Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validating the TAME resource data model

The authors present a conceptual model of software development resource data and validates the model by references to the published literatures on necessary resource data for development support environments. The conceptual model was developed using a top-down strategy. A resource data model is a prerequisite to the development of integrated project support environments which aim to assist in the processes of resource estimation, evaluation, and control. The model proposed is a four-dimensional view of resources which can be used for resource estimation, utilization, and review. The model is validated by reference to three publications on resource databases, and the implications of the model arising out of these comparisons is discussed. <<ETX>>
An Efficient GPU Implementation of Inclusion-Based Pointer Analysis

We present an efficient GPU implementation of Andersen's whole-program inclusion-based pointer analysis, a fundamental analysis on which many others are based, including optimising compilers, bug detection and security analyses. Andersen's algorithm makes extensive modifications to the graph that represents the pointer-manipulating statements in a program. These modifications are highly irregular, input-dependent and statically unpredictable, making it much more challenging to balance such graph workloads across a multitude of GPU cores than those dealt with by traditional graph algorithms such as DFS and BFS. To parallelise Andersen's analysis efficiently on GPUs, we introduce an imbalance-aware workload partitioning scheme that divides its workload dynamically among the concurrent warps, initially in a warp-centric manner (during the coarsegrain stage) but later switches to a task-pool-based model when a workload imbalance is detected (during the fine-grain stage). We improve further its performance by using an adaptive group propagation scheme to reduce some redundant traversals. For a set of 14 C benchmarks evaluated, our parallel implementation of Andersen's analysis achieves a significant speedup of 46 percent on average over the state-of-the art on an NVIDIA Tesla K20c GPU.
Biogeography of Human Infectious Diseases: A Global Historical Analysis

Objectives Human pathogen richness and prevalence vary widely across the globe, yet we know little about whether global patterns found in other taxa also predict diversity in this important group of organisms. This study (a) assesses the relative importance of temperature, precipitation, habitat diversity, and population density on the global distributions of human pathogens and (b) evaluates the species-area predictions of island biogeography for human pathogen distributions on oceanic islands. Methods Historical data were used in order to minimize the influence of differential access to modern health care on pathogen prevalence. The database includes coded data (pathogen, environmental and cultural) for a worldwide sample of 186 non-industrial cultures, including 37 on islands. Prevalence levels for 10 pathogens were combined into a pathogen prevalence index, and OLS regression was used to model the environmental determinants of the prevalence index and number of pathogens. Results Pathogens (number and prevalence index) showed the expected latitudinal gradient, but predictors varied by latitude. Pathogens increased with temperature in high-latitude zones, while mean annual precipitation was a more important predictor in low-latitude zones. Other environmental factors associated with more pathogens included seasonal dry extremes, frost-free climates, and human population density outside the tropics. Islands showed the expected species-area relationship for all but the smallest islands, and the relationship was not mediated by habitat diversity. Although geographic distributions of free-living and parasitic taxa typically have different determinants, these data show that variables that influence the distribution of free-living organisms also shape the global distribution of human pathogens. Understanding the cause of these distributions is potentially important, since geographical variation in human pathogens has an important influence on global disparities in human welfare.
The Football Boost? Testing Three Models on Impacts on Sports Spectators’ Self-Esteem

To explain the wide attraction to sports, self-esteem impacts of a live American college football game were investigated; testing hypotheses were derived from mood-as-information, social identity, and sociometer frameworks along with previous research on sports and self-esteem. A three-wave field study measured mood, group affiliation, and self-esteem among 174 students at two different universities, immediately before and on 2 consecutive days after the football teams of these universities played in a much anticipated game. Both self-esteem and mood were affected 2 days after the game; however, fans of the winning team showed increased self-esteem (with no related mood improvement) while fans of the defeated team showed decreases in mood (with no related self-esteem deflation). Both the game outcome and the social viewing context influenced self-esteem. Impacts on self-esteem were mediated by both mood and group affiliation changes.
The Association between Childhood Environmental Exposures and the Subsequent Development of Crohn's Disease in the Western Cape, South Africa

Background Environmental factors during childhood are thought to play a role in the aetiolgy of Crohn's Disease (CD). However the association between age at time of exposure and the subsequent development of CD in South Africa is unknown. Methods A case control study of all consecutive CD patients seen at 2 large inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) referral centers in the Western Cape, South Africa between September 2011 and January 2013 was performed. Numerous environmental exposures during 3 age intervals; 0–5, 6–10 and 11–18 years were extracted using an investigator administered questionnaire. An agreement analysis was performed to determine the reliability of questionnaire data for all the relevant variables. Results This study included 194 CD patients and 213 controls. On multiple logistic regression analysis, a number of childhood environmental exposures during the 3 age interval were significantly associated with the risk of developing CD. During the age interval 6–10 years, never having had consumed unpasteurized milk (OR = 5.84; 95% CI, 2.73–13.53) and never having a donkey, horse, sheep or cow on the property (OR = 2.48; 95% CI, 1.09–5.98) significantly increased the risk of developing future CD. During the age interval 11–18 years, an independent risk-association was identified for; never having consumed unpasteurized milk (OR = 2.60; 95% CI, 1.17–6.10) and second-hand cigarette smoke exposure (OR = 1.93; 95% CI, 1.13–3.35). Conclusion This study demonstrates that both limited microbial exposures and exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke during childhood is associated with future development of CD.
Weil-Petersson Completion of Teichmueller Spaces and Mapping Class Group Actions

Given a surface of higher genus, we will look at the Weil-Petersson completion of the Teichmuller space of the surface, and will study the isometric action of the mapping class group on it. The main observation is that the geometric characteristics of the setting bear strong similarities to the ones in semi-simple Lie group actions on noncompact symmetric spaces.
The Class of Shareholdings and its Impacts on Corporate Performance – A Case of State Shareholding Composition in Chinese Publicly Listed Companies

Does the class of shareholdings matter for corporate performance? To address the question, our paper starts by classifying shareholdings on the basis of the principle of ultimate ownership. At present, the shareholding structure of Chinese quoted companies is state-dominant in that 84% of public companies ultimately are found controlled by the state, compared with 16% of non-statecontrolled ones. In contrast to our identified shareholdings, the Chinese official shareholding record only reports the state and the legal person share classes that are inevitably ambiguous for the identification of ultimate owners of public corporations, which in turn has misled many previous studies in assessing the impact of shareholding classes on performance. Based on our newly established shareholding classes, we make a nested performance comparison between these different classes, such as the state direct control versus the state indirect control, and find significant evidence from the Chinese data that the class of shareholdings does matter for company performance. The least inefficient shareholding class is the holding companies that are wholly listed and have focused industrial business through the state indirect control of the downstream public corporations. This finding provides ground for us to think more about how the corporate control mechanism could be further improved in China’s current corporate governance reform.
The impact of intrinsic motivation on e-learning in authentic computer tasks

Students with high intrinsic motivation often outperform students with low intrinsic motivation. However, little is known about the processes that lead to these differences. In education based on simulations or authentic electronic learning environments, this lack of insight is even more clear. The present study investigated what students actually did in an electronic learning environment that was designed as a game-like realistic simulation in which students had to play the role of a junior consultant. The results show that students with high intrinsic motivation did not do more, rather they tended to do different things. Analysis of log files showed that the increased curiosity that students with high intrinsic motivation have, resulted in proportionally more explorative study behaviour. However, the learning outcomes of students with high intrinsic motivation were not better.
A new unsupervised event detector for non-intrusive load monitoring

Event detection plays an important role in today's Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) systems faced more and more with nonlinear and variable loads. For this purpose, the paper presents an unsupervised NILM event detector based on kernel Fisher discriminant analysis (KFDA) which provides accurate start and end times of so-called active sections. Active sections are an extension of classical NILM events which are introduced to include pulses, variable load intervals and noisy signals which makes the event classification more flexible. The detector achieves good segmentation into steady states and active sections. When applied to the BLUED dataset, the detector yields a recall / precision of 98.78 % / 99.66 % for phase A and 92.17 % / 86.32 % for phase B, respectively.
Hearing Scenes: A Neuromagnetic Signature of Auditory Source and Reverberant Space Separation

Abstract Perceiving the geometry of surrounding space is a multisensory process, crucial to contextualizing object perception and guiding navigation behavior. Humans can make judgments about surrounding spaces from reverberation cues, caused by sounds reflecting off multiple interior surfaces. However, it remains unclear how the brain represents reverberant spaces separately from sound sources. Here, we report separable neural signatures of auditory space and source perception during magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording as subjects listened to brief sounds convolved with monaural room impulse responses (RIRs). The decoding signature of sound sources began at 57 ms after stimulus onset and peaked at 130 ms, while space decoding started at 138 ms and peaked at 386 ms. Importantly, these neuromagnetic responses were readily dissociable in form and time: while sound source decoding exhibited an early and transient response, the neural signature of space was sustained and independent of the original source that produced it. The reverberant space response was robust to variations in sound source, and vice versa, indicating a generalized response not tied to specific source-space combinations. These results provide the first neuromagnetic evidence for robust, dissociable auditory source and reverberant space representations in the human brain and reveal the temporal dynamics of how auditory scene analysis extracts percepts from complex naturalistic auditory signals.
Light Wiener filters for estimation of slowly varying wireless channels

We derive reduced order (light) Wiener filters for slow flat fading channel estimation in pilot aided Alamouti receiver. The concept is based on the approximation of the channel auto-covariance function to zero and second order Taylor series for the cases when there is only partial knowledge about channel statistics at the receiver. Moreover this approach reduces computational effort in design of the estimation filter and its implementation. The theoretical Mean Square Error (MSE) is developed for each case, verified through simulation and compared to that of a full Wiener filter. Results are then applied to evaluate performance of Alamouti coding Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) transmission system with imperfect Channel State Information (CSI) at the receiver side and pilot-based estimation scheme.
Isoefficiency in Practice: Configuring and Understanding the Performance of Task-based Applications

Task-based programming offers an elegant way to express units of computation and the dependencies among them, making it easier to distribute the computational load evenly across multiple cores. However, this separation of problem decomposition and parallelism requires a sufficiently large input problem to achieve satisfactory efficiency on a given number of cores. Unfortunately, finding a good match between input size and core count usually requires significant experimentation, which is expensive and sometimes even impractical. In this paper, we propose an automated empirical method for finding the isoefficiency function of a task-based program, binding efficiency, core count, and the input size in one analytical expression. This allows the latter two to be adjusted according to given (realistic) efficiency objectives. Moreover, we not only find (i) the actual isoefficiency function but also (ii) the function one would yield if the program execution was free of resource contention and (iii) an upper bound that could only be reached if the program was able to maintain its average parallelism throughout its execution. The difference between the three helps to explain low efficiency, and in particular, it helps to differentiate between resource contention and structural conflicts related to task dependencies or scheduling. The insights gained can be used to co-design programs and shared system resources.
neXus2. An investigation into the library and information services workforce in Australia: The institutional perspective. Final report prepared for the Australian Library and Information Association and National and State Libraries Australia

The neXus2 research project has sought to investigate the library and information services (LIS) workforce in Australia, from the institutional or employer perspective. The study builds on the neXus1 study, which collected data from individuals in the LIS workforce in order to present a snapshot of the profession in 2006, highlighting the demographics, educational background and career details of library and information professionals in Australia. To counterbalance this individual perspective, library institutions were invited to participate in a survey to contribute further data as employers. This final report on the neXus2 project compares the findings from the different library sectors, ie academic libraries, TAFE libraries, the National and State libraries, public libraries, special libraries and school libraries.
Transformational Leadership Directly and Indirectly Effect on Nurse Performance: Organizational Cultural as Intervening Variables

A nurse performance greatly determines the quality of health services in a hospital. The purpose of this study was to prove the influence of transformational leadership on nurse performances, both directly and indirectly through organizational culture and work motivation. The research method used was a quantitative approach with cross-sectional design. The number of samples consisted of 86 nurses in a private hospital. Data collection used a questionnaire. Data analysis techniques used Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Research results shew that transformational leadership had a positive and significant effect on nurse performance both directly and indirectly through organizational culture and work motivation). The study results have shown that Transformational Leadership is effect on Organizational Culture. Transformational Leadership is effect on Work Motivation. Transformational Leadership, Organizational Culture, and Work Motivation are effect on Nurses Performance. Organizational culture mediated the effect of the transformational leadership on performance.
Utilizing Autologous Multipotent Mesenchymal Stromal Cells and β-Tricalcium Phosphate Scaffold in Human Bone Defects: A Prospective, Controlled Feasibility Trial

The purpose of this prospective controlled study was to compare healing quality following the implantation of ultraporous β-tricalcium phosphate, containing either expanded autologous mesenchymal stromal cells (trial group, 9 patients) or β-tricalcium phosphate alone (control group, 9 patients), into femoral defects during revision total hip arthroplasty. Both groups were assessed using the Harris Hip Score, radiography, and DEXA scanning at 6 weeks and 3, 6, and 12 months postoperatively. A significant difference in the bone defect healing was observed between both groups of patients (P < 0.05). In the trial group, trabecular remodeling was found in all nine patients and in the control group, in 1 patient only. Whereas, over the 12-month follow-up period, no significant difference was observed between both groups of patients in terms of the resorption of β-tricalcium phosphate, the significant differences were documented in the presence of radiolucency and bone trabeculation through the defect (P < 0.05). Using autologous mesenchymal stromal cells combined with a β-tricalcium phosphate scaffold is a feasible, safe, and effective approach for management of bone defects with compromised microenvironment. The clinical trial was registered at the EU Clinical Trials Register before patient recruitment has begun (EudraCT number 2012-005599-33).
Genome-Wide Linkage Scan Identifies Two Novel Genetic Loci for Coronary Artery Disease: In GeneQuest Families

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identified >50 common variants associated with CAD or its complication myocardial infarction (MI), but collectively they account for <20% of heritability, generating a phenomena of “missing heritability”. Rare variants with large effects may account for a large portion of missing heritability. Genome-wide linkage studies of large families and follow-up fine mapping and deep sequencing are particularly effective in identifying rare variants with large effects. Here we show results from a genome-wide linkage scan for CAD in multiplex GeneQuest families with early onset CAD and MI. Whole genome genotyping was carried out with 408 markers that span the human genome by every 10 cM and linkage analyses were performed using the affected relative pair analysis implemented in GENEHUNTER. Affected only nonparametric linkage (NPL) analysis identified two novel CAD loci with highly significant evidence of linkage on chromosome 3p25.1 (peak NPL = 5.49) and 3q29 (NPL = 6.84). We also identified four loci with suggestive linkage on 9q22.33, 9q34.11, 17p12, and 21q22.3 (NPL = 3.18–4.07). These results identify novel loci for CAD and provide a framework for fine mapping and deep sequencing to identify new susceptibility genes and novel variants associated with risk of CAD.
Neonatal SSRI Exposure Programs a Hypermetabolic State in Adult Mice

Background. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) therapy complicates up to 10% of pregnancies. During therapy, SSRIs exert pleiotropic antidepressant, anorexigenic, and neurotrophic effects. Intrauterine SSRI exposure has been modeled by neonatal administration to developmentally immature rodents, and it has paradoxically elicited features of adult depression. We hypothesized neonatal SSRI exposure likewise programs a rebound hypermetabolic state in adult mice. Methods. C57BL/6 pups were randomized to saline or sertraline (5 mg/kg/d) from P1–P14. Because estrogen increases tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (TPH2) expression, a subset of female mice underwent sham surgery or bilateral ovariectomy (OVX). Metabolic rate was determined by indirect calorimetry. Results. In both male and female mice, neonatal SSRI exposure increased adult caloric intake and metabolic rate. SSRI-exposed female mice had significantly decreased adult weight with a relative increase in brain weight and melatonin excretion, independent of ovarian status. Cerebral cortex TPH2 expression was increased in SSRI-exposed male mice but decreased in OVX SSRI-exposed female mice. Conclusions. SSRI exposure during a critical neurodevelopmental window increases adult caloric intake and metabolic rate. Ovarian status modulated central TPH2 expression, but not adult energy balance, suggesting programmed neural connectivity or enhanced melatonin production may play a more important role in the post-SSRI hypermetabolic syndrome.
On the Theory and Algorithm for rigorous discretization in applications of Information Theory

We identify fundamental issues with discretization when estimating information-theoretic quantities in the analysis of data. These difficulties are theoretical in nature and arise with discrete datasets carrying significant implications for the corresponding claims and results. Here we describe the origins of the methodological problems, and provide a clear illustration of their impact with the example of biological network reconstruction. We propose an algorithm (shared information metric) that corrects for the biases and the resulting improved performance of the algorithm demonstrates the need to take due consideration of this issue in different contexts.
Observation and motion models for indoor pedestrian tracking

We present effective observation and motion models for tracking the position of a WiFi-equipped smartphone user in large continuous indoor environments. Our observation model can generate likelihoods at locations for which no calibration data is available. Three component motion models provide better proposal distribution of the user motion. These models being incorporated into the particle filter framework, our WiFi fingerprint-based localization algorithm can track the position of a smartphone user accurately in large indoor environments. Experiments carried with an Android smartphone in a multistory building illustrate the advantages of our models.
Aquificales in Yellowstone National Park

Aquificales are metabolically versatile chemolithoautotrophic thermophilic bacteria. This group is widespread in both deep-sea and terrestrial hydrothermal systems. In Yellowstone National Park, they were first described in early descriptions of the biology of the park, and later captured the attention of many microbiologists including Brock, Stahl, Pace, and others. There are four genera currently described from Yellowstone: Thermocrinis, Sulfurihydrogenibium, Hydrogenobacter and the only acidophilic genus, Hydrogenobaculum. Aquificales appear to fix CO2 using the reductive TCA cycle, although several species can also obtain carbon from organic sources such as acetate and formate. Hydrogen and sulfur appear to be the preferred electron donors. Furthermore, many of these filamentous bacteria are associated with visible iron and sulfur mineral precipitation, which points to their overall importance in biogeochemical cycling in hot spring ecosystems.