Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A parallel implementation of reinforced learning model used in analyzing risky decision making

Analyzing datasets for Risky Decision Making (RDM) is a challenging task involving the identification of varied decision making patterns and the categorization of individuals. Researchers from various fields as diverse as psychology and marketing are actively working to identify suitable techniques, which will allow understanding decision making processes better. Researchers have commonly used machine learning algorithms to model decision making processes. However, the high computational costs of most machine learning algorithms make such endeavors challenging for increasingly large datasets. One of the most promising approaches is to use ensemble clustering for RDM analysis. Ensemble clustering is computationally intensive and thus we propose to improve its performance. Our study reveals that computational overhead is introduced through the use of dimensions in ensemble cluster RDM analyses. Improving performance requires more than the parallelization of individual clustering techniques of the ensemble. We therefore propose a FIFO queue based implementation for analyzing RDM datasets using a HPC cluster on a distributed system. Our technique is able to achieve almost a linear speedup (e.g. 44.79x using 48 MPI threads). Possible shortcomings of the proposed method, opportunities for future work, and alternative parallelization scenarios are also discussed in this paper.
TARGET ARTICLE: Stumbling Blocks on the Religious Road: Fractured Relationships, Nagging Vices, and the Inner Struggle to Believe

Religion, although often a powerful source of comfort, can also become a source of sadness, stress, or confusion in people's lives. Given the many demonstrated links between religiosity and well-being, some people may turn to religion with the primary aim of seeing how religion might help or profit them. Granted, religious belief and involvement can provide many benefits, including social support, a sense of meaning, purpose, and direction for one's life, an environment that fosters the development of virtue, and perhaps even a close, personal relationship with God. However, problems can arise in any of these areas, creating stumbling blocks that can create personal distress and weaken religious interest or commitment. This article considers four major stumbling blocks associated with religion: interpersonal strains, negative attitudes toward God, inner struggles to believe, and problems associated with virtuous striving.
Multiterm Keyword Search in NoSQL Systems

Distributed NoSQL systems aim to provide high availability for large volumes of data but lack the inherent support of complex queries often required by overlying applications. Common solutions based on inverted lists for single terms perform poorly in large-scale distributed settings. The authors thus propose a multiterm indexing technique that can store the inverted lists of combinations of terms. A query-driven mechanism adaptively stores popular term combinations derived from the recent query history. Experiments show that this approach reduces the overall bandwidth consumption by half, significantly improving the NoSQL system's capacity and response time with only marginal overhead in terms of additional, but cheaper, required (storage) resources.
Dependency assimilatory relations within xhosa nasal compounds of the class 9 nominal prefixes

Abstract The crucial outcome of the prefixation of the nasal morpheme /N/ to verb stems in the formation of deverbatives is a change in the constituent structure of a syllable to which the morpheme is added. The syllable becomes longer, yet it has to be articulated within relatively normal time, that is, as if no segment(s) have been added to it. To counteract the problem of timing, assimilatory phonological processes occur with the resultant resyllabification. This article attempts to illustrate the importance of phonetic detail in the analysis of the phonological assimilatory processes of nasal assimilation, deaspiration, affrication, assimilation to full egression, the acquisition of breathy voice and plosivation of the lateral sonorant/I/to/d/. Although nasal assimilation has always been described as an assimilatory process in the study of phonology, the nature of sound changes in these other processes, namely, deaspiration, affrication, assimilation to full egression and the acquisition of breathy voice, plosivation of the lateral sonorant /I/ to /d/ has not been explained adequately.
Effectiveness of a university-industry matching program at creating collaborative research

To realize technological innovation based on advanced university technologies, it is important to establish collaborative research projects between universities and industry in the early stages of R&D. One way to stimulate the creation of university-industry collaborative research is to have a systematical coordinating mechanism between a university and industry. We analyzed the effectiveness of a university-industry coordination program at creating university-industry collaborative research projects. We used data from the matching program called Proprius21 at the University of Tokyo and found out that the matching program has increased collaborative studies at the University of Tokyo. We also analyzed the R&D characteristics of various firms using the relation between the firm's R&D intensity and the range of firm's R&D areas. The matching program is especially effective for large companies in ICT-related fields, although it is not so effective for efforts involving life science technologies, which are overall the most active area for university-industry collaboration. Results show that the matching program is most effective for creating collaborative studies with technology-oriented firms engaged in various business domains.
When are Building Blocks Useful?

There is still debate about as to how GAs work. Although exact mathematical formulations have been available for quite some time, they have not really led to much progress in terms of giving an intuitive answer to this question. One of the principle reasons for this is that exact formulations have traditionally been written in terms of strings. For a recombinative GA however, Building Block schemata are the most natural description. We make an experimental study in the context of a family of modular fitness landscapes and compare with theoretical results of the infinite population model. We show how the utility of recombination is linked to the nature of the fitness landscape, the more modular the landscape the more useful is recombination, and from that how the nature - length, order, geometry - of what are optimal Building Blocks manifests itself.
SOA Extension for Supporting QoS Bootstrapping

A distributed application may be composed of global services provided by different organizations and having different properties. To select a service from many similar services, it is important to distinguish between them. Quality of services (QoS) has been used as a distinguishing factor between similar services and plays an important role in service discovery, selection, and composition. There are many research works that assess services and justify the QoS at the finding, composition, or binding stages of services. However, there is a need to justify the QoS once new services are registered and before any requestors use them; this is called bootstrapping QoS. Thus, this paper proposes a QoS bootstrapping solution for Web services and builds a QoS bootstrapping framework, which is incorporated in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Experiments are conducted and a case study is presented to test the proposed QoS bootstrapping solution.
Synesthetic metaphor: A cognitive perspective

The theory of conceptual metaphor claims that poetic metaphor basically uses the same cognitive mechanisms as everyday metaphor; and what makes poetic metaphor look different, however is its extension, elaboration, and combination of those mechanisms in ways that go beyond the ordinary. In light of this claim, the present study focuses on a particular kind of metaphor, synesthetic metaphor, with data extracted from the novels and short stories by Mo Yan, a preeminent contemporary Chinese novelist highly acclaimed for his innovation with language. An analysis shows that his use of synesthetic metaphors (as well as other metaphors and figures), although very novel and unusual, largely conforms to some general tendencies found in both ordinary and poetic language by previous empirical studies. The finding supports the claim that human meaning and understanding are embodied, constrained by the kind of body we have and how it functions.
Pulmonary changes induced by amphophilic drugs.

Administration of amphophilic drugs to experimental animals causes formation of myeloid bodies in many cell types, accumulation of foamy macrophages in pulmonary alveoli, and pulmonary alveolar proteinosis. These changes are the result of an interaction between the drugs and phospholipids which leads to an alteration in physicochemical properties of the phospholipids. Impairment of the digestion of altered pulmonary secretions in phagosomes of macrophages results in accumulation of foam cells in pulmonary alveoli. Impairment of the metabolism of altered phospholipids removed by autophagy induces an accumulation of myeloid bodies. In summary, administration of amphophilic compounds causes a drug-induced lysosomal disease or generalized phospholipidosis. ImagesFIGURE 1.FIGURE 2.FIGURE 3.FIGURE 4.FIGURE 5.FIGURE 6.FIGURE 7.FIGURE 8.FIGURE 9.
Toll-like receptor-4 pathway is required for the pathogenesis of human chronic endometritis

Toll-like receptor (TLR) signal transduction is a central component of the primary innate immune response to pathogenic challenge. TLR4, a member of the TLR family, is highly expressed in the endometrial cells of the uterus and could thus be a key link between human chronic endometritis (CE) and the immune system. However, the exact biological function of TLR4 in human CE remains largely unexplored. The present study aimed to examine the role of TLR4 in human CE. A comprehensive expression and activation analysis of TLR4 in the endometrial cells of the uterus from patients with human CE (n=25) and normal endometrial (NE) tissue (n=15) was performed. Western blot analyses demonstrated that compared with NE, the protein expression TLR4 markedly increased in human CE. Endometrial tissue scrapings were also used for total RNA extraction and were transcribed and amplified by reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction. The results showed that significant upregulation of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and interleukin-1β (IL-1β), and downregulation of IL-10 mRNA was observed in CE compared with the NE group. Furthermore, the protein of the signaling adapter myeloid differentiation factor-88 and the accessory molecules (TNF receptor associated factor 6 and transforming growth factor-β-activated kinase 1) were also detected in all the assayed tissues. Of note, differential expression (CE versus NE) was observed by immunoblotting at each level of the nuclear factor-κB signaling cascade, including inhibitor κBα and P65 (all P<0.05). The altered TLR4 and its corresponding downstream signaling molecules in CE cells may be of relevance for the progression of the human CE. These findings indicate that the evaluation of expression patterns of TLR4 holds promise for the treatment of human CE.
Domain Motion in Cytochrome P450 Reductase

NADPH-cytochrome P450 reductase (CPR), a diflavin reductase, plays a key role in the mammalian P450 mono-oxygenase system. In its crystal structure, the two flavins are close together, positioned for interflavin electron transfer but not for electron transfer to cytochrome P450. A number of lines of evidence suggest that domain motion is important in the action of the enzyme. We report NMR and small-angle x-ray scattering experiments addressing directly the question of domain organization in human CPR. Comparison of the 1H-15N heteronuclear single quantum correlation spectrum of CPR with that of the isolated FMN domain permitted identification of residues in the FMN domain whose environment differs in the two situations. These include several residues that are solvent-exposed in the CPR crystal structure, indicating the existence of a second conformation in which the FMN domain is involved in a different interdomain interface. Small-angle x-ray scattering experiments showed that oxidized and NADPH-reduced CPRs have different overall shapes. The scattering curve of the reduced enzyme can be adequately explained by the crystal structure, whereas analysis of the data for the oxidized enzyme indicates that it exists as a mixture of approximately equal amounts of two conformations, one consistent with the crystal structure and one a more extended structure consistent with that inferred from the NMR data. The correlation between the effects of adenosine 2′,5′-bisphosphate and NADPH on the scattering curve and their effects on the rate of interflavin electron transfer suggests that this conformational equilibrium is physiologically relevant.
Punishment or therapy? The ethics of sexual offending treatment

Abstract The claim that sex offender treatment is a form of punishment and as such cannot be covered by traditional ethical codes is a controversial one. It challenges the ethical basis of current practice and compels clinicians to rethink the work they do with sex offenders. In this paper I comment on Bill Glaser's defence of that idea in a challenging and timely paper and David Prescott and Jill Leveson's rejection of his claims. First, I consider briefly the nature of both punishment and treatment and outline Glaser's argument and Prescott and Levenson's rejoinder. I then investigate what a comprehensive argument for either position should look like and finish with a few comments on each paper.
Epipolar geometry from the deformation of an active contour

An active contour is used to track a target in a sequence recorded by a walking robot in an unstructured scene. The deformations of the contour are analysed in order to extract the robot's egomotion, from which we compute the epipolar geometry that guides the matching between different views of the scene. The results prove that the proposed solution is a promising alternative to the prevalent techniques based on the costly computation of displacement or velocity fields.
Adaptive stochastic resonance in noisy neurons based on mutual information

Noise can improve how memoryless neurons process signals and maximize their throughput information. Such favorable use of noise is the so-called "stochastic resonance" or SR effect at the level of threshold neurons and continuous neurons. This work presents theoretical and simulation evidence that 1) lone noisy threshold and continuous neurons exhibit the SR effect in terms of the mutual information between random input and output sequences, 2) a new statistically robust learning law can find this entropy-optimal noise level, and 3) the adaptive SR effect is robust against highly impulsive noise with infinite variance. Histograms estimate the relevant probability density functions at each learning iteration. A theorem shows that almost all noise probability density functions produce some SR effect in threshold neurons even if the noise is impulsive and has infinite variance. The optimal noise level in threshold neurons also behaves nonlinearly as the input signal amplitude increases. Simulations further show that the SR effect persists for several sigmoidal neurons and for Gaussian radial-basis-function neurons.
Gone in 0.6 Seconds: The Encoding of Motor Memories Depends on Recent Sensorimotor States

Real-world tasks often require movements that depend on a previous action or on changes in the state of the world. Here we investigate whether motor memories encode the current action in a manner that depends on previous sensorimotor states. Human subjects performed trials in which they made movements in a randomly selected clockwise or counterclockwise velocity-dependent curl force field. Movements during this adaptation phase were preceded by a contextual phase that determined which of the two fields would be experienced on any given trial. As expected from previous research, when static visual cues were presented in the contextual phase, strong interference (resulting in an inability to learn either field) was observed. In contrast, when the contextual phase involved subjects making a movement that was continuous with the adaptation-phase movement, a substantial reduction in interference was seen. As the time between the contextual and adaptation movement increased, so did the interference, reaching a level similar to that seen for static visual cues for delays >600 ms. This contextual effect generalized to purely visual motion, active movement without vision, passive movement, and isometric force generation. Our results show that sensorimotor states that differ in their recent temporal history can engage distinct representations in motor memory, but this effect decays progressively over time and is abolished by ∼600 ms. This suggests that motor memories are encoded not simply as a mapping from current state to motor command but are encoded in terms of the recent history of sensorimotor states.
Tracking Phaselock Loop Characteristics with a VCO Using a Barium Strontium Titanate (BST) Thin-Film Varactor

Barium strontium titanate (BST) varactors utilized in a VCO demonstrate unique tuning characteristics compared to junction varactors. A 2.7 GHz microstrip line VCO operates in a tracking phaselock loop configured as an X4 frequency multiplier. BST oscillator tuning and the effect on loop dynamics is observed by the intentional design of an under damped system. Oscillator noise correction and peaking is noted particularly at low tune voltages. Loop dynamics are addressed through proper design of the loop compensator filter. The differences between BST varactor and junction varactor operation in frequency control are noted
Hiv-1 Incidence among Women of Reproductive Age in Malawi

The aim of this study was to determine HIV-1 incidence among women of reproductive age in Malawi. A prospective study design was followed. HIV-1 uninfected women were followed up for nine visits during a period of 12 months. At baseline, women received HIV-1 counselling and testing. At each visit, venous blood was collected for HIV-1 testing. Incidence rate for HIV-1 was estimated using person-years of follow up (PYFU). Risk factors for HIV acquisition were assessed using Cox proportional hazard models. A total of 842 HIV-1 negative women were enrolled in the study. Of these, 787 had subsequent HIV testing and 31 were found HIV-1 infected; an overall incidence rate of 4.51 (95% confidence interval: 2.96–6.06) per 100 PYFU was obtained. Young age, using hormonal injectable contraceptives and bacterial vaginosis were the main predictors of HIV acquisition. The incidence of HIV continues to be high among women in Malawi, and young women appear to be at higher risk.
Performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test Among Adolescents in Taiwan: Norms, Factorial Structure, and Relation to Schizotypy

The aims of this study were to assess developmental trends in performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) among 817 randomly selected adolescents aged 13-15 years, and to explore WCST performance factor structure and relationship to schizotypy. The results showed that of the nine WCST indexes, only the Categories Achieved and Failure to Maintain Set scores were associated with age, and only the Learning to Learn scores reached adult levels. Factor analysis of WCST performance scores yielded a three-factor structure. Psychometrically defined schizotypic subjects did not perform significantly worse than control subjects on any WCST indexes. These findings suggest that performance on various WCST indexes might indicate developmental changes at different ages, and deficits in WCST performance might not be sensitive indicators of vulnerability to schizophrenia in adolescence.
Characterization of heat transfer along a silicon nanowire using thermoreflectance technique

We studied heat transfer along a silicon nanowire suspended between two thin-film heaters using a thermoreflectance imaging technique. The thermoreflectance imaging system achieved submicrometer spatial resolution and 0.1/spl deg/C temperature resolution using visible light. The temperature difference across the nanowire was measured, and then its thermal resistance was calculated. Knowing the dimension of the nanowire (115 nm in width and 3.9 /spl mu/m in length), we calculated the thermal conductivity of the sample, which is 46 W/mK. Thermal conductivity decreases with decreasing wire size. For a 115-nm-wide silicon nanowire, the thermal conductivity is only one-third of the bulk value. In addition, the transient response of the thin-film heaters was also examined using three-dimensional thermal models by the ANSYS program. The simulated thermal map matches well with the experimental thermoreflectance results.
An Investigation of the Contact Hypothesis of the Own-race Bias in Face Recognition

Although previous studies have demonstrated that faces of one's own race are recognized more accurately than are faces of other races, the theoretical basis of this effect is not clearly understood at present. The experiment reported in this paper tested the contact hypothesis of the own-race bias in face recognition using a cross-cultural design. Four groups of subjects were tested for their recognition of distinctive and typical own-race and other-race faces: (1) black Africans who had a high degree of contact with white faces, (2) black Africans who had little or no contact with white faces, (3) white Africans who had a high degree of contact with black faces, and (4) white Britons who had little contact with black faces. The results showed that although on the whole subjects recognized own-race faces more accurately and more confidently than they recognized other-race faces, the own-race bias in face recognition was significantly smaller among the high-contact subjects than it was among the low-contact subjects. Also, although high-contact black and white subjects showed significant main effects of distinctiveness in their recognition of faces of both races, low-contact black and white subjects showed significant main effects of distinctiveness only in their recognition of own-race faces. It is argued that these results support the contact hypothesis of the own-race bias in face recognition and Valentine's multidimensional space (MDS) framework of face encoding.