LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Fast simple linear iterative clustering for superpixel segmentation

In this paper, a fast implementation of simple linear iterative clustering is presented. By exploiting spatial redundancy within natural images, we successfully reduce the number of distance calculation. It is confirmed that the proposed method runs about two times faster than the conventional method with almost same segmentation results.
A Robust Voiced/Unvoiced Phoneme Classification from Whispered Speech Using the 'Color' of Whispered Phonemes and Deep Neural Network

speech using the ‘color’ of whispered phonemes G. NISHA MEENAKSHI, PRASANTA KUMAR GHOSH SPIRE Lab, Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru PROBLEM STATEMENT TO PERFORM FRAME-LEVEL CLASSIFICATION OF VOICED (V) AND UNVOICED (UV) PHONEMES FROM WHISPERED SPEECH. MOTIVATION Whispered speech production: Private and pathological conditions. Need for V/UV decision: Reconstruction of whispered speech.
DVGen: a test generator for the transmeta Efficeon VLIW processor

This paper describes DVGen, a tool that significantly improves the productivity of the verification engineer by facilitating the generation of self-checking tests from high-level specifications of test intent. DVGen automates resource management, instruction scheduling and computation of self-check reference values, allowing the engineer to focus on test intent through minimally-constrained specifications. It provides the control afforded by writing tests in assembly language as well as the power and flexibility afforded by writing tests in a high-level language. This paper details the scheduling of instructions and the methods of controlling code generation. The power of DVGen's interface with the architectural reference simulator is explored. Techniques employed by DVGen to perturb test generation in order to increase coverage from existing test specifications are presented. Following that, the ability of DVGen to combine diverse specifications intelligently in order to create tests that setup and trigger concurrent interesting events is discussed. The paper concludes with a high-level discussion of DVGen's most salient features.
Drag Analysis of an Aircraft Wing Model with and without Bird Feather like Winglet

This work describes the aerodynamic characteristic for aircraft wing model with and without bird feather like winglet. The aerofoil used to construct the whole structure is NACA 653-218 Rectangular wing and this aerofoil has been used to compare the result with previous research using winglet. The model of the rectangular wing with bird feather like winglet has been fabricated using polystyrene before design using CATIA P3 V5R13 software and finally fabricated in wood. The experimental analysis for the aerodynamic characteristic for rectangular wing without winglet, wing with horizontal winglet and wing with 60 degree inclination winglet for Reynolds number 1.66×10, 2.08×10 and 2.50×10 have been carried out in open loop low speed wind tunnel at the Aerodynamics laboratory in Universiti Putra Malaysia. The experimental result shows 25-30 % reduction in drag coefficient and 10-20 % increase in lift coefficient by using bird feather like winglet for angle of attack of 8 degree. Keywords—Aerofoil, Wind tunnel, Winglet, Drag Coefficient.
The prevalence of high anxiety and substance use in university students in the Republic of Macedonia.

AIM
The aim of the study was to determine the prevalence of high anxiety and substance use among university students in the Republic of Macedonia.


MATERIAL AND METHODS
The sample comprised 742 students, aged 18-22 years, who attended the first (188 students) and second year studies at the Medical Faculty (257), Faculty of Dentistry (242), and Faculty of Law (55) within Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. As a psychometric test the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) was used. It is a self-rating questionnaire used for measuring the severity of anxiety. A psychiatric interview was performed with students with BAI scores > 25. A self-administered questionnaire consisted of questions on the habits of substance (alcohol, nicotine, sedative-hypnotics, and illicit drugs) use and abuse was also used. For statistical evaluation Statistica 7 software was used.


RESULTS
The highest mean BAI scores were obtained by first year medical students (16.8 ± 9.8). Fifteen percent of all students and 20% of first year medical students showed high levels of anxiety. Law students showed the highest prevalence of substance use and abuse.


CONCLUSION
High anxiety and substance use as maladaptive behaviours among university students are not systematically investigated in our country. The study showed that students show these types of unhealthy reactions, regardless of the curriculum of education. More attention should be paid to students in the early stages of their education. A student counselling service which offers mental health assistance needs to be established within University facilities in R. Macedonia alongside the existing services in our health system.
Investigating RNN-based speech enhancement methods for noise-robust Text-to-Speech

The quality of text-to-speech (TTS) voices built from noisy speech is compromised. Enhancing the speech data before training has been shown to improve quality but voices built with clean speech are still preferred. In this paper we investigate two different approaches for speech enhancement to train TTS systems. In both approaches we train a recursive neural network (RNN) to map acoustic features extracted from noisy speech to features describing clean speech. The enhanced data is then used to train the TTS acoustic model. In one approach we use the features conventionally employed to train TTS acoustic models, i.e Mel cepstral (MCEP) coefficients, aperiodicity values and fundamental frequency (F0). In the other approach, following conventional speech enhancement methods, we train an RNN using only the MCEP coefficients extracted from the magnitude spectrum. The enhanced MCEP features and the phase extracted from noisy speech are combined to reconstruct the waveform which is then used to extract acoustic features to train the TTS system. We show that the second approach results in larger MCEP distortion but smaller F0 errors. Subjective evaluation shows that synthetic voices trained with data enhanced with this method were rated higher and with similar to scores to voices trained with clean speech.
A Phase 3 Trial of 2 Years of Androgen Suppression and Radiation Therapy With or Without Adjuvant Chemotherapy for High-Risk Prostate Cancer: Final Results of Radiation Therapy Oncology Group Phase 3 Randomized Trial NRG Oncology RTOG 9902.

PURPOSE
Long-term (LT) androgen suppression (AS) with radiation therapy (RT) is a standard treatment of high-risk, localized prostate cancer (PCa). Radiation Therapy Oncology Group 9902 was a randomized trial testing the hypothesis that adjuvant combination chemotherapy (CT) with paclitaxel, estramustine, and oral etoposide plus LT AS plus RT would improve overall survival (OS).


METHODS AND MATERIALS
Patients with high-risk PCa (prostate-specific antigen 20-100 ng/mL and Gleason score [GS] ≥ 7 or clinical stage ≥ T2 and GS ≥ 8) were randomized to RT and AS (AS + RT) alone or with adjuvant CT (AS + RT + CT). CT was given as four 21-day cycles, delivered beginning 28 days after 70.2 Gy of RT. AS was given as luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone for 24 months, beginning 2 months before RT plus an oral antiandrogen for 4 months before and during RT. The study was designed based on a 6% improvement in OS from 79% to 85% at 5 years, with 90% power and a 2-sided alpha of 0.05.


RESULTS
A total of 397 patients (380 eligible) were randomized. The patients had high-risk PCa, 68% with GS 8 to 10 and 34% T3 to T4 tumors, and median prostate-specific antigen of 22.6 ng/mL. The median follow-up period was 9.2 years. The trial closed early because of excess thromboembolic toxicity in the CT arm. The 10-year results for all randomized patients revealed no significant difference between the AS + RT and AS + RT + CT arms in OS (65% vs 63%; P=.81), biochemical failure (58% vs 54%; P=.82), local progression (11% vs 7%; P=.09), distant metastases (16% vs 14%; P=.42), or disease-free survival (22% vs 26%; P=.61).


CONCLUSIONS
NRG Oncology RTOG 9902 showed no significant differences in OS, biochemical failure, local progression, distant metastases, or disease-free survival with the addition of adjuvant CT to LT AS + RT. The trial results provide valuable data regarding the natural history of high-risk PCa treated with LT AS + RT and have implications for the feasibility of clinical trial accrual and tolerability using CT for PCa.
EMDataBank.org: unified data resource for CryoEM

Cryo-electron microscopy reconstruction methods are uniquely able to reveal structures of many important macromolecules and macromolecular complexes. EMDataBank.org, a joint effort of the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe), the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) and the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging (NCMI), is a global 'one-stop shop' resource for deposition and retrieval of cryoEM maps, models and associated metadata. The resource unifies public access to the two major archives containing EM-based structural data: EM Data Bank (EMDB) and Protein Data Bank (PDB), and facilitates use of EM structural data of macromolecules and macromolecular complexes by the wider scientific community.
CuO-Decorated ZnO Hierarchical Nanostructures as Efficient and Established Sensing Materials for H2S Gas Sensors

Highly sensitive hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas sensors were developed from CuO-decorated ZnO semiconducting hierarchical nanostructures. The ZnO hierarchical nanostructure was fabricated by an electrospinning method following hydrothermal and heat treatment. CuO decoration of ZnO hierarchical structures was carried out by a wet method. The H2S gas-sensing properties were examined at different working temperatures using various quantities of CuO as the variable. CuO decoration of the ZnO hierarchical structure was observed to promote sensitivity for H2S gas higher than 30 times at low working temperature (200 °C) compared with that in the nondecorated hierarchical structure. The sensing mechanism of the hybrid sensor structure is also discussed. The morphology and characteristics of the samples were examined by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), UV-vis absorption, photoluminescence (PL), and electrical measurements.
A Comparative Analysis on indoor positioning Techniques and Systems

Positioning objects has been an important topic since it is needed to locate people, guide them to a certain place, and assist companies and organizations with their assets management. Several techniques and algorithms were proposed to solve the positioning problem and to enhance existing systems. In general, one of the several existing wireless standards such as Infrared, RFID, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi is chosen as the target standard for indoor positioning. This paper provides an overview of the existing wireless indoor positioning solutions and attempts to classify different techniques and systems. Comprehensive performance comparisons including accuracy, precision complexity, scalability, robustness, and cost are presented. Keywords—Indoor Localization, Positioning techniques, Wireless Positioning Technologies.
Orthogonal parallel MCMC methods for sampling and optimization

Monte Carlo (MC) methods are widely used for Bayesian inference and optimization in statistics, signal processing and machine learning. A well-known class of MC methods are Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In order to foster better exploration of the state space, specially in high-dimensional applications, several schemes employing multiple parallel MCMC chains have been recently introduced. In this work, we describe a novel parallel interacting MCMC scheme, called orthogonal MCMC (O-MCMC), where a set of “vertical” parallel MCMC chains share information using some ”horizontal” MCMC techniques working on the entire population of current states. More specifically, the vertical chains are led by random-walk proposals, whereas the horizontal MCMC techniques employ independent proposals, thus allowing an efficient combination of global exploration and local approximation. The interaction is contained in these horizontal iterations. Within the analysis of different implementations of O-MCMC, novel schemes in order to reduce the overall computational cost of parallel multiple try Metropolis (MTM) chains are also presented. Furthermore, a modified version of O-MCMC for optimization is provided by considering parallel simulated annealing (SA) algorithms. Numerical results show the advantages of the proposed sampling scheme in terms of efficiency in the estimation, as well as robustness in terms of independence with respect to initial values and the choice of the parameters. c © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
To what extent is personal experience and external validation essential in psychoanalytic therapeutic training

Based on a paper presented at an International Conference to celebrate Freud's 150th anniversary and entitled Therapeutic Training after Freud, organized by the Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University and the Freud Museum, Saturday 20 May 2006. With thanks to the Centre for transcribing the original talk.
A FINITE ELEMENT METHOD FOR NON-LINEAR HYPERELASTICITY APPLIED FOR THE SIMULATION OF OCTOPUS ARM MOTIONS

Abstract. An implicit non-linear finite element (FE) numerical procedure for the simulation of biological muscular tissues is presented. The method has been developed for studying the motion of muscular hydrostats, such as squid and octopus arms and its general framework is applicable to other muscular tissues. The FE framework considered is suitable for the dynamic numerical simulations of three-dimensional non-linear nearly incompressible hyperelastic materials that undergo large displacements and deformations. Human and animal muscles, consisting of fibers and connective tissues, belong to this class of materials. The stress distribution inside the muscular FE model is considered as the superposition of stresses along the muscular fibers and the connective tissues. The stresses along the fibers are modeled as the sum of active and passive stresses, according to the muscular model of Van Leeuwen and Kier (1997) Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London, 352: 551-571. Passive stress distribution is an experimentally-defined function of fibers’ deformation; while active stress distribution is the product of an activation level time function, a force-stretch function and a force-stretch ratio function. The mechanical behavior of the surrounding tissues is determined adopting a Mooney-Rivlin constitutive model. The incompressibility criterion is met by enforcing large bulk modulus and by introducing modified deformation measures. Due to the non-linear nature of the problem,
Systematic care for asthma in Australian general practice: a randomised controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate whether systematic asthma care involving a register-recall system, postcard prompts for review, and education for general practitioners and staff in Australian general practice improves the quality of care and health outcomes for adult patients with moderate to severe asthma.


DESIGN AND SETTING
Cluster randomised controlled trial in 40 general practices in urban and rural South Australia and New South Wales over the 2 years 2004 and 2005; practices were randomly allocated to the intervention or control group.


PARTICIPANTS
565 adult patients of these randomly allocated practices who had doctor-diagnosed moderate to severe asthma and were taking inhaled corticosteroids.


MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Clinical asthma indicators, quality of care, acceptability of the intervention to patients, quality of life, and asthma self-management skills at baseline, 6 months and 12 months.


RESULTS
Although 46% of patients in the intervention group practices responded to the postcard prompts, only 32% actually attended for their asthma review. At 12 months, there was a statistically significant difference in provision of written asthma action plans (rate ratio, 1.9; 95% CI, 1.0-3.5; P = 0.04) for intervention group patients compared with control group patients; there was no significant difference in other indicators.


CONCLUSION
We found little objective evidence of improvement in patient management and outcomes resulting from a systematic model of asthma care.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12605000091606.
Occupational therapy service use among people aging with multiple sclerosis.

OBJECTIVE
We examined the use of occupational therapy services in a sample of people aging with multiple sclerosis (MS).


METHOD
A total of 1,282 people with MS, ages 45 to 90, participated in telephone interviews to identify unmet health-related service needs. Occupational therapy was 1 of 22 services examined. Proportional odds models were used to examine factors associated with how recently services were used.


RESULTS
Four hundred eighty-four participants (38.2%) had used occupational therapy services at some point since their diagnosis; 211 had used these services in the year before the interview. Recent users identified occupational therapy services as important to health and well-being. Satisfaction with services was high. Greater activity limitations and living in an urban or suburban area were associated with more recent use of occupational therapy services.


CONCLUSION
The results raise questions about what constitutes appropriate levels of occupational therapy service use and how to ensure that these levels are achieved.
Efficacy of glucosamine plus diacerein versus monotherapy of glucosamine: a double-blind, parallel randomized clinical trial

BACKGROUND
Patented crystalline glucosamine sulfate (pCGS) and diacerein monotherapy have been recommended for treatment of mild to moderate osteoarthritis (OA), but evidence of efficacy for combined treatments is lacking. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare clinical outcomes (i.e., pain and Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index [WOMAC] score) at 6 months as well as the safety profile of treatment with combined pCGS and diacerein versus pCGS alone.


METHODS
A double-blind, parallel randomized controlled superiority trial was conducted between August 2013 and August 2014 at Ramathibodi Hospital, Bangkok, Thailand. A total of 148 patients (74 patients in each group) was randomly allocated to receive pCGS plus diacerein or pCGS plus placebo daily. Adult patients with OA were eligible if they had a Kellgren-Lawrence grade of 2-3. The primary outcomes were visual analogue scale score (VAS) for pain and WOMAC subscores measured at 24 weeks after receiving treatment, using the intention-to-treat principle (nonresponder imputation).


RESULTS
Among the 148 patients in the study, mean age and body mass index were 60 years and 28.1 kg/m2, respectively. Mean VAS and minimal joint space width at baseline were 5.1 and 2.5 mm, respectively. The mean VAS values measured at 24 weeks were 2.97 and 2.88 in the pCGS plus diacerein and pCGS plus placebo groups, respectively. The estimated mean difference was 0.09 (95 % CI -0.75 to 0.94), which was not statistically significant (P = 0.710). In addition, the mean WOMAC total, pain, function, and stiffness scores for both groups were not significantly different, with corresponding means of 48.59, 12.02, 32.74, and 3.85 for the pCGS plus diacerein group and 48.69, 11.76, 32.47, and 4.16 for the pCGS plus placebo group. The risk of diarrhea and dyspepsia was very similar between the two groups, with risk ratios of 1.03 (95 % CI 0.56-1.89) and 0.91 (95 % CI 0.43-1.92), respectively.


CONCLUSIONS
This study did not demonstrate that coadministration of diacerein with pCGS improves pain and WOMAC score compared with pCGS monotherapy in patients with mild to moderate OA of the knee.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01906801 . Registered on 20 July 2013.
Electron affinities of halogen atoms

Abstract On the basis of an appropriate form of interaction potential, which has been proposed recently as a modification of the Gaussian potential, an expression for the electron affinity has been obtained. The values of the electron affinity for the four halogen atoms were calculated from the expression utilizing the molecular constants ( r e , k e , D e and I ) data for twenty alkali halide molecules and were compared with most reliable experimental values of Berry and Reimann. The agreement is satisfactory.
SHEFT : An Elastic Workflow Scheduling Algorithm for Cloud Computing

Due to the complexity of scientific processes, compute and data intensive scientific workflows are often required to be executed in a distributed high-end computing environment, such as the Cloud. Most existing workflow scheduling algorithms only consider a computing environment in which the number of compute resources is bounded. Resources assigned to a workflow cannot be automatically determined on demand of the size of the workflow and they are not released to the environment until an execution of the workflow completes. The salient features of Cloud that provide an illusion of unlimited resources to requesters and allow resources to scale on demand as usage changes through dynamic provisioning bring a new opportunity to solve this scheduling problem. To address the problem, we firstly formalize a model of a Cloud computing environment and a workflow graph representation for the environment. Then, we propose SHEFT, a workflow scheduling algorithm that are able to schedule workflows given the elastically changing compute resources. Our extensive experiments and comparisons for large-scale, compute-intensive, and data-intensive workflows has shown that SHEFT not only outperforms several representative workflow scheduling algorithms in optimizing workflow execution time, but also enables resources to scale elastically during workflow execution. Keywords-Workflow scheduling; elastic scaling; cloud computing; heterogeneous environment.
A Markov-based channel model algorithm for wireless networks

Techniques for modeling and simulating channel conditions play an essential role in understanding network protocol and application behavior. In [11], we demonstrated that inaccurate modeling using a traditional analytical model yielded significant errors in error control protocol parameters choices. In this paper, we demonstrate that time-varying effects on wireless channels result in wireless traces which exhibit non-stationary behavior over small window sizes. We then present an algorithm that divides traces into stationary components in order to provide analytical channel models that, relative to traditional approaches, more accurately represent characteristics such as burstiness, statistical distribution of errors, and packet loss processes. Our algorithm also generates artificial traces with the same statistical characteristics as actual collected network traces. For validation, we develop a channel model for the circuit-switched data service in GSM and show that it: (1) more closely approximates GSM channel characteristics than a traditional Gilbert model and (2) generates artificial traces that closely match collected traces' statistics. Using these traces in a simulator environment enables future protocol and application testing under different controlled and repeatable conditions.