Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing the validity of a niche strategy model in predicting the potential and success of niche markets and products

Companies can increase market share and profitability through the use of a niche market strategy. Parrish examined how companies use a niche market strategy and developed the Parrish Niche Strategy Model. This paper presents results of a study testing the model in terms of: (1) predicting the potential of a niche market and/or product and (2) predicting the success of a niche market and/or product. In order to test the model, deductive logic was used to develop questions that would gather quantitative data related to market potential strategies and success variables. In order to determine the importance of variables in relation to predicting the potential and success of a niche market and/or product, instrument questions were developed that utilized rank order scales. In addition, three-point Likert scales were used in order to determine the level of importance for each of the market potential and success variables. The sample consisted of fiber and yarn manufacturers, fabric manufacturers, apparel manufacturers and marketers, and retailers. Results indicate that the Parrish Niche Strategy Model was useful for gaging the potential and success of niche strategies, in terms of both product and market. This research was significant in that it tested the only existing model of niche strategies developed specifically for the textile industry. In addition, this study focused on bottomweights, which represents a significant domestic consumption market for the US textile supply chain.
Secure data sharing in public cloud

Secure multi-party protocols have been proposed for entities (organizations or individuals) that don't fully trust each other to share sensitive information. Many types of entities need to collect, analyze, and disseminate data rapidly and accurately, without exposing sensitive information to unauthorized or untrusted parties. Solutions based on secure multiparty computation guarantee privacy and correctness, at an extra communication (too costly in communication to be practical) and computation cost. The high overhead motivates us to extend this SMC to cloud environment which provides large computation and communication capacity which makes SMC to be used between multiple clouds (i.e., it may between private or public or hybrid clouds). Cloud may encompass many high capacity servers which acts as a hosts which participate in computation (IaaS and PaaS) for final result, which is controlled by Cloud Trusted Authority (CTA) for secret sharing within the cloud. The communication between two clouds is controlled by High Level Trusted Authority (HLTA) which is one of the hosts in a cloud which provides MgaaS (Management as a Service). Due to high risk for security in clouds, HLTA generates and distributes public keys and private keys by using Carmichael-R-Prime- RSA algorithm for exchange of private data in SMC between itself and clouds. In cloud, CTA creates Group key for Secure communication between the hosts in cloud based on keys sent by HLTA for exchange of Intermediate values and shares for computation of final result. Since this scheme is extended to be used in clouds( due to high availability and scalability to increase computation power) it is possible to implement SMC practically for privacy preserving in data mining at low cost for the clients.
Measurement of Cardiac Index by Transpulmonary Thermodilution Using an Implanted Central Venous Access Port: A Prospective Study in Patients Scheduled for Oncologic High-Risk Surgery

Background Transpulmonary thermodilution allows the measurement of cardiac index for high risk surgical patients. Oncologic patients often have a central venous access (port-a-catheter) for chronic treatment. The validity of the measurement by a port-a-catheter of the absolute cardiac index and the detection of changes in cardiac index induced by fluid challenge are unknown. Methods We conducted a monocentric prospective study. 27 patients were enrolled. 250 ml colloid volume expansions for fluid challenge were performed during ovarian cytoreductive surgery. The volume expansion-induced changes in cardiac index measured by transpulmonary thermodilution by a central venous access (CIcvc) and by a port-a-catheter (CIport) were recorded. Results 23 patients were analyzed with 123 pairs of measurements. Using a Bland and Altman for repeated measurements, the bias (lower and upper limits of agreement) between CIport and CIcvc was 0.14 (−0.59 to 0.88) L/min/m2. The percentage error was 22%. The concordance between the changes in CIport and CIcvc observed during volume expansion was 92% with an r = 0.7 (with exclusion zone). No complications (included sepsis) were observed during the follow up period. Conclusions The transpulmonary thermodilution by a port-a-catheter is reliable for absolute values estimation of cardiac index and for measurement of the variation after fluid challenge. Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov NCT02063009
Effect Of Turbo Codes On OFDM Systems Over AWGN Channel To Improve BER

OFDM(Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) has gathered increased interest due to its high spectrum efficiency and robustness against multipath interference, which makes the efficient use of spectrum by allowing overlap. OFDM is a popular modulation method for the transmission of high data rates over the wireless channels. There is a growing demand for the transmission of information quickly without the formation of errors. In this paper, the use of Turbo codes increases the reliability of OFDM system to achieve high data rates. Forward Error Correcting (FEC)codes are a new class of codes that can achieve increased error performance in OFDM systems. The Bit Error Rate(BER) performance is substantially improved by increasing the number of iterations in the case of Turbo Codes.The simulation is made with MATLAB source code under Additive white Gaussian Noise(AWGN) channel.
Translation termination: New factors and insights

In eukaryotes, translation termination requires two eukaryotic release factors, eRF1 and eRF3. eRF1 is required for recognition of the stop codon and eRF3 supports the polypeptide chain release in a GTP dependent manner. Recently, several new players in translation termination have been identified. The DEAD-box RNA helicase Dbp5 has been shown to support eRF1 in stop codon recognition, possibly by proper placement of the release factor on the termination codon. Upon its dissociation from eRF1, Dbp5 allows the entry of the second termination factor eRF3 into the complex. Further, the Dbp5 interacting protein Gle1 and its co-factor inositol hexakisphosphate (IP6) have been shown to participate in the termination process. Dbp5 and Gle1 are well known for their function in mRNA export from the nucleus to the cytoplasm. Most interestingly, also the ATP binding cassette (ABC) protein Rli1, which requires the mitochondrial and cytosolic Fe/S protein biogenesis machineries for its assembly, has recently been shown to function in translation termination and recycling of the ribosomes. Rli1 physically and genetically interacts with both, eRF1 and eRF3. Together, all of these novel termination factors modulate in association with the release factors more accurate stop codon recognition and these findings broaden our knowledge about the final steps in translation.
Development of a versatile calibration method for electro-magnetic calorimeters using a stopped cosmic-ray beam

A new method using a stopped cosmic-ray beam for the calibration of an electro-magnetic calorimeter which consists of several hundreds of modules has been established. Cosmic muons stop in the calorimeter, and positrons (and electrons) from the muon decays with the maximum energy of 53 MeV are used for the energy calibration. These events could be identified as double pulses observed by a flash ADC. This technique has many advantages, (1) intermediate energy scale (< 53 MeV) to interpolate between a few MeV for radioactive sources and 153 MeV, the muon from K<sup>+</sup> → μ<sup>+</sup>n<inf>μ</inf>, (2) efficient procedure to calibrate all modules at the same time and (3) versatile method applied for many types of electro-magnetic calorimeters. This method was checked in the J-PARC E36 experiment which was performed to precisely measure the ratio of γ(K+ → e+n<inf>e</inf>)/γ(K<sup>+</sup> → μ+n<inf>μ</inf>). Double pulses from the CsI(Tl) photon detector were successfully observed and the waveform function was carefully studied to decompose the second pulse generated by the decay positron. The experimental energy spectrum is consistent with the simulated Michel spectrum taking into account the shower leakage from the CsI(Tl) module, which indicates the validity of the proposed calibration method.
Mining Text for Word Senses Using Independent Component Analysis

The assumption that the problem of ambiguity in text analysis can only be solved if statistical dependencies of higher than second order are considered leads us to independent component analysis (ICA), a statistical formalism that takes higher-order dependencies into account. By assuming independence, ICA is capable of detecting a set of hidden vectors if only different linear mixtures of these vectors are observable. As a test case for ICA’s applicability to natural language processing we look at the task of word sense induction. Our starting point is that we consider the co-occurrence vector of an ambiguous word as a linear mixture of its unknown sense vectors. If corpora from different domains are available, this should give us the different linear mixtures that are required for ICA. It turns out that the independent sense vectors derived by ICA from the distributional differences of word usage reflect a word’s meanings surprisingly well.
Posttraining Ablation of Adult-Generated Neurons Degrades Previously Acquired Memories

New neurons are continuously generated in the subgranular zone of the adult hippocampus and, once sufficiently mature, are thought to integrate into hippocampal memory circuits. However, whether they play an essential role in subsequent memory expression is not known. Previous studies have shown that suppression of adult neurogenesis often (but not always) impairs subsequent hippocampus-dependent learning (i.e., produces anterograde effects). A major challenge for these studies is that these new neurons represent only a small subpopulation of all dentate granule cells, and so there is large potential for either partial or complete compensation by granule cells generated earlier on during development. A potentially more powerful approach to investigate this question would be to ablate adult-generated neurons after they have already become part of a memory trace (i.e., retrograde effects). Here we developed a diphtheria toxin-based strategy in mice that allowed us to selectively ablate a population of predominantly mature, adult-generated neurons either before or after learning, without affecting ongoing neurogenesis. Removal of these neurons before learning did not prevent the formation of new contextual fear or water maze memories. In contrast, removal of an equivalent population after learning degraded existing contextual fear and water maze memories, without affecting nonhippocampal memory. Ablation of these adult-generated neurons even 1 month after learning produced equivalent memory degradation in the water maze. These retrograde effects suggest that adult-generated neurons form a critical and enduring component of hippocampal memory traces.
Two graph-based algorithms for state-of-the-art WSD

This paper explores the use of two graph algorithms for unsupervised induction and tagging of nominal word senses based on corpora. Our main contribution is the optimization of the free parameters of those algorithms and its evaluation against publicly available gold standards. We present a thorough evaluation comprising supervised and unsupervised modes, and both lexical-sample and all-words tasks. The results show that, in spite of the information loss inherent to mapping the induced senses to the gold-standard, the optimization of parameters based on a small sample of nouns carries over to all nouns, performing close to supervised systems in the lexical sample task and yielding the second-best WSD systems for the Senseval-3 all-words task.
Efficient motion weighted spatio-temporal video SSIM index

Recently, Seshadrinathan and Bovik proposed the Motion-based Video Integrity Evaluation (MOVIE) index for VQA.1, 2 MOVIE utilized a multi-scale spatio-temporal Gabor filter bank to decompose the videos and to compute motion vectors. Apart from its psychovisual inspiration, MOVIE is an interesting option for VQA owing to its performance. However, the use of MOVIE in a practical setting may prove to be difficult owing to the presence of the multi-scale optical flow computation. In order to bridge the gap between the conceptual elegance of MOVIE and a practical VQA algorithm, we propose a new VQA algorithm - the spatio-temporal video SSIM based on the essence of MOVIE. Spatio-temporal video SSIM utilizes motion information computed from a block-based motion-estimation algorithm and quality measures using a localized set of oriented spatio-temporal filters. In this paper we explain the algorithm and demonstrate its conceptual similarity to MOVIE; we explore its computational complexity and evaluate its performance on the popular VQEG dataset. We show that the proposed algorithm allows for efficient FR VQA without compromising on the performance while retaining the conceptual elegance of MOVIE.
Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff in Cognitive Machine-to-Machine Networks

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication enables many applications, which require ubiquitous wireless connections among objects and the surrounding environment. A general cognitive M2M network (CM2M) consists of multi-radio systems, involving primary system (PS) and secondary system(s) of cognitive machines under heterogeneous wireless architecture. However, inherited from dynamic spectrum access (DSA) ability of cognitive radio technology, uni- directional opportunistic wireless fading links exist in multi-hop CM2M network and the conventional flow control mechanisms at link level cannot be applied anymore. In many cases, effective end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) control is also needed to provide reliable data transportation. In addition, emerging multi- user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) technology coherently coordinates the transmission and reception among multiple base stations, leveraging the advantage of MIMO communications based on one-hop physical layer transmission. In this paper, through the exploitation of network coding and MU-MIMO, we develop a novel opportunistic QoS control (OQC) scheme for multi-hop CM2M network. OQC control utilizes the cooperative relaying at session level with the proposed Qos guarantees, realizing diversity-multiplexing tradeoff for session traffic. In particular, the statistical QoS guarantee is first proposed to work with our prior routing design, called SAOR. Furthermore, overlaying the proposed guarantees with the routing algorithm, OQC scheme employs the diversity mode to deal with PS's opportunistic nature and wireless fading, and utilizes the spatial multiplexing mode to obtain the maximum end-to-end throughput. Performance evaluations show the remarkable improvement of end-to-end delay violation probability for cognitive machines' traffic in multi-hop CM2M networks, thus enabling great M2M applications.
An integrated H-bridge circuit in a HV technology

H-Bridges are well known circuits to connect a load to a DC supply in both forward/reverse bias. These circuits are commonly used to drive DC and stepper motors among many other power electronics applications. In this work, a fully integrated 12V H-Bridge is designed in a 0. 6μm HV technology as a replacement of an obsolete commercial part. The main objective is to provide an OEM in Uruguay with a flexible and low cost substitute of an off the shelf IC currently utilized on its products, that is being discontinued. The new H-Bridge was designed for the same package and improves some characteristics like power consumption, maximum switching frequency, over the old one. Because the cost is a major constrain to reach production stage in this project, the silicon area was reduced as much as possible. The resulting circuit is a low cost 12 V H-Bridge, with a logic input `1' down to 2.8V, switching up to 300kHz, in a 1.8mm2 die area.
2004 Workshop on Duplicating , Deconstructing and Debunking June 20 , 2004 Munich , Germany

Statistical simulation systems can provide an accurate and efficient way to carry out early design studies for processors. One such system, HLS, has a rapid simulation capability, but our experiments demonstrate that several modeling improvements are possible. The front-end graph structure in HLS is hampered by workload modeling at the instruction level that reduces the accuracy of program simulation. The workload and processor models require significant changes to provide accurate results for a variety of benchmarks. We improve HLS by modeling the workload at the granularity of the basic block and by changing the processor model to more closely reflect components in modern microprocessors. The specific techniques improve HLS accuracy by a factor of 3.78 at the cost of increased storage and runtime requirements. Our examination of HLS points to a pitfall for simulator developers: reliance on a single small set of benchmarks to qualify a simulation system. A simple regression model shows that the SPECint95 benchmarks, the original benchmarks used to calibrate HLS, have characteristics that yield to very simple modeling.
A solution for the problem of load introduction in biaxial fatigue tests

The concept of Introduction of biaxial loads in a specimen made of sheet material using soft clamps of unidirectional aramld composite sheet is presented. Using this concept it Is possible to generate realistic biaxial tensile stress states in specimens made of sheet materials without the introduction of unwanted fatigue critical areas.
Reasoning About Emotional and Neutral Materials

In two experiments, we investigated whether people reason differently when they reason about emotional and neutral contents. We gave participants a conditional reasoning task (“If p, then q”) and varied the emotionality of the items used as p and q. Participants were asked to draw inferences based on these statements. In Experiment 1, we compared statements including preexisting emotional and neutral words. In Experiment 2, we experimentally manipulated the emotionality of initially neutral words using classical conditioning. In both experiments, emotionality affected participants' responses. They were more likely to draw invalid inferences in response to emotional compared with neutral statements.
Performance Characteristics of Jet Fuel in Heavily Loaded Contacts

Friction coefficient, bearing performance (i.e., torque generation and temperature rise), and rolling contact fatigue of steel and ceramic (silicon nitride) materials operating in the presence of JP-8+100 jet fuel and Mil-L-23699 turbo jet oil were investigated. A ball-on-disk test machine was used to measure the coefficient of friction of a steel ball on a steel disk operating under various loads and slide-to-roll ratios when lubricated with JP-8+100 jet fuel. The results indicate that the fuel provides an extremely low friction coefficient under the conditions considered in this investigation. A three-ball-on-rod rolling contact fatigue testing machine was used to determine the fatigue life for different combinations of materials (i.e., silicon nitride and steels) and lubricants. As expected, the Weibull analysis indicates that the rolling fatigue life operating in the presence of jet fuel was less than that of an oil-lubricated contact. A bearing test machine was also designed, developed, and used to obtain the friction (torque) and the temperature characteristics of bearings operating in jet fuel and oil. The result from the bearing rig indicates that the fuel has a lower generated torque and temperature rise than oil.
Automatic estimation of flux distributions of astrophysical source populations

© Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2014. In astrophysics a common goal is to infer the flux distribution of populations of scientifically interesting objects such as pulsars or supernovae. In practice, inference for the flux distribution is often conducted using the cumulative distribution of the number of sources detected at a given sensitivity. The resulting “log(N > S)-log(S)” relationship can be used to compare and evaluate theoretical models for source populations and their evolution. Under restrictive assumptions the relationship should be linear. In practice, however, when simple theoretical models fail, it is common for astrophysicists to use prespecified piecewise linear models. This paper proposes a methodology for estimating both the number and locations of “breakpoints” in astrophysical source populations that extends beyond existing work in this field. An important component of the proposed methodology is a new interwoven EM algorithm that computes parameter estimates. It is shown that in simple settings such estimates are asymptotically consistent despite the complex nature of the parameter space. Through simulation studies it is demonstrated that the proposed methodology is capable of accurately detecting structural breaks in a variety of parameter configurations. This paper concludes with an application of our methodology to the Chandra Deep Field North (CDFN) data set.
Elderly medical inpatients screening positive for depression may show spontaneous improvement after discharge.

OBJECTIVE To see whether elderly medical in-patients screening positive for depression on the Geriatric Depression Score show any change on discharge home and whether their scores predict this. DESIGN A prospective study. SETTING A large outer London district general hospital with acute wards for all medical admissions of people aged over 75 years. PARTICIPANTS We studied 179 consecutive patients admitted to the acute wards with an abbreviated mental test score of > or = 7 who were resident within the London borough of Waltham Forest. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Geriatric Depression Scores in hospital and at home after discharge. Account was taken of subsequent psychiatric treatment. RESULTS 55 inpatients screened positive for depression (15x point Geriatric Depression Score of 5 or more). Repeat screening of these patients, after discharge, resulted in 24 scoring < 5 and only 19 scoring > or = 5. Three patients out of the 55 were admitted into psychiatric care with depression prior to follow-up screening. The 15 question Geriatric Depression Score was highly sensitive and the 4 question Geriatric Depression Score highly specific in predicting for depression after discharge. CONCLUSION Many patients screen positive for depression on acute elderly medical admission wards and nearly half improve spontaneously upon returning home.
Detecting Image Saliency Based on Spectrum Analysis

Computer vision community has long attempted to automatically detect locations in the image that are able to capture attentions of users. In recent years, more and more researchers have proposed to address this problem from the perspective of simulating human visual attention mechanisms. In this paper, we study modeling visual attention in frequency domain. Our major contributions are twofold: 1. A new method called band-divided method (BDM) is developed to generate the saliency map by integrating the amplitude spectrum with the phase spectrum. 2. A quantitative measurement according to min-distance dissimilarity (MDD) is presented to evaluate the saliency map, which is more appropriate for non-binary ground-truth data. Experiments on benchmark dataset and comparisons with traditional approaches demonstrate the promise of the proposed work.