Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Cooperative Approach to Cache Consistency Maintenance in Wireless Mesh Networks

Cooperative caching is especially desirable for multi-hop wireless networks to achieve efficient data access. Existing cooperative caching algorithms for wireless networks mostly focus on cache placement. Another key issue, cache consistency maintenance has not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we propose the first cooperative approach to maintain cache consistency for wireless mesh networks. It basically combines push and pull by making use of the hierarchical architecture of mesh networks. More precisely, we propose two techniques introducing cooperation among network nodes in delivering Invalidation Reports (IR) so as to reduce communication cost and tolerate message losses: IR integration buffers and integrates IRs at the gateway nodes and periodically broadcasts them, Cooperative IR re-sending lets the intermediate nodes resend missed IR messages upon request. The most challenging issue in our design is the determination of the optimal IR broadcast period in order to achieve the optimal tradeoff between push and pull. We conduct numerical analysis to get optimal values for different scenarios. Simulation results confirm our analysis well and comparisons with existing approaches show that our approach can save message cost significantly (50%-70%).
Multimodal Ternus: Visual, Tactile, and Visuo — Tactile Grouping in Apparent Motion

Gestalt rules that describe how visual stimuli are grouped also apply to sounds, but it is unknown if the Gestalt rules also apply to tactile or uniquely multimodal stimuli. To investigate these rules, we used lights, touches, and a combination of lights and touches, arranged in a classic Ternus configuration. Three stimuli (A, B, C) were arranged in a row across three fingers. A and B were presented for 50 ms and, after a delay, B and C were presented for 50 ms. Subjects were asked whether they perceived AB moving to BC (group motion) or A moving to C (element motion). For all three types of stimuli, at short delays, A to C dominated, while at longer delays AB to BC dominated. The critical delay, where perception changed from group to element motion, was significantly different for the visual Ternus (3 lights, 162 ms) and the tactile Ternus (3 touches, 195 ms). The critical delay for the multimodal Ternus (3 light – touch pairs, 161 ms) was not different from the visual or tactile Ternus effects. In a second experiment, subjects were exposed to 2.5 min of visual group motion (stimulus onset asynchrony = 300 ms). The exposure caused a shift in the critical delay of the visual Ternus, a trend in the same direction for the multimodal Ternus, but no shift in the tactile Ternus. These results suggest separate but similar grouping rules for visual, tactile, and multimodal stimuli.
Applying ADD Model to Enhance Quality of SOA Applications

SOA enables integration of applications and resources flexibly, representing every application or resource as a service. Its purpose is to facilitate reuse and interoperability of applications, which are regarded as quality attributes of a system. It is very easy to talk about the benefits of SOA reuse, etc. But, there are no precise specifications to define this concept as the architectural style. SOA has another shortcoming; it is a problem of performance related to the creation of services that affect the total processing time of the system. This paper provides a basic specification of SOA and identifies architectural tactics to improve performance. The tactics adopted for the performance are then validated by a case study. A solution for the development of tactics is to use the ADD method. This is a method to meet the architectural requirements or qualities expected from a system. Three architectural models have been well integrated into SOA. Validation of the case study determined that the tactics are working and it is interesting to use in SOA architecture. However, an interesting point that arises from the test is that the decomposition model of service can be used with caution. Two contributions emerge from this paper: a basic specification and a design of SOA-based integration models architectural to improve performance. The main recommendation arising from this test is the addition of tactical or creating tools to automate the architecture chosen and thus improve performance.
Realizing justice in local food systems

For alternative agrifood social movements, food-system localization is both an ideal and a pathway to resolve environmental, social and economic issues in the food system. This article addresses the potential for equity within food-system localization in practical and conceptual terms. Historical processes have shaped regions and social relations with vast differences in wealth, power and privilege and this has implications for thinking about and enacting equity through food-system localization. If food-system localization efforts are to work toward equity, they must consider inherited material and discursive asymmetries within frameworks of economy, demography, geography and democracy. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.
Economic Value Added (EVA Super TM): An Empirical Examination of a New Corporate Performance Measure

Is there a single measure of corporate performance enabling investors to identify investment opportunities and motivate managers to make value-added business decisions? Obviously, this is a question of utmost importance to investors, managers, and business researchers. Economic Value Added (EVA)(1) has been acclaimed to be such a measure (Tully, 1993). As defined by Stern Stewart Management Services of New York City, EVA is the difference between a company's net operating income after taxes and its cost of capital of both equity and debt (Stern Stewart, 1993). Although the term EVA had appeared in the literature as early as 1989 (Finegan, 1989; Walter, 1992), it did not receive much attention until a September 20, 1993, article in Fortune magazine (Tully, 1993). Following the article's strong praise of EVA as the most recent and exciting innovation in measuring corporate success, a flurry of papers have been published telling successful EVA stories and promoting EVA adoption (Rutledge, 1993; Walbert, 1993 and 1994; Birchard, 1994; Brossy and Balkcom, 1994; Byrne, 1994; McConville, 1994; White, 1994; Stewart, 1995). One major reason for EVA's sudden popularity is that it appears to have an impressive army of corporate sponsors including such giants as ATT Walbert, 1994). Although the anecdotal evidence may differ in detail between companies, a common theme emerges. Advocates find that EVA motivates companies to find ways to increase the efficiency of capital utilization and consequently brings about a superior stock performance. There is no doubt that when Roberto Goizueta, CEO of Coca-Cola, praises a new management idea, it sends a powerful message to his peers in Corporate America. Companies, large and small, appear eager to get on this new EVA bandwagon. Recently, we made a search in Disclosure SEC and EdgarPlus CD-ROMs and found that the momentum is increasing. As indicated in their annual reports and/ or proxy statements, dozens of companies are starting to implement and integrate EVA into their performance measurement systems. Companies appear to have become enamored with EVA without asking provoking, critical questions such as: Is increasing EVA all that matters in the marketplace? Is EVA a real innovation that provides Corporate America with the golden key to creating wealth? Are the traditional measures of accounting earnings still useful? Are there pitfalls that management needs to be aware of before embracing EVA? Our study addresses these questions and provides a preliminary empirical evaluation of EVA. …
Development and clinical evaluation of a rapid diagnostic kit for feline leukemia virus infection

Feline leukemia virus (FeLV) causes a range of neoplastic and degenerative diseases in cats. To obtain a more sensitive and convenient diagnosis of the disease, we prepared monoclonal antibodies specific for the FeLV p27 to develop a rapid diagnostic test with enhanced sensitivity and specificity. Among these antibodies, we identified two clones (hybridomas 8F8B5 and 8G7D1) that specifically bound to FeLV and were very suitable for a diagnostic kit. The affinity constants for 8F8B5 and 8G7D1 were 0.35 × 109 and 0.86 × 109, respectively. To investigate the diagnostic abilities of the rapid kit using these antibodies, we performed several clinical studies. Assessment of analytical sensitivity revealed that the detection threshold of the rapid diagnostic test was 2 ng/mL for recombinant p27 and 12.5 × 104 IU/mL for FeLV. When evaluating 252 cat sera samples, the kit was found to have a kappa value of 0.88 compared to polymerase chain reaction (PCR), indicating a significant correlation between data from the rapid diagnostic test and PCR. Sensitivity and specificity of the kit were 95.2% (20/21) and 98.5% (257/261), respectively. Our results demonstrated that the rapid diagnostic test would be a suitable diagnostic tool for the rapid detection of FeLV infection in cats.
Applying data mining techniques in software development

Increasing complexity of software engineering and expansion of scope of application makes software credibility be greatly questioned. How to complete high-quality software production more efficiently is a new software development issue. Data mining has been applied widely in knowledge discovery; data mining technology being used in software development process can not only enhances the accuracy and comprehensiveness of software development but also enhances the credibility of the software.
Cyclic GMP regulation of myosin phosphatase: a new piece for the puzzle?

See related article, pages 712–722 The contractile state of smooth muscle (SM) reflects the ratio of activities of myosin light-chain kinase (MLCK) and myosin light chain phosphatase (MLCP), which determines the extent of regulatory light chain (RLC) phosphorylation and actin-activated myosin II activity and can be changed by modulating the activities of the calcium-calmodulin–dependent MLCK or of MLCP. Agonists through G protein–coupled receptors, which activate the small G protein RhoA and its effector, Rho-kinase (ROK), results in inhibitory phosphorylation of the regulatory subunit (MYPT1) of MLCP leading to an increase in RLC phosphorylation and force independent of a change in [Ca2+]i, a process termed Ca2+ sensitization (reviewed in1). The importance of regulation of MLCP activity has focused attention on potential phosphorylation sites2 on MYPT1 especially Thr-696, Thr-853, Ser-695, and Ser-852 (numbering for the human MW133 isoform) (Figure) but the physiologically relevant sites remain to be fully understood. CPI-17, found in some SMs is another potential mediator of Ca2+ sensitization, which on phosphorylation by a variety of kinases inhibits the MLCP catalytic subunit, PP1cδ resulting in Ca2+-sensitized force independent of phosphorylation of MYPT1.3 Conversely, cyclic nucleotides can relax Ca2+-sensitized force and reduce RLC phosphorylation through activation or disinhibition of MLCP activity leading to Ca2+ desensitization. Early studies showed that cyclic GMP decreased Ca2+ sensitivity4 and reversed agonist-induced Ca2+-sensitized force at constant Ca2+. 5,6 Urocortin-induced Ca2+ desensitization through PKA activation leads to a decrease in both Thr-696 and Thr-853.7 Direct phosphorylation of MYPT1 has been shown for both PKA on Ser-6958 and by PKG on a C-terminal Ser residue.9 However, phosphorylation of these sites did not activate phosphatase activity raising the question as to the underlying mechanism. …
The Impact of Family-Friendly Policies in Denmark and Sweden on Mothers' Career Interruptions Due to Childbirth

We analyze the impact of family-friendly policies on women’s career breaks due to childbirth in Denmark and Sweden. In both countries, the labour force attachment of mothers is high, and more than 90% of the women return to work after childbirth. Sweden and Denmark are culturally similar and share the same type of welfare state ideology, but differ remarkably in pursued family policies. The impact of family policy variables on the probability of returning to the labour market is estimated using a duration model approach. Our results show that economic incentives and leave periods of the fathers affect the behaviour of mothers in both countries. However, family policy instruments are found to have a much larger impact on Swedish mothers’ behaviour compared to Danish women. We explain this finding by the fact that family-friendly policies in Sweden have focused much more on flexible leave schemes and on the shared responsibilities of the parents than in Denmark.
Cetuximab in preoperative treatment of rectal cancer – term outcome of the XERT trial

Cetuximab in preoperative treatment of rectal cancer - term outcome of the XERT trial Background. Preoperative capecitabine-based chemoradiotherapy (CRT) is feasible for the treatment of resectable locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC). To try to improve efficacy, we conducted a phase II study in which the epidermal growth factor receptor-targeting monoclonal antibody cetuximab was added to capecitabine-based CRT. The results for long-term survival and for an analysis investigating the relationship between survival and patient and disease characteristics, including tumour KRAS mutation status, and surgery type, are presented. Patients and methods. Patients with resectable LARC received capecitabine (1250 mg/m2 twice daily, orally) for 2 weeks followed by cetuximab alone (400 mg/m2 for 1 week) and then with CRT (250 mg/m2/week) comprising capecitabine (825 mg/m2 twice daily) and radiotherapy to the small pelvis (45 Gy in 25 1.8-Gy fractions), five days a week for five weeks. Surgery was conducted six weeks following CRT, with post-operative chemotherapy with capecitabine (1250 mg/m2 twice daily for 14 days every 21 days) three weeks later. Results. Forty-seven patients were enrolled and 37 underwent treatment. Twenty-eight of the patients (75.7%) had T3N+ disease. Thirty-six patients were evaluable for efficacy. The median follow-up time was 39.0 months (range 5.0-87.0). The three-year local control, disease-free survival, relapse-free survival and overall survival rates were 96.9% (95% CI 90.0-100), 72.2% (57.5-86.9), 74.3% (95% CI 59.8-88.8) and 68.1% (95% CI 36.7-99.4), respectively. There was no significant association between survival and gender, age, tumour location in the rectum, type of surgery, pathological T or N status, tumour regression grade or tumour KRAS mutation status, although sample sizes were small. Conclusions. Preoperative cetuximab plus capecitabine-based CRT was feasible in patients with resectable LARC and was associated with an impressive three-year local control rate. The use of tumour KRAS mutation status as a biomarker for the efficacy of cetuximab-based regimens in this setting requires further investigation.
An Approach to Handling Failure Recovery in Service Composition and Its Analysis

Service composition is an effective way to build complex Web service applications. However, it is a challenge to handle failure recovery due to the uncertainty of service in distributed and heterogeneous environment. This paper proposes an approach to handling failure recovery in service composition. Petri nets are used to model the different components of service composition, failure recovery rules and service selection strategies are given. Based on these, aspect-orientation is used to weave failure recovery concern into service composition, which includes failure warning concern, service selection concern and recovery concern, the weaving mechanism dynamically integrates these schemas into a failure recovery model. The operation semantics and related theories of Petri nets help prove its effectiveness and correctness. A case study and experimental results demonstrate the approach can simplify the failure recovery process, and improve the design quality of service composition.
Adaptive Contrast Enhancement Using Local Region Stretching

This paper describes a real time contrast enhancement technique for digital video applications. This method called ACE is based on a modified histogram equalization procedure that adapts to the input video statistics. The method decides whether to increase dynamic range or to light up dark regions of the image. As a result, for dark images, details in dark areas are enhanced without affecting mid and bright pixels. For images with average brightness, the dynamic range of the scene is increased. Thus it is adaptive and provides a localized contrast enhancement effect which is not possible with traditional contrast stretching based approaches. Unlike other histogram equalization based approaches, the technique described automatically tones down its effects on pictures that are prone to contouring and other artifacts. The implementation offers a high degree of flexibility that is needed for consumer electronics applications such as provision of various degrees of enhancement and exclusion of letter box regions.
Imaging system for classification of local flora of Uttarakhand region

Many plants are facing the risk of extinction due to unplanned urbanization and over growth of population. Digital databases of plants should be maintained for proper tracking of local flora and making data-driven policies/decisions for their preservation. Plant identification is important for medical as well as educational purposes but maintaining an exhaustive digital database is a challenging task due to the presence of large number of plant species. This paper proposes a system for building a digital database of local flora and recognizing different plants using their leaf images. The system proposed in this paper involves four steps: 1) image acquisition, 2) image preprocessing, 3) feature extraction, and 4) classification. Images are acquired using commonly available general purpose desktop scanner with white paper as a background. In the image-preprocessing module, the system applies several image-processing techniques to prepare a leaf image for the feature extraction process. Then twelve leaf-shape based features are estimated and IBI classifier is used to classify the plant species. The proposed system was used to build a dataset of local flora of Uttarakhand region, consisting of 1684 images of thirty-two different plant species. The database contains around fifty leaves of each plant species. The proposed system gives promising results with an average classification accuracy of 79% for these thirty species of plants.
Agent Heterogeneity in Adoption of Anaerobic Digestion Technology: Integrating Economic, Diffusion, and Behavioral Innovation Theories

Anaerobic digestion technology addresses environmental issues of waste disposal and greenhouse gas emission reduction. This paper examines attitudes toward adoption of this conservation technology on dairy farms. To specify an appropriate dependent variable without a large number of adopters, an ordered probit model is constructed. The empirical analysis uses data from a 2006 survey of Pacific Northwest dairy farms. Aggregate variables are constructed based on behavioral economics and conservation adoption literature. Variables include private and social costs, social motives, capacity, innovation receptivity, and opportunity costs, most of which are found to be highly related to the decision to seriously consider adoption. (JEL Q53, Q55)
Inferring Contacting Residues within and between Proteins: What Do the Probabilities Mean?

Although correlations between residues occurring at different positions within multiple protein alignments have long been used to infer directly interacting residues, most of these methods suffer from the frequent occurrence of indirectly correlated residues. Recently, a number of methods have been proposed that incorporate the entire set of observed frequencies of amino acid pairs for all pairs of positions into rigorous probabilistic models; these models have been shown to strongly improve the prediction of directly interacting residues by successfully distinguishing direct from indirect correlations. Some of these methods make use of the maximum entropy principle, originating in statistical physics. It has recently been argued that there is no reason to assume that protein sequences should follow maximum entropy distributions and that it is therefore puzzling that the max-ent formalism is successful for predicting interacting residues in proteins. In this brief review I will argue that such apparent puzzles result from a misconception of the meaning of the max-ent formalism and, more generally, on the meaning of probabilities.
Towards the computer-aided diagnosis of dementia based on the geometric and network connectivity of structural MRI data

We present an intuitive geometric approach for analysing the structure and fragility of T1-weighted structural MRI scans of human brains. Apart from computing characteristics like the surface area and volume of regions of the brain that consist of highly active voxels, we also employ Network Theory in order to test how close these regions are to breaking apart. This analysis is used in an attempt to automatically classify subjects into three categories: Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment and healthy controls, for the CADDementia Challenge.
Capturing Lombardi Flow in Orthogonal Drawings by Minimizing the Number of Segments

Inspired by the artwork of Mark Lombardi, we study the problem of constructing orthogonal drawings where a small number of horizontal and vertical line segments covers all vertices. We study two problems on orthogonal drawings of planar graphs, one that minimizes the total number of line segments and another that minimizes the number of line segments that cover all the vertices. We show that the first problem can be solved by a non-trivial modification of the flow-network orthogonal bend-minimization algorithm of Tamassia, resulting in a polynomial-time algorithm. We show that the second problem is NP-hard even for planar graphs with maximum degree 3. Given this result, we then address this second optimization problem for trees and series-parallel graphs with maximum degree 3. For both graph classes, we give polynomial-time algorithms for upward orthogonal drawings with the minimum number of segments covering the vertices.
A Physical Basis for Color Constancy

A fundamental problem in psycophysical experiments is that significant conclusions are hard to draw due to the complex experimental environment necessary to examine color constancy. An alternative approach to reveal the mechanisms involved in color constancy is by modeling the physical basis for color constancy rather than a psychophysical one. By considering spatial and spectral derivatives of the Lambertian image formation model, object reflectance properties are derived independent of the spectral energy distributions of the illuminant. Gaussian spectral and spatial probes are used to estimate the proposed differential invariant. Knowledge about the spectral power distribution of the illuminant is not required for the proposed invariant. The physical approach to color constancy offered in the paper confirms relational color constancy as a first step in color constant vision systems. Hence, low-level mechanisms as color constant edge detection reported here may play an important role in front-end vision. The research presented raises the question whether the illuminant is estimated at all in pre-attentive vision.