Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A multilevel algorithm for solving the trust-region subproblem

We present a multilevel numerical algorithm for the exact solution of the Euclidean trust-region subproblem. This particular subproblem typically arises when optimizing a nonlinear (possibly non-convex) objective function whose variables are discretized continuous functions, in which case the different levels of discretization provide a natural multilevel context. The trust-region problem is considered at the highest level (corresponding to the finest discretization), but information on the problem curvature at lower levels is exploited for improved efficiency. The algorithm is inspired by the method described in [J.J. Moré and D.C. Sorensen, On the use of directions of negative curvature in a modified Newton method, Math. Program. 16(1) (1979), pp. 1–20], for which two different multilevel variants will be analysed. Some preliminary numerical comparisons are also presented.
Laccase Production and Differential Transcription of Laccase Genes in Cerrena sp. in Response to Metal Ions, Aromatic Compounds, and Nutrients

Laccases can oxidize a wide range of aromatic compounds and are industrially valuable. Laccases often exist in gene families and may differ from each other in expression and function. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) was used for transcription profiling of eight laccase genes in Cerrena sp. strain HYB07 with validated reference genes. A high laccase activity of 280.0 U/mL was obtained after submerged fermentation for 5 days. Laccase production and laccase gene transcription at different fermentation stages and in response to various environmental cues were revealed. HYB07 laccase activity correlated with transcription levels of its predominantly expressed laccase gene, Lac7. Cu2+ ions were indispensable for efficient laccase production by HYB07, mainly through Lac7 transcription induction, and no aromatic compounds were needed. HYB07 laccase synthesis and biomass accumulation were highest with non-limiting carbon and nitrogen. Glycerol and inorganic nitrogen sources adversely impacted Lac7 transcription, laccase yields, and fungal growth. The present study would further our understanding of transcription regulation of laccase genes, which may in turn facilitate laccase production as well as elucidation of their physiological roles.
Origin of Cardiac Fibroblasts and the Role of Periostin

Cardiac fibroblasts are the most populous nonmyocyte cell type within the mature heart and are required for extracellular matrix synthesis and deposition, generation of the cardiac skeleton, and to electrically insulate the atria from the ventricles. Significantly, cardiac fibroblasts have also been shown to play an important role in cardiomyocyte growth and expansion of the ventricular chambers during heart development. Although there are currently no cardiac fibroblast-restricted molecular markers, it is generally envisaged that the majority of the cardiac fibroblasts are derived from the proepicardium via epithelial-to-mesenchymal transformation. However, still relatively little is known about when and where the cardiac fibroblasts cells are generated, the lineage of each cell, and how cardiac fibroblasts move to reside in their final position throughout all four cardiac chambers. In this review, we summarize the present understanding regarding the function of Periostin, a useful marker of the noncardiomyocyte lineages, and its role during cardiac morphogenesis. Characterization of the cardiac fibroblast lineage and identification of the signals that maintain, expand and regulate their differentiation will be required to improve our understanding of cardiac function in both normal and pathophysiological states.
Genetic diversity and population structure of wheat in India and Turkey

Genetic diversity assessment plays an important role in plant improvement. It becomes more significant when evaluation is done at different ploidy and geographical origin levels. The present study provides a better understanding of the genetic association of Indian and Turkish hexaploid and tetraploid wheat. The Turkish hexaploid population demonstrated its close association with Indian hexaploid and tetraploid varieties. This confirmed their relatedness within the diverse gene pool. The results revealed in this study can be effectively used by breeders and evolutionary biologists for the development of genetically diverse, promising and healthier wheat varieties.
Pleiotropic hierarchies from high-dimensional phenotyping by RNA interference

RNA interference (RNAi) is the targeted silencing of gene expression by small interfering RNAs. As an experimental technique it can be applied on a genome-wide scale to probe gene function. Data from large-scale RNAi screens are available for model organisms like C. elegans and Drosophila melanogaster. For many genes silencing leads to a number of distinct phenotypes. This phenomenon is called pleiotropy [4]. Our work shows that pleiotropy can be used to define genetic hierarchies.
Face recognition uiing trichotomic combination Of SVD, DF-LDA and LPP

One of the challengei the face recognition application ii facing today ii that of the high dim eniionality of multivariate data. In thii context, thii paper propoiei to compare the performance of a triumvirate combination of linear dimeniionality reduction techniquei namely S ingular Value Decompoiition (SVD) which maximizei the varia nce of the training vectori, Direct Fractional Linear Diic riminant Analyiii (DFLDA) that maximizei the “between-claii” icatter while minimizing the “within-claii” icatter and Loc ality Preierving Projection (LPP) which preiervei the loc al featurei thoie unique from iti neareit neighbori. The amalga mation containing different ratioi ii choien from the feat urei extracted by the three independent techniquei mentioned above. Original Face ipace ii projected onto the manifold of choien baiii. The weighti obtained from theie projectioni for the pro be iet are compared with that of the query image uiing the mean diitance claiiifier. The propoied method hai been teited on YALE dataiet and the combination in the ratio 3∶2∶5 ihow ed iignificant improvement in the efficiency of recognition, with a calculated accuracy of 92.7% on a teit iet of 165 i magei
Relations between the sides and diagonals of a set of hexagons

2(AB 2 +BC 2 ) = AC 2 +BD . It is most easily proved with the cosine rule or using vectors. The result is also called the “Parallelogram Law” on Wikipedia [2] and some other sites, but this name may be easily confused with the perhaps better-known parallelogram law of forces in physics. Recently the author was considering how this theorem might be generalized to a parallelo-hexagon, in other words, what relationships, if any, could be found between the sum of the squares of the sides of a hexagon with opposite sides equal and parallel, and the sums of the squares of its major diagonals (which connect opposite vertices). Using Sketchpad, the author experimentally found the following interesting inequality for a parallelo-hexagon ABCDEF (see Figure 1):
Changing it up: implications of mid-season coach change on basketball players’ career and professional identities

Abstract Career and professional identities are utilized as a conceptual framework to consider the complexities of basketball players’ working lives amidst mid-season coach change. Seven male professional basketball players, working in top European leagues, participated in semi-structured interviews. The interviews were centred on career trajectories and incidents of mid-season coach change. Results indicate sports workers’ career success is contingent upon strategically undertaking identity work in order to best respond to the demands of the organizational context. Players’ experiences of coach turnover, for example, may have varied however, the event had discernible influence on how they understood themselves, their positional relationship and overall longevity in the sport. Of concern is the necessity for organizations to appreciate their roles in shaping the settings in which their employees work, and the related consequences that contextual changes have in worker’s abilities to labour and the strategies they may need to utilize to cope with such change.
Genomic Selective Constraints in Murid Noncoding DNA

Recent work has suggested that there are many more selectively constrained, functional noncoding than coding sites in mammalian genomes. However, little is known about how selective constraint varies amongst different classes of noncoding DNA. We estimated the magnitude of selective constraint on a large dataset of mouse-rat gene orthologs and their surrounding noncoding DNA. Our analysis indicates that there are more than three times as many selectively constrained, nonrepetitive sites within noncoding DNA as in coding DNA in murids. The majority of these constrained noncoding sites appear to be located within intergenic regions, at distances greater than 5 kilobases from known genes. Our study also shows that in murids, intron length and mean intronic selective constraint are negatively correlated with intron ordinal number. Our results therefore suggest that functional intronic sites tend to accumulate toward the 5′ end of murid genes. Our analysis also reveals that mean number of selectively constrained noncoding sites varies substantially with the function of the adjacent gene. We find that, among others, developmental and neuronal genes are associated with the greatest numbers of putatively functional noncoding sites compared with genes involved in electron transport and a variety of metabolic processes. Combining our estimates of the total number of constrained coding and noncoding bases we calculate that over twice as many deleterious mutations have occurred in intergenic regions as in known genic sequence and that the total genomic deleterious point mutation rate is 0.91 per diploid genome, per generation. This estimated rate is over twice as large as a previous estimate in murids.
Social involvement and park citizenship as moderators for quality-of-life in a national park

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the advancement of quality-of-life research in tourism by examining complex relationships involving direct, mediated, moderated and moderated mediation relationships among the antecedents to quality-of-life. Using a sample of 222 repeat visitors in an Australian national park, the findings indicate positive significant effects of (1) place satisfaction on quality-of-life; (2) place satisfaction on place attachment; (3) place attachment on quality-of-life; (4) park citizenship on place attachment. The findings further support that (5) place attachment mediates the relationship between place satisfaction and quality-of-life; (6) social involvement moderates the relationship between place satisfaction and place attachment; (7) park citizenship moderates the relationship between place satisfaction and place attachment; (8) social involvement moderates the relationship between place attachment and quality-of-life; (9) social involvement moderates the indirect effect of place satisfaction on quality-of-life. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Park managers, for example, need to promote on-site marketing and post-visit communication/interpretation, encouraging repeat visits and behavioural change. Message delivery needs to promote a sense of belonging to the park with personal meaning, creating place distinctiveness. Personal actions to promote include signing petitions supporting the park's biodiversity, and other resources, and volunteering to participate in meetings and other direct actions.
A system for transcribing talk-in-interaction : GAT 2

Dieser Beitrag stellt die englische Ubersetzung und Adaption der uberarbeiteten Version des Transkriptionssystems GAT vor. GAT wurde 1998 von einer Gruppe deutscher Konversations- und Diskursanalytiker und interaktionaler Linguisten entwickelt. GAT versucht, so viele Prinzipien und Konventionen der in der CA genutzten Jefferson'schen Transkriptionsweise wie moglich zu ubernehmen, schlagt jedoch einige Symbole vor, die auf die linguistische und phonetische, insbesondere die prosodische, Analyse gesprochener Sprache ausgerichtet sind. 10 Jahre spater wurde GAT auf der Grundlage der bisherigen Erfahrungen mit seinem Gebrauch und vor dem Hintergrund neuer Anforderungen, die sich aus jungeren technischen Entwicklungen sowie methodologischen Uberlegungen heraus ergaben, uberarbeitet. Dieser Beitrag macht GAT fur die internationale Forschergemeinschaft zuganglich. Er beschreibt GAT 2 mit all seinen Konventionen und gibt detaillierte Anweisungen fur die Transkription gesprochener Interaktion in drei Genauigkeitsstufen: Minimal-, Basis- und Feintranskript. Auserdem stellt er kurz fur die Transkription hilfreiche Werkzeuge vor: das deutsche Online-Tutorial GAT-TO und den Transkriptionseditor FOLKER.
DMRG studies of critical SU(N) spin chains

The DMRG method is applied to integrable models of antiferromagnetic spin chains for fundamental and higher representations of SU(2), SU(3), and SU(4). From the low energy spectrum and the entanglement entropy, we compute the central charge and the primary field scaling dimensions. These parameters allow us to identify uniquely the Wess–Zumino–Witten models capturing the low energy sectors of the models we consider.
Mining broadcast news data: robust information extraction from word lattices

Fine-grained information extraction performance from spoken corpora is strongly correlated with the Word Error Rate (WER) of the automatic transcriptions processed. Despite the recent advances in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) methods, high WER transcriptions are common when dealing with unmatched conditions between the documents to process and those used to train the ASR models. Such mismatch is inevitable in the processing of large spoken archives containing documents related to a large number of time periods and topics. Moreover, from a text indexation point of view, rare events and entities are often the most interesting information to extract as well as the ones that are very likely to be poorly recognized. In order to deal with high WER transcriptions this paper proposes a robust Information Extraction method that mines the full ASR search space for specific entities thanks to a 3-steps process: firstly, adaptation of the extraction models thanks to metadata information linked to the documents to process; secondly transduction of a word lattice outputs by the ASR module into an entity lattice; thirdly a decision module that scores each entity hypothesis with different confidence scores. A first implementation of this model is proposed for the French Broadcast News Named Entity extraction task of the evaluation program ESTER.
On Combining Model-Based Analysis and Testing

Testing a computer system is a challenging task, both due to the large number of possible test cases and the limited resources allocated for testing activities. This means that only a subset of all possible test cases can be chosen to test a system, and therefore the decision on the selection of test cases becomes important. The result of static analysis of a system can be used to help with this decision, in the context of model-based development of systems, this means that the analysis performed on a system model can be used to prioritize and guide the testing efforts. Furthermore, since models allow expression of non-functional requirements (such as performance, timing and security), model-guided testing can be used to direct testing towards specific parts of the system which have large impact on such requirements. In this paper, we focus on modeling and trade-off analysis of non-functional requirements and how static analysis helps to identify problematic parts of a system and thus guide the selection of test cases to target such parts.
International Standards and the Development of Accreditation Policies in Chilean and South African Higher Education

Introduction Accreditation policies in higher education have been implemented in the US and many European countries for many years. Since the end of the 1990s, these forms of regulatory policies for the education sector are also developed in several countries of the South. These reforms are often highly contested, as historically established rights to define academic quality or the ways in which quality should be assessed, as well as guidelines for receiving government funding are called into question. Redistributing privileges, reshaping power structures and questioning university autonomy as well as access to resources is therefore at the heart of these decisions. Chile and South Africa have both developed accreditation policies and have begun with their implementation in recent years. This led to-or was shaped by-fundamental changes of governance structures in the education sector. Thus, accreditation was a highly controversial process of in the phases of policy formulation and implementation. The expertise of international actors like the World Bank and national agencies or individual experts in the field of quality assurance were crucial in the development of these policies in Chile and South Africa. The diffusion of norms, ideas and standards of accreditation policies for higher education was therefore a key input for the creation of reforms in Chile and South Africa. Both countries implemented these accreditation policies as regulatory policies following a fundamental change of the political regime in the early 1990s (Post-Dictatorship, Post-Apartheid). A transformation and re-regulation of the higher education sector was therefore perceived to be crucial for the transformation of these societies towards democracy. However, while reference to international actors and their standards and recommended procedures is made, neither Chile nor South Africa are cases where reforms or standards underlying specific policies were imposed by external actors or where reform programmes were merely " copied ". The diffusion of standards, norms and other elements of accreditation policies was rather a process of adaptation and the result of consultation and cooperation between national government representatives or agencies and international (governmental as well as private) actors. At the same time, the diffusion and reception of international standards was fundamentally shaped by existing governance structures and practices. 4 In this paper, the issue of policy formulation and implementation in accreditation policies of higher education in Chile and South Africa will be analysed with reference to two aspects: • What is the role of international actors and agencies promoting specific standards …
“My dad, the deacon:” Assessing the personality of married Catholic clergy fathers as predictor of number and gender of children

ABSTRACT Catholic deacons with children (N = 1,776: M number of children = 3.3), termed here “clergy dads,” completed the HEXACO-60, social desirability, and demographic variables. Personality dimensions predicting clergy dad’s family size (i.e., number of children) yield only emotional stability and conscientiousness (accounting for social desirability). Higher emotional stability and conscientiousness by clergy dads predicted fewer children in their family size. No personality dimension significantly predicted a child’s gender. Results imply that personality traits of clergy dads yield smaller family size but not gender of their children. Implications for the family dynamics of clergy dads are discussed.
PPS: Pose-to-Pose Skinning of Animated Meshes

In computer graphics, animation compression is essential for efficient storage, streaming and reproduction of animated meshes. Previous work has presented efficient techniques for compression using skinning transformations to derive the animated mesh from a reference pose. We present a pose-to-pose approach to skinning animated meshes by observing that only small deformation variations will normally occur between consecutive poses. The transformations are applied so that a new pose is derived by deforming the geometry of the previous pose, thus maintaining temporal coherence in the parameter space, reducing approximation error and facilitating forward propagated editing of arbitrary poses.
AREA OPTIMIZATION OF 8-BIT MULTIPLIER USING GATE DIFFUSION INPUT LOGIC 1

Multipliers are used in all modern digital systems and DSP applications. They are used in hardware multiplication to achieve high data throughput. Multipliers are major sources of area consumption and power dissipation in such systems. Reduction in area can be achieved using Booth encoding and Wallace tree technique since they generate partial products efficiently and are most suited for multiplication of signed numbers. Multiplier designed in Gate Diffusion Logic (GDI) logic requires lesser number of devices as compared to CMOS logic. Hence, the proposed multiplier design will substantially reduce the number of devices as compared to CMOS design. This results in area optimization with the consequent reduction in power and delay of multiplier.
Use of residual redundancy in the design of joint source/channel coders

A technique for providing error protection without the additional overhead required for channel coding is presented. The authors start from the premise that, during source coder design, for the sake of simplicity or due to imperfect knowledge, assumptions have to be made about the source which are often incorrect. This results in residual redundancy at the output of the source coder. The residual redundancy can then be used to provide error protection in much the same way as the insertion of redundancy in convolutional coding provides error protection. The authors develop an approach for utilizing this redundancy. To show the validity of this approach, the authors apply it to image coding using differential pulse code modulation (DPCM), and obtain substantial performance gains, both in terms of objective and subjective measures. >
Splitting of RC-network for accurate model reduction

Reduction of an extracted RC-network is an important pre-processing step for techniques such as timing and crosstalk noise analysis of VLSI circuit. In a previous paper, we have described a method for reducing an RC-network to a simplified circuit. The experience shows that the accuracy of the method is satisfying but the computation time is not reasonable. In this paper, we propose to split the initial RC-network in order to decrease the computation time.
Varenicline Is a Partial Agonist at α4β2 and a Full Agonist at α7 Neuronal Nicotinic Receptors

Varenicline, a new nicotinic ligand based on the structure of cytisine, has recently been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use as a smoking cessation aid. Varenicline has been shown to be a partial agonist of α4β2 receptors, and in equilibrium binding assays, it is highly selective for the α4β2 receptor. In this study, we have examined the functional activity of varenicline at a variety of rat neuronal nicotinic receptors expressed in Xenopus laevis oocytes and assayed under two-electrode voltage clamp. We also find that varenicline is a potent, partial agonist at α4β2 receptors, with an EC50 of 2.3 ± 0.3 μM and an efficacy (relative to acetylcholine) of 13.4 ± 0.4%. Varenicline has lower potency and higher efficacy at α3β4 receptors, with an EC50 of 55 ± 8 μM and an efficacy of 75 ± 6%. Varenicline also seems to be a weak partial agonist at α3β2 and α6-containing receptors, with an efficacy <10%. It is remarkable that varenicline is a potent, full agonist at α7 receptors with an EC50 of 18 ± 6 μM and an efficacy of 93 ± 7% (relative to acetylcholine). Thus, whereas varenicline is a partial agonist at some heteromeric neuronal nicotinic receptors, it is a full agonist at the homomeric α7 receptor. Some combination of these actions may be involved in the mechanism of varenicline as a smoking cessation aid.