Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Tools for Outsourcing IT Firms in the Context of Innovation

To carry out this study, both the qualitative and quantitative methodologies have been used to collect the evidences and analyzed in light of comments, discussions and feedbacks recorded during surveys and interviews. Results of this case-study indicates, that the factors like positive attitude for innovation, investment towards R&D and willingness to adopt profit and risk sharing approach for business found prominent. However, lack of concern regarding IPRs and scientific publications has also been found in the firms. Statistics also reveal the absence of linear relationship among different variables however, association between some of the factors (i.e. IT outsourcing for innovation, Innovation is important for progress & survival and Investment in Research and Development) found significant. Keywords: Information Technology, Business Process Outsourcing, Information Technology Outsourcing, Human Resource Development, Innovation
An analysis of trends in productivity and cost drivers over years

Background: Software engineering practices have evolved considerably over the last four decades, changing the way software systems are developed and delivered. Such evolvement may result in improvements in software productivity and changes in factors that affect productivity. Aims: This paper reports our empirical analysis on how changes in software engineering practices are reflected in COCOMO cost drivers and how software productivity has evolved over the years. Method: The analysis is based on the COCOMO data set of 341 software projects developed between 1970 and 2009. We analyze the productivity trends over the years, comparing productivity of different types and countries. To explain the overall impact of cost drivers on productivity and explain its trends, we propose a measure named Difficulty which is based on the COCOMO model and its cost drivers. Results: The results of our analysis indicate that the overall productivity of the projects in the data set has increased noticeably over the last 40 years. Our analysis also shows that the productivity trends and productivity variability can be explained by using the proposed Difficulty measure. Conclusions: Our analysis provides empirical evidence that the productivity trends can be characterized by the improvements in software tools, processes, and platforms among other factors. The Difficulty measure can be used to justify and compare productivity among projects of different characteristics, e.g., different domains, platforms, complexity, and personnel experience. Although we define the measure using the COCOMO cost drivers, it may not fully represent the most important factors influencing productivity. One direction for our future work is to analyze the effectiveness of the measure using more cost drivers on more data points.
Genetic polymorphism and evolution in parthenogenetic animals. VII. The amount of heterozygosity in diploid populations.

The enzyme gene variability within parthenogenetic clones of Acyrtosiphon pisum has been followed by gel electrophoresis. No variation was observed within any clone. One enzyme locus was found to vary between clones. No evidence was found to support gene recombination due to the alleged endomeiosis. This hypothesis is proven to be also theoretically untenable. The low average heterozygosity in aphids is explained as a result of directional selection operating upon the parthenogenetic aphid clones, as a consequence of which the heterozygosity is lowered.
Common Beans and Their Non-Digestible Fraction: Cancer Inhibitory Activity—An Overview

The US Department of Agriculture’s MyPyramid guidelines introduced a near doubling of the dietary recommendations for vegetables including dry beans—an important food staple in many traditional diets that can improve public health and nutrition. Populations with high legume (peas, beans, lentils) consumption have a low risk of cancer and chronic degenerative diseases. Common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) are known as a rich, reliable source of non-digested compounds like fiber, phenolics, peptides and phytochemicals that are associated with health benefits. Emerging evidence indicates that common bean consumption is associated with reduced cancer risk in human populations, inhibiting carcinogenesis in animal models and inducing cell cycle arrest and apoptosis in cell cultures. Fiber may reduce the risk of premature death from all causes, whereas the whole non-digestible fraction from common beans exhibits anti-proliferative activity and induces apoptosis in vitro and in vivo colon cancer. The mechanisms responsible for this apparently protective role may include gene-nutrient interactions and modulation of proteins’ expression. This review investigates the potential health benefits and bioactivity of beans on tumor inhibition, highlighting studies involving functional compounds, mainly non-digestible fractions that modulate genes and proteins, thereby, unraveling their preventive role against the development of cancer.
Expression of Amoebapores Is Required for Full Expression of Entamoeba histolytica Virulence in Amebic Liver Abscess but Is Not Necessary for the Induction of Inflammation or Tissue Damage in Amebic Colitis

ABSTRACT Entamoeba histolytica trophozoites produce amoebapores, a family of small amphipathic peptides capable of insertion into bacterial or eukaryotic membranes and causing cellular lysis. Recently, E. histolytica trophozoites that are totally deficient in the production of amoebapore-A were created through a gene silencing mechanism (R. Bracha, Y. Nuchamowitz, and D. Mirelman, Eukaryot. Cell 2:295-305, 2003). Here we tested the virulence of amoebapore A(−) trophozoites in models of the two major forms of amebic disease: amebic liver abscess and amebic colitis. We demonstrate that amoebapore expression is required for full virulence in the SCID mouse model of amebic liver abscess, but E. histolytica trophozoites that do not express amoebapore-A can still cause inflammation and tissue damage in infected human colonic xenografts. These data are consistent with the concept that tissue damage may proceed by different mechanisms in amebic liver abscess compared to amebic colitis.
Integrating Behaviors for Mobile Robots: an Ethological Approach

Robots available nowadays in the everyday markets can be divided into two major groups. First, those that are oriented to a single task, as vacuum cleaners (roomba1, robocleaner2, .), lawn mowers (automower3, robomower4, .), etc; and second, those oriented to various tasks, as robotic pets (Aibo5, Necoro6,. ), museum guiders, or research platforms (Pioneer, Koala, etc.). In order to get service robots or personal assistants we need to improve the abilities of the second ones. These abilities have to do with their ability to smartly combine their basic skills to obtain behaviors that are more complex. The generation of autonomous behavior is a very complex issue. Within a multi-goal system, like service robots, the focus is more on the integration than on the control of perception algorithms. The organization becomes the critical issue; robustness and flexibility are key features. As animals can do it, we can see no compelling reason why robots could not, but more research on robot architectures is needed to reach an acceptable performance. Several paradigms have been historically proposed for behaviour generation in robots. These paradigms are also known as architectures. Dynamic and uncertain environments forced the evolution from symbolic AI (Nilsson 1984) to reactive and behavior based systems (Brooks 1986; Arkin 1989). The behaviors based systems adapt smoothly. They have no anticipation and no state, but they have shown poor scalability for complex systems. Hybrid architectures have been predominant since mid 90s (Simmons 1994; Konolige 1998; Bonasso 1997), mainly those three-tiered ones that add two layers to behavior based ones, usually a sequencer, and a deliberator. Several architectures have been explored after the hybrid three-tiered architectures became the de facto standard. In particular, many reviews of the hierarchy principle have been proposed in last years (Arkin 2003, Saffiotti 2003, Nicolescu 2002, Behnke 2001, Bryson 2001), trying to overcome subsumption limitations. Our contribution in this area is a novel hierarchical approach named JDE. This new hierarchical approach, ethologically inspired, is based on the selective activation of
Widespread red oral lesions.

A 46-year-old man was referred to us by his physician with a chief complaint of red patches on the tongue associated with a burning sensation that had occurred for approximately one year. His medical and dental histories were unremarkable. The patient had not encountered anything, including any type of food, that made the lesions improve or worsen. During a routine examination of the head and neck region, we observed no extraoral alterations, such as changes in the color of the face, swelling, facial asymmetry and palpable lymph nodes. When we conducted an intraoral examination, we observed multiple extensive erythematous areas on the inferior labial mucosa, buccal mucosa, tongue (dorsal, ventral and lateral aspects) and hard palate (Figures 1-3). Because the patient had diffuse mucosal erythema with a generalized burning sensation, we prescribed 20 milligrams of prednisone daily and topical benzocaine three times per day. After we noted no improvement following one week of treatment, we discontinued the prednisone and topical benzocaine and performed incisional biopsies on the tongue and buccal mucosa. Microscopic examination of the biopsied tissues revealed an atrophic surface of stratified squamous epithelium with a mild chronic inflammatory infiltrate within the lamina propria. One month after undergoing the biopsy, the patient complained of gastric distress, cramps, bloating, constipation, hair loss, and lack of energy and appetite. We requested testing for complete blood cell count, vitamin B12 level, and anti-endomysial, antitransglutaminase and anti-immunoglobulin A antibodies. The results of these tests showed a vitamin B12 deficiency with a level of serum cobalamin less than 150 picograms per milliliter (normal range [male], 193-982 pg/mL), a red blood cell (RBC) count of 3.96 million per cubic millimeter (normal range [male], 4.60-6.20 million/mm), a mean corpuscular volume (MCV) of 105.5 femtoliters (normal range [male], 76-96 fL), a mean corpuscular hemoglobin (MCH) weight of 35.1 pg (normal range [male], 27-32 pg) and an RBC distribution width of 17.3 percent (normal range [male], 11.5-14.5 percent). In addition, we found that the patient had negative levels of antiendomysial antibodies (normal titer, 35 units) and anti-immunoglobulin A antibody levels of 259 mg per deciliter (normal range [adults], 40-350 mg/dL).
Quantitative In Vivo Detection of Chlamydia muridarum Associated Inflammation in a Mouse Model Using Optical Imaging

Chlamydia trachomatis is a bacterial sexually transmitted disease with over 1.3 million cases reported to the CDC in 2010. While Chlamydia infection is easily treated with antibiotics, up to 70% of infections are asymptomatic and go untreated. The current mouse model relies on invasive upper genital tract gross pathology readouts at ~60–80 days postinfection. High throughput optical imaging through the use of biomarkers has been successfully used to quickly evaluate several disease processes. Here we evaluate Neutrophil Elastase 680 (Elastase680) for its ability to measure Chlamydia muridarum associated inflammation in live mice using fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) and In Vivo Imaging System (IVIS). Optical imaging was able to distinguish with statistical significance between vaccinated and nonvaccinated mice as well as mock-challenged and challenged mice 2 weeks after challenge which was 9 weeks sooner than typical gross pathological assessment. Immunohistochemistry confirmed the presence of neutrophils and correlated well with both in vivo and ex vivo imaging. In this report we demonstrate that Elastase680 can be used as a molecular imaging biomarker for inflammation associated with chlamydial infection in a mouse model and that these biomarkers can significantly decrease the time for pathology evaluation and thus increase the rate of therapeutics discovery.
Investigating the android apps' success: An empirical study

Measuring the success of software systems was not a trivial task in the past. Nowadays, mobile apps provide a uniform schema, i.e., the average ratings provided by the apps' users to gauge their success. While recent research has focused on examining the relationship between change- and fault- proneness and apps' lack of success, as well as qualitatively analyzing the reasons behind the apps' users dissatisfaction, there is little empirical evidence on the factors related to the success of mobile apps. In this paper, we explore the relationships between the mobile apps' success and a set of metrics that not only characterize the apps themselves but also the quality of the APIs used by the apps, as well as user attributes when they interact with the apps. In particular, we measure API quality in terms of bugs fixed in APIs used by apps and changes that occurred in the API methods. We examine different kinds of changes including changes in the interfaces, implementation, and exception handling. For user-related factors, we leverage the number of app's downloads and installations, and users' reviews. Through an empirical study of 474 free Android apps, we find that factors such as the number of users' reviews provided for an app, app's category and size appear to have an impact on the app's success.
Stimulus norming: It is too soon to close down brick-and-mortar labs

Psycholinguists grapple with an ever-increasing list of control variables, in addition to any that are of theoretical interest. Some variables are subjective constructs like familiarity, concreteness, and semantic or affective connotations. Historically researchers approached these by having participants come to a laboratory and provide ratings for each stimulus, but the use of the Internet in data collection has increased in recent years and is likely to continue doing so. In the context of stimulus norms, the equivalence of lab-based and Internet methodologies has not been extensively examined. We discuss some of the pros and cons of online stimulus norming and touch on several issues to consider. We also highlight some important differences between norms obtained online and those obtained in-person.
QoS‐driven spectrum sharing game in cognitive radio systems: a variational inequality approach

Cognitive radio (CR) technology aspires to the efficient usage of the limited and underutilised radio spectrum resources. Constituting a flexible and intelligent network, the unlicensed secondary users (SUs) may coexist with the licensed primary users (PUs), under the prerequisite not to disturb their communication. A spectrum interweave CR system is considered, where SUs coexist with a single PU pair in a fading environment. The SUs are allowed to transmit their data ‘peacefully’, only with the absence of PU's transmission, by exploiting spectrum holes of the licensed band. A quality of service (QoS)‐driven spectrum sharing scheme is proposed. Specifically, the problem of licensed spectrum sharing among SUs is formulated as a novel non‐cooperative game with a view of maximising the effective capacity of each SU that has specific delay QoS requirements, subject to the coupled constraint of the available bandwidth. Because this game constitutes a generalised Nash equilibrium problem, we apply the variational inequality framework to solve it. The variational solution is proven to be unique, and it is obtained through a distributed iterative algorithm. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through numerical simulations, and the results confirm the importance of incorporating the delay QoS factor in spectrum sharing studies. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
AN OVERVIEW OF LIE GROUP VARIATIONAL INTEGRATORS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS TO OPTIMAL CONTROL

We introduce a general framework for the construction of variational integrators of arbitrarily high-order that incorporate Lie group techniques to automatically remain on a Lie group, while retaining the geometric structure-preserving properties characteristic of variational integrators, including symplecticity, momentum-preservation, and good long-time energy behavior. This is achieved by constructing G-invariant discrete Lagrangians in the context of Lie group methods through the use of natural charts and interpolation at the level of the Lie algebra. In the presence of symmetry, the reduction of these G-invariant Lagrangians yield a higher-order analogue of discrete Euler–Poincaré reduction. As an illustrative example, we consider the full body problem from orbital mechanics, which is concerned with the dynamics of rigid bodies in space interacting under their mutual gravitational potential. The importance of simultaneously preserving the symplectic and Lie group properties of the full body dynamics is demonstrated in numerical simulations comparing Lie group variational integrators with integrators that are not symplectic or do not preserve the Lie group structure. Lastly, we demonstrate the application of Lie group variational integrators to the construction of optimal control algorithms on Lie groups, and describe a modified scheme that improves the numerical efficiency of the computation, while maintaining the accuracy of the computed solutions.
Montage : The Architecture and Scientific Applications of a National Virtual Observatory Service for Computing Astronomical Image Mosaics

Montage is a portable toolkit for constructing custom, science-grade mosaics by composing multiple astronomical images. The mosaics constructed by Montage preserve the astrometry (position) and photometry (intensity) of the sources in the input images. The mosaic to be constructed is specified by the user in terms of a set of parameters, including dataset and wavelength to be used, location and size on the sky, coordinate system and projection, and spatial sampling rate. Many astronomical datasets are massive, and are stored in distributed archives that are, in most cases, remote with respect to the available computational resources. The paper describes scientific applications of Montage by NASA projects and researchers, who run the software on both singleand multi-processor computers, including clusters and grids. Standard grid tools are used to run Montage in the case where the data or computers used to construct a mosaic are located remotely on the Internet. This paper describes the architecture, algorithms, and performance of Montage as both a software toolkit and as a grid portal.
The Infrequent Occurrence of Mycoplasmas in Amniotic Fluid from Women with Intact Fetal Membranes

Abstract. As human genital mycoplasmas have been associated with various forms of reproductive failure, the present study was undertaken to investigate whether M. homi‐nis and U. urealyticum organisms (ureaplasmas) are capable of crossing intact fetal membranes. Nearly 300 women in Denmark and England were investigated. Most of them were seen at about the fourth month of gestation and the remainder towards or at the time of birth, all with unruptured membranes. A swab was taken from the uterine cervix or vagina and M. hominis was isolated from 9% of the women and ureaplasmas from half of them. The presence of these mycoplasmas was not associated with an abnormal outcome of pregnancy. In contrast to the frequent presence of mycoplasmas in the lower genital tract, amniotic fluids obtained by transabdominal amniocentesis or at cesarean section did not contain M. hominis and ureaplasmas were isolated from only one of them. This was associated with the same urea‐plasmal serotype being recovered from the cervix and also from the blood of both infant and mother, whose case differed from the others as labor had already started when the amniotic fluid was obtained. Thus, in our populations, we have no evidence that mycoplasmal invasion of the amniotic fluid occurs before the onset of labor. During labor, despite intact membranes, it seems that genital mycoplasmas may occasionally invade the fetal placental unit, probably by the hematogenous route after strong uterine contractions, or otherwise directly after membrane rupture. Since both these events are followed usually by immediate delivery, there would seem to be insufficient time for the genital mycoplasmas to cause fetal damage.
Regeneration in the metazoans: why does it happen?

Summary Why does regeneration occur? And why, when it manifests itself, does it do so in some but not all metazoan species? Hence, what are the permissive or inhibitory factors operating behind this phenomenon? When it comes to regeneration, many questions, such as these, remain unanswered. In fact, the problem of animal regeneration has withstood the probing of scientific inquiry for over 250 years and still awaits a satisfactory mechanistic explanation. In this essay, I will review the distribution and the modes of regeneration that are found in the different metazoan phyla. Also, I will re-examine ideas on its evolutionary origins, and discuss its possible relationship to both asexual reproduction and embryogenesis. This endeavor has two objectives. First, to bring forward an interpretation of regeneration which integrates evolutionary and developmental considerations into its discussion. And second, to suggest a comparative experimental approach to this problem that may bring us closer to understanding the molecular basis of this long-standing biological problem. BioEssays 22:578‐590, 2000. fl 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Effects of maternal gate-keeping behavior on father involvement in care of a pre-school child

The research so far indicates that the context in which the father’s role takes place significantly influences the form and level of father involvement in taking care of the child. The primary goal of this research was to describe the forms and effects of maternal gate-keeping behavior as a characteristic form of interaction between parents which is, as part of the context, considered a significant factor in father involvement in care of the child. Research participants were 247 parental couples from complete families whose oldest child attended a pre-school institution. Fathers provided assessments of their own involvement via the Father Involvement Inventory, as well as assessments of prominence of gate-keeping behavior in their wives via the checklist of maternal gate-keeping behavior. Mothers reported on their beliefs about the importance and possibilities of father involvement in care of the child, as well as on their personal satisfaction with the current involvement of their husband in the joint care of the child. The results point out to the particular forms of mothers’ ambivalence when it comes to the joint care of the child, which is a form of gate-keeping behavior. The frequency of gate-keeping behavior, assessed by the checklist, significantly changes the possibilities of father involvement in taking care of the child in the developmental phase of the family, having in mind that the task of this phase is precisely the definition of parental roles and formation of parent cooperative principle.