Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lossless and lossy broadcast system source codes: theoretical limits, optimal design, and empirical performance

Broadcast systems are a class of networks where one system node (transmitter) simultaneously sends both common and independent, information to multiple nodes (receivers) in the system. Compressing the messages transmitted in such systems using traditional (single-transmitter, single-receiver) techniques requires use of a collection of independent source codes, one for each message sent through the system. The result of this approach is a system with multiple independent encoders at the transmitter and multiple independent decoders at each receiver. An alternative approach is to design a single joint encoder at the transmitter and a single joint decoder at each receiver. We call the resulting code a "broadcast system source code". This paper treats the theory and practice of optimal lossless and lossy (fixed- and variable-rate) broadcast system source codes. The results given include: theoretical limits for lossless source code performance on broadcast systems; an optimal lossless source code design algorithm; an optimal lossy source code design algorithm that generalizes the generalized Lloyd algorithm to broadcast systems; and experimental results for fixed- and variable-rate code performance in a two-receiver broadcast system.
Applications of the fusion tree method to computational geometry and searching

a related loglogN improvement of Chazelle’s O(N logd-lN / log log N) space data structure [C86a], that performs the reporting version of d-dimensional orthogonal range query in time O(logd-lN / loglogN + K), where K is the number of elements outputted. a data structure for performing the aggregation version of orthogonal range query with a time-space complexity precisely matching the lower bound prediction that Yao [Y82] derived for the dimension d = 2 and Chazelle
Computer Animation of Facial Emotions

Computer facial animation still remains a very challenging topic within the computer graphics community. In this paper, a realistic and expressive computer facial animation system is developed by automated learning from Vicon Nexus facial motion capture data. Facial motion data of different emotions collected using Vicon Nexus are processed using dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA and EMPCA. EMPCA was found to best preserve the originality of the data the most compared with other techniques. Ultimately, the emotions data are mapped to a 3D animated face, which produced results that clearly show the motion of the eyes, eyebrows, and lips. Our approach used data captured from a real speaker, resulting in more natural and lifelike facial animations. This approach can be used for various applications and serve as prototyping tool to automatically generate realistic and expressive facial animation.
Relationship Between Aggression, Assertiveness, Depression and Addiction Potential In Female Students of Allameh Tabbatabai

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between aggression, assertiveness, depression and addiction potential in female students of Allameh Tabbatabai. The research method was correlational-surveyanda total of 150 girls were chosen by available sampling. Data was collected by Ahvaz Aggression Questionnaire (AGQ), Gambril & Rigy Assertiveness questionnaire, Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Zargari Addiction Potential Questionnaire. Then, data was analyzed via correlation, SD, frequency, mode and regression analysis. Results showed that the relationship between aggression, assertiveness, depression and addiction potential was significant. (P<0.01). The results of the multivariate regression analysis showed that linear combination of aggression, assertiveness and depression can predict the Addiction Potential (P<0.01).
Depth Penetration and Detection of pH Gradients in Biofilms by Two-Photon Excitation Microscopy

ABSTRACT Deep microbial biofilms are a major problem in many industrial, environmental, and medical settings. Novel approaches are needed to understand the structure and metabolism of these biofilms. Two-photon excitation microscopy (TPE) and conventional confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) were compared quantitatively for the ability to visualize bacteria within deep in vitro biofilms. pH gradients within these biofilms were determined by fluorescence lifetime imaging, together with TPE. A constant-depth film fermentor (CDFF) was inoculated for 8 h at 50 ml · h−1 with a defined mixed culture of 10 species of bacteria grown in continuous culture. Biofilms of fixed depths were developed in the CDFF for 10 or 11 days. The microbial compositions of the biofilms were determined by using viable counts on selective and nonselective agar media; diverse mixed-culture biofilms developed, including aerobic, facultative, and anaerobic species. TPE was able to record images four times deeper than CLSM. Importantly, in contrast to CLSM images, TPE images recorded deep within the biofilm showed no loss of contrast. The pH within the biofilms was measured directly by means of fluorescence lifetime imaging; the fluorescence decay of carboxyfluorescein was correlated with biofilm pH and was used to construct a calibration curve. pH gradients were detectable, in both the lateral and axial directions, in steady-state biofilms. When biofilms were overlaid with 14 mM sucrose for 1 h, distinct pH gradients developed. Microcolonies with pH values of below pH 3.0 were visible, in some cases adjacent to areas with a much higher pH (>5.0). TPE allowed resolution of images at significantly greater depths (as deep as 140 μm) than were possible with CLSM. Fluorescence lifetime imaging allowed the in situ, real-time imaging of pH and the detection of sharp gradients of pH within microbial biofilms.
Depressive symptoms in late life: associations with apathy, resilience and disability vary between young‐old and old‐old

Prior research has found that disability and apathy are associated with late‐life depression. However, the effect of age on these associations in “late‐life,” an ambiguous term encompassing all individuals typically older than 60 years, has not been examined. We investigated the association of depression with disability, apathy and resilience across the age range of late‐life.
Targeting of the β6 gene to suppress degradation of ECM via inactivation of the MAPK pathway in breast adenocarcinoma cells

Integrin ανβ6 has emerged as a potential novel target for anticancer and plays a major role in promoting malignant tumor progression. Recent studies indicate that integrin ανβ6 occurs in many cancers. However, whether and how ανβ6 is regulated by genetic and epigenetic mechanisms in breast cancer remain unknown. In the present study, two different short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) targeting the β6 gene were designed and constructed into pSUPER, respectively, which were transfected into the MCF-7 human breast adenocarcinoma cell line. The β6-shRNA stably transfected cells were successfully established, and significant lower levels of ανβ6 mRNA and protein expression were confirmed. Furthermore, inhibition of integrin ανβ6 markedly downregulated the expression of matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9), matrix metalloproteinase-3 (MMP-3) and urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA) in tumor conditioned medium. Furthermore, β6-shRNA-mediated silencing of the ανβ6 gene obviously decreased the expression of ERK1/2. In particular, supression of integrin ανβ6 caused significant downregulation of the degradation of basement membrane type IV collagen secretion via modulation of the plasminogen activation cascade. Our results thus indicate that ανβ6 plays a fundamental role in promoting invasion and growth of breast adenocarcinoma cells. Taken together, this study revealed that targeting of the β6 gene by RNA interference (RNAi) could efficiently downregulate ανβ6 expression and suppress the ERK1/2-dependent extracellular matrix degradation in vitro, which is dependent upon inactivation of the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway. These findings may offer a useful therapeutic approach to block invasion and migration of breast cancer cells.
Towards an Understanding of Students' Thinking in Learning New and Unfamiliar Concepts: Focus on the Factorial Function.

This study used participant observation to explore students’ thinking when learning the concept of factorial functions. First-year university students undertaking a mathematics methodology course were asked to find the number of ways in which five people could sit around a circular table with five seats. Using grounded theory as a qualitative research strategy, we analysed student responses and written reflections according to the sequence of their experiential realities: practical and textual experiences. This was followed by an analysis of their reflections on both experiences in a pedagogical context. We found that the way basic mathematics operations are learned impacts on the student’s ability to experience components of new problems as familiar. Consequently, they encounter these problems as new and unfamiliar. At the same time we found that engagement with practical experience does allow for the emergence of representations that have the potential to be used as foundations for learning new and unfamiliar concepts. The blending of practical, textual and teaching experiences provoked students’ thinking and ultimately their understanding of a given new and unfamiliar mathematics concept.
Systems for region selective drug delivery in the gastrointestinal tract: biopharmaceutical considerations.

BACKGROUND The design of a proper region-specific oral drug delivery system has to take into consideration the differences in anatomy, physiology and absorption characteristics that exist between segments within the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, as well as transit kinetics of the dosage form and the site of drug release within the GI tract. OBJECTIVE The aim of this review is to examine the various biopharmaceutical aspects of region-specific drug delivery in the GI tract. METHODS This review is mainly focused on pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic aspects of region-selective drug delivery with special emphasis on drug absorption pathways (para- and transcellular, absorption and efflux transporters, lymphatic uptake etc.). It includes a discussion of gastroretentive systems, colonic delivery, and lipid-based formulations. The review also addresses targeted therapy of local diseases within the GI tract. CONCLUSIONS The advances in pharmaceutical technology allow for the development of a variety of region-specific drug delivery systems for oral administration to optimize local and systemic therapy.
Assessment of stress tolerance acquisition in the heat‐tolerant derivative strains of Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis BB‐12 and Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG

The purpose of this study was to investigate the heat‐shock response at molecular level in Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis BB‐12 and their heat‐tolerant derivatives and to characterize the changes that make the derivatives more robust in terms of heat stress.
Private Equity and Employment

The impact of private equity on employment outcomes arouses considerable controversy. Critics claim that private equity buyouts bring huge job losses, while private equity groups claim large employment gains. To address the issue, we construct and analyze a new dataset that overcomes many of the limitations in previous research. We examine U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005, following 4,500 target firms and more than 200,000 establishments before and after acquisition by private equity groups. We compare employment outcomes at target firms and their establishments to controls that have no private equity ties and that are similar in terms of industry, size and age. Our key findings are as follows: (1) Employment declines at target establishments relative to controls in the wake of private equity buyouts. (2) Target establishments create roughly as many new jobs as control establishments post-buyout, but they destroy old jobs at a much faster pace. (3) However, target firms also create new jobs in new establishments at a much faster pace than control firms. Once we account for new establishments opened post-buyout, the net job loss at target firms relative to controls is about 3-4% of initial employment. (4) The sum of gross job creation and destruction rates is much higher at target firms than at controls in the wake of private equity buyouts. (5) These effects differ considerably across broad industry groups and between public-toprivate and private-to-private transactions. Taken together, our results suggest that private equity groups act as a catalyst for creative destruction in the labor market, and that their employment effects vary greatly by sector and type of target.
Effects of focus and definiteness on children's word order: evidence from German five-year-olds' reproductions of double object constructions

ABSTRACT Two experiments tested how faithfully German children aged 4 ;5 to 5 ;6 reproduce ditransitive sentences that are unmarked or marked with respect to word order and focus (Exp1) or definiteness (Exp2). Adopting an optimality theory (OT) approach, it is assumed that in the German adult grammar word order is ranked lower than focus and definiteness. Faithfulness of children's reproductions decreased as markedness of inputs increased; unmarked structures were reproduced most faithfully and unfaithful outputs had most often an unmarked form. Consistent with the OT proposal, children were more tolerant against inputs marked for word order than for focus; in conflict with the proposal, children were less tolerant against inputs marked for word order than for definiteness. Our results suggest that the linearization of objects in German double object constructions is affected by focus and definiteness, but that prosodic principles may have an impact on the position of a focused constituent.
OBTAINING TREES FROM THEIR DESCRIPTIONS: AN APPLICATION TO TREE‐ADJOINING GRAMMARS

Partial descriptions are sets of constraints which do not necessarily determine a unique object. Two related issues arise when objects arc specified by partial descriptions. The first asks whether a given partial description is satisfied by any object. The second seeks to produce, from a satisfiable description, an appropriate representative of those objects which satisfy it (where the notion of appropriate is defined by the circumstances in which the partial descriptions are employed). We explore these issues in the context of two recent proposals utilizing partial descriptions of trees in the area of tree‐adjoining grammars. One involves the use of descriptions of trees in reinterpreting TAGs as a constraint‐based formalism. In the other these descriptions are the basis of a compact representation of lexicalized TAG grammars. In this context, what counts as an appropriate representative of the set of trees which satisfy a description is a tree in that set which is minimal in the sense that every other tree in the set can be derived from it by adjunction. A partial description for which there is a unique such minimal tree will be called a quasi‐tree. Our work provides precise foundations for the use of descriptions of trees in these proposals. We formalize the notions of partial descriptions of trees and of quasi‐trees, and using this, provide a mechanism which derives, from an arbitrary description, an equivalent set of quasi‐trees. The description is satisfiable iff that set of quasi‐trees is nonempty. We then provide a second mechanism which constructs the unique minimal trees satisfying these quasi‐trees. Thus these mechanisms decide our issues in a strong way–they resolve any description into an equivalent set of descriptions which have unambiguous representative trees, and produce, from that set of descriptions, those representative trees. Such mechanisms are presupposed by the LTAG proposal, but are provided in a complete form for the first time here.
PuppetDroid: A User-Centric UI Exerciser for Automatic Dynamic Analysis of Similar Android Applications

Popularity and complexity of malicious mobile applications are rising, making their analysis difficult and labor intensive. Mobile application analysis is indeed inherently different from desktop application analysis: In the latter, the interaction of the user (i.e., victim) is crucial for the malware to correctly expose all its malicious behaviors. We propose a novel approach to analyze (malicious) mobile applications. The goal is to exercise the user interface (UI) of an Android application to effectively trigger malicious behaviors, automatically. Our key intuition is to record and reproduce the UI interactions of a potential victim of the malware, so as to stimulate the relevant behaviors during dynamic analysis. To make our approach scale, we automatically re-execute the recorded UI interactions on apps that are similar to the original ones. These characteristics make our system orthogonal and complementary to current dynamic analysis and UI-exercising approaches. We developed our approach and experimentally shown that our stimulation allows to reach a higher code coverage than automatic UI exercisers, so to unveil interesting malicious behaviors that are not exposed when using other approaches. Our approach is also suitable for crowdsourcing scenarios, which would push further the collection of new stimulation traces. This can potentially change the way we conduct dynamic analysis of (mobile) applications, from fully automatic only, to user-centric and collaborative too.
POSTER: An integrated vector-scalar design on an in-order ARM core

In the low-end mobile processor market, power, energy and area budgets are significantly lower than in other markets (e.g. servers or high-end mobile markets). It has been shown that vector processors are a highly energy-efficient way to increase performance; however adding support for them incurs area and power overheads that would not be acceptable for low-end mobile processors. In this work, we propose an integrated vector-scalar design for the ARM architecture that mostly reuses scalar hardware to support the execution of vector instructions. The key element of the design is our proposed block-based model of execution that groups vector computational instructions together to execute them in a coordinated manner.
Investigation into the role of five Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis genomic islands in colonization of the chicken reproductive tract and other organs following oral challenge.

Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis is a major cause of human gastrointestinal tract disease, infection being due in large part to the consumption of contaminated eggs. Recent genome sequencing of S. enterica serovars has identified genomic islands, the presence of which differs between serovars. Using defined mutants, we have investigated the contribution that five such loci play in the colonization of the avian reproductive tract, other organs and avian macrophages. All loci appear to play a small role in infection of liver and spleen, but not in colonization of the reproductive tract or macrophages.
Pre-ordering of phrase-based machine translation input in translation workflow

Word reordering is a difficult task for decoders when the languages involved have a significant difference in syntax. Phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT), preferred in commercial settings due to its maturity, is particularly prone to errors in long range reordering. Source sentence pre-ordering, as a pre-processing step before PBSMT, proved to be an efficient solution that can be achieved using limited resources. We propose a dependency-based pre-ordering model with parameters optimized using a reordering score to pre-order the source sentence. The source sentence is then translated using an existing phrase-based system. The proposed solution is very simple to implement. It uses a hierarchical phrase-based statistical machine translation system (HPBSMT) for pre-ordering, combined with a PBSMT system for the actual translation. We show that the system can provide alternate translations of less post-editing effort in a translation workflow with German as the source language.
Expressions of Gratitude in Children and Adolescents

Gratitude is a socially desirable virtue that is related to well-being at both personal and societal levels. The present study took a developmental perspective to examine changes with age in types of wishes and gratitude in two societies. The samples consisted of 357 children, aged 7 to 14 years, from a medium-sized city in the southeast United States, and 334 children from a metropolitan area in southern China. Results showed that the expression of connective gratitude, which is considered the most sophisticated form of gratitude and theorized to promote personal well-being and social relationships, increased with age, regardless of society. Participants in China, a society considered to emphasize relatedness more than does the United States, were more likely to express connective gratitude than were their counterparts in the United States. Furthermore, an inverse relationship between hedonistic wishes and connective gratitude was revealed in the U.S. sample.
Performance Analysis of Adaptive Modulation in Multiuser Selection Diversity Systems With OSTBC Over Time-Varying Channels

This letter analyzes the impact of feedback delay on the performance of multiuser selection diversity systems employing orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC) and rate adaptive modulation over time-varying MIMO Rayleigh fading channels. Rate-adaptive M -QAM modulation along with a user selection diversity is considered in this letter. Analytical expressions are derived for the average spectral efficiency, average bit error rate, and bit error outage probability of the system. Using the results obtained from the analytical expressions, as well as validation from Monte-Carlo simulations, the impact of feedback delay on the system performance is evaluated and discussed.