Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of India's Rural Employment Guarantee on Demand for Agricultural Technology

Landless agricultural laborers and marginal farmers constitute much of India’s poor. As population growth increases and more people enter an expanding rural labor force, either they must eke out a living in the rural sector or add to the growing pressure on the country’s urban areas. Meanwhile, agricultural jobs are fewer and the corresponding wages have been persistently below subsistence levels. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) takes aim at this problem by providing guaranteed employment to the rural poor at minimum wages in exchange for village public works. While the direct effects of this program appear clear—more income is being received by the poor, while village infrastructure is increasing—indirect effects within local agricultural economies abound. Theory developed in this paper shows the theoretical results of NREGA’s impact on agricultural wages, while recent empirical evidence demonstrates a 3-5% increase in agricultural wages. This has the potential to affect farm owners. A farm owner that relies on this targeted unskilled labor to fill relatively inexpensive labor roles during peak agricultural production periods may now alter his production decisions by choosing to adopt labor-saving technologies as a result of an increasing labor-to-capital input price ratios. I specify a threshold model of technology adoption to illustrate this short-run result. In the long run, there may be further ripple effects in the rural economy, including increased agricultural productivity and still higher wages for rural laborers. I use difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity designs to test my theoretical results empirically. These empirical methods take advantage of the unique nature of the phased program rollout.
Test-Suite Reduction Does Not Necessarily Require Executing the Program under Test

Removing redundancies from test-suites is an important task of software testing in order to keep test-suites as small as possible, but not to harm the test-suite's fault detection capabilities. A straightforward algorithm for test-suite reduction would select elements of the test-suite randomly and remove them if and only if the reduced test-suite fulfills the same or similar coverage or mutation score. Such algorithms rely on the execution of the program and the repeated computation of coverage or mutation score. In this paper, we present an alternative approach that purely relies on a model learned from the original test-suite without requiring the execution of the program under test. The idea is to remove those tests that do not change the learned model. In order to evaluate the approach we carried out an experimental study showing that reductions of 60-99% are possible while still keeping coverage and mutation score almost the same.
Sex Differences in Heat Shock Protein 72 Expression in Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells to Acute Exercise in the Heat

Background: Heat shock protein 72 (Hsp72) is responsible for maintaining critical cellular function during heat stress. Hsp72 confers thermotolerance and may play a role in heat acclimation. Animal research suggests a difference between sexes in Hsp72 expression in response to exercise, however, human data is lacking. Objectives: To determine sex differences in intracellular heat shock protein 72 (Hsp72) following exercise in the heat. Patients and Methods: Nine non-heat acclimated women with normal menstrual cycles (VO2pk 58 ± 5 mL.kgFFM-1.min-1) and nine non-heat acclimated men (VO2pk 60 ± 7 ml.kgFFM-1.min-1) completed 2 treadmill bouts at 60% VO2pk for 60 min in a 42°C, 20% RH environment. Women were tested in follicular (fol) and luteal (lut) phases. The duplicate trials were separated by 12 days for men and women. Blood samples were drawn pre, immediately post, 1, and 4 hrs post-exercise. Results: Men and women differed in their Hsp72 response after exercise (time X sex X trial interaction; P < 0.05). Men increased Hsp72 after exercise more than women. Both men and women produced less Hsp72 during trial 2 compared to trial 1. Estrogen (r = 0.24; P > 0.05) and progesterone (r = 0.27, P > 0.05) concentrations were not correlated with Hsp72. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that men and women differ in their cellular stress response. Men up-regulated Hsp72 after a single bout of exercise in the heat, which persists for 12 days, suggesting an accumulation of Hsp72 which may lead to acquired cellular thermotolerance.
Progress report of a project in very low bit-rate speech coding

Background work in various levels of speech coding is reviewed, including unconstrained coding and recognition-synthesis approaches that assume the signal is speech. A pilot project in HMM-TTS based speech coding is then described, in which a comparison with harmonic plus noise modelling is also done. Results of the demonstration project including samples of speech under various transmission situations are presented in an accompanying web page. The report concludes by describing and enumerating the shortcomings of the demonstration system that define directions for future work. This work is a deliverable for the armasuisse funded project “RECOD - Low bit-rate speech coding”
Adolescent girls’ experiences of urban dance programmes: a qualitative analysis of Flemish initiatives targeting disadvantaged youth

Abstract A study on urban dance initiatives for disadvantaged girls in Flanders (Belgium) was set up, as there is little insight into the underlying social mechanisms that allow developmental benefits to occur for this group. A fieldwork approach, including observations at three dance sites and interviews with 25 participants, resulted in four main findings. First, the access to the programmes is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to foster developmental outcomes. Second, the participants described benefits across four main areas including sport-related skills, positive identity, social competencies and positive values. Third, there are various social mechanisms through which significant others, including adult staff and peers, can have an impact on participating youth’s perceived benefits. Identified mechanisms include observational learning, participants’ perceptions of coaches’ autonomy supportive behaviours, a caring climate and a motivational climate. Fourth, inherent characteristics of urban dance provide a context for facilitating an autonomy supportive coaching climate. This study adds to existing literature in the way it connects sport-related characteristics with young people’s opportunities for positive youth development.
The Role of Phosphoinositide 3-Kinases in Neutrophil Migration in 3D Collagen Gels

The entry of neutrophils into tissue has been well characterised; however the fate of these cells once inside the tissue microenvironment is not fully understood. A variety of signal transduction pathways including those involving class I PI3 Kinases have been suggested to be involved in neutrophil migration. This study aims to determine the involvement of PI3 Kinases in chemokinetic and chemotactic neutrophil migration in response to CXCL8 and GM-CSF in a three-dimensional collagen gel, as a model of tissue. Using a three-dimensional collagen assay chemokinetic and chemotactic migration induced by CXCL8 was inhibited with the pan PI3 Kinase inhibitor wortmannin. Analysis of the specific Class I PI3 Kinase catalytic isoforms alpha, delta and gamma using the inhibitors PIK-75, PIK-294 and AS-605240 respectively indicated differential roles in CXCL8-induced neutrophil migration. PIK-294 inhibited both chemokinetic and chemotactic CXCL8-induced migration. AS-605240 markedly reduced CXCL8 induced chemokinetic migration but had no effect on CXCL8 induced chemotactic migration. In contrast PIK-75 inhibited chemotactic migration but not chemokinetic migration. At optimal concentrations of GM-CSF the inhibitors had no effect on the percentage of neutrophil migration in comparison to the control however at suboptimal concentrations wortmannin, AS-605240 and PIK-294 inhibited chemokinesis. This study suggests that PI3 Kinase is necessary for CXCL8 induced migration in a 3D tissue environment but that chemokinetic and chemotactic migration may be controlled by different isoforms with gamma shown to be important in chemokinesis and alpha important in chemotaxis. Neutrophil migration in response to suboptimal concentrations of GM-CSF is dependent on PI3 Kinase, particularly the gamma and delta catalytic isoforms.
The Effects of Rainfall on the Population Dynamics of an Endangered Aquatic Plant, Schoenoplectus gemmifer (Cyperaceae)

The conservation of aquatic plants in river ecosystems should consider the wash-out (away) problem resulting from severe rainfall. The aquatic plant Schoenoplectus gemmifer is an endangered species endemic to Japan. Our previous study reported that the population size of S. gemmifer in Hamamatsu city, Japan, had decreased by one-tenth because many individuals had been washed out by a series of heavy rains in 2004. However, there is insufficient information on the ecological nature of this endangered aquatic plant for adequate conservation. In this paper, we report the population dynamics of one population in Hamamatsu city from 2004 to 2012 in relation to rainfall. We surveyed the number and growing location of all living individuals in the population 300 times during the study period. To examine the temporal changes of individual plants, we also counted the number of culms for 38 individuals in four observations among 300 records. Decreases and increases in the population size of this plant were associated with washing out and the settlement of gemmae (vegetative propagation), respectively. The major cause of the reduction in the population size was an increase in the number of washed-out individuals and not the decreased settlement of gemmae. The wash-out rates for small and large individuals were not significantly different. Small individuals having a stream form with linear leaves resisted flooding, and large individuals were often partially torn off by flooding events. Modification of river basins to reduce the flow velocity may be effective for the conservation of S. gemmifer.
The Well-Tempered Social Brain

taking scores for women were significantly higher than those for men (p < .01), the scores were divided based on gender. We defined low and high perspective taking as more than 1.5 standard deviations lower or higher than the average score, respectively. A total of 42 participants, 14 each (7 female, 7 male) with low, av- erage, and high perspective-taking scores, participated in the experiment. During the fMRI experiment, participants viewed, imitated, and produced social facial expressions or nonsocial facial movements. Social facial expressions are expressions used during social interactions (e.g., happiness, anger, surprise), whereas nonsocial facial movements are typically overlooked in social interactions (e.g., blinking, chewing, sneezing). For each partic- ipant, we obtained five time series for social facial expressions and nonsocial facial movements. During each time series, there were three conditions. In the viewing condition, participants passively viewed the video clips. During the imitation condition, participants imitated the expressions or facial movements that they saw in the video clip. Finally, during the production condi- tion, participants saw a word or phrase describing the expressions or facial movements and produced the action described. Partic- ipants practiced the task outside the scanner to ensure accurate performance.
DESIGN OF A HANDHELD INTERACTIVE SUPPORT FOR MUSEUM VISITORS

The growing availability of small devices has raised an interesting discussion on how to exploit them to support users in various contexts of use. We propose a solution that can be easily adopted for museum visitors. The basic elements are the use of a multimedia PDA whose main purpose is to support a user who can move freely about within a museum. The structure of the user interface allows users to easily orient themselves through appropriate visual representations and then sees to providing the information that can be interesting for them by exploiting the multimedia capabilities of the device.
Skeletal Rigid Skinning with Blending Patches on the GPU

In this paper, we present a novel skeletal rigid skinning approach. First, we introduce a skeleton extraction technique that produces refined skelet ons appropriate for animation from decomposed solid models. Then, to avoid the artifacts generated in previous rigid skinning approaches and the associated high training costs, we develop an efficient and robust rigid skinning technique that applies blending patches around joints. To achieve real time animation, we have implemented all steps of our rigid skinning algorithm on the GPU. Finally, we present an evaluation of our techniques against four criteria: efficiency, quality, scope and robustness.
Ranking pages and the topology of the web

This paper presents our studies on the rearrangement of links from the structure of websites for the purpose of improving the valuation of a page or group of pages as established by a ranking function as Google's PageRank. We build our topological taxonomy starting from unidirectional and bidirectional rooted trees, and up to more complex hierarchical structures as cyclical rooted trees (obtained by closing cycles on bidirectional trees) and PR--digraph rooted trees (digraphs whose condensation digraph is a rooted tree that behave like cyclical rooted trees). We give different modifications on the structure of these trees and its effect on the valuation given by the PageRank function. We derive closed formulas for the PageRank of the root of various types of trees, and establish a hierarchy of these topologies in terms of PageRank. We show that the PageRank of the root of cyclical and PR--digraph trees basically depends on the number of vertices per level and the number of cycles of distinct lengths among levels, and we give a closed vector formula to compute PageRank.
Computing invariants of hybrid system using quantifier elimination

This paper presents a new approach to generate inequalities invariants of hybrid system based on template and quantifier elimination. The main idea is to introduce a candidate parametric invariant as template and then reduce the verification condition into a quantifier elimination problem. The challenge is to deal with the continuous consecution condition of hybrid system because of the existence of differential equation. From the preliminary experiment results, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.
Reader-Response Theory as Antidote to Controversy: Teaching The Bluest Eye

The continual, if usually dormant, threat of censorship poses one of the most hair-raising problems for any high-school English teacher, not only because of the moral obligation to support freedom of speech as one of the tenets of our profession, but also because the more controversial (and therefore more likely to be censored) a work is, the more able its teacher must be to justify it in terms of its importance to a student's education. During the first four years that I taught, I had no particular difficulty in justifying either to myself, to students, or to parents, the value of any work I taught. In fact, I have seldom-if ever-even worried about the possibility of controversy associated with anything I was teaching. However, this year our highschool English department added Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye to the curriculum of the eleventhand twelfth-grade American Literature course I was teaching, and for the first time I was faced with the responsibility of teaching a work of literature which I knew was likely to arouse parental objection. Our department had been wanting to add to the curriculum a major work by an African American writer, and this particular one was recommended by our visiting committee during the North Central Association review. The committee's recommenda-
Multicast relay beamforming through dual approach

We consider physical layer multicasting in an amplify-and-forward multi-antenna relay network. Assuming each relay antenna has individual power budget, our objective is to design the relay processing matrix to minimize the maximum individual antenna power for a given received SNR target at each destination. As the problem is NP-hard, we propose an approximate solution by solving the problem in the Lagrange dual domain. Through this Lagrange dual approach, we reveal a prominent structure, which enables us to derive a semi-closed form expression for the relay processing matrix that depends on a set of dual variables. These dual variables can be determined through an efficient semi-definite programming formulation. Compared with the traditional semi-definite relaxation (SDR) approach, the proposed solution has much lower computational complexity. Furthermore, it produces the optimal solution if such solution can be extracted from the SDR approach. Thus, the proposed solution can serve as a good alternative to the SDR approach, for the performance and complexity trade-off.
QTL Analysis of Dietary Obesity in C57BL/6byj X 129P3/J F2 Mice: Diet- and Sex-Dependent Effects

Obesity is a heritable trait caused by complex interactions between genes and environment, including diet. Gene-by-diet interactions are difficult to study in humans because the human diet is hard to control. Here, we used mice to study dietary obesity genes, by four methods. First, we bred 213 F2 mice from strains that are susceptible [C57BL/6ByJ (B6)] or resistant [129P3/J (129)] to dietary obesity. Percent body fat was assessed after mice ate low-energy diet and again after the same mice ate high-energy diet for 8 weeks. Linkage analyses identified QTLs associated with dietary obesity. Three methods were used to filter candidate genes within the QTL regions: (a) association mapping was conducted using >40 strains; (b) differential gene expression and (c) comparison of genomic DNA sequence, using two strains closely related to the progenitor strains from Experiment 1. The QTL effects depended on whether the mice were male or female or which diet they were recently fed. After feeding a low-energy diet, percent body fat was linked to chr 7 (LOD = 3.42). After feeding a high-energy diet, percent body fat was linked to chr 9 (Obq5; LOD = 3.88), chr 12 (Obq34; LOD = 3.88), and chr 17 (LOD = 4.56). The Chr 7 and 12 QTLs were sex dependent and all QTL were diet-dependent. The combination of filtering methods highlighted seven candidate genes within the QTL locus boundaries: Crx, Dmpk, Ahr, Mrpl28, Glo1, Tubb5, and Mut. However, these filtering methods have limitations so gene identification will require alternative strategies, such as the construction of congenics with very small donor regions.
Cloud Client Prediction Models Using Machine Learning Techniques

One way to proactively provision resources and meet Service Level Agreements (SLA) is by predicting future resource demands a few minutes ahead because of Virtual Machine (VM) boot time. In this research, we have developed and evaluated cloud client prediction models for TPC-W benchmark web application using three machine learning techniques: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Networks (NN) and Linear Regression (LR). We have included two SLA metrics -- Response Time and Throughput with the aim of providing the client with a more robust scaling decision choice. As an improvement to our previous work, we implemented our model on a public cloud infrastructure: Amazon EC2. Furthermore, we extended the experimentation time by over 200%. Finally, we have employed random workload pattern to reflect a more realistic simulation. Our results show that Support Vector Machine provides the best prediction model.
Yeast RNase III as a key processing enzyme in small nucleolar RNAs metabolism.

The variety of biogenesis pathways for small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) reflects the diversity of their genomic organization. We have searched for yeast snoRNAs which are affected by the depletion of the yeast ortholog of bacterial RNase III, Rnt1. In a yeast strain inactivated for RNT1, almost half of the snoRNAs tested are depleted with significant accumulation of monocistronic or polycistronic precursors. snoRNAs from both major families of snoRNAs (C/D and H/ACA) are affected by RNT1 disruption. In vitro, recombinant Rnt1 specifically cleaves pre-snoRNA precursors in the absence of other factors, generating intermediates which require the action of other enzymes for processing to the mature snoRNA. Most Rnt1 cleavage sites fall within potentially double-stranded regions closed by tetraloops with a novel consensus sequence AGNN. These results demonstrate that biogenesis of a large number of snoRNAs from the two major families of snoRNAs requires a common RNA endonuclease and a putative conserved structural motif.
Non-LTE Line-Formation and Abundances of Sulfur and Zinc in F, G, and K Stars

Extensive statistical-equilibrium calculations on neutral sulfur and zinc were carried out, in order to investigate how the non-LTE effect plays a role in the determination of S and Zn abundances in F, G, and K stars. Having checked on the spectra of representative F-type stars (Polaris, Procyon, and alpha Per) and the Sun that our non-LTE corrections yield a reasonable consistency between the abundances derived from different lines, we tried an extensive non-LTE reanalysis of published equivalent-width data of S I and Zn I lines for metal-poor halo/disk stars. According to our calculations, S I 9212/9228/9237 lines suffer significant negative non-LTE corrections amounting to <~ 0.2--0.3 dex, while LTE is practically valid for S I 8683/8694 lines. Embarrassingly, as far as the very metal-poor regime is concerned, a marked discordance is observed between the [S/Fe] values from these two abundance indicators, in the sense that the former attains a nearly flat plateau (or even a slight downward bending) while the latter shows an ever-increasing trend with a further lowering of metallicity. The reason for this discrepancy is yet to be clarified. Regarding Zn, we almost confirmed the characteristic tendencies of [Zn/Fe] reported from recent LTE studies (i.e., an evident/slight increase of [Zn/Fe] with a decrease of [Fe/H] for very metal-poor/disk stars), since the non-LTE corrections for the Zn I 4722/4810 and 6362 lines (tending to be positive and gradually increasing towards lower [Fe/H]) are quantitatively of less significance (<~ 0.1 dex).
Performance Assessment of Control Loops

The main concern of this thesis is to assess control loop performance using minimum variance control by FCOR algorithm in a convenient way by using only routine operating data and comparing the outcomes with an existing algorithm (named PINDEX). Only by determining a performance factor of the feed-back control loop the controller performance could be assessed, even from thousands of control loops in process industries. Minimum variance is the benchmark which indicates attainable minimum variance against the actual variance of the control error. A performance index has been defined as the ratio of minimum variance to actual variance. Where, a performance index value close to 1 indicates good control a value close to 0 indicates poor control. The performance index is always bounded between 0 to1. The performance index calculation algorithm was implemented using MATLAB. A dynamic simulation study was performed using Aspen HYSIS for generating process data and also by SIMULINK. Various cases such as noise corruption, stiction and oscillation were introduced and the aftermath was studied and analyzed. Industrial data from an Ammonia plant (SAFCO) was also analyzed. All the results are compared with previously developed algorithm. This thesis will help to outline a very simple but effective way to detect performance of the controller in process systems.