Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Block jacobi preconditioning of the conjugate gradient method on a vector processor

The preconditioned conjugate gradient method is well established for solving linear systems of equations that arise from the discretization of partial differential equations. Point and block Jacobi preconditioning are both common preconditioning techniques. Although it is reasonable to expect that block Jacobi preconditioning is more effective, block preconditioning requires the solution of triangular systems of equations that are difficult to vectorize. We present an implementation of block Jacobi for vector computers, especially for the Cray Y-MP/264, and discuss several techniques to improve vectorization. We present these in a progression to show the effect on performance. For the model problem, resulting from a self-adjoint operator, the final implementation of one block Jacobi step uses almost the same amount of time as one point Jacobi step on the Cray Y-MP/264 despite the solution of triangular systems.
Adaptive fuzzy vibration control of large flexible truss with Hexapod active interface

The adaptive fuzzy vibration control problem of large flexible truss with Hexapod active interface is studied. Firstly, independent modal space model of flexible truss with Hexapod active interface is established with energy method. A stable direct adaptive fuzzy controller is designed based on fuzzy control theory and classical adaptive control theory. Finally, flexible truss active vibration control simulation is conducted. The results show that the adaptive fuzzy controller is effective in both instantaneous excitation and mixing frequency periodical excitation as well as the kinematics parameters of Hexapod are all in the allowable ranges of the actual prototype.
Expectations and the Labor Supply

The long-run and short-run dynamics of the supply of national output are a key to macro-economic behavior. These dynamics form the basis of the "natural rate" analysis of Milton Friedman and others. And the kev to the dynamics of the total supply is that of the labor supply. It would be an exaggeration to claim that capital supply and the behavior of firms is irrelevant to macroeconomics. But output can be viewed as the product of a cyclical employment variable with a more or less uniformly increasing productivity. Thus it is clear that the properties of the total supply are highly dependent upon those of the labor supply. The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamics of the labor supply, with particular emphasis on the effect of expectations models. In the process a regression that Robert Lucas and Leonard Rapping used to explain the labor supply is replicated with more recent data. Although further analysis is done, one of the purposes of this study was to verify that their earlier 1930-65 results also hold for a more recent period (1950-70), and with improved data series.
LPIN2 Is Associated With Type 2 Diabetes, Glucose Metabolism, and Body Composition

OBJECTIVE—To identify the type 2 diabetes gene located at chromosome 18p11. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—We investigated the region in a young genetically isolated population by genotyping 34 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 78 case subjects and 101 control subjects. Two SNPs were selected and followed up in two cohorts. The first cohort came from a general Dutch population. In this cohort, association with type 2 diabetes was investigated using 616 type 2 diabetic case subjects and 2,890 control subjects; association with oral glucose tolerance test data was performed in 361 normoglycemic people. Association with fat distribution was studied in the second replication cohort, consisting of 836 people from the genetically isolated population. RESULTS—At the initial step, we found that the common C allele of SNP rs3745012 was associated with type 2 diabetes (odds ratio 2.01, P = 0.03). This SNP is located at the 3′ untranslated region of the LPIN2 gene, which is a plausible candidate for type 2 diabetes and obesity. In the cohort from the general Dutch population, we demonstrated that rs3745012 interacts with BMI in determination of type 2 diabetes: whereas in subjects with high BMI, the common C allele is associated with type 2 diabetes, the same allele exhibits a neutral or protective effect in lean subjects (P = 0.05 overall effect, P = 0.02 interaction). Most remarkably, rs3745012 strongly affected composite insulin sensitivity index (P = 0.006 for overall effect, P = 0.004 for interaction). In the second replication cohort, we found that the allele C of rs3745012 increases trunk-to-legs fat mass ratio (P = 0.001) and may affect other fat-related measurements. CONCLUSIONS—rs3745012 SNP of the LPIN2 gene is associated with type 2 diabetes and fat distribution.
The impact of institutions on the development of corporate governance in Saudi Arabia

Recent studies highlight the importance of improving corporate governance practices in order to reduce the impact of financial crises on the economy. However, doing so requires consideration of exactly what forms corporate governance, particularly in a national context. Such consideration necessitates some focus on institutions, an area which has been largely neglected by previous research. As such, this research primarily focuses on understanding a range of institutions in a non-Western, emerging society. Attention will be paid to the influence of such institutions on the emergence and development of corporate governance regimes from an institutional theory perspective, as perceived by significant social actors. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with corporate governance managers in Saudi Arabia. Findings suggest that the emergence of corporate governance regimes in a non-Western, emerging society (Saudi Arabia) is influenced by family, kinship, bureaucratic state, and religion institutions. Family and kinship institutions appear to negatively impact on the emergence and development of corporate governance in this non-Western, emerging society in terms of issues surrounding control, abuse, and conflict of interest. The bureaucratic state and religion appear to positively influence the development of corporate governance in the Saudi Arabian non-Western, emerging society in terms of issues centred on implementation, compliance, and supporting roles. This research provides a new understanding of the impact of, and role played by, institutions in the formation of corporate governance in a non-Western, emerging society which is an under-researched context. Implications, such as how to reduce negative institutional impacts and take advantage of more positive ones, are discussed. Finally, suggestions for further research are offered. Such research might focus on exploring the impact of institutions from extended standpoints of institutional theory, for example institutional logics and institutional work perspectives.
Trade Induced Technical Bias and Wage Inequalities: a Theory of Defensive Innovation

This paper considers a dynamic North South model of international trade and innovations in which firms can endogenously bias the direction of technological change. We show that, when there is a differential degree of protection of property rights between the two regions, innovating firms face a trade-off between delocalization in the South and more secure property rights in the North. For a certain range of products, the optimal response to this tradeoff is the emergence of endogenous technological bias towards skilled labour technologies. We discuss the implications of this trade induced technological bias on the dynamics of international trade and relative wages in the two regions. For some configurations of parameters, the model is able to generate, along the transition path, an increase in wage inequalities in both regions and skill upgrading of southern production compatible with small changes in import penetration rates in North.
Improving RBF-DDA performance on optical character recognition through parameter selection

The dynamic decay adjustment (DDA) algorithm is a fast constructive algorithm for training RBF neural networks. In previous works it has been shown that for some datasets the generalization performance of RBF-DDA depends only weakly on the algorithm parameters /spl theta//sup +/ and /spl theta//sup -/. However, we have observed experimentally that for some problems performance is considerably dependent on the value of /spl theta//sup -/. In this work we propose a method for selecting the value of /spl theta//sup -/ for performance optimization. The proposed method has been evaluated on three optical recognition datasets from the UCI repository. The results show that the proposed method considerably improves the performance of RBF-DDA with default parameters on these tasks. The results are compared to MLP and k-NN results obtained in previous works. It is shown that the method proposed in this paper outperforms MLPs and obtains results comparable to k-NN on these tasks.
Synthesis of Spontaneous Speech With Syllable Contraction Using State-Based Context-Dependent Voice Transformation

Pronunciation normally varies in spontaneous speech, and is an integral aspect of spontaneous expression. This study describes a voice transformation-based approach to generating spontaneous speech with syllable contractions for Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based speech synthesis. A multi-dimensional linear regression model is adopted as the context-dependent, state-based transformation function to convert the feature sequence of read speech to that of spontaneous speech with syllable contraction. With insufficient number of training data, the obtained transformation functions are categorized using a decision tree based on linguistic and articulatory features for better and efficient selection of suitable transformation functions. Furthermore, to cope with the problem of small parallel corpus, cross-validation of trained transformation function is performed to ensure correct transformation functions are obtained and prevent over-fitting. Consequently, pronunciation variations of syllable contraction for the trained and the unseen syllable-contracted words are generated from the transformation function retrieved from the decision tree using linguistic and articulatory features. Objective and subjective tests were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed transformation function substantially improves apparent spontaneity of the synthesized speech compared to the conventional methods.
Locality Based Data Partitioning in MapReduce

Performance of MapReduce heavily depends on its data partitions for parallelism controlling, however, current state of art solutions are implemented using naive methods which are far from optimal. In this paper, we outline our solution, a locality based and skew aware partition technology, intend to address the data partition problems which encumber the job performance seriously. Our solution LBP(Locality Based Partitioning) clusters data blocks from a same node into a single partition, which need only one map task to process avoiding the spoil time for slot reallocation and multiple tasks initializing. Realizing the data skew problem, we enhance the LBP to LBP-SA(LBP Skew Aware) to partition the data file according their record and computation skews, so decrease the variety of tasks lifetime. Experiments results demonstrated that our solutions can improve the MapReduce processing performance remarkably than traditional Hadoop Implementation.
Intrinsic-Extrinsic Motivations, Knowledge Sharing and Innovation in French Firms

ProposalfortheDIMEWorkshop1.2OrganisationalInnovation:thedynamicsoforganisationalcapabilitiesanddesignGREDEG-DEMOS,SophiaAntipolis,15-16November2007Abstract:Thispaperexaminesthemotivationalfoundations,basedonintrinsicand/orextrinsicfactors,ofknowledgecreation,sharingandtransferringprocesswithinmanufactur-ingﬁrmsinaninnovationperspective. First,usingFrenchdataset,westudytheinterrela-tionshipsbetweenknowledgemanagementandmotivationmanagementpractices,andtheirimpactonknowledgesharing(deﬁnedasconductingasharedpoolofknowledge)aswelloninnovation. Weﬁnddiﬀerencesbetweenﬁrms’characteristicsregardingsize,technologicalsectors, groupmembershipandinnovationperformance. Second, organizational diversityof the ﬁrms is showed. We identify three motivation management systems characterizedrespectively: (i)traditionalﬁrmsi. e.traditionalintheirworkorganization;(ii)ﬁrmsusingmotivationpersonelpracticesand(iii)learningﬁrmsusing,addedtomotivation,knowledgemanagementpractices.Firmsusingmotivationpracticesarelinkedtoagencyandincentivestheoriesbasedonextrinsicfactors. Learningﬁrmsusebothinterrelatedintrinsicandex-trinsicmotivationsassuggestedbyself-determinationtheory(SDT)andalsobycognitiveevaluationtheory(CET)inwhichfeelingsofcompetenceandautonomyareimportantforintrinsicmotivation. Third,empiricalevidenceallowstoconcludethatmotivationmanage-ment systems have signiﬁcant andpositive impact onknowledge sharing, while marginalchangesinindividualpracticeshavelittleeﬀect. Thislogicofinterrelationshipsaccountsforsynergiesexistingbetweenthesepractices. Theresultsupportsthenotionthatmotiva-tionpracticesmustbesystematicallyassociatedwithbothintrinsicandextrinsicmotivationpracticesandspeciﬁcorganizationinordertoreachthemaximumperformance. Keywords: Motivationalfactor, IntrinsicandExtrinsicmotivation, Knowledgeman-agement,Humanresourcepractices,Innovation,ComplementarityJELClassiﬁcation:D21,M12,O32.
Transboundary Capital and Pollution Flows and the Emergence of Regional Inequalities

We seek to explain the emergence of spatial heterogeneity regarding development and pollution on the basis of interactions associated with the movement of capital and polluting activities from one economy to another. We use a simple dynamical model describing capital accumulation along the lines of a xed-savings-ratio Solow-type model capable of producing endogenous growth and convergence behavior, and pollution accumulation in each country with pollution diffusion between countries or regions. The basic mechanism underlying the movements of capital across space is the quest for locations where the marginal productivity of capital is relatively higher than the productivity at the location of origin. The notion that capital moves to locations of relatively higher productivity but not necessarily from locations of high concentration to locations of low concentration, does not face difficulties associated with the Lucas paradox. We show that, for a wide range of capital and pollution rates of flow, spatial heterogeneity emerges even between two economies with identical fundamental structures. These results can be interpreted as suggesting that the neoclassical convergence hypothesis might not hold under differential rates of flow of capital and polluting activities among countries of the same fundamental structure.
When is a Man's Life Worth More Than His Human Capital?

This paper develops a subjectivist theory of the value that individuals place on risks to their lives. It explains the paradox that although individuals may view their lives as priceless, they still will take small risks for a finite amount of money. Typical public projects that alter risks to life result in small changes in survival probability for a large number of people. Standard tools of benefit cost can therefore be applied, where statistical lives saved are valued at a price equal to the marginal rate of substitution between survival probability and wealth. This value is compared to human capital measures of the value of saving a life and is shown under reasonable assumptions to exceed the human capital value.
Efficient High Performance Computing Framework for Short Rate Models

Many mathematical calculations in the field of computational finance consume a lot of time and resources for processing. Some of the Short rate models used in quantitative finance which have been taken into consideration in this paper have been optimized for performance within a cluster computing environment. The back-end cluster has been seamlessly integrated with an easy-to-use front-end which can be used by finance professionals who are not aware of the details of the computational and database cluster. Furthermore, many techniques that have been utilized to improve the efficiency of the models have also been described. This paper also describes the generalization of a High Performance Computing Cluster designed for One-factor Short rate models and how it can be used easily to be further extended for other mathematical models in quantitative finance. The ultimate objective is to come up with a generalized framework for quantitative finance.
First results from the INTEGRAL galactic plane scans

Scans of the Galactic plane performed at regular intervals constitute a key element of the guaranteed time obser- vations of the INTEGRAL observing programme. These scans are done for two reasons: frequent monitoring of the Galactic plane in order to detect transient sources, and time resolved mapping of the Galactic plane in continuum and diuse line emission. This paper describes first results obtained from the Galactic plane scans executed so far during the early phase (Dec. 2002-May 2003) of the nominal mission.
A Least Square Method Based Model for Identifying Protein Complexes in Protein-Protein Interaction Network

Protein complex formed by a group of physical interacting proteins plays a crucial role in cell activities. Great effort has been made to computationally identify protein complexes from protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. However, the accuracy of the prediction is still far from being satisfactory, because the topological structures of protein complexes in the PPI network are too complicated. This paper proposes a novel optimization framework to detect complexes from PPI network, named PLSMC. The method is on the basis of the fact that if two proteins are in a common complex, they are likely to be interacting. PLSMC employs this relation to determine complexes by a penalized least squares method. PLSMC is applied to several public yeast PPI networks, and compared with several state-of-the-art methods. The results indicate that PLSMC outperforms other methods. In particular, complexes predicted by PLSMC can match known complexes with a higher accuracy than other methods. Furthermore, the predicted complexes have high functional homogeneity.
Helping Teenagers Relieve Psychological Pressures: A Micro-blog Based System

The rapid development of economy and society brings unprecedentedly intensive competition and adolescent psychological pressures to current teenagers. If these psychological pressures could not be resolved properly, they will turn to mental problems, which will finally lead to serious consequences, such as suicide or aggressive behaviors. Traditional face-to-face psychological diagnosis and treatment cannot meet the demand of relieving teenagers’ stress completely due to its lack of timeliness and diversity. With micro-blog becoming a popular media channel for teenagers’ information acquisition, interaction, self-expression and emotion release, we present a system called tHelper for sensing and easing teenagers’ psychological pressures in study, communication, affection, or self-recognition through micro-blog. The system adopts Gaussian Process to classify a teenager’s pressure (i.e., pressure category, as well as pressure level) based on a number of features extracted from his/her tweets. Then the system provides various methods to help pressurized teenagers relieve their stress according to the sensing results, by sending positive stories, proverbs, pictures, or cheerful jokes, suggesting simple breathing and muscle relaxation exercises, guiding the teenagers to write down something for self expression, and at the worst case notifying their guardians (who have registered the system beforehand) via mobile phone messages. tHelper demonstrates how microblog can be turned into a new kind of adolescent mental education mode to complement and enhance the traditional face-to-face treatment by psychological doctors.
Resource Inefficiency and Poor Aggregate Economic Performance in African Countries: The Case of Namibia, 1968-1992

This essay develops a transcendental variable elasticity of substitution (Trans-VES) production function in which hypotheses concerning scale, output-input, and substitution, elasticities can be examined. The objective is to determine the impacts of domestic resources on the pattern of economic performance. Using aggregate data for Namibia during the 1968-1992 period, the analysis find constant return to scale pre- 1980, followed by diminishing returns to scale post-1980, representing a switch from flexible to rigid substitutes (complements), along with limited technical progress. The shift indicates widespread inefficiencies, and recommend resource improvement.
FGF21 deletion exacerbates diabetic cardiomyopathy by aggravating cardiac lipid accumulation

Fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21) plays an important role in energy homoeostasis. The unaddressed question of FGF21's effect on the development and progression of diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM) is investigated here with FGF21 knockout (FGF21KO) diabetic mice. Type 1 diabetes was induced in both FGF21KO and C57BL/6J wild‐type (WT) mice via streptozotocin. At 1, 2 and 4 months after diabetes onset, the plasma FGF21 levels were significantly decreased in WT diabetic mice compared to controls. There was no significant difference between FGF21KO and WT diabetic mice in blood glucose and triglyceride levels. FGF21KO diabetic mice showed earlier and more severe cardiac dysfunction, remodelling and oxidative stress, as well as greater increase in cardiac lipid accumulation than WT diabetic mice. Western blots showed that increased cardiac lipid accumulation was accompanied by further increases in the expression of nuclear factor (erythroid‐derived 2)‐like 2 (Nrf2) and its target protein CD36, along with decreases in the phosphorylation of AMP‐activated protein kinase and the expression of hexokinase II and peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor gamma co‐activator 1α in the heart of FGF21KO diabetic mice compared to WT diabetic mice. Our results demonstrate that FGF21 deletion‐aggravated cardiac lipid accumulation is likely mediated by cardiac Nrf2‐driven CD36 up‐regulation, which may contribute to the increased cardiac oxidative stress and remodelling, and the eventual development of DCM. These findings suggest that FGF21 may be a therapeutic target for the treatment of DCM.
A bio-inspired hexapod robot with noncircular gear transmission system

We report on the design and implementation of a simple bio-inspired hexapod driven by a single motor. Aiming for generating the dynamic locomotion of the robot, the design is based on the motion of a spring loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) and then expanded to the hexapod morphology. The required speed variations and phase offsets of legs are achieved by utilization of non-circular gear pairs in the transmission system. Thus, the robot can be driven by a single DC motor without control effort. The designed alternating tripod gait allows the robot to adequately negotiate with rough terrain as well as to excite dynamic running behavior. The performance of the robot is evaluated experimentally and is quantitatively compared to the SLIP model.