Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Why Is the Obesity Rate So Low in Japan and High in the U.S.? Some Possible Economic Explanations

More than one billion adults are overweight worldwide, and more than 300 million of them clinically obese, raising the risk of many serious diseases. Only 3.6 percent of Japanese have a body mass index (BMI) over 30, which is the international standard for obesity, whereas 32.0 percent of Americans do. A total of 66.5 percent of Americans have a BMI over 25, making them overweight, but only 24.7 percent of Japanese. This paper examines the reasons Japan has one of the lowest rates of obesity in the world and the United States one of the highest, giving particular attention to underlying economic factors that might be influenced by policy changes. The average person in Japan consumes over 200 fewer calories per day than the average American. Food prices are substantially higher in Japan, but the traditional Japanese dietary habits, although changing, are also healthier. The Japanese are also far more physically active than Americans, but not because they do more planned physical exercise. They walk more as part of their daily lives. They walk more because the cost of driving an automobile is far higher in Japan, whereas public transportation is typically very convenient, but normally requires more walking than the use of a car. In terms of policy solutions, economic incentives could be structured to encourage Americans to drive less and use public transportation more, which would typically also mean walking more.
Towards physical mashups in the Web of Things

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have promising industrial applications, since they reduce the gap between traditional enterprise systems and the real world. However, every particular application requires complex integration work, and therefore technical expertise, effort and time which prevents users from creating small tactical, ad-hoc applications using sensor networks. Following the success of Web 2.0 “mashups”, we propose a similar lightweight approach for combining enterprise services (e.g. ERPs) with WSNs. Specifically, we discuss the traditional integration solutions, propose and implement an alternative architecture where sensor nodes are accessible according to the REST principles. With this approach, the nodes become part of a “Web of Things” and interacting with them as well as composing their services with existing ones, becomes almost as easy as browsing the web.
Separable Codes

Multimedia fingerprinting is an effective technique to trace the sources of pirate copies of copyrighted multimedia information. Separable codes can be used to construct fingerprints resistant to the averaging collusion attack on multimedia contents. In this paper, we investigate -separable codes from a combinatorial point of view. We first derive several upper bounds on the sizes of -separable codes, and then turn our attention to the constructions of optimal -separable codes with short length. Two infinite families of optimal -separable codes of length 2 are constructed from projective planes, and all optimal -separable codes of length 3 are explicitly constructed by means of difference matrices. These optimal -separable codes with short length can be used to construct good -separable codes with long length by a known composition construction.
Multiagent trust management of web services: the “asynchronous computing environment profile unification methodology” (acepum)

Web services are considered as a major challenge for the information technology industry as they emerge from integration of several technologies adaptable within different architectures and platforms. Web Services are deployed within heterogeneous distributed environments; specifically B-2-B interactions are considered as critical-mission processes and services, the main goal for these processes is to provide a secured inter-organizational computing environment. Ion the web, we deploy web services on the web for the purpose of achieving reusability, interoperability, and standards utilization. Web services are based on interactions of peers where loosely coupled systems interact in anonymous computing environments. The environments of web services are considered more vulnerable to faults and incidents than tightly coupled services. In this paper; I introduce a token-based methodology which is utilized for the purpose of achieving trust between end points of communication. I introduce the Asynchronous Computing Environment Profile Unification Methodology (ACEPUM) as a vulnerability reduction methodology which audits the environment profile variables; this approach introduces several levels of trust management routines that addresses different aspects of security requirements.
The Effect of Income on Delinquency: Comment

In the March 1966 issue of this Review, Belton Fleisher proposed an analytical framework for assessing the relationship between income and juvenile delinquency and has attempted to measure the effect of income on delinquency. In a series of multiple regression analyses, he finids a ". general pattern of behavior. " in which "the overall effect of income on delinquency appears to be negative. " although there is a partial off-setting effect as a result of ". the positive influence of income on the payoff for property crimes. " He also finds that "unemployment appears to be a cause of delinquent behavior. " (p. 132), which is consistent with his previous work on the subject. Fleisher's results, however, depend heavily on the choice of variables used to represent "tastes" for delinquency. It is the purpose of this comment to show that, at least for the only set of published data used by Fleisher, which is also the data regarded by him as niost useful for investigating delinquency (74 community areas within Chicago): a more accurate measure of one important taste concept is available, and its inclusion substantially alters Fleisher's results. Secondlv, Fleisher's economic variables are highly collinear with additionial variables, reflecting other aspects of the taste for delinquency, which might reasona'bly be included in his regressions. XVhen these variables are added, Fleisher's results are further modified and his conclusions, particularlIy those with policy implications, are vitiated.
Asymptotic cones and ultrapowers of Lie groups

§1. Introduction . Asymptotic cones of metric spaces were first invented by Gromov. They are metric spaces which capture the ‘large-scale structure’ of the underlying metric space. Later, van den Dries and Wilkie gave a more general construction of asymptotic cones using ultrapowers. Certain facts about asymptotic cones, like the completeness of the metric space, now follow rather easily from saturation properties of ultrapowers, and in this survey, we want to present two applications of the van den Dries-Wilkie approach. Using ultrapowers we obtain an explicit description of the asymptotic cone of a semisimple Lie group. From this description, using semi-algebraic groups and non-standard methods, we can give a short proof of the Margulis Conjecture. In a second application, we use set theory to answer a question of Gromov. §2. Definitions . The intuitive idea behind Gromov's concept of an asymptotic cone was to look at a given metric space from an ‘infinite distance’, so that large-scale patterns should become visible. In his original definition this was done by gradually scaling down the metric by factors 1/ n for n ϵ ℕ. In the approach by van den Dries and Wilkie, this idea was captured by ultrapowers. Their construction is more general in the sense that the asymptotic cone exists for any metric space, whereas in Gromov's original definition, the asymptotic cone existed only for a rather restricted class of spaces.
Non-Perturbative Formulation of Time-Dependent String Solutions

We formulate here a new world-sheet renormalization-group technique for the bosonic string, which is non-perturbative in the Regge slope alpha' and based on a functional method for controlling the quantum fluctuations, whose magnitudes are scaled by the value of alpha'. Using this technique we exhibit, in addition to the well-known linear-dilaton cosmology, a new, non-perturbative time-dependent background solution. Using the reparametrization invariance of the string S-matrix, we demonstrate that this solution is conformally invariant to alpha', and we give a heuristic inductive argument that conformal invariance can be maintained to all orders in alpha'. This new time-dependent string solution may be applicable to primordial cosmology or to the exit from linear-dilaton cosmology at large times.
Mortgage Choice: Who Should Have Their ARMs Capped?

Floating rate loans with a specic cap-rate (a maximal or \ceiling" interest rate that the mortgagor can pay) have recently been introduced in the Danish mortgage market. Jakobsen & Svenstrup (2001) and Svenstrup (2002) give detailed descriptions of both the construction (of the specic \brand" of loan called Bolig-X) and the pricing (theoretically and market practice) of such contracts. They give several arguments why the capped loans should be attractive to mortgagors. While quite compelling, the arguments are all more or less \practically motivated". The contract exploits market imperfections (such as tax-asymmetry) or it reduces them (such as lack of liquidity stemming from model uncertainty). In this paper I give a utility-based argument why these capped adjustable rate mortgages (\capped ARMs") could be the optimal/preferred nancing choice for a large proportion of mortgagors. This is done by considering a toy interest rate model with 3 simplied loan-types representing xed rate, oating rate, and \oating +cap" nancing. I then look at a (possibly) risk averse mortgagor who is unable to adjust his portfolio dynamically and has to choose his nancing from the 3 loan types. For reasonable parameter ranges, no loan-type is dominated, but with empirically plausible parameter values (dierences of 1-2% between short and long rates and logarithmic utility) the capped oating rate loan is optimal. So to answer the question in title: If both the market and the mortgagor are (appropriately) risk averse, then the ARM should indeed be capped.
CVTree update: a newly designed phylogenetic study platform using composition vectors and whole genomes

The CVTree web server (http://tlife.fudan.edu.cn/cvtree) presented here is a new implementation of the whole genome-based, alignment-free composition vector (CV) method for phylogenetic analysis. It is more efficient and user-friendly than the previously published version in the 2004 web server issue of Nucleic Acids Research. The development of whole genome-based alignment-free CV method has provided an independent verification to the traditional phylogenetic analysis based on a single gene or a few genes. This new implementation attempts to meet the challenge of ever increasing amount of genome data and includes in its database more than 850 prokaryotic genomes which will be updated monthly from NCBI, and more than 80 fungal genomes collected manually from several sequencing centers. This new CVTree web server provides a faster and stable research platform. Users can upload their own sequences to find their phylogenetic position among genomes selected from the server's; inbuilt database. All sequence data used in a session may be downloaded as a compressed file. In addition to standard phylogenetic trees, users can also choose to output trees whose monophyletic branches are collapsed to various taxonomic levels. This feature is particularly useful for comparing phylogeny with taxonomy when dealing with thousands of genomes.
Computing Semantic Relatedness between Named Entities Using Wikipedia

In this paper the authors suggest an novel approach that uses Wikipedia to measure the semantic relatedness between Chinese named entities, such as names of persons, books, softwares, etc. The relatedness is measured through articles in Wikipedia that are related to the named entities. The authors select a set of ''definition words'' which are hyperlinks from these articles, and then compute the relatedness between two named entities as the relatedness between two sets of definition words. The authors propose two ways to measure the relatedness between two definition words: by Wiki-articles related to the words or by categories of the words. Proposed approaches are compared with several other baseline models through experiments. The experimental results show that this method renders satisfactory results.
Single Objective Evolutionary Algorithm for Flexible Job-shop Scheduling Problem

A meta-heuristic approach for solving the flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is presented in this study. This problem consists of two sub-problems, the routing problem and the sequencing problem and is among the hardest combinatorial optimization problems. We propose a Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) for the FJSP. Our algorithm uses several different rules for generating the initial population and several strategies for producing new population for next generation. Proposed EA is tested on benchmark problems and with due attention to the results of other meta-heuristics in this field, the results of EA show that our algorithm is effective and comparable to the other algorithms.
Stability of reach-to-grasp movement patterns in Parkinson's disease.

The performance of patients with Parkinson's disease on two reach-to-grasp tasks was compared with that of age-matched control subjects. The aim of the study was to determine whether Parkinson's disease patients have problems coordinating concurrently executed tasks within the same system of effectors in a natural context and whether such problems would be exacerbated by increases in task difficulty. We examined how subjects concurrently executed the transport and grasp components of reach-to-grasp movements in the presence of two types of change in task demands: (i) increases in demands for accurate digit pad placement and (ii) use of two reach-to-grasp tasks, i.e. the standard unimanual task and a bimanual task which increased the control and coordination demands relative to the unimanual task. If Parkinson's disease patients have coordination problems they should demonstrate increased impairment with increasing accuracy demands and in the bimanual task; any such differences should be absent or much smaller in the control group. The Parkinson's disease group showed substantial impairments in all conditions, moving about 30% slower than the control group, with much increased jerking and with signs of difficulty controlling the speed of movement. However, there were no consistent indications that the Parkinson's disease group were differentially impaired on the bimanual task nor that movement deficits increased with increasing accuracy requirements. Grasp and transport components were coordinated similarly by Parkinson's disease and control groups in both reach-to-grasp tasks, and the Parkinson's disease group co-ordinated the two limbs in the bimanual task effectively and in a fashion similar to that of the control group. These results are interpreted to mean that higher levels (effector-independent levels) of motor programming are preserved in Parkinson's disease and that execution of a motor programme need not be compromised by increasing the number of muscle-/joint-level degrees of freedom which are used.
Renewed growth of atmospheric methane

Following almost a decade with little change in global atmospheric methane mole fraction, we present measurements from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) and the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) networks that show renewed growth starting near the beginning of 2007. Remarkably, a similar growth rate is found at all monitoring locations from this time until the latest measurements. We use these data, along with an inverse method applied to a simple model of atmospheric chemistry and transport, to investigate the possible drivers of the rise. Specifically, the relative roles of an increase in emission rate or a decrease in concentration of the hydroxyl radical, the largest methane sink, are examined. We conclude that: 1) if the annual mean hydroxyl radical concentration did not change, a substantial increase in emissions was required simultaneously in both hemispheres between 2006 and 2007; 2) if a small drop in the hydroxyl radical concentration occurred, consistent with AGAGE methyl chloroform measurements, the emission increase is more strongly biased to the Northern Hemisphere.
Viscoelasticity and shear flow of concentrated,noncrystallizing colloidal suspensions: Comparison with mode-coupling theory

We present a comprehensive rheological study of a suspension of thermosensitive particles dispersed in water. The volume fraction of these particles can be adjusted by the temperature of the system in a continuous fashion. Due to the finite polydispersity of the particles (standard deviation: 17%), crystallization is suppressed and no fluid-crystal transition intervenes. Hence, the moduli G′ and G″ in the linear viscoelastic regime as well as the flow curves (shear stress σ(γ) as function of the shear rate γ) could be measured in the fluid region up to the vicinity of the glass transition. Moreover, flow curves could be obtained over a range of shear rates of 8 orders of magnitude, while G′ and G″ could be measured spanning over 9 orders of magnitude. Special emphasis has been laid on precise measurements down to the smallest shear rates/frequencies. It is demonstrated that mode-coupling theory generalized in the integration through transients framework provides a full description of the flow curves as .
Induction and Processing of the Radiation-Induced Gamma-H2AX Signal and Its Link to the Underlying Pattern of DSB: A Combined Experimental and Modelling Study

We present here an analysis of DSB induction and processing after irradiation with X-rays in an extended dose range based on the use of the γH2AX assay. The study was performed by quantitative flow cytometry measurements, since the use of foci counting would result in reasonable accuracy only in a limited dose range of a few Gy. The experimental data are complemented by a theoretical analysis based on the GLOBLE model. In fact, original aim of the study was to test GLOBLE predictions against new experimental data, in order to contribute to the validation of the model. Specifically, the γH2AX signal kinetics has been investigated up to 24 h after exposure to increasing photon doses between 2 and 500 Gy. The prolonged persistence of the signal at high doses strongly suggests dose dependence in DSB processing after low LET irradiation. Importantly, in the framework of our modelling analysis, this is related to a gradually increased fraction of DSB clustering at the micrometre scale. The parallel study of γH2AX dose response curves shows the onset of a pronounced saturation in two cell lines at a dose of about 20 Gy. This dose is much lower than expected according to model predictions based on the values usually adopted for the DSB induction yield (≈ 30 DSB/Gy) and for the γH2AX foci extension of approximately 2 Mbp around the DSB. We show and discuss how theoretical predictions and experimental findings can be in principle reconciled by combining an increased DSB induction yield with the assumption of a larger genomic extension for the single phosphorylated regions. As an alternative approach, we also considered in our model the possibility of a 3D spreading-mechanism of the H2AX phosphorylation around the induced DSB, and applied it to the analysis of both the aspects considered. Our results are found to be supportive for the basic assumptions on which GLOBLE is built. Apart from giving new insights into the H2AX phosphorylation process, experiments performed at high doses are of relevance in the context of radiation therapy, where hypo-fractionated schemes become increasingly popular.
Methodological challenges of studying social media from the perspective of information manipulation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank Professor Hans Klein from the School of Public Policy, my advisor, for his generous support and continuous trust in my work. Dr. Klein's dedication, knowledge, and never-ending curiosity inspired me to explore a new research field as a Graduate Research Assistant and to write this thesis. I am grateful for the time we spent thinking together. By carefully reading the earlier versions of my thesis, asking the right questions, and providing insightful feedback, he has guided me throughout this exciting journey. Dr. Klein has also introduced me to a smart and innovative research community focusing on computer security. From this group, I would like to specially thank Professor Wenke Lee for his support and the opportunity to be part of a team working together on an NSF proposal with brilliant researchers across the country. I learned a lot about how to motivate and bring together people for a common goal. I wish to extend this acknowledgment to Professor Nick Feamster who provided early feedback to my work. I truly enjoyed working together with Dr. Lee and Dr. Feamster developing a common vocabulary for computer scientists and researchers with a background in public policy. As a member of this community and a philosopher interested in technology, Professor Robert Rosenberger, contributed to my research with thoughtful comments. I also wish to express my sincere thanks to Professor Michael Best. I am grateful for the years I spent in his Technologies and International Development lab and the opportunity to work together with the most diverse group of people. This community provided the opportunity to work with real data. I would like to acknowledge Amanda iv Meng for our collaboration on social media and elections in Africa, and Thomas Smyth for sharing his love and knowledge of this wonderful continent. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Klara Benda, for her love, support and encouragement. I would not have started on this road without her.
Fundamentals of analyzing and mining data streams

Many scenarios, such as network analysis, utility monitoring, and financial applications, generate massive streams of data. These streams consist of millions or billions of simple updates every hour, and must be processed to extract the information described in tiny pieces. This survey provides an introduction the problems of data stream monitoring, and some of the techniques that have been developed over recent years to help mine the data while avoiding drowning in these massive flows of information. In particular, this tutorial introduces the fundamental techniques used to create compact summaries of data streams: sampling, sketching, and other synopsis techniques. It describes how to extract features such as clusters and association rules. Lastly, we see methods to detect when and how the process generating the stream is evolving, indicating some important change has occurred. Keywords: data streams, sampling, sketches, association rules, clustering, change detection.
AdjScales: Visualizing Differences between Adjectives for Language Learners

In this study we introduce AdjScales, a method for scaling similar adjectives by their strength. It combines existing Web-based computational linguistic techniques in order to automatically differentiate between similar adjectives that describe the same property by strength. Though this kind of information is rarely present in most of the lexical resources and dictionaries, it may be useful for language learners that try to distinguish between similar words. Additionally, learners might gain from a simple visualization of these differences using unidimensional scales. The method is evaluated by comparison with annotation on a subset of adjectives from WordNet by four native English speakers. It is also compared against two non-native speakers of English. The collected annotation is an interesting resource in its own right. This work is a first step toward automatic differentiation of meaning between similar words for language learners. AdjScales can be useful for lexical resource enhancement.