Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Very Large Collection and Web Tracks (Preprint version)

Together, the TREC Very Large Collection (VLC) Track and its successor the Web Track have run for seven years, after an initial VLC pre-track. During that time five new test collections have been created, five different types of retrieval task have been studied, a large number of important issues have been addressed, and new methods have been tried, not only for retrieval, but also for test collection construction. Since the Web Track was a natural evolutionary step from the VLC Track, from here on we will refer to them as a single VLC/Web track. The corpora created in support of the track have been distributed to more than 120 organisations world wide; they are clearly being used for evaluation and research purposes well beyond the confines of TREC. Not only that but the Web Track model has been adopted for similar Japanese language evaluations within the context of NTCIR (NII-NACSIS Test Collection for IR Systems, research.nii. ac.jp/ntcir/index-en.html). Each edition of the VLC/Web Track (except the 1996 VLC Pre-track) has already been described in a Track Overview paper in the appropriate TREC Proceedings. [29, 26, 30, 20, 22, 23, 16] This chapter:
Adding implicit invocation to traditional programming languages

Implicit invocation based on event broadcasting is an increasingly important technique for integrating systems. The authors broaden the class of systems that can benefit from this approach by showing how to augment general-purpose programming languages with facilities for implicit invocation. They illustrate the approach in the context of the Ada language. Attempts to add implicit invocation to standard languages raise a number of design decisions that can have a significant impact on the properties of the mechanism and on its usability. These design considerations are highlighted so that any similar attempt to add implicit invocation to a strongly-typed, procedure-oriented programming language can benefit from this work. <<ETX>>
Expression Patterns of MicroRNAs in Porcine Endometrium and Their Potential Roles in Embryo Implantation and Placentation

Implantation and placentation are critical steps for successful pregnancy. The pig has a non-invasive placenta and the uterine luminal epithelium is intact throughout pregnancy. To better understand the regulation mechanisms in functions of endometrium at three certain gestational stages that are critical for embryo/fetal loss in pigs, we characterized microRNA (miRNA) expression profiles in the endometrium on days 15 (implantation period), 26 (placentation period) and 50 (mid-gestation period) of gestation. The differentially expressed miRNAs across gestational days were detected and of which, 65 miRNAs were grouped into 4 distinct categories according to the similarities in their temporal expression patterns: (1) categories A and B contain majority of miRNAs (51 miRNAs, such as the miR-181 family) that were down- or up-regulated between gestational days 15 and 26, respectively; (2) categories C and D (14 miRNAs) consist miRNAs that were down- or up-regulated between gestational days 26 and 50, respectively. The expression patterns represented by eleven miRNAs were validated by qPCR. The majority of miRNAs were in categories A and B, suggesting that these miRNAs were involved in regulation of embryo implantation and placentation. The pathway analysis revealed that the predicted targets were involved in several pathways, such as focal adhesion, cell proliferation and tissue remolding. Furthermore, we identified that genes well-known to affect embryo implantation in pigs, namely SPP1, ITGB3 and ESR1, contain the miR-181a or miR-181c binding sites using the luciferase reporter system. The present study revealed distinctive miRNA expression patterns in the porcine endometrium during the implantation, placentation or mid-gestation periods. Additionally, our results suggested that miR-181a and miR-181c likely play important roles in the regulation of genes and pathways that are known to be involved in embryo implantation and placentation in pigs.
Reflections on the 'expert syndrome': a Greek case study on extension education.

The current paper explores the issue of extension education through research carried out in a Greek rural area. The target-group comprises participants in the ‘Young Farmers Programme’, a programme aiming at supporting new entrants in farming. Young Farmers’ (YFs) attitudes towards and relationships with agronomists, with the latter being involved in either training or advice provision, are explored. To refine such an exploration different groups of YFs (those at plain areas vs. those at mountainous ones and thus of the respective production systems) and agronomists (public vs. commercial advisors) are distinguished. The analysis expands on the attitudes of YFs towards scientific and local knowledge as well as on agronomists’ practice. Such an analysis allows, in turn, for the illustration and critical discussion of this component of the current AKS in Greece.
Histocompatibility antigen-activated cytotoxic T lymphocytes. II. Estimates of the frequency and specificity of precursors

Using limiting dilutions of responding cells in mouse mixed leukocyte cultures, we obtained direct estimates of the minimum frequency of precursors of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL.P) for a variety of antigens. Depending on the strain combination, there were as many as 4- 15 CTL.P reactive to DBA/2 among 10(4) lymph node cells. Taking into account that only 5-10% of peripheral T lymphocytes have the potential to develop into cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) (6), this implies that at least 1-2% of all CTL.P are responsive to any given H-2 haplotype difference. Precursors of cytotoxic cells thus have the same high frequency of cells reactive to alloantigens of the major histocompatibility complex as found among proliferating cells in graft- vs.-host reactions and mixed lymphocyte interactions. The frequencies of CTL.P reactive to xenoantigens (rat) or trinitrophenyl-modified self were less than half the frequency of alloreactive CTL.P. A minority of the CTL.P specific for one H-2 haplotype were also reactive to a third party H-2 haplotype, presumably on the basis of recognition of shared determinants. By dilution of sensitized cells from single microcultures, it was shown that a single CTL.P undergoes a minimum of three to four cell divisions and generates at least 8-16 CTLs after antigenic activation.
Commerce et marché du travail en concurrence imparfaite

Quel est le role des profits (ou des rentes) dans l'impact du commerce sur le marche du travail ? Comment l'apprehender en theorie et comment le mesurer empiriquement ? La litterature economique concernant l'ouverture, le partage de la rente et l'ajustement des salaires s'est particulierement interessee a la variable des importations. Or, les exportations devraient aussi contribuer a l'ouverture puisqu'elles peuvent etre generatrices de rentes. Sous l'hypothese de contrats efficaces entre les syndicats et les employeurs d'une part, et sous l'hypothese de segmentation internationale des marches d'autre part, on montre que les salaires reels peuvent s'exprimer comme une combinaison lineaire des parts de marche realisees en vendant a l'etranger et sur le marche domestique. L'effet de ces parts de marche sur les salaires dependrait conjointement du pouvoir des syndicats et de l'etat de la concurrence sur chacun des marches a l'exportation. Si les deux conditions, 1) de pouvoir des entreprises sur le marche des biens (capables de realiser des rentes) et 2) de presence de pouvoir syndical sur le marche du travail (pour les partager), sont verifiees, alors l'accroissement de la part de marche s'accompagne d'un accroissement des salaires. Cette equation theorique fournit un test direct au niveau sectoriel pour savoir si ces deux conditions sont reunies. Les resultats attestent de l'existence de rentes issues des exportations et partagees avec les salaries dans la moitie des secteurs des pays developpes. On a longtemps considere que les importations devaient detruire des emplois du fait de la substitution de biens importes aux biens domestiques. En parallele, les exportations devaient en creer car elles remplacent en retour les biens produits sur les marches etrangers. Un autre effet au moins aussi important peut en fait intervenir, mais toujours de maniere positive sur l'emploi : l'effet de la demande. Au-dela de leur
Flying in the Face of Competition: The Policies and Diplomacy of Airline Regulatory Reform in Britain, the USA and the European Community 1968-94

Deregulation and self-interest the Bermuda 1 System early moves in the USA towards regulatory reform two steps forward, one step back gathering pace re-regulating air services - Bermuda 2 President Carter and the airline deregulation revolution liberalization in Britain and the European Community 1980-93 the challenges of liberalization and globalization competition in crisis?
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in Occupational Medicine Practice

Work-related overload syndromes are chiefly associated with the upper limbs, where carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) plays a leading role. This article analyses methods of diagnosing CTS, with special emphasis on those that can be used by physicians in early diagnosis of CTS in workers doing monotonous work. It also discusses occupational (e.g., assembly work, typing, playing instruments, packaging and work associated with the use of a hammer or pruning scissors) and extra-occupational factors (e.g., post-traumatic deformation of bone elements of the carpal tunnel, degenerative and inflammatory changes in tendon sheaths, connective tissue hypertrophy or formation of crystal deposits) leading to CTS; diagnostic methods (subjective symptoms, physical examination, manual provocative tests, vibration perception threshold, electrophysiological examination and imaging methods); and therapeutic and preventive management tools accessible in occupational medicine practice.
Sentiment classification of review documents using phrase patterns

Sentiment Analysis determines the polarity of text whether it belongs to positive or negative polarity. One motivation for sentiment analysis research is the need for user and e-commerce companies to know the public opinion from blogs, online forums, reviews about certain products, services, topics etc. Phrases are important in extracting contextual information which is important for sentiment classification. Phrases can convey sentiment information more efficiently than individual words. In this paper, sentiment-rich phrases are extracted using Part-of-speech (POS) based rules and dependency relation in the document that are capable of extracting contextual and syntactic information from the document. Next, semantic orientations of these phrases are calculated using Point-wise Mutual Information (PMI) based method. Finally, review document is classified after aggregating the semantic orientation of all the phrases into positive or negative polar document.
A Method of Dealing with Numeric Attribute Based on Sample Distribution

In order to improve the predictive accuracy of inductive learning, a heavy analysis about the demerit of C4.5 in dealing with numeric attribute is given. By the method of estimating the probability distribution of the training samples, a new and simple method of dealing with numeric attribute is proposed in this paper. Experimental results of UCI data sets show that the proposed method has an excellent performance on accuracy issue and faster computing speed than C4.5 algorithm.
Effects of Subcontracting in Information Technologies on Competitive Advantage of GSM Operators in Turkey

Business support functions like Information Technologies are always considered as cost centers. Today's companies generally focus on core business functions and outsource support functions. Also some of them choose subcontracting which is a type of outsourcing. This article represents an investigation of the effects of subcontracting at information technologies function on competitive advantage of the Mobile Telecommunication service providers in Turkey by a case study of a GSM Operator in Turkey. We explain the negative correlation between subcontracting and competitive advantage by demonstrating the changes on the business requests’ completions of the company in the period of 2006 to 2010 in a qualitative way.
BinaryPig : Scalable Static Binary Analysis Over Hadoop

Malware collection and analysis are critical to the modern Internet security industry. This increasing tide of ‘unique’ malware samples and the difficulty in storing and analyzing these samples in a scalable fashion has been frequently decried in academic forums and industry conferences. Due to the increasing volume of samples that are being discovered in the wild, the need for an easily deployed, scalable architecture is becoming increasingly pronounced. Over the past 2.5 years Endgame received 20M samples of malware equating to roughly 9.5 TB of binary data. In this, we’re not alone. McAfee reports that it currently receives roughly 100,000 malware samples per day and received roughly 10M samples in the last quarter of 2012 [1]. Its total corpus is estimated to be about 100M samples. VirusTotal receives between 300k and 600k unique files per day, and of those roughly one-third to half are positively identified as malware [2]. Effectively combating and triaging malware is now a Big Data problem. Most malware analysis scripts are unprepared for processing collections of malware once they surpass the 100GB scale, let alone terabytes. This paper describes the architecture of a system the authors built to overcome these challenges that uses Hadoop [13] and Apache Pig [14] to enable analysts to leverage pre-existing tools to analyze terabytes of malware, at scale. We demonstrate this system to analyze ~20M malware samples weighing in at 9.5 TB of binary data.
Intrinsic mechanisms of antinociception in inflammation: local opioid receptors and beta-endorphin

This study examined antinociception induced through the activation of local opioid receptors in inflammation by endogenous opioids. Rats developed a unilateral localized inflammation upon injection of Freund's adjuvant into one hindpaw. Four to 6 d later they were subjected to cold water swim (CWS), an environmental stimulus known to activate intrinsic opioid systems. Following CWS (1 min) the animals' withdrawal threshold to noxious pressure applied onto the paws increased significantly more on the inflamed paw than on the noninflamed paw. This unilateral antinociceptive effect in inflamed paws was dose-dependently and stereospecifically reversible by intraplantar (i.pl.) but not systemic (i.v. or s.c.) administration of the opioid antagonist naloxone (18 micrograms). This suggested that CWS- induced antinociception in inflamed tissue was brought about by the activation of local opioid receptors. Antiinflammatory or vasoconstrictive events, as measured by paw volume and temperature, did not contribute to this unilateral antinociception. Receptor-selective antagonists indicated the involvement of mu- and delta- but not kappa- receptors. Intravenous application of a universal antibody to endogenous opioid peptides (3-E7) and a specific antibody to beta- endorphin, but not antisera against metenkephalin or dynorphin, abolished the CWS effect. Finally, the i.pl. injection of synthetic beta-endorphin (1–31) produced an antinociceptive effect in inflamed paws which was reversible by i.pl. naloxone and selective mu- and delta- receptor antagonists. These findings suggest that antinociception in inflamed tissue can be induced through the activation of local opioid receptors by endogenous beta-endorphin released during CWS.
Investigating MAC-layer schemes to promote doze mode in 802.11-based WLANs

This paper addresses the energy saving issue in 802.11-based WLANs. Previous work has pointed out that the power management function in the IEEE 802.11 standard presents some inefficiencies, thus other solutions to energy saving are needed. We focus on the infrastructure of WLAN and explore the possibility to increase the time period that a wireless station spends in the low-power operational state, the so-called doze state. We present an energy-saving, MAC-layer scheme which is derived from the 802.11 DCF. The proposed mechanism enables a station to enter the doze state during channel contention by exploiting the virtual carrier sense mechanism and the backoff function. We compare the performance obtained through the proposed scheme with the results attained through both the standard DCF and a simple active/doze state switching mechanism.
Keeping and re-finding information on the web: What do people do and what do they need?

This study (Keeping Found Things Found -KFTF) investigated the methods that people use in their workplace to re-access web information. People were observed using many different methods to keep web information for later use including the use of Bookmarks (or Favorites), self-addressed email, hand-written notes, and paper print-outs. Each keeping method provided a range of functions but none of the observed methods allowed for all desired functions. Participants in the KFTF study were also tested for their ability to return to a web site and several re-finding methods were observed and identified. When prompted with web site descriptions they had generated three to six months earlier, participants had a 95% or better success rate in returning to the cued-for web sites. Moreover, two thirds of these re-finding methods required no explicit keeping behavior. Common re-finding methods included the use of: 1. ) A search service. 2. ) Partial completion of a site's web address and acceptance of a suggested completion to this address (the auto-complete function). 3. ) Hyperlinks from another web site. Results underline the importance of a reminding function. This paper also reports the data collected from a web survey conducted after the keeping and re-finding observations. 214 participants completed the survey. The data from the survey validated and elaborated the various methods that people use to keep web information for later re-use that were identified in earlier observational studies.
JOINT CHANNEL ESTIMATION AND DECODING OF RAPTOR CODE ON FADING CHANNEL

In this paper, the problem of transmission of Raptor codes over fading channel is considered. We present in this paper joint decoder architecture for Raptor codes over phase coherent fading channel. The proposed scheme does not require transmission of pilot symbols or extra coded bits for achieving the same BER performance. The receiver uses sum-product algorithm to jointly estimate the channel and decode the Raptor coded symbols. We also compare the performance of the practical decoder architecture proposed in the paper with existing architecture using LDPC codes which uses joint decoding.
Restoration in carrier networks

Quality of Service (QoS) is an important objective of large telecommunications carriers. Network restoration is the prime capability needed to achieve this objective. While a large body of publications study and propose different restoration methods and network optimization algorithms, very few have actually been implemented. To address this, we present background on how today's large carrier terrestrial networks are constructed and operated. In particular we describe their segmentation, layering, and where, how and why network restoration is selectively implemented. We conclude with some observations where restoration research has the greatest need.
Expression, Characterization, and Cellular Localization of Knowpains, Papain-Like Cysteine Proteases of the Plasmodium knowlesi Malaria Parasite

Papain-like cysteine proteases of malaria parasites degrade haemoglobin in an acidic food vacuole to provide amino acids for intraerythrocytic parasites. These proteases are potential drug targets because their inhibitors block parasite development, and efforts are underway to develop chemotherapeutic inhibitors of these proteases as the treatments for malaria. Plasmodium knowlesi has recently been shown to be an important human pathogen in parts of Asia. We report expression and characterization of three P. knowlesi papain-like proteases, termed knowpains (KP2-4). Recombinant knowpains were produced using a bacterial expression system, and tested for various biochemical properties. Antibodies against recombinant knowpains were generated and used to determine their cellular localization in parasites. Inhibitory effects of the cysteine protease inhibitor E64 were assessed on P. knowlesi culture to validate drug target potential of knowpains. All three knowpains were present in the food vacuole, active in acidic pH, and capable of degrading haemoglobin at the food vacuolar pH (≈5.5), suggesting roles in haemoglobin degradation. The proteases showed absolute (KP2 and KP3) to moderate (KP4) preference for peptide substrates containing leucine at the P2 position; KP4 preferred arginine at the P2 position. While the three knowpains appear to have redundant roles in haemoglobin degradation, KP4 may also have a role in degradation of erythrocyte cytoskeleton during merozoite egress, as it displayed broad substrate specificity and was primarily localized at the parasite periphery. Importantly, E64 blocked erythrocytic development of P. knowlesi, with enlargement of food vacuoles, indicating inhibition of haemoglobin hydrolysis and supporting the potential for inhibition of knowpains as a strategy for the treatment of malaria. Functional expression and characterization of knowpains should enable simultaneous screening of available cysteine protease inhibitor libraries against knowpains for developing broadly effective compounds active against multiple human malaria parasites.
Microvascular Flow Estimation by Contrast-Assisted Ultrasound B-Scan and Statistical Parametric Images

The microbubbles destruction/replenishment technique has been previously applied to estimating blood flow in the microcirculation. The rate of increase of the time-intensity curve (TIC) due to microbubbles flowing into the region of interest (ROI), as measured from B-mode images, closely reflects the flow velocity. In previous studies, we proposed a new approach called the time-Nakagami-parameter curve (TNC) obtained from Nakagami images to monitor microbubble replenishment for quantifying the microvascular flow velocity. This study aimed to further explore some effects that may affect the TNC to estimate the microflow, including microbubble concentration, ultrasound transmitting energy, attenuation, intrinsic noise, and tissue clutter. In order to well control each effect production, we applied a typical simulation method to investigate the TIC and TNC. The rates of increase of the TIC and TNC were expressed by the rate constants betaI and betaN, respectively, of a monoexponential model. The results show that betaN quantifies the microvascular flow velocity similarly to the conventional betaI. Moreover, the measures of betaI and betaN are not influenced by microbubble concentration, transducer excitation energy, and attenuation effect. Although the effect of intrinsic signals contributed by noise and blood would influence the TNC behavior, the TNC method has a better tolerance of tissue clutter than the TIC does, allowing the presence of some clutter components in the ROI. The results suggest that the TNC method can be used as a complementary tool for the conventional TIC to reduce the wall filter requirements for blood flow measurement in the microcirculation.