Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Agent-based and regression models of social influence

This paper studies social influence (i.e., adoption of belief) using agent-based simulation and regression models. Each agent is modeled by a linear regression model. Agents interact with neighbors by exchanging social beliefs. It is observed that if individual belief is linear in neighbors' beliefs, system-level belief and aggregated neighbors' beliefs can also be described by a linear regression model. Analysis is conducted on a simplified 2-node network to provide insight into the interactions and results of general models. Least squares estimates are developed. Explicit expressions are obtained to explain relationship between initial belief and current belief.
Hemodynamic-dependent patterning of endothelin converting enzyme 1 expression and differentiation of impulse-conducting Purkinje fibers in the embryonic heart

Impulse-conducting Purkinje fibers differentiate from myocytes during embryogenesis. The conversion of contractile myocytes into conduction cells is induced by the stretch/pressure-induced factor, endothelin (ET). Active ET is produced via proteolytic processing from its precursor by ET-converting enzyme 1 (ECE1) and triggers signaling by binding to its receptors. In the embryonic chick heart, ET receptors are expressed by all myocytes, but ECE1 is predominantly expressed in endothelial cells of coronary arteries and endocardium along which Purkinje fiber recruitment from myocytes takes place. Furthermore, co-expression of exogenous ECE1 and ET-precursor in the embryonic heart is sufficient to ectopically convert cardiomyocytes into Purkinje fibers. Thus, localized expression of ECE1 defines the site of Purkinje fiber recruitment in embryonic myocardium. However, it is not known how ECE1 expression is regulated in the embryonic heart. The unique expression pattern of ECE1 in the embryonic heart suggests that blood flow-induced stress/stretch may play a role in patterning ECE1 expression and subsequent induction of Purkinje fiber differentiation. We show that gadolinium, an antagonist for stretch-activated cation channels, downregulates the expression of ECE1 and a conduction cell marker, Cx40, in ventricular chambers, concurrently with delayed maturation of a ventricular conduction pathway. Conversely, pressure-overload in the ventricle by conotruncal banding results in a significant expansion of endocardial ECE1 expression and Cx40-positive putative Purkinje fibers. Coincident with this, an excitation pattern typical of the mature heart is precociously established. These in vivo data suggest that biomechanical forces acting on, and created by, the cardiovascular system during embyogenesis play a crucial role in Purkinje fiber induction and patterning.
Conceptualizing interculturality in multicultural teacher education

ABSTRACT This study examined student teachers’ and teacher educators’ discourses about multiculturalism in an international English-medium teacher education programme in Finland. An analysis with discursive pragmatics of semi-structured interviews revealed four positioning strategies for initial responses to multiculturalism: stereotyping and othering, distancing oneself, verbalizing experiences and downplaying multiculturalism. Although the same strategies were present to a large extent among both student teachers and teacher educators, these have different implications. The teacher educators’ lack of a shared critical understanding of interculturality created uncertainty when considering multicultural issues and can lead to a situation where the coherence between the objectives, implementation methods and assessment in the program suffers. The student teachers had difficulties transferring their immediate experiences of multiculturalism into reflections of how these may contribute to their future work as teachers. Student teachers seemed dependent on teacher educators’ support in recognizing challenges with diversities as learning opportunities. Teacher educators should be provided with opportunities to compare and contest their conceptions of interculturality so that they would be able to guide student teachers in reflecting on theirs.
Estimating the distribution of a sum of independent lognormal random variables

Four methods that can be used to approximate the distribution function (DF) of a sum of independent lognormal random variables (RVs) are compared. The aim is to determine the best method to compute the DF considering both accuracy and computational effort. The investigation focuses on values of the dB spread, σ, valid for practical problems in wireless transmission, where σ is between 6 dB and 12 dB. Contrary to some previous reports, our results show that the simpler Wilkinson's approach gives a more accurate estimate, in some cases of interest, than Schwartz and Yeh's 1982 approach.
Visualizing High-Resolution Accelerator Physics

Particle accelerators play an increasingly important role in basic and applied science. Several countries are involved in efforts aimed at developing accelerator-related technologies to support different application domains, including high-energy and nuclear physics, material science, biological science, and military use. The technological challenges associated with designing the next generation of accelerators will require numerical modeling capabilities far beyond those normally used within the accelerator community. In 1997 the US Department of Energy initiated a Grand Challenge in Computational Accelerator Physics, primarily to develop a new generation of high-performance accelerator modeling tools and apply them to projects of national importance. These tools will have a major impact on reducing the cost and technical risk of future projects, as well as maximizing the performance of present and future accelerators. In addition, they will enable the simulation of problems three to four orders of magnitude larger than ever done before. The use of algorithms and software optimized for high-performance computing will make it possible to obtain results quickly and with very high accuracy. This work is being done in collaboration between Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Stanford University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. This article focuses on the accelerator simulation model and the current techniques used to visualize the project results.
Novel flexible vesicles based topical formulation of levocetirizine: in vivo evaluation using oxazolone-induced atopic dermatitis in murine model

Abstract Background: Levocetirizine, an active enantiomer of cetirizine is third generation antihistaminic agent used for treating various allergies like atopic dermatitis, chronic idiopathic urticaria and allergic rhinitis. Objective: Development of novel topical formulation of levocetirizine based on flexible vesicles (FVs) with an aim to have targeted peripheral antihistaminic effect. Materials and methods: The FVs were prepared by thin film hydration method and characterized for drug content, entrapment efficiency, pH, vesicular size, spreadability, morphological characteristics and drug leakage studies. Franz diffusion cell assembly was used to carry out the ex vivo permeation studies through mice skin and the permeation profile of the developed FV formulation was compared with conventional formulations of levocetirizine. Results and discussion: The ex vivo permeation studies revealed 1.78-fold increase in percent permeation of levocetirizine from FV formulation as compared to conventional formulations of levocetirizine in 8 h. Further, oxazolone induced atopic dermatitis murine model was selected to study the in vivo pharmacodynamic activity. The developed formulation was evaluated for scratching score, erythema score and histological evaluation. There was marked reduction in scratching score from 15.25 scratches/20 min with conventional levocetirizine cream to 6.75 scratches/20 min with application of levocetirizine FV formulation. Also, there was significant reduction in erythema score as well as dermal eosinophil count. Results of skin sensitivity and toxicity studies suggest that the developed formulation was dermally safe and nontoxic. Conclusion: A novel FVs based topical formulation of levocetirizine was successfully developed for treatment of atopic dermatitis.
DATA MINING CLASSIFICATION TECHNIQUES APPLIED FOR BREAST CANCER DIAGNOSIS AND PROGNOSIS

Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis are two medical applications pose a great challenge to the researchers. The use of machine learning and data mining techniques has revolutionized the whole process of breast cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis. Breast Cancer Diagnosis distinguishes benign from malignant breast lumps and Breast Cancer Prognosis predicts when Breast Cancer is likely to recur in patients that have had their cancers excised. Thus, these two problems are mainly in the scope of the classification problems. This study paper summarizes various review and technical articles on breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis. In this paper we present an overview of the current research being carried out using the data mining techniques to enhance the breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Breast cancer has become the leading cause of death in women in developed countries. The most effective way to reduce breast cancer deaths is detect it earlier. Early diagnosis requires an accurate and reliable diagnosis procedure that allows physicians to distinguish benign breast tumors from malignant ones without going for surgical biopsy. The objective of these predictions is to assign patients to either a "benign" group that is non- cancerous or a "malignant" group that is cancerous. The prognosis problem is the long-term outlook for the disease for patients whose cancer has been surgically removed. In this problem a patient is classified as a 'recur' if the disease is observed at some subsequent time to tumor excision and a patient for whom cancer has not recurred and may never recur. The objective of these predictions is to handle cases for which cancer has not recurred (censored data) as well as case for which cancer has recurred at a specific time. Thus, breast cancer diagnostic and prognostic problems are mainly in the scope of the widely discussed classification problems. These problems have attracted many researchers in computational intelligence, data mining, and statistics fields. Cancer research is generally clinical and/or biological in nature, data driven statistical research has become a common complement. Predicting the outcome of a disease is one of the most interesting and challenging tasks where to develop data mining applications. As the use of computers powered with automated tools, large volumes of medical data are being collected and made available to the medical research groups. As a result, Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), which includes data mining techniques, has become a popular research tool for medical researchers to identify and exploit patterns and relationships among large number of variables, and made them able to predict the outcome of a disease using the historical cases stored within datasets. The objective of this study is to summarise various review and technical articles on diagnosis and prognosis of breast cancer. It gives an overview of the current research being carried out on various breast cancer datasets using the data mining techniques to enhance the breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis.
A detection system for human abnormal behavior

This paper introduces a real-time video surveillance system which detects human abnormal behaviors. We present two approaches to such a problem. The first one employs principal component analysis for feature selection and support vector machine for classification of human behaviors. The proposed feature selection method is based on the border information of four consecutive blobs. The second approach computes optical flow to obtain the velocity of each pixel for determining whether a human behavior is normal or not. Both algorithms are successfully implemented in crowded environments for detecting the human abnormal behaviors, such as (1) running people in a crowded environment, (2) bending down movement while most are walking or standing, (3) a person carrying a long bar and (4) a person waving hand in the crowd. Experimental results demonstrate the two methods proposed are robust and efficient in detecting human abnormal behaviors.
Does Parental Relational Aggression Interact with Parental Psychological Control in the Prediction of Youth Relational Aggression?

ABSTRACT In a sample of 117 youth and their parents, the associations between parental relational aggression, psychological control, youth gender, and youth relational aggression were examined. Boys with parents high on relational aggression and psychological control reported more relational aggression than boys with parents high on relational aggression and low on psychological control. Girls with parents low on relational aggression and high on psychological control reported more relational aggression than girls with parents low on relational aggression and psychological control. Results indicate youth may learn to use relational aggression from their parents, and have implications for intervention with relationally aggressive youth.
Why Is This Link Here? Identifying Academic Web Interlinking Motivations in Nigerian Universities

This paper investigates the university websites of Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation. Its aim is to identify motivations why authors embed outbound hyperlinks on these websites. A classification scheme for academic web interlinking motivations was applied to over 5,000 hyperlinks pointing from the websites of 107 Nigerian universities. Classifying the motivations based on studying the source and target pages is a big challenge, especially due to the following three reasons: there could be many possible reasons available; guessing the true intentions of link creators could be a difficult task; multiple link creation motivations could exist. The pioneer application of Pearson's chi-square test of independence offers a better picture of motivations. The chi-square test identifies the significant differences in interlinking motivations, which are peculiar to Nigerian universities of a particular category (federal, state and private universities). The study is a stepping stone toward further research on feasibility of findings in other developing countries. Results obtained from this research will be of great use for academic webpage developers and web authors, and will modify their work towards improving the use of hyperlinks as one of the major communication tools on the Web.
Technology affordances

Ecological approaches to psychology suggest succinct accounts ofeasily-used artifacts. Affordances are properties of the world that are compatible with and relevant for people’s interactions. When affordances are perceptible, they offer a direct link between perception and action; hidden and false affordances lead to mistakes. Complex actions can be understood in terms of groups of affordances that are sequential in time or nested in space, and in terms of the abilities of different media to reveal them. I illustrate this discussion with several examples of interface techniques, and suggest that the concept of affordances can provide a useful tool for user-centered analyses of technologies.
Three-dimensional de Sitter gravity and the dS/CFT correspondence

Certain aspects of three dimensional asymptotically de Sitter spaces are studied, with emphasis on the mapping between gravity observables and the representation of the conformal symmetry of the boundary. In particular, we show that non-real conformal weights for the boundary theory correspond to space-times that have non-zero angular momentum. Some miscellaneous results on the role of the holonomies and isometry groups are also presented.
Measuring cyber attribution in games

Cyber attribution is a difficult problem, and conducting attribution research is made even more difficult by a lack of data with ground truth. In this paper we describe a game (capture the flag) based framework to produce cyber attribution data with deception. We discuss the motivation, related work, and the design of the contest and the framework to record data. We make the framework available as open source software.
Clinical Studies of Vaccines Targeting Breast Cancer 1

Many clinical studies have been undertaken to assess the therapeutic potential of vaccination and have included a large variety of cancer immunogens. Most of these studies involved patients with metastatic cancer, which is characterized by the most aggressive malignant cells, the longestlasting disease, and the failure of all standard cytotoxic treatments. The presence of tumor over long periods and the toxicity of previous treatments tend to negatively affect immune responsiveness to tumor antigens presented by the vaccine. In this review, we analyze the ability of past and current vaccine therapies to induce clinical responses in breast cancer. To date, clinical responses have been observed by using vaccines targeting HER-2/neu protein, human telomerase reverse transcriptase, carcinoembryonic antigen, and carbohydrate antigen given after stem cell rescue. The review concludes with a discussion of possible future directions for vaccine development and applications.
Flue gas treatment using multipoint barrier discharge with pulse modulator

An experimental study on the removal of NOx in flue gas has been carried out using plasma chemical reactions in a dielectric barrier discharge. A multipoint-to-plane geometry is used for electrode to lower the operating voltage. Plasma is produced in a narrow gap by a dielectric barrier discharge at low applied voltage with sinusoidal waveform of 2–3 kV r.m.s. The configurations of parallel plane electrode and multipoint-to-plane electrode have been compared to provide information an effectiveness of the gas treatment. The experimental result shows that the multipoint-to-plane electrode is more effective than parallel plane at low energy and low operating voltage. The power requirements would be 24 W to remove 200 ppm of NO using multipoint-to-plane geometry, while the power requirement is 177 W by using parallel plane reactor. At the NOx reduction from a 20 kVA diesel engine exhaust gas, the power supply used was mainly composed with rectifier circuits, IGBT and pulse transformers, and 10 kV pulses can be generated at 2.5 kpps (pulses per seconds). The NOx (NO+NO2) in the gas exhausted from the diesel engine generator has been reduced up to 10% with electrical efficiency of 28 g/kWh at a flow rate of 1.2 Nm3/min‥
Dynamic Neural Fields as Building Blocks of a Cortex-Inspired Architecture for Robotic Scene Representation

Based on the concepts of dynamic field theory (DFT), we present an architecture that autonomously generates scene representations by controlling gaze and attention, creating visual objects in the foreground, tracking objects, reading them into working memory, and taking into account their visibility. At the core of this architecture are three-dimensional dynamic neural fields (DNFs) that link feature to spatial information. These three-dimensional fields couple into lower dimensional fields, which provide the links to the sensory surface and to the motor systems. We discuss how DNFs can be used as building blocks for cognitive architectures, characterize the critical bifurcations in DNFs, as well as the possible coupling structures among DNFs. In a series of robotic experiments, we demonstrate how the DNF architecture provides the core functionalities of a scene representation.
Signed directed graphs and reasoning for agents and multi-agent systems

The paper addresses the problem of modelling an information flow in manufacturing agents (subsystems) consisting of people, machines, robots, etc. It matches very frequent real-life situations in which the following should be answered. How to structure an exchange of information between the elements of an agent? What is better, complete information but heavily delayed, or incomplete information less delayed? The formal mathematical model can be used to generate some examples of knowledge that is useful in answering the above type of questions. Quantitative models of an information flow evaluation, however, are often too complex to serve as the tools useful in the knowledge retrieval process. This realization, also observed in other areas of applied mathematical modelling, has led to increasing interest and research in non-quantitative modelling. In the paper, the application of signed directed graphs in the process of knowledge acquisition for autonomous agents is investigated and illustrated with the cas.
Latent Anaphora Resolution for Cross-Lingual Pronoun Prediction

This paper addresses the task of predicting the correct French translations of third-person subject pronouns in English discourse, a problem that is relevant as a prerequisite for machine translation and that requires anaphora resolution. We present an approach based on neural networks that models anaphoric links as latent variables and show that its performance is competitive with that of a system with separate anaphora resolution while not requiring any coreference-annotated training data. This demonstrates that the information contained in parallel bitexts can successfully be used to acquire knowledge about pronominal anaphora in an unsupervised way.
A New Analysis of Co-Training

In this paper, we present a new analysis on co-training, a representative paradigm of disagreement-based semi-supervised learning methods. In our analysis the co-training process is viewed as a combinative label propagation over two views; this provides a possibility to bring the graph-based and disagreement-based semi-supervised methods into a unified framework. With the analysis we get some insight that has not been disclosed by previous theoretical studies. In particular, we provide the sufficient and necessary condition for co-training to succeed. We also discuss the relationship to previous theoretical results and give some other interesting implications of our results, such as combination of weight matrices and view split.
Effect on performance of wireless uplink for placing decode and forward MIMO relay at different position between source and destination

This paper investigates the effect on performance for placing a decode and forward MIMO relay at different position between source and destination for wireless uplink in the presence of rayleigh fading where source is equipped with single transmit antenna, relay is equipped with multiple transmit and receive antennas, and destination has multiple receive antennas. It is observed that relay at 0.4 and/or 0.5 and/or 0.6 provides best performance. On the other hand, relay at 0.2 and/or 0.8 shows the worst performance. That is, the system shows the best performance placing relay at the middle of the source and the destination, or slightly closer to middle. And the system shows the worse performance placing relay close to the source or the destination. It is also observed that relay at 0.4 or 0.5 or 0.6 provides 5 dB to 12 dB gains at 10-5 compared to relay at 0.2 or 0.8.