Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Social Media and Identity: Understanding Identity Communication and Creation Through Social Media

The present chapter aims to explore the relationship between social media and identity by reviewing theoretical frameworks as well as empirical studies on the topic. Considering the complexity of the concept of identity, a multidisciplinary theoretical approach is provided, including Psychological Theories, Sociological Theories and Communication Theories. These theories are revisited in the context of online identity formation and communication through social media. Different aspects of identity such as gender identity, professional identity, political identity etc., are discussed and illustrated through empirical studies in the field. Moreover, the role of social media as a factor that might either promote or hinder identity development is also discussed (e.g., phenomena such as cyber-bulling and internet addiction). Finally recommendations and suggestions for future research are provided, including the need for multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks to the investigation of the relationships between social media and identity.
Association of statin therapy with blood pressure control in hypertensive hypercholesterolemic outpatients in clinical practice

Background: Some clinical evidence revealed that statins, apart from lowering cholesterol levels, also have an antihypertensive effect. Our aim was to evaluate the existence of a possible association of statin therapy with blood pressure (BP) control in clinical practice. Materials and Methods: Patients attending a hypertension/dyslipidemia clinic were prospectively evaluated. Those patients with a diagnosis of stage 1 hypertension and hypercholesterolemia who consented to participate were included in the study, either in the statin group (when taking a statin) or in the control group (when not taking a statin). Exclusion criteria included dementia, pregnancy, or breastfeeding, and history or evidence of stage 2 hypertension. Detailed clinical information was prospectively obtained from medical records. A total of 110 hypertensive patients were assigned to the study (82 in the statin group and 28 in the control group). Results: Although there were no significant differences (P > 0.05) in both groups concerning gender, body mass index, antihypertensive pharmacotherapy, and serum levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides, a higher BP control was observed in the statin group (P = 0.002). Significantly lower systolic BP (–6.7 mmHg, P = 0.020) and diastolic BP (–6.4 mmHg, P = 0.002) levels were reported in the statin group. Serum levels of low-density lipoprotein were also significantly lower in the statin group (P < 0.001). Conclusions: This observational study detected an association of statin therapy with BP control in hypertensive hypercholesterolemic patients in clinical practice. These findings raise the possibility that statin therapy may be useful for BP control in the studied population.
Regional Integration and the Issue of Choosing an Appropriate Exchange-Rate Regime in Latin America

This book is an up-to-date, authoritative and comprehensive analysis of the key issues and challenges facing regional currency area projects in the context of financial globalization. The authors focus on several central issues that emerged during the experiences of the 1990s and 2000s: exchange rate regimes and optimal currency area theory; exchange rate regimes in emerging countries, international capital markets and regional currency areas; EMU and the euro; exchange rate regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America; dollarization and the coordination of macroeconomic policies in the presence of regional currency areas.
Robust rendezvous for mobile autonomous agents via proximity graphs in d dimensions

This paper presents coordination algorithms for networks of mobile autonomous agents. The objective of the proposed algorithms is to achieve rendezvous, that is, agreement over the location of the agents in the network. We provide analysis and design results for multi-agent networks in arbitrary dimensions under weak requirements on the switching and failing communication topology. The novel correctness proof relies on proximity graphs and their properties and on a general LaSalle Invariance Principle for nondeterministic discrete-time dynamical systems.
Coordinated Multiple Views: a Critical View

Hundreds of papers have been presented at the five conferences on coordinated and multiple views (CMV) in exploratory visualization and related conferences on information visualization and visual analytics. However, CMV are still rarely implemented in commercial systems and many users are even not aware that multiple views are useful and coordination can help them to solve their problems. Even toolkits especially designed for information visualization often do not offer any coordination mechanisms for multiple views. One of possible reasons for this may be that existing CMV tools and approaches are insufficiently suited to real-life problems. Most of the CMV tools deal with single-table data sets of rather small sizes. A typical implementation allows one to create several displays (statistical graphics and/or geographical maps) representing individual entities and/or aggregates (e.g., histograms) and link them by brushing and selection. The displays are coordinated through exchanging references to selected entities. To our best knowledge, this approach works efficiently for tables with sizes up to about 105 records. Linking displays that reflect larger tables causes significant delays.
Band to Band Tunneling limited Off state Current in Ultra-thin Body Double Gate FETs with High Mobility Materials : III-V, Ge and strained Si/Ge

We have developed new band to band tunneling (BTBT) model, which captures band structure information, all possible transitions between different valleys, energy quantization and quantized density of states (DOS). Minimum standby off-state currents (IOFF,MIN) are investigated in double gate (DG) MOSFETs with various high mobility materials, like GaAs, InAs, Ge and strained Si/Ge (s-Si/s-Ge) using the new band to band tunneling model. Our results show that the body thickness & supply voltage strongly affect the BTBT and should be carefully chosen to meet the ITRS specifications of the off state leakage current in these new high mobility/small bandgap materials
Reciprocal relationships between psychosocial work characteristics and sleep problems: A two-wave study

ABSTRACT Sleep problems are common and impair the health and productivity of employees. Work characteristics constitute one possible cause of sleep problems, and sleeping poorly might influence wellbeing and performance at work. This study examines the reciprocal associations between sleep problems and psychosocial work characteristics. The participants were 1744 full-time employed individuals (56% women; mean age 38 years in 2007) from the Young Finns study who responded to questionnaires on work characteristics (conceptualised by the demand–control model and effort–reward imbalance model) and sleep problems (Jenkins Sleep Scale) in 2007 and 2012. Cross-lagged structural equation models are used to examine the associations. The results show that low control and low rewards at baseline predicted sleep problems. Baseline sleep problems predicted higher effort, higher effort–reward imbalance, and lower reward. Sleep problems also predicted lower odds for belonging to the low (rather than high) job strain group and active jobs group. The association between work characteristics and sleep problems appears to be reciprocal, with a stressful work environment increasing sleep problems, and sleep problems influencing future work characteristics. The results emphasise the importance of interventions aimed at both enhancing sleep quality and reducing psychosocial risks at work.
A Semantic Dashboard Description Language for a Process-oriented Dashboard Design Methodology

Monitoring and controlling business processes is a challenging task: different data sources need to be combined, appropriate visualizations need to be defined to observe certain goals or Key Performance Indicators (KPI). In this paper, a new semantic dashboard description language used in a process-oriented dashboard design methodology is introduced, to help users focus more on business processes and actual goals and less on technical aspects of monitoring and controlling infrastructure. A reference implementation is described and plans for future improvements of the methodology are introduced.
Introducing the per-fide project: parallelizing portuguese with six different languages (Español, Russian, Français, Italiano, Deutsch, English)

In this paper we present the Per-Fide project, aimed at the construction of parallel corpora mapping the Portuguese language to six other languages English, Russian, French, Italian, German and Spanish in various domains including literary, journalistic and religious texts. First we will focus on the corpus design criteria and its main features, particularly those that distinguish this corpus from existing parallel corpora. Secondly, we will discuss the challenges of elaborating a typology of text-types for the religious domain and problems associated with the encoding of the texts belonging to this category. To conclude, we will demonstrate how the Per-Fide Corpus can be used in contrastive and translation studies with a case study of pronominal causative constructions in a French-Portuguese contrastive perspective.
An adaptive cross-layer bandwidth scheduling strategy for the speed-sensitive strategy in hierarchical cellular networks

Efficient bandwidth scheduling of wireless bandwidth is critical to cellular system performance. Bandwidth scheduling methods can be divided into cell-layer channel allocation and call-layer channel assignment. Previous studies are focused on the latter type of method. Some problems, such as traffic-load variations among base stations (BSs) and BSs failed to provide wireless communication service, are the cell-layer problems and are difficult to handle using the call-layer methods. Therefore, this study presents an adaptive cross-layer bandwidth scheduling strategy for hierarchical cellular networks. This strategy is implemented to solve the traffic-adaptation and the fault tolerance problem according to the speed-sensitive call-layer method.
TRAAC: Trust and risk aware access control

Systems for allowing users to manage access to their personal data are important for a wide variety of applications including healthcare, where authorised individuals may need to share information in ways that the owner had not anticipated. Simply denying access in unknown cases may hamper critical decisions and affect service delivery. Rather, decisions can be made considering the risk of a given sharing request, and the trustworthiness of the requester. We propose a trust- and risk-aware access control mechanism (TRAAC) and a sparse zone-based policy model, which together allow decision-making on the basis of the requester's trustworthiness with regards to both the information to be shared, and the completion of obligations designed to mitigate risk. We formalise our approach and compare it with an existing approach that does not model trust through simulation.
Design of a Fuzzy Logic Controller with a Variable Structure Based Supervisor

This paper presents a stable variable structure control scheme for achieving uniformly ultimately bounded control of a class of nonlinear systems. To reach a better performance, a generalized two-input single-output fuzzy controller is incorporated into the scheme to help improve dynamic responses when the trajectories enter into an ultimate bound. For practical consideration, we added a GA-based alpha-beta filter in front of the fuzzy controller to suppress noise and obtain smooth input signals. A force-adaptive robot effector acting on various profiles of surfaces has been used as a simulative example to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Évaluer des dossiers « vides »

Cet article s’interesse a la maniere dont la persistance des asymetries d’information entre autorites et entreprises amene les experts a recourir a des considerations gestionnaires et economiques pour former leurs jugements. Partant de l’ethnographie d’un comite d’experts charge d’evaluer les risques de molecules dangereuses dans le contexte du reglement europeen REACH, nous montrons que les savoirs mobilises dans le cadre de l’evaluation portent sur les manieres de gerer les molecules plutot que sur leur toxicite. Les donnees toxicologiques fournies par les entreprises participent a une production organisee de l’ignorance. Pour qualifier les risques et proposer les mesures de gestion adaptees, les evaluateurs mettent alors au centre de l’expertise des informations sur le cadre reglementaire et des analyses socio-economiques. Au cours de ce travail de substitution, l’evaluation devient explicitement un acte de gestion qui agit sur les ontologies et le traitement des risques et qui reproduit la dependance des experts aux donnees des entreprises.
Motivational interviewing and efficacy in reduction of alcohol use

Health behavior change is a topic that has been heavily researched by professionals in both the mental health and medical fields. Particularly, change related to alcohol behaviors has been extensively researched, likely due to the pervasiveness of alcohol-related deaths in the United States. Nearly 88,000 people die from alcohol-related causes annually, making it the fourth leading preventable cause of death in the United States (CDC, 2014). While there is a lack of a clear definition in the literature, health behavior change can be defined as the shift from risky behaviors to the initiation and maintenance of healthy behaviors and functional activities, and the self-management of chronic health conditions (Epsten, Miner, Nieuwenhujisen,& Zemper, 2006). There are a large number of factors that affect the outcome of health behavior change, including, but not limited to, patients’ readiness and motivation to change, their environment, their physical and mental capabilities/limitations, and the specific technique taken to attempt to change behaviors.
Comparison of Biological Significance of Biclusters of SIMBIC and SIMBIC + Biclustering Models

Query driven Biclustering Model refers to the problem of extracting biclusters based on a query gene or query condition. The extracted biclusters consist of a set of genes and a subset of conditions that are similar to the query gene or query condition and it includes the query input also. Two approaches applied for biclustering problems are topdown and bottom-up, based on how they tackle the problems. Top-down techniques [3, 4] start with the entire gene expression matrix and iteratively partition it into smaller sub-matrices. On the other hand, bottom-up approach starts with a randomly chosen set of biclusters that are iteratively modified, usually enlarged, until no local improvement is possible. In this paper, the biological significance of biclusters extracted using two query driven models viz SIMBIC and SIMBIC+ are compared.This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 analyzes the popular MSB algorithm and section 3 introduces an improved version of MSB namely SIMBIC model and the enhanced model of SIMBIC namely SIMBIC+ is presented in section 4. The experimental analysis and the biological significance are illustrated in section 5. Index Terms Data Mining, Gene Expression Data, Biclustering, Average Correlation Value, Biological Significance, Gene Ontology
New algorithm for re-ranking based on the vote operation in the context of CBIR

We propose here a new algorithm which re-ranks the first returned images answered by an image retrieval system. In contrast with other techniques of improvement proposed in the literature, the re-ranking is done automatically without any user intervention. The algorithm has been experimented using the Wang database and the Google image engine. The obtained results indicate that significant improvement in retrieval performance is achieved by the new scheme.
The Tradeoff Between Cyclic Topology and Complexity in Graphical Models of Linear Codes

It is now well-known that together with a suitable message passing schedule, a graphical model for a code implies a soft-in soft-out (SISO) decoding algorithm which is optimal for cycle-free models and suboptimal, yet often substantially less complex, for cyclic models. The Cut-Set Bound (CSB) indicates that the introduction of cycles to graphical models can lead to dramatic reductions in complexity and in the case of tailbiting trellises (i.e. single-cycle models), the CSB can be used to establish the square-root bound, thus quantifying this potential reduction precisely. The aim of this work is to provide such a precise characterization of the tradeoff between cyclic topology and complexity (i.e. maximum hidden variable size and local constraint complexity) in graphical models with more than one cycle. To this end, a new bound is introduced the tree-inducing cut-set bound which can be viewed as a generalization of the square-root bound to graphical models with arbitrary cyclic topologies.
Context-enabled B2B Collaborations

Traditional ways of collaboration among enterprises are no longer adequate and efficient due to increasingly short cycle times and constantly changing business circumstances. Companies compete as value chains using Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations based on infocomm technologies, in particular the Internet. Most B2B collaborations are typically long term and static but are pushing towards short term and dynamic connectivity. This paper introduces a context-aware framework to support such short and dynamic B2B collaborations. In this framework, context information in terms of the user (company), temporal and location information is then used to match of suitable services to realize the business processes formed for B2B collaborations. An initial implementation of this approach is presented together with proposed improvements.
Young Children's Source Monitoring: Exploring the Contexts of Task Difficulty and Repeated Events

This dissertation had two over-arching goals. The first was to study the cognitive mechanisms underlying effective source monitoring by clarifying the role that developing executive function skills play in children’s increasing ability to monitor sources. The second goal was to examine whether a particular interview technique called “source-monitoring training” could help children to recall the sources of their memories more accurately. These two separate lines of research were furthered by the same methodology, and thus, these separate research questions were examined simultaneously within both of the experiments conducted for this dissertation. In the first study, the difficulty of the source-monitoring decisions was manipulated by testing 4to 8-year-old children’s memories of a lab-based event after a shorter delay (1-2 days) or a longer delay (8-10 days). Within these two conditions, I explored both the relationship of source monitoring to executive function, as well as the effectiveness of the source-monitoring training procedure. The results of this study showed that executive function was related to source monitoring, and mediation models demonstrated how children’s source monitoring improves with age due to developments in working memory, which improve event encoding and therefore, source monitoring. The effects of source-monitoring training were not as clear as expected; the only group to benefit from the training were older children in the shorter delay condition. Interestingly, neither the relationship between executive function and source monitoring nor the effects of source-monitoring training were affected by the difficulty of the task in the way expected. In the second study, 4to 8-year-old children’s source monitoring was examined within a repeated-event paradigm. The inclusion of more than two sources (i.e., events) created a more Source Monitoring viii realistic and generalizable task. Again, both the relationship between executive function and source monitoring and the effectiveness of source-monitoring training were examined within the same study. In this study, there was evidence that two broad components of executive function as measured through parent reports were related to source monitoring. The source-monitoring training did not improve source accuracy, but did impact the types of errors children made, such that older children who received the training were more likely to say, “don’t know” instead of confusing the events. Testing these relationships in a variety of conditions illustrates how cognitive and interview factors are related to source monitoring, demonstrating clear links between executive function and source monitoring, but mixed evidence for the effectiveness of source-monitoring training. Collectively, my doctoral program of research contributes a greater understanding of how source monitoring develops and whether source-monitoring training could be used in practice. Source Monitoring ix
IFO: a formal semantic database model

A new, formally defined database model is introduced that combines fundamental principles of “semantic” database modeling in a coherent fashion. Using a graph-based formalism, the IFO model provides mechanisms for representing structured objects, and functional and ISA relationships between them. A number of fundamental results concerning semantic data modeling are obtained in the context of the IFO model. Notably, the types of object structure that can arise as a result of multiple uses of ISA relationships and object construction are described. Also, a natural, formal definition of update propagation is given, and it is shown that (under certain conditions) a correct update always exists.
Golden Rules for Building Effective SAT Solvers

The area of Propositional Satisfiability (SAT) has been the subject of intensive research in recent years, with significant theoretical and practical contributions. From a practical perspective, a large number of very effective SAT solvers have recently been proposed, most of which based on improvements made to the original Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) backtrack search SAT algorithm. The new solvers are capable of solving very large, very hard real-world problem instances, which more traditional SAT solvers are totally incapable of. In this paper we briefly review the search techniques that have been proposed in recent years and then empirically evaluate the different techniques.