Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prediction of Software Effort Using Artificial Neural Network and Support Vector Machine

: Accurately estimating software effort is probably the biggest challenge facing software developers. Estimates done at the proposal stage has high degree of inaccuracy, where requirements for the scope are not defined to the lowest details, but as the project progresses and requirements are elaborated, accuracy and confidence on estimate increases. It is important to choose the right software effort estimation techniques for the prediction of software effort. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) have been used using China dataset for prediction of software effort in this work. The performance indices Sum-Square-Error (SSE), Mean-Square-Error (MSE), Root-Mean-Square-Error (RMSE), Mean-Magnitude-Relative-Error (MMRE), Relative-Absolute-Error (RAE), Relative-Root-Square-Error (RRSE), Mean-Absolute-Error (MAE), Correlation Coefficient (CC), and PRED (25) have been used to compare the results obtained from these two methods.
Quantification of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 RNA from dried plasma spots collected on filter paper

To assess dried plasma spots (DPSs) as a source of material for virus quantification, human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) RNA levels were quantified in matched DPS and liquid plasma samples from 73 infected patients, including 5 neonates and 4 adult patients with acute HIV-1 infection. Quantifications were performed by commercially available assays (NASBA [nucleic acid sequence-based amplification] or Amplicor, or both). There was a strong correlation between HIV-1 RNA levels in plasma and DPSs. More importantly, there was no decline in HIV-1 RNA levels in DPSs stored for as long as 2 weeks at 20 degrees C. Similarly, storage of DPSs for 3 days at 37 degrees C resulted in no decrease in viral RNA levels. For patients with primary infection, the DPS method allowed for the measurement of RNA levels in plasma during the initial spike in the level of viremia and in the subsequent period of suppressed viral replication. DPS quantification was equally informative in the neonatal setting, with all five newborns showing HIV-1 RNA loads of greater than 4.991 log10 copies/ml. We conclude that the viral RNA levels in DPSs are equivalent to those measured in fresh-frozen plasma. The ease and economy of DPS sampling, the minute volumes required, and the unexpected stability of dried RNA suggest that the use of DPSs will be particularly valuable for small-volume neonatal samples and large, population-based studies in which cold storage and transportation present special problems, as is often the case in developing countries. The ability to measure viral changes during primary infection suggests that the method will be useful for assessing vaccine efficacy in large field trials.
Control of chaos by linear and nonlinear feedback methods

The chaotic orbits in the Rossler system are controlled into a periodic cycle by two methods; the delayed feedback controlling method which continues to control chaos by self-controlling feedback, and a control system including online trained neural network controller. It is found that (1) stabilization of chaotic orbits by the former method depends on the initial conditions and the gain parameters and that (2) the linear neural controller fails to control chaotic orbits in the Rossler system and choice of the threshold function (nonlinear function) is found to be essential for the second method.
Actions with Indirect Eeects (preliminary Report)

We deene and study a high-level language for describing actions that extends the language A introduced by Gelfond and Lifschitz. The new language, AR 0 , allows us to describe actions with indirect eeects (ramiications) and simple forms of nondeterminism. A translation from AR 0 into a formalism based on cir-cumscription is proved to be sound and complete .
Surface Reconstruction from High-Density Points Using Deformed Grids

We present a method of surface reconstruction from high-density scatter points P = {p1, p2, . , pN} without a normal vector in R 3 . This method first sets a uniform grid and deforms each cell of the grid by fitting the vertex of each cell to the nearest of the input points. It then constructs triangles according to the pattern of the vertices’s state in each cell. Our method can work fast with little memory. We show that our method generated several polygon meshes from real-world range data.
Modeling the Compatibility of Biological and Economic Objectives on a Forested Landscape

An integrated model combining a wildlife population simulation model and timber harvest and growth models was developed to explore the tradeoffs between the likelihood of persistence of a hypothetical wildlife species and timber harvest volumes on a landscape in the Central Oregon Cascades. Simulated annealing, a heuristic optimization technique, was used to solve for harvest schedules that maximized the likelihood of species persistence relative to a given timber harvest volume constraint over a 100 year planning period. By solving this problem for a range of different harvest volumes a production possibility frontier is developed that shows the relative tradeoffs between timber harvest volumes and likelihood of species persistence on this landscape. Although the results are specific to the wildlife species and the landscape analyzed, the approach is general and may provide a structure for future models that will allow land managers and forest planners to become more informed about the tradeoffs among competing resources.
Biomimetic Undulatory Robotic Fin Optimization Design Using Computational Fluid Dynamic Method

In our previous work, an undulating robotic fin is developed, the design of which is inspired by the pectoral fin of stingray. A Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based comparison of optimal thrust and efficiency generation among four typical fin undulating swimming models with different amplitude envelopes as well as the fin morphologic have been discussed independently. Here, we seek to complement those studies by considering the influence of reciprocal effect between swimming models and morphologic on the fin propulsion performance. The pressure distribution on fin surface was computed and integrated to provide fin forces which were decomposed into lift and thrust. From the simulation, we conclude that: the compliance of the distribution mode of fin outline with amplitude envelope can generate best propulsion effect and fastest swimming speed. These computational results are very useful for optimal design of our undulating robotic fin.
A decoupled impedance observer for a variable stiffness robot

This paper focuses on the estimation of the impedance for a Variable Impedance Actuator (VIA) through torque and position measurements. Despite the recent development of several VIA, impedance control is not yet implemented in closed loop because of the difficulty of obtaining in real-time measurements of time-varying impedance. The estimation algorithm is proposed as an alternative approach to the standard procedures of impedance identification, to robustly tolerate the variability of the mechanical stiffness due, for example, to model uncertainties. The impedance estimator is therefore implemented on the Actuator with Adjustable Stiffness (AwAS). The effectiveness of the proposed estimator is proved through simulation and experimental results.
Synthesis, Biological Profiling and Determination of the Tubulin-Bound Conformation of 12-Aza-Epothilones (Azathilones)

12-Aza-epothilones (azathilones) incorporating quinoline side chains and bearing different N12-substituents have been synthesized via highly efficient RCM-based macrocyclizations. Quinoline-based azathilones with the side chain N-atom in the meta-position to the C15 atom in the macrocycle are highly potent inhibitors of cancer cell growth in vitro. In contrast, shifting the quinoline nitrogen to the position para to C15 leads to a ca. 1000-fold loss in potency. Likewise, the desaturation of the C9-C10 bond in the macrocycle to an E double bond produces a substantial reduction in antiproliferative activity. This is in stark contrast to the effect exerted by the same modification in the natural epothilone macrocycle. The conformation of a representative azathilone bound to α/β-tubulin heterodimers was determined based on TR-NOE measurements and a model for the posture of the compound in its binding site on β-tubulin was deduced through a combination of STD measurements and CORCEMA-ST calculations. The tubulin-bound, bioactive conformation of azathilones was found to be overall similar to that of epothilones A and B.
Free entry equilibria with positive profits: A unified approach to quantity and price competition games

Free entry equilibria are usually characterized by the zero profit condition. We plead instead for a strict application of theNash equilibriumconcept to a symmetric simultaneous game played by actual and potential entrants, producing under decreasing average cost. Equilibrium is then typically indeterminate, with a number of active firms varying between an upper bound imposed by profitability and a lower bound required by sustainability. We use a canonical model with strategies represented by prices, although covering standard regimes of quantity and price competition, to show that in equilibrium the critical (profit maximizing) price must lie between the break-even and the limit prices.
Migration Policy Can Boost PISA Results: Findings from a Natural Experiment

Switzerland radically changed its migration policy in the mid-nineties from a "non-qualified only" policy to one that favors the immigration of highly qualified migrants. To analyze the impact of this change on the schooling outcomes of migrants, this paper compares the PISA (OECD Programme for International Student Assessment) results from 2000, which were not yet affected by the change in the migration policy, with the PISA 2009 test. Using a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis, we find that almost 70% of the 43-point increase (more than one standardized school year) in the PISA scores of first-generation immigrant students in an environment with stagnant Swiss PISA results was due to changes in the individual background characteristics of the new immigrants (direct effect) and improved school composition (lower shares of students who did not speak the testing languages as an indirect effect). The indirect effects also indicate that internationally comparative analyses should more fully consider differences in national migration policies when assessing the success of migrant integration.
Long-term organ damage accrual and safety in patients with SLE treated with belimumab plus standard of care

Objective To examine long-term organ damage and safety following treatment with belimumab plus standard of care (SoC) in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Methods Pooled data were examined from two ongoing open-label studies that enrolled patients who completed BLISS-52 or BLISS-76. Patients received belimumab every four weeks plus SoC. SLICC Damage Index (SDI) values were assessed every 48 weeks (study years) following belimumab initiation (baseline). The primary endpoint was change in SDI from baseline at study years 5–6. Incidences of adverse events (AEs) were reported for the entire study period. Results The modified intent-to-treat (MITT) population comprised 998 patients. At baseline, 940 (94.2%) were female, mean (SD) age was 38.7 (11.49) years, and disease duration was 6.7 (6.24) years. The mean (SD) SELENA-SLEDAI and SDI scores were 8.2 (4.18) and 0.7 (1.19), respectively; 411 (41.2%) patients had organ damage (SDI = 1: 235 (23.5%); SDI ≥ 2: 176 (17.6%)) prior to belimumab. A total of 427 (42.8%) patients withdrew overall; the most common reasons were patient request (16.8%) and AEs (8.5%). The mean (SD) change in SDI was +0.2 (0.48) at study years 5–6 (n = 403); 343 (85.1%) patients had no change from baseline in SDI score (SDI +1: 46 (11.4%), SDI +2: 13 (3.2%), SDI +3: 1 (0.2%)). Of patients without organ damage at baseline, 211/241 (87.6%) had no change in SDI and the mean change (SD) in SDI was +0.2 (0.44). Of patients with organ damage at baseline, 132/162 (81.5%) had no change in SDI and the mean (SD) change in SDI was +0.2 (0.53). The probability of not having a worsening in SDI score was 0.88 (95% CI: 0.85, 0.91) and 0.75 (0.67, 0.81) in those without and with baseline damage, respectively (post hoc analysis). Drug-related AEs were reported for 433 (43.4%) patients; infections/infestations (282, 28.3%) and gastrointestinal disorders (139, 13.9%) were the most common. Conclusion Patients with SLE treated with long-term belimumab plus SoC had a low incidence of organ damage accrual and no unexpected AEs. High-risk patients with pre-existing organ damage also had low accrual, suggesting a favorable effect on future damage development.
DEXTOR: Reduced Effort Authoring for Template-Based Natural Language Generation

A growing issue in the development of realistic and entertain-ing interactive games is the need for mechanisms that support ongoing natural language conversation between human players and artificial non-player characters. Unfortunately, many methods for implementing natural language generation(NLG) induce a significant burden on the author, do not scale well, or require specialized linguistic knowledge. We formalize the notion of typed-templates, an extension of standard structures employed in template-based NLG. We further provide novel algorithms that, when applied to typed-templates, ameliorate the above issues by affording computational support for authoring and increased variation in utterance and scenario generation. We demonstrate the efficacy of typed-templates and the algorithms through a user study.
The Influence of Creative Self-Efficacy towards Creativity with Job Satisfaction as Intervening Variable at PT. Smile Island Surabaya

The study focused on the creative self-efficacy, creativity, and job satisfaction and how these variables influence each other. Job satisfaction acts as the intervening variable for allegedly having influence on the relation between creative self-efficacy and creativity. Creativity is one of the main essential that need to be cultivated in work environment and communicated towards employee in order for the company to develop. The population used in this study is employees of an advertising company specialized in media printing PT. Smile Island Surabaya focus on the division of layout editor with a total of 38 employees. The analysis in this study is using Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis. The result of the study shows a significant influence for some hypothesis with t statistic of 1,96 which are creative self-efficacy influences on job satisfaction with a score of 11,5779, job satisfaction on creativity with a score of 3,4212, and creative self-efficacy on creativity and job satisfaction as an intervening variable in full mediation. Meanwhile, creative self-efficacy doesnâ€™t show a significant influence towards creativity shown evidently with a score of 1,0809 because of different perceptions on creative assessment between supervisor and employee.
An efficient cooperative retransmission for wireless regenerative relay networks

This paper considers retransmission mechanisms in wireless regenerative relay networks. The retransmission can be realized in a cooperative manner with the assistance of all available relays. This may result in a high overall power consumption due to a considerable number of overlapped packets in the retransmission, especially when the number of relays is large. In this paper, we propose a cooperative retransmission (CR) scheme based on relay cooperation and binary XOR operation to significantly reduce the number of packets to be retransmitted for a more power efficient system with non-overlapped retransmission. Particularly, we derive the error probability of the retransmission decision at the source and relays, which shows that the proposed CR scheme also improves the reliability of the retransmission. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the analytical findings and show that the proposed CR scheme reduces the number of retransmissions and removes overlapped retransmitted packets.
“Advanced” Ideas about Democracy: Toward a Pluralist Conception of Citizen Education

Citizenship education is probably the most popular stated mission for public schooling in the United States, but it rests on a feeble conception of democratic citizenship that skirts social and cultural diversity. The effect, oddly enough, is a citizenship education that is unclear about its relationship with multicultural education, and sometimes positioned defensively toward it. Here I outline a conception of democratic citizenship that is appropriate to pluralist societies—a conception on which a renewed, deepened citizenship education might proceed.
Genetic variation associated with euphorigenic effects of d-amphetamine is associated with diminished risk for schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Significance We show that the genetic susceptibility to the euphoric effects of d-amphetamine also influences the genetic predisposition to schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These results reinforce the idea that dopamine plays a role in schizophrenia and ADHD; this so-called dopamine hypothesis has been debated for several decades. Specifically, we found that the alleles associated with increased euphoric response to d-amphetamine were associated with decreased risk for schizophrenia and ADHD. These results illustrate how an acute challenge with a pharmacological agent can reveal a genetic predisposition that will manifest itself as psychiatric illness over the lifetime of an individual. Finally, our study offers a relatively novel paradigm for the analysis of endophenotypes for which large sample sizes are not typically available. Here, we extended our findings from a genome-wide association study of the euphoric response to d-amphetamine in healthy human volunteers by identifying enrichment between SNPs associated with response to d-amphetamine and SNPs associated with psychiatric disorders. We found that SNPs nominally associated (P ≤ 0.05 and P ≤ 0.01) with schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder were also nominally associated with d-amphetamine response. Furthermore, we found that the source of this enrichment was an excess of alleles that increased sensitivity to the euphoric effects of d-amphetamine and decreased susceptibility to schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In contrast, three negative control phenotypes (height, inflammatory bowel disease, and Parkinson disease) did not show this enrichment. Taken together, our results suggest that alleles identified using an acute challenge with a dopaminergic drug in healthy individuals can be used to identify alleles that confer risk for psychiatric disorders commonly treated with dopaminergic agonists and antagonists. More importantly, our results show the use of the enrichment approach as an alternative to stringent standards for genome-wide significance and suggest a relatively novel approach to the analysis of small cohorts in which intermediate phenotypes have been measured.
Retrieval with knowledge-driven kernel design: an approach to improving SVM-based CBIR with relevance feedback

The performance of SVM-based image retrieval is often constrained by the scarcity of training samples. The total number of image samples labeled by users in a retrieval session is very limited, and this small number of labeled samples cannot effectively represent the true distributions of positive and negative image classes, especially for the negative image class. This paper proposes a novel approach to deal with this problem. Instead of treating it as a problem, the mere existence of the small number of labeled images and their desired distribution in the kernel space is considered as prior knowledge from image retrieval to aid the design of the kernel used by SVMs. This is achieved by maximizing a criterion, such as one based on scatter matrices, through gradient-based search methods, incurring very little computational overhead to real-time retrieval process. Experimental results on two benchmark image databases demonstrate the improved retrieval performance by the dynamically designed kernel and hence the effectiveness of the proposed approach for SVM based image retrieval
INTERACTION AFFECTING THE SENSE OF PRESENCE IN VIRTUAL REALITY

thesis originates from an overall project by the Delft University of Technology and the University of Amsterdam on the treatment of phobias using the so-called Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET, see also Schuemie et al. 2000a and iii SUMMARY Virtual Reality (VR) has been proposed as a new tool for treating phobias. Using the so-called Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) it is thought to be possible to treat patients more effectively and/or efficiently than with common methods of therapy. For such treatment the VR experience should be able to evoke fear, and for this the sense of being present in the virtual environment (VE), i.e. the sense of presence, is believed to be a prominent factor. Furthermore, the interactivity in a VE is believed to be a crucial factor for the sense of presence. This report will therefore investigate the effect of interactivity on the sense of presence in a VE. It is the result of a research task, which is part of a M.Sc.-thesis that originates from a The report reviews different views on presence, briefly reviews what effects the sense of presence in VE's can have, and how presence can be measured. It looks into the concept of interactivity, following a definition that is rather unusual in presence research but that seems more promising; interaction as a cycle of our actions and the reactions by the environment. Furthermore, the report reviews our mental models and the affordances of the environment, i.e. what the environment offers or affords us, and the role these concepts have in the interaction of a human with its environment. It also proposes a new model, the PPMC-Model, that sees interaction as determined by four components of a VR experience: the Purpose, the Participant, the Medium, and the Content. Finally, this report examines its main topic: how the interactivity of a VE can affect presence. It will contend that interaction in VE affects the sense of presence by its role in shaping and maintaining the so-called virtual mental model, and by its possible effect on a person's attention and involvement. The report will discuss that interaction has to comply with two constraints to enable these effects: interaction has to be engaging and interaction has to be comprehensible. These two constraints are then reviewed in relation to the four PPMC-components, and from this the report suggests the possible usefulness of activity modeling and user study in …