Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computing the Nearest Correlation Matrix using Difference Map Algorithm by Xuezhi Cui

The difference map algorithm (DMA) is originally designed to find the global optimal solution to nonconvex problems. The main feature of DMA is that it can avoid the stagnation, (which always occurs when applying the alternating projection method (APM) on nonconvex problems so that APM is trapped at local minimized point and fail to find the global optimal solution. ) and converge to the global solution directly. We show that DMA is not only a better algorithm to solve nonconvex problems but also is better to solve convex problems. We using the nearest correlation matrix to show this statement. The nearest correlation matrix (NCM) problem is to find the nearest point to a given symmetric matrix A in the intersection of positive semi-definite cone and the unit diagonal space. This is a very typical example of convex problems. Currently, three popular ways to solve this problem are: the alternating projection method ; (quadratic) Newton’s method ; and the primal-dual interiorexterior-point approach. The least expensive of these methods is the alternating projection method. However, this method can only achieve a linear rate of convergence and may cause a huge computational cost when we are looking for a highly accurate solution. Because of the similarity of DMA and APM, we are going to compare the best results obtained by both algorithms and the computational cost with different desired accuracies of the final solution. Numerical experiments show that DMA with β value equals to 1 can obtain the best solution and it is identical to the one obtained by APM. However, when A is large sized and ill-conditioned, or we are seeking a highly accurate solution, DMA can find the optimal solution with less computational cost.
Searching for massive pre--stellar cores through observations of N2H+ and N2D+

We have measured the deuterium fractionation (through the column density ratio N(N2D+)/N(N2H+)) and the CO depletion factor (ratio between expected and observed CO abundance) in a sample of 10 high-mass protostellar candidates, in order to understand whether the earliest evolutionary stages of high-mass stars have chemical characteristics similar to those of low-mass ones. The observations were carried out with the IRAM-30m telescope and the JCMT. We have detected N2D+ emission in 7 of the 10 sources of our sample, and found an average value N(N2D+)/N(N2H+)~0.015. This value is 3 orders of magnitude larger than the interstellar D/H ratio, indicating the presence of cold and dense gas, in which the physical-chemical conditions are similar to those observed in low-mass pre-stellar cores. Also, the integrated CO depletion factors show that in the majority of the sources the expected CO abundances are larger than the observed values, with a median ratio of 3.2. In principle, the cold gas that gives origin to the N2D+ emission can be the remnant of the massive molecular core in which the high-mass (proto-)star was born, not yet heated up by the central object. If so, our results indicate that the chemical properties of the clouds in which high-mass stars are born are similar to their low-mass counterparts. Alternatively, this cold gas can be located into one (or more) starless core (cores) near the protostellar object. Due to the poor angular resolution of our data, we cannot decide which is the correct scenario.
Improving enterprise software maintenance efficiency through mining software repositories in an industry context

There is an increasing trend to outsource maintenance of large applications and application portfolios of a business to third parties, specializing in application maintenance, who are incented to deliver the best possible maintenance at the lowest cost. In a typical industry setting any maintenance project spans three different phases; Transition, Steady-State and Preventive Maintenance. Each phase has different goals and drivers, but underlying software repositories or artifacts remain the same. To improve the overall efficiency of the process and people involved in these different phases, we require appropriate insights to be derived from the available software repositories. In the past decade considerable research has been done in mining software repositories and deriving insights, particularly focussed on open source softwares. However, focussed studies on enterprise software maintenance in an industrial setting is severely lacking. In this thesis work, we intend to understand the industry needs on desired insights and limitations on available software artifacts across these different phases. Based on this understanding we intend to propose and develop novel methods and approaches for deriving desirable insights from software repositories. We also intend to leverage empirical techniques to validate our approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Solitons for the inverse mean curvature flow

We investigate self-similar solutions to the inverse mean curvature flow in Euclidean space. In the case of one dimensional planar solitons, we explicitly classify all homothetic solitons and translators. Generalizing Andrews' theorem that circles are the only compact homothetic planar solitons, we apply the Hsiung-Minkowski integral formula to prove the rigidity of the hypersphere in the class of compact expanders of codimension one. We also establish that the moduli space of compact expanding surfaces of codimension two is big. Finally, we update the list of Huisken-Ilmanen's rotational expanders by constructing new examples of complete expanders with rotational symmetry, including topological hypercylinders, called infinite bottles, that interpolate between two concentric round hypercylinders.
Excess Bank Reserves and Monetary Policy with a Lower-Bound Lending Rate September 2011

The paper posits the existence of a minimum mark-up loan interest rate threshold, which is identified using a long-term bank demand curve for excess reserves. At the threshold rate, the risk adjusted marginal revenue is equal to the marginal cost of extending loans. An excess reserves-loan (RL) equationis proposed to link excess reserves and aggregate output. The RL equation is combined with an IS equation, emphasizing the loan rate rather than the government bond rate. Together with a Phillips curve, the model is solved recursively to obtain equilibrium output and price level. The theoretical framework allows us to determine whether the unprecedented expansion of bank reserves by the Federal Reserve will engender inflation, deflation, hyperinflation or a deflationary spiral. The final outcome depends on a linear combination of five parameters and two probability regimes. The empirical results tend to support a deflation instead of an inflation regime.
A New Diverse Measure in Ensemble Learning Using Unlabeled Data

Ensemble learning has been successfully used in many areas, due to its powerful ability to solve complex problems. In recent years, some researchers have shown that ensemble of some learners instead of all individual learners could get better performances. However, how to select individual learners as diverse as possible is a very important issue. In this paper, a new diversity measure is proposed to achieve a better selection of individual learners. Different from the commonly used diversity measures, it makes full of the data distribution information provided by the cheap and abundant unlabeled data rather than the expensive and scarce labeled data in order to obtain the higher classification accuracy. The selection method based on the new diversity measure is simple in computation and independent of models. Experimental results demonstrate its good performances.
Dominance-Popularity Status, Behavior, and the Emergence of Sexual Activity in Young Adolescents

In this paper, we investigated the sexual activity levels of several subtypes of middle adolescents (age 14–15 years). The subtype profiles were based on dominance-popularity status and a range of behaviors associated with dominance and popularity. In addition, gender differences in behavioral profiles were examined among dominant-popular, sexually active young adolescents. Results showed that socially dominant and popular young adolescent boys who exhibited a highly aggressive profile were more sexually active than their low-status and non-aggressive male peers; dominant-popular girls who were very attractive and gossips were more sexually active than their female peers. The results are discussed from an evolutionary psychological framework.
Immigrant Earnings Differentials and Cohort Effects in Canada

This paper examines what has happened to immigrant earnings in Canada and test two alternative hypotheses of Chiswick and Borjas re changing immigrant earnings differentials. The paper use a 1973 survey containing detailed information on immigrant status, family background, and a direct measure of work experience. It is found that earning differentials of immigrant men have been widening since later 1960's. This is due to a steepening of earning profiles for native workers, a flattening of the years-since-migration earnings profile for immigrants, and a further flattening of the experience-earnings profile for immigrants.
Finding You on the Internet - An Approach for Finding On-line Presences of People for Fraud Risk Analysis

Fraud risk analysis on data from formal information sources, being a âpaper realityâ, suffers from blindness to false information. Moreover, the very act of providing false information is a strong indicator for fraud. The technology presented in this paper provides one step towards the vision of harnessing real-world data from social media and internet for fraud risk analysis. We introduce a novel iterative search, monitor, and match approach for finding on-line presences of people. A real-world experiment showed that Twitter accounts can be effectively found given only limited name and address data. We also present an analysis of the ethical considerations surrounding the application of such technology for fraud risk analysis.
Freepal: A Large Collection of Deep Lexico-Syntactic Patterns for Relation Extraction

The increasing availability and maturity of both scalable computing architectures and deep syntactic parsers is opening up new possibilities for Relation Extraction (RE) on large corpora of natural language text. In this paper, we present Freepal, a resource designed to assist with the creation of relation extractors for more than 5,000 relations defined in the Freebase knowledge base (KB). The resource consists of over 10 million distinct lexico-syntactic patterns extracted from dependency trees, each of which is assigned to one or more Freebase relations with different confidence strengths. We generate the resource by executing a large-scale distant supervision approach on the ClueWeb09 corpus to extract and parse over 260 million sentences labeled with Freebase entities and relations. We make Freepal freely available to the research community, and present a web demonstrator to the dataset, accessible from free-pal.appspot. com.
Cadmium induces histone H3 lysine methylation by inhibiting histone demethylase activity.

Cadmium is an established human lung carcinogen with weak mutagenicity. However, the mechanisms underlying cadmium-induced carcinogenesis remain obscure. It has been suggested that epigenetic mechanisms may play a role in cadmium-induced carcinogenesis. In this study, we investigated the effects of cadmium on histone methylation and histone demethylases, and the role of histone methylation in transformation of immortalized normal human bronchial epithelial (BEAS-2B) cells. Exposure to 0.625, 1.25, 2.5, and 5.0 μM of cadmium for 6, 24, and 48 h increased global trimethylated histone H3 on lysine 4 (H3K4me3) and dimethylated histone H3 on lysine 9 (H3K9me2) in BEAS-2B cells compared with untreated cells, and most of these changes remained after the removal of cadmium (P < .05 or P < .01 for most modifications). Meanwhile, cadmium inhibited the activities of histone H3 on lysine 4 (H3K4) and histone H3 on lysine 9 (H3K9) demethylases which were detected by histone demethylation assay. However, there was no significant change in the protein levels of the H3K4 demethylase lysine-specific demethylase 5A (KDM5A) and the H3K9 demethylase lysine-specific demethylase 3A (KDM3A). Interestingly, during transformation of BEAS-2B cells by 20 weeks of exposure to 2.0 μM cadmium as assessed by anchorage-independent growth in soft agar, global H3K4me3, and H3K9me2 were significantly increased at 4 weeks (P < .05 or P < .01), whereas no significant change was observed at 8, 12, 16, and 20 weeks compared with control. Our study suggests that cadmium increases global H3K4me3 and H3K9me2 by inhibiting the activities of histone demethylases, and aberrant histone methylation that occurs early (48 h) and at 4 weeks is associated with cadmium-induced transformation of BEAS-2B cells at the early stage.
Changes in GABAA Receptor Gene Expression Associated with Selective Alterations in Receptor Function and Pharmacology after Ethanol Withdrawal

Changes in the expression of subunits of the GABA type A (GABAA) receptor are implicated in the development of ethanol tolerance and dependence as well as in the central hyperexcitability associated with ethanol withdrawal. The impact of such changes on GABAA receptor function and pharmacological sensitivity was investigated with cultured rat hippocampal neurons exposed to ethanol for 5 d and then subjected to ethanol withdrawal. Both ethanol treatment and withdrawal were associated with a marked decrease in the maximal density of GABA-evoked Cl- currents, whereas the potency of GABA was unaffected. Ethanol exposure also reduced the modulatory efficacy of the benzodiazepine receptor agonists lorazepam, zolpidem, and zaleplon as well as that of the inverse agonists Ro 15-4513 and FG 7142, effects that were associated with a reduced abundance of mRNAs encoding the receptor subunits α1, α3, γ2L, and γ2S. Ethanol withdrawal restored the efficacy of lorazepam, but not that of low concentrations of zolpidem or zaleplon, to control values. Flumazenil, which was ineffective in control neurons, and Ro 15-4513 each potentiated the GABA response after ethanol withdrawal. These effects of withdrawal were accompanied by upregulation of the α2, α3, and α4 subunit mRNAs as well as of the α4 protein. Diazepam or γ-hydroxybutyrate, but not baclofen, prevented the changes in both GABAA receptor pharmacology and subunit mRNA levels induced by ethanol withdrawal. Changes in GABAA receptor gene expression induced by prolonged exposure to and withdrawal of ethanol are thus associated with altered GABAA receptor function and pharmacological sensitivity.
Complicated Grief in the Aftermath of Homicide: Spiritual Crisis and Distress in an African American Sample

Both grieving the loss of a loved one and using spirituality or religion as an aid in doing so are common behaviors in the wake of death. This longitudinal examination of 46 African American homicide survivors follows up on our earlier study that established the relation between positive and negative religious coping on the one hand and complicated grief (CG) on the other. In the current report, we broadened this focus to determine the relation between religious coping and other bereavement outcomes, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, to establish whether religious coping more strongly predicted bereavement distress or vice versa. We also sought to determine if the predictive power of CG in terms of religious coping over time exceeded that of PTSD and depression. Our results suggested a link between negative religious coping (NRC) and all forms of bereavement distress, whereas no such link was found between positive religious coping (PRC) and bereavement outcomes in our final analyses. Significantly, only CG prospectively predicted high levels of spiritual struggle six months later. Clinical implications regarding spiritually sensitive interventions are noted.
Methane emissions from pan‐Arctic lakes during the 21st century: An analysis with process‐based models of lake evolution and biogeochemistry

The importance of methane emissions from pan‐Arctic lakes in the global carbon cycle has been suggested by recent studies. These studies indicated that climate change influences this methane source mainly in two ways: the warming of lake sediments and the evolution of thermokarst lakes. Few studies have been conducted to quantify the two impacts together in a unified modeling framework. Here we adapt a region‐specific lake evolution model to the pan‐Arctic scale and couple it with a lake methane biogeochemical model to quantify the change of this freshwater methane source in the 21st century. Our simulations show that the extent of thaw lakes will increase throughout the 21st century in the northern lowlands of the pan‐Arctic where the reworking of epigenetic ice in drained lake basins will continue. The projected methane emissions by 2100 are 28.3 ± 4.5 Tg CH4 yr−1 under a low warming scenario (Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) 2.6) and 32.7 ± 5.2 Tg CH4 yr−1 under a high warming scenario (RCP 8.5), which are about 2.5 and 2.9 times the simulated present‐day emissions. Most of the emitted methane originates from nonpermafrost carbon stock. For permafrost carbon, the methanogenesis will mineralize a cumulative amount of 3.4 ± 0.8 Pg C under RCP 2.6 and 3.9 ± 0.9 Pg C under RCP 8.5 from 2006 to 2099. The projected emissions could increase atmospheric methane concentrations by 55.0–69.3 ppb. This study further indicates that the warming of lake sediments dominates the increase of methane emissions from pan‐Arctic lakes in the future.
General broadcast channels with degraded message sets

A broadcast channel with one sender and two receivers is considered. Three independent messages are to be transmitted over this channel: one common message which is meant for both receivers, and one private message for each of them. The coding theorem and strong converse for this communication situation is proved for the case when one of the private messages has rate zero.
Suppressors Tumor Trp 53 and Retinoblastoma Somatic Inactivation of Spontaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma Induced by the

Squamous cell carcinomas (SCC) represent the most aggressive type of nonmelanoma skin cancer. Although little is known about the causal alterations of SCCs, in organtransplanted patients the E7 and E6 oncogenes of human papillomavirus, targeting the p53and pRb-dependent pathways, have been widely involved. Here, we report the functional consequences of the simultaneous elimination of Trp53 and retinoblastoma (Rb) genes in epidermis using Cre-loxP system. Loss of p53, but not pRb, produces spontaneous tumor development, indicating that p53 is the predominant tumor suppressor acting in mouse epidermis. Although the simultaneous inactivation of pRb and p53 does not aggravate the phenotype observed in Rb-deficient epidermis in terms of proliferation and/or differentiation, spontaneous SCC development is severely accelerated in doubly deficient mice. The tumors are aggressive and undifferentiated and display a hair follicle origin. Detailed analysis indicates that the acceleration is mediated by premature activation of the epidermal growth factor receptor/Akt pathway, resulting in increased proliferation in normal and dysplastic hair follicles and augmented tumor angiogenesis. The molecular characteristics of this model provide valuable tools to understand epidermal tumor formation and may ultimately contribute to the development of therapies for the treatment of aggressive squamous cancer. [Cancer Res 2008;68(3):683–92]
Maximum entropy based emotion classification of Chinese blog sentences

At present there are increasing studies on the classification of textual emotions. Especially with the rapid developments of Internet technology, classifying blog emotions has become a new research field. In this paper, we classified the sentence emotion using the machine learning method based on the maximum entropy model and the Chinese emotion corpus (Ren-CECps)*. Ren-CECps contains eight basic emotion categories (expect, joy, love, surprise, anxiety, sorrow, hate and anger), which presents us with the opportunity to systematically analyze the complex human emotions. Three features (keywords, POS and intensity) were considered for sentence emotion classification, and three aspect experiments have been carried out: 1) classification of any two emotions, 2) classification of eight emotions, and 3) classification of positive and negative emotions. The highest classification accuracies of the three aspect experiments were 90.62%, 35.66% and 73.96%, respectively.
Local a posteriori error estimator based on the hypercircle method Combination of the equilibrated residual method and the method of hypercircle

The error of the finite element solution of linear elliptic problems can be estimated a posteriori by the classical hypercircle method. This method gives accurate and guaranteed upper bound of the error measured in the energy norm. The disadvantage is that a global dual problem has to be solved, which is quite time-consuming. Combining the hypercircle method with the equilibrated residual method, we obtain locally computable guaranteed upper bound. The computer implementation of this a posteriori error estimator is also discussed.
A Dramatic Increase of C1q Protein in the CNS during Normal Aging

The decline of cognitive function has emerged as one of the greatest health threats of old age. Age-related cognitive decline is caused by an impacted neuronal circuitry, yet the molecular mechanisms responsible are unknown. C1q, the initiating protein of the classical complement cascade and powerful effector of the peripheral immune response, mediates synapse elimination in the developing CNS. Here we show that C1q protein levels dramatically increase in the normal aging mouse and human brain, by as much as 300-fold. This increase was predominantly localized in close proximity to synapses and occurred earliest and most dramatically in certain regions of the brain, including some but not all regions known to be selectively vulnerable in neurodegenerative diseases, i.e., the hippocampus, substantia nigra, and piriform cortex. C1q-deficient mice exhibited enhanced synaptic plasticity in the adult and reorganization of the circuitry in the aging hippocampal dentate gyrus. Moreover, aged C1q-deficient mice exhibited significantly less cognitive and memory decline in certain hippocampus-dependent behavior tests compared with their wild-type littermates. Unlike in the developing CNS, the complement cascade effector C3 was only present at very low levels in the adult and aging brain. In addition, the aging-dependent effect of C1q on the hippocampal circuitry was independent of C3 and unaccompanied by detectable synapse loss, providing evidence for a novel, complement- and synapse elimination-independent role for C1q in CNS aging.
Segmentation in singer turns with the Bayesian information criterion

As part of a project on indexing ethno-musicological audio recordings, segmentation in singer turns automatically appeared to be essential. In this article, we present the problem of segmentation in singer turns of musical recordings and our first experiments in this direction by exploring a method based on the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), which are used in numerous works in audio segmentation, to detect singer turns. The BIC penalty coefficient was shown to vary when determining its value to achieve the best performance for each recording. In order to avoid the decision about which single value is best for all the documents, we propose to combine several segmentations obtained with different values of this parameter. This method consists of taking a posteriori decisions on which segment boundaries are to be kept. A gain of 7.1% in terms of F-measure was obtained compared to a standard coefficient.