Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Oriented particles: A tool for shape memory objects modelling

Originally introduced to render probabilistic objects, particle systems are now used in a wide range of applications. Oriented particle systems were designed as a dynamic modelling tool for describing 3D free-form objects. We propose a new method using oriented particle systems to dynamically simulate 3D deformable objects that may either come back to their initial shape or break during animations. This method can be used in a physically based animation system. We also propose a new more robust expression for the attraction/repulsion interaction between particles.
Market Power and the Failure of the Big Push: Evidence and Theory

The comparative history of a Big Push in two regions of Northern Honduras elicits that market power can play two important roles in the implementing of a Big Push. Under strong institutions, firms with strategic market power will support the State’s efforts, greatly reducing the cost of a Big Push. Conversely, when institutions are weak, the presence of market power can undermine the Big Push, as it did in Honduras. To successfully implement a Big Push policy in a weak institutional environment, the government must take costly action to develop competitive markets, and the Push may become unaffordable. The conclusions of the case history are then generalized and operationalized. A theoretical model indicates how considerations of market power can be incorporated in the existing literature, and corroborates the results of the case history.
The importance of accurate calculation of the nonlinear extreme wave kinematics in the design of offshore platforms

The purpose of this work is to highlight the importance of the calculation of the nonlinear extreme wave kinematics appropriate for load calculations of the elements of a platform in deep water. Numerical calculations have been undertaken using a fully nonlinear three-dimensional wave model capable of accurately representing a realistic distribution of wave energy in both the frequency and the directional domains (Bateman, Swan, & Taylor 2001, Bateman, Swan, & Taylor 2003). The purpose of these calculations is to provide what is essentially an exact benchmark against which to assess the accuracy of the commonly applied design wave solutions; linear and 2nd order random waves and nonlinear steady wave solutions. The platform, which is used for the analysis, is a compliant tower set-up in deep water. The load calculations were made by applying the well-known Morison’s equation on all the members of the structure. Through the static analysis, the differences of the results are obvious in the case were geometric nonlinearity is taken into account in the analysis. In order to complete these analyses a well-known software for static and dynamic analysis of structures was used (SAP2000). The results have shown that the fact that none of the common design methods describes accurately the particle velocities, lead not only to a misestimate of the applied loads on the structure investigated but also to important deviations from the predicted displacements of the basic elements of the structure.
Elucidation of differential response networks from toxicogenomics data

We describe a novel approach to the analysis of toxicogenomics data and elucidation of biological networks affected by drug treatments. In this method approximately 15,000 linear pathway modules were generated from manually assembled pathway maps from MetaCore (GeneGo, Inc.). Microarray expression data from livers of rat exposed to phenobarbital, mestranol and tamoxifen were mapped onto these modules. Using different analytical techniques we have identified sets of "differential" pathways featuring highly correlated expression among multiple repeats of the same treatment while showing strong anti-correlation across different treatments. Network modules distinguishing chemical treatments were re-assembled based on these pathways. Unlike traditional statistical and clustering procedures in expression profiling, our method takes into account both network connectivity and gene expression in the course of the analysis. We demonstrate that it enables identification of important cellular mechanisms involved in drug response that would have been missed by the analysis based on individual gene expression profiles.
Formal Verication of Behavioural Vhdl Specications : a Case Study

This paper addresses the problem of formally verifying VHDL descriptions. More precisely, w e c heck the correctness of a VHDL architecture w.r. t. another architecture of the same entity. Both of them are translated into recursive functional forms, and the proof of their equivalence is realized by means of the Boyer-Moore theorem prover. Our methodology is illustrated by a signicant example that has been proposed by THOMSON. This benchmark presents interesting characteristics and its proof is not obvious.
Relational Maintenance Strategies among Mexican Coworkers

This study sought to expand our understanding of the communication behaviors between Mexican coworkers. This involved examining the relational maintenance behaviors that take place between coworkers in Mexican organizations and the impact these behaviors had on the workers job satisfaction, communication satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Since Mexico is considered to be a collectivistic country it was also assessed in order to examine its possible influence on coworkers. The findings indicated that culture played a significant role in Mexican employees’ use of relational maintenance behaviors and their satisfaction and commitment. Additionally, it appeared that Mexican employees engaged in relational maintenance behaviors as a result of their collectivistic culture to fulfill interpersonal needs. Further, significant relationships were found between the coworker relational maintenance behaviors and communication and job satisfaction and organizational commitment. A detailed discussion was also provided highlighting the implications of these findings to organizational communication scholars and business professionals alike. Keywords: Relational Maintenance Strategies; Communication Satisfaction; Job Satisfaction; Intercultural Communication; Organizational Commitment Submission date: 2011-10-16 Acceptance date: 2011-10-24
Proceedings of the 3 r d Joint 161 Syrnpsstuim sn Neural Computatfon

DeCharms et a1. (1995) have provided evidence for stimulus-dependent changes in the correlations between spike trains of simultaneously-recorded pairs of neurons from the auditory cortex of marmosets even when there was no change in the average firing rates. Most of the characteristics of these experimental observations can be reproduced by a simple model based on neurons having leaky integration, fire-and-reset spikes and with Poissondistributed, balanced input. The source of synchrony in the model was common sensory input. Spike frequency adaptation was implemented by sensory-driven, delayed inhibition. The outputs of neurons in the model appear noisy (almost Poisson) owing to the stochastic nature of the input signal, but there is nevertheless a strong central peak in the correlation of the output spike trains. The experimental data and this simple model clearly demonstrate how even a noisy-looking spike train can convey basic information about a sensory stimulus in the relative spike timing between neurons. We address the binding problem and show why sykhrony without periodicity might be advantageous in representing multiple objects at the same cortical site simultaneously.
Modulation-mode assignment in SVD-assisted multiuser MIMO-OFDM systems

In order to comply with the demand on increasing available data rates in particular in wireless technologies, systems with multiple transmit and receive antennas, also called MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems, have become indispensable for future generations of wireless systems. Due to the strongly increasing demand in high-data rate transmission systems, frequency non-selective MIMO links have reached a state of maturity and frequency selective MIMO links are in the focus of interest. In this field, the combination of MIMO transmission and OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) can be considered as an essential part of fulfilling the requirements of future generations of wireless systems. However, single-user scenarios have reached a state of maturity. By contrast multiple users' scenarios require substantial further research, where in comparison to ZF (zero-forcing) multiuser transmission techniques, the individual user's channel characteristics are taken into consideration in this contribution. The performed joint optimization of the number of activated MIMO layers and the number of transmitted bits per subcarrier along with the appropriate allocation of the transmit power shows that not necessarily all user-specific MIMO layers per subcarrier have to be activated in order to minimize the overall BER under the constraint of a given fixed data throughput.
A Petri Net Representation of a Web-Service- Based Emergency Management System in Railway Station

Railway Stations are prone to emergency due to various reasons and proper monitor of railway stations are of immense importance from various angles. A Petri-net representation of a web-service-based Emergency management system has been proposed in this paper which will help in monitoring situation of train, track, signal etc. and in case of any emergency, necessary resources can be dispatched. Keywords—Business process, Petri net, Rail Station Emergency Management, Web service based system
Vowel harmony and the consonant I in Chumburung

This paper presents a synchronic description of the realization of /l/ in Chumburung, a Kwa language of Ghana. In this description I attempt to demonstrate that the influence of the feature advanced tongue root is not restricted to the vowel harmony system, but also spreads to influence the realization of the consonant /l/. Following from this synchronic description is evidence suggesting that native speakers of Chumburung require more than phonetic information in order to choose the appropriate allophone of /l/.
Surgery as a Double-Edged Sword: A Clinically Feasible Approach to Overcome the Metastasis-Promoting Effects of Surgery by Blunting Stress and Prostaglandin Responses

Surgery remains an essential therapeutic approach for most solid malignancies, including breast cancer. However, surgery also constitutes a risk factor for promotion of pre-existing micrometastases and the initiation of new metastases through several mechanisms, including the release of prostaglandins and stress hormones (e.g., catecholamines and glucocorticoids). However, the perioperative period also presents an opportunity for cell mediated immunity (CMI) and other mechanisms to eradicate or control minimal residual disease, provided that the deleterious effects of surgery are minimized. Here, we discuss the key role of endogenous stress hormones and prostaglandins in promoting the metastatic process through their direct impact on malignant cells, and through their deleterious impact on anti-cancer CMI. We further discuss the effects of anesthetic techniques, the extent of surgery, pain alleviation, and timing within the menstrual cycle with respect to their impact on tumor recurrence and physiological stress responses. Last, we suggest an attractive perioperative drug regimen, based on a combination of a cyclooxygenase (COX)-2 inhibitor and a β-adrenergic blocker, which we found effective in attenuating immune suppression and the metastasis-promoting effects of surgery in several tumor models. This regimen is clinically applicable, and could potentially promote disease free survival in patients operated for breast and other types of cancer.
Cognitive and Behavioral Outcomes After Early Exposure to Anesthesia and Surgery

BACKGROUND: Annually, millions of children are exposed to anesthetic agents that cause apoptotic neurodegeneration in immature animals. To explore the possible significance of these findings in children, we investigated the association between exposure to anesthesia and subsequent (1) learning disabilities (LDs), (2) receipt of an individualized education program for an emotional/behavior disorder (IEP-EBD), and (3) scores of group-administered achievement tests. METHODS: This was a matched cohort study in which children (N = 8548) born between January 1, 1976, and December 31, 1982, in Rochester, Minnesota, were the source of cases and controls. Those exposed to anesthesia (n = 350) before the age of 2 were matched to unexposed controls (n = 700) on the basis of known risk factors for LDs. Multivariable analysis adjusted for the burden of illness, and outcomes including LDs, receipt of an IEP-EBD, and the results of group-administered tests of cognition and achievement were outcomes. RESULTS: Exposure to multiple, but not single, anesthetic/surgery significantly increased the risk of developing LDs (hazard ratio: 2.12 [95% confidence interval: 1.26–3.54]), even when accounting for health status. A similar pattern was observed for decrements in group-administered tests of achievement and cognition. However, exposure did not affect the rate of children receiving an individualized education program. CONCLUSIONS: Repeated exposure to anesthesia and surgery before the age of 2 was a significant independent risk factor for the later development of LDs but not the need for educational interventions related to emotion/behavior. We cannot exclude the possibility that multiple exposures to anesthesia/surgery at an early age may adversely affect human neurodevelopment with lasting consequence.
Rapid Repression of ADP Transport by Palmitoyl-CoA Is Attenuated by Exercise Training in Humans: A Potential Mechanism to Decrease Oxidative Stress and Improve Skeletal Muscle Insulin Signaling

Mitochondrial ADP transport may represent a convergence point unifying two prominent working models for the development of insulin resistance, as reactive lipids (specifically palmitoyl-CoA [P-CoA]) can inhibit ADP transport and subsequently increase mitochondrial reactive oxygen species emissions. In the current study, we aimed to determine if exercise training in humans diminished P-CoA attenuation of mitochondrial ADP respiratory sensitivity. Six weeks of exercise training increased whole-body glucose homeostasis and skeletal muscle Akt signaling and reduced markers of oxidative stress without reducing maximal mitochondrial H2O2 emissions. To ascertain if enhanced mitochondrial ADP transport contributed to the improvement in the in vivo oxidative state, we determined mitochondrial ADP sensitivity in the presence and absence of P-CoA. In the absence of P-CoA, exercise training reduced mitochondrial ADP sensitivity. In contrast, exercise training increased mitochondrial ADP sensitivity with P-CoA present. We further show that P-CoA noncompetitively inhibits mitochondrial ADP transport and the ability of ADP to attenuate mitochondrial H2O2 emission. Altogether, the current data provide a potential mechanism for how P-CoA contributes to insulin resistance and highlight the ability of exercise training to diminish P-CoA attenuation in mitochondrial ADP transport.
PsycheTagger: using hidden Markov model to annotate English text with semantic tags based on emotive content

The human elements of personality working behind the creation of a write-up play an important part in determining the final dominant mood of a text. This paper presents a tool, PsycheTagger, which extracts the emotive content of a text in English Language in its context and tags each open-class word of the text with one of the predefined psyche categories that represent the emotive content. Working in the lines of statistical Parts-of-Speech Taggers, this tool is an example of a semantic tagger. The tagger self-ranks its choices with a probabilistic score, calculated using Viterbi algorithm run on a Hidden Markov Model of the psyche categories. The results of the tagging exercise are critically evaluated on the Likert scale. These results strongly justify the validity and determine high accuracy of tagging using the probabilistic parser.
Psychosocial Distress among Children Living on the Street in Mumbai City, India

Children living on street are considered as most marginal and socially excluded section of the society. They are vulnerable to face problems like substance dependence, abuse, neglect, sexual problems and violence. The objectives of the study were to examine the psychosocial distress among children on street in Mumbai city and factors associated with that. The primary data has been used in this paper which was collected through a survey of 234 children living on the street during October 2015 to November 2016. The study has used the GHQ 12 scale to examine the psychosocial distress among the children living on street. The result indicates that two-thirds of children from age group 13-15 years and 16-18 years were facing severe kind of distress. Gender wise analysis shows that boys were slightly more prone to psychosocial distress than girls. Children from Muslim religion were considerably more prone to have psychosocial distress than children from other religion. Children those who were staying five years or more were having considerably severe kind of distress. About half of the children those who were engaged in begging or rag picking were having moderate kind of distress. The study has found that factors like age of the children, duration of stay, gender and their occupation contributes to the distresses among the children on street.
Text Structure-aware Classification I Text Structure-aware Classification

Bag-of-words representations are used in many NLP applications, such as text classification and sentiment analysis. These representations ignore relations across different sentences in a text and disregard the underlying structure of documents. In this work, we present a method for text classification that takes into account document structure and only considers segments that contain information relevant for a classification task. In contrast to the previous work, which assumes that relevance annotation is given, we perform the relevance prediction in an unsupervised fashion. We develop a Conditional Bayesian Network model that incorporates relevance as a hidden variable of a target classifier. Relevance and label predictions are performed jointly, optimizing the relevance component for the best result of the target classifier. Our work demonstrates that incorporating structural information in document analysis yields significant performance gains over bag-of-words approaches on some NLP tasks. Thesis Supervisor: Regina Barzilay Title: Associate Professor
Developing skills for success: Interactions among classroom, child, and activity context on preschoolers' behavioral regulation.

EDUCATION PhD University of Michigan, Combined Program in Education & Psychology 2007 Dissertation: “Developing skills for success: Interactions among classroom, child, and activity context on preschoolers’ behavioral regulation” Committee: Frederick J. Morrison (Chair), Daniel P. Keating, Priti R. Shah, Kai S. Cortina MS University of Michigan, Psychology 2005 BA University of Michigan, Highest Honors in Psychology, Italian 2002
Statistical, Structural, Hybrid, and Graph Theoretical Features to Measure Land Development

Extracting information on a developing region from its sequential satellite images has many benefits. Therefore, in a previous study, we introduced graph theoretical and conditional statistical features to measure land development in a predefined region. There, we only used the grayscale information from the satellite image at hand. Here, we extend that work by introducing novel statistical, hybrid, and graph theoretical features using multispectral information. We also introduce novel structural features based on three different structure extraction methods. We test our new features on a diverse data set and report their performances in measuring land development.
A novel multiband sierpinski triangular fractal antenna for cognitive radio

This article demonstrates about the design and performance of a novel triangular fractal antenna for X band (8–12GHz), Ku band (12–18 GHz) and K band (18–26.5 GHz) of frequencies. It was simulated using Advanced System Design (ADS) momentum software. It resonates at three different frequencies 9.5GHz, 16.4GHz, and 20.7GHz respectively. The fractal antenna has the advantages like multiple resonances or enhancing bandwidth and hence it can be used in cognitive radio for spectrum sensing. The anticipated triangular fractal antenna results shows that it has excellent control over three operating bands. This antenna offers good efficiency which changes from 55% –100% and its gain fluctuates from 2.5–5.4 dBi over three bands.
Community perceptions of the contributions of parks to sustainability in Canada

ABSTRACT National Parks are thought to contribute to sustainability by addressing conservation, social values and local tourism economies. However, some studies challenge these claims, suggesting that parks can create inequitable flows of costs and benefits to local communities. This study focussed on Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, and five nearby communities. Focus groups and 262 random surveys were used to examine perceived benefits and costs of the park to sustainability. The most important perceived benefits were environmental, followed by economic benefits and social benefits. Perceived costs were rated lower, and were most evident regarding economic impacts (e.g. inflated prices, inflated property values). However, perceptions varied substantially by community, particularly with the First Nations village of Esowista where perceived concerns were greater than in other communities. Contrary to expectations, perceptions were less correlated to length of residence, employment in tourism, employment in the park, involvement in park management or income.
Pompe disease diagnosis and management guideline

Disclaimer: ACMG standards and guidelines are designed primarily as an educational resource for physicians and other health care providers to help them provide quality medical genetic services. Adherence to these standards and guidelines does not necessarily ensure a successful medical outcome. These standards and guidelines should not be considered inclusive of all proper procedures and tests or exclusive of other procedures and tests that are reasonably directed to obtaining the same results. In determining the propriety of any specific procedure or test, the geneticist should apply his or her own professional judgment to the specific clinical circumstances presented by the individual patient or specimen. It may be prudent, however, to document in the patient’s record the rationale for any significant deviation from these standards and guidelines.