Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MuSIC: An IT security architecture for inter-community clouds

The evolution towards the Inter-Cloud (a global “cloud of clouds”) represents a huge developmental leap for cloud computing, enabling new innovative value-added services. Naturally, one of the main issues of interconnecting clouds is security (i. e., Interor Intra-cloud security). MuSIC addresses this issue by proposing an IT security architecture which concepts have been developed on the basis of the input of more than 25 leading research and industry organizations from the Munich Security Cluster. Based on requirements derived from realistic and innovative Inter-Cloud use cases, the architecture with six core modules has been defined and corresponding IT Service Management processes have been specified.
A modified hysteresis-based DTC strategy for synchronous reluctance motors in high speed range

This paper presents a modified hysteresis-based direct torque control (DTC) for synchronous reluctance machines. The proposed method is utilized to achieve high torque capability in flux weakening region. It will be shown that hysteresis-based DTC is established by two hysteresis comparators. A higher torque capability is fulfilled by switching only the optimized voltage vector during torque dynamic condition, instead of alternating between two vectors. The selection of optimized voltage vector can be implemented by modifying the flux error status generated by the stator flux comparator before it is fed to the switching table. The main benefit of the proposed method is its simplicity because it requires only a minor modification to conventional hysteresis-based DTC and does not require a space vector block. The effectiveness is verified by simulation.
Rab GTPases Regulate Endothelial Cell Protein C Receptor-Mediated Endocytosis and Trafficking of Factor VIIa

Recent studies have established that factor VIIa (FVIIa) binds to the endothelial cell protein C receptor (EPCR). FVIIa binding to EPCR may promote the endocytosis of this receptor/ligand complex. Rab GTPases are known to play a crucial role in the endocytic and exocytic pathways of receptors or receptor/ligand complexes. The present study was undertaken to investigate the role of Rab GTPases in the intracellular trafficking of EPCR and FVIIa. CHO-EPCR cells and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) were transduced with recombinant adenoviral vectors to express wild-type, constitutively active, or dominant negative mutant of various Rab GTPases. Cells were exposed to FVIIa conjugated with AF488 fluorescent probe (AF488-FVIIa), and intracellular trafficking of FVIIa, EPCR, and Rab proteins was evaluated by immunofluorescence confocal microscopy. In cells expressing wild-type or constitutively active Rab4A, internalized AF488-FVIIa accumulated in early/sorting endosomes and its entry into the recycling endosomal compartment (REC) was inhibited. Expression of constitutively active Rab5A induced large endosomal structures beneath the plasma membrane where EPCR and FVIIa accumulated. Dominant negative Rab5A inhibited the endocytosis of EPCR-FVIIa. Expression of constitutively active Rab11 resulted in retention of accumulated AF488-FVIIa in the REC, whereas expression of a dominant negative form of Rab11 led to accumulation of internalized FVIIa in the cytoplasm and prevented entry of internalized FVIIa into the REC. Expression of dominant negative Rab11 also inhibited the transport of FVIIa across the endothelium. Overall our data show that Rab GTPases regulate the internalization and intracellular trafficking of EPCR-FVIIa.
The Effect of Incentives in Web Surveys: Application and Ethical Considerations

Although researchers use internet-based surveys more often than ever in their research, there is little research on the effect of incentives on response rate, speed and cost. This study attempts to fill in some of the blanks by comparing the different incentives offered to respondents of web-based surveys. The results indicate that offering a luggage-tag to each respondent and including them in a draw for a bigger value prize (a personal digital assistant) yields the highest response rate. In terms of response speed, there are no significant differences among each incentive group. The most expensive group in terms of costs was the combination of luggage tag and prize draw.
On the influence of GVR in vehicle routing

A comparative study is made between a new evolutionary approach for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and a standard evolutionary model, based on Path Representation. Genetic Vehicle Representation (GVR) is the new two-level representational scheme designed to deal in an effective way with all the information needed by candidate solutions. Experimental results, obtained from a set of VRP instances, show performance improvements when GVR is used.
Registration of $3{\rm D}+{\rm t}$ Coronary CTA and Monoplane $2{\rm D}+{\rm t}$ X-Ray Angiography

A method for registering preoperative 3D+t coronary CTA with intraoperative monoplane 2D+t X-ray angiography images is proposed to improve image guidance during minimally invasive coronary interventions. The method uses a patient-specific dynamic coronary model, which is derived from the CTA scan by centerline extraction and motion estimation. The dynamic coronary model is registered with the 2D+t X-ray sequence, considering multiple X-ray time points concurrently, while taking breathing induced motion into account. Evaluation was performed on 26 datasets of 17 patients by comparing projected model centerlines with manually annotated centerlines in the X-ray images. The proposed 3D+t/2D+t registration method performed better than a 3D/2D registration method with respect to the accuracy and especially the robustness of the registration. Registration with a median error of 1.47 mm was achieved.
SPECIFIC IMMUNITY IN FARM ANIMALS TO HEARTWATER

STEWART, C. G. , 1987. Specific immunity in farm animals to heartwater. Onderstepoon Journal of Veterinary Research, 54,341-342 (1987). The duration of immunity to heartwater normally varies. fro! D 6 months I<? 4 yeru:s. In Angora goats it may be difficult to produce a specific immune response With vaccmat10n. Humor~l1mm~rnty does not appear to play a role in the development of immunity. It has been s~gge.sted that cellular 1mmumo/ ~ay play a.role, but the actual mechanism involved remains obscure. The specific unrnune response developmg m farm arnmals following infection with Cowdria ruminantium is reviewed.
Job Strain and the Risk of Stroke: An Individual-Participant Data Meta-Analysis

Background and Purpose— Psychosocial stress at work has been proposed to be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. However, its role as a risk factor for stroke is uncertain. Methods— We conducted an individual-participant-data meta-analysis of 196 380 males and females from 14 European cohort studies to investigate the association between job strain, a measure of work-related stress, and incident stroke. Results— In 1.8 million person-years at risk (mean follow-up 9.2 years), 2023 first-time stroke events were recorded. The age- and sex-adjusted hazard ratio for job strain relative to no job strain was 1.24 (95% confidence interval, 1.05;1.47) for ischemic stroke, 1.01 (95% confidence interval, 0.75;1.36) for hemorrhagic stroke, and 1.09 (95% confidence interval, 0.94;1.26) for overall stroke. The association with ischemic stroke was robust to further adjustment for socioeconomic status. Conclusion— Job strain may be associated with an increased risk of ischemic stroke, but further research is needed to determine whether interventions targeting job strain would reduce stroke risk beyond existing preventive strategies.
A Single‐Dose Placebo‐Controlled Study of AMG 162, a Fully Human Monoclonal Antibody to RANKL, in Postmenopausal Women

The safety and bone antiresorptive effect of a single subcutaneous dose of AMG 162, a human monoclonal antibody to RANKL, was investigated in 49 postmenopausal women. AMG 162 is a potent antiresorptive agent for diseases such as osteoporosis.
Religiosity and Corporate Illegal Activity

This paper explores the effects of regional religiosity on the illegal financialactions of business executives. In particular, we examine the extent to which agencyand institutional theories may be used to explain fraudulent financial reporting andstock options backdating. Our findings indicate that religiosity has a negative influenceon illegal corporate activity but that this relationship is primarily limited to stockoptions backdating. Board size and independence are also shown to moderate therelationship between religiosity and illegal corporate activity. These results providesupport for an institutional theory perspective on mitigating executive opportunism.
Facing the pain of others: perspectives on international volunteer tourism between agency and spectatorship

This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing academic debate on volunteer tourism by reviewing the volunteer tourists' experience in light of their encounter with poverty and sufferance. Through the analysis of data collected from semi-structured in-depth interviews with a group of 29 young Italian adults, the author examines the different ways in which volunteer tourists construct and negotiate their role as agents of change during their vacations abroad. Results show that the expectations of providing effective help to the local communities is often challenged by the limitations and constraints of the volunteer tourism experience and, as a consequence, volunteer tourists need to find new ways of making sense of their experiences abroad. Looking at the work of French sociologist [Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant suffering. Morality, media and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] on the ways in which spectators respond to the distant suffering of others, this paper argues that, in order to avoid an oversimplification and a trivialisation of the volunteer tourism experience, the volunteers' participation needs to be addressed primarily as a matter of spectatorship, rather than as a question of agency.
Workload Estimates for Risk-Limiting Audits of Large Contests

We compare the expected number of ballots that must be counted by hand for two risk-limiting auditing methods, Canvass Audits by Sampling and Testing (CAST) and Kaplan-Markov (KM). The methods use dierent sampling designs to select batches of ballots to count by hand and dierent test statistics to decide when the audit can stop. The comparisons are based on the 2008 U.S. House of Representatives contests in California. The comparisons include hypothetical errors in the precinct vote totals, but errors are assumed to be small enough that the electoral outcomes are still correct. KM requires auditing fewer ballots than CAST. The workload for CAST can be reduced modestly by optimizing the number of precincts drawn from each county. Stratication by county is necessary for the practical implementation of risk-limiting audit methods in cross-jurisdictional contests. Workload can be reduced substantially, for both KM and CAST, by tallying ballots in batches smaller than precincts: Workload is roughly proportional to the average size of the batches. We discuss several methods to reduce batch sizes using current vote tabulation systems.
Improving the Rendering Speed of 3D Model Animation on Smart Phones

The advancement of technology enables smart phones or handheld devices to render complex 3D graphics. However, the processing power and memory of smart phones remain very limited to render high polygon and details 3D models especially on games which requires animation, physic engine, or augmented reality. In this paper, several techniques will be introduced to speed up the computation and reducing the number of vertices of the 3D meshes without losing much detail.
Elementary Classroom Teachers' Perceptions of and Lived Experiences with Children in Foster Care: A Qualitative Study

The literature describing the academic performance, school experiences, and social relations of children in foster care is fraught with negative findings regarding educational delays, high attrition in high school, and inadequate social skills, as well as inability to maintain employment, incarceration, and homelessness in young adulthood. Such findings could influence classroom teachers to stereotype them intellectually, behaviorally, and psychosocially, and to expend little time and effort to help foster children. To investigate elementary classroom teachers’ perceptions of and lived experiences with foster children the researcher used a grounded theory strategy and methods. Twenty-five teachers from three urban school districts in a Midwestern state were interviewed one-on-one according to a semi-structured interview schedule. Each interview was audio taped and transcribed verbatim. The constant comparative method was used to analyze emergent data and construct themes. The final stage of analysis yielded the following themes: 1. Participants’ empathy for children in foster care, 2. Participants’ impressions of foster parents, 3. Participants’ interactions within the system, 4. Foster care children’s academic performance, 5. Behavioral issues with children in foster care, 6. Foster care children’s interactions with peers, and 7. Participants’ advice to colleagues. Overall, results indicate that elementary school teachers did not stereotype children in foster care. Instead, they demonstrated a ii balanced perspective on their abilities and challenges, and understood how their interactions and interventions as educators could support foster care children in their classrooms and enhance their development, academically and psychosocially.
An extended HOG model: SCHOG for human hand detection

It is crucial to get human hand information for hand gesture recognition tasks. However, at present, people can not still get a perfect hand segmentation or localize hand accurately especially under complex conditions. Therefore, it is necessary to develop robust and effective methods for detecting human hand accurately. In this paper, we propose a new method for hand detection. We present an extended histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) model: skin color histogram of oriented gradients, which named SCHOG, to construct a human hand detector. In first, we extract our SCHOG feature by combining HOG with skin color cues. Secondly, we apply support vector machine (SVM) algorithm for training our dataset and construct a SVM trained classifier for hand detection. Finally, we test our method on the testing dataset for the SCHOG features and the unchanged HOG features respectively. As experimental results shown, SCHOG exhibits a good performance on our testing dataset.
Meropenem Pharmacokinetics in the Newborn

ABSTRACT We studied meropenem in 23 pre-term (gestational age, 29 to 36 weeks) and 15 full-term (gestational age, 37 to 42 weeks) neonates. Meropenem doses of 10, 20, and 40 mg/kg were administered as single doses (30-min intravenous infusion) on a random basis. Blood was obtained for determining the meropenem concentration nine times. Each child required other antimicrobials for proven/suspected bacterial infections. Samples were assayed by high-performance liquid chromatography analysis. Population pharmacokinetic parameter values were obtained by employing the BigNPAG program. Model building was performed by the likelihood ratio test. The final model included estimated creatinine clearance (CLcr) (Schwartz formula) and weight (Wt) in the calculation of clearance (meropenem clearance = 0.00112 × CLcr + 0.0925 × Wt + 0.156 liter/hr). The overall fit of the model to the data was good (observed = 1.037 × predicted − 0.096; r2 = 0.977). Given the distributions of estimated creatinine clearance and weight between pre-term and full-term neonates, meropenem clearance was substantially higher in the full-term group. A Monte Carlo simulation was performed using the creatinine clearance and weight distributions for pre-term and full-term populations separately, examining 20- and 40-mg/kg doses, 8- and 12-h dosing intervals, and 0.5-h and 4-h infusion times. The 8-h interval produced robust target attainments (both populations). If more resistant organisms were to be treated (MIC of 4 to 8 mg/liter), the 40-mg/kg dose and a prolonged infusion was favored. Treating clinicians need to balance dose choices for optimizing target attainment against potential toxicity. These findings require validation in clinical circumstances.
Proactive seeding for information cascades in cellular networks

Online social networks (OSNs) play an increasingly important role today in informing users about content. At the same time, mobile devices provide ubiquitous access to this content through the cellular infrastructure. In this paper, we exploit the fact that the interest in content spreads over OSNs, which makes it, to a certain extent, predictable. We propose Proactive Seeding-a technique for minimizing the peak load of cellular networks, by proactively pushing (“seeding”) content to selected users before they actually request it. We develop a family of algorithms that take as input information primarily about (i) cascades on the OSN and possibly about (ii) the background traffic load in the cellular network and (iii) the local connectivity among mobiles; the algorithms then select which nodes to seed and when. We prove that Proactive Seeding is optimal when the prediction of information cascades is perfect. In realistic simulations, driven by traces from Twitter and cellular networks, we find that Proactive Seeding reduces the peak cellular load by 20%-50%. Finally, we combine Proactive Seeding with techniques that exploit local mobile-to-mobile connections to further reduce the peak load.
Lyapunov Technique and Backstepping for Nonlinear Neutral Systems

For nonlinear systems with delay of neutral type, we propose a new technique of stability and robustness analysis. It relies on the construction of functionals which make it possible to establish estimates of the solutions different from, but very similar to, estimates of input-to-state stability (ISS) or integral ISS (iISS) type. These functionals are themselves different from, but very similar to, ISS or iISS Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals. The approach applies to systems which do not have a globally Lipschitz vector field and are not necessarily locally exponentially stable. We apply this technique to carry out a backstepping design of stabilizing control laws for a family of neutral nonlinear systems.
Brief novelty exposure facilitates dentate gyrus LTP in aged rats

Aging is associated with a decreased capacity for dentate gyrus (DG) granule cell depolarization as well as reduced perforant path activation. Although it is well established that the maintenance of DG long‐term potentiation (LTP) over days is impaired in aged, as compared to young animals, the threshold for inducing this LTP has never been investigated in aged, awake animals. In addition, although exposure to novelty prior to θ‐burst stimulation (TBS) increases both the induction and longevity of DG LTP in adult rats, the effects of exposure to novelty on LTP in aged rats have never been investigated. Here, we report that although TBS delivered in the home cage induces robust and long‐lasting DG LTP in young rats, TBS fails to induce DG LTP in aged rats. Interestingly, delivery of TBS to aged rats exploring novel environments induces robust and long‐lasting LTP, with the induction, but not the longevity, of this LTP being similar in magnitude to that observed in young rats delivered TBS in the home cage. These results indicate that although TBS‐induced DG LTP is impaired in aged, as compared to young rats, TBS during exploration of novel environments is sufficient to rescue age‐related deficits in DG LTP. We discuss these observations in the context of previous findings suggesting that the facilitation of LTP by exposure to novel environments results as a consequence of reduced network inhibition in the DG and we suggest that, in spite of age‐related changes in the DG, this capacity persists in aged rats and represents a nondietary and nonpharmacological way to facilitate DG LTP during aging. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Under consideration for publication in Formal Aspects of Computing Exploring Tabular Verification and Refinement

Tabular representations have been proposed for structuring complex mathematical expressions as they appear in the specification of programs. We argue that tables not only help in writing and checking complex expressions, but also in their formal manipulation. More specifically, we explore the use of tabular predicates and tabular relations in program verification and refinement.
Analyzing Agent-Oriented Service Models based on SRMO

This paper reports our experiences in analyzing service models based on the Service Requirements Modelling Ontology (SRMO) with an agent-oriented reasoning procedure. The service model in this paper adopts concepts from the strategic actor based early requirements modelling framework i* and extended with service manipulation rules. By mapping a static conceptual service model into a runtime situation, the set of service manipulation rules can be simulated and validated against expected service requirements. The Service-Oriented Model Reasoner (SOMR) has been designed and implemented as a plug-in of the Organization Modelling Environment (OME). Our testing results have shown that the agent-oriented service model reasoner can be used as an effective rule debugger and service model simulation tool.
Pronunciation modelling for conversational speech recognition: a status report from WS97

Accurately modelling of pronunciation variability in conversational speech is an important component for automatic speech recognition. We describe some of the projects undertaken in this direction at WS97 [the Fifth LVCSR (large-vocabulary conversational speech recognition) Summer Workshop], held at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in July-August 1997. We first illustrate a use of hand-labelled phonetic transcriptions of a portion of the Switchboard corpus, in conjunction with statistical techniques, to learn alternatives to canonical pronunciations of words. We then describe the use of these alternative pronunciations in a recognition experiment as well as in the acoustic training of an automatic speech recognition system. Our results show a reduction of the word error rate in both cases-0.9% without acoustic retraining and 2.2% with acoustic retraining.
Hispanic Psychiatry: From Margin to Mainstream

The advent of the 21st century offers a unique opportunity for a reassessment of the epistemological bases of American psychiatry and its diverse components. The case of Hispanic/Latino psychiatry in the U.S. exemplifies the complexities of this process including a reaffirmation of its singular characteristics, and a struggle to gain recognition from and full acceptance into ‘mainstream’ psychiatry. After a brief review of the history of Hispanic communities in the U.S., relevant issues such as acculturation and the response of the host society to the waves of immigrants from ‘south of the border’ are discussed. The growth and increasing visibility of Hispanic psychiatry are demonstrated by an examination of existing organizations, workforce, academic enrollment and productivity, and the contributions of its Latin American and Spanish streams. The receptivity of American psychiatry and the accomplishments and failures on the way towards a true integration are assessed. The journey of Hispanic psychiatry f.