Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Topologically robust 3D modeling for shape approximation

This paper proposes a topologically robust and accurate shape modeling procedure that approximates a real 3D object based not on the widely used so-called ICP (iterative closed point) algorithm or the Delaunay triangulation for the noise resistive modeling and for the matrix-form meshing. A geometric model with desired meshing, not limited to a triangular one, but also quadrilateral, hexagonal or n-gonal mesh, is directly reconstructed based on a solid modeling approach. The radial distance of each scanning point from the axis of the cylindrical coordinates is measured using a laser triangulation sensor. The angular and vertical positions of the laser beam are two other coordinate values of the scanning to be simultaneously acquired. A face array listing (topology), which defines the vertex (sampling point) connectivity and the shape of the mesh, is assigned to meet the desired meshing, including that for watermarking. An example shows the procedure is immune to occasional triangulation noises. Stable meshing, and hence, an accurate shape approximation, free from the misconnection unavoidable in the ICP-based modeling, is then accomplished. This proposal allows a versatile, accurate and practical shape approximation, though limited to a one-axis rotational application at this moment.
Structural handwritten and machine print classification for sparse content and arbitrary oriented document fragments

Discriminating handwritten and printed text is a challenging task in an arbitrary orientation scenario. The task gets even tougher when the text content is by nature sparse in the document, e.g. in torn document pieces. We here propose a system for discriminating handwritten and printed text in the context of sparse data and arbitrary orientation. A chain-code feature is used with Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for the purpose. Prior to feature extraction and classification some preprocessing steps (like region growing and angle estimation using Principle Component Analysis) are performed in order to resolve the arbitrary orientation issue. We got promising results of 96.90% accuracy, even when the document consists of sparse data with arbitrary orientation.
Is urban logistics pooling viable? A multistakeholder multicriteria analysis

Collaborative transportation and logistics pooling are relatively new concepts in research, but are very popular in practice. In the last years, collaborative transportation seems a good city logistics alternative to classical urban consolidation centres, but it is still in a development stage. This paper proposes a framework for urban logistics pooling ex-ante evaluation. This framework is developed with two purposes. The first is to generate comparable contrasted or progressive scenarios representing realistic situations; the second to simulate and assess them to make a "before-after" comparative analysis. In this framework, a demand generation model is combined with a route optimization algorithm to simulate the resulting routes of the proposed individual or collaborative distribution schemes assumed by each scenario. Then, several indicators can be obtained, mainly travelled distances, working times, road occupancy rates and operational monetary costs. To illustrate that framework, several scenarios for the urban area of Lyon (France) are simulated and discussed to illustrate the proposed framework possible applications.
Monetary Policy Rules in an Uncertain Environment

This article examines recent research on the influence of various forms of economic uncertainty on the performance of different classes of monetary policy rules: from simple rules to fully optimal monetary policy under commitment. The authors explain why uncertainty matters in the design of monetary policy rules and provide quantitative examples from the recent literature. They also present results for several policy rules in ToTEM, the Bank of Canada's main model for projection and analysis, including rules that respond to price level, rather than to inflation.
Imagining management education: A critique of the contribution of the United Nations PRME to critical reflexivity and rethinking management education

Over 650 business schools worldwide have embraced the 2007 United Nations initiative, the Principles for Responsible Management Education. Proponents claim the initiative drives change and a fundamental rethinking of management education through questioning and the challenging of assumptions. Critical discussions of the Principles for Responsible Management Education have been slower to emerge, and this article contributes a necessary critique. We relate claims of questioning and social change to ideas of critical reflexivity, including those of Margaret Archer, who presents it as an open-ended process of deliberation, generating social transformation. In so doing, we ask whether the Principles for Responsible Management Education enables a critical reflexivity which might drive fundamental change in management education. Based on a critical discourse analysis of research data gathered in our UK business school, we answer this question in the negative, arguing that the Principles for Responsible Management Education, far from promoting critical reflexivity, operate as an ‘imaginary’ to inhibit critical reflexivity and to impose a particular agenda, limiting fundamental change. Rather it is resistance to the Principles for Responsible Management Education agenda and the availability of alternative imaginaries providing different meaning-making resources, which may contribute to a much needed rethinking of management education.
Rating Pattern Formation for Better Recommendation

Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems are used to recommend items that may match each user preference on the basis of preferences of similar users in the system. Since different users have different patterns of preference, there is a problem when one user's preference is used to recommend another user's preference. A way of converting one user's preference pattern into another user's pattern is proposed. However, there are several problems with current methods: some methods take many users' patterns as a similar one, some rely on co-rated items data between user pairs which is hardly obtained, and some methods can't exactly convert a rating to a suitable one. This work proposes a new transpose function that can be utilized on any pair of users regardless of using co-rated items by applying latent model. The new transpose function is composed of an original value term and an adjustment term which transposes an original rating to an average of the target user's rating on the corresponding items. Moreover, for more accuracy, a distribution term and a confidence term are combined to the adjustment term. This new function provides better results than the current transpose function in terms of three evaluation metrics (MAE, F-measure, and coverage).
Full-chip routing system for reducing Cu CMP & ECP variation

Topography variation has a significant impact on performance as well as printability for nanometer technologies. In this paper, we propose an improved full-chip routing system for reducing Cu CMP (Chemical Mechanical Polishing) & ECP (Electroplating) topology variation, in which CMP aware global routing, CMP aware layer assignment and ECP aware detailed routing are integrated. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to consider both Cu CMP and ECP variation all through routing procedure. First, a Cu CMP and ECP topology model considering both perimeter density and feature density is used in global routing, layer assignment and detailed routing to guide the whole optimization procedure. Second, a W-shape multilevel routing model is applied to fully control topology variation from a macroscopic level to a microscopic level. Third, layer assignment which plays a key role in trading off the density between interlayer and intralayer, is integrated into the multilevel routing system and a fast simulated annealing based algorithm is presented to take additive effect on multiple layers into consideration. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can reduce 6%-7% post-ECP variation and 15%-17% post-CMP variation on average than CMP-aware detailed routing algorithm in [5]. Furthermore, it can insert smaller amount (about 5%) of dummy fill, which means less impact on performance.
American Journal of Epidemiology Original Contribution Rotating Night Shift Work and the Risk of Ischemic Stroke

Rotating night shift work disrupts circadian rhythms and is associated with coronary heart disease. The relation between rotating night shift work and ischemic stroke is unclear. The Nurses' Health Study, an ongoing cohort study of registered female nurses, assessed in 1988 the total number of years the nurses had worked rotating night shifts. The majority (69%) of stroke outcomes from 1988 to 2004 were confirmed by physician chart review. The authors used Cox proportional hazards models to assess the relation between years of rotating night shift work and ischemic stroke, adjusting for multiple vascular risk factors. Of 80,108 subjects available for analysis, 60% reported at least 1 year of rotating night shift work. There were 1,660 ischemic strokes. Rotating night shift work was associated with a 4% increased risk of ischemic stroke for every 5 years (hazard ratio ¼ 1.04, 95% confidence interval: 1.01, 1.07; P trend ¼ 0.01). This increase in risk was similar when limited to the 1,152 confirmed ischemic strokes (hazard ratio ¼ 1.03, 95% confidence interval: 0.99, 1.07; P trend ¼ 0.10) and may be confined to women with a history of 15 or more years of rotating shift work. Women appear to have a modestly increased risk of stroke after extended periods of rotating night shift work. Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the United States and the leading cause of adult disability (1). Because traditional risk factors do not account for stroke risk entirely, the study of novel stroke risk factors is important (2). There is growing evidence that perturbations in sleep influence stroke risk (3, 4). Shift work, a term that encompasses long-term night shift work, evening shifts, and rotating shift work, is known to disrupt circadian rhythms (5) and is associated with vascular disease risk factors (6–8) and increased catechol-amine secretion (9). Several prospective studies have identified rotating night shift work as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (10–12), with mixed findings regarding cardiovascu-lar mortality (13–15). The association between shift work and cerebrovascular disease has not been well studied. One small case-control study from Europe has been reported, with no association identified (16). In a previous analysis within the Nurses' Health Study, rotating night shift work was found to be associated with a higher risk of developing coronary heart disease (10). Our objective was to assess the relation between rotating night shift work and incident ischemic stroke in this …
Bandwidth occupancy of non-coherent wideband fading channels

Peaky and non-peaky signaling schemes have long been considered species apart in non-coherent wideband fading channels, as the first approaches asymptotically the linear-in-power capacity of a wideband AWGN channel with the same SNR, whereas the second reaches a nearly power-limited peak rate at some finite critical bandwidth and then falls to zero as bandwidth grows to infinity. In this paper it is shown that this distinction is in fact an artifact of the limited attention paid in the past to the product between the bandwidth and the fraction of time it is in use. This fundamental quantity, that is termed bandwidth occupancy, measures average bandwidth usage over time. The two types of signaling in the literature are harmonized to show that, for any type of signals, there is a fundamental limit-a critical bandwidth occupancy. All signaling schemes with the same bandwidth occupancy approach the capacity of wideband AWGN channels with the same asymptotic behavior as the bandwidth occupancy grows to its critical value. For a bandwidth occupancy above the critical, rate decreases to zero as the bandwidth occupancy goes to infinity.
ADiJaC -- Automatic Differentiation of Java Classfiles

This work presents the current design and implementation of ADiJaC, an automatic differentiation tool for Java classfiles. ADiJaC uses source transformation to generate derivative codes in both the forward and the reverse modes of automatic differentiation. We describe the overall architecture of the tool and present various details and examples for each of the two modes of differentiation. We emphasize the enhancements that have been made over previous versions of ADiJaC and illustrate their influence on the generality of the tool and on the performance of the generated derivative codes. The ADiJaC tool has been used to generate derivatives for a variety of problems, including real-world applications. We evaluate the performance of such codes and compare it to derivatives generated by Tapenade, a well-established automatic differentiation tool for Fortran and C/C++. Additionally, we present a more detailed performance analysis of a real-world application. Apart from being the only general-purpose automatic differentiation tool for Java bytecode, we argue that ADiJaC’s features and performance are comparable to those of similar mature tools for other programming languages such as C/C++ or Fortran.
Exploring the Use of WhatsApp in Mathematics Learning: A Case Study

This study reports on the use of the WhatsApp instant messaging as a resource for learning mathematics. WhatsApp is a smartphone messenger that employs the users’ existing Internet data plan to connect the user to their learning community. This interpretive study employed a mixed method design. The participants for this study were 75 pre-service mathematics teachers enrolled for the Mathematics 110 module in one university in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The data generated was analyzed using Activity Theory as a framework. The findings of the research suggest that the use of the WhatsApp instant messaging may assist students in learning mathematics. The use of WhatsApp instant messaging as a tool fostered a social constructivist environment for mathematical learning. This environment supported students in improving their performance in mathematics. Thus, within the domain of sustainable learning, this educational attainment is possible by designing and monitoring the e-learning
Author ' s personal copy Transport-independent fairness

The Internet relies on cooperative endpoints to react to signals from the network that congestion is occurring. In particular, TCP interprets packet loss as a signal of congestion. However there are many new non-cooperative protocols in use which attempt to exploit the network aggressively and do not reduce their demands when the network signals congestion. We propose the aggregate control of ‘‘fluxes” defined by policies at individual routers. Each router can then calculate an optimal allocation of bandwidth to each flux contending for a given output link. We propose a combined hill climbing and convex programming method for this optimization, which we call HCCP. HCCP is designed to punish greedy fluxes rather than just regulating them: such fluxes may find their bandwidth allocation reduced to zero if they are sufficiently aggressive. Our results show that HCCP is effective at regulating a wide range of rather generally characterized transport protocols. We explore the use of both throughput maximization and proportionally fair allocation and recommend the latter because the former often leads to the situation where one or more fluxes receive zero bandwidth. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Smart booking without looking: providing hotel recommendations in the TripRebel portal

In this paper, we present a scalable hotel recommender system for TripRebel, a new online booking portal. On the basis of the open-source enterprise search platform Apache Solr, we developed a system architecture with Web-based services to interact with indexed data at large scale as well as to provide hotel recommendations using various state-of-the-art recommender algorithms. We demonstrate the efficiency of our system directly using the live TripRebel portal where, in its current state, hotel alternatives for a given hotel are calculated based on data gathered from the Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN).
What You See is Not Always What You Sign

A fundamental aspect of computer systems is that displaying and signing a digital document are separate and unlinked processes. In addition, the same digital document can be displayed differently on different systems. As a consequence it is difﬁcult to determine what exactly has been signed, both from the signer’s and the veriﬁer’s point of view. This paper discusses how confusion about the meaning of digitally signed documents can occur, and proposes some mitigation strategies
Age-related changes in the innervation of the prostate gland

The adult prostate gland grows and develops under hormonal control while its physiological functions are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. The prostate gland receives sympathetic input via the hypogastric nerve and parasympathetic input via the pelvic nerve. In addition, the hypogastric and pelvic nerves also provide sensory inputs to the gland. This review provides a summary of the innervation of the adult prostate gland and describes the changes which occur with age and disease. Growth and development of the prostate gland is age dependent as is the occurrence of both benign prostate disease and prostate cancer. In parallel, the activity and influence of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system changes with age. The influence of the sympathetic nervous system on benign prostatic hyperplasia is well documented and this review considers the possibility of a link between changes in autonomic innervation and prostate cancer progression.
Robust bilinear matrix recovery by Tensor Low-Rank Representation

For low-rank recovery and error correction, Low-Rank Representation (LRR) row-reconstructs given data matrix X by seeking a low-rank representation, while Inductive Robust Principal Component Analysis (IRPCA) aims to calculate a low-rank projection to column-reconstruct X. But either column or row information of Xis lost by LRR and IRPCA. In addition, the matrix X itself is chosen as the dictionary by LRR, but (grossly) corrupted entries may greatly depress its performance. To solve these issues, we propose a simultaneous low-rank representation and dictionary learning framework termed Tensor LRR (TLRR) for robust bilinear recovery. TLRR reconstructs given matrix X along both row and column directions by computing a pair of low-rank matrices alternately from a nuclear norm minimization problem for constructing a low-rank tensor subspace. As a result, TLRR in the optimizations can be regarded as enhanced IRPCA with noises removed by low-rank representation, and can also be considered as enhanced LRR with a clean informative dictionary using a low-rank projection. The comparison with other criteria shows that TLRR exhibits certain advantages, for instance strong generalization power and robustness enhancement to the missing values. Simulations verified the validity of TLRR for recovery.
EXPERIMENTAL INFECTION OF THE SKIN IN THE HAMSTER SIMULATING HUMAN IMPETIGO

The interaction between staphylococci and Group A beta hemolytic streptococci in mixed lesions was investigated in an experimental impetigo model. A strain of staphylococcus of phage Type 71, which has been shown in vitro to produce a bacteriocin for streptococci and other Gram-positive organisms, eliminates or reduces Group A streptococci in mixed lesions. In contrast, staphylococcal strains of phage Types 75 and 81, which do not produce a demonstrable bacteriocin in vitro, exhibit no such effect. Some variation was noted in the in vivo response of two different streptococcal M Types to the bactericidal effect of phage Type 71 staphylococci. Bacterial antagonism is more pronounced when staphylococci and streptococci are injected simultaneously into animals than when staphylococci are superimposed on preexisting streptococcal lesions. Marked variations were found in the numbers of viable streptococci (colony-forming units) recovered from individual lesions containing identical mixtures of streptococci and phage Type 71 staphylococci. The frequency of a demonstrable bactericidal effect was related to the number of streptococci injected. With small inocula of streptococci, the tendency towards an all-or-none effect was particularly striking. No evidence of selection of streptococcal or staphylococcal mutants which might explain this phenomenon was obtained. These observations suggest that the bactericidal effect of phage Type 71 staphylococci on other Gram-positive organisms, previously demonstrated in vitro, appears to operate also in vivo.
Etiology of Sarcoidosis: Does Infection Play a Role?

Sarcoidosis is a granulomatous inflammatory disorder of unclear etiology, which is known to affect multiple organ systems including the lungs, heart, skin, central nervous system, and eyes, among others. For this reason, sarcoidosis represents a systemic medical disorder that is clinically relevant to multiple medical sub-specialties. Despite extensive research, the etiology of sarcoidosis has yet to be elucidated, although most evidence supports that the pathogenetic mechanism of sarcoidosis is an aberrant immune response, driven by an unidentified antigen (or antigens) in genetically susceptible individuals. Multiple candidate etiologic agents, including microbial organisms and environmental agents, have been investigated, but study results are inconclusive. In this review, we describe the known histologic and immunologic features of sarcoidosis and discuss the evidence supporting a role for infectious processes in the pathogenesis of sarcoidosis.