Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The leadership styles dilemma in the business world

The present study is an exploratory study that is conducted in 31 companies of automobile parts and accessories manufacturers located at Lahore, Pakistan to integrate dozens of leadership styles available in leadership literature. Factor analysis technique was used for dimensions reduction. SPSS and smartPLS3 software were used for data analysis. The study identified four basic leadership styles that could represent most of the leadership styles available in the literature. The results resemble leadership studies conducted at Ohio and Michigan State Universities with one basic difference of the dimensions suggested by the researchers to explain leadership styles, which are consultation and the relationship instead of task oriented and relationship oriented dimensions. The concept of representative leadership styles will make it simple to understand and handier to practice leadership styles’ theories. The representative leadership styles will add a new perspective about the relationship and mutual exclusiveness of different leadership styles by looking at the bigger picture that was sketched through micro level studies. Research will help organizations in hiring of new leadership and in the setting priorities of leadership development. Though this study has been carried out in Pakistan but due to the size of the sample and extensiveness of the study its results can be considered generalizable.
Adenovirus transduction of 3 T 3L 1 cells

3T3-L1 cells offer an excellent model system for studies of differentiation and biochemistry of fat cells. However, these cells are limited in their utility by the low efficiency with which DNA can be introduced by transfection. Gene delivery by viral vectors, particularly adenovirus, has proven a powerful means for introduction of genes into certain cell types. Furthermore, adenovirus transduction has been used to study mechanisms involved in the differentiation of 3T3-L1 cells into mature fat cells. We show in this study that 3T3-L1 cells are inefficiently transduced by adenovirus. The potential advantages offered by adenovirus transduction led us to examine methods designed to enhance transduction of 3T3-L1 cells by adenovirus. Of these methods, polylysine-mediated enhancement demonstrates considerable promise because it permits up to 100% of cells to be transduced and because it does not inhibit differentiation of 3T3-L1 cells. — Orlicky D. J., and J. Schaack. Adenovirus transduction of 3T3-L1 cells. J. Lipid Res. 2001. 42: 460–466. Supplementary key words adenoviral vectors • adipocyte lipid homeostasis • transduction efficiency Efficient introduction of genes into tissue culture cells offers a powerful method for studies of control processes within cells. Not all cell lines can be efficiently transfected using naked DNA. However, virally mediated introduction of genes permits vastly greater efficiencies of introduction of genes of interest. In particular, adenovirus has become a popular and powerful tool for transduction of tissue culture cells [e.g., Mazu et al. (1)]. In certain cell lines, adenovirus vectors made replication-defective by deletion of the E1 region can be used to deliver genes to virtually 100% of the cells in culture with little or no adverse effect on the transduced cells. This efficiency permits cells to be studied in bulk and allows determination of control mechanisms to be derived from biochemical studies. The 3T3-L1 preadipocyte cell line can differentiate into mature, lipid droplet-containing adipocytes when stimulated with an appropriate hormonal regimen. During the process of adipocyte conversion, these preadipocytes lose their primitive mesenchymal character, assume a rounded morphology, and acquire many of the enzymatic and biochemical characteristics of adipocytes (2–4). Adipocytes play a key role in providing energy in times of demand and the storage of energy in the form of triacylglycerolrich lipid droplets. Understanding the factors and mechanisms involved in adipocyte lipid homeostasis is key to understanding conditions such as obesity, lipoatrophies, and non-insulin-dependent diabetes, as well as hypertension and coronary artery disease. Therefore, identification of the proteins and their activities associated with lipid droplet accumulation is an important step in understanding the normal regulation of adipocytes or other lipogenic cells. The adenovirus vehicle could be of great use in these studies if a means were found to increase its transduction efficiency in the 3T3-L1 cell line. MATERIALS AND METHODS
Understanding Trajectory Behavior: A Motion Pattern Approach

Mining the underlying patterns in gigantic and complex data is of great importance to data analysts. In this paper, we propose a motion pattern approach to mine frequent behaviors in trajectory data. Motion patterns, defined by a set of highly similar flow vector groups in a spatial locality, have been shown to be very effective in extracting dominant motion behaviors in video sequences. Inspired by applications and properties of motion patterns, we have designed a framework that successfully solves the general task of trajectory clustering. Our proposed algorithm consists of four phases: flow vector computation, motion component extraction, motion component's reachability set creation, and motion pattern formation. For the first phase, we break down trajectories into flow vectors that indicate instantaneous movements. In the second phase, via a Kmeans clustering approach, we create motion components by clustering the flow vectors with respect to their location and velocity. Next, we create motion components' reachability set in terms of spatial proximity and motion similarity. Finally, for the fourth phase, we cluster motion components using agglomerative clustering with the weighted Jaccard distance between the motion components' signatures, a set created using path reachability. We have evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed method in an extensive set of experiments on diverse datasets. Further, we have shown how our proposed method handles difficulties in the general task of trajectory clustering that challenge the existing state-of-the-art methods.
High-latitude ocean and sea ice surface fluxes: requirements and challenges for climate research

Improving knowledge of air-sea exchanges of heat, momentum, fresh water, and gases is critical to understanding climate, and this is particularly true in high-latitude regions, where anthropogenic climate change is predicted to be exceptionally rapid. However, observations of these fluxes are extremely scarce in the Arctic, the Southern Ocean, and the Antarctic marginal seas. High winds, high sea state, extreme cold temperatures, seasonal sea ice, and the remoteness of the regions all conspire to make observations difficult to obtain. Annually averaged heat-flux climatologies can differ by more than their means, and in many cases there is no clear consensus about which flux products are most reliable. Although specific flux accuracy requirements for climate research vary depending on the application, in general fluxes would better represent high-latitude processes if wind stresses achieved 0.01Nm accuracy at high wind speed and if heat fluxes achieved 10 W m accuracy (averaged over several days) with 25 km grid spacing. Improvements in flux estimates will require a combination of efforts, including a concerted plan to make better use of ships of opportunity to collect meteorological data, targeted efforts to deploy a few flux moorings in high-wind regions, and improved satellite retrievals of flux-related variables. Short summary: Air-sea fluxes at high latitudes are critical for evaluating climate processes, but they have been sparsely measured in the past and the physics is not yet well understood.
Analysis of required resources for a node using queue system in an ad hoc network

Required resource for nodes in an ad hoc network with specific parameters (e.g. node-count and topology) is one of the most important problems for the manufacturer. In this paper, in the first phase, we showed that according to the proposed game model for the node behaviour, the network converge to a steady state and in the second phase, the process of a node in forwarding the received packets is modeled as a queue system and according to the load of a node the required resources (e.g. buffer-size and average service rate).
Bayesian Analysis of Dynamic Disequilibrium Models: An Application to the Polish Credit Market

We show how to perform Bayesian inference in dynamic disequilibrium models by data augmentation. Bayesian inference is much simpler than maximum likelihood estimation since multiple integrals that appear in the likelihood function are avoided by working in the spaces of latent and observed variables. This allows to devise a Gibbs sampler which iterates between the latent variables and the parameters. Identification is discussed. An application to credit rationing is provided involving Polish data.
EXPLORING FEATURES FOR TEXT-DEPENDENT SPEAKER VERIFICATION IN DISTANT SPEECH SIGNALS

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) is the task of verifying a person’s claimed identity from his/her voice using a digital computer. The existing ASV systems perform with high accuracy of verification when the speech signal is collected close to the mouth of the speaker (< 1 ft). However, the performance of the ASV systems reduces significantly for speech signals collected at a distance from the speaker (2-6 ft). The objective of this work is to address some research issues in the processing of speech signals collected at a distance from the speaker, for text-dependent ASV system. The distant speech signal is collected using single channel microphone. An acoustic feature derived from short segments of speech signals is proposed for ASV task. The key idea is to exploit the high signal-to-noise nature of short segments of speech in the vicinity of impulse-like excitations. We demonstrate that the proposed feature suffers lesser degradation with distance when compared to the widely used Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and also yields better performance of speaker verification than MFCCs. We propose a method of begin-end detection based on the strength of the spectral peaks. A score normalization method is proposed by considering only the robust regions of speech signal. In addition, the regions of speech signal with high signal-to-reverberation ratio are identified, and greater weightage is given to these regions. These modifications are shown to result in a systematic improvement in the performance of the speaker verification system. The use of additional features of duration and pitch is shown to further improve the performance of speaker verification system for distant speech.
A compact representation of human single-object grasping

Observations of human grasping reveal that the exploitation of environmental constraints is a key structural aspect for the robustness and versatility of human grasping behavior. We analyze 3,400 human grasping trials with 17 subjects grasping 25 objects to show that viewing environmental constraints as the central structural aspect of human grasping yields surprisingly simple representations of human grasping behavior. We present hypothesis-driven experiments that emphasize the centrality of environmental constraints in human grasping and extract from data a simple “grasping plan” that is a generative model for all of the human grasping trials we observed. This grasping plan can in principle be transferred to a robot system in an attempt to leverage environmental constraints to improve the performance of robotic grasping.
(Partial) user preference similarity as classification-based model similarity

Recommender systems play an important role in helping people finding items they like. One type of recommender system is collaborative filtering that considers feedback of like-minded people. The fundamental assumption of collaborative filtering is that people who previously shared similar preferences behave similarly later on. This paper introduces several novel, classification-based similarity metrics that are used to compare user preferences. Furthermore, the concept of partial preference similarity based on a machine learning model is presented. For evaluation the cold-start behavior of the presented classification-based similarity metrics is evaluated in a large-scale experiment. It is shown that classification-based similarity metrics with machine learning significantly outperforms other similarity approaches in different cold-start situations under different degrees of data-sparseness.
Long-Term Potentiation in the Neonatal Rat Barrel Cortex In Vivo

Long-term potentiation (LTP) is important for the activity-dependent formation of early cortical circuits. In the neonatal rodent barrel cortex, LTP has been studied only in vitro. We combined voltage-sensitive dye imaging with extracellular multielectrode recordings to study whisker stimulation-induced LTP in the whisker-to-barrel cortex pathway of the neonatal rat barrel cortex in vivo. Single whisker stimulation at 2 Hz for 10 min induced an age-dependent expression of LTP in postnatal day (P) 0 to P14 rats, with the strongest expression of LTP at P3–P5. The magnitude of LTP was largest in the activated barrel-related column, smaller in the surrounding septal region, and no LTP could be observed in the neighboring barrel. Current source density analyses revealed an LTP-associated increase of synaptic current sinks in layer IV/lower layer II/III at P3–P5 and in the cortical plate/upper layer V at P0–P1. Our study demonstrates for the first time an age-dependent and spatially confined LTP in the barrel cortex of the newborn rat in vivo.
Demonstration Abstract: A Novel Human Tracking and Localization System Based on Pyroelectric Infrared Sensors

In this Demo, we present the design and implementation of a novel human localization and tracking system based on pyroelectric infrared(PIR) sensors. It is a new approach to setup several low-cost sensors to improve the simplicity of deployment. We first present a novel design in mechanical architecture, circuit board and sensors which enables our PIR sensor based system to detect the moving objects and track human beings in real time. Different from the previous work which only adopts binary output, we further explore the usage of analog signals from the sensors. This improvement is beneficial to accurate estimation of the distance between the device and human body. We have implemented several prototypes for evaluation and demonstration. According to the experimental results, our system can achieve an accuracy of 0.113m in an area of 12m × 6m.
Applying Software-based Memory Error Correction for In-Memory Key-Value Store: Case Studies on Memcached and RAMCloud

With the nature of being memory hungry, in-memory key-value store is fundamentally subject to very high memory cost and energy consumption. Intuitively, the availability of a strong memory error correction at sufficiently small redundancy overhead could be leveraged to reduce memory cost and/or energy consumption. Nevertheless, current computing systems handle memory error correction solely in the hardware stack with very weak error correction strength. This paper for the first time studies the practical feasibility of implementing strong memory error correction code (ECC) in the software stack for in-memory key-value store without incurring significant speed performance penalty. This is fundamentally enabled by the low memory bandwidth utilization and relatively simple data structure of in-memory key-value store, which are actually shared with many other datacenter applications (e.g., Web search). This paper presents several design techniques to optimize software-based ECC implementation for in-memory key-value store, and elaborates on several important design issues. Using Memcached and RAMCloud as test vehicles, this work shows that the proposed design solution can improve the memory error correction strength by several orders of magnitude at similar (and even less) coding redundancy compared with current hardware-based design practice, and meanwhile incur less than 6% degradation of in-memory key-value store operational throughput.
Allocating resources in cloud computing when users have strict preferences

The economic settings of allocating resources in cloud computing have been studied, so far, by the concept of mechanism design with money. However in some applications resources can be disseminated by the service providers to some users free of cost. The problem of allocating resources in this charitable environment predominantly becomes challenging if the users try to pick their favorite service provider. To the best of our knowledge, this highly possible framework of allocating resources when every user has strict preference ordering of the service providers, is not studied in cloud computing environment. First time this framework is studied in this paper and a DSIC mechanism is rendered, which satisfies the core allocation.
The effect of asymmetries in fiscal policy conducts on business cycle correlation in the EU

The paper examines the effects of asymmetries in fiscal policy conduct upon the correlation of business cycles in the European Union. In particular the paper estimates the effects of fiscal indiscipline and dissimilarity on business cycle correlation in the period 1996-2012 using a panel of 27 EU countries. The paper pays special attention to Central and Eastern European countries and examines the effects of interactions between fiscal policy measures and the fact that the country has not yet adopted the Euro. The results show a significant and robust negative effect of fiscal indiscipline and dissimilarity upon business cycle correlation in the EU. The paper also provides some evidence for the significance of intra-industry trade as well as of the interactions between fiscal measures and non-Euro area membership. The study provides arguments for fiscal policy harmonisation and fiscal discipline of the Euro area member as well as acceding countries, as undisciplined and dissimilar fiscal policies are shown as sources of business cycle deviations from the average European cycle.
Financial management practice amongst SMEs

While deficiencies in financial management have been repeatedly cited as a root cause of business failure (Najak and Greenfield 1994) two arguments are advanced for such deficiencies in SMEs; that new accounting is not relevant and that SME managers are unable to make use of accounting. Here it is argued that accounting ideas are relevant to SMEs but that a process of innovation combining both knowledge to overcome a barrier of belief and an external shock are necessary in order for innovation to take place. These ideas were explored through a survey of SMEs from both service and manufacturing business in the Greater Manchester region. It was observed that the use of accounting techniques is negatively related to growth in turnover. However the use of accounting techniques that were related to product market was found to be positively related to growth in turnover and that owner/managers belief in the importance of accounting in business decisions was strongly related to growth in turnover. These results were the more interesting when it was observed that growth was negatively related to size. A second theme of the research was the significance of the role of external advisors. Prima facie it was suggested that external advisors may be key agents of change, but the study found that their (accountants, academics and consultants) perceived value was relatively low. The findings of this survey suggest that when accounting is perceived to be relevant then its use does support business growth but innovation in accounting in SME requires further research.
Visualization of Metadata using the SuperTable + Scatterplot

In this paper we will present a new approach combining different visualizations into a so called SuperTable with a Scatterplot. The goal was to improve user experience during the information seeking process. Originally INSYDER was a system to supply small and medium size enterprises with business information from the Internet by using a local meta search engine. The new prototype will be much more flexible concerning the operational area as well as the used visualizations. Instead of offering multiple visualizations to choose from INSYDER combines them into one, reducing the confusion of different visualizations.
Adaptive control design of uncertain piecewise-linear systems

In this paper, we study adaptive control design problem of piecewise-linear systems with matching parametric uncertainties. The basic idea is to construct a piecewise control law and a piecewise parameter adaptation law in such a way that a piecewise quadric Lyapunov function can be used to establish the global stability. All of the synthesis conditions are formulated as Linear Matrix Inequities and can therefore be efficiently solved. Moreover, the possibility of sliding motion at the boundary of polytopic regions is considered, and the results are demonstrated by application to control a linear motor.
Virtual View Generation Method without Pre-processing Depth-Image for 3DTV

Abstract-Depth image based rendering (DIBR) algorithm cantheoretically render arbitrary view, but with low quality andlarge disocclusion regions. The most common method is that:depth-image is firstly pre-processed and finally thedisocclusion regions are inpainted. Preprocessing depth-imageleads to serious deformation of virtual view image. Algorithms for image inpainting are sophisticated and fail to obtain ideally results. In this paper, a double-side DIBR method without preprocessing depth-image is proposed. An algorithm for reducing tiny holes is utilized during the process of image rendering,and algorithm for image merging is improved. The experimental results show that deformation is fundamentally eliminated and the complication for inpainting disocclusion regions is also greatly decreased.
Bipartite DNA-binding region of the Epstein-Barr virus BMRF1 product essential for DNA polymerase accessory function

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) BMRF1 gene product is necessary for DNA polymerase catalytic subunit (BALF5) activity in 100 mM ammonium sulfate. To map regions of BMRF1 necessary for polymerase accessory function, linker insertion and deletion mutant BMRF1 polypeptides were expressed by in vitro transcription-translation and assayed for DNA polymerase elongation activity and binding to double-stranded DNA (dsDNA)-cellulose. Amino-terminal deletions up to residue 303 were defective for stimulation of elongation. Deletions between residues 44 and 194 and residues 238 and 303 abolished binding to dsDNA-cellulose. The region from residues 194 to 238, therefore, is necessary for stimulation of BALF5 elongation but dispensable for dsDNA-cellulose binding. Deletion analysis also localized reactive epitopes of two neutralizing monoclonal antibodies to BMRF1 to a carboxy-terminal region which is dispensable for activity. These data suggest that a bipartite DNA-binding region is an essential component of the DNA polymerase accessory function and that the two noncontiguous regions are separated by a region (residues 194 to 217) which is essential for stimulation; therefore, it may interact with the BALF5 catalytic subunit of EBV DNA polymerase. Both EBV BMRF1 and herpes simplex virus UL42 gene products are DNA polymerase accessory proteins which bind dsDNA and increase the processivity of their corresponding catalytic components. Outstanding similarities between their primary amino acid sequences are not evident. However, it appears that their structural organizations are similar.