Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SPITZER PLANET LIMITS AROUND THE PULSATING WHITE DWARF GD66

We present infrared observations in search of a planet around the white dwarf, GD66. Time-series photometry of GD66 shows a variation in the arrival time of stellar pulsations consistent with the presence of a planet with mass ⩾2.4 MJ. Any such planet is too close to the star to be resolved, but the planet's light can be directly detected as an excess flux at 4.5 μm. We observed GD66 with the two shorter wavelength channels of the Infrared Array Camera on Spitzer but did not find strong evidence of a companion, placing an upper limit of 5–7 MJ on the mass of the companion, assuming an age of 1.2–1.7 Gyr.
Evaluation Framework for an ERP System using Balanced Scorecard Approach

IFTM Muradabad " The reporting patterns within the ERP system is required to be so powerful that a " weekly dashboard' would be established and it can be used by executives throughout the month to monitor the key indicators " Abstract The overall purpose of this study is to explore whether BSC can be a better indicator to measure ERP system performance and how the initial objectives of ERP implementation affect the later ERP performance. In addition to this the study analyzes, the relations between financial and non-financial perspectives in an ERP Environment.
Teach-in of a robot by showing the motion

A computer controlled life size marionette, which is equipped with twelve mechanical degrees of freedom, can be taught to move by a human dancer. The person carries a rucksack with four flashing infrared light emitting diodes, which are strobed by radio transmission. Two CCD-cameras observe the motions. The generalized coordinates of the dancer are computed by use of the images of the light sources and filtered by several methods. When the same music is played, the marionette shows the choreographical motions of the dancer. The delays of the servo-systems are taken into account and the playback speed is synchronized by correlation control.
A Feasibility and Efficacy Randomized Controlled Trial of an Online Preventative Program for Childhood Obesity: Protocol for the EMPOWER Intervention

Background: The home and family environment is a highly influential psychosocial antecedent of pediatric obesity. Implementation of conventional family- and home-based childhood obesity interventions is challenging for parents, often requiring them to attend multiple educational sessions. Attrition rates for traditional interventions are frequently high due to competing demands for parents’ time. Under such constraints, an Internet-based intervention has the potential to modify determinants of childhood obesity while making judicious use of parents’ time. Theory-based interventions offer many advantages over atheoretical interventions, including reduced intervention dosage, increased likelihood of behavioral change, and efficient resource allocation. Social cognitive theory (SCT) is a robust theoretical framework for addressing childhood obesity. SCT is a behavior change model rooted in reciprocal determinism, a causal paradigm that states that human functioning is the product of a dynamic interplay of behavioral, personal, and environmental factors. Objectives: To evaluate the efficacy of the Enabling Mothers to Prevent Childhood Obesity Through Web-Based Education and Reciprocal Determinism (EMPOWER) program, an Internet-based, theory-driven intervention for preventing childhood overweight and obesity. The project goal is supported by two specific aims: (1) modification of four obesogenic protective factors related to childhood obesity (minutes engaged in physical activity, servings of fruits and vegetables consumed, servings of sugar-sweetened and sugar-free beverages consumed, and minutes engaged in screen time), and (2) reification of five maternal-mediated constructs of SCT (environment, expectations, emotional coping, self-control, and self-efficacy). Methods: We will recruit mothers with children ages 4 to 6 years from childcare centers and randomly assign them to either the theory-based (experimental) or knowledge-based (control) arm of the trial. Data for the intervention will be collected at three intervals: baseline (week 0), posttest (week 4), and follow-up (8 weeks). At each phase of data collection, we will collect from both groups (1) measures of the four obesogenic protective factors, and (2) summated SCT construct scores. Constructs will be measured by a psychometrically valid and reliable SCT-based instrument. Behaviors will be evaluated by a behavior log. We will use a repeated-measures one-between-, one-within-participants design to evaluate intervention results. Constructs will be modified through Web-based learning modules, online interactive worksheets, and mother–child home-based activities. Process evaluation will assess program fidelity.
One Step at a Time: Does Gradualism Build Coordination?

We study how gradualism -- increasing required levels (“thresholds”) of contributions slowly over time rather than requiring a high level of contribution immediately -- affects individuals’ decisions to contribute to a public project. Using a laboratory binary choice minimum-effort coordination game, we randomly assign participants to three treatments: starting and continuing at a high threshold, starting at a low threshold but jumping to a high threshold after a few periods, and starting at a low threshold and gradually increasing the threshold over time (the “gradualism” treatment). We find that individuals coordinate most successfully at the high threshold in the gradualism treatment relative to the other two groups. We propose a theory based on belief updating to explain why gradualism works. We also discuss alternative explanations such as reinforcement learning, conditional cooperation, inertia, preference for consistency, and limited attention. Our findings point to a simple, voluntary mechanism to promote successful coordination when the capacity to impose sanctions is limited.
Stepping towards noiseless Linux environment

Scientific applications are interrupted by the operating system far too often. Historically operating systems have been written efficiently to time-share a single resource, the CPU. We now have an abundance of cores but we are still swapping out the application to run other tasks and therefore increasing the application's time to solution. Current task scheduling in Linux is not tuned for a high performance computing environment, where a single job is running on all available cores. For example, checking for context switches hundreds of times per second is counter-productive in this setting. One solution to this problem is to partition the cores between operating system and application; with the advent of many-core processors this approach is more attractive. This work describes our investigation of isolation of application processes from the operating system using a soft-partitioning scheme. We use increasingly invasive approaches; from configuration changes with available Linux features such as control groups and pinning interrupts using the CPU affinity settings, to invasive source level code changes to try to reduce, or in some cases completely eliminate, application interruptions such as OS clock ticks and timers. Explained here are the measures that can be taken to reduce application interruption solely with compile and run time configurations in a recent unmodified Linux kernel. Although these measures have been available for a some time, to our knowledge, they have never been addressed in an HPC context. We then introduce our invasive method, where we remove the involuntary preemption induced by task scheduling. Our experiments show that parallel applications benefit from these modifications even at relatively small scales. At the modest scale of our testbed, we see a 1.72% improvement that should project into higher benefits at extreme scales.
Re-evaluating Machine Translation Results with Paraphrase Support

In this paper, we present ParaEval, an automatic evaluation framework that uses paraphrases to improve the quality of machine translation evaluations. Previous work has focused on fixed n-gram evaluation metrics coupled with lexical identity matching. ParaEval addresses three important issues: support for paraphrase/synonym matching, recall measurement, and correlation with human judgments. We show that ParaEval correlates significantly better than BLEU with human assessment in measurements for both fluency and adequacy.
Philippine Institute for Development Studies Determinants of Individual Trade Policy Preference in the Philippines Determinants of Individual Trade Policy Preference in the Philippines

Surian sa mga Pag-aaral Pangkaunlaran ng Pilipinas The PIDS Discussion Paper Series constitutes studies that are preliminary and subject to further revisions. They are being circulated in a limited number of copies only for purposes of soliciting comments and suggestions for further refinements. The studies under the Series are unedited and unreviewed. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute. Abstract In a democratic country, economic policies succeed or fail depending on its political support. Open trade policies that were initiated and accepted years ago, in particular, can be reversed, within the limits of the country's international commitments, depending on the government's conviction as well as popular pressure. If trade policy were to be subject to a national vote, doubtless, many would show inclination towards greater protectionism. Using ISSP survey data for the Philippines, the paper examines factors that affect individual preferences towards more protectionism as well as towards greater trade liberalization. It finds, surprisingly, that years of education, economic class, employment in public sector, and urban population negatively correlate with pro-trade attitude. In the case of the negative relation of years of education with pro-trade preference, the authors argue that this has its justification in the Hecksher-Ohlin-Samuelson model of trade and factor returns.
Work-Stealing by Stealing States from Live Stack Frames of a Running Application

The use of a work stealing scheduler has become a popular approach for providing task parallelism. It is used in many modern parallel programming languages, such as Cilk and X10, which have emerged to address the concerns of parallel programming complexity on modern multicore architectures. There are various challenges in providing an efficient implementation of work-stealing, but in any implementation it must be possible for the thief to access the execution state required to perform the stolen task. The natural way to achieve this is to save the necessary state whenever a producer creates stealable work. While the ability to provide some degree of parallelism may dominate performance at scale, it is common for the vast majority of potentially stealable work to never actually be stolen, but instead processed by the producer itself. This indicates that to further improve performance we should minimize the overheads incurred in making work available for stealing. We are not the only ones to make this observation, for example X10’s current C++ work-stealing implementation stack-allocates state objects and lazily copies them to the heap to avoid unnecessary heap allocation during normal execution. In our context of a Java virtual machine, it is possible to extend this idea further and avoid heap allocating state objects, but instead allow thieves to extract state directly from within stack frames of the producer. This is achieved by using state-map information provided by a cooperative runtime compiler, allowing us to drive down the cost of making state available for stealable work items. We discuss our design and preliminary findings for the implementation of our framework inside X10 work-stealing runtime and the optimizing compiler of Jikes RVM, a high-performance Java research virtual machine.
Structure of S. aureus HPPK and the Discovery of a New Substrate Site Inhibitor

The first structural and biophysical data on the folate biosynthesis pathway enzyme and drug target, 6-hydroxymethyl-7,8-dihydropterin pyrophosphokinase (SaHPPK), from the pathogen Staphylococcus aureus is presented. HPPK is the second essential enzyme in the pathway catalysing the pyrophosphoryl transfer from cofactor (ATP) to the substrate (6-hydroxymethyl-7,8-dihydropterin, HMDP). In-silico screening identified 8-mercaptoguanine which was shown to bind with an equilibrium dissociation constant, Kd, of ∼13 µM as measured by isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) and surface plasmon resonance (SPR). An IC50 of ∼41 µM was determined by means of a luminescent kinase assay. In contrast to the biological substrate, the inhibitor has no requirement for magnesium or the ATP cofactor for competitive binding to the substrate site. The 1.65 Å resolution crystal structure of the inhibited complex showed that it binds in the pterin site and shares many of the key intermolecular interactions of the substrate. Chemical shift and 15N heteronuclear NMR measurements reveal that the fast motion of the pterin-binding loop (L2) is partially dampened in the SaHPPK/HMDP/α,β-methylene adenosine 5′-triphosphate (AMPCPP) ternary complex, but the ATP loop (L3) remains mobile on the µs-ms timescale. In contrast, for the SaHPPK/8-mercaptoguanine/AMPCPP ternary complex, the loop L2 becomes rigid on the fast timescale and the L3 loop also becomes more ordered – an observation that correlates with the large entropic penalty associated with inhibitor binding as revealed by ITC. NMR data, including 15N-1H residual dipolar coupling measurements, indicate that the sulfur atom in the inhibitor is important for stabilizing and restricting important motions of the L2 and L3 catalytic loops in the inhibited ternary complex. This work describes a comprehensive analysis of a new HPPK inhibitor, and may provide a foundation for the development of novel antimicrobials targeting the folate biosynthetic pathway.
Galaxy-induced transformation of dark matter haloes

We use N-body/gasdynamical cosmological simulations to examine the effect of the assembly of a central galaxy on the shape and mass profile of its surrounding dark matter halo. Two series of simulations are compared; one that follows only the evolution of the dark matter com- ponent of individual haloes in the propercold dark matter (� CDM) cosmological context, and a second series where a baryonic component is added and followed hydrodynamically. The simulations with baryons include radiative cooling but neglect the formation of stars and their feedback. The efficient, unimpeded cooling that results leads most baryons to collect at the halo centre in a centrifugally supported disc which, due to angular momentum losses, is too small and too massive when compared with typical spiral galaxies. This admittedly unrealistic model allows us, nevertheless, to gauge the maximum effect that galaxies may have in transforming their surrounding dark haloes. We find, in agreement with earlier work, that the shape of the halo becomes more axisymmetric: post galaxy assembly, haloes are trans- formed from triaxial into essentially oblate systems, with well-aligned isopotential contours of roughly constant flattening (� c/a �∼ 0.85). Haloes always contract as a result of galaxy assembly, but the effect is substantially less pronounced than predicted by the traditional 'adiabatic-contraction' hypothesis. The reduced contraction helps to reconcileCDM haloes with constraints on the dark matter content inside the solar circle and should alleviate the longstanding difficulty of matching simultaneously the scaling properties of galaxy discs and the galaxy luminosity function. The halo contraction we report is also less pronounced than found in earlier simulations, a disagreement which suggests that halo contraction is not solely a function of the initial and final distribution of baryons. Not only how much baryonic mass has been deposited at the centre of a halo matters, but also the mode of its deposition. Although simple formulae might work in particular cases where galaxies form nearly adiabatically, in general it might prove impossible to predict the halo response to galaxy formation without a detailed understanding of a galaxy's detailed assembly history.
Volatility processes and volatility forecast with long memory

Abstract We introduce a new family of processes that include the long memory (LM) (power law) in the volatility correlation. This is achieved by measuring the historical volatilities on a set of increasing time horizons and by computing the resulting effective volatility by a sum with power law weights. The processes have two parameters (linear processes) or four parameters (affine processes). In the limit where only one component is included, the processes are equivalent to GARCH(1, 1) and I-GARCH(1). Volatility forecast is discussed in the context of processes with quadratic equations, in particular as a means to estimate process parameters. Using hourly data, the empirical properties of the new processes are compared to existing processes (GARCH, I-GARCH, FIGARCH,…), in particular log-likelihood estimates and volatility forecast errors. This study covers time horizons ranging from 1 h to 1 month. We also study the variation of the estimated parameters with respect to changing sample by introducing a natural coordinate invariant distance. The LM processes show a small but systematic quantitative improvement with respect to the standard GARCH(1, 1) process. Yet, the main advantage of the new LM processes is that they give a good description of the empirical data from 1 h to 1 month, with the same parameters. Their other advantages are that they are efficient to evaluate numerically, that they behave well with respect to the cut-off (i.e. the largest time horizon included in the process) and that they can be extended along several directions.
Transcription Elongation Factor GreA Has Functional Chaperone Activity

Background Bacterial GreA is an indispensable factor in the RNA polymerase elongation complex. It plays multiple roles in transcriptional elongation, and may be implicated in resistance to various stresses. Methodology/Principal Findings In this study, we show that Escherichia coli GreA inhibits aggregation of several substrate proteins under heat shock condition. GreA can also effectively promote the refolding of denatured proteins. These facts reveal that GreA has chaperone activity. Distinct from many molecular chaperones, GreA does not form stable complexes with unfolded substrates. GreA overexpression confers the host cells with enhanced resistance to heat shock and oxidative stress. Moreover, GreA expression in the greA/greB double mutant could suppress the temperature-sensitive phenotype, and dramatically alleviate the in vivo protein aggregation. The results suggest that bacterial GreA may act as chaperone in vivo. Conclusions/Significance These results suggest that GreA, in addition to its function as a transcription factor, is involved in protection of cellular proteins against aggregation.
HETE-2 Localization and Observations of the Gamma-Ray Burst GRB 020813

A bright, long gamma-ray burst (GRB) was detected and localized by the instruments on board the High Energy Transient Explorer 2 satellite (HETE-2) at 02:44:19.17 UTC (9859.17s UT) on 2002 August 13. The location was reported to the GRB Coordinates Network (GCN) about 4min after the burst. In the prompt emission, the burst had a duration of approximately 125s, and more than four peaks. We analyzed the time-resolved 2–400keV energy spectra of the prompt emission of GRB 020813 using the Wide Field X-Ray Monitor (WXM) and the French Gamma Telescope (FREGATE) in detail. We found that the early part of the burst (17–52s after the burst trigger) shows a depletion of low-energy photons below about 50keV. It is difficult to explain the depletion by either synchrotron self-absorption or Comptonization. One possibility is that the low-energy depletion may be understood as a mixture of “jitter” radiation with the usual synchrotron radiation component.
Gestures are strings: efficient online gesture spotting and classification using string matching

Context awareness is one mechanism that allows wearable computers to provide information proactively, unobtrusively and with minimal user disturbance. Gestures and activities are an important aspect of the user's context. Detection and classification of gestures may be computationally expensive for low-power, miniaturized wearable platforms, such as those that may be integrated into garments. In this paper we introduce a novel method for online and real-time spotting and classification of gestures. Continuous user motion, acquired from a body-worn network of inertial sensors, is represented by strings of symbols encoding motion vectors. Fast string matching techniques, inspired from bioinformatics, spot trained gestures and classify them. Robustness to gesture variability is provided by approximate matching efficiently implemented through dynamic programming. Our method is successfully demonstrated by spotting and classifying the occurrences of trained gestures within a continuous recording of a complex bicycle maintenance task. It executes in real-time on a desktop computer with a fraction of CPU time. Only simple integer arithmetic operations are required, which makes this method ideally suited for implementation on body-worn sensor nodes and real-time operation.
Computational Mental Imagery, and Visual Mechanisms for Maintaining a Goal-Subgoal Hierarchy

Mental imagery is one important and powerful mechanism of human cognition that has been little explored in AI research. I present a computational framework for mental imagery which specifies the representational and inferential primitives needed to form an imagery-based reasoning system. I then present a computational model of mental imagery that uses a novel recursive memory structure that I call Recursive Visual Memory (RVM), which provides a purely visual mechanism for maintaining a nested sequence of reasoning goals and subgoals. I tested this model on the same set of reasoning problems attempted by Evans’ classic ANALOGY program and show that, even without any prior geometric concepts such as shapes or lines, the use of RVM enables successful problem solving. I discuss several disciplines of AI that are commonly conflated with mental imagery and show why mental imagery is distinct. I close by considering broader impacts of this work, which include the construction of creative AI systems as well as improved understanding of individual differences in human cognition.