Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Grappling with Ignorance:

Of course, the immediate future is uncertain; America has faced the unknown since 1776. It's just that sometimes people focus on the myriad of uncertainties that always exist while at other times they ignore them (usually because the recent past has been uneventful). Economists, psychologists, and decision theorists try to distill the ways in which people in the real world make decisions. When outcomes are known, decision making is fairly straightforward. Hence, across a broad range of circumstances, decision making approximates rational prescriptions. However, when outcomes are unknown, grave difficulties intrude. People choose poorly, at least as judged from the standpoint of the well-developed prescriptive theories built on Bayesian decision and expected utility. Unknown outcomes can be further described as involving risk or uncertainty. Risk applies when probabilities are known, as they are at gambling tables or for insurance companies that have vast amounts of actuarial data on individual risks. Uncertainty prevails when even those probabilities are unknown, as they are for virtually all real-life decisions. The rational decision paradigm was posited seminally by Savage (1954) and more accessibly by Raiffa (1968). Decision theory has emphatically modeled itself on the expected utility (EU) approach, which requires that a probability and a utility be attached to each potential outcome. The behavioral decision approach, building on the work of economist Maurice Allais and psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and those who followed in their
A Sobolev Space Theory of SPDEs with Constant Coefficients in a Half Space

Equations of the form du = (auxixj +Dif i) dt+ ∑ k (σuxi + g k) dwk t are considered for t > 0 and x ∈ R+. The unique solvability of these equations is proved in weighted Sobolev spaces with fractional positive or negative derivatives, summable to the power p ∈ [2,∞).
A "follow the perturbed leader"-type algorithm for zero-delay quantization of individual sequences

Zero-delay lossy source coding schemes are considered for individual sequences. Performance is measured by the distortion redundancy, defined as the difference between the normalized cumulative mean squared distortion of the scheme and the normalized cumulative distortion of the best scalar quantizer of the same rate which is matched to the entire sequence to be encoded. Recently, Weissman and Merhav constructed a randomized scheme which, for any bounded individual sequence of length n, achieves a distortion redundancy O(n/sup -1/3/logn). However, this scheme has prohibitive complexity (both space and time) which makes practical implementation infeasible. In this paper, we present an efficiently computable algorithm based on a "follow the perturbed leader"-type prediction method by Kalai and Vempala. Our algorithm achieves distortion redundancy O(n/sup -1/4/ logn), which is somewhat worse than that of the scheme by Merhav and Weissman, but it has computational complexity that is linear in the sequence length n, and requires O(n/sup 1/4/) storage capacity.
Using weighted majority voting classifier combination for relation classification in biomedical texts

In biomedical area, information is mainly in natural language text format. Such information is stored in huge repositories. It is not easy to access required information from this large amount of data. Also the classification systems developed for general text is not applicable for biomedical data. The biomedical researchers need fast and accurate information accessing tools for extracting useful information from huge amount of biomedical repositories. This paper proposes a multiple classifier system for relation extraction from biomedical sentences. For classifier combination, the system uses weighted majority voting method. It classifies biomedical sentences according to the disease-treatment relations present in the sentences. This paper shows that multiple classifier system outperforms the single classifiers for relation classification from biomedical sentences.
Association between physical activity and mental health among high-school adolescents in Boushehr province: A population based study

Objective Mental health is one of the evaluating factors of community indicators, and physical activity is considered an important tool for the importance of public health. Previous studies have demonstrated associations between physical activity and mental health, but these studies did not include those populations in which training children have some traditional and religious aspects. Methods Multiple logistic regression analyses were used to compare the prevalence of mental health among those who had inactive, minimally and HEPA activity in a representative sample of adolescents aged 15–19 in South of Iran using data from the Mental Health Survey (n=2584). The GHQ-28 and IPAQ-short forms were used to evaluate the mental health and physical activity, respectively. Results A total of 2584 adolescents (1401 male and 1178 female) participated in the study. The observed odds of psychological symptoms in boys compared to girls is 1.2 times (p=0.018). We observed that HEPA-activity decreases odds of somatic distress and social dysfunction compared with inactivity (p=0.031 and 0.001, respectively); minimally activity decreases odds of anxiety compared with inactivity (p=0.038); but physical activity rate was not affected on odds of adolescent's depression (p>0.05). Conclusion Physical activity decreases mental health subscales except for depression among adolescents in Boushehr, southern city of Iran.
Understanding the cognitive mechanisms of developmental prosopagnosia

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a condition associated with severe difficulties recognising familiar faces, which occurs in individuals with normal intelligence, typical low-level vision, and in the absence of manifest brain injuries. The neuro-cognitive origins of DP are still debated. Cognitive accounts have attributed face recognition deficits to reduced holistic processing of faces (i.e., whereby individual features of faces are integrated into a unified perceptual whole), and mnemonic difficulties, whereby prosopagnosics may be able to form accurate percepts, but are unable to maintain those percepts over time. At the neurological level, differences have been reported in the structural and functional connectivity of occipito-temporal regions which include face selective areas. Chapter 2 of this thesis investigated facial emotion recognition in DP and revealed widespread difficulties recognising facial emotion in individuals with apperceptive profiles of DP (i.e., DPs exhibiting difficulties forming view-invariant structural descriptions of faces at early stages of encoding). Chapter 3 explored body recognition in DP and found evidence of impaired body and object recognition in DP individuals. Moreover, the lack of relationship between observers’ object and body recognition performances suggested that body and object recognition impairments in DP may co-occur independently. Chapter 4 investigated the susceptibility to the composite face illusion in two independent samples of individuals with DP and failed to show evidence of diminished composite face effects in both samples. Finally, Chapter 5 considered the contribution of perceptual encoding and short term face memory in DP using a delayed match-to-sample task and found that recognition impairments in prosopagnosics were insensitive to changes in retention interval and viewing angle, supporting an apperceptive characterisation of DP. The implications of these findings for the characterisation of DP and for understanding its underlying cognitive mechanisms, are discussed in Chapter 6.
A nucleosome positioned in the distal promoter region activates transcription of the human U6 gene

To investigate the consequences of chromatin reconstitution for transcription of the human U6 gene, we assembled nucleosomes on both plasmids and linear DNA fragments containing the U6 gene. Initial experiments with DNA fragments revealed that U6 sequences located between the distal sequence element (DSE) and the proximal sequence element (PSE) lead to the positioning of a nucleosome partially encompassing these promoter elements. Furthermore, indirect end-labelling analyses of the reconstituted U6 wild-type plasmids showed strong micrococcal nuclease cuts near the DSE and PSE, indicating that a nucleosome is located between these elements. To investigate the influence that nucleosomes exert on U6 transcription, we used two different experimental approaches for chromatin reconstitution, both of which resulted in the observation that transcription of the U6 wild-type gene was enhanced after chromatin assembly. To ensure that the facilitated transcription of the nucleosomal templates is in fact due to a positioned nucleosome, we constructed mutants of the U6 gene in which the sequences between the DSE and PSE were progressively deleted. In contrast to what was observed with the wild-type genes, transcription of these deletion mutants was significantly inhibited when they were packaged into nucleosomes.
Does distance matter? Variations in alternative 3′ splicing regulation

Alternative splicing constitutes a major mechanism creating protein diversity in humans. This diversity can result from the alternative skipping of entire exons or by alternative selection of the 5′ or 3′ splice sites that define the exon boundaries. In this study, we analyze the sequence and evolutionary characteristics of alternative 3′ splice sites conserved between human and mouse genomes for distances ranging from 3 to 100 nucleotides. We show that alternative splicing events can be distinguished from constitutive splicing by a combination of properties which vary depending on the distance between the splice sites. Among the unique features of alternative 3′ splice sites, we observed an unexpectedly high occurrence of events in which a polypyrimidine tract was found to overlap the upstream splice site. By applying a machine-learning approach, we show that we can successfully discriminate true alternative 3′ splice sites from constitutive 3′ splice sites. Finally, we propose that the unique features of the intron flanking alternative splice sites are indicative of a regulatory mechanism that is involved in splice site selection. We postulate that the process of splice site selection is influenced by the distance between the competitive splice sites.
Increased IL-6 and IL-4 in exhaled breath condensate of patients with nasal polyposis.

BACKGROUND AND AIM Nasal polyposis (NP) occurs in about 1-4% of the worldwide population. Increased plasma concentrations of different pro-inflammatory cytokines have been observed in NP, and might be related to the pathogenesis of this syndrome. The present study was designed to investigate IL-6 and IL-4 concentrations in nasal and oral exhaled breath condensate of patients with early and advanced NP, and following polypectomy. METHODS Ten individuals with polyposis in early status, twenty-three patients affected by advanced status of NP and ten healthy controls were enrolled into the study. Exhaled breath condensate was collected by all individuals, according to a previous standardised method. An immunoassay kit was used to measure IL-6 and IL-4 levels. RESULTS Concentrations of oral and nasal exhaled IL-6 and IL-4 were significantly higher in patients with early nasal polyposis and advanced nasal polyposis, compared to healthy controls. A statistically significant decrease of nasally but not of orally exhaled IL-6 (p < 0.001) and IL-4 (p < 0.05) was observed after polypectomy. CONCLUSIONS We consider oral and nasal exhaled condensate of IL-6 and IL-4 as valid inflammatory and oxidative stress marker in patients with nasal polyposis.
Zero-delay FPGA-based odd-even sorting network

Sorting is one of the most well-known problems in computer science and is frequently used for benchmarking computer systems. It can contribute significantly to the overall execution time of a process in a computer system. Dedicated sorting architectures can be used to accelerate applications and/or to reduce energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an efficient sorting network aiming at accelerating the sorting operation in FPGA-based embedded systems. The proposed sorting network is implemented based on an Optimized Odd-even sorting method (O2) using fully pipelined combinational logic architecture and ring shape processing. Consequently, O2 generates the sorted array of numbers in parallel when the input array of numbers is given, without any delay or lag. Unlike conventional sorting networks, O2 sorting network does not need memory to hold data and information about sorting, and neither need input clock to perform the sorting operations sequentially. We conclude that by using O2 in FPGA-based image processing, we can optimize the performance of filters such as median filter which demands high performance sorting operations for realtime applications.
Sharing Computing Resources with Virtual Machines by Transparent Data Access

Cloud computing has rapid growth in enterprise and academic areas. Computing platform makes up the transition from physical servers to virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. Instead of many advantages, VMs remain several problems to employ effective utilization of physical computing resources, especially many-core accelerators. Even though GPGPU is a hopeful solution for high-load applications, existing methods to utilize GPUs from VMs are subjected to various restraints. In order to solve this problem, we propose a flexible method to share external computing resources by providing transparent access for data in the VMs. By committing commands to a computing host which processes the jobs as substitution, VMs can process high load jobs as necessary even if the VM has a tiny configuration. The computing host mounts the working directories in the VMs and enqueues jobs committed by the VMs. Experimental results show that the overhead of our implementation is sufficiently small in the low I/O load processes.
A hybrid registration of medical images using intensity information and landmark points

This paper proposes a hybrid registration approach of medical images using intensity information and landmark points. In our scheme, the transformation function is obtained by interpolating discrete landmark points with the local constraint deformation. Then the intensity information is employed to improve the transformation function by minimizing the criterion SSD (sum of squared differences) with Lagrangian multipliers and Newton' method. The experimental results show that the landmark information alone is generally not sufficient to accurately register the images and the incorporation of intensity information significantly improves the results
Problematising recent developments in non-English foreign language education in Chinese universities

ABSTRACT In light of China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, many mainland Chinese universities have been promoting non-English foreign language degree programs at the undergraduate level. This study examines the growth of these non-English foreign language programs by collecting and analysing a variety of data on curriculum design, teachers and learners through online and archive research. The results from the analysis problematise the development of non-English foreign language degree programs in Chinese universities. Although the analysis identified a significant leap in the growth of non-English foreign language programs, many of these programs need to address a variety of challenges including ‘unrealistic’ curriculum objectives, teacher shortages, and attracting high quality applicants. While the rapid expansion of non-English foreign language degree programs potentially enables Chinese universities to play a critical role in promoting the learning and teaching of non-English foreign languages in China, it has become imperative for these universities to engage in carefully coordinated efforts so that this growth can be sustained.
BAR: An Efficient Data Locality Driven Task Scheduling Algorithm for Cloud Computing

Large scale data processing is increasingly common in cloud computing systems like MapReduce, Hadoop, and Dryad in recent years. In these systems, files are split into many small blocks and all blocks are replicated over several servers. To process files efficiently, each job is divided into many tasks and each task is allocated to a server to deals with a file block. Because network bandwidth is a scarce resource in these systems, enhancing task data locality(placing tasks on servers that contain their input blocks) is crucial for the job completion time. Although there have been many approaches on improving data locality, most of them either are greedy and ignore global optimization, or suffer from high computation complexity. To address these problems, we propose a heuristic task scheduling algorithm called Balance-Reduce(BAR), in which an initial task allocation will be produced at first, then the job completion time can be reduced gradually by tuning the initial task allocation. By taking a global view, BAR can adjust data locality dynamically according to network state and cluster workload. The simulation results show that BAR is able to deal with large problem instances in a few seconds and outperforms previous related algorithms in term of the job completion time.
Enabling Secure and Dependable Client Side Deduplication in Large Cloud

Since from recent years, lot of corporate and private users outsource their data to cloud storage providers. Cloud storage services use deduplication which means elimination of redundant data. So it reduces the storage space and bandwidth consumption of data storage services, but brings many security and privacy implications. There are some issues in cloud computing, but security and privacy are most important issues which need to be considered for the public cloud environments. A new client-side deduplication scheme has been proposed for securely sharing and storing data via the public cloud. The proposed method has twofold. Firstly, higher confidentiality is being ensured from unauthorized users. That is, every consumer computes a per data key in order to encrypt the data which intends to store in the cloud. So the data owner manages every data access. Secondly, metadata file is being integrated with access rights, so approved user can access the file which is encrypted with his own private key only.
An Easily Testable Routing Architecture and Efficient Test Technique

Generally, a programmable LSI such as an FPGA is difficult to test as compared to an ASIC. There are two major reasons for this. One is that automatic test pattern generator (ATPG) cannot be used because of the programmability of the FPGA. The other reason is that the FPGA architecture is very complex. In this paper, we propose a novel FPGA architecture that will simplify the testing of the device. The architecture is very simple and has several types of circuit blocks and orderly wire connections. This paper also presents efficient test configurations for our proposed architecture. We tested the interconnects of our architecture by using our configurations and achieved 100% test coverage for a short test time.
The physiology of climate change: how potentials for acclimatization and genetic adaptation will determine ‘winners’ and ‘losers’

SUMMARY Physiological studies can help predict effects of climate change through determining which species currently live closest to their upper thermal tolerance limits, which physiological systems set these limits, and how species differ in acclimatization capacities for modifying their thermal tolerances. Reductionist studies at the molecular level can contribute to this analysis by revealing how much change in sequence is needed to adapt proteins to warmer temperatures — thus providing insights into potential rates of adaptive evolution — and determining how the contents of genomes — protein-coding genes and gene regulatory mechanisms — influence capacities for adapting to acute and long-term increases in temperature. Studies of congeneric invertebrates from thermally stressful rocky intertidal habitats have shown that warm-adapted congeners are most susceptible to local extinctions because their acute upper thermal limits (LT50 values) lie near current thermal maxima and their abilities to increase thermal tolerance through acclimation are limited. Collapse of cardiac function may underlie acute and longer-term thermal limits. Local extinctions from heat death may be offset by in-migration of genetically warm-adapted conspecifics from mid-latitude ‘hot spots’, where midday low tides in summer select for heat tolerance. A single amino acid replacement is sufficient to adapt a protein to a new thermal range. More challenging to adaptive evolution are lesions in genomes of stenotherms like Antarctic marine ectotherms, which have lost protein-coding genes and gene regulatory mechanisms needed for coping with rising temperature. These extreme stenotherms, along with warm-adapted eurytherms living near their thermal limits, may be the major ‘losers’ from climate change.
Mind Your Words ! You Might Convey What You Wouldn ’ t Like To ( Extended Abstract )

Natural language ambiguity is a well-known challenge for the NLP community in deepening the performances of the computer programs when dealing with human languages. Language ambiguity as produced by humans, is often unnoticed and as such, is most of the times involuntary. However, in many cases ambiguity is purposely used for various reasons. In an original context, a sentence might be very clear with respect to the producer's intentions, but if it contains some unnoticed ambiguities (obliterated by the context), when put in another context, might convey a very different meaning, sometimes funny, sometimes embarrassing. We describe a system which is able to pinpoint such potential misinterpretations and advise the writer to make other lexical choices for his/her wording.
Identification of angiogenic properties of insulin-like growth factor II in in vitro angiogenesis models

Insulin-like growth factor II (IGF-II), highly expressed in a number of human tumours, has been recently known to promote neovascularization in vivo. Yet, the detailed mechanism by which IGF-II induces angiogenesis has not been well defined. In the present study, we explored an angiogenic activity of IGF-II in in vitro angiogenesis model. Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) treated with IGF-II rapidly aligned and formed a capillary-like network on Matrigel. In chemotaxis assay, IGF-II remarkably increased migration of HUVECs. A rapid and transient activation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38 MAPK) and p125 focal adhesion kinase (p125FAK) phosphorylation was detected in HUVECs exposed to IGF-II. IGF-II also stimulated invasion of HUVECs through a polycarbonate filter coated with Matrigel. Quantitative gelatin-based zymography identified that matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) activity generated from HUVECs was increased by IGF-II. This induction of MMP-2 activity was correlated with Northern blot analysis, showing in HUVECs that IGF-II increased the expression of MMP-2 mRNA, while it did not affect that of TIMP-2, a tissue inhibitor of MMP-2. These results provide the evidence that IGF-II directly induces angiogenesis by stimulating migration and morphological differentiation of endothelial cells, and suggest that IGF-II may play a crucial role in the progression of tumorigenesis by promoting the deleterious neovascularization. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaign