Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Product Assortment Changes on Customer Retention

This research investigates the impact of a large-scale assortment reduction on customer retention, utilizing a model we develop to explore the effect on sales at both the store level and the category level simultaneously. We apply our model to a data set provided by an online grocer. The data contain detailed household purchase records for every category in the store. Our results indicate that the reduction in assortment reduces overall store sales, a result that contrasts with that of all of the recent studies on assortment reductions Food Marketing Institute. 1993. Variety or duplication: A process to know where you stand. Prepared by Willard Bishop Consulting and Information resources, Inc., in cooperation with Frito Lay; Dreze, Xavier, Stephen J. Hoch, Mary E. Purk. 1994. Shelf management and space elasticity. J. Retailing704 301-326; Broniarczyk, Susan M. , Wayne D. Hoyer, Leigh McAlister. 1998. Consumers' perceptions of the assortment offered in a grocery category: The impact of item reduction. J. Marketing Res.35May 166-176; Boatwright, Peter, Joseph C. Nunes. 2001. Reducing assortment: An attribute-based approach. J. Marketing65July 50-63; Boatwright, Peter, Joseph C. Nunes. 2004. Correction note for "Reducing assortment: An attribute-based approach. " J. Marketing. Forthcoming. We find the reduction had a negative effect on both shopping frequency and purchase quantity, and we find that the decline in shopping frequency resulted in a greater loss than did the reduction in purchase quantities. We also find that the impact of the assortment cut varies widely by category, with less-frequently purchased categories more adversely affected. The variation in the assortment reduction's impact across categories suggests that managers compare select categories in order to moderate the overall loss in sales.
Designing and Implementing Cooperative Services

Cooperative services are an increasingly popular way to deploy applications. In these services, computers controlled by different entities are supposed to work together to achieve a common goal, such as file-sharing [6, 12], mesh routing [2], and peer-to-peer backup [1, 7]. The resulting systems can be more fault-tolerant, scalable, and less expensive than traditional client-server approaches. However, a cooperative service may never see these benefits if it does not tolerate Byzantine users who may disrupt the service or selfish ones who may try to use it without contributing their fair share. One of the key challenges in designing a cooperative service is ensuring that participants actually cooperate. Several deployed applications [6, 12] and research prototypes [7, 17] include incentives and punishments to encourage cooperation. However, selfish participants still frequently find ways to cheat. For example, in the KaZaA [12] network almost half the users falsify their contributions by using a hacked binary [13]. In BitTorrent [6], researchers have found ways to free-ride [19]. These vulnerabilities are symptoms of a deeper problem: almost no cooperative service rigorously shows that its incentives and punishments are sufficient to induce cooperation. In my research, I aim to build cooperative systems that tolerate the actions of Byzantine users while removing incentives for selfish users to cheat. In this adversarial environment, constructing systems that work well and are robust requires me to step back and forth between practice and theory, something that distinguishes my research from that of many others who design these systems. I believe that pursuing the practice-theory cycle—letting practice guide theory and vice versa—is necessary in building robust and practical systems. This approach requires me to be persistent, resourceful, and creative. Drawing upon these traits and my training so far, I plan to i) develop the theoretical framework necessary to reason about selfish and Byzantine behaviors in cooperative services, ii) design efficient and scalable mechanisms in this framework to address practical issues in building real services, and iii) implement large-scale prototypes that are competitive with if not better than existing less robust works.
Automatic Keyphrase Extractor from Arabic Documents

The keyphrase is a sentence or a part of a sentence that contains a sequence of words that expresses the meaning and the purpose of any given paragraph. Keyphrase extraction is the task of identifying the possible keyphrases from a given document. Many applications including text summarization, indexing, and characterization use keyphrase extraction. Also, it is an essential task to improve the performance of any information retrieval system. The internet contains a massive amount of documents that may have been manually assigned keyphrases or not. The Arabic language is an important language in the world. Nowadays the number of online Arabic documents is growing rapidly; and most of them have no manually assigned keyphrases, so the user will scan the whole retrieved web documents. To avoid scanning the entire retrieved document, we need keyphrases assigned to each web document manually or automatically. This paper addresses the problem of identifying keyphrases in Arabic documents automatically. In this work, we provide a novel algorithm that identified keyphrases from Arabic text. The new algorithm, Automatic Keyphrases Extraction from Arabic (AKEA), extracts keyphrases from Arabic documents automatically. In order to test the algorithm, we collected a dataset containing 100 documents from Arabic wiki; also, we downloaded another 56 agricultural documents from Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (F.A.O.). The evaluation results show that the system achieves 83% precision value in identifying 2-word and 3-word keyphrases from agricultural domains.
Secure Social Recommendation based on Secret Sharing

Nowadays, privacy preserving machine learning has been drawing much attention in both industry and academy. Meanwhile, recommender systems have been extensively adopted by many commercial platforms (e.g. Amazon) and they are mainly built based on user-item interactions. Besides, social platforms (e.g. Facebook) have rich resources of user social information. It is well known that social information, which is rich on social platforms such as Facebook, are useful to recommender systems. It is anticipated to combine the social information with the user-item ratings to improve the overall recommendation performance. Most existing recommendation models are built based on the assumptions that the social information are available. However, different platforms are usually reluctant to (or cannot) share their data due to certain concerns. In this paper, we first propose a SEcure SOcial RECommendation (SeSoRec) framework which can (1) collaboratively mine knowledge from social platform to improve the recommendation performance of the rating platform, and (2) securely keep the raw data of both platforms. We then propose a Secret Sharing based Matrix Multiplication (SSMM) protocol to optimize SeSoRec and prove its correctness and security theoretically. By applying minibatch gradient descent, SeSoRec has linear time complexities in terms of both computation and communication. The comprehensive experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SeSoRec and SSMM.
An Attempt Towards Lab And Clinical Combine Appraised, Including Future Concerns Regarding Dengue Infection.

BACKGROUND Dengue infection is a deadly global pandemic due to its fatal nature, being emerged from mild stage to turn into more severe stages and consequently causing casualties. it upsurges various phases, namely subclinical infection, undifferentiated febrile fever, Dengue fever (DF) and devastating states which often ends to life, they are Dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF) and Dengue shock syndrome (DSS). Dengue infection is a mosquito born disease which has engulfed many regions in general and tropical zone in particular, causing many casualties and has posed a threat to humanity, demanding strategies to resolve the global issue. It is reported that 50-200 million people fall prey to it globally by dint of its causative agents and imperative to mention that over proportional are the minor among the victims. Because of awful joint pain dengue fever is also named break bone fever. The common indicator in infected individuals is thrombocytopenia, coagulopathy and vasculopathy. Apart from supportive therapy, no aphoristic therapy has been introduced so far, however care may prove rescuer. Timely prognosis thwarts to enter it in deteriorating phase. METHODS In the list of laboratory diagnosis virus serology and detection of Ribonucleic acid are primed. In general, there's no specific decisive diagnostic biomarker present through which accurate and prompt prognosis can possible during the entire patient presentation time, particularly in case of secondary dengue infection. Although, through the advancement and commercialization of point-care combined tests, capable of tracking disease markers present during various phases of infection (viral non-structural protein 1 and immunoglobulin M), such evaluation massively improved the treatment through lab-based. CONCLUSIONS Despite such improvements, major hurdles persist in the clinical management of patients with dengue infection, particularly lack of dependable biomarkers that have an efficacious prognostic gauge to predict steady progress to severe disease. In the described review both clinical and laboratory diagnosis of dengue infection has been highlighted, including concern regarding future accessibility.
The Role of Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia: Nosematidae) in Honey Bee Colony Losses and Current Insights on Treatment

Honeybee populations have locally and temporally declined in the last few years because of both biotic and abiotic factors. Among the latter, one of the most important reasons is infection by the microsporidia Nosema ceranae, which is the etiological agent of type C nosemosis. This species was first described in Asian honeybees (Apis cerana). Nowadays, domestic honeybees (Apis mellifera) worldwide are also becoming infected due to globalization. Type C nosemosis can be asymptomatic or can cause important damage to bees, such as changes in temporal polyethism, energy and oxidative stress, immunity loss, and decreased average life expectancy. It causes drastic reductions in workers, numbers of broods, and honey production, finally leading to colony loss. Common treatment is based on fumagillin, an antibiotic with side effects and relatively poor efficiency, which is banned in the European Union. Natural products, probiotics, food supplements, nutraceuticals, and other veterinary drugs are currently under study and might represent alternative treatments. Prophylaxis and management of affected colonies are essential to control the disease. While N. ceranae is one potential cause of bee losses in a colony, other factors must also be considered, especially synergies between microsporidia and the use of insecticides.
Decentralized Coded Caching Attains Order-Optimal Memory-Rate Tradeoff

Replicating or caching popular content in memories distributed across the network is a technique to reduce peak network loads. Conventionally, the main performance gain of this caching was thought to result from making part of the requested data available closer to end-users. Instead, we recently showed that a much more significant gain can be achieved by using caches to create coded-multicasting opportunities, even for users with different demands, through coding across data streams. These coded-multicasting opportunities are enabled by careful content overlap at the various caches in the network, created by a central coordinating server. In many scenarios, such a central coordinating server may not be available, raising the question if this multicasting gain can still be achieved in a more decentralized setting. In this paper, we propose an efficient caching scheme, in which the content placement is performed in a decentralized manner. In other words, no coordination is required for the content placement. Despite this lack of coordination, the proposed scheme is nevertheless able to create coded-multicasting opportunities and achieves a rate close to the optimal centralized scheme.
Exploring the lives of youth in the BPO sector: Findings from a study in Gurgaon

This report is the result of a project entitled " Personal competencies, social network and risk taking: Understanding emerging issues among youth in BPOs " undertaken as part of the Health and Population Innovation Fellowship (HPIF) awarded to the author in 2005. The HPIF programme is administered by the Population Council, New Delhi and is a continuation of the MacArthur Foundation's Fund for Leadership Development (FLD) fellowship programme that continued over the period 1995 to 2004. The Council is grateful to the MacArthur Foundation for its support to this programme. The HPIF programme aims to support mid-career individuals who have innovative ideas, leadership potential, and the capacity to help shape policy and public debate in the field of population, reproductive health and rights in general, with a focus on two priority themes—maternal mortality and morbidity, and the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people. Since the transfer of the programme to the Population Council through 2006, a total of 17 individuals have been supported under the HPIF programme. The Population Council is an international, non-profit, non-governmental organisation that seeks to improve the well-being and reproductive health of current and future generations around the world and to help achieve a humane, equitable and sustainable balance between people and resources. The Council conducts biomedical, social science and public health research, and helps build research capacities in developing countries. About the author: Monisha Vaid has a Masters degree in Community Resource Management and Extension from Lady Irwin College, Delhi University (India). She has been involved in project development, implementation and monitoring of sexual and reproductive health programs and adolescent life skill building programs. Currently she is associated with Urban Health Resource Centre (UHRC) working on urban poor health issues.
Exposure Error Masks the Relationship Between Traffic-Related Air Pollution and Heart Rate Variability

Objective: We examined whether more precise exposure measures would better detect associations between traffic-related pollution, elemental carbon (EC), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and heart rate variability (HRV). Methods: Repeated 24-hour personal and ambient pm2.5, EC, and NO2 were measured for 30 people living in Atlanta, GA. The association between HRV and either ambient concentrations or personal exposures was examined using linear mixed effects models. Results: Ambient pm2.5, EC, NO2, and personal pm2.5 were not associated with HRV. Personal EC and NO2 measured 24 hours before HRV were associated with decreased RMSSD, PNN50, and HF and with increased LF/HF. RMSSD decreased by 10.97% (95% confidence interval: −18.00 to −3.34) for an inter-quartile range change in personal EC (0.81 &mgr;g/m3). Conclusions: Results indicate decreased vagal tone in response to traffic pollutants, which can best be detected with precise personal exposure measures.
Cyanodiacetylene (HC/sub 5/N) in Sagittarius B2

The J=2. -->. 1 and 3. -->. 2 rotational transitions of cyanodiacetylene have been observed in Sgr B2. Statistical equilibrium calculations have been carried out to construct a three-component model of the HC/sub 5/N cloud in Sgr B2 which is consistent with these observations, with our earlier observations of the J=1. -->. 0.4. -->. 3, and 8. -->. 7 lines and with the data obtained by Guelin and Thaddeus for the J=31. -->. 30 to J=37. -->. 36 millimeter-wave transitions. The relative strength of the J=1. -->. 0 line requires the presence of an extensive, low-density envelope around the Sgr B2 molecular cloud which serves as a weak 1. -->. 0 line maser. This envelope is characterized by an H/sub 2/ density of 100 cm/sup -3/ and a kinetic temperature of about 20 K. The maximum column density of HC/sub 5/N in Sgr B2 is found to be 1.6 x 10/sup 14/ cm/sup -3/, equal to that of HC/sub 3/N.
PCP (phencyclidine): an update.

The steady rise in the promiscuous use of phencyclidine (PCP) as a "recreational" drug has recently gained nationwide attention because of the numerous violent and/or bizarre incidents caused by the use of this drug. Because the media often exaggerate reports of bizarre and violent behavior to make a "good" story, the potential PCP user may be tempted to ignore the media warnings. In the case of PCP, however exaggerated the story, a real danger does exist. So, despite numerous newspaper, radio and television warnings about the possible consequences of PCP use and abuse, the incidence of toxic reactions continues to climb. In many cases PCP is sold as other drugs, particularly THC, and in various colored capsules, tablets, liquids and crystals which may explain the increased usage despite the numerous warnings against its use. The advances in laboratory techniques and chemical processess have enabled the clandestine chemist to prepare relatively pure PCP and thus eliminate many of the toxic side effects due to impurities in the drug. In addition, 30 or more psychoactive PCP analogues have been developed and are starting to make an appearance on the street. PCP is perhaps the most potent psychotomimetic compound known at the present time and is capable of inducing a psychosis which is clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia. The psychosis-producing effects of PCP are the most common toxic effects seen in hospital emergency rooms; but as the amount of PCP taken and/or the simultaneous involvement of other drugs, particularly barbiturates, occurs, severe medical problems (e.g., coma, seizures, respiratory arrest) begin to appear. Death from high doses of PCP or PCP plus other drugs does occur, but the principal cause of death from PCP abuse is due to trauma, homicide or suicide (usually of the bizarre or violent form). Young adult males, persons predisposed to mental illness and naive drug users appear to be the most susceptible to the adverse effects of PCP. The fact that chronic PCP users are starting to increase in number is mute testimony that not all users experience "bad trips" with PCP. Unfortunately for the user, however, this does not guarantee that the next trip will not be a bad one. The effects of chronic use seem to be twofold: severe depression with suicidal thoughts and numerous violent, agitated behavioral patterns. Neither seems to be a suitable alternative. At the present time there is not specific antidote for toxic PCP reactions and the prolonged psychosis induced in some cases does not appear to respond to the standard antipsychotic medications as quickly as do the functional psychoses. The major improvement from a medical standpoint is the development of more sensitive laboratory techniques to confirm the presence of PCP in body fluids. This advance has undoubtedly led to the apparent increase in the number of PCP cases reported by hospitals and to the accuracy of clinical diagnosis by medical, drug or law enforcement communities.
Long-Term Follow-Up of Cognitive Function and Activities of Daily Living in Older People: A Feasibility Study in the PROSPER Cohort

Background: The Prospective Study of Pravastatin in the Elderly at Risk (PROSPER) considered the benefits of pravastatin therapy and provided insights into cognitive decline/disability in older people but follow-up was short. Methods: We performed a feasibility study of 300 PROSPER recruits, 7 years after the trial finished. The subject’s general practitioner provided basic follow-up data. Telephone contact with participants established cognition/functional level. Relatives of those unsuitable for contact were asked to complete postal questionnaires. Results: Of 300 participants we established 132 were alive, 135 dead and 33 lost to follow-up. Of 132 survivors data were obtained for 78 participants by telephone, 10 participants with GP diagnosis of dementia, and 3 participants whose relative provided information. Therefore cognitive function was determined in 69% of survivors and functional ability in 61%. Conclusions: It was feasible to perform long-term follow-up of cognition/functional ability in the majority of survivors from a large randomised controlled trial.
Hepatitis C Virus Infection and Renal Disorders

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is frequently associated with extrahepatic disorders, among which renal diseases are frequent. This article highlights the most frequent HCV-associated renal disorders, the impact of HCV infection on chronic renal disease and renal transplantation, and the role of current direct-acting antiviral therapies. HCV is associated with membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis, acceleration of end-stage renal diseases in patients with glomerulopathies, and a higher risk of death in patients affected by chronic kidney disease. Before the introduction of direct-acting antiviral drugs as treatment modality, renal transplantation was a challenging clinical problem because the drugs available until 2011 obtained a poor sustained virologic response, had several side effects, and caused acute rejection when used after transplantation. The knowledge of the viral structure and its replication allowed the discovery of new classes of direct-acting antiviral drugs that revolutionized this scenario. These new drugs are comparatively more effective and safer. Accumulating evidence suggests that it is possible to cure HCV-related glomerulonephritis, and obtain a sustained virologic response in patients with renal failure, or on dialysis, before commencing transplantation. Finally, it became possible to transplant HCV-positive kidneys into HCV-positive or HCV-negative recipients.
Fe(III) Reducing Microorganisms from Iron Ore Caves Demonstrate Fermentative Fe(III) Reduction and Promote Cave Formation

ABSTRACT The banded iron formations (BIF) of Brazil are composed of silica and Fe(III) oxide lamina, and are largely covered by a rock cap of BIF fragments in a goethite matrix (canga). Despite both BIF and canga being highly resistant to erosion and poorly soluble, >3,000 iron ore caves (IOCs) have formed at their interface. Fe(III) reducing microorganisms (FeRM) can reduce the Fe(III) oxides present in the BIF and canga, which could account for the observed speleogenesis. Here, we show that IOCs contain a variety of microbial taxa with member species capable of dissimilatory Fe(III) reduction, including the Chloroflexi, Acidobacteria and the Alpha- Beta- and Gammaproteobacteria; however, Fe(III) reducing enrichment cultures from IOCs indicate the predominance of Firmicutes and Enterobacteriaceae, despite varying the carbon/electron donor, Fe(III) type, and pH. We used model-based inference to evaluate multiple candidate hypotheses that accounted for the variation in medium chemistry and culture composition. Model selection indicated that none of the tested variables account for the dominance of the Firmicutes in these cultures. The addition of H2 to the headspace of the enrichment cultures enhanced Fe(III) reduction, while addition of N2 resulted in diminished Fe(III) reduction, indicating that these Enterobacteriaceae and Firmicutes were reducing Fe(III) during fermentative growth. These results suggest that fermentative reduction of Fe(III) may play a larger role in iron-rich environments than expected. Our findings also demonstrate that FeRM are present within the IOCs, and that their reductive dissolution of Fe(III) oxides, combined with mass transport of solubilized Fe(II) by groundwater, could contribute to IOC formation.