Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal Stabilization Policy When Wages and Prices are Sticky: The Case of a Distorted Steady State

Erceg et al. (2000) show that when both wages and prices are sticky, maximization of expected utility is equivalent to minimizing a loss function with three terms, involving measures of the variability of wage inflation, price inflation and the output gap respectively. Here we generalize their analysis, most importantly by not assuming the existence of output and employment subsidies that eliminate the distortions resulting from market power in goods and labor markets, so that the equilibrium level of output under flexible wages and prices would not necessarily be optimal. We show that a quadratic loss function can still be justified that involves the same three terms, albeit with different relative weights and a different definition of the output gap. Many conclusions of Erceg et al. are thus found to apply more generally. However, we argue that in the presence of significant steady-state distortions, simple rules of the kind that they examine are likely to approximate optimal policy less closely than is suggested by their numerical results.
Working memory training in patients with multiple sclerosis - comparison of two different training schedules.

PURPOSE Evaluation of two different training schedules of a computer based working memory training (BrainStim) in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). METHOD Forty-five MS outpatients were allocated to two different training groups and a control group without training. Patients with treatment received 16 training sessions scheduled either as a high intensity training (4 times per week for 4 weeks) or as a distributed training (2 times per week for 8 weeks). A neuropsychological test battery including self-report measures was applied at baseline and at retest. The baseline assessment was performed twice at an interval of two weeks to control for possible learning effects. RESULTS In the outcome measures training for both intervention groups led to significantly improved fatigue symptoms as well as working memory -, and mental speed performances. Log files recorded during training showed a similar increase in levels of difficulty for both intervention groups as training progressed. No effects were found on short term memory, quality of life or depression. CONCLUSIONS Since comparable improvements were observed in both training groups, BrainStim can be applied as a therapeutic intervention adjusted to the personal agenda of MS patients.
Web directories: selected features and their impact on directory quality

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is statistical examination of nearly 7,000 web directories and an analysis of factors which affect their quality measured by PageRank. Design/methodology/approach – The authors analysed 6,821 directories registered at www.katalogiseo. info/. The following information about the directories was examined: the year of registration on the website, the directory’s PageRank value, the existence of an active IP address, backlink requests, a fee charged for submission to the directory, as well as directory moderation and subject. Statistical analyses were performed with the use of Microsoft Excel, version 2010, and R software, version 3.0. 0. The PageRank values were collected with a software written in Python. Findings – The study has shown a gradual increase in popularity of directories as one of the basic tools in search engine optimisation. The analysis has indicated a relatively high percentage of spam web directories. The evidence of this is the number of directories with undetermined PageRank values. The study revealed that careful management of a directory and its subject have key impact on directory quality measured by PageRank. Originality/value – Relatively few publications focus on the problem of web directories which represent a very large group of websites created solely to manipulate web search engine rankings. This paper discusses the phenomenon of web directories, reveals the percentage of spam directories, and factors which affect their quality measured by PageRank.
Syntactic Normalization of Twitter Messages

—The use of computer mediated communication such as emailing, microblogs, Short Messaging System (SMS), and chat rooms has created corpora which contain incredibly noisy text. Tweets, messages sent by users on Twitter.com, are an especially noisy form of communication. Twitter.com contains billions of these tweets, but in their current state they contain so much noise that it is difﬁcult to extract useful information. Tweets often contain highly irregular syntax and nonstandard use of English. This paper describes a novel system which normalizes these Twitter posts, converting them into a more standard form of English, so that standard machine translation (MT) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be more easily applied to them. In order to normalize Twitter tweets, we take a two step approach. We ﬁrst preprocess tweets to remove as much noise as possible and then feed them into a machine translation model to convert them into standard English. Together, these two steps allow us to achieve improvement in BLEU scores comporable to the improvements achieved by SMS normalization
Analysis of human exposure to benzo(a)pyrene via inhalation and food ingestion in the Total Human Environmental Exposure Study (THEES).

The Total Human Environmental Exposure Study (THEES) focuses on benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) as an example of a combustion-generated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) compound. Primary pathways for environmental exposures to BaP are inhalation and ingestion. This program of field studies was conducted in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, a small, industrial city in the Delaware River valley. The study protocols included direct monitoring of BaP exposures via inhalation and ingestion pathways during three separate periods, each lasting 14 days. BaP concentrations in air were sampled at outdoor and in-home locations, with personal air sampling added during the latter two phases. Cooked food samples from each household were acquired, using a constant portion "second plate" of each meal prepared at home. Ambient levels were 4-10 times higher during the cold months compared with the late summer study period. Space heating and regional aerosol were major contributors to community levels of BaP in the air during the wintertime. Penetration of outdoor air, cooking activities, combustion appliances, and cigarette smoke were important sources of indoor air exposures. Cooking activities, besides releasing BaP-enriched particles indoors, produced food imbued with BaP and added substantially to exposure via the ingestion route. Among the study subjects, the range and magnitude of dietary exposures (2 to 500 ng/d) were much greater than for inhalation (10 to 50 ng/d). Nevertheless, there were ample individual cases where inhalation of BaP was the predominant exposure route. Indoor air BaP levels were closely correlated with ambient levels in most of the homes. For some individuals, measured personal air BaP exposures were adequately predicted by time-weighting of microenvironmental (i.e., outdoor and in-home) concentrations. However, enormously high exposures for ingestion or inhalation were detected only by direct observation, not from microenvironmental data.
Multidimensional mapping for bit-interleaved coded modulation with BPSK/QPSK signaling

In recent years, it has been recognized that bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) achieves excellent performance on virtually any channel, provided the signal mapping is carefully designed. In this paper, we introduce multidimensional mapping for BICM-ID, where a group of bits is mapped to a vector of symbols, rather than a single symbol. This allows for more flexibility and potential performance improvements. Our analysis shows that multidimensional mapping leads to an increase in Euclidean distance, thus boosting the performance compared to conventional mapping schemes. We derive a design criterion for optimal mappings and we provide such optimal mappings for BPSK and QPSK constellations.
Aspect-Oriented Framework Modeling

Aspects and aspect-oriented programming have gained much attention in recent years, but the focus was limited to the programming part of software development, especially detailed design and programming. In this paper, we describe a modelbased approach based on an industrial case study that uses aspects. The approach provides a merge of the implementation of a requirements model with the predefined and thus reusable aspect-implementation, which is given in form of a framework.
Cancer registry data based estimation of regional cancer incidence: application to breast and colorectal cancer in French administrative regions.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: In many countries, cancer registries cover only a small part of the national population. Cancer incidence for the rest of the country has therefore to be estimated. This can be done from mortality data using the relation between incidence and mortality observed in the cancer registry areas. Such an approach was used to study geographical variation and trend of colorectal and breast cancer incidence in France where 10% of the national population is covered by cancer registries. DESIGN: This study applies the incidence/mortality ratios of cancer registry areas to regional mortality data to obtain an estimation of cancer incidence at a given point in time. Age and period effects are included in the statistical models. MAIN RESULTS: The incidence estimations are given for 21 administrative regions and three time points (1985, 1990, 1995). The European standardised incidence rates for breast cancer ranged from 86.8 to 128.8. For colorectal cancer, these rates ranged from 48.2 to 79.6 for men, and from 32.5 to 48.8 for women. Breast cancer incidence has increased considerably between 1985 and 1995 with a higher increase in the north than in the south of France. The incidence of colorectal cancer has also increased, albeit to a lesser extent. CONCLUSION: The incidence estimation method proposed leads to regional incidence rates that are useful for planning health care services on a regional basis and may also be used to study regional differences in incidence. This method is useful when only partial incidence data are available.
The zen of multidisciplinary team recommendation

It is often necessary to compose a team consisting of experts with diverse competencies to accomplish complex tasks. However, for its proper functioning, it is also preferable that a team be socially cohesive. A team recommendation system, which facilitates the search for potential team members, can be of great help both for (a) individuals who need to seek out collaborators and for (b) managers who need to build a team for some specific tasks. Such a decision support system that readily helps summarize multiple metrics indicating a team (and its members) quality, and possibly rank the teams in a personalized manner according to the end users' preferences, thus serves as a tool to cope with what would otherwise be an information avalanche. In this work, we present Social Web Application for Team Recommendation, a general‐purpose framework to compose various information retrieval and social graph mining and visualization subsystems together to build a composite team recommendation system, and instantiate it for a case study of academic teams.
Facial Texture Coding at Very Low Bit Rates

| This paper treats the topic of how to eeciently represent facial textures, for model based coding of human face images. The scheme is based on the Karhunen-Lo eve transform and involves an elaborate normalization process that enhances PSNR with around 0.5 dB compared to normalization with scaling, translation and rotation. It also seems to augment the perceived visual quality. Furthermore , a block tiling technique is introduced, improving quality to levels where comparison with waveform coders is worthwhile, showing a 5 dB improvement over JPEG. The nonstationarity of the signal is here exploited in a rate/distortion optimizing fashion, which further improves the quality by 0.4 dB. To further lower complexity for high quality images while preserving coding eeciency at very low bit rates, quadtree tiling of the eigenspace is introduced.
Identification of Amino Acid Substitutions Supporting Antigenic Change of Influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 Viruses

ABSTRACT The majority of currently circulating influenza A(H1N1) viruses are antigenically similar to the virus that caused the 2009 influenza pandemic. However, antigenic variants are expected to emerge as population immunity increases. Amino acid substitutions in the hemagglutinin protein can result in escape from neutralizing antibodies, affect viral fitness, and change receptor preference. In this study, we constructed mutants with substitutions in the hemagglutinin of A/Netherlands/602/09 in an attenuated backbone to explore amino acid changes that may contribute to emergence of antigenic variants in the human population. Our analysis revealed that single substitutions affecting the loop that consists of amino acid positions 151 to 159 located adjacent to the receptor binding site caused escape from ferret and human antibodies elicited after primary A(H1N1)pdm09 virus infection. The majority of these substitutions resulted in similar or increased replication efficiency in vitro compared to that of the virus carrying the wild-type hemagglutinin and did not result in a change of receptor preference. However, none of the substitutions was sufficient for escape from the antibodies in sera from individuals that experienced both seasonal and pandemic A(H1N1) virus infections. These results suggest that antibodies directed against epitopes on seasonal A(H1N1) viruses contribute to neutralization of A(H1N1)pdm09 antigenic variants, thereby limiting the number of possible substitutions that could lead to escape from population immunity. IMPORTANCE Influenza A viruses can cause significant morbidity and mortality in humans. Amino acid substitutions in the hemagglutinin protein can result in escape from antibody-mediated neutralization. This allows the virus to reinfect individuals that have acquired immunity to previously circulating strains through infection or vaccination. To date, the vast majority of A(H1N1)pdm09 strains remain antigenically similar to the virus that caused the 2009 influenza pandemic. However, antigenic variants are expected to emerge as a result of increasing population immunity. We show that single amino acid substitutions near the receptor binding site were sufficient to escape from antibodies specific for A(H1N1)pdm09 viruses but not from antibodies elicited in response to infections with seasonal A(H1N1) and A(H1N1)pdm09 viruses. This study identified substitutions in A(H1N1)pdm09 viruses that support escape from population immunity but also suggested that the number of potential escape variants is limited by previous exposure to seasonal A(H1N1) viruses.
A Self-initializing Eyebrow Tracker for Binary Switch Emulation

We designed the Eyebrow-Clicker, a camera-based human computer interface system that implements a new form of binary switch. When the user raises his or her eyebrows, the binary switch is activated and a selection command is issued. The Eyebrow-Clicker thus replaces the \click" functionality of a mouse. The system initializes itself by detecting the user's eyes and eyebrows, tracks these features at frame rate, and recovers in the event of errors. The initialization uses the natural blinking of the human eye to select suitable templates for tracking. Once execution has begun, a user therefore never has to restart the program or even touch the computer. In our experiments with humancomputer interaction software, the system successfully determined 93% of the time when a user raised his eyebrows.
The dipeptidyl peptidase IV inhibitor vildagliptin suppresses endogenous glucose production and enhances islet function after single-dose administration in type 2 diabetic patients.

AIMS/HYPOTHESIS Vildagliptin is a selective dipeptidyl peptidase IV inhibitor that augments meal-stimulated levels of biologically active glucagon-like peptide-1. Chronic vildagliptin treatment decreases postprandial glucose levels and reduces hemoglobin A1c in type 2 diabetic patients. However, little is known about the mechanism(s) by which vildagliptin promotes reduction in plasma glucose concentration. METHODS Sixteen patients with type 2 diabetes (age, 48+/-3 yr; body mass index, 34.4+/-1.7 kg/m2; hemoglobin A1c, 9.0+/-0.3%) participated in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. On separate days patients received 100 mg vildagliptin or placebo at 1730 h followed 30 min later by a meal tolerance test (MTT) performed with double tracer technique (3-(3)H-glucose iv and 1-(14)C-glucose orally). RESULTS After vildagliptin, suppression of endogenous glucose production (EGP) during 6-h MTT was greater than with placebo (1.02+/-0.06 vs. 0.74+/-0.06 mg.kg-1.min-1; P=0.004), and insulin secretion rate increased by 21% (P=0.003) despite significant reduction in mean plasma glucose (213+/-4 vs. 230+/-4 mg/dl; P=0.006). Consequently, insulin secretion rate (area under the curve) divided by plasma glucose (area under the curve) increased by 29% (P=0.01). Suppression of plasma glucagon during MTT was 5-fold greater with vildagliptin (P<0.02). The decline in EGP was positively correlated (r=0.55; P<0.03) with the decrease in fasting plasma glucose (change=-14 mg/dl). CONCLUSIONS During MTT, vildagliptin augments insulin secretion and inhibits glucagon release, leading to enhanced suppression of EGP. During the postprandial period, a single dose of vildagliptin reduced plasma glucose levels by enhancing suppression of EGP.
CURRENT TRENDS IN MODELLING AND SIMULATION OF PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Parallel and distributed computing is valuable for problem solving in many scientific domains and has gained a large amount of attention. Performance studies have explored a wealth of alternatives with respect to parallel and distributed systems aimed at improving system performance by improving the performance of its individual components. Other research efforts have focused on improving networks in order to deliver high performance. The References Section of this paper lists only a few examples from the literature.
ParticipArt: Exploring participation in interactive art installations

ParticipART is an initiative aimed at exploring participation in interactive works using ubiquitous computing and mixed reality. It supports and analyses work of artists and creative practitioners incorporating or reflecting on participatory processes to support new roles and forms of engagement for art participants. We aim at proposing a space for discussion that can enliven and enrich the dialogue between human-computer interaction and the creative practices. We present several works that have been exhibited and experienced. The works are used to reflect on the different participative strategies and the role of interaction technologies: enabling authorship, affording connectivity, interacting with artificial beings, reinterpreting the visitor world, and engaging in performative acts.
Fast and sensitive probe selection for DNA chips using jumps in matching statistics

The design of large scale DNA microarrays is a challenging problem. So far, probe selection algorithms must trade the ability to cope with large scale problems for a loss of accuracy in the estimation of probe quality. We present an approach based on jumps in matching statistics that combines the best of both worlds. This article consists of two parts. The first part is theoretical. We introduce the notion of jumps in matching statistics between two strings and derive their properties. We estimate the frequency of jumps for random strings in a nonuniform Bernoulli model and present a new heuristic argument to find the center of the length distribution of the longest substring that two random strings have in common. The results are generalized to near-perfect matches with a small number of mismatches. In the second part, we use the concept of jumps to improve the accuracy of the longest common factor approach for probe selection by moving from a string-based to an energy-based specificity measure, while only slightly more than doubling the selection time.
Rapid mixing of hypergraph independent sets

We prove that the mixing time of the Glauber dynamics for sampling independent sets on n‐vertex k‐uniform hypergraphs is O(nlogn) when the maximum degree Δ satisfies Δ ≤ c2k/2, improving on the previous bound Bordewich and co‐workers of Δ ≤ k − 2. This result brings the algorithmic bound to within a constant factor of the hardness bound of Bezakova and co‐workers which showed that it is NP‐hard to approximately count independent sets on hypergraphs when Δ ≥ 5·2k/2.
Automatically segmenting and reconstructing neurons in SEM images

Neuronal networks reconstruction is a big challenge in the neuroscience. Recent developments in volume electron microscopy (EM) imaging have enabled us to obtain large amounts of brain tissues image data. Analysis of the tremendously huge neuronal EM images based on automated method would be of vital importance. In this paper, we propose a method that Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) is used for neuronal boundary detection; and then, with the membrane detection probability map (MDPM) generated by DCNN, a marker-controlled watershed method is applied to segment neurons in the EM images over the MDPM. Semi-automated and fully automated 3D reconstruction methods are employed to connect the sections of the corresponding segmentations belonging to each neuron. Finally, we have reconstructed dense neurons in 8000×8000×1796 consecutive EM images stack of drosophila mushroom body with resolution of 4nm×4nm×50nm with automated method and several sparse neurons with semi-automated method.
Vectorization of the 2D wavelet lifting transform using SIMD extensions

This paper addresses the vectorization of the lifting-based wavelet transform on general-purpose microprocessors in the context of JPEG2000. Since SIMD exploitation strongly depends on an efficient memory hierarchy usage, this research is based on previous work about cache-conscious DWT implementations. The experimental platform on which we have chosen to study the benefits of the SIMD extensions is an Intel Pentium-4 (P-4) based PC. However, unlike other authors, the vectorization has been performed avoiding assembler language programming in order to improve both code portability and development cost.
Antimicrobial Susceptibilities of Staphylococcus aureus Isolated from Commercial Broilers in Northeastern Georgia

SUMMARY. Staphylococcus aureus is an important opportunist that can cause superficial to life-threatening illnesses in a variety of animal species. In poultry, this organism has been implicated in osteomyelitis, synovitis, and cellulitis. Whereas most infections can be treated with antibiotics, because of the organism's propensity to acquire antimicrobial resistance, it is important to continually monitor antibiotic susceptibilities of clinical isolates. We surveyed 77 clinical poultry S. aureus isolates, collected from 1998 to 2000, for susceptibilities to a panel of 18 antimicrobial agents. Thirty-six percent of isolates were susceptible to all antibiotics. Forty-three and 16% of avian S. aureus were resistant to one and two antibiotics respectively. Staphylococcus aureus isolates were commonly resistant to tetracycline (40%; minimal inhibitory concentration [MIC]90 > 32 µg/ml), lincomycin (19%; MIC90 > 32 µg/ml), erythromycin (12%; MIC90 > 8 µg/ml), and kanamycin (8%; MIC90 < 128 µg/ml). All S. aureus isolates were susceptible to chloramphenicol, gentamicin, streptomycin, nitrofurantion, linezolid, quinupristin/dalfopristin, vancomycin, and the production antimicrobials virginiamycin, salinomycin, and flavomycin. A periodic assessment of antimicrobial susceptibilities of important avian pathogens like S. aureus will be important in helping the clinician's choice of antibiotic to control infection.