Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
JiTTree: A Just-in-Time Compiled Sparse GPU Volume Data Structure

Sparse volume data structures enable the efficient representation of large but sparse volumes in GPU memory for computation and visualization. However, the choice of a specific data structure for a given data set depends on several factors, such as the memory budget, the sparsity of the data, and data access patterns. In general, there is no single optimal sparse data structure, but a set of several candidates with individual strengths and drawbacks. One solution to this problem are hybrid data structures which locally adapt themselves to the sparsity. However, they typically suffer from increased traversal overhead which limits their utility in many applications. This paper presents JiTTree, a novel sparse hybrid volume data structure that uses just-in-time compilation to overcome these problems. By combining multiple sparse data structures and reducing traversal overhead we leverage their individual advantages. We demonstrate that hybrid data structures adapt well to a large range of data sets. They are especially superior to other sparse data structures for data sets that locally vary in sparsity. Possible optimization criteria are memory, performance and a combination thereof. Through just-in-time (JIT) compilation, JiTTree reduces the traversal overhead of the resulting optimal data structure. As a result, our hybrid volume data structure enables efficient computations on the GPU, while being superior in terms of memory usage when compared to non-hybrid data structures.
Training fMRI Classifiers to Detect Cognitive States across Multiple Human Subjects

We consider learning to classify cognitive states of human subjects, based on their brain activity observed via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). This problem is important because such classifiers constitute “virtual sensors” of hidden cognitive states, which may be useful in cognitive science research and clinical applications. In recent work, Mitchell, et al. [6,7,9] have demonstrated the feasibility of training such classifiers for individual human subjects (e.g., to distinguish whether the subject is reading an ambiguous or unambiguous sentence, or whether they are reading a noun or a verb). Here we extend that line of research, exploring how to train classifiers that can be applied across multiple human subjects, including subjects who were not involved in training the classifier. We describe the design of several machine learning approaches to training multiple-subject classifiers, and report experimental results demonstrating the success of these methods in learning cross-subject classifiers for two different fMRI data sets.
Combined Inactivation and Expression Strategy To Study Gene Function under Physiological Conditions: Application to Identification of New Escherichia coli Adhesins

ABSTRACT In bacteria, whereas disruption methods have been improved recently, the use of plasmid complementation strategies are still subject to limitations, such as cloning difficulties, nonphysiological levels of gene expression, or a requirement for antibiotics as plasmid selection pressure. Moreover, because of the pleiotropic modifications of cell physiology often induced by plasmid-based complementation, these strategies may introduce biases when biological process such as adhesion or biofilm formation are studied. We developed a plasmid-free approach that combines the lambda-red linear DNA recombination method with site-directed insertion of a repression and expression (RExBAD) cassette which places a functional pBAD promoter upstream of a target gene. We showed that this method permits both inactivation and modulation of most Escherichia coli gene expression, including expression of toxin and essential genes. We used this strategy to study adhesion and bacterial biofilms by placing the RExBAD cassette in front of the tra operon, encoding the DNA transfer and pilus genes on the F conjugative plasmid, and in front of flu, the antigen 43 (Ag43) autotransporter adhesin-encoding gene. In silico analysis revealed the existence of 10 genes with homology to the Ag43 gene that were good candidates for genes that encode putative new adhesins in E. coli. We used the RExBAD strategy to study these genes and demonstrated that induction of expression of four of them is associated with adhesion of E. coli to abiotic surfaces. The potential use of the RExBAD approach to study the function of cryptic or uncharacterized genes in large-scale postgenomic functional analyses is discussed.
Evidence for Endemic Chikungunya Virus Infections in Bandung, Indonesia

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is known to cause sporadic or explosive outbreaks. However, little is known about the endemic transmission of CHIKV. To ascertain the endemic occurrence of CHIKV transmission, we tested blood samples from patients with a non-dengue febrile illness who participated in a prospective cohort study of factory workers in Bandung, Indonesia. From August 2000 to June 2004, and September 2006 to April 2008, 1901 febrile episodes occurred and 231 (12.2%) dengue cases were identified. The remaining febrile cases were evaluated for possible CHIKV infection by measuring anti-CHIKV IgM and IgG antibodies in acute and convalescent samples. Acute samples of serologically positive cases were subsequently tested for the presence of CHIKV RNA by RT-PCR and/or virus isolation. A total of 135 (7.1%) CHIKV infections were identified, providing an incidence rate of 10.1/1,000 person years. CHIKV infections were identified all year round and tended to increase during the rainy season (January to March). Severe illness was not found and severe arthralgia was not a prominently reported symptom. Serial post-illness samples from nine cases were tested to obtain a kinetic picture of IgM and IgG anti-CHIKV antibodies. Anti-CHIKV IgM antibodies were persistently detected in high titers for approximately one year. Three patients demonstrated evidence of possible sequential CHIKV infections. The high incidence rate and continuous chikungunya cases in this adult cohort suggests that CHIKV is endemically transmitted in Bandung. Further characterization of the circulating strains and surveillance in larger areas are needed to better understand CHIKV epidemiology in Indonesia.
Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives

Can hardened criminals really reform? "Making Good" provides resounding proof that the answer is yes. This book provides a fascinating narrative analysis of the lives of repeat offenders who, by all statistical measures, should have continued on the criminal path but instead have created lives of productivity and purpose. This examination of the phenomenology of "making good" includes an encyclopedic review of the literature on personal reform as well as a practical guide to the use of narratives in offender counseling and rehabilitation.The author's research shows that criminals who desist from crime have constructed powerful narratives that aided them in making sense of their pasts, finding fulfillment in productive behaviors, and feeling in control of their future. Borrowing from the field of narrative psychology, Maruna argues that to truly understand offenders, we must understand the stories that they tell - and that in turn this story-making process has the capacity to transform lives. "Making Good" challenges some of the cherished assumptions of various therapy models for offenders and supports new paradigms for offender rehabilitation. This groundbreaking book is a must read for criminologists, forensic psychologists, lawyers, rehabilitation counselors, or anyone interested in the generative process of change.
Therapeutic Culture and Religion in America

Much has been written about the psychologization of different spheres of contemporary American culture (education, industrial–military complex, health care, etc.) from different disciplinary perspectives. In this article, I will discuss the concept of therapeutic culture in relation to religion in America. The essay will trace contemporary therapeutic culture back to the mind cure movement and “New Thought” and its concept of the instrumental power of thoughts. A variety of 20th century developments that can be framed both as secular and as religious or spiritual, such as positive thinking, self-help, 12-step programs, New Age, and the so-called Prosperity Gospel, have predecessors in New Thought. Furthermore, the essay will survey early influential works on therapeutic culture in America. Philip Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1979), and Eva S. Moskowitz's more recent study In Therapy We Trust (2001) are based on the idea that traditional Protestant religion has been eroded and replaced by the therapeutic ethos. These authors are concerned that America has traded its soul for its psyche and has swapped religion for therapy. In contrast, Eva Illouz' Saving the Modern Soul (2008) introduces a more comprehensive understanding of the therapeutic discourse as a new cultural matrix that permeates society as a whole. Moreover, a discussion of different historical studies on the interrelation of Protestant religious cultures and therapeutic ethos in the United States will demonstrate that it is not simply a relationship of replacement but one of intricate interconnection and entanglement. The works under discussion show that clinical pastoral education programs, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Salvation Army adapted psychology and therapy to facilitate religious counseling, to foster outreach to homeless men, and to create spiritual engagement and fellowship among inebriates. As I explore the relationship between therapeutic culture and religion in America, I will point out central themes, possible shortcomings of approaches to the therapeutic so far, and desirable avenues for future research into the interplay of the therapeutic and religion.
Playing the Climate Dominoes : Tipping Points and the Cost of Delaying Policy

Greenhouse gas emissions can trigger irreversible regime shifts in the climate system, known as tipping points. Multiple tipping points affect each other’s probability of occurrence (a “domino effect”) and they reinforce each other’s economic impacts. Today’s optimal mitigation policy has to consider all possible future interactions between tipping points, economic activity, and policy responses over long time horizons. We find that the presence of three commonly discussed tipping points nearly doubles the currently optimal carbon tax, reducing peak warming along the optimal path by approximately 1 degree Celsius. Our study also provides the first quantification of the expected cost of delaying optimal policy in the face of tipping points, which is comparable to the annual output of several large nations. This novel assessment of the policy implications of tipping points bridges the increasingly severe divide between scientific concerns about abrupt climate change and economic analyses. Furthermore, we demonstrate that even the recognition of an already-triggered tipping point can have substantial economic value, complementing the scientific literature’s focus on the recognition of early warning signals.
Interactive Cause and Effect Comic-book Storytelling for Improving Nutrition Outcomes in Children

Obesity among children and adolescents is increasingly becoming a major public health problem. Poverty and lower socio-economic status as well as lack of parental awareness regarding a balanced diet and adequate exercise all contribute towards childhood obesity. Unfortunately minority children have been especially vulnerable, among them inner-city Latino children continue to have the highest incidence rates of overweight and obesity; hence targeted intervention for this population group is of paramount importance. Access and affordability of smartphones and mobile internet devices provide an opportunity to create nutrition education interventions that can significantly impact and change attitude and knowledge regarding healthy diet and exercise. In this paper we present the design of a comic book style interactive storytelling mobile application that creates multiple cause and effect scenarios that the child can role play and learn from. The novelty and innovation lies in the design of the application to begin at a clinical setting while requiring completion at home and involving significant participation by the parent and the child
An efficient algorithm for extrinsic calibration between a 3D laser range finder and a stereo camera for surveillance

The combined use of 3D Laser Range Finders (LRF) and cameras is increasingly common in the navigation application for autonomous mobile robots. The integration of laser range information and images requires the estimation of the Euclidean 3-dimensional transformation between the coordinate systems of the LRF and the cameras. This paper describes a new and efficient method to perform the extrinsic calibration between a 3D LRF and a stereo camera with the aid of inertial data. The main novelty of the proposed approach compared to other state of the art calibration procedures is the use of an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), which decreases the number of points needed to a robust calibration. Furthermore, a freely moving bright spot is the only calibration object. A set of virtual 3D points is made by waving the bright spot through the working volume in three different planes. Its projections onto the images are found with sub-pixel precision and verified by a robust RANSAC analysis. These same points are extracted according to the laser scan data and are corresponded to the virtual 3D points in the stereo pair. Experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate the accuracy of our approach. Furthermore, the applicability of the proposed technique is high, only requiring of an inertial sensor coupled to the sensor platform. This approach has been also extended for a camera network.
Some challenges for context-aware recommender systems

Recently, context-aware recommender systems (CARS), which incorporates contextual information into recommender systems, has become one of the hottest topics in the domain of recommender systems. In this paper, we identify and discuss some challenges for context-aware recommender systems, including viewing it as a process, valid contexts discovering and computing, contextual user preference elicitation, classification and design of context-aware recommendation algorithms, lack of publicly available datasets, evaluation, the sparsity problem, taking account of interdisciplinary research and applications. If these issues can be properly addressed, the development of context-aware recommender systems, in our opinion, will be promoted significantly.
Bringing Sociology to International Relations: World Politics as Differentiation Theory

1. Introduction: differentiation theory and international relations Mathias Albert, Barry Buzan and Michael Zurn Part I. Sociological Perspectives: 2. Rationalized cultural contexts of functional differentiation George M. Thomas 3. The history and systematics of functional differentiation in sociology Rudolf Stichweh 4. Functional, segmentary, and stratificatory differentiation of world society Richard Munch Part II. On the Differentiated Structure of the International System: 5. Differentiation: type and dimension approaches Jack Donnelly 6. Stratificatory differentiation as a constitutive principle of the international system Lora Anne Viola 7. Some quanta of solace: world politics in the era of functional differentiation Stephan Stetter Part III. On the Interplay of (Global) Function Systems: 8. Functional differentiation and the oughts and musts of international law Oliver Kessler and Friedrich Kratochwil 9. International institutions in a functionally differentiated world society Mathias Koenig-Archibugi 10. Functional differentiation, globalization and the new transnational neo-pluralism Philip G. Cerny 11. Conclusion: differentiation theory and world politics Michael Zurn, Barry Buzan and Mathias Albert.
Graded Encoding, Variations on a Scheme

In this note we provide a more-or-less unified framework to talk about the functionality and security of graded encoding schemes, describe some variations of recent schemes, and discuss their security. In particular we describe schemes that combine elements from both the GGH13 scheme of Garg, Gentry and Halevi (EUROCRYPT 2013) and the GGH15 scheme of Gentry, Gorbunov and Halevi (TCC 2015). On one hand, we show how to use techniques from GGH13 in the GGH15 construction to enable encoding of arbitrary plaintext elements (as opposed to only small ones) and to introduce “levels/subsets” (e.g., as needed to implement straddling sets). On the other hand, we show how to modify the GGH13 scheme to support graph-induced constraints (either instead of, or in addition to, the levels from GGH13). Turning to security, we describe zeroizing attacks on the GGH15 scheme, similar to those described by Cheon et al. (EUROCRYPT 2015) and Coron et al. (CRYPTO 2015) on the CLT13 and GGH13 constructions. As far as we know, however, these attacks to not break the GGH15 multi-partite key-agreement protocol. We also describe a new multi-partite keyagreement protocol using the GGH13 scheme, which also seems to resist known attacks. That protocol suggests a relatively simple hardness assumption for the GGH13 scheme, that we put forward as a target for cryptanalysis.
Critical Transitions: A Mixed Methods Examination of Sleep from Inpatient Alcohol Rehabilitation Treatment to the Community

Aims This prospective, repeated measures study utilized a convergent parallel mixed methods approach to assess sleep experiences among individuals who were alcohol-dependent undergoing inpatient detoxification and treatment at a clinical research facility across the transition periods associated with the rehabilitation process: the initial adjustment to becoming an inpatient and the transition from inpatient to outpatient status. Methods This study included individual semi-structured interviews and quantitative measures relating to psychological distress, sleep quality, daytime sleepiness, and sleep-related beliefs and behavior (n = 33; 66.7% male). Interviews were conducted and questionnaires were administered within one week of participants’ scheduled discharge date and again four to six weeks post-discharge when they returned for a follow-up visit (or via phone). Results Participants self-reported significant sleep disturbances at both study time points. Of those participants with valid data at both time points (n = 28), there were no significant changes in mean scores from pre- to post-discharge with the exception of self-efficacy for sleep (SE-S) being significantly higher post-discharge. Preliminary qualitative findings suggested differences between those with ongoing sleep disturbances, those whose sleep disturbances had resolved, and those with no sleep disturbances at either time point. Conclusions This analysis highlights individual variation in sleep throughout the process of inpatient treatment and transition to outpatient aftercare in individuals with alcohol dependence. Collecting quantitative and qualitative data concurrently and combining emerging themes from qualitative data with quantitative analyses allowed for a more thorough examination of this relatively novel area of research and provided information that can be utilized to inform future behavioral sleep interventions.
SemEval-2017 Task 8: RumourEval: Determining rumour veracity and support for rumours

Media is full of false claims. Even Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as the word of 2016. This makes it more important than ever to build systems that can identify the veracity of a story, and the nature of the discourse around it. RumourEval is a SemEval shared task that aims to identify and handle rumours and reactions to them, in text. We present an annotation scheme, a large dataset covering multiple topics – each having their own families of claims and replies – and use these to pose two concrete challenges as well as the results achieved by participants on these challenges.
Inclusion of Preschoolers with Profound Disabilities: An Analysis of Children's Interactions

The purpose of this study was to explore the nature of spontaneous peer interactions in a full-inclusion preschool. Three children with profound disabilities were observed for a total of 480 min each in indoor and outdoor supervised play. Three children without disabilities were observed under the same conditions for comparison purposes. Results of the study showed variation in the behavior of the children with disabilities, but also showed that the children with disabilities had many opportunities to participate in peer social interactions and engaged in interactions comparable in length to those of their peers without disabilities. Findings also indicate that particular attention may need to be paid to the encouragement of initiating interactions and to helping young children without disabilities understand and respond to the idiosyncratic behaviors of peers with profound disabilities.
High levels of oestrogen receptor‐α in tumorigenesis: inhibition of cell growth and angiogenic factors

We previously found that the stable overexpression of oestrogen receptor‐α in the human endothelial cell line ECV304 * inhibits its growth in vitro, and that this inhibition is possibly mediated through a down‐regulation of the vasoactive agents endothelin‐1 and vascular endothelial growth factor. Here we show an in vivo growth‐inhibitory effect of oestrogen receptor‐α overexpression in tumours initiated in nude mice from the same clone of ECV304. In addition, we show that this growth inhibition is accompanied by an αvβ3‐mediated inhibition of cell migration in vitro, and a down‐regulation of the integrin αvβ3, vascular endothelial growth factor and vascularization in vivo. The levels of vascular endothelial growth factor and integrin αvβ3, through their effect on cell growth and migration, contribute to the process of angiogenesis and to the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis and cancer. The results shown here demonstrate that a higher level of oestrogen receptor‐α in the cell, through its effect on certain angiogenic factors, may play a role in the control of angiogenesis.
GMM-model for Dynamic Multicast Groups using a probabilistic BFS Algorithm

Generalized Multiobjective Multitree model (GMMmodel) considering by the first time multitree-multicast load balancing with splitting in a multiobjective context. To solve the GMM-model, a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) inspired by the Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA) was proposed. In this paper, we extends the GMM-model to dynamic multicast groups (i.e., in which egress nodes can change during the connection’s lifetime). If a multicast tree is recomputed from scratch, it may consume a considerable amount of CPU time and all communication using the multicast tree will be temporarily interrupted. To alleviate these drawbacks we propose a Dynamic Generalized Multiobjective Multitree model (Dynamic-GMM-model) that in order to add new egress nodes makes use of a multicast tree previously computed with GMM-model. To solve the Dynamic-GMM-model, a D-GMM algorithm is proposed. In this case, several path between every node in the multicast transmission paths given by the GMMmodel and the new egress node is found using a probabilistic Breadth First Search (BFS) algorithm which the computational time is polynomial. Experimental results considering up to 11 different objectives are presented for the well-known NSF network. We compare the GMM-model performance using MOEA with the proposed Dynamic-GMM-model using D-GMM-BFS algorithm. The main contributions of this paper are the optimization model for dynamic multicast routing; and the heuristic algorithm proposed with polynomial complexity.