Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The emission line sequence of H II galaxies

We consider 400 H II galaxies in which the oxygen abundances were obtained by electron temperature based methods. We split the sample in three metallicity bins. In each bin, a narrow sequence is found not only in pure emission line ratio diagrams but also in terms of Hbeta equivalent width, indicating the existence of an evolutionary sequence. Our diagrams show unambiguously the existence of an evolution on a timescale of a few Myr. We compare the observed sequences with photoionization models of appropriate metallicity. In order to understand the evolution of H II galaxies one needs to consider the evolution of the gas as well as that of the stars. The observations require EW(Hbeta) to decrease more rapidly than predicted by the passive evolution of a starburst. A photoionized adiabatic expanding bubble with a covering factor decreasing with time reproduces most diagrams. However, the question of the heating of H II galaxies and the origin of the nebular He II 4686 emission are not settled. We find evidence for self-enrichment in nitrogen on a time scale of several Myr.
Declines in Numeracy Skill among University Students: Why Does It Matter?

research on university students’ arithmetic skills has shown an interesting trend: The efficiency (i.e., speed and accuracy) with which they solve problems such as 34 + 17 or 456 x 3 has declined by 25 – 40% over the last 20 years. This phenomenon has been observed in students studying in various disciplines in al., 2014; Standing, 2006; Standing, Sproule, & and Northern Ireland & Wylie, 2004). In this article, we summarize these findings and address the question of why reductions in efficient numeracy skills have implications for young adults.
00 Unsupervised Training of HMM Structure and Parameters for OCRed List Recognition and Ontology Population

Machine learning based approaches to information extraction and ontology population often require a large number of manually selected and annotated examples in order to learn a mapping from facts asserted in text to structured facts asserted in an ontology. In this paper, we propose ListReader which provides a way to train the structure and parameters of a hidden Markov model (HMM) using text selected and labeled completely automatically. This HMM is capable of recognizing lists of records in OCRed and other text documents and associating subsets of identical fields across related record templates. The training method we employ is based on a novel unsupervised active grammar-induction framework that, after producing an HMM wrapper, uses an efficient active sampling process to complete the mapping from the HMM wrapper to ontology by requesting annotations from a user for automatically-selected examples. We measure performance of the final HMM in terms of F-measure of extracted information and manual annotation cost and show that ListReader (HMM) learns faster than a state-of-the-art baseline (CRF) and an alternate version of ListReader that induces a regular expression wrapper.
Real-time TV logo detection based on color and HOG features

This paper proposes a real-time TV logo detection algorithm that can detect logos embedded in TV videos or in the real-world videos/images. Unlike most existing TV logo detection methods, the proposed algorithm makes no assumption on temporal motion, spatial location, or any other visual view constrains on TV logos. The detection process consists of three stages: in the first stage, a color based region segmentation and candidate selection strategy is developed, which can narrow down the candidate search space and reduce computation cost significantly; at the second stage, SVM based classifier is trained, where geometric correction based on minimum rectangle bounding is used to improve the accuracy of the classifier, and affine transformation is adopted to construct a robust sample database; finally, the candidates are recognized by the trained SVM Classifiers using their HOG features. Experiments on several video sequences and logotypes have been carried out to verify the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method.
The Impact of Private Sector Pricing Policy on Health Care: Evidence from Wal-Mart’s $4 Prescription Program

Acknowledgements I would first and foremost express my sincere appreciation to my thesis advisor Robin McKnight for her knowledge, support and patience throughout the senior year. I could not at all imagine finishing the work without her. I started my thesis project with almost no economic research experience, but I was lucky enough to have the most patient and helpful person to guide me through it. Now I gained a deeper understanding of health economics and economics research. I truly appreciate all of her guidance and assistance. Second, I would like to thank the economics department. Specifically, I would like to thank Eric Hilt for committing a lot of time and effort in Economic Research Seminar (ERS) and for his attention and helpful comments on my presentations and my paper. I also want to express my gratitude to Casey Rothschild and Kristin Butcher who came to my presentation for their precious time and invaluable feedback. I would like to acknowledge Akila Weerapana, Courtney Coile and Daniel Fetter for their emotional support. Additionally, I would like to thank all students of the ERS for their support and suggestions. To all of my wonderful friends, especially those who I have known for four years, I want to thank them for their encouragement. Lastly, to my parents, I couldn't thank them enough for their love, trust and support throughout my life. I am truly grateful for having them as my parents.
A System for Task Scheduling and Task Migration in Cloud Environment

Large scale data processing is increasingly common in cloud computing systems in recent years. In these systems, files are split into many small blocks and all blocks are replicated over several servers. To process files efficiently, each job is divided into many tasks and each task is allocated to a server to deals with a file block. If the current server is busy, then it migrates the small block of task to another free server. Task Scheduling and task migration are the techniques for increasing flexibility and scalability in cloud computing. These techniques are used to perform different goals like balancing and load sharing, reducing response time and improvement of Quality of Service. In this paper we expect the idealised system for task scheduling and migration in cloud environment in which an initial task will be just a chunk of programming code that will be converted into executable program.
Human Integration of Shape Primitives

This paper deals with human shape recognition. In particular, we present results relating the role of human inferior temporal cortex to the description and recognition of shapes using a parametric three-dimensional shape space. In experiments with a patient with damaged IT cortex, we show that his inability to recognize or distinguish between members of a large family of simple shapes can be traced to an inability to simultaneously combine information related to multiple global shape dimensions. We have discovered that the relevant dimensions describing global object shape, in this case, are related to simple geometric deformations. When object recognition tasks involve multi-dimensional comparisons between potential targets our subjects have diiculty. This deecit is not related to early visual processing, but to an apparently higher-level processing stage. We suggest that the role of IT cortex in combining shape dimensions may be related to its acknowledged role in the control of visual attention. This has implications for the construction of computer vision systems that recognize large ensembles of objects.
Retrograde Approximation Algorithms for Jeopardy Stochastic Games

We study algorithms for solving oneand two-player stochas tic games with perfect information, by modeling a game as a finite, possibly cyclic graph. We analyze a family of jeopardy stochastic games, prove the existence and uniqueness of optimal solutions, an d give approximation algorithms to solve them by incorporating Newton’s method into retrograde anal ysis. Examples of jeopardy stochastic games include Can’t Stop, Pig, and some variants. Results of experiments on small versions of the game Can’t Stop are presented.
Morbidity of pertussis in adolescents and adults.

The effect of age on the clinical presentation of pertussis was assessed in 664 adolescent and adult cases. Complications were more frequent in adults than in adolescents (28% vs. 16%). Pneumonia occurred in 2% of patients <30 years old but in 5%-9% of older patients. Urinary incontinence occurred in 34% of women >/=50 years old. Duration of cough, risk of sinusitis, and number of nights with disturbed sleep increased with smoking and asthma. The secondary attack rate in other household members >/=12 years was 11%. Pertussis in secondary case patients was less severe than in index case patients but presented with classic symptoms. The main source of infection in adolescents was schoolmates or friends; in adults it was workplace or their children. Teachers and health care workers had a greater risk of pertussis than did the general population. The burden of disease appears to increase with age, with smoking, and with asthma.
Orexins: neuropeptides for all seasons and functions.

the neuropeptides orexin (ORX) A and B were first identified by a screen for novel hypothalamic homeostatic regulatory peptides ([15][1]). Because of the substantial homology in amino acid sequences with secretin, they were named hypocretins by one group ([9][2]). Because they stimulated food intake
Content Independent Writer Identification Using Occurrences of Writing Styles for Bangla Handwritings

In most forensic cases handwritten documents are useful for person identification. It is not easy to identify a writer or narrow down a writer from a group of writings. Each person has his or her own individual handwriting styles. This paper presents an approach to extract unique features based on writers' writing styles from the handwritten Bangla scripts. The computed features are used to identify the writer from a group of writings. An identification strategy using those features and rejection criteria are shown. The proposed approach is applied on a collected dataset and it gives us an encouraging results.
Predictive log-synchronization

This paper proposes predictive log-synchronization, an alternative paradigm to the software transactional memory approach for simplifying the design of concurrent data structures. Predictive log-synchronization simplifies concurrent programming and program verification by requiring programmers to write only specialized sequential code. This sequential code is then automatically transformed into a non-blocking concurrent program in which threads coordinate all data structure operations via a shared lock-controlled log. The non-blocking progress property is achieved by having threads that fail to acquire the lock predict the outcome of their operations by reading the log and state and computing the effect of these operations without modifying the actual data structure.Log-synchronization is founded on the belief (at this point unsubstantiated by statistical data) that in many concurrent data structures used in real-world applications, the ratio of high level operations that modify the structure to ones that simply read it, greatly favors read-only operations, and what's more, that many natural data structures have inherent sequential bottlenecks limiting the concurrency among operations that modify the structure. It follows that delegating all data structure modifications to a single lock-controlled thread at a time will not significantly harm the throughput of modifying operations. Moreover, as we show, it can boost read-only throughput by significantly reducing the overhead of coordination among concurrent operations, and provides a way to simplify concurrent data structures.Initial experimental testing using a Java-based implementation of predictive log-synchronization showed that a log-synchronized concurrent red-black tree is up to five times faster than a simple lock-based one. This paper presents our current understanding of the advantages, drawbacks, and scope of predictive log-synchronization.
Do PPARγ Ligands Suppress the Growth of Cholangiocarcinoma or the Cholangiohepatitis Induced by the Tumor?

Cholangiocarcinoma is a predominantly fatal cancer, which can be difficult to treat. It has been reported that the administration of pioglitazone temporarily improved not only diabetic control, but also bile duct carcinoma-induced cholangiohepatitis. Pioglitazone is considered to have both direct and indirect mechanisms of action on the tumor-related hepatitis. Several molecules induced by thiazolidinedione, including Smad pathway-related molecules, adipokines, and other lipid metabolism-related proteins, may directly or indirectly suppress tumor development and/or tumor-induced cholangiohepatitis. Although the most frequent and critical side effect of thiazolidinedione is drug-induced hepatitis, it can probably be avoided by careful monitoring of serum hepatic enzyme levels. Thiazolidinedione should be considered for management of tumor-induced hepatitis in the presence of diabetes unless severe side effects occur.
Temperature-Aware NBTI Modeling and the Impact of Standby Leakage Reduction Techniques on Circuit Performance Degradation

As technology scales, Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI), which causes temporal performance degradation in digital circuits by affecting PMOS threshold voltage, is emerging as one of the major circuit reliability concerns. In this paper, we first investigate the impact of NBTI on PMOS devices and propose a temporal performance degradation model that considers the temperature variation between active and standby mode. We then discuss the resemblance between NBTI and leakage mechanisms, and find out that the impact of input vector and internal node on leakage and NBTI is different; hence, leakage and NBTI should be optimized simultaneously. Based on this, we study the impact of standby leakage reduction techniques (including input vector control and sleep transistor insertion) on circuit performance degradation considering active and standby temperature differences. We demonstrate the potential mitigation of the circuit performance degradation by these techniques.
Evaluating speech synthesis in a mobile context: Audio presentation of Facebook, Twitter and RSS

This paper presents an evaluation of a podcast service that aggregates data from Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds, using speech synthesis. The service uses a novel approach to speech synthesis generation, where XML markup is used to control both the speech synthesis and the sound design of a resulting podcast. A two-phase evaluation was carried out: 1) participants listening to the podcasts on desktop computers, 2) participants listening to the podcasts while walking. Our findings show that participants preferred shorter podcasts with sound effects and background music, and were affected by the surrounding environmental noise. However, audio advertising which is part of the service did not have a significant negative effect. Another finding was that the advantage of using multiple voices for content segmentation may have been undermined by difficulties in listener adaptation. The work is part of a new approach to speech synthesis provision, where its style of rendition forms a part of the application design and it is evaluated within an application context.
On a razor's edge: evaluating arguments from expert opinion

This paper takes an argumentation approach to find the place of trust in a method for evaluating arguments from expert opinion. The method uses the argumentation scheme for argument from expert opinion along with its matching set of critical questions. It shows how to use this scheme in three formal computational argumentation models that provide tools to analyse and evaluate instances of argument from expert opinion. The paper uses several examples to illustrate the use of these tools. A conclusion of the paper is that from an argumentation point of view, it is better to critically question arguments from expert opinion than to accept or reject them based solely on trust.
Transcription factors WRKY 70 and WRKY 11 served as regulators in rhizobacterium Bacillus cereus AR 156-induced systemic resistance to Pseudomonas syringae pv . tomato DC 3000 in Arabidopsis

The activation of both the SA and JA/ETsignalling pathways may lead to more efficient general and broad resistance to Pst DC3000 by non-pathogenic rhizobacteria. However, the mechanisms that govern this simultaneous activation are unclear. Using Arabidopsis as a model system, two transcription factors, WRKY11 and WRKY70, were identified as important regulators involved in Induced Systemic Resistance (ISR) triggered by Bacillus cereus AR156. The results revealed that AR156 treatment significantly stimulated the transcription of WRKY70, but suppressed that of WRKY11 in Arabidopsis leaves. Furthermore, they were shown to be required for AR156 enhancing the activation of cellular defence responses and the transcription level of the plant defence response gene. Overexpression of the two transcription factors in Arabidopsis also showed that they were essential for AR156 to elicit ISR. AR156-triggered ISR was completely abolished in the double mutant of the two transcription factors, but still partially retained in the single mutants, indicating that the regulation of the two transcription factors depend on two different pathways. The target genes of the two transcription factors and epistasis analysis suggested that WRKY11 regulated AR156-triggered ISR through activating the JA signalling pathway, and WRKY70 regulated the ISR through activating the SA signalling pathway. In addition, both WRKY11 and WRKY70 modulated AR156-triggered ISR in a NPR1-dependent manner. In conclusion, WRKY11 and WRKY70 played an important role in regulating the signalling transduction pathways involved in AR156-triggered ISR. This study is the first to illustrate the mechanism by which a single rhizobacterium elicits ISR by simultaneously activating both the SA and JA/ET signalling pathways.
Adopting a music-to-heart rate alignment strategy to measure the impact of music and its tempo on human heart rate

Music is frequently used as a means of relaxation. Conversely, it is used as a means of arousal in sports and exercise contexts. Previous research suggests that tempo is one of the most significant determinants of music-related arousal and relaxation effects. Here we investigate the specific effect of music tempo, but also more generally, the influence of music on human heart rate. We took the pulses of 32 participants in silence, and then we played them non-vocal, ambient music at a tempo corresponding to their heart rates. Finally, we played the same music again, either with the tempo increased or decreased by a factor of 45%, 30%, or 15%; or maintaining the same tempo as in the first playing. Mixed-design ANOVA tests revealed a significant increase in heart rate while listening to the music as compared with silence (p < .05). In addition, substantial decreases in tempo (-45% or -30%) could account for smaller subsequent heart rate reductions (p < .05). We neither found links between increases in tempo (+15%, +30%, and +45%) and heart rate change, nor small decreases (-15%). In addition, neither effects of gender, music training, nor of musical preference were found. This indicates that during passive music listening, music exerts a general arousal effect on human heart rate, which might be regulated by tempo. These results are a major contribution to the way in which music may be used in everyday activities.
Sourcery VSIPL++ on the Cell Broadband Engine: A Fused Fast Convolution Example

The importance of obtaining significant performance in reasonable amounts of time is emphasized by the speed at which hardware platforms evolve as compared to large signal- and image- processing software applications. Tools like Sourcery VSIPL++ increase productivity while still enabling system designers to extend the software life cycle by leveraging the potential of a portable, standards- compliant, math-intensive library. This paper illustrates this by showing a pulse-compression (fast convolution) example, written in just a few lines of C++, achieves good performance on the Cell/B.E. as well as several other different processors.
Predictive modeling and retaining connectivity for mobile wireless communication network

The problem of maintaining connectivity in a mobile communication network is considered. The agents consist of two classes: one class of agents, which is termed primary mission agents, performs surveillance operations that may or may not be coordinated efforts. The second class of agents, which is termed relay agents, is controlled to maintain the connectivity. Two control algorithms are proposed to retain the connectivity of the network. Sliding mode observers are employed to predict the trajectories of the primary mission agents, when only their positions are known from blue force messages, and this information is used to construct state dependent graphs encapsulating the measure of connectivity. An optimal model predictive control is employed to develop the control policies for the relay agents to maximize connectivity. Also, the hybrid system approach is used to retain the connectivity of the communication network. The efficacy of the proposed control algorithms is confirmed on a case study of Riverine detection and interdiction operation.
Optimal Fiscal Policy, Public Capital and the Productivity Slowdown

This paper develops a quantitative theoretical model for the optimal provision of public capital. We show that the ratio of public to private capital in the U.S. economy since 1925 evolves in a manner that is broadly consistent with an optimal transition path derived from a simple growth model. The model is used to quantify the conditions under which an increase in the stock of public capital is desirable and to investigate the degree to which non-optimal fiscal policies can account for the U.S. productivity slowdown.
Mandibular growth and dentoalveolar development in the treatment of class II, division 1, malocclusion using Balters Bionator according to the skeletal maturation.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the study was to evaluate the influence of the skeletal maturation in the mandibular and dentoalveolar growth and development during the Class II, division 1, malocclusion correction with Balters bionator. METHODS Three groups of children with Class II, division 1, malocclusion were evaluated. Two of them were treated for one year with the bionator of Balters appliance in different skeletal ages (Group 1: 6 children, 7 to 8 years old and Group 2: 10 children, 9 to 10 years old) and the other one was followed without treatment ( CONTROL GROUP 7 children, 8 to 9 years old). Lateral 45 degree cephalometric radiographs were used for the evaluation of the mandibular growth and dentoalveolar development. Tantalum metallic implants were used as fixed and stable references for radiograph superimposition and data acquisition. Student's t test was used in the statistical analysis of the displacement of the points in the condyle, ramus, mandibular base and dental points. One-fixed criteria analysis of variance was used to evaluate group differences (95% of level of significance). RESULTS The intragroup evaluation showed that all groups present significant skeletal growth for all points analyzed (1.2 to 3.7 mm), but in an intergroup comparison, the increments of the mandibular growth in the condyle, ramus and mandibular base were not statically different. For the dentoalveolar modifications, the less mature children showed greater labial inclination of the lower incisors (1.86 mm) and the most mature children showed greater first permanent molar extrusion (4.8 mm).