Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigating Task Coordination in Globally Dispersed Teams: A Structural Contingency Perspective

Task coordination poses significant challenges for globally dispersed teams (GDTs). Although various task coordination mechanisms have been proposed for such teams, there is a lack of systematic examination of the appropriate coordination mechanisms for different teams based on the nature of their task and the context under which they operate. Prior studies on collocated teams suggest matching their levels of task dependence to specific task coordination mechanisms for effective coordination. This research goes beyond the earlier work by also considering additional contextual factors of GDT (i.e., temporal dispersion and time constraints) in deriving their optimal IT-mediated task coordination mechanisms. Adopting the structural contingency theory, we propose optimal IT-mediated task coordination portfolios to fit the different levels of task dependence, temporal dispersion, and perceived time constraint of GDTs. The proposed fit is tested through a survey and profile analysis of 95 globally dispersed software development teams in a large financial organization. We find, as hypothesized, that the extent of fit between the actual IT-mediated task coordination portfolios used by the surveyed teams and their optimal portfolios proposed here is positively related to their task coordination effectiveness that in turn impacts the team's efficiency and effectiveness. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Relativistic Effects in the Pulse Profile of the 2.5 Millisecond X-Ray Pulsar SAX J1808.4–3658

I analyze the properties of the pulsed emission from the accreting millisecond pulsar SAX J1808.4-3658 in observations of its 1998 April outburst by the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer. Pulse phase spectroscopy shows that the emission evolves from a hard spectrum (power law with photon index of 2.39 ± 0.06) to a soft spectrum (index of 3.39 ± 0.24). This softening is also observable as a phase lag in the fundamental of low-energy photons with respect to high-energy photons. I show that this lag is roughly constant over 10 days of the outburst. I fit these data with a model in which the pulse emission is from a hot spot on the rotating neutron star and the flux as a function of phase is determined in a calculation which includes the effects of general relativity. The energy-dependent lags are very well described by this model. The harder spectra at earlier phases (i.e., as the spot approaches) are the result of larger Doppler-boosting factors that are important for this fast pulsar. Since this model is sensitive to the equatorial speed as an independent parameter and since the spin frequency is known, this offers us a new means of measuring the neutron star radius, which is notoriously difficult to determine.
Association between Soft Neurological Signs and Clinical Progression in Alzheimer ’ s Disease

Objective: Unlike cognitive function, clinical assessment of neurological deficits in Alzheimer’s disease has received limited attention. This study aimed to determine the association between soft neurological signs and rate of clinical progression in Chinese people with Alzheimer’s disease. Patients and Methods: 104 Chinese patients with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease were followed up for an average of 22.5 months (SD, 5.2 months). Soft neurological signs were evaluated with the Cambridge Neurological Inventory. Outcome was determined by deterioration in Clinical Dementia Rating and mortality. Results: Motor coordination, sensory integration, and failure of suppression signs were more prevalent in participants with Alzheimer’s disease than in controls without dementia (p < 0.001) and the scores for these signs were significantly correlated with most cognitive function tests (p < 0.05). Patients with stable Clinical Dementia Rating scores at follow-up had lower scores for parkinsonian signs (p < 0.005) than those who had died during the follow-up period. Conclusions: The findings suggest that cortical soft neurological signs such as motor coordination and sensory integration, which were highly associated with cognitive performance in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, represent overlapping clinical dimensions. The presence of subcortical extrapyramidal signs may signify poorer prognosis.
Matching Faces Against the Clock

This study examined the effect of time pressure on face-matching accuracy. Across two experiments, observers decided whether pairs of faces depict one person or different people. Time pressure was exerted via two additional displays, which were constantly updated to inform observers on whether they were on track to meet or miss a time target. In this paradigm, faces were matched under increasing or decreasing (Experiment 1) and constant time pressure (Experiment 2), which varied from 10 to 2 seconds. In both experiments, time pressure reduced accuracy, but the point at which this declined varied from 8 to 2 seconds. A separate match response bias was found, which developed over the course of the experiments. These results indicate that both time pressure and the repetitive nature of face matching are detrimental to performance.
Non-contact measurement of object based on binocular stereo vision

This paper proposed a solution in view of the non-contact measurement problem. In this solution, the camera is applied in the non-contact 3D measurement. Firstly, we complete the camera calibration, and then the feature point extraction and matching in turn based on the epipolar constraint criterion and gray similarity. Finally we calculate the three-dimensional coordinates of the feature points. The experimental results show that this method has a good application prospects in the industrial testing field.
Intracellular Shuttle: The Lactate Aerobic Metabolism

Lactate is a highly dynamic metabolite that can be used as a fuel by several cells of the human body, particularly during physical exercise. Traditionally, it has been believed that the first step of lactate oxidation occurs in cytosol; however, this idea was recently challenged. A new hypothesis has been presented based on the fact that lactate-to-pyruvate conversion cannot occur in cytosol, because the LDH enzyme characteristics and cytosolic environment do not allow the reaction in this way. Instead, the Intracellular Lactate Shuttle hypothesis states that lactate first enters in mitochondria and only then is metabolized. In several tissues of the human body this idea is well accepted but is quite resistant in skeletal muscle. In this paper, we will present not only the studies which are protagonists in this discussion, but the potential mechanism by which this oxidation occurs and also a link between lactate and mitochondrial proliferation. This new perspective brings some implications and comes to change our understanding of the interaction between the energy systems, because the product of one serves as a substrate for the other.
A Practice Pathway for the Identification, Evaluation, and Management of Insomnia in Children and Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorders

OBJECTIVE This report describes the development of a practice pathway for the identification, evaluation, and management of insomnia in children and adolescents who have autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). METHODS The Sleep Committee of the Autism Treatment Network (ATN) developed a practice pathway, based on expert consensus, to capture best practices for an overarching approach to insomnia by a general pediatrician, primary care provider, or autism medical specialist, including identification, evaluation, and management. A field test at 4 ATN sites was used to evaluate the pathway. In addition, a systematic literature review and grading of evidence provided data regarding treatments of insomnia in children who have neurodevelopmental disabilities. RESULTS The literature review revealed that current treatments for insomnia in children who have ASD show promise for behavioral/educational interventions and melatonin trials. However, there is a paucity of evidence, supporting the need for additional research. Consensus among the ATN sleep medicine committee experts included: (1) all children who have ASD should be screened for insomnia; (2) screening should be done for potential contributing factors, including other medical problems; (3) the need for therapeutic intervention should be determined; (4) therapeutic interventions should begin with parent education in the use of behavioral approaches as a first-line approach; (5) pharmacologic therapy may be indicated in certain situations; and (6) there should be follow-up after any intervention to evaluate effectiveness and tolerance of the therapy. Field testing of the practice pathway by autism medical specialists allowed for refinement of the practice pathway. CONCLUSIONS The insomnia practice pathway may help health care providers to identify and manage insomnia symptoms in children and adolescents who have ASD. It may also provide a framework to evaluate the impact of contributing factors on insomnia and to test the effectiveness of nonpharmacologic and pharmacologic treatment strategies for the nighttime symptoms and daytime functioning and quality of life in ASD.
A Real-time Iterative Three-point Model-based Pose-estimation Algorithm

| In this paper, an iterative algorithm for the model-based P3P pose-estimation problem based on the Gauss-Newton method is described. In this system, correspondences between three noncollinear object points on a rigid body and their image points after movement under full perspective projection model are used to estimate the new position and orientation of the object. Both real images and synthetic data have been used to verify our method with satisfactory results.
InteroPORC: automated inference of highly conserved protein interaction networks

MOTIVATION Protein-protein interaction networks provide insights into the relationships between the proteins of an organism thereby contributing to a better understanding of cellular processes. Nevertheless, large-scale interaction networks are available for only a few model organisms. Thus, interologs are useful for a systematic transfer of protein interaction networks between organisms. However, no standard tool is available so far for that purpose. RESULTS In this study, we present an automated prediction tool developed for all sequenced genomes available in Integr8. We also have developed a second method to predict protein-protein interactions in the widely used cyanobacterium Synechocystis. Using these methods, we have constructed a new network of 8783 inferred interactions for Synechocystis. AVAILABILITY InteroPORC is open-source, downloadable and usable through a web interface at http://biodev.extra. cea.fr/interoporc/.
Testing the emotional value of facial stimuli using attention bias in Rhesus Macaques, Macaca mulatta.

Approximately 2000 rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, are used annually forbiomedical research in the UK, the psychological wellbeing and welfare of theseprimates is a primary concern. Attention bias is a measure of cognitive bias usedto assess whether an individual is stressed. Current methods using attention biasto evaluate the welfare of macaques, use images of conspecifics expressing anaggressive face vs. a neutral face with either opened eyes or closed eyes.Nevertheless, it is commonly acknowledged that direct staring, eyes open, is seenas a threat to macaques. The exact emotional value of these conspecific ‘neutral’facial stimuli, however, is not known.In order to refine attention bias testing for its use in primate cognitive research,understanding the exact value of facial stimuli used is important. This study usesattention bias to explore whether ‘eyes open’ vs. ‘eyes closed’ has the samerelative threat value, or whether ‘eyes open’ could actually be perceived asaggressive. Three different facial expressions (neutral eyes closed, neutral eyesopen and aggressive) of unfamiliar monkeys were presented as paired stimuli tomeasure attention bias to facial stimuli. Twenty-eight individuals were presentedwith counterbalanced presentations of the three facial stimuli in order to identifythe emotional value of stimuli. Image pairs were presented simultaneously for ~3s.Video footage was blind-coded, frame by frame, for gaze towards stimuli.Behavioural reactions in-trial were coded to highlight any variation in keybehavioural reactions. Five minute instantaneous scan samples were conductedpost-trial to assess variation in time budget.IIIResults showed that there was a significantly greater attention bias towards thethree facial combinations; the greatest bias was toward the eyes open vs.aggressive facial combination. Other factors including monkey ID, reproductivestatus, trial, stimulus monkey, previous exposure, age (in months), and matrilinewere considered within the results. Mixed models were used to also show that agehad a significant effect on monkeys’ attention bias and previous exposure tostimuli significantly reduced attention bias. In-trial behavioural reactions showed asignificantly greater representation of extreme reactions to the eyes open vs.aggressive facial combination compared to all other facial combinations. Post-trialbehaviours showed a significantly greater representation of fear/avoid behavioursafter the eyes open vs. aggressive compared to the eyes closed vs. aggressivefacial combination.
The LIA at QA@CLEF-2006

This article presents the first participation of the Laboratoire Informatique d’Avignon (LIA) to the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). LIA participated to the monolingual Question Answering (QA) track dedicated to French language, and to the crosslingual English to French QA track. Two runs for each track were submitted. English questions were first translated and then answered by using the monolingual French system. This QA System (QAS) already participated to the French Technolangue QA campaign (EQueR) but some improvements needed to be evaluated: definition questions answering module; or were developed specifically for CLEF: integration of Lucene search engine, and re-ranking based on redundancy for factoid answer candidates. The CLEF-QA provided an opportunity to evaluate these modules. Also, English conversion of the QAS was started, even if, only the Question Analysis module was adapted to English this year. The generic factoid QAS is based on an extraction of answer candidates in the form of Named Entities (NE) by using keywords density measures. Few factoid answers were also provided by a knowledge base module. Lastly, definition questions were answered by a module based upon detection of frequent appositive informational nuggets appearing near the focus to define. The system obtained reasonable results in all runs except for Temporal and List questions that were not recognized as such and wrongly handled as simple factoid one.
Decreased function of survival motor neuron protein impairs endocytic pathways

Significance Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a devastating motor neuron disease, caused by decreased levels of the ubiquitous survival motor neuron (SMN) protein. Despite the well-characterized role of SMN in pre-mRNA splicing, it remains unclear why SMA has a high carrier frequency (∼1:50 Caucasians) and why diminished SMN affects synaptic function. Here, we demonstrate for the first time, to our knowledge, that SMN depletion causes defects in endosomal trafficking that impair synaptic function. Additionally, diminished SMN in human cells reduced endocytosis-dependent viral infection. It is possible that decreased SMN function may increase resistance to infection. Our findings point to endocytic trafficking as a major player in SMA pathogenesis. Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is caused by depletion of the ubiquitously expressed survival motor neuron (SMN) protein, with 1 in 40 Caucasians being heterozygous for a disease allele. SMN is critical for the assembly of numerous ribonucleoprotein complexes, yet it is still unclear how reduced SMN levels affect motor neuron function. Here, we examined the impact of SMN depletion in Caenorhabditis elegans and found that decreased function of the SMN ortholog SMN-1 perturbed endocytic pathways at motor neuron synapses and in other tissues. Diminished SMN-1 levels caused defects in C. elegans neuromuscular function, and smn-1 genetic interactions were consistent with an endocytic defect. Changes were observed in synaptic endocytic proteins when SMN-1 levels decreased. At the ultrastructural level, defects were observed in endosomal compartments, including significantly fewer docked synaptic vesicles. Finally, endocytosis-dependent infection by JC polyomavirus (JCPyV) was reduced in human cells with decreased SMN levels. Collectively, these results demonstrate for the first time, to our knowledge, that SMN depletion causes defects in endosomal trafficking that impair synaptic function, even in the absence of motor neuron cell death.
The XTATIC Experience

XTATIC is a lightweight extension of C# with native support for statically typed XML processing. It features XML trees as built-in values, a refined type system based on regular types in the style of XDUCE, and "tree grep"-style regular patterns for traversing and manipulating XML. Previous papers on XTATIC have reported results on a number of specific technical issues: basic theoretical properties of an idealized core language, novel compilation algorithms for regular pattern matching, and efficient runtime support for XML processing in the style encouraged by XTATIC. The aim of the present paper is to discuss XTATIC—less formally and more holistically—from the perspective of language design. We survey the most significant issues we faced in the design process and evaluate the choices we have made in addressing them. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-04-24. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/cis_reports/25 The Xtatic Experience Vladimir Gapeyev Michael Y. Levin Benjamin C. Pierce Alan Schmitt Technical Report MS-CIS-04-24 Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania
z9: An Alternative Approach to Collaborative Navigation

The search for relevant information on the Web is a personalized discovery process. In this process each person aggregates new information to the border of what he or she already knows. Finding relevant information is also related to the user history, being driven by his or her intentional selection of documents to access. This paper presents a collaborative navigation tool, called z9, whose main purpose is to selectively transfer anonymous navigation information among a group of users, based on identified user similarities. These similarities are the starting point for the presentation of exploration paths that potentially lead to relevant information
Synergistic coupling of SSD and hard disk for QoS-aware virtual memory

With significant advantages in capacity, power consumption, and price, solid state disk (SSD) has good potential to be employed as an extension of DRAM (memory), such that applications with large working sets could run efficiently on a modestly configured system. While initial results reported in recent works show promising prospects for this use of SSD by incorporating it into the management of virtual memory, frequent writes from write-intensive programs could quickly wear out SSD, making the idea less practical. We propose a scheme, HybridSwap, that integrates a hard disk with an SSD for virtual memory management, synergistically achieving the advantages of both. In addition, HybridSwap can constrain performance loss caused by swapping according to user-specified QoS requirements. To minimize writes to the SSD without undue performance loss, HybridSwap sequentially swaps a set of pages of virtual memory to the hard disk if they are expected to be read together. Using a history of page access patterns HybridSwap dynamically creates an out-of-memory virtual memory page layout on the swap space spanning the SSD and hard disk such that random reads are served by SSD and sequential reads are asynchronously served by the hard disk with high efficiency. In practice HybridSwap can effectively exploit the aggregate bandwidth of the two devices to accelerate page swapping. We have implemented HybridSwap in a recent Linux kernel, version 2.6. 35.7. Our evaluation with representative benchmarks, such as Memcached for key-value store, and scientific programs from the ALGLIB cross-platform numerical analysis and data processing library, shows that the number of writes to SSD can be reduced by 40% with the system's performance comparable to that with pure SSD swapping, and can satisfy a swapping-related QoS requirement as long as
Signalling and cell death in ozone‐exposed plants

Experiments with Arabidopsis mutants and sensitive and tolerant pairs in several other species have elucidated the molecular basis of plant ozone sensitivity and ozone lesion development. They have indicated an important role for hormonal signalling in determining the outcome of ozone challenge at the cellular level. The reactive oxygen species (ROS) from ozone degradation can cause either direct necrotic damage or induce the process of programmed cell death. Perception of ozone or ROS from its degradation in the apoplast activates several signal transduction pathways that regulate the responses of the cells to the increased oxidative load. Plant hormones salicylic acid, jasmonic acid, ethylene and abscisic acid are involved in determining the duration and extent of ozone-induced cell death and its propagation. Salicylic acid is required for the programmed cell death, ethylene promotes endogenous ROS formation and lesion propagation, and jasmonic acid is involved in limiting the lesion spreading. Abscisic acid is most likely involved through the regulation of stomata and thus is expected to affect lesion initiation. The roles and interactions of perception of ozone, the immediate downstream responses, hormone biosynthesis and signalling during ozone lesion initiation and formation are reviewed.
Feasibility of using an Alternative Larval Host and Host Plants to Establish Cotesia flavipes (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) in the Temperate Louisiana Sugarcane Ecosystem

ABSTRACT Attempts to establish Cotesia flavipes Cameron (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) in Louisiana sugarcane fields to control the sugarcane borer, Diatraea saccharalis (F.) (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) have been unsuccessful. Experiments were conducted to investigate the feasibility of using an alternative larval host and host plants to overcome barriers preventing establishment. In addition, we evaluated C. flavipes' ability to search for D. saccharalis in sugarcane without above-ground internodes. Diatraea evanescens Dyar (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) was investigated as an alternative host for C. flavipes. Cotesia flavipes was reared for five generations on D. evanescens without any indication of diminishing fitness as measured by days to parasite pupation and average cocoon mass weight. However, there was a significant reduction in percent parasitism, cocoon mass weight, and percent emergence when C. flavipes parasitized D. evanescens as compared with D. saccharalis, resulting in a 75% reduction in the gross reproductive rate (R0 ). Greenhouse studies indicated little difference in parasitism of D. saccharalis on the weed hosts johnsongrass, Sorghum halepense (L.), and vaseygrass, Paspalum urvillei Steud. However, when planted as refuge plots, we found it difficult to establish infestations of D. saccharalis in either of these hosts, or in two energy sugarcanes. After 3 yr of infesting host plants and releasing parasitoids only one parasitized D. saccharalis larvae was recovered within the johnsongrass refuge. Diatraea evanescens readily established in vaseygrass; however, these larvae appear inaccessible to C. flavipes. In contrast, parasitism of D. saccharalis by C. flavipes infesting young sugarcane was 30%.