Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Low Molecular Weight Heparin Improves Peritoneal Ultrafiltration and Blocks Complement and Coagulation

Objectives Clinical studies have demonstrated that the intraperitoneal (IP) complement and coagulation systems are activated in peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients. In animal models, low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) was seen to inhibit peritoneal angiogenesis, and related compounds have increased ultrafiltration volumes after repeated administration to PD patients. The present study evaluated the effects of LMWH on ultrafiltration, coagulation, and complement activation during a single PD dwell. Design Rats were exposed to a single dose of 20 mL 2.5% glucose-based, filter-sterilized PD fluid, with or without supplementation with LMWH. The PD fluid was administered either as an IP injection or as an infusion through an indwelling catheter. The dwell fluid was analyzed 2 hours later concerning activation of the complement and coagulation cascades, chemotactic activity, neutrophil recruitment, ultrafiltration volume, and glucose and urea concentrations. Results Exposure to PD fluid induced activation of IP complement [formation of C3a(desArg) and increase of C5a-dependent chemotactic activity] and coagulation (formation of thrombin–antithrombin complex) and recruitment of neutrophils. In the case of IP injection, neutrophil recruitment and complement activation were inhibited by LMWH. In both models, LMWH inhibited thrombin formation, reduced complement-dependent chemotactic activity, and increased the IP fluid volume, indicating an improved ultrafiltration. Conclusions The acute inflammatory reaction to PD fluid involves the complement and coagulation cascades. Addition of LMWH to the PD fluid improves ultrafiltration, inhibits formation of thrombin, and potentially blocks C5a activity. The present results motivate further investigations of the IP cascade systems in PD.
Palette based colour transfer using image segmentation

While the ability to see colours is innate, their perception is a guided process. Varying across languages and cultures, linguistic vocabulary is one such influence that guides our perception. In colour specifically, the names of colours in a language act as verbal cues that help us memorize and later recognize colours of the spectrum. This makes colour a cultural and local phenomenon. This paper presents a novel method to perform colour transfer, given an image and an elaborate colour palette as inputs. Image segmentation is employed, followed by a region based colour transfer to ensure accurate local colour mapping. The method is used to bias the given image with colours that are perceptually closest to it in a reference language. This is done in an attempt to make the colour transfer reflect the changes in colour vocabularies of people from different languages and cultures.
Seven challenges to combining human and automated service

We introduce this special issue by addressing seven key challenges associated with managing hybrid human-automated service systems. These consist of the following: 1 What strategic and tactical issues arise when managing hybrid service systems? 2 How should the core “value proposition” be set? 3 What special considerations arise in the design and implementation phases? 4 How can service delivery be managed to identify systemic problems and to address service breakdowns? 5 How can communications with clients improve the functioning of service systems? 6 What performance measures should be used to monitor process, outputs, client perceptions, and financial outcomes? 7 How can we coordinate the various interdisciplinary activities needed to address the previous six issues? We consider these challenges after first characterizing the historical evolution of service delivery, reviewing some of the literature in the administrative sciences, and proposing a conceptual framework. Copyright © 2009 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Nous introduisons ce numero special en nous penchant sur sept defis cles lies a la gestion des systemes de services automatiques humains hybrides. Nous formulons ces defis sous forme de questions: 1 Quels sont les problemes tactiques et strategiques lies a la gestion des systemes de services hybrides? 2 Comment elaborer la «proposition de valeur» fondamentale? 3 Quels sont les aspects auxquels il faut preter attention pendant les phases de conception et de realisation? 4 Comment gerer la prestation de services pour identifier les problemes systemiques et mettre fin aux interruptions de services? 5 Comment les communications avec la clientele peuvent-elles ameliorer le fonctionnement des systemes de services? 6 Quelles sont les mesures de performance qu'il faut utiliser pour controler les processus et les resultats? 7 Comment coordonner les differentes activites interdisciplinaires necessaires pour faire face aux six problemes sus-evoques? Avant de proposer des elements de reponses a ces questions, nous caracterisons l'evolution historique de la prestation de service, passons en revue les travaux anterieurs dans le domaine des sciences de l'administration et proposons un cadre conceptuel. Copyright © 2009 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An Empirical Analysis of Bundling and Tying: Over-the-Counter Pain Relief and Cold Medicines

We apply and extend the cost-based approach to bundling and tying under competition developed in Evans and Salinger (2004a) to over-the-counter pain relievers and cold medicines. We document that consumers pay much less for tablets with multiple ingredients than they would to buy tablets with each ingredient separately. We then decompose the sources of these savings into marginal cost savings and a component that reflects fixed costs of product offerings. The analysis both documents substantial economies of bundling and illustrates the sort of cost analysis that is necessary for understanding tying.
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) 2008 Using Degree of Proficiency for Classifying Respondents in IS Success Evaluations

A contemporary Information System (IS) entails many stakeholders ranging from top executives to data entry operators, with diverse skill, expertise and knowledge. Respondent’s perspective of measurement has been recognized as an important consideration in system evaluations. However, only few IS success studies report details of respondent classifications, of many are confined to the standard employment hierarchy as the sole classifier. Though the standard employment hierarchies provide reasonable insights into IS success, the results of those classifications are often subjected to respondents’ emotional party-lines, thus compromising valuable management insights. Analyzing data from 310 respondents representing 27 organizations, this study proposes ‘degree of proficiency’ as a supplementary method of classifying respondents in IS success evaluations. The study empirically validates three types of proficiencies demonstrating their value research and practice.
Data independence in the model checking of security protocols

The research presented in this thesis lies in the area of security protocol analysis, focusing mainly on confidentiality and authentication properties. The formal method used is CSP with the model checker FDR. This approach has proved to be very successful for modelling security protocols, especially when it comes to finding attacks (for example [Low95] and [LR97b]). However, since it can only check a small finite instance of a protocol model, this was incomplete as a method for proving correctness and limited when it came to analysing larger models. This thesis is concerned with enhancing this approach to enable a more complete analysis of security protocols. The data independence techniques developed by Roscoe [Ros98a] allow models in which agents can perform an unbounded number of sequential runs, to be verified by means of a finite refinement check in FDR. This work is generalised here to cover a broad class of protocols and fully automated within the Casper compiler [Low98], thereby abstracting away the complexity of their implementation within the CSP models. The problem of capturing parallelism within agents is addressed by the development of an alternative modelling approach, referred to as internal agents. Not only does this act as an excellent state space reduction strategy, but also enables higher degrees of parallelism to be captured within the CSP models than was previously feasible. A number of classes of protocols are derived for which this modelling technique captures arbitrary parallelism amongst the internal agents (still within the confines of a finite refinement check). The models are also extended to enable the construction of signal events for internal agents, thereby allowing these techniques to be applied to agents that are part of specifications. Further avenues benefiting from this work (for example, the ability to verify arbitrary parallelism among all agents) are discussed. State space explosion is another common phenomenon in model checking approaches. A number of effective state space reduction strategies are developed within this framework.
The Yield Curve as a Determinant of Investment in Durable Capital

I study and test for a relationship between the shape of the yield curve and the composition of firms’ capital structure with respect to durability. This empirical test takes the form of a dynamic panel model, estimated using firm level financial data and US government bond yields. The results indicate that a decrease in the cost of long-term debt leads firms to shift to higher durability capital and vice-versa, supporting the claim that firms internalize the heterogeneous required financial market returns (or opportunity costs) of capital inputs with different expected service lives.
Gravitational Waves from the Collapse and Bounce of a Stellar Core in Tensor-Scalar Gravity

Tensor-scalar theory of gravity allows the generation of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources, like supernovae, even in the spherical case. That motivated us to study the collapse of a degenerate stellar core, within tensor-scalar gravity, leading to the formation of a neutron star through a bounce and the formation of a shock. This paper discusses the effects of the scalar field on the evolution of the system, as well as the appearance of strong nonperturbative effects of this scalar field (the so-called spontaneous scalarization). As a main result, we describe the resulting gravitational monopolar radiation (form and amplitude) and discuss the possibility of its detection by the gravitational detectors currently under construction, taking into account the existing constraints on the scalar field. From the numerical point of view, it is worthy to point out that we have developed a combined code that uses pseudo-spectral methods for the evolution of the scalar field and High-Resolution Shock-Capturing schemes, as well as for the evolution of the hydrodynamical system. Although this code has been used to integrate the field equations of that theory of gravity, in the spherically symmetric case, a by-product of the present work is to gain experience for an ulterior extension to multidimensional problems in Numerical Relativity of such numerical strategy.
Signal Processing

learnable upsampling strategy DUpsampling is utilized to replace the commonly used bilinear interpolation to improve the segmentation accuracy. We deploy detailed experiments on three publicly available datasets, named NWPU_YRCC_EX, NWPU_YRCC2, and Alberta River Ice Segmentation Dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with competing methods, on the NWPU_YRCC_EX dataset, we can achieve the segmentation speed as 90.84FPS and the segmentation accuracy as 90.770 % mIoU, which also illustrates the good leverage between accuracy and speed. Our code is available at https://github.com/nwpulab113/FastICENet ©
A circle criterion observer for estimating the unmeasured membrane potential of neuronal populations

A circle criterion observer is designed for estimating the unmeasured membrane potential of neuronal populations using the electroencephalogram (EEG) from a class of parameterised models that replicates patterns seen on the EEG. Compared to existing similar designs, we provide a less conservative linear matrix inequality (LMI) condition that is shown to be fulfilled for the neural models we consider. The designed observer is robust towards disturbances in the input and measurement, as well as model uncertainty. We show that the observer can be designed for a model that reproduces alpha rhythms in the EEG as an illustrative example.
An Assessment of Inflation Targeting in a Quantitative Monetary Business Cycle Framework

This paper examines the effectiveness of inflation targeting to stabilize the real economy of the advanced countries where inflation targeting was adopted in the early 1990s. This paper employs the monetary business cycle accounting methodology recently developed by Sustek (2011) which is an extended version of Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2007) to monetary models in order to quantitatively assess inflation targeting. Our main finding is that the monetary policy wedge, which captures economic fluctuations caused by monetary policy, has significantly declined since the implementation of inflation targeting in the early 1990s. The results suggest that advanced economies such as Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the UK, that adopted inflation targeting in the early 1990s have been successful in stabilizing business cycle fluctuations.
Quantized Capacitance Charging of Monolayer-Protected Au Clusters

A theoretical model based on electrostatic interactions is developed to account for the formal potentials of current peaks observed in differential pulse voltammetry of solutions of 10 different nanometer-sized alkylthiolate and arylthiolate monolayer-protected gold clusters. The current peaks arise from successive, quantized (single-electron) capacitative charging of ensembles of individual cluster cores (i.e., electrochemical ensemble Coulomb staircase charging). Experimental peak potentials for a given cluster change roughly linearly with changes in its core charge state, as predicted by the theory, and the sub-attofarad capacitances (CCLU) of individual clusters obtained from the slopes of such plots agree with those estimated from a simple concentric sphere capacitor model. The charging of clusters with very small cores becomes redox molecule-like, indicating as reported recently, the emergence of HOMO−LUMO energy gaps. Because the quantized charging currents of the clusters are diffusion controlled,.
The hump-shaped relation between income and life satisfaction

Individual Life Satisfaction depends in a hump-shaped way on household income, peaking around 150K-200K USD per year, and decreasing for larger values. This conclusion holds after controlling for a large set of potentially moderating factors, and for country and regional (European) average values. A major puzzle follows: if higher income produces a reduction in Life Satisfaction, why should individuals strive to increase income? We test a potential explanation using individual personality traits. They all affect directly Life Satisfaction, but only Neuroticism systematically affects its relation with income. Life Satisfaction is never decreasing in income in individuals with low neuroticism. In high neuroticism individuals, Life Satisfaction peaks around 90K-120K USD, and decreases for higher values. We provide and test an explanation of these findings based on sensitivity to the gap between aspiration and realization in level of income.
Information Processing and Energy Dissipation in Neurons

We investigate the relationship between thermodynamic and information theoretic inefficiency in an individual neuron model, the adaptive exponential integrate-and-fire neuron. Recent work has revealed that minimization of energy dissipation is tightly related to optimal information processing, in the sense that a system has to compute a maximally predictive model. In this thesis we justify the extension of these results to the neuron and quantify the neuron’s thermodynamic and information processing inefficiency as a function of spike frequency adaptation.
Fluctuations of the superconducting order parameter as an origin of the Nernst effect

We show that the strong Nernst signal observed recently in amorphous superconducting films far above the critical temperature is caused by the fluctuations of the superconducting order parameter. We demonstrate a striking agreement between our theoretical calculations and the experimental data at various temperatures and magnetic fields. Besides, the Nernst effect is interesting not only in the context of superconductivity. We discuss some subtle issues in the theoretical study of thermal phenomena that we have encountered while calculating the Nernst coefficient. In particular, we explain how the Nernst theorem (the third law of thermodynamics) imposes a strict constraint on the magnitude of the Nernst effect.
Reducing conservatism in response time analysis of distributed systems

Rate monotonic analysis (RMA) is a well-established technique for assessing schedulability of periodic and sporadic tasks which share a processor resource using fixed priority scheduling. An alternative approach to analysing such systems is to build a model which represents the behaviour of the system more dynamically, taking into account the dependency between the tasks.
Error Analysis of Projection Schemes

The Navier-Stokes equations can be used to model the motion of many types fluids in different geometries. Over the years numerical methods have been developed to approximate their solutions to simulate fluid behavior, saving the industry millions of dollars by decreasing the need to create physical models to perform experiments. One class of these numerical methods used for timestepping are the projection schemes originally presented by Chorin in reference [1]. The main advantage of these methods is that the resulting algebraic system is decoupled with symmetric positive definite matrices which can be solved efficiently, reducing computation time. In this project, an error analysis of different projection methods is presented and tested with a finite difference discretization in space. Although gauge methods [2], regular backward Euler, Crank-Nicolson and a spectral spacial discretization [5] were also implemented, they are omitted from this report due to space limitations.
Review Paper: A critical review of the present and future prospects for electronic paper

Abstract— The commercial success of monochrome electronic paper (e‐Paper) is now propelling the development of next‐generation flexible, video, and color e‐Paper products. Unlike the early battles in the 1980s and 1990s between transmissive and emissive display technologies, there is a extraordinary diversity of technologies vying to become the next generation of e‐Paper. A critical review of all major e‐Paper technologies, including a technical breakdown of the performance limitations based on device physics and commentary on possible future breakthroughs, is presented. In addition, the visual requirements for color e‐Paper are provided and compared to standards used in conventional print. It is concluded that researchers have much work remaining in order to bridge the significant gap between reflective electronic displays and print‐on‐paper.
Tilburg University Coordinated Tax-Tariff Reforms , Informality , and Welfare Distribution

The paper studies the revenue, efficiency, and distributional implications of a simple strategy of offsetting tariff reductions with increases in destination-based consumption taxes so as to leave consumer prices unchanged. We employ a dynamic micro-founded macroeconomic model of a small open developing economy, which features an informal sector that cannot be taxed, a formal agricultural sector, and an import-substitution sector. The reform strategy increases government revenue, imports, exports, and the informal sector. In contrast to Emran and Stiglitz (2005), who ignore the dynamic effects of taxes and tariffs on factor markets, we find an efficiency gain, which is unevenly distributed. Existing generations benefit more than future generations, who—depending on pre-existing tax and tariff rates and the informal sector size—even may become worse off. JEL codes: E26, F11, F13, H20, H26
Are we ready for Taenia solium cysticercosis elimination in sub-Saharan Africa?

SUMMARY The World Health Organization announced in November 2014 at the fourth international meeting on ‘the control of neglected zoonotic diseases – from advocacy to action’, that intervention tools for eliminating Taenia solium taeniosis/cysticercosis (TSTC) are in place. The aim of this work was to elucidate theoretical outcomes of various control options suggested for TSTC elimination in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over a 4-year period. Our current knowledge regarding T. solium epidemiology and control primarily builds on studies from Latin America. A simple transmission model – built on data from Latin America – has been used to predict the effect of various interventions such as mass treatment of humans, vaccination and treatment of pigs, and health education of communities, potentially leading to change in bad practices and reducing transmission risks. Based on simulations of the transmission model, even a 4-year integrated One Health approach fails to eliminate TSTC from a small community and in all simulations, the prevalence of human taeniosis and porcine cysticercosis start to rise as soon as the programmes end. Our current knowledge regarding transmission and burden of TSTC in SSA is scarce and while claiming to be tool ready, the selection of diagnostic and surveillance tools, as well as the algorithms and stepwise approaches for control and elimination of TSTC remain major challenges.
Reconciling institutional theory with organizational theories

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to review and compare traditional and new institutional postulates in order to address some of the criticism that this theory has received.Design/methodology/approach – Throughout this paper, five interesting paradoxes are presented in management contexts of change, the creation of competitive advantages, and organizational behaviour.Findings – Light is shed on the integration efforts that seek to combine institutional theory with transaction cost theory, the resource‐based view of the firm, and the resource dependence theory.Originality/value – The paper reviews the Oliver contribution work done around neoinstitutional theory. The paper offers a different view of organizational change, the creation of competitive advantage, and organizational behaviour.
Investment-specific technology growth: concepts and recent estimates

The strength of U.S. productivity growth in recent years has been attributed to technological improvements that are, in some sense, embodied in new types of capital equipment. However, traditional growth theory and growth accounting techniques—which emphasize the role of disembodied, neutral technological progress—are deficient in explaining this phenomenon. In this article, Michael R. Pakko outlines a model of investment-specific technological change that has become popular for describing the notion of capital-embodied growth and summarizes some recent estimates of the importance of this type of technological progress for assessing U.S. productivity trends.