Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Resourcefulness In Action: The Case Of Global Diversity Management

In this essay, I highlight “social identity resourcing” as a generative mechanism whereby individuals’ social identities are used as assets to develop a vision and strategy for global diversity management. Social identity resourcing includes two forms: harnessing and integrating. Harnessing refers to practices that enable organizational members to share their perspectives on how global diversity management should be approached. Integrating reflects the actual use of different perspectives to implement a global vision and strategy for diversity management. In doing so, this essay departs from past research on global diversity management which focuses revealing the differences between a global and a multi-domestic (i.e., countrylevel) approach to diversity management (e.g., Nishii & Ozbilgin, 2007; Sippola & Smale, 2007) or highlighting a conceptual framework for managing global diversity (Mor Barak, 2014). Instead, this essay draws on both diversity management research (Ely & Thomas, 2001; Ramarajan & Thomas, 2010; Thomas & Ely, 1996) and a positive organizational scholarship (POS) perspective (Feldman, 2004; Fredrickson & Dutton, 2008; Sonenshein, 2014) to reveal a social identity-based mechanism that promotes individual and collective flourishing in global organizations.
Subject‐level matching for imbalance in cluster randomized trials with a small number of clusters

In a cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT), the number of randomized units is typically considerably smaller than in trials where the unit of randomization is the patient. If the number of randomized clusters is small, there is a reasonable chance of baseline imbalance between the experimental and control groups. This imbalance threatens the validity of inferences regarding post‐treatment intervention effects unless an appropriate statistical adjustment is used. Here, we consider application of the propensity score adjustment for cluster RCTs. For the purpose of illustration, we apply the propensity adjustment to a cluster RCT that evaluated an intervention to reduce suicidal ideation and depression. This approach to adjusting imbalance had considerable bearing on the interpretation of results. A simulation study demonstrates that the propensity adjustment reduced well over 90% of the bias seen in unadjusted models for the specifications examined. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Reusing constraint proofs for scalable program analysis

Despite the recent advances of research and technology in the area of automated constraint solvers, constraint solving remains a major bottleneck for the scalability of many techniques for program analysis. Recent studies indicate that this problem can be mitigated by caching the proofs for the constraints that occur repeatedly during the analysis of the same or similar programs, showing preliminary evidence that this can result in significantly reducing the analysis time. My PhD research draws on this initial results and aims to bring the technology for storing and reusing constraint proofs at an entirely new stage of maturity. We believe that equivalent constraints occur frequently across programs, and aim to turn the problem of solving the constraints into a fast and reliable search over proofs shared among different projects and teams through distributed data stores.
The Co-Organization of Demonstratives and Pointing Gestures

Demonstratives and pointing gestures are universal, early emerging, and ubiquitous, and it has long been claimed that there is a special relationship between them. But what exactly is the nature of this relationship? The present study investigates this question using a referential communication task. Speakers referred to targets that were near or far and pointed with the hand (more ambiguous) or a laser pointer (less ambiguous). Demonstratives and pointing frequently co-occurred but were also related in less obvious ways: speakers (1) used fewer demonstrative-pointing combinations when pointing was ambiguous, (2) preferred proximal demonstratives when pointing and distals when not pointing, and (3) used fewer proximal demonstratives when pointing was ambiguous. These findings suggest that the relationship between demonstratives and pointing goes beyond one of mere co-occurrence or functional resemblance and reveal some of the principles by which speakers organize these two powerful tools in relation to each other.
Stent-assisted coiling in ruptured wide-necked aneurysms: A single-center analysis

Background: To evaluate the safety and efficacy of stent-assisted coiling of ruptured intracranial wide-necked aneurysms in a setting of acute subarachnoid hemorrhage, without compromising on the antiplatelet regimen. Methods: Forty-two consecutive patients who underwent stent-assisted coiling for ruptured wide-necked intracranial aneurysms from August 2008 to May 2012 were studied. Demographic data like age, sex, Hunt & Hess grade, Fischer scale, and location, and size of the aneurysms were noted. Complications such as aneurysmal rupture, bleeding complications, thromboembolic events, etc. were documented. Also, 30-day and 1-year outcome was measured using modified Rankin scale (mRS). Results: Forty-four wide-necked aneurysms were treated in 42 patients with stent-assisted coiling from August 2008 to May 2012 in our institution, out of a total of 248 aneurysms treated endovascularly in the same period. All these patients presented with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) with varying grades and were treated in the acute phase, i.e. within 1 week of the ictus. There were 24 males and 18 females in the age group ranging from 12 to 78 years, with a mean of 45 years. Technical success was achieved in 39 patients with complete angiographic cure (93%). Intraprocedural stent thrombosis was seen in two patients, which resolved with intra-arterial bolus of tirofiban, and both the patients did not have any neurological deficit. Rebleed occurred in two patients of which one patient succumbed. Six patients required external ventricular drain because of worsening hydrocephalus on computed tomography (CT) scan with clinical deterioration. There was one death in our series due to rebleed. Three other patients died in a period of 1 month due to complications not related to the coiling procedure which include vasospasm, pulmonary embolism, and respiratory infection. All the patients were clinically followed up at 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year. Also, angiographic follow- up was done at 1 year in 25 patients (72%). All the patients were maintained on clopidogrel 75 mg per day and ecospirin 150 mg per day for a period of 1 year and were advised to continue ecospirin 150 mg per day lifelong. Conclusion: Even in a setting of acute SAH, stent-assisted coiling can be an effective and safe treatment option with acceptable risks in experienced hands.
EDDIE for investment opportunities forecasting: Extending the search space of the GP

In this paper we present a new version of a GP-based financial forecasting tool called EDDIE. The novelty of this new version (EDDIE 8), is its enlarged search space, where we allow the GP to search in the space of the technical indicators, in order to form its Genetic Decision Trees. In this way, EDDIE 8 is not constrained in using pre-specified indicators, but it is left up to the GP to choose the optimal ones. We then proceed to compare EDDIE 8 with EDDIE 7, which is based on previous EDDIE versions; EDDIE 7 has a smaller space where the indicators are pre-specified by the user and are part of EDDIE 8's space. Results show that thanks to the bigger search space, new and improved solutions can be found by EDDIE 8. However, there are cases where EDDIE 8 can still be outperformed by its predecessor. Analysis shows that this depends on the nature of the solutions. If the solutions come from EDDIE 8's search space, then EDDIE 8 can find them and perform better; if, however, solutions come from the smaller search space of EDDIE 7, then EDDIE 8 is having difficulties focusing in such a small space and is thus outperformed by EDDIE 7.
A New Hyper-Laplacian Prior-Based Deconvolution Method for Single Image Deblurring

Motion blur is an ill-posed problem which has been addressed for a long time in digital photographing. It usually happens under the circumstance without enough surrounding light. Several methods have been proposed for this problem. However, the ringing is inevitable artifacts arising in the deconvolution stage. To suppress undesirable artifacts, regularization-based methods have been proposed, and they use the natural image priors to overcome the ill-posedness of deconvolution problems. These studies suggest that priors based on natural image statistics can regularize deblurring problems to yield better results. In this paper, we propose a new single image deblurring algorithm based on the hyper-Laplacian priors. We apply hyper-Laplacian priors to obtain a precise blur kernel in the point spread function (PSF) estimation phase. Our proposed method successfully reduces ringing artifacts while preserving the edge of images. Experimental results simulated and real images show that our method performs better than other methods.
Early‐phase ERK activation as a biomarker for metabolic status in fragile X syndrome

Lack of production of the Fragile X Mental Retardation Protein (FMRP) leads to changes in dendritic morphology and resultant cognitive and behavioral manifestations characteristic of individuals with Fragile X syndrome (FXS). FMRP is an RNA‐binding protein that is believed to regulate the translation of a large number (probably over 100) of other proteins, leading to a complex and variable set of symptoms in FXS. In a mouse model of FXS, we previously observed delayed initiation of synaptically localized protein synthesis in response to neurotransmitter stimulation, as compared to wild‐type mice. We now likewise have observed delayed early‐phase phosphorylation of extracellular‐signal regulated kinase (ERK), a nodal point for cell signaling cascades, in both neurons and thymocytes of fmr‐1 KO mice. We further report that early‐phase kinetics of ERK activation in lymphocytes from human peripheral blood is delayed in a cohort of individuals with FXS, relative to normlal controls, suggesting a potential biomarker to measure metabolic status of disease for individuals with FXS. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Role of Magnetic Materials in a Novel Electrical Motogenerator for the More Electric Aircraft

The more electric engine concept considers the electric motor-generators included inside aircraft reactors. Because of the environment characteristics, the problem of reducing the losses in these machines becomes crucial. For such a purpose, this paper focuses on the magnetic losses, analyzing a small (10 kW) 12-phase induction motor-generator prototype through a validated numerical approach. We demonstrate that, with respect to the more traditional Fe-Si rotor core, the use of a Fe-Co alloy in the rotor reduces the total losses of up to 1%, and specifically the iron losses up to 7%, while increasing the generated electrical power up to 3%.
Renal Translocation Carcinomas: Clinicopathologic, Immunohistochemical, and Gene Expression Profiling Analysis of 31 Cases With a Review of the Literature

We report clinicopathologic features of a large series of renal translocation carcinomas from a multicentric study. Diagnosis was performed by cytogenetic examination of fresh material and/or by immunochemistry with antibodies directed against the C-terminal part of transcription factor E3 (TFE3) and native transcription factor EB (TFEB) proteins. Clinical data, follow-up, and histologic features were assessed. Antibodies against CK7, CD10, vimentin, epithelial membrane antigen, AE1-AE3, E-cadherin, α-methylacyl-coenzyme A racemase, melan A, and HMB45 were tested on tissue microarrays. Whole-genome microarray expression profiling was performed on 4 tumors. Twenty-nine cases were diagnosed as TFE3 and 2 as TFEB renal translocation carcinomas, including 13 males and 18 females, mean age 24.6 years. Two patients had a previous history of chemotherapy and 1 had a history of renal failure. Mean size of the tumor was 6.9 cm. Thirteen cases were ≥pT3 stage. Twelve cases were N+ or M+. Mean follow-up was 29.5 months. Three patients presented metastases and 5 have died. Mixed papillary and nested patterns with clear and/or eosinophilic cells represented the most consistent histologic appearance, with common foci of calcifications regardless of the type of translocation. Using a 30 mn incubation at room temperature, TFE3 immunostainings were positive in only 82% of our TFE3 translocation carcinomas. Both TFE3 and TFEB renal translocation carcinomas expressed CD10 and α-methylacyl-coenzyme A racemase in all cases. An expression of E-cadherin was observed in two-third of cases. Cytokeratins were expressed in less than one-third of cases. Melanocytic markers were expressed at least weakly in all cases except two. Unsupervised clustering on the basis of the gene expression profiling indicated a distinct subgroup of tumors. TRIM 63 glutathione S-transferase A1 and alanyl aminopeptidase are the main differentially expressed genes for this group of tumors. Our results suggest that these differentially expressed genes may serve as novel diagnostic or prognostic markers.
The MADS-box transcription factor FgMcm1 regulates cell identity and fungal development in Fusarium graminearum.

In eukaryotic cells, MADS-box genes are known to play major regulatory roles in various biological processes by combinatorial interactions with other transcription factors. In this study, we functionally characterized the FgMCM1 MADS-box gene in Fusarium graminearum, the causal agent of wheat and barley head blight. Deletion of FgMCM1 resulted in the loss of perithecium production and phialide formation. The Fgmcm1 mutant was significantly reduced in virulence, deoxynivalenol biosynthesis and conidiation. In yeast two-hybrid assays, FgMcm1 interacted with Mat1-1-1 and Fst12, two transcription factors important for sexual reproduction. Whereas Fgmcm1 mutants were unstable and produced stunted subcultures, Fgmcm1 mat1-1-1 but not Fgmcm1 fst12 double mutants were stable. Furthermore, spontaneous suppressor mutations occurred frequently in stunted subcultures to recover growth rate. Ribonucleic acid sequencing analysis indicated that a number of sexual reproduction-related genes were upregulated in stunted subcultures compared with the Fgmcm1 mutant, which was downregulated in the expression of genes involved in pathogenesis, secondary metabolism and conidiation. We also showed that culture instability was not observed in the Fvmcm1 mutants of the heterothallic Fusarium verticillioides. Overall, our data indicate that FgMcm1 plays a critical role in the regulation of cell identity, sexual and asexual reproduction, secondary metabolism and pathogenesis in F. graminearum.
Implementation of Interval Arithmetic Algorithms on FPGAs

Interval arithmetic provides an efficient method for monitoring and controlling errors in numerical calculations and can be used to solve problems that cannot be efficiently solved with floating-point arithmetic. However, existing software packages for interval arithmetic are often too slow for numerically intensive calculations. While conventional floating point arithmetic is provided by fast hardware, interval arithmetic is simulated with software routines based on integer arithmetic. Therefore, the hardware design for interval arithmetic can provide a significant performance improvement over software implementations of interval arithmetic. In this paper, we design and implement interval arithmetic algorithms. The proposed method performs interval intersection, hull, minimum, maximum, and comparisons, as well as floating-point minimum, maximum and comparisons. Compared to the corresponding Forte Fortran 95 interval operations, about 80% reduction in the number of instructions is obtained with the proposed method. In short, it is found to greatly speedup the interval operations of hull, intersection, maximum, minimum, and comparisons over the corresponding Forte Fortran 95 interval operations.
PermA and Balloon: Tools for string alignment and text processing

Two online research tools are presented in this paper: PermA, a general-purpose string aligner which can for example be used for grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-phoneme alignment, and Balloon, a text processing toolkit for German and English providing components for part-of-speech tagging, morphological analyses, and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion including syllabifica- tion and word-stress assignment. The general architectures of these tools are introduced with a focus on recent improvements concerning the alignment cost function derivation and word stress assignment.
Haptic Perception of Unknown Object by Robot Hand: Exploration Strategy and Recognition Approach

In this paper, the exploration and recognition in unknown object perception by robot hand is discussed. Inspired by the touch and exploration of human hand, a haptic exploration strategy for multi-fingered robot hand is proposed. Based on the observations from human experiments, the proposed strategy can be used to guide the robot hand to plan a series of movements to get tactile information from different unknown objects, with the precondition of avoiding unexpected collisions with the objects. A recognition approach is then presented to recognize object shapes based on the tactile point data collected by the strategy. Geometric feature vectors are extracted from tactile point locations and normal vectors after clustering, and the object shapes are recognized by the random forests classifier. Simulations and experiments results show that the exploration strategy can be used to guide the robot to gather tactile information from unknown object automatically, and the recognition approach is effective and robust in object shape recognition work. This framework provides a sensible solution for robot unknown object perception problem, which is suitable for the multi-fingered robot hand with low-resolution tactile sensors.
Realistic Simulation of 3 D Cloud

-The digital creation of cloud is important for many applications in computer graphics, including outdoor simulations and the digital rendering of atmospheric effects. Unfortunately, it is still difficult to simulate realistic cloud with interactive frame rates due to its peculiar microstructures and complex physical process of formation. Realistic simulation of cloud turns to be one of the most challenging topics in computer graphics. In this paper, we present a method for simulating 3D cloud. The Coupled Map Lattice (CML) is adopted for the modeling of cloud, and the simulation of light scattering in clouds is achieved by using a series of spherical harmonics and spherical harmonic coefficients that represent incident-light distribution. A frequency domain volume-rendering algorithm combined with spherical harmonics is applied to implement fast rendering of cloud scenes. Experiments demonstrate that our method facilitates computing efficiency, while yielding realistic visual quality. Key-Words: Natural Scene, Coupled Map Lattice (CML), Spherical Harmonics, Frequency Domain, Cloud Rendering, Volume Rendering
Conflict over reasons to eat tasty food predicts weight fluctuation over 6 weeks

Abstract Several theories suggest that goal conflict leads to loss of control, but few studies have tested this proposal objectively. A transdiagnostic approach to CBT based on Perceptual Control Theory proposes that conflict between superordinate goals is at the heart of loss of control, and in turn, psychological distress. This study used the example of goal conflict around eating in a non-clinical sample as proof-of-concept to test whether it predicted loss of control. We examined whether the conflict regarding reasons to eat tasty food (e.g. ‘Eating tasty food helps me feel better’) versus reasons not to eat tasty food (e.g. ‘I want to lose weight’) correlated with weight fluctuations over 6 weeks in 33 students. At baseline, higher levels of goal conflict were associated with greater state and trait food cravings, and more problems with control over eating. As predicted, people with higher levels of goal conflict showed greater weight fluctuation. The effect diminished when controlling for trait food craving, and exercise fluctuation remained an independent predictor. We discuss the implications for future research on goal conflict, and for interventions that raise awareness of goal conflict to improve wellbeing via the enhancement of self-control.
An endless hierarchy of probabilities

According to radical probabilism, all factual claims are merely probabilistic in character. Throughout the centuries this view has been criticized on the grounds that it triggers an infinite regress: if every claim is probabilistic, then the proposition that something is probable is itself only probable, and so on. An endless hierarchy of probabilities seems to emerge and, as a result, the probability of the original proposition can never be determined. This criticism goes back as far as David Hume, and in the twentieth century it was raised also by statisticians such as Leonard J. Savage. Recently Nicholas Rescher ventured a similar critique of radical probabilism. In this paper it is argued that the criticism does not hold water, for an endless hierarchy of probability statements is no obstacle to attaching a definite probability value to the original proposition. Moreover, it is claimed that radical probabilism can reinforce some of Rescher's own main claims.
Linear dimensionality reduction applied to scale invariant feature transformation and speeded up robust feature descriptors

Abstract. Robust local descriptors usually consist of high-dimensional feature vectors to describe distinctive characteristics of images. The high dimensionality of a feature vector incurs considerable costs in terms of computational time and storage. It also results in the curse of dimensionality that affects the performance of several tasks that use feature vectors, such as matching, retrieval, and classification of images. To address these problems, it is possible to employ some dimensionality reduction techniques, leading frequently to information lost and, consequently, accuracy reduction. This work aims at applying linear dimensionality reduction to the scale invariant feature transformation and speeded up robust feature descriptors. The objective is to demonstrate that even risking the decrease of the accuracy of the feature vectors, it results in a satisfactory trade-off between computational time and storage requirements. We perform linear dimensionality reduction through random projections, principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis, and partial least squares in order to create lower dimensional feature vectors. These new reduced descriptors lead us to less computational time and memory storage requirements, even improving accuracy in some cases. We evaluate reduced feature vectors in a matching application, as well as their distinctiveness in image retrieval. Finally, we assess the computational time and storage requirements by comparing the original and the reduced feature vectors.