Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding the effects of multi-dimensional tourism experiences on tourists’ positive emotions and satisfaction in the context of casino hotels

Purpose This study aims to evaluate casino-hotel visitors’ tourism experiences which consist of multiple dimensions, and test their joint effects on visitors’ positive emotions and satisfaction. The findings are expected to reveal how multi-dimensional tourism experiences could shape visitors’ positive emotions, and empirically support positive emotions as the mediator between tourism experiences and satisfaction in the context of casino hotels. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative survey was conducted for this study. In all, 500 valid questionnaires were collected at four major casino hotels in Macao. Respondents were Chinese tourists who visited casino hotels in June. A structural model was developed and tested to understand the relationships between multi-dimensional tourism experiences, positive emotions and satisfaction. Findings Positive emotions were identified as “light pleasure” and “intense fun” emotions based on the context-specific measurement of casino hotels. The “light pleasure” emotions were found to be more effective in influencing respondents’ satisfaction than “intense fun” emotions. Different dimensions of tourism experiences were found to have different levels of impact on respondents’ positive emotions. The findings revealed how multi-dimensional tourism experiences influenced respondents’ positive emotions which in turn determined their satisfaction. Originality/value The findings advanced the understanding of the relationships between tourism experiences, positive emotions and satisfaction in the context of casino hotels. The two types of positive emotions identified in the study add values to the literature of casino-hotel visitors and emotional experiences. This study suggests a further investigation into the scope and measurement of each dimension of tourism experiences in different tourism settings in future research. The findings provided some practical suggestions for the management of positive emotions and tourism experiences in casino hotels.
A blind adaptive step-size time-domain receiver for MC-CDMA systems

A blind adaptive step-size time-domain receiver for multi-carrier code-division multiple access (MC-CDMA) systems is presented. Adjustment rules for the receiver tap-weight as well as its step-size are based upon the stochastic approximation of the constant modulus (CM) criterion. The ability of the proposed receiver to detect the desired user in multipath fading channels at full load is assessed. Sensitivity to the various initial values of the step-size and the adaptation rates of the algorithm is also investigated.
Young children’s musical activities in the home

ABSTRACT The association between human speech, language and communication (SLC) and participation in music is manifest in music education and psychology literature in a number of ways. Research studies into young children’s SLC are numerous and policy focus on this area of children’s learning and development and their later literacy has been intense. By contrast, there is a gap in research into young children’s musical worlds especially in the home, even though existing research shows the additional benefits of shared music activities over shared reading activities for children’s prosocial skills and music making for parent–child communication. This paper reports on a survey and interviews of parents carried out in England with a focus on the musical activities of children aged birth to five in the home. Contrary to previous studies, findings suggest that children participate in a range of spontaneous shared musical activities in the home daily. The factors that both promote and inhibit musical activities in the home for young children are highlighted. The study also shows that children are participating in a wide range of organised, structured musical activities outside the home. Research is needed to examine the quality of such activities and the appropriateness of formal musical activities for very young children to ensure that formality does not disturb spontaneity in young children’s musical worlds.
A role for preadipocytes as macrophage‐like cells

Several lines of evidence have supported a link betweeen adipose tissue and immunocompetent cells. This link is illustrated in obesity, where excess adiposity and impaired immune function have been described in both humans and genetically obese rodents. In addition, numerous factors involved in inflammatory response are secreted by both preadipocytes and macrophages. Here we show that proliferating preadipocytes in cell lines and primary cultures, develop phagocytic activity toward microorganisms. This is demonstrated by phagocytosis assays and confocal microscopy. This function disappears when preadipocytes stop proliferating and differentiate into adipocytes. After phagocytosis, preadipocytes show microbicide activity via an oxygen‐dependent mechanism. In addition, preadipocytes as well as adipocytes are stained with MOMA‐2, a marker of monocyte‐macrophage lineage, but are negative for specific mature macrophage markers (F4/80 and Mac‐1). These results suggest that preadipocytes could function as macro‐phage‐like cells and raise the possibility of a potential direct involvement of adipose tissue in inflammatory processes. —Cousin, B. , Munoz, O. , André, M. , Fontanilles, A. M. , Dani, C. , Cousin, J. L. , Laharrague, P., Casteilla, L. , Pénicaud, L. A role for preadipocytes as macrophage‐like cells. FASEB J. 13, 305–312 (1999)
Rethinking socialist and Marxist legacies in feminist imaginaries of protest from postsocialist perspectives

ABSTRACT The article raises questions about the neoliberal discursive erasures of socialist and Marxist legacies in feminist histories and imaginaries of protest. However, far from promoting an uncritical recycling of feminist Marxisms and socialisms as they unfolded in feminist movements during the 1970s, the article instead reassesses these trends in feminist thought through the analytical lens of the revised notion of ‘postsocialism’ in focus of this special issue, aiming at unmooring it from addressing only the twentieth-century past of a particular geopolitical region, the ‘Second World’. To rethink feminist Marxisms and socialisms from the perspective of this revised notion of postsocialism, the article discusses how the erasure of Marxist and socialist legacies works in contemporary feminist histories with a particular focus on the Nordic countries and my past as a feminist socialist activist there. Moreover, a genealogical analysis of a couple of still centrally performing feminist thought figures – situated knowledges (Haraway) and de/naturalizations of gender/sex binaries (Butler) – is undertaken. The aim is to consider how these thought figures can be understood as postsocialist, when the ‘post’ is defined as marking a combination of resonance and critical transgression, as the ‘post’ in, for example, ‘post-structuralism’. Finally, the article addresses the troubled relationship of Marxism with whiteness, race, racism and Eurocentric understandings of histories of revolutionary transformation. In particular, the flaws of European socialisms and Marxisms, and their resonances with Eurocentric thought more generally, are addressed, while giving attention to their implications for a reassessment of Marxist and socialist legacies in feminism.
Fast Construction of Near Parsimonious Hybridization Networks for Multiple Phylogenetic Trees

Hybridization networks represent plausible evolutionary histories of species that are affected by reticulate evolutionary processes. An established computational problem on hybridization networks is constructing the most parsimonious hybridization network such that each of the given phylogenetic trees (called gene trees) is “displayed” in the network. There have been several previous approaches, including an exact method and several heuristics, for this NP-hard problem. However, the exact method is only applicable to a limited range of data, and heuristic methods can be less accurate and also slow sometimes. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm for constructing near parsimonious networks for multiple binary gene trees. This method is more efficient for large numbers of gene trees than previous heuristics. This new method also produces more parsimonious results on many simulated datasets as well as a real biological dataset than a previous method. We also show that our method produces topologically more accurate networks for many datasets.
Evaluating the Strength of Genomic Privacy Metrics

The genome is a unique identifier for human individuals. The genome also contains highly sensitive information, creating a high potential for misuse of genomic data (for example, genetic discrimination). In this article, we investigate how genomic privacy can be measured in scenarios where an adversary aims to infer a person’s genomic markers by constructing probability distributions on the values of genetic variations. We measured the strength of privacy metrics by requiring that metrics are monotonic with increasing adversary strength and uncovered serious problems with several existing metrics currently used to measure genomic privacy. We provide suggestions on metric selection, interpretation, and visualization and illustrate the work flow using case studies for three real-world diseases.
Finding Frequent Items in SlidingWindows over Data Streams Using EBF

This paper introduces the algorithm FIS-EBF for estimating the frequent items in sliding windows over data streams. FIS-EBF is Based the data structure named EBF (extensible bloom filter). Experiments show that FIS-EBF can work with high precision and recall, it is also showed that FIS-EBF is very efficient in terms of processing time.
Self- coherent optical OFDM: An interesting alternative to direct or coherent detection

Recently, coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) has been considered for the next generation 400-Gb/s long haul data transmission. For long haul transmission systems coherent detection is beneficial compared to direct detection as it provides higher sensitivity. Though CO-OFDM offers a virtually unlimited tolerance against linear impairments, phase noise represents major challenge that must be compensated for. Thus, phase noise compensation (PNC) technique must be applied in the digital signal processing (DSP), which is already limited in speed and processing capabilities. Conversely, self coherent optical (SCO-) OFDM is an interesting alternative which does not require any PNC in the DSP. Furthermore, no local oscillator (LO) is required at the receiver. In this paper, an overview of the recently seen self coherent techniques will be given. Generally, self coherent detection is realized by sending an optical carrier along with the data signal like in direct detection systems. At the receiver, however, the optical carrier is extracted from the signal with the use of filters with very narrow bandwidth and used as an LO using heterodyne or homodyne detection. The performance of such a system depends on the filter bandwidth that is used to extract the carrier.
Sub-National–Cross-National Variation: Method and Analysis in Sub-Saharan Africa

This article proposes four different types of research designs to highlight the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological value of an interactive sub-national cross-national approach: as a two-level interaction, as a hierarchical model, as a set of controls, and as quasi-experimental. These possibilities demonstrate the unique advantages of theorizing and empirically analyzing sub-national variation in its relation to the national superstructure. Using the example of the multi-level identities and institutions associated with religious organizations across sub-Saharan Africa, I demonstrate that the impact of religious leaders on their affiliated followers’ political orientations vary according to the interactive position of each group in their local and national context.
Mediobasal Hypothalamic Leucine Sensing Regulates Food Intake through Activation of a Hypothalamus–Brainstem Circuit

In response to nutrient stimuli, the mediobasal hypothalamus (MBH) drives multiple neuroendocrine and behavioral mechanisms to regulate energy balance. While central leucine reduces food intake and body weight, the specific neuroanatomical sites of leucine sensing, downstream neural substrates, and neurochemical effectors involved in this regulation remain largely unknown. Here we demonstrate that MBH leucine engages a neural energy regulatory circuit by stimulating POMC (proopiomelanocortin) neurons of the MBH, oxytocin neurons of the paraventricular hypothalamus, and neurons within the brainstem nucleus of the solitary tract to acutely suppress food intake by reducing meal size. We identify central p70 S6 kinase and Erk1/2 pathways as intracellular effectors required for this response. Activation of endogenous leucine intracellular metabolism produced longer-term reductions in meal number. Our data identify a novel, specific hypothalamus–brainstem circuit that links amino acid availability and nutrient sensing to the control of food intake.
An EEG-based Approach for Evaluating Graphic Icons from the Perspective of Semantic Distance

Graphic icons play an increasingly important role in interface design due to the proliferation of digital devices in recent years. Their ability to express information in a universal fashion allows us to immediately interact with new applications, systems, and devices. Icons can, however, cause user confusion and frustration if designed poorly. Several studies have evaluated icons using behavioral-performance metrics such as reaction time as well as self-report methods. However, determining the usability of icons based on behavioral measures alone is not straightforward, because users' interpretations of the meaning of icons involve various cognitive processes and perceptual mechanisms. Moreover, these perceptual mechanisms are affected not only by the icons themselves, but by usage scenarios. Thus, we need a means of sensitively and continuously measuring users' different cognitive processes when they are interacting with icons. In this study, we propose an EEG-based approach to icon evaluation, in which users' EEG signals are measured in multiple usage scenarios. Based on a combination of EEG and behavioral results, we provide a novel interpretation of the participants' perception during these tasks, and identify some important implications for icon design.
Scheduling in distributed stream processing systems

Stream processing systems receive continuous streams of messages with relatively raw information and produce streams of messages with processed information. The utility of a stream-processing system depends, in part, on the accuracy and timeliness of the output. Streams in complex event processing systems are processed on distributed systems; several steps are taken on different processors to process each incoming message, and messages may be enqueued between steps. This work explores the problem of distributed dynamic control of streams to optimize the total utility provided by the system. A system can be controlled using central control or distributed control. In the former case a single central controller maintains the state of the entire system and controls the operation of all processors. In distributed control systems, each processor controls itself based on its state and information from other processors. A challenge of distributed control is that timeliness of output depends only on the total end-to-end time and is otherwise independent of the delays at each separate processor whereas the controller for each processor takes action to control only the steps on that processor and cannot directly control the entire network. In this work, we discuss a framework for design and analysis of the control-based scheduling algorithms for a distributed stream processing system and illustrate our framework with two concrete scheduling algorithms.
Home Area Network technology assessment for demand response in smart grid environment

Modern electricity network will increasingly rely upon a set of intelligent communication and control technologies like home area network. Within the smart grid network, Home Area Network (HAN) help develop the demand response and demand side management. Renewable Energy opportunities such as Rooftop PV systems is also closely linked to the development of HAN and Demand Response. Several communication technologies are available in the market to implement HAN, but it is very important to choose the right one. Simply installing tools for implementing smart grid does nothing to influence customer energy usage behaviour. In this paper, we analyse the opportunities to improve demand management in a home for peak load curtailment and implementing the dynamic pricing policy. Wet also propose the comprehensive assessment of different technologies available for HAN and develop an approach for selecting suitable technologies, which contribute to demand management.
CellSense: An Accurate Energy-Efficient GSM Positioning System

Context-aware applications have been gaining huge interest in the last few years. With cell phones becoming ubiquitous computing devices, cell phone localization has become an important research problem. In this paper, we present CellSense, which is a probabilistic received signal strength indicator (RSSI)-based fingerprinting location determination system for Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) phones. We discuss the challenges of implementing a probabilistic fingerprinting localization technique in GSM networks and present the details of the CellSense system and how it addresses these challenges. We then extend the proposed system using a hybrid technique that combines probabilistic and deterministic estimations to achieve both high accuracy and low computational overhead. Moreover, the accuracy of the hybrid technique is robust to changes in its parameter values. To evaluate our proposed system, we implemented CellSense on Android-based phones. Results from two different testbeds, representing urban and rural environments, for three different cellular providers show that CellSense provides at least 108.57% enhancement in accuracy in rural areas and at least 89.03% in urban areas compared with current state-of-the-art RSSI-based GSM localization systems. In additional, the proposed hybrid technique provides more than 6 and 5.4 times reduction in computational requirements compared with state-of-the-art RSSI-based GSM localization systems for rural and urban testbeds, respectively. We also evaluate the effect of changing the different system parameters on the accuracy-complexity tradeoff and how the cell tower and fingerprint densities affect system performance.
Remedying the eval that men do

A range of static analysis tools and techniques have been developed in recent years with the aim of helping JavaScript web application programmers produce code that is more robust, safe, and efficient. However, as shown in a previous large-scale study, many web applications use the JavaScript eval function to dynamically construct code from text strings in ways that obstruct existing static analyses. As a consequence, the analyses either fail to reason about the web applications or produce unsound or useless results. We present an approach to soundly and automatically transform many common uses of eval into other language constructs to enable sound static analysis of web applications. By eliminating calls to eval, we expand the applicability of static analysis for JavaScript web applications in general. The transformation we propose works by incorporating a refactoring technique into a dataflow analyzer. We report on our experimental results with a small collection of programming patterns extracted from popular web sites. Although there are inevitably cases where the transformation must give up, our technique succeeds in eliminating many nontrivial occurrences of eval.
Private and continual releasing of statistics

We consider the following problem. Assume that the input stream σ ∈ {0, 1}N is a sequence of bits. The bit σ(t) at time t ∈ N denotes whether an event of interest occurred at time t. At every time step t ∈ N, we want to know how many 1’s have appeared in the stream by time t. Definition 1.1 (Continual Counting Query) Given a stream σ ∈ {0, 1}N, the count for the stream is a mapping cσ : N→ Z such that for each t ∈ N, cσ(t) := ∑t i=1 σ(i). Definition 1.2 (Counting Mechanism) A counting mechanism M takes a stream σ ∈ {0, 1}N and produces a (possibly randomized) mapping M(σ) : N → R. Moreover, for all t ∈ N, M(σ)(t) is independent of all σ(i)′s for i > t. We can also view M(σ) as a point in RN.
Changes in Glucose and Glutamine Lymphocyte Metabolisms Induced by Type I Interferon α

In lymphocytes (LY), the well-documented antiproliferative effects of IFN-α are associated with inhibition of protein synthesis, decreased amino acid incorporation, and cell cycle arrest. However, the effects of this cytokine on the metabolism of glucose and glutamine in these cells have not been well investigated. Thus, mesenteric and spleen LY of male Wistar rats were cultured in the presence or absence of IFN-α, and the changes on glucose and glutamine metabolisms were investigated. The reduced proliferation of mesenteric LY was accompanied by a reduction in glucose total consumption (35%), aerobic glucose metabolism (55%), maximal activity of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (49%), citrate synthase activity (34%), total glutamine consumption (30%), aerobic glutamine consumption (20.3%) and glutaminase activity (56%). In LY isolated from spleen, IFNα also reduced the proliferation and impaired metabolism. These data demonstrate that in LY, the antiproliferative effects of IFNα are associated with a reduction in glucose and glutamine metabolisms.
A buffer overflow benchmark for software model checkers

Software model checking based on abstraction-refinement has recently achieved widespread success in verifying API conformance in device drivers, and we believe this success can be replicated for the problem of buffer overflow detection. This paper presents a publicly-available benchmark suite to help guide and evaluate this research. The benchmark consists of 298 code fragments of varying complexity capturing 22 buffer overflow vulnerabilities in 12 open source applications. We give a preliminary evaluation of the benchmark using the SatAbs model checker
Quantum Hysteresis in Coupled Light-Matter Systems

We investigate the non-equilibrium quantum dynamics of a canonical light-matter system, namely the Dicke model, when the light-matter interaction is ramped up and down through a cycle across the quantum phase transition. Our calculations reveal a rich set of dynamical behaviors determined by the cycle times, ranging from the slow, near adiabatic regime through to the fast, sudden quench regime. As the cycle time decreases, we uncover a crossover from an oscillatory exchange of quantum information between light and matter that approaches a reversible adiabatic process, to a dispersive regime that generates large values of light-matter entanglement. The phenomena uncovered in this work have implications in quantum control, quantum interferometry, as well as in quantum information theory.