Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
National campaign to prevent teen pregnancy.

Establishment of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy a nongovernmental organization based in Washington D.C. was stimulated by President Clintons 1995 challenge in his State of the Union address that "parents and leaders all across the country join together in a national campaign against teen pregnancy to make a difference. " Following his speech a group of citizens representing the media government agencies child and adolescent advocacy groups foundations the entertainment industry academia and medicine met at the White House to develop a strategy. It was agreed that such an effort should be non-partisan long-term and based in the private sector. At present the Campaign is attempting to identify the primary underlying causes of the USs high adolescent pregnancy rate. In the future the Campaign expects to take a clear stand against adolescent pregnancy and attract the interest of an even broader range of community leaders; enlist the help of the media; support state and local actions; lead a national discussion about the role of religion culture and public values in reducing teen pregnancy; and strengthen the knowledge base for effective community-level programming. Planned is an international convention on teen pregnancy prevention to promote a cross-cultural exchange of promising models and ideas. To gain a better understanding of the situation at the grass-roots level Campaign staff are combining speaking engagements with visits to state and local programs. The Campaign has four task forces: media; state and local action; religion culture and public values; and effective programs and research.
Review of duloxetine in the management of diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain

Duloxetine is a balanced selective serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) which, in 2004, became the first agent to receive regulatory approval for the treatment of painful diabetic neuropathy in the US. This compound has no other significant receptor or channel activities other than the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibition mechanisms and works to diminish or control the symptoms of diabetic neuropathy. Duloxetine has no known neuroprotective or other effects which prevent the development of neuropathy in patients with diabetes. The purpose of this review article is to discuss the background of painful diabetic neuropathy, the pharmacology of duloxetine, and its safety and efficacy in clinical trials and long-term observations. The authors will also comment on its use in clinical practice. Results from controlled clinical trials reveal that duloxetine administered at 60 mg qd or 60 mg bid is efficacious in treating diabetic neuropathic pain relative to placebo. Positive treatment outcomes are also seen for other measures of pain and quality of life. A minor but statistically significant increase in blood glucose compared with placebo treated patients has been observed in controlled clinical trials. Otherwise, controlled and open-label clinical studies have demonstrated a high degree of safety and tolerability for the compound. These findings provide support for the proposed role of serotonin and norepinephrine as key mediators of the descending pain inhibition pathways of the brain stem and spinal cord.
Resveratrol: French Paradox Revisited

Resveratrol is a polyphenol that plays a potentially important role in many disorders and has been studied in different diseases. The research on this chemical started through the “French paradox,” which describes improved cardiovascular outcomes despite a high-fat diet in French people. Since then, resveratrol has been broadly studied and shown to have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-proliferative, and anti-angiogenic effects, with those on oxidative stress possibly being most important and underlying some of the others, but many signaling pathways are among the molecular targets of resveratrol. In concert they may be beneficial in many disorders, particularly in diseases where oxidative stress plays an important role. The main focus of this review will be the pathways affected by resveratrol. Based on these mechanistic considerations, the involvement of resveratrol especially in cardiovascular diseases, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and possibly in longevity will be is addressed.
Disruptor of Telomeric Silencing-1 Is a Chromatin-specific Histone H3 Methyltransferase*

Yeast disruptor of telomeric silencing-1 (DOT1) is involved in gene silencing and in the pachytene checkpoint during meiotic cell cycle. Here we show that the Dot1 protein possesses intrinsic histone methyltransferase (HMT) activity. When compared with Rmt1, another putative yeast HMT, Dot1 shows very distinct substrate specificity. While Rmt1 methylates histone H4, Dot1 targets histone H3. In contrast to Rmt1, which can only modify free histones, Dot1 activity is specific to nucleosomal substrates. This was also confirmed using native chromatin purified from yeast cells. We also demonstrate that, like its mammalian homolog PRMT1, Rmt1 specifically dimethylates an arginine residue at position 3 of histone H4 N-terminal tail. In surprising contrast, methylation by Dot1 occurs in the globular domain of nucleosomal histone H3. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) analysis suggests that H3 lysine 79 is trimethylated by Dot1. The intrinsic nucleosomal histone H3 methyltransferase activity of Dot1 is certainly a key aspect of its function in gene silencing at telomeres, most likely by directly modulating chromatin structure and Sir protein localization. In agreement with a role in regulating localization of histone deacetylase complexes like SIR, an increase of bulk histone acetylation is detected in dot1− cells.
THEORETICAL AND NUMERICAL STUDY OF SOLITONS INRANDOM

This paper contains a study of the transmission of a soliton through a slab of nonlinear and random medium. A random nonlinear Schrr odinger equation is considered, where the randomness holds in the potential and the nonlinear coeecient. Using the inverse scattering transform, we exhibit several asymptotic behaviors corresponding to the limit when the amplitudes of the random uctuations go to zero and the size of the slab goes to innnity. The mass of the transmitted soliton may tend to zero exponentially (as a function of the size of the slab) or following a power law; or else the soliton may keep its mass, while its velocity decreases at a logarithmic rate or even slower. Numerical simulations are in good agreement with the theoretical results. present here more numerical simulations and give the proofs of all the technical estimates.
Regularity of roots of polynomials

We show that smooth curves of monic complex polynomials $P_a (Z)=Z^n+\sum_{j=1}^n a_j Z^{n-j}$, $a_j : I \to \mathbb C$ with $I \subset \mathbb R$ a compact interval, have absolutely continuous roots in a uniform way. More precisely, there exists a positive integer $k$ and a rational number $p >1$, both depending only on the degree $n$, such that if $a_j \in C^{k}$ then any continuous choice of roots of $P_a$ is absolutely continuous with derivatives in $L^q$ for all $1 \le q < p$, in a uniform way with respect to $\max_j\|a_j\|_{C^k}$. The uniformity allows us to deduce also a multiparameter version of this result. The proof is based on formulas for the roots of the universal polynomial $P_a$ in terms of its coefficients $a_j$ which we derive using resolution of singularities. For cubic polynomials we compute the formulas as well as bounds for $k$ and $p$ explicitly.
Network design for vertex connectivity

We study the survivable network design problem (SNDP) for vertex connectivity. Given a graph G(V,E) with costs on edges, the goal of SNDP is to find a minimum cost subset of edges that ensures a given set of pairwise vertex connectivity requirements. When all connectivity requirements are between a special vertex, called the source, and vertices in a subset T ⊆ V, called terminals, the problem is called the single-source SNDP. Our main result is a randomized kO(k2) log4n-approximation algorithm for single-source SNDP where k denotes the largest connectivity requirement for any source-terminal pair. In particular, we get a poly-logarithmic approximation for any constant k. Prior to our work, no non-trivial approximation guarantees were known for this problem for any k ≥ 3. We also show that SNDP is kΩ(1)-hard to approximate and provide an elementary construction that shows that the well-studied set-pair linear programming relaxation for this problem has an Ω(k1/3) integrality gap.
Styrofoam: a tightly packed coding scheme for camera-based visible light communication

Screen-to-camera visible-light communication links are fundamentally limited by inter-symbol interference, in which the camera receives multiple overlapping symbols in a single capture exposure. By determining interference constraints, we are able to decode symbols with multi-bit depth across all three color channels. We present Styrofoam, a coding scheme which optimally satisfies the constraints by inserting blank frames into the transmission pattern. The coding scheme improves upon the state-of-the-art in camera-based visible light communication by: (1) ensuring a decode with at least half exposure of colored multi-bit symbols, (2) limiting decode latency to two transmission frames, and (3) transmitting 0.4 bytes per grid block at the slowest camera's frame rate. In doing so, we outperform peer unsynchronized VLC transmission schemes by 2.9x. Our implementation on smartphone displays and cameras achieves 69.1 kbps.
Dimension Compactness in Speaker Identification

The automatic speaker identification procedure is used to extract features that help to identify the components of the acoustic signal by discarding all the other stuff like background noise, emotion, hesitation, etc. The acoustic signal is generated by a human that is filtered by the shape of the vocal tract, including tongue, teeth, etc. The shape of the vocal tract determines and produced, what signal comes out in real time. The analytically develops shape of the vocal tract, which exhibits envelop for the short time power spectrum. The ASR needs efficient way of extracting features from the acoustic signal that is used effectively to makes the shape of the individual vocal tract. To identify any acoustic signal in the large collection of acoustic signal i.e. corpora, it needs dimension compactness of total variability space by using the GMM mean supervector. This work presents the efficient way to implement dimension compactness in total variability space and using cosine distance scoring to predict a fast output score for small size utterance.
Demonstration of power enhancements on an industrial circuit through delay management of non-critical data paths

On-chip power dissipation has become a fundamental design issue in high performance integrated circuits. A technique to significantly reduce the power dissipated in the non-critical data paths of an industrial circuit is demonstrated. The application of this technique with non-zero clock skew scheduling to the slower data paths is also described. Simulation results demonstrating the application of this technique to certain functional blocks of a high performance microprocessor are presented. A greater than 80% power savings is achieved in specific circuit blocks.
Automatic Detection of Pathological Voices Using GMM-SVM Method

Modern lifestyle has increased the risk of pathological voices problems. So the therapy of pathological people attracts more attention of people. Meanwhile, acoustic features have been used widely in the therapy of voice disordered people. Classification of Normal and Pathological people is also an auxiliary therapy operation. MFCC has been proved to be a useful feature with traditional classifier such as GMM or HMM. However, the precision rate of the classification can still be improved. In Pattern Recognition field, GMM-SVM has been an effective classification method. In this study, we found that this classification method is also effective in voice disorder classification. EER was improved from 8.2% of GMM to 6.0% of GMM-SVM. Keywords-Pathological voices, GMM, SVM
Kinematic analysis of a shotcreting robot

The shotcreting robot has 8 joints including 3 joints coupled with others on the shotcreting robot. This paper set up the Denavit-Hartenberg Frames and deduced the kinematic equations with extra three constrain equations to decouple the linked motions. The unique analytical solution of the inverse kinematic equations was educed, which provided foundation for further research on trajectory plan, dynamics analysis and control strategies.
Computing Optimal Strategies to Commit to in Stochastic Games

Significant progress has been made recently in the following two lines of research in the intersection of AI and game theory: (1) the computation of optimal strategies to commit to (Stackelberg strategies), and (2) the computation of correlated equilibria of stochastic games. In this paper, we unite these two lines of research by studying the computation of Stackelberg strategies in stochastic games. We provide theoretical results on the value of being able to commit and the value of being able to correlate, as well as complexity results about computing Stackelberg strategies in stochastic games. We then modify the QPACE algorithm (MacDermed et al. 2011) to compute Stackelberg strategies, and provide experimental results.
Large-scale lattice Boltzmann simulations of complex fluids: advances through the advent of computational Grids

During the last 2.5 years, the RealityGrid project has allowed us to be one of the few scientific groups involved in the development of computational Grids. Since smoothly working production Grids are not yet available, we have been able to substantially influence the direction of software and Grid deployment within the project. In this paper, we review our results from large-scale three-dimensional lattice Boltzmann simulations performed over the last 2.5 years. We describe how the proactive use of computational steering, and advanced job migration and visualization techniques enabled us to do our scientific work more efficiently. The projects reported on in this paper are studies of complex fluid flows under shear or in porous media, as well as large-scale parameter searches, and studies of the self-organization of liquid cubic mesophases.
The Impact of a Promise: A Loan Replacement Grant, Low-Income Students, and College Graduation

Abstract:This study examines the impact of Illinois Promise, a loan replacement grant for low-income students, on college graduation within five years. A quasi-experimental design using propensity score matching is employed for first-time, full-time students enrolled as freshman from fall, 2007 through fall, 2009. Eligibility criteria are used to construct the comparison group of one-to-one matches for a total of 414 students. Results show the odds ratio of graduating within five years is 2.4 times more likely for I-Promise students in relation to the low-income comparison group. Policy and practice implications are discussed.
Voltage-dependent block of fast chloride channels from rat cortical neurons by external tetraethylammonium ion

Tetraethylammonium ion (TEA) and its longer chain derivatives have been used extensively to block currents through K-selective ion channels. Substantial information has been gained about the structure and gating mechanisms of K and other cation channels from the analysis of the blocking interactions of TEA and other quaternary ammonium ions. We now present an analysis of blocking interactions between single Cl- selective ion channels from acutely dissociated rat cortical neurons and externally applied TEA. TEA applied to the extracellular membrane surface (TEAo) blocked Cl channels in a voltage-dependent manner, with hyperpolarizing potentials favoring block. The voltage dependence of block could be adequately fit assuming that TEA enters the channel pore and binds to a site located approximately 28% of the way through the membrane electrical field. The dose-response relationship between fractional current and [TEA]o at a fixed holding potential of -40 mV was well fit to a simple model with two blocking sites with dissociation constants (Kd) of approximately 2 and 70 mM. The dose- response relationship could also be fit by a mechanism where TEA only partially blocks the channels. At the bandwidth used in these experiments (1-2 kHz), both the mean open duration (composed of the open and blocked durations) and burst duration (composed of open, blocked, and short lifetime shut durations) increased with increased [TEA]o. This is expected if TEAo can bind and unbind only when the channel is in the open kinetic state. These results suggest that the structure of the permeability pathway of these anion-selective channels may be very similar to that of other channels that are blocked by TEA. Additionally, these results caution that a blocking effect by TEA cannot, by itself, be used as sufficient evidence for implicating the participation of K channels in a particular process.
A Selective Survey of DDoS Related Research

The open nature of the Internet makes distributed denialof-service (DDoS) attacks relatively easy to mount and difficult to counter. In the ten years since the first attacks were observed several methods of defense were proposed, yet the problem still lacks a complete solution. We present a selective survey of proposed defense mechanisms and show possible research directions.
Robust and Stable Gene Selection via Maximum-Minimum Correntropy Criterion

One of the central challenges in cancer research is identifying significant genes among thousands of others on a microarray. Since preventing outbreak and progression of cancer is the ultimate goal in bioinformatics and computational biology, detection of genes that are most involved is vital and crucial. In this article, we propose a Maximum-Minimum Correntropy Criterion (MMCC) approach for selection of biologically meaningful genes from microarray data sets which is stable, fast and robust against diverse noise and outliers and competitively accurate in comparison with other algorithms. Moreover, via an evolutionary optimization process, the optimal number of features for each data set is determined. Through broad experimental evaluation, MMCC is proved to be significantly better compared to other well-known gene selection algorithms for 25 commonly used microarray data sets. Surprisingly, high accuracy in classification by Support Vector Machine (SVM) is achieved by less than10 genes selected by MMCC in all of the cases.
Practical specification and verification with code contracts

In this tutorial I will introduce CodeContracts, the . NET solution for contract specifications. CodeContracts consist of a language and compiler-agnostic API to express contracts, and of a set of tools to automatically generate the documentation and to perform dynamic and static verification. The CodeContracts API is part of . NET since v4, the tools are available for download on the Visual Studio Gallery. To date, they have been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Visual object detection by parts-based modeling using extended histogram of gradients

In this paper, we present a parts-based modeling framework using Extended Histogram of Gradients (ExHoG) for object detection. Visual object detection is a challenging issue in computer vision where objects need to be detected in varying illumination and contrast environments. Furthermore, objects belonging to the same class exhibit large intra-class variations. Here, we propose using ExHoG with the discriminatively trained deformable part models of Felzenszwalb et. al. [1]. This framework is based on mixtures of multiscale deformable part models. ExHoG is a novel feature proposed earlier for the purpose of human detection and has shown promising results against other state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed approach is tested on INRIA Human data set and the PASCAL VOC 2007 data set. Results demonstrate superior performance on INRIA compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches and improved performance on PASCAL VOC 2007.
Coordinated control of regenerative three-level neutral point clamped PWM voltage source inverters

This paper studies the coordinated control strategy between the source and load controllers for regenerative back-to-back three level neutral-point-clamped PWM voltage source inverters. The focus is on the coordinated dc link voltage control through a feed-forward power flow control and the coordinated dc link neutral point control. The paper also covers various neutral point control methods including a new linear control scheme. The simulation and experiment results show that, compared with independent source and load control approach, the coordinated approach can significantly improve system response, reduce component stress, and help eliminating nuisance trips.
Gender segmentation to increase brand preference? The role of product involvement

Purpose This paper aims to address the role of product involvement in the brand preference formation of men and women. Product involvement can be defined as a consumer’s motivation for product purchase that affects their information processing strategies when forming a brand preference (e.g. more automatic at low levels vs more deliberative at high levels). Given that gender differences are found to be context-dependent, it was expected that, when forming a single brand preference, men would emphasize instrumental aspects (functional and socially conspicuous utilities) and women the experiential utility of the brand only with high-involvement-level products. Design/methodology/approach A descriptive survey (n = 459) using structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was used following an online experiment where involvement level was manipulated (n = 255) to validate the results. Findings Stereotypical gender differences appeared at high, but not low-involvement levels. Theoretically, these findings question the evolutionary basis of gender differences, as differences were not consistent at both levels. Practical implications The findings raise questions about the efficacy of segmenting by gender when aiming to increase brand preference of low-involvement products, whereas stereotypical targeting seem to be effective for increasing preference for high-involvement ones. Originality/value For the first time, the role of product involvement and gender was examined in brand preference formation. This can theoretically clarify whether gender differences are consistent or dependent on the level of involvement. This information can help in designing efficient marketing strategies for products with different involvement levels.
Efectos del capital público y del capital humano sobre la productividad de las regiones españolas

espanolEn el presente estudio analizamos el crecimiento de la productividad total de los factores experimentado por las regiones espanolas entre 1965 y 1995. Con esta finalidad, se construyen unos indices de productividad de Malmquist, calculados mediante tecnicas no parametricas de programacion lineal, descomponiendo dicho crecimiento en ganancias de eficiencia y cambio tecnico. Una vez realizado este estudio, nuestro objetivo sera determinar que factores inciden en el crecimiento de laproductividad total de los factores privados, centrandonos en el estudio del capital publico productivo y del capital humano como factores condicionantes de dicho crecimiento. EnglishIn this study we examine the growthof total factor productivity that took place in the Spanish regions in the period 1965-1995. To this end, we have constructed Malmquist productivity indexes, which we calculated by means of non-parametric linear programming techniques, breaking this growth down into gains in efficiency and technical change. Having conducted this study, our aim will be to determine what factors affect total private factor productivity growth, concentrating on the study of productive private capitaland human capital as factors determining this growth.