Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Design of Robust Energy Management Strategies for FCHEV

In this paper, we analyze the limitations that impose the presence of uncertainty in the design of optimal energy management strategies (EMSs) for fuel cell (FC) hybrid electric vehicles. Using an electric powertrain constituted by a hydrogen FC and a battery bank, the fuel consumption minimization problem is analyzed in the presence of parametric uncertainty. The conditions that ensure that the nominal optimization problem matches the solution of the real (unknown) optimization problem are clearly stated. By observing that the uncertainty will limit the feasible solutions of the minimization consumption problem, supervisory control constituted by heuristic rules is proposed to face such limitations, resulting in a mixed optimal-heuristic EMS. The effect of the powertrain design, driving cycle, and initial conditions in the proposed strategy is discussed. Numerical simulations provide evidence of the advantages and features of the supervisory control strategy.
Stem cell factor/c-kit system in spermatogenesis.

One of the major unresolved questions with male infertility is the identification of the molecular origin of a great majority of the spermatogenetic arrests currently diagnosed as idiopathic male infertility. During the past years, several families of regulating factors have been implicated in spermatogenesis defects observed essentially in animal models. Among these factors are signalling molecules, and particularly the stem cell factor (SCF)/c-kit system. The SCF and its receptor c-kit are an appropriate example to illustrate the role of signalling molecules in the physiology and pathology of spermatogenesis. The SCF/c-kit regulates primordial germ cell migration, proliferation and apoptosis during fetal gonadal development. The SCF/c-kit also regulates spermatogonia proliferation in the adult animal. In mutant mice, abnormalities of the SCF/c-kit gene expression, such as gene deletion, point mutation, alternative splicing defect, lead to different types of spermatogenesis alterations (e.g. decrease in primordial germ cell migration, decrease in spermatogonia proliferation). More recently, defects in SCF/c-kit gene expression have also been shown in human testicular dysfunctions. Indeed, a reduction in SCF/c-kit expression has been evidenced in oligozoospermia/azoospermia associated with an increase in the germ cell apoptosis process. In addition, c-kit seems to be a good marker of seminoma testicular tumours. This review reports a large number of data--obtained essentially in animal models--that suggest an important role for the SCF/c-kit system in spermatogenesis and, as a corollary, its potential involvement in spermatogenic defects.
A Generic Analysis Server System for Functional Logic Programs

We present a system, called CASS, for the analysis of functional logic programs. The system is generic so that various kinds of analyses (e.g., groundness, non-determinism, demanded arguments) can be easily integrated. In order to analyze larger applications consisting of dozens or hundreds of modules, CASS supports a modular and incremental analysis of programs. Moreover, it can be used by different programming tools, like documentation generators, analysis environments, program optimizers, as well as Eclipse-based development environments. For this purpose, CASS can also be invoked as a server system to get a language-independent access to its functionality. CASS is completely implemented in the functional logic language Curry as a master/worker architecture to exploit parallel or distributed execution environments.
A principal-components analysis of the Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory factor scales

Johnson, Butcher, Null, and Johnson (1984) reported on factor scales developed from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). A principal-components analysis of the 21 factor scales and Edwards's (1957) Social Desirability (SD) scale gave 5 factors. The SD scale had the highest absolute loading on the 1st MMPI factor. Also, the 1st-factor loadings of the scales were linearly related to the SD intensity intensity index of the scales. A 2nd principal-components analysis of 16 of the Johnson et al. scales along with marker scales for the first 3 MMPI factors also resulted in 5 factors; the SD scale again had the highest absolute loading on the 1st factor, and the 1st-factor loadings were again linearly related to the SD intensity index. On only 2 of the 5 factors did any of the factor scales have higher absolute loadings than 1 of the marker scales, suggesting that Johnson et al. were overly optimistic that their scales may serve as marker scales
Correlation of bioenergetic parameters with cell death in Listeria monocytogenes cells exposed to nisin

In Listeria monocytogenes, nisin induced ATP efflux, reduced the intracellular ATP concentration within 1 min, and dissipated the proton motive force within 2 min. Efflux accounted for only 20% of the ATP depletion, suggesting that ATP hydrolysis also occurred. ATP efflux depended on nisin concentration and followed saturation kinetics. These results suggest that nisin breaches the membrane permeability barrier in a manner more consistent with pore formation than with a nonspecific detergent-like membrane destabilization.
Native Friends and Host Country Identification among Adolescent Immigrants in Germany: The Role of Ethnic Boundaries 1

Many studies find that high shares of native friends are positively related to immigrant youths’ identification with the host country. By examining various immigrant groups together, these studies imply that having native friends matters in the same way for the national identification in different immigrant groups. In contrast, we argue that the extent to which having native friends affects immigrants’ national identification depends on both immigrant group characteristics and the receiving context, especially on ethnic boundaries and related group differences in perceived discrimination and the compatibility of ethnic and national identities. Analyses based on data from the National Educational Panel Study in Germany that are representative of 15-year-old adolescents in secondary schools indeed reveal pronounced group differences: While national identification of ethnic German repatriates as well as of adolescents of former Yugoslavian and Southern European origin is related to the share of native friends, as hypothesized, we do not find this association for immigrants of Turkish and Polish origin. Our finding underlines the importance of theoretically as well as empirically accounting for group differences.
“A Compliment is all I need” – Teachers Telling Principals How to Promote Their Staff's Self-Efficacy

The purpose of the present study is to compare the perceptions of teachers representing opposite ends of the self-efficacy spectrum regarding the effects of the principal’s behavior on their professional self-efficacy. In the first quantitative stage, a statistical procedure was conducted to identify the two groups of teachers: a group of 16 teachers with a high self-efficacy and a group of 14 teachers with a low self-efficacy. In the second and main stage, the qualitative stage, the teachers were asked about their professional successes and failures, using in-depth, open-ended interviews. Data were analyzed using grounded theory. Five categories of management style were found pertinent to both groups: modes of communication, feedback from the principal, social atmosphere, strength of the principal, and shared values. Differences found between the two participant groups regarding each management style category are discussed. Findings also indicate that the human aspect of teacher-principal relations is the decisive factor determining those teachers’ sense of professional self-efficacy. L’objectif de la présente étude est de comparer des perceptions d’enseignants quant à l’effet du comportement du directeur d’école sur leur auto-efficacité professionnelle. Les perceptions recueillies représentent les extrémités opposées du spectre. Pendant la première étape quantitative, on a identifié les deux groupes d’enseignants par une procédure statistique : un groupe de 16 enseignants jouissant d’une grande auto-efficacité et un groupe de 14 enseignants avec un faible degré d’auto-efficacité. Pendant l’étape principale, la deuxième et qualitative cette fois, nous avons interrogé les enseignants sur leurs réussites et leurs échecs professionnels par le biais d’entrevues approfondies à questions ouvertes. Les données ont été analysées conformément à la théorie reposant sur les faits. Les résultats ont révélé cinq catégories de style de gestion, applicables aux deux groupes : modes de communication, rétroaction du directeur, ambiance sociale, autorité du directeur et valeurs partagées. Nous discutons des écarts entre les deux groupes par rapport aux styles de gestion. Les conclusions ont également indiqué que l’aspect humain du rapport enseignant-directeur est le facteur déterminant dans le sentiment d’auto-efficacité professionnelle chez les enseignants.
FORMATION AND ALIGNMENT OF ELONGATED, FRACTAL-LIKE WATER-ICE GRAINS IN EXTREMELY COLD, WEAKLY IONIZED PLASMA

Elongated, fractal-like water-ice grains are observed to form spontaneously when water vapor is injected into a weakly ionized laboratory plasma formed in a background gas cooled to an astrophysically relevant temperature. The water-ice grains form in 1–2 minutes, levitate with regular spacing, and are aligned parallel to the sheath electric field. Water-ice grains formed in plasma where the neutrals and ions have low mass, such as hydrogen and helium, are larger, more elongated, and more fractal-like than water-ice grains formed in plasmas where the neutrals and ions have high mass such as argon and krypton. Typical aspect ratios (length to width ratio) are as great as 5 while typical fractal dimensions are ∼1.7. Water-ice grain lengths in plasmas with low neutral and ion masses can be several hundred microns long. Infrared absorption spectroscopy reveals that the water-ice grains are crystalline and so are similar in constitution to the water-ice grains in protoplanetary disks, Saturn’s rings, and mesospheric clouds. The properties and behavior of these laboratory water-ice grains may provide insights into morphology and alignment behavior of water-ice grains in astrophysical dusty plasmas.
Cage Size Preference in Rats in the Laboratory

The size of an enclosure is an integral part of how well it accommodates a nonhuman animal's welfare; however, most enrichment studies concentrate on modifying the area inside the enclosure rather than enlarging it. It has been suggested that rats have little need for more cage space, but there is no empirical evidence about rats' need for space. This experiment provides preliminary evidence for the preferences of 5 male and 5 female albino rats using T-maze choices followed by 5 min dwelling times. The rats showed a moderate but significant preference for the larger of 2 cages (540 cm2 vs. 1,620 cm2binomial z, p <.05). When the rats shared the chosen cage with 4 familiar cage mates, their preference for the larger cage did not become any stronger (paired t(9) = -. 820, p > . 05). The results suggest that rats should be given a somewhat larger space allowance but could share it with up to 4 other rats.
Calretinin‐like immunoreactivity in mormyrid and gymnarchid electrosensory and electromotor systems

Calretinin‐like immunoreactivity was examined in the electrosensory and electromotor systems of the two families of mormyriform electric fish. Mormyrid fish showed the strongest immunoreactivity in the knollenorgan electroreceptor pathway; in the nucleus of the electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELL) and the big cells of the nucleus exterolateralis pars anterior. Mormyromast and ampullary zones of the ELL showed calretinin‐like immunoreactivity in the ganglion, granule, and intermediate cell and fiber layers. Mormyromast zones additionally showed labeling of apical dendrites and commissural cells, but the ampullary zone did not. In the electromotor system, two nuclei in the corollary discharge pathway showed labeling: in the paratrigeminal command‐associated nucleus and the juxtalobar nucleus.
On the relation between demographic variables and neuropsychological test performance

This paper reports a study of the relation between demographic variables and neuropsychological test performance in a sample of 141 normal subjects. A preliminary analysis demonstrated the importance of age, educational level, sex, and Verbal IQ for the prediction of neuropsychological test performance. The main study is a detailed analysis of the relation between these four variables and neuropsychological test performance. The results are presented in the form of standardized regression coefficients and are discussed in relation to the problem of predicting expected premorbid performance in neuropsychological tests.
Handling of Out-of-vocabulary Words in Japanese-English Machine Translation by Exploiting Parallel Corpus

A large number of loanwords and orthographic variants in Japanese pose a challenge for machine translation. In this article, we present a hybrid model for handling out-of-vocabulary words in Japanese-to-English statistical machine translation output by exploiting parallel corpus. As the Japanese writing system makes use of four different script sets (kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romaji), we treat these scripts differently. A machine transliteration model is built to transliterate out-of-vocabulary Japanese katakana words into English words. A Japanese dependency structure analyzer is employed to tackle out-of-vocabulary kanji and hiragana words. The evaluation results demonstrate that it is an effective approach for addressing out-of-vocabulary word problems and decreasing the OOVs rate in the Japanese-to-English machine translation tasks.
The relations between observer-rating and self-report of depressive symptomatology.

Sources of discrepancy between the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were investigated in 114 depressed inpatients treated with electroconvulsive therapy. Three previously reported observations were found to occur within the same sample: (a) There was only a moderate baseline correlation between the measures; (b) this correlation improved markedly at later assessment; (c) the HRSD had a greater effect size for change. The modest baseline correlation was largely due to patients who rated themselves as substantially less depressed than clinicians had rated them. Improvement in the correlation with repeated assessment was due to the representation of clinical responders
Predictive Regressions: A Reduced-Bias Estimation Method

Abstract Standard predictive regressions produce biased coefficient estimates in small samples when the regressors are Gaussian first-order autoregressive with errors that are correlated with the error series of the dependent variable. See Stambaugh (1999) for the single regressor model. This paper proposes a direct and convenient method to obtain reduced-bias estimators for single and multiple regressor models by employing an augmented regression, adding a proxy for the errors in the autoregressive model. We derive bias expressions for both the ordinary least-squares and our reduced-bias estimated coefficients. For the standard errors of the estimated predictive coefficients, we develop a heuristic estimator that performs well in simulations, for both the single predictor model and an important specification of the multiple predictor model. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by simulations and empirical estimates of common predictive models in finance. Our empirical results show that some of the predictive variables that were significant under ordinary least squares become insignificant under our estimation procedure.
The Bases of Elite Social Behaviour: Patterns of Club Affiliation among Members of the House of Lords

This article examines the relationship between club affiliations by members of the House of Lords and their political and social backgrounds. The odds of being a club member and the networks of association created by clubs are positively associated with ascriptive, educational, occupational and political variables. The communities created by clubs augment inequalities in Lords’ representativeness. The evidence is incompatible with arguments that the British political elite is unified or that clubs integrate functionally differentiated groupings. The evidence is consistent, however, with clubs offering social unity to elites with vested interests in traditional status structures. A British establishment is still evident in the club community.
QoE-Driven Dynamic Adaptive Video Streaming Strategy With Future Information

DASH, the Dynamic adaptive video streaming over hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), has become the de-facto video delivery mechanism nowadays, which takes advantage of the existing low cost and wide-spread HTTP platforms. Standards like MPEG-DASH defines the bitstreams conformance and decoding process, while leaving the bitrate adaptive algorithm open for research. So far, most DASH researches focus on the constant bitrate video delivery. In this paper, various bitrate (VBR) video delivery is investigated in the on-demand streaming scenario. Detailed instant bitrates of future segments are exploited in the proposed adaptation method to grasp the fluctuation traits of the VBR video. Meanwhile, the adaptation problem is formulated as an optimization process with the proposed internal QoE goal function, which keeps a good balance between various requirements. Besides, the parameters within the internal QoE function can be tuned to guarantee the flexibility of meeting different preferences. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed QoE-based video adaptation method outperforms the state-of-the-art method with a good margin.
Developing research priorities with a cohort of higher education for sustainability experts

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the results of a Delphi exercise used at the Halifax Consultation in which 35 experts representing 17 countries gathered to develop research priorities for the emerging field of higher education for sustainability (HES). Design/methodology/approach – The Delphi technique was used to elicit the opinions of a group of experts in order to achieve a consensus position on a research priority list through a series of questionnaires interspersed with controlled feedback.Findings – The final stages of the Delphi exercise revealed 19 research theme areas that were ranked by the group to develop a final priority list.Research limitations/implications – The results from each round of the Delphi give an interesting perspective on experts conceptualizations of what constitutes important research in the field. Further, the final results can be used to develop research programs and projects in the future.Practical implications – Reflections on the use of the Delphi in dev.
Multi-Functional Regulation of 4E-BP Gene Expression by the Ccr4-Not Complex

The mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway is highly conserved from yeast to humans. It senses various environmental cues to regulate cellular growth and homeostasis. Deregulation of the pathway has been implicated in many pathological conditions including cancer. Phosphorylation cascades through the pathway have been extensively studied but not much is known about the regulation of gene expression of the pathway components. Here, we report that the mRNA level of eukaryotic translation initiation factor (eIF) subunit 4E-binding protein (4E-BP) gene, one of the key mTOR signaling components, is regulated by the highly conserved Ccr4-Not complex. RNAi knockdown of Not1, a putative scaffold protein of this protein complex, increases the mRNA level of 4E-BP in Drosophila Kc cells. Examination of the gene expression mechanism using reporter swap constructs reveals that Not1 depletion increases reporter mRNAs with the 3’UTR of 4E-BP gene, but decreases the ones with the 4E-BP promoter region, suggesting that Ccr4-Not complex regulates both degradation and transcription of 4E-BP mRNA. These results indicate that the Ccr4-Not complex controls expression of a single gene at multiple levels and adjusts the magnitude of the total effect. Thus, our study reveals a novel regulatory mechanism of a key component of the mTOR signaling pathway at the level of gene expression.
Simple compact genetic algorithm for XCS

This paper proposes a novel rule discovery mechanism for the XCS classifier system, which is an extension of the compact genetic algorithm (cGA) to XCS. Our rule discovery mechanism, like cGA, extracts appropriate attributes of classifier conditions through a probability vector and evolves classifiers using the extracted attributes. Unlike cGA, it newly builds the probability vector at every generations (i.e., it keeps no any probability vectors) not so that it requires XCS to have a lot of probability vectors that represent all available attributes, and mutates classifier conditions based on the extracted attributes as attribute feedback. Experimental results show that XCS with our rule discovery mechanism (or XCScGA) can reach optimal performance with fewer rule evaluations and requires smaller population sizes than XCS. Our conclusion is that the proposed rule discovery mechanism promotes a recombination of building blocks, and that our mutation operator works to repair the classifier conditions towards a compact solutions, hence, XCScGA can generate good offspring which represent maximally general, maximally accurate, and compact solutions.
Cypriot Speech Database: Data Collection and Greek to Cypriot Dialect Adaptation

This paper describes the Cypriot Greek speech database collected in the framework of the European project OrienTel (IST-200028373) and the acoustic models adaptation techniques that were applied in order to perform dialect adaptation from Greek to Cypriot. Greek and Cypriot Greek share the same phoneme set. However, there are some differences in the way the same phonemes are pronounced. That is, Cypriot Greek may be considered as a variation of standard Greek. Utterances from 500 speakers are used (450 for training, that is, performing adaptation, and 50 as testing material). Two tools are available for training, adaptation and evaluation of the acoustic models. These are the Wire Communications Laboratory (WCL) recognition tool and the Hidden Markov Models toolkit (HTK). For both recognition engines Greek acoustic models were already available using the SpeechDat-II Greek telephone database. Two well-known techniques are applied for adapting the Greek acoustic models to the new data: Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR) and Maximum A-Posteriori (MAP) adaptation. Pure Cypriot Greek models are also trained using only the Cypriot Greek database, to be compared with the adapted ones. Preliminary results show a small improvement in the performance of the adapted models over the pure Greek and Cypriot Greek models.