Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning without local minima in radial basis function networks

Learning from examples plays a central role in artificial neural networks. The success of many learning schemes is not guaranteed, however, since algorithms like backpropagation may get stuck in local minima, thus providing suboptimal solutions. For feedforward networks, optimal learning can be achieved provided that certain conditions on the network and the learning environment are met. This principle is investigated for the case of networks using radial basis functions (RBF). It is assumed that the patterns of the learning environment are separable by hyperspheres. In that case, we prove that the attached cost function is local minima free with respect to all the weights. This provides us with some theoretical foundations for a massive application of RBF in pattern recognition.
Noise-Induced “Toughening” Effect in Wistar Rats: Enhanced Auditory Brainstem Responses Are Related to Calretinin and Nitric Oxide Synthase Upregulation

An appropriate conditioning noise exposure may reduce a subsequent noise-induced threshold shift. Although this “toughening” effect helps to protect the auditory system from a subsequent traumatic noise exposure, the mechanisms that regulate this protective process are not fully understood yet. Accordingly, the goal of the present study was to characterize physiological processes associated with “toughening” and to determine their relationship to metabolic changes in the cochlea and cochlear nucleus (CN). Auditory brainstem responses (ABR) were evaluated in Wistar rats before and after exposures to a sound conditioning protocol consisting of a broad-band white noise of 118 dB SPL for 1 h every 72 h, four times. After the last ABR evaluation, animals were perfused and their cochleae and brains removed and processed for the activity markers calretinin (CR) and neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS). Toughening was demonstrated by a progressively faster recovery of the threshold shift, as well as wave amplitudes and latencies over time. Immunostaining revealed an increase in CR and nNOS levels in the spiral ganglion, spiral ligament, and CN in noise-conditioned rats. Overall, these results suggest that the protective mechanisms of the auditory toughening effect initiate in the cochlea and extend to the central auditory system. Such phenomenon might be in part related to an interplay between CR and nitric oxide signaling pathways, and involve an increased cytosolic calcium buffering capacity induced by the noise conditioning protocol.
Lectures on the Theory of Contracts

The contours of contract theory as a field are difficult to define. Many would argue that contract theory is a subset of Game Theory which is defined by the notion that one party to the game (typically called the principal) is given all of the bargaining power and so can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the other party or parties (i.e., the agent(s)). In fact, the techniques for screening contracts were largely developed by pure game theorists to study allocation mechanisms and game design. But then again, carefully defined, everything is a subset of game theory. Others would argue that contract theory is an extension of price theory in the following sense. Price theory studies how actors interact where the actors are allowed to choose prices, wages, quantities, etc. and studies partial or general equilibrium outcomes. Contract theory extends the choice spaces of the actors to include richer strategies (i.e. contracts) rather than simple one-dimensional choice variables. Hence, a firm can offer a nonlinear price menu to its customers (i.e., a screening contract) rather than a simple uniform price and an employer can offer its employee a wage schedule for differing levels of stochastic performance (i.e., an incentives contract) rather than a simple wage. Finally, one could group contract theory together by the substantive questions it asks. How should contracts be developed between principals and their agents to provide correct incentives for communication of information and actions. Thus, contract theory seeks to understand organizations, institutions, and relationships between productive individuals when there are differences in personal objectives (e.g., effort, information revelation, etc.). It is this later classification that probably best defines contract theory as a field, although many interesting questions such as the optimal design of auctions and resource allocation do not fit this description very well but comprise an important part of contract theory nonetheless. ∗ c ©1993, Lars A. Stole.
Query optimization for inter document relationships in XML structured document

The information published in the form of XML-complaint keeps growing. They are mainly used in web-based applications and have many simultaneous interactive users. Hence there should be an efficient and effective way to optimize the XML queries. Query optimization in the context of XML database is extremely challenging as compared with the other data models. The existing optimization algorithms focus only on the containment relationships with in a XML document. This paper explains the optimization of XPath for structured Inter- documents, which make use of referencing relationship among the different XML documents. The Inter-document concept is helpful in cases where it is beneficial to have several documents. A new method of schema level query optimization for structured Inter- document is being proposed herein. The results demonstrate better scalability, selectivity and reduction in execution time.
Multi-scale car detection and localization using contour fragments

This research features multi-scale car detection and localization. Deformable active contour fragments are represented and learned at multiple scales, which directly represent the shape of cars. Accurate localization is also achieved by learning the variation of the car center position through the deformation of each active contour fragment. Employing Real-Boost for the proposed multi-scale deformable contour fragments provides a very good performance on widely used single scale multi-view and multi-scale multi-view car datasets.
Measurement system with experiments for galvanic coupling type intra-body communication

Intra-body communication (IBC) is a technique to transmit electric signal through the on-body and implanted sensors by means of the conducting properties of the human body. This technique could be an innovative networking method for sensors on the human body and sharing information among the devices scattered across the human body. To analyze the characteristics of human data channel, we devise a quantitative measurement system that can provide a quantitative current in the transmitter and a qualitative analysis in the receiver. The transmitter of the system includes a current driving circuit with an amplifying and filtering circuit in receiver. By testing performance of the system and conducting in-vivo experiments with the proposed measurement system, the physical characteristic of human data channel was studied. Experimental results show that the human body has a stable propagation characteristic in the frequency range from 1 kHz to 100 kHz, and the potential gain characteristics approximate to a high-pass filter.
Alcohol Consumption, Progression of Disease and Other Comorbidities, and Responses to Antiretroviral Medication in People Living with HIV

The present paper describes the possible connection between alcohol consumption and adherence to medicine used to treat human deficiency viral (HIV) infection. Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has a positive influence on longevity in patients with HIV, substantially reducing morbidity and mortality, including resource-poor settings such as South Africa. However, in a systematic comparison of HAART outcomes between low-income and high-income countries in the treatment of HIV-patients, mortality was higher in resource-poor settings. Specifically, in South Africa, patients often suffer from concomitant tuberculosis and other infections that may contribute to these results. Alcohol influences the use of medicine for opportunistic infections (e.g., pneumonia, tuberculosis), or coinfections HIV-hepatitis viruses-B (HBV) and C (HCV), cytomegalovirus, or herpes simplex virus. Furthermore, alcohol use may negatively impact on medication adherence contributing to HIV progression. The materials used provide a data-supported approach. They are based on analysis of published (2006–2011) world literature and the experience of the authors in the specified topic. Intended for use by health care professionals, these recommendations suggest approaches to the therapeutic and preventive aspects of care. Our intention was to fully characterize the quality of evidence supporting recommendations, which are reflecting benefit versus risk, and assessing strength or certainty.
KEYnet: a keywords database for biosequences functional organization

KEYnet is a database where gene and protein names are hierarchically structured. Particular care has been devoted to the search and organisation of synonyms. The structuring is based on biological criteria in order to assist the user in the data search and to minimise the risk of loss of information. Links to the EMBL data library by the entry name and the accession number have been implemented. KEYnet is available through the World Wide Web at the following site: http://www.ba. cnr.it/keynet.html. Recently KEYnet has incorporated specific gene name classifications, which can be browsed starting from the above-mentioned KEYnet home page: the Mitochondrial Gene Names classification and the Rat Gene Names classification. KEYnet database has also been structured in a flatfile format and can be queried through SRS (http://bio-www.ba.cnr.t:8000/srs).
Organizing curriculum change: an introduction*

Abstract This paper introduces the questions and approaches of a five-nation cross-cultural study of state-based curriculum-making discussed in this issue of JCS. The paper reviews the two decade-long interest of many nations in state-based curriculum-making and presents a framework for thinking about state-based curriculum-making as a tool of educational governance.
A cognitive study of subjectivity extraction in sentiment annotation

Existing sentiment analysers are weak AI systems: they try to capture the functionality of human sentiment detection faculty, without worrying about how such faculty is realized in the hardware of the human. These analysers are agnostic of the actual cognitive processes involved. This, however, does not deliver when applications demand order of magnitude facelift in accuracy, as well as insight into characteristics of sentiment detection process. In this paper, we present a cognitive study of sentiment detection from the perspective of strong AI. We study the sentiment detection process of a set of human “sentiment readers”. Using eye-tracking, we show that on the way to sentiment detection, humans first extract subjectivity. They focus attention on a subset of sentences before arriving at the overall sentiment. This they do either through ”anticipation” where sentences are skipped during the first pass of reading, or through ”homing” where a subset of the sentences are read over multiple passes, or through both. ”Homing” behaviour is also observed at the sub-sentence level in complex sentiment phenomena like sarcasm.
Combining Evaluation Metrics with a Unanimous Improvement Ratio and its Application to the Web People Search Clustering Task

This paper presents the Unanimous Improvement Ratio (UIR), a measure that allows to compare systems using two evaluation metrics without dependencies on relative metric weights. For clustering tasks, this kind of measure becomes necessary given the trade-o between precision and recall oriented metrics (e.g. Purity and Inverse Purity) which usually depends on a clustering threshold parameter stated in the algorithm. Our empirical results show that (1) UIR rewards system improvements that are robusts regarding weighting schemes in evaluation metrics, (2) UIR reects improvement ranges and (3) although it is a non parametric measure, it is sensitive enough for detecting most robust system improvements. The application of UIR to the second Web People Search evaluation campaign (WePS-2) shows that UIR is able to complement successfully the results oered by a conventional metric combination approach (such as Van Rijsbergen’s F measure).
Cognitive Rehabilitation After Traumatic Brain Injury

Nearly 1.7 million Americans sustain a traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year. These injuries can result in physical, emotional, and cognitive consequences. While many individuals receive cognitive rehabilitation from occupational therapists (OTs), the interdisciplinary nature of TBI research makes it difficult to remain up-to-date on relevant findings. We conducted a literature review to identify and summarize interdisciplinary evidence-based practice targeting cognitive rehabilitation for civilian adults with TBI. Our review summarizes TBI background, and our cognitive remediation section focuses on the findings from 37 recent (since 2006) empirical articles directly related to cognitive rehabilitation for individuals (i.e., excluding special populations such as veterans or athletes). This manuscript is offered as a tool for OTs engaged in cognitive rehabilitation and as a means to highlight arenas where more empirical, interdisciplinary research is needed.
Do we stop learning from our mistakes when using automatic code analysis tools? An experiment proposal

When we learn how to program, we often do that by trial and error. We struggle with the syntax and with our own understanding of how the idea of the program should look like in the specific programming language. Today there is a huge amount of tools available, which automatically check your code and recommend alterations to the code for the sake of maintainability or correctness. The question, that has not yet been asked by science, is: Are we still learning something from these mistakes, besides the knowledge, that such mistakes will be corrected for us? In the following we will propose an experimental setup, that aims to answer this question.
Investigation of defect cavities formed in inverse three-dimensional rod-connected diamond photonic crystals

We report the optical properties of single defects in inverse three-dimensional (3D) rod-connected diamond (RCD) photonic crystal (PhC) cavities by using plane-wave expansion (PWE) and finite-difference time domain (FDTD) methods. By optimizing the dimensions of a 3D inverse RCD PhC, wide photonic band gaps (PBG) are obtained. Optical cavities with resonances in the bandgap arise when point defects are introduced in the crystal. A variety of shapes and locations of single defects are investigated in high-refractive-index contrast (gallium phosphide-air or chalcogenide-air) inverse RCD structures, and Q-factors and mode volumes (Veff) of the resonant cavity modes are calculated. By choosing a single sphere defect located at the center of a tetrahedral arrangement, small mode volumes can be obtained. Here, high Q-factors up to 724,000 and cavity mode volumes down to Veff <; 0.3(λ/n)3 have been demonstrated.
Dimension reduction for linear separation with curvilinear distances

Any high dimensional data in its original raw form may contain obviously classifiable clusters which are difficult to identify given the high-dimension representation. In reducing the dimensions it may be possible to perform a simple classification technique to extract this cluster information whilst retaining the overall topology of the data set. The supervised method presented here takes a high dimension data set consisting of multiple clusters and employs curvilinear distance as a relation between points, projecting in a lower dimension according to this relationship. This representation allows for linear separation of the non-separable high dimensional cluster data and the classification to a cluster of any successive unseen data point extracted from the same higher dimension.
A young, dusty, compact radio source within a Lyα halo

We report here on the discovery of a red quasar, J004929.4+351025.7 at a redshift of z = 2.48, situated within a large Lyα emission-line halo. The radio spectral energy distribution implies that the radio jets were triggered < 10 4 years prior to the time at which the object is observed, suggesting that the jet triggering of the active galactic nucleus is recent. The loosely biconical structure of the emission-line halo suggests that it is ionised by photons emitted by the central quasar nucleus and that the central nucleus is obscured by a dusty torus with Av � 3.0. The large spatial extent of the Lyα halo relative to the radio emission means this could only have occurred if the radio jets emerged from an already established highly-accreting black hole. This suggests that the radio-jet triggering is delayed with respect to the onset of accretion activity on to the central supermassive black hole.
Usefulness of the Vitreous Fluid Analysis in the Translational Research of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the major cause of acquired blindness in working-age adults. Current treatments for DR (laser photocoagulation, intravitreal corticosteroids, intravitreal antivascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) agents, and vitreo-retinal surgery) are applicable only at advanced stages of the disease and are associated with significant adverse effects. Therefore, new pharmacological treatments for the early stages of the disease are needed. Vitreous fluid obtained from diabetic patients undergoing vitreoretinal surgery is currently used to explore the events that are taking place in the retina for clinical research. However, several confounding factors such as vitreous haemorrhage and concentration of vitreous proteins should be considered in the analysis of the results. In this paper we will focus on the vitreous fluid as a tool for exploring the mediators of DR and in particular the molecules related to inflammatory pathways. In addition, their role in the pathogenesis of DR will be discussed. The usefulness of new technologies such as flow cytometry and proteomics in identifying new candidates involved in the inflammatory process that occurs in DR will be overviewed. Finally, a more personalized treatment based on vitreous fluid analysis aiming to reduce the burden associated with DR is suggested.
The Relationship between Spiritual Leadership and Quality of Work Life among Employees: Case Study of Education Offices in Mazandaran, Iran

In this study our purpose is to investigate the relationship between spiritual leadership and quality of work life among employees in Mazandaran, Iran. In this descriptive/correlational research, statistical population consists of all the employees of education offices in the West of Mazandaran Province. Of this, 140 subjects were randomly selected as study samples using cluster sampling method. To measure participants, we used Inventory of spiritual leadership developed by Fry et al. (2005), and a designed quality of work life questionnaire. Data were analyzed using Pearson correlation and multivariate regression analyses. According to the statistical results, we found a significant relationship between spiritual leadership (vision, altruistic love, faith, meaning, membership, organizational commitment, productivity) and quality of working life (p<0.01), and these seven variables together were able to explain 34% of variations in quality of working life. Among these predictors, “hope/faith” factor showed the highest effect on prediction of quality of working life among employees.
Arboviral Bottlenecks and Challenges to Maintaining Diversity and Fitness during Mosquito Transmission

The term arbovirus denotes viruses that are transmitted by arthropods, such as ticks, mosquitoes, and other biting arthropods. The infection of these vectors produces a certain set of evolutionary pressures on the virus; involving migration from the midgut, where the blood meal containing the virus is processed, to the salivary glands, in order to transmit the virus to the next host. During this process the virus is subject to numerous bottlenecks, stochastic events that significantly reduce the number of viral particles that are able to infect the next stage. This article reviews the latest research on the bottlenecks that occur in arboviruses and the way in which these affect the evolution and fitness of these viruses. In particular we focus on the latest research on three important arboviruses, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and Chikungunya viruses and compare the differing effects of the mosquito bottlenecks on these viruses as well as other evolutionary pressures that affect their evolution and transmission.
Measure of the Fractal Dimension of Islands in Epitaxial Thin Film Growth

We measure the fractal dimension of islands during epitaxial thin-film growth. The fractal dimension appears to depend on the ratio of the diffusion-to-deposition rates D/F and on the coverage of adatoms. For sufficiently large D/F , i.e., D/F ≥ 10, and for sufficiently low coverages, the fractal dimension appears to be similar to that of the diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) while for smaller D/F and low coverages it is found to be much smaller than the DLA fractal dimension. As the coverage is increased, the fractal dimension is found to increase monotonically up to the substrate dimension at the coverage of about 0.6 monolayer. The rate-equation solutions obtained using the measured fractal dimensions are also discussed.