Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two architectures for real-time sensor data streaming for cloud applications

This paper presents two simple, practical and scalable architectures which facilitate real-time sensor data streaming for cloud applications. Real-time sensor data is invaluable in applications where either the sensor or system state is time variant. Applications involving sensors typically push live data values to cloud based software applications that rely on live data feeds to aid real-time analytics, multi-user collaboration, processing, and re-transmission. The proposed architectures utilize the latest HTML5 WebSocket framework and NODE.JS API to facilitate transmission of real time sensor data. The strength of our architectures leverage vast ubiquitous computing resources available both on the cloud and at the client end to create a rapidly deployable, low-cost, and scalable real-time communication link.
Understanding Indian Trade Union Existence in the Zeitgeist of the Global

Trade unions represent employee collec tives ' voice to otherwise disaggregated employees to check the arbitrary use of managerial power. In the age of globalisation, where state policy, free movement of capital and the spreading footprints of multinational corporations across the world have intersected to create the Zeitgeist of liberalisation and deregulation, Indian trade unions are loosing sympathy from numerous quar ters. Though unions at the grassroots are aligned to larger state and national unions, these alignments appear to be only formal in nature and devoid of the ideological richness that they should normally yield. There appear to be great asymmetries in power as well. Through interviews with seven trade union lead ers, the authors were able to discern the expression of alienated connectedness characterised by powerlessness, self es trangement, normlessness, socio-cultural isolation and disenchantment.
A philosophical refugee? – A philosophical Interview

Theory of definition distinguishes between several types of definition. Lexical definitions clarify the ordinary usage while precising definitions aim at sharpening the usage in certain aspects. When such sharpening has taken place the precising definition may end as a revised lexical definition. The aim of definitions is to determine what objects or phenomena the concept applies to, and what objects it does not apply to, so that the objects can be identified. This holds true for lexical definitions as well as precising definitions. It holds true for ostensive definitions that work by pointing out good exemplars as well as extensional definitions that list the objects of a concept. It also holds for theoretical or conceptual definitions as Aristotelian definition by genus et differentiam, or definitions of the intensional definitions, i.e. definition of the conceptual 'content' or meaning of the concept. A definition enables the user to distinguish between what falls under the concept and what not. A definition of the notion of distinguish between refugees and other people. Here we should distinguish between concepts and words: do we define concepts or words? Concepts are cognitive structures enabling people to understand and reflect. Words convey meaning between people. Defining words may serve the purpose of enabling common understanding. Our concepts on the other hand are cognitive skills that develop over time. They tend to become highly sophisticated structures, cognitive habita involving many layers of understanding. Such complexity defies any definition. Thus, highly skilled and professional concepts transcend any definition. Thus, a central social concept such as a refugee is not definable. On the other hand there is the word refugee. Obviously, one can define it by precising definitions. Such definitions do exist and play an important operative role in law and politics. According to them a refugee is [roughly] a person who has been forced to leave her country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. Such definition connects directly to our habitual cognition of refugees, which enables us to reflect, evaluate and revise operating precising definitions. They may be social, legal, technical, theoretical, lexical or whatever definitions but they are not philosophical definitions. What is a philosophical definition? It is unheard of. What is the point of such thing?
Multilinguals’ Verbalisation and Perception of Emotions

universities and colleges. Educators in elementary and middle schools can use this resource to establish and develop strong foundations for ESL and bilingual/bicultural education, particularly with regard to bilingual/bicultural curriculum design. It can also serve in education leadership courses that prepare principals to serve minority students and provide teachers and administrators with practical implications in this field.
International Transmission of Volatility: A Study on the Volatility Indexes Vx1, Vdax and VIX

The relation between risk and return is very well documented in financial literature. While Sharpe (1964) proposed a linear relation between risk and return through the CAPM, Black (1976) pointed out later an asymmetric relation between these variables. Indeed, he noted that volatility was higher after a stock market fall than after a rise. From this observation, many articles were written on the transmission mechanism of price and on volatility spillovers across different markets. All these papers modeled returns and historical variance through different models and generally with GARCH models. In this paper, we propose a precise description of volatility spillovers based on the international transmission of implied volatility. Indeed, we examine the possible interactions between returns and implied volatility and between implied volatilities belonging to different markets. To do so, we use three implied volatility indexes, the French VX1, the German VDAX and the American VIX. We find very interesting results concerning the impact of news on the implied volatility behavior and also on the interaction between implied volatility and realized volatility. We get rich information on the nature of the underlying process of implied volatility and historical volatility.
Inflation Expectation and Asset Allocation in the Presence of an Indexed Bond

Optimal asset allocation choice for long term individual investors is complicated by inflation expectation. This article analyzes how anticipated rate of inflation influences asset allocation decision of US investors who employ a subjective equilibrium allocation approach in which investors include their inflation forecasts based on a survey of consumers' price expectations and the interest rate model in the optimization process. The universe of asset choices includes a newly introduced Treasury inflation protected securities (TIPS), equity, real estate, Treasury bonds and corporate bonds. This study shows that in an event of higher anticipated rate of inflation investors should allocate more wealth to TIPS and reduce their exposure to Treasury bonds, corporate bonds and equity.
Couple models for socioeconomic effects on the mortality of older persons.

This paper develops and applies models for the multivariate analysis of survival processes when observations are naturally paired. These models include bivariate tobit models for observations drawn from censored bivariate normal distributions bivariate hazard models and models based on pair rank data. These models provide alternative ways of estimating the effects of the covariates of survival within pairs while controlling for unobserved factors that are shared by members of the pair. The models make varying distributional assumptions about the age pattern of survival and about unobserved pair-level determinants of survival. The models are applied to the assessment of socioeconomic effects on mortality of husbands and wives in the US using the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Men. Bivariate survival models provide a systematic way of assessing common cross-spouse and within-spouse effects of education occupational status and other sociodemographic predictors of mortality as well as bereavement and widowhood effects. Most socioeconomic influences on mortality are through their effects on shared experiences of spouses rather than person-specific mechanisms. In the application presented here the bivariate tobit bivariate hazard and pair rank models yield similar results. (authors)
Project Interactions in value based IT Project Portfolio Management

Adequately considering interactions among IT projects in the process of constructing an IT project portfolio is a necessary condition in value-based IT project portfolio management (PPM). A lot of articles already deal with such interactions, but the literature lacks a common terminology and a structured perspective on the manifold types of interactions and their effects. In this article we present a framework that provides a structured perspective on interactions and thereby supports decision makers in the identification of possible interactions and the selection of appropriate methods for value-based IT PPM.
Experience in Measuring Internet Backbone Traffic Variability: Models, Metrics, Measurements and Meaning

Understanding the variability of Internet traffic in backbone networks is essential to better plan and manage existing networks, as well as to design next generation networks. However, most traffic analyses that might be used to approach this problem are based on detailed packet or flow level measurements, which are usually not available throughout a large network. As a result there is a poor understanding of backbone traffic variability, and its impact on network operations (e.g. on capacity planning or traffic engineering). This paper introduces a metric for measuring backbone traffic variability that is grounded on simple but powerful traffic theory. What sets this metric apart, however, is that we present a method for practical implementation of the metric using widely available SNMP traffic measurements. In addition to simulations, we use a large set of SNMP data from an operational IP network on the order of 1000 nodes to test our methods. We also delve into the degree and sources of variability in real backbone traffic, providing insight into the true nature of traffic variability.
Biomarkers of Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Traditionally, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) has not been regarded as an organic disease, and the pathophysiology of IBS is heterogeneous. Currently, the diagnosis of IBS is based upon the Rome diagnostic criteria. The performance of these criteria is only modest in predicting IBS, and moreover their validation is lacking. Additionally, as functional symptoms are common in the general population, healthy controls or volunteers are difficult to define and there is currently no definition of “normal” in the Rome criteria. Due to the weaknesses of the current diagnostic criteria, patients and doctors expect new gold standard diagnostic tools. Various etiologic mechanisms result in potential biomarkers. The focus of this research has been to find non-invasive biomarkers from serum, breath gas, and fecal materials. Though biomarkers should be based on biological and pathogenic processes, most biomarkers for IBS have been developed to identify organic diseases and therefore eliminate IBS. To date, these types of biomarkers for IBS have been disappointing. The purposes of developing biomarkers include improvement of diagnosis, differentiation from other organic diseases, and discrimination of IBS subtypes. A true mechanistic biomarker would make it possible to rule in IBS, rather than to rule out other organic diseases. New serologic biomarkers for diarrhea-predominant IBS have been introduced based on the pathophysiologic findings from a rat model and validation in a large-scale clinical trial. Further investigations of abnormal organic findings from each subtype of IBS would enable the development of new, simple subtype-specific biomarkers.
An Efficient Modeling and Execution Framework for Complex Systems Development

In this paper, we present different modeling and execution frameworks that allow us to efficiently analyze, design and verify complex systems, mainly to cope with the specific concerns of the Real-time and embedded systems (RTE) domain. First we depict a UML /MARTE based methodology for executable RTE systems modeling with a framework and its underlying model transformations required to execute UML models conforming to the MARTE standard. The advantages of adopting a more generic action language with formal features are highlighted, in order to raise the level of abstraction with formal features. Then, we investigate how MARTE, with its Time Model facilities, can be made to represent faithfully AADL periodic/aperiodic tasks communicating through event or data ports, in an approach to end-to-end flow latency analysis. An analytical framework allows us to optimize port-based communication by generating a run time executive that utilizes shared data areas where appropriate, while ensuring the timing semantic assumed by the control application. An analysis of the AADL mode change protocol is also provided, exposing a translation process that takes as an input an AADL model and produces as an output a time Petri net. We show how an AADL model transformation provides a formal model for model checking activities and we suggest that model transformation provides useful support to improve the integration of formal verification in an industrial engineering process. As a case study we use an implementation of a UDP /IP protocol stack.
Structural Feature Extraction Based on Active Sensing Experiences

Affordance is a feature of an object or environment that implies how to interact with it. Based on affordance theory, humans are said to perceive invariant structures for cognizing the object/environment for generating behaviors. In this paper, the authors present a method to extract invariant structures of objects from visual raw images, based on object manipulation experiences using a humanoid robot. The method consists of two training phases. The first phase utilizes Recurrent Neural Network with Parametric Bias (RN-NPB) to self-organize dynamical object features extracted during active sensing with objects. The second phase trains a hierarchical neural network attached to RNNPB for associating object images and robot motions with self-organized object features. Analysis of the model has uncovered static objects features that are closely related to dynamic object motions, such as round or stable.
Using a high-definition stereoscopic video system to teach microscopic surgery

Introduction: While there is an increasing demand for minimally invasive operative techniques in Ear, Nose and Throat surgery, these operations are difficult to learn for junior doctors and demanding to supervise for experienced surgeons. The motivation for this study was to integrate high-definition (HD) stereoscopic video monitoring in microscopic surgery in order to facilitate teaching interaction between senior and junior surgeon. Material and methods: We attached a 1280x1024 HD stereo camera (TrueVisionSystemsTM Inc., Santa Barbara, CA, USA) to an operating microscope (Zeiss ProMagis, Zeiss Co., Oberkochen, Germany), whose images were processed online by a PC workstation consisting of a dual Intel® Xeon® CPU (Intel Co., Santa Clara, CA). The live image was displayed by two LCD projectors @ 1280x768 pixels on a 1,25m rear-projection screen by polarized filters. While the junior surgeon performed the surgical procedure based on the displayed stereoscopic image, all other participants (senior surgeon, nurse and medical students) shared the same stereoscopic image from the screen. Results: With the basic setup being performed only once on the day before surgery, fine adjustments required about 10 minutes extra during the operation schedule, which fitted into the time interval between patients and thus did not prolong operation times. As all relevant features of the operative field were demonstrated on one large screen, four major effects were obtained: A) Stereoscopy facilitated orientation for the junior surgeon as well as for medical students. B) The stereoscopic image served as an unequivocal guide for the senior surgeon to demonstrate the next surgical steps to the junior colleague. C) The theatre nurse shared the same image, anticipating the next instruments which were needed. D) Medical students instantly share the information given by all staff and the image, thus avoiding the need for an extra teaching session. Conclusion: High definition stereoscopy bears the potential to compress the learning curve for undergraduate as well as postgraduate medical professionals in minimally invasive surgery. Further studies will focus on the long term effect for operative training as well as on post-processing of HD stereoscopy video content for off-line interactive medical education.
Evidence for Accretion in the High-Resolution X-Ray Spectrum of the T Tauri Star System Hen 3-600

We present high-resolution X-ray spectra of the nearby multiple T Tauri star (TTS) system Hen 3-600, obtained with the High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrograph (HETGS) aboard the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Both principal binary components of Hen 3-600 (A and B, separation 1.4'') were detected in the zeroth-order Chandra HETGS X-ray image. Hen 3-600-A, the component with a large mid-infrared excess, is a factor of ~2-3 fainter in X-rays than Hen 3-600-B, due to a large flare at Hen 3-600-B during our observation. The dispersed X-ray spectra of the two primary components overlap significantly, so spectral analysis was performed primarily on the first-order spectrum of the combined A + B system, with analysis of the individual dispersed spectra limited to regions where the contributions of A and B can be disentangled via cross-dispersion profile fitting. This analysis results in two lines of evidence indicating that the X-ray emission from Hen 3-600 A + B is derived, in part, from accretion processes. (1) The line ratios of He-like O VII in the spectrum of Hen 3-600 A + B indicate that the characteristic density of its X-ray-emitting plasma is significantly larger than those of coronally active main-sequence and pre-main-sequence stars. (2) A significant component of low-temperature (2-3 MK) plasma is present in the Hen 3-600 A + B spectrum; this "soft excess" appears somewhat stronger in component A. These results for Hen 3-600 A + B are consistent with, although less pronounced than, results obtained from X-ray grating spectroscopy of more rapidly accreting TTS systems. Indeed, all of the emission signatures of Hen 3-600 A + B that are potential diagnostics of accretion activity—from its high-resolution X-ray spectrum, through its UV excess and Hα emission-line strengths, to its weak near-infrared excess—suggest that its components (and component A in particular) represent a transition phase between rapidly accreting, classical T Tauri stars and nonaccreting, weak-lined T Tauri stars.
ow voltage electrowetting-on-dielectric platform using multi-layer insulators an -

A low voltage, two-level-metal, and multi-layer insulator electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWD) platform is presented. Dispensing 300 pl droplets from 140 nl closed on-chip reservoirs was accomplished with as little as 11.4 V solely through EWD forces, and the actuation threshold voltage was 7.2 V with a 1 Hz voltage switching rate between electrodes. EWD devices were fabricated with a multilayer insulator consisting of 135 nm sputtered tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5) and 180 nm parylene C coated with 70 nm of CYTOP. Furthermore, the minimum actuation threshold voltage followed a previously published scaling model for
Weinberg bounds over nonspherical graphs

Let   G Aut and  E G   denote the automorphism group and the edge set of a graph  G, respectively. Weinberg’s Theorem states that 4 is a constant sharp upper bound on the ratio     G E G Aut over planar (or spherical) 3-connected graphs  G. We have obtained various analogues of this theorem for nonspherical graphs, introducing two Weinberg-type bounds for an arbitrary closed surface  , namely:         G E G W W G T P Aut sup and def    , where supremum is taken over the polyhedral graphs  G with respect to   for  WP    and over the graphs  G triangulating   for  WT   . We have proved that Weinberg bounds are finite for any surface; in particular:  WP WT  48 for the projective plane, and  WT  240 for the torus. We have also proved that the original Weinberg bound of 4 holds over the graphs  G triangulating the projective plane with at least 8 vertices and, in general, for the graphs of sufficiently large order triangulating a fixed closed surface  .
PSO with Gompertz increasing inertia weight

This paper implements Standard Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and a new algorithm that aims to be better than the classical PSO. An m-file code is used to simulate the Standard Particle Swarm Optimization and it is evaluated using the five well known benchmark functions namely Sphere, Ackley, Rastrigin, Rosenbrock, and Shcwefel's Problem 2.26. A new PSO algorithm known as Gompertz increasing inertia weight (GIIW) is proposed and also implemented as above. The comparison has been simulated with standard PSO. From experiments, it shows that PSO with GIIW gives good performance with quick convergence capability and aggressive movement narrowing towards the solution region.
3-D object recognition using adaptive scale MEGI

We propose a method for recognition of a 3-D object using a multi scale description of the object and adaptive matching. MEGI model is a description model to represent arbitrary shapes. However, many MEGI elements are necessary to represent uneven or carved surfaces with accuracy, so it is difficult to use them for recognition. As a solution, we make a tree which corresponds to the multi scale description of the object. While tracing the tree from the root which corresponds the coarsest representation to leaves, a matching algorithm presented in this paper assigns a different scale to each part of the object adaptively and estimates the matching score effectively.
Experiences with Legion on the Centurion Cluster

The Legion Project spends most of its time building metacomputing environments and applications, but we are also actively building a clustered system, which we have named Centurion. Centurion is currently a cluster of 64 Alpha PCs, networked with low-latency gigabit networking hardware from Myricom, joined by a dozen x86-architecture PCs. We plan on doubling the size of the cluster in the near future. This shared-nothing, heterogeneous environment is an ideal fit for the Legion metacomputing system, which provides services such as naming, scheduling, heterogeneous communications, and parallel I/O. Centurion is roughly the size of "small" HPC systems in use today at supercomputing centers, giving us the opportunity to compare price and performance with traditional systems, and investigate the hardware and software challenges of building large clusters with commodity hardware. This paper will cover our experiences with Centurion and Legion. We begin with an overview of the Legion metacomputing system. We will then discuss the costs and hidden costs of assembling a cluster. We then describe the performance of Centurion, using microbenchmarks of the communications system, standard parallel application benchmarks, and user applications. User applications running on the system come from a variety of scientific disciplines, and range from traditional MPI codes taken straight from supercomputers to more novel applications using "bag of tasks" and macro-dataflow formalisms. Within this range of applications, we will discuss our successes and failures with hiding network latency, load balancing, and most importantly, usability of the system by researchers without extensive training in parallel computing.