Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Oral Glucosamine for 6 Weeks at Standard Doses Does Not Cause or Worsen Insulin Resistance or Endothelial Dysfunction in Lean or Obese Subjects

Glucosamine is a popular nutritional supplement used to treat osteoarthritis. Intravenous administration of glucosamine causes insulin resistance and endothelial dysfunction. However, rigorous clinical studies evaluating the safety of oral glucosamine with respect to metabolic and cardiovascular pathophysiology are lacking. Therefore, we conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover trial of oral glucosamine at standard doses (500 mg p.o. t.i.d.) in lean (n = 20) and obese (n = 20) subjects. Glucosamine or placebo treatment for 6 weeks was followed by a 1-week washout and crossover to the other arm. At baseline, and after each treatment period, insulin sensitivity was assessed by hyperinsulinemic-isoglycemic glucose clamp (SIClamp) and endothelial function evaluated by brachial artery blood flow (BAF; Doppler ultrasound) and forearm skeletal muscle microvascular recruitment (ultrasound with microbubble contrast) before and during steady-state hyperinsulinemia. Plasma glucosamine pharmacokinetics after oral dosing were determined in each subject using a high-performance liquid chromatography method. As expected, at baseline, obese subjects had insulin resistance and endothelial dysfunction when compared with lean subjects (SIClamp [median {25th–75th percentile}] = 4.3 [2.9–5.3] vs. 7.3 [5.7–11.3], P < 0.0001; insulin-stimulated changes in BAF [% over basal] = 12 [−6 to 84] vs. 39 [2–108], P < 0.04). When compared with placebo, glucosamine did not cause insulin resistance or endothelial dysfunction in lean subjects or significantly worsen these findings in obese subjects. The half-life of plasma glucosamine after oral dosing was ∼150 min, with no significant changes in steady-state glucosamine levels detectable after 6 weeks of therapy. We conclude that oral glucosamine at standard doses for 6 weeks does not cause or significantly worsen insulin resistance or endothelial dysfunction in lean or obese subjects.
Fast homography refinement in soccer videos

Sports video analysis and camera calibration are important applications which rely on accurate homography computation as a challenging task. Homography refinement is an important step in the task of accurate homography computation and homography tracking. Also, in certain applications (such as homography tracking) the process speed is of great importance. A robust and fast method for accurate refinement of highly inaccurate homographies in soccer video frames is proposed in this paper. To achieve that goal, a new homography model fitting method named the point-line (PL) method is proposed. It uses point-line correspondences to compute the homography, rather than point correspondences or line correspondences used by the common direct linear transformation (DLT) method. The method can be used as a fast homography refinement algorithm but it is sensitive to outliers. In order to make it robust to outliers, the PL method is employed in two different schemes: a random sample consensus (RANSAC) scheme and an iterative scheme. The two schemes are then evaluated on a set of video frames and are compared to the state-of-the-art methods. They are proved to be accurate and robust to noise and one of them is at least 3.9 times faster in soccer penalty area scenes.
The Entrepreneurial Intention between Reasoned Action and Planned Behavior: Empirical Evidence in the Case of the Tunisian Public Civil Servants

The analysis of the entrepreneurial intention makes it possible to apprehend the behaviors leading to the creation of a company. Indeed, the entrepreneurial intention constitutes the first act in the entrepreneurial process and therefore, the study of its subjacent factors is of great range particularly when they are the public civil servants. However, the determinants of the entrepreneurial intention remain still not unanimously identified and rudimentary. We will try in this paper to locate the factors of the entrepreneurial intention while following a comparative approach between the reasoned action theory and the planned behavior theory and adding the necessary refinements. With this intention, we base ourselves on an analysis of the hierarchical regressions for the prediction of the intention of the Tunisian public civil servants.
Finding time-dependent shortest paths over large graphs

The spatial and temporal databases have been studied widely and intensively over years. In this paper, we study how to answer queries of finding the best departure time that minimizes the total travel time from a place to another, over a road network, where the traffic conditions dynamically change from time to time. We study a generalized form of this problem, called the time-dependent shortest-path problem. A time-dependent graph <i>G<sub>T</sub></i> is a graph that has an edge-delay function, <i>w<sub>i, j</sub>(t)</i>, associated with each edge (<i>v<sub>i</sub>, v<sub>j</sub>)</i>, to be stored in a database. The edge-delay function <i>w<sub>i, j</sub>(t)</i> specifies how much time it takes to travel from node <i>v<sub>i</sub></i> to node <i>v<sub>j</sub></i>, if it departs from <i>v<sub>i</sub></i> at time <i>t</i>. A user-specified query is to ask the minimum-travel-time path, from a source node, <i>v<sub>s</sub></i>, to a destination node, <i>v<sub>e</sub></i>, over the time-dependent graph, <i>G<sub>T</sub></i>, with the best departure time to be selected from a time interval <i>T</i>. We denote this user query as LTT(<i>v<sub>s</sub>, v<sub>e</sub>, T)</i> over <i>G<sub>T</sub></i>. The challenge of this problem is the added complexity due to the time dependency in the time-dependent graph. That is, edge delays are not constants, and can vary from time to time. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to find the minimum-travel-time path with the best departure time for a LTT(<i>v<sub>s</sub>, v<sub>e</sub>, T)</i> query over a large graph <i>G<sub>T</sub></i>. Our approach outperforms existing algorithms in terms of both time complexity in theory and efficiency in practice. We will discuss the design of our algorithm, together with its correctness and complexity. We conducted extensive experimental studies over large graphs and will report our findings.
Bayesian model averaging using particle filtering and Gaussian mixture modeling: Theory, concepts, and simulation experiments

Bayesian model averaging (BMA) is a standard method for combining predictive distributions from different models. In recent years, this method has enjoyed widespread application and use in many fields of study to improve the spread‐skill relationship of forecast ensembles. The BMA predictive probability density function (pdf) of any quantity of interest is a weighted average of pdfs centered around the individual (possibly bias‐corrected) forecasts, where the weights are equal to posterior probabilities of the models generating the forecasts, and reflect the individual models skill over a training (calibration) period. The original BMA approach presented by Raftery et al. (2005) assumes that the conditional pdf of each individual model is adequately described with a rather standard Gaussian or Gamma statistical distribution, possibly with a heteroscedastic variance. Here we analyze the advantages of using BMA with a flexible representation of the conditional pdf. A joint particle filtering and Gaussian mixture modeling framework is presented to derive analytically, as closely and consistently as possible, the evolving forecast density (conditional pdf) of each constituent ensemble member. The median forecasts and evolving conditional pdfs of the constituent models are subsequently combined using BMA to derive one overall predictive distribution. This paper introduces the theory and concepts of this new ensemble postprocessing method, and demonstrates its usefulness and applicability by numerical simulation of the rainfall‐runoff transformation using discharge data from three different catchments in the contiguous United States. The revised BMA method receives significantly lower‐prediction errors than the original default BMA method (due to filtering) with predictive uncertainty intervals that are substantially smaller but still statistically coherent (due to the use of a time‐variant conditional pdf).
The relationship between inequality and GDP growth: An empirical approach

The aim of this work is to analyze the relationship between inequality and economic growth. The results obtained by previous empirical papers were mixed. Authors such as Persson and Tabellini (1991) or Alesina and Rodrik (1994), in fact, find evidence of a negative relationship between the two variables of interest; on the contrary, Li and Zou (1998) and Forbes (2000) find that greater inequality is associated with faster economic growth. Barro (2000 and 2008) claims that inequality has a positive effect on GDP growth in advanced economies, but has a negative impact in developing ones. The present work considers two samples of OCSE countries; in the full sample 33 countries are analyzed for the 1971-2010 period and inequality data are taken from the UNU-WIDER dataset. In the restricted sample 27 countries are considered for the 1981-2010 period and inequality data from the Luxembourg Income Study are used. The estimation technique employed are fixed effects, random effects and GMM Arellano-Bond. The Gini coefficient has been used as inequality measure and ten-years averages of the data have been computed in order to reduce the problem linked to the limited variability of the Gini coefficient across time. In the case of the fixed effects and the GMM estimates on the full sample, positive and statistically significant estimated coefficients for the inequality measure are obtained. The value ranges from 1.2 to 1.5; this means that a 1% increase in inequality within a country would be followed by a more than proportional increase in the rate of economic growth in the following ten years. All the other estimated coefficients, when statistically significant, take the expected sign and the Sargan test confirms that the over-identifying restriction used for the GMM estimation are valid. However, there is room for further research, in particular by considering that: the relationship between the two variables of interest may be quadratic and not linear, the time horizon considered may significatively influence the estimation results and finally it would be necessary to extend the sample by also including developing countries (non-OCSE members).
Breaking the k 2 Barrier for Explicit RIP Matrices (Extended Abstract)

We give a new explicit construction of n N matrices satisfying the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP). Namely, for some " > 0, largek andk 2 " N k 2+" , we construct RIP matrices of order k with n = O(k 2 " ). This overcomes the natural barrier n k 2 for proofs based on small coherence, which are used in all previous explicit constructions of RIP matrices. Key ingredients in our proof are new estimates for sumsets in product sets and for exponential sums with the products of sets possessing special additive structure.
Bargaining over Randomly Generated Offers: A new Perspective on Multi-Party Bargaining

We study a n−person bargaining problem where offers are generated randomly and each party decides to accept or reject the current proposal. Bargaining terminates when n0 out of the n agents accept the current proposal. The effect of patience, the number of players, as well as the majority requirement (n0) are examined. For example, as n0 increases, we find the following tradeoff: more efficient outcome are obtained, but it takes more time to reach them. We also relate the solutions obtained to some classic results in bargaining and voting.
Series WP-0510 Farewell to Maternalism ? State Policies and Mothers ’ Employment

Across the rich, developed democracies of Western Europe, North America, and the Antipodes, we are in the midst of changes in gendered policy logics from supporting women as full-time caregivers to requiring and supporting employment for all, or a series “farewells to maternalism. ” Whether these changes are “women-friendly”— for some or all women—depends very much on how state support for caregiving activities and employment is configured. This paper analyzes the politics and policies surrounding the “farewell to maternalism. ” First, I will briefly examine the social policies and politics that have been recently described as “maternalist,” and the predominant gendered divisions of labor and patterns of family and household formation that they depended upon and reinforced, for it is against these backdrops that current changes are occurring. Next, I take up the politics and policies which have moved Sweden and the U.S. away from maternalism and towards support for women’s employment, from supporting women’s claims as mothers to supporting women’s claims as workers or citizens, sometimes also caregivers. I close with some consideration about the potential for the emergence of new models in continental Europe, and whether it might be possible to imagine a situation incorporating higher levels of women’s employment with less displacement of family care to either market or state services. Depending on each country’s starting point, different strategies may be pursued to enhance women’s employment, while reducing poverty and economic vulnerability, and ensuring that caregiving activities are supported. Supporting mothers’ employment presents a challenge not only politically and culturally, but also in terms of state capacities. The ultimate—though possibly utopian—solution to the problems of reconciling employment and care and women’s economic dependency in all systems may be a “universal caregiver” model: to induce “men to become more like what most women are now—that is, people who do primary care work” (Fraser 1994, p.611). Paper to appear in The State After Statism, edited by Jonah Levy (forthcoming 2006) 1
RBP: Reliable Broadcasting Protocol in Large Scale Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Conventional broadcasting protocols suffer from network congestion, frequent message losses and corruption of broadcast messages due to a vast number of duplicate packets transmitting in the network. In this paper, we propose an efficient, scalable and reliable broadcast protocol to send a message in the entire network where every node is guaranteed to receive the message with low overhead and minimal cost. The scalability and reliability of broadcast transmission is ensured by composing the entire network in a hierarchy of grids/squares. A higher order square is made up of four lower order squares forming a quad tree architecture. With this grid architecture a node does not need to flood the broadcast packet to the entire network. Rather a node exploits the Geographic Forwarding mechanism to send the packet to a particular square. The rest of the work is done by the very first node receiving the packet destined for that particular grid. This node has now the responsibility to update its own grid with the broadcast packet. The whole procedure is repeated iteratively in every grid. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm is reliable, scalable, robust and also outperforms some other promising broadcasting protocols that exist in the current literature.
Context-driven disruption tolerant networking for vehicular applications

In this paper, we describe how a context-driven disruption tolerant network may be utilized for vehicular applications. The key concept involves utilizing contextual information pertaining to space and time settings of applications to drive networking functions. As a result, the performance characteristics may be better attuned to the time-scale of relevant vehicular applications. We discuss the protocol highlights and present a compact grid-based method for performance evaluation of such systems. Novel metrics such as information freshness demonstrate the discrete nature of information dissemination. Additionally, we observe that asymptotic evaluation of metrics such as packet delivery ratio do not provide a realistic picture of application performance. As a consequence, the time-scale of interest for the applications becomes crucial.
What is a Market? On the Methodology of a Contested Concept

Some economists find markets everywhere and assume that they emerge spontaneously once a set of necessary conditions such as well-defined property rights is fulfilled. Others emphasise the role of organisations and contend that markets are actually less dominant. But despite claims to the contrary, the market concept is hardly analyzed in depth. Nor are there serious attempts to examine empirically where markets exist. Against this background, the paper addresses the question of what is a market? It begins by illustrating how the literature has hitherto defined the concept of a market. On the basis of methodological considerations, which center on the subject matter of economic analysis, the paper provides a revised conceptualisation of markets in terms of those conditions under which stylised facts about relative prices can be observed. The final part of the paper discusses the link between the conceptualisation of a market and the informational role of relative prices highlighted by the Austrian School.
A Study of Scientific Writing: Comparing Theoretical Guidelines with Practical Implementation

Good scientific writing is a skill researchers seek to acquire. Textbook literature provides guidelines to improve scientific writing, for instance, “use active voice when describing your own work”. In this paper we investigate to what extent researchers adhere to textbook principles in their articles. In our analyses we examine a set of selected principles which (i) are general and (ii) verifiable by applying text mining and natural language processing techniques. We develop a framework to automatically analyse a large data set containing 14.000 scientific articles received from Mendeley and PubMed. We are interested in whether adhering to writing principles is related to scientific quality, scientific domain or gender and whether these relations change over time. Our results show (i) a clear relation between journal quality and scientific imprecision, i.e. journals with low impact factors exhibit higher numbers of imprecision indicators such as number of citation bunches and number of relativating words and (ii) that writing style partly depends on domain characteristics and preferences.
Use of occlusal sealant in a community program and caries incidence in high- and low-risk children

Objective The aims of this study were to investigate the effectiveness of sealant placement under the guidelines of the Oral Health Promotion Program for Children and Adolescents (Portugal), and to test the influence of clinical and socioeconomic variables on the DMFT increment in 277 children, born in 1997. Material and Methods A dental hygienist performed the initial examinations and sealant placement (Helioseal, Vivadent) on the permanent first molars in 2005. These activities were registered in dental records that were assessed in 2007. Children were classified according to caries risk at baseline [high (HR: DMFT+dmft>0); low (LR: DMFT+dmft=0) risk] and sealant placement as follows: HR-S and LR-S Groups (with sealant placement); HR-NS and LR-NS Groups (without sealant placement). A calibrated dentist performed the final examination in 2007 at school, based on the World Health Organization recommendations. The variables collected were: dental caries, visible dental plaque, malocclusions, and socioeconomic level (questionnaire sent to children's parents). For univariate (Chi-square or Fisher tests) and multivariate (Multiple logistic regression) analyses the DMFT increment >0 was selected as dependent variable. Results Approximately 17.0% of the children showed DMFT increment>0 (mean=0.25). High-risk children presented a significant increase in the number of decayed and/or filled teeth. These children had 7.94 more chance of developing caries. Children who did not receive sealant were 1.8 more prone to have DMFT increment >0. Conclusion It appears that sealant placement was effective in preventing dental caries development. Moreover, the variables "risk" and "sealant placement" were predictors for DMFT increment in the studied children.
Sparse disparity map estimation on stereo images

In this work we are presenting a sparse disparity map extraction procedure based on block matching approach. The blocks are taken around the edge locations in the reference image and searched in the target image by evaluating matching costs for each search location. For this block matching approach, the performances of cost calculation methods, such as Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD), Herman Weyl's Discrepancy Measure (HWDM) and Adaptive Support Windows (ASW), are investigated. The methods are compared with each other according to their performance in estimation of disparity and maximum disparity values.
I Couldn’t Agree More: The Role of Conversational Structure in Agreement and Disagreement Detection in Online Discussions

Determining when conversational participants agree or disagree is instrumental for broader conversational analysis; it is necessary, for example, in deciding when a group has reached consensus. In this paper, we describe three main contributions. We show how different aspects of conversational structure can be used to detect agreement and disagreement in discussion forums. In particular, we exploit information about meta-thread structure and accommodation between participants. Second, we demonstrate the impact of the features using 3-way classification, including sentences expressing disagreement, agreement or neither. Finally, we show how to use a naturally occurring data set with labels derived from the sides that participants choose in debates on createdebate.com. The resulting new agreement corpus, Agreement by Create Debaters (ABCD) is 25 times larger than any prior corpus. We demonstrate that using this data enables us to outperform the same system trained on prior existing in-domain smaller annotated datasets.
Hyperclip : a Tool for Gathering and Sharing Meta-Data on Users ’ Activities by using Peer-to-Peer Technology

We have developed a tool called “Hyperclip” for gathering and sharing meta-data which represents background information about electronic content to enhance intellectual creative work without imposing much burden on users. In this research, we call this meta-data “context”; it is composed of links among various contents, and has the flexibility to allow users to add descriptions freely. We propose the idea of handling context as knowledge that is extracted from users’ activities such as referring to, creating, and reviewing electronic documents. This paper explains a method of describing the context using XML (RDF or XLink). We also propose an architecture for sharing the context among users via peer-to-peer technology. This architecture is called knowledge sharing platform. Hyperclip is implemented on this platform. These help users better understand how the existing contents can be reused by showing context, for example “which content was referred when it was created” and “who used it and with what”.
Nonorthogonal PEEC formulation for time- and frequency-domain EM and circuit modeling

Electromagnetic solvers based on the partial element equivalent circuit (PEEC) approach have proven to be well suited for the solution of combined circuit and EM problems. The inclusion of all types of Spice circuit elements is possible. Due to this, the approach has been used in many different tools. Most of these solvers have been based on a rectangular or Manhattan representation of the geometries. In this paper, we systematically extend the PEEC formulation to nonorthogonal geometries since many practical EM problems require a more general formulation. Importantly, the model given in this paper is consistent with the classical PEEC model for rectangular geometries. Some examples illustrating the application of the approach are given for both the time and frequency domain.