Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SHOPSMART: product recommendations through technical specifications and user reviews

This paper describes a new method for providing recommendations tailored to a user's preferences using text mining techniques and online technical specifications of products. We first learn a model that can predict the price of a product given automatically-determined features describing technical specifications and users' opinions. We then use this model to rank a list of products based on individual users' preferences about various features. On a data set collected from Amazon reviews and online technical specifications, rankings produced by this model rank the best product for a user in the 87th percentile of products in its category, on average. Our approach outperforms several comparison systems by 21 percentiles or more.
X-ray properties of the Parkes sample of flat-spectrum radio sources: dust in radio-loud quasars?

We investigate the X-ray properties of the Parkes sample of Bat-spectrum radio sources using data from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey and archival pointed PSPC observations. In total, 163 of the 323 sources are detected. For the remaining 160 sources, 2 sigma upper limits to the X-ray flux are derived. We present power-law photon indices in the 0.1-2.4 keV energy band for 115 sources, which were determined either with a hardness ratio technique or from direct fits to pointed PSPC data if a sufficient number of photons were available. The average photon index is lGamma g = 1.95(-0.12)(+0.13) for flat-spectrum radio-loud quasars, lGamma g = 1.70(-0.24)(+0.23) for galaxies, and lGamma g = 2.40(-0.31)(+0.12) for BL Lac objects. The soft X-ray photon index is correlated with redshift and with radio spectral index in the sense that sources at high redshift and/or with flat (or inverted) radio spectra have flatter X-ray spectra on average. The results are in accord with orientation-dependent unification schemes for radio-loud active galactic nuclei. Webster et al. discovered many sources with unusually red optical continua among the quasars of this sample, and interpreted this result in terms of extinction by dust. Although the X-ray spectra in general do not show excess absorption, we find that low-redshift optically red quasars have significantly lower soft X-ray luminosities on average than objects with blue optical continua. The difference disappears for higher redshifts, as is expected for intrinsic absorption by cold gas associated with the dust. In addition, the scatter in log(f(x)/f(o)) is consistent with the observed optical extinction, contrary to previous claims based on optically or X-ray selected samples. Although alternative explanations for the red optical continua cannot be excluded with the present X-ray data, we note that the observed X-ray properties are consistent with the idea that dust plays an important role in some of the radio-loud quasars with red optical continua.
A Model to Predict the Long-Term Strength of E-Glass Fiber Composites Subjected to Environmental Exposure

A Model to Predict the Long-Term Strength of E-Glass Fiber Composites Subjected to Environmental Exposure Thomas Miles Damiani Glass Fiber Reinforced Plastics (FRP) are being used in an increasing number of structures and machines because of their advantages over conventional materials such as steel or aluminum. However, sustained exposure to seemingly nominal service conditions can act to degrade the strength of an FRP composite, potentially negating the advantages of their use. This research sought to develop a theoretical model to predict the long-term strength of an FRP composite subjected to environmental exposure. Degradation models for the reinforcement fibers and the interphase region were developed and verified using existing data. The two constituent models were combined through the modification of Rosen’s model and compared with both unidirectional composite and laminate data. The composite model showed good agreement with the both the unidirectional composite and laminate data, thus verifying the model. Further investigation of this subject through more consistent and complete experimental data is needed for further verification.
Long-run determinants of immigration to Germany 1974 - 1999: A Ricardian framework

This paper examines the long-run determinants of immigration to Germany using a modified version of the Ricardo model. After a brief overview of labour flows to Germany and the related empirical literature, a Ricardian model of migration is estimated using static panel data methods. The results show that variables representing factor abundance appear to have no effect whatsoever on labour flows to Germany in a period of rising unemployment (1974? 1999), while variables representing income or productivity differences do have an impact. The latter obtains only if the stock of previous immigrants in the country of destination and the distance between sending countries and the receiving country are controlled for.
Revisiting Multi-channel Communication to Mitigate Interference and Link Dynamics in Wireless Sensor Networks

Multichannel communication has been proposed as alternative to adaptive (single-channel) routing protocols for mitigating the impact of interference and link dynamics in wireless sensor networks. While several studies have advocated features of both techniques (not without running up against contradicting arguments) a comprehensive study that aligns these results is still lacking. This paper aims at filling this gap. We present an experimental test bed setup used to perform extensive measurements for both single-channel and multichannel communication. We first analyze single-channel and multichannel communication over a single-hop in terms of packet reception ratio, maximum burst loss, temporal correlation of losses, and loss correlations across channels. Results show that multichannel communication with channel hopping significantly reduces link burstiness and packet loss correlation. For multi-hop networks, multi-channel communication and adaptive routing show similar end-to-end reliability in dense topologies, while multichannel communication can outperform adaptive routing in sparse networks with bursty links.
Object-aware Gradient-Domain Image Compositing

We describe an approach to suppress bleeding artifacts without altering the boundary location in gradient-domain compositing , a technique to create seamless composites. While gradient-domain compositing has become a standard tool for many complex image editing tasks such as seamless cloning, panorama stitching or scene completion, its quality suffers from mismatches in the composited image regions. We propose an approach that is robust to non-optimal region selection by the user without altering his selection which may be neither intended nor possible for certain compositing tasks. In addition, we present an easy-to-use extension to composite interleaving objects. The usability of our approach is demonstrated by several image compositing tasks and comparisons to current state-of-the-art algorithms in gradient-domain image compositing are presented.
Design automation for deepsubmicron: present and future

Advancing technology drives design technology and thus design automation (EDA). How to model interconnect, how to handle degradation of signal integrity and increasing power density are changing now, and have led to integrating logic and layout synthesis. Aggressive gate sizing to control timing has become part of any modern back-end. From 0.13 /spl mu/ and down, chips will be more susceptive to breakdown during fabrication (antenna effect) or to wear out over time (electromigration) and dealing with these issues will require careful planning. More integration of fast and accurate analysis with a complete design flow (chip planning, synthesis, placement and routing) will be needed, and still, advancing complexity will affect design and verification. Using hundreds of millions of devices effectively will be possible only by reusing pre-designed intellectual property (IP) effectively and by addressing system-level issues in EDA. In the long term only more radical changes will keep us on Moore's track, changes that ultimately will have us depart from the two/sup +/-dimensional confinement and lead to multiple active layers, and changes that will affect deeply the face of EDA altogether.
A new reduced-complexity sphere decoder for multiple antenna systems

Sphere decoding for multiple antenna systems has been shown to achieve near-ML performance with low complexity. However, the achievement of such an excellent performance-complexity tradeoff is highly dependent on the initial choice of sphere radius. We present a new sphere decoding algorithm which is even less computationally complex than the original sphere decoder. Moreover, the complexity of the new sphere decoder is relatively insensitive to the initial choice of sphere radius. Thus, by making the choice of radius sufficiently large, the ML solution is guaranteed with low complexity, even for large constellations. In our simulations, we show that with 4 transmit and 4 receive antennas and 64-QAM, our new sphere decoding algorithm achieves the exact ML solution with approximately a factor of 3.5 reduction in complexity when compared to the original sphere decoder, and a factor of 10/sup 5/ reduction when compared to brute-force ML decoding.
What can economics teach us about Santa Claus

In this paper we sketch a theory about the role of supernatural beliefs in incentivizing “good” behavior among children by parents. We present a simple theory on the production and the use of certain supernatural beliefs by parents to influence their children’s behavior. A prime example of this is the idea of Santa Claus and the idea that Santa Claus rewards children according to how well they have behaved during the year. We show that under standard conditions parents face a time inconsistency problem when trying to incentivize their offspring. We claim that the production of beliefs in certain supernatural or quasi-supernatural persons who allegedly have infinite lives can help parents discipline their children. Finally, we extend this logic to a community and its ruler or rulers. We show that rulers can have incentives to influence the beliefs of their subjects. This incentive is greater whenever the ruler is a monopolist and when he or she expects to rule for a long period. Rulers with limited ability and/or superior technology for producing beliefs will also supply more supernatural stories to enforce their rule.
Supporting End-to-End Social Media Data Analysis with the IndexedHBase Platform

As data intensive applications evolve, many research projects involving Big Data require efficient extraction and analysis of specific data subsets, rather than the whole dataset. Social media data analysis is one such example. While social media platforms such as Twitter provide tremendous data about all kinds of social activities, most research analyses focus on specific social events, such as presidential elections or protests. In order to support the requirements of such research use cases, the storage platform needs to provide not only a scalable solution for the overall large dataset, but also mechanisms for efficiently querying the target subsets and applying post-query analyses. This paper introduces IndexedHBase, a storage platform specially designed to support end-to-end analysis of social media data. IndexedHBase uses HBase as the storage substrate, and provides a customizable indexing framework to facilitate queries about data subsets related to different social events. Beyond the queries, IndexedHBase can be integrated with parallel processing runtimes such as Hadoop and Twister to support sophisticated analysis of the query results through user-defined MapReduce functions. We describe the architecture and components of IndexedHBase, and demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency by reproducing the end-to-end analysis of a published research project about the 2010 US midterm elections. We then extend this to a data subset about the 2012 presidential election, which serves to demonstrate that IndexedHBase correctly generates results that match with independent evaluations. Furthermore, our parallel implementation for the most time-consuming analysis step can achieve a processing speed that is tens to hundreds of times faster compared with a baseline sequential implementation in R for a distributed setup.
Using stereotypes to help characterize commits

Individual commits to a version control system are automatically characterized based on the stereotypes of added and deleted methods. The stereotype of each method is automatically reverse engineerd using a previously defined taxonomy. Method stereotypes reflect intrinsic atomic behavior of a method and its role in the class. The stereotypes of the added and deleted methods form a descriptors are then used to categorize commits, into types, based on the impact of the changes to a class (or classes). The goal is to gain a better understanding of the design changes to a system over its history and provide a means for documenting the commit.
Spatiotemporal periodicity during atrial fibrillation in the isolated sheep heart.

BACKGROUND The activation patterns that underlie the irregular electrical activity during atrial fibrillation (AF) have traditionally been described as disorganized or random. Recent studies, based predominantly on statistical methods, have provided evidence that AF is spatially organized. The objective of this study was to demonstrate the presence of spatial and temporal periodicity during AF. METHODS AND RESULTS We used a combination of high-resolution video imaging, ECG recordings, and spectral analysis to identify sequential wave fronts with temporal periodicity and similar spatial patterns of propagation during 20 episodes of AF in 6 Langendorff-perfused sheep hearts. Spectral analysis of AF demonstrated multiple narrow-band peaks with a single dominant peak in all cases (mean, 9.4+/-2.6 Hz; cycle length, 112+/-26 ms). Evidence of spatiotemporal periodicity was found in 12 of 20 optical recordings of the right atrium (RA) and in all (n=19) recordings of the left atrium (LA). The cycle length of spatiotemporal periodic waves correlated with the dominant frequency of their respective optical pseudo-ECGs (LA: R2=0.99, slope=0.94 [95% CI, 0.88 to 0.99]; RA: R2=0.97, slope=0.92 [95% CI, 0.80 to 1.03]). The dominant frequency of the LA pseudo-ECG alone correlated with the global bipolar atrial EG (R2=0.76, slope=0.75 [95% CI, 0.52 to 0.99]). In specific examples, sources of periodic activity were seen as rotors in the epicardial sheet or as periodic breakthroughs that most likely represented transmural pectinate muscle reentry. However, in the majority of cases, periodic waves were seen to enter the mapping area from the edge of the field of view. CONCLUSIONS Reentry in anatomically or functionally determined circuits forms the basis of spatiotemporal periodic activity during AF. The cycle length of sources in the LA determines the dominant peak in the frequency spectra in this experimental model of AF.
Energy-Aware Virtual Backbone Tree for Efficient Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Virtual backbone has been proposed recently for provisioning an efficient communication infrastructure in energy constrained wireless sensor network. In this paper, a distributed algorithm is proposed for constructing a energy-aware virtual backbone tree (EVBT) for general-purpose communication in wireless sensor network. What distinguishes our algorithm from others is that it chooses only nodes with adequate energy levels (energy level above threshold) as the member of the virtual backbone. Simulation results show that size of the EVBT is always much smaller compared to other prominent schemes. This will greatly reduce the protocol overhead. It also shows that algorithm performs competitively with others in terms total energy consumption for data delivery along the tree. The use of multiple nodes disjoint EVBTs further improves the robustness of the communication infrastructure.
Topological analysis of the complex formed between neurokinin A and the NK2 tachykinin receptor

Neurokinin A stimulates physiological responses in the peripheral and central nervous systems upon interacting primarily with the tachykinin NK2 receptor (NK2R). In this study, the structure of NKA bound to the NK2R is characterised by use of fluorescence resonance energy transfer. Four fluorescent NKA analogues with Texas red introduced at amino acid positions 1, 4, 7 and 10 were prepared. When bound to a NK2R carrying enhanced green fluorescent protein at the N‐terminus, all peptides reduce green fluorescent protein fluorescence from 10% to 50% due to energy transfer. The derived donor‐acceptor distances are 46, 55, 59 and 69 Å for the fluorophore linked to positions 1–10, respectively. The monotonic increase in distance clearly indicates that the peptide adopts an extended structure when bound to its receptor.
Reachability of a class of infinite-dimensional linear systems: an external approach with applicatio

This paper studies the question of quasi- (approximate) reachability of the standard observable realizations of pseudorational impulse responses introduced by the author. The framework places the current theory of retarded and neutral delay-differential systems into a unified input/output framework. Several necessary and sufficient conditions for quasi-reachability are derived. In particular, new criteria for quasireachability and eigenfunction completeness are obtained for general delay-differential systems with no restriction on the type of delays. Furthermore, as a byproduct, the theory leads to necessary and sufficient conditions for approximate left coprimeness of matrices with distribution entries. Examples are discussed to illustrate the theory.
Diet, nutrition and the prevention of hypertension and cardiovascular diseases

Abstract Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are growing contributors to global disease burdens, with epidemics of CVD advancing across many regions of the world which are experiencing a rapid health transition. Diet and nutrition have been extensively investigated as risk factors for major cardiovascular diseases like coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke and are also linked to other cardiovascular risk factors like diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. The interpretation of evidence needs to involve a critical appraisal of methodological issues related to measurement of exposures, nature of outcome variables, types of research design and careful separation of cause, consequence and confounding as the basis for observed associations. Adequate evidence is available, from studies conducted within and across populations, to link several nutrients, minerals, food groups and dietary patterns with an increased or decreased risk of CVD. Dietary fats associated with an increased risk of CHD include trans–fats and saturated fats, while polyunsaturated fats are known to be protective. Dietary sodium is associated with elevation of blood pressure, while dietary potassium lowers the risk of hypertension and stroke. Regular frequent intake of fruits and vegetables is protective against hypertension, CHD and stroke. Composite diets (such as DASH diets, Mediterranean diet, ‘prudent’ diet) have been demonstrated to reduce the risk of hypertension and CHD. Sufficient knowledge exists to recommend nutritional interventions, at both population and individual levels, to reduce cardiovascular risk. That knowledge should now be translated into policies which promote healthy diets and discourage unhealthy diets. This requires coordinated action at the level of governments, international organizations, civil society and responsible sections of the food industry.
Tuning the climate of a global model

During a development stage global climate models have their properties adjusted or tuned in various ways to best match the known state of the Earth's climate system. These desired properties are observables, such as the radiation balance at the top of the atmosphere, the global mean temperature, sea ice, clouds and wind fields. The tuning is typically performed by adjusting uncertain, or even non‐observable, parameters related to processes not explicitly represented at the model grid resolution. The practice of climate model tuning has seen an increasing level of attention because key model properties, such as climate sensitivity, have been shown to depend on frequently used tuning parameters. Here we provide insights into how climate model tuning is practically done in the case of closing the radiation balance and adjusting the global mean temperature for the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI‐ESM). We demonstrate that considerable ambiguity exists in the choice of parameters, and present and compare three alternatively tuned, yet plausible configurations of the climate model. The impacts of parameter tuning on climate sensitivity was less than anticipated.
Hope, perceived ability, and achievement in physical education classes and sports

The present study examined the relationships among hope, in its trait and state forms, perceived ability in sport, and students' grades in physical education classes (GPEC). Participants were 216 French students from middle and high schools. Consistent with previous studies (Curry, Snyder, Cook, Ruby, & Rehm, 1997; Peterson, Gerhardt, & Rode, 2006), results from a 6-month prospective study revealed that perceived ability predicted final GPEC, through the mediating role of state hope. Moreover, dispositional hope predicted perceived ability in PE, and state hope that, in turn, positively predicted final GPEC. Implications and future research directions are discussed in light of the present research.
Experimental Study to Determine if Low-Pathogenicity and High-Pathogenicity Avian Influenza Viruses Can Be Present in Chicken Breast and Thigh Meat Following Intranasal Virus Inoculation

Abstract Two low-pathogenicity (LP) and two high-pathogenicity (HP) avian influenza (AI) viruses were inoculated into chickens by the intranasal route to determine the presence of the AI virus in breast and thigh meat as well as any potential role that meat could fill as a transmission vehicle. The LPAI viruses caused localized virus infections in respiratory and gastrointestinal (GI) tracts. Virus was not detected in blood, bone marrow, or breast and thigh meat, and feeding breast and thigh meat from virus-infected birds did not transmit the virus. In contrast to the two LPAI viruses, A/chicken/Pennsylvania/1370/1983 (H5N2) HPAI virus caused respiratory and GI tract infections with systemic spread, and virus was detected in blood, bone marrow, and breast and thigh meat. Feeding breast or thigh meat from HPAI (H5N2) virus-infected chickens to other chickens did not transmit the infection. However, A/chicken/Korea/ES/2003 (H5N1) HPAI virus produced high titers of virus in the breast meat, and feeding breast meat from these infected chickens to other chickens resulted in AI virus infection and death. Usage of either recombinant fowlpox vaccine with H5 AI gene insert or inactivated AI whole-virus vaccines prevented HPAI virus in breast meat. These data indicate that the potential for LPAI virus appearing in meat of infected chickens is negligible, while the potential for having HPAI virus in meat from infected chickens is high, but proper usage of vaccines can prevent HPAI virus from being present in meat.