Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PBS: A Unified Priority-Based CPU Scheduler

A novel CPU scheduling policy is designed and implemented. It is a configurable policy in the sense that a tunable parameter is provided to change its behavior. With different settings of the parameter, this policy can emulate the first-come first-serve, the processing sharing, or the feedback policies, as well as different levels of their mixtures. This policy is implemented in the Linux kernel as a replacement of the default scheduler. The drastic changes of behaviors as the parameter changes are analyzed and simulated. Its performance is measured with the real systems by the workload generators and benchmarks.
Negotiating the Tension Between the Discourses of Christianity and Spiritual Pluralism in Alcoholics Anonymous

This study employs dialogism theory and relational dialectics theory as sensitizing concepts to understand how meaning emerges as members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) negotiate the tension between two religious discourses: Christianity and spiritual pluralism. Focus groups consisting of 32 AA members revealed instances of emergent meaning as the participants negotiated the dialectical tension between these discourses by employing four strategies: (a) centering and muting; (b) eliding tension through ambiguity; (c) inverting discourses; and (d) hybridity. Close analysis of the enactment of these strategies reveals how participants construct meaning while engaging the interplay of these discourses. The usefulness of this study for alcoholism treatment, public-health agencies, and individuals seeking treatment for alcohol abuse is discussed.
From Program to Network

Today’s public policy discussions increasingly focus on how networks of public and private actors collaborate across organizational, sectoral, and geographical boundaries to solve increasingly complex problems. Yet, many of evaluation’s key concepts, including the evaluator’s role, assume an evaluand that is programmatically or organizationally defined and bounded. This article explores the implications of this changing public policy environment for the evaluator’s role by examining one case: an evaluand that was a loose collaboration of four individuals in dispersed organizations working to reframe public policy and to change professional practice in early care and education. We describe this evaluand and the dimensions of it that challenged our evaluative role. We conclude by suggesting an alternative conception of the evaluator’s role that can serve evaluators in this changing policy environment.
Images of an organisation: the use of metaphor in a multinational company

This article presents the results of a metaphor‐based investigation of managers, supervisors and team leaders drawn from the UK subsidiaries of a large US multinational. Participants were asked two main questions, namely: if you were asked to compare your organisation to an animal – what animal would it be? and If the organisation was part of a car – what part of a car would it be? The selection of animals equates to aspects of organisational change. Images of heavy and slow moving animals exemplified low levels of change activity while lean, fast moving, and often predatory animals portray an adaptive organisation responding to a turbulent environment. The car part descriptions were largely concerned with aspects of corporate strategy and primarily conveyed the characteristics “movement” and “direction”. The article discusses these insights in relation to the case study organisation. It also considers the role, status and utility of metaphor in the study of organisations.
FusionDB: a database for in-depth analysis of prokaryotic gene fusion events

FusionDB (http://igs-server.cnrs-mrs.fr/FusionDB/) constitutes a resource dedicated to in-depth analysis of bacterial and archaeal gene fusion events. Such events can provide the 'Rosetta stone' in the search for potential protein-protein interactions, as well as metabolic and regulatory networks. However, the false positive rate of this approach may be quite high, prompting a detailed scrutiny of putative gene fusion events. FusionDB readily provides much of the information required for that task. Moreover, FusionDB extends the notion of gene fusion from that of a single gene to that of a family of genes by assembling pairs of genes from different genomes that belong to the same Cluster of Orthogonal Groups (COG). Multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic tree reconstruction for the N- and C-terminal parts of these 'COG fusion' events are provided to distinguish single and multiple fusion events from cases of gene fission, pseudogenes and other false positives. Finally, gene fusion events with matches to known structures of heterodimers in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) are identified and may be visualized. FusionDB is fully searchable with access to sequence and alignment data at all levels. A number of different scores are provided to easily differentiate 'real' from 'questionable' cases, especially when larger database searches are performed. FusionDB is cross-linked with the 'Phylogenomic Display of Bacterial Genes' (PhydBac) online web server. Together, these servers provide the complete set of information required for in-depth analysis of non-homology-based gene function attribution.
Catechol-O-Methyltransferase Gene and Executive Function in Children With ADHD

Objective: To examine the association between functional haplotypes in the catechol-o-methyltransferase (COMT) gene and ADHD diagnosis, and executive function (EF) in children with ADHD. Method: COMT single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs; rs6269, rs4633, rs4818, and rs4680) were genotyped in 445 ADHD children. EF was assessed using Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Tower of London, and self-ordered pointing task. COMT haplotypes were tested for association using family-based association testing (fBAT) and quantitative trait analyses. Results: fBAT analysis showed no association between COMT alleles/haplotypes and ADHD diagnosis and EF parameters. Using ANCOVA in the Caucasian only sample, significant associations between COMT haplotypes, and WCST indices were observed. However, after correction for multipletesting, the only significant effect observed was between rs6269 and the number of categories completed (a measure of concept formation ability) on the WCST, F(1,285) = 8.92, p = . 003. Conclusion: These results tentatively implicate COMT gene in modulating EF in children with ADHD.
Thickness and Refractive Index Measurements by Full-Field Optical Coherence Microscopy

We present the noble sensing method that can simultaneously measure the physical thickness and the refractive index of a transparent specimen based on full-field optical coherence microscopy. As a sample, a small drop of epoxy was placed on a flat glass plate and high-resolution depth resolved en-face images were taken. With adopting the reference plane from a cross-sectional image, the physical thickness, and the refractive index distribution could be obtained.
Predicting Student Participation in Voluntary Associations From Attitudes and Personality: a preliminary report

One of the major questions in research on voluntary activities concerns the determinants of individual participation in organized voluntary action. The most comprehensive and sophisticated approach currently available is that proposed by Smith (Smith & Reddy, 1972) which he has called the ’sequential specificity model’. This model incorporates a variety-of levels of explanatory variables that range from the very general (contextual factors such as the bio-physical environment, social structure, subculture) through the intermediate (personal factors such as social background, personality, attitudes, capacities) to the very specific (situational stimli and perceptions relevant to individual action). In one application of this model, using the ’personal factors’ category of variables, Smith (1966) was able to account, in
The Politics of Electoral Reform Abolition: The Informed Process of Israel's Return to its Previous Electoral System

This article examines the process that led to the repeal of Israeli electoral reform (1992–2001) and compares it with that of reform adoption (1987–92). The most significant difference between the two processes is in the kinds of information that were available in them. In the politics of reform adoption, information was susceptible to manipulation and its supply was a crucial part of the struggle itself. In the politics of reform abolition, the real consequences of reform were constantly unfolding. This substantial difference resulted in other differences – not in type but in extent. First, while both were ongoing processes in which coalitions of supporters and opponents had to be built and then rebuilt several times, the cohesion of the camps throughout the struggle for reform abolition was higher than in the struggle for reform adoption. Second, while office-seeking successfully served as a basis for understanding the behavior of most parliamentary actors, the actual perceptions of its exact contextual meaning was dependent upon different available information. The two processes also had two common characteristics: power was diffused in both arenas of the politics of reform and in both instances the selection of the right timing proved to be necessary for successfully promoting the initiatives against veto players who were interested in preserving the status quo.
Capturing knowledge of user preferences with recommender systems

Capturing user preferences is a problematic task. Simply asking the users what they want is too intrusive and prone to error, yet monitoring behaviour unobtrusively and finding meaningful patterns is both difficult and computationally time consuming. Capturing accurate user preferences is, however, an essential task if the information systems of tomorrow are to respond dynamically to the changing needs of their users. This thesis tests the hypothesis that using an ontology to represent user profiles offers advantages over traditional profile representations in the context of recommender systems. A novel ontology-based approach to recommendation is applied to a real world problem and empirically evaluated. Synergy between recommender systems and ontologies is then explored to help overcome both the recommender system cold-start problem and the ontology interest-acquisition problem. Finally, the visualization of profiles in ontological terms is examined in a real world situation and empirically evaluated.
Vegetally localized Xenopus trim36 regulates cortical rotation and dorsal axis formation

Specification of the dorsoventral axis in Xenopus depends on rearrangements of the egg vegetal cortex following fertilization, concomitant with activation of Wnt/β-catenin signaling. How these processes are tied together is not clear, but RNAs localized to the vegetal cortex during oogenesis are known to be essential. Despite their importance, few vegetally localized RNAs have been examined in detail. In this study, we describe the identification of a novel localized mRNA, trim36, and characterize its function through maternal loss-of-function experiments. We find that trim36 is expressed in the germ plasm and encodes a ubiquitin ligase of the Tripartite motif-containing (Trim) family. Depletion of maternal trim36 using antisense oligonucleotides results in ventralized embryos and reduced organizer gene expression. We show that injection of wnt11 mRNA rescues this effect, suggesting that Trim36 functions upstream of Wnt/β-catenin activation. We further find that vegetal microtubule polymerization and cortical rotation are disrupted in trim36-depleted embryos, in a manner dependent on Trim36 ubiquitin ligase activity. Additionally, these embryos can be rescued by tipping the eggs 90° relative to the animal-vegetal axis. Taken together, our results suggest a role for Trim36 in controlling the stability of proteins regulating microtubule polymerization during cortical rotation, and subsequently axis formation.
On combining visual SLAM and visual odometry

Sequential monocular SLAM systems perform drift free tracking of the pose of a camera relative to a jointly estimated map of landmarks. To allow real-time operation in moderately sized environments, the map is kept quite spare with usually only tens of landmarks visible in each frame. In contrast, visual odometry techniques track hundreds of visual features per frame. This leads to a very accurate estimate of the relative camera motion, but without a persistent map, the estimate tends to drift over time. We demonstrate a new monocular SLAM system which combines the benefits of these two techniques. In addition to maintaining a sparse map of landmarks in the world, our system finds as many inter-frame point matches as possible. These point matches provide additional constraints on the inter-frame motion of the camera leading to a more accurate pose estimate, and, since they are not maintained as full map landmarks, they do not cause a large increase in the computational cost. Our results in both a simulated environment and in real video demonstrate the improvement in estimation accuracy gained by the inclusion of visual odometry style observations. The constraints available from pairwise point matches are most naturally cast in the context of a camera-centric rather than world-centric frame. To that end we recast the usual world-centric EKF implementation of visual SLAM in a robo-centric frame. We show that this robo-centric visual SLAM, as expected, leads to the estimated uncertainty more closely matching the ideal uncertainty; i.e., that robo-centric visual SLAM yields a more consistent estimate than the traditional world-centric EKF algorithm.
The Effect of Simultaneous Grip on Wrist Flexion/Extension Strength

This study quantifies the effect of a simultaneous grip on wrist strength. It was hypothesized that wrist flexion strength increases with an increasing grip and wrist extension strength decreases with an increasing grip. Twelve subjects performed maximum wrist flexion and extension exertions with a different level of simultaneous grip – minimum, preferred, and maximum. Wrist flexion strength increased 34% and wrist extension strength decreased 10% from minimum to maximum grip. This shows that measure of wrist strength for assessing strength capabilities or the efficacy of hand surgeries or rehabilitation programs requires control of finger flexor activities to ensure consistent and relevant results. When opening a bottle in an outward direction (right hand thread), wrist extension strength may be significantly limited by a simultaneous grip due to muscle antagonism. When twisting a fragile or uncomfortable object, reduced finger flexor activities can limit wrist flexion strength.
Using decision trees within the tilt intonation model to predict F0 contours

This paper presents an intonation generation system for use in a text-to-speech synthesis system. The intonation generation system uses classification trees to predict intonation event location and regression trees to predict parameters relating to the F0 shape for the predicted events. The decision trees model intonation within the Tilt intonation model, which provides a parameterized description of fundmaental frequency and an intuitive labelling scheme. The event location trees predict an event class (e.g. accent, boundary, none) for each syllable in an utterance based on local and global context (e.g. stress, phrasing, part of speech). The parameter prediction trees then provide the parameterized description of each intonation event based on similar context features. Informal results of the full system are presented together with results for the individual components.
Why Have Tobacco Control Policies Stalled? Using Genetic Moderation to Examine Policy Impacts

Background Research has shown that tobacco control policies have helped produce the dramatic decline in use over the decades following the 1964 surgeon general’s report. However, prevalence rates have stagnated during the past two decades in the US, even with large tobacco taxes and expansions of clean air laws. The observed differences in tobacco control policy effectiveness and why policies do not help all smokers are largely unexplained. Objective The aim of this study was to determine the importance of genetics in explaining response to tobacco taxation policy by testing the potential of gene-policy interaction in determining adult tobacco use. Methods A moderated regression analysis framework was used to test interactive effects between genotype and tobacco policy in predicting tobacco use. Cross sectional data of US adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) linked with genotype and geocodes were used to identify tobacco use phenotypes, state-level taxation rates, and variation in the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (CHRNA6) genotype. Tobacco use phenotypes included current use, number of cigarettes smoked per day, and blood serum cotinine measurements. Results Variation in the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor was found to moderate the influence of tobacco taxation on multiple measures of tobacco use. Individuals with the protective G/G polymorphism (51% of the sample) responded to taxation while others had no response. The estimated differences in response by genotype were C/C genotype: b = −0.016 se = 0.018; G/C genotype: b = 0.014 se = 0.017; G/G genotype: b = −0.071 se 0.029. Conclusions This study provides novel evidence of “gene-policy” interaction and suggests a genetic mechanism for the large differences in response to tobacco policies. The inability for these policies to reduce use for individuals with specific genotypes suggests alternative methods may be needed to further reduce use.
Neuroanatomy of the spleen: Mapping the relationship between sympathetic neurons and lymphocytes

The nervous system plays a profound regulatory role in maintaining appropriate immune responses by signaling to immune cells. These immune cells, including B- and T-cells, can further act as intermediary messengers, with subsets of B- and T-cells expressing choline acetyltransferase (ChAT), the enzyme required for acetylcholine (ACh) synthesis. Neural control of ACh release from ChAT+ T-cells can have powerful immune implications, regulating lymphocyte trafficking, inflammation, and prevent death due to experimental septic shock. Although ACh release from T-cells has been proposed to occur following norepinephrine (NE) released from sympathetic nerve terminals in the spleen, it is unknown how this communication occurs. While it was proposed that tyrosine hydroxylase (TH+) axons form synapse-like structures with ChAT+ T-cells, there is scant evidence to support or refute this phenomenon. With this in mind, we sought to determine the relative abundance of ChAT+ B- and T-cells in close proximity to TH+ axons, and determine what factors contribute to their localization in the spleen. Using confocal microscopy of tissue sections and three-dimensional imaging of intact spleen, we confirmed that ChAT+ B-cells exceed the number of ChAT+ T-cells, and overall few ChAT+ B- or T-cells are located close to TH+ fibers compared to total numbers. The organized location of ChAT+ lymphocytes within the spleen suggested that these cells were recruited by chemokine gradients. We identified ChAT+ B- and T-cells express the chemokine receptor CXCR5; indicating that these cells can respond to CXCL13 produced by stromal cells expressing the β2 adrenergic receptor in the spleen. Our findings suggest that sympathetic innervation contributes to organization of ChAT+ immune cells in the white pulp of the spleen by regulating CXCL13. Supporting this contention, chemical sympathectomy significantly reduced expression of this chemokine. Together, we demonstrated that there does not appear to be a basis for synaptic neuro-immune communication, and that sympathetic innervation can modulate immune function through altering stromal cell chemokine production.
SYSTOLES AND INTERSYSTOLIC INEQUALITIES

This articles surveys inequalities involving systoles in Riemannian geometry. Resume. Cet article presente l’ensemble des inegalites connues sur les systoles en geometrie riemannienne. M.S.C. Subject Classification Index (1991) : 53C22. c © Seminaires & Congres 1, SMF 1996
Lack of efficacy of bevacizumab plus irinotecan in children with recurrent malignant glioma and diffuse brainstem glioma: a Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium study.

PURPOSE A phase II study of bevacizumab (BVZ) plus irinotecan (CPT-11) was conducted in children with recurrent malignant glioma (MG) and intrinsic brainstem glioma (BSG). PATIENTS AND METHODS Eligible patients received two doses of BVZ intravenously (10 mg/kg) 2 weeks apart and then BVZ plus CPT-11 every 2 weeks until progressive disease, unacceptable toxicity, or a maximum of 2 years of therapy. Correlative studies included diffusion weighted and T1 dynamic contrast-enhanced permeability imaging, BVZ pharmacokinetics, and estimation of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR-2) phosphorylation in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) after single-agent BVZ. RESULTS Thirty-one evaluable patients received a median of two courses of BVZ plus CPT-11 (range, 1 to 19). No sustained responses were observed in either stratum. Median time to progression for all 34 eligible patients enrolled was 127 days for MG and 71 days for BSG. Progression-free survival rates at 6 months were 41.8% and 9.7% for MG and BSG, respectively. Toxicities related to BVZ included grade 1 to 3 fatigue in seven patients, grade 1 to 2 hypertension in seven patients, grade 1 CNS hemorrhage in four patients, and grade 4 CNS ischemia in two patients. The mean diffusion ratio decreased after two doses of BVZ in patients with MG only. Vascular permeability parameters did not change significantly after therapy in either stratum. Inhibition of VEGFR-2 phosphorylation in PBMC was detected in eight of 11 patients after BVZ exposure. CONCLUSION BVZ plus CPT-11 was well-tolerated but had minimal efficacy in children with recurrent malignant glioma and brainstem glioma.
Localization of neurons projecting into the extrinsic penile smooth musculature of the pig: an experimental study on the retractor penis muscle.

The aim of this study was to locate in male pigs the sensory and autonomic ganglia innervating the retractor penis muscle (RPM), which was taken as an experimental model of the genital smooth musculature. The retrograde neuronal tracers horseradish peroxidase (HRP), Fast Blue (FB), and diamidino yellow (DY) were injected into the bulbopenile portion of the left RPM. The tracers highlighted a different affinity for the neuronal structures, although labelled cells supplying the RPM were generally found in bilateral dorsal root ganglia (DRGs, S1-S3), in bilateral paravertebral ganglia (PaGs, L2-S3), and in the left and right caudal mesenteric ganglia (CMGs). The mean number of labelled FB cells was 795 (range, 645-952) in DRGs, 16046.25 (range, 10226-18742) in PaGs, and 635.25 (range, 333-786) in CMGs. The mean diameter of pseudounipolar DRG cells was 60-75 microm, while the multipolar neurons of PaGs and CMGs had dimensions varying between 20-50 microm and 20-30 microm, respectively.
Oscillating system design applying universal formula for control

The problem of oscillating system design applying the homogeneity approach is studied. The Anti-control Lyapunov Function (ALF) is introduced as a counterpart of Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) for the control design that destabilizes a nonlinear system. A universal anti-control formula is proposed. Next, the universal control formulas based on ALF and CLF are used to design an oscillating system. Efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated on example.