Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interpreting services in the Western Cape Legislature

This article investigates the standard of interpreting services in the Western Cape Provincial Legislature/Parliament to examine the concept of quality in interpreting. This study includes interviews and open-ended discussions with language practitioners, interpreters, and members of parliament. By means of a questionnaire, interpreters provided feedback on their training, working conditions, and their work experience, while the standard of the interpreting service was assessed by users of interpreting services who rated the service on eleven different levels. These different levels were derived from previous studies to connect the literature with the outcomes of the collected data. The article concludes that there is much room for improvement of the interpreting service currently provided at the provincial legislature. Furthermore, the study revealed a lack of understanding and awareness of what interpreting entails and the value of an interpreting service.
Linking tourism flows and biological biodiversity in Small Island Developing States (SIDS): evidence from panel data

Abstract Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are characterized by high levels of biodiversity that are under threat. Simultaneously, the tourism sector plays a key role in many of these economies. In this paper, the Hausman-Taylor estimator is used to investigate a tourism demand function in SIDS in which marine and terrestrial biodiversity play a key role, in addition to the traditional economic and price variables. This estimator allows for both the presence of time-invariant variables, a standard feature of environmental data, and the existence of endogenous covariates. Levels of biodiversity are found to have a significant influence on tourism in SIDS and, in particular, a test for redundant variables shows that the biodiversity variables are jointly significant. This justifies their inclusion in a tourism demand function, over and above the conventional economic factors, and points to the importance of national and international policy in protecting the biodiversity of SIDS.
Earnings differentials in Botswana's labour market: private versus public sector

The paper investigates earning differentials in the Botswana Formal Labour Market comparing the private and public sector earnings. The analytical framework used is an extension of the Mincerian earnings function and uses 2002/03 HIES data. Results show that the private sector earnings are on average more than the public sector. The human capital variables have a stronger effect on earnings determination in the private sector than the public sector and earnings differentials are higher in the private sector. All the variables have the right signs and were significant except marital status. The results imply that earnings differentials significantly contribute to the general income inequality in Botswana. Therefore any efforts towards curbing income inequalities should take into consideration the labour market policies. Efforts should be made to strengthen labour employed in the private sector through education and encouragement of unionisation and creation of more jobs.
Democratization of Deep Learning Using DARVIZ

With an abundance of research papers in deep learning, adoption and reproducibility of existing works becomes a challenge. To make a DL developer life easy, we propose a novel system, DARVIZ, to visually design a DL model using a drag-and-drop framework in an platform agnostic manner. The code could be automatically generated in both Caffe and Keras. DARVIZ could import (i) any existing Caffe code, or (ii) a research paper containing a DL design; extract the design, and present it in visual editor.
Effects of disease progression and L-dopa therapy on the control of reaching-grasping in Parkinson ’ s disease

The present study aimed to determine whether the bradykinesia of Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients during the execution of reachinggrasping movements (i) is related to an impaired implementation of movement parameters and (ii) selectively involves the control of reach and/or grasp movements. We compared the kinematics of reaching to grasp of differently sized objects placed at different positions, among PD patients in the early stage of disease (ESPD), in the advanced stage of disease (ASPD) without L-dopa medication (off-state), and in healthy c advanced s t only in the i ng responded t ough this w s, b , the BG d kinematics m rea (SMA), t ©
On the Causes of Geomagnetic Activity.

Abstract : The causes of geomagnetic activity are studied both theoretically in terms of the reconnection model and empirically using the am-index and interplanetary solar wind parameters. It is found that two separate mechanisms supply energy to the magnetosphere. One mechanism depends critically on the magnetude and direction of the interplanetary magnetic field. Both depend strongly on solar wind speed.
Enhancing RNN Based OCR by Transductive Transfer Learning From Text to Images

This paper presents a novel approach for optical character recognition (OCR) on acceleration and to avoid underfitting by text. Previously proposed OCR models typically take much time in the training phase and require large amount of labelled data to avoid underfitting. In contrast, our method does not require such condition. This is a challenging task related to transferring the character sequential relationship from text to OCR. We build a model based on transductive transfer learning to achieve domain adaptation from text to image. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on different datasets, including a general one and a relatively small one. We also compare the performance of our model with the general OCR model on different circumstances. We show that (1) our approach accelerates the training phase 20-30% on time cost; and (2) our approach can avoid underfitting while model is trained on a small dataset.
Evaluating the Use of Serum Inflammatory Markers for Preoperative Diagnosis of Infection in Patients with Nonunions

Purpose The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of laboratory serum tests in the diagnosis of infected nonunion. Methods Forty-two patients suspected of having infected nonunion were investigated in the study. The serum levels of white blood-cell count (WBC), C-reactive protein (CRP), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and interleukin-6 (IL-6) were measured. A positive diagnosis of infection was made on the basis of the positive culture results. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) of each test were calculated. Results The sensitivity and specificity of CRP both were higher than IL-6: 60.0% versus 57.1% and 85.7% versus 57.1%, respectively. With one, two, three, and four positive tests, the predicted probabilities of infection were 66.7%, 90.9%, 100%, and 100%, respectively, but the number of patients who had three or four positive tests was small. Conclusions The diagnostic utility of IL-6 is inferior to CRP and the finding conflicts with previous conclusions drawn from periprosthetic infections. Laboratory analysis of serum inflammatory markers alone is not an effective screening tool for patients suspected of having an infected nonunion.
Effects of flight activity and age on oxidative damage in the honey bee, Apis mellifera

ABSTRACT Frequent and highly aerobic behaviors likely contribute to naturally occurring stress, accelerate senescence and limit lifespan. To understand how the physiological and cellular mechanisms that determine the onset and duration of senescence are shaped by behavioral development and behavioral duration, we exploited the tractability of the honey bee (Apis mellifera) model system. First, we determined whether a cause–effect relationship exists between honey bee flight and oxidative stress by comparing oxidative damage accrued from intense flight bouts to damage accrued from d-galactose ingestion, which induces oxidative stress and limits lifespan in other insects. Second, we experimentally manipulated the duration of honey bee flight across a range of ages to determine the effects on reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation and associated enzymatic antioxidant protective mechanisms. In bees fed d-galactose, lipid peroxidation (assessed by measuring malondialdehyde levels) was higher than in bees fed sucrose and age-matched bees with a high and low number of flight experiences collected from a colony. Bees with high amounts of flight experience exhibited elevated 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanosine, a marker of oxidative DNA damage, relative to bees with less flight experience. Bees with high amounts of flight experience also showed increased levels of pro-oxidants (superoxide and hydrogen peroxide) and decreased or unchanged levels of antioxidants (superoxide dismutase and catalase). These data implicate an imbalance of pro- to anti-oxidants in flight-associated oxidative stress, and reveal how behavior can damage a cell and consequently limit lifespan. Summary: Honey bee flight induces oxidative damage and reveals a mechanism by which behavior can damage a cell.
Multi-item contests

Contests are games in which the players compete for a valuable prize by exerting effort or using resources so as to increase their probability of winning. This paper examines two player multi-item contests, a class of games in which players are faced with a decision about how much of a given resource to devote to an entire collection or sequence of different contests. Applications include multi-item rent-seeking behavior, multi-good marketing and advertising, multi-jurisdictional political contests. In these games, even when the (uncertain) outcomes in each contest are assumed to be mutually statistically independent, equilibrium efforts can exhibit strong interdependencies. Changes in either the contest success function or value of the prize in one contest usually alter the equilibrium amount of resources devoted to all contests by both players. We unify and extend results from marketing and political science, and also derive conditions under which both players exert zero effort in equilibrium in some subset of contests.
Physical Selection as Tangible User Interface

Physical browsing is an interaction paradigm that allows associating digital information with physical objects. In physical browsing, the interaction happens via a mobile terminal – such as a mobile phone or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). The links are implemented as tags that can be read with the terminal. They can be, for example, Radio Frequency Identifier (RFID) tags that are read with a mobile phone augmented with an RFID reader. The basis of physical browsing is physical selection – the interaction task with which the user tells the mobile terminal which link the user is interested in and wants to activate. After the selection, an action occurs, for example, if the tag contains a web address, the mobile phone may display the associated web page in the browser. Physical selection is thus a mobile terminal and tag based interaction technique, which is intended for interacting with the physical world and its entities. In ubiquitous computing, the physical environment is augmented with devices offering digital information and services. Ubiquitous computing can be divided into two broad categories: distributed, in which widgets with user interfaces are embedded into the environment, and mobile terminal centred, in which the user interacts with the devices with a mediator device. In both cases, an important issue in ubiquitous computing is how to interact with the devices embedded into the environment. Physical selection is a direct selection technique for choosing a target in the mobile terminal centred approach. Computer-augmented environment is a concept very similar to ubiquitous computing. The concept grew from the combination of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, but common to both approaches is the emphasis on the physical world and the tools that enhance our everyday activities. Another concept close to ubiquitous computing and computer-augmented environments is physically based user interfaces, in which the interaction is based on computationally augmented physical artefacts. Tangible user interfaces are based on tangible or graspable physical objects and are thus closely related to physically based user interfaces.
Chlamydia exploits filopodial capture and a macropinocytosis-like pathway for host cell entry

Pathogens hijack host endocytic pathways to force their own entry into eukaryotic target cells. Many bacteria either exploit receptor-mediated zippering or inject virulence proteins directly to trigger membrane reorganisation and cytoskeletal rearrangements. By contrast, extracellular C. trachomatis elementary bodies (EBs) apparently employ facets of both the zipper and trigger mechanisms and are only ~400 nm in diameter. Our cryo-electron tomography of C. trachomatis entry revealed an unexpectedly diverse array of host structures in association with invading EBs, suggesting internalisation may progress by multiple, potentially redundant routes or several sequential events within a single pathway. Here we performed quantitative analysis of actin organisation at chlamydial entry foci, highlighting filopodial capture and phagocytic cups as dominant and conserved morphological structures early during internalisation. We applied inhibitor-based screening and employed reporters to systematically assay and visualise the spatio-temporal contribution of diverse endocytic signalling mediators to C. trachomatis entry. In addition to the recognised roles of the Rac1 GTPase and its associated nucleation-promoting factor (NPF) WAVE, our data revealed an additional unrecognised pathway sharing key hallmarks of macropinocytosis: i) amiloride sensitivity, ii) fluid-phase uptake, iii) recruitment and activity of the NPF N-WASP, and iv) the localised generation of phosphoinositide-3-phosphate (PI3P) species. Given their central role in macropinocytosis and affinity for PI3P, we assessed the role of SNX-PX-BAR family proteins. Strikingly, SNX9 was specifically and transiently enriched at C. trachomatis entry foci. SNX9-/- cells exhibited a 20% defect in EB entry, which was enhanced to 60% when the cells were infected without sedimentation-induced EB adhesion, consistent with a defect in initial EB-host interaction. Correspondingly, filopodial capture of C. trachomatis EBs was specifically attenuated in SNX9-/- cells, implicating SNX9 as a central host mediator of filopodial capture early during chlamydial entry. Our findings identify an unanticipated complexity of signalling underpinning cell entry by this major human pathogen, and suggest intriguing parallels with viral entry mechanisms.
2 Representation style – just a matter of taste ?

“How might Petri nets enhance my Systems Biology toolkit? ” – this is one of the questions that we get on a regular basis, which motivated us to write an answer in the form of this paper. We discuss the extent to which the Petri net approach can be used as an umbrella formalism to support the process of BioModel Engineering. This includes the facilitation of an active and productive interaction between biomodellers and bioscientists during the construction and analysis of dynamic models of biological systems. These models play a crucial role in both Systems Biology, where they can be explanatory and predictive, and synthetic biology, where they are effectively design templates. In this paper we give an overview of the tools and techniques which have been shown to be useful so far, and describe some of the current open challenges.
Testing Efficiency of the Copper Futures Market: New Evidence from London Metal Exchange

This paper investigates the joint hypothesis of market efficiency and unbiasedness of futures prices for the copper futures contract traded on the London Metal Exchange. This contract is of particular importance given the usage and properties of the underlying commodity and its highest share of trading during the last decade, in an exchange which is the centre of the world’s trading in copper. The data contain prices from two different copper futures contracts (three and fifteen months maturity) covering the decade of 1990s, a very volatile and turbulent period for the copper market worldwide. Unlike previous studies, it tests for both long-run and short-run efficiency using cointegration and error correction model. Our results show that the market is not efficient and do not provide unbiased estimates of future copper spot prices, which has important implications for the users of this market.
Current Exposure Method for CCP's Under Basel III

Exposure-at-default is one of the most interesting and most difficult parameters to estimate in counterparty credit risk. Basel I offered only the non-internal Current Exposure Method for estimating this quantity whilst Basel II further introduced the Standardized Method and an Internal Model Method. Under new Basel III rules a central counterparty is defined as being a financial institution. New principles set out by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision forces Central Counterparties in using the Current Exposure Method when estimating the credit exposures to Clearing Member banks notwithstanding its shortcomings. The Current Exposure Method relies on the Value-at-Risk methodology and its characteristics are discussed in this note. We will particularly investigate exposures to SAFCOM, the South African clearing house and point to a mathematical discrepancy on how netting is effected through the Basel accord.
Identification of a Novel Nuclear Export Signal Sensitive to Oxidative Stress in Yeast AP‐1‐Like Transcription Factor

Leptomycin B (LMB) is an antitumor antibiotic that causes arrest of the cell cycle.1,2 Recently, it was found to inhibit nuclear export of proteins bearing nuclear export signal (NES) such as human immunodeficiency virus type I (HIV-1). 3 The target molecule of LMB in fission yeast has genetically been suggested to be CRM1, a protein structurally conserved in eukaryotes.4 CRM1 was shown to be a receptor for the leucine-rich NESs of proteins and was renamed exportin 1.5–8 We showed that LMB directly binds CRM1 and inhibits the association of CRM1 with NES-bearing proteins, resulting in the nuclear accumulation of NES-bearing proteins that should be exported to the cytoplasm.9 Therefore, LMB is a useful probe for determining the presence or absence of an NES in a protein of interest.
Ranking ideas for diversity and quality

When selecting ideas or trying to find inspiration, designers often must sift through hundreds or thousands of ideas. This paper provides an algorithm to rank design ideas such that the ranked list simultaneously maximizes the quality and diversity of recommended designs. To do so, we first define and compare two diversity measures using Determinantal Point Processes (DPP) and additive sub-modular functions. We show that DPPs are more suitable for items expressed as text and that a greedy algorithm diversifies rankings with both theoretical guarantees and empirical performance on what is otherwise an NP-Hard problem. To produce such rankings, this paper contributes a novel way to extend quality and diversity metrics from sets to permutations of ranked lists. These rank metrics open up the use of multi-objective optimization to describe trade-offs between diversity and quality in ranked lists. We use such trade-off fronts to help designers select rankings using indifference curves. However, we also show that rankings on trade-off front share a number of top-ranked items; this means reviewing items (for a given depth like the top 10) from across the entire diversity-to-quality front incurs only a marginal increase in the number of designs considered. While the proposed techniques are general purpose enough to be used across domains, we demonstrate concrete performance on selecting items in an online design community (OpenIDEO), where our approach reduces the time required to review diverse, high-quality ideas from around 25 hours to 90 minutes. This makes evaluation of crowd-generated ideas tractable for a single designer. Our code is publicly accessible for further research.
An improved advertising CTR prediction approach based on the fuzzy deep neural network

Combining a deep neural network with fuzzy theory, this paper proposes an advertising click-through rate (CTR) prediction approach based on a fuzzy deep neural network (FDNN). In this approach, fuzzy Gaussian-Bernoulli restricted Boltzmann machine (FGBRBM) is first applied to input raw data from advertising datasets. Next, fuzzy restricted Boltzmann machine (FRBM) is used to construct the fuzzy deep belief network (FDBN) with the unsupervised method layer by layer. Finally, fuzzy logistic regression (FLR) is utilized for modeling the CTR. The experimental results show that the proposed FDNN model outperforms several baseline models in terms of both data representation capability and robustness in advertising click log datasets with noise.
Information Guided Precoding for OFDM

In conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM), the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-ary modulated symbols are transmitted on a subset of subcarriers under the guidance of information bits. In this paper, a novel information guided precoding technique, called precoding aided (P-) OFDM-IM, is proposed to improve the spectral efficiency (SE) of OFDM-IM. In P-OFDM-IM, the information bits are jointly conveyed through the conventional <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-ary modulated symbols and the indices of precoding matrices and vectors. The P-OFDM-IM principle is embodied in two different implementations, P-OFDM-IM-I and P-OFDM-IM-II. Specifically, P-OFDM-IM-I divides all subcarriers into <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L$ </tex-math></inline-formula> groups and modulates them using <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L$ </tex-math></inline-formula> distinguishable constellations. P-OFDM-IM-II partitions the set of all subcarriers into <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L$ </tex-math></inline-formula> overlapping layers and performs IM layer by layer, where distinguishable constellations are employed across layers. A practical precoding strategy is designed for P-OFDM-IM under the phase shift keying/quadrature amplitude modulation constraint. A low-complexity log-likelihood ratio detector is proposed to ease the computational burden on the receiver. To evaluate the performance of P-OFDM-IM analytically, an upper bound on the bit error rate and the achievable rate is studied. Computer simulation results show that P-OFDM-IM-I outperforms the existing OFDM-IM-related schemes at high SE, while P-OFDM-IM-II performs the best at low SE.
MAPPING THE CLASSROOM INTO THE WEB: CASE STUDIES FROM SEVERAL INSTITUTIONS

The paper describes our research with a system that automatically produces web based education out of regular classroom lectures. In the classroom, the lecturer writes on a wide pen sensitive display in place of the traditional chalkboard. The system records all actions and makes it possible to replay the lecture from the web at any time. Remote students follow the lecture looking at the dynamic board content and listening to the recorded voice of the instructor. In addition to drawings, the new chalkboard handle s a range of multimedia elements from the Internet. Using handwriting recognition, mathematical expressions can be evaluated and functions can be plotted immediately on the board. Since the first release in early 2002, we have gained practical experiences with different use cases and scenarios which we present in this paper.