Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Observing Others: Multiple Action Representation in the Frontal Lobe

Observation of actions performed by others activates monkey ventral premotor cortex, where action meaning, but not object identity, is coded. In a functional MRI (fMRI) study, we investigated whether other monkey frontal areas respond to actions performed by others. Observation of a hand grasping objects activated four frontal areas: rostral F5 and areas 45B, 45A, and 46. Observation of an individual grasping an object also activated caudal F5, which indicates different degrees of action abstraction in F5. Observation of shapes activated area 45, but not premotor F5. Convergence of object and action information in area 45 may be important for full comprehension of actions.
THE PERFORMANCE OF Moringa oleifera SEED POWDER SODIUM CHLORIDE EXTRACT ON NATURAL SURFACE WATER

The aim of this paper is to show the performance of M ringa oleifera sodium chloride extract on high turbidity natural surface water source (pond) water in the arid zone region of North East, Nigeria. Ei ght samples of collected high turbidity water were subj ected to varying doses of a combination of M oringa oleifera seed powder (sodium chloride extract) and the alum ini sulphate (alum). The effluent of the sedimentation tank (into which has been added the r aw water and crude sodium chloride M oringa oleifera alum extract) was collected and tested for salinity , temperature, colour, turbidity and pH after a per iod of settling period of two hours. The results show that Moringa oleifera crude sodium chloride seed powder extract performs as well as alum as a coagulant. Ho wever the results reveal that the use of a filter b d is indispensable when the Moringa oleifera active ingredients would be extracted using the so dium chloride (common salt). High total coliform removal efficie ncy in the slow sand filter medium was achieved aft er there were initial runs to “innoculate” the filter medium.
Evaluating the Impacts of Subsidies on Innovation Activities in Germany

Innovations are a key factor to ensure the competitiveness of establishments as well as to enhance the growth and wealth of nations. But more than any other economic activity, decisions about innovations are plagued by failures of the market mechanism. As a response, public instruments have been implemented to stimulate private innovation activities. The effectiveness of these measures, however, is ambiguous and calls for an empirical evaluation. In this paper we make use of the IAB Establishment Panel and apply various microeconometric methods to estimate the effect of public measures on innovation activities of German establishments. We find that neglecting sample selection due to observable as well as to unobservable characteristics leads to an overestimation of the treatment effect and that there are considerable differences with regard to size class and between West and East German establishments.
Xenopus Egg Extract Treatment Reduced Global DNA Methylation of Donor Cells and Enhanced Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer Embryo Development in Pigs

Abstract The efficiency to produce offspring by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is low. It has been showed that treatment of donor cells with Xenopus oocyte extract increased live births in ovine and handmade cloned embryo development in pigs. Scriptaid treatment after oocyte activation is another approach to improve SCNT efficiency. The present study was carried out to investigate (a) the effects of treatment of donor cells with Xenopus egg extract on donor cell DNA methylation at days 0 and 4 with two digitonin permeabilization concentrations (10 and 15 μg/mL), (b) the effects of treatment of donor cells with Xenopus egg extract on early development of cloned embryos, and (c) the effects of combined treatments, treating donor cells with extract before nuclear transfer and treatment of cloned embryos with scriptaid after oocyte activation, on embryo development. Compared to the control, a decrease of DNA methylation in donor cells was observed at 2.5 h after extract treatment. However, this effect was not observed after the cells were cultured for four more days. More embryos developed into blastocysts in the Xenopus egg extract-treated group than in the control (13.4±1.9% vs. 9.1±1.9%, p=0.01). Furthermore, scriptaid treatment of cloned embryos further increased the frequency of development to blastocyst, compared to the control reconstructed with the same extract-treated cells (22.5±0.9% vs. 15.3±0.9%, p<0.01). In addition, egg extract treatments increased the cell number in the blastocysts. This study demonstrated that Xenopus egg extract treatment reduced donor cell DNA methylation and enhanced the SCNT embryo development. Moreover, the combined treatments of donor cells with egg extract before nuclear transfer and of cloned embryos with scriptaid could improve cloned embryo development additively.
Translational molecular imaging for cancer

Although most clinical diagnostic imaging studies employ anatomic techniques such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, much of radiology research currently focuses on adapting these conventional methods to physiologic imaging as well as on introducing new techniques and probes for studying processes at the cellular and molecular levels in vivo, i.e. molecular imaging. Molecular imaging promises to provide new methods for the early detection of cancer and support for personalized cancer therapy. Although molecular imaging has been practiced in various incarnations for over 20 years in the context of nuclear medicine, other imaging modalities have only recently been applied to the noninvasive assessment of physiology and molecular events. Nevertheless, there has been sufficient experience with specifically targeted contrast agents and high-resolution techniques for MR imaging and other modalities that we must begin moving these new technologies from the laboratory to the clinic. This brief review outlines several of the more promising areas of pursuit in molecular imaging for oncology with an emphasis on those that show the most immediate likelihood for clinical translation.
Neural Network Based Method for Melamine Analysis in Liquid Milk

We propose the use of spectroscopy data – produced by near-infrared (near-IR/NIR) and mid-infrared (mid-IR/MIR) spectroscopies, in particular – for melamine detection in complex dairy matrixes. It was found that infrared spectroscopy is an effective tool to detect melamine in liquid milk. The limit of detection (LOD) below 1 ppm (0.75 ppm) can be reached if a correct spectrum pre-processing (pre-treatment) technique and a correct multivariate (MDA) algorithm: partial least squares regression (PLS), polynomial PLS (Poly-PLS), or artificial neural network (ANN) – is used for spectrum analysis. It can be concluded that mid- and near-infrared spectroscopy can be regarded as a quick, sensitive, robust, and low-cost method for liquid milk analysis. The technique can be applied for the automation of milk analysis.
Goal-driven modulation as a function of time in saccadic target selection

Four experiments were performed to investigate the contribution of goal-driven modulation in saccadic target selection as a function of time. Observers were required to make an eye movement to a prespecified target that was concurrently presented with multiple nontargets and possibly one distractor. Target and distractor were defined in different dimensions (orientation dimension and colour dimension in Experiment 1), or were both defined in the same dimension (i.e., both defined in the orientation dimension in Experiment 2, or both defined in the colour dimension in Experiments 3 and 4). The identities of target and distractor were switched over conditions. Speed–accuracy functions were computed to examine the full time course of selection in each condition. There were three major results. First, the ability to exert goal-driven control increased as a function of response latency. Second, this ability depended on the specific target–distractor combination, yet was not a function of whether target and distractor were defined within or across dimensions. Third, goal-driven control was available earlier when target and distractor were dissimilar than when they were similar. It was concluded that the influence of goal-driven control in visual selection is not all or none, but is of a continuous nature.
Coordinate Transmissions Centrally: A Cross-Layer Approach for WLANs

This paper represents the design, feasibility evaluation and performance validation of concurrency-based coordination mechanism (CCM), a novel cross-layer protocol that can coordinate among nodes effectively to avoid data packet interference in wireless local area networks (WLANs), achieving higher throughput compared to 802.11 standard and other state-of-the-art protocols. The design of CCM contains OpenCCM which is based on the architecture of software defined network to schedule the transmissions in both the uplink and downlink directions centrally to maximize transmission concurrency. It also contains an interference-resistant mechanism in the physical layer that can make the control message transmitted with the data packet simultaneously to eliminate the coordination overhead. Experiment results with USRP2 demonstrate the feasibility of the interference-resistant mechanism, and the simulations by ns-2 show that CCM can outperform other protocols significantly.
Dynamic Programming Method Applied in Vietnamese Word Segmentation Based on Mutual Information among Syllables

Vietnamese word segmentation is an important step in Vietnamese natural language processing such as text categorization, text summary, and automated machine translation. The problem with Vietnamese word segmentation is complicated because Vietnamese words are not always separated by a space. One word can include one or more syllables depending on the context. This paper proposes a method for Vietnamese word segmentation based on the mutual information among the syllables combined with dynamic programming. With this method, we can achieve an accuracy rate of about 90% with a raw text corpus.
Election Campaigning in East and Southeast Asia : Globalization of Political Marketing

Contents: Preface The globalization of political marketing: an introduction, Christian Schafferer Electoral campaigning in Japan, Christian Schafferer with Kawakami Kazuhisa Electoral campaigning in Taiwan, Christian Schafferer Electoral campaigning in Malaysia, Lim Hong Hai and Ong Kian Ming Electoral campaigning in the Philippines, Julio Teehankee Is there an Asian style of electoral campaigning? , Christian Schafferer Bibliography Index.
GOSSIP: a method for fast and accurate global alignment of protein structures

MOTIVATION The database of known protein structures (PDB) is increasing rapidly. This results in a growing need for methods that can cope with the vast amount of structural data. To analyze the accumulating data, it is important to have a fast tool for identifying similar structures and clustering them by structural resemblance. Several excellent tools have been developed for the comparison of protein structures. These usually address the task of local structure alignment, an important yet computationally intensive problem due to its complexity. It is difficult to use such tools for comparing a large number of structures to each other at a reasonable time. RESULTS Here we present GOSSIP, a novel method for a global all-against-all alignment of any set of protein structures. The method detects similarities between structures down to a certain cutoff (a parameter of the program), hence allowing it to detect similar structures at a much higher speed than local structure alignment methods. GOSSIP compares many structures in times which are several orders of magnitude faster than well-known available structure alignment servers, and it is also faster than a database scanning method. We evaluate GOSSIP both on a dataset of short structural fragments and on two large sequence-diverse structural benchmarks. Our conclusions are that for a threshold of 0.6 and above, the speed of GOSSIP is obtained with no compromise of the accuracy of the alignments or of the number of detected global similarities. AVAILABILITY A server, as well as an executable for download, are available at http://bioinfo3d.cs. tau.ac. il/gossip/.
Equity and equality in HR-work in South Africa. : HR professionals’ perspective.

In this thesis we have studied equality and equity from an HR perspective in South Africa. The study is partly made from an inductive approach and an analytical interpretation in line with hermeneutic has been used. The data is mainly contracted from interviews with HR professionals within various South African organizations. A mix of snowball and convenience sample has been used and among our respondents there are a variety and mix of the following variables: gender, position (manager/practitioner), race (blacks/white) and organization sector(public/parastatal/private). Our main findings are that equality and equity are highly debated topics and that the laws regulating them have a major effect on the HR professionals’ dailywork. The study gives us various perspectives of employment equity but a majority of our respondents do believe that the regulation of employment equity is needed. We find that there are obstacles for achieving equality in South African workplaces and our respondents have given us examples of different ways of how to tackle them. Many of our respondents are also of the opinion that there is a lack of implementation of the regulations and that it is time to rewrite several Acts.
Target pose computation for nonholonomic mobile manipulators

This paper presents a path planning algorithm for nonholonomic mobile manipulators that computes the robot trajectory by maximizing a performance index that combines manipulability and pose stability measures. The objective of this method is to find the best platform location when the robot end-effector reaches a given pose or tracks a desired trajectory. Furthermore, the proposed approach decouples the path planning computation from the robot control, thus maximizing manipulability and stability, and accounting for the nonholonomic constraints at the execution phase. The method proposed is suitable for free roaming and for obstacle avoidance maneuvers. The proposed method is validated by simulation examples and results are presented.
Formalized Proof of Type Safety of Hoare Type Theory

We prove type safety of the Hoare Type Theory (HTT), an extension of Separation Logic and Hoare Logic to higher-order functional programs. Our proof is rather simple and is based on subject reduction, unlike previous work on HTT by Birkedal et al., which uses nontrivial denotational semantics. Further, we formalized our proof in the Coq theorem prover. This formalization can be seen as a basis of a platform for verifying higher-order imperative programs that is alternative to Ynot, another implementation of HTT in Coq. 1 Background and Contributions The use of dependent types as expressive specifications for functional programs is an active topic of research. Unfortunately, research progress in verification of side-effecting programs has been slower despite the importance of this topic. In functional programs, limited use of assignment, for example, is both convenient and common; most dialects of ML include mutable references, and Haskell allows assignment using monads. On the other hand, Hoare logic has been used for over forty years to specify and prove imperative programs. Hoare logic uses formulas, or assertions, of first-order logic (or some other chosen logic) to describe heaps, i.e., memory segments. We will write h |= P whenever an assertion P is true on a heap h. The derivable judgments of Hoare logic are triples {P}M{Q} where M is a program and P and Q are assertions, called respectively preand postconditions. The triple {P}M{Q} means that if h |= P for some h, then M , starting with h, works without errors and, if it finishes computation with another heap h′, then h′ |= Q. We developed an analog of Hoare logic (and its extension, separation logic [6]) for a small functional programming language with assignments. Our goal was not the creation of an effective platform for verifying real-life programs; rather,
Entity Disambiguation based on a Probabilistic Taxonomy

This paper presents a method for entity disambiguation, one of the most substantial tasks for machines to understand text in natural languages. In a natural language, terms have ambiguity, e.g. “Barcelona” usually means a Spanish city but it can also refer to a professional football club. In our work, we utilize a probabilistic taxonomy that is as rich as our mental world in terms of the concepts of worldly facts it contains. We then employ a naive Bayes probabilistic model to disambiguate a term by identifying its related terms in the same document. Specifically, our method consists of two steps: clustering related terms and conceptualizing the cluster using the probabilistic taxonomy. We cluster related terms probabilistically instead of using any threshold-based deterministic clustering approach. Our method automatically adjusts the relevance weight between two terms by taking the topic of the document into consideration. This enables us to perform clustering without using a sensitive, predefined threshold. Then, we conceptualize all possible clusters using the probabilistic taxonomy, and we aggregate the probabilities of each concept to find the most likely one. Experimental results show that our method outperforms threshold-based methods with optimally set thresholds as well as several gold standard approaches for entity disambiguation.
Advances in environmental accounting & management

The identification, measurement, and reporting of corporate social impacts - past, present, and future, M.J. Epstein legitimacy and the internet - an examination of corporate web page environmental disclosures, D.M. Patten, W. Crampton impact of the Clean Air Act of 1990 on pollution disclosures by electric utilities, M. Freedman et al financial analysts' views of the value of environmental information, H.G. Hunt III, D. Jacque Grinnell the impact of corporate social responsibility on the informativeness of earnings and accounting choices, A. Riahi-Belkaoui an assessment of the quality of environmental disclosure themes, W.D. Walden, A.J. Stagliano.
<> <> Web Site Visualization by Hierarchical Data Visualization Technique " Data Jewelry Box "

There are many hierarchical data in daily lives, such as file systems, human resources of companies, and web sites. We have proposed new visualization method for hierarchical data, " Data Jewelry Box " algorithm, which displays overviews of huge hierarchical data in one window. This paper presents the overview of " Data Jewelry Box " algorithm, and proposes a web site visualization tool using the algorithm. Our tool constructs directory-based hierarchical data of a web site, and represents its sitemap by " Data Jewelry Box " algorithm. The tool represents web pages as icons, and directories as nested rectangles. Importing web access log file, our tool automatically builds access statistics bar charts in addition to the web sitemap. Our tool provides a user interface which displays number of accesses onto a sitemap when user clicks a part of bar chats. This paper shows interesting access trends discovered by using our tool.
An IDEF 1 x Information Model for a Supply Chain Simulation

This paper describes the scope and configuration of the simulation model that is under development for a manufacturing supply chain. An information model that serves as a neutral interface specification is also presented in the paper. The supply chain simulation model described here is being developed to validate interface specifications as part of the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) Modeling and Simulation Environments for Design, Planning and Operation of Globally Distributed Enterprises (MISSION) project [1]. This simulation model is largely based upon the practical business operations of a U.S. power-tools manufacturing company. The information model has been developed using the IDEF1X information modeling language [2]. The information model can ultimately be used to integrate distributed simulation models that are developed by other manufacturers to model their supply chains.
Organizational Structures for Multi-Agent Architectures Application to Lego Mindstorms Mobile Robots

This paper proposes architectural styles for multi-agent systems (MAS) which adopt concepts from organization theory and strategic alliances. In particular, we discuss here the structure-in-5 and joint venture styles. These structures consist of actors who have goals to fulfill and social dependencies describing their obligations. They are represented in i*, a framework designed to model social and intentional primitives and formalized in Formal Tropos. Each proposed style is evaluated with respect to a set of agent software qualities, such as predictability, adaptability and openness. The styles are evaluated and contrasted with a software architecture for mobile robots, notably Lego® Mindstorms TM .
FINE-TUNE YOUR SMILE CORRECTION TO HAGAN ET AL

Using results derived in Berestycki et al. [1] we correct the celebrated formulae of Hagan et al. [4, 3]. We derive explicitly the correct zero order term in the expansion of the implied volatility in time to maturity. The new term is consistent as β → 1. Furthermore, numerical simulations show that it reduces or eliminates known pathologies of the earlier formula. In this small note1 we comment the celebrated formulae of Hagan and Woodward [4] and Hagan et al. [3], point out some inconsistencies and compare them with the results of Berestycki et al. [1]. Consider the following model for the underlying (we take r = 0 which should be interpreted as St representing the forward value process) { dSt = σtS β t dW 1 t , S0 = s, dσt = νσtdW 2 t , σ0 = α, where d〈W 1,W 〉t = ρdt, (1) β ∈ (0, 1), |ρ| ≤ 1, which is known as the SABR model. We take ν ≥ 0 and note that putting ν = 0 we obtain a local volatility model. Consider now the Taylor expansion of the implied volatility surface in time to maturity τ I = I0(x, τ) = I (1 + Iτ) + O(τ), (2) where I0, I1 are functions of x. Hagan et al. [3] were first to obtain explicit expressions for I0 and I1. They used perturbation theory (combined with impressive intuition). More recently, Berestycki et al. [1] treated the subject in a rigorous analytical manner. They proved in particular that I0(x) = limτ→0 I(x, τ) is well defined and characterized it via a solution to eikonal equation (or via Varadhan’s signed geodesic distance). We now compare their expression for I0 with that of [3] and of [4] (case of ν = 0). Let K be the strike and put x = ln(s/K). Direct, but somewhat tedious, computations yield Date: August 2007. Please send comments to: j.obloj@imperial.ac. uk. 1 The present note is an excerpt from a survey paper (in preparation) about the asymptotics and dynamics of implied volatility surface originating from a seminar I co-organised at Imperial College in 2006/2007. I take the opportunity to thank Dr Mijatović and all the participants for fruitful discussions. 1
Converging MQTT Resources in ETSI Standards Based M2M Platform

One of the key challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the integration of heterogeneous technologies and communications solutions. This paper proposes a method to integrate Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol with the ETSI M2M architecture via a new network function called MQTT proxy. The MQTT proxy, on the one side, acts as an MQTT broker to the MQTT clients. While on the other side, it serves as a Gateway Application (GA) for interfacing with the ETSI M2M-compliant architecture, specifically OpenMTC developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS. By the MQTT Proxy, MQTT resources can be converged in the ETSI M2M architecture. Finally, we compare the MQTT Proxy with our previous HTTP Proxy.