Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Manycore Processor Based Multilayer Perceptron Feedforward Acceleration Framework for Embedded System

Because of the complex architecture and multiple iterations algorithm, neural network is sometimes hard for traditional embedded devices to meet the needs of real-time processing speed in large scale data applications. Manycore processors are directly applicable for parallel implementation of the neural network. In this paper we present a multilayer perception feed forward acceleration framework based on power efficiency manycore processor, including network mapping strategy, data structure design and inter-core communication method. The framework is implemented on a Zynq and Epiphany combined hardware platform with OpenCL. The experimental results show that in a concrete example of character recognition, the framework with Epiphany achieves about four times feed forward acceleration than the dual-core ARM in Zynq with same prediction accuracy level.
Predicting Severity of Voice Disorder from DNN-HMM Acoustic Posteriors

Acoustical analysis of speech is considered a favorable and promising approach to objective assessment of voice disorders. Previous research emphasized on the extraction and classification of voice quality features from sustained vowel sounds. In this paper, an investigation on voice assessment using continuous speech utterances of Cantonese is presented. A DNN-HMM based speech recognition system is trained with speech data of unimpaired voice. The recognition accuracy for pathological utterances is found to decrease significantly with the disorder severity increasing. Average acoustic posterior probabilities are computed for individual phones from the speech recognition output lattices and the DNN soft-max layer. The phone posteriors obtained for continuous speech from the mild, moderate and severe categories are highly distinctive and thus useful to the determination of voice disorder severity. A subset of Cantonese phonemes are identified to be suitable and reliable for voice assessment with continuous speech.
Identification of Genetic Regulatory Networks: A Stochastic Hybrid Approach

Genetic regulatory networks are families of biochemically interacting genes that regulate most functions of a living cell via the synthesis of proteins and other essential molecules. In this paper we introduce a piecewise deterministic model of genetic network and devise a systematic procedure for the identification of the model parameters from experimental observations of the protein concentration dynamics. Numerical results on simulated data are presented to show the effectiveness of our method.
Cost Effectiveness of Colorectal Cancer Screening Strategies.

BACKGROUND Several screening tests are available to detect colorectal cancer (CRC) and reduce the incidence and mortality of CRC. The purpose of this review was to determine how current CRC screening strategies for CRC compare with no screening and whether agreement exists with regard to the cost effectiveness of different strategies. METHODS Databases were searched for cost-effectiveness analyses focused on CRC screening strategies in the United States and published between May 2007 and February 2014. We analyzed the uses of fecal occult blood, fecal immunochemistry, and stool DNA tests, as well as sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopy, and virtual colonoscopy. A paired comparison of each screening strategy with no screening across each of the studies reviewed was conducted. A series of paired comparisons of the results reported in each of the studies is also included. RESULTS When compared with no screening, all CRC screening strategies evaluated in this review were cost effective. There was disagreement as to which screening strategy was the most cost effective. However, sigmoidoscopy combined with fecal blood testing always dominated either strategy alone. Studies comparing colonoscopy with fecal blood testing, sigmoidoscopy, or both had mixed results. CONCLUSIONS Compared with no screening, all CRC screening strategies are more cost effective. Study results disagree as to which screening strategy should be the preferred method.
ORCA: an ORChestration automata for configuring VNFs

Onboarding network functions onto current clouds requires labor-intensive configuration of the virtual environment. Developers need to dimension the resources available to each virtual machine such as CPU and memory, define thresholds for scaling dynamically and create configuration files that operators can use to execute the network services. This process is time consuming and dependent on the server architecture. As resources are managed on an individual virtual machine basis, services cannot be orchestrated end to end without significant expertise. In this paper, we argue that much of the manual configuration needed for onboarding services onto a cloud can be automated. Moreover, we can automatically generate abstractions that consider services end-to-end and enable their holistic orchestration. We propose a framework that benchmarks network services during the onboarding process and generates an elastic model which relates workload mixes to resource requirements, identifies component dependencies and automates service operation on heterogeneous stacks. We have evaluated our framework using a real-time communication service that handles multiple classes of workloads. Results show that underprovisioning can be eliminated for regular daily traffic, reducing resource provisioning time by at least 5X for the most stressing traffic surges, while improving key performance indicators by at least 40%.
Measurement Error in Estimates of Sprint Velocity from a Laser Displacement Measurement Device

Abstract This study aimed to determine the measurement error associated with estimates of velocity from a laser-based device during different phases of a maximal athletic sprint. Laser-based displacement data were obtained from 10 sprinters completing a total of 89 sprints and were fitted with a fifth-order polynomial function which was differentiated to obtain instantaneous velocity data. These velocity estimates were compared against criterion high-speed video velocities at either 1, 5, 10, 30 or 50 m using a Bland-Altman analysis to assess bias and random error. Bias was highest at 1 m (+ 0.41 m/s) and tended to decrease as the measurement distance increased, with values less than + 0.10 m/s at 30 and 50 m. Random error was more consistent between distances, and reached a minimum value (±0.11 m/s) at 10 m. Laser devices offer a potentially useful time-efficient tool for assessing between-subject or between-session performance from the mid-acceleration and maximum velocity phases (i. e., at 10 m and beyond), although only differences exceeding 0.22–0.30 m/s should be considered genuine. However, laser data should not be used during the first 5 m of a sprint, and are likely of limited use for assessing within-subject variation in performance during a single session.
Preparation, Phytochemical Investigation, and Safety Evaluation of Chlorogenic Acid Products from Eupatorium adenophorum

Eupatorium adenophorum is widely distributed throughout the world’s tropical and temperate regions. It has become a harmful weed of crops and natural environments. Its leaves contain bioactive compounds such as chlorogenic acid and may be used as feed additives. In this study, chlorogenic acid was extracted and separated from leaves of E. adenophorum. Three chlorogenic acid products were prepared with different purities of 6.11%, 22.17%, and 96.03%. Phytochemical analysis demonstrated that the main toxins of sesquiterpenes were almost completely removed in sample preparation procedure. The three products were evaluated for safety via in vitro and in vivo toxicological studies. All the products exhibited no cytotoxic effects at a dose of 400 μg/mL in an in vitro cell viability assay. When administered in vivo at a single dose up to 1.5 g/kg bw, all three products caused no signs or symptoms of toxicity in mice. These results encourage further exploration of extracts from E. adenophorum in feed additive application.
Software engineering code of ethics is approved

between these two versions. The original eight Principles were reordered to reflect the order in which software professionals should consider their ethical obligations—version 3.0’s first Principle was the Product while version 5.2’s first Principle is the Public. A shortened version of the Code was added to the front of the full version of the Code to facilitate a quick review of the Principles of the Code (see box). However, this shortened version must not be viewed as a standalone abbreviated code since this would detract from the detailed breadth and depth of the full version. The details are necessary to provide clear guidance for the practical application of these ethical principals. The Preamble to the Code was significantly revised. It includes specific ethical standards to help the professional make ethical decisions. The Code emphasizes the professional’s obligations to the public at large. This obligation is the final arbiter in all decisions. “In all these judgements, concern for the health, safety, and welfare of the public is primary; that is, the ‘Public Interest’ is central to this Code. ” The primacy of well being and quality of life of the public, in all decisions related to software engineering, is emphasized throughout the Code. For example, the whistle-blowing clauses (6.11–6.13) describe obligations for protecting the public when their well being is threatened by defective software development and describe steps to meet those obligations. The Code contains a clause (8.07) against using prejudices or bias in any decision making. The intent of this clause is to be open ended, thus enabling it to include consideration of new social concerns. The exhaustive efforts of the ACM and IEEE–CS has resulted in the adoption of a code of professional practices for software engineers to consider—and use. Don Gotterbarn, Keith Miller, and Simon Rogerson
Does Work Contribute to Successful Aging Outcomes in Older Workers?

Older workers are the fastest growing segment of the labor force, yet little is known about designing jobs for older workers that optimize their experiences relative to aging successfully. This study examined the contribution of workplace job design (opportunities for decision-making, skill variety, coworker support, supervisor support) to dimensions of successful aging (social network, emotional support, personal control, generativity) in a sample of 109 older workers in the retail homebuilding industry. Older workers completed four standardized tests reflecting the job design and successful aging variables. Results indicated that job design contributed to 23% of the variance in generativity and 15.5% of the variance in personal sense of control scores. Skill variety and coworker support were the most important job design variables for successful aging outcomes. The potential for workplaces to become social institutions that contribute to dimensions of successful aging is discussed.
Gelastic seizures due to hypothalamic hamartoma: Rapid resolution after endoscopic tumor disconnection

Gelastic epilepsy are focal seizures manifesting as recurrent brief seizures starting as laughter or grimaces. They are most commonly associated with other types of seizures and can be secondary to infectious, malformative, metabolic, or neoplastic processes involving the central nervous system. We report on an 18-month-old girl who presented since the age of 2 months with multiple, recurrent, unprovoked episodes of stereotypical laughter. Brain magnetic resonance study revealed an hypothalamic hamartoma. Endoscopic tumor disconnection of the hamartoma resulted in rapid resolution of neurological symptomatology.
Parsing for Grammatical Relations via Graph Merging

This paper is concerned with building deep grammatical relation (GR) analysis using data-driven approach. To deal with this problem, we propose graph merging, a new perspective, for building flexible dependency graphs: Constructing complex graphs via constructing simple subgraphs. We discuss two key problems in this perspective: (1) how to decompose a complex graph into simple subgraphs, and (2) how to combine subgraphs into a coherent complex graph. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of graph merging. Our parser reaches state-of-the-art performance and is significantly better than two transition-based parsers.
Service Delivery System Practices in Malaysian Hotel Operations: An Exploratory Study

A hotel’s service delivery system is unique because it produces products as well as services. Prior research in this area is still scarce especially in the context of the Malaysian service industry. This paper investigates the extent of service delivery system practices in Malaysia’s hotels. In doing so, a questionnaire was sent to all 474 star-rated hotels in Malaysia. A response rate of 19% was received. By using factor analysis and descriptive statistics, the results indicated that the extent of hotel service delivery system could be measured by the following seven dimensions – new products/services, customer participation, hotel operations layout, push/pull orientation, level of standardisation, use of Information Technology (IT), and human resource specialisation. Furthermore, on each dimension, managers of hotels perceived that their hotels had high introduction of products/services, high customer participation for service adaptation, mixed operations layout, pull orientation, high standardisation of processes, high use of IT for cost reduction, and low human resource specialisation.
Extraforaminal meningioma with extrapleural space extension.

3Department of Radiology, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans, LA 70112-4800. horacic involvement by meningioma is uncommon. Most reported cases are secondary to metastatic disease. Brachial plexus invasion by extraforaminal meningioma has been reported in the literature. This case illustrates another form of thoracic involvement by meningioma: extension to the chest wall. To our knowledge, the imaging findings of extrapleural space involvement by meningioma have not been described previously in the radiologic literature. We therefore present the MRI findings and pathologic correlation in the case of a patient with this unusual presentation of meningioma.
Social comparison and submissive behaviour in eating disorder patients.

Animal analogues of anorexia nervosa suggest that submissive behaviour and social defeat may be implicated in the onset of wasting diseases. Data from human sufferers of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are also consistent with the presence of submissive behaviours and perceived low social rank (e.g. low self-esteem, helplessness, and feelings of shame). A total of 101 patients with eating disorders completed the Submissive Behaviour Scale and the Social Comparison Rating Scale, and their responses were compared with 101 age- and sex-matched student controls. Patients with eating disorders reported significantly higher levels of submissive behaviour and a more unfavourable social comparison than did student controls. Furthermore, levels of submissive behaviour and unfavourable social comparison were significantly related to severity of eating disorder symptoms, even after taking account of depressive symptoms and other psychopathology. These preliminary results suggest that ranking theory may have some application to eating disorders. Further research is required to determine whether rank plays a specific role in eating disorders (beyond the increased rates of depression which also occur in eating disorders) and, if so, what is its precise role.
nalytical strategies for shotgun phosphoproteomics : Status and prospects

New analytical strategies for phosphoproteomics, both experimental and computational, have been rapidly introduced in recent years, leading to novel biological findings on the role of protein phosphorylation, which have in turn stimulated further development of the analytical techniques. In this review, we describe the development of analytical strategies for LC–MS/MS-based phosphoproteomics, focusing particularly on recent progress in phosphopeptide enrichment, LC–MS/MS measurement and the subsequent computational analysis. High-coverage analysis of the phosphoproteome has largely been achieved rotein identification by combining pre-fractionation methods with multiple phosphopeptide enrichment approaches, at some cost in LC–MS/MS measurement time and increased sample loss. Key points for the future will be to further increase the selectivity and the recovery of enrichment methods to achieve higher sensitivity and efficiency in LC–MS/MS analysis in order to detect protein phosphorylation comprehensively, including low-abundance proteins. This is expected to lead to a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms and interactions of phosphorylation-mediated regulatory pathways in biological systems. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Intramolecular disulphide bond arrangements in nonhomologous proteins

The presence and location of intramolecular disulphide bonds are a key determinant of the structure and function of proteins. Intramolecular disulphide bonds in proteins have previously been analyzed under the assumption that there is no clear relationship between disulphide arrangement and disulphide concentration. To investigate this, a set of sequence nonhomologous protein chains containing one or more intramolecular disulphide bonds was extracted from the Protein Data Bank, and the arrangements of the bonds, Protein Data Bank header, and Structural Characterization of Proteins fold were analyzed as a function of intramolecular disulphide bond concentration. Two populations of intramolecular disulphide bond‐containing proteins were identified, with a naturally occurring partition at 25 residues per bond. These populations were named intramolecular disulphide bond‐rich and ‐poor. Benefits of partitioning were illustrated by three results: (1) rich chains most frequently contained three disulphides, explaining the plateaux in extant disulphide frequency distributions; (2) a positive relationship between median chain length and the number of disulphides, only seen when the data were partitioned; and (3) the most common bonding pattern for chains with three disulphide bonds was based on the most common for two, only when the data were partitioned. The two populations had different headers, folds, bond arrangements, and chain lengths. Associations between IDSB concentration, IDSB bonding pattern, loop sizes, SCOP fold, and PDB header were also found. From this, we found that intramolecular disulphide bond‐rich and ‐poor proteins follow different bonding rules, and must be considered separately to generate meaningful models of bond formation.
The Financial Impact and Shareholder Wealth Effect of the Role of Relationship Bonding Tactics, Relationship Quality and Customer Asset Management: A Research Agenda

Various researches conducted previously have strived to rediscover the essence or substance of the marketing activity through productivity measuring by financial performance measures. The focus of attention of most of the practitioners as well as academicians in the marketing field towards the issue of the correlation between marketing and finance has become even more narrowed, just as elaborated within series of journals like the Journal of Marketing (2004, 2005), Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2005), Journal of Marketing Research (2004), as well as the Journal of Service Research (2006). The shift on the transactional marketing paradigm to the relational one has also grown more attention, particularly concerning the needs to trace what are the relational dimensions which can bring a superior financial performance. The research on the relation quality dimension is also one realm of research which is being developed in the relational marketing perspective. Nevertheless, there are still few researches which give a complete explanation on the impact of the relational quality (satisfaction-trust-commitment) towards the company's financial performance, and as far as far as I know, there are yet studies which thoroughly scrutinize the financial impact from the relational quality of the company-customer. The relational quality of company-customer is influenced by various customer-attracting tactic, which eventually become potential to create a behavior (the length of the relationship, cross purchase, up-grade, CUSAM), as well as customer's attitude (positive WOM, price insensitivity, tendency not to move away to other). This article is intended to retrace the financial impact (ROI) and the stake holder's value (Tobin's Q) from the Relationship Bonding Tactics towards the Relationship Quality and the Customers Asset Management (CUSAM) through the development of a conceptual framework which is able to explain the phenomenon.
Modified edge detection for segmentation

Image segmentation is one of the major methods of image processing. Several techniques exist to tackle segmentation related ideas based on the targeted area of interest. Edge detection is another important area in image processing that can be used for segmentation. This paper presents an edge based segmentation approach that relies on applying standard edge detection algorithms followed by connecting the discontinuous edges in an efficient manner. This leads to a new segmented image with more complete edges and better distinguishable objects. This is verified by comparing the obtained edge images and the resulting segmentation with the regular edge images and their corresponding segmentation results.
Come to work each day willing to be fired : A study of intrapreneurship within Swedish SMEs active in developing countries

The aim of this thesis is to enlighten intrapreneurship as a subject and the implementations and effect it has on small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) pushing towards organizational change in developing countries. Therefore the specific traits of SMEs in developing countries are examined and related to the promotion of intraprenuership. To gain deeper understanding and achieve the aim of the study a research question was created; How can Swedish SMEs foster intrapreneurship in order to create organizational change in developing countries? The theoretical framework in this thesis is divided into three main areas; organizational change, promotion of intrapreneurship and innovation. In this study a qualitative methodology with an abductive approach is used. The empirical data is collected through interviews of three companies; Norden Machinery AB, Bigso AB and Sara Woodcraft. In the analysis the empirical data is analyzed based on the theoretical framework which leads to the conclusion. This study show that first and foremost intrapreneurship does create organizational change and is an important part of survival for SMEs in developing countries and further that promotion of intrapreneurship demands certain factors to be successful. These factors are ways for organizations to create an environment where innovation and intrapreneurship grows. Furthermore we present what we argue the current theory lack and our contribution as well as managerial implementations which focus on the promotion of intrapreneurship and further research within the subject.