Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recognition of human activity using Internet of Things in a non-controlled environment

Recognition of human activity in a non-controlled environment remained an unsolved problem. In this study, we wonder if accurate recognition of activity can be obtained using Internet of Things technology. We propose a processing methodology that can allow to an automatic system like a robot to recognize human activity. The approach consists of the classification of some activities of the subjects: walking, standing, sitting and laying. The study exploits a standard smartwatch and a smartphone carried by participants during a non-controlled experiment. We propose a pre-computation using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and we identify the best window width and feature length that provides the best results. We show that Support Vector Machines (SVM) provides better results compared with Decision Tree algorithms (DT). The results also demonstrate that participants' activities were classified with an accuracy of more than 91% in a non-controlled environment, with a non-controlled position of the smartphone. We define the notion of transient that corresponds to the transition between two activities as well between two positions of the sensors. The last result shows that removing the transients provides better results for the classification, i.e. 98%. This approach shows that it is possible for a robot assistant to understand the human behavior only using standard Internet of Things technology in a non-controlled environment.
Magnetic NDT Technology for Characterizing Materials – A State of the Art Survey

Per definition, magnetic NDT can be applied at ferromagnetic material only. However, most of the materials we use today still are iron-based steels with bcc lattice and therefore magnetic. The magnetic properties of these materials can be utilized in NDT for defect detection and sizing as well as for materials characterization in terms of mechanical properties determination, also in on-line process-controlled systems. MT is old and one of the most applied NDT techniques in the world for detecting surface-breaking cracks by using magnetic particles. Nowadays the technique can be mechanized and the interpretation of powder indications as findings is performed by intelligent pattern recognition software, i.e. the drawback to be working with a high human factor influence can be eliminated. However, in complex shaped geometries, for instance pusher beams of steering gears in car industry, the existence of pseudoindications prevent the application of MPI. Based on new magnetic sensors, i.e. GMR, an automatic detection with high sensitivity became possible. Manufacturers in automotive industry after validation of the new technology ask for a replacement of MPI. There are many similarities between mechanical and magnetic properties of magnetic materials. Microstructure characteristics like vacancies, dissolved atoms, dislocations, precipitates, and grain and phase boundaries influence the dislocation movement under mechanical loads similar as they hinder the Bloch wall movement under magnetic loads. Therefore micro-magnetic techniques are suitable to characterize properties like hardness, yield and tensile strength but also toughness properties like Charpy energy or ductile – brittle transition temperature. The contribution introduces into recently developed industrial applications in steel industry to non-destructively and on-line characterize mechanical properties in the manufacturing process as well as to approaches to describe the ageing state of steels in power plant applications performing an in-service inspection.
A Meta-Analysis of Antiviral Therapy for Hepatitis B Virus-Associated Membranous Nephropathy

Hepatitis B virus-associated membranous nephropathy (HBV-MN) is the most common renal extra-hepatic manifestation in patients with chronic HBV infection. In September 2015, we searched the MEDLINE, EMBASE, and CENTRAL databases, and the reference lists of retrieved articles, to identify relevant studies. Descriptions of antiviral drugs used to treat HBV-MN were included in our review. Two authors independently screened all relevant articles, extracted data, and assessed the risk of bias. Nine hundred and fifty-four papers have been considered after electronic and manual searching, only five relevant studies were identified. Complete remission (OR = 26.87, 95% CI: 8.06 to 89.52), total remission (OR = 10.31, 95% CI: 3.59 to 29.63) of proteinuria and HBeAg clearance (OR = 20.91, 95% CI: 6.90 to 63.39) increased significantly after antiviral therapy. No significant differences were seen between interferon and nucleoside analog treatments. Our study found that antiviral therapy was an effective treatment in HBV-MN patients; interferon and nucleoside analogs were equally effective at causing proteinuria remission and HBeAg clearance.
Influence of advection on measurements of the net ecosystem‐atmosphere exchange of CO2 from a very tall tower

In most studies of the net ecosystem-atmosphere exchange of CO2 (NEE) using tower-based eddy covariance (EC) systems it has been assumed that advection is negligible. In this study we use a scalar conservation budget method to estimate the contribution of advection to NEE measurements from a very tall tower in northern Wisconsin. We examine data for June-August 1997. Measured NEE0, calculated as the sum of the EC flux plus the rate of change of storage below the EC measurement level, is expected to be constant with measurement height, and we take the differences between levels as a measure of advection. We find that the average difference in total advection DFCadtot between 30 and 122 m is as large as 6 mmol m 22 s 21 during the morning transition from stable to convective conditions and the average difference DFCadtot between 122 and 396 m is as large as 4 mmol m 22 s 21 during daytime. For the month of July, advection between 30 and 122 m is 27% of the diurnally integrated NEE0 at 122 m, and advection between 122 and 396 m accounts for 5% of the NEE0 observed at 396 m. The observed differences of advection often have significant correlation with the vertical integral of wind speed within the same layer. This indicates that the horizontal advection contribution to NEE could be significant. Direct observations of the vertical gradient in CO2 show that DFCadtot cannot be explained by vertical advection alone. It is hypothesized that differing flux footprints and pooling of CO2 in the heterogeneous landscape causes the advection contribution. The magnitudes of the total advection component FCadtot of NEE at the 30 m level are roughly estimated by a linear extrapolation. A peak in F Cadtot at 30 m of ;3 mmol m 22 s 21 during the morning transition is predicted for all three months. The July integrated F Cadtot is estimated to be 10% of the diurnally integrated NEE0 at 30 m.
Mapping disaster areas jointly: RFID-Coordinated SLAM by Hurnans and Robots

We consider the problem of jointly performing SLAM by humans and robots in Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) scenarios. In this context, SLAM is a challenging task. First, places are hardly re-observable by vision techniques since visibility might be affected by smoke and fire. Second, loop-closure is cumbersome due to the fact that fire fighters will intentionally try to avoid performing loops when facing the reality of emergency response, e.g. while they are searching for victims. Furthermore, there might be places that are only accessible to robots, making it necessary to integrate humans and robots into one team for mapping the area after a disaster. In this paper, we introduce a method for jointly correcting individual trajectories of humans and robots by utilizing RFID technology for data association. Hereby the poses of humans and robots are tracked by PDR (Pedestrian Dead Reckoning) and slippage sensitive odometry, respectively. We conducted extensive experiments with a team of humans and robots within a semi-outdoor environment. Results from these experiments show that the introduced method allows to improve single trajectories based on the joint graph, even if they do not contain any loop.
Supplemental calcium suppresses colonic mucosal ornithine decarboxylase activity in elderly patients with adenomatous polyps.

Epidemiological and animal studies suggest a role for calcium in the chemoprevention of colorectal neoplasia. This study was designed to investigate whether supplemental oral calcium has a suppressant effect on colonic mucosal ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) and tyrosine kinase activities in patients with adenomatous polyps or a history of adenomatous polyps and whether this is affected by age. ODC and tyrosine kinase activities were measured in rectal mucosal biopsies of 19 male patients (age, years 46-85 years; mean, 66 years) with adenomatous polyps or a history of adenomatous polyps before and after 1 week of calcium supplementation p.o. (CaCO3; 2500 mg/day) and 2 weeks after cessation of calcium treatment. The basal rectal mucosal ODC activity of patients greater than or equal to 64 years old was nearly 4-fold higher than that of patients less than 64 years old (P less than 0.005). In patients greater than or equal to 64 years old, there was a significant decrease in rectal mucosal ODC activity following 1 week of calcium p.o. compared to those age less than 64 years (P less than 0.05). Overall tyrosine kinase activity did not differ significantly in either patient group before or after calcium supplementation p.o. However, the concentration of phosphotyrosine membrane proteins with molecular weights between 40,000 and 60,000 and between 80,000 and 100,000 were suppressed in patients age greater than or equal to 64 years after 1 week of calcium treatment p.o. These patients also had a corresponding decrease in their rectal mucosal ODC activity. Alternatively, patients whose ODC was not affected by calcium showed no apparent change in the relative concentration of rectal mucosal phosphotyrosine membrane proteins. Our data indicate that there is an age-related increase in basal rectal mucosal ODC activity in patients with adenomatous polyps which can be suppressed with calcium supplementation p.o. , suggesting a role for dietary calcium in the chemoprevention of colorectal neoplasia.
Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching: What Makes Good Teachers Great?

In the 1970s and 1980s, educational researchers began to study what makes good teachers great. One common approach of these early researchers was to compare experienced teachers with novice teachers; they found that experienced teachers have a greater repertoire of scripts than novice teachers – standard sequences of activities, or responses to students, that work in specific situations. Researchers also found, however, that experienced teachers were better at improvising in response to each class’s unique flow; in fact, they tended to spend less advance time planning than novice teachers (Berliner & Tikunoff, 1976; Borko & Livingston, 1989; Yinger, 1987). Experienced teachers do two apparently contradictory things: They use more structures, and yet they improvise more. These early studies of teacher expertise focused on the structures that teachers created themselves, as ways to enhance teaching, manage classrooms, and handle problems that may arise. In addition, many of the structures that guide teaching are mandated by law, administration, or state and federal guidelines. Modern schools are complex organizations, with relatively rigid structures and bureaucratic and administrative frameworks that constrain what teachers can do in classrooms (Olson, 2003).
Healthcare Service Utilization for Practicing Physicians: A Population-Based Study

Background Physicians are considered to be the most informed consumers in the use of medical services since they have more information about diseases or medical technology. However, although plenty of researchers have suggested that different medical seeking behavior exists among physicians, very few empirical studies have been conducted to investigate differences in medical utilization between physicians and the general population. Objective We explored differences in the utilization of healthcare services between physicians and the general population using a population-based dataset. Design A cross-sectional study. Participants Data for this study were sourced from the Taiwan Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2000. We included 1426 physicians and 1426 sex- and age-matched comparison subjects. Methods We used Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests to explore differences in variables of healthcare resource utilization between physicians and comparison subjects. We further used Kruskal-Wallis tests to examine differences in variables of healthcare resource utilization between physician practice location and comparison subjects. Results We found that physicians had significantly fewer outpatient visits (13.2 vs. 15.7, p<0.001) and significantly lower outpatient costs (US$477 vs. US$680, p<0.001) than comparison subjects. Furthermore, physicians had lower total health service costs than comparison subjects (US$643 vs. US$1066, p<0.001). This indicates that the mean total health service costs in the year 2010 was 1.66-fold greater for comparison subjects than for physicians. We also found that there were significant differences in the mean number of outpatient services (p<0.001), outpatient costs (p = 0.001), inpatients costs (p = 0.018), and total costs (p = 0.001) among office-based physicians, hospital-based physicians, and comparison subjects. Specifically, Scheffe contrast tests showed that office-based physicians had significantly more outpatient visits (19.3 vs.10.7, p<0.001) and significantly higher outpatient costs (US$656 vs. US$402, p<0.001) than hospital-based physicians. Conclusions Physicians had less healthcare utilization than comparison subjects. Furthermore, hospital-based physicians had higher inpatient costs and less outpatient services and costs than office-based physicians.
MAP-JOIN-REDUCE: Toward Scalable and Efficient Data Analysis on Large Clusters

Data analysis is an important functionality in cloud computing which allows a huge amount of data to be processed over very large clusters. MapReduce is recognized as a popular way to handle data in the cloud environment due to its excellent scalability and good fault tolerance. However, compared to parallel databases, the performance of MapReduce is slower when it is adopted to perform complex data analysis tasks that require the joining of multiple data sets in order to compute certain aggregates. A common concern is whether MapReduce can be improved to produce a system with both scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce Map-Join-Reduce, a system that extends and improves MapReduce runtime framework to efficiently process complex data analysis tasks on large clusters. We first propose a filtering-join-aggregation programming model, a natural extension of MapReduce's filtering-aggregation programming model. Then, we present a new data processing strategy which performs filtering-join-aggregation tasks in two successive MapReduce jobs. The first job applies filtering logic to all the data sets in parallel, joins the qualified tuples, and pushes the join results to the reducers for partial aggregation. The second job combines all partial aggregation results and produces the final answer. The advantage of our approach is that we join multiple data sets in one go and thus avoid frequent checkpointing and shuffling of intermediate results, a major performance bottleneck in most of the current MapReduce-based systems. We benchmark our system against Hive, a state-of-the-art MapReduce-based data warehouse on a 100-node cluster on Amazon EC2 using TPC-H benchmark. The results show that our approach significantly boosts the performance of complex analysis queries.
Small-Scale Habitat Structure Modulates the Effects of No-Take Marine Reserves for Coral Reef Macroinvertebrates

No-take marine reserves are one of the oldest and most versatile tools used across the Pacific for the conservation of reef resources, in particular for invertebrates traditionally targeted by local fishers. Assessing their actual efficiency is still a challenge in complex ecosystems such as coral reefs, where reserve effects are likely to be obscured by high levels of environmental variability. The goal of this study was to investigate the potential interference of small-scale habitat structure on the efficiency of reserves. The spatial distribution of widely harvested macroinvertebrates was surveyed in a large set of protected vs. unprotected stations from eleven reefs located in New Caledonia. Abundance, density and individual size data were collected along random, small-scale (20×1 m) transects. Fine habitat typology was derived with a quantitative photographic method using 17 local habitat variables. Marine reserves substantially augmented the local density, size structure and biomass of the target species. Density of Trochus niloticus and Tridacna maxima doubled globally inside the reserve network; average size was greater by 10 to 20% for T. niloticus. We demonstrated that the apparent success of protection could be obscured by marked variations in population structure occurring over short distances, resulting from small-scale heterogeneity in the reef habitat. The efficiency of reserves appeared to be modulated by the availability of suitable habitats at the decimetric scale (“microhabitats”) for the considered sessile/low-mobile macroinvertebrate species. Incorporating microhabitat distribution could significantly enhance the efficiency of habitat surrogacy, a valuable approach in the case of conservation targets focusing on endangered or emblematic macroinvertebrate or relatively sedentary fish species
NMDA-Receptor Activation but Not Ion Flux Is Required for Amyloid-Beta Induced Synaptic Depression

Alzheimer disease is characterized by a gradual decrease of synaptic function and, ultimately, by neuronal loss. There is considerable evidence supporting the involvement of oligomeric amyloid-beta (Aβ) in the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease. Historically, AD research has mainly focused on the long-term changes caused by Aβ rather than analyzing its immediate effects. Here we show that acute perfusion of hippocampal slice cultures with oligomeric Aβ depresses synaptic transmission within 20 minutes. This depression is dependent on synaptic stimulation and the activation of NMDA-receptors, but not on NMDA-receptor mediated ion flux. It, therefore, appears that Aβ dependent synaptic depression is mediated through a use-dependent metabotropic-like mechanism of the NMDA-receptor, but does not involve NMDA-receptor mediated synaptic transmission, i.e. it is independent of calcium flux through the NMDA-receptor.
Do Security Vulnerability Announcemnets Impact Software Vendors - An Event Study Analysis

In this paper, we use the event study methodology to examine the role that financial markets play in determining the impact of vulnerability disclosures on software vendors. We collect data from leading national newspapers and industry sources by searching for reports on published software vulnerabilities. Our main result is that vulnerability disclosures do lead to a negative and significant change in market value for a software vendor. On average, a vendor loses around 0.6% value in stock price when a vulnerability is reported. To provide further insight, we use the information content of the disclosure announcement to classify vulnerabilities into various types. This is the first study to measure vendors’ incentive to develop secure software and also provides many interesting implications for software vendors as well as policy makers.
Masculinity and Fathering Alone during Parental Leave

Based on interviews with fathers who stay home alone on parental leave in Norway, this article explores how the masculine identities of employed fathers may be affected by caring. Research on changing masculinities has been concerned with the reworking of men’s gender identities into caring ones, and this article aims to add empirical knowledge on ways that parental leave for fathers may contribute to undoing gender. Findings support a development toward “caring masculinities” in which values and practices of care are integrated into masculine identities without degradation in masculine status. Self-worth is measured against building care competence and being able to contribute love to their children rather than acquisition of status and resources. Findings also show that fathers tend to interpret caring within conventional masculine activities such as “hard work” and outdoor challenges.
High-Throughput Analysis of T-DNA Location and Structure Using Sequence Capture

Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of plants with T-DNA is used both to introduce transgenes and for mutagenesis. Conventional approaches used to identify the genomic location and the structure of the inserted T-DNA are laborious and high-throughput methods using next-generation sequencing are being developed to address these problems. Here, we present a cost-effective approach that uses sequence capture targeted to the T-DNA borders to select genomic DNA fragments containing T-DNA—genome junctions, followed by Illumina sequencing to determine the location and junction structure of T-DNA insertions. Multiple probes can be mixed so that transgenic lines transformed with different T-DNA types can be processed simultaneously, using a simple, index-based pooling approach. We also developed a simple bioinformatic tool to find sequence read pairs that span the junction between the genome and T-DNA or any foreign DNA. We analyzed 29 transgenic lines of Arabidopsis thaliana, each containing inserts from 4 different T-DNA vectors. We determined the location of T-DNA insertions in 22 lines, 4 of which carried multiple insertion sites. Additionally, our analysis uncovered a high frequency of unconventional and complex T-DNA insertions, highlighting the needs for high-throughput methods for T-DNA localization and structural characterization. Transgene insertion events have to be fully characterized prior to use as commercial products. Our method greatly facilitates the first step of this characterization of transgenic plants by providing an efficient screen for the selection of promising lines.
Telehealth Parent Training in the Early Start Denver Model: Results From a Randomized Controlled Study

Telehealth training may benefit parents’ use of early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study is one of the few randomized trials to compare telehealth parent training in the Early Start Denver Model (P-ESDM) with a community treatment-as-usual, early intervention program. Parents were randomized to 12 weekly 1.5-hr videoconferencing sessions with website access to P-ESDM learning resources or to monthly 1.5-hr videoconferencing sessions with website access to alternative resources to support their intervention. Telehealth training facilitated higher parent fidelity gains and program satisfaction for more of the P-ESDM than the community group at the end of the 12-week training and at follow-up. Children’s social communication skills improved for both groups regardless of parent fidelity. Findings suggest the feasibility of telehealth training with improved parent intervention usage and satisfaction from the program. However, the impact of these effects on children’s development over time is yet to be understood.