Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DEVELOPING A CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF FACTORS AFFECTING SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKING USAGE IN E-LEARNING AT TALAL ABU GHAZELEH UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF BUSINESS (TAGUCB) IN BAHRAIN

Social networking has become pervasive in all sectors in the 21st century. The Kingdom of Bahrain is experiencing a big wave in reference to the use of social media networking in the context of a classroom. Indisputably, an innovative learning environment will be provided if this technology is astutely used. Within the e-learning environment, the technology acceptance model (TAM) has been heavily used to examine the acceptance of different types of technologies. As such, this study aims at discussing the main factors that affect usage of social media networking in e-learning by students and educators at the Talal Abu-Ghazaleh University College of Business (TAGUCB). Based on TAM, a proposed conceptual model of social media usage in e-learning is developed
Speeding Document Annotation with Topic Models

Document classification and topic models are useful tools for managing and understanding large corpora. Topic models are used to uncover underlying semantic and structure of document collections. Categorizing large collection of documents requires hand-labeled training data, which is time consuming and needs human expertise. We believe engaging user in the process of document labeling helps reduce annotation time and address user needs. We present an interactive tool for document labeling. We use topic models to help users in this procedure. Our preliminary results show that users can more eectively and eciently apply labels to documents using topic model information.
Did the FED Inflate a Housing Price Bubble? A Cointegration Analysis between the 1980s and the 1990s

The aim of this work is to verify if the recent episodes of expansionary policies followed by the FED contributed to the creation a housing price bubble. This study compares two different samples, both including periods of recession followed by accommodating monetary policies. The paper showed that even though the long-run relationship between inflation and the interest rate did not change along the whole sample, suggesting an unaltered behavior of the central bank with respect to changes in inflation, the reactivity of housing prices to monetary policy has considerably augmented during the 1990s compared to the 1980s. This is interpreted as evidence that prolonged accommodating monetary policies affected the US real estate market.
Respiratory Chain Complexes in Dynamic Mitochondria Display a Patchy Distribution in Life Cells

Background Mitochondria, the main suppliers of cellular energy, are dynamic organelles that fuse and divide frequently. Constraining these processes impairs mitochondrial is closely linked to certain neurodegenerative diseases. It is proposed that functional mitochondrial dynamics allows the exchange of compounds thereby providing a rescue mechanism. Methodology/Principal Findings The question discussed in this paper is whether fusion and fission of mitochondria in different cell lines result in re-localization of respiratory chain (RC) complexes and of the ATP synthase. This was addressed by fusing cells containing mitochondria with respiratory complexes labelled with different fluorescent proteins and resolving their time dependent re-localization in living cells. We found a complete reshuffling of RC complexes throughout the entire chondriome in single HeLa cells within 2–3 h by organelle fusion and fission. Polykaryons of fused cells completely re-mixed their RC complexes in 10–24 h in a progressive way. In contrast to the recently described homogeneous mixing of matrix-targeted proteins or outer membrane proteins, the distribution of RC complexes and ATP synthase in fused hybrid mitochondria, however, was not homogeneous but patterned. Thus, complete equilibration of respiratory chain complexes as integral inner mitochondrial membrane complexes is a slow process compared with matrix proteins probably limited by complete fusion. In co-expressing cells, complex II is more homogenously distributed than complex I and V, resp. Indeed, this result argues for higher mobility and less integration in supercomplexes. Conclusion/Significance Our results clearly demonstrate that mitochondrial fusion and fission dynamics favours the re-mixing of all RC complexes within the chondriome. This permanent mixing avoids a static situation with a fixed composition of RC complexes per mitochondrion.
Relationship of variable region genes expressed by a human B cell lymphoma secreting pathologic anti-Pr2 erythrocyte autoantibodies

To study the biology of cold agglutinin disease we previously established EBV-transformed B cell clones isolated from a patient with splenic lymphoma of an early plasmacytic cell type and immune hemolysis due to an anti-Pr2 cold agglutinin. These clones had an aberrant chromosomal marker identical to the patient's B cell lymphoma and each secreted IgMk anti-Pr2 similar to the pathologic autoantibody in the serum of the patient. In this study, we have further investigated the Pr2-specific autoimmune response through nucleotide sequencing of VH and VL region genes. We have shown that the seven clones share the same VDJ/VJ gene segments and junctional elements confirming their clonal origin. The VH sequences were 88% homologous to a VHI germline gene while the VL sequences were 97% homologous to a VkIII germline gene. Only 4 somatic mutations (3 silent and 1 conservative) were found in greater than 5,000 bp sequenced, suggesting that a low mutation rate existed. Based on a tumor mass of 10(12) cells and a minimum of 40 divisions, we estimated the somatic mutation rate to be 4.45 x 10(-5) m/bp/d. This somatic mutation rate is similar to those estimated for acute lymphocytic leukemia (pre-B cell) and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (intermediate B cell), but significantly lower than the mutation frequency in follicular lymphomas (activated B cell). We propose that the difference in somatic mutation frequency of a B cell tumor may be related to the stage of B cell differentiation. In addition, the low mutation frequency observed in the Pr2-specific B cell tumor may also reflect, in part, selection by autoantigen to conserve sIg structure and specificity.
Computationally efficient E-model improvement of MOS estimate including jitter and buffer losses

In the article we propose a method of improving ITU-T E-model MOS estimate of VoIP call quality. The improvement consists of including the effects of network jitter as measured and distributed in RTCP packets; jitter buffer size at receiver and codec packetization settings as input parameters of E-Model. Our method uses Pareto/D/1/k system for modeling general VoIP input traffic stream interarrival times and jitter buffer behavior resulting in additional packet loss. Consequently we propose the inclusion of jitter buffer size, codec packetization and network jitter into E-Model by means of substitution of existing Ppl (packet loss) parameter for Pplef (effective packet loss) in computationally effective manner suitable for real-time MOS estimate without the need of capturing large packet traces from the network and performing estimation of Hurst parameter or using other means of traffic statistics description in advance.
Virtual student exchange: lessons learned in virtual international teaming in interdisciplinary design education

The increasing globalization of corporate economies has changed the face of engineering practice. In addition to core engineering skills, modern engineers must possess cross-cultural communication skills, team management skills, and the ability to perform on geographically-distributed teams. As part of a novel curricular paradigm we are exploring the so called Global Engineering College (GEC). We have developed the concept of virtual student exchange, which aims to address the geographic and temporal obstacles to joint international teaming by allowing students at one institution to participate virtually in team design courses offered at another institution. After a year of planning and software development, we piloted this concept in Fall 2003 and again in Spring 2004, allowing German and Polish students to participate as team members in a robotics design course offered at the University of Northern Arizona (USA). We describe the virtual student exchange concept, report on our experiences piloting the key elements of this model under an NSF planning grant, focusing on the many obstacles - both expected and unexpected - encountered, and solutions developed to address them.
Media malaise or a virtuous circle? Exploring the causal relationships between news media exposure, political news attention and political interest

Being politically interested is one of the most important norms from a democratic perspective, as it is a crucial antecedent for voting, political knowledge, civic and political participation, and attentiveness to political information. However, only limited research has focused on the relationship between media use and political interest, despite the notion that modern politics is mediated politics. Even more important is the fact that the causal relationship between media use and political interest still has not been firmly established. Against this background, the purpose of this study is to investigate the causal relationship between news media use and political interest.The results show that there are indeed causal and reciprocal relationships between political interest and attention to political news, and between political interest and exposure to some, but not all, news media. Overall these results lend stronger support to the perspective of media mobilisation theories than media malaise theories.
Learning User Profiles for Content-Based Filtering in e-Commerce

The recent evolution of e-commerce emphasized the need for more and more receptive services to the unique and individual requests of users. Personalization became an important business strategy in Business to Consumer commerce, where a user explicitly wants the e-commerce site to consider her own information such as preferences in order to improve access to relevant products. In this work, we present a personalization component that uses supervised machine learning to induce a classifier able to discriminate between interesting and uninteresting items for the user. The prototype system exploits a content-based technique, which makes use of textual annotations usually describing the products offered by e-commerce sites. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method and encourage the integration of the prototype in the personalization module developed in the COGITO project, which aims at improving consumersupplier relationships in future e-commerce using advanced technologies.
Survey about Speech Recognition and Its Usage for Impaired ( Disabled ) Persons

Speech Recognition enables the operating system to convert spoken words to written text which is achieved by Speech to Text method (STT). Speech synthesis enables the operating system to convert written text into spoken words which is achieved by Text to Speech (TTS). Speech recognition based on Acoustic model and Language model (Pronunciation Model). Usual Method used in Speech Recognition (SR) is Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm and Artificial Neural Network (ANNs). The widely used technique for Speech Recognition is HMM. These Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis methods are especially very useful for Disabled persons like Hearing Disability and visually impaired, Speech impaired and Co-ordination or dexterity impairment.
Spatiotemporal database models and languages for moving objects: A review

Geographic Information Systems and mobile devices, using wireless technology or the Global Position System, have proliferated in the last decade and made available huge amounts of spatial data. Applications of spatial data are spreading and new purposes are expected. The extensive use of mobility data is among the most promising applications. However, database models and technology to fully explore the potential of mobility data are lacking. This paper presents a short overview of the significant research in the spatiotemporal data models and query languages fields, and summarizes some of the research open issues.
PARIX: a protocol adaptive mechanism for routing information exchange across heterogeneous ad hoc routing domains

With a multitude of routing protocols being developed for ad hoc networks, it is a very realistic scenario for a set of ad hoc nodes to congregate and still be unable to communicate with one another simply because two or more subsets of these ad hoc elements belong to heterogeneous routing domains each running a different routing protocol. This paper outlines a mechanism for ad hoc network elements forming such heterogeneous routing domains to be able to exchange routing information. Further, the mechanism offers a platform, for both reactive and proactive protocols to inter-operate with one another while not losing their identity of being proactive or reactive.
Greening the copper access network with dynamic spectrum management

This paper investigates the benefits of dynamic spectrum management (DSM) in terms of reducing the power consumption and improving the data rates and robustness in digital subscriber line (DSL) networks. Non-DSM solutions cause strong interference in a shared DSL binder and lead to instability in the network. However, DSM mitigates such interference, stabilises DSL service, and saves power consumed by the DSL networks. This paper compares the savings in power and the improvement in data rates and robustness of the DSL networks when the proposed DSM methods are used instead of other non-DSM techniques. The power savings, data rate increase and quality-of-service improvement by DSM make the operation of DSL networks greener and more efficient, which in turn reduces operational expenditure and brings higher customer satisfaction for DSL service providers.
An immunohistochemical study on the regulation of estrogen receptor alpha by estradiol in the endometrium of the immature ewe.

The effects of estradiol-17beta (E2) on the expression of estrogen receptor alpha (ERalpha) in stromal and epithelial cells of endometrium in prepubertal lambs were investigated. Twenty three-month-old lambs were treated or not treated with one, two or three i.m. injections of E2 (1 microg x kg(-1)) in corn oil at intervals of 24 h. Lambs were slaughtered 12 or 24 h after the last injection. An immunohistochemical technique was used to visualize ERalpha immunostaining which was then analyzed quantitatively by a computer imaging analysis system. Seven endometrial compartments defined by cell type and location were analyzed separately. Positive staining of ERalpha was seen in the nuclei of stromal and epithelial cells. Glandular epithelium located next to the myometrium was stained more intensely than that next to the luminal epithelium and this phenomenon was maintained during treatment. Significantly less immunostaining was found in stromal cells 12 and 24 h after the first injection compared to the control group. A similar pattern was found in the glandular epithelium, although the decrease was more pronounced and the restoration of ERalpha was faster. This study shows that E2 treatment down regulates ERalpha in the endometrium temporarily in both stromal and epithelial cells, but the characteristics of this effect seems to be cell type specific.
WML Detection of Brain Images Using Fuzzy and Possibilistic Approach in Feature Space

White matter lesions are small areas of dead cells found in parts of the brain that act as connectors are detected using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) which has increasingly been an active and challenging research area in computational neuroscience. This paper presents new image segmentation models for automated detection of white matter changes of the brain in an elderly population. The main focus is on unsupervised clustering algorithms. Clustering is a method for dividing scattered groups of data into several groups. It is commonly viewed as an instance of unsupervised learning. In machine learning, unsupervised learning refers to the problem of trying to find hidden structures in unlabeled data. Unsupervised clustering models, Fuzzy c-means clustering, Geostatistical Fuzzy c-means clustering and Geostatistical Possibilistic clustering algorithms partition the dataset into clusters according to some defined distance measure. The Region of Interest (ROI) is then extracted on the membership map. Much more accurate results are obtained by GFCM, which better localized the large regions of WMLs when compared to FCM. Key-Words: Fuzzy clustering, geostatistics, image segmentation, magnetic resonance imaging, possibilistic clustering, white matter changes
A Fully Distributed P2P Communications Architecture for Network Virtual Environments

Distributed Network Virtual Environments (NVEs) are becoming more and more popular in today's computing and communications. The scalability of NVEs is an important problem, and faces many challenges. Voronoi-based Overlay Network (VON) has been proposed that promises to maintain the P2P topology in a fully-distributed, low-latency, and message-efficient manner. However, since node heterogeneity in VON does not be considered, communication and message exchange cannot be regulated properly. Additionally, as nodes need to connect to all of their AOI neighbors directly, if there are too many AOI neighbors the transmission size will be too big to transfer in time. Even packet loss can generate in certain some nodes. To these problems, a fully distributed P2P communications architecture for Network Virtual Environments is presented. The architecture calculates optimal AOI-radii according to node ability, and the node crowding may be avoided to a great extent. In constructing multicast tree, node's fan-out is selected based on node's degree in theory which can be calculated by node ability. The child node degrees can be adjusted dynamically in system, and the nodes can balance message load independently based node load. The simulation results show that the algorithm gains a greater improvement on multicast efficiency, and achieves better scalability.
On cooperation between evolutionary algorithms and other search paradigms

We present a multi-agent based approach for achieving cooperation between search systems employing different search paradigms. The search agents periodically interrupt their search, select interesting information from their states that is transmitted to the other agents, filter the information sent to them with respect to their own demands, integrate the remaining information into their search, and then continue the search. There are different kinds of information to be exchanged and the selection is both success- and demand-driven. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by coupling a search system based on a genetic algorithm and a branch-and-bound based system for job-shop-scheduling. Our experiments show that the cooperation results in finding better solutions within a given time limit and in finding solutions comparable to those generated by the best system working alone in less time. The speed-up factors for some examples even exceed the number of agents (computers) used.
STATE TRANSITIONS IN BRIGHT GALACTIC X-RAY BINARIES: LUMINOSITIES SPAN BY TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE

Using X-ray monitoring observations with the All-Sky Monitor on board the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer and the Burst Alert Telescope on board the Swift, we are able to study the spectral state transitions occurred in about 20 bright persistent and transient black hole and neutron star binaries. We have confirmed that there is a correlation between the X-ray luminosity corresponding to the hard-to-soft transition and the X-ray luminosity of the following soft state. This correlation holds over a luminosity range spanning by 2 orders of magnitude, with no indication of a flux saturation or cutoff. We have also found that the transition luminosity correlates with the rate of increase in the X-ray luminosity during the rising phase of an outburst or flare, implying that the origin of the variation of the transition luminosity is associated with non-stationary accretion in both transient sources and persistent sources. The correlation between the luminosity corresponding to the end of the soft-to-hard transition and the peak luminosity of the preceding soft state is found insignificant. The results suggest that the hysteresis effect of spectral state transitions is primarily driven by non-stationary accretion when the mass accretion rate increases rather than the mass accretion rate decreases. Our results also imply that Galactic X-ray binaries can reach more luminous hard states during outbursts of higher luminosities and of similar rise timescales as those observed. Based on the correlations, we speculate that bright hard state beyond the Eddington luminosity will be observed in Galactic binaries in the next century. We also suggest that some ultra-luminous X-ray sources in nearby galaxies, which stay in the hard states during bright, short flares, harbor stellar-mass compact stars.
A novel printed monopole antenna for dual-band WLAN application

A novel dual-band microstrip antenna for WLAN applications is proposed. The antenna fed by a 50Ω microstrip line. The configuration is simple. The lower and higher resonant frequencies can be easily tuned by adjusting a few antenna parameters. HFSS is used to simulate and optimize this antenna. The requirement of the model is achieved to practical application. This antenna satisfies the requirements of wireless local area network (WLAN) 802.11b/g and 802.11a applications.
The limb-darkened Arcturus: imaging with the IOTA/IONIC interferometer

Aims. We undertook an H band interferometric examination of Arcturus, a star frequently used as a spatial and spectral calibrator. Methods. Using the IOTA 3 telescope interferometer, we performed spectro-interferometric observations (R ≈ 35) of Arcturus. Atmospheric models and prescriptions were fitted to the data to derive the brightness distribution of the photosphere. Image reconstruction was performed using two software algorithms: Wisard and Mira. Results. An achromatic power law proved to be a good model of the brightness distribution, with a limb darkening compatible with the one derived from atmospheric model simulations using our marcs model. A Rosseland diameter of 21.05 ± 0.21 was derived, corresponding to an effective temperature of Teff = 4295 ± 26 K. No companion was detected from the closure phases, with an upper limit on the brightness ratio of 8 × 10^−4 at 1 AU. The dynamic range at such distance from the photosphere was established as 1.5 × 10^−4 (1σrms). An upper limit of 1.7×10^−3 was also derived for the level of brightness asymmetries present in the photosphere.