Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lattice index codes from algebraic number fields

Broadcasting K independent messages to multiple users where each user has a subset of the K messages as side information is studied. This problem can be regarded as a natural generalization of the well-known index coding problem to the physical-layer additive white Gaussian noise channel due to the analogy between these two problems. Recently, Natarajan, Hong, and Viterbo proposed a novel broadcasting strategy called lattice index coding which uses lattices constructed over principal ideal domains (PIDs) as a transmission scheme and showed that such a scheme provides uniform side information gains. In this paper, we generalize this strategy to rings of algebraic integers of number fields which may not be PIDs and show upper and lower bounds on the achievable side information gains. This generalization substantially enlarges the design space and includes some interesting examples in which all the messages are from the same field.
Manipulating power can affect memory conformity

Memory is malleable and open to influence between encoding and retrieval. Information about a past event given to us by, for example, a co-witness can be incorporated into our own memory reports. Pairs of participants were shown 50 photographs of faces, given a power task where one had to be a designer (low-power) and one a judge (high-power), and then given a recognition test where one partner had to answer before the other. The individuals in the low-power group were more influenced by their partner's responses than those in the high-power group. This has important forensic, educational and organisational applications and shows that memory conformity can be manipulated by power. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Infrastructure for Tracking Users in Open Collaborative Applications : A Preliminary Report

Open collaborative applications which utilize user-modeling techniques pose several challenges to the basic capability of tracking the users’ actions. In such environments, users may use multiple applications—which can differ between users. Unfortunately, existing approaches to tracking actions either rely on access to the applications’ source code, or on their supporting scripting, or on their being written in specific languages. Unfortunately, all of these conditions frequently do not hold in open settings. To address this challenge, we are developing a new measurement tool for the user-modeling community, which relies on intercepting the API calls between the applications and the operating system to detect users’ actions. Although in initial state of development, it is already capable of tracking collaborative scenarios which previous approaches could not. We report on the design of the tool and the challenges it raises.
Exploring Libraries’ Efforts in Inclusion and Outreach Activities Using Social Media

Abstract The main purpose of this study was to investigate the use of social media tools to enhance inclusion and outreach activities in libraries. The study also examined the existence of policies that encouraged the use of social media and the challenges that libraries face when integrating social media into their services. Invitations to participate in a survey were sent to 110 libraries in Greater China, Switzerland, United States of America, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand to investigate the use of social media tools in their inclusion/outreach programmes and librarians’ perceptions of their usefulness. Libraries were selected on the basis of indicating on their websites that they used social media. From the 110 libraries that were invited to participate in the survey, 28 responses were received and analysed. Among these, academic libraries made up 68% of the respondents, and the remaining 32% were from public libraries. The findings indicated that the libraries had already incorporated social media tools into their services, and, to some extent, for inclusion/outreach activities. In general, participants in this study indicated an acknowledgement of the benefits of using social media and an inclination to apply social media in the future, although the libraries and librarians faced the challenge of equipping themselves well in order to keep abreast of these technologies. The study highlighted the lack of specific policies that clarified the responsibilities of libraries in promoting social inclusion. Institutionalizing specific policies on the use of social media tools in libraries could be done either using a top-down and/or a bottom-up approach.
Ipl1/Aurora Kinase Suppresses S-CDK-Driven Spindle Formation during Prophase I to Ensure Chromosome Integrity during Meiosis

Cells coordinate spindle formation with DNA repair and morphological modifications to chromosomes prior to their segregation to prevent cell division with damaged chromosomes. Here we uncover a novel and unexpected role for Aurora kinase in preventing the formation of spindles by Clb5-CDK (S-CDK) during meiotic prophase I and when the DDR is active in budding yeast. This is critical since S-CDK is essential for replication during premeiotic S-phase as well as double-strand break induction that facilitates meiotic recombination and, ultimately, chromosome segregation. Furthermore, we find that depletion of Cdc5 polo kinase activity delays spindle formation in DDR-arrested cells and that ectopic expression of Cdc5 in prophase I enhances spindle formation, when Ipl1 is depleted. Our findings establish a new paradigm for Aurora kinase function in both negative and positive regulation of spindle dynamics.
Reasoning and Ontologies for Personalized E-Learning in the Semantic Web

The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information by taking the individual needs and requirements of the users into account. In this paper we propose a framework for personalized e-Learning in the semantic web and show how the semantic web resource description formats can be utilized for automatic generation of hypertext structures from distributed metadata. Ontologies and metadata for three types of resources (domain, user, and observation) are investigated. We investigate a logic-based approach to educational hypermedia using TRIPLE, a rule and query language for the semantic web.
Dependence in packet queues

The burstiness of the total arrival process has been previously characterized in packet network performance models by the dependence among successive interarrival times. It is shown that associated dependence among successive service times and between service times and interarrival times also can be important for packet queues involving variable packet lengths. These dependence effects are demonstrated analytically by considering a multiclass single-server queue with batch-Poisson arrival processes. For this model and more realistic models of packet queues, insight is gained from heavy-traffic limit theorems. This study indicates that all three kinds of dependence should be considered in the analysis and measurement of packet queues involving variables packet lengths. Specific measurements are proposed for real systems and simulations. This study also indicates how to predict expected packet delays under heavy loads. Finally, this study is important for understanding the limitations of procedures such as the queuing network analyzer (QNA) for approximately describing the performance of queuing networks using the techniques of aggregation and decomposition. >
Microbiology and geochemistry of Little Hot Creek, a hot spring environment in the Long Valley Caldera

A culture‐independent community census was combined with chemical and thermodynamic analyses of three springs located within the Long Valley Caldera, Little Hot Creek (LHC) 1, 3, and 4. All three springs were approximately 80 °C, circumneutral, apparently anaerobic and had similar water chemistries. 16S rRNA gene libraries constructed from DNA isolated from spring sediment revealed moderately diverse but highly novel microbial communities. Over half of the phylotypes could not be grouped into known taxonomic classes. Bacterial libraries from LHC1 and LHC3 were predominantly species within the phyla Aquificae and Thermodesulfobacteria, while those from LHC4 were dominated by candidate phyla, including OP1 and OP9. Archaeal libraries from LHC3 contained large numbers of Archaeoglobales and Desulfurococcales, while LHC1 and LHC4 were dominated by Crenarchaeota unaffiliated with known orders. The heterogeneity in microbial populations could not easily be attributed to measurable differences in water chemistry, but may be determined by availability of trace amounts of oxygen to the spring sediments. Thermodynamic modeling predicted the most favorable reactions to be sulfur and nitrate respirations, yielding 40–70 kJ mol−1 e− transferred; however, levels of oxygen at or below our detection limit could result in aerobic respirations yielding up to 100 kJ mol−1 e− transferred. Important electron donors are predicted to be H2, H2S, S0, Fe2+ and CH4, all of which yield similar energies when coupled to a given electron acceptor. The results indicate that springs associated with the Long Valley Caldera contain microbial populations that show some similarities both to springs in Yellowstone and springs in the Great Basin.
Promoting choice and control in residential services for people with learning disabilities

This paper discusses the gap between policy goals and practice in residential services for people with learning disabilities. Drawing on a nine month ethnographic study of three residential services, it outlines a range of obstacles to the promotion of choice and control that were routinely observed in the culture and working practices of the services. Issues discussed include conflicting service values and agendas, inspection regimes, an attention to the bigger decisions in a person's life when empowerment could more quickly and effectively be promoted at the level of everyday practice, problems of communication and interpretation and the pervasiveness of teaching. We offer a range of suggestions as to how these obstacles might be tackled.
LDPC convolutional codes coded cooperation based on puncturing

Coded cooperation is a kind of virtual MIMO transmission technology that can achieve both coding gain and diversity gain, which is very promising in 5G communication. To design a scheme that can be used for near-capacity transmission and can be generalized for slow and fast fading channels, this paper studies the coding cooperation based on convolutional LDPC codes. Firstly, channel coding the original information by LDPC convolutional codes, then divided the coded words into two parts by puncturing algorithm; secondly, introducing space-time transmission into the second frame of coded cooperation, so the diversity gain can be obtained under different fading scenarios. Simulation results show that the system performance can be improved generally.
Investor Conferences as a Research Service

Broker-hosted investor conferences are invitation-only events that allow select clients to interact with firm management. We find that firms that attend investor conferences tend to have high intangible assets, consistent with greater demand for management access among hard-to-value firms. Using a sample of institutional transactions, we find that investor conferences have a significant effect on broker commission shares for conference stocks in the days following the event, and the effect is larger when conference disclosures are more informative, which suggests investors reward brokers for providing management access and facilitating informative disclosures.
Dynamically Adaptive User Profiling for Personalized Recommendations

Modelling user interests for time sensitive domains like RSS feeds and spontaneous social media has been a vibrant research activity in recent times. Although numerous efforts have been invested in to the personalisation of dynamic web content, the voluminous and diversified production of continuous online information still poses significant research challenges. In this paper, we propose a profiling mechanism that learns the user access patterns in a dynamic environment like RSS feeds. Main goal of the proposed mechanism is the retrieval optimisation and personalised recommendation of RSS feeds in close to real time. The mechanism allocates personalized time windows based on the learned access patterns and tries to minimize the chances of time-sensitive information from being missed by the user using a delay minimisation algorithm based on Non-homogenous Poisson Process. The mechanism acquires implicit feedback from the user interaction to calculate potential recommendations. The experiments conducted prove the significance of the mechanism in terms of optimised information retrieval and faster adaptation process where it clearly outperforms the other mechanisms in the literature on these properties.
Comparative effectiveness of six Chinese herb formulas for acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: protocol for systematic review and network meta-analysis

Introduction Chinese medicine is commonly used to combine with pharmacotherapy for the treatment of acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD). Six Chinese herb formulas involving Weijing decoction, Maxingshigan decoction, Yuebijiabanxia decoction, Qingqihuatan decoction, Dingchuan decoction and Sangbaipi decoction are recommended in Chinese medicine clinical guideline or textbook, to relieve patients with phlegm-heat according to Chinese syndrome differentiation. However, the comparative effectiveness among these six formulas has not been investigated in published randomised controlled trials. We plan to summarise the direct and indirect evidence for these six formulas combined with pharmacotherapy to determine the relative merits options for the management of AECOPD. Methods and analysis We will perform the comprehensive search for the randomised controlled trials to evaluate the effectiveness of six Chinese herb formulas recommended in Chinese medicine clinical guideline or textbook. The combination of pharmacotherapy includes bronchodilators, antibiotics and corticosteroids that are routinely prescribed for AECOPD. The primary outcome will be lung function, arterial blood gases and length of hospital stay. The data screening and extraction will be conducted by two different reviewers. The quality of RCT will be assessed according to the Cochrane handbook risk of bias tool. The Bayes of network meta-analysis (NMA) will be conducted with WinBUGS to compare the effectiveness of six formulas. We will also use the surface under the cumulative ranking curve (SUCRA) to obtain the comprehensive rank for these treatments. Ethics and dissemination This review does not require ethics approval and the results of NMA will be submitted to a peer-review journal. Trial registration number PROSPERO (CRD42016052699).
Painterly rendering using image salience

The contribution of this paper is a novel non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) technique, capable of producing an artificial 'hand-painted' effect on 2D images, such as photographs. Our method requires no user interaction, and makes use of image salience and gradient information to determine the implicit ordering and attributes of individual brush strokes. The benefits of our technique are complete automation, and mitigation against the loss of image detail during painting. Strokes from lower salience regions of the image do not encroach upon higher salience regions; this can occur with some existing painting methods. We describe our algorithm in detail, and illustrate its application with a gallery of images.
Integration of sparse Bayesian learning and random subspace for fMRI Multivariate Pattern Analysis

Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) is frequently used to decode cognitive states from brain activities in fMRI study. Due to the discrepancy between sample and feature size, MVPA methods are suffered from the overfitting problem. This paper addresses this issue by introducing sparse modelling along with its advanced decoding method, Compressive Sensing (CS). As brain voxels have highly correlated in spatial domain, the prerequisite of CS methods are not well satisfied. We therefore propose a novel MVPA method to integrate linear Sparse Bayesian Learning (i.e. Bayesian Compressive Sensing) with random subspace method. Benefiting from the random subspace method, spatial correlation and feature-to-sample ratio are largely reduced. The experimental results from a real fMRI dataset demonstrate that our method has distinct prediction power compared to three other popular MVPA methods, and the detected relevant voxels are located in informative brain areas.
Automatic Activity in Depolarized Guinea Pig Ventricular Myocardium: Characteristics and Mechanisms

Membrane potential was changed uniformly in segments, 0.7–1.0 mm long, of guinea pig papillary muscles exdsed from the right ventricle by using extracellular polarizing current pulses applied across two electrically insulated compartments. Rhythmic automatic depolarizations (RAD) occurred in 90% of preparations superfused with Tyrode's solution at maximum dlastolic membrane potentials ranging from -35.2 ± 7.5 (threshold) to + 4.0 ± 9.2 mV. The average maximum dV/dt of RAD ranged from 17.1 to 18.0 V/sec within a membrane potential range of -40 to + 20 mV. Raising extracellular Ca'+ concentration [Ca2+]n from 1.8 to 6.8 itim, or application of isoprotere-nol (10-5 g/ml) enhanced the rate of RAD, but lowering [CaJ+]0 to 0.4 mM or exposure to MnCl2 (6 mix) abolished RAD. RAD were enhanced by lowering extracellular K+ concentration [K+]0 from 5.4 to 1.5 mm. RAD were suppressed in 40% of fibers by raising [K+]0 to 15.4 ram, and in all fibers by raising [K+]o to 40.4 him. This suppression was dne to increased |K+]0 and not to K-induced depolarization because it persisted when membrane potential was held by means of a conditioning hyperpolarizing pulse at the level of control resting potential. The slope resistance increased gradually after maximum re polarization. These observations suggest that the development of RAD in depolarized myocardium is associated with a time-dependent decrease in outward current (probably K current) and with increase in the background inward current, presumably flowing through the stow channel carrying Ca or Na ions, or both.
The Religious Orientation Scale: Review and Meta-Analysis of Social Desirability Effects

Reliability and validity of scores on the Religious Orientation Scale (ROS) are reviewed with respect to social desirability. ROS measures intrinsic religiousness (I; religion as an end unto itself) and extrinsic religiousness (E; religion as a means to some end, like friendship or solace). Development of the scale is briefly traced, including the modification of the E scale to include two subscales. Scores from the I scale have good internal consistency reliability (.83), but scores from E subscales (Social and Personal) have marginal internal consistency reliability (.63 and .64, respectively). I tends to correlate with desirable variables (mental health, altruism, religious commitment), and E correlates with that which is undesirable (prejudice, nonmarital sex). Meta-analysis revealed that I correlates . 15 with social desirability but that E does not. Given the religious relevancy of social desirability measures, partialing out this variance is not recommended.
Can Fertilization of Soil Select Less Mutualistic Mycorrhizae?

It has been noted previously that nutrient-stressed plants generally release more soluble carbohydrate in root exudates and consequently support more mycorrhizae than plants supplied with ample nutrients. Fertilization may select strains of vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhizal (VAM) fungi that are inferior mutualists if the same characteristics that make a VAM fungus successful in roots with a lowered carbohydrate content also reduce the benefits that the fungus provides a host plant. This two-phase study experimentally tests the hypothesis that fertilizing low-nutrient soil selects VAM fungi that are inferior mutualists. The first phase examines the effects of chemical fertilizers on the species composition of VAM fungal communities in long-term field plots. The second phase measures the effects of VAM fungal assemblages from fertilized and unfertilized plots on big bluestem grass grown in a greenhouse. The field results indicate that 8 yr of fertilization altered the species composition of VAM fungal communities. Relative abundance of Gigaspora gigantea, Gigaspora margarita, Scutellispora calospora, and Glomus occultum decreased while Glomus intraradix increased in response to fertilization. Results from the greenhouse experiment show that big bluestem colonized with VAM fungi from fertilized soil were smaller after 1 mo and produced fewer inflorescences at 3 mo than big bluestem colonized with VAM fungi from unfertilized soil. Fungal structures within big bluestem roots suggest that VAM fungi from fertilized soil exerted a higher net carbon cost on their host than VAM fungi from unfertilized soil. VAM fungi from fertilized soil produced fewer hyphae and arbuscules (and consequently provided their host with less inorganic nutrients from the soil) and produced as many vesicles (and thus provisioned their own storage structures at the same level) as fungi from unfertilized soil. These results support the hypothesis that fertilization selects VAM fungi that are inferior mutualists.
Block variants of Hammarling's method for solving Lyapunov equations

This article is concerned with the efficient numerical solution of the Lyapunov equation <i>A</i><sup><i>T</i></sup> <i>X</i> + <i>XA</i> &equls; −<i>C</i> with a stable matrix <i>A</i> and a symmetric positive semidefinite matrix <i>C</i> of possibly small rank. We discuss the efficient implementation of Hammarling's method and propose among other algorithmic improvements a block variant, which is demonstrated to perform significantly better than existing implementations. An extension to the discrete-time Lyapunov equation <i>A</i><sup><i>T</i></sup><i>XA</i> − <i>X</i> = −<i>C</i> is also described.
The current state of empathy research

The literature on empathy, primarily from counseling and psychotherapy and secondarily from social and developmental psychology, is reviewed. Obstacles that may account for theoretical confusions and empirical difficulties in studying empathy are highlighted. The decrease in empathy research in recent years appears attributable to the lack of clear focus and effective research tools as well as the shift in interest from empathy to other concepts such as the working alliance. It is argued that there is a need to return to studying empathy. Researchers should distinguish between dispositional and experiential empathy and between intellectual empathy and empathic emotions and indicate whether they are examining therapist or client experience of empathy. Suggestions for future research are offered.