Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Complexity and Competition, Part I: Sequential Matching

This paper uses the complexity of non-competitive behaviour to provide a new justification for competitive equilibrium in the context of extensive-form market games with a finite number of agents. This paper demonstrates that if rational agents have (at least at the margin) an aversion for complex behaviours then their maximizing behaviour will result in simple behavioural rules and thereby in a perfectly competitive outcome. In particular, we consider sequential market games with heterogeneous sets of buyers and sellers and show that if the complexity costs of implementing strategies enter players’ preferences, together with the standard payoff in the game, then every equilibrium strategy profile induces a competitive outcome. This is done for sequential deterministic matching/bargaining models in which at any date either the identities of the matched players are determined exogenously or one player is exogenously selected to choose his partner and make a price proposal.
TSP-Chord : An Improved Chord Model with Physical Topology Awareness

A physical topology awared Chord model (TSP-Chord) which based on ant colony algorithm is proposed in this paper. The idea of TSP-Chord is regarding the storage nodes in the whole Chord as a TSP problem and solving the TSP problem quickly by using the ant colony optimization algorithm, then building the Chord with the obtained TSP solution. The model is simple and easy to implement, which has small changes within the original Chord model. Simulation results show that TSP-Chord has obvious advantages in routing delay in comparison with other Chord models.
Predicting vulnerable software components with dependency graphs

Security metrics and vulnerability prediction for software have gained a lot of interests from the community. Many software security metrics have been proposed e.g., complexity metrics, cohesion and coupling metrics. In this paper, we propose a novel code metric based on dependency graphs to predict vulnerable components. To validate the efficiency of the proposed metric, we conduct a prediction model which targets the JavaScript Engine of Firefox. In this experiment, our prediction model has obtained a very good result in term of accuracy and recall rates. This empirical result is a good evidence showing dependency graphs are also a good option for early indicating vulnerability.
Hepatitis C Virus Core Protein Selectively Inhibits Synthesis and Accumulation of p21/Waf1 and Certain Nuclear Proteins

By using a vaccinia virus‐T7 expression system, possible effects of hepatitis C virus (HCV) core protein on synthesis and accumulation of host cellular proteins transiently expressed in cultured cells were analyzed. Immunoblot and immunofluorescence analyses revealed that synthesis and accumulation of certain nuclear proteins, such as p21/Waf1, p53, proliferating cell nuclear antigen and c‐Fos, were strongly inhibited by HCV core protein. On the other hand, synthesis and accumulation of cytoplasmic proteins, such as 2′‐5′‐oligoadenylate synthetase (2′‐5′‐OAS), RNase L and MEK1, were barely affected by HCV core protein. Northern blot analysis showed that the degrees of mRNA expression for those proteins did not differ between HCV core protein‐expressing cells and the control, suggesting that the inhibition occurred at the post‐transcription level. Pulse‐labeling analysis suggested that HCV core protein strongly inhibited synthesis of p21/Waf1 at the translation level. Once being accumulated in the nucleus, p21/Waf1 stability was not significantly affected by HCV core protein. Mutants of HCV core protein C‐terminally deleted by 18 or 41 amino acids (aa), which were localized almost exclusively in the nucleus, lost their ability to inhibit synthesis/accumulation of p21/Waf1 whereas another mutant C‐terminally deleted by 8 aa still maintained the same properties (subcellular localization and the inhibitory effect) as the full‐length HCV core protein of 191 aa. Taken together, our present results suggest that expression of HCV core protein in the cytoplasm selectively inhibits synthesis of p21/Waf1 and some other nuclear proteins at the translation level.
Evaluating Three Hydrological Distributed Watershed Models: MIKE-SHE, APEX, SWAT

Selecting the right model to simulate a specific watershed has always been a challenge, and field testing of watersheds could help researchers to use the proper model for their purposes. The performance of three popular Geographic Information System (GIS)-based watershed simulation models (European Hydrological System Model (MIKE SHE), Agricultural Policy/Environmental Extender (APEX) and Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT)) were evaluated for their ability to simulate the hydrology of the 52.6 km2 Canagagigue Watershed located in the Grand River Basin in southern Ontario, Canada. All three models were calibrated for a four-year period and then validated using an independent four-year period by comparing simulated and observed daily, monthly and annual streamflow. The simulated flows generated by the three models are quite similar and closely match the observed flow, particularly for the calibration results. The mean daily/monthly flow at the outlet of the Canagagigue Watershed simulated by MIKE SHE was more accurate than that simulated by either the SWAT or the APEX model, during both the calibration and validation periods. Moreover, for the validation period, MIKE SHE predicted the overall variation of streamflow slightly better than either SWAT or APEX.
Document image retrieval system using character candidates generated by character recognition process

The authors have implemented a document image retrieval system; it automatically stores document images in the form of character candidates obtained by character recognition process. When we give some keywords to the system, it can retrieve the images containing at least one of the keywords. The strategy of using character candidates remarkably lowers the rate of missing the keywords on retrieval, because it includes several hypotheses in character segmentation and in character recognition. For finding the keywords from the storage of the character candidates, the authors have developed a fast and efficient searching algorithm. It is able to locate all occurrences of any finite number of keywords in the character candidates. The improvement of using character candidates and the efficiency of the searching algorithm are also described. <<ETX>>
Bassline Pitch Prediction for Real-Time Performance Systems

This paper presents a methodology for predicting the pitch of bass notes by utilising their metrical position within the bar. Our system assumes two separate audio channels for drums and bass. We make use of onset detection and beat tracking algorithms to determine the onset times for each bass note and the beat locations. A monophonic bass track is analysed for repetitive structures relative to the beat grid, enabling the system to make a prediction of the pitch of each bass note prior to any pitch-related analysis. We present an analysis on a small collection of studio recordings.
Cu(II)‐induced molecular and physiological responses in the brown‐rot basidiomycete Polyporales sp. KUC9061

A potentially safe disposal method for copper‐containing waste wood is bioremediation using brown‐rot fungi. However, the mechanisms regulating brown‐rot fungi copper tolerance are poorly understood. The objective of this study was to better understand the molecular and physiological changes in Polyporales sp. KUC9061 in response to Cu(II) using GeneFishing technology.
Measuring the socio-economic status of women across the life course

An extensive research literature highlights the significance of socio-economic status in explaining disparities in outcomes among women across the life course, including in areas such as education, employment and health (see McLachlan, Gilfillan, and Gordon, 2014). Developing and implementing appropriate policy responses requires an understanding of why such disparities occur, and which women they affect. This, in turn, requires appreciation of the challenges in the measurement of socio-economic status. In 2013, the Australian Institute of Family Studies was contracted by Women NSW in the NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) to explore issues related to the measurement of socio-economic status (SES) of women in NSW over the life course. This article presents some highlights from this research. The full research paper contains more extensive analyses and discussion of related policy issues and approaches (see Baxter and Taylor, 2013).
Regularized non-negative matrix factorization with temporal dependencies for speech denoising

We present a technique for denoising speech using temporally regularized nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). In previous work [1], we used a regularized NMF update to impose structure within each audio frame. In this paper, we add frame-to-frame regularization across time and show that this additional regularization can also improve our speech denoising results. We evaluate our algorithm on a range of nonstationary noise types and outperform a state-of-the-art Wiener filter implementation. Interspeech 2008
Discursivity, difference, and disruption

We offer a genealogical perspective on the reflexive critique that consumer culture theory (CCT) has institutionalized a hyperindividualizing, overly agentic, and sociologically impoverished mode of analysis that impedes systematic investigations into the historical, ideological, and sociological shaping of marketing, markets, and consumption systems. Our analysis shows that the CCT pioneers embraced the humanistic/experientialist discourse to carve out a disciplinary niche in a largely antagonistic marketing field. However, this original epistemological orientation has long given way to a multilayered CCT heteroglossia that features a broad range of theorizations integrating structural and agentic levels of analysis. We close with a discussion of how reflexive debates over CCT's supposed biases toward the agentic reproduce symbolic distinctions between North American and European scholarship styles and thus primarily reflect the institutional interests of those positioned in the Northern hemisphere. By destabilizing the north–south and center–periphery relations of power that have long-framed metropole social science constructions of the marginalized cultural “other” as an object of study—rather than as a producer of legitimate knowledge and theory—the CCT heteroglossia can be further diversified and enriched through a blending of historical, material, critical, and experiential perspectives.
Identification of Conserved Residues in Hepatitis C Virus Envelope Glycoprotein E2 That Modulate Virus Dependence on CD81 and SRB1 Entry Factors

ABSTRACT In spite of the high variability of its sequence, hepatitis C virus (HCV) envelope glycoprotein E2 contains several conserved regions. In this study, we explored the structural and functional features of the highly conserved E2 segment from amino acid (aa) 502 to 520, which had been proposed as a fusion peptide and shown to strongly overlap a potential conserved neutralizing epitope. For this purpose, we used reverse genetics to introduce point mutations within this region, and we characterized the phenotypes of these mutants in the light of the recently published structure of E2. The functional analyses showed that their phenotypes are in agreement with the positions of the corresponding residues in the E2 crystal structure. In contrast, our data ruled out the involvement of this region in membrane fusion, and they indicate that alternative conformations would be necessary to expose the potential neutralizing epitope present in this segment. Of particular interest, we identified three specific mutations (Y507L, V514A, and V515A) located within this neutralizing epitope which only mildly reduced infectivity and showed no assembly defect. These mutations modulated HCV dependence on the viral receptor SRB1, and/or they also modulated virion sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies. Importantly, their characterization also showed that amino acids Y507, V514, and V515 contribute to E2 interaction with HCV receptor CD81. In conclusion, our data show that the highly conserved E2 segment from aa 502 to 520 plays a key role in cell entry by influencing the association of the viral particle with coreceptors and neutralizing antibodies. IMPORTANCE Hepatitis C virus (HCV) envelope proteins E1 and E2 exhibit sequence variability. However, some segments of the envelope proteins are highly conserved, suggesting that these sequences play a key role at some steps of the HCV life cycle. In this work, we characterized the function and structure of a highly conserved E2 region that is targeted by neutralizing antibodies and had been proposed as a fusion peptide. Our data ruled out the involvement of this region in membrane fusion but allowed for the identification of new residues modulating the interaction of the virus with entry factors and its sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies. Moreover, structural data suggest that alternative conformations could exist for E2, which would explain the presence of a partially masked neutralizing epitope in this segment in the currently available E2 structure. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of conserved regions in the sequences of HCV envelope proteins.
Absence of preferential looking to the eyes of approaching adults predicts level of social disability in 2-year-old toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

CONTEXT Within the first week of life, typical human newborns give preferential attention to the eyes of others. Similar findings in other species suggest that attention to the eyes is a highly conserved phylogenetic mechanism of social development. For children with autism, however, diminished and aberrant eye contact is a lifelong hallmark of disability. OBJECTIVE To quantify preferential attention to the eyes of others at what is presently the earliest point of diagnosis in autism. DESIGN We presented the children with 10 videos. Each video showed an actress looking directly into the camera, playing the role of caregiver, and engaging the viewer (playing pat-a-cake, peek-a-boo, etc). Children's visual fixation patterns were measured by eye tracking. PARTICIPANTS Fifteen 2-year-old children with autism were compared with 36 typically developing children and with 15 developmentally delayed but nonautistic children. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Preferential attention was measured as percentage of visual fixation time to 4 regions of interest: eyes, mouth, body, and object. Level of social disability was assessed by the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. RESULTS Looking at the eyes of others was significantly decreased in 2-year-old children with autism (P < .001), while looking at mouths was increased (P < .01) in comparison with both control groups. The 2 control groups were not distinguishable on the basis of fixation patterns. In addition, fixation on eyes by the children with autism correlated with their level of social disability; less fixation on eyes predicted greater social disability (r = -0.669, P < .01). CONCLUSIONS Looking at the eyes of others is important in early social development and in social adaptation throughout one's life span. Our results indicate that in 2-year-old children with autism, this behavior is already derailed, suggesting critical consequences for development but also offering a potential biomarker for quantifying syndrome manifestation at this early age.
An Open CNC System Based on Component Technology

In a conventional CNC system, communications between the motion controller and the analogue servo driver usually take place in a unidirectional manner, i.e., from the controller to the driver. In order to increase the interoperability level between the motion controller and the driver, Fieldbus is used in this research. The digital servo in a Fieldbus-based system enables applications with all servo loops closed. Functions that have been traditionally executed by the motion controller can now be shifted to the driver. In this research, the traditional CNC system has been redesigned based on the component technology. Following the analysis of the architecture of a traditional CNC and the features of a Fieldbus, component models have been developed for the motion controller and the driver. This Fieldbus-based CNC system gives the much-needed interoperability between the motion controller and the driver. A comparative experiment based on a four-axis CNC system has been carried out to showcase the component model-based system.
Computation of term/document discrimination values by use of the cover coefficient concept

Indexing in information retrieval (IR) is used to obtain a suitable vocabulary of index terms and optimum assignment of these terms to documents for increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of an IR system. The concept of term discrimination value (TDV) is one of the criteria used for index-term selection. In this article a new concept called the cover coefficient (CC) will be used in computing TDVs. After a brief introduction to the theory of indexing and the CC concept, an efficient way of computing TDVs by use of the CC concept, index-term selection, and weight modification are discussed. It is also shown that the computational cost of the CC approach in the calculation of TDVs is favorably comparable to the cost of a different approach that uses similarity coefficients. Furthermore, the TDVs obtained by the CC approach are consistent with those of the latter approach.
Boosting Bug-Report-Oriented Fault Localization with Segmentation and Stack-Trace Analysis

To deal with post-release bugs, many software projects set up public bug repositories for users all over the world to report bugs that they have encountered. Recently, researchers have proposed various information retrieval based approaches to localizing faults based on bug reports. In these approaches, source files are processed as single units, where noise in large files may affect the accuracy of fault localization. Furthermore, bug reports often contain stack-trace information, but existing approaches often treat this information as plain text. In this paper, we propose to use segmentation and stack-trace analysis to improve the performance of bug localization. Specifically, given a bug report, we divide each source code file into a series of segments and use the segment most similar to the bug report to represent the file. We also analyze the bug report to identify possible faulty files in a stack trace and favor these files in our retrieval. According to our empirical results, our approach is able to significantly improve Bug Locator, a representative fault localization approach, on all the three software projects (i.e., Eclipse, AspectJ, and SWT) used in our empirical evaluation. Furthermore, segmentation and stack-trace analysis are complementary to each other for boosting the performance of bug-report-oriented fault localization.
Top-Down Segmentation of Non-rigid Visual Objects Using Derivative-Based Search on Sparse Manifolds

The solution for the top-down segmentation of non rigid visual objects using machine learning techniques is generally regarded as too complex to be solved in its full generality given the large dimensionality of the search space of the explicit representation of the segmentation contour. In order to reduce this complexity, the problem is usually divided into two stages: rigid detection and non-rigid segmentation. The rationale is based on the fact that the rigid detection can be run in a lower dimensionality space (i.e., less complex and faster) than the original contour space, and its result is then used to constrain the non-rigid segmentation. In this paper, we propose the use of sparse manifolds to reduce the dimensionality of the rigid detection search space of current state-of-the-art top-down segmentation methodologies. The main goals targeted by this smaller dimensionality search space are the decrease of the search running time complexity and the reduction of the training complexity of the rigid detector. These goals are attainable given that both the search and training complexities are function of the dimensionality of the rigid search space. We test our approach in the segmentation of the left ventricle from ultrasound images and lips from frontal face images. Compared to the performance of state-of-the-art non-rigid segmentation system, our experiments show that the use of sparse manifolds for the rigid detection leads to the two goals mentioned above.
Personal exercise prescription: Cardiac rehabilitation and preventive medicine

This paper describes a practical programme for the physical and psychological rehabilitation of patients with cardiac disorders. This programme makes possible the prescription of exercise to an accuracy of one metre per minute or two pulse beats per minute. It is inexpensive, portable, requires minimum supervision and has been in use for seven years. The basic principle is to walk or jog in a circle, completing one revolution per minute with the radius of the circle being almost imperceptibly increased as fitness improves. A timing device is incorporated to ensure an absolutely uniform pace for each participant.
Behavior of a fully controlled rectifier from a power group

The paper deals with the behavior of a rectifier with thyristors as part of a power group. Data acquisition systems and original software are used. Information on the standards used for the equipment construction and numerical processing are provided. Two distinct power-related theories are discussed when applied to distorting and/or unsymmetrical regimes. The harmonic decompositions based on Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) are used and implemented into an original software for the a.c. three-phase side. The discussed power-related theories are applied for the rectifier's input. For the d.c. side one presents the records corresponding to voltage and current. The d.c. and harmonic active powers are determined. One deals with the flow of active power along the fundamental and higher harmonics toward and from the main generator excitation through the fully controlled rectifier with thyristors.
Modelo de evaluación de riesgos psicosociales determinado por factores internos, individuales, doble presencia y externos para entornos laborales

Los factores psicosociales son parte de la gestion de seguridad y salud laboral. La definicion de riesgo psicosocial enumera tres causas: factores internos, caracteristicas del individuo y factores externos. Sin embargo, los metodos existentes para su evaluacion no consideran los factores externos. En este sentido, el objetivo de la investigacion es desarrollar un modelo de evaluacion de riesgos psicosociales que incluya factores internos de la organizacion, factores individuales del trabajador y doble presencia , establecidos en el modelo ISTAS 21, y los factores externos del contexto laboral. Se utiliza un enfoque cualitativo-cuantitativo. Los factores externos derivan del Modelo de los Determinantes Sociales de la Salud de la Organizacion Mundial de la Salud (OMS). El trabajo de campo se realiza en una empresa comercializadora de alimentos con una muestra de 58 trabajadores. Del analisis factorial exploratorio se obtiene el modelo, conformado por siete (7) factores internos e individuales con un KMO de 0.752 y una varianza total explicada de 70.576%, y seis (6) factores externos con KMO de 0.706 y una varianza total explicada de 75.025 %. Finalmente resulta que los factores externos especificos del contexto laboral tienen incidencia significativa en el resultado de la evaluacion de los riesgos psicosociales. Normal 0 21 false false false ES-VE X-NONE X-NONE