Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the stability of virtual network topology control for overlay routing services

Overlay networks achieve new functionality and enhance network performance by allowing routing to be controlled at the application layer. However, these approaches result in degradations of underlying networks due to the selfish behavior of overlay networks. In this paper, we investigate the stability of virtual network topology (VNT) control under the overlay networks that perform dynamic routing updates. We reveal that the dynamics of routing on overlay networks causes a high fluctuation in the traffic demand matrix, which leads to significant instability of VNT control. To overcome the instability induced by the overlay routing, we introduce hysteresis to the VNT control. Simulation results indicate that the hysteresis mechanism improves the network stability, but cannot always improve the network performance. We therefore extend the hysteresis mechanism and show that the proposed method improves both the network stability and the performance when the amount of traffic for overlay network is not large.
The combined presence of H pylori infection and gastro-oesophageal reflux disease leads to an up-regulation of CDX2 gene expression in antrum and cardia

Background: CDX2 is an epithelial transcription factor that regulates intestinal differentiation and is involved in the development of intestinal metaplasia (IM). Aim: To analyse the expression of CDX2 in the gastric mucosa in various locations and its relationship to Helicobacter pylori infection and gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD). Methods: 69 patients with upper gastrointestinal symptoms were stratified into four groups according to their H pylori and GORD status. Patients without infection and without GORD were the reference group (H pylori(−)/GORD(−)). Biopsies from the antrum, corpus and cardia were assessed by histopathology according to the updated Sydney System. CDX2 transcription levels were determined by quantitative RT-PCR and immunohistochemistry. Results: CDX2 gene expression was significantly up-regulated in antral and cardia mucosa of patients with both H pylori infection and GORD (26- and 100-fold, respectively; p<0.05), but remained unchanged in corpus mucosa. If only H pylori infection or GORD was present, CDX2 expression levels were 6- to 11-fold increased in the antrum, but without reaching statistical significance. CDX2 expression correlated positively with the degree of IM (p<0.01) and the degree of H pylori induced inflammation (p<0.05). Gene expression data were confirmed immunohistochemically by the detection of CDX2 in areas of IM and in focally distributed CDX2-expressing cells in non-metaplastic gastric mucosa. Conclusions: The combined presence of H pylori infection and GORD leads to an up-regulation of CDX2 gene expression in cardia and antral mucosa, but not in the corpus.
Human Metapneumovirus Detection in Patients with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

We used a combination approach of conventional virus isolation and molecular techniques to detect human metapneumovirus (HMPV) in patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Of the 48 study patients, 25 (52.1%) were infected with HMPV; 6 of these 25 patients were also infected with coronavirus, and another 5 patients (10.4%) were infected with coronavirus alone. Using this combination approach, we found that human laryngeal carcinoma (HEp-2) cells were superior to rhesus monkey kidney (LLC-MK2) cells commonly used in previous studies for isolation of HMPV. These widely available HEp-2 cells should be included in conjunction with a molecular method for cell culture followup to detect HMPV, particularly in patients with SARS.
Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter: Experiment summary after the first year of global mapping of Mars

The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), an instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, has measured the topography, surface roughness, and 1.064-μm reflectivity of Mars and the heights of volatile and dust clouds. This paper discusses the function of the MOLA instrument and the acquisition, processing, and correction of observations to produce global data sets. The altimeter measurements have been converted to both gridded and spherical harmonic models for the topography and shape of Mars that have vertical and radial accuracies of ~1 m with respect to the planet's center of mass. The current global topographic grid has a resolution of 1/64° in latitude × 1/32° in longitude (1 × 2 km^2 at the equator). Reconstruction of the locations of incident laser pulses on the Martian surface appears to be at the 100-m spatial accuracy level and results in 2 orders of magnitude improvement in the global geodetic grid of Mars. Global maps of optical pulse width indicative of 100-m-scale surface roughness and 1.064-μm reflectivity with an accuracy of 5% have also been obtained.
Reduced cardiac hypertrophy and altered blood pressure control in transgenic rats with the human tissue kallikrein gene

To evaluate the cardiovascular actions of kinins, we established a transgenic rat line harboring the human tissue kallikrein gene, TGR(hKLK1). Under the control of the zinc‐inducible metallothionein promoter, the transgene was expressed in most tissues including the heart, kidney, lung, and brain, and human kallikrein was detected in the urine of transgenic animals. Transgenic rats had a lower 24‐h mean arterial pressure in comparison with control rats, which was further decreased when their diet was supplemented with zinc. The day/night rhythm of blood pressure was significantly diminished in TGR(hKLK1) animals, whereas the circadian rhythms of heart rate and locomotor activity were unaffected. Induction of cardiac hypertrophy by isoproterenol treatment revealed a marked protective effect of the kallikrein transgene because the cardiac weight of TGR(hKLK1) increased significantly less, and the expression of atrial natriuretic peptide and collagen III as markers for hypertrophy and fibrosis, respectively, were less enhanced. The specific kinin‐B2 receptor antagonist, icatibant, abolished this cardioprotective effect. In conclusion, the kallikrein‐kinin system is an important determinant in the regulation of blood pressure and its circadian rhythmicity. It also exerts antihypertrophic and antifibrotic actions in the heart.
Multiple Prefetch Adaptive Disk Caching

A new disk caching algorithm is presented that uses an adaptive prefetching scheme to reduce the average service time for disk references. Unlike schemes which simply prefetch the next sector or group of sectors, this method maintains information about the order of past disk accesses which is used to accurately predict future access sequences. The range of parameters of this scheme is explored, and its performance is evaluated through trace-driven simulation, using traces obtained from three different UNIX minicomputers. Unlike disk trace data previously described in the literature, the traces used include time stamps for each reference. With this timing information-essential for evaluating any prefetching scheme-it is shown that a cache with the adaptive prefetching mechanism can reduce the average time to service a disk request by a factor of up to three, relative to an identical disk cache without prefetching. >
Center for Financial Markets & Policy Assessing Tax Accrual Quality

This paper develops a measure of income tax expense accrual quality. Following the framework of Dechow and Dichev (2002), we examine the extent to which the financial statement accrual for book tax expense maps into tax-related cash flows. We argue that the quality of a firm’s tax accrual is decreasing in the magnitude of estimation error associated with the accrual, and that tax accrual quality has implications for earnings quality over and above working capital accruals quality. We estimate tax accrual quality (TaxAQ) as the standard deviation of the residuals from firm-specific regressions of a firm’s tax expense accrual on past, present, and future cash taxes paid. We next evaluate the construct validity of our new measure. We find that lower tax accrual quality is associated with higher pre-tax earnings volatility, greater uncertain tax positions, discontinued operations and extraordinary items, option grants, and the presence of tax-related internal control weaknesses, consistent with our expectations. We conclude by providing an application of our new measure, documenting that firms with lower tax accrual quality have lower overall earnings quality.
Utilizing review analysis to suggest product advertisement improvements

On an e-commerce site, product blurbs (short promotional statements) and user reviews give us a lot of information about products. While a blurb should be appealing to encourage more users to click on a product link, sometimes sellers may miss or misunderstand which aspects of the product are important to their users. We therefore propose a novel task: sug- gesting aspects of products for an advertisement improvement. As reviews have a lot of information about aspects from the perspective of users, review analysis enables us to suggest aspects that could attract more users. To achieve this, we break this task into the following two subtasks: aspect grouping and aspect group ranking. Aspect grouping enables us to treat product aspects at the semantic level rather than expression level. Aspect group ranking allows us to show users only aspects important for them. On the basis of experimental results using travel domain hotel data, we show that our proposed solution accomplishes NDCG@3 score of 0.739, which shows our solution is effective in achieving our goal.
ALMA Discovery of Dust Belts around Proxima Centauri

Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our Sun, is known to host at least one terrestrial planet candidate in a temperate orbit. Here we report the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) detection of the star at 1.3 mm wavelength and the discovery of a belt of dust orbiting around it at distances ranging between 1 and 4 au, approximately. Given the low luminosity of the Proxima Centauri star, we estimate a characteristic temperature of about 40 K for this dust, which might constitute the dust component of a small-scale analog to our solar system’s Kuiper Belt. The estimated total mass, including dust and bodies up to 50 km in size, is of the order of 0.01 Earth masses, which is similar to that of the solar Kuiper Belt. Our data also show a hint of warmer dust closer to the star. We also find signs of two additional features that might be associated with the Proxima Centauri system that still require further observations to be confirmed: an outer extremely cold (about 10 K) belt around the star at about 30 au, with an orbital plane that is tilted about 45° with respect to the plane of the sky; additionally, we marginally detect a compact 1.3 mm emission source at a projected distance of about 1.2 arcsec from the star, the nature of which is still unknown.
Communication Reduced Parallel Multigrid: Analysis and Experiments

The most common technique for the parallelization of multigrid methods is grid partitioning. For such methods Brandt and Diskin have suggested the use of a variant of segmental reenement in order to reduce the amount of inter{processor communication. A parallel multigrid method with this technique avoids all communication on the nest grid levels. This article will examine some features of this class of algorithms as compared to standard parallel multigrid methods. In particular, the communication pattern will be analysed in detail.
Verocytotoxin-producing and attaching and effacing activity of Escherichia coli isolated from diseased farm livestock

Between May 2005 and June 2008, strategically selected isolates of Escherichia coli obtained from clinical submissions to Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) regional laboratories in England and Wales were serogrouped and examined by PCR for verocytotoxin (VT) production and attaching and effacing (eae) genes, both of which are zoonotic determinants. VT-encoding genes were detected in 54 (5.3 per cent) of the 1022 isolates examined. Only one isolate (0.1 per cent) was identified as verocytotoxigenic E coli (VTEC) O157. Non-O157 VTECs were present in 4.7 per cent of isolates from cattle, compared with 7.9 per cent in pigs, 2.3 per cent in sheep and 6.7 per cent in goats. The predominant serogroup identified in cattle was O26 and the predominant serogroup in pigs was O2. Attaching and effacing activity was attributed to 69 (6.8 per cent) of all isolates.
Error concealment considering error propagation inside a frame

Transmission of compressed video over error prone channels may result in packet losses or errors, which can significantly degrade the image quality. Such degradation even becomes worse in 1Seg video broadcasting, which is widely used in Japan and Brazil for mobile phone TV service recently, where errors are drastically increased and lost areas are contiguous. Therefore the errors in earlier concealed MBs (macro blocks) may propagate to the MBs later to be concealed inside the same frame (spatial domain). The error concealment (EC) is used to recover the lost data by the redundancy in videos. Aiming at spatial error propagation (SEP) reduction, this paper proposes a SEP reduction based EC (SEPEC). In SEPEC, besides the mismatch distortion in current MB, the potential propagated mismatch distortion in the following to be concealed MBs is also minimized. Also, 2 extensions of SEPEC, that SEPEC with refined search and SEPEC with multiple layer match are discussed. Compared with previous work, the experiments show SEPEC achieves much better performance of video recovery and excellent trade-off between quality and computation in 1Seg broadcasting in terms of computation cost.
Syllogistic reasoning and cognitive ageing

Gilinsky and Judd (1994) demonstrated that age-related impairment in syllogistic reasoning was in part due to reduced working-memory capacity. A total of 30 older (average age 66 years) and 34 younger persons (average age 24 years) were tested on syllogisms of various types as well as on other measures. Syllogistic reasoning was significantly correlated with education, processing speed, word span, and word fluency. Correlations with visuo-spatial processing and random letter generation were just short of significance. Syllogistic reasoning performance declined with age, although the deficit was no longer statistically significant following control for age-related differences in information-processing speed. On the other hand the inclusion of word fluency as an additional covariate boosted the apparent age effect, returning it to statistical significance. Thus it is possible that cognitive processes outside of working memory might underpin at least part of the apparent age deficit. This possibility is evaluated in the light of neuropsychological evidence implicating the prefrontal cortex in both the processing of syllogisms and more generally in cognitive ageing.
Developing Learning Activities using Mixed Reality Contents at Elementary Smart School

This study aims to develop learning activities using mixed reality contents in elementary classroom. For the purpose of this study, we analyzed 10 mixed reality contents, VR experiencing classroom environment, and curriculum in C smart model school. Moreover, we applied three teaching models to experience learning activity design using mixed reality contents. Teaching models included role play model, group investigation model, and task based language teaching model. As the result of this study, we developed 10 lessons based on teaching models in Korean language, science, and English subject. In further studies, it is needed to apply experience learning activities to elementary class, and to evaluate the effectiveness of these lessons.
Transthoracic needle aspiration biopsy: variables that affect risk of pneumothorax.

PURPOSE To analyze the influence of multiple variables on the rate of pneumothorax and chest tube placement associated with transthoracic needle aspiration biopsy of the lung. MATERIALS AND METHODS In 346 patients, 331 computed tomographically (CT) guided and 24 fluoroscopically guided lung biopsies were performed. Variables analyzed were lesion size, depth, and location; number of pleural passes; needle size; presence of emphysema; and training level of the person who performed the biopsy. RESULTS Pneumothorax occurred at 144 (40.4%) of 356 biopsies, including 139 (42.0%) CT-guided and five (21%) fluoroscopically guided biopsies. Chest tube placement was needed in 25 (17.4%) of 144 cases of pneumothorax (7% of all biopsies). An increased rate of pneumothorax was correlated with smaller lesion size (P = .001) and presence of emphysema (P = .01). Patients with emphysema were three times as likely to require chest tube placement. The pneumothorax rate was 15% (16 of 105) if no aerated lung was traversed and approximately 50% if aerated lung was penetrated. Lesion location, needle size, number of pleural passes, and level of training were not correlated with pneumothorax rate. CONCLUSION Smaller lesion size and emphysema are strongly correlated with occurrence of pneumothorax. Pneumothorax was more than three times less frequent if no aerated lung was traversed. After pneumothorax, chest tube placements were related to the presence of emphysema.
Log-periodic behavior in a forest-fire model

This paper explores log-periodicity in a forest-fire cellular-automata model. At each time step of this model a tree is dropped on a randomly chosen site; if the site is unoccupied, the tree is planted. Then, for a given sparking frequency, matches are dropped on a randomly chosen site; if the site is occupied by a tree, the tree ignites and an "in- stantaneous" model fire consumes that tree and all adjacent trees. The resultant frequency-area distribution for the small and medium model fires is a power-law. However, if we con- sider very small sparking frequencies, the large model fires that span the square grid are dominant, and we find that the peaks in the frequency-area distribution of these large fires satisfy log-periodic scaling to a good approximation. This behavior can be examined using a simple mean-field model, where in time, the density of trees on the grid exponentially approaches unity. This exponential behavior coupled with a periodic or near-periodic sparking frequency also generates a sequence of peaks in the frequency-area distribution of large fires that satisfy log-periodic scaling. We conclude that the forest-fire model might provide a relatively simple explana- tion for the log-periodic behavior often seen in nature. pile model and the forest-fire model, the latter which we will focus on in this paper. A fractal distribution is a power-law distribution with a real exponent. If the exponent is taken to be a complex num- ber, log-periodic behavior is obtained. In this paper we show that the peaks in the frequency-area distribution of large fires in the forest-fire model can satisfy log-periodic scaling to a good approximation. The possibility of complex scaling ex- ponents and "log periodicity" in critical phenomena has been known for three decades (Nauenberg, 1975) with reviews of log-periodic variabilities given by Sornette (1998, 2002), Jo- hansen and Sornette (2001), and Ide and Sornette (2002). We now briefly review a few specific studies that have proposed spatial and/or temporal log-periodic behavior, including (a) ruptures, (b) seismicity, (c) ground-water, (d) bronchial trees, (e) financial systems, and (f) models:
Solving the C/sub sum/ permutation flowshop scheduling problem by genetic local search

A new meta-heuristic method is proposed to solve the classical permutation flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing sum of completion times. The representative neighbourhood combines the stochastic sampling method (mainly used in simulated annealing) and the best descent method (elaborated in the tabu search), and integrates them naturally into a single method. The method is further extended into the genetic local search framework by using a population and a special crossover operator called multi-step crossover fusion. Computational experiments using benchmark problems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
An Abused Spouse's Self-Saving Process: A Theory of Identity Transformation

Lofland and Stark (1965) put forward an empirically grounded theory of identity conversion to a millennium cult that has primarily been applied to religious contexts. Using largely retrospective observational data, this article examines the applicability of their model to account for the decision of some spouse abuse victims to leave or to return to their violent mates after a shelter stay. Tentative analysis suggests certain weaknesses in their seven stage, value-added process model of conversion. More rigorous empirical and theoretical reformulation and testing of their model appear warranted.
How many foods in the UK carry health and nutrition claims, and are they healthier than those that do not?

Abstract Objective The present study aimed to measure the prevalence of different types of health and nutrition claims on foods and non-alcoholic beverages in a UK sample and to assess the nutritional quality of such products carrying health or nutrition claims. Design A survey of health and nutrition claims on food packaging using a newly defined taxonomy of claims and internationally agreed definitions of claim types. Setting A national UK food retailer: Tesco. Subjects Three hundred and eighty-two products randomly sampled from those available through the retailer’s website. Results Of the products, 32 % (95 % CI 28, 37 %) carried either a health or nutrition claim; 15 % (95 % CI 11, 18 %) of products carried at least one health claim and 29 % (95 % CI 25, 34 %) carried at least one nutrition claim. When adjusted for product category, products carrying health claims tended to be lower in total fat and saturated fat than those that did not, but there was no significant difference in sugar or sodium levels. Products carrying health claims had slightly higher fibre levels than products without. Results were similar for comparisons between products that carry nutrition claims and those that do not. Conclusions Health and nutrition claims appear frequently on food and beverage products in the UK. The nutrient profile of products carrying claims is marginally healthier than for similar products without claims, suggesting that claims may have some but limited informational value. The implication of these findings for guiding policy is unclear; future research should investigate the ‘clinical relevance’ of these differences in nutritional quality.
Underwater vehicle communication using electromagnetic fields in shallow seas

Some unavoidable shortcomings of acoustic wave based communications leads to the use of low frequency electromagnetic (EM) waves for underwater vehicle communication. Electric conductivity, causing frequency dependent attenuation, limits communication distance and data transfer rate in sea environment. An enhancement in range and bandwidth can be achieved by: 1) allowing EM signals to cross seawater-to-air boundary and achieve long-range horizontal communication using air path, followed by air to water signal transmission, if needed, and 2) exploring guided waves phenomenon at the water side of the seawater-air interface. A computational investigation to compare the EM wave propagation characteristics in seawater, in both sides of the seawater-air interface within a thin layer, and in air after crossing interface, in order to determine the optimum operating frequencies, ranges of communication, antenna orientation, and vertical offset of submerged antenna is presented in this paper. It is shown that with approximately 70 dB loss of signal strength, guided electric fields through air-water interface can be transmitted to a distance of 1 km at 10 KHz when the transmitter is 5 m below the interface.