Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alcohol Outlet Density, Heavy Episodic Drinking, and Sexual Violence Perpetration: A Multilevel Mediation Model

Current campus sexual violence prevention strategies have focused almost exclusively on person-level change by targeting individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. However, few of these programs have demonstrated effectiveness and few studies have investigated alternative prevention strategies that could be implemented across multiple levels of analysis. One potential promising community-level prevention strategy is alcohol availability. Alcohol is a significant predictor of sexual violence perpetration and alcohol outlet density is a significant positive predictor of violence and crime in campus and community samples. However, no study to date has assessed the effect of alcohol availability on campus sexual violence. The current study examined the extent to which alcohol availability, defined as alcohol outlet density within a specified radius, was a community-level risk factor for sexual violence perpetration on college campuses. Using publicly-available alcohol license data and self-report data from a recentlycompleted longitudinal cohort study of college men, a three-level mediation model was estimated to investigate the effect of institution-level alcohol availability on college men’s alcohol use and sexual violence perpetration. Institution-level alcohol availability within a threemile radius did not predict college men’s heavy episodic drinking or sexual violence perpetration and heavy episodic drinking did not mediate the relationship between alcohol availability and person-level sexual violence perpetration. Although these findings are surprising, alcohol availability is more complex than alcohol outlet density and there are several other factors that may be important to understand alcohol availability, especially near college campuses (e.g., alcohol control policies, enforcement of legal drinking age laws, culture of alcohol outlets). Findings from the post-hoc exploratory model suggest that changing norms related to drinking may be a way to both reduce heavy episodic drinking and prevent sexual violence perpetration. Perceptions of drinking behavior, aggregated at the institution-level, significantly predicted heavy episodic drinking, which mediated the relationship between perceptions of drinking behavior and sexual violence perpetration. Combining these findings with evidence of successful social norms campaigns related to drinking provides some hope for identifying potential community-level risk factors for sexual violence perpetration. INDEX WORDS: Alcohol outlet density, Sexual violence perpetration, Binge drinking, Heavy episodic drinking, Multilevel SEM, Alcohol availability ALCOHOL OUTLET DENSITY, HEAVY EPISODIC DRINKING, AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE PERPETRATION: A MULTILEVEL MEDIATION MODEL
Automated Feature Weighting for Network Anomaly Detection

Summary A number of network features is used to describe normal and intrusive traffic patterns. However the choice of features is dependent on which pattern to be detected. In order to identify which network features are more important for a particular network pattern, we propose an automated feature weighting method based on a fuzzy subspace approach to vector quantization modeling that can assign a weight to each feature when network models are trained. The proposed method not only increases the detection rate but also reduces false alarm rate as presented in our experiments.
A conceptual model for multi-level mining and visualization of association rules

Association Rule Mining has been widely used by researchers and practitioners for discovering meaningful rules from large datasets. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in applying association rule mining on data warehouses to identify trends and patterns that exist in the historical data present in large warehouses. However, the application of rule mining algorithms on data warehouses is not a straight forward task. The reason is that the underlying data in a warehouse is modeled in the form of a multidimensional schema, usually the STAR schema, which imposes difficulties in mining rules from its multidimensional structure. Moreover, the data aggregates are stored in the form of data cubes and the presence of dimensional hierarchies makes it even harder to apply rule mining at multiple levels of data abstraction. In this paper, we review the techniques proposed in the literature for mining association rules from data warehouses. Moreover, we critically evaluate the work done in this area and highlight the major limitations and research gaps present in the literature. Literature review reveals that majority of the prior approaches heavily rely on domain knowledge, lack automatic discovery methods, incapable of mining rules at multiple levels of data abstraction, deficient in applying advanced rule interestingness measures and do not provide any visual assistance to analysts for the exploration of discovered rules. In order to overcome these limitations and to fill the identified research gaps, we propose a conceptual model for the discovery of multi-level mining and visualization of association rules from data warehouses. However, the implementation of our proposed model is beyond the scope of this paper.
LogFS-finally a scalable flash file system

Currently, two different solutions for filesystems on flash storage exist: Flash Translation Layers in combination with traditional filesystems and log-structured flash file systems. This paper analyzes the weaknesses of both approaches and derives a number of requirements that help avoiding these weaknesses. Finally the basic concept of a tree structured flash file system fulfilling all of these requirements is presented.
Splitting Abstract Dialectical Frameworks

Among the abundance of generalizations of abstract argumentation frameworks, the formalism of abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs) proved to be powerful in modelling various argumentation problems. Implementations of reasoning tasks that come within ADFs struggle with their high computational complexity. Thus methods simplifying the evaluation process are required. One such method is splitting, which was shown to be an effective optimization technique in other nonmonotonic formalisms. We apply this approach to ADFs by providing suitable techniques for directional splitting (allowing links only from the first to the second part of the splitting) under all the standard semantics of ADFs as well as preliminary results on general splitting.
Mapping of QTLs underlying flowering time in sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench]

Due to its critical importance in crop yield, the photoperiodic regulation of flowering time is considered an important trait in sorghum breeding programs. In this study, quantitative trait loci for flowering time were detected using an F2 population derived from a cross between Kikuchi Zairai, a late-flowering cultivar originating from Japan and SC112, an early-flowering cultivar originating from Ethiopia. F2 plants were grown with their parents under a natural day length and a 12 h day length. Two linkage maps were constructed using 213 simple sequence repeats markers. Nine quantitative trait loci controlling flowering time were identified in F2 plants grown under a natural day length, whereas 7 QTLs were identified under a 12 h day length. Five QTLs controlling flowering time were shared under both of the day length conditions.
N-Terminal-Based Targeted, Inducible Protein Degradation in Escherichia coli

Dynamically altering protein concentration is a central activity in synthetic biology. While many tools are available to modulate protein concentration by altering protein synthesis rate, methods for decreasing protein concentration by inactivation or degradation rate are just being realized. Altering protein synthesis rates can quickly increase the concentration of a protein but not decrease, as residual protein will remain for a while. Inducible, targeted protein degradation is an attractive option and some tools have been introduced for higher organisms and bacteria. Current bacterial tools rely on C-terminal fusions, so we have developed an N-terminal fusion (Ntag) strategy to increase the possible proteins that can be targeted. We demonstrate Ntag dependent degradation of mCherry and beta-galactosidase and reconfigure the Ntag system to perform dynamic, exogenously inducible degradation of a targeted protein and complement protein depletion by traditional synthesis repression. Model driven analysis that focused on rates, rather than concentrations, was critical to understanding and engineering the system. We expect this tool and our model to enable inducible protein degradation use particularly in metabolic engineering, biological study of essential proteins, and protein circuits.
A brain electrophysiological correlate of depth perception.

OBJECTIVE To investigate brain electrical activity accompanying depth perception using random-dot stereograms. Additional experiments were conducted to ascertain the specificity of this potential to depth perception. METHODS In the present study, we performed 3 different and independent experiments on 34 subjects to establish the relationship between depth perception and its cortical electrophysiological correlate. Visual evoked potentials in response to visual stimulation by random-dot stereograms were recorded. To achieve this goal, a data acquisition and analysis system, different from common visual evoked potential recording systems, consisting of 2 personal computers, was used. One of the computers was used to generate the visual stimulus patterns and the other to record and digitally average the potentials evoked by the stimuli. This study was carried out at the Department of Biophysics of Ege University Medical School, Izmir, Turkey, from April to December, 2006. RESULTS A negative potential component, which is thought to arise in association with depth perception, was recorded from the occipital region from 30 of the 34 subjects. Typically, it had a mean latency of 211.46 ms and 6.40 uV amplitude. CONCLUSION The negative potential is related to depth perception, as this component is present in the responses to stimulus, which carries disparity information but is absent when the stimulus is switched to no disparity information. Additional experiments also showed that the specificity of this component to depth perception becomes evident beyond doubt.
Isolated Lymphoid Follicles are Dynamic Reservoirs for the Induction of Intestinal IgA

IgA is one of the most important molecules in the regulation of intestinal homeostasis. Peyer’s patches have been traditionally recognized as sites for the induction of intestinal IgA responses, however more recent studies demonstrate that isolated lymphoid follicles (ILFs) can perform this function as well. ILF development is dynamic, changing in response to the luminal microbial burden, suggesting that ILFs play an important role providing an expandable reservoir of compensatory IgA inductive sites. However, in situations of immune dysfunction, ILFs can over-develop in response to uncontrollable enteric flora, resulting in ILF hyperplasia. The ability of ILFs to expand and respond to help control the enteric flora makes this dynamic reservoir an important arm of IgA inductive sites in intestinal immunity.
The Four Faces of Political Participation in Argentina: Using Latent Class Analysis to Study Political Behavior

In this paper we use latent class analysis to identify the four faces of political participation. Previous research has generally focused on conventional forms of political participation (for example, voting), with some research looking as well at unconventional forms of political participation, like protesting. Moreover, most research studies these forms of participation separately. However, citizens actually engage in both conventional and unconventional participation simultaneously, and here we present a methodology that can identify citizens who engage in both, neither, or only one form of participation. Using our approach, we examine a series of hypotheses about how social, political, and economic grievances lead citizens to engage in each face of political participation. We apply this methodology to recent survey data from Argentina, which we argue is an excellent case for studying both forms of participation simultaneously. This application demonstrates the utility of the latent class approach for studying the four faces of political participation.
When Occlusions are Outliers

In many tracking applications, the deformable object of interest suffers from frequent occlusions. Traditional augmenting methods use templates and measures of similarity to recover from occlusions. In this paper, we break with these methods. Instead, we model bad image correspondences, which are induced by occlusions, as statistical outliers in the context of tracking high-dimensional deformable models. This interpretation allows us to use robust statistical estimators in the deformable model’s parameter space to detect and eliminate such outliers. Because fast-moving occlusions can generate an excessively large outlier to inlier ratio in the occluded areas, we combine the robust statistical estimation with an initial rejection of correspondences based on the magnitude of the optical flow, a simple 2D criterion. To improve robustness even further, we have the final outlier rejection test take into account both the statistical distribution of the deformable model’s parameters, and that different parameters are affected by different subsets of correspondences. We validate and demonstrate our technique on real sequences of American Sign Language, which exhibit frequent and extensive occlusions caused by fast movement of the subjects’ hands.
A set of criteria to assess motivation and/or persuasion of elearning applications

Motivational factors have long been a topic of study in e-learning applications and there is a strong overlap between these factors and the persuasive factors. This study intends to investigate this overlap. Which criteria are common to both, and which criteria are specific to each? The objective is ultimately to design an interactive persuasion criteria grid that is specific to e-learning along the lines of an existing grid, while taking into account the body of research on motivational factors in e-learning. To investigate these questions, we compare the persuasion grid of Nemery, Brangier & Kopp (2011) with a number of the motivational criteria of Vincente and Pain (2002), and apply both approaches to evaluate the quality of an e-learning application to induce motivation to learn.
(SC)²: A System to Secure Off-Card Contract-Policy Matching in Security-by-Contract for Open Multi-application Smart Cards

The Security-by-Contract (SxC) framework has recently been proposed to support software evolution in open multi-application smart cards. The key idea lies in the notion of contract, a specification of the security behavior of an application that must be compliant with the security policy of the smart card hosting the application. In this demonstration we show SC^2 (Secure Communication over Smart Cards), a system developed to address a key issue of the SxC framework, namely the secure outsourcing of the SxC contract-policy matching service to a Trusted Third Party (TTP). SC^2 secures the communication between a smart card and the TTP that provides the SxC matching service.
Low-level pure-tone masking: a comparison of "tuning curves" obtained with simultaneous and forward masking.

Simultaneous and forward pure‐tone masking are compared, using a fixed‐level probe of 20‐ms and a 200‐ms masker. For a 1‐kHz probe of 30 dB SPL the required masker level Lm is measured as a function of the time interval Δt between masker offset and probe onset. When masker and probe have equal frequencies a monotonic relationship is found for phase π/2 but not for phase 0. When the masker frequency fm is 50 or 100 Hz below the probe frequency fp a nonmonotony is found, with a minimum at Δt=0, the transition between simultaneous and forward masking. When fm is 50 or 100 Hz above fp, however, the relationship of Lm to Δt is monotonic. In the case of simultaneous masking the iso‐Lp curves, which give Lm as a function of fm, show a typical asymmetry around fm=fp, leading to the positive shift of the maximum masking frequency MMF previously reported for stationary pure‐tone maskers. In the case of forward masking, however, this asymmetry ceases to exist. We conclude that simultaneity of probe and masker is a n.
Characteristics and Outcomes of Patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction at Non-PCI Capable Hospitals in 2007 and in 2014

Background. There is little known about whether characteristics and outcomes of patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) have changed over the years in non-PCI capable hospitals in real-life. Our aim was to assess them between 2007 and 2014. Methods. It was a retrospective cohort study. Characteristics and in-hospital mortality (standardized in cases of different characteristics between the groups by original simple method) were assessed for all patients with non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) and ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) at two non-PCI capable hospitals: one in 2007 (n = 104) and another in 2014 (n = 58). Results. In 2014, females were older than in 2007 (80.18 ± 7.54 versus 76.15 ± 8.77, p = 0.011), males were younger (71.61 ± 11.22 versus 79.20 ± 7.63, p = 0.019), less had renal failure (RF) (19% versus 34.6%, p < 0.0001) and reinfarction (13.8% versus 35.6%, p < 0.0001), and the proportion of males (31% versus 43.3%, p = 0.001) and the proportion of NSTEMI (60.3 versus 69.2, p < 0.0001) decreased. In cases of STEMI there were no differences in patient characteristics. STEMI (18.8% versus 21.7%) and standardized mortalities by gender, RF, and reinfarction NSTEMI (19.47%, 15.34%, and 17.5%, resp., versus 17.1%) showed no differences between 2007 and 2014. Conclusions. There were some differences in patient characteristics but not in mortality for AMI at non-PCI capable hospitals between 2007 and 2014.
A realtime and direct-touch interaction for 3D woven cultural artifact exhibition

We propose a realtime and direct-touch interaction system for 3D woven cultural artifact exhibition. Our system enables to exhibit the cultural artifact at high-definition and enables realtime and direct-touch interaction based on our texture-based haptic modeling and rendering techniques. In our techniques, the reaction force is changed according to the pixel value of the 2D texture images of the 3D model surface on the screen.
ETD 2010 1 HTML 5 ETDs

We have developed and demonstrated a software prototype to convert plain ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) into HTML5. This can be thought of as a migration to a better format for preservation. Browsers for HTML5, the latest revision of HTML, directly support access to multimedia content and hypermedia works. Most current ETDs are submitted in PDF (Portable Document Format). Some are accompanied by multimedia files or other files connected with hypertext links, i.e., are hypermedia works. All of these kinds of files can be integrated using HTML5. For readers of ETDs it would be much more convenient to view an HTML5 file in a browser that directly manages multimedia; thus our goal is to transform to HTML5. Our semi-automatic algorithm first finds links or clues for links (e.g., video or audio file names, figures, references, tables, etc.) in a PDF ETD. Then it constructs an HTML5 file including all suitable links. Thus, HTML5 will make it easier to read and preserve multimedia and hypermedia ETDs. We have transformed 3 multimedia plus 3 linked (hypertext/hypermedia) ETDs into HTML5 in a semi-automatic way. We have developed a software prototype that helps in the migration. For a user's viewing convenience, an ETD digital library can support HTML5, which facilitates viewing of integrated multimedia content following video and audio tagging. In addition to helping with preservation and supporting browsing, this will improve access to multimedia ETDs by mobile devices (e.g., iPods).
Detecting Selective Forwarding Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks using Support Vector Machines

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a new technology foreseen to be used increasingly in the near future due to their data acquisition and data processing abilities. Security for WSNs is an area that needs to be considered in order to protect the functionality of these networks, the data they convey and the location of their members. The security models and protocols used in wired and other networks are not suited to WSNs because of their severe resource constraints, especially concerning energy . In this article, we propose a centralized intrusion detection scheme based on support vector machines (SVMs) and sliding windows. We find that our system can detect black hole attacks and selective forwarding attacks with high accuracy without depleting the nodes of their energy.
THE USE OF SURROGATE PULSE-RESPONSE MATRIX IN THE UNIVERSAL DYNAMIC CONTROL

The universal dynamic control law (UDCL) advocated by the author can achieve ODE-based control objectives without the need for detailed knowledge of the system itself—and is therefore very robust with respect to uncertainties of and unmodeled disturbances in the system. The present paper shows, via an example, how to find a usable “surrogate” pulse-response matrix needed in the implementation of the control law. Numerical simulations will be presented. A brief discussion on design guidelines for sensors and actuators is also included.
FingerCloud: uncertainty and autonomy handover incapacitive sensing

We describe a particle filtering approach to inferring finger movements on capacitive sensing arrays. This technique allows the efficient combination of human movement models with accurate sensing models, and gives high-fidelity results with low-resolution sensor grids and tracks finger height. Our model provides uncertainty estimates, which can be linked to the interaction to provide appropriately smoothed responses as sensing perfomance degrades; system autonomy is increased as estimates of user behaviour become less certain. We demonstrate the particle filter approach with a map browser running with a very small sensor board, where finger position uncertainty is linked to autonomy handover.
The CMU-interACT 2008 Mandarin transcription system

We present our Mandarin BN/BC transcription system recently developed for the GALE07 evaluation. The system employs a 3-pass decoding strategy trained with over 1300 hours of quickly transcribed audio. We successfully apply discriminative training, dynamic unsupervised language model adaptation, and system combination techniques in our system. We furthermore achieve improvements by combining an Initial-Final system with a genre dependent phone system. On the GALE07 phase 2 retest evaluation, our system achieves a character error rate(CER) of 13.3% on dev07 test set and 13.5% on eval07 unsequestered test set. Our system also allows combination with other sites and in this paper, we investigate different system combination strategies which significantly improve thefinal recognition performance.
An Internet-based system for trading green electricity certificates on small scale

We present a prototype of an Internet-based system for the exchange of certificates for electricity generated from renewable sources. The system consists of hardware and software for the measurement of electric power produced or consumed and for transmitting requests to buy or sell certificates corresponding to the power produced or consumed a green certificates exchange system receives or distributes certificates according to demand. Users may interact with the system via a Web-based interface. The system has been implemented for a number of electricity producers and consumers and has proven to be very stable while being simple and cost-effective enough to be used by small-scale producers and consumers.