Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DISTORTED MIRRORS : STRATEGIC VOTING AND CONTAMINATION EFFECTS

I rely on data from a natural experiment in Spain to show that contamination effects challenge the conventional voter information argument behind strategic voting. I argue that when the electoral system of the most important office or arena within the country is the strongest, coattails effects from the most important office make strategic voting possible in large district magnitudes and among unsophisticated voters in the remaining electoral arenas. 1 I thank Mariano Torcal for his comments about a previous version of this paper.
ASYMPTOTICALLY OPTIMAL MULTI-ARMED BANDIT POLICIES UNDER A COST CONSTRAINT

We consider the multi-armed bandit problem under a cost constraint. Successive samples from each population are i.i. d. with unknown distribution and each sample incurs a known population-dependent cost. The objective is to design an adaptive sampling policy to maximize the expected sum of n samples such that the average cost does not exceed a given bound sample-path wise. We establish an asymptotic lower bound for the regret of feasible uniformly fast convergent policies, and construct a class of policies, which achieve the bound. We also provide their explicit form under Normal distributions with unknown means and known variances.
Non-uniform Depth Compression Control Algorithm for 3D Real Time Video Detection

For real-time stereo vision system, this paper analyzes the parallax generation mechanism of the virtual camera imaging; it presents projection transform of binocular images in single camera space. At the same time it changes the control depth perception by introducing camera wheelbase into bending deformation of the object, which can ensure the continuity of non-uniform compression ratio. The method is simple and flexible. The experimental results show that the depth mapping method will not visually produce distortion,which can effectively improve the quality of image. This method is a 3D graphics development for virtual reality and real-time game rendering, and it can be applied to 3D computer animation. When rendering stereo image, it can use this method to control the depth, which can reduce the amount of complicated work in post-production.
Higher blood flow and circulating NO products offset high-altitude hypoxia among Tibetans

The low barometric pressure at high altitude causes lower arterial oxygen content among Tibetan highlanders, who maintain normal levels of oxygen use as indicated by basal and maximal oxygen consumption levels that are consistent with sea level predictions. This study tested the hypothesis that Tibetans resident at 4,200 m offset physiological hypoxia and achieve normal oxygen delivery by means of higher blood flow enabled by higher levels of bioactive forms of NO, the main endothelial factor regulating blood flow and vascular resistance. The natural experimental study design compared Tibetans at 4,200 m and U.S. residents at 206 m. Eighty-eight Tibetan and 50 U.S. resident volunteers (18–56 years of age, healthy, nonsmoking, nonhypertensive, not pregnant, with normal pulmonary function) participated. Forearm blood flow, an indicator of systemic blood flow, was measured noninvasively by using plethysmography at rest, after breathing supplemental oxygen, and after exercise. The Tibetans had more than double the forearm blood flow of low-altitude residents, resulting in greater than sea level oxygen delivery to tissues. In comparison to sea level controls, Tibetans had >10-fold-higher circulating concentrations of bioactive NO products, including plasma and red blood cell nitrate and nitroso proteins and plasma nitrite, but lower concentrations of iron nitrosyl complexes (HbFeIINO) in red blood cells. This suggests that NO production is increased and that metabolic pathways controlling formation of NO products are regulated differently among Tibetans. These findings shift attention from the traditional focus on pulmonary and hematological systems to vascular factors contributing to adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia.
Adaptive Chosen-Plaintext Correlation Power Analysis

Yongdae K ea al. poposed biasing power traces to improve correlation in power analysis attack in 2010. However this method abandons large numbers of power traces which is unreasonable in comparison with traditional CPA. In this paper, the traces acquirement process is divided into two stages. In the first stage, some plaintexts are chosen randomly and two most probable key byte candidates are recovered. In the second stage, we adaptively choose specific plaintexts corresponding to the traces with high signal-to-noise ratio, encrypt them, and acquire the second batch of traces. So the attack can be finished with fewer traces. According to our experiments on AT89S52 software implementation of AES, getting the same success rate 0.955, our adaptive chosen-plaintext CPA only requires 78.9% traces of traditional CPA. Our proposal can be implemented by automatic software through two interactions with the AT89S52.
Commoditization of Culture - Destroying Authenticity or Revitalizing Tradition?

Set in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, this thesis has examined the commoditization of the Ju/'hoansi San culture through cultural tourism. Tourists visit the Ju/'hoansi in order to experience their traditional culture. They can experience how the Ju/'hoansi do hunting and gathering, observe their traditional dances and do bushwalks with them. However, what effect does this have on the culture, and more specifically on its authenticity? What does it mean that many Ju/'hoansi are no longer living the traditional life? Are they still interested in their own traditional culture? These and other questions will be discussed in this thesis. In this thesis I have mainly focused at the perspectives and perceptions of the Ju/'hoansi themselves.
“We walk on eggshells”: A phenomenological inquiry of wives’ experiences of living with active-duty Marine husbands with PTSD

ABSTRACT In this qualitative study, the authors explored the lived experiences of wives married to active-duty male Marines who have a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The first author and primary investigator conducted in-depth interviews with eight women, all of whom had been married more than 3 years and experienced at least one deployment while married. Transcendental phenomenology was used to gain an understanding of each woman’s experience. The central research question in this study was “What is it like to live with an active-duty male Marine with PTSD? ” Findings demonstrated five essential themes: (1) the unpredictability of living with someone with PTSD, (2) the spouse had to take on different roles, (3) the wives felt unprepared to handle PTSD, (4) the wives received different messages when trying to seek help for their husbands, and (5) the wives wanted to send messages to other wives living with Marines with PTSD.
Complexes Detection in Biological Networks via Diversified Dense Subgraphs Mining

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, providing a comprehensive landscape of protein interacting patterns, enable us to explore biological processes and cellular components at multiple resolutions. For a biological process, a number of proteins need to work together to perform the job. Proteins densely interact with each other, forming large molecular machines or cellular building blocks. Identification of such densely interconnected clusters or protein complexes from PPI networks enables us to obtain a better understanding of the hierarchy and organization of biological processes and cellular components. Most existing methods apply efficient graph clustering algorithms on PPI networks, often failing to detect possible densely connected subgraphs and overlapped subgraphs. Besides clustering-based methods, dense subgraph enumeration methods have also been used, which aim to find all densely connected protein sets. However, such methods are not practically tractable even on a small yeast PPI network, due to high computational complexity. In this paper, we introduce a novel approximate algorithm to efficiently enumerate putative protein complexes from biological networks. The key insight of our algorithm is that we do not need to enumerate all dense subgraphs. Instead we only need to find a small subset of subgraphs that cover as many proteins as possible. The problem is formulated as finding a diverse set of dense subgraphs, where we develop highly effective pruning techniques to guarantee efficiency. To handle large networks, we take a divide-and-conquer approach to speed up the algorithm in a distributed manner. By comparing with existing clustering and dense subgraph-based algorithms on several human and yeast PPI networks, we demonstrate that our method can detect more putative protein complexes and achieves better prediction accuracy.
On the Coupling Integrals Arising in the Method of Moments Formulation of Laterally Bounded Structures

A generic integral equation and method of moments formulation is presented for laterally bounded stratified media including planar metallization. The main asset of the developed approach is its flexibility, as it encompasses generic lateral boundary conditions and explicitly applies to any linear subsectional basis functions with constant surface divergence. This includes the rooftop functions on rectangular and triangular supports currently proposed in standard method of moment meshers. This approach provides closed expressions for the coupling integrals appearing in the method of moments matrix elements. These formulas are based of Green's functions modal expansions and in the possibility, conclusively demonstrated in this paper to transform the surface integrals into contour integrals allowing an efficient and systematic implementation of the procedure. Full derivations are presented for several lateral boundary conditions, including rectangular and circular metallic cavities and periodic structures. Numerical examples including the analysis of real-life planar boxed circuits are presented. In all cases the obtained results compare favourably with other existing techniques.
Hyponatremia and Congestive Heart Failure: A Marker of Increased Mortality and a Target for Therapy

Heart failure is one of the most common chronic medical conditions in the developed world. It is characterized by neurohormonal activation of multiple systems that can lead to clinical deterioration and significant morbidity and mortality. In this regard, hyponatremia is due to inappropriate and continued vasopressin activity despite hypoosmolality and volume overload. Hyponatremia is also due to diuretic use in an attempt to manage volume overload. When hyponatremia occurs, it is a marker of heart failure severity and identifies patients with increased mortality. The recent introduction of specific vasopressin-receptor antagonists offers a targeted pharmacological approach to these pathophysiological derangements. Thus far, clinical trials with vasopressin-receptor antagonists have demonstrated an increase in free-water excretion, improvement in serum sodium, modest improvements in dyspnea but no improvement in mortality. Continued clinical trials with these agents are needed to determine their specific role in the treatment of both chronic and decompensated heart failure.
Understanding Millennials' Perspectives on Work-Life Balance: A Modified Instrumental Case Study.

WYATT, ELIZABETH. Understanding Millennials’ Perspectives on Work-Life Balance: A Modified Instrumental Case Study. (Under the direction of Dr. Julia Storberg-Walker). As Millennials enter the workplace in rapid numbers, organizations are forced to learn more about the work, communication, and social styles of this generation as they differ from those who came before them. While many workplaces have attempted to make themselves more ‘Millennial-friendly,’ studies suggest that, based on Millennials’ characteristics, one of the most attractive qualities in a workplace to this generation is its ability to help them achieve a healthy work-life balance. The purpose of this study was to better understand the millennial generation’s perceptions about work-life balance. This modified instrumental case study examined six individuals from an organization that is considered Millennial-friendly. Findings were examined using the Theory of Reasoned Action, a theory that suggests background and cultural factors influence human social behavior in the form of behavioral, normative, and control beliefs. The study determined that much of the participants’ perceptions regarding work-life balance reflected that described in the previous research involving Millennials. In addition, The Theory of Reasoned Action approach can help explain participants’ decisions involving work-life balance based on background factors and their beliefs. While the study contributes to understanding Millennials’ perceptions about and decisions involving work-life balance, further research might be helpful in determining work-life balance offerings that are most likely to recruit and retain this generation. © Copyright 2014 by Elizabeth Wyatt
Enhancing emotion-based learning in decision-making under uncertainty.

BACKGROUND The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to study decision-making differences between several clinical and healthy populations. Unlike the healthy participants, clinical participants have difficulty choosing between advantageous options, which yield long-term benefits, and disadvantageous options, which give high immediate rewards but lead to negative profits. However, recent studies have found that healthy participants avoid the options with a higher frequency of losses regardless of whether or not they are profitable in the long run. The aim of this study was to control for the confounding effect of the frequency of losses between options to improve the performance of healthy participants on the IGT. METHOD Eighty healthy participants were randomly assigned to the original IGT or a modified version of the IGT that diminished the gap in the frequency of losses between options. RESULTS The participants who used the modified IGT version learned to make better decisions based on long-term profit, as indicated by an earlier ability to discriminate good from bad options, and took less time to make their choices. CONCLUSIONS This research represents an advance in the study of decision making under uncertainty by showing that emotion-based learning is improved by controlling for the loss-frequency bias effect.
Towards automatic assessment of the social media impact of news content

In this paper, we investigate the possibilities to estimate the impact the content of a news article has on social media, and in particular on Twitter. We propose an approach that makes use of captured and temporarily stored microposts found in social media, and compares their relevance to an arbitrary news article. These results are used to derive key indicators of the social media impact of the specified content. We describe each step of our approach, provide a first implementation, and discuss the most imminent challenges and discussion points.
Foundation of Organizational Development

• Text Questions • Bibliography • Case Study: 1. Action Plan for CSR When an individual develops, organization develops automatically. OD refers to development of following elements of the organization: 1. Developments of individuals, teams and the organizations. 2. Development can only take place when an appropriate knowledge is achieved and passed on to subordinates. Hence it is necessary to study various fields of studies that contribute heavily to the field of OD. In this context, study of psychology, social and industrial psychology, economics, politics, commerce, medical, and sociology is important. These fields of study are already rich. OD envisages acquiring skills through already proved models and applying the same for improvement based on situations on hand.
Compressed Sensing for Speech Processing Based on Wavelet Transform

Sampling is the bridge between analog source signal and digital signal. With the rapid progress of information technologies. The demands for information are increasing dramatically. So the existing systems are very difficult to meet the challenges of high speed sampling, large volume data transmission and storage. How to acquire information in signal efficiently is an urgent problem in electronic information fields. In recent years, an emerging theory of signal acquirement-compressed sensing (CS) provides an opportunity for solving this problem. CS is a research focus rising in the last few years. It is a new sampling theory and points out that if a signal can be compressed under some condition, a very accurate reconstruction can be obtained from a relatively small number of non-traditional samples. In this paper, the CS framework is introduced firstly, and then the approximate sparsity in the wavelet domain of male and female speech signals is analyzed. Secondly, the CS algorithm preserves the low frequency wavelet transform coefficients but compresses the high frequency wavelet transform coefficients of the speech signal. Two methods are proposed to compress the high frequency wavelet transform coefficients of the speech signal. One is compressing them separately, and the other is compressing them together. Finally, the high frequency wavelet transform coefficients are recovered by using Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm, and then the reconstruction of the speech signal can be achieved by the inverse wavelet transform. Simulation results show that whether male or female speech signals, the first method can acquire better reconstruction performance and it needs less time than the second one at the same measurement number.
A mixed-design technique for integrated MEMS using a circuit simulator with HDL

We report a multi-physics simulation and layout design technique for integrated-MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) based on an electrical circuit simulator. A solver for the mechanical equation of motion has been programmed in a Verilog-A compatible HDL (hardware description language) within the Cadence Virtuoso environment to attain new designing capabilities including automatic mask layout synthesis, DRC (design rule check), and LVS (layout-versus-schematic) verification for MEMS structures. Microelectromechanical components such as parallel-plate actuator and bending suspension are interpreted into HDL-coded equivalent circuits. Electrostatic displacement hysteresis is numerically simulated as a lumped mass-and-spring system and verified against the corresponding analytical simulation results. A multi-physics model for the Colpitts oscillator circuit has been built in the developed simulation environment, and its self-excited resonance has been confirmed by the simulation.
FPGA implementation of a multimodal sample rate converter and synchronizer

This paper deals with the implementation of the sample rate conversion subsystems of the digital front-end, at intermediate frequency (IF), and of a synchronization subsystem in the framework of a software radio receiving terminal. A perviously proposed architecture is adopted and optimized for the realization of a multimodal terminal, the main operational mode of which is UMTS, but also capable to interface with GSM or IS-95. In particular, a class of multiplierless filters in conjunction with reduced complexity FIR filters is chosen for the rate conversion. The selected approach for synchronization is a modified MAX/TC algorithm that exploits dedicated sync channels, for the UMTS case. Its performance in terms of acquisition probability has been studied either in a classic AWGN channel or in a multipath environment. The algorithms have been optimized considering an FPGA based implementation, where power consumption and occupied area strongly constrain designer choices.
The Enterprise Content Management can develop the Organizational Value through Knowledge Management

This study analyzes how Enterprise Content Management systems (ECMs), which manage enterprise knowledge directly correlated with learning in organizational memory, help generate such value by investigating the extent to which developing such technologies actually contributes to improving the efficacy and efficiency of the decision-making processes. For the analysis of the case study we used the action research method, and specifically Multiv iew2. Hence, a continuous interaction between analysts and method, including the present situation and the future scenario that originated by application of the methodology. The final effects of the reorganization process help reduce the time to market for the design, production, and sale of new products from 24 months to 18 months after the implementation. The ECM system thus optimizes informat ion management in organizational memo ry, perfects the decision-making process, and improves company performance through competitiveness. Through empirical analyses, various authors have stressed that ECM systems increase efficiency and reduce management and research costs. Few studies consider the impacts of these tools on the organization or company processes. In particular, no research has highlighted the strategic role of the knowledge in “content” as a means to improve and speed up the decision-making process.
A Flexible Fully-Multiplicative Orthogonal-Group Based ICA Algorithm

In this paper, we propose a flexible fully-multiplicative orthogonal-group based ICA (FlexibleOgICA) algorithm, which can instantaneously separate the mixture of sub-Gaussian and super-Gaussian source signals. It adopts a self-adaptive nonlinear function, which adjusts its parameter to achieve better performance based on the estimation of the kurtosis of super-Gaussian source signals. We also have successfully applied the algorithm to obtain the fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) signal, showing its fast convergence speed and high separation performance
Frequency Agile Monolithic GaN Doherty Power Amplifier

This paper proposes a monolithic GaN Doherty power amplifier (DPA) capable of efficiently amplifying communication signals located in multiple widely spaced wireless frequency bands. The proposed monolithic DPA incorporates a number of microelectromechanical systems switches which were used to mitigate the variation of the DPA circuit parameters within the operating frequency. A systematic design methodology was used to optimize the size and complexity of the frequency agile DPA thus locating the reconfigurability out of the combining network so that this latter can be kept off-chip. A monolithic DPA was designed and fabricated using the Canadian Photonics Fabrication Centre GaN500 monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) process (0.5 um gate length) which was operated at 1.7GHz, 2.14GHz and 2.6GHz. The preliminary measurement results demonstrated drain efficiency higher than 50% for power levels up to 6dB back-off from the peak output power.
An evolutionary cut points search for graph clustering-based discretization

Most discretization algorithms focus on the univariate case, which proceeds without considering interactions among attributes. Furthermore, they find the value of discretization criterion based on a greedy method that usually leads to a sub-optimal set of cut-points. In response, this paper introduces an evolutionary cut points search for graph clustering-based discretization (GraphE). The resulting method exhibits both multivariate and searching properties. The proposed evolutionary model is based on Genetic algorithm with the specifically designed fitness function. It simultaneously considers the data similarity via the notion of normalized association and the number of intervals. The proposed method is compared with 7 state-of-the-art discretization algorithms, conducted on 15 datasets and 3 classifier models. The results suggest that the new technique usually achieves higher classification accuracy than the comparative methods, while requiring less computational time than the existing optimization-based model.