Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relational entropy-based saliency detection in images and videos

Salient regions in an image facilitate the non-uniform allocation of computational resources to just the interesting parts of an image. In this paper, we present a saliency detection mechanism using relational distributions that capture geometric statistics based on distance and gradient direction relationships between pixels. The entropy of these normalized distributions is related to saliency. We employ an efficient technique for calculating the Rényi entropy of the probabilistic relational distributions using Parzen window weighted samples, thus eliminating the need for constructing intermediate histogram representations. We quantitatively demonstrate the biological plausibility of our method by showing how the saliency maps produced strongly correlate to human fixations in still images and to dominant objects in video. We find that our approach is better than six other saliency models.
Language problems in Parkinson's Disease patients without dementia

One of the major pathophysiological features in Parkinson’s disease, from now on referred to as PD, is the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, which in turn results in dysfunction of the cortico-striato-cortical circuits (Bartels & Leenders, 2009). In PD the components of the cortico-striato-cortical circuits are not in an optimal interaction, leading to insufficient engagement of for example the frontal and prefrontal lobes. Motor symptoms of tremor, bradykinesia, and rigidity are the clinical hallmark of PD (Wolters & Bosboom, 2007), however, non-motor symptoms are often present (Dubois & Pillon, 1995, 1997). In particular cognitive impairments in the domain of executive functioning have frequently been observed, both in late and also in very early stages of PD (Muslimovic et al., 2005). The term ‘executive functioning’ is used as a blanket term referring to a set of abilities that allow individuals to achieve goal-oriented behavior. These aspects of behavior can be regarded as top-down processes, in contrast to bottom-up processes that only represent stimulus-driven processing. Strauss et al. (2006) defined executive functioning as a collection of processes that are responsible for guiding, directing, and managing cognitive, emotional and behavioral functions, particularly during active, novel problem solving. As PD progresses, more severe cognitive impairments or dementia can occur (Aarsland et al., 2003). The dementia in PD exhibits normal or only slightly decreased performance in gnosis and praxis functions, and is typically characterized by a progressive dysexecutive syndrome with disturbed memory functions and attention (Dubois & Pillon, 1997). In addition, it has repeatedly been shown that language functions in PD patients with dementia are affected. Demented PD patients show reduced verbal fluency, poor confrontation naming abilities, decreased word list generation, and difficulties in wordfinding (Dubois & Pillon, 1997; Pahwa et al., 1998). However, prior to dementia, PD patients also evidence subtle language impairments. The question whether the language system itself is impaired, as for example in aphasia, or whether language performance is disrupted because of non-linguistic executive function disorders in PD is still unanswered. We assume that, intact executive functioning is a prerequisite for normal language functioning. Therefore, language processing deficits in PD will always be associated with executive function deficits. Under this view, the language faculty is not considered to be totally modular in nature, but thought to depend on other cognitive functions, since, for example, comprehending a sentence demands that a listener flexibly guides his/her attention to relevant linguistic information, maintains information in working memory during the
Distributed Tracking Control for Linear Multiagent Systems With a Leader of Bounded Unknown Input

This technical note considers the distributed tracking control problem of multiagent systems with general linear dynamics and a leader whose control input is nonzero and not available to any follower. Based on the relative states of neighboring agents, two distributed discontinuous controllers with, respectively, static and adaptive coupling gains, are designed for each follower to ensure that the states of the followers converge to the state of the leader, if the interaction graph among the followers is undirected, the leader has directed paths to all followers, and the leader's control input is bounded. A sufficient condition for the existence of the distributed controllers is that each agent is stabilizable. Simulation examples are given to illustrate the theoretical results.
Identifying the consequences of dynamic treatment strategies: A decision-theoretic overview

We consider the problem of learning about and comparing the consequences of dynamic treatment strategies on the basis of observational data. We formulate this within a probabilistic decision-theoretic framework. Our approach is compared with related work by Robins and others: in particular, we show how Robins's 'G-computation' algorithm arises naturally from this decision-theoretic perspective. Careful attention is paid to the mathematical and substantive conditions required to justify the use of this formula. These conditions revolve around a property we term stability, which relates the probabilistic behaviours of observational and interventional regimes. We show how an assumption of 'sequential randomization' (or 'no unmeasured confounders'), or an alternative assumption of 'sequential irrelevance', can be used to infer stability. Probabilistic influence diagrams are used to simplify manipulations, and their power and limitations are discussed. We compare our approach with alternative formulations based on causal DAGs or potential response models. We aim to show that formulating the problem of assessing dynamic treatment strategies as a problem of decision analysis brings clarity, simplicity and generality.
Risk Factors of Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae Infection: A Serious Threat in ICUs

Background Nosocomial infections caused by Carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CRKP) are increasing. Our aim in this study was to investigate the risk factors of CRKP infections. Material/Methods A retrospective cohort study was performed between 1 January and 31 December 2012 in ICU patients. Data was taken from the hospital infection control database for CRKP. The clinical samples collected from the patients were tested by an automatized system and disk diffusion. SPSS software v11.5 was used for statistical analysis. Results Totally, 105 Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates were found in 2012 and the carbapenem resistance rate was 48%. The first episode of infection was taken into risk factor analysis. Of the 98 patients, 61 (62.2%) were male and the mean and median ages were 30.4±29.8 and 25 (0–93). The length of stay was longer in the resistant group (p=0.026). Mortality was 48% in the whole group and similar between groups (p=0.533). There was a relationship between meropenem and third-generation cephalosporin use and resistance (OR 3.244 (1.193–8.819) and OR: 3.590 (1.056–12.209). The other risk factors in univariate analysis were: Immunosuppression OR: 2.186 (1.754–2.724), nasogastric catheter OR: 3.562 (1.317–9.634), peripheral arterial catheter OR: 2.545 (1.027–6.307), and being admitted to the neurosurgical unit OR: 4.324 (1.110–16.842). The multivariate analysis showed use of third-generation cephalosporin OR: 4.699 (1.292–17.089), nasogastric catheter use OR: 3.983 (1.356–11.698), and being admitted to neurosurgical ICU OR: 4.603 (1.084–19.555) as independent risk factors. Conclusions Restriction of third-generation cephalosporin and carbapenem use and invasive procedures, along with infection control precautions and disinfection policies, may be effective in reducing the carbapenem resistance in ICUs.
Bias-variance decomposition of ir evaluation

It has been recognized that, when an information retrieval (IR) system achieves improvement in mean retrieval effectiveness (e.g. mean average precision (MAP)) over all the queries, the performance (e.g., average precision (AP)) of some individual queries could be hurt, resulting in retrieval instability. Some stability/robustness metrics have been proposed. However, they are often defined separately from the mean effectiveness metric. Consequently, there is a lack of a unified formulation of effectiveness, stability and overall retrieval quality (considering both). In this paper, we present a unified formulation based on the bias-variance decomposition. Correspondingly, a novel evaluation methodology is developed to evaluate the effectiveness and stability in an integrated manner. A case study applying the proposed methodology to evaluation of query language modeling illustrates the usefulness and analytical power of our approach.
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES DOES THE MARKET VALUE R&D INVESTMENT BY EUROPEAN FIRMS? EVIDENCE FROM A PANEL OF MANUFACTURING FIRMS IN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND ITALY

We are grateful to participants in the DRUID conference, Elsinore, June 2003, the EEA-ESEM conference, Stockholm, August 2003, the AiIG Conference, Bergamo, October 2003, and seminar participants at University of Bologna, European University Institute, Universitat Pompeu-Fabra, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Economicum, Helsinki for comments. Thanks also to Jim Powell for advice on the sample selection model, Federico Munari for suggestions on the ownership data, Lucia Piscitello and Maurizio Sobrero for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. Raffaele Oriani gratefully acknowledges the support of Andrea Generale and other colleagues at the Research Department of the Bank of Italy and the funding of the COFIN 2001 grant (prot. 20011097179-003) by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR). The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Opening the Black Box of Efficiency Measurement: Input Allocation in Multi-Output Settings

We develop a new data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based methodology for measuring the efficiency of decision-making units (DMUs) characterized by multiple inputs and multiple outputs. The distinguishing feature of our method is that it explicitly includes information about output-specific inputs and joint inputs in the efficiency evaluation. This method contributes to opening the "black box" of efficiency measurement in two different ways. First, including information on the input allocation substantially increases the discriminatory power of the efficiency measurement. Second, it allows us to decompose the efficiency value of a DMU into output-specific efficiency values, which facilitates the identification of the outputs the manager should focus on to remedy the observed inefficiency. We demonstrate the usefulness and managerial implications of our methodology by means of a unique data set collected from the activity-based costing (ABC) system of a large service company with 290 DMUs. © 2013 INFORMS.
The Meaning of AIDS-Related Deaths in an Urban Town in Ghana

HIV/AIDS has claimed the lives of many people, the majority of whom are young. In Ghana, about 200,000 people have lost their lives to the disease. While HIV/AIDS as a disease has enjoyed considerable academic scholarship, understanding how people make sense of death has not received adequate academic attention. This article explores the meaning of death resulting from AIDS in an urban town in Ghana. The views of 25 persons living with HIV/AIDS were solicited through in-depth interviews. Additional data were obtained from focus group discussions with members of the community in which the 25 persons were interviewed. The findings indicate that death from AIDS is seen as disgraceful and shameful. The meaning of AIDS deaths was based on the fact that HIV/AIDS is a metaphor for moral decadence. This image is subsequently projected onto its death. The classification of AIDS death as disgraceful and shameful may have implications for the funeral rites of AIDS patients, while at the same time affecting prevention and treatment.
Serum Omega-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids and Risk of Incident Type 2 Diabetes in Men: The Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study

OBJECTIVE The relationship between fish or omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) and type 2 diabetes is inconclusive. Even contaminants in fish, such as mercury, may modify the effects. We investigated the associations between serum omega-3 PUFAs eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosapentaenoic acid (DPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), α-linolenic acid (ALA), hair mercury, and risk of incident type 2 diabetes in middle-aged and older Finnish men. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A total of 2,212 men from the prospective, population-based Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease Risk Factor study, aged 42–60 years and free of type 2 diabetes at baseline in 1984–1989, were investigated. Serum PUFA and hair mercury were used as biomarkers for exposure. Dietary intakes were assessed with 4-day food recording. Type 2 diabetes was assessed by self-administered questionnaires and fasting and 2-h oral glucose tolerance test blood glucose measurement at re-examination rounds 4, 11, and 20 years after the baseline and by record linkage to hospital discharge registry and reimbursement register on diabetes medication expenses. Cox proportional hazards models were used to analyze associations. RESULTS During the average follow-up of 19.3 years, 422 men developed type 2 diabetes. Men in the highest versus the lowest serum EPA + DPA + DHA quartile had 33% lower multivariate-adjusted risk for type 2 diabetes (95% CI 13–49; P trend 0.01). No statistically significant associations were observed with serum or dietary ALA, dietary fish or EPA + DHA, or hair mercury. CONCLUSIONS Serum long-chain omega-3 PUFA concentration, an objective biomarker for fish intake, was associated with long-term lower risk of type 2 diabetes.
Targeted Therapy in Breast Cancer

The HER-2/neu oncogene, a member of the epidermal growth factor receptor or erb gene family, encodes a transmembrane tyrosine kinase receptor that has been linked to prognosis and response to therapy with the anti-HER-2-humanized monoclonal antibody, trastuzumab (Herceptin, Genentech, South San Francisco, CA) in patients with advanced metastatic breast cancer. HER-2/neu status has also been tested for its ability to predict the response of breast cancer to other therapies including hormonal therapies, topoisomerase inhibitors, and anthracyclines. This review includes an analysis of 80 published studies encompassing more than 25,000 patients designed to consider the relative advantages and disadvantages of the various methods of measuring HER-2/neu in clinical breast cancer specimens. Southern blotting, PCR amplification detection, and fluorescence in situ hybridization assays designed to detect HER-2/neu gene amplification are compared with HER-2/neu protein overexpression assays performed by immunohistochemical techniques applied to frozen and paraffin-embedded tissues and enzyme immunoassays performed on tumor cytosols. The significance of HER-2/neu overexpression in ductal carcinoma in situ and the HER-2/neu status in uncommon female breast conditions and male breast cancer are also considered. The role of HER-2/neu testing for the prediction of response to trastuzumab therapy in breast cancer is reviewed along with the current studies designed to test whether HER-2/neu status can predict the response to standard and newer hormonal therapies, cytotoxic chemotherapy, and radiation. The review will also evaluate the status of serum-based testing for circulating HER-2/neu receptor protein and its ability to predict disease outcome and therapy response.
WebCorp: providing a renewable data source for corpus linguists

The many electronic text corpora available nowadays present ever fewer obstacles to a wide range of corpus linguistic study. However, corpora are expensive resources to create and to update, and there remain problems for linguists if they seek access to very large, very recent, or changing language. The World Wide Web, whilst intended as an information source, is an obvious resource for the retrieval of linguistic information, being the largest store of texts in existence, freely-available, covering a range of domains, and constantly added to and updated. Individual linguistic researchers have been trying to retrieve instances of rare or neologistic language use from the web by manipulating existing web search engines. Whilst this strategy is possible, in particular via Google, the output is rather haphazard and not linguist-friendly. The Research and Development Unit for English Studies has been seeking to remedy the situation through the creation of ‘WebCorp’, a tool designed to search the Internet and provide on-line tailored access to linguists. A demonstration tool is available at http://www.webcorp. org.uk. This paper will report on the research initiative and highlight some of the issues involved.
Sums of Dilates in Groups of Prime Order

We obtain a first non-trivial estimate for the sum of dilates problem in the case of groups of prime order, by showing that if t is an integer different from 0, 1 or −1 and if ⊂ ℤ/pℤ is not too large (with respect to p), then | + t ⋅ | is significantly larger than 2|| (unless |t| = 3). In the important case |t| = 2, we obtain for instance | + t ⋅ | ≥ 2.08 ||−2.
Avoiding Spurious Breaks in Binned Luminosity Functions

We show that using either the method of Page & Carrera or the well-known 1/Va method to construct the binned luminosity function (LF) of a flux limited sample of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) can produce an artificial flattening (or steepening in the case of negative evolution) of the binned LF for bins intersected by the flux cutoff of the sample. This effect is more pronounced for samples with steep and strongly evolving parent LFs but is still present even for non-evolving LFs. As a result of this distortion of the true LF, fitting a model LF to binned data may lead to errors in the estimation of the parameters and may even prompt the erroneous use of broken power-law functions. We compute the expected positions of apparent breaks in the binned LF. We show that these spurious breaks in the binned LFs can be avoided if the binning is done in the flux-redshift plane instead of the typically used luminosity-redshift plane. Binning in the flux-redshift plane can be used in conjunction with the binning in the luminosity-redshift plane to test for real breaks in the binned LFs and to identify the features that are the result of binning biases. We illustrate this effect for most typical forms of luminosity dependence and redshift evolution and show how the proposed method helps address this problem. We also apply this method to the MOJAVE AGN sample and show that it eliminates an apparent break in the binned LF.
Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Prostate Cancer

Purpose:To explore the feasibility of 3T magnetic resonance (MR) diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and fiber tracking (FT) in patients with prostate cancer. Materials and methods:Thirty consecutive patients (mean age, 62.5 years) with biopsy proven prostate cancer underwent 3T-MR imaging (MRI) and DTI using a 6-channel external phased-array coil before radical prostatectomy. Regions of interest of 14 pixels were defined in tumors and nonaffected areas in the peripheral zone (PZ) and central gland (CG), according to histopatology after radical prostatectomy. Apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) and fractional anisotropy (FA) values were determined. Differences in mean ADC and FA values among prostate cancer, normal PZ and CG were compared by 2-sided Student t test. The predominant diffusion direction of the prostate anisotropy was color coded on a directionally encoded color (DEC) map. A 3D reconstruction of fiber tract orientations of the whole prostate was determined using the continuous tracking method. The overall image quality for tumor localization and local staging was assessed in retrospective matching with whole-mount section histopathology images. Nodules detected at MRI were classified as matched lesions if tumor presence and extension were evidenced at histopathology. Results:For all the patients, the DTI sequence images were suitable for the evaluation of the zonal anatomy of the prostate gland and the tumor localization. Quantitative evaluation of the regions of interest (ROIs) showed a mean ADC value significantly lower in the peripheral neoplastic area (1.06 ± 0.37 × 10−3 mm2/s) than in the normal peripheral portion (1.95 ± 0.38 × 10−3 mm2/s) (P < 0.05). The mean FA values calculated in the normal peripheral (0.47 ± 0.04) and central area (0.41 ± 0.08) were very similar (P > 0.05). The mean FA values in the neoplastic lesion (0.27 ± 0.05) were significantly lower (P < 0.05) than in the normal peripheral area and in the normal central and adenomyomatous area. DEC map showed a top-bottom type preferential direction in the peripheral but not in the central area, with the tumor lesions reducing the diffusion coding direction represented as color zones tending toward gray. Tractographic analysis permitted good delineation of the prostate anatomy (capsule outline, peripheral and central area borders) and neoplastic lesion extension and capsule infiltration compared with histopathology. Conclusions:Three Tesla DTI of the prostate gland is feasible and has the potential for providing improved diagnostic information.
Listening to the voices of dementia : the therapist's teaching-learning process through co-construction of narrative and the triadic relationship with Alzheimer’s disease sufferers

In dementia care, it has been widely recognized that not only providing medical treatment, but also building an appropriate care relationship between medical professionals and the persons with dementia is one of the keys for understanding the person’s needs and for developing their residual physical and mental abilities. However, there has been little discussion about the meanings and contexts of the care relationship and the role of the therapeutic tools used and the therapist’s expertise in establishing it. To examine these points, the following research questions were addressed: 1) as a mediating tool in the care relationship, what kinds of narratives were created through everyday interaction between therapists and dementia sufferers? 2) how and why were narratives constructed? 3) what is the teaching-learning process of the therapist through narrative joint formation? , and consequently, 4) what is the relationship in dementia care? The data was collected from interviews with one experienced occupational therapist and observations of his care sessions with two Alzheimer’s disease (AD) sufferers in a Japanese nursing home for two years. Their interactions and narratives were transcribed and qualitatively analysed based on Vygotsky's cultural-historical approaches and Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue in education as a theoretical framework. The results have shown that the therapist jointly created narratives and a triadic relationship between the AD sufferers, the narratives, and himself. Using the narratives, he arranged a dialogical environment where the AD sufferers could express their own voices and encounter the voices of others. This enabled them to learn the meaning of their therapeutic activity in connection to their own life experience. As cognitive/psychological tools, the narratives worked towards a teaching-learning process and helped to establish the care relationship. Through the co-construction of narratives and the triadic relationship, the therapist listened to the AD sufferers’ voices carefully, participated in an open ended and unfinalisable dialogue himself with them, and confronted them as equal respondents. In this sense, the therapist is seen as a dialogic teacher who actively learns knowledge and ideas from the dementia sufferers and unceasingly explores unknown questions in narratives with them.