Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SYNCHRONIZATION OF SHIMIZU-MORIOKA CHAOTIC SYSTEMS

This paper investigates the global chaos synchronization of identical Shimizhu-Morioka chaotic systems (Shimizu and Morioka, 1980) by sliding mode control. The stability results derived in this paper for the complete synchronization of identical Shimizu-Morioka chaotic systems are established using Lyapunov stability theory. Since the Lyapunov exponents are not required for these calculations, the sliding mode control method is very effective and convenient to achieve global chaos synchronization of the identical Shimizu-Morioka chaotic systems. Numerical simulations are shown to illustrate and validate the synchronization schemes derived in this paper for the identical Shimizu-Morioka systems.
Seasonal Changes in Mesotocin and Localization of Its Receptor in the Prostate of the Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula)

Abstract The prostate gland in the brushtail possum grows and regresses seasonally. It has similarities to the human prostate and may therefore provide a unique model for investigating prostatic hyperplasia. Oxytocin has been implicated in the regulation of prostate growth in eutherian mammals, and the initial aim of this study was to identify and localize the marsupial equivalent, mesotocin, and its receptor in the prostate of the brushtail possum. Seasonal changes in prostatic mesotocin concentrations and receptor localization were then assessed and related to prostate growth. Mesotocin and mesotocin receptor gene transcripts with high sequence homology to eutherian oxytocin/oxytocin receptors were demonstrated, and mesotocin, neurophysin, and the receptor were all localized predominantly in the epithelial cells of the glandular acini. Western blot analysis confirmed the presence of a single immunoreactive receptor protein of ∼60 Mr−3. Prostatic mesotocin concentrations were highest immediately before the increases in prostate weight associated with the autumn and spring breeding periods. At this time, mesotocin receptors were also present in the prostatic capsule in addition to those present in the glandular tissue. Mesotocin concentrations proceeded to decrease in association with the regression of prostate size toward the end of the breeding periods. No significant differences were present in serum testosterone or dihydrotestosterone throughout the year. The identification of mesotocin and its receptor in the possum prostate and the demonstration of seasonal changes in local mesotocin concentrations preceding changes in prostate size suggests that mesotocin may play a physiological role in regulating prostate growth and regression.
Radiological-Pathological Comparison in a Case of Conjoined Gnatho-Thoracopagus Twins

Background: Conjoined twins may present an extremely wide range of complex congenital malformations. Because of the increasing number of attempts to separate them surgically, profound knowledge is needed of this abnormality spectrum. Case: Ultrasonographic, radiological (X-ray, computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging) and pathological findings of gnatho-thoracopagus conjoined twins at 18 weeks of gestation are reported, focusing on clinical topographic correlations. Conclusions: High-resolution imaging techniques may provide useful information for surgery or autopsy planning of cases with complex congenital malformations.
A novel radiochemical approach to 1-(2'-deoxy-2'-[(18) F]fluoro-β-d-arabinofuranosyl)cytosine ((18) F-FAC).

(18) F-FAC (1-(2'-deoxy-2'-[(18) F]fluoro-β-D-arabinofuranosyl)-cytosine) is an important 2'-fluoro-nucleoside-based positron emission tomography (PET) tracer that has been used for in vivo prediction of response to the widely used cancer chemotherapy drug gemcitabine. Previously reported synthetic routes to (18) F-FAC have relied on early introduction of the (18) F radiolabel prior to attachment to protected cytosine base. Considering the (18) F radiochemical half-life (110 min) and the technical challenges of multi-step syntheses on PET radiochemistry modular systems, late-stage radiofluorination is preferred for reproducible and reliable radiosynthesis with in vivo applications. Herein, we report the first late-stage radiosynthesis of (18) F-FAC. Cytidine derivatives with leaving groups at the 2'-position are particularly prone to undergo anhydro side-product formation upon heating because of their electron density at the 2-carbonyl pyrimidone oxygen. Our rationally developed fluorination precursor showed an improved reactivity-to-stability ratio at elevated temperatures. (18) F-FAC was obtained in radiochemical yields of 4.3-5.5% (n = 8, decay-corrected from end of bombardment), with purities ≥98% and specific activities ≥63 GBq/µmol. The synthesis time was 168 min.
Venture Philanthropy: The Evolution of High Engagement Philanthropy in Europe

Venture philanthropy provides a blend of performance-based development finance and professional services to social purpose organisations in helping them expand their social impact. This is a high-engagement, partnership approach analogous to the practices of venture capital in building the commercial value of companies. In its modern form, venture philanthropy developed significantly in the US in the mid 1990s, took hold in the UK from 2002 and is now expanding into continental Europe. Although not without its sceptics, venture philanthropy has the potential to contribute to developing a more responsive and diverse capital market for the social sector. Its focus on building organisational capacity in entrepreneurial social purpose organisations, matching appropriate finance with strategic business-like advice, makes it a distinctive provider of capital. Venture philanthropy in Europe has strong links to the private equity and venture capital community, giving it opportunities to influence the corporate social responsibility of a set of major players in Europe's financial services industry. Several new venture philanthropy funds have been established by philanthropists with successful careers in private equity. Europe's transitional countries, in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and former Soviet Union, have under-capacitated social sectors and widespread, unmet social needs. Venture philanthropy may have a particularly valuable role to play in helping build stronger civil society institutions in these countries. As a relatively young industry, venture philanthropy faces many challenges in communicating and marketing what it does; developing a menu of financial instruments and advisory services; measuring performance and social impact; collaborating with complementary capital providers such as foundations. This working paper is the first in a series which explores the expansion of high engagement philanthropy in Europe.
FPGA bitstream protection with PUFs, obfuscation, and multi-boot

With the combination of PUFs, obfuscation, and multi-boot, we are able to do the equivalent of partial bitstream encryption on low-cost FPGAs, which is only featured on high-end FPGAs. Low-cost FPGAs do not even have built-in support for encrypted (full) bitstreams. Our particular PUF implementation does not steal valuable FPGA real estate from the actual design with the help of multi-boot. We favor multi-boot over self partial reconfiguration as it is easier to implement.
Basic Marketing: A Global-Managerial Approach

Marketing's role in the global economy marketing's role within the firm or non-profit organization focusing marketing strategy with segmentation and positioning evaluating opportunities in the changing marketing environment demographic dimensions of global consumer markets behaviourial dimensions of the consumer market business and organizational customer and their buying behaviour improving decisions with marketing information elements of product planning for goods and services product management and new-product development, place and development of channel systems distribution customer service and logistics retailers, wholesalers, and their strategy planning promotion-introduction to integrated marketing communications personal selling advertising and sales promotion pricing objectives and policies price setting in the business world developing innovative marketing plans implementing and controlling marketing plans - evolution and revolution managing marketing's link with other functional areas ethical marketing in consumer-oriented societies - appraisal and challenges.
Near-Real-Time Monitoring of Insect Defoliation Using Landsat Time Series

Introduced insects and pathogens impact millions of acres of forested land in the United States each year, and large-scale monitoring efforts are essential for tracking the spread of outbreaks and quantifying the extent of damage. However, monitoring the impacts of defoliating insects presents a significant challenge due to the ephemeral nature of defoliation events. Using the 2016 gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) outbreak in Southern New England as a case study, we present a new approach for near-real-time defoliation monitoring using synthetic images produced from Landsat time series. By comparing predicted and observed images, we assessed changes in vegetation condition multiple times over the course of an outbreak. Initial measures can be made as imagery becomes available, and season-integrated products provide a wall-to-wall assessment of potential defoliation at 30 m resolution. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons suggest our Landsat Time Series (LTS) products improve identification of defoliation events relative to existing products and provide a repeatable metric of change in condition. Our synthetic-image approach is an important step toward using the full temporal potential of the Landsat archive for operational monitoring of forest health over large extents, and provides an important new tool for understanding spatial and temporal dynamics of insect defoliators.
Testbed Assisted Control Flow Tracing for Wireless Embedded Systems

Observing wireless embedded systems is difficult because of resource constraints and tight interaction with the environment. In this paper, we develop a method that can reconstruct the entire control flow of a program based on recorded state changes (time and state) of I/O pins. We instrument program binaries by statically inserting instructions that alter the states of a set of I/O pins. During program execution, the overhead of added instructions must be kept as low as possible to preserve the original program behavior. We first adapt an existing software-only placement method to generate an unambiguous pattern on the I/O pins for every possible execution path. Then, we make use of recorded timestamps to further reduce the runtime overhead substantially. This timing information is extracted from the executable by means of an elaborate static analysis. An algorithm is presented that safely reduces the number of recorded events while still being able to uniquely determine the executed program path. Experiments on a testbed show that using time information reduces the runtime overhead by up to 38.3 % for typical applications. The average runtime overhead is 19%.
ArbiText: Arbitrary-Oriented Text Detection in Unconstrained Scene

Arbitrary-oriented text detection in the wild is a very challenging task, due to the aspect ratio, scale, orientation, and illumination variations. In this paper, we propose a novel method, namely Arbitrary-oriented Text (or ArbText for short) detector, for efficient text detection in unconstrained natural scene images. Specifically, we first adopt the circle anchors rather than the rectangular ones to represent bounding boxes, which is more robust to orientation variations. Subsequently, we incorporate a pyramid pooling module into the Single Shot MultiBox Detector framework, in order to simultaneously explore the local and global visual information, which can, therefore, generate more confidential detection results. Experiments on established scene-text datasets, such as the ICDAR 2015 and MSRA-TD500 datasets, have demonstrated the supe rior performance of the proposed method, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
SERVICE QUALITY AS A PACKAGE: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HETEROGENEOUS CONSUMERS?

The world of customer surveys is awash with satisfaction scales that assess the degree of satisfaction of each attribute independently of the levels offered by other attributes that represent the package of services provided by a transport supplier. While not denying the potential usefulness of many data collection methods, if service providers are to establish a mechanism for prioritizing the improvements in services that produce the greatest gain in consumer satisfaction, it makes good sense to understand the relationships between the attributes, given a knowledge of the weights that individuals place on each attribute. These weights represent the relative importance of an attribute in the overall determination of the satisfaction (or utility) level associated with a specific package of service attribute levels. In contrast satisfaction indicators provide little information on the importance of each attribute (one can be very satisfied with the cleanliness of a bus or train yet it is very low on the list in terms of its importance in the global measure of service quality). This paper builds on the previous research on the development of an integrated service quality index (SQI) and how it can be used to prioritize the user-based benefits from operator-driven service improvements. Contextual and socio-economic differences in the SQI index that provide useful guidance to operators in targeting the changes in services so as to maximize service effectiveness for a specific investment outlay are established.
The Social Construction of the Responsible Corporate Citizen: Sustainability Reports of the Global Automotive Firms

The constitutive meanings of responsible corporate environmental citizenship are to be found in global discourses. We use Gubrium and Holstein‘s framework on interpretive practice to study the Corporate Sustainability Reports of multinational automotive companies regarding global warming. We observe three common themes – recognizing the issue of greenhouse gases, acknowledging stakeholders, and being rolemodels for society. However, these themes take on unique meanings vis-a-vis each corporate identity. We utilize our analytic findings to offer theoretic propositions regarding emergent meanings of corporate environmental citizenship. These meanings are important to understand as firm behavior will be based on these socially-constructed meanings.
Building the 'JMMC Stellar Diameters Catalog' using SearchCal

The JMMC1 Calibrator Workgroup has long developed methods to ascertain the angular diameter of stars, and provides this expertise in the SearchCal2 software. SearchCal dynamically finds calibrators near science objects by querying CDS3 hosted catalogs according to observational parameters. Initially limited to bright objects (K magnitude ≤ 5.5), it has been upgraded with a new method providing calibrators without any magnitude limit but those of queried catalogs. We introduce here a new static catalog of stellar diameters, containing more than 38000 entries, obtained from SearchCal results aggregation on the whole celestial sphere, complete for all stars with HIPPARCOS4 parallaxes. We detail the methods and tools used to produce and study this catalog, and compare the static catalog approach with the dynamical querying provided by SearchCal engine. We also introduce a new Virtual Observatory service, enabling the reporting of, and querying about, stars flagged as "bad calibrators" by astronomers, adding this ever-growing database to our SearchCal service.
Beyond Sexual Partnerships: The Lack of Condom Use during Vaginal Sex with Steady Partners.

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to identify independent correlates of the lack of condom use when engaging in vaginal sex with steady partners among HIV-negative African American adults. The conceptual model includes proximal as well as more distal domains. METHODS Cross-sectional data were collected between May 2009 and August 2011. Recruitment involved active and passive recruitment strategies. Computer-assisted, individual interviews were conducted with 1,050 African American adults. Multivariate logistic regression was used to identify independent predictors of a lack of condom use with steady partners in the past 30 days. RESULTS In multivariate analysis, being older than 35, being partnered, perceiving having a steady partner as important, and ever having been homeless were associated positively with the odds of a lack of condom use during vaginal sex with steady partners in the past 30 days. On the other hand, reporting more than one steady partner in the past 30 days, having health insurance during the past 12 months, and perceived neighborhood social cohesion were negatively associated. CONCLUSIONS These findings highlight the need for HIV risk-reduction prevention and intervention efforts that consider distal as well as proximal domains. Such a perspective allows for a broader sociological inquiry into health disparities that moves beyond epidemiological factors that commonly guide public health research.
Recent developments in cross-border investment in securities

Securities have replaced bank lending in recent years as the primary means through which funds are invested internationally, and in the process, the share of U.S. securities owned by foreigners has grown markedly. Between 1974 and 2002, the proportion of the value of outstanding U.S. long-term securities (equities and long-term debt) that was foreign-owned increased from about 5 percent to about 12 percent. At the same time, U.S. holdings of foreign long-term securities also increased, although their growth did not match the rapid growth in foreign holdings of U.S. securities. At $1.8 trillion, the value of U.S. holdings of foreign long-term securities at the end of 2002 was less than half the value of foreign holdings of U.S. securities; this difference resulted in a negative net international position in long-term securities of $2.3 trillion. ; The U.S. system for measuring cross-border securities activity consists of annual surveys measuring holdings of securities and monthly reports measuring transactions in securities. This article reports the latest survey data on holdings as well as the more-recent transactions data. The discussion focuses on U.S. cross-border securities activity, but it also addresses the investment patterns of some other countries and describes the initiatives to improve the measurement of cross-border securities investments.
Thinking Outside of the Ballot Box: Examining Public Trust in E-Voting Technology

Electronic voting, or e-voting, is a relatively closed process that contains inherent risks associated with the potential for voting irregularities, translation errors, and inappropriate manipulation (Oravec, 2005). To develop a greater understanding of trust issues surrounding the use of e-voting, an investigation into the public trust and the relationship between trust and electronic voting technology were assessed. Men and women of various ethnicities, ages, educational backgrounds, technological experiences, political affiliations, and prior experience with e-voting participated in this study. Rogers’ (1995) taxonomy of adopters—innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—was used to classify individuals based on their willingness to participate in e-voting. A principle-components factor analysis (PCFA) with separate tests for discriminant validity and multiple-regression analyses were used to confirm the hypotheses. The findings suggest that innovators and early adopters are more likely to trust technology and express an intention to use an e-voting system.
Understanding the Profit and Loss Distribution of Trading Algorithms

With the advent of algorithmic trading, it is essential that investors become more proactive in the decision-making process to ensure selection of the most appropriate algorithm. Investors need to specify benchmark price, implementation goal, and preferred deviation strategy (i.e., how the optimally prescribed algorithm is to react to changing market conditions or prices). In this article the authors describe an analytical process to assess the impact of these decisions on the profit and loss distribution of the algorithm.
Oestrogen‐deficient female aromatase knockout (ArKO) mice exhibit ‘depressive‐like’ symptomatology

We recently found that female aromatase knockout (ArKO) mice that are deficient in oestradiol due to a targeted mutation in the aromatase gene show deficits in sexual behaviour that cannot be corrected by adult treatment with oestrogens. We determined here whether these impairments are associated with changes in general levels of activity, anxiety or ‘depressive‐like’ symptomatology due to chronic oestrogen deficiency. We also compared the neurochemical profile of ArKO and wild‐type (WT) females, as oestrogens have been shown to modulate dopaminergic, serotonergic and noradrenergic brain activities. ArKO females did not differ from WT in spontaneous motor activity, exploration or anxiety. These findings are in line with the absence of major neurochemical alterations in hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex or striatum, which are involved in the expression of these behaviours. By contrast, ArKO females displayed decreased active behaviours, such as struggling and swimming, and increased passive behaviours, such as floating, in repeated sessions of the forced swim test, indicating that these females exhibit ‘depressive‐like’ symptoms. Adult treatment with oestradiol did not reverse the behavioural deficits observed in the forced swim test, suggesting that they may be due to the absence of oestradiol during development. Accordingly, an increased serotonergic activity was observed in the hippocampus of ArKO females compared with WT, which was also not reversed by adult oestradiol treatment. The possible organizational role of oestradiol on the hippocampal serotonergic system and the ‘depressive‐like’ profile of ArKO females provide new insights into the pathophysiology of depression and the increased vulnerability of women to depression.
Emerging Markets and E-Commerce in Developing Economies

High Internet penetration in regions such as North America, Australia, and Europe, has proven the World Wide Web as an important medium for e-commerce transaction. Despite the soaring adoption statistics for those already developed societies, diffusion rates still remain low for the less developed countries, with e-commerce in its infancy. Emerging Markets and E-Commerce in Developing Economies enhances understanding of e-commerce models and practices in less developed countries, and extends the growing literature on e-commerce. An essential addition to worldwide library collections in technology, commerce, social sciences, and related fields, this essential contribution expands the body of knowledge in the field with relevant theoretical foundations, methodologies, and frameworks, to the benefit of the international academic, research, governmental, and industrial communities.
Phase modulation scheme for chipless RFID- and wireless sensor tags

Inspired by state of the art surface acoustic wave (SAW) technique an approach for the realization of chipless microwave RFID tags based on electrical circuits is proposed. For information coding of the retransmitted signal a passive QPSK coding scheme and for wireless monitoring of physical quantities an analog phase modulation scheme are investigated. Key elements for the realization of tags are lumped element delay lines. Therefore properties of left- and right-handed lines are discussed with the view on the special application. Finally, the proposed principles have been experimentally verified with a prototype.