Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
War and Destiny: How the Bush Revolution in Foreign and Military Affairs Redefined American Power

Throughout time, major wars have defined historical epochs and charted the rise and decline of great powers. The U.S. global "war on terror," with Iraq as the Bush administration's chosen centerpiece, is almost certainly destined to do the same. Indeed, the Bush doctrine for conducting the war on terror and the Iraqi Freedom campaign are likely to prove benchmarks in U.S. history precisely because of the many orthodoxies and traditions the administration has purposely challenged. At the same time, fundamental flaws have already appeared in many tenets underlying the Bush transformation of foreign and military affairs. So contends award-winning journalist James Kitfield. As with his critically acclaimed Prodigal Soldiers, the story of how America arrived at this fateful crossroads is a narrative full of drama and personal anecdote, rich in context and detail. War and Destiny is based on interviews with the key players and on Kitfield's personal observation of major events. Like his first book, it may well become the chronicle of a critical period in American history.
Understanding the Formation of Trust in IT Artifacts

IT artifacts often take the role of a trustee in a trust relationship between users and IT artifacts. The goal of this paper is to increase the understanding of the formation of trust in such trust relationships. Instead of using the predominant theoretical foundation of interpersonal trust, we use the theoretical foundation of trust in automation from the HCI discipline for studying the formation of trust. Since we aim at creating insights on the formation of trust and its dimensions, we develop a formative first-order, formative second-order measurement model for trust. To evaluate the impact of the single indicators and dimensions on trust, we conduct a laboratory experiment. Our results show that the dimensions performance, process and purpose have a comparable impact on trust, and that indicators related to user data are especially important. The results complement existing insights, deepening the understanding of the formation of trust in IT artifacts.
God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America

In recent years, as government agencies have encouraged faith-based organizations to help ensure social welfare, many black churches have received grants to provide services to their neighborhoods' poorest residents. This collaboration, activist churches explain, is a way of enacting their faith and helping their neighborhoods. But as Michael Leo Owens demonstrates in "God and Government in the Ghetto", this alliance also serves as a means for black clergy to reaffirm their political leadership and reposition moral authority in black civil society. Drawing on both survey data and fieldwork in New York City, Owens reveals that African American churches can use these newly forged connections with public agencies to influence policy and government responsiveness in a way that reaches beyond traditional electoral or protest politics. The churches and neighborhoods, Owens argues, can see a real benefit from that influence - but it may come at the expense of less involvement at the grassroots. Anyone with a stake in the changing strategies employed by churches as they fight for social justice will find "God and Government in the Ghetto" compelling reading.
The vocal minority : Local self-representation through co-editing on Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa

We analyze the geotagged articles in the English la ngu ge Wikipedia. After filtering to the articles that geo r ference places in the Middle East and North Africa, we construct a co-editing network of authors. We then examine the talk pages of these authors to assess the self-declared locational affi liations of the authors (i.e. where they live, work or were born). We demonstrate that a paucity of authors claim to be from the MENA region, except for Israel, Iran and to a much lesser extent Egypt. This raises significant concerns about how Wikipedia rep resents the middle east, if there are more self-declared editor s from the UK than all MENA countries combined.
Understanding as Inverse Planning Appendix

This section formalizes the encoding of an agent’s environment and goal into a Markov decision problem (MDP), and describes how this MDP can be solved efficiently by algorithms for rational planning. Let π be an agent’s plan, referred to here (and in the MDP literature) as a policy, such that Pπ(at|st, g, w) is a probability distribution over actions at at time t, given the agent’s state st at time t, the agent’s goal g and world state w. This distribution formalizes P (Actions|Goal, Environment), the expression for probabilistic planning sketched in the main text. The policy π encodes all goal-dependent plans the agent could make in a given environment. We assume that agents’ policies follow the principle of rationality. Within a goal-based MDP, this means that agents choose action sequences that minimize the expected cost to achieve their goals, given their beliefs about the environment. Let Cg,w(a, s) be the environmentand goal-dependent cost to an agent of taking action a in state s. The expected cost to an agent of executing policy π starting from state s is given by the agent’s value function, which sums the costs the agent is expected to incur over an infinite horizon:
Expressive facial animation from videos

We address the issue of synthesizing real-time expressive facial animation from videos. Given video footage of a person's face, some existing methods track a few facial landmarks to drive the virtual character. Compared with these methods, ours has the following characteristics. 1) We incorporate global texture into a constrained local model to increase the accuracy of facial tracking. 2) To animate a blenshape face model, facial tracking results as well as facial expression recognition results are used to estimate blendshape weights. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective for producing realistic expressive facial animations. Moreover, the method does not require facial markers or complex offline pre-processing, these properties make it very easy to use for ordinary users.
Unravelling the relative roles of top‐down and bottom‐up forces driving population change in an oceanic predator

Abstract In the open ocean ecosystem, climate and anthropogenic changes have driven biological change at both ends of the food chain. Understanding how the population dynamics of pelagic predators are simultaneously influenced by nutrient‐driven processes acting from the “bottom‐up” and predator‐driven processes acting from the “top‐down” is therefore considered an urgent task. Using a state‐space demographic model, we evaluated the population trajectory of an oceanic predator, the Macaroni Penguin (Eudyptes chrysolophus), and numerically assessed the relative importance of bottom‐up and top‐down drivers acting through different demographic rates. The population trajectory was considerably more sensitive to changes in top‐down control of survival compared to bottom‐up control of survival or productivity. This study integrates a unique set of demographic and covariate data and highlights the benefits of using a single estimation framework to examine the links between covariates, demographic rates and population dynamics.
The Combined Effect of Individual and Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status on Nasopharyngeal Cancer Survival

Background The relationship between individual and neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) and mortality rates in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is unknown. This population-based study aimed to examine the association between SES and survival of patients with NPC in Taiwan. Materials and Methods A population-based follow-up study was conducted of 4691 patients diagnosed with NPC between 2002 and 2006. Each patient was traced to death or for 5 years. Individual SES was defined by enrollee job category. Neighborhood SES was based on household income dichotomized into advantaged and disadvantaged areas. Cox proportional hazards model was used to compare the death-free survival rates between the different SES groups after adjusting for possible confounding factors and risk factors. Results In NPC patients below the age of 65 years, 5-year overall survival rates were worst for those with low individual SES living in disadvantaged neighborhoods. After adjusting for patient characteristics (age, gender, Charlson Comorbidity Index Score), NPC patients with low individual SES residing in disadvantaged neighborhoods were found to have a 2-fold higher risk of mortality than patients with high individual SES residing in advantaged neighborhoods. We found no significant difference in mortality rates between different SES groups in NPC patients aged 65 and above. Conclusions Our findings indicate that NPC patients with low individual SES who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods have the higher risk of mortality than their more privileged counterparts. Public health strategies and welfare policies would be well advised to try to offset the inequalities in health care and pay more attention to addressing the needs of this vulnerable group.
Understanding high endothelial venules: Lessons for cancer immunology

High endothelial venules (HEVs) are blood vessels especially adapted for lymphocyte trafficking which are normally found in secondary lymphoid organs such as lymph nodes (LN) and Peyer's patches. It has long been known that HEVs develop in non-lymphoid organs during chronic inflammation driven by autoimmunity, infection or allografts. More recently, HEVs have been observed in solid, vascularized tumors and their presence correlated with reduced tumor size and improved patient outcome. It is proposed that newly formed HEV promote antitumor immunity by recruiting naive lymphocytes into the tumor, thus allowing the local generation of cancerous tissue-destroying lymphocytes. Understanding how HEVs develop and function are therefore important to unravel their role in human cancers. In LN, HEVs develop during embryonic and early post-natal life and are actively maintained by the LN microenvironment. Systemic blockade of lymphotoxin-β receptor leads to HEV de-differentiation, but the LN components that induce HEV differentiation have remained elusive. Recent elegant studies using gene-targeted mice have demonstrated clearly that triggering the lymphotoxin-β receptor in endothelial cells (EC) induces the differentiation of HEV and that CD11c+ dendritic cells play a crucial role in this process. It will be important to determine whether lymphotoxin-β receptor-dependent signaling in EC drives the development of HEV during tumorigenesis and which cells have HEV-inducer properties. This may reveal therapeutic approaches to promote HEV neogenesis and determine the impact of newly formed HEV on tumor immunity.
A novel remote user authentication and key agreement scheme for mobile client-server environment

Recently, many identity (ID)-based user authentication and key agreement schemes for mobile client-server environment were proposed. However, these schemes are subjected to an inherent design weakness, namely, the server knows all users' private keys. Under this problem, these schemes cannot provide insider attack resistance or mutual authentication. Furthermore, some of these schemes cannot simultaneously provide user anonymity, perfect forward secrecy, or leakage of session temporary secrets resistance. In this paper, we propose a strongly secure remote user authentication and key agreement scheme to solve these security weaknesses. Security proof shows that the proposed scheme can achieve mutual authentication and key agreement, and provide perfect forward secrecy. Further security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can provide user anonymity, insider attack resistance and leakage of session temporary secrets resistance. In addition, the proposed sche me possesses low computation cost and low power consumption. Thus the proposed scheme is more suitable for mobile client-server environment.
SEISMIC DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF RECTANGULAR CONCRETE FILLED STEEL TUBE (RCFT) MEMBER AND FRAMES

This paper presents a computational study assessing the seismic response of rectangular concrete-filled steel tube (RCFT) members and frames to develop a reliability-based performance-based design methodology. A new analysis formulation was derived based on a mixed-finite element approach allowing geometrically and materially nonlinear analysis of RCFT frames under seismic and non-seismic loadings. The mechanism of load transfer and composite interactions between the steel tube and the concrete core were accounted for through calibrating the formulations based on a comprehensive range of experimental results in the literature. The formulation was then used to study the progression of damage within a series of RCFT frames to facilitate the development of performance-based design provisions for composite structures. Multiple earthquake records were selected representing ground motions with far-field characteristics, and the nonlinear dynamic seismic response characteristics of the frames were documented in terms of structural parameters describing the damaged state of the RCFT frames.
What Doesn't Go Without Saying: Communication, Induction, and Exploration

Although prior research on the development of causal reasoning has focused on inferential abilities within the individual child, causal learning often occurs in a social and communicative context. In this paper, we review recent research from our laboratory and look at how linguistic communication may influence children's causal reasoning. First, we present a study suggesting that toddlers only treat spontaneously occurring predictive relationships as if they might support intervention if the events are described with causal language. Second, we show that presenting causal hypotheses as contrastive beliefs, rather than neutrally, improves kindergarteners' ability to provide evidence for their causal inferences. Third, we provide a rational analysis suggesting that stronger inductive inferences are licensed when evidence is presented pedagogically than nonpedagogically; preschoolers are sensitive to this with the consequence that, for better and worse, instruction constrains exploration. In each case study, we discuss the implication that language has a unique role in changing children's interpretation of evidence for causal relationships.
factor for eukaryotes. deazaguanine derivative queuine, a nutrient genes involved in biosynthesis of the Structure and organization of Escherichia coli

bracket. (b) tgt. Analysis was performed with total RNAfrom E. coli K-12 with anoligonucleotide complementaryto nucleotides 1919 to 1940. Theprimerextensionproductis shownin lane 1. ThesequencingladderoftheDNAfromplasmidpUSB12, starting withthe sameoligonucleotide, servedas asize marker. Thenucleotide sequenceofthe correspondingsize marker is included as in panel a. (c) ORF12. Analysis was performed with total RNAfrom E.
MORPHOLOGICAL AND ADABOOST FACE DETECTORS COMPARISON

In this paper two novel face detection methods based on different approaches are presented. The Morphological Elastic Graph Matching face detector uses some expert knowledge about a layout of the face and mutual relations between its most parts. It allows for accurate detection of frontal faces with some tolerance regrading view, in-plane rotation etc. but it is relatively slow. The high speed of the detector is a crucial parameter in many face detection applications, e.g. the face recognition. To this end the Central Two-step AdaBoost detector is presented which defines a cascade of the extended weak classifiers that accelerates the detection speed to a high degree.
Learning a policy for collision avoidance by mining interactive multi-robot games

Humans are very good at abstract spatial reasoning, both in the physical world and in virtual settings. For example, game players immersed in virtual environments simulating mobile agents can quickly identify potential collisions and effect evasive action if given control over agents’ movements. In a multi-robot system, avoiding collisions is a necessary behaviour. Traditional methods typically employ a fixed policy, such as robots negotiating for right-of-way when approaching a threshold separation distance. More sophisticated methods that account for robots’ velocities and planned paths of motion can be more effective, but are computationally expensive, do not scale well, and are impractical for deployment on-board limited robot platforms. The work presented here takes advantage of humans’ spatial reasoning skills, by collecting data from a simple 2D game where multiple robots move around in an enclosed arena and a human player prevents the robots from colliding with each other by issuing commands via a point-and-click interface. Behaviours for avoiding collisions are learned by mining data logged during games. These mined behaviours are then deployed on robots in a non-interactive environment and are compared with a fixed-range policy. Results show that mined behaviours provide a more effective and flexible alternative to the fixed policy.
An Extract of Artemisia dracunculus L. Inhibits Ubiquitin-Proteasome Activity and Preserves Skeletal Muscle Mass in a Murine Model of Diabetes

Impaired insulin signaling is a key feature of type 2 diabetes and is associated with increased ubiquitin-proteasome-dependent protein degradation in skeletal muscle. An extract of Artemisia dracunculus L. (termed PMI5011) improves insulin action by increasing insulin signaling in skeletal muscle. We sought to determine if the effect of PMI5011 on insulin signaling extends to regulation of the ubiquitin-proteasome system. C2C12 myotubes and the KK-Ay murine model of type 2 diabetes were used to evaluate the effect of PMI5011 on steady-state levels of ubiquitylation, proteasome activity and expression of Atrogin-1 and MuRF-1, muscle-specific ubiquitin ligases that are upregulated with impaired insulin signaling. Our results show that PMI5011 inhibits proteasome activity and steady-state ubiquitylation levels in vitro and in vivo. The effect of PMI5011 is mediated by PI3K/Akt signaling and correlates with decreased expression of Atrogin-1 and MuRF-1. Under in vitro conditions of hormonal or fatty acid-induced insulin resistance, PMI5011 improves insulin signaling and reduces Atrogin-1 and MuRF-1 protein levels. In the KK-Ay murine model of type 2 diabetes, skeletal muscle ubiquitylation and proteasome activity is inhibited and Atrogin-1 and MuRF-1 expression is decreased by PMI5011. PMI5011-mediated changes in the ubiquitin-proteasome system in vivo correlate with increased phosphorylation of Akt and FoxO3a and increased myofiber size. The changes in Atrogin-1 and MuRF-1 expression, ubiquitin-proteasome activity and myofiber size modulated by PMI5011 in the presence of insulin resistance indicate the botanical extract PMI5011 may have therapeutic potential in the preservation of muscle mass in type 2 diabetes.
Expression and intracellular transport of microvillus membrane hydrolases in human intestinal epithelial cells

A panel of monoclonal antibodies was produced against purified microvillus membranes of human small intestinal enterocytes. By means of these probes three disaccharidases (sucrase-isomaltase, lactase- phlorizin hydrolase, and maltase-glucoamylase) and four peptidases (aminopeptidase N, dipeptidylpeptidase IV, angiotension I-converting enzyme, and p-aminobenzoic acid peptide hydrolase) were successfully identified as individual entities by SDS PAGE and localized in the microvillus border of the enterocytes by immunofluorescence microscopy. The antibodies were used to study the expression of small intestinal hydrolases in the colonic adenocarcinoma cell line Caco 2. This cell line was found to express sucrase-isomaltase, lactase-phlorizin hydrolase, aminopeptidase N, and dipeptidylpeptidase IV, but not the other three enzymes. Pulse-chase studies with [35S]methionine and analysis by subunit-specific monoclonal antibodies revealed that sucrase-isomaltase was synthesized and persisted as a single-chain protein comprising both subunits. Similarly, lactase-phlorizin hydrolase was synthesized as a large precursor about twice the size of the lactase subunits found in the human intestine. Aminopeptidase N and dipeptidylpeptidase IV, known to be dimeric enzymes in most mammals, were synthesized as monomers. Transport from the rough endoplasmic reticulum to the trans-Golgi apparatus was considerably faster for the peptidases than for the disaccharidases, as probed by endoglycosidase H sensitivity. These results suggest that the major disaccharidases share a common biosynthetic mechanism that differs from that for peptidases. Furthermore, the data indicate that the transport of microvillus membrane proteins to and through the Golgi apparatus is a selective process that may be mediated by transport receptors.
Sucrose transporter1 functions in phloem loading in maize leaves

In most plants, sucrose is exported from source leaves to carbon-importing sink tissues to sustain their growth and metabolism. Apoplastic phloem-loading species require sucrose transporters (SUTs) to transport sucrose into the phloem. In many dicot plants, genetic and biochemical evidence has established that SUT1-type proteins function in phloem loading. However, the role of SUT1 in phloem loading in monocot plants is not clear since the rice (Oryza sativa) and sugarcane (Saccharum hybrid) SUT1 orthologues do not appear to function in phloem loading of sucrose. A SUT1 gene was previously cloned from maize (Zea mays) and shown to have expression and biochemical activity consistent with a hypothesized role in phloem loading. To determine the biological function of SUT1 in maize, a sut1 mutant was isolated and characterized. sut1 mutant plants hyperaccumulate carbohydrates in mature leaves and display leaf chlorosis with premature senescence. In addition, sut1 mutants have greatly reduced stature, altered biomass partitioning, delayed flowering, and stunted tassel development. Cold-girdling wild-type leaves to block phloem transport phenocopied the sut1 mutants, supporting a role for maize SUT1 in sucrose export. Furthermore, application of 14C-sucrose to abraded sut1 mutant and wild-type leaves showed that sucrose export was greatly diminished in sut1 mutants compared with wild type. Collectively, these data demonstrate that SUT1 is crucial for efficient phloem loading of sucrose in maize leaves.
The Economic Value of Technical Trading Rules: A Nonparametric Utility-Based Approach

We adapt Brandt's (1999) nonparametric approach to determine the optimal portfolio choice of a risk averse foreign exchange investor who uses moving average trading signals as the information instrument for investment opportunities. Additionally, we assess the economic value of the estimated optimal trading rules based on the investor's preferences. The approach consists of a conditional generalized method of moments (GMM) applied to the conditional Euler optimality conditions. The method presents two main advantages: (i) it avoids ad hoc specifications of statistical models used to explain return predictability; and (ii) it implicitly incorporates all return moments in the investor's expected utility maximization problem. We apply the procedure to different moving average trading rules for the German mark-US dollar exchange rate for the period 1973-2001. We find that technical trading rules are partially recovered and that the estimated optimal trading rules represent a significant economic value for the investor. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.