Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
K-counting Automata

In this paper, we define k -counting automata as recognizers for ω -languages, i.e. languages of infinite words. We prove that the class of ω -languages they recognize is a proper extension of the ω -regular languages. In addition we prove that languages recognized by k -counting automata are closed under Boolean operations. It remains an open problem whether or not emptiness is decidable for k -counting automata. However, we conjecture strongly that it is decidable and give formal reasons why we believe so.
Advances and challenges in basic and translational research on clusterin.

Clusterin (CLU), known by several other names, has recently drawn much attention because of its association with cancer promotion and metastasis ( [1][1]– [3][2]). First discovered as serum apolipoprotein J with chaperoning properties for protein stabilization, CLU also can exist within the cell
Opening and Closing of the Bacterial RNA Polymerase Clamp

Clamping Down Crystal structures of RNA polymerase show that a “clamp” region which surrounds the DNA binding site can adopt conformations ranging from a closed to an open state. Chakraborty et al. (p. 591) used single-molecule fluorescence energy transfer experiments to detect the clamp's conformational changes in solution during the transcription cycle. The results support a model in which a clamp opening allows DNA to be loaded into the active-center cleft and unwound. Direct interactions with DNA likely trigger clamp closure upon formation of a catalytically competent transcription initiation complex. Single-molecule fluorescence measurements define the clamp conformation during transcription initiation and elongation. Using single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer, we have defined bacterial RNA polymerase (RNAP) clamp conformation at each step in transcription initiation and elongation. We find that the clamp predominantly is open in free RNAP and early intermediates in transcription initiation but closes upon formation of a catalytically competent transcription initiation complex and remains closed during initial transcription and transcription elongation. We show that four RNAP inhibitors interfere with clamp opening. We propose that clamp opening allows DNA to be loaded into and unwound in the RNAP active-center cleft, that DNA loading and unwinding trigger clamp closure, and that clamp closure accounts for the high stability of initiation complexes and the high stability and processivity of elongation complexes.
A critical survey of vestigial structures in the postcranial skeletons of extant mammals

In the Mammalia, vestigial skeletal structures abound but have not previously been the focus of study, with a few exceptions (e.g., whale pelves). Here we use a phylogenetic bracketing approach to identify vestigial structures in mammalian postcranial skeletons and present a descriptive survey of such structures in the Mammalia. We also correct previous misidentifications, including the previous misidentification of vestigial caviid metatarsals as sesamoids. We also examine the phylogenetic distribution of vestigiality and loss. This distribution indicates multiple vestigialization and loss events in mammalian skeletal structures, especially in the hand and foot, and reveals no correlation in such events between mammalian fore and hind limbs.
FPGA implementation of advanced FEC schemes for intelligent aggregation networks

In state-of-the-art fiber-optics communication systems the fixed forward error correction (FEC) and constellation size are employed. While it is important to closely approach the Shannon limit by using turbo product codes (TPC) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with soft-decision decoding (SDD) algorithm; rate-adaptive techniques, which enable increased information rates over short links and reliable transmission over long links, are likely to become more important with ever-increasing network traffic demands. In this invited paper, we describe a rate adaptive non-binary LDPC coding technique, and demonstrate its flexibility and good performance exhibiting no error floor at BER down to 10-15 in entire code rate range, by FPGA-based emulation, making it a viable solution in the next-generation high-speed intelligent aggregation networks.
Michael Jensen - la théorie positive de l'agence et ses applications à l'architecture et à la gouvernance des organisations

L'objectif de cet article est de faire une presentation des travaux de M.C. Jensen dans le domaine de l'architecture et de la gouvernance des organisations. Apres avoir precise les principales composantes et le champ d’application de la theorie positive de l’agence,sont presentees les applications de cette theorie dans les champs de la finance, du controle de gestion et de la gestion des ressources humaines, a travers les travaux de M.C. Jensen
Individually guided motivation

Individual Conferences to Promote Independent Reading is one of four classroom activities in the system of Individually Guided Motivation. A package of teacher-education materials designed to allow schools to implement the program of individual conferences was evaluted in six different school settings. Objectives were identified for both the conference leaders (direct target group) and the pupils participating in conferences (indirect target group). The conference leaders, after using film, handbook, and user's manual included in the package, were assessed both by a paper-and-pencil test and by observation during the conferences. In all but one school, conference leaders were considered to have achieved an adequate level of knowledge and skill in conducting conferences. Conference leaders' responses to a questionnaire and their extension of the conference technique to other subject-matter areas indicated that they perceived the program as usable and effective. Students in Grades 2-6 participated in the conferences. Significant gains in number of books read during an eight-week period were observed at all grades. A positive change in attitude toward reading was observed at all grades, with a significant change in Grades 4-6. Children participating in the conferences showed significant gains in reading skills. (Author) 1 J U S DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT ! lAS BEEN REPRO DUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIG INATING IT POINTS OF VIEW OR OPIN IONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDU CATION POSITION OR POLICY Technical Report No. 185 INDIVIDUAL CONFERENCES TO PROMOTE INDEPENDENT READING: A REPORT ON THE FIELD TEST by Deborah M . Stewart, Mary R. Quilling, and Dorothy A. Frayer Report from the Program 2 Component, A System of Individually Guided Motivation Herbert J. Klausmeier, Principal Investigator Dorothy A. Frayer, Assistant Scientist Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning The University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin
Visibility of Corporate Websites: The Role of Information Prosociality

Abstract With an ever expanding content and user base, the Web presents information discovery and consumption challenges for both consumers and producers of information. Producers of information strive for visibility among consumers who have limited attention. Corporate websites are a primary digital marketing channel for firms through which they seek to gain a bigger share of their stakeholders' (i.e., customers, investors, communities) attention. Using observations spanning several years we study the website visibility, as measured by user traffic, of more than 2500 public firms and its association with properties of corporate websites and the corresponding firms. One property that is of particular interest to us is the availability of “community-engaging” pages, i.e., pages that support blogs or forums on the website or provide links to external social media platforms such as Facebook. These community-engaging pages signify online prosocial services provided by firms. We find that websites with larger number of community-engaging pages are associated with higher visibility. This provides a novel empirical support for the promotion and use of social media content and tools on websites of firms. We also find that websites with more specific content are associated with lower visibility while providing more out-links is associated with higher visibility. We observe these results consistently over time. These associations are observed while controlling for the size of the firms, types of their industries, the magnitude of media attention and other firm-level heterogeneity. Finally, machine learning models derived from our empirical analysis provide strong predictive utility for out-of-sample data.
A faster image registration algorithm

Image registration is of prime importance for image mosaic. It is the process of geometrically aligning one image to another image of the same scene taken from different time, from different viewpoints or by different sensors. In general, image registration needs a lot of time. This paper reduces the computation time from two aspects. For coarse matching, the paper combines normalized cross correlation (NCC) matching and sequential similarity detection algorithm (SSDA) to reduce unnecessary computation. For precise matching, by introducing an outlier constraint, the paper terminates computation early by comparing outliers. By adopting these improvements there may be a saving of computation time of about 92.57% and 8.17% respectively.
The Impact of Acquisition Time on Image Quality in Whole-Body 18F-FDG PET/CT for Cancer Staging

Our objective was to evaluate the impact of acquisition time on image quality, lesion detection rate, standardized uptake values, and lesion volume for 18F-FDG PET in cancer patients. Methods: Over 7 mo, 33 cancer patients were included in this study. In these patients, 63 lesions were independently evaluated by 2 nuclear medicine specialists (experienced and beginner). Two consecutive whole-body 18F-FDG PET/CT scans using a 3-min and 1.5-min acquisition time per bed position were obtained for each patient. Lesions were visually identified, and their locations were compared. The lesion volumes and standardized uptake values of the primary tumor, lymph nodes, and metastases were determined and compared. Image quality was scored using a 5-range Likert-type scale. For all parameters, interobserver agreement was assessed. Results: All relevant lesions could be identified at both acquisition times. Image quality was slightly adversely affected by an acquisition time of 1.5 min but was excellent or good in 85% of the scans. In a patient with increased blood sugar levels, the image quality was rated moderate at 3 min and poor at 1.5 min. The quality of lesion visualization was excellent regardless of the acquisition time. Lesion volume and maximum standardized uptake value on PET images showed an excellent correlation between the 2 acquisition times (Pearson correlation coefficient, 0.99 and 0.97, respectively). Interobserver agreement was excellent (κ > 0.83). Conclusion: Although image quality is slightly poorer, reducing the acquisition time to 1.5 min per bed position seems to be clinically feasible without decreasing the lesion detection rate even for less experienced observers.
Multicenter phase II study of erlotinib, an oral epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor, in patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous cell cancer of the head and neck.

PURPOSE To determine the efficacy and safety profiles of erlotinib in patients with advanced recurrent and/or metastatic squamous cell cancer of the head and neck (HNSCC). PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients with locally recurrent and/or metastatic HNSCC, regardless of their HER1/EGFR status, were treated with erlotinib at an initial dose of 150 mg daily. Dose reductions or escalations were allowed based on tolerability of erlotinib. RESULTS One-hundred fifteen patients were enrolled onto this study. Forty-seven percent of patients received erlotinib at 150 mg daily throughout the entire study, 6% had dose escalations, and 46% required dose reductions and/or interruptions. Five patients achieved partial responses on study, for an overall objective response rate of 4.3% (95% CI, 1.4% to 9.9%). Disease stabilization was maintained in 44 patients (38.3%) for a median duration of 16.1 weeks. The median progression-free survival was 9.6 weeks (95% CI, 8.1 to 12.1 weeks), and the median overall survival was 6.0 months (95% CI, 4.8 to 7.0 months). Subgroup analyses revealed a significant difference in overall survival favoring patients who developed at least grade 2 skin rashes versus those who did not (P =.045), whereas no difference was detected based on HER1/EGFR expression. Rash and diarrhea were the most common drug-related toxicities, encountered in 79% and 37% of patients, respectively, though the severity was mild to moderate in most cases. CONCLUSION Erlotinib was well tolerated in this heavily pretreated HNSCC population and produced prolonged disease stabilization; hence, further evaluation of its role in this tumor type is warranted.
An articulatory prosody study of /u/ : motor equivalence.

Acoustic and articulatory data are presented for the vowel /u/ at 5 different prosodic boundaries in French. It is shown that although the 3 speakers studied produce similar acoustic output with lower F1 and F2 at stronger prosodic boundaries – they adopt different articulatory strategies to achieve these acoustic targets. Two of the speakers use a combination of tongue backing/raising and lip protrusion, whereas the third speaker primarily uses the tongue tip. It is suggested that these strategies represent motor equivalence in the production of /u/, and it is hoped that the data presented here will lead to better articulatory models of this vowel.
Evolvability of representations in complex system engineering: A survey

A successful design optimization crucially depends on the underlying representation, which has to adapt to a variety of demands and changing boundary conditions. Complex system engineering addresses these challenges through key features like self-organization, modularity, locality, or evolution. The representation covers the parameter setup (location and quantity) and the mapping between parameter space (genotype) and design space (phenotype), and should allow for both adaptation and specialization of a design. To quantify the potential of a representation, suitable quality criteria are needed. Evolvability is such a criterion, which has been derived from biological analysis. However, many biological and technical studies propose different definitions of evolvability. We analyze, interpret, and extend them in order to derive an evolvability criterion suitable for complex system engineering. This can be used as a basis for future design optimization problems.
ContrACT: a software environment for developing control architecture.

Robotic software is now one of essential part of robotic system development, therefore software control architecture design methods and concepts, often inspired by engineering software field, are necessary within a robotic project to enhance evolution, modularity and re-usability, and to avoid redesign costs [1]. Control software architecture design approaches are usually classified into three main categories: Reactive architectures are built by gathering several modules called behaviors. Each behavior reacts continuously to the situation sensed by the perception system [4]. Actuators control values are obtained from a weighted summation of all commands generated by these modules. The complexity of this method lies in weights adjustment allowing a good reaction and keeping global objective [5][8]. Deliberative architectures are built in several levels, usually three. Decisions are taken in the higher level; the intermediate level is in charge of controlling and supervising. The low level deals with all periodical treatment related to the instrumentation, such actuator control or measuring instrument management [3]. Hybrid architectures are a mixed of two previous ones. Usually these are structured in three layers: the deliberative layer, based on planning, the control execution layer and a functional reactive layer [6][7][9][11].
On the Maximum-Likelihood based data-aided frequency offset and channel estimates

We consider transmission over a frequency-selective channel. We focus on the data-aided joint and directed maximum-likelihood estimation of the carrier frequency offset and of the dispersive channel. The directed estimators correspond to the frequency offset estimator assuming the channel known, as well as the channel estimator assuming the frequency offset known. A comparison of directed and non-directed estimators based on asymptotic (large sample) analysis is addressed and shows that the performance of the joint estimates and the directed estimates is not so different.
Semantic Discovery of the User Intended Query in a Selectable Target Query Language

The syntactic approach of most of Web search engines still has the drawback of not considering the semantics of the keywords entered by the user. So, users usually have to browse many hits looking for the information they want. In this paper, we present a system that, given a set of keywords with well defined semantics, automatically generates a set of formal queries, in the query language of the user's choice, which attempt to capture what the user had in mind when she or he wrote those keywords. The system uses ontologies and a description logics reasoner to perform a semantic enrichment of user keywords to improve the discovering of possible user queries and to reject semantically inconsistent queries.
Preverbal Communication of Blind Infants and Their Mothers

Films of interactions between five mothers and their blind infants, aged 11 months to 2 years, 8 months, made at regular intervals over six months, were analyzed to determine the development of communicative skills in each mother-infant dyad. It was found that, although the frequency of the infants’ vocalizations was within normal limits, the vocalizations did not follow normal patterns of responsiveness, and the mothers’ responses to them were weak and inconsistent. Suggestions are made for a highly structured program to enhance the communicative skills of parents and their blind infants.
XFI , Optimal Interconnections

In this paper, a general N, problem for continuous time, linear time invariant systems is formulated and solved in a behavioral framework. This general formulation, which includes standard 3-1, optimization as a special case, provides added freedom in the design of sub-optimal compensators, and can in fact be viewed as a means of designing optimal systems. In particular, the formulation presented allows for singular interconnections, which naturally occur when interconnecting first principles models.
Students' experiences of community engagement in an educational psychology practicum

conceptualization was indicated by the students’ ability to tie course-related and other previously acquired knowledge and theories to describe the practicum experience from a conceptual rather than a descriptive perspective (Collier & Williams, 2005). This was indicated by the students’ experiences of applying theories in their assessments and interventions, their ability to understand theories as the result of implementing it in practice and at times even integrating theories from other modules in the programme such as the eco-systemic theory. Abstract conceptualization was also illustrated by the students’ ability to put into practice the skills that they had learned in the classroom environment as Educational Psychologists. Reflective observation was indicated by the students’ experiences of writing in the reflective journal, participating in the reflective dialogue and the occurrence of reflexivity during the practicum. Students were encouraged to consciously reflect on the practicum in their reflective journals and during reflective dialogue after each session at the secondary school. In addition, some students indicated that they were reflecting during the practicum by themselves (reflexivity) and as a result learned about themselves and how to enhance and adapt their skills whilst the practicum was still in session. This indicates that students were reflecting on their experiences and during their experiences, hence it can be assumed that the learning experience at the practicum enriched their knowledge as deep and effective learning occurs when new knowledge is processed within a reflective process (Brockbank et al., 2002). Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle indicates that experiential learning took place during the community engagement practicum.
PAC: Taming TCP Incast Congestion Using Proactive ACK Control

TCP in cast congestion which can introduce hundreds of milliseconds delay and up to 90% throughput degradation, severely affecting application performance, has been a practical issue in high-bandwidth low-latency data enter networks. Despite continuous efforts, prior solutions have significant drawbacks. They either only support quite a limited number of senders (e.g., 40-60), which is not sufficient, or require non-trivial system modifications, which is impractical and not incrementally deployable. We present PAC, a simple yet very effective design to tame TCP in cast congestion via Proactive ACK Control at the receiver. The key design principle behind PAC is that we treat ACK not only as the acknowledgement of received packets but also as the trigger for new packets. Leveraging data center network characteristics, PAC enforces a novel ACK control to release ACKs in such a way that the ACK-triggered in-flight data can fully utilize the bottleneck link without causing in cast collapse even when faced with over a thousand senders. We implement PAC on both Windows and Linux platforms, and extensively evaluate PAC using small-scale test bed experiments and large-scale ns-2 simulations. Our results show that PAC significantly outperforms the previous representative designs such as ICTCP and DCTCP by supporting 40X (i.e., 40? 1600) more senders, further, it does not introduce spurious timeout and retransmission even when the measured 99th percentile RTT is only 3.6ms. Our implementation experiences show that PAC is readily deployable in production data enters, while requiring minimal system modification compared to prior designs.
Nomen Est Omen: Quantitative Prediction of Molecular Properties Directly from IUPAC Names

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) was formed in 1919 by chemists from indus- try and academia (1). Over nearly nine decades the Union has succeeded in fostering worldwide communications in the chemical sciences and in uniting chemistry - academic, industrial and government - in a common language. As one of the results of the Union, IUPAC names nowadays serve as a commonly agreed text representation of chemical structures in patents, publications and databases. In public databases of chemical compounds, like PubChem with more than 12 million entries, chemical structures are identified by default using their IUPAC names (2). We report a very fast linguistic method to extract the implicit information contained in IUPAC names to statistically predict pharmacologically relevant proper- ties. This provides an efficient annotation tool that can be used to assess the likelihood of a given compound as a drug candidate and renders the entire chemical literature a searchable database for virtual screening experiments and data mining.