Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The conditional benefits of early user involvement at employee self-service applications in four Dutch ministries

User participation and user involvement is generally accepted as one of the important factors for IS success. In this paper, several types of early end-user involvement are distinguished and empirically explored through four case studies. The cases concern four Dutch governmental organisations (ministries) that have recently deployed an Employee Self-Service (ESS) application. Interviews were held with developers, project managers and users. It was found that the perceived success of the ESS-systems within the ministries is not directly related to the type or number of user involvement methods applied. Benefits of user participation are conditional, i.e., dependent on time- and culture-related factors. In particular, expectancy management about the project milestones is important, and so is the belief among employees that they can easily use the self-service applications without much support from the HR departments.
The ears of the hippopotamus: manifestations, determinants, and estimates of the malaria burden.

Malarious patients experience asymptomatic parasitemia; acute febrile illness (with cerebral damage, anemia, respiratory distress, hypoglycemia); chronic debilitation (anemia, malnutrition, nervous system-related sequelae); and complications of pregnancy (anemia, low birth weight, increased infant mortality). These manifestations in patients, communities, and countries reflect intrinsic (human, parasite, mosquito) and extrinsic (environmental, social, behavioral, political, and economic conditions as well as disease-control efforts) determinants. At a minimum, between 700,000 and 2.7 million persons die yearly from malaria, over 75% of them African children. Between 400 and 900 million acute febrile episodes occur yearly in African children under 5 yr of age living in endemic areas. Although about half of these children are parasitemic, all merit consideration of malaria-specific therapy, which is becoming more problematic because of parasite resistance to drugs. These numbers will more than double over the next 20 yr without effective control. Fewer than 20% of these febrile episodes and deaths come to the attention of any formal health system. The relatively few ill patients who have any contact with the health services represent the "ears of the hippopotamus. " Greatly intensified research activities and control of the intolerable burden of malaria are mandatory if economic development is to accelerate in Africa. In particular, support should be targeted to understanding and preventing malaria-induced anemia, hypoglycemia, effects on pregnancy, and neurologic and developmental impairment. To decrease and stop transmission of this intolerable scourge, there is an urgent need for malaria vaccines, newer drugs, and better vector control methods as well as the ability to improve current technologies and use them more efficiently.
Die Diskussion um die Anwendung und die Wirksamkeit von Musik bei depressiven Störungen in Geschichte und Gegenwart

Zusammenfassung Musiktherapie ist der gezielte Einsatz von Musik zu therapeutischen Zwecken. Zur Therapie der Depression wird sie meist innerhalb eines multimodalen Therapieangebots angewendet. Da Musik bereits in frühgeschichtlichen Gesellschaften zur Heilung von Krankheiten angewendet wurde, kann sie als traditionelle Therapieform betrachtet werden. Die musikalische Form, Dauer und Häufigkeit der Anwendung werden seit der Antike diskutiert. Die Begründer der modernen wissenschaftlichen Psychiatrie begannen ab dem 19. Jahrhundert, diesen Fragen mit empirisch-experimentellen Forschungen nachzugehen. Ab dem 20. Jahrhundert beschäftigten sich Wissenschaftler mit der Untersuchung der Wirkung von Musik auf biologische und psychologische Parameter. Aktuelle Studien zeigen, dass Musiktherapie die Symptomatik bei depressiven Patienten zu verbessern scheint, vor allem in Kombination mit einem Antidepressivum. Aufgrund der wenigen randomisierten Studien, die bislang vorliegen, ist die Aussagekraft limitiert. Weitere Forschungen sind notwendig, um evidenzbasierte Empfehlungen hinsichtlich des Einsatzes der Musiktherapie in der Depressionsbehandlung geben zu können.
Comparing apples to oranges: a scalable solution with heterogeneous hashing

Although hashing techniques have been popular for the large scale similarity search problem, most of the existing methods for designing optimal hash functions focus on homogeneous similarity assessment, i.e., the data entities to be indexed are of the same type. Realizing that heterogeneous entities and relationships are also ubiquitous in the real world applications, there is an emerging need to retrieve and search similar or relevant data entities from multiple heterogeneous domains, e.g., recommending relevant posts and images to a certain Facebook user. In this paper, we address the problem of ``comparing apples to oranges'' under the large scale setting. Specifically, we propose a novel Relation-aware Heterogeneous Hashing (RaHH), which provides a general framework for generating hash codes of data entities sitting in multiple heterogeneous domains. Unlike some existing hashing methods that map heterogeneous data in a common Hamming space, the RaHH approach constructs a Hamming space for each type of data entities, and learns optimal mappings between them simultaneously. This makes the learned hash codes flexibly cope with the characteristics of different data domains. Moreover, the RaHH framework encodes both homogeneous and heterogeneous relationships between the data entities to design hash functions with improved accuracy. To validate the proposed RaHH method, we conduct extensive evaluations on two large datasets; one is crawled from a popular social media sites, Tencent Weibo, and the other is an open dataset of Flickr(NUS-WIDE). The experimental results clearly demonstrate that the RaHH outperforms several state-of-the-art hashing methods with significant performance gains.
The Unified and Holistic Method Gamma (γ) for Inter-Annotator Agreement Measure and Alignment

Agreement measures have been widely used in computational linguistics for more than 15 years to check the reliability of annotation processes. Although considerable effort has been made concerning categorization, fewer studies address unitizing, and when both paradigms are combined even fewer methods are available and discussed. The aim of this article is threefold. First, we advocate that to deal with unitizing, alignment and agreement measures should be considered as a unified process, because a relevant measure should rely on an alignment of the units from different annotators, and this alignment should be computed according to the principles of the measure. Second, we propose the new versatile measure γ, which fulfills this requirement and copes with both paradigms, and we introduce its implementation. Third, we show that this new method performs as well as, or even better than, other more specialized methods devoted to categorization or segmentation, while combining the two paradigms at the same time.
Rare Genomic Variants Link Bipolar Disorder with Anxiety Disorders to CREB-Regulated Intracellular Signaling Pathways

Bipolar disorder is a common, complex, and severe psychiatric disorder with cyclical disturbances of mood and a high suicide rate. Here, we describe a family with four siblings, three affected females and one unaffected male. The disease course was characterized by early-onset bipolar disorder and co-morbid anxiety spectrum disorders that followed the onset of bipolar disorder. Genetic risk factors were suggested by the early onset of the disease, the severe disease course, including multiple suicide attempts, and lack of adverse prenatal or early life events. In particular, drug and alcohol abuse did not contribute to the disease onset. Exome sequencing identified very rare, heterozygous, and likely protein-damaging variants in eight brain-expressed genes: IQUB, JMJD1C, GADD45A, GOLGB1, PLSCR5, VRK2, MESDC2, and FGGY. The variants were shared among all three affected family members but absent in the unaffected sibling and in more than 200 controls. The genes encode proteins with significant regulatory roles in the ERK/MAPK and CREB-regulated intracellular signaling pathways. These pathways are central to neuronal and synaptic plasticity, cognition, affect regulation and response to chronic stress. In addition, proteins in these pathways are the target of commonly used mood-stabilizing drugs, such as tricyclic antidepressants, lithium, and valproic acid. The combination of multiple rare, damaging mutations in these central pathways could lead to reduced resilience and increased vulnerability to stressful life events. Our results support a new model for psychiatric disorders, in which multiple rare, damaging mutations in genes functionally related to a common signaling pathway contribute to the manifestation of bipolar disorder.
Degrees of freedom of two-user MIMO networks with random medium access control mechanism

This paper studies a multiple access network with two users and one Access Point (AP). It is assumed that the users and the AP are equipped with M and N antennas, respectively. To access the network, each user independently decides whether to transmit in a time slot or not (no coordination between users). Focusing on the high SNR behavior of the system, this paper presents the optimal value of the network average Degrees of Freedom (DoF) in different network settings. To this end, after finding an upper-bound for the network average DoF, we propose a transmission scheme (based on interference alignment) which achieves this upper-bound. Some illustrative examples are also presented in the paper.
Pushing methods for working six-legged robots capable of locomotion and manipulation in three modes

A working six-legged robot which can switch three modes for locomotion and manipulation was already developed. In its vertical four-leg two-arm mode, lower four legs are used for locomotion and upper two legs for manipulation with its body vertical to the ground. In order to expend capabilities of this robot, a method of pushing a large object in this mode is proposed. The robot holds the object using its upper two legs and body. The robot leans against the object and applies pushing force. Then it walks by moving the outer and inner pairs of the lower four legs alternately. Because of this symmetric walking, the robot can push the object with keeping lateral balance. It can apply large force owing to the effect of its body weight. Because holding the object firmly, the robot can push the object stably without falling down. For comparison, two methods are also analyzed. First the robot simply walks by tripod gait with its body touching the object. Second the robot pushes the object using its upper two legs and walks using its lower four legs in vertical four-leg two-arm mode. Then the merits of the proposed method are clarified. Three methods are experimentally ascertained using the developed robot.
Inducible Protective Processes in Animal Systems XIII: Comparative Analysis of Induction of Adaptive Response by EMS and MMS in Ehrlich Ascites Carcinoma Cells

In order to investigate the presence of adaptive response in cancerous cells, two monofunctional alkylating agents, namely, ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) and methyl methanesulfonate (MMS), were employed to treat Ehrlich ascites carcinoma (EAC) cells in vivo. Conditioning dose of 80 mg/kg body weight of EMS or 50 mg/kg body weight of MMS and challenging dose of 240 mg/kg body weight of EMS or 150 mg/kg body weight of MMS were selected by pilot toxicity studies. Conditioned EAC cells when challenged after 8 h time lag resulted in significant reduction in chromosomal aberrations compared to challenging dose of respective agents. As has been proved in earlier studies with normal organisms, even in cancerous cells (EAC), there is presence of adaptive response to methylating and ethylating agents. Furthermore, it is also interesting to note in the present studies that the methylating agent, MMS, is a stronger inducer of the adaptive response than the ethylating agent, EMS.
Gabor-based Discriminant Locality Preserving Projections for face recognition

In this paper, a novel face recognition method called gabor-based discriminant locality preserving projections (Gabor-DLPP) is proposed. Locality preserving projections (LPP) is a recently proposed method for linear dimensionality reduction. Gabor-DLPP first gets the high-order statistic information by calculating the Gabor wavelet representation of face images. Based on LPP, Gabor-DLPP takes into account the between-class information, changes the objective function, and extracts the discriminant feature of face for recognition. We performed comparative experiments of various face recognition schemes, including PCA, Gabor-DLPP, LPP and LDA. Experimental results on AR and Yale database show the superior of the proposed method.
Ensemble method based on individual evolving classifiers

Humans often seek a second or third opinion about an important matter. Then, a final decision is reached after weighing and combining these opinions. This idea is the base of the ensemble based systems. Ensembles of classifiers are well established as a method for obtaining highly accurate classifiers by combining less accurate ones. On the other hand, evolving classifiers are inspired by the idea of evolve their structure in order to adapt to the changes of the environment. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept method for constructing an ensemble system based on Evolving Fuzzy Systems. The main contribution of this approach is that the base-classifiers are self-developing (evolving) Fuzzy-rule-based (FRB) classifiers. Thus, we present an ensemble system which is based on evolving classifiers and keeps the properties of the evolving approach classification of streaming data. It is important to clarify that the evolving classifiers are gradually developing but they are not genetic or evolutionary.
Affordance Judgments in HMD-Based Virtual Environments: Stepping over a Pole and Stepping off a Ledge

People judge what they can and cannot do all the time when acting in the physical world. Can I step over that fence or do I need to duck under it? Can I step off of that ledge or do I need to climb off of it? These qualities of the environment that people perceive that allow them to act are called affordances. This article compares people’s judgments of affordances on two tasks in both the real world and in virtual environments presented with head-mounted displays. The two tasks were stepping over or ducking under a pole, and stepping straight off of a ledge. Comparisons between the real world and virtual environments are important because they allow us to evaluate the fidelity of virtual environments. Another reason is that virtual environment technologies enable precise control of the myriad perceptual cues at work in the physical world and deepen our understanding of how people use vision to decide how to act. In the experiments presented here, the presence or absence of a self-avatar—an animated graphical representation of a person embedded in the virtual environment—was a central factor. Another important factor was the presence or absence of action, that is, whether people performed the task or reported that they could or could not perform the task. The results show that animated self-avatars provide critical information for people deciding what they can and cannot do in virtual environments, and that action is significant in people’s affordance judgments.
Visualization of variations in human brain morphology using differentiating reflection functions

Conventional visualization media such as MRI prints and computer screens are inherently two dimensional, making them incapable of displaying true 3D volume data sets. By applying only transparency or intensity projection, and ignoring light-matter interaction, results will likely fail to give optimal results. Little research has been done on using reflectance functions to visually separate the various segments of a MRI volume. We will explore if applying specific reflectance functions to individual anatomical structures can help in building an intuitive 2D image from a 3D dataset. We will test our hypothesis by visualizing a statistical analysis of the genetic influences on variations in human brain morphology because it inherently contains complex and many different types of data making it a good candidate for our approach
Ethnomedicinal Uses of Honeybee Products in Lithuania: The First Analysis of Archival Sources

Lithuania has old ethnomedicine traditions, consisting of many recipes with herbal, animal, and mineral original ingredients. All these findings were mostly collected in Lithuanian language, often in local community's dialects, and stored only in archives. We analyzed archival sources about honeybee and its products used for medicinal purposes dated from 1886 till 1992 in different parts of Lithuania. We systematized and presented the most important information about bees and their products: indication for usage, ingredients used in the recipe, their preparation techniques, and application for therapeutic purposes. Researchers in Lithuania are now looking for new evidence based indications and preparation and standardization methods of bee products. Archival sources are a foundation for studies in Lithuania. The results can be integrated into scientifically approved folk medicine practices into today's healthcare.
DISCERN: A collaborative visualization system for learning cryptographic protocols

In this paper we propose a novel approach to the learning of cryptographic protocols, based on a collaborative role-based visualization system, DISCERN, that helps students to understand a protocol by actively engaging them in a simulation of its execution. In DISCERN, each student shares a visual exemplification of a real-world scenario with other students and impersonates one of the parties involved in the execution of a protocol. Students may take the role of legal or malicious parties and are provided with primitives that are useful for the implementation of several protocols. To achieve a certain security goal correctly, legal parties have to collaborate and carefully execute the steps required by the implemented protocol in the correct order. If any error is made, the security of the protocol is exposed to the threats coming from other students impersonating malicious parties. The entire process is run under the supervision of the teacher.
Computer Vision in the Post-Production Industry

The field of special effects in post-production has undergone an exciting period of innovation in recent years. There has been a surge in demand for camera tracking or “matchmoving”. A number of companies have built manual matchmoving products, and more recently automatic matchmovers have come to market. We will discuss the nature of the problems that the industry requires solved, and the products that have attempted to deliver solutions. Complex vision algorithms have inevitable failure modes, and this raises several issues including the relationship between automatic and manual solutions and the performance of published algorithms.
New adaptive blind equalization algorithms for constant modulus constellations

We present a new class of adaptive filtering algorithms for blind equalization of constant modulus signals. The algorithms are first derived in a classical system identification context by minimizing at each iteration a deterministic criterion and then their counterpart for blind equalization is derived by modifying this criterion taking into account the constant-modulus property of the transmitted signal. The algorithms impose more constraints than the classical constant modulus algorithm (CMA) and as a result achieve faster convergence. An asymptotic analysis has provided useful parameter bounds that guarantee the algorithms' stability. A priori knowledge of these bounds helps the algorithms escape from undesirable local minima of their cost function thus giving them a potential advantage over the classical CMA. An efficient computational organization for the derived algorithms is also proposed and their behaviour has been tested by means of computer simulations. <<ETX>>
The Design and Effects of Monetary Policy in Sub-Saharan African Countries

Since the 1990s there have been a number of major changes in the design and conduct of monetary policy. In a globalized environment, there is less time to adjust to shocks and greater need to achieve closer convergence of economic performance among trading partners. As a result, a number of developing countries have adopted exchange rate regimes with more flexibility, and thereby greater scope for monetary policy. Notable examples include a number of sub-Saharan African countries moving from fixed exchange-rate regimes to more flexible regimes and the adoption of formal or informal inflation targeting regimes by some of these countries. These changes have triggered considerable debate on how monetary policy should be conducted and the effects it has on the real economy. Mohsin Khan discusses the conventional objectives, targets, and instruments of monetary policy, including an analysis of the monetary transmission process. This paper examines the problems of dynamic inconsistency and inflationary bias, where governments deviate from their stated or target inflation level in order to obtain short-run output gains. Most economists now agree that any rules-based regime permits a margin for discretion, and they reject the idea that rules and discretion are mutually exclusive. As policymakers in many countries throughout the world have gravitated toward an approach based more on rules than on full discretion, a key issue is choosing an appropriate policy target, or nominal anchor. Khan discusses nominal anchors and current monetary frameworks before moving on to analyze the output effects of monetary policy. He looks at the relationship between the growth of GDP and different monetary aggregates in 20 sub-Saharan African economies and finds empirical support for the hypothesis that credit growth is more closely linked than is money growth to the growth of real GDP in these countries.
USENIX Association Proceedings of the FREENIX Track : 2004

Xen is an x86 virtual machine monitor produced by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and released under the GNU General Public License. Performance results comparing XenoLinux (Linux running in a Xen virtual machine) to native Linux as well as to other virtualization tools such as User Mode Linux (UML) were recently published in the paper “Xen and the Art of Virtualization” at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (October 2003). In this study, we repeat this performance analysis of Xen. We also extend the analysis in several ways, including comparing XenoLinux on x86 to an IBM zServer. We use this study as an example of repeated research. We argue that this model of research, which is enabled by open source software, is an important step in transferring the results of computer science research into production environments.