Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive reachability assessment in the humanoid robot iCub

We present a model for reachability assessment implemented in a simulated iCub humanoid robot. The robot uses a neural network both for estimating reachability and as a controller for the arm. During training, multi-modality information including vision and proprioception of the effector's length was provided, along with tactile and postural information. The task was to assess if a target in view was at reach range. After training with data from two different effector's lengths, the system generalised also for a third one, both for producing reaching postures and for assessing reachability. We present preliminary results that show good reachability predictions with a decrease in confidence that display a depth gradient.
The Economics of Corruption and Illegal Markets

This authoritative three volume set brings together the most important published papers on the economic analysis of corruption and illegal markets. It ranges from theoretical issues explaining the nature of corruption to analogies between governments regulating legal markets and organised crime ruling over illegal markets. Particular attention is paid to the effects of standard public policies, such as standard controls or quality standards, on the development of shadow and illegal markets, and consequently on the incentives to invest in bribery and extortion. The book highlights the consequences of corruption both for the efficiency of a market system and on the long run growth of the economy with special reference to developing countries.
Temporality in relation with discourse structure

Temporal relations between events and times are often difficult to discover, time-consuming and expensive. In this paper a corpus study is performed to derive a strong relation between discourse structure, as revealed by Veins theory, and the temporal links between entities, as addressed in the TimeML annotation standard. The data interpretation helps us gain insight on how Veins theory can improve the manual and even (semi-) automatic detection of temporal relations.
An Econometric Analysis of Inter-Firm Labour Mobility

This paper utilizes the Survey of Work History (1981) data to examine the importance of non-random sampling in the context of a model of interfirm labour mobility. The paper adopts Heckman's two-step procedure in order to estimate a three-equation model incorporating an individual's mobility status as endogenously determined. The main conclusion is that in estimating wage equations it is important to consider the role of job mobility and to correct for the effects of sample-selection bias. The results generally accord with those reported by Osberg et al. (1986) in the only previous Canadian study of job mobility in a sample-selection context.
Cycles in the de Rham cohomology of abelian varieties over number fields

In his 1982 paper, Ogus defined a class of cycles in the de Rham cohomology of smooth proper varieties over number fields. This notion is a crystalline analogue of $\ell$ -adic Tate cycles. In the case of abelian varieties, this class includes all the Hodge cycles by the work of Deligne, Ogus, and Blasius. Ogus predicted that such cycles coincide with Hodge cycles for abelian varieties. In this paper, we confirm Ogus’ prediction for some families of abelian varieties. These families include geometrically simple abelian varieties of prime dimension that have non-trivial endomorphism ring. The proof uses a crystalline analogue of Faltings’ isogeny theorem due to Bost and the known cases of the Mumford–Tate conjecture.
Text Processing in Video Frames with Complex Background

Information deficiency is a huge problem when researching on video indexing and retrieval. On the other hand, text in video frames implies lots of semantics inherently, and can provide supplemental but important information for video data processing. In this paper, we present a fast and robust approach for text detection, localization, extraction, and reorganization in video frames with complex background. Here, block change rate (BCR for short) is imported to realize text detection and localization, smoothness model is used to narrow the scope of the text stroke, element image division in Lab color space is implied in binary text extraction, and Langue model is imported to evaluate the text extraction results. Experiments based on a large amount of video frames from different sources show that this approach is robust, effective and compatible for variety videos with complex background.
Changes in ADMA/DDAH Pathway after Hepatic Ischemia/Reperfusion Injury in Rats: The Role of Bile

We investigated the effects of hepatic ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury on asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA, a nitric oxide synthase inhibitor), protein methyltransferase (PRMT) and dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolase (DDAH) (involved, resp., in ADMA synthesis and degradation), and the cationic transporter (CAT). Male Wistar rats were subjected to 30 or 60 min hepatic ischemia followed by 60 min reperfusion. ADMA levels in serum and bile were determined. Tissue ADMA, DDAH activity, DDAH-1 and CAT-2 protein, DDAH-1 and PRMT-1 mRNA expression, GSH/GSSG, ROS production, and lipid peroxidation were detected. ADMA was found in bile. I/R increased serum and bile ADMA levels while an intracellular decrease was detected after 60 min ischemia. Decreased DDAH activity, mRNA, and protein expression were observed at the end of reperfusion. No significant difference was observed in GSH/GSSG, ROS, lipid peroxidation, and CAT-2; a decrease in PRMT-1 mRNA expression was found after I/R. Liver is responsible for the biliary excretion of ADMA, as documented here for the first time, and I/R injury is associated with an oxidative stress-independent alteration in DDAH activity. These data are a step forward in the understanding of the pathways that regulate serum, tissue, and biliary levels of ADMA in which DDAH enzyme plays a crucial role.
Entry of Human Papillomavirus Type 16 by Actin-Dependent, Clathrin- and Lipid Raft-Independent Endocytosis

Infectious endocytosis of incoming human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV-16), the main etiological agent of cervical cancer, is poorly characterized in terms of cellular requirements and pathways. Conflicting reports attribute HPV-16 entry to clathrin-dependent and -independent mechanisms. To comprehensively describe the cell biological features of HPV-16 entry into human epithelial cells, we compared HPV-16 pseudovirion (PsV) infection in the context of cell perturbations (drug inhibition, siRNA silencing, overexpression of dominant mutants) to five other viruses (influenza A virus, Semliki Forest virus, simian virus 40, vesicular stomatitis virus, and vaccinia virus) with defined endocytic requirements. Our analysis included infection data, i.e. GFP expression after plasmid delivery by HPV-16 PsV, and endocytosis assays in combination with electron, immunofluorescence, and video microscopy. The results indicated that HPV-16 entry into HeLa and HaCaT cells was clathrin-, caveolin-, cholesterol- and dynamin-independent. The virus made use of a potentially novel ligand-induced endocytic pathway related to macropinocytosis. This pathway was distinct from classical macropinocytosis in regards to vesicle size, cholesterol-sensitivity, and GTPase requirements, but similar in respect to the need for tyrosine kinase signaling, actin dynamics, Na+/H+ exchangers, PAK-1 and PKC. After internalization the virus was transported to late endosomes and/or endolysosomes, and activated through exposure to low pH.
Differential Roles of Cardiac Myosin-Binding Protein C and Cardiac Troponin I in the Myofibrillar Force Responses to Protein Kinase A Phosphorylation

The heart is remarkably adaptable in its ability to vary its function to meet the changing demands of the circulatory system. During times of physiological stress, cardiac output increases in response to increased sympathetic activity, which results in protein kinase A (PKA)-mediated phosphorylations of the myofilament proteins cardiac troponin (cTn)I and cardiac myosin-binding protein (cMyBP)-C. Despite the importance of this mechanism, little is known about the relative contributions of cTnI and cMyBP-C phosphorylation to increased cardiac contractility. Using engineered mouse lines either lacking cMyBP-C (cMyBP-C−/−) or expressing a non-PKA phosphorylatable cTnI (cTnIala2), or both (cMyBP-C−/−/cTnIala2), we investigated the roles of cTnI and cMyBP-C phosphorylation in the regulation of the stretch-activation response. PKA treatment of wild-type and cTnIala2 skinned ventricular myocardium accelerated stretch activation such that the response was indistinguishable from stretch activation of cMyBP-C−/− or cMyBP-C−/−/cTnIala2 myocardium; however, PKA had no effect on stretch activation in cMyBP-C−/− or cMyBP-C−/−/cTnIala2 myocardium. These results indicate that the acceleration of stretch activation in wild-type and cTnIala2 myocardium is caused by phosphorylation of cMyBP-C and not cTnI. We conclude that the primary effect of PKA phosphorylation of cTnI is reduced Ca2+ sensitivity of force, whereas phosphorylation of cMyBP-C accelerates the kinetics of force development. These results predict that PKA phosphorylation of myofibrillar proteins in living myocardium contributes to accelerated relaxation in diastole and increased rates of force development in systole.
Transcriptome Sequencing of and Microarray Development for a Helicoverpa zea Cell Line to Investigate In Vitro Insect Cell-Baculovirus Interactions

The Heliothine insect complex contains some of the most destructive pests of agricultural crops worldwide, including the closely related Helicoverpa zea and H. armigera. Biological control using baculoviruses is practiced at a moderate level worldwide. In order to enable more wide spread use, a better understanding of cell-virus interactions is required. While many baculoviruses have been sequenced, none of the Heliothine insect genomes have been available. In this study, we sequenced, assembled and functionally annotated 29,586 transcripts from cultured H. zea cells using Illumina 100 bps and paired-end transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq). The transcript sequences had high assembly coverage (64.5 times). 23,401 sequences had putative protein functions, and over 13,000 sequences had high similarities to available sequences in other insect species. The sequence database was estimated to cover at least 85% of all H. zea genes. The sequences were used to construct a microarray, which was evaluated on the infection of H. zea cells with H. Armigera single-capsid nucleopolyhedrovirus (HearNPV). The analysis revealed that up-regulation of apoptosis genes is the main cellular response in the early infection phase (18 hours post infection), while genes linked to four major immunological signalling pathways (Toll, IMD, Jak-STAT and JNK) were down-regulated. Only small changes (generally downwards) were observed for central carbon metabolism. The transcriptome and microarray platform developed in this study represent a greatly expanded resource base for H. zea insect- HearNPV interaction studies, in which key cellular pathways such as those for metabolism, immune response, transcription and replication have been identified. This resource will be used to develop better cell culture-based virus production processes, and more generally to investigate the molecular basis of host range and susceptibility, virus infectivity and virulence, and the ecology and evolution of baculoviruses.
Model Reduction of Collective Motion by Principal Manifolds

While the existence of low-dimensional embedding manifolds has been shown in patterns of collective motion, the current battery of nonlinear dimensionality methods are not amenable to the analysis of such manifolds. This is mainly due to the necessary spectral decomposition step, which limits control over the mapping from the original high-dimensional space to the embedding space. Here, we propose an alternative approach that demands a twodimensional embedding which topologically summarizes the high-dimensional data. In this sense, our approach is closely related to the construction of one-dimensional p rincipal curves that minimize orthogonal error to data points subject to smoothness constraints. Specifically, we construct a two-dimensional principal manifold directly in the high-dimensional space using cubic smoothing splines, and define the embedding coordinates in terms of geodesic distances. Thus, the mapping from the high-dimensional data to the manifold is defined in terms of local coordinates. Through representative examples, we show that the principal manifold retains the original structure eve n in noisy and sparse datasets. The principal manifold finding algorithm is validated on a dynamical system of multiple agents simulating a complex maneuver called predator mobbing and the results are compared with a well-established nonlinear dimensionality reduction method.
Subsocial Neotropical Doryphorini (Chrysomelidae, Chrysomelinae): new observations on behavior, host plants and systematics

Abstract A summary of literature, documented observations and field studies finds evidence that mothers actively defend offspring in at least eight species and three genera of Neotropical Chrysomelinae associated with two host plant families. Reports on three Doryphora species reveal that all are oviparous and feed on vines in the Apocyanaceae. Mothers in the two subsocial species defend eggs and larvae by straddling, blocking access at the petiole and greeting potential predators with leaf-shaking and jerky advances. A less aggressive form of maternal care is found in two Platyphora and four Proseicela species associated with Solanaceae, shrubs and small trees. For these and other morphologically similar taxa associated with Solanaceae, genetic distances support morphology-based taxonomy at the species level, reveal one new species, but raise questions regarding boundaries separating genera. We urge continued study of these magnificent insects, their enemies and their defenses, both behavioral and chemical, especially in forests along the eastern versant of the Central and South American cordillera.
Collective Human Mobility Pattern from Taxi Trips in Urban Area

We analyze the passengers' traffic pattern for 1.58 million taxi trips of Shanghai, China. By employing the non-negative matrix factorization and optimization methods, we find that, people travel on workdays mainly for three purposes: commuting between home and workplace, traveling from workplace to workplace, and others such as leisure activities. Therefore, traffic flow in one area or between any pair of locations can be approximated by a linear combination of three basis flows, corresponding to the three purposes respectively. We name the coefficients in the linear combination as traffic powers, each of which indicates the strength of each basis flow. The traffic powers on different days are typically different even for the same location, due to the uncertainty of the human motion. Therefore, we provide a probability distribution function for the relative deviation of the traffic power. This distribution function is in terms of a series of functions for normalized binomial distributions. It can be well explained by statistical theories and is verified by empirical data. These findings are applicable in predicting the road traffic, tracing the traffic pattern and diagnosing the traffic related abnormal events. These results can also be used to infer land uses of urban area quite parsimoniously.
Tabular Abstraction, Editing, and Formatting

This dissertation investigates the composition of high-quality tables with the use of electronic tools. A generic model is designed to support the different stages of tabular composition, including the editing of logical structure, the specification of layout structure, and the formatting of concrete tables. The model separates table's logical structure from its layout structure, which consists of tabular topology and typographic style. The notion of an abstract table, which describes the logical relationships among tabular items, is formally defined and a set of logical operations is proposed to manipulate tables based on these logical relationships. An abstract table can be visualized through a layout structure specified by a set of topological rules, which determine the relative placement of tabular items in two dimensions, and a set of style rules, which determine the final appearance of different items. The absolute placement of a concrete table can be automatically generated by applying a layout specification to an abstract line. An NP-complete problem arises in the formatting process that uses automatic line breaking and determines the physical dimension of a table to satisfy user-specified size constraints. An algorithm has been designed to solve the formatting problem in polynomial time for typical tables. Based on the tabular model, a prototype tabular composition system has been implemented in a UNIX, X Windows environment. This prototype provides an interactive interface to edit the logical structure, the topology and the styles of tables. It allows us to manipulate tables based on the logical relationships tabular items, regardless of where the items are placed in the layout structure, and capable of presenting a table in different topologies and styles so that we can select a high-quality layout structure.
SentiFul: Generating a reliable lexicon for sentiment analysis

The main drawback of any lexicon-based sentiment analysis system is the lack of scalability. Thus, in this paper, we will describe methods to automatically generate and score a new sentiment lexicon, called SentiFul, and expand it through direct synonymy relations and morphologic modifications with known lexical units. We propose to distinguish four types of affixes (used to derive new words) depending on the role they play with regard to sentiment features: propagating, reversing, intensifying, and weakening.
Adjoint Sensitivity Analysis of Neutral Delay Differential Models

Sensitivity analysis is crucial both in the modeling phase and in the interpretation of model predictions. It contributes to model development, model calibration, model validation, reliability and robustness analysis, decision-making under uncertainty, and model reduction. Sensitivity analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between infinitesimal changes in the model parameters and changes in model output. As an example, biological and physical problems are often subject to disturbance or perturbations in the system data. It is quite usual for a model to display very high sensitivity to small variations in some parameters, while displaying robustness to variations in other parameters; See [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. A retarded functional differential equation (RFDE) describes a system where the rate of change of state is determined by the present and the past states of the system. If the rate of change of the state depends on its own values as well, the system is called a neutral functional differential equations (NFDEs). When only discrete values of the past have influence on the present rate of change of state, the corresponding mathematical model is either delay differential equation (DDE) or neutral differential equation (NDDE). The theory of RFDEs is of both theoretical and practical interest, as they provide a powerful model of many phenomena in applied sciences such as physics, biology, economics, control theory and so on. The work reported in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 13, 14]
Repeated Cocaine Administration Impairs Group II Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor-Mediated Long-Term Depression in Rat Medial Prefrontal Cortex

Drug-induced neuroadaptations within the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are thought to underlie the development of cocaine sensitization. Here, we report that repeated cocaine administration in vivo impaired the long-term depression (LTD) induced by bath application of group II metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluR) agonists DCG-IV [2S, 2′R, 3′R)-2-(2′, 3′-dicarboxycyclopropyl)glycine] or LY379268 [(1R,4R,5S,6R)-4-amino-2-oxabicyclo[3.1. 0]hexane-4,6-dicarboxylic acid] at excitatory synapses onto layer V pyramidal neurons of rat mPFC. In contrast, this impairment was not found in slices from rats treated with saline or a single dose of cocaine. Such effect of cocaine was selectively prevented when cocaine was coadministered with the selective D1-like receptor antagonist SCH23390 [(R)-(+)-chloro-8-hydroxy-3-methyl-1-phenyl-2,3,4,5-tetrahydro-1H-3-benzazepine]. In slices from control rats, a brief application of either protein kinase C (PKC) activator phorbol-12,13-dibutyrute or adenosine A3 receptor agonist 2-chloro-N6-(3-iodobenzyl)-adenosine-5-N-methyluronamide mimicked the effect of repeated cocaine treatment to impair the induction of LTD. Bilateral intra-mPFC infusion of PKC inhibitor bisindolylmaleimide I or adenosine A3 receptor antagonist MRS1220 (N-[9-chloro-2-(2-furanyl)[1,2,4]-triazolo[1,5-c]quinazolin-5-benzeneacetamide) before cocaine injection prevented cocaine-induced impairment of LTD induction. Furthermore, endogenous adenosine tone is greater in slices from cocaine-treated rats than from the saline-treated controls. When the metabolism of cAMP to adenosine was blocked, the extent of LTD in slices from saline and cocaine-treated rats was similar. These results suggest that cocaine-induced impairment of group II mGluR-mediated LTD is caused, at least in part, by an increase in adenosine subsequent to the rise in cAMP after D1-like receptor activation, which leads to an adenosine A3 receptor-mediated upregulation of PKC activity and thereby triggers an inhibition of group II metabotropic glutamate receptor function.
Innovation in the nonprofit organizational context: Examining the strategic significance of systems trust and individual resistance to change

In the context of globalization, technological advances, and the development of the knowledge economy, organizations must innovate to remain competitive. Recently, the call for innovation in public and nonprofit sector organizations has increased. These organizations, which rely on tax exemption, state allocations, or charitable contributions, must innovate for practical and symbolic reasons. While many factors contribute to innovation capacity, a key variable – employee perceptions of organizational support for innovation – is an influential variable. In several studies, employees who perceived greater organization-supported innovation were more likely to behave in innovative ways. Research indicates that perceptions of organizational support for innovation may be affected by organizational trust and individual resistance to change. The purpose of this study was to conduct an exploratory investigation of perceptions of organizational support for innovation among employees of a nonprofit credit union in a Midwestern state. Associations among organizational support for innovation, resistance to change, organizational trust, and several independent variables were measured. A web-based survey, made up of previously tested scales, was distributed to 534 employees and completed by 345, for a 64.6% response rate. Three methods were used to test the hypotheses: principal components analysis, multiple regression analysis, and path analysis. Several significant direct associations were found. As organizational trust and work engagement increased, organizational support for innovation also increased. As resistance to change, conflict, and level of education increased, organizational support for innovation decreased. Two significant interaction effects were also found; the interaction variable of organizational trust and education and the interaction variable of resistance to change and participation in the innovation workshop each contributed significantly to the