Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Cournot-Nash Model of Family Decision Making

This paper models a two-person family. Each family member is utility maximising, yet family members are interdependent because of caring and public goods within the family. The two family members' interdependent utility maximisation problems are first solved using a non-cooperative, or Cournot-Nash, game theoretic framework. The Cournot-Nash equilibrium is then used as a threat point in a bargaining game. The paper provides a rigorous derivation of the properties of household demands, a full analysis of the determinants of intra-household resource allocation, including the effect of varying household bargaining power, and consideration of policy implications.
A panorama-based architecture for multimedia from hand-held devices

Many kinds of multimedia data can be obtained easily by hand-held devices easily nowadays. In this paper, we prompt a panorama-based processing architecture which combines repeated data of images/videos to increase the speed of browsing diverse multimedia information. Two servers, feature server (FS) extracting scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) features from images or every frame of videos and central information server (CIS) creating information packages are designed to enhance this architecturepsilas performance. One browsing request package containing region of interest (ROI) data is sent to CIS from terminal devices, and CIS will create one panoramic image including this ROI and send it back. Users can see more information in a short time because the new image has a wider field of view (FOV) than each origin image/frame.
Asymptotic Rational Approximation To Pi: Solution of an ``Unsolved Problem'' Posed By Herbert Wilf

The webpage of Herbert Wilf describes eight Unsolved Problems. Here, we completely resolve the third of these eight problems. The task seems innocent: find the first term of the asymptotic behavior of the coefficients of an ordinary generating function, whose coefficients naturally yield rational approximations to $\pi$. Upon closer examination, however, the analysis is fraught with difficulties. For instance, the function is the composition of three functions, but the innermost function has a non-zero constant term, so many standard techniques for analyzing function compositions will completely fail. Additionally, the signs of the coefficients are neither all positive, nor alternating in a regular manner. The generating function involves both a square root and an arctangent. The complex-valued square root and arctangent functions each rely on complex logarithms, which are multivalued and fundamentally depend on branch cuts. These multiple values and branch cuts make the function extremely tedious to visualize using Maple. We provide a complete asymptotic analysis of the coefficients of Wilf's generating function. The asymptotic expansion is naturally additive (not multiplicative); each term of the expansion contains oscillations, which we precisely characterize. The proofs rely on complex analysis, in particular, singularity analysis (which, in turn, rely on a Hankel contour and transfer theorems).
Is Pre-Kindergarten an Educational Panacea? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Scaled-Up Pre-Kindergarten in the United States

We synthesize the existing research and compute meta-analytic averages for the effects of scaled-up, publicly funded pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs on student pre-kindergarten achievement in math and reading. Other systematic reviews of pre-K programs have focused on the effects for specific groups of students from various types of pre-K programs. We add to the literature by focusing on scaled-up pre-K often provided at the state level, which is of growing policy interest. Scaled-up programs are large state or district run programs that are available to a large portion of children before they enter kindergarten. We limit our analysis to state and districtwide pre-K programs in the United States from 2000 through 2016. In order to obtain the most accurate effect estimates, we restrict our analysis to experimental and quasi-experimental research designs with the highest internal validity. We synthesize the short-term cognitive effects of pre-K and find large positive effects of scaled-up public pre-K programs on student pre-kindergarten test scores. In particular, we find that the overall effect on math scores is over a third of a standard deviation and the overall effect on reading scores is three-fifths of a standard deviation. This review is restricted to studies focused on short term results of pre-K programs; our search uncovered only one study rigorously assessing the impacts of scaled-up pre-K programs on student achievement after kindergarten. More research is needed on the sustained effects of pre-K as policymakers debate whether to expand or adopt such programs.
A note on CFT dual of RS model with gauge fields in bulk

It has been conjectured that the (weakly coupled) Randall-Sundrum (RS) model with gauge fields in the bulk is dual to a (strongly coupled) 4D conformal field theory (CFT) with an UV cut-off and in which global symmetries of the CFT are gauged. We elucidate features of this dual CFT which are crucial for a complete understanding of the proposed duality. We argue that the limit of no (or small) brane-localized kinetic term for bulk gauge field on the RS side (often studied in the literature) is dual to no bare kinetic term for the gauge field which is coupled to the CFT global current. In this limit, the kinetic term for this gauge field in the dual CFT is ``induced'' by CFT loops. Then, this CFT loop contribution to the gauge field 1PI two-point function is dual (on the RS side) to the full gauge propagator (i.e., including the contribution of Kaluza-Klein and zero-modes) with both external points on the Planck brane. We also emphasize that loop corrections to the gauge coupling on the RS side are dual to sub-leading effects in a large-N expansion on the CFT side; these sub-leading corrections to the gauge coupling in the dual CFT are (in general) sensitive to the strong dynamics of the CFT.
Effect of add-on valproate on craving in methamphetamine depended patients: A randomized trial

Background: Methamphetamine dependence lead to the compulsive use, loss of control, and social and occupational dysfunctions. This study aimed to compare the effect of valproate in reducing the craving in methamphetamine dependents. Materials and Methods: This is a randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical trial on 40 men of 18–40 years old referred to Noor Hospital during December 2012–September 2013 in Isfahan, Iran. The subjects participated in matrix program and randomly were divided into two groups of valproate and placebo. A 4-months program of intervention with valproate or placebo was arranged for each group. The rate of craving to methamphetamine and positive methamphetamine urine tests were evaluated in both groups every 2 weeks using cocaine craving questionnaire-brief (CCQ-Brief) and urine test. After the 4 months (active treatment with valproate and placebo), the drug was tapered and discontinued within 10 days, and patients were introduced to self-help groups and monitored regularly on a weekly basis over another 3 months. Collected data were analyzed with SPSS 20 using analysis of covariance repeated measure, Chi-square, and t-test. Results: CCQ score of the intervention group was significantly less than the placebo group (P < 0.001), except on weeks 1, 3, and 28. The ratio of a positive urine test for methamphetamine in the intervention group was significantly lower than the control group in all screenings except weeks 3 and 28. Conclusion: Adding valproate to matrix program in the treatment of methamphetamine dependence showed significant effect on the reduction of the craving to methamphetamine.
RNA silencing is required for Arabidopsis defence against Verticillium wilt disease

RNA silencing is a conserved mechanism in eukaryotes that plays an important role in various biological processes including regulation of gene expression. RNA silencing also plays a role in genome stability and protects plants against invading nucleic acids such as transgenes and viruses. Recently, RNA silencing has been found to play a role in defence against bacterial plant pathogens in Arabidopsis through modulating host defence responses. In this study, it is shown that gene silencing plays a role in plant defence against multicellular microbial pathogens; vascular fungi belonging to the Verticillium genus. Several components of RNA silencing pathways were tested, of which many were found to affect Verticillium defence. Remarkably, no altered defence towards other fungal pathogens that include Alternaria brassicicola, Botrytis cinerea, and Plectosphaerella cucumerina, but also the vascular pathogen Fusarium oxysporum, was recorded. Since the observed differences in Verticillium susceptibility cannot be explained by notable differences in root architecture, it is speculated that the gene silencing mechanisms affect regulation of Verticillium-specific defence responses.
Support sets of pairs of modules

Let R be the quotient of a local domain (Q, n) by a proper ideal minimally generated by f 1 ,. ,f c . Assume Q/ n is algebraically closed, and let M and N be finitely generated R-modules. We show there is an algebraic set in c-dimensional affine space, called the support set of the pair (M, N), which describes those hypersurfaces h E (f 1 ,.,f c )-n( 1 ,.,f c ) over which there are infinitely many nonzero Ext i Q/(h) (M,N). This generalizes to arbitrary quotients of regular local rings the notion of support variety for modules over complete intersections.
Insights into the Survival of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii during Sulfur Starvation Based on Microarray Analysis of Gene Expression

ABSTRACT Responses of photosynthetic organisms to sulfur starvation include (i) increasing the capacity of the cell for transporting and/or assimilating exogenous sulfate, (ii) restructuring cellular features to conserve sulfur resources, and (iii) modulating metabolic processes and rates of cell growth and division. We used microarray analyses to obtain a genome-level view of changes in mRNA abundances in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii during sulfur starvation. The work confirms and extends upon previous findings showing that sulfur deprivation elicits changes in levels of transcripts for proteins that help scavenge sulfate and economize on the use of sulfur resources. Changes in levels of transcripts encoding members of the light-harvesting polypeptide family, such as LhcSR2, suggest restructuring of the photosynthetic apparatus during sulfur deprivation. There are also significant changes in levels of transcripts encoding enzymes involved in metabolic processes (e.g., carbon metabolism), intracellular proteolysis, and the amelioration of oxidative damage; a marked and sustained increase in mRNAs for a putative vanadium chloroperoxidase and a peroxiredoxin may help prolong survival of C. reinhardtii during sulfur deprivation. Furthermore, many of the sulfur stress-regulated transcripts (encoding polypeptides associated with sulfate uptake and assimilation, oxidative stress, and photosynthetic function) are not properly regulated in the sac1 mutant of C. reinhardtii, a strain that dies much more rapidly than parental cells during sulfur deprivation. Interestingly, sulfur stress elicits dramatic changes in levels of transcripts encoding putative chloroplast-localized chaperones in the sac1 mutant but not in the parental strain. These results suggest various strategies used by photosynthetic organisms during acclimation to nutrient-limited growth.
A semantic-based and adaptive architecture for automatic multimedia retrieval composition

In this paper we present a domain-independent multimedia retrieval (MMR) platform. Currently, the use of MMR systems for different domains poses several limitations, mainly related to the poor flexibility and adaptability to different domains and user requirements. A semantic-based platform that uses ontologies for describing not only the application domain but also the processing workflow to be followed for the retrieval, according to user's requirements and domain characteristics is here proposed. In detail, an ontological model (domain-processing ontology) that integrates domain peculiarities and processing algorithms allows self-adaptation of the retrieval mechanism to the specified application domain. According to the instances generated for each user request, our platform generates the appropriate interface (GUI) for the specified application domain (e.g. music, sport video, medical images, etc…) by a procedure guided by the defined domain-processing ontology. A use case on content based music retrieval is here presented in order to show how the proposed platform also facilitates the process of multimedia retrieval system implementation.
Comparison of Microbial Communities Isolated from Feces of Asymptomatic Salmonella-Shedding and Non-Salmonella Shedding Dairy Cows

In the United States Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serotypes Kentucky and Cerro are frequently isolated from asymptomatic dairy cows. However, factors that contribute to colonization of the bovine gut by these two serotypes have not been identified. To investigate associations between Salmonella status and bacterial diversity, as well as the diversity of the microbial community in the dairy cow hindgut, the bacterial and archaeal communities of fecal samples from cows on a single dairy farm were determined by high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons. Fecal grab samples were collected from two Salmonella-positive cows and two Salmonella-negative cows on five sampling dates (n = 20 cows), and 16S rRNA gene amplicons from these samples were sequenced on the Illumina MiSeq platform. A high level of alpha (within) and beta diversity (between) samples demonstrated that microbial profiles of dairy cow hindguts are quite diverse. To determine whether Salmonella presence, sampling year, or sampling date explained a significant amount of the variation in microbial diversity, we performed constrained ordination analyses (distance based RDA) on the unifrac distance matrix produced with QIIME. Results indicated that there was not a significant difference in the microbial diversity associated with Salmonella presence (P > 0.05), but there were significant differences between sampling dates and years (Pseudo-F = 2.157 to 4.385, P < 0.05). Based on these data, it appears that commensal Salmonella infections with serotypes Cerro and Kentucky in dairy cows have little or no association with changes in the abundance of major bacterial groups in the hindgut. Rather, our results indicated that temporal dynamics and other undescribed parameters associated with them were the most influential drivers of the differences in microbial diversity and community structure in the dairy cow hindgut.
Heavy tails with parameter adaptation in random projection based continuous EDA

In this paper, we present a new variant of EDA for high dimensional continuous optimisation, which extends a recently proposed random projections (RP) ensemble based approach by employing heavy tailed random matrices. In particular, we use random matrices with i.i. d. t-distributed entries. The use of t-distributions may look surprising in the context of random projections, however we show that the resulting ensemble covariance is enlarged when the degree of freedom parameter is lowered. Based on this observation, we develop an adaptive scheme to adjust this parameter during evolution, and this results in a flexible means of balancing exploration and exploitation of the search process. A comprehensive set of experiments on high dimensional benchmark functions demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.
A secure trust establishment model

Trust is used in many applications, such as on-line auctions. However, trust establishment is not well understood. Different researchers have focused on different aspects of trust establishment. In this paper, we provide a unifying view of trust establishment, which includes the primitives, authentication, semantics of trust and trust evaluation. We propose a model which can serve as a framework for trust establishment. Trust is justified only if its establishment is secure against an adversary who seeks to gain it under false pretenses. We define an adversary model that takes malicious activities into account. We have conducted experiments to demonstrate how different policies react to attacks using an on-line auction as the scenario
A Cross-Layer Approach for Per-Station Fairness in TCP over WLANs

In this paper, we investigate the issue of per-station fairness in TCP over IEEE 802.11-compliant wireless local area networks (WLANs), especially in Wi-Fi hot spot. It is asserted that the hot spot suffers from the unfairness among stations in exploiting the wireless medium. The source of this unfairness is analyzed from two aspects, TCP-induced asymmetry and MAC-induced asymmetry; the former causes TCP congestion control with a cumulative acknowledgment mechanism to prefer the sending stations to receiving stations, while the later exacerbates the unfairness problem in the hot spots. We investigate the interaction between TCP congestion control and MAC contention control, and propose a cross-layer feedback approach to assure per-station fairness and to ensure high channel utilization. In this approach, we introduce the notion of channel access cost to quantify the system-wide traffic load and per-station channel usage. The access cost is estimated at the MAC in an access point and conveyed to the TCP sender. Then, the TCP sender adjusts its sending rate based on the access cost, so as to assure per-station fairness. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can provide both per-station fairness and high channel utilization, irrespective of network configurations.
Notice of RetractionTrust as a Mediator of the Effects of Transformational Leadership on Performance in Virtual Teams

This study examines the effects of transformational and transactional leadership on team member's performance in virtual teams. Trust in leader acts as an important mediator of the effects of transformational leadership on performance. Fifty-three, four-person teams participated in a laboratory study. Results showed the direct and indirect effects of transformational leadership and challenged the assumption about effects of transactional leadership in virtual teams.
Image steganography by closest pixel-pair mapping

Steganography is one of the important and elegant tools used to securely transfer secret message in an imperceptible manner. Visual Steganography is another added feature of it. It is the steganographic method involving multimedia files like image, video etc. to hide a secret message. However this method may result in the distortion of the colour frequencies of the cover image which is predictable by some analysis. Here in this paper we have proposed a method for steganography which results in absolutely no distortion of the cover image. The proposed image is independent of the size of the cover image and the secret image i.e. a larger image can be hidden in a smaller image. The proposed method also uses AES Encryption for secure transfer of the stego-key. The nexus of this cover image and the encrypted data serves the purpose of secure transfer of secret data.
Precoder design for Orthogonal Space-Time Block Coding based Cognitive Radio with polarized antennas

The spectrum sharing has recently passed into a mainstream Cognitive Radio (CR) strategy. We investigate the core issue in this strategy: interference mitigation at Primary Receiver (PR). We propose a linear precoder design which aims at alleviating the interference caused by Secondary User (SU) from the source for Orthogonal Space-Time Block Coding (OSTBC) based CR. We resort to Minimum Variance (MV) approach to contrive the precoding matrix at Secondary Transmitter (ST) in order to maximize the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) at Secondary Receiver (SR) on the premise that the orthogonality of OSTBC is kept, the interference introduced to Primary Link (PL) by Secondary Link (SL) is maintained under a tolerable level and the total transmitted power constraint at ST is satisfied. Moreover, the selection of polarization mode for SL is incorporated in the precoder design. In order to provide an analytic solution with low computational cost, we put forward an original precoder design algorithm which exploits an auxiliary variable to treat the optimization problem with a mixture of linear and quadratic constraints. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed precoder design enable SR to have an agreeable SNR on the prerequisite that the interference at PR is maintained below the threshold.
A Range-Wide Experiment to Investigate Nutrient and Soil Moisture Interactions in Loblolly Pine Plantations

The future climate of the southeastern USA is predicted to be warmer, drier and more variable in rainfall, which may increase drought frequency and intensity. Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) is the most important commercial tree species in the world and is planted on ~11 million ha within its native range in the southeastern USA. A regional study was installed to evaluate effects of decreased rainfall and nutrient additions on loblolly pine plantation productivity and physiology. Four locations were established to capture the range-wide variability of soil and climate. Treatments were initiated in 2012 and consisted of a factorial combination of throughfall reduction (approximate 30% reduction) and fertilization (complete suite of nutrients). Tree and stand growth were measured at each site. Results after two growing seasons indicate a positive but variable response of fertilization on stand volume increment at all four sites and a negative effect of throughfall reduction at two sites. Data will be used to produce robust process model parameterizations useful for simulating loblolly pine growth and function under future, novel climate and management scenarios. The resulting improved models will provide support for developing management strategies to increase pine plantation productivity and carbon sequestration under a changing climate.
Shadow of the contract: how contract structure shapes inter-firm dispute resolution

This paper investigates how contract structure influences inter-firm dispute resolution processes and outcomes by examining a unique dataset consisting of over 150,000 pages of documents relating to 102 business disputes. We find that the level of contract detail affects the type of dispute resolution approach that is adopted when conflict arises, and that different approaches are associated with different costs for resolving the dispute. We also find that the effect of contract choice on dispute resolution approach is moderated by the degree of coordination required in the relationship, and that the effect of dispute approach on costs is moderated by the degree of power asymmetry between the parties. Thus, even after controlling for various attributes of the exchange relationship and the dispute, the choice of contracting structure has important strategic implications.
Jornalistas e tecnoatores: a negociação de culturas profissionais em redações on-line

Este artigo investiga a crescente influencia de designers e programadores no trabalho jornalistico em redacoes on-line. Descritos como “tecnoatores”, estes profissionais conquistam visibilidade pelo dominio de conhecimentos especializados decisivos na producao da noticia. O objetivo e investigar como jornalistas, designers e programadores estabelecem negociacoes durante as rotinas produtivas. O estudo empirico esta delimitado a seis redacoes on-line – tres brasileiras e tres portuguesas – onde foram feitas 17 entrevistas semiestruturadas com integrantes das categorias profissionais em questao. A analise qualitativa das entrevistas e composta de quatro eixos tematicos: 1) processos de negociacao; 2) conceito de noticia; 3) distância fisica versus distância epistemica; 4) hibridismo profissional.