Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry Pre-emptive Patenting: Securing Market Exclusion and Freedom of Operation Sti Working Paper 2009/8 Statistical Analysis of Science, Technology and Industry Document Complet Disponible Sur Olis Dans Son Format D'origine Complete Document Available on O

The Working Paper series of the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry is designed to make available to a wider readership selected studies prepared by staff in the Directorate or by outside consultants working on OECD projects. The papers included in the series cover a broad range of issues, of both a technical and policy-analytical nature, in the areas of work of the DSTI. The Working Papers are generally available only in their original language – English or French – with a summary in the other. The opinions expressed in these papers are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries. ABSTRACT We investigate statistically the characteristics, functioning and incidence of pre-emptive patenting, defined as patent filings whose main effect is to hamper the grant of other patents. Patent applications can be used to prevent the grant of exclusive rights on markets and technologies to others in order to ensure freedom of operation to their holder or keep patent-less competitors out of the market. Combining data from examination outcomes and prior art at the European Patent Office (EPO), we develop a methodology to identify pre-emptive patent applications. We find evidence of pre-emption associated to patent applications cited as compromising patentability while being deemed non inventive. Furthermore, amongst them, those which are withdrawn by the applicant have the strongest pre-emptive power. The coincidence of low inventiveness and high pre-emptive impact supports the idea that some of these patents may be strategically designed by their applicants to block patenting by others. for their comments. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) nor of the CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas). We thank Stéphane Maraut for his aid in the creation of the specific database of patent indicators needed for this research. RESUMÉ Nous analysons statistiquement les caractéristiques, le fonctionnement et les effets des brevets préemptifs, définis comme des (demandes de) brevets dont l'effet principal est d'empêcher la délivrance d'autres brevets. Les demandes de brevets peuvent être utilisées pour empêcher la délivrance de droits exclusifs à d'autres parties sur des marchés et des technologies en vue d'assurer la liberté de manoeuvre à leur titulaire ou de maintenir des compétiteurs sans brevets à l'écart du marché. Combinant des données …
Architectures and synthesis algorithms for power-efficient businterfaces

In this paper we present algorithms for the synthesis of encoding and decoding interface logic that minimizes the average number of transitions on heavily-loaded global bus lines at no cost in communication throughput (i.e., one word is transmitted at each cycle). The distinguishing feature of our approach is that it does not rely on designer's intuition, but it automatically constructs low-transition activity codes and hardware implementation of encoders and decoders, given information on word-level statistics. We propose an accurate method that is applicable to low-width buses, as well as approximate methods that scale well with bus width. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive architecture that automatically adjusts encoding to reduce transition activity on buses whose word-level statistics are not known a priori. Experimental results demonstrate that our approaches out-perform specialized low-power encoding schemes presented in the past.
How Behavioral Economics Trims Its Sails and Why

The preference of behavioral law and economics (BLE) for regulatory approaches that preserve “freedom of choice” has led to incomplete policy analysis and inefficient policies. BLE has been broadly regarded as among the most promising new developments in public policymaking theory and practice. As social science, BLE offers hope that better understanding of human behavior will provide a sounder foundation for policy design. As politics, BLE offers a possible political consensus built around minimalist forms of government action — “nudges” — that preserve freedom of choice. These two seductive dimensions of BLE are, however, in deep tension. Put simply, it would be surprising if the evidence documenting the failure of individual choice implied a turn toward regulatory tools that preserve individual choice.Developing BLE fully along its social-scientific dimension would reveal two categories of recurring limitations in BLE. First, BLE often artificially excludes traditional regulatory tools, such as direct mandates, from its analysis of policy options. However, BLE’s preferred nudges are, in important cases, not likely to be effective — ironically, for reasons BLE itself identifies. BLE has also neglected the ways in which behavioral failures interact with traditional market failures and the implications of this interaction for policy design. A more complete framework generates policy recommendations beyond both nudges and neoclassical economic prescriptions.Second, BLE does not properly evaluate, at times, how its own regulatory tools actually function. Many of these seemingly choice-preserving tools are not nearly as light touch as advertised. The default rules so central to BLE are often better viewed as preserving the formality of choice while, for many individuals, functioning as effective mandates. The view that people can always rationally opt out has led policymakers to set these powerful defaults at the wrong levels, resulting in counterproductive policies.We illustrate the costs of BLE’s commitment to freedom of choice by analyzing three of the most important areas for current policy: retirement savings, consumer credit, and environmental protection.
Llama-b: automatic hyperlink authoring in the blogosphere

Viewed collectively, the sum of all blog entries recorded to date (usually referred to as the blogosphere) represents a prodigiously rich collection of commentary and opinion, a dizzying mixture of fact and speculation, subjective opinion and objective data. This paper introduces a hypermedia authoring tool intended to simplify the process of navigating this chaotic environment. The tool works by adding additional hyperlinks to blogs, links which connect blog entries addressing similar topics. These hyperlinks are generated by an algorithm that uses statistical language modeling and graph based analysis to exploit the implicit associative structure of the blogosphere. An evaluative exercise, centred upon the unsupervised labeling of blog articles, confirms the effectiveness of this approach.
Visual-inertial navigation, mapping and localization: A scalable real-time causal approach

We describe a model to estimate motion from monocular visual and inertial measurements. We analyze the model and characterize the conditions under which its state is observable, and its parameters are identifiable. These include the unknown gravity vector, and the unknown transformation between the camera coordinate frame and the inertial unit. We show that it is possible to estimate both state and parameters as part of an on-line procedure, but only provided that the motion sequence is ‘rich enough’, a condition that we characterize explicitly. We then describe an efficient implementation of a filter to estimate the state and parameters of this model, including gravity and camera-to-inertial calibration. It runs in real-time on an embedded platform. We report experiments of continuous operation, without failures, re-initialization, or re-calibration, on paths of length up to 30 km. We also describe an integrated approach to ‘loop-closure’, that is the recognition of previously seen locations and the topological re-adjustment of the traveled path. It represents visual features relative to the global orientation reference provided by the gravity vector estimated by the filter, and relative to the scale provided by their known position within the map; these features are organized into ‘locations’ defined by visibility constraints, represented in a topological graph, where loop-closure can be performed without the need to re-compute past trajectories or perform bundle adjustment. The software infrastructure as well as the embedded platform is described in detail in a previous technical report.
Removal of Indoor Volatile Organic Compounds via Photocatalytic Oxidation: A Short Review and Prospect

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are ubiquitous in indoor environments. Inhalation of VOCs can cause irritation, difficulty breathing, and nausea, and damage the central nervous system as well as other organs. Formaldehyde is a particularly important VOC as it is even a carcinogen. Removal of VOCs is thus critical to control indoor air quality (IAQ). Photocatalytic oxidation has demonstrated feasibility to remove toxic VOCs and formaldehyde from indoor environments. The technique is highly-chemical stable, inexpensive, non-toxic, and capable of removing a wide variety of organics under light irradiation. In this paper, we review and summarize the traditional air cleaning methods and current photocatalytic oxidation approaches in both of VOCs and formaldehyde degradation in indoor environments. Influencing factors such as temperature, relative humidity, deactivation and reactivations of the photocatalyst are discussed. Aspects of the application of the photocatalytic technique to improve the IAQ are suggested.
The Effect of Fundamental Religious Belief Upon Males' and Females' Attitudes Toward Woman's Role in Society

Studying the effect of fundamental religious belief upon attitudes toward woman's role in society, findings were: (1) persons high in fundamental belief have more traditional attitudes than persons low in fundamental belief; (2) atheists, agnostics, Unitarians, Jews, and 'others' hold more liberal attitudes than Protestants or Catholics; (3) persons who frequently attend religious services hold more conservative attitudes than persons who attend infrequently; and (4) females hold more liberal attitudes than males. Also, marital status did not affect attitudes toward woman's role. Subjects were 63 female and 38 male college students. Findings were discussed in light of effects conservative attitudes toward woman's role could have upon fundamentalists, and of the theory supporting the hypotheses.
Ultraluminous X-ray Sources: Bubbles and Optical Counterparts

Optical studies of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULX) in nearby galaxies have turned out to be instrumental in discriminating between various models including the much advertised intermediate mass black hole hypothesis and various beaming scenarios. Here we report on ESO VLT and SUBARU observations of ULX that have revealed the parent stellar clusters with ages of some 60 million years in two cases. Thus we are able to derive upper limits of about 8 M$_{\odot}$ for the mass donors in these systems. The optical counterparts are dominated by X-ray heated accretion disks, and the discovery of the He II $\gamma$4686 emission line now allows to derive dynamical masses in these systems. Apparent radial velocity variations of 300 km/s have been detected in NGC 1313 X-2 which, if confirmed by further observations, would exclude the presence of IMBH in these systems.
Bayesian state-space modeling of age-structured data: fitting a model is just the beginning

Explicit modeling of process variability in the dynamics of fisheries is motivated by a desire to incorporate more realism into stock assessment models, and much recent research effort has been devoted to the computational features of fitting state-space models for this purpose. Here, we extend the Bayesian application of nonlinear state-space modeling to sequential population analysis of age-structured data using a model formulation that allows for unreported catches and incidental fishing mortality. It is shown that, once a familiarity with the general-purpose Bayesian software BUGS is acquired, implementing a state-space model is a relatively simple task. Indeed, this application requires just 18 lines of code in its entirety and does not require the programmer to know the formulae for any prior density functions or likelihoods. Consequently, we suggest that this methodology may permit the implementation phase of nonlinear state-space modeling to be relegated, thereby allowing more effort to be devoted.
Accurate planar image registration for an integrated video surveillance system

Large-scale video surveillance systems typically deploy many video cameras over a wide area and display video streams on separate screens. Operators of this kind of systems have difficulties perceiving the whole pictures of intermixed views and are prone to losing track of targets. This paper presents a surveillance system which integrates videos from multiple cameras into a single comprehensive view. Operators can monitor the guarded area from any 3-D viewpoint. For integrated surveillance systems, the accuracy of image registration significantly affects the appearance of stitched views. This paper also presents a new planar image registration method in which the transformation parameters are decomposed from the homography matrix and are optimized according to a similarity measure between corresponding regions. The proposed registration method is pratical and accurate, as demonstrated in our integrated surveillance system.
Frontiers in Synaptic Neuroscience Synaptic Neuroscience

" natural " patterns of activity do not fit into the categories of tetanic stimulation, theta burst, pairing, and other simplified experimental contexts that synaptic learning rules are usually studied with. The basis of STDP on the timing of single spikes potentially provides a formula for taking an arbitrary set of pre-and postsynaptic activity and predicting what the effect of such activity patterns on the synaptic efficacy will be. Furthermore, because of its close appo-sition of windows for potentiation and depression, as described below, several theoretical studies have shown that STDP implicitly introduces both competition and homeostatic regulation between the inputs to a given neuron (Song et al., potentially explaining what have been traditionally thought of as separate aspects of developmental plasticity. Thus, STDP studies during development present the possibility of understanding the role of synaptic plasticity in vivo, whereby known activity patterns might be combined with known changes in con-nectivity and arrive at a known outcome. However, though appealing , STDP may be only one form of synaptic plasticity that governs development. As we describe in this review, STDP fits more broadly into the category of Hebbian plasticity (Caporale and Dan, 2008), but with the additional requirement for relationships of neural activity between presynaptic afferents and postsynaptic targets on the order of 10 ms. As a result, for STDP to yield consistent results at a given synapse, neuronal activity must contain information at these " fast " time scales. Likewise, the tight temporal correlation requirement limits the applicability of STDP in cases where there is no such tight pairing between pre-and postsynaptic activity. As a result, below, we describe
Substance Use in Adolescents 10 Years After the World Trade Center Attacks in New York City

ABSTRACT We examined prevalence of and factors associated with substance use 10 to 11 years post-9/11 among adolescents in the World Trade Center Health Registry. Logistic regression analyses showed that adolescents who witnessed a disturbing event on 9/11 were twice as likely to report ever drinking and almost three times as likely to have ever used marijuana. Among those ≥5 years of age on 9/11, fear for personal safety on 9/11 was significantly associated with having ever smoked cigarettes, ever drank, and ever used marijuana. Intervention and education for adolescents particularly focused on substance use and coping strategies may be warranted after large-scale disasters.
First human exposure to FSH-CTP in hypogonadotrophic hypogonadal males.

BACKGROUND This is the first report of human exposure to the novel compound follicle stimulating hormone (FSH)-C-terminal peptide (CTP) 'FSH-CTP' (Org 36286), a long-acting recombinant FSH like substance, consisting of the alpha-subunit of human FSH and a hybrid beta-subunit. The latter is composed of the beta-subunit of human FSH and the C-terminus part (CTP) of the beta-subunit of human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG). METHODS In this phase I, non-blind, multi-centre study, 13 hypogonadotrophic hypogonadal male subjects were enrolled to test the safety of FSH-CTP in terms of antibody formation in humans. Furthermore, the pharmacokinetic profile of this new compound was determined. Subjects were injected four times with 15 microg FSH-CTP with an interval of approximately 4 weeks between each injection. RESULTS No drug related (serious) adverse events occurred. No antibodies against FSH-CTP or chinese hamster ovary (CHO)-cell derived proteins were detected and measurement of local tolerance demonstrated that s.c. administration of FSH-CTP is well tolerated and no increase in intensity of injection-site responses was observed after repeated exposure to FSH-CTP. After the first and third injection, FSH-CTP serum concentrations were determined. Overall mean (+/- SD) C(max) was 0.426 (+/- 0.116) ng/ml, mean t(1/2) and AUC(0-infinity) were 94.7 (+/- 26.2) h and 81.5 (+/- 18.8) ng.h/ml respectively. Compared with recFSH (Puregon), the half life of FSH-CTP was increased 2-3 times. Following the first and third injection a clear rise in serum inhibin-B concentrations were observed. CONCLUSIONS The use of FSH-CTP is safe and does not lead to detectable formation of antibodies. Furthermore, the pharmacokinetic and dynamic profile of FSH-CTP may lead to the development of new, more convenient regimens for the treatment of male and female infertility.
OPAL at SemEval-2016 Task 4: the Challenge of Porting a Sentiment Analysis System to the “Real” World

Sentiment analysis has become a wellestablished task in Natural Language Processing. As such, a high variety of methods have been proposed to tackle it, for different types of texts, text levels, languages, domains and formality levels. Although state-of-theart systems have obtained promising results, a big challenge that still remains is to port the systems to the “real world” – i.e. to implement systems that are running around the clock, dealing with information of heterogeneous nature, from different domains, written in different styles and diverse in formality levels. The present paper describes our efforts to implement such a system, using a variety of strategies to homogenize the input and comparing various approaches to tackle the task. Specifically, we are tackling the task using two different approaches: a) one that is unsupervised, based on dictionaries of sentiment-bearing words and heuristics to compute final polarity of the text considered; b) the second, supervised, trained on previously annotated data from different domains. For both approaches, the data is first normalized and the slang is replaced with its expanded version.
GROUND-MOTION PREDICTION EQUATIONS FOR SOUTHERN SPAIN AND SOUTHERN NORWAY OBTAINED USING THE COMPOSITE MODEL PERSPECTIVE

In this paper, two sets of earthquake ground-motion relations to estimate peak ground and response spectral acceleration are developed for sites in southern Spain and in southern Norway using a recently published composite approach. For this purpose seven empirical ground-motion relations developed from recorded strong-motion data from different parts of the world were employed. The different relations were first adjusted based on a number of transformations to convert the differing choices of independent parameters to a single one. After these transformations, which include the scatter introduced, were performed, the equations were modified to account for differences between the host and the target regions using the stochastic method to compute the host-to-target conversion factors. Finally functions were fitted to the derived ground-motion estimates to obtain sets of seven individual equations for use in probabilistic seismic hazard assessment for southern Spain and southern Norway. The relations are compared with local ones published for the two regions. The composite methodology calls for the setting up of independent logic trees for the median values and for the sigma values, in order to properly separate epistemic and aleatory uncertainties after the corrections and the conversions.
An Empirical Study of Extended Guided Local Search on the Quadratic Assignment Problem

In this paper, we show how an Extended Guided Local Search can be applied to the Quadratic Assignment Problem and show the extensions can improve its performance. GLS is a general, penalty-based meta-heuristic, which sits on top of local search algorithms, to help guide them out of local minima. GLS has been shown to be successful in solving a number of practical real life problems, such as the travelling salesman problem, BT’s workforce scheduling problem, the radio link frequency assignment problem, the SAT problem, the weighted MAX-SAT problems, and the vehicle routing problem. We present empirical results of applying several extended versions of Guided Local Search to the Quadratic Assignment Problem, and show that these extensions can improve the range of parameter setting within which Guided Local Search performs well. Finally, we compare the results of running our Extended Guided Local Search with some state of the art algorithms for the QAP.
Neural Responses in the Retinotopic Representation of the Blind Spot in the Macaque V1 to Stimuli for Perceptual Filling-In

When visual stimuli that cover the entire blind spot are presented monocularly, the color and brightness of the surrounding field are seen within the blind spot, although it receives no retinal input. Important questions about such perceptual filling-in are whether neurons in the visual system representing visual field locations within the blind spot are activated when filling-in occurs and, if so, what the properties of these neurons are. To address these questions, we recorded the activities of single neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) of the awake monkey. We first identified the area of V1 representing the region of the blind spot and then assessed neural responses to stationary visual stimuli of various size. We found that there are neurons in layer 4 and deeper laminae, particularly layer 6, that respond to large stimuli covering the blind spot which induces perceptual filling-in. Most of these neurons had very large binocular receptive fields that extended outside the blind spot. These neurons also preferred relatively large stimuli and exhibited color selectivity. These results indicate that when a large uniform surface is presented on the blind spot, neurons at the V1 region representing the blind spot transmit signals essential for filling-in that inform of the presence of a large surface as well as the absence of smaller stimuli at the blind spot.