Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Software Controlled Clock Modulation for Energy Efficiency Optimization on Intel Processors

Current Intel processors implement a variety of power saving features like frequency scaling and idle states. These mechanisms limit the power draw and thereby decrease the thermal dissipation of the processors. However, they also have an impact on the achievable performance. The various mechanisms significantly differ regarding the amount of power savings, the latency of mode changes, and the associated overhead. In this paper, we describe and closely examine the so-called software controlled clock modulation mechanism for different processor generations. We present results that imply that the available documentation is not always correct and describe when this feature can be used to improve energy efficiency. We additionally compare it against the more popular feature of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling and develop a model to decide which feature should be used to optimize inter-process synchronizations on Intel Haswell-EP processors.
Natural beta interferon in acute type-C hepatitis patients: a randomized controlled trial.

AIM OF THE STUDY A multicentre randomized controlled trial to assess whether a short course of beta-interferon could reduce the rate of chronic evolution of acute hepatitis C, in line with recent observations, was started in Northern Italy in 1991. METHODS Forty acute hepatitis C patients were randomized to receive natural beta interferon 3,000,000 international units intramuscularly three times a week for 4 weeks or symptomatic drugs, and were followed up for a median period of 22.5 months. RESULTS The chronicity rate was 75% (15/20 patients) in the interferon-treated group, and 80% (16/20) in the untreated group. No difference in the duration of the acute phase of hepatitis was observed. Hepatitis C virus ribonucleic acid was determined in 21 cases and was positive in 19 cases at baseline and in 15/17 chronic and 1/4 non chronic cases at the end of follow-up. Side effects of therapy (flu-like syndrome in 40% of cases) were mild and short-lasting. No aminotransferase flare-ups were observed during treatment. CONCLUSIONS Beta interferon at the suggested regimen is well tolerated but does not seem to significantly influence the natural course of acute hepatitis C.
Fat-Holding in Hamburgers as Influenced by the Different Constituents of Beef Adipose Tissue

The effects of addition of adipose tissue, rendered fat, rendered fat + the separated connective tissue and rendered fat + gelatin, respectively, were compared on the fat-holding properties of hamburgers upon heating. The fat losses on frying (175 °C, 3.5 minutes on each side) were substantially less than in the net test (cooking in a water bath at 77 oc for 35 minutes, followed by a centrifugation step). Fat losses during frying were governed both by the instability of the fat and the migration of the fat out of the product. The fat losses determined by the net test, however, reflected only the instability of the fat, as the effect of the migration of the fat out of the product was minimized, due to the centrifugation step. Fat-holding on frying was the best when fat was added in the form of fat cells and when an increased amount of connective tissue was added. On the contrary, fat-holding in the net test was be.st, when the fat was emulsified to smaller droplets with gelatin as an emulsifier. These observations suggest that the migration of the fat out of the hamburger is the most important factor, governing fat-holding in hamburgers on frying, whereas for the net test the instability of the fat per se seemed to be more essential.
Strategies to produce hepatocytes and hepatocyte‐like cells from pluripotent stem cells

Human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are a potent source for unlimited production of hepatocytes and hepatocyte‐like cells that may replace primary human hepatocytes in a variety of fields including liver cell therapy, liver tissue engineering, manufacturing bioartificial liver, modeling inherited and chronic liver diseases, drug screening and toxicity testing. Human ESCs are able to spontaneously form embryoid bodies, which then spontaneously differentiate to various tissue‐specific cell lineages containing a total of 10–30% albumin‐producing hepatocytes and hepatocyte‐like cells. Enrichment of embryoid bodies with the definitive endoderm, from which hepatocytes arise, yields increasing the final ratio of hepatocyte population up by 50–65%. Current strategies of the directed differentiation of human ESCs (and iPSCs) to hepatocytes that reproduce liver embryogenesis by sequential stimulation of culturing ESCs with tissue‐specific growth factors result in achieving the differentiation rate up to 60–80%. In the future, directed differentiation of human ESCs and iPSCs to hepatocytes should be further optimized towards generating homogeneous cultures of hepatocytes in order to avoid expensive procedures of separation and isolation of hepatocytes and hepatocyte‐like cells.
iPath2.0: interactive pathway explorer

iPath2.0 is a web-based tool (http://pathways.embl.de) for the visualization and analysis of cellular pathways. Its primary map summarizes the metabolism in biological systems as annotated to date. Nodes in the map correspond to various chemical compounds and edges represent series of enzymatic reactions. In two other maps, iPath2.0 provides an overview of secondary metabolite biosynthesis and a hand-picked selection of important regulatory pathways and other functional modules, allowing a more general overview of protein functions in a genome or metagenome. iPath2.0′s main interface is an interactive Flash-based viewer, which allows users to easily navigate and explore the complex pathway maps. In addition to the default pre-computed overview maps, iPath offers several data mapping tools. Users can upload various types of data and completely customize all nodes and edges of iPath2.0′s maps. These customized maps give users an intuitive overview of their own data, guiding the analysis of various genomics and metagenomics projects.
A Phenomenological Approach to Uncovering the Essence of Grieving Experiences of Undergraduates.

BERGENE, LISA BETH. A Phenomenological Approach to Uncovering the Essence of Grieving Experiences of Undergraduates. (Under the direction of Dr. Carol Kasworm). Past studies have suggested that during their time on campus, as many as half of all undergraduates will experience the death of a loved one (Balk, 2001; Balk, Walker, & Baker, 2010; Holland & Neimeyer, 2010). The purpose of this study was to use a phenomenological method to uncover a thick, rich description of the lived experience of grieving among college undergraduates. Seven undergraduates took part in this study. Inclusion criteria required participants to have experienced the loss of a loved one within the past year. The participants in this study experienced the death of parents, close friends, a grandparent, or an uncle. Phenomenological method was used to collect and analyze data. Participants completed two semi-structured interviews and a final meeting to review and confirm initial findings. Interview transcripts were reduced into units of meaning. Units of meaning expressing a similar experience were grouped together into clusters. Participants were asked to review and refine these clusters to ensure they accurately expressed their experiences. Findings of the study can be grouped into four areas: (1) the influence of others on the experience of grieving, (2) the experience of adjusting to new roles and responsibilities, (3) innermost thoughts and feelings, and (4) moving forward after loss. Participants revealed that the feeling of being alone, even amongst thousands of classmates, was a prominent part of the lived experience of grieving. By the same token, peers who were present and consistent in expressing care and concern were an important source of support. Participants described the experience of taking on new responsibilities, such as planning the memorial
Simultaneous position and displacement sensing using two fibre Bragg grating sensors

Over the years, many shape sensing methods have been developed with technologies including optical fibre, PZT and fringe projection. Among them, optical fibres have gained a lot of attention due to their unobtrusive nature when either surface mounted or embedded in the structure. Optical fibre Bragg gratings (FBG) are currently employed for structural health monitoring in civil and aerospace systems and their shape sensing capabilities have been previously reported. In this paper, we propose a novel fibre optic based shape sensor of an isotropic cantilever beam based on the principles of interferometry and FBG sensing. The method described in this paper uses a standard single core single-mode optical fibre and the least number of sensors to estimate the shape, making it comparatively an inexpensive sensing method. On displacing the beam with an unknown magnitude and at an unknown location along the beam, we are able to demonstrate that we can measure the shape of the displaced beam and the magnitude and location of the force applied. The analysis involves using a calibration method and an iterative calculation to measure the two unknowns. An analytical model based on the known beam theories was used to assess the accuracy of the measurements. The preliminary analysis yielded an accuracy of ±1 mm and ±50 mm for the displacement and location, respectively.
Sparse approximated nearest points for image set classification

Classification based on image sets has recently attracted great research interest as it holds more promise than single image based classification. In this paper, we propose an efficient and robust algorithm for image set classification. An image set is represented as a triplet: a number of image samples, their mean and an affine hull model. The affine hull model is used to account for unseen appearances in the form of affine combinations of sample images. We introduce a novel between-set distance called Sparse Approximated Nearest Point (SANP) distance. Unlike existing methods, the dissimilarity of two sets is measured as the distance between their nearest points, which can be sparsely approximated from the image samples of their respective set. Different from standard sparse modeling of a single image, this novel sparse formulation for the image set enforces sparsity on the sample coefficients rather than the model coefficients and jointly optimizes the nearest points as well as their sparse approximations. A convex formulation for searching the optimal SANP between two sets is proposed and the accelerated proximal gradient method is adapted to efficiently solve this optimization. Experimental evaluation was performed on the Honda, MoBo and Youtube datasets. Comparison with existing techniques shows that our method consistently achieves better results.
Teacher Prepared Material for Slow Readers.

Betty Daniel Roe is an assistant professor of education at the Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, Tennessee, She teaches reading methods courses, diagnostic and remedial reading, and college reading improvement courses. In spare hours she has tutored elementary and secondary students in reading skills. ■ A complaint frequently heard from high school teachers is that they have no reading materials in any of the content areas to use with students who are reading below grade level. When suitable titles for these students are suggested, a typical response is that funds are not available to purchase such books. My reply to several teachers who complained of lack of money for materials was: prepare some materials yourself. Each one looked at me in disbelief and gave an answer equivalent to "I wouldn't know where to begin. " With these conversations in mind, I decided to find out if typical high school teachers could rewrite the materials available in their schools on lower readability levels. For the purposes of my investigation, I used a group of nine graduate students enrolled in a class titled "Teaching Reading in the Secondary School. " All were public school teachers actively engaged in classroom teaching at the time. One of the assignments for this class was as follows. Choose a chapter or major section from a textbook designed for
Towards a framework for collating help-desk responses from multiple documents

Responses to help-desk email inquiries are often repetitive, sharing varying degrees of commonality. In addition, a significant proportion of the responses are generic, containing a very low level of technical content. In this paper, we present a corpus-based approach for identifying common elements in help-desk responses and using them to construct a new response. A help-desk domain is unique in that responses that contain even one incongruous sentence can alienate a user. It is therefore not always possible to automatically generate a complete response, because personalization is often better handled by human operators. Our system is designed to find and collate the generic portions of responses. We have adapted multi-document summarization techniques, and developed a measure that predicts the completeness of a planned response, thus indicating when a fully automated response is possible. Our evaluation shows that 14% of the responses in our corpus can be represented by complete generic responses.
Why are So Few Females Promoted into CEO and Vice President Positions? Danish Empirical Evidence, 1997–2007

The authors estimate the probability of promotion into VP and CEO positions using employer-employee data from all Danish companies observed during the period 1997 to 2007. After controlling for a large number of firm and family-related variables, including take-up history of maternity and paternity leave and proxies for female-friendly companies, a considerable gap still occurs in the promotion probabilities for CEO positions. Part of the gap is due to gender differences in the area of specialization as top executive. Women tend to cluster in VP positions in HR, R&D, and IT areas in which the chances of a CEO promotion are lower than for positions as CFOs and VPs in Sales or Production areas.
Globalization, localization and food culture: perceived roles of social and cultural capitals in healthy child feeding practices in Japan

Objectives: The current study examined parental perceptions of sociocultural factors associated with healthy child feeding practices among parents of preschool-age children in rural Japan. Methods: Fifteen Japanese mothers of preschool-age children participated in this qualitative study. These participants were aged 22–39 years and resided in a rural town in western Japan. We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews to assess parental perceptions of healthy child feeding practices and their relationships with globalization and localization. These interviews were transcribed, translated into English and coded, based on the principles of grounded theory. A codebook was developed and pre-identified, and the newly-identified themes from this codebook were examined and compared. Results: Overall, local and seasonal foods, along with traditional Japanese foods and simple foods (soshoku), were considered to be beneficial for children. Participants also noted that children were expected to be mindful and exhibit good table manners that reflect cultural values related to meal-time socializing or family bonding, and food appreciation. On the other hand, the majority of the participants stated that foods containing food additives and imported foods were unsuitable for children. Participants noted that strong social capital, especially social support from their mothers or mothers-in-law, as well as social networks for obtaining fresh local foods, contributed to healthy child feeding practices. Cultural capital (including the preservation of traditional Japanese dietary habits, eating rules and inter-generational commensality), was also identified as being key to healthy feeding practices. Conclusions: Identifying and promoting the social and cultural capital that positively support healthy child feeding practices may be an important component of nutrition education programs.
A novel neural network-based linearization and auto-compensation technique for sensors

An artificial neural network (NN)-based technique for smart sensors operating in harsh environments is proposed that automatically calibrates, linearizes and compensates for the adverse effects due to nonlinear response characteristics and complex nonlinear dependency of the sensor characteristics on the environmental parameters. To show the potential of the proposed NN-based technique, we provide simulation results of a smart capacitive pressure sensor (CPS) operating under a wide temperature range
Research on Malicious Transaction Processing Method of Database System

Recovery from information attacks is difficult because DBMS is not designed to deal with malicious committed transactions. A few existing methods developed for this purpose rely on operation logs, which can't express the dependency between different transactions directly. These methods usually use rollback mechanism and abandon results of innocent transactions to maintain correctness, which may indeed be used as an approach to realize DOS attack. Hence, it's necessary to find out the malicious transaction and subsequent transactions depending on it precisely. In this paper, the definition of transaction recovery log is presented and each log item records the actions taken in one transaction, by which, we can calculate transactions' dependency directly. Based on the log model and the algorithm for log's creation, the dependency calculation and data recovery algorithm are studied, which are proofed to be complete and correct. Using transaction recovery log and the algorithm, database system can significantly enhance the performance of recovery for defensive information warfare.
Natural Barrier to Entry in the Credit Rating Industry

We present an infinite horizon model that studies the competition between a relatively ineffective incumbent Credit Rating Agency (CRA) and a sequence of entrant CRAs that are potentially more effective but whose ability in appraising default risk is unproven at the time they enter the market. We show that free entry competition in the credit rating business fails in selecting the most competent CRA as long as two conditions are met. First, investors and issuers trust the incumbent CRA to provide a sincere, although imperfect, assessment of issuers' default risk. Second, CRAs cannot charge higher fees for low rating than for high rating. Under these conditions a rather incompetent CRA can dominate the market without being worried about potentially more competent entrants. We derive policy implications.
Molecular Determinants in the Second Intracellular Loop of the 5-Hydroxytryptamine-1A Receptor for G-Protein Coupling

This study provides the first comprehensive evidence that the second intracellular loop C-terminal domain (Ci2) is critical for receptor-G protein coupling to multiple responses. Although Ci2 is weakly conserved, its role in 5-hydroxytryptamine-1A (5-HT1A) receptor function was suggested by the selective loss of Gβγ-mediated signaling in the T149A-5-HT1A receptor mutant. More than 60 point mutant 5-HT1A receptors in the α-helical Ci2 sequence (143DYVNKRTPRR152) were generated. Most mutants retained agonist binding and were tested for Gβγ signaling to adenylyl cyclase II or phospholipase C and Gαi coupling to detect constitutive and agonist-induced Gi/Go coupling. Remarkably, most point mutations markedly attenuated 5-HT1A signaling, indicating that the entire Ci2 domain is critical for receptor G-protein coupling. Six signaling phenotypes were observed: wild-type-like, Gαi-coupled/weak Gβγ-coupled, Gβγ-uncoupled, Gβγ-selective coupled, uncoupled, and inverse coupling. Our data elucidate specific roles of Ci2 residues consistent with predictions based on rhodopsin crystal structure. The absolute coupling requirement for lysine, arginine, and proline residues is consistent with a predicted amphipathic α-helical Ci2 domain that is kinked at Pro150. Polar residues (Thr149, Asn146) located in the externally oriented positively charged face were required for Gβγ but not Gαi coupling, suggesting a direct interface with Gβγ subunits. The hydrophobic face includes the critical Tyr144 that directs the specificity of coupling to both Gβγ and Gαi pathways. The key coupling residues Tyr144/Lys147 (Ci2) are predicted to orient internally, forming hydrogen and ionic bonds with Asp133/Arg134 (Ni2 DRY motif) and Glu340 (Ci3) to stabilize the Gprotein coupling domain. Thus, the 5-HT1A receptor Ci2 domain determines Gβγ specificity and stabilizes Gαi-mediated signaling.
Convertible Securities and Venture Capital Finance

This paper offers a new explanation for the prevalent use of convertible securities in venture capital finance. Convertible securities can be used to endogenously allocate cash flow rights as a function of the realized quality of the project. This property can be used to mitigate the double moral hazard problem between the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist. It is shown that an optimally designed convertible security outperforms any mixture of debt and equity and that it can induce both parties to invest efficiently. The result is robust to renegotiation and to changes in the timing of investments and information flows.
A Study on Genetic Variants of Fibroblast Growth Factor Receptor 2 (FGFR2) and the Risk of Breast Cancer from North India

Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have identified Fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 (FGFR2) as a candidate gene for breast cancer with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located in intron 2 region as the susceptibility loci strongly associated with the risk. However, replicate studies have often failed to extrapolate the association to diverse ethnic regions. This hints towards the existing heterogeneity among different populations, arising due to differential linkage disequilibrium (LD) structures and frequencies of SNPs within the associated regions of the genome. It is therefore important to revisit the previously linked candidates in varied population groups to unravel the extent of heterogeneity. In an attempt to investigate the role of FGFR2 polymorphisms in susceptibility to the risk of breast cancer among North Indian women, we genotyped rs2981582, rs1219648, rs2981578 and rs7895676 polymorphisms in 368 breast cancer patients and 484 healthy controls by Polymerase chain reaction-Restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) assay. We observed a statistically significant association with breast cancer risk for all the four genetic variants (P<0.05). In per-allele model for rs2981582, rs1219648, rs7895676 and in dominant model for rs2981578, association remained significant after bonferroni correction (P<0.0125). On performing stratified analysis, significant correlations with various clinicopathological as well as environmental and lifestyle characteristics were observed. It was evident that rs1219648 and rs2981578 interacted with exogenous hormone use and advanced clinical stage III (after Bonferroni correction, P<0.000694), respectively. Furthermore, combined analysis on these four loci revealed that compared to women with 0–1 risk loci, those with 2–4 risk loci had increased risk (OR = 1.645, 95%CI = 1.152–2.347, P = 0.006). In haplotype analysis, for rs2981578, rs2981582 and rs1219648, risk haplotype (GTG) was associated with a significantly increased risk compared to the common (ACA) haplotype (OR = 1.365, 95% CI = 1.086–1.717, P = 0.008). Our results suggest that intron 2 SNPs of FGFR2 may contribute to genetic susceptibility of breast cancer in North India population.