Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combing Location-Aware Applications with in-situ Actors Performances

In this paper we present a model to define location-aware experiences having its different aspects (contents, location, etc) decoupled one from another. We have created an application following this model, which is also combined with actors? performances. This application defines three relevant locations inside a specific building. By reading a QR-code the user indicates that he/she has arrived at one of those locations. In that moment, the application triggers some questions related to the actors' performances. Hence, the user is required to see all the plays in order to be able to answer such questions. The application assists the user in moving throughout the different locations. We present the evaluation of this application and then we discuss interesting aspects that have shown up as a result of the in-situ evaluation of this application.
A New Extragalactic Distance Determination Method Using the Flux-weighted Gravity of Late B and Early A Supergiants

Stellar evolution calculations predict the flux-weighted gravity g/T and absolute bolometric magnitude of blue supergiants to be strongly correlated. We use medium-resolution multiobject spectroscopy of late B and early A supergiants in two spiral galaxies, NGC 300 and NGC 3621, to demonstrate the existence of such a relationship, which proves to be surprisingly tight. An analysis of high-resolution spectra of blue supergiants in Local Group galaxies confirms this detection. We discuss the application of the relationship for extragalactic distance determinations and conservatively conclude that once properly calibrated it has the potential to allow for measurements of distance moduli out to 30.5 mag with an accuracy of 0.1 mag or better.
Using Information Communication Technologies in Maritime Travel Business

The paper presents the emerging information and communication needs in maritime travel and gives directions for future maritime business activities in e-tourism. The presented results are based on findings of a maritime web survey and of analysis of a number of collected questionnaires through interviews. The maritime web survey points out approaches and technologies encountered in the Internet ship-travel related business, thus providing an image of how can be developed a www site/portal intending to sell maritime services. The interviews (combined with questionnaires) supplement the outcome of the web survey giving an overall view for future maritime business activities. These activities refer to Maritime Transport Operators (MTOs), Travel Agencies (TAs) and Port Authorities (PAs). Many of the elements presented herein are used for the composition of a business plan concerning an EU funded maritime telecommunication platform for providing ship management information and services for passengers and the general public.
Quality assessment based on noise influencing force

This article introduces a new image quality assessment: QNIF (quality assessment based on noise influencing force). Considering uneven property of noise distribution, we put forward the concept of noise influencing significance area. Analyzing noise in significance area coverage is to identify the property that noise destructiveness on image structure can approach to human visual system. In addition, in view of human eyes' physiological characteristics of gaze and fast jump, QNIF also includes noise area influencing image quality. Test result shows that QNIF performance is evidently superior to traditional MSE because it can effectively estimate different types of quality reduction.
Dermat - the dermoscopy management system

I n order to recognize early symptoms of melanoma, the lethal cancer of the skin, our group is developing pattern recognition and machine learning tools that may help medical doctors in the melanoma diagnosis. Since in the machine learning approach data from diversified sources are required, in this article we present the Java-based Dermat 1.0 application, a medical software system for management of dermoscopy data and the patients follow-up documentation. The chief objective for this system is to integrate all the management activi- ties (image acquisition, anamneses, medical documentation and annotations) into a self- content optimal data base system. Such an integrated approach to digital dermoscopy and management of the patient data between the visits is crucial in comparing the results, stor- ing/retrieving/transmitting dermoscopic images and making a proper and early diagnosis. The Dermat application is distributed among dermatological clinics and private practition- ers in accordance to the 'tool-for-the-data' model.
Polymorphisms in GSTM1, GSTT1 and CYP1A1 and risk of pancreatic adenocarcinoma

A prospective study of 149 unselected incident cases of pancreatic adenocarcinoma and 146 ethnically-matched controls found no associations between GSTM1 (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) 1.14), GSTT1 (AOR: 1.19) and CYP1A1 (AOR: 1.08) polymorphisms and pancreatic cancer susceptibility. Smoking and drinking status did not affect results. These polymorphisms do not appear to be important gene modifiers in pancreatic cancer. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaign
Extracting Investor Sentiment from Weblog Texts: A Knowledge-based Approach

Financial web logs contain a large amount of investor sentiments, i.e., expert assessments of financial instruments and market situations. These blogs provide potentially new and relevant information for investment managers. Since humans are not able to process and interpret the large amounts of available web information, an automated solution is required. We present a knowledge-based approach for extracting investor sentiment directly at high frequency. The approach performs a semantic analysis that starts on the word and sentence level. We employ ontology-guided and rule-based web information extraction based on domain expertise and linguistic knowledge. We evaluate our approach against standard machine learning approaches. A portfolio selection test using extracted sentiments provides evidence for the economic utility of investor sentiments from weblogs.
Pay-as-You-Go Social Security and the Distribution of Bequests

This paper studies the impact of an unfunded social security system on the distribution of bequests in a framework where savings are due both by life cycle and by random altruistic motivations. We show that the impact of social security on the distribution of bequests depends crucially on the importance of the bequest motive in explaining savings behavior. If the bequest motive is strong, then an increase in the social security tax raises the bequests left by altruistic parents. On the other hand, when the importance of bequests in motivating savings is sufficiently low, the increase in the social security tax could result in a reduction of the bequests left by altruistic parents under some conditions on the attitude of individuals toward risk and on the relative returns associated with private saving and social security. Some implications concerning the transitional effects of introducing an unfunded social security scheme are also discussed.
A Self-Organizing Approach to Background Subtraction for Visual Surveillance Applications

Detection of moving objects in video streams is the first relevant step of information extraction in many computer vision applications. Aside from the intrinsic usefulness of being able to segment video streams into moving and background components, detecting moving objects provides a focus of attention for recognition, classification, and activity analysis, making these later steps more efficient. We propose an approach based on self organization through artificial neural networks, widely applied in human image processing systems and more generally in cognitive science. The proposed approach can handle scenes containing moving backgrounds, gradual illumination variations and camouflage, has no bootstrapping limitations, can include into the background model shadows cast by moving objects, and achieves robust detection for different types of videos taken with stationary cameras. We compare our method with other modeling techniques and report experimental results, both in terms of detection accuracy and in terms of processing speed, for color video sequences that represent typical situations critical for video surveillance systems.
Familial colorectal adenocarcinoma and hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer: a nationwide epidemiological study from Sweden

Although estimates are available of the proportion of hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC) among all colorectal cancer (CRC), its proportion among familial CRC is unclear. We estimated these proportions epidemiologically from the nationwide Swedish Family-Cancer Database on 9.6 million individuals. Colorectal adenocarcinomas were retrieved from the Cancer Registry covering years 1958–1996. Standardized incidence ratios (SIRs) were calculated for offspring (aged less than 62 years) when their parent had colorectal adenocarcinoma. In 9.82% of all families, an offspring and a parent were affected, giving a population attributable proportion of 4.91% and a familial SIR of 2.00. When offspring and parents shared the anatomic site, the SIR was 2.32 for proximal and 2.00 for distal CRC. When offspring were diagnosed before age 40 years and parents before age 50 years, the SIR was 25.72 for familial proximal CRC. In older age groups familial risks did not differ between proximal and distal CRC. Familial risks were increased also for endometrial, small intestinal and gastric cancers, manifestations in HNPCC. Depending on which assumptions were made, HNPCC was calculated to account for 20 to 50% of familial CRC, corresponding to 1 or 2.5% of all CRC among 0–61-year-old individuals. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign
Thy‐1 as a regulator of cell‐cell and cell‐matrix interactions in axon regeneration, apoptosis, adhesion, migration, cancer, and fibrosis

Thy‐1 (CD90) is a 25–37 kDa glyco‐sylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) ‐anchored glycoprotein expressed on many cell types, including T cells, thymocytes, neurons, endothelial cells, and fibroblasts. Activation of Thy‐1 can promote T cell activation, and this role of Thy‐1 is reviewed elsewhere. Thy‐1 also affects numerous nonimmunologic biological processes, including cellular adhesion, neurite outgrowth, tumor growth, migration, and cell death. In reviewing the nonimmunologic functions of Thy‐1, we discuss the phenotype of the Thy‐1 null mouse, signaling pathways modulated by Thy‐1, the role of the GPI anchor in Thy‐1 localization to lipid rafts and signaling, and regulation of Thy‐1 expression. Thy‐1 is an important regulator of cell‐cell and cell‐matrix interactions, with important roles in nerve regeneration, metastasis, inflammation, and fibrosis. —Rege, T. A. , Hagood, J. S. Thy‐1 as a regulator of cell‐cell and cell‐matrix interactions in axon regeneration, apoptosis, adhesion, migration, cancer, and fibrosis. FASEB J. 20, 1045–1054 (2006)
Hydration and dehydration at the tropical tropopause

High-resolution water measurements from three tropical airborne missions in Northern Australia, Southern Brazil and West Africa in different seasons are analysed to study the transport and transformation of water in the tropical tropopause layer (TTL) and its impact on the stratosphere. The mean profiles are quite different according to the season and location of the campaigns, with lowest mixing ratios below 2 ppmv at the cold point tropopause during the Australian mission in November/December and high TTL mixing ratios during the African measurements in August. We present backward trajectory calculations considering freeze-drying of the air to the minimum saturation mixing ratio and initialised with climatological satellite data. This trajectory-based reconstruction of water agrees well with the observed H 2 O average profiles and therefore demonstrates that the water vapour set point in the TTL is primarily determined by the Lagrangian saturation history. Deep convection was found to moisten the TTL, in several events even above the cold point up to 420 K potential temperatures. However, our study does not provide evidence for a larger impact of these highly-localised events on global scales.
Phytochemical Composition and Antibacterial Potential of Hexane Extract from Malaysian Red Algae, Acanthophora spicifera (Vahl) Borgesen

The present study aims to study the antibacterial potentiality and phytochemistry constituents of hexane extract of Acanthophora spicifera from Malaysian water. It includes the evaluation of hexane extract for antibacterial activity using disc diffusion method, MIC, MBC and composition study using GC-MS analysis. The results revealed a potential antibacterial activity of hexane extract against MRSA and P. aeruginosa (27853) with low MICs of 0.125 and 0.50 mg/ml, respectively. To the best of our knowledge no details GC-MS analysis of volatile components of A. spicifera has been carried out from this local algae, eventhough details examination of fatty acids of A. spicifera from India has been performed. This prompted us to examine the preliminary phytochemical constituents of A. spicifera from Malaysian water. The GC-MS analysis revealed the presence of hydrocarbons, fatty acids and cholesterol. Oleic acid (14.58%) and n-hexadecanoic acid (24.73%) were the major components.
Automatic E-Baby Cradle Swing based on Baby Cry

There is a need to develop a new low cost indigenous electronic cradle because the existing cradles are imported and costly. This paper presents the design and implementation of a new indigenous low cost E-Baby Cradle that swings automatically when baby cries, for this it has a cry analyzing system which detects the baby cry voice and accordingly the cradle swings till the baby stops crying. The speed of the cradle can be controlled as per the user need. The system has inbuilt alarm that indicates two conditions – first when the mattress is wet, which is an important parameter to keep the baby in hygienic condition, second when baby does not stop crying with in a stipulated time, which intimated that baby needs attention. This system helps parents and nurses to take care of babies without physical attention. General Terms E-Baby cradle, low cost, indigenous.
POCA : A User Distributions Algorithm in Enterprise Systems with Clustering

As enterprises worldwide race to improve real-time management to im- prove productivity, customer services and flexibility, huge resources have been invested into enterprise systems (ESs). All modern ESs adopt an n-tier client-server architec- ture, which includes several application servers to hold users and applications. As in any other multi-server environment, the load distributions, and user distributions in particular, become a critical issue in tuning system performance. In stateful ESs, a user who logs onto an application server and stays connected to the server for an entire working session, which can last for days, evokes each application. Therefore, admitting a user onto an application server affects not only current but also future performance of that server. Although the n-tier architecture may involve web servers, there is little in the literature in Distributed Web Server Architectures that considers the effects of distributing users instead of individual requests to servers. The algorithm proposed in this paper gives specific suggestions in user distributions and the minimal number of servers required based on the application reusability threshold. A heuristic version of the algorithm is also presented to improve the performance. The paper also discusses how to apply association rules to predict new user behavior when distributing users in the run-time. The distributions recommended by the algorithms are compared against the Round-Robin distributions on a set of real data derived from a mid size company. The result shows that the user distributions suggested have better performance than Round Robin distributions.
Consideration of cognitive ability in designing user interface for illiterate user

The rapid development of technology has enable people in developing countries to catch up with the rest of the world, as technologies are becoming more affordable and accessible. But some of them are still facing difficulties when interacting with the technology, due to their inability to read, hence understanding the interface of the technology. This study is going to look at the comparison of some cognitive abilities relevant to ICT use between illiterate and literate user. Some recommendations in designing user interface for illiterate user were presented based on the study.
Condorcet Fusion for Blog Opinion Retrieval

Blogs have been popular social networking platforms in recent years. Blog opinion retrieval is one of the key issues that needs to be solved. In this paper, we investigate if the Condorcet fusion and the weighted Condorcet fusion can be used for effectiveness improvement of blog opinion retrieval. The experiments carried out with the data set from the TREC 2008 Blog track show that the Condorcet fusion is effective and the weighted Condorcet fusion, with its weights trained by linear discriminant analysis, is very effective. Both of them outperform the best component result by a clear margin.
The Heard-Of Model: Unifying all Benign Failures

Problems in fault-tolerant distributed computing have been studied in a variety of models. These models are structured around two central ideas: 1. Degree of synchrony and failure model are two independent parameters that determine a particular type of system. 2. Failure and faulty component (i.e., the component responsible for the failure) are necessary and indissociable notions for the analysis of system behaviors. In this work, we question these two dogmas and present a general computational model, suitable for describing any type of system with benign failures, that depends only on the notion of transmission failure. In this model, computations evolve in rounds, and messages missed at a round are lost. " Only information transmission is represented: for each round r and each process p, our model provides the set of processes that p "hears of" at round r (heard-of set) namely the processes from which p receives some message at round r. The features of a specific system are thus captured as a whole, just by a predicate over the collection of heard-of sets. We show that our model handles all types of benign failures, to be static or dynamic, permanent or transient, in a unified framework. Using this new approach, we are able to give shorter and simpler proofs of important results (non-solvability, lower bounds). In particular, we prove that in general, Consensus cannot be solved without an implicit and permanent consensus on heard-of sets. We also examine Consensus algorithms in our model. In light of this specific agreement problem, we show how our approach allows us to devise new interesting solutions.
A new approach to object-oriented middleware

Ice is a new object-oriented middleware platform that allows developers to build distributed client-server applications with minimal effort. While similar in concept to Corba, Ice breaks new ground by providing an object model that is both simpler and more powerful, by getting rid of inefficiencies that plagued middleware in the past, and by providing new features such as user datagram protocol (UDP) support, asynchronous method dispatch, built-in security, automatic object persistence, and interface aggregation. We discuss design decisions, contrasts the Corba and Ice approaches, and outlines the advantages that result from a better design.
The Human Cytomegalovirus UL76 Gene Regulates the Level of Expression of the UL77 Gene

Background Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) can be reactivated under immunosuppressive conditions causing several fatal pneumonitis, hepatitis, retinitis, and gastrointestinal diseases. HCMV also causes deafness and mental retardation in neonates when primary infection has occurred during pregnancy. In the genome of HCMV at least 194 known open reading frames (ORFs) have been predicted, and approximately one-quarter, or 41 ORFs, are required for viral replication in cell culture. In contrast, the majority of the predicted ORFs are nonessential for viral replication in cell culture. However, it is also possible that these ORFs are required for the efficient viral replication in the host. The UL77 gene of HCMV is essential for viral replication and has a role in viral DNA packaging. The function of the upstream UL76 gene in the HCMV-infected cells is not understood. UL76 and UL77 are cistons on the same viral mRNA and a conventional 5′ mRNA for UL77 has not been detected. The vast majority of eukaryotic mRNAs are monocistronic, i.e., they encode only a single protein. Methodology/Principal Findings To determine whether the UL76 ORF affects UL77 gene expression, we mutated UL76 by ORF frame-shifts, stop codons or deletion of the viral gene. The effect on UL77 protein expression was determined by either transfection of expression plasmids or infection with recombinant viruses. Mutation of UL76 ORF significantly increased the level of UL77 protein expression. However, deletion of UL76 upstream of the UL77 ORF had only marginal effects on viral growth. Conclusions/Significance While UL76 is not essential for viral replication, the UL76 ORF is involved in regulation of the level of UL77 protein expression in a manner dependent on the translation re-initiation. UL76 may fine-tune the UL77 expression for the efficient viral replication in the HCMV- infected cells.
MBE-Regrown Ohmics in InAlN HEMTs With a Regrowth Interface Resistance of 0.05 $\Omega\cdot\hbox{mm}$

Nonalloyed ohmic contacts regrown by molecular beam epitaxy were made on InAlN/AlN/GaN/SiC high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs). Transmission-line-method measurements were carried out from 4 K to 350 K. Although the total contact resistance is dominated by the metal/ n+-GaN resistance ( ~ 0.16 Ω·mm), the resistance induced by the interface between the regrown n+ GaN and HEMT channel is found to be 0.05-0.075 Ω·mm over the entire temperature window, indicating a minimal barrier for electron flow at the as-regrown interface. The quantum contact resistance theory suggests that the interface resistance can be further reduced to be <; 0.02 Ω·mm in GaN HEMTs.
An Integrated Meta-Analysis of Two Variants in HOXA1/HOXB1 and Their Effect on the Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background HOXA1 and HOXB1 have been strongly posed as candidate genes for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) given their important role in the development of hindbrain. The A218G (rs10951154) in HOXA1 and the insertion variant in HOXB1 (nINS/INS, rs72338773) were of special interest for ASD but with inconclusive results. Thus, we conducted a meta-analysis integrating case-control and transmission/disequilibrium test (TDT) studies to clearly discern the effect of these two variants in ASD. Methods and Findings Multiple electronic databases were searched to identify studies assessing the A218G and/or nINS/INS variant in ASD. Data from case-control and TDT studies were analyzed in an allelic model using the Catmap software. A total of 10 and 7 reports were found to be eligible for meta-analyses of A218G and nINS/INS variant, respectively. In overall meta-analysis, the pooled OR for the 218G allele and the INS allele was 0.97 (95% CI = 0.76-1.25, P heterogeneity = 0.029) and 1.14 (95% CI = 0.97-1.33, P heterogeneity = 0.269), respectively. No significant association was also identified between these two variants and ASD risk in stratified analysis. Further, cumulative meta-analysis in chronologic order showed the inclination toward null-significant association for both variants with continual adding studies. Additionally, although the between-study heterogeneity regarding the A218G is not explained by study design, ethnicity, and sample size, the sensitive analysis indicated the stability of the result. Conclusions This meta-analysis suggests the HOXA1 A218G and HOXB1 nINS/INS variants may not contribute significantly to ASD risk.