Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
From minimal embeddings to minimal diffusions

We show that there is a one-to-one correspondence between diffusions and the solutions of the Skorokhod Embedding Problem due to Bertoin and Le-Jan. In particular, the minimal embedding corresponds to a "minimal local martingale diffusion", which is a notion we introduce in this article. Minimality is closely related to the martingale property. A diffusion is minimal if it minimises the expected local time at every point among all diffusions with a given distribution at an exponential time. Our approach makes explicit the connection between the boundary behaviour, the martingale property and the local time characteristics of time-homogeneous diffusions.
Balanced Scorecard in Higher Education Institutions: Congruence and Roles to Quality Assurance Practices.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to highlight the congruence and roles of the balanced scorecard in the quality assurance practices in higher education institutions, and second, to propose a balanced scorecard model for higher education institutions. Design/methodology/approach A descriptive literature review was used to understand the balanced scorecard, quality assurance practice (System model) and characteristics of the higher education institutions. Findings Used appropriately, the philosophical tenets of the perspectives of the balanced scorecard seem to be congruent with the input, process and output dimensions of quality assurance practices. Thus, if the core functions of higher education are explicitly represented in each perspective, the balanced scorecard seems important for materializing the input, process and output dimensions of quality assurance in higher education institutions. It may help to track and measure the status of higher education institutions in each quality assurance dimension and ultimately help to align each dimension with the university’s vision. Research limitations/implications The paper relied on the description of previous literature. Therefore, as it did not depend on the empirical evidences, the conclusions derived in the paper are more argumentative. Practical implications The paper will add an input to the ongoing discussions on the applications of the balanced scorecard to higher education institutions. Moreover, the proposed model of the balanced scorecard may help higher education managers to assess the performances of higher education institutions and their academic disciplines according to their areas of excellence. Originality/value This paper attempts to undertake a literature review on the balanced scorecard and its roles to the quality assurance practices in higher education. In addition, the congruence between the balanced scorecard and the contemporary characteristics of the higher education institutions is also explored.
NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN DEVELOPMENT t Modeling Technology Adoption in Developing Countries

Perhaps one of the main reasons for studying economic development is to understand better how individuals are able to make the transition out of poverty. Technology may be viewed as a means to this end. Yet, while the development of higher-yielding varieties (HYV's) of many crops grown by poor farmers has enhanced this hope, it is essential to understand how new technologies are adopted in practice if their promise is to be fulfilled. In our collective understanding of technology adoption, many questions remain unanswered. For instance, to what extent are socially valuable technologies slow to realize their potential due to information constraints or to externalities that lead the private and social value of new technologies to diverge? A prior step to answering these questions is to provide an adequate analysis of technology adoption decisions by poor farmers, and the purpose of this paper is to review some possible empirical models for studying technology adoption. In so doing, we will belabor the issue of theoretical consistency. Can researchers ensure that their empirical adoption models are consistent with an underlying choice-based model? What are the costs of such consistency, measured in terms of data needs and model complexity, and what are the benefits, measured in terms of understanding the microeconomic foundations of adoption? The typical scenario we investigate is as follows. Each of M farmers within a village or a region must decide whether or not to adopt a particular agricultural technology. We are interested in understanding what determines adoption of the technology across space and time. We begin by reviewing three basic empirical approaches that vary according to the type of data available.
Complete genome sequence of Desulfarculus baarsii type strain (2st14T)

Desulfarculus baarsii (Widdel 1981) Kuever et al. 2006 is the type and only species of the genus Desulfarculus, which represents the family Desulfarculaceae and the order Desulfarculales. This species is a mesophilic sulfate-reducing bacterium with the capability to oxidize acetate and fatty acids of up to 18 carbon atoms completely to CO2. The acetyl-CoA/CODH (Wood-Ljungdahl) pathway is used by this species for the complete oxidation of carbon sources and autotrophic growth on formate. The type strain 2st14T was isolated from a ditch sediment collected near the University of Konstanz, Germany. This is the first completed genome sequence of a member of the order Desulfarculales. The 3,655,731 bp long single replicon genome with its 3,303 protein-coding and 52 RNA genes is a part of the GenomicEncyclopedia ofBacteria andArchaea project.
Electron-positron outflows from gamma-ray emitting accretion discs

An electron-positron atmosphere is inevitably created around a black hole accretion disc, the spectrum of which extends to MeV energies. Pairs created in photon-photon collisions outside the disc are blown away by soft radiation (which dominates the bolometric luminosity of the disc) and form a semirelativistic outflow. We simulate numerically the conversion of the MeV radiation into a vertical e+- outflow above a disc-like source. The outflowing e+- plasma becomes optically thick to Thomson scattering if the compactness of the gamma-ray source exceeds 30. The scattering by e+- then collimates the bulk of soft radiation along the disc axis, and the apparent bolometric luminosity of the disc depends strongly on its inclination to the line of sight. The anisotropic central emission may account for the lack of Fe K-alpha lines in the X-ray spectra of bright radio-quiet quasars. The scattering in e+- outflows may also explain the orientation of optical polarization in non-blazar active galactic nuclei.
Are aftershocks of large Californian earthquakes diffusing

We analyze 21 aftershock sequences of California to test for evidence of space-time diffusion. Aftershock diffusion may result from stress diffusion and is also predicted by any mechanism of stress weakening. Here, we test an alternative mechanism to explain aftershock diffusion, based on multiple cascades of triggering. In order to characterize aftershock diffusion, we develop two methods, one based on a suitable time and space windowing, the other using a wavelet transform adapted to the removal of background seismicity. Both methods confirm that diffusion of seismic activity is very weak, much weaker than reported in previous studies. A possible mechanism explaining the weakness of observed diffusion is the effect of geometry, including the localization of aftershocks on a fractal fault network and the impact of extended rupture lengths which control the typical distances of interaction between earthquakes.
PDFeH: A PDF Based Generic Teacher-Student E-Homework System

A generic e-homework system, PDFeH, was proposed and prototyped to replace traditional paper homework electronically. With pre-created PDF form documents as templates, teachers and students can complete main e-homework phases using free Adobe Reader. That is, composing questions, entering answers, commenting and markup and grading, and viewing finally archived documents. Digital signatures are used to secure contents. Supporting files can be converted and packaged with their host PDF document with moderate additional effort. The interactive process was implemented with server/client network software for users to work online and offline.
Effect of unstable routing in location-aware mobile ad hoc networks on a geographic DHT protocol

Geographic distributed hash table (DHT) protocols assume that the set of langkey, valuerang pairs, called indexes, should be distributed among nodes. In geographic DHT protocols, the overhead of index redistribution due to node mobility may be high enough to impact the normal lookup operation if each node contains a large number of indexes. In our previous work, we proposed an efficient lookup protocol, called double indirect access (DIA), that dispenses with index redistribution to improve lookup performance. We also evaluated the performance of DIA by using our own simulator which could show only limited simulation results with the assumptions that all nodes are connected and the packets are transferred instantly without delay. In this paper, we implement DIA into the packet-level simulator ns2 in order to evaluate how DIA is affected by the underlying unstable routing in MANET. The metrics of the effectiveness are considered lookup success rate and bandwidth consumption, and the simulation results show that DIA performs better than a conventional geographic DHT protocol.
Training Compositional Agents on Negotiation Protocols

Internet facilitates the rising of new markets, which has motivated the development of new technologies for ecommerce. The increasing number of e-markets poses a big challenge to e-consumers. Agent-based applications are the most appropriate for merchandising because software agents are suitable for automating tedious tasks that may be performed by the user, such as, the searching of goods. Furthermore, software agents are able to negotiate on user behalf according to negotiation protocols. However, new challenges arise from the evolution of negotiation mechanisms. The protocol interoperability is a challenging issue, because the set of interaction protocols supported by a software agent is usually fixed once the agent is created, and any protocol adjust needs agent replacement. Thus new software technologies for the development of more flexible, adaptable and reusable software agents are needed. We propose the use of component technology for the development of adaptive software agents to new negotiations protocols. In this paper we describe the compositional architecture of a software agent, and how we take advantage of the component orientation for training agents on new negotiation mechanisms at runtime.
ACE-FTS observation of a young biomass burning plume: first reported measurements of C 2 H 4 , C 3 H 6 O, H 2 CO and PAN by infrared occultation from space

In the course of our study of the upper tropospheric composition with the infrared Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment – Fourier Transform Spectrometer (ACE–FTS), we found an occultation sequence that on 8 October 2005, sampled a remarkable plume near the east coast of Tanzania. Model simulations of the CO distribution in the Southern hemisphere are performed for this period and they suggest that the emissions for this event likely originated from a nearby forest fire, after which the plume was transported from the source region to the upper troposphere. Taking advantage of the very high signal-to-noise ratio of the ACE–FTS spectra over a wide wavenumber range (750–4400 cm-1), we present in-depth analyses of the chemical composition of this plume in the middle and upper troposphere, focusing on the measurements of weakly absorbing pollutants. For this specific biomass burning event, we report simultaneous observations of an unprecedented number of organic species. Measurements of C2H4 (ethene), C3H4 (propyne), H2CO (formaldehyde), C3H6O (acetone) and CH3COO2NO2 (peroxyacetylnitrate, abbreviated as PAN) are the first reported detections using infrared occultation spectroscopy from satellites. Based on the lifetime of the emitted species, we discuss the photochemical age of the plume and also report, whenever possible, the enhancement ratios relative to CO.
Color indexing with weak spatial constraints

To improve the discrimination power of color indexing techniques we encode a minimal amount of spatial information in the index. We propose an approach that lies between uniformly tesselating the images with rectangular regions and relying on fully segmented images. For each image we define 5 partially overlapping, fuzzy regions. From each region in the image we extract the first three moments of the color distribution and store them in the index. The feature vectors in the index are relatively insensitive to small translations and small rotations of an image because they are extracted from fuzzy regions. To retrieve images we define a function which measures the similarity of two color feature vectors. Invariance of retrieval results with respect to the typical image rotations of 90 degrees around the center of the image is guaranteed because our feature similarity function exploits the spatial arrangement of the 5 image regions. We present experimental results using an image database which contains more than 11,000 color images. Our experiments demonstrate clearly that our weak encoding of spatial information significantly increases the discrimination power of the index compared to plain color indexing techniques.
Bioactive Compounds Isolated from Microalgae in Chronic Inflammation and Cancer

The risk of onset of cancer is influenced by poorly controlled chronic inflammatory processes. Inflammatory diseases related to cancer development include inflammatory bowel disease, which can lead to colon cancer, or actinic keratosis, associated with chronic exposure to ultraviolet light, which can progress to squamous cell carcinoma. Chronic inflammatory states expose these patients to a number of signals with tumorigenic effects, including nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) and mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPK) activation, pro-inflammatory cytokines and prostaglandins release and ROS production. In addition, the participation of inflammasomes, autophagy and sirtuins has been demonstrated in pathological processes such as inflammation and cancer. Chemoprevention consists in the use of drugs, vitamins, or nutritional supplements to reduce the risk of developing or having a recurrence of cancer. Numerous in vitro and animal studies have established the potential colon and skin cancer chemopreventive properties of substances from marine environment, including microalgae species and their products (carotenoids, fatty acids, glycolipids, polysaccharides and proteins). This review summarizes the main mechanisms of actions of these compounds in the chemoprevention of these cancers. These actions include suppression of cell proliferation, induction of apoptosis, stimulation of antimetastatic and antiangiogenic responses and increased antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity.
Chinese-English Chunk Alignment Based on Anchor Chunk

A new statistical method called "bilingual chunking" for structure alignment is proposed. Different with the existing approaches which align hierarchical structures like sub-trees, our method conducts alignment on chunks. The alignment is finished through a simultaneous bilingual chunking algorithm. Using the constrains of chunk correspondence between source language (SL) and target language (TL), our algorithm can dramatically reduce search space, support time synchronous DP algorithm, and lead to highly consistent chunking. Furthermore, by unifying the POS tagging and chunking in the search process, our algorithm alleviates effectively the influence of POS tagging deficiency to the chunking result.
A Technology-Based Peer Education Intervention: Results from a Sexual Health Textline Feasibility Study

ABSTRACT Sexuality health education is moving beyond the classroom, with technology expanding youth access to sexual health information. While text message services are increasingly being used to provide information, a peer education approach has yet to be incorporated. Results from this feasibility study support a sexual health textline (IOTAS), incorporating teens asking and answering questions. Our findings suggest IOTAS fills a gap for sexual health information, and the technology-based approach offers peer educators an opportunity to expand their knowledge of healthy sexual behaviors and educate an extended peer network. Further work to refine IOTAS will enable dissemination of the intervention model.
Attenuation of Hind-Limb Ischemia in Mice with Endothelial-Like Cells Derived from Different Sources of Human Stem Cells

Functional endothelial-like cells (EC) have been successfully derived from different cell sources and potentially used for treatment of cardiovascular diseases; however, their relative therapeutic efficacy remains unclear. We differentiated functional EC from human bone marrow mononuclear cells (BM-EC), human embryonic stem cells (hESC-EC) and human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC-EC), and compared their in-vitro tube formation, migration and cytokine expression profiles, and in-vivo capacity to attenuate hind-limb ischemia in mice. Successful differentiation of BM-EC was only achieved in 1/6 patient with severe coronary artery disease. Nevertheless, BM-EC, hESC-EC and hiPSC-EC exhibited typical cobblestone morphology, had the ability of uptaking DiI-labeled acetylated low-density-lipoprotein, and binding of Ulex europaeus lectin. In-vitro functional assay demonstrated that hiPSC-EC and hESC-EC had similar capacity for tube formation and migration as human umbilical cord endothelial cells (HUVEC) and BM-EC (P>0.05). While increased expression of major angiogenic factors including epidermal growth factor, hepatocyte growth factor, vascular endothelial growth factor, placental growth factor and stromal derived factor-1 were observed in all EC cultures during hypoxia compared with normoxia (P<0.05), the magnitudes of cytokine up-regulation upon hypoxic were more dramatic in hiPSC-EC and hESC-EC (P<0.05). Compared with medium, transplanting BM-EC (n = 6), HUVEC (n = 6), hESC-EC (n = 8) or hiPSC-EC (n = 8) significantly attenuated severe hind-limb ischemia in mice via enhancement of neovascularization. In conclusion, functional EC can be generated from hECS and hiPSC with similar therapeutic efficacy for attenuation of severe hind-limb ischemia. Differentiation of functional BM-EC was more difficult to achieve in patients with cardiovascular diseases, and hESC-EC or iPSC-EC are readily available as “off-the-shelf” format for the treatment of tissue ischemia.
NEW DATABASE ARCHITECTURES : STEPS TOWARDS BIG DATA PROCESSING

Both research and practice indicate that traditional universal DBMS architecture hardly satisfies new trends in data processing, particularly in the context of cloud computing and Big Data problems. New database architectures and their basic features will be described, particularly their horizontal scalability and concurrency model, which is mostly weaker than ACID transactions in relational SQL-like database systems. We focus on so called NoSQL databases which support solving, at least partially, Big Data problems. Some features of NoSQL databases like data models and querying capabilities are presented in more detail. We will also mention an overview of some their representatives. Finally, we point out on actual problems associated with current database research at all.
Prognostic Factors and Survival in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients Treated with Chemoradiotherapy

BACKGROUND: According to the literature, performance status, stage-tumor dimension and nodal status, weight loss, were the most important prognostic factors for survival in patients with locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer. AIM: To evaluate the treatment results and the prognostic variables in our patients treated with sequential and concurrent chemoradiotherapy. MATERIAL AND METHODS: In the study 85 patients were randomly assigned to one of the two treatment arms. In the sequential arm, 45 patients had previously received sequential chemotherapy with 4 cycles of and etoposide followed by conformal radiotherapy (RT). In the second concurrent group, 40 patients received concomitant chemotherapy of cisplatine and etoposide and conformal RT, followed by two cycles of consolidation chemotherapy of carboplatine and etoposide. We described all phases of the conformal three dimensional (3-D) RT. RESULTS: From October 2005 to March 2008, 93 patients were enrolled. Eight patients were not eligible, seven had stage IV and one patient had pleural effusion. They were all initially considered to have stage IIIB disease. The median survival was 13 months for the patients in the sequential arm and 19 months for those in the concurrent treatment arm. The differences were statistically significant (log-rank test p=0.0039). The disease-free survival was 9 months in the sequential arm and 16 months in the concurrent treatment group. The differences were statistically significant (log-rank test p=0.0023). We found that the following prognostic factors significantly influenced the survival in lung cancer patients treated with conservative method: - age, p<0.05; - performant status, p<0.001; - weight loss, p<0.001; tumor dimension, p<0.05; and - nodal involvement, p<0.05. CONCLUSION: In our study, the dose-limiting toxicity, esophagitis was reduced by performing conformal radiotherapy. Conformal thoracic radiotherapy and new radiotherapy technics, such as respiratory gated radiotherapy, allow dose escalating and may probably improve survival and local control in lung cancer patients.
Active Area Search via Bayesian Quadrature

The selection of data collection locations is a problem that has received significant research attention from classical design of experiments to various recent active learning algorithms. Typical objectives are to map an unknown function, optimize it, or find level sets in it. Each of these objectives focuses on an assessment of individual points. The introduction of set kernels has led to algorithms that instead consider labels assigned to sets of data points. In this paper we combine these two concepts and consider the problem of choosing data collection locations when the goal is to identify regions whose set of collected data would be labeled positively by a set classifier. We present an algorithm for the case where the positive class is defined in terms of a region’s average function value being above some threshold with high probability, a problem we call active area search. To this end, we model the latent function using a Gaussian process and use Bayesian quadrature to estimate its integral on predefined regions. Our method is the first which directly solves the active area search problem. In experiments it outperforms previous algorithms that were developed for other active search goals.
CLASSIFICATION OF COLOR TEXTURES USING MULTISPECTRAL RANDOM FIELD MODELS

A large number of texture classification approaches have been developed in the past but most of these studies target gray-level textures. In this paper, supervised classification of color textures is considered. Several different Multispectral Random Field models are used to characterize the texture. The classifying features are based on the estimated parameters of these model and functions defined on them. The approach is tested on a database of sixteen different color textures. A near 100% classification accuracy is achieved. The advantage of utilizing color information is demonstrated by converting color textures to gray-level ones and classifying them using gray-level random field models. It is shown that color based classification is significantly more accurate than its gray-level counterpart.