Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mobile Banking Adoption and Diffusion: Enabling and Constraining Social or Financial Inclusion among Poor Women in Pakistan?

Whilst the adoption and diffusion of mobile banking has revolutionised the banking sector in developing countries, paucity remains on exploring the role of mobile banking for government-to-person (G2P) transfers. Through an interpretive case study of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) in Pakistan, the paper investigated how the adoption of mobile phones enabled and constrained poor women for receiving G2P payments and its impact on poor households. We analysed the qualitative data collected, through semi-structured interviews, from semi-urban women users, programme designers and mobile banking providers through the structuration lens. We argued that albeit mbanking was ‘socially constructed’ and ‘socially embedded’ within the organisational context that enabled BISP designers, it imposed technological and human constraints upon women users. Our findings further revealed that the diffusion of m-banking empowered women for social inclusion, but financial inclusion was limited in providing access to a range of financial services. We contributed to the theoretical literature by contending that Orlikowski’s Duality of Technology failed to address the issue of ‘human poverty’ through the Capabilities Approach. So unless there was a paradigm shift through which m-banking provided ‘capabilities’ in enabling micro-entrepreneurial development, mbanking would remain palliative for poverty ‘alleviation’ rather than poverty ‘elimination’ in Pakistan.
Improving Forage Quality and Animal Performance with Fibrolytic Enzymes

Enzymes have been used for decades to improve the utilization of swine and poultry diets. For instance phytase, amylase, f3-glucanase and xylanase are added to the cereal-based diets of such monogastrics to increase the utilization of dietary phosphorous, starch, 8-glucans and arabinoxylans respectively. For many years, researchers were discouraged from using enzymes to enhance the utilization of ruminant diets because of perceptions that the hydrolytic capacity of the rumen could not be enhanced by supplemental enzymes, and concerns that such enzymes would be ineffective due to ruminal proteolysis. These concerns have been disproved by several recent studies that have demonstrated that fibrolytic enzyme supplementation enhances the productivity of livestock, and several fibrolytic enzyme products are currently commercially available. However in vitro and animal-based studies on the effects of fibrolytic enzyme application to feeds have not been unanimously supportive of their benefits. The interplay of several enzyme, host, feed and management related factors determine the effectiveness of enzymes in hydrolyzing feed components. Several excellent reviews have been published on this subject (Kung 2001 a, b; McAllister et al., 2001; Beauchemin et al., 2003; Beauchemin et al., 2004). However, these have either only focused on direct fed enzyme application with the exclusion of enzyme application at ensiling, and have not considered the potential of using enzymes to improve the quality of tropical forages. The intention in this paper is to review the literature on the effects of enzyme application to feeds at ensiling or feeding, and the determinants of such effects, and to present the results of certain preliminary studies aimed at improving the utilization of tropical forages with fibrolytic enzymes.
Utility, Limitations, and Future of Non-Human Primates for Dengue Research and Vaccine Development

Dengue is considered the most important emerging, human arboviruses, with worldwide distribution in the tropics. Unfortunately, there are no licensed dengue vaccines available or specific anti-viral drugs. The development of a dengue vaccine faces unique challenges. The four serotypes co-circulate in endemic areas, and pre-existing immunity to one serotype does not protect against infection with other serotypes, and actually may enhance severity of disease. One foremost constraint to test the efficacy of a dengue vaccine is the lack of an animal model that adequately recapitulates the clinical manifestations of a dengue infection in humans. In spite of this limitation, non-human primates (NHP) are considered the best available animal model to evaluate dengue vaccine candidates due to their genetic relatedness to humans and their ability to develop a viremia upon infection and a robust immune response similar to that in humans. Therefore, most dengue vaccines candidates are tested in primates before going into clinical trials. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of published studies on dengue vaccine evaluations using the NHP model, and discuss critical parameters affecting the usefulness of the model. In the light of recent clinical data, we assess the ability of the NHP model to predict immunological parameters of vaccine performances in humans and discuss parameters that should be further examined as potential correlates of protection. Finally, we propose some guidelines toward a more standardized use of the model to maximize its usefulness and to better compare the performance of vaccine candidates from different research groups.
Storage and Retrieval of Individual Genomes and other Repetitive Sequence Collections

In the near future, biomolecular engineering techniques will reach a state where the sequencing of individual genomes becomes feasible. This progress will create huge expectations for the data analysis domain to reveal new knowledge on the ”secrets of life”. Quite rudimentary reasons may inhibit such breakthroughs; it may not be feasible to store all the data in a form that would enable anything but most basic data analysis routines to be executed. This paper is devoted into studying ways to store massive sets of complete individual genomes in space-efficient manner so that retrieval of the content as well as queries on the content of the sequences can be provided time-efficiently. We show that although the state-of-the-art full-text self-indexes do not yet provide satisfactory space bounds for this specific task, after carefully engineering those structures it is possible to achieve very attractive results; the new structures are fully able to exploit the fact that the individual genomes are highly similar. We confirm the theoretical findings by experiments on large DNA sequences, and also on version control data, that forms another application domain for our methods.
Distortion-minimizing network-aware scheduling for UMTS video streaming

In this paper we propose a mechanism for scheduling video streaming data of a single user over a UMTS dedicated channel. The proposed method makes use of link error prediction and schedules the more important data in the time intervals with lowest predicted error probability. The importance of the information is measured by means of the distortion that would be caused by its loss. The distortion is estimated by a novel proposed model based on the size of the lost information in bits and in picture blocks. The presented scheduling improves the PSNR at the decoder by up to 2dB while preserving rate.
Efficient and Secure Source Authentication for Multicast

One of the main challenges of securing multicast communicationis source authentication,or enabling receivers of multicast data to verify that the received data originated with the claimed source and was not modified enroute. The problem becomes more complex in common settings where other receivers of the data are not trusted, and where lost packets are not retransmitted. Several source authentication schemes for multicast have been suggested in the past, but none of these schemes is satisfactorily efficient in all prominent parameters. We recently proposed a very efficient scheme, TESLA, that is based on initial loose time synchronization between the sender and the receivers, followed by delayed release of keys by the sender. This paper proposes several substantial modifications and improvements to TESLA. One modification allows receivers to authenticate most packets as soon as they arrive (whereas TESLArequires buffering packets at the receiver side, and provides delayed authentication only). Other modifications improve the scalability of the scheme, reduce the space overhead for multiple instances, increase its resistance to denial-of-service attacks, and more.
Complete chloroplast genome of a valuable medicinal plant, Huperzia serrata (Lycopodiaceae), and comparison with its congener

Premise of the study: Here we report the complete chloroplast genome of the important medicinal species Huperzia serrata (Lycopodiaceae) and compare it to the chloroplast genome of the congeneric species H. lucidula. Methods and Results: The whole chloroplast genome of H. serrata was sequenced using an Illumina platform and assembled with Geneious version R9.0. 5. The genome size of H. serrata was 154,176 bp, with 36.3% GC content. The complete chloroplast genome contained 120 unique genes, including 86 coding genes, four rRNA genes, and 30 tRNA genes. Comparison with the chloroplast genome of H. lucidula revealed three highly variable regions (rps16-chlB, ycf12-trnR, and ycf1) between these two species and 252 mutation events including 27 insertion/deletion polymorphisms and 225 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Ninety-two SNPs were identified in the gene-coding regions. In addition, 18 microsatellite sites were found, which can potentially be used in phylogeographic studies. Conclusions: The complete chloroplast genome of H. serrata is reported here, and will be a valuable genome resource for further phylogenetic, evolutionary, and medical studies of medicinal plants in the genus Huperzia.
Combining shape sensor and haptic sensors for highly flexible single port system using Fiber Bragg sensor technology

Single port surgery is a promising approach to further optimize the benefits of robot assisted minimally invasive surgery. Advantages include further minimization of trauma and reduction of scars, but it also increases the need for flexible, high-end instruments and miniaturized sensors. This paper describes a new concept of a miniaturized sensor system which combines a kinesthetic sensor, a tactile sensor and a position sensor. Latter is realized as a shape sensor. The combination of the sensors is possible because they are all based on Fiber Bragg Grating technology. A concept for each sensor is also presented. They are improved compared to current research and adapted to our needs. The miniaturized sensor system is integrated into an innovative, highly flexible single port system.
Real-Time Occlusion Culling with a Lazy Occlusion Grid

We present a new conservative image-space occlusion culling method to increase the rendering speed of very large general scenes on today's available hardware without time-expensive preprocessing. The method is based on a low-resolution grid upon a conventional z-buffer. The occlusion information in the grid is updated in a lazy manner. In comparison to related methods this significantly reduces the number of pixels that have to be read from the z-buffer. The grid allows fast decisions if an object is occluded or potentially visible. It is used together with a bounding volume hierarchy that is traversed in a front-to-back order and which allows to cull large parts of the scene at once. A special front-to-back traversal is used if no pixel-level query for the furthest z-value of an image area is available. We show that the method works efficiently on today's available hardware and we compare it with related methods.
Translational Research Working Group Developmental Pathway for Immune Response Modifiers

The Translational Research Working Group (TRWG) was created as a national initiative to evaluate the current status of the investment of National Cancer Institute in translational research and envision its future. The Translational Research Working Group conceptualized translational research as a set of six developmental processes or pathways focused on various clinical goals. One of those pathways describes the development of immune response modifiers such as vaccines and cytokines. A hallmark of the Immune Response Modifier Developmental Pathway is the coordinated development of multiple components. The Immune Response Modifier Pathway was conceived not as a comprehensive description of the corresponding real-world processes but rather as a tool designed to facilitate movement of a candidate assay through the translational process to the point where it can be handed off for definitive clinical testing. This paper discusses key challenges associated with the immune response modifier agent development process in light of the pathway.
A Soft Semantic Web

The importance of automated meaning handling in the Internet has been widely acknowledged; this is indeed the rational behind initiatives like the so-called "semantic Web", which proposes the widespread use of "ontologies" to define concepts and make online documentation self-described. Nevertheless, several practical problems have hindered the semantic Web from becoming mainstream. In this paper we propose a way to make explicit the underlying semantic structure of the ordinary (HTML-based) Web, by measuring joint keyword occurrences in Web pages, around our notion of "semantic contexts". The resulting infrastructure semantically characterizes contextual semantic information in the Internet. Semantic contexts can have many practical uses, such as focusing Internet searches in such a way that results are much more relevant to users than with current search engines, as we show in this paper. Further, we propose to make semantic contexts publicly available online, in order to make semantic-aware many Internet applications in a simpler way than -or even better, complementing - the currently marginal semantic Web
fastseg An R Package for fast segmentation

This document is a user manual for the R package fastseg. It is only meant as a gentle introduction into how to use the basic functions implemented in this package. Not all features of the R package are described in full detail. Such details can be obtained from the documentation enclosed in the R package. Further note the following: (1) this is neither an introduction to segmentation algorithms; (2) this is not an introduction to R. If you lack the background for understanding this manual, you first have to read introductory literature on these subjects.
An evaluation of authorship attribution using random forests

Electronic text (e-text) stylometry aims at identifying the writing style of authors of electronic texts, such as electronic documents, blog posts, tweets, etc. Identifying such styles is quite attractive for identifying authors of disputed e-text, identifying their profile attributes (e.g. gender, age group, etc), or even enhancing services such as search engines and recommender systems. Despite the success of Random Forests, its performance has not been evaluated on Author Attribtion problems. In this paper, we present an evaluation of Random Forests in the problem domain of Authorship Attribution. Additionally, we have taken advantage of Random Forests' robustness against noisy features by extracting a diverse set of features from evaluated e-texts. Interestingly, the resultant model achieved the highest classification accuracy in all problems, except one where it misclassified only a single instance.
Extracting collocations from text corpora

A collocation is a habitual word combination. Col-locational knowledge is essential for many tasks in natural language processing. We present a method for extracting collocations from text corpora. By comparison with the SUSANNE corpus, we show that both high precision and broad coverage can be achieved with our method. Finally, we describe an application of the automatically extracted collocations for computing word similarities
Atoh1 Directs the Formation of Sensory Mosaics and Induces Cell Proliferation in the Postnatal Mammalian Cochlea In Vivo

Hearing impairment due to the loss of sensory hair cells is permanent in humans. Considerable interest targets the hair cell differentiation factor Atoh1 as a potential tool with which to promote hair cell regeneration. We generated a novel mouse model to direct the expression of Atoh1 in a spatially and temporally specific manner in the postnatal mammalian cochlea to determine the competency of various types of cochlear epithelial cells for hair cell differentiation. Atoh1 can generate cells in young animals with morphological, molecular, and physiological properties reminiscent of hair cells. This competency is cell type specific and progressively restricted with age. Significantly, Atoh1 induces ectopic sensory patches through Notch signaling to form a cellular mosaic similar to the endogenous sensory epithelia and expansion of the sensory mosaic through the conversion of supporting cells and nonautonomous supporting cell production. Furthermore, Atoh1 also activates proliferation within the normally postmitotic cochlear epithelium. These results provide insight into the potential and limitations of Atoh1-mediated hair cell regeneration.
Manufacturing systems integration and agility: Can mobile agents help?

Mobile code is being championed as a solution to a plethora of software problems. This paper investigates whether Mobile Agents and Mobile Objects support improved system integration and agility in the manufacturing domain. We describe two systems built to support the Sales Order Process of a distributed manufacturing enterprise, using IBM's Aglets Software Development Kit. The Sales Order Process model and the requirements for agility used as the basis for these implementations are derived from data collected in an industrial case study. Both systems are evaluated using the Goal/Question/Metric methodology. Two new metrics for Semantic Alignment and Change Capability are presented and used to evaluate each system with respect to the degree of system agility supported. The work described provides evidence that both Mobile Agent and Mobile Object systems have inherent properties that can be used to build agile distributed systems. Further, Mobile Agents with their additional autonomy provide marginally greater support.
Extraction of thermal workload signatures in multicore processors using least angle regression

Performance counters (PCs) embedded in microprocessor are frequently used to characterize workload and predict thermal behavior for multicore processors. These PCs are required to be highly accurate, very compact, and tunable to workload changes in real time. Traditionally these PCs are selected using correlation map or some sort of statistical trial-error techniques. These techniques have the disadvantage of requiring the large PC set regardless of the workload type which is computationally burden when scaling number of cores in processor. In this paper, we use the more recent algorithm of least-angle regression to choose specific set of PCs for definite workload characteristic and validate its accuracy by thermal modeling. It include only those PCs most correlated with thermal behavior of workload. Such PCs are considered as signatures to predict workload characteristic and to apply specific thermal management action. The PC sets are trained and tested on model using workloads from the PARSEC and SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarks.
Developmental Trajectories and Normative Profiles of Motion and Form Perception

The research focuses on the study of the methods useful to evaluate the developmental trajectories for global motion perception and global form perception. The studies aim to present two different instruments created in order to evaluate the dorsal and ventral streams functionalities and to analyze their psychometric characteristics. The first study presents the Motion and Form perception tests as new tools to investigate motion and form perception accuracy. The use of these tests allows to cope with some of the criticism reported in other studies presented in literature. The tests have been evaluated in a large sample of children of different ages. The second study evaluates the applicability of a specific psychophysical function which allows to analyze the accuracy profiles obtained by Motion and Form coherence test. The response profile of the two tasks are fitted with a half-normal distribution function, that estimates the discrimination performance (i.e. the number of correct responses) on the basis of the coherence level of a stimulus. Moreover, the use of the function allows to statistically define the perceptive thresholds of the two test and to compare them. The third study presented analyzes the developmental trajectories of motion detection and form discrimination abilities in a sample of typically developing children (4 to 13 years) and adults. Moreover, this study allows to define the normative scores for motion coherence and form coherence tests calculated with different normative indexes in the different age groups. The fourth study investigates if motion and form tests can recognize specific deficits in clinical populations. The differences between motion and form perception accuracy are evaluated in children with different genetic syndromes (Noonan syndrome and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome) and in controls. The different populations show specific results in motion and form perception abilities
Significance Testing for INEX 2008-09 Ad Hoc Track

i Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge all the people who helped me during this thesis work. Firstly I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Carolyn J. Crouch for her invaluable guidance, timely advice and support. I would like to thank my committee members Dr. Donald B. Crouch and Dr. Todd W. Loushine for their suggestions and feedback during the important stages of my thesis.
Automatic level crossing gate with database collection

There has been an increase in the road traffic as well as the rail traffic, accidents at level crossing has increased and this has caused the concern for the Indian railways. There are certainly many ways to solve this issues but there are major concerns regarding its feasibility for the current environment. Along this factor the cost factor remains the major concern. In this paper, we are proposing a simple solution for the level crossing in which we fix the Radio Frequency tag (RF tag) on the train. we also fix RF tags on each level crossing to communicate with each other, in order to gather the details about the level crossing, train location, train timings and density of vehicles passing the level crossing. These information are send to the database server through Internet Of Things (IOT).
Temporally variable multi-aspect auditory morphing enabling extrapolation without objective and perceptual breakdown

A generalized framework of auditory morphing based on the speech analysis, modification and resynthesis system STRAIGHT is proposed that enables each morphing rate of representational aspects to be a function of time, including the temporal axis itself. Two types of algorithms were derived: an incremental algorithm for real-time manipulation of morphing rates and a batch processing algorithm for off-line post-production applications. By defining morphing in terms of the derivative of mapping functions in the logarithmic domain, breakdown of morphing resynthesis found in the previous formulation in the case of extrapolations was eliminated. A method to alleviate perceptual defects in extrapolation is also introduced.