Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Visual Analysis Through Four Lenses

The iSquare Research Program is an arts-informed, visual study of the concept of information, utilizing the draw-and-write technique (Pridmore & Bendelow, 1995). Participants are asked to respond to the question, “What is information? ” by drawing upon a 4” by 4” piece of paper, coined an “iSquare. ” The ongoing research program explores three questions: 1. ) How do people visualize the concept of information? ; 2. ) How do visual conceptions of information differ among populations? ; and 3. ) How do these images relate to the traditional conceptions of information made of words? Since 2011, more than 1,000 iSquares have been collected from around the world and fresh insights into the nature of information have been reported in journals of information science (Hartel, 2014a, 2014b, in press), and the drawings have been showcased as exhibitions at international conferences (Hartel, 2012, 2013a, 2013b). This paper will introduce the study to the visual methods community and then take a critical look at the visual analysis process by describing, comparing, and problematizing the four analytical strategies used on the iSquare data thus far: compositional interpretation (Rose, 2007), thematic analysis (Guest, 2012), content analysis (Krippendorff, 2012), and pictorial metaphor analysis (Forceville, 2009). As cast upon the iSquare data set, each analytical technique will be profiled to reveal its disciplinary roots, epistemological and ontological commitments, application process, and quintessential findings. The audience will gain a heightened critical awareness of the power of analytical techniques to determine findings and will stand better able to select and use such devices.
The Relationship Between Sexual Function and Quality of Sleep in Caregiving Mothers of Sons with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy

Introduction The task of the caregiver, especially a caregiving mother of a son with a chronic and fatal disease, may interfere with their quality of sleep, sexuality, and some hormone levels. Aim The aim of this study was to evaluate the sexual function and the quality of sleep of caregiving mothers of sons with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Methods We evaluated 20 caregiving mothers of sons with DMD and 20 caregiving mothers of sons without any neuromuscular or chronic disease. All of them voluntarily responded to the evaluating questionnaires about their sexuality and their quality of sleep, and gave blood samples to evaluate their hormonal levels. Main Outcome Measures All mothers were evaluated using the questionnaire of Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) and the Pittsburgh questionnaire (PSQI). The blood samples were tested to determine serum levels of testosterone, estradiol, follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, progesterone, adrenocorticotropic hormone, and cortisol. Results Caregiving mothers of sons with DMD had significantly lower scores in the FSFI questionnaire, suggesting a higher risk for sexual dysfunction. The PSQI demonstrated that these caregiving mothers present increased sleep latency, reduced sleep efficiency, daytime dysfunction, and poor sleep quality. Blood tests showed a rise in cortisol levels, which correlated with the compromised sexuality and quality of sleep. Conclusions This study indicates that caregiving mothers of sons with DMD show major risk for sexual dysfunction and a reduction in their quality of sleep mediated in part by the hormonal changes related to stress. Nozoe KT, Hachul H, Hirotsu C, Polesel DN, Moreira GA, Tufik S, and Andersen ML. The relationship between sexual function and quality of sleep in caregiving mothers of sons with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Sex Med 2014;2:133–140.
DSP RE-Encryption: A Flexible Mechanism for Access Control Enforcement Management in DaaS

With the popular use of service-oriented technologies, Database as a Service(DaaS) as a new paradigm is becoming a more practical and useful model for those enterprises who can't afford the expensive DBMS products. However access control management by the database service provider ($DSP$) in the DaaS context is challenging because the $DSP$ may be untrusted for the delegated data contents. In thispaper, we first present an approach to implement the flexible accesscontrol enforcement management by applying a $DSP$ re-encryption mechanism. Our approach not only can implement the selective accesscontrol of the encrypted data by the $DSP$, but also can relieve the users from the complex key derivation procedure. The underlying idea of our approach is that the $DSP$ uses different re-encryption keys for users of the system to implement flexible access control enforcement management under the $DSP$ re-encryption mechanism. We demonstrate the usefulness and security property of our flexible access control enforcement management, finally we analyze and resolve the possible attacks and information disclosure.
2016 Ieee International Conference on Big Data (big Data) Scaling Character-based Morphological Tagging to Fourteen Languages

—This paper investigates neural character-based morphological tagging for languages with complex morphology and large tag sets. Character-based approaches are attractive as they can handle rarely-and unseen words gracefully. More specifically, beside a rich morphology, non-canonical language, change of language or other linguistic variability can heavily degrade the accuracy of natural language processing of web and CMC data. We evaluate on 14 languages and observe consistent gains over a state-of-the-art morphological tagger across all languages except for English and French, where we match the state-of-the-art. The gains are clearly correlated with the amount of training data. We present supplementary experiments to explore whether and to what extent unsuper-vised data through pre-trained word vectors can compensate for limited amounts of supervised data. Moreover, we show preliminary results to study the effect of noisy input data by flipping characters at random.
Effects of Soil-Applied Imidacloprid on Asian Citrus Psyllid (Hemiptera: Psyllidae) Feeding Behavior

ABSTRACT The Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri Kuwayama (Hemiptera: Psyllidae), is one of the most important pests of citrus (Citrus spp.) because of its status as a vector of Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (Las), the bacterium associated with citrus greening disease. The use of insecticides for vector control is the primary method of managing the spread of this pathogen. Imidacloprid is an insecticide commonly applied to the root zone of young citrus trees to provide systemic protection from pests. The effects of imidacloprid on feeding behavior of D. citri have not been studied in much detail. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of imidacloprid application on feeding behavior of D. citri and to determine whether use of this systemic insecticide could have any effect on pathogen transmission by D. citri. A direct current electrical penetration graph monitor was used to record D. citri feeding behaviors for 12-h periods on mature and young leaves of imidacloprid-treated and -untreated citrus seedlings. Overall, compared with untreated plants, the feeding behavior of D. citri was disrupted on imidacloprid-treated plants via reduction in the number of probes, as well as durations of average probes, initial stylet contact with phloem, phloem salivation, and phloem ingestion. The results of this study demonstrate that soil applications of imidacloprid can reduce the probability of citrus plants becoming inoculated with Las through a reduction in the number and duration of phloem salivation events by D. citri. Furthermore, Las acquisition from infected citrus is greatly reduced as a result of decreased phloem ingestion by D. citri on imidacloprid-treated plants.
MODELING OF THE NEGATIVE SURPLUS IN INSURANCE

An insurance activity model that allows to evaluate the duration of the negative surplus is presented in this paper. Assuming the surplus process as continuing if ruin occurs, we consider how long this process will stay below zero. The compound Poisson continuous time surplus process is used for the model development. Analytical formulas are obtained for estimating the expected value and the dispersion of both the number and the duration times of negative surpluses when individual claims amount is distributed according to the Gamma (α, β) distribution, with free choice of the parameters α ∈N and β > 0. We use simulation to verify the soundness of the analytical results, evaluating the performance of surplus process under various factors. An aggregate approach has been used for creation of formal description of insurer’s business process. The characteristics of the duration of the negative surplus are computed and compared with the theoretical approximate values obtained from the analytical expressions.
Node Specificity in Convolutional Deep Nets Depends on Receptive Field Position and Size

In convolutional deep neural networks, receptive field (RF) size increases with hierarchical depth. When RF size approaches full coverage of the input image, different RF positions result in RFs with different specificity, as portions of the RF fall out of the input space. This leads to a departure from the convolutional concept of positional invariance and opens the possibility for complex forms of context specificity.
Playing by the Rules? The Development of an Amended Index to Measure the Impact of Rules of Origin on Intra-PTA Trade Flows

Rules of Origin (RoO) are essential components of any preferential trade agreement (PTA) short of a full customs union. The recent proliferation of PTAs has led to increased interest in the effects of RoO with empirical estimates consistently showing that they act as barriers to intra-PTA trade. However, this paper argues that the indices of RoO restrictiveness currently used in empirical analysis are flawed as they focus solely on product specific RoO and do not incorporate information on regime wide provisions, that is, those rules that apply across all goods in a particular agreement. As such, they do not capture fully the effective restrictiveness of a given RoO. In order to address this issue, this paper weights the Harris Index of RoO restrictiveness by three regime wide provisions; the size of the Cumulation Zone, the de minimis allowance, and certification type. The resulting new measure, the Regime Weighted Harris Index (RWHI), is then each used in both OLS and IV regressions to measure the impact of RoO on intra-PTA trade flows. Across an eleven year panel of 90 country-pairs, a negative effect of RoO on intra-PTA trade is found using OLS. However, the results of an IV regression suggest that the situation is somewhat more complicated, with RoO actually promoting trade flows in certain product groups. This is the first attempt in the literature to develop an instrument for RoO restrictiveness which constitutes a second source of value added for this paper.
Evidence for the role of German final devoicing in pre-attentive speech processing: a mismatch negativity study

Results of a mismatch negativity experiment are reported in which the pre-attentive relevance of the German phonological alternation of final devoicing (FD) is shown in two ways. The experiment employs pseudowords. (1) A deviant [vus] paired with standard /vuzə/ did not show a mismatch effect for the voicing change in /z/ versus [s] because the two can be related by FD. When standard and deviant were reversed, the two could not be related by FD and a mismatch effect for the voicing difference occurred. (2) An ill-formed deviant that violates FD, *[vuz], triggered mismatch effects that were plausibly attributed to its ill-formedness. The results show that a syllable-related process like FD is already taken into account by the processing system in early pre-attentive processing.
Influence of oxygen flow rate during annealing process of Titanium Dioxide thin films

Titanium Dioxide (TiO2) thin films have been successfully deposited on glass substrate using sol-gel method. The samples were then annealed in a furnace under different oxygen gas flow rate. Current-Voltage (I–V) measurement, SEM, and UV-Vis characterization are done for all samples. SEM images confirm the nanostructured nature of the thin films. The sample with higher oxygen flow rate shows significant improvement in term of structural and electrical properties.
A high-precision collaboration positioning algorithm with indoor environment

In this paper, the actual indoor environment the effects of reflection, diffraction, partition loss and other interference factors between the mobile station (MT) and a base station (BS), aiming at actual indoor environment is researched. The algorithm proposed here consists of real-time environment parameter measure, pseudolite positioning technology and cooperative multiple positioning circles algorithm. In view of the problems, such as the interference between mobile nodes and fixed BSs, multiple linear regression is applied to measure the environment parameter in real-time to ensure the follow-up positioning accuracy. Against the problem that traditional pseudolite positioning technology may introduce near and far field effect, multipath or other issues when the distance between the users is too close, a new location algorithm with collaboration of multiple positioning circles based on pseudolite is proposed in this paper. Simulation result shows that the new algorithm can effectively improve the positioning accuracy of the indoor environment.
Introducing recursive learning algorithm for system identification of nonlinear time varying processes

several methods have been introduced for identification of nonlinear processes via locally or partially linear models. Unfortunately, most of these methods have a training phase which should be done offline. There are phenomena that possess time varying behavior. Furthermore, the amount, distribution and/or quality of measurement data that is available before the model is put to operation may be insufficient to build a model that would meet the specification. One of the most popular learning methods in nonlinear system identification is Locally Linear Model Tree (LoLiMoT) algorithm as an incremental learning method which needs to be carried out by an offline data set. This paper introduces a recursive version of this algorithm called Recursive Locally Linear Model Tree algorithm (RLoLiMoT) for time varying and online applications. The proposed method also eliminates some of the LoLiMoT restrictions in tuning premise parameters of the Locally Linear Models (LLMs). Two case studies are considered to test the performance of the proposed method. The results depict the power of the proposed method in online system identification of nonlinear time varying systems.
Seasonal change in Titan's haze 1992–2002 from Hubble Space Telescope observations

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) document the seasonal migration of haze in Titan's atmosphere. Image profiles show darkening of the north relative to the south at 439 nm (blue) but no change at 619 nm. The limb profile at 889 nm has inverted, becoming north‐bright, a variation consistent with haze transport towards the winter hemisphere by winds. The complex altitude‐time variation of the north‐south haze differences are indicated in resolved spectra acquired with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS): the continuum slope of a north/south ratio spectrum changes sign, becoming red, between 2000 and 2002, although the 889 nm band had already reversed by 2000, suggesting the haze distribution changes most rapidly at high altitudes.
Accelerating the distance transform

The distance transform is an important image processing operation. This paper presents improvements on current FPGA implementations of the chamfer distance transform, and the separable Euclidean distance transform. Stream processing (one pixel per clock cycle) is assumed, and methods for accelerating the transforms (multiple pixels per clock cycle) are analysed, in particular the external memory bandwidth required to achieve the acceleration. A new memory access pattern, the zip-zap buffer, reduces the memory requirements of several of the operations.
RIPK3—a predictive marker for personalized immunotherapy?

ABSTRACT Cancer immunotherapy is an attractive therapeutic option but it is currently unclear which patient may benefit from such approaches. Using the model of cervical cancer, we have demonstrated that PolyIC-driven immunogenicity strictly depends on the necroptosis regulator RIPK3 in the neoplastic cells. This proposes RIPK3 as a novel predictive marker for personalization of cancer immunotherapy
Lecture L8 - Relative Motion using Rotating Axes

In the previous lecture, we related the motion experienced by two observers in relative translational motion with respect to each other. In this lecture, we will extend this relation to another type of observer. That is, an observer who rotates relative to a stationary observer. Later in the term, we will consider the more general case of a translating (includes accelerating) and rotating observer as well as multiple observers who may be translating and rotating with respect to one another.
LCL: A graphical meta-language for specification of language constraints

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is commonly used for constraints in meta-model-based language specifications. However, it may be advantageous to have a domain-specific constraint meta-language optimised for language specifications. A survey of OCL usage in language specifications has been performed, in order to gain an understanding of common constraint patterns. This is used as a starting point for defining a new meta-language for language constraints, Language Constraint Language (LCL), that has an intuitive graphical syntax.
Does Dietary Deoxynivalenol Modulate the Acute Phase Reaction in Endotoxaemic Pigs?—Lessons from Clinical Signs, White Blood Cell Counts, and TNF-Alpha

We studied the interaction between deoxynivalenol (DON)-feeding and a subsequent pre- and post-hepatic immune stimulus with the hypothesis that the liver differently mediates the acute phase reaction (APR) in pigs. Barrows (n = 44) were divided into a DON-(4.59 mg DON/kg feed) and a control-diet group, surgically equipped with permanent catheters pre- (V. portae hepatis) and post-hepatic (V. jugularis interna) and infused either with 0.9% NaCl or LPS (7.5 µg/kg BW). Thus, combination of diet (CON vs. DON) and infusion (CON vs. LPS, jugular vs. portal) created six groups: CON_CONjug. -CONpor. , CON_CONjug. -LPSpor. , CON_LPSjug. -CONpor. , DON_CONjug. -CONpor. , DON_CONjug. -LPSpor. , DON_LPSjug. -CONpor. Blood samples were taken at −30, 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90, 120, 150, 180 min relative to infusion and analyzed for leukocytes and TNF-alpha. Concurrently, clinical signs were scored and body temperature measured during the same period. LPS as such induced a dramatic rise in TNF-alpha (p < 0.001), hyperthermia (p < 0.01), and severe leukopenia (p < 0.001). In CON-fed pigs, an earlier return to physiological base levels was observed for the clinical complex, starting at 120 min post infusionem (p < 0.05) and persisting until 180 min. DON_LPSjug. -CONpor. resulted in a lower temperature rise (p = 0.08) compared to CON_LPSjug. -CONpor. In conclusion, APR resulting from a post-hepatic immune stimulus was altered by chronic DON-feeding.
An smpUMHexagonS-based motion estimation algorithm for heterogeneous architectures

Simplified Unsymmetrical Multi-Hexagon Search is one of the faster motion estimation algorithms for video coding available in the literature. It achieves a very good tradeoff between computational complexity and coding efficiency. In fact, the H.264/AVC reference software includes it, and it could easily be extended to the new video coding standard: High Efficiency Video Coding. This paper proposes a parallel algorithm which implements the Simplified Unsymmetrical Multi-Hexagon motion search in a graphic processing unit which serves as co-processor for the central processing unit. The results show a negligible rate distortion drop with a speed-up of up to 8× for the motion estimation module compared to the sequential version. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is evaluated against some related proposals available in the literature, outperforming all of them in terms of time reduction as well as coding efficiency.
OBJECT NETWORK: A FORMAL MODEL TO DEVELOP INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

The aim of this work is to introduce an approach based on a generalization of the object-oriented paradigm for system modeling and implementation. The key concept is object network, a set of connected places containing objects modeling the characteristics and properties of a given system. Object network has a naturally distributed structure, is derived from a general and formal approach for a theory of objects, and provides a framework particularly suitable for computational intelligence. An object network has both, formal and representational power needed to develop and to implement intelligent systems.
Estimating the Implied Distribution of the Future Short Term Interest Rate Using the Longstaff-Schwartz Model

This paper proposes the use of the two-factor term-structure model of Longstaff and Schwartz (1992a, LS) to estimate the risk-neutral density (RND) of the future short-term interest rate. The resulting RND can be interpreted as the market's estimate of the density of the future short-term interest rate. As such, it provides a useful financial indicator of the perceived uncertainty of future developments in the short-term interest rate. The LS approach used in this paper provides an alternative to option-based estimation procedures, which may be useful in situations here options markets are not sufficiently developed to allow estimation of the implied distribution from observed option prices. A simulation-based comparison of these two approaches reveals that the differences in the results are relatively small in magnitude, at least for short forecast horizons. Furthermore, the LS model is quite successful in capturing the asymmetries of the true distribution. It is therefore concluded that the LS model can be useful for estimating the distribution of future interest rates, when the purpose is to provide a general measure of the market' s perceived uncertainty, for example as an indictor for monetary policy purposes. JEL Classification: C15, E43, E47, G12
Fiona: A Tool to Analyze Interacting Open Nets

Fiona is a tool that has been designed to check behavioral correctness of a service and to analyze the interaction of services in service oriented architectures, for instance. It implements very efficient data structures and algorithms, which have partly been adapted from LoLA. Fiona has been proven to be applicable in practice by service designers, service publishers, and service brokers. This tool paper describes the functionality of Fiona and provides an insight into its architecture.