Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adding store to web: migration and synergy effects in multi-channel retailing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the topic of multi-channel retailing. Specifically, the research intends to determine if and to what extent the opening of physical stores by a former web-only retailer reduces or extends overall retail sales, and whether such effects tend to change over time. Empirical analysis focuses on data elaboration from a retailer who has passed from the initial mono-channel model (pure online), to a multi-channel one with the opening of stores. Design/methodology/approach – Through the analysis of an internal data set of a leading consumer electronics retailer applying Probit and Logit estimation techniques, the authors extract information about actual customers’ purchases (or rather retail sales) in three newly opened stores and about online purchases (through an e-commerce web site managed by the same retailer with the same store brand) by people living in the new store service areas before and after the openings. Findings – The paper shows that, for the sin.
Magnetic-force microscopy of vortices in thin niobium films: Correlation between the vortex distribution and the thickness-dependent film morphology

We demonstrate the possibility to reliably image vortices in superconducting Nb films with a low-temperature magnetic-force microscope. Our force microscope enables to monitor the surface topography as well, allowing to correlate the location of the vortices with specific topographic features. For Nb films of different thickness (32 nm − 87 nm) and different Tc (7.9 K − 9.1 K) we studied how the vortex configuration changes when changing the applied magnetic field under field-cooled conditions (1 mT − 5 mT). We find that the vortex pinning preferentially occurs in between the grains appearing at the film surface. This is consistent with a distribution of pinning centers which is governed by the columnar growth of the Nb films. For thicker Nb films the vortex arrangement is no longer dominated by pinning alone, and there appear short-range correlations in the vortex lattice. The short-range correlations are enhanced when increasing the applied magnetic field.
Atherosclerosis and risk for dementia

Atherosclerosis has been implicated in the development of dementia and its major subtypes, Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia. However, support for this association mainly comes from cross‐sectional studies. We investigated the association of atherosclerosis with dementia and subtypes of dementia during long follow‐up, with various noninvasive measures of atherosclerosis.
Chemokine receptor‐dependent alloresponses

Summary: Immunologists have typically viewed alloreactivity schematically as a function of antigen presentation, expansion of alloreactive T and B cells within regional lymphoid tissues, and cellular infiltration and destruction of an allograft. Actual details of the steps between immune activation and accumulation of effector cells within a graft typically have not received much attention. However, just how cells ‘know’ to move to and migrate within a graft or not is proving to be of increasing interest, as the chemokine‐dependent mechanisms underlying leukocyte recruitment to a transplant are dissected. Experimentally, chemokine receptor targeting can prolong or induce permanent allograft survival, despite preservation of alloresponses within secondary lymphoid tissues, whereas current immunosuppressive protocols have only modest effects on chemokine production and leukocyte homing. Recent knowledge of the chemokine‐dependent nature of allograft rejection, acceptance, and tolerance induction are presented as a basis for understanding the rationale for preclinical trials of chemokine receptor‐targeted therapies currently underway in primate recipients of solid organ allografts.
Assessing the influence of gender towards the adoption of technology-enabled self-service systems in retail environments

Traditional brick-and-mortar business is facing several challenges. “Retail companies that want to survive among other retailers will have to make sure their store is more than just a collection of products” (Floor, 2006). Competition is not only driven by other companies but also exists among different sales channels (Brynjolfsson, Hu, and Rahman, 2009). Online business experiences a continuous growth throughout the last years and it is getting harder to reach consumers through traditional channels. Business that previously took place in physical environments now finds itself faced with a variety of new channels. Recent technology merges the real with the virtual world. Particularly in the times of “always on”, consumers perceive the channels that brands provide as one holistic construct. Firms have to keep up with this rapid development in consumer behavior. Today, companies of the modern service-driven economy still strive to be successful by offering a broad choice of products and services (Zagel and Bodendorf, 2012). However, the consumer’s experience with the brand is not only determined by the actual product itself. It is rather a combination of all single experiences gained at each and every touch point. These consist of so-called experiential features that are either of functional/utilitarian or emotional/hedonic nature (Holbrook, 1999; Gentile, Spiller, and Noci, 2007). By evoking fun, pleasure, and other positive emotions during shopping, companies can not only satisfy, but fascinate their consumers over their brands and products. And this can happen best, if brands lead their customers back to the touch point where they have most influence: the physical POS.
On the Global Distribution of Aerosols

Aerosol concentrations were measured during a 54-hour circum-navigation of the earth at altitudes between 238 and 162 millibars and concurrently by a separate flight at lower altitudes over the Pacific Ocean. The aerosol concentrations were found to be symmetrically distributed about the earth. Concurrent meteorological measurements indicate that tropospheric aerosols enter the stratosphere in the vicinity of jet streams and that surface aerosols are carried aloft over the intertropical convergence and Antarctic polar front.
Multiview Positron Attenuation Tomography

Positron attenuation tomography (PAT) is a new modality for imaging the linear attenuation coefficients (LACs) of magnetically constrained $\beta ^{+}$ -ray beams in matter. A complete 3-D LAC image of an object can be made by measuring the positron annihilation rate density within it at a single orientation relative to the beam, and then applying the PAT transformation. The spatial resolution of this image is limited by the resolution of the positron emission tomography (PET), or other, system used to acquire the data as well as the scattering and gyration of the positrons around the magnetic field lines. The finite resolution of the PET system also leads to nonlinear artifacts associated with extended LAC discontinuities parallel to the beam. The mass thickness of an object that can be imaged is limited by the positron beam’s range in it. However, due to the directional nature of the imaging process as well as its discrete sampling, PAT images acquired at different view angles may each carry unique information on the object’s structure. This paper describes a forward model of PAT image formation and a backpropagation algorithm that, when used together to iteratively combine the data from multiple views, can improve the spatial resolution of PAT LAC images, extend their effective field of view, and reduce artifacts. The technique is demonstrated on measured and simulated data.
Analysis of IMC method applied to output current control on DC/DC buck converter - a power led switching on application

In the last years, the advances on power electronics technology have led to many switching converters design, whose switching on-off property is more efficient than traditional rheostat based converters, which power losses are higher. Therefore, the switching converters are present at many devices, like photovoltaic systems, no-break circuits and DC settable voltage sources. A typical DC/DC converter transforms voltage and current between constant levels. Hence, when the application needs an output voltage level lower than input voltage level, it is common to design a step down, or a buck, DC/DC converter; it is the case of power LED switching on. More specifically, light emitter diode (LED) has become increasingly common in power applications, like lighting sources, because its high efficiency characteristic is economically advantageous. However, the power LED, in general, needs an accurate current level supply, because the diode non-linear resistance may lead it to overheat by an overcurrent, damaging it. Thereby, this paper presents the study of the internal model control (IMC) design, applied on the buck converter's output current control, used for supply a power LED, and it analyses the performance parameters comparing it with PI controller used at the same application.
Apoptosis precedes necrosis of fish cell line with infectious pancreatic necrosis virus infection.

The current view of infectious pancreatic necrosis virus (IPNV) infection includes a necrotic process that relies primarily on the histological appearance of tissue after the degenerative process. We tested this view by examining the possibility that apoptosis is a component of double-stranded RNA virus (IPNV) that induces fish embryonic cell death. Four kinds of assays for apoptosis were used in analyzing IPNV-infected CHSE-214 cells: (1) assay with terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT)-mediated end-labeling of DNA in nuclei of intact cells during virus infection, (2) assay for procoagulant activity, (3) assay for DNA ladders, and (4) electron microscopic assays for the ultrastructural changes in characteristic apoptotic cells. In all p.i. samples, both low and high m.o. i. groups contained apoptotic nuclei, according to TdT-mediated dUTP labeling of intact cells, but in control CHSE-214 cells, apoptotic nuclei were rare at all levels of incubation sampled by TdT-mediated dUTP labeling. Prenecrotic or postnecrotic cells were found to express phosphatidylserine on the surface by annexin V-FITC labeling, but normal cells did not. DNAs from both 4 h p.i. of high m.o. i. and 8 h p.i. of low m.o. i. were found to be cleaved into fragments indicative of preferential cleavage at internucleosomal sites. The IPNV-infected CHSE-214 cells were analyzed with an electron microscope and showed a pattern of ultrastructural change, indicating that apoptosis appears before pathological changes of necrosis, including condensed chromatin, fragmented nuclei, nuclei with chromatin marginations, and secondary necrosis from prenecrotic cells in IPNV-infected CHSE-214 cells. Together, these findings show that apoptosis precedes any detectable necrotic change in CHSE-214 cells that is currently viewed as necrosis. Thus, apoptosis characterizes the onset of pathology in host cells and is followed by necrotic processes.
Automatic music transcription using Non-negative matrix factorization

This paper proposes an effective method for the automatic music transcription in polyphonic music. The method consists of a combination of Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), subharmonic summation method and onset detection algorithm. We decompose the magnitude spectrum of a music signal into the spectral component and the temporal information of every note using NMF. Then, the accurate pitch of each note is calculated from the decomposed frequency components based on the subharmonic summation method. And an algorithm for detecting the onset is applied for estimating the temporal information of a musical note. Our method is simple and has a low computational cost, because the method is not a note training-based. The previous researches using NMF detect the pitch and the time duration ‘manually’, therefore the previous methods are difficult to use in the real engineering. Our proposed method improved this problem with ‘automatically’ detecting the fundamental frequency and the rhythm component. Furthermore, the proposed method automatically performed the indexing of the musical notes which is useful in the real engineering field. The transcription performance is evaluated with recorded polyphonic music signals, and the performance of the proposed method is better than the conventional NMF based methods in estimating both frequency component and time duration information.
Activation of p21-Activated Kinase 2 by Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Nef Induces Merlin Phosphorylation

ABSTRACT The accessory human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) protein Nef activates the autophosphorylation activity of p21-activated kinase 2 (PAK2). Merlin, a cellular substrate of PAK2, is homologous to the ezrin-radixin-moesin family and plays a critical role in Rac signaling. To assess the possible impact on host cell metabolism of Nef-induced PAK2 activation, we investigated the phosphorylation of merlin in Nef expressing cells. Here we report that Nef induces merlin phosphorylation in multiple cell lines independently of protein kinase A. This intracellular phosphorylation of merlin directly correlates with in vitro assay of the autophosphorylation activity of Nef-activated PAK2. Importantly, merlin phosphorylation induced by Nef was also observed in human primary T cells. The finding that Nef induces phosphorylation of the key signaling molecule merlin suggests several possible roles for PAK2 activation in HIV pathogenesis.
Dual Roles of Gln137 of Actin Revealed by Recombinant Human Cardiac Muscle α-Actin Mutants*

The actin filament is quite dynamic in the cell. To determine the relationship between the structure and the dynamic properties of the actin filament, experiments using actin mutants are indispensable. We focused on Gln137 to understand the relationships between two activities: the conformational changes relevant to the G- to F-actin transition and the activation of actin ATPase upon actin polymerization. To elucidate the function of Gln137 in these activities, we characterized Gln137 mutants of human cardiac muscle α-actin. Although all of the single mutants, Q137E, Q137K, Q137P, and Q137A, as well as the wild type were expressed by a baculovirus-based system, only Q137A and the wild type were purified to high homogeneity. The CD spectrum of Q137A was similar to that of the wild type, and Q137A showed the typical morphology of negatively stained Q137A F-actin images. However, Q137A had an extremely low critical concentration for polymerization. Furthermore, we found that Q137A polymerized 4-fold faster, cleaved the γ-phosphate group of bound ATP 4-fold slower, and depolymerized 5-fold slower, as compared with the wild-type rates. These results suggest that Gln137 plays dual roles in actin polymerization, in both the conformational transition of the actin molecule and the mechanism of ATP hydrolysis.
Easy 3D Mapping for Indoor Navigation of Micro UAVs

Indoor operation of micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV or UAS) is significantly simplified with the capability for indoor localization as well as a sufficiently precise 3D map of the facility. Creation of 3D maps based on the available architectural information should on the one hand provide a map of sufficient precision and on the other limit complexity to a manageable level. This paper presents a box based approach for easy generation of 3D maps to serve as the basis for indoor navigation of UAS. The basic building block employed is a 3D axis parallel box (APB). Unions of APBs constitute maps, which are by definition closed to basic set operations such as; union, intersection, set difference etc. The restriction to APBs is made in accordance with the tradeoff between simplicity and expressiveness, where real time requirements emphasize simplicity. The mapping approach is presented along with different approaches of selecting via points ensuring sufficiently efficient path planning and at the same time ensuring scalability by keeping complexity low. A proposition for minimal via point assignment is ensuring at least feasibility of path planning is presented. Feasibility is not proved formally. Instead results from a randomized statistical proof are given. 3D Mapping, via point assignment and calibration are all implemented in a stand alone software application. The application program provides, through a graphical user interface, the possibility to map indoor environments based on existing 2D floor maps.
Using spectral discretisation for the optimal ℋ 2 design of time-delay systems

The stabilisation and robustification of a time-delay system is the topic of this article. More precisely, we want to minimise the ℋ2 norm of the transfer function corresponding to the class of linear time-invariant input–output systems with fixed time delays in the states. Due to the presence of the delays, the transfer function is a nonrational, nonlinear function, and the classical procedure which involves solving Lyapunov equations is no longer applicable. We therefore propose an approach based on a spectral discretisation applied to a reformulation of the time-delay system as an infinite-dimensional standard linear system. In this way, we obtain a large delay-free system, which serves as an approximation to the original time-delay system, and which allows the application of standard ℋ2 norm optimisation techniques. We give an interpretation of this approach in the frequency domain and relate it to the approximation of the nonlinear terms in the time-delay transfer function by means of a rational function. Using this property, we can provide some insight into the convergence behaviour of the approximation, justifying its use for the purpose of ℋ2 norm computation. Along with this, the easy availability of derivatives with respect to the original matrices allows for an efficient integration into any standard optimisation framework. A few numerical examples finally illustrate how the presented method can be employed to perform optimal ℋ2 norm design using smooth optimisation techniques.
E-services security assessment model

Information security plays an extremely important role in e-services, as the e-services are vulnerable to various kinds of security and privacy threats on the Internet. The paper presents a formal model of e-services considering four different abstraction levels: application, middleware, operating system and network. Various security threats to e-services and security services to prevent these threats are described. The security level of e-services is determined by the weighted sum of security ratings of individual security services.
Piracy prevention methods in software business

There are various forms of piracy in software business, and many prevention techniques have been developed against them. Forms of software piracy are, for example, cracks and serials, softlifting and hard disk loading, internet piracy and software counterfeiting, mischanneling, reverse engineering, and tampering. There are various prevention methods that target these types of piracy, although all of these methods have been broken. The piracy prevention measures can be divided into ethical, legal, and technical measures. Technical measures include measures like obfuscation and tamper-proofing, for example. However, relying on a single method does not provide complete protection from attacks against intellectual property, so companies wishing to protect their product should consider combining multiple methods of piracy prevention.
The design of a CAMDF-based pitch recognition embedded module and its applications for mobile consumer devices

This paper presents a speech interactivity embedded module (PREM) that is quite simplified and suitable for command-driven recognition applications. The proposed PREM adopts circular average magnitude different function (CAMDF)-based pitch feature extractor and dynamic time warping (DTW)-based recognizer. The simulated experiments indicate the performance is improved considerably relative to the conventional LPCC-based DTW method. In addition, we apply the proposed PREM design for wireless master/slave architecture for mobile consumer devices, providing a cost effective solution to meet the request of real-time and flexibility in embedded system prototype development. It also encourages concurrent development of different parts of system hardware as well as module reusing.
Problematic Internet Use among Internet Café Users in China

Problematic Internet use (PIU), defined as “ excessive use or addictive tendencies toward the Internet ” (Czincz and Hechanova 2009), is an issue of global importance, particularly among adolescents. The Chinese media often portray Internet caf é s as places where young people only play online games and waste time. This chapter reviews the incidence of PIU among Internet caf é users in China. A distinction is made between Internet overuse and users with addiction tendencies. It finds that of the 976 users surveyed, 2.2 percent could be defined as Internet “ addicts, ” and another 16 percent display some signs of overuse. Males between 18 and 25 years old, and self-identifying as coming from a rural area, are most likely to display signs of PIU. There are significant differences between Internet addicts, overusers, and common users. Overusers start to use the Internet or Internet caf é s at a younger age; they also visit more caf é s, spend more time there, prefer to use Internet caf é s located near them, play more games, and believe that the option to use the Internet caf é overnight is an important feature. Willingness to pay for Internet caf é services does not vary much between problematic Internet users and ordinary users. Nevertheless, “ addicted ” users show greater willingness to visit Internet caf é s more often should the price of services come down. This suggests that subsidies lowering the price to encourage more use among low-income people would also induce problematic users to spend even more time in Internet caf é s. However, limiting overnight Internet caf é use while increasing government subsidies for Internet caf é s in rural areas or those servicing low-income users could increase information and communication technology penetration without encouraging problematic Internet use.
The antitumor properties of a nontoxic, nitric oxide–modified version of saquinavir are independent of Akt

Application of the HIV protease inhibitor saquinavir (Saq) to cancer chemotherapy is limited by its numerous side effects. To overcome this toxicity, we modified the original compound by covalently attaching a nitric oxide (NO) group. We compared the efficacy of the parental and NO-modified drugs in vitro and in vivo. The novel compound saquinavir-NO (Saq-NO) significantly reduced the viability of a wide spectrum of human and rodent tumor cell lines at significantly lower concentration than the unmodified drug. In contrast to Saq, Saq-NO had no effect on the viability of primary cells and drastically reduced B16 melanoma growth in syngeneic C57BL/6 mice. In addition, at the equivalent of the 100% lethal dose of Saq, Saq-NO treatment caused no apparent signs of toxicity. Saq-NO blocked the proliferation of C6 and B16 cells, up-regulated p53 expression, and promoted the differentiation of these two cell types into oligodendrocytes or Schwann-like cells, respectively. Although it has been well documented that Saq decreases tumor cell viability by inhibiting Akt, the anticancer properties of Saq-NO were completely independent of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/Akt signaling pathway. Moreover, Saq-NO transiently up-regulated Akt phosphorylation, delivering a protective signal that could be relevant for primary cell protection and the absence of drug toxicity in vivo. It was unlikely that released NO was independently responsible for these drug effects because Saq-NO treatment increased intracellular and secreted NO levels only slightly. Rather, the chemical modification seems to have produced a qualitatively new chemical entity, which may have a unique mode of action against cancer cells. [Mol Cancer Ther 2009;8(5):1169–78]