Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A coarse‐to‐fine shape decomposition based on critical points

The segmentation of a shape into a series of meaningful parts is a fundamental problem in shape analysis and part‐based object representation. However, it is difficult to make the result of shape segmentation accord with the expectations of humans performing the same task. There is still a need for an effective way to segment the shape although a variety of methods have been proposed. In this paper, we present a novel shape decomposition algorithm, which is implemented in a coarse‐to‐fine manner, taking into account the critical points on the silhouette. First, a part‐cut hypotheses candidate set is generated and classified into 2 categories. Then, the hypotheses with adjacent endpoints are determined first, and later, the other kinds of hypotheses are finely determined by our presented measures such as chord arc ratio and inner angle. We note that the proposed coarse‐to‐fine decomposition conforms to the mechanism of human vision. The extensive experimental results on a large set of shapes show that our algorithm can generate shape decomposition results that better accord with human intuition compared to competing algorithms.
Glucosamine Administration in Athletes: Effects on Recovery of Acute Knee Injury

The main aim of this study was to examine the effects of 4 weeks of glucosamine administration on the functional ability and the degree of pain intensity in competitive male athletes after acute knee injury. This study was a randomized, double-blind parallel trial of glucosamine (1500 mg per day) or a placebo for 28 days, utilising 106 patients with an acute knee injury. Pain and functional ability were evaluated at the beginning of the study and at 7, 14, 21, and 28 days after starting treatment. Pain intensity at rest and while walking was assessed using a visual analog scale. Passive knee flexibility (flexion and extension) of the injured limb was measured using a modified goniometer, and the degree of knee swelling was measured and compared with the noninjured limb. No significant difference was found between the glucosamine, and placebo group in mean pain intensity scores for resting and walking, and degree of knee swelling at the 7-day, 14-day, 21-day, and 28-day assessment. There was no significant difference between passive knee flexibility at the 7-day, 14-day, and 21-day assessment. After 28 days of treatment the patients from the glucosamine group demonstrated significant improvement in knee flexion and extension as compared with the placebo group.
High-frequency ground motion from Australian earthquakes

ABSTRACT The dominant high-frequency component of ground motion for most seismic events in Australia comes from the crustal Lg phase that can commonly propagate efficiently to considerable distances across the continent. Using results from recent tomography for the attenuation of Lg, we are able to build the pattern of transmission of ground motion from events within the continent. The effects are readily displayed in terms of a distribution of effective magnitude. The same approach can also be used to look at the cumulative effects across the continent from 1840 to date as a useful complement to other ways of assessing earthquake potential.
Sociodemographic and Health Characteristics, Rather Than Primary Care Supply, are Major Drivers of Geographic Variation in Preventable Hospitalizations in Australia

Background:Geographic rates of preventable hospitalization are used internationally as an indicator of accessibility and quality of primary care. Much research has correlated the indicator with the supply of primary care services, yet multiple other factors may influence these admissions. Objective:To quantify the relative contributions of the supply of general practitioners (GPs) and personal sociodemographic and health characteristics, to geographic variation in preventable hospitalization. Methods:Self-reported questionnaire data for 267,091 participants in the 45 and Up Study, Australia, were linked with administrative hospital data to identify preventable hospitalizations. Multilevel Poisson models, with participants clustered in their geographic area of residence, were used to explore factors that explain geographic variation in hospitalization. Results:GP supply, measured as full-time workload equivalents, was not a significant predictor of preventable hospitalization, and explained only a small amount (2.9%) of the geographic variation in hospitalization rates. Conversely, more than one-third (36.9%) of variation was driven by the sociodemographic composition, health, and behaviors of the population. These personal characteristics explained a greater amount of the variation for chronic conditions (37.5%) than acute (15.5%) or vaccine-preventable conditions (2.4%). Conclusions:Personal sociodemographic and health characteristics, rather than GP supply, are major drivers of preventable hospitalization. Their contribution varies according to condition, and if used for performance comparison purposes, geographic rates of preventable hospitalization should be reported according to individual condition or potential pathways for intervention.
Association between renal insufficiency and malnutrition in older adults: results from the NHANES III.

BACKGROUND The extent to which relevant confounding variables influence the recognized association between renal insufficiency and malnutrition is not known. This study examined whether renal insufficiency was associated with malnutrition, independent of relevant demographic, social, and medical conditions in noninstitutionalized adults 60 years of age and older. METHODS Participants (5248) in the United States Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III, 1988 to 1994), a cross-sectional study, were examined in a multivariate logistic regression model. Participants were stratified into three groups of glomerular filtration rate (GFR) by serum creatinine. Dietary and nutritional factors were estimated from 24-hour dietary recall, biochemistry measurements, anthropometry, and bioelectrical impedance. Participants were malnourished if they demonstrated at least three of the following five criteria: (1) serum albumin < or =37 g/L, (2) male weight < or =63.9 kg, female weight < or =51.8 kg, (3) serum cholesterol <4.1 mmol/L, (4) energy intake <15 kcal/kg/day, and (5) protein intake <0.5 g/kg/day. RESULTS A GFR <30 mL/min/1.73 m(2) was present in 2.3% of men and 2.6% of women; these participants demonstrated low energy and protein intake and higher serum markers of inflammation. Thirty-one percent of individuals with malnutrition demonstrated a GFR <60 mL/min/1.73 m(2). In multivariate analysis, a GFR <30 mL/min/1.73 m(2) was independently associated with malnutrition [odds ratio 3.6 (2.0 to 6.6)] after adjustment for relevant demographic, social and medical conditions. CONCLUSIONS It is probable that renal insufficiency is an important independent risk factor for malnutrition in older adults. Malnutrition should be considered, prevented, and treated as possible in persons with clinically important renal insufficiency. These results should be confirmed in a prospective longitudinal cohort study.
Daily college student drinking patterns across the first year of college.

OBJECTIVE Despite the long recognized importance and well-documented impact of drinking patterns on health and safety, college student drinking patterns are understudied. This study used a daily-level, academic-year-long, multisite sample to identify subpopulations of college student drinking patterns and to describe how these groups differ from one another before, during, and after their first year of college. METHOD Two cohorts of first-year college students (n = 588; 59% female) reported daily drinking on a biweekly basis using web-based surveys and completed surveys before and after their first year of college. RESULTS Cluster analyses based on time series analysis estimates of within-person drinking differences (per weekday, semester, first 6 weeks) and other descriptors of day-to-day drinking identified five drinking patterns: two low (47% and 6%), two medium (24% and 15%), and one high (8%) drinking cluster. Multinomial logistic regression analyses examined cluster differences in pre-college characteristics (i.e., demographics, alcohol outcome expectancies, alcohol problems, depression, other substance use) and first-year college experiences (i.e., academic engagement, alcohol consequences, risky drinking practices, alcohol problems, drinking during academic breaks). Low-drinking students appeared to form a relatively homogeneous group, whereas two distinct patterns were found for medium-drinking students with different weekend and Thursday drinking rates. The Thursday drinking cluster showed lower academic engagement and greater participation in risky drinking practices. CONCLUSIONS These findings highlight quantitative and qualitative differences in day-to-day drinking patterns and suggest a link between motivational differences and drinking patterns, which may be addressed in developing tailored interventional strategies.
Computing Thresholds of Linguistic Saliency

We propose and test several computational methods to automatically determine possible saliency cut-off points in Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff and Tugwell, 2001). Sketch Engine currently displays collocations in descending importance, as well as according to grammatical relations. However, Sketch Engine does not provide suggestions for a cut-off point such that any items above this cut-off point may be considered significantly salient. This proposal suggests improvement to the present Sketch Engine interface by calculating three different cut-off point methods, so that the presentation of results can be made more meaningful to users. In addition, our findings also contribute to linguistic analyses based on empirical data.
Filtered Document Retrieval with Frequency-Sorted Indexes

Ranking techniques are effective at finding answers in document collections but can be expensive to evaluate. We propose an evaluation technique that uses early recognition of which documents are likely to be highly ranked to reduce costs ; for our test data, queries are evaluated in 2% of the memory of the standard implementation without degradation in retrieval effectiveness. Cpu time and disk traffic can also be dramatically reduced by designing inverted indexes explicitly to support the technique. The principle of the index design is that inverted lists are sorted by decreasing within-document frequency rather than by document number, and this method experimentally reduces cpu time and disk traffic to around one third of the original requirement. We also show that frequency sorting can lead to a net reduction in index size, regardless of whether the index is compressed.
Considerations for Assessing Maximum Critical Temperatures in Small Ectothermic Animals: Insights from Leaf-Cutting Ants

The thermal limits of individual animals were originally proposed as a link between animal physiology and thermal ecology. Although this link is valid in theory, the evaluation of physiological tolerances involves some problems that are the focus of this study. One rationale was that heating rates shall influence upper critical limits, so that ecological thermal limits need to consider experimental heating rates. In addition, if thermal limits are not surpassed in experiments, subsequent tests of the same individual should yield similar results or produce evidence of hardening. Finally, several non-controlled variables such as time under experimental conditions and procedures may affect results. To analyze these issues we conducted an integrative study of upper critical temperatures in a single species, the ant Atta sexdens rubropiosa, an animal model providing large numbers of individuals of diverse sizes but similar genetic makeup. Our specific aims were to test the 1) influence of heating rates in the experimental evaluation of upper critical temperature, 2) assumptions of absence of physical damage and reproducibility, and 3) sources of variance often overlooked in the thermal-limits literature; and 4) to introduce some experimental approaches that may help researchers to separate physiological and methodological issues. The upper thermal limits were influenced by both heating rates and body mass. In the latter case, the effect was physiological rather than methodological. The critical temperature decreased during subsequent tests performed on the same individual ants, even one week after the initial test. Accordingly, upper thermal limits may have been overestimated by our (and typical) protocols. Heating rates, body mass, procedures independent of temperature and other variables may affect the estimation of upper critical temperatures. Therefore, based on our data, we offer suggestions to enhance the quality of measurements, and offer recommendations to authors aiming to compile and analyze databases from the literature.
A Monotonic and Prognostic Genomic Signature from Fibroblasts for Colorectal Cancer Initiation, Progression, and Metastasis

The differential gene expression patterns between normal colonic fibroblasts (NCF), carcinoma-associated fibroblasts from primary tumors (CAF-PT), and CAFs from hepatic metastasis (CAF-LM) are hypothesized to be useful for predicting relapse in primary tumors. A transcriptomic profile of NCF (n = 9), CAF-PT (n = 14), and CAF-LM (n = 11) was derived. Prediction Analysis of Microarrays (PAM) was used to obtain molecular details for each fibroblast class, and differentially expressed transcripts were used to classify patients according to recurrence status. A number of transcripts (n = 277) were common to all three types of fibroblasts and whose expression level was sequentially deregulated according to the transition: NCF→CAF-PT→CAF-LM. Importantly, the gene signature was able to accurately classify patients with primary tumors according to their prognosis. This capacity was exploited to obtain a refined 19-gene classifier that predicted recurrence with high accuracy in two independent datasets of patients with colorectal cancer and correlates with fibroblast migratory potential. The prognostic power of this genomic signature is strong evidence of the link between the tumor-stroma microenvironment and cancer progression. Furthermore, the 19-gene classifier was able to identify low-risk patients very accurately, which is of particular importance for stage II patients, who would benefit from the omission of chemotherapy, especially T4N0 patients, who are clinically classified as being at high risk. Implications: A defined stromal gene expression signature predicts relapse in patients with colorectal cancer. Mol Cancer Res; 12(9); 1254–66. ©2014 AACR.
An Agile Approach to Captur ing Requirements and Traceability

Agile methodologies are gaining popularity quickly, receiving increasing support from the software development community. Current requirements engineering practices have addressed traceability approaches for well defined phase-driven development models. Echo is a tool-based approach that provides for the implicit recording and management of relationships between conversations about requirements, specifications, and subsequent design decisions. By providing a means to capture requirements in an informal manner and later restructure the information to suit formal requirements specifications, Echo aims to solve the problems of applying traditional requirements engineering practices to agile development methods making available the demonstrated benefits of requirements traceability – a key enabler for large-scale
Energy Dissipation in Graphene Mechanical Resonators with and without Free Edges

Graphene-based nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) have high future potential to realize sensitive mass and force sensors owing to graphene’s low mass density and exceptional mechanical properties. One of the important remaining issues in this field is how to achieve mechanical resonators with a high quality factor (Q). Energy dissipation in resonators decreases Q, and suppressing it is the key to realizing sensitive sensors. In this article, we review our recent work on energy dissipation in doubly-clamped and circular drumhead graphene resonators. We examined the temperature (T) dependence of the inverse of a quality factor (Q-1) to reveal what the dominant dissipation mechanism is. Our doubly-clamped trilayer resonators show a characteristic Q-1-T curve similar to that observed in monolayer resonators: Q-1 ∝ T2 above ∼100 K and ∝ T0.3 below ∼100 K. By comparing our results with previous experimental and theoretical results, we determine that the T2 and T0.3 dependences can be attributed to tensile strain induced by clamping metals and vibrations at the free edges in doubly-clamped resonators, respectively. The Q-1-T curve in our circular drumhead resonators indicates that removing free edges and clamping metal suppresses energy dissipation in the resonators, resulting in a linear T dependence of Q-1 in a wide temperature range.
Relating function spaces to resourced function spaces

In order to prove the computational adequacy of the (operational) natural semantics for lazy evaluation with respect to a standard denotational semantics, Launchbury defines a resourced denotational semantics. This should be equivalent to the standard one when given infinite resources, but this fact cannot be so directly established, because each semantics produces values in a different domain. The values obtained by the standard semantics belong to the usual lifted function space D = [D → D]⊥, while those produced by the resourced semantics belong to [C → E] where E satisfies the equation E = [[C → E] → [C → E]]⊥ and C (the domain of resources) is a countable chain domain defined as the least solution of the domain equation C = C⊥. We propose a way to relate functional values in the standard lifted function space to functional values in the corresponding resourced function space. We first construct the initial solution for the domain equation E = [[C → E]] → [C → E]]⊥ following Abramsky's construction of the initial solution of D = [D → D]⊥. Then we define a "similarity" relation between values in the constructed domain and values in the standard lifted function space. This relation is inspired by Abramsky's applicative bisimulation. Finally we prove the desired equivalence between the standard denotational semantics and the resourced semantics for the lazy λ-calculus.
DRE-Bot: A hierarchical First Person Shooter bot using multiple Sarsa(λ) reinforcement learners

This paper describes an architecture for controlling non-player characters (NPC) in the First Person Shooter (FPS) game Unreal Tournament 2004. Specifically, the DRE-Bot architecture is made up of three reinforcement learners, Danger, Replenish and Explore, which use the tabular Sarsa(λ) algorithm. This algorithm enables the NPC to learn through trial and error building up experience over time in an approach inspired by human learning. Experimentation is carried to measure the performance of DRE-Bot when competing against fixed strategy bots that ship with the game. The discount parameter, γ, and the trace parameter, λ, are also varied to see if their values have an effect on the performance.
A Mesh Simplification Algorithm Applied To Mpeg-4 Compliant 3 D Facial Models

This paper describes of an efficient mesh simplification algorithm, based on the iterative edge contraction, applied to MPEG-4 compliant 3D animated faces. Among the several simplification techniques available in literature, the one offering the best trade-off between quality of the simplified model and simplification time has been selected and briefly described. In the following pages, it will be shown that rather complex 3D facial models, optionally textured, can be simplified in real-time in order to adapt the rendering performances to the hardware capabilities, still maintaining the compliance with the MPEG-4 specifications on facial animation. 1.INTRODUCTION Recently, the interest around mesh simplification has increased significantly. The idea of having a virtual 3D model at different resolutions is not a new concept: Clark [10] introduced the concept more than 25 years ago. However, most significant achievements in this area have been obtained in recent years, when several techniques have been proposed by many researchers, like the "vertex decimation" (Shroeder et al. [1]), the "vertex clustering" (Rossignac and Borrel [11]), the "iterative contraction" (Hoppe et al. [2] and Garland et al. [3]). In this paper, a simplification technique is applied to MPEG-4 animated faces, to prove how it is possible to reduce the model complexity even during an animation, still preserving a correct interpretation of the facial animation parameters defined by MPEG-4. 2.ITERATIVE EDGE CONTRACTION AND QUADRIC ERROR METRIC The algorithm proposed by Garland et al in [3] is based on two main concepts: the Iterative Contraction of Edges and the Quadric Error Metric. The algorithm processes the original surface and iteratively removes vertices and faces from the model. At each step, a single operation consisting of the contraction of a pair of vertices, is performed (see fig. 1). vi vj v Figure 1: Contraction of two vertices with a common edge: (left) before and (right) after contractio This operation, written in [3] as (v i , v j) o v, where v i and v j are the original vertices and v is the contraction result, modifies the model surface in three steps: 1) v i and v j are moved to the new position v. 2) all the occurrences of v j are replaced with v i 3) v j and all the degenerated faces are removed. The first step actually modifies the surface geometry, the second modifies the surface topology, and the last one removes elements that are not necessary …
Environmental Research and Public Health Pathogens in Ornamental Waters: a Pilot Study

In parks, ornamental waters of easy access and populated with animals are quite attractive to children and yet might hide threats to human health. The present work focuses on the microbiota of the ornamental waters of a Lisboa park, characterized during 2015. The results show a dynamic microbiota integrating human pathogens such as Klebsiella pneumoniae, Aeromonas spp. and Enterobacter spp. , and also antibiotic resistant bacteria. K. pneumoniae and Aeromonas spp. were present as planktonic and biofilm organized bacteria. In vitro K. pneumoniae and Aeromonas spp. showed an enhanced ability to assemble biofilm at 25 ˝ C than at 37 ˝ C. Bacteria recovered from biofilm samples showed an increased antibiotic resistance compared to the respective planktonic counterparts.
TAHES: A Truthful Double Auction Mechanism for Heterogeneous Spectrums

Auction is widely applied in wireless communication for spectrum allocation. Most of prior works have assumed that all spectrums are identical. In reality, however, spectrums provided by different owners have distinctive characteristics in both spacial and frequency domains. Spectrum availability also varies in different geo-locations. Furthermore, frequency diversity may cause non-identical conflict relationships among spectrum buyers since different frequencies have distinct communication ranges. Under such a scenario, existing spectrum auction schemes cannot provide truthfulness or efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Truthful double Auction mechanism for HEterogeneous Spectrum, called TAHES, which allows buyers to explicitly express their personalized preferences for heterogeneous spectrums and also addresses the problem of interference graph variation. We prove that TAHES has nice economic properties including truthfulness, individual rationality and budget balance. Results from extensive simulation studies demonstrate the truthfulness, effectiveness and efficiency of TAHES.