Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantum Background Independence and Witten Geometric Quantization of the Moduli of CY Threefolds.

In this paper we study two diﬀerent topics. The ﬁrst topic is the applications of the geometric quantization scheme of Witten introduced in [2] and [16] to the problem of the quantum background independence in string theory. The second topic is the introduction of a Z structure on the tangent space of the moduli space of polarized CY threefolds M (M). Based on the existence of a Z structure on the tangent space of the moduli space of polarized CY threefolds we associate an algebraic integrable structure on the tangent bundle of M (M). In both cases it is crucial to construct a ﬂat Sp (2 h 2 , 1 , R ) connection on the tangent bundle of the moduli space M (M) of polarized CY threefolds. In this paper we deﬁne a Higgs ﬁeld on the tangent bundle of the moduli space of CY threefolds. Combining this Higgs ﬁeld with the Levi-Cevita connection of the Weil-Petersson metrics on the moduli space of three dimensional CY manifolds, we construct a new Sp (2 h 2 , 1 , R ) connection, following the ideas of Cecotti and Vafa. Using this ﬂat connection, we apply the scheme of geometric quantization introduced by Axelrod, Della Pietra and Witten to the tangent bundle of the moduli space of three dimensional CY manifolds to realize Witten program in [37] of solving the problem of background quantum independence for topological string ﬁeld theories. By modifying the calculations of E. Witten done on the ﬂat bundle R 3 π ∗ C to the tangent bundle of the moduli space of CY threefolds, we
Enhancing the work placement experience of international students: towards a support framework

Abstract This article reports the findings from an institutional case study into the work placement experience of undergraduate international students studying at a UK-based university. Given the centrality and importance of the employability and internationalisation agendas in higher education, little published literature considers both and how they impact upon the work placement experience of international students. With past increases in international student recruitment numbers and the drive for students, regardless of their nationality, to gain work experience, there is a need for institutions to better understand work placement from the international students’ perspective. Findings revealed that challenges exist in finding and securing work placement, with critical themes emerging to include placement information, visa rules, culture differences, prior work experience, academic preparation for placement and academic writing ability. A support framework is proposed to assist institutions to consider how they could align their practices to meet international students’ work placement and employability needs.
Sensing Opportunities for Personalized Feedback Technology to Reduce Consumption

Most people are unaware of how their daily activities affect the environment. Previous studies have shown that feedback technology is one of the most effective strategies in reducing electricity usage in the home. In this position paper, we expand the notion of feedback systems to a broad range of human behaviors that have an impact on the environment. In particular, we enumerate five areas of consumption: electricity, water, personal transportation, product purchases, and garbage disposal. For each, we outline their effect on the environment and review and propose methods for automatically sensing them to enable new types of feedback systems.
Logarithmic Sobolev inequalities and concentration of measure for convex functions and polynomial chaoses

We prove logarithmic Sobolev inequalities and concentration results for convex functions and a class of product random vectors. The results are used to derive tail and moment inequalities for chaos variables (in the spirit of Talagrand and Arcones, Giné). We also show that the same proof may be used for chaoses generated by log-concave random variables, recovering results by Lochowski and present an application to exponential integrability of Rademacher chaos.
DENSE URBAN DEM WITH THREE OR MORE HIGH-RESOLUTION AERIAL IMAGES

In cartographic applications, area-based matching techniques are commonly used for stereo matching of low-resolution aerial images. However, these techniques fail in matching high-resolution aerial images of urban areas because of relatively frequent and sharp depth discontinuities and large occluded or textureless areas present in such images, as compared to low-resolution aerial images. This paper presents a hierarchical correlation-based matching technique which fuses information from multiple image pairs and employs a support-collection mechanism in the object space as well as a relaxation algorithm to resolve ambiguities, producing accurate and dense disparity maps. The disambiguating power of the algorithm and the use of multiple pairs allow us to use very small correlation windows, so that the computational complexity is kept small and boundary overreach problem is avoided. They also allow us not to use any threshold on correlation values; as a result, very dense disparity maps can be obtained.
Journal of Experimental Pharmacology Dovepress Effect of Combined Therapy of Diabinese and Nicotinic Acid on Liver Enzymes in Rabbits with Dithizone-induced Diabetes

The effects of diabinese, a known antidiabetic drug, and the combined effects of diabinese and nicotinic acid, a vitamin and antilipidemic drug, were studied in rabbits with dithizone-induced diabetes. Side effects of diabinese include hypoglycemia and liver toxicity. Dithizone was used to induce partial experimental diabetes and to increase blood glucose significantly (P , 0.05) by 31.3%, 23.5%, 19.5, 24.7%, and 23.9% in groups A (single therapy of diabinese 10 mg/kg body weight), B (10 mg of diabinese and nicotinic acid 150 mg/kg), C (10 mg diabinese and nicotinic acid 200 mg/kg), D (10 mg diabinese and nicotinic acid 250 mg/kg) and E control (distilled water 5 mL), respectively. Dithizone administration also increased bilirubin, alkaline phosphatase (ALP), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels by 28.dependent. Also, combined therapy produced a significant (P , 0.05) decrease in AST and ALT levels, especially at 72 hours after drug administration, but did not affect ALP levels. No significant changes in glucose, bilirubin, ALP, AST, and ALT levels were observed in Group E (control). This study shows that liver toxicity and the hypoglycemic side effects of diabinese could be managed by the concomitant administration of nicotinic acid.
Honey: A Novel Antioxidant

The global prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension, atherosclerosis, cancer and Alzheimer's disease is on the rise. These diseases, which constitute the major causes of death globally, are associated with oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is defined as an “imbalance between oxidants and antioxidants in favor of the oxidants, potentially leading to damage”. Individuals with chronic diseases are more susceptible to oxidative stress and damage because they have elevated levels of oxidants and/or reduced antioxidants. This, therefore, necessitates supplementation with antioxidants so as to delay, prevent or remove oxidative damage. Honey is a natural substance with many medicinal effects such as antibacterial, hepatoprotective, hypoglycemic, reproductive, antihypertensive and antioxidant effects. This review presents findings that indicate honey may ameliorate oxidative stress in the gastrointestinal tract (GIT), liver, pancreas, kidney, reproductive organs and plasma/serum. Besides, the review highlights data that demonstrate the synergistic antioxidant effect of honey and antidiabetic drugs in the pancreas, kidney and serum of diabetic rats. These data suggest that honey, administered alone or in combination with conventional therapy, might be a novel antioxidant in the management of chronic diseases commonly associated with oxidative stress. In view of the fact that the majority of these data emanate from animal studies, there is an urgent need to investigate this antioxidant effect of honey in human subjects with chronic or degenerative diseases.
Boundary value analysis in automatic white-box test generation

White-box testing is an effective technique for generating test cases to provide high coverage for programs. We usually select several execution paths using some strategy, and generate a corresponding test case that follows each path. Each execution path corresponds to an input subspace bounded by constraints. Extreme values in these subspaces are very likely to trigger failures since the constraints bounding input subspaces may be faulty. In this paper, we propose a new way of defining the boundaries of comparison predicates in white-box testing, and apply constrained combinatorial testing to cover these boundaries with reduced number of test cases. Our approach can guarantee to cover all possible boundaries for each selected execution path, thus achieving high fault coverage for boundary faults, while the original structural coverage is still preserved.
Towards an automation of the traceability of bugs from development logs: a study based on open source software

Context: Information and tracking of defects can be severely incomplete in almost every Open Source project, resulting in a reduced traceability of defects into the development logs (i.e., version control commit logs). In particular, defect data often appears not in sync when considering what developers logged as their actions. Synchronizing or completing the missing data of the bug repositories, with the logs detailing the actions of developers, would benefit various branches of empirical software engineering research: prediction of software faults, software reliability, traceability, software quality, effort and cost estimation, bug prediction and bug fixing. Objective: To design a framework that automates the process of synchronizing and filling the gaps of the development logs and bug issue data for open source software projects. Method: We instantiate the framework with a sample of OSS projects from GitHub, and by parsing, linking and filling the gaps found in their bug issue data, and development logs. UML diagrams show the relevant modules that will be used to merge, link and connect the bug issue data with the development data. Results: Analysing a sample of over 300 OSS projects we observed that around 1/2 of bug-related data is present in either development logs or issue tracker logs: the rest of the data is missing from one or the other source. We designed an automated approach that fills the gaps of either source by making use of the available data, and we successfully mapped all the missing data of the analysed projects, when using one heuristics of annotating bugs. Other heuristics need to be investigated and implemented. Conclusion: In this paper a framework to synchronise the development logs and bug data used in empirical software engineering was designed to automatically fill the missing parts of development logs and bugs of issue data.
The Discovery of Price Responsiveness – A Survey of Experiments Involving Dynamic Pricing of Electricity

This paper surveys the results from 126 pricing experiments with dynamic pricing and time-of-use pricing of electricity. These experiments have been carried out across three continents at various times during the past decade. Data from 74 of these experiments are sufficiently complete to allow us to identify the relationship between the strength of the peak to off-peak price ratio and the associated reduction in peak demand or demand response. An “arc of price responsiveness” emerges from our analysis, showing that the amount of demand response rises with the price ratio but at a decreasing rate. We also find that about half of the variation in demand response can be explained by variations in the price ratio. This is a remarkable result, since the experiments vary in many other respects – climate, time period, the length of the peak period, the history of pricing innovation in each area, and the manner in which the dynamic pricing designs were marketed to customers. We also find that enabling technologies such as in-home displays, energy orbs and programmable and communicating thermostats boost the amount of demand response. The results of the paper support the case for widespread rollout of dynamic pricing and time-of-use pricing.
Developing clinical self-assessment skills in first-year dental students

The hidden nature of dentistry and the rapidly changing practice environment require our graduates to be effective self-assessors, to ensure that they are competent life-long learners. The assessment literature indicates that if students do not develop an understanding of assessment processes then their learning outcomes will be limited. Therefore, this showcase focuses on how we support our first-year dental students to understand our assessment processes, particularly related to development of their selfassessment capabilities. Students participate in weekly self-assessment of their clinic performance using current criteria/standards and in a series of specifically designed workshops, involving observation of videos depicting ‘peers’ completing relevant clinical activities. They also practise applying criteria to assess performance of 'peers' in the videos, supported by discussion with peers and tutors, and reflection through critiquing their own assessments. The outcomes from these activities will inform how our selfassessment/feedback activities can be designed to support development of dental graduates as effective life-long learners.
On quantum and probabilistic communication: Las Vegas and one-way protocols

We investigate the power of quantum communication protocols compared to classical probabilistic protocols. In our first result we describe a total Boolean function that has a quantum Las Vegas protocol communicating at most O(N 1°/11+~) qubits for all e > 0, while any classical probabilistic protocol (with bounded error) needs ~(N/log N) bits. Then we investigate quantum one-way communication complexity. First we show tha t the VC-dimension lower bound on one-way probabilist ic communication of [26] holds for quantum protocols, too. Then we prove that for oneway protocols computing total functions quantum Las Vegas communication is asymptotical ly as efficient as exact quantum communication, which is exactly as efficient as determinist ic communication. We describe applications of the lower bounds for one-way communication complexity to quantum finite au tomata and quantum formulae.
An Overview of Scaffold Design and Fabrication Technology for Engineered Knee Meniscus

Current surgical treatments for meniscal tears suffer from subsequent degeneration of knee joints, limited donor organs and inconsistent post-treatment results. Three clinical scaffolds (Menaflex CMI, Actifit® scaffold and NUsurface® Meniscus Implant) are available on the market, but additional data are needed to properly evaluate their safety and effectiveness. Thus, many scaffold-based research activities have been done to develop new materials, structures and fabrication technologies to mimic native meniscus for cell attachment and subsequent tissue development, and restore functionalities of injured meniscus for long-term effects. This study begins with a synopsis of relevant structural features of meniscus and goes on to describe the critical considerations. Promising advances made in the field of meniscal scaffolding technology, in terms of biocompatible materials, fabrication methods, structure design and their impact on mechanical and biological properties are discussed in detail. Among all the scaffolding technologies, additive manufacturing (AM) is very promising because of its ability to precisely control fiber diameter, orientation, and pore network micro-architecture to mimic the native meniscus microenvironment.
Arginase contributes to endothelial cell oxidative stress in response to plasma from women with preeclampsia.

AIMS Preeclampsia is a hypertensive disorder characterized by vascular oxidative stress. Decreased availability of the vasodilator nitric oxide (NO) has been postulated to be involved in the pathophysiology of this disorder. Arginase, an enzyme that competes with nitric oxide synthase (NOS) for l-arginine, not only reduces NO formation but also increases superoxide production by NOS. In placenta of preeclamptic women, arginase upregulation has been shown to be increased and contributes to superoxide formation via uncoupling of NOS. However, the role of arginase in the maternal vasculature is not clear. We hypothesized that arginase would be upregulated in the maternal vasculature of women with preeclampsia and contribute to oxidative stress within the endothelium. METHODS AND RESULTS We observed increased arginase expression in the maternal vasculature of women with preeclampsia compared with normotensive pregnant women. Furthermore, human umbilical vein endothelial cells treated with 2% plasma from preeclamptic women show increased arginase II expression and activity that was reduced by a peroxynitrite scavenger. Also, both 3-morpholino sydnonimine and exogenous peroxynitrite increased arginase expression and activity. Preeclamptic plasma treatment increased superoxide and peroxynitrite levels. Superoxide levels were significantly reduced after arginase and NOS inhibition with [(S)-(2-boronoethyl)-l-cysteine] and N(omega)-nitro-l-arginine methyl ester, respectively, but peroxynitrite levels were in fact increased after arginase inhibition. Moreover, in the presence of preeclamptic plasma, l-arginine supplementation increased peroxynitrite formation during arginase inhibition. CONCLUSION Increased arginase expression in preeclampsia can induce uncoupling of NOS as a source of superoxide in the maternal vasculature in preeclampsia. However, l-arginine supplementation in the face of oxidative stress could lead to a further increase in peroxynitrite.
Function and Evolution of DNA Methylation in Nasonia vitripennis

The parasitoid wasp Nasonia vitripennis is an emerging genetic model for functional analysis of DNA methylation. Here, we characterize genome-wide methylation at a base-pair resolution, and compare these results to gene expression across five developmental stages and to methylation patterns reported in other insects. An accurate assessment of DNA methylation across the genome is accomplished using bisulfite sequencing of adult females from a highly inbred line. One-third of genes show extensive methylation over the gene body, yet methylated DNA is not found in non-coding regions and rarely in transposons. Methylated genes occur in small clusters across the genome. Methylation demarcates exon-intron boundaries, with elevated levels over exons, primarily in the 5′ regions of genes. It is also elevated near the sites of translational initiation and termination, with reduced levels in 5′ and 3′ UTRs. Methylated genes have higher median expression levels and lower expression variation across development stages than non-methylated genes. There is no difference in frequency of differential splicing between methylated and non-methylated genes, and as yet no established role for methylation in regulating alternative splicing in Nasonia. Phylogenetic comparisons indicate that many genes maintain methylation status across long evolutionary time scales. Nasonia methylated genes are more likely to be conserved in insects, but even those that are not conserved show broader expression across development than comparable non-methylated genes. Finally, examination of duplicated genes shows that those paralogs that have lost methylation in the Nasonia lineage following gene duplication evolve more rapidly, show decreased median expression levels, and increased specialization in expression across development. Methylation of Nasonia genes signals constitutive transcription across developmental stages, whereas non-methylated genes show more dynamic developmental expression patterns. We speculate that loss of methylation may result in increased developmental specialization in evolution and acquisition of methylation may lead to broader constitutive expression.
Analysis and Recognition of NAM Speech Using HMM Distances and Visual Information

Non-audible murmur (NAM) is an unvoiced speech signal that can be received through the body tissue with the use of special acoustic sensors (i.e., NAM microphones) attached behind the talker's ear. The authors had previously reported experimental results for NAM recognition using a stethoscopic and a silicon NAM microphone. Using a small amount of training data from a single speaker and adaptation approaches, 93.9% of word accuracy was achieved for a 20 k Japanese vocabulary dictation task. In this paper, further analysis of NAM speech is made using distance measures between hidden Markov models (HMMs). It has been shown that owing to the reduced spectral space of NAM speech, the HMM distances are also reduced when compared with those of normal speech. In the case of Japanese vowels and fricatives, the distance measures in NAM speech follow the same relative inter-phoneme relationship as that in normal speech without significant differences. However, significant differences have been found in the case of Japanese plosives. More specifically, in NAM speech, the distances between voiced/unvoiced consonant pairs articulated in the same place drastically decreased. As a result, the inter-phoneme relationship as compared to normal-speech changed significantly, causing a substantial decrease in the recognition accuracy. A speaker-dependent phoneme recognition experiment has been conducted, obtained 81.5% NAM phoneme correct, showing a relationship between HMM distance measures and phoneme accuracy. In a NAM microphone, body transmission and loss of lip radiation act as a low-pass filter. As a result, higher frequency components are attenuated in a NAM signal. Because of spectral reduction, NAM's unvoiced nature, and the type of articulation, NAM sounds become similar, causing a larger number of confusions when compared with normal speech. Yet many of those sounds are visually different on face/mouth/lips, and the integration of visual information increases their discrimination. As a result, recognition accuracy increases as well. In this article, the visual information extracted from the talkers' facial movements is fused with NAM speech. The experimental results reveal a relative improvement of 10.5% on average when fused NAM speech and facial information were used compared with using only NAM speech.
Towards a Syntactic Structural Analysis and an Augmented Transition Explanation: A Comparative Study of the Globally Ambiguous Sentences and Garden Path Sentences

Globally ambiguous sentences can be understood in more than one way and any decoding involved can be understandable. Garden Path (GP) sentences possess a special structural feature with a semantic trigger, which calls for a much heavier cognition burden since only one decoding is reasonable. The present paper explores the data structures of globally ambiguous sentences and GP ones. The augmented transition networks (ATNs) are used to deepen the analyses and comparison of globally ambiguous sentences and GP ones. We come to the conclusion that GP sentences, syntactically and cognitively different from globally ambiguous ones, have more complex structures.