Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relational platform entrepreneurs: Live commerce and the 818 Jiazu

This paper explores the emerging platform entrepreneurship through an observational case study of one of the most prominent Kuaishou influencers, Xin Youzhi, and his 818 jiazu. Jiazus are influencer communities on Kuaishou, a Chinese livestreaming and e-commerce platform. Examining platform entrepreneurs through a relational lens, we illustrate the organisation and operation of the 818 jiazu and its interaction with the followers, the Kuaishou platform and the Chinese state. Identifying relations of mutuality, autonomy and domination, we find that 818 kiazu’s rise and fall manifest the relationality and contingency of entrepreneurial labours in the Chinese platform economy. We argue that Kuaishou jiazu can be understood as relational entrepreneurs who need new sociotechnical skills to navigate various relationships with the platform, users and state regulations. Our study contributes to understanding the organisation and practices of livestreamers by foregrounding the entrepreneurial agency of the influencer community.
The maximum multiplicity and the two largest multiplicities of eigenvalues in a Hermitian matrix whose graph is a tree

Abstract The maximum multiplicity of an eigenvalue in a matrix whose graph is a tree, M1, was understood fully (froma combinatorial perspective) by C.R. Johnson, A. Leal-Duarte (Linear Algebra and Multilinear Algebra 46 (1999) 139-144). Among the possible multiplicity lists for the eigenvalues of Hermitian matrices whose graph is a tree, we focus upon M2, the maximum value of the sum of the two largest multiplicities when the largest multiplicity is M1. Upper and lower bounds are given for M2. Using a combinatorial algorithm, cases of equality are computed for M2.
Estimating Population Receptive Fields in Space and Time

Right from the first synapse in the retina, visual information gets distributed across several parallel channels with different temporal filtering properties. Yet, commonly used system identification tools for characterizing neural responses, such as the spike-triggered average, only allow one to investigate the individual neural responses independently of each other. Conversely, many population coding models of neurons and correlations between neurons concentrate on the encoding of a single-variate stimulus.
Impact of conventional lipid-lowering therapy on circulating levels of PCSK9: protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Introduction Conventional lipid-lowering agents, including statins, ezetimibe, fibrates, bile acid sequestrants, nicotinic acid, bempedoic acid and Omega-3, are essential to the management of dyslipidaemia. However, these agents have been shown to increase the level of plasma proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin 9 (PCSK9), a serine protease associated with increased cardiovascular risk. This review aims to investigate the impact of commonly available conventional lipid-lowering agents on circulating PCSK9 levels and lipid profiles. Methods and analysis This protocol is conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols guidelines. A systematic search will be conducted in the following databases: MEDLINE, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), EMBASE, Web of Science, SCOPUS and ScienceDirect. Additional information will be retrieved from clinical trial registries or from reference list searches. Published and peer-reviewed randomised controlled trials with adults receiving statin, ezetimibe, fibrate, bile acid sequestrant, nicotinic acid, bempedoic acid or Omega-3 monotherapy or in combination for at least 2 weeks, with availability of plasma PCSK9 at the beginning and end of treatment or the net changes in values, will be included. Study selection, data extraction and assessment of the risk of bias will be independently conducted by two investigators. Continuous data will be presented as a standardised mean difference with 95% confidence interval (CI) and dichotomous data as risk ratios with 95% CI. Subgroup analysis and sensitivity analysis will be performed when sufficient studies are included. Publication bias will be assessed with a funnel plot and Egger’s test. Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval is not required as this review will only include data from published sources. The results will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Patient and public involvement No patient or members of the general public are involved. PROSPERO registration number CRD42022297942.
Prospective Teachers' Understanding of Proof: What If the Truth Set of an Open Sentence Is Broader than That Covered by the Proof?.

This paper investigates prospective elementary and secondary school teachers’ understanding of proof in a case where the truth set of an open sentence is broader than the set covered by a valid proof by mathematical induction. This case breaks the boundaries of students’ usual experience with proving tasks. The most important finding is that a significant number of students from both groups who recognized correctly the validity of the purported proof thought that it was not possible for the truth set of the open sentence to include any number outside its domain of discourse covered by the proof. The discussion of student difficulties provides insights into the development of instructional practices in teacher preparation programs aiming to uncover these aspects of students’ knowledge fragility and address them accordingly. Proof is a defining feature of mathematics and, in current school reform recommendations in various countries, is considered a fundamental aspect of instructional programs in all grade levels. However, to have success in the goal to make proof central to all students’ mathematical experiences, prospective teachers need to have solid understanding of this mathematical concept. If teacher preparation programs are to develop effective instructional practices that will help prospective teachers cultivate proof in their classrooms, it is essential that these practices be informed by research that illuminates prospective teachers’ understanding of proof. Despite the importance of this kind of research, only few studies have investigated inservice or preservice teachers’ knowledge of proof (Knuth, 2002; Martin & Harel, 1989; Movshovitz-Hadar, 1993; Simon & Blume, 1996; Stylianides, Stylianides, & Philippou, 2004). Also, these studies have focused more on the logical components of different proof methods than on other important features of the proving process, such as the relationship among the domain of discourse D and truth set U of an open sentence, and a proof that purports to show that the sentence is true in D. This paper contributes to this research area, focusing on the proof method of mathematical induction. Specifically, we examine what might be some common difficulties that prospective teachers have in dealing with a proof by mathematical induction that is not as encompassing as it could be (D is a proper subset of U). Based on anecdotal evidence that students’ normal experience is of being given opportunities to engage in ‘universal’ proofs (D = U), this study aims to advance the field’s understanding of possible issues of knowledge fragility by exposing prospective teachers to a case that falls outside the boundaries of what appears to constitute ‘standard practice’ for them.
Mandarin Chinese wh-in-situ argument–adjunct asymmetry in island sensitivity: Evidence from a formal judgment study

Unlike adjunct wh’s-in-situ, argument wh’s-in-situ do not seem to be subject to island constraints in Chinese and other East Asian languages. This difference in island sensitivity between argument and adjunct wh’s-in-situ is known as argument–adjunct asymmetry in the theoretical literature. Recently, this long-established asymmetry is challenged by a formal judgment study. It was claimed in the study that this asymmetry is an illusion and both argument and adjunct wh’s-in-situ are subject to island constraints. The present study demonstrates that such a claim is not convincing because it is based on problematic experimental design. We designed two experiments to test the island effects on Chinese wh’s-in-situ. The results reaffirm that the argument–adjunct asymmetry in Chinese wh’s-in-situ is indeed present, contrary to the findings of previous formal judgment study, and they also corroborate our assumption that when object wh’s-in-situ like shénme ‘what’ are located inside a relative clause, they are subject to a pragmatic constraint, suggesting that the VP (formed by a verb and its wh-object) in the relative clause tends to describe the prominent/salient feature of the relativized nominal head.
The impact of national values on the prevention and control of COVID-19: An empirical study

The outbreak of COVID-19 at the end of 2019 has become the most devastating public health event of the 21st century. The different performances of governments and people in different countries and regions show that national values may play an important role in the prevention and control of COVID-19. Based on data from the seventh wave of World Values Survey (WVS-7) and the Human Freedom Index (HFI) report in 2020, three national value factors are extracted in this manuscript, including religious belief, government satisfaction and individual freedom. Then ordinary least squares regression (OLS) regression model is constructed to explore the influence of these three value factors on the prevention and control of COVID-19 and some heterogeneity analysis is implemented. The results show that religious belief and individual freedom significantly increased the COVID-19 infection rate, while government satisfaction significantly reduced the COVID-19 infection rate. The study findings have the ability to hold up after a range of robustness. For countries and regions with different COVID-19 testing policies, the influence of national values is different. Only in countries and regions with high testing rate policies and complete systems of the prevention and control of COVID-19, the influence of national values is significant. Based on these findings, a series of targeted policy recommendations for building national values in the post-epidemic era are proposed.
Hippocampal morphological atrophy and distinct patterns of structural covariance network in Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment

Elucidating distinct morphological atrophy patterns of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its prodromal stage, namely, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) helps to improve early diagnosis and medical intervention of AD. On that account, we aimed to obtain distinct patterns of voxel-wise morphological atrophy and its further perturbation on structural covariance network in AD and MCI compared with healthy controls (HCs). T1-weighted anatomical images of matched AD, MCI, and HCs were included in this study. Gray matter volume was obtained using voxel-based morphometry and compared among three groups. In addition, structural covariance network of identified brain regions exhibiting morphological difference was constructed and compared between pairs of three groups. Thus, patients with AD have a reduced hippocampal volume and an increased rate of atrophy compared with MCI and HCs. MCI exhibited a decreased trend in bilateral hippocampal volume compared with HCs and the accelerated right hippocampal atrophy rate than HCs. In AD, the hippocampus further exhibited increased structural covariance connected to reward related brain regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex, the putamen, the caudate, and the insula compared with HCs. In addition, the patients with AD exhibited increased structural covariance of left hippocampus with the bilateral insula, the inferior frontal gyrus, the superior temporal gyrus, and the cerebellum than MCI. These results reveal distinct patterns of morphological atrophy in AD and MCI, providing new insights into pathology of AD.
Precipitation and soil nutrients determine the spatial variability of grassland productivity at large scales in China

Changes in net primary productivity (NPP) to global change have been studied, yet the relative impacts of global change on grassland productivity at large scales remain poorly understood. Using 182 grassland samples established in 17 alpine meadows (AM) and 21 desert steppes (DS) in China, we show that NPP of AM was significantly higher than that of DS. NPP increased significantly with increasing leaf nitrogen content (LN) and leaf phosphorus content (LP) but decreased significantly with increasing leaf dry matter content (LDMC). Among all abiotic factors, soil nutrient factor was the dominant factor affecting the variation of NPP of AM, while the NPP of DS was mainly influenced by the changing of precipitation. All abiotic factors accounted for 62.4% of the spatial variation in the NPP of AM, which was higher than the ability to explain the spatial variation in the NPP of DS (43.5%). Leaf traits together with soil nutrients and climatic factors determined the changes of the grassland productivity, but the relative contributions varied somewhat among different grassland types. We quantified the effects of biotic and abiotic factors on grassland NPP, and provided theoretical guidance for predicting the impacts of global change on the NPP of grasslands.
RESOLVE: A new algorithm for aperture synthesis imaging of extended emission in radio astronomy

We present resolve, a new algorithm for radio aperture synthesis imaging of extended and diffuse emission in total intensity. The algorithm is derived using Bayesian statistical inference techniques, estimating the surface brightness in the sky assuming a priori log-normal statistics. resolve estimates the measured sky brightness in total intensity, and the spatial correlation structure in the sky, which is used to guide the algorithm to an optimal reconstruction of extended and diffuse sources. During this process, the algorithm succeeds in deconvolving the effects of the radio interferometric point spread function. Additionally, resolve provides a map with an uncertainty estimate of the reconstructed surface brightness. Furthermore, with resolve we introduce a new, optimal visibility weighting scheme that can be viewed as an extension to robust weighting. In tests using simulated observations, the algorithm shows improved performance against two standard imaging approaches for extended sources, Multiscale-CLEAN and the Maximum Entropy Method.
Chicken IgY reduces the risk of Pseudomonas aeruginosa urinary tract infections in a murine model

Introduction Urinary tract infections (UTIs) with Pseudomonas aeruginosa are a severe problem in disposed patients in modern healthcare. Pseudomonas aeruginosa establishes recalcitrant biofilm infections and can develop antibiotic resistance. Gargling with avian egg yolk anti-Pseudomonas antibodies (IgY) has shown clinical effect in preventing onset of chronic P. aeruginosa lung infections in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). Therefore, we speculated whether passive intravesically administered IgY immunotherapy could be a novel strategy against P. aeruginosa UTIs. Aim To evaluate if prophylactic repurposing of anti-Pseudomonas IgY can prevent UTIs with P. aeruginosa in a UTI mouse model. Materials and methods In vitro, P. aeruginosa (PAO1 and PAO3) was mixed with increasing concentrations of specific anti-Pseudomonas IgY (sIgY) or non-specific control IgY (cIgY) and/or freshly isolated human neutrophils. Bacterial growth was evaluated by the optical density at 600 nm. In vivo, via a temporary transurethral catheter, 10-week-old female Balb/c mice were intravesically infected with 50 ml of a bacterial suspension and sIgY, cIgY, or isotonic NaCl. IgY and NaCl were either co-instilled with the bacteria, or instilled prophylactically, 30 min prior to infection. The animals were euthanized 20 h after infection. Vesical bacteriology was quantified, and cytokine expression in the bladder homogenate was measured by multiplex cytokine assay. Results In vitro, sIgY concentrations above 2.5% reduced bacterial growth in a dose-dependent manner. In vivo, a UTI lasting for minimum 7 days was established by installing 5 × 106 colony-forming units (CFU) of P. aeruginosa PAO1. sIgY reduced vesical bacterial load if co-installed with P. aeruginosa PAO1. Prophylactic sIgY and cIgY reduced bacterial load when compared to isotonic NaCl. CXCL2 and G-CSF were both increased in infected bladders compared to non-infected controls which had non-detectable levels. Co-installation of sIgY and bacteria nearly completely inhibited the inflammatory response. However, the cytokine levels in the bladder did not change after prophylactic administration of sIgY or cIgY. Conclusion Prophylactic sIgY significantly reduces the amount of bacteria in the bladder in a mouse model of P. aeruginosa cystitis and may serve as a novel non-antibiotic strategy in preventing P. aeruginosa UTIs.
A framework for privacy aware design in future mobile applications

Mobile communications and applications play an important role in connecting people ubiquitously across different domain spaces due to their portable nature and easy accessibility. Mobile applications have drastically changed the way businesses are run by bringing them closer to their customers. Businesses today are connected to cloud based-tools, which makes it easier to start and run a business. Furthermore, mobile applications have changed the way we communicate with each other in our daily lives. They have increasingly been deployed by companies to help with, among other things, the management of business efficiency, ease in accessing information, simplifying communication and the provision of user-friendly applications. The number of mobile devices is increasing exponentially, it is estimated that 1.5 billion devices are available to the public worldwide. In addition, there is a multitude of operating systems running on these devices, all running on different architectures and configurations. The diversity of the different versions of applications that need to be constantly updated as they become outdated makes mobile applications highly susceptible to security and privacy flaws. Until recently, privacy has not been the main centre of interest within the design of mobile applications. Although, a number of privacy preserving solutions have been developed to improve privacy, existing research solutions adopt static design models which are not suitable for mobile applications. There is a significant gap between having common practices for designing and implementing privacy-preserving methods due to the cross-disciplinary nature of mobile applications. Most importantly, personal data are constantly collected and shared with unknown recipients. This is a challenging problem as users are not aware of how their data is used and shared without their consent. Furthermore, existing privacy policies are not stringently
Incremental Algorithm to Cluster the Categorical Data with Frequency Based Similarity Measure

Clustering categorical data is more complicated than the numerical clustering because of its special properties. Scalability and memory constraint is the challenging problem in clustering large data set. This paper presents an incremental algorithm to cluster the categorical data. Frequencies of attribute values contribute much in clustering similar categorical objects. In this paper we propose new similarity measures based on the frequencies of attribute values and its cardinalities. The proposed measures and the algorithm are experimented with the data sets from UCI data repository. Results prove that the proposed method generates better clusters than the existing one. Keywords—Clustering, Categorical, Incremental, Frequency, Domain
Optimal Power Flow Integrating Renewable Energy Sources in Microgrid Employing Hybrid Grey Wolf- Equilibrium Optimizer

The grid electricity market is undergoing massive transformation in the midst of advent of renewable energy sources (RES). The intermittent and stochastic nature of RES poses a great challenge for effective and economical operation of the grid. The optimal power flow mathematical formulation has high non-convexity as well as non-linearity. The complexity further increases by the addition of the RES for the grid stability and adequacy. This paper proposes a hybrid Grey wolf - Equilibrium Optimizer (HGW-EO) for finding optimal scheduling of a hybrid power plant consisting of thermal generators, wind power farms and solar power farm. The uncertainty of the solar and wind power is considered for real time grid operation. The stochastic nature of wind and solar farms power output are forecasted using the Weibull and Lognormal probability density functions. For real world scenario, the overestimation and underestimation costs are also considered.A modified IEEE-30 bus system is utilised for testing and comparing the proposed HGW-EO algorithms to other metaheuristics methods showing promising results.
An ILP Task Mapping for MIMD Processor with Vector Accelerator in Model-Based Development*

This paper presents a parallelization workflow in model-based development for a MIMD (Multiple Instruction streams, Multiple Data streams) processor with a vector accelerator. In the workflow, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation is proposed to deploy tasks extracted from the Simulink model. The proposed formulation can determine the number of processors that a task needs, and whether vectorization should be used to accelerate a task to reduce synchronization overhead and execution time. In the experiments, a MATLAB script was used to simulate the ILP formulation with randomly generated task graphs and evaluate its performance. Furthermore, we applied ILP task mapping to a real-world Model Predictive Control (MPC) application on DR1000C, a type of RISC-V MIMD processor with a vector accelerator. The maximum speedup of 10. 05x is obtained, which is promising for use in real-time embedded systems.
Raspberry Pi based Modular System for Multichannel Event-Driven Functional Electrical Stimulation Control

This paper describes the implementation and testing of a modular software for multichannel control of Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES). Moving towards an embedded scenario, the core of the system is a Raspberry Pi, whose different models (with different computing powers) best suit two different system use-cases: user-supervised and stand-alone. Given the need for real-time and reliable FES applications, software processing timings were analyzed for multiple configurations, along with hardware resources utilization. Among the results, the simultaneous use of eight channels has been functionally achieved (0% lost packets) while minimizing system timing failures (excessive processing latency). Further investigations included stressing the system using more constraining acquisition parameters, eventually limiting the usable channels (only for the stand-alone use-case).
B2B buyers’ purchase process of an employee recognition software: A qualitative study

B2B software purchase is an important decision as it results in a long commitment with the seller including important direct and indirect costs. One relatively new software is the employee recognition software. It promises a large-scale individualized follow-up. The purchase process of this product leads the buyer to take into consideration different features that may be specific to this purchase. This study aims to determine the factors that influence the purchase process involving B2B buyers of employee recognition software. Therefore, qualitative interviews were conducted with professional experience leading participants from 7 countries. Data analysis resulted in 28 codes organized into 4 themes that describe the different factors considered by the buyers for the information search and evaluation of alternatives. These themes are (1) Purchase Process Obstacles; (2) Marketing and communication needs; (3) Initial software search and (4) Buyer’s evaluation criteria. Our study results in the suggestion of a revised decision making process taking into consideration the dynamic nature of the relationships between the steps.