Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The JEDI Event-Based Infrastructure and Its Application to the Development of the OPSS WFMS

The development of complex distributed systems demands the creation of suitable architectural styles (or paradigms) and related runtime infrastructures. An emerging style that is receiving increasing attention is based on the notion of event. In an event-based architecture, distributed software components interact by generating and consuming events. An event is the occurrence of some state change in a component of a software system, made visible to the external world. The occurrence of an event in a component is asynchronously notified to any other component that has declared some interest in it. This paradigm (usually called "publish/subscribe", from the names of the two basic operations that regulate the communication) holds the promise of supporting a flexible and effective interaction among highly reconfigurable, distributed software components. In the past two years, we have developed an object-oriented infrastructure called JEDI (Java event-based distributed infrastructure). JEDI supports the development and operation of event-based systems and has been used to implement a significant example of distributed system, namely, the OPSS workflow management system (WFMS). The paper illustrates the main features of JEDI and how we have used them to implement OPSS. Moreover, the paper provides an initial evaluation of our experiences in using the event-based architectural style and a classification of some of the event-based infrastructures presented in the literature.
Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Model Based on User's Credibility Clustering

Aiming at the long response time, inaccurate recommendation and cold-start problems that faced by present recommendation algorithm, this paper, taking movie recommendation system as an example, proposes a collaborative filtering recommendation model based on user's credibility clustering. This model divides recommendation process into offline and online phases. Offline, it uses the result of user's credibility for clustering and then writes the clustered information into a table in database. Online, finds the cluster that target user belongs to and then gives recommendation. As a whole, the model reduces the response time, improves the accuracy of the recommendation rate, and solves the new user's cold-start problem.
' s personal copy Cognitive and psychological predictors of the negative outcomes associated with playing MMOGs ( massively multiplayer online games )

This study integrates research on problematic Internet use to explore the cognitive and psychological predictors of negative consequences associated with playing massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Participants recruited from online discussion boards completed self-report measures on their online game-related cognitions and psychological condition, social skills, psychological well-being, and negative life outcomes associated with game playing. The results demonstrated the important roles that psychological dependency and deficient self-regulation play in negative consequences associated with online gaming. The results also indicated that psychological dependency on MMOGs was predicted by cognitive preference for a virtual life—a construct that is negatively related to social control skills. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Visual and inertial multi-rate data fusion for motion estimation via Pareto-optimization

Motion estimation is an open research field in control and robotic applications. Sensor fusion algorithms are generally used to achieve an accurate estimation of the vehicle motion by combining heterogeneous sensors measurements with different statistical characteristics. In this paper, a new method that combines measurements provided by an inertial sensor and a vision system is presented. Compared to classical modelbased techniques, the method relies on a Pareto optimization that trades off the statistical properties of the measurements. The proposed technique is evaluated with simulations in terms of computational requirements and estimation accuracy with respect to a classical Kalman filter approach. It is shown that the proposed method gives an improved estimation accuracy at the cost of a slightly increased computational complexity.
The voting behaviour of the European Union member states in the United Nations General Assembly

Despite their explicit intent to speak with a single voice in foreign affairs, EU member states manage to do so only some of the time. Which are the factors that determine whether or not the EU member states successfully coordinate their positions in the international arena? To find out, I propose to examine the voting behaviour of the EU member states inside the United Nations General Assembly; a forum in which, notwithstanding heterogeneous policy preferences, they intend to coordinate their votes and are thus subject to coordination pressures. This means that for divisive resolutions, each member state must try to reconcile its national policy preference with the objective of casting a unified vote. I hypothesise that the balance a member state strikes generally depends on how important it views the issue at hand, how powerful it is, what type of relationship it maintains with the EU and under certain conditions, what type of relationship it maintains with US. I further argue that the balance is expected to tip in favour of EU unity when increasing the collective bargaining power by working together becomes a tangible objective. By adopting a multi-method approach, the thesis shows that the EU member states make a genuine and continuous effort to coordinate their votes inside the General Assembly. Significantly, the thesis illustrates that member states, at times, are able to override their heterogeneous national policy preference in order to stand united. I conclude by connecting the findings with the constructivist/rationalist debate, which juxtaposes foreign policy cooperation according to the logic of appropriateness with the logic of consequence. The results obtained have implications not only for the study of EU voting behaviour in the United Nations, but also for theoretical debate underlying it.
Leave Vacant or Rent: The Optimal Decision for Absentee Home Sellers

Home-sellers may not occupy their property when listed for sale. While previous research has analyzed the effect of a vacancy on the sales price of residential properties, no research to date has quantified the economic benefits and costs of renting vis-a-vis leaving a property vacant while listed for sale. Renting a property will produce revenue but perhaps at the cost of a lower sale price and/or longer time on the market. This paper employs data on 55,202 homes sold in the Las Vegas, Nevada area to determine if renting a property increases or decreases the wealth position of home sellers. The results of an empirical test of the model are used to quantify the wealth effect. The findings indicate that renting the property produces a significant reduction in the home seller's wealth position.
PAB: Parallelism-Aware Buffer Management Scheme for Nand-Based SSDs

Recently, internal buffer module and multi-level parallel components have already become the standard elements of SSDs. The internal buffer module is always used as a write cache, reducing the erasures and thus improving overall performance. The multi-level parallelism is exploited to service requests in a concurrent or interleaving manner, which promotes the system throughput. These two aspects have been extensively discussed in the literature. However, current buffer algorithms cannot take full advantage of parallelism inside SSDs. In this paper, we propose a novel write buffer management scheme called Parallelism-Aware Buffer (PAB). In this scheme, the buffer is divided into two parts named as Work-Zone and Para-Zone respectively. Conventional buffer algorithms are employed in the Work-Zone, while the Para-Zone is responsible for reorganizing the requests evicted from Work-Zone according to the underlying parallelism. Simulation results show that with only a small size of Para-Zone, PAB can achieve 19.2% ~ 68.1% enhanced performance compared with LRU based on a page-mapping FTL, while this improvement scope becomes 5.6% ~ 35.6% compared with BPLRU based on the state-of-the-art block-mapping FTL known as FAST.
Specific recognition of guanines in non-duplex regions of nucleic acids with potassium tungstate and hydrogen peroxide

Structural features of nucleic acids have become an integral part of current biomedical research. Highly selective and readily performed methods with little toxicity that target guanosines in non-duplex nucleic acids are needed, which led us to search for an effective agent for guanosine sequencing. Treatment of DNA or RNA with potassium tungstate and hydrogen peroxide produced damaged guanosines in DNA or RNA sequences. The damaged guanosines in non-duplex DNA could be cleaved by hot piperidine. Similarly, damaged guanosines in non-duplex RNA could be cleaved by aniline acetate. We could identify structural features of nucleic acid using this strategy instead of dimethyl sulphate and Ribonuclease T1.
Efficiently encoding term co-occurrences in inverted indexes

Precomputation of common term co-occurrences has been successfully applied to improve query performance in large scale search engines based on inverted indexes. The results of such precomputations are traditionally stored as additional posting lists in the index. During query evaluation, these precomputed lists are used to reduce the number of query terms, as the results for multiple terms can be accessed through a single precomputed list. In this paper, we expand this paradigm by considering an alternative method for storing term co-occurrences in inverted indexes. For a selected set of terms in the index, we store bitmaps that encode term co-occurrences. A bitmap of size k for term t augments each posting to store the co-occurrences of t with k other terms, across every document in the index. At query evaluation, size k bitmaps can be used to answer queries that involve any of the 2^k combinations of the additional terms. In contrast, a precomputed list, although typically shorter, can only be used to evaluate queries containing all of its terms. We evaluate the bitmaps technique we propose, and the baseline of adding precomputed posting lists and show that they are complementary, as they capture different aspects of the query evaluation cost. We perform an experimental evaluation on the TREC WT10g corpus and show that a hybrid strategy combining both methods significantly lowers the cost of query evaluation compared to each method separately.
Bone Marrow Changes in Adolescent Girls With Anorexia Nervosa

Early osteoporosis is common among adolescent girls with anorexia nervosa (AN) and may result from premature conversion of red (RM) to yellow bone marrow. We performed right knee magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on a 1.0 T extremity scanner in 20 patients and 20 healthy controls, aged 16.2 ± 1.6 years (mean ± SD). Coronal T1‐weighted (T1W) images and T1 maps were generated from T1 relaxometry images. Blinded radiologists visually assessed RM in the distal femoral and proximal tibial metaphyses in T1W images using a scale of signal intensity from 0 (homogeneous hyperintensity, no RM) to 4 (all dark, complete RM). Subjects with AN exhibited nearly twofold lower metaphyseal RM scores in both the femur (0.64 versus 1.22, p = .03) and tibia (0.54 versus 0.96, p = .08). In relaxometric measurements of four selected regions (femur and tibia amd epiphysis and metaphysis), subjects with AN showed higher mean epiphyseal but lower metaphyseal T1. The net AN‐control difference between epiphysis and metaphysis was 70 ms in the femur (+31 versus −35 ms, p = .02) and of smaller magnitude in the tibia. In relaxometry data from the full width of the femur adjacent to the growth plate, AN subjects showed mean T1 consistently lower than in controls by 30 to 50 ms in virtually every part of the sampling region. These findings suggest that adolescents with AN exhibit premature conversion of hematopoietic to fat cells in the marrow of the peripheral skeleton potentially owing to adipocyte over osteoblast differentiation in the mesenchymal stem cell pool. © 2010 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research
Politics of Market Socialism

The debate over market socialism has ignored the importance of the assumptions about the objectives of politicians in determining resource allocation. Theory and evidence suggest that totalitarian socialism does not lead to efficient resource allocation because dictators do not maximize social welfare. But democratic governments have political objectives different from social welfare as well. The authors argue that because these governments command greater resources (have more control rights) under socialism, democratic socialism (even if it could exist) is a less efficient system than democratic capitalism. Thus the political case against market socialism is even stronger than the economic case.
Neutrophil-Dependent Oxidative Stress in Ulcerative Colitis

Neutrophil accumulation within epithelial crypts and in the intestinal mucosa directly correlates with clinical disease activity and epithelial injury in ulcerative colitis (UC). Current advances have defined the mechanisms by which neutrophils are activated or migrate across mucosal epithelia. A better understanding of this process will likely provide new insights into novel treatment strategies for UC. Especially, activated neutrophils produce reactive oxygen and nitrogen species within intestinal mucosa, which induce oxidative stress. In clinically, we have succeeded to develop a novel granulocytes adsorptive apheresis therapy for UC. In this article, we discuss current advances to define the role of neutrophils-dependent oxidative stress in UC.
Time Based (TB) Application model for Mobile Cloud computing

— Smartphones have gained enormous popularity over the past few years. Smartphones are now capable of Supporting a wide range of applications, many of which demand an ever increasing computational power. Running complex Applications on smart phones could result in poor performance and shortened battery life because of their limited resources. So it creates a challenge to increase the energy efficiency and performance enhancement as these are resource-constrained devices. So in this paper we will discuss about computation offloading to get better performance and Battery life using various Mobile cloud Application Models.
What Do Data on Millions of U.S. Workers Say About Labor Income Risk

The first part of this paper estimates a set of stochastic processes with increasing generality to capture these salient features of earnings dynamics to provide a reliable "user's guide" for applied economists. In the second part, we examine if these documented features can be explained in a standard job ladder model with learning about match quality and depreciation of skills during unemployment.
Low-complexity joint modulation classification and detection in MU-MIMO

In this paper, dual-layer multi-user multiple-input multiple-output systems are studied. Building on the low-complexity layered orthogonal lattice detector (LC-LORD), an efficient sub-optimal joint modulation classification (MC) of the co-scheduled user and data detection receiver is developed. By adjusting the Max-Log-Maximum-a-Posteriori MC approach to the limitations of LC-LORD, and expanding it to include distances of counter maximum likelihood hypothesis symbols, the decision metric for MC is shown to be an accumulation over a set of tones of Euclidean distance computations also used by the LC-LORD detector for bit log-likelihood ratio soft decision generation. Simulations demonstrate that with a small complexity overhead, the proposed approaches achieve near interference-aware performance. An efficient hardware implementation scheme is presented.
LLLR parsing

The idea of an LLLR parsing is presented. An LLLR(k) parser can be constructed for any LR(k) grammar but it produces the left parse of the input string in linear time (in respect to the length of the derivation) without backtracking. If used as a basis for a syntax-directed translation, it triggers semantic actions using the top-down strategy just like the canonical LL(k) parser. Hence, from a compiler writer's point of view, it acts as an LL(k) parser. The backbone of the LLLR(k) parser is the LL(k) parser which triggers the embedded left LR(k) parser whenever an LL(k) conflict appears during parsing. Once the embedded LR(k) parser resolves the conflict, it passes the control back to the backbone LL(k) parser together with the left parse of the part of the input string scanned by the embedded LR parser, and LL parsing continues. Hence, LLLR parsing is similar to LL(*) parsing except (a) it uses LR(k) parsers instead of finite automata to resolve the LL(k) conflicts and (b) that it does not need to use backtracking. An LLLR(k) parser is the most appropriate for grammars where the LL(k) conflicting nonterminals appear relatively close to the leaves of the derivation trees.
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Changes in Organic Aerosol Composition with Aging Inferred from Aerosol Mass Spectra

Organic aerosols (OA) can be separated with factor analysis of aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) data into hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA) and oxygenated OA (OOA). We develop a new method to parameterize H:C of OOA in terms of f 43 (ratio of m/z 43, mostly C 2 H 3 O + , to total signal in the component mass spectrum). Such parameteriza-tion allows for the transformation of large database of ambient OOA components from the f 44 (mostly CO + 2 , likely from acid groups) vs. f 43 space (" triangle plot ") (Ng et al., 2010) into the Van Krevelen diagram (H:C vs. O:C) (Van Krevelen, 1950). Heald et al. (2010) examined the evolution of total OA in the Van Krevelen diagram. In this work total OA is deconvolved into components that correspond to primary (HOA and others) and secondary (OOA) organic aerosols. By deconvolving total OA into different components , we remove physical mixing effects between secondary and primary aerosols which allows for examination of the evolution of OOA components alone in the Van Krevelen space. This provides a unique means of following ambient secondary OA evolution that is analogous to and can be compared with trends observed in chamber studies of secondary organic aerosol formation. The triangle plot in Ng et al. (2010) indicates that f 44 of OOA components increases with photochemical age, suggesting the importance of acid formation in OOA evolution. Once they are transformed with the new parameterization, the triangle plot of the OOA components from all sites occupy an area in Van Krevelen space which follows a H:C/O:C slope of ∼ −0.5. This slope suggests that ambient OOA aging results in net changes in chemical composition that are equivalent to the addition of both acid and alcohol/peroxide functional groups without fragmentation (i.e. CC bond breakage), and/or the addition of acid groups with fragmentation. These results provide a framework for linking the bulk aerosol chemical composition evolution to molecular-level studies.
This Work Is Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Date Deposited: the Contribution of Raised Intraneuronal Chloride to Epileptic Network Activity

The contribution of raised intraneuronal chloride to epileptic network activity. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed. Altered inhibitory function is an important facet of epileptic pathology. A key concept is that GABAergic activity can become excitatory if intraneuronal chloride rises. However, it has proved difficult to separate the role of raised chloride from other contributory factors in complex network phenomena, such as epileptic pathology. Therefore, we asked what patterns of activity are associated with chloride dysregulation by making novel use of Halorhodopsin to load clusters of mouse pyramidal cells artificially with Cl Ϫ. Brief (1–10 s) activation of Halorhodopsin caused substantial positive shifts in the GABAergic reversal potential that were proportional to the charge transfer during the illumination and in adult neocortical pyramidal neurons decayed with a time constant of ␶ ϭ 8.0 Ϯ 2.8s. At the network level, these positive shifts in E GABA produced a transient rise in network excitability, with many distinctive features of epileptic foci, including high-frequency oscillations with evidence of out-of-phase firing (Ibarz et al., 2010). We show how such firing patterns can arise from quite small shifts in the mean intracellular Cl Ϫ level, within heterogeneous neuronal populations. Notably, however, chloride loading by itself did not trigger full ictal events, even with additional electrical stimulation to the underlying white matter. In contrast, when performed in combination with low, subepileptic levels of 4-aminopyridine, Halorhodopsin activation rapidly induced full ictal activity. These results suggest that chloride loading has at most an adjunctive role in ictogenesis. Our simulations also show how chloride loading can affect the jitter of action potential timing associated with imminent recruitment to an ictal event (Netoff and Schiff, 2002).
Life without tRNAArg–adenosine deaminase TadA: evolutionary consequences of decoding the four CGN codons as arginine in Mycoplasmas and other Mollicutes

In most bacteria, two tRNAs decode the four arginine CGN codons. One tRNA harboring a wobble inosine (tRNAArgICG) reads the CGU, CGC and CGA codons, whereas a second tRNA harboring a wobble cytidine (tRNAArgCCG) reads the remaining CGG codon. The reduced genomes of Mycoplasmas and other Mollicutes lack the gene encoding tRNAArgCCG. This raises the question of how these organisms decode CGG codons. Examination of 36 Mollicute genomes for genes encoding tRNAArg and the TadA enzyme, responsible for wobble inosine formation, suggested an evolutionary scenario where tadA gene mutations first occurred. This allowed the temporary accumulation of non-deaminated tRNAArgACG, capable of reading all CGN codons. This hypothesis was verified in Mycoplasma capricolum, which contains a small fraction of tRNAArgACG with a non-deaminated wobble adenosine. Subsets of Mollicutes continued to evolve by losing both the mutated tRNAArgCCG and tadA, and then acquired a new tRNAArgUCG. This permitted further tRNAArgACG mutations with tRNAArgGCG or its disappearance, leaving a single tRNAArgUCG to decode the four CGN codons. The key point of our model is that the A-to-I deamination activity had to be controlled before the loss of the tadA gene, allowing the stepwise evolution of Mollicutes toward an alternative decoding strategy.
The Effect of Product Classifications on the Formulation of Export Unit Value Indices: A Comparison of Export Unit Value Indices based on SITC and HS

With the globalization of economic activity, the relative weight of foreign trade in national economic activities has increased, and the question of how to measure trends in the value and quantity of international trade has become an important issue for policy-makers and economists.This paper compares the chain-linked indices formulated by Masato Kuroko, based on HS this fiscal year for individual industry categories and countries with chain-linked indices based on SITC-R1 codes, in order to study how changes in the quality composition of the same products, which cannot be considered using unit value indices based on SITC-R1 codes, can be considered using unit value indices based on the more detailed HS product classifications.