Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Face Perception and Test Reliabilities in Congenital Prosopagnosia in Seven Tests

Congenital prosopagnosia, the innate impairment in recognizing faces, is a very heterogeneous disorder with different phenotypical manifestations. To investigate the nature of prosopagnosia in more detail, we tested 16 prosopagnosics and 21 controls with an extended test battery addressing various aspects of face recognition. Our results show that prosopagnosics exhibited significant impairments in several face recognition tasks: impaired holistic processing (they were tested amongst others with the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT)) as well as reduced processing of configural information of faces. This test battery also revealed some new findings. While controls recognized moving faces better than static faces, prosopagnosics did not exhibit this effect. Furthermore, prosopagnosics had significantly impaired gender recognition—which is shown on a groupwise level for the first time in our study. There was no difference between groups in the automatic extraction of face identity information or in object recognition as tested with the Cambridge Car Memory Test. In addition, a methodological analysis of the tests revealed reduced reliability for holistic face processing tests in prosopagnosics. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that prosopagnosics showed a significantly reduced reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) in the CFMT compared to the controls. We suggest that compensatory strategies employed by the prosopagnosics might be the cause for the vast variety of response patterns revealed by the reduced test reliability. This finding raises the question whether classical face tests measure the same perceptual processes in controls and prosopagnosics.
An N-version electronic voting system

The ballot battles of the 2000 US Presidential Election clearly indicate that existing voting technologies and processes are not sufficient to guarantee that every eligible voter is granted their right to vote and implicitly to have that vote counted, as per the fifteenth, nineteenth, twenty fourth and twenty sixth amendments to the US constitution [1-3]. Developing a voting system that is secure, correct, reliable and trustworthy is a significant challenge to current technology [3, 4]. The Secure Architecture for Voting Electronically (SAVE) demonstrates that N-version programming increases the reliability and security of its systems, and can be used to increase the trustworthiness of systems. Further, SAVE demonstrates how a viable practical approach to voting can be created using N-version programming. SAVE represents a significant contribution to voting technology research because of its design, and also because it demonstrates the benefits of N-version programming and introduces these benefits to the field of voting technology. Thesis Supervisor: Ted Selker Title: Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Studying Educational Attainment among First-Generation Students in the United States.

Although graduating from college may be viewed as a rite of passage for better social mobility in our society, first-generation students, whose parents never graduated from college, face unique challenges to achieve educational success in our country. The purpose of the proposed study is to investigate longitudinal educational attainments of first-generation students using the national data sets. This study tracks the same cohort of students over time, and illustrates their educational endeavors through multi-levels of analyses, from attrition behavior of 8 graders to the likelihood of college graduation.
Association of a Deletion of GSTT2B with an Altered Risk of Oesophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma in a South African Population: A Case-Control Study

Background Polymorphisms in the Glutathione S-transferase genes are associated with altered risks in many cancers, but their role in oesophageal cancer is unclear. Recently a 37-kb deletion polymorphism of GSTT2B that reduces expression of GSTT2 has been described. We evaluated the influence of the GSTT1 and GSTT2B deletion polymorphisms, and the GSTP1 Ile105Val polymorphism (rs1695) on susceptibility to oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) in the Black and Mixed Ancestry populations of South Africa. Methods and Results The GSTT1, GSTT2B and GSTP1 variants were genotyped in 562 OSCC cases and 907 controls, and tested for association with OSCC and for interaction with smoking and alcohol consumption. Linkage disequilibrium (LD) between the deletions at GSTT1 and GSTT2B was determined, and the haplotypes tested for association with OSCC. Neither the GSTT1 deletion nor the GSTP1 Ile105Val polymorphism was associated with OSCC risk in the Black or Mixed Ancestry populations. The GSTT2B deletion was not associated with OSCC risk in the Black population, but was associated with reduced risk of OSCC in the Mixed Ancestry population (OR = 0.71; 95% CI 0.57–0.90, p = 0.004). Case-only analysis showed no interaction between the GST polymorphisms and smoking or alcohol consumption. LD between the neighboring GSTT1 and GSTT2B deletions was low in both populations (r2 Black = 0.04; r2 MxA = 0.07), thus these deletions should be assessed independently for effects on disease risk. Conclusions Although there was no association between the GSTT1 deletion polymorphism or the GSTP1 Ile105Val polymorphism with OSCC, our results suggest that the presence of the recently described GSTT2B deletion may have a protective effect on the risk of OSCC in the Mixed Ancestry South African population. This is the first report of the contribution of the GSTT2B deletion to cancer risk.
A Simulation Framework for Knowledge Acquisition Evaluation

Knowledge acquisition (KA) plays an important role in building knowledge based systems (KBS). However, evaluating different KA techniques has been difficult because of the costs of using human expertise in experimental studies. In this paper, we first address the problem of evaluating knowledge acquisition methods. Then, we develop an analysis of the types of errors a human expert makes in building a KBS. Our analysis suggests that a simulation of the key factors in building a KBS is possible. We demonstrate the approach by evaluating three variants of a practically successful KA methodology, namely Ripple Down Rules (RDR). The experimental results provide some fundamental insights into this family of KA techniques and suggest various hints for improvement.
1036 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY Editorial Book Reviewing as an Important Scholarly Activity

lamented that, in many academic institutions, writing book reviews seems to be undervalued as a scholarly activity. When tenure and promotion decisions are made, the authors of book reviews often receive little or no credit for their work. For us, this raises four important issues. First, how can faculty members enhance their own and as well as their students' knowledge without critically analyzing the most recent ideas published in books? Second, although faculty members rely on book reviews for making decisions about which texts to adopt for their courses, they have no incentive for sharing their own reviews with their colleagues. Third, although publishing scholarly books is highly regarded in most academic institutions, reviewing these books is not. Fourth, important standards for scientific and professional activities are communicated, and even emerge, through book reviewing. According to Lowman (1999), keeping current in one's field is an important ethical responsibility for psychologists. Although it is often difficult to keep fully abreast of recent developments in the field, book reviews can provide a " just-in-time " version of the latest ideas. Moreover , important trends in our field are often first presented in book format. Book reviews, therefore, can help to advance the field through knowledge dissemination, as well as through the development of new research questions. Our international colleagues tell us that the book review section of this journal is highly valued by the global community as an excellent source of the latest thinking. Many practitioners and graduate students also consider the book review section to be an invaluable resource for keeping up-to-date on the latest developments relevant to our profession. Given these important contributions of book reviews, why then are they given such a low weighting by those evaluating scholarly productivity? Although book reviews clearly do not go through the same vetting process as do journal articles, we would argue that they should be given similar weighting to, for example, participating in a symposium at a conference. We encourage faculty to include their diligently written, well-researched, and truly critical book reviews as significant components of their vitas, and to attempt to persuade university decision makers to reconsider the EDITORIAL 1037 relative contributions of book reviews to our profession. It is our hope that, in the foreseeable future, the authors of book reviews will begin to receive recognition that is commensurate with the value of this important scholarly activity.
Wide Area Multiple Camera Calibration and Estimation of Radial Distortion

The calibration of cameras distributed in a wide area is a challenging task because it is impossible to use reference objects visible to all cameras and because wide ﬁeld-of-view cameras suffer under radial distortion. The present work proposes the ﬁrst algorithm in the literature for radial distortion estimation from multiple views without involving non-linear minimization. The correspondences between views are obtained by deliberately moving an LED in thousands of unknown positions in front of the cameras. Then both projection matrices and radial distortion parameters are simultaneously computed using a factorization approach. The algorithm is based on the application of two subspace approximation steps. At these steps, the estimated approximate solution for a matrix can be projected to the manifold of the parameter space by adjusting the singular values. It is remarkable, that our system does not involve a single non-linear minimization or outlier treatment and still produces accurate results which have been tested in a multi-camera reconstruction algorithm. In addition to real imagery results, we have analyzed the behavior of the algorithm in simulations.
Default probabilities, CDS premiums and downgrades : A probit-MIDAS analysis

This paper examines the relationship between sovereign credit default swaps CDS and sovereign rating changes of European countries. To this aim, a new estimator is introduced which merges mixed data sampling MIDAS with probit regression. Simulations show that the estimator has good properties in finite sample. Also, I investigate a bootstrap procedure introduced by Ghysels et al. 2007, which should be able to handle significance testing in a MIDAS setting. The bootstrap hasgood size but low power. For the empirical analysis I use sovereign CDS data for 22 EU countries trying to correlate sovereign downgrades with sovereign CDS premiums. Overall the CDS data and the ratings are in most cases significantly positively correlated. Therefore, Credit Rating Agencies CRA and financial markets are generally agreeing on the implied default probability of sovereign nations. Also, CDS prices are expecting downgrades in advance in the majority of investigateddatasets. However, this does not mean that a default probability can be extracted from raw CDS prices. Instead, by using a MIDAS estimator, I significantly reduce the amount of noise in the data. Therefore, CRAs are still providing important information to financial markets.
Truth and the Aim of Belief

It is often said that ‘belief aims at truth’. This is presented sometimes as a truism, sometimes as capturing an essential and constitutive feature of belief and of inquiry. It is a truism that to believe something is to believe that it is true, and that in this sense beliefs are directed towards truth. It is also a truism that we aim at having true beliefs rather than false ones, and that in this sense truth is our goal when we form beliefs. But it is false if it is supposed to apply literally to beliefs rather than to believers: obviously beliefs do not ‘aim’ at anything by themselves, they do not contain little archers trying to hit the target of truth with their arrows. In this sense the claim must be metaphorical. It is more appropriate, if there is an aim at all, to ascribe it to persons and not to beliefs. But in this sense too it is false: sometimes we do not aim at having true beliefs, but at having pleasurable or comforting ones. Or perhaps what the claim says is that we should aim at having true beliefs. So what does it mean to say that beliefs aim at truth? And is it true? There are least three reasons to be interested in clarifying what, to use a generic term, the truth-directedness of belief1 means. The first is that it promises to tell us what belief is, as a mental state, and what distinguishes it from other kinds of mental states. In particular it is held that truth-directedness is the feature which differentiates belief as a cognitive mental state from motivational states, such as desires and wants. Indeed it is also said to be what prevents belief from being subject to the control of the will. The second reason is that the truth-directedness of belief seems to have something to do with another feature of belief, its ‘normative’ character. Beliefs are correct or incorrect, rational or irrational, justified or unjustified. And the fact that beliefs aim at truth, in the sense that truth is the fundamental dimension of assessment of beliefs seems to be related to this normative dimension. So this normative sense should shed light on the nature of our epistemic norms and principles. The third reason has to do with the nature of truth as a goal or as the main theoretical value. This too is often presented as a truism: truth is the ultimate
Effective Tax Rates and Guarantees in the AFDC Program, 1967-1982

Estimates of effective tax rates on earned and unearned income and estimates of effective guarantees in the AFDC program by state are provided for the period 1967-1982. The results indicate that effective real guarantees fell every year from 1967 to 1981 but stabilized in 1982. Effective tax rates on unearned income rose steadily from 1967 to 1981 and took a particularly large additional jump in 1982. Effective tax rates on earned income fell after 1967, but then gradually rose throughout the 1970s until 1982, when they took a much larger jump. Thus, guarantees fell and tax rates rose over the 1970s as tight budgets forced states to restrict benefits, and in the early 1980s tax rates were pushed even higher by federal legislation.
A Word Counting Graph

We study methods for counting occurrences of words from a given set H over an alphabet V in a given text. All words have the same length m. Our goal is the computation of the probability to find p occur- rences of words from a set H in a random text of size n, assuming that the text is generated by a Bernoulli or Markov model. We have designed an algorithm solving the problem; the algorithm relies on traversals of a graph, whose set of vertices is associated with the overlaps of words from H. Edges define two oriented subgraphs that can be interpreted as equiv- alence relations on words of H. Let P(H) be the set of equivalence classes and S be the set of other vertices. The run time for the Bernoulli model is O(np(|P(H)|+|S|)) time and the space complexity is O(pm|S|+|P(H)|). In a Markov model of order K, additional space complexity is O(pm|V | K ) and additional time complexity is O(npm|V | K ). Our preprocessing uses a variant of Aho-Corasick automaton and achieves O(m|H|) time com- plexity. Our algorithm is implemented and provides a significant space improvement in practice. We compare its complexity to the additional improvement due to AhoCorasick minimization.
Accuracy of interpreting pointing gestures in egocentric view

Communicating spatial information by pointing is ubiquitous in human interactions. With the growing use of head-mounted cameras for collaborative purposes, it is important to assess how accurately viewers of the resulting egocentric videos can interpret pointing acts. We conducted an experiment to compare the accuracy of interpreting four different pointing techniques: hand pointing, head pointing, gaze pointing and hand+gaze pointing. Our results suggest that superimposing the gaze information on the egocentric video can enable viewers to determine pointing targets more accurately and more confidently. Hand pointing performed best when the pointing target was straight ahead and head pointing was the least preferred in terms of ease of interpretation. Our results can inform the design of collaborative applications that make use of the egocentric view.
DETECTION OF THE FLOODED AREA BY TSUNAMI USING SATELLITE THERMAL INFRARED IMAGES

Heavy casualties and severe property losses occurred by the tsunami in the Off Pacific Coast of Tohoku, Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Satellite visible images are easy to grasp damages caused by disasters, but they cannot be obtained in nighttime. Hence a blank time of information may occur if a disaster happens in nighttime. On the other hand, a satellite thermal infrared image can be taken in nighttime while it has an inferior spatial resolution. It is also expected to grasp flooded areas by tsunami using the temperature distribution from thermal infrared band images. In this study, the extraction of flooded areas was carried out by superimposing ASTER thermal infrared band images captured before and after the Tohoku earthquake, obtaining the difference in temperature. This result was compared with the flooded area map that was created by the interpretation of aerial photos and site investigations. The comparison shows a reasonably good agreement although the times of acquiring the post-event images were not the same. A further improvement of flooded area extraction may be achieved by introducing land-cover information and DEM data.
Stages of Small-Group Development Revisited

The purpose of this review was to examine published research on small-group development done in the last ten years that would constitute an empirical test of Tuckman's (1965) hypothesis that groups go through the stages of "forming," "storming," "norming," and "performing. " Of the twenty-two studies reviewed, only one set out to directly test this hypothesis, although many of the others could be related to it. Following a review of these studies, a fifth stage, "adjourning," was added to the hypothesis, and more empirical work was recommended.
Access Versus Bandwidth in Codes for Storage

Maximum distance separable (MDS) codes are widely used in storage systems to protect against disk (node) failures. A node is said to have capacity l over some field F, if it can store that amount of symbols of the field. An (n, k, l) MDS code uses n nodes of capacity l to store k information nodes. The MDS property guarantees the resiliency to any n-k node failures. An optimal bandwidth (respectively, optimal access) MDS code communicates (respectively, accesses) the minimum amount of data during the repair process of a single failed node. It was shown that this amount equals a fraction of 1/(n - k) of data stored in each node. In previous optimal bandwidth constructions, l scaled polynomially with k in codes when the asymptotic rate is less than 1. Moreover, in constructions with a constant number of parities, i.e., when the rate approaches 1, l is scaled exponentially with k. In this paper, we focus on the case of linear codes with linear repair operations and constant number of parities n - k = r, and ask the following question: given the capacity of a node l what is the largest number of information disks k in an optimal bandwidth (respectively, access) (k + r, k, l) MDS code? We give an upper bound for the general case, and two tight bounds in the special cases of two important families of codes. The first is a family of codes with optimal update property, and the second is a family with optimal access property. Moreover, the bounds show that in some cases optimal-bandwidth codes have larger k than optimal-access codes, and therefore these two measures are not equivalent.
The international role of the dollar

The dollar is certainly the most frequently discussed economic phenomenon of our times. Wherever I go I am asked (because in the past I had for many years a lot to do with the dollar): what about the dollar? 'Will it continue to fall? Will it rise again? And if it should continue to fall, will it be a gentle slide towards a soft landing, or will it end in a crash landing? Why is there so much discussion about the dollar? There are three reasons:
Discriminative Focus of Attention for Real-Time Object Detection in Video

We propose a novel object detection approach that combines the discriminative power of object category classifiers with a simple pixel level focus of attention mechanism. The pixel-level foreground/background detectors evolve to classify each pixel as either being part of an object of interest or noise. Unlike background subtraction algorithms, the decision of what is foreground is influenced by object level knowledge rather than it being an outlier to a background distribution. The approach outperforms many background subtraction techniques in challenging scenarios. Combined with the proposed focus of attention mechanism, a robust object classifier(capable of classifying known objects or rejecting noise) runs in real-time while processing 1920x1080 videos on an off-the-shelf DSP.
The Seller's Perspective on Determinants of Acquisition Likelihood: Insights from China's Beer Industry

This study investigates acquisition antecedents during China's transition from a planned to a market-based economic system. Because of contextual realities such as a lack of freely tradable targets for buyers, the seller's willingness to sell is critical for acquisition occurrence in transition economies. We therefore take the seller's perspective and examine factors underlying firms' willingness to sell. We posit that selling is a decision based on the evaluation of a firm's prospects determined by its embeddedness within the planned system, organizational changes it undertook during the transition, and its ability to adjust its strategy according to the evolving strengths of the planning and marketing institutions. Data from the Chinese beer industry from 1995 to 2004 show that acquisition likelihood is high for firms founded as SOEs, low for firms having attracted more private investment or undertaken multiple changes, and has a U-shaped relationship with firms' relative investment in marketing resources.