Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antioxidants in different parts of oleaster as a function of genotype

Introduction: Fruits of oleaster (Elaeagnus angustifolia L.) were used in traditional medicine to treat various diseases. The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the phenol and flavonoid contents and antioxidant activity of methanol extracts from the fruit peel, flesh and seed of seven genotypes of oleaster. Methods: The phenol and flavonoid contents were determined using spectrophotometric methods. Antioxidant and antiradical activities were determined using reducing power, ferric-reducing antioxidant potential (FRAP) and ability to scavenge DPPH radical assays. Results: Significant differences ( P < 0.05) were found in phenol and flavonoid contents and antioxidant activity among components of fruit and within various genotypes. Conclusion: Results indicated that oleaster has good fruit quality varying among different genotypes. Seeds of fruits have excellent antioxidant activity and phenolic contents in comparison to flesh and peel.
An operating environment for dynamic-recursive computer programming systems

Presented in this paper is a brief nontechnical introduction to OEDIPUS, a computer programming system which can serve as an operating environment for dynamic and/or recursive programs and programming systems. The available services include dynamic allocation of storage for contiguous blocks of arbitrary size, input and output for a hierarchy of data types, a public pushdown list for automatic recursive programming, a rudimentary compiler for subroutine communication and bookkeeping, and debugging aids.
Texting Among the Bottom of the Pyramid: Facilitators and Barriers to SMSs Use Among the Low-Income Mobile Users in Asia

This paper investigates the adoption and use behaviors of SMS at the BOP. It asks three research questions: (1) Who are the users and the non-users of SMS among the BOP mobile owners? (2) What are the barriers to SMS adoption? and finally, (3) What are the factors driving SMS use at the BOP? Based on the multi-country survey data from LIRNEasia Teleuse@BOP project in 2011, this paper presents two sets of analyses: first, a descriptive analysis is used to explore the user and non-user characteristics and their usage patterns. The paper then presents the second analysis using structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the SMS user’s perceptions and decision-making process of SMS use. Based on its findings, the paper attempts to provide theoretically grounded empirical evidence on mobile use behaviors among the BOP, as well as drawing practical implications for the Information Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) practitioners providing SMS-based development services in the region.
Estimating Spatial and Temporal Components of Variation for Fisheries Count Data Using Negative Binomial Mixed Models

Abstract Partitioning total variability into its component temporal and spatial sources is a powerful way to better understand time series and elucidate trends. The data available for such analyses of fish and other populations are usually nonnegative integer counts of the number of organisms, often dominated by many low values with few observations of relatively high abundance. These characteristics are not well approximated by the Gaussian distribution. We present a detailed description of a negative binomial mixed-model framework that can be used to model count data and quantify temporal and spatial variability. We applied these models to data from four fishery-independent surveys of Walleyes Sander vitreus across the Great Lakes basin. Specifically, we fitted models to gill-net catches from Wisconsin waters of Lake Superior; Oneida Lake, New York; Saginaw Bay in Lake Huron, Michigan; and Ohio waters of Lake Erie. These long-term monitoring surveys varied in overall sampling intensity, the total catch .
Concept and Implementation of a Collaborative Workspace for Augmented Reality

In this paper we present Studierstube Workspace, an application framework which supports multiple users, multiple applications and multiple 3D and 2D interaction contexts in an augmented environment. We develop a design concept for collaborative working environments in virtual reality, especially the concept of multi-user aware applications and show how our implementation fits into this concept. Implementation details and application samples conclude the paper.
MEASURING ERP SYSTEM SUCCESS: A RESPECIFICATION OF THE DELONE AND MCLEAN'S IS SUCCESS MODEL

The implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system has grown rapidly world-wide in recent years. According to AMR Research, the globalization and centralization, and the performance management as the key drivers for continue ERP investment among the large corporations and small companies. Therefore measuring ERP systems success has been an important criterion for adopting organization. This paper presents a re-specification to DeLone and McLean’s IS success Model and empirically examines it in ERP context. A conceptual model was proposed by the comprehensive review of IS success literature that attempted to evaluate the ERP system success. Four dependent valuables (system quality, information quality, vendor/consultant’s quality, and perceived ERP benefits) were used in evaluating ERP system success. This conceptual model and relationships will be tested and validated using data gathering from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia. The result provides an expanded understanding of factors that measure ERP system success and suggest a ways to improve the ERP system usage. Keywords— ERP system success, Delone and McLean, SMEs in Malaysia
Analysis, conversion and visualization of discrete simulation results

This paper presents a methodology to create 3D visualization of discrete event simulation. This methodology connects discrete event simulation directly to 3D animation with its novel methods of analyzing and converting discrete simulation results into animation events to trigger 3D animation. Discrete simulation results are analyzed and displayed in a graph structure that reveals all possible sequences of simulation events. In addition, a 3D animation framework is constructed for the visualization of discrete simulation results. This framework supports the reuse of both the existing 3D animation objects and behavior components, and allows the rapid development of new 3D animation objects by users with no special knowledge in computer graphics. This methodology has been implemented with the software component technology. Results in an electronics assembly factory are also provided in the paper to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.
Analysis of Near-Carrier Phase-Noise Spectrum in Free-Running Oscillators in the Presence of White and Colored Noise Sources

This paper presents the stochastic characterization of the phase-noise spectrum of free-running oscillators in the envelope domain. The flicker-noise sources are modeled as an infinite summation of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. Inputs of the formulation are parameters extracted with harmonic balance (HB) by means of the carrier-modulation approach. These parameters can be easily identified with commercial software packages without user access to the Jacobian matrix of the HB system. The presented envelope-domain formulation significantly reduces the complexity of the stochastic analysis in comparison with time-domain techniques. The phase-noise spectrum depends on the measurement time interval, instead of estimated cutoff frequencies for the colored noise sources. With the new formulation it has been possible to investigate the influence of the measurement time interval on the near-carrier phase-noise spectrum. The formulation will show that provided the measurement time fulfills some nonstrict mathematical conditions, typically accomplished in any practical measurement, the full phase-noise spectrum will be nearly the same, whatever the measurement time interval. Analytical expressions are provided for the full phase-noise spectrum. All the obtained expressions have been exhaustively validated by means of Monte Carlo simulations. In order to verify the generality of the results, the analysis method has been applied to various oscillator configurations. The simulated and measured phase-noise spectra have been compared, obtaining very good agreement in all cases.
Welfare and performance in layers following temporary exclusion from the litter area on introduction to the layer facility.

When introduced to the laying facility, pullets are sometimes temporarily excluded from the litter area in order to help them locate food and water, and to prevent floor-laid eggs. This procedure is not permitted in Sweden, because it involves denying access to both litter and space, which may have a negative effect on bird welfare. The present study investigated how the welfare and performance of layers were affected by this temporary exclusion on introduction of hens to the laying facility. The study included 600 floor-reared Dekalb White layers obtained at 16 wk age and housed in 6 groups of 100 in a conventional single-tier floor-laying system. Birds were either given full access to the litter area during the whole study or were excluded from the litter area during the first 2 wk after transfer to the laying facility. From 18 to 72 wk age, birds in both treatments had full access to the litter area. Excluding birds from the litter area for 2 wk resulted in better feather cover and reduced fearfulness, according to novel object and tonic immobility tests. Furthermore, birds initially excluded from the litter area produced eggs with a lower proportion of shell irregularities than birds with full access to the litter area throughout. No difference was found in corticosterone metabolites in droppings rate of lay, mortality, or proportion of floor-laid eggs. In conclusion, none of the parameters studied indicated that the welfare of laying hens was compromised by temporary exclusion from the litter area on introduction to the laying facility. In fact, some of the data suggested that bird welfare had improved.
Emotional Reinforcement Learning for Portfolio Selection

Reinforcement learning algorithm has been successfully used in prediction and decision making [5,11]. The main contribution of this paper is to provide decision making using reinforcement learning approach to allocate resources optimally in stochastic conditions in a well known example; in the portfolio selection. The modern theories of portfolio selection consider some presumptions. But if they don’t hold, these methods are no longer efficient. So these days, some papers have been written by using the artificial intelligent methods. In this paper, appropriate emotional reinforcement signal is composed for portfolio selection. For this purpose, the reward signal is taken as the output of a linguistic fuzzy inference system with the return of portfolio and the risk of portfolio as inputs, then we implement the Q-learning neural network and we train this network with the proposed reward signal.
OverSim: A scalable and flexible overlay framework for simulation and real network applications

OverSim facilitates rapid prototyping of new overlay protocols by providing functions common to most overlay protocols. The framework allows to use the same implementations for scalable simulations and in real networks. OverSim benefits from features like an efficient event scheduler and strong GUI support. The large number of implemented overlay protocols and the availability to collect various statistical data make OverSim a powerful tool and reference platform for the peer-to-peer research community. OverSim is welldocumented, actively developed as an open source project on http://www.oversim. org/, has an active mailing list with a strong user base and is open to contributions.
Dynamic Reconfigurable Testing of Service-Oriented Architecture

SOA (service-oriented architecture) presents unique requirements and challenges for testing. Dynamic reconfiguration in SOA software means that testing need to be adaptive to the changes of the service-oriented applications at runtime. This paper presents a ConfigTest approach to enable the online change of test organization, test scheduling, test deployment, test case binding, and service binding. ConfigTest is based on our previous research on the MAST (multi-agents-based service testing) framework. It extends MAST with a new test broker architecture, configuration management and event-based subscription/notification mechanism. The test broker decouples test case definition from its implementation and usage. It also decouples the testing system from the services under test. With the configuration management, ConfigTest allows the test agents to bind dynamically to each other and build up their collaborations at runtime. The event mechanism enables that a change in one test artifact can be notified to all the others which subscribe their interests to the change event. This paper presents and analyzes the collaboration diagrams of various testing reconfiguration scenarios and illustrates the ConfigTest approach with an example of service-based book ordering system.
Learning from erroneous models using SCYDynamics

Dynamic phenomena are common in science education. Students can learn about such system dynamic processes through model based learning activities. This paper describes a study on the effects of a learning from erroneous models approach using the learning environment SCYDynamics. The study compared three conditions. Two experimental conditions where students had to correct errors in a model were contrasted to working with a correct model. The experimental conditions differed on whether or not the students had to detect the errors before correcting them. Results indicate that this approach enhanced students’ model testing and revising activities. Furthermore this approach was found to have a beneficial effect on learning common errors. Contrary to expectations this approach showed no learning effect on domain knowledge acquisition. The discussion further elaborates on improvements that might enhance this learning from erroneous model approach
Generalized ordering constraints for multilabel optimization

We propose a novel framework for imposing label ordering constraints in multilabel optimization. In particular, label jumps can be penalized differently depending on the jump direction. In contrast to the recently proposed MRF-based approaches, the proposed method arises from the viewpoint of spatially continuous optimization. It unifies and generalizes previous approaches to label ordering constraints: Firstly, it provides a common solution to three different problems which are otherwise solved by three separate approaches [4, 10, 14]. We provide an exact characterization of the penalization functions expressible with our approach. Secondly, we show that it naturally extends to three and higher dimensions of the image domain. Thirdly, it allows novel applications, such as the convex shape prior. Despite this generality, our model is easily adjustable to various label layouts and is also easy to implement. On a number of experiments we show that it works quite well, producing solutions comparable and superior to those obtained with previous approaches.
Logo retrieval with a contrario visual query expansion

This paper presents a new content-based retrieval framework applied to logo retrieval in large natural image collections. The first contribution is a new challenging dataset, called BelgaLogos, which was created in collaboration with professionals of a press agency, in order to evaluate logo retrieval technologies in real-world scenarios. The second and main contribution is a new visual query expansion method using an a contrario thresholding strategy in order to improve the accuracy of expanded query images. Whereas previous methods based on the same paradigm used a purely hand tuned fixed threshold, we provide a fully adaptive method enhancing both genericity and effectiveness. This new technique is evaluated on both OxfordBuilding dataset and our new BelgaLogos dataset.
Use of the MULTINEST algorithm for gravitational wave data analysis

We describe an application of the MULTINEST algorithm to gravitational wave data analysis. MULTINEST is a multimodal nested sampling algorithm designed to efficiently evaluate the Bayesian evidence and return posterior probability densities for likelihood surfaces containing multiple secondary modes. The algorithm employs a set of ‘live’ points which are updated by partitioning the set into multiple overlapping ellipsoids and sampling uniformly from within them. This set of ‘live’ points climbs up the likelihood surface through nested iso-likelihood contours and the evidence and posterior distributions can be recovered from the point set evolution. The algorithm is model independent in the sense that the specific problem being tackled enters only through the likelihood computation, and does not change how the ‘live’ point set is updated. In this paper, we consider the use of the algorithm for gravitational wave data analysis by searching a simulated LISA data set containing two non-spinning supermassive black hole binary signals. The algorithm is able to rapidly identify all the modes of the solution and recover the true parameters of the sources to high precision.
University of Birmingham Development and feasibility testing of a smart phone based attentive eating intervention

Background: Attentive eating means eating devoid of distraction and increasing awareness and memory for food being consumed. Encouraging individuals to eat more attentively could help reduce calorie intake, as a strong evidence base suggests that memory and awareness of food being consumed substantially influence energy intake. Methods: The development and feasibility testing of a smartphone based attentive eating intervention is reported. Informed by models of behavioral change, a smartphone application was developed. Feasibility was tested in twelve overweight and obese volunteers, sampled from university staff. Participants used the application during a four week trial and semi-structured interviews were conducted to assess acceptability and to identify barriers to usage. We also recorded adherence by downloading application usage data from participants ’ phones at the end of the trial. Results: Adherence data indicated that participants used the application regularly. Participants also felt the application was easy to use and lost weight during the trial. Thematic analysis indicated that participants felt that the application raised their awareness of what they were eating. Analysis also indicated barriers to using a smartphone application to change dietary behavior. Conclusions: An attentive eating based intervention using smartphone technology is feasible and testing of its effectiveness for dietary change and weight loss is warranted.
Unique Organizational and Functional Features of the Cytochrome c Maturation System in Shewanella oneidensis

Shewanella are renowned for their ability to respire on a wide range of electron acceptors, which has been partially accredited to the presence of a large number of the c-type cytochromes. In the model species S. oneidensis MR-1, at least 41 genes encode c-type cytochromes that are predicted to be intact, thereby likely functional. Previously, in-frame deletion mutants for 36 of these genes were obtained and characterized. In this study, first we completed the construction of an entire set of c-type cytochrome mutants utilizing a newly developed att-based mutagenesis approach, which is more effective and efficient than the approach used previously by circumventing the conventional cloning. Second, we investigated the cytochrome c maturation (Ccm) system in S. oneidensis. There are two loci predicted to encode components of the Ccm system, SO0259-SO0269 and SO0476-SO0478. The former is proven essential for cytochrome c maturation whereas the latter is dispensable. Unlike the single operon organization observed in other γ-proteobacteria, genes at the SO0259-SO0269 locus are uniquely organized into four operons, ccmABCDE, scyA, SO0265, and ccmFGH-SO0269. Functional analysis revealed that the SO0265 gene rather than the scyA and SO0269 genes are relevant to cytochrome c maturation.
Stéréo multi-vues : erreur de reprojection et maillages triangulaires

Cet article propose une methode variationnelle basee sur les maillages pour la reconstruction 3D de scenes (forme et radiance) a partir de plusieurs images. Notre methode est basee sur les modeles generatifs et minimise l'erreur de reprojection (difference entre une image observee et une image obtenue a partir de la reconstruction) par une descente de gradient. Pour la premiere fois, nous calculons le gradient de l'erreur de reprojection pour des surfaces non lisses representees de maniere discrete par des maillages triangules. Le gradient prend correctement en compte les changements de visibilite qui apparaissent lorsque la surface bouge durant l'evolution ; cela force les contours occultants generes par la surface a correspondre parfaitement aux contours apparents dans les images observees. Notre methode est capable de retrouver la forme et la radiance de diverses scenes.
Monetary policy transmission mechanism in Saudi Arabia

In most emerging economies, the exchange rate still plays a greater role in the monetary transmission mechanism than interest rates. This is partly because domestic banking systems are less developed, and partly because a full range of monetary instruments is not available. The exchange rate is part of the transmission mechanism in two ways. First, it affects aggregate demand through net exports; and second, it affects inflation directly through the pass-through effect, although the pass-through is having less of an impact in a globalised economy, where competition is keeping prices well contained.
Differential Modulation of Excitatory and Inhibitory Neurons during Periodic Stimulation

Non-invasive transcranial neuronal stimulation, in addition to deep brain stimulation, is seen as a promising therapeutic and diagnostic approach for an increasing number of neurological diseases such as epilepsy, cluster headaches, depression, specific type of blindness, and other central nervous system disfunctions. Improving its effectiveness and widening its range of use may strongly rely on development of proper stimulation protocols that are tailored to specific brain circuits and that are based on a deep knowledge of different neuron types response to stimulation. To this aim, we have performed a simulation study on the behavior of excitatory and inhibitory neurons subject to sinusoidal stimulation. Due to the intrinsic difference in membrane conductance properties of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, we show that their firing is differentially modulated by the wave parameters. We analyzed the behavior of the two neuronal types for a broad range of stimulus frequency and amplitude and demonstrated that, within a small-world network prototype, parameters tuning allow for a selective enhancement or suppression of the excitation/inhibition ratio.
Social Networking by Proxy: Analysis of Dogster, Catster and Hamsterster

Online pet social networks provide a unique opportunity to study an online social network in which a single user manages multiple user profiles, i.e. one for each pet they own. These types of multi-profile networks allow us to investigate two questions: (1) What is the relationship between the pet-level and human-level network, and (2) what is the relationship between friendship links and family ties? Concretely, we study the online pet social networks Catster, Dogster and Hamsterster, and show how the networks on the two levels interact, and perform experiments to find out whether knowledge about friendships on a profile-level alone can be used to predict which users are behind which profile.