Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Approach to Implement Software Process Improvement in Small and Mid Sized Organizations

Software Process Improvement is an important mechanism to boost competitiveness and efficiency in software companies. Maturity models such as CMMI and MR MPS can support development organizations and contribute to the attainment of their quality goals when used as guides for software process improvement. However, implementing process improvements based on models implies long-term and large investments projects. This is particularly critical in small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) which usually have the largest financial constraints. To reduce some of these influences the MPS.BR Programme encourages the assembling of company group formation as a facilitating element in the implementing of software process improvements in SMEs. This work aims at discussing an approach for initiatives to implement software process improvement in groups of small and mid sized Brazilian companies and also a formal process set to minimize the influence of elements such as risks and critical factors in their initiatives.
Hiv/Aids and the Accumulation and Utilization of Human Capital in Africa

Education is one of the great challenges of development. This paper outlines the likely effects of the AIDS pandemic in Africa on the continent's ability to produce education and use it effectively for growth and poverty reduction. Four channels are explored. First, a supply effect: the deaths of millions of adults will increase the difficulty of finding and retaining enough teachers. Secondly, a demand effect: the foreshortening of time horizons will reduce lifetime private returns to education, making investments of time and money in schooling appear less attractive. Thirdly, a factor productivity effect: in many countries the loss of a large share of the skilled work force may reduce the social returns to skill among educated people who survive, reducing the contribution of education to overall growth. And finally, a factor complementarity effect: the loss of physical capital assets may reduce the ability of skilled workers to contribute to overall economic production, to the extent that physical and human capital are complementary inputs. The channels described add up to the qualitative conclusion that among the costs of the epidemic is the likelihood that, absent offsetting policies and programmes, Africa's dearth of human capital will get worse. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.
Introducing the Speect speech synthesis platform

We introduce a new open source speech synthesis engine and related set of tools: Speect is designed to be a portable and flexible synthesis engine, equally relevant as a research platform and runtime synthesis system in multilingual environments. In this paper we document our approach to the rapid development of British English voices for the 2010 Blizzard Challenge using this platform and resources.
Sport tourism and theory and other developments: some reflections

Over the past 20 years, we have seen scholarship in sport tourism grow from less than 50 citations to 949 on the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) database. If you look at Google Scholar, a keyword search reveals 331,000 results in 0.06 seconds! I tend to think that the CABI result is more reflective of the scholarly efforts in the area. During this time, we have been through the definitional discussions debating whether sport tourism has two (active and passive) (e.g. Standeven & De Knop, 1999) or three different types (active, event and nostalgia) (e.g. Gibson, 1998); whether it is sport or sports (e.g. Weed & Bull, 2004); debates over whether nostalgia is reflective of remembrance or worship (Pigeassou, 2004) or heritage tourism (Ramshaw & Gammon, 2005). Incidentally, these debates were never resolved, instead we agreed to a coexistence where both sport and sports tourism were, and are used, where nostalgia is still being debated, and more recently the need to further delineate the role of events in definitions of sport tourism as we have witnessed the rise in mass participation sport events (MPSEs) which necessitated a revisit of the active and event sport tourism definition to account for the number of event sport tourists who were actively taking part in running, cycling, triathlons and the like (Kaplanidou & Gibson, 2010). Along our journey, similar to the theme of this special issue, we also called for more theoretical integration into sport tourism scholarship. Much of this was in response to criticism that our work was atheoretical (Slack, 2002), lacked a logical progression in the development of the body of knowledge (Weed, 2006), and was overly descriptive (Gibson, 2004). Several initiatives were launched to try and encourage theoretical approaches to building a coherent body of knowledge in sport tourism including a special issue of the European Sport Management Quarterly (2005) edited by Mike Weed and a project that started as a special issue of Sport and Society (2005) and was developed into the book Sport Tourism: Concepts and Theories (2006) edited by me with contributions from many of the scholars engaged in sport tourism research at the time. I think over the past 10 years we have seen some good examples of scholarship that heeded this call with the integration of concepts from anthropology (e.g. Chalip, 2006), geography (e.g. Higham & Hinch, 2006; Hinch & Higham, 2001), social psychology (e.g. Kaplanidou & Vogt, 2007); marketing (e.g. Chalip, 2004; Ziakas, 2010), feminist theory and sociology (e.g. Mansfield, 2007), and more. Some of these papers have also spurred what Weed (2006) advocated when he invoked Forscher’s (1963) classic treatise on the need to avert ‘Chaos in the
Targeting of NAD Metabolism in Pancreatic Cancer Cells: Potential Novel Therapy for Pancreatic Tumors

Purpose: Here, we describe a novel interplay between NAD synthesis and degradation involved in pancreatic tumor growth. Experimental Design: We used human pancreatic cancer cells, both in vitro (cell culture experiments) and in vivo (xenograft experiments), to demonstrate the role of NAD synthesis and degradation in tumor cell metabolism and growth. Results: We demonstrated that pharmacologic and genetic targeting of Nampt, the key enzyme in the NAD salvage synthesis pathway, inhibits cell growth and survival of pancreatic cancer cells. These changes were accompanied by a reduction of NAD levels, glycolytic flux, lactate production, mitochondrial function, and levels of ATP. The massive reduction in overall metabolic activity induced by Nampt inhibition was accompanied by a dramatic decrease in pancreatic tumor growth. The results of the mechanistic experiments showed that neither the NAD-dependent enzymes PARP-1 nor SIRT1 play a significant role on the effect of Nampt inhibition on pancreatic cancer cells. However, we identified a role for the NAD degradation pathway mediated by the NADase CD38 on the sensitivity to Nampt inhibition. The responsiveness to Nampt inhibition is modulated by the expression of CD38; low levels of this enzyme decrease the sensitivity to Nampt inhibition. In contrast, its overexpression decreased cell growth in vitro and in vivo, and further increased the sensitivity to Nampt inhibition. Conclusions: Our study demonstrates that NAD metabolism is essential for pancreatic cancer cell survival and proliferation and that targeting NAD synthesis via the Nampt pathway could lead to novel therapeutic treatments for pancreatic cancer. Clin Cancer Res; 20(1); 120–30. ©2013 AACR.
A Cooperative Diversity-Based Opportunistic Virtual MISO (OVM) Protocol for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Wireless communications are highly errorprone due to inherent wireless channel effects, which include interference, multi-path fading, and noise. The conventional approach to reducing the effects of frequent channel errors is to attempt retransmitting the corrupted frames. This solution however introduces long end-to-end delay and channel usage inefficiency, especially in multihop wireless networks. In this work, we introduce the cooperative diversity-based opportunistic virtual MISO (Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output) approach to alleviate the problem and to improve the overall performance in multihop wireless networks. Our approach allows neighboring nodes to effectively share their available resources when there is an opportunity to participate. Our observation showed that multi-hop wireless networks consist of low and high quality links. In the low-quality links, we utilize spatial-diversity property that allows a wireless node with the highest delivery probability to relay data frames to the next hop. In the high-quality links, when there are more than one nodes successfully receiving the same data frame, we utilize space-time block codes (STBC) to extend the transmission range to deliver data frames up to two hops away. By proposing the approach described above, available network resources are always utilized to improve the overall performance. OVM provides an effective and simple design solution. Simulation results show that OVM is able to improve end-to-end network performance by up to eighty-six percent over previous works.
Between “this” side and “that” side: On performativity, youth identities and “sticky” spaces

In this article, I investigate the performativity of everyday practices – doings and sayings – that work to constitute identities and spaces through different affective intensities. In doing so, I attempt to bridge a gap between Judith Butler’s account on performativity and affect theory by developing the notion of “sticky” space that I define as a performative embodied space saturated with affect. The site of the study is a post-conflict city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a place that appears mired in stark divisions and continued “ethnicization” of city space. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and a photography project with Mostar’s high school students, this article argues that variations in affective and emotional intensities become crucial in enabling and arresting young Mostarians’ social and spatial relations.
Virtual calligraphic carving through smoothness scalar field and brush‐pressure distribution

Virtual calligraphic carving aims to generate 3D virtual carving works from 2D calligraphic images. This paper proposes a method of virtual calligraphic carving taking calligraphic carving work as a depth map composed of smoothness scalar field and brush‐pressure distribution, which ensures the smoothness of carving surface and interprets the strength of calligraphy, respectively. On one hand, the smoothness scalar field is modeled as a bounded planar scalar field with sources and constructed by applying a series of algorithms. On the other hand, the brush‐pressure distribution is represented by a map created by estimating the touching pressures employed by brush on paper. Then the depth map is composed of the smoothness scalar field and brush‐pressure distribution map and rendered into a virtual calligraphic carving work. The experiments show that this method can generate virtual calligraphic carving works that are vivid and very similar to that of artists. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Rapid language model development for new task domains

Data sparseness has been regularly indicted as the primary problem in statistical language modelling. We go one step further to consider the situation when no text data is available for the target domain. We present two techniques for building efficient language models quickly for new domains. The first technique is based on using a context-free grammar to generate a corpus of word collocations. The second is an adaptation technique based on using out-of-domain corpora to estimate target domain language models. We report results of successfully using these two techniques individually and in combination to build efficient models for a spontaneous speech recognition task in a medium-sized vocabu-
Performances of Block Codes Attaining the Expurgated and Cutoff Rate Lower Bounds on the Error Exponent of Binary Classical-Quantum Channels

A conceptually simple method for derivation of lower bounds on the error exponent of specific families of block codes used on classical-quantum channels with arbitrary signal states over a finite Hilbert space is presented. It is shown that families of binary block codes with appropriately rescaled binomial multiplicity enumerators used on binary classical-quantum channels and decoded by the suboptimal decision rule introduced by Holevo attain the expurgated and cutoff rate lower bounds on the error exponent.
Learning Syntactic Frames with Simple Recurrent Networks

Syntactic bootstrapping and semantic bootstrapping are often seen as rival hypotheses for learning the meaning of verbs. While both theories have different starting points, both credit the child with sensitivity to syntactic information in the input. Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1997) conducted experiments to examine whether young children are capable of exploiting the syntactic frames in which the verbs are embedded, by testing whether they can distinguish between transitive and intransitive sentence frames. Here, I present a preliminary connectionist model which uses a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) (Elman, 1990) to learn to classify similar frames. A brief, simplified description of the experiments follows.
The Diversity of the Place of Residence of Students and their Level of Physical Activity

The aim of the research was to study the diversity of the level of physical activity among the students according to their place of residence: a house (a detached house) or a flat (a residential block). The research was carried out in 2015 among 730 students (373 women and 357 men) of John Paul II State School of Higher Education in Biala Podlaska (PSW). The method used in the research was the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) in its long version. The results have shown that there were no significant differences in the overall level of physical activity of both men and women according to their place of residence. However, significant differences have been noticed among female and male students as regards the physical activity connected to housework in favour of people living in houses. The same correlation was observed in favour of women living in flats (residential blocks).
Pass-them-around: collaborative use of mobile phones for photo sharing

In this paper we explore shared collocated interactions with mobile phones. We introduce a phone-based application that allows a small group of collocated people to share photos using the metaphor of passing paper photos around. The prototype encourages people to share their devices and use them interchangeably while discussing photos face-to-face. The prototype supports ad-hoc photo sharing in different contexts by taking into account the spatial arrangement of users around a table, measured with sensors embedded in their mobile phones. Our evaluations show that people are willing to share and connect their mobile phones to engage in collaborative interactions. Participants were able to easily share their collections of photos using our proposed interaction techniques.
3-D Scene Representation as a Collection of Images and Fundamental Matrices

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. 3-D Scene Representation as a Collection of Images and Fundamental Matrices Stephane Laveau, Olivier Faugeras
The truth about “it is true that…”

Deflationism, one of the influential philosophical doctrines of truth, holds that there is no property of truth, and that overt uses of the predicate “true” are redundant. However, the hypothetical examples used by theorists to exemplify deflationism are isolated sentences, offering little to examine what the predicate adds to meaning within context. We oppose the theory not on philosophical but on empirical grounds. We collect 7,610 occurrences of “it is true that” from 10 influential periodicals published in the United States. We classify and annotate these with respect to the positions of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions that they contain. This way we investigate the contextual relationships between the proposition following “it is true that” with its surroundings. Overall, 34 different syntactical patterns are encountered. In some occurrences of “true”, the predicate acts in the same manner as a performative verb does. These occurrences, having been observed in linguistically reliable media, constitute pragmatic counter-examples to deflationism.
A sieve algorithm for the shortest lattice vector problem

We present a randomized 2^{<italic>O(n)</italic>} time algorithm to compute a shortest non-zero vector in an <italic>n</italic>-dimensional rational lattice. The best known time upper bound for this problem was 2^{<italic>O(n</italic>\log <italic>n</italic>)} first given by Kannan [7] in 1983. We obtain several consequences of this algorithm for related problems on lattices and codes, including an improvement for polynomial time approximations to the shortest vector problem. In this improvement we gain a factor of log log <italic>n</italic> in the exponent of the approximating factor.
OHPI : A Maize Basic Domain / Leucine Zipper Protein That lnteracts with Opaque 2

OPAQUE2 (02) is a regulatory gene that predominantly affects the expression of the 22-kD class of zein storage protein genes at the leve1 of transcription. The 02 gene encodes a polypeptide belonging to the basic domain/leucine zipper (bZIP) class of transcriptional regulatory proteins. Our prior analyses have demonstrated that the 0 2 protein binds 22-kD zein gene promoters as a homodimer in vitro and have also suggested that 0 2 may bind as a heterodimer in vivo. To identify cDNAs encoding other bZlP motifs that might interact with 02, a portion encoding the bZlP motif from an 0 2 cDNA was used to screen an endosperm cDNA library. Sequence analysis of one isolated recombinant phage indicated the presence of a bZlP motif similar to 02. The protein product of this partia1 cDNA, designated OHP1, can bind the 0 2 target site both as a homodimer and in a heterodimeric complex with 02. Whole genome DNA gel blot analysis of maize recombinant inbreds revealed two strongly hybridizing restriction fragments, neither of which mapped close to any locus known to affect zein expression. RNA gel blot analysis revealed an m1.7-kb transcript that is expressed in all organs examined except the female flower and is also expressed in endosperms homozygous for 02 and other mutations that affect zein expression (opaque7, floury2, and Defective endosperm b-30). Based on these results and previously reported data, we propose models to accommodate OHPl in the regulation of zein gene expression by 02.
A New Fast Chinese Visible Human Brain Skull Stripping Method

Image data of the entire cadaver from the Chinese Visible Human is being used to produce three-dimensional images and software for human anatomy research. The anatomy of human brain is more complicated. With the effect of noise, bias field, and fake grey matters, it is a challenging task to build a digital three dimensional representation of a human brain. In order to obtain more accurate representation, the brain regions must be separated from highly variable background regions to obtain a suitable stack of segmentation images. We use adapted Gauss Mixture model as a promising starting point for a sophisticated segmentation framework of color images within 3dimensions. The model can classify images meanwhile estimate the bias field. For the effect of the fake grey matters, a proper image preprocessing strategy turned out to be necessary for accurate and robust segmentation results. We present a complete high resolution and accurate segmentation of the CVH brain. Based on these images, 3D representation is presented. Keywords-Skull stripping, Chinese Visible Human, denoising
Power, diversity and public relations: Theorizing a new paradigm for democratic public relations practice and scholarly analysis

Lee Edwards’ book Power, Diversity and Public Relations – a part of the Routledge New Directions in Public Relations and Communication Research series – analyzes the complexities surrounding the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the UK public relations industry. This issue is a source of ongoing interest and inquiry, as well as antipathy, for public relations scholars and practitioners. Stark statistics frame Edwards’ analysis: Although the majority of the industry is based in London where 40 percent of the city’s population is from non-White, minority communities, Black, Asian and other minority ethnic (BAME) practitioners only make up 7 percent of the UK public relations industry (Edwards, 2015). Despite a proliferation of diversity programs and the rise of the rhetoric of inclusion, enough substantial progress has not been made when it comes to increasing diversity within the public relations field, and Edwards explicates some of the main reasons why the problem of homogeneity in public relations persists. She does so by uniting theoretical exploration with empirical evidence through a critical discourse analysis of key industry texts and first-hand accounts of BAME practitioners, which combine to provide a unique and comprehensive view of diversity in the UK public relations industry. The introductory chapter lays out the key theories that form the basis of Edwards’ arguments and foundation for her analysis. Quite appropriately, diversity is a primary focus. She argues that the issue of diversity remains problematic in public relations because of the way the occupation operates. For example, while organizations may have diversity policies, there is no penalty or punishment for a lack of progress on diversity initiatives. If the organization’s rhetoric of diversity and inclusion does not align with its actions or produce meaningful results, there are no consequences; it is still business as usual for the organization. Moreover, the mere existence of an organization’s diversity program functions as valuable reputational asset, creating a favorable image of the organization, even if undeserved. In this way, as Edwards points out, diversity programs can actually function to benefit powerful organizations more than the vulnerable individuals they were intended to aid. 721945 PRI0010.1177/2046147X17721945Public Relations InquiryBook review book-review2017
Eh?Placer

The placement problem has become more complex and challenging due to a wide variety of complicated constraints imposed by modern process technologies. Some of the most challenging constraints and objectives were highlighted during the most recent ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) contests. In this article, the framework of Eh? Placer and its developed algorithms are elaborated, with the main focus on modern technology constraints and runtime. The technology constraints considered as part of Eh? Placer are fence region, target density, and detailed routability constraints. We present a complete description on how these constraints are considered in different stages of Eh? Placer. The results obtained from the contests indicate that Eh? Placer is able to efficiently handle modern technology constraints and ranks highly among top academic placement tools.