Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synchronization and Robust Synchronization for Fractional-Order Coupled Neural Networks

Synchronization and robust synchronization of fractional-order coupled neural networks (FCNNs) are considered in this paper. Different with the most published works on synchronization based on a special solution of an isolate node of the networks, we remove this restriction and introduce a more widely accepted definition of synchronization. Meanwhile, because of parametric uncertainties of network models, robust synchronization for FCNNs is investigated. In addition, by utilizing pinning control strategies, several sufficient conditions are derived to make sure that the considered networks can realize pinning synchronization and robust pinning synchronization. Finally, the correctness of the obtained results is substantiated by two given numerical examples.
HISTORICAL ALLEGORIES: LET US HAVE DIVERSITY

Abstract This paper points out that differences between “old” and “new” accounting history are not resolvable at the level of evidence because history is a form of allegory–a “true” allegory. In addition, it cautions against an overly zealous evangelization of particular “new”/critical faiths and argues instead for a “celebration of difference” in the telling of historical stories.
Anticipating habit formation: a psychological computing approach to behavior change support

Mobile computing systems hold the promise of becoming a cost-effective solution for supporting behavior change towards more healthy lifestyles. We present here an approach where the system implements a formal model of habit formation based on psychology theories, anticipates the behaviors and cognitive states of the users, and picks interventions based on model predictions. First, we discuss the motivation and system requirements for the approach. Next, we propose in detail an underlying computational model of habit formation which constitutes the key component of the system. Finally, future work and challenges will be discussed, focusing on the empirical validation of the model and the mapping between the model and intervention techniques.
Treatment of Prion Disease with Heterologous Prion Proteins

Prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle, and scrapie in sheep are fatal neurodegenerative diseases for which there is no effective treatment. The pathology of these diseases involves the conversion of a protease sensitive form of the cellular prion protein (PrPC) into a protease resistant infectious form (PrPsc or PrPres). Both in vitro (cell culture and cell free conversion assays) and in vivo (animal) studies have demonstrated the strong dependence of this conversion process on protein sequence homology between the initial prion inoculum and the host’s own cellular prion protein. The presence of non-homologous (heterologous) proteins is often inhibitory to this conversion process. We hypothesize that the presence of heterologous prion proteins from one species might therefore constitute an effective treatment for prion disease in another species. To test this hypothesis, we infected mice intracerebrally with murine adapted RML-Chandler scrapie and treated them with heterologous prion protein (purified bacterially expressed recombinant hamster prion protein) or vehicle alone. Treated animals demonstrated reduced disease associated pathology, decreased accumulation of protease-resistant disease-associated prion protein, with delayed onset of clinical symptoms and motor deficits. This was concomitant with significantly increased survival times relative to mock-treated animals. These results provide proof of principle that recombinant hamster prion proteins can effectively and safely inhibit prion disease in mice, and suggest that hamster or other non-human prion proteins may be a viable treatment for prion diseases in humans.
Speed of Aiming Movements

Fitts' Law describes human movement time in the horizontal and frontal planes, but its application to movement in the sagittal plane has been questioned by Beggs and Howarth. To evaluate the Law in this plane, eight subjects performed a forearm action, similar to dart-throwing without release, moving a stylus through the sagittal plane from a back contact plate forward to a target. Four movement distances, 8, 12, 16 and 20 in, were combined with four target widths, 1/4, 1/2, 1 and 2 in, in 16 experimental conditions. Following practice all subjects were tested in each condition, with visual knowledge of results. The plot of movement time against log 2A/W was essentially linear, accounting for 92.6% of the variance.
A web text classification technique for unlabeled training samples

The common classification is conducted under the supervised learning algorithms, which design classifiers through learning the labeled training samples. However, in actual situations, it is very costly to acquire class-labeled samples, because manually labeling documents requires a lot of time and efforts from experts. Therefore, it restrains the text classification to a great extent. To solve the issue that labeled texts are hard to retrieve from the Internet, this paper has proposed the text classification method combining Fuzzy Partition Clustering Method (FPCM) and Naive Bayesian Augment Learning to integrate the unsupervision of the clustering with the prior knowledge of the sample, which has solved the bottleneck problem of unlabeled training set in the text classification, further improved the classification performance by estimating the classification error loss to balance the sample selection, and constructed superior classification learning method.
Problem Drift: a Risk Model for Complex Socio-technical Projects

Increased globalisation and market volatility put pressure on organisations to become more flexible and explore new technologies and operational domains, so that projects are becoming more complex, with increasing uncertainty and risk. Complex project management is challenging for both traditional and agile approaches: traditional techniques may be left behind by unrecognised environmental change in a volatile context, while in a stable environment, agile may require too expensive interaction with the client. One area of growing interest is how traditional and agile may combine to increase the chance of project success. Yet how to strike a balance between the two remains poorly understood. In this position paper, we propose a model for complex socio-technical projects related to risk arising from volatility, that tries to explain the balance of agile and traditional. The model introduces the concept of drift rate as a measure of volatility, with the impact of drift related to loss of development resource, risk accumulation as a function of resource expenditure and drift rate, and validation the means to manage that risk.
Prediction of bipartite transcriptional regulatory elements using transcriptome data of Arabidopsis

Abstract In our previous study, a methodology was established to predict transcriptional regulatory elements in promoter sequences using transcriptome data based on a frequency comparison of octamers. Some transcription factors, including the NAC family, cannot be covered by this method because their binding sequences have non-specific spacers in the middle of the two binding sites. In order to remove this blind spot in promoter prediction, we have extended our analysis by including bipartite octamers that are composed of ‘4 bases—a spacer with a flexible length—4 bases’. 8,044 pre-selected bipartite octamers, which had an overrepresentation of specific spacer lengths in promoter sequences and sequences related to core elements removed, were subjected to frequency comparison analysis. Prediction of ER stress-responsive elements in the BiP/BiPL promoter and an ANAC017 target sequence resulted in precise detection of true positives, judged by functional analyses of a reported article and our own in vitro protein–DNA binding assays. These results demonstrate that incorporation of bipartite octamers with continuous ones improves promoter prediction significantly.
The tarsal taste of honey bees: behavioral and electrophysiological analyses

Taste plays a crucial role in the life of honey bees as their survival depends on the collection and intake of nectar and pollen, and other natural products. Here we studied the tarsal taste of honey bees through a series of behavioral and electrophysiological analyses. We characterized responsiveness to various sweet, salty and bitter tastants delivered to gustatory sensilla of the fore tarsi. Behavioral experiments showed that stimulation of opposite fore tarsi with sucrose and bitter substances or water yielded different outcomes depending on the stimulation sequence. When sucrose was applied first, thereby eliciting proboscis extension, no bitter substance could induce proboscis retraction, thus suggesting that the primacy of sucrose stimulation induced a central excitatory state. When bitter substances or water were applied first, sucrose stimulation could still elicit proboscis extension but to a lower level, thus suggesting central inhibition based on contradictory gustatory input on opposite tarsi. Electrophysiological experiments showed that receptor cells in the gustatory sensilla of the tarsomeres are highly sensitive to saline solutions at low concentrations. No evidence for receptors responding specifically to sucrose or to bitter substances was found in these sensilla. Receptor cells in the gustatory sensilla of the claws are highly sensitive to sucrose. Although bees do not possess dedicated bitter-taste receptors in the tarsi, indirect bitter detection is possible because bitter tastes inhibit sucrose receptor cells of the claws when mixed with sucrose solution. By combining behavioral and electrophysiological approaches, these results provide the first integrative study on tarsal taste detection in the honey bee.
Diagnosis of anaplastic large‐cell lymphoma, including multifocal osseous KI‐1 lymphoma, by fine‐needle aspiration biopsy

We present the fine‐needle aspiration (FNA) findings of 4 cases of anaplastic (Ki‐1) large‐cell lymphoma (ALCL). A primary diagnosis of ALCL was made on FNA material in 2 cases, of which one was a multifocal osseous Ki‐1 lymphoma. In the other 2 patients who had a known history of ALCL, FNA was used to detect recurrent disease. In all cases, large discohesive pleomorphic cells in the absence of lymphoglandular bodies in the background raised the possibility of a nonhematopoietic neoplasm. Immunochemical staining for CD30 was positive in all cases. The cytomorphologic and immunochemical features are discussed, along with the differential diagnosis of Ki‐1 lymphoma. Diagn. Cytopathol. 1999;21:174–179. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Triarylmethanes, a New Class of Cx50 Inhibitors

The paucity of specific pharmacological agents has been a major impediment for delineating the roles of gap junction (GJ) channels formed by connexin proteins in physiology and pathophysiology. Here, we used the selective optimization of side activities (SOSA) approach, which has led to the design of high affinity inhibitors of other ion channels, to identify a specific inhibitor for channels formed by Cx50, a connexin subtype that is primarily expressed in the lens. We initially screened a library of common ion channel modulating pharmacophores for their inhibitory effects on Cx50 GJ channels, and identified four new classes of compounds. The triarlymethane (TRAM) clotrimazole was the most potent Cx50 inhibitor and we therefore used it as a template to explore the structure activity relationship (SAR) of the TRAMs for Cx50 inhibition. We describe the design of T122 (N-[(2-methoxyphenyl)diphenylmethyl]-1,3-thiazol-2-amine) and T136 (N-[(2-iodophenyl)diphenylmethyl]-1,3-thiazol-2-amine), which inhibit Cx50 with IC50s of 1.2 and 2.4 μM. Both compounds exhibit at least 10-fold selectivity over other connexins as well as major neuronal and cardiac voltage-gated K+ and Na+ channels. The SAR studies also indicated that the TRAM pharmacophore required for connexin inhibition is significantly different from the pharmacophore required for blocking the calcium-activated KCa3.1 channel. Both T122 and T136 selectively inhibited Cx50 GJ channels in lens epithelial cells, suggesting that they could be used to further explore the role of Cx50 in the lens. In addition, our results indicate that a similar approach may be used to find specific inhibitors of other connexin subtypes.
Analyzing the Thai state policy on private tutoring: the prevalence of the market discourse

Private tutoring in academic subjects, which is provided for a fee and which takes place outside standard school hours, has become a global phenomenon. It is also very visible in Thailand. This paper draws on qualitative method including documentary analyses and semi-structured interviews with Thai policy elites, to understand the Thai state policy on the issue. Using a theory of the state, particularly the concepts of policy text and policy discourse, it analyses the Thai state policy responses to regulate private tutoring. While the state has given much attention to commercial regulations for safety and customers’ protection, little attention has been given to the educational aspects such as curriculum, quality assessment and qualification of the tutors. Analyses of policy texts and interviews with Thai policymakers at the Office of Private Education Commission and the Office of Education Council showed that the Thai state regulation on private tutoring is dominated by the market ideology. The Thai state was unequivocally embracing “public-private partnership”, treating students as consumers and endorsing private tutoring as a contributor to the development of Thailand's human resources. This paper contributes to the empirical evidence on private tutoring in Thailand and offers a theoretical framework to further analyze and understand the state policy on private tutoring.
Integrated Variational And Nearest Neighbor field ( IVANN ) for Optical Flow

It is a fundamental problem to construct accurate dense correspondences between two images. Despite the efforts and promising methods handling relatively small motion, one remaining challenge is induced by large and complex nonrigid motion. Aiming at this challenge, the new method proposed exploits the mutual boosting between the variational flow and the nearest-neighbor field (NNF). The proposed method “IVANN” gives a very effective solution under rather complex motion, and currently achieved state-ofthe-art performance on both the Middlebury[3] and MPISintel benchmarks[7].
The Association between Kidney Function, Coronary Artery Disease, and Clinical Outcome in Patients Undergoing Coronary Angiography

To characterize the association between chronic kidney disease (CKD), mortality, severity of coronary artery disease (CAD), treatment modality of CAD, and type of coronary stents among patients undergoing coronary angiography (CAG), we retrospectively reviewed the electronic medical records of the patients who underwent CAG at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital in Korea between May 2003 and January 2006. CKD was staged using an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from the creatinine value prior to CAG. There were 3,637 patients included. The presence of CAD was 48% in CKD stage 1, 61% in stage 2, 73% in stage 3, 87% in stage 4, and 81% in stage 5. Survival rate gradually diminished for patients with decreasing renal function. No significant differences in all-cause and cardiac mortality were observed by medical treatment, PCI or CABG, in CKD patients with an eGFR less than 60 mL/min/1.73 m2. CKD patients with drug-eluting stents showed significantly lower all-cause mortality (5.4% vs. 13.3%) and incidence of myocardial infarction (1.7% vs. 10%) than those with bare metal stents. In conclusion, an eGFR is a strong independent prognostic marker among patients undergoing CAG and the severity of CAD increases progressively with worsening renal function.
Think Globally, Act Locally: Decentralized Supervisory Control

Decentralized supervisory control is investigated by considering problem formulations that model systems whose specifications are given as global constraints but whose solution is described by local controllers. A necessary and sufficient condition is given for the existence of a solution to the problem of finding decentralized supervisors that ensure that the behaviour of the closed-loop system lies in a given range. Where the range of behaviour can be described by regular languages, it can be effectively tested whether the decentralized control problem is solvable; in this case, a procedure is given to compute the associated supervisors.
Adult Null Subjects in the non-pro-drop Languages: Two Diary Dialects

This article is concerned with subject omission in English diaries, a phenomenon that has often been taken to be the adult analogue of subject omission in child language. This hypothesis is based on the observation that, as is the case in subject omission in the child language, subject omission in the adult diary style is restricted to root contexts. We show that this restriction to root contexts is not absolute and that in recent British English, some varieties of diary style and of abbreviated registers do allow for embedded subject omission. We postulate that such data illustrate dialectal variation in the diary style. Further data suggest that diaries with embedded subject omission are more liberal with respect to pronoun ellipsis in other contexts (reflexives, coordination).
Self‐organisation and capacity building: sustaining the change

Purpose – The paper aims to describe the application of theoretical principles derived from a study of self‐organisation and complex systems theory and their application to school‐based capacity building to support planned change.Design/methodology/approach – The paper employs a case example in a Hong Kong School to illustrate the application of the principles and discuss their potential to sustain the effect of capacity building in schools. The descriptive case study is used to illustrate six theoretical propositions of self‐organization. The case is then unpacked using each of the propositions to illustrate the application of the theory to capacity building in a secondary school setting.Findings – The case illustrates the way each of the principles are reflected in a design process undertaken by the school's principal and its leadership team to create a self‐organizing approach to capacity building.Originality/value – The value of this paper is threefold. First it shows the way in which capacity buildi.
Purification and Propeties of (+)-cis-Naphthalene Dihydrodiol Dehydrogenase of Pseudomonas putida

Cells of Pseudomonas putida, after growth with naphthalene as sole source of carbon and energy, contain an enzyme that oxidizes (+)-cis-1(r),2(s)-dihydroxy-1,2-dihydronaphthalene to 1,2-dihydroxynaphthalene. The purified enzyme has a molecular weight of 102,000 and apparently consists of four 25,500 molecular weight subunits. The enzyme is specific for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide as an electron acceptor and also oxidizes several other cis-dihydrodiols. However, no enzymatic activity was observed with trans-1,2-dihydronaphthalene, or the K-region cis-dihydrodiols of carcinogenic polycyclic hydrocarbons.
Unsupervised Techniques for Audio Content Analysis and Summarization

This thesis explores unsupervised algorithms for broadcast audio analysis and summarization. For this work, the audio content analysis and summarization task will be to extract semantic structures from audio databases and organize them into a hierarchical presentation such as a table of contents for applications such as audio retrieval and browsing. Previous works on audio content analysis and summarization focus mainly on single audio content type, e.g. broadcast news only segments, music and songs structure analysis, commercials detection. As these works operate only on specific audio type, their applications are limited. This motivates us to propose a framework that can examine general audio broadcast database, e.g. radio broadcast or news channel broadcast. In this thesis, our main focus is to investigate unsupervised techniques to detect repeating patterns in large audio database and explore audio classification methods to assign repeating patterns into semantic classes with priori knowledge. Within each semantic class, existing segmentation techniques could be applied to further classify broadcast audio program into smaller semantic units such as individual news stories so that a table-of-content like audio content structure could be obtained. One novelty of our approach will be to use Acoustic Segment Model to simultaneously process speech and music segments without the need to first discriminate between them [1]. To find repeating patterns, we explore two methods: a) token strings representation of the audio segments and classical string repetition discovery techniques, and b) vector based suffix tree approach. To verify our research, we will examine our approach on public domain audio database such as the TRECVID and Channel News Asia. We will also apply large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer to generate basic transcription. These text transcriptions i will be used along with our proposed approach to find repeating patterns to index news stories and label detected commercials.
Psychosocial rehabilitation of deaf persons with severe mental illness: A multivariate model of residential outcomes

This analysis focuses on an innovative model of community treatment which integrates the fields of psychosocial rehabilitation and deaf culture. Multivariate regression analysis revealed that five factors account for 47% of the variance in the residential outcomes of 60 clients who are deaf and mentally ill. The implications of these factors for further program development and individual client outcome enhancement are discussed.
Model-Based performance prediction with the palladio component model

One aim of component-based software engineering (CBSE) is to enable the prediction of extra-functional properties, such as performance and reliability, utilising a well-defined composition theory. Nowadays, such theories and their accompanying prediction methods are still in a maturation stage. Several factors influencing extra-functional properties need additional research to be understood. A special problem in CBSE stems from its specific development process: Software components should be specified and implemented independent from their later context to enable reuse. Thus, extra-functional properties of components need to be specified in a parametric way to take different influence factors like the hardware platform or the usage profile into account. In our approach, we use the Palladio Component Model (PCM) to specify component-based software architectures in a parametric way. This model offers direct support of the CBSE development process by dividing the model creation among the developer roles. In this paper, we present our model and a simulation tool based on it, which is capable of making performance predictions. Within a case study, we show that the resulting prediction accuracy can be sufficient to support the evaluation of architectural design decisions.