Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Shape as a Perturbation to Projective Mapping

In the classical computer-graphics approach to three-dimensional rendering, a scene is described in terms of its geometry and surface properties. Given this representation, the rendering task can be thought of as a physical simulation problem. Recently, there has been an increased interest in alternate rendering paradigms, most of which fall into a category that we call image-based rendering. In these alternate approaches, reference images, rather than geometry and surface properties, are used as the primary scene description. In this paper we describe a simple extension to the well known results of projective geometry, resulting in an efficient foundation for the construction of image-based rendering systems.
Securing Cryptographic Keys in the Cloud: A Survey

Public cloud users are increasingly interested in securing their data and network traffic by using outsourced encryption or decryption services (cryptography as a service). However, many concerns have been raised about trusting the outsourced service's memory with sensitive information like the user's cryptographic keys. This survey reviews techniques for securing data owners' cryptographic keys in a public cloud, preserving them from any inquisitive actions on the part of cotenants (fellow data owners, domain administrators, or other third parties) and the cloud provider itself. The aim is to provide readers with a comparative in-depth analysis of available techniques and point to open research problems.
The Brave New World of Multiplayer Online Games: Synchronization Issues with Smart Solutions

The technology supporting multiplayer online games (MOGs) has greatly improved in the past few years. This represents great news both for players all over the world and for researchers that are struggling behind tough problems in real-time distributed systems. Indeed, MOGs represent a peculiar class of distributed systems, sharing features, requirements, challenges, and thereby also feasible solutions. To this aim, we focus on issues and state-of art solutions related to a crucial aspect in MOG deployment: the synchronization of its nodes. In particular, we review techniques able to guarantee that the system evolves in a quick and consistent way and highlight how they can be made more effective by exploiting specific game features. To further support this claim, we also present results from an experimental evaluation we performed.
From Otherization to Collaboration in the English Composition Classroom: A Look at the Effectiveness of Teacher-Student Collaboration

This essay is a critical review of literature on the topic of instructor-student collaboration and its potential improvement of student writing performance in the college-level English composition classroom. Moreover, this review of literature highlights a broad range of literature and experts on this topic with the aim of highlighting a critical gap or void within this area of writing pedagogy, and student learning. In addition, the pieces of literature comprising this review of literature presents critical and pedagogically insightful findings that call attention to many specific writing challenges, as well as the educational, ethnic, and cultural discrimination commonly experienced by many nontraditional adult writing students within today’s modern college-level English classroom.
A novel low cost structure of microstrip coupler 3dB

this paper presents a novel design of branch line (3dB, 90°) coupler, it is designed and simulated by using FR4 substrate at the operating frequency 2.45 GHz in the ISM “Industrial Scientific Medical” band. The design is based on two different models, the T-model and combinational-model (T- and π-model). After a theoretical study on the use of open stubs, we present the simulation results of this branch line coupler by using the ADS from Agilent technologies and CST Microwave Studio. Good agreement is found between simulated results using ADS and CST Microwave Studio.
Asset Ownership across Generations Asset Ownership across Generations We Are Grateful To

The Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan is one of the oldest population centers in the United States. Established in 1961 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, the Center has a rich history as the main workplace for an interdisciplinary community of scholars in the field of population studies. PSC Research Reports are prepublication working papers that report on current demographic research conducted by PSC associates and affiliates. The papers are written by the researcher(s) for timely dissemination of their findings and are often later submitted for publication in scholarly journals. The PSC Research Report Series was begun in 1981 and is organized chronologically. Copyrights are held by the authors. Readers may freely quote from, copy, and distribute this work as long as the copyright holder and PSC are properly acknowledged and the original work is not altered. Abstract This paper examines cross-generational connections in asset ownership. We study the effect that parental ownership of individual assets has on their children's knowledge about assets and their portfolio choice decisions. The paper first presents a theoretical framework that develops the distinction between the intergenerational transfer of knowledge about financial assets and the direct transfer of dollars. It subsequently analyzes data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Our empirical research reveals that there is intergenerational correlation in asset ownership and that parental asset-ownership affects the probability of holding a bank account and the probability of owning stock. and participants of the Economic Behavior Program seminar series at the University of Michigan for helpful comments. Additionally, special thanks is owed specifically to Erik Hurst and Ming-Ching Luoh for their assistance as we were constructing our dataset. We also thank Margaux Matter for her research assistance. Finally, Chiteji wishes to acknowledge the financial support of a Ford Foundation grant in Poverty, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Sloan Foundation Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life. All views and mistakes are the sole responsibility of the authors. 1 "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, & you feed him for the rest of his life. "
Human action recognition in videos based on the Transferable Belief Model Application to athletics jumps

This paper focuses on human behavior recognition where the main problem is to bridge the semantic gap between the analogue observations of the real world and the symbolic world of human interpretation. For that, a fusion architecture based on the Transferable Belief Model framework is proposed and applied to action recognition of an athlete in video sequences of athletics meeting with moving camera. Relevant features are extracted from videos based on both the camera motion analysis and the tracking of particular points on athlete’s silhouette. Some models of interpretation are used to link the numerical features to the symbols to be recognized which are running, jumping and falling actions. A Temporal Belief Filter is then used to improve the robustness of action recognition. The proposed approach demonstrates good performance when tested on real videos of athletics sports videos (high jumps, pole vaults, triple jumps and long jumps) acquired by moving camera and varying view angles. The proposed system is also compared to Bayesian Networks.
Significance of Ubiquitin Carboxy-Terminal Hydrolase L1 Elevations in Athletes after Sub-Concussive Head Hits

The impact of sub-concussive head hits (sub-CHIs) has been recently investigated in American football players, a population at risk for varying degrees of post-traumatic sequelae. Results show how sub-CHIs in athletes translate in serum as the appearance of reporters of blood-brain barrier disruption (BBBD), how the number and severity of sub-CHIs correlate with elevations of putative markers of brain injury is unknown. Serum brain injury markers such as UCH-L1 depend on BBBD. We investigated the effects of sub-CHIs in collegiate football players on markers of BBBD, markers of cerebrospinal fluid leakage (serum beta 2-transferrin) and markers of brain damage. Emergency room patients admitted for a clinically-diagnosed mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) were used as positive controls. Healthy volunteers were used as negative controls. Specifically this study was designed to determine the use of UCH-L1 as an aid in the diagnosis of sub-concussive head injury in athletes. The extent and intensity of head impacts and serum values of S100B, UCH-L1, and beta-2 transferrin were measured pre- and post-game from 15 college football players who did not experience a concussion after a game. S100B was elevated in players experiencing the most sub-CHIs; UCH-L1 levels were also elevated but did not correlate with S100B or sub-CHIs. Beta-2 transferrin levels remained unchanged. No correlation between UCH-L1 levels and mTBI were measured in patients. Low levels of S100B were able to rule out mTBI and high S100B levels correlated with TBI severity. UCH-L1 did not display any interpretable change in football players or in individuals with mild TBI. The significance of UCH-L1 changes in sub-concussions or mTBI needs to be further elucidated.
Three phase verification for spoken dialog clarification

Spoken dialog tasks incur many errors including speech recognition errors, understanding errors, and even dialog management errors. These errors create a big gap between user's will and the system's understanding, and eventually result in a misinterpretation. To fill in the gap, people in human-to-human dialog try to clarify the major causes of the misunderstanding and selectively correct them. This paper presents a method for applying the human's clarification techniques to human-machine spoken dialog systems. To increase the error detection precision and error recovery efficiency for the clarification dialogs, error detection phase is organized into three systematic phases and a clarification expert is devised for recovering the errors using the three phase verification. The experiment results demonstrate that the three phase verification could effectively catch the word and utterance-level errors in order to increase the SLU (spoken language understanding) performance and the clarification experts can actually increase the dialog success rate and the dialog efficiency.
Choice of Cell-Delivery Route for Skeletal Myoblast Transplantation for Treating Post-Infarction Chronic Heart Failure in Rat

Background Intramyocardial injection of skeletal myoblasts (SMB) has been shown to be a promising strategy for treating post-infarction chronic heart failure. However, insufficient therapeutic benefit and occurrence of ventricular arrhythmias are concerns. We hypothesised that the use of a retrograde intracoronary route for SMB-delivery might favourably alter the behaviour of the grafted SMB, consequently modulating the therapeutic effects and arrhythmogenicity. Methods and Results Three weeks after coronary artery ligation in female wild-type rats, 5×106 GFP-expressing SMB or PBS only (control) were injected via either the intramyocardial or retrograde intracoronary routes. Injection of SMB via either route similarly improved cardiac performance and physical activity, associated with reduced cardiomyocyte-hypertrophy and fibrosis. Grafted SMB via either route were only present in low numbers in the myocardium, analysed by real-time PCR for the Y-chromosome specific gene, Sry. Cardiomyogenic differentiation of grafted SMB was extremely rare. Continuous ECG monitoring by telemetry revealed that only intramyocardial injection of SMB produced spontaneous ventricular tachycardia up to 14 days, associated with local myocardial heterogeneity generated by clusters of injected SMB and accumulated inflammatory cells. A small number of ventricular premature contractions with latent ventricular tachycardia were detected in the late-phase of SMB injection regardless of the injection-route. Conclusion Retrograde intracoronary injection of SMB provided significant therapeutic benefits with attenuated early-phase arrhythmogenicity in treating ischaemic cardiomyopathy, indicating the promising utility of this route for SMB-delivery. Late-phase arrhythmogenicity remains a concern, regardless of the delivery route.
On the Equivalence of Several Security Notions of KEM and DEM

KEM (Key Encapsulation Mechanism) and DEM (Data Encapsulation Mechanism) were introduced by Shoup to formalize the asymmetric encryption specified for key distribution and the symmetric encryption specified for data exchange in ISO standards on public-key encryption. Shoup defined the “semantic security (IND) against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks (CCA2)” as a desirable security notion of KEM and DEM, that is, IND-CCA2 KEM and IND-CCA2 DEM. This paper defines “non-malleability (NM)” for KEM, which is a stronger security notion than IND. We provide three definitions of NM for KEM, and show that these three definitions are equivalent. We then show that NM-CCA2 KEM is equivalent to IND-CCA2 KEM. That is, we show that NM is equivalent to IND for KEM under CCA2 attacks, although NM is stronger than IND in the definition (or under some attacks like CCA1). In addition, this paper defines the universally composable (UC) security of KEM and DEM, and shows that IND-CCA2 KEM (or NM-CCA2 KEM) is equivalent to UC KEM and that “IND against adaptive chosen plaintext/ciphertext attacks (IND-P2-C2)” DEM is equivalent to UC DEM.
Life‐Cycle Assessment and Temporal Distributions of Emissions: Developing a Fleet‐Based Analysis

Although the product‐centered focus of life‐cycle assessment has been one of its strengths, this analytical perspective embeds assumptions that may conflict with the realities of environmental problems. This article demonstrates, through a series of mathematical derivations, that all the products in use, rather than a single product, frequently should be the appropriate unit of analysis. Such a “fleet‐centered” approach supplies a richer perspective on the comparative emissions burdens generated by alternative products, and it eliminates certain simplifying assumptions imposed upon the analysis by a product‐centered approach.
Beden Eğitimi Öğretmen Adayları İçin Halk Oyunları Dersi Tutum Ölçeğinin Geliştirilmesi

Bu calismada beden egitimi ogretmen adaylarinin halk oyunlari dersine yonelik tutumlarini ortaya koyan gecerli ve guvenilir bir olcme aracinin gelistirilmesi amaclanmistir. Calismaya, 2014-2015 egitim-ogretim yili Bahar Donemi’nde Balikesir Universitesi ve 2013-2014 ogretim yili Bahar doneminde Celal Bayar Universitesi Beden Egitimi ve Spor Yuksekokullarinin Ogretmenlik Bolumlerinde ogrenim goren ve Halk Oyunlari Dersi almis 37’si kadin (%33,0) ve 75’i erkek (%67,0) olmak uzere toplam 112 ogrenci gonullu olarak katilmistir. Uygulamaya, Beden Egitimi Ogretmenligi 2. 3. 4. sinif ogrencileri dâhil edilerek, ilgili ders hakkinda henuz yeterli bilgi sahibi olamayacaklari dusuncesiyle 1. sinif ogrencileri kapsama alinmamistir. Arastirma verilerinin analizinde SPSS 20.0 programi kullanilmistir. Yapilan analizler sonucunda olcek 13 maddeye indirilmistir. Olcegin faktor analizinden elde edilen KMO degeri . 91 ve guvenirligi icin elde edilen Cronbach Alpha katsayisi . 94’tur. Gecerlik icin yapilan faktor analizi sonucunda olcegin maddelerinin yuk degerlerinin tek boyutta toplandigi gorulmustur. Sonuc olarak; Beden Egitimi Ogretmen Adaylarinin, Halk Oyunlari Dersine yonelik tutumlarini olcmek amaciyla hazirlanan olcegin, yapilan gecerlik ve guvenirlik calismasi sonucunda kullanilabilir bir olcum araci oldugu tespit edilmistir
Growth and generation in SL_2(Z/pZ)

We show that every subset of SL_2(Z/pZ) grows rapidly when it acts on itself by the group operation. It follows readily that, for every set of generators A of SL_2(Z/pZ), every element of SL_2(Z/pZ) can be expressed as a product of at most O((log p)^c) elements of the union of A and A^{-1}, where c and the implied constant are absolute.
The Renal Histopathology Spectrum of Elderly Patients with Kidney Diseases

AbstractThe elderly population has significantly increased in China. However, data regarding renal histopathology in this population is lacking. The present study retrospectively analyzed renal disease spectrum of 430 elderly patients who had received renal biopsy at Peking University First Hospital between January 2003 and December 2012.Among 6049 patients receiving renal biopsies during the same period, 430 (7.10%) were elderly (≥65 years). The ratio of male (263 patients) to female (167 patients) was 1.57:1, with an age of 70.29 ± 3.99 (range 65–82) years at the time of biopsy. The most common indication for renal biopsy was nephrotic syndrome (59.53%), followed by acute kidney injury (AKI, 19.53%) and chronic glomerulonephritis (CGN, 16.05%). The most common renal histopathology in primary glomerular disease was idiopathic membranous nephropathy (iMN, 61.02%), followed by IgA nephropathy (18.22%), minimal change disease (MCD, 9.32%) and focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (6.78%). ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV, 43.95%) was the leading secondary glomerular disease, followed by HBV-related glomerulonephritis (HBV-GN, 24.2%), and amyloidosis (14.01%). In patients with nephrotic syndrome, iMN (50%) was the leading cause, followed by HBV-GN (16.02%), MCD (7.81%), and amyloidosis (7.81%). In patients with iMN, 89.5% presented as nephrotic syndrome, 8.39% as CGN. In patients with AKI, the leading cause was AAV (48.12%), followed by acute interstitial nephritis (20.48%) and acute tubular necrosis (8.43%). In conclusion, in elderly Chinese patients, the most common renal histopathology pattern was iMN in patients with nephrotic syndrome, and AAV in patients with AKI.
Laura Dugan Veto players and terror

Democratic regimes have been linked to terrorism for contending reasons, with some scholars claiming democracy increases terrorism and others claiming it decreases terror. Corroborating evidence has been used for both relationships leading to the following puzzle: why do some democratic regimes seem to foster terrorism while others do not? We offer an explanation based on Tsbelis’s veto players theory. Beginning with the assumption that terror groups want to change government policy, we argue that the more veto players present in a political system, the more likely the system is to experience deadlock. Given the inability of societal actors to change policies through nonviolent and institutional participation, these systems will tend to generate more terror events. We also explore different methods for estimating terrorism models. We identify several ways to match the data with the proper statistical estimator and discuss implications for terrorism research. Finally, we use new data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) that was previously unavailable. These data allow us to use different operational definitions of terrorism and to identify homegrown terror events.
NUMERICAL STUDIES OF CAHN-HILLIARD EQUATION AND APPLICATIONS IN IMAGE PROCESSING

In this article we present a numerical scheme for solving the Cahn-Hilliard equation with degenerate mobility. This scheme is based on the method of lines, we discretize the equation by (cid:12)nite di(cid:11)erences in space and the resulting system of ordinary di(cid:11)erential equations is solved by an embedded fourth-order Runge-Kutta Cash-Karp method with (cid:12)fth-order error estimate. The experimental order of convergence suggests that the scheme is accurate of the (cid:12)rst order. We also summarize some results concerning the e(cid:14)ciency of parallel implementation. Finally, we consider the application of the scheme for processing of binary images, which contain objects with distorted boundaries, and present various numerical experiments.
Analytical Model and Performance Evaluation for the TRIDNT protocol

In Mobile ad-hoc networks, nodes must cooperate to achieve the routing functions. Node misbehavior due to selfish or malicious intention could significantly degrade the performance of MANET because most existing routing protocols in MANET are aiming at finding the most efficient path. A Two node-disjoint Routes scheme for Isolating Dropper Node (TRIDNT) protocol has been proposed in [13]. The protocol uses an incentive mechanism for selfish node to declare its selfishness behavior and also use two node-disjoint routes to reduce the malicious searching time. In this paper, we give an analytical model and performance evaluation for the TRIDNT protocol. First we calculate the time taken to detect the malicious node in the routing path. Second we will drive an expression for the expected attempt time until finding a misbehaving free route, and calculate the probability of failing in finding a misbehaving-free route in case of limited number of attempts. Finally, the connection request blocking probability and per flow throughput are calculated. The performance of the proposed TRIDNT protocol is compared with the TWOACK and Muhammad Zeshan protocols. The results indicate that under a low threshold and low traffic intensity conditions the TWOACK and Muhammad Zeshan protocols have a malicious searching time little greater than that of TRIDNT, but with high probability of false reporting of legitimate nodes as misbehaving nodes due to small threshold value and without differentiating between selfish node and malicious nodes. The expected attempt time of TRIDNT protocol have the smallest value because it allows a controlled degree of node selfishness which gives the selfish node the incentive to declare itself and reduce the path diagnosis time, and save the misbehaving detection time. Also TRIDNT protocol has a smaller limited-attempts-based connection blocking probability than TWOACK and Muhammad Zeshan protocols, but has a higher connection request blocking probability than the other two protocols. Finally because per flow throughput is inversely proportional to the expected attempt time, so TRIDNT has the highest per flow throughput. Then we say that TRIDNT protocol can find and isolate the malicious node in small amount of time without using of promiscuous listening, which results in improving the per flow throughput and improving the overall throughput performance of MANET.
Transcription of ribosomal genes can cause nondisjunction

Mitotic disjunction of the repetitive ribosomal DNA (rDNA) involves specialized segregation mechanisms dependent on the conserved phosphatase Cdc14. The reason behind this requirement is unknown. We show that rDNA segregation requires Cdc14 partly because of its physical length but most importantly because a fraction of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes are transcribed at very high rates. We show that cells cannot segregate rDNA without Cdc14 unless they undergo genetic rearrangements that reduce rDNA copy number. We then demonstrate that cells with normal length rDNA arrays can segregate rDNA in the absence of Cdc14 as long as rRNA genes are not transcribed. In addition, our study uncovers an unexpected role for the replication barrier protein Fob1 in rDNA segregation that is independent of Cdc14. These findings demonstrate that highly transcribed loci can cause chromosome nondisjunction.