Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works

This is a close textual analysis of Rushdie's five major novels: 'Midnights Children', 'Shame', 'The Satanic Verses', 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories', and 'The Moor's Last Sigh'. Rushdie recognizes that practicing identity politics leads to nativism and nationalism, categories he rejects because they merely invert the colonizer/colonized binary, leaving violent hierarchies intact. His impulse is to deconstruct the colonizer/colonized binary and in doing so to clear a "new" postmodern space. This text employs post-structuralist/postmodern theory not only to address the issues of representation that Rushdies raises in his major political novels, but also to faciliate a discussion of the manner in which he pushes the boundaries of the modern novel.
In Vivo Visualization of Tumor Antigen-containing Microparticles Generated in Fluorescent-protein-elicited Immunity

In vivo optical spatio-temporal imaging of the tumor microenvironment is useful to explain how tumor immunotherapies work. However, the lack of fluorescent antigens with strong immunogenicity makes it difficult to study the dynamics of how tumors are eliminated by any given immune response. Here, we develop an effective fluorescent model antigen based on the tetrameric far-red fluorescent protein KatushkaS158A (tfRFP), which elicits both humoral and cellular immunity. We use this fluorescent antigen to visualize the dynamic behavior of immunocytes as they attack and selectively eliminate tfRFP-expressing tumors in vivo; swarms of immunocytes rush toward tumors with high motility, clusters of immunocytes form quickly, and numerous antigen-antibody complexes in the form of tfRFP+ microparticles are generated in the tumor areas and ingested by macrophages in the tumor microenvironment. Therefore, tfRFP, as both a model antigen and fluorescent reporter, is a useful tool to visualize specific immune responses in vivo.
Estimation of the variation of prices using high-frequency financial data

﻿ When high-frequency data is available, realised variance and realised absolute variation can be calculated from intra-day prices. In the context of a stochastic volatility model, realised variance and realised absolute variation can estimate the integrated variance and the integrated spot volatility respectively. A central limit theory enables us to do filtering and smoothing using model-based and model-free approaches in order to improve the precision of these estimators. When the log-price process involves a finite activity jump process, realised variance estimates the quadratic variation of both continuous and jump components. Other consistent estimators of integrated variance can be constructed on the basis of realised multipower variation, i.e., realised bipower, tripower and quadpower variation. These objects are robust to jumps in the log-price process. Therefore, given adequate asymptotic assumptions, the difference between realised multipower variation and realised variance can provide a tool to test for jumps in the process. Realised variance becomes biased in the presence of market microstructure effect, meanwhile realised bipower, tripower and quadpower variation are more robust in such a situation. Nevertheless there is always a trade-off between bias and variance; bias is due to market microstructure noise when sampling at high frequencies and variance is due to the asymptotic assumptions when sampling at low frequencies. By subsampling and averaging realised multipower variation this effect can be reduced, thereby allowing for calculations with higher frequencies.
A gene to organism approach—assessing the impact of environmental pollution in eelpout (Zoarces viviparus) females and larvae

A broad biomarker approach was applied to study the effects of marine pollution along the Swedish west coast using the teleost eelpout (Zoarces viviparus) as the sentinel species. Measurements were performed on different biological levels, from the molecular to the organismal, including measurements of messenger RNA (mRNA), proteins, cellular and tissue changes, and reproductive success. Results revealed that eelpout captured in Stenungsund had significantly higher hepatic ethoxyresorufin O‐deethylase activity, high levels of both cytochrome P4501A and diablo homolog mRNA, and high prevalence of dead larvae and nuclear damage in erythrocytes. Eelpout collected in Göteborg harbor displayed extensive macrovesicular steatosis, whereby the majority of hepatocytes were affected throughout the liver, which could indicate an effect on lipid metabolism. Results also indicate that eelpouts collected at polluted sites might have an affected immune system, with lower mRNA expression of genes involved in the innate immune system and a higher number of lymphocytes. Biomarker assessment also was performed on livers dissected from unborn eelpout larvae collected from the ovary of the females. No significant differences were noted, which might indicate that the larvae to some extent are protected from effects of environmental pollutants. In conclusion, usage of the selected set of biological markers, covering responses from gene to organism, has demonstrated site‐specific biomarker patterns that provided a broad and comprehensive picture of the impact of environmental stressors. Environ Toxicol Chem 2015;34:1511–1523. © 2015 The Authors. Published by SETAC.
Susceptibility of Opportunistic Burkholderia glumae to Copper Surfaces Following Wet or Dry Surface Contact

Burkholderia glumae has been proposed to have a potential risk to vulnerable communities. In this work, we investigated the antibacterial activity and mechanism of copper surfaces against multi-drug resistant B. glumae from both patients and rice plants. The susceptibility of B. glumae to copper surfaces was noted by a significant decline in viable bacterial counts, relative to the slight reduction of stainless steel and polyvinylchloride, both of which were used as control surfaces. The mode of action of bacterial killing was determined by examing the mutagenicity, DNA damage, copper ions accumulation, and membrane damage in bacterial cells. The results indicated that the cells exposed to copper surfaces did not cause severe DNA lesions or increase the mutation frequencies, but resulted in a loss of cell membrane integrity within minutes. Furthermore, bacterial cells exposed to copper surfaces accumulated significantly higher amounts of copper compared to control surfaces. Overall, this study showed that metallic copper had strong antibacterial effect against B. glumae by causing DNA and membrane damage, cellular accumulation of copper, and cell death following DNA degradation, which could be utilized to reduce the risk of bacterial contamination and infection.
Distribution and Propagation of Hepatitis E Virus in Experimentally Infected Swine

HEV infections in human and pigs have been reported in many countries; however, the precise distribution and multiplication of this virus in the host remains poorly understood. In this study, we examined the distribution and multi- plication of HEV genotype 3 in two piglets at the early phase of intravenous infection, and also examined the virus distri- bution in a naturally infected pig. We developed real-time RT-PCR to determine copy numbers of the HEV genome in the sera, feces and organs. HEV-RNA was detected in serum from a pig transiently for 7 days post-inoculation (dpi). The HEV copy numbers in the feces appearing 7 dpi were increased to 3.4x10 6 copies/g at 14 dpi. In contrast, the higher copy numbers of HEV were widely distributed in the tissue organs from naturally HEV-infected pig. The study showed that in- travenously inoculated HEV was distributed in several restricted tissues, such as in the liver and intestine.
Creation of Multi Agent Resource Conversion Processes Model and Simulation Modeling System

The mathematical model of multi agent resource conversion processes (RCP) is developed by the means of discrete-event simulation systems and expert systems. Within the framework of mathematical model RCP are defined: production system of the RCP structure and rules transformation structure, that taking into account conflicts origin. The discrete-event simulation system "BPsim" is developed on the basis of the RCP mathematical model
Speech and gesture understanding in a homeostatic control framework for a robotic chandelier

We describe a home lighting robot that uses directional spotlights to create complex lighting scenes. The robot senses its visual environment using a panoramic camera and attempts to maintain its target goal state by adjusting the positions and intensities of its lights. Users can communicate desired changes in the lighting environment through speech and gesture (e.g., "Make it brighter over there"). Information obtained from these two modalities are combined to form a goal, a desired change in the lighting of the scene. This goal is then incorporated into the system's target goal state. When the target goal state and the world are out of alignment, the system formulates a sensorimotor plan that acts on the world to return the system to homeostasis. Thesis Supervisor: Deb Roy Title: Associate Professor
Citation Block Determination Using Textual Coherence

This work has been funded in part by the Microsoft 2008 WEBSCALE grant, as well as by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Department of Interior National Business Center (DoI/NBC) contract number D11PC20153. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. Disclaimer: The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of IARPA, DoI/NBC, or the U.S. Government.
Two Phase Commit on Persistent Key Value Store with Data Replication

We implemented a distributed transaction processing sys-tem where data is partitioned and mapped to diﬀerent shards. All shards are replicated to enhance the availability and durability of the system. The database model is simple key-value store inherited from Lab 4. The objectives of the project are 1) to process transaction using two phase commit and guarantee atomic execution, 2) to persistently store data and server status on disk to tolerate server failures. The requests of a transaction consist of GET, PUT, and ADD. To simplify implementation, the only scenario of aborting a transaction is that it has an add request that results a negative value. Firstly, we implemented a coarse-grained locking scheme where a transaction locks the groups it touches. In order to achieve better performance gains, we later reﬁned our system with a ﬁne-grained locking scheme where a transaction locks the keys it touches. Secondly, we implemented test cases to verify the correctness of the system under diﬀerent failure scenarios including unreliable networks and server failures. Lastly we benchmark our sys-tem with synthetic workloads that varies with parameters like distribution of number of groups a transaction accesses, read/write ratios of a transaction, number of clients and so on.
Persuasive strategies for motivating elders to exercise

Several strategies have been identified for designing effective persuasive technologies that encourage people to adopt healthy lifestyle habits. However, there are no general guidelines for implementing these strategies to motivate elders to exercise, neither they have been evaluated to determine how effective they are for the elderly. To design appropriate persuasive technology prone to be adopted by elders, we are following a user-centered approach. In this paper, we report the design and evaluation of an ambient information system for mobile phones, which supports the following strategies for persuasion: abstraction, historical information and reflection, triggers for exercising, and positive and playful reinforcement.
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology Image-based Modeling: a Review

We review work on image-based 3D modelling. 3D modelling entails the availability of complete 3D coordinates, and yet obtaining the coordinates is one of the most difficult tasks. Resorting to using 2D images appears a promising means to achieve this task and has been much reported. Prevalent methods are the shape from shading, photometry, stereopsis, photogrammetry and the video approach. Shape from shading takes minimal input (one image) but requires huge mathematical complexity. Photometry takes in at least twice as much input but produces more accurate results. Stereopsis takes in input of similar order but offers even better accuracy with less mathematical complexity. Photogrammetry uses even more input and produces good results in some types of applications. Video approach does away with assumptions in the previous methods and produces good results. However, stereopsis, photogrammetry and video approaches suffer from the correspondence problem. 1 INTRODUCTION In 3D applications, geometrical objects such as spheres or regular polyhedrons can be easily modelled. When irregular objects like those of human being and animals need to be incorporated, the task becomes more challenging and daunting. The main problem lies in determining the 3D coordinates. Some techniques have already been deployed to address this issue. Horn's seminal work to acquire 3D data from a single image (hence termed 'shape from shading') was notable (Horn, 1970). Decent results were obtained with creative and innovative approaches to model 3D objects have been attempted and developed; among which are shape from stereopsis (Akimoto et al. Since all these works were based on 2D images, we now look at some of their basic relevant characteristics. A digital image is composed of a rectangular array of pixels (picture elements). A pixel holds the value of brightness at that particular discrete point usually using a combination of RGB (red, blue and green) colour space. Without loss of generality, a highly magnified section of an 8-by-8 pixel grey-scale digital image may be represented like the picture in Figure 1, where each small square represents a pixel. The light intensity value for each pixel that makes up the letter 'L', for example, may have a very low pixel value, while other pixels (white squares) have values one. We can use these brightness intensities to derive the depth (z-coordinates); the x-and y-coordinates can be arbitrarily determined. However, direct use of these pixel values will not give good results. The resulting intensities of the image are …
Coding theory and projective spaces

The projective space of order $n$ over a finite field $\F_q$ is a set of all subspaces of the vector space $\F_q^{n}$. In this work, we consider error-correcting codes in the projective space, focusing mainly on constant dimension codes. We start with the different representations of subspaces in the projective space. These representations involve matrices in reduced row echelon form, associated binary vectors, and Ferrers diagrams. Based on these representations, we provide a new formula for the computation of the distance between any two subspaces in the projective space. We examine lifted maximum rank distance (MRD) codes, which are nearly optimal constant dimension codes. We prove that a lifted MRD code can be represented in such a way that it forms a block design known as a transversal design. The incidence matrix of the transversal design derived from a lifted MRD code can be viewed as a parity-check matrix of a linear code in the Hamming space. We find the properties of these codes which can be viewed also as LDPC codes. We present new bounds and constructions for constant dimension codes. First, we present a multilevel construction for constant dimension codes, which can be viewed as a generalization of a lifted MRD codes construction. This construction is based on a new type of rank-metric codes, called Ferrers diagram rank-metric codes. Then we derive upper bounds on the size of constant dimension codes which contain the lifted MRD code, and provide a construction for two families of codes, that attain these upper bounds. We generalize the well-known concept of a punctured code for a code in the projective space to obtain large codes which are not constant dimension. We present efficient enumerative encoding and decoding techniques for the Grassmannian. Finally we describe a search method for constant dimension lexicodes.
An amplifier and capacitor sharing technique using recycling folded cascode operational amplifier with applications in MDAC of CMOS pipelined ADC

An amplifier and capacitor sharing technique with applications in a multiplying digital-to-analog converter (MDAC) of CMOS pipelined ACDC is presented. The amplifier used in this implementation is a recycling amplifier based on the folded cascode operational amplifier with gain improved using positive feedback. The operational amplifier designed in 0.35um CMOS process show a simulated gain of 75 dB, frequency bandwidth of 95 MHz, phase margin of 75 degree and power consumption of 0.75 mW on a 1.8V power supply. The simulation results in MDAC of 1.5 bits show that this configuration can be used in a implementation of a 10 bits 10 MSample/s CMOS pipelined ADC with 2.8 mW power consumption (analog part) on a 1.8V supply.
Graph Based Approach for the Question Answering Task Based on Entrance Exams

This paper describes the approach used in the system for the Question Answering Task based on Entrance Exams, which was presented at the CLEF 2014. The task aims to evaluate methods of text understanding with reading comprehension tests. The system should read a given document and answer multiple-choice questions about it. Our approach transforms the documents along with the multiple-choice answers into a graph-based representation that contains lexical, morphological, and syntactic features. After this, it traverses different paths both in the document itself and in the the graphs of the answers in order to find these features of the graphs. It is performed by counting text components: lemmas, PoS tags, grammatical tags. As the result of this procedure, the system constructs several feature vectors: one for each traversed graph. Finally, a cosine based similarity is calculated over these feature vectors in order to rank the multiple-choice answers and select the correct one—with the best similarity with the graph that corresponds to the text itself. Our system obtained a c@1 of 0.375, which was outperformed only by one system in the competition.
Verito: A Practical System for Transparency and Accountability in Virtual Economies

Purchase of virtual goods and services is now a major source of revenue for developers on platforms like Facebook, Xbox, and iOS. These virtual economies are typically based on users maintaining a stored-value account of virtual-currency (purchased with real-currency) with the platform. While the model is similar to that of a bank, these economies lack transparency and regulatory oversight that protect a consumer’s financial interests. We propose Verito, a practical solution that provides transparency and accountability in this context. We combine state-of-the-art cryptographic constructs in novel ways to design a system that provides four desirable properties, viz., transparency (money-in equals money-out), fairness (users treated equally), non-repudiation (users’ virtual money is safe), and scalability (low processing and storage costs). Our design also accommodates nuances such as support for multiple-currencies, and defense against arbitrage, while addressing scalability bottlenecks. We present an experimental evaluation based on our implementation of Verito and study its performance characteristics. Overall, we show that it is possible to protect consumer interests in virtual economies in a practical manner, without relying only
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) 1-1-2010 An Ontology-Based Natural Language Service Discovery Engine – Design and Experimental Evaluation

Around the globe, we are witnessing a transition from a primarily goods-based to a service-based economy. At the same time, advances in information technology provide significant opportunities for the electronic provisioning of services via the internet. As a result, more and more services are being traded online. Just as search tools are indispensable to discover information or goods on the web, they will become vital for discovering services on the web. In this paper we present Themis-S, a prototype of an ontology-based natural language service discovery engine. In a series of experiments, we evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of Themis-S in comparison to other state-of-the-art information retrieval models. The experiments indicate that Themis-S, incorporating WordNet as a general purpose ontology, can outperform systems applying syntactic information retrieval models such as the Vector Space Model (VSM) or the Probabilistic Relevance Model (PRM).
Towards Fast Detecting Intrusions: Using Key Attributes of Network Traffic

Extracting attributes from network traffic is the first step of network intrusion detection. However, the question of what attributes are most effective for the detection still remains. In this paper, we employed information gain, wrapper with Bayesian networks (BN) and decision trees (C4.5) respectively to select key subsets of attributes for network intrusion detection based on KDD Cup 1999 data. We then used the selected 10 attributes to detect DDoS attacks in the real environments. The empirical results based on KDD Cup 1999 data as well as DDoS attack data show that only using the 10 attributes, the detection accuracy almost remains the same or even becomes better compared with that of using all the 41 attributes with both BN and C4.5 classifiers. Using a small subset of attributes also improves the efficiency of intrusion detection.
A Note on the Stability of Lognormal Interest Rate Models and the Pricing of Eurodollar Futures

The lognormal distribution assumption for the term structure of interest is the most natural way to exclude negative spot and forward rates. However, imposing this assumption on the continuously compounded interest rate has a serious drawback: rates explode and expected rollover returns are infinite even if the rollover period is arbitrarily short. As a consequence, such models cannot price one of the most widely used hedging instruments on the Euromoney market, namely the Eurodollar futures contract.
Socio-Political and Economic Influences on Consumers' Willingness to Punish Irresponsible Corporate Behaviour Across 30 Countries

This paper explores the relationship between consumer behaviour, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and a set of socio-political and economic factors using a sample of nearly 90,000 stakeholders drawn from 30 countries over the period 2000-2003. We develop a set of hypotheses relating consumers' willingness to punish poor CSR to a number of economic, social and political indicators. Our results show that globalisation, free markets and the development of liberal citizenship rights increase the willingness and ability of consumers to regulate firm behaviour and to punish bad CSR. However we find very limited evidence that government involvement makes much of a difference. Paradoxically, these market oriented implications contradict the Friedman (1970) view since they suggest that when exposed to market pressures and, "free-to-choose," consumers firms have to pay more attention to social concerns not less as implied by the, "shareholder-only," view. The observation that consumer attitudes to CSR depend on social and institutional differences between countries has implications for our understanding of CSR and for the development and assessment of theoretical models of CSR in different contexts. Further our results provide insights into how CSR strategies might be designed by multinational firms and addressed by NGOs and for how government policy in this area should be devised and implemented.