Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Whole body air displacement plethysmography compared with hydrodensitometry for body composition analysis

AIMS To assess the acceptability and feasibility of whole body air displacement plethysmography in children and to determine its precision and agreement with hydrodensitometry, an appropriate reference method. METHODS Age specific two component model equations were used to predict fat mass from body density in 22 children aged 8–12 years and in 10 adults for comparison of methods. Precision for each method was established from duplicate measurements. RESULTS Plethysmography was accepted more readily than hydrodensitometry (100%v 69% provided duplicate measurements). Precision for fat mass in children was 0.38 kg by plethysmography and 0.68 kg by hydrodensitometry, and results were similar in adults. The mean (SD) fat mass in children was 6.9 kg (4.0) and 6.7 kg (4.2) by plethysmography and hydrodensitometry, respectively, but 95% limits of agreement between methods were large (−4.1 kg to 3.5 kg fat). CONCLUSION Plethysmography was more readily accepted and had better precision than hydrodensitometry. It also provided similar body composition results for the group but not for all individual children.
Guanxi and Performance of Foreign-invested Enterprises in China: An Empirical Inquiry

■ This study empirically examines the relationship between guanxi-based business variables and the performance of foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) operating in the P.R. China. The moderating effect of FIE's investing characteristics is also investigated. ■ The findings suggest that guanxi-based business variables has a significant and positive impact on venture's accounting and market performance. FIE's entry mode, country of origin of investment, and length of operation are found to systematically moderate the linkage between guanxi and FIE performance.
Web Information Retrieval for Complex Not-Informational Intents: An Introduction to User Intent Analysis

The World Wide Web has been showing an incredible capacity of renewing itself not only by adapting in order to fulfill mutable users’ needs but also fomenting new types of exigencies and requirements. For such a reason classical web information retrieval models developed around the concept of query seem not anymore adequate to satisfy complex and transactional needs for which the final goal is to accomplish a task rather than to find information. Transactional need satisfaction is not reached by showing the user with a list of documents but by reducing the total time from the moment the user issues the query to the moment the transaction is accomplished. Better support for complex queries can be obtained by a careful User Intent Analysis. In the rest of this paper, we present the reader with some of the most promising lines of research that are currently try to investigate intents and goals by focusing on all the activity related to intent satisfaction rather than on a single query.
Cepheid calibration of Type Ia supernovae and the Hubble constant

We investigate how a different calibration of the Cepheid period-luminosity (PL) relation, taking into account metallicity corrections, affects the absolute magnitude calibration of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and, in turn, the determination of the Hubble constant H 0 . We use SN Ia light curves from the literature and previously unpublished data to establish the M B -Δm 15 (B) relation, and calibrate the zero point by means of nine SNe Ia with Cepheid-measured distances. This relation is then used to establish the Hubble diagram, and in turn to derive H 0 . In the attempt to correct for the host-galaxy extinction, we find that the data suggest a value for the total to selective absorption ratio of R B = 3.5, which is smaller than the standard value for our own Galaxy of R B = 4.315. Depending on the metallicity correction for the Cepheid PL relation, the value of R B , and SN sample selection criteria, the value of the Hubble constant H 0 takes a value in the range 68-74 km s -1 Mpc -1 , with associated uncertainties of the order of 10 per cent. Unpublished photometry is also presented for 18 SNe of our sample (1991S, 1991T, 1992A, 1992K, 1993H, 1993L, 1994D, 1994M, 1994ae, 1995D, 1995ac, 1995bd, 1996bo, 1997bp, 1997br, 1999aa, 1999dk, 2000cx). These data are the results of a long-standing effort in supernova monitoring at ESO - La Silla and Asiago observatories.
A SIMPLE, FAST SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE ALGORITHM FOR DATA MINING

Support Vector Machines (SVM) and kernel related methods have shown to build accurate models but the learning task usually needs a quadratic programming, so that the learning task for large datasets requires big memory capacity and a long time. A new incremental, parallel and distributed SVM algorithm using linear or non linear kernels proposed in this paper aims at classifying very large datasets on standard personal computers. We extend the recent finite Newton classifier for building an incremental, parallel and distributed SVM algorithm. The new algorithm is very fast and can handle very large datasets in linear or non linear classification tasks. An example of the effectiveness is given with the linear classification into two classes of two million datapoints in 20- dimensional input space in some seconds on ten personal computers (3 GHz Pentium IV, 512 MB RAM, Linux).
Iterative cross‐training: An algorithm for learning from unlabeled Web pages

The article presents a new learning method, called iterative cross‐training (ICT), for classifying Web pages in three classification problems, i.e., (1) classification of Thai/non‐Thai Web pages, (2) classification of course/non‐course home pages, and (3) classification of university‐related Web pages. Given domain knowledge or a small set of labeled data, our method combines two classifiers that are able to use effectively unlabeled examples to iteratively train each other. We compare ICT against the other learning methods: a supervised word segmentation classifier, a supervised naïve Bayes classifier, and a co–training‐style classifier. The experimental results on three classification problems show that ICT gives better performance than those of the other classifiers. One of the advantages of ICT is that it needs only a small set of prelabeled data or no prelabeled data in the case that domain knowledge is available. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Shaking the dead: multimodal location based experiences for un-stewarded archaeological sites

We consider how visits to un-stewarded historical and archaeological sites - those that are unstaffed and have few visible archaeological remains - can be augmented with multimodal interaction to create more engaging experiences. We developed and evaluated a mobile application that allowed multimodal exploration of a rural Roman fort. Sixteen primary school children used the application to explore the fort. Issues, including the influence of visual remains, were identified and compared with findings from a second study with eight users at a separate site. From these, we determined key design implications around the importance of physical space, group work and interaction with the auditory data.
Formation of slowly rotating early-type galaxies via major mergers: a resolution study

We study resolution effects in numerical simulations of gas-rich and gas-poor major mergers, and show that the formation of slowly rotating elliptical galaxies often requires a resolution that is beyond the present-day standards to be properly modelled. Our sample of equal-mass merger models encompasses various masses and spatial resolutions, ranging from about 200 pc and 105 particles per component (stars, gas and dark matter), i.e. a gas mass resolution of ~105Msolar, typical of some recently published major merger simulations, to up to 32 pc and ~103Msolar in simulations using 2.4 × 107 collisionless particles and 1.2 × 107 gas particles, among the highest resolutions reached so far for gas-rich major merger of massive disc galaxies. We find that the formation of fast-rotating early-type galaxies, that are flattened by a significant residual rotation, is overall correctly reproduced at all such resolutions. However, the formation of slow-rotating early-type galaxies, which have a low-residual angular momentum and are supported mostly by anisotropic velocity dispersions, is strongly resolution-dependent. The evacuation of angular momentum from the main stellar body is largely missed at standard resolution, and systems that should be slow rotators are then found to be fast rotators. The effect is most important for gas-rich mergers, but is also witnessed in mergers with an absent or modest gas component (0-10 per cent in mass). The effect is robust with respect to our initial conditions and interaction orbits, and originates in the physical treatment of the relaxation process during the coalescence of the galaxies. Our findings show that a high-enough resolution is required to accurately model the global properties of merger remnants and the evolution of their angular momentum. The role of gas-rich mergers of spiral galaxies in the formation of slow-rotating ellipticals may therefore have been underestimated. Moreover, the effect of gas in a galaxy merger is not limited to helping the survival/rebuilding of rotating disc components: at high resolution, gas actively participates in the relaxation process and the formation of slowly rotating stellar systems.
Position-guided Sliding-window Routing ( PSR ) for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

∗ This research is supported in part by The New Jersey Center for Multimedia Research and in part by New Jersey Institute of Technology under Grant No 421050. Abstract In this paper we propose PSR (Position-guided Sliding-window Routing), a position-based/link-state hybrid, proactive routing protocol that provides for a flat, mobile ad-hoc routing architecture. Our protocol is based on the superposition of link-state and position-based routing, and it employs a simplified way of localizing routing overhead, without having to resort to complex, multiple-tier routing organization schemes. This is achieved by ‘merging’ the processes of routing and mobility management via combining the use of geographic position with the adaptation of a hierarchical organization concept used for locationdatabase updating in cellular PCS networks. In our protocol, a set of geographic routing zones is defined for each node, where the purpose of the ith routing zone is to restrict propagation of position updates advertising position differentials equal to the radius of the (i-1)th routing zone. Thus, the proposed protocol controls position-update overhead generation and propagation by making the overhead generation rate and propagation distance directly proportional to the amount of change in a node’s geographic position. Finally, we show through simulation that the proposed routing protocol is a bandwidth-efficient routing mechanism that can be applied across large-scale networks.
Chronometric features of processing unpleasant stimuli: a functional MRI-based transcranial magnetic stimulation study

The quick identification of potentially threatening events is a crucial cognitive capacity to survive in a changing environment. Previous functional MRI data revealed the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the region of the left intraparietal sulcus (IPS) to be involved in the perception of emotionally negative stimuli. For assessing chronometric aspects of emotion processing, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation above these areas at different times after negative and neutral picture presentation. An interference with emotion processing was found with transcranial magnetic stimulation above the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex 200–300 ms and above the left intraparietal sulcus 240/260 ms after negative stimuli. The data suggest a parallel and conjoint involvement of prefrontal and parietal areas for the identification of emotionally negative stimuli.
READ -- A Resolution and Abduction Based Approach for Policy Comparison in Organizational Collaboration

The policy compliance problem is one of the categories of inconsistency problems existing between access control policies. One of the ways to cope with it is called policy comparison. In this paper we develop and use our approach to perform policy comparison, i.e. when newly specified access control policies for the resources are provided to be compared with certain original policy, we are able to ensure that the noncompliance problem between these newly specified policies and the original policies on the resources will be found. In this paper we propose the READ (Resolution and Abduction based) algorithm to be an approach of finding policy noncompliance. Our approach is based on the resolution and abduction work for Data log rules, and the evaluation of compliance is performed through set implication by Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) Z3 prover. We will illustrate the implementation of READ algorithm with two examples from existing work and one example based on role based access control model.
Reconstruction of Three Dimensional Models of Environments with a Mobile Robot

In this paper a method is presented for the three-dimensional reconstruction of environment, using a mobile platform equipped with an onboard laser scanner (for the scene geometry acquisition), and a webcam (for the texture registration). The used algorithm is based on calculating the 3D planes in the scene upon the measured 3D points, through the normal calculation, the projection of the points onto the found planes, and the 2D triangulation of the projected points. This way, the plane regions and the corresponding contours in the model are obtained. Concerning the texture, images are assigned to the plane regions, and the complete scene is built through a stitching algorithm. Images and 3D points are projected onto a sphere, in order the information loss on free form objects, and the distortion caused by points improperly assigned to planes, to be reduced.
Splatting: a parallel, feed-forward volume rendering algorithm

Volume rendering is the generation of images from discrete samples of volume data. The volume data is sampled in at least three dimensions and comes in three basic classes: the rectilinear mesh-for example, a stack of computed tomography scans; the curvilinear mesh-for example, computational fluid dynamic data sets of the flow of air over an airplane wing; and the unstructured mesh-for example, a collection of ozone density readings at multiple elevations from a set of collection stations in the United States. Previous methods coerced the volumetric data into line and surface primitives that were viewed on conventional computer graphics displays. This coercion process has two fundamental flaws: viewers are never sure whether they are viewing a feature of the data or an artifact of the coercion process; and the insertion of a geometric modeling procedure into the middle of the display pipeline hampers interactive viewing. New direct rendering approaches that operate on the original data are replacing coercion approaches. These new methods, which avoid the artifacts introduced by conventional graphics primitives, fall into two basic categories: feed-backward methods that attempt to map the image plane onto the data, and feed-forward methods that attempt to map each volume element onto the image plane. This thesis presents a feed-forward algorithm, called splatting, that directly renders rectilinear volume meshes. The method achieves interactive speed through parallel execution, successive refinement, table-driven shading, and table-driven filtering. The method achieves high image quality by paying careful attention to signal processing principles during the process of reconstructing a continuous volume from the sampled input. This thesis' major contribution to computer graphics is the splatting algorithm. It is a naturally parallel algorithm that adheres well to the requirements imposed by signal processing theory. The algorithm has uncommon features. First, it can render volumes as either clouds or surfaces by changing the shading functions. Second, it can smoothly trade rendering time for image quality at several stages of the rendering pipeline. In addition this thesis presents a theoretical framework for volume rendering.
The Oxford Handbook of Capitalism

The financial crisis that began in 2008 and its lingering aftermath have caused many intellectuals and politicians to question the virtues of capitalist systems. The 19 original essays in this handbook, written by leading scholars from Asia, North America, and Europe, analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of capitalist systems. The volume opens with essays on the historical and legal origins of capitalism. These are followed by chapters describing the nature, institutions, and advantages of capitalism: entrepreneurship, innovation, property rights, contracts, capital markets, and the modern corporation. The next set of chapters discusses the problems that can arise in capitalist systems including monopoly, principal agent problems, financial bubbles, excessive managerial compensation, and empire building through wealth-destroying mergers. Two subsequent essays examine in detail the properties of the "Asian model" of capitalism as exemplified by Japan and South Korea, and capitalist systems where ownership and control are largely separated as in the United States and United Kingdom. The handbook concludes with an essay on capitalism in the 21st century by Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordhandbooks. com/oso/public/content/oho_economics/9780195391176/toc.html
Rep on the block: A next generation reputation system based on the blockchain

This paper presents the first generalized reputation system that can be applied to multiple networks that is based on the blockchain. We first discuss current reputation systems, conducting a critical analysis of their current security vulnerabilities, before looking at how new blockchain based technologies are used. We propose an innovative new reputation system that is based on blockchain technologies which aims to solve many unanswered questions in today's current generation reputation systems. We then consider the limitations of such a system, before using simulations and analyses to demonstrate methods of overcoming these limitations. We conclude by suggesting areas for future studies, and summarizing our findings.
An overview of ultra wide band indoor channel measurements and modeling

In this paper, an overview of reported measurements and modeling of the ultra wide band (UWB) indoor wireless channel is presented. An introduction to UWB technology and UWB channels is provided. Different UWB channel sounding techniques are discussed and approaches for the modeling of the UWB channel are reviewed. The available indoor UWB channel measurement results are consulted and accordingly, the major UWB channel parameters are presented and compared to those of narrowband systems. The novelty of this work is the gathering of different UWB channel parameters, analysis, and comparison. Added with the influence of UWB antenna in channel-modeling as well as the frequency-dependency of the channel parameters, leading to a conclusion on the UWB radio channel modeling.
The Economic Effects of EU-Wide Industry-Level Emission Trading to Reduce Greenhouse Gases: Results from PRIMES Energy Systems Model

In preparation of the Green Paper on greenhouse gas emissions trading within the European Union, the cost implications of EU-wide emissions trading carbon dioxide were estimated by E3-Lab with their PRIMES energy systems model. According to the report, if each EU member States implemented its target under the Burden sharing agreement individually, the total annual cost for the EU to reach the Kyoto target would be 9.0 billion Pound.
Cost-Benefit Rules for Public Good Provision with Distortionary Taxation

The paper shows that a comparison of the appropriately-weighted sum of households’ marginal willingness to pay for a public good with the net effect of the increased supply of the public good on shadow, as distinct from actual, government revenue is a generally valid rule for public good provision. This rule does not depend on any assumption that existing policy is optimal. The practical problems in measuring the true social cost of additional public good provision involve the need to estimate shadow prices of non-traded goods and goods which are not traded at given world prices The marginal cost of public funds is not required in order to measure the social cost of public good provision.
Extracting key sentiment sentences from internet news via multiple source features

Extracting key sentences with sentiments from discourses plays an important role in sentiment analysis. Different from general discourses, Internet news has its own fashion of sentiment expression. In this paper, we attempt to extract key sentiment sentences from those Internet news articles. In this paper, we propose a method, called MSF, by using multiple sources features. In our method, for each sentence we first design four sources of features, including lexical sentiment, global position, word grammar indicator, and title similarity. Then, these features are linearly combined to obtain a score indicating the probability that the sentence is a key sentiment sentence. Experiments on a publicly available dataset show the effectiveness of our MSF method.
Development and Evaluation of Functional Gene Arrays for Detection of Selected Genes in the Environment

ABSTRACT To determine the potential of DNA array technology for assessing functional gene diversity and distribution, a prototype microarray was constructed with genes involved in nitrogen cycling: nitrite reductase (nirS and nirK) genes, ammonia mono-oxygenase (amoA) genes, and methane mono-oxygenase (pmoA) genes from pure cultures and those cloned from marine sediments. In experiments using glass slide microarrays, genes possessing less than 80 to 85% sequence identity were differentiated under hybridization conditions of high stringency (65°C). The detection limit fornirS genes was approximately 1 ng of pure genomic DNA and 25 ng of soil community DNA using our optimized protocol. A linear quantitative relationship (r2 = 0.89 to 0.94) was observed between signal intensity and target DNA concentration over a range of 1 to 100 ng for genomic DNA (or genomic DNA equivalent) from both pure cultures and mixed communities. However, the quantitative capacity of microarrays for measuring the relative abundance of targeted genes in complex environmental samples is less clear due to divergent target sequences. Sequence divergence and probe length affected hybridization signal intensity within a certain range of sequence identity and size, respectively. This prototype functional gene array did reveal differences in the apparent distribution ofnir and amoA and pmoA gene families in sediment and soil samples. Our results indicate that glass-based microarray hybridization has potential as a tool for revealing functional gene composition in natural microbial communities; however, more work is needed to improve sensitivity and quantitation and to understand the associated issue of specificity.