Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vertical International Trade as a Monetary Transmission Mechanism in an Open Economy

This paper analyzes a two-country general equilibrium model with multiple stages of production and sticky prices. Working through the cross-country input-output relations and endogenous price stickiness, the model generates the observed patterns in international aggregate comovements following monetary shocks. In particular, both output and consumption comove across countries, and output correlation is larger than consumption correlation, as in the data. The model also generates persistent fluctuations of real exchange rates. Thus, vertical international trade plays an important role in propagating monetary shocks in an open economy.
An IDE-agnostic system to capture reading behaviour of C++ programs using eye-gaze tracker

Over 70% of software development effort is spent in software maintenance comprising bug fixes and version updates. These activities involve fast comprehension of large codebases authored by multiple developers. Developers are mostly trained to write code while in practice they often need to read code. Hence effective and efficient systems are needed to assess the code reading ability of developers. While there have been some studies on program comprehension, they do not deliver a working system. They use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that more suits the needs of program comprehension system and caters less to the needs of program development or developers. Importantly, to measure the productivity of a developer, we need to use the same IDE which the developer regularly uses and is comfortable with. In short, such systems need to be IDE-agnostic. In this paper, we build a front-end for a program comprehension assessment system using Tobii X2-30 eye-gaze tracker. The system comprises a flat screen monitor fitted with X2-30 and the developer seated within a specific distance from it. As the developer reads the C++ program, her eye movements are captured by X2-30 at 30 samples / sec. Once the reading is over, the X2-30 data stream is analysed off-line along with the program text to generate the reading sequence of the tokens as read by the developer. We use image analysis to extract regions from the displayed program text corresponding to token lexicons in C++. The lexical tokens are extracted separately from the program text. Finally we stitch the image regions, gaze points in and around the regions, and the tokens to generate the reading streams. We use several heuristics to compress the stream for semantic clarity. Several experiments have been conducted to estimate the accuracy of the generated sequences. In future, we plan to mine these reading sequences for extracting the comprehension features and develop metrics for reading skills.
Enhanced Blood Lymphocytes Apoptosis in Children with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

The aim of this work was to measure peripheral lymphocyte apoptosis during IBD flare and remission. Subjects and Methods. Flow-cytometric assessment of apoptosis of peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBL) was assessed in 30 children with IBD (16 with ulcerative colitis and 14 with Crohn's disease) compared to 22, age and sex matched, healthy children. This was carried out during a flare, whether in newly diagnosed or relapsing patients, and after achievement of remission. Clinical findings, complete blood count, liver transaminases, and kidney functions were assessed. Results. Early apoptotic and late apoptotic/necrotic lymphocytes were significantly higher during IBD flare compared to controls (P ≤ 0.01 and <0.01, resp., in ulcerative colitis and P ≤ 0.01 and <0.01, resp., in Crohn's disease patients). Remission values were significantly decreased but did not come back to the control levels. Early apoptotic values were significantly related to joint involvement in IBD patients (P < 0.0001). Conclusions. We can speculate a systemic nature of IBD as evident by enhanced peripheral lymphocyte apoptosis. This is related, to a great extent, to the disease process as it is more deranged in flare than in remission. Relation of this derangement to extraintestinal manifestations needs a special attention.
A structured mean field approach for existence-based multiple target tracking

A challenge of multiple target tracking is that targets appear and disappear without notice. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a joint estimation algorithm, Structured Mean Field Existence-based Tracker (SMFET), that infers not only the states of targets but also the existence of targets. SMFET is related to Joint Integrated Probabilistic Data Association (JIPDA) through their existence model. Although JIPDA is effective in the presence of false alarms and missed detections, the algorithm suffers from track coalescence. Unlike JIPDA, our algorithm avoids track coalescence, which we demonstrate through simulations containing a varying number of closely spaced targets. Results show SMFET to be tractable with accuracy that rivals JIPDA.
Taming tree amplitudes in general relativity

We give a proof of BCFW recursion relations for all tree-level amplitudes of gravitons in General Relativity. The proof follows the same basic steps as in the BCFW construction and it is an extension of the one given for next-to-MHV amplitudes by one of the authors and P. Svrcek in hep-th/0502160. The main obstacle to overcome is to prove that deformed graviton amplitudes vanish as the complex variable parameterizing the deformation is taken to infinity. This step is done by first proving an auxiliary recursion relation where the vanishing at infinity follows directly from a Feynman diagram analysis. The auxiliary recursion relation gives rise to a representation of gravity amplitudes where the vanishing under the BCFW deformation can be directly proven. Since all our steps are based only on Feynman diagrams, our proof completely establishes the validity of BCFW recursion relations. This means that many results in the literature that were derived assuming their validity become true statements.
Serum bilirubin and risk of ischemic heart disease in middle-aged British men.

The possibility that low concentrations of serum bilirubin may be associated with increased risk of ischemic heart disease has been examined in a prospective study of 7685 middle-aged British men. During 11.5 years there were 737 major ischemic heart disease (IHD) events. A U-shaped relationship was observed between serum bilirubin and risk of IHD. Low bilirubin was associated with several cardiovascular risk factors, in particular smoking, low concentrations of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, low forced expiratory volume in 1 s, and low serum albumin. The U-shaped relationship persisted even after adjusting for several risk factors. Compared with men in the lowest fifth of the distribution (bilirubin < 7 mumol/L), those in the middle range (8-9 mumol/L) showed a 30% reduction in relative risk [RR = 0.68 (95% confidence intervals 0.51-0.89)] in IHD, whereas men in the top fifth (> 12 mumol/L) showed similar risk to the lowest fifth [RR = 0.99 (95% confidence intervals 0.73-1.34)], which persisted after exclusion of men with bilirubin > 17 mumol/L. The significance of this U-shaped relationship is unclear, but it could be interpreted as support for the role of endogenous antioxidants in the etiology of IHD.
A new species of Melampyrum (Orobanchaceae) from Southern Korea

A new species, Melampyrum koreanum K. -J. Kim & S. -M. Yun, is described and illustrated. The new species is similar to M. roseum Maxim. in general habit, but the new species has a corolla tube and style up to 3 cm long. The new species occurs on one of the islands of the southern Korean peninsula.
Multi-feature Visual Tracking Using Adaptive Unscented Kalman Filtering

Visual tracking is often confronted with some impediments, such as the target's sudden acceleration and structural deformation, occlusion, lighting changes and so on. To overcome these problems, a tracking approach is proposed, which is based on the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) and the multi-feature fusion. First, the mean and covariance of the target state variable is predicted based on a nearly constant velocity system. And the target's hue histogram and edge orientation histogram are extracted at the corresponding position. Second, the measured position is calculated by Mean-shift algorithm based on the fusion of multi-feature. Finally, according to the measured position the UKF updates the mean and covariance of the state variable and reports the current position of the target. The experiments in 2 different scenes showed that the tracking method could efficiently track the fast moving objects and adapt to the lighting changes, rotation, and partial occlusion and deform. These demonstrated that the method have more tracking accuracy and adaptive robustness.
BPSK to ASK Signal Conversion Using Injection-Locked Oscillators&#8212;Part I: Theory

This paper presents a new method and circuit for the conversion of binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signals into amplitude shift keying signals. The basic principles of the conversion method are the superharmonic injection and locking of oscillator circuits, and interference phenomena. The first one is used to synchronize the oscillators, while the second is used to generate an amplitude interference pattern that reproduces the original phase modulation. When combined with an envelope detector, the proposed converter circuit allows the coherent demodulation of BPSK signals without need of any explicit carrier recovery system. The time response of the converter circuit to phase changes of the input signal, as well as the conversion limits, are discussed in detail.
Toward self-healing distributed services

Modern clouds and datacenters are rapidly growing in scale and complexity. They contain an eclectic set of hardware, networks, applications, and virtual machines that give rise to complex emergent behaviour, unobservable when components are tested individually. Problem diagnosis in these environments is especially difficult, as it can require developers to have expert knowledge about every detail of the datacenter. For example, Google engineers diagnosing a distributed service’s performance must often have intricate knowledge of the service, its dependencies (e.g., GFS, BigTable, the authentication mechanism, and the network topology), its configuration (e.g., the machines on which it’s running and its resource allocation), its critical paths, and the many co-located applications that might be interfering with it. To keep problems in these environments from becoming completely undiagnosable, many researchers believe the only recourse is to build self-healing systems, capable of fixing problems automatically without human intervention.
Anaesthesia for carotid artery surgery.

Carotid endarterectomy has assumed an increasingly important role in the definitive management of those patients with cerebrovascular insufficiency whose lesions are located in the extracranial vasculature. Of the extracranial arterial lesions which cause symptoms of transient cerebral ischaemia, the most common are internal carotid artery stenosis, vertebrobasilar insufficiency and lesions of the first part of the subclavian artery associated with the subclavian steal syndrome (Editorial, 1974). The first reported successful carotid reconstruction was achieved in 1954 (Eastcott, Pickering and Rob, 1954) and since that time endarterectomy of a stenosed segment of the carotid artery has become a standard and successful method of treatment. The objectives of the operation are to remove the atheromatous plaque without leaving loose intima distally, to leave a smooth arterial wall and to achieve a blood-tight closure (Smellie, 1972). As a result, the operation entails clamping of the common, internal and external carotid arteries during the actual removal of the plaque and during the arterial reconstruction. As with every operation, it is important that the benefits from surgery exceed the risks inherent in the procedure. If carotid endarterectomy is to be performed on patients with extracranial occlusive cerebrovascular disease who have not suffered a stroke, then every effort must be made to prevent ischaemic brain damage during the period of operation.
Structural Elucidation of Three Anthraquinones from a Marine-Derived Mangrove Endophytic Fungus (Isolate 1850)

Anthracycline antibiotics now were used extensively as clinic medicines, but new anthracyclines with novel bioactivities are still urgently needed because of the drug-resistant problem. During our screening for lead compounds from marine fungi from the South China Sea, three anthraquinones (1-3) were found to be produced by the marine-derived endophytic fungus isolate 1850 from a leaf of Kandelia candel from an estuarine mangrove in Hong Kong. Their structures were elucidated as averufin (1), nidurufin (2) and versicolorin C (3) by analysis of spectroscopic data. These three anthraquinones had also been obtained from another marine fungus (isolate 2526). The results that the same metabolites were produced by two different fungal strains derived from two different species mangrove plants shows the presence of some close connections between the two fungal strains and the two species mangrove plants.
Update on the role of antipsychotics in the treatment of Tourette syndrome

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neuropsychiatric disorder with typical onset in childhood and characterized by chronic occurrence of motor and vocal tics. The disorder can lead to serious impairments of both quality of life and psychosocial functioning, particularly for those individuals displaying complex tics. In such patients, drug treatment is recommended. The pathophysiology of TS is thought to involve a dysfunction of basal ganglia-related circuits and hyperactive dopaminergic innervations. Congruently, dopamine receptor antagonism of neuroleptics appears to be the most efficacious approach for pharmacological intervention. To assess the efficacy of the different neuroleptics available, a systematic, keyword-related search in PubMed (National Library of Medicine, Washington, DC) was undertaken. Much information on the use of antipsychotics in the treatment of TS is based on older data. Our objective was to give an update and therefore we focused on papers published in the last decade (between 2001 and 2011). Accordingly, the present review aims to summarize the current and evidence-based knowledge on the risk-benefit ratio of both first and second generation neuroleptics in TS.
Cryptographic Approach to “Privacy-Friendly” Tags

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is expected to become an important and ubiquitous infrastructure technology. As RFID tags are affixed to everyday items, they may be used to support various useful services. However, widespread deployment of RFID tags may create new threats to user privacy, due to the powerful tracking capability of the tags. There are several important technical points when constructing an RFID scheme. Particularly important is ensuring forward security, i.e., data transmitted today will still be secure even if secret tag information is revealed by tampering in the future. Low cost implementation is another key RFID requirement. This paper discusses and clarifies the requirements and restrictions of RFID systems. This paper also examines the features and issues pertinent to several existing RFID schemes. Finally, this paper suggests the use of our previously proposed scheme, which protects user privacy using a low-cost hash chain mechanism.
A fault detection and isolation system for cooperative manipulators

The problem of fault detection and isolation (FDI) in cooperative manipulators is addressed in this paper. Four FDI procedures are developed to deal with free-swinging joint faults, locked joint faults, incorrectly measured joint position, and incorrectly measured joint velocity. Free-swinging and locked joint faults are isolated via neural networks. For each arm, a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) is used to reproduce the dynamics of the fault-free robot. The outputs of each MLP are compared to the actual joint velocities in order to generate a residual vector which is then classified by an RBF network. The remaining faults are isolated based on the kinematic constraints imposed on the cooperative system. Results obtained via simulations and via an actual cooperative manipulator robot are presented.
Crowdsourced geometric morphometrics enable rapid large-scale collection and analysis of phenotypic data

Advances in genomics and informatics have enabled the production of large phylogenetic trees. However, the ability to collect large phenotypic datasets has not kept pace. Here, we present a method to quickly and accurately gather morphometric data using crowdsourced image-based landmarking. We find that crowdsourced workers perform similarly to experienced morphologists on the same digitization tasks. We also demonstrate the speed and accuracy of our method on seven families of ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii). Crowdsourcing will enable the collection of morphological data across vast radiations of organisms, and can facilitate richer inference on the macroevolutionary processes that shape phenotypic diversity across the tree of life.
Designing Efficient Index-Digit Algorithms for CUDA GPU Architectures

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) offer very high computing power at relatively low cost. Nevertheless, designing efficient algorithms for the GPUs normally requires additional time and effort, even for experienced programmers. In this work we present a tuning methodology that allows the design for CUDA-enabled GPU architectures of index-digit algorithms, that is, algorithms where the data movement can be described as the permutations of the digits comprising the indices of the data elements. This methodology, based on two-stages identified as GPU resource analysis and operators string manipulation, is applied to FFT and tridiagonal systems solver algorithms, analyzing the performance features and the most adequate solutions. The resulting implementation is compact and outperforms other well-known and commonly used state-of-the-art libraries, with an improvement of up to 19.2 percent over NVIDIA's complex CUFFT , and more than 3000 percent over the NVIDIA'sCUDPP for real data tridiagonal systems.
Azo-azulene derivatives for nonlinear optical applications

Organic materials are of high interest and are widely used for the development of new powerful and low dimensional technologies. They exhibit several advantages with respect to inorganic compounds such as large cubic and quadratic optical nonlinearities, flexibility, easy manufacturing and so on. Among them, some present abilities for photonic or nonlinear optical applications. Intensive researches have been performed these latest decades to synthesize highly efficient and optically active molecules because of the miniaturization of optoelectronic devices. Azo-azulene derivatives are an interesting class of organic molecules for potential applications in optoelectronics and optical data storage due to their polyfunctional properties. We discuss second and third order nonlinear optical properties of a series of azo-azulene compounds in solid state. Thin films were prepared by incorporating these molecules in a polymethylmetacrylate (PMMA) matrix and were investigated. Moreover, potential usage of these guest-host systems for optical data storage is also discussed.
Adding Flexibility to Russian Doll Search

The weighted constraint satisfaction problem (WCSP) is a popular formalism for encoding instances of hard optimization problems. The common approach to solving WCSP is branch-and-bound (BB), whose efficiency strongly depends on the method of computing a lower bound (LB) associated with the current node of the search tree. Two of the most important approaches for computing LB include (1) using local inconsistency counts, such as maintaining directed arc-consistency (MDAC), and (2) Russian Doll search (RDS). In this paper we present two BB-based algorithms. The first algorithm extends RDS. The second algorithm combines RDS and MDAC in an adaptive manner. We empirically demonstrate that the WCSP solver combining the above two algorithms outperforms both RDS and MDAC, over all the problem domains and instances we studied. To the best of our knowledge this is the first attempt to combine these two methodologies of computing LB for a BB-based algorithm.
The loud bird doesn't (always) get the worm: Why computational salience also needs brightness and tempo

Salience shapes the involuntary perception of a sound scene into foreground and background. A computational model of salience would provide a strong perceptual baseline for the sonification designer. However, there is a lack of ground truth to evaluate the proposed models and to measure their performance with respect to human perception. This paper describes three contributions. First, we introduce a behavioral definition of salience. We describe an experiment based on our definition that tests a corpus of natural communication sounds. Our results suggest that salience is well described by three perceptual dimensions: not only loudness, but also, tempo and brightness. Second, we extract the most significant acoustical features and analyze their relation with salience, as measured by our ground truth. The context effects emerging from our analysis confirm the difference between salience and novelty. Finally, we suggest some necessary characteristics of the computational salience model based on the analyzed features.
Syncretism and How to Deal with it in a Morphological Analyzer: a German Example

Syncretism is the area of the morphologysyntax interface where morphology fails the syntax. Inadequate treatment in the design of a morphological analyzer can lead to unbalanced performance of the analyzer either at generation, or at analysis. Furthermore, adequate and consistent treatment of syncretism is needed if the analyzer is to be used for language modeling, especially modeling of the syncretism. In this paper I will show that it is possible to create a morphological analyzer that can be tailored to various intended uses with minimal effort.
Opportunities for computer abuse: Considering systems risk from the offender's perspective

Systems risk refers to the likelihood that an Information System (IS) is inadequately protected against certain types of damage or loss. While risks are posed by acts of God, hackers and viruses, consideration should also be given to the ‘insider’ threat of dishonest employees, intent on undertaking some form of computer abuse. Against this backdrop, a number of researchers have addressed the extent to which security managers are cognisant of the very nature of systems risk. In particular, they note how security practitioners’ knowledge of local threats, which form part of the risk, is often fragmented. This shortcoming contributes to situations where risk reducing efforts are often less than effective. Security efforts are further complicated given that the task of managing systems risk requires input from a number of departments including, for example, HR, compliance, IS/IT and physical security. In a bid to complement existing research, but also offer a fresh perspective, this paper addresses systems risk from the offender’s perspective. If systems risk entails the likelihood that an IS is inadequately protected, this text considers those conditions, within the organisational context, which offer a criminal opportunity for the potential offender, and a model known as the ‘Crime Specific Opportunity Structure’ is advanced. Focussing on the opportunities for computer crime, the model addresses the nature of such opportunities with regards to the organisational context and the threats posed by rogue employees. Drawing on a number of criminological theories, it is believed the model may help inform managers about local threats and, by so doing, enhance safeguard implementation.