Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Love, Sexuality and Migration: Mapping the Issue(s)

Abstract In our globalised age of accelerating travel and communication, many migrations and other forms of mobility are informed by a variety of emotional, affective and sexual liaisons, attachments and expectations, which can be powerful and necessary motivations for mobility and for the risks taken in crossing boundaries. In some cases, the emotional and sexual motivations involve economic sacrifices; in others, especially for migrants from poor countries, they can also be a means to economic betterment. In yet others the economic imperative of acquiring work and income through migration implies a loss of emotional expressiveness and sexual identity. In this introductory paper to the special issue, we argue for both a ‘sexual turn’ and an ‘emotional turn’ in mobility studies, stressing also the intersectionality of these two dimensions. Some of the most productive research on sexuality in relation to mobility comes from ‘queer theory’, an intrinsically post‐structuralist heuristic paradigm which challenges established heteronormative and homonormative categories in favour of an emphasis on the polymorphous and performative dimensions of sexuality. The final part of the article provides an overview of the papers that follow and the themes they explore. Taken together, the papers investigate different globalised intersections of love, sexuality and migration, and the way they inform, and are informed by, existing narratives and practices of migration and settlement.
Update on Root Hair Development Root Hair Development in the Grasses : What We Already Know and What We Still Need to Know 1

A priority in many crop improvement programs for a long time has been to enhance the tolerance level of plants to both abiotic and biotic stress. Recognition that the root system is the prime determinant of a plant’s ability to extract both water and minerals from the soil implies that its architecture is an important variable underlying a cultivar’s adaptation. The density and/or length of the root hairs (RHs) that are formed are thought to have a major bearing on the plant’s performance under stressful conditions. Any attempt to improve a crop’s root system will require a detailed understanding of the processes of RH differentiation. Recent progress in uncovering the molecular basis of root epidermis specialization has been recorded in the grasses. This review seeks to present the current view of RH differentiation in grass species. It combines what has been learned from molecular-based analyses, histological studies, and observation of the phenotypes of both laboratoryand field-grown plants.
3D contrast‐enhanced MR angiography

Safe, fast, accurate contrast arteriography can be obtained utilizing gadolinium (Gd) and 3D MR data acquisition for diagnosing vascular diseases. Optimizing contrast enhanced MRA (CE MRA), however, requires understanding the complex interplay between Gd injection timing, the Fourier mapping of 3D MR data acquisition and a multitude of parameters determining resolution, anatomic coverage, and sensitivity to motion artifacts. It is critical to time the bolus peak to coincide with central k‐space data acquisition, which dominates image contrast. Oversampling the center of k‐space allows reconstruction of multiple 3D acquisitions in rapid succession to time‐resolve the passage of the contrast bolus. Parallel imaging increases resolution, shortens scan time and compresses the center of k‐space into a shorter period of time, thereby minimizing motion and timing artifacts. Absence of ionizing radiation allows MRA to be repeated and combined with additional sequences to more fully characterize anatomy, flow, and physiology. Utilizing stepping table technology and thigh compression, whole body MRA is possible with a single contrast injection. As MR technology continues to advance, CE MRA becomes better and simpler to perform, increasing its efficacy in the diagnosis and management of vascular diseases. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2007. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Learning Partially Observable Deterministic Action Models

We present the first tractable, exact solution for the problem of identifying actions' effects in partially observable STRIPS domains. Our algorithms resemble Version Spaces and Logical Filtering, and they identify all the models that are consistent with observations. They apply in other deterministic domains (e.g., with conditional effects), but are inexact (may return false positives) or inefficient (we could not bound the representation size). Our experiments verify the theoretical guarantees, and show that we learn STRIPS actions efficiently, with time that is significantly better than approaches for HMMs and Reinforcement Learning (which are inexact). Our results are especially surprising because of the inherent intractability of the general deterministic case. These results have been applied to an autonomous agent in a virtual world, facilitating decision making, diagnosis, and exploration.
Orphan Trains: Teaching about an Early Twentieth-Century Social Experiment

Between 1854 and 1930, over 200,000 children left New York City, as well as other major east coast cities, bound for families in rural areas. They traveled to towns in New England, the Midwest, the South, and even as far west as Texas, California, Oregon, and Washington. These orphans were the children of immigrant families who were pouring into the United States in search of a better life. Many of these children were abandoned, or their parents had died and they were left to fend for themselves. To address this growing social problem, the process of placing out, or Orphan Trains, was developed by Charles Loring Brace, the director of the Children's Aid Society in New York City. This article summarizes the implementation of the placing-out process, including the social conditions, the underlying philosophy, the basic components, and the public perceptions. A lesson plan, teaching strategies, and materials are provided for teachers who want to explore this social practice when studying the rise of industrialization, immigration, and social change during the beginning of the twentieth century in American History.
F0 estimation in noisy speech based on long-term harmonic feature analysis combined with neural network classification

In this study, we propose a frequency domain F0 estimation approach based on long term Harmonic Feature Analysis combined with artificial neural network ( ANN ) classification. Long term spectrum analysis is proposed to gain better harmonic resolution, which reduces the spectrum interference between speech and noise. Next pitch candidates are extracted for each frame from the long term spectrum. Five specific features related to harmonic structure are computed for each candidate and combined together as a feature vector to indicate the status of each candidate. An ANN is trained to model the relation between the harmonic features and the true pitch values. In the test phase, target pitch is selected from the candidates according to the maximum output score from the ANN . Finally, post-processing is applied based on average segmental output to eliminate inconsistent or fluctuating decision errors. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for F0 estimation under adverse conditions, including white noise and multi-speaker babble noise.
Correction to "Antiwindup Design With Guaranteed Regions of Stability: An LMI-Based Approach"

In the footnote of J.M. Gomes da Silva, Jr. and S. Tarbouriech (see ibid., vol.50, no.1, p.110, 2005), we have stated that the value of 61.29 obtained by Y.Y. Cao et al. (2002) was apparently incorrect. In fact, the different values come from the fact that the example considered by Y.Y. Cao is slightly different from the one by J.M. Gomes da Silva, Jr. and S. Tarbouriech (2005). Hence, the result presented by Y.Y. Cao is indeed correct and we apologize to the authors for the misunderstanding.
Plasma Norepinephrine and Epinephrine in Untreated Diabetics, During Fasting and After Insulin Administration

Employing a precise and sensitive double-isotope derivative technic, plasma norepinephrine and epinephrine were measured in twenty-three normal subjects and fourteen diabetics during various metabolic conditions. Patients with poorly controlled diabetes showed a rise in norepinephrine, which correlated with the degree of metabolic derangement, during resting conditions. High epinephrine values were seen only in patients with moderate to severe ketoacidosis. During exercise, diabetic patients with ketosis demonstrated large increments in plasma catecholamines as compared to normals. During insulin treatment, when good control had been achieved, plasma catecholaniine levels were similar to those in normal subjects. During prolonged fasting, plasma norepinephrine rose from 0.18 to 0.40 ng. per milliliter in four normal nonobese subjects. No change was observed in plasma epinephrine. During insulin hypoglycemia, high plasma epinephrine levels were seen only in subjects in whom the blood glucose concentration declined to values below 20 mg. per 100 ml. Plasma norepinephrine rose as blood glucose concentrations decreased even in diabetics in whom values had not reached hypoglycemic levels. No correlation was observed between plasma epinephrine and increase in pulse rate during hypoglycemia.
Deobfuscation is in NP

There are two important problems in the security of mobile programs: protecting the host computer from the program, and protecting the program from the host computer. For the first problem, many successful techniques apply from virtual-memory protection to type-checking and even proof-carrying code. But the second problem seems harder: computing a result “in full sight” of the host computer while keeping the algorithms or intermediate results secret. Protection of programs from hosts has many applications; a typical application is in “digital rights management,” where it is desired (for example) to permit the decryption of a document for display on the screen but not for copying or printing. The display program must somehow hide the decryption key from the prying eyes of the host computer and operating system. Every part of a typical personal computer is accessible to the person who has physical possession of it. This means the user can read the disk drive, can insert emulation layers to debug or analyze the execution of the program, and so on. Under such circumstances, protection is difficult indeed. Some work in this area assumes the use of a secure processor (or coprocessor) that can do computations that are not physically accessible to the user [3, 2]. Such approaches can be made as strong as public-key encryption, and appear to have significant promise. However, much of the work in program-protection is meant to be applicable on conventional, general-purpose PCs, and does not rely on special hardware. The algorithms used are generally called “code obfuscation;” they rearrange the protected program to make their control-
An Implicit ConnectionGraph MazeRouting Algorithm for ECO Routing JasonCong ,

ECOroutingis a very importantdesigncapability in advancedIC, MCM andPCB designswhenadditionalroutingsneedtobemadeatthelatterstageof thephysical design.ECOis difficult in two aspects:first, therearea largenumberof existinginterconnectswhichbecomeobstaclesin theregion. A hierarchicalapproachis not applicable in thissituation,andweneedto searchalarge,congestedregionthoroughly. Second,advancesin circuit designsrequire variablewidth andvariablespacingon interconnects. Thus, agridlessroutingalgorithmis needed.In thispaper , weproposeto useanimplicit representationof a non-uniformgrid graphfor gridlessmazeroutingalgorithm.A novel slit-tree plusinterval-treedatastructureis developed,combinedwith a cachestructure,to supportefficient queriesinto the connectiongraph.Ourexperimentsshow thatthisdatastructure is verysmall in memoryusagewhile very fastin answering mazeexpansionrelatedqueries.This make the framework veryusefulin theECOtypeof routing.
Demo: an experience sampling toolkit for the transport domain

There are a large number of projects that aim to use mobile computing technologies to help address transport related issues such as proving better travel information. These projects can often benefit from experience sampling in which mobile devices are used to collect in-situ user feedback on either the mobile computing application or the journey itself. In this demonstration we show elements of the Reflect toolkit, an experience sampling toolkit designed to help survey traveller experiences in-situ using mobile smartphones. The Reflect experience sampling toolkit differs from previous experience sampling research such as MyExperience [1] by specifically focusing on supporting behavioral researchers in the transportation research domain. It enables simple and rapid configuration and deployment of surveys on modern mobile platforms to crowd-source new forms of travel experience data.
Digestive Proteolytic Activity in the Sunn Pest, Eurygaster integriceps

Abstract The Sunn pest, Eurygaster integriceps Puton (Heteroptera: Scutelleridae), is one of the most important pests of wheat and causes considerable damage to this valuable crop annually. Digestive proteinase activity of adult insects was investigated using general and specific substrates and inhibitors. Proteolytic activity was low when the common conventional substrates, azoalbumin, azocasein and hemoglobin were used to assay salivary glands and midguts. Using the fluorescent casein substrate (BODIPY FL casein), total proteolytic activity was measured at different pH. Maximum proteolytic activity was detected at pH 7 (100%) and 8(65%) which suggested the presence of serine proteinases in the salivary glands. There was no detectable proteolytic activity in midgut extracts. The inhibitors; PMSF (inhibitor of serine proteinases) and TPCK (a specific chymotrypsin inhibitor) showed greater than 50% inhibitory effect on total proteolytic activity, however, TLCK (specific trypsin inhibitor) and E-64(specific cysteine proteinase inhibitor) did not inhibit total proteolytic activity. Using fluorescent specific substrates for serine and cysteine proteinases (Z-Arg-AMC, Z-Arg-Arg-AMC, Z-Arg-Phe-AMC and Suc-Ala-Ala-Pro-Phe-AMZ) revealed the presence of tryptic and chymotryptic activity in the salivary gland extract. Zymogram analysis under non-reducing SDS-PAGE conditions and using the substrate APNE showed at least 8 tryptic and chymotryptic activity bands in salivary gland extracts. A single high molecular weight band with tryptic activity (165 kDa) was detected using the substrate BApNA in a zymogram analysis uisng native-PAGE. Kinetic studies showed a km value of 0.6 mM for this enzyme against the substrate BApNA . The inhibitor TLCK decreased activity of the trypsin-like enzyme up to 73% and almost completely eliminated the only band related to this proteinase in the zymogram. Soybean Kunitz type trypsin inhibitor showed no effect on proteolytic activity of the trypsin-like serine proteinase. In general, the results revealed the presence of chymotrypsin- and trypsin-like serine proteinases in the salivary gland of E. integriceps, and it seems that the major total proteolytic activity is due to chymotrypsin proteinases.
Cancer diagnosis disclosure from Portuguese physicians

Abstract Objective: Doctor–patient communication in oncology, particularly concerning diagnostic disclosure, is a crucial factor related to the quality of the doctor–patient relationship and the psychological state of the patient. The aims of our study were to investigate physicians' opinions and practice with respect to disclosure of a cancer diagnosis and to explore potential related factors. Method: A self-report questionnaire developed for our study was responded to by 120 physicians from Coimbra University Hospital Centre and its primary healthcare units. Results: Some 91.7% of physician respondents generally disclosed a diagnosis, and 94.2% were of the opinion that the patient knowing the truth about a diagnosis had a positive effect on the doctor–patient relationship. A need for training about communicating with oncology patients was reported by 85.8% of participants. The main factors determining what information to provide to patients were: (1) patient intellectual and cultural level, (2) patient desire to know the truth, and (3) the existence of family. Significance of results: Our results point to a paradigm shift in communication with cancer patients where disclosure of the diagnosis should be made part of general clinical practice. Nevertheless, physicians still experience difficulties in revealing cancer diagnoses to patients and often lack the skills to deal with a patient's emotional responses, which suggests that more attention needs to be focused on communication skills training programs.
Competing Changes as a Cause of Residue

In the literature on sound change, much has been made of the neogrammarian doctrine that sound changes operate without exceptions. Without some such hypothesis any description would be a long list of unsystematic correspondences, with no assurance that the same sound under comparable conditions would not change into a variety of different sounds, with no governing principle whatsoever. This point of view, which Hockett has termed the 'regularity hypothesis', has been richly rewarding in historical research; as a celebrated part of the heritage of modern linguistics, the point needs no elaboration here. When irregularities appear to leak through the net of postulated phonetic laws, there should be an explanation for them. In the words of Karl Verner, 'There must be a rule for irregularity; the problem is to find it. ' In searching for a rule that would explain certain residues of Grimm's Law, Verner found it necessary to go beyond the segmental environment into the accentual systems of IndoEuropean and Germanic, though the condition in the rule he discovered is still phonetic. In recent years, an impressive body of evidence has accumulated that there are diachronic rules which depend on conditions that are altogether nonphonetic, e.g. factors which are morphological and syntactic. ' That this is so should not be surprising: in phonology, diachronic rules frequently leave counterparts in the form of synchronic rules, and there are numerous instances where synchronic rules are obviously dependent on 'grammatical prerequisites'. Furthermore, the stock of morphemes in a language is often partitioned into several layers according to non-phonetic criteria, where these layers exhibit different phonological behavior. To a large extent, such partitions correlate with the historical sources of the various layers, e.g. Romance versus native morphemes in English, or Chinese versus native morphemes in Japanese.
Elementary Social Functions: Concept and Interrelation to Social Dependence Relations

This paper introduces a general notion of elementary systemic functions and shows how elementary systemic functions can be instantiated as elementary social functions in agent societies, thus allowing for a functional view of agent interactions. The paper shows a way to interrelate elementary social functions and social dependence relations, for social dependence relations determined by maintenance goals. Also, the paper introduces the notions of elementary functional cycles and elementary functional networks, with functional cycles constituting the operational bases of functional networks, and shows how such structures interrelate to social dependence networks. An example social system is analysed from this elementary functional point of view. Starting from its social dependence network, an elementary functional network is determined for such system. The distinction between elementary social functions and maintenance goals is emphasized in the analysis of the example.
Enhancing Software Visualization with Information Retrieval

I have enhanced Metric Attitude. It is a visualization tool based on static analysis that provides a mental picture by viewing an object-oriented software system by means of polymetric views. In particular, we have integrated an Information Retrieval engine and named this new version of visualization tool as Metric Attitude++. It allows the user to formulate a textual query and to show on the visual representation of the subject software the elements that are more similar to that query. This could be useful in all those cases in which a user needs to identify (or to localize) features implemented in the source code. Several filters are also available to hide possibly irrelevant details and to ease the browsing and then the comprehension of a software system. Finally, we have applied Metric Attitude++ on a number of object-oriented software systems. In this paper, we report preliminary results of a quantitative study on a widely studied open-source software, namely JEdit. On the basis of our results it seems that Metric Attitude++ can be effectively applied to different kinds of source code comprehension tasks and to concept location in source code, in particular.
Overlap versus partition: Marketing classification and customer profiling in complex networks of products

In recent years we witnessed the explosion in the availability of data regarding human and customer behavior in the market. This data richness era has fostered the development of useful applications in understanding how markets and the minds of the customers work. In this paper we focus on the analysis of complex networks based on customer behavior. Complex network analysis has provided a new and wide toolbox for the classic data mining task of clustering. With community discovery, i.e. the detection of functional modules in complex networks, we are now able to group together customers and products using a variety of different criteria. The aim of this paper is to explore this new analytic degree of freedom. We are interested in providing a case study uncovering the meaning of different community discovery algorithms on a network of products connected together because co-purchased by the same customers. We focus our interest in the different interpretation of a partition approach, where each product belongs to a single community, against an overlapping approach, where each product can belong to multiple communities. We found that the former is useful to improve the marketing classification of products, while the latter is able to create a collection of different customer profiles.
The CHR-based Implementation of the SCIFF Abductive System

Abduction is a form of inference that supports hypothetical reasoning and has been applied to a number of domains, such as diagnosis, planning, protocol verification. Abductive Logic Programming ALP is the integration of abduction in logic programming. Usually, the operational semantics of an ALP language is defined as a proof procedure. The first implementations of ALP proof-procedures were based on the meta-interpretation technique, which is flexible but limits the use of the built-in predicates of logic programming systems. Another, more recent, approach exploits theoretical results on the similarity between abducibles and constraints. With this approach, which bears the advantage of an easy integration with built-in predicates and constraints, Constraint Handling Rules has been the language of choice for the implementation of abductive proof procedures. The first CHR-based implementation mapped integrity constraints directly to CHR rules, which is an efficient solution, but prevents defined predicates from being in the body of integrity constraints and does not allow a sound treatment of negation by default. In this paper, we describe the CHR-based implementation of the SCIFF abductive proof-procedure, which follows a different approach. The SCIFF implementation maps integrity constraints to CHR constraints, and the transitions of the proof-procedure to CHR rules, making it possible to treat default negation, while retaining the other advantages of CHR-based implementations of ALP proof-procedures.