Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Could innovative teams provide the necessary flexibility to compete in the current context

[EN] In the modern era firms should look for a sustainable and profitable business model. They operate in highly volatile and competitive markets. Innovation is a key element that allows firms to survive in these complex environments. Accordingly, some companies are developing human resource models that align to the actual competitive context. For instance, they establish democratic systems, flexible work practices, they focus on responsibility and initiative and increase the self-control of team members. In this framework, firms tend to use resources such as creativity, capacity for innovation or development of human talent. Therefore, innovative teams are able to adapt and react to turbulent, complex and dynamic environments, which allow them to handle in a more efficient way several subtasks. This fact gives rise to a higher effectiveness in the activities of firms. This paper analyze the characteristics and performance of multifunctional teams, virtual teams, open-innovation teams and self-managing teams. It also study the case of Semco, a company that is characterized by its innovative practices in human resources management and focus on responsibility and initiative and increase the self-control of team members.
1 . 9 THz Waveguide HEB Mixers for the upGREAT Low Frequency Array

We report on the development of waveguide HEB mixers for the upGREAT low frequency array (LFA). upGREAT is the focal plane array extension of the German Receiver for Astronomy at THz frequencies (GREAT) in operation on SOFIA. Its LFA will have 14 pixels for the 1.9–2.5 THz band divided in two 7 pixel hexagonal sub arrays. The mean corrected noise temperature of 12 of the 14 mixers characterized so far, averaged over a 1 – 2 GHz IF bandwidth, is 700 K (+/100 K). In order to meet the LO power requirement of the receiver we reduced the NbN HEB device volume to 3.5 nm thickness x 200 nm length x 3250 nm width (120 Ohm normal state impedance), by a reoptimization of the critical NbN device layer and an adjustment of the RF circuit. We will present the measured performance of the mixers with a focus on uniformity.
Identification of HPV 82-BA 10 , A New Variant of the Papillomavirus Type 82 , in a PreCancerous Cervical Lesion

Human Papillomaviruses (HPVs) account for 75% of invasive cervical cancers worldwide. Viral variants of these HPVs differ in evolutionary history and pathogenicity. The taxonomic status of HPV types, subtypes, and variants is based on the traditional criteria that the sequence of their L1 genes should be, at least, 10%, 2-10 %, and maximally 2 % dissimilar from other well known HPVs. Recently, the genome of a new human papillomavirus (HPV-82) was detected in a vaginal intraepithelial neoplasia grade I, thus classified in super group A, together with HPV-26, -51, and -69, probable high risk virus types in cervical cancer. In this report, we demonstrate the presence of a new Variant of HPV Type 82, named HPV82-BA10, in a patient with a pathological cervical lesion.
Nucleation process of unstable rupture in the brittle regime: A theoretical approach based on experimentally inferred relations

Ohnaka and Kuwahara investigated the nucleation process of unstable rupture in their elaborate laboratory experiment with a very high resolution, using a rock sample with a simulated fault. They found, among other things, that the crack growth resistance such as the stress σp — σi (σp being the peak stress at the crack tip and σi being the shear stress at the propagating tip on the verge of slip) and the breakdown stress drop increase with crack growth in the nucleation zone. They also found that the critical slip displacement is inhomogeneously distributed on the fault in the nucleation zone. We investigate whether inhomogeneous distribution of the crack growth resistance can necessarily cause the stable and quasi-static nucleation process in the brittle regime. The slip-dependent breakdown zone model has been assumed in the present theoretical analysis of crack. It has theoretically been shown that an increase in the critical slip displacement with the distance is required for the occurrence of stable crack growth. Its increase rate must be larger than a certain threshold value. The transition to unstable rupture growth occurs at a location where the increase rate falls short of the threshold value. The inhomogeneous distribution of the critical slip displacement may physically be attributed to that of fault surface roughness, as shown in laboratory experiments. The stress distributions on the crack plane prescribe the rate of stable crack growth. The stable rupture growth process observed by Ohnaka and Kuwahara can be explained quantitatively assuming inhomogeneously distributed stresses and critical slip displacement, which have also been observed in their experiments. The present theoretical study shows that both the distribution of the crack growth resistance, particularly that of the critical slip displacement, and the size of preexisting initial crack play important roles in creating stable and quasi-static nucleation in the brittle regime. We show that diverse rupture phenomena can be caused by the differences in the distribution of critical slip displacement and in the size of preexisting initial crack.
Analysis of Hydraulic and Geomorphic Conditions Causing Railway Embankment Breach due to Inundation Flow

Embankments on a floodplain, usually treated as solid walls in inundation simulations can cause considerable damage during severe flood events. The damage to road or railway embankment system not only changes the propagation of inundation flow but also destroys the transportation infrastructure. In this study, the failure of the embankment system of the Kishin Railway Line during the flood event in August, 2009 is analyzed. The factors in causing embankment failure are analyzed from the geographic and hydraulic view points. A framework to estimate the risk of the embankment failure, which is based on the analysis of the structures of the geography and inundation flow, is proposed in this work.
Selecting models with different spectral density matrix structures by the cross-validated log likelihood criterion

We propose the cross-validated log likelihood (CVLL) criterion for selecting multivariate time series models with different forms of the spectral density matrix, which correspond to different constraints on the component time series such as mutual independence, separable correlation, time reversibility, graphical interaction and others. We obtain asymptotic properties of the CVLL, and demonstrate the empirical properties of the CVLL selection with both simulated and real data.
Understanding the Risk to Neotropical Migrant Bird Species of Multiple Human-Caused Stressors: Elucidating Processes Behind the Patterns.

Ubiquitous human-caused changes to the environment act as multiple stressors for organisms in the wild, and the effects of these stressors may be synergistic, rather than merely additive, with unexpected results. However, understanding how focal organisms respond to these stressors is crucial for conservation planning for these species. We propose a paradigm that alternates extensive, broadscale data collection by volunteer collaborators to document patterns of response, with intensive fine-scale studies by professional researchers, to elucidate the processes underlying these patterns. We demonstrate this technique, building on our existing work linking patterns of population declines in the Wood Thrush ( Hylocichla mustelina) to synergistic effects of acid rain and habitat fragmentation. To better understand the processes behind these patterns, we use a simple protocol to explore linkages between acid rain, leaching of calcium from the soil, and declines in the abundance of calcium-rich invertebrate prey species, which may be necessary for successful breeding by this thrush. We sampled at 40 study sites across New York that were chosen based on estimated acid deposition and soil properties. Our results show that the calcium content of the soils sampled is proportional to the soil pH, that the abundance of calcium-rich invertebrate prey tracks soil properties, and that the presence of a breeding Wood Thrush was correctly predicted in >70% of study sites by the biomass of calcium-rich prey, and in particular, the biomass of myriapods (Diplopoda). We show that a simple repeatable protocol, suitable for use by volunteers across broad geographic extents and ranges of habitat fragmentation, can help us understand the reactions of some forest birds to acid rain in combination with habitat fragmentation. We detail the development of this protocol for volunteers in the Birds in Forested Landscapes project, and describe future plans.
Next-Generation, Data Centric and End-to-End IoT Architecture Based on Microservices

The early Internet of Things (IoT) systems have been infrastructure dependent. But these systems are evolving due to the advent of data centric IoT architectures, applications and services that are independent of infrastructure. Cloudification, virtualization and softwarization of IoT devices and services are heavily used to design, develop and deploy new End-to-End IoT applications. Scalability, extensibility and interoperability challenges are now coming to forefront regarding the new IoT services and platforms. This paper proposes to tackle these challenges using microservices in the Cloud. We are extending our previously developed DataTweet IoT architecture and services to cover a high degree of heterogeneity, information systems, integration of virtual IoT devices, gateways and micro-granular architectures. The paper investigates the new challenges and describes solutions for integrating microservices with more flexible and scalable architectural meta models. We present a prototype of the enhanced architecture, its operational steps and a use cases on roadside assistance.
Isolated Pancreas Injury by Blunt Trauma, a Case Report

We here in present our experience with the rare injury of main pancreatic duct because of the blunt trauma and managed by pancreatico-enterostomy. A 35-year-old male patient presented with a motor vehicle accident and was diagnosed isolated pancreas main duct ınjury by blunt trauma. Computerized tomography (CT) was used as a diagnostic method and were confirmed by Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP). Intraoperative image was that necrosis developed in the anterior and lateral faces of pancreatic neck body tissues, and pancreatic duct was progressing towards necrosis in this area, but back wall was intact. Anterior Roux-en-Y pancreatico-jejunostomy was applied following the debridement of the wound area due to the intact posterior pancreatic parenchyma in the patient with proximal pancreatic duct injury in which pancreatic tissue was not transected. In a stable patients with isolated pancreatic duct injury, for not causing loss of organs such as the pancreas, spleen, duodenum, pancreaticoenterostomy is a safe option to reduce mortality and morbidity.
Accretion through the inner hole of transitional disks: what happens to the dust?

We study the effect of radiation pressure on the dust in the inner rim of transitional disks with large inner holes. In particular, we evaluate whether radiation pressure can be responsible for keeping the inner holes dust-free, while allowing gas accretion to proceed. This has been proposed in a paper by Chiang & Murray-Clay (2007, Nature Phys., 3, 604) who explain the formation of these holes as an inside-out evacuation due to X-ray-triggered accretion of the innermost layer of the disk rim outside of the hole. We show that radiation pressure is clearly incapable of stopping dust from flowing into the hole because of dust pile-up and optical depth effects, and also because of viscous mixing. Other mechanisms need to be found to explain the persistence of the opacity hole in the presence of accretion, and we speculate on possible solutions.
Enabling RISC-V support on MaxineVM

In this paper we outline the current state of language Virtual Machines (VMs) running on RISC-V as well as our initiatives in augmenting the existing ecosystem with Maxine VM, a state-of-theart open source research Virtual Machine (VM). Maxine VM is a metacircular VM for Java and is currently part of the Beehive ecosystem that provides a unified framework for hardware/software co-designed research on managed languages runtimes.
Flipping interferometry with doubled imaging area

We present a new external off-axis holographic module that doubles the acquired complex wavefront field of view, based on using both flipping and holographic multiplexing. In contrast to previous designs, this design does not require spatial filtering (no pinhole and lenses) to create the reference beam externally. In addition, the overlap area between the fields of view as well as the off-axis angle between the sample and reference beams can be fully controlled. As we demonstrate experimentally, this approach is useful for quantitative phase microscopy of extended stationary and dynamic samples, such as cancer cells during rapid flow and beating cardiomyocytes. © 2018 Optical Society of America
MODELING OF ENERGY ABSORBING CAPABILITY OF BUS SUPERSTRUCTURE FOR ROLLOVER SAFETY

This paper describes further investigations that have been carried out to make the proposed procedure [5] becomes more reliable to be practically applied as a requirement in bus type approval. One important aspect highlighted in this paper is an effort to improve the accuracy of the FEA model by taking into account detailed construction of bus superstructure. It worth to note that, based on survey carried out on several bus manufacturers, the detailed construction may vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. As a case study, a bus superstructure from a prominent manufacturer was chosen as a sample. Energy absorbing capacity of a bus superstructure section consisting of four bays including rear entrance door, emergency door and rear end was investigated through elasticplastic finite element model. Incremental quasy static load according to ECE R66 was applied, subsequently to the right and left cantrail to obtain load deflection curve. Then the energy absorbing capacity of the structure when residual space limit was reached was evaluated through derived energy deflection curve. Essential components of the bus superstructure governing its energy absorbing capacity will be discussed. Modeling strategy in dealing with elastic-plastic analysis for such a rather complex structure is also highlighted.
When Private Information Settles the Bill: Money and Privacy in Google's Market for Smartphone Applications

We shed light on a money-for-privacy trade-off in the market for smartphone applications (“apps”). Developers offer their apps at lower prices in return for greater access to personal information, and consumers choose between low prices and more privacy. We provide evidence for this pattern using data from 300,000 apps obtained from the Google Play Store (formerly Android Market) in 2012 and 2014. Our findings show that the market’s supply and demand sides both consider an app’s ability to collect private information, measured by the apps’s use of privacy-sensitive permissions: (1) cheaper apps use more privacy-sensitive permissions; (2) given price and functionality, demand is lower for apps with sensitive permissions; and (3) the strength of this relationship depends on contextual factors, such as the targeted user group, the app’s previous success, and its category. Our results are robust and consistent across several robustness checks, including the use of panel data, a difference-in-differences analysis, “twin” pairs of apps, and various measures of privacy-sensitivity and app demand. This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems.
Public-Private Mix of Health Expenditure : An OLG Political Economy Model and Quantitative Analysis

This paper constructs a simple overlapping generations (OLG) model to examine decisions on public and private health spending under majority voting. In the model, agents with heterogeneous incomes decide how much to consume, save, and spend on health care, and vote for public health expenditure. Agents’ survival probabilities are determined by a CES composite of public and private health expenditure. The existence and uniqueness of the voting equilibrium are established. A quantitative exercise is conducted for a sample of advanced democratic countries and shows that the predicted public-private mix of health expenditure matches the data fairly well. JEL code: D7, H51, I1
Molecular Cloning , Sequence Feature and Expression Pattern of Acetylcholinesterase ( AChE ) Gene from Apis cerana cerana

The acetylcholinesterase gene ace2 was cloned from head tissue of Apis cerana cerana worker bees by RT-PCR and RACE. Full-length cDNA of this gene is 2062 bp with an open read frame of 1887bp that encodes 628 amino acids. The encoded protein is predicted to have a molecular weight of 70.71 kD and isoelectric point 5.49. The protein has a signal peptide precursor of 22 amino acids and is predicted to be a secretory protein. Phylogenetic analyses are congruent with a basal split of the order into Rhabditida, Ixodida, Diptera, Hemiptera, Lepidoptera, Coleoptera and Hymenoptera, which shows a closer relationship of the Apis cerana cerana (family Apidae) to Pteromalidae than to Formicidae, Ichneumonidae, Braconidae. We conclude that these two species are part of a molecular clade that is different from the recent studies, in which Tenthredinidae and Vespidae appears as a sister group. Our results show Braconidae appearing as the most basal extant, and Apidae appearing as a sister group of Formicidae, Ichneumonidae and Braconidae. The Hymenoptera shows close phylogenetic relationship to the Hemiptera. Real-time PCR analysis shows that ace2 gene is expressed in head, hemolymph, fat body, and midgut. The highest expression level is in head. Among various developmental stages of Apis cerana cerana, transcriptional level of ace2 is obviously higher at adult stage. The lowest transcriptional level is at the larval stage. © 2018 Friends Science Publishers
Image Caption Generation with Hierarchical Contextual Visual Spatial Attention

We present a novel context-aware attention-based deep architecture for image caption generation. Our architecture employs a Bidirectional Grid LSTM, which takes visual features of an image as input and learns complex spatial patterns based on two-dimensional context, by selecting or ignoring its input. The Grid LSTM has not been applied to image caption generation task before. Another novel aspect is that we leverage a set of local region-grounded texts obtained by transfer learning. The region-grounded texts often describe the properties of the objects and their relationships in an image. To generate a global caption for the image, we integrate the spatial features from the Grid LSTM with the local region-grounded texts, using a two-layer Bidirectional LSTM. The first layer models the global scene context such as object presence. The second layer utilizes a novel dynamic spatial attention mechanism, based on another Grid LSTM, to generate the global caption word-by-word, while considering the caption context around a word in both directions. Unlike recent models that use a soft attention mechanism, our dynamic spatial attention mechanism considers the spatial context of the image regions. Experimental results on MS-COCO dataset show that our architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Probabilistic Neural Programmed Networks for Scene Generation

In this paper we address the text to scene image generation problem. Generative models that capture the variability in complicated scenes containing rich semantics is a grand goal of image generation. Complicated scene images contain rich visual elements, compositional visual concepts, and complicated relations between objects. Generative models, as an analysis-by-synthesis process, should encompass the following three core components: 1) the generation process that composes the scene; 2) what are the primitive visual elements and how are they composed; 3) the rendering of abstract concepts into their pixel-level realizations. We propose PNP-Net, a variational auto-encoder framework that addresses these three challenges: it flexibly composes images with a dynamic network structure, learns a set of distribution transformers that can compose distributions based on semantics, and decodes samples from these distributions into realistic images.
Embodying Power

Adopting expansive (vs. contractive) body postures may influence psychological states associated with power. The current experiment sought to replicate and extend research on the power pose effect by adding another manipulation that embodies power—eye gaze. Participants (N = 305) adopted expansive (high power) or contractive (low power) poses while gazing ahead (i.e., dominantly) or down at the ground (i.e., submissively). Afterward, participants played a hypothetical ultimatum game, made a gambling decision, and reported how powerful and in charge they felt. Neither body posture nor eye gaze influenced the gambling decision, and contrary to the predictions, adopting an expansive pose reduced feelings of power. We also found that holding a direct gaze increased the probability of rejecting a low offer on the ultimatum game. We consider why power posing did not have the predicted effects.
Molecular Neurobiology A REST-dependent presynaptic homeostasis induced by chronic neuronal hyperactivity --Manuscript Draft--

Abstract: Homeostatic plasticity is a regulatory feedback response in which either synaptic strength or intrinsic excitability can be adjusted up or down to offset sustained changes in neuronal activity. Although a growing number of evidences constantly provide new insights into these two apparently distinct homeostatic processes, a unified molecular model remains unknown. We recently demonstrated that REST is a transcriptional repressor critical for the downscaling of intrinsic excitability in cultured hippocampal neurons subjected to prolonged elevation of electrical activity. Here we report that, in the same experimental system, REST also participates in synaptic homeostasis by reducing the strength of excitatory synapses by specifically acting at the presynaptic level. Indeed, chronic hyperactivity triggers a REST-dependent decrease of the size of synaptic vesicle pools through the transcriptional repression of several presynaptic REST-target genes. Together with our previous report, the data identify REST as a fundamental molecular player for neuronal homeostasis able to downscale simultaneously both intrinsic excitability and presynaptic efficiency in response to elevated neuronal activity. This experimental evidence adds new insights to the complex activity-dependent transcriptional regulation of homeostatic plasticity processes.