Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The real impact of financial crises

Output falls precipitously in most emerging nations that experience financial crises. The authors conjecture that a significant part of the real impact of financial crises is due to the fact that during turbulent times firms choose to leave a large fraction of productive resources idle until business conditions improve. In the case of Mexico’s 1994–95 crisis, they calculate that capital utilization could account for as much as half the drop in standard measures of total factor productivity. Capital utilization matters much more during financial crises than during other periods, they argue, because crises create ideal conditions for large swings in utilization rates.
Competition in the Supply Option Market

This paper develops a multiattribute competition model for procurement of short life-cycle products. In such an environment, the buyer installs dedicated production capacity at the suppliers before demand is realized. Final production orders are decided after demand materializes. Of course, the buyer is reluctant to bear all the capacity and inventory risk, and thus signs flexible contracts with several suppliers. We model the suppliers' offers as option contracts, where each supplier charges a reservation price per unit of capacity and an execution price per unit of delivered supply. These two parameters illustrate the trade-off between total price and flexibility of a contract, which are both important to the buyer. We model the interaction between suppliers and the buyer as a game in which the suppliers are the leaders and the buyer is the follower. Specifically, suppliers compete to provide supply capacity to the buyer, and the buyer optimizes its expected profit by selecting one or more suppliers. We characterize the suppliers' equilibria in pure strategies for a class of customer demand distributions. In particular, we show that this type of interaction gives rise to cluster competition. That is, in equilibrium suppliers tend to be clustered in small groups of two or three suppliers each, such that within the same group all suppliers use similar technologies and offer the same type of contract. Finally, we show that in equilibrium, supply chain inefficiencies---i.e., the loss of profit due to competition---are at most 25% of the profit of a centralized supply chain.
S-Dependent Gene Expression at the Onset of Stationary Phase in Escherichia coli : Function of S-Dependent Genes and Identification of Their Promoter Sequences †

The S subunit of RNA polymerase, the product of the rpoS gene, controls the expression of genes responding to starvation and cellular stresses. Using gene array technology, we investigated rpoS-dependent expression at the onset of stationary phase in Escherichia coli grown in rich medium. Forty-one genes were expressed at significantly lower levels in an rpoS mutant derived from the MG1655 strain; for 10 of these, we also confirmed rpoS and stationary-phase dependence by reverse transcription-PCR. Only seven genes (dps, osmE, osmY, sodC, rpsV, wrbA, and yahO) had previously been recognized as rpoS dependent. Several newly identified rpoSdependent genes are involved in the uptake and metabolism of amino acids, sugars, and iron. Indeed, the rpoS mutant strain shows severely impaired growth on some sugars such as fructose and N-acetylglucosamine. The rpoS gene controls the production of indole, which acts as a signal molecule in stationary-phase cells, via regulation of the tnaA-encoded tryptophanase enzyme. Genes involved in protein biosynthesis, encoding the ribosome-associated protein RpsV (sra) and the initiation factor IF-1 (infA), were also induced in an rpoSdependent fashion. Using primer extension, we determined the promoter sequences of a selection of rpoSregulated genes representative of different functional classes. Significant fractions of these promoters carry sequence features specific for E S recognition of the 10 region, such as cytosines at positions 13 (70%) and 12 (30%) as well as a TG motif located upstream of the 10 region (50%), thus supporting the TGN0-2C(C/ T)ATA(C/A)T consensus sequence recently proposed for .
Context Dependent Auditory Thresholds Determined by Brainstem Audiometry and Prepulse Inhibition in Mongolian Gerbils

Information on hearing thresholds is not always reliable as differences in these thresholds have been described even for the same species. This may partially be due to different methods used by different labs. A frequently used approach to obtain an estimate of hearing threshold is the electrophysiological recording of auditory brainstem responses (ABR). They are usually recorded under deep anesthesia and represent the auditory evoked far-field potentials at various levels in the central auditory pathway. Alternatively, several behavioral approaches are employed. These commonly use operant or classical conditioning to determine hearing thresholds. A potential disadvantage of these methods is that any sound conditioning may in principle alter auditory perception and therefore auditory thresholds. To exclude this type of methodological bias a prepulse inhibition (PPI) paradigm can be used where an audiogram can be determined without any kind of pre-training. Here we compare the threshold estimates obtained by two different ABR and PPI measurements where stimuli are presented in different contexts, either randomly or non-randomly, to test for a possible effect of auditory sensitization. In addition we test the effect of a frequency specific acoustic trauma on the audiograms obtained with both methods. In general we find behaviorally determined audiograms to be significantly lower in absolute thresh- old compared to ABR measurements. Furthermore non-randomized presentation context of the stimuli generally results in audiograms with 10 to 15 dB lower thresholds than pseudo-randomized presentation. Finally, the amount of threshold loss induced by acoustic trauma is similar for all methods tested.
Is an open organizational culture an important factor in the hospital-in-the-home

This paper shows some of the tools and methods that Hospital-in-the-Home Units (HHU) have used to update organizational memory. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to highlight the links among the extent to which a HHU possesses some unlearning practices and some memories and the strengths of its outcomes from the practitioners' point of view (human capital).
Annual simulation of in-duct ultraviolet germicidal irradiation system performance

In-duct ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) systems treat moving air streams in heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems to inactivate airborne microorganisms. UVGI system performance depends on air temperature, velocity, cumulative operating time, variations in exposure time and other factors. Annual simulations of UVGI efficiency and space concentration that accounted for these effects were performed for a hypothetical building served by a VAV system. The UVGI device was assumed to be located in the supply air stream and exposed to a near constant temperature, but variable flow. UVGI performance was compared with enhanced ventilation and infiltration. Large seasonal variations in UVC dose due mainly to the effect of airflow variation on residence time were observed. UVGI air treatment resulted in much lower predicted space concentrations of Staphylococcus aureus than ventilation according to ASHRAE Standard 62.1 and levels comparable to those achieved by high efficiency, but sub-HEPA, particulate filtration. Transient variations in space concentration due to lamp output variation were small, but adjustment of lamp output to the design operating condition was very important for modeling accuracy.
Controlling a Class of Nonlinear Systems on Rectangles

In this paper, we focus on a particular class of nonlinear affine control systems of the form xdot=f(x)+Bu, where the drift f is a multi-affine vector field (i.e., affine in each state component), the control distribution B is constant, and the control u is constrained to a convex set. For such a system, we first derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a multiaffine feedback control law keeping the system in a rectangular invariant. We then derive sufficient conditions for driving all initial states in a rectangle through a desired facet in finite time. If the control constraints are polyhedral, we show that all these conditions translate to checking the feasibility of systems of linear inequalities to be satisfied by the control at the vertices of the state rectangle. This work is motivated by the need to construct discrete abstractions for continuous and hybrid systems, in which analysis and control tasks specified in terms of reachability of sets of states can be reduced to searches on finite graphs. We show the application of our results to the problem of controlling the angular velocity of an aircraft with gas jet actuators
Impact of ethical dilemmas on well-being of teachers in vocational education and training in Queensland, Australia

ABSTRACT Vocational education and training (VET) in Australia has been subject to a range of major policy reforms aimed at making it more effective and competitive in response to global pressures. Those reforms have raised significant ethical challenges for teachers in the sector. A recent study of ethical dilemmas faced by vocational trainers in Australia investigated the experiences of Australian vocational education teachers working registered training organizations (RTOs) using qualitative research. The author drew primarily on discursive interviews with 18 VET teachers in South-East Queensland, from which she identified four different dilemmas: responding flexibly to heightened student diversity; limiting educational engagement; constraining teacher responsiveness; manipulating learning assessment. The impacts of these dilemmas were identified as disappointment, confusion, anxiety, discomfort, and distress. While this study focuses on the ethical impact on VET teaching, the dilemmas themselves could be seen as a basis for positive change and a stimulus to improve teaching practices.
Deriving models of software fault-proneness

The effectiveness of the software testing process is a key issue for meeting the increasing demand of quality without augmenting the overall costs of software development. The estimation of software fault-proneness is important for assessing costs and quality and thus better planning and tuning the testing process. Unfortunately, no general techniques are available for estimating software fault-proneness and the distribution of faults to identify the correct level of test for the required quality. Although software complexity and testing thoroughness are intuitively related to the costs of quality assurance and the quality of the final product, single software metrics and coverage criteria provide limited help in planning the testing process and assuring the required quality.By using logistic regression, this paper shows how models can be built that relate software measures and software fault-proneness for classes of homogeneous software products. It also proposes the use of cross-validation for selecting valid models even for small data sets.The early results show that it is possible to build statistical models based on historical data for estimating fault-proneness of software modules before testing, and thus better planning and monitoring the testing activities.
A Service-Oriented Visualization of Medical Data

The purpose of scientific visualization is to enhance existing scientific methods by increasing scientist’s abilities to gain the understanding and insight into data and computational results. Dataset sizes and the amount of details in these datasets are growing at explosive rates. Aside from developing efficient extraction techniques to act on these datasets, it is necessary to have available computational facilities to visualize the results of the extraction process. Having this in mind we have developed a visualization framework under the concept of services in a distributed computing environment. The framework allows, on one hand, visualization experts to construct visualizations for end-users, and on the other hand, end-users to exploit the visualization functionalities irrespective to the available computational resources and geographical locations. The test case of this research is the surface extraction and streamlinebased visualizations applied to the medical data generated from medical imaging technology and results of the CFD simulation. Parts of this thesis have been accepted for publication in and presentation at: Zudilova-Seinstra E.V. , Yang N. (2005): Towards Service-based Interactive Visualization, Proc. of the International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence and Life, July 21-22, 2005, San Sebastian, Spain, pp. 15-25.
Reliability Tests for Process Flow with Fault Tree Analysis

This paper presents a method to automate the generation of test cases from the UML activity diagram representing a process flow. The Fault Tree Diagram (FTD) and the Success Tree Diagram (STD) can be derived from condition-classification tree model. FTD and STD can then be used to facilitate the generation of test cases for functionality and reliability testing by using Fault Tree Analysis method.
Tracking multiple people under global appearance constraints

In this paper, we show that tracking multiple people whose paths may intersect can be formulated as a convex global optimization problem. Our proposed framework is designed to exploit image appearance cues to prevent identity switches. Our method is effective even when such cues are only available at distant time intervals. This is unlike many current approaches that depend on appearance being exploitable from frame to frame. We validate our approach on three multi-camera sport and pedestrian datasets that contain long and complex sequences. Our algorithm perseveres identities better than state-of-the-art algorithms while keeping similar MOTA scores.
Judicialisation of politics and Kenya’s 2017 elections

ABSTRACT Kenya’s 2017 elections stand out as the most litigated and judicialised in the country’s electoral history. The election witnessed a litany of legal disputes over rules and regulations ahead of the polls, two presidential petitions, and 388 petitions for other seats. Rulings met with controversy as losers viciously attacked the courts. Every decision the courts made potentially caused them trouble; it raised the ire of either the government or the opposition. Nevertheless, the judiciary made decisions independent of any party and candidate, and played such a critical role in the elections that it ultimately overshadowed the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). This article reveals how the judicialisation of elections in Kenya is an outcome of the 2010 Constitution, which sought to moderate the country’s ‘winner-takes-all’ politics. We argue that the electoral process in Kenya will remain judicialised not only because the courts have gained a degree of independence and can make brave decisions, but also that the political culture has not changed: the judiciary operates in an environment in which partisan political interests weaken all institutions and in which politicians seek to use the courts to advance their interests.
Semi-supervised learning for speech recognition in the context of accent adaptation

Accented speech that is under-represented in the training data still suffers high Word Error Rate (WER) with state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Careful collection and transcription of training data for different accents can address this issue, but it is both time consuming and expensive. However, for many tasks such as broadcast news or voice search, it is easy to obtain large amounts of audio data from target users with representative accents, albeit without accent labels or even transcriptions. Semi-supervised training have been explored for ASR in the past to leverage such data, but many of these techniques assume homogeneous training and test conditions. In this paper, we experiment with cross-entropy based speaker selection to adapt a source recognizer to a target accent in a semi-supervised manner, using additional data with no accent labels. We compare our technique to self-training based only on confidence scores and show that we obtain significant improvements over the baseline by leveraging additional unlabeled data on two different tasks in Arabic and English.
AuraOrb: social notification appliance

One of the problems with notification appliances is that they can be distracting when providing information not of immediate interest to the user. In this paper, we present AuraOrb, an ambient notification appliance that deploys progressive turn taking techniques to minimize notification disruptions. AuraOrb uses eye contact sensing to detect user interest in an initially ambient light notification. Once detected, it displays a text message with a notification heading visible from 360 degrees. Touching the orb causes the associated message to be displayed on the user's computer screen.We performed an initial evaluation of AuraOrb's functionality using a set of heuristics tailored to ambient displays. Results of our evaluation suggest that progressive turn taking techniques allowed AuraOrb users to access notification headings with minimal impact on their focus task.
EmuCloud: An extension to build SDN test environment on IaaS cloud

In this paper, we propose a platform named EmuCloud, aiming to provide a test environment for SDN with high fidelity and low cost. EmuCloud is based on IaaS cloud, and the key idea of the platform is to extend the abstract networking resources to provide virtual openflow switch, and combine this new abstraction with existing service (such as computing, storage, authentication, etc.) seamlessly. Compared to the lightweight SDN emulator, EmuCloud provide more fidelity, extensibility and flexibility, while keeping the low-cost feature. Our prototype implementation and test case show that it is possible to build a network composed of virtual machines and fully controlled virtual openflow switches for testing SDN applications on IaaS Cloud, and the network can be adjusted dynamically to adapt to users' requests.
New face recognition method based on local binary pattern histogram

Face recognition is one of the most important tasks in computer vision and biometrics where many algorithms have been developed. The Local Binary Pattern (LBP) has been proved to be effective for facial image representation and analysis, but it is too local to be robust. In this paper, we present an improved method for face recognition named Elongated Multi-Block Local Ternary Pattern (EMBLTP), which is based on Local Binary Pattern (LBP). The proposed method is tested on Yale face database and compared with different variants of LBP. Experimental results show that, the classification rate of the proposed method is appreciable.
Synthetic peptide vaccine confers protection against murine malaria

A synthetic peptide, (DPPPPNPN)2D, representing a subunit of the repeat domain of the Plasmodium berghei circumsporozoite protein, was conjugated to tetanus toxoid using bisdiazobenzidine. Immunization of mice and rats with the conjugate induced high serum titers of antibodies to the parasite, and most of the animals were completely protected from malaria infection when challenged with sporozoites.
Advances in X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) diffraction data processing applied to the crystal structure of the synaptotagmin-1 / SNARE complex

X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) reduce the effects of radiation damage on macromolecular diffraction data and thereby extend the limiting resolution. Previously, we adapted classical post-refinement techniques to XFEL diffraction data to produce accurate diffraction data sets from a limited number of diffraction images (Uervirojnangkoorn et al., 2015), and went on to use these techniques to obtain a complete data set from crystals of the synaptotagmin-1 / SNARE complex and to determine the structure at 3.5 Å resolution (Zhou et al., 2015). Here, we describe new advances in our methods and present a reprocessed XFEL data set of the synaptotagmin-1 / SNARE complex. The reprocessing produced small improvements in electron density maps and the refined atomic model. The maps also contained more information than those of a lower resolution (4.1 Å) synchrotron data set. Processing a set of simulated XFEL diffraction images revealed that our methods yield accurate data and atomic models. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.18740. 001
Accommodating hybrid retrieval in a comprehensive video database management system

A comprehensive video retrieval system should be able to accommodate and utilize various (complementary) description data in facilitating effective retrieval. We advocate a hybrid retrieval approach by integrating a query-based (database) mechanism with content-based retrieval (CBR) functions. We describe the VideoMAP/sup +/ architecture, discuss issues related to developing such a comprehensive video database management system, and its specific language mechanism (CAROL/ST with CBR) which provides an improved expressive power than pure query-based or CBR methods currently offer. We also describe an experimental prototype being developed based on a commercial object-oriented toolkit using VC++ and Java.
Image Processing Supports HCI in Museum Application

This work introduces a novel information visualization technique for mobile devices through Augmented Reality (AR). A painting boundary detector and a features extraction modules have been implemented to compute paintings signatures. The computed signatures are matched using a linear weighted combination of the extracted features. The detected boundaries and the features are exploited to compute the homography transformations. The homography transformations are used to introduce a novel user interaction technique for AR. Three different user interfaces have been evaluated using standard usability methods.
Analysing real students' passwords and students' passwords characteristics received from a questionnaire

Measuring strength of passwords is important in order to ensure the security of password-based authentication. Since passwords are still the most widely used method for authentication, there has been a considerable research on passwords and password strength. Yet, studies related to password still lack of access to plaintext passwords that are created under a specific password policy. Our research explores the connection between real students' passwords used for managing students' university account and students' passwords characteristics received through a questionnaire. The objective of this paper is to explore whether the characteristics of passwords received through a questionnaire are in line with real university passwords. We analyze real students' university passwords, using access to plaintext of these passwords, and compare the results to the ones as reported by students of the Faculty of Tourism and Faculty of electrical engineering and computer science, collected through the questionnaire. We find that there is a significant connection between the reported and the directly analyzed university passwords for the Faculty of Tourism, but no significant connection for the Faculty of electrical engineering and computer science. Our results for the Faculty of electrical engineering and computer science suggest that students' answers to our questionnaire regarding password characteristics are not in-line with actual university passwords collected in plaintext.