Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Metaclasses and Reflection in Smalltalk

Many object-oriented programming languages provide reflective features which may be used to control the interpretive mechanism of the language. Often, these features are defined with respect to a golden braid consisting of objects, classes and metaclasses. This paper describes the Smalltalk golden braid and generalize it for multiple inheritance. Multiple inheritance leads to choices between many different inheritance strategies. The reflective features of Smalltalk cannot affect the basic mechanisms of inheritance and so an arbitrary choice must be made for multiple inheritance. A language is described in which the reflective features of Smalltalk are extended so as to allow programmer defined inheritance strategies.
A comparative analysis of constraint programming and metaheuristics for job-shop scheduling

The paper considers two kinds of optimization methods: constraint programming and metaheuristic search. It shows how each of the approaches can be applied to multiple instances of the job shop scheduling problem and compares the performance of these approaches among themselves and also under various parameter settings. It is shown that, given the instances of the problem and the parameter configurations considered in the paper, constraint programming clearly outperforms the other approaches. In its final section, the paper outlines further conclusions as well as suggestions for future work.
The use of stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen to identify water sources in two hypersaline estuaries with different hydrologic regimes

Stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen are used here with salinity data in geochemical and mass-balance modelstodeciphertheproportionofdifferentsourcesofwaterintwohypersalineestuariesthatvaryinsizeandhydrologic condition. Shark Bay, located on the mid-western coast of Australia, is hypersaline year round and has an arid climate. Florida Bay, located in the south-eastern United States, is seasonally hypersaline and has a subtropical climate. The water budget in both bays can be explained by evaporation of seawater, with seasonal inputs of surface-water runoff and precipitation. In Shark Bay, discharge from the Wooramel River associated with a recent major flood was detected in the relationship between the stable isotopic composition and salinity of surface waters near the mouth of the river, despite the persistenceofhypersalinity.ThevolumeofwaterequaltoonepoolvolumereplenishedHamelinPool(ahypersalinewater body located at the southern end of eastern Shark Bay that supports living stromatolites) once every 6-12 months. The eastern portion of Florida Bay received a greater proportion of freshwater from overland flow (70-80%) than did the western portion where rainfall was the dominant source of freshwater.
A convex polynomial model for planar sliding mechanics: theory, application, and experimental validation

We propose a polynomial model for planar sliding mechanics. For the force–motion mapping, we treat the set of generalized friction loads as the 1-sublevel set of a polynomial whose gradient directions correspond to generalized velocities. The polynomial is confined to be convex even-degree homogeneous in order to obey the maximum work inequality, symmetry, shape invariance in scale, and fast invertibility. We present a simple and statistically efficient model identification procedure using a sum-of-squares convex relaxation. We then derive the kinematic contact model that resolves the contact modes and instantaneous object motion given a position controlled manipulator action. The inherently stochastic object-to-surface friction distributions are modeled by sampling polynomial parameters from distributions that preserve sum-of-squares convexity. Thanks to the model smoothness, the mechanics of patch contact is captured while being computationally efficient without mode selection at support points. Simulation and robotic experiments on pushing and grasping validate the accuracy and efficiency of our approach.
Intra‐specific variation in social organization of Strepsirrhines

Strepsirrhines, that is, lemurs, galagos, and lorises, are considered basal primates, making them important to understand the evolution of primate sociality. Apart from some lemurs, they are nocturnal and solitary living, though the view of their sociality nature has changed with field studies being completed. We conducted a review of the primary literature about the social organization (group composition) of strepsirrhines, with the aim to determine whether intra‐specific variation in social organization (IVSO) occurs and to determine how many species are pair‐living, group‐living, or solitary living. We found data in 83 peer‐reviewed studies for 43 of the 132 strepsirrhine species and compared our results using two databases on social systems of mammals published in 2011 and 2013. While it is often assumed that primates show relatively fixed social organizations, we found that 60.5% of species for which data exist have IVSO. We found only 7% of the species to be truly solitary living (with 34.9% additional species to be sometimes solitary living), which is in contrast to the other databases, which had reported 60.9% and 37.7% of species to be solitary. We further explored group compositions by designating “functional groups” (e.g., foraging, breeding, and infant care groups). While functional groups might explain IVSO within a single species, this was not consistent over species with IVSO, such that IVSO was poorly explained by functional groups. Our study supports the view that most strepsirrhines are social (58.1% of species with another 34.9% of species sometimes living in pairs or groups) and show complex and often variable social organizations; reinforcing the assumption that the ancestor of all primates was social and not solitary.
Genetic Algorithm Based Optimization of ECDM Process for Polymer Matrix Composite

The acceptability of polymer matrix composites for various industrial applications has been increased over the years due to their better mechanical properties. However, nonconductive nature and fibrous residuals produced during micro drilling of these materials has become major challenge for the research fraternity. The conventional machining of these materials causes high tool wear due to presence of abrasive particles. Recently, the electrochemical discharge machining (ECDM) process has emerged as potential contender for the machining of nonconductive hard and brittle materials. Keeping in mind all these challenges, the present research work focuses on micro drilling of PMCs using ECDM process. The experimentation was planned as per Taguchi’s methodology using L9 orthogonal array. Voltage, electrolyte concentration and duty factor were considered as process parameters whereas material removal rate and taper were observed as output quality characteristics. The regression equation and coefficients were obtained using regression analysis. Using this regression equations, further solutions were obtained by genetic algorithm.
Effect of Fe and/or N on the photoactivity of TiO2 prepared by sol-gel method

Mono- and co-doped TiO2 photocatalyst were synthesized using sol–gel method followed with calcination process. The effect of Fe and/or N on the structural, morphological, and optical properties of TiO2 was studied. The samples were characterized using XRD, FESEM, and UV–visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy to study the changes in the properties due to the presence of the dopants. XRD diffraction analysis shows anatase structure in all samples. FESEM images exhibit agglomerated particles with grain size of 30–40 nm. A slight shift of the absorption edge to higher wavelength up to 480 nm was observed due to the addition of mono- and co-doped Fe and/or N, respectively. The photocatalytic activity of all samples was assessed by testing the degradation of methyl orange (MO) under visible light.Mono- and co-doped TiO2 photocatalyst were synthesized using sol–gel method followed with calcination process. The effect of Fe and/or N on the structural, morphological, and optical properties of TiO2 was studied. The samples were characterized using XRD, FESEM, and UV–visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy to study the changes in the properties due to the presence of the dopants. XRD diffraction analysis shows anatase structure in all samples. FESEM images exhibit agglomerated particles with grain size of 30–40 nm. A slight shift of the absorption edge to higher wavelength up to 480 nm was observed due to the addition of mono- and co-doped Fe and/or N, respectively. The photocatalytic activity of all samples was assessed by testing the degradation of methyl orange (MO) under visible light.
ADRB2 Arg16Gly Polymorphism and Pulmonary Function Response of Inhaled Corticosteroids plus Long-Acting Beta Agonists for Asthma Treatment: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background The beta-2 adrenergic receptor (ADRB2) Arg16Gly polymorphism may alter the bronchodilation response to long-acting beta2-agonists, thereby influencing the clinical effectiveness of LABAs plus corticosteroids (ICS) treatment. But the results of individual studies are inconclusive. Methods A systematic search was conducted in PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Database, WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, Chinese BioMedical Literature Database, and VIP databases. The meta-analysis was performed with RevMan statistical software (version 5.2), and potential publication bias was estimated by Egger's test using STATA (version 12.0), with p < 0.05 indicating significant publication bias. Results We found 5 cohort studies with a total of 632 patients and included them in the meta-analysis. There are no significant differences in pulmonary function response between patients with the Arg/Arg and Arg/Gly phenotype (SMD −0.04, 95% CI −0.45 to 0.37; p=0.84). There were also no significant differences in the pulmonary function response between patients with the Arg/Arg and Gly/Gly phenotype (MD −0.03, 95% CI −0.07 to 0.02; p=0.28). Conclusions Our systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that ADRB2 Arg16Gly polymorphism is not associated with pulmonary response to asthma treatment with ICS plus LABAs.
Dysprosody after severe closed head injury: an acoustic analysis

OBJECTIVES Neurological speech disorders (dysarthria and dysprosody) are known to be frequent sequelae after severe closed head injury. These disorders may dramatically alter communicative intent and accentuate social isolation. The aim was to provide an instrumental evaluation for prosodic production in a group of patients with severe closed head injury and to determine the correlations between prosodic production and neurobehavioural status. METHODS Fifteen patients, at the subacute stage after severe closed head injury, were studied and compared with 11 controls, matched for age, sex, and duration of education. Each subject was required to read aloud a French sentence “Je m’en vais samedi matin” (I am leaving saturday morning) under six different prosodic intonations (neutral, affirmation, interrogation, happiness, sadness, anger). The recorded sentences were analysed using a sound signal analysis software (Signalyse) allowing the measurement of signal intensity and fundamental frequency. Statistical analyses were carried out using repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). RESULTS Patients with closed head injury were significantly less able than controls to modulate speech output (pitch and intensity) according to prosodic context. This deficit was particularly pronounced for the intonation feature of anger, question, and statement. No consistent correlations could be found between prosodic production and cognitive or behavioural data. CONCLUSIONS Acoustic analysis of pitch and intensity may show impairments of prosodic production after severe closed head injury, which may be useful in rehabilitation planning. This impairment does not seem to reflect the eventual cognitive and behavioural deficits of the patients, but rather a specific disorder of modulation of speech output.
Signal acquisition and processing techniques for sEMG based silent speech recognition

sEMG based silent speech recognition systems seek to bypass the limitations of acoustic speech recognition by measuring and interpreting muscle activity of the facial and neck musculature involved in speech production. However, this speech recognition modality introduces unique challenges of its own. This paper describes signal acquisition and processing strategies that we have employed to address these challenges during our development of a silent speech recognition system.
Automatic Assessment of Artistic Quality of Photos

This paper proposes a technique to assess the aesthetic quality of photographs. The goal of the study is to predict whether a given photograph is captured by professional photographers, or by common people, based on a measurement of artistic quality of the photograph. We propose a Multi-Layer-Perceptron based system to analyze some low, mid and high level image features and find their effectiveness to measure artistic quality of the image and produce a measurement of the artistic quality of the image on a scale of 10. We validate the proposed system on a large dataset, containing images downloaded from the internet. The dataset contains some images captured by professional photographers and the rest of the images captured by common people. The proposed measurement of artistic quality of images provides higher value of photo quality for the images captured by professional photographers, compared to the values provided for the other images.
Mobility-Aware Reconstruction Algorithm for Correlated Nonzero Neighborhood Structured Downlink Channel in Massive MIMO

This paper investigates downlink (DL) channel estimation of frequency division duplex (FDD) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) with a finite number of base station (BS) antennas. Based on the performance analysis of DL channel in FDD, it is demonstrated that the interference effect cannot be ignored in the finite region. Also, excessive training overhead is required in conventional channel estimation methods when the number of BS antennas goes large. Therefore, it is necessary to design an algorithm for alleviating the interference in addition to the reduction of pilot overhead. In this paper, a general model is presented to exploit certain sparsity structure of massive MIMO channel in beam domain, which is called nonzero-neighborhood (NZN) structure. Considering the smooth variation of channel paths during two consecutive estimation intervals, a compressed sensing-based algorithm is proposed to efficiently estimate and track NZN-structured DL channel. The convergence behavior and computational complexity of the proposed mobility-aware subspace pursuit (MA-SP) algorithm are analyzed based on restricted isometric property. It is demonstrated that the application of proposed MA-SP algorithm efficiently reduces the required pilot length in channel estimation. Interference analysis shows that inter-cell interference is considerably alleviated in the proposed channel estimation phase without any prior information about interference. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MA-SP technique compared with the previous methods.
Complete synchronization of two Chen-Lee systems

This study demonstrates that complete synchronization of two Chen-Lee chaotic systems can be easily achieved. The upper bound of the Chen-Lee chaotic system is estimated numerically. A controller is designed to synchronize two chaotic systems. Sufficient conditions for synchronization are obtained using Lyapunov's direct method. Two numerical examples are presented to verify the proposed synchronization approach.
Stock Price Prediction by Deep Neural Generative Model of News Articles

In this study, we propose a deep neural generative model for predicting daily stock price movements given news articles. Approaches involving conventional technical analysis have been investigated to identify certain patterns in past price movements, which in turn helps to predict future price movements. However, the financial market is highly sensitive to specific events, including corporate buyouts, product releases, and the like. Therefore, recent research has focused on modeling relationships between these events that appear in the news articles and future price movements; however, a very large number of news articles are published daily, each article containing rich information, which results in overfitting to past price movements used for parameter adjustment. Given the above, we propose a model based on a generative model of news articles that includes price movement as a condition, thereby avoiding excessive overfitting thanks to the nature of the generative model. We evaluate our proposed model using historical price movements of Nikkei 225 and Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index, confirming that our model predicts future price movements better than such conventional classifiers as support vector machines and multilayer perceptrons. Further, our proposed model extracts significant words from news articles that are directly related to future stock price movements. key words: stock price prediction, news articles, deep learning, generative model
Evaluating Answers to Reading Comprehension Questions in Context: Results for German and the Role of Information Structure

Reading comprehension activities are an authentic task including a rich, language-based context, which makes them an interesting real-life challenge for research into automatic content analysis. For textual entailment research, content assessment of reading comprehension exercises provides an interesting opportunity for extrinsic, real-purpose evaluation, which also supports the integration of context and task information into the analysis. In this paper, we discuss the first results for content assessment of reading comprehension activities for German and present results which are competitive with the current state of the art for English. Diving deeper into the results, we provide an analysis in terms of the different question types and the ways in which the information asked for is encoded in the text. We then turn to analyzing the role of the question and argue that the surface-based account of information that is given in the question should be replaced with a more sophisticated, linguistically informed analysis of the information structuring of the answer in the context of the question that it is a response to.
Mining correlated high-utility itemsets using various measures

Discovering high-utility itemsets (HUIs) consists of finding sets of items that yield a high profit in customer transaction databases. An important limitation of traditional high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) is that only the utility measure is used for assessing the interestingness of patterns. This leads to finding several itemsets that have a high profit but contain items that are weakly correlated. To address this issue, this paper proposes to integrate the concept of correlation in HUIM to find profitable itemsets that are highly correlated, using the all-confidence and bond measures. An efficient algorithm named FCHM (fast correlated high-utility itemset miner) is proposed to efficiently discover correlated high-utility itemsets (CHIs). Two versions of the algorithm are proposed: FCHM$_{all\text{-}confidence}$ and FCHM$_{bond}$, which are based on the all-confidence and bond measures, respectively. An experimental evaluation was done using four real-life benchmark datasets from the HUIM literature: mushroom, retail, kosarak and foodmart. Results show that FCHM is efficient and can prune a huge amount of weakly CHIs.
Industrial Biotechnology-Made in Germany: The Path from policies to sustainable energy, Commodity and specialty products

Lipases A and B from the psychrophilic basidiomyceteous yeast Pseudozyma antarctica (formerly known as Candida antarctica) belong to the most important industrial biocatalysts with numerous applications in the oleochemical, polymer, textile, biodiesel, and detergent industry. Both lipases have been intensively studied for decades. Nevertheless, several important achievements were made in the last few years. This highlight presents three recent trends that significantly widen the application of lipases. Firstly, improvements in enzyme formulation and reactor setups have improved the performance of lipase in solvent-free reactions systems, which have significantly broadened the scope of lipases for the environmentally friendly synthesis of cosmetic products. Secondly, combination with chemical reactions has a tremendous potential to widen the scope of lipases. For instance, metal-free racemization reactions proved to be a successful approach to increase the yield in the industrially established kinetic resolution of amines. Thirdly, the impressive process in the engineering of lipases shortened time horizons for catalyst development and led to series of novel biocatalysts with engineered selectivity. Successful examples include lipase variants with improved activity towards amines, increased substrate scope, increased or even inverted enantioselectivity and increased ability to discriminate cis and trans fatty acids.
Common transdiagnostic cognitive deficits among people with psychiatric disorders exposed to childhood maltreatment: a meta-analysis

ABSTRACT Introduction: Previous meta-analyses have shown a moderate negative impact of maltreatment on the neuropsychological functioning of people with or without psychiatric disorders compared to healthy groups. The objectives of the present meta-analysis were to (1) investigate the impact of maltreatment on neuropsychological functioning of people with psychiatric disorders and to (2) evaluate the moderating effect of age, at the time of the cognitive assessment, on neuropsychological functioning. Methods: Seventeen studies published between 1970 and July 2017 were included. Results: The results showed a negative impact of maltreatment with a small effect size (g = −0.25) on the neuropsychological performances in the group with psychiatric disorders with a history of exposure to childhood maltreatment compared to the group with psychiatric disorders without a history of exposure to childhood maltreatment. Cognitive domains that are significantly affected by maltreatment are: working memory (g = −0.56), verbal episodic memory (g = −0.39), intelligence (g = −0.27) and processing speed (g = −0.21). The impact of childhood maltreatment on the cognitive profile is greater in adults than young people. Conclusions: Clinicians should consider these common cognitive deficits using a transdiagnostic approach in cognitive interventions.
A P ] 2 6 M ar 2 01 8 A sufficient condition for the Kolmogorov 4 / 5 law for stationary martingale solutions to the 3 D Navier-Stokes equations

Abstract. We prove that statistically stationary martingale solutions of the 3D Navier-Stokes equations on T subjected to white-in-time (colored-in-space) forcing satisfy the Kolmogorov 4/5 law (in an averaged sense and over a suitable inertial range) using only the assumption that the kinetic energy is o(ν) as ν → 0 (where ν is the inverse Reynolds number). This plays the role of a weak anomalous dissipation. No energy balance or additional regularity is assumed (aside from that satisfied by all martingale solutions from the energy inequality). If the force is statistically homogeneous, then any homogeneous martingale solution satisfies the spherically averaged 4/5 law pointwise in space. An additional hypothesis of approximate isotropy in the inertial range gives the traditional version of the Kolmogorov law. We demonstrate a necessary condition by proving that energy balance and an additional quantitative regularity estimate as ν → 0 imply that the 4/5 law (or any similar scaling law) cannot hold.