Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-Time Prediction of Incipient Congestion on Freeways from Detector Data

This paper is devoted to identifying precursors of freeway breakdown: decreased speed and ow as the result of excess demand. We do so by formulating prediction problems wherein we try to predict whether a breakdown will begin in the next ve or ten minutes. We use tree-structured statistical models to select conditions that are likely to precede breakdowns. The data we use are from single loop detectors on Interstate 5 in the Seattle area, and were Correspondence contact: Room 1Q-331, Bell Laboratories, 1000 East Warrenville Road, Naperville, IL 60566. Research supported in part by NSF grants DMS-9313013 and DMS-9208758 to the National Institute of Statistical Sciences.
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the implicit association of concepts and attributes

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) examines the differential association of two object categories (e.g. flower and insect) with attribute categories (e.g. pleasant and unpleasant). When items from congruent categories (e.g. flower + pleasant) share a response key, performance is faster and more accurate than when items from incongruent categories (e.g. insect + pleasant) share a key. Performing incongruent word classification engages inhibitory processes to overcome the prepotent tendency to map emotionally congruent items to the same response key. Using fMRI on subjects undergoing the IAT, we show that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and to a lesser extent the anterior cingulate cortex, mediate inhibitory processes where manipulation of word association is required.
CRUDE OIL AND THE NIGERIAN ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

For the past three decades, crude oil has been a major source of revenue, energy and foreign exchange for the Nigerian economy. Against this background, this paper analyses the relationship between the crude oil sector and the Nigerian economic performance. Using the Ordinary Least Square regression method, the study reveals that crude oil consumption and export have contributed to the improvement of the Nigerian economy. However, one of the recommendations of the study is that government should implement policies that would encourage the private sector to participate actively in the crude oil sector.
Name That Link: Intelligent Link Anchor Generation

A useful and growing web technology is the ability to present dynamically customized web content to users on the fly. Customized content often includes customized links, so a natural question arises: what should the anchor text be for dynamically generated links? This paper addresses the question of how to label dynamically generated links informatively and understandably. Our approach uses heuristics to generate many possible anchor labels, evaluates these labels, and then chooses the best anchor text for the link.
AutBlocks: Using Collaborative Learning to Develop Joint Attention Skills for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The development of Joint Attention skills for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder is an important pre-requisite to them achieving their full potential in terms of social and emotional interaction skills as they progress through childhood. This paper describes the development of a multiuser collaborative game using gestural interaction to provide autistic children with social interaction difficulties a means to build, practice and consolidate their joint attention skills. The feedback and experiences of a group of teachers of children with Autism are also presented for analysis and planning for future work.
A Proposal for Progressive Authentication and Data Integrity of Jpeg2000 Codestreams

This paper presents a progressive authentication proposition for JPEG2000 code-streams. This scheme is fully compatible with the core part of JPEG2000 standard. The authentication scheme allows users to verify the authenticity and the data integrity of subimages progressively extracted from a single code-stream protected with multiples signatures. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme is very efficient and highly scalable
Features and prevalence of plagiarism in biomedical science

Integrity is fundamental value for scientists, especially for medical science which results have immediate impact on health. Plagiarism is form of dis- honesty, "illegitimate appropriation of intellectual property, ideas, methods, results, text, speech or thought for the purpose of displaying as its own. " Plagiarism can be prevented by using software (computer installed, on Internet) for examination of all scientific papers before publication or reviewing process and education. This article explains past and future research projects of our Department.
Researching persons & organizations: AWAKE: From text to an entity-centric knowledge base

We describe a pilot experiment building a capability to automatically read documents, develop a knowledge base, support analytics, and visualize the information found. The capability allows someone researching a topic of interest of focus on analysis and synthesis rather than on reading. We show how information from multiple modalities (speech, text, structured databases) and multiple approaches (ontology driven and open information extraction) can be fused to create a resource about both previously known and novel entities. We describe an extensible framework for language understanding tools that allows for scalability, plug-and-play of alternative components, and incorporation of additional input streams, including video, images, and foreign language text.
Molecular validation of the schizophrenia spectrum.

BACKGROUND Early descriptive work and controlled family and adoption studies support the hypothesis that a range of personality and nonschizophrenic psychotic disorders aggregate in families of schizophrenic probands. Can we validate, using molecular polygene scores from genome-wide association studies (GWAS), this schizophrenia spectrum? METHODS The predictive value of polygenic findings reported by the Psychiatric GWAS Consortium (PGC) was applied to 4 groups of relatives from the Irish Study of High-Density Schizophrenia Families (ISHDSF; N = 836) differing on their assignment within the schizophrenia spectrum. Genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism data for affected and unaffected relatives were used to construct per-individual polygene risk scores based on the PGC stage-I results. We compared mean polygene scores in the ISHDSF with mean scores in ethnically matched population controls (N = 929). RESULTS The schizophrenia polygene score differed significantly across diagnostic categories and was highest in those with narrow schizophrenia spectrum, lowest in those with no psychiatric illness, and in-between in those classified in the intermediate, broad, and very broad schizophrenia spectrum. Relatives of all of these groups of affected subjects, including those with no diagnosis, had schizophrenia polygene scores significantly higher than the control sample. CONCLUSIONS In the relatives of high-density families, the observed pattern of enrichment of molecular indices of schizophrenia risk suggests an underlying, continuous liability distribution and validates, using aggregate common risk alleles, a genetic basis for the schizophrenia spectrum disorders. In addition, as predicted by genetic theory, nonpsychotic members of multiply-affected schizophrenia families are significantly enriched for replicated, polygenic risk variants compared with the general population.
Extraintestinal Helminth Infection Reduces the Development of Colitis-Associated Tumorigenesis

Colitis-associated colorectal cancer (CAC) is one of the most common cancers and is closely related to chronic or deregulated inflammation. Helminthic infections can modulate inflammatory responses in some diseases, but their immunomodulatory role during cancer development remains completely unknown. We have analyzed the role of Taenia crassiceps-induced anti-inflammatory response in determining the outcome of CAC. We show that extraintestinal T. crassiceps infection in CAC mice inhibited colonic inflammatory responses and tumor formation and prevented goblet cell loss. There was also increased expression of IL-4 and alternatively activated macrophages markers in colonic tissue and negative immunomodulation of pro-inflammatory cytokine expression. In addition, T. crassiceps infection prevented the upregulation of β-catenin and CXCR2 expression observed in the CAC mice, which are both markers associated with CAC-tumorigenesis, and reduced the numbers of circulating and colonic CD11b+Ly6ChiCCR2+ monocytes. Thus, immunomodulatory activities induced by helminth infections may have a role in the progression of CAC.
Outcome Prediction for Estrogen Receptor–Positive Breast Cancer Based on Postneoadjuvant Endocrine Therapy Tumor Characteristics

Background Understanding how tumor response is related to relapse risk would help clinicians make decisions about additional treatment options for patients who have received neoadjuvant endocrine treatment for estrogen receptor–positive (ER+) breast cancer. Methods Tumors from 228 postmenopausal women with confirmed ER+ stage 2 and 3 breast cancers in the P024 neoadjuvant endocrine therapy trial, which compared letrozole and tamoxifen for 4 months before surgery, were analyzed for posttreatment ER status, Ki67 proliferation index, histological grade, pathological tumor size, node status, and treatment response. Cox proportional hazards were used to identify factors associated with relapse-free survival (RFS) and breast cancer–specific survival (BCSS) in 158 women. A preoperative endocrine prognostic index (PEPI) for RFS was developed from these data and validated in an independent study of 203 postmenopausal women in the IMPACT trial, which compared treatment with anastrozole, tamoxifen, or the combination 3 months before surgery. Statistical tests were two-sided. Results Median follow-up in P024 was 61.2 months. Patients with confirmed baseline ER+ clinical stage 2 and 3 tumors that were downstaged to stage 1 or 0 at surgery had 100% RFS (compared with higher stages, P < .001). Multivariable testing of posttreatment tumor characteristics revealed that pathological tumor size, node status, Ki67 level, and ER status were independently associated with both RFS and BCSS. The PEPI model based on these factors predicted RFS in the IMPACT trial (P = .002). Conclusions Breast cancer patients with pathological stage 1 or 0 disease after neoadjuvant endocrine therapy and a low-risk biomarker profile in the surgical specimen (PEPI score 0) have an extremely low risk of relapse and are therefore unlikely to benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy.
Performance evaluation of LDPC codes in the presence of ISI with application to 10GBASE-T Ethernet

Low density party check (LDPC) codes are among the most powerful error control codes known. They can produce error correcting performance close to the Shannon limit and can be decoded using iterative decoding algorithms with linear complexity. These key advantages have made LDPC codes a candidate coding scheme for various novel applications and standards, such as 10GBASE-T Ethernet, in which both coding performance and implementation complexity are important considerations. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a recent LDPC code candidate for 10GBASE-T Ethernet, as well as a standard LDPC code, over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels with inter-symbol interference (ISI). We show that in comparison with AWGN, ISI introduces less performance degradation at the same level of signal-to-noise-and-interference ratio (SNIR). Given this SNIR scenario, we give simulation evidence that the performance of LDPC codes over ISI channels is upper-bounded by their performance over a AWGN channel. These results provide insight into the performance evaluation of LDPC codes in practical systems. In particular, the results allow us to characterize the equivalent AWGN for given amounts of ISI
Real Money Supply, Price and Fiscal Deficit in Nigeria: Evidence from Multivariate Granger Causality Tests

In this paper, Granger causality test is implemented within the context of Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework to determine the directions of causality between a pair of price level, real money supply, government fiscal deficit, interest rate and real output in Nigeria over the period 1970 to 2010. Result of the study shows that in the short run, there is a unidirectional causality running from real money supply to inflation, government deficit to price level, real output to inflation, and interest rate to inflation. The long run results indicate that bidirectional causality runs between the real money supply and price level, and also between price level and interest rate. The results suggest that pro-cyclical has been the practice in Nigerian fiscal policy which has accounted for the country’s public deficit. Therefore, there is a need for fiscal policy rule that will guide all the tiers of government to a particular level of fiscal conduct and budgetary management to the extent of making it credible over time. This result is important in that it provides the likely implications of fiscal deficits on some macroeconomic variables such as output, price level, money supply and balance of payment. Knowing these implications is likely to provide an insight into the formulation and design of appropriate fiscal policy by the Nigerian policy makers because far from the efficient provision of publ ic goods, fiscal policy performs stabilizing role.
Differential Expression of CD163 on Monocyte Subsets in Healthy and HIV-1 Infected Individuals

CD163, a haptoglobin-hemoglobin (Hp-Hb) scavenger receptor, expressed by monocytes and macrophages, is important in resolution of inflammation. Age-related non-AIDS co-morbidities in HIV-infected individuals, particularly dementia and cardiovascular disease, result in part from effects of HIV-1 infection on monocyte and macrophage biology. CD163 co-expression on CD14+CD16++ monocytes has been proposed as a useful biomarker for HIV-1 disease progression and the presence of HIV associated dementia. Here we investigated CD163 expression on monocyte subsets ex vivo, on cultured macrophages, and soluble in plasma, in the setting of HIV-1 infection. Whole blood immunophenotyping revealed CD163 expression on CD14++CD16- monocytes but not on CD14+CD16++ monocytes (P = 0.004), supported by CD163 mRNA levels. Incubation with M-CSF induced CD163 protein expression on CD14+CD16++ monocytes to the same extent as CD14++CD16− monocytes. CD163 expression on CD14++CD16+ monocytes from HIV-infected subjects was significantly higher than from uninfected individuals, with a trend towards increased expression on CD14++CD16− monocytes (P = 0.019 and 0.069 respectively), which is accounted for by HIV-1 therapy including protease inhibitors. Shedding of CD163 was shown to predominantly occur from the CD14++CD16− subset after Ficoll isolation and LPS stimulation. Soluble CD163 concentration in plasma from HIV-1 infected donors was similar to HIV-1 uninfected donors. Monocyte CD163 expression in HIV-1 infected patients showed a complicated relationship with classical measures of disease progression. Our findings clarify technical issues regarding CD163 expression on monocyte subsets and further elucidates its role in HIV-associated inflammation by demonstrating that CD163 is readily lost from CD14++CD16− monocytes and induced in pro-inflammatory CD14+CD16++ monocytes by M-CSF. Our data show that all monocyte subsets are potentially capable of differentiating into CD163-expressing anti-inflammatory macrophages given appropriate stimuli. Levels of CD163 expression on monocytes may be a potential biomarker reflecting efforts by the immune system to resolve immune activation and inflammation in HIV-infected individuals.
Effects of learners' language transfer on native listeners' evaluation of the prosodic naturalness of Japanese words

For language learners it can be very difficult to speak without a non-native accent. This is due to the phenomenon called language transfer. At times, this can decrease the intelligibility of the speech and make it difficult to convey the correct message to the listener. Thus, many learners have a desire to speak more naturally in order not to be misjudged due to their pronunciation. For this, learners should be provided with some knowledge on what kinds of accents cause greater loss in naturalness when native speakers hear learners. In this paper, word utterances with various kinds and degrees of foreign accentedness were synthesized using a technique to morph the prosodic aspect of an utterance. These variously accented utterances were presented to native speakers, who were asked to judge the naturalness. This paper describes what degrees of prosodic morphing from native Japanese to American Japanese, Chinese Japanese, and Korean Japanese do and do not affect the naturalness perceived by Japanese and what kinds of words produced the least loss in naturalness for the non-native speakers.
A Matter of Life and Death: Innovation and Firm Survival

This article examines the effects of innovation on survival using data on all manufacturing firms active in the Netherlands and the Community Innovation Survey. By estimating a parametric duration model, we show that firms benefit from an innovation premium that extends their life expectancy, independent of firm-specific traits such as age and size. Process innovation in particular seems to have a distinctive effect on survival. Furthermore, survival chances increase with the age and growth rate of a firm, the latter being more crucial than initial size. Finally, high intensity technology sectors are the most favorable to firm's survival. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.
Money Matters: There is No Such Thing as a Money 'Supply'

Monetary literature remains plagued by references to money “supply” at a time when the endogeneity of money is becoming generally accepted. Money endogeneity is not a hypothesis; it is a fact, and one that has existed since a goldsmith-banker wrote out the first receipt (bank note) and handed it to a borrower (as opposed to a depositor of gold coins). The creation of money has always been endogenous, even under the Friedman-Schwartzian Monetarist fixed-money-rule model. Once this is accepted, then it is logical to refer to the quantity or stock of money, and to the supply of bank credit. The household, corporate and government sectors borrow from banks to consume (C) or invest (I), which are the major components of nominal GDP [C + I + net exports (= aggregate demand, AD)]. Domestic credit extension (DCE) thus represents the link between the monetary and real economies. Money creation is the outcome of the change in DCE; the latter, not the change in M, approximates the change in AD (there are other influences). The essence of monetary policy is that the central bank controls the (reference) prime lending rate (PR) of banks via its policy interest rate (PIR), and thereby the demand for bank credit. It controls PR in normal (ie non-QE) times by manipulating the liquidity of banks to a borrowed reserves condition (actual, close to, or threat of), in order to make the PIR effective. The causation path is clear.
Economic Thought and U.S. Climate Change Policy

The United States, once a world leader in addressing international environmental challenges, became a vigorous opponent of action on climate change over the past two decades, repudiating regulation and promoting only ineffectual voluntary actions to meet a growing global threat. Why has the United States failed so utterly to address the most pressing environmental issue of the age? This book argues that the failure arose from an unyielding ideological stance that embraced free markets and viewed government action as anathema. The most notorious result of this hands-off approach was the financial meltdown of late 2008; but strict reliance on free markets also hobbled government policymakers' response to the challenge of global warming. This book explores the relationship between free-market fundamentalism and U.S. inaction on climate change and offers recommendations for new approaches that can lead to effective climate-change policy and improve enviromental, health, and safety policies in general. After describing the evolution of U.S. climate change policy and the influence of neoliberal economic thought, the book takes up the question of what ideas might supersede the neoliberal reliance on cost-benefit analysis, overly broad market-based mechanisms, and rejection of precautionary approaches and environmental justice concerns. With a new administration in Washington, the need for a new policy framework is acute; this book supplies a timely guide to the kinds of policies that are most promising. Contributors include Frank Ackerman, John S. Applegate, Carl Cranor, David M. Driesen, Robert L. Glicksman, Lisa Heinzerling, Thomas O. McGarity, Chris Schroeder, Amy Sinden, Joe Tomain, and Robert R. M. Verchick. American and Comparative Environmental Policy series
Case Study of Parental Involvement for Enhanced Kindergarten Students' Development in Low Socioeconomic Households

Case Study of Parental Involvement for Enhanced Kindergarten Students’ Development in Low Socioeconomic Households by Robyn Tresnak MS, NOVA Southeastern University, 2003 BA, MidAmerica Nazarene University, 1998 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Education Walden University May 2015 Abstract Evidence suggests that parents in low socioeconomic households may have unaddressed educational needs about their children’s development. The purpose of this case study was to discover innovative ways parents in a low socioeconomic community engaged in activities with their young children to influence academic and social development. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of human development and Epstein’s parentalEvidence suggests that parents in low socioeconomic households may have unaddressed educational needs about their children’s development. The purpose of this case study was to discover innovative ways parents in a low socioeconomic community engaged in activities with their young children to influence academic and social development. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of human development and Epstein’s parental involvement model, the family process model, and the family strength model were used to build the conceptual framework. Parents and educators were asked to describe parentengagement opportunities that were provided within the kindergarten classroom. Data were collected using a focus group with 13 educators who were involved in early childhood education to discuss parental involvement in the early development of young children and via in-depth interviews with 6 parents who attended classroom events to promote engagement in their child’s development in school and at home. Data were analyzed in a cycle with a deductive coding process. Manual coding was completed in each stage. The major themes identified include creating a team of early childhood educators and parents, building 21st century thinking skills, and enabling the community for early preparation using authentic learning. Recommendations were presented for educators and parents as they guide young children in the development of academic, social, and behavioral skills. Positive social change will come to the full community as parents are more prepared to equip their children with 21st century learning skills; in turn, children will obtain higher levels of achievement and enter the work force equipped for success. Case Study of Parental Involvement for Enhanced Kindergarten Students’ Development in Low Socioeconomic Households by Robyn Tresnak MS, NOVA Southeastern University, 2003 BA, MidAmerica Nazarene University, 1998 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy