Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Formal Depiction of Composition of Web Services Based on CCS and Modal Mu-Calculus

How to guarantee the validity of web services composition is one of the study hot topics in theory and practice. An important research field is to describe and characterize web services by formal method which is an effective way for modeling concurrent systems. In this paper, we formalize web services composition using CCS, a classical process algebra, and display which is an effective way through a case study. Furthermore we utilize interrelated modal -calculus which is a appropriate program logic for characterizing properties of the formal model established by using CCS. Some properties is discussed such as capacity, necessity, safety and liveness.
Arabidopsis EPSIN1 Plays an Important Role in Vacuolar Trafficking of Soluble Cargo Proteins in Plant Cells via Interactions with Clathrin, AP-1, VTI11, and VSR1[W]

Epsin and related proteins play important roles in various steps of protein trafficking in animal and yeast cells. Many epsin homologs have been identified in plant cells from analysis of genome sequences. However, their roles have not been elucidated. Here, we investigate the expression, localization, and biological role in protein trafficking of an epsin homolog, Arabidopsis thaliana EPSIN1, which is expressed in most tissues we examined. In the cell, one pool of EPSIN1 is associated with actin filaments, producing a network pattern, and a second pool localizes primarily to the Golgi complex with a minor portion to the prevacuolar compartment, producing a punctate staining pattern. Protein pull-down and coimmunoprecipitation experiments reveal that Arabidopsis EPSIN1 interacts with clathrin, VTI11, γ-adaptin-related protein (γ-ADR), and vacuolar sorting receptor1 (VSR1). In addition, EPSIN1 colocalizes with clathrin and VTI11. The epsin1 mutant, which has a T-DNA insertion in EPSIN1, displays a defect in the vacuolar trafficking of sporamin:green fluorescent protein (GFP), but not in the secretion of invertase:GFP into the medium. Stably expressed HA:EPSIN1 complements this trafficking defect. Based on these data, we propose that EPSIN1 plays an important role in the vacuolar trafficking of soluble proteins at the trans-Golgi network via its interaction with γ-ADR, VTI11, VSR1, and clathrin.
A method for helpdesk-oriented question answering

We propose a Question Answering (QA) method that answers actions for a how-question. We model an action as a verb phrase consisting of a main verb and its governing noun phrase. Existing QA methods resemble consulting dictionaries and encyclopedias, in which users satisfy their intellectual cravings. In contrast, our method is a step toward automation of a helpdesk or a call center, which suggests solutions to alleviate user's problems. We show the effectiveness of our method experimentally.
Robust planning of green wireless networks

Current methods dealing with the energy efficient wireless network planning problem require a static model. However, bit rate requirements vary and rise over time, users move around and path gain fluctuates. In this paper, robust optimization is applied to deal with demand uncertainty. We present a robust optimization model for the energy-efficient planning of wireless networks and apply cutting planes to reduce the complexity of the model. Furthermore, a case study is performed to compare the robust formulation to its deterministic counterpart and to conventional network planning.
Biometric Data Safeguarding Technologies Analysis and Best Practices

Abstract : This document is the Study Report for PSTP 02-0351BIO, Biometric Data Safeguarding Technologies Analysis and Best Practices. One of the main goals of the Public Security Technical Program (PSTP) Biometrics Community of Practice is to evaluate, analyze, and implement biometric technologies that enhance national capabilities in access control, identity verification, and e-Commerce security in a manner that is consistent with Canadian laws and acts. This is done in collaboration with the appropriate Government of Canada agencies and departments responsible for national security, border control and security, and law enforcement and immigration. The rapid progress of biometrics technology in the last few years and the ease with which biometrics data can be acquired has resulted in the accumulation of large varying databases of biometrics information. This trend will continue in the future, with databases growing at an ever-increasing rate. The purpose of the Study is to examine some of the issues surrounding the sharing and safeguarding of biometric data in the Canadian Public Security context writ large. Throughout the study, the modality focus will be on iris biometrics (prime focus) and fingerprints (secondary). This document presents methodologies and results from scientific studies that identify and evaluate biometric technologies with respect to their ability to be used securely (in terms of safeguarding biometric databases). These new biometric technologies and associated data safeguarding capabilities must be consistent with the Government of Canada? s dual prosperity and security mandates, and must consider legal, ethical, cultural, and privacy issues.
Role of Social Media in Cross-cultural Settings to Foster Individual Creativity: An Empirical Research in China

Social media has become ubiquitous public platform intervening individual learning process. However, limited empirical research has explored how social media impacts individual creativity. This research examined the effects of social media usage on the development of individual self-efficacy, creativity and the role of perceived organizational support moderating the relationships between social media usage and self-efficacy. With the data collected from 248 international students studying at Chinese universities, the current research indicates that social media usage enhances individual creativity partially through the conduit of self-efficacy. Furthermore, perceived organizational support was found to significantly strengthen the relationships between two dimensions of social media usage (informational and socializing) and self-efficacy respectively. The findings greatly contribute to the cross-cultural studies of social media usage and reveal the mechanism how social media impacts on individual development.
"COREPER: Stealthy Power Brokers or Loyal Servants to Their Government Masters? The role of the Committee of Permanent Representatives in a changing Union. Report from an Ongoing Research Project"

This paper represents a first and thus preliminary account of an ongoing research project on the EU’s Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper). The objective is to interview a significant number of current and former ambassadors and staff-members of Coreper and associated working groups in light of the research program outlined below. The interviews, reflecting a representative sample of old and new member states, began in 2004 following the presentation of the EU’s draft constitution and the accession of the new member states. The following report provides an overview of the findings thus far.
A Mysterious European Threesome: Work-care Regimes, Policies and Gender

Arguing that European family lives are affected by many societal factors, this article discusses the interplay between three sets of phenomena: the management of work and care responsibilities, work-care policies and regimes, and gender order within the family context.Based on discussions about orientations to work and care, we compare European countries and analyze regularities and singularities among them. Identifying and assessing the interplay between structural, institutional and cultural determinants of orientations we try to explain country diversity mobilizing data from the European Social Survey (rounds 2002, 2004 and 2006) and data from Eurobarometer 2003.The paper is organized around three analytical axes. First, we analyze how work and family orientations are perceived by the Europeans. Secondly, we assess different European political policies regarding work and care arrangements, the outcome being a proposal for a work-care political typology. And finally we discuss the connections between those policies and the production or reproduction of gender order within the family.We conclude that in countries with more egalitarian gender values and policies targeted at work-care arrangements, individuals experience less work-family conflict. Conversely, in countries with more traditional gender values and restricted or disadvantaged policies we found more family-work conflict. But institutional constraints don’t act alone: orientations to work and care differ according to age, education, family forms and employment status.
A component-based specification approach for embedded systems using FDTs

This paper presents a framework for specification and testing of component-based embedded systems using formal description techniques (FDTs). We deal with embedded systems from the point of view of communication and thus we propose a communication model for them. We further explain the meaning of component-based embedded systems and how these can be specified using FDTs. FDTs such as Estelle and SDL are based on EFSMs (Extended finite State Machines) and have been widely used in the automation of the development process of protocols and communicating systems, i.e. for specification, analysis and validation purposes. The main goal of this work is to demonstrate the reusability of FDTs for component-based systems.
A DC-6 GHz, 50 dB dynamic range, SiGe HBT true logarithmic amplifier

In this work, a DC-6 GHz true logarithmic amplifier is presented. The amplifier uses a branch parallel summation architecture with four gain paths, and provides a piecewise approximate logarithmic response. The amplifier has 39 dB gain, 12.5 dB noise figure, 6.5 mV/dB logarithmic slope, and 50 dB logarithmic dynamic range. The amplifier uses Cherry-Hooper gain stages with emitter follower feedback. It also includes an on-chip automatic DC offset error reduction scheme. The circuit was fabricated in a 47 GHz SiGe HBT process. It draws 130 mA from a -3.3 V supply for a power consumption of 430 mW.
Synthesis of Broadband Negative Group Delay Active Circuits

This paper deals with the design and synthesis of active circuits able to simultaneously produce negative group delay and gain at microwave frequencies or for baseband signals. Analytical equations show that the proposed topology meets these objectives while also satisfying active device requirements. Then, a synthesis approach is extracted and applied to design a two-stage microwave circuit, further validated by experimental results. This method is extended to the design of a four-stage baseband active circuit providing gain and negative group delay up to 600 MHz. A high relative time-advance is evidenced by time-domain simulations.
ETO-2 Associates with SCL in Erythroid Cells and Megakaryocytes and Provides Repressor Functions in Erythropoiesis

ABSTRACT Lineage specification and cellular maturation require coordinated regulation of gene expression programs. In large part, this is dependent on the activator and repressor functions of protein complexes associated with tissue-specific transcriptional regulators. In this study, we have used a proteomic approach to characterize multiprotein complexes containing the key hematopoietic regulator SCL in erythroid and megakaryocytic cell lines. One of the novel SCL-interacting proteins identified in both cell types is the transcriptional corepressor ETO-2. Interaction between endogenous proteins was confirmed in primary cells. We then showed that SCL complexes are shared but also significantly differ in the two cell types. Importantly, SCL/ETO-2 interacts with another corepressor, Gfi-1b, in red cells but not megakaryocytes. The SCL/ETO-2/Gfi-1b association is lost during erythroid differentiation of primary fetal liver cells. Genetic studies of erythroid cells show that ETO-2 exerts a repressor effect on SCL target genes. We suggest that, through its association with SCL, ETO-2 represses gene expression in the early stages of erythroid differentiation and that alleviation/modulation of the repressive state is then required for expression of genes necessary for terminal erythroid maturation to proceed.
Efficient network coding transmission in 2-hop multi-channel cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), there is no guarantee on the availability of spectrum for the opportunistic communications between cognitive radio (CR) users. Transmission design plays a key role in leveraging the benefits of CRNs. In this paper, we propose an efficient batch transmission scheme for the data transmission in multi-channel CRNs with practical lossy channels. The proposed scheme exploits the dynamic spectrum opportunities by combining opportunistic routing strategy with network coding based multi-channel transmission. We derive network performance measures of the scheme in terms of batch delay, which provide better insights into the data transmission capability than packet based link delay analysis. Our analyses, validated by simulations, show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms others, reducing batch delay by up to 60%.
Hydrodynamic Simulations of a Moving Substructure in a Cluster of Galaxies: Cold Fronts and Turbulence Generation

We perform three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of a moving substructure in a cluster of galaxies. We investigate dynamical evolution of the intracluster medium (ICM) in and around the substructure moving radially in the larger cluster's gravitational potential, and its observational consequences. After the substructure passes the larger cluster's center, a bow shock and clear contact discontinuity form in front of it. The contact discontinuity looks like a sharp cold front in the X-ray image synthesized from the simulation results. This agrees with a structure found in 1E 0657-56. The flow structure remains laminar before the first turnaround because the ram pressure stripping is dominant over the development of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities on the boundary between the substructure and the ambient ICM. When a subcluster oscillates radially around the larger cluster's center, both Kelvin-Helmholtz and Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities develop well and the flow structure becomes highly turbulent. Around the turnaround, the subcluster's cold gas is pushed out of its potential well. Therefore, the cold gas component appears to be in front of the subcluster. A relatively blunt cold front appears in the simulated X-ray image because the contact discontinuity is perturbed by Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. This can explain the ICM structure found in A168.
Embedded cache architecture with programmable write buffer support for power and performance flexibility

Next generation portable devices are placing stringent requirements on overall system power and performance. Voice recognition, streaming video and high speed wire¿less internet access are just some of the features being incorporated in these handheld electronic gadgets. The M¿CORE M341-S processor has been designed for high performance and cost sensitive portable products as well as for high end embedded control applications. M341-S obtains increased performance over the M¿CORE M2 and M310 families by integrating unified 16KB cache, and additional instruction pipelining and buffering to increase the operating frequency. An 8-entry programmable write buffer which can defer pending write misses and writethrough accesses is used in order to maximize perfor¿mance. In this paper, we discuss the enhanced cache archi¿tecture and the flexible priority scheme for controlling the write buffer. We use a hardware technique which provides a flexible mechanism to control emptying and flushing of write buffer based on a set of configurable thresholds, as well as a mechanism to alter the priorities from the write buffer to the main memory system. The same unified mechanism is used to support flushing as well as providing a solution for the read after write (RAW) hazard avoid¿ance. We present the enhancements made to the M3 core and discuss the effect on power and performance through benchmark analysis and actual silicon measurements.
Supervised Dimensionality Reduction Method for Predicting Membrane Proteins Types

With the rapid increase of protein sequences in the post-genomic age, the need for an automated and accurate tool to predict membrane protein types becomes increasingly important. Many efforts have been tried. Most of them aim to find the optimal classification scheme and less of them take the simplifying the complexity of biological system into consideration. This work shows how to decrease the complexity of biological system with the supervised DR (Dimensionality Reduction) method by transforming the original high-dimensional feature vectors into the low-dimensional feature vectors. Moreover, a powerful sequence encoding scheme by fusing PSSM (Position-Specific Score Matrix) and PseAA (Pseudo Amino Acid) method is used to represent the protein samples. Then, the K-NN (K-Nearest Neighbor) classifier is employed to identify the membrane protein types based on their reduced low-dimensional feature vectors. As a result, the jackknife and re-substitution test success rates on this model reach 85.2% and 92.6% respectively, and suggesting that the proposed approach is very promising for predicting membrane proteins types.
Arabidopsis COG Complex Subunits COG3 and COG8 Modulate Golgi Morphology, Vesicle Trafficking Homeostasis and Are Essential for Pollen Tube Growth

Spatially and temporally regulated membrane trafficking events incorporate membrane and cell wall materials into the pollen tube apex and are believed to underlie the rapid pollen tube growth. In plants, the molecular mechanisms and physiological functions of intra-Golgi transport and Golgi integrity maintenance remain largely unclear. The conserved oligomeric Golgi (COG) complex has been implicated in tethering of retrograde intra-Golgi vesicles in yeast and mammalian cells. Using genetic and cytologic approaches, we demonstrate that T-DNA insertions in Arabidopsis COG complex subunits, COG3 and COG8, cause an absolute, male-specific transmission defect that can be complemented by expression of COG3 and COG8 from the LAT52 pollen promoter, respectively. No obvious abnormalities in the microgametogenesis of the two mutants are observed, but in vitro and in vivo pollen tube growth are defective. COG3 or COG8 proteins fused to green fluorescent protein (GFP) label the Golgi apparatus. In pollen of both mutants, Golgi bodies exhibit altered morphology. Moreover, γ-COP and EMP12 proteins lose their tight association with the Golgi. These defects lead to the incorrect deposition of cell wall components and proteins during pollen tube growth. COG3 and COG8 interact directly with each other, and a structural model of the Arabidopsis COG complex is proposed. We believe that the COG complex helps to modulate Golgi morphology and vesicle trafficking homeostasis during pollen tube tip growth.
Harmful Effects of Synthetic Surface-Active Detergents against Atopic Dermatitis

We report herein two cases of intractable atopic dermatitis successfully treated by simply avoiding the contact with surface-active detergents in the daily life and living. The detergents were closely related to the exacerbation and remission of the disease. Steroid ointment was no longer used. We discuss that the removal of horny layer lipids by surface-active detergents accelerates the transepidermal water loss and disturbs the barrier function of the epidermis and thus is intimately involved in the pathogenesis of atopic dermatitis.
Factors affecting tax compliant attitude in Africa: Evidence from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa

In this study, we explore factors that determine citizens' tax compliance attitude in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. The analysis is based on attitude and perception data from the new round of Afrobarometer surveys, which contain more tax-specific information than previous rounds. Using binary logit regression, we find some similarities, but also differences in factors that are correlated with tax compliance attitude in the four countries. In Kenya and South Africa, citizens who perceive that it is difficult to avoid taxes are more likely to have tax compliant attitude than citizens who think avoidance is relatively easier. We also find evidence that individuals who are more satisfied with public service provision are more likely to have a tax compliant attitude in all the four countries. On the other hand, frequent payment to non-state actors, for instance criminal gangs, in exchange for protection, reduces individual's likelihood to have tax compliant attitude. Furthermore, in Tanzania and South Africa individuals who perceive that their ethnic group is treated unfairly by the government are less likely to have a tax compliant attitude. The degree to which respondents perceive that it is difficult to know what taxes to pay is also negatively correlated with tax compliant attitude in these two countries. Our findings are robust for different econometric specifications.
Strong geometrical consistency in large scale partial-duplicate image search

The state-of-the-art partial-duplicate image search systems reply heavily on the match of local features like SIFT. Independently matching local features across two images ignores the overall geometry structure and therefore may incur many false matches. To reduce such matches, several geometry verification methods have been proposed. This paper introduces a new geometry verification method named as Strong Geometry Consistency (SGC), which uses the orientation, scale and location information of the local feature points to accurately and quickly remove the false matches. We also propose a simple scale weighting (SW) strategy, which gives feature points with larger scales greater weights, based on the intuition that a larger-scale feature point tends to be more robust for image search as it occupies a larger area of an image. Extensive experiments performed on three popular datasets show that SGC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art geometry verification methods, and SW can further boost the performance with marginal additional computation.
Alterations in corticotropin-releasing factor-like immunoreactivity in discrete rat brain regions after acute and chronic stress

Corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) may regulate endocrine, autonomic, and behavioral responses to stress. Evidence indicates that CRF-like immunoreactivity (CRF-LI) is widely distributed throughout the CNS. In this study, the distribution of CRF-LI was determined in 36 rat brain regions by combined radioimmunoassay-micropunch dissection techniques and the effect of stress on CRF-LI was investigated, using a chronic stress model that induces endocrine changes in rats similar to those seen in depressed humans. A control group of rats was handled daily. An acute stress group was subjected to 3 hr of immobilization at 4 degrees C, while a chronic stress group was exposed to unpredictable stressors. Thirty-six brain regions were microdissected by the technique of Palkovits and assayed for CRF-LI, using a specific antiserum to ovine CRF. CRF-LI was detected in most regions. In controls, the highest concentrations were found in the arcuate nucleus/median eminence, the hypothalamic paraventricular (PVN) nucleus, and the periventricular nucleus. The next highest levels were found in the raphe nuclei and dorsal vagal complex. CRF-LI was well represented in the locus coeruleus (LC); in the central, cortical, and medial amygdaloid nuclei; and in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Low concentrations occurred in the hippocampus and cerebrocortical regions. Appreciable concentrations were detected in midbrain and brain stem regions. Acute stress reduced CRF-LI in the arcuate nucleus/median eminence (ME) (by 52%) and in the median preoptic (MPO) nucleus (by 32%) and doubled its concentration in the locus coeruleus. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)