Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Geography and Economy: Three Lectures

This book focuses on the theme of the mutually constitutive relations between geographic space and the economic order. Three principle lines of investigation are identified and explored. First, Allen J. Scott sketches out the general theory of the division of labour and the ways in which it is reflected in geographic patterns of specialization and interaction. He examines, in particular, the role of the division of labour in the formation of large-scale agglomerations of economic activity and the ways in which their internal and external relationships are played out. Second, he considers the structure of geographic space as a fountainhead of creativity, learning, and innovation. A theory of the creative field is presented, and its application to the investigation of entrepreneurship, technological change, and the dynamics of the cultural economy is considered. Third, he offers an account of the regional question in less developed parts of the world. Here, he recovers some of the arguments of high development theory and shows how they can be revitalized in the light of a specifically geographic approach. These three lines of investigation are, of course, tightly intertwined with one another. The argument in general demonstrates that geographic space is not just an inert dimension in which the economy unfolds, but plays an active role in the eventuation of economic outcomes. This state of affairs raises many difficult policy questions about growth and development in both more and less economically advanced countries. Some of the more important of these questions are also broached in the book.
Simple constrained deformations for geometric modeling and interactive design

Deformations are a powerful tool for shape modeling and design. We present a new model for producing controlled spatial deformations, which we term Simple Constrained Deformations (Scodef). The user defines a set of constraint points, giving a desired displacement and radius of influence for each. Each constraint point determines a local B-spline basis function centered at the constraint point, falling to zero for points beyond the radius. The deformed image of any point in space is a blend of these basis functions, using a projection matrix computed to satisfy the constraints. The deformation operates on the whole space regardless of the representation of the objects embedded inside the space. The constraints directly influence the final shape of the deformed objects, and this shape can be fine-tuned by adjusting the radius of influence of each constraint point. The computations required by the technique can be done very efficiently, and real-time interactive deformation editing on current workstations is possible.
An extensible approach for mapping relational DB to RDF

Converting web data to semantic format is an important task for the next generation of the web. A huge amount of web data is stored in databases. Moreover, many approaches have been proposed to map between DB and web ontologies. This paper proposes an approach to convert DB to RDF with extra user-defined rules. These extra rules, which extend the original data, enable semantic query engines to answer more queries. The proposed approach generates not only RDF data based on the mapping of DB to RDF but also extra discovered relations based on user-defined rules. A prototype for the proposed approach is implemented to show the feasibility of the proposed idea.
Towards bridging the gap between Dalvik bytecode and native code during static analysis of Android applications

We propose a method for statically analyzing components that can be part of Android applications and which have not been very well analyzed so far, namely native libraries. As of now, third-party native code can be seen as a black box that can be fed input parameters from the Dalvik bytecode context, and output parameters can be returned back to the bytecode context. However, the native code can still initialize and invoke Android API and internal Java-based application classes and methods solely within the native context using an interface towards the Dalvik Virtual Machine. This introduces a contingency during analysis and therefore, it is crucial to understand inner-workings of the native code in order to fully understand the behavior of an application. The contribution of this paper is to bridge the gap between static analysis of Dalvik bytecode and native code by attempting to reconstruct calls to Android APIs and performing data-flow analysis inside native libraries. Our results from real-world applications show that such constructions used for invoking Java code inside native code do exist to some extent and could potentially be used more widely in order to obfuscate applications.
Identifying the Best-Fitting Factor Structure of the Experience of Close Relations - Revised in a Scandinavian Example

The aim of this study was to enhance the understanding of cultural and sample differences in the assessment of attachment by examining the factor structure of the Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R). The ECR-R is a self-report measure of adult romantic attachment dimensions. The present study used a Danish sample with the purpose of addressing limitations in previous studies, such as the lack of diversity in cultural background, restricted sample characteristics, and poorly fitting structure models. Participants consisted of 253 parents of children between the ages of 7 and 12 years, 53% being mothers. The parents completed the paper version of the questionnaire. Confirmatory Factor Analyses were carried out to determine whether theoretically and empirically established models including one and two factors would also provide adequate fits in a Danish sample. A previous study using the original ECR suggested that Scandinavian samples may best be described using a five-factor solution. Our results indicated that the one- and two-factor models of the ECR-R did not fit the data well. Exploratory Factor Analysis revealed a five-factor model. Our study provides evidence that further investigation is needed to establish which model may provide the best model fit in the Scandinavian countries.
Loss Aversion and the Asymmetric Transmission of Monetary Policy

There is widespread evidence that monetary policy exerts asymmetric effects on output over contractions and expansions in economic activity, while price responses display no sizeable asymmetry. To rationalize these facts we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where households’ utility depends on consumption deviations from a reference level below which loss aversion is displayed. State-dependent degrees of real rigidity and elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption generate competing effects on output and inflation. Contractions face the Central Bank with higher responsiveness of output to interest rate changes, as well as a flatter aggregate supply schedule.
Automatic Diagnosis Support System Using Nuclear and Luminal Features

We present a method of automatic colorectal cancer diagnosis that can quantify cellular and structural tissue information. In this paper, we consider sixteen-dimensional features, consisting of the nuclei-cytoplasm (NC) ratio, connected nuclei area, and atypical lumen ratio. For the purpose of imitating the conditions of accurate medical diagnosing, we introduce a four-class classification for group 1, group 3 low, group 3 high, and group 5 biopsies (group 5 biopsies include well-, moderately, and poorly differentiated) in contrast to most previous works proposed in the literature, which classify biopsies into two or three classes. The image set used in this paper consists of 400 images stained from 123 patients by hematoxylin and eosin (the HE method). We compared the performance of the proposed method with a method using texture features that have been widely used in previous studies. Two classification tests were performed, leave-one-ROI-out cross-validation (CV) and leave-one-specimen-out CV. As a result, the proposed method obtained a classification accuracy of 95.0% for ROI-based CV and 78.3% for specimen-based CV.
Controversial Industries , Regional Differences , and Risk : Role of CSR

Controversial industry sectors, such as alcohol, gambling, tobacco, and firearms, have suffered organizational legitimacy problems for a long period of time. This paper examines whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities reduce the level of risk for firms in controversial industries over the long term in an attempt to seek organizational legitimacy around the world. Using data covering 32 countries, this study finds that both the systematic and total risk for firms in controversial industries are generally higher than those for firms in uncontroversial industries due to their inherent harmful image. We then show that controversial industry firms’ engagement in CSR initiatives and policies has a substantial risk-decreasing effect, and that might increase the probability of obtaining and maintaining the social license to operate. The documented effect of CSR on firm risk, however, is more pronounced for firms in Europe and North America than in the Asia-Pacific region, suggesting differential CSR-risk association in different region. These results are significant and robust even after potential endogeneity problems are mitigated. Our results further show the longterm impact of controversial industry firms’ CSR engagement on firm risk, which is more pronounced in firms under highly developed financial system for each region. We interpret that our results are supportive of the “harmful image”, “social license to operate”, “differential recognition”, and “long-term risk reduction” explanations.
Convergence of the 26S proteasome and the REVOLUTA pathways in regulating inflorescence and floral meristem functions in Arabidopsis

The 26S proteasome is a large multisubunit proteolytic complex, regulating growth and development in eukaryotes by selective removal of short-lived regulatory proteins. Here, it is shown that the 26S proteasome and the transcription factor gene REVOLUTA (REV) act together in maintaining inflorescence and floral meristem (IM and FM) functions. The characterization of a newly identified Arabidopsis mutant, designated ae4 (asymmetric leaves1/2 enhancer4), which carries a mutation in the gene encoding the 26S proteasome subunit, RPN2a, is reported. ae4 and rev have minor defects in phyllotaxy structure and meristem initiation, respectively, whereas ae4 rev demonstrated strong developmental defects. Compared with the rev single mutant, an increased percentage of ae4 rev plants exhibited abnormal vegetative shoot apical and axillary meristems. After flowering, ae4 rev first gave rise to a few normal-looking flowers, and then flowers with reduced numbers of all types of floral organs. In late reproductive development, instead of flowers, the ae4 rev IM produced numerous filamentous structures, which contained cells seen only in the floral organs, and then carpelloid organs. In situ hybridization revealed that expression of the WUSCHEL and CLAVATA3 genes was severely down-regulated or absent in the late appearing ae4 rev primordia, but the genes were strongly expressed in top-layer cells of inflorescence tips. Double mutant plants combining rev with other 26S proteasome subunit mutants, rpn1a and rpn9a, resembled ae4 rev, suggesting that the 26S proteasome might act as a whole in regulating IM and FM functions.
A 2 D SENSOR BASED CONTROL LAW FOR HOMING OF AUVS IN THE HORIZONTAL PLANE

A new sensor based homing integrated guidance and control law is presented to drive an underactuated autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) towards a fixed target, in the horizontal plane, using the information provided by an Ultra-Short Base Line (USBL) positioning system. Almost global asymptotic stability (AGAS) is achieved, both in the absence of external disturbances and in the presence of constant known ocean currents. Simulations are presented to illustrate the performance and behavior of the overall closed loop system.
1 Paper Code 507 PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP AND SCHOOL RENEWAL

Introduction The study upon which this paper is based solicited information on school renewal from a purposive sample of principals initially identified using quantitative profiling techniques (Silcox, Cavanagh and Dellar, 2003). Principals were presented with a series of questions that enabled an investigation of their leadership behaviours with respect to school renewal. The principals' responses provided a reflective insight into school renewal and change processes in their schools. The paper concentrates on an aspect of the study of leadership of school renewal by exploring principal conceptions of renewal, their approaches to implementing a renewal agenda in their schools and how barriers to renewal were addressed.
Untangling Typechecking of Intersections and Unions

Intersection and union types denote conjunctions and disjunctions of properties. Using bidirectional typechecking, intersection types are relatively straightforward, but union types present challenges. For union types, we can case-analyze a subterm of union type when it appears in evaluation position (replacing the subterm with a variable, and checking that term twice under appropriate assumptions). This technique preserves soundness in a call-by-value semantics. Sadly, there are so many choices of subterms that a direct implementation is not practical. But carefully transforming programs into let-normal form drastically reduces the number of choices. The key results are soundness and completeness: a typing derivation (in the system with too many subterm choices) exists for a program if and only if a derivation exists for the let-normalized program.
Object proposal by multi-branch hierarchical segmentation

Hierarchical segmentation based object proposal methods have become an important step in modern object detection paradigm. However, standard single-way hierarchical methods are fundamentally flawed in that the errors in early steps cannot be corrected and accumulate. In this work, we propose a novel multi-branch hierarchical segmentation approach that alleviates such problems by learning multiple merging strategies in each step in a complementary manner, such that errors in one merging strategy could be corrected by the others. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance for both object proposal and object detection tasks, comparing to previous object proposal methods.
AVATAR : Using text analytics to bridge the structured – unstructured divide

There is a growing need in enterprise applications to query and analyze seamlessly across structured and unstructured data. We propose an information system in which text analytics bridges the structured–unstructured divide. Annotations extracted by text analytic engines, with associated uncertainty, is automatically ingested into a structured data store. We propose an interface that is capable of supporting rich queries over this hybrid data. Uncertainty associated with the extracted information is addressed by building statistical models. We show that different classes of statistical models can be built to address issues such as ranking and OLAP style reporting. We are currently building a prototype system called AVATAR that utilizes an existing commercial relational DBMS system as the underlying storage engine. We present the architecture of AVATAR and identify several research challenges arising out of our prototyping effort.
AN OPTIMIZED IMAGE ENHANCEMENT OF FOGGY IMAGES USING GAMMA ADJUSTMENT

An Adaptive Contrast image enhancement is proposed for degraded color images. The fogs are removed in two concerns, at initial stage the foggy image information's are extracted which means that HIS components are obtained by converting RGB component from an input image. At second stage the Intensity (I) has been calculated by contrast enhancement and then adjusted with the value of atmospheric light. After completion of morphological operation the fog is slightly removed from an source image. It is observed that transmission ratio is not perfect for the output of calculated atmospheric light and morphological operation. Because the fog is still exist according to the distance of the object. Moreover the gamma adjustment is made for image which comes from fulfillment operation of transmission ratio and morphological operation. Finally the enhanced defogging image has been obtained as a required or goal output. The resultant image has increased efficiency and reduced system computation time. The proposed method overcomes the drawbacks of retinex method of theory approach.
Nanocrystalline Ge Flash Memories: Electrical Characterization and Trap Engineering

A single transistor memory structure with threshold voltage shift, Vth, exceeding ~1.5 V corresponding to interface charge trapping in nanocrystalline germanium (ncGe), operating at 0.96 MV/cm, is presented. The trapping effect is eliminated when nc-Ge is synthesized in forming gas thus excluding the possibility of quantum confinement and Coulomb blockade effects. Through discharging kinetics, the model of deep level trap charge storage is confirmed. The trap energy level is dependent on the matrix which confines the ncGe.
A Preface to Post-Chicago Antitrust

Three broad eras have characterized antitrust interpretation in the United States: a classical era around the end of the 19th Century, a structural era around the middle of the 20th Century, and a Chicago school perspective characterizing the last quarter of the 20th Century. This essay examines that history, asks why antitrust doctrine changes over time, and suggests some doctrinal possibilities for a new, post-Chicago era of antitrust interpretation that may be emerging.
Physical activity and cancer prevention: a review of current evidence and biological mechanisms.

OBJECTIVE The main aim of this paper is to review the evidence available from the date of PubMed's inception to May 2011 for a link between cancer and physical activity (PA) in both animal models and humans. METHODS We decided to select studies that comply with the scheme proposed by the American College of Sports Medicine/American Heart Association (ACSM/AHA) that distinguish occupational physical activity (OPA) and leisure-time physical activity (LT-PA), further classified in three levels of intensity (low, moderate and heavy) based on the Metabolic Equivalent of Task (MET) index. RESULTS Considering animal models, there was strong evidence for an inverse association between voluntary wheel exercise and the risk of colon and breast cancer. Regarding human studies, we identified the following main results: 1) colorectum: LT-PA provided an overall colon risk reduction of 13-14%; 2) breast: significant reduction in the frequency of post-menopausal (PMP) cancers in women that practiced heavy and moderate LT-PA; 3) prostate: heavy OPA and LT-PA seemed to reduce the risk of advanced prostate cancers; 4) endometrium: strong protective effect of heavy/moderate LT-PA among overweight/ obese women; 5) lung: inverse relationship between heavy LT-PA and lung cancer in former or current smokers across all histologies. CONCLUSION Increased LT-PA is associated with cancer prevention in several organs, but strong biases, such as body mass index (BMI), gender and age, make it difficult to assess which aspects of PA contribute most strongly to the reduced risk. Furthermore, we found few studies that indicated a protective role for OPA in cancer prevention when compared with LT-PA.
Metastable Nematic Preordering in Smectic Liquid Crystalline Phase Transitions

Modeling and simulation studies using a high-order Landau-de Gennes type model for the direct isotropic/smectic-A liquid crystal transition are presented showing the existence of meta-stable nematic pre-ordering under certain conditions, in agreement with experimental observations (Tokita, M. et al. Macromolecules 2006, 39, 2021-2023)
Region-o f-Interest Video Compression with a Composite and a Long-Term Frame

Multiple frame prediction has proved successful in increasing the performance of motion compensated video coders. Region-of-interest (ROI) coding in conjunction with a dual frame predictor can lead to interesting design choices on how to allocate the available bitrate among the frame regions. In this work, we tackle the problem of applying ROI coding on aerial imagery and then on standard videoconferencing sequences. For the latter, we introduce a novel composite frame scheme that takes advantage of the flexibility offered by the dual frame predictor that captures motion history from the short term past. Experimental results show that we can achieve significant bit rate and computational complexity savings for packet loss scenarios.
A knowledge based genetic algorithm for path planning of a mobile robot

In this paper, a knowledge based genetic algorithm (GA) for path planning of a mobile robot is proposed, which uses problem-specific genetic algorithms for robot path planning instead of the standard GAs. The proposed knowledge based genetic algorithm incorporates the domain knowledge into its specialized operators, where some also combine a local search technique. The proposed genetic algorithm also features a unique and simple path representation and a simple but effective evaluation method. The knowledge based genetic algorithm is capable of finding an optimal or near-optimal robot path in both complex static and dynamic environments. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed genetic algorithm is demonstrated by simulation studies. The irreplaceable role of the specialized genetic operators in the proposed GA for solving robot path planning problem is demonstrated by a comparison study.
A Data Placement Method Based on Bayesian Network for Data-Intensive Scientific Workflows

For the data-intensive scientific workflows, large mount of data need to be stored and often been distributed into several data centers. So the data movements between different data centers become inevitable when the application executed. The more time the data movements, the less efficiency of the data-intensive application. This paper proposed a data placement method based on Bayesian network for data-intensive scientific workflows, which could effectively reduce the data movement time between different data centers. The validity of this method is discussed and illustrated by experiment.
A Single Residue, Arginine 65, Is Critical for the Functional Interaction of Leukocyte-Associated Inhibitory Receptor-1 with Collagens1

ITIM-containing receptors play an essential role in modulating immune responses. Leukocyte-associated inhibitory receptor (LAIR)-1, also known as CD305, is an ITIM-containing inhibitory receptor, expressed by all leukocytes, that binds collagens. In this article, we investigate the effect of a conservative R65K mutation on LAIR-1 ligand binding and function. Compared with LAIR-1 wild-type (wt)-expressing cells, LAIR-1 R65K cells show markedly reduced binding to collagen, which correlates with a reduced level of LAIR-1 polarization to the site of interaction with collagens. Both LAIR-1 wt and R65K cells can generate intracellular signals when ligated by anti-LAIR-1 mAb, but only LAIR-1 wt cells respond to collagens or matrigel. In agreement, surface plasmon resonance analyses showed that LAIR-1 R65K protein has markedly reduced avidity for collagen type I compared with LAIR-1 wt. Likewise, LAIR-1 R65K protein has decreased avidity for cells expressing transmembrane collagen XVII. Thus, a single residue, Arg65, is critical for the interaction of LAIR-1 with collagens.