Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is Government Size Optimal in the Gulf Countries of the Middle East? An Answer

The size of government consumption relative to national output is examined to see if it is optimal in five Gulf countries of the Middle East. We follow the methodology suggested in Barro (1990) and Karras (1996, 1997) and examine the marginal productivity of government consumption. The "Barro rule" states that government services are optimally provided when the marginal product of government consumption is one. Regression tests are undertaken for each country, and then in panels created by pooling data from all countries. Results find government consumption is productive, but the size of government is too large to be optimal.
Dynamic programming and influence diagrams

The concept of a super value node is developed to extend the theory of influence diagrams to allow dynamic programming to be performed within this graphical modeling framework. The operations necessary to exploit the presence of these nodes and efficiently analyze the models are developed. The key result is that by representing value function separability in the structure of the graph of the influence diagram, formulation is simplified and operations on the model can take advantage of the separability. From the decision analysis perspective, this allows simple exploitation of separability in the value function of a decision problem. This allows algorithms to be designed to solve influence diagrams that automatically recognize the opportunity for applying dynamic programming. From the decision processes perspective, influence diagrams with super value nodes allow efficient formulation and solution of nonstandard decision process structures. They also allow the exploitation of conditional independence between state variables. >
Fair scheduling of dynamically provisioned WDM connections with differentiated signal quality

Emerging, on-demand applications (e.g., Interactive video, ultra-high definition TV, backup storage and grid computing) are gaining momentum and are becoming increasingly important. Given the high bandwidth required by these applications, Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks are seen as the natural choice for their transport technology. Among the various on-line strategies proposed to provision such services, the ones based on service level agreement (SLA) metrics such as setup delay tolerance and connection holding-time awareness showed a good potential in improving the overall network blocking performance. However, in a scenario where connection requests are grouped in different service classes, the provisioning success rate might be unbalanced towards those connection requests with less stringent requirements, i.e., not all the connection requests are treated in a fair way. This paper addresses the problem of how to guarantee the signal quality and the fair provisioning of different service classes, where each class corresponds to a specified target of quality of transmission (QoT). With this objective in mind three fair scheduling algorithms are proposed in a dynamic traffic scenario, each one combining in a different way the concept of both set-up delay tolerance and connection holding-time awareness. Proposed solutions are specifically taylored to facilitate the provisioning of the most stringent service class so as to balance the success rate among the different classes. Simulation results confirm that the proposed approaches are able to guarantee a fair treatment reaching up to 99% in terms of Jain's fairness index, considering the per-class success ratio, without compromising the improvements in terms of overall network blocking probability.
Executive Control Over Cognition: Stronger and Earlier Rule-Based Modulation of Spatial Category Signals in Prefrontal Cortex Relative to Parietal Cortex

Human cognition is characterized by flexibility, the ability to select not only which action but which cognitive process to engage to best achieve the current behavioral objective. The ability to tailor information processing in the brain to rules, goals, or context is typically referred to as executive control, and although there is consensus that prefrontal cortex is importantly involved, at present we have an incomplete understanding of how computational flexibility is implemented at the level of prefrontal neurons and networks. To better understand the neural mechanisms of computational flexibility, we simultaneously recorded the electrical activity of groups of single neurons within prefrontal and posterior parietal cortex of monkeys performing a task that required executive control of spatial cognitive processing. In this task, monkeys applied different spatial categorization rules to reassign the same set of visual stimuli to alternative categories on a trial-by-trial basis. We found that single neurons were activated to represent spatially defined categories in a manner that was rule dependent, providing a physiological signature of a cognitive process that was implemented under executive control. We found also that neural signals coding rule-dependent categories were distributed between the parietal and prefrontal cortex—however, not equally. Rule-dependent category signals were stronger, more powerfully modulated by the rule, and earlier to emerge in prefrontal cortex relative to parietal cortex. This suggests that prefrontal cortex may initiate the switch in neural representation at a network level that is important for computational flexibility.
Fast image interpolation for motion estimation using graphics hardware

Motion estimation and compensation is the key to high quality video coding. Block matching motion estimation is used in most video codecs, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263 and H.26L. Motion estimation is also a key component in the digital restoration of archived video and for post-production and special effects in the movie industry. Sub-pixel accurate motion vectors can improve the quality of the vector field and lead to more efficient video coding. However sub-pixel accuracy requires interpolation of the image data. Image interpolation is a key requirement of many image processing algorithms. Often interpolation can be a bottleneck in these applications, especially in motion estimation due to the large number pixels involved. In this paper we propose using commodity computer graphics hardware for fast image interpolation. We use the full search block matching algorithm to illustrate the problems and limitations of using graphics hardware in this way.
Guiding future early childhood educators to reclaim their own play as a foundation for becoming effective advocates for children's play

Two case studies describe how two women, enrolled in an undergraduate course on play, were guided to examine play across their lifespan, critique the barriers that led to a decline in their play from childhood to young adulthood, and engage in cycles of documentation, dialogue, and analysis of their adult play experiences in order to discover pathways to reclaim play in their adult lives. Two assignments were used to facilitate the students' learning process; online blogs and digital lifespan play portfolios created on interactive wikis. Research on women's leisure and feminist poststructuralism informs discussion of the findings. Implications of the study's findings suggest that supporting early childhood professionals to develop as child advocates able to articulate the value of play for children's learning and development should begin by helping them to make important discoveries about the role of play in their own lives.
Development and implementation of a risk assessment tool for chemotherapy-induced neutropenia.

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To evaluate a tool developed and implemented to help practitioners assess the risk of chemotherapy-induced neutropenia (CIN) and its complications in patients with nonleukemia cancer types. DESIGN Retrospective survey of chart records. SETTING Community-based oncology practice. SAMPLE The medical records of 85 adult patients treated with new courses of chemotherapy, regardless of the cancer type or stage; 50 charts belonged to patients treated before the implementation of the tool and 35 to patients evaluated with the tool. METHODS A risk assessment tool for CIN that was developed using risk factors from published studies and national guidelines was implemented. Patients who were found to be at increased risk for CIN were given colony-stimulating factor (CSF) support starting with the first chemotherapy cycle. The effectiveness of the tool was evaluated by comparing clinical outcomes before and after the implementation of the risk assessment tool. MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES Febrile neutropenia, IV antibiotic use, hospitalization for neutropenia, and chemotherapy dose reductions and delays. FINDINGS Chemotherapy dose delays, febrile neutropenia, treatment with IV antibiotics, and hospitalization for neutropenia occurred less frequently in patients assessed with the tool and managed with the algorithm for CSF use than in those who were not assessed. CONCLUSIONS The Risk Assessment for Neutropenic Complications Tool is effective in helping practitioners determine which patients are at high risk for CIN and its complications IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING By using the tool to identify patients treated with chemotherapy who need growth factor support, nurses can help to reduce the incidence of neutropenia and its complications.
Impaired tuftsin activity in cirrhosis: relationship with splenic function and clinical outcome

Background: Cirrhotic patients show increased susceptibility to bacterial infections. It is not known whether tuftsin deficiency, which is associated with an increased incidence of infections in many disease states, is present in cirrhosis. Our aims were to determine whether tuftsin activity is deficient in cirrhosis and if so, whether this deficiency is related to splenic function, contributes to altered neutrophil granulocyte function, or influences the occurrence of bacterial infections and patient survival. Methods: Tuftsin activity and splenic function were assessed in 31 patients with liver cirrhosis and 31 healthy subjects. The phagocytic activity of neutrophil granulocytes from 23 patients was tested in vitro with addition of both autologous and pooled sera from healthy subjects. In 10 patients and eight controls it was also tested with addition of synthetic tuftsin. Patients were followed up until death or liver transplantation. Results: Patients had reduced tuftsin activity (median 8% (range 3–24.5)) compared with controls (17% (11.5–37)) (p<0.001) and a higher pitted red cell count (p<0.001). Tuftsin activity was correlated with pitted cell count (p=0.02) and the Child-Pugh score (p=0.002). Nineteen of 23 patients showed deficient phagocytic activity of neutrophil granulocytes, which was correlated with tuftsin activity (p<0.001), improved in all cases but one with addition of serum from healthy subjects, and normalised with addition of synthetic tuftsin. Reduced tuftsin activity did not influence patient survival but was associated with a higher incidence of bacterial infections (p=0.029). Comment: Tuftsin activity was reduced in cirrhosis, and contributed to impaired phagocytic activity of neutrophil granulocytes. Such an abnormality appears to be related to impaired splenic function and severity of cirrhosis, and probably favours the occurrence of bacterial infections.
Shift Related Dietary Intake in Day and Shift Workers

To study the impact of work hours on eating habits the dietary intake of 96 male industrial workers on day work and two- and three-shift work was investigated using repeated 24 h recall. The intake of energy, 14 nutrients, and coffee and tea was computed, using a nutrient data base, for 8 h work and shifts (day, morning, afternoon, night) and for the 24-h periods including these work shifts. No changes in intake of energy, nutrients and coffee/tea were observed between 8 h morning and afternoon shifts, but there was a reduction in intake during 8 h night shifts. Night shift work caused a redistribution of food and coffee intake, but not an overall 24 h reduction. On the whole, the energy-intake and the quality of food intake (percentages of energy from macronutrients and density of micronutrients) were not affected by shift work, although the intake of carbohydrates was lower in day- and three-shift workers during days off. The intake of alcohol was higher during days off in all groups. In summary, two- and three-shift work in this study affected the circadian distribution of food intakes and coffee consumption, but not the overall 24-h consumption.
CROWD-IN-THE-LOOP: A Hybrid Approach for Annotating Semantic Roles

Crowdsourcing has proven to be an effective method for generating labeled data for a range of NLP tasks. However, multiple recent attempts of using crowdsourcing to generate gold-labeled training data for semantic role labeling (SRL) reported only modest results, indicating that SRL is perhaps too difficult a task to be effectively crowdsourced. In this paper, we postulate that while producing SRL annotation does require expert involvement in general, a large subset of SRL labeling tasks is in fact appropriate for the crowd. We present a novel workflow in which we employ a classifier to identify difficult annotation tasks and route each task either to experts or crowd workers according to their difficulties. Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed approach reduces the workload for experts by over two-thirds, and thus significantly reduces the cost of producing SRL annotation at little loss in quality.
Multiple fluorescent labeling of silica nanoparticles with lanthanide chelates for highly sensitive time-resolved immunofluorometric assays.

BACKGROUND Time-resolved immunofluorometric assays (TrIFA) using lanthanide-labeled nanoparticles have greatly increased the sensitivity of immunoassays. Current labeling strategies, however, use either physical doping of lanthanide chelates into preformed nanoparticles or covalent linking of lanthanide chelates to precursors used for making nanoparticles; both these strategies have drawbacks. METHODS Luminescent Eu(III) and Tb(III) chelates were covalently coated on the surface of preformed silica nanoparticles to which detection antibodies or bridging proteins for antibody binding were conjugated. We used the resulting conjugates in TrIFA for detection of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) and hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg), both individually and simultaneously. We compared the results of the newly established method with results of an ELISA for serum samples. Positive samples identified by TrIFA but not by ELISA were confirmed by additional assays, including real-time PCR detection of viral DNA. RESULTS The prepared nanoparticle conjugates were homogeneous in size, at approximately 55 (5) nm in diameter [mean (SD)], were stable for long-time storage (>2 years), and contained more chelates [6.86 x 10(5) for Eu(III), 4.73 x 10(4) for Tb(III)] per nanoparticle than particles made as previously reported. The TrIFA established for HBsAg had a comparable or lower detection limit (0.0092 microg/L) than existing nanoparticle-based TrIFA or ELISA. The TrIFA for HBeAg had a much lower detection limit [10.0 National Centre Unit (NCU)/L] than ELISA and detected HBeAg in 5 samples missed by the ELISA method. Simultaneous TrIFA for both HBsAg and HBeAg was achieved with detection limits (0.033 microg/L for HBsAg and 27.0 NCU/L for HBeAg) close to those of the individual assays. CONCLUSIONS Covalent surface labeling of silica nanoparticles with lanthanide chelates provides good fluorescent labels that can be used in TrIFA for highly sensitive and robust detection of clinical targets.
Identifying social groups in pedestrian crowd videos

A Non-recursive Motion Similarity Clustering (NMSC) algorithm is proposed to identify pedestrians traveling together in social groups. The clustering algorithm is unsupervised and can automatically identify social groups within a region of interest in a video. Social groups are identified using only pedestrian motion information by imposing motion parameter thresholds defined by social psychological principles. Social groups are identified without any prior training. In addition to detecting small social groups, NMSC also detects short-term groups (occurring for a few seconds) and social groups with sparsely distributed pedestrians. The real-time performance and group identification accuracy reveal that the proposed clustering algorithm performs better compared to existing algorithms even for scenes with a large number of pedestrians.
The HOP Sensor: Wireless Motion Sensor

This paper describes the HOP system. It consists of a wireless module built up by multiple nodes and a base station. The nodes detect acceleration of e.g. human movement. At a rate of 100 Hertz the base station collects the acceleration samples. The data can be acquired in real-time software like Pure Data and Max/MSP. The data can be used to analyze and/or sonify movement.
Protective Effects of Vitamin C against Nicotine-Induced Oxidative Damage of Rat Liver and Kidney

Objective: Vitamin C is a vital antioxidant that may antagonize deleterious effects of smoking. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of administration of nicotine alone for three weeks or combined with vitamin C on the antioxidant defense status, functional, histopathological changes, and immunohistochemical demonstration of proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) in rat liver and kidney tissues. Methods: Animals were divided into four groups; (C) saline-treated, (VC) vitamin C-treated, (NIC) nicotinetreated, all were for 3 weeks, and (NIC+VC) is given vitamin C for 3 days prior, with nicotine injection and 2 days thereafter. Results: Present work showed that nicotine exposure caused significant reduction in total body weight, relative liver and kidney weights, elevated malondialdehyde (MDA), alanine transaminase (ALT), aspirate transaminase (AST), and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) in both hepatic and renal tissues. Co-exposure to nicotine and vitamin C maintained normal liver and kidney weight, significantly lowered MDA, ALT, AST, ALP and elevated glutathione in both hepatic and renal tissues compared NIC group as well as controls. Nicotine administration resulted in shedding, necrosis, and loss of brush border of cells covering proximal and distal convoluted tubules of kidney. The liver in the nicotine-treated group showed vacuolated cytoplasm of hepatocytes, with dilated central vein and sinusoids and mitochondrial destruction. Immunohistochemistry showed dense PCNA immunostaining in the livers of nicotine-treated rats. Vitamin C induced partial correction of nicotine-induced histopathological damage of liver and kidney and significant elevation in PCNA expression. Conclusion: The results of present work suggested that vitamin C has a promising prophylactic effect against nicotine-induced oxidative damage of liver and kidney.
A Faster Parallel Implementation of The Kanellakis-Smolka Algorithm for Bisimilarity Checking

Bisimulation equivalence is one of the most important equivalence relations that capture the notion of ‘behavioral equivalence’ of concurrent systems. In this paper we present a randomized parallel implementation of the Kanellakis-Smolka algorithm that tests the bisimilarity of two finite CCS specifications in O(n) time with O(n2) processors, when the semantic models are given as (S1; A; T1; s1) and (S2; A; T2; s2), respectively (jS1j+ jS2j = n; jT1j+ jT2j = m), and jAj = 1. We claim that our implementation is faster than that of Lee and Rajasekaran [12] by a factor of O(lg n)1.
Design and Weighting Methods for a Nationally Representative Sample of HIV-infected Adults Receiving Medical Care in the United States-Medical Monitoring Project

Background: Health surveys of the general US population are inadequate for monitoring human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection because the relatively low prevalence of the disease (<0.5%) leads to small subpopulation sample sizes. Objective: To collect a nationally and locally representative probability sample of HIV-infected adults receiving medical care to monitor clinical and behavioral outcomes, supplementing the data in the National HIV Surveillance System. This paper describes the sample design and weighting methods for the Medical Monitoring Project (MMP) and provides estimates of the size and characteristics of this population. Methods: To develop a method for obtaining valid, representative estimates of the in-care population, we implemented a cross-sectional, three-stage design that sampled 23 jurisdictions, then 691 facilities, then 9,344 HIV patients receiving medical care, using probability-proportional-to-size methods. The data weighting process followed standard methods, accounting for the probabilities of selection at each stage and adjusting for nonresponse and multiplicity. Nonresponse adjustments accounted for differing response at both facility and patient levels. Multiplicity adjustments accounted for visits to more than one HIV care facility. Results: MMP used a multistage stratified probability sampling design that was approximately self-weighting in each of the 23 project areas and nationally. The probability sample represents the estimated 421,186 HIV-infected adults receiving medical care during January through April 2009. Methods were efficient (i.e., induced small, unequal weighting effects and small standard errors for a range of weighted estimates). Conclusion: The information collected through MMP allows monitoring trends in clinical and behavioral outcomes and informs resource allocation for treatment and prevention activities.
The IgH Locus of the Channel Catfish, Ictalurus punctatus, Contains Multiple Constant Region Gene Sequences: Different Genes Encode Heavy Chains of Membrane and Secreted IgD1

The δ-chain of catfish IgD was initially characterized as a unique chimeric molecule containing a rearranged VDJ spliced to Cμ1, seven C domain-encoding exons (δ1–δ7), and a transmembrane tail. The presence of cDNA forms showing splicing of δ7 to an exon encoding a secretory tail was interpreted to indicate that membrane (δm) and secreted (δs) forms were likely expressed from a single gene by alternative RNA processing. Subsequent cloning and sequence analyses have unexpectedly revealed the presence of three δ C region genes, each linked to a μ gene or pseudogene. The first (IGHD1) is located 1.6 kb 3′ of the functional Cμ (IGHM1). The second (IGHD3) is positioned immediately downstream of a pseudo Cμ (IGHM3P), ∼725 kb 5′ of IGHM1. These two δ genes are highly similar in sequence and each contains a tandem duplication of δ2-δ3-δ4. However, IGHD1 has a terminal exon encoding the transmembrane region, whereas IGHD3 has a single terminal exon encoding a secreted tail. The occurrence of IGHD3 immediately downstream of a μ pseudogene indicates that the putative δs product may not be expressed as a chimeric μδ molecule. Western blots and protein sequencing data indicate that an IGHD3-encoded protein is expressed in catfish serum. Thus, catfish δm transcripts appear to originate from IGHD1, whereas δs transcripts originate from IGHD3 rather than, as previously inferred, from a single expressed δ gene. The third δ (IGHD2) is associated with a pseudo Cμ (IGHM2P); its presence is inferred by Southern blot analyses.
ReviewEvolutionary Explanations for Cooperation

Natural selection favours genes that increase an organism’s ability to survive and reproduce. This would appear to lead to a world dominated by selfish behaviour. However, cooperation can be found at all levels of biological organisation: genes cooperate in genomes, organelles cooperate to form eukaryotic cells, cells cooperate to make multicellular organisms, bacterial parasites cooperate to overcome host defences, animals breed cooperatively, and humans and insects cooperate to build societies. Over the last 40 years, biologists have developed a theoretical framework that can explain cooperation at all these levels. Here, we summarise this theory, illustrate how it may be applied to real organisms and discuss future directions.