Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comprehensive population synthesis study of post‐common envelope binaries

We apply population synthesis techniques to calculate the present-day population of post-common envelope binaries (PCEBs) for a range of theoretical models describing the common envelope (CE) phase. Adopting the canonical energy budget approach, we consider models where the ejection efficiency α CE is either a constant or a function of the secondary mass. We obtain the envelope binding energy from detailed stellar models of the progenitor primary, with and without the thermal and ionization energy, but we also test a commonly used analytical scaling. We also employ the alternative angular momentum budget approach, known as the γ-algorithm. We find that a constant, global value of α CE >~ 0.1 can adequately account for the observed population of PCEBs with late spectral-type secondaries. However, this prescription fails to reproduce IK Pegasi (IK Peg), which has a secondary with spectral type A8. We can account for IK Peg if we include thermal and ionization energy of the giant's envelope, or if we use the γ-algorithm. However, the γ-algorithm predicts local space densities that are 1 to 2 orders of magnitude greater than estimates from observations. In contrast, the canonical energy budget prescription with an initial mass ratio distribution that favours unequal initial mass ratios (n(q i ) ~ q -0.99 i ) gives a local space density which is in good agreement with observations, and best reproduces the observed distribution of PCEBs. Finally, all models fail to reproduce the sharp decline for orbital periods, P orb >~ 1 d in the orbital period distribution of observed PCEBs, even if we take into account selection effects against systems with long orbital periods and early spectral-type secondaries.
Why You Can&Apos;T Find a Taxi in the Rain and Other Labor Supply Lessons from Cab Drivers

I replicate and extend the seminal work of Camerer et al. ("Labor Supply of New York City Cabdrivers: One Day at a Time," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112 [1997], 407–441), who find that the wage elasticity of daily hours of work for New York City taxi drivers is negative and conclude that their labor supply behavior is consistent with reference dependence. In contrast, my analysis of the complete record of all trips taken in NYC taxi cabs from 2009 to 2013 shows that drivers tend to respond positively to unanticipated as well as anticipated increases in earnings opportunities. Additionally, using a discrete choice stopping model, the probability of a shift ending is strongly positively related to hours worked but at best weakly related to income earned. I find substantial heterogeneity across drivers in their elasticities, but the estimated elasticities are generally positive and rarely substantially negative. I find that new drivers with smaller elasticities are more likely to exit the industry, whereas drivers who remain quickly learn to be better optimizers (have positive labor supply elasticities that grow with experience). These results are consistent with the neoclassical optimizing model of labor supply and suggest that consideration of gain-loss utility and income reference dependence is not an important factor in the daily labor supply decisions of taxi drivers. JEL Codes: D01, D03, J22.
A Study of Analysis Parameters That Influence the Sensitivity of Event-Related fMRI Analyses

To assess the effect of various analysis parameters on the sensitivity of event-related fMRI analyses, 36 analyses were performed on a single fMRI data-set, varying parameters along four axes: (1) resampled voxel size; (2) spatial smoothing; (3) temporal smoothing; and (4) the set of basis functions used to model event-related responses. Sensitivity (i.e., the probability of detecting an activation given it exists) was assessed in terms of Z scores and by a metric for corrected P values, the negative log of the expected Euler characteristic. Sixteen brain regions distributed across cortical and subcortical areas were included in the meta-analysis. Main effects on sensitivity were found for resampled voxel size, spatial smoothing, temporal smoothing, and the set of basis functions chosen. The analysis parameters that generally produced the most sensitive analyses were a 2-mm(3) resampled voxel size, 10-mm spatial smoothing, 4-s temporal smoothing, and a basis set comprising a hemodynamic response function and its temporal derivative.
Tracing policy influence of diffuse interests: the post-crisis consumer finance protection politics in the US

ABSTRACT Dodd–Frank, the financial reform law passed in the United States in response to the 2008 financial crisis, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal regulator with the sole responsibility of protecting consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices. This decision marked the end of a highly politicized reform debate in the US Congress, in which proponents of the new bureau would normally have been considered to be much weaker than its opponents. Paradoxically, an emerging civil society coalition successfully lobbied decision-makers and countered industry attempts to prevent industry capture. What explains the fact that rather weak and peripheral actors prevailed over more resourceful and dominant actors? The goal of this study is to examine and challenge questions of regulatory capture by concentrated industry interests in the reform debates in response to the credit crisis which originated in the US in 2007. The analysis suggests that for weak actors to prevail in policy conflicts over established, resource-rich opponents, they must undertake broad coalition building among themselves and with influential elite allies outside and inside of Congress who share the same policy goals.
Starfish: policy driven self-management in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are a key aspect of many pervasive systems designed to aid people in their normal activities and adapt to their current context. However, these systems also need to be self-managing in discovering and configuring devices for services, detecting and responding to attacks, determining errors and faults and reconfiguring the system to mitigate these. In this paper we describe the Starfish framework for specifying and dynamically managing policies in sensor nodes. We discuss the components in the framework which include the Finger2 policy system for specifying dynamic adaptivity, a module library to simplify the programming the basic funtionality of nodes and a client side editor for managing policies. We describe policies for an adaptive healthcare body network then focus on policies for self-healing aspects of sensor networks and give examples of policy-based reconfigurations to deal with faults.
A new associative classifier for text categorization

Text categorization has become one of the key techniques for handling and organizing text data. In practical text classification tasks, the ability to interpret the classification result is as important as the ability to classify exactly. Associative classifiers have many favorable characteristics such as rapid training, good classification accuracy, and excellent interpretation. In this paper, Closed-AC, which is a new associative classifier for text categorization, is proposed. Firstly, rough set is used to dimension reduction. Then, only generic rules composed of closed itemsets are used for classification. Experimental results show benefits of the proposed associative classifier.
Thin Film Interface Fracture Properties at Scales Relevant to Microelectronics

Nowadays, one of the trends in microelectronic packaging is to integrate multi-functional systems into one package, resulting in more applications of highly dissimilar materials in the form of laminated thin films or composite structures. As a consequence, the number of interfaces increases. Often, the interface between these dissimilar materials is where the failure is most likely to occur especially when the packaged devices are subjected to the thermo-mechanical loading. Prediction of interface delamination is typically done using the critical energy release rate. However, the critical value is dependent on mode mixity. This paper describes our efforts on interface characterization as a function of mode mixity. A new test setup is designed for mixed mode bending testing. It allows for measuring the stable crack growth as the function of mode mixity. The crack length, necessary for calculation of the energy release rate is measured by means of an optical microscope. Finite element simulation is used to interpret the experimental results and thus to establish the critical energy release rates and mode mixities.
Research Statement 1 Automatic Signature Generation for Polymorphic Worms

My research interests center design and analysis of algorithms and span multiple application areas including bioinformatics, network security, DNA word design, musical information retrieval, autonomic computing, P2P networks and e-commerce. In addition to research in algorithms for combinatorial optimization, I have a track record for collaborating with different research groups and designing solutions to computational problems they encounter. The first and perhaps the greatest challenge in interdisciplinary research is the formulation of the correct computational problem. Often we are faced with computational problems that are NP-Hard. Therefore, under the widely believed conjecture that P 6= NP, no polynomial time algorithm can solve them in the worst case. Fortunately, it is usually possible to devise heuristics that give good performance in practice in spite of negative theoretical results. To me this indicates that a worst case analysis is perhaps too prohibitive. Average case analysis on the other hand could be unconvincing for it involves assuming the input to be drawn from some random distribution. Existence of such algorithms which work well in practice but evade traditional analysis techniques is what intrigues me the most. I had some success in the design and analysis of one such algorithm for a network security problem recently which I describe next. I then discuss a recent work on DNA word design, an interdisciplinary research project and conclude with some fundamental research directions.
The Formation of Persister Cells in Stationary-Phase Cultures of Escherichia Coli Is Associated with the Aggregation of Endogenous Proteins

Persister cells (persisters) are transiently tolerant to antibiotics and usually constitute a small part of bacterial populations. Persisters remain dormant but are able to re-grow after antibiotic treatment. In this study we found that the frequency of persisters correlated to the level of protein aggregates accumulated in E. coli stationary-phase cultures. When 3-(N-morpholino) propanesulfonic acid or an osmolyte (trehalose, betaine, glycerol or glucose) were added to the growth medium at low concentrations, proteins were prevented from aggregation and persister formation was inhibited. On the other hand, acetate or high concentrations of osmolytes enhanced protein aggregation and the generation of persisters. We demonstrated that in the E. coli stationary-phase cultures supplemented with MOPS or a selected osmolyte, the level of protein aggregates and persister frequency were not correlated with such physiological parameters as the extent of protein oxidation, culturability, ATP level or membrane integrity. The results described here may help to understand the mechanisms underlying persister formation.
“Never too late to spot a difference”: the development of L2 speech perception in adults

Abstract Learning correct pronunciation of a second/foreign language always represents a considerable challenge for language learners (e.g. Rojczyk, 2010a), especially for adults (e.g. Flege, 2007). There is an abundance of studies (e.g. Nowacka, 2010; Flege, 1991) showing that second language learners whose first language (L1) phonetic system has only one sound where L2 is characterized by noticeable richness of separate sound categories, encounter serious problems when they try to distinguish those new sounds and, moreover, they tend to apply their native vowels or consonants in L2 speech. It may be easily audible in the case of vowels and actually a lot of studies on L2 learners’ production and perception of L1 and L2 vowels have been carried (e.g. Flege, 1992; Nowacka, 2010; Rojczyk, 2010a; Rojczyk, 2010b). The aim of this study was to examine elementary learners’ perception of 4 German vowels, namely: /ɪ/, /iː/, /ʏ/ and /yː/. They were organized as two sets of minimal pairs, namely /ɪ/ vs. /ʏ/ and /iː/ vs. /yː/. The aforementioned sounds were chosen for the study since /ʏ/ and /yː/ are considered to be very difficult vowels for Polish learners (e.g. Bęza, 2001). Twelve elementary, adult (29-52 years old) Polish learners of German agreed to participate in the study. The subjects had just began their A2-level language course, however they had been taught the basics of German pronunciation for a year, during their A1-level course. They were presented a printed list of word pairs and listened to the recorded words. Then they were asked to circle the right option in each pair. The results revealed that although all study participants were adults when they started learning German and they were still just elementary users of the language, they were already able to distinguish correctly a considerable number of words. It may suggest that proper pronunciation training during a FL/L2 course can provide language learners with measurable benefits.
Feasible Aspect Mining Model for Drug Reviews

In the present computer era most of the recent important drugs for patients are given in online through reviews and discussion forums where our paper comprises of various research parameters for statistical report in drugs reviews and the techniques used in it as it is effective to understand the techniques and gives idea to propose an efficient EM algorithm to develop for deriving aspects for various age groups using medicines of chronic diseases as the assessment to be carried out and experimental results on reviews of these different drugs to be compared if PAMM is able to find better aspects than other common approaches when measured with mean point wise mutual information and classification accuracy.
Cell-Permeable Pentapeptide V5 Inhibits Apoptosis and Enhances Insulin Secretion, Allowing Experimental Single-Donor Islet Transplantation in Mice

OBJECTIVE—Treatment of diabetic patients by pancreatic islet transplantation often requires the use of islets from two to four donors to produce insulin independence in a single recipient. Following isolation and transplantation, islets are susceptible to apoptosis, which limits their function and probably long-term islet graft survival. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—To address this issue, we examined the effect of the cell-permeable apoptosis inhibitor pentapeptide Val-Pro-Met-Leu-Lys, V5, on pancreatic islets in a mouse model. RESULTS—V5 treatment upregulated expression of anti-apoptotic proteins Bcl-2 and XIAP (X-linked inhibitor of apoptosis protein) by more than 3- and 11-fold and downregulated expression of apoptosis-inducing proteins Bax, Bad, and nuclear factor-κB–p65 by 10, 30, and nearly 50%, respectively. Treatment improved the recovered islet mass following collagenase digestion and isolation by 44% and in vitro glucose-responsive insulin secretion nearly fourfold. Following transplantation in streptozotocin-induced diabetic mice, 150 V5-treated islet equivalents functioned as well as 450 control untreated islet equivalents in normalizing blood glucose. CONCLUSIONS—These studies indicate that inhibition of apoptosis by V5 significantly improves islet function following isolation and improves islet graft function following transplantation. Use of this reagent in clinical islet transplantation could have a dramatic impact on the number of patients that might benefit from this therapy and could affect long-term graft survival.
Combining Geometry and Local Appearance for Object Detection

In this paper we address the problem of object detection in cluttered scenes. Local image features and their spatial configuration act as representation of object classes which are learned in a discriminative fashion. Recent contributions in the area of object detection indicate the importance of using geometrical properties for representing object classes. Prompted by this, we devised an approach tailored to control the importance of the features and their spatial alignment. We quantitatively show that modeling the spatial distribution of local features and optimising the in? uence of both cues significantly boosts object detection performance.
Semantic Cooperation and Node Sharing Among P 2 P Networks

Peer-to-Peer networks are dynamic computational environments that can experience massive and sudden increases of their workloads. Typical P2P networks cannot cope with significant workload increases due to the limited processing power of their member nodes. In this paper we propose the G-ROME system which aims to interconnect multiple independent DHT-based P2P networks for the purposes of transferring capacity from underutilized to overloaded networks. The architecture is built upon the ROME protocol which has been shown to keep Chord rings at near optimal size based on their workload. We describe the G-ROME processes and we show simulations that prove its benefit in increasing workload scenarios.
Limit order placement across multiple exchanges

The US equity exchange market is organized as a National Market System, enforcing price priority across exchanges, but otherwise allowing competition for order flow among exchanges. This flexibility has naturally evolved to a market where exchanges have varying quality and cost of execution. To meet the obligation for best execution, a broker must employ a strategy for selecting the exchange to which limit orders are placed. We consider a market consisting of exchanges with different pricing and priority schemes, and derive a theoretical model to estimate the delay until execution of limit orders. We estimate model parameters from quote and trade data of stocks in the Russell 1000 index, and use them to evaluate expected delay per exchange. We show that inverted cost exchanges and price-size priority exchanges offer improved performance over short time intervals, while traditional and price-time priority exchanges offer improved performance over longer time intervals. We observe that while exchanges with large market share may have high market order liquidity, they may in fact have low limit order liquidity. Low limit order liquidity in turn leads to low execution quality of algorithmic orders. For time-sensitive algorithmic orders, we show a trade-off between execution quality and cost, and show exchanges on an efficient frontier for each stock that achieves good trade-off performance given current exchange pricing.
Eye movements: from psycholinguistics to font design.

The study of reading has been greatly advanced in the past 40 years by the examination of eye movements recorded during the reading process. Despite the advances made by reading researchers using eye movement recording as a methodology, this research has resulted in relatively few advances in the way text is displayed to readers. That is not to say that textual displays have not undergone significant improvements over this time. Only that the improvements were not driven by eye movement research. This disconnect is of particular interest given the applicability that eye movements offer for understanding all aspects of the read process. The possible reasons for this disconnect between psycholinguistic research and font design will be discussed. Additionally, current psycholinguistic research trends that overlap with potential font design issues will be explored during a review of the eye movement findings.
Matching estimators for the effect of a treatment on survival times

We perform inference on the effect of a treatment on survival times in studies where the treatment assignment is not randomized and the assignment time is not known in advance. We estimate survival functions on a treated and a control group which are made comparable through matching on observed covariates. The inference is performed by conditioning on waiting time to treatment, that is time between the entrance in the study and treatment. This can be done only when sufficient data is available. In other cases, averaging over waiting times is a possibility, although the classical interpretation of the estimated survival functions is lost unless hazards are not functions of the waiting times. To show unbiasedness and to obtain an estimator of the variance, we build on the potential outcome framework, which was introduced by J. Neyman in the context of randomized experiments, and adapted to observational studies by D. B. Rubin. Our approach does not make parametric or distributional assumptions. In particular, we do not assume proportionality of the hazards compared. Small sample performance of the estimator and a derived test of no treatment effect are studied in a Monte Carlo study.
Efficient human-like walking for the compliant huMANoid COMAN based on linematic Motion Primitives (kMPs)

Research in humanoid robotics in recent years has led to significant advances in terms of the ability to walk and even run. Yet, despite the general achievements in locomotion and control, energy efficiency is still one important area that requires further attention, especially as it is one of the major steeping stones leading to increased autonomy. This paper examines, and quantifies, the energetic benefits of introducing passive compliance into bipedal locomotion using COMAN, an intrinsically COmpliant huMANoid robot. The novelty of the method proposed consists of: i) the use of a method of gait synthesis based on kinematic Motion Primitives (kMPs) extracted from human, ii) the frequency tuning of the resultant trajectories, to excite the physical elasticity of the system, and the subsequent analysis of the energetic performance of the robot. The motivation is to assess the possible effects of using dynamic human-like, and human derived, trajectories, with significant Center of Mass (CoM) vertical displacement, regulated in frequency around the frequency band of the system resonances, on the excitation of the compliant actuators, and subsequently to measure and verify any energetic benefit. Experimental results show that if the gait frequency is close to one of the main resonant frequencies of the robot, then the total work contribution of the elastic compliant element to the overall motion of the robot is positive (15% of the work required is generated by the springs).
Chaos theory analysis of the newborn EEG - is it worth the wait?

In this study neonatal EEG has been analysed with information theory, complexity, SVD-based and nonlinear dynamic systems theory, or chaos theory, approaches. The analysis has been carried out to determine, given the amount of extra time needed to generate the chaos theory results, if they are considerably better than their information theory, complexity and SVD-based counterparts. The results show that while the KY dimension gives comparable performance to the information theory approaches, its computation time is more than 1000 times greater. The effects of preprocessing are also analysed