Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sarcasm Suite: A Browser-Based Engine for Sarcasm Detection and Generation

Sarcasm Suite is a browser-based engine that deploys five of our past papers in sarcasm detection and generation. The sarcasm detection modules use four kinds of incongruity: sentiment incongruity, semantic incongruity, historical context incongruity and conversational context incongruity. The sarcasm generation module is a chatbot that responds sarcastically to user input. With a visually appealing interface that indicates predictions using `faces' of our co-authors from our past papers, Sarcasm Suite is our first demonstration of our work in computational sarcasm.
Editor's Introduction: Combining Pragmatic Case Studies Within a Single Case Experimental Design

The target article in the current issue of PCSP by Fredrik Folke and associates (2012) documents and interprets six case studies of cognitive-behavioral therapy for Body Dysmorphic Disorder. This introduction places the article in a larger methodological context from my perspective as editor of the PCSP journal. I first review five types of case studies identified by McLeod (2010) in his seminal book on case study research. These include the main type of case study employed in PCSP, the Pragmatic Case Study, and four other kinds, including those that focus on theorybuilding, the adjudication of truth claims, the narrative experience of the participants, and singlecase experimental designs. I then discuss the advantages of combining Pragmatic Case Study designs with these other types. The Folke et al. article is an example of a successful such combination, integrating parallel pragmatic case studies within a single-case experimental design structure.
Mean Field Approach to a Probabilistic Model in Information Retrieval

We study an explicit parametric model of documents, queries, and relevancy assessment for Information Retrieval (IR). Mean-field methods are applied to analyze the model and derive efficient practical algorithms to estimate the parameters in the problem. The hyperparameters are estimated by a fast approximate leave-one-out cross-validation procedure based on the cavity method. The algorithm is further evaluated on several benchmark databases by comparing with standard algorithms in IR.
Identifying underlying principles in social work law: A teaching and learning approach to the legal framework of decision making

Courses in social work law need to ensure that students know, understand and can apply specific rules of law. However, the sheer volume of law affecting social work and the rapidity with which that law changes require courses in social work law not just to ensure that, but that they are equipped to manage changes in the law. In order to be able to do this, it is argued, the general principles underlying those individual legal rules need to be identified and understood. Students and practitioners need to have educational and professional skills at a higher level of transferability than merely acquiring knowledge of specific legal rules can provide. We use the legal framework of decision making to explain the importance of this approach. The principles of administrative law have been identified as a major component in social work law, and, despite limited exposition in social work law texts, we outline the teaching and learning strategy we have pursued in relation to this topic. |em|We argue that there are thus both educational and practice based reasons for the approach advocated, which we also believe accord with wider imperatives of social work education.
Adolescents' Legality Representations and Crime Reporting

Abstract The present study primarily focused on the appraisals that nearly 4000 middle school and high school students made of crimes or unlawful acts they hypothetically witnessed. The key appraisal dimensions were concerned with students' evaluation of the legality and acceptability of the crimes and unlawful acts, and with the evaluation of the personal concerns, emotional consequences for the self, and potential benefits for the victims that would accrue from filing and not filing a police report for the crimes. Students also evaluated the probability of filing a police report, if the situation actually occurred. The primary goal of the study was to examine the general hypothesis that adolescents' willingness to file a police report would be directly affected by their appraisals. It was also hypothesized that these appraisals, in turn, would mediate any effect exerted by adolescents' personal levels of antisocial or aggressive behaviors and prosocial behavior, as well as by their personal views about socially accepted codes of conduct. The findings of structural equation modeling confirmed the tenets of these guiding hypotheses.
Improving reinforcement learning algorithms by the use of data mining techniques for feature and action selection

Data mining can be seen as an area of artificial intelligence that seeks to extract information or patterns from large amounts of data either stored in databases or flowing in streams. The main contribution of this work is to present how LVF data mining technique improves Sarsa(λ) algorithm combined with tile-coding technique by selecting the most relevant features and actions from reinforcement learning environments. The objective of this selection is to reduce the complexity of the problem and the amount of memory used by the agent thus leading to faster convergence. The motivation of this work was inspired by the rationale behind Occam's razor, which describes that a complex model tends to be less accurate than another with a lower complexity. The difficulty in using data mining techniques in reinforcement learning environments is due to the lack of data in a database, so this paper proposes a storage schema for states visited and actions performed by the agent. In this study, the selection of features and actions are applied to a specific problem of RoboCup soccer, the dribble. This problem is composed of 20 continuous variables and 113 actions available to the agent which results in a memory consumption of approximately 4.5mb when the traditional Sarsa(λ) algorithm is used combined with the tile-coding technique. The experiments' results show that the amount of variables in the environment were reduced by 35% and the amount of actions by 65%, which resulted in a reduction in memory consumption of 43% and an increase in performance of up to 23%, according to the relative frequency distribution of agent's success. The approach proposed here is both easy to use and efficient.
Cytokine Effects on Mechano-Induced Electrical Activity in Atrial Myocardium

ABSTRACT The role of cytokines as regulators of stretch-related mechanisms is of special importance since mechano-sensitivity plays an important role in a wide variety of biological processes. Here, we elucidate the influence of cytokine application on mechano-sensitivity and mechano-transduction. The atrial myocardial stretch induces production of interleukin (IL)-2, IL-6, IL-13, IL-17A, and IL-18 with exception of tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α), IL-1β, and vascular endothelial growth factor B (VEGF-B). Positive ionotropic effect was specific for VEGF-B, negative ionotropic effects were specific for TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-2, IL-6, IL-13, IL-17A and IL-18, while IL-1α doesn’t show direct ionotropic effect. The IL-2, IL-6, IL-17A, IL-18, and VEGF-B cause elongation of the APD, in comparison with the reduced APD caused by the IL-13. The TNF-α, IL-1β, and IL-18 influences L-type Ca2+ channels, IL-2 has an inhibitory effect on the fast Na+ channels while IL-17A and VEGF-B were specific for Kir channels. With exception of the IL-1α, IL-2, and VEGF-B, all analyzed cytokines include nitric oxide dependent signaling with resultant combined effects on mechano-gated and Ca2+ channels. The relationships between these pathways and the time-dependence of their activation are of important considerations in the evaluation of cytokine-induced electrical abnormality, specific for cardiac dysfunctions. In general, the discussion presented in this review covers research devoted to counterbalance between different cytokines in the regulation of stretch-induced effects in rat atrial myocardium. Abbreviations: APs: action potentials; APD25: action potential durations to 25% of re-polarization; APD50: action potential durations to 50% of repolarization; APD90: action potential durations to 90% of repolarization; MGCs: mechanically gated channels
Fuzzy models and modeling beyond Artificial Intelligence

In a great variety of application fields where decision making is based on a very large number of factors and/or vague or imprecise conditions it is necessary to introduce some new models and modeling techniques which go beyond the more traditional approaches offered by symbolic Artificial Intelligence. The key problem here is the combination of imprecision and uncertainty with high complexity which cannot be managed by any algorithm with tractable computational complexity not even within the limits of polynomiality [1]. A large portion of decision problems within management engineering falls into this class. In this paper a fuzzy approach is proposed which goes beyond traditional Artificial Intelligence using fuzzy rule based inference systems, while it utilizes other techniques, evolutionary algorithms, neural networks and traditional optimization along with their respective combinations. We hope the proposed tools will be useful for solving some of the real life problems in this area.
Total Least Squares Registration of 3 D Surfaces

Co-registration of point clouds of partially scanned objects is the first step of the 3D modeling workflow. The aim of co-registration is to merge the overlapping point clouds by estimating the spatial transformation parameters. In computer vision and photogrammetry domain one of the most popular methods is the ICP (Iterative Closest Point) algorithm and its variants. There exist the 3D Least Squares (LS) matching methods as well (Gruen and Akca, 2005). The co-registration methods commonly use the least squares (LS) estimation method in which the unknown transformation parameters of the (floating) search surface is functionally related to the observation of the (fixed) template surface. Here, the stochastic properties of the search surfaces are usually omitted. This omission is expected to be minor and does not disturb the solution vector significantly. However, the a posteriori covariance matrix will be affected by the neglected uncertainty of the function values of the search surface. This causes deterioration in the realistic precision estimates. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose a method where the stochastic properties of both the observations and the parameters are considered under an errors-in-variables (EIV) model. The experiments have been carried out using diverse laser scanning data sets and the results of EIV with the ICP and the conventional LS matching methods have been compared.
Positive allosteric modulation by ivermectin of human but not murine P2X7 receptors

In mammalian cells, the anti‐parasitic drug ivermectin is known as a positive allosteric modulator of the ATP‐activated ion channel P2X4 and is used to discriminate between P2X4‐ and P2X7‐mediated cellular responses. In this paper we provide evidence that the reported isoform selectivity of ivermectin is a species‐specific phenomenon.
Mitigating path diminution in disjoint multipath routing for mobile ad hoc networks

Design of a disjoint multipath routing protocol in an ad hoc environment is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a protocol named Vertex Disjoint Multipath Routing (VDMR) to discover multiple node disjoint paths between a given pair of nodes. A major issue in node disjoint multipath routing is path diminution. We propose schemes to mitigate path diminution. We analyse the probability of path diminution in a scheme commonly employed to discover node disjoint paths. We discuss how the probability of path diminution is reduced, using proposed schemes. We observe that VDMR with proposed schemes performs much better than existing multipath routing protocols in the sense that it has a low probability of diminution and high packet delivery ratio.
Biosynthesis of bacterial glycogen: primary structure of Salmonella typhimurium ADPglucose synthetase as deduced from the nucleotide sequence of the glgC gene

The nucleotide sequence of a 1.4-kilobase-pair fragment containing the Salmonella typhimurium LT2 glgC gene coding for ADPglucose synthetase was determined. The glgC structural gene contains 1,293 base pairs, having a coding capacity of 431 amino acids. The amino acid sequence deduced from the nucleotide sequence shows that the molecular weight of ADPglucose synthetase is 45,580. Previous results of the total amino acid composition analysis and amino acid sequencing (M. Lehmann and J. Preiss, J. Bacteriol. 143:120-127, 1980) of the first 27 amino acids from the N terminus agree with that deduced from nucleotide sequencing data. Comparison of the Escherichia coli K-12 and S. typhimurium LT2 ADPglucose synthetase shows that there is 80% homology in their nucleotide sequence and 90% homology in their deduced amino acid sequence. Moreover, the amino acid residues of the putative allosteric sites for the physiological activator fructose bisphosphate (amino acid residue 39) and inhibitor AMP (amino acid residue 114) are identical between the two enzymes. There is also extensive homology in the putative ADPglucose binding site. In both E. coli K-12 and S. typhimurium LT2, the first base of the translational start ATG of glgA overlaps with the third base TAA stop codon of the glgC gene.
Study of Telomere Length in Preimplanted Cultured Chondrocytes

Design In the process of cell division, the extremes of the eukaryotic chromosomes are progressively shortening, and this phenomenon is related to cell degeneration and senescence. The treatment of cartilage lesions with autologous chondrocytes implies that cells proliferate in an artificial environment. We have studied the viability of cultured chondrocytes after measurement of their telomere length before implantation. Methods Articular cartilage biopsies (B1, B2, and B3) were obtained from 3 patients (2 males and 1 female) with knee cartilage defects, who were going to be treated with chondrocyte implantation. Chondrocytes were cultured in DMEM with autologous serum. After the third passage, an aliquot of 1 million cells was removed to estimate the telomere length and the remaining cells were implanted. Telomere length was measured by quantitative fluorescent in situ hybridization (Q-FISH). Patients’ clinical outcome was determined preoperatively, and 12 and 24 months postimplantation with the International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) questionnaire. Results After chondrocyte implantation, IKDC score doubled at 12 and 24 months with regard to the basal value. After 3 passages, chondrocytes were cultured for a mean of 45.67 days, the mean duplication time being 4.53 days and the mean number of cell divisions being 10.04 during the culture period. The 20th percentile of telomere lengths were 6.84, 6.96, and 7.06 kbp and the median telomere lengths 10.30, 10.47, and 10.73 kbp, respectively. No significant correlation was found between IKDC score and telomere length. Conclusion Culturing autologous chondrocytes for implantation is not related to cell senescence in terms of telomere length.
Social Disorganization Revisited: Mapping the Recent Immigration and Black Homicide Relationship in Northern Miami

Abstract This critical case study assesses the utility of spatial analysis based on maps rather than statistics for evaluating a fundamental premise of the social disorganization perspective: that immigration and ethnic heterogeneity weaken social control and increase community levels of crime. We investigate the relationship between the most recent wave of immigration and community levels of black homicide in the northern part of the city of Miami, an area that has received a large number of recent arrivals from Haiti and contains an established African American community. While quantitative methods have been used to explore this issue as part of an ongoing city-wide analysis, the current focus is on visual representations of the immigration/homicide linkage in the subsection of the city where the theoretically important target populations of African Americans and Haitians reside. Key findings are consistent with previous quantitative analyses that have demonstrated that immigration is not generally associated with higher community levels of homicide. These results call into question basic tenets of the social disorganization perspective while lending support to the concentrated disadvantage and immigration revitalization perspectives.
Identification of quantitative trait loci for the fatty acid composition in Korean native chicken

Objective Fatty acid composition is one of the most important meat quality traits because it can contribute to functional, sensorial, and nutritional factors. In this study, quantitative trait locus (QTL) analyses for fatty acid composition traits were investigated in thigh and breast meat of Korean native chicken (KNC). Methods In total, 18 fatty acid composition traits were investigated from each meat sample using 83 parents, and 595 F1 chicks of 20 week old. Genotype assessment was performed using 171 informative DNA markers on 26 autosomes. The KNC linkage map was constructed by CRI-MAP software, which calculated genetic distances, with map orders between markers. The half-sib and full-sib QTL analyses were performed using GridQTL and SOLAR programs, respectively. Results In total, 30 QTLs (12 in the thigh and 18 in the breast meat) were detected by the half-sib analysis and 7 QTLs (3 in the thigh and 4 in the breast meat) were identified by the full-sib analysis. Conclusion With further verification of the QTL regions using additional markers and positional candidate gene studies, these results can provide valuable information for determining causative mutations affecting the fatty acid composition of KNC meat. Moreover, these findings may aid in the selection of birds with favorable fatty acid composition traits.
Prenominal adjectives and the phrasal/lexical distinction

This paper aims to demonstrate that there is no adequate treatment of adjectives in NP in English, and attempts to remedy this. The central problem is to account for the syntactic and semantic differences between prenominal and postnominal adjectival constructions as in (i)–(iv): (i) the navigable river (ii) the rivers navigable (iii) *the navigable by boat rivers (iv) the rivers navigable by boat Existing treatments are reviewed, and a novel analysis proposed whereby the structures in (ii) and (iv) are normal syntactic N-AP structures, but prenominally, adjectives form what we call ‘small’ syntactic constructions (X° constructions, with X° daughters) which have some properties in common with lexical/morphological constructions. If the analysis is right, it poses a serious challenge to the view that there is a strict separation of lexical and syntactic aspects of grammar: grammatical theory should recognize a kind of construction which is neither fully syntactic nor fully lexical, but has properties of both.
A First Look at Mobile-Live-Users of a Large CDN

Video streaming is one of the greatest application on the Internet, and mobile devices became more powerful and popular every passing day. Understanding live-streaming-mobile-user behavior is imperative to map issues, to then seek solutions. The purpose of this work is to characterized mobile users watching popular live events, such as Dilma's Impeachment and Opening of Rio2016 Games.
On the existence and strength of stable membrane protrusions

We present a mathematical model for the protrusion of lamellipodia in motile cells. The model lamellipodium consists of a viscoelastic actin gel in the bulk and a dynamic boundary layer of newly polymerized filaments at the leading edge called the semiflexible region (SR). The density of filaments in the SR can increase due to nucleation of new filaments and decrease due to capping and severing of existing filaments. Following on from previous publications, we present important approximations that make the model feasible and accessible to fast computational analysis. It reveals that there are three qualitatively different parameter regimes: a stable, stationarily protruding lamellipodium; a stable lamellipodium showing oscillatory motion of the leading edge; and zero filament density and no stable lamellipodium. Hence, the model defines criteria for the existence of lamellipodia and the ability of cells to move effectively, and we discuss which parameter changes can induce transitions between the different states. Furthermore, stable lamellipodia have to be able to exert and withstand substantial forces. We can fit the experimentally measured dynamic force–velocity relation that describes how cells can adapt to increasing external forces when encountering an obstacle in their environment during motion. Moreover, we predict a different stationary force–velocity relation that should apply if cells experience a constant force, e.g. exerted by the surrounding tissue.
Contagiousness and Vulnerability in the Austrian Interbank Market

The purpose of this paper is to analyze (hypothetical) contagious bank defaults, i.e. defaults not caused by the fundamental weakness of a given bank but triggered by failures in the banking system. As failing banks become unable to honor their commitments on the interbank market, they may cause other banks to default, which may in turn push even more banks over the edge in so-called default cascades. In our paper we distinguish between contagiousness (the share of total banking assets represented by those banks that a specific bank brings down by contagion) and vulnerability (the number of banks by which a bank is brought down by cascading failures). Our analysis consists of three steps: first, we analyze the structure of the Austrian interbank market from end-2008 to end-2011. Second, we run (hypothetical) default simulations based on Eisenberg and Noe (2001) for the same set of banks. Finally, we estimate a panel data model to explain the (hypothetical) defaults generated by these simulations with the underlying structure of the network using network indicators that reflect (i) the network as a whole, (ii) a subnetwork or cluster, and (iii) the node level based on banks’ interbank lending relationships. As a result we find strong correlations between a bank’s position in the Austrian interbank market and its likelihood of either causing contagion or being affected by contagion. Although our analysis is based on a dataset constrained to the interbank market of unconsolidated Austrian banks, we believe our findings could be verified by analyzing other banking systems (albeit with a different model calibration). Given the importance of identifying systemically important banks for the formulation of macroprudential policy, we believe that our analysis has the potential to improve our assessment with regard to second-round effects and default cascades in the interbank market.