Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Housing Boom and Bust Cycles

This paper describes a quantitative model developed to understand the key determinats of house prices boom-and-bust cycles. The key driving forces behind the boom are residential investment, immigration, current account deficits, relaxation of downpayment constraints, and the elimination of land regulation. Housing supply is comprised by the stock of housing and new construction. The baseline economy considers the housing boom in Spain because its peak surpased the magnitude in the United States by 15 percent. A calibrated version of the model for the Spanish economy replicates the pre-boom aggregates. The model predicts that a change in observed fundamentals can rationalize at least 84 percent of the recent boom in the value of housing capital. Without large current account deficits and demographic changes the size of the housing boom should have been much smaller. With respect to the housing bust, the model suggests that the combination of increasing mortgage rates, unemployment, and low productivity can have large effects in the value of housing capital. Some conservative predictions quantify adjustments that range between 24 and 29 percent. The paper explores the boom-bust cycles in other economies such as the United States and Japan.
Methodological criticisms in the evaluation of Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine effectiveness

Summary Globally, lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs), including community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), cause considerable of morbidity and mortality in adults, especially in the elderly. In addition to age, underlying medical conditions are associated with an increased risk of CAP. From an aetiological point of view, Streptococcus pneumoniae is the leading cause of adult CAP throughout the world. Two types of vaccine are available for the prevention of pneumococcal diseases: the pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (PPV23) and the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7, PCV10 and PCV13). An accurate understanding of the LRTIs burden and the types of subjects at risk of CAP, allow to find an appropriately targeted immunization strategy and provide baseline data to evaluate pneumococcal vaccine effectiveness. Given the high variability in available estimates of LRTIs burden and associated risk factors, the objective of the study was to discuss the methodological criticism in its evaluation, in the light of the gradual introduction of PCV13 immunization strategy targeted to elderly and risk groups in middle-high income countries.
Aflatoxin Cause DNA Damage

Abstract Aflatoxins are food-borne secondary toxic fungal metabolites produced during the growth of Aspergillus flavusand A. parasiticus. Aflatoxins are well known hepatotoxic, hepatocarcinogenic and mutagenic agents. These effects are mainly due to adduct formation with DNA, RNA and protein. In addition, it also causes lipid peroxidation as well as oxidative damage to DNA. AFB1 possess genotoxic potential in a variety of test systems. Other aflatoxin has not been so extensively investigated, but in a variety of studies B2, G1, G2 and M1 have all shown evidence of genotoxicity.
Nicotine content in tobacco used in hubble-bubble smoking.

OBJECTIVE To determine the nicotine content of commonly used tobacco in hubble-bubble (HB) and compare it with that found in cigarettes. METHODS Analysis of nicotine content of 13 commercial brands of HB tobacco was carried out using gas chromatography over an 8 month period; November 2002 through to June 2003 at the Toxicology Laboratory, University of Jordan. RESULTS A wide variation in nicotine content in all brands was noticed with an average of 8.32 mg/g tobacco, range (1.8-41.3 mg/g). The average nicotine content in each HB head (20 gm) of unflavored tobacco was (713 mg/head) and flavored tobacco has (67 mg/head). One head of unflavored tobacco has nicotine equivalent to 70 regular cigarettes. The addition of adulterations; honey, glycerin and other flavors in the process of preparing the flavored (Muasel) tobacco contributes to lowering the nicotine content in each gram of flavored tobacco. Smoking one head of flavored (Mua'sel) tobacco which contains on average one third of nicotine presented in 20 cigarettes (204 mg/pack) usually resulted in a higher plasma nicotine level by 20%. CONCLUSION Hubble-bubble smokers are not at a lesser risk from smoking than cigarette smokers in relation to nicotine dependence. The inability of water to trap significant amounts of chemical substances present in tobacco (especially nicotine) and the danger which might result from the combustion of additives like; glycerin, honey and other flavors could be a very important factor to extrapolate the damage resulting from HB smoking.
Effects of Stormwater Runoff from New Development

Most people know that urban runoff is a problem. Few understand just how harmful it can be for rivers and streams. To secure better watershed planning urban runoff control, we must first convince the public and its officials that they are needed. We need to show clearly and convincingly both the nature and the magnitude of the water quality and quantity problems that poorly planned and managed new development can create.
Four Distinctions for the Auditory “Wastebasket” of Timbre1

If there is one thing about timbre that researchers in psychoacoustics and music psychology agree on, it is the claim that it is a poorly understood auditory attribute. One facet of this commonplace conception is that it is not only the complexity of the subject matter that complicates research, but also that timbre is hard to define (cf., Krumhansl, 1989). Perhaps for lack of a better alternative, one can observe a curious habit in introductory sections of articles on timbre, namely to cite a definition from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and to elaborate on its shortcomings.
Implicit sequence learning in children.

The main purpose of the present study was to examine whether implicit learning abilities, assessed by means of a serial reaction time task, are present to the same extent in 6- and 10-year-old children as in adults. We also wondered whether the knowledge acquired after one learning session is retained after a 1-week delay. And finally, we studied the explicit knowledge developed by the children in this task. Our results show no age-related difference in the serial reaction time performance, which is consistent with the idea that implicit learning abilities may be efficient early in development.
On promoting modal shift via Generalized Ride-Sharing

In the last decades, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and, in particular, the Internet technologies have shown a great capability of changing people behaviors in different activities of the daily life, providing an easy access to many information, allowing on-line shop, planning mobility, and so on. In this framework, designing transportation supply systems that take advantage of these new features has become an interesting task to cope with. In this paper, a Generalized Ride Sharing (GRS) system is proposed as an innovative and integrated transportation supply that connects already existing modes (Taxis, Buses, Car-Sharing and Ride-Sharing) with the aim of better satisfying the users' needs and promote a modal shift from private vehicles towards more sustainable transportation modes.
MLL5 maintains genomic integrity by regulating the stability of the chromosomal passenger complex through a functional interaction with Borealin

Summary Mixed lineage leukemia 5 (MLL5) is a versatile nuclear protein associated with many cellular events. We have shown previously that phosphorylation of MLL5 by Cdk1 is required for mitotic entry. In this paper, the function of MLL5 in mitotic regulation is further explored. SiRNA-mediated downregulation of MLL5 caused improper chromosome alignment at metaphase and resulted in failure of DNA segregation and cytokinesis. Mechanistic studies revealed that the chromosomal passenger complex (CPC), which plays a key role in chromosomal bi-orientation, was delocalized from the inner centromere region because of proteasome-mediated degradation in MLL5-depleted cells. Biochemical analyses further demonstrated that the central domain of MLL5 interacted with the C-terminus of Borealin, and the interaction is essential to maintain the stability of Borealin. Moreover, the mitotic defects in MLL5-depleted cells were rescued by overexpression of FLAG-MLL5, but not by a FLAG-MLL5 mutant that did not contain the central domain. Collectively, our results suggest that MLL5 functionally interacts with Borealin, facilitates the expression of CPC, and hence contributes to mitotic fidelity and genomic integrity.
An Efficient Two-Party Protocol for Approximate Matching in Private Record Linkage

The task of linking multiple databases with the aim to identify records that refer to the same entity is occurring increasingly in many application areas. If unique identifiers for the entities are not available in all the databases to be linked, techniques that calculate approximate similarities between records must be used for the identification of matching pairs of records. Often, the records to be linked contain personal information such as names and addresses. In many applications, the exchange of attribute values that contain such personal details between organisations is not allowed due to privacy concerns. The linking of records between databases without revealing the actual attribute values in these records is the research problem known as 'privacy-preserving record linkage' (PPRL). While various approaches have been proposed to deal with privacy within the record linkage process, a viable solution that is well applicable to real-world conditions needs to address the major aspect of scalability of linking very large databases while preserving security and linkage quality. We propose a novel two-party protocol for PPRL that addresses scalability, security and quality/accuracy. The protocol is based on (1) the use of reference values that are available to both database owners, and allows them to individually calculate the similarities between their attribute values and the reference values; and (2) the binning of these calculated similarity values to allow their secure exchange between the two database owners. Experiments on a real-world database with nearly two million records yield linkage results that have a linear scalability to large databases and high linkage accuracy, allowing for approximate matching in the privacy-preserving context. Since the protocol has a low computational burden and allows quality approximate matching while still preserving the privacy of the databases that are matched, the protocol can be useful for many real-world applications requiring PPRL.
Hot or Not ? Finding Star Projects in Coding Social Network

Open-source software and social coding are in demand these days. How would an open-source software stand out and engage more users (development, usage, subscription, etc.) than others? In this paper, we first try to understand the structure of social coding network and then we will attempt to classify popular projects on GitHub using degree centrality, PageRank and logistic regression. Our data are based on GitHub events: ForkEvent, WatchEvent, IssueCommentEvent, PullRequestEvent, PushEvent, ReleaseEvent, IssuesEvent, MemberEvent, and StatusEvent. We will build project-project networks from four of these events (Fork, Watch, Issue Comment and Pull Request) and run logistic regression algorithm on all of these events. This paper will help project contributors to improve their project popularity by focusing on the determining factors and also help users to identify projects that have the potential to become popular later on, so that they can have a wiser choice for their tech stack. Keywords—Github, influential, classification, logistic regression, centrality, PageRank
Ecology Drives the Worldwide Distribution of Human Diseases

Identifying the factors underlying the origin and maintenance of the latitudinal diversity gradient is a central problem in ecology, but no consensus has emerged on which processes might generate this broad pattern. Interestingly, the vast majority of studies exploring the gradient have focused on free-living organisms, ignoring parasitic and infectious disease (PID) species. Here, we address the influence of environmental factors on the biological diversity of human pathogens and their global spatial organization. Using generalized linear multivariate models and Monte Carlo simulations, we conducted a series of comparative analyses to test the hypothesis that human PIDs exhibit the same global patterns of distribution as other taxonomic groups. We found a significant negative relationship between latitude and PID species richness, and a nested spatial organization, i.e., the accumulation of PID species with latitude, over large spatial scales. Additionally, our results show that climatic factors are of primary importance in explaining the link between latitude and the spatial pattern of human pathogens. Based on our findings, we propose that the global latitudinal species diversity gradient might be generated in large part by biotic interactions, providing strong support for the idea that current estimates of species diversity are substantially underestimated. When parasites and pathogens are included, estimates of total species diversity may increase by more than an order of magnitude.
Idiosyncratic and systematic aspects of spatial representations in the macaque parietal cortex

The sensorimotor transformations for visually guided reaching were originally thought to take place in a series of discrete transitions from one systematic frame of reference to the next with neurons coding location relative to the fixation position (gaze-centered) in occipital and posterior parietal areas, relative to the shoulder in dorsal premotor cortex, and in muscle- or joint-based coordinates in motor output neurons. Recent empirical and theoretical work has suggested that spatial encodings that use a range of idiosyncratic representations may increase computational power and flexibility. We now show that neurons in the parietal reach region use nonuniform and idiosyncratic frames of reference. We also show that these nonsystematic reference frames coexist with a systematic compound gain field that modulates activity proportional to the distance between the eyes and the hand. Thus, systematic and idiosyncratic signals may coexist within individual neurons.
Into the depths of C: elaborating the de facto standards

C remains central to our computing infrastructure. It is notionally defined by ISO standards, but in reality the properties of C assumed by systems code and those implemented by compilers have diverged, both from the ISO standards and from each other, and none of these are clearly understood. We make two contributions to help improve this error-prone situation. First, we describe an in-depth analysis of the design space for the semantics of pointers and memory in C as it is used in practice. We articulate many specific questions, build a suite of semantic test cases, gather experimental data from multiple implementations, and survey what C experts believe about the de facto standards. We identify questions where there is a consensus (either following ISO or differing) and where there are conflicts. We apply all this to an experimental C implemented above capability hardware. Second, we describe a formal model, Cerberus, for large parts of C. Cerberus is parameterised on its memory model; it is linkable either with a candidate de facto memory object model, under construction, or with an operational C11 concurrency model; it is defined by elaboration to a much simpler Core language for accessibility, and it is executable as a test oracle on small examples. This should provide a solid basis for discussion of what mainstream C is now: what programmers and analysis tools can assume and what compilers aim to implement. Ultimately we hope it will be a step towards clear, consistent, and accepted semantics for the various use-cases of C.
An Improved Multimodal Palm Vein Recognition System Using Shape and Texture Features

1 Abstract—Multimodal analysis of palm vein for biometric authentication has been carried out and presented in this paper. The proposed system is based on parallel mode multiple feature analysis and multilevel fusion. The directional information of the palm vein has been considered for better analysis. The developed multimodal palm vein recognition system has very low value of matching error rate and false acceptance or rejection rate. Index Terms—Palm vein recognition, Multimodal Biometrics, Feature subset selection, ASFFS, FAR, FRR
Fast continuous collision detection for articulated models

We present a novel algorithm to perform continuous collision detection for articulated models. Given two discrete configurations of the links of an articulated model, we use an "arbitrary in-between motion" to interpolate its motion between two successive time steps and check the resulting trajectory for collisions. Our approach uses a three-stage pipeline: (1) dynamic bounding-volume hierarchy (D-BVH) culling based on interval arithmetic; (2) culling refinement using the swept volume of line swept sphere (LSS) and graphics hardware accelerated queries; (3) exact contact computation using OBB-trees and continuous collision detection between triangular primitives. The overall algorithm computes the time of collision, contact locations and prevents any interpenetration between the articulated model with the environment. We have implemented the algorithm and tested its performance on a 2.4 GHz Pentium PC with 1 Gbyte of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 graphics card. In practice, our algorithm is able to perform accurate and continuous collision detection between articulated models and complex environments at nearly interactive rates.
Contextual restaurant recommendation utilizing implicit feedback

Selecting a good, appropriate restaurant for an event is a common problem for most people. In addition to the main features of restaurants (e.g. food style, price, and taste), a good recommendation system should also consider diners' context information. Although there are many context-aware restaurant recommenders, most of them only focus on location information. This research aims to incorporate a greater variety of useful contexts into the recommendation process. Instead of explicit user restaurant ratings, our system relies on diners' restaurant booking logs to recommend restaurants. Each booking record contains the dining context: event type, dining time, number of diners, etc. In this paper, we propose using the canonical decomposition Bayesian personalized ranking (CD-BPR) algorithm to model the context information in a restaurant booking record. Experiments were conducted using three years of booking logs from EZTable, the largest online restaurant booking service in Taiwan. Experiment results show that adding context information into BPR significantly outperforms the baseline BPR method.
Hybrid method for numerical simulation of room acoustics with auralization: part 1 - theoretical and numerical aspects

A new hybrid simulation method for room acoustics is presented. It is grounded on two well known numerical simulation techniques for room acoustics. The hybrid method takes geometric acoustics for granted and uses an improved version of the classical ray-tracing technique for computing the specular reflections and a slightly modified energy transition method for simulating the diffuse reflections. The impulse responses (IRs) are then computed by superposition of the specular and diffuse ones. The reverberant part of the IRs gains a much more realistic aspect than the one obtained from either ones method alone. Both the ray-tracing technique and the energy transition method are reviewed and some improved features are discussed. The sound source and the receiver modeling are presented, including a new method for simulating the head related transfer functions (HRTFs), and based on the wavelet technique, which provides a shorter time computation of the binaural impulse responses for auralization purposes. In a companion paper, entitled Hybrid method for numerical simulation of room acoustics: Part 2 - Validation of the computational code RAIOS 3, a validation of the method in an international inter-comparison with other softwares and measurements data is presented, showing the efficiency and the accuracy of the proposed hybrid method over non-hybrid ones.
Interpolation/decimation scheme applied to size normalization of character images

In several pattern recognition systems it is required that input images have the same dimensions, which can be achieved through size normalization. This works presents an interpolation-decimation scheme as a novel form to implement size normalization. The method can deal with any changes of size in images, by integer as well as non-integer scaling factors. This scheme uses cubic spline interpolation in two forms, the polynomial form and polyphase network form, as well as linear decimation by block averaging. A recurrent neural network has been used to test the effects of the proposed method on character recognition. The results obtained indicate that the rate normalization scheme can significantly improve the performance of the NN recognisor.
Scale-invariant segmentation of dynamic contrast-enhanced perfusion MR images with inherent scale selection

Selection of the best set of scales is problematic when developing signal-driven approaches for pixel-based image segmentation. Often, different possibly conflicting criteria need to be fulfilled in order to obtain the best trade-off between uncertainty (variance) and location accuracy. The optimal set of scales depends on several factors: the noise level present in the image material, the prior distribution of the different types of segments, the class-conditional distributions associated with each type of segment as well as the actual size of the (connected) segments. We analyse, theoretically and through experiments, the possibility of using the overall and class-conditional error rates as criteria for selecting the optimal sampling of the linear and morphological scale spaces. It is shown that the overall error rate is optimized by taking the prior class distribution in the image material into account. However, a uniform (ignorant) prior distribution ensures constant class-conditional error rates. Consequently, we advocate for a uniform prior class distribution when an uncommitted, scale-invariant segmentation approach is desired. Experiments with a neural net classifier developed for segmentation of dynamic magnetic resonance (MR) images, acquired with a paramagnetic tracer, support the theoretical results. Furthermore, the experiments show that the addition of spatial features to the classifier, extracted from the linear or morphological scale spaces, improves the segmentation result compared to a signal-driven approach based solely on the dynamic MR signal. The segmentation results obtained from the two types of features are compared using two novel quality measures that characterize spatial properties of labelled images. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Annual meeting of the EpiGeneSys Network of Excellence – Advancing epigenetics towards systems biology

The third annual meeting of the EpiGeneSys network brought together epigenetics and systems biologists to report on collaborative projects that apply quantitative approaches to understanding complex epigenetic processes. The figure shown represents one meeting highlight, which was the unexpected emergence of genotype versus epigenotype in control of cell state. © 2015 The Authors. Bioessays published by WILEY Periodicals, Inc.