Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Show Me the Money: Characterizing Spam-advertised Revenue

Modern spam is ultimately driven by product sales: goods purchased by customers online. However, while this model is easy to state in the abstract, our understanding of the concrete business environment--how many orders, of what kind, from which customers, for how much--is poor at best. This situation is unsurprising since such sellers typically operate under questionable legal footing, with "ground truth" data rarely available to the public. However, absent quantifiable empirical data, "guesstimates" operate unchecked and can distort both policy making and our choice of appropriate interventions. In this paper, we describe two inference techniques for peering inside the business operations of spam-advertised enterprises: purchase pair and basket inference. Using these, we provide informed estimates on order volumes, product sales distribution, customer makeup and total revenues for a range of spam-advertised programs.
A PDF Based Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation Algorithm Using Last Recent Polling Table

Bandwidth allocation is very critical issue in the passive optical networks. An efficient bandwidth allocation algorithm can significantly improve the network performance by assuring the network availability to all the ONU’s in the network. In this paper we proposed a efficient PDF based DBA algorithm which uses the last recent polling table for the current allocation of the bandwidth among the ONU’s dynamically. This scheme early allocates bandwidth the bandwidth to the ONU’s requesting bandwidth lower than minimum guaranteed bandwidth and ONU’s demanding bandwidth greater than minimum guaranteed whose PDF in the last polling table is greater than threshold value. It allocates excess bandwidth of lightly loaded ONU’s to the heavily loaded ONU’s. This algorithm uses the early assignment concept thus incorporates the idle period. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the network performance in terms of packet delay, queue length, and bandwidth utilization under high traffic load as compared with a well-known DBA algorithm in the literature.
Spatial Organization in the Free Recall of Pictorial Stimuli

Thirty-one young adults were presented with a series of visual arrays each containing drawings of objects. Free recall of the objects on each visual array could be organized by the spatial location of the objects or by another type of organization. The other type of organization was different on each array and comprised semantic, shape, colour, size, orientation or phonetic categories. The results showed that free recall could be organized by spatial location or by semantic, shape, colour or size categories. However, only semantic and colour category organization were found to correlate significantly with recall. To account for the correlation results, two distinct general forms of organization are hypothesized.
Adaptive Control for Nonlinear Pure-Feedback Systems With High-Order Sliding Mode Observer

Most of the available control schemes for pure-feedback systems are derived based on the backstepping technique. On the contrary, this paper presents a novel adaptive control design for nonlinear pure-feedback systems without using backstepping. By introducing a set of alternative state variables and the corresponding transform, state-feedback control of the pure-feedback system can be viewed as output-feedback control of a canonical system. Consequently, backstepping is not necessary and the previously encountered explosion of complexity and circular issue are also circumvented. To estimate unknown states of the newly derived canonical system, a high-order sliding mode observer is adopted, for which finite-time observer error convergence is guaranteed. Two adaptive neural controllers are then proposed to achieve tracking control. In the first scheme, a robust term is introduced to account for the neural approximation error. In the second scheme, a novel neural network with only a scalar weight updated online is constructed to further reduce the computational costs. The closed-loop stability and the convergence of the tracking error to a small compact set around zero are all proved. Comparative simulation and practical experiments on a servo motor system are included to verify the reliability and effectiveness.
Levosimendan enhances force generation of diaphragm muscle from patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

RATIONALE Levosimendan is clinically used to improve myocardial contractility by enhancing calcium sensitivity of force generation. The effects of levosimendan on skeletal muscle contractility are unknown. Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) suffer from diaphragm weakness, which is associated with decreased calcium sensitivity. OBJECTIVES To investigate the effects of levosimendan on contractility of diaphragm fibers from patients with COPD. METHODS Muscle fibers were isolated from diaphragm biopsies obtained from thoracotomized patients with and without COPD (both groups n = 5, 10 fibers per patient). Diaphragm fibers were skinned and activated with solutions containing incremental calcium concentrations and 10 microM levosimendan or vehicle (0.02% dimethyl sulfoxide). Developed force was measured at each step and force versus calcium concentration relationships were derived. Results were grouped per myosin heavy chain isoform, which was determined by sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS At sub-maximal activation levosimendan improved force generation of COPD and non-COPD diaphragm fibers by approximately 25%, both in slow and fast fibers. Levosimendan increased calcium sensitivity of force generation (P < 0.01) in both slow and fast diaphragm fibers from patients with and without COPD, without affecting maximal force generation. CONCLUSIONS Levosimendan enhances force generating capacity of diaphragm fibers from patients with and without COPD patients by increasing calcium sensitivity of force generation. These results provide a strong rationale for testing the effect of calcium sensitizers on respiratory muscle dysfunction in patients with COPD.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Hope Theory Weathers Its First Decade

We appreciate the opportunity to discuss the current state of hope theory with so many of our renowned colleagues. It is a luxury to have nine experts comment on hope theory. It allows those of us in the Hope Research Group to examine carefully the theory that we have developed and tested over the last decade. To facilitate our responding to the commentators, we have grouped their various points together, and take up each of these issues separately.
Surviving Corporate Moves: Sources of Stress and Adaption among Corporate Executive Families.

Employment transfers and the visible impact of geographic dislocation have been identified as prevalent aspects of our society. According to the U.S. Census Bureau nearly 40 million Americans, or one out of five, moved every year during the early 1970's. More than one-half of these individuals, or 22 million people, made moves that were job related. It has been estimated that the average person entering the job market today can expect to move 13 times and to change jobs seven times during his career (Gaylord, 1979). Bane (1976) has observed that mobility is not evenly distributed among the entire population. It is the young, upwardly mobile executive who moves most frequently. Packard (1972) concludes that employee transfers contribute heavily to the breakup of upwardly mobile families, the increased isolation of individuals, and disrupt the natural continuity of life. Defenders of employee transfers state that the negative impact of moving is vastly overrated and insist that transfers usually are beneficial to
Multiscale orientation estimation of perceptual boundaries

The dominant orientation at any point, P, in an image is the direction from P in which there is the least gray-level variance. It is often defined by using gradient estimates, but may be extended to employ neighbourhood operators that provide some degree of phase invariance. However, the approach to estimating the dominant orientation at P depends on the scale or size of the (usually) non-trivial neighbourhood being considered. Multiscale PCA-based orientation estimation techniques involve computationally-heavy solving of eigensystems at each scale and location. In contrast, we propose two methods which use a measure of anisotropy to select or weight orientations respectively at different scales in order to provide a single estimate of orientation at any given point. This is believed to be closer to human perception of contour direction. Results are presented for two simple orientation estimation techniques against comparisons with multiscale PCA estimation for human perceptual boundaries.
Relevance Feedback Fusion via Query Expansion

Relevance Feedback (RF) is an important technique to improve information retrieval and has emerged as one of the hottest topics for both the industry and academic researchers. The performance of RF depends on feedback information. As the volume of feedback information gradually increases, Explicit Relevance Feedback (ERF) is attractive. In this paper, we focus on the ERF in which Feedback information is given. With regards to the lack of information in ERF, we apply Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF) to enhance retrieval effectiveness. However, the instability of PRF can result in a negative impact on retrieval performance. We use feedback information to define features and propose a classification model to predict which query can benefit from PRF. Then, we form relevance feedback fusion by the prediction of PRF performance. This method is designed to exploit the strengths of PRF and ERF while avoiding some weaknesses of these approaches. Experiment results show that our approach is feasible and effective.
A haiku suite: the importance of music making in the lives of secondary school students

This study offers an arts-based a/r/tographic inquiry using poetic transcription and representation of interviews conducted with a co-educational group of 14 students in a West Vancouver, British Columbia secondary school rhythm and blues band class. The decision to translate and analyse the interview transcripts into the Japanese poetry form of haiku is rooted in research literature in education and other fields, primarily health and nursing studies. Those studies demonstrate the efficacy of the highly condensed haiku to transmit meaning in a synthesised and creative form. While music education has a body of scholarship on students’ attitudes towards music and their music education, this kind of research has generally been presented in more traditional ways. Our contention here is that arts-based topics are complemented and illuminated when investigated through arts-based methods. As well, arts-based methods such as a/r/tography, offer multiple and complex perspectives of what the data ‘means’, thereby offering a welcome harmony of topic and method. This paper captures the depth and intensity of emotions, engagement and transformative affects that adolescents experience through music making – music matters to young people.
Cosmological perturbation theory and the spherical collapse model - II. Non-Gaussian initial conditions

In Paper I of this series, we introduced the spherical collapse (SC) approximation in Lagrangian space as a way of estimating the cumulants ξJ of density fluctuations in cosmological perturbation theory (PT). Within this approximation, the dynamics is decoupled from the statistics of the initial conditions, so we are able to present here the cumulants for generic non-Gaussian initial conditions, which can be estimated to arbitrary order including the smoothing effects. The SC model turns out to recover the exact leading-order non-linear contributions up to terms involving non-local integrals of the J-point functions. We argue that for the hierarchical ratios SJ, these non-local terms are subdominant and tend to compensate each other. The resulting predictions show a non-trivial time evolution that can be used to discriminate between models of structure formation. We compare these analytic results with non-Gaussian N-body simulations, which turn out to be in very good agreement up to scales where σ ≲ 1.
Elucidation of Genetic Interactions in the Yeast GATA-Factor Network Using Bayesian Model Selection

Understanding the structure and function of complex gene regulatory networks using classical genetic assays is an error-prone procedure that frequently generates ambiguous outcomes. Even some of the best-characterized gene networks contain interactions whose validity is not conclusively proven. Founded on dynamic experimental data, mechanistic mathematical models are able to offer detailed insights that would otherwise require prohibitively large numbers of genetic experiments. Here we attempt mechanistic modeling of the transcriptional network formed by the four GATA-factor proteins, a well-studied system of central importance for nitrogen-source regulation of transcription in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. To resolve ambiguities in the network organization, we encoded a set of five interactions hypothesized in the literature into a set of 32 mathematical models, and employed Bayesian model selection to identify the most plausible set of interactions based on dynamic gene expression data. The top-ranking model was validated on newly generated GFP reporter dynamic data and was subsequently used to gain a better understanding of how yeast cells organize their transcriptional response to dynamic changes of nitrogen sources. Our work constitutes a necessary and important step towards obtaining a holistic view of the yeast nitrogen regulation mechanisms; on the computational side, it provides a demonstration of how powerful Monte Carlo techniques can be creatively combined and used to address the great challenges of large-scale dynamical system inference.
3D recovery with free hand camera motion

3D recovery from a set of images has been one of the main efforts in computer vision. In the last twenty years, a large number of approaches have been developed, which have been applied to different areas. In this work, a 3D recovery system for a rigid scene is proposed, based on the acquisition of an image sequence taken with a camera undergoing free motion. The sequence of images must have a set of features which are matched all along the sequence. The system does not require any knowledge about camera position or any previous model about the 3D scene, it is only required the camera calibration matrix. Once the feature set and the camera calibration matrix is known, the 3D recovery process can be done. First, based on the epipolar restriction for two views, an initial reconstruction with the first and the last view is calculated. After two view reconstruction, an improvement can be carried out with a factorization using some of the other views. Execution time depends on features number, the number of images and the position of the features in the images. In our tests, the average time execution was less than two minutes.
The type specimens of Bebryce (Cnidaria, Octocorallia, Plexauridae) re-examined, with emphasis on the sclerites.

Nineteen species of Bebryce are re-described and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of sclerites presented. For B. sulfurea Grasshoff, 2000, this is the first time SEM images of sclerites are presented. Two new species are described, Bebryce asteria n. sp. and B. cofferi n. sp. , and B. stellata Hentschel, 1903 is synonymized with B. studeri Whitelegge, 1897. Bebryce acanthoides Thomson & Russell, 1910 is referred to Discogorgia Kükenthal, 1919. The status of the original type material is discussed.
‘Nature’ in deep ecology and social ecology: Contesting the core

'Nature' is a core principle in ecological political thought, and if political ecology has contributed anything new to the discipline of political theory, then part of what that consists in is the placing of the 'human-nature relationship' at the centre of theoretical concern. This notwithstanding, ecological political thought, and its analysis, has tended to focus upon the 'ecocentric-anthropocentric divide', and the normative question on 'values in nature' to the extent that conceptual differences about the 'nature of nature' in ecological thought have been somewhat neglected. Here I explore differing decontestations of nature in deep ecology and social ecology, and assess their import for the different normative arguments each of these eco-variant ideologies makes for human action in the natural world. I show that these different decontestations of nature are crucial to this normative argument, and that this has important implications for the study of ecological political thought.
Teachers and Teaching: Testing Policy Hypotheses From a National Commission Report

—What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future W ith these words, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future summarized its challenge to the American public in September 1996. Following two years of intense study and discussion, the commission concluded that the reform of elementary and secondary education depends first and foremost on investments in teaching aimed at (1) increasing teachers' access to knowledge to meet the demands they face and (2) redesigning schools so they can better support serious teaching and learning. Since that time, the report and the commission's subsequent work have stimulated dozens of pieces of federal and state legislation, more than 1,200 news articles and editorials nationally and abroad, and at least two major federally funded research and development initiatives—one for a National Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy and the other for a National Partnership for Excellence and Accountability in Teaching—that bring together researchers, professional associations, state and local education agencies, policymakers, and practitioners to work on deepening knowledge and practice in the fields of both teaching and policy. Twelve states are working collaboratively, with the support of their governors, state education departments, legislative leaders, and education leaders to develop strategies for implementing the commission's recommendations. They include Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oklahoma. Several others will join this group of partner states in the coming year.
Design and implementation of a digital LED desk lamp using the halftone method and a touch pad

In this paper we propose a design of a digital LED desk lamp (DLDL) which consists of two parts: an LED array and a control unit with a touch pad. The LED array includes both LEDs and a constant current source not only to ensure that every LED receives a fixed current and but also to provide a uniform brightness. We use the halftone method which provides an on/off control for each LED of the array, transforms different gray levels into LED array patterns and uses those patterns to maintain digital levels of brightness. Our halftone method is similar to the PWM method of adjusting the brightness; however, it provides a digital control for the brightness of the LED array. In the digital control panel we use the capacitive sensor to design the touch pad and to replace the traditional mechanical button to provide a user-friendly interface.
Position Sensorless Control of PMSM Based on a Novel Sliding Mode Observer over Wide Speed Range

A position sensorless control scheme of permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSM) without saliency is proposed. The rotor position angle of PMSM is estimated by a novel sliding mode observer over a wide speed range including flux-weakening region. A feedback of the equivalent control is applied in the sliding mode observer. Compared to conventional sliding mode observers (SMO), the proposed approach features the flexibility to design the sliding mode observer with broad operating range. By properly selecting equivalent control feedback gains, the estimation error of rotor position angle can be reduced in the low-speed range and fast convergence guaranteed in the high-speed range. Computer simulation and experimental results are presented to verify the proposed sensorless control algorithm
Occlusion-aware interaction techniques for tabletop systems

This paper addresses challenges created by physical objects that occlude screen contents on interactive tabletops. We propose novel techniques to support awareness, access and overview of occluded digital objects. These techniques take into account different functional zones on tabletops to provide information at varying levels of detail. We also contribute the PressView technique, a pressure-based interaction technique to get a quick overview of occluded objects.
Multiplex GPCR Assay in Reverse Transfection Cell Microarrays

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are a superfamily of proteins that include some of the most important drug targets in the pharmaceutical industry. Despite the success of this group of drugs, there remains a need to identify GPCR-targeted drugs with greater selectivity, to develop screening assays for validated targets, and to identify ligands for orphan receptors. To address these challenges, the authors have created a multiplexed GPCR assay that measures greater than 3000 receptor: ligand interactions in a single microplate. The multiplexed assay is generated by combining reverse transfection in a 96-well plate format with a calcium flux readout. This assay quantitatively measures receptor activation and inhibition and permits the determination of compound potency and selectivity for entire families of GPCRs in parallel. To expand the number of GPCR targets that may be screened in this system, receptors are cotransfected with plasmids encoding a promiscuous G protein, permitting the analysis of receptors that do not normally mobilize intracellular calcium upon activation. The authors demonstrate the utility of reverse transfection cell microarrays to GPCR-targeted drug discovery with examples of ligand selectivity screening against a panel of GPCRs as well as dose-dependent titrations of selected agonists and antagonists.
Teacher Professional Development, Technology, and Communities of Practice: Are We Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

Over the past decade, education reform and teacher training projects have spent a great deal of effort to create and support sustainable, scalable online communities of education professionals. For the most part, those communities have been created in isolation from the existing local professional communities within which the teachers practice. We argue that focusing on online technology solely as a mechanism to deliver training and/or create online networks places the cart before the horse by ignoring the Internet's even greater potential to help support and strengthen local communities of practice within which teachers work. In this article we seek guideposts to help education technologists understand the nature of local K-12 education communities of practice--specifically their reciprocal relationship with teacher professional development and instructional improvement interventions--as a prerequisite to designing online sociotechnical infrastructure that supports the professional growth of education professionals.
Wherefore the Oedipus Complex in Adolescence? Its Relevance, Evolution, and Appearance in Treatment

This article is a critique of the frequent and reflexive use of the Oedipus complex in clinical discussions as a constellation that refers specifically to experiences of young children. A more fluid concept of the Oedipus complex is described in which it is seen as a constellation of issues that derives from early childhood and recurs throughout development. The adolescent Oedipus complex is described in detail and is seen as the more probable form that occurs in treatment when adult patients are describing their sexual and gender-based lives.