Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Community Structure of the European Network of Interlocking Directorates 2005–2010

The boards of directors at large European companies overlap with each other to a sizable extent both within and across national borders. This could have important economic, political and management consequences. In this work we study in detail the topological structure of the networks that arise from this phenomenon. Using a comprehensive information database, we reconstruct the implicit networks of shared directorates among the top 300 European firms in 2005 and 2010, and suggest a number of novel ways to explore the trans-nationality of such business elite networks. Powerful community detection heuristics indicate that geography still plays an important role: there exist clear communities and they have a distinct national character. Nonetheless, from 2005 to 2010 we observe a densification of the boards interlocks network and a larger transnational orientation in its communities. Together with central actors and assortativity analyses, we provide statistical evidence that, at the level of corporate governance, Europe is getting closer.
Intrachromosomal triplication 12p11.22–p12.3 and gonadal mosaicism of partial tetrasomy 12p , **

Cases of tetrasomy 12p and trisomy 12p are known to be associated with specific phenotypic abnormalities well described in the literature. Here, we report on the unusual case of a partial tetrasomy 12p found in an affected patient and in a mosaic constellation in the patient's mother, who showed no phenotypic abnormality. The index patient was a 16‐year‐old boy with clinical features similar to the “trisomy 12p syndrome” including mental retardation, macrocephaly, a short nose with anteverted nostrils, and a broad protruding lower lip. G‐banding analysis and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) experiments using locus specific YAC DNA probes revealed a derivative chromosome 12 with a partial triplication of the short arm with an inverted copy, flanked by two direct copies. Chromosome analyses in parental lymphocytes showed a chromosomal mosaicism in the phenotypically normal mother, with 12% cells exhibiting the same partial tetrasomy 12p as detected in her son. The allelic pattern of short tandem repeats (STR) in the mother's blood DNA showed that a chimerism can be excluded with high probability. To our knowledge, this is the first report of intrachromosomal triplication on chromosome 12, as well as partial tetrasomy 12p mosaicism. Moreover, as a consequence of the chromosomal aberration in the son it can be concluded that a gonadal mosaicism is present in the mother. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Generic Sketch-Based Retrieval Learned without Drawing a Single Sketch

We cast the sketch-based retrieval as edge-map matching. A shared convolutional network is trained to extract descriptors from edge maps and sketches, which are treated as a special case of edge maps. The network is fine-tuned solely from edge maps of landmark images. The training images are acquired in a fully unsupervised manner from 3D landmark models obtained by an automated structure-from-motion pipeline. The proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art results on a standard benchmark. On two other fine-grained sketch-based retrieval benchmarks, it performs on par with or comes just after the method specifically designed for the dataset.
Development of Low-Cost Compact Omnidirectional Vision Sensors and their applications

Omnidirectional vision sensors, which have been proposed in 1970, are recently studied in Computer Vision and Multimedia research. This paper discusses features of previously developed omnidirectional vision sensors and their problems in the design. Further, this paper proposes designs of low-cost and compact omnidirectional vision sensors and their new applications. The author considers utilization of omnidirectional vision sensor will be a key issue in Computer Vision and Multimedia applications.
Age-related declines in anaerobic muscular performance: weightlifting and powerlifting.

PURPOSE One approach to studying the effects of aging on physiological functional capacity (PFC) in humans is to analyze the peak physical performance of trained athletes with increasing age. The primary aim of the present study was to determine weightlifting and powerlifting performance with increasing age in both men and women. METHODS We performed a retrospective analysis of top age-group weightlifting and powerlifting records compiled from the U.S. Weightlifting and U.S. Powerlifting Organizations. RESULTS Regression analyses showed that in both men and women weightlifting and powerlifting performance declined curvilinearly and linearly, respectively. The rate and the overall magnitude of declines in performance with age were markedly greater (P < 0.05) in weightlifting than in powerlifting. The rates of age-related decline in muscular power were not different between upper body (bench press) and lower body (squat). Similarly, the age-related declines were not different between snatch and clean and jerk in weightlifting events. The magnitude of the declines with age was greater (P < 0.05) in women than in men in weightlifting; no such sex-related differences were observed in powerlifting performance. CONCLUSIONS The findings in this cross-sectional study indicate that 1) peak anaerobic muscular power, as assessed by peak lifting performance, decreases progressively even from earlier ages than previously thought; 2) the overall magnitude of decline in peak muscular power appears to be greater in tasks requiring more complex and powerful movements; 3) the age-related rates of decline are greater in women than in men only in the events that require more complex and explosive power; and 4) upper- and lower-body muscular power demonstrate similar rate of decline with age.
Nasal polyposis, eosinophil dominated inflammation, and allergy

A polyp is an oedematous mucous membrane which forms a pedunculating process with a slim or broad stalk or base. Nasal polyps originate in the upper part of the nose around the openings to the ethmoidal sinuses. The polyps extend into the nasal cavity from the middle meatus, resulting in nasal blockage and restricted airflow to the olfactory region. The polyp stroma is highly oedematous with a varying density of inflammatory cells. Nasal polyposis, consisting of recurrent, multiple polyps, is part of an inflammatory reaction involving the mucous membrane of the nose, paranasal sinuses, and often the lower airways. The polyps are easily accessible for immunological and histological studies and an increasing number of publications have appeared in recent years, including two monographs.1 2 Nasal polyps have long been associated with rhinitis and asthma. However, the role of allergy in the aetiology and pathogenesis of nasal polyps is a controversial issue. It has been postulated that allergy is an aetiological factor for nasal polyposis. If this is so, then it can be expected that allergic patients will have polyps more often than a control population and that patients with polyps have an increased occurrence of positive allergy testing. In this paper we will describe the possible connection between nasal polyposis and allergy, based on an analysis of (1) the occurrence of polyps and of allergy, (2) the anatomy and histology of nasal polyps, (3) the inflammation in nasal polyps, (4) the occurrence of positive allergy tests in patients with polyps, (5) the effect of allergen exposure on nasal symptoms in patients with polyps, and (6) the response to treatment. While the aetiology of nasal polyposis is unknown in many patients, in a few cases it is well defined. Polyps occur in most patients with allergic fungal sinusitis. In this …
Market Efficiencies and Market Risks

Numerous papers constructed or simulated financial markets at an agent level, aiming to explain the non-stationarity of price processes. All such papers agree that the heterogeneity of agents and of pricing models creates a dynamics in terms of pricing models used that explains not only the non-stationarity of price processes, but also stylised facts such as bubbles and fat tails. However, all these results issue from very specific parametric set-ups, and even if multiple approaches confirm it, there is no proof of the aforementioned results outside of such specifications. By modeling agents as black boxes that receive information that they transform into an output information, information according to which they then act upon the financial market, we show that the diversity of agents is directly associated to the resulting quality of the information efficiency of the market : homogenous agents lead to good information propagation but poor information aggregation by the price, while heterogenous agents lead to good information aggregation but poor information propagation. This difference in quality of efficiency explains, outside of any parametric model, the dynamics of the number of different pricing models used within artificial stock markets.
Clinical Interventions in Aging Dovepress the Beneficial Effects of Honeybee-venom Serum on Facial Wrinkles in Humans

Facial wrinkles are an undesirable outcome caused by extrinsic photodamage and intrinsic aging processes. Currently, no effective strategies are known to prevent facial wrinkles. We assessed the beneficial effects of bee-venom serum on the clinical signs of aging skin. Our results show that bee-venom serum treatment clinically improved facial wrinkles by decreasing total wrinkle area, total wrinkle count, and average wrinkle depth. Therefore, bee-venom serum may be effective for the improvement of skin wrinkles.
A Survey on Vision-based Dynamic Gesture Recognition

Gesture is the most primitive way of communication among human being. Today in the era of modern technology gesture recognition influences the world very diversely, from the physically challenged people to robot control to virtual reality environments. Compared to the systems which use extra devices (gloves, sensors), vision-based systems are more userfriendly and simple. Vision-based systems are easy to use, but most difficult to implement. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the vision-based dynamic gesture recognition approaches, a comparative study on those methods, and find out the issues and challenges in this area.
Anti-inflammatory activity of Heliotropium strigosum in animal models

The current project was designed to evaluate the anti-inflammatory activity of crude extract of Heliotropium strigosum and its subsequent solvent fractions in post carrageenan-induced edema and post xylene-induced ear edema at 50, 100, and 200 mg/kg intraperitoneally. The results revealed marked attenuation of edema induced by carrageenan injection in a dose-dependent manner. The ethyl acetate fraction was most dominant with 73.33% inhibition followed by hexane fraction (70.66%). When the extracts were challenged against xylene-induced ear edema, again ethyl acetate and hexane fractions were most impressive with 38.21 and 35.77% inhibition, respectively. It is concluded that various extracts of H. strigosum possessed strong anti-inflammatory activity in animal models.
Regulation of neutrophil and eosinophil secondary granule gene expression by transcription factors C/EBPε and PU.1

In the bone marrow of C/EBPe−/− mice, expression of neutrophil secondary and tertiary granule mRNAs is absent for lactoferrin (LF), neutrophil gelatinase (NG), murine cathelinlike protein (MCLP), and the cathelin B9; it is severely reduced for neutrophil collagenase (NC) and neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL). In addition, the expression of eosinophil granule genes, major basic protein (MBP), and eosinophil peroxidase (EPX) is absent. These mice express C/EBPα, C/EBPβ, and C/EBPδ in the bone marrow at levels similar to those of their wild-type counterparts, suggesting a lack of functional redundancy among the family in vivo. Stable inducible expression of C/EBPe and C/EBPα in the murine fibroblast cell line NIH 3T3 activated expression of mRNAs for B9, MCLP, NC, and NGAL but not for LF. In transient transfections of C/EBPe and C/EBPα, B9 was strongly induced with weaker induction of the other genes. C/EBPβ and C/EBPδ proteins weakly induced B9 expression, but C/EBPδ induced NC expression more efficiently than the other C/EBPs. The expression of MBP was inefficiently induced by C/EBPe alone and weakly induced with C/EBPe and GATA-1, but the addition of PU.1 resulted in a striking cooperative induction of MBP in NIH 3T3 cells. Mutation of a predicted PU.1 site in the human MBP promoter-luciferase reporter construct abrogated the response to PU.1. Gel-shift analysis demonstrated binding of PU.1 to this site. MBP and EPX mRNAs were absent in a PU.1-null myeloid cell line established from the embryonic liver of PU.1−/− mice. Restitution of PU.1 protein expression restored MBP and EPX protein expression. This study demonstrates that C/EBPe is essential and sufficient for the expression of a particular subset of neutrophil secondary granule genes. Furthermore, it indicates the importance of PU.1 in the cooperative activation of eosinophil granule genes.
Theoretical analysis of laterally vibrating microcantilever sensors in a viscous liquid medium

THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF LATERALLY VIBRATING MICROCANTILEVER SENSORS IN A VISCOUS LIQUID MEDIUM Russell Cox, B.S., M.S. Marquette University, 2011 Dynamically driven microcantilevers are normally excited into resonance in the out-of-plane flexural mode. The beam’s resonant frequency and quality factor are used to characterize the devices. The devices are well suited for operation in air, but are limited in viscous liquid media due to the increased viscous damping. In order to improve these characteristics, other vibration modes such as the in-plane (or lateral) flexural mode are investigated. In this work, microcantilevers vibrating in the in-plane flexural mode (or lateral direction) in a viscous liquid medium are investigated. The hydrodynamic forces on the microcantilever as a function of both Reynolds number and aspect ratio (thickness over width) are first calculated using a combination of numerical methods and Stokes’ solution. The results allowed for the resonant frequency, quality factor, and mass sensitivity to be investigated as a function of both beam geometry and medium properties. The predicted resonant frequency and quality factor for several different laterally vibrating beams in water are also found to match the trends given by experimentally determined values found in the literature. The results show a significant improvement over those of similar devices vibrating in the out-of-plane flexural mode. The resonant frequency increases by a factor proportional to the inverse of the beam’s aspect ratio. Moreover, the resonant frequency of a laterally vibrating beam shows a smaller decrease when immersed in water (5-10% compared to ~50% for transversely vibrating beams) and, as the viscosity increases, the resonant frequency decreases slower compared to beams excited transversely. The quality factor is found to increase by a factor of 2-4 or higher depending on the medium of operation and the beam geometry. Due to the increased resonant frequency and the decreased effective mass of the beam (compared to beams excited transversely), the estimated mass sensitivity of a laterally excited microcantilever is found to be much larger (up to two orders of magnitude). The improvement in these characteristics is expected to yield much lower limits of detection in liquid-phase bio-chemical sensing applications.
Interface design techniques for single-chip systems

Quantifies the performance of typical functional unit interface designs in single-chip systems. We introduce a specific equation to guide the design of optimal module interfaces. We show how the equation and interface considerations lead to more efficient queue structures for request buffering. For a specific single-chip design, we use simulation to show that: 1) For low request rates, queue structure is relatively unimportant to either system request bandwidth or service latency; 2) For a narrow range of request rates, queue structure has a significant impact on system latency but not bandwidth; 3) For high request rates, queue structure impacts bandwidth significantly; 4) As request service latencies increase relative to the queue size, the impact of the queue structure decreases; 5) Given a particular range of request rates, the complexity of particular queue structures can be traded off with the desired system bandwidth and latency performance. For a particular single-chip system, a maximum 29% bandwidth improvement and 60% latency improvement are achieved when using the more efficient queue structures.
Energy and Execution Time Analysis of a Software-based Trusted Platform Module

Trusted platforms have been proposed as a promising approach to enhance the security of general-purpose computing systems. However, for many resource-constrained embedded systems, the size and cost overheads of a separate trusted platform module (TPM) chip are not acceptable. One alternative is to use a software-based TPM (SW-TPM), which implements TPM functions using software that executes in a protected execution domain on the embedded processor itself. However, since many embedded systems have limited processing capabilities and are battery-powered, it is also important to ensure that the computational and energy requirements for SW-TPMs are acceptable. In this work, an evaluation of the energy and execution time overheads for a SW-TPM implementation on a Sharp Zaurus PDA was performed. The execution time and energy required by each TPM command was characterized through actual measurements on the target platform. In addition, the overheads of using SW-TPM in the context of various end applications, including trusted boot of the Linux operating system (OS), secure file storage, secure VoIP client, and secure Web browser was also evaluated. Furthermore, it was observed that for most TPM commands, the overheads are primarily due to the use of 2048-bit RSA operations that are performed within SW-TPM. In order to alleviate SW-TPM overheads, the use of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) as a replacement for the RSA algorithm specified in the trusted computing group (TCG) standards was evaluated. Experiments indicate that this optimization can significantly reduce SW-TPM overheads (an average of 6.51times execution time reduction and 6.75times energy consumption reduction for individual TPM commands, and an average of 10.25times execution time reduction and 10.75times energy consumption reduction for applications). This work demonstrates that ECC-based SW-TPMs are a viable approach to realizing the benefits of trusted computing in resource-constrained embedded systems
Automatic multi-document summarization for Indonesian documents using hybrid abstractive-extractive summarization technique

This paper discusses the development of multi-document summarization for Indonesian documents by using hybrid abstractive-extractive summarization approach. Multi-document summarization is a technology that able to summarize multiple documents and present them in one summary. The method used in this research, hybrid abstractive-extractive summarization technique, is a summarization technique that is the combination of WordNet based text summarization (abstractive technique) and title word based text summarization (extractive technique). After an experiment with LSA as the comparison method, this research method successfully generated a well-compressed and readable summary with a fast processing time.
Prognostic Value of Abnormal Vasoreactivity of Epicardial Coronary Arteries to Sympathetic Stimulation in Patients With Normal Coronary Angiograms

Objective—We aimed to evaluate prospectively whether patients with normal coronary angiogram but abnormal epicardial vasoreactivity to cold pressor test (CPT) are at increased risk for cardiovascular events. Methods and Results—Vasoreactivity in response to CPT and dilation of epicardial arteries to intracoronary application of nitroglycerin were assessed quantitatively (percent change of luminal area, &Dgr;LA%) in 130 patients with normal coronary angiograms. Cardiovascular events (cardiovascular death, acute coronary syndrome, myocardial infarction, percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty, coronary bypass grafting, ischemic stroke, or peripheral revascularization) were assessed as clinical outcome parameters over a mean follow-up period of 45±9 months. Based on their vascular responses to CPT, patients were assigned into the following 3 groups: group 1, patients with normal vasodilator response (&Dgr;LA >0%; n=37); group 2, patients with moderate vasoconstrictor response (&Dgr;LA between 0% and −15%; n=42); and group 3, patients with severe vasoconstrictor response (&Dgr;LA ≤−15%; n=51). Although patients from groups 2 and 3 had significantly increased vasoconstrictor response to CPT (group 2, &Dgr;LA −6±3% and group 3, &Dgr;LA −24±6% versus group 1, &Dgr;LA 11±9%;P ≤0.0001), they showed normal endothelial-independent epicardial vasodilation to intracoronary application of nitroglycerin similar to patients from group 1 (&Dgr;LA 39±16% and 34±14% versus 41±14%;P =NS, respectively). During follow-up, none of the patients from group 1 developed cardiac events. However, 7 cardiovascular events occurred in group 2 and 30 occurred in group 3 in 4 and 22 patients, respectively (P ≤0.0001, univariate by log-rank test). After adjustment for known risk factors for coronary artery disease, impaired epicardial coronary vasoreactivity to CPT remained significantly associated with the risk of developing cardiovascular events (P =0.040, multivariate by Cox regression model). Conclusions—In patients with normal coronary angiogram, abnormal vasoreactivity of epicardial coronary arteries in response to sympathetic stimulation is associated with the risk of developing cardiovascular events.
Towards a Formal Model of Context Awareness

There is a definite lack of formal support for modeling realistic context-awareness in pervasive computing applications. The CONAWA calculus presented in this paper provides mechanisms for modeling complex and interwoven sets of context-information by extending ambient calculus with new constructs and capabilities. The calculus is a step in the direction of making formal methods applicable in the area of pervasive computing.
LICOS Centre for Transition Economics LICOS

Global retail companies (“supermarkets”) have an increasing influence on developing countries, through foreign investments and/or through the imposition of their private standards. The impact on developing countries and poverty is often assessed as negative. In this paper we show the opposite, based on an analysis of primary data collected to measure the impact of supermarkets on small contract farmers in Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world. Almost 10,000 farmers in the Highlands of Madagascar produce vegetables for supermarkets in Europe. In this global supply chain, small farmers’ micro-contracts are combined with extensive farm assistance and supervision programs to fulfill complex quality requirements and phyto-sanitary standards of supermarkets. Small farmers that participate in these contracts have higher welfare, more income stability and shorter lean periods. We also find significant effects on improved technology adoption, better resource management and spillovers on the productivity of the staple crop rice. The small but emerging modern retail sector in Madagascar does not (yet) deliver these benefits as they do not (yet) request the same high standards for their supplies.