Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Large Sample Properties of Matching Estimators for Average Treatment Effects

Matching estimators for average treatment effects are widely used in evaluation research despite the fact that their large sample properties have not been established in many cases. The absence of formal results in this area may be partly due to the fact that standard asymptotic expansions do not apply to matching estimators with a fixed number of matches because such estimators are highly nonsmooth functionals of the data. In this article we develop new methods for analyzing the large sample properties of matching estimators and establish a number of new results. We focus on matching with replacement with a fixed number of matches. First, we show that matching estimators are not N-super-1s2-consistent in general and describe conditions under which matching estimators do attain N-super-1s2-consistency. Second, we show that even in settings where matching estimators are N-super-1s2-consistent, simple matching estimators with a fixed number of matches do not attain the semiparametric efficiency bound. Third, we provide a consistent estimator for the large sample variance that does not require consistent nonparametric estimation of unknown functions. Software for implementing these methods is available in Matlab, Stata, and R. Copyright The Econometric Society 2006.
Characteristic alterations of quantity and quality of soil organic matter caused by forest fires in continental Mediterranean ecosystems: a solid‐state 13C NMR study

The variable effect of different types of forest fires on the quantity and quality of soil organic matter (SOM) was analysed by comparing burnt and unburnt soils from six forest ecosystems in central Spain by organic elemental analysis and solid‐state 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Whole soil samples were collected 1 to 2 years after the fires and included one site affected by two fires within 2 years. The fire‐affected soils showed no common pattern with respect to the amount of additional carbon (Cadd) but at all sites, the fire enhanced the aromatic‐C content. The weakest fire intensity resulted in the greatest aromatic‐C enrichment factor, EFI(aromatic C) indicating the greatest local accumulation of char. The respective Cadd disclosed an EFI(aromatic C) to EFI(alkyl C) ratio, Bchar, of c.1, which supports a small degree of charring. Extensive combustion and volatilization at stronger fire intensities yielded a decrease of EFI(aromatic C) and an increase in Bchar. These trends are in good agreement with fire intensity and forest fuel combustibility in the various sites and therefore these indices could be used to elucidate the quality and quantity of char input that occurs during and after forest fires. No 13C NMR evidence for substantial inputs from non‐charred plant necromass was found for any of the single‐burn soils. The large carboxyl‐C content of Cadd is evidence of the occurrence of oxidation reactions very shortly after the fire. In comparing the single and double‐burn sites, no additional char input was observed for the double‐burn site, possibly because of complete combustion of young shrubs and char remains during the second fire. The large O‐alkyl‐C portion found in Cadd of the double‐burn soil is best explained by decreased litter degradation.
Field swimming performance of bluegill sunfish, Lepomis macrochirus: implications for field activity cost estimates and laboratory measures of swimming performance

Abstract Mobility is essential to the fitness of many animals, and the costs of locomotion can dominate daily energy budgets. Locomotor costs are determined by the physiological demands of sustaining mechanical performance, yet performance is poorly understood for most animals in the field, particularly aquatic organisms. We have used 3‐D underwater videography to quantify the swimming trajectories and propulsive modes of bluegills sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus, Rafinesque) in the field with high spatial (1–3 mm per pixel) and temporal (60 Hz frame rate) resolution. Although field swimming trajectories were variable and nonlinear in comparison to quasi steady‐state swimming in recirculating flumes, they were much less unsteady than the volitional swimming behaviors that underlie existing predictive models of field swimming cost. Performance analyses suggested that speed and path curvature data could be used to derive reasonable estimates of locomotor cost that fit within measured capacities for sustainable activity. The distinct differences between field swimming behavior and performance measures obtained under steady‐state laboratory conditions suggest that field observations are essential for informing approaches to quantifying locomotor performance in the laboratory.
Quantitative Measures for Cartogram Generation Techniques

Cartograms are used to visualize geographically distributed data by scaling the regions of a map (e.g., US states) such that their areas are proportional to some data associated with them (e.g., population). Thus the cartogram computation problem can be considered as a map deformation problem where the input is a planar polygonal map M and an assignment of some positive weight for each region. The goal is to create a deformed map M′, where the area of each region realizes the weight assigned to it (no cartographic error) while the overall map remains readable and recognizable (e.g., the topology, relative positions and shapes of the regions remain as close to those before the deformation as possible). Although several such measures of cartogram quality are well‐known, different cartogram generation methods optimize different features and there is no standard set of quantitative metrics. In this paper we define such a set of seven quantitative measures, designed to evaluate how faithfully a cartogram represents the desired weights and to estimate the readability of the final representation. We then study several cartogram‐generation algorithms and compare them in terms of these quantitative measures.
A bisimulation for type abstraction and recursion

We present a sound, complete, and elementary proof method, based on bisimulation, for contextual equivalence in a λ-calculus with full universal, existential, and recursive types. Unlike logical relations (either semantic or syntactic), our development is elementary, using only sets and relations and avoiding advanced machinery such as domain theory, admissibility, and ΤΤ-closure. Unlike other bisimulations, ours is complete even for existential types. The key idea is to consider sets of relations---instead of just relations---as bisimulations.
Combining classifiers: Soft computing solutions.

Classier combination is now an established pattern recognition subdiscipline. Despite the strong aspiration for theoretical studies, classier combination relies mainly on heuristic and empirical solutions. Assuming that \soft computing" encompasses neural networks, evolutionary computation, and fuzzy sets, we explain how each of the three components has been used in classier combination.
Aicardi Syndrome: An Unusual Case Associated With Pineal Gland Cyst and Ventricular Septal Defect

Aicardi syndrome is a cerebroretinal disorder consisting of a heterogeneous spectrum of clinical findings that includes the triad of infantile spasms, agenesis of the corpus callosum, and chorioretinal lacunae. This report describes a 6-month-old girl who has all of the essential features suggestive of Aicardi syndrome, as well as a pineal gland cyst and ventricular septal defect. Although the characteristic features of Aicardi syndrome have been described, its association with pineal gland cyst and ventricular septal defect has not been reported in the literature.
Low-Density Lipoprotein for Delivery of an Acrylophenone Antineoplastic Molecule into Malignant Cells 1

In vitro and in vivo data have indicated that tumor cells actively internalize the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) from the circulation. A family of 2-(aminomethyl) acrylophenones (AMA) possesses an in vitro antileukemic activity but is devoid of any in vivo antineoplastic activity, because the compounds are actively captured by proteins in solution in the blood. In order to achieve a selective delivery of these drugs via the LDL pathway, we have incorporated an AMA drug, 2-morpholinomethyl2',3',4'-trimethoxy acrylophenone hydrochloride (ILE) into LDL parti cles. ILE spontaneously associated with LDL to produce an LDL-ILE complex containing 200 Â±100 molecules of drug per LDL particle. The LDL-ILE complex was highly electronegative as detected by electrophoresis. Further, this complex presented an immunologically detected over expression of the ligand-binding domain to the LDL receptor. In spite of these modifications, the LDL receptor processing bound, internalized, and degraded the LDL-ILE complex. Nevertheless, these biological properties were reduced by 32, 20, and 40%, respectively, in comparison to native LDL. Despite its high electronegativity, the LDL-ILE complex was not recognized by the macrophagic scavenger receptor. The LDLILE complex showed specific LDL receptor mediated in vitro cytotoxicity as judged from the growth inhibition of neoplastic A549 cells and of normal fibroblasts, but no activity on defective LDL receptor cells. Further, the pharmacological activity of the complex against A549 cells has been demonstrated to be equally potent as that of the free drug (median inhibitory dose, 5 Â¿IM). It is suggested that LDL drug targeting of AMA molecules could specifically deliver active molecules to cancer cells, avoiding their entrapment by other blood proteins and their rapid clearance by the reticuloendothelial system.
Automated feature extraction in color retinal images by a model based approach

Color retinal photography is an important tool to detect the evidence of various eye diseases. Novel methods to extract the main features in color retinal images have been developed in this paper. Principal component analysis is employed to locate optic disk; A modified active shape model is proposed in the shape detection of optic disk; A fundus coordinate system is established to provide a better description of the features in the retinal images; An approach to detect exudates by the combined region growing and edge detection is proposed. The success rates of disk localization, disk boundary detection, and fovea localization are 99%, 94%, and 100%, respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of exudate detection are 100 % and 71 %, correspondingly. The success of the proposed algorithms can be attributed to the utilization of the model-based methods. The detection and analysis could be applied to automatic mass screening and diagnosis of the retinal diseases.
A wearable inertial sensing device for fall detection and motion tracking

Fall is a major problem for the elderly persons and patients suffering from neuromuscular disorders. A body-worn fall detector can greatly help in providing timely assistance by alerting the emergency services and relatives in case of such an occurrence. A wearable inertial sensing device is developed for fall detection and motion tracking. It consists of an integrated sensor with tri-axial accelerometer and tri-axial gyroscope for sensing linear acceleration and angular velocity, a microcontroller for data acquisition and processing, nonvolatile memory for recording the sensed data, and Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. A fall detection algorithm applying multiple decompositions and thresholding on the acceleration data is implemented for real-time processing using sampling frequency of 100 Hz. The sensed data can be continuously recorded for approximately 10 hours at a sampling frequency of 20 Hz and therefore the device can also be used for actigraphy for diagnosis of sleep disorders. A number of such devices worn on the different parts of the body and wirelessly connected to a central device can be used for continuous tracking of the posture and movement and can serve as an aid for assisted living.
A Review of the Use of Gaze and Pupil Metrics to Assess Mental Workload in Gamified and Simulated Sensorimotor Tasks

Gaze and pupil metrics are used to represent higher cognitive processes in a variety of contexts. One growing area of research is the real-time assessment of workload and corresponding effort in gamified or simulated cognitive and motor tasks, which will be reviewed in this paper. While some measurements are consistent across studies, others vary and are likely dependent on the nature of the effort required by the task and the resulting changes in arousal. Pupil diameter is shown to consistently increase with task effort and arousal; however, the valence of arousal must be considered. In many cases, measures of pupil diameter were sensitive to both excessive and insufficient challenge. Overall, it is evident that gaze and pupil metrics are valuable to assess the cognitive state during gamified and simulated tasks, and further research is indicated regarding their use in clinical populations in rehabilitation to inform optimally engaging interventions.
Environmental Contamination in Households of Patients with Recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection

ABSTRACT Recurrent Clostridium difficile infection (R-CDI) is common and difficult to treat, potentially necessitating fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT). Although C. difficile spores persist in the hospital environment and cause infection, little is known about their potential presence or importance in the household environment. Households of R-CDI subjects in the peri-FMT period and of geographically matched and age-matched controls were analyzed for the presence of C. difficile. Household environmental surfaces and fecal samples from humans and pets in the household were examined. Households of post-FMT subjects were also examined (environmental surfaces only). Participants were surveyed regarding their personal history and household cleaning habits. Species identity and molecular characteristics of presumptive C. difficile isolates from environmental and fecal samples were determined by using the Pro kit (Remel, USA), Gram staining, PCR, toxinotyping, tcdC gene sequencing, and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). Environmental cultures detected C. difficile on ≥1 surface in 8/8 (100%) peri-FMT households, versus 3/8 (38%) post-FMT households and 3/8 (38%) control households (P = 0.025). The most common C. difficile-positive sites were the vacuum (11/27; 41%), toilet (8/30; 27%), and bathroom sink (5/29; 17%). C. difficile was detected in 3/36 (8%) fecal samples (two R-CDI subjects and one household member). Nine (90%) of 10 households with multiple C. difficile-positive samples had a single genotype present each. In conclusion, C. difficile was found in the household environment of R-CDI patients, but whether it was found as a cause or consequence of R-CDI is unknown. If household contamination leads to R-CDI, effective decontamination may be protective.
The Gesture Pendant: A Self-illuminating, Wearable, Infrared Computer Vision System for Home Automation Control and Medical Monitoring

In this paper we present a wearable device for control of home automation systems via hand gestures. This solution has many advantages over traditional home automation interfaces in that it can be used by those with loss of vision, motor skills, and mobility. By combining other sources of context with the pendant we can reduce the number and complexity of gestures while maintaining functionality. As users input gestures, the system can also analyze their movements for pathological tremors. This information can then be used for medical diagnosis, therapy, and emergency services.Currently, the Gesture Pendant can recognize control gestures with an accuracy of 95% and userdefined gestures with an accuracy of 97% It can detect tremors above 2HZ within . 1 Hz.
Comparison of spatial modelling approaches to simulate urban growth: a case study on Udaipur city, India

Abstract Assessment of past and future urban growth processes helps the decision makers to evaluate and formulate the policy documents. In an attempt to make such assessments, this study compares three commonly used urban growth models: Multicriteria Cellular Automata-Markov Chain (MCCA-MC), Multi-Layer Perception Markov Chain (MLP-MC), and the Slope, Land use, Exclusion, Urban Extent, Transportation and Hillshade (SLEUTH). This study has taken into account the land use and land cover data for the years, 1977, 1992, 2000, 2008, 2016 and prepared driving variables for urban growth. The KAPPA index of agreement indicates that the MCCA-MC, MLP-MC and SLEUTH models avoid errors by 94%, 93%, and 92% respectively. Models forecast that about 156.96 km2, 157.43 km2 and 142.43 km2 built-up areas will emerge through the process of urbanization by 2031 in the city of Udaipur. However, this assessment identified that all the models are embodied with their own advantages and disadvantages while serving specific purposes. While the MCCA-MC and MLP-MC provides a good account of the urban spread, the SLEUTH identifies the new isolated growth centres more accurately.
License plate recognition with an intelligent camera

This paper describes a robust car identification system for surveillance of parking lot entrances that runs completely on a stand alone low cost intelligent camera. In order to meet accuracy and speed requirements hierarchical classifiers and coarse to fine search techniques are applied at each recognition stage from localization, segmentation to classification. The paper gives an overview of the applied image processing techniques and focuses in particular on the character classification part. Character recognition is based on a convolutional neural network that proved to generalize better than a fully connected multi-layer perceptron.
A Proof Theoretic Study of Soft Concurrent Constraint Programming

Abstract Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) is a simple and powerful model for concurrency where agents interact by telling and asking constraints. Since their inception, CCP-languages have been designed for having a strong connection to logic. In fact, the underlying constraint system can be built from a suitable fragment of intuitionistic (linear) logic -ILL- and processes can be interpreted as formulas in ILL. Constraints as ILL formulas fail to represent accurately situations where “preferences” (called soft constraints) such as probabilities, uncertainty or fuzziness are present. In order to circumvent this problem, c-semirings have been proposed as algebraic structures for defining constraint systems where agents are allowed to tell and ask soft constraints. Nevertheless, in this case, the tight connection to logic and proof theory is lost. In this work, we give a proof theoretical meaning to soft constraints: they can be defined as formulas in a suitable fragment of ILL with subexponentials (SELL) where subexponentials, ordered in a c-semiring structure, are interpreted as preferences. We hence achieve two goals: (1) obtain a CCP language where agents can tell and ask soft constraints and (2) prove that the language in (1) has a strong connection with logic. Hence we keep a declarative reading of processes as formulas while providing a logical framework for soft-CCP based systems. An interesting side effect of (1) is that one is also able to handle probabilities (and other modalities) in SELL, by restricting the use of the promotion rule for non-idempotent c-semirings.This finer way of controlling subexponentials allows for considering more interesting spaces and restrictions, and it opens the possibility of specifying more challenging computational systems.
Unsupervised Morphology Rivals Supervised Morphology for Arabic MT

If unsupervised morphological analyzers could approach the effectiveness of supervised ones, they would be a very attractive choice for improving MT performance on low-resource inflected languages. In this paper, we compare performance gains for state-of-the-art supervised vs. unsupervised morphological analyzers, using a state-of-the-art Arabic-to-English MT system. We apply maximum marginal decoding to the unsupervised analyzer, and show that this yields the best published segmentation accuracy for Arabic, while also making segmentation output more stable. Our approach gives an 18% relative BLEU gain for Levantine dialectal Arabic. Furthermore, it gives higher gains for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), as measured on NIST MT-08, than does MADA (Habash and Rambow, 2005), a leading supervised MSA segmenter.
Towards efficient and accurate privacy preserving web search

Querying Web search engines is by far the most frequent activity performed by online users and consequently the one in which they are likely to reveal a significant amount of personal information. Protecting the privacy of Web requesters is thus becoming increasingly important. This is often done by using systems that guarantee unlinkability between the requester and her query. The most effective solution to reach this objective is the use of anonymous communication protocols (e.g., onion routing [10]). However, according to [14], anonymity might not resist to machine learning attacks. Thus, an adversary could link a query to her requester's public profile. Other approaches (e.g., [8,17]) guarantee unidentifiability of the user interests by generating noise (e.g., creating covert queries or adding extra keywords). However, these solutions overload the network and decrease the accuracy of the results. We present in this paper the first contribution that combines both approaches. It allows a user to perform a private Web search resistant to machine learning attacks while slightly decreasing the relevance of the results. Our three stage architecture contains: (1) a Privacy Proxy that relies on two non-colluding servers to hide the requester identity from the search engine; (2) a Linkability Assessment that analyses the risk that a request is reassociated with the identity of the requester; (3) an Obfuscator that protects the queries which have been flagged linkable by the linkability assessment.
Optical Simulations and Characterisations of Antenna Integrated YBCO THz Detectors

For accurate characterisation of quasi-optical terahertz (0.1 − 10THz) detectors the beam pattern of both the detector and the transmitter antennas have to be optically matched. For this purpose a quasi-optical waveguide has to be designed to couple the RF power from the source antenna to the detector. This can be done using focusing elements such as lenses or mirrors. In this thesis the beam patterns from different hybrid antennas (planar antenna on a Si lens) are simulated using CST Microwave Studio and a quasi-optical waveguide with two parabolic mirrors is designed. It is shown that it is possible with standard desktop computers to simulate the whole hybrid antenna for frequencies in the lower terahertz region. It was discovered that a quasi-optical waveguide designed using parabolic mirror was more sensitive to misalignment than expected. The standing waves in the system were also more present than expected making the alignment even more difficult. The coupling loss through the diagonal horns and the quasi-optical waveguide relative to direct connection withWR-2.2 interface were measured to be 1.3 dB at 452GHz and 1.5 dB at 389GHz. Responsivity measurements on a YBCO bolometer with a log-spiral planar feed antenna mounted on a ? = 5mm lens were also performed. The measurements gave an optical responsivity of 30 V/W at 452 GHz and 40 V/W at 389GHz. The bolometer used had an electrical responsivity of 50 V/W and was biased at 0.7mA.