fitted to corresponding projection rays by evaluating a succinct CGA expression which emerged from a purely geometric approach. It results a set of 3-point poses each given by a motor. These spinor elements of CGA embody rigid body motions from the manifold SE(3). The poses are then to be averaged according to their quality. This is the second aspect of this work as the respective motors do not come from a linear space and averaging must be carried out appropriately. For this purpose, a technique called weighted intrinsic mean is used.
This Paper Is Included in the Proceedings of the 12th Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (osdi '16). the Snow Theorem and Latency-optimal Read-only Transactions the Snow Theorem and Latency-optimal Read-only Transactions

Scalable storage systems where data is sharded across many machines are now the norm for Web services as their data has grown beyond what a single machine can handle. Consistently reading data across different shards requires transactional isolation for the reads. Yet a Web service may read from its data store hundreds or thousands of times for a single page load and must minimize read latency to keep response times low. Examining the read-only transaction algorithms for many recent academic and industrial scalable storage systems suggests there is a tradeoff between their power—expressed as the consistency they provide and their compatibility with other types of transactions—and their latency. We show that this tradeoff is fundamental by proving the SNOW Theorem, an impossibility result that states that no read-only transaction algorithm can provide both the lowest latency and the highest power. We then use the tight boundary from the theorem to guide the design of new read-only transaction algorithms for two scalable storage systems, COPS and Rococo. We implement our new algorithms and then evaluate them to demonstrate they provide lower latency for read-only transactions and to understand their impact on overall throughput.
PROGRESSIVE FRACTURE OF CONCRETE AND ROCK

A constitutive model for a brittle aggregate material that undergoes progressive tensile fracturing or damage is presented. It is assumed that the normal stress on a plane of any orientation within the material, called the microplane, is a function of only the normal strain on the same microplane. This strain is further assumed to be egual to the resolved component of the macroscopic strain tensor, while the stress on the microplan! ' is not egual to the resolved component of the macroscopic stress tensor. The normal strain on a microplane may be interpreted as the sum of the elastic strain and of the opening widths (per unit length) of all microcracks of the same orientation as the minoplane. An additional volumetric elastic strain is introduced to adjust the elastic Poisson ratio to a desired value. An explicit formula which expresses the tangent stiffness of the matPrial as an integral over the surface of a unit hemispher! ' is derived from the principle of virtual work. The model can represent experimentally observed uniaxial tensile strain-softening behavior, and the stress reduces to zero as the strain becomes sufficiently large. Due to various combinations of loading and unloading on individual microplanes, the response of the model is path-dependent. Since the tensorial invariance restrictions are always satisfied by the microplane system, IIH' model can be applied to progressive fracturing under rotating principal stress directions. This type of application is the main purpose of the model.
Distributed Beamforming for Multi-Group Multicasting Relay Networks

We generalize the concept of multiuser peer-to-peer (MUP2P) relay networks, where K source-destination pairs communicate through L relays, to that of a multi-group multicasting (MGM) relay network. In the MGM scenario, each source may broadcast its message to a group of multiple users rather than to a single user only. Common distributed beamformer designs for MUP2P relay networks aim to minimize the total transmitted relay power subject to receiver quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. In state-of-the-art techniques, the resulting nonconvex problem is approximated by a convex one which is efficiently solvable using interior point methods. These techniques are shown to be straightforwardly extendable to more general MGM relay networks. However, as the number of receivers increases (which may be typical for the proposed MGM networks where each multicast group may contain many users), these approximations become more and more inaccurate leading to severe performance degradation and problem infeasibility. To avoid this drawback, we propose an iterative method where in each iteration, a convex approximation of the original problem is solved and then adapted to the solution obtained in this iteration. We show that the approximate solution can be successively improved using such iterations. Simulation results show that in scenarios with large numbers of destination users, the proposed method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art methods developed for MUP2P relay networks.
Synthesizing photo-real talking head via trajectory-guided sample selection

In this paper, we propose an HMM trajectory-guided, real image sample concatenation approach to photo-real talking head synthesis. It renders a smooth and natural video of articulators in sync with given speech signals. An audio-visual database is used to train a statistical Hidden Markov Model (HMM) of lips movement first and the trained model is then used to generate a visual parameter trajectory of lips movement for given speech signals, all in the maximum likelihood sense. The HMM generated trajectory is then used as a guide to select, in the original training database, an optimal sequence of mouth images which are then stitched back to a background head video. The whole procedure is fully automatic and data driven. With an audio/video footage as short as 20 minutes from a speaker, the proposed system can synthesize a highly photo-real video in sync with the given speech signals. This system won the FIRST place in the Audio-Visual match contest in LIPS2009 Challenge, which was perceptually evaluated by recruited human subjects. Index Terms: visual speech synthesis, photo-real, talking head, trajectory-guided
On the Systematic Block Size Adaptation for Coded Single Carrier Overlap Frequency Domain Equalization Systems

In this paper, we propose a systematic design of the overlap frequency domain equalizer (FDE) for SC transmissions. Based on the description of the inter-symbol interference (ISI) and the inter-carrier interference (ICI), we evaluate the signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) at the FDE output and adjust the block size of the overlap FDE. The proposed method consists of a simple procedure to evaluate the utility part of the equalized signal. The systematic approach can be extremely useful to adjust the block size. Simulation results validate the proposed systematic design of the overlap FDE and show that the proposed scheme achieve approximatively the same bit error rate (BER) performances than of the SC FDE with well-designed guard interval insertion for both coded cases with various modulation levels. KeywordsSingle carrier, overlap frequency domain equalization, SINR
The serial and parallel belief propagation algorithms

It has been shown that the stable fixed points of belief propagation (BP) algorithms correspond to extrema of the Bethe free energy. In this paper, we describe the dual problem for the minimization of the Bethe free energy and solve it using simple nonlinear block Gauss-Seidel and Jacobi algorithms. The use of the nonlinear block Gauss-Seidel algorithm corresponds to serial scheduling for the BP algorithm. In addition, it is shown that applying the nonlinear block Jacobi algorithm on the dual of the Bethe free energy corresponds to the parallel BP algorithm
Transcranial direct current stimulation modulates performance in challenging situations

Objective: We investigated how transcranial direct current stimulation impacts neurophysiological function in the performance of a complex task where task load was systematically manipulated. Method: Participants were randomly assigned to one of three right parietal stimulation conditions: anodal, cathodal or sham. They completed a set of cognitive batteries prior to stimulation. Participants then completed a real-time strategy simulation while simultaneously being stimulated and cerebral blood flow velocities being recorded. Results: Cathodal stimulation significantly improved performance compared to anodal and sham. We then categorized participants using a cluster analysis to control for individual differences in baseline abilities. The subsequent results revealed that anodal stimulation significantly reduced performance for the high ability individuals. There were no differences in cerebral blood flow velocities between stimulation conditions. Conclusions: Anodal stimulation decreased performance potentially by increasing neural noise, thus reducing executive control abilities. The results highlight a need in this field to measure and control for individual differences in cognitive abilities and baseline task performance as both can moderate tDCS-based effects.
Preoperative gemcitabine-based chemoradiation for patients with resectable adenocarcinoma of the pancreatic head.

PURPOSE We conducted a phase II trial to assess the outcomes of patients who received preoperative gemcitabine-based chemoradiation and pancreaticoduodenectomy (PD) for stage I/II pancreatic adenocarcinoma. PATIENTS AND METHODS Eligible patients with pancreatic head/uncinate process adenocarcinoma and radiographically defined potentially resectable disease received chemoradiation with 7 weekly intravenous (IV) infusions of gemcitabine (400 mg/m(2) IV over 30 minutes) plus radiation therapy (30 Gy in 10 fractions over 2 weeks). Patients underwent restaging 4 to 6 weeks after completion of chemoradiation and, in the absence of disease progression, were taken to surgery. RESULTS The study enrolled 86 patients. At the time of restaging, disease progression or a decline in performance status precluded 13 patients from surgery. Seventy-three (85%) of 86 patients were taken to surgery, extrapancreatic disease was found in nine, and 64 (74%) of 86 underwent a successful PD. Median overall survival (86 patients) was 22.7 months with a 27% 5-year survival. Median survival was 34 months for the 64 patients who underwent PD and 7 months for the 22 unresected patients (P < .001). The 5-year survival for those who did and did not undergo PD was 36% and 0%, respectively. CONCLUSION Preoperative gemcitabine-based chemoradiation followed by restaging and evaluation for surgery separated the study population into two different subsets: patients likely to benefit from PD (n = 64) and those in whom surgery would be unlikely to provide clinical benefit (n = 22). Furthermore, the encouraging overall survival observed in this large trial supports the continued investigation of gemcitabine-based preoperative therapy in resectable pancreatic cancer.
Predicting cloud resource provisioning using machine learning techniques

In order to meet Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements, Virtual Machine (VM) resources must be provisioned few minutes ahead due to the VM boot-up time. One way to do this is by predicting future resource demands. In this research, we have developed and evaluated cloud client prediction models for TPCW benchmark web application using three machine learning techniques: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Networks (NN) and Linear Regression (LR). We included the SLA metrics for Response Time and Throughput to the prediction model with the aim of providing the client with a more robust scaling decision choice. Our results show that Support Vector Machine provides the best prediction model.
Adaptive routing in mobile opportunistic networks

In this paper, we study how to adapt the routing according to dynamic network conditions in wireless ad hoc networks. We present a method that dynamically chooses routing agent between ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocol (AODV) with TCP (end-to-end transport) and delay-tolerant networking (DTN) routing and bundle protocol (hop-by-hop transport). We use simulations to confirm that DTN routing and the bundle protocol leads to significantly shorter end-to-end delays and higher message delivery ratios than AODV and end-to-end TCP when the wireless node density is low. However, with high node density, DTN routing, especially epidemic routing, suffers from multiple bundle copies and simultaneous transmissions that lead into collisions and retransmissions at the wireless link (MAC) layer. Thus, we propose a simple adaptive scheme that uses only local information to transmit the messages from source to destination using either AODV or DTN routing, depending on current node density, message size, and path length to destination.
Range finding system using monocular in-vehicle camera and LED

Collisions often occur because the area behind a car is not clearly visible in the dark. In this paper, we propose a system to measure the distance between the rear of the car and a target behind it in order to reduce the number of these accidents. Because it is expensive and time-consuming to develop new devices, this system uses a factory-installed monocular camera, brake light, and tail light that are installed beforehand. The light from the brake light and tail light diffuses, though, so with this system, we aim to extract the slit light from the distribution of the diffused light, and to apply a light-section method.
Multiple Bcl-2 family immunomodulators from vaccinia virus regulate MAPK/AP-1 activation

Vaccinia virus (VACV) is a poxvirus and encodes many proteins that modify the host cell metabolism or inhibit the host response to infection. For instance, it is known that VACV infection can activate the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK)/activator protein 1 (AP-1) pathway and inhibit activation of the pro-inflammatory transcription factor NF-κB. Since NF-κB and MAPK/AP-1 share common upstream activators we investigated whether six different VACV Bcl-2-like NF-κB inhibitors can also influence MAPK/AP-1 activation. Data presented show that proteins A52, B14 and K7 each contribute to AP-1 activation during VACV infection, and when expressed individually outwith infection. B14 induced the greatest stimulation of AP-1 and further investigation showed B14 activated mainly the MAPKs ERK (extracellular signal-regulated kinase) and JNK (Jun N-terminal kinase), and their substrate c-Jun (a component of AP-1). These data indicate that the same viral protein can have different effects on distinct signalling pathways, in blocking NF-κB activation whilst leading to MAPK/AP-1 activation.