Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identifying city center using human travel flows generated from location-based social networking data

Since cities become more complex and some of large cities are likely to be polycentric, a better understanding of cities requires a clear topology that reveals how city centers are spatially distributed and interacted. The identification of city center that aims to find out accurate location of city center or delineate city center with a precise boundary becomes vital. This work attempts to achieve this by using a new type of movement data generated from location-based social networks, whereby three different methods are deployed for clustering and compared regarding identification of city centers and delineation of their boundaries. Experiments show that city centers with precise boundaries can be identified by using the proposed approach with location-based social network data. In further, it finds out that the three methods for clustering have different advantages and disadvantages during the process of city center identification, and thus seem to be suitable for cities with different urban structures.
Exercise, employment, other daily activities, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.

The relations of exercise, employment, and other daily activities during pregnancy with pregnancy outcomes were examined using data from the Missouri Maternal and Infant Health Survey. Maternal surveys were available for the following singleton birth categories: 450 fetal deaths; 782 very low birth weight (VLBW, < 1,500 g); 802 moderately low birth weight (MLBW, 1,500-2,499 g); and 794 normal birth weight (NBW, > or = 2,500 g). All mothers were Missouri residents at the time of their December 1989 to March 1991 deliveries. It was found that VLBW mothers had exercised during pregnancy significantly less than NBW mothers. When compared with NBW mothers before pregnancy, VLBW mothers had been just as likely not to exercise as NBW mothers (odds ratio (OR) = 0.88, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.69-1.12). During the first, second, and third trimesters, the odds ratios decreased to 0.70 (95% CI 0.53-0.92), 0.54 (95% CI 0.40-0.74), and 0.33 (95% CI 0.20-0.53), respectively. The VLBW mothers also were less likely to exercise during the third trimester than MLBW mothers (OR = 0.34, 95% CI 0.21-0.54) or mothers with fetal deaths (OR = 0.36, 95% CI 0.19-0.67). During the 3 months after pregnancy, none of the exercise odds ratios were statistically significant between groups. No significantly increased risks were found between employment during pregnancy or other daily activities and adverse pregnancy outcome. The study supports the recently relaxed guidelines of exercise during pregnancy.
Learning to Serve and Bounce a Ball

In this paper we investigate learning the tasks of ball serving and ball bouncing. These tasks display characteristics which are common in a variety of motor skills. To learn the required motor skills for these tasks the robot uses Relative Entropy Policy Search which is a state of the art method in Policy Search Reinforcement Learning. Our experiments show that REPS does not only converge consistently to good solutions, but also robust solutions.
Monocular 3-D Gait Tracking in Surveillance Scenes

Gait recognition can potentially provide a noninvasive and effective biometric authentication from a distance. However, the performance of gait recognition systems will suffer in real surveillance scenarios with multiple interacting individuals and where the camera is usually placed at a significant angle and distance from the floor. We present a methodology for view-invariant monocular 3-D human pose tracking in man-made environments in which we assume that observed people move on a known ground plane. First, we model 3-D body poses and camera viewpoints with a low dimensional manifold and learn a generative model of the silhouette from this manifold to a reduced set of training views. During the online stage, 3-D body poses are tracked using recursive Bayesian sampling conducted jointly over the scene's ground plane and the pose-viewpoint manifold. For each sample, the homography that relates the corresponding training plane to the image points is calculated using the dominant 3-D directions of the scene, the sampled location on the ground plane and the sampled camera view. Each regressed silhouette shape is projected using this homographic transformation and is matched in the image to estimate its likelihood. Our framework is able to track 3-D human walking poses in a 3-D environment exploring only a 4-D state space with success. In our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate the significant improvements of the homographic alignment over a commonly used similarity transformation and provide quantitative pose tracking results for the monocular sequences with a high perspective effect from the CAVIAR dataset.
Porter's Generic Strategies: An Exploratory Study of Their Use In Japan

While the use of Porter's generic strategies have been well documented inAmerica and Europe, no studies have assessed their use in Japan. This researchinvestigates if Japanese companies are indeed following Porter's genericstrategies or continuing to follow more traditional "Japanese" managementstrategies. Using a survey to operationalize Porter's generic strategies, Japanesemanagers were questioned about their firm's current strategic practices. Afactor analysis revealed Japanese firms are following only two strategies thatcould be identified as those of Porter. A cost leadership strategy was the mostfrequently used strategy, and the differentiation strategy was used the least.There was no evidence of organizations using a focus strategy. Interestingly,two additional strategies emerged that did not fit Porter's research but are inline with traditional Japanese strategies including a supply chain focus and atraining based strategy.
Peering through the stellar wind of IGR J19140+0951 with simultaneous INTEGRAL/RXTE observations

We have used the RXTE and INTEGRAL satellites simultaneously to observe the high-mass X-ray binary (HMXB) IGR J19140+0951. The spectra obtained in the 3-80 keV range have allowed us to perform a precise spectral analysis of the system along its binary orbit. The spectral evolution confirms the supergiant nature of the companion star and the neutron star nature of the compact object. Using a simple stellar wind model to describe the evolution of the photoelectric absorption, we were able to restrict the orbital inclination angle in the range 38°-75°. This analysis leads to a wind mass-loss rate from the companion star of ∼5 x 10 -8 M ⊙ yr -1 , consistent with an OB I spectral type. We have detected a soft excess in at least four observations, for the first time for this source. Such soft excesses have been reported in several HMXBs in the past. We discuss the possible origin of this excess, and suggest, based on its spectral properties and occurrences around the superior conjunction, that it may be explained as the reprocessing of the X-ray emission originating from the neutron star by the surrounding ionized gas.
You Too ? ! Mixed-Initiative LDA istress

Adolescent cyber-bullying on social networks is a phenomenon that has received widespread attention. Recent work by sociologists has examined this phenomenon under the larger context of teenage drama and it's manifestations on social networks. Tackling cyber-bullying involves two key components – automatic detection of possible cases, and interaction strategies that encourage reflection and emotional support. Key is showing distressed teenagers that they are not alone in their plight. Conventional topic spotting and document classification into labels like "dating" or "sports" are not enough to effectively match stories for this task. In this work, we examine a corpus of 5500 stories from distressed teenagers from a major youth social network. We combine Latent Dirichlet Allocation and human interpretation of its output using principles from sociolinguistics to extract high-level themes in the stories and use them to match new stories to similar ones. A user evaluation of the story matching shows that theme-based retrieval does a better job of finding relevant and effective stories for this application than conventional approaches.
Relevance of initial and final conditions for the fluctuation relation in Markov processes

Numerical observations on a Markov chain and on the continuous Markov process performed with a granular tracer show that the ‘usual’ fluctuation relation for a given observable is not verified for finite (but arbitrarily large) times. This suggests that some terms which are usually expected to be negligible, i.e. ‘border terms’ dependent only on initial and final states, in fact cannot be neglected. Furthermore, the Markov chain and the granular tracer behave in a quite similar fashion.
Performance Evaluation of On-demand Multicasting Routing Protocols in Mobile Adhoc Networks

Mobile adhoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless nodes that dynamically create a wireless network among them without using any infrastructure. Nodes are free to move, independent of each other which makes routing much difficult. The routing protocols in MANET should be more dynamic so that they quickly respond to topological changes. On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol is a protocol for routing multicast and unicast traffic throughout adhoc wireless mesh networks. ODMRP creates routes on demand so they suffer from a route acquisition delay, although it helps reduce network traffic in general. In this paper simulation based experiments are performed to analyze the performance of On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol by evaluating Packet Delivery Ratio, End to End delay and average throughput. These results are compared with AODV and FSR routing protocols by varying number of nodes and mobility. The comparison shows that ODMRP for adhoc networks performs better as compared to AODV and FSR.
Comparison on the rule based method and statistical based method on emotion classification for Indonesian Twitter text

In this study, we conducted experiments on emotion classification of Indonesian Twitter text. To conduct such experiments, we built a corpus of labeled Twitter data with size of 7622 Twitter text taken from 69 Twitter accounts, manually labeled by 5 native speakers. We used 6 basic emotion labels (angry, disgust, fear, joy, sad, surprise) and add one label of neutral emotion class. Here, we compared a rule based method with a statistical based method. In the rule based method, we employed the existing Synesketch algorithm with two types of emotion word list: a manually written and a translated WordNet-Affect list. In the statistical based method, we employed SVM (Support Vector Machine) algorithm with unigram feature and feature selection algorithms of Information Gain and Minimum Frequency. Other than a pure statistical based method, we also employed the manually built emotion word list in the SVM based classification. In the text pre-processing, we compared several methods such as the normalization, emotion conversion, stop words removal, number removal, and a one-character token removal. The experimental results showed that the statistical based method result of 71.740% accuracy score is higher than the rule based method of 63.172% accuracy score. To enhance the accuracy, we employed SMOTE in order to handle the imbalanced data and achieved best result with the f-measure of 83.203%. In another experiment, we combined the pure statistical method with the rule based method by employing the manually word list into the classification features. The f-measure for this experiment has only reached 81.592%.
Fingerprint based symmetric cryptography

Key management is an important issue in traditional symmetric cryptography. It consists of key generation, key modification and key sharing to establish a message communication between partners. In general, a randomly generated key is shared with the counter partner by transmitting it along with the message or prior to the message communication. Maintaining privacy of cryptographic key determines the security of cryptography. Biometric is the alternate to maintain the privacy of key by protecting it with users biometric from unauthorized access. In this paper, a cryptographic key is linked with users fingerprint data. A string of binary number as cryptographic key is extracted from fingerprint template and this key is used to encrypt a message. During decryption process, the user is able to generate that cryptographic key from a fresh fingerprint instance to decrypt the encrypted message.
Lack of Evidence for Reproductive Isolation among Ecologically Specialised Lycaenid Butterflies

1. The evolution of reproductive isolation between recently diverged or incipient species is a critical component of speciation and a major focus of speciation models. In phytophagous insects, host plant fidelity (the habit of mating and ovipositing on a single host species) can contribute to assortative mating and reproductive isolation between populations adapting to alternative hosts. The potential role of host plant fidelity in the evolution of reproductive isolation was examined in a pair of North American blue butterfly species, Lycaeides idas and L. melissa. 2. These species are morphologically distinct and populations of each species utilise different host plants; however they share 410 bp haplotypes of the mito-chondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene, indicating recent divergence. 3. Some populations using native hosts exhibited strong fidelity for their natal host plant over the hosts used by nearby populations. Because these butterflies mate on or near the host plant, the development of strong host fidelity may create reproductive isolation among populations on different hosts and restrict gene flow. 4. Tests of population differentiation using allozyme allele frequency data did not provide convincing evidence of restricted gene flow among populations. Based on morphological differences, observed ecological specialisation, and the sharing of genetic markers, these butterflies appear to be undergoing adaptive radiation driven at least partially by host shifts. Neutral genetic markers may fail to detect the effects of very recent host shifts in these populations due to gene flow and/or the recency of divergence and shared ancestral polymorphism.
Settling It on the Field

Using a sample of battlefield data from twentieth-century wars, the author of this article tests a number of previously untested hypotheses linking battle events and the decision to end violent conflict. The author explores how factors like the distribution of power, battlefield casualties, and information that flows from the battlefield influence war termination. The analysis speaks to the validity of competing rational choice theories of war termination.
Apitherapy: Usage And Experience In German Beekeepers

This study aimed to investigate the practice of apitherapy - using bee products such as honey, pollen, propolis, royal jelly and bee venom to prevent or treat illness and promote healing - among German beekeepers and to evaluate their experiences with these therapies. A questionnaire incorporating two instruments on beekeepers’ physical and mental health and working practice was included in three German beekeeping journals and readers were asked to complete it. The instrument included questions on the use of apitherapy. Simple descriptive methods, bivariate correlation, cross-tabulation and one-way ANOVA were used to analyze the data. Altogether 1059 completed questionnaires were received. The beekeepers reported the most effective and favorable therapeutic effects with honey, followed by propolis, pollen and royal jelly. The factors associated with successful experiences were: age, number of hives tended, health consciousness, positive experiences with one product and self-administration of treatment. Beekeepers were asked for which condition they would employ propolis and pollen. They reported that they used propolis most frequently to treat colds, wounds and burns, sore throats, gum disorders and also as a general prophylactic, while pollen was most commonly used as a general prophylactic and, less frequently, in treating prostate diseases. No adverse experiences were reported. The potential benefit of bee products is supported by the positive experiences of a large group of beekeepers who use some of these products to treat a wide range of conditions. The indications and treatments given here may be important in selecting bee products and designing future trials.
Coordinated Self-Adaptation in Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Overlays

Self-adaptive systems typically rely on a closed control loop which detects when the current behavior deviates too much from the optimal one, determines new optimal values for system parameters, and applies changes to the system configuration. In decentralized systems, implementing each of these steps is challenging, especially when nodes need to coordinate their local configurations. In this paper, we propose a decentralized method to automatically tune global system parameters in a coordinated manner. We use gossip-based protocols to continuously monitor system properties and to disseminate parameter updates. We show that this method applied to a decentralized resource selection service allows the system to quickly adapt to changes in workload types and node properties, and only incurs a negligible communication overhead.
Targeted Derepression of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Long Terminal Repeat by Pyrrole-Imidazole Polyamides

ABSTRACT The host factor LSF represses the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 long terminal repeat (LTR) by mediating recruitment of histone deacetylase. We show that pyrrole-imidazole polyamides targeted to the LTR can specifically block LSF binding both in vitro and within cells via direct access to chromatin, resulting in increased LTR expression.
A Multiscale Approach for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Applications to Image Classification

We use a multiscale approach to reduce the time to produce the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) of a matrix A, that is, A ≈ WH. We also investigate QR factorization as a method for initializing W during the iterative process for producing the nonnegative matrix factorization of A. Finally, we use our approach to produce nonnegative matrix factorizations for classifying images and compare it to the standard approach in terms of classification accuracy.
Does it get better? Change in depressive symptoms from late-adolescence to early-adulthood, disordered eating behaviors, and sexual identity

Abstract Sexual minority youth are often described as at-risk for mental health comorbidities, including disordered eating behavior (DEB) and depression. This study assesses differences in late-adolescent DEB and depressive symptoms among gay/lesbian, bisexual, or mostly heterosexual individuals, and how their symptoms change across early adulthood. While sexual minority youth were more likely to report DEB and elevated depressive symptoms in late adolescence relative to exclusively heterosexual peers, gay/lesbian individuals experienced improvement in early-adulthood depressive symptoms. Conversely, bisexual individuals maintained elevated depressive symptoms into early adulthood, and additional depressive symptoms associated with DEB. DEB may be a unique risk factor shaping the mental health of bisexual youth.
UMARAM: A novel fast encryption algorithm for data security in local area network

Hacking is one of the greatest problems in the wireless local area networks. Many algorithms have been used to prevent the outside attacks to eavesdrop or prevent the data to be transferred to the end-user safely and correctly. In this paper, two type of Symmetric encryption algorithms introduced, they are 1. UMARAM 2. IMAkey Algorithm. These two algorithms a new symmetrical encryption algorithm is proposed that prevents the outside attacks. The new algorithm avoids key exchange between users and reduces the time taken for the encryption and decryption. It operates at high data rate in comparison with The Data Encryption Standard (DES), Triple DES (TDES), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256), and RC6 algorithms. The IMAKey is a key generation algorithm based on random extraction of data from an image file. The algorithm is demonstrated in MATLAB and tested for key randomness and effect of image size on key generated. It is used for generating 1st key in the AES encryption process. The results for same plaintext input and different keys are obtained and analyzed. The new algorithm is applied successfully on both text file, voice message, And Image File.
Yin-Cold or Yang-Heat Syndrome Type of Traditional Chinese Medicine Was Associated with the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Gene Status in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients: Confirmation of a TCM Concept

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) therapies should be tailored according to the different syndrome types. In order to identify the relationship between the TCM Yin-cold (YC) or Yang-heat (YH) syndrome types and the EGFR gene status, we prospectively studied 310 NSCLC patients. TCM YH or YC was diagnosed by three TCM experts. TCM symptoms and signs were entered into a binary cluster analysis. The relationships between the EGFR gene status, YH or YC syndrome types, and classification by cluster analysis were analyzed using the chi-square test and multivariate logistic regression. In the 299 patients who had their EGFR gene tested, 45.24% YC (76/168) and 25.95% YH (34/131) patients had EGFR mutations (p = 0.001). Among the 292 patients entered into the cluster analysis, 132 were classified into group A, with signs and symptoms similar to YC, whereas 160 group B patients were similar to YH. In the 281 patients with EGFR tested, 45.67% group A (58/127) and 28.57% group B patients (44/154) had EGFR mutations (p = 0.003). The EGFR status was independently correlated with TCM syndrome type and classification by cluster analysis on multivariate logistic regression. NSCLC patients with YC were more likely to have EGFR gene mutations.
Cloning , Upregulation , and Mitogenic Role of Porcine P 2 Y 2 Receptor in Coronary Artery Smooth Muscle Cells

Previous work has shown upregulation of a UTP-sensitive P2Y receptor in porcine coronary smooth muscle cells (CSMC) of organ-cultured arteries. However, the molecular identity and functional role of this putative receptor remained undefined. Here, we report the cloning of the cDNA for this receptor that encodes an open reading frame for a protein of 373 amino acids with highest homology to the human P2Y 2 receptor (84%). Heterologous expression of this receptor in 1321N1 cells revealed a novel pharmacology in that UTP and ITP were full agonists and UTP was more potent and efficacious than ATP for increasing intracellular [Ca 2+ ] and ERK phosphorylation. Stimulation of sub-cultured CSMC with UTP, ITP or ATP induced a concentration-dependent increase in cellular DNA content, protein synthesis, cell number, and PCNA expression, indicating a mitogenic role for P2Y 2 receptors. This was supported by the finding that treatment of CSMC with anti-sense oligonucleotides to the cloned cDNA sequence significantly inhibited UTP-and ATP-induced DNA and protein synthesis. In addition, RT-PCR analysis showed that P2Y 2 receptor mRNA was dramatically increased in cells of organ-cultured arteries as compared with freshly harvested arteries, whereas the P2Y 6 receptor mRNA level was unchanged and P2Y 4 receptor mRNA was undetectable. This P2Y 2 subtype-specific upregulation was confirmed in cells of coronary arteries stented in vivo. In conclusion, we have cloned the porcine P2Y 2 receptor with novel pharmacology and demonstrated that this receptor is upregulated in CSMC of in vitro organ cultures or in vivo stented coronary arteries to mediate the mitogenic effects of nucleotides.