Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sensing performance of efficient cyclostationary detector with multiple antennas in multipath fading and lognormal shadowing environments

Spectrum sensing is a key technical challenge for cognitive radio (CR). It is well known that multicycle cyclostation-arity (MC) detection is a powerful method for spectrum sensing. However, a conventional MC detector is difficult to implement because of its high computational complexity. This paper considers reducing computational complexity by simplifying the test statistic of a conventional MC detector. On the basis of this simplification process, an improved MC detector is proposed. Compared with the conventional detector, the proposed detector has low-computational complexity and high-accuracy sensing performance. Subsequently, the sensing performance is further investigated for the cases of Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, Rician, and Rayleigh fading and lognormal shadowing channels. Furthermore, square-law combining (SLC) is introduced to improve the detection capability in fading and shadowing environments. The corresponding closed-form expressions of average detection probability are derived for each case by the moment generation function (MGF) and contour integral approaches. Finally, illustrative and analytical results show the efficiency and reliability of the proposed detector and the improvement in sensing performance by SLC in multipath fading and lognormal shadowing environments.
Approximation Algorithms for the Metric Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a well-known, commonly studied, and very important NP-hard optimization problem in theoretical computer science. It consists of finding a cyclic (i.e., start and stop on the same vertex) tour of minimum cost of a graph G that visits each vertex exactly once; i.e., a Hamiltonian cycle. The undirected or directed graph G has non-negative weights associated with each edge, which are used to compute the cost. Due to the NP-hardness of this problem, most theoretical work has focused on finding algorithms that produce “good” approximations in polynomial time. That is, if the cost of the optimum tour of a weighted graph is OPT , then we want to be able to return a tour of cost at most α ·OPT in polynomial time. Such an algorithm is said to be an α-approximation. The symmetric TSP is perhaps the most well known TSP variant. Symmetric TSP means that the edge-costs of the graph G are such that c({(u, v)}) = c({(v, u)}). A simple algorithm due to Christofides obtains an approximation ratio of 3 2 [Chr76]. Here, we will be considering a slightly more general TSP variant, asymmetric TSP, of which symmetric TSP is a special case. Asymmetric TSP allows c({(u, v)}) 6= c({(v, u)}). This is a natural generalization, since in many practical situations, traveling from point A to point B does not have the same cost as the return trip; i.e., due to disorganized, Bostonian one-way streets, hilly terrain, or otherwise. Additionally, we will be making the metric assumption. So the edge costs of G arise from some metric space. In particular, for any three vertices u, v, w, the triangle inequality is always satisfied:
Adjacent segment disease of the lumbar spine : genetic versus biomechanical theories

Adjacent segment disease has been considered a late complication of spinal fusion. It’s described as any degeneration that develops at mobile segments above or below a fused spinal segment. Several questions have arisen in the late years regarding this syndrome, we try to define it, describe it and determine if it’s caused by strain forces due to spinal arthrodesis or whether it’s the natural history of the degenerative spinal process. Possibilities on conservative and surgical management are discussed. Spinal degeneration is a pre – determined genetic process and therefore the involvement of unfused levels is an expected result. KeYWords: Intervertebral disc/pathology; Lumbar vertebrae/surgery; transitional syndrome; Spinal fusion/ adverse effects resuMen La enfermedad del disco adyacente ha sido considerada como una complicación tardía de la artrodesis vertebral. Ella es descrita como cualquier degeneración que ocurre en los segmentos movibles encima o abajo del segmento vertebral artrodesados. Muchas controversias se han presentado en los últimos años relacionados con ese problema. De esta forma será presentado y discutido la posible etiología mecánica relacionada con la formación de artrodesis vertebral y el proceso degenerativo vertebral del disco intervertebral. Las posibilidades del tratamiento conservador y quirúrgico serán presentadas y discutidas. La degeneración del disco intervertebral está relacionada con la predisposición genética, con la agresión de los segmentos vertebrales no artrodesados y una agresión esperada. descriptores: Disco intervertebral/patología; Vértebras lumbares/cirugía; Fusión vertebral/efectos adversos Trabajo hecho no Hospital Exequeil Gonzalez Cortés e Fundación Médica San Cristoba. Santiago, Chile. 1MD, Instituto Traumatologico de Santiago, Chief of Spine group. Fundación Médica San Cristobal, member of the spine group. Member of the Sociedad Chilena de Ortopedia y Traumatología. Santiago, Chile. 2MD, Hospital Exequeil Gonzalez Cortés, Staff member of the spine group. Fundación Médica San Cristoba. Santiago, Chile. Recebido: 19/06/08 Aprovado: 30/09/08
Privacy-Preserving Friend Search over Online Social Networks

Friendships or social contacts represent an important attribute characterizing one’s social position and significantly impact one’s daily life. Over online social networks (OSNs), users may opt to hide their social circle, membership or connections to certain individuals or groups for privacy concern. On the other hand, this prohibits a major benefit of OSNs – building social connections. In order to enable OSN users to search for contacts they interested and leverage friends-of-friends relationship to grow their social network, we study the following privacypreserving profiles searching (PPPS) problem: user P1 wants to seek for contacts possessing a certain set of attributes from the contacts of P2, while the contacts of P2 remain hidden from P1 and the criteria of P1 is unknown to P2 unless P2 indeed having such contacts. While the PPPS problem can be solved with the help of oblivious transfer with hidden access control (OT-HAC) which in turn can be built by anonymous identity-based encryption (IBE) with blind key extraction (BKE) protocol, the designs of existing systems are often complicated and the efficiency are not satisfactory. A simple and efficient approach is especially important for P2 since he is playing a helping role in the protocol. In this paper, we propose efficient BKE protocols, for an anonymous IBE and an anonymous hierarchical IBE attributed to Ducas in CT-RSA ’10. Our protocol for IBE is conceptually simpler and more efficient than an existing proposal by Camenisch et al . in PKC ’09. Our protocol for HIBE is the first of its kind in the literature to the best of our knowledge. When compared with the OT-HAC system proposed by Camenisch et al . in PKC ’11, our protocol is again conceptually simpler, supports predicates defined by vectors from a large-domain instead of bit-vectors, and allows retrieval of multiple items in one invocation. Finally, we demonstrate their practicality by our performance analysis on prototypes implementation.
The impact of family policy packages on fertility trends in

We examine how far fertility trends respond to family policies in OECD countries. In the light of the recent fertility rebound observed in several OECD countries, we empirically test the impact of different family policy settings on fertility, using macro panel data from 18 OECD countries that spans the years 1982 to 2007. Our results confirm that each instrument of the family policy package (paid leave, childcare services and financial transfers) has a positive influence, suggesting that the combination of these forms of support for working parents in a continuum during their children's early years is likely to facilitate parents’ choice to have children. Policy levers do not all have the same weight, however: in-cash benefits covering childhood after the year of childbirth and the provision of childcare services for children under age three have a larger potential influence on fertility than leave entitlements and benefits granted around childbirth. Our findings are robust after controlling for birth postponement, endogeneity, time-lagged fertility reactions and for different national contexts, such as economic development, female labour market participation, labour market insecurity
The Quality of Health Care: Evidence from Italy

We provide evidence that the quality of health care affects health outcomes, exploiting the substantial variability in the quality of the Italian public health service. The data are drawn from the 2001 Survey of Health, Aging and Wealth, providing detailed information on health status, and detailed demographic and economic variables for a sample of about 2000 individuals older than 50. The correlation between quality of health care and health outcomes is also confirmed in the panel section of the 1993-95 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. The Survey contains an individual indicator of the quality of health care services, which allows us to measure the impact of quality on health status controlling explicitly for regional effects. We find that raising the quality of health care from the level of the poorest quality regions to the sample average increases the probability of excellent health outcomes by 1.1 percentage points.
Mechanistic Insights Into Very Slow Conduction in Branching Cardiac Tissue: A Model Study

It is known that branching strands of cardiac tissue can form a substrate for very slow conduction. The branches slow conduction by acting as current loads drawing depolarizing current from the main strand (“pull” effect). It has been suggested that, upon depolarization of the branches, they become current sources reinjecting current back into the strand, thus enhancing propagation safety (“push” effect). It was the aim of this study to verify this hypothesis and to assess the contribution of the push effect to propagation velocity and safety. Conduction was investigated in strands of Luo-Rudy dynamic model cells that branch from either a single branch point or from multiple successive branch points. In single-branching strands, blocking the push effect by not allowing current to flow retrogradely from the branches into the strand did not significantly increase the branching-induced local propagation delay. However, in multiple branching strands, blocking the push effect resulted in a significant slowing of overall conduction velocity or even in conduction failure. Furthermore, for certain slow velocities, the safety factor for propagation was higher when slow conduction was caused by branching tissue geometry than by reduced excitability without branching. Therefore, these results confirm the proposed “pull and push” mechanism of slow, but nevertheless robust, conduction in branching structures. Slow conduction based on this mechanism could occur in the atrioventricular node, where multiple branching is structurally present. It could also support reentrant excitation in diseased myocardium where the substrate is structurally complex.
Estimating the 'Coordinated Effects' of Mergers *

Tacit collusion plays an important role in merger policy: competition agencies sometimes block mergers on the grounds that they will generate „coordinated effects‟, an increased likelihood of collusion. The tools available to competition authorities to evaluate such theories are limited, although there have been some recent contributions by Kovacic, Marshall, Marx and Schulenberg (2007) and Davis and Sabbattini (2008). The latter authors propose an approach to coordinated effects merger simulation in markets where multi-product firms operate in differentiated product markets. As far as the authors of this paper are aware, we provide the first full empirical implementation of a coordinated effects merger simulation model in a differentiated product market. We use our model to study the network server market and, specifically, we examine the effect of the merger between HP and Compaq on their and their rivals‟ collective incentives and ability to sustain tacit collusion. Our preliminary results suggest that the incentives to collude in the network server market are substantial, but actively decreased following the merger between HP and Compaq. In addition to exploring the incentives for collusion on one market we also examine the impact of (i) multi-market contact on firms‟ incentive and ability to sustain tacit coordination and (ii) a competitive fringe of smaller players who co-exist with a subset of the larger players in an industry who tacitly collude. Finally, we examine the impact of competition agencies enforcing prohibitions on such concerted practices. We find that the incentives to collude can be reduced dramatically, if the fines charged on cartel participants are large enough even if the probability of successful enforcement action following detection is low. Most importantly, by taking the economic theory of tacit collusion seriously in an empirical example, we establish that the intuition many economists have for the effect of mergers on the incentives to tacitly collude is actually wrong.
The effect of guided and free navigation on spatial memory in mixed reality

The role of active and passive navigation strategies on human spatial cognition is not well understood. One problem in addressing this question is that combining free movement with controlled stimulus conditions in navigation tasks is difficult to achieve. We have constructed a unique mixed reality space that answers this challenge. In our experiment we expose human subjects to a virtual house where they can navigate following two different protocols: guided or free navigation. We want to assess how navigation mode affects spatial memory. Our results show that the participants that were assigned to the guided navigation condition display higher spatial memory performance, as opposed to those assigned to the free navigation paradigm.
Representational Bias as Guidance for Learning Interactions: A Research Agenda.

The author hypothesizes that variation in features of representational tools can have a significant effect on collaborative learning discourse, and hence on learning outcomes. Representational tools mediate collaborative learning discourse by providing learners with the means to express their emerging knowledge in a persistent medium, where the knowledge then becomes part of the shared context. The representational bias of these tools constrains the knowledge that can be expressed, and makes some of that knowledge more salient and hence a likely topic of discussion. This paper sketches a theoretical analysis of the roles of constraint and salience in the effect of representational bias on collaborative learning discourse, and suggests a research agenda for systematic investigation of these claims.
TIPE2 suppresses angiogenesis and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) invasiveness via inhibiting Rac1 activation and VEGF expression

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is one of the leading causes of all cancer-related deaths worldwide. Despite extensive efforts to improve the diagnosis and treatment of this neoplasm, limited progress has been made. Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha-induced protein 8-like 2 (TIPE2 or TNFAIP8L2) is a newly introduced negative immune regulator, which also controls tumorigenesis. However, the role of TIPE2 in angiogenesis is unknown. In the present study, we investigated the expression and roles of TIPE2 in NSCLC. TIPE2 upregulation in human NSCLC tissues was negatively associated with the primary tumor size, lymph node metastasis, and advanced clinical stage, which can be used to predict lymph node metastasis. Moreover, overexpression of TIPE2 not only inhibited the colony formation, migration, and invasion of NSCLC cells but also indirectly suppressed the proliferation, migration, and tube formation of vascular endothelial cells. Furthermore, TIPE2 suppressed tumor invasiveness and angiogenesis via inhibiting the activation of Rac1 and subsequently weakening its downstream effects, including F-actin polymerization and VEGF expression. Collectively, these results indicate that TIPE2 plays a key role in NSCLC metastasis, suggesting that forced TIPE2 expression might be a novel strategy for the treatment of NSCLC.
The social network structure of in-service advancement education for the Chinese literature teachers in high school

The purpose of this study focused on the social network structure of in-service development for the Chinese literature expertise teachers in Taiwan High school. Social network analysis methods include the core measures, identification of groups to analyze the role, figure based on the statistical analysis and so on. In this study we use 2009 National Teacher in-service Education Information Network (http://inservice.edu.tw/) database to obtain 5,417 sample resources. The expected result should be able to understand Chinese literature teacher in-service refresher training expertise in the overall network of centricity, teachers participate in studies course subject categories and countries connected, education seminar for subgroups generated number, subgroups on overall network impact, etc.
A Corpus-based Study of Rhythm Patterns

We present a corpus-based study of musical rhythm, based on a collection of 4.8 million bar-length drum patterns extracted from 48,176 pieces of symbolic music. Approaches to the analysis of rhythm in music information retrieval to date have focussed on low-level features for retrieval or on the detection of tempo, beats and drums in audio recordings. Musicological approaches are usually concerned with the description or implementation of manmade music theories. In this paper, we present a quantitative bottom-up approach to the study of rhythm that relies upon well-understood statistical methods from natural language processing. We adapt these methods to our corpus of music, based on the realisation that—unlike words—barlength drum patterns can be systematically decomposed into sub-patterns both in time and by instrument. We show that, in some respects, our rhythm corpus behaves like natural language corpora, particularly in the sparsity of vocabulary. The same methods that detect word collocations allow us to quantify and rank idiomatic combinations of drum patterns. In other respects, our corpus has properties absent from language corpora, in particular, the high amount of repetition and strong mutual information rates between drum instruments. Our findings may be of direct interest to musicians and musicologists, and can inform the design of ground truth corpora and computational models of musical rhythm.
Platform for Pushing the Device-Oriented Information into a Cloud

In this paper, we propose a platform to share device-oriented information between devices. We consider missed call history, location and battery information as typical device-oriented information. By cooperating with existing cloud systems such as Gmail or Ever note, we realized the sharing of such kinds of information between devices. For a first trial, we proposed a platform and released a client application that works on Android. Our platform makes it easy to support new cloud services as output, and our Android application can set various kinds of trigger to push the information into the cloud.
A SIFT and local features based integrated method for copy-move attack detection in digital image

To determine whether a particular image is authentic or not is a principal problem in digital image forensics. Many techniques have been proposed to detect clues of intended manipulation in the literature. In this paper, an integrated method based on SIFT and local features including color and texture features has been developed to deal with copy-move attack. Initially analogous feature points are paired by comparing SIFT features. Then a distance examination is applied to eliminate false matched points. Normalized RGB color feature of matched points neighborhoods is extracted and comparison between pairs produced by previous step is done. At last revised Gabor texture feature is utilized to dispose of the rest false matched pairs by applying statistic tools and final detection result is presented. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed method is able to detect altered area even though these regions are changed in geometry and shading.
An Uncertain Volatility Explanation for Delayed Calls of Convertible Bonds

Arbitrage-free price bounds for convertible bonds are obtained assuming a stochastic volatility process for the common stock that lies within a band but makes few other assumptions about volatility dynamics. Equity-linked hazard rates, stochastic interest rates and different assumptions about default and recovery behavior are accommodated within this approach. A non-linear multi-factor reduced-form equity-linked default model leads to a set of non-linear partial differential complementarity equations that are governed by the volatility path. Empirical results focus on call notice period effects, showing that uncertain volatility can capture the call premia so often observed in issuer’s call policies. Increasingly pessimistic values for the issuer’s substitution asset obtain as we introduce more uncertainty during the notice period. Volatility uncertainty is thus a useful mechanism to explain issuers delayed call policies.
An extended Q learning system with emotion state to make up an agent with individuality

Recently, researches for the intelligent robots incorporating knowledge of neuroscience have been actively carried out. In particular, a lot of researchers making use of reinforcement learning have been seen, especially, “Reinforcement learning methods with emotions”, that has already proposed so far, is very attractive method because it made us possible to achieve the complicated object, which could not be achieved by the conventional reinforcement learning method, taking into account of emotions. In this paper, we propose an extended reinforcement (Q) learning system with amygdala (emotion) models to make up individual emotions for each agent. In addition, through computer simulations that the proposed method is applied to the goal search problem including a variety of distinctive solutions, it finds that each agent is able to have each individual solution.
Non-myopic active learning with mutual information

Active learning methods seek to reduce the number of labeled instances needed to train an effective classifier. Most current methods are myopic, i.e. select a single unlabelled sample to label at a time. The batch-mode active learning methods, on the other hand, typically select top N unlabeled samples with maximum score. Such selected samples often cannot guarantee the learner's performance. In this paper, a non-myopic active learning algorithm is presented based on mutual information. Our algorithm selects a set of samples at each iteration, and the objective function of the algorithm is proved to be submodular, which guarantees to find the near-optimal solution. Our experimental results on UCI data sets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms myopic active learning.
Information flow in a network model and the law of diminishing marginal returns

We analyze a simple dynamical network model which describes the limited capacity of nodes to process the input information. For a suitable choice of the parameters, the information flow pattern is characterized by exponential distribution of the incoming information and a fat-tailed distribution of the outgoing information, as a signature of the law of diminishing marginal returns. The analysis of a real EEG data-set shows that similar phenomena may be relevant for brain signals.