Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anticipatory feelings may generate ambiguity averse preferences

We consider the impact of anticipatory feelings on behavior. We focus on a very simple type of anticipatory feelings: we assume that anticipatory feelings are based on future expected utility. Although this modeling may not reflect the complexity of anticipatory emotions, it has an interesting consequence: We show that when there are diminishing returns in anticipatory feelings and additive separability, individual preferences are formally similar to ambiguity-averse preferences a la Klibanoff, Marinacci and Mukerji (2005), under uncertainty. This particularly applies to situations in which utility is by nature anticipatory, as for parents who care for the future welfare of their children, after their own death. The analysis can explain patters of behavior for large long-term environmental risks. JEL Codes: D81, D64, D87.
Service Oriented Architecture for Patient Monitoring Application

This paper presents a new approach that exploits service oriented architecture (SOA) for patient monitoring application. In particular, we describe the use of web services, UPnP and semantic web in a loosely coupled manner to monitor dementia patients, model sensors and pervasive devices as services, and enable proactive action for handling patients by automatically triggering intervention services. The proposed architecture enables the development of a sophisticated monitoring system to facilitate care-giving and clinical assessment of patients in a context enlightened fashion within an administrative domain and across the internet that exceeds the current state-of-the-art in terms of scalability, interoperability, intelligence and robustness.
An Efficient Implementation of Multi-Context Algebraic Reasoning System with Lazy Evaluation

A multi-context algebraic reasoning system is a computational system which can efficiently simulate parallel processes each executing an algebraic reasoning procedure under a particular context (or a premise). In particular, the multi-completion system MKB simulates the parallel KnuthBendix completion procedures, which, given a set of equations and a set of reduction orderings, try to generate a complete (i.e., terminating and confluent) term rewriting system equivalent to the input equations. MKB handles multiple contexts each corresponding to a reduction ordering, and normally, one of them leads to a success and others cause the failure or the divergence. In this study, we present an efficient implementation of MKB, called lz-mkb, which exploits the lazy evaluation mechanism of a functional, object-oriented programming language Scala. The experiment shows that lz-mkb is more efficient than the original MKB implementation of Kurihara and Kondo.
Género en la ciencia: el impacto de las políticas de igualdad en las instituciones y las prácticas científicas - el caso de Alemania

The Fourth World Conference on Women that took place in Beijing in 1995 became a milestone in the history of gender equality. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, adopted unanimously by 189 countries, became a central document for gender equality policies around the world. Today we can observe how the situation of women has substantially changed in relation to their physical and economic autonomy, their participation in decision-making processes and their integration into different levels of education. It is important to take stock of the changes that occurred in the past two decades to be able to identify the challenges that we are to face in the following years. In this context, I would like to discuss in this article the measures taken to gender mainstream policies to fight gender inequalities in the frame of the actions proposed by the European Union (EU) to establish gender equality mechanisms in science and technology. To this end, I will first provide an introduction to gender equality policies in the European context and briefly comment on their impact. Secondly, I will summarise the equality policies in German academia and science and provide elements to understand why in Germany, in spite of great efforts to institutionalise gender equality policies, women are still greatly underrepresented in science and research in the European context.
The Effect of Endogenous Dopamine in Rotenone-Induced Toxicity in PC 12 Cells APRIL

Deficiencies in Complex I have been observed in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. Systemic exposure to rotenone, a Complex I inhibitor, has been shown to lead to selective dopaminergic cell death in vivo and toxicity in many in vitro models, including dopaminergic cell cultures. However, it remains unclear why rotenone seems to affect dopaminergic cells more adversely. Therefore, the role of dopamine (DA) in rotenone-induced PC12 cell toxicity was examined. Rotenone (1.0 μM) caused significant toxicity in differentiated PC12 cells, which was accompanied by decreases in ATP levels, changes in catechol levels, and increased DA oxidation. To determine whether endogenous DA makes PC12 cells more susceptible to rotenone, cells were treated with the tyrosine hydroxylase inhibitor -methyl-p-tyrosine (AMPT) to reduce DA levels prior to rotenone exposure, and then cell viability was measured. No changes in rotenone-induced toxicity were observed with or without AMPT treatment. However, a potentiation of toxicity was observed following coexposure of PC12 cells to rotenone and methamphetamine. To determine whether this effect was due to DA, PC12 cells were depleted of DA prior to methamphetamine and rotenone cotreatment, resulting in a large attenuation in toxicity. These findings suggest that DA plays a role in rotenone-induced toxicity and possibly the vulnerability of DA neurons in PD. Antioxid. Redox Signal. 7, 630–638. Forum Original Research Communication ANTIOXIDANTS & REDOX SIGNALING Volume 7, Numbers 5 & 6, 2005 © Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 13910C11.pgs 4/5/05 4:35 PM Page 630
Achieving High Transparency in Bilateral Teleoperation Using Stiffness Observer for Passivity Control

In this paper a new approach is developed that increases transparency in bilateral teleoperation. We define a stiffness observer which detects hard contact instant by analyzing the generated force in the slave side to activate a passivity controller. This approach uses passivity based idea of monitoring energies flowing in and out of the teleoperator. It improves performance of previous works by eliminating instability in transition to hard contact. It also provides a more general and less conservative approach to passivity control of teleoperated systems. The performance of the new approach has been investigated through simulation results
Distribution Regularized Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Transfer Visual Feature Learning

Transfer visual feature learning (TVFL), which learns compact representations for images such that we can build accurate classifier for target domain by leveraging rich labeled data in the source domain, has attracted increasingly attention recently. Previous methods mainly focus on reducing the distribution difference between domains but ignore the intrinsic hidden semantics in data. In this paper, we put forward a novel method for TVFL, called Distribution Regularized Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (DRNMF). Specifically, we employ Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to uncover the intrinsic information in visual data, and regularize it with geometrical distribution, marginal probability distribution and conditional probability distribution. Thus, DRNMF can discover the intrinsic information, preserve the manifold structure and reducing both marginal and conditional probability distribution difference simultaneously, which all perspectives above are important for TVFL. We also propose an effective and efficient algorithm for the optimization of DRNMF and theoretically prove the convergence. Extensive experiments on three types of cross-domain image classification tasks in comparison with several state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our DRNMF, which validates its effectiveness.
Mobile Phase Optimization Method for Steroids Separation

The paper presented a mathematical model developed for optimization of mobile phase composition in thin layer chromatography applied on steroids separation. The proper solvents system was experimental identify as being a mixture of chloroform, cyclohexan, and methyl-ethyl-cetone. An original mathematical model was developed and used in order to identify the composition of mobile phase. Starting with the mathematical model and with the optimization procedure a computer program has been developed. The proposed model is able to optimize simultaneously many mobile phases with respect of the shortest analysis time and of the selectivity of compounds. The efficiency of the mathematical and optimization models is demonstrated on a sample of five androstane isomers.
What Determines the Future Value of an Icon Wine? New Evidence from Australia*

Abstract To what extent can the future price of icon wines be anticipated from information available at the time of their initial sale by wineries? Using a seemingly unrelated regression model we show that weather variables and changes in production techniques, along with the age of the wine, have significant power in explaining the secondary market price variation across different vintages of each of three icon Australian red wines. The results have implications for winemakers in determining the prices they pay for grapes and charge for their wines, and for consumers/wine investors as a guide to the prospective quality of immature icon wines. (JEL codes: C23, D12, D44, D80, G12)
Improved End-to-End Response-Time Bounds for DAG-Based Task Systems ∗

This paper considers for the first time end-to-end responsetime analysis for DAG-based real-time task systems implemented on heterogeneous multiprocessor platforms. The specific analysis problem that is considered was motivated by an ongoing industrial collaboration. The DAG-based systems considered in this work differ from those considered in prior work in that intra-task parallelism is allowed: while each invocation of a task is sequential, successive invocations of the same task may execute in parallel. This difference enables much smaller response-time bounds to be obtained. These bounds are obtained via a task-model transformation process that ultimately enables prior work to be applied. This process allows some leeway in setting task relative deadlines. It is shown that response-time bounds can be lessened by using linear-programming techniques to determine such relative deadlines. The proposed scheduling approach and analysis are evaluated via both case-study and schedulability experiments. These experiments demonstrate that significant improvements in end-to-end responsetime bounds are enabled by the proposed techniques.
Improved mammographic CAD performance using multi-view information: a Bayesian network framework

Mammographic reading by radiologists requires the comparison of at least two breast projections (views) for the detection and the diagnosis of breast abnormalities. Despite their reported potential to support radiologists, most mammographic computer-aided detection (CAD) systems have a major limitation: as opposed to the radiologist's practice, computerized systems analyze each view independently. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a Bayesian network framework for multi-view mammographic analysis, with main focus on breast cancer detection at a patient level. We use causal-independence models and context modeling over the whole breast represented as links between the regions detected by a single-view CAD system in the two breast projections. The proposed approach is implemented and tested with screening mammograms for 1063 cases of whom 385 had breast cancer. The single-view CAD system is used as a benchmark method for comparison. The results show that our multi-view modeling leads to significantly better performance in discriminating between normal and cancerous patients. We also demonstrate the potential of our multi-view system for selecting the most suspicious cases.
Modulation Effects of Curcumin on Erythrocyte Ion-Transporter Activity

Curcumin ((1E,6E)-1,7-Bis(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-1,6-heptadiene-3,5-dione), the yellow biphenolic pigment isolated from turmeric (Curcuma longa), has various medicinal benefits through antioxidation, anti-inflammation, cardiovascular protection, immunomodulation, enhancing of the apoptotic process, and antiangiogenic property. We explored the effects of curcumin in vitro (10−5 M to 10−8 M) and in vivo (340 and 170 mg/kg b.w., oral) on Na+/K+ ATPase (NKA), Na+/H+ exchanger (NHE) activity, and membrane lipid hydroperoxides (ROOH) in control and experimental oxidative stress erythrocytes of Wistar rats. As a result, we found that curcumin potently modulated the membrane transporters activity with protecting membrane lipids against hydro-peroxidation in control as well as oxidatively challenged erythrocytes evidenced by stimulation of NKA, downregulation of NHE, and reduction of ROOH in the membrane. The observed results corroborate membrane transporters activity with susceptibility of erythrocyte membrane towards oxidative damage. Results explain the protective mechanism of curcumin against oxidative stress mediated impairment in ions-transporters activity and health beneficial effects.
Esophageal Submucosal Injection of Capsaicin but Not Acid Induces Symptoms in Normal Subjects

Background/Aims Transient receptor potential vanilloid-1 (TRPV1) is a candidate for mediating acid-induced symptoms in the esophagus. We conducted studies to determine if the presence of acid in the mucosa/submucosa and direct activation of TRPV1 by capsaicin elicited symptoms in normal healthy subjects. We also studied the presence of TRPV1 receptors in the esophagus. Methods Unsedated endoscopy was performed on healthy subjects with no symptoms. Using a sclerotherapy needle, normal saline (pH 2.0–7.5) was injected into the mucosa/submucosa, 5 cm above the Z line. In a separate group of healthy subjects, injection of capsaicin and vehicle was also studied. Quality of symptoms was reported using the McGill Pain Questionnaire, and symptom intensity using the visual analogue scale (VAS). Immunohistochemistry was performed on 8 surgical esophagus specimens using TRPV1 antibody. Results Acid injection either did not elicit or elicited mild symptoms in subjects at all pH solutions. Capsaicin but not the vehicle elicited severe heartburn/chest pain in all subjects. Mean VAS for capsaicin was 91 ± 3 and symptoms lasted for 25 ± 1 minutes. Immunohistochemistry revealed a linear TRPV1 staining pattern between the epithelial layer and the submucosa that extended into the papillae. Eighty-five percent of papillae stained positive for TRPV1 with a mean 1.1 positive papillae per high-powered field. Conclusions The mechanism of acid-induced heartburn and chest pain is not the simple interaction of hydrogen ions with afferents located in the esophageal mucosa and submucosa. TRPV1 receptors are present in the lamina propria and their activation induces heartburn and chest pain.
C5a Regulates IL-1β Production and Leukocyte Recruitment in a Murine Model of Monosodium Urate Crystal-Induced Peritonitis

Gouty arthritis results from the generation of monosodium urate (MSU) crystals within joints. These MSU crystals elicit acute inflammation characterized by massive infiltration of neutrophils and monocytes that are mobilized by the pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-1β. MSU crystals also activate the complement system, which regulates the inflammatory response; however, it is unclear whether or how MSU-mediated complement activation is linked to IL-1β release in vivo, and the various roles that might be played by individual components of the complement cascade. Here we show that exposure to MSU crystals in vivo triggers the complement cascade, leading to the generation of the biologically active complement proteins C3a and C5a. C5a, but not C3a, potentiated IL-1β and IL-1α release from LPS–primed MSU-exposed peritoneal macrophages and human monocytic cells in vitro; while in vivo MSU–induced C5a mediated murine neutrophil recruitment as well as IL-1β production at the site of inflammation. These effects were significantly ameliorated by treatment of mice with a C5a receptor antagonist. Mechanistic studies revealed that C5a most likely increased NLRP3 inflammasome activation via production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and not through increased transcription of inflammasome components. Therefore we conclude that C5a generated upon MSU-induced complement activation increases neutrophil recruitment in vivo by promoting IL-1 production via the generation of ROS, which activate the NLRP3 inflammasome. Identification of the C5a receptor as a key determinant of IL-1-mediated recruitment of inflammatory cells provides a novel potential target for therapeutic intervention to mitigate gouty arthritis.
Toward a unified theory of fertility.

This paper reviews the economic sociological psychological and anthropological theories of fertility and presents an integrated model. This model shows that the soruces of demand for children are economic but that noneconomic factors (female drives towards motherhood or male desire for dominance) are also sources of utility. The present return is a discounted value of an expected future stream of utilities. 2 individuals confronted with the same objective situation and the same potential payoff may still respond differently if their subjective appraisals of future events are different. Family and social approval of actions also constitute possible benefits. The constraints and costs comprise the resource-income base available the direct and indirect costs of children the competing ways in which resources can be used to obtain satisfaction and finally any norms or decision rules imposed on the individual by the larger social group. Economic cultural social and psychological forces all interact in determining the actual fertility decisions of couples. Thus the parity 1 birth decision may be strongly affected by the psychological values while higher parities are affected by economic factors. Social norms may dominate individual utilities in societies with very little margin for error ecologically whereas in a less confining environmental situation norms may be freely ignored and rapidly lose meaning.
Mı́ry a lineárnı́ maticové nerovnosti v optimálnı́m polynomiálnı́m řı́zenı́ Measures and linear matrix inequalities in polynomial optimal control Summary

Míry a lineární maticové nerovnosti v optimálním polynomiálnímřízení Measures and linear matrix inequalities in polynomial optimal control Summary This lecture describes the application of modern techniques of convex optimization to solve nonconvex nonlinear optimal control problems (OCPs) which may feature oscillation phenomena (chattering control) or concentration phenomena (impulsive control). First, with the help of occupation measures, we reformulate nonconvex non-linear OCPs as convex linear programming (LP) problems on the cone of nonnegative measures. Second, relying on recent results merging techniques of real algebraic geometry , functional analysis (measures, problems of moments) and mathematical programming (semidefinite optimization), we propose a general methodology to solve numerically these infinite-dimensional LP on measures. We describe a hierarchy of convex semidefinite programming (SDP) or linear matrix inequality (LMI) relaxations that can be implemented to solve OCP with asymptotic convergence guarantees. 2 Souhrn Tato přednáška popisuje, jak aplikovat moderní techniky konvexní optimal-izace nařešení problémů optimálníhořízení nelineárních a nekonvexních systémů, které mohou obsahovat jevy oscilace a koncentrace. Nejprve pomocí měr obsazenosti vyjádříme nelineární a nekonvexní problémy optimálníhořízení jako konvexní problémy lineárního programování vkuželu nezáporn´ych měr. Poté na základě nejnovějších v´ysledků, které spojily techniky reálné alge-braické geometrie, funkcionální anal´yzy (míry, problémy momentů) a matem-atického programování (semi-definitní optimalizace), navrhujeme všeobecnou metodologii numerick´ychřešení těchto nekonečněrozměrn´ych problémů lineárního programování měr. Popisujeme hierarchii konvexních semi-definitních problémů neboli lineární maticové nerovnosti, která může b´yt použita křešení problémů optimálníhořízení se zárukou asymptotické konvergence. 3 Klíčová slova: Optimálnířízení, konvexní optimalizace.
Translation practice in the workplace and Machine Translation

Localisation has long been regarded as an appropriate domain for the deployment of MT. This paper reports the results of a qualitative study which investigated the activities of professional translators working in a Language Services Provider. We analyse the observed work practices and highlight issues related to translation efficiency, quality assessment and teamwork. These issues may impact on the successful deployment of MT in a localisation setting but have not been considered extensively by research assessing the appropriateness of MT for localisation as yet.
Prognostic effect of insertion/deletion polymorphism of the ace gene on renal and cardiovascular clinical outcomes in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes.

OBJECTIVE The insertion/deletion (I/D) polymorphism of the ACE gene has been reported to be associated with diabetic microvascular or macrovascular complications. The aim of the present study was to investigate the prognostic effect of I/D polymorphism on renal and cardiovascular clinical outcomes in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A consecutive cohort of 1,281 Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes were followed for 41.3 +/- 21.6 months. Renal end points were defined as renal death and events (need for dialysis, plasma creatinine >/=500 micromol/l, or doubling of plasma creatinine of baseline value >/=150 micromol/l). Cardiovascular end points were defined as cardiovascular death and events, which included ischemic heart disease, heart failure, cerebrovascular accident, and revascularization requiring hospital admission. The I/D polymorphism of the ACE gene was examined by PCR followed by agarose gel electrophoresis. RESULTS The frequencies of ACE gene I/D polymorphisms were in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Patients who developed a renal end point (n = 98) had higher frequencies of DD genotype (19.4 vs. 10.8%, P = 0.018) and D allele (41.3 vs. 31.8%, P = 0.006) compared with subjects who did not (n = 1,183). The cumulative rates of renal end points were 10.0, 19.2, and 24.4% in the II (n = 595), DI (n = 539), and DD genotype carriers (n = 147), respectively (log rank P = 0.004). In multiple Cox regression analysis, the occurrence of renal end points remained significantly influenced by I/D polymorphism with a dominant deleterious effect of the DD genotype (DD versus II, adjusted hazard ratio 2.80 [95% CI 1.49-5.29]). There was no prognostic effect of I/D polymorphism on cardiovascular end points. CONCLUSIONS The DD genotype of the ACE I/D polymorphism was an independent risk factor for renal but not cardiovascular end points in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes.
MS-TDNN with global discriminant trainings

This article analyses the behavior of various hybrid architectures based on a multi-state neuro-Markovian scheme (MS-TDNN HMM) applied to online handwriting word recognition systems. We have considered different cost functions, including maximal mutual information criteria with discriminant training and maximum likelihood estimation, to train the systems globally at the word level and also we varied the number of states from one up to three to model the basic hidden Markov models at the letter level. We report experimental results for non-constrained, writer independent, word recognition obtained on the IRONOFF database.