Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Matter of Faith: Religion in the 2004 Presidential Election

Moral values dominated the post-election headlines in 2004. Analysts pointed to exit polls, strong turnout among evangelicals, and controversy over gay marriage as evidence that the election had been decided along religious lines. Soon, however, this explanation was called into question. In A Matter of Faith , distinguished scholars go beyond the headlines to assess the role of religion in the 2004 election. Were issues such as stem cell research really more influential than the economy and Iraq? Did deeply religious Americans necessarily vote Republican? Was the morality factor really a dramatic new development? David E. Campbell and his colleagues examine the religious affiliations of voters and party elite and evaluate the claim that moral values were decisive in 2004. The authors analyze strategies used to mobilize religious conservatives and examine the voting behavior of a broad range of groups, including evangelicals, African-Americans, and the understudied religious left. This rich perspective on faith and politics is essential reading on a critical aspect of American politics. Contributors include John Green (University of Akron; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life), James Guth (Furman University), Sunshine Hillygus (Harvard University), Laura Hussey (University of Baltimore), John Jackson (University of Southern Illinois), Scott Keeter (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press), Lyman Kellstedt (Wheaton College), Geoffrey Layman (University of Maryland), David Leal (University of Texas at Austin), David Leege (Notre Dame), Eric McDaniel (University of Texas at Austin),Quin Monson (Brigham Young University), Barbara Norrander (University of Arizona), Jan Norrander (University of Minnesota), Baxter Oliphant (Brigham Young University), Corwin Smidt (Calvin College), and Matthew Wilson (Southern Methodist University).
Design of a hardware channel emulator as lab demonstrator for detailed verification of long-distance FSO systems

The field of Free Space Optical (FSO) communications has to deal with several challenges, which have to be considered. One of the most serious amongst them is fog attenuation. In this paper, an effective method for investigation of a long-distant FSO system's performance in the presence of fog is described. The proposed hardware channel emulator for laboratory measurements is based on a controllable optical attenuator, providing uncomplicated experimental environment in terms of fog conditions. An overview of already accomplished fog measurement campaigns is given as well as a rough summary of the self-developed MATLAB channel models. The findings were incorporated into the custom-made voltage driver (attenuator control unit), which controls the optical attenuator and represent sufficient basis for further laboratory long-distance FSO link verifications.
Analysing Evolution of Work and Load

Evolution of work and load is required for investigating elasticity and cost-efficiency of cloud computing applications as well as their underlying architecture. Existing modelling environments have fixed load and work, therefore rendering model-and-analyse approaches infeasible for such applications. This deficiency particularly leads to high risks that applications will violate their service level objectives. Therefore, this article describes how we can model and analyse the evolution of both work and load. We have created a corresponding meta model for usage evolution, and describe how we have integrated our meta model with Palladio, a common model-and-analyse environment. To model evolution we use the Descartes Load Intensity Model (DLIM). DLIM is coupled with the scenario model in the Palladio Component Model (PCM). We illustrate evolution of both work and load within Palladio simulations using a simple image server example.
A potential-flow BEM for large-displacement FSI

This work concerns the interaction of light membrane structures enclosing incompressible fluids. Large displacements and collapsed boundaries (initially slender subdomains) are characteristic of this class of problems. A finite-element/boundary-element (FE/BE) coupled discretization is discussed in this work which addresses these challenges. Most common linear fluid models have a boundary-integral representation, restricting the problem to the boundary and making them amenable to a boundary element method (BEM) discretization. A marked advantage of this representation with respect to the conventional partial-differential-equation-based view of finite-element methods for fluids is the bypassing of volumetric meshing. The FE/BE approach is therefore an enabling method for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems involving membranes, and the present work serves as a proof of concept for this approach. Numerical experiments show the capabilities of the proposed scheme.
Simultaneous single-pulse observations of radio pulsars IV: flux density spectra of individual pulses

In this paper we demonstrate that a large, unexplored reservoir of information about pulsar emission exists, that is directly linked to the radiating particles and their radiation process: We present a study of flux density measurements of individual pulses simultaneously observed at four different frequencies. Correcting for effects caused by the interstellar medium, we derive intrinsic flux density spectra of individual radio pulses observed at several frequencies for the first time. Pulsar B0329+54 was observed at 238, 626, 1412 and 4850 MHz, while observations of PSR B1133+16 were made at 341, 626, 1412 and 4850 MHz. We derive intrinsic pulse-to-pulse modulation indices which show a minimum around 1 GHz. Correlations between the flux densities of different frequency pairs worsen as the frequency separation widens and also tend to be worse for outer profile components. The single pulse spectra of PSR B0329+54 resemble the spectra of the integrated profile. However, the spectral index distributions for the single pulses of PSR B1133+16 show significant deviations from a Gaussian. This asymmetry is caused by very strong pulses with flux densities exceeding the mean value by more than a factor of ten. These strong pulses occur preferentially at the trailing edge of the leading component and appear to be broadband in most cases. Their properties are similar to those of so-called giant pulses, suggesting that these phenomena are related.
Phylogenetic and Complementation Analysis of a Single-Stranded DNA Binding Protein Family from Lactococcal Phages Indicates a Non-Bacterial Origin

Background The single-stranded-nucleic acid binding (SSB) protein superfamily includes proteins encoded by different organisms from Bacteria and their phages to Eukaryotes. SSB proteins share common structural characteristics and have been suggested to descend from an ancestor polypeptide. However, as other proteins involved in DNA replication, bacterial SSB proteins are clearly different from those found in Archaea and Eukaryotes. It was proposed that the corresponding genes in the phage genomes were transferred from the bacterial hosts. Recently new SSB proteins encoded by the virulent lactococcal bacteriophages (Orf14bIL67-like proteins) have been identified and characterized structurally and biochemically. Methodology/Principal Findings This study focused on the determination of phylogenetic relationships between Orf14bIL67-like proteins and other SSBs. We have performed a large scale phylogenetic analysis and pairwise sequence comparisons of SSB proteins from different phyla. The results show that, in remarkable contrast to other phage SSBs, the Orf14bIL67–like proteins form a distinct, self-contained and well supported phylogenetic group connected to the archaeal SSBs. Functional studies demonstrated that, despite the structural and amino acid sequence differences from bacterial SSBs, Orf14bIL67 protein complements the conditional lethal ssb-1 mutation of Escherichia coli. Conclusions/Significance Here we identified for the first time a group of phages encoded SSBs which are clearly distinct from their bacterial counterparts. All methods supported the recognition of these phage proteins as a new family within the SSB superfamily. Our findings suggest that unlike other phages, the virulent lactococcal phages carry ssb genes that were not acquired from their hosts, but transferred from an archaeal genome. This represents a unique example of a horizontal gene transfer between Archaea and bacterial phages.
Reaction force estimation of surgical robot instrument using perturbation observer with SMCSPO algorithm

This paper proposes a sensorless force estimation method for the end effector tip of a surgical robot instrument. Due to various size and safety constraints related to the surgical robot instrument, it is difficult to measure the reaction force at the instrument tip. This paper presents a method of estimating the reaction force of the surgical robot instrument without sensors and attempts to use state observer of control algorithm. Sliding mode control with sliding perturbation observer (SMCSPO) is used to drive the instrument, where the sliding perturbation observer (SPO) computes the amount of perturbation defined as the combination of the uncertainties and nonlinear terms where the major uncertainties arise from the reaction force. Based on this idea, this paper proposes a method to estimate the reaction force on the end-effector tip of the surgical robot instruments using only SPO and encoder without any additional sensors. To evaluate the validity of this paper, experiment was performed and the results showed that the estimated force computed from SPO is similar to the actual force.
Homing and Restorative Effects of Bone Marrow-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells on Cisplatin Injured Ovaries in Rats

Premature ovarian failure (POF) is a long-term adverse effect of chemotherapy treatment. However, current available treatment regimens are not optimal. Emerging evidence suggests that bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) could restore the structure and function of injured tissues, but the homing and restorative effects of BMSCs on chemotherapy injured ovaries are still not clear. In this study, we found that granulosa cell (GC) apoptosis induced by cisplatin was reduced when BMSCs were migrated to granulosa cells (GCs) in vitro. Chemotherapy-induced POF was induced by intraperitoneal injection of cisplatin in rats. BMSCs labeled with enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) were injected into the rats via the tail vein to investigate the homing and distribution of BMSCs in vivo. The number of BMSCs in the ovarian hilum and medulla was greater than in the cortex, but no BMSCs were found in the follicles and corpus lutea. In addition, the BMSCs treatment group’s antral follicle count and estradiol levels increased after 30 days, compared with the POF group. Hence, our study demonstrates that intravenously delivered BMSCs can home to the ovaries, and restore its structure and function in POF model rats.
On the Sum Formula for Multiple $q$-Zeta Values

Multiple q-zeta values are a 1-parameter generalization (in fact, a q-analog) of the multiple harmonic sums commonly referred to as multiple zeta values. These latter are obtained from the multiple q-zeta values in the limit as q tends to 1. Here, we discuss the sum formula for multiple q-zeta values, and provide a self-contained proof. As a consequence, we also derive a q-analog of Euler's evaluation of the double zeta function zeta(m,1).
Protein Coexpression Using FMDV 2A: Effect of “Linker” Residues

Many biomedical applications absolutely require, or are substantially enhanced by, coexpression of multiple proteins from a single vector. Foot-and-mouth disease virus 2A (F2A) and “2A-like” sequences (e.g., Thosea asigna virus 2A; T2A) are used widely for this purpose since multiple proteins can be coexpressed by linking open reading frames (ORFs) to form a single cistron. The activity of F2A “cleavage” may, however, be compromised by both the use of shorter versions of F2A and the sequences (derived from multiple-purpose cloning sites) used to link F2A to the upstream protein. To characterise these effects, different lengths of F2A and T2A were inserted between green and cherry fluorescent proteins. Mutations were introduced in the linker region immediately upstream of both F2A- and T2A-based constructs and activities determined using both cell-free translation systems and transfected cells. In shorter versions of F2A, activity may be affected by both the C-terminal sequence of the protein upstream and, equally strikingly, the residues immediately upstream introduced during cloning. Mutations significantly improved activity for shorter versions of F2A but could decrease activity in the case of T2A. These data will aid the design of cloning strategies for the co-expression of multiple proteins in biomedical/biotechnological applications.
Analysis of torque capability and quality in vernier permanent magnet machines

This paper presents theoretical analysis and comprehensive simulations about average torque and pulsation torque of vernier permanent magnet (VPM) machine. A general torque equation is proposed which is used to analyze torque features and the parameters effect on torque performance of VPM machines in this paper. Based on the general torque equation and finite element algorithm, it is found that smooth torque is the inherent performance of VPM machines. Furthermore, It is demonstrated that the torque density of the VPM machine is larger than that of a regular commercial PM machine by almost 60%. All these advantages demonstrate that the VPM machines can obtain much better steady and dynamic drive performance. In order to validate theoretical analysis, a prototype is built, and more experiments will be available.
Computação n ° 29 / 05 Governing the Interactions of an Agent-based Open Supply Chain Management System

In open multi-agent systems, in which components are autonomous and heterogeneous, trust is crucial. This paper presents a law-governed mechanism to ensure trust and augment reliability in open systems. The mechanism is based on governing the interactions within the system. This is a non-intrusive method, which allows free development of agents for open systems – they must only follow the protocols specified for the system. This paper gives a complete example of the law government approach, using a real open system environment for supply chain management. In this paper, the XMLaw description language was extended to specify the characteristics of the Trading Agent Competition – Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM) domain and these new features have been mapped to a mechanism that interprets the descriptions and analyzes the compliance of the software agents that inhabit the open software system to its laws. Using this specification, a supply chain management application based on TAC-SCM’s description was developed.
A Study of Cultural Dependence of Perceived Mood in Greek Music

Several algorithms have been developed in the music information retrieval community for predicting mood in music in order to facilitate organising and accessing large audio collections. Little attention has been paid however to how perceived emotion depends on cultural factors, such as listeners’ acculturation or familiarity with musical background or language. In this study, we examine this dependence in the context of Greek music. A large representative database of Greek songs has been created and sampled observing predefined criteria such as the balance between Eastern and Western influenced musical genres. Listeners were then asked to rate songs according to their perceived mood. We collected continuous ratings of arousal and valence for short song excerpts and also asked participants to select a mood tag from a controlled mood vocabulary that best described the music. We analysed the consistency of ratings between Greek and non-Greek listeners and the relationships between the categorical and dimensional representations of emotions. Our results show that there is a greater agreement in listener’s judgements with Greek background compared to the group with varying background. These findings suggest valuable implications on the future development of mood prediction systems.
Design and Operation of a Phase-Locked Loop with Kalman Estimator-Based Filter for Single-Phase Applications

This paper describes the design procedure of a phase-locked loop (PLL) preceded by a Kalman estimator-based filter. It provides a highly accurate and fast estimate of the grid frequency and phase angle in grid-connected power electronic applications. Moreover, it enables the transformation to the rotational dq frame for various control purposes. Closed-form equations allow for a performance driven design for both PLL and estimator. By using a variable sample frequency controlled by the PLL, the Kalman filter is always operated around its center frequency, which is the rated grid frequency. The new topology is compared to other published single-phase PLL designs and its operation is verified by both simulations and experiments. The PLL exhibits excellent performance even under severely distorted utility grid voltage conditions. This robustness makes it very suitable for use in systems connected to grids having an important share of non-linear loads
Adaptive steganalysis against WOW embedding algorithm

WOW (Wavelet Obtained Weights) [5] is one of the advanced steganographic methods in spatial domain, which can adaptively embed secret message into cover image according to textural complexity. Usually, the more complex of an image region, the more pixel values within it would be modified. In such a way, it can achieve good visual quality of the resulting stegos and high security against typical steganalytic detectors. Based on our analysis, however, we point out one of the limitations in the WOW embedding algorithm, namely, it is easy to narrow down those possible modified regions for a given stego image based on the embedding costs used in WOW. If we just extract features from such regions and perform analysis on them, it is expected that the detection performance would be improved compared with that of extracting steganalytic features from the whole image. In this paper, we first proposed an adaptive steganalytic scheme for the WOW method, and use the spatial rich model (SRM) based features [4] to model those possible modified regions in our experiments. The experimental results evaluated on 10,000 images have shown the effectiveness of our scheme. It is also noted that our steganalytic strategy can be combined with other steganalytic features to detect the WOW and/or other adaptive steganographic methods both in the spatial and JPEG domains.
A Robust Multiple Object Tracking Algorithm under Highly Occlusion

We describe a real-time multiple face-tracking algorithm under highly occlusion. In order to resolve the occlusion and temporal lost problem, a robust data association + filtering procedure is proposed. The mechanism combines the census transform based block-by-block strategy to infer the occlusion state via concerning observation changes of two faces. And a robust and straightforward filtering approach is provided to infer the state of the occluded object, so that the prior motion cues and observations are jointly utilized. Finally cross validation scheme is introduced to adjust the association process and resist unpredicted motion changes. Combining the proposed scheme to resist occlusion with a baseline discriminative kernel tracker, experiments demonstrate that the proposed tracking algorithm has favorable capability on video sequences.
SSDP: A Simple Evolutionary Approach for Top-K Discriminative Patterns in High Dimensional Databases

It is a great challenge to companies, governments and researchers to extract knowledge in high dimensional databases. Discriminative Patterns (DPs) is an area of data mining that aims to extract relevant and readable information in databases with target attribute. Among the algorithms developed for search DPs, it has highlighted the use of evolutionary computing. However, the evolutionary approaches typically (1) are not adapted for high dimensional problems and (2) have many nontrivial parameters. This paper presents SSDP (Simple Search Discriminative Patterns), an evolutionary approach to search the top-k DPs adapted to high dimensional databases that use only two easily adjustable external parameters.
Extracting Target Features from Angle-Angle and Range-Doppler Images

Abstract : For diffuse targets, features such as shape, size, and motion can be determined from a time series of images from either angle-angle passive telescopes or range-Doppler radars. The extracted target features can then be used for automated target recognition and identification. An algorithm that uses scene-analysis techniques has been developed to perform the feature extraction. The algorithm first processes the images to suppress noise, then applies a two- dimensional slope operation for edge detection to determine the target boundaries. Next, Hough transforms are used on the target edges to detect straight lines and curves, which are subsequently refined with line and curve fits. Groups of the fitted lines are then examined to form cylinders and cones representing typical target components. After these shapes have been identified, the target configuration, size, location, and attitude can be estimated. The target motion can then be inferred from a time series of attitudes that have been extracted from a sequence of images.
Existence crises of actual financial management systems

The present financial management systems reflects only partially the economic reality and they are no longer able to act as an instrument for the management. It is absurd that an economy populated by business models based on 21st century technology to use financial management systems based mainly on the same principles formalised by Luca Paciolli in 1494. Therefore, one of the causes of the current economic crisis could be the lack of coordination between the evolution of the business models and the development of new financial management models used by companies, state and investors. The present financial management systems facilitate the existence of grey or even black bookkeeping systems, tax evasion with the help of fiscal paradises, and financial shenanigans aiming to optimise, barely illegal, the financial situations.