Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Joining the backstage: locality and centrality in an online community

The design of viable, small‐scale community spaces on the Net is often a hit‐or‐miss affair. To better understand promising approaches in this design space, it is necessary to go back in time to examine an earlier community technology. A field study is presented of The Castle, a dial‐up bulletin board system, that focuses on Disneyland. As a “gathering place for Disney enthusiasts”, The Castle is a fascinating, albeit eccentric, online community. The Castle's centrality in the fans’ interest network allows it to function as a collecting point. Here people find similar enthusiasts and even those with insider knowledge. Yet, because of the cost structure of dial‐up access (an accidental side‐effect of the technology), participants are overwhelmingly geographically local, which has useful consequences for social maintenance. It is argued that the geographical locality and centrality of interest allow The Castle to thrive. Most importantly, however, the combination of the two together creates a powerful socia.
Impact of Flow Rate, Collection Devices, and Extraction Methods on Tear Concentrations Following Oral Administration of Doxycycline in Dogs and Cats

Abstract Purpose: Compare the precision of doxycycline quantification in tear fluid collected with either Schirmer strips or polyvinyl acetal (PVA) sponges following oral drug administration. Methods: Three dogs and 3 cats were administered doxycycline orally at a dose of 4.2–5 mg/kg every 12 h for 6 consecutive days. At day 5 and 6, blood and tear fluid were sampled to capture doxycycline trough and maximal concentrations. Tear fluid was collected 3 times (spaced 10 min apart) at each session with the absorbent material placed in the lower conjunctival fornix until the 20-mm mark was reached (Schirmer strip, one eye) or for 1 min (PVA sponge, other eye). Tear extraction was performed with either centrifugation or elution in methanol. Doxycycline concentrations were measured with liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry. Low (100 ng/mL) and high (1,000 ng/mL) tear concentrations measured in vivo were spiked into each absorbent material in vitro to evaluate percentage drug recovery. Results: After oral administration of doxycycline, the drug reached the tear compartment at concentrations of 45.1–900.7 ng/mL in cats and 45.4–632.0 ng/mL in dogs, representing a tear-to-serum ratio of 12% and 16%, respectively. Doxycycline tear concentrations were significantly more precise when tear collection was performed with Schirmer strips rather than PVA sponges (P = 0.007), but were not correlated with tear flow rate. In vitro doxycycline recovery was poor to moderate (<75%). Conclusions: Schirmer strips represent a good option for lacrimal doxycycline quantification, although the collection and subsequent extraction have to be optimized to improve drug recovery.
Visualization of OpenCL application execution on CPU-GPU systems

Evaluating the performance of parallel and heterogeneous programs and architectures can be challenging. An emulator or simulator can be used to aid the programmer. To provide guidance and feedback to the programmer, the simulator needs to present traces, reports, and debugging information in a coherent and unambiguous format. Although these outputs contain a lot of detailed information relative to the logical and physical transactions about the execution, they are usually extremely large and hard to analyze. What is needed is an interface into the simulator that can help programmers and architects shift through this myriad of data. In this contribution, we describe the M2S-Visual trace-driven visualization tool, a complementary addition to Multi2sim (M2S) heterogeneous system simulator. M2S-Visual provides a graphical representation of parallel program execution on the simulator. M2S is an established simulator, designed with an emphasis on simulating the execution of parallel applications on graphics processing units, and provides a number of instrumentation capabilities that enable research in architecture exploration and application characterization. This visualization framework, added to Multi2sim, aims to complement (and potentially replace) text-based statistical profiling, enabling the user to better learn and understand each software transaction executed on the simulated hardware. While M2S supports emulation of both OpenCL and CUDA programs, our visualization framework presently only supports OpenCL execution. M2S supports execution on both CPUs (X86, ARM and MIPS) and GPUs (AMD Evergreen and Southern Islands, and NVIDIA Fermi and Kepler), but presently only supports detailed visualization on a multicore X86 CPU and AMD Evergreen and Southern Islands GPUs. Besides supporting OpenCL programming and debugging, an additional goal is to deliver a reliable product for teaching the details of parallel programming execution on heterogeneous systems. Given the move to many-core architectures in the industry, this toolset is timely and addresses a growing gap in our educational infrastructure. The tool is also designed to support the research community, providing analysis of performance bottlenecks of OpenCL programs. We also incorporated the option to produce visualization graphs which provide deeper insight into application performance and hardware resource utilization.
Programming the Harmonium Petri Myllym

We show how to synthesize, given a Bayesian network description of a probability distribution, an instance of Smolensky's harmony network that computes maximum-likelihood completions to partial value assignments, according to the given distribution. As an application, we present a scheme for translating a high-level description of a conceptual hierarchy, with default values and exceptions, to a harmony network representation, which is then inherently capable of quite complicated query processing. Finally, we discuss our experience from implementing such a translation scheme.
Industrial Relations Climate, Attendance Behaviour and the Role of Trade Unions

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the impact of co-operative union‐management relations on firm performance and organizational outcomes such as employee turnover and absenteeism. This paper seeks to identify the factors that affect the development of a co-operative industrial relations climate and analyses the effects of that climate on organizational and union allegiance and on employee attendance behaviour. The data are drawn from a study of a large automotive manufacturer in Australia. The results indicate that a positive union‐management relationship is associated with higher levels of work attendance. Moreover, this outcome is consistent with the presence of strong and effective unionism at the workplace.
Body and Self-Identity in Stroke Rehabilitation

The experience of stroke is variously described in several studies as a rupture in everyday life, a change that is constantly present, and as a new aspect of life to which the individual has to relate [1-14]. The stroke is described as a sudden and overwhelming reversal [1,2,8,13], and an essential severance [5,10] that separates stroke survivors from their earlier life and forces them into a new and foreign existence [1,4,6,10]. For some, it takes a long time before they understand that something serious and inexorable has taken place and before they understand the extent of the consequences [1,10]. A stroke has also a significant influence on mood (underlying state of mind) [7], personality [6,10], capabilities [5,10], activities [2,6] roles and social relations [4,14] and on self-identity [3].
The nutrition and health transition in Malaysia

Abstract The accelerated phase of industrialisation and urbanisation in recent decades has inevitably brought about changes in the lifestyle of Malaysians. Changes in dietary habits and sedentary lifestyles are known to be associated with changes in health and increased prevalence of chronic diseases in the population. The objective of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the link between demographic variables and food consumption patterns related to the nutrition transition in Malaysia. This review uses various reports and publications from several ministries and selected local studies. The statistics compiled over the last two decades have shown that as the population achieves affluence, intakes of calories, fats and sugars increase, which may account for the substantial increase in food importation bills over the same period. Similarly, the rapid growth of the fast food industry during the last decade has added another dimension to the change in food consumption patterns of Malaysians. With the exception of a study on adolescents, the prevalences of overweight and obesity in children and adults are not strictly comparable due to the difference in body mass index (BMI) cut-off points in children and the study protocol in adults, and hence should not be misinterpreted as trends. The recent recommendation to lower the BMI cut-off points for Asians would only increase the magnitude of the existing prevalence among adults. The need to promote healthy nutrition for the population must be pursued vigorously, as the escalation of nutrition-related chronic degenerative diseases – once an urban phenomenon – has now spread to the rural population at an alarming rate. This paper indicates that the problem is real and needs urgent attention because it may be just the tip of the iceberg.
Conscious and Nonconscious Components of Superstitious Beliefs in Judgment and Decision Making

Despite the large impact that superstitious beliefs have on the marketplace, we currently know very little about their implications for consumer judgment and decision making. We document the existence of the influence of superstitious beliefs on consumer behavior and specify their conscious and nonconscious underlying properties. In particular, we show that superstitious beliefs have a robust influence on product satisfaction and decision making under risk. However, these effects are only observed when superstitious beliefs are allowed to work nonconsciously. Using a process-dissociation task, we further demonstrate the distinct conscious versus nonconscious components of the effect of superstition on decision making under risk. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc.
THE RADIUS OF CONVERGENCE AND THE WELL-POSEDNESS OF THE PAINLEV ´ E EXPANSIONS OF THE KORTEWEG-DE-VRIES EQUATION Short Title: Well Posedness of Painlevexpansions

A light source device includes: a phosphor unit that is provided with a phosphor; an excitation light source that supplies excitation light that excites the phosphor; a reducing optical system that reduces the luminous flux diameter of the excitation light; and a light condensing optical system that condenses, on the phosphor unit, excitation light for which the luminous flux diameter was reduced by the reducing optical system. The reducing optical system includes: a plurality of lenses including two lenses having positive power; and a lens-moving section that moves the lens back and forth along the direction of the optical axis. The lens is disposed on the excitation light source side, and has a lower power than the lens. The refractive index of the lens is equal to or smaller than the refractive indexes of the other lenses of the reducing optical system.
Measuring Time Dependence of Dark Energy Density from Type Ia Supernova Data

Observations of high-redshift supernovae imply an accelerating universe that can only be explained by an unusual energy component such as vacuum energy or quintessence. To assess the ability of current and future supernova data to constrain the properties of the dark energy, we allow its density to have arbitrary time dependence, ρX(z). This leads to an equation of state for the dark energy, wX(z) = pX(z)/ρX(z), which is a free function of redshift z. We find that current data of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are consistent with a cosmological constant, with large uncertainties at z ≳ 0.5. We show that ρX(z)/ρX(z = 0) can be measured reasonably well to about z = 1.5 using SN Ia data from realistic future SN Ia pencil beam surveys, provided that the weak energy condition (energy density of matter is nonnegative for any observer) is imposed. While it is only possible to differentiate between different models (say, quintessence and k-essence) at z ≲ 1.5 using realistic data, the correct trend in the time dependence of the dark energy density can be clearly detected out to z = 2, even in the presence of plausible systematic effects. This would allow us to determine whether the dark energy is a cosmological constant or some exotic form of energy with a time-dependent density.
Performance comparison of GTS mechanism enabled IEEE 802.15.4 based Wireless Sensor Networks using LAR and DYMO protocol

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an emerging field of engineering with various applications. The motivation is due to the low power and small size sensor nodes used in the network. It has started to emerge as the next generation wireless standard for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LRWPAN). The IEEE 802.15. 4 standard is adopted as a communication protocol for LR-WPAN which supports low data rate, less power consumption and short transmission distance. IEEE 802.15. 4 is the basis for the Zigbee enabled WSNs. IEEE and ZigBee alliance have joined hands to develop a complete specification of protocol stack for 802.15. 4. The Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) mechanism provided by IEEE 802.15. 4 standard allocates specific time slots to all nodes in the network and makes communication more consistent. This consistency makes the network to enhance their performance. In this paper, the performance analysis of GTS mechanism enabled IEEE 802.15. 4 based wireless sensor networks using various routing protocols is done by using QualNet. Performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio, delay and packets dropped of IEEE 802.15. 4 based wireless sensor networks are analysed using Location Aided Routing (LAR) protocol. Then the performance metrics are then compared with that of DYnamic MANET On-Demand (DYMO) routing protocol.
Humanoid Personalized Avatar Through Multiple Natural Language Processing

— There has been a growing interest in implementing humanoid avatars in networked virtual environment. However, most existing avatar communication systems do not take avatars’ social backgrounds into consideration. This paper proposes a novel humanoid avatar animation system to represent personalities and facial emotions of avatars based on culture, profession, mood, age, taste, and so forth. We extract semantic keywords from the input text through natural language processing, and then the animations of personalized avatars are retrieved and displayed according to the order of the keywords. Our primary work is focused on giving avatars run-time instruction from multiple natural languages. Experiments with Chinese, Japanese and English input based on the prototype show that interactive avatar animations can be displayed in real time and be made available online. This system provides a more natural and interesting means of human communication, and therefore is expected to be used for cross-cultural communication, multiuser online games, and other entertainment applications
Monaural Sound Source Separation by Perceptually Weighted Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

A data-adaptive algorithm for the separation of sound sources from one-channel signals is presented. The algorithm applies weighted non-negative matrix factorization on the power spectrogram of the input signal. Perceptually motivated weights for each critical band in each frame are used to model the loudness perception of the human auditory system. The method compresses high-energy components, and enables the estimation of perceptually significant low-energy characteristics of sources. The power spectrogram is factorized into a sum of components which have a fixed magnitude spectrum with a time-varying gain. Each source consists of one or more components. The parameters of the components are estimated by minimizing the weighted divergence between the observed power spectrogram and the model, for which a weighted non-negative matrix factorization algorithm is proposed. Simulation experiments were carried out using generated mixtures of pitched musical instrument samples and percussive sounds. The performance of the proposed method was compared with other separation algorithms which are based on the same signal model. These include for example independent subspace analysis and sparse coding. According to the simulations the proposed method enables perceptually better separation quality than the existing algorithms. Demonstration signals are available at http://www.cs. tut.fi/~tuomasv/. Index Terms — Sound source separation, non-negative matrix factorization, sparse coding, independent subspace analysis
Position-Dependent Methylation and Transcriptional Silencing of Transgenes in Inverted T-DNA Repeats: Implications for Posttranscriptional Silencing of Homologous Host Genes in Plants

ABSTRACT Posttranscriptional silencing of chalcone synthase (Chs) genes in petunia transformants occurs by introducing T-DNAs that contain a promoter-driven or promoterless Chstransgene. With the constructs we used, silencing occurs only by T-DNA loci which are composed of two or more T-DNA copies that are arranged as inverted repeats (IRs). Since we are interested in the mechanism by which these IR loci induce silencing, we have analyzed different IR loci and nonsilencing single-copy (S) T-DNA loci with respect to the expression and methylation of the transgenes residing in these loci. We show that in an IR locus, the transgenes located proximal to the IR center are much more highly methylated than are the distal genes. A strong silencing locus composed of three inverted T-DNAs bearing promoterless Chs transgenes was methylated across the entire locus. The host Chs genes in untransformed plants were moderately methylated, and no change in methylation was detected when the genes were silenced. Run-on transcription assays showed that promoter-driven transgenes located proximal to the center of a particular IR are transcriptionally more repressed than are the distal genes of the same IR locus. Transcription of the promoterlessChs transgenes could not be detected. In the primary transformant, some of the IR loci were detected together with an unlinked S locus. We observed that the methylation and expression characteristics of the transgenes of these S loci were comparable to those of the partner IR loci, suggesting that there has been cross talk between the two types of loci. Despite the similar features, S loci are unable to induce silencing, indicating that the palindromic arrangement of the Chs transgenes in the IR loci is critical for silencing. Since transcriptionally silenced transgenes in IRs can trigger posttranscriptional silencing of the host genes, our data are most consistent with a model of silencing in which the transgenes physically interact with the homologous host gene(s). The interaction may alter epigenetic features other than methylation, thereby impairing the regular production of mRNA.
Towards Automated Counter-Melody Generation for Monophonic Melodies

Algorithmic composition has focused on creating music from algorithms, stemming from the capacity to convert notes into numbers and vice versa, thus allowing simple to complex algorithmic manipulations. The focus of these studies has either been the creation of melodies, chords, accompaniments or entire songs. This study focuses on a relatively underexplored topic on the algorithmic generation of a counter-melody from a given melody. Using a method based on existing knowledge of generating chords and music theory on compatible notes and chord progressions, combined with concepts of machine learning and tree traversal techniques for generating chords, this study was able to generate 200 counter-melodies from 100 inputs, involving two generation techniques per input. The results show that counter-melodies were successfully generated based on chord progression generation and note selection approaches, and after subjecting the counter-melodies to proper subject evaluation, the average scores of 2.89 and 3.02 on a 5-point evaluation criteria reveal that the counter-melodies are musically fit for the original melodies they were based from.
A Historical Construction of Western Judges Profession

The emergency of judge is the result of power granting by the rulers.Form the establishment of judges,they are linked to justice.Owing to the different characteristics of nationalities,the paths of judge selection are not the same: some are selected from the whole society through democratic elections,while others are merely elites in the democratic elections.Early judges are not "official",their social status are lower than official's and they are not experts.Judiciary corruption seems to come along with the judicial power.Judges and other professional careers are inevitable outcome of labor division and progress of civilization.Different forms of government decide the forms of judges.The ultimate aim of the judiciary is to protect the independence of the judiciary.
The Relationship between Executive Function and Falls and Gait Abnormalities in Older Adults: A Systematic Review

Background/Objectives: Older adults with dementia have at least a twofold increased risk of falls. Multi-factorial interventions have failed to demonstrate a reduction in falls in this group. Improved understanding of specific cognitive factors and their relationship to gait, balance and falls is required. Methods: Systematic searches of Medline, Embase, PsycInfo, and CINAHL databases from inception to April 2011 were conducted to identify prospective studies in older adults examining executive function and its relationship with falls, balance and gait abnormalities. Two independent reviewers extracted data on study populations, executive function measures and study outcomes. Results: Of 8,985 abstracts identified, 14 studies met inclusion criteria. Eleven studies examined executive function and falls. The remaining studies examined executive function and gait speed decline. Nine studies examining executive function and falls found a relationship between poor executive function and increased fall risk. All 3 studies examining executive function and gait found an association between poor executive function and declines in gait speed. Impaired executive function was associated with more serious falling patterns. Conclusions: Executive function was associated with falls and gait speed slowing in older adults. Future research should consider executive dysfunction as a training target for fall prevention, or as a factor mediating the failure of conventional fall prevention interventions.
Tracking and Segmentation of Highway Vehicles in Cluttered and Crowded Scenes

Monitoring highway traffic is an important application of computer vision research. In this paper, we analyze congested highway situations where it is difficult to track individual vehicles in heavy traffic because vehicles either occlude each other or are connected together by shadow. Moreover, scenes from traffic monitoring videos are usually noisy due to weather conditions and/or video compression. We present a method that can separate occluded vehicles by tracking movements of feature points and assigning over-segmented image fragments to the motion vector that best represents the fragment's movement. Experiments were conducted on traffic videos taken from highways in Turkey, and the proposed method can successfully separate vehicles in overpopulated and cluttered scenes.