Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self-Regulation in a Cognitive--Affective Personality System: Attentional Control in the Service of the Self

The highly valued goals of the self too often turn into failed good intentions. Even when the goals are important and motivation is high, they easily become difficult to achieve in the face of temptations, frustrations and obstacles. The model and research discussed here address how people can exert willpower even when the situational pull to give up is strong. Research on the basic mechanisms and dynamics that enable delay of gratification show that exertion of willpower requires one to “cool” or self-distance from the negative arousal of difficult and frustrating situations. Such attention control helps prevent “hot,” impulsive responses that undermine long-term goal attainment. The attentional control mechanisms assessed in the preschool delay of gratification paradigm are visible in toddlerhood and continue to affect important life outcomes—academic, social, and interpersonal, through adolescence to adulthood. Most importantly, they seem to serve as protective factors against the negative long-term consequences of dispositional vulnerabilities. These self-regulatory and protective processes are conceptualized within a cognitive - affective processing system model of personality.
Spatial Distribution of a Large Herbivore Community at Waterholes: An Assessment of Its Stability over Years in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

The spatial structuring of populations or communities is an important driver of their functioning and their influence on ecosystems. Identifying the (in)stability of the spatial structure of populations is a first step towards understanding the underlying causes of these structures. Here we studied the relative importance of spatial vs. interannual variability in explaining the patterns of abundance of a large herbivore community (8 species) at waterholes in Hwange National Park (Zimbabwe). We analyzed census data collected over 13 years using multivariate methods. Our results showed that variability in the census data was mostly explained by the spatial structure of the community, as some waterholes had consistently greater herbivore abundance than others. Some temporal variability probably linked to Park-scale migration dependent on annual rainfall was noticeable, however. Once this was accounted for, little temporal variability remained to be explained, suggesting that other factors affecting herbivore abundance over time had a negligible effect at the scale of the study. The extent of spatial and temporal variability in census data was also measured for each species. This study could help in projecting the consequences of surface water management, and more generally presents a methodological framework to simultaneously address the relative importance of spatial vs. temporal effects in driving the distribution of organisms across landscapes.
Systematic design of a voltage controlled oscillator using a layout-aware approach

This paper focuses on the systematic design of voltage controlled oscillators (V CO), a commonly used radiofrequency (RF) electronic circuit. RF circuits are among the most difficult analog circuits to design due to its trade-offs and high operation frequencies. At such operation frequencies, layout parasitics and accurate passive component characterization become of upmost importance, causing re-design iterations if they are not considered by the designer. To avoid this problem, and reduce the design time, this paper presents a systematic design of a VCO, entailing layout parasitics and accurate characterization of passive components from early design stages. Results clearly illustrate the benefit of this strategy.
The Cutaneous Lymphocyte Antigen Is an Essential Component of the L-selectin Ligand Induced on Human Vascular Endothelial Cells

L-selectin mediates leukocyte rolling on vascular endothelium during inflammation. Although vascular endothelium can be activated with inflammatory cytokines to express functional L-selectin ligands, these ligands have not been well characterized. In this study, fucosyltransferase VII cDNA (Fuc-TVII) transfection of the EA.hy926 human vascular endothelial cell line (926-FtVII) induced functional L-selectin ligand expression and expression of sialyl Lewisx (sLex), as defined by HECA-452 (cutaneous lymphocyte antigen; CLA) and CSLEX-1 mAbs. Cytokine activation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) also induced functional L-selectin ligand expression, with increased CLA expression and Fuc-TVII transcription. The majority of L-selectin–dependent lymphocyte attachment to activated HUVEC and 926-FtVII cells was blocked specifically by treating the endothelial cells with the HECA-452 mAb, but not the CSLEX-1 mAb. CLA-bearing ligands on vascular endothelium also required sulfation and appropriate molecular scaffolds for functional activity, but were distinct from the L-selectin ligands previously identified by the MECA-79 mAb. These findings demonstrate that the HECA-452– defined antigen, CLA, is an essential carbohydrate component of vascular L-selectin ligands.
Design and evaluation of new, highly sensitive and specific primers for polymerase chain reaction detection of HIV-1 infected primary lymphocytes.

Abstract Primer pairs in the HIV-1 POL and ENV genes were evaluated by performing a PCR on lysed peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 96 HIV-1 seropositive and 40 seronegative individuals originating from 16 different geographical localities in Africa, Europe and Haiti. A single PCR using primer pairs to the LTR, GAG and ENV regions and detection by radioactively labelled oligonucleotide probes was compared to a nested PCR scheme using newly designed POL and ENV primers which used ethidium-bromide staining of the amplified product on agarose gel. The newly designed POL nested primer pair was shown to be highly sensitive (93%) and specific (100%) for the detection of HIV-1 proviral DNA of very diverse geographical and genetic origin, including highly aberrant HIV-1 isolates. The sensitivity of the newly designed ENV primers was 68·7%, which does not differ significantly from the sensitivity of the classical primers, SK 68/69. Both ENV primers were unable to amplify two SIV cpz isolates from naturally infected chimpanzees.
Resource Provisioning based on Preempting Virtual Machines in Resource Sharing Environments

Resource provisioning is one of the main challenges in large-scale resource sharing environments such as federated Grids. Recently, many resource management systems in these environments have started to use the lease abstraction and virtual machines (VMs) for resource provisioning. In resource sharing environments resource providers serve requests from external users along with their own local users. The problem arises when there is not sufficient resources for local users, who have higher priority than external ones, and need resources urgently. This problem could be solved by preempting leases from external users and allocating them to the local ones. However, preempting leases entails side-effects in terms of overhead time as well as increasing makespan of external requests. In this paper, we model the overhead of preempting VMs. Then, to reduce the impact of these side-effects, we propose and compare several policies that determine the proper set of lease(s) for preemption. We evaluate our proposed policies through simulation as well as real experimentation in the context of InterGrid under different working conditions. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed preemption policies serve up to 72% more local requests without increasing the rejection ratio of external requests. Copyright c © 0000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Virtual Honeypot Framework

A honeypot is a closely monitored network decoy serving several purposes: it can distract adversaries from more valuable machines on a network, provide early warning about new attack and exploitation trends, or allow in-depth examination of adversaries during and after exploitation of a honeypot. Deploying a physical honeypot is often time intensive and expensive as different operating systems require specialized hardware and every honeypot requires its own physical system. This paper presents Honeyd, a framework for virtual honeypots that simulates virtual computer systems at the network level. The simulated computer systems appear to run on unallocated network addresses. To deceive network fingerprinting tools, Honeyd simulates the networking stack of different operating systems and can provide arbitrary routing topologies and services for an arbitrary number of virtual systems. This paper discusses Honeyd's design and shows how the Honeyd framework helps in many areas of system security, e.g. detecting and disabling worms, distracting adversaries, or preventing the spread of spam email.
Charles A . Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics Why Do Banks Practice Regulatory Arbitrage ? Evidence from Usage of Trust Preferred Securities

We propose a theory of regulatory arbitrage by banks and test it using trust preferred securities (TPS) issuance. From 1996 to 2007, U.S. banks in the aggregate increased their regulatory capital through issuance of TPS while their net issuance of common stock was negative due to repurchases. We assume that, in the absence of capital requirements, a bank has an optimal capital structure that depends on its business model. Capital requirements can impose constraints on bank decisions. If a bank’s optimal capital structure also meets regulatory capital requirements with a sufficient buffer, the bank is unconstrained by these requirements. We expect that unconstrained banks will not issue TPS, that constrained banks will issue TPS and engage in other forms of regulatory arbitrage, and that banks with TPS will be riskier than other banks with the same amount of regulatory capital, and therefore, more adversely affected by the credit crisis. Our empirical evidence supports these predictions. Boyson is from Northeastern University. Fahlenbrach is from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and is affiliated with the Swiss Finance Institute. Stulz is Everett D. Reese Chair of Banking and Monetary Economics, Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, and is affiliated with NBER, ECGI and Wharton Financial Institutions Center. We thank Wolfgang Bühler, Jan Krahnen, Christian Leuz, Sascha Steffen, Elu von Thadden, and seminar participants at Bentley University, Bristol University, European School of Management and Technology, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, HEC Paris, Universität Mannheim, Universität St. Gallen, University of Oxford, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for helpful comments and suggestions. Brian Baugh and Andrei Goncalves provided valuable research assistance. René Stulz serves on the board of a bank that is affected by capital requirements and consults and provides expert testimony for financial institutions.
'Person Runs' detection for the TRECVID Surveillance Event Detection task

: We discuss an event detection approach based on local feature modeling, which is based on spatio-temporal cuboids and perspective normalization ( QMUL-ACTIVA 3 / p-baseline 1 ). Motion information is compared against examples of events learned from a training dataset to deﬁne a similarity measure. This similarity measure is then analyzed in both space and time to identify frames containing instances of the event of interest (a person running in an airport building). Features are analyzed locally to enable the differentiation of simultaneously occurring events in different portions of an image frame. The performance is quantiﬁed on the TRECVID 2010 surveillance event detection dataset.
Procedural Justice in Resolving Family Conflict: Implications for Youth Violence Prevention

The fairness of our legal system is often judged by individuals and the public at large along dimensions of procedural and distributive justice. People seem to care about how legal decisions are made as well as about the specific outcomes reached by juries and judges. In fact, perceptions of procedural and distributive justice or injustice may influence public perceptions and confidence in the legitimacy of our legal system. This paper focuses mainly on procedural justice. Using an ecological framework, we tested the hypothesis that older adolescents use the same or similar criteria for evaluating fairness in the context of family decision making that people in general use to evaluate the fairness of legal processes and decisions. We also tested the hypothesis that family decision-making procedures that are perceived to be unfair contribute to increased risk for acting out and deviant behavior among older adolescents. Principal components analysis confirmed that older adolescents use several distinct criteria for evaluating procedural fairness in the family context and that these criteria are comparable to those that people use to evaluate the fairness of legal procedures (rational and objective treatment conveying personal respect, consistent and non-discriminatory treatment reflecting social status or standing, and instrumental participation or having "an opportunity to be heard"). Hierarchical multiple regression analysis confirmed that procedural justice factors are associated with adolescent deviant behavior. We discuss implications for adolescent deviance and youth violence prevention.
On the Computational Complexity of Stochastic Controller Optimization in POMDPs

We show that the problem of finding an optimal stochastic blind controller in a Markov decision process is an NP-hard problem. The corresponding decision problem is NP-hard in PSPACE and sqrt-sum-hard, hence placing it in NP would imply breakthroughs in long-standing open problems in computer science. Our result establishes that the more general problem of stochastic controller optimization in POMDPs is also NP-hard. Nonetheless, we outline a special case that is convex and admits efficient global solutions.
Bootstrapping Distantly Supervised IE Using Joint Learning and Small Well-Structured Corpora

We propose a framework to improve the performance of distantly-supervised relation extraction, by jointly learning to solve two related tasks: concept-instance extraction and relation extraction. We further extend this framework to make a novel use of document structure: in some small, well-structured corpora, sections can be identified that correspond to relation arguments, and distantly-labeled examples from such sections tend to have good precision. Using these as seeds we extract additional relation examples by applying label propagation on a graph composed of noisy examples extracted from a large unstructured testing corpus. Combined with the soft constraint that concept examples should have the same type as the second argument of the relation, we get significant improvements over several state-of-the-art approaches to distantly-supervised relation extraction, and reasonable extraction performance even with very small set of distant labels.
Fabrication and Characterisation of the Graphene Ring Micro Electrode (GRiME) with an Integrated, Concentric Ag/AgCl Reference Electrode

We report the fabrication and characterisation of the first graphene ring micro electrodes with the addition of a miniature concentric Ag/AgCl reference electrode. The graphene ring electrode is formed by dip coating fibre optics with graphene produced by a modified Hummers method. The reference electrode is formed using an established photocatalytically initiated electroless deposition (PIED) plating method. The performance of the so-formed graphene ring micro electrodes (GRiMEs) and associated reference electrode is studied using the probe redox system ferricyanide and electrode thicknesses assessed using established electrochemical methods. Using 220 μm diameter fibre optics, a ∼15 nm thick graphene ring electrode is obtained corresponding to an inner to outer radius ratio of >0.999, so allowing for use of extant analytical descriptions of very thin ring microelectrodes in data analysis. GRiMEs are highly reliable (current response invariant over >3,000 scans), with the concentric reference electrode showing comparable stability (current response invariant over >300 scans). Furthermore the micro-ring design allows for efficient use of electrochemically active graphene edge sites and the associated nA scale currents obtained neatly obviate issues relating to the high resistivity of undoped graphene. Thus, the use of graphene in ring microelectrodes improves the reliability of existing micro-electrode designs and expands the range of use of graphene-based electrochemical devices.
BUILDING SPARSE 3 D REPRESENTATIONS FROM A SET OF CALIBRATED PANORAMIC IMAGES

Virtual navigation in remote environments can be achieved by building an image-based model made of multiple panoramas gathered from cameras moving around the scene. In such models, it could be useful to acquire knowledge of the 3D structure of the scene. In this paper, we propose a method that constructs a sparse but rich 3D representation of a scene, given a set of calibrated panoramic images. The proposed method is a heuristic search algorithm that, given calibrated panoramic images, finds 3D points that correspond to the surfaces of objects in the scene. The algorithm constructs a set of 3D points by searching for matching edge pixels in pairs of images using the epipolar constraint. Empirical results show that the proposed method performs well at locating 3D points of interest in different scenes.
The evolution of the study of life trajectories in social sciences over the past five years: A state of the art review

Abstract More recently, since roughly the end of the 1990s, two main types of statistical analysis created for longitudinal data in social sciences were disseminated throughout and widely used by the research community, namely: Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) and semiparametric group-based analysis (group-based modeling). These methodological advances are not unrelated to the great increase in the number of longitudinal studies of individual trajectories. However, technical tools alone are not enough to shed light on the inherent complexity of life course analysis. Considering the development of sophisticated techniques and the proliferation of knowledge relating to individuals’ trajectories, it is surprising that the concept of trajectory has, in itself, never been systematically examined. This article will review the body of knowledge that pertains to individuals’ trajectories in the area of mental health. This involved systematic documentary research of scientific works published in the last five years on the topic of individuals’ trajectories. Our research outlines the state of knowledge on the topic and presents a critical reflection on the multiple constructions and uses of the concept of life trajectories in scientific research.
Immersion, presence and performance in virtual environments: an experiment with tri-dimensional chess

This paper describes an experiment to assess the influence of immersion on performance in immersive virtual environments. The task involved Tri-Dimensional Chess, and required subjects to reproduce on a real chess board the state of board learned from a sequence of moves witnessed in a virtual environment. Twenty four subjects were allocated to a factorial design consisting of two levels of immersion (exocentric screen based, and egocentric HMD based), and two kinds of environment (plain and realistic). The results suggest that egocentric subjects performed better than exocentric, and those in the more realistic environment performed better than those in the less realistic environment. Previous knowledge of chess, and amount of virtual practice were also significant, and may be considered as control variables to equalise these factors amongst the subjects. Other things being equal, males remembered the moves better than females, although female performance improved with higher spatial ability test score. The paper also attempts to clarify the relationship between immersion, presence and performance, and locates the experiment within such a theoretical framework.
LANGUAGE SYNTHESIS USING IMAGE PLACEMENT

Outlined images can be used for communication between users . Using the combination of semantic knowledge, scenes having user initiated motion, d iscretised gauges, and placement of these images present an opportunity to machine translate a storyboard into a paragraph. This paragraph can be synthesised into speech. The story res ults in a target language free representation, without prior knowledge of language, othe r n the cultural understanding of the scene. In compare to other methods based on pictogram’s o ur approach does not require a priory knowledge of the target language and is language inde pendent.
VUIMS: a visual user interface management system

VUIMS is an object-oriented user interface management system that was designed to support reconfigurable components. VUIMS consists of a collection of objects and a semantically rich token language. The objects implement primitive presentation and interaction functions. The token language controls interaction and visual style. High level objects can be created from primitive objects using token templates. The user interface and application are controlled by token streams that are emitted in response to user actions. VUIMS supports a variety of presentation and interaction styles through simple, robust manipulation of a hierarchy of visual panels with a rich set of relationships and constraints. VUIMS has been used to implement two commercial highperformance computer graphics applications and an on-line help system. It has evolved over a three-year period and has proven to be an effective tool in commercial use.
The Big Five and eating disorders: a prospective study in the general population

The present study assessed the Big‐Five personality dimensions according to the lexical hypothesis among participants with a lifetime history of eating disorders (ED) (n = 84), as well as participants with a first‐time incidence of ED (n = 33) compared to participants with no history of ED (non‐ED, n = 1014). Personality and ED were investigated with self‐report questionnaires among women (n = 1157) randomly selected from the general population. Participants with a lifetime ED reported significantly lower levels of Agreeableness. Conscientious, Emotional Stability, and a significantly higher level of Openness compared to the non‐ED. When Emotional Stability was controlled for, participants with ED scored higher on Openness compared to controls. Participants were followed up after two years. Thirty‐three participants with complete data on all the scales developed an eating disorder for the first time at follow‐up. This first‐time incidence group had a very similar pattern of personality prior to developing any symptoms of ED (i.e. low on Agreeableness and Emotional Stability, and high on Openness) to those with a lifetime history of ED, and significantly different from those who never reported any symptoms of ED (controls, n = 636). This pattern resembles the Type 3 personality according to Caspi and colleagues. It is suggested that the presence of some specific personality traits may be regarded as a risk factor for developing ED. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.