Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Denmark a Nordic Welfare State - Are the Active Labour Market Policy Withering Away?

Denmark has been portrayed as a country with a focus on full employment, gender equality and high level of participation on the labour market. It has historically further been built upon consensus and class-compromises and known for flexi-curity. The active labour market policy has focused on how to ensure not only a work-first approach, but that a constant upgrading of qualifications would guarantee that the individual citizen could have the qualification to enter and to stay on the labour market. A core question is whether the focus on flexi-curity including upgrading of skills and integration on the labour market has been withering away towards a sharper focus on a work first approach, where activation is used as a stick more than a carrot, also implying that rights' as citizens has been increasingly reduced, and, thereby increased the role of citizens as labourer on the labour market. The article concludes, based on a detailed case-analysis of Denmark, that profound changes has taken place over the last 10-15 years implying that the active labour market policy has strengthened its focus on work-first. Access to benefits has moved in a less citizen based direction, and the principles of universality and generosity of benefits has been gradually eroded. Furthermore, that the social partner's role has been reduced among other things also due to lower union density rates. A short comparison with the other Nordic countries is used as a background for depicting the changes. However, by the end of 2011 a few changes perhaps marking a shift towards a human-capital approach has taken place.
VpRFP1, a novel C4C4-type RING finger protein gene from Chinese wild Vitis pseudoreticulata, functions as a transcriptional activator in defence response of grapevine

RING finger proteins comprise a large family and play important roles in regulation of growth and development, hormone signalling, and responses to biotic and abiotic stresses in plants. In this study, the identification and functional characterization of a C4C4-type RING finger protein gene from the Chinese wild grapevine Vitis pseudoreticulata (designated VpRFP1) are reported. VpRFP1 was initially identified as an expressed sequence tag (EST) from a cDNA library constructed from leaves of V. pseudoreticulata inoculated with the grapevine powdery mildew Uncinula necator. Sequence analysis of the deduced VpRFP1 protein based on the full-length cDNA revealed an N-terminal nuclear localization signal (NLS) and a C-terminal C4C4-type RING finger motif with the consensus sequence Cys-X2-Cys-X13-Cys-X1-Cys-X4-Cys-X2-Cys-X10-Cys-X2-Cys. Upon inoculation with U. necator, expression of VpRFP1 was rapidly induced to higher levels in mildew-resistant V. pseudoreticulata plants. In contrast, expression of VpRFP1 was down-regulated in mildew-susceptible V. vinifera plants. Western blotting using an antibody raised against VpRFP1 showed that VpRFP1 was also induced to higher levels in V. pseudoreticulata plants at 12–48 hours post-inoculation (hpi). However, there was only slight increase in VpRFP in V. vinifera plants in the same time frame, even though a more significant increase was observed at 96–144 hpi in these plants. Results from transactivation assays in yeast showed that the RING finger motif of VpRFP1 exhibited some activity of transcriptional activation; however, no activity was seen with the full-length VpRFP1. Overexpression of VpRFP1 in Arabidopsis plants was found to enhance resistance to Arabidopsis powdery mildew Golovinomyces cichoracearum, which seemed to be correlated with increased transcript levels of AtPR1 and AtPR2 in the pathogen-infected tissues. In addition, the Arabidopsis transgenic lines showed enhanced resistance to a virulent bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000. Taken together, the results suggested that VpRFP1 may be a transcriptional activator of defence-related genes in grapevines.
Development of Autonomous Emergency Braking control system based on road friction

Autonomous emergency brake (AEB) is one of important vehicle active safety function to avoid or mitigate collision. In general, the AEB system employs a Time-To-Collision (TTC) to measure the potential danger of impact into obstacles. Once the TTC is smaller than desired threshold, the AEB would activate the braking system. The threshold of TTC for braking is designed based on assuming road friction to be a constant. However, the actual road condition is intricate and changed at any time. Therefore, an AEB strategy considering the effect of different road friction on the braking threshold of TTC is developed. First, a combined-slip tire model is used to estimate peak road friction. The estimated peak road friction is then used to obtain braking threshold of TTC. Since the road friction can be identified in real-time, the proposed AEB algorithm can adapt to different road surface. The simulation results show that proposed control strategy has batter performance than that of the conventional one.
PolyMorph: Increasing P300 Spelling Efficiency by Selection Matrix Polymorphism and Sentence-Based Predictions

P300 is an electric signal emitted by brain about 300 milliseconds after a rare, but relevant-for-the-user event. One of the applications of this signal is sentence spelling that enables subjects who lost the control of their motor pathways to communicate by selecting characters in a matrix containing all the alphabet symbols. Although this technology has made considerable progress in the last years, it still suffers from both low communication rate and high error rate. This article presents a P300 speller, named PolyMorph, that introduces two major novelties in the field: the selection matrix polymorphism, that reduces the size of the selection matrix itself by removing useless symbols, and sentence-based predictions, that exploit all the spelt characters of a sentence to determine the probability of a word. In order to measure the effectiveness of the presented speller, we describe two sets of tests: the first one in vivo and the second one in silico. The results of these experiments suggest that the use of PolyMorph in place of the naive character-by-character speller both increases the number of spelt characters per time unit and reduces the error rate.
A New Improved GPSR (GPSR-kP) Routing Protocol for Multimedia Communication over Vehicular Ad hoc Network

One of the main constraint in front of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) is delivering the data in efficient time. This paper provides an improved Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing protocol (GPSR) to enhance the video quality transmission over VANETs. We propose to adapt the mechanism of GPSR through a modification on greedy process. This latter uses only one single hop to send packets, while that there could exist another valid hop to transmit another packet instead of making it wait a fairly long duration and therefore increasing the average delay of a complete message. Our enhanced variant of GPSR named GPSR-kP (GPSR with k Packets), allows to use a number k, limited between one and six, of neighbours close to the destination and necessary to transfer the k number of packets possessed by a same source node which takes into account if they have the same final destination or not. We evaluate GPSR-kP protocol in urban scenario with obstacles using a real video clips to demonstrate its feasibility for real videos. Our experimental results show the ability of the GPSR-kP to overcome the observed problem and to improve the performance of GPSR.
A face-to-muscle inversion of a biomechanical face model for audiovisual and motor control research

Muscle-based models of the human face produce high quality animation but rely on recorded muscle activity signals or synthetic muscle signals often derived by trial and error. In this paper we present a dynamic inversion of a muscle-based model [1] that permits the animation to be created from kinematic recordings of facial movements. Using a nonlinear optimizer (Powell’s algorithm) the inversion produces a muscle activity set for 16 muscle groups in the lower face that minimize the root mean square error between kinematic data recorded with OPTOTRAK and the corresponding nodes of the modeled facial mesh. This inverted muscle activity is then used to animate the facial model. The results of a first experiment showed that the inversion-synthesis method can accurately reproduce a synthetic facial animation, even for a partial sampling of the face. The results of a second experiment showed that the method is as successful for OPTOTRAK recording of a talker uttering a sentence. The animation was of high quality.
Detecting Targeted Malicious Email Using Persistent Threat and Recipient Oriented Features

Targeted email attacks to enable computer network exploitation have become more prevalent, more insidious, and more widely documented in recent years. Beyond spam, or phishing designed to trick users into revealing personal information, targeted malicious email facilitates computer network exploitation and the gathering of sensitive information from targeted networks. These targeted email attacks are not singular unrelated events, instead they are coordinated and persistent attack campaigns that can span years. We survey and categorize existing email filtering techniques, propose and implement new methods for detecting targeted malicious email and compare these newly developed techniques to traditional detection methods. These new techniques are based on using persistent threat and recipient oriented features of email with a random forest classifier. Incorporating these features significantly improves the detection of targeted malicious email while maintaining reasonable false positive rates.
The effect of arbutin on lipid peroxidation and antioxidant capacity in the serum of cyclosporine-treated rats

Background: Cyclosporine A (CsA) is a potent immunosuppressant drug with therapeutic and toxic actions. The use of CsA is limited by its toxicity. Several researchers had proposed that oxidative stress could play an important role in CsA-induced toxicity. Arbutin has recently been shown to possess antioxidative and free radical scavenging abilities. The present study was designed to investigate the in vivo effects of arbutin on lipid peroxidation and antioxidant capacity in the serum of cyclosporine treated rats. Methods: Adult male Wistar rats were divided into six groups (n=8/group): (I) control (no CsA and arbutin administration), (II and III) were treated subcutaneously (Sc) with arbutin (50,100 mg/kg/bw), respectively, (IV) administered CsA (25 mg/kg/bw) intraperitoneally (IP), (V and VI) received the combination of CsA (25 mg/kg/bw) i.p and arbutin (50,100 mg/kg/bw) Sc daily, respectively. At the end of the treatment (after3 weeks), serum lipid peroxidation was measured by thiobarbituric acid-reacting substances (TBARS) and serum total antioxidant capacity (ferric reducing ability of plasma [FRAP]) was assayed based on spectrophotometric method. Results: TBARS had been significantly increased by CsA administration compared with control rats. Arbutin (50mg/kg/bw) completely prevented this effect, but arbutin (100 mg/kg/bw) alone or in combination with CsA significantly increased lipid peroxidation compared with controls. Conclusion: Our data indicate that arbutin (50mg/kg/bw) had protective effect in the CsA-induced toxicity but high concentration of arbutin (100mg/kg/bw) showed meaningful oxidative and lipoperoxidative effects.
Social Media Advertising Value: A Study on Consumer's Perception

The appearance of Internet-based social media has made it possible for an individual to communicate with other people all over the world about a product or service. Social media allows individuals to interact freely, discuss and share information by using a multimedia mix of personal pictures, words, audio and videos. Over the last decade social media evolved from conventional means to web. Internet penetration in Malaysia is very high. Internet users in Malaysia are more than 17 million in year 2013. Most of them are active in social media networking. However, there"s only a small number of study on social media advertising and how consumer perceived on its value in Malaysia, thus there is a huge literature gap on this issue. The study investigates the relationship of entertainment, informative and irritation of social media advertising towards product awareness and advertising values. A nationwide survey by using online survey was done and 253 valid respondents were selected. The study employs frequency, correlation and multiple regression analysis using SPSS to analyze the data. Based on the result, the study proposed a model of social media advertising in which informative as the predictor, product awareness as the mediator and advertising value as the dependent variable.
Real-Time Control Systems with Delays

Control loops that are closed over a communication network get more and more common. A problem with such systems is that the transfer delays will be varying with different characteristics depending on the network hardware and software. The network delays are typically varying due to varying network load, scheduling policies in the network and the nodes, and due to network failures. Two network models of different complexity are studied: Random delays that are independent from transfer to transfer, Random delays with probability distribution functions governed by an underlying Markov chain. The delay models are verified by experimental measurements of network delays. In the thesis it is shown how to analyze stability and expected performance of linear controllers where the network delays are described by one of the two network models above. Methods to evaluate quadratic cost functions are developed. Through the same analysis we find criteria for mean square stability of the closed loop for the different network models. The Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) optimal controller is developed for the two delay models. The derived controller uses knowledge of old time delays. These can be calculated using ``timestamping'' of messages in the network. ``Timestamping'' means that every transfered signal is marked with the time of generation. The receiving node can then calculate how long the transfer delay was by comparing the timestamp with the node's internal clock. (Less)
Measurement of magnetic field produced by the 25kV-50Hz Italian high speed railway line

The paper presents the results of a measurement campaign aimed to evaluate the level of magnetic flux density field generated, in the neighbouring of the route, by the 25 kV-50 Hz Italian high speed railway line. The measured values are fairly lower than limits given in the national law relevant to human exposure to ELF (extremely low frequency) magnetic field
Span: Spike Pattern Association Neuron for Learning Spatio-Temporal Spike Patterns

Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) were shown to be suitable tools for the processing of spatio-temporal information. However, due to their inherent complexity, the formulation of efficient supervised learning algorithms for SNN is difficult and remains an important problem in the research area. This article presents SPAN - a spiking neuron that is able to learn associations of arbitrary spike trains in a supervised fashion allowing the processing of spatio-temporal information encoded in the precise timing of spikes. The idea of the proposed algorithm is to transform spike trains during the learning phase into analog signals so that common mathematical operations can be performed on them. Using this conversion, it is possible to apply the well-known Widrow-Hoff rule directly to the transformed spike trains in order to adjust the synaptic weights and to achieve a desired input/output spike behavior of the neuron. In the presented experimental analysis, the proposed learning algorithm is evaluated regarding its learning capabilities, its memory capacity, its robustness to noisy stimuli and its classification performance. Differences and similarities of SPAN regarding two related algorithms, ReSuMe and Chronotron, are discussed.
Implementing Atomic Sequences on Uniprocessors Using Rollforward

This article presents a software‐only solution to the synchronization problem for uniprocessors. The idea is to execute atomic sequences without any hardware protection, and in the rare case of pre‐emption, to roll the sequence forward to the end, thereby preserving atomicity. One of the proposed implementations protects atomic sequences without any memory‐accesses. This is significant as it enables execution at CPU‐speeds, rather than memory‐speeds. The benefit of this method increases with the frequency at which atomic sequences are executed. It therefore encourages the building of systems with fine‐grained synchronization. This has the additional advantage of reducing average latency. Experiments demonstrate that this technique has the potential to outperform even the best hardware mechanisms. The main contribution of this article is to discuss operating‐system related issues of rollforward and to demonstrate its practicality, both in terms of flexibility and performance.
On manifest SU(4)-invariant superstring action in AdS5×S5

We discuss manifestly SL(2,C)×SU(4) and κ-invariant superstring action in an AdS5×S5 background within the framework of the Green-Schwarz formulation. The action is formulated in terms of 16 Poincare fermionic coordinates which through AdS/CFT correspondence should represent = 4 SYM superspace and 16 superconformal fermionic coordinates. The action is also manifestly invariant with respect to the usual = 4 Poincare superalgebra transformations. κ-symmetry gauge fixing and the derivation of lightcone gauge action are simplified.
How Corrosive Is College to Religious Faith and Practice

While Americans remain among the most religious in the industrialized world, it is widely observed that many of them exhibit cycles of religiosity, the most evident of which occurs in early adulthood. The young adult years of many Americans are marked by a clear decline in outward religious expression, which is widely thought to hit bottom during—and perhaps because of—the college experience. Data from 30 years of the General Social Survey pinpoints age 22 as the point in the life course when average levels of weekly or more frequent church attendance are at their lowest (17 percent). The climb back into regular or semi-regular religious practice—if it occurs at all, and it usually does—is often stimulated by marriage and childbearing (Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995). This barely needs retelling, as if a farewell to organized religion during the college years is simply part of the cultural script so many possess. But not all Americans check their religion at the dorm door. While much is made of religious decline, emerging adulthood is also a time in the life course when Americans are most open to religious change and growth. It is a phase commonly associated with religious conversion and thus targeted for considerable proselytizing by evangelical religious organizations. Waxing or waning, adolescence and early adulthood are certainly the most religiously unstable phases of the life course.
Coupled dynamics of the co‐evolution of gravel bed topography, flow turbulence and sediment transport in an experimental channel

A series of flume experiments were conducted in a large experimental channel at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory to understand the coupled dynamics of flow and bed forms above the sediment-water interface. Simultaneous high resolution measurements of velocity fluctuations, bed elevations and sediment flux at the downstream end of the channel, were made for a range of discharges. The probability density functions (pdfs) of bed elevation increments and instantaneous Reynolds stress reveal a power law tail behavior and a wavelet cross-correlation analysis depicts a strong dependence of these series across a range of scales, indicating a feedback between bed form dynamics and near-bed turbulence. These results complement our previous findings in which the signature of bed form evolution on the near-bed velocity fluctuations was confirmed via the presence of a spectral gap and two distinct power law scaling regimes in the spectral density of velocity fluctuations. We report herein a strong asymmetry in the probability distribution of bed elevation increments and instantaneous Reynolds stresses, the latter being further analyzed and interpreted via a quadrant analysis of velocity fluctuations in the longitudinal and vertical directions. We also report the presence of intermittency (multifractality) in bed elevation increments and interpret it, in view of the asymmetric nature of the pdfs, as the result of scale coupling. In other words, the geometric asymmetry at the bed form scale gets transferred down to a probabilistic asymmetry at all smaller scales indicating a local anisotropy in the energy transfer. Finally, we propose a predictive relationship between bed form averaged sediment transport rates and bed form averaged instantaneous Reynolds stress and validate it using our experimental data.
Common Exposure to STL Polyomavirus During Childhood

STL polyomavirus (STLPyV) was recently identified in human specimens. To determine seropositivity for STLPyV, we developed an ELISA and screened patient samples from 2 US cities (Denver, Colorado [500]; St. Louis, Missouri [419]). Overall seropositivity was 68%–70%. The age-stratified data suggest that STLPyV infection is widespread and commonly acquired during childhood.
Fragmentation and complexity: Analyzing structural change in the Chicago regional economy

In this paper, two dimensions are differentiated within the fragmentation process: a spatial and a functional one. On the one hand, due to fragmentation and industrial relocation, regional and national economies might be losing some internal linkages. This spatial fragmentation determines a decrease in the complexity of the production systems. On the other hand, outsourcing, as a form of functional fragmentation, increases the density of transactions and linkages within an economy. The overall impact of fragmentation on the complexity of the regional and national economic systems depends on the net effect of these two fragmentation forces. In this paper, the effects of fragmentation on the complexity of the economy of the Chicago region are studied from a set of input-output tables estimated for the period 1978-2014 using Average Propagation Lengths (APLs).
Partially Reflected Brownian Motion: A Stochastic Approach to Transport Phenomena

Transport phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and known to be important for various scientific domains. Examples can be found in physics, electrochemistry, heterogeneous catalysis, physiology, etc. To obtain new information about diffusive or Laplacian transport towards a semi-permeable or resistive interface, one can study the random trajectories of diffusing particles modeled, in a first approximation, by the partially refle cted Brownian motion. This stochastic process turns out to be a convenient mathematical foundation for discrete, semi-continuous and continuous theoretical descriptions of diffusive transport. This paper presents an overview of these topics with a special emphasis on the close relation between stochastic processes with partial reflections and Laplacian transport phenomena. We give selected examples of these phenomena followed by a brief introduction to the partially reflected Brownian motion and related probabilistic topics (e.g., local t ime process and spread harmonic measure). A particular attention is paid to the use of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator. Some practical consequences and further perspectives are discussed.