Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MmAP : Multi-modal Alignment Prompt for Cross-domain Multi-task Learning

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is designed to train multiple correlated tasks simultaneously, thereby enhancing the performance of individual tasks. Typically, a multi-task network structure consists of a shared backbone and task-specific decoders. However, the complexity of the decoders increases with the number of tasks. To tackle this challenge, we integrate the decoder-free vision-language model CLIP, which exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capability. Recently, parameter-efficient transfer learning methods have been extensively explored with CLIP for adapting to downstream tasks, where prompt tuning showcases strong potential. Nevertheless, these methods solely fine-tune a single modality (text or visual), disrupting the modality structure of CLIP. In this paper, we first propose Multi-modal Alignment Prompt (MmAP) for CLIP, which aligns text and visual modalities during fine-tuning process. Building upon MmAP, we develop an innovative multi-task prompt learning framework. On the one hand, to maximize the complementarity of tasks with high similarity, we utilize a gradient-driven task grouping method that partitions tasks into several disjoint groups and assign a group-shared MmAP to each group. On the other hand, to preserve the unique characteristics of each task, we assign an task-specific MmAP to each task. Comprehensive experiments on two large multi-task learning datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance improvements compared to full fine-tuning while only utilizing approximately ~ 0.09% of trainable parameters.
National Oil Companies

Leslie Grayson of the University of Virginia has set out to write a book on an interesting topic; the national oil companies. As the blurb has it the book sets out to be a 'comprehensive study of national oil companies' consisting of 'analytic case studies of the major national oil companies and in several synthesising chapters it studies the entire group as an important emerging phenomenon of the international energy scene'. Comparative studies in this field are not all that common and the author is to be congratulated on his choice of topic. Since he does not appear to be all that close to the oil industry or the study of public corporations generally, it is probably not all that surprising that the book shows no evidence of knowledge of the intention of Oystein Noreng to publish a book covering very similar territory, despite the fact that Mr Noreng has been signaling his intention at conferences and by the presentation of papers for some little while. Right at the beginning of the book the author faces the usual dilemma of definition of what is a national oil company, and selection of which companies to study. It would be time wasting and unproductive to take issue with him on his selection of companies or indeed on his implicit definition, though why, in explaining why he has excluded British Petroleum and Petrofina he throws in Burmah Oil as well is a complete mystery to this reviewer. A more serious criticism which remains totally unexplained is why the book is limited to European national oil companies. The exclusion of interesting organisations like Y.P.F. , Sonatrach and Pemex is surely worthy of explanation. If that explanation is the readily acceptable one of limitation of time and money then it might have been more accurate if Grayson and his Publisher had qualified the title of the book so as to import European into the title or sub-title. The first main chapter of the book addresses itself to the question 'Why national oil companies? '. Unsurprisingly, it reduces the question to the statement of three objectives reducing dependence on oil multi-national companies, gaining knowledge about the petroleum industry, and assuring oil supplies both at the crude oil and product market stage: unsurprisingly because these statements can be found in published material relating to one national oil company after another (for instance published articles of Lord Balogh's in Britain). What is disappointing is that when we come to what is the core of the book, the second to eighth chapters which deal with seven individual national oil companies one by one, there is no consistent effort made to measure how each of the companies has performed by relation to these objectives. Despite the appearance of sections in most of the chapters purporting to deal with an assessment, in practice the assessments do not have much coherence so that a reader wishing to
Learning core clinical skills—a survey at 3 time points during medical education

Background: It is generally unknown which clinical skills students acquire during medical education and which factors influence their levels of competence. Methods: We asked German medical students how competent they felt in performing individual clinical skills. Results: Third year students evaluated their competence in clinical skills, on average, not better than 4.7 on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (= ‘excellent’) to 6 (= ‘insufficient’). The average score for fifth year students was 4.1, for final-year students 3.3. Deficits in all groups of students were most prominent in communication skills and diagnostic skills. Conclusions: These results are a plea for a structured curriculum including training courses to practice clinical skills.
Toward scalable source level accuracy analysis for floating-point to fixed-point conversion

In embedded systems, many numerical algorithms are implemented with fixed-point arithmetic to meet area cost and power constraints. Fixed-point encoding decisions can significantly affect cost and performance. To evaluate their impact on accuracy, designers resort to simulations. Their high running-time prevents thorough exploration of the design-space. To address this issue, analytical modeling techniques have been proposed, but their applicability is limited by scalability issues. In this paper, we extend these techniques to a larger class of programs. We use polyhedral methods to extract a more compact, graph-based representation of the program. We validate our approach with a several image and signal processing algorithms.
Interdisciplinary English and Re-forming the Schools

argues that "Certainly not! " said Alice indignantly one key to "Ah! Then yours wasn't a really good e-fOrig school," said the Mock Turtle. school it(Carroll 1960, 92-93) schools-d isCOVthe Thus Lewis Carroll launches his mock r iovryt discussion of the disciplinary contents of of intereducation. The Mock Turtle goes on to brag disciplinary that he took "Reeling and Writhing," plus Studies. "the different branches of Arithmetic-Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. " There was course work in "Mystery, ancient and modern," "Seography," and "Drawing, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils," and these were topped off by the classics: "Laughing and Grief" (93). Could it be that Lewis Carroll antici-
The Roots of Modern Social Psychology: 1872-1954

Preface. 1. Modern social psychology: a characteristically American phenomenon. 2. The emergence in Germany of psychology as a natural and social science. 3. The psychology of the masses and of culture. 4. George Herbert Mead: philosopher and social psychologist. 5. The Murchison Handbook of 1935: a truly comparative psychology. 6. The individualisation of social psychology in North America. 7. Sociological and psychological forms of social psychology. 8. Ancestors and founders: reconstructing the past. 9. War and the history of social psychology. 10. The long past and the short history of social psychology. Appendix I: Some significant dates in the emergence of psychology as an experimental and social science 1872 -- 1937. Appendix II: The rubric for Paper V of the University of London Examinations in Psychology in the early 1960s. Appendix III: Reviewers comments on The Long past and the Short History of Social Psychology. Bibliography. Index.
What Does It Mean to Compare Language and Gesture ? Modalities and Contrasts

I n this paper I would like to reexamine some of the traditional dichotomies between language and gesture. In order to do so, it will be necessary to consider a three-way contrast—spoken languages, signed languages, and gesture. Without this three-way comparison, we risk collapsing contrasts between visual and auditory media with contrasts between linguistic structure and co-linguistic gestural structure. Such a comparison clearly belongs in this volume because Dan Slobin’s work on thinking for Speaking has provided a crucial impetus to the research which feeds my new evaluation—both his own work on spoken and signed language, and the new perspectives on co-speech gesture which have been inspired by that work, not to mention his general intellectual influence on my work for the last 30 years. Dan has never been never afraid to cross boundaries between modalities—or to be skeptical about accepted dichotomies. So I hope readers will see this paper as being in his tradition. returning to our topic: what kinds of contrasts are there between language and gesture? First of all, many researchers agree that language is conventional, while spontaneous co-speech gesture is non-conventional and flexible (though “quotable gestures” are conventional). In gesturing about a tree, for example, a gesturer might trace the fat tube of the trunk with two “C” hands forming a circle, while another gesturer might hold up a forearm as trunk with fingers as branches. Neither would be “wrong,” and indeed they might successfully highlight different aspects of the tree’s structure. However, Hong Kong Sign Language conventionally and lexically represents trEE in the first way, while the American Sign Language lexical sign for trEE is based on the second strategy. Neither language’s word for trEE is correct in the other language. Similarly, there seems some consensus that language is compositional, discrete, and analytic, while gesture is global and synthetic. Further, as McNeill (1992, 2005) and others have documented, language is a more consciously monitored channel relative to gesture. Speakers are often unaware of gesturing at all, while non-sleeping language-users are aware at least of whether they are producing linguistic forms, even if they cannot be conscious of each lexical and morphological choice involved in production. Overall there are also general feelings that language is somehow abstract,
Perceptual organization via the symmetry map and symmetry transforms

Variations in the projection of objects on a 2D image, e.g., due to occlusion and articulation, lead to edge maps which are noisy, contain gaps and spurious elements, and which are deformed. These variations in turn cause variations in the edge map which are typically regularized by the use of a salient measure for each edge element. The use of edge salience, however, typically faced with two drawback. First, salience measures take advantage of boundary continuity, but not of shape continuity, which includes continuity of the interior. Second, while each edge element can only belong to one object boundary, in the computation of salience measures, it often freely contributes to the salience of edges in competing grouping hypotheses as well. We identify both drawbacks with the lack of an explicit intermediate representation between the edge map and grouped object boundaries. We propose that (i) a symmetry map can fully represent the initial edge map so that both boundary and regional continuities can be represented via skeletal/shock continuity; (ii) a re-organization of the edge map in the form of completing gaps, discarding spurious elements, smoothing, and partitioning a contour (grouped set of edge elements) can be represented by transformations on the symmetry map; (iii) the optimal grouping corresponds to the least action path consisting of a sequence of symmetry transforms. The focus of this paper is to define transformations on the symmetry map and illustrate results for them. Specifically, we illustrate how spurious elements can be removed, gaps completed, and parts computed despite significant noise.
Simulating superior genotypes for plant height based on QTLs: Towards virtual breeding of rice

Crop plant researchers and agronomists have in the recent past increasingly turned to crop modeling as a promising tool for the integration and exploration of experimental data from breeding and agronomy. Set up suitably, crop modeling can then also be used to predict performance of future high-yielding cultivars, e.g. of rice, which is one of the major food crops worldwide. Questions such as “Which combination of alleles is likely to have the strongest influence on the development of the individual phenotype? ” or “In which way is QTL action modified by a particular environment? ” can be tackled with the help of a crop modeling approach. As a further extension of a previously established Functional-Structural Plant model (FSPM) of rice we present here simulated “virtual” reproduction of individuals using QTL information, which can contribute to providing answers to these difficult questions. In this study, we briefly describe the way QTL information has been integrated into the rice model, and sketch the algorithmic implementation of processes leading to the creation of filial genotypes from parental genotypes via simulated sexual reproduction. The phenotype value, which in this case was plant height, was determined with the rules that specify the genetic processes operating on genotypes as intrinsic properties of each individual. The mapping results from the simulated population were compared with the input values for the parental lines. It is shown that the rice model faithfully reflected the genetic properties from the parental lines with low bias, which suggests a reasonable way to integrate QTLs into the plant eco-physiological model with the predictive properties. It could in the future be used as a supporting tool in breeding practice.
Fact Or Fiction: The Source Of Perchloroethylene Contamination In Groundwater Is A Manufacturing Impurity In Chlorinated Solvents

Manufacturing impurities in chlorinated solvents have been considered to be sources of contamination in groundwater. Chlorinated solvents are manufactured in a variety of grades; the technical grade is used at many industrial and manufacturing facilities. Compounds present as manufacturing impurities in technical grade chlorinated solvents vary, and their quantity is extremely small or not measurable, because chlorinated solvents historically have been manufactured to a high degree of purity. The purity of currently manufactured TCE ranges from 99.9% for reagent grade to 98.0% for the technical grade. Impurities in technical grade 1,2dichloroethane, also known as ethylene dichloride (EDC), manufactured within the last 10 years with purities of 99.9991% and 99.9955% contained PCE between about 0.0001% and 0.0006%, respectively. In a number of litigation cases where TCE released from a vapor degreaser is the major contaminant in groundwater, there is an accompanying minor concentration of PCE. The assumption made in these cases is that the PCE impurity in technical grades of TCE is the source of the PCE in groundwater. This assumption is based on the release of these two compounds together from a distillation bottom residue where PCE is concentrated, relative to the TCE, because of its much higher boiling point at atmospheric pressure. There is no peer reviewed literature that can be cited to prove that PCE is a significant impurity in either the distillation bottoms produced from a vapor degreaser or technical grade TCE. PCE, if present as a manufacturing impurity, is present in such small amounts that significant concentrations would not be generated in groundwater. When PCE and TCE are present together in groundwater, the source of the PCE is likely not an impurity in the manufactured TCE.
VIP delegation: Enabling VIPs to offload data in wireless social mobile networks

We propose the use of opportunistic delegation as a data traffic offload solution to the recent boost up of mobile data consumption in metropolitan areas, by investigating two main questions: (i) “How to gain insights into social mobile networking scenarios? ” and (ii) “How to utilize such insights to design solutions to alleviate overloaded 3G networks? ”. The purpose of our solution is to leverage usage of mobile applications requiring large data transfers by channeling the traffic to a few, socially selected important users in the network called VIP delegates. The proposed VIP selection strategies are based on social network properties and are compared to the optimal solution (that covers 100% of users with minimum number of VIPs). Our extensive experiments with real and synthetic traces show the effectiveness of VIP delegation both in terms of coverage and required number of VIPs — down to 7% in average of VIPs are needed in campuslike scenarios to offload about 90% of the traffic.
Extended Group Key Transfer Protocol for Authentication Using DES based on Secret Sharing in Cloud

— The Key establishment protocol also needs to provide security, confidentiality, authentication and integrity for session keys to be sent messages to any system in network. There are two types of key establishment protocols one is key transfer protocol and other one is key agreement protocol. Key transfer protocol rely on a mutually trusted key generation center (KGC) to select session keys and transport session keys to all communication entities secretly. Most often, KGC encrypts session keys under another secret key shared with each entity during registration. A secret sharing scheme is a method which distributes shares of a secret to a set of participants in such a way that only specified groups of participants can reconstruct the secret by poling they share. So, this paper proposes a security in terms of data encryption Standard (DES) and digital signature (DSA) to send the files secretly in between the groups. Secret sharing schemes have natural applications in access control and cryptographic key initialization. Data is encrypted with DES by using a secret key, the encrypted data is send to the particular group entities and KGC is shared between the sender and receiver. The received data is decrypted using the KGC, but unauthorized users cannot recover the group key. To provide a flexible, on-demand, and dynamically scalable computing infrastructure for many applications the best solution is cloud computing. In case of private cloud environment access is limited to a group of users or an organization. Even though there are many aspects in cloud environment. The data security, confidentiality and privacy plays a major role in cloud deployment model will be analyzed in detail.
A compressive sensing based clustering scheme for UAS-aided networks

The development of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) makes it possible to collect data from ground sensor nodes by UASs. Special cluster heads (CHs) and the mobility pattern of the UAS make the UAS-aided network different from normal sensor networks. There are works which have addressed the energy efficiency problem of the CHs, but no works have done with the energy efficiency of the normal sensor nodes within the UAS-aided networks. Both the Compressive Sensing (CS) and clustering techniques can be applied for saving energy of the network, however, existing works barely integrate them. Although few works integrate CS with clustering, they ignored the sparsity difference in temporal and spacial domain, moreover, they assume nodes can transmit data to the CH by one hop, which is usually unreal for UAS-aided networks. In this paper, a CS based clustering scheme for UAS-aided networks is proposed. By jointly consider the effect of the compressive ratio variation of a cluster and the distances variation between cluster members and the CH in the clustering process, the energy consumption of sensor nodes is minimized. We evaluate our proposed scheme based on the real data traces. The simulation results show our proposed scheme can significantly reduce the power consumption of the sensor nodes within UAS-aided networks.
Determination of particulate lead during MILAGRO / MCMA-2006 using Aerosol Mass Spectrometry

D. Salcedo, T. B. Onasch, A. C. Aiken, L. R. Williams, B. de Foy, M. J. Cubison, D. R. Worsnop, L. T. Molina, and J. L. Jimenez Centro de Investigaciones Quı́micas, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Cuernavaca, México Center for Aerosol and Cloud Chemistry, Aerodyne Research, Billerica, MA, USA Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, MO, USA Molina Center for Energy and the Environment, La Jolla, CA, USA
Protection of Humans by Plant Glucosinolates: Efficiency of Conversion of Glucosinolates to Isothiocyanates by the Gastrointestinal Microflora

Plant-based diets rich in crucifers are effective in preventing cancer and other chronic diseases. Crucifers contain very high concentrations of glucosinolates (GS; β-thioglucoside-N-hydroxysulfates). Although not themselves protective, GS are converted by coexisting myrosinases to bitter isothiocyanates (ITC) which defend plants against predators. Coincidentally, ITC also induce mammalian genes that regulate defenses against oxidative stress, inflammation, and DNA-damaging electrophiles. Consequently, the efficiency of conversion of GS to ITC may be critical in controlling the health-promoting benefits of crucifers. If myrosinase is heat-inactivated by cooking, the gastrointestinal microflora converts GS to ITC, a process abolished by enteric antibiotics and bowel cleansing. When single oral doses of GS were administered as broccoli sprout extracts (BSE) to two dissimilar populations (rural Han Chinese and racially mixed Baltimoreans) patterns of excretions of urinary dithiocarbamates (DTC) were very similar. Individual conversions in both populations varied enormously, from about 1% to more than 40% of dose. In contrast, administration of ITC (largely sulforaphane)-containing BSE resulted in uniformly high (70%–90%) conversions to urinary DTC. Despite the remarkably large range of conversion efficiencies between individuals, repeated determinations within individuals were much more consistent. The rates of urinary excretion (slow or fast) were unrelated to the ultimate magnitudes (low or high) of these conversions. Although no demographic factors affecting conversion efficiency have been identified, there are clearly diurnal variations: conversion of GS to DTC was greater during the day, but conversion of ITC to DTC was more efficient at night. Cancer Prev Res; 5(4); 603–11. ©2012 AACR.