Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Supervised Force Directed Algorithm for the Generation of Flow Maps

Cartographic flow maps are graphical representations for portraying the movement of objects, such as people, goods or traffic network, from one location to another. On the one hand, flow maps can reduce visual clutter by merging single representations of movement. On the other hand, flow maps are also fast to produce and simple to understand. In this paper, we present a new method for the automatic generation of flow maps. Our method is based on a theoretically grounded physical system to describe the motion and forces of attraction and repulsion between data points. Additionally, support for an optional supervision of the graph layout is also available. Finally, the cost of our algorithm is evaluated and a comparison with existing implementations is provided. Results have shown a good balance between computational complexity and the visual quality of the generated maps.
NFRs: Fact or Fiction

Customer requirements are the foundation upon which a software system is built. These requirements, derived from the customers’ needs and desires, are used to both guide the development of the system and to determine if the completed system is what the customer requested. Because of its importance, requirement specification has become a research area known as Requirements Engineering (RE) both in Software Engineering [Zave, 1997; Nuseibeh & Easterbrook, 2000] and Systems Engineering [Dorfman, 1990; Chandrasekaran & Kaindl, 1996].
Expected Returns and Markov-Switching Illiquidity

Recent theoretical models imply that liquidity is fragile: financial markets are liquid in some equilibria and illiquid in others. This paper employs an intuitively appealing Markov-switching regime model to investigate the episodic nature of stock market illiquidity and the intertemporal relation between illiquidity risk and expected stock returns. We introduce a two-state Markov-switching regime model for stock market illiquidity, returns and volatility. We find evidence of a significant illiquidity risk premium; the expected stock return is positively related to the conditional probability of an illiquid regime. By combining the Markov-switching model with a log-linear model for stock returns, we derive a tractable expression for the illiquidity feedback effect. Modeling the illiquidity feedback effect is critical to understanding the relation between realized stock returns, expected returns and Markov-switching illiquidity. We develop a flexible Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach for estimating and comparing models.
Temporal Stability and the Effect of Transgenerational Transfer on Fecal Microbiota Structure in a Long Distance Migratory Bird

Animal bodies are inhabited by a taxonomically and functionally diverse community of symbiotic and commensal microorganisms. From an ecological and evolutionary perspective, inter-individual variation in host-associated microbiota contributes to physiological and immune system variation. As such, host-associated microbiota may be considered an integral part of the host’s phenotype, serving as a substrate for natural selection. This assumes that host-associated microbiota exhibits high temporal stability, however, and that its composition is shaped by trans-generational transfer or heritable host-associated microbiota modulators encoded by the host genome. Although this concept is widely accepted, its crucial assumptions have rarely been tested in wild vertebrate populations. We performed 16S rRNA metabarcoding on an extensive set of fecal microbiota (FM) samples from an insectivorous, long-distance migratory bird, the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica). Our data revealed clear differences in FM among juveniles and adults as regards taxonomic and functional composition, diversity and co-occurrence network complexity. Multiple FM samples from the same juvenile or adult collected within single breeding seasons exhibited higher similarity than expected by chance, as did adult FM samples over two consecutive years. Despite low effect sizes for FM stability over time at the community level, we identified an adult FM subset with relative abundances exhibiting significant temporal consistency, possibly inducing long-term effects on the host phenotype. Our data also indicate a slight maternal (but not paternal) effect on FM composition in social offspring, though this is unlikely to persist into adulthood. We discuss our findings in the context of both evolution and ecology of microbiota vs. host interactions and barn swallow biology.
Birds of passage: Index

Birds of Passage presents an unorthodox analysis of migration ion to urban industrial societies from underdeveloped rual areas. It argues that such migrations are a continuing feature of industrial societies and that they are generated by forces inherent in the nature of industrial economies. It explains why conventional economic theory finds such migrations so difficult to comprehend, and challenges a set of older assumptions that supported the view that these migrations were beneficial to both sending and receiving societies. Professor Piore seriously questions whether migration actually relieves population pressure and rural unemployment, and whether it develops skills necessary for the emergence of an industrial labour force in the home country. Furthermore, he criticizes the notion that in the long run migrant labour complements native labour. On the basis of this critique, he develops an alternative theory of the nature of the migration process.
The Nursing Home Five Star Rating: How Does It Compare to Resident and Family Views of Care?

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY In 2008, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented a five-star rating system of nursing homes in the United States. These star ratings have been widely publicized both by CMS and the national and state media. Although the components of the star rating system take into account various dimensions of quality, satisfaction of nursing home residents and their families is not taken into consideration. DESIGN AND METHODS The current study compares the CMS star rating system to nursing home satisfaction data reported by residents and their families in Ohio. RESULTS Findings indicate that the star rating system does not adequately reflect consumer satisfaction. IMPLICATIONS We recommend that the star system be refined to include a consumer component.
Extrinsic Factors Involved in the Differentiation of Stem Cells into Insulin-Producing Cells: An Overview

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic disease with many debilitating complications. Treatment of diabetes mellitus mainly revolves around conventional oral hypoglycaemic agents and insulin replacement therapy. Recently, scientists have turned their attention to the generation of insulin-producing cells (IPCs) from stem cells of various sources. To date, many types of stem cells of human and animal origins have been successfully turned into IPCs in vitro and have been shown to exert glucose-lowering effect in vivo. However, scientists are still faced with the challenge of producing a sufficient number of IPCs that can in turn produce sufficient insulin for clinical use. A careful choice of stem cells, methods, and extrinsic factors for induction may all be contributing factors to successful production of functional beta-islet like IPCs. It is also important that the mechanism of differentiation and mechanism by which IPCs correct hyperglycaemia are carefully studied before they are used in human subjects.
Web Prefetching : Costs , Benefits and Performance

Due to the fast development of internet services and a huge amount of network traffic, it is becoming an essential issue to reduce World Wide Web user-perceived latency. Although web performance is improved by caching, the benefit of caches is limited. To further reduce the retrieval latency, web prefetching becomes an attractive solution to this problem. Prefetching reduces user access time, but at the same time, it requires more bandwidth and increases traffic. Performance measurement of prefetching techniques is primarily in terms of hit ratio and bandwidth usage. A significant factor for a prefetching algorithm in its ability to reduce latency is deciding which objects to prefetch in advance. This paper presents a solution space of prefetching according to various object-selecting criteria and a comparison of their performance is provided.
Retinal Image Analysis Using Contourlet Transform and Multistructure Elements Morphology by Reconstruction

Retinal images play a vital role in most of the applications like ocular fundus operations and human recognition. Also, it is used to detect the diabetes in early stages by evaluating all the retinal blood vessels together. The detection of blood vessels from the retinal images is generally a slow process. In this paper, a novel algorithm called Contourlet Transform is proposed to detect the blood vessels efficiently. The proposed Contourlet Transform is the extension of wavelet transform used to enhance the retinal image then the image is utilized for the segmentation part. The existing curvelet transform has disadvantages that is directional specificity of the image is less owing to that the effectiveness is poor. The directionality features of the multistructure elements technique construct it as an effectual tool in edge detection. Therefore, morphology operators by means of multistructure elements are given to the enhanced image in order to locate the retinal image ridges. Later, morphological operators by reconstruction eradicate the ridges not related to the vessel tree as trying to protect the thin vessels that are unaffected. This approach uses multistructure elements in order to improve the performance of morphological operators by reconstruction. An improved Ostu thresholding method is combined with Strongly Connected Component Analysis (SCCA) which indicates the remained ridges pertaining to vessels. The experimental results show the proposed method obtains 96% accuracy in detection of blood vessels and is compared with other existing approaches.
Applications of the signal space separation method

The reliability of biomagnetic measurements is traditionally challenged by external interference signals, movement artifacts, and comparison problems caused by different positions of the subjects or different sensor configurations. The Signal Space Separation method (SSS) idealizes magnetic multichannel signals by transforming them into device-independent idealized channels representing the measured data in uncorrelated form. The transformation has separate components for the biomagnetic and external interference signals, and thus, the biomagnetic signals can be reconstructed simply by leaving out the contribution of the external interference. The foundation of SSS is a basis spanning all multichannel signals of magnetic origin. It is based on Maxwell's equations and the geometry of the sensor array only, with the assumption that the sensors are located in a current free volume. SSS is demonstrated to provide suppression of external interference signals, standardization of different positions of the subject, standardization of different sensor configurations, compensation for distortions caused by movement of the subject (even a subject containing magnetic impurities), suppression of sporadic sensor artifacts, a tool for fine calibration of the device, extraction of biomagnetic DC fields, and an aid for realizing an active compensation system. Thus, SSS removes many limitations of traditional biomagnetic measurements.
Information fusion measures of effectiveness (MOE) for decision support

For decades, there have been discussions on measures of merits (MOM) that include measures of effectiveness (MOE) and measures of performance (MOP) for system-level performance. As the amount of sensed and collected data becomes increasingly large, there is a need to look at the architectures, metrics, and processes that provide the best methods for decision support systems. In this paper, we overview some information fusion methods in decision support and address the capability to measure the effects of the fusion products on user functions. The current standard Information Fusion model is the Data Fusion Information Group (DFIG) model that specifically addresses the needs of the user in an information fusion system. Decision support implies that information methods augment user decision making as opposed to the machine making the decision and displaying it to user. We develop a list of suggested measures of merits that facilitate decision support decision support Measures of Effectiveness (MOE) metrics of quality, information gain, and robustness, from the analysis based on the measures of performance (MOPs) of timeliness, accuracy, confidence, throughput, and cost. We demonstrate in an example with motion imagery to support the MOEs of quality (time/decision confidence plots), information gain (completeness of annotated imagery for situation awareness), and robustness through analysis of imagery over time and repeated looks for enhanced target identification confidence.
Monetary Equilibrium and the Productivity Norm of Price-Level Policy

Now that the Phillips curve has disappeared, leaving an “empty place where it used to be” (Leijonhufvud 1981, p. 276), economists must come face to face with the problem of deciding how the price level ought to behave. They can no longer treat price-level policy as incidental to employment policy. Yet,rather than becoming an object of economic controversy, the place left vacant by the Phillips curve has become the exclusive, if somewhat barren, grazing ground of advocates of a stable consumer price level. These advocates appear to be winning the macroeconomic policy battle by default. The only challenge now facing them seems to be that of implementing pricelevel stabilization by means of a strict and unambiguous policy mandate.
Towards an Algebraic Formulation of Domain Definitions using Parameterised Machines

Abstractly specifying, rapidly creating, and re-using models of domain structure are desirable goals for knowledge engineering in AI Planning. However, while planning algorithms, and now knowledge engineering itself, are maturing areas of research, the descriptions used to formulate dynamic domain descriptions is under researched. In this paper we describe on-going work attempting to establish an algebraic approach to constructing domain descriptions. We postulate that this formulation will serve several purposes: it will help descriptions of domains to be rapidly built up by composing and interfacing pre-defined abstract, primitive machines. It will help engineers re-use existing domains, and it will serve as a semantics for concrete description languages such as PDDL.
Cross voltage control with inner hysteresis current control for multi-output boost converter

Multi-output boost (MOB) converter is a novel DC-DC converter unlike the regular boost converter, has the ability to share its total output voltage and to have different series output voltage from a given duty cycle for low and high power applications. In this paper, discrete voltage control with inner hysteresis current control loop has been proposed to keep the simplicity of the control law for the double-output MOB converter, which can be implemented by a combination of analogue and logical ICs or simple microcontroller to constrain the output voltages of MOB converter at their reference voltages against variation in load or input voltage. The salient features of the proposed control strategy are simplicity of implementation and ease to extend to multiple outputs in the MOB converter. Simulation and experimental results are presented to show the validity of control strategy.
An Empirical Investigation of Intraday Jumps and Cojumps in US Equities

An information reproducing apparatus method includes the steps of radiating an optical spots to scan information marks recorded on tracks inside a predetermined information recording region, detecting an optical change of the information marks by this scanning operation, executing a signal processing for the reproducing signal so as to reduce inter-symbol interference of an interference amount that varies for each of the information marks, and reproducing the information corresponding to the information mark. The magnitude of the optical change due to the information mark is thereby detected, and a plurality of equalization coefficients used for an equalization processing are calculated for the magnitude of the optical change detected for each information mark. The inter-symbol interference is reduced on the basis of these equalization coefficients. In consequence, the inter-symbol interference can be reduced while the equalization coefficients are changed in accordance with the level of the reproducing signal.
FAST - Fast Algorithm for the Scenario Technique

The scenario approach is a recently introduced method to obtain feasible solutions to chance-constrained optimization problems based on random sampling. It has been noted that the sample complexity of the scenario approach rapidly increases with the number of optimization variables and this may pose a hurdle to its applicability to medium- and large-scale problems. We here introduce the Fast Algorithm for the Scenario Technique, a variant of the scenario optimization algorithm with reduced sample complexity.
Serious games for health: personalized exergames

In this paper, we describe a set of personalized exergames which combine methods and concepts of serious games, adaptation and personalization, authoring and sensor technologies. Compared to existing systems, the set of games does not only keep track of the user's vital state, but also directly integrates vital parameters into the gameplay and supports the training and motivation for sustainable physical activity in a playful manner.
Mitochondrial COI and morphological specificity of the mealy aphids (Hyalopterus ssp.) collected from different hosts in Europe (Hemiptera, Aphididae)

Abstract Forty three European population samples of mealy aphids from various winter and summer host plants were attributed to respective species of Hyalopterus by means of their partial sequences of mitochondrial COI gene. Used Hyalopterus samples emerged as monophyletic relative to outgroup and formed three major clades representing three host specific mealy aphid species in the Neighbor joining, Maximum parsimony, Maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference trees. Hyalopterus pruni and Hyalopterus persikonus emerged as a sister species, whilst Hyalopterus amygdali was located basally. Samples representing different clades in the molecular trees were used for canonical discrimination analysis based on twenty two morphological characters. Length of the median dorsal head hair enabled a 97.3 % separation of Hyalopterus amygdali from the remaining two species. No single character enabled satisfactory discrimination between apterous viviparous females of Hyalopterus pruni and Hyalopterus persikonus. A modified key for the morphological identification of Hyalopterus species is suggested and their taxonomic status discussed.
Using least-square Monte Carlo simulation to price American multi underlying stock options

Stock options is a contract which give the right (without obligation) to the owner to buy or to sell stock asset at certain price during specified time period. Stock option is derivate product of stock, created to hedge and speculate. This research use Least-Square Monte Carlo (LSM) method to estimate American put option price. Firstly, LSM method is applied to determine single asset of American put option price and its optimal exercise boundary. According to parameter volatility, the computation result using implied volatility approach market value better than using estimated volatility from historical data. In determining the value of multiple assets put option, it is used the similar algorithm scheme as single asset put option. The comparison result of multi asset option price either using implied volatility and estimated volatility from historical data, does not give a significant differences. Also, this research observe the sensitivity of option price in Stock option is a contract which gives the right (without obligation) to the owner of the option to buy or sell stocks at a specified price within a certain period of time. Contract of the option has several parameters, such as the maturity date, interest rate, volatility of the underlying asset, and dividend rate. Based on the type of the rights granted, the option can be divided into two, namely call option and put option.
A FLARE IN THE JET OF PICTOR A

A Chandra X-ray imaging observation of the jet in Pictor A showed a feature that appears to be a flare that faded between 2000 and 2002. The feature was not detected in a follow-up observation in 2009. The jet itself is over 150 kpc long and about 1 kpc wide, so finding year-long variability is surprising. Assuming a synchrotron origin of the observed high-energy photons and a minimum energy condition for the outflow, the synchrotron loss time of the X-ray emitting electrons is of order 1200 years, which is much longer than the observed variability timescale. This leads to the possibility that the variable X-ray emission arises from a very small sub-volume of the jet, characterized by a magnetic field that is substantially larger than the average over the jet.
Diversity of influenza viruses in swine and the emergence of a novel human pandemic influenza A (H1N1)

Abstract The novel H1N1 influenza virus that emerged in humans in Mexico in early 2009 and transmitted efficiently in the human population with global spread has been declared a pandemic strain. Here we review influenza infections in swine since 1918 and the introduction of different avian and human influenza virus genes into swine influenza viruses of North America and Eurasia. These introductions often result in viruses of increased fitness for pigs that occasionally transmit to humans. The novel virus affecting humans is derived from a North American swine influenza virus that has acquired two gene segments [Neuraminidase (NA) and Matrix (M)] from the European swine lineages. This reassortant appears to have increased fitness in humans. The potential for increased virulence in humans and of further reassortment between the novel H1N1 influenza virus and oseltamivir resistant seasonal H1N1 or with highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza stresses the need for urgent pandemic planning.