Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improvement of transmission utilization and efficiency using new generation of power routers

New technologies for controlling power flow in electric networks have been developed in past few years. The new technologies are simpler, more compact and lower cost than the traditional power flow controllers such as phase shifters transformers, HVDC and FACTS devices. Such characteristics make them attractive for a variety of applications in transmission, subtransmission and distribution networks. This paper studies the use of these new power routers to increase transmission capacity and flexibility of the transmission grid, and consequently improve the utilization of the existing assets. A framework developed by Electric Power Research Institute for estimating benefits and cost of smart grid projects are used as a reference to assess the various benefits affecting different stakeholders. Two case studies performed for actual regional transmission networks of the Argentinean electric system are presented.
Who Wants What's Hot? Popularity Profiles and Customer Value

Online content aggregators such as DVD-rental companies offer their customers a wide selection of products, ranging from the most popular to the most obscure. Although there has been a sharp debate about the demand for niche products in the “long tail” of an aggregator’s library, leading to questions around optimal strategies, research has not linked the consumption of popular and obscure offerings to customers’ value to the firm. We propose that firms can use information on “who wants what’s hot” (and what’s not) to assess which customers are the most valuable and which are at the greatest risk for defecting. Using data from an online DVD-rental company, we present a joint model of the time until customers begin service, their consumption of titles of varying degrees of popularity, and the duration for which they maintain service. We find that customers’ “popularity profiles,” which characterize how choices are distributed across popular and unpopular offerings, are associated with customers’ service usage frequencies and discounted expected tenures, both of which reflect customers’ value to the service provider. We demonstrate how firms can employ information on the set of titles consumed to update expectations of customers’ remaining values and likelihoods of canceling service.
PTPN22 R620W minor allele is a genetic risk factor for giant cell arteritis

Giant cell arteritis (GCA) is one of the commonest forms of vasculitis in the elderly, and may result in blindness and stroke. The pathogenesis of GCA is not understood, although environmental, infectious and genetic risk factors are implicated. One gene of interest is PTPN22, encoding lymphoid protein tyrosine phosphatase (Lyp), expressed exclusively in immune cells, which is proposed to be an ‘archetypal non-HLA autoimmunity gene’. The minor allele of a functional PTPN22 single nucleotide polymorphism (rs2476601, R620W), which disrupts an interaction motif in the protein, was originally reported to be associated with biopsy-proven GCA in Spanish patients, with supporting data from three replicate Northern European studies. Recently, this observation was extended with additional patients and controls, and studies encompassing European, Scandinavian, UK and American patients. The aim of our study was to determine the association between PTPN22 rs2476601 (R620W) and biopsy-proven GCA in an Australian case cohort.
Analysis and research models of the Estimation of Distribution Algorithms

The Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) is a novel class of evolutionary algorithms which is motivated by the idea of building probabilistic graphical model of promising solutions to represent linkage information between variables in chromosome. Through learning of and sampling from probabilistic graphical model, new population is generated and optimization procedure is repeated until the stopping criteria are met. In this paper, the mechanism of the Estimation of Distribution Algorithms is analyzed. Currently existing EDAs are surveyed and categorized according to the probabilistic model they used, then the strengths and weakness and the future perspective of EDAs are concluded.
A visual interface for browsing and summarizing conversations

In our daily lives, we have conversations with others in many different modalities like meetings, emails, chats, blogs etc. The Web has significantly increased the volume and the complexity of the conversational data generated through our day to day communication. Automatic summarization can be of benefit in dealing with this overwhelming amount of interactional information by providing quick access. However, due to its highly informal nature, the multimodal diverse data has proved to be a challenge from Natural Language Processing (NLP) point of view; rendering text processing using syntactic, lexicographic and semantic rules often insufficient. Here we present an interactive interface (see Fig. 1) that takes advantage of human perception in conjunction with automatically extracted conversation knowledge to generate a brief, focused overview of a conversation. The dominant approach to summarization has been extractive, where the summary is generated by selecting and concatenating the most informative sentences from the source document(s). Extractive summarization has been popular as it is a simple binary classification task using machine learning techniques. The alternative is abstractive summarization, where the summary is generated by extracting and aggregating information from the conversation. This approach requires a Natural Language Generation (NLG) component and is preferred by users for coherency but the resultant summary sentences are often too generic and lack the details of the original conversation sentences. The objective of our interface is to provide a Visual Structured Summary that gives the user more
Preliminary study of the role of red foxes in Echinococcus multilocularis transmission in the urban area of Sapporo, Japan

In order to assess the infection risk of alveolar echinococcosis among urban residents of Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, Japan, a survey was conducted on fox distribution in the urban area and on the prevalence of Echinococcus multilocularis among the foxes. The fox distribution, evaluated from fox footprints left on the snow in parks and woodlands, and from locations of fox carcasses recorded by the Sapporo municipality, was concentrated along the border of the urban area and in the southwestern part of the city, facing the mountain. Fox faeces were collected around active fox dens, and analysed by a coproantigen detection assay and parasite egg examination for the Echinococcus infection. Thirty-three out of 155 faeces were coproantigen positive. Coproantigen-positive faeces were collected from 11 den sites (57·9% of total den sites), and all except 1 were located in the urban fringe. A high intensity of taeniid eggs (>100 eggs per 0·5 g) containing faeces were also collected in the 3 sites of them. Although Echinococcus infection in rodents was not observed from the necropsy of 23 rodents captured around active fox dens, arvicolid rodents, a suitable intermediate host for E. multilocularis, were captured in the urban fringe. Therefore, the urban fringe offers suitable conditions in which the life-cycle of E. multilocularis could be maintained. Prompt measures to control echinococcus infection should be taken, even in urban areas.
Linearly compressed pages: A low-complexity, low-latency main memory compression framework

Data compression is a promising approach for meeting the increasing memory capacity demands expected in future systems. Unfortunately, existing compression algorithms do not translate well when directly applied to main memory because they require the memory controller to perform non-trivial computation to locate a cache line within a compressed memory page, thereby increasing access latency and degrading system performance. Prior proposals for addressing this performance degradation problem are either costly or energy inefficient. By leveraging the key insight that all cache lines within a page should be compressed to the same size, this paper proposes a new approach to main memory compression — Linearly Compressed Pages (LCP) — that avoids the performance degradation problem without requiring costly or energy-inefficient hardware. We show that any compression algorithm can be adapted to fit the requirements of LCP, and we specifically adapt two previously-proposed compression algorithms to LCP: Frequent Pattern Compression and Base-Delta-Immediate Compression. Evaluations using benchmarks from SPEC CPU2006 and five server benchmarks show that our approach can significantly increase the effective memory capacity (by 69% on average). In addition to the capacity gains, we evaluate the benefit of transferring consecutive compressed cache lines between the memory controller and main memory. Our new mechanism considerably reduces the memory bandwidth requirements of most of the evaluated benchmarks (by 24% on average), and improves overall performance (by 6.1%/13.9%/10.7% for single-/two-/four-core workloads on average) compared to a baseline system that does not employ main memory compression. LCP also decreases energy consumed by the main memory subsystem (by 9.5% on average over the best prior mechanism).
Analyses of chaos generated by neural-network-differential-equation for intelligent fish-catching

Continuous catching and releasing experiment of several fishes make the fishes find some escaping strategies. To make fish-catching robot intelligent more than fish's adapting and escaping abilities, we have proposed a chaos-generator comprising Neural-Network-Differential-Equation(NNDE) and an evolving mechanism to have the NNDE generate chaotic trajectories as many as possible. We believe that the fish could not be adaptive enough to escape from chasing net with chaos motions since unpredictable chaotic motions of net may go beyond the fish's adapting abilities. In this report we examine interesting chaotic characters of plural chaos generated by NNDE through Lyapunov number, Poincare return map, initial value sensitivity and bifurcation map.
A Critical Look at Critics in HTN Planning

Detecting interactions and resolving conflicts is one of the key issues for generative planning systems Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning sytems use critics for this purpose Critics have provided extra efficiency and flexibility to HTN planning systems, but their procedural and sometimes domain-specific - nature has not been amenable to analytical studies As a result, little work is available on the correctness or efficiency of critics. This paper describes a principled approach to handling conflicts, as implemented in UMCP, an HTN planning system Critics in UMCP have desirable properties such as systematicity and the preservation of soundness and completeness.
Usability of Health Web Sites for Older Adults: A Preliminary Study

Although an increasing number of Web sites are devoted to providing health information to older adults, many sites have usability problems unique to this population. The purpose of this study was to explore the usability of three health-promoting Web sites specifically designed for use by older adults. This descriptive study used two usability assessment methods: (1) a heuristic evaluation by four experts in Web usability and gerontology and (2) a usability test by 10 senior Web users with a mean age of 73.9. The design aspects identified as inappropriate for seniors by experts were as follows: small font size, too much information on one page, and a failure to provide instructions. The older adults in this sample preferred a simple design with clear instructions. During testing, these individuals expressed great interest in online health information. However, they needed instructions on how to search for credible health information online. Some usability-testing methods might need to be modified for older adults' specific needs.
Complex Propagation Patterns Characterize Human Cortical Activity during Slow-Wave Sleep

Cortical electrical activity during nonrapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep is dominated by slow-wave activity (SWA). At larger spatial scales (∼2–30 cm), investigated by scalp EEG recordings, SWA has been shown to propagate globally over wide cortical regions as traveling waves, which has been proposed to serve as a temporal framework for neural plasticity. However, whether SWA dynamics at finer spatial scales also reflects the orderly propagation has not previously been investigated in humans. To reveal the local, finer spatial scale (∼1–6 cm) patterns of SWA propagation during non-REM sleep, electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings were conducted from subdurally implanted electrode grids and a nonlinear correlation technique [mutual information (MI)] was implemented. MI analysis revealed spatial maps of correlations between cortical areas demonstrating SWA propagation directions, speed, and association strength. Highest correlations, indicating significant coupling, were detected during the initial positive-going deflection of slow waves. SWA propagated predominantly between adjacent cortical areas, albeit spatial noncontinuities were also frequently observed. MI analysis further uncovered significant convergence and divergence patterns. Areas receiving the most convergent activity were similar to those with high divergence rate, while reciprocal and circular propagation of SWA was also frequent. We hypothesize that SWA is characterized by distinct attributes depending on the spatial scale observed. At larger spatial scales, the orderly SWA propagation dominates; at the finer scale of the ECoG recordings, non-REM sleep is characterized by complex SWA propagation patterns.
Competitive Analysis of Paging: A Survey

This paper is a survey of competitive analysis of paging. We present proofs showing tight bounds for the competitive ratio achievable by any deterministic or randomized online algorithm. We then go on to discuss variations and reenements of the competitive ratio and the insights they give into the paging problem. Finally, we variations to the online paging problem to which competitive analysis has been applied.
Continuous Performance Testing in the Differential Diagnosis of ADHD

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Guardrail : High Fidelity Correctness Checking of Device Drivers for Safeguarding I / O Operations OLATUNJI RUWASE

Device drivers are an Achilles’ heel of modern commodity operating systems, accounting for far too many system failures. Previous work on driver reliability has focused on protecting the kernel from unsafe driver side-effects by interposing an invariant-checking layer at the driver interface, but otherwise treating the driver as a black box. In this paper, we propose and evaluate Guardrail, which is a more powerful framework for run-time driver analysis that performs decoupled, instruction-grain dynamic correctness checking on arbitrary kernel-mode drivers as they execute, thereby enabling the system to detect and mitigate more challenging correctness bugs (e.g., data races, uninitialized memory accesses) that cannot be detected by today’s fault isolation techniques. Our implementation of Guardrail demonstrates that it can find serious data races, memory faults, and DMA faults in native Linux drivers that required fixes, including previously unknown bugs. Also, we show that with hardware logging support, Guardrail can be used for online protection of persistent device state from defective drivers with minimal impact on the end-to-end performance of standard I/O workloads.
Frame-to-frame coherence and the hidden surface computation: constraints for a convex world

Frame-to-frame coherence is the highly structured relationship tha t exists between successive frames of certain animation sequences. From the point of view of the hidden surface computation, this implies tha t parts of the scene will become visible or invisible in a predictable fashion. In this paper the frame-to-frame coherence constraints are identified and characterized for static scenes restricted to stationary, closed, convex, nonintersecting polyhedra. The animation derives from a continuous movement of the viewer. The mathematical analysis of the constraints is geometric and leads to a characterization of the self-occlusion or change of self-occlusion relationship over a single polyhedron, and to a characterization of the occlusion or change of occlusion relationship over two polyhedra. On the basis of these constraints, an algorithm which generates successive frames in an animation sequence is presented.
New method for gene disruption in Salmonella typhimurium: construction and characterization of an ada-deletion derivative of Salmonella typhimurium TA1535

A new method for gene disruption in Salmonella typhimurium was developed. The key steps of this method are to produce restriction fragments with compatible ends, preligate to produce concatemers, and then transform by electrotransformation. We developed and used this method to construct a mutant of S. typhimurium TA1535 in which the resident ada-like (adaST) gene was replaced with a kanamycin resistance gene to produce an adaST-deletion mutant derivative. The S. typhimurium adaST-deletion strain did not exhibit a higher level of mutability upon treatment with N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine than did its wild-type parent strain. However, it did exhibit a higher sensitivity with respect to killing by N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine. The ability of AdaST to function as a transcriptional activator is discussed.
Testing the statistical learning of spelling patterns by manipulating semantic and orthographic frequency

ABSTRACT This study tested the diverging predictions of recent theories of children's learning of spelling regularities. We asked younger (Grades 1 and 2) and older (Grades 3 and 4) elementary school–aged children to choose the correct endings for words that varied in their morphological structure. We tested the impacts of semantic frequency by including three types of words ending in -er: derived and inflected forms, the first of which are far more frequent across the language, and one-morpheme control forms. Both younger and older children were more likely to choose the correct ending for derived forms over one-morpheme control words. This difference emerged for inflected forms only for the older children. We also tested the impacts of orthographic frequency by contrasting performance on the two derived allomorphs -er and -or, the first of which is far more frequent, and comparison one-morpheme forms. Both younger and older children were more likely to choose the correct spelling for the derivational -er over the same letter pattern in control words. This difference did not emerge in either group for the -or ending. The implications of these findings for current models of children's spelling development are discussed.
Towards a Secure SCRUM Process for Agile Web Application Development

Agile development such as Scrum and Extreme Programming deliver software in short iterations for quick response to rapid business requirement and market changes. However, established secure software development methodologies are mostly based on linear models such as waterfall and V-model, making them unsuitable for direct application in an agile environment. This paper presents a proposal for integrating security activities into Scrum process for developing secure Web applications. We identify gaps in existing approaches to secure agile development and analyze established security engineering activities. We then adapt these activities and orchestrate them into Scrum development process to achieve both security and agility. Our proposal is evaluated by a Scrum team developing commercial JAVA EE applications in an opinion survey.
Endocytosis in filter-grown Madin-Darby canine kidney cells

In this paper, we have characterized the apical and basolateral endocytic pathways of epithelial MDCK cells grown on filters. The three- dimensional organization of the endocytic compartments was analyzed by confocal microscopy after internalization of a fluorescent fluid-phase marker from either side of the cell layer. After 5 min of internalization, distinct sets of apical and basolateral early endosomes were observed lining the plasma membrane domain from which internalization had occurred. At later time points, the apical and the basolateral endocytic pathways were shown to converge in the perinuclear region. Mixing of two different fluorescent markers could be detected after their simultaneous internalization from opposite sides of the cell layer. The extent of the meeting was quantitated by measuring the amount of complex formed intracellularly between avidin internalized from the apical side and biotinylated horseradish peroxidase (HRP) from the basolateral side. After 15 min, 14% of the avidin marker was complexed with the biotinylated HRP and this value increased to 50% during a subsequent chase of 60 min in avidin-free medium. We also determined the kinetics of fluid internalization, recycling, transcytosis, and intracellular retention using HRP as a marker. Fluid was internalized with the same rates from either surface domain (1.2 x 10(-4) microns 3/min per microns 2 of surface area). However, significant differences were observed for each pathway in the amounts and kinetics of marker recycled and transcytosed. The content of apical early endosomes was primarily recycled and transcytosed (45% along Bach route after 1 h internalization), whereas delivery to late endocytic compartments was favored from the basolateral early endosome (77% after 1 h). Our results demonstrate that early apical and basolateral endosomes are functionally and topologically distinct, but that the endocytic pathways converge at later stages in the perinuclear region of the cell.
Cost-Effectiveness in Individual Development Accounts

Because resources are limited, the benefits and costs of social-work interventions—like all interventions—must be compared with the benefits and costs of alternatives. Evidence-based practice should ask, What works? How well does it work? And what does it cost? This article analyzes the provision of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) with a new cost-effectiveness framework meant to help make assumptions and judgments explicit. In the specific IDA program examined, 1 month of services for 1 participant costs about $64. The mere existence of a cost figure— regardless of whether it is seen as high or low—has sparked many questions in the IDA community: How can costs be reduced without sacrificing quality? Which features of IDAs are essential? Are IDAs worth it? This sort of healthy questioning is precisely the purpose of cost-effectiveness analysis in social-work practice.