Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simfirms - Simulating The Spatial Demography Of Firms, With An Application In The Netherlands

Recently, there is an increasing demand in spatial planning for models based on the demographic concepts of birth and death of firms. This paper describes the structure of a spatial demographic simulation model of firms, and its application within the Netherlands. The model structure is essentially of the familiar demographic cohort component type, where an initial cohort of firms ages in a number of discrete steps, and where in each step additions and subtractions to and from the population are modelled using birth, death and migration components. Apart from the central processes of birth, death and migration, the type of economic activity and firm size are highly important for understanding firm behaviour over time. The paper describes the transition functions for each of the demographic components and for firm growth. In addition, some empirical results are presented of a number of model simulations in the Netherlands. The results were partly validated using observed economic demographic data. It is concluded that a substantial amount of work remains to be done in this new field. The model presented here has direct implications for the research agenda of the study of the demography of the firm.
Deceit in the Name of Conservation?

MARCH 2003 E V I E W R O N 28 January, the Queensland Government released Report on the study of land-sourced pollutants and their impacts on water quality in and adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef. In the associated media release, the Queensland Premier Peter Beattie said, ‘Now the report is in, work on the Great Barrier Reef Water Quality Protection Plan will continue without arguments about whether land activities harm the Reef. The report is the adjudicator’s decision, and is based on the best available science’. The report, written by a panel of scientists chaired by Queensland’s Chief Scientist Dr Joe Baker, makes several key findings regarding impacts of land-based pollution on the reef. A key allegation in the report’s summary, highlighted in the Premier’s media release, is that elevated concentrations of pesticide residue have been found in dugongs. Since publication of the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962, there has been concern that pesticides can bio-accumulate in the fat tissue of animals. Prior to 1987, organochlorine pesticides (for example, DDT) were used in Great Barrier Reef catchments, including for sugarcane production. These chemicals have since been banned due to global concerns about their persistence in the environment and their capacity to bio-accumulate. I first became aware of the specific issue of pesticide in dugongs in August 1998. A senior officer with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) phoned me with the news that a soon-to-beDeceit in the Name of Conservation?
Pathophysiology of Locus Ceruleus Neurons in a Mouse Model of Rett Syndrome

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a neurodevelopmental disorder caused by loss-of-function mutations in the Methyl-CpG-binding protein-2 (MECP2) gene and is characterized by derangements in cognition, behavior, motor control, respiration and autonomic homeostasis, as well as seizures. Deficits in norepinephrine (NE) are thought to contribute to RTT pathogenesis, but little is known about how MeCP2 regulates function of noradrenergic neurons. We therefore characterized morphological, electrical, and neurochemical properties of neurons in the locus ceruleus (LC), the major source of noradrenergic innervation to the central neuraxis, in Mecp2 mutant mice. We found that MeCP2 null LC neurons are electrically hyperexcitable, smaller in size, and express less of the NE-synthesizing enzyme tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) compared with wild-type neurons. Increased excitability of mutant neurons is associated with reductions in passive membrane conductance and the amplitude of the slow afterhyperpolarization. Studies in Mecp2 heterozygotes, which are mosaic for the null allele, demonstrated that electrical hyperexcitability and reduced neuronal size are cell-autonomous consequences of MeCP2 loss, whereas reduced TH expression appears to reflect both cell-autonomous and non-autonomous influences. Finally, we found reduced levels of TH and norepinephrine in cingulate cortex, a forebrain target of the LC. Thus, genetic loss of MeCP2 results in a somewhat paradoxical LC neuron phenotype, characterized by both electrical hyperexcitability and reduced indices of noradrenergic function. Given the importance of the LC in modulating activity in brainstem and forebrain networks, we hypothesize that dysregulation of LC function in the absence of MeCP2 plays a key role in the pathophysiology of RTT.
Algebraic Decoding of Some Quadratic Residue Codes With Weak Locators

In this paper, an explicit expression of the weak-locator polynomial for p-ary quadratic residue codes is presented by a modification of the Feng-Tzeng matrix method. The differences between the modified version and the original Feng-Tzeng matrix are that in the new matrix, not every entry is a syndrome, and every syndrome entry is a known syndrome. By utilizing this technique, an algebraic decoding of the ternary (61, 30, 12) quadratic residue code is proposed. This new result has never been seen in the literature to our knowledge. An advantage of the proposed decoding algorithm is that in general the obtained weak-locator polynomials can decode efficiently not only all the error patterns of weights four and five, but also some error patterns of weight six.
Statistical Process Techniques on Water Toxicity Data

Statistical Process Control (SPC) uses statistical techniques to improve the quality of a process reducing its variability. The main tools of SPC are the control charts. The basic idea of control charts is to test the hypothesis that there are only common causes of variability versus the alternative that there are special causes. Control charts are designed and evaluated under the assumption that the observations from the process are independent and identically distributed (iid) normal. However, the independence assumption is often violated in practice. Autocorrelation may be present in many chemical procedures, and may have a significant effect on the properties of the control charts. Thus, traditional SPC charts are inappropriate for monitoring process quality. In this study, we present methods for process control that deal with autocorrelated data and mainly a more sophisticated method based on time – series ARIMA models (Alwan – Roberts method). We apply the typical SPC tetechniques and the timeseries method on toxicity data of water for human consumption from treated water tanks. This application shows the serious effects of autocorrelation when typical SPC control charts are applied on autocorrelated observations.
A Q-band Low Phase Noise Voltage Controlled Oscillator Using Balanced π-Feedback in 2-μm GaAs HBT Process

A Q-band low phase noise voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) using balanced π-feedback with 2-μm GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) process is reported in this paper. The VCO features a phase noise of -105.5 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset, and a tuning frequency of from 41.2 to 42.1 GHz with a maximum output power of -9 dBm. The differential outputs are also provided from the VCO due to the use of balanced π-feedback. The overall dc power consumption of the VCO is only 20 mW with a supply voltage of 2.5 V. The chip size of the VCO is 1 times 1 mm2. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this work demonstrates the lowest FOM among all the reported VCOs except the InP-based HBT VCOs around 40 GHz.
Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Embedded Systems Development

The development of embedded systems is a complex and challenging task. Part of this complexity originates from limited resources and the need to solve tradeoffs between competing quality properties and goals. Producing a correct design therefore requires a complete and understandable requirements specification. Non-Functional Goals (NFGs) are commonly used to analyze these tradeoffs, while Model-Driven Development has the potential to reduce the design complexity of embedded systems by increasing the abstraction level. In this paper, we extend the Requirements Definition and Analysis Language (RDAL) for goals specification in order to drive a model-driven architecture refinement of embedded systems. Determining the impact of the refinements on Non-Functional Properties (NFPs) and relating these NFPs to design objects are the key aspects of our method. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated through the introduction of a Pacemaker system which needs to deal with several NFPs such as performance, availability, and power consumption.
Stable User-Specific Haptic Rendering of the Virtual Wall

Efficient control algorithms are developed to implement stiff virtual walls without chatter. An analysis of the complete coupled system comprising controller, interface device, and user’s finger underlies the design of a wall algorithm, thus each virtual wall is tailored to a specific user impedance. The finger is modeled as a static second order impedance with justification drawn from empirical studies of limb dynamics available in the literature and from observations of the disparity in time scales between contact instability and volitional control. Compensation is incorporated for the destabilizing effects of the zero order hold using either model based prediction or design in the digital domain. The destabilizing effects of asynchronous wall on/off switching times and sampling times are tracked by a special watchdog while deadbeat control is used to periodically eliminate these effects. Extensions are discussed, including on-the-fly system identification of the user impedance.
Strategically Seeking Service: How Competition Can Generate Poisson Arrivals

We consider a simple game in which strategic agents select arrival times to a service facility. Agents find congestion costly and, hence, try to arrive when the system is underutilized. Working in discrete time, we characterize pure-strategy Nash equilibria for the case of ample service capacity. In this case, agents try to spread themselves out as much as possible and their self-interested actions will lead to a socially optimal outcome if all agents have the same well-behaved delay cost function. For even modest sized problems, the set of possible pure-strategy Nash equilibria is quite large, making implementation potentially cumbersome. We consequently examine mixed-strategy Nash equilibria and show that there is a unique symmetric Nash equilibrium. Not only is this equilibrium independent of the number of agents and their individual delay cost functions, the arrival pattern it generates approaches a discrete-time Poisson process as the number of agents and arrival points gets large. Our results extend to the case of time varying preferences. With an appropriate initialization, the results also extend to a system with limited capacity. Our model lends support to the traditional literature on managing service systems. This work has generally ignored customers strategically choosing arrival times. Rather it is commonly assumed that customers seek service according to some well-behaved process (e.g., that interarrival times follow a renewal process). We show that assuming Poisson arrivals is an acceptable assumption even with strategic customers if the population is large and the horizon is long.
Association of CYP2D6*10, OATP1B1 A388G, and OATP1B1 T521C Polymorphisms and Overall Survival of Breast Cancer Patients after Tamoxifen Therapy

Background The global incidence of breast cancer is increasing, mainly due to the sharp rise in breast cancer incidence in Asia. The aim of this study was to evaluate the association of CYP2D6*10 (c.100C>T and c.1039C>T), OATP1B1 A388G, and OATP1B1 T521C polymorphisms with overall survival (OS) for hormone receptor (estrogen receptor or progesterone receptor)-positive tumors (ER+/PR+) breast cancer patients after adjuvant tamoxifen (TAM) therapy. Material/Method We included 296 invasive breast cancer patients with hormone receptor-positive tumors during the period 2002–2009. We collected patient data, including clinical features, TAM therapy, and survival status. Archived paraffin blocks from surgery were the source of tissue for genotyping. CYP2D6*10, OATP1B1 A388G, and T521C polymorphisms were detected by direct sequencing of genomic DNA. OS was assessed with Kaplan-Meier analysis, while the Cox proportional hazards model was used to implement multivariate tests for the prognostic significance. Results There was a significant difference in OS between OATP1B1 T521C wild-type and the mutant genotype C carrier (P=0.034). However, there was no difference in overall survival between wild-type and carrier groups for CYP2D6*10 (P=0.096) and OATP1B1 A388G (P=0.388), respectively. Conclusions These results suggest that the OATP1B1 T521C mutation may be an independent prognostic marker for breast cancer patients using TAM therapy.
A Comparative Study on Alexithymia Characteristics among Three Kinds of Main Hospitalized Mental Disorders

Objective:To explore the alexithymia characteristics of hospitalized schizophrenics,manics and major de-pressive patients.Methods:320 schizophrenics,120 manics,105 major depressive patients and 120 healthy controls were assessed with a self-developed questionnaire and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale(TAS). Results:Compared with controls,schizophrenics showed significantly higher scores in total score of TAS,TAS factor I,II and IV(P0.05 or P0.01),and manics showed higher scores in total score of TAS,TAS factor III and IV(P0.05 or P0.01). Major depressive patients showed significant higher scores in total score of TAS and all factors of TAS(P0.01). Compared with manics and shci-zophrenics,depressive patients got higher scores in total score of TAS,scores of TAS factor I and II(P0.05),while there was no significant difference in TAS between manics and schizophrenics(P 0.05). Conclusion:Major depressive,schizophrenic and manic patients all suffer from significant alexithymia in some degree.Major depresive patients suffer from severer alexithymia than schizophrenics and manics.
Facial adaptive BM3D filter: A method for compressed face image deblocking

To deal with the blocking artifacts in compressed face images, a facial adaptive BM3D (Block Matching and 3D filtering) is proposed in this paper. BM3D is one of the typical image denoising methods, which is also efficient to image deblocking. However, the specific parameters are closely related to its performance. On the observation that faces are featured with the symmetric and similar geometry structures, the BM3D can be further improved for face images deblocking. We extend the searching region of patches according to the facial symmetry. The parameter sigma of the filter is also adaptively adjusted according to the location of eyes, nose, mouth and the compressed quality. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better results in both the subjective and objective performance.
Genetica delle formazioni ideologiche

Esiste un modo piu agevole per studiare il rapporto tra mente e cervello al di fuori degli schemi usuali di ricerca tendenti a creare mappe cerebrali come correlati o fotocopie delle nostre mappe mentali. Si tratta di valorizzare un approccio di tipo fenomenologico hard problem come viene oggi definito, andando ad esplorare i luoghi e le circostanze in cui il mondo delle idee si fissa sul corpo organico diventando tutt’uno con esso. Gia Platone parlava di una “discesa delle anime” che prendevano possesso dei corpi. Questa stessa funzione e espressa dall’apparato ideologico che “ingabbia” la persona ed entra a far parte della sua stessa struttura e persino della sua stessa “figura” (come si esprimeva un tempo il teologo Lavater). Le domande sono dunque queste: come avviene questo processo di fusione? In che modo il corpo organico seleziona le idee che si addicono alla sua struttura? Qual e la forza che conferisce alle idee quella solidita e durezza tali per cui l’individuo non riesce a mutare i propri orientamenti ideologici (estetici, culturali, politici, morali, sessuali)? E qual e invece la forza che e in grado di sciogliere questo legame tra corpo e idee determinando un mutamento di indirizzi e direzione delle forze che trascinano l’evoluzione umana? Nei successivi capitoli cercheremo di esplorare queste problematiche in senso generale, nella prospettiva piu ampia di un chiarimento del concetto di “biologia della cultura” in quanto punto di incontro e di integrazione tra scienze umane e scienze naturali.
Local metric learning for tag recommendation in social networks

We address the problem of tag recommendation for media objects, like images, videos, etc in social media sharing systems. We propose a framework that 1) extracts both object features and the social context and 2) uses them to learn recommendation rules. The social context is described by different types of information, such as a user's personal objects, the objects of a user's social contacts, the importance of the user in the social network, etc. Both object features and the social context are first used to guide the k-nearest neighbour method for the tag recommendation. We then enhance the method by the local topology adjustment on how the nearest neighbours are selected. We learn a local transformation of the feature space surrounding a given object which pushes together objects with the same tags and puts apart objects with different tags. We show how to learn the Mahalanobis distance metric on multi-tag objects and adopt it to the tag recommendation problem.
Ethical Leadership and Workplace Deviance: The Role of Moral Disengagement

Research has demonstrated that ethical leadership helps to limit subordinates' workplace deviance. In this chapter, we draw on social cognitive theory of moral thought and action to further understand why ethical leadership has a preventing impact on workplace deviance. We propose that the key mechanism between ethical leadership and deviance is moral disengagement, which refers to the process of making unethical behavior morally or socially acceptable. Specifically, subordinates learn cognitively and emotionally from ethical leaders to minimize the adoption of moral disengagement. When they decrease the use of moral disengagement, subordinates are less likely to display deviant behavior.
Parallel simulation of a high speed LAN

Simulation of communication networks is often time consuming. Parallel simulation may be used to reduce the execution time of such a simulator. However, efficient modeling and simulation of such complex applications is not a trivial task. In this paper, we discuss the results of simulating a multigigabit/s network using both an optimistic and a conservative scheme. Our experimental result on a shared memory multiprocessor indicates that the conservative approach is superior to the optimistic one for this application.
Design of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle Used for Marine Environment Monitoring

This paper presents the design of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) used for marine environment monitoring or hydrologic survey. A catamaran is used to improve stability against waves, and the shape of high-speed ship is exploited to reduce the resistance. The characteristics of resistance, electric motor and propeller are optimally matched, so that the battery power is saved and the endurance is improved. By using wireless local loop based on IP, the reliability of remotely operated system is increased and distance of effective communication is extended. All the compartmentalized cabins are modularized and configured with universal data interfaces to facilitate connecting various instruments. Tests on near sea show that the ASV can do both fixed-spot observation as a moored buoy and cruise observation as a survey vessel. In addition, it can reach shallow areas where a survey vessel cannot access. Therefore, it can be widely used on water surface of river, lake and ocean for environment monitoring, survey and exploration.
Automated Verification of Load Tests Using Control Charts

Load testing is an important phase in the software development process. It is very time consuming but there is usually little time for it. As a solution to the tight testing schedule, software companies automate their testing procedures. However, existing automation only reduces the time required to run load tests. The analysis of the test results is still performed manually. A typical load test outputs thousands of performance counters. Analyzing these counters manually requires time and tacit knowledge of the system-under-test from the performance engineers. The goal of this study is to derive an approach to automatically verify load tests' results. We propose an approach based on a statistical quality control technique called control charts. Our approach can a) automatically determine if a test run passes or fails and b) identify the subsystem where performance problem originated. We conduct two case studies on a large commercial telecommunication software and an open-source software system to evaluate our approach. Our results warrant further development of control chart based techniques in performance verification.
Relational motivation for conformal operator ordering in quantum cosmology

Operator ordering in quantum cosmology is a major as-yet unsettled ambiguity with not only formal but also physical consequences. We determine the Lagrangian origin of the conformal invariance that underlies the conformal operator-ordering choice in quantum cosmology. This arises particularly naturally and simply from relationalist product-type actions (such as the Jacobi action for mechanics or Baierlein–Sharp–Wheeler-type actions for general relativity), for which all that is required is for the kinetic and potential factors to rescale in compensation to each other. These actions themselves mathematically sharply implement philosophical principles relevant to whole-universe modelling, so that the motivation for conformal operator ordering in quantum cosmology is thereby substantially strengthened. Relationalist product-type actions also give emergent times which amount to recovering Newtonian, proper and cosmic time in various contexts. The conformal scaling of these actions directly tells us how emergent time scales; if one follows suit with the Newtonian time or the lapse in the more commonly used difference-type Euler–Lagrange or Arnowitt–Deser–Misner-type actions, one sees how these too obey a more complicated conformal invariance. Moreover, our discovery of the conformal scaling of the emergent time permits relating how this simplifies equations of motion with how affine parametrization simplifies geodesics.
TCP's Retransmission Timer and the Minimum RTO

We study the performance impact of recently recommended TCP retransmission timer settings using a bare PC Web server with no operating system or kernel running in the machine. We first evaluate server performance in a test LAN with various settings of the alpha and beta constants used for computing SRTT and RTTVAR in the presence of varying levels of background traffic generated by conventional systems. We then study performance with different minimum RTO settings, and compare the performance of the bare PC Web server using the recommended timer settings with the performance of the Apache and IIS Web servers running on Linux and Windows respectively. We find that (1) no combinations of alpha and beta, or sampling strategies, perform consistently better than others under the different levels of background traffic; (2) lower minimum RTO settings than the recommended 1- second minimum will work when there is moderate background traffic, but the 1-second minimum is best when there are higher levels of congestion; and (3) using the standard timer settings but not using the TCP SACK option and congestion control mechanisms degrades bare server performance for some levels of background traffic.