Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Where Does the Good Shepherd Go? Civic Virtue and Sorting into Public Sector Employment

Abstract Several studies have analyzed motives to work in the public versus private sector. However, research on prosocial motivation in the context of public sector employment has largely neglected civic virtue, the motive to contribute to society. This study considers civic virtue in addition to other possible motives, using a representative, longitudinal dataset of employees in Germany including 63,180 observations of 13,683 different individuals. We find that civic virtue relates positively to public sector employment beyond altruism, risk aversion, laziness and (low) financial motivation. The result holds within different branches and is explained by sorting into the sector.
Immunoprecipitation of nonerythrocyte spectrin within live cells following microinjection of specific antibodies: relation to cytoskeletal structures

The intracellular precipitation of nonerythrocyte spectrin has been achieved by the microinjection into cells of either a monoclonal antibody (IgM) directed against the alpha chain of nonerythrocyte spectrin or an affinity-purified polyclonal antibody raised against bovine brain spectrin (fodrin). This antibody-induced precipitation of spectrin was observed in fibroblastic and epithelial cell types, including embryonic bovine tracheal fibroblasts, a bovine kidney epithelial cell line (MDBK), Hela cells, gerbil fibroma cells, and fibroblast lines of human and mouse origins. The precipitation of the spectrin was specific and two proteins with a similar distribution to the nonerythrocyte spectrin were not induced to co-precipitate in the spectrin aggregates. Comparing the two types of antibody microinjected, the affinity-purified polyclonal antibody resulted in more compact aggregates of spectrin and these were frequently aligned with microfilament bundles. The rate at which the spectrin aggregates were cleared into presumptive lysosomes varied with different cell types: in some such as the bovine kidney epithelial cells, this appeared complete within 3 h after microinjection, whereas in some of the fibroblasts the spectrin aggregates were prominent in the cytoplasm at 24 and even 48 h after microinjection. Microfilament bundles appeared unaffected by the aggregation of spectrin. We conclude that the integrity of the actin microfilament bundles does not require nonerythrocyte spectrin and that most probably these structures are linked at their termini to the membrane through proteins other than nonerythrocyte spectrin. No effect of the intracellular spectrin precipitation was observed on cell shape, or on the distribution of coated vesicles or microtubules. The aggregation of the nonerythrocyte spectrin, however, did affect the distribution of the vimentin type of intermediate filaments in most of the cell types studied. These filaments became more distorted and condensed, but generally did not collapse around the nucleus as occurs following microtubule disruption induced by colchicine treatment. The clumped intermediate filaments were frequently seen to coincide with regions of aggregated spectrin. This aggregation of intermediate filaments was not induced by microinjection of irrelevant antibodies, nor was it induced by the monoclonal antibody against spectrin in cells with which it did not cross-react. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Why share knowledge? The influence of ICT on the motivation for knowledge sharing

Information and communication technology (ICT) can enhance knowledge sharing by lowering temporal and spatial barriers between knowledge workers, and improving access to information about knowledge. Looking at ICT for knowledge sharing in this light, however, has limited value, because it ignores when and how the quality of knowledge sharing will be enhanced. A more encompassing perspective will come about if ICT is studied with relation to the motivation for knowledge sharing. The article explores this perspective by developing a theoretical model identifying and linking the variables involved. By presenting the outcomes of an empirical investigation, it also illustrates the differential effects of ICT on the motivation for knowledge sharing in different settings.
Psychosocial correlates of physical activity in school children aged 8-10 years.

BACKGROUND Understanding correlates of physical activity (PA) among children in different populations may contribute to fostering active lifestyles. This study considered gender differences in relationships between biologic (body mass index, BMI), demographic (socioeconomic sport status, SES) and psychosocial correlates of PA and level of PA in Portuguese primary school children. METHODS 683 children, aged 8-10 years, from 20 different elementary schools in northern Portugal were surveyed. Weight status was classified using International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) criteria for the BMI. Family SES was estimated from school records. PA level and psychosocial correlates (attraction to PA, perceived physical competence and parental socialization) were obtained with interview and standardized questionnaires, respectively. Sex-specific hierarchical multiple regression analyses (SPSS 18.0) were conducted and included two blocks of predictor variables (biologic and demographic, and psychosocial). RESULTS Level of PA was significantly higher in boys than girls. Enjoyment of participation in vigorous PA was positively associated with level of PA. Perceived acceptance by peers in games and sports and parental encouragement were positively and significantly related to PA in girls. Perceived physical competence was positively and significantly related to PA in boys. Weight status and SES were not associated with PA. CONCLUSIONS Boys and girls differed in perceived attractiveness of PA and perceived physical competence, both of which influenced level of PA. Differences in perceptions may be important aspects of motivation for PA in school children.
The daf‐2 gene network for longevity regulates oxidative stress resistance and Mn‐superoxide dismutase gene expression in Caenorhabditis elegans

Longevity is regulated by the daf‐2 gene network in Caenorhabditis elegans. Mutations in the daf‐2 gene, which encodes a member of the insulin receptor family, confer the life extension (Age) phenotype and the constitutive dauer (a growth‐arrested larval form specialized for dispersal) formation phenotype. The Age phenotype is mutually potentiated by two life extension mutations in the daf‐2 gene and the clk‐1 gene, a homologue of yeast CAT5/COQ7 known to regulate ubiquinone biosynthesis. In this study, we demonstrated that the daf‐2 mutation also conferred an oxidative stress resistance (Oxr) phenotype, which was also enhanced by the clk‐1 mutation. Similar to the Age phenotype, the Oxr phenotype was regulated by the genetic pathway of insulin‐like signaling from daf‐2 to the daf‐16 gene, a homologue of the HNF‐3/forkhead transcription factor. These findings led us to examine whether the insulin‐like signaling pathway regulates the gene expression of antioxidant defense enzymes. We found that the mRNA level of the sod‐3 gene, which encodes Mn‐superoxide dismutase (SOD), was much higher in daf‐2 mutants than in the wild type. Moreover, the increased sod‐3 gene expression phenotype is regulated by the insulin‐like signaling pathway. Although the clk‐1 mutant itself did not display Oxr and the increased sod‐3 expression phenotypes, the clk‐1 mutation enhanced them in the daf‐2 mutant, suggesting that clk‐1 is involved in longevity in two ways: clk‐1 composes the original clk‐1 longevity program and the daf‐2 longevity program. These observations suggest that the daf‐2 gene network controls longevity by regulating the Mn‐SOD‐associated antioxidant defense system. This system appears to play a role in efficient life maintenance at the dauer stage. —Honda, Y. , Honda, S. The daf‐2 gene network for longevity regulates oxidative stress resistance and Mn‐superoxide dismutase gene expression in Caenorhabditis elegans. FASEB J. 13, 1385–1393 (1999)
VIOLENCE RISK IN PERSONALITY DISORDERS

The history of personality disorders renders evident the evolution of defining and identifying them towards a forensic evaluation concept, mainly promoted in the psychological and juridical-psychiatric domain. The assessment of personality disorders described in DSM and ICD, on priority diagnoses of behavioral type, although it may serve as a mark, relatively non-controversial, it causes polemic between the specialists in medical-legal expertise. Consequently, in order to reveal the personality traits associated to psychopathy, is used the Psychopathy Checklist (Hare, PCL-R, 1991; 2003). Modern statistic and clinical instruments (PCL-R, HCR-20) win ground in psychiatric forensic evaluation and violence management. The prediction of violent behavior by statistic instruments requires a validation on particular populations.
L-form bacteria, chronic diseases and the origins of life

The peptidoglycan cell wall is widely conserved across the bacterial domain, suggesting that it appeared early in the evolution of bacteria. It is normally essential but under certain conditions wall-deficient or ‘L-form’ bacteria can be isolated. In Bacillus subtilis this normally requires two genetic changes. The first, exemplified by mutations shutting down wall precursor synthesis, works by increasing membrane synthesis. This promotes the unusual form of proliferation used by L-forms, involving a range of relatively disorganized membrane blebbing or vesiculation events. The secondary class of mutations probably work by relieving oxidative stress that L-forms may incur due to their unbalanced metabolism. Repression or inhibition of cell wall precursor synthesis can stimulate the L-form transition in a wide range of bacteria, of both Gram-positive and -negative lineages. L-forms are completely resistant to most antibiotics working specifically on cell wall synthesis, such as penicillins and cephalosporins, consistent with the many reports of their involvement in various chronic diseases. They are potentially important in biotechnology, because lack of a wall can be advantageous in a range of production or strain improvement applications. Finally, L-forms provide an interesting model system for studying early steps in the evolution of cellular life. This article is part of the themed issue ‘The new bacteriology’.
Control of stochastic discrete event systems: synthesis

We (1996) have presented a framework for their supervisory control, where control is exercised by dynamically disabling certain controllable events thereby nulling the occurrence probabilities of disabled events, and increasing the occurrence probabilities of enabled events proportionately. The control objective is to design a supervisor such that the controlled system never executes any illegal traces, and legal traces occur with minimum prespecified occurrence probabilities. In other words, the probabilistic language of the controlled system lies within a prespecified range, where the upper bound is a "non-probabilistic language" representing a legality constraint. We provide a condition for the existence of a supervisor, and also present an algorithm to test this condition when the probabilistic languages are regular. In this paper we give a technique to compute online a maximally permissive supervisor achieving the specified lower and upper bound constraints.
Exploring term proximity statistic for Arabic information retrieval

Term proximity statistic, which consists of rewarding documents where the matched query terms occur in close proximity, has proved its effectiveness in document retrieval performance. However, this field of research remains unexplored for Arabic information retrieval (IR) despite of the non diacritical text and the rich morphology of Arabic language which complicate the retrieval process. In this paper, we propose to boost the Arabic information retrieval performance by using proximity information. Our aim is to evaluate proximity features for Arabic language in order to go beyond the bag-of-words, and to overcome the problems related to text preprocessing. We investigate several state-of-the-art proximity models, including the Cross-Term model (CRTER), the Markov Random Field model (MRF), the divergence from randomness (DFR) multinomial model, and the Positional Language Model (PLM). For preprocessing purposes, Khoja and light stemming algorithms have been used. Experiments are performed on the Arabic TREC-2001/2002 collection using Terrier IR platform. The obtained results show significant improvements by using proximity based-models for Arabic IR.
MusiCube: a visual music recommendation system featuring interactive evolutionary computing

We often want to select tunes based on our purposes or situations. For example, we may want background music for particular spaces. We think interactive evolutionary computing is a good solution to adequately recommend tunes based on users' preferences. This paper presents MusiCube, a visual interface for music selection. It applies interactive genetic algorithm in a multidimensional musical feature space. MusiCube displays a set of tunes as colored icons in a 2D cubic space, and provides a user interface to intuitively select suggested tunes. This paper presents a user experience that MusiCube adequately represented clouds of icons corresponding to sets of users' preferable tunes in the 2D cubic space.
GridMiner : A Framework for Knowledge Discovery on the Grid-from a Vision to Design and Implementation

Knowledge discovery in data sources available on Computational Grids is a challenging research and development issue. Several Grid research activities addressing some facets of this process have already been reported. The GridMiner project (www.gridminer.org) at the University of Vienna aims, as the first Grid research effort, to cover all aspects of the knowledge discovery process and integrate them as advanced service-oriented Grid application. The innovative architecture provides a robust and reliable high performance data mining and OLAP environment and strengths the importance of Grid enabled applications in terms of business intelligence and detailed analysis of very large scientific data sets. The interactive cooperation of different services data integration, data selection, data transformation, data mining, pattern evaluation and knowledge presentation within the GridMiner architecture is the key to high performance knowledge discovery on large datasets.
Floor versus electronic trading of government bond futures

This paper analyses the impact of a transition from open outcry to electronic trading in the UK Long Gilt futures market. Price clustering behaviour is not materially affected, but there is an increased concentration of large trades at more popular prices. After automation, narrower bid-ask spreads tend to be associated with relatively smaller trades. There is a substantial reduction in mean trade size as reduced-depth orders become trades. The mean daily number of transactions and quotations increases substantially, which is entirely consistent with static volumes and decreased mean trade size. Bid-ask spreads widen significantly after automation, which is largely accounted for by the finding that spreads under electronic systems demonstrate an increased sensitivity to price volatility. This effect is accentuated by increased volatility after automation.
A Visual Object Tracking Method Based on Improved Bhattacharyya Coefficient and Model Update Strategy

In the traditional Mean Shift tracking algorithm, The Bhattacharyya coefficient is an efficient method in image statistical feature matching. But for the influence of background feature, the optimal location obtained by Bhattacharyya coefficient may not be the exact target location. Thus, there will be drifted or even wrong location in tracking. This paper proposes an improved Bhattacharyya coefficient based on visual saliency. The new coefficient effectively reduces the influence of background feature, and emphasizes the importance of target feature, which obviously improves the target matching accuracy compared to the original coefficient. In order to get an effective model update strategy, the paper synthetically analyzes the similarity of target model and background model, and estimates the reason of the disturbance. The experiment result shows the proposed method can well restrain background distraction, meanwhile, it can effectively update the model and overcome the problem of model drift, and the tracking algorithm is effective and robust.
Exploiting redundancy to construct energy-efficient , high-performance RAIDs

Recent studies show that disk-based I/O subsystems account for a non-trivial portion of energy consumption in data-intensive environment such as storage servers and data centers. Previous powerefficient I/O solutions for a single disk drive or mobile computers cannot be applied to data-intensive environment where the I/O load is much more intensive. Current solutions seek help from multi-speed disks but this type of disk will not be on the market soon. Solutions have to be sought on extensions on conventional storage system techniques such as RAIDs. This paper seeks a novel way to build EnergyEfficient, high-performance RAID system called EERAID by exploiting inherent redundant information such as mirroring and parity at the RAID controller level. As representative mirroring and parity redundant RAID systems, RAID 1 and RAID 5 are particularly studied. For RAID 1, we develop a Windows Round Robin (WRR) request scheduling policy. For RAID 5, we introduce a Transformable Read policY(TRY) to transform disk requests from spun-down disks to active disks, and develop a Power and Redundant Aware Destage policy (PRAD) to defer writes to work together with TRY. Comprehensive trace-driven simulations show that EERAID can significantly conserve energy with a minor performance impairment, by 12-30% energy saving for both small-scale and large scale RAID level 1, and 10-20% energy saving for small-scale RAID level 5.
Allying BPR with Strategy: A New Perspective for BPR

Since early 1990’s, Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has become a buzzword around the world. Of the BPR methods and models suggested, the majority has put much attention on redesigning processes at operational levels. Those who stress the importance of strategic process reengineering tend to emphasize that redesigning should be embarked and implemented at a broader scope (cross-functional) in order to obtain greater pay offs, whereas the impact of BPR on strategies is less studied. In this paper, we propose that BPR ally with strategies and, consequently, emphasize the importance of BPR relevant to strategies and the significant role of strategic directions in light of BPR. Thus, we develop a conceptual BPR model that links a firm’s strategy, with a real world example. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the inter-relationship between BPR and strategy and to help provide guidelines for better BPR implementation to enterprises.
Systematic methodology for the design of Seevinck's CMOS log-domain integrators

This work presents a methodology for the design of Seevinck's CMOS log-domain integrators. Since companding circuits in general and log-domain circuits in particular impose many restrictions concerning the correct operating point of transistors and the perfect cancellation of nonlinearities, their dimensioning is not simple. In order not to such a difficulty become a drawback against the achievable low power consumption and high signal-to-noise(distortion) ratio, if compared to conventional small-signal circuits, a careful design methodology is required.
Optimization of H 2 Performance Criterion for Disturbance Attenuation in the Direct Data-based Control Design *

The direct data-based control design solves the optimal control parameters which minimize the performance criterion. The input and output data collected from the controlled process derives the performance criterion instead of using process model. The approach has difficulty when the initial input and output data for the control design is generated from a disturbance signal, and the disturbance signal is assumed to be neither known, nor deterministic signals. The paper considers disturbance attenuation problem in the regulatory control using direct data-based control design approach on the assumption that the disturbance is modeled by colored stochastic signal, and is fed at the input signal. The paper formulates H2 performance criterion representing the variance of disturbance response. The performance criterion is derived from the initial input and output data. The paper gives analytical results for the optimization problem. According to the main result in the paper, the problem can be formulated as a quadratic optimization problem with equality constraints. Finally, a simple numerical example is illustrated to show the analytical result.
On the energy efficiency gain of MIMO communication under various power consumption models

Along with spectral efficiency (SE), Energy efficiency (EE) is becoming one of the main performance evaluation criteria in communication. These two criteria, which are conflicting, can be linked through their trade-off. As far as MIMO is concerned, a closed-form approximation of the EE-SE trade-off has recently been proposed and it proved useful for analyzing the impact of using multiple antennas on the EE. In this paper, we use this closed-form approximation for assessing and comparing the EE gain of MIMO over SISO system when different power consumption models (PCMs) are considered at the transmitter. The EE of a communication system is closely related to its power consumption. In theory only the transmit power is considered as consumed power, whereas in a practical setting, the consumed power is the addition of two terms; the fixed consumed power, which accounts for cooling, processing, etc., and the variable consumed power, which varies as a function of the transmit power. Our analysis unveils the large mismatch between theoretical and practical EE gain of MIMO over SISO system; In theory, the EE gain increases both with the SE and the number of antennas, and, hence the potential of MIMO for EE improvement is very large in comparison with SISO; On the contrary, the EE gain is small and decreases as the number of transmit antennas increases when realistic PCMs are considered.
HD 209458: Physical Parameters of the Parent Star and the Transiting Planet

The Sun-like star HD 209458 harbors a close-in giant planet that transits across the star's disk, and thus allows an unprecedented access to the basic parameters of the planet, given a certain knowledge of the basic parameters of the star, namely, its mass and radius. We present theoretical stellar evolution model calculations for HD 209458 and discuss the uncertainties involved in deriving the stellar mass and radius. We derive the mass, M = 1.06 M☉, radius, R = 1.18 R☉, and age, t = 5.2 Gyr of the star with uncertainties of 10% or more. The dominant sources of uncertainty remain the helium abundance estimate and the treatment of convection, even after an optimistic estimate for the effective temperature of the star. However, we find that in deriving the radius of the planet, Rp, the relevant stellar model input is the M/R relation, which runs orthogonal to a degeneracy in the transit light-curve solution and greatly improves the estimate of Rp. Theoretically, the M/R relation has a lower uncertainty than the M and R separately. We estimate the planet radius and mass to be Rp = 1.42 RJ and Mp = 0.69 ± 0.02 MJ.
Graph Cuts for Energy Minimization and Assignment Problem (1)

In this lecture, we first talked about a generalized Potts energy model in the Markov Random Field (MRF) framework, and presented a multiway graph cut algorithm to find the minimum energy [1]. After that, we presented an α-expansion move algorithm to compute the visual correspondence with occlusions [2]. Markov Random Fields (MRFs). Let f p denote the disparity at pixel p, and N p denote the set of the neighbors of p. In a Markov Random Field (MRF) framework, we have Pr(f p |f q , p = q) = Pr(f p |f q , q ∈ N p).