Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sticky Elastic Collisions

The effects of purely elastic collisions on the dynamics of heavy inertial particles is investigated in a three-dimensional random incompressible flow. It is shown that the statistical properties of inter-particle separations and relative velocities are strongly influenced by the occurrence of sticky elastic collisions — particle pairs undergo a large number of collisions against each other during a small time interval over which, hence, they remain close to each other. A theoretical framework is provided for describing and quantifying this phenomenon and it is substantiated by numerical simulations. Furthermore, the impact of hydrodynamic interactions is discussed for such a system of colliding particles.
On the Estimation of Demand Systems Through Consumption Efficiency

The authors consider a Bayesian implementation of a new approach to estimating demand systems. This approach, suggested by Hal R. Varian (1990), is based on a generalization of Sidney Afriat's (1967) efficiency index. The model the authors propose leads to a very tractable posterior and predictive analysis, yet allows for interesting economic interpretations. They conduct a sensitivity analysis with respect to the prior in an application to annual aggregate U.S. consumption data and conclude that the sample is quite informative. Average efficiency and expected budget shares are examined in some detail. Copyright 1996 by MIT Press.
Policy-based security assessment of mobile end-user devices an alternative to mobile device management solutions for Android smartphones

For security-critical applications, the integrity and security of end-user devices is of particular importance. This especially applies to mobile applications that use smartphones to process security-critical data. Unfortunately, users often compromise the security of smartphones by disabling security features for convenience reasons or by unintentionally installing malware from untrusted application sources. Mobile device management (MDM) solutions overcome this problem by providing means to centrally manage and configure smartphones. However, MDM is mainly suitable for corporate environments but often cannot be applied in non-corporate fields of application such as m-banking or m-government. To address this problem, we propose an alternative approach to assure the security and integrity of smartphones. Our approach relies on a device assessor that evaluates the current state of a smartphone according to a security policy. Integration of this device assessor allows smartphone applications to condition the processing of security-critical data on the smartphone's compliance with a defined security policy. We have shown the practicability of the proposed approach by means of a concrete implementation for the Android platform. We have evaluated this implementation on different Android devices. Obtained results show that our approach constitutes an appropriate alternative for scenarios, in which MDM cannot be applied.
The first 25 years of the Queensland Rugby Football League: Claims to legitimacy in annual reports

Despite the cultural importance of sporting organizations, little academic attention has been paid to the legitimizing role of their annual reports. In this paper we examine the role of annual reports in establishing the legitimacy of a new organization, the Queensland Rugby Football League (QRFL), founded in 1908. Contextualized with media reports from newspapers of the day, 12 annual reports from QRFL’s first 25 years are analysed and interpreted using insights from legitimacy theory. Through the presentation of audited financial statements and persuasive narrative accounts of its operations and success, QRFL made claims to pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy as it sought to establish a niche as a new football code and organization. This contextualized study situates the annual reports in their historical landscape, providing insights about how they contributed to QRFL’s efforts in overcoming the liability of newness in a competitive sports environment.
β-Adrenergic Receptor-Dependent Alterations in Murine Cardiac Transcript Expression Are Differentially Regulated by Gefitinib In Vivo

β-adrenergic receptor (βAR)-mediated transactivation of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) has been shown to promote cardioprotection in a mouse model of heart failure and we recently showed that this mechanism leads to enhanced cell survival in part via regulation of apoptotic transcript expression in isolated primary rat neonatal cardiomyocytes. Thus, we hypothesized that this process could regulate cardiac transcript expression in vivo. To comprehensively assess cardiac transcript alterations in response to acute βAR-dependent EGFR transactivation, we performed whole transcriptome analysis of hearts from C57BL/6 mice given i.p. injections of the βAR agonist isoproterenol in the presence or absence of the EGFR antagonist gefitinib for 1 hour. Total cardiac RNA from each treatment group underwent transcriptome analysis, revealing a substantial number of transcripts regulated by each treatment. Gefitinib alone significantly altered the expression of 405 transcripts, while isoproterenol either alone or in conjunction with gefitinib significantly altered 493 and 698 distinct transcripts, respectively. Further statistical analysis was performed, confirming 473 transcripts whose regulation by isoproterenol were significantly altered by gefitinib (isoproterenol-induced up/downregulation antagonized/promoted by gefinitib), including several known to be involved in the regulation of numerous processes including cell death and survival. Thus, βAR-dependent regulation of cardiac transcript expression in vivo can be modulated by the EGFR antagonist gefitinib.
When is it better to wait for a new version? Optimal replacement of an emerging technology under uncertainty

Firms that use an emerging technology often face uncertainty in both the arrival of new versions and the revenue that may be earned from their deployment. Via a sequential decision-making framework, we determine the value of the investment opportunity and the optimal replacement rule under three different strategies: compulsive, laggard, and leapfrog. In the first one, a firm invests sequentially in every version that becomes available, whereas in the second and third ones, it first waits for a new version to arrive and then either invests in the older or the newer version, respectively. We show that, under a compulsive strategy, technological uncertainty has a non-monotonic impact on the optimal investment decision. In fact, uncertainty regarding the availability of future versions may actually hasten investment. By comparing the relative values of the three strategies, we find that, under a low output price the compulsive strategy always dominates, whereas, at a high output price, the incentive to wait for a new version and adopt either a leapfrog or a laggard strategy increases as the rate of innovation increases. By contrast, high price uncertainty mitigates this effect, thereby increasing the relative attraction of a compulsive strategy.
Spontaneous Changes in Taste Sensitivity of Single Units Recorded over Consecutive Days in the Brainstem of the Awake Rat

A neuron’s sensitivity profile is fundamental to functional classification of cell types, and underlies theories of sensory coding. Here we show that gustatory neurons in the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS) and parabrachial nucleus of the pons (PbN) of awake rats spontaneously change their tuning properties across days. Rats were surgically implanted with a chronic microwire assembly into the NTS or PbN. Following recovery, water-deprived rats had free access to a lick spout that delivered taste stimuli while cellular activity was recorded. In 12 rats for the NTS and 8 rats for the PbN, single units could be isolated at the same electrode on consecutive days (NTS, 14 units for 2–5 consecutive days, median = 2 days; PbN, 23 units for 2–7 days, median = 2.5 days). Waveforms were highly similar (waveform template correlation > 0.99) across days in 13 units in NTS and 13 units in PbN. This degree of similarity was rare (0.3% of pairs in NTS, 1.5% of pairs in PbN) when the waveforms were from presumed-different neurons (units recorded on nonconsecutive days with at least one intervening day in which there were no spikes, or from different wires or rats). Analyses of multi-day recordings that met this criterion for “same unit” showed that responses to taste stimuli appeared, disappeared, or shifted in magnitude across days, resulting in changes in tuning. These data imply, generally, that frameworks for cell classification and, specifically, that theories of taste coding, need to consider plasticity of response profiles.
Original Paper

Animal personality is considered to be subject to natural selection, and measuring its fitness consequences is an important step in the study of the evolution of this phenomenon. The evolutionary costs and benefits of certain personality traits are frequently assumed to fluctuate across different life history stages. However, little is still known about survival consequences of personality during juvenile life. We predicted survival costs of exploration tendency in juvenile European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus), which we studied under quasi-natural conditions. In addition, consistencies between exploration and the animal's behavioral responses in other contexts were tested. Early exploratory behavior was assessed in two annual cohorts, either observationally by quantifying the time course of exploring the area around the nursery burrow shortly after emergence above ground or experimentally by conducting open-field tests shortly before emergence. In both years, the study revealed consistent results: more exploratory individuals had a lower chance of survival until the end of the vegetation period, presumably due to a higher predation risk. Fast explorers, as assessed by their exploration of the burrow environment, were also less sociable and tended to be more aggressive toward conspecifics as subadults. So-ciability was repeatable across time. Furthermore, fast explorers , as assessed by their open-field behavior, were bolder in a handling test before emergence. These consistencies across context and time suggest the existence of personality. In conclusion, the results provide evidence for survival costs of fast exploration during juvenile life. The findings are in line with predictions on personality-related life history variation.
Facial motion retargeting

When done correctly, a digitally recorded facial performance is an accurate measurement of the performer’s motions. As such it reflects all the idiosyncrasies of the performer. However, often the digital character that needs to be animated is not a digital replica of the performer. In this case, the decision to use performance capture might be motivated by cost issues, the desire to use a favorite actor regardless of the intended character, or the desire to portray an older, younger, or otherwise altered version of the actor. The many incarnations of Tom Hanks in Polar Express illustrate several of these scenarios. In this scenario, the recorded (source) performance has to be adapted to the target character. This process is called motion retargeting or cross-mapping. In this section, we examine different techniqques for retargeting a recorded facial performance onto a digital face.
Mobile agent security in multi agent environments using a multi agent-multi key approach

We consider the problem of keeping sensitive data and algorithms contained in a mobile agent from discovery and exploitation by a malicious host. The paper illustrates a novel distributed protocol for multi agent environments to improve the communication security in packet-switched networks. To enrich the overall system security the approach makes use of distribution and double encryption and some other traditional methods such as digital signature. In this approach the encrypted private key and the message are broken into different parts carrying by different agents which makes it difficult for malicious entities to mine the private key for message encryption, while the private key for the encrypted key is allocated on the predetermined destination nodes. On the other hand, all of the previously proposed encryption algorithms can be applied in the proposed approach that deteriorates the key discovery process. To improve the overall security, the paper makes use of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as the encryption base for message encryption. The paper also presents some evaluation discussions presenting time overhead analysis and crack probability.
Transmit antenna selection for coded multiple-input dual-output systems

Antenna selection (AS) in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems has been introduced to benefit from MIMO gains with tolerable cost and complexity. In the literature, the AS has been addressed only for the case of uncoded MIMO systems. In this paper, we assess the benefits of transmit AS technique for coded multiple-input dual-output (MIDO) sys-tems. First, we design an SNR-dependent adaptive space time block code suited for capacity achieving coded MIDO systems with transmit antenna selection. In the context of a turbo-coded WiMAX system, the designed adaptive STBC matches or outperforms WiMAX MIMO profiles in terms of bit error performance. We show that using transmit antenna selection provides a substantial SNR gain of more than 3 dB with respect to a 2 × 2 turbo coded WiMAX system, and this, with a low cost and complexity increase.
Group Recommender Systems: Exploring Underlying Information of the User Space

This work proposes a new methodology for the Group Recommendation problem. In this approach we choose the Most Representative User (MRU) as the group medoid in a user space projection, and then generate the recommendation list based on his preferences. We evaluate our proposal by using the well-known dataset Movie lens. We have taken two different measures so as to evaluate the group recommender strategies. The obtained results seem promising and our strategy has shown an empirical robustness compared with the baselines in the literature.
Mining packages change history to predict their future change-coupling behavior

In development and maintenance phases, packages of object oriented (OO) software applications are changed. During change process, change in one package in most of the cases will result in changes in other packages. The accurate prediction of future change-coupling behavior provides a significant challenge for development or maintenance team. In this paper, we have used association mining for analyzing the change history of the packages of an OO application and proposed an approach based on mining results and graph clustering for predicting change coupling. Firstly, a framework has been proposed to measure changeability index and change readiness of packages as well as frequently changed packages of an application. Secondly, package clustering has been done to generate clusters of packages that are highly change-coupled. A case study on a Java application has been done to demonstrate our work as well as to analyze the results. The results obtained from this study show that the proposed approach can be an essential aid for development team to predict future change-coupling behavior of packages.
A dynamic scheduling method for irregular parallel programs

This paper develops a methodology for compiling and executing irregular parallel programs. Such programs implement parallel operations whose size and work distribution depend on input data. We show a fundamental relationship between three quantities that characterize an irregular parallel computation: the total available parallelism, the optimal grain size, and the statistical variance of execution times for individual tasks. This relationship yields a dynamic scheduling algorithm that substantially reduces the overhead of executing irregular parallel operations. We incorporated this algorithm into an extended Fortran compiler. The compiler accepts as input a subset of Fortran D which includes blocked and cyclic decompositions and perfect alignment; it outputs Fortran 77 augmented with calls to library routines written in C. For irregular parallel operations, the compiled code gathers information about available parallelism and task execution time variance and uses this information to schedule the operation. On distributed memory architectures, the compiler encodes information about data access patterns for the runtime scheduling system so that it can preserve communication locality. We evaluated these compilation techniques using a set of application programs including climate modeling, circuit simulation, and x-ray tomography, that contain irregular parallel operations. The results demonstrate that, for these applications, the dynamic techniques described here achieve near-optimal efficiency on large numbers of processors. In addition, they perform significantly better, on these problems, than any previously proposed static or dynamic scheduling algorithm.
A comparative study of predictive current control for three-phase voltage source inverters based on switching frequency and current error

Conventional linear current control with pulse width modulation and predictive current control for a three phase voltage source inverter are compared in this paper based on the ripple of current for a range of switching frequencies. Predictive current control allows to improve the performance by increasing the sampling frequency, but the resulting switching frequency can also make the semiconductors to operate out of their thermal limits. Behavior of the predictive control scheme for a range of switching frequencies is presented. A modification of the predictive current control is presented for decoupling the switching frequency from the sampling frequency, thus the performance of the system is improved and the switching frequency is kept controlled.
Optimal Path Discovery with Mobility Management in Heterogeneous Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is a promising technology for backhaul wireless connectivity in user premises due to its multi-hop nature, multi-radio multi-channel capabilities and stable power supplies. With proliferation of new and advanced access technologies, future WMN’s will bean integrated paradigm to provide seamless and ubiquitous connectivity to multi interface end user devices. Co-existence of multiple heterogeneous interfaces on wireless mesh routers increases overall network capacity, resilience and availability in the mesh backhaul as compared to homogenous radios mesh networks. In this paper, we present a novel architecture for heterogeneous WMN’s based on integrated IEEE 802.11/16/15technologies and discuss issues, possible solutions and future insight. We propose an optimal route algorithm along with radio assignment graph which captures the heterogeneity of radios. We also present a handover mechanism for seamless interface switch for mobile and static end user devices.
Sleep Lab Adaptation in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Typically Developing Children

Objectives. Research has shown inconsistencies across studies examining sleep problems in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is possible that these inconsistencies are due to sleep lab adaptation. The goal of the current study was to investigate the possibility that children with ADHD adapt differently to the sleep lab than do typically developing (TD) children. Patients and Methods. Actigraphy variables were compared between home and the sleep lab. Sleep lab adaptation reports from the parent and child were compared between children with ADHD (n = 25) and TD children (n = 25). Results. Based on actigraphy, both groups had reduced sleep duration and reduced wake after sleep onset in the sleep lab compared to home. The only interaction effect was that TD children had increased sleep efficiency in the sleep lab compared to home. Conclusions. The results of this study do not support the hypothesis that children with ADHD adjust to the sleep lab differently than their typically developing peers. However, both groups of children did sleep differently in the sleep lab compared to home, and this needs to be considered when generalizing research findings from a sleep lab environment to children's sleep in general.
A Proposal of Four-Panel Cartoon CAPTCHA: The Concept

CAPTCHA is a technique that is used to prevent automatic programs from being able to acquire free e-mail or online service accounts. However, as many researchers have already reported, conventional CAPTCHA could be overcome by state-of-the-art malware since the capabilities of computers are approaching those of humans. Therefore, CAPTCHA should be based on even more advanced human-cognitive-processing abilities. In addition, it is also important to keep in mind that answering CAPTCHA is an added annoyance for users, who feel troublesome to prove that they are human at every Web access. So, CAPTCHA should be enjoyable for users. To cope with these issues, this paper focuses on using the human ability to understand humor, which represents the ultimate in human cognitive processing abilities, and propose a new CAPTCHA that uses four-panel cartoons.
A Taxonomy of Enterprise Architecture Framework for Indonesian SMEs

Indonesian Government commits to increase Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption in SMEs by providing computer training ranging from basic up to advance, but the level of adoption in SMEs is still low. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an approach not only to improve adoption but also to align between business and Information Technology (IT). The paper proposed the taxonomy of the EA framework for Indonesian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This study employs desk research exploring 4 key concepts of EA framework i.e. stakeholders, principles, views and model.
Automatic Recognition of Signed Polish Expressions

The paper considers recognition of single sentences of the Polish Sign Language. We use a canonical stereo system that observes the signer from a frontal view. Feature vectors take into account information about the hand shape and orientation, as well as 3D position of the hand with respect to the face. Recognition based on human skin detection and hidden Markov models (HMMs) is performed on line. We focus on 35 sentences and a 101 word vocabulary that can be used at the doctor’s and at the post office. Details of the solution and results of experiments with regular and parallel HMMs are given.
Active Teaching for Inductive Learners

We propose and study a new intelligent teaching paradigm called active teaching in this paper. In contrast to active learning, we assume that the learner can only passively conduct inductive learning from the given examples, but the teacher (oracle) can actively provide “good” examples to the learner, in order to speed up the teaching (learning) process. We establish the framework with four specific paradigms of active teaching, and develop the corresponding teaching strategies. Empirical study shows that, the proposed teaching strategies can indeed outperform the traditional active learning and the basic random sampling strategies, thus making the teaching (learning) process more efficient.
Statistical and Heuristic Model Selection in Regularized Least-Squares

The Regularized Least-Squares (RLS) method uses the kernel trick to perform non-linear regression estimation. Its performance depends on the proper selection of a regularization parameter. This model selection task has been traditionally carried out using cross-validation. However, when training data is scarce or noisy, cross-validation may lead to poor model selection performance. In this paper we investigate alternative statistical and heuristic procedures for model selection in RLS that were shown to perform well for other regression methods. Experiments conducted on real datasets show that these alternative model selection procedures are not able to improve performance when cross-validation fails.