Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Software engineering companies' multicultural education

The Software Engineering (SE) industry is experiencing the effects of strong globalization. The world is changing rapidly in many areas including financial, technological, economic, and political, but the structures of SE companies are also changing. This means that companies are becoming closer to each other, and geographical distance and national borders are losing their meaning. Because of this globalization, companies are facing more competition in their market area. SE companies are in the middle of complex networks with many interest groups. One effect of globalization is that companies more often collide with multicultural issues on national and organizational level. In earlier studies, it has been shown that the standards and guides that are used in the SE education concept do not include much knowledge about multicultural factors in the SE sector. This paper examines how SE companies should educate their employees on cultural factors. This study examines the need for culture education from two aspects: the general level of cultural education in a company and the SE level of cultural education in a company. The factors in the last level are special characteristics, processes, and products. A cultural education experience has been introduced with one case company. The study summarizes the areas of recommended cultural education in a single table — the cultural education framework. Finally, a potential research idea for a cultural maturity model is discussed.
A Land and Ocean Microwave Cloud Classification Algorithm Derived from AMSU-A and -B, Trained Using MSG-SEVIRI Infrared and Visible Observations

A statistical cloud classification and cloud mask algorithm is developed based on Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A and -B) microwave (MW) observations. The visible and infrared data from the Meteosat Third Generation-Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (MSG-SEVIRI) are used to train the microwave classifier. The goal of the MW algorithms is not to fully reproduce this MSG-SEVIRI cloud classification, as the MW observations do not have enough information on clouds to reach this level of precision. The objective is instead to obtain a stand-alone MW cloud mask and classification algorithm that can be used efficiently in forthcoming retrieval schemes of surface or atmospheric parameters from microwave satellite observations. This is an important tool over both ocean and land since the assimilation of the MW observations in the operational centers is independent from the other satellite observations. Clear sky and low, medium, and opaque-high clouds can be retrieved over ocean and land at a confidence level of more than 80%. An information content analysis shows that AMSU-B provides significant information over both land and ocean, especially for the classification of medium and high clouds, whereas AMSU-A is more efficient over ocean when discriminating clear situations and low clouds.
Listeria monocytogenes has a functional chitinolytic system and an active lytic polysaccharide monooxygenase

Chitinases and chitin‐active lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases (LPMOs) are most commonly associated with chitin metabolism, but are also reported as virulence factors in pathogenic bacteria. Listeria monocytogenes, a well‐known virulent bacterium, possesses two chitinases (ChiA and ChiB) and a multi‐modular lytic polysaccharide monooxygenase (LmLPMO10). These enzymes have been related to virulence and their role in chitin metabolism is poorly understood. It is thus of interest to functionally characterize the individual enzymes in order to shed light on their roles in vivo. Our results demonstrate that L. monocytogenes has a fully functional chitinolytic system. Both chitinases show substrate degradation rates similar to those of the nonprocessive endo‐chitinase SmChiC from Serratia marcescens. Compared to the S. marcescens LPMO chitin‐binding protein CBP21, LmLPMO10 shows a similar rate but different product profiles depending on the substrate. In LPMO‐chitinase synergy experiments, CBP21 is able to boost the activity of both ChiA and ChiB more than LmLPMO10. Product analysis of the synergy assays revealed that the chitinases were unable to efficiently hydrolyse the LPMO products (chitooligosaccharide aldonic acids) with a degree of polymerization below four (ChiA and SmChiC) or three (ChiB). Gene transcription and protein expression analysis showed that LmLPMO10 is neither highly transcribed, nor abundantly secreted during the growth of L. monocytogenes in a chitin‐containing medium. The chitinases on the other hand are both abundantly secreted in the presence of chitin. Although LmLPMO10 is shown to promote chitin degradation in tandem with the chitinases in vitro, the secretome and transcription data question whether this is the primary role of LmLPMO10 in vivo.
Detection of Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials in the EEG

A brain computer interface (BCI) is a communication or control system which does not need any neuromuscular activity to produce the message or action. Therefore it can be a communication solution for those people with severe neuromuscular disorders as well as for healthy people in practical applications in entertainment, and communication restoration. SSVEPs are oscillatory responses elicited by a flickering light stimulus that can be recorded in the electroencephalogram(EEG). It is a repetitive evoked potential whose constituent discrete frequency components remain constant in amplitude and phase over aninfinitive long time period. The SSVEP response consists of a number of sinusoids with frequencies given by the stimulus flickering frequency and a number of harmonics. This study is based on brain computer interfaces based on steady-state-visual-evoked-potentials. Thebrain regions where the response is produced has been demonstrated along this work to be stable for a certain frequency and so on spatial filters that discriminate the regions responsible of the SSVEP response have been consider a good solution. We present an approach to automatically obtain the optimum spatial filter to detect the SSVEP at a given stimulation frequency using short signal segments where the stimulation is presented at intermittent periods interspersed with breaks. The best harmonic combination is calculated and asan output all the necessary tools for a suitable detection, thresholdand detection filters.
Associations between awareness of beyondblue and mental health literacy in Australian youth: Results from a national survey

Objectives: The aim of this paper is to examine whether Australian young people’s awareness of beyondblue is associated with better recognition of depression and anxiety disorders, and better quality of beliefs about possible interventions and first-aid actions for these problems. Method: In 2011, a telephone interview was conducted with a national sample of 3021 Australians aged between 15 and 25 years. Participants were presented with a vignette portraying depression, depression with suicidal thoughts, social phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder or psychosis in a young person. They were then asked about recognition of the disorder portrayed, their beliefs about the helpfulness or harmfulness of various interventions and first-aid actions, and their awareness of beyondblue. The quality of youths’ beliefs was scored against health professionals’ ratings of the same list of interventions and first-aid actions. Results: Beyondblue awareness was associated with more accurate recognition of the disorder portrayed in all vignettes except social phobia. It was also associated with beliefs about the helpfulness of first-aid actions that were more closely aligned with professional ratings for the depression, psychosis and social phobia vignettes. However, it was associated with beliefs about interventions for the psychosis vignette only. Conclusions: Overall, the associations of beyondblue awareness with better mental health literacy were not specific to depression and anxiety disorders, which are their main focus. Beyondblue awareness is mostly unrelated to treatment beliefs, but seems to have non-specific associations with recognition of disorders and first-aid beliefs.
Genetic Programming for Discrimination of Buried Unexploded Ordnance ( UXO )

According to the Department of Defense, over 10 million acres of land in the US need to be cleared of buried unexploded ordnance (UXO). Worldwide, UXO injures thousands each year. Cleanup costs are prohibitively expensive due to the difficulties in discriminating buried UXO from other inert non-UXO objects. Government agencies are actively searching for improved sensor methodologies to detect and discriminate buried UXO from other objects. This paper describes the results of work performed on data gathered by the GeoPhex GEM-3 electromagnetic sensor during their attempts to discriminate buried UXO at the U.S. Army Jefferson Proving Ground (JPG). We used a variety of evolutionary computing (EC) approaches that included genetic programming, genetic algorithms, and decision-tree methods. All approaches were essentially formulated as regression problems whereby the EC algorithms used sensor data to evolve buried UXO discrimination chromosomes. Predictions were then compared with a ground-truth file and the number of false positives and negatives determined.
Attractors in Confined Source Problems for Coupled Nonlinear Diffusion

In processes driven by nonlinear diffusion, a signal from a concentrated source is confined in a finite region. Such solutions can be sought in the form of power series in a spatial coordinate. We use this approach in problems involving coupled agents. To test the method, we consider a single equation with (a) linear and (b) quadratic diffusivity in order to recover the known results. The original set of PDEs is converted into a dynamical system with respect to the time-dependent series coefficients. As an application we consider an expansion of a free turbulent jet. Some example trajectories from the respective dynamical system are presented. The structure of the system hints at the existence of an attracting center manifold. The attractor is explicitly found for a reduced version of the system.
Opportunistic relaying for space-time coded cooperation with multiple antennas terminals

We consider a wireless relay network with multiple antennas terminals over Rayleigh fading channels, and apply distributed space-time coding (DSTC) in amplify-and-forward (A&F) mode. It turns out that, combined with power allocation in the relays, A&F DSTC results in an opportunistic relaying scheme, in which the best relay is selected to retransmit the source's space-time coded signal. Next, assuming M-PSK or M-QAM modulations, we analyze the performance of the cooperative diversity wireless networks using A&F opportunistic relaying with the multiple-antennas source and destination. We first derive the probability density function (PDF) of the received SNR at the destination. Then, the PDF is used to determine the symbol error rate in Rayleigh fading channels. Then, we derived closed-form approximations for SER in high SNR scenario, from which we find the diversity order of system Rmin{Ns, Nd}, where R, Ns, and Nd are the number of the relays, the source antennas, and the destination antennas, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed system obtain 2 dB gain in SNR over DSTC for BER 10-5, when R = 2, Ns = 2, Nd = 2.
Printed Assemblies of Inorganic Light-Emitting Diodes for Deformable and Semitransparent Displays

Bend Me, Stretch Me In the push toward flexible electronics, much research has focused on using organic conducting materials, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs), because they are more readily processed using scalable techniques. Park et al. (p. 977) have developed a series of techniques for depositing and assembling inorganic LEDs onto glass, plastic, or rubber. Conventional processing techniques are used to connect the LEDs in order to create flexible, stretchable displays, which, because the active diode material only covers a small part of the substrate, are mostly transparent. Methods to fabricate and assemble inorganic light-emitting diodes provide a route toward transparent, flexible, or stretchable display devices. We have developed methods for creating microscale inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and for assembling and interconnecting them into unusual display and lighting systems. The LEDs use specialized epitaxial semiconductor layers that allow delineation and release of large collections of ultrathin devices. Diverse shapes are possible, with dimensions from micrometers to millimeters, in either flat or “wavy” configurations. Printing-based assembly methods can deposit these devices on substrates of glass, plastic, or rubber, in arbitrary spatial layouts and over areas that can be much larger than those of the growth wafer. The thin geometries of these LEDs enable them to be interconnected by conventional planar processing techniques. Displays, lighting elements, and related systems formed in this manner can offer interesting mechanical and optical properties.
Analysis and Prediction of Translation Rate Based on Sequence and Functional Features of the mRNA

Protein concentrations depend not only on the mRNA level, but also on the translation rate and the degradation rate. Prediction of mRNA's translation rate would provide valuable information for in-depth understanding of the translation mechanism and dynamic proteome. In this study, we developed a new computational model to predict the translation rate, featured by (1) integrating various sequence-derived and functional features, (2) applying the maximum relevance & minimum redundancy method and incremental feature selection to select features to optimize the prediction model, and (3) being able to predict the translation rate of RNA into high or low translation rate category. The prediction accuracies under rich and starvation condition were 68.8% and 70.0%, respectively, evaluated by jackknife cross-validation. It was found that the following features were correlated with translation rate: codon usage frequency, some gene ontology enrichment scores, number of RNA binding proteins known to bind its mRNA product, coding sequence length, protein abundance and 5′UTR free energy. These findings might provide useful information for understanding the mechanisms of translation and dynamic proteome. Our translation rate prediction model might become a high throughput tool for annotating the translation rate of mRNAs in large-scale.
CAUSES OF VARIATION IN BIOTIC INTERACTION STRENGTH AND PHENOTYPIC SELECTION ALONG AN ALTITUDINAL GRADIENT

Understanding the causes of variation in biotic interaction strength and phenotypic selection remains one of the outstanding goals of evolutionary ecology. Here we examine the variation in strength of interactions between two seed predators, common crossbills (Loxia curvirostra) and European red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris), and mountain pine (Pinus uncinata) at and below tree limit in the Pyrenees, and how this translates into phenotypic selection. Seed predation by crossbills increased whereas seed predation by squirrels decreased with increasing elevation and as the canopy became more open. Overall, seed predation by crossbills averaged about twice that by squirrels, and the intensity of selection exerted by crossbills averaged between 2.6 and 7.5 times greater than by squirrels. The higher levels of seed predation by crossbills than squirrels were related to the relatively open nature of most of the forests, and the higher intensity of selection exerted by crossbills resulted from their higher levels of seed predation. However, most of the differences in selection intensity between crossbills and squirrels were the result of habitat features having a greater effect on the foraging behavior of squirrels than of crossbills, causing selection to be much lower for squirrels than for crossbills.
Information Dependencies Et Veritas Information Dependencies

This paper uses the tools of information theory to examine and reason about the information content of the attributes within a relation instance. For two sets of attributes, an information dependency measure (InD measure) characterizes the uncertainty remaining about the values for the second set when the values for the rst set are known. A variety of arithmetic inequalities (InD inequalities) are shown to hold among InD measures; InD inequalities hold in any relation instance. Numeric constraints (InD constraints) on InD measures, consistent with the InD inequalities, can be applied to relation instances. Remarkably, functional and multivalued dependencies correspond to setting certain constraints to zero, with Armstrong's axioms shown to be consequences of the arithmetic inequalities applied to constraints. As an analog of completeness, for any set of constraints consistent with the inequalities, we may construct a relation instance that approximates these constraints within any positive .
Coadministration of Methylprednisolone with Hypertonic Saline Solution Improves Overall Neurological Function and Survival Rates in a Chronic Model of Spinal Cord Injury

OBJECTIVE We previously demonstrated that administration of 7.5% hypertonic saline (HS) significantly improved spinal cord blood flow and neurological outcomes after spinal cord injury. The aim of this study was to determine whether hypertonicity would enhance the effects of methylprednisolone (MP), further improving neurological function. METHODS Rat spinal cords were compressed for 10 minutes with 50 g of weight, and neurological function was assessed for 28 days, using the Basso-Beattie-Bresnahan locomotor rating scale. The control group received an intravenous injection of isotonic saline (IS) (5 ml/kg). Group 1 received an intravenous injection of 7.5% HS (5 ml/kg). Group 2 received an intravenous injection of MP (30 mg/kg) and IS (5 ml/kg). Group 3 received an intravenous injection of MP (30 mg/kg) administered with 7.5% HS (5 ml/kg). RESULTS At 24 hours after spinal cord injury, the combination of MP plus HS provided significant (P < 0.01) neurological improvements, compared with all other treatment groups. At 10 days after injury, the animals that had received MP plus HS exhibited significantly (P < 0.01) higher Basso-Beattie-Bresnahan scores, compared with the MP plus IS and control groups. The median survival time was significantly (P < 0.01) increased for the MP plus HS group (28 d), compared with the MP plus IS group (16 d). Because of the dramatic decrease in survival rates at 28 days after injury, there was a significant (P < 0.01) difference in neurological function only between the MP plus HS group and the control group. CONCLUSION The results indicate that the administration of HS may enhance the delivery of MP and prevent immunosuppression, leading to improvements in overall neurological function and survival rates after spinal cord injury.
Studies on a lysogenic Bacillus strain. I. A Bacteriophage specific for Bacillus anthracis

A bacteriophage is described which attacks almost exclusively strains of Bacillus anthracis, and attacks all the strains of this species which have been tested. As well as attacking typical strains of this species it attacks atypical variants. Strains of B. anthracis are not attacked by this phage when they are in a muciod state. A few strains of B. anthracis are only feebly attacked by this phage. Some experiments, conducted in an attempt to discover the reason for this, are described. The results are discussed and arguments in favour of regarding B. anthracis as a valid species are put forward.
Dynamic open spectrum sharing MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

In legacy wireless communication systems, spectrum allocation is static, resulting in extremely low spectrum utilization. On the other hand, there is little spectrum left for allocation to an increasing number of emerging wireless applications. A promising approach to solving this paradox is opening up most of the spectrum for unlicensed spectrum users in ways that co-exist with legacy users. Following this direction, this paper proposes the dynamic open spectrum sharing (DOSS) MAC protocol. This protocol allows nodes to adaptively select an arbitrary spectrum for the incipient communication subject to spectrum availability. It offers real-time dynamic spectrum allocation and high spectrum utilization without relying on any infrastructure. It also coexists with legacy wireless applications, while avoiding the hidden and exposed terminal problems. We conduct theoretical analysis of the protocol, and study its performance via simulations. In addition, we covers the radio receiver design
Multi-agent Q-learning and regression trees for automated pricing decisions

We study the use of the reinforcement learning algorithm Q-learning with regression tree function approximation to learn pricing strategies in a competitive marketplace of economic software agents. Q-learning is an algorithm for learning to estimate the long-term expected reward for a given state-action pair. In the case of a stationary environment with a lookup table representing the Q-function, the learning procedure is guaranteed to converge to an optimal policy. However, utilizing Q-learning in multi-agent systems presents special challenges. The simultaneous adaptation of multiple agents creates a non-stationary environment for each agent, hence there are no theoretical guarantees of convergence or optimality. Also, large multi-agent systems may have state spaces too large to represent with lookup tables, necessitating the use of function approximation.
Design Tools for Power Electronics : Trends and Innovations

Numerical simulation is a standard procedure in the design of power electronic systems. With simulation, one can test new concepts immediately without the need to order components and assembling which might be time-consuming and expensive. If something fails, there is no destruction but information about too high voltages and/or currents. Critical operating states just before failure can be exactly reproduced, and currents, voltages and junction temperatures can be easily monitored in simulation which ma kes it comparably easy to identify problematic designs. Expensive equipment for measurement, power supply and load which is essential tor testing prototypes is not needed in a first design stage. Further advantages of simulation are the ability to easily visualize fields, flows and distributions of physical properties, and the ability of automated parameter optimization and/or statistical analysis with Monte Carlo techniques. Due to these advantages it would be desirable to replace designing and testing prototypes by numerical simulations as for as possible in order to, reduce development time, save development cost and detect reliability problems. Unfortunately, practical simulation will never fully map reality. The power electronic system under investigation has to be simplified in order to be able to handle the model with a computer. Numerical simulation will always give a result, but it is up to experience and knowledge of the design engineer to verify the usefulness and/or accuracy of the result. In the paper we discuss what can be numerically simulated, what limits are given to modelling by scaling laws and what kind of developments we might experience in the future. Emphasis is on the numerical simulation of converter systems.