Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between Stock Market Gains and Losses and Google Searches

Experimental studies in the area of Psychology and Behavioral Economics have suggested that people change their search pattern in response to positive and negative events. Using Internet search data provided by Google, we investigated the relationship between stock-specific events and related Google searches. We studied daily data from 13 stocks from the Dow-Jones and NASDAQ100 indices, over a period of 4 trading years. Focusing on periods in which stocks were extensively searched (Intensive Search Periods), we found a correlation between the magnitude of stock returns at the beginning of the period and the volume, peak, and duration of search generated during the period. This relation between magnitudes of stock returns and subsequent searches was considerably magnified in periods following negative stock returns. Yet, we did not find that intensive search periods following losses were associated with more Google searches than periods following gains. Thus, rather than increasing search, losses improved the fit between people’s search behavior and the extent of real-world events triggering the search. The findings demonstrate the robustness of the attentional effect of losses.
Benzene Uptake and Glutathione S-transferase T1 Status as Determinants of S-Phenylmercapturic Acid in Cigarette Smokers in the Multiethnic Cohort

Research from the Multiethnic Cohort (MEC) demonstrated that, for the same quantity of cigarette smoking, African Americans and Native Hawaiians have a higher lung cancer risk than Whites, while Latinos and Japanese Americans are less susceptible. We collected urine samples from 2,239 cigarette smokers from five different ethnic groups in the MEC and analyzed each sample for S-phenylmercapturic acid (SPMA), a specific biomarker of benzene uptake. African Americans had significantly higher (geometric mean [SE] 3.69 [0.2], p<0.005) SPMA/ml urine than Whites (2.67 [0.13]) while Japanese Americans had significantly lower levels than Whites (1.65 [0.07], p<0.005). SPMA levels in Native Hawaiians and Latinos were not significantly different from those of Whites. We also conducted a genome-wide association study in search of genetic risk factors related to benzene exposure. The glutathione S-transferase T1 (GSTT1) deletion explained between 14.2–31.6% (p = 5.4x10-157) and the GSTM1 deletion explained between 0.2%-2.4% of the variance (p = 1.1x10-9) of SPMA levels in these populations. Ethnic differences in levels of SPMA remained strong even after controlling for the effects of these two deletions. These results demonstrate the powerful effect of GSTT1 status on SPMA levels in urine and show that uptake of benzene in African American, White, and Japanese American cigarette smokers is consistent with their lung cancer risk in the MEC. While benzene is not generally considered a cause of lung cancer, its metabolite SPMA could be a biomarker for other volatile lung carcinogens in cigarette smoke.
The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty

IFAD believes that the only way to reach the international poverty reduction target is to focus on rural development: in the early stages, with a strong focus on the production of food staples on small farms; in later stages, with more attention to commercial crops and the non-farm sector (itself strongly linked to agriculture). The key interventions are: better access for the poor to assets, especially land, water and human capital; improved technology, both ‘old’ and ‘new’; better access to markets; and reform of institutions through decentralisation and devolution - all designed to achieve rapid reduction of poverty, through employment intensity and the exploitation of local linkages with agriculture. IFAD’s approach and experience lay particular stress on supporting women and minorities.
DNS traffic analysis for malicious domains detection

The web has become the medium of choice for people to search for information, conduct business, and enjoy entertainment. At the same time, the web has also become the primary platform used by miscreants to attack users. For example, drive-by-download attacks, which could be through malicious domains, are a popular choice among bot herders to grow their botnets. In this paper we present our methodology for detecting any connection to malicious domain. Our detection method is based on a blacklist of malicious domains. We process the network traffic, particularly DNS traffic. We analyze all DNS requests and match the query with the blacklist. The blacklist of malicious domains is updated automatically and the detection is in the real time. We applied our methodology on a packet capture (pcap) file which contains traffic to malicious domains and we proved that our methodology can successfully detect the connections to malicious domains. We also applied our methodology on campus live traffic and showed that it can detect malicious domain connections in the real time.
Habitus and reflexivity in tandem? Insights from postcolonial Sri Lanka

This article contributes to the unresolved concern about the relationship between habitus and reflexivity. Using Sri Lanka, a postcolonial social context, as the research ground, the article provides a contemporary interpretation of individuals’ reflexive and habitual behaviour that displaces Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as inappropriate for the representation of 21st-century social dynamics. While Sri Lanka is often labelled a traditional society, where habitual, routine, pre-reflexive action is thought to be more common, studies that question this generalised view appear to be largely absent. Therefore, based on a critical realist morphogenetic perspective that offers the analytical possibility of both routine and conscious action, this article investigates the role of habitus and reflexivity through 75 work and life histories gathered from Sri Lanka. The findings suggest that even the reproduction of traditional practices has increasingly become a reflexive task; thus, this work supports the position that habitus fails to provide reliable guidance to understand social action, even within a society labelled as traditional.
The Alleviation of Nutrient Deficiency Symptoms in Changbai Larch (Larix olgensis) Seedlings by the Application of Exogenous Organic Acids

Exogenous organic acids are beneficial in protecting plants from the stress of heavy metal toxins (e.g., Pb) in soils. This work focuses on the potential role of organic acids in protecting Changbai larch (Larix olgensis) seedlings from the stress of growing in nutrient deficient soil. The seedlings were planted in a nutrient rich or deficient soil (A1 horizon of a Haplic Cambisol without organic acid as the nutrient rich control, or fully-mixed A1 + B horizons in a proportion of 1:2 as deficient) in pots in a greenhouse. In A1 + B horizons the seedlings were treated daily with concentrations of oxalic or citric acid (OA or CA) at a rate approximately equivalent to 0, 0.04, 0.2, 1.0, or 2.0 mmol·kg−1 of soil for 10, 20, and 30 days. Nutrient deficiency stressed the seedlings as indicated by lipid peroxidation and malondialdehyde (MDA) content in leaves significantly increasing, and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activities, proline, photosynthetic pigment contents, and chlorophyll fluorescence (Fv/Fm) decreasing. The stress increased in controls over the application periods. When nutrient deficient plants were exposed to an organic acid (especially 5.0 or 10.0 mmol·L−1 for 20 days), the stress as indicated by the physiological parameters was reversed, and survival rate of seedlings, and biomass of root, stem, and leaf significantly increased; CA was more effective than OA. The results demonstrate that exogenous organic acids alleviate nutrient deficiency-induced oxidative injuries and improve the tolerance of L. olgensis seedlings to nutrient deficiency.
Retaining and Exploring Online Remains on YouTube

The paper presents a method and a collection of techniques for conducting virtual excavations in online social networking services. YouTube and its Data API are used as a case study of a virtual settlement. The objective is to assess not only what is retained by YouTube but also what sense can be made of a designated set of YouTube online remains. The research focuses on defining, capturing and transforming digital trace data into interactive visualizations that unlock crucial dynamics of online activity.
2 Coordination in Mobile Agent Applications

The paper addresses the issue of coordination in distributed applications based on mobile agents. The presence of mobile active computational entities makes traditional coordination models based on message-passing, such as the client-server one, not effective, from both the performance and the usability points of view. Indirect coordination models suit better the mobile scenario: interactions occur via blackboards where information is accessed in an associative way, thus uncoupling the involved entities. The paper surveys these different approaches and evaluates their impact in the design of a widely distributed application in the area of information retrieval. This permits to outline the advantages of uncoupled coordination models and to point out the urge for a coordination model based on reactive and programmable blackboards, that may increase the safety and the security of the environment while simplifying the task of programming distributed mobile agent applications.
Workload on your fingertips: the influence of workload on touch-based drag and drop

In this paper we explore if it is possible to recognize different cognitive states of a user through analyzing drag and drop behavior on a tablet device. We introduce a modified version of the classic Stroop task, which is a commonly used psychological stressor and investigate how different levels of perceived workload correlate with measures related to fingertip movement during drag and drop. A study with 24 participants is reported, where we were able to replicate the Stroop effect in a touch-based drag and drop task and present 2 measures in fingertip movement that correlate with subjective ratings of workload based on the NASA-TLX questionnaire.
Self-maintained folder hierarchies as document repositories

This paper presents a novel approach for the management of large collections of electronic documents. The major technical contribution of our approach is the seamless integration of features found in systems such as file systems, document repositories, directory services, classification hierarchies, and email folders into a single folder-based system. The user may specify rules for characterizing interesting or relevant document classes. Based on these rules which are checked for consistency, folders are not only populated with documents, but folders themselves are created and deleted based on the occurrence of values in documents.
A human emotion recognition system using supervised self-organising maps

Emotions constantly guide and modulate our rationality which plays an essential role in how we behave intelligently while interacting with other humans as well as machines. The technique described here provides an effective interface between humans and machines using facial expressions. This technique could be used to allow machines to incorporate an interpretation of human emotions in their principles of rationality, which could result in a more intelligent interaction with humans. In this technique, 15 feature values are calculated from the 18 feature points set on the facial images. It uses clustering based approach and supervised self-organising maps for emotion classification. The novelty of this technique is that it uses a modified form of FACS (Facial Action Coding System) to get 15 facial feature vectors of an image. Five emotions that have been considered are: neutral, anger, happy, sad and surprised. A self-clicked authentic emotion database of web-cam clicked images is used. The technique has been implemented and high efficiency has been confirmed in real-time application.
Optimal monitoring in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) are finding increasing usage in city-wide deployments for providing network connectivity. Mesh routers in WMNs typically use multiple wireless channels to enhance the spatial-reuse of frequency bands, often with multiple radios per node. Due to the cooperative nature of WMNs, they are susceptible to many attacks that cannot be defeated by using traditional cryptographic mechanisms of authentication or encryption alone. A solution approach commonly used for defending against such attacks is behavior-based detection in which some nodes overhear communication in their neighborhood to determine if the behavior by a neighbor is legitimate. It has been proposed to use specialized monitoring nodes deployed strategically throughout the network for performing such detection. The problem that arises is where to deploy these monitoring nodes, how to minimize their number, and which channels to tune their radios to, such that the maximum part of the network can be covered. This problem has been solved for single channel networks by a greedy approximation algorithm since the exact solution is NP-hard. The greedy algorithm achieves the best performance, in terms of the worst case, possible among all polynomial-time algorithms provided that P! =NP. In this paper, we solve the problem for multi-channel multi-radio WMNs. The intuitive extension of the greedy algorithm destroys the property of best performance. Instead, we formulate the problem as an integer linear program, solve its linear program relaxation, and then use two rounding techniques that we develop by adapting existing rounding schemes. We thereby present two approximation algorithms. The first, computationally-light algorithm, called probabilistic rounding algorithm gives an expected best performance in the worst case. The second, called deterministic rounding algorithm achieves the best worst-case performance in a deterministic manner. To evaluate how the three algorithms perform in practice, we simulate them in random networks and scale-free networks.
The Role of IT and Inter-firm Partnership Activities in SME Performance

This research draws upon the resource-based view theory, the information systems (IS) and fast growth company literature to examine the impact of IT on fast growth small-tomedium enterprise (SME) performance. The results show that fast growth SMEs are highly entrepreneurial and innovative, know how to strategically utilize IT to improve inter-firm partnership activities such as information sharing, activity integration, coordination, and partnership enhancement and thus achieve rapid growth. This study contributes to the ongoing debate surrounding the business value of IT in the SME context and highlights the ways in which IT helps fast growth SMEs to achieve business success.
Verification of Embedded Processors

This paper presents a technique for formal verification of processors. The verification process is performed at the RTL level of implementation, which has the advantage of being synthesizable by a synthesis tool. Cadence SMV is used as the verification tool. It employs the symbolic model checking technique. A stepwise verification method is proposed where the details of design are increased in each step. This method facilitates the error finding process. The proposed technique can reduce the complexity of the verification process and enables it to be completed in a reasonable time. The technique is illustrated on a simple processor used in an embedded web server. The design is verified successfully.
A cross-cultural study of English and Chinese online platform reviews: A genre-based view

Regardless of the increasing research attention paid to peer-to-peer accommodation worldwide, our understanding of consumer experiences across different languages and cultures is limited. Extant research tends to support the view that consumer experiences are homogeneous, while overlooking possible cultural divergence across cultures. To fill this gap, this study uses a cross-cultural perspective based on genre analysis and cross-cultural rhetoric study to compare English and Chinese reviews about users’ peer-to-peer accommodation experiences in two popular platforms in China, Airbnb and Xiaozhu (China’s Airbnb platform). Through analyzing 584 online reviews (256 in Chinese and 328 in English), we found similar moves in both sets of data, including reviews about the accommodation and about the host, expressing feelings, and making a recommendation. However, we found significant differences in expressing these moves in communication styles. We found that there was a stronger sense of a close and family- like relationship between the guest and the host in the Chinese reviews, while English reviews stressed the importance of space and privacy.
Relay search algorithms for coded cooperative systems

Cooperation provides an efficient form of diversity in wireless communications. In this paper we consider a coded cooperative system where the source and the relays may have multiple antennas. We describe two simple algorithms for choosing a good relay: blind-selection-algorithm and informed-selection-algorithm. These algorithms only require the knowledge of average received signal to noise ratios at the destination. Simulation results, carried out for a cellular system, show that both algorithms result in substantial improvement over direct transmission and random choice of relay in the cell and provide error rates close to best relay performance.
The Motivations of U.S. Preservice Teaching Graduates Returning to Teach

Due to increased global access to teacher employment, many first-year teachers from the United States are seeking employment abroad. Giving preservice teachers an initial opportunity to study and/or teach abroad before graduation can create greater opportunities to secure eventual employment abroad, and some graduates choose to return to the site of their preservice experience. This case study examines the motivations of two U.S. students who sought employment at the site of their overseas preservice teaching location in Spain for their first professional teaching placement. In exploring the motivations of these new teachers, the authors identified two major reasons they chose to return: relationships and language. Both study participants talked extensively about the benefits of establishing strong relationships while studying/teaching abroad and how this enabled them to find the elements required to live and work abroad. They also highlighted language acquisition. For both of them, the importance of being fluent in Spanish for their future career was a significant factor in their decision to return to teach abroad.
An Efficient and Robust Algorithm for Shape Indexing and Retrieval

Many shape matching methods are either fast but too simplistic to give the desired performance or promising as far as performance is concerned but computationally demanding. In this paper, we present a very simple and efficient approach that not only performs almost as good as many state-of-the-art techniques but also scales up to large databases. In the proposed approach, each shape is indexed based on a variety of simple and easily computable features which are invariant to articulations, rigid transformations, etc. The features characterize pairwise geometric relationships between interest points on the shape. The fact that each shape is represented using a number of distributed features instead of a single global feature that captures the shape in its entirety provides robustness to the approach. Shapes in the database are ordered according to their similarity with the query shape and similar shapes are retrieved using an efficient scheme which does not involve costly operations like shape-wise alignment or establishing correspondences. Depending on the application, the approach can be used directly for matching or as a first step for obtaining a short list of candidate shapes for more rigorous matching. We show that the features proposed to perform shape indexing can be used to perform the rigorous matching as well, to further improve the retrieval performance.
Regenerating 1 and 3b Gene Expression in the Pancreas of Type 2 Diabetic Goto-Kakizaki (GK) Rats

Regenerating (REG) proteins are associated with islet development, β-cell damage, diabetes and pancreatitis. Particularly, REG-1 and REG-3-beta are involved in cell growth/survival and/or inflammation and the Reg1 promoter contains interleukin-6 (IL-6)-responsive elements. We showed by transcriptome analysis that islets of Goto-Kakizaki (GK) rats, a model of spontaneous type 2 diabetes, overexpress Reg1, 3α, 3β and 3γ, vs Wistar islets. Goto-Kakizaki rat islets also exhibit increased cytokine/chemokine expression/release, particularly IL-6. Here we analyzed Reg1 and Reg3β expression and REG-1 immuno-localization in the GK rat pancreas in relationship with inflammation. Isolated pancreatic islets and acinar tissue from male adult Wistar and diabetic GK rats were used for quantitative RT-PCR analysis. REG-1 immunohistochemistry was performed on paraffin sections with a monoclonal anti-rat REG-1 antibody. Islet cytokine/chemokine release was measured after 48 h-culture. Islet macrophage-positive area was quantified on cryostat sections using anti-CD68 and major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II antibodies. Pancreatic exocrine-to-endocrine Reg1 and Reg3β mRNA ratios were markedly increased in Wistar vs GK rats. Conversely, both genes were upregulated in isolated GK rat islets. These findings were unexpected, because Reg genes are expressed in the pancreatic acinar tissue. However, we observed REG-1 protein labeling in acinar peri-ductal tissue close to islets and around large, often disorganized, GK rat islets, which may retain acinar cells due to their irregular shape. These large islets also showed peri-islet macrophage infiltration and increased release of various cytokines/chemokines, particularly IL-6. Thus, IL-6 might potentially trigger acinar REG-1 expression and secretion in the vicinity of large diabetic GK rat islets. This increased acinar REG-1 expression might reflect an adaptive though unsuccessful response to deleterious microenvironment.
Norwegian child language and the history of English : The interaction of syntax and information structure in the development of word order 1

In this paper, data from a study investigating the acquisition of verb second (V2) word order in a dialect of Norwegian which allows two different word orders in wh-questions (V2 and V3) are used to argue for a cue-based approach to language acquisition and change (Lightfoot 1999). More specifically, it is shown that certain word order patterns that are dependent on information structure are acquired extremely early, and that they appear in Norwegian child language even in constructions where there is no evidence for them in the input. Similar patterns are attested in Old and Middle English, where V2 and non-V2 structures co-exist in topicalizations. The paper argues that a change in the statistical frequencies in the input to children, brought about by patterns of information structure, could be (at least partly) responsible for the development from V2 to non-V2 word order in the history of English.