Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards Knowledge Management in Self-Adaptable Clouds

Cloud computing represents a promising computing paradigm where resources have to be dynamically allocated to software that needs to be executed. Self-manageable Cloud infrastructures are required to achieve that level of flexibility on the one hand, and to comply to users’ requirements specified by means of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on the other. Such infrastructures should automatically respond to changing component, workload, and environmental conditions minimizing user interactions with the system and preventing violations of SLAs. However, identification of system states where reactive actions are necessary for the prevention of SLA violations is far from trivial. In this paper we investigate how current knowledge management systems can be used for the prevention of SLA violations in Clouds. First, we define a typical SLA use case and formulate the expected behavior of the knowledge management system in order to prevent possible SLA violations. Second, we investigate different methods for knowledge management, e.g., situation calculus and case based reasoning (CBR). We discuss how these methods match the expected behavior for SLA violation prevention. In particular we examine the CBR method and devise several approaches for knowledge management in Clouds based on CBR. Finally, we evaluate our approach based on the presented use case.
Fail Fast

The most annoying aspect of software development is debugging. We don't mind the kinds of bugs that yield to a few minutes inspection. The bugs we hate are the ones that show up only after hours of successful operation, under unusual circumstances, or whose stack traces lead to dead ends. Fortunately, there's a simple technique that dramatically reduces the number of these bugs in our software. It won't reduce the overall number of bugs, at least not at first, but it'll make most defects much easier to find. The technique is to build our software to "fail fast".
Mutualism breakdown in breadfruit domestication

During the process of plant domestication, below-ground communities are rarely considered. Some studies have attempted to understand the changes in root symbionts owing to domestication, but little is known about how it influences mycorrhizal response in domesticated crops. We hypothesized that selection for above-ground traits may also result in decreased mycorrhizal abundance in roots. Breadfruit (Artocarpus sp.) has a long domestication history, with a strong geographical movement of cultivars from west to east across the Melanesian and Polynesian islands. Our results clearly show a decrease in arbuscular mycorrhizas (AMs) along a domestication gradient from wild to recently derived cultivars. We showed that the vesicular and arbuscular colonization rate decreased significantly in more recently derived breadfruit cultivars. In addition, molecular analyses of breadfruit roots indicated that AM fungal species richness also responded along the domestication gradient. These results suggest that human-driven selection for plant cultivars can have unintended effects on below-ground mutualists, with potential impacts on the stress tolerance of crops and long-term food security.
Isolation and Identification of Actinobacteria from Plant Roots

Coombs and Franco (1) reported their isolation and identification of actinobacteria from surface-sterilized root tissues of wheat plants. They claim that their study reveals a novel plant-microbe interaction. While they recognize that actinobacteria inhabit the rhizospheres of many plant species (2), they failed to recognize that Tokala et al. had previously described the colonization of Pisum sativum root nodules and roots by Streptomyces lydicus WYEC108 (3), a similar plant-microbe interaction that had previously been undescribed. It was shown that P. sativum nodule colonization by Streptomyces is a natural event, based on the finding of actinobacteria colonizing the root nodules of pea plants growing in agricultural fields. It was also shown that S. lydicus WYEC108 hyphal growth penetrated the surface layers of the nodules and that colonization aided nodular assimilation of iron and molybdenum. These findings taken together with those of Coombs and Franco (1) strengthen the argument that plants benefit from harboring actinobacteria within their healthy tissues. While the findings of Coombs and Franco showed culture-dependent evidence of plant-root colonization, previous findings that were not cited in their paper show that colonization of the plant roots of P. sativum is important for the health of the plant in the natural environment.
Age‐associated Changes in the Innervation of Muscle Fibers and Changes in the Mechanical Properties of Motor Units

ABSTRACT: In both humans and animals there is a progressive loss of muscle strength with age. Tests of handgrip and knee extension in men show that some decline in strength is evident by the age of 55 years and is pronounced by the age of 65, compared with the 25‐ to 35‐year period when strength is at a maximum. A comparable age‐related decline in peak force development has also been shown in hindlimb muscles of aged rats. Motoneurons and consequently motor units are lost with age, and this is apparent in man after the age of 60. Again, a comparable decline has been demonstrated in the motoneuron population of hindlimb muscles of rats aged 20‐24 months. Loss of motoneurons in young adults (through either injury or disease) results in the remaining intact motoneurons sprouting to innervate the denervated fibers. This capacity for sprouting has been shown to be seriously impaired in the hindlimb muscles of aged rats. Furthermore, the well‐established relationship between motor unit size and fatigability (smaller units tend to be more fatigue resistant) also tends to break down, with large units just as likely to be fatigable as fatigue resistant. The normally large, fatigable motor units also appear to be reduced in size in the aged muscles. The age‐related loss of motoneurons and associated loss of muscle fibers accounts in part for the reduced functional capacity of muscle with age. The reason for the impairment of the aged motoneuron remains to be investigated, but it may relate to the integrity of the oxidative metabolic pathways within the cell, given that mitochondrial respiratory chain function is known to be reduced with age.
User-Centric Energy-Efficient Resource Management for Time Switching Wireless Powered Communications

In this letter, we investigate the joint power control and time allocation scheme in a wireless powered communication network, in which wireless sensors harvest the energy and then transmit information with a time switching protocol. Unlike the time-division-multiple-access scheme, the time switching protocol allows sensors transmit information signal simultaneously. Our purpose is to maximize sum of the user-centric energy efficiency (EE) of the system. However, due to the coupled time and power, the user-centric EE optimization problem is non-convex, which is difficult to be solved directly. We propose an iterative resource management scheme to solve the formulated problem. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the fast convergence and to show the advantage of our proposed algorithm compared with the previous studies.
Hashtag Recommendation Using End-To-End Memory Networks with Hierarchical Attention

On microblogging services, people usually use hashtags to mark microblogs, which have a specific theme or content, making them easier for users to find. Hence, how to automatically recommend hashtags for microblogs has received much attention in recent years. Previous deep neural network-based hashtag recommendation approaches converted the task into a multi-class classification problem. However, most of these methods only took the microblog itself into consideration. Motivated by the intuition that the history of users should impact the recommendation procedure, in this work, we extend end-to-end memory networks to perform this task. We incorporate the histories of users into the external memory and introduce a hierarchical attention mechanism to select more appropriate histories. To train and evaluate the proposed method, we also construct a dataset based on microblogs collected from Twitter. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods. By incorporating the hierarchical attention mechanism, the relative improvement in the proposed method over the state-of-the-art method is around 67.9% in the F1-score.
Ventricular/Vascular Coupling and Regional Arterial Dynamics in the Chronically Hypertensive Baboon: Correlation With Cardiovascular Structural Adaptation

Ventricular/vascular coupling dynamics and regional hemodynamics of five hypertensive baboons with concentric left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy (mean arterial pressure ± SD, 148 ± 16 mm Hg; LV mass/body weight ratio 3.42 ± 0.8) were compared with five normotensive controls (mean arterial pressure 89 ± 3 mm Hg; LV mass/body wt ratio 2.73 ± 0.5) at different mean arterial pressures. Ventricular/vascular dynamics were assessed by aortic input impedance, pulsatile/total power ratio, effective arterial elastance and compliance from a three-element Windkessel "lumped" model of the circulation. Regional arterial dynamics were assessed by pulse-wave velocities and local reflection coefficients. Systemic arterial compliance was similarly decreased with elevated pressure in both groups but was significantly more reduced for the hypertensive group compared with control animals at control (0.49 ± 0.16 vs. 0.96 ± 0.09 ml/mm Hg; p<0.05) and acutely lowered arterial pressure (0.62 ± 0.26 vs. 1.41 ± 0.24 ml/mm Hg, respectively). Changes in compliance were paralleled by differences in effective arterial elastance derived from cineventriculographic pressure-volume ratios. Regional foot-foot and apparent phase pulse-wave velocities were significantly increased for distal aortic segments of the hypertensive animals during elevated pressures compared with controls (cff, 17.5 ± 7.5 vs. 8.7 ± 3.0 m/sec; p<0.05). Histology of the aorta revealed significant increases in collagen content (μg/mg dry wt) from proximal to distal aortic segments (27 ± 2 vs. 38 ± 6; p<0.005) in hypertensive animals but not in controls (27 ± 2 vs. 32 ± 6; NS). With pharmacological normalization of systemic arterial pressures, hypertensive baboons developed aortic wave speeds similar to controls but manifested significantly reduced compliance compared with controls. In contrast, with acute elevations of pressure, systemic arterial aortic compliances were similar for both groups, but distal pulse-wave velocities were significantly increased for hypertensive animals compared with controls. We conclude that measures of ventricular/vascular coupling and arterial dynamics are determined by both the level of arterial pressure and the physical characteristics of the cardiovascular system in chronic systemic hypertension and pressure overload ventricular hypertrophy.
Shape Optimization of Fish Tail Propulsion with Hydro-Elastic Effects

Performance of a fish tail is brought out from many facters, such as shape, movement and material. The purpose of the present study is to reveal their relations by means of multidisciplinary design optimization. Kriging method and Adaptive Range Multi Objective Genetic Algorithms were used to reveal the structure of the design space. The relationship between the factors were revealed, and two specific types of the fish tails were obtained.
Models of blocking probability in all-optical networks with and without wavelength changers

We introduce a traffic model for circuit switched all-optical networks (AONs) which we then use to calculate the blocking probability along a path for networks with and without wavelength changers. We investigate the effects of path length, switch size, and interference length (the expected number of hops shared by two sessions which share at least one hop) on blocking probability and the ability of wavelength changers to improve performance. Our model correctly predicts unobvious qualitative behavior demonstrated in simulations by other authors.
Voice over Workplace (VoWP): voice navigation in a complex business GUI

Voice interfaces can be used to meet some accessibility requirements for physically disabled users, but only if they address inherent usability problems, namely, the trade-off between user efficiency and ambiguity handling. This paper explores usability issues related to voice interfaces for complex GUIs. We present two user studies on a series of interface designs to support voice navigation within a complex business GUI, and discuss the findings as they relate to efficiency and ambiguity handling. We conclude by discussing future directions for this work, including the addition of data input capabilities, which will be necessary to provide a truly accessible solution.
Expression of a Catalytically Inactive Mutant Form of Glutathione Peroxidase 4 (Gpx4) Confers a Dominant-negative Effect in Male Fertility*

Background: The selenoperoxidase (Gpx4) is essential for embryogenesis, adult tissue function, and spermatogenesis. Results: Homozygous expression of Gpx4 with a targeted substitution of selenocysteine to serine causes early embryonic death as expected but, unexpectedly, male subfertility in heterozygous mice. Conclusion: Heterozygous expression of a catalytically inactive mutant form of Gpx4 impairs spermatogenesis. Significance: Well-balanced expression of wild type Gpx4 is prerequisite for proper sperm development. The selenoenzyme Gpx4 is essential for early embryogenesis and cell viability for its unique function to prevent phospholipid oxidation. Recently, the cytosolic form of Gpx4 was identified as an upstream regulator of a novel form of non-apoptotic cell death, called ferroptosis, whereas the mitochondrial isoform of Gpx4 was previously shown to be crucial for male fertility. Here, we generated and analyzed mice with a targeted mutation of the active site selenocysteine of Gpx4 (Gpx4_U46S). Mice homozygous for Gpx4_U46S died at the same embryonic stage (E7.5) as Gpx4−/− embryos as expected. Surprisingly, male mice heterozygous for Gpx4_U46S presented subfertility. Subfertility was manifested in a reduced number of litters from heterozygous breeding and an impairment of spermatozoa to fertilize oocytes in vitro. Morphologically, sperm isolated from heterozygous Gpx4_U46S mice revealed many structural abnormalities particularly in the spermatozoa midpiece due to improper oxidation and polymerization of sperm capsular proteins and malformation of the mitochondrial capsule surrounding and stabilizing sperm mitochondria. These findings are reminiscent of sperm isolated from selenium-deprived rodents or from mice specifically lacking mitochondrial Gpx4. Due to a strongly facilitated incorporation of Ser in the polypeptide chain as compared with selenocysteine at the UGA codon, expression of the catalytically inactive Gpx4_U46S was found to be strongly increased. Because the stability of the mitochondrial capsule of mature spermatozoa depends on the moonlighting function of Gpx4 both as an enzyme oxidizing capsular protein thiols and as a structural protein, tightly controlled expression of functional Gpx4 emerges as a key for full male fertility.
ABC efflux pump-based resistance to chemotherapy drugs.

3.2. Other Potential in vivo Functions of Pgp 2992 3.3. Physiological Role of ABCG2 2992 3.4. Physiological Role of MRP1 2992 4. Structure of ABC Superfamily Drug Efflux Pumps 2992 4.1. Domain Structure of ABC Proteins 2992 4.2. Structure of Entire Bacterial ABC Proteins 2993 4.3. Structure of Pgp, MRP1, and ABCG2 2994 5. Substrate Specificity of ABC Drug Efflux Pumps 2995 5.1. MDR Spectrum Substrates 2995 5.2. Binding and Transport of Drugs 2998 5.3. Multidrug-Binding Pockets 2998 6. Catalytic Cycle of ABC Drug Efflux Pumps 3000 6.1. ATP Binding and Hydrolysis 3000 6.2. Occluded Nucleotide Conformation of Pgp 3000 6.3. Role of NBD Dimerization and the Occluded Conformation in the Catalytic Cycle of Pgp 3000
On multi-arm manipulation planning

This paper considers the automatic generation of motion paths for several cooperating robot arms to manipulate a movable object between two configurations among obstacles. To avoid collisions the robots may have to change their grasp of the object, for example, by passing it from one arm to another. The case where the movable object can only be moved by two arms acting simultaneously is also considered. An approach for solving this planning problem is described and illustrated with a robot system made of three arms moving in a 3D environment. Experiments with a planner implementing this approach show that it is not only fast, but also reliable in finding collision-free paths. <<ETX>>
2-distance coloring of not-so-sparse graphs

The square G 2 of a graph G is the graph obtained from G by adding an edge between every pair of vertices having a common neighbor. A proper coloring of G 2 is also called a 2-distance coloring of G. The maximum average degree Mad(G) of a graph G is the maximum among the average degrees of the subgraphs of G, i.e. Mad(G) = max n 2jE(H)j V (H) jH G o . Graphs with bounded maximum average degree are often called sparse graphs. There are results about the chromatic number of G 2 with Mad(G) < m for several values of m, all striclty lesser than 4. We provides upper and lower bounds for the chromatic number of G 2 when Mad(G) < 2k for every k 2, and conjecture that our lower bounds are best possible.
The performance of processor co-allocation in multicluster systems

In systems consisting of multiple clusters of processors which are interconnected by relatively slow communication links and which employ space sharing for scheduling jobs, such as our Distributed ASCI Supercomputer (DAS), co-allocation, i.e., the simultaneous allocation of processors to single jobs in different clusters, may be required. We study the performance of co-allocation by means of simulations for the mean response time of jobs depending on the structure and sizes of jobs, the scheduling policy, and the communication speed ratio. Our main conclusion is that for current communication speed ratios in multiclusters, coallocation is a viable option.
Proteinase 2Apro Is Essential for Enterovirus Replication in Type I Interferon-Treated Cells

ABSTRACT The Picornaviridae family comprises a diverse group of small RNA viruses that cause a variety of human and animal diseases. Some of these viruses are known to induce cleavage of components of the innate immune system and to inhibit steps in the interferon pathway that lead to the production of type I interferon. There has been no study of the effect of picornaviral infection on the events that occur after interferons have been produced. To determine whether members of the Enterovirus genus can antagonize the antiviral activity of interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs), we pretreated cells with alpha interferon (IFN-α) and then infected the cells with poliovirus type 1, 2, or 3; enterovirus type 70; or human rhinovirus type 16. We found that these viruses were able to replicate in IFN-α-pretreated cells but that replication of vesicular stomatitis virus, a Rhabdovirus, and encephalomyocarditis virus (EMCV), a picornavirus of the Cardiovirus genus, was completely inhibited. Although EMCV is sensitive to IFN-α, coinfection of cells with poliovirus and EMCV leads to EMCV replication in IFN-α-pretreated cells. The enteroviral 2A proteinase (2Apro) is essential for replication in cells pretreated with interferon, because amino acid changes in this protein render poliovirus sensitive to IFN-α. The addition of the poliovirus 2Apro gene to the EMCV genome allowed EMCV to replicate in IFN-α-pretreated cells. These results support an inhibitory role for 2Apro in the most downstream event in interferon signaling, the antiviral activities of ISGs.
Losing Fewer Votes

Problems in the 2000 presidential election, especially in Florida, initiated a large-scale shift toward new voting technology. Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data, we report on the effects of changes in voting systems in Florida and Michigan. The variety of initial conditions and the numerous changes make these excellent case studies. We find that reforms succeeded in reducing the residual vote. Every change from old to new technology resulted in a decline in residual votes that was significantly greater than in areas that did not change voting equipment. The percentage of residual votes in the 2004 presidential race in localities that changed voting systems was well under 1 percent, representing a 90 percent reduction in error in Florida and a 35 percent reduction in Michigan. We run these analyses separately for undervotes and overvotes. Using ecological-inference techniques, we investigate the persistence of residual votes when technology changed and find very little persistence.
A Miniaturized GNSS Antenna with Bandwidth Broadening

A miniaturized patch antenna loaded with split-ring resonators (SRRs) and modified reactive impedance surface (RIS) is proposed and present. Four sequentially rotated SRRs around the patch of antenna improve the impedance and the axial ratio bandwidth, the modified RIS which with a balanced slots can miniaturize the antenna size and the circularly polarized radiation is achieved by an asymmetric cross slot cut along the orthogonal directions in the center of patch over RIS. The measured results of the proposed antenna are 3.2% (2.44--2.52 GHz) for 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth, 7.8% (2.40--2.595 GHz) for 10-dB return loss bandwidth, and 2.48 dBi for gain at the boresight. The overall antenna volume is 0.27 λ0 x 0.27 x λ0 0.03 x λ0 on a low cost F4B substrate at 2.49 GHz.
Multigrid Q-Learning

Reinforcement learning scales poorly when reinforcements are delayed. The problem of propagating information from delayed rein-forcements to the states and actions that have an e(cid:11)ect the reinforcement is similar to the problem of propagating information in a discretized boundary value problem. Multigrid methods have been shown to decrease the number of updates required to solve boundary value problems. Here we extend Q-Learning by casting it as a multigrid method and show a reduction in updates required to reach a given error level in the Q-function for a simple, 1-d Markov decision task.
Efficient Database Access from Prolog

In designing the interface between a relational database and a Prolog interpreter, efficiency is a major issue. The authors present a method for loading into the memory-resident database of Prolog facts permanently stored in secondary storage. The rationale of the method is to save access to the database by never repeating the same query and by storing in main memory, in a compact and efficient way, information about the past interaction with the database. The authors discuss how to reduce subsumption rests required by the method to pattern matching in many relevant cases. They also describe a simulator of the method, which validates their approach, and they discuss the results of the simulation. >
Public goods provision and revenue distribution

Kaplow (2006) presented a theoretical analysis on the distributive incidence of public goods which can help guide empirical efforts. This paper mainly analyzes the effects on fiscal revenue of public goods provision by utilizing panel model based on Chinese provincial data from 2001 through 2008. The main conclusion drawn is that changes in fiscal outlay and rural resident's net income bring about significant influences on fiscal revenue growth.