Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Adaptive and Collaborative Server-Side SMS Spam Filtering Scheme Using Artificial Immune System

ABSTRACT SMS Spam, which is an unsolicited or unwanted message, is a major problem with Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) subscribers. Existing Spam filters have not been able to stop the SMS Spam problem due to frequent drift in spammer’s words, limited bag of words for training, device portability, and high computational overhead of filters. This paper presents a collaborative and adaptive server-side SMS Spam filter using Artificial Immune System (coined ExAIS_SMS). The proposed scheme involves five modules: the innate mechanism, the user feedback, the quarantine, the tokenizer, and the immune engine. In this study, a new English corpus consisting of 5,240 SMS messages from 20 different users was collected for the study. A comprehensive experimental analysis on the SMS data set reveals the constant changes of Spam keywords and the impact of user feedback for system adaptability. In order to prove the efficiency of the proposed scheme, ExAIS_SMS was benchmarked with existing systems using the NUS corpus. The result gave an overall accuracy of 99% for ExAIS_SMS, 98% for Bayesian, and 97% for a client side AIS. The results showed that ExAIS_SMS is an efficient SMS Spam filtering technique, especially in resource constrained mobile phones.
System Identification in Noisy Data Environments: An Application to Six Asian Stock Markets

This paper analyzes the systematic relationship between the stock market valuations, the nominal GDPs and the interest rates of six Asian countries, using not single equation regession, but an alternative methodology based on complete, multidirectional, least squares projections. We compare the results with the spectral analysis of the information matices and determine the noise levels. The objective is to extract the multidimensional economic system structures from the noisy empirical observations. This complete methodology sharply contrasts with that of the incomplete methodology of Fama (1990), Schwert (1990), etc., who presume planal relations, fit them to the multidimensional data by only one prejudiced unidirectional projection, thereby ignoring between 75% - 92% of the available covariance information and not publishing the absolute majoity of all possible model projections. The results in this paper show that the analyzed countries are better analyzed using such complete multidirectional LS projections, even though the analysis is combinatorially much more complex. All six Asian financial-economic systems are high data noise environments, in which it is very difficult to separate the systematic signals from the noise. Because of these high noise levels, spectral analysis is very unreliable. We identify Taiwan's stock market, economy and financial market to be rationally coherent. In contrast, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Indonesia show only partially coherent systems, while no coherent system can be identified among Japan's data.
Ageing Populations in Post-Industrial Democracies : Comparative Studies of Policies and Politics

1. Mapping the Field: Comparative Generational Politics and Policies in Ageing Democracies Achim Goerres and Pieter Vanhuysse 2. Explaining the Success of Pensioners' Parties: A Qualitative-Comparative Analysis of 31 Polities Sean Hanley 3. Rhetoric and Action on Ageing in the World's 'Oldest' Democracies: Party Platforms and Labor Policies in Germany, Italy and Japan Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba 4. Live Longer, Work Longer? Intergenerational Fairness in Retirement Age Reforms in Germany and the United Kingdom Martin Hering 5. Pension Regimes, Gender and Generational Inequalities: The Persistence of Institutional Differences in Ageing Post-Industrial Democracies Mehmet F. Aysan 6. Accelerating Smaller Cutbacks to Delay Larger Ones? The Politics of Timing and Alarm Bells in OECD Pension Generosity Retrenchment Markus Tepe and Pieter Vanhuysse 7. Population Ageing, the Elderly, and the Generosity of Standard and Minimum Pensions Juan Fernandez 8. The Family and the Welfare State: The Impact of Public Provision for Families on Young People's Demand for Public Childcare Across 21 Nations Achim Goerres and Marcus Tepe 9. Cohort, Class and Attitudes to Redistribution in Two Liberal Welfare States: Britain and the United States, 1996-2006 Jonas Edlund and Stefan Svallfors 10. How Family Policies Affect Women's Formation of Domestic Unions - And Why it Matters for Fertility Andrej Kokkonen 11. Epilogue: Conflict and Convergence: An American Perspective on the Politics of Ageing Welfare Atates Robert B. Hudson
Scenario planning as a tool to understand uncertainty in tourism: the example of transport and tourism in Scotland in 2025

This paper discusses the use of scenario planning as a methodology to help understand the future of tourism. It reports on the results of a scenario planning exercise undertaken in 2007 in Scotland by VisitScotland, the National Tourism Organisation for Scotland, which seeks to understand how transport might shape tourism in 2025. The study followed an established methodology used by the UK's Office for Science and Technology [OfST. (2006). Transport – intelligent futures project. London: Author. ] and how it set out to understand what transport provision might look like in 2055. The methodology used by the OfST study was modified and expanded by this study with a series of in-depth interviews with industry stakeholders to understand what the key drivers of change in the transport sector were in 2007 and would be in 2025. This was followed by the construction of two scenarios designed to look at two extreme cases of how transport and tourism would be interconnected to shape the destination and ability to access different types of tourism product and experience. These scenarios were then introduced to a workshop setting with key industry stakeholders to assess the reliability and validity of the scenarios. The paper also draws out wider implications for academic research of using scenario analysis in tourism, so that the value of this methodology can be understood and used more widely in appropriate settings. The study has to be viewed against the current tourism strategy for Scotland – the Tourism Framework for Change.
Software Energy Consumption Estimation at Architecture-Level

The architecture of software systems can be naturally modeled as complex networks, where entities of software are nodes and interactions between entities are edges. These edges represent data-flows, instruction-flows and control-flows of the software, and these flows driving hardware circuit is the internal cause of the energy consumption of the software. In this research, we model software systems as complex networks, assuming that there is a nonlinear function relation between network characteristics of software and its energy consumption. Based on this assumption, we propose a software energy consumption estimation model at architecture-level. First we measure five network characteristics of software, and then use extreme learning machine (ELM) to fit the relation between network characteristics of software and its energy consumption. Finally we evaluate our energy model on Linux platform and the results show that our model can achieve a 7.9% error rate compared to pTop model, which indicates our assumption is reasonable and our software energy model is effective.
Anticipating and Adjusting to the Introduction of the National Minimum Wage in the Hospitality and Clothing Industries

The National Minimum Wage (NMW) has been a unique event, providing an exceptional opportunity to learn how firms manage change and adjust to a significant intervention in the labour market. This article discusses how hospitality and clothing firms managed the introduction of the NMW in the two-year period leading up to its arrival on 1 April 1999. Individual firms do have scope for discretionary, random and opportunistic decisions, and the introduction of the NMW is not a discrete event occurring in a stable world. Ultimately, its impact will be difficult to predict and to measure even though we can discern inter- and intra-industry differences, and along a small and larger firm divide. While the NMW is clearly an important dimension of public policy that has been successful in raising workers' pay, the level at which it is set will continue to pose conundrums to the policy makers in terms of dealing with firms' performance and competitiveness.
Towards a framework for performing outsourcing capability

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to go beyond the “What to outsource” and “To Outsource or Not” debate. Recognizing outsourcing as a fast growing reality that firms have to depend upon, the paper concerns itself with optimal management of outsourcing arrangements through the practice of “outsourcing capability”. It argues that outsourcing failure can be mitigated if organizations see outsourcing as an “ongoing activity” to be managed as opposed to treating it as a one-time opportunistic “act”. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the review of existing literature and drawing upon recent instances of outsourcing successes and failures, the paper develops a conceptual framework which divides various organizational processes into four different classes. It delineates the varied aspects of “outsourcing capability” that a firm would need to use to manage these varied class of processes as and when they are outsourced. Findings – There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to managing outsourced processes. Dif.
A Production-and-Scheduling for One-Vendor Multi-Buyer Model under the Consolidation Policy

This paper considers an integrated one-vendor multi-buyer production-inventory model where the vendor manufactures multiple products in lot at their associated finite production rates. In the model, it is allowed for each product to be shipped in lot to the buyers even before the whole product production is not completed yet. Each product lot is dispatched to the associated buyer in a number of shipments. The buyers consume their products at fixed rates. The objective is to the production and shipment schedules in the integrated system, which minimizes the total cost per unit time. The total cost consists of production setup cost, inventory holding cost and shipment cost. For the model, an iterative optimal solution procedure with shipment consolidation policy incorporated. It is then tested through numerical experiments to show how efficient and effective the shipment consolidation policy is.
An Agent Harms a Victim: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study on Specific Moral Emotions

The statement: An agent harms a victim, depicts a situation that triggers moral emotions. Depending on whether the agent and the victim are the self or someone else, it can lead to four different moral emotions: self-anger (I harm myself), guilt (I harm someone), other-anger (someone harms me), and compassion (someone harms someone). In order to investigate the neural correlates of these emotions, we examined brain activation patterns elicited by variations in the agent (self vs. other) and the victim (self vs. other) of a harmful action. Twenty-nine healthy participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while imagining being in situations in which they or someone else harmed themselves or someone else. Results indicated that the three emotional conditions associated with the involvement of other, either as agent or victim (guilt, other-anger, and compassion conditions), all activated structures that have been previously associated with the Theory of Mind (ToM, the attribution of mental states to others), namely, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the precuneus, and the bilateral temporo-parietal junction. Moreover, the two conditions in which both the self and other were concerned by the harmful action (guilt and other-anger conditions) recruited emotional structures (i.e., the bilateral amygdala, anterior cingulate, and basal ganglia). These results suggest that specific moral emotions induce different neural activity depending on the extent to which they involve the self and other.
Streaming Tables: Native Support to Streaming Data in DBMSs

Data stream management systems (DSMSs) are conceived for running continuous queries (CQs) on the most recently streamed data. This model does not completely fit the needs of several modern data-intensive applications that require to manage recent/historical/static data and execute both CQs and OTQs joining such data. In order to cope with these new needs, some DSMSs have moved toward the integration of database management systems (DBMSs) functionalities to augment their capabilities. In this paper we adopt the opposite perspective and we lay the groundwork for extending DBMSs to natively support streaming facilities. To this end, we introduce a new kind of table, the streaming table, as a persistent structure where streaming data enters and remains stored for a long period, ideally forever. Streaming tables feature a novel access paradigm: continuous writes and one-time as well as continuous reads. We present a streaming table implementation and two novel types of indices that efficiently support both update and scan high rates. A detailed experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed technology.
Effect of cigarette smoke on endothelial regeneration in vivo and nitric oxide levels.

BACKGROUND Cigarette smoking accelerates atherosclerosis and restenosis after vascular reconstruction. The mechanisms by which smoking alters vessel structure after injury are unclear. This study examined the effects of cigarette smoking on endothelial regeneration, an important component of arterial remodeling. MATERIALS AND METHODS Adult male rats were subjected to balloon injury of the thoracic aorta and exposed to mainstream cigarette smoke via a Griffith-type smoking machine for 2 weeks. Control groups included rats which were restrained in the machine but not smoked and a group not utilizing the machine. Aortic reendothelialization was determined using Evan's blue staining of the arterial surface. Serum levels of nitric oxide were measured to determine if smoke exposure altered this potential endothelial cell mitogen. RESULTS Cigarette smoking increased aortic endothelial regeneration (78.4 +/- 4.6% vs 59.2 +/- 2.1%, P < 0.05) and was associated with an increase in serum nitric oxide level (59.9 +/- 7. 1 microM vs 28.5 +/- 1.8 microM, P < 0.05). Daily restraint alone in the smoking machine had no effect on endothelial regeneration. CONCLUSIONS This is the first report on the effects of smoking on endothelial regeneration and demonstrates that smoking increases reendothelialization after large vessel injury and serum levels of nitric oxide, an EC mitogen.
Physiological and Transcriptional Characterization of Persistent and Nonpersistent Listeria monocytogenes Isolates

ABSTRACT This study aimed to characterize physiological differences between persistent and presumed nonpersistent Listeria monocytogenes strains isolated at processing facilities and to investigate the molecular basis for this by transcriptomic sequencing. Full metabolic profiles of two strains, one persistent and one nonpersistent, were initially screened using Biolog's Phenotype MicroArray (PM) technology. Based on these results, in which major differences from selected antimicrobial agents were detected, another persistent strain and two nonpersistent strains were characterized using two antimicrobial PMs. Resistance to quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs) was shown to be higher among persistent strains. Growth of persistent and nonpersistent strains in various concentrations of the QACs benzethonium chloride (BZT) and cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC) was determined. Transcriptomic sequencing of a persistent and a presumed nonpersistent strain was performed to compare gene expression among these strains in the presence and absence of BZT. Two strains, designated “frequent persisters” because they were the most frequently isolated at the processing facility, showed overall higher resistance to QACs. Transcriptome analysis showed that BZT induced a complex peptidoglycan (PG) biosynthesis response, which may play a key role in BZT resistance. Comparison of persistent and nonpersistent strains indicated that transcription of many genes was upregulated among persistent strains. This included three gene operons: pdu, cob-cbi, and eut. These genes may play a role in the persistence of L. monocytogenes outside the human host.
Non-local Deep Features for Salient Object Detection

Saliency detection aims to highlight the most relevant objects in an image. Methods using conventional models struggle whenever salient objects are pictured on top of a cluttered background while deep neural nets suffer from excess complexity and slow evaluation speeds. In this paper, we propose a simplified convolutional neural network which combines local and global information through a multi-resolution 4&#xd7;5 grid structure. Instead of enforcing spacial coherence with a CRF or superpixels as is usually the case, we implemented a loss function inspired by the Mumford-Shah functional which penalizes errors on the boundary. We trained our model on the MSRA-B dataset, and tested it on six different saliency benchmark datasets. Results show that our method is on par with the state-of-the-art while reducing computation time by a factor of 18 to 100 times, enabling near real-time, high performance saliency detection.
Why is quality improving continuously? An integrated perspective of institution theory and the resource-based view of the firm

In this paper, we seek to answer a fundamental question: Why is quality improving continuously? Quality improvement is a goal that firms always pursue. Previous research on quality improvement centred mostly on total quality management (TQM), which emphasises a customer-oriented activity that relies on continuous devotion to quality improvement throughout a whole company. Yet, the mechanism of quality improvement is not well understood. This article draws on an integrated perspective of institutional theory and the resource-based view of the firm, highlighting the importance of resource exploitation based on an institution. We further argue that a hereditary institution can facilitate trust development, which in turn results in an advantageous endogenous resource, i.e., self-reinforcing human capital, supporting continuous quality improvement. To examine this argument, we draw on a case study of Largan Precision, the world's largest aspherical optical plastic lens supplier, to illustrate its successful mechanism of quality improvement. Finally, conclusion and implications for theory and practice are presented.
Face segmentation and detection using Voronoi diagram and 2D histogram

Human face segmentation have drawn much attention over the years and many techniques have been used. Seeing that it has many potential applications in computer science vision and automatic access control system, its research domain has promptly broadened not only in engineer but also in the neuroscience. Particularly, face segmentation is a needed step for face recognition system. In this paper, we are going to present a new approach based on color segmentation by exploiting the Delaunay triangulation generated by Voronoi diagram and some feature points from 2D histogram. As for face detection we have used a distance transformation and selected the region of interest. For this work, we have used Georgia Tech face database. The results are quiet satisfying as the success rate reaches 92% for face detection.
Audit Committee Effectiveness: Perceptions of Public Company Audit Committee Members Post-SOX

Effective audit committees provide numerous public benefits including better financial reporting and reduced corporate fraud. Prior to the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), research identified specific features of audit committee effectiveness, many of which were subsequently included in SOX Sections 301 and 407 regulations on audit committees. Using survey methodology, this study examines the extent to which public company audit committee members believe these effectiveness features are operating within their committees today. Eighty public company audit committee members from a variety of industries completed a survey and indicated that overall, features of effective audit committees are present. A number of areas for potential improvement were noted. By soliciting post-SOX information about audit committee effectiveness from a difficult to access subject pool, our study provides researchers, educators, public company management, and public company boards of directors with an updated understanding of the current state of public audit committee effectiveness. Results from this study can inform policy makers as they consider the adequacy of current regulations for audit committees.
HACCP for the hospitality industry: a psychological model for success

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to answer the question as to why until 2004 there had been no systematic, effective implementation of HACCP in the hospitality industry anywhere in the world. It is the third article in the second Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes issue of the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management presenting a new method of HACCP for the hospitality industry and proof of its utility.Design/methodology/approach – In‐depth narrative interviews, supported by documentary analysis, were carried out in 22 hospitality businesses in Greater Manchester.Findings – The research techniques find 21 practical and psychological barriers to success at knowledge, attitude and behavioural levels. These are investigated in depth in order to develop a model for overcoming the problems and achieving tangible improvements in food safety and HACCP in the hospitality industry.Originality/value – The research techniques chosen for the project documented in this paper overcome th.
A novel dynamic parameters calculation approach for model compensation

Model compensation approach has been successfully applied to various noise robust speech recognition tasks. In this paper, based on Continuous Time (CT) approximation, the dynamic mismatch function is derived without further approximation. With such mismatch function, a novel approach to deriving the formula for calculating the dynamic statistics is presented. Besides, we also provide an insight on the processing of the pseudo inverse of non-square discrete cosine transform (DCT) matrix during model compensation. Experiments on Aurora 4 showed that the proposed approach obtained 23.2% relative WER reduction over traditional ﬁrst-order Vector Taylor Series (VTS) approach.
Discounting the Distant Future

If the historical average annual real interest rate is m > 0, and if the world is stationary, should consumption in the distant future be discounted at the rate of m per year? Suppose the annual real interest rate r(t) reverts to m according to the Ornstein Uhlenbeck (OU) continuous time process dr(t) = alpha[m - r(t)]dt + kdw(t), where w is a standard Wiener process. Then we prove that the long run rate of interest is r_infinity = m-k^2/2alpha^2. This confirms the Weitzman-Gollier principle that the volatility and the persistence of interest rates lower long run discounting. We fit the OU model to historical data across 14 countries covering 87 to 318 years and estimate the average short rate m and the long run rate r_infinity for each country. The data corroborate that, when doing cost benefit analysis, the long run rate of discount should be taken to be substantially less than the average short run rate observed over a very long history.