Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
3D MCRLB Evaluation of a UMTS-Based Passive Multistatic Radar Operating in a Line-of-Sight Environment

In this paper, the performance of a universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS)-based passive multistatic radar in a line-of-sight (LoS) environment is studied. The presence of LoS component from the target considerably alters the received signal model, therefore, its characterization is necessary and is the main subject of this work where the transceivers and a target are localized in a three-dimensional Euclidean space. The probability density function (PDF) of the received signal in the presence of LoS is derived and the closed-form expressions of the modified Cramér-Rao lower bounds (MCRLBs) on the Euclidean coordinates of target's position and velocity are found. It is shown that modified Fisher information matrix (MFIM) is a combination of MFIMs due to non-LoS (NLoS) components and LoS component. With the aid of numerical examples, it is verified that by exploiting LoS, the target radar cross section (RCS) increases, which improves the accuracy of target's detection and parameter estimation. In addition, it is also shown that by exploiting LoS component, the performance limits of a waveform can be determined for a generalized radar cross section model (GRCSM), which provides the characterization of a waveform for a broader range of radar applications.
The effect of tax simplification on educational and charitable organizations

The tax code in the United States historically has provided quite a favorable environment for nonprofit institutions. Not only are such institutions usually exempt from taxation, but contributions made to them are deductible in the individual, corporate, and estate taxes. Other tax provisions, such as the exclusion of scholarships and certain fringe benefits from income, the use of tax-exempt bond financing, and tax credits for research support, have also aided educational and other nonprofit organizations. Although there has been no comprehensive analysis comparing the impact of these various provisions, it is clear that the charitable deductions in federal taxes provide a subsidy for contributions and that private donations constitute a very important source of support for nonprofit institutions. Table 1 shows the relative importance of private donations to the nonprofit sector by type of organization. Educational and research institutions in 1980 received 15.5 percent of their operating revenues from contributions and another 5.5 percent from endowments, most of which were created by private gifts. Religious organizations, with some 90 percent of their revenues from these two sources, were most dependent on private giving; health services, with only about 10 percent, were least dependent by this measure. Most tax reform and simplification proposals currently being discussed would alter the favorable treatment of charitable contributions and nonprofit institutions. Motivated by dissatisfaction with the complexity and high rates of the present income tax, most proposals would
Inservice Science Supervisors' Stories: A Source of Practical Knowledge for Student Science Teachers.

This paper aims to demonstrate how listening to and discussing the stories inservice science supervisors tell about a novice science teacher provides an opportunity for student science teachers to construct practical knowledge about teaching. Three levels of practical knowledge of teaching are recognized: (1) rules of practice; (2) practical principles; and (3) images. During individual audiotaped interviews, inservice science supervisors were asked to "Tell me a story about a novice science teacher you've supervised. " Thirty-two student teachers listened to the stories, discussed them, and then individually wrote what they came to know from the exercise. A list was made of all the student teachers' comments that embodied a rule, principle, or image. The various pieces of practical knowledge that the student teachers constructed cohered around four themes: the complex nature of teaching; planning and implementing lessons; professional improvement and growth; and the character, personality, and style of a teacher. Contains 20 references. (DDR) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND Zr DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS 00 BEEN GRANTED BY zr Y\ A O THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) J U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement UCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as ceived from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. Inservice Science Supervisors' Stories: A Source of Practical Knowledge for Student Science Teachers June Trop Zuckerman The State University of New York at New Paltz Department of Secondary Education Old Main 204 The State University of New York at New Paltz 75 South Manheim Boulevard, Suite 8 New Paltz, NY 12561-2442, USA ZUCKERJT @NPVM. NEWPALTZ. EDU Paper Presented at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching San Diego, CA, April, 1998
Lyme disease: The great controversy

17.1 Background We live in interesting times. As a result of vigorous eě orts by well-intentioned but misinformed patient advocates and by a small cadre of their physician supporters, Lyme disease – with fewer annual conę rmed cases in the USA than varicella (Hall-Baker et al., 2010) – is repeatedly characterized as epidemic, controversial and diĜ cult to diagnose or treat. Pseudo-documentary movies (Halperin, 2009) have been produced vilifying experts in the ę eld and purporting to demonstrate a medical conspiracy – driven supposedly by unsupported and unsup-portable allegations of conĚ icts of interest – to hide the suě ering of the victims of this disorder. The press, politicians and advocates repeatedly portray this as a subject of substantive and legitimate scientię c controversy. Yet the scientię c evidence is remarkably consistent, providing no real basis for Rhode Island and others have passed or considered legislation or regulations to assure the provision of demonstrably ineě ective prolonged antibiotic treatment (Klempner et al., 2001; Krupp et al., 2003; Fallon et al., 2008) for patients diagnosed with an undeę ned disorder termed 'chronic Lyme disease'. In 2006, the AĴ orney General of the state of Connecticut opened an investigation of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) for issuing evidence-based guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease, on the legally questionable theory that this clinical guideline represented an antitrust violation. Although this remarkable action yielded no ę nding of any antitrust violation (but ultimately cost the IDSA over half a million dollars in legal and other costs (IDSA, October 2010, personal communication), it did result in a detailed review of the guidelines by an independent panel that endorsed all of the guidelines' original recommendations (Lantos et al., 2010). What, then, is the basis for this controversy? This strange story begins with the disease's original characterization in the USA in the early 1970s, when a surprising number of children in Lyme and Old Lyme, Connecticut, were diagnosed as having juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Eě orts by several mothers of aě ected children led to a more detailed investigation. This ultimately resulted in the pioneering work of Allen Steere and others (Steere et al., 1977), who identię ed both the tick vector and the responsible bacterial pathogen, Borrelia burgdorferi (Burgdorfer et al., 1982; Benach et al., 1983; Steere et al., 1983). It also resulted in the early creation of multiple vocal patient
Evaluation of Bone Metabolism in Critically Ill Patients Using CTx and PINP

Background. Prolonged immobilization, nutritional and vitamin D deficiency, and specific drug administration may lead to significant bone resorption. Methods and Patients. We prospectively evaluated critically ill patients admitted to the ICU for at least 10 days. Demographics, APACHE II, SOFA scores, length of stay (LOS), and drug administration were recorded. Blood collections were performed at baseline and on a weekly basis for five consecutive weeks. Serum levels of PINP, β-CTx, iPTH, and 25(OH)vitamin D were measured at each time-point. Results. We enrolled 28 patients of mean age 67.4 ± 2.3 years, mean APACHE II 22.2 ± 0.9, SOFA 10.1 ± 0.6, and LOS 31.6 ± 5.7 days. Nineteen patients were receiving low molecular weight heparin, 17 nor-epinephrine and low dose hydrocortisone, 18 transfusions, and 3 phenytoin. 25(OH)vitamin D serum levels were very low in all patients at all time-points; iPTH serum levels were increased at baseline tending to normalize on 5th week; β-CTx serum levels were significantly increased compared to baseline on 2nd week (peak values), whereas PINP levels were increased significantly after the 4th week. Conclusions. Our data show that critically ill patients had a pattern of hypovitaminosis D, increased iPTH, hypocalcaemia, and BTMs compatible with altered bone metabolism.
Properties of the connection associated with planar webs and applications

We give various results and applications using the connection $(E,\nabla)$ associated with a $d$-web. Precisely, we exhibit fundamental invariants of the web related to the differential equation of first order which presents the web. They cast some new lights on the connection and its construction, both conceptually and effectively. We describe 4 and 5-webs from this point of view and show for instance that the connection gives account for the linearizability conditions of the web. Moreover, we get characterization of maximal rank webs such as exceptional 5-webs, and 4-webs \emph{via} a new proof of the Poincar\'e theorem in terms of differential systems. We establish the trace formula related to the determinant bundle $(\det E, \det \nabla)$ and the extracted 3-webs. Furthermore, the theorem of determination of the rank is proved to give an explicit criterion for measuring the rank of a web.
SSDH: Semi-Supervised Deep Hashing for Large Scale Image Retrieval

Hashing methods have been widely used for efficient similarity retrieval on large scale image database. Traditional hashing methods learn hash functions to generate binary codes from hand-crafted features, which achieve limited accuracy since the hand-crafted features cannot optimally represent the image content and preserve the semantic similarity. Recently, several deep hashing methods have shown better performance because the deep architectures generate more discriminative feature representations. However, these deep hashing methods are mainly designed for supervised scenarios, which only exploit the semantic similarity information, but ignore the underlying data structures. In this paper, we propose the semi-supervised deep hashing approach, to perform more effective hash function learning by simultaneously preserving semantic similarity and underlying data structures. The main contributions are as follows: 1) We propose a semi-supervised loss to jointly minimize the empirical error on labeled data, as well as the embedding error on both labeled and unlabeled data, which can preserve the semantic similarity and capture the meaningful neighbors on the underlying data structures for effective hashing. 2) A semi-supervised deep hashing network is designed to extensively exploit both labeled and unlabeled data, in which we propose an online graph construction method to benefit from the evolving deep features during training to better capture semantic neighbors. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed deep network is the first deep hashing method that can perform hash code learning and feature learning simultaneously in a semi-supervised fashion. Experimental results on five widely-used data sets show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art hashing methods.
Sound Source Separation Using Sparse Coding with Temporal Continuity Objective

A data-adaptive sound source separation system is presented, which is able to extract meaningful sources from polyphonic real-world music signals. The system is based on the assumption of non-negative sparse sources which have constant spectra with time-varying gain. Temporal continuity objective is proposed as an improvement to the existing techniques. The objective increases the robustness of estimation and perceptual quality of synthesized signals. An algorithm is presented for the estimation of sources. Quantitative results are shown for a drum transcription application, which is able to transcribe 66% of the bass and snare drum hits from synthesized MIDI signals. Separation demonstrations for polyphonic real-world music signals can be found at http://www.cs. tut.fi/~tuomasv/demopage.html.
Visual Field Asymmetries for Motion Processing in Deaf and Hearing Signers

Recently, we reported a strong right visual field/left hemisphere advantage for motion processing in deaf signers and a slight reverse asymmetry in hearing nonsigners (Bosworth & Dobkins, 1999). This visual field asymmetry in deaf signers may be due to auditory deprivation or to experience with a visual-manual language, American Sign Language (ASL). In order to separate these two possible sources, in this study we added a third group, hearing native signers, who have normal hearing and have learned ASL from their deaf parents. As in our previous study, subjects performed a direction-of-motion discrimination task at different locations across the visual field. In addition to investigating differences in left vs right visual field asymmetries across subject groups, we also asked whether performance differences exist for superior vs inferior visual fields and peripheral vs central visual fields. Replicating our previous study, a robust right visual field advantage was observed in deaf signers, but not in hearing nonsigners. Like deaf signers, hearing signers also exhibited a strong right visual field advantage, suggesting that this effect is related to experience with sign language. These results suggest that perceptual processes required for the acquisition and comprehension of language (motion processing in the case of ASL) are recruited by the left, language-dominant, hemisphere. Deaf subjects also exhibited an inferior visual field advantage that was significantly larger than that observed in either hearing group. In addition, there was a trend for deaf subjects to perform relatively better on peripheral than on central stimuli, while both hearing groups showed the reverse pattern. Because deaf signers differed from hearing signers and nonsigners along these domains, the inferior and peripheral visual field advantages observed in deaf subjects is presumably related to auditory deprivation. Finally, these visual field asymmetries were not modulated by attention for any subject group, suggesting they are a result of sensory, and not attentional, factors.
The structure of competitive equilibrium with unsecured debt

I provide a complete characterization of equilibrium with risk of default in sequential economies under uncertainty. Default induces permanent exclusion from financial markets and not-too-tight solvency constraints prevent debt repudiation at equilibrium. The method of analysis relies on a recursive planning program along with the theory of monotone concave opera- tors. The reputational mechanism is fragile, as it sustains constrained efficient as well as constrained inefficient equilibria. Constrained inefficient equilibria involve a progressive deterioration of reputation, inducing a collapse of fi nancial markets with positive probability. Importantly, the only ergodic recursive equilibria (involving trade) are constrained efficient.
Gini decompositions and Gini elasticities

This paper points to flaws in Gini decompositions by income sources and population subgroups and to common pitfalls in the interpretation of decomposition results, focusing on methods within the framework of Rao (1969). We argue that within this framework Gini elasticities may provide the only meaningful way to examine the relevance of income sources or population subgroups for total income inequality. Moreover, we show that existing methods are unsuitable to decompose the trend in the Gini coefficient and provide a coherent method to decompose the Gini trend by income sources. We add to the recent trend of multi-decompositions by deriving Gini elasticities from a simultaneous decomposition by income sources and population subgroups.
Apraxia for differentiating Alzheimer’s disease from subcortical vascular dementia and mild cognitive impairment

Although ideomotor limb apraxia is considered to be a typical sign of cortical pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), it has been also reported in subcortical neurodegenerative diseases and vascular lesions. We aimed to investigate the difference between AD, subcortical vascular dementia (SVaD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients by means of ideomotor limb apraxia frequency and severity. Ninety-six AD, 72 SVaD, and 84 MCI patients were assessed with the mini-mental status examination (MMSe), clinical dementia rating (CDR) and the apraxia screening test of TULIA (AST). Apraxia was significantly more frequent in the AD patients (32.3%) than in both of the SVaD (16.7%) and MCI (4.8%) patients. The frequency of apraxia was also significantly higher in SVaD patients than in MCI patients. AD patients had significantly lower apraxia scores than both SVaD and MCI patients. In addition, a significant difference was found between SVaD and MCI patients in terms of apraxia scores. These results suggest that the widespread belief of the association between apraxia and cortical dementias is not exactly correct. The significant difference between both of the dementia groups and the MCI patients suggests that the absence of apraxia can be an indicator for MCI diagnosis.
How to share a secret

In this paper we show how to divide data <italic>D</italic> into <italic>n</italic> pieces in such a way that <italic>D</italic> is easily reconstructable from any <italic>k</italic> pieces, but even complete knowledge of <italic>k</italic> - 1 pieces reveals absolutely no information about <italic>D</italic>. This technique enables the construction of robust key management schemes for cryptographic systems that can function securely and reliably even when misfortunes destroy half the pieces and security breaches expose all but one of the remaining pieces.
Word Embeddings and Convolutional Neural Network for Arabic Sentiment Classification

With the development and the advancement of social networks, forums, blogs and online sales, a growing number of Arabs are expressing their opinions on the web. In this paper, a scheme of Arabic sentiment classification, which evaluates and detects the sentiment polarity from Arabic reviews and Arabic social media, is studied. We investigated in several architectures to build a quality neural word embeddings using a 3.4 billion words corpus from a collected 10 billion words web-crawled corpus. Moreover, a convolutional neural network trained on top of pre-trained Arabic word embeddings is used for sentiment classification to evaluate the quality of these word embeddings. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existed methods on 4 out of 5 balanced and unbalanced datasets.
Minimax Rates for Estimating the Dimension of a Manifold

Many algorithms in machine learning and computational geometry require, as input, the intrinsic dimension of the manifold that supports the probability distribution of the data. This parameter is rarely known and therefore has to be estimated. We characterize the statistical difficulty of this problem by deriving upper and lower bounds on the minimax rate for estimating the dimension. First, we consider the problem of testing the hypothesis that the support of the data-generating probability distribution is a well-behaved manifold of intrinsic dimension $d_1$ versus the alternative that it is of dimension $d_2$, with $d_{1}<d_{2}$. With an i.i. d. sample of size $n$, we provide an upper bound on the probability of choosing the wrong dimension of $O\left( n^{-\left(d_{2}/d_{1}-1-\epsilon\right)n} \right)$, where $\epsilon$ is an arbitrarily small positive number. The proof is based on bounding the length of the traveling salesman path through the data points. We also demonstrate a lower bound of $\Omega \left( n^{-(2d_{2}-2d_{1}+\epsilon)n} \right)$, by applying Le Cam's lemma with a specific set of $d_{1}$-dimensional probability distributions. We then extend these results to get minimax rates for estimating the dimension of well-behaved manifolds. We obtain an upper bound of order $O \left( n^{-(\frac{1}{m-1}-\epsilon)n} \right)$ and a lower bound of order $\Omega \left( n^{-(2+\epsilon)n} \right)$, where $m$ is the embedding dimension.
Risk factors related to falling in stroke patients: a cross-sectional study

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to investigate a comprehensive understanding of the factors associated with falls in poststroke patients. [Subjects] Forty-eight stroke patients (22 males and 26 females; age 63.79 years) participated in this study. [Methods] This study applied a cross-sectional design. Fear of falling [Falls Efficacy Scale (FES)], balance function [Berg Balance Scale (BBS) and Modified Rivermead Mobility Index (MRMI)], ADL performance level [Modified Barthel Index (MBI)] and cognitive function [Loewenstein Occupational Therapy Cognitive Assessment for Geriatric Populations (LOTCA-G)] were assessed. [Results] Falls efficacy was moderately correlated with ADL performance, balance, and cognition. In addition, stepwise linear regression analysis revealed that ADL performance was the explanatory variable closely associated with falls efficacy in stroke patients. [Conclusion] ADL performance was the primary explanatory variable of falls efficacy according to regression analysis. Thus, we suggest that these results may be used as basic data for developing rehabilitation programs for prevention of falls in stroke patients.
Why are optimistic entrepreneurs successful? An application of the regulatory focus theory

Does entrepreneurial optimism affect business performance? Using a unique data set based on repeated survey design, we investigate this relationship empirically. Our measures of ‘optimism’ and ‘realism’ are derived from comparing the turnover growth expectations of 133 owners-managers with the actual outcomes one year later. Our results indicate that entrepreneurial optimists perform significantly better in terms of profits than pessimists. Moreover, it is the optimist-realist combination that performs best. We interpret our results using regulatory focus theory.