Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A latent class analysis of sexual and romantic relationships among HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay and bisexual men in Vancouver

Quantitative studies of gay and bisexual men have often reduced relational experiences to single dimensions and explored linkages with sexual risk behaviours. We sought to document the intersection of multiple relationship dimensions among 218 HIV-positive and 556 HIV-negative gay and bisexual men, and estimate associations with love and affection as well as various health and social covariates. We performed latent class analysis of relationships, employing five indicators: relationship status, sexual agreement (monogamous/open), and number of recent sex partners, sex parties, and anonymous sex encounters. We assessed differences in love and affection, and identified covariates using multinomial logistic regression. Two latent classes involved single men: 'single, less sex partners' (45% of sample) and 'single, more sex partners' (17%), differentiated by number of partners (52% vs. 92% of each class had ≥5 partners, respectively), party sex (3% vs. 57%), and anonymous sex (2% vs. 58%). Three involved regular partners: 'monogamish' (15%) (78% were monogamous yet 50% reported ≥1 recent sex partner); 'open, less sex partners' (15%) (100% open, 43% ≥5 partners, 10% party sex, 4% anonymous sex); and 'open, more sex partners' (9%) (96% open, 92% ≥5 partners, 47% party sex, 69% anonymous sex). Love and affection were common across classes, although more prevalent among partnered (85–91%) versus single (48–51%) men. Relative to 'single/less partners,' the study demonstrated that higher sexual sensation seeking scores were associated with membership in every class except 'monogamish'; erectile dysfunction drug use was associated with being in the 'more partners' (single and open) classes; anxiety and older age were associated with the 'open/less partners' class; and loneliness was associated with reduced odds of membership in all three partnered classes. We uncovered considerable relational diversity among gay and bisexual men and complex associations with love and wellbeing. Findings are relevant for sex researchers, educators, and therapists.
Teacher evaluation in Chile: highlights and complexities in 13 years of experience

Abstract The paper examines the process of establishing a teacher evaluation system in Chile and its acceptance by teachers over time. The conceptual base upon which the system was established is described. Evidence is also examined from a variety of data sources and research related to the evaluation system as well as teachers’ use of its results. This evidence includes information from an external review of the system noting tensions between the formative versus accountability purposes of the evaluation system and that are being attended to in the new Teacher Professional Development Law (2016).
Imaging Systems for Advanced Underwater Vehicles

Exploration of the underwater environment either by human operated or by autonomous vehicles can highly benefit from using a visual imaging system. When a vision system for an underwater vehicle has to be designed, some specific characteristics of the image formation in sub-sea conditions should be taken into account. This paper presents an extensive survey of components, techniques and methods used to build underwater vision systems. First, most of the phenomena that affect the image formation in submersed conditions are described; second, some significant illumination techniques and light sources, including laser, are presented; and third, the review follows with a list of relevant underwater visual installations and submarine vehicles with vision-based infrastructures recently developed and commercially available. Furthermore, the paper finally introduces some techniques for improving the quality of underwater images. Among all these techniques, a special attention has been paid to the effect of employing polarized light to overcome the undesired scatter present in images. This last section includes some experiments carried out by the authors to test the usefulness of polarization-based methods in robotic applications.
Optical Photometry of the Type Ia Supernova 1999ee and the Type Ib/c Supernova 1999ex in IC 5179

We present UBVRIz light curves of the Type Ia SN 1999ee and the Type Ib/c SN 1999ex, both located in the galaxy IC 5179. SN 1999ee has an extremely well-sampled light curve spanning from 10 days before Bmax through 53 days after peak. Near maximum, we find systematic differences of ∼0.05 mag in photometry measured with two different telescopes, even though the photometry is reduced to the same local standards around the supernova using the specific color terms for each instrumental system. We use models for our bandpasses and spectrophotometry of SN 1999ee to derive magnitude corrections (S-corrections) and remedy this problem. This exercise demonstrates the need of accurately characterizing the instrumental system before great photometric accuracies of Type Ia supernovae can be claimed. It also shows that this effect can have important astrophysical consequences, since a small systematic shift of 0.02 mag in the B-V color can introduce a 0.08 mag error in the extinction-corrected peak B magnitude of a supernova and thus lead to biased cosmological parameters. The data for the Type Ib/c SN 1999ex present us with the first ever observed shock breakout of a supernova of this class. These observations show that shock breakout occurred 18 days before Bmax and support the idea that Type Ib/c supernovae are due to the core collapse of massive stars rather than thermonuclear disruption of white dwarfs.
MUHIT: A Multilingual Harmonized Dictionary

This paper discusses a trial to build a multilingual harmonized dictionary that contains more than 40 languages, with special reference to Arabic which represents about 20% of the whole size of the dictionary. This dictionary is called MUHIT which is an interactive multilingual dictionary application. It is a web application that makes it easily accessible to all users. MUHIT is developed within the Universal Networking Language (UNL) framework by the UNDL Foundation, in cooperation with Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA). This application targets to serve specialists and non-specialists. It provides users with full linguistic description to each lexical item. This free application is useful to many NLP tasks such as multilingual translation and cross-language synonym search. This dictionary is built depending on WordNet and corpus based approaches, in a specially designed linguistic environment called UNLariam that is developed by the UNLD foundation. This dictionary is the first launched application by the UNLD foundation.
Tabu Search Solution for Resource Confidence Considered Partner Selection Problem in Cross-Enterprise Project

Cross-enterprise project is the main implementation form in multi enterprises collaborative production environment. Minimizing the risk of failure and tardiness caused by the uncertainty of partner’s resources in partner selection is the key problem to ensure success in Cross-enterprise project. In this paper, considering the factors and constraints of sub-project processing times, precedence of sub-project and project due date, especially the resource confidence, a 0-1 integer programming model was presented with the objective to minimize the risk of failure and the tardiness of the project. A project scheduling algorithm was designed to search and evaluate selection solutions, and the project scheduling algorithm was embedded into a Tabu search algorithm to solve the model. Simulation experiments and comparisons with other algorithms showed that the proposed approach was possible to find the optimal solution with a faster speed and higher probability.
An image inpainting technique based on illumination variation and structure consistency

Image inpainting is that restores the damaged region of interest by user specified or removes areas in an image. For the purpose of patching up automatically, filling in large-sized damaged areas in the image, and lowering down the operation complexity, we design an exemplar-based image inpainting as our main framework. In order to keep the structure consistency between the damaged areas and the non-damaged areas, we redefine two factors, confidence and variation, which use to determine the priority of the filling order of target (damaged) regions. With these two newly defined factors, we propose a dynamic rule to choose the best target region and the suitable patch size in each filling step. To solve the challenging problem of repairing structure in image completion, we introduce a novel image completion approach based on automatic salient structure propagation. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach can make an effective inpainting and visual quality.
Beating Exhaustive Search for Quantified Boolean Formulas and Connections to Circuit Complexity

We study algorithms for the satisfiability problem for quantified Boolean formulas (QBFs), and consequences of faster algorithms for circuit complexity. • We show that satisfiability of quantified 3-CNFs with m clauses, n variables, and two quantifier blocks (one existential block and one universal) can be solved deterministically in time 2n−Ω([EQUATION]n) · poly(m). For the case of multiple quantifier blocks (alternations), we show that satisfiability of quantified CNFs of size poly(n) on n variables with q quantifier blocks can be solved in 2n-n1/(q+1) · poly(n) time by a zero-error randomized algorithm. These are the first provable improvements over brute force search in the general case, even for quantified polynomial-sized CNFs with two quantifier blocks. A second zero-error randomized algorithm solves QBF on circuits of size s in 2n-Ω(q) · poly(s) time when the number of quantifier blocks is q. • We complement these algorithms by showing that improvements on them would imply new circuit complexity lower bounds. For example, if satisfiability of quantified CNF formulas with n variables, poly(n) size and at most q quantifier blocks can be solved in time 2n−nwq(1/q), then the complexity class NEXP does not have O(log n) depth circuits of polynomial size. Furthermore, solving satisfiability of quantified CNF formulas with n variables, poly(n) size and O(log n) quantifier blocks in time 2n−w(log(n)) time would imply the same circuit complexity lower bound. The proofs of these results proceed by establishing strong relationships between the time complexity of QBF satisfiability over CNF formulas and the time complexity of QBF satisfiability over arbitrary Boolean formulas.
Bribecaster : Documenting Bribes Through Community Participation by Manas Mittal Research Project

Corruption is endemic in emerging economies – many transactions of private citizens with government institutions require the payment of bribes. While well known as a general phenomenon, specific data about the “bribe economy” is hard to come by. But such data is needed for rational responses to corruption at the societal and individual level – to expose it; to know which offices to avoid; or to know how much to pay if other recourse is not available. In response to a corruption survey of 102 participants, we have developed Bribecaster, a web application and an Android app to enable citizens to report and consume corruption information about dealing with government offices. Bribecaster uses a novel privacypreserving implicit login schema and one-way hashing for protecting user identities while simultaneously ensuring the accuracy and integrity of reports. This citizen-induced transparency facilitates rational social and individual responses to corruption. Participants in a first-use user study rated Bribecaster highly for its usefulness.
PMUs placement with max-flow min-cut communication constraint in smart grids

Synchronized phasor measurement units (PMUs) play an important role in the process of monitoring, controlling, and protection of today's smart grid networks. Therefore, a strategic placement of these PMUs is essential to perform these tasks. Previous studies in this area mostly concentrate on minimizing the total number of PMUs while maintaining the system fully observable in various contingency situations. However, most of them neglect the communication constraints among PMUs, e.g., the finite communication capacity1 available when using power line communications (PLC) among PMUs. In this paper, we introduce two different formulations to solve the problem of optimal PMUs placement (OPP), while taking into consideration a communication constraint for the case where the communication between the PMUs and the control center is established via wired power lines. Therefore, there will be a constraint on the max-flow min-cut in the wired smart grid model. In the first formulation, we find the best location or bus in the grid for the controller to be located in order to support the communication max-flow min-cut constraint. In the second formulation, we fix the controller at a certain bus and find the optimal solution that maintains the networks full observability and also satisfies the communication max-flow min-cut constraint. We also apply our formulations to different IEEE standard bus systems, and our results reveal that there are some buses at which we should avoid placing the controller, and the solution of the conventional OPP problem may not support the max-flow min-cut constraint.
Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing 2015 Fast and Exact (poisson) Solvers on Symmetric Geometries M.kazhdan / Fast and Exact (poisson) Solvers on Symmetric Geometries

Figure 1: Applications of our solver: (top) spherical image stitching, followed by Laplacian sharpening, (middle) successive frames of incompressible fluid simulation on a surface of revolution, and (bottom) successive frames of wave propagation on a surface of revolution with angular boundary. Abstract In computer graphics, numerous geometry processing applications reduce to the solution of a Poisson equation. When considering geometries with symmetry, a natural question to consider is whether and how the symmetry can be leveraged to derive an efficient solver for the underlying system of linear equations. In this work we provide a simple representation-theoretic analysis that demonstrates how symmetries of the geometry translate into block diagonalization of the linear operators and we show how this results in efficient linear solvers for surfaces of revolution with and without angular boundaries.
Correcting Serial Grammatical Errors based on N-grams and Syntax

In this paper, we present a new method based on machine translation for correcting serial grammatical errors in a given sentence in learners' writing. In our approach, translation models are generated to translate the input into a grammatical sentence. The method involves automatically learning two translation models that are based on Web-scale n-grams. The first model translates trigrams containing serial preposition-verb errors into correct ones. The second model is a back-off model, used in the case where the trigram is not found in the training data. At run-time, the phrases in the input are matched and translated, and ranking is performed on all possible translations to produce a corrected sentence as output. Evaluation on a set of sentences in a learner corpus shows that the method corrects serial errors reasonably well. Our methodology exploits the state-of-the art in machine translation, resulting in an effective system that can deal with many error types at the same time.
Evolutionary MCMC Sampling and Optimization in Discrete Spaces

The links between genetic algorithms and population-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are explored. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are well-known for their capability to optimize functions of discrete-valued variables, but the MCMC interpretation allows GA variants to be used for sampling discrete spaces (e.g. in Bayesian inference for machine learning). The GA crossover and mutation operators are modified to provide valid MCMC samples, and a new "exclusive-or" operator is introduced as an alternative way to recombine population members. This is shown to improve sampling performance in a medical diagnostic problem domain. The sampler can also be used within simulated annealing to provide a global optimizer that is similar to a GA in structure but has known convergence properties.
A structure-exploiting numbering algorithm for finite elements on extruded meshes, and its performance evaluation in Firedrake

Abstract. We present a generic algorithm for numbering and then efficiently iterating over the data values attached to an extruded mesh. An extruded mesh is formed by replicating an existing mesh, assumed to be unstructured, to form layers of prismatic cells. Applications of extruded meshes include, but are not limited to, the representation of three-dimensional high aspect ratio domains employed by geophysical finite element simulations. These meshes are structured in the extruded direction. The algorithm presented here exploits this structure to avoid the performance penalty traditionally associated with unstructured meshes. We evaluate the implementation of this algorithm in the Firedrake finite element system on a range of low compute intensity operations which constitute worst cases for data layout performance exploration. The experiments show that having structure along the extruded direction enables the cost of the indirect data accesses to be amortized after 10–20 layers as long as the underlying mesh is well ordered. We characterize the resulting spatial and temporal reuse in a representative set of both continuous-Galerkin and discontinuous-Galerkin discretizations. On meshes with realistic numbers of layers the performance achieved is between 70 and 90 % of a theoretical hardware-specific limit.
Deaths and Medical Visits Attributable to Environmental Pollution in the United Arab Emirates

Background This study estimates the potential health gains achievable in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with improved controls on environmental pollution. The UAE is an emerging economy in which population health risks have shifted rapidly from infectious diseases to chronic conditions observed in developed nations. The UAE government commissioned this work as part of an environmental health strategic planning project intended to address this shift in the nature of the country’s disease burden. Methods and Findings We assessed the burden of disease attributable to six environmental exposure routes outdoor air, indoor air, drinking water, coastal water, occupational environments, and climate change. For every exposure route, we integrated UAE environmental monitoring and public health data in a spatially resolved Monte Carlo simulation model to estimate the annual disease burden attributable to selected pollutants. The assessment included the entire UAE population (4.5 million for the year of analysis). The study found that outdoor air pollution was the leading contributor to mortality, with 651 attributable deaths (95% confidence interval [CI] 143–1,440), or 7.3% of all deaths. Indoor air pollution and occupational exposures were the second and third leading contributors to mortality, with 153 (95% CI 85–216) and 46 attributable deaths (95% CI 26–72), respectively. The leading contributor to health-care facility visits was drinking water pollution, to which 46,600 (95% CI 15,300–61,400) health-care facility visits were attributed (about 15% of the visits for all the diseases considered in this study). Major study limitations included (1) a lack of information needed to translate health-care facility visits to quality-adjusted-life-year estimates and (2) insufficient spatial coverage of environmental data. Conclusions Based on international comparisons, the UAE’s environmental disease burden is low for all factors except outdoor air pollution. From a public health perspective, reducing pollutant emissions to outdoor air should be a high priority for the UAE’s environmental agencies.
Instrumentos para Rastreamento de Sinais Precoces do Autismo: Revisão Sistemática

O rastreamento dos sinais precoces do autismo e crucial para um diagnostico tambem precoce, viabilizando uma intervencao efetiva que possibilite a melhora no desenvolvimento e na qualidade de vida do individuo com autismo. O objetivo deste estudo foi identificar os instrumentos disponiveis para rastreamento dos sinais do autismo em criancas com ate 36 meses de idade. Para tanto, foi conduzida uma revisao de artigos publicados entre 2004 e 2015 nas bases de dados eletronicas SciELO, PubMed, Psy-cINFO e Lilacs. Foram encontrados 11 instrumentos em 34 artigos analisados, sendo que apenas um instrumento foi traduzido para o portugues, o que indica uma escassez desses instrumentos no Brasil. Considerando a relevância da identificacao e do diagnostico precoce do autismo para a melhoria da qualidade de vida do sujeito, acredita-se que e essencial que estudos sobre instrumentos para rastreamento precoce sejam conduzidos no pais.
Cryopreservation of GABAergic Neuronal Precursors for Cell-Based Therapy

Cryopreservation protocols are essential for stem cells storage in order to apply them in the clinic. Here we describe a new standardized cryopreservation protocol for GABAergic neural precursors derived from the medial glanglionic eminence (MGE), a promising source of GABAergic neuronal progenitors for cell therapy against interneuron-related pathologies. We used 10% Me2SO as cryoprotectant and assessed the effects of cell culture amplification and cellular organization, as in toto explants, neurospheres, or individualized cells, on post-thaw cell viability and retrieval. We confirmed that in toto cryopreservation of MGE explants is an optimal preservation system to keep intact the interneuron precursor properties for cell transplantation, together with a high cell viability (>80%) and yield (>70%). Post-thaw proliferation and self-renewal of the cryopreserved precursors were tested in vitro. In addition, their migration capacity, acquisition of mature neuronal morphology, and potency to differentiate into multiple interneuron subtypes were also confirmed in vivo after transplantation. The results show that the cryopreserved precursor features remained intact and were similar to those immediately transplanted after their dissection from the MGE. We hope this protocol will facilitate the generation of biobanks to obtain a permanent and reliable source of GABAergic precursors for clinical application in cell-based therapies against interneuronopathies.
Construction of Phylogenetic Trees from Amino Acid Sequences using a Genetic Algorithm

We have developed a novel algorithm to search for the maximum likelihood tree constructed from amino acid sequences. This algorithm is a variant of genetic algorithms which uses scores derived from the log-likelihood of trees computed by the maximum likelihood method. This algorithm is valuable since it may construct more likely tree from randomly generated trees by utilizing crossover and mutation operators. In a test of our algorithm on a data set of elongation factor-1 sequences, we found that the performance of our algorithm is comparable to that of other tree-construction methods (UPGMA, the neighbor-joining and the maximum parsimony methods; and the maximum likelihood method with di erent search algorithms).