Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of pain perception latencies following metabolic alteration of plasma pH

Pain has been a subject of intense and continuous research over the years. Several approaches have been employed in understanding and management of pain ranging from peripheral to central modulation as well as systemic to molecular mechanism of integration. This study is therefore aimed at investigating the role of altered plasma pH in the perception of experimental pain in both chronic and acute model. The results indicated significant (p < 0.05) prolonged nociceptive activity by nerve endings at increasing alkalinity and acidity of the plasma in both models of experimental pain used. In conclusion, plasma condition should be an important consideration in the management of pain because introduction of exogenous substances could shift the homeostatic equilibrium and could eventually affect latency and integration of nociception. Key words: Alkalosis, acidosis, nociception, homeostasis, plasma.
Predictors of Objectively Measured Medication Nonadherence in Adults With Heart Failure

Background—Medication nonadherence rates are high. The factors predicting nonadherence in heart failure remain unclear. Methods and Results—A sample of 202 adults with heart failure was enrolled from the northeastern United States and followed for 6 months. Specific aims were to describe the types of objectively measured medication adherence (eg, taking, timing, dosing, drug holidays) and to identify contributors to nonadherence 6 months after enrollment. Latent growth mixture modeling was used to identify distinct trajectories of adherence. Indicators of the 5 World Health Organization dimensions of adherence (socioeconomic, condition, therapy, patient, and healthcare system) were tested to identify contributors to nonadherence. Two distinct trajectories were identified and labeled persistent adherence (77.8%) and steep decline (22.3%). Three contributors to the steep decline in adherence were identified. Participants with lapses in attention (adjusted OR, 2.65; P=0.023), those with excessive daytime sleepiness (OR, 2.51; P=0.037), and those with ≥2 medication dosings per day (OR, 2.59; P=0.016) were more likely to have a steep decline in adherence over time than to have persistent adherence. Conclusions—Two distinct patterns of adherence were identified. Three potentially modifiable contributors to nonadherence have been identified.
Single-trial analysis of EEG during rapid visual discrimination: enabling cortically-coupled computer vision

We describe our work using linear discrimination of multi-channel electroencephalography for single-trial detection of neural signatures of visual recognition events. We demonstrate the approach as a methodology for relating neural variability to response variability, describing studies for response accuracy and response latency during visual target detection. We then show how the approach can be utilized to construct a novel type of brain-computer interface, which we term cortically-coupled computer vision. In this application, a large database of images is triaged using the detected neural signatures. We show how ‘corticaltriaging’ improves image search over a strictly behavioral response.
Chaos based audio watermarking with MPEG psychoacoustic model I

A method to implement digital audio watermarking in the frequency domain is presented. The embedding is performed by using chaos based sequences to increase the signature hiding properties. The proposed scheme takes into account the MPEG psychoacoustic model I to improve the robustness against the MP3 compression. Some tests have been performed to verify the system robustness against the MP3 compression and also against the signal cropping, re-sampling, re-quantization and filtering.
Being Labeled Gifted or Talented: Meanings and Effects Perceived by Students in Special Programs

Questionnaires were administered to 295 students in summer programs for 9-15 year old academically gifted and artistically talented students, asking for their conceptions of giftedness and talent and their perceptions of the causes and consequences of being so identified. Findings suggested that their stereotypes regarding gifted and talented students were highly positive. These students reported that giftedness can be attained by hard work, that they are not very different from others, and that others treat them well. A minority reported negative reactions from peers.
Pre- to Post-Season Changes in the Intrinsic Motivation of First Year College Athletes: Relationships with Coaching Behavior and Scholarship Status

This study examined whether the intrinsic motivation levels of first-year college athletes changed from pre- to post-season as a function of their scholarship status or their perceptions of their coaches' behavior. Division I college athletes ( N = 72) completed questionnaires assessing their intrinsic motivation at the beginning and end of their first year of participation. They also reported their scholarship status and their perceptions of their coaches' behaviors over the season. Contrary to predictions, results revealed that neither scholarship status nor time affected the athletes' level of intrinsic motivation. Strong support for the relationship between athletes' perceptions of their coaches' behavior and changes in athletes' level of intrinsic motivation over the season, however, emerged. Increases in athletes' level of intrinsic motivation were associated with athletes' perceptions that their coaches exhibited high frequencies of training and instruction behavior, and low frequencies of autocratic behavior and social support. Results are discussed in relation to cognitive evaluation theory and previous research on intrinsic motivation.
VEGETATION CHARACTERISTICS USING MULTI-RETURN TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNER

Abstract. Distinguishing vegetation characteristics in a terrestrial laser scanner dataset is an interesting issue for environmental assessment. Methods for filtering vegetation points to distinguish them from ground class have been widely studied mostly on datasets derived from airborne laser scanner, less so for terrestrial laser scanners (TLS). Recent developments in terrestrial laser sensors – further ranges, faster acquisition and multiple return echoes for some models – has risen interest for surface modelling applications. The downside of TLS is that a typical dataset has a very dense cloud, with obvious side-effects on post-processing time. Here we use a scan from a sensor which provides evaluation of multiple target echoes providing with more than 70 million points on our study area. The area presents a complex set of features ranging from dense vegetation undergrowth to very steep and uneven terrain. The method consists on a first step which subsets the original points to define ground candidates by taking into account the ordinal return number and the amplitude. Next a custom progressive morphological filter (closing operation) is applied on ground candidate points using multidimensional (varying resolutions) grids and a structure element to determine cell values. Vegetation density mapping over the area is then estimated using a weighted ration of point counts in the tri-dimensional space over each cell. The overall result is a pipeline for processing TLS points clouds with minimal user interaction, producing a Digital Terrain Model (DTM), a Digital Surface Model (DSM) a vegetation density map and a derived canopy height model (CHM). Results on DTM show an accuracy (RMSE) of 0.307 m with a mean error of 0.0573 m compared to a control DTM extracted from Terrascan's progressive triangulation procedure. The derived CHM was tested over 30 tree heights resulting in 27 trees having an absolute error value below 0.2 m (three were just below 0.7 m).
Novel Depth-Fused Display (DFD) System With Wide Viewing 3D Images

Viewing angle caused by images shift is the most serious issue for depth-fused display (DFD). A wide viewing angle 3D-DFD system utilized high collimated backlight with wide viewing angle micro-lens array was proposed to avoid the images shift. From the experiment results, the viewing angle was demonstrated to be increased to thetas =plusmn30deg~plusmn40deg, which is much wider than that of conventional DFD (thetas<plusmn10deg). Consequently, the proposed 3D-DFD system will be glasses-less, fatigue-less, and wide viewing.
Spatially-modulated space-time coding in visible light communications using 2×2 LED array

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of binary spatially-modulated space-time (SM-ST) coding in an outdoor image-sensor-based visible light communication (VLC) system. We showed that at the transmission distance where intensity modulated symbols from two different light emitting diodes (LEDs) are detected at one pixel of the image plane of the image sensor, space time (ST) coding enables to decouple the two symbols and to extend error-free transmission distance. We furthermore aim at increasing transmission rate per symbol duration when the spatial resolution is improved when the receiver approaches the LED array of the transmitter, by superimposing space shift keying (SSK) signal with the diagonal and anti-diagonal set of the 2×2 matrix onto the LED patterns. We built an experimental testbed with LEDs modulated at 1 kbps and a high-speed camera operating at 1,000 fps. Our experimental results validate that SM-ST coding achieves 30 m of the error-free transmission distance for the additional bit based on SSK, without deteriorating the reception quality and range of the space-time coded bits.
The Global Seamount Census Oceanography Bathymetric Seamount Studies

aBstr aCt. Seamounts are active or extinct undersea volcanoes with heights exceeding ~ 100 m. They represent a small but significant fraction of the volcanic extrusive budget for oceanic seafloor and their distribution gives information about spatial and temporal variations in intraplate volcanic activity. In addition, they sustain important ecological communities, determine habitats for fish, and act as obstacles to currents, thus enhancing tidal energy dissipation and ocean mixing. Mapping the complete global distribution will help constrain models of seamount formation as well as aid in understanding marine habitats and deep ocean circulation. Two approaches have been used to map the global seamount distribution. Depth soundings from single-and multibeam echosounders can provide the most detailed maps with up to 200-m horizontal resolution. However, soundings from the > 5000 publicly available cruises sample only a small fraction of the ocean floor. Satellite altimetry can detect seamounts taller than ~ 1.5 km, and studies using altimetry have produced seamount catalogues holding almost 13,000 seamounts. Based on the size-frequency relationship for larger seamounts, we predict over 100,000 seamounts > 1 km in height remain uncharted, and speculatively 25 million > 100 m in height. Future altimetry missions could improve on resolution and significantly decrease noise levels, allowing for an even larger number of intermediate (1–1.5-km height) seamounts to be detected. Recent retracking of the radar altimeter waveforms to improve the accuracy of the gravity field has resulted in a twofold increase in resolution. Thus, improved analyses of existing altimetry with better calibration from multibeam bathymetry could also increase census estimates. contrast between seamounts and water gives rise to gravity anomalies that perturb the geoid, an equipotential surface approximated by the sea surface. Altimeters can measure these perturbations , and processing can isolate their causes (i.e., seamounts). However, there are assumptions and uncertainties in this approach that need to be considered. Here, we briefly review results from both direct bathymetric and indirect altimetric mapping of seamounts, what the uncertainties are, and why smaller seamounts may be under-represented. For clarity, we follow Pitcher et al. (2007) and separate small from large seamounts at the height limit of 1500 m, which is the current threshold for characterizing seamounts with satellite altimetry. We then discuss why global estimates of seamount counts can vary considerably, depending on the methodology employed and the definition of a seamount. Finally, we discuss uncertainties in these estimates and arrive at our best …
Learned Color Constancy from Local Invariant Regions

Human color constancy, the ability to correct for color deviation caused by illumination changes, is still unmatched by computer vision performances. The model used in this paper learns how illumination changes affect reference objects. It can then explain complex non-linear color transformations with only a few parameters. Global color changes can consequently be estimated from several observations of small reference regions.
Antecedents of individuals' interteam coordination: Broad functional experiences as a mixed blessing

This manuscript investigates the role of individual team members' breadth of functional experience for their interteam coordination behavior. Integrating personal construct and social identity theories, we examine interpersonal cognitive complexity as a mediating variable and organizational identification as a moderator. We test our hypotheses across two independent field studies, comprising an international peace support training mission (Study 1) and a municipality administration (Study 2). Corroborating our predictions, interpersonal cognitive complexity appeared as a conditional mediating variable that can translate an individual's breadth of functional experience into interteam coordination. The strength and direction of this indirect relationship, however, depended on the individual's identification with the organization as a whole. Moreover, on the team level of analysis, we found members' overall interteam coordination to positively relate with team performance in Study 2. All in all, this paper advances new knowledge on the antecedents, mechanisms, contingency factors, and team-level consequences of members' boundary spanning.
An emulator framework for a new radio resource management for QoS guaranteed services in W-CDMA systems

In the context of third-generation (3G) systems a mix of services with different requirements are expected. Consequently, packet scheduling mechanisms for quality of service (QoS) guarantees will play a key role. This paper proposes a new scheduling strategy that makes consistent the target quality in the radio link with the priority level assigned to each user. The performance of such a strategy is assessed by system level simulations and, in order to gain more insight into the difficulties of this optimization problem, it is compared to other alternatives. This work is part of the Wineglass project, within the Fifth Framework Program of the European Commission (IST), where a real time demonstrator including the radio resource management tasks is being developed. Thus, an implementation approach of the proposed scheduling is also described. The implementation is based on lookup tables and this approach is validated by simulation.
An Open-Structure Treadmill Gait Trainer: From Research to Application

Lower limb rehabilitation robots are designed to enhance gait function in individuals with motor impairments. Although numerous rehabilitation robots have been developed, only few of these robots have been used in practical health care, particularly in China. The objective of this study is to construct a lower limb rehabilitation robot and bridge the gap between research and application. Open structure to facilitate practical application was created for the whole robot. Three typical movement patterns of a single leg were adopted in designing the exoskeletons, and force models for patient training were established and analyzed under three different conditions, respectively, and then a control system and security strategy were introduced. After establishing the robot, a preliminary experiment on the actual use of a prototype by patients was conducted to validate the functionality of the robot. The experiment showed that different patients and stages displayed different performances, and results on the trend variations across patients and across stages confirmed the validity of the robot and suggested that the design may lead to a system that could be successful in the treatment of patients with walking disorders in China. Furthermore, this study could provide a reference for a similar application design.
Improving the accuracy and the robustness of harmonic model for pitch estimation

Accurate and robust estimation of pitch plays a central role in speech processing. Various methods in time, frequency and cepstral domain have been proposed for generating pitch candidates. Most algorithms excel when the background noise is minimal or for specific types of background noise. In this work, our aim is to improve the robustness and accuracy of pitch estimation across a wide variety of background noise conditions. For this we have chosen to adopt, the harmonic model of speech, a model that has gained considerable attention recently. We address two major weakness of this model. The problem of pitch halving and doubling, and the need to specify the number of harmonics. We exploit the energy of frequency in the neighborhood to alleviate halving and doubling. Using a model complexity term with a BIC criterion, we chose the optimal number of harmonics. We evaluated our proposed pitch estimation method with other state of the art techniques on Keele data set in terms of gross pitch error and fine pitch error. Through extensive experiments on several noisy conditions, we demonstrate that the proposed improvements provide substantial gains over other popular methods under different noise levels and environments.
A comparison of amniotic fluid alpha‐fetoprotein and acetylcholinesterase in the prenatal diagnosis of open neural tube defects and anterior abdominal wall defects

Amniotic fluid samples received for routine prenatal diagnosis of open neural tube defects were used for a study to compare amniotic fluid acetylcholinesterase (AChE) determination using a monoclonal antibody (4F19) enzyme antigen immunoassay and amniotic fluid alpha‐fetoprotein (AFP) measurement as diagnostic tests for open neural tube defects. The study was based on 9964 women with singleton pregnancies and known outcome (including 6 with anencephaly and 18 with open spina bifida) having an amniocentesis at 14–23 weeks of gestation. The AChE immunoassay yielded detection rates for anencephaly of 100 per cent (95 per cent confidence interval (CI) 54·07–100 per cent), for open spina bifida of 100 per cent (95 per cent CI 81·47–100 per cent), for anterior abdominal wall defects of 20 per cent (95 per cent CI 0‐51‐71‐64 per cent), and a false‐positive rate of 0·22 percent (95 per cent CI 0·14–0·34 per cent) excluding anencephaly, open spina bifida, and anterior abdominal wall defects. For similar detection rates the false‐positive rate of the AFP test was significantly higher, 0·74 per cent (95 per cent CI 0·58–0·94 per cent). On the basis of these findings, it is recommended that the technically simple AChE immunoassay should be used on all samples; the AFP test should only be used on the 0·5 per cent of the samples with concentrations of AChE activity ⩾ 8·5 nkat/1 for clear samples and blood‐stained samples becoming clear after centrifugation, and ⩾ 25·0 nkat/1 for blood‐stained samples that are discoloured after centrifugation; an AFP cut‐off level of 2·0 MOM is recommended for this policy. Thereby, the detection rates for anencephaly, open spina bifida, and anterior abdominal wall defects would be 100, 100, and 20 per cent, respectively (95 per cent CIs 54·07–100, 81·47–100, and 0·51–71·64 per cent, respectively), and the false‐positive rate would be 0·08 per cent (95 per cent CI 0·03–0·16 per cent) (excluding anencephaly, open spina bifida, and anterior abdominal wall defects).
Dolphin: A search engine for OSS based on crowd discussions across communities

The global open source software resources have become an Internet-scale repository, which provide abundant resources for software reuse. However, how to locate the desired resource efficiently and accurately from such large amounts is quite a challenge problem. Most of recent works barely focus on the semantic similarity by analyzing the software itself, which often result in inappropriate ranking. In this paper, we propose Dolphin, a global OSS search engine, which leverage the crowd discussions around OSS across communities for optimizing software ranking. Dolphin employs the crowd wisdom as an important factor and combines it with the semantic similarity to optimize search results ranking. We implement an OSS search engine based on the proposed approach, which provides online service continuously. Extensive experiments and user studies suggest the effectiveness of our approach.
Functional analysis and treatment of OCD-related behaviour in a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Research indicates that Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD; DSM-IV-TR, American Psychiatric Association, 2000) is the second most frequent disorder to coincide with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD; Leyfer et aI., 2006). Excessive collecting and hoarding are also frequently reported in children with ASD (Berjerot, 2007). Although functional analysis (Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman, & Richman, 1982/1994) has successfully identified maintaining variables for repetitive behaviours such as of bizarre vocalizations (e.g., Wilder, Masuda, O'Connor, & Baham, 2001), tics (e.g., Scotti, Schulman, & Hojnacki, 1994), and habit disorders (e.g., Woods & Miltenberger, 1996), extant literature ofOCD and functional analysis methodology is scarce (May et aI., 2008). The current studies utilized functional analysis methodology to identify the types of operant functions associated with the OCD-related hoarding behaviour of a child with ASD and examined the efficacy of function-based intervention. Results supported hypotheses of automatic and socially mediated positive reinforcement. A corresponding function-based treatment plan incorporated antecedent strategies and differential reinforcement (Deitz, 1977; Lindberg, Iwata, Kahng, and DeLeon, 1999; Reynolds, 1961). Reductions in problem behaviour were evidenced through use of a multiple baseline across behaviours design and maintained during two-month follow-up. Decreases in symptom severity were also discerned through subjective measures of treatment effectiveness.
Advice from the professors in a university Social Sciences department on the teaching-research nexus

This article reports on a small-scale interview study of all the professors in one social sciences department in a university in England. The study asks for advice on how academic teaching staff can best develop their research activity whilst effectively fulfilling their teaching position. The findings identify five strands of advice for developing research: teach as part of your research activity; use your research when planning lectures; be a flexible researcher and adapt your research interests to available opportunities; proactively promote yourself and your research; and engage in research as a collective activity. Such advice comments on the possible relationships between teaching and research. The data are also considered in terms of a Bourdieu analytic framework, where the importance of building research capital and creating a research habitus is emphasised in order to succeed in what is an increasingly competitive research environment.