Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Glass Ceiling in the Public Sector: A Case Study Regarding Romanian Elected and Appointed Officials

Although the glass ceiling (the underrepresentation of women in top management and decision making positions) is largely connected in the academic literature with the private sphere, such practices are often (consciously or unconsciously) omnipresent in the public sphere as well.Beside setting an unfortunate example for private entities, gender discrimination in the public field can lead to unbalanced public policies as female values are less represented than male values (in both design and implementation phase). Using official data from the 2012 Romanian national (parliamentary) elections, our results show that women are consistently underrepresented as potential candidates for public decision making positions, while the ratio of females elected officials is significantly lower than that of males.Furthermore, a glass ceiling phenomena can also be observed regarding appointed officials with decision making positions at the national (ministries and subordinated institutions) level.
Testing Resistive Opens and Bridging Faults Through Pulse Propagation

This paper addresses the problems related to resistive opens and bridging faults that lie out of the most critical paths. These faults cannot be detected by traditional delay fault testing because the induced delay defects are not large enough to result in timing violations when the test rate is equal to the nominal operating frequency. In spite of this problem, resistive opens and bridgings should be detected because they may give rise to reliability problems. To detect them, we propose a testing method that is based on the propagation of pulses within the faulty circuit and that exploits the degraded capability of faulty paths to propagate pulses. The effectiveness of our method is analyzed at the transistor level and compared with the use of reduced clock periods to detect the same class of faults. Results show similar performance in the case of resistive opens and better performance in the case of bridgings. Moreover, the proposed approach is not affected by possible problems in the clock distribution.
A Least-Squares Algorithm for Multipath Estimation Using an UWB-IR Link

This paper introduces a modified complex to real amplitude least-squares (CRALS) algorithm for the estimation of dense multipath in an UWB-IR channel. The traditional CRALS is ineffective for UWB-IR signal due to its wide bandwidth and large off period. This algorithm is modified to resolve three closely spaced paths in a correlation window. One novelty of the modified algorithm is that region-based processing is used for the initial estimate in place of coordinate descent processing used in traditional algorithm, and so the long iteration due to large off period is saved. The other novelty is that the procedures are simplified because of no necessity to increase the penalty term to infinity in UWB-IR case. Its efficiency is compared to the generalized maximum-likelihood estimator (GML) by simulation in different signal to noise ratios (SNR). The reason for its efficiency improvement comes from fewer effective spectrum samples and region-based processing of correlation results. Real measurement is conducted to verify this algorithm's performance. Its estimation error of time difference of arrival (TDOA) is about 0.18ns.
Improving access to digital music through content-based analysis

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report recent advances on a collaborative project that aims to develop content‐based methods for music information retrieval (MIR) as an alternative to standard text‐based modes of access to digital music libraries.Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes current practices and ongoing research, and it discusses potential applications for future use.Findings – Content‐based MIR approaches can extend and enhance the capabilities of traditional text‐based discovery and delivery systems and thus support the work of expert users such as musicians and musicologists. Examples of technologies developed in the context of the project include novel methods for automatic chord identification, motif finding, the visualization of musical structure, and retrieval of musical variations using harmonic and structural information.Practical implications – The paper looks at new, non‐verbal modes of interaction with digital music archives based on musically substantive featur.
Ultra-rapid delayed rectifier channels: molecular basis and therapeutic implications.

The ultrarapid delayed rectifier channels have attracted considerable interest as targets for 'atrial-selective' antiarrhythmic drugs because they contribute to atrial but not to ventricular repolarization. Thus, I(Kur) channel blockers are expected to prolong selectively the atrial effective refractory period without inducing proarrhythmic effects due to excessive ventricular action potential prolongation. Here we provide an overview of the properties of I(Kur) channels in expression systems and native cardiomyocytes. The ion conducting pore of the channel is formed by four Kv1.5 α-subunits, whereas the ancillary β-subunits Kvβ1. 2, Kvβ1. 3, and Kvβ2. 1 control channel trafficking and plasma membrane integration as well as activation and inactivation kinetics. Investigation of I(Kur) channel blockers in cardiomyocytes is complicated (i) by substantial overlap of I(Kur) with other currents, notably the transient outward current I(to), (ii) by lack of drug selectivity, and (iii) by disease-induced regulation of I(Kur). Some new compounds developed as I(Kur) blockers are described and their efficacy in treatment of atrial fibrillation (AF) is discussed. Current evidence suggests that pure I(Kur) channel block may not be sufficient to suppress AF.
GABAergic Synaptic Scaling in Embryonic Motoneurons Is Mediated by a Shift in the Chloride Reversal Potential

Homeostatic synaptic plasticity ensures that networks maintain specific levels of activity by regulating synaptic strength in a compensatory manner. When spontaneous network activity was blocked in vivo in the embryonic spinal cord, compensatory increases in excitatory GABAergic synaptic inputs were observed. This homeostatic synaptic strengthening was observed as an increase in the amplitude of GABAergic miniature postsynaptic currents. We find that this process is mediated by an increase in chloride accumulation, which produces a depolarizing shift in the GABAergic reversal potential (EGABA). The findings demonstrate a previously unrecognized mechanism underlying homeostatic synaptic scaling. Similar shifts in EGABA have been described following various forms of neuronal injury, introducing the possibility that these shifts in EGABA represent a homeostatic response.
Semantic Learning Modifies Perceptual Face Processing

Face processing changes when a face is learned with personally relevant information. In a five-day learning paradigm, faces were presented with rich semantic stories that conveyed personal information about the faces. Event-related potentials were recorded before and after learning during a passive viewing task. When faces were novel, we observed the expected N170 repetition effect—a reduction in amplitude following face repetition. However, when faces were learned with personal information, the N170 repetition effect was eliminated, suggesting that semantic information modulates the N170 repetition effect. To control for the possibility that a simple perceptual effect contributed to the change in the N170 repetition effect, another experiment was conducted using stories that were not related to the person (i.e., stories about rocks and volcanoes). Although viewers were exposed to the faces an equal amount of time, the typical N170 repetition effect was observed, indicating that personal semantic information associated with a face, and not simply perceptual exposure, produced the observed reduction in the N170 repetition effect. These results are the first to reveal a critical perceptual change in face processing as a result of learning person-related information. The results have important implications for researchers studying face processing, as well as learning and memory in general, as they demonstrate that perceptual information alone is not enough to establish familiarity akin to real-world person learning.
Paralogous Genes Involved in Juvenile Hormone Action in Drosophila melanogaster

Juvenile hormone (JH) is critical for multiple aspects of insect development and physiology. Although roles for the hormone have received considerable study, an understanding of the molecules necessary for JH action in insects has been frustratingly slow to evolve. Methoprene-tolerant (Met) in Drosophila melanogaster fulfills many of the requirements for a hormone receptor gene. A paralogous gene, germ-cell expressed (gce), possesses homology and is a candidate as a Met partner in JH action. Expression of gce was found to occur at multiple times and in multiple tissues during development, similar to that previously found for Met. To probe roles of this gene in JH action, we carried out in vivo gce over- and underexpression studies. We show by overexpression studies that gce can substitute in vivo for Met, alleviating preadult but not adult phenotypic characters. We also demonstrate that RNA interference-driven knockdown of gce expression in transgenic flies results in preadult lethality in the absence of MET. These results show that (1) unlike Met, gce is a vital gene and shows functional flexibility and (2) both gene products appear to promote JH action in preadult but not adult development.
Efficient nearly error-less LVCSR decoding based on incremental forward and backward passes

We show that most search errors can be identified by aligning the results of a symmetric forward and backward decoding pass. Based on this knowledge, we introduce an efficient high-level decoding architecture which yields virtually no search errors, and requires virtually no manual tuning. We perform an initial forward- and backward decoding with tight initial beams, then we identify search errors, and then we recursively increment the beam sizes and perform new forward and backward decodings for erroneous intervals until no more search errors are detected. Consequently, each utterance and even each single word is decoded with the smallest beam size required to decode it correctly. On all tested systems we achieve an error rate equal or very close to classical decoding with ideally tuned beam size, but unsupervisedly without specific tuning, and at around 2 times faster runtime. An additional speedup by factor 2 can be achieved by decoding the forward and backward pass in separate threads.
Measuring Quality Policy Deployment: A Fuzzy Logic Approach

Global and balanced performance measurement in Quality Policy Deployment is a key element of quality management in public Higher Education Institutions (HEI s). This paper describes the design of a fuzzy linguistic model for measuring Quality Policy Deployment in a Colombian public HEI. The proposed model integrates Balanced Scorecard (BSC) principles with the theory of fuzzy sets for treatment of imprecision associated with quantifying of Quality Policy Deployment. The application of the model allowed to obtain a crisp Quality Policy Deployment Index incorporating imprecision and vagueness on these calculations through a fuzzy rule-based system.
Coherent load information mechanisms for distributed dynamic scheduling

We consider a distributed system where processes can only communicate by message passing and need a coherent view of the load (e.g., workload, memory) of others to take dynamic decisions (scheduling). We present several mechanisms to obtain distributed estimates of such information and experiment them in the context of a real application, an asynchronous parallel solver for large sparse systems of linear equations.
Unforeseen Inpatient Mortality Among Veterans With Schizophrenia

Background:Patients with schizophrenia have co-occurring medical conditions, like other patients, but may lack the capacity to provide good self-care or to work with their providers to ensure appropriate medical treatment. We hypothesized that death among patients with schizophrenia occurs more frequently after minimal care of comorbid conditions. Methods:All patients who died in veterans affairs (VA) hospitals during FY02 were categorized as to type of death: unforeseen (age <80 years, 1–2 inpatient days past year), cancer, organ failure (heart, lungs, kidneys), frailty (dementias, hip fractures, dehydration, etc.), or other deaths. Logistic regression explored factors in unforeseen death. Results:During the year, 27,798 patients died in VA facilities; 3% had schizophrenia (n = 943). Roughly two-thirds of all deaths were from cancer or organ failure, 11% frailty, 9% other, and 8% met criteria for unforeseen death. Among patients with schizophrenia, however, 20% fell into the unforeseen death category. In an adjusted model, schizophrenia was associated with a 2-fold increased risk of unforeseen death compared with any other category (odds ratio = 2.4, 95% confidence interval 1.6–3.4). Unforeseen death was less likely among patients with substance abuse diagnoses in the year before death and more likely when patients had no outpatient medical care. Conclusions:VA patients with schizophrenia were more likely to die as inpatients with little previous-year care compared with other inpatient decedents without schizophrenia. Outreach efforts may be necessary to engage patients with schizophrenia in treatment of potentially life-threatening conditions.
BUILD A REMOTE EDUCATION SYSTEM USING ASPECT-ORIENTED COMPONENT ENGINEERING

There are currently many online education systems, but however there isn’t any system that is well designed to increase both the users and the developers experience in using the site. This report shows how we designed and developed a new remote education system that will solve these problems by using a newly developed methodology – Aspect-Oriented Component Engineering (AOCE). This report also describes how we used some other good programming practices during our development such as eXtreme programming (XP) and test driven development (TDD). The project aims to provide not only easy use web user interface (WUI) to the users but also provide easy understandable and highly reusable code, flexible and extendible components to the developers. The overall accessibility and efficiency of our online education system has increase dramatically when compared to the existing systems.
Improved Eavesdropping Detection in Quantum Key Distribution

The School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK(Dated: December 7, 2011)Employing the fundamental laws of quantum physics, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) promisesthe unconditionally secure distribution of cryptographic keys. However, in practical realisations, aQKD protocol is only secure, when the quantum bit error rate introduced by an eavesdropperunavoidably exceeds the system error rate. This condition guarantees that an eavesdropper can-not disguise his presence by simply replacing the original transmission line with a less faulty one.Unfortunately, this condition also limits the possible distance between the communicating parties,Alice and Bob, to a few hundred kilometers. To overcome this problem, we design a QKD pro-tocol which allows Alice and Bob to distinguish system errors from eavesdropping errors. If theyare able to identify the origin of their errors, they can detect eavesdropping even when the systemerror rate exceeds the eavesdropping error rate. To achieve this, the proposed protocol employs analternative encoding of information in two-dimensional photon states. Errors manifest themselvesas quantum bit and as index transmission errors with a distinct correlation between them in caseof intercept-resend eavesdropping. As a result, Alice and Bob can tolerate lower eavesdropping andhigher system error rates without compromising their privacy.
A Comparison of Stent-Assisted Mechanical Thrombectomy and Conventional Intra-Arterial Thrombolysis for Acute Cerebral Infarction

Background and Purpose We evaluated whether stent-assisted thrombectomy (SAT) is safer or more clinically beneficial than aggressive mechanical clot disruption (AMCD) for patients with acute intracranial artery occlusion. Methods We retrospectively analyzed the clinical data of 72 patients (33 with SAT and 39 with AMCD) who underwent intra-arterial thrombolysis for acute intracranial artery occlusions. Procedure parameters, clinical outcomes, and incidence of complications were compared between the SAT and AMCD groups. Results The time interval to recanalization was shorter in SAT patients (69.2±39.6 minutes, mean±standard deviation) than in AMCD patients (94.4±48.0 minutes, p<0.05). Recanalization was achieved in more SAT patients (91%) than AMCD patients (80%), but with no statistically significance. Urokinase was used less frequently in SAT patients (21%) than in AMCD patients (92%, p<0.05), and the incidence of symptomatic hemorrhages was lower in SAT patients (3%) than in AMCD patients (18%, p<0.05). Device-related complications in SAT patients comprised two cases of stent fracture and one case of distal migration of a captured thrombus. The proportion of patients with good outcomes, defined as scores from 0 to 3 on the modified Rankin Scale, was similar in the two groups at discharge (SAT, 46%; AMCD, 39%), but significantly higher in the SAT group than in the AMCD group at 3 months (64% vs. 40%, p<0.05) and 6 months (67% vs. 42%, p<0.05) after discharge. Conclusions The outcomes and clinical parameters were better for SAT during thrombolytic procedures for acute intracranial artery occlusions than for AMCD for up to 6 months. However, some device-related complications occurred during stent interventions.
Models of Orientation and Ocular Dominance Columns in the Visual Cortex: A Critical Comparison

Orientation and ocular dominance maps in the primary visual cortex of mammals are among the most thoroughly investigated of the patterns in the cerebral cortex. A considerable amount of work has been dedicated to unraveling both their detailed structure and the neural mechanisms that underlie their formation and development. Many schemes have been proposed, some of which are in competition. Some models focus on development of receptive fields while others focus on the structure of cortical maps, i.e., the arrangement of receptive field properties across the cortex. Each model used different means to determine its success at reproducing experimental map patterns, often relying principally on visual comparison. Experimental data are becoming available that allow a more careful evaluation of models. In this contribution more than 10 of the most prominent models of cortical map formation and structure are critically evaluated and compared with the most recent experimental findings from macaque striate cortex. Comparisons are based on properties of the predicted or measured cortical map patterns. We introduce several new measures for comparing experimental and model map data that reveal important differences between models. We expect that the use of these measures will improve current models by helping determine parameters to match model maps to experimental data now becoming available from a variety of species. Our study reveals that (1) despite apparent differences, many models are based on similar principles and consequently make similar predictions, (2) several models produce orientation map patterns that are not consistent with the experimental data from macaques, regardless of the plausibility of the models' suggested physiological implementations, and (3) no models have yet fully accounted for both the local and the global relationships between orientation and ocular dominance map patterns.
Formal Verification of Payment protocol using AVISPA

Emerging e-commerce activity is giving scope for the design of many new protocols, and to gain confidence, these protocol need to be verified for its designed properties. Specifically protocol used in ecommerce transactions needs to be verified for their security properties. Verification of these protocols is done using the formal verification tools. AVISPA is one of the evolving tools used mainly for verifying security properties. A newly designed electronic payment protocol is verified for its correctness and security properties. This paper discusses various formal verification methods and tools. Also it presents the use of AVISPA for verifying the security properties of the newly evolved electronic transaction protocol.
The (Un)expected Effects of Applying Standard Cleansing Models to Human Ratings on Compositionality

Human ratings are an important source for evaluating computational models that predict compositionality, but like many data sets of human semantic judgements, are often fraught with uncertainty and noise. However, despite their importance, to our knowledge there has been no extensive look at the effects of cleansing methods on human rating data. This paper assesses two standard cleansing approaches on two sets of compositionality ratings for German noun-noun compounds, in their ability to produce compositionality ratings of higher consistency, while reducing data quantity. We find (i) that our ratings are highly robust against aggressive filtering; (ii) Z-score filtering fails to detect unreliable item ratings; and (iii) Minimum Subject Agreement is highly effective at detecting unreliable subjects.
Enhanced Backtracking Chord protocol for mobile Ad hoc networks

Nowadays, a new paradigm is emerging: the challenging integration of Peer-to-Peer into mobile Ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this context, this paper proposes to combine two Chord extensions for MANETs. Its main objective is to reduce the lookup failures. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme has an improved performance in comparison with the two Chord extensions, the Backtracking Chord protocol and the Enhanced Mobile Chord.
Achieving price stability: a summary of the Bank's 1996 symposium

Central banks throughout the world are moving to adopt long-run price stability as their primary goal. Whether operating with multiple short-run goals or legislative mandates for price stability, virtually all central banks have recognized the desirability of achieving price stability over time. Countries with moderate to high inflation are adopting policies to reduce inflation, and countries with low inflation are adopting policies to achieve and maintain price stability. > To better understand how central banks can best reduce inflation and what policies and operating procedures should be implemented to maintain price stability, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City sponsored a symposium entitled Achieving Price Stability, held at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on August 29-31, 1996. The symposium brought together a distinguished group of central bankers, academics, and financial market representatives. > Kahn summarizes the papers and commentary presented at the symposium. Participants agreed that low or zero inflation is the appropriate long-run goal for monetary policy. They disagreed, however, about whether a little inflation should be tolerated and what strategies should be adopted to achieve and maintain price stability.
Die Rechtsstellung nichtehelicher Lebensgemeinschaften – The Legal Status of Cohabitants

ISBN 978-3-16-148705-7 cloth 104,00 € Published in German. The book contains an extensive analysis of the legal status of cohabitants in nine European countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as articles on speci c issues, an overview of the historic development and demographical data. The contents of the respective legislation and their practical experiences are analysed and guidance is given to legislators aiming to design an adequate legal framework for cohabitants. The need for such a coherent framework is apparent; as despite the growing number of cohabitants and the resulting legal problems, in many countries piecemeal regulations have emerged that do not adequately re ect social reality.