Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cost of Controlling Modern Healthcare With Information Systems

The notion of controlling performance in modern healthcare constitutes a key justification for implementing large IT systems. By examining the relationship between healthcare performance and IS cost we significantly improve our understanding of healthcare delivery profile. In the absence of an appropriate fit between the goals of IS projects and smooth healthcare delivery, this research satisfies information needs for healthcare decision-makers. Drawing upon contingency research the authors develop a framework to analyze fit between healthcare delivery strategies and IS focus. They review empirical evidence from the English National Health Service implementation of a nationwide healthcare system with functional and interpretive paradigms. The results not only suggest a monumental gap between the two and but also explains how attempts to control healthcare performance can easily lead to even higher costs. It also elaborates on current pragmatic thoughts about costing IS projects before outlining the research approach.
WAVELET USE FOR IMAGE RESTORATION

The interdisciplinary area of digital signal and image processing forms a basis for de-noising, enhancement, recovery and classification of biomedical images. The paper is devoted to the wavelet transform as a general mathematical tool and its use for image decomposition and reconstruction to recover its corrupted regions. The main part of the paper is devoted to image decomposition, thresholding and reconstruction to reject specific image components. A special attention is paid to recovery of image regions using iterated wavelet decomposition and reconstruction. All algorithms are verified for simulated images and then applied to biomedical images obtained by magnetic resonance. The Matlab programming environment has been used to realize the algorithms and to obtain the presented results.
Numerical Comparison of SVD and Propagator/Reflectivity Decomposition for the Acoustic Wave Equation: Rapport de recherche

In acoustic seismic-reflection experiments, because of the lack of low frequencies in the usual seismic sources, the reflection of the energy back to the surface is associated to the short wavelengths of the slowness (the «reflectivity» parameters), while the long wavelengths of the slowness (the «propagator» parameters) are associated to the kinematics of the arrival times of this energy. Such a decomposition between the propagator and reflectivity parameters is automatic when a linearized model is used, but can only approximately be satisfied in the case of the full (non linearized) acoustic model. In the 2D case, the embedded sequence of subspaces built by bilinear interpolation at the nodes of subgrids provides the slowness space with a hierarchical basis which allows a simple multiscale analysis and leads to the choice of two orthogonal subspaces for the propagator and reflectivity unknowns. This paper is devoted to the mathematical justification of the previous propagator/reflectivity decomposition by means of singular value decomposition (SVD) analysis of the Frechet derivative of the modeling operator mapping the slowness to the surface data in the case of the 2D acoustic wave equation. It is shown numerically that the propagator/reflectivity decomposition is associated to a truncated SVD.
Monosodium Glutamate Dietary Consumption Decreases Pancreatic β-Cell Mass in Adult Wistar Rats

Background The amount of dietary monosodium glutamate (MSG) is increasing worldwide, in parallel with the epidemics of metabolic syndrome. Parenteral administration of MSG to rodents induces obesity, hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes. However, the impact of dietary MSG is still being debated. We investigated the morphological and functional effects of prolonged MSG consumption on rat glucose metabolism and on pancreatic islet histology. Methods Eighty adult male Wistar rats were randomly subdivided into 4 groups, and test rats in each group were supplemented with MSG for a different duration (1, 3, 6, or 9 months, n=20 for each group). All rats were fed ad libitum with a standard rat chow and water. Ten test rats in each group were provided MSG 2 mg/g body weight/day in drinking water and the 10 remaining rats in each group served as non-MSG treated controls. Oral glucose tolerance tests (OGTT) were performed and serum insulin measured at 9 months. Animals were sacrificed at 1, 3, 6, or 9 months to examine the histopathology of pancreatic islets. Results MSG-treated rats had significantly lower pancreatic β-cell mass at 1, 6 and 9 months of study. Islet hemorrhages increased with age in all groups and fibrosis was significantly more frequent in MSG-treated rats at 1 and 3 months. Serum insulin levels and glucose tolerance in MSG-treated and untreated rats were similar at all time points we investigated. Conclusion Daily MSG dietary consumption was associated with reduced pancreatic β-cell mass and enhanced hemorrhages and fibrosis, but did not affect glucose homeostasis. We speculate that high dietary MSG intake may exert a negative effect on the pancreas and such effect might become functionally significant in the presence or susceptibility to diabetes or NaCl; future experiments will take these crucial cofactors into account.
Generalized and Resource-Efficient VNet Embeddings with Migrations

This paper attends to the problem of embedding flexibly specified CloudNets, virtual networks connecting cloud resources (such as storage or computation). We attend to a scenario where customers can request CloudNets at short notice, and an infrastructure provider (or a potential itermediate broker or reseller) first embeds the CloudNet fast (e.g., using a simple heuristic). Later, however, long-lived CloudNets embeddings are optimized by migrating them to more suitable locations, whose precise definition depends on a given objective function. For instance, such migrations can be useful to reduce the peak resource loads in the network by spreading CloudNets across the infrastructure, to save energy by moving CloudNets together and switching off unused components, or for maintenance purposes. We present a very generic algorithm to compute optimal embeddings of CloudNets: It allows for different objective functions (such as load minimization or energy conservation), supports cost-aware migration, and can deal with all link types that arise in practice (e.g., full-duplex or even wireless or wired broadcast links with multiple endpoints). Our evaluation shows that such a rigorous optimization is even feasible in order to optimize a moderate-size CloudNet of full flexibility (e.g., a router site, a small physical infrastructure or virtual provider network).
Liveability of high-rise housing estates: a resident-centered high-rise residential environment evaluation in Tianjin, China

Global climate change, energy crisis and deterioration of ecological environment are some of the most significant challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. In this context, more and more people accept the concept of sustainable development, ever since this definition, “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, was presented in the Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987). City, as the main platform of human activities where almost half the energy is consumed, its sustainable development has been one of the research focuses. Various sustainable urban theories, such as Smart Growth, Compact City, New Urbanism, and Infill Development, have been advocated, and one of the common strategies adopted by these theories is to increase intensity and density of urban development. High-rise housing, as the most compact housing form, has been re-accepted as a sustainable housing solution by many policy-makers, developers, planners, and designers worldwide, after the rejection in mid-1970s (Yeh and Yuen, 2011, Turkington et al., 2004). Many stakeholders of housing system believe that high-rise housing, compared to other residential types, is a more sustainable housing form and has some advantages of sustainability, such as less land consumption (Rudlin and Falk, 1999, Jenkins et al., 2007), higher energy efficiency (Travers, 2001, Lau et al., 2005), lower resource consumption (Barter, 2000, KAJI, 2001), better accessibility to services and facilities (Jenks et al., 1996, Kaido, 2005), and can bring some positive benefits such as spectacular view, privacy and quietness (Conway and Adams, 1977, Yuen et al., 2006). In this context, mass high-rise housing developments have been or are being constructed in many cities both in developed countries and developing countries, and high-rise housing is now recognised as a global phenomenon (Yeh and Yuen, 2011).
Wavelet Demodulation Codes, Statistical Independence, and Pattern Recognition

Samples from stochastic signals with suucient complexity need reveal only a little unexpected agreement, in order to reject the hypothesis that they are independent. The mere failure of a test of statistical independence can thereby serve as a basis for recognizing patterns conndently, provided they possess enough degrees-of-freedom. This paper discusses exploitation of this statistical principle in combination with wavelet image coding to extract phase descriptions of patterns. Demodulation and coarse quantization of the phase information creates decision environments characterized by well separated binomial-class distributions , and this lends itself to rapid and reliable pattern recognition.
The Resurgence of the Latin American Left

Latin America experienced an unprecedented wave of left-leaning governments between 1998 and 2010. This volume examines the causes of this leftward turn and the consequences it carries for the region in the twenty-first century. The Resurgence of the Latin American Left asks three central questions: Why have left-wing parties and candidates flourished in Latin America? How have these leftist parties governed, particularly in terms of social and economic policy? What effects has the rise of the Left had on democracy and development in the region? The book addresses these questions through two sections. The first looks at several major themes regarding the contemporary Latin American Left, including whether Latin American public opinion actually shifted leftward in the 2000s, why the Left won in some countries but not in others, and how the left turn has affected market economies, social welfare, popular participation in politics, and citizenship rights. The second section examines social and economic policy and regime trajectories in eight cases: those of leftist governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela, as well as that of a historically populist party that governed on the right in Peru. Featuring a new typology of Left parties in Latin America, an original framework for identifying and categorizing variation among these governments, and contributions from prominent and influential scholars of Latin American politics, this historical-institutional approach to understanding the region's left turn-and variation within it-is the most comprehensive explanation to date on the topic.
Control technique for the compensation of current harmonics with tolerance to line voltage dips

Nonlinear loads generate harmonic currents in power systems deteriorating the efficiency of the involved industrial processes. The use of shunt active power filters (APFs) reduces the line current harmonic distortion improving the power quality level. Usually, APF control strategies are tested under sinusoidal main voltage waveforms. However, in practice the main voltage might he affected by sudden changes in their magnitude and phase. This paper presents a new control technique for shunt APFs with tolerance to voltage dips. Simulation and experimental results validating the proposed technique are shown.
Hierarchical Text Classification for Supporting Educational Programs

More than two decades have passed since the first design of the CONSTRUE system [2], a powerful rule-based model for the categorization of Reuters news. Nowadays, statistical approaches are well assessed and they allow for an easy design of text classification (TC) systems. Additionally, the Web has emphasized the need of approaches for digesting large amount of textual information and making it more easily accessible, e.g., thorough hierarchical taxonomies like Dmoz or Yahoo! categories. Surprisingly, automated approaches have not proved yet to be indispensable for such categorization processes. This suggests that the role of TC might be different from simply routing documents to different topical categories. In this paper, we provide evidence of the promising use of TC as a support for an interesting and high level human activity in the educational context. The latter refers to the selection and definition of educational programs tailored on specific needs of pupils, who sometime require particular attention and actions to solve their learning problems. TC in this context is exploited to automatically extract several aspects and properties from learning objects, i.e., didactic material, in terms of semantic labels. These can be used to organized the different pieces of material in specific didactic program, which can address specific deficiencies of pupils. The TC experiments, carried out with state-of-the-art algorithms and a small set of training data, show that automatic classifiers can easily derive labels like, didactic context, school matter, pupil difficulties and educative solution type.
Quantifying Near-Threshold CMOS Circuit Robustness

In order to build energy efficient digital CMOS circuits, the supply voltage must be reduced to near-threshold. Problematically, due to random parameter variation, supply scaling reduces circuit robustness to noise. Moreover, the effects of parameter variation worsen as device dimensions diminish, further reducing robustness, and making parameter variation one of the most significant hurdles to continued CMOS scaling. This paper presents a new metric to quantify circuit robustness with respect to variation and noise along with an efficient method of calculation. The method relies on the statistical analysis of standard cells and memories resulting an an extremely compact representation of robustness data. With this metric and method of calculation, circuit robustness can be included alongside energy, delay, and area during circuit design and optimization.
AMPK-HDAC5 pathway facilitates nuclear accumulation of HIF-1α and functional activation of HIF-1 by deacetylating Hsp70 in the cytosol

Hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) transcriptionally promotes production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) whereas AMPK senses and regulates cellular energy homeostasis. A histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity has been proven to be critical for HIF-1 activation but the underlying mechanism and its role in energy homesostasis remain unclear. Here, we demonstrate that HIF-1 activation depends on a cytosolic, enzymatically active HDAC5. HDAC5 knockdown impairs hypoxia-induced HIF-1α accumulation and HIF-1 transactivation, whereas HDAC5 overexpression enhances HIF-1α stabilization and nuclear translocation. Mechanistically, we show that Hsp70 is a cytosolic substrate of HDAC5; and hyperacetylation renders Hsp70 higher affinity for HIF-1α binding, which correlates with accelerated degradation and attenuated nuclear accumulation of HIF-1α. Physiologically, AMPK-triggered cytosolic shuttling of HDAC5 is critical; inhibition of either AMPK or HDAC5 impairs HIF-1α nuclear accumulation under hypoxia or low glucose conditions. Finally, we show specifically suppressing HDAC5 is sufficient to inhibit tumor cell proliferation under hypoxic conditions. Our data delineate a novel link between AMPK, the energy sensor, and HIF-1, the major driver of ATP production, indicating that specifically inhibiting HDAC5 may selectively suppress the survival and proliferation of hypoxic tumor cells.
Altered gene expression of angiogenic factors induced by calcium-mediated dissociation of retinal pigment epithelial cells.

PURPOSE To examine the effect of loss of cell-cell contacts on the gene expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and other factors in primary culture of human retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells with real-time reverse transcription-PCR. METHODS The dissociation of postconfluent RPE cells was induced by calcium chelation, low-calcium medium, anti-E-cadherin, and anti-N-cadherin antibodies. Total RNA was isolated from the cultured RPE cells and reverse transcribed to cDNA. VEGF was quantified by real-time PCR with a fluorescence detector. VEGF isoforms were differentially measured by specific exon-spanning primers. Besides VEGF, the gene expression levels of some other growth factors were also examined in calcium-mediated dissociation. RESULTS Disruption of cell-cell contacts of RPE cells was induced by calcium chelation and low-calcium medium, but not by anti-E-cadherin and anti-N-cadherin antibodies. Calcium-mediated dissociation of RPE cells significantly increased the gene expression levels of VEGF. The mRNA levels of VEGF increased by 6.3-fold on treatment with EGTA and by 4.7-fold in the low-calcium medium at 6 hours. Splice variants of VEGF showed the differential pattern of gene expression. Whereas the expression of VEGF(121) and VEGF(165) was upregulated on calcium-induced dissociation of RPE cells, that of VEGF(145) and VEGF(189) was unchanged. VEGF(206) was not detected. On calcium-induced dissociation, bFGF, IL-6, matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-1, and placental growth factor (PlGF) were upregulated, whereas acidic (a)FGF and pigment epithelium-derived factor (PEDF) were both downregulated. CONCLUSIONS The results show that loss of intercellular contacts promotes increased gene expression of VEGF and other angiogenic factors in human RPE cells.
Environmental Information Disclosure: Three Cases of Policy and Politics

One of the most notable innovations in environmental management in the past 15 years has been the use of environmental information disclosure as a strategy for improving firms’ environmental performance. Following the Environmental Protection Agency’s success with the Toxics Release Inventory, the agency and Congress initiated a number of other disclosure initiatives. This discussion paper documents the experience of three of these: risk management planning, materials accounting, and the Sector Facility Indexing Project. The paper examines the benefits and costs of these programs, their effectiveness, and the dynamics by which disclosure works.
Acclimation of E miliania huxleyi (1516) to nutrient limitation involves precise modification of the proteome to scavenge alternative sources of N and P

Summary Limitation of marine primary production by the availability of nitrogen or phosphorus is common. E miliania huxleyi, a ubiquitous phytoplankter that plays key roles in primary production, calcium carbonate precipitation and production of dimethyl sulfide, often blooms in mid‐latitude at the beginning of summer when inorganic nutrient concentrations are low. To understand physiological mechanisms that allow such blooms, we examined how the proteome of E . huxleyi (strain 1516) responds to N and P limitation. We observed modest changes in much of the proteome despite large physiological changes (e.g. cellular biomass, C, N and P) associated with nutrient limitation of growth rate. Acclimation to nutrient limitation did however involve significant increases in the abundance of transporters for ammonium and nitrate under N limitation and for phosphate under P limitation. More notable were large increases in proteins involved in the acquisition of organic forms of N and P, including urea and amino acid/polyamine transporters and numerous C‐N hydrolases under N limitation and a large upregulation of alkaline phosphatase under P limitation. This highly targeted reorganization of the proteome towards scavenging organic forms of macronutrients gives unique insight into the molecular mechanisms that underpin how E . huxleyi has found its niche to bloom in surface waters depleted of inorganic nutrients.
A Signaling Protocol for Service Function Localization

Current proposals for chaining service functions (SFs) do not address some critical management issues, such as the discovery of SF instances close to IP data paths. This information is crucial for deploying complex services both in large cloud networks, where SFs may be moved or replicated, and in the emerging fog/mobile edge computing systems. For this purpose, in this letter, we propose the distributed off-path signaling protocol. We show the protocol functions and demonstrate its scalability and effectiveness by experimental results.
MemProf: A Memory Profiler for NUMA Multicore Systems

Modern multicore systems are based on a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) design. Efficiently exploiting such architectures is notoriously complex for programmers. One of the key concerns is to limit as much as possible the number of remote memory accesses (i.e., main memory accesses performed from a core to a memory bank that is not directly attached to it). However, in many cases, existing profilers do not provide enough information to help programmers achieve this goal. This paper presents MemProf, a profiler that allows programmers to choose and implement efficient application-level optimizations for NUMA systems. MemProf builds temporal flows of interactions between threads and objects, which help programmers understand why and which memory objects are accessed remotely. We evaluate MemProf on Linux using four applications (FaceRec, Streamcluster, Psearchy, and Apache) on three differentmachines. In each case, we show howMemProf helps us choose and implement efficient optimizations, unlike existing profilers. These optimizations provide significant performance gains (up to 161%), while requiring very lightweight modifications (10 lines of code or less).
An integrated commit protocol for mobile network databases

While traditional fixed-wired network protocols like 2-phase-commit guarantee atomicity, we cannot use them in mobile low bandwidth networks where network partitioning, node failure, and message loss may result in blocking. To deploy traditional database applications easily into a mobile environment, there is a demand for a protocol which guarantees an atomic commit of transactions. This paper introduces a protocol which can guarantee such atomic commitment in mobile environments using a combination of commit and consensus protocols. In addition, it takes advantage of mobile network sub-structures like single-hop environments to reduce message transfer costs.
New forms of democracy

New Forms of Democracy explores the idea of extending democracy to new domains, a question which no single text addresses broadly. It therefore contributes to the continuing debate about this central concept of political and social theory. At a time when some vitality appears to be going out of the traditional Western liberal democracies (with fewer people joining parties and voting at elections) new growth points for political activity are simultaneously appearing. The book considers increasing the scope of democracy and applying it to the private sphere, the workplace, bureaucracies, and to military and foreign policy. It investigates new methods by which the democratic process could be conducted. This includes a discussion of electoral systems and an assessment of the possibilities of discovering popular preferences using new technological developments - such as direct democracy through mass electronic communications networks. The extent to which these ideas and proposals can be practically applied is also discussed. New Forms of Democracy draws on examples from many countries. It is critically concerned with examining new initiatives from below as well as new developments in formal political and policy agendas. In short, in spanning both theoretical and empirical questions, this book offers a unique account of the possibilities for democracy in the twentieth century.