Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Boundary modeling in human walking trajectory analysis for surveillance

Surveillance of public places has become a world-wide concern in recent years. The ability to classify human behaviors in real-time is fundamental to the success of intelligent surveillance systems. The recognition of different human walking trajectory patterns is an important step towards the achievement of this goal. In this research, we utilize the approach of Longest Common Subsequence (LCSS) in determining the similarity between different types of walking trajectories. In order to establish the position and speed boundaries required for the similarity measure, we compare the performance of a number of approaches, including fixed boundary values, variable boundary values, learning boundary by support vector regression, and learning boundary by cascade neural networks. The LCSS similarity approach is also compared with a similarity measure based on hidden Markov model. We found that the boundary establishing method based on learning by support vector regression gives the best results using real-life data during testing.
Genetic algorithm learning and the cobweb model

This paper presents the cobweb model in which competitive firms, in a market for a single good, use a genetic algorithm to update their decision rules about next-period production and sales. The results of simulations show that the genetic algorithm converges to the rational expectations equilibrium for a wider range of parameter values than other algorithms frequently studied within the context of the cobweb model. Price and quantity patterns generated by the genetic algorithm are also compared to the data of experimental cobweb economies. It is shown that the algorithm can capture several features of the experimental behavior of human subjects better than three other learning algorithms that are considered.
Analysis of efficient lip reading method for various languages

The traditional researches targeted at only one language, and there is no research to refer the language and recognition method. Moreover, a lot of model-based methods use only an external lip or intraoral region, and tooth or tongue region is not reflected to the feature. This paper describes analysis of efficient lip reading method for various languages. First, we applies active appearance model, and simultaneously extracts the external and internal lip contour. Then, the tooth and intraoral regions are detected. Various features from five regions are fed to the recognition process. We set four languages to be the recognition target, and recorded twenty words per each language. As the result, proposed trajectory feature based on three shape features, the area and aspect ratio of internal lip region, and area of intraoral region, was obtained the highest recognition rates of 93.6%, compared with the traditional methods and other regions.
Body Space in Social Interactions: A Comparison of Reaching and Comfort Distance in Immersive Virtual Reality

Background Do peripersonal space for acting on objects and interpersonal space for interacting with con-specifics share common mechanisms and reflect the social valence of stimuli? To answer this question, we investigated whether these spaces refer to a similar or different physical distance. Methodology Participants provided reachability-distance (for potential action) and comfort-distance (for social processing) judgments towards human and non-human virtual stimuli while standing still (passive) or walking toward stimuli (active). Principal Findings Comfort-distance was larger than other conditions when participants were passive, but reachability and comfort distances were similar when participants were active. Both spaces were modulated by the social valence of stimuli (reduction with virtual females vs males, expansion with cylinder vs robot) and the gender of participants. Conclusions These findings reveal that peripersonal reaching and interpersonal comfort spaces share a common motor nature and are sensitive, at different degrees, to social modulation. Therefore, social processing seems embodied and grounded in the body acting in space.
Ageing in autism spectrum disorder

Research in the United Kingdom has estimated that the prevalence for ASD in adults is comparable to the prevalence in childhood (Brugha, et al., 2012). The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reports that there is an estimated 64,600 people in Australia diagnosed with ASD, however, this only includes people up to 30 years of age (ABS, 2011). Generalizing from this data, it could be expected that there are some 60,000 adults, many of those over 55 years of age. If data collected in the United Kingdom (U.K.) by the National Autistic Society can be used as a representation of the Australian community, around 70% of people with ASD over 55 years of age may have only been diagnosed in the last ten years (NAS, 2013).
Cancer cell-oriented migration of mesenchymal stem cells engineered with an anticancer gene (PTEN): an imaging demonstration

Background Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been considered to hold great potential as ideal carriers for the delivery of anticancer agents since the discovery of their tumor tropism. This study was performed to demonstrate the effects of phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN) engineering on MSCs’ capacity for cancer cell-oriented migration. Methods MSCs were engineered with a PTEN-bearing plasmid and the expression was confirmed with Western blotting. A human glioma cell line (DBTRG) was used as the target cell; DBTRG cell-oriented migration of MSCs was monitored with a micro speed photographic system. Results The expression of transfected PTEN in MSCs was identified by immunoblotting analysis and confirmed with cell viability assessment of target cells. The DBTRG cell-oriented migration of PTEN-engineered MSCs was demonstrated by a real-time dynamic monitoring system, and a phagocytosis-like action of MSCs was also observed. Conclusion MSCs maintained their capacity for cancer cell-directed migration after they were engineered with anticancer genes. This study provides the first direct evidence of MSCs’ tropism post-anticancer gene engineering.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis Strains of the Modern Sublineage of the Beijing Family Are More Likely To Display Increased Virulence than Strains of the Ancient Sublineage

ABSTRACT Strains of the Beijing genotype family of Mycobacterium tuberculosis are a cause of particular concern because of their increasing dissemination in the world and their association with drug resistance. Phylogenetically, this family includes distinct ancient and modern sublineages. The modern strains, contrary to the ancestral counterparts, demonstrated increasing prevalence in many world regions that suggest an enhanced bacterial pathogenicity. We therefore evaluated virulence of modern versus ancient Beijing strains with similar epidemiological and genotype characteristics. For this, we selected six strains that had very similar 24-locus mycobacterial interspersed repetitive-unit–variable-number tandem-repeat (MIRU-VNTR) typing profiles and belonged to the region of difference 181 (RD181) subgroup but differed using markers (mutT2 and mutT4 genes and NTF locus) that discriminate between modern and ancient Beijing sublineages. The strains were isolated from native patients in Brazil and Mozambique, countries with a low prevalence of Beijing strains. The virulence levels of these strains were determined in models of pulmonary infection in mice and in vitro macrophage infection and compared with that of a strain from Russia, part of the epidemic and hypervirulent Beijing clone B0/W148, and of the laboratory strain H37Rv. The results showed that two of the three modern Beijing strains were highly pathogenic, exhibiting levels of virulence comparable with that of the epidemic Russian strain. In contrast, all isolates of the ancient sublineage displayed intermediate or low virulence. The data obtained demonstrate that the strains of the modern Beijing sublineage are more likely to exhibit highly virulent phenotypes than ancient strains and suggest that genetic alterations characteristic of the modern Beijing sublineage favor selection of highly virulent bacteria.
Compliance with aftercare treatment, including disulfiram, and effect on outcome in alcohol-dependent patients.

AIM To delineate the features of treatment compliance which predicted outcome during aftercare treatment in a series of patients that completed an inpatient program at the Lisbon Regional Alcohology Centre (CRAS). METHODS Seventy-four alcohol dependent patients, sequentially admitted to the inpatient treatment of CRAS, were followed over 6 months after discharge. This study focused on the predictive value of the aftercare therapies, which included: attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, attending aftercare groups (AG), attending outpatient consultations with the medical assistant. Disulfiram was prescribed to 83.3% of the patients. At the end of the 6-months follow-up period, the patients and their 'significant others' (co-responsible persons) were interviewed on the telephone by an independent interviewer. The data collected for analysis consists of information from the interviews, and also of data from the patient clinical files. RESULTS Survival analysis revealed that, after 6 months of follow-up, 39.2% of the patients had attained total abstinence of alcohol ingestion; 71% of the relapses on alcohol consumption occurred within the first 3 months. The median number of days taking disulfiram was significantly related to the number of days of abstinence. Demographic variables, pre-treatment variables, attendance at AA meetings, AGs and outpatient appointments were not significant predictors of outcome. CONCLUSIONS Consistently taking disulfiram is associated with good outcome, but this may reflect commitment to abstinence as well as a treatment effect.
Flood loss reduction of private households due to building precautionary measures - lessons learned from the Elbe flood in August 2002

Building houses in inundation areas is always a risk, since absolute flood protection is impossible. Where settlements already exist, flood damage must be kept as small as possible. Suitable means are precautionary measures such as elevated building configuration or flood adapted use. However, data about the effects of such measures are rare, and consequently, the efficiency of different precautionary measures is unclear. To improve the knowledge about efficient precautionary measures, approximately 1200 private households, which were affected by the 2002 flood at the river Elbe and its tributaries, were interviewed about the flood damage of their buildings and contents as well as about their precautionary measures. The affected households had little flood experience, i.e. only 15% had experienced a flood before. 59% of the households stated that they did not know, that they live in a flood prone area. Thus, people were not well prepared, e.g. just 11% had used and furnished their house in a flood adapted way and only 6% had a flood adapted building structure. Building precautionary measures are mainly effective in areas with frequent small floods. But also during the extreme flood event in 2002 building measures reduced the flood loss. From the six different building precautionary measures under study, flood adapted use and adapted interior fitting were the most effective ones. They reduced the damage ratio for buildings by 46% and 53%, respectively. The damage ratio for contents was reduced by 48% due to flood adapted use and by 53% due to flood adapted interior fitting. The 2002 flood motivated a relatively large number of people to implement private precautionary measures, but still much more could be done. Hence, to further reduce flood losses, people's motivation to invest in precaution should be improved. More information campaigns and financial incentives should be issued to encourage precautionary measures.
Evolving Co-occurrence Based Query Expansion Schemes in Information Retrieval Using Genetic Programming

Global query expansion techniques have long been proposed as a solution to overcome the problem of term mismatch between a query and its relevant documents. This paper describes a method which automatically tackles the problems of how to find the best terms for the expansion of a particular query and secondly, how to weight these terms for use with the original query. Genetic Programming is used to evolve schemes for term selection using global (collection-wide) co-occurrence measures. The schemes evolved are also used to weight the term in the expanded query as they are a measure of the term’s importance in relation to the query. As a result, the genetic program has to learn a suitable scheme for identifying the best correlates for the query concept and also a scheme that correctly weights these in relation to each other. These schemes are tested on standard test collections and show a significant increase in performance on the training data but only modest improvement on the collections that are not included in training.
Fuzzy based IRIS recognition system (FIRS) for person identification

Person identification using iris recognition method is very effective and popular. Existing iris recognition methods have problems because of non-uniform illumination, rotational inconsistencies and noise. An efficient Fuzzy based Iris Recognition Scheme (FIRS) has been proposed in this paper to overcome the above deficiencies. This scheme has four stages namely Segmentation, Normalization, Feature extraction and classification using fuzzy logic. The proposed scheme uses Hough transform for detection of Region Of Interest (ROI), and combination of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for feature extraction. The proposed scheme has been tested and the results have been reported. It was observed that the proposed method classifies the images with better accuracy and outperforms the existing methods.
What Macroeconomic Risks Are (Not) Shared by International Investors?

Adopting an asset-market view of international risk sharing, we identify various sources of macroeconomic risk faced by international investors using a structural Vector Autoregression model. We find that most of the risks of exogenous financial market shocks are shared by international investors through the existing asset markets. However, other macroeconomic risks such as those associated with exogenous shocks to consumption growth, inflation and monetary policies are not fully shared across countries. This finding helps us understand the apparently contradicting perceptions of international risk sharing generated by the analysis of asset-market returns versus that of aggregate consumption growth across countries.
Is a .51 Validity Coefficient Good? Value Sensitivity for Interview Validity

Human&#8208;resource professionals (n&#8201;=&#8201;201) were presented with meta&#8208;analytic validity coefficients associated with unstructured and structured employment interviews. When presented alone, the unstructured interview received a higher effectiveness rating&#8212;despite having a smaller validity coefficient&#8212;than the structured interview received (d&#8201;=&#8201;&#8722;.30). When presented together, however, the structured interview was strongly favored (d&#8201;=&#8201;.61). The inclusion of the endpoints of the range of operational validities for all selection methods made the presentation&#8208;mode by interview&#8208;structure interaction disappear.
Analyzing the Social Networks of High- and Low-Performing Students in Online Discussion Forums

ABSTRACT An ego network is an individual’s social netwrk relationships with core members. In this study, the ego network parameters in online discussion spaces of high- and low-performing students were compared. The extent to which students’ ego networks changed over the course were also analyzed. Participation in 7 weeks of online discussions were analyzed for 12 high-performing students and 9 low-performing students. Results suggested that ego networks’ compositions of high- and low-performing students were significantly different. Particularly, high-performing students had denser ego networks and tended to exhibit a higher level of centralities than low-performing students. Results of network visualization indicated that high-performing students increased and kept their networks stable over the course in comparison to low-performing students, who had fragmented networks. Several networks’ change mechanisms for high- and low-performing groups are also identified and discussed.
Integral Operators and Delay Differential Equations

The monodromy operator of a linear delay differential equation with periodic coefficients is formulated as an integral operator. The kernel of this operator includes a factor formed from the fundamental solution of the linear delay differential equation. Although the properties of the fundamental solutions are known, in general there is no closed form for the fundamental solution. This paper describes a collocation procedure to approximate the fundamental solution before the integral operator is discretized. Using arguments on collectively compact operators, the eigenvalues of the discretized monodromy operator are shown to converge to the eigenvalues of the monodromy operator in integral form. The eigenvalues of the monodromy operator tell the stability of the linear delay differential equation. An application to several cases of the Van der Pol oscillator with delay will be given. AMS (MOS) Subject Classification. 34K11, 34K13, 34K28, 45P05, 47A75, 47B38, 47G10.
Resources and features of robotics learning environments (RLEs) in Spain and Latin America

In today's information society there is a wide range of resources available to carry out different activities involving Educational Robotics (ER). Teachers can choose from a variety of robotics platforms, such as EIM, IM or I (Electronics/Mechanics/Informatics), as well as different software programs (textual or graphical), and thus eventually create a particular Robotics Learning Environment (RLE). Recent studies have shown that learning results associated with ER activities have a stronger link to RLE factors than to proper tools. In this paper we examine the state of the art (RLE resources and features) of ER in Spain and Latin America. A total of 127 teachers completed an online survey between March and May 2013. The final results confirm similar features existing between ordinary school activities and those carried out after school, as well as a high presence of hereby proposed features (active, manipulative, constructive, collaborative, reflexive, intentional, complex, conversational, contextual and technological), promoting significant learning. However, there are important differences with regard to gender, age and participants' countries of origin, as well as their participation in competitions, and their implementation of phases or roles, depending on the different features taken into consideration. This paper points at the importance of focusing research on pedagogical actions which may strengthen RLE features, and thus improve learning results.
SCHOOL RELATED FACTORS CAUSING TEACHER ATTRITION IN PREPRIMARY SCHOOLS IN MOMBASA COUNTY, KENYA

Teacher attrition is an issue that is affecting many schools globally and a matter of great concern in schools in Kenya. It is due to this context that the study was conducted to explore the school related factors influencing teacher attrition in preprimary schools in Kengeleni zone in Mombasa County. Descriptive survey design was used to guide the study. The target population was pre-primary school teachers in the zone. Stratified random sampling was used to select sample for the study. Questionnaires and interview schedules were used to collect data which was analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods and results presented using tables and figures. Results had shown that teacher attrition existed in preprimary schools in the zone and it was caused by many school related factors, including poor school management, inadequate school facilities and administrative support. Article visualizations:
Development and Validation of a Social Network Site Use Motives Scale for College Students in South Korea

Although it has been suggested that social network site (SNS) use motives are one of important determinants of SNS addiction, there has not been yet a scale to assess them. The aim of this study was to examine psychological properties of a newly developed Social Network Site Use Motives Scale (SUMS) in a college student sample. The SUMS was administered to 481 nonclinical participants. Exploratory factor analysis, internal consistency analysis, and correlation analysis were undertaken to examine its validity and reliability. Results of factor analysis indicated that the SUMS consisted of four factors. Indices of internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, and criterion validity of SUMS were acceptable. Our study suggested that SUMS could be used as an effective tool to assess SNS use motives. The usage of SUMS should be encouraged in future studies of SNS use motives. Future research using this measure could provide a more comprehensive model of the relationship between SNS use motives and SNS addiction.
The Experiences in a Toxicology Unit: A Review of 623 Cases

Background To evaluate the etiological and demographic characteristics of adult poisoning patients followed up in a toxicology unit in Konya, Turkey. Methods Patients (≥ 15 years old) followed up with the diagnosis of poisoning in our toxicology unit in 2011 were included in this retrospective study. The patients’ medical records were investigated. Age, gender, medical history, the first medical center the patient had been admitted to, the routes and causes of poisoning, the toxins involved, the number of the pills taken, treatments, complications, the length of stay in the hospital and the outcome were recorded. Results A total of 623 patients were included in the study. The mean age of patients was 28.1 ± 15.1. Four hundred and forty-five (71.4%) of patients were female, 541 (86.9%) of them were poisoned via the oral route and 75 (12.0%) of them were poisoned by inhalation. The causes of poisoning were drugs in 408 (65.5%) patients, pesticides/insecticides in 58 (9.3%) patients and carbon monoxide in 49 (7.9%) patients. The commonly used drugs were as follows: analgesics (57.2%), antidepressants (25.4%) and gastrointestinal system drugs (15.8%). The poisonings were suicidal in 489 (78.5%) patients, accidental in 120 (19.3%) patients and overdose in 14 (2.2%) patients. The number of women was higher in the suicide group. At the end of the treatment, 604 (97.0%) of the patients were discharged and 3 (0.4%) of them died. The duration of follow-up was 39.2 ± 37.5 h. Conclusion The most common causes of poisoning are drugs, pesticides/insecticides and carbon monoxide. Health and educational policies at a national level are needed in order to prevent this medicosocial problem. Furthermore, specially equipped toxicology units should be constructed for the treatment and follow-up of the poisoned patients in order to reduce the morbidity and mortality to a significant extent.