Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The evaluation turn in the higher education system: lessons from Italy

ABSTRACT This article explores how new public management policy ideas and technologies circulating in the globalised education space have been re-contextualised in the re-design of the Italian Higher Education System. In doing so, it uses the governmentality studies as a sensitising framework to problematise what we term here as the ‘calculative and instrumental turn’ in the evaluation of Higher Education. The work reflects on the complex assemblage of forms of knowledge, technical means and collective and individual subjects through which the evaluation of the Italian universities unfolds in its current form. The attempt is to highlight the changes produced in how Higher Education and its ethical subjects are thought and their qualities are conceived and appraised. The article presents some conclusive remarks on some of the paradoxical risks of the Evaluation turn, namely contractualisation, depoliticisation and fabrication, but also insists on its reflexivity potential, interpreting the current developments as a missed opportunity.
RISK, RACE, AND RECIDIVISM: PREDICTIVE BIAS AND DISPARATE IMPACT*: RISK, RACE, AND RECIDIVISM

One way to unwind mass incarceration without compromising public safety is to use risk assessment instruments in sentencing and corrections. Although these instruments figure prominently in current reforms, critics argue that benefits in crime control will be offset by an adverse effect on racial minorities. Based on a sample of 34,794 federal offenders, we examine the relationships among race, risk assessment [the Post Conviction Risk Assessment (PCRA)], and future arrest. First, application of wellestablished principles of psychological science revealed little evidence of test bias for the PCRA—the instrument strongly predicts arrest for both Black and White offenders, and a given score has essentially the same meaning—that is, the same probability of recidivism—across groups. Second, Black offenders obtain higher average PCRA scores than do White offenders (d = .34; 13.5 percent nonoverlap in groups’ scores), so some applications could create disparate impact. Third, most (66 percent) of the racial difference in PCRA scores is attributable to criminal history—which is already embedded in sentencing guidelines. Finally, criminal history is not a proxy for race, but instead it mediates the relationship between race and future arrest. Data are more helpful than rhetoric if the goal is to improve practice at this opportune moment in history.
Localization of manganese superoxide dismutase in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus of Alzheimer-type senile dementia.

Manganese-superoxide dismutase (Mn-SOD) was localized in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus of patients with Alzheimer-type senile dementia (ATD) by immunocytochemistry and the relationship of Mn-SOD with two major pathological features of ATD, i.e., senile plaques and neurofibrillar tangles (NFTs), was examined. Many astrocytes in senile plaques exhibited strong immunoreactivity for both Mn-SOD and glial fibrillar acidic protein (GFAP) on serial section analysis. This suggests that Mn-SOD scavenger system is associated with the formation of senile plaques. On the other hand, Mn-SOD immunoreactivity was not significant in NFT-loaded neurons.
Visualization techniques for efficient malware detection

Traditional tools for reverse engineering of binary and PE files are limited to heavy text base output, thus requiring skilled analysts to use them. In this paper, we present techniques that will visualize PE files, which will help analysts with basic skills to quickly understand their underlying structure. We also present Markov Byte Plot-based techniques to identify packed malware and discuss how our techniques can aid cybersecurity community for better enumeration of malicious software.
Opinion dynamics and fractional operators

The aim of the paper is to consider - in base on classical models and numerical simulations - fractional model of the type of Hegselmann and Krause (FHK) taking into account memory of states. One of our hypothesis is that fractional operators will include memory of the system to the whole process. Then we are going to examine and to do an analyze with verification of properties of this fractional model with discrete time. We are aware of the fact that a direct change of an operator can cause the uselessness of a system, thus we expect a necessity of changing of the definition of consensus and modification of parameters describing the systems.
THE COLLISIONAL DIVOT IN THE KUIPER BELT SIZE DISTRIBUTION

This paper presents the results of collisional evolution calculations for the Kuiper Belt starting from an initial size distribution similar to that produced by accretion simulations of that region—a steep power-law large object size distribution that breaks to a shallower slope at r ∼ 1–2 km, with collisional equilibrium achieved for objects r ≲ 0.5 km. We find that the break from the steep large object power law causes a divot, or depletion of objects at r ∼ 10–20 km, which, in turn, greatly reduces the disruption rate of objects with r ≳ 25–50 km, preserving the steep power-law behavior for objects at this size. Our calculations demonstrate that the roll-over observed in the Kuiper Belt size distribution is naturally explained as an edge of a divot in the size distribution; the radius at which the size distribution transitions away from the power law, and the shape of the divot from our simulations are consistent with the size of the observed roll-over, and size distribution for smaller bodies. Both the kink radius and the radius of the divot center depend on the strength scaling law in the gravity regime for Kuiper Belt objects. These simulations suggest that the sky density of r ∼ 1 km objects is ∼106–107 objects per square degree. A detection of the divot in the size distribution would provide a measure of the strength of large Kuiper Belt objects, and constrain the shape of the size distribution at the end of accretion in the Kuiper Belt.
Building Wireless Sensor Network Applications with LooCI

Considerable research has been performed in applying run-time reconfigurable component models to the domain of wireless sensor networks. The ability to dynamically deploy and reconfigure software components has clear advantages in sensor networks, which are typically large in scale and expected to operate for long periods in the face of node mobility, dynamic environmental conditions, and changing application requirements. LooCI is a component and binding model that is optimized for use in resource-constrained environments such as Wireless Sensor Networks. LooCI components use a novel event-based binding model that allows developers to model rich component interactions, while providing support for run-time reconfiguration, reflection, and policy-based management. This paper reports on the design of LooCI and describes a prototype implementation for the Sun SPOT. This platform is then evaluated in context of a real-world river monitoring and warning scenario in the city of Sao Carlos, Brazil.
A Comparison Of Scattering From 2-D And 3-D Rough Interface

In this paper we compared scattered waves from 2-D and 3-D interface structures. The modeling technique is the 3-D time domain finite difference method. The scheme is second-order accurate in time and fourth-order accurate in space. It is implemented on a massively parallel nCUBE computer. In order to investigate the characteristics of 2-D and 3-D rough surface scattering, we consider an acoustic-elastic boundary, which is described by a Gaussian autocorrelation function. The F-K analysis of reflected signals shows that 2-D scattering generates similar amounts of forward and back scattering, while in the 3-D case, more forward and less back scattering. The 3-D effects also show larger reflected energy than the 2-D case, especially near the normal incident. The outof-plane scatterings are clearly demonstrated on the F-K spectra in the 3-D case. In the 2-D simulations, we have to keep in mind that it tends to overestimate the amount 10-1
Host Genetic Background Strongly Influences the Response to Influenza A Virus Infections

The genetic make-up of the host has a major influence on its response to combat pathogens. For influenza A virus, several single gene mutations have been described which contribute to survival, the immune response and clearance of the pathogen by the host organism. Here, we have studied the influence of the genetic background to influenza A H1N1 (PR8) and H7N7 (SC35M) viruses. The seven inbred laboratory strains of mice analyzed exhibited different weight loss kinetics and survival rates after infection with PR8. Two strains in particular, DBA/2J and A/J, showed very high susceptibility to viral infections compared to all other strains. The LD50 to the influenza virus PR8 in DBA/2J mice was more than 1000-fold lower than in C57BL/6J mice. High susceptibility in DBA/2J mice was also observed after infection with influenza strain SC35M. In addition, infected DBA/2J mice showed a higher viral load in their lungs, elevated expression of cytokines and chemokines, and a more severe and extended lung pathology compared to infected C57BL/6J mice. These findings indicate a major contribution of the genetic background of the host to influenza A virus infections. The overall response in highly susceptible DBA/2J mice resembled the pathology described for infections with the highly virulent influenza H1N1-1918 and newly emerged H5N1 viruses.
Enforcing Obligations within RelationalDatabase Management Systems

Within Database Management Systems (DBMS), privacy policies regulate the collection, access and disclosure of the stored personal, identifiable and sensitive data. Policies often specify obligations which represent actions that must be executed or conditions that must be satisfied before and/or after data are accessed. Although numerous policies specification languages allow the specification, no systematic support is provided to enforce obligations within relational DBMS. In this paper, we make a step to fill this void presenting an approach to the definition of an enforcement monitor which handles privacy policies that include obligations. Such a monitor is derived from the same set of policies that must be enforced, and regulates the execution of SQL code based on the satisfaction of a variety of obligation types. The proposed solution is systematic, has been automated, does not require any programming activity and can be used with most of the existing relational DBMSs.
GRP78 enhances the glutamine metabolism to support cell survival from glucose deficiency by modulating the β-catenin signaling

To support the high rates of proliferation, cancer cells undergo the metabolic reprogramming: aerobic glycolysis and glutamine addiction. Though glucose regulated protein 78 (GRP78) is a glucose-sensing protein and frequently highly expressed in tumor cells, its roles in glucose and glutamine metabolic regulation remain poorly unknown. We report here that glucose deficiency-induced GRP78 enhances β-catenin signaling and consequently promotes its downstream c-Myc-mediated glutamine metabolism in colorectal cancer cells. Mechanistically, GRP78 elevates intracellular free β-catenin level via disruption of adenomatous polyposis coli (APC)-β-catenin and E-cadherin-β-catenin protein complexes. Notably, overexpression of GRP78 causes APC protein downregulation in proteasome- and lysosome-independent manners. Further mechanistic studies reveal that GRP78 facilitates the extracellular release of APC, thereby rendering the liberation of β-catenin from APC. Furthermore, GRP78 acts through both hindering E-cadherin expression and impairing the interaction of E-cadherin with β-catenin to indirectly and directly influence E-cadherin-β-catenin complex stability. Our study reveals that GRP78 is a novel molecular link between metabolic alterations and signal transduction during tumor progression.
Multi-agent based joint production and maintenance scheduling considering human resources

Joint production and maintenance scheduling has been widely studied and many solutions have been proposed. However, all proposed solutions consider production tasks as maintenance ones. In fact, these task types have different constraints and can't be planned similarly. In this paper, we propose a new joint production and maintenance scheduling that takes into account human resources availability and skills to propose realistic schedules. Multi Agent Systems are used for modeling the floor shop.
Male subfertility and the role of micronutrient supplementation: clinical and economic issues

The concept of male subfertility has evolved rapidly since 2000. This term is discussed based upon evidence relating to its first entrance into the literature, along with contemporary references to its purported incidence and prevalence. Factors affecting sperm quality are described in detail, and available data pertaining to the effects of micronutrients on spermatic parameters and resulting pregnancies are described. The first cost-efficiency analysis of the use of micronutrients vs. assisted reproductive technologies is presented. This paper also describes a therapeutic approach to males, recognizing that many potential fathers have no recourse to medical facilities to evaluate their fertility. At a time when medical dollars are either nonexistent or precious, such an approach using micronutrient supplementation may be cost-effective in developing and possibly even in developed countries.
Directional Higher Order Information for Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Dataset

Higher order information includes k-nearestneighbor information and k-order region information that are of great importance when the first order or lower order information is not functioning. Despite of the importance of direction in spatio-temporal analysis, directional higher order information has received almost no attention. This paper introduces a new directional higher order information dissimilarity measure that combines topological and geometrical information for spatio-temporal trajectories. It also presents a spider chart-like visualisation approach for directional higher order information and demonstrates the usefulness of this measure with a case study from top-k trajectory mining.
High resolution imaging of the early-type galaxy NGC 1380: an insight into the nature of extended extragalactic star clusters ⋆

Context. NGC 1380 is a lenticular galaxy located near the centre of the Fornax Cluster, northeast of NGC 1399. The globular cluster system of this galaxy has hitherto only been studied from the ground. Recent studies of similar early-type galaxies, specially lenticular ones, reveal the existence of star clusters that apparently break up the traditional open/globular cluster dichotomy. Aims. With higher quality photometry from HST/WFPC2 we study the star clusters in NGC 1380, measuring their magnitudes, colours, sizes and projected distances from the centre of the galaxy. Methods. We used deep archival HST/WFPC2 in the B and V bands. We built colour magnitude diagrams from which we selected a sample of cluster candidates. We also analysed their colour distribution and measured their sizes. Based on their location in the luminosity-size diagram we estimated probabilities of them being typical globular clusters as those found in the Galaxy. Results. A total of about 570 cluster candidates were found down to V = 26.5. We measured sizes for approximately 200 of them. The observed colour distribution has three apparent peaks. Likewise for the size distribution. We identified the smaller population as being mainly typical globular clusters, while the more extended objects have small probabilities of being such objects. Different correlations between absolute magnitudes, sizes, colours and location were inferred for these cluster sub-populations. Conclusions. Most extended clusters (Reff > 4 pc) share similar properties to the diffuse star clusters reported to inhabit luminous early-type galaxies in the Virgo galaxy cluster such as being of low surface brightness and fainter than MV �− 8. We also report on a small group of (Reff � 10 pc), −8 < MV < −6, red clusters located near the centre of NGC 1380, which may be interpreted as faint fuzzies.
Learning Flames

In this work we propose a novel approach for realistic fire animation and manipulation. We apply a statistical learning method to an image sequence of a real-world flame to jointly capture flame motion and appearance characteristics. A low-dimensional generic flame model is then robustly matched to the video images. The model parameter values are used as input to drive an Expectation-Maximization algorithm to learn an auto regressive process with respect to flame dynamics. The generic flame model and the trained motion model enable us to synthesize new, unique flame sequences of arbitrary length in real-time.
Continuous Feature Adaptation for Non-Native Speech Recognition

The current speech interfaces in many military applications may be adequate for native speakers. However, the recognition rate drops quite a lot for non-native speakers (people with foreign accents). This is mainly because the nonnative speakers have large temporal and intra-phoneme variations when they pronounce the same words. This problem is also complicated by the presence of large environmental noise such as tank noise, helicopter noise, etc. In this paper, we proposed a novel continuous acoustic feature adaptation algorithm for on-line accent and environmental adaptation. Implemented by incremental singular value decomposition (SVD), the algorithm captures local acoustic variation and runs in real-time. This feature-based adaptation method is then integrated with conventional model-based maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) algorithm. Extensive experiments have been performed on the NATO non-native speech corpus with baseline acoustic model trained on native American English. The proposed feature-based adaptation algorithm improved the average recognition accuracy by 15%, while the MLLR model based adaptation achieved 11% improvement. The corresponding word error rate (WER) reduction was 25.8% and 2.73%, as compared to that without adaptation. The combined adaptation achieved overall recognition accuracy improvement of 29.5%, and WER reduction of 31.8%, as compared to that without adaptation. Keywords—speaker adaptation; environment adaptation; robust speech recognition; SVD; non-native speech recognition
Document clustering and Visualization

Document clustering is an approach to organize unstructure d text information into meaningful groups. It can be applied to documents in a database to improv e performance in information retrieval, or it can be used to organize query results from th e web or other types of large, heterogeneous text collections. In this report, we describe a n ew clustering algorithm to categorize and spatially cluster text documents. We employ TF-IDF and t erm co-occurrence to measure document-to-document similarities. Next, a modified minim um spanning tree algorithm is used to cluster similar documents. Finally, we apply multid imensional scaling on the clusters to represent them as spatial clusters on a 2D plane. The syste m i t sted with sets of articles generated by an Internet search engine for certain topic are as. Our result shows that the system is capable of distinguishing different topics and produ cing recognizable and informative clusters.
Production of the Acetylcholinesterase Inhibitor from Yarrowia lipolytica S-3

The acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitor of Yarrowia lipolytica S-3 was maximally produced when it was incubated at 30°C for 36 h in an optimal medium containing 1% yeast extract, 2% peptone and 2% glucose, with an initial pH 6.0. The final AChE inhibitory activity under these conditions was an IC50 value of 64 mg/ml. After partial purification of the AChE inhibitor by means of systematic solvent extraction, the final IC50 value of the partially purified AChE inhibitor was 0.75 mg/ml. We prepared a test product by using the partially purified AChE inhibitor and then determined its stability for the development of a new antidementia commercial product. The test product was stable at room temperature for 15 weeks.
Unraveling the relationship between regional gray matter atrophy and pathology in connected white matter tracts in long‐standing multiple sclerosis

Gray matter (GM) atrophy is common in multiple sclerosis (MS), but the relationship with white matter (WM) pathology is largely unknown. Some studies found a co‐occurrence in specific systems, but a regional analysis across the brain in different clinical phenotypes is necessary to further understand the disease mechanism underlying GM atrophy in MS. Therefore, we investigated the association between regional GM atrophy and pathology in anatomically connected WM tracts.
Robust thread-level speculation

Robustness is a key issue on any runtime system that aims to speed up the execution of a program. However, robustness considerations are commonly overlooked when new software-based, thread-level speculation (STLS) systems are proposed. This paper highlights the relevance of the problem, showing different situations when the use of incorrect data can irreversibly alter the speculative execution of an algorithm, despite the efforts of a given STLS system to maintain sequential consistency. We show that the management of speculative exceptions is a common factor to these problems. Based on this fact, we propose a novel solution to handle speculative exceptions. Our solution eagerly tries to solve the issue before the non-speculative thread arrives to the instruction that rose the exception. We compare our solution to a more conservative approach found in the bibliography. The comparison is done both qualitatively, through a detailed analysis of the tradeoffs involved, and quantitatively, evaluating the effects of both solutions in the execution of three different benchmarks on a real system. Both studies conclude that our solution handles the occurrence of speculative exceptions more efficiently. Under heavy loads intended to push to its limits a STLS system, our solution leads to execution times reduced by up to 52.02% with respect to earlier proposals. Our solution does not affect the performance when speculative exceptions do not appear. We believe that our proposal makes STLS systems robust enough to be used in production environments.
DesignCon 2004 Error-Correction Coding for 10 Gb / s Backplane Transmission

Backplane links operating in the 6-12Gb/s region are affected by a number of transmission channel impairments such as frequency-dependent losses, reflections, crosstalk, thermal noise and environmental impulse noise. In this paper, we describe a prototype backplane transceiver environment that combines equalization and error-correction coding (ECC, also known as FEC) to combat the above impairments, as well as the effect of imperfect equalization and resulting data-dependent error sensitivity.
Astrocyte-Neuron Interactions during Learning May Occur by Lactate Signaling Rather than Metabolism

Biology is full of instances of exaptation, the functional shift or co-optation of a trait during evolution (Gould and Vrba, 1982). Exaptation played a critical role in human brain evolution. For example, hominin brain expansion is thought to have happened opportunistically upon food resources rich in brain-selective nutrients (Tattersall, 2010). Prehensile hands and bipedalism were other enabling factors in this process, as both features preceded the expansion of the brain, and notably, the development and utilization of tools (Wood, 2010). Similarly, central and peripheral vocal structures, initially used for a variety of non-linguistic reasons (chewing, larynx protection, size exaggeration), were pre-existing conditions to, and provided the anatomical basis for, the evolution of language (e.g., MacNeilage, 2010). The very emergence of abstract cognitive abilities in humans are hypothesized to have evolved from faculties originally developed for other purposes (Pinker, 2010).