Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Outsourcing and Volatility

While outsourcing of production from the U.S. to Mexico has been hailed in Mexico as a valuable engine of growth, recently there have been misgivings regarding its fickleness and volatility. This paper is among the first in the trade literature to study the second moment properties of outsourcing. We begin by documenting a new stylized fact: the maquiladora outsourcing industries in Mexico experience fluctuations in value added that are roughly twice as volatile as the corresponding industries in the U.S. A difference-in-difference method is extended to second moments to verify the statistical significance of this finding. We then develop a stochastic model of outsourcing with heterogeneous firms that can explain this volatility. The model employs two novel mechanisms: an extensive margin in outsourcing which responds endogenously to transmit shocks internationally, and translog preferences which modulate firm entry.
Global Arrays: a portable "shared-memory" programming model for distributed memory computers

Portability, efficiency and ease of coding are all important considerations in choosing the programming model for a scalable parallel application. The message-passing programming model is widely used because of its portability, yet some applications are too complex to code in it while also trying to maintain a balanced computation load and avoid redundant computations. The shared-memory programming model simplifies coding, but it is not portable and often provides little control over interprocessor data transfer costs. This paper describes a new approach, called Global Arrays (GA) that combines the better features of both other models, leading to both simple coding and efficient execution. The key concept of GA is that it provides a portable interface through which each process in a MIMD parallel program can asynchronously access logical blocks of physically distributed matrices, with no need for explicit cooperation by other processes. We have implemented GA libraries on a variety of computer systems, including the Intel DELTA and Paragon, the IBM SP-1 (all message-passers), the Kendall Square KSR-2 (a nonuniform access shared-memory machine), and networks of Unix workstations. We discuss the design and implementation of these libraries, report their performance, illustrate the use of GA in the context of computational chemistry applications, and describe the use of a GA performance visualization tool. <<ETX>>
The SAS Statistical Machine Translation System for WAT 2014

This paper is a description of the techniques and experiment results by SAS Institute Inc in WAT 2014 evaluation cam-paign. We participate in two subtasks of WAT 2014: the Chinese to Japanese track and the English to Japanese track. Our baseline system is MOSES statistical machine translation toolkit. We propose syntactic reordering approaches for English to Japanese and Chinese to Japanese translation which transform the order of source sentence into the target-like order. In addition, we apply the segmentation tool in SAS® Text Miner to enhance the translation results. Several contrastive experiments are presented based on the automatic evaluation results.
A role for TGF-beta in oligodendrocyte differentiation

Oligodendrocyte-type-2 astrocyte (O-2A) glial progenitor cells undergo a limited number of mitotic divisions in response to PDGF before differentiating into oligodendrocytes, the myelin-forming cell of the CNS. We examined the mechanism limiting O-2A proliferation, and demonstrate that these cells secrete an inhibitor of cell proliferation that can be neutralized with antibodies to TGF-beta. O-2A cells also secrete an inhibitory activity that cannot be neutralized with TGF-beta antibodies. O-2A progenitor cultures express TGF-beta 1 isoform and its transcript, while oligodendrocyte cultures express TGF-beta 1, beta-2, and beta-3 isoforms. Both recombinant TGF-beta 1 and O-2A conditioned medium inhibit the proliferation of O-2A progenitor cells cultured in the presence of PDGF, and this inhibition can be partially neutralized with polyclonal TGF-beta antibodies. Thus, TGF-beta produced by O-2A cells may limit PDGF-driven mitosis and promote oligodendrocyte development. TGF-beta is a less potent inhibitor of O-2A proliferation when these cells are cultured in the presence of bFGF, suggesting that bFGF interferes with TGF-beta signaling. Thus, the production of TGF- beta by cells in the O-2A lineage may account for the distinct effects of PDGF and bFGF on O-2A progenitor cell proliferation. Moreover, our results suggest that TGF-beta may be an important mediator of oligodendrocyte differentiation.
Using Dependence Graphs for Slicing Functional Programs Extended Abstract

One of the popular ways to perform automated analysis of programs is by manipulating slices — reduced executable programs derived from the originals by removing some steps in such a way that they replicate parts of the original behaviour [18]. Such slices are useful for debugging and comprehension, refactoring and restructuring, reverse engineering and maintenance, model checking, as well as other tasks related to similar problems. At the core of this family of methods are the slicing strategies (backward slicing [18], forward slicing [8], as well as other variations [19], including higher-order lazy functional slicing [13]) and the base data structures. In rare cases analysis, slicing and transformation are performed directly on abstract syntax trees enriched with annotations [3]. However, it is more productive to operate on a data structure specifically designed to facilitate these tasks. Many such structures were proposed in the last three decades:
Use-centric mining of customer reviews

Prior research involving customer reviews focuses on individual consumers and/or specific products. By contrast, use-centric mining aggregates over all reviews for all products in a category. Specifically, we induce a category-specific ontology from reviews and use that ontology to automatically extract product features and uses. We then use frequent-item sets to match product uses with product features. For example, what features do reviews suggest are important when purchasing a digital camera for travel? Use-centric mining may lead to recommendations based upon the correspondence between features and applications. In this paper, we focus on feature extraction and use-centric mining. We report preliminary results from a database of more than 300 digital camera customer reviews.
The Cultural Part of Cognition

This paper discusses the role of cultural anthropology in Cognitive Science. Culture is described as a very large pool of information passed along from generation to generation, composed of learned “programs” for action and understanding. These cultural programs differ in important ways from computer programs. Cultural programs tend to be unspecified and inexplicit rather than clearly stated algorithms learned through a slow process of guided discovery, and involve the manipulation of content based rather than formal symbol systems. Cultural symbol systems often have affective as well as objective referents, giving them a strong directive effect. The argument is made that in the process of repeated social transmission and use, cultural programs come to take forms which have a good “fit” to the natural capacities and constraints of the human information processing system.
Energy efficient building climate control using Stochastic Model Predictive Control and weather predictions

One of the most critical challenges facing society today is climate change and thus the need to realize massive energy savings. Since buildings account for about 40% of global final energy use, energy efficient building climate control can have an important contribution. In this paper we develop and analyze a Stochastic Model Predictive Control (SMPC) strategy for building climate control that takes into account weather predictions to increase energy efficiency while respecting constraints resulting from desired occupant comfort. We investigate a bilinear model under stochastic uncertainty with probabilistic, time varying constraints. We report on the assessment of this control strategy in a large-scale simulation study where the control performance with different building variants and under different weather conditions is studied. For selected cases the SMPC approach is analyzed in detail and shown to significantly outperform current control practice.
Distinguishing the Master to Defend DDoS Attack in Peer-to-Peer Networks

In Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks a malicious peer can control the direction of the traffic after it controls lots of bots. This paper focus on defending Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in P2P networks by selecting the most active peer with its credit values which is recorded in a period of Credit Construction time. The Credit values can be updated in the lest period. We propose Scheduler to compute local credit values and maintain the global trust relationships. In order to assess the effectiveness of the above techniques, we extend Sybil attack and DDoS attack in simulator tool named p2psim-0.3 and implement distinguishing master and updating credit algorithms. Although we adopt tapestry protocol and Euclidean topology to implement the algorithms, the same methodology can be applied to other DHT (Distributed Hash Table)_based lookup protocols in P2P networks and topologies as well.
A New Calculation of the Recombination Epoch

We have developed an improved recombination calculation of H, He I, and He II in the early universe that involves a line-by-line treatment of each atomic level. We find two major differences compared with previous calculations. First, the ionization fraction xe is approximately 10% smaller for redshifts ≲800 because of nonequilibrium processes in the excited states of H. Second, He I recombination is much slower than previously thought, and it is delayed until just before H recombines. We describe the basic physics behind the new results and present a simple way to reproduce our calculation. This should enable a fast computation of the ionization history (and of the quantities such as the power spectrum of cosmic microwave background anisotropies that depend on it) for arbitrary cosmologies, without the need to consider the hundreds of atomic levels used in our complete model.
Various Techniques for Activity Recognition : An Overview

The Information Technology today has influenced every aspect of human life and its newest impact has been in the field of Smart Home Environment for providing better proactive services to its inhabitants. In such a scenario, predicting the next event that is to occur is a very important factor wherein comes the play of our Activity Recognition. In this paper, different types of technique for Activity Recognition have been studied and the advances of work in a particular technique have been discussed and the advances made by researchers in making the activity recognition algorithm better has also been discussed.
Information Retrieval using probability and belief theory

This paper presents two approaches for Information Retrieval (IR) from a collection of documents: Bayesian theory of probability and Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions. Each method has been supported with essential derivations to prove their suitability for IR. The conclusions of derivations have been applied in illustrative examples. Finally, comparison of both the methods suggests the suitability of each for specific domains.
Generalized Cores

The notion of core was introduced by Seidman in 1983 [Seidman 1983; Wasserman and Faust 1994]. Let G = (V, L) be a simple graph. V is the set of vertices and L is the set of lines (edges or arcs). We will denote n = |V | and m = |L|. A subgraph H = (C, L|C) induced by the set C ⊆ V is a k-core or a core of order k iff ∀v ∈ C : degH(v) ≥ k and H is a maximum subgraph with this property. The core of maximum order is also called the main core. The core number of vertex v is the highest order of a core that contains this vertex. Since the set C determines the corresponding core H we also often call it a core. The degree deg(v) can be the number of neighbors in an undirected graph or in-degree, out-degree, in-degree + out-degree, . determining different types of cores. The cores have the following important properties:
Origins of cell-to-cell variability, kinetic proof-reading and the robustness of MAPK signal transduction

Cellular signalling processes can exhibit pronounced cell-to-cell variability in genetically identical cells. This affects how individual cells respond differentially to the same environmental stimulus. However, the origins of cell-to-cell variability in cellular signalling systems remain poorly understood. Here we measure the temporal evolution of phosphorylated MEK and ERK dynamics across populations of cells and quantify the levels of population heterogeneity over time using high-throughput image cytometry. We use a statistical modelling framework to show that upstream noise is the dominant factor causing cell-to-cell variability in ERK phosphorylation, rather than stochasticity in the phosphorylation/dephosphorylation of ERK. In particular, the cell-to-cell variability during sustained phosphorylation stems from random fluctuations in the background upstream signalling processes, while during transient phosphorylation, the heterogeneity is primarily due to noise in the intensity of the upstream signal(s). We show that the core MEK/ERK system uses kinetic proof-reading to faithfully and robustly transmits these variable inputs. The MAPK cascade thus propagates cell-to-cell variability at the population level, rather than attenuating or increasing it.
Monitoring crowd condition in public spaces by tracking mobile consumer devices with wifi interface

We present a systematic study and optimization of crowd monitoring methods based on tracking consumer devices with activated WiFi/Bluetooth interfaces using stationary scanners with directional antennas. To this end we have recorded a large scale, real life data set from a car manufacturers exhibition at the Frankfurt Motor Show IAA that includes data from 31 directional scanners covering a total area of 6000m2 running for 13 business days and providing nearly 90 million data points from a total of over 300000 unique mobile devices. For seven of the 13 days video ground truth has been recorded and extensively annotated. Questions that we addressed include the mapping from the number of detected devices to the number of people, the ability to generalize the calibration from a small number of ground truth points recorded on one day to other days and the ability to localize individuals in different conditions. Our methods show less than 20% error for the crowd density and less than 8 m localization error for individuals.
The Association between the Cross-Sectional Area of the Dural Sac and Low Back Pain in a Large Population: The Wakayama Spine Study

Objective The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relations between the degree of encroachment, measured as the cross-sectional area of the dural sac, and low back pain in a large population. Methods In this cross-sectional study, data from 802 participants (247 men, 555 women; mean age, 63.5 years) were analyzed. The measurement of the cross-sectional area of the dural sac from the level of L1/2 to L4/5 was taken using axial T2-weighted images. The minimum cross-sectional area was defined as the cross-sectional area of the dural sac at the most constricted level in the examined spine. Participants were divided into three groups according to minimum cross-sectional area measurement quartiles (less than the first quartile, between the first and third quartiles, and greater than the third quartile). A multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to estimate the association between the minimum cross-sectional area and the prevalence of low back pain. Results The mean minimum cross-sectional area was 117.3 mm2 (men: 114.4 mm2; women: 118.6 mm2). A logistic regression analysis adjusted for age, sex, body mass index, and other confounding factors, including disc degeneration, showed that a narrow minimum cross-sectional area (smaller than the first quartile) was significantly associated with low back pain (odds ratio, 1.78; 95% confidence interval, 1.13–2.80 compared to the wide minimum cross-sectional area group: minimum cross-sectional area greater than the third quartile measured). Conclusion This study showed that a narrow dural sac cross-sectional area was significantly associated with the presence of low back pain after adjustment for age, sex, and body mass index. Further investigations that include additional radiographic findings and psychological factors will continue to elucidate the causes of low back pain.
An Approach to the Analysis of the South Slavic Medieval Labels Using Image Texture

The paper presents a new script classification method for the discrimination of the South Slavic medieval labels. It consists in the textural analysis of the script types. In the first step, each letter is coded by the equivalent script type, which is defined by its typographical features. Obtained coded text is subjected to the run-length statistical analysis and to the adjacent local binary pattern analysis in order to extract the features. The result shows a diversity between the extracted features of the scripts, which makes the feature classification more effective. It is the basis for the classification process of the script identification by using an extension of a state-of-the-art approach for document clustering. The proposed method is evaluated on an example of hand-engraved in stone and hand-printed in paper labels in old Cyrillic, angular and round Glagolitic. Experiments demonstrate very positive results, which prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Isoform Composition and Gene Expression of Thick and Thin Filament Proteins in Striated Muscles of Mice after 30-Day Space Flight

Changes in isoform composition, gene expression of titin and nebulin, and isoform composition of myosin heavy chains as well as changes in titin phosphorylation level in skeletal (m. gastrocnemius, m. tibialis anterior, and m. psoas) and cardiac muscles of mice were studied after a 30-day-long space flight onboard the Russian spacecraft “BION-M” number 1. A muscle fibre-type shift from slow-to-fast and a decrease in the content of titin and nebulin in the skeletal muscles of animals from “Flight” group was found. Using Pro-Q Diamond staining, an ~3-fold increase in the phosphorylation level of titin in m. gastrocnemius of mice from the “Flight” group was detected. The content of titin and its phosphorylation level in the cardiac muscle of mice from “Flight” and “Control” groups did not differ; nevertheless an increase (2.2 times) in titin gene expression in the myocardium of flight animals was found. The observed changes are discussed in the context of their role in the contractile activity of striated muscles of mice under conditions of weightlessness.
Implementation a HERIC inverter prototype connected to the grid controlled by SOGI-FLL

This paper presents a feasible implementation of a single phase inverter prototype via a Highly Efficient and Reliable Inverter Concept (HERIC) topology, which is connected to the grid through a phase and frequency synchronization system by means of a Second Order Generalized Integrator - Frequency Locked Loop (SOGI-FLL). The chosen topology for the inverter design-unlike a full H-bridge (FB) inverter-incorporates two transistors in the output aimed at preventing reactive power transfer between the output filter and input capacitor when zero-crossing. Furthermore, proposed inverter implementation presents low leakage currents, and increases HERIC system efficiency. Moreover, the SOGI-FLL chosen for connecting the HERIC inverter to the grid provides - even under harmonic distortion - a fast and accurate frequency tracking. The prototype implementation can be divided into two parts: First, the power inverter HERIC is implemented, which holds four transistors MOSFET IRF730 (400V-10A) in a FB topology, as well as two IGBT transistors GP10NC60KD (600V-10A). In addition, in order to protect all the devices and ensure a well transistor conmmuation, four diodes type SF54 (200V-5A) are located between emisor and collector from all transistors. Second, the synchronization system is implemented on an Arduino Due digital platform.
Hypothalamic ERK Mediates the Anorectic and Thermogenic Sympathetic Effects of Leptin

OBJECTIVE—Leptin is an adipocyte hormone that plays a major role in energy balance. Leptin receptors in the hypothalamus are known to signal via distinct mechanisms, including signal transducer and activator of transcription-3 (STAT3) and phosphoinositol-3 kinase (PI 3-kinase). Here, we tested the hypothesis that extracellular signal–regulated kinase (ERK) is mediating leptin action in the hypothalamus. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—Biochemical, pharmacological, and physiological approaches were combined to characterize leptin activation of ERK in the hypothalamus in rats. RESULTS—Leptin activates ERK1/2 in a receptor-mediated manner that involves JAK2. Leptin-induced ERK1/2 activation was restricted to the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus. Pharmacological blockade of hypothalamic ERK1/2 reverses the anorectic and weight-reducing effects of leptin. The pharmacological antagonists of ERK1/2 did not attenuate leptin-induced activation of STAT3 or PI 3-kinase. Blockade of ERK1/2 abolishes leptin-induced increases in sympathetic nerve traffic to thermogenic brown adipose tissue (BAT) but does not alter the stimulatory effects of leptin on sympathetic nerve activity to kidney, hindlimb, or adrenal gland. In contrast, blockade of PI 3-kinase prevents leptin-induced sympathetic activation to kidney but not to BAT, hindlimb, or adrenal gland. CONCLUSIONS—Our findings indicate that hypothalamic ERK plays a key role in the control of food intake, body weight, and thermogenic sympathetic outflow by leptin but does not participate in the cardiovascular and renal sympathetic actions of leptin.
Mesh Segmentation by Local Depth

In this paper, we propose a novel segmentation algorithm based on the local depth, a new measure for capturing the geometrical feature of 3D boundary points. Compared to the curvature feature, the local depth has two advantages: 1) The local depth is in itself defined on a discrete space, while the curvature is defined on a smooth space. Thus, the local depth is more suitable for capturing the geometrical feature of partial boundary on unsmooth 3D surface. 2) The local depth considers a wider range of geometry information than the curvature does, hence it avoids discovering some false boundary, and is able to find more boundaries that the curvature. Based on the local depth, we then introduce the Fast Marching Watersheds algorithm [13] to segment a mesh into representative regions.