Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East

Nijf, Onno M. van The Civic World of Profesional Associations in the Roman East 1997 This study examines the mentalite of craftsmen and traders in the Greek cities of the Roman empire through the epigraphic evidence for their membership of private associations based on shared profession. It places these associations firmly in the context of the civic world of the cities in which they were active. The author argues that such inscriptions are not straightforward and unproblematic records of reality, but rather were important elements in the strategies of self-definition practised by these associations. Epigraphic commemoration was used to transform private activities into public events; epitaphs and honorific inscriptions spoke a public language which aimed to present the associations of craftsmen and traders as status groups alongside other, well-established groups. The author investigates how successful the members of professional associations were in this form of epigraphic self-fashioning, through a discussion of their role in public ceremonial. The associations were present in public banquets and distributions, they took part in public processions, and they had reserved seats in theatres and stadia of the cities. Professional associations can thus be seen as taking their place in the hierarchy of status groups which made up the Greek city under Roman rule. This book makes an important contribution to the study of private sociability in the ancient world; it sheds new light on the nature of civic life in the Greek cities of the Roman empire; and it proposes a new approach to reading epigraphy.
Efficient Inverse Reinforcement Learning using Adaptive State-Graphs

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides a powerful mechanism for learning complex behaviors from demonstration by rationalizing such demonstrations. Unfortunately its applicability has been largely hindered by lack of powerful representations that can take advantage of various task affordances while still admitting scalability. Inspired by the success of sampling based approaches in classical motion planning, we use adaptive state graphs to model the underlying Markov decision process (MDP) allowing us to further incorporate task specific constraints efficiently. We then develop a new Bayesian IRL (BIRL) algorithm to learn behaviors using sampled trajectories over the adaptive state graph. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in the task of learning socially compliant robot navigation policies.
The Impact of Broadband Infrastructure on Economic Growth in Egypt and Some Arab and Emerging Countries

Infrastructure investments expansion typically adds to the productive capacity in an economy, and thus to its economic growth. Network industries account for between one–tenth and one-quarter of economy wide investments (OECD 2009 B). Telecom industry is one of the network industries, and broadband is a new technology that is widely used all over the world. It is the popular mode of access to the internet, as it refers to high speed internet access. This study aims at examining the impact of broadband infrastructure on economic growth in emerging countries and Arab countries. In addition, the impact of competition in telecom sector has been included in the growth equation estimated to control for the effect of competition in telecom sector, and thus broadband, on the economic growth in these countries. The empirical study reaches a conclusion in line with previous studies that there is a positive impact of broadband uptake on economic growth. In addition, the contribution of this paper is also in the construction of the competition index which was statistically insignificant, but became significant once we controlled for FDI as a percent of GDP. Thus, governments should create an enabling environment and open their markets for more competition in order to induce the establishments of more broadband and telecom networks in their respective countries.
Delude Remote Operating System (OS) Scan by Honeyd

Remote Operating System (OS) detection is an important technique in the network system security and becomes more and more popular these days, because it has close connection with the vulnerability just for an open port. This paper detailedly introduces the techniques of active TCP/IP stack fingerprinting in the remote OS scanning, presents how to simulate the fingerprints of OS which will react to OS detection, uses Honeyd(a software of honeypot) to run some virtual OS to delude remote OS scan.
Robust two-step image restoration with adaptive regularization parameter

Restoration of noisy blurred images is a typical ill-posed inverse problem, which requires suitable regularization techniques to guarantee high-quality solutions. Total variation (TV), among the most popular regularizers, has attracted considerable attention during the past two decades. In particular, TV regularizer is known for its capacity of reducing undesirable noise while preserving image edges. Due to the non-smooth and non-differentiable natures of TV regularizer, TV-regularized variational image restoration models are inherently difficult to solve directly through commonly-used numerical methods. Motivated by the success of proximal forward-backward splitting algorithm, we tend to decompose the original image restoration problem into two steps, i.e., direct deconvolution and TV-regularized image denoising. The simple image denoising problem could be easily dealt with using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). To further improve the image quality, an automatic method was introduced to adaptively calculate the spatially invariant regularization parameters during image denoising (not the whole process of restoring noisy blurred images). Comprehensive experiments have been conduced on different imaging degradation conditions to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Both quantitative results and extensive qualitative comparisons illustrate that the proposed method outperforms several widely-used image restoration methods.
Building 3D anatomical scenes on the Web

We propose a new service for building user-defined 3D anatomical structures on the Web. The Web server is connected to a database storing more than 1000 3D anatomical models reconstructed from the Visible Human. Users may combine existing models as well as planar oblique slices in order to create their own structured anatomical scenes. Furthermore, they may record sequences of scene construction and visualization actions. These actions enable the server to construct high-quality video animations, downloadable by the user. Professionals and students in anatomy, medicine and related disciplines are invited to use the server and create their own anatomical scenes
AWRT: A Recommender System for Improving Revisiting Web Pages

Web revisit has become one of the dominant phenomena in the web. Nevertheless, standard revisit features in typical web browsers currently do not significantly support this phenomenon. Various efforts, therefore, have been carried out to provide web users with approaches for facilitating web revisit. However, these approaches burden users with management tasks such as flagging and marking. This paper presents a novel approach, called the Adaptive Web Revisit Tool (AWRT), which helps facilitate revisiting web pages without involving users with any actions. In a similar way to the recommendation systems of well-known e-commerce websites, pages that are most likely to be revisited are adaptively recommended to users based on three attributes: frequency of visits, relation to current web page, and time per visit. AWRT consists of three main features: most visited pages (MVP), related pages (RP) and browsing behavior pages (BBP). AWRT was evaluated in terms of efficiency and usability using logging files and a satisfaction questionnaire. The results demonstrated an overall high rate of revisiting using AWRT when compared to a typical web browser i.e. Internet Explorer (IE) and a high users' satisfaction was demonstrated as well. Therefore, incorporating recommendation systems and adaptive techniques such AWRT can significantly improve web revisit.
Detecting Compromised VM via Application-Aware Anomaly Detection

Nowadays, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud has become the new target of attackers and the security of virtual machine (VM) in cloud is attracting more and more attention. In this paper, we propose to use virtualization to combine information of system level with that of network level and monitor the behavior of VM at the granularity of process. Based on Xen hypervisor, we implement this approach and develop APPLICATION-AWARE ANOMALY DETECTION SYSTEM (AADS) to detect anomalous behavior in VM. Experimental results show that our correlated approach performs better than that use features from only system level or network level.
Increasing Returns and New Developments in the Theory of Growth

From the beginning, growth theory has been faced with technically challenging questions about increasing returns and the way to capture ideas in a model of market exchange. Initially, reliance on perfect competition forced growth theory to narrow its scope. Recently, new tools for studying dynamic equilibria with nonconvexities, externalities, and imperfect competition have allowed growth theory to address broader questions like: Why have growth rates tended to increase over time? Why is it that flows of capital are not sufficient to equalize wages in different countries? How is it that trade policy, or aggregate research and development expenditure, or the extent of patent protection influences the rate of growth?
An Attractor Partition Described as Joined Manifolds for a Chaotic Beam System

Motivated by considering the application of a ship carrying either a crane(s), or perhaps fluids in internal tanks, here we model an elastic beam stressed under two separate loads, which we will see brings important dimensionality differences to the single load scenario we studied in [37], and modeled spatiotemporal evolution by principle curves methods. These beam models generally yields a Partial Differential Equation, (PDE), but under the complex load dynamics the beam yields chaotic solutions. Despite the temporal complexity of the solutions of the beam dynamics at any given site on the beam, when considering solutions of the PDE, the solutions show regularity in space, where the solution at one spatial site is compared to solutions at other spatial sites. Specifically, we find that in this spatially displaced coordinate representation, that there is an attractor like structure that displays a strong degree of simplicity in the form of an apparent two-dimensional structure which well describes the data. Interestingly this two dimensional structure appears as a union of two-dimensional manifolds, which we call a “joined” manifold, and we exploit this structure to partition the set into manifold segments, and a locus of joins. This partitioning allows us to uniquely identify states of the system as coordinates on an approximating manifold, for prediction of states at other sites in terms of observations on this unusual but useful low-dimensional representation.
Remote Core Locking: Migrating Critical-Section Execution to Improve the Performance of Multithreaded Applications

The scalability of multithreaded applications on current multicore systems is hampered by the performance of lock algorithms, due to the costs of access contention and cache misses. In this paper, we propose a new lock algorithm, Remote Core Locking (RCL), that aims to improve the performance of critical sections in legacy applications on multicore architectures. The idea of RCL is to replace lock acquisitions by optimized remote procedure calls to a dedicated server core. RCL limits the performance collapse observed with other lock algorithms when many threads try to acquire a lock concurrently and removes the need to transfer lock-protected shared data to the core acquiring the lock because such data can typically remain in the server core's cache. We have developed a profiler that identifies the locks that are the bottlenecks in multithreaded applications and that can thus benefit from RCL, and a reengineering tool that transforms POSIX locks into RCL locks. We have evaluated our approach on 18 applications: Memcached, Berkeley DB, the 9 applications of the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite and the 7 applications of the Phoenix2 benchmark suite. 10 of these applications, including Memcached and Berkeley DB, are unable to scale because of locks, and benefit from RCL. Using RCL locks, we get performance improvements of up to 2.6 times with respect to POSIX locks on Memcached, and up to 14 times with respect to Berkeley DB.
Synthesis of Distributed Control of Coordinated Path Following Based on Hybrid Approach

The coordinated path following problem, steering a fleet of unicycles along a path while achieving a desired inter-vehicle formation, is investigated. The path is a paved road in the world or a marked curve on the floor of work area, for which each vehicle can measure the distance to the path and the heading error as well as the curvature of the path segment in its sensing range. Moreover, the vehicles can measure the arc distances of their neighbors that lie in their sensing range. A hybrid control approach is proposed to solve the problem. Depending on the posture with respect to the partly observed path, each vehicle either interacts with one of the others or works at the single-agent level. It is shown that the path following error of each vehicle is eventually reduced to zero and vehicles of every weakly connected component asymptotically converge to formations with equal arc distances.
Leslie Lamport: The Specification Language TLA+

+ This is an addendum to a chapter by Stephan Merz in the book Logics of Specification Languages by Dines Bjørner and Martin C. Henson (Springer, 2008). It appeared in that book as part of a " reviews " chapter. Stephan Merz describes the TLA logic in great detail and provides about as good a description of TLA + and how it can be used as is possible in a single chapter. Here, I give a historical account of how I developed TLA and TLA + that explains some of the design choices, and I briefly discuss how TLA + is used in practice. The logic TLA adds three things to the very simple temporal logic introduced into computer science by Pnueli [4]: • Invariance under stuttering. • Temporal existential quantification. • Taking as atomic formulas not just state predicates but also action formulas. Here is what prompted these additions. When Pnueli first introduced temporal logic to computer science in the 1970s, it was clear to me that it provided the right logic for expressing the simple liveness properties of concurrent algorithms that were being considered at the time and for formalizing their proofs. In the early 1980s, interest turned from ad hoc properties of systems to complete specifications. The idea of specifying a system as a conjunction of the temporal logic properties it should satisfy seemed quite attractive [5]. However, it soon became obvious that this approach does not work in practice. It is impossible to understand what a conjunction of individual properties actually specifies. The only practical way to specify non-trivial systems is to describe them as abstract state machines. So, I started writing specifications as state machines, where the meaning of a state machine was a temporal logic formula that described the set of all its possible executions. There is a basic problem with using a state machine as a specification. Consider an hour clock—a clock that displays only the hour. Ignoring the actual time that elapses between ticks, an hour clock is trivially specified by a state machine that increments the hour with each step. This specification, or any similar one, does not forbid the clock from showing minutes (or temperature or the phase of the moon). The specification should therefore be satisfied by a 1
HIV-1 Transmission Patterns in Antiretroviral Therapy-Naïve, HIV-Infected North Americans Based on Phylogenetic Analysis by Population Level and Ultra-Deep DNA Sequencing

Factors that contribute to the transmission of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), especially drug-resistant HIV-1 variants remain a significant public health concern. In-depth phylogenetic analyses of viral sequences obtained in the screening phase from antiretroviral-naïve HIV-infected patients seeking enrollment in EPZ108859, a large open-label study in the USA, Canada and Puerto Rico (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00440947) were examined for insights into the roles of drug resistance and epidemiological factors that could impact disease dissemination. Viral transmission clusters (VTCs) were initially predicted from a phylogenetic analysis of population level HIV-1 pol sequences obtained from 690 antiretroviral-naïve subjects in 2007. Subsequently, the predicted VTCs were tested for robustness by ultra deep sequencing (UDS) using pyrosequencing technology and further phylogenetic analyses. The demographic characteristics of clustered and non-clustered subjects were then compared. From 690 subjects, 69 were assigned to 1 of 30 VTCs, each containing 2 to 5 subjects. Race composition of VTCs were significantly more likely to be white (72% vs. 60%; p = 0.04). VTCs had fewer reverse transcriptase and major PI resistance mutations (9% vs. 24%; p = 0.002) than non-clustered sequences. Both men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) (68% vs. 48%; p = 0.001) and Canadians (29% vs. 14%; p = 0.03) were significantly more frequent in VTCs than non-clustered sequences. Of the 515 subjects who initiated antiretroviral therapy, 33 experienced confirmed virologic failure through 144 weeks while only 3/33 were from VTCs. Fewer VTCs subjects (as compared to those with non-clustering virus) had HIV-1 with resistance-associated mutations or experienced virologic failure during the course of the study. Our analysis shows specific geographical and drug resistance trends that correlate well with transmission clusters defined by HIV sequences of similarity. Furthermore, our study demonstrates the utility of molecular and epidemiological analysis of VTCs for identifying population-specific risks associated with HIV-1 transmission and developing effective local healthcare strategies.
EFFECTS OF INCOME AND CAR OWNERSHIP ON TRIP GENERATION: A STRUCTURAL EQUATIONS MODEL AND ITS TEMPORAL STABILITY

A simultaneous equations model is developed to explain car ownership and trip generation by mode at the household level. The data are from three years of a panel survey conducted in the Netherlands. The variables are household income, treated in three dummy variables to represent four income classes; number of cars; and trips per person by three modes: car, public transport, and bicycle. Each equation in the simultaneous system represents the direct effect of one variable upon another, and all variables with the exception of the income variables are endogenous. The application of the model to a panel data set allows testing of the temporal stabilty pf the structure of cause and effect. It was found that the structure can be considered stable, but its details change over the years 1984, 1985, and 1986. The principal results are that income effects on car demand are channeled exclusively through car ownership, and that car ownership and car travel explain a significant portion of public transport and bicycle demand. However, there are also direct links from income to public transport and bicycle demand. In particular, public transport trip making is shown to be an increasing function of income, controlling for differences in car ownership.
How Does the System Know It ’ s Right ? Automated Confidence Assessment for Compliant Coding

Because there are numerous gray areas in code assignment, it can be difficult to define a single notion of correctness in medical coding. Beyond coding guidelines that may not be fully determinate, the desired outputs for a computer-assisted coding (CAC) system can vary depending on the consumer of the technology, the payer, the date of service, and other factors. Nonetheless, CAC systems need a welldefined basis for evaluating their own correctness in order to avoid presenting subpar coding results as trustworthy. In this paper, we present a solution to that problem.
Preliminary Study of Quercetin Affecting the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Gonadal Axis on Rat Endometriosis Model

In this study, the endometriosis rats model was randomly divided into 6 groups: model control group, ovariectomized group, Gestrinone group, and quercetin high/medium/low dose group. Rats were killed after 3 weeks of administration. The expression levels of serum FSH and LH were detected by ELISA. The localizations and quantities of ERα, ERβ, and PR were detected by immunohistochemistry and western blot. The results showed that the mechanism of quercetin inhibiting the growth of ectopic endometrium on rat endometriosis model may be through the decreasing of serum FSH and LH levels and then reducing local estrogen content to make the ectopic endometrium atrophy. Quercetin can decrease the expression of ERα, ERβ, and PR in hypothalamus, pituitary, and endometrium, thereby inhibiting estrogen and progesterone binding to their receptors to play the role of antiestrogen and progesterone.
The Chinese Consumer Shopping Behavior on Taobao

Based on the rapid increase of China’s economy, Chinese online retail market contains the huge potential business opportunities to the companies who attempt to expand into Chinese market. Internet-based Taobao is the biggest network for the consumers’ online shopping in China. Taobao is borderless, which means it is more accessible to the world, because electronic commerce have few constraints from the political, social and economical rules in China. For the Chinese consumers, online shopping has become a common phenomenon in the current society. The thesis aims to deeply understand the online shopping behavior of Chinese consumers by investigating the specific consumer online traits, consumer online usage and three main factors: price, truest and convenience. The thesis provides the current online shopping behavior pattern of Chinese consumers, which describes the Chinese consumer behavior in the process of making purchasing decisions. Although the certain amounts of Chinese consumers believe to gain advantages of online shopping, but they still prefer to shop in the physical stores. The reason is the shopping of consumers is not only for purchasing the products, but also can be treated as the social activities. People create and maintain the relationships with the families, friends or communities through shopping together in the physical stores. Therefore shopping for Chinese consumers have two meanings: purchasing behavior and social activities.
Gamma-ray bursts as dark energy-matter probes in the context of the generalized Chaplygin gas model

In this paper we consider the use of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) as distance markers to study the unification of dark energy and dark matter in the context of the so-called generalized Chaplygin gas (GCG) model. We consider that the GRB luminosity may be estimated from its variability and time-lag, and we also use the so-called Ghirlanda relation. We evaluate the improvements expected once more GRBs and their redshift become available. We show that although GRBs allow for extending the Hubble diagram to higher redshifts, its use as a dark energy probe is limited when compared to Type Ia supernovae. We find that the information from GRBs can provide some bounds on the amount of dark matter and dark energy independently of the equation of state. This is particularly evident for XCDM-type models, which are, for low redshifts (z < 2), degenerate with the GCG.