Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Knowledge Licensing , Patents , and Optimal Organization of Research and Development 1

We develop a model of two-stage cumulative research and development (R&D), in which one Research Unit (RU) with an innovative idea bargains to license her nonverifiable interim knowledge exclusively to one of two competing Development Units (DUs) via one of two alternative modes: an Open sale after patenting this interim knowledge, or a Closed sale in which precluding further disclosure to a competing DU requires the RU to hold a stake in the licensed DU’s post-invention revenues. Both modes lead to partial leakage of RU’s knowledge from its description, to the licensed DU alone in a closed sale, and to both DUs in an open sale. We find that higher levels of interim knowledge are more likely to be licensed via closed sales. If the extent of leakage is lower, more RUs choose open sales, generating a non-monotonic relationship between the strength of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and aggregate R&D expenditures. We also develop a rationale for the ex ante acquisition of control rights over the RU by a DU, rooted in the RU’s incentives to create knowledge under alternative modes of sale thereof, and her wealth constraint in ex interim bargaining. JEL Codes: D23, O32, O34.
Draft genome sequence of marine alphaproteobacterial strain HIMB11, the first cultivated representative of a unique lineage within the Roseobacter clade possessing an unusually small genome

Strain HIMB11 is a planktonic marine bacterium isolated from coastal seawater in Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, Hawaii belonging to the ubiquitous and versatile Roseobacter clade of the alphaproteobacterial family Rhodobacteraceae. Here we describe the preliminary characteristics of strain HIMB11, including annotation of the draft genome sequence and comparative genomic analysis with other members of the Roseobacter lineage. The 3,098,747 bp draft genome is arranged in 34 contigs and contains 3,183 protein-coding genes and 54 RNA genes. Phylogenomic and 16S rRNA gene analyses indicate that HIMB11 represents a unique sublineage within the Roseobacter clade. Comparison with other publicly available genome sequences from members of the Roseobacter lineage reveals that strain HIMB11 has the genomic potential to utilize a wide variety of energy sources (e.g. organic matter, reduced inorganic sulfur, light, carbon monoxide), while possessing a reduced number of substrate transporters.
RedFlag: Reducing Inadvertent Leaks by Personal Machines

Reference monitors rely on correct access-control policies to prevent confidential data from leaking. Unfortunately, sensitive data is increasingly stored on personal machines operated by users who are either unwilling or unqualified to properly protect their sensitive files. This often leads to misconfigured applications and damaging leaks. In this paper, we describe RedFlag, a system designed to unobtrusively identify and protect sensitive files on personal machines. Our main insight is that personal machines often receive sensitive data from servers over encrypted network connections. Using this heuristic allows RedFlag to help prevent large classes of leaks, without requiring user-defined policies or changes to existing server-side and client-side applications.
Association between Plasma PFOA and PFOS Levels and Total Cholesterol in a Middle-Aged Danish Population

Perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) are used in a variety of consumer products and have been detected worldwide in human blood. Recent studies mainly of highly exposed populations have indicated that PFOA and PFOS may affect serum cholesterol levels, but the magnitude of the effect may be inconsistent across exposure levels. The aim of the present cross-sectional study was to investigate the association between plasma PFOA and PFOS and total cholesterol in a general, middle-aged Danish population. The study population comprised 753 individuals (663 men and 90 women), 50–65 years of age, nested within a Danish cohort of 57,053 participants. Blood samples were taken from all cohort members at enrolment (1993–1997) and stored in a biobank at -150°C. Plasma levels of PFOA and PFOS and serum levels of total cholesterol were measured. The associations between plasma PFOA and PFOS levels and total cholesterol levels were analysed by generalized linear models, both crude and adjusted for potential confounders. We observed statistically significant positive associations between both perfluorinated compounds and total cholesterol, e.g. a 4.4 [95% CI = 1.1–7.8] higher concentration of total cholesterol (mg/dL) per interquartile range of PFOA plasma level. Sex and prevalent diabetes appeared to modify the association between PFOA and PFOS, respectively, and cholesterol. In conclusion, this study indicated positive associations between plasma PFOA and PFOS levels and total cholesterol in a middle-aged Danish population, although whether the observed pattern of results reflects a causal association is unclear.
Draft Genome Sequences of Three Strains of Bacteroides pyogenes Isolated from a Cat and Swine

ABSTRACT Here, we report the draft genome sequences of Bacteroides pyogenes JCM 6294T, JCM 6292, and JCM 10003, which were isolated from a cat and swine and were recently classified into a single species, B. pyogenes. Comparative analyses of these genomes revealed the diversification of B. pyogenes strains isolated from different animals.
Age, spreading rates, and spreading asymmetry of the world's ocean crust

We present four companion digital models of the age, age uncertainty, spreading rates, and spreading asymmetries of the world's ocean basins as geographic and Mercator grids with 2 arc min resolution. The grids include data from all the major ocean basins as well as detailed reconstructions of back‐arc basins. The age, spreading rate, and asymmetry at each grid node are determined by linear interpolation between adjacent seafloor isochrons in the direction of spreading. Ages for ocean floor between the oldest identified magnetic anomalies and continental crust are interpolated by geological estimates of the ages of passive continental margin segments. The age uncertainties for grid cells coinciding with marine magnetic anomaly identifications, observed or rotated to their conjugate ridge flanks, are based on the difference between gridded age and observed age. The uncertainties are also a function of the distance of a given grid cell to the nearest age observation and the proximity to fracture zones or other age discontinuities. Asymmetries in crustal accretion appear to be frequently related to asthenospheric flow from mantle plumes to spreading ridges, resulting in ridge jumps toward hot spots. We also use the new age grid to compute global residual basement depth grids from the difference between observed oceanic basement depth and predicted depth using three alternative age‐depth relationships. The new set of grids helps to investigate prominent negative depth anomalies, which may be alternatively related to subducted slab material descending in the mantle or to asthenospheric flow. A combination of our digital grids and the associated relative and absolute plate motion model with seismic tomography and mantle convection model outputs represents a valuable set of tools to investigate geodynamic problems.
A Critical Review of Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory in Second Language Acquisition

The purpose of this study is to explore Vygotsky’s contribution to the socio-cultural theory in the field of education in general, and applied linguistics in particular. The study aims to elaborate the impact of social-cultural theory in the existing body of literature. The study also reviews implications and applications of socio-cultural theory in second language acquisition (SLA). Moreover, this study also critiques the basic concepts of the theory and how far these concepts have been implicated in the domain of research. The central focus is to explore and to critically understand central ideas such as Zone of Proximal Development, mediation, scaffolding, internalization, and private speech. The socio-cultural theory focuses on what learners learn and the solution to their learning problems. Socio- cultural theory has made a great effect on learning and teaching languages. It also regards learning second language as a semiotic process where participation in socially mediated activities is very important (Ellis, 2000). Vygotsky (1987) singled out and studied the dynamic social surroundings which indicate the connection between teacher and the child. Moreover, he focused on the social, cultural and historical artifacts which play a pivotal role in the children’s cognitive development as well as their potential performance. The study concludes with the idea of Williams & Burden (1997) that socio-cultural theory suggests that education should be associated with learning to learn and making learning experiences meaningful and relevant to the learner. The study also suggests some pedagogical implications and offers teaching and learning practices in relation to socio-cultural theory.
Word and Sentence Level Emotion Analyz ationin Telugu Blog and News

Emotion analysis, a recent sub discipline at the crossroads of information retrieval and computational linguistics is becoming increasinglyimportant from application view points of affective computing.Emotion is crucial to identify as it is not open to any objective observation or verification. In this paper, emotion analysis on blog texts has been carried out for a less privileged language, Teluguand the same system has been applied on the English SemEval 20 07 affect sensing corpus containing only news headlines. A set of six emotion tags, namely, happy ( ), sad ( ), anger ( ), fear ( ), surprise ( )and disgust ( ), have been selected towards this emotion detection task for re liable and semi-automatic annotation of blog and news data. Conditional Random Field (CRF) based classifier has been applied for recognizing six basic emotion tags for different words of a sentence. The classifier accuracy has been improved by arranging anequal distribution of emotional tags and non -emotional tag. A score based technique has been adopted to calculate and assign tag weights to each of the six emotion tags. A sense based scoring strategy has been applied to identify sentence level emotion sc ores for the six emotion tags based on the acquired word level emotion tags. Sentence level emotion tagging has been carried out based on the maximum obtained sentence level emotion scores. Evaluation has been conducted for each emotion class separately on200 test sentences from each of the Telugublog and English news data. The system has resulted accuracies of 69.82% and 71.06 % for happy, 70.24% and 66.42% for sad, 65.73% and 64.27% for anger, 76.01% and 69.90% for disgust, 72.19% and 73.59% for fear and 70.54% and 66.64% for surprise emotion classes on blog and news test data respectively.
GSTT1 is upregulated by oxidative stress through p38-MK2 signaling pathway in human granulosa cells: possible association with mitochondrial activity

We previously reported that GSTT1 was upregulated in human granulosa cells during aging and that activation and localization of p38 MAPK was changed in parallel. Although oxidative stress is responsible for these changes, the age-associated expression of GSTT1 regulated by MAPKs and the role of GSTT1 in aged granulosa cells remain unclear. Therefore, we examined the relationship between the expression of GSTT1 and MAPK signaling pathways using human granulosa-like KGN cells stimulated with H2O2 in the presence or absence of various MAPK inhibitors. Interestingly, H2O2-induced GSTT1 was only inhibited by a p38 inhibitor. An inhibitor of MK2, a downstream regulator of p38, also diminished H2O2-induced GSTT1 upregulation. Notably, both p38 and MK2 were significantly inactivated in cells carrying an shRNA construct of GSTT1 (ΔGSTT1 cells), suggesting that the p38-MK2 pathway is essential for age-associated upregulation of GSTT1. The relevance of GSTT1 in mitochondrial activity was then determined. ΔGSTT1 cells displayed enhanced polarization of mitochondrial membrane potential without increasing the apoptosis, suggesting that the age-associated upregulation of GSTT1 may influence the mitochondrial activity of granulosa cells. Collectively, it appears that the age-associated expression of GSTT1 is induced through the p38 signaling pathway and GSTT1 influences homeostatic activities in granulosa cells.
Extensibility in Data Mining Systems

The successful application of data mining techniques ideally requires both system support for the entire knowledge discovery process and the right analysis algorithms for the particular task at hand. While there are a number of successful data mining systems that support the entire mining process, they usually are limited to a fixed selection of analysis algorithms. In this paper, we argue in favor of extensibility as a key feature of data mining systems, and discuss the requirements that this entails for system architecture. We identify in which points existing data mining systems fail to meet these requirements, and then describe a new integration architecture for data mining systems that addresses these problems based on the concept of "plug-ins". KEPLER, our data mining system built according to this architecture, is presented and discussed.
A COMPARISON OF MIKE SHE AND DRAINMOD FOR MODELING FORESTED WETLAND HYDROLOGY IN COASTAL SOUTH CAROLINA, USA

Models are widely used to assess hydrologic impacts of land-management, land-use change and climate change. Two hydrologic models with different spatial scales, MIKE SHE (spatially distributed, watershed-scale) and DRAINMOD (lumped, field-scale), were compared in terms of their performance in predicting stream flow and water table depth in a first-order forested watershed in coastal South Carolina. The model performance was evaluated using the coefficient of determination (R2) and Nash-Sutcliffe’s model efficiency (E). Although both models performed reasonably well in predicting monthly and annual average water table depths and stream flow with acceptable E values (0.55-0.99) for the five-year period (2003-2007), MIKE SHE yielded better results than DRAINMOD for daily hydrologic dynamics. Both models, however, showed relatively large uncertainty in simulating stream flow for dry years. The subsurface drainage predicted by MIKE SHE was lower than simulated by DRAINMOD for dry years, higher for extremely wet years and similar for normal climate years. The differences were likely that MIKE SHE employed distributed physical characteristics of the watershed, especially of soil and topography which can substantially affect the subsurface flow, but the spatial average condition was only used by DRAINMOD; the results from both models were, thus, similar for those average (e.g., normal climate) conditions, and different for varying conditions. This study suggests a lumped parameter model could perform equally well at the monthly temporal scale for modeling stream flow under average climatic conditions; however a distributed hydrological model provides more accurate prediction of daily stream flow and water table depth across varying climatic conditions.
Modeling and Simulation of Pathloss and Fading for Air-Ground Link of HAPs within a Network Simulator

Development in Near Space Vehicle communication has increased the need for simulation to test and analyze protocols for this emerging technology. Network simulators lack a realistic near space path loss and fading module which would allow having accurate simulation. To explore and simulate accurately the influence of rain, cloud, gaseous absorption and multipath fading on the air-ground link, the mathematical and simulation models for the rain attenuation, cloud attenuation, gaseous absorption attenuation and Ricean fading were implemented. Moreover, modeling and simulation were done within QualNet. Simulation results quantitatively show the effects of rain attenuation, cloud attenuation, gaseous absorption attenuation and Ricean fading on the performance of packet delivery rate of the High Altitude Platform station (HAPs) air-ground link. Thus, simulation of the air-ground link becomes more accurate and reasonable. Simultaneously, the used simulation platform is also improved by integrating new models.
AUTOMATIC EXTRACTION OF VERTICAL WALLS FROM MOBILE AND AIRBORNE LASER SCANNING DATA

Building outlines in cadastral maps are often created from different sources such as terrestrial surveying and photogrammetric analyses. In the latter case the position of the building wall cannot be estimated correctly if a roof overhang is present. This causes an inconsistent representation of the building outlines in cadastral map data. Laser scanning can be used to correct for such estimation inconsistencies and additional occurring changes in the building shape. Nowadays, airborne (ALS) and mobile laser scanning (MLS) data for overlapping areas are available. The object representation in ALS and MLS point clouds is rather different regarding point density, representation of object details (scale), and completeness, which is caused by the different platform position i.e. distance to the object and scan direction. These differences are analysed by developing a workflow for automatic extraction of vertical building walls from 3D laser scanning point clouds. A region growing segmentation using Hough transform derives the initial segments. These are then classified based on planarity, inclination, wall height and width. The planar position accuracy of corresponding walls and completeness of the automatically extracted vertical walls are investigated. If corresponding vertical wall segments are defined by a maximum distance of 0.1 m and maximum angle of 3o then 24 matches with a planimetric accuracy of 0.05 m RMS and 0.04 m standard deviation of the X- and Y-coordinates could be found. Finally the extracted walls are compared to building outlines of a cadastral map for map updating. The completeness of building walls in both ALS and MLS depends strongly on the relative position between sensor and object. A visibility analysis for the building facades is performed to estimate the potential completeness in the MLS data. Vertical walls in ALS data are represented as less detailed facades caused by lower point densities, which is enforced by large incidence angles. This can be compensated by the denser MLS data if the facade is covered by the survey.
Statistical Compact Modeling and Si Verification Methodology

As we scale down to sub-65nm technologies, transistors and interconnects no longer act as predictable elements, but start acting as statistical blocks due to static and dynamic variations. This invited paper first reviews some of the key variations that need to be considered for any statistical analysis. Also, details for implementing statistical models into compact modeling flow are discussed. Finally, the paper reviews one of the techniques used for generating and validating statistical models with the silicon data
Text detection and recognition in natural scene with edge analysis

Text plays an important role in daily life because of its rich information, thus automatic text detection in natural scenes has many attractive applications. However, detecting and recognising such text is always a challenging problem. In this study, the authors propose a method which extends the widely-used stroke width transform by two steps of edge analysis, namely candidate edge recombination and edge classification. A new method that recognises text through candidate edge recombination and candidate edge recognition is also proposed. In the step of candidate edge recombination, they use the idea of over-segmentation and region merging. To separate text edge from background, the edge of the input image is first divided into small segments. Then, neighbour edge segments are merged, if they have similar stroke width and colour. Through this step, each character is described by one candidate boundary. In the step of boundary classification, candidate boundaries are aggregated into text chains, followed by chain classification using character-based and chain-based features. To recognise text, the grey image is extracted based on the location of each candidate edge after the step of candidate edge recombination. Then, histogram of gradient features and a classifier are used to recognise each character. To evaluate the effectiveness of their method, the algorithm is run on the ICDAR competition dataset and Street View Text database. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides promising performance in comparison with the existing methods.
Perceived organizational support as a mediator between ethical culture and organizational commitment

This paper reports the results of an assessment of the mediating impact of perceived organizational support between ethical culture and employees’ commitment to a firm. The results are based upon a convenience sample size of 101employees from Australian travel agencies. After determining valid and reliable measurement instruments, a series of regressions indicated a partial mediation effect for POS between ethical culture and organizational commitment. This means that firms exhibiting an ethical culture, but also providing adequate support to their employees will gain and advantage by having more committed employees. Future research is also discussed.
Individual differences in visuospatial working memory: benefits from environmental support for rehearsal

ABSTRACT Previous research has suggested that participants with low working memory spans are less likely than those with high spans to engage in rehearsal and other effective strategies during memory tasks. However, most of this research has been conducted in the verbal domain, and less is known about strategy differences in visuospatial working memory. Therefore, the present experiments investigated potential individual differences in the benefit participants receive from environmental support for visuospatial rehearsal. In Experiment 1, memory spans were significantly larger when support was present (i.e. when the array of possible locations remained on the screen) during long inter-item intervals, but importantly, the observed benefit was larger for high-span participants than low-span participants, suggesting that high spans were more likely to use support to facilitate their rehearsal. Other research has suggested that low spans may benefit more than high spans from rehearsal instructions, and so in Experiment 2, participants also were provided with such instructions. However, the rehearsal instructions did not improve memory spans significantly in either group, suggesting that low spans are not only naturally less strategic than high spans, but they may be less capable of taking advantage of effective rehearsal strategies, even when environmental support is present.
The State of Charge Estimation of Lithium-Ion Batteries Based on a Proportional-Integral Observer

With the development of electric drive vehicles (EDVs), the state-of-charge (SOC) estimation for lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries has become increasingly more important. Based on the analysis of some of the most popular model-based SOC estimation methods, the proportional-integral (PI) observer is proposed to estimate the SOC of lithium-ion batteries in EDVs. The structure of the proposed PI observer is analyzed, and the convergence of the estimation method with model errors is verified. To demonstrate the superiority and compensation properties of the proposed PI observer, the simple-structure RC battery model is utilized to model the Li-ion battery. To validate the results of the proposed PI-based SOC estimation method, the experimental battery test bench is established. In the validation, the urban dynamometer driving schedule (UDDS) drive cycle is utilized, and the PI-based SOC estimation results are found to agree with the reference SOC, generally within the 2% error band for both the known and unknown initial SOC cases.