Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Choosing Free/Open Source

Open source software is becoming a credible and realistic alternative to proprietary software in municipalities. The aim of this thesis is to explore the strategies and logical issues that inspire and motivate municipalities to migrate into or integrate use of open source software. The research approach used in the study is an explorative, comparative case study performed in the three Swedish municipalities of Falköping, Alingsås and Kungälv, which considers implementation and use of OpenOffice in administration. The methodologies used in the case study were in-depth interviews with Chief Information Officers in the municipalities and document analysis. The interviews were combined with the tool of SWOTanalysis to further focus on the reasons for choosing OpenOffice as an application program. There is certainly not a unique strategy to migrate into or integrate use of Free/Open Source Software. Since each municipality is autonomous in the process of decision-making, various strategic planning or guidelines are use in different municipalities. In the municipalities of Alingsås and Kungälv the strategic planning is used for leading the processes of implementation of new software applications. However, in Falköping municipality, the procedures are guided by a set of guidelines. The lower Total Cost of Ownership and the Free/Open Source Software’s freedoms besides many other advantages, make the municipalities stimulated to migrate into use of OpenOffice suite. In contrast, there are some drawbacks and barriers, such as shortage of internal and external standardization and lack of user knowledge and familiarity, which demotivate the municipalities to take this decision. To lower costs of IT administration seems to be the most significant factor in motivating municipalities to migrate into use of OpenOffice. More research is needed in order to find out the consequences of implementation of OpenOffice in municipalities as well as to investigate if Total Cost of Ownership really is decreased by the use of Open Office.
Cryptanalysis of secret sharing schemes based on spherical spaces

In this article the analysis of secret sharing scheme developed by Tan, Yang, Cheng and Wang, in which taken as the basis for personalized spherical spaces. This method is a threshold secret sharing scheme in which secret itself is represented as a center of the sphere, and its shadows as points on the surface of the sphere. But in this article proposed a method of unleash the secret in a fairly short time.
Renal impairment: a challenge for opioid treatment? The role of buprenorphine

Impairment of renal function is common among elderly patients due to an age-related decline in renal excretory function. In addition, many diseases such as hypertension and diabetes mellitus are associated with an accelerated decline in renal function. Renal dysfunction affects the metabolism of compounds and thus has important therapeutic consequences for drug safety. For pain patients who have reduced renal function such as those in palliative care, most opioids used for chronic pain treatment should be administered at reduced dosages, with increased dosage intervals, or not at all because of the risk of accumulation of the parent compound or its metabolites. For instance, for morphine or codeine, active metabolites are formed in the liver and cleared by the kidney and may therefore accumulate in cases of renal dysfunction. In contrast, buprenorphine can be administered at normal doses in patients with renal dysfunction because it is mainly excreted through the liver. In patients undergoing regular haemodialysis treatment, removal of an opioid during dialysis varies between individuals based upon a number of factors including the dialysis technique used. Morphine appears to be difficult to process in haemodialysis patients due to possible ‘rebound’ of metabolites between dialysis sessions. By contrast, the pharmacokinetics of buprenorphine are unchanged in haemodialysis patients, which means that there is no need for dose-reduction with this drug. Thus, in patients with reduced renal function, chronic renal insufficiency and haemodialysis, buprenorphine appears to be a safe choice when opioid treatment is initiated.
Data-Driven Personalized Drama Management

A drama manager is an omniscient background agent responsible for guiding players through the story space and delivering an enjoyable and coherent experience. Most previous drama managers only consider the designer's intent. We present a drama manager that uses data-driven techniques to model players and provides personalized guidance in the story space without removing player agency. In order to guide players' experiences, our drama manager manipulates the story space to maximize the probability of the players making choices intended by the drama manager. Our system is evaluated on an interactive storytelling game. Results show that our drama manager can significantly increase the likelihood of the drama manager's desired story continuation.
Biphasic responses in multi-site phosphorylation systems

Multi-site phosphorylation systems are repeatedly encountered in cellular biology and multi-site modification is a basic building block of post-translational modification. In this paper, we demonstrate how distributive multi-site modification mechanisms by a single kinase/phosphatase pair can lead to biphasic/partial biphasic dose–response characteristics for the maximally phosphorylated substrate at steady state. We use simulations and analysis to uncover a hidden competing effect which is responsible for this and analyse how it may be accentuated. We build on this to analyse different variants of multi-site phosphorylation mechanisms showing that some mechanisms are intrinsically not capable of displaying this behaviour. This provides both a consolidated understanding of how and under what conditions biphasic responses are obtained in multi-site phosphorylation and a basis for discriminating between different mechanisms based on this. We also demonstrate how this behaviour may be combined with other behaviour such as threshold and bistable responses, demonstrating the capacity of multi-site phosphorylation systems to act as complex molecular signal processors.
On the probabilistic formulation of the replica approach to spin glasses

In this paper we review the predictions of the replica approach on the probability distribution of the overlaps among replicas and on the sample to sample fluctuations of this probability. We stress the role of replica equivalence in obtaining relations which do not depend on the form of replica symmetry breaking. A comparison is done with the results obtained with a different rigorous approach. The role of the ultrametricity and of other algebraic properties in discussed. It is shown that the ultrametric solution can be obtained from a variational principle.
A Novel Bandwidth Allocation Algorithm for DOCSIS Based Hybrid Fiber Coaxial Networks

(DUGS) scheduling algorithm makes use of piggybacking request and changes the unsolicited grant size allocation dynamically. It is shown through simulation results that throughput, channel utilization and delay performance have been improved in case of DUGS, compared with current DOCSIS protocol. This algorithm can also keep fairness among connections.
Unicorns Do Exist: A Tutorial on “Proving” the Null Hypothesis

Introductory statistics classes teach us that we can never prove the null hypothesis; all we can do is reject or fail to reject it. However, there are times when it is necessary to try to prove the nonexistence of a difference between groups. This most often happens within the context of comparing a new treatment against an established one and showing that the new intervention is not inferior to the standard. This article first outlines the logic of “noninferiority” testing by differentiating between the null hypothesis (that which we are trying to nullify) and the “nill” hypothesis (there is no difference), reversing the role of the null and alternate hypotheses, and defining an interval within which groups are said to be equivalent. We then work through an example and show how to calculate sample sizes for noninferiority studies.
Chapter Artificial Neural Networks 4.1 Introduction

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) provide a general, practical method for learning real-valued, discrete-valued, and vector-valued functions from examples. Algorithms such as BACKPROPAGATION use gradient descent to tune network parameters to best fit a training set of input-output pairs. ANN learning is robust to errors in the training data and has been successfully applied to problems such as interpreting visual scenes, speech recognition, and learning robot control strategies. Neural network learning methods provide a robust approach to approximating real-valued, discrete-valued, and vector-valued target functions. For certain types of problems, such as learning to interpret complex real-world sensor data, artificial neural networks are among the most effective learning methods currently known. For example, the BACKPROPAGATION algorithm described in this chapter has proven surprisingly successful in many practical problems such as learning to recognize handwritten characters (LeCun et al. 1989), learning to recognize spoken words (Lang et al. 1990), and learning to recognize faces (Cottrell 1990). One survey of practical applications is provided by Rumelhart et al. (1994).
Insects could exploit UV-green contrast for Landmark navigation.

Illumination-invariant detection of landmark features is a prerequisite for landmark navigation in insects. It is suggested that a contrast mechanism involving the UV and green receptors of insect eyes could guarantee a robust separation between natural objects as foreground and sky as background. Using a sensor with a UV and a green channel that in their spectral characteristics are close to the corresponding insect photoreceptors, data of natural objects and sky were collected. The data show that the two classes can be separated by a fixed threshold in the UV-green color space, offering an advantage over a purely UV-based separation that would require a dynamic threshold. Based on a numerical method, UV-green antagonism is shown to guarantee a more reliable discrimination than UV-blue antagonism.
Gene Expression Atlas at the European Bioinformatics Institute

The Gene Expression Atlas (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/gxa) is an added-value database providing information about gene expression in different cell types, organism parts, developmental stages, disease states, sample treatments and other biological/experimental conditions. The content of this database derives from curation, re-annotation and statistical analysis of selected data from the ArrayExpress Archive of Functional Genomics Data. A simple interface allows the user to query for differential gene expression either (i) by gene names or attributes such as Gene Ontology terms, or (ii) by biological conditions, e.g. diseases, organism parts or cell types. The gene queries return the conditions where expression has been reported, while condition queries return which genes are reported to be expressed in these conditions. A combination of both query types is possible. The query results are ranked using various statistical measures and by how many independent studies in the database show the particular gene-condition association. Currently, the database contains information about more than 200 000 genes from nine species and almost 4500 biological conditions studied in over 30 000 assays from over 1000 independent studies.
Work History, Labor Force Attachment, and Earnings Differences between the Races and Sexes

This article uses a new data set to investigate the extent to which differences in work history, on-the-job training, absenteeism, and self-imposed restrictions on work hours and location account for wage differences between the sexes and races. As expected, white men generally had more education and training and less absenteeism and fewer restrictions than black men and women of both races. Contrary to past studies, the proportionate wage payoff on the qualification measures are virtually identical for the four race/sex subgroups. The average differences in qualifications, however, explained less than one-third, one-half, and three-fifths of the wage gaps between white men and black women, white women, and black men, respectively.
Remote Oblivious Storage: Making Oblivious RAM Practical

Remote storage of data has become an increasingly attractive and advantageous option, especially due to cloud systems. While encryption protects the data, it does not hide the access pattern to the data. A natural solution is to access remote storage using an Oblivious RAM (ORAM) which provably hides all access patterns. While ORAM is asymptotically efficient, the best existing scheme (Pinkas and Reinman, Crypto’10) still has considerable overhead for a practical implementation: for M stored items, it stores 4 times and sometimes 6 times more items remotely, requires O(log M) round trips to storage server per request, and periodically blocks all data requests to shuffle all storage (which is a lengthy process). In this paper, we first define a related notion to ORAM, oblivious storage (OS), which captures more accurately and naturally the security setting of remote storage. Then, we propose a new ORAM/OS construction that solves the practicality issues just outlined: it has a storage constant of ≈ 1, achieves O(1) round trips to the storage server per request, and allows requests to happen concurrently with shuffle without jeopardizing security. Our construction consists of a new organization of server memory into a flat main part and a hierarchical shelter, a client-side index for rapidly locating identifiers at the server, a new shelter serving requests concurrent with the shuffle, and a data structure for locating items efficiently in a partially shuffled storage.
Estimating the spatial distribution of wintering little brown bat populations in the eastern United States

Depicting the spatial distribution of wildlife species is an important first step in developing management and conservation programs for particular species. Accurate representation of a species distribution is important for predicting the effects of climate change, land-use change, management activities, disease, and other landscape-level processes on wildlife populations. We developed models to estimate the spatial distribution of little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) wintering populations in the United States east of the 100th meridian, based on known hibernacula locations. From this data, we developed several scenarios of wintering population counts per county that incorporated uncertainty in the spatial distribution of the hibernacula as well as uncertainty in the size of the current little brown bat population. We assessed the variability in our results resulting from effects of uncertainty. Despite considerable uncertainty in the known locations of overwintering little brown bats in the eastern United States, we believe that models accurately depicting the effects of the uncertainty are useful for making management decisions as these models are a coherent organization of the best available information.
A Customizable Ranking Method for Digital Evidence Search through Interestingness Injection

Digital evidence search is one of the key issues in digital forensics. Current forensic search tools just present the results without a kind of grouping or inappropriate filtering. So a criminal investigator has to spend a lot of time in order to find documents related to the investigation among the searched results. If the interestingness of the crime investigator is injected into the system, the system can rank the search hits according to it and present the most relevant results to him. In this paper we present a customizable ranking method through injecting the interestingness of crime investigator to improve the performance of digital evidence search in email forensics.
Research on train reception and departure system based on intelligent video analysis

The train reception and departure time directly affects the performance of the passenger service system. However, the system in existing stations sometimes cannot accurately obtain the train arrival time because of train delay. This paper proposed a kind of informative linkage mechanism for train reception and departure system by fusing intelligent video processing techniques. By using surveillance cameras deployed in track turnout region, we can obtain the real-time image for monitoring the status of train operation. The images can be used for the further analysis for acquiring the position, arrival time, type and velocity of the train. Then the information can be sent to the passenger service system and fused with the information from the transporting dispatching management information system. The system proposed in this paper presents a kind of low cost solution for railway monitoring, which can effectively solve the problem of how to accurately get the arrival time through the linkage of the video monitoring system and of the passenger service system.
Factors influencing clinical decision making

Conclusion 98 Research in clinical reasoning has focused strongly on the cognitive aspects of the processes involved. This chapter reports on research that examined the context of and factors influencing clinical decision making. Clinical decision making is both an outcome and a component of clinical reasoning. Given its pivotal place in the practice of health professionals, it is imperative to identify and understand factors that positively or negatively influence decision making. Of particular interest, when considering the quality of health care, are situations when factors influencing decision making contribute to errors or mistakes, with potential adverse outcomes for receivers of health care, or when factors influencing decision making can enhance healthcare experiences or outcomes.
A sub-graph of strand spaces in security protocols

In this paper we define the sub-graph of strand spaces by extending the open bundle, which is adopted as the formalism of security protocols that run in an infinite concurrent way. We re-define communication relations amongst nodes and causal predecessor relations by refining sub-term relations respectively. The novel sub-graph of strand spaces of security protocols that run in infinite concurrent ways, which is different from the open bundle contributes to simplifying its strand spaces to reduce the computational complexity of proofs of safety properties based on theorem proving. The extending strand space theory that contains the method of sub-graphs of strand spaces can be also used to analyses of ordinary concurrent systems.
On avoiding Moving Objects for indoor autonomous quadrotors

A mini quadrotor can be used in many applications, such as indoor airborne surveillance, payload delivery, and warehouse monitoring. In these applications, vision-based autonomous navigation is one of the most interesting research topics because precise navigation can be implemented based on vision analysis. However, pixel-based vision analysis approaches require a high-powered computer, which is inappropriate to be attached to a small indoor quadrotor. This paper proposes a method called the Motion-vector-based Moving Objects Detection. This method detects and avoids obstacles using stereo motion vectors instead of individual pixels, thereby substantially reducing the data processing requirement. Although this method can also be used in the avoidance of stationary obstacles by taking into account the ego-motion of the quadrotor, this paper primarily focuses on providing our empirical verification on the real-time avoidance of moving objects.
Classification of three types of red blood cells in peripheral blood smear based on morphology

Analysis of microscopic images is used in many fields of technology and medicine. In some medical experiments, some drugs, with known effects in red blood cells (R.B. Cs) membranes, are used to find out their activity. In addition, different diseases affect the appearance of R.B. Cs and cause the malfunction of the internal organs. In this paper, Elliptocytes, Discocytes and Echinocytes, which are three known R.B. Cs, are classified in a peripheral blood smear based on morphological methods. For this reason, a simple statistical analysis of distances of each edge pixel from mass center is employed. This method is 98.63% successful for Elliptocyte recognition, 96.7% successful for the normal Discocyte recognition and 95.36% successful for Echinocyte recognition.
Heterocyst-Specific Expression of patB, a Gene Required for Nitrogen Fixation in Anabaena sp. Strain PCC 7120

ABSTRACT The patB gene product is required for growth and survival of the filamentous cyanobacterium Anabaena sp. strain PCC 7120 in the absence of combined nitrogen. A patB::gfp fusion demonstrated that this gene is expressed exclusively in heterocysts. patB mutants have a normal initial pattern of heterocyst spacing along the filament but differentiate excess heterocysts after several days in the absence of combined nitrogen. Expression of hetR and patS, two critical regulators of the heterocyst development cascade, are normal for patB mutants, indicating that patB acts downstream of them in the differentiation pathway. A patB deletion mutant suffers an almost complete cessation of growth and nitrogen fixation within 24 h of combined nitrogen removal. In contrast, a new PatB mutant that is defective in its N-terminal ferredoxin domain, or a previously described mutant that has a frameshift removing its C-terminal helix-turn-helix domain, grows very slowly and differentiates multiple contiguous heterocysts under nitrogen-deficient conditions.
Study on the output characteristics of piezoelectric-electromagnetic hybrid harvest structure

The expansion of wireless sensor networks in our daily environment and the rapid development of low power consumption devices and MEMS devices have been driving research on energy harvester. In this paper, based on the designed hybrid harvest structure, the equivalent vibration model and the governing electromechanical equations of PE-EM hybrid harvest structure are established. And the electromechanical coupling characteristics of the PE-EM hybrid harvester are analyzed. And the output power expression of hybrid harvester is derived. The influences of dimension parameters of PE harvest element and EM harvest element on the output characteristics of the hybrid harvester are analyzed. The results of the theory analysis and experimental tests show that the harvesting performance of hybrid harvester is better than that of single harvest structure. The output power of hybrid harvester is larger and the 3dB bandwidth and the environmental adaptability of designed hybrid harvester are better than that of PE-only and EM-only harvest structure. And the designed hybrid harvest structure will have a broad application.