Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning Boundary and Appearance for Video Object Cutout

This letter presents an approach to object cutout for arbitrary videos. Our approach is in a “learning and propagating” way. First, the object(s) of interest is (are) cut out in the first frame (or the key frame) in the video clip using some interactive image segmentation tool. Then some statistical features of the object regions, the non-object regions, and the boundaries are learnt from the result of image segmentation. Finally, the result is propagated to the other frames automatically. We formulate the “learning and propagating” step in Markov random fields (MRFs). In this model, we well design the patch term and the boundary term to significantly improve the performance of the algorithm. Experimental results indicate that the algorithm performs excellent.
Administrative Reform in Developing Nations

Preface Introduction: Administrative Reform and Development by Ali Farazmand Administrative Reform in Asia Innovation for Administrative Reforms in Korea: A Case of Local Autonomy System by Jong-Hae Yoo Administrative Reforms in India by Krishna Tummala Toward Good Governance in Bangladesh: External Intervention, Bureaucratic Inertia, and Political Inaction by Habib Zafraullah Resistance to Administrative Reforms in South Asian Civil Bureaucracies by Mohammad Mohabbat Khan Administrative Reform in Hong Kong by Ahmed Shafiqul Haque Administrative Reform, Reorganization, and Revolution in the Near/Middle East Reorganization, Reform, and Revolution in Contemporary Iran by Ali Farazmand Political Dynamics and Administrative Reform in Turkey by A. Umit Berman and Metin Heper Predicament of Administrative Reform in the Arab States by Jamil Jreisat Administrative Reform in Africa Decentralization and Development Adminstration in Nigeria by Olatunde and Peter Koehn The Role of Human Resources Management in South African Public Service Reform by Victor Hiliard Civil Service Reform in a Developing Country: A Critique of the Management and Administration of the Zimbabwe Reform Program by Hope Sadza Administrative Reform in East/South Europe and Asia Compared Hungarian Local Government Transition From Communism to Capitalist Democracy by Terry Buss Administrative Reform Difficulties and the Role of Religion: Greece, South Korea, and Thailand by Constantine Danopoulos, and Dongsung Kong, and Ronald Sylvia Index
An Empirical Study on the Relationship between Software Security Skills, Usage and Training Needs in Agile Settings

Organizations recognize that protecting their assets against attacks is an important business. However, achieving what is adequate security requires taking bold steps to address security practices within the organization. In the Agile software development world, security engineering process is unacceptable as it runs counter to the agile values. Agile teams have thus approached software security activities in their own way. To improve security within agile settings requires that management understands the current practices of software security activities within their agile teams. In this study, we use survey to investigate software security usage, competence, and training needs in two agile organizations. We find that (1) The two organizations perform differently in core software security activities but are similar when activities that could be leveraged for security are considered (2) regardless of cost or benefit, skill drives the kind of activities that are performed (3) Secure design is expressed as the most important training need by all groups in both organizations (4) Effective software security adoption in agile setting is not automatic, it requires a driver.
HIF-1α Inhibits Wnt Signaling Pathway by Activating Sost Expression in Osteoblasts

The nature of the cellular and molecular mechanisms for the transition of avascular cartilage replacement with bone during endochondral ossification remains poorly understood. One of the driving forces is hypoxia. As a master regulator of hypoxia, hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) has been reported to couple angiogenesis to osteogenesis. Our recent study has demonstrated that osteoblast growth is inhibited under hypoxia and that HIF-1α cooperates with Osterix (Osx) to inhibit Wnt pathway. However, molecular mechanisms for inhibitory effects of HIF-1α on Wnt pathway are not well understood. In this study, our quantitative RT-PCR results revealed that the expression of a Wnt antagonist Sclerostin (Sost) was upregulated in osteoblasts during hypoxia while HIF-1α was upregulated. Treatment of desferrioxamine (DFO), a HIF-1α activator, led to further increase of Sost expression, suggesting that HIF-1α may activate Sost expression. The regulation of Sost gene expression by HIF-1α was then investigated. We performed loss-of-function experiments to examine Sost expression by using siRNA approach against HIF-1α, and found that the inhibition of HIF-1α by siRNA in osteoblasts led to the decrease of Sost expression. To address transcriptional regulation of Sost gene by HIF-1α, transient transfection assay was performed and showed that HIF-1α activated Sost-1 kb promoter reporter activity in a dose-dependent manner. To narrow down the minimal region of Sost promoter activated by HIF-1α, we generated a series of deletion mutants of Sost constructs. It was demonstrated that Sost-260 was the minimal region of Sost promoter for HIF-1α activation and that Sost-106 construct, which lack hypoxia response element, abolished HIF-1α-mediated Sost reporter activation. Gel shift assay showed that HIF-1 bound to the promoter sequence of Sost directly. These findings support our hypothesis that HIF-1α activates Sost expression. This study provides a novel molecular mechanism through which HIF-1α inhibits Wnt signaling in osteoblasts.
Pass-through of External Shocks Along the Pricing Chain: A Panel Estimation Approach for the Euro Area

In this paper we analyse in a mark-up framework the pass-through of commodity price and exchange rate shocks to the main components of producer and consumer prices. Thereby we link movements in prices at the different production stages as firms set their prices as a mark-up over production costs. The empirical results reveal significant linkages between different price stages in the euro area. The overall results are roughly in line with the literature and provide insight into the effects at different stages of the production chain. Non-energy commodity prices turn out to be important determinants of euro area prices. JEL Classification: E31, E37
Distance-Enhancing Constrained Codes with Parity-Check Constraints for Data Storage Channels

This paper proposes efficient distance-enhancing constrained codes with parity-check (PC) constraints for data storage channels. We first propose simple and efficient finite-state encoding methods to design various distance-enhancing constrained codes, including a repeated minimum transition runlength (RMTR) code for optical recording channels, as well as a maximum transition run (MTR) code for magnetic recording channels. We further propose a general and systematic code design methodology, which can efficiently combine constrained codes with PC codes. The constrained codes can be any distance-enhancing constrained codes. The PC codes can be any linear binary PC codes. The rates of the designed codes are only a few tenths of a percent below the theoretical maximum. The proposed method enables soft information to be available to the PC decoder and soft decoding of PC codes. Examples of several newly designed distance-enhancing constrained PC codes are illustrated. Simulation results with blu-ray disc (BD) systems show that the proposed new RMTR code and RMTR constrained 4-bit PC code perform 0.2 dB and 0.85 dB better than the standard 17PP code, respectively, at error correction code (ECC) failure rate (EFR) of 10-12 and high recording density.
Predicting the Construction of New Highway Links

This paper examines new highway construction based on the status of the network, traffic demand, project costs, and budget constraints. The data span two decades and consist of descriptions of physical attributes of the network, the construction and expansion history, and average annual daily traffic values on each of the links. An algorithm is developed to designate adjacent and parallel links in a large network. A nonlinear cost model for new construction and highway expansion is developed for the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Results show that new links providing greater potential access are more likely to be constructed and that more links will be constructed when the budget is larger, which supports the underlying economic theory. The models developed here have important implications for planning and forecasting, allowing us to predict how networks might be altered in the future in response to changing conditions.
THE VALUE OF SAFETY: RESULTS OF A NATIONAL SAMPLE SURVEY. IN: URBAN TRANSPORT

Public sector allocative and legislative decisions typically involve the assessment of a variety of prospective consequences. In some cases, notably in transport as well as energy and medical care, these consequences may include significant beneficial or harmful effects on individual safety. If such decisions are to be taken in a systematic and consistent manner and if scarce resources are to be allocated efficiently and to greatest advantage, then it would seem to be necessary to have a method of associating explicit values with anticipated improvements in safety and costs in deterioration in order that these effects can be weighted in relation to other desirable and undesirable consequences of the decisions.
Human gut microbiota and healthy aging: Recent developments and future prospective

The human gut microbiota alters with the aging process. In the first 2-3 years of life, the gut microbiota varies extensively in composition and metabolic functions. After this period, the gut microbiota demonstrates adult-like more stable and diverse microbial species. However, at old age, deterioration of physiological functions of the human body enforces the decrement in count of beneficial species (e.g. Bifidobacteria) in the gut microbiota, which promotes various gut-related diseases (e.g. inflammatory bowel disease). Use of plant-based diets and probiotics/prebiotics may elevate the abundance of beneficial species and prevent gut-related diseases. Still, the connections between diet, microbes, and host are only partially known. To this end, genome-scale metabolic modeling can help to explore these connections as well as to expand the understanding of the metabolic capability of each species in the gut microbiota. This systems biology approach can also predict metabolic variations in the gut microbiota during ageing, and hereby help to design more effective probiotics/prebiotics.
Isochromosome der(17)(q10)t(15;17) in Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia Resulting in an Additional Copy of the RARA-PML Fusion Gene: Report of 4 Cases and Review of the Literature

Isochromosome of the long arm of the derivative chromosome 17, originating from the translocation t(15;17) [ider(17)(q10)t(15;17) or ider(17q)] in acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), is a rare chromosome aberration which has been associated with a poor prognosis. In the present study, we report on 4 male APL patients with ider(17q) and review the clinical, cytogenetic and molecular characteristics of all previously reported APL patients with ider(17q) in order to clarify the clinical features and outcome of these patients. The data presented in this study demonstrated that ider(17q), which resulted in an extra RARA-PML fusion gene, was more frequent in males than females (male/female ratio of 2.12/1), was associated with a rather low initial white blood cell count and did not confer an adverse prognosis in APL patients treated with all-trans-retinoic acid and chemotherapy. The most frequent additional chromosome change to ider(17q) was trisomy 8. Ider(17q) was observed in all subtypes of the PML-RARA fusion gene, but the frequency of the bcr1 subtype was increased. Cases of overrepresentation of the RARA-PML fusion gene and ider(17q) cases may help in elucidating the role of RARA-PML in leukemogenesis.
Patient Ethnicity Affects Triage Assessments and Patient Prioritization in U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Emergency Departments

AbstractEthnic minority patients receive lower priority triage assignments in Veteran's Affairs (VA) emergency departments (EDs) compared to White patients, but it is currently unknown whether this disparity arises from generalized biases across the triage assessment process or from differences in how objective and/or subjective institution-level or person-level information is incorporated into the triage assessment process, thus contributing to disparate treatment.The VA database of electronic medical records of patients who presented to the VA ED from 2008 to 2012 was used to measure patient ethnicity, self-reported pain intensity (PI) levels, heart rate (HR), respiratory rate (RR), and nurse-provided triage assignment, the Emergency Severity Index (ESI) score. Multilevel, random effects linear modeling was used to control for demographic and clinical characteristics of patients as well as age, gender, and experience of triage nurses.A total of 359,642 patient/provider encounters between 129,991 VA patients and 774 nurses were included in the study. Patients were 61% non-Hispanic White [NHW], 28% African-American, 7% Hispanic, 2% Asian-American, <1% American Indian/Alaska Native, and 1% mixed ethnicity. After controlling for demographic characteristics of nurses and patients, African-American, Hispanic, and mixed-ethnicity patients reported higher average PI scores but lower HRs and RRs than NHW patients. NHW patients received higher priority ESI ratings with lower PI when compared against African-American patients. NHW patients with low to moderate HRs also received higher priority ESI scoring than African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, and Mixed-ethnicity patients; however, when HR was high NHWs received lower priority ESI ratings than each of the minority groups (except for African-Americans). This study provides evidence for systemic differences in how patients’ vital signs are applied for determining ESI scores for different ethnic groups. Additional prospective research will be needed to determine how this specific person-level mechanism affects healthcare quality and outcomes.
Neural Correlates of the Difference between Working Memory Speed and Simple Sensorimotor Speed: An fMRI Study

The difference between the speed of simple cognitive processes and the speed of complex cognitive processes has various psychological correlates. However, the neural correlates of this difference have not yet been investigated. In this study, we focused on working memory (WM) for typical complex cognitive processes. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired during the performance of an N-back task, which is a measure of WM for typical complex cognitive processes. In our N-back task, task speed and memory load were varied to identify the neural correlates responsible for the difference between the speed of simple cognitive processes (estimated from the 0-back task) and the speed of WM. Our findings showed that this difference was characterized by the increased activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the increased functional interaction between the right DLPFC and right superior parietal lobe. Furthermore, the local gray matter volume of the right DLPFC was correlated with participants' accuracy during fast WM tasks, which in turn correlated with a psychometric measure of participants' intelligence. Our findings indicate that the right DLPFC and its related network are responsible for the execution of the fast cognitive processes involved in WM. Identified neural bases may underlie the psychometric differences between the speed with which subjects perform simple cognitive tasks and the speed with which subjects perform more complex cognitive tasks, and explain the previous traditional psychological findings.
Constructing Simple Stable Descriptions for Image Partitioning Final Submission to Ijcv

(1) In eeect, Binford 2] calls stability with respect to change in viewpoint the \assump-tion of general position. " In this sense, general position is a special case of our notion of stability. (2) An optimal descriptive language is one that minimizes the average number of bits of description per bit of input. This will be discussed in detail shortly. (3) The inequality occurs only because of boundary conditions. Thus, the approximation is best for large regions, where the eeects of boundary conditions are minimal. Abstract A new formulation of the image partitioning problem is presented: construct a complete and stable description of an image, in terms of a speciied descriptive language, that is simplest in the sense of being shortest. We show that a descriptive language limited to a low-order polynomial description of the intensity variation within each region and a chain-code-like description of the region boundaries yields intuitively satisfying partitions for a wide class of images. The advantage of this formulation is that it can be extended to deal with subsequent steps of the image-understanding problem (or to deal with other image attributes, such as texture) in a natural way by augmenting the descriptive language. Experiments performed on a variety of both real and synthetic images demonstrate the superior performance of this approach over partitioning techniques based on clustering vectors of local image attributes and standard edge-detection techniques.
Plasticity in the adult human oligodendrocyte lineage

Preoligodendrocytes have been described in cultures and tissue prints of adult human white matter (Armstrong et al., 1992). To characterize further these precursors of human oligodendrocytes, we have investigated whether they express genes playing a critical role in oligodendrocyte development. In the intact human brain, platelet- derived growth factor receptor alpha (PDGF alpha R) and myelin transcription factor 1 (MyTI) transcripts are expressed in 1–2% of cells of the oligodendrocyte lineage (OL), and clusters of such cells can be found in the periventricular region. Myelin basic protein transcripts containing exon 2 information (exon 2+ MBP), which are characteristic of the premyelinating stage, are detected in 15–20% of OL cells in vivo. When OL cells are separated from human white matter and allowed to regenerate in vitro, a much larger proportion of these cells express developmentally regulated genes, while exon 2- MBP and proteolipid protein (PLP) transcripts characteristic of mature OL cells appear transiently downregulated. Basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF), even in the presence of PDGF, does not promote DNA synthesis in these cultured OL cells. Yet bFGF induces human oligodendrocytes to regenerate their processes rapidly in vitro and to express O4 antigens as well as exon 2+ MBP, MyTI, and PLP transcripts. While bFGF accelerates early regenerative processes, it also maintains high expression of exon 2+ MBP transcripts in OL cells for up to 2 weeks in vitro. In contrast, high levels of insulin in the absence of bFGF allow accumulation of exon 2- MBP and PLP transcripts in most OL cells at 2–3 weeks in vitro. We propose that the myelinated human brain harbors a small pool of precursors of oligodendrocytes and that growth factor- regulated phenotypic plasticity rather than mitogenic potential accounts for the regeneration of oligodendrocytes in the initial stages of demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
Medical diagnostic expert system based on PDP model

The applicability of PDP (parallel distributed processing) models to knowledge processing is clarified. The authors evaluate the diagnostic capabilities of a prototype medical diagnostic expert system based on a multilayer network. After having been trained on only 300 patients, the prototype system shows diagnostic capabilities almost equivalent to those of a symbolic expert system. Symbolic knowledge is extracted from what the multilayer network has learned. The extracted knowledge is compared with doctors' knowledge. Moreover, a method to extract rules from the network and usage of the rules in a confirmation process are proposed. <<ETX>>
A First Estimate of the Baryonic Mass Function of Galaxies

We estimate the baryonic (stellar+cold gas) mass function of galaxies in the local universe by assigning a complete sample of Two Micron All Sky Survey and Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies a gas fraction based on a statistical sample of the entire population, under the assumption of a universally applicable stellar initial mass function. The baryonic mass function is similar to the stellar mass function at the high-mass end and has a reasonably steep faint-end slope owing to the typically high cold gas fractions and low stellar mass-to-light ratios characteristic of low-mass galaxies. The Schechter function fit parameters are ϕ*h-3 = 0.0108(6) Mpc-3 log M-1, M*h2 = 5.3(3) × 1010 M☉, and α = -1.21(5), with formal error estimates given in parentheses. We show that the H I and H2 mass functions derived using this indirect route are in agreement with direct estimates, validating our indirect method. Integrating under the baryonic mass function and incorporating all sources of uncertainty, we find that the baryonic (stellar+cold gas) mass density implied by this estimate is Ωcold baryonh = 2.4 × 10-3, or 8% of the big bang nucleosynthesis expectation.
An algorithm for computing theory prime implicates in first order logic

An algorithm based on consensus method to compute the set of prime implicates of a quantifier free first order formula X was presented in an earlier work. In this paper the notion of prime implicates is extended to theory prime implicates in the first order case. We provide an algorithm to compute the theory prime implicates of a knowledge base X with respect to another knowledge base Y where both X and Y are assumed to be unquantified first order formulas. The partial correctness of the algorithm is proved.
The Value Relevance of Transparency and Corporate Governance in Malaysia Before and after the Asian Financial Crisis

This paper investigates whether the value relevance of financial reporting transparency and corporate governance in Malaysia increased after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Our sample comprised 94 companies listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange in both 1996 and 2001. The disclosure indexes were significantly value relevant for 2001 but not for 1996. Our corporate governance measure was also significantly value relevant for 2001 but not for 1996. Accordingly, it would appear that after the Asian financial crisis, investors have become more sensitized to transparency and corporate governance issues.