Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intelligent Wrapping of Information Sources: Getting Ready for the Electronic Market

Literature search and delivery in the World Wide Web becomes a rapidly expanding market. Up to now the search is mostly cost-free. But in the future we expect the appearance of more and more providers charging for their services. The main problems are finding the right provider and extracting the information. UniCats is a system for intelligent information search and extraction from multiple providers Web sites. One important part of the system is the so-called wrapper. This paper concentrates on wrappers and their generators. The wrappers' task is the translation of a customer’s query into the source’s syntax and the re-translation of the answer. Applying these wrappers in an electronic commerce environment needs additional functionality, e.g., navigation through a provider's site, collection of the information the customer desires or cost pre-calculation. Because of the variety of the source's functionality, we need a flexible and individually built wrapper. This could be achieved using a modular concept. For a wide acceptance of our system, easy wrapper generation is important. Thus, we develop a wrapper generator which enables laymen with no programming skills to build an individual wrapper for an information provider in an electronic commerce environment.
Household labour supply in Great Britain: can policy-makers rely on neoclassical models?

This thesis empirically examines whether the neoclassical economic model provides an adequate framework to analyse a couple’s labour supply behaviour in Britain using recent data from the British Household Panel Survey. The thesis comprises three empirical chapters. The first chapter uses the instrumental variable (IV) estimation procedure to model the hours of work of married couples. This approach allows us to test whether some of the assumptions of the neoclassical model (e.g., income pooling and Slutsky properties) are satisfied by the data. In addition, further variables that have been identified as distribution factors in the literature are introduced to the empirical model to assess whether they play a role in explaining a couple’s hours of work. The first chapter only considers couples in which both spouses work. In the second chapter, the sample is amended to include all couples (i.e., those that work and those that do not) and the analysis conducted models a couple’s labour market participation decisions rather than their hours of work. After testing for income pooling and the impact of distribution factors, a further variable, the wife’s mother-in-law work status when the male spouse was aged 14, is introduced into the model. This is done to determine the effect of 'cultural' variables on labour market decisions. In the last chapter, this issue is explored further by explicitly modelling attitudes to a woman’s role in the labour market. This approach uses a bivariate ordered probit model given the ordinal nature of responses to the attitudinal questions and again restricts the analysis to couples only. Finally, gender-role attitudes are introduced to the labour supply framework used in the second chapter in order to evaluate whether beliefs regarding women’s role impact on a couple’s labour market decisions.
Moral injury, coherence, and spiritual repair

ABSTRACT In the PTSD literature, moral injury represents dissonance between a person’s beliefs about how they and the world should function, and the trauma event(s) they experienced. Given the association of moral injury with the assumptive world, it is not surprising the concept is closely intertwined with spiritual concerns. This paper reports on a spiritually integrated group intervention designed to help veterans with PTSD in the process of moral and spiritual repair. Qualitative findings are shared from interviews conducted with 18 participants who completed the intervention. Themes are centred around participants’ overall response to their experience in the group; where they are at regarding feelings such as guilt, shame, anger, trust, sense of betrayal, and desire for forgiveness; changes in religious/spiritual beliefs and practices and the experience of moral injury; and if they now find meaning in the trauma. The findings support the need for additional treatment options that address the moral and spiritual aspects of trauma.
Effect of vocoder type to Mandarin speech recognition in cochlear implant simulation

Vocoder simulation is an effective tool in predicting the general pattern of speech recognition performance in cochlear implant users. The present study investigated the effect of vocoder type (i.e., noise-vocoder and tone-vocoder) to Mandarin speech recognition in vocoder simulation. Mandarin speech materials (sentences and single vowels) were processed by tone-vocoder and noise-vocoder, and presented to normal-hearing listeners to recognize. Experimental results showed that Mandarin sentences synthesized with a tone vocoder were more intelligible than those synthesized with a noise vocoder; however, this intelligibility advantage was not found in the lexical tone identification task. Consistent with previous outcomes, the present work showed that tone-vocoder was able to yield a better sentence recognition performance. It is still arguable that this improved recognition performance of tone-vocoded sentences could be attributed to the better lexical tone identification in tone-vocoder based study.
Analysis of the performance improvement of fountain codes over puncturing schemes for OFDM system

The orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become the most popular technique for wireless communication nowadays because of its high spectral efficiency and robustness against frequency selective fading. The rateless codes can provide better performance when the channel characteristics are time varying in nature. Fountain codes are class of rateless codes with forward error correction capability for erasure channels. It is widely used to compensate for high delay of retransmission protocol, high BER and high erasure probability. The channel associated with the space communication and internet produces erasure in addition to noise on the signal. In this paper novel crosscoding scheme of convolutional encoding and fountain coding is proposed for OFDM to improve the performance of fountain coded OFDM system in AWGN channel and to extent the system performance to a channel having both erasure and noise. The performance of the system is compared with punctured OFDM system. The simulation results show that the performance of the proposed system is superior to existing punctured OFDM system.
Proteomic Analysis of Highly Prevalent Amyloid A Amyloidosis Endemic to Endangered Island Foxes

Amyloid A (AA) amyloidosis is a debilitating, often fatal, systemic amyloid disease associated with chronic inflammation and persistently elevated serum amyloid A (SAA). Elevated SAA is necessary but not sufficient to cause disease and the risk factors for AA amyloidosis remain poorly understood. Here we identify an extraordinarily high prevalence of AA amyloidosis (34%) in a genetically isolated population of island foxes (Urocyon littoralis) with concurrent chronic inflammatory diseases. Amyloid deposits were most common in kidney (76%), spleen (58%), oral cavity (45%), and vasculature (44%) and were composed of unbranching, 10 nm in diameter fibrils. Peptide sequencing by mass spectrometry revealed that SAA peptides were dominant in amyloid-laden kidney, together with high levels of apolipoprotein E, apolipoprotein A-IV, fibrinogen-α chain, and complement C3 and C4 (false discovery rate ≤0.05). Reassembled peptide sequences showed island fox SAA as an 111 amino acid protein, most similar to dog and artic fox, with 5 unique amino acid variants among carnivores. SAA peptides extended to the last two C-terminal amino acids in 5 of 9 samples, indicating that near full length SAA was often present in amyloid aggregates. These studies define a remarkably prevalent AA amyloidosis in island foxes with widespread systemic amyloid deposition, a unique SAA sequence, and the co-occurrence of AA with apolipoproteins.
Biomimetic design and development of a hexapedal running robot with automatic gaiting selection based on terrain

Animals inspire our intuition that legs may be necessary for satisfactory exploration of highly broken and unstable landscapes. Gaiting style is the next crucial element in determining mobility of the legged robot as special gaits improve the mobility of the robot drastically and permit the robot to climb over small obstacles or cross broken terrain more efficiently. The aim for this research is to design and develop an automatic gaiting selection system which decides the gaits of the robot according to the environments using embedded vision system. The proposed method has been tested on the Hexapedal Running Robot and result is discussed in this paper.
Identification of MicroRNAs as Potential Biomarker for Gastric Cancer by System Biological Analysis

Gastric cancers (GC) have the high morbidity and mortality rates worldwide and there is a need to identify sufficiently sensitive biomarkers for GC. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) could be promising potential biomarkers for GC diagnosis. We employed a systematic and integrative bioinformatics framework to identify GC-related microRNAs from the public microRNA and mRNA expression dataset generated by RNA-seq technology. The performance of the 17 candidate miRNAs was evaluated by hierarchal clustering, ROC analysis, and literature mining. Fourteen have been found to be associated with GC and three microRNAs (miR-211, let-7b, and miR-708) were for the first time reported to associate with GC and may be used for diagnostic biomarkers for GC.
Doppler images of the RS CVn binary HR 1099 (V711 Tau) from the MUSICOS 1998 campaign

We present Doppler Images of the RS CVn binary system HR 1099 (V711 Tau) from spectra taken in two different sites, KPNO and MSO, during the MUSICOS 1998 campaign. Contemporaneous APT photometry is used to constrain the Doppler Images. The resulting maximum entropy reconstructions based on the least-squares deconvolved profiles, derived from ∼ 2000 photospheric absorption lines, reveal the presence of starspots at medium-high latitudes. We have obtained maps for both components of the binary system for the first time. The predominant structure in the primary component is an off-centered polar spot, confirming previous works on the same target by using independent codes. The result is verified by using both data sets independently. The lower spectral resolution data set gives a less detailed map for the MSO data set. The images obtained for the secondary component show a low latitude spot around orbital phase 0.7. This spot seems to mirror the structure seen on the primary. It might suggest that tidal forces may influence the spot distribution on this binary system.
Real stable polynomials and matroids: optimization and counting

Several fundamental optimization and counting problems arising in computer science, mathematics and physics can be reduced to one of the following computational tasks involving polynomials and set systems: given an oracle access to an m-variate real polynomial g and to a family of (multi-)subsets ℬ of [m], (1) compute the sum of coefficients of monomials in g corresponding to all the sets that appear in B(1), or find S ε ℬ such that the monomial in g corresponding to S has the largest coefficient in g. Special cases of these problems, such as computing permanents and mixed discriminants, sampling from determinantal point processes, and maximizing sub-determinants with combinatorial constraints have been topics of much recent interest in theoretical computer science. In this paper we present a general convex programming framework geared to solve both of these problems. Subsequently, we show that roughly, when g is a real stable polynomial with non-negative coefficients and B is a matroid, the integrality gap of our convex relaxation is finite and depends only on m (and not on the coefficients of g). Prior to this work, such results were known only in important but sporadic cases that relied heavily on the structure of either g or ℬ; it was not even a priori clear if one could formulate a convex relaxation that has a finite integrality gap beyond these special cases. Two notable examples are a result by Gurvits for real stable polynomials g when ℬ contains one element, and a result by Nikolov and Singh for a family of multi-linear real stable polynomials when B is the partition matroid. This work, which encapsulates almost all interesting cases of g and B, benefits from both - it is inspired by the latter in coming up with the right convex programming relaxation and the former in deriving the integrality gap. However, proving our results requires extensions of both; in that process we come up with new notions and connections between real stable polynomials and matroids which might be of independent interest.
MLSA — A Multi-layered Reference Corpus for German Sentiment Analysis

In this paper, we describe MLSA, a publicly available multi-layered reference corpus for German-language sentiment analysis. The construction of the corpus is based on the manual annotation of 270 German-language sentences considering three different layers of granularity. The sentence-layer annotation, as the most coarse-grained annotation, focuses on aspects of objectivity, subjectivity and the overall polarity of the respective sentences. Layer 2 is concerned with polarity on the word- and phrase-level, annotating both subjective and factual language. The annotations on Layer 3 focus on the expression-level, denoting frames of private states such as objective and direct speech events. These three layers and their respective annotations are intended to be fully independent of each other. At the same time, exploring for and discovering interactions that may exist between different layers should also be possible. The reliability of the respective annotations was assessed using the average pairwise agreement and Fleiss' multi-rater measures. We believe that MLSA is a beneficial resource for sentiment analysis research, algorithms and applications that focus on the German language.
Using a RESTful Messaging and Registry System to Support a Range a Distributed Applications

Tycho was conceived in 2003 in response to a need by the GridRM [1] resource-monitoring project for a “light-weight”, scalable and easy to use wide-area distributed registry and messaging system. Since Tycho’s first release in 2006 a number of modifications have been made to the system to make it easier to use and more flexible. Since its inception, Tycho has been utilised across a number of application domains including widearea resource monitoring, distributed queries across archival databases, providing services for the nodes of a Cray supercomputer, and as a system for transferring multi-terabyte scientific datasets across the Internet. This paper provides an overview of the initial Tycho system, describes a number of applications that utilise Tycho, discusses a number of new utilities, and how the Tycho infrastructure has evolved in response to experience of building applications with it.
SybilConf: Computational Puzzles for Confining Sybil Attacks

In decentralized dynamic networks such as peer-to-peer networks, it is difficult to authorize identities without a centralized authority, since a node interacts with nodes previously unknown to itself. To optimize the quality of experience and exclude malicious nodes from such networks, various trust and reputation systems (TRS) have been proposed. However, most of these TRSs rely on properties such as trust attributed to certain persistent identities and the bootstrapping is difficult without a central trusted instance. Hence, TRSs are vulnerable to sybil attacks [1], where a number of artificial identities can be used by some malicious entity to compromise probabilistic protection mechanisms. These mechanisms usually rely on the assumption that most nodes in a network behave well. Unfortunately, this is not the case if an attacker maintains numerous identities. We present SybilConf, a simple scheme to increase costs for maintaining an identity, thus reducing the sybil attack's impact. The basic idea is to combine public/ private keying with a novel puzzle creation algorithm to enable a flexible, strong and identity-bound sybil protection.
FTIR spectral subtraction based on asymmetric least squares

Based on asymmetric least squares, a new method for infrared absorbance spectral subtraction is proposed. In order to reflect the scaling relation between the sample spectrum and scaling spectrum, the proposed method uses scaling vector rather than scaling factor which is usually used in the traditional spectral subtraction model. As independent of reference peak, the method can deal with most of subtraction cases of binary mixtures. For multiple system with unknown scaling spectrum, ei-genspectra method is introduced to calculate the accurate scaling spectra. Experimental results show that difference spectra can match the real spectra well. Besides, in contrast to the results of traditional method, difference spectra obtained by this method is more similar with the real spectra. The prediction results based on partial least squares (PLS) model demonstrate that the performance of difference spectra is better than that of sample spectra in characteristic regions.
Axial Anomaly and Dimensional Regularization -a Review

This is a brief review of some of the theoretical and practical aspects of the technique of the dimensional regularization. A detailed general overview of the 5 problem and its solutions within various schemes of dimensional regularization is given and, as an example of the practical calculation, we explicitly compute the VVA anomaly using diierent 5 prescriptions. Apart from this topic, we present an elementary introduction to the subject of the ultraviolet divergences in perturbative quantum eld theory, regularization procedures, Ward identities and anomalies with special stress on the axial anomaly in order to cover the background necessary for the rest of the review and to make it readable for non-specialists.
Automated summary evaluation with inbuilt rubric method: An alternative to constructed responses and multiple-choice tests assessments

Abstract Automated summary evaluation is proposed as an alternative to rubrics and multiple-choice tests in knowledge assessment. Inbuilt rubric is a recent Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) method that implements rubrics in an artificially-generated semantic space. It was compared with classical LSA’s cosine-based methods assessing knowledge in a within-subjects design regarding two validation sources: a comparison with the results of rubric scores and multiple-choice tests, and the sensitivity of predicting the academic level of the test-taker. Results showed a higher reliability for inbuilt rubric (from Pearson correlation coefficient .81 to .49) over the classical LSA method (from .61 to .34), and a higher sensitivity using binary logistic regressions and effect sizes to predict academic level. It is concluded that inbuilt rubric has a qualitatively higher reliability and validity than classical LSA methods in a way that is complementary to models based on semantic networks. Thus, it is concluded that new automated summary evaluation approaches such as the inbuilt rubric method can be practical in terms of reliability and efficiency, and, thus, they can offer an affordable and valuable form of knowledge assessment in different educational levels.
Proteomic analysis of urine from proteinuric patients shows a proteolitic activity directed against albumin.

BACKGROUND Nephrotic syndrome is a condition that is clinically associated with poor outcome. In this study, we compared different techniques of urine sample preparation in order to develop a robust analytical protocol to define the differential urinary proteome of urinary abnormalities compared to nephrotic proteinuria. METHODS We recruited 5 normal control subjects, 16 patients with urinary abnormalities and 16 patients with nephrotic syndrome. Proteins from normal urine were processed using three different protocols [acetone, ultrafiltration and trichloroacetic acid (TCA) precipitation], depletion of albumin and IgGs and then analysed by two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2D-PAGE) gels and mass spectrometry. RESULTS Comparing the three extraction methods by visual inspection of gels after 2D gel electrophoresis, the acetone precipitation and TCA methods yielded the best quality of protein extraction, while the acetone precipitation method was the most efficient. Furthermore, we tested three commercial kits for albumin and IgG depletion. We applied the optimized acetone extraction protocol to compare urinary samples from nephrotic patients (NP) to urinary samples obtained from patients presenting with urinary abnormalities (UAP). We observed a proteolytic activity directed against albumin. This observation was more prevalent in urinary samples from NP than from UAP. Within both groups, there was some inter-individual variability in the observed proteolytic activity. An increased concentration of alpha1 antitrypsin was also observed in urine of NP. We analysed albumin fragmentation by 1D and 2D western blots in the same samples skipping the albumin and IgG depletion steps to avoid the possible confound of albumin fragment removal. The analysis confirmed a stronger proteolytic activity in the nephrotic group. CONCLUSIONS The proteolytic activity against albumin and the anti-proteolytic activity of alpha1 antitrypsin are likely linked and could play an important role in the nephrotic process. If replicated in larger samples, this methodology may lead to a better understanding of the underlying pathophysiological process of nephrotic syndrome.
SBA-15 Mesoporous Silica Modified with Gallic Acid and Evaluation of Its Cytotoxic Activity

Gallic acid has been covalently conjugated to SBA-15 mesoporous silica surface through different linkers. Cytotoxic activity of the hybrid organic-inorganic systems against HeLa and KB cell lines has been analyzed. Up to 67% of HeLa or KB tumor cells growth inhibition has been achieved at low silica concentration used (10 μg mL-1).
Deadlock free dynamic resource assignment in multi-robot systems with multiple missions: a matrix-based approach

Effective cooperation of robot teams in unstructured environments requires dynamic resource assignment. If the robots are also in charge of executing multiple simultaneous missions, then risks of deadlocks due to the presence of shared resources among different missions have to be tackled. This paper presents a novel approach to combine together a one step-ahead deadlock avoidance policy with a greedy dynamic resource assignment for multi-mission robot teams in the framework of a matrix based discrete event controller. Simulation results in Matlabreg are presented to discuss in detail the proposed control strategy
e-mail authentication system: a spam filtering for smart senders

In the present time, the electronic mail is the most popular communication method of people around the world. However, the increasing of electronic mails is the beginning of a malevolent aftereffect e-mail. The transgressors have developed a set of codes that is the electronic bomb of the electronic mails passing through the communication line. As a result, various protection methods and software have been implemented. However, miscellaneous problems caused by spams still remain. Therefore, this paper proposed a novel method, called EMAS, to certify delivered mails. The benefits obtained from this system do not only solve the spam problem, but also untie the indirect effects from spams that no other methods have been missed.