Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Critical Perspectives on Television from the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism

Paul Lazarsfeld (1942), one of the originators of modern communications studies, distinguished between what he called a "administrative research," that deployed empirical research for the goals of corporate and state institutions, and " critical research, " that he associated with the Frankfurt School. Critical research situates the media within the broader context of social life and interrogates its structure, goals, values, messages, and effects. It develops critical perspectives by which media are evaluated and appraised. Since the 1940s, an impressive variety of critical approaches to the media and television have developed. In this study, I will first present the Frankfurt School as an inaugurator of critical approaches to television studies and will then discuss how a wide range of theorists addressed what later became known as the politics of representation in critical television studies, engaging problematics of class, gender, race, sexuality, and other central components of media representation and social life. Then, I discuss how a postmodern turn in cultural studies contested earlier critical models and provided alternative approaches to television studies. I conclude with some comments that argue for a critical approach to television and media culture and in this text sketch out a comprehensive critical model that embraces production and political economy of television; textual analysis; and investigation of the effects and uses of television by audiences. As this study will indicate, such a multidimensional approach to critical media and television studies is found initially in the Frankfurt School and was developed by many other television theorists in diverse locations and from often conflicting perspectives, ranging from British cultural studies to critical feminism. The Frankfurt School and the Culture Industries From the classical Frankfurt School perspective, commercial television is a form of what Horkheimer and Adorno and their colleagues called "culture industry. " Moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the Frankfurt School experienced at first hand the rise of a media culture involving film, popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass culture. 1 In the United States, where they found themselves in exile, media production was by and large a form of commercial entertainment controlled by big corporations. Thus, the Frankfurt School coined the term "culture industries" to call attention to the industrialization and commercialization of culture under capitalist relations of production. This situation was most marked in the United States that had little state support of film or television industries. To a large extent, …
A Calculus for Reactive

Traditionally, interaction with a database is performed by a query on the current state of the database. Such queries are typically independent of one other; in fact, they are modelled as isolated transactions thus necessitating concurrency control. Increasingly, applications live and operate over updates to the database, and which interact with one another explicitly. Further, the database itself needs to be more than just a repository of facts, but be a knowledge base. In this paper, we present an abstract framework, in the form of a formal calculus. Its purpose is to capture, in a minimal and declarative way, an operational model which combines concurrent programming with databases. The key concepts are: sustained truth, for consistency and synchronization; hidden publication, for atomicity and timely updates; sudden-death, for making delayed committed-choice actions. In the end, our calculus forms the foundation of a programming system for writing reactors which are program fragments expressing the database interactions to be embedded within arbitrary agent programs. The basic constructs of reactors provide the ability to react to changes, synchronize with other agents, and perform updates, all within a speciiable degree of atomicity and transactional behavior akin to that in traditional databases.
Detection of Brain Tumors from MRI using Gaussian RBF kernel based Support Vector Machine

The Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a powerful classification technique that has been used extensively in the field of medical imaging. A model based on SVM with Gaussian RBF kernel is proposed here for the automatic detection of brain tumor from MRI images. Various textural characteristics of the MRI images of human brain are extracted to construct a feature set. These features sets are then used to train the classifier. The results obtained are compared with another powerful efficient classifier AdaBoost. AdaBoost classifies data according to the law of majority vote by base classifiers (ensemble learning). The comparative results show that though the difference between the performance measures is marginal, SVM gives higher precision and low error rates.
Energy Expenditure During Cane-Assisted Gait in Patients with Knee Osteoarthritis

OBJECTIVE To compare the energy expenditure in patients with unilateral knee osteoarthritis while walking with canes of different lengths. METHODS A quasi-experimental study (single-group) was carried out on thirty patients with unilateral knee osteoarthritis. An adjustable aluminum cane was used, and three different cane lengths were determined for each subject: C1 – length from the floor to the greater trochanter; C2 – length from the floor to the distal wrist crease; and C3 – length obtained by the formula: height x 0.45 + 0.87 m. Resting and walking heart rates were measured with a Polar hear rate meter. Walking speed was calculated by the time required for the patient to walk 10 m. Gait energy cost was estimated using the physiological cost index, and results were compared. RESULTS The sample consisted of 25 women and five men (average age of 68 years). Statistically significant differences in physiological cost index measurements were observed between unassisted walking and assisted walking with a cane of any length (p<0.001), as well as between walking with a C2-length cane and unassisted walking, and walking with a C1-length cane and walking with a C3-length cane (p=0.001; p = 0.037; p=0.001; respectively). CONCLUSION These data demonstrate that small alterations in the length of canes used for weight-bearing ambulation in patients with unilateral knee osteoarthritis increase the energy expenditure measured by the physiological cost index during walking. Further studies are needed for a more precise quantification of the increase in energy expenditure during cane-assisted gait and an assessment of the effectiveness of cane use in relieving pain and improving function in patients with knee osteoarthritis.
Mitigation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Threats

of Service (DoS) attacks is a kind of attacks against computers connected to the Internet. The goal of DoS attacks is to keep away authorized users from accessing resources. The infected computers may crash or disconnect from the Internet. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a continuous critical threat that has caused severe damage to servers and will cause even greater intimidation to the development of new Internet services. In the present scenario the mitigation of these attacks has most importance. There are a number of mitigation techniques have been proposed by various researchers. A Web Referral Architecture for Privileged Services (WRAPS) proposed by the authors (8), that can mitigate the DDoS attack that plague website today. It allows a legitimate client to obtain a privileged URL by a referral hyperlink, from a website trusted by the target website. There are several limitations are present in this architecture. WRAPS support only clients that use fixed IP address, instead of as domain names it encodes privileged URLs as IP addresses. If the users want privileged services, then they must access the target site through privileged URL. That means the domain name of server not resolved via DNS and the users must save their privileged URL from the server when it is updated at the end of a privileged period, thus WRAPS not transparent to users.
Extracting structure from HTML documents for language visualization and analysis

Document analysis is shifting from document image analysis to the analysis of electronic documents, especially those available on the Web in HTML and PDF formats. We are analyzing a 250M word collection of HTML formatted papers from the American Society for Microbiology with the ultimate goal of doing query answering and information extraction. Each document is converted to a sequence of token-id items by an invertible process called Extreme Tokenization. A lexicon is constructed with attributes including: token string, tag, capitalized, etc. A number of structures are identified, including section titles, figure captions, document navigation tables and most importantly, running text blocks. An XML descriptive structure is built using JAXB 1.0. Sentence boundaries are discovered. Language framework patterns are visualized in a custom Framework Viewer to identify important patterns of expression for further analysis. This work complements our diagram analysis research (ICDAR03).
Adaptive Windows for Duplicate Detection

Duplicate detection is the task of identifying all groups of records within a data set that represent the same real-world entity, respectively. This task is difficult, because (i) representations might differ slightly, so some similarity measure must be defined to compare pairs of records and (ii) data sets might have a high volume making a pair-wise comparison of all records infeasible. To tackle the second problem, many algorithms have been suggested that partition the data set and compare all record pairs only within each partition. One well-known such approach is the Sorted Neighborhood Method (SNM), which sorts the data according to some key and then advances a window over the data comparing only records that appear within the same window. We propose with the Duplicate Count Strategy (DCS) a variation of SNM that uses a varying window size. It is based on the intuition that there might be regions of high similarity suggesting a larger window size and regions of lower similarity suggesting a smaller window size. Next to the basic variant of DCS, we also propose and thoroughly evaluate a variant called DCS++ which is provably better than the original SNM in terms of efficiency (same results with fewer comparisons).
A rapid and dramatic outburst in Blazar 3C 454.3 during May 2005 - Optical and infrared observations with REM and AIT

The flat-spectrum radio quasar 3C454.3 is well known to be a highly active and variable source with outbursts occurring across the whole electromagnetic spectrum over the last decades. In spring 2005, 3C454.3 has been reported to exhibit a strong optical outburst which subsequently triggered multi-frequency observations of the source covering the radio up to γ-ray bands. Here, we present first results of our near-IR/optical (V, R, I, H band) photometry performed between May 11 and August 5, 2005 with the Rapid Eye Mount (REM) at La Silla in Chile and the Automatic Imaging Telescope (AIT) of the Perugia University Observatory. 3C454.3 was observed during an exceptional and historical high state with a subsequent decrease in brightness over our 86 days observing period. The continuum spectral behaviour during the flaring and declining phase suggests a synchrotron peak below the near-IR band as well as a geometrical origin of the variations e.g. due to changes in the direction of forward beaming.
How to be in a good shape? The influence of clone morphology on cell competition

ABSTRACT Cell competition is a conserved mechanism where slow proliferating cells (so called losers) are eliminated by faster proliferating neighbors (so called winners) through apoptosis.1 It is an important process which prevents developmental malformations and maintains tissue fitness in aging adults.2 Recently, we have shown that the probability of elimination of loser cells correlates with the surface of contact between losers and winners in Myc-induced competition.3 Moreover, we have characterized an active mechanism that increases the surface of contact between losers and winners, hence accelerating the elimination of loser cells. This is the first indication that cell shape and mechanics can influence cell competition. Here, we will discuss the consequence of the relationship between shape and competition, as well as the relevance of this model for other modes of competition.
Ray Tracing on a GPU with CUDA – Comparative Study of Three Algorithms

We present a comparative study of ray tracing algorithms implemented on a GPU for three published papers using different spatial data structures evaluated for performance on nine static scenes in walk-through animation. We compare the performance for uniform grids, bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs), and kd-trees evaluated on a GPU for ray casting and Whitted-style ray tracing. We show that performance of ray tracing with BVHs exceeds the performance of ray tracing with kd-trees for coherent rays. Contrary, the ray tracing with kd-trees is faster than that with BVHs for incoherent rays. The performance of ray tracing with uniform grids is slower than both ray tracing with BVHs and kd-trees except for uniformly populated scenes. We show that the performance is highly sensitive to details of implementation on kd-trees.
Experimental analysis of propagation properties implementing the path-based measurement

In this paper, we will show the experimental analysis of network load propagation properties of Internet paths using our IP performance active measurement method. This method sends ICMP T1MESTAMP messages and receives reply messages to and from each node along the path. After collecting and analyzing the delay fluctuations and loss occurrences, we extracted following results. First, delays are classified two types, burst-type delays and cyclic delays. Second, burst-type delays caused by loads on intermediate routers were propagated to each node throughout the path. Third, cyclic delays were peculiar to each node and had time intervals of 30 or 60 seconds. Fourth, forward trip time included cyclic delays and backward trip time included burst-type delays. Finally, scattered losses occurred along paths through one of the providers.
Positive steady state in multi-species models of real food webs

Real food web data available in the literature presents us with the relations between various species, sizes of these species, metabolic types of the species and other useful information, which allows us to define parameters for the mathematical dynamical models of these food webs, and perform theoretical studies of these models. Unfortunately, the researches often face the problem of the extinction of the species in such situations, which could be an important limiting factor. In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm of parameterisation that leads to the existence of positive steady state and improves persistence of the species in multi-species models of real food webs.
Temporal Analysis of the Wikigraph

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, available in more than 100 languages and comprising over 1 million articles in its English version. If we consider each Wikipedia article as a node and each hyperlink between articles as an arc we have a "Wikigraph", a graph that represents the link structure of Wikipedia. The Wikigraph differs from other Web graphs studied in the literature by the fact that there are explicit timestamps associated with each node's events. This allows us to do a detailed analysis of the Wikipedia evolution over time. In the first part of this study we characterize this evolution in terms of users, editions and articles; in the second part, we depict the temporal evolution of several topological properties of the Wikigraph. The insights obtained from the Wikigraphs can be applied to large Web graphs from which the temporal data is usually not available
Cosmological analogues of the Bartnik-McKinnon solutions.

We present a numerical classification of the spherically symmetric, static solutions to the Einstein-Yang-Mills equations with a cosmological constant $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$. We find three qualitatively different classes of configurations, where the solutions in each class are characterized by the value of $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ and the number of nodes, $n$, of the Yang-Mills amplitude. For sufficiently small, positive values of the cosmological constant, $\ensuremath{\Lambda}l{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{\mathrm{crit}}(n)$, the solutions generalize the Bartnik-McKinnon solitons, which are now surrounded by a cosmological horizon and approach the de Sitter geometry in the asymptotic region. For a discrete set of values ${\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{\mathrm{reg}}(n)g{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{\mathrm{crit}}(n)$, the solutions are topologically three-spheres, the ground state ($n=1$) being the Einstein universe. In the intermediate region, that is, for ${\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{\mathrm{crit}}(n)l\ensuremath{\Lambda}l{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{\mathrm{reg}}(n)$, there exists a discrete family of global solutions with an horizon and "finite size. "
Phase I Evaluation of the Safety and Pharmacokinetics of Murine-Derived Anticryptococcal Antibody 18B7 in Subjects with Treated Cryptococcal Meningitis

ABSTRACT A promising approach to improving outcomes in patients with cryptococcal meningitis is to use adjunctive passive immunotherapy with a monoclonal antibody (MAb) directed against the capsular polysaccharide of Cryptococcus neoformans. This is the first application of MAb therapy for the treatment of a fungal disease in humans. We determined the safety and maximum tolerated dose of the murine anticryptococcal MAb 18B7 in a phase I dose-escalation study. The subjects were human immunodeficiency virus-infected patients who had been successfully treated for cryptococcal meningitis. Six dosing cohorts received MAb 18B7 at 0.01 to 2 mg/kg of body weight as a single infusion. Three patients each received 0.01, 0.05, 0.2, and 0.5 mg of MAb 18B7 per kg without significant adverse events. Four of the subjects who received the 1-mg/kg dose had mild study drug-associated toxicity, including transient nausea, vomiting, back pain, and urticarial rash. Two of the subjects who received 2 mg/kg developed drug-associated mild to moderate nausea, vomiting, chills, and myalgias. One of the subjects who received 2 mg/kg developed intracranial hypertension 10 weeks after MAb 18B7 administration. Serum cryptococcal antigen titers in the cohorts receiving doses of 1 and 2 mg/kg declined by a median of twofold at 1 week and a median of threefold at 2 weeks postinfusion, but the titers subsequently returned toward the baseline values by week 12. The half-life of MAb 18B7 in serum was approximately 53 h, while the MAb was undetectable in the cerebrospinal fluid of all patients. These data support the continued investigation of MAb 18B7 at a maximum single dose of 1.0 mg/kg.
Software reliability qualitative evaluation method based on Bayesian networks

The correlative and uncertain relationship between software metrics and software reliability was analyzed. An approach for software reliability qualitative evaluation by using Bayesian networks was proposed. The rationale and process of this method were described in detail. The software reliability evaluation results were obtained by the causality reasoning. The proposed approach has been implemented in a case study. The experimental results constructed by the application process, key step and computational solution, showed that the approach was effective and could combine the expert experience, history data and various kinds of uncertain information to improve the modeling efficiency and validity, and provided a new method for software reliability evaluation.
Vendor Performance Measurement Using Fuzzy Logic Controller

era of globalization has begun and organizations endeavor to increase their market share in the competitive environment. To achieve the mentioned goal, organizations should increase their effectiveness as a major strategy in order to improve their performance. Performance measurement as a managerial key can be used for monitoring activities in organizations. Vendors' selection is one of the issues which influence the efficiency of organizations. Therefore, performance measurement of vendors plays a vital role in firms. Many conceptual and analytical models have been developed for addressing vendor selection problems. Hence, a suitable approach is needed to consider all the factors in order to select the most efficient vendor. In this paper, fuzzy logic controller as a robust and easy understanding approach is applied to transform the quantitative variable to linguistic terms in order to measure the vendors' performance. Four criteria which can influence vendors' performance are considered. The criteria are service quality, price, lateness deliveries and rate of rejected parts.
Rapid Command Selection on Multi-Touch Tablets with Single-Handed HandMark Menus

Fast command selection is important for touch devices, but there are few techniques that allow accelerated selection while still providing a large command set. HandMark menus [25] propose the use of the hands as landmarks for fast memory-based selection. However, the original HandMark menus rely on bimanual operation, and earlier studies provided only limited evidence for the value of hand-based landmarks as a reference frame for spatial memory. In this paper we address these limitations. We introduce adapted HandMark menus that can be operated with one hand (while the other hand holds the tablet); the new version changes bimanual selection operations into sequential actions with one hand. We carried out three studies of these HandMark menus. The first study showed that the adapted menus still allowed fast performance and the development of spatial memory, even with one-handed use. The second study focused on the value of hands as landmarks, by comparing HandMark menus against a hidden popup menu. This study showed that using the hand as a reference frame significantly improved performance, and was strongly preferred by participants. Our work extends HandMark menus and shows that they are an effective selection method for tablets, and provides new evidence about the value of the hands as a spatial landmark for interaction.
Notch and Prospero Repress Proliferation following Cyclin E Overexpression in the Drosophila Bristle Lineage

Understanding the mechanisms that coordinate cell proliferation, cell cycle arrest, and cell differentiation is essential to address the problem of how “normal” versus pathological developmental processes take place. In the bristle lineage of the adult fly, we have tested the capacity of post-mitotic cells to re-enter the cell cycle in response to the overexpression of cyclin E. We show that only terminal cells in which the identity is independent of Notch pathway undergo extra divisions after CycE overexpression. Our analysis shows that the responsiveness of cells to forced proliferation depends on both Prospero, a fate determinant, and on the level of Notch pathway activity. Our results demonstrate that the terminal quiescent state and differentiation are regulated by two parallel mechanisms acting simultaneously on fate acquisition and cell cycle progression.