Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Low-Fidelity Video Encoder Optimization for Temporal Action Localization

Temporal action localization (TAL) is a fundamental yet challenging task in video understanding. Existing TAL methods rely on pre-training a video encoder through action classification supervision. This results in a task discrepancy problem for the video encoder -- trained for action classification, but used for TAL. Intuitively, end-to-end model optimization is a good solution. However, this is not operable for TAL subject to the GPU memory constraints, due to the prohibitive computational cost in processing long untrimmed videos. In this paper, we resolve this challenge by introducing a novel low-fidelity end-to-end (LoFi) video encoder pre-training method. Instead of always using the full training configurations for TAL learning, we propose to reduce the mini-batch composition in terms of temporal, spatial or spatio-temporal resolution so that end-to-end optimization for the video encoder becomes operable under the memory conditions of a mid-range hardware budget. Crucially, this enables the gradient to flow backward through the video encoder from a TAL loss supervision, favourably solving the task discrepancy problem and providing more effective feature representations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed LoFi pre-training approach can significantly enhance the performance of existing TAL methods. Encouragingly, even with a lightweight ResNet18 based video encoder in a single RGB stream, our method surpasses two-stream ResNet50 based alternatives with expensive optical flow, often by a good margin.
Tasks performed and primary challenges identified by group process facilitators: Implications for teamwork research and practice

The use of facilitators, or small group process experts, is one way to help teams work effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we examine group process and specifically tasks and challenges as seen through the lens of experienced process facilitators. Study participants were asked to respond to short-answer and focus group questions on important tasks performed, primary challenges faced in working with teams, and ways in which challenges were handled. Responses were coded using thematic analysis. The top four themes under important tasks were: keeping the group focused; encouraging group ownership and involvement; using appropriate comments, questions and observations; and listening actively. The first two themes were cited again as challenges; other top challenges were remaining neutral and objective and handling disruptive/dysfunctional group member behaviors. Implications for teamwork research and practice are discussed. Keywords: teams, facilitation, group process, teamwork
A new solution to an old riddle: elongate dinosaur tracks explained as deep penetration of the foot, not plantigrade locomotion

The dinosaur track record features numerous examples of trackways with elongated metatarsal marks. Such ‘elongate tracks’ are often highly variable and characterized by indistinct outlines and abbreviated or missing digit impressions. Elongate dinosaur tracks are well‐known from the Paluxy River bed of Texas, where some have been interpreted as ‘man tracks’ by creationists due to their superficially human‐like appearance. The horizontal orientation of the metatarsal marks led to the now widely accepted idea of a facultative plantigrade, or ‘flat‐footed’, mode of locomotion in a variety of dinosaurian trackmakers small to large. This hypothesis, however, is at odds with the observation that elongate tracks do not indicate reduced locomotion speeds and increased pace angulation values, but instead are correlated with low anatomical fidelity. We here interpret elongate tracks as deep penetrations of the foot in soft sediment. Sediment may collapse above parts of the descending foot, leaving a shallow surface track that preserves a metatarsal mark. The length of a metatarsal mark is determined by multiple factors and is not necessarily correlated with the length of the metatarsus. Other types of posterior marks in dinosaur footprints, such as drag and slip marks, are reviewed.
Changes in cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone levels immediately after urban park visits

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to explore physiological and psychological changes immediately after a short-term visit to urban parks in an uncontrolled condition. Sixty park visitors completed a short questionnaire evaluating their subjective well-being (SWB) and donated a saliva sample immediately before and after their park visit. In addition, participants wore a pedometer to track their physical activity level during the park visit. Results indicated the levels of all biomarkers (cortisol, dehydroepiandrosterone [DHEA], and cortisol/DHEA ratio) decreased while SWB scores increased after the park visit. The duration of park visit was identified as a key variable significantly associated with cortisol reduction, and changes in SWB scores after the park visit were significantly associated with changes in cortisol level. A park visit duration of 21.8 min has the predictive ability to discriminate park visitors who exhibit reductions in cortisol levels after the park visit from those who do not.
Physiological activation of the nephron central command drives endogenous kidney tissue regeneration

Tissue regeneration is limited in several organs including the kidney, contributing to the high prevalence of kidney disease globally. However, evolutionary and physiological adaptive responses and the presence of renal progenitor cells suggest existing remodeling capacity. This study uncovered a novel endogenous tissue remodeling mechanism in the kidney that is activated by the loss of body fluid and salt and involves a unique niche of chief cells called macula densa (MD) that control resident progenitor cells via secreted angiogenic, growth and extracellular matrix remodeling factors, cytokines and chemokines. Serial intravital imaging, MD Wnt mouse models and transcriptome analysis provide functional and molecular characterization of this newly identified MD program for kidney regeneration complemented with human and therapeutic translation. The concept that chief cells responding to organ-specific physiological inputs control local progenitors and direct them to remodel or repair tissues may be applicable to other organs and diverse tissue regenerative therapeutic strategies.
Identification of deformable droplets from boundary measurements: the case of non-stationary Stokes problem

In this paper, we use asymptotic expansion of the velocity field to reconstruct small deformable droplets (i.e. their forms and locations) immersed in an incompressible Newtonian fluid. Here the fluid motion is assumed to be governed by the non-stationary linear Stokes system. Taking advantage of the smallness of the droplets, our asymptotic formula and identification methods extend those already derived for rigid inhomogeneity and for stationary Stokes system. Our derivations, based on dynamical boundary measurements, are rigorous and proved by involving the notion of viscous moment tensor VMT. The viability of our reconstruction approach is documented by numerical results.
Use of Field Observations in Developing Collision-Avoidance System for Arterial Red Light Running

Red light running (RLR) behaviors at arterial intersections are different from RLR behaviors at high-speed intersections. The majority of RLRs at arterial intersections are not caused by drivers trapped in the dilemma zone; at high-speed intersections, drivers' becoming caught in the dilemma zone is an important contributory factor to RLR. Consequently, collision-avoidance systems (CAS) based on detection of actual RLR trajectories after yellow light onset have been conceived. To form a set of parameters and to detect or predict RLR and optimize the performance of CAS, data collection and analysis are needed. Research was done at a well-designed arterial intersection in California and data were collected with multiple discrete point sensors. The work focused on empirical observation of vehicle trajectories to arrive at statistical descriptions that could be used in RLR CAS. Empirical data showed that for more than 90% of RLRs, drivers were not trapped in the dilemma zone at yellow light onset. Instead, they could have stopped safely. Further headway analysis of the empirical data showed that most RLR vehicles belonged to a platoon, and that the average headways of RLR vehicles were 5% to 10% less than the headways of vehicles traveling in the yellow light phase. This suggests that those RLR drivers either were trying to beat the yellow light or were following a leading vehicle, and so drivers were inattentive to the traffic signal. An intervehicle analysis found that following a leading vehicle contributes significantly to stopping probabilities. It is concluded that parameters such as approaching speed, acceleration or deceleration rate, and intervehicle characteristics should be included in an effective RLR CAS.
AraC: up for down.

The different PROTACs were then used in cytotoxicity and functional assays in ALL cell lines and xenograft cell lines from several Ph-like ALL patients. Unlike ruxolitinib, which failed to inhibit growth, compounds 5, 6, 7, and 8 induced complete inhibition at concentrations ,100 nM. Toxicity in ALL cell lines correlated with the presence of rearranged IGH-CRLF2 and JAK2 mutant cells. Compound 8 was the best. Protein degradation was measured by western blots and the specificity varied among compounds between JAKs and the 2 targets of CRBN, namely G1 to S phase transition 1 (GSPT1), which is involved in effective translation termination of nascent protein chains and the transcription factor IKZF1 (IKAROS family zinc finger 1). The significance of the degradation of this transcription factor in the tumor remains to be determined in vivo. In addition, whether baricitinib-derived PROTACs retain the ability to regulate Numbassociated kinases will also be of interest.
Cooperatives' performance relative to investor-owned firms: a non-distorted approach for the wine sector

Purpose This study aims to investigate whether significant performance differences between cooperatives and investor-owned firms (IOFs) may exist.Design/methodology/approach Based on data from a sample of Italian wine firms for the period from 2009 to 2018, an adjusted measure of performance called earnings before interests, taxes, depreciations and amortizations gross the raw materials cost was adopted to consider the different objectives of cooperatives relative to those of IOFs.Findings Empirical evidence shows that in the context under analysis, cooperatives have performed better than IOFs.Originality/value Despite the theoretical literature suggesting that the cooperative form of organizations suffers from many weaknesses, these results highlight that cooperatives operating in the wine sector are at least as economically efficient as other organizations, and more specifically, they perform better than for-profit firms. Consequent implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Effects of Knowledge Management Competencies of School Principals' to Quality Studies in School

The purpose of the study is to determine and compare the Knowledge Management (KM) competencies of principals of schools in Antalya Province- Turkey which have won Total Quality Management (TQM) Award in national level and which have not. Also to find an answer to the question “what is the effect of KM capacities of principals’ on school quality and planned school development process? ”. This study was carried out in Antalya Turkey on teachers working at state schools. “Judgment Sampling” method was used to select sample. 12 awarded schools’ teachers and 12 equivalent schools’ teachers were invited to the research. In the study both quantitative and qualitative research methods were used. The quantitative data was gathered via a Questionnaire which applied to 557 teachers. Seven teachers who had actively worked in TQM system from awarded schools were interviewed and also documents about TQM System were analyzed to gather qualitative data. The findings support there is a relation between KM competencies of school principals’ and success in TQM Awards. As a result of the study it can be suggested that, schools should develop a quality management system and run KM process very actively for sustainable and planned development.
Echocardiographic and clinical predictors of cardiac amyloidosis: limitations of apical sparing

The accuracy of an apical‐sparing strain pattern on transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) for predicting cardiac amyloidosis (CA) has varied in prior studies depending on the underlying cohort. We sought to evaluate the performance of apical sparing and other TTE strain findings to screen for CA in an unselected population and determine the frequency that patients with echocardiographic concern for CA undergo evaluation for amyloidosis in clinical practice.
Searching for biomarkers in schizophrenia and psychosis: Case‐control study using capillary electrophoresis and liquid chromatography time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry and systematic review for biofluid metabolites

Metabolomics has been attracting attention in recent years as an objective method for diagnosing schizophrenia. In this study, we analyzed 378 metabolites in the serum of schizophrenia patients using capillary electrophoresis‐ and liquid chromatography‐time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry. Using multivariate analysis with the orthogonal partial least squares method, we observed significantly higher levels of alanine, glutamate, lactic acid, ornithine, and serine and significantly lower levels of urea, in patients with chronic schizophrenia compared to healthy controls. Additionally, levels of fatty acids (15:0), (17:0), and (19:1), cis‐11‐eicosenoic acid, and thyroxine were significantly higher in patients with acute psychosis than in those in remission. Moreover, we conducted a systematic review of comprehensive metabolomics studies on schizophrenia over the last 20 years and observed consistent trends of increase in some metabolites such as glutamate and glucose, and decrease in citrate in schizophrenia patients across several studies. Hence, we provide substantial evidence for metabolic biomarkers in schizophrenia patients through our metabolomics study.
Effect of Ethanol Leaf Extract of Anthocleista vogelii on the Kidney Parameters of Albino Rats Exposed to Cadmium Oxide

This work evaluates the ameliorating effect of ethanol extract of Anthocleista vogelii leaves on serum electrolytes and kidney parameters of albino rats exposed to cadmium oxide. The electrolyte parameters; Sodium (Na + ), potassium (k + ), chloride (Cl ) and Bicarbonate (HCo 3 ), with some kidney parameters, creatinine, and urea were assayed.The extract was administered to the rats by oral intubation at a dose of (5mg/kg body weight) daily for 21 days after which electrolytes and kidney function indicators were measured in the serum using a standard method. The result showed that there was significant increase in the serum electrolytes and kidney levels in rats exposed to cadmium oxide. Treatment with (400 or 600 mg/kg body weight) extract showed a significant (P <0.05) reversal effect that mitigated the deleterious effect of cadmium oxide. Thus, indicating that Anthocleista vogeliileaves extract maybe useful in the management of both electrolytes’ imbalance and kidney alterations in albino rats exposed to cadmium oxide toxicity.
IDOSR JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 1(1): 105-126. Assessing the Role of Safety Stock Practice in Achieving Organizational Efficiency in a Computerized Era in Aluminium Manufacturing Firms in South East Nigeria Orga Christopher Chukwudi and Chukwu Dominic Chidinma

The study assessed the role of safety stock practice in achieving organizational efficiency in a computerized era in aluminum manufacturing firms in South East, Nigeria. Determining inventory level is one of the most challenging tasks faced by entrepreneurs and operations managers. The objectives of the study were to: ascertain the effect of safety stock on product availability, determine customer satisfaction and find the relationship between safety stock and sales volume. Survey design was adopted for the study. Questionnaire was used to obtain data which were presented in tables. The data were tested using Fdistribution. The result of the study showed that safety stock practice enhanced the availability of products in the aluminum manufacturing firms in South East, Nigeria (r = .738; F = 310.967; p < .000); safety stock practice promoted customer satisfaction in the aluminum manufacturing firms in South East, Nigeria (r = .899; F = 1099.647; p < .000) and safety stock practice increased sales volume in the aluminum manufacturing firms in South East, Nigeria (r = .789; p = .000 < 0.05). It was concluded that the adoption of safety stock practice had significant effect on the organizations‟ operations, particularly in ability to satisfy its customers, create higher sales volume and increased efficiency. It was therefore recommended that management of such firms should ensure adequate maintenance of safety stock of raw materials and finished products to assure uninterrupted productions and steady supply of the products to customers.
The COVID-19 Pandemic and School Closure: Learning Loss in Mathematics in Primary Education

Italy was the first Western country hit by Covid-19 in February 2020, responding with a tight lockdown and full school closure until the end of the school year. This paper estimates the effect of the pandemic and school closure on the math skills of primary school pupils in Italy. We compare the learning achievements of two cohorts of pupils, the pre-Covid and the Covid cohort. For both cohorts, we match scores on the national standardised assessment in grade 2 with scores on a standardised test delivered by the researchers at the end of grade 3. The pandemic had a large negative impact on the pupils’ performance in mathematics (-0.19 standard deviations). Among children of low-educated parents, the learning loss was larger for the best-performing ones (up to -0.51 s.d.) and for girls (-0.29 s.d.).
Parallelization on Gauss Sieve Algorithm over Ideal Lattice

Cryptanalysis of lattice-based cryptography is an important field in cryptography since lattice problems are among the most robust assumptions and have been used to construct a variety of cryptographic primitives. The security estimation model for concrete parameters is one of the most important topics in lattice-based cryptography. In this research, we focus on the Gauss Sieve algorithm proposed by Micciancio and Voulgaris, a heuristic lattice sieving algorithm for the central lattice problem, shortest vector problem (SVP). We propose a technique of lifting computations in prime-cyclotomic ideals into that in cyclic ideals. Lifting makes rotations easier to compute and reduces the complexity of inner products from O(n^3) to O(n^2). We implemented the Gauss Sieve on multi-GPU systems using two layers of parallelism in our framework, and achieved up to 55 times speed of previous results of dimension 96. We were able to solve SVP on ideal lattice in dimension up to 130, which is the highest dimension SVP instance solved by sieve algorithm so far. As a result, we are able to provide a better estimate of the complexity of solving central lattice problem.
Experimental and Computational Investigation of the Tip Clearance Flow in a Transonic Axial Compressor Rotor

Experimental and computational techniques are used to investigate tip clearance flows in a transonic axial compressor rotor at design and part speed conditions. Laser anemometer data acquired in the endwall region are presented for operating conditions near peak efficiency and near stall at 100% design speed and at near peak efficiency at 60% design speed. The role of the passage shock / leakage vortex interaction in generating endwall blockage is discussed. As a result of the shock / vortex interaction at design speed, the radial influence of the tip clearance flow extends to 20 times the physical tip clearance height. At part speed, in the absence of the shock, the radial extent is only 5 times the tip clearance height. Both measurements and analysis indicate that under part-speed operating conditions a second vortex, which does not originate from the tip leakage flow, forms in the endwall region within the blade passage and exits the passage near midpitch. Mixing of the leakage vortex with the primary flow downstream of the rotor at both design and part speed conditions is also discussed.Copyright © 1994 by ASME
Denoising Normalizing Flow

Normalizing ﬂows (NF) are expressive as well as tractable density estimation methods whenever the support of the density is diffeomorphic to the entire data-space. However, real-world data sets typically live on (or very close to) low-dimensional manifolds thereby challenging the applicability of standard NF on real-world problems. Here we propose a novel method - called Denoising Normalizing Flow (DNF) - that estimates the density on the low-dimensional manifold while learning the manifold as well. The DNF works in 3 steps. First, it inﬂates the manifold - making it diffeomorphic to the entire data-space. Secondly, it learns an NF on the inﬂated manifold and ﬁnally it learns a denoising mapping - similarly to denoising autoencoders. The DNF relies on a single cost function and does not require to alternate between a density estimation phase and a manifold learning phase - as it is the case with other recent methods. Furthermore, we show that the DNF can learn meaningful low-dimensional representations from naturalistic images as well as generate high-quality samples.
Lower and Upper Bounds on the Pseudo-Dimension of Tensor Network Models

Tensor network (TN) methods have been a key ingredient of advances in condensed matter physics and have recently sparked interest in the machine learning community for their ability to compactly represent very high-dimensional objects. TN methods can for example be used to efﬁciently learn linear models in exponentially large feature spaces [56]. In this work, we derive upper and lower bounds on the VC-dimension and pseudo-dimension of a large class of TN models for classiﬁcation, regression and completion. Our upper bounds hold for linear models parameterized by arbitrary TN structures, and we derive lower bounds for common tensor decomposition models (CP, Tensor Train, Tensor Ring and Tucker) showing the tightness of our general upper bound. These results are used to derive a generalization bound which can be applied to classiﬁcation with low-rank matrices as well as linear classiﬁers based on any of the commonly used tensor decomposition models. As a corollary of our results, we obtain a bound on the VC-dimension of the matrix product state classiﬁer introduced in [56] as a function of the so-called bond dimension (i.e. tensor train rank), which answers an open problem listed by Cirac, Garre-Rubio and Pérez-García in [13].