Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gravitational demise of cold degenerate stars

We consider the long term fate and evolution of cold degenerate stars under the action of gravity alone. Although such stars cannot emit radiation through the Hawking mechanism, the wave function of the star will contain a small admixture of black hole states. These black hole states will emit radiation and hence the star can lose its mass energy in the long term. We discuss the allowed range of possible degenerate stellar evolution within this framework.
String theory and inflation.

String theory abounds with light scalar fields (the dilaton and various moduli) which create a host of observational problems, and notably some serious cosmological difficulties similar to the ones associated with the Polonyi field in the earliest versions of spontaneously broken supergravity. We show that all these problems are naturally avoided if a recently introduced mechanism for fixing the vacuum expectation values of the dilaton and/or moduli is at work. We study both the classical evolution and the quantum fluctuations of such scalar fields during a primordial inflationary era and find that the results are naturally compatible with observational facts. In this model, dilatons or moduli within a very wide range of masses (which includes the SUSY-breaking favored value \ensuremath{\sim}1 TeV and extends up to the Planck scale) qualify to define a novel type of essentially stable ultraweakly interacting massive particles able to provide enough mass density to close the universe.
Direct approach to the self-calibration of omnidirectional cameras

Omnidirectional cameras are a popular choice of visual sensors in robotics because their large field of view is well suited for motion estimation and obstacle avoidance. However their practical use is often burdened by the calibration phase that can be time consuming and require an experienced user. The contribution of this work is a simplification of calibration phase by providing a direct approach to the calibration of this kind of sensor. This approach tracks a planar region in the scene to find the camera's intrinsic parameters. The only requirement for the user is to select a plane in the first image of the sequence. The algorithm needs no prior knowledge about extrinsic, camera, lens or mirror parameters. In order to assess the performance of the proposed method, we perform experiments with synthetic and real data.
Constant Character, Changing Nature: The Transformation of the Hollywood War Film, From 1949 - 1989

Abstract : The Hollywood war film was an extremely popular genre both during and immediately after World War II. During this period conventions were established which secured the genre s popularity with audiences throughout the late 1960 s, such as using the Democratic Platoon as a framing device to depict warfare as a patriotic and honorable undertaking. The ambiguous conclusion of the Korean War led both American society and filmmakers to question the legitimacy of war. This notion was explored further in film after the Vietnam War. The perceived illegitimacy of this conflict resulted in auteurs using the established techniques of the genre to create anti-war messages which present warfare as pointless and immoral. As the depiction of war changed during this time, so did the depiction of the warrior in American films. Film regarded the Vietnam War as immoral through its numerous depictions of veterans as criminals, whose current path was directly influenced by their war service. Sympathetic veterans were primarily presented as wounded warriors, whose participation in war unjustly left them with both physical and emotional scars. In the eighties, Reaganism permitted Rambo and other depictions of superhero veterans to return to Vietnam in order to symbolically win the war and restore morality to American participation in the conflict.
javar Manual ( version 1 . 3 BETA )

This paper describes the prototype restructuring compiler javar, which can be used to make implicit parallelism in a Java program explicit by means of multi-threading. Although the prototype does not provide a complete Java front-end (unicode escapes are not supported and only limited semantic analysis has been implemented) and relies completely on the identiication ofìmplicit' parallelism by means of annotations, we hope that the research tool still provides suucient functionality to make the parallelization of Java programs less complex and less error-prone.
Assessing Stream Ecosystem Rehabilitation: Limitations of Community Structure Data

Inappropriate land use practices, pollutants, exploitation, and overpopulation have simplified stream habitats and degraded water quality worldwide. Management agencies are now being tasked to ameliorate impacts and restore stream “health,” yet there is a dearth of rigorous scientific methods and theory on which to base sound restoration design and monitoring. Despite this, many localized restoration projects are being constructed to stabilize erosion and enhance habitat heterogeneity in streams. Many restoration attempts adopt the paradigm that increasing habitat heterogeneity will lead to restoration of biotic diversity, yet there have been few studies that have manipulated variation of a physical parameter independent of the mean to isolate the effects of heterogeneity per se. We conducted a field experiment to mimic restoration of habitat heterogeneity in a shallow. stony stream. By using an experimental approach rather than a detailed assessment of existing restoration work, we were able to control the starting conditions of replicate riffles so that organism responses could be unambiguously attributed to the heterogeneity treatments. We successfully manipulated the variability of streambed particle sizes and consequently near‐bed flow characteristics of entire riffles. These factors define axes of habitat heterogeneity at scales relevant to the resident macroinvertebrate fauna. Despite this, we were unable to distinguish differences in community structure between high and low habitat heterogeneity treatments. Power analysis indicated that macroinvertebrate populations were more sensitive to individual site conditions at each riffle than to the heterogeneity treatments, suggesting that increasing habitat heterogeneity may be an ineffective technique if the restoration goals are to promote macroinvertebrate recovery in denuded streams. With extremely high variability between replicate riffles, monitoring programs for localized restoration projects or point source impacts are unlikely to detect gradual shifts in community structure until the differences between the reference and treatment sites are extreme. Innovative measurement of other parameters, such as ecosystem function variables (e.g., production, respiration, decomposition), may be more appropriate indicators of change at local scales.
Wideband, wide scanning conformal arrays with practical integrated feeds

A key challenge in designing wideband dipole arrays is developing a wideband balun that is sufficiently compact to fit within a single unit cell. A new technique has recently been developed which uses the the reactance of a compact balun as an impedance matching network to improve the bandwidth of a Tightly Coupled Dipole Array (TCDA). In this paper, we apply this technique to two TCDA designs, with and without resistive loading. The first design uses a compact balun and low-loss materials to achieve 7.2:1 bandwidth, with VSWR<;2.6:1 while scanning to ±45° in all planes. The second design uses a similar balun design along with a resistive sheet placed below the dipoles, achieving a bandwidth of 14.2:1 with VSWR<;2.4:1 at broadside, and >70% efficiency across most of the band.
Development and Tracking of Body Mass Index from Preschool Age into Adolescence in Rural South African Children: Ellisras Longitudinal Growth and Health Study

The purpose of this observational prospective cohort study was to investigate the development and tracking of body mass index (BMI) of Ellisras rural children from preschool age into late adolescence from the Ellisras Longitudinal Growth and Health Study. Heights and weights of children were measured according to the standard procedures recommended by the International Society for the Advancement of Kinanthropometry twice a year from 1996 to 2003. In total, 2,225 children—550 preschool and 1,675 primary school—aged 3-10 years (birth cohorts 1993 to 1986) were enrolled at baseline in 1996 and followed through out the eight-year periodic surveys. In 2003, 1,771 children—489 preschool and 1,282 primary school—were still in the study. The prevalence of overweight was significantly higher among girls (range 1.6-15.5%) compared to boys (range 0.3-4.9%) from age 9.1 years to 14.9 years. The prevalence of thinness (severe, moderate, and mild) ranged from 7.1% to 53.7% for preschool children and from 8.0% to 47.6% for primary school children. Both preschool and primary school children showed a significant association between the first measurements of BMI and the subsequent measurement which ranged from B=0.2 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.1-0.4) to B=0.8 (95% CI 0.6-0.9) for preschool and B=0.2 (95% CI 0.1-0.3) to B=0.7 (95% CI 0.6-0.8) for primary children. A significant tracking of BMI during 4-12 years of life was more consistent for preschool children (B=0.6 (95% CI 0.6-0.7) and for primary school children (B=0.6 (95%CI 0.5-0.6). Investigation of nutritional intake and physical activity patterns will shed light on how healthy these children are and their lifestyle.
AN EXAMPLE ON THE UNRELIABILITY OF MACBETH APPLICATIONS

AHP and MACBETH are two of the MCDM methods most often applied to solve Production Management problems in Brazil. However, a MACBETH application can generate unreliable results. An example of a MACBETH application resulting in a wrong ranking of the alternatives, in terms of money, is presented. The AHP application, on the other hand, gives the same ranking as one obtains with cash-flow analysis. Reasons for the unreliability of the MACBETH application are also discussed.
A Hybrid Multi-classifier to Characterize and Interpret Hemiparetic Patients Gait Coordination

The characterization of inter-segmental coordination patterns in hemi paretic gait is interesting to improve the management of hemiparetic patients. Indeed, the analysis of the coordination patterns can help clinician to establish patient diagnosis and to choose a treatment. The coordination patterns used in this article were obtained from the Continuous Relative Phase (CRP) measure in the sagittal plane. The CRP correlates angle positions and velocity of two segments, i.e. parts of the patient leg, over each phase of the gait cycle. Thigh-shank and shank-foot CRPs were measured for 66 hemiparetic patients, 27 healthy subjects and 14 patients pre and post treatment. CRPs signals are classified using a multi-classifier. This classification permits to discriminate gait patterns for hemiparetic and healthy subjects. The multi-classifier is based on a structural and a statistical approaches used in parallel. The structural part of the proposed hybrid method keeps links between the data issued from CRPs and the statistical part converts CRPs into spatial scalar parameters. Then, using a similarity measure this approach permits to quantify the global gait coordination improvement of patients after a therapeutic treatment. The proposed approach uses only interpretable parameters in order to let the classification results be physically understandable.
Domain and Type Enforcement for Legacy File Systems

This report describes how to integrate domain and type enforcement (DTE), a form of mandatory access control, with legacy le systems within the SPIN extensible operating system. The design intends to minimize changes to legacy le systems and, at the same time, minimize the performance overhead of the added access control checks. It relies on a secondary le system tree which maps the global le system name space into DTE types and which is linked into from the primary le system tree. The secondary tree is sparse in the sense that it only represents le system nodes that are required by the mapping or that have been visited by le system operations. The design has been implemented as part of the NFS client in SPIN. The measured overhead of expanding the secondary tree and providing access control on directory traversal is up to 19.3% as compared to the insecure implementation. Small le reads incur a minimal access control overhead of less than 3%.
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Applied to Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

A general methodology for performance improvement of Intelligent Machines based on Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning is introduced. Machine Decision Making and Learning are based on a cost function which balances reliability and computational cost of algorithms at the three levels of the hierarchy proposed by Saridis. Despite this particular framework, the methodology intends to be suuciently general to encompass diierent types of architectures and applications. Novel contributions of this work include the deenition of a cost function combining reliability and complexity, recursively improved through feedback, a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making algorithm which uses that cost function, and a coherent joint deenition of algorithm cost and reliability. Results of simulations show the application of the formalism to an Intelligent Robotic System mounted on an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.
Finding Heavy Paths in Graphs: A Rank Join Approach

Graphs have been commonly used to model many applications. A natural problem which abstracts applications such as itinerary planning, playlist recommendation, and flow analysis in information networks is that of finding the heaviest path(s) in a graph. More precisely, we can model these applications as a graph with non-negative edge weights, along with a monotone function such as sum, which aggregates edge weights into a path weight, capturing some notion of quality. We are then interested in finding the top-k heaviest simple paths, i.e., the $k$ simple (cycle-free) paths with the greatest weight, whose length equals a given parameter $\ell$. We call this the \emph{Heavy Path Problem} (HPP). It is easy to show that the problem is NP-Hard. In this work, we develop a practical approach to solve the Heavy Path problem by leveraging a strong connection with the well-known Rank Join paradigm. We first present an algorithm by adapting the Rank Join algorithm. We identify its limitations and develop a new exact algorithm called HeavyPath and a scalable heuristic algorithm. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments on three real data sets and show that HeavyPath outperforms the baseline algorithms significantly, with respect to both $\ell$ and $k$. Further, our heuristic algorithm scales to longer lengths, finding paths that are empirically within 50% of the optimum solution or better under various settings, and takes only a fraction of the running time compared to the exact algorithm.
Volatile Organic Compound Optical Fiber Sensors: A Review

Volatile organic compound (VOC) detection is a topic of growing interest with applications in diverse fields, ranging from environmental uses to the food or chemical industries. Optical fiber VOC sensors offering new and interesting properties which overcame some of the inconveniences found on traditional gas sensors appeared over two decades ago. Thanks to its minimum invasive nature and the advantages that optical fiber offers such as light weight, passive nature, low attenuation and the possibility of multiplexing, among others, these sensors are a real alternative to electronic ones in electrically noisy environments where electronic sensors cannot operate correctly. In the present work, a classification of these devices has been made according to the sensing mechanism and taking also into account the sensing materials or the different methods of fabrication. In addition, some solutions already implemented for the detection of VOCs using optical fiber sensors will be described with detail.
The Brain Metabolite Kynurenic Acid Inhibits α7 Nicotinic Receptor Activity and Increases Non-α7 Nicotinic Receptor Expression: Physiopathological Implications

The tryptophan metabolite kynurenic acid (KYNA) has long been recognized as an NMDA receptor antagonist. Here, interactions between KYNA and the nicotinic system in the brain were investigated using the patch-clamp technique and HPLC. In the electrophysiological studies, agonists were delivered via a U-shaped tube, and KYNA was applied in admixture with agonists and via the background perfusion. Exposure (≥4 min) of cultured hippocampal neurons to KYNA (≥100 nm) inhibited activation of somatodendritic α7 nAChRs; the IC50 for KYNA was ∼7 μm. The inhibition of α7 nAChRs was noncompetitive with respect to the agonist and voltage independent. The slow onset of this effect could not be accounted for by an intracellular action because KYNA (1 mm) in the pipette solution had no effect on α7 nAChR activity. KYNA also blocked the activity of preterminal/presynaptic α7 nAChRs in hippocampal neurons in cultures and in slices. NMDA receptors were less sensitive than α7 nAChRs to KYNA. The IC50 values for KYNA-induced blockade of NMDA receptors in the absence and presence of glycine (10 μm) were ∼15 and 235 μm, respectively. Prolonged (3 d) exposure of cultured hippocampal neurons to KYNA increased their nicotinic sensitivity, apparently by enhancing α4β2 nAChR expression. Furthermore, as determined by HPLC with fluorescence detection, repeated systemic treatment of rats with nicotine caused a transient reduction followed by an increase in brain KYNA levels. These results demonstrate that nAChRs are targets for KYNA and suggest a functionally significant cross talk between the nicotinic cholinergic system and the kynurenine pathway in the brain.
Diagnostic Technique based on Rotor Modulating Signals Signature Analysis for Doubly Fed Induction Machines in Wind Generator Systems

The paper introduces an advanced monitoring and diagnosis system for the detection of incipient electrical faults in doubly fed induction generators (DFIGs) used in wind generator systems. In this application the rotor power is supplied by a converter for the control of active and reactive power flow from the generator to the mains. The paper deals with a new diagnostic method based on the analysis of the rotor modulating signals. Simulation and experimental results confirm that the analysis of the spectra of rotor input modulating signals leads to an effective diagnostic procedure. The system is suitable to be easily embedded in the drive control system
The ‘silence’ of silent brain infarctions may be related to chronic ischemic preconditioning and nonstrategic locations rather than to a small infarction size

OBJECTIVE: Silent brain infarctions are the silent cerebrovascular events that are distinguished from symptomatic lacunar infarctions by their ‘silence'; the origin of these infarctions is still unclear. This study analyzed the characteristics of silent and symptomatic lacunar infarctions and sought to explore the mechanism of this ‘silence'. METHODS: In total, 156 patients with only silent brain infarctions, 90 with only symptomatic lacunar infarctions, 160 with both silent and symptomatic lacunar infarctions, and 115 without any infarctions were recruited. Vascular risk factors, leukoaraiosis, and vascular assessment results were compared. The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale scores were compared between patients with only symptomatic lacunar infarctions and patients with two types of infarctions. The locations of all of the infarctions were evaluated. The evolution of the two types of infarctions was retrospectively studied by comparing the infarcts on the magnetic resonance images of 63 patients obtained at different times. RESULTS: The main risk factors for silent brain infarctions were hypertension, age, and advanced leukoaraiosis; the main factors for symptomatic lacunar infarctions were hypertension, atrial fibrillation, and atherosclerosis of relevant arteries. The neurological deficits of patients with only symptomatic lacunar infarctions were more severe than those of patients with both types of infarctions. More silent brain infarctions were located in the corona radiata and basal ganglia; these locations were different from those of the symptomatic lacunar infarctions. The initial sizes of the symptomatic lacunar infarctions were larger than the silent brain infarctions, whereas the final sizes were almost equal between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Chronic ischemic preconditioning and nonstrategic locations may be the main reasons for the ‘silence' of silent brain infarctions.
Mobile Devices Offer Little In-depth News: Sensational, Breaking and Entertainment News Dominate Mobile News Sites

ABSTRACT The smartphone is now an indispensable part of everyday life. Such mobile devices are increasingly used to consume news. Newspapers have embraced the mobile devices to augment their print and online versions. Newspapers, however, appear to offer different news content to mobile newsreaders when compared to their own print and online content. Mobile newsreaders are provided significantly more sensational, breaking, and entertainment-oriented news. Mobile devices on the mobile web also provide significantly less public affairs content as top stories. Analyzing a sample of 50 U.S. newspapers over a six-month period, this content analysis quantifies the heterogeneity of news content in print, online, and mobile platforms.
On the Structure and Complexity of Symbolic Proofs of Polynomial Identities

A symbolic proof for establishing that a given arithmetic formula computes the zero polynomial (or equivalently, that two given arithmetic formulas compute the same polynomial) is a sequence of formulas, starting with and deriving the formula 0 by means of the standard polynomial-ring axioms applied to any subformula. Motivated by results in proof complexity and algebraic complexity, we investigate basic structural and complexity characterizations of symbolic proofs of polynomial identities. Specically, we introduce fragments of symbolic proofs named analytic symbolic proofs, enjoying a natural property: a symbolic proof is analytic if one cannot introduce arbitrary new formulas throughout the proof (that is, formulas computing the zero polynomial which do not originate, in a precise manner, from the initial arithmetic formula). We establish exponential lower bounds on the lengths of analytic symbolic proofs operating with depth-3 arithmetic formulas, under a certain regularity condition on the structure of proofs (roughly, mimicking a tree-like structure). The hard instances are explicit and rely on small formulas for the symmetric polynomials.
Expanding network communities from representative examples

We present an approach to leverage a small subset of a coherent community within a social network into a much larger, more representative sample. Our problem becomes identifying a small conductance subgraph containing many (but not necessarily all) members of the given seed set. Starting with an initial seed set representing a sample of a community, we seek to discover as much of the full community as possible. We present a general method for network community expansion, demonstrating that our methods work well in expanding communities in real world networks starting from small given seed groups (20 to 400 members). Our approach is marked by incremental expansion from the seeds with retrospective analysis to determine the ultimate boundaries of our community. We demonstrate how to increase the robustness of the general approach through bootstrapping multiple random partitions of the input set into seed and evaluation groups. We go beyond statistical comparisons against gold standards to careful subjective evaluations of our expanded communities. This process explains the causes of most disagreement between our expanded communities and our gold-standards—arguing that our expansion methods provide more reliable communities than can be extracted from reference sources/gazetteers such as Wikipedia.