Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effects of popular culture on youth sub-culture and how it plays a role in the school environment

This study examines the effect that popular culture has on youth sub-culture and how it relates to or plays a role in the school environment. This exploratory study is based on unstructured interviews with high school students from one all female private school, one all male private school, and one public school. This was done so that I would have an equal representation of male to female students as found in the public school. The focus is on student involvement in three particular popular cultural forms: film, television, and music. The data collected indicates that the extent of student participation in various popular cultural forms merits serious consideration to address this phenomenon in the school curriculum, educational practice, and classroom activities. Suggestions as to how this can occur and further research are discussed.
Defending SQL injection attacks based-on intention-oriented detection

SQL injection attacks(SQLIA) are the most serious threats to WEB program security, while dynamic analysis may effectively defend SQLIA. An intention-oriented detection approach is proposed to represent all the database operations expected by WEB programmers. It intercepts the requests before user submission and drops the unintentional ones. A language named SQLIDL is proposed to express the user intention of database operations and is used to transform SQL requests into string sets formalized by the deterministic finite automaton (DFA). SQLIDL currently implements the regular expression representation of table names, column names, values and store procedure names. The prototype implementation is evaluated on SecuriBench and the results demonstrate all existing SQL attack patterns can be correctly detected with acceptable run-time overhead.
Large-Scale Network Analysis for Online Social Brand Advertising

This paper proposes an audience selection framework for online brand advertising based on user activities on social media platforms. It is one of the first studies to our knowledge that develops and analyzes implicit brand–brand networks for online brand advertising. This paper makes several contributions. We first extract and analyze implicit weighted brand–brand networks, representing interactions among users and brands, from a large dataset. We examine network properties and community structures and propose a framework combining text and network analyses to find target audiences. As a part of this framework, we develop a hierarchical community detection algorithm to identify a set of brands that are closely related to a specific brand. This latter brand is referred to as the “focal brand. ” We also develop a global ranking algorithm to calculate brand influence and select influential brands from this set of closely related brands. This is then combined with sentiment analysis to identify target users from these selected brands. To process large-scale datasets and networks, we implement several MapReduce-based algorithms. Finally, we design a novel evaluation technique to test the effectiveness of our targeting framework. Experiments conducted with Facebook data show that our framework provides significant performance improvements in identifying target audiences for focal brands.
Modified Tahoe TCP for Wireless Networks Using OPNET Simulator

This paper describes a modification to the Transmission Control Protocol’s (TCP) Tahoe flavour for use in Wireless networks. It shows that by slightly modifying the algorithm of the Tahoe TCP, it can be made to respond better to wireless links, while maintaining its advantages on the wired networks at the same time. This is certainly a very desirable feature as the conventional TCP in most cases contradicts to the demands of the wireless links of the network.
A Novel Method of Protein Secondary Structure Prediction Using Context Sensitive Vocabulary

Protein secondary structure prediction is an important step towards the understanding of protein three-dimensional structure. However, most current systems use features difficult to interpret. In this paper, we present the TXTpred system, where we propose a new method to encode context sensitive biological vocabulary that is subsequently fed to a text classification method to predict protein secondary structure. The experimental results show that our method performs comparably well with most current systems, including those using PHD[14] and DSC[11]. Furthermore, our context sensitive vocabularies can serve as a useful tool to aid in understanding the relationship between protein sequences and structures. We compute most discriminating “words” for different structures by statistical Chi-square analysis. These words, translated into regular expressions, not only agree well with previous findings in propensities of amino acids for different structures but also step further by giving exact context information. We also discover several meaningful regular expression patterns for protein structures through Singular Value Decomposition (SVD).
OPTIMAL GAMBLING SYSTEMS FOR FAVORABLE GAMES

The following sections are included:INTRODUCTIONPART I. FAVORABLE GAMESBLACKJACKBACCARATROULETTETHE WHEEL OF FORTUNETHE STOCK MARKETPART II. A MATHEMATICAL THEORY FOR COMMITTING RESOURCES IN FAVORABLE GAMESINTRODUCTION: COIN TOSSINGMINIMIZING THE PROBABILITY OF RUINTHE KELLY CRITERIONTHE ADVANTAGES OF MAXIMIZING E LOG XnA STOCK MARKET EXAMPLEWARRANT HEDGINGPORTFOLIO SELECTION USING E LOG XTHE KELLY CRITERION AND DEFICIENCIES IN THE MARKOWITZ THEORY OF PORTFOLIO SELECTIONREFERENCES
Optimised Multi Homing -- an Approach for Inter-domain Traffic Engineering

Traffic engineering (TE) has been widely investigated in recent years. Though, the scope of these works were predominantly limited to intra-domain TE and single administrative domains. Not even the long term TE with monitoring and analysis of traffic exchange points has been adequately solved, not to mention the short term, real-time performance related inter-domain TE tasks. This is in spite of the fact that today’s operators acknowledge that the edges of their networks where they pass traffic to other domains is the source of their greatest costs, which demands effective management of their inter-domain traffic. In this article, the authors argue that the first simplest step towards inter-domain TE could be the distribution of load towards one destination prefix among the possible alternative egress links. This is achieved by having more than one connection in the domain to the outside world; commonly known as multi-homing. The authors propose a network model and several algorithmic approaches to capture, incorporate and utilise the advantages given by multi-homing into the intra-domain TE objectives. Numerical evaluation of the different proposals compared to traditional shortest path first routing is also performed.
Can the Survivor Principle Survive Diversification?

The survivor principle holds that the competitive process weeds out inefficient firms, so that hypotheses about efficient behavior can be tested by observing what firms actually do. This principle underlies a large body of empirical work in strategy, economics, and management. But do competitive markets really select for efficient behavior? Is the survivor principle reliable? We evaluate the survivor principle in the context of corporate diversification, asking if survivor-based measures of interindustry relatedness are good predictors of firms’ decisions to exit particular lines of business, controlling for other firm and industry characteristics that affect firms’ portfolio choices. We find strong, robust evidence that survivor-based relatedness is an important determinant of exit. This empirical regularity is consistent with an efficiency rationale for firm-level diversification, though we cannot rule out alternative explanations based on firms’ desire for legitimacy by imitation and attempts to temper multimarket competition.
Class Dependency in Observers ’ Motor Areas Revealed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Human and animal data suggest that the mere observation of biological motion activates those premotor areas that also underlie the initiation of the same motion. However, data also indicate that the human premotor cortex (PM), in contrast to the monkey PM, responds not only to the observation of goal-directed (transitive) motion but also to intransitive motion. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test this hypothesis directly. Participants were presented cycles of intransitive motion specified as belonging to the distal (fingers and mouth), proximal (knee, ankle, elbow, and wrist), or axial (trunk and shoulder) motion class. Attention to motion was behaviorally tested by a forced-choice task on motion acceleration and deceleration. Results revealed extended PM activation for each motion condition. However, direct contrasts showed that the most significant activations were elicited in ventrolateral PM by distal motion, in dorsolateral PM by proximal motion, and medial PM (supplementary motor area) by axial motion. Findings confirm observed intransitive motions to engage premotor areas along a gross-scaled somatotopy.
Methods for Fine Scale Functional Imaging of Tactile Motion in Human and Nonhuman Primates

In the visual and auditory systems specialized neural pathways use motion cues to track object motion and self-motion, and use differential motion cues for figure-ground segregation. To examine the neural circuits that encode motion in the somatosensory system, we have developed neuroimaging methods to study motion processing in human and nonhuman primates. We have implemented stimulus presentation paradigms to examine neural encoding of apparent motion percepts. These paradigms are designed to be compatible with fMRI, optical imaging, and electrophysiological methods, thereby permitting direct comparison of data derived across neurofunctional scales. An additional motivation for using a common tactile motion stimulation paradigm is to bridge two disparate bodies of work, that derived from neuroimaging studies in humans and another from neuroimaging, neurophysiological and neuroanatomical studies in monkeys. Here, we demonstrate that such an approach through the use of optical imaging and 9.4 Tesla fMRI experiments in monkeys, and 7 Tesla fMRI experiments in humans is effective in revealing neural regions activated by tactile motion stimuli. These methods span spatial scales capable of detecting 100 μm sized domains to those that would reveal global whole brain circuits. Armed with such capabilities, our long-term goals are to identify directionally selective areas and directionally se-lective functional domains and understand the global pathways within which they reside. Such knowledge would have great impact on our thinking regarding not only tactile motion processing, but also general strategies underlying somatosensory cortical processing.
Parental Predictors of School Attendance Difficulties in Children Referred to an Anxiety Disorders Clinic

Difficulties with attending school are common in children referred to anxiety disorders clinics. Although parental factors have been posited as playing an important predictive role, little is known about which parental factors are associated with school attendance difficulties (SADs). We address this gap by examining family accommodation, parental psychological control, parental anxiety, and parental depression as possible predictors of SADs in children (N=343; ages 6 to 17 years, M=10.40 years, SD=2.93; 84% mothers; M=41.20 years, SD=5.49) who presented to a childhood anxiety disorders clinic. Forty-eight percent (n= 166) had SADs including not attending school, arriving to school late and/or leaving early, not staying in the classroom during school hours, or behavior problems associated with attending school (e.g. morning tantrums). Logistic regression analyses using child and parent ratings revealed that of the parental variables examined, family accommodation and parental depression were significant predictors of SADs after controlling for the effects of parental psychological control, parental anxiety, child age, child anxiety and child depression. The study’s findings suggest that high levels of family accommodation and high levels of parental depression increase the odds of SADs in anxious children.
Tools for exploring GermaNet in the context of cl-teaching

Word nets, such as Princeton WordNet or GermaNet, are resources organizing a (more or less extensive) fraction of the vocabulary of a language according to lexical semantic relations. Such resources are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics (CL) both for research and teaching purposes. While several graphical user interfaces (GUI) exist for Princeton WordNet–some of which are also available online –GermaNet still lacks such utilities. In this paper we describe two GUI-based tools meant to facilitate the navigation through and exploration of GermaNet. Both are freely available for download from our project web page (www.hytex.info). We additionally discuss ways of deploying these tools in teaching. We argue that the GUI-based access to word nets, which can be regarded as a fundamental resource in CL and NLP, enhances the students’ understanding of basic lexical semantic concepts, computational semantics and lexicography.
The 'Unhyphenated American' Phenomenon: An Individual-Level Analysis of Causes and Consequences

Since 1980, the U.S. Census has asked Americans to indicate their “ancestry or ethnic origin. ” In the 2000 Census, more than 20 million Americans reported being of “American” ancestry. These “unhyphenated Americans” are obviously not all Native-Americans, but are European-Americans eschewing a foreign ancestral identification. The regions of the country where these unhyphenated Americans are concentrated were also some of the only places where Barack Obama earned a lower percentage of the vote in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004 and also had some of the lowest pro-Obama (and highest pro-Clinton) voting patterns among Democratic partisans in the 2008 Democratic primaries. This paper seeks to investigate the “unhyphenated American” phenomenon by taking advantage of a novel dataset that provides individual-level information on ancestral self-identification and political behavior. Specifically, I seek to address two central questions: 1) what leads some people to claim “American” ancestry despite being white Americans of European ancestry, and 2) what are the political implications of this “American” ancestral self-identification? The results of this analysis will extend and contribute to existing preliminary research on the “unhyphenated American” phenomenon (see Arbour and Teigen 2011; Arbour 2011, e.g.).
Collective Resistance in Microbial Communities by Intracellular Antibiotic Deactivation

The structure and composition of bacterial communities can compromise antibiotic efficacy. For example, the secretion of β-lactamase by individual bacteria provides passive resistance for all residents within a polymicrobial environment. Here, we uncover that collective resistance can also develop via intracellular antibiotic deactivation. Real-time luminescence measurements and single-cell analysis demonstrate that the opportunistic human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae grows in medium supplemented with chloramphenicol (Cm) when resistant bacteria expressing Cm acetyltransferase (CAT) are present. We show that CAT processes Cm intracellularly but not extracellularly. In a mouse pneumonia model, more susceptible pneumococci survive Cm treatment when coinfected with a CAT-expressing strain. Mathematical modeling predicts that stable coexistence is only possible when antibiotic resistance comes at a fitness cost. Strikingly, CAT-expressing pneumococci in mouse lungs were outcompeted by susceptible cells even during Cm treatment. Our results highlight the importance of the microbial context during infectious disease as a potential complicating factor to antibiotic therapy.
Reduced choroidal neovascular membrane formation in matrix metalloproteinase-2-deficient mice.

PURPOSE Findings in studies have suggested a role for matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-2 in angiogenesis, including choroidal neovascularization (CNV). To investigate further, the current study was conducted to observe the formation of experimental CNV in MMP-2-deficient mice. METHODS CNV was induced in wild-type and MMP-2-deficient mice by krypton laser photocoagulation of the fundus. The time-course of expression of MMP-2 mRNA after laser treatment was determined by in situ hybridization with anti-sense and sense cRNA probes. MMP-2 protein distribution was determined by immunohistochemistry. Ten days after treatment, the extent of CNV was evaluated on hematoxylin-eosin stained serial sections. The maximum height of the CNV lesions was calculated by image analysis of digitized histologic images. RESULTS Expression of MMP-2 mRNA was detected in the CNV lesions at day 3 after laser treatment and peaked at day 5, after which it slowly declined. MMP-2 mRNA expression appeared to be highest at the margins of the membrane. Immunostaining for MMP-2 confirmed the presence of MMP-2 protein in the CNV lesions. The CNV lesions of MMP-2-deficient mice showed that relative thickness was reduced by 31% compared with wild-type mice (P = 0.006). CONCLUSIONS The present study demonstrated that MMP-2 mRNA and protein are upregulated during experimental CNV in the mouse. The marked difference in thickness of the CNV membrane between wild-type and MMP-2-deficient mice shows that MMP-2 is involved in the formation of experimental CNV in the mouse. These results suggest that pharmacologic targeting of MMPs, including MMP-2, may reduce formation of CNV in conditions such as age-related macular degeneration.
Critical Success Factors for R&D Leaders

To succeed as an RD (2) they are creative in their approach to problem solving; (3) they have a commitment to continuous learning; and (4) they are adaptable to change. Researchers also have to design, sell and manage projects, monitor the financial aspects of their work, and communicate the results. As would be expected, the most productive and creative R&D performers are usually the ones who move over to manage other researchers, in many cases as a step up on a dual-ladder career-development plan. Occasionally, a remarkable researcher finds the management side boring or distasteful because it is more of an art than a science, or because the person does not have the right set of skills at the appropriate level for management. Thus, the best researchers don't always make the best R&D managers. Starting the Right Way Beginning one's career in R&D the right way is essential, which is why the Industrial Research Institute developed, and has periodically updated, a training syllabus for a person's first five years in R&D (1). This "study guide" offers a check list of items to become aware of and knowledgeable about in time segments. Its key premise is that the principal accountability for career success lies with the individual. The guide covers such topics as job orientation, safety, mission of the R&D function, ethics, career development, project planning, computers, quality, mentoring, personal skills, leadership, and performance appraisals. …
First Experiences Optimizing Smith-Waterman on Intel's Knights Landing Processor

The well-known Smith-Waterman (SW) algorithm is the most commonly used method for local sequence alignments. However, SW is very computationally demanding for large protein databases. There exist several implementations that take advantage of computing parallelization on many-cores, FPGAs or GPUs, in order to increase the alignment throughtput. In this paper, we have explored SW acceleration on Intel KNL processor. The novelty of this architecture requires the revision of previous programming and optimization techniques on many-core architectures. To the best of authors knowledge, this is the first KNL architecture assessment for SW algorithm. Our evaluation, using the renowned Environmental NR database as benchmark, has shown that multi-threading and SIMD exploitation reports competitive performance (351 GCUPS) in comparison with other implementations.
Optimal Design of Broadband Microwave Baluns Using Single-Layer Planar Circuit Technology

A new design methodology is presented for the planar implementation of a classical Marchand balun. A novel intuitive analysis shows that the Marchand configuration can be designed optimally to eliminate the phenomenon of “trace separation,” which is frequently observed in planar implementations. The new theory shows that this unbalancing effect is caused by the parasitic transmission line formed between the inner strip and ground, which is not considered in Marchand's original coaxial structures. Compact design equations are derived, based on which a new innovative structure is proposed and fabricated. This demonstrates the elimination of trace separation and achieves flat equal port split over a double octave bandwidth, performing up to 10 GHz, using an industry standard single-layer thin-film process having a continuous unpatterned ground plane. Popular planar variants of Marchand's original structures are also designed and fabricated to verify the new design equations. These structures are compared in terms of bandwidth, trace separation, and balanced port impedances.
Sequence of Age-Associated Changes to the Mouse Neuromuscular Junction and the Protective Effects of Voluntary Exercise

Loss of connections between motor neurons and skeletal muscle fibers contribute to motor impairment in old age, but the sequence of age-associated changes that precede loss of the neuromuscular synapse remains uncertain. Here we determine changes in the size of neuromuscular synapses within the tibialis anterior muscle across the life span of C57BL/6J mice. Immunofluorescence, confocal microscopy and morphometry were used to measure the area occupied by nerve terminal synaptophysin staining and postsynaptic acetylcholine receptors at motor endplates of 2, 14, 19, 22, 25 and 28month old mice. The key findings were: 1) At middle age (14-months) endplate acetylcholine receptors occupied 238±11 µm2 and nerve terminal synaptophysin 168±14 µm2 (mean ± SEM). 2) Between 14-months and 19-months (onset of old age) the area occupied by postsynaptic acetylcholine receptors declined 30%. At many endplates the large acetylcholine receptor plaque became fragmented into multiple smaller acetylcholine receptor clusters. 3) Between 19- and 25-months, the fraction of endplate acetylcholine receptors covered by synaptophysin fell 21%. By 28-months, half of the endplates imaged retained ≤50 µm2 area of synaptophysin staining. 4) Within aged muscles, the degree to which an endplate remained covered by synaptophysin did not depend upon the total area of acetylcholine receptors, nor upon the number of discrete receptor clusters. 5) Voluntary wheel-running exercise, beginning late in middle-age, prevented much of the age-associated loss of nerve terminal synaptophysin. In summary, a decline in the area of endplate acetylcholine receptor clusters at the onset of old age was followed by loss of nerve terminal synaptophysin from the endplate. Voluntary running exercise, begun late in middle age, substantially inhibited the loss of nerve terminal from aging motor endplates.