Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Specific Communication Network Measure Distribution Estimation

Abstract : A new method is proposed to estimate the probability distribution of specific communication network measures. Real world communication networks are dynamic and vary based on an underlying social network, thus reliably estimating network measures is challenging. Two individuals that are socially connected may communicate several times one day, and not at all on another, yet their basic relationship remains unchanged. In this situation, estimates of network measures, such as density, degree centrality and others may be severely affected by the occurrence or absence of observed communication ties between individuals. The communication network of a group of mid-career Army officers is modeled from empirical data using the network probability matrix (NPM) proposed by McCulloh and Lospinoso (2007). The NPM provides a framework to model a communication network by estimating the edge probabilities between two individuals in a network. This framework can model a specific social group regardless of their network topology: random, small-world, scale-free, cellular, etc. Monte Carlo simulation is used with the NPM to generate 100,000 instances of the communication network. A statistical distribution is fit to the density measure. Using this probability distribution, statistically significant changes in density can be detected.
An Integrated DEA and Data Mining Approach for Performance Assessment

This paper presents a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model combined with Bootstrapping to assess performance of one of the Data mining Algorithms. We applied a two-step process for performance productivity analysis of insurance branches within a case study. First, using a DEA model, the study analyzes the productivity of eighteen decision-making units (DMUs). Using a Malmquist index, DEA determines the productivity scores but cannot give details of factors depend on regress and progress productivity. The proposed model presents anew latent variable radial input-oriented technology and simultaneously reduces inputs and undesirable outputs in a single multiple objective linear programming. On the other hand, classification and regression tree allow DMU to extract rules for exploring and discovering meaningful and hidden information from the vast databases. The results provide a set of rules that can be used by policy makers to explore reasons behind the progress and regress produc-tivities of DMUs.
Role of Thrombocytopenia as an Independent Prognostic Marker in the Critically Ill Patients with Multiorgan Failure

Background: Thrombocytopenia is the most common coagulation problem in the ICU with an incidence of 15 to 60% depending on the definition used, population evaluated, and period of ICU stay studied. Objective: The aim of this work is to detect the role of thrombocytopenia a predictor of bad outcome if associated with multiorgan failure. Study Design: The study included 50 patients (30 pts. in prospective group and 20 pts. in retrospective group) with multiorgan failure and thrombocytopenia whish was either present at admission or developed during ICU stay, and 20 patients in the control group with multirgan failure without thrombocytopenia. Results: Patients who developed thrombocytopenia during ICU stay, thrombocytopenia was a predictor of mortality (60%, 63% in both retrospective and prospective groups respectively versus 55% in the control group), associated with more stay in ICU, more duration of MV and high SOFA score. The reverse in patients who improved from thrombocytopenia. There was increase in mortality in patients who develop thrombocytopenia during hospital stay (79.2% in prospective group and 73% in retrospective group) but thrombocytopenia at admission may be improved or worsened so thrombocytopenia at admission wasn’t a predictor of mortality in our small size study. Conclusion: Thrombocytopenia could be used as independent prognostic marker ofin critically ill patients with multiorgan failure.
Is variation in brood sex ratios adaptive in the great tit (Parus major)

Life-history theory predicts skewed offspring sex ratios in a range of situations in which the costs and benefits of producing the two sexes differ. In recent years, many studies have demonstrated biased sex ratios in a variety of bird species. However, many of these investigations have been based on small sample sizes, on data from a single year, or both. Using a recently developed polymerase chain reaction-based molecular DNA technique, 912 great tit (Parus major) nestlings from 118 broods in 5 different years were sexed. As found in a number of previous studies on the same species, there were significant predictors of offspring sex ratio in individual years. However, there were no consistent trends across years, and none of the measured variables significantly predicted sex ratio over all years combined. Furthermore, brood sex ratio of the population did not depart from the expected binomial distribution. Although there are theoretical advantages to manipulating the sex ratio in this and other species, the physiological mechanism by which it is achieved in birds remains obscure. We argue that data from several years are needed to confirm whether facultative sex ratio manipulation is a consistent breeding strategy used by birds. Key words: great tits, molecular sexing, Parus major, sex ratios. [Behav Ecol 11:294–298 (2000)]
Title: Increasing thyroid cancer incidence in Queensland, Australia 1982-2008 – true increase or over-diagnosis? ABSTRACT: Background: Thyroid cancer incidence has been increasing worldwide. Some suggest greater ascertainment of indolent tumours is the only driver, but others suggest there has been 

Background: Thyroid cancer incidence has been increasing worldwide. Some suggest greater ascertainment of indolent tumours is the only driver, but others suggest there has been a true increase. Increases in Australia appear to have been among the largest in the world so we investigated incidence trends in the Australian state of Queensland to help understand reasons for the rise. Methods: Thyroid cancers diagnoses in Queensland 1982-2008 were ascertained from the Queensland Cancer Registry. We calculated age-standardized incidence rates (ASR) and used Poisson regression to estimate annual percentage change (APC) in thyroid cancer incidence by socio-demographic and tumour-related factors. Results: Thyroid cancer ASR in Queensland increased from 2.2 to 10.6/100,000 between 19822008 equating to an APC of 5.5% (95% Confidence Interval (CI) 4.7–6.4) in men and 6.1% (95%CI 5.5–6.6) in women. The rise was evident, and did not significantly differ, across socio-economic and remoteness-of-residence categories. The largest increase seen was in the papillary subtype in women (APC 7.9 %, 95%CI 7.3–8.5). Incidence of localized and more advanced-stage cancers rose over time although the increase was greater for early stage cancers. Conclusion: There has been a marked increase in thyroid cancer incidence in Queensland. The increase is evident in men and women across all adult age groups, socioeconomic strata and remoteness-of-residence categories as well as in localized and more advanced-stage cancers. Our results suggest ‘over-diagnosis’ may not entirely explain rising incidence. Contemporary etiological data and individual-level information about diagnostic circumstances are required to further understand reasons for rising thyroid cancer incidence.
Transformation Program of Co-operative Retail Store: Customer Satisfaction Analysis

Government Transformation Programme which was introduced in 2011 is expected to have a positive impact on the management of Coop Mart stores in Malaysia, including a co-operative grocery business under the Small Retailer Transformation Programme (TUKAR). TUKAR Program was introduced to change the traditional concept of a retail store to a more modern concept. Since its implementation there was no study conducted to see how customers’ views on the performance of co-operatives retail store under TUKAR program. Customer view is important to gauge their level of satisfaction towards TUKAR. Therefore, customer views before and after the transformation program is required to determine the actual level of customer satisfaction towards TUKAR program. Research was conducted and information obtained through a questionnaire from 510 (65.8 %) regular customers of Coop Mart store using stratified random sampling method. The results showed that there was an improvement in customer satisfaction in terms of location, additional services, product, amenities availability, trustworthiness, operational processes, value for money, staff attitude and personal services. This provides the evidence that the TUKAR program is successful, viable and should be continued by the government to all cooperatives in Malaysia as it has high potential to attract new customers.
INVESTMENT IN HUMAN CAPITAL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA

Education has a dual nature as both private consumption and investment process on the one hand and a social investment process on the other. The paper seeks to examine the concept and influence of education on sustainable development in Nigeria. To achieve this, the paper is structured into: abstract, introduction, conceptual clarification, challenges affecting education and economic growth, conclusion and recommendations. The paper revealed that there is a symbiotic nexus between human capital and sustainable national development. It is in the light of this that the paper advocates that federal government should provide funds for adequate production and provision of relevant teaching and research equipment in educational institutions.
A comparative study of neuropeptide Y-immunoreactivity in the retina of dolphin and several other mammalian species

Shur-Tzu Chen, Ching-Liang Shen, Jiang-Ping Wang and Lien-Siang Chou (1999) A comparative study of neuropeptide Y-immunoreactivity in the retina of dolphin and several other mammalian species. Zoological Studies 38(4): 416-422. The immunoreactivity of an antibody to neuropeptide Y (NPY) in the retina of striped (Stenella coeruleoalba) and Fraser (Lagenodelphis hosei ) dolphins and several other species was studied and compared. In dolphin retina, moderate to intense immunostaining was observed primarily in the giant retinal ganglion cells and their dendrite-like processes, while ganglion cells with smaller somata were only weakly immunoreactive. In contrast, NPY immunoreactive cell bodies are mainly located in cells with small somata in the ganglion cell layer and cells resembling amacrine cells in the inner nuclear layer in rat retina. Positive immunostaining was also observed in the inner and outer plexiform layers of rat retina, a feature that was not found in dolphin retina. Interestingly, the overall pattern of NPY expression in the retina of dolphin is similar to that in dog but not in rat, or other mammalian species described previously. One possible explanation is that dolphin and dog are more active by day as compared with rat and cat which are considered to be nocturnal. The variable pattern of distribution of NPY observed in different species suggests that NPY plays a unique functional role, for instance, in the demand for higher levels of blood supply for visual connections through the influence of NPY, in the retinal system in a species-dependent manner probably related to animals’ visual behaviors and environments.
A novel mutation of the GLI2 gene associated with body weight in bovine (Bos taurus) (Brief Report) Eine neue Mutation des GLI2 Gens assoziiert mit dem Körpergewicht bei Rindern (Bos taurus) (Brief Report)

Abstract. During pituitary gland development, the actions of transcription factors control the development of the hormone-producing cell types. Defects in transcription factor genes, including PIT1/POU1F1, PROP1, GLI2, HESX1, LHX3 , and LHX4 , are associated with combined pituitary hormone deficiency (CPHD) (SAVAGE et al. 2007). Removal of the mouse GLI2 gene by targeted disruption leads to an embryonic lethal phenotype with defects in early brain and spinal cord development, which include absence of the floor plate (MATISE et al. 1998). At present, no polymorphisms of GLI2 gene have been reported in bovine. In the present paper, partial 5’ flanking region, coding region and partially introns of GLI2 were screened to detect the SNPs in Chinese cattle breeds.
Kenmerken van jongeren met gedragsproblemen en samenhang met het voltooien van een residentiële behandeling

achtergrond Veel jongeren met een combinatie van psychiatrische stoornissen en gedragsproblematiek verlaten vroegtijdig de behandeling, waardoor ze niet de hulp krijgen die ze nodig hebben. doel Onderzoeken of sekse en aard en ernst van de klachten aan het begin van de behandeling voorspellende waarde hebben voor het voltooien van de behandeling. methode Met vragenlijsten (scl-90, ysr en cbcl) werd onder 127 jongeren die in een instelling voor ortho- en forensische jeugdpsychiatrie opgenomen waren, onderzocht of de gerapporteerde klachten aan het begin van de behandeling voorspellende waarde hebben voor het al dan niet voltooien van de behandeling. Voor dit onderzoek werden definities geformuleerd van de begrippen ‘drop-out’, ‘push-out’ en ‘behandelsucces’. resultaten De interbeoordelaarsbetrouwbaarheid van de definities drop-out en behandelsucces bleek voldoende tot goed, terwijl de betrouwbaarheid van het bepalen van pushout matig was. conclusie Uit de resultaten komt naar voren dat de vragenlijsten nauwelijks het volledig doorlopen van de behandeling konden voorspellen. Jongeren met meer ‘behandelsucces’ bleken aan het begin van de behandeling hoger op de subschaal ‘Hostiliteit’ (scl-90) te hebben gescoord, en meer meisjes dan jongens hadden een verbetering doorgemaakt.
A Large-Scale Optical Fiber Sensor Network With Reconfigurable Routing Path Functionality

A novel large-scale three-layer-ring optical fiber sensor network is proposed with reconfigurable routing functionality. To provide large-scale sensing region as hybrid star-ring architecture and to provide robust self-healing function to deal with large amount of fiber-link failures as mesh architecture, the proposed architecture utilizes optical switches (SW) and new type of remote nodes (RNs) to compose the entire system in three layers. In the first layer, several fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors connect each other to compose a sensing subnet. In the second layer, several FBG sensing subnets connect each other by SWs to form the ringed sensing regions. In the third layer, each sensing region connects with central office by RNs. When fiber-link failure occurs in the system, the proposed three-layer-ring architecture can immediately restore the sensing signals by changing the status of the SWs and RNs in the sensing network. According to the simulation results, the proposed three-layer-ring architecture can completely restore the sensing signals when there are up to four break points occurring in a sensing region at the same time. The observed optical spectra of the received optical sensing signals in CO are roughly identical when the proposed architecture has no fiber-link failure or has up to four breakpoints.
Acoustic Scene Classification Using Efficient Summary Statistics and Multiple Spectro-Temporal Descriptor Fusion

This paper presents a novel approach for acoustic scene classification based on efficient acoustic feature extraction using spectro-temporal descriptors fusion. Grounded on the finding in neuroscience—“auditory system summarizes the temporal details of sounds using time-averaged statistics to understand acoustic scenes”, we devise an efficient computational framework for sound scene classification by using multipe time-frequency descriptors fusion with discriminant information enhancement. To characterize rich information of sound, i.e., local structures on the time-frequency plane, we adopt 2-dimensional local descriptors. A more critical issue raised in how to logically ‘summarize’ those local details into a compact feature vector for scene classification. Although ‘time-averaged statistics’ is suggested by the psychological investigation, directly computing time average of local acoustic features is not a logical way, since arithmetic mean is vulnerable to extreme values which are anticipated to be generated by interference sounds which are irrelevant to the scene category. To tackle this problem, we develop time-frame weighting approach to enhance sound textures as well as to suppress scene-irrelevant events. Subsequently, robust acoustic feature for scene classification can be efficiently characterized. The proposed method had been validated by using Rouen dataset which consists of 19 acoustic scene categories with 3029 real samples. Extensive results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
The image of immigration in fiction broadcast on prime-time television in Spain

El articulo describe los resultados de una investigacion de analisis de contenido sobre la imagen de los inmigrantes en los programas de ficcion emitidos en el horario de prime time de television en Espana, basado en la teoria de cultivo y la investigacion sobre las minorias etnicas en los medios de comunicacion. Los datos permiten concluir que existe una infra-representacion de los personajes inmigrantes, y tambien se observa que estos tienden a ser representadosde manera negativa reforzando los estereotipos sobre los inmigrantes. Se discuten los resultados en relacion con el papel que podria desempenar la ficcion televisiva en la reduccion de los prejuicios a traves del contacto mediado intergrupal (Park, 2012)
Collocation and knowledge production in an academic discourse community

This paper analyses the discourse of science and technology through the study of lexical and grammatical co-selection in research articles. The corpus comprises 1,376 articles, from specialist leading journals (a total of 6,104,323 tokens, 71,516 types, and 1.17 type/token ratio). The main criterion for choosing these journal articles for our corpus is that they are written by the members of the academic discourse community of the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia. The research follows on work by Gledhill (2000) who analysed the most frequent collocations in a corpus of pharmaceutical research articles and proposed possible functions for these collocations. However, this paper takes a more lexico-grammatical approach to collocations as a system of preferred expressions of knowledge in scientific research. The concept of collocation used here is in the Hallidayan tradition as an intermediate level between syntax and lexis, which focuses on recurrent word patterns (Hunston & Francis, 2000). The paper’s ultimate objective is to show that collocations as a system of preferred expressions of knowledge in scientific research can help us to analyse knowledge produced in our academic discourse community.
Full Downwind Turbine Simulations Using Actuator Line Method

In the present work the actuator line (AL) technique is proposed to model a complete wind turbine (rotor and tower) in downwind configuration. The case study used is the Unsteady Aerodynamics Experiment (UAE) Phase VI turbine to analyze its suitability in capturing the tower shadow effect. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations were carried out using the open-source code OpenFOAM and the class of horizontal wind turbine AL from the toolbox SOWFA developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The objective of the present work is to validate the use of AL model for tower simulations and to establish whether such simplification is valid to capture the effect that tower shadow exerts over the rotor aerodynamics and to verify the accuracy of the proposed model regarding prediction of loads in the rotor. Computations were done first on an isolated rotor modelled with the AL technique; second on a full downwind turbine with AL in both rotor and tower; and, finally, on a 3D rotor with AL tower. Numerical results show good agreement with the experimental data concluding that the AL model is capable of a fast and accurate load prediction under certain conditions.
Comparison of the calorimetric and kinematic methods of neutrino energy reconstruction in disappearance experiments

To be able to achieve their physics goals, future neutrino-oscillation experiments will need to reconstruct the neutrino energy with very high accuracy. In this work, we analyze how the energy reconstruction may be affected by realistic detection capabilities, such as energy resolutions, efficiencies, and thresholds. This allows us to estimate how well the detector performance needs to be determined a priori in order to avoid a sizable bias in the measurement of the relevant oscillation parameters. We compare the kinematic and calorimetric methods of energy reconstruction in the context of two ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}$ disappearance experiments operating in different energy regimes. For the calorimetric reconstruction method, we find that the detector performance has to be estimated with an $\mathcal{O}(10%)$ accuracy to avoid a significant bias in the extracted oscillation parameters. On the other hand, in the case of kinematic energy reconstruction, we observe that the results exhibit less sensitivity to an overestimation of the detector capabilities.
Everyday listening to auditory displays: lessons from acoustic ecology.

In order to design auditory displays that function well within the cultural, informational and acoustic ecology of everyday situations designers as well as researchers in psychoacoustics need to continue to gain a better understanding of how listeners hear and make sense of information in more ecological settings and outside the lab! In this paper the authors present a preliminary study that builds on past work and theoretical ideas from acoustic ecology, exploring the practice of everyday listening in settings containing auditory displays. This pilot study involves 10 participants who are asked to listen to two separate soundscapes and describe in three tasks, both verbally and in writing, what they hear and how they make sense of these aural environments. The results suggest directions for understanding everyday listening form a holistic perspective in order to inform both the design of auditory displays, and the development of other research tools and instruments for measuring auditory perception ecologically. The bigger study which involves 100 participants has been completed and is expected to be published shortly as a journal article.
Variation and Reduction as Aspects of Competence in Language Development

AN E X P L A N A T I O N of what children know about language when they begin to use multiword utterances is a central concern in the study of child language. Two specific aspects of early sentences were investigated in this study: apparent constraint on length and the developmental interaction among grammatical complexity, lexical and discourse factors. In early child speech, first sentences are two words long, and sentences get longer as the child's acquisition of grammar increases. However, although utterance length is correlated with increased grammatical maturity up to a ceiling of about 4.0 morphemes, utterance length, per se, is not an index of the complexity of child sentences. Two-word utterances, for example, can represent a variety of relationships between constituents — compare "a book," "Daddy book," "new book," "read book," and "book table. " It is reasonable that an explanation of why the child is limited to two or three words at a time, and how circumstances that influence sentence length and complexity change over time so that longer utterances occur, will contribute to an understanding of the linguistic system that children learn for coding information in multiword messages. There are three main issues in the present study. The first has to do with the relative adequacy of different explanations of child language — pragmatic, semantic, action-based, or grammatical — in accounting for the variable