Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Reply to Michl

In his 'Comments', Tom Michl defends the proposal for a fully funded pension scheme based on a saving-led 'classical growth model' against my Keynesian contention that a higher saving supply would be deflationary in both the short run and the long run. Michl adds a further argument that an increase in the saving rate associated with a lower interest rate may speed up the accumulation process. I remark that the thesis that a lower interest rate has a positive influence on investment is empirically and theoretically controversial, while the idea that an increase in investment requires a larger saving supply is open to further Keynesian objections. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.
Reflections on simultaneous impact

Resolving simultaneous impacts is an open and significant problem in collision response modeling. Existing algorithms in this domain fail to fulfill at least one of five physical desiderata. To address this we present a simple generalized impact model motivated by both the successes and pitfalls of two popular approaches: pair-wise propagation and linear complementarity models. Our algorithm is the first to satisfy all identified desiderata, including simultaneously guaranteeing symmetry preservation, kinetic energy conservation, and allowing break-away. Furthermore, we address the associated problem of inelastic collapse, proposing a complementary generalized restitution model that eliminates this source of nontermination. We then consider the application of our models to the synchronous time-integration of large-scale assemblies of impacting rigid bodies. To enable such simulations we formulate a consistent frictional impact model that continues to satisfy the desiderata. Finally, we validate our proposed algorithm by correctly capturing the observed characteristics of physical experiments including the phenomenon of extended patterns in vertically oscillated granular materials.
Localization of event-related activity by SAM(erf).

Abstract Synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM) has been used to image source power or source signal-to-noise ratio from MEG. However, the locations of maximal event-related oscillatory activity (or changes from resting state) do not necessarily coincide with those sites that are phase-locked to external events (i.e., localized by dipole fit to the averaged evoked response). Since an estimate of the source time-series may also be obtained by applying the beamformer coefficients to the MEG signal, one can image event-related activity by mapping some function reflecting the reliability of the averaged source waveform at each location. We have devised a new analysis method, SAM(erf), for obtaining a functional image of event-related brain activity and revealing the corresponding waveforms for activated sites. The mapping function used is the ratio of RMS amplitude of the averaged source waveform to that of the +/- average waveform, for a selected time window. This function is computed at each coordinate on a three-dimensional grid in the head. In addition to the SAM(erf) functional image, the averaged source waveforms for each local maximum in the image can be computed and displayed. This procedure can reveal multiple locations and waveforms at sites in the brain engaged in event-related activities. When this method is applied to evoked response studies, phase-locked activity can sometimes be found in areas distant from primary sensory cortex. Given the sensitivity of this functional imaging method to areas outside primary sensory cortex, it has the potential for detecting subtle changes in brain activity in health and disease.
Design Patterns for Context-Aware Adaptation

In this paper we show how the judicious use of design patterns can improve the design of context-awareness in software systems. We first review well-known problems in the development of context-aware applications. Next, we present our view on the design process of context-aware software; we introduce design patterns and explain why they can be useful to improve the quality of this kind of applications. We finally present some design patterns we mined by researching on successful context-aware approaches. Some concluding remarks are finally presented together with further work we are pursuing.
Frequency doubler employing active fundamental cancellation in CMOS

A novel CMOS frequency doubler circuit is presented in this paper. A common source transistor pair biased at threshold is used to rectify the input signal in both the positive and negative cycles. The rectified signals are then subtracted to generate a double frequency signal. Measurement results show that there is more than 20 dB fundamental rejection with the input power level ranging from −20 dBm to −10.3 dBm. The 3rd and 4th harmonic rejections are above 20 dB with input power up to −10 dBm without any on-chip or off-chip filtering.
Performance analysis of a new updating rule for TD(/spl lambda/) learning in feedforward networks for position evaluation in Go game

In this paper, a new updating rule for applying temporal difference (TD) learning to multilayer feedforward networks is derived. Networks are trained to evaluate Go board positions by TD(/spl lambda/) learning with different values of /spl lambda/. Performance of each network is estimated by letting it play against other networks. Results show that nonzero /spl lambda/ gives better learning for the network and statistically, larger /spl lambda/ gives better performance.
Sofosbuvir for hepatitis C genotype 2 or 3 in patients without treatment options.

BACKGROUND Patients chronically infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 2 or 3 for whom treatment with peginterferon is not an option, or who have not had a response to prior interferon treatment, currently have no approved treatment options. In phase 2 trials, regimens including the oral nucleotide polymerase inhibitor sofosbuvir have shown efficacy in patients with HCV genotype 2 or 3 infection. METHODS We conducted two randomized, phase 3 studies involving patients with chronic HCV genotype 2 or 3 infection. In one trial, patients for whom treatment with peginterferon was not an option received oral sofosbuvir and ribavirin (207 patients) or matching placebo (71) for 12 weeks. In a second trial, patients who had not had a response to prior interferon therapy received sofosbuvir and ribavirin for 12 weeks (103 patients) or 16 weeks (98). The primary end point was a sustained virologic response at 12 weeks after therapy. RESULTS Among patients for whom treatment with peginterferon was not an option, the rate of a sustained virologic response was 78% (95% confidence interval [CI], 72 to 83) with sofosbuvir and ribavirin, as compared with 0% with placebo (P<0.001). Among previously treated patients, the rate of response was 50% with 12 weeks of treatment, as compared with 73% with 16 weeks of treatment (difference, -23 percentage points; 95% CI, -35 to -11; P<0.001). In both studies, response rates were lower among patients with genotype 3 infection than among those with genotype 2 infection and, among patients with genotype 3 infection, lower among those with cirrhosis than among those without cirrhosis. The most common adverse events were headache, fatigue, nausea, and insomnia; the overall rate of discontinuation of sofosbuvir was low (1 to 2%). CONCLUSIONS In patients with HCV genotype 2 or 3 infection for whom treatment with peginterferon and ribavirin was not an option, 12 or 16 weeks of treatment with sofosbuvir and ribavirin was effective. Efficacy was increased among patients with HCV genotype 2 infection and those without cirrhosis. In previously treated patients with genotype 3 infection, 16 weeks of therapy was significantly more effective than 12 weeks. (Funded by Gilead Sciences; POSITRON and FUSION ClinicalTrials.gov numbers, NCT01542788 and NCT01604850, respectively.).
Evaluation of Glucose Homeostasis

Obesity and dyslipidemia are often found in association with insulin resistance (IR). These components combined with hypertension characterize the most common endocrine disorder in humans, the metabolic syndrome. Thus, in addition to profiling body weight evolution and lipid metabolites, glucose tolerance (a reflection of IR) and insulin sensitivity should also be considered as part of any metabolic phenotyping protocol. The ability to measure IR and glucose tolerance is important not only in the quest to fully understand the pathogenesis of the metabolic syndrome in the mouse, but also to test the effects of potential interventions. This unit presents a variety of tests used for this purpose, including direct blood glucose measurements, insulin measurement by ELISA, the homeostatic model assessment, glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity tests, and the euglycemic clamp.
A new parallel algorithm for security constrained optimal power flow with a nonlinear interior point method

This paper presents a new algorithm for parallel solution of security constrained optimal power flow (SCOPF) with a nonlinear interior point method (IPM). In the parallel algorithm proposed in this paper, the SCOPF problem is easily decomposed and distributed to a set of processors where the computations are done independently on a subset of the contingency states. Moreover, a full AC model is used in this parallel algorithm. The new parallel algorithm has been tested for accuracy and speedup with two systems: one with 57 buses, 80 branches and 9 contingencies, another with 3493 buses, 6689 branches and 79 contingencies. With less than 1% relative error and more than a factor of 10 speedup, the test results demonstrate that this new parallel algorithm with IPM is accurate and efficient for large-scale SCOPF problems.
Video interaction through finger tips

Nowadays online videos are one of the most popular and powerful communication tools. But, still online videos provide only a passive user-experience and in more precise terms, the only thing user can do is to watch the videos. The main objective of this work is to leverage the existing video contents and turn them into transactional content marketing. For example, user can select items shown while playing the video and without making any interruption, the selected items are displayed in a special merchandised page where you can purchase them or can know more details about that selected item later on. TLD technique which is designed for long-term tracking is used for obtaining items location in the video stream. With that extracted location information, we draw bounding box around the items in each frame and the user can select those items displayed within the bounding box. In our system, user finger gestures are used for selecting the items using the Leap Motion Controller.
Torsors over the punctured affine line

We provide a classification of $G$-torsors over the punctured affine line ${\rm Spec}(k[t^{\pm 1}])$ where $G$ is a reductive algebraic group defined over a field $k$ of good characteristic. Our classification is in terms of the Galois cohomology of the complete field $k((t))$ with values in $G$.
Primary Cultures of Embryonic Chicken Neurons for Sensitive Cell-Based Assay of Botulinum Neurotoxin: Implications for Therapeutic Discovery

Botulinum toxin is an exceedingly potent inhibitor of neurotransmission across the neuromuscular junction, causing flaccid paralysis and death. The potential for misuse of this deadly poison as a bioweapon has added a greater urgency to the search for effective therapeutics. The development of sensitive and efficient cell-based assays for the evaluation of toxin antagonists is crucial to the rapid and successful identification of therapeutic compounds. The authors evaluated the sensitivity of primary cultures from 4 distinct regions of the embryonic chick nervous system to botulinum neurotoxin A (BoNT/A) cleavage of synaptosomal-associated protein of 25 kD (SNAP-25). Although differences in sensitivity were apparent, SNAP-25 cleavage was detectable in neuronal cells from each of the 4 regions within 3 h at BoNT/A concentrations of 1 nM or lower. Co-incubation of chick neurons with BoNT/A and toxin-neutralizing antibodies inhibited SNAP-25 cleavage, demonstrating the utility of these cultures for the assay of BoNT/A antagonists. (Journal of Biomolecular Screening 2007:370-377)
Modeling social interactions and their effects on individual decision making

In this thesis, we are interested in the influence of social environment on individual decision making. We develop models of social interactions and culture, with the aim to facilitate their integration into theories of individual decision making. In an interdisciplinary mindset, we adopt approaches derived from the study of physics to model and quantify aspects of individual decision making under risk and uncertainty, social relationships, population dynamics and cultural contexts. Each study adopts a different methodology, including the use of mathematical modeling, empirical data analysis, computer-based simulation, and qualitative literature review. We motivate this work in the first chapter by highlighting the gap between theories of individual and social decision making. This introduction also summarizes subsequent chapters by providing simple examples illustrating their key ideas. We start by considering a theory of individual decision making and gradually extend our scope to social relationships, populations and societies. In the second chapter of this thesis, we test a theory of decision making, quantum decision theory (QDT), on an empirical dataset. QDT is built on a mathematical formulation inspired by quantum mechanics with the assumption that decision making is inherently probabilistic. This theory offers a prediction for the frequency with which an option is chosen by one decision maker at different times, or by different decision makers in a population. We find that QDT predictions are in agreement with our results at the level of groups and could be refined at the individual level. The dataset shows gender differences in risk-taking behavior, a first hint of the role that social interactions may play in individual decision making. To further investigate gender differences risk-taking behavior, we develop in the third chapter an agent-based model (ABM) of a population composed of females and males with interactions between genders. We quantify the effect of social and biological factors on population dynamics and gender-specific variance in reproductive success. This ABM allows us to investigate the degree of population heterogeneity and kind of mating system most likely to reproduce features of ancestry lines inferred by genetic analyses on humans. Our results support the hypothesis that we may be descended from men who were successful in a highly competitive context, while women were facing a smaller competition for reproductive success. Present generations inherited the genes and culture of these ancestors, which provides insights into gender-specific competitiveness and risk-taking behavior. We then broaden the scope of our study by generalizing the analysis of social interactions. In the fourth chapter, we introduce a generic model of relationships between two persons or
The effect of noise on the performance of cultural evolution in multi-agent systems

This work examines the effect of the addition of noise to the cultural learning process of a population of agents. Experiments are undertaken using an artificial life simulator capable of simulating population learning (through the use of genetic algorithms) and lifetime learning (through the use of neural networks). To simulate cultural learning, (the exchange of information through nongenetic means) a group of highly fit agents is selected at each generation to function as teachers which are assigned a number of pupils to instruct. Cultural exchanges occur through a hidden layer of an agent's neural network known as the verbal layer. Through the use of back-propagation, a pupil agent imitates the teacher's behaviour and overall population fitness is increased. We introduce cultural mutation into a population of agents by adding noise to cultural exchanges between teacher and pupil agents. We conduct a series of experiments with varying values of cultural mutation to study the effects of this operator on the performance of the population. We show that the addition of noise to cultural exchanges can improve on the performance of cultural learning.
The diversification of mate preferences by natural and sexual selection

The evolution of sexual display traits or preferences for them in response to divergent natural selection will alter sexual selection within populations, yet the role of sexual selection in ecological speciation has received little empirical attention. We evolved 12 populations of Drosophila serrata in a two‐way factorial design to investigate the roles of natural and sexual selection in the evolution of female mate preferences for male cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs). Mate preferences weakened in populations evolving under natural selection alone, implying a cost in the absence of their expression. Comparison of the vectors of linear sexual selection revealed that the populations diverged in the combination of male CHCs that females found most attractive, although this was not significant using a mixed modelling approach. Changes in preference direction tended to evolve when natural and sexual selection were unconstrained, suggesting that both processes may be the key to initial stages of ecological speciation. Determining the generality of this result will require data from various species across a range of novel environments.
Self destructive tamper response for software protection

A method of creating tamper resistant software that is resistant to unauthorized modification is proposed. It utilizes a primitive that combines self-modifying based instruction camouflage and self integrity verification, and a method to construct a structure in which the multiple primitives are interlocked each other. Tamper resistant software created by the proposed method contains multiple camouflaged instructions in the object program, so that it is difficult for attacker to correctly understand the content of processing using static analysis. When attacker tries to do dynamic analysis, anti-debugging techniques prevent the attempt. The tamper resistant software, at runtime, continuously executes detecting and preventing dynamic analysis, verifying its integrity, and self-modifying itself in such a way that target of self-modifying is dynamically determined according to result of self integrity verification. If unauthorized modification is detected, then it self-modifies a part of instruction which is different from the part of camouflaged instruction to be self-modified, and executes different instructions from its original. As a result, it generates a series of unpredictable abnormal self destructive behaviors such as error or termination, so that attacker's analysis and modification are strongly disturbed. Cost of analysis is increased as the numbers of self integrity verification and instruction camouflage are increased, hence, the tamper resistance can be strengthened quantitatively.
The MSA: An Instrument for Measuring Motivation to Study Abroad.

This paper describes the development of a paper and pencil instrument that classifies the principal motivations for students participating in study abroad programs. While many of the factors relating to relevant program parameters are readily apparent (Engle and Engle, 2003), it is important to understand how students’ motivation for participating in a study abroad program mediates the magnitude of those gains. For research to advance on the moderating influence of student motivation, an instrument is needed to classify these motivations so that students can be sorted into appropriate categories.
Nativization of English words in Spanish using analogy

Nowadays modern speech technologies need to be ﬂexible and adaptable to any framework. Mass media globalization introduces the challenge of multilingualism into most popular speech applications such as text-to-speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition. Mixed-language texts vary in their nature and when processed, some essential characteristics ought to be considered. In Spain, the usage of English and other foreign origin words is growing as well as in other countries. The particularity of the peninsular Spanish is that there is a tendency to nativized foreign words pronunciation so that they ﬁt in properly into Spanish phonetics. In this work our goal was to approach the nativization challenge by data-driven methods, since they are transferable to other languages and do not yield in performance. Training and test corpora for nativization were manually crafted and the experiments were carried out using pronunciation by analogy. The results obtained were encouraging and proved that even a small training corpus of 1000 words allows obtaining a higher level of intelligibility for English inclusions in Spanish utterances.
Medication Use in Children with Asthma: Not a Child Size Problem

Objective. The global burden of pediatric asthma is high. Governments and health-care systems are affected by the increasing costs of childhood asthma—in terms of direct health-care costs and indirect costs due to loss of parental productivity, missed school days, and hospitalizations. Despite the availability of effective treatment, the current use of medications in children with asthma is suboptimal. The purpose of this review is to scope the empirical literature to identify the problems associated with the use of pediatric asthma medications. The findings will help to design interventions aiming to improve the use of asthma medications among children. Methods. A literature search using electronic search engines (i.e., Medline, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA), PubMed, PsycINFO, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL)) and the search terms “asthma,” “children,” and “medicines” (and derivatives of these keywords) was conducted. Results. The search terms were expanded to include emergent themes arising out of search findings. Content themes relating to parents, children themselves, health-care professionals, organizational systems, and specific medications and devices were found. Within these themes, key issues included a lack of parental knowledge about asthma and asthma medications, lack of information provided to parents, parental beliefs and fears, parental behavioral problems, the high costs of medications and devices, the child’s self-image, the need for more child responsibility, physician nonadherence to prescribing guidelines, “off-label” prescribing, poor understanding of teachers, lack of access to educational resources, and specific medications. Conclusion. These key issues should be taken into account when modifying the development of educational tools. These tools should focus on targeting the children themselves, the parent/carers, the health-care professionals, and various organizational systems.
Isotonic Regression by Dynamic Programming

For a given sequence of numbers, we want to find a monotonically increasing sequence of the same length that best approximates it in the sense of minimizing the weighted sum of absolute values of the differences. A conceptually easy dynamic programming approach leads to an algorithm with running time O(n logn). While other algorithms with the same running time are known, our algorithm is very simple. The only auxiliary data structure that it requires is a priority queue. The approach extends to other error measures. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Human-centered computing → Graph drawings. Mathematics of computing → Graph algorithms