Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Asymmetric Similarity Measure for Tag Clustering on Flickr

Web 2.0 tools and environments have made tagging, the act of assigning keywords to on-line objects, a popular way to annotate shared resources. The success of now-prominent tagging systems makes tagging "the natural way for people to classify objects as well as an attractive way to discover new material". One of the most challenging problems is to harvest the semantics from these systems, which can support a number of applications, including tag clustering and tag recommendation. We conduct detailed studies on different types of tag relations and tag similarity measures, and propose a scalable measure that we name Reliability Factor Similarity Measure (RFSM). We compare it with two other measures having similar scalability by integrating them into hierarchical clustering methods and performing tag clustering on a subset of Flickr data. The results suggest that RFSM outperforms those two measures when it is applies for tag clustering purpose. We also present an alternative way of utilizing discovered tag relations to set up tag refining rules in order to deal with some noise in the initial tag sets, which can in turn improve the precision of tag relations.
Traffic-aware active link rate adaptation via power control for multi-hop multi-rate 802.11 networks

Many emerging wireless networks provide multi-rate facilities. How to explore the rate diversity is a new research interest. The commonly used Auto Rate Feedback (ARF) provides a flexibility of switching among the available rates. However, ARF can only passively react to the signal quality experienced at the receiver. In some occasions, we need to actively improve the signal quality in order to make the transmission rate to meet the traffic demand, even when the link length is a little large. This paper proposes a traffic-aware active link rate adaptation scheme via power control (TA-ARA) for multi-hop multi-rate 802.11 networks without degrading the serving rate of existing links. Its basic idea consists of the following points. We firstly run an ACK based information exchange to estimate the upper power bound of the link under adaptation. Then by continuously monitoring the queue length in the MAC layer, we are able to know whether the traffic demand can be met or not. If not, we try to increase the emitting power with respect to the estimated power upper-bound and switch to a higher modulation scheme. The simulations result shows that with this scheme, traffic demands can be tracked and satisfied much better than ARF.
Clinical pharmacokinetics of tacrolimus in rescue therapy after renal transplantation.

Tacrolimus, a potent new immunosuppressive drug, was introduced for rescue therapy in 25 renal transplant recipients with ongoing rejection (n = 24) or severe cyclosporine toxicity (n = 1). A highly significant (p < 0.001) rise in serum creatinine from 138 +/- 14 (3 months before conversion) to 295 +/- 26 mumol/l preceded conversion to tacrolimus. Tacrolimus rescue therapy started 73 +/- 9 months after transplantation, the follow-up was 8 +/- 1 months. Outcome, pharmacokinetics, and side-effects were analyzed. Patient survival was 100% on tacrolimus therapy. Graft survival was 88% after 3 months, and 70% after 8 months. Serum creatinine remained stable during the observation period (Crea after 8 months: 271 +/- 26 mumol/l). Starting with an initial dose of 9.6 +/- 0.3 mg/day (0.14 +/- 0.01 mg/kg/day) we could reduce tacrolimus dose to 6.0 +/- 0.9 mg/day (0.09 +/- 0.02 mg/kg/day; p < 0.001) after 1 month. Tacrolimus trough levels were adjusted to a therapeutic window of 5-8 ng/ml. We had to perform 3.4 +/- 0.5 dose adjustments per patient mainly within the first month after conversion (70%). A high variability in interindividual tacrolimus dose was noted. Last cyclosporine dose was a good predictor of required tacrolimus dose after 1 month (r = 0.88; p < 0.001). Overall, 82 adverse events were noted, of which 29 (35%) were associated with high trough levels (> 10 ng/ml). In contrast, 3 patients with trough levels < 4 ng/ml had ongoing rejection. Blood pressure and routine laboratory data remained unchanged. Steroid dose could be tapered from 12 +/- 2 to 5 +/- 0.3 mg/day (p < 0.02). Gingival hyperplasia and hirsutism improved after conversion. We conclude: Tacrolimus conversion for rescue therapy after renal transplantation is efficient and safe with target trough levels between 5 -8 ng/ml. Frequent drug monitoring is necessary, especially within the first month after conversion. Previous cyclosporine dose can be used as a guideline for starting dose.
Estratégias de Coping para Lidar com o Processo de Bullying: Um Estudo Qualitativo

The aim of the present study was to investigate coping strategies reported by children victims and non victims of bullying, identifying gender differences and school differences. Sixteen children, from a Public and a Private school were interviewed. Instruments to access bullying social roles and coping strategies were administered. The content analysis and the construction of categories about coping strategies were accomplished. The category with higher frequency of citation was Social Support Search, emphasizing the need of professional awareness and intervention toward bullying. The results showed no gender differences and also no differences between schools and among social roles (victims and non-victims).
The Soccer Handbook for Players, Coaches and Parents

Soccer, long the worlds most played sport, is now undergoing a phenomenal popularity spurt among youth in North America. This book, the complete amateur soccer handbook for all ages, is indispensable for players, coaches, managers, league officials, referees and parents. Rules of the game, conditioning methods, basic and advanced skills, positional play, team formations, defensive techniques--and much more--are covered. The Laws of the Game, a publication of the Fdration Internationale de Football Associations publication is reprinted in full. The modern short-ball soccer concept is explained. Ball control skills are stressed for both developing and advanced players, along with self-discipline and a strong defense. With this handbook, championship teams and successful players can be built on these principles. In addition to technical skills, the important principles of leadership, self-control, sportsmanship, team play, fairness, and self-confidence are also promoted.
How Learning Can Guide Evolution of Communication

The Baldwin effect is known as a possible scenario of the genetic acquisition process of a learned trait without the Lamarckian mechanism. However, it is still controversial how learning can facilitate evolution in dynamically changing environments caused by internal factors. Our purpose is to clarify whether and how leaning can facilitate evolution in dynamic environments which arise from communicative interactions among individuals. We constructed a simple computational model for the evolution of communication ability and its phenotypic plasticity. In the model, the levels of adaptive communication, which correspond to the expected fitness value when the communication results in success, of signalling and receiving processes are determined by different sets of traits under the assumption of the correlation between their fitness and the effects of epistatic interactions among traits. A communication is successful only when the levels of the signaller and the receiver are the same, and the individuals try to improve their communication levels through the learning process in which the values of plastic traits can be modified from their genetically determined values. The evolutionary experiments clearly showed that the Baldwin effect repeatedly occurred and facilitated the adaptive evolution of communication in this type of dynamic environments.
A Temporal Mining Method for an Interval Encoded Temporal Database with Prioritized Items

The necessity of this era is to extract meaningful information from large collections of data present in organizations. The traditional mining methods have previously been applied to a static database which has been encoded. The proposed method performs temporal mining by encoding the database with weighted items which prioritizes the items according to their importance from the user’s perspective. The proposed method, priority based temporal mining (PBTM) is found to have better performance than the time based Apriori when compared in terms of the execution time and computation. The experimental results are obtained from the complaints database of the telecommunications system, which shows the most feasible method for temporal mining.
RATIONAL SPECTRAL COLLOCATION METHOD FOR A COUPLED SYSTEM OF SINGULARLY PERTURBED BOUNDARY VALUE PROBLEMS

A novel collocation method for a coupled system of singularly perturbed linear equations is presented. This method is based on rational spectral collocation method in barycentric form with sinh transform. By sinh transform, the original Chebyshev points are mapped into the transformed ones clustered near the singular points of the solution. The results from asymptotic analysis about the singularity solution are employed to determine the parameters in this sinh transform. Numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the high accuracy and efficiency of our method.
Environment of infants during sleep and risk of the sudden infant death syndrome: results of 1993-5 case-control study for confidential inquiry into stillbirths and deaths in infancy

Abstract Objective: To investigate the role of sleeping arrangements as risk factors for the sudden infant death syndrome after a national risk reduction campaign. Design: Two year population based case-control study. Parental interviews were conducted for each infant who died and for four controls matched for age and date of interview. Setting: Three regions in England with a total population of 17 million people. Subjects: 195 babies who died and 780 matched controls. Results: Prone and side sleeping positions both carried increased risks of death compared with supine when adjusted for maternal age, parity, gestation, birth weight, exposure to smoke, and other relevant factors in the sleeping environment (multivariate odds ratio = 9.00 (95% confidence interval 2.84 to 28.47) and 1.84 (1.02 to 3.31), respectively). The higher incidence of side rather than prone sleeping led to a higher population attributable risk (side 18.4%, prone 14.2%). More of the infants who died were found with bed covers over their heads (21.58; 6.21 to 74.99). The use of a dummy had an apparent protective effect (0.38; 0.21 to 0.70). Bed sharing for the whole night was a significant risk factor for infants whose mothers smoked (9.25; 2.31 to 34.02). No protective effect of breast feeding could be identified on multivariate analysis. Conclusions: This study confirms the importance of certain risk factors for the sudden infant death syndrome and identifies others—for example, covers over the head, side sleeping position—which may be amenable to change by educating and informing parents and health care professionals. Key messages This large case-control study is the first after the national campaign to reduce the risk of the syndrome The risk of sudden infant death is increased by prone or side sleeping position; loose bedding (particularly duvets), which can slip over the baby's head; and bed sharing by mothers who smoke The risk may be reduced by supine sleeping position; placing the baby with feet at the foot of the cot (“feet to foot”); ensuring that bedding is securely tucked in; and avoiding the use of duvets
Unsupervised Individual Whales Identification: Spot the Difference in the Ocean

Identifying organisms is a key step in accessing information related to the ecology of species. But unfortunately, this is difficult to achieve due to the level of expertise necessary to correctly identify and record living organisms. To try bridging this gap, enormous work has been done on the development of automated species identification tools such as image-based plant identification or audio recordings-based bird identification. Yet, for some groups, it is preferable to monitor the organisms at the individual level rather than at the species level. The automatizing of this problem has received much less attention than species identification. In this paper, we address the specific scenario of discovering humpack whales individuals in a large collections of pictures collected by nature observers. The process is initiated from scratch, without any knowledge on the number of individuals and without any training samples of these individuals. Thus, the problem is entirely unsupervised. To address it, we set up and experimented a scalable fine-grained matching system allowing to discover small rigid visual patterns in highly clutter background. The evaluation was conducted in blind in the context of the LifeCLEF evaluation campaign. Results show that the proposed system provides very promising results with regard to the difficulty of the task but that there is still room for improvements to reach higher recall and precision in the future.
Dysregulation of allergic airway inflammation in the absence of microbial colonization.

RATIONALE The incidence of allergic disorders is increasing in developed countries and has been associated with reduced exposure to microbes and alterations in the commensal bacterial flora. OBJECTIVES To ascertain the relevance of commensal bacteria on the development of an allergic response, we used a model of allergic airway inflammation in germ-free (GF) mice that lack any exposure to pathogenic or nonpathogenic microorganisms. METHODS Allergic airway inflammation was induced in GF, specific pathogen-free (SPF), or recolonized mice by sensitization and challenge with ovalbumin. The resulting cellular infiltrate and cytokine production were measured. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Our results show that the total number of infiltrating lymphocytes and eosinophils were elevated in the airways of allergic GF mice compared with control SPF mice, and that this increase could be reversed by recolonization of GF mice with the complex commensal flora of SPF mice. Exaggerated airway eosinophilia correlated with increased local production of Th2-associated cytokines, elevated IgE production, and an altered number and phenotype of conventional dendritic cells. Regulatory T-cell populations and regulatory cytokine levels were unaltered, but GF mice exhibited an increased number of basophils and decreased numbers of alveolar macrophages and plasmacytoid dendritic cells. CONCLUSIONS These data demonstrate that the presence of commensal bacteria is critical for ensuring normal cellular maturation, recruitment, and control of allergic airway inflammation.
MuSIC: Mobility-Aware Optimal Service Allocation in Mobile Cloud Computing

This paper exploits the observation that using tiered clouds, i.e. clouds at multiple levels (local and public) can increase the performance and scalability of mobile applications. User Mobility introduces new complexities in enabling an optimal decomposition of tasks that can execute cooperatively on mobile clients and the tiered cloud architecture while considering multiple QoS goals such application delay, device power consumption and user cost/price. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to model mobile applications as a location-time workflows (LTW) of tasks, here user mobility patterns are translated to a mobile service usage patterns. We show that an optimal mapping of LTWs to tiered mobile cloud resources is an NP-hard problem. We propose an efficient heuristic algorithm called MuSIC that is able to perform well (78% of optimal, 30% better than simple strategies), and scale well to a large number of users while ensuring high application QoS. We evaluate MuSIC and the 2-tier mobile cloud approach via implementation (on real world clouds) and extensive simulations using rich mobile applications like intensive signal processing and video streaming applications. Our experimental and simulation results indicate that MuSIC supports scalable operation (100+ concurrent users executing complex workflows) while improving QoS. We observe about 25% lower delays and power (under fixed price constraints) and about 35% decrease in price (considering fixed delay) in comparison to only using the public cloud. Our studies also show that MuSIC performs quite well under different mobility patterns, e.g. random waypoint, Manhattan models and is resilient to errors/uncertainty in prediction of mobile user location-time workflows.
A Generalized Poor-Verdú Error Bound for Multihypothesis Testing

A lower bound on the minimum error probability for multihypothesis testing is established. The bound, which is expressed in terms of the cumulative distribution function of the tilted posterior hypothesis distribution given the observation with tilting parameter , generalizes an earlier bound due the Poor and Verdú (1995). A sufficient condition is established under which the new bound (minus a multiplicative factor) provides the exact error probability asymptotically in . Examples illustrating the new bound are also provided.
On the Modeling and Performance of Three Opportunistic Spectrum Access Schemes

We model and study the amount of supported secondary system traffic for three opportunistic spectrum access schemes. We assume that the spectrum band is partitioned into C frequency bins, and whenever all are occupied, spectrum access by secondary radio (SR) will be blocked. On the other hand, an SR transmission is forced to terminate whenever a primary radio (PR) transmission is detected in the same frequency bin. The grade of service (GoS) of the secondary system is quantified by the SR service dropped and SR service blocked probabilities. We model each scheme using a continuous-time Markov chain and derive the expressions to compute the two GoS performance metrics. In the first scheme, the PRs randomly access the frequency bins with no knowledge about the presence of SRs. Therefore, the existing SR transmission has to drop whenever a PR chooses to transmit in the same frequency bin, although there are other unoccupied frequency bins. For the second scheme, the newly arrived PR will avoid colliding with existing SRs by occupying the vacant frequency bin. In the third scheme, the newly arrived SR is limited to access C - r frequency bins only, where r can flexibly be selected to optimize the amount of supported SR traffic. This paper suggests that more SR traffic can be supported when spectrum access is coordinated between primary and secondary systems. We finally compare the effective spectrum utilization. The simulated results verify the correctness of the derived expressions.
An Effective Drought Early Warning System for Sub-Saharan Africa: Integrating Modern and Indigenous Approaches

Droughts remain the number one disaster in Africa; of all the people affected by all types disasters, drought is responsible for over 88% of them. An effective drought early warning system can support appropriate mitigation and preparedness strategies and hence minimize these effects. Existing systems tend to ignore the 'at risk' community and are faced with a number of implementation challenges; their utilisation is very low. This paper describes an effective drought early warning system that integrates indigenous and scientific drought forecasting approaches. The system is anchored on a novel integration framework called ITIKI (acronym for Information Technology and Indigenous Knowledge with Intelligence). Indigenous knowledge ensures that the system is relevant, acceptable and resilient. ITIKI further employs three ICTs (Mobile phones, wireless sensor networks and artificial intelligence) to enhance the system's effectiveness, affordability, sustainability and intelligence. This paper describes the design, development and evaluation of the system.
New Explorations in the Field of Leadership Research: A Walk on the Dark Side of Personality & Implications for Leadership (In)Effectiveness

Abstract : If asked to generate a list of leaders, most people could quickly provide the names of several very popular, successful, and great leaders. It seems that when we think about leadership, we are conditioned to think about only the positives. The increasing number of corporate scandals, ethical breaches, and failed organizations suggests that we have neglected a very important and fruitful side of leadership research -- the dark side of personality and its effects on leadership and organizational performance with an emphasis on ineffective leadership or leadership gone wrong. The central objective of this thesis was to develop a more robust understanding of the predictor-criterion linkage in the leadership domain, with a particular emphasis on the derailing/dark side personality traits; and to test the assertion that using what we know about the personality-based, interpersonal flaws that lead to derailment and failure does, indeed, enhance our ability to predict leadership performance. The study employed available measures of FFM traits and derailing/dark side traits to test the hypotheses that: 1) derailing/dark side traits would be distinct from FFM personality traits, 2) including derailing/dark side traits in the prediction of leadership performance would account for additional, incremental variance beyond the FFM traits, 3) emotional stability/adjustment would moderate the relationship between leadership performance and derailing/dark side traits, and 4) the relationship between derailing/dark side traits and leadership performance would be curvilinear and follow an inverted U function. The results provided robust support for the validity and utility of using derailing/dark side traits in the selection of leaders and the assessment of leadership performance across a wide range of samples. Implications for theory, future leadership research, management/leadership practitioners are also discussed.
Systematic Testing of Reactive Software with Non-Deterministic Events: A Case Study on LG Electric Oven

Most home appliance devices such as electric ovens are reactive systems which repeat receiving a user input/event through an event handler, updating their internal state based on the input, and generating outputs. A challenge to test a reactive program is to check if the program correctly reacts to various non-deterministic sequence of events because an unexpected sequence of events may make the system fail due to the race conditions between the main loop and asynchronous event handlers. Thus, it is important to systematically generate/test various sequences of events by controlling the order of events and relative timing of event occurrences with respect to the main loop execution. In this paper, we report our industrial experience to solve the aforementioned problem by developing a systematic event generation framework based on concolic testing technique. We have applied the framework to a LG electric oven and detected several critical bugs including one that makes the oven ignore user inputs due to the illegal state transition.
Paroxetine in Parkinson’s disease: Effects on motor and depressive symptoms

Article abstract Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors have been used in the treatment of depression in patients with PD. Conflicting data as to whether selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors worsen parkinsonian motor symptomatology have been reported. In this study, the additional 6 months therapy with paroxetine 20 mg/d in a group of depressed patients with PD did not modify parkinsonian motor function (Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale scores); however, in one patient, fully reversible worsening of tremor was observed. Depression, as evaluated by Beck Depression Inventory and Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, improved from baseline to final visit (p < 0.05 by analysis of variance).