Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Thermal cooking changes the profile of phenolic compounds, but does not attenuate the anti-inflammatory activities of black rice

Background Evidence on biological activities of cooked black rice is limited. This study examined the effects of washing and cooking on the bioactive ingredients and biological activities of black rice. Methods Cooked rice was prepared by washing 0–3 times followed by cooking in a rice cooker. The acidic methanol extracts of raw and cooked rice were used for the analyses. Results Raw black rice, both washed and unwashed, had higher contents of polyphenols, anthocyanins, and cyanidin-3-glucoside (C3G), but lower protocatechuic acid (PA), than did cooked samples. Similarly, raw rice extracts were higher in ferric-reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) activities than extracts of cooked samples. Nonetheless, extracts of raw and cooked rice showed similar inhibitory potencies on nitric oxide, tumor necrosis factor-α, and interleukin-6 productions in lipopolysaccharide-activated macrophages, whereas equivalent amounts of C3G and PA did not possess such inhibitory effects. Conclusions Thermal cooking decreased total anthocyanin and C3G contents and the FRAP antioxidative capacity, but did not affect anti-inflammatory activities of black rice. Neither C3G nor PA contributed to the anti-inflammatory activity of black rice.
Design and Explanation of the Credit Ratings of Customers Model Using Neural Networks

The aim of this study formed with purpose of providing a suitable model to investigate the credit behavior of consumer of speculation loan using neural networks for credit ratings. Nowadays, intelligent systems found many applications in different fields of banking and financing. One of main application of neural networks is review and approval of credits. Thus, at first factors affecting credit behavior of consumer was identified and then, consumers divided in three categories: on-time payer (good payer), bad payer and overdue (belated) payer. In the next step, neural network models designed using the training data was instructed and then tested with these experimental data. The results show that the credit behavior of the customers could be predicted using neural networks ranking models.
Interactively building a discriminative vocabulary of nameable attributes

Human-name able visual attributes offer many advantages when used as mid-level features for object recognition, but existing techniques to gather relevant attributes can be inefficient (costing substantial effort or expertise) and/or insufficient (descriptive properties need not be discriminative). We introduce an approach to define a vocabulary of attributes that is both human understandable and discriminative. The system takes object/scene-labeled images as input, and returns as output a set of attributes elicited from human annotators that distinguish the categories of interest. To ensure a compact vocabulary and efficient use of annotators' effort, we 1) show how to actively augment the vocabulary such that new attributes resolve inter-class confusions, and 2) propose a novel "nameability" manifold that prioritizes candidate attributes by their likelihood of being associated with a nameable property. We demonstrate the approach with multiple datasets, and show its clear advantages over baselines that lack a name-ability model or rely on a list of expert-provided attributes.
TRANSFAC®: transcriptional regulation, from patterns to profiles

The TRANSFAC 1 database on eukaryotic transcriptional regulation, comprising data on transcription factors, their target genes and regulatory binding sites, has been extended and further developed, both in number of entries and in the scope and structure of the collected data. Structured fields for expression patterns have been introduced for transcription factors from human and mouse, using the CYTOMER 1 database on anatomical structures and developmental stages. The functionality of Match TM , a tool for matrix-based search of transcription factor binding sites, has been enhanced. For instance, the program now comes along with a number of tissue(or state-)specific profiles and new profiles can be created and modified with Match TM Profiler. The GENE table was extended and gained in importance, containing amongst others links to LocusLink, RefSeq and OMIM now. Further, (direct) links between factor and target gene on one hand and between gene and encoded factor on the other hand were introduced. The TRANSFAC 1 public release is available at http://www.gene-regulation.com. For yeast an additional release including the latest data was made available separately as TRANSFAC 1 Saccharomyces Module (TSM) at http://transfac. gbf.de. For CYTOMER 1 free download versions are available at http://www.biobase. de:8080/index.html.
Does Self-Compassion affect the Stress on Married Women Workers ?

One's response to stress is certainly different. Everyone has preparation in facing reality so that they can receive the preparation and create a sense of self-compassion. This study aims to determine the effect of selfcompassion on stress. The subjects in this study were 60 married women workers. The measurements for this study was conducted by means of SCS (Self Compassion Scale), and DASS-21 scale (Depression Anxiety Stress Scales) for stress measurement. The data analysis was conducted by using regression analysis. The study found that the self-compassion had significant coefficient effect on stress. Therefore, the hypothesis proved that self-compassion has a negative and significant effect on stress, which means that the higher the level of self-compassion, the lower the level of stress in married women workers. The suggestions for further research are included in the discussion.
Reanalysis of semantically required dependents as complements in the Chinese ba -construction

This paper aims at a formulation of semantic constraints on the productivity of the bǎ-construction and their representation at the syntax-semantics interface. It builds on the observation that requirements on the surface form of the construction may be altered by the choice of the verb. I propose that the semantics of the bǎ-construction can be treated in terms of a scalar constraint: a bǎ-sentence must come with a scale and a difference value that holds of the described event. The satisfaction of this constraint largely relies on the lexical semantics of the sentence. Not all verbs are inherently associated with scalar relations; those that are not must combine with an additional dependent which satisfies the scale requirement. Due to the obligatory presence of the additional dependent for some verbs, it is reanalyzed as a complement of bǎ: being optional on their level of combination with the verb, it becomes obligatory once the verb is used in the bǎ-construction.
Knowledge Discovery using Artificial Neural Networks for a Conservation Biology Domain

We present an artificial intelligence method for the development of decision support systems for environmental management and demonstrate its strengths using an example from the domain of biodiversity and conservation biology. Renosterveld vegetation is unique to South Africa; it is under threat of extinction as a result of rapidly growing agricultural activities. We use artificial neural networks and decision trees for knowledge discovery on the Renosterveld domain. We train artificial neural networks on a dataset of the existing plant species and show their generalization performance with gradient descent learning. We then extract knowledge from trained neural networks in the form of decision trees and obtain rules which describe the existence of the remaining Renosterveld vegetation. These rules will be used as a contribution for the conservation of Renosterveld. The rules demonstrate a prediction of 78% that a Renosterveld plant will grow in a particular environment given its environmental conditions. The general paradigm can hence be applied to other plant species for knowledge discovery and the development of decision support systems.
Optimal production run length and inspection schedules in a deteriorating production process

This paper presents an economic manufacturing quantity model which determines an optimal production run length and inspection schedules simultaneously in a deteriorating production process. It is assumed that a production process is subject to a random deterioration from the in-control state to the out-of-control state and, thus, produces some proportion of defective items. An optimal production run length and an optimal number of inspections are derived, and unique properties of the proposed model are discussed. A numerical experiment is carried out to examine the behavior of the proposed model and compare the proposed model to an existing model.
Estimation of rotation and divergence from optical flow constraint

In previous paper[1], we suggested a new algorithm to estimate optical flow and motion parameters (angular velocity and scale of enlargement). There are two advantages in this method. First, more accurate optical flow and motion parameters can be estimated because it is strictly consistent with the assumption that the motion contains not only translation but also rotation and divergence. Second, this method can reduce the cost of calculation because optical flow and motion parameters can be estimated at the same time after scanning images only once. We examined the effectiveness of the proposed method in some simulations in previous paper. In this paper, we will show experimental results of proposed method for more realistic scenes.
A web site protection oriented remote backup and recovery method

It becomes more and more important to protect the security of web sites. In order to solve the problem about web site disaster recovery, a web site protection oriented remote backup and recovery method is proposed in this paper. Customers can design various backup strategies such as full, incremental and differential backup by themselves. A multi version control method is given to text files, and the remote transmission and backup mechanism is designed based on Rsync and FTP protocols. Rsync is used to reduce the transferred data efficiently, the experiment results show that the remote backup and recovery system can work fast and it can meet the requirements of web site protection.
Workforce reduction and firm performance: a comparison between French publicly-listed and non-listed companies, 1994-2000

Using an exhaustive database with labour, accounting and financial market information on French firms (1994-2000), the authors analyse the causes and the consequences of a workforce reduction in 1996 - the year chosen as reference - on firms' performance in a long term perspective. One important contribution to the topic consists in comparing the estimates of publicly-listed and non-listed companies. As far as we know, the comparative method had not be used before. A logistic model shows that in both groups, headcount reduction occurs in less-productive and financially distressed firms, resorting to downsizing as a defensive response to an adverse economic shock. However, the former anticipates better than the latter the decision to eliminate jobs. An econometric model that captures the initial characteristics of the firms, suggests the major performance indicators are significantly improved only for non-listed companies. Yet, there is no net gain on the full period studied.
Curiosity-Driven Development of Tool Use Precursors: a Computational Model

Studies of child development of tool use precursors show successive but overlapping phases of qualitatively different types of behaviours. We hypothesize that two mechanisms in particular play a role in the structuring of these phases: the intrinsic motivation to explore and the representation used to encode sensorimotor experience. Previous models showed how curiosity-driven learning mechanisms could allow the emergence of developmental trajectories. We build upon those models and present the HACOB (Hierarchical Active Curiosity-driven mOdel Babbling) architecture that actively chooses which sensorimotor model to train in a hierarchy of models representing the environmental structure. We study this architecture using a simulated robotic arm interacting with objects in a 2D environment. We show that overlapping phases of behaviours are autonomously emerging in hierarchical models using active model babbling. To our knowledge, this is the first model of curiosity-driven development of simple tool use and of the self-organization of overlapping phases of behaviours. In particular, our model explains why and how in-trinsically motivated exploration of non-optimal methods to solve certain sensorimotor problems can be useful to discover how to solve other sensorimotor problems, in accordance with Siegler's overlapping waves theory, by scaffolding the learning of increasingly complex affordances in the environment.
Multicanonical Stochastic Variational Inference

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) enables approximate posterior inference with large data sets for otherwise intractable models, but like all variational inference algorithms it suffers from local optima. Deterministic annealing, which we formulate here for the generic class of conditionally conjugate exponential family models, uses a temperature parameter that deterministically deforms the objective, and reduce this parameter over the course of the optimization to recover the original variational set-up. A well-known drawback in annealing approaches is the choice of the annealing schedule. We therefore introduce multicanonical variational inference (MVI), a variational algorithm that operates at several annealing temperatures simultaneously. This algorithm gives us adaptive annealing schedules. Compared to the traditional SVI algorithm, both approaches find improved predictive likelihoods on held-out data, with MVI being close to the best-tuned annealing schedule.
The UPC text-to-speech system for Spanish and catalan

This paper summarizes the text-to-speech system that has been developed in the Speech Group of the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC). The system is composed of a core and different interfaces so that it is compatible for research, for telephone applications (either CTI boards or standard ISDN PC cards supporting CAPI), and Windows applications developed using Microsoft SAPI. The paper reviews the system making emphasis in the parts of the system which are language dependent and which allow the reading of bilingual text (Spanish and Catalan). The paper also presents new approaches in prosodic modeling (segmental duration modeling) and generation of the database of speech segments, which have been introduced last year.
NL2CM: A Natural Language Interface to Crowd Mining

The joint processing of general data, which can refer to objective data such as geographical locations, with individual data, which is related to the habits and opinions of individuals, is required in many real-life scenarios. For this purpose, crowd mining platforms combine searching knowledge bases for general data, with mining the crowd for individual, unrecorded data. Existing such platforms require queries to be stated in a formal language. To bridge the gap between naïve users, who are not familiar with formal query languages, and crowd mining platforms, we develop NL2CM, a prototype system which translates natural language (NL) questions into well-formed crowd mining queries. The mix of general and individual information needs raises unique challenges. In particular, the different types of needs must be identified and translated into separate query parts. To account for these challenges, we develop new, dedicated modules and embed them within the modular and easily extensible architecture of NL2CM. Some of the modules interact with the user during the translation process to resolve uncertainties and complete missing data. We demonstrate NL2CM by translating questions of the audience, in different domains, into NL2CM, a crowd mining query language which is based on SPARQL.
The Development of Multi-agent System Using Finite State Machine

This paper sets out to develop and create a search agent that can retrieve requested information from two databases; the user will be able to search for a book by inputting variables such as title, author, ISBN and more significantly for this study the price. The system will identify the books requested, where they can be found and will show the cheapest available. SAS will work from the Application software and will link to the two databases, the design will allow more databases to be incorporated in the future. Each of the two databases has the same names of the titles however each database may contain a different price. The agent will get the required information quickly, helping the user to find the cheapest and possibly nearest. The agent will connect to the database using the Agent Interface; there are two agents in the system, known as MAS. These agents collect the required data and send it to the Agent Handler.
The Investigation of the Attitudes of Teachers towards Using Student Centered Teaching Methods and Techniques

The importance given to student-centered teaching methods and techniques is increasing as a reflection of the constructivist approach. This study was conducted with the aim of determining the attitude of teachers working in secondary schools to use student centered teaching methods and techniques and compare it based on the gender, subject, seniority year, and school type variables. The survey method was used in the study. The population of the research is 409 subject teachers who work in the central schools of one city located in the Blacksea Region of the Turkey in the 2017-2018 academic year. 10 middle school were selected using random sampling. 135 teachers participating in the research voluntarily. The data related to the study were obtained by attitude scale for using student centered teaching methods and techniques. Findings indicated that teachers' attitudes towards using student- centered teaching methods and techniques do not change according to gender, school type and seniority year variables. However, according to the subject variable, there was a significant difference in the given importance sub-dimension when there was no meaningful difference in resistance, cost-benefit, positive effects sub-dimensions and scale-wide differences. Further studies should investigate why teachers' attitudes towards using student centered teaching methods and techniques are high in skills lessons than verbal and numerical lessons.
An Overview of Cryptographic Hash Functions

This report gives a survey on cryptographic hash functions. It gives an overview of different types of hash functions and reviews design principles. It also focuses on keyed hash functions and suggests some applications and constructions of keyed hash functions. We have used hash (keyed) function for authenticating messages encrypted using Rijndael [1] block cipher. Moreover, a parallel message digest has been implemented using VHDL. The computational complexity is O(log k) compared to O(k) in case of serial method. Mersenne Twister is a uniform pRNG suggested by Matsumoto and Nishimura [2] which provides a astronomical period of 2-1, but is not suitable for cryptographic applications. This report suggests a method for creating cryptographically secure random number using Mersenne Twister.
New proofs of classical insertion theorems

We provide new proofs for the classical insertion theorems of Dowker and Michael. The proofs are geometric in nature and highlight the connection with the preservation of normality in products. Both proofs follow directly from the Katětov-Tong insertion theorem and we also discuss a proof of this. A function from a topological space X to R is said to be upper semicontinuous if, for every a in R, the preimage of [a,∞) is closed and lower semicontinuous if the preimage of (−∞, a] is closed. Given a pair of semicontinuous functions g ≤ h one can ask whether there is a continuous function f , with g ≤ f ≤ h. Such insertion results form part of the classical theory of general topology, tracing back to Hahn [5], who proved Theorem 1 in the realm of metrizable spaces, and Dieudonne [2], who proved Theorems 1 and 2 for paracompact spaces. Theorem 1 (Katětov [7], Tong [16]). A space X is normal if and only if whenever g, h : X → R are upper (resp. lower) semi-continuous and g ≤ h, there is a continuous f : X → R such that g ≤ f ≤ h. Theorem 2 (Dowker [3]). A space X is normal and countably paracompact if and only if whenever g, h : X → R are upper (resp. lower) semi-continuous and g < h, there is a continuous f : X → R such that g < f < h. Theorem 3 (Michael [13]). A space X is perfectly normal if and only if whenever g, h : X → R are upper (resp. lower) semi-continuous and g ≤ h, there is a continuous f : X → R such that g ≤ f ≤ h and g(x) < f(x) < h(x) whenever g(x) < h(x). There is an intimate connection between insertion theorems and the normality of product spaces, an area that has been the focus of much attention [14]. Normality is significant as it is precisely the property allowing continuous, real-valued functions on closed subspaces to be extended to the whole space. However, it does not behave well on taking products: for example it is known that a normal space X need not be binormal (that is, X × [0, 1] need not be normal) [4]. Binormality was, for a long time, an hypothesis in Borsuk’s homotopy extension theorem (Rudin and Starbird eventually proved that normality suffices [14]). The connection between binormality 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary: 54C30, 54D15.
Candidate Gene-Based Association Study of Antipsychotic-Induced Movement Disorders in Long-Stay Psychiatric Patients: A Prospective Study

Objective Four types of antipsychotic-induced movement disorders: tardive dyskinesia (TD), parkinsonism, akathisia and tardive dystonia, subtypes of TD (orofacial and limb truncal dyskinesia), subtypes of parkinsonism (rest tremor, rigidity, and bradykinesia), as well as a principal-factor of the movement disorders and their subtypes, were examined for association with variation in 10 candidate genes (PPP1R1B, BDNF, DRD3, DRD2, HTR2A, HTR2C, COMT, MnSOD, CYP1A2, and RGS2). Methods Naturalistic study of 168 white long-stay patients with chronic mental illness requiring long-term antipsychotic treatment, examined by the same rater at least two times over a 4-year period, with a mean follow-up time of 1.1 years, with validated scales for TD, parkinsonism, akathisia, and tardive dystonia. The authors genotyped 31 SNPs, associated with movement disorders or schizophrenia in previous studies. Genotype and allele frequency comparisons were performed with multiple regression methods for continuous movement disorders. Results Various SNPs reached nominal significance: TD and orofacial dyskinesia with rs6265 and rs988748, limb truncal dyskinesia with rs6314, rest tremor with rs6275, rigidity with rs6265 and rs4680, bradykinesia with rs4795390, akathisia with rs4680, tardive dystonia with rs1799732, rs4880 and rs1152746. After controlling for multiple testing, no significant results remained. Conclusions The findings suggest that selected SNPs are not associated with a susceptibility to movement disorders. However, as the sample size was small and previous studies show inconsistent results, definite conclusions cannot be made. Replication is needed in larger study samples, preferably in longitudinal studies which take the fluctuating course of movement disorders and gene-environment interactions into account.