Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Changing Guard of Patent Law: Chevron Deference for the PTO

Whereas Congress has increasingly turned to administrative agencies to regulate complex technical areas, the patent system has remarkably remained an outlier. In the patent arena, the judiciary — not a federal agency — is perceived to be the most important expositor of substantive patent law standards. Yet, as the criticism toward the patent system has grown, so too have the challenges to this unusual power dynamic. The calls for institutional reform culminated in late 2011 with the enactment of the historic Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA). Although scholars have recognized that the AIA bestows a glut of new powers upon the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), this Article contends that commentators have failed to recognize the extent to which the AIA alters the fundamental power dynamics between the judiciary and the PTO. This Article contends that the AIA rejects over two hundred years of court dominance in patent policy by anointing the PTO the primary interpreter of the core patentability standards through its new formal adjudicatory authority. Although the patent system has traditionally suffered from a lack of serious engagement with administrative law, applying administrative law principles to the AIA has tremendous implications for the roles of patent institutions and, as this Article argues, results in a normatively desirable outcome. The AIA, by making the PTO the primary expositor of its core provisions of the Patent Act, ushers the patent system into the modern administrative era — which has long recognized the deficiencies associated with judge-driven policy. Moreover, the incorporation of administrative law principles into the patent system has substantial implications for administrative law itself. As this Article attempts to reconcile the distinctive features of patent administration with existing administrative law jurisprudence, it provides insight into a prolonged circuit split on the proper approach to determining the triggering provisions for formal adjudication, as well as when a grant of formal adjudicatory authority carries with it the ability to speak with the force of law.
No-Reference Quality Assessment for Multiply-Distorted Images in Gradient Domain

In practice, images available to consumers usually undergo several stages of processing including acquisition, compression, transmission, and presentation, and each stage may introduce certain type of distortion. It is common that images are simultaneously distorted by multiple types of distortions. Most existing objective image quality assessment (IQA) methods have been designed to estimate perceived quality of images corrupted by a single image processing stage. In this letter, we propose a no-reference (NR) IQA method to predict the visual quality of multiply-distorted images based on structural degradation. In the proposed method, a novel structural feature is extracted as the gradient-weighted histogram of local binary pattern (LBP) calculated on the gradient map (GWH-GLBP), which is effective to describe the complex degradation pattern introduced by multiple distortions. Extensive experiments conducted on two public multiply-distorted image databases have demonstrated that the proposed GWH-GLBP metric compares favorably with existing full-reference and NR IQA methods in terms of high accordance with human subjective ratings.
Are the French Happy with the 35-Hour Workweek?

Legally mandated reductions in the workweek can be either a constraint on individuals' choice or a tool to coordinate individuals' preferences for lower work hours. We confront these two hypotheses by studying the consequences of the workweek reduction in France from 39 to 35 hours, which was first applied to large firms in 2000. Using the timing difference by firm size to set up a quasi-experiment and data from the French labor force survey, we show that the law constrained the choice of a significant number of individuals: dual-job holdings increased, some workers in large firms went to small firms where hours were not constrained, and others were replaced by cheaper, unemployed individuals as relative hourly wages increased in large firms. Employment of persons directly affected by the law declined, although the net effect on aggregate employment was not significant.
Bullying resilience: Informing schools and communities to transform conflict by using an anti-bullying restorative justice campaign

The purpose of the study was to spotlight the implementation of anti-bullying programs in schools and to engage the public in the development of mitigating practices that include students, parents, school administrators, teachers, and entire communities. The study measured a group of students from two very different school districts with input from restorative justice practitioners on bullying exploring why students bully and what can be done about it. The study showed that restorative justice practitioners have led educators to focus more on using the relationship development protocols from restorative justice in schools. Restorative justice originated in the criminal justice system and included the victim and the offender to address repairing the harm done. The current study adopted the idea of implementing bullying prevention programs in schools that incorporated proven strategies and influenced the movement to develop long-term programs that include student input. When asked, “Have you ever been bullied? ” 88% of the students responded that they have been bullied. Implications from the study suggested that cultivating youth voices creates a sense of community in the classroom and decreases the common practice of suspending students for misbehaving because it only contributes to expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. The study determined that new disciplinary practices provide successful tools for behavior interventions that support students learning how to manage conflict in school and experience academic and social success without heavy-handed punishment. The outcome of the study revealed that adopting alternative practices to bullying behavior has been worth the effort to modify unwanted behaviors, improve school climate and achieve successful results in dispute resolutions.
Experiences in speeding up computer vision applications on mobile computing platforms

Computer vision (CV) is widely expected to be the next big thing in mobile computing. The availability of a camera and a large number of sensors in mobile devices will enable CV applications that understand the environment and enhance people's lives through augmented reality. One of the problems yet to solve is how to transfer demanding state-of-the-art CV algorithms -designed to run on powerful desktop computers with several GPUs- onto energy-efficient, but slow, processors and GPUs found in mobile devices. To accommodate to the lack of performance, current CV applications for mobile devices are simpler versions of more complex algorithms, which generally run slowly and unreliably and provide a poor user experience. In this paper, we investigate ways to speed up demanding CV applications to run faster on mobile devices. We selected KinectFusion (KF) as a representative CV application. The KF application constructs a 3D model from the images captured by a Kinect. After porting it to an ARM platform, we applied several optimisation and parallelisation techniques using OpenCL to exploit all the available computing resources. We evaluated the impact on performance and power and demonstrate a 4× speedup with just a 1.38× power increase. We also evaluated the performance portability of our optimisations by running on a different platform, and assessed similar improvements despite the different multi-core configuration and memory system. By measuring processor temperature, we found overheating to be the main limiting factor for running such high-performance codes on a mobile device not designed for full continuous utilisation.
Noisy speech recognition failure diagnosis using Minimum Message Length decision trees

Current ASR technology lacks of effective failure diagnosis of ASR systems. Figures of merits such as WER are very useful, but donpsilat bring much insight into error patterns, error predictions or error analysis of ASR output. This paper explores an application of minimum message length (MML) style decision trees for such a diagnosis, focusing on theoretical background and the failure diagnosis of noisy speech recognition. In addition, the paper focuses on failure diagnosis of noisy speech, covering several kinds of intrinsic speech variabilities as well. Results on added speech-shaped noise at different SNR, ranging from 25 dB to -10 dB, are presented.
An Analysis of Security System for Intrusion in Smartphone Environment

There are many malware applications in Smartphone. Smartphone's users may become unaware if their data has been recorded and stolen by intruders via malware. Smartphone—whether for business or personal use—may not be protected from malwares. Thus, monitoring, detecting, tracking, and notification (MDTN) have become the main purpose of the writing of this paper. MDTN is meant to enable Smartphone to prevent and reduce the number of cybercrimes. The methods are shown to be effective in protecting Smartphone and isolating malware and sending warning in the form of notification to the user about the danger in progress. In particular, (a) MDTN process is possible and will be enabled for Smartphone environment. (b) The methods are shown to be an advanced security for private sensitive data of the Smartphone user.
Multidisciplinary design optimization: A survey of architectures

Multidisciplinary design optimization is a field of research that studies the application of numerical optimization techniques to the design of engineering systems involving multiple disciplines or components. Since the inception of multidisciplinary design optimization, various methods (architectures) have been developed and applied to solve multidisciplinary design-optimization problems. This paper provides a survey of all the architectures that have been presented in the literature so far. All architectures are explained in detail using a unified description that includes optimization problem statements, diagrams, and detailed algorithms. The diagrams show both data and process flow through the multidisciplinary system and computational elements, which facilitate the understanding of the various architectures, and how they relate to each other. A classification of the multidisciplinary design-optimization architectures based on their problem formulations and decomposition strategies is also provided, a.
Mouse Fyn induces pseudopodium formation in Chinese hamster ovary cells

Molecular mechanisms underlying the effects of Fyn on cell morphology, pseudopodium movement, and cell migration were investigated. The Fyn gene was subcloned into pEGFP-N1 to produce pEGFP-N1-Fyn. Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells were transfected with pEGFP-N1-Fyn. The expression of Fyn mRNA and proteins was monitored by reverse transcription-PCR and Western blotting. Additionally, transfected cells were stained with 4',6-diamidino-2-phenylindole and a series of time-lapse images was taken. Sequences of the recombinant plasmids pMD18-T-Fyn and pEGFP-N1-Fyn were confirmed by sequence identification using National Center for Biotechnology Information in USA, and Fyn expression was detected by RT-PCR and Western blotting. The morphology of CHO cells transfected with the recombinant vector was significantly altered. Fyn expression induced filopodia and lamellipodia formation. Based on these results, we concluded that overexpression of mouse Fyn induces the formation of filopodia and lamellipodia in CHO cells, and promotes cell movement.
VARIÁVEIS MACROECONÔMICAS E O IBOVESPA: UM ESTUDO DA RELAÇÃO DE CAUSALIDADE

The purpose of this study is to analyze the causality relationship among a sort of selected macroeconomic variables and the return of the Brazilian stock market, using multivariate VAR methodology. The following macroeconomic variables were used in the study: interest rate (SELIC), exchange rate (PTAX) and inflation (IPCA). The Brazilian stock market was represented by the Sao Paulo Stock Index (Ibovespa). The study included the period from july 1994, the beginning of the Real Plan (Plano Real), to july 2005. Four econometric tests were used in the development of the study: Unit Root Test (Augmented Dickey-Fuller Test – ADF), Granger Causality Test, Variance Decomposition (VDC) and Impulse Response Analysis (IRF). The results showed that the exchange rate (PTAX), among the selected variables, presented the highest causality level when compared to Ibovespa. Nevertheless, none of the selected variables presented a causality relationship statistically significant.
Protein complexes subunits interaction topology and sequence identity

Many protein complexes prediction approaches are based on the assumptions that (i) protein complexes have dense protein-protein interactions (PPI) among their subunits, and (ii) high functional similarity for the subunits. We suggest to investigate those assumptions by studying the subunits' interaction topology and sequences identity. Such consideration can possibly provide better insights for our understanding of protein complexes architecture. Two topological parameters, density of protein-protein interaction (PPI) and connectedness, are defined to test whether protein complex are found in PPI dense region or not. The present data indicated that interaction dense regions represent protein complexes up to 20% cases. A rather large proportion of protein complexes have a lower density of PPI, and connectedness. It is conjectured that prediction approaches based on the assumption that complexes are composed of highly PPI dense regions, connectedness can predict a rather limited numbers of the complexes. On the other hand, our result indicates that protein complexes do composing of subunits with higher sequence identity or similarity.
Ejecta and progenitor of the low-luminosity type IIP supernova 2003Z

Context. The origin of low-luminosity type IIP supernovae is unclear: they have been proposed to originate either from massive (∼25 M� )o r low-mass (∼9 M� )s tars. Aims. We wish to determine parameters of the low-luminosity type IIP supernova 2003Z, to estimate a mass-loss rate of the presupernova, and to recover a progenitor mass. Methods. We compute the hydrodynamic models of the supernova to describe the light curves and the observed expansion velocities. The wind density of the presupernova is estimated using a thin shell model for the interaction with circumstellar matter. Results. We estimate an ejecta mass of 14.0 ± 1.2 M� , an explosion energy of (2.45 ± 0.18) × 10 50 erg, a presupernova radius of 229 ± 39 R� , and a radioactive 56 Ni amount of 0.0063 ± 0.0006 M� . The upper limit of the wind density parameter in the presupernova
Modelo de Precificação de Ativos – CAPM

A apuracao do custo de oportunidade do capital proprio e tema de diversos estudos. Neste intuito, o modelo do CAPM e praticamente um consenso entre os diversos interessados, nao havendo na literatura financeira nenhum outro modelo que atenda satisfatoriamente a todas as exigencias dos usuarios. O objetivo neste trabalho e estudar o caso da apuracao do custo de oportunidade do capital proprio utilizando-se da metodologia proposta pelo CAPM. Nele, foram estudados os indicadores do CAPM para o calculo do custo de oportunidade do capital proprio, bem como, a metodologia proposta pelo modelo para apuracao do referido custo. Foram identificados os principais aspectos caracteristicos de mercados emergentes que podem influenciar nos indicadores do CAPM. E para aplicacao pratica do estudo, foi demonstrada a apuracao do custo de oportunidade do capital proprio das acoes ordinarias das empresas Petrobras e Vale do Rio Doce. Concluiu-se que, apesar das varias criticas recebidas, o modelo do CAPM oferece conceitos validos e amplamente aceitos para a apuracao do custo de oportunidade do capital proprio, sendo objetivo dos novos estudos seu aperfeicoamento, e nao sua substituicao. Palavras-chave: Custo de oportunidade do capital proprio; Modelo CAPM; Investimento.
A reduced clock-swing flip-flop (RCSFF) for 63% power reduction

A reduced clock-swing flip-flop (RCSFF) is proposed, which is composed of a reduced swing clock driver and a special flip-flop which embodies the leakage current cutoff mechanism. The RCSFF can reduce the clock system power of a VLSI down to one-third compared to the conventional flip-flop. This power improvement is achieved through the reduced clock swing down to 1 V. The area and the delay of the RCSFF can also be reduced by a factor of about 20% compared to the conventional flip-flop. The RCSFF can also reduce the RC delay of a long RC interconnect to one-half.
3D Medical Volume Segmentation Using Hybrid Multiresolution Statistical Approaches

3D volume segmentation is the process of partitioning voxels into 3D regions (subvolumes) that represent meaningful physical entities which are more meaningful and easier to analyze and usable in future applications. Multiresolution Analysis (MRA) enables the preservation of an image according to certain levels of resolution or blurring. Because of multiresolution quality, wavelets have been deployed in image compression, denoising, and classification. This paper focuses on the implementation of efficient medical volume segmentation techniques. Multiresolution analysis including 3D wavelet and ridgelet has been used for feature extraction which can be modeled using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to segment the volume slices. A comparison study has been carried out to evaluate 2D and 3D techniques which reveals that 3D methodologies can accurately detect the Region Of Interest (ROI). Automatic segmentation has been achieved using HMMs where the ROI is detected accurately but suffers a long computation time for its calculations.
Autonomous Learning of a Robust Background Model for Change Detection ∗

We propose a framework for observing static scenes that can be used to detect unknown objects (i.e., left luggage or lost cargo) as well as objects that were removed or changed (i.e., theft or vandalism). The core of the method is a robust background model based on on-line AdaBoost which is able to adapt to a large variety of appearance changes (e.g., blinking lights, illumination changes). However, a natural scene contains foreground objects (e.g., persons, cars). Thus, a detector for these foreground objects is automatically trained and a tracker is initialized for two purposes: (1) to prevent that a foreground object is included into the background model and (2) to analyze the scene. For efficiency reasons it is important that all components of the framework are using the same efficient data structure. We demonstrate and evaluate the developed method on the PETS 2006 sequences as well as on own sequences of surveillance cameras.
Integrating consciousness

Cognitive science has largely assumed we can understand the mind without taking consciousness into account. From an evolutionary perspective, this is not a plausible assumption. The sophisticated display of multiple types of information characteristic of consciousness could not have evolved unless these display formats were functionally integrated into the mind's information processing system. In this paper I advocate setting aside the “hard” mind-body problem as provisionally intractable and embracing the “easy” problem of integrating consciousness into our model of the mind's architectural design. Building on existing models, I develop a basic adaptationist cognitive architecture that incorporates consciousness as a functional feature. I propose it helps solve the problem of coherent belief formation by meeting internal communication needs in a massively modular
LPV approach to friction estimation as a fault diagnosis problem

The control of systems that involve friction presents interesting challenges. Recent research has focused on detailed modelling of friction phenomena as a very complex and difficult modelling challenge. However, the friction effects acting in a dynamic system can be viewed as actuator faults with time-varying characteristics to be estimated and compensated within a Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) scheme, so that the limitations arising from the use of a friction model are obviated. This work is motivated by the utilisation of robust Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) estimation approach providing effective and robust fault estimation. The approach is illustrated using a two-link manipulator system with Stribeck friction. Results show that the time-varying friction forces on each joint can be simultaneously and robustly estimated through the online measurement of the varying parameters.
TRPM4 Is a Novel Component of the Adhesome Required for Focal Adhesion Disassembly, Migration and Contractility

Cellular migration and contractility are fundamental processes that are regulated by a variety of concerted mechanisms such as cytoskeleton rearrangements, focal adhesion turnover, and Ca2+ oscillations. TRPM4 is a Ca2+-activated non-selective cationic channel (Ca2+-NSCC) that conducts monovalent but not divalent cations. Here, we used a mass spectrometry-based proteomics approach to identify putative TRPM4-associated proteins. Interestingly, the largest group of these proteins has actin cytoskeleton-related functions, and among these nine are specifically annotated as focal adhesion-related proteins. Consistent with these results, we found that TRPM4 localizes to focal adhesions in cells from different cellular lineages. We show that suppression of TRPM4 in MEFs impacts turnover of focal adhesions, serum-induced Ca2+ influx, focal adhesion kinase (FAK) and Rac activities, and results in reduced cellular spreading, migration and contractile behavior. Finally, we demonstrate that the inhibition of TRPM4 activity alters cellular contractility in vivo, affecting cutaneous wound healing. Together, these findings provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, for a TRP channel specifically localized to focal adhesions, where it performs a central role in modulating cellular migration and contractility.
Analysis of Determinant Factors of Land Price in Rural Area Using a Hedonic Land Price Model and Spatial Econometric Models

Land prices reflect not only the uses of land, but the potential uses as well(Plantinga, 2002) so land values can be applied to very effective indices for deciding regional status and growing potential. The purpose of this study is to deduce determinant factors of regional land prices. Principal determinants of regional land prices are analyzed with a hedonic technique and spatial econometric models based on 2001 statistic data of Korea except large cities. The results provide the followings. 1. The spatial effect of rural regions are very little with adjacent regions. 2. The common index of land price is population density and other determinant factors are different depending on land uses.
Mono-camera based side vehicle detection for blind spot detection systems

This paper proposes a vision-based side vehicle detection for blind spot detection systems. The proposed algorithm uses a HoG cascade classifier in order to detect vehicles, and tracks the detected vehicles with Kalman filter. The proposed algorithm performs a periodical vehicle detection instead of every frame vehicle detection. And the proposed algorithm reduces the detecting image size by downscaling the original image and setting the region of interest where vehicles can exist. As a result, we can reduce the processing time for vehicle detection. Also, the proposed algorithm uses a false alarm reducing methods by control the reliability points at vehicle tracking. We evaluated the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of processing time and detection ratio. At target board, the proposed algorithm has 40 frames per second, which meets the real time requirements of the ADAS systems. The detection ratio of the proposed algorithm is over 96 % at both original image size and downscale image size.