Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trying to Outrun a Speeding Environment: Developing "High-velocity" Strategic DSS Evaluation Criteria

This research develops 45 evaluation criteria for “high-velocity” strategic Decision Support Systems (DSS), and uses them to evaluate 16 popular commercial DSS tools for their fit in supporting “high-velocity” strategic decision-making. Results illustrate the assertion that few currently-available DSS tools support “high-velocity” strategic decision requirements. Based on the findings, the authors recommend further investigation into the importance of configuration on fit between a DSS tool and its environment, and ultimately, recommend designing DSSs that are configurable in the ways outlined herein.
Remote homolog detection using local sequence–structure correlations

Remote homology detection refers to the detection of structural homology in proteins when there is little or no sequence similarity. In this article, we present a remote homolog detection method called SVM‐HMMSTR that overcomes the reliance on detectable sequence similarity by transforming the sequences into strings of hidden Markov states that represent local folding motif patterns. These state strings are transformed into fixed‐dimension feature vectors for input to a support vector machine. Two sets of features are defined: an order‐independent feature set that captures the amino acid and local structure composition; and an order‐dependent feature set that captures the sequential ordering of the local structures. Tests using the Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) 1.53 data set show that the SVM‐HMMSTR gives a significant improvement over several current methods. Proteins 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Congenital Amusia in linguistic and non-linguistic pitch perception - What behavior and reaction times reveal

Congenital Amusia is a developmental disorder that has a negative influence on pitch perception. While it used to be described as a disorder of musical pitch perception, recent studies indicate that congenital amusics also show deficits in linguistic pitch perception. This study investigates the perception of linguistic and non-linguistic pitch by ten German amusics and their matched controls. To test the influence of amusia on linguistic pitch perception, the present study parametrically varied pitch differences in steps of one semitone in resynthesized statement-question pairs. In addition, we looked at the influence of stimulus duration, continuity of pitch and direction of pitch change (statement or question). Performance accuracy and reaction times were recorded. Behavioral results show that amusics performed worse than controls over all conditions. The reaction time analysis supports these findings, as amusics were significantly slower across all conditions. Both groups were faster in discriminating statements than questions. Performance accuracy supports these findings, as questions were also harder to discriminate. The present results warrant further investigation of the linguistic factors influencing amusics’ perception of intonation.
Identification of story units in audio-visual sequences by joint audio and video processing

A novel technique, which uses a joint audio-visual analysis for scene identification and characterization, is proposed. The paper defines four different scene types: dialogues, stories, actions, and generic scenes. It then explains how any audio-visual material can be decomposed into a series of scenes obeying the previous classification, by properly analyzing and then combining the underlying audio and visual information. A rule-based procedure is defined for such purpose. Before such rule-based decision can take place, a series of low-level pre-processing tasks are suggested to adequately measure audio and visual correlations. As far as visual information is concerned, it is proposed to measure the similarities between non-consecutive shots using a learning vector quantization approach. An outlook on a possible implementation strategy for the overall scene identification task is suggested, and validated through a series of experimental simulations on real audio-visual data.
Quantitative Phase Analysis by the Rietveld Method for Forensic Science

Quantitative phase analysis (QPA) is helpful to determine the type attribute of the object because it could present the content of the constituents. QPA by Rietveld method requires neither measurement of calibration data nor the use of an internal standard; however, the approximate crystal structure of each phase in a mixture is necessary. In this study, 8 synthetic mixtures composed of potassium nitrate and sulfur were analyzed by Rietveld QPA method. The Rietveld refinement was accomplished with a material analysis using diffraction program and evaluated by three agreement indices. Results showed that Rietveld QPA yielded precise results, with errors generally less than 2.0% absolute. In addition, a criminal case which was broken successfully with the help of Rietveld QPA method was also introduced. This method will allow forensic investigators to acquire detailed information of the material evidence, which could point out the direction for case detection and court proceedings.
The Receptor Tyrosine Phosphatase Crypα Promotes Intraretinal Axon Growth

Retinal ganglion cell axons grow towards the optic fissure in close contact with the basal membrane, an excellent growth substratum. One of the ligands of receptor tyrosine phosphatase CRYPα is located on the retinal and tectal basal membranes. To analyze the role of this RPTP and its ligand in intraretinal growth and guidance of ganglion cell axons, we disrupted ligand- receptor interactions on the retinal basal membrane in culture. Antibodies against CRYPα strongly reduced retinal axon growth on the basal membrane, and induced a dramatic change in morphology of retinal growth cones, reducing the size of growth cone lamellipodia. A similar effect was observed by blocking the ligand with a CRYPα ectodomain fusion protein. These effects did not occur, or were much reduced, when axons were grown either on laminin-1, on matrigel or on basal membranes with glial endfeet removed. This indicates that a ligand for CRYPα is located on glial endfeet. These results show for the first time in vertebrates that the interaction of a receptor tyrosine phosphatase with its ligand is crucial not only for promotion of retinal axon growth but also for maintenance of retinal growth cone lamellipodia on basal membranes.
Variable Neighbourhood Search: A case study for a highly-constrained workforce scheduling problem

This paper describes a Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) combined with Metropolis-Hastings acceptance to tackle a highly constrained workforce scheduling problem typical of field service operations (FSO) companies. A refined greedy algorithm is firstly designed to create an initial solution which meets all hard constraints and satisfies some of the soft constraints. The VNS is then used to swap out less promising combinations, continually moving towards a optimal solution until meeting finishing requirements, which are either a satisfactory mean fitness set as a parameter, or a time allowance of one hour. The results of this approach are promising when compared to the stand-alone greedy algorithm, and have showed an average of 10.3% increase in fitness when parameterized with expected demand data and real employee data.
Next-Generation Monitoring, Analysis, and Control for the Future Smart Control Center

This paper proposes a vision of next-generation monitoring, analysis, and control functions for tomorrow's smart power system control centers. The paper first reviews the present control center technology and then presents the vision of the next-generation monitoring, analysis, and control functions. The paper also identifies the technology and infrastructure gaps that must be filled, and develops a roadmap to realize the proposed vision. This smart control center vision is expected to be a critical part of the future smart transmission grid.
Experiments with adaptive error recovery strategies

We report results on the efficiency of error recovery strategies over heterogeneous networks with both wired and wireless components. We investigate the relative impact of end-to-end delays and error patterns on protocol performance for three broad categories of protocol behavior: aggressive, conservative and adaptive. We monitor the network behavior using varying error conditions and we set end-to-end delays ranging from 10 to 200 ms in order to capture delay characteristics of wired, wireless and satellite networks. We show that (i) the end-to-end delay has varying impact on protocol performance. This impact depends on the recovery strategy, the error rate and the error type. (ii) Standard TCP Reno and Tahoe mechanisms that implement their respective recovery strategies display conflicting patterns of behavior, that might not conform to network conditions nor to their strategic goals. (iii) Adaptive behavior yields better results when a protocol flexibly alternates conservative and aggressive strategies based on the error pattern detected and the end-to-end delay. We Support this conclusion with the results of TCP-Probing.
Near-Optimal Tracking Control of Mobile Robots Via Receding-Horizon Dual Heuristic Programming

Trajectory tracking control of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) has been an important research topic in control theory and robotics. Although various tracking control methods with stability have been developed for WMRs, it is still difficult to design optimal or near-optimal tracking controller under uncertainties and disturbances. In this paper, a near-optimal tracking control method is presented for WMRs based on receding-horizon dual heuristic programming (RHDHP). In the proposed method, a backstepping kinematic controller is designed to generate desired velocity profiles and the receding horizon strategy is used to decompose the infinite-horizon optimal control problem into a series of finite-horizon optimal control problems. In each horizon, a closed-loop tracking control policy is successively updated using a class of approximate dynamic programming algorithms called finite-horizon dual heuristic programming (DHP). The convergence property of the proposed method is analyzed and it is shown that the tracking control system based on RHDHP is asymptotically stable by using the Lyapunov approach. Simulation results on three tracking control problems demonstrate that the proposed method has improved control performance when compared with conventional model predictive control (MPC) and DHP. It is also illustrated that the proposed method has lower computational burden than conventional MPC, which is very beneficial for real-time tracking control.
N- and C-Terminal Cooperation in Rotavirus Enterotoxin: Novel Mechanism of Modulation of the Properties of a Multifunctional Protein by a Structurally and Functionally Overlapping Conformational Domain

ABSTRACT Rotavirus NSP4 is a multifunctional endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-resident nonstructural protein with the N terminus anchored in the ER and about 131 amino acids (aa) of the C-terminal tail (CT) oriented in the cytoplasm. Previous studies showed a peptide spanning aa 114 to 135 to induce diarrhea in newborn mouse pups with the 50% diarrheal dose approximately 100-fold higher than that for the full-length protein, suggesting a role for other regions in the protein in potentiating its diarrhea-inducing ability. In this report, employing a large number of methods and deletion and amino acid substitution mutants, we provide evidence for the cooperation between the extreme C terminus and a putative amphipathic α-helix located between aa 73 and 85 (AAH73-85) at the N terminus of ΔN72, a mutant that lacked the N-terminal 72 aa of nonstructural protein 4 (NSP4) from Hg18 and SA11. Cooperation between the two termini appears to generate a unique conformational state, specifically recognized by thioflavin T, that promoted efficient multimerization of the oligomer into high-molecular-mass soluble complexes and dramatically enhanced resistance against trypsin digestion, enterotoxin activity of the diarrhea-inducing region (DIR), and double-layered particle-binding activity of the protein. Mutations in either the C terminus, AAH73-85, or the DIR resulted in severely compromised biological functions, suggesting that the properties of NSP4 are subject to modulation by a single and/or overlapping highly sensitive conformational domain that appears to encompass the entire CT. Our results provide for the first time, in the absence of a three-dimensional structure, a unique conformation-dependent mechanism for understanding the NSP4-mediated pleiotropic properties including virus virulence and morphogenesis.
Memory detection: theory and application of the concealed information test

Part I. Introduction: Introduction. Science on the rise: birth and development of the Concealed Information Test Christopher J. Patrick 1. Encouraging the use of the Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT): what the GKT has to offer law enforcement William G. Iacono Part II. The Laboratory: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of the Concealed Information Test: 2. Detecting concealed information using autonomic measures Matthias Gamer 3. Detecting concealed information in less than a second: response latency-based measures Bruno Verschuere and Jan De Houwer 4. P300 in detecting concealed information J. Peter Rosenfeld 5. Detecting of deception and concealed information using neuroimaging techniques Matthias Gamer 6. New and old covert measures in the Concealed Information Test Eitan Elaad 7. Theory of the Concealed Information Test Bruno Verschuere and Gershon Ben-Shakhar Part III. Field Applications of Concealed Information Detection: Promises and Perils: 8. Limitations of the Concealed Information Test in criminal cases Donald J. Kraphol 9. Validity of the Concealed Information Test in realistic contexts Eitan Elaad 10. Leakage of information to innocent suspects M. T. Bradley, Clair A. Barefoot and Andrea M. Arsenault 11. Countermeasures Gershon Ben-Shakhar 12. Psychopathy and the detection of concealed information Bruno Verschuere 13. Clinical applications of the Concealed Information Test John J. B. Allen 14. Daily application of the Concealed Information Test: Japan Akemi Osugi 15. The Concealed Information Test in the courtroom: legal aspects Gershon Ben-Shakhar and Mordechai Kremnitzer Part IV. Conclusions: 16. Practical guidelines for developing a Concealed Information Test Ewout Meijer, Bruno Verschuere and Gershon Ben-Shakhar Epilogue Gershon Ben-Shakhar, Bruno Verschuere and Ewout Meijer.
Periodontal Aspects for Psoriasis: A Systematic Review

Purpose: Psoriasis is a disease that requires careful management to minimize the risks of complications arising from therapeutic procedures. Psoriasis is often related to oral or systemic adverse events after routine medical or dental treatment. From dental diseases, those affecting the periodontium are the most related to psoriasis. Periodontal breakdown (periodontitis) is usually a consequence of inflammatory destruction as a result of poor oral hygiene and the subsequent accumulation of dental bacterial plaque or dysbiosis, present in children, adolescents and adults. Dental techniques are usually invasive being likely to generate complications. Although there are many publications on dental aspects of psoriasis in the literature, few of them refer to involvement of procedures. Psoriasis and dentistry are related in different issues able to generate uncertain outcomes. The scope of present study is to assess the possibility that the periodontal disease can to contribute to the worsening of psoriasis lesions and assess if the dental treatment can to contribute to the improvement of psoriasis lesions? Methods: We conducted systematic review of clinical trial literature. Findings: Studies are few and with high level of incompleteness. The highest level of evidence obtained was 2 B (Clinical Trial Case Control). The methodological quality and risk of bias of included studies were assessed by different tools. Implications: The aim the present study was to map the knowledge about psoriasis and dental health status and to evaluate the importance to state a minimum dental care protocol able to mitigate the impact on chronic psoriasis plaques.
Potent Neutralization of Influenza A Virus by a Single-Domain Antibody Blocking M2 Ion Channel Protein

Influenza A virus poses serious health threat to humans. Neutralizing antibodies against the highly conserved M2 ion channel is thought to offer broad protection against influenza A viruses. Here, we screened synthetic Camel single-domain antibody (VHH) libraries against native M2 ion channel protein. One of the isolated VHHs, M2-7A, specifically bound to M2-expressed cell membrane as well as influenza A virion, inhibited replication of both amantadine-sensitive and resistant influenza A viruses in vitro, and protected mice from a lethal influenza virus challenge. Moreover, M2-7A showed blocking activity for proton influx through M2 ion channel. These pieces of evidence collectively demonstrate for the first time that a neutralizing antibody against M2 with broad specificity is achievable, and M2-7A may have potential for cross protection against a number of variants and subtypes of influenza A viruses.
Translation Validation of High-Level Synthesis

The growing complexity of systems and their implementation into silicon encourages designers to look for ways to model designs at higher levels of abstraction and then incrementally build portions of these designs - automatically or manually - from these high-level specifications. Unfortunately, this translation process itself can be buggy, which can create a mismatch between what a designer intends and what is actually implemented in the circuit. Therefore, checking if the implementation is a refinement or equivalent to its initial specification is of tremendous value. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically validate the implementation against its initial high-level specification using insights from translation validation, automated theorem proving, and relational approaches to reasoning about programs. In our experiments, we first focus on concurrent systems modeled as communicating sequential processes and show that their refinements can be validated using our approach. Next, we have applied our validation approach to a realistic scenario - a parallelizing high-level synthesis framework called Spark. We present the details of our algorithm and experimental results.
Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions

We investigate why the Supreme Court grants a smaller percentage of cases at the first conference of each term compared to other conferences. According to received wisdom, Supreme Court law clerks are overly cautious at the beginning of their tenure because they receive only a brief amount of training. Reputational concerns motivate clerks to provide fewer recommendations to grant review in cert. pool memos written over the summer months. Using a random sample of petitions from the Blackmun Archives, we code case characteristics, clerk recommendation, and the Court’s decision on cert. Nearest neighbor matching suggests clerks are 36% less likely to recommend grants in their early cert. pool memos. Because of this temporal discrepancy, petitions arriving over the summer have a 16% worse chance of being granted by the Court. This seasonal variation in access to the Court’s docket imposes a legally-irrelevant burden on litigants who have little control over the timing of their appeal.
IDENTIFYING HETEROGENEITY IN RATES OF MORPHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION: DISCRETE CHARACTER CHANGE IN THE EVOLUTION OF LUNGFISH (SARCOPTERYGII; DIPNOI)

Quantifying rates of morphological evolution is important in many macroevolutionary studies, and critical when assessing possible adaptive radiations and episodes of punctuated equilibrium in the fossil record. However, studies of morphological rates of change have lagged behind those on taxonomic diversification, and most authors have focused on continuous characters and quantifying patterns of morphological rates over time. Here, we provide a phylogenetic approach, using discrete characters and three statistical tests to determine points on a cladogram (branches or entire clades) that are characterized by significantly high or low rates of change. These methods include a randomization approach that identifies branches with significantly high rates and likelihood ratio tests that pinpoint either branches or clades that have significantly higher or lower rates than the pooled rate of the remainder of the tree. As a test case for these methods, we analyze a discrete character dataset of lungfish, which have long been regarded as “living fossils” due to an apparent slowdown in rates since the Devonian. We find that morphological rates are highly heterogeneous across the phylogeny and recover a general pattern of decreasing rates along the phylogenetic backbone toward living taxa, from the Devonian until the present. Compared with previous work, we are able to report a more nuanced picture of lungfish evolution using these new methods.
Learning to predict closed questions on stack overflow

The paper deals with the problem of predicting whether the user’s question will be closed by the moderator on Stack Overflow, a popular question answering service devoted to software programming. The task along with data and evaluation metrics was offered as an open machine learning competition on Kaggle platform. To solve this problem, we employed a wide range of classification features related to users, their interactions, and post content. Classification was carried out using several machine learning methods. According to the results of the experiment, the most important features are characteristics of the user and topical features of the question. The best results were obtained using Vowpal Wabbit – an implementation of online learning based on stochastic gradient descent. Our results are among the best ones in overall ranking, although they were obtained after the official competition was over.
Children’s Production of Word Accents in Swedish Revisited

Abstract The two word accents in Stockholm Swedish (Accent I and Accent II) are distinguishedby a consistent falling pitch contour on the stressed syllable of AccentII words. The current study presents new types of evidence that this feature ofword accent can be systematically found in words produced by 16- to 18-montholdSwedish-speaking children. Compared to other disyllabic productions, thestressed syllable in Accent II words have a larger F0 decline, more sequences ofhigh-low turning points identified by a stylized contour algorithm and an earlier F0peak. In addition, a negative correlation is found between the value of F0 peak andF0 change in the stressed syllable. Taken together, these findings indicate that childrenlearning Swedish have internalized a subtle but lexically relevant pitch contourby a very early stage of word production.
Perceptions of Affective Expression in a minimalist robotic face

This study explores deriving minimal features for a robotic face to convey information (via facial expressions) that people can perceive/understand. Recent research in computer vision has shown that a small number of moving points/lines can be used to capture the majority of information (~95%) in human facial expressions. Here, we apply such findings to a minimalist robot face; recognition rates were similar to more complex robots. The project aims to answer a number of fundamental questions about robotic face design, as well as to develop inexpensive/replicable robotic faces for experimental purposes.