Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Men, women, messages, and media : understanding human communication

A revision of the 1973 "Men Messages and Media" this book attempts to introduce the reader to the communication process with revisions to reflect the growth of knowledge and experience in teaching. The initial sections which deal with the nature of language cover the following: how communication developed; what communication does; the process of communications; the signs and codes of communication; and the pathways of communication that is who talks to whom. The section devoted to the mass media concentrates on the makeup of audiences the nature of their exposure to television and print and the process through which news in particular is highlighted. Material dealing with social control of the mass media has been elaborated and updated. The major theories of the effects of communication are reviewed and some of the context of their historical development identified. Focus in the final chapter is on communication tomorrow -- an age geared to computers recorders individualized and interactive broadcasting and new systems for storing and exchanging information. These are the beginning years of such as age. The beginning chapters talk about human communication as it exists a system in place sufficiently long to be able to talk about models of how it works the nature of social controls upon it the audiences it has and its effects. It is necessary to understand that this focus is prologue to a new age in which the basic nature of human communication will not change yet one in which the social system of communication itself is likely to be considerably different from the ages of communication known in the past. The signs of this new ge include an explosion of new communication technology the enormous increase in the production of information and a significant change in the work forces i.e. a larger and larger proportion of service and business jobs concerned with information. Some of the characteristics of this new age will be: more information will flow with consequent chance of an overload; information will come faster making it necessary to create mechanisms and institutions to scan and sort and process it more effectively; a higher proportion of the information will come from farther away; more of this flow of information than at any time since the introduction of radio is likely to be point-to-point rather than point-to-mass; and information is likely to be a source of power to those who have quick access to it and can process it efficiently.
Epileptic Activity Detection in EEG with Neural Networks

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is an important clinical tool for diagnosing, monitoring, and managing neurological disorders related to epilepsy. Neural networks provide intriguing possibilities for the analysis of the EEG. In this paper we propose a neural network based system to detect epileptic activity. The system comprises of three main components: feature extraction, feature quantization and classi cation. Key components in the proposed approach are the Self Organizing Maps (SOMs) used to quantize feature vectors and the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) network used to classify the quantized vectors. We performed tests with three sets of features: Fourier spectral energy features, wavelet energy features, and Haralick's co-occurrence features. Over 96% of the epileptic activity was correctly identi ed with wavelet and Fourier features and with Haralick features the detection rate was in excess of 99%. Though roughly 95% of the normal activity was also correctly identi ed room for improvement still exists.
Business and IT Alignment: What We Know and What We Don't Know

A key success factor for a successful company in a dynamic environment is effective and efficient information technology (IT) supporting business strategies and processes. In recent surveys however IT executives consistently name IT to Business alignment their top-concern. The alignment between business needs and IT capabilities is therefore still a prominent area of concern. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the alignment challenge by providing an overview of the development of Business &amp; IT Alignment (BIA), the known insights and the still to be discovered considerations.
Sequential clinical scheduling with patient no-shows and general service time distributions

A sequential clinical scheduling method for patients with general service time distributions is developed in this paper. Patients call a medical clinic to request an appointment with their physician. During the call, the scheduler assigns the patient to an available slot in the physician's schedule. This is communicated to the patient before the call terminates and, thus, the schedule is constructed sequentially. In practice, there is very limited opportunity to adjust the schedule once the complete set of patients is known. Scheduled patients might not attend, that is, they might “no-show,” and the service times of those attending are random. A myopic scheduling algorithm with an optimal stopping criteria for this problem assuming exponential service times already exists in the literature. This work relaxes this assumption and develops numerical techniques for general service time distributions. A special case in which service times are gamma distributed is considered and it is shown that computation is significantly reduced. Finally, exhaustive experimental results are provided along with discussions that provide insights into the practical aspects of the scheduling approach.
Parallel approaches to BDD manipulation

Symbolic model checking is an automatic method for system verification in which the system is given as a Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) encoded finite state machine. BDD is a common data structure for representation of mathematical objects. The main issue in symbolic model checking is a state explosion problem that restricts the verification domain. In this paper we present possibilities for the parallelization of BDD manipulation algorithms in order to enable verification of complex systems. We also demonstrate results of our parallel algorithm for computing BDD operations.
New fault model analysis for embedded SRAM cell for deep submicron technologies using parasitic extraction method

A bit difficult task is to identify better fit algorithms for testing complex circuits such as SRAMs in the fast growing technology environment. Many fault models have emerged but limitations and constraints for the given test environment restrict their freedom of utilization. It is observed that majority of the existing fault models were analyzed in terms of well known March algorithms which give only the fault detection information. Scale down technologies influence the parasitic effects and this causes an additional source of faulty behavior and the present test algorithms become weak in encountering them. In this paper we propose a layout dependent method for fault detection along with fault location identification. A new fault model for SRAM is presented in which the faulty model reflects as local disturbances in the layout of the SRAM cell. Two technologies, 180nm and 120nm, are considered. Applying the proposed test method resulted in 100% fault coverage. The test results of submicron (180nm) to deep sub micron (120nm) variation levels are tabulated and analyzed. The parasitic variations are compared with that of fault free SRAM. The proposed parasitic extraction method identifies the type of fault along with its location independent of the technology (180nm and 120nm) selected.
The Organisational Gap Model for Hotel Management

This paper describes the development of the organisational gap model for hotel management. It descries a management measurement instrument that helps to assess the 3 organizational service gaps that are preconditions for delivering service quality (the positioning gap, specification gap and evaluation gap). The described theoretical model was constructed based upon the four organisational gaps of the Parasuraman et al. service quality model, then redefined and reassessed. Data were gathered on the sample of 500 questionnaires from the Slovenian hotel industry and analysed with exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modelling. The results can be useful guidelines for hotel management on how to improve the service delivery process.
Are Stated Preferences Invariant to the Prospect of Real-Money Choice?

This paper reports on a choice experiment where respondents stated their preferences for different wetland parcels. The study used hypothetical surveys to measure respondents' preferences, but in one survey version respondents expected and received a follow-up question involving real monetary payments. The results indicate that those respondents who received hypothetical surveys that included a real-money question registered a different preference function from those respondents who received a survey that asked respondents to answer hypothetical questions only. The study finds that respondents may reverse their preferences for parcel attributes, such as public access to the parcel as related to presentation.
Air quality monitoring and analysis in Qatar using a wireless sensor network deployment

In this paper, an actual deployment of a wireless sensor network is described. The purpose of the sensor network is to monitor and analyze air quality in Doha. Small scale wireless sensor stations communicate with a backend server to relay their measurements in real-time. Data stored on the server is subjected to intelligent processing and analysis in order to present it in different formats for different categories of end users. This paper describes a user friendly computation of an air quality index to disseminate the data to the general public. In addition, it describes data presentation for environmental experts using dedicated software tools, e.g. the R software system and its OpenAir package. Analysis and assessment of real measurement data is also performed in the paper.
Active capability: an application specific security and protection model

Traditional security models are mostly centralized, coarse grained and static. They are not suitable for large distributed and anonymous evironments like internet. With the increasing importance of internet and highspeed networking, it is essential to provide a security model that could incorporate application speciic security policies dynamicaly and eeeciently. In this paper we proposed a new script-based security and protection model which supports application speciic security policies. Essentially it extends traditional capabilities with user-deenable scripts, called Active Capabilities. This model synthizes the recent innovations on type safe scripting language, extensible operating systems, and software protection. We demostrated that active capability can support security features diicult to provide in traditional capability-based systems such as revocation, propagation connnement (cascading), access constrain (Restriction) and auditing. We show that by shifting the complexity from system level to user level the simple security core can be implemented eeciently. In addition, applications only pay the necessary overhead incurred by their required security functions.
DELAY - LOSS ANALYSIS OF CHANNEL ASSIGNMENT SCHEMES IN MOBILE CELLULAR SYSTEMS WITH HANDOFF PRIORITY AND HYSTERESIS CONTROL∗

We consider new channel assignment schemes with hysteresis mechanism, suitable to be used in cellular mobile networks. Two types of calls arrive to the base station of each cell. Stream 1 (of high priority) arrivals are those calls in progress that were originated in another cell and are handed over to our cell (handoff attempts). Stream 2, arrivals of low priority, are those calls originated in our cell (new calls). The priority is provided in order to reduce the forced termination probability of handoff calls. Three extensions of the guard channel scheme with hysteresis, some times identified as reserve margin algorithm with hysteresis, have been considered. The models consider finite and infinite queueing for handoff call and new calls attempts, respectively. The matrix analytic method used gives a matrix geometric solution for the waiting time distribution under First In First Out (FIFO) discipline, and a matrix exponential form for the waiting time distribution of both, the handoff attempts, that do not renege or abandon the finite queue, and the new call attempts. ∗This work has been supported by Spanish Ministry of Educacion y Cultura through the “Comision Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnoloǵia (CICYT)” under project TIC 980495-C02-02
Sensorless Speed Control for Brushless DC Motors System Using Sliding-Mode Controller and Observers

An improved sensorless operation scheme for the Brushless DC motors (BLDC) control system is proposed. A high-speed sliding-mode observer (SMO) for back electromotive force (back-EMF) estimation is employed to obtain the position and speed. A speed control algorithm for the BLDC control systems combining a sliding mode controller with disturbance observer (DOB) is developed to restrain the speed fluctuation caused by abrupt change of load torque. The DOB is used to estimate the load torque and generate a feed-back compensating signal for a controller. Detailed simulation results show that the proposed high-speed SMO could improve the estimation accuracy, and the designed compensating scheme could enhance the robustness against the abrupt load torque change effectively.
Template-based portrait caricature generation with facial components analysis

This paper presents a template-based facial caricature generation approach. Since the major difficulty in generating facial caricature automatically is the uniqueness of individuals and the polymorphism of features, a modified Active Shape Model (ASM) is first designed to locate key feature points accurately by using 2D local grey-level structures. Then, extracted facial components are classified into low-accuracy ones and high-accuracy ones according to their fitting accuracy and are processed respectively. Hierarchical clustering combined with the template-based method is employed for low-accuracy components to bridge the gap between the accuracy provided by feature localization and that required by caricature generation. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the presented approach.
Fast Power and Reduced Temporal Discounting

Decision makers generally feel disconnected from their future selves, an experience that leads them to prefer smaller immediate gains to larger future gains. This pervasive tendency is known as temporal discounting, and researchers across disciplines are interested in understanding how to overcome it. Following recent advances in the power literature, we suggest that the experience of power enhances one’s connection with the future self, which in turn results in reduced temporal discounting. In Study 1, we found that participants assigned to high-power roles were less likely than participants assigned to low-power roles to display temporal discounting. In Studies 2 and 3, priming power reduced temporal discounting in monetary and nonmonetary tasks, and, further, connection with the future self mediated the relation between power and reduced discounting. In Study 4, experiencing a general sense of power in the workplace predicted actual lifetime savings. These results have important implications for future research.
Conflict and Conflict Management in Innovation Processes in the Life Sciences

Research on social conflicts in innovation processes has been rare, leaving an important research gap, as conflicts often arise in innovation processes and are even part of a researcher's everyday life. This study examines innovation and the variables of innovation success in the life sciences; it tests a conflict management model and examines the impact of both conflict type and conflict management style on innovation performance. This study surveyed 152 basic and applied researchers on their conflict management style through a multi‐method approach incorporating both survey and qualitative methods. The substantive aspects and relational effectiveness of conflict management styles were compared, considering their number of publications and patents, problem solution quality, project newness, conflict de‐escalation and communication. Applied researchers showed significantly more domination than did basic researchers, and a dominating conflict management style was significantly related to project newness. Moreover, problem solving was not always the most successful conflict management style. These findings have important practical implications for conflict management training and can help managers and researchers strengthen their co‐operation and improve productivity.
Maximal Association Rules: A New Tool for Mining for Keyword Co-Occurrences in Document Collections

Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) focuses on the computerized exploration of large amounts of data and on the discovery of interesting patterns within them. While most work on KDD has been concerned with structured databases, there has been little work on handling the huge amount of information that is available only in unstructured document collections. This paper describes a new method for computing co-occurrence frequencies of the various keywords labeling the documents. This method is based on computing maximal association rules. Regular associations are based on the notion of frequent sets: sets of attributes, which appear in many records. In analogy, maximal associations are based on the notion of frequent maximal sets. Conceptually, a frequent maximal set is a set of attributes, which appear alone, or maximally, in many records. For the definition of "maximality" we use an underlying taxonomy, T, of the attributes. This allows us to obtain the "interesting" correlations between attributes from different categories. Frequent maximal sets are useful for efficiently finding association rules that include negated attributes. We provide an experimental evaluation of our methodology on the Reuters-21578 document collection.
An Empirical Comparison of Alternative Models for Valuing Interest Rate Options

This article presents the first comprehensive comparative study of alternative models for valuing interest rate options. One and two factor inversion models of the Hull/White type and one and two factor Heath/J arrow/Morton models are considered. The valuation models are assessed by different criteria which are of considerable importance for the practical use of the models. To assess empirical performance, the models are tested on an identical set of bond warrant data. Not only the empirical quality, however, but also the practical problems in implementing the different approaches contribute to the differentiation of the models.
Design and simulation of circularly polarized pentagonal-shaped microstrip patch antenna at RFID frequency 2 . 4 GHz

In wireless communication system antennas play an inherent role. In terms of geometrical shapes and implementations microstrip patch antennas are versatile in nature. Characteristics like low gain and smaller bandwidth make single microstrip more popular. Printed type of antenna which consists of a radiating patch on one side of a dielectric substrate and ground plane on the other side is a microstrip patch antenna. The intension of exploiting design is to implement a circularly polarized pentagonal-shaped microstrip patch antenna with a dielectric constant of 2.33, for a dielectric substrate. The antenna is designed and simulated using IE3D electromagnetic simulator. Circularly polarized pentagonal-shaped microstrip patch antenna has good CP axial ratio bandwidth and minimum reflection coefficient. The aimed antenna designed for WLAN applications at RFID frequency of 2.4 GHz in ISM band. The simulation outcomes shows that the designed CP pentagonal shaped microstrip patch antenna gives axial ratio of 0.6023 at 2.38 GHz and CP axial ratio bandwidth of 36MHz with 1.5%.
A Review on Node-Matching Between Networks

The relationships between individuals in various systems are always described by networks. Recently, the quick development of computer science makes it possible to study the structures of those super-complex networks in many areas including sociology (Xuan et al., 2009; Xuan, Du & Wu, 2010a), biology (Barabasi & Oltvai, 2004; Eguiluz et al., 2005), physics (Dorogovtsev et al., 2008; Rozenfeld et al., 2010), etc., by the tools in graph theory. Interestingly, it was revealed that many of these complex networks in various areas present several similar topological properties, such as small-world (Watts & Strogatz, 1998), scale-free (Barabasi & Albert, 1999), self-similarity (Motter et al., 2003), symmetry (Xiao et al., 2008), etc. In order to explain these properties, a large number of models have been proposed (Barabasi & Albert, 1999; Li & Chen, 2003;Mossa et al., 2002;Watts & Strogatz, 1998; Xiao et al., 2008; Xuan, Du, Wu & Chen, 2010; Xuan et al., 2006; 2007; 2008). However, most of current researches still focus on understanding the relationships between individuals in a single system, while the inter-system relationships are always ignored.
Discovering hierarchical structure in normal relational data

Hierarchical clustering is a widely used tool for structuring and visualizing complex data using similarity. Traditionally, hierarchical clustering is based on local heuristics that do not explicitly provide assessment of the statistical saliency of the extracted hierarchy. We propose a non-parametric generative model for hierarchical clustering of similarity based on multifurcating Gibbs fragmentation trees. This allows us to infer and display the posterior distribution of hierarchical structures that comply with the data. We demonstrate the utility of our method on synthetic data and data of functional brain connectivity.
Presence of Antigen-Experienced T Cells with Low Grade of Differentiation and Proliferative Potential in Chronic Chagas Disease Myocarditis

Background The main consequence of chronic Trypanosoma cruzi infection is the development of myocarditis in approximately 20–30% of infected individuals but not until 10–20 years after the initial infection. We have previously shown that circulating interferon-γ-secreting T cells responsive to Trypanosoma cruzi antigens in chronic Chagas disease patients display a low grade of differentiation and the frequency of these T lymphocytes decreases along with the severity of heart disease. This study thought to explore the expression of inhibitory receptors, transcription factors of type 1 or regulatory T cells, and markers of T cell differentiation, immunosenescence or active cell cycle in cardiac explants from patients with advanced Chagas disease myocarditis. Methodology/Principal Findings The expression of different markers for T and B cells as well as for macrophages was evaluated by immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence techniques in cardiac explants from patients with advanced chronic Chagas disease submitted to heart transplantation. Most infiltrating cells displayed markers of antigen-experienced T cells (CD3+, CD4+, CD8+, CD45RO+) with a low grade of differentiation (CD27+, CD57−, CD45RA−, PD-1−). A skewed T helper1/T cytotoxic 1 profile was supported by the expression of T-bet; whereas FOXP3+ cells were scarce and located only in areas of severe myocarditis. In addition, a significant proliferative capacity of CD3+ T cells, assessed by Ki67 staining, was found. Conclusions/Significance The quality of T cell responses and immunoregulatory mechanisms might determine the pattern of the cellular response and the severity of disease in chronic Trypanosoma cruzi infection.