Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A high definition experience from standard definition video

The advent of High Definition television has increased the demand for displays capable of displaying the higher resolution pictures. However, the availability of high definition video broadcast is still very limited. Therefore, one might expect that only in these scarce cases one can fully appreciate the fine details associated with a High Definition picture. However, this is not completely correct. The high display resolution can be exploited by up-converting the Standard Definition video towards the higher resolution, creating a close to High Definition experience. In this paper we will present a methodology to convert standard definition video into video with up to a four times higher picture resolution.
Statistics and Computing

Submission information at the series homepage and springer.com/authors Order online at springer.com ▶ or for the Americas call (toll free) 1-800-SPRINGER ▶ or email us at: customerservice@springer.com. ▶ For outside the Americas call +49 (0) 6221-345-4301 ▶ or email us at: customerservice@springer.com. Statistics and Computing Series Ed.: W.K. Härdle Statistics and Computing (SC) includes monographs and advanced texts on statistical computing and statistical packages.
Analysis of Cerebrospinal Fluid Cells by Flow Cytometry and Immunocytochemistry in Inflammatory Central Nervous System Diseases: Comparison of Low‐ and High‐Density Cell Surface Antigen Expression

The examination of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) continues to play an important role in the diagnosis of inflammatory diseases of the central nervous system (CNS). Immunocytochemistry and flow cytometry are the most commonly used methods for analysis of surface markers on CSF cells. We here compared these methods in the examination of CSF cells from a total of 68 patients with acute and chronic inflammatory CNS diseases. Expression of costimulatory molecules CD80 (B7‐1) and CD86 (B7‐2) as activation markers that are present at low density on the cell surface was analyzed in comparison to CD22 (B‐cells) and CD4 (T‐cell subset), that show high staining intensities. For CD22 and CD4, the results obtained with both methods were similar and reliable. Using flow cytometry, CD80 expression was detected in 6% of CSF cells in patients with chronic inflammatory CNS disease, as compared to 2% using immunocytochemistry, where the reliability of the data was found to be higher. We conclude that for examination of low‐density surface markers on CSF cells, particularly with low cell counts, immunocytochemistry may be more reliable. Diagn. Cytopathol. 1999;21:313–318. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Cooperative interactions in Peer Tutoring: patterns and sequences in paired writing

The research analyzes the interaction of 24 students (12 pairs) of secondary students when using peer tutoring techniques to learn Catalan. Students worked together in a program to produce an authentic writing experience. Significant increases were observed in pre- and posttest Catalan attainment scores of students. An analysis of the interactivity, or joint activity highlighted the emergence of 2 patterns: the tutor’s active pattern and the tutee’s reactive pattern. Different styles of cooperative interactions were also identified, tutors tended to utilize cooperative messages, and tutees tended to initiate collaborative messages. A sequential analysis of the exchanges in the peer tutoring session identified 3 types of sequences: collaborative, tutorial and the initiationresponse-feedback.
Every Family in the Land: Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination against People with Mental Illness

Ed Arthur Crisp Sir Robert Mond Memorial Trust, Royal Society of Medicine, Royal College of Psychiatrists ISBN 0 9541314 0 1 Electronic book (pp 464) available free on www.stigma. org/everyfamily Also available on CD Rom, £11.75 For details, telephone +44(0)20 7881 9000 or +44(0)20 7235 2351 Rating:! [Graphic][1] ! [Graphic][2] It was seven years into the HIV epidemic and several thousand deaths before the then president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, could bring himself to use the word AIDS in a speech. Contrast this with the legionnaires' disease outbreak of the early 1970s. This generated several front page headlines, public debate, and a photograph in the New York Times showing President Ford holding an emergency cabinet meeting to address the … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif [2]: /embed/inline-graphic-2.gif
Radar sea echo in UHF in coastal zone: experimental observations and theory

We present the results of a preliminary experiment of remote sensing of near-shore environment by an UHF radar initially devoted to atmospheric wind profiling. VV and HH Doppler signatures of the sea surface during a one-day experiment are analyzed in terms of signal decay with distance and Doppler spectra morphology. Marked differences between VV ("slow" scatterers) and HH spectra ("fast" scatterers) were observed. VV spectra could be partly reproduced considering a first-order Bragg theory.
Turbulence in Organizations: New Metaphors for Organizational Research

Nonlinear dynamics provides two metaphors for organizational dynamics, bifurcation, and mathematical chaos. These metaphors make possible distinct observations about turbulent organizational processes that have previously been described as “chaotic. ” Careful distinction between the metaphors affords additional insight into organizational processes and can aid theory development. The metaphors are integrated into organizational process research through application to two current process theory taxonomies. New research directions in managing turbulence and constructing process models are suggested.
Detection of dim targets in high cluttered background using high order correlation neural network

Presents the development and neural network implementation of a high order spatio-temporal correlation scheme for clutter rejection and dim target track detection from infrared (IR) data. The authors first describe the problem of multiscan target detection and then formulate a model for the process. A high-order correlation method is developed to examine the data between consecutive scans. Images of point sources received from IR sensors were processed consecutively using a connectionist high-order correlation network to reject the background clutter without losing the target information. About 95% clutter rejection rate was achieved using this method. <<ETX>>
Robust control design for uncertain flexible-joint manipulators: a singular perturbation approach

A robust composite control law is proposed for flexible-joint manipulators which contain uncertainties. The uncertainty considered is nonlinear and (possibly fast) time-varying. Therefore, the uncertain factors such as imperfect modeling, friction, payload change, and external disturbances are all addressed. Based only on the possible bound of the uncertainty, a robust control law is constructed for the rigid counterpart of the flexible-joint robot. A velocity feedback control term is then added to the robust control law to stabilize the elastic vibrations at the joint. To show that the proposed robust composite control law is indeed applicable to flexible-joint robots, a singular perturbation approach for the stability study is proposed. Practical stability is proven. The size of the uniform ultimate boundedness ball can be manipulated to be arbitrary small. <<ETX>>
The role of the help desk in the strategic management of information systems

Draws on a recently completed British Library Research and Development‐funded project investigating key factors in help‐desk success. Describes the methodology of survey by questionnaire and case studies. Summarizes the results briefly and focusses specifically on the results which feed into a discussion of the potential of the help desk in enabling an organization or its customers to gather data on systems use, plan and implement IT development strategies and assess their impact on attitudes to IT.
High-performance and power-efficient CMOS comparators

Several design techniques for high-performance and power-efficient CMOS comparators are proposed. First, the comparator is based on the priority-encoding (PE) algorithm, and the dynamic circuit technique developed specifically for the priority encoder can be applied. Second, the PE function and the subsequent logic functions are merged and efficiently realized in the multiple output domino logic (MODL) to result in a shortened logic depth. The circuit in MODL CMOS is also compact and power efficient because few transistors are needed. Third, the multilevel look-ahead technique is used to shorten the path of priority-token propagation. Finally, the circuit is realized with a latch-based two-stage pipelined structure, and the comparison function is partitioned into two parts, with each part executed in each half of the clock cycle in a delay-balanced manner. Post-layout simulation results show that a 64-b comparator designed with the proposed techniques in a 3-V 0.6-/spl mu/m CMOS technology is 16% faster, 50% smaller, and 79% more power efficient as compared with the all-n-transistor comparator, which is the fastest among the conventional comparators. Measurement results of the test chip conform with simulation results and prove the feasibility of the proposed techniques.
A New Soft‐Fusion Approach for Multiple‐Receiver Wireless Communication Systems

In this paper, a new soft‐fusion approach for multiple‐receiver wireless communication systems is proposed. In the proposed approach, each individual receiver provides the central receiver with a confidence level rather than a binary decision. The confidence levels associated with the local receiver are modeled by means of soft‐membership functions. The proposed approach can be applied to wireless digital communication systems, such as amplitude shift keying, frequency shift keying, phase shift keying, multi‐carrier code division multiple access, and multiple inputs multiple outputs sensor networks. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated and compared to the performance of the optimal diversity, majority voting, optimal partial decision, and selection diversity in case of binary noncoherent frequency shift keying on a Rayleigh faded additive white Gaussian noise channel. It is shown that the proposed approach achieves considerable performance improvement over optimal partial decision, majority voting, and selection diversity. It is also shown that the proposed approach achieves a performance comparable to the optimal diversity scheme.
Development and Validation of Scores on a Computer Programming Self-Efficacy Scale and Group Analyses of Novice Programmer Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy theory was applied to the domain of computer programming to develop a thirty-two-item self-efficacy scale for computer programming, primed to the C++ programming language. To assess its construct validity, the scale was administered to 421 students enrolled in an introductory course in C++ programming at the beginning and the end of the course. The reliability of the scores was high. An exploratory factor analysis, with oblimin rotation, yielded a four-factor solution. There was a growth in self-efficacy between two administrations of the scale twelve weeks apart, particularly for students who initially had low self-efficacy. The computer programming self-efficacy of males and females did not differ substantially in practical terms.
Implicación de la IL-6 y su polimorfismo -174G>C en el control del peso corporal y en las complicaciones metabólicas asociadas a la obesidad

La obesidad y sus comorbilidades se han relacionado con un estado proinflamatorio de bajo grado, en el que el tejido adiposo parece estar implicado. De hecho, el adipocito secreta diferentes citoquinas proinflamatorias, como la IL-6, entre otras. En efecto, las concentraciones elevadas de IL-6 se han asociado con elevados indices de masa corporal, con la diabetes mellitus tipo 2, con dislipemias y con la hipertension arterial. La implicacion de la IL-6 en la homeostasis energetica esta ampliamente documentada, de forma que su posible relacion con el desarrollo de obesidad podria estar mediada por las acciones de esta citoquina y en funcion del polimorfismo -174G>C presente en el genoma. Diferentes investigaciones han senalado la relacion del alelo G del gen de la IL-6 con la obesidad, la resistencia a la insulina y diferentes factores de riesgo cardiovascular. Sin embargo, tambien se han publicado estudios que han asociado estos procesos patologicos con el alelo C de este gen. El presente trabajo revisa los datos publicados recientemente sobre la IL-6 y sus implicaciones fisiopatologicas en la ganancia de peso, con el fin de profundizar en el conocimiento que se dispone del polimorfismo -174G>C en el desarrollo de esta enfermedad, asi como de las complicaciones para las cuales la obesidad supone uno de los factores de riesgo mas relevantes.
Breastfeeding in rural and urban areas of Tanzania.

In rural Tanzania prolonged breastfeeding is practiced widely. The aim of this study is to establish breastfeeding patterns in the rural areas of Lindi Mwanza Morogoro Ruvuma and Kilimanjaro as well as the urban area of Dar es Salaam. The women of the rural areas are Africans; the ethnic background of the urban mothers Ismaili Moslems. The overall trend shows that rural mothers tend to breastfeed the longest 3 years not being unusual. Urban mothers tend to abandon breastfeeding much earlier 6 months being the average length of time for breastfeeding. Causes for disinterest in breastfeeding among urban mothers are apathy towards breastfeeding because of a lack of success as well as the fashionable character associated with bottle feeding. Modern hospital care and marketing methodology are implicated in the trend away from breastfeeding as well as full time paid employment of some mothers.
Optimal Bandwidth Allocation for Scalable H.264 Video Transmission Over MIMO Systems

In this paper we propose an optimal strategy for the transmission of scalable video over packet-based multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The latest scalable H. 264 codec is used, which provides combined temporal, quality and spatial scalability. In this work, we propose different error concealment schemes to handle packet losses at the decoder. At the encoder we have developed a method for the estimation of the video distortion at the receiver for given channel conditions. We show the performance of our distortion estimation algorithm in comparison with simulated video transmission over wireless channels with packet errors. In the proposed system, we use a MIMO system with orthogonal space-time block codes (O-STBC) that provides spatial diversity and guarantees independent transmission of different symbols within the block code. Rate-compatible turbo codes (RCPT) are used for unequal error protection of the scalable layers. In the proposed constrained bandwidth allocation framework, we use the estimated decoder distortion to optimally select the application layer parameters, i.e. quantization parameter (QP) and group of pictures (GOP) size, and physical layer parameters, i.e. RCPT and symbol constellation. Also, the simulation results show the substantial performance gain by using different symbol constellations across the scalable layers as compared to a fixed constellation
Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure For Scholarship In The Digital Age

In the fall of 2002, something extraordinary occurred in the continuing networked information revolution, shifting the dynamic among individually driven innovation, institutional progress, and the evolution of disciplinary scholarly practices. The development of institutional repositories emerged as a new strategy that allows universities to apply serious, systematic leverage to accelerate changes taking place in scholarship and scholarly communication, both moving beyond their historic relatively passive role of supporting established publishers in modernizing scholarly publishing through the licensing of digital content, and also scaling up beyond ad-hoc alliances, partnerships, and support arrangements with a few select faculty pioneers exploring more transformative new uses of the digital medium. Many technology trends and development efforts came together to make this strategy possible. Online storage costs have dropped significantly; repositories are now affordable. Standards like the open archives metadata harvesting protocol are now in place; some progress has also been made on the standards for the underlying metadata itself. The thinking about digital preservation over the past five years has advanced to the point where the needs are widely recognized and well defined, the technical approaches at least superficially mapped out, and the need for action is now clear. The development of free, publicly accessible journal article collections in disciplines such as high-energy physics has demonstrated ways in which the network can change scholarly communication by altering dissemination and access patterns; separately, the development of a series of extraordinary digital works had at least suggested the potential of creative authorship specifically for the digital medium to transform the presentation and transmission of scholarship. The leadership of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the development and deployment of the DSpace institutional repository system <http:// www.dspace. org/>, created in collaboration with the Hewlett Packard Corporation,
A Study on Stability of Optimal Regulators under Online Gain Adjustment

The objective of this paper is to show a general framework for online adjustment methods of the state feedback gains for multi-input multi-output optimal regulators via the quadratic stability arguments. We first give a region of state feedback gains containing the nominal optimal gain such that quadratic stability is ensured for all time-invariant state feedback gains in the region. We then show that under some mild conditions, quadratic stability is retained for arbitrary time-varying adjustment of the state feedback gain within this region via the concept of strong uniform complete observability. It is then illustrated how the result can be utilized as a general framework for constructing heuristic online gain adjustment laws, and the usefulness of the result is confirmed with a numerical example.
Profile of Clients Tested HIV Positive in a Voluntary Counseling and Testing Center of a District Hospital, Udupi, South Kannada.

Background: The growing menace created by the HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) has alarmed not only the public health officials but also the general community. The Voluntary Counseling and Testing Centre (VCTC) services have begun as a cost-effective intervention in reversing this epidemic. Objectives: 1. To study the sociodemographic characteristics of HIV-positive clients and their risk behaviors. 2. To elucidate the reasons for their visit to the VCTC and know the problems anticipated by the clients after revealing their HIV-positive status. Study Design: A cross-sectional record-based study. Materials and Methods: The study was conducted in August 2007 among clients who tested positive for HIV in the VCTC of a district hospital in Karnataka from January to July 2007. Results: Study included 249 individuals, of whom 64.7% were males, 88.7% (age, 15-49 years), married (72.7% males and 84.0% females) and literate (females 71.5% and males 85.7%). A high percentage of nonresponse regarding the pattern of risk behavior was noted among the subjects (males: 42.8% and females: 90.9%). Of the individuals who responded, 91 males (98.9%) and 6 females (75.0%) had multiple heterosexual sex partners, while 1 male had homosexual partner. The figures in females show that two (25%) of them had a history of blood transfusion. The reason for visiting the VCTC were cited as some form of illness (33.3%), confirmation of test results (32.9%), family members diagnosed as HIV positive (12.9%) and 11.6% were referred from Directly Observed Treatment Scheme (DOTS) center. More than three quarter of the sample population anticipated discrimination at the time of medical treatment. Conclusion: People have begun using VCTC services, which reflects a change in their attitude toward HIV. The study provides us a clue to formulate an effective approach to educate people as well as the health personnel who are thought of as one of the important sources of discrimination.
Splice-junction recognition on gene sequences (DNA) by BRAIN learning algorithm

Splice junctions are points on a DNA sequence at which superfluous DNA is removed during the process of protein creation in higher organisms. The problem afforded in this paper is to recognize, given a sequence of DNA, the boundaries between exons (the parts of the DNA sequence retained after splicing) and introns (the parts of the DNA sequence that are spliced out). This is achieved by means of a new learning algorithm (BRAIN), described in the paper, inferring Boolean formulae from examples, and by considering the splicing rules as disjunctive normal form formulae. The formula terms are computed in an iterative way, by identifying from the training set a relevance coefficient for each attribute. The classification accuracy is then refined by a neural network hybrid approach.
Cell phones in task based learning - Are cell phones useful language learning tools?

Cell phones are now widespread in many countries including Japan where we teach, and are particularly popular among university students. Although they can be a distraction in the classroom, functions such as Internet access and e-mail capability have transformed them into sophisticated communication tools. But are they also potentially useful in language learning? While task-based approaches (Nunan, 1989) adapted to desktop e-mail are now a growing area of research in CALL (Greenfield, 2003; Gonzalez-Lloret, 2003), cell phones have yet to receive much attention. This paper reports on a classroom research project aimed at evaluating the use of mobile phones as tools for classroom learning. Freshman university students in intact EFL classes (2 elementary classes, 2 lower intermediate) were first surveyed regarding their cell phone use and pre-tested to assess their knowledge of certain target learning structures. Following this they were subdivided into three groups: (a) using cell phone text messages, (b) using computer e-mail, and (c) speaking. The learners were paired, trained with warm-up tasks, and given two further sets of tasks to complete (one in class and the other at home). The target vocabulary appeared in the initial narrative task. All messages sent while doing the tasks were saved for analysis. The speaking task pairs were recorded and samples were transcribed for comparison. Finally learners took a post-test the following week to assess short-term learning gains. This project drew attention to a number of potential advantages of mobile phones as well as highlighting some limitations, but overall suggested that mobile phones represent a language learning resource worthy of further investigation.
An integrated software cost model based on COCOMO and function point approaches

Software cost estimation is important in information systems management and is commonly taught in software engineering courses. The paper re-examines the key features of two well-known "public domain" methods, COCOMO and function point analysis, and attempts to combine the advantages of these two approaches into a single model. To address the problem of language dependency, language-weighted function point is introduced. In addition, continuous, rather than discrete, "cost drivers" are used. A data set from 81 software projects was used to test the model. Cost estimates so obtained compared favourably with results from other more elaborate methods. It is argued that the conceptual simplicity of this integrated model makes it suitable for inclusion in software engineering courses. Also the model renders itself flexibly in tailoring to different realistic cost estimation environments. <<ETX>>