Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Theoretical Analysis of the Distributed Stochastic and Distributed Breakout Algorithms

The distributed constraint satisfaction problem is often used to model real-world situations and find agent-based solutions. A number of methods have been developed to solve these problems, including the well-known DSA and DBA algorithms. In many real scenarios, however, the problems are not static. This forces practitioners to adapt these protocols to solve dynamic distributed constraint satisfaction problems (DynDCSP). Surprisingly, despite long-running study of the problem, practically all analysis of DynDCSP algorithms has been experimental in nature. This work presents a new theoretical assessment of the DSA and DBA algorithms, leveraging a mapping of DynDCSP instances to a physical thermodynamics model to develop a deeper understanding of the algorithms' behavior. Here, we assess the static versions of DSA and DBA, but focus on examining their rates of convergence, not just their final convergence points, as a means of understanding how they will perform in dynamic settings. We develop various theoretical approaches to show how the algorithms' convergence rates are affected by problem density and tightness, and examine the impact that problem size has on an algorithm's performance. Finally, we show the accuracy of our analytical predictions through comparison with experimental results.
Strong Effects of an Individual Water Molecule on the Rate of Light-driven Charge Separation in the Rhodobacter sphaeroides Reaction Center*

The role of a water molecule (water A) located between the primary electron donor (P) and first electron acceptor bacteriochlorophyll (BA) in the purple bacterial reaction center was investigated by mutation of glycine M203 to leucine (GM203L). The x-ray crystal structure of the GM203L reaction center shows that the new leucine residue packs in such a way that water A is sterically excluded from the complex, but the structure of the protein-cofactor system around the mutation site is largely undisturbed. The results of absorbance and resonance Raman spectroscopy were consistent with either the removal of a hydrogen bond interaction between water A and the keto carbonyl group of BA or a change in the local electrostatic environment of this carbonyl group. Similarities in the spectroscopic properties and x-ray crystal structures of reaction centers with leucine and aspartic acid mutations at the M203 position suggested that the effects of a glycine to aspartic acid substitution at the M203 position can also be explained by steric exclusion of water A. In the GM203L mutant, loss of water A was accompanied by an ∼8-fold slowing of the rate of decay of the primary donor excited state, indicating that the presence of water A is important for optimization of the rate of primary electron transfer. Possible functions of this water molecule are discussed, including a switching role in which the redox potential of the BA acceptor is rapidly modulated in response to oxidation of the primary electron donor.
Designing with people with disabilities: adapting best practices of DIY and organizational approaches

Individualization of design is often necessary particularly when designing with people with disabilities. Maker communities, with their flexible Do-It-Yourself (DIY) practices, offer potential to support individualized and cost-effective product design. However, efforts to adapt DIY practices in designing with people with disabilities tend to face difficulties with regard to continuous commitment, infrastructure provision and proper guidance. We carried out interviews with diverse stakeholders in the disability services sector and carried out observations of local makerspaces to understand their current practices and potential for future collaborations. We found that makerspace participants face difficulties in terms of infrastructure provision and proper guidance whereas Disability Service Organizations face difficulties in continuous expertise. We suggest that artful infrastructuring to blend the best of both approaches offers potential to create a sustainable community that can design individualized technologies to support people with disabilities.
A Heuristic for Magic and Antimagic Graph Labellings

Graph labellings have been a very fruitful area of research in the last four decades. However, despite the staggering number of papers published in the field (over 1000), few general results are available, and most papers deal with particular classes of graphs and methods. Here we approach the problem from the computational viewpoint, and in a quite general way. We present the existence problem of a particular labelling as a combinatorial optimization problem, then we discuss the possible strategies to solve it, and finally we present a heuristic for finding different classes of labellings, like vertex-, edge-, or face-magic, and $(a, d)$-antimagic $(v, e, f)$-labellings. The algorithm has been implemented in C++ and MATLAB, and with its aid we have been able to derive new results for some classes of graphs, in particular, vertex-antimagic edge labellings for small graphs of the type $P_2^r \times P_3^s$, for which no general construction is known so far.
The Mirage of Peer Effects: Evidence from U. S. Medical Schools

A mechanical hand comprises a palm element and at least two finger elements and incorporates a closed link mechanism. The two finger elements are connected at their basal ends, each with a joint, the first one to the palm element and the second one to the forward end of the first finger element, respectively. The closed link mechanism is constructed of the first finger element in combination with a projecting bar which stems at a certain angle from the basal end of the second finger element and constitutes a unitary part in conjunction with the second finger element. Driving this closed link mechanism by an actuator sets the finger elements to movement. When any portion of the finger elements comes into contact with an obstacle standing in its way, the closed link mechanism begins to change its form. In consequence of this change of form, the first finger element and/or the second finger element begins to turn round the joint as a pivot and continues, while adapting the form of the mechanical hand to the immediate environment, to converge in the direction of gradually conforming to the exterior contour of an object desired to be gripped and eventually gripping the object.
Rank and fooling set size

Say that A is a Hadamard factorization of the identity I_n of size n if the entrywise product of A and the transpose of A is I_n. It can be easily seen that the rank of any Hadamard factorization of the identity must be at least sqrt{n}. Dietzfelbinger et al. raised the question if this bound can be achieved, and showed a boolean Hadamard factorization of the identity of rank n^{0.792}. More recently, Klauck and Wolf gave a construction of Hadamard factorizations of the identity of rank n^{0.613}. Over finite fields, Friesen and Theis resolved the question, showing for a prime p and r=p^t+1 a Hadamard factorization of the identity A of size r(r-1)+1 and rank r over F_p. Here we resolve the question for fields of zero characteristic, up to a constant factor, giving a construction of Hadamard factorizations of the identity of rank r and size (r+1)r/2. The matrices in our construction are blockwise Toeplitz, and have entries whose magnitudes are binomial coefficients.
Measuring bloat, overfitting and functional complexity in genetic programming

Recent contributions clearly show that eliminating bloat in a genetic programming system does not necessarily eliminate overfitting and vice-versa. This fact seems to contradict a common agreement of many researchers known as the minimum description length principle, which states that the best model is the one that minimizes the amount of information needed to encode it. Another common agreement is that overfitting should be, in some sense, related to the functional complexity of the model. The goal of this paper is to define three measures to respectively quantify bloat, overfitting and functional complexity of solutions and show their suitability on a set of test problems including a simple bidimensional symbolic regression test function and two real-life multidimensional regression problems. The experimental results are encouraging and should pave the way to further investigation. Advantages and drawbacks of the proposed measures are discussed, and ways to improve them are suggested. In the future, these measures should be useful to study and better understand the relationship between bloat, overfitting and functional complexity of solutions.
Dynamic policy model for target based intrusion detection system

Network intrusion detection system (NIDS) is an important tool for network security. It observes all transmitting packets on a network system and alerts when intrusions or unusual activities are detected. To analyze every single packet on the network, NIDS with good performance and high accuracy can make network more secure and reliable. However, some disadvantages of NIDS, such as evasion technique and noise, can affect the accuracy of the traditional NIDS. A new approach is a target based IDS which can increase accuracy and reduce noises. This paper proposes a new method to reduce system workload and increase the accuracy of the typical target based IDS by providing flexibility of specifying policy for individual host or group.
Acute induction of human IL-8 production by intestinal epithelium triggers neutrophil infiltration without mucosal injury

Aim: Neutrophil migration in the intestine depends on chemotaxis of neutrophils to CXC chemokines produced by epithelial cells. The goal of this project was to determine if acute induction of a CXC chemokine gradient originating from intestinal epithelial cells is sufficient to induce neutrophil influx into intact intestinal tissue. Methods and results: The authors developed a double transgenic mouse model with doxycycline induced human IL-8 expression restricted to intestinal epithelial cells. Doxycycline treatment of double transgenic mice for three days resulted in a 50-fold increase in the caecal IL-8 concentration and influx of neutrophils into the lamina propria. Although neutrophils entered the paracellular space between epithelial cells, complete transepithelial migration was not observed. Doxycycline treatment also increased the water content of the caecal and colonic stool, indicating dysfunctional water transport. However, the transmural electrical resistance was not decreased. Neutrophils recruited to the intestinal epithelium did not show evidence of degranulation and the epithelium remained intact as judged by histology. Conclusions: This conditional transgenic model of chemokine expression provides evidence that acute induction of IL-8 in the intestinal epithelium is sufficient to trigger neutrophil recruitment to the lamina propria, but additional activation signals are needed for full activation and degranulation of neutrophils, mucosal injury, and complete transepithelial migration.
INHIBITORY AVOIDANCE WITH A TWO-WAY SHUTTLE-BOX

The possibility of carrying out inhibitory avoidance experiments, also called passive avoidance, with a two-way shuttle-box was tested in thirty-five OF1 male mice. Two intensity levels of shock (0.3 and 0.6 mA) and a non-shocked group of animals were employed in this experiment. Inhibitory avoidance conditioning was observed in the 0.6 mA group (statistically significant differences between the response latencies of Day 2 versus Day 1) but not in the case of the 0.3 mA group. These results allow us to conclude that it is possible to obtain inhibitory avoidance in a shuttle-box.
Chapter 1 Type-safe Functional Strategies

We demonstrate how the concept of strategies originating from term rewriting can be introduced in a typed, functional setting. We provide a model of strategies based on a further generalisation of updatable, monadic, generalised fold algebras. We show how strategies can be used as a structuring device for functional programming.
Cover Feature A Framework for Online Learning : The Virtual-U

44 Computer M uch of the online postsecondary education available in North America and Europe has been created piecemeal. This situation arose because educators began to adopt computer networking in the mid-1970s, soon after the invention of packetswitched networks (1969) and e-mail and computer conferencing (1971) for exchange of scientific information. However, the changes were erratic responses to technical advances rather than attempts to achieve specific educational goals. Despite its piecemeal development, early online education promised benefits. Chief among these were the ability of technologies like e-mail and computer conferencing to expand opportunities for student communication, interaction, and collaboration.
A Neurovascular Niche for Neurogenesis after Stroke

Stroke causes cell death but also birth and migration of new neurons within sites of ischemic damage. The cellular environment that induces neuronal regeneration and migration after stroke has not been defined. We have used a model of long-distance migration of newly born neurons from the subventricular zone to cortex after stroke to define the cellular cues that induce neuronal regeneration after CNS injury. Mitotic, genetic, and viral labeling and chemokine/growth factor gain- and loss-of-function studies show that stroke induces neurogenesis from a GFAP-expressing progenitor cell in the subventricular zone and migration of newly born neurons into a unique neurovascular niche in peri-infarct cortex. Within this neurovascular niche, newly born, immature neurons closely associate with the remodeling vasculature. Neurogenesis and angiogenesis are causally linked through vascular production of stromal-derived factor 1 (SDF1) and angiopoietin 1 (Ang1). Furthermore, SDF1 and Ang1 promote post-stroke neuroblast migration and behavioral recovery. These experiments define a novel brain environment for neuronal regeneration after stroke and identify molecular mechanisms that are shared between angiogenesis and neurogenesis during functional recovery from brain injury.
A Unified Deployment and Management Model for Dynamic and Distributed Software Architectures

Dynamic deployment of software components and services constitutes a solution for enhancing the addictiveness of distributed software systems. Such a property is necessary for the evolutionary systems that need to adapt their behaviour according to the changes in their application-level requirements or context situations. Therefore, this chapter looks for a modelling solution that can react in response to unpredictable changes in the communication and/or execution resources. This chapter provides a generic model called Unified deployment and management Model of Dynamic and Distributed software architectures (UMoDD) based on the D&C standard proposed by the OMG. UMoDD has been designed to be suitable to dynamic deployment and management for both architecture styles: the service-oriented and component-based architecture style. The proposed model is based on a model-driven approach. It offers two levels of modelling: a generic level and a specific level to an architecture style.
Inheritance of Alcohol Consumption Patterns in the Australian Twin Survey , 1981

We review published data from the 1981 survey of alcohol consumption patterns in the Australian Twin Register and present results from new analyses. Both genetic and shared environmental effects have a substantial influence on whether or not teenage drinking occurs (as indicated by the results of parametric model fitting); however, the timing of the onset of drinking is under purely environmental control in males though also subject to genetic influence in females. Results from both multidimensional scaling (MDS) and model-fitting analyses indicate that adult alcohol consumption patterns are determined by separate abstinence, quantity, and frequency dimensions. Twin correlations for abstinence are uniformly high across all twin groups and are consistent with nongenetic determination of this dimension. For both quantity and frequency dimensions, there are substantial genetic effects in females and, at least, moderate genetic (and, possibly, also shared environmental) influences in males. The implications of this evidence for genetic effects on alcohol exposure are considered.
Improving X!Tandem on Peptide Identification from Mass Spectrometry by Self-Boosted Percolator

A critical component in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics is an accurate protein identification procedure. Database search algorithms commonly generate a list of peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs). The validity of these PSMs is critical for downstream analysis since proteins that are present in the sample are inferred from those PSMs. A variety of postprocessing algorithms have been proposed to validate and filter PSMs. Among them, the most popular ones include a semi-supervised learning (SSL) approach known as Percolator and an empirical modeling approach known as PeptideProphet. However, they are predominantly designed for commercial database search algorithms, i.e., SEQUEST and MASCOT. Therefore, it is highly desirable to extend and optimize those PSM postprocessing algorithms for open source database search algorithms such as X! Tandem. In this paper, we propose a Self-boosted Percolator for postprocessing X! Tandem search results. We find that the SSL algorithm utilized by Percolator depends heavily on the initial ranking of PSMs. Starting with a poor PSM ranking list may cause Percolator to perform suboptimally. By implementing Percolator in a cascade learning manner, we can progressively improve the performance through multiple boost runs, enabling many more PSM identifications without sacrificing false discovery rate (FDR).
Lexicon Estimates from Non-Parallel Corpora Pairs

The estimation of translation lexicon probabilities from parallel corpora is well studied in statistical machine translation. Whenever parallel corpora are not available, it is still possible to obtain unsupervised estimates from pairs of monolingual, non-parallel corpora. In both cases the standard estimator is the Expectation-Maximization (EM) that aims at increasing the likelihood of the source corpus under the translation model. In this paper we study the utility of maximizing the joint likelihood of source and target corpora under a bi-directional translation model. A recently presented bi-directional estimator (BiEM [10]), which maximizes the joint likelihood, constitutes an instance of the EM algorithm. We show that Bi-EM reconciles the asymmetric statistics in the two corpora and leads to better lexicon estimates than standard EM. Our extensive experimental results show that relative to standard EM, our Bi-EM gives substantially better word-to-word translation results across variably related pairs of monolingual corpora.
Cross-border financial linkages and international financial contagion: an empirical study of East Asia during the 2007-2011 global financial crisis

Motivated by the global financial market turbulence in 2007-2011 and the gaps from the literature, this thesis presents an econometric assessment of different transmission mechanisms that propagated and amplified shocks from advanced economies to East Asia. The asset price channel is investigated with MS-VAR model and multivariate unconditional correlation tests. The recursive bivariate probit models are applied to test the liquidity shock transmission via the sudden stop in international lending. The second round effects are examined with partial adjustment models and system GMM estimation. The econometric procedure and testing approach bring about novel results from superior estimation techniques and handle several statistical problems such as heteroskedasticity, non-linearity, endogeneity, omitted variables, simultaneous equations and sample selection bias. The main finding of the thesis is that despite relatively sound fundamentals and limited exposure to structured credit products, East Asia could not totally decouple from the global financial crisis. Specifically, the asset price channels propagated volatility spillovers from the US and Europe to East Asian equity, foreign exchange and CDS markets. While international volatility spillovers were mainly caused by fundamental links, international behaviour during the shocks intensified the regional linkages and generated contagion effect. There was also contagion evidence associated with the sudden stop in international lending which facilitated the transmission of liquidity tensions in the interbank markets. Finally, contagion was magnified by the second round effects, defined as the feedback loops from the sudden changes in macro-financial conditions which caused adverse adjustment in bank performance. These findings have useful implications for international investors and policy authorities regarding to portfolio diversification and systematic risk containment.
The key to relational care: Care on the path home

"The emergence of palliative care—defined as “active care delivered as part of a global approach to a person suffering from a serious, progressive, or terminal illness” (SFAP 1996)—has allowed support work to find its rightful place within practices of care. The physical, psychic, moral, social, and spiritual dimensions of support are discussed here, in connection with the cultural context of the person under care. The concept of “taking care” is then developed, finding a place within an increasingly technical world. Ethics has established roots in the medical world, in order to preserve human beings from the sometimes harmful consequences of science. A sense of responsibility which is not just juridical but also moral is recalled, as well as the importance of responsibility as a basic attitude of care. Currently, the concept of solicitude as a mode of relation has provoked interest and enthusiasm; this ought to be taken further, so that its impact on the world of care can be understood. This discussion takes homecare as its specific context. "
Impact of impedance cardiography on diagnosis and therapy of emergent dyspnea: the ED-IMPACT trial.

BACKGROUND Dyspnea is one of the most common emergency department (ED) symptoms, but early diagnosis and treatment are challenging because of multiple potential causes. Impedance cardiography (ICG) is a noninvasive method to measure hemodynamics that may assist in early ED decision making. OBJECTIVES To determine the rate of change in working diagnosis and initial treatment plan by adding ICG data during the course of ED clinical evaluation of elder patients presenting with dyspnea. METHODS The authors studied a convenience sample of dyspneic patients 65 years and older who were presenting to the EDs of two urban academic centers. The attending emergency physician was initially blinded to the ICG data, which was collected by research staff not involved in patient care. At initial ED presentation, after history and physical but before central lab or radiograph data were returned, the attending ED physician completed a case report form documenting diagnosis and treatment plan. The physician then was shown the ICG data and the same information was again recorded. Pre- and post-ICG differences were analyzed. RESULTS Eighty-nine patients were enrolled, with a mean age of 74.8 +/- 7.0 years; 52 (58%) were African American, 42 (47%) were male. Congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were the most common final diagnoses, occurring in 43 (48%), and 20 (22%), respectively. ICG data changed the working diagnosis in 12 (13%; 95% CI = 7% to 22%) and medications administered in 35 (39%; 95% CI = 29% to 50%). CONCLUSIONS Impedance cardiography data result in significant changes in ED physician diagnosis and therapeutic plan during the evaluation of dyspneic patients 65 years and older.