Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Very High Spectral Resolution Study of Ground-State OH Masers in W3(OH)

We present VLBA observations of the ground-state hydroxyl masers in W3(OH) at 0.02 km s-1 spectral resolution. Over 250 masers are detected, including 56 Zeeman pairs. Line shapes are predominantly Gaussian or combinations of several Gaussians, with normalized deviations typically of the same magnitude as in masers in other species. Typical FWHM maser line widths are 0.15-0.38 km s-1 and are larger in the 1665 MHz transition than in the other three ground-state transitions. The satellite-line 1612 and 1720 MHz masers show no evidence of σ±2,3 components. The spatial positions of most masers are seen to vary across the line profile, with many spots showing clear, organized positional gradients. Equivalent line-of-sight velocity gradients in the plane of the sky typically range from 0.01 to 1 km s-1 AU-1 (i.e., positional gradients of 1-100 AU [km s-1]-1). Small velocity gradients in the 1667 MHz transition support theoretical predictions that 1667 MHz masers appear in regions with small velocity shifts along the amplification length. Deconvolved maser spot sizes appear to be larger in the line wings but do not support a spherical maser geometry.
University teachers’ conceptions of their current and ideal intermediate assessment: an A+ is good, but speaking your mind is better

ABSTRACT Assessment in higher education with a transformational instead of a reproductive purpose can be a powerful way of supporting student learning. Since university teachers usually design their own assessments, it is important to investigate their conceptions of assessment. The current study focuses on teachers’ conceptions of their current and ideal assessment with a focus on intermediate assessment. Thirteen teachers teaching law, psychology and criminology, reflected on their current and ideal assessment in an attempt to eliminate the influence of practical constraints on assessment practice. Results indicate that the majority of teachers have transformational conceptions of their intermediate assessment practice, and in general, their conceptions of the ideal assessment are even more transformational. This suggests that teachers’ main focus for assessment is on student learning and that a lack of transformational assessments in practice may be mainly caused by external constraints.
Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems ( PACIS ) 6-18-2013 Effect of IT Skills on IT Capabilities and IT-Business Alignment

How to create competitive advantage through information technology (IT) in the turbulent environment is an important issue to most organizations. This study contributes to the information systems (IS) literatures by help gaining a greater understanding of whether and how IT skills that an IT department possesses influence the firm’s IT capabilities and IT-business alignment. This study proposes a theoretical model to investigate how soft skills and hard skills of the IT department influence a firm’s IT capabilities, and how these IT capabilities in turn affect its IT-business alignment. The study identifies three IT capabilities related to the IS development context: IT-user collaboration, IT adaptability, and IT innovativeness. The empirical data collected from 120 IT directors showed that both soft IT skills and hard IT skills positively affect the three IT capabilities simultaneously, IT adaptability and IT-user collaboration significantly affect the IT-business alignment, and IT-user collaboration has significant effect on IT adaptability. Yet the result failed to support the role of IT innovativeness in facilitating IT-business alignment, nor the effect of IT-user collaboration on IT innovativeness. Our findings confirm the importance of IT-related resources and capabilities possessed by the IT department. The implications and limitations of this study are provided.
Tick-Pathogen Interactions and Vector Competence: Identification of Molecular Drivers for Tick-Borne Diseases

Ticks and the pathogens they transmit constitute a growing burden for human and animal health worldwide. Vector competence is a component of vectorial capacity and depends on genetic determinants affecting the ability of a vector to transmit a pathogen. These determinants affect traits such as tick-host-pathogen and susceptibility to pathogen infection. Therefore, the elucidation of the mechanisms involved in tick-pathogen interactions that affect vector competence is essential for the identification of molecular drivers for tick-borne diseases. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of tick-pathogen molecular interactions for bacteria, viruses, and protozoa affecting human and animal health. Additionally, the impact of tick microbiome on these interactions was considered. Results show that different pathogens evolved similar strategies such as manipulation of the immune response to infect vectors and facilitate multiplication and transmission. Furthermore, some of these strategies may be used by pathogens to infect both tick and mammalian hosts. Identification of interactions that promote tick survival, spread, and pathogen transmission provides the opportunity to disrupt these interactions and lead to a reduction in tick burden and the prevalence of tick-borne diseases. Targeting some of the similar mechanisms used by the pathogens for infection and transmission by ticks may assist in development of preventative strategies against multiple tick-borne diseases.
Attribution Model Evaluation

Many advertisers rely on attribution to make a variety of tactical and strategic marketing decisions, and there is no shortage of attribution models for advertisers to consider. In the end, most advertisers choose an attribution model based on their preconceived notions about how attribution credit should be allocated. A misguided selection can lead an advertiser to use erroneous information in making marketing decisions. In this paper, we address this issue by identifying a well-defined objective for attribution modeling and proposing a systematic approach for evaluating and comparing attribution model performance using simulation. Following this process also leads to a better understanding of the conditions under which attribution models are able to provide useful and reliable information for advertisers.
Secrecy-based channel assignment for device-to-device communication: An auction approach

Device-to-device (D2D) communication has revealed great potential to satisfy the soaring wireless data demands. As a key point, interference management should be carefully investigated. Different from the view that D2D transmissions cause harmful interference to cellular communication when reusing the same channels, we deem such interference as a kind of spontaneous interference against eavesdropping and use this interference to guarantee the secrecy capacity of cellular communication. Hence D2D pairs could have their own D2D transmission without violating secrecy-based cellular communication. Also, we utilize secrecy outage probability to overcome the difficulty in accurately obtaining channel gains at the eavesdropper. On the other hand, we take the advantage of auction algorithm to derive the channel assignment policy, such that multiple D2D pairs are assigned different channels with low complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm works well and converges quickly.
JOINT ESTIMATION OF VOICE SOURCE AND VOCAL TRACT PARAMETERS AS APPLIED TO THE STUDY OF VOICE SOURCE DYNAMICS

A novel method is presented for the joint estimation of voice source and vocal tract (formant/anti-formant) parameters from the acoustic speech signal. The method is based on the ARX (auto-regressive with exogenous input) model with a glottal flow waveform as an input to the system. A nonlinear optimization strategy is employed to estimate glottal flow parameters, whereas an extended Kalman filter algorithm is used to extract vocal tract parameters. The amount of turbulence noise components included in the voiced speech segment is also measured by a bank of band pass filters. The method is applied to the study of voice source dynamics as a conveyer of paralinguistic and vocal quality features that include perceived naturalness of an utterance. It is shown that this method is useful to gain profound understanding of voice source dynamics when used under certain limitations.
Cre-lox-Based System for Multiple Gene Deletions and Selectable-Marker Removal in Lactobacillus plantarum

ABSTRACT The classic strategy to achieve gene deletion variants is based on double-crossover integration of nonreplicating vectors into the genome. In addition, recombination systems such as Cre-lox have been used extensively, mainly for eukaryotic organisms. This study presents the construction of a Cre-lox-based system for multiple gene deletions in Lactobacillus plantarum that could be adapted for use on gram-positive bacteria. First, an effective mutagenesis vector (pNZ5319) was constructed that allows direct cloning of blunt-end PCR products representing homologous recombination target regions. Using this mutagenesis vector, double-crossover gene replacement mutants could be readily selected based on their antibiotic resistance phenotype. In the resulting mutants, the target gene is replaced by a lox66-P32-cat-lox71 cassette, where lox66 and lox71 are mutant variants of loxP and P32-cat is a chloramphenicol resistance cassette. The lox sites serve as recognition sites for the Cre enzyme, a protein that belongs to the integrase family of site-specific recombinases. Thus, transient Cre recombinase expression in double-crossover mutants leads to recombination of the lox66-P32-cat-lox71 cassette into a double-mutant loxP site, called lox72, which displays strongly reduced recognition by Cre. The effectiveness of the Cre-lox-based strategy for multiple gene deletions was demonstrated by construction of both single and double gene deletions at the melA and bsh1 loci on the chromosome of the gram-positive model organism Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1. Furthermore, the efficiency of the Cre-lox-based system in multiple gene replacements was determined by successive mutagenesis of the genetically closely linked loci melA and lacS2 in L. plantarum WCFS1. The fact that 99.4% of the clones that were analyzed had undergone correct Cre-lox resolution emphasizes the suitability of the system described here for multiple gene replacement and deletion strategies in a single genetic background.
UNCOVERING THE ORIGINS OF SPIRAL STRUCTURE BY MEASURING RADIAL VARIATION IN PATTERN SPEEDS

Current theories of spiral and bar structure predict a variety of pattern speed behaviors, calling for detailed, direct measurement of the radial variation of pattern speeds. Our recently developed Radial Tremaine–Weinberg (TWR) method allows this goal to be achieved for the first time. Here, we present TWR spiral pattern speed estimates for M101, IC 342, NGC 3938, and NGC 3344 in order to investigate whether spiral structure is steady or winding, whether spirals are described by multiple pattern speeds, and the relation between bar and spiral speeds. Where possible, we interpret our pattern speeds estimates according to the resonance radii associated with each (established with the disk angular rotation), and compare these to previous determinations. By analyzing the high-quality H i and CO data cubes available for these galaxies, we show that it is possible to determine directly multiple pattern speeds within these systems, and hence identify the characteristic signatures of the processes that drive the spiral structure. Even this small sample of galaxies reveals a surprisingly complex taxonomy, with the first direct evidence for the presence of resonant coupling of multiple patterns found in some systems, and the measurement of a simple single-pattern speed in others. Overall, this study demonstrates that we are now in a position to uncover more of the apparently complex physics that lies behind spiral structure.
Learning Economies, Innovation Systems and European Integration

GREGERSEN B. and JOHNSON B. (1997) Learning economies, innovation systems and European integration, Reg. Studies 31, 479-490. This paper uses the 'learning economy' as an analytical framework to discuss how the process of European integration affects national systems of innovation. European integration is described as a process of institutional learning. It is argued that European integration will not do away with national systems of innovation in Europe and that only a very partial European system of innovation in a narrow sense of the term is likely to emerge in the not too distant future. GREGERSEN B. et JOHNSON B. (1997) Les e´conomies d'apprentissage, les syste ¤ mes d'innovation et l'inte´gration europe´enne, Reg. Studies 31, 479‐490. Cet article se sert de ‘l'e´conomie d'apprentissage' comme cadre analytique afin de discuter comment le processus d'inte´gration europe´enne influe sur les syste ¤ mes d'innovation nationaux. L'inte´gration europe´enne se voit pre´senter en tant qu'un processus d'appre.
Medical Image Denoising Using a Nonlinear Thresholding Function in Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform

This paper proposes a new method of medical image denoising based on a new nonlinear thresholding function in Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) domain. In medical images, noise suppression is a particularly delicate and difficult task. A tradeoff between noise reduction and the preservation of actual image features has to be made in a way that enhances the diagnostically relevant image content. The contourlet transform is a new extension of the wavelet transform that provides a multi-resolution and multidirection analysis for two dimension images. The NSCT expansion is composed of basis images oriented at various directions in multiple scales, with flexible aspect ratios. Each coefficient of the NSCT transform is tuned by a polynomial function for denoising. We compared the results of the proposed method with other methods of image de-noising. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can obtain better visual results and higher PSNR values.
Evolution of bacterial genomes under horizontal gene transfer

Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in gene content. This huge variation in gene content led to the concepts of the distributed genome of bacteria and their pangenome (Tettelin et al.,2005; Ehrlich et al.,2005). We present a population genetic model for gene content evolution which accounts for several mechanisms. Gene uptake from the environment is modeled by events of gene gain along the genealogical tree relating the population. Pseudogenization may lead to deletion of genes and is incoporated by gene loss. These two mechanisms were studied by Huson and Steel (2004) using a fixed phylogenetic tree. Taking the random genealogy given by the coalescent (Kingman, 1982; Hudson, 1983), we studied the resulting genomic diversity already in Baumdicker et al. (2010). In the present paper, we extend the model in order to incorporate events of interspecies horizontal gene transfer. Within this model, we derive expectations for the gene frequency spectrum and other quantities of interest.
Trusted Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Trusted Network Connection in Mobile Environment

Technologies make the mobile terminals such as smart phones, PDAs and handsets much more powerful to access mobile network in recent years. Especially with the widely use of mobile terminals, mobile network now becomes a primary tool for daily and business interactions. However, the proliferation of mobile terminals also draws mobile malware’s attention which will do damage to the mobile terminal and further affect the security of mobile network. But the traditional access control and authentication mechanism cannot resolve such security issues. On the basis of trusted computing technology, we proposed a mobile trusted network architecture by extending the trusted network connection in mobile environment. And an improvement EAP-EHash method is used in the proposed architecture to implement authentication. We defined two service scenarios in the authentication scheme, home network authentication and roaming network authentication. The process of each scenario is described in detail. By introducing the pseudonym mechanism, our scheme can protect user identity. And the connection status not only depends on the identification process, but also the trust status of the platform. The analysis shows that our scheme benefits the properties of user identity anonymity, mutual authentication, fake agent resistance, platform integrity verification, EAP and TNC Compatible. And the ciphersuite negotiation makes our scheme more suitable for resource limited mobile terminals.
Geographical Access to Services, Health (GASH): Modelling Population Access to New Zealand Public Hospitals

This paper demonstrates a method for estimating the geographical accessibility of public hospitals. Using Geographical Information Systems, cost path analysis is used to determine the minimum travel time and distance to the closest hospital via a road network. This analysis is applied to approximately 36,000 small areas in New Zealand allowing geographical access to be linked to local populations. Statistics can be generated on what is the total time spent traveling or the total distance traveled if everybody visited a hospital once. These statistics can be generated for different management areas and enables comparisons to be made between regions. This accessibility model is intended for decision support for planners assessing the distribution of hospital services. It can also be easily adapted for other services such as access to General Practitioners and cancer screening centers. A difficulty with calculating travel times is determining the travel speeds for different roads. Road layers often contain information that describes the road characteristics and additional information on the bendiness of the roads can be obtained from calculating the sinuosity of the roads. A process for calculating sinuosity and estimating road travel speeds is described. This study has shown that the northern and southern parts of New Zealand have high average travel times to hospital services.
Grammar fragments fly first-class

We present a Embedded Domain Specific language in the form of a Haskell library (EDSL) for expressing grammar (fragments), using typed abstract syntax with observable references. Thus grammar fragments have become fully typed, first-class Haskell values. We can analyze and transform such representations and generate parsers from them. What makes our approach special is that we can combine embedded grammar fragments on the fly, i.e. after they have been compiled and that the Haskell type system is used to check the consistency of a collection of combined fragments. We show how we can extend an initial, limited grammar embedded in a compiler with new syntactic constructs, either by introducing new non-terminals or by adding new productions for existing non-terminals. We do not impose any restrictions on the individual grammar fragments, nor on the structure as a whole.
Peran Coping Berfokus Emosi sebagai Mediator Pada Hubungan antara Kepribadian dan Penggunaan Internet Bermasalah

This study was conducted to examine the role of emotion-focused coping as mediator of the relationship between personality traits and the level of problematic internet use. A total of 174 participants in the age range 18-29 (M = 23.1, SD = 2.7) have completed online questionnaires. The instruments used were Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2 (GPIUS2), Big Five Inventory 44, and Brief COPE. The findings of this study show that emotional-focused coping did not work as a mediator in the three personality trait relationships (neuroticism, extraversion, & openness) with problematic internet use. Nevertheless, this study found that the direction of the relationship between the three variables has aligned with previous theories and findings. Allegations about the possibility of no significance are discussed.Key words: Emotional-focused coping, personality traits, problematic internet useAbstrak: Penelitian ini dilakukan untuk melihat peran mediasi coping berfokus emosi pada hubungan trait kepribadian dan tingkat penggunaan internet bermasalah. Sebanyak 174 orang partisipan dengan rentang usia 18-29 tahun (M = 23,1, SD = 2,7) telah mengisi kuesioner secara online. Terdapat tiga alat ukur untuk mengukur ketiga variabel, yakni Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2 (GPIUS2), Big Five Inventory 44, dan Brief COPE. Hasil temuan dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa coping berfokus emosi tidak dapat bekerja sebagai mediator dalam hubungan tiga trait kepribadian (neuroticism, extraversion, dan openness) dengan penggunaan internet bermasalah. Meskipun demikian, penelitian ini menemukan bahwa arah hubungan antara ketiga variabel telah sejalan dengan teori dan temuan sebelumnya. Dugaan mengenai kemungkinan tidak terjadi signifikansi didiskusikan.
Analysis of single event radiation effects and fault mechanisms in SRAM, FRAM and NAND Flash : application to the MTCube nanosatellite project

L’environnement radiatif spatial est un environnement severe qui agit sur tout composants electroniques embarques sur des engins spatiaux, y compris sous le bouclier naturel que nous procure le champ magnetique terrestre en orbite basse. Bien qu’il soit possible, en particulier a ces orbites, de se proteger efficacement contre les particules creant de la dose totale ionisante, cela pose plus de difficultes pour les particules generant des effets singuliers. Cela est d’autant plus un probleme que l’utilisation des composants commerciaux (dits « COTS »), non concus pour de telles applications, sont de plus en plus utilises. Dans le cadre de cette these, les effets singuliers sur trois types de memoires sont etudies: SRAM, FRAM et NAND Flash. En se basant sur l’analyse des resultats de tests, les mecanismes d’erreurs induits par des particules generant des effets singuliers sont analyses. Avec pour objectif d’etudier et comparer la sensibilite de ces memoires directement en orbite, l’experience RES (Radiation Effect Study) a ete developpee et est presentee dans ce manuscrit. Cette experience scientifique constituera la charge utile du nanosatellite de type CubeSat nomme MTCube (Memory Test CubeSat) developpe a l’Universite de Montpellier en collaboration entre le Centre Spatial Universitaire Montpellier-Nimes, et les laboratoires LIRMM et IES. Ce nanosatellite est finance par l’ESA (Agence Spatial Europeenne).