Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relative Effects of Forward and Backward Planning on Goal Pursuit

Considerable research has shown that planning plays an important role in goal pursuit. But how does the way people plan affect goal pursuit? Research on this question is scarce. In the current research, we examined how planning the steps required for goal attainment in chronological order (i.e., forward planning) and reverse chronological order (i.e., backward planning) influences individuals’ motivation for and perceptions of goal pursuit. Compared with forward planning, backward planning not only led to greater motivation, higher goal expectancy, and less time pressure but also resulted in better goal-relevant performance. We further demonstrated that this motivational effect occurred because backward planning allowed people to think of tasks required to reach their goals more clearly, especially when goals were complex to plan. These findings suggest that the way people plan matters just as much as whether or not they plan.
Does Anything Go in Psychoanalytic Supervision?

The supervisory situation should provide conditions in which learning can develop and the candidate can integrate his personal and professional experiences, theoretical knowledge, and his personality for a competent participation in and handling of the psychoanalytic situation. The supervisory process is a very complex one, influenced by many factors, among these the personality of participants, their previous experience, the structure of the training organization, and the fact of multiple determination, as well as the inherent ambiguities such as autonomy/subordination and openness in face of being evaluated and assessed. The supervisor has to establish a working platform differentiating his or her own motives from the manifold, and often conflicting, interests of all participants (analysand, analyst, supervisor, Institute—that is, “the extended clinical rhombus,” Szecsödy, 1990, p. 10). The necessity to study how supervision is conducted, as well as to train supervisors, is emphasized.
The Space of Civil Society and the Practices of Resistance and Subordination

Abstract We argue that the majority of civil society conceptualizations employ a narrow concept of the state and a narrow concept of civil society. The life history of a Brazilian woman demonstrates that as individuals travel through state institutions and civil society organizations (CSOs), they carry conflicting worldviews with them which bear on the practices of CSOs. With Gramsci we recognize civil society as a space where movements and the state struggle for hegemony; beyond him we conceptualize CSOs as contradictory, being simultaneously of and against the state, while the state is simultaneously outside and within them.
Large Deviations and Internet Congestion

Glossary 78 Bibliography 80 Preface How to read this thesis The progression of chapters in this thesis mirrors the progression in the title, from abstract probability to applied modelling of the Internet. Accordingly, each chapter concludes with a summary of what is used in those that follow. The queueing model in Chapter 3 should be read before the remaining chapters, but otherwise they can be read in any order, and indeed it might be more interesting to start with the applications and read backwards. Acknowledgements I am grateful above all to Professor Frank Kelly, m y supervisor, whose enthusiasm and insight h a ve m a d e t h i s w ork enjoyable. I h a ve also beneeted greatly from my time with Dr Neil O'Connell at Hewlett-Packard/BRIMS and with Dr Nick Duueld at AT&T Labs.
Pursuing the holy grail by interrelating user intentions and bag of visual words to perform retrieval adaptation

When searching for visual content in large image repositories users face a serious problem. Due to the large amount of resources to tap, they cannot find the content, which fits their information need best. The information need is typically based on the user's intention or the goal s/he wants to achieve and is expressed by the user's search behavior. For instance, if someone wants to buy a bicycle, the information need - find pictures of bicycles - is based on the intention to buy a bicycle. In this paper we consider users with a more specific and less specific, hence vague intent. We apply retrieval adaptation in terms of the degree of intentionality using hard and soft assignment techniques of the well known Bag of Visual Word(BoVW) retrieval method. Our evaluations on two common data sets reveal interesting results, which pose the potential of our approach.
User Experience Building Blocks

Many books and publications have been written about user experience, but it still lacks a commonly agreed definition. The definition together with understanding of user experience building blocks would help in designing for good experiences and in evaluating user experience of a product. Based on the existing knowledge about user experience and our own empirical research, this paper proposes a set of user experience building blocks to help defining the term user experience and to facilitate method development for designing and evaluating user experiences. Author
Growth Characterization of Single and Double Salmonella Methionine Auxotroph Strains for Potential Vaccine Use in Poultry

Poultry meat is an important source of zoonotic Salmonella infection. Oral vaccination of chickens with live attenuated Salmonella during grow-out is an attractive approach to control Salmonella colonization in the chicken gastrointestinal tract. In this study, we report the construction of methionine-dependent and growth of Salmonella Typhimurium mutant strains with methionine auxotrophy (ΔmetR and ΔΔmetRmetD) and survival in chicken feed and fecal matrices. The methionine auxotroph mutant ΔΔmetRmetD grew slowly on L-methionine but failed to grow on D-methionine, as expected, and exhibited lower affinity for methionine compared with the isogenic parent strain (ΔmetR single mutant) in whole-cell affinity experiments. Preliminary data conducted as part of a previously published bird challenge study indicated that the methionine auxotroph was less effective at protection in chickens to a challenge with virulent wild-type parent strain but generated greater Salmonella-specific serum IgG. Although the auxotroph could not sustain itself in minimal media it was able to survive when incubated in the presence of chicken and fecal material. The immune response appears promising but further work may be needed to alter low-affinity methionine transporters and methionine biosynthesis genes in combination with the knock-out of the high affinity transporter metD reported here to ensure timely clearance of the candidate vaccine strain.
Power Mean Pyramid Scores for Summarization Evaluation

We present Power Mean Pyramid Scores (PMP), an evaluation metric that extends the Pyramid evaluation scheme for summarization by combining Sentence Content Units (SCU) scores using Power Mean. The Pyramid method generates a summarization score by linearly combining component SCU scores. We find that by combining SCU scores using Power Mean, we can optimize a single parameter, α, leading to significantly improved correlation with human judgements. We demonstrate this result through an empirical study based on TAC-08 evaluation.
A Novel Architecture and Mechanism for Congestion Control in High Speed Network

Today is the era of multimedia applications such as audio or video transmission. Multimedia traffic can be classified according to bandwidth, latency and Quality of Service. For multimedia applications, there is strong need of higher transmission capacity and higher bandwidth, which leads the need of high speed network based architecture at the forefront of several current technology based networks. Due to the unpredictable fluctuations and burstiness of traffic flows within high speed network congestion can occur frequently and TCP will perform poorly in future high speed network. In this paper, we purposed the solution for the problem of frequent congestion occurrence in high speed network and it’s model that has learning capability on the basis of round trip time, node’s outlink capacity and average queue size and passes a signal to the sender to change its sending rate accordingly. Therefore, congestion occurrence in high speed network can be resolved.
Robust Distributed Control Protocols for Large Vehicular Platoons With Prescribed Transient and Steady-State Performance

In this brief, we study the longitudinal control problem for a platoon of vehicles with unknown nonlinear dynamics under both the predecessor-following and the bidirectional control architectures. The proposed control protocols are fully distributed in the sense that each vehicle utilizes feedback from its relative position with respect to its preceding and following vehicles as well as its own velocity, which can all be easily acquired by onboard sensors. Moreover, no previous knowledge of model nonlinearities/disturbances is incorporated in the control design, enhancing in that way the robustness of the overall closed-loop system against model imperfections. Additionally, certain designer-specified performance functions determine the transient and steady-state response, thus preventing connectivity breaks due to sensor limitations as well as intervehicular collisions. Finally, extensive simulation studies and a real-time experiment conducted with mobile robots clarify the proposed control protocols and verify their effectiveness.
Extracellular Optical Recording Configuration for Neuronal Action Potential Detection by using Surface Plasmon Resonance: Preliminary Experiment

We propose an extracellular optical recording configuration for neuronal action potential detection by using surface plasmon resonance (SPR). The method does not use fluorescence dyes but still taking advantages of optical recording. As a preliminary experiment, the electrochemical SPR effect without neurons was investigated. This showed that a high resolution SPR setup (10-4~10~5 angular shift or more) is required to overcome noise and improve SPR signal. Several issues for neural signal recording are addressed to modify SPR optical configuration
Language independent and language adaptive large vocabulary speech recognition

This paper describes the design of a multilingual speech recognizer using an LVCSR dictation database which has been collected under the project GlobalPhone. This project at the University of Karlsruhe investigates LVCSR systems in 15 languages of the world, namely Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, and Turkish. Based on a global phoneme set we built different multilingual speech recognition systems for five of the 15 languages. Context dependent phoneme models are created data-driven by introducing questions about language and language groups to our polyphone clustering procedure. We apply the resulting multilingual models to unseen languages and present several recognition results in language independent and language adaptive setups.
The Role of the Putative Inactivation Lid in Sodium Channel Gating Current Immobilization

We investigated the contribution of the putative inactivation lid in voltage-gated sodium channels to gating charge immobilization (i.e., the slow return of gating charge during repolarization) by studying a lid-modified mutant of the human heart sodium channel (hH1a) that had the phenylalanine at position 1485 in the isoleucine, phenylalanine, and methionine (IFM) region of the domain III–IV linker mutated to a cysteine (ICM-hH1a). Residual fast inactivation of ICM-hH1a in fused tsA201 cells was abolished by intracellular perfusion with 2.5 mM 2-(trimethylammonium)ethyl methanethiosulfonate (MTSET). The time constants of gating current relaxations in response to step depolarizations and gating charge–voltage relationships were not different between wild-type hH1a and ICM-hH1aMTSET. The time constant of the development of charge immobilization assayed at −180 mV after depolarization to 0 mV was similar to the time constant of inactivation of INa at 0 mV for hH1a. By 44 ms, 53% of the gating charge during repolarization returned slowly; i.e., became immobilized. In ICM-hH1aMTSET, immobilization occurred with a similar time course, although only 31% of gating charge upon repolarization (OFF charge) immobilized. After modification of hH1a and ICM-hH1aMTSET with Anthopleurin-A toxin, a site-3 peptide toxin that inhibits movement of the domain IV-S4, charge immobilization did not occur for conditioning durations up to 44 ms. OFF charge for both hH1a and ICM-hH1aMTSET modified with Anthopleurin-A toxin were similar in time course and in magnitude to the fast component of OFF charge in ICM-hH1aMTSET in control. We conclude that movement of domain IV-S4 is the rate-limiting step during repolarization, and it contributes to charge immobilization regardless of whether the inactivation lid is bound. Taken together with previous reports, these data also suggest that S4 in domain III contributes to charge immobilization only after binding of the inactivation lid.
Determining Vision Graphs for Distributed Camera Networks Using Feature Digests

We propose a decentralized method for obtaining the vision graph for a distributed, ad-hoc camera network, in which each edge of the graph represents two cameras that image a sufficiently large part of the same environment. Each camera encodes a spatially well-distributed set of distinctive, approximately viewpoint-invariant feature points into a fixed-length "feature digest" that is broadcast throughout the network. Each receiver camera robustly matches its own features with the decompressed digest and decides whether sufficient evidence exists to form a vision graph edge. We also show how a camera calibration algorithm that passes messages only along vision graph edges can recover accurate 3D structure and camera positions in a distributed manner. We analyze the performance of different message formation schemes, and show that high detection rates () can be achieved while maintaining low false alarm rates () using a simulated 60-node outdoor camera network.
Nuclear Import of c-Jun Is Mediated by Multiple Transport Receptors *

c-Jun and c-Fos are major components of the transcriptional complex AP-1. Here, we investigate the nuclear import pathway(s) of the transcription factor c-Jun. c-Jun bound specifically to the nuclear import receptors importin β, transportin, importin 5, importin 7, importin 9, and importin 13. In digitonin-permeabilized cells, importin β, transportin, importin 7, and importin 9 promoted efficient import of c-Jun into the nucleus. Importin α, by contrast, inhibited nuclear import of c-Jun in vitro. A single basic region preceding the leucine zipper of c-Jun functions as a nuclear localization signal (NLS) and was required for interaction with all tested import receptors. In vivo, nuclear import of a c-Jun reporter protein lacking the leucine zipper strictly depended on this NLS. In a leucine zipper-dependent manner, c-Jun with mutations in its NLS was still imported into the nucleus in a complex with endogenous leucine zipper proteins or, for example, with cotransfected c-Fos. Together, these results explain the highly efficient nuclear import of the transcription factor c-Jun.
Hybrid expansion–contraction: a robust scaleable method for approximating the H∞ norm

We present a new scaleable algorithm for approximating the H∞ norm, an important robust stability measure for linear dynamical systems with input and output. Our spectral-value-set-based method uses a novel hybrid expansion–contraction scheme that, under reasonable assumptions, is guaranteed to converge to a stationary point of the optimization problem defining the H∞ norm, and, in practice, typically returns local or global maximizers. We prove that the hybrid expansion–contraction method has a quadratic rate of convergence that is also confirmed in practice. In comprehensive numerical experiments, we show that our new method is not only robust but exceptionally fast, successfully completing a large-scale test set 25 times faster than an earlier method by Guglielmi, Gürbüzbalaban & Overton (2013, SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 34, 709–737), which occasionally breaks down far from a stationary point of the underlying optimization problem.
Acquiring information from wider scope to improve event extraction

Event extraction is a particularly challenging type of information extraction (IE). Most current event extraction systems rely on local information at the phrase or sentence level. However, this local context may be insufficient to resolve ambiguities in identifying particular types of events; information from a wider scope can serve to resolve some of these ambiguities. In this thesis, we first investigate how to extract supervised and unsupervised features to improve a supervised baseline system. Then, we present two additional tasks to show the benefit of wider scope features in semi-supervised learning (self training) and active learning (co-testing). Experiments show that using features from wider scope can not only aid a supervised local event extraction baseline system, but also help the semi-supervised or active learning approach.
Object detection by common fate Hough transform

Two challenging issues for object detection are how to separate near objects and how to separate similar different-class objects. Learned that during human's vision perception, tokens moving or functioning in a similar manner are perceived as one unit, stated by the common fate principle, we propose a method to detect objects of multiple classes. Our method extends the Implicit Shape Model (ISM) to incorporate motion grouping results of object parts, and meets the challenges. Keypoint-based object parts are firstly detected and then grouped by the similarities of their corresponding trajectories which are traced by keypoint tracking. The grouping results are combined into a Hough transform framework. In Hough transform based methods, each object part votes for object centers and labels according to a trained codebook. In our method, the votes are assigned different weights according to the motion grouping results. One vote is assigned larger weight if it has larger consistence with the votes of other object parts in the same motion group. In such a manner, peaks in the formed Hough images which correspond to object hypotheses become easier to find. And our method gains improvement in both object position and label estimation. Experiments are provided to show the merit in terms of detection accuracy.
Feminism and Agency

Given conditions of oppression presupposed by a feminist understanding of social structures, feminist agency is paradoxical. I am going to understand feminist agency as women's ability to be effective agents against their own oppression. The paradox of feminist agency arises because feminist assumptions about women's socialization seem to entail that women's agency is compromised by sexist oppression. In particular, women's agency appears to be diminished in ways that interfere with their capacity for feminist action, that is, action against sexist oppression. Feminist philosophers have taken issue with traditional conceptions of agency, claiming that these conceptions are overly individualistic and valorize an illusory and unattractive ideal of agents and agency. If the paradox arises because women do not attain traditional ideals
White Patch Gamut Mapping Colour Constancy

The White-Patch method, one of the first colour constancy methods, estimates the light source colour from the maximum response of the different colour channels. However, it has been eclipsed by the advent of more advanced physical or statistical methods, as well as complex learning based methods. Recently, a new independent line of work claims that the simple idea of using maximum pixel values is not as naive as it seems, but can also be made to perform very well via some manipulations. The bright areas of images can include highlights and specularity as well as white surfaces or light sources, and indeed all may be helpful in the illumination estimation process. In this paper, we define the White Patch Gamut as a new extension to the Gamut Mapping Colour Constancy method, comprising the bright pixels of the image. Adding new constraints based on the possible White Patch Gamut to the standard gamut mapping constraints, a new combined method outperforms gamut mapping methods as well as other wellknown colour constancy methods. The new constraints that are brought to bear are powerful, and indeed can be more discriminating than those in the original gamut mapping method itself.
Angiotensin-(1–1) Suppresses Hepatocellular Carcinoma Growth and Angiogenesis via Complex Interactions of Angiotensin II Type 1 Receptor, Angiotensin II Type 2 Receptor and Mas Receptor

We recently confirmed that angiotensin II (Ang II) type 1 receptor (AT1R) was overexpressed in hepatocellular carcinoma tissue using a murine hepatoma model. Angiotensin(Ang)-(1-7) has been found beneficial in ameliorating lung cancer and prostate cancer. Which receptor of Ang-(1-7) is activated to mediate its effects is much speculated. This study was designed to investigate the effects of Ang-(1-7) on hepatocellular carcinoma, as well as the probable mechanisms. H22 hepatoma-bearing mice were randomly divided into five groups for treatment: mock group, low-dose Ang-(1-7), high-dose Ang-(1-7), high-dose Ang-(1-7) + A779 and high-dose Ang-(1-7) + PD123319. Ang-(1-7) treatment inhibited tumor growth time- and dose-dependently by arresting tumor proliferation and promoting tumor apoptosis as well as inhibiting tumor angiogenesis. The effects of Ang-(1-7) on tumor proliferation and apoptosis were reversed by coadministration with A779 or PD123319, whereas the effects on tumor angiogenesis were completely reversed by A779 but not by PD123319. Moreover, Ang-(1-7) downregulated AT1R mRNA, upregulated mRNA levels of Ang II type 2 receptor (AT2R) and Mas receptor (MasR) and p38-MAPK phosphorylation and suppressed H22 cell-endothelial cell communication. Thus, Ang-(1-7) administration suppresses hepatocellular carcinoma via complex interactions of AT1R, AT2R and MasR and may provide a novel and promising approach for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma.
EphA4‐dependent axon retraction and midline localization of Ephrin‐B3 are disrupted in the spinal cord of mice lacking mDia1 and mDia3 in combination

mDia is an actin nucleator and polymerization factor regulated by the small GTPase Rho and consists of three isoforms. Here, we found that mice lacking mDia1 and mDia3, two isoforms expressed in the brain, in combination (mDia‐DKO mice) show impaired left–right limb coordination during locomotion and aberrant midline crossing of axons of corticospinal neurons and spinal cord interneurons. Given that mice lacking Ephrin‐B3–EphA4 signaling show a similar impairment in locomotion, we examined whether mDia is involved in Ephrin‐B3–EphA4 signaling for axon repulsion. In primary cultured neurons, mDia deficiency impairs growth cone collapse and axon retraction induced by chemo‐repellants including EphA ligands. In mDia‐DKO mice, the Ephrin‐B3‐expressing midline structure in the spinal cord is disrupted, and axons aberrantly cross the spinal cord midline preferentially through the region devoid of Ephrin‐B3. Therefore, mDia plays multiple roles in the proper formation of the neural network in vivo.
A 6-DOF ARTag-based tracking system

This paper presents a system to track position and orientation of a generic mobile device equipped with a camera using a set of variable size fiducial markers. The system provides six degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) by tracking fiducial markers through the camera and deriving the position and orientation of the device, thus making possible the implementation of innovative and affordable 3D user interfaces. The system has been integrated in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) through the use of projectors and polarizers.