Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extending TAM : Success factors of Mobile Marketing

Extending TAM: Success factors of Mobile Marketing Xing Who Management Infomraiton Systems Department, Univerity of Shanghai, China, E-mail: X.Who@shangahi.edu. cn Abstract The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is an information systems theory that models how users come to accept and use a technology. In mobile marketing, trust is perceived to be an important factor affecting the use of this new marketing channel. This study intends to test the impact of trust on mobile marketing adoption based on and extended technology acceptance model. A survey is conducted among a sample of respondents from five shopping centers. Statistial correlations and regressions analysis was used to test the research main hypotheses. The results shows that the new factor added to TAM significantly conftibute to the success factors of mobile marketing. Кеу words – Technology Acceptance Model, Trust, Mobile Marketing Introduction The Technology Acceptance Model presented by Davis in 1989 suggests that when users are presented with a new technology, a number of factors influence their decision about how and when they will use it. [1]. TAM as a model is based on the Theory of Reasoned Action by Ajzen and Fishbein [2]. TAM clearly shows that perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness affect the degree of adoption of new technology [1]. According to the model perceived ease of use shows the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free from effort; and perceived usefulness shows the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance. Perceived ease of use also affects the perceived usefulness as depicted in (Figure 1). The TAM have been continuously studied and expanded, the two major upgrade being the TAM 2 [9] and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology [9]. A TAM 3 have also been proposed [13]. The model provides a tool to study the impact of external variables on internal beliefs, attitudes and intentions. The intention to use affects the real usage behavior. TAM is designed to study information systems at work to anticipate if the users will actually take a certain system into use in their jobs. Davis and other researchers tested and extended TAM to suite the research domain. TAM has been applied mostly in studying adoptin of new technology including Interent, Web and Mobile Applications [25].
Spreader Selection by Community to Maximize Information Diffusion in Social Networks

Rumors or information can spread quickly and reach many users in social networks. Models for understanding, preventing or increasing the diffusion of information are of greatest interest to companies, governments, scientists, etc. In this paper, we propose an approach for maximizing the information diffusion by selecting the most important (central) users from communities. We also analyze the selection of the most central vertices of the network and considered artificial and real social networks, such as email, hamsterster, advogato and astrophysics. Experimental results confirmed the improvement of the final fraction of informed individuals by applying the proposed approach.
Use of Stochastic Models To Assess the Effect of Environmental Factors on Microbial Growth

ABSTRACT We present a novel application of a stochastic ecological model to the study and analysis of microbial growth dynamics as influenced by environmental conditions in an extensive experimental data set. The model proved to be useful in bridging the gap between theoretical ideas in ecology and an applied problem in microbiology. The data consisted of recorded growth curves of Escherichia coli grown in triplicate in a base medium with all 32 possible combinations of five supplements: glucose, NH4Cl, HCl, EDTA, and NaCl. The potential complexity of 25 experimental treatments and their effects was reduced to 22 as just the metal chelator EDTA, the presumed osmotic pressure imposed by NaCl, and the interaction between these two factors were enough to explain the variability seen in the data. The statistical analysis showed that the positive and negative effects of the five chemical supplements and their combinations were directly translated into an increase or decrease in time required to attain stationary phase and the population size at which the stationary phase started. The stochastic ecological model proved to be useful, as it effectively explained and summarized the uncertainty seen in the recorded growth curves. Our findings have broad implications for both basic and applied research and illustrate how stochastic mathematical modeling coupled with rigorous statistical methods can be of great assistance in understanding basic processes in microbial ecology.
Abiding Geocast for Warning Message Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are emerging as a new network environment for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In many applications envisaged for VANETs, traffic information needs to be disseminated to a group of relevant vehicles and maintained for a duration of time. Here a system of abiding geocast is presented for disseminating warning message among mobile vehicles in VANETs. In this system vehicles on a stretch of roads carry safety messages to vehicles in the opposite direction, so as to warn them regarding a dangerous situation ahead. The objective is that as much as possible all relevant vehicles receive the warning before they reach the warning line, whereas as few messages are broadcasted as possible. Opposite vehicles are preferred as relays to reduce broadcast overhead and help message delivery upstream. Furthermore, wait time of individual relay vehicles are set dynamically for the next broadcast, thus unnecessary broadcasts can be saved while keeping the warning message in the affected area. Simulations show the quality of the proposed system by measuring the broadcast overhead under various conditions.
Identification of a thyroid hormone response element in the mouse myogenin gene: characterization of the thyroid hormone and retinoid X receptor heterodimeric binding site.

Thyroid hormones are positive regulators of muscle development in vivo. Triiodo-L-thyronine (T3) treatment of myogenic cell lines results in the precocious expression of myogenin, a muscle specific, helix-loop-helix factor that can trans-activate muscle specific gene expression (G. Carnac et al., Mol. Endocrinol., 6: 1185-1194, 1992). We have identified a T3 response element (TRE) in the mouse myogenin (MM) promoter between nucleotide positions -526 and -494 (5' GTGGTAGGTCTTTAGGGGTCTCATGGGACTGACA 3'). This sequence conferred appropriate hormonal regulation to an enhancerless SV40 promoter. Electrophoretic mobility shift analysis experiments showed that thyroid hormone receptor alpha (TR alpha) and retinoid X receptor alpha (RXR alpha) formed a heterodimeric complex on the MM TRE that was specifically competed by classical TREs and not by other response elements. Analyses of this heterodimer with a battery of steroid hormone response elements indicated that the complex was efficiently competed by a direct repeat of the AGGTCA motif separated by 4 nucleotides, as predicted by the 3-4-5 rule. Electrophoretic mobility shift analysis experiments showed that the myogenin, growth hormone, and myosin heavy chain TREs interacted with an identical nuclear factor(s) in muscle cells that was constitutively expressed during myogenesis. Mutagenesis of the MM TRE indicated that the sequence of the direct repeats (AGGTCA) and the 4-nucleotide gap were necessary for efficient binding to the TR alpha/RXR alpha heterodimeric complex. In conclusion, our data suggest that the MM TRE is a target for direct cross-talk between two different hormonal signals (T3 and 9-cis-retinoic acid) at the receptor level. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
In situ studies of the primary immune response to (4-hydroxy-3- nitrophenyl)acetyl. III. The kinetics of V region mutation and selection in germinal center B cells

In the murine spleen, germinal centers are the anatomic sites for antigen-driven hypermutation and selection of immunoglobulin (Ig) genes. To detail the kinetics of Ig mutation and selection, 178 VDJ sequences from 16 antigen-induced germinal centers were analyzed. Although germinal centers appeared by day 4, mutation was not observed in germinal center B cells until day 8 postimmunization; thereafter, point mutations favoring asymmetrical transversions accumulated until day 14. During this period, strong phenotypic selection on the mutant B lymphocytes was inferred from progressively biased distributions of mutations within the Ig variable region, the loss of crippling mutations, decreased relative clonal diversity, and increasingly restricted use of canonical gene segments. The period of most intense selection on germinal center B cell populations preceded significant levels of mutation and may represent a physiologically determined restriction on B cells permitted to enter the memory pathway. Noncanonical Ig genes recovered from germinal centers were mostly unmutated although they probably came from antigen-reactive cells. Together, these observations demonstrate that the germinal center microenvironment is rich and temporally complex but may not be constitutive for somatic hypermutation.
The Prevalence and Impact of Racism Toward Indigenous Māori in New Zealand

Intolerance toward indigenous people is a common feature of colonial societies, and New Zealand is no exception. Despite aspirations of equality, evidence suggests that discrimination toward Māori remains pervasive and may relate to continued inequalities in social, economic, and psychological domains. This article analyzes self-report questionnaire data from 1,790 Māori sampled as part of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. We describe a Bayesian regression model assessing the links between perceived discrimination and 15 social, economic, and psychological indicators of well-being (including health care access, evaluation of own health, job security, self-esteem, life satisfaction, and psychological distress). The model adjusts for relevant covariates (including age, ethnicity, gender, and income). Forty-three percent of the sample reported experiencing either some discrimination or high levels of discrimination. Higher levels of perceived discrimination among Māori were associated with poorer outcomes in every measure, across multiple domains. This study demonstrates that New Zealand’s “bi-cultural” aspirations are far from realized, and should raise concerns for all countries with a history of colonisation. We call for more research on the incidences and impact of various forms of discrimination throughout New Zealand society, specifically in relation to the perpetuation of Māori disadvantage.
An End-to-End Supervised Target-Word Sense Disambiguation System

We present an extensible supervised Target-Word Sense Disambiguation system that leverages upon GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering), NSP (Ngram Statistics Package) and WEKA (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) to present an end-to-end solution that integrates feature identification, feature extraction, preprocessing and classification.
Multimodal Physiotherapy Based on a Biobehavioral Approach as a Treatment for Chronic Tension-Type Headache: A Case Report

Introduction: Tension-type headache (TTH) is the most common primary headache affecting the general population, which is characterized by bilateral headache and mild to moderate pain. This disorder causes high levels of disability and recent scientific evidence suggests that manual therapy (MT) and therapeutic exercise are effective in reducing medication intake and decreasing the frequency and intensity of headaches in patients with TTH. Case Presentation: A 34-year-old woman was known to have chronic TTH. Initially, the patient presented moderate headaches 5 days per week, mechanical neck pain and no positive response to analgesics. A battery of self-reports was given to the patient to assess disability (using the Spanish versions of the Headache Impact Test-6 and the neck disability index), pain (visual analogue scale) and psychosocial issues (Spanish version of the pain catastrophizing scale) involved in the headaches. All measurements were taken four times during 161 days. Eleven sessions of treatment including MT, motor control therapeutic exercise (MCTE) and therapeutic patient education (TPE) were applied. Conclusions: This biobehavioral-based multimodal physical rehabilitation treatment combining MT, TPE and MCTE produced a substantial reduction in pain intensity, pain catastrophizing, disability and the impact of headaches on patient’s life.
Towards an aspect-oriented framework in the design of collaborative virtual environments

The increasing complexity in the development of distributed systems has promoted the appearance of new software technologies that complements compositional framework technology providing a high degree of separation of concerns. One of these approaches is aspect-oriented-programming that introduces a new entity, the aspect, to model those features that cut across different components in the system, increasing its extensibility and configurability. Our goal is the application of this new technology to develop an aspect-oriented application framework to construct highly reusable collaborative virtual environments in short time.
Efficient Implementation of Canny Edge Detection Filter for ITK Using CUDA

This work presents an efficient CUDA implementation of the Canny edge detection Filter for the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK). The algorithm is tested on three generations of NVidia GPGPUs, showing performance gains of 3.6 to 50 times when compared to the standard ITK Canny running on two CPU models. The CUDA-enabled Canny is also compared to a more efficient Canny implementation from the OpenCV library. Examples of coding strategies to avoid warp serialization in CUDA are shown on a smart implementation of the Sobel filter, as well as on other algorithms.
Identification of a Novel Lipoprotein Regulator of Clostridium difficile Spore Germination

Clostridium difficile is a Gram-positive spore-forming pathogen and a leading cause of nosocomial diarrhea. C. difficile infections are transmitted when ingested spores germinate in the gastrointestinal tract and transform into vegetative cells. Germination begins when the germinant receptor CspC detects bile salts in the gut. CspC is a subtilisin-like serine pseudoprotease that activates the related CspB serine protease through an unknown mechanism. Activated CspB cleaves the pro-SleC zymogen, which allows the activated SleC cortex hydrolase to degrade the protective cortex layer. While these regulators are essential for C. difficile spores to outgrow and form toxin-secreting vegetative cells, the mechanisms controlling their function have only been partially characterized. In this study, we identify the lipoprotein GerS as a novel regulator of C. difficile spore germination using targeted mutagenesis. A gerS mutant has a severe germination defect and fails to degrade cortex even though it processes SleC at wildtype levels. Using complementation analyses, we demonstrate that GerS secretion, but not lipidation, is necessary for GerS to activate SleC. Importantly, loss of GerS attenuates the virulence of C. difficile in a hamster model of infection. Since GerS appears to be conserved exclusively in related Peptostreptococcaeace family members, our results contribute to a growing body of work indicating that C. difficile has evolved distinct mechanisms for controlling the exit from dormancy relative to B. subtilis and other spore-forming organisms.
Moduli Space of Cubic Surfaces as Ball Quotient via Hypergeometric Functions

We describe hypergeometric functions of Deligne-Mostow type for open subsets of the configuration space of six points on P^2, induced from those for seven points on P^1. The seven point ball quotient example DM(2^5,1^2) does not appear on Mostow's original list, but does appear on Thurston's corrected version. We show that DM(2^5,1^2) is a finite cover of the moduli space of cubic surfaces M_C endowed with the ball quotient structure G_C\B^4 of Allcock, Carlson, and Toledo. This answers a question of Allcock about the commensurability of G_C with the monodromy groups of Deligne-Mostow hypergeometric functions.
Towards a Resolution of P = NP Conjecture

In this research paper, the problem of optimization of a quadratic form over the convex hull generated by the corners of hypercube is attempted and solved. It is reasoned that under some conditions, the optimum occurs at the corners of hypercube. Results related to the computation of global optimum stable / anti-stable state are discussed. Efficient Algorithms for computation of min cut in undirected as well as directed graphs are discussed. Algorithm for computation of maximum cut in an undirected graph is discussed. It is hoped that the results shed light on resolving the P NP ≠ problem.
Optimal Control under a Dynamic Fuel Constraint

We present a new approach to solve optimal control problems of the monotone follower type. The key feature of our approach is that it allows us to include an arbitrary dynamic fuel constraint. Instead of dynamic programming, we use the convexity of our cost functional to derive a first order characterization of optimal policies based on the Snell envelope of the objective functional's gradient at the optimum. The optimal control policy is constructed explicitly in terms of the solution to a representation theorem for stochastic processes obtained in Bank and El Karoui (2004), {Ann. Probab. }, 32, pp. 1030--1067. As an illustration, we show how our methodology allows us to extend the scope of the explicit solutions obtained for the classical monotone follower problem and for an irreversible investment problem arising in economics.
Celecoxib inhibits insulin-like growth factor 1 induced growth and invasion in non-small cell lung cancer

Despite a large number of studies indicating that celecoxib plays an important role in the prevention and treatment of tumors, the detailed molecular mechanisms are not well understood. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of celecoxib on insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1)-induced growth and invasion in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). For these experiments, IGF-1-induced cell growth and invasion were analyzed in A549 cells in the presence and absence of celecoxib. The effects of celecoxib on the expression of phosphorylated type-1 IGF receptor (IGF-1R) and phosphorylated AKT (p-AKT) were examined using western blot analysis. The influence of celecoxib on IGF-binding protein-3 (IGFBP-3) expression was analyzed using ELISA. Celecoxib inhibited IGF-1-stimulated growth and invasion in a dose-dependent manner. Celecoxib also reduced the expression of IGF-1R, IGFBP-3 and phosphorylation of AKT. The results suggest that modulating the IGF axis may be a new mechanism for the anticancer effect of celecoxib on NSCLC.
Intrinsic difficulties in using the doubly-infinite time axis for input-output control theory

Points out that the natural definitions of stability and causality in input-output control theory lead to certain inconsistencies when inputs and outputs are allowed to have support on the doubly-infinite time-axis. In particular, linear time-invariant systems with right-half plane poles cannot be considered to be both causal and stabilizable. In contrast, there is no such conflict when the semi-infinite time axis is used. >
Harmonic Oscillator, Coherent States, and Feynman Path Integral yz

The Feynman path integral for the generalized harmonic oscillator is reviewed, and it is shown that the path integral can be used to nd a complete set of wave functions for the oscillator. Harmonic oscillators with dierent (time-dependent) parameters can be related through unitary transformations. The existence of generalized coherent states for a simple harmonic oscillator can then be interpreted as the result of a (formal) invariance under a unitary transformation which relates the same harmonic oscillator. In the path integral formalism, the invariance is reflected in that the kernels do not depend on the choice of classical solutions.
Variable-length sequence modeling: multigrams

The conventional n-gram language model exploits dependencies between words and their fixed-length past. This letter presents a model that represents sentences as a concatenation of variable-length sequences of units and describes an algorithm for unsupervised estimation of the model parameters. The approach is illustrated for the segmentation of sequences of letters into subword-like units. It is evaluated as a language model on a corpus of transcribed spoken sentences. Multigrams can provide a significantly lower test set perplexity than n-gram models. <<ETX>>
The Environment and Performance of Real Estate Investment Trusts

Executive Summary. Researchers have been interested in investigating the role of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in institutional portfolios since their debut in the financial market over four decades ago. The cyclical popularity and performance of various types of REITs as well as the availability of daily returns data for REITs have provided researchers a fruitful and unique area of examination. This study explores the recent financial economics literature on the environment and performance of REITs by extending the 1995 work of Corgel, McIntosh and Ott.
Local mean spatio-temporal feature for depth image-based speed-up action recognition

With the promptly growing population of the low-cost Microsoft Kinect sensor, action recognition, which is a hard yet important problem in computer vision, has been received substantial attention. However, most existing approaches in action recognition spend much time on feature detection even though these methods can achieve high recognition rates. In this paper, we propose a local mean spatio-temporal feature (LMSF) to speed up depth image based action recognition. In particular, we solve the problem from three aspects: (1) associate the 4D normals by a local mean spatio-temporal neighborhood; (2) extract motion frames by detecting the differences between consecutive frames; (3) reduce redundant normals extracted from depth cloud points by sparse coding. The proposed approach is tested on two public benchmark datasets, i.e., MSRAction3D and MSRGesture3D. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our improvement method and the state-of-the-art performance on processing speed.
REPLY TO THE COMMENT ON "NONCOMMUTATIVITY AS A POSSIBLE ORIGIN OF THE ULTRAHIGH-ENERGY COSMIC RAY AND THE TEV PHOTON PARADOXES"

A cogitative comment on Ref. 1 was given by the author of Ref. 2 arguing that the Lorentz-noninvariant modification of the kinematic dispersion law does not follow from deformed oscillator systems, and it cannot evade ultrahigh energy threshold anomalies by raising the respective thresholds. It is pointed out that the dispersion relations of a q-deformed boson and fermion are derived heedlessly and further study on noncommutative theories is necessary. However if such dispersion relations are assumed tenable, the tachyonic propagation and photon instability do not exist at all because the deviation from 1 in q must be imaginary.
Intelligent System Based Speed Estimation of Induction Motors for Industrial Sensorless Schemes

The use of sensorless technologies is an increasing tendency on industrial drivers for electrical machines. The estimation of electrical and mechanical parameters involved with the electrical machine control is used very frequently in order to avoid measurement of all variables involved in this process. The cost reduction may also be considered in industrial drivers, besides the increasing robustness of the system, as an advantage of the use of sensorless technologies. This work proposes the use of artificial neural networks to estimate one of the most important variables in the induction motor control schemes: the speed. Simulation results are presented to validate the induction motor control proposed approach.