Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A heuristic algorithm for profit maximization problem on customer social networking

The rapidly increasing development of online social networking sites such as Facebook, Epinions and Twitter has facilitated immense opportunities for viral marketing. In the presence of “word-of-mouth” referral, individuals' decisions to purchase a product or adopt an innovation are strongly influenced by recommendations from their friends and acquaintances. With the tremendous popularity of social networking sites, enterprises have begun to explore the valuable information from customer social networking. Given huge numbers of customers and the pairwise influencing weights, how to choose appropriate customers as promotion group and target group and then obtain the maximum profit is one of the key issues in marketing's decision-making. This paper introduces a novel profit maximization model and proposes a heuristic-based algorithm to solve this problem.
ESTIMATION OF BRAIN RESPONSES BASED ON INDEPENDENT COMPONENT ANALYSIS AND WAVELET DENOISING

Analysis of brain responses on a single-trial basis allows the study of the dynamical characteristics of brain activation. However, single-trial responses are buried into the more prominent background activity, and thus advanced procedures are needed to obtain only the activity of the cortical generators that are activated by the experimental task under study. In this paper, we use simulated data and actual recordings from normal subjects to compare the effectiveness of two methods at removing extraneous activity from single-trial responses, namely, wavelet denoising and our recently proposed procedure, which is based on independent component analysis. Our results show that the new technique can separate individual components from the entire response waveform, and it can also uncover the dynamic evolution of brain responses that cannot be revealed by standard averaging techniques. This work was supported by a fellowship from the W.M. Keck Foundation and a grant from the Texas Learning and Computation Center (TLC). 1 2 ESTIMATION OF BRAIN RESPONSES BASED ON INDEPENDENT COMPONENT ANALYSIS AND WAVELET DENOISING Darshan Iyer and George Zouridakis
Circumstances and consequences of falls in independent community-dwelling older adults.

BACKGROUND knowledge of the circumstances and consequences of falls in older adults is important for understanding the aetiology of falls as well as for effective clinical assessment and design of fall prevention strategies. Such data, however, are relatively scarce, especially in community-dwelling elders. METHOD accidental falls (including their circumstances and consequences) occurring in 96 male and female participants between 60 and 88 years of age were monitored prospectively for 1 year. After the monitoring period, participants were divided into three groups based on fall status: non-fallers (n = 46), one-time fallers (n = 27) and recurrent fallers (n = 23). Frequency distributions were created for selected circumstances and consequences of falls and the prevalence of these consequences were examined. RESULTS 50 participants (52%) fell during the 1 year period, amassing 91 falls. Trips and slips were the most prevalent causes of falls, accounting for 59% of falls. Falls most often occurred during the afternoon and while subjects walked on level or uneven surfaces. Fallers most commonly attributed falls to hurrying too much. Fractures resulted from five of the 91 falls and eight other falls resulted in soft tissue injuries that required treatment by a physician. There were no differences between one-time and recurrent fallers in the circumstances and consequences of falls. However, several notable differences were found between men (n = 20) and women (n = 30) who fell. Falls by men most often resulted from slips whereas falls by women most often resulted from trips. Moreover, women and men differed in the time of the year in which falls occurred, with men falling most often during winter and women during summer. CONCLUSIONS the results of this study provide insight into the circumstances and consequences of falls among independent community-dwelling older adults and suggest some possible ways of preventing falls. Preventive services, however, should not solely target recurrent fallers, nor should the type of services necessarily differ for one-time and recurrent fallers.
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments

Differently from passive Brownian particles, active particles, also known as self-propelled Brownian particles or microswimmers and nanoswimmers, are capable of taking up energy from their environment and converting it into directed motion. Because of this constant flow of energy, their behavior can be explained and understood only within the framework of nonequilibrium physics. In the biological realm, many cells perform directed motion, for example, as a way to browse for nutrients or to avoid toxins. Inspired by these motile microorganisms, researchers have been developing artificial particles that feature similar swimming behaviors based on different mechanisms. These man-made micromachines and nanomachines hold a great potential as autonomous agents for health care, sustainability, and security applications. With a focus on the basic physical features of the interactions of self-propelled Brownian particles with a crowded and complex environment, this comprehensive review will provide a guided tour through its basic principles, the development of artificial self-propelling microparticles and nanoparticles, and their application to the study of nonequilibrium phenomena, as well as the open challenges that the field is currently facing.
Biolinguistics today and Platonism yesterday

This contribution expounds on ideas put forth by a group of New York City generative grammarians that language possesses certain essential features that are uncaused and adhere to an abstract ideal form. An analogy of the situation with language is made with certain natural properties of numbers. It is also noted that this situation contrasts with that of the functional structure of human color vision. This idea is viewed alongside recent work in biolinguistics and is compared to the neoplatonist view of language, namely that language is discovered by the child learner and not triggered. The main consequences of this idea are discussed both within the historical context and with respect to current theories on language acquisition.
Work-related physical activity among adults in Germany

In GEDA 2014/2015-EHIS the prevalence of work-related physical activity was estimated based on respondents’ self-reported data. 47.5% of women and 47.2% of men mostly sit or stand during work. The highest proportion of people who mostly sit or stand during work is found among 18- to 29-year-old women (55.5%) and men aged 30 to 44 (50.2%). A significantly higher proportion of men (14.8%) than women (3.2%) have jobs involving mostly heavy manual labour. For both genders, the higher a person’s level of education, the more likely it is that physical activity during work is limited to sitting or standing. The results highlight great potential to promote physical activity.
Doppler radar signatures analysis by using joint bispectrum-based time-frequency distributions

Estimation of instantaneous frequency (IF) time-varying behavior of a non-stationary and multi-component signals embedded in additive Gaussian noise is considered for Wigner-Ville (WVD), Wigner bispecrum (WBD), parametric (PBBD) and non-parametric (NPBBD) bispectrum-based distributions. A performance comparative study between WVD, WBD, PBBD and NPBBD is carried out by computer simulations both for several non-stationary and multi-component test signals and real radar backscattered echo-signals measured by Doppler surveillance radar for a moving human. Analysis of time-frequency (TF) distributions shows that bispectrum-based approach permits to detect and extract phase coupling among pairs of Doppler IFs containing in non-stationary and multi-component wideband signals. Experimental radar micro-Doppler signatures derived from the returns measured for moving human demonstrate important information features about the object dynamics and kinematics. These information features can be useful in radar automatic target recognition systems.
Neutral Hydrogen in the Edge-on Spiral Galaxy NGC 3044—Global Properties and Discovery of H I Supershells

The first detailed VLA mapping of the neutral hydrogen distribution in the isolated, edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3044 is presented. Physical parameters such as MH I, MT, etc. determined for this galaxy are typical for galaxies of its morphological class (SBc). We have modeled the H I spectra in order to derive its global density and velocity distributions. An H I scale height of 420 h-1 pc is thus found. This can be compared to the impressive radio continuum halo, previously found to extend to 8 kpc above the midplane. The present study reveals an asymmetry in the H I distribution as well as numerous high-latitude H I structures at various galactocentric radii. The approaching (northwest) side of the galaxy is 14% less massive than the receding side and its rotation curve does not reach terminal velocity. The rotation curve of the receding (southeast) side, however, resembles that of a normal galaxy. Twelve high-latitude features were cataloged, of which four exhibit the signature of an expanding shell. There is some correlation of these features with features observed in the radio continuum from independent data. The most massive shell (feature 10) extends out to 6 h-1 kpc above the galactic disk. The radii and masses of these shells range from 1.2-2.0 h-1 kpc and 1.6 × 107-5.5 × 107 h-2 M☉, respectively. We have investigated the possibility that the supershells could have been produced by external impacting clouds, but conclude that this scenario is unattractive, given the age of the shells, the isolation of the galaxy, and the lack of any observed features sufficiently massive to form the shells in the vicinity of the galaxy. Therefore, an internal origin is suggested. Since the implied input energies from supernovae are extremely high (e.g., from 1.4 × 1053-7.4 × 1055 h-2 ergs, corresponding to 400-74,000 supernovae), we suggest that some additional energy (e.g., from magnetic fields) may be needed to produce the observed supershells.
Resistive Bridging Faults DFT with Adaptive Power Management Awareness

A key design constraint of circuits used in handheld devices is the power consumption, due mainly to the limitations of battery life. The employment of adaptive power management (APM) methods optimizes the power consumption of such circuits. This paper describes an effective APM-aware DFT technique that consists of a Test Generation Suite, including fault list generation, test pattern generation and fault simulation. The test generation suite is capable of generating test patterns for multiple supply voltage (Vdd) settings to maximize coverage of resistive bridging faults; and a method to reduce the number of Vdd settings without compromising the fault coverage in order to reduce the cost of test. Preliminarily validations of the proposed DFT technique using a number of benchmark circuits demonstrate its effectiveness.
Comparative Stress Levels among Residents in Three Chinese Provincial Capitals, 2001 and 2008

Objectives To compare stress levels among residents in large Chinese cities between 2001 and 2008. Methods Survey data were collected in three mainland Chinese capital cities in two waves, in 2001 and 2008, respectively. Participants were recruited through a multi-stage stratified sampling process. Stress was assessed using the Perceived Stress Scale, Chinese version (CPSS). Descriptive methods were used to estimate mean stress levels and associated 95% confidence intervals. Estimates were adjusted by post-stratification weights. Results Indicating stable stress levels, respective adjusted mean stress scores for the combined samples of study participants were 23.90 (95%CI: 23.68–24.12) in 2001 and 23.69 (95%CI: 23.38–24.01) in 2008. A lower stress level in 2008 than in 2001 manifested among residents who were under 25 years of age; female; with a college or higher level education; divorced, widowed, or separated; members of the managerial and clerical group; students or army personnel; or with an annual income of at least 30,000 RMB. Conclusion The overall stress level did not change among the combined sample of residents in the three Chinese study cities between 2001 and 2008. However, levels remained high and varied across social strata, and may have reflected a national trend among urban residents. Findings indicate a need for a new health policy, and call for the design and implementation of evidence-based interventions that target the highest-risk groups.
Aligning images in the wild

Aligning image pairs with significant appearance change is a long standing computer vision challenge. Much of this problem stems from the local patch descriptors' instability to appearance variation. In this paper we suggest this instability is due less to descriptor corruption and more the difficulty in utilizing local information to canonically define the orientation (scale and rotation) at which a patch's descriptor should be computed. We address this issue by jointly estimating correspondence and relative patch orientation, within a hierarchical algorithm that utilizes a smoothly varying parameterization of geometric transformations. By collectively estimating the correspondence and orientation of all the features, we can align and orient features that cannot be stably matched with only local information. At the price of smoothing over motion discontinuities (due to independent motion or parallax), this approach can align image pairs that display significant inter-image appearance variations.
Analysis of Documents Published in Scopus Database on Foreign Language Learning Through Mobile Learning: A Content Analysis

The purpose of this study is to determine the recent trends in foreign language learning through mobile learning. The study was conducted employing document analysis and related content analysis among the qualitative research methodology. Through the search conducted on Scopus database with the key words “mobile learning and foreign language learning”, the study is based on the analysis of the documents published between the years 2005 and 2017; their distribution took place by years, subject areas, document types, country/regions, and the affiliated universities of the authors. The varied findings revealed that the analysis of the studies published on Scopus database was important in terms of content for the significance of foreign language learning through mobile learning.
A Conceptual Model of a Workflow Management System Based on Web Services

Web service, as an emerging technology, is being more and more widely adopted on the Internet for electronic business. The emergence of web service greatly facilitates business process management and reengineering. This paper develops a conceptual architecture for workflow management system based on web service infrastructure. The proposed architecture fully explores the benefits offered by web services by providing a flexible, dynamic and adaptive environment for workflow processing. Customer satisfaction and competitive advantages are supposed to result from systems based on the architecture.
PlGF Repairs Myocardial Ischemia through Mechanisms of Angiogenesis, Cardioprotection and Recruitment of Myo-Angiogenic Competent Marrow Progenitors

Rationale Despite preclinical success in regenerating and revascularizing the infarcted heart using angiogenic growth factors or bone marrow (BM) cells, recent clinical trials have revealed less benefit from these therapies than expected. Objective We explored the therapeutic potential of myocardial gene therapy of placental growth factor (PlGF), a VEGF-related angiogenic growth factor, with progenitor-mobilizing activity. Methods and Results Myocardial PlGF gene therapy improves cardiac performance after myocardial infarction, by inducing cardiac repair and reparative myoangiogenesis, via upregulation of paracrine anti-apoptotic and angiogenic factors. In addition, PlGF therapy stimulated Sca-1+/Lin− (SL) BM progenitor proliferation, enhanced their mobilization into peripheral blood, and promoted their recruitment into the peri-infarct borders. Moreover, PlGF enhanced endothelial progenitor colony formation of BM-derived SL cells, and induced a phenotypic switch of BM-SL cells, recruited in the infarct, to the endothelial, smooth muscle and cardiomyocyte lineage. Conclusions Such pleiotropic effects of PlGF on cardiac repair and regeneration offer novel opportunities in the treatment of ischemic heart disease.
The Lasting Legacy of Traumatic Events on Life Satisfaction

In this paper, we employ large-scale survey data from the four 2006-2012 waves of the US Health and Retirement Study to show that traumatic events experienced throughout the life span leave a legacy on life satisfaction. Having had a life-threatening illness or accident, having a close relative hit by a life-threatening illness or accident and, especially, having been victim of a serious physical attack or assault are life events out of individuals’ control that turn out to be negatively associated with both general and domain-specific life satisfaction, even after controlling for personality traits. As to extremely adverse events experienced during childhood or adolescence, life satisfaction is significantly lowered by being physically abused by a parent. Overall, we provide evidence that the effects of some traumas are persistent over time and that men and women do not significantly differ in their reactions to traumas. Surprisingly, the effects of child death on general life satisfaction are negligible also in the short term.
An Integrity Verification System for Images Using Hashing and Watermarking

Integrity verification is verifying the originality of an object. A number of robust and secure image hashing methods are existing in literature, which are suited for integrity verification of images. However, a complete system for integrity verification which clearly distinguishes between acceptable and malicious manipulations is still in research. This paper presents a complete system for integrity verification of images using, an image hashing method based on Fast Johnson Linden Strauss Transform (FJLT) and a DCT based blind watermarking method. The proposed method is robust against JPEG compression of quality level more than 60 and is able to distinguish from all other possible manipulations.
TCP Nice: Self-tuning Network Support for Background Applications

Many distributed applications can make use of large background transfers transfers of data that humans are not waiting for to improve availability, reliability, latency or consistency. However, given the rapid fluctuations of available network bandwidth and changing resource costs due to technology trends, hand tuning the aggressiveness of background transfers risks (1) complicating applications, (2) being too aggressive and interfering with other applications, and (3) being too timid and not gaining the benefits of background transfers. Our goal is for the operating system to manage network resources in order to provide a simple abstraction of near zero-cost background transfers. Our system, TCP Nice, can provably bound the interference inflicted by background flows on foreground flows in a restricted network model. And our microbenchmarks and case study applications suggest that in practice it interferes little with foreground flows, reaps a large fraction of spare network bandwidth, and simplifies application construction and deployment. For example, in our prefetching case study application, aggressive prefetching improves demand performance by a factor of three when Nice manages resources; but the same prefetching hurts demand performance by a factor of six under standard network congestion control.
Recycling in pipelined query evaluation

Database systems typically execute queries in isolation. Sharing recurring intermediate and final results between successive query invocations is ignored or only exploited by caching final query results. The DBA is kept in the loop to make explicit sharing decisions by identifying and/or defining materialized views. Thus decisions are made only after a long time and sharing opportunities may be missed. Recycling intermediate results has been proposed as a method to make database query engines profit from opportunities to reuse fine-grained partial query results, that is fully autonomous and is able to continuously adapt to changes in the workload. The technique was recently revisited in the context of MonetDB, a system that by default materializes all intermediate results. Materializing intermediate results can consume significant system resources, therefore most other database systems avoid this where possible, following a pipelined query architecture instead. The novelty of this paper is to show how recycling can successfully be applied in pipelined query executors, by tracking the benefit of materializing possible intermediate results and then choosing the ones making best use of a limited intermediate result cache. We present ways to maximize the potential of recycling by leveraging subsumption and proactive query rewriting. We have implemented our approach in the Vectorwise database engine and have experimentally evaluated its potential using both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results show that intermediate result recycling significantly improves performance.
Small Interfering RNA Specific for N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor 2B Offers Neuroprotection to Dopamine Neurons through Activation of MAP Kinase

In the present study, N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor 2B (NR2B)-specific siRNA was applied in parkinsonian models. Our previous results showed that reduction in expression of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor 1 (NR1), the key subunit of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors, by antisense oligos amelio-rated the motor symptoms in the 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA)-lesioned rat, an animal model of Parkinson's disease (PD) [Lai et al.: Neurochem Int 2004;45:11-22]. To further the investigation on the efficacy of gene silencing, small interference RNA (siRNA) specific for the NR2B subunit was designed and administered in the striatum of 6-OHDA-lesioned rats. The present results show that administration of NR2B-specific siRNA decreased the number of apomorphine-induced rotations in the lesioned rats and that there was a significant reduction in NR2B proteins levels after NR2B-specific siRNA administration. Furthermore, attenuation of the loss of dopaminergic neurons was found in both the striatal and substantia nigra regions of the 6-OHDA-lesioned rats that had been continuously infused with siRNA for 7 days. In addition, a significant upregulation of p-p44/42 MAPK (ERK1/2; Thr202/Tyr204) and p-CREB (Ser133) in striatal neurons was found. These results suggest that application of the gene silencing targeting NR2B could be a potential treatment of PD, and they also revealed the possibility of NR2B-specific siRNA being involved in the prosurvival pathway.