Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Linear quadratic team theory revisited

A linear quadratic stochastic control problem is considered. The problem involves several different controllers acting as a team, but with access to different measurements. Under appropriate assumptions on communication delays between the controllers, a quadratic control objective can be optimized using finite-dimensional convex optimization. Versions of this problem has been discussed in economic literature, as well as in statistical decision theory. Some instances were solved in the 1960-70's, but significant progress on convexity properties and the role of communication delays has recently been made. In this paper a stochastic criterion is optimized subject to communication delays. Control of vehicle formations is considered as an example
The Fourth Asian Roundtable on Corporate Governance Shareholder Rights and the Equitable Treatment of Shareholders

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the OECD or its Member countries, the ADB or the World Bank 2 Abstract This study adopts the frameworks of the privatization and x-efficiency theories to examine the effects of ownership and competition on the performance of 153 firms in Vietnam over a three years period after their privatization. The goal of the study is to determine whether firm performance in a competitive environment would improvement with privatization. Problems with the measures for competition and performance raise questions to the validity of the results of this study and of prior privatiza tion research. Suggestion is made with respect to the importance of longitudinal study in privatization research.
Joint Multi-Image Saliency Analysis for Region of Interest Detection in Optical Multispectral Remote Sensing Images

The automatic detection of regions of interest (ROI) is useful for remote sensing image analysis, such as land cover classification, object recognition, image compression, and various computer vision related applications. Recently, approaches based on visual saliency have been utilized for ROI detection. However, most existing methods focus on detecting ROIs from a single image, which generally cannot precisely extract ROIs against a complicated background or exclude images with no ROIs. In this paper, we propose a joint multi-image saliency (JMS) algorithm to simultaneously extract the common ROIs in a set of optical multispectral remote sensing images with the additional ability to identify images that do not contain the common ROIs. First, bisecting K-means clustering on the entire image set allows us to extract the global correspondence among multiple images in RGB and CIELab color spaces. Second, clusterwise saliency computation aggregating global color and shape contrast efficiently assigns common ROIs with high saliency, while effectively depressing interfering background that is salient only within its own image. Finally, binary ROI masks are generated by thresholding saliency maps. In addition, we construct an edge-preserving JMS model through edge-preserving mask optimization strategy, so as to facilitate the generation of a uniformly highlighted ROI mask with sharp borders. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our model in detection accuracy consistency and runtime efficiency.
The Fading of Transient Anomalous X-Ray Pulsar XTE J1810–197

Three observations of the 5.54 s transient anomalous X-ray pulsar XTE J1810-197 obtained over 6 months with the Newton X-ray Multi-Mirror (XMM-Newton) mission are used to study its spectrum and pulsed light curve as the source fades from outburst. The decay is consistent with an exponential of time constant ~300 days but not a power law as predicted in some models of sudden deep crustal heating events. All spectra are well fitted by a blackbody plus a steep power law, a problematic model that is commonly fitted to anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs). A two-temperature blackbody fit is also acceptable and better motivated physically in view of the faint optical/IR fluxes, the X-ray pulse shapes that weakly depend on energy in XTE J1810-197, and the inferred emitting areas that are less than or equal to the surface area of a neutron star. The fitted temperatures remained the same while the flux declined by 46%, which can be interpreted as a decrease in area of the emitting regions. The pulsar continues to spin down, albeit at a reduced rate of (5.1 ± 1.6) × 10-12 s s-1. The inferred characteristic age τc ≡ P/2 ≈ 17,000 yr, magnetic field strength Bs ≈ 1.7 × 1014 G, and outburst properties are consistent with both the outburst and quiescent X-ray luminosities being powered by magnetic field decay, i.e., XTE J1810-197 is a magnetar.
Privacy Preserving Density-Based Outlier Detection

Outlier detection can find its tremendous applications in areas such as intrusion detection, fraud detection, and image processing. Among many outlier detection algorithms, LOF is a very important density-based algorithm in which one critical step is to find the k-distance neighbors. In some privacy preserving circumstances, the cooperation between data holders is necessary while the privacy of the participators should be guaranteed. In this paper, we focus on privacy preserving LOF. We propose a novel algorithm for privacy preserving k-distance neighbors search. Combining it with other secure multiparty computation techniques, we detect outliers by LOF in a privacy preserving way.
Corporal Punishment and Its Relation to Race, Psychological Well-Being, and Parental Relationship

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT AND ITS RELATION TO RACE, PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING, AND PARENTAL RELATIONSHIP Michelle P. Kravitz Old Dominion University, 2005 Director: Michelle L. Kelley Previous research has documented the numerous negative effects associated with corporal punishment (Gershoff, 2002). The present study examined whether experiencing corporal punishment as a child is related to one’s perception of the legitimacy of corporal punishment, race, the nature of the parent-child relationship (i.e., biological parent versus step-parent), and psychological well-being. Compared to college students who did not experience corporal punishment during childhood, college students who experienced higher levels of corporal punishment are expected to report that corporal punishment is a more acceptable form of discipline. College students who grew up with a stepfather were expected to be more likely to report having received corporal punishment as a disciplinary technique during childhood than were biological parents. African-American college students were expected to report higher levels of corporal punishment than were European-American college students. An interaction was expected such that European-American students who reported high levels of corporal punishment would report more depressive symptoms and psychological adjustment difficulties than would European-American students who experienced lower levels of corporal punishment during childhood or African-American college students who reported higher or lower levels of corporal punishment. College students who received corporal punishment as children believed that corporal punishment was a more acceptable form of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. punishment than college students who were not spanked as children. Results of the other hypotheses were not significant. That is, after controlling for paternal education and family income, African-American college students were not more likely to report having received corporal punishment as children. In addition, individuals who lived with their biological mothers and a stepfather during the majority of childhood were not more likely to have received corporal punishment. Finally, experiencing corporal punishment as a child was not a significant predictor of psychological well-being for college students. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Students Whose Parents Did Not Go to College: Postsecondary Access, Persistence, and Attainment. Findings from the Condition of Education, 2001.

Reflecting the value placed on postsecondary education, nearly all 1992 high school graduates (97 percent) reported in 12th grade that they expected to continue their education at some point, and 79 percent planned to enroll immediately after finishing high school (Berkner and Chavez 1997). Sixty-five percent of this cohort had carried out these plans by October 1992. Over the last decade, the percentage of high school completers who were enrolled in college the October after finishing high school has ranged between 60 and 67 percent, up from 49 percent in 1972 (Indicator 26).
Event Source Position Estimation Using Sensor Networks

This paper investigates the use of a wireless sensor network (WSN) for estimating the location of an event source that releases a certain signal or substance in the environment which is then propagated over a large area. The concentration of the substance at the source location is assumed unknown. The sensor nodes are able to measure the substance concentration at their own locations but the measurements are noisy. Based on these concentration readings we use nonlinear least squares (LS) optimization to estimate the event source position. Such a network can be of tremendous help for environmental monitoring or for emergency personnel responding to a catastrophic event. Our simulation results indicate that the LS method performs significantly better that the closest point approach (CPA) where the source location is assumed to be the sensor node with the highest measurement. Furthermore, our results indicate that in the presence of a "draft" that pushes the substance in certain direction, a threshold is necessary for the LS method to yield accurate results. In addition, our results show that the use of unconstrained optimization or the existing knowledge of the wind direction can further improve the performance of the location estimate
INCREASED ROBUSTNESS OF NOISY SPEECH FEATURES USING NEURAL NETWORKS

We describe a neural-network-based approach to estimate a set clean features from a noise-corrupted speech waveform. A series of sentence-level and frame-level knowledge sources are extracted from the noisy waveform and fed into a multilayer neural network trained to minimize the average feature distortion caused by the noise. At recognition time, the neural network estimates a framelevel bias that is removed from the noisy frame features to make them more similar to clean features. We describe different knowledge sources and compare neural networks that estimate feature biases at different stages in the front-end unit. We report results of recognition experiments performed on field data recorded over the telephone network, and show that the proposed approach yields word and sentence error rate improvements over a wide range of SNRs.
Feasibility of percutaneous mitral commissurotomy in patients with commissural mitral valve calcification.

AIMS Whether a percutaneous mitral commissurotomy (PMC) should be attempted in patients with mitral stenosis (MS) and valvular calcification, especially located at the commissural level remained debated. We sought to evaluate the impact of the degree and location of mitral valve calcifications on PMC results. METHODS AND RESULTS Over a 3-year period, we enrolled 464 consecutive patients who underwent a PMC at our institution. According to the location (within the body valve leaflets' or at the commissural level) and the degree of calcification, patients were divided into three groups: 261 patients were in Group 1 (no leaflets' or commissural calcification), 141 in Group 2 (leaflets' calcification with no significant commissural calcification), and 62 in Group 3 (at least one commissure significantly calcified). Final valve area (1.83 ± 0.26, 1.71 ± 0.25, and 1.60 ± 0.24 cm(2), P < 0.00001) and the rate of complete opening of at least one commissure (92, 94, and 84%, P = 0.05) were significantly different. However, the rate of post-PMC mitral regurgitation (MR) of grade ≥ 3 (10, 10, and 8%, P = 0.90) was not different among the groups and if the rate of good immediate result, defined as valve area ≥ 1.5 cm(2) with no MR >2/4 was different among the three groups (88, 78, and 73%, P = 0.004), an overallprocedural success could be achieved in most patients with calcified commissures. CONCLUSION In this large contemporary series of patients with MS, a procedural success was obtained less frequently in patients with calcified commissure but a successful PMC could still be safely achieved in a large proportion of patients. Our results support the use of PMC as a first-line treatment of patients with severe MS even in the presence of significant commissural calcifications with otherwise favourable clinical characteristics.
Cost-based Optimization of Complex Scientific Queries

High energy physics scientists analyze large amounts of data looking for interesting events when particles collide. These analyses are easily expressed using complex queries that filter events. We developed a cost model for aggregation operators and other functions used in such queries and show that it substantially improves performance. However, the query optimizer still produces suboptimal plans because of estimate errors. Furthermore, the optimization is very slow because of the large query size. We improved the optimization by a profiled grouping strategy where the scientific query is first automatically fragmented into subqueries based on application knowledge. Each fragment is then independently profiled on a sample of events to measure real execution cost and cardinality. An optimized fragmented query is shown to execute faster than a query optimized with the cost model alone. Furthermore, the total optimization time, including fragmentation and profiling, is substantially improved.
Reliable Wireless Multicasting with Minimum Overheads in OFDM-Based WLANs

Even though multicast data transmissions in wireless communication standards doesn't require ARQ, to achieve reliable multicast over wireless channel, using ARQ is inevitable. However, unlike unicast, a sender needs to receive multiple acknowledgements (ACKs) from group members, and transmitting ACK from each group member degrades the network performance due to the overhead including multiple ACK packet transmissions and channel access process for ACKs and so on. An acknowledgement method with a minimum overhead is proposed in this paper, called OFDMA-based Multicast ACK (OMACK). The scheme uses one OFDM symbol for acknowledgements from all member stations (STAs), and each member STA indicates their packet reception status by allocating a symbol on previously allocated its own sub-carrier within the OFDM symbol. The proposed scheme is extensively evaluated by using simulation, and the results show that the scheme significantly reduces the aforementioned overhead comparing to legacy solutions and as a consequence improves the performance of the wireless networks.
The Theory of Relative Dependency: Higher Coupling Concentration in Smaller Modules

Our observations on several large-scale software products has consistently shown that smaller modules are proportionally more defect prone. These findings, challenge the common recommendations from the literature suggesting that quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) resources should focus on larger modules. Those recommendations are based on the unfounded assumption that a monotonically increasing linear relationship exists between module size and defects. Given that complexity is correlated with the size.
Study on 3D Reconstruction of Medical Image and Orthographic Views

D reconstruction of medical image and orthographic views provide useful information for doctors. In this paper, firstly, reconstruction of medical image based on MC (Marching cubes) algorithm is implemented using Microsoft Visual C++ and the VTK (Visualization ToolKit). Secondly, to solve the problems of huge quantities of triangle meshes and stepping effects, optimizations such as mesh simplification and mesh smoothing are presented. Finally, the method to obtain the orientation of the resliced imaging planes is presented and the orthographic views are obtained based on it. The experimental results show that optimal methods are effective and the method to get the orientation of the resliced imaging planes is practical.
Multicellular Stalk-Like Structures inSaccharomyces cerevisiae

ABSTRACT Stalk formation is a novel pattern of multicellular organization. Yeast cells which survive UV irradiation form colonies that grow vertically to form very long (0.5 to 3.0 cm) and thin (0.5 to 4 mm in diameter) multicellular structures. We describe the conditions required to obtain these stalk-like structures reproducibly in large numbers. Yeast mutants, mutated for control of cell polarity, developmental processes, UV response, and signal transduction cascades were tested and found capable of forming stalk-like structures. We suggest a model that explains the mechanism of stalk formation by mechanical environmental forces. We show that other microorganisms (Candida albicans, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, andEscherichia coli) also form stalks, suggesting that the ability to produce stalks may be a general property of microorganisms. Diploid yeast stalks sporulate at an elevated frequency, raising the possibility that the physiological role of stalks might be disseminating spores.
Transductive Rademacher Complexities for Learning Over a Graph

Recent investigations [12, 2, 8, 5, 6] and [11, 9] indicate the use of a probabilistic (’learning’) perspective of tasks defined on a single graph, as opposed to the traditional algorithmical (’computational’) point of view. This note discusses the use of Rademacher complexities in this setting, and illustrates the use of Kruskal’s algorithm for transductive inference based on a nearest neighbor rule.
Combining Different Ways of Learning and Teaching in a Dynamic Model of Educational Effectiveness

In educational effectiveness research evidence is provided for the importance of the learning level. This has resulted in an interest in theory, research and practice for models on effective instruction. In improvement projects these models turn out to be effective. However, the models are criticised for not paying sufficient attention to higher order knowledge and skills and new ways of learning and teaching and more constructivist ways of learning and teaching are advocated, stressing the active involvement and responsibility of the student for his or her own learning processes and outcomes. In research and improvement projects more active, independent ways of learning and teaching turn out to be successful under specified conditions. In a proposed Dynamic Model of Educational Effectiveness a combination of different ways of learning and teaching related to the context, input and process is proposed. Suggestions will be given for the positive uses of the dynamic model for improving educational practice.
On the status of perturbation theory

Perturbation theory has always been an important component of the natural sciences. From celestial mechanics to the quantum theory of fields, it has always played a central role, which this little note sets out to analyse briefly. We will show, in particular, how its epistemological position has changed from being just a ‘tool’ to being the basis of definition for objects in quantum field theory.
The morphometric parameters of adrenal cortex in sows: in normal condition and after prolactin infusion.

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of experimental hyperprolactinemia on the stereological parameters of porcine adrenal cortex. In cyclic sows, after preovulatory luteinizing hormone (LH) peak, porcine prolactin (PRL, 0.3 mg) or saline were administered i.v. for 48 h at 2 h intervals. Next sows were slaughtered and adrenal glands were dissected. Stereological analysis of the left adrenal gland did not reveal any significant differences between control and PRL-treated sows. Experimental hyperprolactinemia did not affect the volume of particular cortical zones, the number and the volume of adrenocortical cells or the average volume of their cell nuclei. Moreover, we present for the first time a detailed stereological description of adrenal cortex in sows.
Financial Constraints, Firm Growth and the Dynamics of U.S. Firm Size Distribution

Using data drawn from the universe of firms to avoid sample censoring problems, this paper finds financial constraints to be binding on mid-sized firms and those in construction and services sectors only. Growth of the majority of firms is unaffected by financial burdens. Firm size distribution remains highly skewed to the right, and is unchanged over the long run when entrants and exits are included. The negative size-growth relationship is conditional on sector, with convergence most rapid for the largest firms. We check the robustness of our findings by simulating out-of-sample firm size distribution.
NMR Structure of the Myristylated Feline Immunodeficiency Virus Matrix Protein

Membrane targeting by the Gag proteins of the human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV types-1 and -2) is mediated by Gag’s N-terminally myristylated matrix (MA) domain and is dependent on cellular phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate [PI(4,5)P2]. To determine if other lentiviruses employ a similar membrane targeting mechanism, we initiated studies of the feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV), a widespread feline pathogen with potential utility for development of human therapeutics. Bacterial co-translational myristylation was facilitated by mutation of two amino acids near the amino-terminus of the protein (Q5A/G6S; myrMAQ5A/G6S). These substitutions did not affect virus assembly or release from transfected cells. NMR studies revealed that the myristyl group is buried within a hydrophobic pocket in a manner that is structurally similar to that observed for the myristylated HIV-1 protein. Comparisons with a recent crystal structure of the unmyristylated FIV protein [myr(-)MA] indicate that only small changes in helix orientation are required to accommodate the sequestered myr group. Depletion of PI(4,5)P2 from the plasma membrane of FIV-infected CRFK cells inhibited production of FIV particles, indicating that, like HIV, FIV hijacks the PI(4,5)P2 cellular signaling system to direct intracellular Gag trafficking during virus assembly.
Novel activity-based metrics for efficient forwarding over online and detected social networks

Pocket Switched Networks (PSNs) are challenged wireless networks of handheld mobile devices that exploit user mobility to distribute data in an opportunistic way. In PSNs, a fundamental issue is the choice of a suitable relay node for message forwarding. In such environments, disconnections are very frequent and an end-to-end path from source to destination usually does not exist. Consequently, routing protocols are based on a hop-by-hop communication paradigm. Most of these protocols exploit social behaviour characteristics to decide whether an encountered node is a good relay. Social network information is commonly extracted from encounters detected between mobile devices. However, Internet added online social interaction techniques, which are not based on physical meetings and that reflect users' online behaviour. In this paper we present novel routing metrics for social-based routing in PSNs that exploit both offline and online users' social network information. By proposing a model of dynamic online social network that uses information extracted from offline and online user behaviour, we show that routing centrality metrics, combining node centrality extracted from dynamic online social network and centrality extracted from detected social network, improve delivery ratio and in some scenarios even reduce end-to-end delay.