Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Photometric activity of the Seyfert galaxy Markarian 6 from UBV observations in 1970-2001

The light curve of Mrk 6 for 1970-2002 is presented and discussed. The amplitudes of variability were 1.6 m , 1.1 m , and 0.8 m in UBV bands, respectively. The magnitudes of the underlying galaxy in the 27.5 00 aperture were found to be Ug= 15:82, Bg = 15:42 and Vg = 14:36. The mean color indices of the variable component are (U B)var = 0:49 and (B V)var= 0:75 without correction for reddening. In the time intervals from 10 days to 1300 days the structure function can be presented as a power function, SF/ b ,w hereb= 0:72 0:04. The time where the SF for Mrk 6 reaches the upper plateau is about 3300 days. The observed SF can be interpreted by the superposition of independent flares model with the maximal duration of flares 800 days. If these flares are located in the radiation pressure dominated region of the accretion disk, the size of this region is about 70, 330 RS, assuming the viscous parameter is 0.1, 0.01, respectively. It is concluded that the optical long-term variability of Seyfert galaxies can be explained by thermal instability in the accretion disk.
Characterization of Road Condition with Data Mining Based on Measured Kinematic Vehicle Parameters

This work aims at classifying the road condition with data mining methods using simple acceleration sensors and gyroscopes installed in vehicles. Two classifiers are developed with a support vector machine (SVM) to distinguish between different types of road surfaces, such as asphalt and concrete, and obstacles, such as potholes or railway crossings. From the sensor signals, frequency-based features are extracted, evaluated automatically with MANOVA. The selected features and their meaning to predict the classes are discussed. The best features are used for designing the classifiers. Finally, the methods, which are developed and applied in this work, are implemented in a Matlab toolbox with a graphical user interface. The toolbox visualizes the classification results on maps, thus enabling manual verification of the results. The accuracy of the cross-validation of classifying obstacles yields 81.0% on average and of classifying road material 96.1% on average. The results are discussed on a comprehensive exemplary data set.
iRDQL - Imprecise RDQL Queries Using Similarity Joins

Traditional semantic web query languages support a logic-based access to the semantic web. They offer a retrieval (or reasoning) of data based on facts. On the traditional web and in databases, however, exact querying often provides an incomplete answer as queries are overspecified or the mix of multiple ontologies/modelling differences requires “interpretational flexibility. ” This paper introduces iRDQL – a semantic web query language with support for similarity joins. It is an extension to RDQL that enables the user to query for similar resources in an ontology. A similarity measure is used to determine the degree of similarity between two semantic web resources. Similar resources are ranked by their similarity and returned to the user. We show how iRDQL allows to extend the reach of a query by finding additional results. We quantitatively evaluated one measure of SimPack – our library of similarity measures for the use in ontologies – for its usefulness in iRDQL within the context of an OWL-S semantic web service retrieval test collection. Initial results of using iRDQL indicate that it is indeed useful for extending the reach of the query and that it is able to improve recall without overly sacrificing precision.
Experiences in Sense Making: Health Science Students’ I-Positioning in an Online Philosophy of Science Course

This article reports on a qualitative study on the dialogical approach to learning in the context of higher education. The aim was to shed light on the I-Position and multivoicedness in students’ identity building and to provide empirical substantiation for these theoretical constructs, focusing especially on the connection between personal knowledge and theoretical knowledge. The study explored how health science students’ reflections on their work and discipline-related experiences provided resources for making personal sense of and understanding the subject studied. The students took an online course on the philosophy of science. To study students’ internal and external dialogue in terms of multivoicedness in their sense-making processes I combined a discourse analysis with a dialogical approach. The results showed that in reflecting on their experiences in light of different scientific approaches, the students became engaged in dialogues with different voices, thereby experiencing tensions in their professional positioning. The reasoning tasks gave rise to internal dialogue, involving negotiation between different I-Positions of the self or heterodialogue with the texts. These identity negotiations were manifested in refining, strengthening, and reconstructing professional and scientific I-Positions and in sharing and constructing a We-Position.
An ASIC-architecture for VLSI-implementation of the RBN-algorithm

An optimized recursive binary nesting (RBN) algorithm for coding true color documents is presented. The RBN compression in which algorithm is a segmentation algorithm in which a picture is subdivided into regions with equal properties and for each region only the relevant information for the human eye is kept. Thus, the compressed image consists of segmentation information and the information of the picture behavior in those regions. The picture is subsampled on a quadtree based lattice (segmentation information). The inner pixels are approximated with the use of four lattice corner pixels (pictorial behavior). The subdivision in blocks has to be a function of the image contents. The size of the initial blocks is 65*65. Each pixel in the block is approximated as a weighted average of the four corner pixels (bilinear interpolation). The efficient VLSI architecture used to implement the algorithm is termed the lowly multiplexed cooperating data-path style. Several other designs under consideration are briefly reviewed. <<ETX>>
Efficient in vitro regeneration of chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum morifolium L.) plantlets from nodal segments

Efficient plant regeneration system has been developed from the nodal segments of chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum morifolium L). Nodal segments, after being sterilized with 1.0% mercuric chloride for three minutes, were inoculated in Murashige and Skoog (MS) media with varied concentrations of indole acetic acid (IAA), benzylaminopurine (BAP) and their combinations. Different parameters including shoot initiation percentage, average number of shoots per explant, length of shoots (cm), number of leaves per shoot and number of nodes per shoot were studied during the course of study. Intermediate level (0.3 mg/l) of IAA exceeded all the other concentrations of IAA by producing 80.0 % shoot initiation, an average of 4.0 shoots per explants, 5.1 cm long shoots, 11.3 leaves and 5.6 nodes per shoot, when used alone. Similarly, intermediate level of BAP (1.0 mg/l) showed its supremacy over all the other concentrations as it produced 100% shoot initiation, 4.9 shoots per explant, 5.8 cm long shoots, 13.4 leaves and 6.3 nodes per shoot, when used alone. When the combination of different concentrations of IAA and BAP were used, significant results regarding the regeneration of chrysanthemum plantlets were also achieved. MS media supplemented with lower concentrations of IAA (0.1 and 0.2 mg/l) along with intermediate levels of BAP (1.0 and 2.0 mg/l) had a favorable effect on the regeneration of chrysanthemum plantlets using nodal segments of chrysanthemum, as compared to other concentrations and combinations. Satisfactory rooting response was obtained in half strength MS media supplemented with 0.2 mg/l indole butyric acid (IBA), followed by 0.2 mg/l naphthalene acetic acid (NAA) and IAA, respectively.
Structural relaxation of the chlorite surface imaged by the atomic force microscope

The surface structure of the layer silicate mineral chlorite has been imaged at nearatomic resolution using an atomic force microscope (AFM). The chlorite structure consists of a 2:l talc-like layer and a brucite-like interlayer sheet. The AFM clearly resolves the OH groups of the brucite-like interlayer sheet and the bases of the SiOo tetrahedra of the talc-like sheet. The imaged surface structures of both the talc- and brucitelike layers are generally consistent with that of the bulk structure. The mean unit-cell distances (a: 5.31 + 0.31, b:9.74 + 0.80 A) are within I and 5ol0, respectively, of those calculated for the known structure. However, some structural relaxation of the talc-like surface is observed. This relaxation manifests itself as a systematic shortening and elongation of both a and b across the layer and probably results from a concertina-like readjustment of the surface after cleaving. The bruciteJike layer does not exhibit similar behavior.
Fewer mothers with more colleges? The impacts of expansion in higher education on first marriage and first childbirth

Background: Since the mid-1990s, South Korea has undergone two remarkable social changes: a large-scale expansion in higher education and a transition to lowest-low fertility. These changes offer an appropriate quasi-experimental setting for the causal inferences of the impacts of college education on transitions into marriage and parenthood. Objective: I examine the effects of the large-scale college expansion on first marriage and first childbirth, using data from South Korea. Methods: I define two cohorts of women depending on their exposure to the expansion (pre-expansion versus post-expansion), and from this I identify a marginal group affected by the college expansion. Using a difference-in-difference approach, I examine how marriage and childbirth changes in this group (the New College Class) differed in comparison with the changes in other groups (the High School Class and the Traditional College Class). Results: I found a considerable impact of college expansion on the falling rates of first marriage and first childbirth among the New College Class women. The growing divide in family formation between college graduates and non-college graduates explains a large part of the total college expansion effects, while the effect of increased education among New College Class women was minimal. Conclusions: The college expansion in South Korea did have an impact, but the impact was mostly indirect from interactions with other social structural changes. Contribution: I provide causal evidence on the impact of the large-scale expansion in higher education on family formation, in particular fertility, utilizing a novel analytical approach and a rare empirical case in South Korea.
Modular Smoothed Analysis of Median-of-three Quicksort 1

Spielman’s smoothed complexity - a hybrid between worst and average case complexity measures - relies on perturbations of input instances to determine where average-case behavior turns to worst-case. This approach simplifies the smoothed analysis and achieves greater precession in the expression of the smoothed complexity, where a recurrence equation is obtained as opposed to bounds. Moreover, the approach addresses, in this context, the formation of input instances–an open problem in smoothed complexity. In [23], we proposed a method supporting modular smoothed analysis and illustrated the method by determining the modular smoothed complexity of Quicksort. Here, we use the modular approach to calculate the median of three variant and compare these results with those in [23].
Surface eletromiography in the diagnosis of syndromes of the cranio-cervical pain

Abstract This paper first provides a review of the anatomy and physiology of striated muscles, focusing on the muscle fiber, motor unit and μ neuron. We also commented on the factors that affect the depolarization of this neuron, resulting in its excitation or inhibition, and thereby altering the contractions of the motor unit, which in turn alters the equilibrium of the muscle dynamics. The changes caused by these factors, such as muscular hyperactivity, found mainly in the temporal muscles, with the jaw the resting position and chewing are also discussed. However, muscular hypoactivity is most frequently observed in the masseter muscles. The suprahyoid muscles, responsible for the positioning of the tongue, also show a large number of alterations. We also commented on the changes observed in the contractions of the posterior cranio-cervical musculature, sternocleidomastoid muscles and the upper fibers the trapezius, which are sources of referred pain.
TETRIS: TilE-matching the TRemendous Irregular Sparsity

Compressing neural networks by pruning weights with small magnitudes can significantly reduce the computation and storage cost. Although pruning makes the model smaller, it is difficult to get practical speedup in modern computing platforms such as CPU and GPU due to the irregularity. Structural pruning has attract a lot of research interest to make sparsity hardware-friendly. Increasing the sparsity granularity can lead to better hardware utilization, but it will compromise the sparsity for maintaining accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel method, TETRIS, to achieve both better hardware utilization and higher sparsity. Just like a tile-matching game, we cluster the irregularly distributed weights with small value into structured groups by reordering the input/output dimension and structurally prune them. Results show that it can achieve comparable sparsity with the irregular element-wise pruning and demonstrate negligible accuracy loss. The experiments also shows ideal speedup, which is proportional to the sparsity, on GPU platforms. Our proposed method provides a new solution toward algorithm and architecture co-optimization for accuracy-efficiency trade-off.
THE CULTURE OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT IMMATURITY IN PUBLIC SECTOR INFRASTRUCTURE ORGANIZATIONS-THE CASE OF WOB

Public sector infrastructure organizations responsible for infrastructure development in South Africa, which include infrastructure departments, parastatal organizations and other statutory organizations qualify as project-oriented organizations (POO). Project management (PM) within their activities is considered to be a core competence and this competence has to be explicitly developed by these organizations. There are strong indications to suggest that these organizations’ PM competencies leave a lot to be desired. On face value they purport to be fully fledged project oriented organizations and performing as mature PM organizations, while in reality they are enmeshed in the culture of PM incompetence by default. This paper reports on a study, which was carried out in one of the largest infrastructure department in South Africa. The focus is on one of the largest programmes managed by the department. In order to determine the department’s PM maturity, an evaluation of the performance of the programme was carried out in relation to department’s mandate. It is found that the programme in its current form could be described as a ‘white elephant’ and a programme, which does not have an appropriate organisation structure, appropriate and sufficient staff to carry its objectives. Generally, it is quite clear that the programme control system is very weak or non existent, hence the existence of sketchy standards, policies, procedures, decision rules, and reporting requirements to monitor and control its various initiatives – PM immaturity characteristics seem to dominate the management of the programme and departmental managers responsible for the programme are not conscious of these immaturity characteristics. There are strong indications to suggest that the department is still marking time at Level 1 of PM Maturity. Recommendations are made which will help the department to move up the ladder of PM Maturity and shed the culture of PM immaturity thus capable of managing the programme.
Quantitative interpretation of X-ray diffraction patterns of mixtures. I. Matrix-flushing method for quantitative multicomponent analysis

A matrix-flushing method for quantitative multicomponent analysis by X-ray diffraction is reported. It is simpler and faster than, yet as reliable as, the conventional internal-standard method. In this new method, the calibration-curve procedure is shunted; a more fundamental `matrix-flushing' concept is introduced. The matrix-flushing theory gives an exact relationship between intensity and concentration free from matrix effect. Contrary to most theoretical methods the working equation is very simple, no complicated calculations are involved. The matrix-flushing theory and the analytical procedure are presented. Eight illustrative examples are drawn to demonstrate how this theory is applied to multicomponent analysis and amorphous-content determination. A novel `auto-flushing' phenomenon of binary systems was observed which appears to make the analysis of any binary system a simple matter.
The Frequency of Co-occuring Disorders, Childhood Trauma and Selfesteemin the Parents of Substance Dependent Individuals

It has been demonstrated that childhood traumas are a risk factor for psychiatric disorders [1-3]. Studies have shown that childhood emotional and physical abuse, sexual abuse, substance abuse, and low self esteem contribute to sexual and interpersonal relationship problems [4-6]. Substance dependent people frequently show a history of significant childhood trauma [7-9]. There are also many epidemiological studies that show high rates of psychiatric disorders co-occuring with substance dependency disorders [10,11]. During the treatment of dependent individuals, our observations that families of dependent patients are more likely to have co-occuring psychiatric diagnosis and complaints about childhood traumas in family interviews is motivated us to make this study. Despite all the studies that show high rates of childhood traumas and co-occuring disorders, parents of substance dependent have not been well studied. We believe that this is a gap in the literature that should be remedied.
A preliminary examination of the nutritive value of four saltbush (Atriplex) species.

Four saltbush (Atriplex spp.) and two hay-based diets were fed to individually penned sheep over a three week period. Sheep fed the saltbush diets generally lost weight (about 200 g/day) and had an elevated water intake relative to the hay-fed group. Mean dry matter (DM) intake on all the saltbush diets increased over the term of the experiment. Intake of a diet containing equal proportions of hay and one of the saltbushes was much greater than any of the other diets. Digestibility of dry matter from the saltbushes was 0.53 to 0.62, nitrogen 0.70 to 0.81 and fibre 0.26 to 0.45.
Association of Polymorphic Variants of VEGF and KDR Genes with Development and Metastasing of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is one of the most important and specific factors affecting angiogenesis in tumor development. VEGFR2 is a receptor encoded by the KDR gene. VEGF and VEGFR2 transmit a signal to intracellular tyrosine kinase cascades. Polymorphic variants of the VEGF and KDR genes significantly influence the expression levels of the endothelial growth factor and its receptor, which leads to a change in the activation of angiogenesis in oncopathological processes. In this study, the relationship between the polymorphic variants rs2010963, rs699947 and rs3025039 of the VEGF gene and rs1870377 and rs2071559 of the KDR gene was analyzed with the development of a specific histological type of non-small cell lung cancer and its clinical and morphological characteristics. It was established that the development of squamous cell carcinoma is associated with -634CC genotype of the VEGF gene and the genotypes containing -2578A allele of the VEGF gene reduce the likelihood of this cancer type development. The development of adenocarcinoma is associated with +936CC VEGF/1719TT KDR and +936CT VEGF/1719TT KDR combinations. In women with non-small cell lung cancer, -634GC genotype of the VEGF gene is associated with a greater degree of the primary lesion spread. Genotype -2578СС of the VEGF gene is associated with a higher degree of the primary tumor spread in the general group of patients and with regional metastases in women. Haplotypes -634G/-2578C/+936C are risky for the occurrence of metastases in regional lymph nodes in women.
Transmission electron microscopic study on the niche induced ultrastructural changes in digestive gland cells of the green mussel Perna viridis (L.)

The ultrastructural studies by transmission electron microscopy revealed significant changes at cellular level in both digestive gland and digestive tract of Perna viridis collected from polluted water near the coast as compared to those collected 1 km off the shore line. The digestive gland cells of polluted group showed distorted and enlarged nuclei along with several inclusions and lipid granules in the cytoplasm. The cells lining the digestive tract also revealed the presence of large number of lipid granules, inclusions, vacuoles, disturbed epithelium along with lytic areas, necrosis and enlarged nucleus. The morphological changes in the digestive cells of mussels are attributed to environmental stress i.e., due to the sequestration of heavy metal pollutants in the specimens collected from the coast. The damage to tissues at cellular level has been discussed in the light of previous reports and observations which employed green mussels as biomonitors of marine pollution.
The Tower of Babel in the Classroom: Immigrants and Natives in Italian Schools

We exploit rules of class formation to identify the causal effect of increasing the number of immigrants in a classroom on natives test scores, keeping class size constant (Pure Composition Effect). We explain why this is a relevant policy parameter although it has been neglected so far. We show that the PCE is sizeable and negative at age 7 (-1.6% for language and math) and does not vanish when children grow up to age 10. Conventional estimates are instead smaller because they are confounded by endogenous class size adjustments implemented by principals when confronted with immigrant and native inflows.
A Deep Latent-Variable Model Application to Select Treatment Intensity in Survival Analysis

In the following short article we adapt a new and popular machine learning model for inference on medical data sets. Our method is based on the Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) framework that we adapt to survival analysis on small data sets with missing values. In our model, the true health status appears as a set of latent variables that affects the observed covariates and the survival chances. We show that this flexible model allows insightful decision-making using a predicted distribution and outperforms a classic survival analysis model.
EAST ASIAN FINANCIAL CRISIS REVISITED: WHAT DOES A COPULA TELL?

We construct a regime-switching model of copulas to capture observed asymmetric dependence in daily changes of exchange rates in five selected East Asian economies during the 1997 financial crisis era. In particular, we investigate the effects of the financial crisis on asymmetric dependence in exchange rates returns and assess the asymmetric relationships between five currencies, including the Singapore Dollar, Japanese Yen, South Korea Won, Thailand Baht and Indonesia Rupiah. Various time-varying copula models will also be applied to examine the possible structural breaks. The results confirm significant changes at the dependence level, tail behaviour and asymmetry structures between returns of all permuted pairs from the five currencies before and after the crisis. In comparison with other methods, it is found that the copular approach has more explanatory power than the existing ones in identifying structure breaks.