Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Proceedings of Mic97 2nd International Conference on Metaheuristics 2nd International Conference on Metaheuristics -mic97 I Contents 1 the Lavish Ordering Genetic Algorithm 2nd International Conference on Metaheuristics -mic97 the Lavish Ordering Genetic Algorithm

It has often been assumed that ordering problems form a special class of problems amenable to a largely uniform treatment. Since successful ordering Genetic Algorithms (gas) have been deened for optimization of some ordering problems, it has become customary to assume that ordering problems are well solved by ordering gas tted with standardd operators. The success of the standard ordering gas on some problems led to an indirect approach to solving numerous combinatorial problems as follows: deene a decoder of a permutation of items that builds a solution to the original problem, and use the ordering ga to nd a permutation that decodes into a good solution to the original problem. Such lavish applications of the standard ordering ga to all sorts of problems have become pervasive. In this paper, we construct a very simple way of transforming a function deened over bitstrings to a function deened over permutations, and conversely. As a result, there is a simple way of transforming any function to an ordering problemm. The implication of this is that should there indeed be a standard way of eeciently solving ordering problems, then the standard ordering ga would be capable of eeciently optimizing all functions. That, however, would contradict the No Free Lunch Theorem for search. Consequently, many ordering problems are not amenable to solution by standard ordering gas, i.e. the lavish use of the standard ordering ga is unwarranted. We support this claim by experiments where we attempt to optimize the easy 32-bit one-max function with an ordering ga, using the simple transformation between permutations and bitstrings. As expected, standard ordering crossover operators perform extremely poorly on that simple function. In order to illustrate how much an ordering crossover for one-max would have to diier from the standard ones, we then construct an exoticc tailored crossover which performs well.
Impulse response shortening for discrete multitone transceivers

In discrete multitone (DMT) transceivers an intelligent guard time sequence, called a cyclic prefix (CP), is inserted between symbols to ensure that samples from one symbol do not interfere with the samples of another symbol. The length of the CP is determined by the length of the impulse response of the effective physical channel. Using a long CP reduces the throughput of the transceiver, To avoid using a long CP, a short time-domain finite impulse response (FIR) filter is used to shorten the effective channels impulse response. This paper explores various methods of determining the coefficients for this time-domain filter. An optimal shortening and a least-squares (LS) approach are developed for shortening the channel's impulse response. To provide a computationally efficient algorithm a variation of the LS approach is explored. In full-duplex transceivers the length of the effective echo path impacts the computational requirements of the transceiver. A new paradigm of joint shortening is introduced and three methods are developed to jointly shorten the channel and the echo impulse responses in order to reduce the length of the CP and reduce computational requirements for the echo canceller.
Assessment of neurological and behavioural function: the NIH Toolbox

138 www.thelancet. com/neurology Vol 9 February 2010 The National Institutes of Health Toolbox for the Assessment of Neurological and Behavioral Function (NIH Toolbox) initiative, part of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research (NIH Blueprint) initiative, is developing brief yet comprehensive instruments to measure motor, cognitive, sensory, and emotional function. When completed, the Toolbox should provide a standard set of concise, well validated measures that will be available in English and Spanish for longitudinal or epidemiological studies and also for prevention or intervention trials of people aged 3–85 years. The need for brief and uniform instruments to facilitate the assessment of neurological and behavioural function in large-scale studies was initially identifi ed by the trans-NIH Cognitive and Emotional Health Project (CEHP) Critical Evaluation Study Committee. Although this Committee focused on cognition and emotion, most of its fi ndings were also applicable to other domains such as motor and sensory health, and were incorporated into the NIH Blueprint development team’s recommendations for the Toolbox. The underlying proposition was that a focus on optimum functioning and health might lead to the identifi cation of a diff erent set of risk factors and thus diff erent prevention strategies, rather than the conventional focus on single disease outcomes. This approach could apply to studies on neurological and behavioural function, and also to studies outside these areas (eg, cardiovascular research) that might wish to assess these functions in addition to their specifi c primary outcome measures. However, there are few assessment tools that reliably refl ect everyday function and monitor health rather than identify illness and disability. Furthermore, current instruments for assessing brain function are not used uniformly, making comparison of data across studies diffi cult. This variability limits the ability to undertake combined analyses to design strategies that could both maintain health and prevent disease. The NIH Toolbox, envisioned as a standard set of measures of function, is intended to address these needs. Additionally, the NIH Toolbox is designed to be brief, inexpensive, reliable over time, and to incorporate state-of-the-art psychometric properties and advances in technology (eg, computerised administration and adaptive testing when applicable). To ascertain the needs of potential end users, we fi rst solicited expert input on criteria that the Toolbox should meet, and the specifi c areas (subdomains) of function it should target, and reviewed relevant existing measures. To date we have undertaken two internetbased interviews with NIH-funded researchers (n=150 and 143), one phone-based interview of a subset of those interviewees (n=44), and a systematic literature review for each of our targeted domains. These Assessment of neurological and behavioural function: the NIH Toolbox
CONVERSION TO DEMENTIA IN THE PATIENTS WITH MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT

Mild cognitive impairment is a syndrome defined as the cognitive decline greater than the expectancy determined by the age and educational level of the individual, but which does not interfere with the daily activities. (1) The prevalence in the population studies of epidemiological type is between 3-19% in adults over 65 years old. A number of people with mild cognitive impairment remain stable or regain cognitive normality, but more than a half, progress to dementia over the next five years, and that is why a number of authors state that mild cognitive impairment can be considered a risk factor for dementia. The amnestic type of cognitive impairment has an increased risk of conversion to Alzheimer's dementia. Petersen et al. states that 80-95% of the patients with mild cognitive impairment will develop dementia during their life. (1,2)
REFINING COMMON SENSE: TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE IN MANAGEMENT STUDIES*

Drawing on Pepper’s World Hypotheses we describe four Werent approaches to obtaining formal knowledge in management studies. These approaches are: fonnism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism. All of them are valid ways of refining common sense that resist synthesis. Applying Pepper’s framework in as extremely diverse a field as management studies (focusing on organizational behaviour (OB) and strategic management (SMJ in particular) we show the different assumptions and knowledge claims made by different types of theorists in management and, moreover, we shed light on the sources of conceptual rivalry that often characterize the field. By way of illustration, the Mintzberg-Ansoff debate on the nature of strategic management is focused upon for closer examination. It is shown that analysing this debate in terms of Pepper’s framework one can understand and evaluate the epistemological differences between Mintzberg and Ansoff, which stem from their adherence to contextualist and mechanistic-cum-formistic types of knowledge respectively.
Searching for Expertise: Experiments with the Voting Model

In an expert search task, the user's need is to identify people who have relevant expertise to a topic of interest. An expert search system predicts and ranks the expertise of a set of candidate persons with respect to the user's query. In this work, we propose a novel approach for estimating and ranking candidate expertise with respect to a query. We see the problem of ranking experts as a voting problem, which we model using adaptations of data fusion techniques. We extensively investigate the effectiveness of the voting approach and the associated data fusion techniques across a range of document weighting models, in the context of the TREC 2005 and TREC 2006 Enterprise track settings. The evaluation results show that the voting paradigm is very effective, without using any collection-specific heuristics. Additionally, we further analyse two main features of the voting model, namely the manner in which document votes are combined and the effect of the underlying document ranking. First, for the combination of document votes, we hypothesise that candidate with large profiles can introduce bias in the generated ranking of candidates. We propose and integrate into the model a candidate length normalisation technique that removes bias towards prolific candidate experts. Secondly, we investigate the relative effects of applying various retrieval enhancing techniques to improve the quality of the underlying document ranking, to investigate how each technique improves the retrieval effectiveness of the generated ranking of candidates. At each stage, we experiment extensively and draw conclusions. Our results show that the voting techniques proposed are indeed effective, across several different document weighting models and settings. Secondly, we see that candidate profile length normalisation can help improve retrieval accuracy when applied to the candidate profile sets. Lastly, we show that increasing the quality of the underlying ranking of candidates can enhance the retrieval accuracy of the generated ranking of candidates.
Physician-Hospital Integration and the Economic Theory of the Firm

Physicians and hospitals are pioneering new and more coordinated organizational forms under pressure from market competition. Arms-length "doctor's workshop" relationships are yielding to integrated delivery systems and contractual delivery networks. This article analyzes organizational change in health care through the conceptual lens of institutional economics, defined broadly as including agency theory, transactions cost economics, and the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. These theoretical frameworks highlight three distinct functions of organization under managed care: coordination, governance, and innovation.
Resilience in Families With Adolescents Suffering From Traumatic Brain Injuries

Purpose: This study aims to coconstruct the building blocks for an intervention program to support family resilience in conjunction with families with an adolescent suffering from traumatic brain injury and rehabilitation professionals. Design: This is a qualitative and inductive study, supported by a collaborative research approach. Methods: Based on the complex intervention design and validation model, the investigator follows a three‐stage data collection process: (1) identifying the building blocks of the intervention program in the eyes of families and rehabilitation professionals, (2) prioritizing, and (3) validating the building blocks with the same participants. Findings: After analyzing the data, the investigator identifies five encompassing themes as the building blocks of the intervention program. Conclusions/Clinical Relevance: This study offers promising avenues for practitioners and researchers in nursing and other fields with respect to the implementation of concrete strategies to support the resilience process of families facing particularly difficult times in their lives.
Parenting practices and children’s academic success in low-SES families

Given the disadvantaged position of working-class children in the education system, it is important to understand how parents and families might support their children to succeed academically. This paper reports on 35 case studies that were conducted as part of the Effective Provision of Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE 3–16) research project. Using in-depth interviews with children and parents this study investigates parental involvement with school and learning during primary and secondary school years in working-class families with children who are academically succeeding above prediction and children who are progressing as predicted, given their background characteristics. The paper provides descriptions of emotional and practical support for academic learning in these families and discusses how parents explain their involvement or lack thereof. This paper identifies differences in socialisation practices between the two groups of working-class families: ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ in families with children progressing as predicted (Lareau, 2003) and ‘active cultivation’ in families with children succeeding above prediction.
On the Interaction of Prior Knowledge and Stimulus Structure in Category Learning

Contemporary theories of categorization propose that concepts are coherent in virtue of being embedded in a network of theories about the world. Those theories function to pick out some of the many possible features of a set of objects as most salient for purposes of classification, a process that is complex and still poorly understood (Murphy & Medin, 1985). Part of what makes this account incomplete is a lack of information as to (1) what makes a feature salient on a given occasion and (2) how feature salience interacts with category structure to determine the course of learning. We report on the results of three studies of category learning using complex schematic drawings to show that (1) the contrast set defined by one's initial encounters with category exemplars can be a source of individual differences in feature salience assignments; (2) such effects are short-lived in the face of clear evidence about actual feature diagnosticity; and (3) more robust prior hypotheses interact with category structure to either enhance learning or impede it. The enhancement occurs when the hypothesis emphasizes category-relevant features, even if the hypothesis is in fact incorrect. A hypothesis that assigns high salience to irrelevant features impedes learning. Learning does occur as feedback concerning category structure leads to enhanced salience for relevant features. Salience of irrelevant features remains high, however, suggesting that such learning as occurs involves augmentation and not total revision of the (incorrect) prior hypothesis.
Inter-Phone and Inter-Word Distances for Confusability Prediction in Speech Recognition

In this work we investigate new inter-phone and inter-word distances and we apply them to predict if two words of the lexicon of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system are likely to be confused. The inter-word distance is calculated from an alignment between the phonetic transcriptions of the words by adding the distances between the aligned phones. We bring a new solution in which the inter-phone distance used for computing the inter-word distance is not the same used to compute the phonetic alignment. The first one is calculated between the acoustic models of the phones with a new formula that we propose. The second one is based on phonetic knowledge. We also use two different kinds of alignments: either with or without insertions and deletions. In order to evaluate the performances, we introduce a classical false acceptance/false rejection framework and the prediction Equal Error Rate (EER) was measured to be less than 2%.
The Poisson Collocation Measure and its Applications

In this paper we introduce a measure for calculating statistically significant collocation sets that is related to the Poisson distribution. We show that results calculated using this measure are comparable to well-known measures like the log-likelihood measure. Additionally, we discuss asymptotic behaviour and additivity as general properties of the measure which may be applied to the analysis of multi-word collocations as well and can be used for defining a relative collocation measure as well. Finally, we give a brief overview of various possibilities of postprocessing collocation sets.
The socially distributed cognition of musical timbre : a convergence of semantic, perceptual, and acoustic aspects

Ferrer Flores, Rafael The Socially Distributed Cognition of Musical Timbre: a Convergence of Semantic, Perceptual, and Acoustic Aspects Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2012, 42 p.(+included articles) (Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities ISSN ISBN 978-951-39-4691-3 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-39-4692-0 (PDF) Finnish summary Diss. The cognition of musical timbre is studied from a social perspective. The exploration starts by narrowing the definition of timbre to specific phenomena defined as timbral environments, which describe the global sound of musical objects within a social context. For this reason a theoretical framework is provided, to extend the scope of timbre in two aspects: from the perception of short, isolated sonic events, to real-world complex auditory phenomena; and from individual’s embodied perception to a socially distributed cognition domain. To test the pragmatic value of such a definition, first a conservative approach relating timbral descriptors to affective dimensions is used to confirm the methodological plausibility of connecting physical entities with high level cognitive functions. Then an empirical approach is employed to analyze the public data, provided by a pioneering online musical social network (Last.fm). In this kind of social network, a form of synthesized natural language has emerged consisting of semantic labels, known as "tags". Specific musical objects such as artists and songs are each given a list of different tags that have been attributed to them by users over time. This language of tags is used by subscribers in such a network to exchange ideas, descriptions, and emotions related with the music (among other kinds of abstractions). The semantic properties of these tags are analyzed, and links with the perceptual and acoustic domains of the objects they describe, are established. The analysis of tags revealed a structure from which specific categories can be extracted and examined more closely, such as musical genres, adjectives or affect related terms. Finally, the practical value of these findings is tested with the implementation of a psychometric tool to assess musical preferences.
A fully automated 2-DE gel image analysis pipeline for high throughput proteomics

Image analysis is still considered as the bottleneck in 2D-gel based expression proteomics analysis for biomarkers discovery. We are presenting a new end-to-end image analysis pipeline of operations that can be fully automated. The pipeline includes image denoising and enhancement based on contourlets, image segmentation into Regions of Interest (ROIs) based on active contours, followed by the analysis of the extracted ROIs for spot detection and quantification using mixture modeling, model selection and unsupervised machine learning methods. The proposed system is shown to match the sensitivity and exceed the precision of commercial spot detection software when analyzing real 2D gel images. It is suitable for high throughput proteomics analysis of image stacks since, unlike commercial software, it does not require any manual re-calibration of parameters every time a new image is to be processed.
Lipopolysaccharide-mediated transcriptional activation of the human tissue factor gene in THP-1 monocytic cells requires both activator protein 1 and nuclear factor kappa B binding sites

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) activation of cells of monocytic lineage leads to rapid and transient expression of a set of inflammatory gene products, including tissue factor (TF). This transmembrane receptor is the major cellular initiator of the blood coagulation cascades, and induced expression of TF is postulated to play a role in inflammation. Functional studies using transfected THP-1 monocytic cells revealed the presence of a 56-bp LPS response element (LRE) within the TF promoter that conferred LPS responsiveness to a heterologous promoter. LPS stimulation of these cells activated proteins that bound to nucleotide sequences within the LRE resembling consensus binding sites for activator protein 1 (AP-1) and nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kappa B). Induction of the TF gene may represent a prototypic example of gene activation in monocytic cells by assembly of transcription factor complexes, and may clarify the role of AP-1 and NF-kappa B in the regulation of other LPS-responsive genes.
Smoking and life expectancy among HIV-infected individuals on antiretroviral therapy in Europe and North America

Background:Cardiovascular disease and non-AIDS malignancies have become major causes of death among HIV-infected individuals. The relative impact of lifestyle and HIV-related factors are debated. Methods:We estimated associations of smoking with mortality more than 1 year after antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation among HIV-infected individuals enrolled in European and North American cohorts. IDUs were excluded. Causes of death were assigned using standardized procedures. We used abridged life tables to estimate life expectancies. Life-years lost to HIV were estimated by comparison with the French background population. Results:Among 17 995 HIV-infected individuals followed for 79 760 person-years, the proportion of smokers was 60%. The mortality rate ratio (MRR) comparing smokers with nonsmokers was 1.94 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.56–2.41]. The MRRs comparing current and previous smokers with never smokers were 1.70 (95% CI 1.23–2.34) and 0.92 (95% CI 0.64–1.34), respectively. Smokers had substantially higher mortality from cardiovascular disease, non-AIDS malignancies than nonsmokers [MRR 6.28 (95% CI 2.19–18.0) and 2.67 (95% CI 1.60–4.46), respectively]. Among 35-year-old HIV-infected men, the loss of life-years associated with smoking and HIV was 7.9 (95% CI 7.1–8.7) and 5.9 (95% CI 4.9–6.9), respectively. The life expectancy of virally suppressed, never-smokers was 43.5 years (95% CI 41.7–45.3), compared with 44.4 years among 35-year-old men in the background population. Excess MRRs/1000 person-years associated with smoking increased from 0.6 (95% CI –1.3 to 2.6) at age 35 to 43.6 (95% CI 37.9–49.3) at age at least 65 years. Conclusion:Well treated HIV-infected individuals may lose more life years through smoking than through HIV. Excess mortality associated with smoking increases markedly with age. Therefore, increases in smoking-related mortality can be expected as the treated HIV-infected population ages. Interventions for smoking cessation should be prioritized.