Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Penguin Has Entered the Building: The Commercialization of Open Source Software Products

Previous literature on open source software (OSS) mostly analyzes organizational issues within communities of developers and users. This paper focuses on for-profit organizations that release software products under OSS licenses, and argues that variations in their endowments of intellectual property rights, namely patents and trademarks, help to determine which firms will tend to incorporate OSS into commercial products. We explain whether and under what conditions preexisting stocks of intellectual property rights can be useful complementary assets that allow firms to benefit directly or indirectly from commercializing OSS products, and test our hypotheses on a novel data set built on firms' announcements of OSS product releases in the specialized press between 1995 and 2003. We find three robust results: (a) firms with large stocks of software patents are more likely to release OSS products; (b) firms with large stocks of software trademarks are less likely to release OSS products; (c) firms with large stocks of hardware trademarks are more likely to release OSS products.
Design and Tuning of a Modified Power-Based PLL for Single-Phase Grid-Connected Power Conditioning Systems

One of the most important aspects for the proper operation of the single-phase grid-tied power-conditioning systems is the synchronization with the utility grid. Among various synchronization techniques, phase locked loop (PLL)-based algorithms have found a lot of interest for the advantages they present. Typically, the single-phase PLLs use a sinusoidal multiplier as the phase detector (PD). These PLLs are generally referred to as the power-based PLL (pPLL). In this paper, the drawbacks associated with the pPLL technique (i.e., the sensitivity to the grid voltage variations, and the double-frequency oscillations that appear in the estimated phase/frequency) are discussed in detail, and some of the previously reported solutions are examined. Then, to overcome these drawbacks, a simple and effective technique, called the double-frequency and amplitude compensation (DFAC) method is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated through a detailed mathematical analysis. A systematic design method to fine-tune the PLL parameters is then suggested, which guarantees a fast transient response, a high disturbance rejection capability, and a robust performance. Finally, the simulation and experimental results are presented, which highlight the effectiveness of the proposed PLL.
Inactivation of Serum Response Factor Contributes To Decrease Vascular Muscular Tone and Arterial Stiffness in Mice

Rationale: Vascular smooth muscle (SM) cell phenotypic modulation plays an important role in arterial stiffening associated with aging. Serum response factor (SRF) is a major transcription factor regulating SM genes involved in maintenance of the contractile state of vascular SM cells. Objective: We investigated whether SRF and its target genes regulate intrinsic SM tone and thereby arterial stiffness. Methods and Results: The SRF gene was inactivated SM-specific knockout of SRF (SRFSMKO) specifically in vascular SM cells by injection of tamoxifen into adult transgenic mice. Fifteen days later, arterial pressure and carotid thickness were lower in SRFSMKO than in control mice. The carotid distensibility/pressure and elastic modulus/wall stress curves showed a greater arterial elasticity in SRFSMKO without modification in collagen/elastin ratio. In SRFSMKO, vasodilation was decreased in aorta and carotid arteries, whereas a decrease in contractile response was found in mesenteric arteries. By contrast, in mice with inducible SRF overexpression, the in vitro contractile response was significantly increased in all arteries. Without endothelium, the contraction was reduced in SRFSMKO compared with control aortic rings owing to impairment of the NO pathway. Contractile components (SM-actin and myosin light chain), regulators of the contractile response (myosin light chain kinase, myosin phosphatase target subunit 1, and protein kinase C–potentiated myosin phosphatase inhibitor) and integrins were reduced in SRFSMKO. Conclusions: SRF controls vasoconstriction in mesenteric arteries via vascular SM cell phenotypic modulation linked to changes in contractile protein gene expression. SRF-related decreases in vasomotor tone and cell-matrix attachment increase arterial elasticity in large arteries.
Introducing New AdaBoost Features for Real-Time Vehicle Detection

This paper shows how to improve the real-time object detection in complex robotics applications, by exploring new visual features as AdaBoost weak classifiers. These new features are symmetric Haar filters (enforcing global horizontal and vertical symmetry) and N-connexity control points. Experimental evaluation on a car database show that the latter appear to provide the best results for the vehicle-detection problem.
A cooperative asynchronous write mechanism for NAS

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is the high performance storage appliance that provides shared data to clients and other servers in a Local Area Network (LAN). The existing NAS products provide file services by themselves. They can not cooperate with each other to improve performance. This paper presents an automatically cooperative asynchronous write mechanism for NAS: ACAWM. ACAWM is a set of pure software mechanisms which provide both the reliability of synchronous write operations and the performance of asynchronous write operations. ACAWM contains two parts: automatically cooperative mechanism and asynchronous write mechanism. The automatically cooperative mechanism of ACAWM can make all NAS in a LAN to cooperate with each other without artificial configuration. Basing on the automatically cooperative mechanism, asynchronous write mechanism of ACAWM can allow a NAS to use the free RAM of the cooperative NAS to realize asynchronous write in the file system of NAS. The data of asynchronous write in ACAWM are saved on both of the two cooperative NAS before being written to disk, thus ACAWM can ensure the security of data. The design of ACAWM fully considers the usability of NAS and has no special requirement for the system software of clients. The experiments in this paper prove that ACAWM can greatly improve the performance of NAS.
Osteogenic efficacy enhancement of kaempferol through an engineered layer-by-layer matrix: a study in ovariectomized rats.

AIM A layer-by-layer matrix (LBL) comprising kaempferol (LBL-KEM) was prepared for improved osteogenic action. MATERIALS & METHODS The LBL-KEM consisted of alternate layers of sodium alginate and protamine sulfate, which were sequentially deposited on the preformed kaempferol (KEM)-loaded CaCO3 core (CaCO3-KEM) by LBL self-assembly. The LBL matrix developed was evaluated for layer growth by ζ-potential and size alterations after self-assembly of each layer. Its physicochemical properties and intestinal absorption pattern were characterized and its pharmacokinetic behavior, mineralization of bone marrow cells, bone mineral density, bone strength, microcrack formation and estrogenicity were evaluated after oral administration. RESULTS The entrapment efficiency of KEM was 94 ± 2% and the cumulative %KEM released from LBL-KEM was 19.2 and 63.5% at pH 1.4 and 7.4, respectively, after 24 h. Stepwise polyelectrolyte assembly onto initially positively charged particles (+21.2 mV) resulted in alterations between -28.5 and +10.9 mV. A final ζ-potential of -8.9 mV was obtained after terminal surface modification with sodium deoxycholate. Fluorescein isothiocyanate-labeled LBL matrix was diffused into the basolateral lacteal region upon oral administration to rats. The area under the KEM serum concentration curve following oral administration of LBL-KEM to rats was 2479 ± 682 ng·h/ml, nearly twofold higher than free KEM. The concentration-time profile in bone marrow indicated improved penetration and retention of KEM on administration of LBL-KEM. Treatment with LBL-KEM restored bone mineralization, bone mineral density, microcrack formation and empty osteocyte lacunae density in ovariectomized (OVx) rats, which was significantly (p < 0.05) improved in femoral diaphysea, tibial head and vertebrae compared with free KEM treatment. Administration of LBL-KEM to growing female rats for 4 weeks resulted in no estrogenicity when compared with OVx rats. CONCLUSION The data suggests that LBL matrix enhanced drug delivery, improved pharmacokinetics and maintained better bone quality under OVx conditions.
Using a Hybrid Convolution Tree Kernel for Semantic Role Labeling

As a kind of Shallow Semantic Parsing, Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is gaining more attention as it benefits a wide range of natural language processing applications. Given a sentence, the task of SRL is to recognize semantic arguments (roles) for each predicate (target verb or noun). Feature-based methods have achieved much success in SRL and are regarded as the state-of-the-art methods for SRL. However, these methods are less effective in modeling structured features. As an extension of feature-based methods, kernel-based methods are able to capture structured features more efficiently in a much higher dimension. Application of kernel methods to SRL has been achieved by selecting the tree portion of a predicate and one of its arguments as feature space, which is named as predicate-argument feature (PAF) kernel. The PAF kernel captures the syntactic tree structure features using convolution tree kernel, however, it does not distinguish between the path structure and the constituent structure. In this article, a hybrid convolution tree kernel is proposed to model different linguistic objects. The hybrid convolution tree kernel consists of two individual convolution tree kernels. They are a Path kernel, which captures predicate-argument link features, and a Constituent Structure kernel, which captures the syntactic structure features of arguments. Evaluations on the data sets of the CoNLL-2005 SRL shared task and the Chinese PropBank (CPB) show that our proposed hybrid convolution tree kernel statistically significantly outperforms the previous tree kernels. Moreover, in order to maximize the system performance, we present a composite kernel through combining our hybrid convolution tree kernel method with a feature-based method extended by the polynomial kernel. The experimental results show that the composite kernel achieves better performance than each of the individual methods and outperforms the best reported system on the CoNLL-2005 corpus when only one syntactic parser is used and on the CPB corpus when automated syntactic parse results and correct syntactic parse results are used respectively.
Knowledge evolution in autonomic software product lines

We describe ongoing work in knowledge evolution management for autonomic software product lines. We explore how an autonomic product line may benefit from new knowledge originating from different source activities and artifacts at run time. The motivation for sharing run-time knowledge is that products may self-optimize at run time and thus improve quality faster compared to traditional software product line evolution. We propose two mechanisms that support knowledge evolution in product lines: online learning and knowledge sharing. We describe two basic scenarios for runtime knowledge evolution that involves these mechanisms. We evaluate online learning and knowledge sharing in a small product line setting that shows promising results.
Insights from unifying modern approximations to infections on networks

Networks are increasingly central to modern science owing to their ability to conceptualize multiple interacting components of a complex system. As a specific example of this, understanding the implications of contact network structure for the transmission of infectious diseases remains a key issue in epidemiology. Three broad approaches to this problem exist: explicit simulation; derivation of exact results for special networks; and dynamical approximations. This paper focuses on the last of these approaches, and makes two main contributions. Firstly, formal mathematical links are demonstrated between several prima facie unrelated dynamical approximations. And secondly, these links are used to derive two novel dynamical models for network epidemiology, which are compared against explicit stochastic simulation. The success of these new models provides improved understanding about the interaction of network structure and transmission dynamics.
A multi-channel corpus for distant-speech interaction in presence of known interferences

This paper describes a new corpus of multi-channel audio data designed to study and develop distant-speech recognition systems able to cope with known interfering sounds propagating in an environment. The corpus consists of both real and simulated signals and of a corresponding detailed annotation. An extensive set of speech recognition experiments was conducted using three different Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) techniques to establish baseline results for future reference. The AEC techniques were applied both to single distant microphone input signals and beamformed signals generated using two state-of-the-art beamforming techniques. We show that the speech recognition performance using the different techniques is comparable for both the simulated and real data, demonstrating the usefulness of this corpus for speech research. We also show that a significant improvement in speech recognition performance can be obtained by combining state-of-the-art AEC and beamforming techniques, compared to using a single distant microphone input.
Identification of Histologically Distinct Conventional Adenomas that Arise Predominately in Patients With Sessile Serrated Adenomas

We have recently shown that a study population of patients with at least 1 sessile serrated adenoma (SSA) are 4 times more likely to harbor synchronous serrated polyps [SSAs, traditional serrated adenomas (TSAs) and right sided hyperplastic polyps] than a unselected population of patients. However, 35% of the polyps in the study patients were conventional adenomas (CAds). We hypothesized that the CAds in these study patients would have histologic and molecular differences compared with CAds from a control population without sessile serrated adenomas. To this end, 104 study and 79 control CAds were analyzed according to 9 histologic criteria. A subset of these polyps was also screened for BRAF mutations, KRAS mutations, CpG island methylation, and MUC6 expression. A total of 31 study CAds and 2 control CAds had atypical histologic features (bright cytoplasmic eosinophilia ± focal serrations and crypt dilatation). None of the adenomas tested had mutations in BRAF or KRAS. Evidence of low levels of CpG island methylation was seen in 35% of the atypical CAds and in only 4.5% of the typical CAds. In addition, these atypical CAds were more likely to express MUC6. Thus, the presence of cytoplasmic eosinophilia with or without focal serrations and crypt dilatation identifies a subset of CAds with characteristics of the serrated neoplasia pathway. These atypical CAds occur more commonly in patients predisposed to developing SSAs and suggest the presence of a mucosal field defect in these patients.
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis: design or too much design

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is a technique that was first applied in humans in 1990 (Handyside et al., 1990; Verlinsky et al., 1990). Thirty years on an estimated 15000 children have been conceived and born using PGD, a number dwarfed by the huge number of children already conceived via conventional in vitro fertilisation. In contrast to numerous reports on reproductive outcome in conventional IVF, data on reproductive outcome of PGD are scarse. There is ongoing debate about the diagnostic accuracy and clinical relevance of Preimplantation genetic screening for aneuploidy (PGS) (Shahine et al., 2006; Twisk et al., 2006), however well conducted prospective randomized studies are few. In this PhD summary, the author describes the reproductive results of a large PGD program and applies life table analysis with multiple regression analysis and comparative analysis where appropriate. Potential risks of PGD including misdiagnosis, perinatal mortality and monozygotic twinning rate are assessed. The aim is to provide both patients and physicians with adequate information on all reproductive aspects of PGD as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool.
SEMANTIC NAVIGATION MAPS FOR MOBILE ROBOT LOCALIZATION ON PLANETARY SURFACES

Exploration with autonomous mobile robots is an important means in recent space exploration missions. One key requirement imposed is the ability to localize the robots in relation to their environment and to represent this environment in an accessible way. This paper discusses map building and localization for mobile robot exploration missions on planetary surfaces using a novel map representation we call semantic navigation map. We define and discuss the concept of our map representation, show how the map is generated, and explain how the localization algorithm utilizes and extends the map during the exploration phase of the mission. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our concept in a virtual testbed.
Metabolic transition in mycorrhizal tomato roots

Beneficial plant–microorganism interactions are widespread in nature. Among them, the symbiosis between plant roots and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) is of major importance, commonly improving host nutrition and tolerance against environmental and biotic challenges. Metabolic changes were observed in a well-established symbiosis between tomato and two common AMF: Rhizophagus irregularis and Funneliformis mosseae. Principal component analysis of metabolites, determined by non-targeted liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry, showed a strong metabolic rearrangement in mycorrhizal roots. There was generally a negative impact of mycorrhizal symbiosis on amino acid content, mainly on those involved in the biosynthesis of phenylpropanoids. On the other hand, many intermediaries in amino acid and sugar metabolism and the oxylipin pathway were among the compounds accumulating more in mycorrhizal roots. The metabolic reprogramming also affected other pathways in the secondary metabolism, mainly phenyl alcohols (lignins and lignans) and vitamins. The results showed that source metabolites of these pathways decreased in mycorrhizal roots, whilst the products derived from α-linolenic and amino acids presented higher concentrations in AMF-colonized roots. Mycorrhization therefore increased the flux into those pathways. Venn-diagram analysis showed that there are many induced signals shared by both mycorrhizal interactions, pointing to general mycorrhiza-associated changes in the tomato metabolome. Moreover, fungus-specific fingerprints were also found, suggesting that specific molecular alterations may underlie the reported functional diversity of the symbiosis. Since most positively regulated pathways were related to stress response mechanisms, their potential contribution to improved host stress tolerance is discussed.
From conflict to resolution : skills and strategies for individual, couple, and family therapy

In a dramatic theoretical breakthrough, psychologist Susan M. Heitler unites various schools of therapy with a powerful insight: Conflicts, within and between people, lie at the core of emotional distress. Emotional healing depends on movement from conflict to resolution; therapists, whatever their belief system, serve as guides along the way. Conflict resolution strategies are described in lively case examples.
DETECTION OF WATERMARKING METHODS USING

This paper presents a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based steganalysis technique to determine the watermarking method used to embed a watermark in an image. The detection is carried out in three steps. First, the proposed technique determines whether an image under consideration contains a watermark. If a watermark is detected, the embedding domain is revealed. Finally, the exact watermarking algorithm is named. The idea behind the method is that when the image is watermarked, relative and strict linear dependencies of rows/columns will differ from the original image and this can be modeled by the analysis of SVD. By using SVD, several features for the classification of the original and watermarked images are defined. The classification operation including both a linear and a SVM classifier is performed with a feature selection algorithm which serves to reduce the number of features and to increase the detection performance. The performance of the proposed technique is promising and simulation results indicate that the chosen features can reliably detect the watermarking domain as well as the watermarking method. Index Terms — Watermarking, Steganalysis, Classification
Relationship between California Mastitis Test score and ultrasonographic teat measurements in dairy cows.

OBJECTIVE The majority of published studies about mastitis are related to the control and prevention of mastitis, with particular emphasis on eliminating predisposition factors. The objective of the current study was to determine the role of teat morphology as an important factor in the aetiology of mastitis. DESIGN Ultrasonographic measurements were taken from 190 teats from 100 dairy cows of different breeds. PROCEDURE Mastitis in cows was diagnosed by the California Mastitis Test (CMT) and microbiological tests. The data were evaluated in the light of the clinical history of the animals. RESULTS Main effects of breed on teat diameter at the position of the Furstenberg rosette (FTD) and teat cistern diameter (CD), that of age on FTD and overall teat diameter (OTD), and that of CMT score on CD and OTD were significant (P < 0.05, P < 0.01). Number of lactations, pregnancy, the lactation period and the udder lobe (rear, front) were not found to have a significant effect on any of the measurements. Results showed that CD was significantly smaller (1.44 +/- 0.04 cm) (P < 0.01) in CMT-positive udder lobes than that in CMT-negative lobes. No difference was detected in canal length, CD, teat wall thickness, OTD or FTD between the CMT-positive and -negative lobes. CONCLUSION The occurrence of mastitis could be related to specific ultrasonographic teat measurements (e.g. CD, OTD and FTD) and these may be important in the breeding of cows with a predisposition to mastitis, as well in the evaluation of in-herd cows in terms of udder/teat deformities.