Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Complete Models with Stochastic

The paper proposes an original class of models for the continuous time price process of a nancial security with non-constant volatility. The idea is to deene instantaneous volatility in terms of exponentially-weighted moments of historic log-price. The instantaneous volatility is therefore driven by the same stochastic factors as the price process, so that unlike many other models of non-constant volatility, it is not necessary to introduce additional sources of randomness. Thus the market is complete and there are unique, preference-independent options prices. We nd a partial diierential equation for the price of a European Call Option. Smiles and skews are found in the resulting plots of implied volatility. Acknowledgement. It is a pleasure to thank the referees of an earlier draft of this paper whose perceptive comments have resulted in many improvements.
A circumscribed projection from the nucleus of the solitary tract to the nucleus ambiguus in the rat: anatomical evidence for somatostatin- 28-immunoreactive interneurons subserving reflex control of esophageal motility

Axonal transport and immunohistochemical methods were used to investigate the anatomical and biochemical organization of projections from the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS) to the rostral, esophageal, part of the nucleus ambiguus (NA) in the rat. Discrete iontophoretic deposits of a retrogradely transported tracer, fluorogold, placed in the rostral NA labeled a column of cells within the NTS, termed the central part of the NTS (after Ross et al., 1985), situated just medial to the solitary tract and extending from about 300 to 1000 microns rostral to the obex. Iontophoretic deposits of the anterogradely transported tracer, Phaseolus vulgaris-leucoagglutinin (PHA-L), placed in the central part of the NTS gave rise to dense and topographically restricted projections to the rostral NA. More caudal and ventral aspects of the NA did not receive prominent inputs from the central part of the NTS, and deposits that spared the central part of the NTS gave rise to only sparse projections to the rostral NA. Antisera against somatostatin-28 (SS-28) stained cell bodies within the central part of the NTS. In addition, a double-labeling procedure, capable of colocalizing anterogradely transported PHA-L and endogenous peptides to individual fibers and/or terminals, demonstrated an appreciable number of SS-28-immunoreactive terminals within the rostral NA that arose from the NTS. Correspondingly, unilateral lesions that involved the central part of the NTS resulted in a marked depletion of SS-28 immunoreactivity in the ipsilateral rostral NA. These data provide evidence for a discrete, partly somatostatinergic, projection from the central part of the NTS to the rostral NA. Anatomical and physiological studies implicating the central part of the NTS and the rostral NA in esophageal function suggest this pathway to be involved in the reflex control of esophageal motility.
QUANTITATIVE GENETICS OF GEOMETRIC SHAPE IN THE MOUSE MANDIBLE

Abstract We combine the methods of geometric morphometrics and multivariate quantitative genetics to study the patterns of phenotypic and genetic variation of mandible shape in random-bred mice. The data are the positions of 11 landmarks on the mandibles of 1241 mice from a parent-offspring breeding design. We use Procrustes superimposition to extract shape variation and restricted maximum likelihood to estimate the additive genetic and environmental components of variance and covariance. Matrix permutation tests showed that the genetic and phenotypic as well as the genetic and environmental covariance matrices were similar, but not identical. Likewise, principal component analyses revealed correspondence in the patterns of phenotypic and genetic variation. Patterns revealed in these analyses also showed similarities to features previously found in the effects of quantitative trait loci and in the phenotypes generated in gene knockout experiments. We used the multivariate version of the breeders' equation to explore the potential for short-term response to selection on shape. In general, the correlated response is substantial and regularly exceeds the direct response: Selection applied locally to one landmark usually produces a response in other parts of the mandible as well. Moreover, even selection for shifts of the same landmark in different directions can yield dramatically different responses. These results demonstrate the role of the geometry and anatomical structure of the mandible, which are key determinants of the patterns of the genetic and phenotypic covariance matrices, in molding the potential for adaptive evolution. Corresponding Editor: J. Merilä
Barriers to sexual reproductive health services and rights among young people in Mtwara district, Tanzania: a qualitative study

Background In Tanzania over 1/3 of the population is under 24 years. Nationwide 23% of teenagers have started childbearing. However, Mtwara Region has the highest percentage (25.5%) of teenagers who begin childbearing early. Mtwara District has a teenage pregnancy rate of 11% with young people utilizing sexual reproductive health services (SRHS) less frequently than adults.This study aimed at gaining insights on barriers to the utilization of SRHS in Mtwara district. Methods A qualitative study was carried out using focus group discussions, facility assessment interviews and case studies. A total of nine focus group discussions (comprising 8 to10 persons per group) were conducted among girls (10-18 years), community leaders and adults. Data was transcribed using pattern matching methods then merged into relevant themes for analysis and interpretation. Results The study revealed that a good number of health facilities do not have skilled service providers (SPs) on sexual reproductive health rights. Girls start sexual intercourse between 9 and12 years. Services sought included; education, family planning and voluntary counseling and testing. However, the services were inaccessible due to lack of privacy, confidentiality, equipments and negative attitudes from SPs. Initiation ceremonies, early marriages and gender disparities were mentioned as social-cultural barriers to SRH rights. Conclusion This study has demonstrated that factors such as lack of youth friendly services, gender disparity and unfavorable socio-cultural practices may create barriers to accessing adolescent SRHS and rights. Therefore, there is a need to integrate youth friendly services in health facilities and advocate for behavior change.
Analysis and Design of Phase Desynchronization in Pulse-coupled Oscillators

By spreading phases on the unit circle, desynchronization algorithm is a powerful tool to achieve round-robin scheduling, which is crucial in applications as diverse as media access control of communication networks, realization of analog-to-digital converters, and scheduling of traffic flows in intersections. Driven by the increased application of pulse-coupled oscillators in achieving synchronization, desynchronization of pulse-coupled oscillators is also receiving more attention. In this paper, we propose a phase desynchronization algorithm by rigorously analyzing the dynamics of pulse-coupled oscillators and carefully designing the pulse based interaction function. A systematic proof for convergence to phase desynchronization is also given. Different from many existing results which can only achieve equal separation of firing time instants, the proposed approach can achieve equal separation of phases, which is more difficult to achieve due to phase jumps in pulse-coupled oscillators. Furthermore, the new strategy can guarantee achievement of desynchronization even when some nodes have identical initial phases, a situation which fails most existing desynchronization approaches. Numerical simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.
Active networks for efficient distributed network management

The emerging next generation of routers exhibit both high performance and rich functionality, such as support for virtual private networks and QoS. To achieve this, per-flow queuing and fast IP filtering are incorporated into the router hardware. The management of a network comprising such devices and efficient use of the new functionality introduce new challenges. A truly distributed network management system is an attractive candidate to address these challenges. We describe how active network techniques can be used to allow fast and easy deployment of distributed network management applications in IP networks. We describe a prototype system where legacy routers are enhanced with an adjunct active engine, which enables the safe execution and rapid deployment of new distributed management applications in the network layer. This system can gradually be integrated in today's IP network, and allows smooth migration from IP to programmable networks. This is done with an emphasis on efficient use of network resources, which is somewhat obscure by many of today's high-level solutions.
A Consolidated Process for Software Process Simulation: State of the Art and Industry Experience

Software process simulation is a complex task and in order to conduct a simulation project practitioners require support through a process for software process simulation modelling (SPSM), including what steps to take and what guidelines to follow in each step. This paper provides a literature based consolidated process for SPSM where the steps and guidelines for each step are identified through a review of literature and are complemented by experience from using these recommendations in an action research at a large Telecommunication vendor. We found five simulation processes in SPSM literature, resulting in a seven-step process. The consolidated process was successfully applied at the studied company, with the experiences of doing so being reported.
Review of source-code plagiarism detection in academia

Plagiarism is a big concern in academia and it can be a problem in every course. Plagiarism occurs when someone present others work as their own. Students plagiarize in different areas: homework assignments, essays, projects, etc. In this work focus is on programming courses and plagiarism in programming assignments. While source-code plagiarism detection, is in some way very similar to text plagiarism detection, it is very different in other ways. So, a lot of research is done focusing on source-code plagiarism. Some questions that are researched in this field are: what is considered plagiarism in programming assignments, how to perform plagiarism detection in programming assignments, how to do it automatically, what tool(s) to use, how students cheat in programming courses, how they try to obfuscate cheating, and many other questions. This work is a review of important research papers in the field of source-code plagiarism detection in academia. This paper tries to answer some of the mentioned research questions and give indication to future work.
Towards Web Application Mobilization via Efficient Web Control Extraction

Traditional web applications are not suitable for mobile devices, because mobile devices are usually equipped with small screens and use slow and expensive mobile network. In order to adapt web applications to mobile devices, existing approaches reconstruct particular web applications, or adapt only partial views of web pages. They require a lot of additional reconstructing work or network bandwidth. In this paper we propose an approach that can extract a part of a web page as an executable web control efficiently. Our approach monitors the execution of user code, builds a dependency graph of executed user code, and performs slicing based on the dependency graph. The evaluation on two real-world web applications shows that our approach is able to extract executable web controls efficiently, and for the two web applications, visiting extracted web controls instead of the original web pages can save 98% and 23% of bandwidth respectively.
Political Dependence, Social Scrutiny, and Corporate Philanthropy: Evidence from Disaster Relief

This study explores why and how firms respond to social demands through philanthropic giving in the context of a severe natural disaster. Drawing on Marquis and Qian's organizational response model to government signals, we integrate resource dependence theory and institutional theory to build a two-step model of organizational response to social needs, in situations of disaster relief. We argue that firms depending more on the government for support are more likely to donate in disaster relief, while firms who receive more scrutiny from the government and the general public and firms having more slack resources are likely to donate more. Evidence from Chinese listed companies' donations to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake largely supports our predictions. This study provides a more precise understanding of the corporate philanthropic decision process, decoupling the drivers of philanthropic giving, and those determining the amount given. Theoretical and practical implications are suggested.
Verification of Conjunctive Artifact-Centric Services

An artifact-centric service is a stateful service that holistically represents both the data and the process in terms of a (dynamic) artifact. An artifact is constituted by a data component, holding all the data of interest for the service, and a lifecycle, which specifies the process that the service enacts. In this paper, we study artifact-centric services whose data component is a full-fledged relational database, queried through (first-order) conjunctive queries, and the lifecycle component is specified as sets of condition-action rules, where actions are tasks invocations, again based on conjunctive queries. Notably, the database can evolve in an unbounded way due to new values (unknown at verification time) inserted by tasks. The main result of the paper is that verification in this setting is decidable under a reasonable restriction on the form of tasks, called weak acyclicity, which we borrow from the recent literature on data exchange. In particular, we develop a sound, complete and terminating verification procedure for sophisticated temporal properties expressed in a first-order variant of μ-calculus.
The Missing Link

Several government initiatives aim to increase the availability of home and community-based services. These efforts have helped facilitate the transition of individuals with disabilities living in institutions such as nursing facilities to community living, resulting in improved quality of life and potential health care savings. However, evidence suggests that a lack of affordable housing remains a key barrier that keeps some individuals living in institutions from transitioning to community living. This study evaluated the effect on transition rates among nursing home residents eligible for the Non-Elderly Disabled Housing Choice Voucher Program. The program provided housing vouchers that subsidized rental costs along with access to home and community-based services to nonelderly institutionalized residents with a disability. We assessed this program’s impact on the likelihood of community transitions among the target population in five areas for which these vouchers were made available. In a pooled sample of three of the five areas, the program increased community transition rates by 8.7 percentage points. This finding suggests that targeting housing vouchers to people with disabilities living in institutions could help facilitate or expedite transitions to community living.
Recognition of Human Motions for Imitation and Control of a Humanoid Robot

Most of the works in the field of teleoperation of humanoid robots do not use the whole-body of the robot to perform some task. This work treats the teleoperation of a humanoid robot through the recognition of human motions by using a natural interface mechanism. We propose the use of simple mathematical techniques to allow, in a satisfactory level, the user order in real-time a robot to mimic a person, to walk, to manipulate the environment with its hands and to perform some predetermined behaviors. Also, we provide an appropriate discussion around the findings of this research. The results of the experiments show a satisfactory performance for the system developed.
An Orthologous Epigenetic Gene Expression Signature Derived from Differentiating Embryonic Stem Cells Identifies Regulators of Cardiogenesis

Here we used predictive gene expression signatures within a multi-species framework to identify the genes that underlie cardiac cell fate decisions in differentiating embryonic stem cells. We show that the overlapping orthologous mouse and human genes are the most accurate candidate cardiogenic genes as these genes identified the most conserved developmental pathways that characterize the cardiac lineage. An RNAi-based screen of the candidate genes in Drosophila uncovered numerous novel cardiogenic genes. shRNA knockdown combined with transcriptome profiling of the newly-identified transcription factors zinc finger protein 503 and zinc finger E-box binding homeobox 2 and the well-known cardiac regulatory factor NK2 homeobox 5 revealed that zinc finger E-box binding homeobox 2 activates terminal differentiation genes required for cardiomyocyte structure and function whereas zinc finger protein 503 and NK2 homeobox 5 are required for specification of the cardiac lineage. We further demonstrated that an essential role of NK2 homeobox 5 and zinc finger protein 503 in specification of the cardiac lineage is the repression of gene expression programs characteristic of alternative cell fates. Collectively, these results show that orthologous gene expression signatures can be used to identify conserved cardiogenic pathways.
Wandering as a design strategy for infrastructuring

The notion of design gradually diverges from its conceptualization as framed design projects that focus on the production of objects. It shifts to open-ended processes that are oriented toward the creation of services and the congregation of organizations. In the participatory design (PD) scene the emerging future-oriented design-after-design approach is understood as a process of ‘infrastructuring’. The co-design process of Recup’Kitchen is described as an example of an infrastructuring design practice within the Brussels urban living lab of the Incubators of Public Spaces research. The empirical findings of the related action-research bring up the importance of ‘wandering’ in the design process. The design journey unfolds as an explorative endeavor without a clearly outlined direction. The paper argues that this wandering contributed to a process of infrastructuring. Three factors of the wandering in the Recup’Kitchen design are discussed: multi-layered openness, future-oriented incompleteness and strategic dialogue. This framework is based on a combination of a theoretical framework and the empirical findings within the Recup’Kitchen case. Together these factors of wandering illustrate how such a design approach can benefit infrastructuring activities. Recognizing the benefits of a loss of control and an entanglement in the messiness, the article suggests implementing this spontaneous wandering practice as a design strategy. Keywords: participatory design, infrastructuring, wandering design process, urban living lab, multi-layered openness, future-oriented incompleteness, strategic dialogue.
Unifying Geographical Influence in Recommender Systems via Matrix Factorization

In recent years, we have witnessed the development of location-based services where geographical information plays an important role in reflecting user preferences. This paper aims to provide a unified framework for location-aware recommender systems with the consideration of geographical influence using the matrix factorization method. In the framework, we propose three models corresponding to three kinds of ratings, namely, ILARS-MF to non-spatial ratings for spatial items, ULARS-MF to spatial ratings for non-spatial items and UILARS-MF to spatial ratings for spatial items. The experimental results on real data sets show that our recommendations are more effective than baseline methods.
A micro-bacterial foraging algorithm for high-dimensional optimization

Very recently bacterial foraging has emerged as a powerful technique for solving optimization problems. In this paper, we introduce a micro-bacterial foraging optimization algorithm, which evolves with a very small population compared to its classical version. In this modified bacterial foraging algorithm, the best bacterium is kept unaltered, whereas the other population members are reinitialized. This new small population μ-BFOA is tested over a number of numerical benchmark problems for high dimensions and we find this to outperform the normal bacterial foraging with a larger population as well as with a smaller population.
A Management Framework for Context-Aware Multimedia Services

This paper presents a framework for building user interfaces for context-aware service management. It enables us to easily deploy context-aware services at computers through user-friendly manipulations to edit documents and monitor changes and services in the real world. It is constructed as a compound document framework whose the structural composition of visual components can be adapted to changes in the real world. Since components in the framework are programmable entities, they can directly monitor and control their target devices. This paper presents the design for the framework and describes its implementation and several practical applications with it in
ULTRA WIDEBAND MONOPOLE ANTENNA EXCITED BY A CAPACITIVE COUPLING FEED WITH DOUBLE BAND NOTCH FUNCTION

Manuscript Received 9-September-2012 and revised 20-November-2012 ISSN: 2322-3936 Accepted on 2December-2012 Abstract— This paper presents the results of a new monopole antenna that exhibits 2.75-10.7 GHz performance. The proposed antenna consists of a radiating patch with notches excited by capacitive coupling feed. Also, the antenna’s truncated ground-plane incorporates a central notch. This modification significantly improves the antenna’s impedance bandwidth by 118% over an ultra-wideband frequency range. These characteristics make the proposed antenna an excellent candidate for numerous UWB applications and next generation communication systems. The key physical parameters affecting the antenna’s frequency characteristics have also been investigated in order to determine optimum antenna performance. The antenna’s simulated return-loss, and E-plane and H-plane radiation patterns show very good correlation with the requirements of UWB applications.