Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Function of Suffering in Philippians

This closely argued and thoughtful book offers a fresh and nuanced understanding of the function of the suffering theme in Philippians. A comprehensive survey of previous readings of Philippians is followed by a clear outline of the principles and practice of rhetorical criticism with particular reference to the study of letter-structure. The book concludes by considering in detail the shape and function of the theme of suffering in each of the rhetorical sections of the letter as identified by the author.
Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopy of the Dwarf Novae SS Cygni and WX Hydri in Quiescence

We present time-resolved FUV spectra of the dwarf novae SS Cyg and WX Hyi in quiescence from observations using the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope on the Astro-1 and Astro-2 space shuttle missions and the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Both dwarf novae are characterized by blue continua that extend to the Lyman limit punctuated by broad emission lines including transitions of O VI, N V, Si IV, and C IV. The continuum of WX Hyi can be fitted with a white dwarf model with physically reasonable model parameters, but neither system actually shows unambiguous signatures of white dwarf emission. The shape and flux of the spectrum of SS Cyg cannot be self-consistently reconciled with a white dwarf providing all of the FUV continuum flux. Combination white dwarf/disk or white dwarf/optically thin plasma models improve the fit but still do not give physically reasonable model parameters for a quiescent dwarf nova. Assuming that the UV emission lines arise from the disk, the line shapes indicate that surface fluxes fall roughly as R-2 in both systems. Fits to the double-peaked line profiles in SS Cyg indicate that the FUV line-forming region is concentrated closer to the white dwarf than that of the optical lines and provide no evidence of a hole in the inner disk. Although the flux from SS Cyg was relatively constant during all of our observations, WX Hyi showed significant variability during the GHRS observations. In WX Hyi, the line and continuum fluxes are (with the exception of He II) highly correlated, indicating a link between the formation mechanisms of the line and continuum regions.
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series Gaming and Strategic Opacity in Incentive Provision

It is often suggested that incentive schemes under moral hazard can be gamed by an agent with superior knowledge of the environment and that deliberate lack of transparency about the incentive scheme can reduce gaming. We formally investigate these arguments in a two-task moral hazard model in which the agent is privately informed about which task is less costly for him. We examine a simple class of incentive schemes that are “opaque” in that they make the agent uncertain ex ante about the incentive coefficients in the linear payment rule. Relative to transparent menus of linear contracts, these opaque schemes induce more balanced efforts, but they also impose more risk on the agent per unit of aggregate effort induced. We identify specific settings in which optimally designed opaque schemes not only strictly dominate the best transparent menu but also eliminate the efficiency losses from the agent’s hidden information. Opaque schemes are more likely to be preferred to transparent ones when (i) the agent’s privately known preference between the tasks is weak; (ii) the agent’s risk aversion is significant; (iii) efforts on the tasks are highly complementary for the principal; or (iv) the errors in measuring performance have large correlation or small variance. ( JEL D86, D21, L22) and Bikhchandani, Simon Bolton, Bulow, Vince Kate Doornik, Guido Friebel, Robert Gibbons, Edward Glaeser, Oliver Ian Navin Kartik, Paul Klemperer, Shmuel Leshem, Phillip Leslie, Steven Lippman, Steven Matthews, John Moore, Andy Newman, In-Uck Park, Charles Roddie, Jesse Shapiro, Ferdinand von Siemens, Jason Snyder, Alexander Stremitzer, Jeroen Swinkels, Jean Tirole for helpful discussions and suggestions, as well as to seminar participants at Bonn, Boston University, Bristol, Chicago, Columbia, Frankfurt, Georgia Tech, Gerzensee, HBS,
Comparative analysis of land-cover data accuracy and uncertainty in arid land

LUCC research in arid area showed that population increasing, human activities, and climate change have brought great land changes. As a very important basic geographic data, land cover data reflects anthropic activity and climate change on the environment. The ecological environment in arid area experienced serious degradation. In order to resolve the core issues of sustainable development in the arid area, many models seek quantitative simulation of ecology-hydrological processes. Arid area with scarce rainfall and sparse vegetation, the primary land surface characteristics is landscape fragmentation, which generated huge data inaccuracies and uncertainties. This article set the land-cover data acquired by artificial visual classification with QB (0.61 meters) as actual land surface, and compared it with other land-cover data produced through classification tree with LandSat(30m), SPOT(10 m), and QB(2.5 m), four different resolution images in arid land. Results showed that overall accuracy of land cover maps is TM30m 46%, SPOT10m 73, and QB2.5m 81%, respectively. Coarse resolution image take more errors and uncertainty than fine resolution image.
Between authenticity and argument: Rhizomatic writing and educational insights

In this dissertation I aim to present a place for teachers and students to encounter authenticity in education. At present, our cultural knowledge is imbued by fast moving attention spans that are fixated and entertained by the hyperreal, virtual world. The crux for most pedagogues is whether to compete with this virtual consciousness by reinforcing a traditional modernist’s approach to education or to merge with this new consciousness by introducing more technology in the classroom. I offer another insight, one that is grounded in the Real. I hope to provide a place that engages students and teachers in a Truthful space that exists between the symbolic order of education and the Real matter. By material I do not mean burlap or a conglomeration of atoms, I mean something more ontological and phenomenological: Realness – the spontaneous, unpredictable material that exists beyond the scope of discourse. By enacting a philosophy of education inspired by Deleuze’s and Guattari’s figuration of a rhizome, I map a pragmatic territory in which rhizomatic learning and writing is a field for students to experience authenticity in education. The concept of the rhizome as developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in A Thousand Plateaus provides the ontology for the style of pedagogy and writing that I am unfolding in this essay. At the same time that rhizomes seem to grow in any scattered direction without structure, they produce a plant above the earth. One that is ordered and visible to any eye. It exists in a completely new terrain but is also interdependently linked to the one below. There are two planes to this dissertation: one that is formalized, argumentative, and academic, while the other plane is an attempt at authenticity and engagement with the Real. The interpellation of the academic with the authentic voices is articulatory for the ontology of ‘becoming’ within the rhizome. In this way the Real and Truth are not ignored but discovered and created within education. This dissertation is an attempt at embodying the paradoxical ontology of Truth that is essential to authentic philosophical writing and pedagogy.
Understanding Negative Results in tDCS Research: The Importance of Neural Targeting and Cortical Engagement

Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Neuromodulation Center, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Boston, MA, United States, Coma Science Group, GIGA-Consciousness, University Hospital of Liege, University of Liege, Liege, Belgium, 3 Spaulding-Harvard SCI Model System Center, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Boston, MA, United States, 5 Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Boston, MA, United States, 6 Rocky Mountain Regional Spinal Injury System, Craig Rehabilitation Hospital, Englewood, CO, United States, Department of PMR, University of Colorado School of Medicine, University of Colorado, Aurora, CO,
The coalescent and its descendants

The coalescent revolutionised theoretical population genetics, simplifying, or making possible for the first time, many analyses, proofs, and derivations, and offering crucial insights about the way in which the structure of data in samples from populations depends on the demographic history of the population. However statistical inference under the coalescent model is extremely challenging, effectively because no explicit expressions are available for key sampling probabilities. This led initially to approximation of these probabilities by ingenious application of modern computationally-intensive statistical methods. A key breakthrough occurred when Li and Stephens introduced a different model, similar in spirit to the coalescent, for which efficient calculations are feasible. In turn, the Li and Stephens model has changed statistical inference for the wealth of data now available which documents molecular genetic variation within populations. We briefly review the coalescent and associated measure-valued diffusions, describe the Li and Stephens model, and introduce and apply a generalisation of it for inference of population structure in the presence of linkage disequilibrium.
Antibodies against a Surface Protein of Streptococcus pyogenes Promote a Pathological Inflammatory Response

Streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS) caused by Streptococcus pyogenes is a clinical condition with a high mortality rate despite modern intensive care. A key feature of STSS is excessive plasma leakage leading to hypovolemic hypotension, disturbed microcirculation and multiorgan failure. Previous work has identified a virulence mechanism in STSS where M1 protein of S. pyogenes forms complexes with fibrinogen that activate neutrophils to release heparin-binding protein (HBP), an inducer of vascular leakage. Here, we report a marked inter-individual difference in the response to M1 protein–induced HBP release, a difference found to be related to IgG antibodies directed against the central region of the M1 protein. To elicit massive HBP release, such antibodies need to be part of the M1 protein–fibrinogen complexes. The data add a novel aspect to bacterial pathogenesis where antibodies contribute to the severity of disease by promoting a pathologic inflammatory response.
Wheelchair Navigation System for Disabled and Elderly People

An intelligent wheelchair (IW) system is developed in order to support safe mobility for disabled or elderly people with various impairments. The proposed IW offers two main functions: obstacle detection and avoidance, and situation recognition. First, through a combination of a vision sensor and eight ultrasonic ones, it detects diverse obstacles and produces occupancy grid maps (OGMs) that describe environmental information, including the positions and sizes of obstacles, which is then given to the learning-based algorithm. By learning the common patterns among OGMs assigned to the same directions, the IW can automatically find paths to prevent collisions with obstacles. Second, it distinguishes a situation whereby the user is standing on a sidewalk, traffic intersection, or roadway through analyzing the texture and shape of the images, which aids in preventing any accidents that would result in fatal injuries to the user, such as collisions with vehicles. From the experiments that were performed in various environments, we can prove the following: (1) the proposed system can recognize different types of outdoor places with 98.3% accuracy; and (2) it can produce paths that avoid obstacles with 92.0% accuracy.
The Peculiar Light Curve of J1415+1320: A Case Study in Extreme Scattering Events

The radio light curve of J1415+1320 (PKS 1413+135) shows time-symmetric and recurring U-shaped features across the centimeter-wave and millimeter-wave bands. The symmetry of these features points to lensing by an intervening object as the cause. U-shaped events in radio light curves in the centimeter-wave band have previously been attributed to Extreme scattering events (ESE). ESEs are thought to be the result of lensing by compact plasma structures in the Galactic interstellar medium, but the precise nature of these plasma structures remains unknown. Since the strength of a plasma lens evolves with wavelength λ as , the presence of correlated variations at over a wide wavelength range casts doubt on the canonical ESE interpretation for J1415+1320. In this paper, we critically examine the evidence for plasma lensing in J1415+1320. We compute limits on the lensing strength and the associated free–free opacity of the putative plasma lenses. We compare the observed and model ESE light curves, and also derive a lower limit on the lens distance based on the effects of parallax due to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. We conclude that plasma lensing is not a viable interpretation for J1415+1320's light curves and that symmetric U-shaped features in the radio light curves of extragalactic sources do not present prima facie evidence for ESEs. The methodology presented here is generic enough to be applicable to any plasma-lensing candidate.
DCE‐MRI of the prostate using shutter‐speed vs. Tofts model for tumor characterization and assessment of aggressiveness

To quantify Tofts model (TM) and shutter‐speed model (SSM) perfusion parameters in prostate cancer (PCa) and noncancerous peripheral zone (PZ) and to compare the diagnostic performance of dynamic contrast‐enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE‐MRI) to Prostate Imaging and Reporting and Data System (PI‐RADS) classification for the assessment of PCa aggressiveness.
Negotiation behavior during requirement specification

Negotiation is part of specification; during specification acquisition, users negotiate among themselves and with analysts. During specification design, designers negotiate among themselves and with a project leader. The author reports on work concerned with multiagent specification design. He describes how various agents, often with conflicting goals, can resolve their differences, integrate their results, and produce a unified specification. Such bargaining behavior is both ubiquitous in complex specification and unrepresented by current methods. Automated means to promote integrative behavior during specification are presented. Formal models of users' desires and resolution methods are necessary for integrative reasoning. <<ETX>>
Natural Sound Facilitates Mood Recovery

Abstract Visual exposure to natural scenes can aid in recovery from stress, attentional fatigue, and physical ailments including surgery and sickness. Yet little is known about what role auditory stimuli may play in restorative processes. The current study extends prior work on the benefit of natural visual scenes to the domain of natural auditory exposure. Undergraduate students (N=133) were exposed to an unsettling video and reliably reported worsened affective state on the Brief Mood Introspection Scale (BMIS) immediately following the stimuli. Participants were then randomly assigned to either a natural sounds condition or to a comparison condition that was natural sounds intermingled with anthropogenic sounds (human voices or motorized vehicles). Participants exposed to a brief period of natural sounds following the video showed greater mood recovery, as measured by the BMIS, than did those exposed to the same stimuli also containing human-caused sounds (voices or motorized vehicles). Thus natural so.
KI-Zeitschrift-Auszug als Leseprobe

Many motor skills in humanoid robotics can be learned using parametrized motor primitives from demonstrations. However, most interesting motor learning problems require self-improvement often beyond the reach of current reinforcement learning methods due to the high dimensionality of the state-space. We develop an EM-inspired algorithm applicable to complex motor learning tasks. We compare this algorithm to several well-known parametrized policy search methods and show that it outperforms them. We apply it to motor learning problems and show that it can learn the complex Ball-in-a-Cup task using a real Barrett WAMTM robot arm.
Algorithms for Rendering in Artistic Styles

We describe new algorithms and tools for generating paintings, illustrations, and animation on a computer. These algorithms are designed to produce visually appealing and expressive images that look hand-painted or hand-drawn. In many contexts, painting and illustration have many advantages over photorealistic computer graphics, in aspects such as aesthetics, expression, and computational requirements. We explore three general strategies for non-photorealistic rendering: First, we describe explicit procedures for placing brush strokes. We begin with a painterly image processing algorithm inspired by painting with real physical media. This method produces images with a much greater subjective impression of looking hand-made than do earlier methods. By adjusting algorithm parameters, a variety of styles can be generated, such as styles inspired by the Impressionists and the Expressionists. This method is then extended to processing video, as demonstrated by painterly animations and an interactive installation. We then present a new style of line art illustration for smooth 3D surfaces. This style is designed to clearly convey surface shape, even for surfaces without predefined material properties or hatching directions. Next, we describe a new relaxation-based algorithm, in which we search for the painting that minimizes some energy function. In contrast to the first approach, we ideally only need to specify what we want, not how to directly compute it. The system allows as fine user control as desired: the user may interactively change the painting style, specify variations of style over an image, and/or add specific strokes to the painting.
Sodium channel activity modulates multiple functions in microglia

Microglia provide surveillance in the central nervous system and become activated following tissue insult. Detailed mechanisms by which microglia detect and respond to their environment are not fully understood, but it is known that microglia express a number of surface receptors and ion channels, including voltage‐gated sodium channels, that participate in transduction of external stimuli to intra‐cellular responses. To determine whether activated microglia are affected by the activity of sodium channels, we examined the expression of sodium channel isoforms in cultured microglia and the action of sodium channel blockade on multiple functions of activated microglia. Rat microglia in vitro express tetrodotoxin (TTX)‐sensitive sodium channels Nav1.1 and Nav1.6 and the TTX‐resistant channel Nav1.5, but not detectable levels of Nav1.2, Nav1.3, Nav1.7, Nav1.8, and Nav1.9. Sodium channel blockade with phenytoin (40 μM) and TTX (0.3 μM) significantly reduced by 50–60% the phagocytic activity of microglia activated with lipopolysaccharide (LPS); blockade with 10 μM TTX did not further reduce phagocytic activity. Phenytoin attenuated by ∼50% the release of IL‐1α, IL‐1β, and TNF‐α from LPS‐stimulated microglia, but had minimal effects on the release of IL‐2, IL‐4, IL‐6, IL‐10, MCP‐1, and TGF‐α. TTX (0.3 μM) reduced, but to a smaller extent, the release of IL‐1α, IL‐1β, and TNF‐α from activated microglia. Phenytoin and TTX also significantly decreased by ∼50% adenosine triphosphate‐induced migration by microglia; studies with microglia cultured from med mice (which lack Nav1.6) indicate that Nav1.6 plays a role in microglial migration. The results demonstrate that the activity of sodium channels contributes to effector roles of activated microglia. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Political Economy of FDI Flows into Developing Countries: Does the Depth of International Trade Agreements Matter?

There is considerable debate whether the domestic political institutions (specifically, the country’s level of democracy) of the host developing country toward foreign investors are effective in establishing the credibility of commitments are still underway, researchers have also analyzed the effect of international institutions such as (GATT-WTO) membership and Bilateral Investment treaties (BIT) in their role of establishing the credibility of commitment to attract foreign investments. In addition, most recent studies have examined the effect of International Trade Agreements (TAs) on FDI flows as they contain separate investment chapters and dispute settlement mechanism, thus providing confidence to investor regarding the security of their investments. We argue that there are qualitative differences among various types of trade agreements. Full-fledged trade agreements (FTAs-CUs) provide credibility of commitments to foreign investors whereas the partial scope agreements (PSA) are not sufficient in providing credibility. Moreover, the level of democracy in the host country conditions the effect of FTAs-CUs and not in the case of PSAs. This paper analyses the impact of heterogeneous TAs, and their interaction with domestic institutions, on FDI inflows. Statistical analyses for 122 developing countries from 1970 to 2005 support this argument. The method adopted relies on fixed effects estimator which is robust to control endogeneity on a large panel dataset. The strict exogeneity of results by using a method suggested by Baier and Bergstrand (2007) and no feedback effect found in sample. The results state that (1) The conclusion of FTAs-CUs attract FDI inflows into the developing countries significantly whereas PSAs are insignificant (2) FTAs-CUs are complementary to democratic regime whereas the conditional effect of PSA with democracy on levels of FDI inflows is insignificant.
Control of Neutral-Point-Clamped Converter in Distributed Power Generation to fulfil Low Voltage Ride-Through Requirements

Grid connection requirements established by power system operators have been updated in recent years, in order to include distributed power generation plants operation in the transient operation control of the overall electric power system. Among them, low voltage ride-through requirements demand wind power plant to remain connected to the network in presence of grid voltage dips. It is well-known that grid voltages present positive, negative and zero sequence components under faulty condition, hence regulators based on symmetrical components are well suited to control grid-connected converters. In this work, a neutral-point-clamped topology has been considered as an active front end of a distributed power generation system. In order to achieve balanced grid currents under any grid condition, negative-sequence grid voltage is feed forwarded, working concurrently with the linear quadratic regulator current controller. An outer loop for dc-link voltage control is implemented using a proportional-integral regulator. Power flow mismatch during grid fault condition causes dc-link voltage increase, therefore generator-side regulation is needed to avoid improper dc bus voltage evolution.
A ship detector using invariant scattering feature for polarimetric SAR images

Ship detection and monitoring techniques are important applications in protection of marine resources. In this paper, a ship detection method is proposed based on the Freeman three component decomposition and OS-CFAR detector. The detector has been applied on RADARSAT-2 QUAD Mode image to demonstrate the efficiency of the method. Compared with polarimetric white filter, SPAN image, HH-CFAR and HV-CFAR methods, the proposed method can detect ships in ocean clutter correctly and control false alarms well. Moreover, this method does not depend on the size of targets and therefore offers more adaptability for ship detection.