Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reach the Person behind the Dementia - Physical Therapists' Reflections and Strategies when Composing Physical Training

Dementia is a disease characterized by cognitive impairment and physical decline that worsens over time. Exercise is one lifestyle factor that has been identified as a potential means of reducing or delaying progression of the symptoms of dementia, maximizing function and independence. The purpose of this study was to explore physical therapists’ (PTs) experiences and reflections on facilitating high-intensity functional exercise with older people living with dementia, in residential care home settings. The study used a qualitative design based on interviews, individually or in small groups, with seven PTs engaged as leaders in the training of older people with dementia. The interviews were analyzed with a modified Grounded Theory method with focus on constant comparisons. To increase trustworthiness the study used triangulation within investigators and member checking. The core category “Discover and act in the moment—learn over time” reflects how the PTs continuously developed their own learning in an iterative process. They built on previous knowledge to communicate with residents and staff and to tailor the high intensity training in relation to each individual at that time point. The category "Be on your toes" highlights how the PTs searched for sufficient information about each individual, before and during training, by eliciting the person's current status from staff and by interpreting the person's body language. The category "Build a bond with a palette of strategies" describes the importance of confirmation to build up trust and the use of group members and the room to create an interplay between exercise and social interaction. These findings highlight the continuous iterative process of building on existing knowledge, sharing and reflecting, being alert to any alterations needed for individuals that day, communication skills (both with residents and staff) and building a relationship and trust with residents in the effective delivery of high intensity functional exercise to older people living with dementia in care settings.
Feature Extraction of Edible Oil FTIR Based on Fractal Geometry

A feature extraction of edible oil FTIR based on fractal geometry is proposed in this paper. Theoretical calculation formulas of fractal dimension are introduced. The calculation method of box-counting dimension based on FTIR is analyzed. We have used the open source computer vision library OpenCV to implement the FTIR of edible vegetable oils fractal dimension calculation algorithm. The result indicates that the FTIR of corn oil and sesame oil can be discriminated effectively by the difference of boxcounting dimension.
Risk Management in the Financial Services Sector—Applicability and Performance of VaR Models in Pakistan

Sound risk management practices by financial institution are critical to the stability of the institutions and to the sustainability of economic growth. We evaluate market risk based on the Value-at-Risk (VaR) approach for the KSE100 index return series over the period January 2001–June 2012. We estimate the conditional quantiles of the loss distribution under different distributional assumptions. Our back-testing results show that the procedure based on the Extreme Value Theory (EVT) performs better than methods which ignore the heavy tails of the innovations or the heteroskadasticity in returns. Analysis of Pre- and Post-Global Financial Crisis suggests that EVT based VaR measures which incorporate market dynamics may be helpful in managing market risk.
Anticipating and considering customers' flexibility demands in is outsourcing relationships

Information systems (IS) outsourcing relationships are determined by uncertainties and changing business environments for both client and vendor over a long-term outsourcing lifecycle. Although IS outsourcing arrangements have been widely researched, little attention has been paid to how changing business circumstances and resulting customer demands can be systematically assessed, considered, and integrated in adapted service offerings. In this paper we argue that flexibility and agility are the key to handle uncertainty in IS outsourcing and to achieve a continuous fit in the outsourcing relationship. However, the later clients and vendors identify changing requirements the more expensive it generally becomes to provide the necessary flexibility in outsourcing arrangements. This paper proposes an assessment instrument for a systematic identification of changing customer demands on a business level and resulting flexibility requirements on an IT level that clients and vendors can utilize to structure their discussions in an early phase of an outsourcing relationship. Based on a thorough literature review and a requirements analysis with qualitative expert interviews, relevant dimensions and parameters of customers’ flexibility requirements are derived. These dimensions are involved in the design of the assessment instrument. Managerial implications and directions for future research, especially on the applicability and evaluation of the instrument are discussed.
Collective Motivational Attitudes in Cooperative Problem Solving

In this paper we investigate the role of collective commitments in groups of agents involved in Cooperative Problem Solving (CPS). Collective intentions and collective commitmens are formalized in the logical framework designed by Rao and Georgee in 22]. The novelty of our approach is to base a collective commitment on a social plan, and deening it in terms of collective intentions and pairwise social commitments between team members together with mutual beliefs about them. During social plan execution collective commitment within a group inevitably leads to the execution of agent-speciic actions. However, due to the dynamic and possibly unpredictable environment, team members may fail their actions or be presented with new opportunities. Thus, it is necessary for them to monitor action performance and replan based on the present situation. This leads to the reconnguration problem. In order to solve this problem, the main phases of CPS, namely construction, maintenance, and realization of collective commitments, are assigned to a four-level abstract architecture. In terms of these generic levels and their interplay reconngu-ration algorithm is speciied.
A Theory of Mechanism Design for Stackelberg Problems with Selfish Agents

In this paper, we focus on designing mechanisms for a class of hierarchical decision making problems, involving selfish agents. We call these Stackelberg problems. These are problems where the decisions or actions in successive layers of the hierarchy are taken in a sequential way while decisions or actions within each layer are taken in a simultaneous manner. There are many emerging applications of these problems in distributed computing, network routing, ad hoc networks, electronic commerce, and distributed artificial intelligence. We consider a special class of Stackelberg problems called SLRF (Single Leader Rest Followers) problems and develop a theory of mechanism design for this. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the direction of designing mechanisms for Stackelberg problems. In developing our theory, we are guided by the classical theory of mechanism design which is built around noncooperative game theory. To illustrate the proposed approach, we consider two examples in the domain of electronic commerce first-price and second-price electronic procurement auctions with reserve prices. By applying the developed theory, we derive two interesting results regarding incentive compatibility of these two examples.
Schwager on futures : fundamental analysis

Partial table of contents: PRELIMINARIES. The Great Fundamental Versus Technical Analysis Debate. For Beginners Only. FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS. Fourteen Popular Fallacies, or What Not to Do Wrong. Types of Fundamental Analysis. Applying Technical Analysis to Fundamental Data. The Role of Expectations. Incorporating Inflation. Seasonal Analysis. Analyzing Market Response. Fundamental Analysis and Trading. A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO REGRESSION ANALYSIS. A Review of Elementary Statistics. Checking the Significance of the Regression Equation. The Multiple Regression Model. Analyzing the Regression Equation. FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS APPLIED-THE MARKETS. Forecasting Hog Prices. Forecasting Grain Prices. Forecasting Sugar Prices. Forecasting Copper Prices. Appendix. Index.
New Institutional Economics

This essay surveys the new institutional economics, a rapidly growing literature combining economics, law, organization theory, political science, sociology, and anthropology to understand social, political, and commercial institutions. This literature tries to explain what institutions are, how they arise, what purposes they serve, how they change, and how they may be reformed. Following convention, I distinguish between the institutional environment (the background constraints, or rules of the game that guide individuals' behavior) and institutional arrangements (specific guidelines designed by trading partners to facilitate particular exchanges). In both cases, the discussion here focuses on applications, evidence, and policy implications.
A novel cloud bursting technique

Companies (even SMEs) are roused by the success and potentials of the public clouds and they build their own private cloud infrastructures. Thus, they open the door to an easier and more flexible way for outsourcing their IT services than before. However, the currently available software solutions still do not provide seamless extensibility by cloud bursting. Therefore, the IaaS users have to prepare their images in every infrastructure. This paper presents the criteria for idealistic cloud bursting and introduces a method that overcomes the current cloud bursting issues (e.g. different administration domains and networking policies). The proposed technique uses nested virtualization, that reduces the complexity of the cloud bursting procedure. Furthermore, we have evaluated the applicability of our design by performance tests. The evaluation showed that the seamless extensibility has a cost of 5-10% overhead on the deployment time.
Beneficial effects of an angiotensin-II receptor blocker on structural atrial reverse-remodeling in a rat model of ischemic heart failure

The remodeling of gap junctions may affect their conduction properties and contribute to the maintenance of atrial fibrillation. The significance of the role of angiotensin-II receptor blockers (ARBs) in upstream therapy is not clear. This study was performed to investigate the effects of ARBs on atrial remodeling in a heart failure model. A model of heart failure was established or sham surgery performed in 24 Sprague-Dawley male rats. The rats were divided into sham, heart failure and heart failure-ARB groups. In the ARB group, 30 mg/kg of losartan was administered each day for 4 weeks. Echocardiography was performed at the baseline and 4 weeks following the surgery. An atrial fibrillation induction study and histological and immunohistochemical evaluation were performed 4 weeks after surgery. The increase in the left atrial diameter of the heart failure-ARB group was smaller than that of the heart failure group (P=0.028). The atrial fibrillation inducibility and duration of induced atrial fibrillation were not different between the heart failure and heart failure-ARB groups. Masson’s trichrome staining revealed less fibrosis in the heart failure-ARB group compared with the heart failure group. Immunohistochemical staining and western blot analysis for connexin 43 showed a lower expression level in the heart failure-ARB group compared with that in the heart failure group. In a rat model of ischemic heart failure the ARB losartan had structural and histological atrial reverse-remodeling effects. However, its role as an electrical stabilizer requires further study.
Incremental Raycasting of Piecewise Quadratic Surfaces on the GPU

To overcome the limitations of triangle and point based surfaces several authors have recently investigated surface representations that are based on higher order primitives. Among these are MPU, SLIM surfaces, dynamic skin surfaces and higher order iso-surfaces. Up to now these representations were not suitable for interactive applications because of the lack of an efficient rendering algorithm. In this paper we close this gap for implicit surface representations of degree two by developing highly optimized GPU implementations of the raycasting algorithm. We investigate techniques for fast incremental raycasting and cover per fragment and per quadric backface culling. We apply the approaches to the rendering of SLIM surfaces, quadratic iso-surfaces over tetrahedral meshes and bilinear quadrilaterals. Compared to triangle based surface approximations of similar geometric error we achieve only slightly lower frame rates but with much higher visual quality due to the quadratic approximation power of the underlying surfaces
Fast construction of speech recognition model based on sample selection strategy

In the process of building speech recognition models, accurate labeling of speech utterances is extremely time consuming and requires trained linguists. For fast building the speech recognition models in some industrial applications, we present a novel sample selection strategy that can use very few labeled speech utterances to construct the effective recognition model. The experimental results show that our approach has better performance than state-of-the-art methods and passive learning, and has enough robust to be accepted in the worse case of building speech recognition models.
Price Discovery in the Foreign Exchange Market: The Analysis of Highs and Lows

A great deal of controversy surrounding technical analysis and the efficient market hypothesis as well as a lack of research in the academic literature on the role of price highs and lows in the foreign exchange market were the reasons to undertake this research. The purpose of this paper was to examine a broad range of literature on market efficiency, behavioural finance and technical analysis, and to scrutinise price action after the breakouts of monthly and 52-week highs and lows of 6 major currency pairs over the period of 1980-2011. It was shown that price action followed by the breakouts exhibits a non-random price behaviour which in some currency pairs can help to systematically generate alpha.
ADDRESSING UTILITY SPACE COMPLEXITY IN NEGOTIATIONS INVOLVING HIGHLY UNCORRELATED, CONSTRAINT‐BASED UTILITY SPACES

There is an increasing interest in complex automated negotiations, where agents negotiate about multiple, interdependent issues and agent utility functions exhibit low autocorrelation. In these scenarios, the negotiation mechanisms used to find agreement solutions among agents tend to fail due to the complexity of agents’ preference spaces, and this tendency increases as the degree of autocorrelation decreases. In this paper, we propose an automated negotiation model specially tailored for highly uncorrelated utility spaces based on weighted constraints. The model relies on a mediated, auction‐based interaction protocol and a set of heuristic mechanisms for bidding and deal identification. To address the challenges raised by highly uncorrelated utility spaces, we propose to use a quality factor, which allows agents to balance utility and deal probability when placing their bids or when searching for agreement regions among these bids. Experiments show that the proposed negotiation model achieves high optimality results and low failure rates even in negotiation scenarios involving highly uncorrelated utility spaces, thus outperforming previous approaches.
Messaging Media Perceptions and Preferences: A Pilot Study in Two Distinct Cultures

This study empirically examines university students' perceptions and their views of when they adopt instant messaging (IM) and short messaging service (SMS) and how they perceive and prefer these two media, in conjunction with other media (face-to-face, telephone, and email), in their university learning activities across two different cultural contexts: Australian university and Chinese university. The overall results of this study support some aspects of media richness theory. Although IM is perceived to be richer than email, it is not perceived to be the most popular medium for any situation. Data also demonstrate cultural differences in media perceptions of and preferences for new media. Specifically, Australian students have higher preference for email than their Chinese counterparts and Australian students also perceive SMS as leaner in terms of medium richness and have less preference for SMS than their Chinese counterparts.
Fibronectin expression is critical for liver fibrogenesis in vivo and in vitro

Increased fibronectin (FN) expression has an important role during liver fibrosis. The present study examined FN expression in rats subjected to carbon tetrachloride (CCl4)-induced liver fibrosis. In addition, the potential mechanisms underlying fibrogenesis were investigated by exposing hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) to transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β), which is a known inducer of myofibroblastic transformation of HSCs. Briefly, a rat model of liver fibrosis was created by administering intraperitoneal injections of CCl4. Furthermore, HSC-T6 cells were stimulated with increasing doses of recombinant TGF-β over 24 h. Hepatic fibrosis gradually increased following CCl4 administration in vivo. Western blotting and immunohistochemistry demonstrated that fibronectin (FN), TGF-β and α-smooth muscle actin (SMA) expression was increased following CCl4 injection, and the maximum expression levels were observed at 8 weeks. Once CCl4 treatment had been terminated, the expression levels of FN, TGF-β and α-SMA progressively declined to near baseline levels. Western blotting and quantitative polymerase chain reaction demonstrated that FN expression was gradually increased in response to TGF-β-stimulation of HSCs; maximum expression was achieved 12 h post-treatment (P<0.01 vs. the baseline). In conclusion, these findings indicated that FN expression is an early and progressive event that occurs during liver fibrogenesis in vivo and in vitro.
Fuzzy Quotients in Reactive Common Sense Reasoning

In contemporary distributed applications questions concerning coordination have become increasingly urgent. There is a trade-off however to be made between the need for a highly reactive behavior and the need for semantically rich high level abstractions. Especially w.r. t. context-aware applications where various systems have to act together and come to coordinated conclusions the need for powerful semantic abstractions is evident. Our research is based on the observation that human teams are very good in coordinating (when compared to technical systems). Consequently we chose an approach of common sense reasoning which is capable to grasp the specifics of human behavior. One specific in this approach is the usage of fuzzy quotients which bears strong similarities to the notion of granules.
Cell-Autonomous Defects in Thymic Epithelial Cells Disrupt Endothelial-Perivascular Cell Interactions in the Mouse Thymus

The thymus is composed of multiple stromal elements comprising specialized stromal microenvironments responsible for the development of self-tolerant and self-restricted T cells. Here, we investigated the ontogeny and maturation of the thymic vasculature. We show that endothelial cells initially enter the thymus at E13.5, with PDGFR-β+ mesenchymal cells following at E14.5. Using an allelic series of the thymic epithelial cell (TEC) specific transcription factor Foxn1, we showed that these events are delayed by 1–2 days in Foxn1 Δ/Δ mice, and this phenotype was exacerbated with reduced Foxn1 dosage. At subsequent stages there were fewer capillaries, leaky blood vessels, disrupted endothelium - perivascular cell interactions, endothelial cell vacuolization, and an overall failure of vascular organization. The expression of both VEGF-A and PDGF-B, which are both primarily expressed in vasculature-associated mesenchyme or endothelium in the thymus, were reduced at E13.5 and E15.5 in Foxn1 Δ/Δ mice compared with controls. These data suggest that Foxn1 is required in TECs both to recruit endothelial cells and for endothelial cells to communicate with thymic mesenchyme, and for the differentiation of vascular-associated mesenchymal cells. These data show that Foxn1 function in TECs is required for normal thymus size and to generate the cellular and molecular environment needed for normal thymic vascularization. These data further demonstrate a novel TEC-mesenchyme-endothelial interaction required for proper fetal thymus organogenesis.
Discovering Protein-Protein Interaction Sites from Sequence and Structure

This chapter gives a comprehensive introduction of the sequence/structural features that are characteristic of protein-protein interaction sites and reviews state-of-the-art methodologies for protein-protein binding site prediction. Protein-protein interaction residues are largely responsible for mediating physical binding processes such as inhibitory effects through enzyme-inhibitor interaction, initiating immune response by an antibody-antigen interaction, and regulation of cell signaling proteins. Currently, various methods are available for predicting protein-protein interaction sites, which allow a residue-level understanding of the physical protein binding phenomena presented by the global construction protein-protein interaction networks. The overview of the discussed protein-protein binding site prediction strategies and detailed comparison of their weaknesses and strengths is aimed towards assisting protein researchers in gaining more insight to protein-protein interaction networks.
Non-data-aided adaptive beamforming algorithm based on the Widely Linear Auxiliary Vector Filter

We propose a non-data-aided adaptive beamforming algorithm based on Widely Linear (WL) processing techniques and the Auxiliary Vector Filtering (AVF) algorithm for non-circular signals, where only the steering vector of the desired user is known. The proposed Widely Linear Auxiliary Vector Filtering (WL-AVF) algorithm recursively updates the filter weights by a sequence of auxiliary vectors that are designed according to the Widely Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance (WLCMV) criterion. It takes full advantage of the second-order statistics of the non-circular data, achieving a higher maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) than the linear AVF. Key properties of the proposed WL-AVF are analyzed. Simulation results show that the WL-AVF beamforming algorithm performs the best among the existing adaptive algorithms.