Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
False-name-proof combinatorial auction protocol: Groves Mechanism with SubModular Approximation

This paper develops a new combinatorial auction protocol called the Groves Mechanism with SubModular Approximation (GM-SMA). This protocol satisfies the following characteristics: (1) it is false-name-proof, (2) each winner is included in a Pareto efficient allocation, and (3) as long as a Pareto efficient allocation is achieved, the protocol is robust against the collusion of losers and the outcome is in the core. As far as the authors are aware, the GM-SMA is the first protocol that satisfies all three of these characteristics.The basic ideas of the GM-SMA are as follows: (i) It is based on the VCG protocol, i.e., the payment of a winner in this protocol is identical to the payment in one instance of the Groves mechanism, which is a class of protocols that includes the VCG. (ii) When calculating the payment of a bidder, we approximate the valuations of other bidders by using a submodular valuation function (submodular approximation). Simulation results show that the GM-SMA achieves a better social surplus and seller's revenue than existing false-name-proof protocols, as long as the submodular approximation is close enough to the original valuations.
Latitude or Latent Control? How Occupational Embeddedness and Control Shape Emergent Coordination

We examine how different occupational communities that are embedded in organizations exercise control processes to achieve emergent coordination as they create complex products together. We compare two types of organizations, equipment manufacturing and film production, and find that although occupational control was important for emergent coordination in both settings, this relationship varied according to two aspects of occupational embeddedness: organizational acknowledgment of occupational control and occupational interdependence. In the equipment manufacturing setting, occupational control was latent: the communities visibly conformed to organizational control processes while exercising occupational control behind the scenes to coordinate emergently. In the film setting, the organization granted the occupational community significant latitude over its tasks, which enabled members to coordinate emergently to solve problems the majority of the time. We propose that these two aspects of occupational embeddedness must be analyzed together with occupational control processes to explain how integration unfolds in knowledge-based settings in ways that organizational control processes are ill-equipped to manage.
Translating Chinese Unknown Words by Automatically Acquired Templates

In this paper, we present a translation template model to translate Chinese unknown words. The model exploits translation templates, which are extracted automatically from a word-aligned parallel corpus, to translate unknown words. The translation templates are designed in accordance with the structure of unknown words. When an unknown word is detected during translation, the model applies translation templates to the word to get a set of matched templates, and then translates the word into a set of suggested translations. Our experiment results demonstrate that the translations suggested by the unknown word translation template model significantly improve the performance of the Moses machine translation system.
Evidence for heterogeneous pathogenesis of insulin-treated diabetes in black and white children.

OBJECTIVE We have previously reported differences in the prevalence of beta-cell autoantibodies (AAs) in black and white children with insulin-treated diabetes, suggesting that the disease pathogenesis may be more heterogeneous among racial groups than previously thought. To further explore this issue, we compared clinical, biochemical, and autoimmune characteristics at disease diagnosis and follow-up treatment in an expanded number of black and white children with and without the presence of AAs. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The study cohort of 130 black children and adolescents, aged <19 years, diagnosed with diabetes and treated with insulin at time of diagnosis (January 1979 to December 1998) were matched with an equal number of white children by age at onset, sex, and year of diagnosis. RESULTS The black children had a higher prevalence of obesity (43 vs. 11%) and acanthosis nigricans (21 vs. 1%) than white children and a lower prevalence of AAs. Compared with black children who had AAs, those with no AAs were older and had a higher prevalence of obesity, acanthosis nigricans, and parental diabetes. However, one of four of the black children with AAs was obese and/or had acanthosis nigricans. Among white children, the absence of AAs was not associated with any differences in terms of obesity or acanthosis nigricans compared with those with AAs. Similar to their black counterparts, white children without antibodies were older and had a higher prevalence of parental diabetes. Although treatment with an insulin sensitizer was used, insulin therapy was rarely discontinued on follow-up. CONCLUSIONS These pediatric subjects, irrespective of autoimmunity, often showed characteristics associated with type 2 diabetes. These characteristics were more frequently displayed in black than in white children. Our data suggest that childhood diabetes may constitute a spectrum of pathogenic mechanisms that may overlap, including those typically associated with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. This finding could have therapeutic implications.
Curtailing data biases in business research: Introducing a hybrid approach

This study elucidates the falsity of business research in relying on either respondents or informants alone for data collection, and argues that with the biased data, business research cannot provide unbiased solutions. We compare 400 reports (200 respondents and 200 informants) on the workplace deviance and assess the goodness of both the techniques. Analysis of variance and posthoc (descriptive discriminant analysis) indicate significant disparities between the two approaches across all items. In the informant’s role, people tend to overreport, whereas in the respondent’s part they underreport an undesirable behavior. Further, we find that conventional techniques for assessing the construct’s validity and common-method bias neither assures realistic measurement nor eliminate the response bias. Drawing on the theory of psychological projection, we propose a hybrid approach that curtails some of the main biases in data and measurement. Qualitative confirmation through informal interviews with managers in the investigated firms validates the proposed method.
The BioPAX Validator

Summary: BioPAX is a community-developed standard language for biological pathway data. A key functionality required for efficient BioPAX data exchange is validation—detecting errors and inconsistencies in BioPAX documents. The BioPAX Validator is a command-line tool, Java library and online web service for BioPAX that performs >100 classes of consistency checks. Availability and implementation: The validator recognizes common syntactic errors and semantic inconsistencies and reports them in a customizable human readable format. It can also automatically fix some errors and normalize BioPAX data. Since its release, the validator has become a critical tool for the pathway informatics community, detecting thousands of errors and helping substantially increase the conformity and uniformity of BioPAX-formatted data. The BioPAX Validator is open source and released under LGPL v3 license. All sources, binaries and documentation can be found at sf.net/p/biopax, and the latest stable version of the web application is available at biopax.org/validator. Contact: igor.rodchenkov@utoronto.ca or gary.bader@utoronto.ca
BIMAS: a prototype for intrusion detection system using motion sensors and ZigBee

Wireless sensors nodes are broadly used in the area of remote monitoring such as habitat tracking, wild life monitoring, weather and tsunami alert. These nodes require less administration since they are placed in remote locations, and battery power is needed for them to sustain their lifetime. Since the nodes are placed in remote location, powering up the nodes is often impossible. Autonomic computing is needed in these situations so that sensor nodes can supervise themselves without being monitored by human. Hence a mobile agent assisted self-healing sensor network is proposed in our work. Simulation results are presented to validate our protocol in terms of energy efficiency and self-healing. The idea then further expanded into in a real world prototype specifically into intrusion detection system within buildings. Preliminary results of the prototype exhibit that the system is feasible to be deployed in a real world scenario with the energy efficient routing protocol. This gives innovation into energy efficient routing protocol in wireless sensor areas.
Challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks

Software development for wireless sensor networks requires novel programming paradigms and technologies. This article describes the concept of a new service oriented software architecture for mobile sensor networks. With this architecture, a flexible, scalable programming of applications based on an adaptive middleware is possible. The middleware supports mechanisms for cooperative data mining, selforganization, networking, and energy optimization to build higher-level service structures. The purpose of our research activities is the development of a framework, which radically simplifies the development of software for sensor network applications.
PCR assessment of HSV-1 corneal infection in animals treated with rose bengal and lissamine green B.

PURPOSE In vivo, the ophthalmic dye rose bengal displays profound antiviral effects against herpes simplex virus (HSV)-1, thus limiting its utility in diagnosis of epithelial keratitis when used before viral culture is performed. In contrast, lissamine green B does not possess significant antiviral activity in vivo. To determine whether polymerase chain reaction (PCR) could successfully detect HSV-1 DNA in ocular samples that have been exposed to ophthalmic dyes, animal models were used to observe the presence of infectious HSV-1 and viral DNA in eyes treated with rose bengal or lissamine green B. METHODS Animals were bilaterally infected with HSV-1 strain H129, and at daily intervals up to 16 days post infection (dpi) rose bengal or lissamine green B was instilled in the left eyes. The right eyes were not treated with dyes. Swabs of the dye-treated and untreated eyes were assayed by PCR for viral infectivity by culture and the presence of DNA specific for a fragment of the HSV-1 DNA polymerase gene. RESULTS A statistically equivalent number of samples from lissamine green B-treated and untreated eyes were positive by both viral culture and PCR. In contrast, rose bengal significantly decreased the infectious virus present in ocular secretions. A total of 44% and 78% of the rose bengal-treated and untreated eye samples, respectively, were positive by culture from 1 through 16 dpi. PCR was more sensitive than culture for detection of HSV-1 in rose bengal-treated eyes, in that 74% of rose bengal-treated samples were positive by PCR compared with 44% that were positive by culture during the 16-day period studied. It was also noted that both rose bengal and lissamine green B treatments slightly prolonged the period during which viral DNA was detectable in ocular secretions by PCR, possibly because the singlet oxygen produced by these photoreactive dyes compromised ocular cellular, humoral, and nonspecific immune factors allowing viral DNA to persist for slightly longer periods. CONCLUSIONS PCR can successfully detect HSV-1 DNA in ocular samples that are culture negative and contain rose bengal or lissamine green B. Visualization of ocular epithelial defects with lissamine green B does not interfere with detection of infectious virus or HSV-1 DNA.
ConfDTree: Improving Decision Trees Using Confidence Intervals

Decision trees have three main disadvantages: reduced performance when the training set is small, rigid decision criteria and the fact that a single "uncharacteristic" attribute might "derail" the classification process. In this paper we present ConfDTree - a post-processing method which enables decision trees to better classify outlier instances. This method, which can be applied on any decision trees algorithm, uses confidence intervals in order to identify these hard-to-classify instances and proposes alternative routes. The experimental study indicates that the proposed post-processing method consistently and significantly improves the predictive performance of decision trees, particularly for small, imbalanced or multi-class datasets in which an average improvement of 5%-9% in the AUC performance is reported.
A Importância da Reflexão no Estágio Curricular na Licenciatura em Enfermagem: Uso de Heurísticos

O presente artigo apresenta o desenvolvimento de um heuristico para estimular a reflexao sobre o clima emocional e as dimensoes relacional e comunicacional no estagio curricular supervisionado no curso de Licenciatura em Enfermagem da Escola de Enfermagem da Universidade de Sao Paulo. A metodologia consistiu na traducao, adaptacao, reorganizacao e desenvolvimento de um heuristico com foco na vivencia durante os estagios curriculares supervisionados da Licenciatura em Enfermagem. O heuristico e composto por 53 indagacoes reflexivas que evidenciam quatro dimensoes: o relacionamento entre o licenciando e o professor supervisor; entre o licenciando e os funcionarios das instituicoes de saude; entre os licenciandos e os estudantes; e entre os proprios licenciandos. O uso do heuristico pode contribuir para a reflexao sobre o estagio curricular supervisionado e auxiliar o licenciando a (re)pensar seu desempenho com vistas ao seu aprimoramento pessoal e docente a partir da analise de suas proprias emocoes, relacoes interpessoais e estrategias de comunicacao que podem interferir em seu processo de ensino e de aprendizagem.
Biological Phosphorus Removal During High-Rate, Low-Temperature, Anaerobic Digestion of Wastewater

We report, for the first time, extensive biologically mediated phosphate removal from wastewater during high-rate anaerobic digestion (AD). A hybrid sludge bed/fixed-film (packed pumice stone) reactor was employed for low-temperature (12°C) anaerobic treatment of synthetic sewage wastewater. Successful phosphate removal from the wastewater (up to 78% of influent phosphate) was observed, mediated by biofilms in the reactor. Scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray analysis revealed the accumulation of elemental phosphorus (∼2%) within the sludge bed and fixed-film biofilms. 4′, 6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI) staining indicated phosphorus accumulation was biological in nature and mediated through the formation of intracellular inorganic polyphosphate (polyP) granules within these biofilms. DAPI staining further indicated that polyP accumulation was rarely associated with free cells. Efficient and consistent chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal was recorded, throughout the 732-day trial, at applied organic loading rates between 0.4 and 1.5 kg COD m-3 d-1 and hydraulic retention times of 8–24 h, while phosphate removal efficiency ranged from 28 to 78% on average per phase. Analysis of protein hydrolysis kinetics and the methanogenic activity profiles of the biomass revealed the development, at 12°C, of active hydrolytic and methanogenic populations. Temporal microbial changes were monitored using Illumina MiSeq analysis of bacterial and archaeal 16S rRNA gene sequences. The dominant bacterial phyla present in the biomass at the conclusion of the trial were the Proteobacteria and Firmicutes and the dominant archaeal genus was Methanosaeta. Trichococcus and Flavobacterium populations, previously associated with low temperature protein degradation, developed in the reactor biomass. The presence of previously characterized polyphosphate accumulating organisms (PAOs) such as Rhodocyclus, Chromatiales, Actinobacter, and Acinetobacter was recorded at low numbers. However, it is unknown as yet if these were responsible for the luxury polyP uptake observed in this system. The possibility of efficient phosphate removal and recovery from wastewater during AD would represent a major advance in the scope for widespread application of anaerobic wastewater treatment technologies.
Automatically Linking GermaNet to Wikipedia for Harvesting Corpus Examples for GermaNet Senses

The comprehension of a word sense is much easier when its usages are illustrated by example sentences in linguistic contexts. Hence, examples are crucially important to better understand the sense of a word in a dictionary. The goal of this research is the semi-automatic enrichment of senses from the German wordnet GermaNet with corpus examples from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The paper describes the automatic mapping of GermaNet senses to Wikipedia articles, using proven, state-ofthe-art word sense disambiguation methods, in particular different versions of word overlap algorithms and PageRank as well as classifiers that combine these methods. This mapping is optimized for precision and then used to automatically harvest corpus examples from Wikipedia for GermaNet senses. The paper presents details about the optimization of the model for the GermaNet-Wikipedia mapping and concludes with a detailed evaluation of the quantity and quality of the harvested examples. Apart from enriching the GermaNet resource, the harvested corpus examples can also be used to construct a corpus of German nouns that are annotated with GermaNet senses. This sense-annotated corpus can be used for a wide range of NLP applications.
Women in the Lac Labor Market: The Remarkable 1990's

We examine levels and trends of labor market outcomes for women in the 1990? s using household survey data for 18 Latin American countries covering several years per country. The outcomes we analyze include labor force participation rates, the distribution of employment of women across sectors of the economy (formal versus informal) and across industries (agriculture versus non-agriculture), unemployment, and earnings. Overall we document substantial progress made by women in many areas. The gender wage gap is closing steadily in Venezuela, Costa Rica, Brazil and Uruguay, while Colombian women now enjoy higher earnings than those of men. Women? s share of household labor earnings rose from 28% in the early 1990? s to 30% in the late 1990? s. Regarding the quality of jobs, we examine self-employment and employment in small forms as possible indicators of employment in the informal sector. There is no evidence of a systematic increase in self-employment nor in employment in small firms, and contrary to findings by the ILO, we find that the share of female employment accounted by domestic servants did not increase in the 1990? s. Perhaps the salient development of the 1990? s for women in LAC countries was the brisk-paced, secular rise in their labor force participation rates. We examine this development from several angles. We explore the Singh-Goldin-Durand hypothesis that women? s work status changes with economic development. Mammen and Paxson (2000) examine this hypothesis using data for 90 countries, and find that female participation of 45-59 year olds follows a U-shaped profile, with rates rising with GDP per capita increases above $3000. We find that female participation in LAC does not follow the Mammen-Paxson pattern. Next, we examine the role of schooling in explaining the increase in female labor force participation in LAC countries. We find that increases in female schooling account for 30% of the overall increase in female participation rates. The remaining 70% is explained by increases in participation rates at given schooling levels. Finally, we analyze the role of wages, especially the returns to different schooling levels, as a partial explanation for the pattern of changes in labor force participation rates. All of these findings suggest a fair degree of change in the role of women within households and in the labor market. We conclude that the macro economic picture of stagnation for LAC in the 1990s masks non-trivial developments in the division of labor and time allocation by gender.
Improved radial basis function based parameterization for facial expression animation

This paper presents an improved method for facial expression animation based on the radial basis functions. The existing facial action coding system is adopted for expression parameterization. A set of parameters that are able to generate proper expressions is carefully selected through a series of analyses and comparisons. A deformation algorithm combining compactly supported radial basis functions with a geodesic distance metric is employed to address the difficulties in generating facial expressions, such as localized deformation and hole handling. In this work, the complex manipulation of a 3D face mesh is transformed into simple linear parameter adjustments, which is intuitive and efficient. Implementation results have demonstrated that real-time interactive mesh modification for facial expression animation is achieved.
A robust method for camera calibration and 3-D reconstruction for stereo vision systems

This work presents a camera calibration procedure for a stereo vision system to be applied in visual inspection activities involving the three-dimensional reconstruction of a scene. The presented procedure encompasses a robust method developed for solving the non-linear least-squares problems encountered, in order to obtain the global solution, and hence achieve the smallest error in estimating the parameters of the exterior orientation of the camera system. Stemming from the theoretical analysis of the camera orientation problem, the development of the robust method entailed a combination of optimization techniques. Experiments with real images were performed to verify the robustness of the proposed approach.
The Impact of Customer Retention Strategies in the South African Cellular Industry: The Case of the Eastern Free State.

In recent years, the South African cellular industry has registered a tremendous rise in number of subscribers, with some networks experiencing more than 30% increase in subscriptions. This research study explores the strategies that have been employed by the cellphone companies in South Africa in order to retain subscribers. While previous research has focused on customer retention strategies that are employed across different service industries this study evaluates the retention strategies that have been adopted by the cellular industry, where players are battling to retain customers or recruit new ones. The evaluation is based on the perceptions of the customers of the five cellphone network providers that operate in South Africa. The paper concludes that though there are many customer retention strategies that are employed in the South African cellular industry, the most effective are those related to quality of service, affordability of service and provision of customer support services.
Stresses in smooth flows of dense granular media

The form of the stress tensor is investigated in smooth, dense granular flows which are generated in split-bottom shear geometries. We find that, within a fluctuation fluidized spatial region, the form of the stress tensor is directly dictated by the flow field: The stress and strain-rate tensors are co-linear. The effective friction, defined as the ratio between shear and normal stresses acting on a shearing plane, is found not to be constant but to vary throughout the flowing zone. This variation cannot be explained by inertial effects, but appears to be set by the local geometry of the flow field. This is in agreement with a recent prediction, but in contrast with most models for slow grain flows, and points to there being a subtle mechanism that selects the flow profiles.