Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Large Girth Non-Binary LDPC Codes Based on Finite Fields and Euclidean Geometries

This letter presents an approach to the construction of non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes based on alpha-multiplied circulant permutation matrices and hyperplanes of two different dimensions in Euclidean geometries. Codes constructed by this method have large girth and high binary column weight when the order of Galois field is high. Simulation results show that these codes perform very well with fast Fourier transform (FFT) based sum-product algorithm (SPA).
Fairness concerns and cooperation in context

Interaction settings offering identical choices result in different behaviour when they are presented in different frames or when they are conducted in different contexts. This thesis investigates the influence of various contexts on people’s fairness and fairness-driven cooperative behaviour. We are particularly interested in the effect of the social context, the strategic context and the cultural context on individuals’ cooperative behaviour and fairness-concerns. First we present a network game where players are located on nodes of certain networks with different degrees of symmetry and transitivity and their decisions depend on the actions taken by their neighbours in the network. Assuming that people are not exclusively self-interested, we develop a theory of marginal fairness-concerns by imposing an interaction structure on a local public good decision situation. We discuss how various degrees of influence between individuals affect their behaviour and how fairness-concerns affect subjects’ behaviour based on their positions. The second part of this dissertation presents a model of behaviour where players have heterogeneous roles in various interaction settings. Next to the utilities caused by inequality of payoffs, the model assumes that subjects benefit from the social-welfare resulting from their contributions. This model enables us to scrutinize the effect of fairness-concerns on decisions of advantaged and disadvantaged players within and between different interactional contexts. Further, we test the precision of the theoretical predictions of the model by employing some experimental data from cooperation and coordination games to understand how fairness-concerns change the number of Nash equilibria in various interactional settings. The third part of this dissertation looks at the individuals’ from a more general perspective. It assumes that culture, as a set of collective norms, affects social interactions. By investigating the effect of cultural orientation of individuals on their cooperative behaviour, we try to explain behavioural differences. We examine laboratory experiments with participants from the relatively more individually-oriented West and participants from the relatively more collectively-oriented countries in Asia.
Pathology practice patterns affect lymph node evaluation and outcome of colon cancer: a population-based study.

BACKGROUND A large variation in the number of nodes examined between patients, hospitals, and regions has been reported for patients with colon cancer. We studied determinants of this variation and its relation to survival in the south of The Netherlands. PATIENTS AND METHODS All patients who underwent resection for stage I-III colon carcinoma diagnosed from 1999 to 2002 in the Eindhoven Cancer Registry area were included (n = 2168). Determinants of lymph node evaluation and their relationship to survival were assessed, including variation between the six departments of pathology. RESULTS A median number of six lymph nodes per specimen had been examined. The median number for each department of pathology ranged from three to eight (P < 0.0001). After correction for relevant factors, this variation remained, resulting in differences in the proportion of N+ tumours between departments from 29% to 41% (P < 0.0001). The number of nodes examined was positively associated with survival. Survival for node-negative patients differed between the departments of pathology (up to hazard ratio 1.5; P = 0.02). CONCLUSION There was a large variation in lymph node evaluation between the departments of pathology, leading to differences in stage distribution and survival. Intervention strategies should be directed at nodal assessment.
Women in and Beyond the Script: A Dialogue Analysis of An Ideal Husband

The characterization of the female images in An Ideal Husband can reflect the social status of women in that era, and imply the author’s attitudes toward the different lifestyles of women. This essay is going to use dialogue analysis to find out how these female images are portrayed in the play, and discover the hidden implications about female lives beyond the script.
Kalman channel estimation based on oversampled polynomial model for OFDM over doubly-selective channels

To take intercarrier interference (ICI) attributed to time variations of the channel into consideration, we propose to parameterize the doubly-selective channel by the oversampled polynomial model (OPM). The OPM outperforms the over-sampled basis expansion model (OBEM). On top of that, we also propose to incorporate the effective ICI suppressing, reduced-complexity Viterbi-type maximum likelihood (RML) equalizer into Kalman filter for recursive channel tracking and equalization. An enhancement in the channel tracking ability and a significant improvement in BER performance are validated by numerical simulations.
Can open flow make transport networks smarter and dynamic? An overview on transport SDN

The growth of intra data center communications, cloud computing and multimedia content applications force transport network providers to allocate resources faster, smarter and dynamically. Software-defined Networking (SDN), has been proposed to create a unified control plane for transport networks (Transport SDN). This article presents an overview on Transport SDN proposals based on OpenFlow, the de facto SDN protocol. OpenFlow is at the forefront of the Transport SDN models and several testbeds have proved the implementation of a unified control plane for multi-domain and multi-technology optical transport networks. We show how OpenFlow can be enabled in current and future network devices through agents and new hardware respectively. Transport SDN can boost the programmability and scalability of the network. , increase the network intelligence and allow for dynamic resource allocation and restoration. The review highlights a rapid development of Transport SDN, which seems to tackle the problems that GMPLS encountered for commercial deployment. Finally a comparison between the main research efforts towards a multi-domain transport SDN is given.
Classification of Security Issues and Solutions in Cloud Environments

Cloud computing is, nowadays, one of the most interesting topics in computer science. Also, in research, a lot of effort is concentrated on cloud computing security issues. In this paper, we classify different security issues into the different levels that exist in cloud environments. We also present different solutions to the security issues in the cloud according to the type of security they provide with. Privacy, integrity, accountability, and integrity are major topics that are raised when companies start considering the cloud as an alternative to having their IT internally managed. Therefore, it is important to have a broad view of the different security problems present in the cloud and the different solutions that researchers are working on.
Leader-follower formation control of networked spacecraft in deep space

In this paper, we present a leader-follower formation control for six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) networked spacecraft flying in deep space. In this approach, a spacecraft was designated as the leader for all other spacecraft. The proposed control strategy allows each follower spacecraft to track its desired relative trajectory with respect to the leader. Simulation results validate the performance of the proposed controller.
Organizing the Audit Society: Does Good Auditing Generate Less Public Sector Corruption?

Few cross-country studies examine the effects of auditing quality on public sector corruption. We present a definition of good auditing consisting of three principles: independence, professionalism, and recognizing the people as the principal. Using novel data from an original expert survey covering more than 100 countries, the concept is then operationalized and tested empirically. The results demonstrate that good auditing has a positive effect on national levels of public sector corruption. This lends reason to believe that auditing which is organized according to certain principles has potential to contribute to well-functioning public administrations with a low degree of corruption.
2CAuth: A New Two Factor Authentication Scheme Using QR-Code

Password based schemes has been the standard means of authentication over decades. Enhancements use entities like ownership (something one possess), knowledge (something one knows), and inherence (something one is) as first factor and mobile phones as token less second factor, in combinations, to offer different levels of security assurances, trading off usability. In this paper we present '2CAuth' a new two factor authentication scheme that enhances secure usage of application information and preserves usability, without sacrificing user's privacy. A significant feature of the scheme is that it DOES NOT call for any synchronization between Mobile Network Operator (MNO) and users. The analysis of the scheme clearly brings out its effectiveness in terms of its usability even at times of peak loads on mobile networks. The scheme has the dual advantage of carrying out the verification of transactions which involve the physical presence of the user as well as those to be done in his absence. Many of the services that we use daily, for example banking, have transformed from traditional customer services into Internet services. As services that contain sensitive data are moved to Internet, strong authentication is required to provide a high enough level of security and privacy. With computing becoming pervasive, people increasingly rely on public computers to do business over the Internet thus making it a preferred environment for a multitude of e-services like e-commerce, e-banking, etc. Security for these applications is an important enabler. In general, the password based authentication mechanism provides the basic capability to prevent unauthorized access. One-time passwords make it more difficult to gain unauthorized access to restricted resources. Many researchers have devoted efforts to implement various OTP schemes using smartcards, time-synchronized token or SMS etc. Security risks are more pressing as attacks become more daring. This makes systems that rely on single factor authentication more vulnerable and at risk calling for authentication using multiple factors. In this paper, we introduce, implement and analyze an efficient, robust, scalable, and easy to use web authentication system called '2CAuth'. The proposed method is based on ownership (smart code and Mobile) and knowledge (Security Code) factors. It combines the above factors with OTP and challenge response methods without requiring any time synchronization between user's mobile phone and service provider's server for authentication purpose. The rest of the paper is organized as follows section 2 presents literature review, section 3 describes the motivation for the work and the contributions of this paper. Section 4 discusses the proposed scheme and its details. Section 5 presents the analysis of the scheme and finally Section 6 presents the conclusions.
Looking for Entropy Rate Constancy in Spoken Dialog

The entropy constancy principle describes the tendency for information in language to be conveyed at a constant rate. We explore the possible role of this principle in spoken dialog, using the “summed entropy rate,” that is, the sum of the entropies of the words of both speakers per second of time. Using the Switchboard corpus of casual dialogs and a standard ngram language model to estimate entropy, we examine patterns in entropy rate over time and the distribution of entropy across the two speakers. The results show effects that can be taken as support for the principle of constant entropy, but also indicate a need for better language models and better techniques for estimating non-lexical entropy.
Future Pharmacological Armamentaria in Management of Alzheimer Disease

Introduction: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a chronic progressive neurodegenerative disorder and common cause of dementia in elderly. With advancing age, number of people suffering from AD is also increased. Exact aetiology of AD was not known and therapy was focused mainly on increasing central cholinergic transmission with drugs like donepazil, reivastigmine and galantamine. With the generation of amyloid hypothesis, extracellular amyloid plaques, consisting of amorphous extra cellular deposits of β-amyloid protein (known as Aβ) and intraneuronal neurofibrillary tangles(Tau) mainly in the hippocampus and frontal cortex ,altered processing of amyloid protein from its precursor (amyloid precursor protein, APP) recognised as the key to the pathogenesis of AD. But, now various studies have shown that etiology may be multifactorial. Inspite of having identified many potential targets, currently no drug modifying disease pathology is available . Advancement of the early diagnostic methods like positron emission tomography (PET) scan and measurement of various biomarkers like NO tagged proteins, ADAM-10 in c.s. f. could potentiate research to develop disease modifying drugs. Drugs modifying Y secretase, tyrosine kinase inhibitors, sigma receptor agonists, anti-Aβ monoclonal Abs are in the various stages of drug development and could become the cornerstone in the management of AD in future. Methods: Reviews from index journals and books were taken in this study. In this process, we identified 276 possible sources of information which, upon further scrutiny, were eventually reduced to 30 appropriate studies for inclusion in the review. Conclusion: Understanding the role and extent of factors causing AD, robust designing of RCTs with use of various biomarkers and multitargeted therapeutic approach are required to develop disease modifying drug which can ameliorate suffering of alzheimer disease patients.
Video composition by the crowd: a system to compose user-generated videos in near real-time

To compose high-quality movies directors need life-long learning and talent. User-generated video defines a new era of video production in which non-professionals record videos and share them on platforms such as YouTube. As hiring professional directors results in high costs, our work focuses on replacing those directors by crowdsourcing. The proposed system allows users to record and stream live videos to servers on which workers create a video mashup. A smartphone application for recording live video has been designed that supports the composition in the crowd by a multi-modal analysis of the recording quality. The contributions of this work are: The proposed system demonstrates that composing a large number of video views can be achieved in near real-time. Second, the system achieves comparable video quality for user-generated video in comparison to manual composition. Third, it offers insights on how to design real-time capable crowdsourcing systems. Fourth, by leveraging multi-modal features that can already be evaluated during recording the number of streams considered for presentation can be reduced.
An experimental investigation of hypervigilance for threat in children and adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder

Background. The present study examined biases in visual attention for emotional material in children and adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and healthy controls. Methods. The participants carried out an attentional deployment task in which probe detection latency data were used to determine the distribution of visual attention for threat-related and depression-related material. Results. The results showed that children and adolescents with PTSD, relative to controls, selectively allocated processing resources towards socially threatening stimuli and away from depression-related stimuli. This attentional avoidance of depression-related information in the PTSD participants declined with age. Conclusions. The results of the study are interpreted as a consolidation and extension of previous research on attentional bias and emotional disorder in younger participants.
CT Image Reconstruction from Sparse Projections Using Adaptive TpV Regularization

Radiation dose reduction without losing CT image quality has been an increasing concern. Reducing the number of X-ray projections to reconstruct CT images, which is also called sparse-projection reconstruction, can potentially avoid excessive dose delivered to patients in CT examination. To overcome the disadvantages of total variation (TV) minimization method, in this work we introduce a novel adaptive TpV regularization into sparse-projection image reconstruction and use FISTA technique to accelerate iterative convergence. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method suppresses noise and artifacts more efficiently, and preserves structure information better than other existing reconstruction methods.
A surface response methodology approach to study the influence of specifications in the multiobjective optimal design of power converters

Nowadays, the use of mathematical optimization techniques to design power converters becomes more and more attractive. This paper tries to go a step further in studying the influence of some specifications in the multiobjective optimal design of isolated dc-dc converters. To do so, a response surface methodology (RSM) approach is used in combination with a multiobjective optimal design tool dedicated to such power converters and using genetic algorithms. So, the response surfaces are computed based on optimized power converters. At each time, two factors are studied whereas two response variables are of interest, viz. the power loss and the weight of the converter. The pairs of factors are, as for them, the input voltage and the output power, and, the current and voltage ripples (across the inductor and capacitor of the output filter). Finally, it should be pointed out that the full-bridge topology is considered in this paper but the proposed methodology is easily applicable to other topologies. Moreover, it can also be extended to study other factors and other response variables.
Structure and mechanism of action of a novel phosphoglycerate mutase from Bacillus stearothermophilus

Bacillus stearothermophilus phosphoglycerate mutase (PGM), which interconverts 2‐ and 3‐phosphoglyceric acid (PGA), does not require 2,3‐diphosphoglyceric acid for activity. However, this enzyme does have an absolute and specific requirement for Mn2+ ions for catalysis. Here we report the crystal structure of this enzyme complexed with 3PGA and manganese ions to 1.9 Å resolution; this is the first crystal structure of a diphosphoglycerate‐independent PGM to be determined. This information, plus the location of the two bound Mn2+ ions and the 3PGA have allowed formulation of a possible catalytic mechanism for this PGM. In this mechanism Mn2+ ions facilitate the transfer of the substrate's phosphate group to Ser62 to form a phosphoserine intermediate. In the subsequent phosphotransferase part of the reaction, the phosphate group is transferred from Ser62 to the O2 or O3 positions of the reoriented glycerate to yield the PGA product. Site‐directed mutagenesis studies were used to confirm our mechanism and the involvement of specific enzyme residues in Mn2+ binding and catalysis.
When the Interface is the User ’ s Face : Ideas for Research and Applications

INTRODUCTION There has been an interest in research on exploring the use of faces as interfaces [2,10,11]. These projects show that using faces can help interfaces seem more credible to the user [10], help with learning [2], and make the user feel more engaged and excited [11]. However, only a few researchers have looked at using one’s own face as an interface [10]. Using one’s own face has several benefits. Facial resemblance has been shown to have positive effects in social interaction and can lead to trust [4] and influence [1]. From the cocktail party phenomenon and scanning for one’s own face in a photograph, we know that one's own face can be recognized immediately. Practically, the face of the user is immediately available and that may alleviate the need to design agents or to use celebrity faces which can be difficult to obtain and can be prohibitively expensive.
MONAD COMPOSITIONS I: GENERAL CONSTRUCTIONS AND RECURSIVE DISTRIBUTIVE LAWS

New techniques for constructing a distributive law of a monad over another are studied using submonads, quotient monads, product mon- ads, recursively-defined distributive laws, and linear equations. Sequel papers will consider distributive laws in closed categories and will construct monad approximations for compositions which fail to be a monad.
Sociality and Classification: Reading Gender, Race, and Class in a Humorous Meme

This article is concerned with how the gendered, raced, and classed practices of readership of a humorous meme on Tumblr organize forms of sociality and belonging along these lines. Based on the anonymous Tumblr blog, WhatShouldWeCallMe, the meme narrates feelings and reactions related to youthful, feminine, Western “everyday” experience through the use of captions and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images. Drawing on the feminist Cultural Studies tradition of text-reader analysis as well as New Literacy Studies approaches to literacy, I suggest the practices of readerly participation in the meme require a social rather than individual set of competencies and knowledges. I propose “spectatorial girlfriendship” as a term encompassing how the texts of the meme require the reader to operationalize gendered, classed, and raced classificatory knowledges and construct social forms of commonality on this basis. In the meme, the reader “gets” the joke by aligning an ostensibly incongruous GIF and caption, remixing and matching existing classifications of people, bodies, and objects. I demonstrate how spectatorial girlfriendship as a readerly lens arranges, transacts, and interacts gender, class, and race in multiple ways, indexing social inequalities without recognizing them as such. Bodies in the GIFs become “stock” images, used for selective resignification. Consequently, while offering pleasures of an understood readerly feminine commonality, participation in the meme is structured unequally, going beyond the reader’s ability to decipher the GIF and caption in the posts. The meme privileges an ideal reader constructed through postrace, postfeminist “theories” of the useability of gender, race, and class.