Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intimate partner violence (physical and sexual) and sexually transmitted infection: results from Nepal Demographic Health Survey 2011

Introduction Violence against women perpetrated by their intimate partners is a social problem with adverse health consequences. Intimate partner violence has acute and chronic as well as direct and indirect health consequences related to physical, psychological, and reproductive health. Studies exploring relationships of intimate partner violence and health consequences are rare in Nepal. Hence, this study aimed to examine the relationships between intimate partner violence and sexually transmitted infections. Method This study used data from the nationally representative Nepal Demographic Health Survey 2011, which collected data through a two-stage complex sampling technique. Women 15–49 years were asked about domestic violence including intimate partner violence. For this analysis, 3,084 currently married women were included. Questions about domestic violence were adapted from the Conflict Tactic Scale. Relationships between different forms of physical and sexual intimate partner violence and reported signs and symptoms of sexually transmitted infections were examined using multiple logistic regression analysis. Results Approximately 15% of currently young and middle-aged married women experienced some form of violence in the last 12 months. About one in four women who were exposed to physical and sexual intimate partner violence reported sexually transmitted infection in the last 12 months. The odds of getting sexually transmitted infection were 1.88 [95% CI:1.29, 2.73] times higher among women exposed to any form of intimate partner violence in the last 12 months compared to women not exposed to any form of intimate partner violence. Conclusion Intimate partner violence was common among currently married women in Nepal. Being exposed to intimate partner violence and getting signs and symptoms of sexually transmitted disease were found to be associated. Integration of intimate partner violence prevention and reproductive health programs is needed to reduce the burden of sexually transmitted disease among currently married women.
Appropriation and creative use: linking user studies and design

Appropriation refers to the ways that technologies are ÿadapted and repurposed to new purposes of use by individuals, groups or communities. This workshop brings together researchers interested in appropriation from CSCW and design. Until now, these communities have been working separately, despite their converging interests. The workshop is based on roundtable discussions that bring the participants' qualitative observations and theoretical viewpoints in contact with practical design efforts that support user creativity and appropriation.
Equity Valuation Under Stochastic Interest Rates

This paper presents an equity valuation model that employs risk-neutral valuation under stochastic interest rates along the lines of Ohlson and Feltham (1999). Closed form valuation formulae for equities are presented in a discrete time setting whereby the short term interest rate is modelled by a quadratic term structure model. Earnings are driven by mean reverting return on equity (ROE). The term strcture of interest rates, and in particular the variance of the future short rates, is found to be a primary dterminant of equity value tat has been largely overlooked by the previous equity valuation literature. Equity value decreases in the correlation between the short interest rate and ROE and can be very sensitive to such correlation when the ROE process is very persistent. This suggests that equity value dreceases in the degree of pro-cyclicality of the firm's profitability.
Lines in space-combinators, algorithms and applications

We study combinatorial and algorithmic problems involving arrangements of <italic>n</italic> lines in 3-dimensional space, and then present applications of our results to a variety of problems on polyhedral terrains. Our main results include:<list><item>A tight &THgr;(<italic>n</italic><supscrpt>2</supscrpt>) bound on the complexity of the space of all lines passing above all the <italic>n</italic> given lines (their “upper envelope”) and satisfying a certain orientation consistency constraint. </item><item>A preprocessing procedure using near-quadratic time and storage that builds a structure supporting <italic>&Ogr;</italic>(log <italic>n</italic>) time queries for testing if a line lies above all the given lines. </item><item>An <italic>&Ogr;</italic>(<italic>n</italic><supscrpt>4/3+<italic>ε</italic></supscrpt>) randomized expected time algorithm, for any fixed <italic>ε</italic> > 0, that tests the “towering property”: do <italic>n</italic> given red lines lie all above <italic>n</italic> given blue lines? </item><item>A preprocessing procedure for a polyhedral terrain &Sgr; with <italic>n</italic> edges, that uses near-quadratic time and storage and builds a structure supporting <italic>&Ogr;</italic>(log<supscrpt>2</supscrpt> <italic>n</italic>) time <italic>rayshooting</italic> queries for computing the first intersection of an arbitrary query ray with &Sgr;. </item><item>Finding the smallest vertical distance between two disjoint polyhedral terrains with a total of <italic>n</italic> edges, in time <italic>&Ogr;</italic>(<italic>n</italic><supscrpt>4/3+<italic>ε</italic></supscrpt>), for any ε > 0. </item><item>Computing the upper envelope (pointwise maximum) of two polyhedral terrains with a total of <italic>n</italic> edges, in time <italic>&Ogr;</italic>(<italic>n</italic><supscrpt>1.5+ε</supscrpt> + <italic>k</italic>log<supscrpt>2</supscrpt> <italic>n</italic>), for any ε > 0, where <italic>&kgr;</italic> is the size of the output envelope. </item></list> The tools used to obtain these results include Plücker coordinates for lines in space, random sampling in geometric problems, and a new variant of segment trees.
An online controller redesign based fault-tolerant strategy for thermal comfort in a multi-zone building

Variable air volume (VAV) boxes are used in multi-zone buildings, which varies the volume of constant temperature air separately supplied by an air-handling unit to meet challenging thermal load demands of individual zones. A fault appearing in the VAV damper severely affects the control performance and consequently, the energy efficiency of the overall system. To address this issue, we present a novel online redesign based fault-tolerant control strategy in this paper for a VAV thermal system in a multi-zone building. The novelty of the proposed strategy is that no a priori information about the process is used in real-time. In fact, no online identification of the thermal dynamical model of the building process or estimation of its operating status (healthy or faulty) is done. The design of the fault accommodation scheme is solely based on the real-time trajectories generated by the process. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed strategy, we consider a case-study of three-zones in a one-story building.
The Tlx Gene Regulates the Timing of Neurogenesis in the Cortex

The tailless (tlx) gene is a forebrain-restricted transcription factor. Tlx mutant animals exhibit a reduction in the size of the cerebral hemispheres and associated structures (Monaghan et al., 1997). Superficial cortical layers are specifically reduced, whereas deep layers are relatively unaltered (Land and Monaghan, 2003). To determine whether the adult laminar phenotype has a developmental etiology and whether it is associated with a change in proliferation/differentiation decisions, we examined the cell cycle and neurogenesis in the embryonic cortex. We found that there is a temporal and regional requirement for the Tlx protein in progenitor cells (PCs). Neurons prematurely differentiate at all rostrocaudal levels up to mid-neurogenesis in mutant animals. Heterozygote animals have an intermediate phenotype indicating there is a threshold requirement for Tlx in early cortical neurogenesis. Our studies indicate that PCs in the ventricular zone are sensitive to loss of Tlx in caudal regions only; however, PCs in the subventricular zone are altered at all rostrocaudal levels in tlx-deficient animals. Furthermore, we found that the cell cycle is shorter from embryonic day 9.5 in tlx–/– embryos. At mid-neurogenesis, the PC population becomes depleted, and late PCs have a longer cell cycle in tlx-deficient animals. Consequently, later generated structures, such as upper cortical layers, the dentate gyrus, and the olfactory bulbs, are severely reduced. These studies indicate that tlx is an essential intrinsic regulator in the decision to proliferate or differentiate in the developing forebrain.
On 2-path signed graphs

A signed graph (sigraph) is a graph where each edge receives positive or negative sign. In this paper, we report our investigation on a new signed graph (S)2 called 2-path sigraphs of a given sigraph S defined as that sigraph whose vertex set is the vertex set of S and two vertices in (S)2 are adjacent if there exist a path of length two between them in S and negatively signed if all the paths of length two between them are all-negative, otherwise positively signed.
Credit Token Based Dynamic Resource Renting and Offering Mechanism for Cognitive Radio WRAN BS Spectrum Sharing

With the development of cognitive radio technologies, dynamic spectrum sharing has become a promising approach to increasing the efficiency of spectrum use. This paper describes dynamic resource renting and offering mechanism for dynamic spectrum sharing in a multi cell context for OFDMA systems. A credit token based mechanism using auctioning is proposed in support of dynamic spectrum sharing between cells. The implementation of mechanism proposed is discussed from the perspective of current IEEE 802.22 standard activities. The mechanism proposed provides the incentive to sharing resources with the advantages of being real time, dynamic and self governance based policy so as to adapt the space time varying spectrum use between cells.
Shear‐strain step response in linear regime of dilute suspensions of naturally bent carbon nanotubes

Impressive enhancements of the storage modulus have been documented when low volume frac- tions of single wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are added to a Newtonian solvent for obtaining dilute suspensions. The intrinsic bending dynamics of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) has been proposed to explain such elasticity. CNTs contain topological defects inducing naturally bent struc- tures in absence of external forces and, hence, a semiflexi- ble filament with a bent configuration at minimal internal- bending-energy is used for mimicking the structure of SWNTs in suspension. Previous continuous model is dis- cretized as a nonfreely jointed bead-rod chain with a natu- rally bent configuration for simulating the rheological behavior after a shear-strain step in linear regime of SWNT dilute suspensions by using a Brownian dynamics (BD) approach. In general, bead-rod chains exhibit an instantaneous relaxation after a high shear-strain step. Bending rigidity and number of constitutive rods are found to be determinant parameters in the internal-energy relaxation behavior of nonfreely jointed bead-rod chains in dilute solution. Proper comparisons between the BD simu- lation results and the experimental data for treated SWNT dilute suspensions confirm the consistency of the physical model mimicking the structure of a SWNT. V C 2012 Wiley
Feature expansion for Microblogging text based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation with User Feature

Traditional TDT (Topic Detection and Tracking, TDT) is based on large scale of news stream. However, with the development of new technology, Microblogging platform has become a new generation of platform for information distribution and communication. As many features which are totally different from the common news report exist in Microblogging text, old methods for TDT become ineffective. We present a new framework based on U-LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation with User Feature, U-LDA) which considers the user features on the Microblogging platform. We expand the feature of short text on the Microblogging platform by using U-LDA Model, which improves the precision of TDT tasks. In this paper, we discuss and summarize the particular features of Microblogging text, and present a method which considers user features in LDA model, thus we propose a general TDT framework based on U-LDA model. By applying the new model on a Microblogging corpus, we conclude that U-LDA is more effective than LDA.
A Decision-Theoretic Scheduling of Resource-Bounded Agents in Dynamic Environments

Markov Decision processes have been widely used to control the execution of a static set of tasks with limited resources. But little attention has been paid to adapt these techniques to cope with changes in the environment. This is a problem of the dynamic optimisation of resource allocation to a changing set of tasks. We transform this problem into a dynamic composition of local policies (each of which controls a task) to approximate the optimal control policy. Our main claim in this paper is that it is possible to dynamically compute good decisions without completely calculating the optimal policy. We develop an approach which provides more flexibility for MDPs to deal with dynamic environments. This approach is made up of two steps. The first step consists of an off-line pre-processing of tasks and the compilation of policies for all possible available resources. The second step concerns a quick on-line approximation of the policy of executing the current task taking into account the current state of the queue. We present a preliminary analysis of the performance of our approach.
Raman Spectroscopy Analysis of the Biochemical Characteristics of Molecules Associated with the Malignant Transformation of Gastric Mucosa

Objective The purpose of this study was to comparatively analyze the signature Raman spectra of genomic DNA, nuclei, and tissue of normal gastric mucosa and gastric cancer and to investigate the biochemical transformation of molecules associated with gastric mucosa malignancy. Method Genomic DNA, nuclei, and tissue from normal gastric mucosa and gastric cancer were analyzed by Raman spectroscopy. Results 1) The Raman spectrum of gastric cancer genomic DNA showed that two peaks appeared, one at approximately 1090 cm-1 with a higher intensity than the peak at 1050 cm-1 in the spectrum. Characteristic peaks appeared at 950 cm-1, 1010 cm-1, and 1100-1600 cm-1. 2) Using a hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained section, the intensity of the characteristic peak of nucleic acids at 1085 cm-1 was increased and shifted to 1088 cm-1 in cancer cells. The relative intensity of the characteristic peaks of nucleoproteins at 755 cm-1 and 1607 cm-1 was significantly increased in cancer cells compared with normal cells. 3) Compared with normal tissues, the peak representing PO2- symmetric stretching vibration shifted from 1088 cm-1 to 1083 cm-1 in cancer tissue, and the characteristic peak for collagen at 938 cm-1 shifted to 944 cm-1. In addition, an extra characteristic peak indicating C = C stretching vibration appeared at 1379 cm-1 in the lipid spectrum in cancer tissue. Conclusions The position, intensity, and shape of peaks in the Raman spectra of DNA, nuclei, and tissue from gastric cancer were significantly different compared with those of normal cells. These results indicate that the DNA phosphate backbone becomes unstable in cancer cells and might be broken; the relative content of histones is increased and stable; the relative collagen content is reduced, facilitating cancer cell metastasis; and the relative content of unsaturated fatty acids is increased, increasing the mobility of the plasma membrane of cancer cells.
Modeling Query Term Dependencies in Information Retrieval with Markov Random Fields

This paper develops a general, formal framework for modeling term dependencies via Markov random fields. The model allows for arbitrary text features to be incorporated as evidence. In particular, we make use of features based on occurrences of single terms, ordered phrases, and unordered phrases. We explore full independence, sequential dependence, and full dependence variants of the model. A novel approach is developed to train the model by directly maximizing mean average precision. Our results show that significant improvements are possible by modeling dependencies, especially on larger web collections.
Isolating crosscutting concerns in system software

This paper reports upon our experience in automatically migrating the crosscutting concerns of a large-scale software system, written in C, to an aspect-oriented implementation. We zoom in on one particular crosscutting concern, and show how detailed information about it is extracted from the source code, and how this information enables us to characterise this code and define an appropriate aspect automatically. Additionally, we compare the already existing solution to the aspect-oriented solution, and discuss advantages as well as disadvantages of both in terms of selected quality attributes. Our results show that automated migration is feasible, and can lead to significant improvements in source code quality
Lane Recognition on Country Roads

Most of the common lane recognition systems are designed to work on well structured roads and rely on the existence of markings. In this paper we present a lane recognition scheme for country roads. Our novel approach works even in the absence of markings. The parameter estimation is formulated as a maximum-a-posteriori estimation task fusing color, texture, and edges. The framework can easily be extended by additional features not considered here. The optimization is carried out by means of a particle filter. Efficient computation schemes allow running the system in video real-time using a standard PC. The proposed algorithm can cope with varying feature statistics. Practical tests prove the robustness on marked as well as unmarked roads.
Black hole in three-dimensional spacetime.

The standard Einstein-Maxwell equations in 2+1 spacetime dimensions, with a negative cosmological constant, admit a black hole solution. The 2+1 black hole---characterized by mass, angular momentum, and charge, defined by flux integrals at infinity---is quite similar to its 3+1 counterpart. Anti--de Sitter space appears as a negative energy state separated by a mass gap from the continuous black hole spectrum. Evaluation of the partition function yields that the entropy is equal to twice the perimeter length of the horizon.
Can Actors and -agents Live Together? 1 Modeling Actors and Agents

The syntax and semantics of actors and-agents is rst deened separately, using a uniform, \unbiased" approach. New coordination primitives are the added to the union of the two calculi which allow actors and-agents to cooperate. The syntax and semantics of actors and-agents are rst deened separately, using a uniform, \unbiased" approach. Since we aim at modeling concurrent distributed systems, and thus we are interested in asynchronous behavior, we choose for comparison with actors an asynchronous version of the-calculus. In the paper, the behavior of both actors and-agents is deened by certain logic sequents called tiles. A tile is a rewrite rule which describes a possible evolution of a part s of the system which is matched by it. In addition, a tile also describes the evolution of the interfaces of s with the rest of the system. Thus two parts s and s 0 sharing an interface can be rewritten only by tiles which agree on the evolution of the common interface. This restriction
HLA-B∗57 and Gender Influence the Occurrence of Tuberculosis in HIV Infected People of South India

Background. Substantial evidence exists for HLA and other host genetic factors being determinants of susceptibility or resistance to infectious diseases. However, very little information is available on the role of host genetic factors in HIV-TB coinfection. Hence, a longitudinal study was undertaken to investigate HLA associations in a cohort of HIV seropositive individuals with and without TB in Bangalore, South India. Methods. A cohort of 238 HIV seropositive subjects were typed for HLA-A, B, and DR by PCR-SSP and followed up for 5 years or till manifestation of Tuberculosis. HLA data of 682 HIV Negative healthy renal donors was used as control. Results. The ratio of males and females in HIV cohort was comparable (50.4% and 49.6%). But the incidence of TB was markedly lower in females (12.6%,) than males (25.6%). Further, HLA-B*57 frequency in HIV cohort was significantly higher among females without TB (21.6%, 19/88) than males (1.7%, 1/59); P = 0.0046; OR = 38. CD4 counts also were higher among females in this cohort. Conclusion. This study suggests that HIV positive women with HLA-B*57 have less occurrence of TB as compared to males.
Active tectonics at Wheeler Ridge, southern San Joaquin Valley, California

Wheeler Ridge is an east-west–trending anticline that is actively deforming on the upper plate of the Pleito–Wheeler Ridge thrust-fault system. Holocene and late Pleistocene deformation is demonstrated at the eastern end of the anticline where Salt Creek crosses the anticlinal axis. Uplift, tilting, and faulting, associated with the eastward growth of the anticline, are documented by geomorphic surfaces that are higher and older to the west. Faulting and associated folding is propagating eastward, as indicated by increases in both the degree of surface dissection and the degree of soil development from east to west. Distinct topographic areas having distinct degrees of surface dissection, bounded by tear faults, suggest that faulting and folding have propagated eastward in discrete segments. Numerical dates indicate (1) the anticline is propagating eastward at a rate of about 30 mm/yr (about 10 times the rate of uplift); (2) folding was initiated about 400 ka; (3) a prominent wind gap was formed during Q3 time (about 60 ka) when an antecedent stream was defeated, forcing the stream east around the nose of the fold; today drainage through the ridge is by way of two antecedent streams (water gaps) east of the wind gap; and (4) the rate of uplift at the easternmost and youngest (past 1 k.y.) part of the fold is at least 3 mm/yr. Investigations of the tectonic geomorphology of Wheeler Ridge support the hypothesis that climatic perturbations are primarily responsible for producing geomorphic surfaces such as alluvial fan segments and river terraces—tectonic perturbations deform the surfaces.
Efficient Key Distribution Schemes for Large Scale Mobile Computing Applications

In emerging networks consisting of large-scale deployments of mobile devices, efficient security mechanisms are required to facilitate cryptographic authentication. While computation and bandwidth overheads are expensive for mobile devices, the cost of storage resources continue to fall at a rapid rate. We propose a simple novel key predistribution scheme, key subset and symmetric certificates (KSSC) which can take good advantage of inexpensive storage resources, and has many compelling advantages over other approaches for facilitating ad hoc establishment of pairwise secrets in mobile computing environments. We argue that a combination of KSSC with a variant of an elegant KDS proposed by Leighton and Micali is an appealing choice for securing large scale deployments of mobile devices.
Evaluating consistency of biosphere models: software tools for a web-based service

A biosphere model is a geographical extension of an ecosystem model, and so modelling ecosystems at global scale we are facing the same problem as at the local scale -- structural uncertainty. The structural uncertainty includes competing conceptual frameworks, lack of agreement on model structure, ambiguous definitions of system boundaries, inadequate − ⎧ < ⎪ − ⎪ = ⎨ − ⎪ ≥ ⎪ − ⎩