Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Probe Based Dynamic Server Selection for Multimedia QoS

This paper proposes a probe-based scheme to select which one of a number of replica servers to use to satisfy client requests for multimedia content. Our scheme attempts to select the candidate server that can provide the best connection in terms of loss, delay and jitter (delay variation). A grading system applies meaningful values to periodic active probe measurements, and a selection algorithm chooses a server so as to avoid congested paths and bursty network traffic in order to improve end-user video presentation quality. Our proposed dynamic server selection system has been designed to work as a complementary technology with any existing multimedia congestion control system. Some experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme are described.
Beyond User-Centered Design and User Experience : Designing for User Performance

prototyping to defer introduction of realistic details. Usability inspections to multiply the effectiveness of user testing. Elevating user performance over user experience. Model-driven exploration. Exploratory modeling (Windl, 2002a) is a technique for speeding up and simplifying the process of user study and requirements definition. Where common ethnographic approaches to user study begin with observation and data gathering followed by building models based on the data, exploratory modeling reverses the order, beginning with preliminary modeling on which to base subsequent user study. Provisional models of users and user tasks are first constructed in order to help identify holes in understanding, formulate questions, and to highlight areas of ambiguity and uncertainty or outright confusion. These admittedly incomplete models are used to clarify priorities and guide the investigation and observation by sharpening the focus onto key areas. Provisional models are then refined based on findings from a more rapid and pointed data gathering process. As originally proposed and most commonly practiced, exploratory modeling constructs condensed and simplified inventories of essential needs: the roles that users will play in relation to the planned system and the tasks that must be supported in order for users to successfully perform those roles. Instead of a protracted investigation producing a potentially overwhelming surplus of data, model-driven exploration quickly and efficiently delivers answers to the most important questions. In principle, model-driven exploration entails a risk that modelers will not realize where information is missing or will not recognize what is unknown or misunderstood, but in practice this does not seem to be a problem. In any event, it is almost invariably cheaper and easier to go back and fill in a few blanks missed on a tightly focused initial inquiry than to gather great quantities of superfluous data that must nevertheless be processed and understood before it can be discarded. Complete task modeling. Of all the thing that visual and interaction designers and other usability professionals need to understand about users, none is more important than their intentions. What are the tasks that users intend to accomplish with the product? Guided by a task model that maps out all the user tasks and how they are interconnected, designers are in a better position to put features that support user tasks in the most appropriate places. Task cases and essential use cases (Constantine, 1995; Constantine and Lockwood, 2001) offer a more precise and less wordy alternative to user-centered models like scenarios and customer stories. These models have a structure that focuses on the intentions of users and the responsibilities of the system in support of those needs. Their fine-grained and succinct format helps promotes compact but comprehensive modeling of task essentials. They the have a long record of success in leading to world-class designs that enhance user performance (Windl, 2002b).
Molecular Pathways Molecular Pathways : Targeting NRAS in Melanoma and Acute Myelogenous Leukemia

Successful targeting of specific oncogenic "driver" mutations with small-molecule inhibitors has represented a major advance in cancer therapeutics over the past 10 to 15 years. The most common activating oncogene in humanmalignancy,RAS (rat sarcoma), has proved to be an elusive target. Activatingmutations in RAS induce mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and phosphoinositide 3-kinase–AKT pathway signaling and drive malignant progression in up to 30% of cancers. Oncogenic NRAS mutations occur in several cancer types, notably melanoma, acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), and less commonly, colon adenocarcinoma, thyroid carcinoma, and other hematologicmalignancies. AlthoughNRAS-mutant tumors have been recalcitrant to targeted therapeutic strategies historically, newer agents targetingMAP/ERK kinase 1 (MEK1)/2 have recently shown signs of clinical efficacy as monotherapy. Combination strategies of MEK inhibitorswithother targeted agents have strong preclinical support andare being evaluated in clinical trials. This review discusses the recent preclinical and clinical studies about the role ofNRAS in cancer, with a focus on melanoma and AML. Clin Cancer Res; 20(16); 1–7. 2014 AACR.
Whole Genome Bisulfite Sequencing

Methylation of DNA at the fifth position in cytosine (5-mC) is a stable epigenetic modification and plays an important role in many biological processes, including gene silencing, suppression of transposable elements, genomic imprinting and X chromosome inactivation. Detection and quantification of methylation are critical to understand gene expression and other processes subjected to epigenetic regulation. Whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) is used to detect methylated cytosines by treating the DNA with sodium bisulfite before sequencing. WGBS has become the gold standard for studying genome-wide methylation at single base resolution.
THE MULTIRESOLUTION ANALYSIS FOR ULTRASONIC NON DESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION

Acoustical characterization is an important item in materials testing and takes an increasing place during the fabrication and the “in service inspection” processes. Indeed, ultrasonic techniques have been commonly used in power and petrochemical industries for nearly 50 years and the often used technique is the echo-graphic in which the waves reflected by the material structures are observed and analyzed. Since, the performance of ultrasonic techniques are often affected by the physical structure of the component and by background noise, the effects of aging and environment on failure mechanisms cannot be sufficiently predicted by the traditional methods. However computational modelling of materials behaviour is becoming a reliable tool to emphasize scientific investigations and to match up theoretical and experimental approaches. With the continuous progress in computational power new ultrasonic testing systems are expected to be discovered and implemented. This requires not only development of improved processing techniques but also a better understanding of material structure. These conditions implicate multiple length scales analysis and multiple implementation steps, which are available only by means of simulation models. Therefore, increasing efforts are focused on ultrasonic multiscale modelling methods for signal interpretation; the multi-resolution models are the mainly investigated approaches. In this work a multiresolution ultrasonic signal analysis is accomplished and an enhanced energetic smoothing filtering algorithm is proposed for an advanced material behavior characterization.
Study on Long-term Aerosol Distribution over the Land of East China Using MODIS Data

East China is among the fastest developing area in Asia, where atmospheric aerosol loading is high due to heavy urban and industrial emission. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) level 2 aerosol products (2000–2007) were used to study aerosol spatial and temporal distributions, as well as their variations with local meteorological conditions over East China. By combining Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) and aerosol Fine Mode Fraction (FMF), we found that the urban/industrial aerosol and soil dust are possibly two dominant species over northern part, whereas continental and marine aerosols possibly dominate the southern part of East China. Both annual mean AOD and area with high AOD increased from 2000 to 2007, with the largest increase seen in Yangtze River Delta region (YRD). In summer, AOD in East China reached the maximum of about 0.8 in YRD, dominated by fine mode particles. The minimum AOD occurred in winter with mostly coarse mode particles. Local aerosol properties were analyzed in three typical zones: the northern dry zone (I), the central urban/industrial zone (II) and the southern natural background zone (III). Monthly mean AODs in zone I and II were above 0.5 throughout the entire year, with the maximum AOD in June. High FMFs in this period indicated heavy urban and industrial pollution. Monthly mean AODs and FMFs in zone III reached maximum of 0.51 in April and September (up to 90.7%) respectively. High AOD in spring in zone III appears mostly due to the long-range dust transport from the North.
Supplementary Information : LICORN : learning co-operative regulation networks from gene expression data

We used the normalised data set available at http://genome-www.stanford. edu/cellcycle/data/ rawdata/combined.txt. This expression data set [9] comes from yeast cultures synchronised by four independent methods: alpha for alpha factor arrest, elu for elutriation, cdc15 for arrest of a cdc15 temperature-sensitive mutant, cdc28 for arrest of a cdc28 temperature-sensitive mutant (from [2]). As explained in [9], this data set represents log2 ratios that have been normalised so that for each synchronisation method, the average log2 ratio over the course of the experiments is equal to 0. We worked on data for each synchronisation method separately. We made use of the temporal structure of the expression profiles, by calculating the differences between consecutive time points1, and chose a discretisation threshold corresponding to half the overall standard deviation of these differences for the synchronisation method chosen. Note that for a given synchronisation method, the threshold is the same for all genes:
Optimizing the role of organizational commitment

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to find out the factors that affect organizational commitment in the school education sector and second, how these factors might be modified to judge organizational commitment of the school teachers. Design/methodology/approach This study was conducted using qualitative interviews with two sets of school teachers – government and government-affiliated schools and private schools in and around Kolkata city. The sample size was 40. The data triangulation method was applied for optimal verification of the result. Then the pattern of concordance author– coder pair was tested using Cohen’s kappa. Findings This study investigated eight factors expected to influence organizational commitment. Out of these eight factors, five factors were found – “on employees’ perception and need achievement,” “cognitive abilities of the employees,” “assessment of the employees,” “factors related to personality” and “organizational factors which influence organizational commitment” – which qualitatively exert more influence on organizational commitment. Practical implications The authors proposed that the concept of organizational commitment and its application in the academic sector might be modified to optimize the role of organizational commitment and to enhance the credibility of the teachers. A comprehensive organizational commitment model that has been proposed is expected to gain future direction of organizational commitment research. The parameters of the study can be used in the school sector, as well as in the corporate sector through proper improvisation, and it is expected that the corporate sector will be benefited. It is because the factors that were selected for the study are also relevant to the corporate sector. Originality/value This is a conceptual-type paper. The factors that were selected had an effect on the organizational commitment of the school teachers and these factors can also be applied in corporate sector to improve their level of commitment.
Personalized QoS Prediction forWeb Services via Collaborative Filtering

Many researchers propose that, not only functional but also non-functional properties, also known as quality of service (QoS), should be taken into consideration when consumers select services. Consumers need to make prediction on quality of unused web services before selecting. Usually, this prediction is based on other consumers' experiences. Being aware of different QoS experiences of consumers, this paper proposes a collaborative filtering based approach to making similarity mining and prediction from consumers' experiences. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach can make significant improvement on the effectiveness of QoS prediction for web services.
FAST IMAGE AUTO-ANNOTATION WITH VISUAL VECTOR APPROXIMATION CLUSTERS

The paper proposes a simple novel technique to automatically determine a set of keywords that describe the content of an image. The images are segmented in ‘blobs’, which are approximatively classified using discretized features space. This results in a small number of visual Vector Approximation Clusters (VAC), which allows to train the joint probability table of the visual features and the textual annotations from a training data set. Futhermore a simple Bayes model is used to determine the probability that a keyword describes a test image. The paper includes an experimental evaluation on COREL database. We compare our approach with state of the art auto-annotation methods using the same database, words set and scoring method. Results show that our simple method give similar results than state of the art models.
Structural features can be unconserved in proteins with similar folds. An analysis of side-chain to side-chain contacts secondary structure and accessibility.

Side-chain to side-chain contacts, accessibility, secondary structure and RMS deviation were compared within 607 pairs of proteins having similar three-dimensional (3D) structures. Three types of protein 3D structural similarities were defined: type A having sequence and usually functional similarity; type B having functional, but no sequence similarity; and type C having only 3D structural similarity. Within proteins having little or no sequence similarity (types B and C), structural features frequently had a degree of conservation comparable to dissimilar 3D structures. Despite similar protein folds, as few as 30% of residues within similar protein 3D structures can form a common core. RMS deviations on core C alpha atoms can be as high as 3.2 A. Similar protein structures can have secondary structure identities as low as 41%, which is equivalent to that expected by chance. By defining three categories of amino acid accessibility (buried, half buried and exposed), some similar protein 3D structures have as few as 30% of positions in the same category, making them indistinguishable from pairs of dissimilar protein structures. Similar structures can also have as few as 12% of common side-chain to side-chain contacts, and virtually no similar energetically favourable side-chain to side-chain interactions. Complementary changes are defined as structurally equivalent pairs of interacting residues in two structures with energetically favourable but different side-chain interactions. For many proteins with similar three-dimensional structures, the proportion of complementary changes is near to that expected by chance, suggesting that many similar structures have fundamentally different stabilising interactions. All of the results suggest that proteins having similar 3D structures can have little in common apart from a scaffold of core secondary structures. This has profound implications for methods of protein fold detection, since many of the properties assumed to be conserved across similar protein 3D structures (e.g. accessibility, side-chain to side-chain contacts, etc.) are often unconserved within weakly similar (i.e. type B and C) protein 3D structures. Little difference was found between type B and C similarities suggesting that the structure of similar proteins can evolve beyond recognition even when function is conserved. Our findings suggest that it is more general features of protein structure, such as the requirements for burial of hydrophobic residues and exposure of polar residues, rather than specific residue-residue interactions that determine how well a particular sequence adopts a particular fold. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Stressors and Strategies for Managing Urban Water Scarcity: Perspectives from the Field

Largely because water resource planning in the U.S. has been separated from land-use planning, opportunities for explicitly linking planning policies to water availability remain unexamined. The pressing need for better coordination between land-use planning and water management is amplified by changes in the global climate, which will place even greater importance on managing water supplies and demands than in the past. By surveying land and water managers in two urbanizing regions of the western United States—Portland, Oregon and Phoenix Arizona—we assessed the extent to which their perspectives regarding municipal water resource management align or differ. We specifically focus on characterizing how they perceive water scarcity problems (i.e., stressors) and solutions (i.e., strategies). Overall, the results show a general agreement across both regions and professions that long-term drought, population growth, and outdoor water use are the most important stressors to urban water systems. The results of the survey indicated more agreement across cities than across professions with regard to effective strategies, reinforcing the idea that land-use planners and water managers remain divided in their conception of the solutions to urban water management. To conclude, we recommend potential pathways for coordinating the fields of land and water management for urban sustainability.
Public Preschool and the Labor Supply of Arab Mothers: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Low labor force participation among mothers in North Africa and the Middle East is often attributed to cultural factors independent of economic considerations. There is little evidence, however, to support or refute this view. In September 1999, the Israeli government introduced free public preschool for children aged 3 and 4. I use this policy change to estimate the effects of a reduction in child care costs on preschool enrollment, and Arab mothers’ labor supply and fertility. I find that as a result of the intervention, preschool enrollment and mothers’ labor supply both increased sharply. The increase in labor supply occurred mainly among more educated mothers. In spite of increasing labor force participation, the fertility of these mothers appears to have been unchanged in the short-run. There is no evidence of a peer effect on mothers in affected towns who did not have children of preschool age. (JEL I28, J13, J22, O15) * I am particularly grateful to Josh Angrist and Victor Lavy for their support and helpful suggestions. I also thank Saul Lach, Daniel Paserman, seminar participants at the Sapir Forum Annual Conference, the Annual Meeting of the Israeli Economic Association, the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ben Gurion, UCSD, LSE, RAND, Oxford, Case Western, and University of Houston for their comments. Special thanks are due to the Central Bureau of Statistics for providing the data on preschool and kindergarten enrollment and to the Israel Social Science Data Center (ISDC) at the Hebrew University for providing the Labor Force Surveys. I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Pinhas Sapir Forum for Economic Policy.
Wireless information and power transfer in full-duplex systems with massive antenna arrays

We consider a multiuser wireless system with a full-duplex hybrid access point (HAP) that transmits to a set of users in the downlink channel, while receiving data from a set of energy-constrained sensors in the uplink channel. We assume that the HAP is equipped with a massive antenna array, while all users and sensor nodes have a single antenna. We adopt a time-switching protocol where in the first phase, sensors are powered through wireless energy transfer from HAP and HAP estimates the downlink channel of the users. In the second phase, sensors use the harvested energy to transmit to the HAP. The downlink-uplink sum-rate region is obtained by solving downlink sum-rate maximization problem under a constraint on uplink sum-rate. Moreover, assuming perfect and imperfect channel state information, we derive expressions for the achievable uplink and downlink rates in the large-antenna limit and approximate results that hold for any finite number of antennas. Based on these analytical results, we obtain the power-scaling law and analyze the effect of the number of antennas on the cancellation of intra-user interference and the self-interference.
Neurokinin-1 Receptor-Expressing Cells of the Ventral Respiratory Group Are Functionally Heterogeneous and Predominantly Glutamatergic

According to a recent theory (Gray et al., 1999) the neurokinin-1 receptor (NK1R)-immunoreactive (ir) neurons of the ventral respiratory group (VRG) are confined to the pre-Bötzinger complex (pre-BötC) and might be glutamatergic interneurons that drive respiratory rhythmogenesis. In this study we tested whether the NK1R-ir neurons of the VRG are glutamatergic. We also examined whether different groups of NK1R-ir neurons coexist in the VRG on the basis of whether these cells contain preproenkephalin (PPE) mRNA or project to the spinal cord. NK1R immunoreactivity was found in two populations of VRG neurons that are both predominantly glutamatergic because most of them contained vesicular glutamate transporter 2 mRNA (77 ± 9%;n = 3). A group of small fusiform neurons (somatic cross section: 91 ± 3.6 μm2) that has neither PPE mRNA nor spinal projections is primarily restricted to the pre-BötC. These cells may be the interneurons the destruction of which produces massive disruptions of the respiratory rhythm (Gray et al., 2001). The rest of the NK1R-ir neurons of the VRG are multipolar, are larger (somatic cross section: 252 ± 15 μm2), and express high levels of PPE mRNA. Some of these cells located in the rostral half of the rostral VRG project to the spinal cord (C4 or T3). Using electrophysiological methods, we showed that these bulbospinal NK1R-ir neurons are slowly discharging inspiratory-augmenting neurons, suggesting that they may control phrenic or intercostal motor neurons. In summary, NK1R-expressing cells of the VRG are a heterogeneous group of predominantly glutamatergic neurons that include subpopulations of respiratory premotor neurons.