Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Radar Data Cube Processing for Human Activity Recognition Using Multisubspace Learning

In recent years, radar has been employed as a fall detector because of its effective sensing capabilities and penetration through walls. In this paper, we introduce a multilinear subspace human activity recognition scheme that exploits the three radar signal variables: slow-time, fast-time, and Doppler frequency. The proposed approach attempts to find the optimum subspaces that minimize the reconstruction error for different modes of the radar data cube. A comprehensive analysis of the optimization considerations is performed, such as initialization, number of projections, and convergence of the algorithms. Finally, a boosting scheme is proposed combining the unsupervised multilinear principal component analysis (PCA) with the supervised methods of linear discriminant analysis and shallow neural networks. Experimental results based on real radar data obtained from multiple subjects, different locations, and aspect angles (0<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula>, 30<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula>, 45<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula>, 60<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula>, and 90<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula>) demonstrate that the proposed algorithm yields the highest overall classification accuracy among spectrogram-based methods including predefined physical features, one- and two-dimensional PCA and convolutional neural networks.
Impacts of Hosting Forced Migrants in Poor Countries

Most of the world's displaced people are hosted in low-income countries. Focusing on evidence from poor countries, we review the literature on the economic consequences of hosting refugees or internally displaced people. In the short run, violence, environmental degradation, and disease propagation are major risks to the host populations. In the long run, infrastructure, trade, and labor markets are key channels that determine the impacts on host communities. These impacts can be positive or negative and often unequally distributed among different hosts. We discuss policy options for building resilience in the light of this evidence. Investments in road infrastructure and deepening trade with refugees’ countries of origin are strategies worth exploring for enhancing resilience and transitioning from humanitarian assistance toward development. Finally, we identify key knowledge gaps in this literature and formulate a research agenda for the near future.
Peer-to-Peer Crowdfunding: Information and the Potential for Disruption in Consumer Lending

Can peer-to-peer lending (P2P) disintermediate and mitigate information frictions in lending so that choices and outcomes for at least some borrowers and investors are improved? I offer a framing of issues and survey the nascent literature on P2P. On the investor side, P2P disintermediates an asset class of consumer loans, and investors may be able to capture rents associated with the removal of a layer of financial intermediation. Risk and portfolio choice questions linger prior to any inference. On the borrower side, evidence suggests that proximate knowledge (direct or inferred) unearths soft information. Thus, P2P may be able to offer pricing and/or access benefits to potential borrowers. Early research suggests that the future of consumer lending will involve more big data and reintermediation of underwriting by all types of financial institutions. I ask many more questions than current research can answer, hoping to motivate future research.
Depth Variation of the Lithosphere beneath Garoua Rift Region (Cameroon Volcanic Line) Studied from Teleseismic P-Waves

Teleseismic events have been selected from a database of earthquakes with three components which were recorded between February 2005 and January 2007 by five seismic stations across the Garoua rift region which constitutes a part of the Cameroon Volcanic Line (CVL). The iterative time deconvolution performed by [1] applied on these teleseismic events, permitted us to obtain P-receiver functions. The latter were subsequently inverted in order to obtain S-wave velocity models with respect to depth which were then associated to the synthetic receiver functions. This made it possible to explain the behavior of the wave and the medium through which they traveled. The main results obtained indicate that: (1) The lithosphere appears to be thin in its crustal part with a mean Moho depth of 28 km and S wave velocity of 3.7 km/s. (2) In its mantle part, the lithosphere is thick in nature having a thickness that varies between 42 km and 67.2 km. The greatest depth is noticed towards the center located around Garoua while the least depth corresponds to a location around Yagoua in the North. The Low velocity zone which makes it possible to determine the depth of the lithosphere was seen to have a thickness which varies between 42 km and 118.8 km. (3) The synthetic receiver functions associated to shear velocity models reveal that, on one hand the wave has really undergone a conversion and multiple conversions such that the existing Ps phase and subsequent reverberations PpPs and PpSs have mean times of 3.7 s, 11 s and 17.6 s respectively. On the other hand, they reveal an attenuation shown by the decrease in the amplitude of the aforementioned phases along a South-North direction in the Garoua rift.
MiR-449a regulates the cell migration and invasion of human non-small cell lung carcinoma by targeting ADAM10

Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are non-coding small RNAs that have been shown to play a key role in the development of many tumors. However, its specific mechanism of action in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is not very clear. Purpose: This study was to identify the effect of miRNA-449a on NSCLC invasion and migration. Methods: We used quantitative real-time PCR experiments to demonstrate that miRNA-449a is down-regulated in NSCLC tissues and cell lines. We also used the Transwell assay to detect cell invasion and migration, and the Western Blot assay was used to detect protein expression. The dual luciferase assay was used to detect the targeting relationship between miR-449a and A Disintegrin And Metalloproteinases 10 (ADAM10). Results: Our experiments demonstrated that miRNA-449a was down-regulated in NSCLC tissues and cell lines. When miRNA-449a was up-regulated in NSCLC cells, the invasion and migration ability of the cells was weakened, and the expression of ADAM10 was decreased. After down-regulation of miRNA-449a, the cell’s invasion and migration ability was enhanced, and the expression of ADAM10 was increased. Through dual luciferase assays, we also found that miRNA-449a can target ADAM10 to delay the progression of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and inhibit invasion and migration. Conclusion: Our experiments demonstrated that miRNA-449a acted as a tumor suppressor gene through inhibiting the expression of ADAM10 in NSCLC.
The Intersection between Climate Adaptation, Mitigation, and Natural Resources: An Empirical Analysis of Forest Management

Forest landowners can adapt to climate change and carbon pricing by altering the types of forests that are replanted or regenerated. By inducing land-use changes within forestry, climate adaptation and mitigation policy can alter the flow of nonmarket forest ecosystem services. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the effect of climate change and carbon pricing on adaptation behavior of private forest owners. We develop an empirical framework with application to the US Pacific coast. An estimated discrete-choice econometric model is used as the empirical basis for a simulation of land-use changes to the composition of a landscape’s forest stock. Results indicate that climate change induces landowners to adapt away from their current dominant species choice of Douglas-fir to species more suitable for the future climate, notably hardwoods and ponderosa pine. A carbon price policy accelerates adaptation away from current forest types, potentially creating an externality at the local level.
Online social viewing: Cross-cultural adoption and uses of bullet-screen videos

ABSTRACT Bullet-screen technology, an innovative way of interacting with online videos, allows viewers to contribute comments that simultaneously appear over videos. Popular in East Asia, the technology is making its way to American audiences. This study employed a comparative qualitative focus group approach to explore how American and Chinese viewers responded to and interacted with this new format of online videos. Three themes emerge from this investigation: (1) the unique affordances of this technology; (2) barriers to adoption and usage; and (3) cultural differences that impact the user experience. The theoretical and practical implications for bullet-screen technologies are discussed.
Adaptación de la multidimensional sportspersonship orientations scale al contexto español de la educación física

El objetivo fue analizar la estructura factorial de las diferentes versiones propuestas para la Multidimensional Sportspersonship Orientations Scale (MSOS) en el contexto español de la educación física. Los participantes fueron 652 estudiantes de educación secundaria y bachillerato (353 hombres y 299 mujeres; Medad = 14.98, DTedad = 1.59). El análisis factorial confirmatorio no apoyó psicométricamente ninguna de las versiones planteadas por los trabajos previos para la MSOS. Sin embargo, los hallazgos sustentaron psicométricamente un modelo de cuatro factores correlacionados y 17 ítems (i.e., respecto por las convenciones sociales, respeto por las reglas, compromiso y respeto por el compañero) para la educación física. Esta estructura fue invariante por género. Las correlaciones sustentaron la validez discriminante del instrumento. El análisis de fiabilidad reflejó valores adecuados para cada factor. Como conclusión, se recomienda la utilización de una nueva estructural factorial para la MSOS en el contexto español de la educación física.
Population viability and harvest sustainability for Madagascar lemurs

Subsistence hunting presents a conservation challenge by which biodiversity preservation must be balanced with safeguarding of human livelihoods. Globally, subsistence hunting threatens primate populations, including Madagascar's endemic lemurs. We used population viability analysis to assess the sustainability of lemur hunting in Makira Natural Park, Madagascar. We identified trends in seasonal hunting of 11 Makira lemur species from household interview data, estimated local lemur densities in populations adjacent to focal villages via transect surveys, and quantified extinction vulnerability for these populations based on species‐specific demographic parameters and empirically derived hunting rates. We compared stage‐based Lefkovitch with periodic Leslie matrices to evaluate the impact of regional dispersal on persistence trajectories and explored the consequences of perturbations to the timing of peak hunting relative to the lemur birth pulse, under assumptions of density‐dependent reproductive compensation. Lemur hunting peaked during the fruit‐abundant wet season (March–June). Estimated local lemur densities were roughly inverse to body size across our study area. Life‐history modeling indicated that hunting most severely threatened the species with the largest bodies (i.e., Hapalemur occidentalis, Avahi laniger, Daubentonia madagascariensis, and Indri indi), characterized by late‐age reproductive onsets and long interbirth intervals. In model simulations, lemur dispersal within a regional metapopulation buffered extinction threats when a majority of local sites supported growth rates above the replacement level but drove regional extirpations when most local sites were overharvested. Hunt simulations were most detrimental when timed to overlap lemur births (a reality for D. madagascariensis and I. indri). In sum, Makira lemurs were overharvested. Regional extirpations, which may contribute to broad‐scale extinctions, will be likely if current hunting rates persist. Cessation of anthropogenic lemur harvest is a conservation priority, and development programs are needed to help communities switch from wildlife consumption to domestic protein alternatives.
Detection of Leishmania DNA in saliva among patients with HIV/AIDS in Trang Province, southern Thailand

Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease causing opportunistic infection among patients with HIV/AIDS. The fatal form of this disease is visceral leishmaniasis (VL). DNA of Leishmania can be detected in saliva, for which the collection is noninvasive and requires little expertise. This study aimed to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of a nested-PCR to amplify the Internal Transcribed Spacer 1 (ITS1) to detect Leishmania DNA in paired saliva and buffy coat samples of 305 Thai patients with HIV/AIDS in Trang Hospital, Trang Province, southern Thailand. For asymptomatic Leishmania infection among Thai patients with HIV/AIDS, the sensitivity and specificity of the nested-PCR-ITS1 in buffy coat were 73.9 and 100%, respectively. However, the sensitivity in saliva was 26.1% and specificity was 100%. Using the nested-PCR-ITS1, saliva and buffy coat samples showed positive agreement in only 52.0% of patients. Saliva tested results with the nested-PCR-ITS1 showed positive agreement with the Direct Agglutination Test (DAT) in 46.5% of patients. Only 12.1% of the samples showed positive agreement for Leishmania infection among all the three tests: saliva, buffy coat and DAT results. Using nucleotide sequencing, at least three species of Leishmania infection were identified in saliva, i.e., L. siamensis (n=28), L. martiniquensis (n=9), and L. donovani complex (n=1). As a result, buffy coat still appears to be a better specimen to diagnose asymptomatic VL infection among individuals with HIV. However, the use of both buffy coat and saliva together as clinical specimens would increase the sensitivity of Leishmania detection.
How Design Science Research Helps Improve Learning Efficiency in Online Conversations

In this design science research paper, we report on our constructing and evaluating an attention-guidance system that we integrated into a computer-supported collaborative learning system. Drawing on social constructivist literature, our proposed design focuses on attracting, retaining, and, if necessary, reacquiring users’ attention on task-relevant information in online collaborative literature processing. The investigation involved an experiment across two sections of students in a human-computer interaction course. Results show that the new design allowed users to consistently reflect and evaluate the content of a text as they capitalized on one another’s reasoning to resolve misconceptions. Moreover, we found that the new system increased users’ perceptions of learning. However, the difference in knowledge gain scores was marginally significant and represented a medium effect size. Interestingly, we found that the attention-guidance system supported more efficient learning. Finally, we discovered that task-oriented reading of text, revisions of incomplete or incorrect ideas, and perceptions of learning mediated the relationship between software system and learning efficiency. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications.
Fast Rotational Sparse Coding

We propose an algorithm for rotational sparse coding along with an efficient implementation using steerability. Sparse coding (also called dictionary learning) is an important technique in image processing, useful in inverse problems, compression, and analysis; however, the usual formulation fails to capture an important aspect of the structure of images: images are formed from building blocks, e.g., edges, lines, or points, that appear at different locations, orientations, and scales. The sparse coding problem can be reformulated to explicitly account for these transforms, at the cost of increased computation. In this work, we propose an algorithm for a rotational version of sparse coding that is based on K-SVD with additional rotation operations. We then propose a method to accelerate these rotations by learning the dictionary in a steerable basis. Our experiments on patch coding and texture classification demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is fast enough for practical use and compares favorably to standard sparse coding.
Knowledge Distillation by On-the-Fly Native Ensemble

Knowledge distillation is effective to train small and generalisable network models for meeting the low-memory and fast running requirements. Existing offline distillation methods rely on a strong pre-trained teacher, which enables favourable knowledge discovery and transfer but requires a complex two-phase training procedure. Online counterparts address this limitation at the price of lacking a highcapacity teacher. In this work, we present an On-the-fly Native Ensemble (ONE) strategy for one-stage online distillation. Specifically, ONE trains only a single multi-branch network while simultaneously establishing a strong teacher on-the- fly to enhance the learning of target network. Extensive evaluations show that ONE improves the generalisation performance a variety of deep neural networks more significantly than alternative methods on four image classification dataset: CIFAR10, CIFAR100, SVHN, and ImageNet, whilst having the computational efficiency advantages.
Effect of thyroidectomy with totally preserved recurrent laryngeal nerve on the objective vocal functions

Objective: To study the effect of thyroidectomy with totally preserved recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) on the objective vocal functions. Methodology: It is a prospective pilot study of 10 patients undergoing thyroid surgery on whom to study the effect of thyroidectomy with totally preserved RLN on the objective vocal functions. Patient history and demographic data were collected at the time of admission and in each period of assessment average fundamental frequency; absolute jitter, shimmer, and others were measured. Furthermore, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) repeated measurements statistical technique was used to test the difference among the 3 time period of measurements and P < 0.05 was considered significant (α = 0.05). Results: The mean age was 39.5 ± 3.31 years. There were two males and eight females. Total thyroidectomy was performed on eight patients while one had left hemithyroidectomy and one completion thyroidectomy. Histopathology revealed papillary thyroid carcinoma in 50%. 34 acoustic voice analysis parameters were measured using the multidimensional voice program, which showed no significant differences at the end of 1st and 3rd month post-operative as compared to the pre-operative measurements. There was no significant difference in measurement for each factor over the time (P > 0.05). Conclusions: All the acoustic analysis parameters for 10 patients showed no significant differences in 1st and 3rd month postoperatively as compared to the pre-operative values. However, due to small sample size, our study may have failed to detect any significant difference.
The use of texture analysis in breast magnetic resonance imaging

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Quality of Life After Translabyrinthine Vestibular Schwannoma Resection-Reliability of the German PANQOL Questionnaire.

OBJECTIVE To quantify the postoperative quality of life (QOL) of patients after translabyrinthine surgery for vestibular schwannoma (VS) using the German version of the Penn acoustic neuroma quality-of-life questionnaire (PANQOL) in a university hospital. METHODS The PANQOL questionnaire was administered to 72 patients who were treated in our department with translabyrinthine surgery for VS between January 2007 and January 2017. Descriptive evaluations of results were performed in addition to analyses of the reliability and convergent validity of the results and a subgroup analysis. RESULTS For the first time, QOL was measured in German-speaking VS patients after translabyrinthine surgery. Cronbach's alpha for internal consistency and Guttman's split half, used as measures of reliability, showed values between 0.39 and 0.92 (raw alpha) and 0.58 and 0.98 (Lambda 4), respectively. DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS The mean total PANQOL score of patients after translabyrinthine VS resection was 61.96. The domain "hearing" had the lowest score (50.87), while "facial dysfunction" had the highest score (74.88). Subgroup analysis showed that neither preoperative tumor size nor elapsed time postoperatively significantly influenced QOL outcomes. CONCLUSIONS Depending on the different domains the German PANQOL questionnaire showed poor to good internal consistency, reliability, and convergent validity. Moreover, some VS patients suffer from reduced QOL for a long time after the translabyrinthine procedure, thus psycho-oncological care should be recommended in these cases.
Effects of Therapeutic Hypothermia Combined with Other Neuroprotective Strategies on Ischemic Stroke: Review of Evidence

Ischemic stroke is a major cause of death and disability globally, and its incidence is increasing. The only treatment approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for acute ischemic stroke is thrombolytic treatment with recombinant tissue plasminogen activator. As an alternative, therapeutic hypothermia has shown excellent potential in preclinical and small clinical studies, but it has largely failed in large clinical studies. This has led clinicians to explore the combination of therapeutic hypothermia with other neuroprotective strategies. This review examines preclinical and clinical progress towards developing highly effective combination therapy involving hypothermia for stroke patients.