Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TMT Diversity, CEO Procedural Fairness, and TMT Conflict

Title of dissertation: TMT DIVERSITY, CEO PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS, AND TMT CONFLICT Long Jiang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Ken G. Smith, Ph.D. Professor Paul E. Tesluk, Ph.D. Department of Management and Organization Robert H. Smith School of Business University of Maryland, College Park The purpose of this dissertation was to address three research questions: (1) What are the antecedent conditions that contribute to the development of conflict within TMTs? (2) how can TMTs develop constructive conflict profiles – those that simultaneously have relatively high levels of cognitive conflict but low levels of or little affective conflict? and (3) how does TMT conflict relate to firm performance? Two complementary studies were conducted to enhance both the internal validity and the generalizability of this research: an experimental study of 77 project teams with senior business-major undergraduates at a US-based university, and an in-depth field study of 61 TMTs of USbased high-technology firms. The consistent results from both studies revealed that: (1) TMT informational diversity was positively related to TMT cognitive conflict, however, TMT power centralization was negatively related to TMT cognitive conflict; (2) TMTs with higher levels of CEO procedural fairness were more likely to report constructive conflict profiles; and (3) TMT affective conflict was detrimental to firm performance. Contributions to the literature, methodology and managerial practices, and limitation and future research directions were discussed. TMT DIVERSITY, CEO PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS, AND TMT CONFLICT
Improved Stimulation of Human Dendritic Cells by Receptor Engagement with Surface-modified Microparticles

Dendritic cells (DC) need to be stimulated before they can function to initiate immune responses. This study investigates whether microparticles loaded with antibodies specific for selected receptors expressed by DC can induce stimulation of these cells. Plain microparticles were compared with microparticles which were surface-loaded with specific antibodies for human CD40, Fcγ, αvβ3 and αvβ5 integrin receptors. The antibodies were either physically adsorbed or covalently linked to the microparticle surface. Anti-CD40 antibody and human IgG immobilised on the surface of microparticles induced enhanced DC maturation and activation as expressed by CD83 and CD86 up-regulation. IL-12 secretion was induced at a detectable but relatively low level. Both anti-integrin antibodies (anti-αvβ3 and anti-αvβ5) induced comparable and considerable maturation of DC, but only anti-αvβ3 antibody induced significant activation of DC, whereas anti-αvβ5 did not. The stimulatory effects were most pronounced by employing microparticles with covalently linked antibodies, but were also observed to a minor extent when the antibodies were physically adsorbed to polystyrene and biodegradable poly(lactide-co-glycolide) microparticles. Engineering of microparticles by surface conjugation of specific ligands to stimulate DC may increase the effectiveness of microparticulate vaccine delivery systems.
2 Problem Formulation 2 . 1

The theory of compressed sensing shows that sparsity pattern (or support) of a sparse signal can be recovered from a small number of appropriate linear projections (samples). Unfortunately, as soon as noise is added, the number of required samples exceeds the full signal dimension, rendering compressed sensing ineffective. In recent work, we have shown that this can be fixed if a small distortion is allowed in the signal recovery. The present paper extends our results to a simplified estimator.
Modeling RDX reduction within iron bed reactors

Abstract : Iron has been used to reduce organic contaminants including high explosives (HE) such as Research Department Explosive (RDX). Work is ongoing at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) to develop guidelines for using iron bed reactors to remove RDX in surface water runoff from the impact areas of firing ranges. As part of this work, a mathematical model was developed to gain a better understanding of the experimental results and to provide information for design and operation of these reactors. This model and its application results are described within this technical note (TN). Following additional validation against field data, this model will be implemented within the Training Range Environmental Evaluation and Characterization System (TREECS ) (http://el.erdc.usace. army.mil/treecs/). TREECS was developed by ERDC for the Army with varying levels of capability to forecast the fate of munitions constituents (MC), such as HE and metals, within and transported from firing/training ranges to surface water and groundwater. The overall purpose of TREECS is to provide environmental specialists with tools to assess the potential for MC migration into surface water and groundwater systems and to assess range management strategies to ensure protection of human health and the environment. Although TREECS was developed to forecast the fate of MC on firing ranges, it has general applicability to many other situations requiring prediction of contaminant fate in multi-media environmental systems.
BISmark: A Testbed for Deploying Measurements and Applications in Broadband Access Networks

BISmark (Broadband Internet Service Benchmark) is a deployment of home routers running custom software, and backend infrastructure to manage experiments and collect measurements. The project began in 2010 as an attempt to better understand the characteristics of broadband access networks. We have since deployed BISmark routers in hundreds of home networks in about thirty countries. BISmark is currently used and shared by researchers at nine institutions, including commercial Internet service providers, and has enabled studies of access link performance, network connectivity, Web page load times, and user behavior and activity. Research using BISmark and its data has informed both technical and policy research. This paper describes and revisits design choices we made during the platform's evolution and lessons we have learned from the deployment effort thus far. We also explain how BISmark enables experimentation, and our efforts to make it available to the networking community. We encourage researchers to contact us if they are interested in running experiments on BISmark.
Exploring the norms for the UX design of intelligent products: a case study

User experience design is crucial to achieve a successful intelligent product design. By taking the user experience design of a xylophone playing robot as an example, this paper attempts to identify the prominent attributes in the user experience design of intelligent products, and to find the general norms guiding the design. Both the pragmatic and the hedonic aspects have been investigated via questionnaires from the selected participants aging from 3 to the age above 60 year old, covering the majority of the users of consumer products. And both statistical and analytical methods have been employed to reveal the functional relationship between the product attributes and the user's feeling, trying to explore the intrinsic principles leading to a good user experience design from the collected user feedbacks. With the support of the empirical data and the analytical findings, this paper formulates a three phases and two-aspect norm, i.e., the early-phase, the mid-phase and the post-phase, as well as the pragmatic and the hedonic aspects, guiding the UX design on a right track. The proposed norm bears a general applicability, and is capable to serve as fundamental strategies to implement a better user experience design for intelligent products.
Crowdsourcing service-level network event monitoring

The user experience for networked applications is becoming a key benchmark for customers and network providers. Perceived user experience is largely determined by the frequency, duration and severity of network events that impact a service. While today's networks implement sophisticated infrastructure that issues alarms for most failures, there remains a class of silent outages (e.g., caused by configuration errors) that are not detected. Further, existing alarms provide little information to help operators understand the impact of network events on services. Attempts to address this through infrastructure that monitors end-to-end performance for customers have been hampered by the cost of deployment and by the volume of data generated by these solutions. We present an alternative approach that pushes monitoring to applications on end systems and uses their collective view to detect network events and their impact on services - an approach we call Crowdsourcing Event Monitoring (CEM). This paper presents a general framework for CEM systems and demonstrates its effectiveness for a P2P application using a large dataset gathered from BitTorrent users and confirmed network events from two ISPs. We discuss how we designed and deployed a prototype CEM implementation as an extension to BitTorrent. This system performs online service-level network event detection through passive monitoring and correlation of performance in end-users' applications.
Pars Plana Vitrectomy versus Immunomodulatory Therapy for Intermediate Uveitis: A Prospective, Randomized Pilot Study

Purpose: Comparison of pars plana vitrectomy (PPV) with immunomodulatory therapy (IMT) for patients with intermediate uveitis (IU). Methods: A prospective, randomized pilot study was performed on patients with recalcitrant IU associated with degradation of visual acuity (VA) despite standard treatment. Outcome measures (VA, intraocular pressure, anterior chamber and vitreous cellular infiltrate) were collected. Results: Sixteen patients (18 eyes) were randomized to the PPV IMT group. Nine of 11 eyes (82%) treated with PPV showed resolution of inflammation at follow-up, at 5.93 years. Four of 7 eyes (57%) given IMT had persistent inflammation requiring subsequent PPV. PPV patients showed greater improvement in Snellen line, IOP, and vitreous cell reduction. Three PPV patients had cystoid macular edema (CME) initially; all resolved postoperatively. CME improved in 2 of 3 eyes using IMT. Conclusions: A higher percentage of patients treated with PPV had improvement of uveitis compared to those given IMT. A multicentered clinical trial is needed to confirm and statistically validate these conclusions.
Two Consecutive Days of Extreme Conditioning Program Training Affects Pro and Anti-inflammatory Cytokines and Osteoprotegerin without Impairments in Muscle Power

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of two consecutive extreme conditioning program training sessions (24 h apart) designed to enhance work-capacity that involved both cardiovascular and muscular exercises on cytokines, muscle power, blood lactate and glucose. Nine male members of the extreme conditioning community (age 26.7 ± 6.6 years; body mass 78.8 ± 13.2 kg; body fat 13.5 ± 6.2%; training experience 2.5 ± 1.2 years) completed two experimental protocols (24 h apart): (1) strength and power exercises, (2) gymnastic movements, and (3) metabolic conditioning as follows: 10 min of as many rounds as possible (AMRAP) of 30 double-unders and 15 power snatches (34 kg). The same sequence as repeated on session 2 with the following metabolic conditioning: 12 min AMRAP of: row 250 m and 25 target burpees. Serum interleukin-6 (IL-6), IL-10, and osteoprotegerin were measured before, immediately post and 24 h after workout of the day (WOD) 1, immediately post, 24 and 48 h after WOD 2. Peak and mean power were obtained for each repetition (back squat with 50% of 1 repetition maximum) using a linear position transducer measured before, immediately post and 24 h after WOD 1, immediately post and 24 h after WOD 2. Blood lactate and glucose were measured pre and immediately post WOD 1 and 2. Although both sessions of exercise elicited an significant increase in blood lactate (1.20 ± 0.41 to 11.84 ± 1.34 vs. 0.94 ± 0.34 to 9.05 ± 2.56 mmol/l) and glucose concentration (81.59 ± 10.27 to 114.99 ± 12.52 vs. 69.47 ± 6.97 to 89.95 ± 19.26 mg/dL), WOD 1 induced a significantly greater increase than WOD 2 (p ≤ 0.05). The training sessions elicited significant changes (p ≤ 0.05) in IL-6, IL-10 and osteoprotegerin concentration over time. IL-6 displayed an increase immediately after training WOD 1 [197 ± 109%] (p = 0.009) and 2 [99 ± 58%] (p = 0.045). IL-10 displayed an increase immediately after only WOD 1 [44 ± 52%] (p = 0.046), and decreased 24 and 48 h following WOD 2 (~40%; p = 0.018) as compared to pre-exercise values. Osteoprotegerin displayed a decrease 48 h following WOD 2 (~25%; p = 0.018) as compared with pre intervention. In conclusion, two consecutive extreme conditioning training sessions increase pro/anti-inflammatory cytokines with no interference on muscle performance in the recovery period.
Image pseudo tag generation with Deep Boltzmann machine anc topic-concept similarity map

General purpose search engines are used for searching not only plain text but also multimedia information. In multimodal search, it is common to use multiple queries to find the demanded information in the different media modalities. In most cases, however, it is hard to prepare such multimodal search queries. In addition, the semantic connection between the individual modalities is often weak or totally lacking in such multimodal search. Hence, single modality searching makes it hard to find the searched for information in the multimodal domain. In this paper we improve the Deep Boltzmann Machine applied to multimodal search by using GoogLeNet deep convolutional neural network and semantic concept features. We also propose a supervised method to produce a similarity map between hidden topics in text documents and the visual concepts in corresponding images, and an unsupervised method which uses the hidden topics in the documents as pseudo labels. The model can be used to infer and generate pseudo tags for untagged input query images in order to complement an image-only query to a multimodal one. The classification results with pseudo tag inputs show in our experiments improvement compared to the original tag inputs.
A novel memristor-based rSRAM structure for multiple-bit upsets immunity

A radiation hardened resistive SRAM structure (rSRAM) is proposed for the SRAM-based FPGAs in this paper. The rSRAM extends the conventional 6T SRAM structure by connecting memristors between the information nodes and drains of the transistors which compose cross-coupled invertors. With memristors connected to drains of OFF transistors configured to high resistance state while others configured to low resistance state forming stable voltage dividing path, the rSRAM structure is immune to both multiple-node upsets and multiplebit upsets (MBUs). The simulation result demonstrates that rSRAM cell can tolerate simultaneous disruptions affecting all sensitive nodes with an LET (Liner Energy Transfer) of 100Mev-cm2/mg.
Tonic And Phasic Inhibitory Mechanisms Mediating Sensorimotor Decision-Making In The Goldfish Auditory Startle Circuit

Here we applied behavioral testing, pharmacology, and in vivo electrophysiology to determine the function of the 5-HT5A receptor in goldfish startle plasticity and sensorimotor gating. In an initial series of behavioral experiments we characterized the effects of a selective 5-HT5A antagonist, SB-699551, on prepulse inhibition of the acoustic startle response. Those experiments showed a dose-dependent decline in startle rates in prepulse conditions. Subsequent behavioral experiments showed that SB-699551 also reduced baseline startle rates (i.e., without prepulse). To determine the cellular mechanisms underlying these behaviors, we tested the effects of two distinct selective 5-HT5A antagonists, SB-699551 and A-843277, on the intrinsic membrane properties and synaptic sound-response of the Mauthner-cell (M-cell), the decision-making neuron of the startle circuit. Auditory-evoked post-synaptic potentials (PSPs) recorded in the Mcell were similarly attenuated following treatment with either 5-HT5A antagonist (SB-699551: 26.41 ± 3.98 % reduction; A-843277: 17.52 ± 6.24 % reduction). This attenuation was produced by a tonic (intrinsic) reduction in M-cell input resistance, likely mediated by a Cl conductance, that added to the extrinsic inhibition produced by an auditory prepulse. Interestingly, the effector mechanisms underlying neural PPI itself were unaffected by antagonist treatment. In sum, these results provide an in vivo electrophysiological characterization of the 5-HT5A receptor and its behavioral relevance, and provide a new perspective on the interaction of intrinsic and extrinsic modulatory mechanisms in startle plasticity and sensorimotor gating.
Lower Bounds on Query Complexity for Testing Bounded-Degree CSPs

In this paper, we consider lower bounds on the query complexity for testing CSPs in the bounded-degree model. We mainly consider Boolean CSPs allowing literals. First, for any "symmetric'' predicate P:\bit^{k}\to \bit except \equ where k\geq 3, we show that every (randomized) algorithm that distinguishes satisfiable instances of \csp{$P$} from instances (|P^{-1}(0)|/2^k-\epsilon)-far from satisfiability requires \Omega(n^{1/2+\delta}) queries where n is the number of variables and \delta>0 is a constant that depends on P and \epsilon. This breaks a natural lower bound \Omega(n^{1/2}), which is obtained by the birthday paradox. We also show that every one-sided error tester requires \Omega(n) queries for such P. These results are hereditary in the sense that the same results hold for any predicate Q such that P^{-1}(1)\subseteq Q^{-1}(1). For \equ, we give a one-sided error tester whose query complexity is \tilde{O}(n^{1/2}). Also, for \txor (or, equivalently \textsf{E2LIN2}), we show an \Omega(n^{1/2+\delta}) lower bound for distinguishing instances between \epsilon-close to and (1/2-\epsilon)-far from satisfiability. Next, for the general \kcsp over the binary domain, we show that every algorithm that distinguishes satisfiable instances from instances (1-2k/2^k-\epsilon)-far from satisfiability requires \Omega(n) queries. The matching NP-hardness is not known, even assuming the Unique Games Conjecture or the d-to-1 Conjecture. As a corollary, for \mislong on graphs with n vertices and a degree bound d, we show that every approximation algorithm within a factor d/\poly\log d and an additive error of \epsilon n requires \Omega(n) queries. Previously, only super-constant lower bounds were known.
The relationship between inhibition and working memory in predicting children's reading difficulties

The study evaluated the role of working memory and inhibition in predicting children’s word reading difficulties. Twenty-one participants with word reading difficulties were individually matched to two other participants to form the chronological-age-matched and the reading-level-matched group. All participants were administered measures of performance IQ, inhibition and working memory. Multinomial logistic regression revealed that tasks of working memory and a composite measure of inhibition discriminated between the groups above the impact of performance IQ when the working memory task was verbally based, but only inhibition discriminated when a nonverbal working memory task was used. This suggests domain-specific deficits on tasks of working memory, independent of the influence of inhibition on reading difficulties. The implications for theory and assessment practice are discussed.
Delaunay based shape reconstruction from large data

Surface reconstruction provides a powerful paradigm for modeling shapes from samples. For point cloud data with only geometric coordinates as input, Delaunay based surface reconstruction algorithms are shown to be quite effective both in theory and practice. However, a major complaint against Delaunay based methods is that they are slow and cannot handle large data. We extend the COCONE algorithm to handle supersize data. This is the first reported Delaunay based surface reconstruction algorithm that can handle data containing more than a million sample points on a modest machine.
Internalization of therapeutic relationships in short-term psychotherapy.

Application de l'analyse structurale du comportement social afin de se faire une idee de l'internalisation des relations therapeutiques par 48 clients en psychotherapie courte dans deux centres de Conseil universitaires. Propositions pour une integration des theories interpersonnelle et psychodynamique de la psychotherapie
Scalable concurrent priority queue algorithms

This paper addresses the problem of designing bounded range priority queues, that is, queues that support a fixed range of priorities. Bounded range priority queues are fundamental in the design of modern multiprocessor algorithms from the application level to lowest levels of the operating system kernel. While most of the available priority queue literature is directed at existing small-scale machines, we chose to evaluate algorithms on a broader concurrency scale using a simulated 256 node shared memory multiprocessor architecture similar to the MIT Alewife. Our empirical evidence suggests that the priority queue algorithms currently available in the literature do not scale. Based on these findings, we present two simple new algorithms, LinearFunnels and FunnelTree, that provide true scalability throughout the concurrency range.
The Context and Contextual Constructs of Research

This paper presents the Contextual Constructs Model (CCM) and the theory which underpins it, Contextual Constructs Theory (CCT). Developed as part of a complex project designed to investigate user perceptions of Information Quality (IQ) in the context of Web-based Information Retrieval (IR), the CCM is not a single research method per se. Instead, CCT/CCM is a modelled research framework providing an over-arching approach to scientific investigation, by which a researcher is able to identify multiple possible methods of study and analysis according to the identified research constructs and their contexts. Central to CCT is that all research involves the fusion of two key component parts; that of (1) context; and (2) cognitively-driven constructs; and that the co-dependent nature of the relationship between these components inform the research process, development and eventual outcomes. The resulting CCM framework is one which scaffolds research as a contextual process of phases, identifying the conceptual; philosophical, implementation, and evaluation tasks associated with a complex research investigation. The underlying epistemology of such a contextual approach to research is said to be a blend of a critical-real world view within a systems-science approach to investigation.
Semisynthesis of cytochrome c analogues. The effect of modifying the conserved residues 38 and 39.

We have used chemical and enzymic protein engineering techniques to create analogues of the semisynthetic two-fragment complex (1-37). (38-104) of mitochondrial cytochrome c. This complex, unlike the natural product of specific tryptic cleavage, (1-38). (39-104), from which it is prepared, quite closely resembles the parent protein in functional characteristics and is thus a suitable substrate for modifications designed to study structure-function relations. We have replaced the invariant Arg-38 and the conserved Lys-39 with a range of alternative amino acids and have studied the effects on the principal functional parameters. The hydrogen-bonding capacity of Arg-38 is crucial to the stabilization of the bottom omega-loop, while the positive charge of Lys-39 helps maintain the high redox potential by electrostatic effects at the haem iron.