Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
La reconfiguration des universités selon l'OCDE [Économie du savoir et politique de l'innovation]

Depuis la parution, en 1996, d’un rapport de l’OCDE intitule L’Economie fondee sur le savoir, le cadre analytique de « l’economie du savoir » a ete standardise dans l’ensemble du discours des organisations internationales et des pouvoirs publics. Associee tres etroitement a la notion de « nouvelle economie », cette theorie est progressivement devenue le paradigme des politiques publiques des pays de l’OCDE, et plus particulierement de leurs « politiques de l’innovation ». Le caractere performatif de ce cadre conceptuel s’inscrit dans une strategie internationale de reconfiguration majeure de la place des universites dans le contexte de la mondialisation de la production, de la diffusion et de l’utilisation des connaissances. La « nouvelle production du savoir » proclame (malgre les multiples desaccords dont cette theorie fait l’objet) que la standardisation des « systemes nationaux d’innovation » (reliant entreprises, universites et gouvernements) serait necessaire : elle permettrait la stabilisation du marche de l’emploi par l’education et la formation adequate du « personnel hautement qualifie » de plus en plus indispensable a la croissance economique des pays industrialises. Plutot que de chercher a mesurer les consequences induites par les nouveaux arrangements institutionnels, et tenir compte des conflits de legitimite pouvant en resulter, les rapports de l’OCDE se limitent trop souvent a rendre compte d’un nombre restreint de « pratiques exemplaires » servant de vitrine a « la politique de l’innovation » des pouvoirs publics.
Increased Residual Force Enhancement in Older Adults Is Associated with a Maintenance of Eccentric Strength

Despite an age-related loss of voluntary isometric and concentric strength, muscle strength is well maintained during lengthening muscle actions (i.e., eccentric strength) in old age. Additionally, in younger adults during lengthening of an activated skeletal muscle, the force level observed following the stretch is greater than the isometric force at the same muscle length. This feature is termed residual force enhancement (RFE) and is believed to be a combination of active and passive components of the contractile apparatus. The purpose of this study was to provide an initial assessment of RFE in older adults and utilize aging as a muscle model to explore RFE in a system in which isometric force production is compromised, but structural mechanisms of eccentric strength are well-maintained. Therefore, we hypothesised that older adults will experience greater RFE compared with young adults. Following a reference maximal voluntary isometric contraction (MVC) of the dorsiflexors in 10 young (26.1±2.7y) and 10 old (76.0±6.5y) men, an active stretch was performed at 15°/s over a 30° ankle joint excursion ending at the same muscle length as the reference MVCs (40° of plantar flexion). Any additional torque compared with the reference MVC therefore represented RFE. In older men RFE was ∼2.5 times greater compared to young. The passive component of force enhancement contributed ∼37% and ∼20% to total force enhancement, in old and young respectively. The positive association (R 2 = 0.57) between maintained eccentric strength in old age and RFE indicates age-related mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of eccentric strength likely contributed to the observed elevated RFE. Additionally, as indicated by the greater passive force enhancement, these mechanisms may be related to increased muscle series elastic stiffness in old age.
Looking Beyond the Numbers: Stakeholders and Multiple School Accountability

How to hold autonomous schools and school governing boards accountable for their decisions and performance has become a particularly pressing question for central governments in many OECD countries. Increasing complexity in education systems has led to a greater degree of freedom in decision making for many local authorities, school governing boards and schools. However despite this increasing decentralisation, central governments are still held responsible by the general public for ensuring high quality education. During the last ten years, school accountability has become a critical topic, triggered by the results of international benchmarks such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). This paper analyses trends in accountability mechanisms and processes and argues that vertical measures of accountability, that is, regulatory and school performance accountability, can be usefully augmented by horizontal measures involving multiple stakeholders. This system of multiple school accountability aims to efficiently and effectively take into account the nuanced nature and purposes of education. By combining various forms of accountability, it has the potential to enhance the overall education system, policy for reform, and therefore ultimately improve the quality of education. Comment rendre les ecoles et leurs conseils d’administration plus responsables dans leurs prises de decisions et leur performance est une question pressante pour les gouvernements centraux, eu egard aux complexites croissantes, dans la majeure partie des pays de l’OCDE. L’une des meilleures reponses a cette complexite est la decentralisation de la prise de decisions administratives, c'est-a-dire l’octroit aux autorites locales, aux conseils d’administration et aux ecoles d’un plus grand degre de liberte, dans leurs prises de decisions. Toutefois pour le grand public, en depit d’une decentralisation accrue la responsabilite de garantir une education de tres grande qualite incombe toujours aux gouvernements centraux. Ces dix dernieres annees, la responsabilite des ecoles est un sujet crucial, declenche par les resultats de criteres internationaux tels que le Programme international pour le suivi des acquis des eleves (PISA) et l'Enquete internationale sur les mathematiques et les sciences (TIMSS). Ce document analyse les tendances de ces mecanismes et de ces processus et defend l'argument que la responsabilite verticale, qui est la plus repandue dans le systeme scolaire, peut-etre enrichie par des mesures horizontales impliquant les parties prenantes. Ce systeme de partage des responsabilites a pour but de prendre en compte la nature nuancee et les differents propos de l'education. En combinant plusieurs formes de directions, il permet d'ameliorer le systeme educatif, les politiques de reformes, et par consequent d'ameliorer la qualite de l'education.
Serum Levels of IL-10 and IL-17A in Occult HBV-Infected South-East Iranian Patients

Background and Aims Occult hepatitis B infected (OBI) patients can not completely eradicate hepatitis B virus-DNA (HBV-DNA) from their liver and peripheral blood. The main aim of this study was to investigate the Interleukin (IL)-10and IL-17A serum levels in patients suffering from OBI. Material and Methods In this observational study, plasma samples of 3700 blood donors were tested for hepatitis Bsurface antigen (HBsAg) and antibodies to the hepatitis B core antigen (anti-HBc), using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The HBsAg-/anti-HBc+ samples were selected and screened for HBV-DNA, using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). HBV-DNA positive samples were assigned as OBI cases and IL-10 and IL-17 serum levels were detected using ELISA. Results The results demonstrated that, 352 (9.5%) out of 3700 blood samples were HBsAg-/anti-HBc+ and HBV-DNA was detected in 57/352 (16.1%) of the HBsAg-/anti-HBc+ samples. Our results showed that the IL-10 and IL-17A serum levels increased significantly in the OBI cases in comparison to the controls (P < 0.001). Conclusions According to the results of this study the higher level of IL-10 production may suppress the functioning of the immune system against HBV in OBI patients. The elevated IL-17A serum level also indicates a long period of infection in the patients observed.
Crying wolf? On the price discrimination of online airline tickets

Price discrimination refers to the practice of dynamically varying the prices of goods based on a customer's purchasing power and willingness to pay. In this paper, motivated by several anecdotal ac-counts, we report on a three-week experiment, conducted in search of price discrimination in airline tickets. Despite presenting the companies with multiple opportunities for discriminating us, and contrary to our expectations, we do not find any evidence for systematic price discrimi-nation. At the same time, we witness the highly volatile prices of certain airlines which make it hard to establish cause and effect. Finally, we provide alternative explanations for the observed price differences.
Studies on Resilient Control Through Multiagent Consensus Networks Subject to Disturbances

Resiliency is one of the most critical objectives found in complex industrial applications today and designing control systems to provide resiliency is an open problem. This paper proposes resilient control design guidelines for industrial systems that can be modeled as networked multiagent consensus systems subject to disturbances or noise. We give a general analysis of multiagent consensus networks in the presence of different disturbances from the input-to-output stability point of view. Using a nonsingular linear transformation, some necessary and sufficient results are established for disturbed multiagent consensus networks by taking advantage of the input-to-state stability theory, based on which the disturbance rejection performance is analyzed in three cases separated by the spaces of disturbances and state disagreements between agents. It is shown that the linear matrix inequality technique can be adopted to determine the optimal disturbance rejection indexes for all the three cases. In addition, two illustrative numerical examples are given to demonstrate the derived consensus results for different types of directed graphs and subject to different classes of disturbances.
Exploring how deep neural networks form phonemic categories

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become the dominant technique for acoustic-phonetic modeling due to their markedly improved performance over other models. Despite this, little is understood about the computation they implement in creating phonemic categories from highly variable acoustic signals. In this paper, we analyzed a DNN trained for phoneme recognition and characterized its representational properties, both at the single node and population level in each layer. At the single node level, we found strong selectivity to distinct phonetic features in all layers. Node selectivity to specific manners and places of articulation appeared from the first hidden layer and became more explicit in deeper layers. Furthermore, we found that nodes with similar phonetic feature selectivity were differentially activated to different exemplars of these features. Thus, each node becomes tuned to a particular acoustic manifestation of the same feature, providing an effective representational basis for the formation of invariant phonemic categories. This study reveals that phonetic features organize the activations in different layers of a DNN, a result that mirrors the recent findings of feature encoding in the human auditory system. These insights may provide better understanding of the limitations of current models, leading to new strategies to improve their performance. Index Terms: Deep neural networks, deep learning, automatic speech recognition.
Outcomes of acute exacerbations in COPD in relation to pre-hospital oxygen therapy

Background Pre-hospital, high-concentration oxygen therapy during acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD) has been associated with increased mortality. Recent COPD guidelines have encouraged titrated oxygen therapy with a target saturation range of 88–92%. Oxygen therapy leading to saturation above 92% is defined as ‘inappropriate oxygen therapy’. Objectives To examine the frequency of inappropriate oxygen therapy and whether inappropriate oxygen therapy in the ambulance in an urban area with short transit time to hospital was associated with poor outcome. Methods In an audit of 405 consecutive patients with AECOPD arriving by ambulance to Hvidovre Hospital, details of transit time, oxygen administration, saturation, and arterial blood gases were registered. Outcomes were respiratory acidosis, need of supported ventilation, length of hospitalisation, and in-hospital mortality. Results Only 15 patients were not treated with oxygen and information on oxygen flow was missing in seven patients and on saturation on one patient. Altogether, 352 (88.7%) of 397 patients received inappropriate oxygen therapy. Patients on ‘inappropriate oxygen therapy’ (saturation ≥92%) had a high frequency of respiratory acidosis at hospital admission, 108 (33.5%) of 324 patients, length of stay was on average 5.1 days, 12.5% of the patients needed ventilatory support, and in-hospital mortality was 3.4%. Conclusion The majority of patients with AECOPD received inappropriate oxygen therapy in the ambulance, but their need of ventilatory support, length of stay, and mortality were low. Randomised studies are needed to clarify the optimal pre-hospital oxygen therapy.
Context-Based Energy Disaggregation in Smart Homes

In this paper, we address the problem of energy conservation and optimization in residential environments by providing users with useful information to solicit a change in consumption behavior. Taking care to highly limit the costs of installation and management, our work proposes a Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) approach, which consists of disaggregating the whole-house power consumption into the individual portions associated to each device. State of the art NILM algorithms need monitoring data sampled at high frequency, thus requiring high costs for data collection and management. In this paper, we propose an NILM approach that relaxes the requirements on monitoring data since it uses total active power measurements gathered at low frequency (about 1 Hz). The proposed approach is based on the use of Factorial Hidden Markov Models (FHMM) in conjunction with context information related to the user presence in the house and the hourly utilization of appliances. Through a set of tests, we investigated how the use of these additional context-awareness features could improve disaggregation results with respect to the basic FHMM algorithm. The tests have been performed by using Tracebase, an open dataset made of data gathered from real home environments.
Danish Echoes of English

The present dominance of Anglo-American culture is recognized worldwide as having a huge impact on the way national cultures and languages change nowadays. Not surprisingly, with the influx of English-inspired language features (in the following referred to as Anglicisms) there follow extensive languagepolitical discussions among concerned laymen, scholars and politicians in the speech communities affected. Unfortunately, such discussions often lack coherent terminology, and statements are seldom based on a sound empirical foundation.
What Do They Think and Feel about Growth? An Expectancy–Value Approach to Small Business Managers’ Attitudes toward Growth 1

This study focuses on small business managers’ motivation to expand their firms. More specifically, we examine the relationships between expected consequences of growth on the one hand, and overall attitude toward growth on the other. Data were collected in three separate studies over a ten–year period using the same measuring instrument. The results suggest that noneconomic concerns may be more important than expected financial outcomes in determining overall attitude toward growth. In particular, the concern for employee well–being comes out strongly. We interpret this as reflecting a concern that the positive atmosphere of the small organization may be lost in growth. We conclude that this concern may be a cause for recurrent conflict for small business managers when deciding about the future route for their firms.
Application oriented data cleaning For RFID middleware

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is broadly used in many applications just like Supply Chain and Retail trade. However, owing to the working mechanism of RFID reader and RFID tag, raw RFID readings are not always reliable. False negative induced by low identifying rate in the reader's minor detect region and duplication owing to detection region's spatial overlap are the two main problems that cause unexpected consequence in upper applications of RFID Middleware. In this paper we discriminate the application scenarios by defining the concepts FN-S and “FN-NS” and propose an improved adapted smoothing method and an Bayesian method towards the two different scenarios. Both theoretically and by convincible experiment, we show the superiority of our algorithms.
A Machine Learning Approach to Classification of Drug Reviews in Russian

The automatic extraction of drug side effects from social media has gained popularity in pharmacovigilance. Information extraction methods tailored to medical subjects are essential for the task of drug repurposing and finding drug reactions. In this article, we focus on extracting information about side effects and symptoms in users' reviews about medications in Russian. We manually develop a real-world dataset by crawling user reviews from a health-related website and annotate a set of reviews on a sentence level. The paper addresses the classification problem with more than two classes, comparing a simple bag-of-words baseline and a feature-rich machine learning approach.
A review of the outcome of upper lid lowering for eyelid retraction and complications of spacers at a single unit over five years

AIM To review the outcome of upper lid lowering for eyelid retraction at a single unit over five years and to report the high complication rate with mersilene mesh as a spacer material. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the case records of 48 patients who underwent upper lid lowering for lid retraction between January 1995 and January 2000. RESULTS The indication for surgery was eyelid retraction secondary to dysthyroid disease in 41 patients, seventh nerve palsy in 3 cases, overcorrection of ptosis elsewhere in 3 cases and previously treated orbital lymphoma in one patient. A good result was achieved in 80% with a single procedure. Undercorrection occurred in 10% and overcorrection occurred in 8%. Spacer material, either mersilene mesh or more recently vicryl, was used in 42% of lids. Late extrusion of mersilene mesh occurred in 20% of lids that had a spacer inserted an average of 18 months postoperatively. CONCLUSIONS The high extrusion rate with mersilene was unacceptable and the alternative spacer material vicryl is now used.The possibility of revisional surgery because of under- or overcorrection should be explained to patients.
Motion-Aware Graph Regularized RPCA for background modeling of complex scenes

Computing a background model from a given sequence of video frames is a prerequisite for many computer vision applications. Recently, this problem has been posed as learning a low-dimensional subspace from high dimensional data. Many contemporary subspace segmentation methods have been proposed to overcome the limitations of the methods developed for simple background scenes. Unfortunately, because of the absence of motion information and without preserving intrinsic geometric structure of video data, most existing algorithms do not provide promising nature of the low-rank component for complex scenes. Such as largely occluded background by foreground objects, superfluity in video frames in order to cope with intermittent motion of foreground objects, sudden lighting condition variation, and camera jitter sequences. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a motion-aware regularization of graphs on low-rank component for video background modeling. We compute optical flow and use this information to make a motion-aware matrix. In order to learn the locality and similarity information within a video we compute inter-frame and intra-frame graphs which we use to preserve geometric information in the low-rank component. Finally, we use linearized alternating direction method with parallel splitting and adaptive penalty to incorporate the preceding steps to recover the model of the background. Experimental evaluations on challenging sequences demonstrate promising results over state-of-the-art methods.
Propiedades psicométricas de un test adaptativo informatizado para la medición del ajuste emocional

En el presente trabajo se describen las propiedades psicometricas de un Test Adaptativo Informatizado para la medicion del ajuste emocional de las personas. La revision de la literatura acerca de la aplicacion de los modelos de la teoria de la respuesta a los items (TRI) muestra que esta se ha utilizado mas en el trabajo con variables aptitudinales que para la medicion de variables de personalidad, sin embargo diversos estudios han mostrado la eficacia de la TRI para la descripcion psicometrica de dichas variables. Aun asi, pocos trabajos han explorado las caracteristicas de un Test Adaptativo Informatizado, basado en la TRI, para la medicion de una variable de personalidad como es el ajuste emocional. Nuestros resultados muestran la eficiencia del TAI para la evaluacion del ajuste emocional, proporcionando una medicion valida y precisa, utilizando menor numero de elementos de medida en comparacion con las escalas de ajuste emocional de instrumentos fuertemente implantados.
Comparative studies on QTL mapping by simple interval mapping and composite interval mapping models for selected growth and yield traits in rice (Oryza sativa L.)

QTL mapping was performed for five yield determining traits including grain yield in rice using a double haploid population of IR64 and Azucena cross. A comparison of QTLs detected by two different models simple interval mapping (SIM) using MAPMAKER/QTL and composite interval mapping (CIM) using QTL Cartographer was made, and common QTLs across the models were identified. The SIM detected 5 significant QTLs whereas CIM revealed 9 QTLs and only CIM could dissect flowering and maturity with QTLs, indicating its power and precision in QTL detection. Clustering of QTLs controlling correlated traits was common in both models. Apart from the QTLs detected by SIM, extra five QTLs were observed in CIM model with much higher LOD scores than SIM. The position of QTLs on different chromosomes was identical in both models except in case of new QTLs identified by CIM on chromosome 3 and 10. Congregation of multiple QTLs in the same marker interval concurred with the results of trait phenotypic association with each other indicated sharing of common regions of chromosomes by the correlated traits. These chromosomal regions may be focused for further saturation with additional markers to confirm the nature of QTL affecting the trait. The MAPMAKER/QTL and QTL Cartographer have different approaches in detecting the QTL and because of the more precision of the latter model, additional QTLs that had significant effect on traits were detected. However the common QTL detected by both the approaches, could be considered as stable QTL and be of use in Marker Assisted Selection.
ResToRinG CaPitaLiZaTion in #TweeTs

The rapid proliferation of microblogs such as Twitter has resulted in a vast quantity of written text becoming available that contains interesting information for NLP tasks. However, the noise level in tweets is so high that standard NLP tools perform poorly. In this pa- per, we present a statistical truecaser for tweets using a 3-gram language model built with truecased newswire texts and tweets. Our truecasing method shows an improvement in named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging tasks.