Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Visualizing large-scale telecommunication networks and services (case study)

Visual exploration of massive data sets arising from telecommunication networks and services is a challenge. This paper describes SWIFT-3D, an integrated data visualization and exploration system created at AT&T Labs for large scale network analysis. SWIFT-3D integrates a collection of interactive tools that includes pixel-oriented 2D maps, interactive 3D maps, statistical displays, network topology diagrams and an interactive drill-down query interface. Example applications are described, demonstrating a successful application to analyze unexpected network events (high volumes of unanswered calls), and comparison of usage of an Internet service with voice network traffic and local access coverage.1
The Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum MCM protein can form heptameric rings

Mini‐chromosome maintenance (MCM) proteins form a conserved family found in all eukaryotes and are essential for DNA replication. They exist as heteromultimeric complexes containing as many as six different proteins. These complexes are believed to be the replicative helicases, functioning as hexameric rings at replication forks. In most archaea a single MCM protein exists. The protein from Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum (mtMCM) has been reported to assemble into a large complex consistent with a dodecamer. We show that mtMCM can assemble into a heptameric ring. This ring contains a C‐terminal helicase domain that can be fit with crystal structures of ring helicases and an N‐terminal domain of unknown function. While the structure of the ring is very similar to that of hexameric replicative helicases such as bacteriophage T7 gp4, our results show that such ring structures may not be constrained to have only six subunits.
World Futures Studies Federation

The aim of this paper is to raise for debate the way in which critical realism can be used to understand the present and to ask how this can inform futures studies. This is a relevant focus for ‘futures’ because it raises the question of what makes the discipline of futures studies more meaningful than simple speculation, or worse still entertainment? The debate on critical realism is complex and it rests on work developed by Roy Bhaskar (see for example Bhaskar, 1976; 1979; 1989). This work has deep epistemological meaning and informs a much broader debate than that concerned with futures methods.
RTCR: a soft real-time context reasoner

Context-aware applications in pervasive computing environments consume a large variety of context information. Some of the contexts are highly dynamic and applications put real-time requirements on their provision. This kind of requirement applies to any component that provide such contexts, including context reasoners, which synthesize high level contexts from low level ones. This paper presents the architecture of real-time context reasoner (RTCR), a context reasoner that is designed to satisfy soft real-time requirements on the reasoning process. It manages to meet timing constraints by scheduling executions of reasoning jobs with respect to demanded deadlines on result contexts. The reasoner follows a first order logic model and uses rule based reasoning. A heuristic temporary rules mechanism is introduced in its design to reduce repeated reasoning at run time. Simulation results show that the reasoner provides all demanded contexts on time in situations where an identical reasoner without real-time scheduling misses many deadlines. Another experiment illustrates the potential of the temporary rules mechanism in reducing workload for the reasoner.
Salinity Boundary Conditions and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation in Depth and Quasi-Isopycnic Coordinate Global Ocean Models

Abstract : This paper compares the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in global simulations performed with the depth coordinate Parallel Ocean Program (POP) ocean model and with the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) under different surface salinity boundary conditions. When forced by the Coordinated Ocean-ice Reference Experiment (CORE) repeat Normal Year Forcing, HYCOM develops internal inter-annual variability during the model spin-up, while POP does not and HYCOM is more sensitive to the salinity boundary condition in the Southern Ocean. Otherwise the AMOC and related fields in the two models are qualitatively similar, but neither is able to maintain a non-trivial AMOC, because of a positive feedback that continually freshens the high-latitude surface waters. However, with salinity restoring at the ocean surface the AMOC becomes progressively stronger as the piston velocity is increased. The different restoring strategies in POP and HYCOM cause differences in the AMOC simulation. The components of the AMOC and closely related fields, including the oceanic deep convection, thermohaline fluxes, three dimensional currents, water mass distribution and overflows, are compared between the models with different salinity boundary conditions. The comparison provides insights on the models' response and increases our understanding of ocean climate simulations. It also provides motivation for the future development of ocean climate models capable of simulating the AMOC more realistically.
Small-world effects in wireless agent sensor networks

We describe a model for analysing the coverage graph from physical placement of mobile agents or sensor devices to improve coverage, fault tolerance and network lifetime. The planar graph for the devices is augmented by small-world network 'short-cuts'; the network then has properties intermediate between those of a fixed regular mesh and a random graph. Results from computational physics involving percolation and scaling phenomena help interpret network behaviours. Individual mobile sensors are modelled as points in Euclidean space with a circular region of influence and awareness; clustering algorithms are used to construct connectivity graphs which are analysed using conventional methods.
Gaia and the asteroids: Local test of GR

Abstract We present in the following some capabilities of the Gaia mission for performing local test of General Relativity (GR) based on the astrometry of asteroids. This ESA cornerstone mission, to be launched in Spring 2012, will observe—in addition to the stars and QSOs—a large number of small solar system bodies with unprecedented photometric and, mostly, astrometric precisions. Indeed, it is expected that about 250,000 asteroids will be observed with a nominal precision ranging from a few milli-arcsecond (mas), to sub-mas precision, depending on the target's brightness. While the majority of this sample is constituted of known main-belt asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, a substantial fraction will be made of near-Earth objects, and possibly some newly discovered inner-Earth or co-orbital objects. Here we show the results obtained from a simulation of Gaia observations for local tests of GR in the gravitational field of the Sun. The simulation takes into account the time sequences and geometry of the observations that are particular to Gaia observations of solar system objects, as well as the instrument sensitivity and photon noise. We show the results from a variance analysis for the nominal precision of the joint determination of the solar quadrupole J2 and the PPN parameter β. Additionally we include the link of the dynamical reference frame to the conventional kinematically non-rotating reference frame (as obtained in the visible wavelength by Gaia observations of QSOs). The study is completed by the determination of a possible variation of the gravitational constant /G, and deviation from Newtonian 1/r2 gravitational law. Comparisons to the results obtained from other techniques are also given.
Improved marker combination for detection of de novo genetic variation and aberrant DNA in colorectal neoplasia.

BACKGROUND The genetic heterogeneity of sporadic colorectal cancer (CRC) makes the choice of genetic markers and sequence variation-detection technologies critical to the performance of screening assays. We have previously described the effectiveness of a CRC assay composed of 22 known variants in KRAS, APC, TP53, and BAT-26 (V1). We introduce a new marker formulation (V2) that includes detection of de novo variation in APC, PIK3CA, and CTNNB1, hypermethylated sequences within SMARCA3 and VIM, and a single-base variation within BRAF. We compared the abilities of the V1 and V2 markers to detect aberrant DNA in colorectal neoplasias. METHODS V1 and V2 marker formulations were used to analyze 144 colorectal tissue samples comprising 50 precancerous adenomas, 94 carcinomas, and 11 nonpathologic tissues. V1 analysis consisted of single-base extension analysis of the 22 V1 variants. V2 analysis consisted of DNA scanning of the APC mutation cluster region, PIK3CA exons 9 and 20, CTNNB1 exon 3, analysis for the BRAF Val600Glu substitution, and methylation-specific PCR analysis of VIM and SMARCA3. RESULTS The V2 marker formulation had significantly higher sensitivity than the V1 markers for carcinomas (93.6% and 72.3%, respectively; P = 0.0002) and adenomas (92.0% and 62.0%, respectively; P = 0.0006). None of the nonpathologic samples were positive for any marker. CONCLUSIONS We demonstrate improved sensitivity of a new marker formulation (V2) to detect aberrant DNA in CRC and precancerous adenoma tumor tissues.
Organizational Clientelism: An Analysis of Private Entrepreneurs in Chinese Local Legislatures

Extant literature on authoritarian legislatures argues that dictators set up quasi-democratic institutions to co-opt opposition and attract investors. We argue that dictators also nurture clientelistic ties with social groups useful to their rule, a previously overlooked function of authoritarian legislatures. Drawing on the case of Chinese local legislatures—namely, the local People's Congress and the local People's Political Consultative Conference—we find that Chinese local governments use these institutions to channel patronage to and gain political support from the private sector. Field interviews and an analysis of a nationwide firm-level survey show that private firms owned by local legislative members, while obtaining more bank loans, provide more support to the local government in various forms than those owned by nonmembers. This finding suggests that authoritarian legislatures, even those with weak policymaking efficacy, can help authoritarian states build stable alliances with social groups, thereby contributing to regime resilience.
The Greenfoot Programming Environment

Greenfoot is an educational integrated development environment aimed at learning and teaching programming. It is aimed at a target audience of students from about 14 years old upwards, and is also suitable for college- and university-level education. Greenfoot combines graphical, interactive output with programming in Java, a standard, text-based object-oriented programming language. This article first describes Greenfoot and then goes on to discuss design goals and motivations, strengths and weaknesses of the system, and its relation to two environments with similar goals, Scratch and Alice.
Dynamic Frequency Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Deployment of low power pico basestations within cellular networks can potentially increase both capacity and coverage. However, such deployments require efficient frequency allocation schemes for managing interference from the pico and macro basestations that are located within each other's transmission range. Partitioning the available frequencies between the various basestations avoids the problem of interference, but can lead to inefficient spectrum usage. In this paper, we introduce a distributed frequency allocation scheme that shares frequencies between macro and pico basestations, and guarantees a minimum average throughput to users. The scheme seeks to minimize the total number of frequencies needed to honor the minimum throughput requirements. We evaluate our scheme using detailed simulations and show that it performs on par with the centralized optimum allocation. Moreover, our proposed scheme outperforms a static frequency reuse scheme and the centralized optimal partitioning between the macro and pico basestations.
On the Design of Efficient Vehicular Applications

Vehicular communications attract the attention of many people in the networking research world. These networks present some special features, such as high mobility or specific topologies, which affect the performance of applications. In order to select the appropriate technologies, more effort should be directed to identify the final necessities of the network. Few works identify possible applications of vehicular networks, but none of them link application requirements which networking technologies available in the vehicular field. In this paper, we fill this gap, and propose an analysis of application requirements and study how to deal with them using communication technologies for the physical and network level. This study contains key factors which must be taken into account, especially, at the designing stage of the vehicular network.
Chronix: Long Term Storage and Retrieval Technology for Anomaly Detection in Operational Data

Anomalies in the runtime behavior of software systems, especially in distributed systems, are inevitable, expensive, and hard to locate. To detect and correct such anomalies (like instability due to a growing memory consumption, failure due to load spikes, etc.) one has to automatically collect, store, and analyze the operational data of the runtime behavior, often represented as time series. There are efficient means both to collect and analyze the runtime behavior. But traditional time series databases do not yet focus on the specific needs of anomaly detection (generic data model, specific built-in functions, storage efficiency, and fast query execution). The paper presents Chronix, a domain specific time series database targeted at anomaly detection in operational data. Chronix uses an ideal compression and chunking of the time series data, a methodology for commissioning Chronix' parameters to a sweet spot, a way of enhancing the data with attributes, an expandable set of analysis functions, and other techniques to achieve both faster query times and a significantly smaller memory footprint. On benchmarks Chronix saves 20%-68% of the space that other time series databases need to store the data and saves 80%-92% of the data retrieval time and 73%-97% of the runtime of analyzing functions.
Incremental Construction Approach for Distributed System Specifications

In this paper, we propose an incremental construction approach for distributed system specifications. These specifications are structured as a parallel composition of subsystem specifications. The approach consists of merging two specifications Sold and Sadded into a new specification Snew, such that Snew extends Sold and Snew extends Sadded. Moreover, in the case of cyclic behaviors, Snew offers a choice between behaviors of Sold and behaviors of Sadded, in a recursive manner. The derived specification Snew has the same internal structure as Sold. Our approach is described in terms of Labelled Transition Systems, and it is applicable for many specification languages.
A Model of Multiple Equilibria in Geographic Labor Mobility

We develop a model of double matching in the labor market and the social environment in order to explain different migration patterns in response to local economic shocks. This approach explains the different behaviors of workers in different groups, regions, or countries in an endogenous way by showing the existence of multiple equilibria, rather than in an exogenous manner by introducing ex-ante regulations or unemployment benefits. This model can also explain why individuals from some communities form "sister" communities in some cases and not in others.
Implementation of WirelessHART in NS-2 simulator

One of the first standards in the wireless sensor networks domain, WirelessHART, was introduced to address industrial process automation and control requirements. The standard can be used as a reference point to evaluate other wireless protocols in the domain of industrial monitoring and control. This makes it worthwhile to set up a reliable WirelessHART simulator to achieve that reference point in a relatively easy way. This paper explains our implementation of WirelessHART in the NS-2 simulator. According to our knowledge, this is the first implementation that supports the WirelessHART network manager as well as the whole stack of the WirelessHART standard. We evaluated the performance of our implementation in terms of delay and communication load in the network. This implementation offers an alternative to expensive testbeds for testing WirelessHART.
Histopathology Confirms White-Nose Syndrome in Bats in Europe

White-nose syndrome, associated with the fungal skin infection geomycosis, caused regional population collapse in bats in North America. Our results, based on histopathology, show the presence of white-nose syndrome in Europe. Dermatohistopathology on two bats (Myotis myotis) found dead in March 2010 with geomycosis in the Czech Republic had characteristics resembling Geomyces destructans infection in bats confirmed with white-nose syndrome in US hibernacula. In addition, a live M. myotis, biopsied for histopathology during hibernation in April 2011, had typical fungal infection with cupping erosion and invasion of muzzle skin diagnostic for white-nose syndrome and conidiospores identical to G. destructans that were genetically confirmed as G. destructans.
A distributed transmit antenna selection scheme for fixed-gain multi-antenna AF relaying systems

Antenna selection has arisen as an attractive strategy in multi-antenna systems due to its reduced complexity and cost. In this paper, the outage performance of a distributed transmit antenna selection scheme for dual-hop fixed-gain amplify-and-forward relaying systems is investigated. Our analysis considers a multi-antenna source, a multi-antenna relay, and a single-antenna destination, in which selection combining and maximal-ratio combining are employed at the relay and destination receptions, respectively. Lower and upper bounds for the outage probability of the proposed scheme are derived as the sum of two terms, one term given in closed form and the other term given in single integral form. Moreover, asymptotic expressions for these bounds at high signal-to-noise ratio are obtained in closed form. The results show that our scheme presents full diversity order. More importantly, the underlying distributed strategy is shown to perform closely to the costly optimal centralized antenna selection.
FINITE STATE MACHINE TESTING FROM AN OR STATE REFINEMENT DESIGN

The paper formalizes the OR reflnement of flnite state machines and devel- ops an e-cient method to integrate the test sets of the component machines in order to test the ∞attened machine. The approach supports component- software development since it constructs test sets for an assembly of systems from readily available test sets of the prefabricated parts.
Water body detection and delineation with Landsat TM data.

The aim of this project was to determine the accuracy of using simple digital image processing techniques to map riverine water bodies with Landsat 5 TM data. This paper quantifies the classification accuracy of single band density slicing of Landsat 5 TM data to delineate water bodies on riverine floodplains. The results of these analyses are then compared to a 6-band maximum likelihood classification over the same area. The water boundaries delineated by each of these digital classification procedures were compared to water boundaries delineated from colour aerial photography acquired on the same day as the TM data. These comparisons show that Landsat TM data can be used to map water bodies accurately. Density slicing of the single mid-infrared band 5 proved as successful as multispectral classification achieving an overall accuracy of 96.9%, a producer's accuracy for water bodies of 81.7% and a user's accuracy for water bodies of 64.5%.
Functional data analysis with applications in finance

In many different fields of applied statistics an object of interest is depending on some continuous parameter. Typical examples in finance are implied volatility functions, yield curves or risk-neutral densities. Due to the different market conventions and further technical reasons, these objects are observable only on a discrete grid, e.g. for a grid of strikes and maturities for which the trade has been settled at a given time-point. By collecting these functions for several time points (e.g. days) or for different underlyings, a bunch (sample) of functions is obtained – a functional data set. The first topic considered in this thesis concerns the strategies of recovering the functional objects (e.g. implied volatilities function) from the observed data based on the nonparametric smoothing methods. Besides the standard smoothing methods, a procedure based on a combination of nonparametric smoothing and the no-arbitrage-theory results is proposed for implied volatility smoothing. The second part of the thesis is devoted to the functional data analysis (FDA) and its connection to the problems present in the empirical analysis of the financial markets. The theoretical part of the thesis focuses on the functional principal components analysis – functional counterpart of the well known multivariate dimension-reduction-technique. A comprehensive overview of the existing methods is given, an estimation method based on the dual problem as well as the two-sample inference based on the functional principal component analysis are discussed. The FDA techniques are applied to the analysis of the implied volatility and yield curve dynamics. In addition, the implementation of the FDA techniques together with a FDA library for the statistical environment XploRe are presented.
A taxonomy of visualization strategies for cultural heritage applications

In this article we present a general classification of the different approaches that might be employed to constitute a visual representation of a cultural heritage item, including the ones featuring the use of traditional tools as the ones exhibiting the inclusion of modern 2D and 3D digital technologies. In order to establish a coherent taxonomy, specific elements characterizing such approaches will be discussed and employed to assist the definition of a general conceptual framework that will enable the classification of the possible design choices according to their specific characteristics. Finally, a selection of modeling and simulation techniques which are specifically related to the creation process underlying the virtual representation of heritage items by means of modern visualization technologies will be explored alongside the main areas of preferences linked to the major actors active in the cultural heritage field.
Using Twitter to Estimate and Predict the Trends and Opinions 1 Introduction

The most common and conventional way to collect people’s opinions has always been random sampling and asking several survey questions by phone. For instance, if a news media is interested in how popular Obama is among Americans, it would probably call up a thousand people and ask how they would rate Obama. The data collected in this manner is considered a gold standard; there has been only few attempts to find a different way to collect such data. However, this approach bears a few shortcoming such as costs, limited targeted people, etc.