Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Visual Trend Analytics in Digital Libraries

The early awareness of upcoming trends in technology enables a more goal-directed and efficient way for deciding future strategic directions in enterprises and research. Possible sources for this valuable information are ubiquitously and freely available in the Web, e.g. news services, companies’ reports, social media platforms and blog infrastructures. To support users in handling these information sources and to keep track of the newest developments, current information systems make intensively use of information retrieval methods that extract relevant information out of the mass amount of data. The related information systems are commonly focused on providing users with easy access to information of their interest and deal with the access to information items and resources [1], but they neither provide an overview of the content nor enable the exploration of emerging or decreasing trends for inferring possible future innovations. The gathering and analysis of this continuously increasing knowledge pool is a very tedious and time-consuming task and borders on the limits of manual feasibility. The interactive overview on data, the continuous changes in data, and the ability to explore data and gain insights are sufficiently supported by Visual Analytics and information visualization approaches, whereas the appliance of such approach in combination with trend analysis are rarely propagated. In fact, these so-called early signals require not only an analysis through machine learning techniques to identify emerging trends, but also human interaction and intervention to adapt the parameters used to their own needs [2]. There are two main aspects to consider in the analysis process:
T Cells Develop Normally in the Absence of both Deltex1 and Deltex2 (cid:1) ‡

Deltex1, Deltex2, and Deltex4 form a family of related proteins that are the mammalian homologues of Drosophila Deltex, a known regulator of Notch signals. Deltex1 is highly induced by Notch signaling in thymocytes, and overexpression of Deltex1 in T-cell progenitors can block Notch signals, suggesting that Deltex1 may play an important role in regulating Notch signals during T-cell development. A recent report found that T cells develop normally in mice carrying a targeted deletion in the Deltex1 gene (S. Storck, F. Delbos, N. Stadler, C. Thirion-Delalande, F. Bernex, C. Verthuy, P. Ferrier, J. C. Weill, and C. A. Reynaud, Mol. Cell. Biol. 25: 1437–1445, 2005), suggesting that other Deltex homologues may compensate in Deltex1- deﬁcient T cells. We generated mice that lack expression of both Deltex1 and Deltex2 by gene targeting and further reduced expression of Deltex4 in Deltex1/Deltex2 double-deﬁcient T-cell progenitors using RNA interference. Using a sensitive in vitro assay, we found that Notch signaling is more potent in cells expressing lower levels of Deltex proteins. Nevertheless, we were unable to detect any signiﬁcant defects in thymocyte maturation in Deltex1/Deltex2 double-knockout mice.
Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Managing Seller Heterogeneity in a Competitive Marketplace Managing Seller Heterogeneity in a Competitive Marketplace

The growth of online marketplaces is accompanied by significant heterogeneity of the third-party sellers. The marketplace owner often applies policies that favor the sellers who offer higher values to buyers, which puts the lower-value sellers at an even greater disadvantage. This leads to the phenomenon of Matthew Effect. Our study focuses on a marketplace owner’s policy in managing seller heterogeneity and analyzes Matthew Effect in a competitive market environment. By extending the circular city model, we analytically examine the price competition among a large number of sellers that differ both in variety and in their value offerings. We present the closed-form equilibrium solution for the sellers’ pricing strategies, which illustrates the ripple effect that exerts competitive pressure from seller to seller at a diminishing magnitude. Furthermore, we show that, by providing each seller with the support that enhances its value offering proportionally, the marketplace owner further sharpens seller heterogeneity and creates Matthew Effect. This results in an increased profit for the marketplace owner and improved consumer surplus. The optimal level of such value-based support is dependent on the distribution of the sellers’ values and the buyers’ horizontal preferences. Our findings suggest that Matthew Effect improves social welfare by increasing the total profits of sellers and the marketplace owner, as well as the consumer surplus; moreover, it creates business opportunities for new sellers in the online marketplace.
Feedback Informed Treatment: Clinical and Cost Implications

Psychotherapy research has been dominated by the question, “does this treatment work? ” However, in the quest to determine specific treatment effectiveness, the issue of cost has been largely ignored. Given the current economic climate of limited resources, agencies and providers are being asked to do more with less and document that what they are doing is working. Feedback Informed Treatment is a meta-level platform to treatment delivery in which outcomes are monitored on a session-by-session basis to track progress so treatment can modified if the current approach is not working. More specifically, FIT takes into account the two factors consistently shown to be related to be predictive of outcome: 1) strength of the alliance (from the client’s perspective) and 2) early change in the therapeutic process. This report briefly provides a rationale for the use of FIT as well how it might be applied in practice.
A Poisson scaling approach to backward wave propagation in a tube

A mathematical analysis of wave propagation along an elastic cylindrical tube is presented, with the aim of determining the range of Poisson’s ratio for which backward wave propagation (i.e. at negative group velocity) can occur near the ring frequency. This range includes zero Poisson’s ratio and a surrounding interval of positive and negative values, whose width depends on the thickness of the tube. The whole range of Poisson’s ratio is considered, so that the work applies to modern materials, e.g. composites. All results are presented in simple analytic form by means of a dominant balance in parameter space. The identification of this balance, which is unique, is a main new result in the paper, which makes possible a new type of shell theory based on ‘Poisson scaling’. The mathematical approach is deductive from the equations of motion, rather than being based on kinematic hypotheses. A key finding, accessible via the Poisson scaling, is that the regime of negative group velocities extends to high wavenumbers, while being confined to a narrow band of frequencies. Thus responses localized in space are possible for near-monochromatic forcing, an important fact for nonlinear theories of tube dynamics near the ring frequency. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Wave generation and transmission in multi-scale complex media and structured metamaterials (part 1)’.
Decay of waves in strain gradient porous elasticity with Moore–Gibson–Thompson dissipation

We study a one-dimensional problem arising in strain gradient porous-elasticity. Three different Moore–Gibson–Thompson dissipation mechanisms are considered: viscosity and hyperviscosity on the displacements, and weak viscoporosity. The existence and uniqueness of solutions are proved. The energy decay is also shown, being polynomial for the two first situations, unless a particular choice of the constitutive parameters is made in the hyperviscosity case. Finally, for the weak viscoporosity, only the slow decay can be expected. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Wave generation and transmission in multi-scale complex media and structured metamaterials (part 1)’.
Setting a Research Framework for Digital Transformation Role in Enabling Successful Entrepreneurship in Egypt

Digital Transformation (DX) is achieved through utilizing digital technology in enabling innovative business models and creating new experiences for beneficiaries and end-users. It is becoming a global trend in all business domains and all sizes of business. DX is becoming increasingly crucial in entrepreneurship and in creating successful startups. The paper aims to set a research framework for studying the role of digital technologies and digital capabilities in enabling the performance of entrepreneurial startups. Based on prior studies, the paper explores research results on the impact of startups’ digital orientation and digital capability adoption that includes data collected from different sectors and business domains from different parts of the world. Literature review shall help identify the key variables related to digital transformation adoption, as well as setting a framework for measuring startups’ performance and growth as a dependent variable. The paper has the ultimate objective of applying the research framework to the Egyptian market. The global findings are compared with the literature related to the Egyptian technology entrepreneurs.
mira: an Application Containerisation Pipeline for Small Software Development Teams in Low Resource Settings

Cloud native applications leverage Development and Operation (DevOps), microservice architectures and containerisation for primarily availability, resilience and scalability reasons. Small developer teams in low resource settings have unique DevOps needs and harnessing its principles and practices is technically challenging and distinctly difficult in these contexts. We conducted a survey with professional developers, students and researchers situated and working in a low resource setting and the results indicate that these principles and practices are relatively new. In application containerisation, an operating system virtualisation method that can significantly optimize the use of computing resources, the respondents indicated challenges in the process steps. Particularly, small developer teams in low resource settings require custom tools and abstractions for software development and delivery automation. Informed by the developer needs, we designed and developed a custom automated containerisation pipeline, mira, for a managed cloud native platform situated in a low-resource setting. We validate mira against 6 major application frameworks, tools and/or languages and successful deployment of the resultant applications onto a cloud native platform.
Blockchain Analytics Reference Architecture for FinTech - A Positioning Paper: Advancing FinTech with Blockchain, Data Analytics, and Enterprise Architecture

Financial services industry is one of the highly impacted industries with what is currently happening in the digital economy due to the “Digital Transformation” wave derived by the rapid evolution of the “Disruptive Emerging Technologies”. “FinTech” is the current dominating trend describing the role played by these technologies in the financial services industry. Although all financial sectors are affected, the insurance sector had been much disrupted due to not only the severe competition but also due to its data sensitivity and dependability. This makes insurance companies in an urgent need for the transparency and trust as well as the need to be “Data-Driven Enterprises” that competes through a “Data-Centric Strategy” that utilizes the power of “Big Data”. This made the “InsurTech” to become a standalone trend recently. The Blockchain technology can provide transparency and trust. However, having an "Enterprise-Wide Analytics" capability is the key strategic enabler to this needed data-centric strategy to make informed decisions that are inspired by data. Not to mention the competitive advantage that results from the synergistic effect of building a "Blockchain Analytics" capability specifically. Furthermore, many digital transformation initiatives are chaotic, Blockchain technology is under critical development and analytics is so time and money consuming. Traceability to strategic objectives are missing or implicit and no standardization is available. Something is needed to navigate these challenges and achieve this ambitious transformative vision. This paper will explain how “Value-Driven Enterprise Architecture”, with the “TOGAF” and the “Capability-Based Planning” technique, as a discipline and the “ArchiMate” as a modelling framework can provide a master blueprint for designing a “Blockchain Analytics" solution within an "Enterprise Wide Analytics" capability following the latest standards of the “Enterprise Data Lakes”. This blueprint will make the traceability to the strategic objectives explicit and provide the basis for the needed standardization. This paper cab be considered as a positioning paper that try to propose a vision for new research lines about this topic, which can be validated, enhanced, and extended through further empirical research projects in the future.
Open Source Software Digital Sociology: Engineering Open Source Software Ecosystem for Impact and Sustainability

Open source Software (OSS) ecosystems have had a tremendous impact on computing and society, while their sustainability poses great challenges to both practitioners and researchers. We utilize vast collections of open data produced by distributed version control and social media to discover the mechanisms by which such ecosystems form and operate, which we call open source software sociology.
Building on Success – Beyond the Obvious: A Closer Look at Good Enough Testing

On a regular basis I have in recent years delivered an evolving keynote presentation under the title “Building on success – Beyond the obvious”. During this keynote I try indicate which basic testing practices are, based on my personal experiences, often key and sometimes even sufficient to “survive” in real-life projects. Being honest and looking at day-to-day practice, I often notice that many structured testing practices, as defined by TMap [1], TMMi [2] and/or ISTQB [3], are not, or at most partly, applied. I often encounter a meaningless test plan, test design techniques not being applied, reviews not being performed and testers not trained and prepared for their job. And this being is the case more than 30 years after releasing the best-seller “Testing according to TMap”, and also more than 20 years after releasing the basic ISTQB Foundations in Software Testing syllabus! The contradiction here is that despite not applying the proposed testing practices most of us are still releasing systems. However, the release is often (a bit) too late, at much higher costs and often not fully according the expectations. At the project retrospective, management typically at first firmly state they are unsatisfied with the result and the situation, and performance shall be better next time. In practice, next time nothing has changed and often it is the same result and situation. I can only conclude that this is apparently acceptable to the management since they don't really act (although they say differently). My personal observation is that there is a sort of minimum set of testing practice and that there are often in practice just enough to get the job done in a project. In this paper, we will explore and present a minimum set of testing practices starting from the concept of “good enough testing”.
Service Quality & Its Impact on Customer Loyalty: A Study on Tripenda Hotels Pvt. Ltd.

Customer loyalty is particularly important to the hotel industry, because most hotel industry segments are mature and competition is strong. Often there is little differentiation among products in the same segment. (Bowen and Shoemaker, 2003). Managing Customer loyalty through a customer relationship approach has become a significant marketing strategy given most of services which hotels offer, are intangible. It is difficult to differentiate themselves from other competitors. Because of this, hotels have been making an effort to succeed in the industry by improving service quality and the service itself in order to maximize the customers’ satisfaction and ensure guests become “loyal guests”. O’Malley and Prothero (2004) have defined that the purpose of relationship marketing is to create, extend and keep the relationships with customers and other stakeholders. Because of this fact, customer loyalty as relationship marketing is significant. Barsky and Nash (2002) mentioned that the emotions a guest feels during a hotel stay are vital components of satisfaction and loyalty. However it is important to recognize the difference between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Total protein staining with Congo red as an alternative loading control for western blot analysis

ABSTRACT For western blot analysis, a housekeeping protein, such as β-actin or glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, is used as loading control with the assumption that these proteins are stable. In practice, these internal loading control proteins vary with different cell states and tissue types. These internal standards are not appropriate for use with serum, extracellular secretion, cerebrospinal fluid analysis or for protein purification. We investigated total protein measurement using Congo red staining and found it to be a superior alternative to routine loading controls. Advantages include lower cost, technical simplicity and improved linear regression. We propose using Congo red staining for total protein immunoblotting to evaluate protein loading in western blots.
Fluid deformation in isotropic Darcy flow

Abstract The deformation of fluid elements governs many processes in porous media, including the transport, dispersion and mixing of solutes, chemical reactions and colloidal particles. Recently, it has been shown that even in strongly heterogeneous porous media, steady three-dimensional (3-D) Darcy flow with isotropic hydraulic conductivity admits only constrained kinematics. This is due to its inherently helicity-free nature, as the velocity is everywhere orthogonal to the vorticity. This property precludes braided streamlines and instead admits a pair of coherent 3-D streamfunctions, and the streamlines cannot wander freely throughout the flow domain. In this study, we consider the impact of these kinematic constraints upon fluid deformation at the Darcy scale. We show that the helicity-free condition corresponds to an orthogonal 3-D streamline coordinate system, which we use to derive an ab initio continuous time random walk framework for fluid deformation. We find that the helicity-free condition combined with the intermittent nature of shear events leads to fluid deformation that is limited to algebraic growth, with stretching ranging from sublinear to superlinear behaviour. Fluid deformation in 3-D isotropic Darcy flow is remarkably similar to that of two-dimensional (2-D) Darcy flow, and the structure of 3-D Darcy flow is fundamentally the same as two superposed 2-D Darcy flows. These results have implications for understanding flow and transport in heterogeneous porous media, and provide a basis for quantification of mixing and dispersion in isotropic 3-D Darcy flow.
Transcriptome profiling and RNA interference reveals relevant detoxification genes in Monochamus alternatus response to (+)‐α‐pinene

Understanding the mechanism of insect resistance to toxic effects of phytochemicals can provide an insight into plant–herbivore interactions. Monochamus alternatus Hope, a main vector of pine wood nematode (Bursaphelenchus xylophilus), prefers to infest masson pine (Pinus massoniana Lamb) and causes huge economic and environmental losses. α‐Pinene is the primary component of resin produced by masson pine and plays a crucial role in defending against herbivorous insects, but its defensive effects on M. alternatus larvae are barely known. Here, we explored the physiological metabolism in M. alternatus larvae that were fumigated with (+)‐α‐pinene, (‐)‐α‐pinene, β‐pinene, (R)‐(+)‐limonene, myrcene and (‐)‐α‐phellandrene. (+)‐α‐Pinene showed the highest fumigant toxicity to M. alternatus larvae among these monoterpenes, and the fourth instar larvae possessed the highest resistance to this compound at the larval stage. Comparative transcriptome analysis detected 423 up‐regulated and 311 down‐regulated genes in the larvae fumigated with (+)‐α‐pinene, which were mainly related to detoxification, energy and protein metabolism. Among the differentially expressed genes encoding for detoxification enzymes, 14 P450s, 13 UGTs, 1GSTs and 3ABCs were dramatically up‐regulated in the larvae fumigated with (+)‐α‐pinene. Silencing of P450s via RNA interference led to an increased mortality in the larval fumigated with (+)‐α‐pinene. Piperonyl butoxide exposure significantly increased the mortality and inhibited the expressions of P450s, UGTs and ABCs in the larvae fumigated with (+)‐α‐pinene. These results suggested an important role of P450s in the resistance of M. alternatus larvae to (+)‐α‐pinene fumigation, which may facilitate the understanding of terpenoid detoxification in M. alternatus larvae.
Integración de arquitectura de software en el ciclo de vida de las metodologías ágiles

Las metodologías Ágiles se centran en el trabajo en equipo, la adaptabilidad y colaboración dentro del grupo de software y también entre los miembros del grupo y los usuarios finales. El uso de las Metodologías Ágiles (MA), ha marcado una tendencia [1] en su adopción al desarrollo de proyectos de software dado las necesidades cambiantes y la espera de beneficios en el menor tiempo posible. En general, pero también desde la perspectiva de los requisitos, esto hace que las MA, típicamente eviten un trabajo inicial sustancial, suponiendo que los requisitos siempre cambian y continúan cambiando a lo largo del ciclo de vida del proyecto. La Arquitectura de Software (AR), en tanto, es una manifestación de decisiones de etapas muy tempranas del diseño sobre un sistema [2]. Estas decisiones tempranas llevan un peso importante con respecto al desarrollo del resto de un sistema, ya que condicionan otras decisiones que siguen, y en el caso de cambios, implican ramificaciones posteriores. Esto supone una captura de requisitos que no tengan cambios sustanciales en las etapas intermedias y finales del desarrollo de un proyecto. Este tratamiento con enfoques diferentes en las primeras etapas (y también en otros aspectos), ha sido uno de los factores que ha causado la sensación de que las MA y la AS van en direcciones diferentes y no pueden coexistir juntas [3]. Sin embargo, en los últimos cinco años esta tendencia esta cambiando [4,5], hasta el punto que ha surgido el concepto “Arquitectura Ágil” (AA). En la AA, se enfatiza fuertemente en el concepto de los “Requisitos Significantes para la Arquitectura” (RSA) o “Architecturally Significant Requirement” ASR, por sus siglas en inglés. En ese sentido, esta línea de investigación tiene como objetivo indagar y validar el alcance de hasta dónde pueden confluir la AS con las MA, poniendo foco en la captura de requisitos y en los procesos de identificación de los RSA.
Holomorphic equivariant cohomology of Atiyah algebroids and localization

In a previous paper we developed an equivariant cohomology theory associated to a set of data formed by a diﬀerentiable manifold M carrying the action of a Lie group G , and a Lie algebroid A on M equipped with a compatible inﬁnitesimal action of G . We also obtained a localization formula for a twisted version of this cohomology, and from it, a Bott-type formula. In this paper we slightly modify that theory to obtain a localization formula for an equivariant cohomology associated to an equivariant holomorphic vector bundle. This formula encompasses many residues formulas in complex geometry, in particular we shall show that it admits as a special case Carrell-Lieberman’s residue formula [7, 6].