Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
H . 264 / AVC Scalable High Profile 解碼器之設計與實作 Design and Implementation of H . 264 / AVC Scalable High Profile Decoder

Video applications are everywhere with the more and more advance standards. Scalable Video Coding (SVC) not only supports high definition specifications but also provides temporal, quality, and spatial scalabilities. However, these additional scalabilities cause the decoding time, memory bandwidth, and area cost overhead in chip design aspect. Thus, this thesis presents an H.264/AVC Scalable High Profile decoder with optimizations on decoding flow, architecture design, and module implementation. For decoding flow, this thesis adopts the previous proposed frame-based flow for spatial layer decoding, and proposes one-pass MB-based flow for quality layer decoding that saves 71% and 66% in external memory bandwidth and macroblock processing cycle respectively. For texture padding in inter-layer intra prediction, we propose BL-level padding flow that saves 26% decoding time in IntraBL coded macroblocks. With above flow, the decoder adopts four stages pipeline architecture to enhance
Role of Patient Safety Incident Reporting Systems in Home Hospitalization

Introduction: The present study aimed to assess the effectiveness of the current hospital-based electronic patient safety incident reporting system (IRS) in the improvement of patient safety in home hospitalization (HH). Materials and Methods: Out of 6381 patient safety reports voluntarily presented by healthcare professionals in a tertiary hospital in Barcelona between 2016 and 2019, all those related to HH were analyzed. They were characterized by incident type, description, risk and year, the ways to get notified, patient’s age, and the results of the analysis. Moreover, falls were classified depending on circumstances. Results: Based on the results, 68 HH incident reports were related to the following factors: use of medication (n=2), procedures (1), patient’s behavior (n=1), and falls (n=64). Regarding the damage degree, the incidents were reported as extreme risk (n=1), high (n=8), moderate (n=27), low (29), and very low risk (n=3). The majority of patients involved in the incidents were more than 60 years old. Out of the reported falls, 8 cases were categorized as high risk, and 32 cases reported health consequences. Moreover, 19 falls from height, 31 cases of falling while sitting or lying, and 30 incidents classified as unknown were identified. Conclusion: Patient safety is a matter of great concern, especially in HH but with some differential features. The IRS can play a peculiar role in minimizing patient safety risks and promoting a safety culture. The results of the present study pointed to some frequent risks and suggested improving opportunities in HH. Nonetheless, further studies are needed to design tailored patient safety interventions in HH, as well as a tailored IRS adapted to this growing setting.
Effect of some Postharvest Treatments on Vase Life and Quality of Chrysanthemum ( Dendranthema Grandiflorum Kitam )

The present study was conducted at the laboratory of Horticulture Department, Faculty of Agriculture, Benha University during the two seasons of 2010-2011, 2011-2012. to evaluate the effects of five preservative solutions as pulsing applications, four cold storage periods and three holding solution treatments as well as their interactions on vase life and quality of chrysanthemum(Dendranthema grandiflorum Kitam.) cv. "White Zambla" cut flowers. Pulsing solution treatments were 1Distilled water (dw) for 24 h as control, 2silver thiosulphate (STS) at 0.4mM for 30minutes then 10ppm Benzyladenine (BA) for 24 hours. 3STS at 0.4mM for 30minutes then 20ppm gibberellic acid (GA3) for 24 hours 4Aminooxy acetic acid (AOA) at 4mM + GA3 at 20ppm for 24 hours. 5STS at 0.4mM for 30minutes then pulsed in BA at 10ppm + GA3at 20ppm + AOA at 4mM for 24 hours. Cut flowers were subjected to pulsing treatments just before cold storage. The four tested cold storage periods were without cold storage (control), storage for 7, 14 or 21-days at 2±1°C and 65-80% relative humidity . After subjecting flowers to pulsing and storage treatments, treated cut flowers were subjected to three holding solution treatments i.e., 1Distilled water (dw) as control, 2Sucrose (S) at 2% + citric acid (CA) at 100ppm + silver nitrate (AgNO3) at 25 ppm and 3Sucrose at 2% + 8-hydroxy-quinoline sulphate at 100ppm + citric acid at 100ppm to record the effects on vase life and quality of chrysanthemum cut flowers. All tested pulsing solutions significantly increased vase life, florets opening % and change percentage in fresh weight of cut flowers, decreased contamination in vase solution, improved water balance for cut flowers, and increased total sugars content in florets. Pulsing treatment of STS at 0.4mM for 30minutes then pulsed in BA at 10ppm + GA3 at 20ppm + AOA at 4mM for 24 hours had the most favorable effect in this respect. Also, all tested holding solution treatments increased vase life, florets opening % and change percentage in fresh weight of cut flower spike, decreased contamination in vase solution, improved water balance for cut flower spikes, and increased total sugars content in florets, with superiority for the treatment of sucrose at 2% + 8-hydroxyquinoline sulphate at 100ppm + citric acid at 100ppm. As the cold storage period was increased from zero-time to 21-days, the above mentioned characters of cut flower longevity and quality were decreased. When pulsing applications interacted with cold storage periods then subjected to holding solution treatments, the highest quality and the longest vase life of chrysanthemum cut flowers were obtained under the interaction treatments of pulsing in STS at 0.4mM for 30minutes then pulsed in BA at 10ppm + GA3 at 20ppm + AOA at 4mM for 24 hours without cold storage or with storage for 7-days at 2±1°C and treated with holding solution containing sucrose at 2% + 8-hydroxy quinoline sulphate at 100ppm + citric acid at 100ppm as compared to control and the other interaction treatments in both seasons of this study.
The Experience-Dependent Dynamics of Human Consciousness

By reviewing most of the neurobiology of consciousness, this article highlights some major reasons why a successful emulation of the dynamics of human consciousness by artificial intelligence is unlikely. The analysis provided leads to conclude that human consciousness is epigenetically determined, experience, and context-dependent at the individual level. It is subject to changes in time that are essentially unpredictable. If cracking the code to human consciousness were possible, the result would most likely have to consist of a temporal pattern code simulating long-distance signal reverberation and de-correlation of all spatial signal contents from temporal signals. In the light of the massive evidence for complex interactions between implicit (non-conscious) and explicit (conscious) contents of representation, the code would have to be capable of making implicit (non-conscious) processes explicit. It would have to be capable of a progressively less and less arbitrary selection of temporal activity patterns in a continuously developing neural network structure identical to that of the human brain, from the synaptic level to that of higher cognitive functions. The code’s activation thresholds would depend on specific temporal signal coincidence probabilities, vary considerably with time and across individual experience data, and would therefore require dynamically adaptive computations capable of emulating the properties of individual human experience. No known machine or neural network learning approach has such potential.
THE USE OF MULTIMEDIA MATERIAL IN TEACHING MATERIAL IN TEACHING CHINESE AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

THE USE OF MULTIMEDIA MATERIAL IN TEACHING CHINESE AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FEBRUARY 2013 ZHONGYUAN C. WILLIAMS, B.A., KANTO-GAKUIN UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professors Zhijun Wang, Enhua Zhang and Weijia Li The use of Multimedia materials has been widely accepted as an useful and effective tool in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Many studies and researchers have examined multimedia material’s effectiveness from a number of aspects, including four skills of language learning: listening, speaking, reading (including vocabulary comprehension) and writing. However, the effectiveness of multimedia material from the aspect of L2 grammar comprehension hasn’t been well explored. This study examines the effectiveness of multimedia material in teaching second language grammar comprehension among beginning and intermediate-level Chinese learners. In particular, it investigates the relative efficacy of three different modes used in teaching an important Chinese grammar, directional complements: text alone, text with a still picture and text with video clips. The study’s focal issue is to determine which mode or modes — text alone, text with still picture or text with dynamic video clip — is most effective in aiding grammar acquisition in both shortterm and long-term. The study employed an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test. The participants were 53 college students, beginning level Chinese language learners who had studied Chinese for a half year, and were naturally assigned to one of the three parallel groups. The three groups differed as to the use of the different mode used to present the teaching material: text-only, text-picture, and text-video. Analysis of the collected data yielded three main findings. First, learners who received textvideo material outperformed those who received text-picture; and learners who received text-
Price Shocks and Child Mortality: Evidence from Anti-Drug Policies in Peru∗

How do aggregate income shocks affect child mortality in developing countries? In the developing world, child health may be vulnerable to aggregate income shocks as credit constraints and other market imperfections may prevent households from fully smoothing consumption and health investments. Empirical studies, however, have found positive, negative, and null relationships. This paper brings new evidence by exploiting quasi-exogenous variation in the price of coca leaves—the main input for cocaine production—induced by an anti-drug policy to study how sharp decreases in coca revenues affect child mortality in producing sites. The identification strategy relies on an abrupt decline in prices to compare survival rates across cohorts and areas with different levels of baseline coca cultivation. I document important increases in mortality: for the average coca district, the 50 percent price drop caused by the policy is associated with an effect equivalent to a 6-11 percent increase in under 5 mortality. Moreover, I establish that deaths occur both in-utero and during the first years of life. To do this, I use direct mortality records and a “missing children” approach that infers survival rates by comparing relative cohort sizes in census and survey data. Using data from before and after the shock, I find that households increase their labor supply to cope with the price drop; however, reductions in health investments make health vulnerable to income losses. The results are robust to several alternative explanations. This paper contributes to a literature on aggregate income shocks and health and a growing body of research on illegal markets and law enforcement. Furthermore, this paper suggests that anti-drug policies can impose important costs to the weakest links involved in drug trade. ∗I am grateful to my advisors, Erica Field, Rob Garlick, Duncan Thomas, and Xiao Yu Wang for their guidance and encouragement. I thank Luke Fesko, Amanda Grittner, Ranae Jabri, Gabor Nyeki, Thomas Polley, and several participants at Duke for useful comments. All errors are my own. †Romero Haaker: Department of Economics, 213 Social Sciences Building, Duke University, NC 207708, USA. (E-mail: javier.romero@duke.edu).
ADSORPTION ISOTHERM STUDY FOR THE REMOVAL OF NICKEL IONS FROM AQUEOUS SOLUTION USING THERMAL POWER PLANT FLY ASH

In the present study, the adsorption of nickel ions on the surface of fly ash was investigated. The batch adsorption experiments were performed at constant room temperature 25±1 0 C using Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (AAS) Technique. Three adsorption isotherms such as Temkin, Harkins Jura and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) were used to analyze the results obtained from the experiments. The coefficient of correlation (R 2 ) was determined for each isotherm model to establish the best fit adsorption isotherm model. To carry out the error analysis of the three adsorption isotherm models Chi-square test (Ʃχ 2 ) was used. It was concluded from the laboratory investigations and analysis that BET adsorption isotherm is best-fit adsorption isotherm as per linear coefficient of correlation and by nonlinear Chi-square test. Article DOI: https://dx.doi. org/10.20319/mijst.2017. 32.93104 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.
Title A Glycoprotein in Shells of Conspecifics Induces Larval Settlement of thePacific Oyster Crassostrea gigas

Settlement of larvae of Crassostrea gigas on shell chips (SC) prepared from shells of 11 different species of mollusks was investigated. Furthermore, the settlement inducing compound in the shell of C. gigas was extracted and subjected to various treatments to characterize the chemical cue. C. gigas larvae settled on SC of all species tested except on Patinopecten yessoensis and Atrina pinnata. In SC of species that induced C. gigas larvae to settle, settlement was proportionate to the amount of SC supplied to the larvae. When compared to C. gigas SC, all species except Crassostrea nippona showed lower settlement inducing activities, suggesting that the cue may be more abundant or in a more available form to the larvae in shells of conspecific and C. nippona than in other species. The settlement inducing activity of C. gigas SC remained intact after antibiotic treatment. Extraction of C. gigas SC with diethyl ether (Et2O-ex), ethanol (EtOH-ex), and water (Aq-ex) did not induce larval settlement of C. gigas larvae. However, extraction of C. gigas SC with 2N of hydrochloric acid (HCl-ex) induced larval settlement that was at the same level as the SC. The settlement inducing compound in the HClex was stable at 100uC but was destroyed or degraded after pepsin, trypsin, PNGase F and trifluoromethanesulfonic acid treatments. This chemical cue eluted between the molecular mass range of 45 and 150 kDa after gel filtration and revealed a major band at 55 kDa on the SDS-PAGE gel after staining with Stains-all. Thus, a 55 kDa glycoprotein component in the organic matrix of C. gigas shells is hypothesized to be the chemical basis of larval settlement on conspecifics. Citation: Vasquez HE, Hashimoto K, Yoshida A, Hara K, Imai CC, et al. (2013) A Glycoprotein in Shells of Conspecifics Induces Larval Settlement of the Pacific Oyster Crassostrea gigas. PLoS ONE 8(12): e82358. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0082358 Editor: Tilmann Harder, University of New South Wales, Australia Received March 24, 2013; Accepted October 22, 2013; Published December 12, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Vasquez et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The corresponding first author was supported by the MEXT scholarship granted by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: hebertely@gmail.com
Intergenerational Mobility : The Role of Nature versus Nurture in Wealth and Other Economic Outcomes and Behaviors

Abstract Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use administrative data on the net wealth of a large sample of Swedish adoptees merged with similar information for their biological and adoptive parents. Comparing the relationship between the wealth of adopted and biological parents and that of the adopted child, we find that, even prior to any inheritance, there is a substantial role for environment and a much smaller role for pre-birth factors and we find little evidence that nature/nurture interactions are important. When bequests are taken into account, the role of adoptive parental wealth becomes much stronger. Our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not primarily because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented or more able but that, even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth. We further build on the existing literature by providing a more comprehensive view of the role of nature and nurture on intergenerational mobility, looking at a wide range of different outcomes using a common sample and method. We find that environmental influences are relatively more important for wealth-related variables such as savings and investment decisions than for human capital. We conclude by studying consumption as an overall measure of welfare and find that, like wealth, it is more determined by environment than by biology.
Spatial scales of mesoscale variability in the North Atlantic as deduced from Geosat data

Two years of Geosat data were used to systematically investigate the mesoscale variability and spatial scales of the North Atlantic. We first calculated sea surface height variability and eddy kinetic energy. These compare well with the eddy kinetic energy obtained with surface drifters. Then the spatial scales of mesoscale variability were characterized in 10° (latitude) × 10° (longitude) areas by their wave number spectra and autocorrelation functions. Comparison with existing in situ data shows good agreement, and it is believed that the total error budget is globally below that of the oceanic signal. The wave number spectra show significant differences as a function of latitude and longitude, and these can be related to different types of forcing (instability of a mean current or fluctuating wind). Scales typically decrease from west to east and south to north. Simple proportionality with respect to the first internal Rossby radii does not apply everywhere.
Liquid film on an unsteady stretching surface

A fluid film lies on an accelerating stretching surface. A similarity transform reduces the unsteady Navier-Stokes equations to a nonlinear ordinary differential equation governed by a nondimensional unsteady parameter. Asymptotic and numerical solutions are found. The results represent rare exact similarity solutions of the unsteady Navier-Stokes equations
Influence of the Natural and Built Environment on Personal Exposure to Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5) in Cyclists Using City Designated Bicycle Routes

Urban cyclists are exposed to many traffic-related air pollutants including particulate matter (PM) that may increase vulnerability to health effects. This study investigates second-by-second personal exposure to PM2.5 (fine particulate matter that is 2.5 microns in diameter and less) along bicycle commuting paths, and assesses elements of the natural and built environment for the relative importance of these factors in understanding the variability in PM2.5 personal exposure. Urban cyclists were carrying high resolution PM2.5 monitors (placed in a backpack) in combination with portable GPS trackers to provide a spatial identity to each one-second pollutant measurement. The results of this study indicate that daily averages of PM2.5 concentrations from all bicycle routes were weakly correlated with meteorological variables, however, a strong influence of regional levels of PM2.5 was observed. Geospatial analysis of PM2.5 personal exposure concentrations showed a considerable variation within routes, correlated with land use (with lower concentrations in parks and higher in industrial areas) and clustered at four areas: busiest bridge, heavily trafficked road segments, the downtown urban core, and two construction sites. This study has found many incidences of personal exposure to PM2.5 exceeding the provincial guidelines for healthy activity (e.g., very poor (PM2.5 > 91 μg/m3) pollution concentrations are clustered in three regions: approaching the bridge in the west part of the city; the downtown urban core; and two under construction spots), which suggests behavioural and infrastructure modifications in balancing the health benefits of cycling with the environmental exposure to air pollutants.
The incorporation of subjective risks into choice experiments to test scenario adjustment

In choice experiment (CE) applications, subjects are typically assumed to fully accept information given in the status quo (SQ) alternative, however, subjects might adjust such information on the basis of their subjective beliefs. This phenomenon is known as scenario adjustment. By using a CE field survey, we investigate whether subjects adjust risks portrayed in the SQ using their subjective estimates via a two-stage approach. In the first stage, subjective risks are elicited using the exchangeability method. In the second stage, two treatment groups are designed. In the first group, each subject is presented with a SQ which incorporates her/his own subjective risk estimate, and, hence, no adjustment is required. In the second group, each subject faces a SQ where the presented risk is not consistent with her/his own estimate, and, hence, a mental adjustment to the scenario might take place. Our modeling results suggest that subjects who are provided with a SQ in which the risk is lower than their own subjective estimates have a higher maximum willingness to pay (WTP) for a risk reduction than subjects provided with a SQ where the risk is consistent with their perceptions. Hence, in this case the scenario adjustment takes place. In contrast, subjects who are presented with a SQ where the risk is higher than their subjective estimates, overreact to the risk information, and have a higher WTP for the risk reduction than subjects who face a SQ where the presented risk is consistent with their perceived risks. Hence, in this case they appear to go along with the information in the SQ and abandon their subjective estimate
The Impact of Post Stress Tests Capital on Bank Lending

We investigate one channel through which the annual bank stress tests, as part of the Federal Reserve’s Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) review, could unexpectedly affect the provision of bank credit. To quantify the impact of the stress tests on lending, we compare the capital implied by the supervisory stress tests with the level of capital implied by the banks’ own models, a measure we call the capital gap. We then study the impact of the capital gap on the loan growth of BHCs subject to supervisory or bank-run stress tests. Consistent with previous results in the bank capital literature, we find evidence that better capitalized banks have higher loan growth. The additional capital implied by the supervisory stress tests (capital gap) does not appear to unduly restrict loan growth.