Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Analysis of Factors Affecting the Effective Use of Knowledge Management in Counter Improvised Explosive Device (C-IED) Operations

Improvised Explosive Device (IED) is a weapon of choice and is likely to remain a major component of the Global War on Terrorism. It is critical that gaps in knowledge transfer are quickly addressed in order to more effectively equip personnel to counter IED (CIED) threat. Therefore, the military must analyze the current Knowledge Management (KM) programs in CIED arena in order to maximize transfer of knowledge derived from experience and skill to staffs and finally to commanders. This study investigates the factors that influence effective use of KM in C-IED operations in the military. The study suggests that effective KM program is determined by the interaction of three organizational capabilities: knowledge infrastructure, knowledge process, and leadership orientation. A selfadministrated survey was conducted on 300 NATO staff officers who have served in C-IED environments. A structural equation modeling technique was used to test a set of hypotheses using 118 completed responses collected from the survey. The results suggest that out of the 11 constructs within the model; two are rated as 'attribute needs immediate attention' (i.e. Culture and Traditional Leadership), eight are rated as 'attribute needs further enhancement' (i .e. Overall Organizational Capability, Knowledge Process, Knowledge Infrastructure, Acquisition, Transfer, Application, Structure and Transformational Leadership) and one is rated as ' attribute runs satisfactorily' (i.e. Technology). The results of this research have particular value to engineering management researchers and practitioners operating in military domains because it proposes, empirically tests and justifies a conceptual model that explains KM in C-IED operations in the military.
Effect of Total Body Irradiation on Rabbit Pituitary as Measured by Gonadotropin Response in Chicks.∗

Summary Rabbit pituitaries from animals exposed to 750 and 1100 r of total body Cobalt-60 gamma irradiation showed an early suppression of gonadotropin principles as measured by the chick gonad response. The 750 r group showed the depression on the 8th day after irradiation while in the 1100 r group the suppression was evident by day one and was sustained through day 7. After this time the gonadotropin activity in both groups returned to the normal level.
2 EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing assumptions about frequency or geometry involves the exact

The inclusion of edge diffraction has long been recognized as an improvement to geometrical-acoustics (GA) modeling techniques, particularly for acoustic simulations of complex environments that are represented as collections of finite-sized planar surfaces. One particular benefit of combining edge diffraction with GA components is that the resulting total sound field is continuous when an acoustic source or receiver crosses a specular-zone or shadow-zone boundary, despite the discontinuity experienced by the associated GA component. In interactive acoustic simulations which include only GA components, such discontinuities may be heard as clicks or other undesirable audible artifacts, and thus diffraction calculations are important for high perceptual quality as well as physical realism. While exact diffraction calculations are difficult to compute at interactive rates, approximate calculations are possible and sufficient for situations in which the ultimate goal is a perceptually plausible simulation rather than a numerically exact one. In this paper, we describe an edge-subdivision strategy that allows for fast time-domain edge-diffraction calculations with relatively low error when compared with results from a more numerically accurate solution. The tradeoff between computation time and accuracy can be controlled with a number of parameters, allowing the user to choose the speed that is necessary and the error that is tolerable for a specific modeling scenario.
Proteome analysis of body fluids for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis biomarker discovery

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder of motor neurons leading to death of the patients, mostly within 2–5 years after disease onset. The pathomechanism of motor neuron degeneration is only partially understood and therapeutic strategies based on mechanistic insights are largely ineffective. The discovery of reliable biomarkers of disease diagnosis and progression is the sine qua non of both the revelation of insights into the ALS pathomechanism and the assessment of treatment efficacies. Proteomic approaches are an important pillar in ALS biomarker discovery. Cerebrospinal fluid is the most promising body fluid for differential proteome analyses, followed by blood (serum, plasma), and even urine and saliva. The present study provides an overview about reported peptide/protein biomarker candidates that showed significantly altered levels in certain body fluids of ALS patients. These findings have to be discussed according to proposed pathomechanisms to identify modifiers of disease progression and to pave the way for the development of potential therapeutic strategies. Furthermore, limitations and advantages of proteomic approaches for ALS biomarker discovery in different body fluids and reliable validation of biomarker candidates have been addressed.
Product Differentiation and Market Power in Cable Television Industry

Previous studies of the cable television industry have focused on the effects of deregulation and competition on cable service prices. These studies use either the "most popular" tier or the "lowest-priced" tier when comparing prices of different cable systems. However, these tiers often represent a different type of cable service so that previous empirical results based on the assumption that they are comparing homogeneous products are in question. The problem stems from the product differentiation by multiproduct monopolists. This paper looks at how cable operators choose different levels of service quality and its effects on prices.
Substrate noise immune design of an LC-tank VCO using sensitivity functions

Substrate noise is a major concern for the realization of radios on a mixed-signal chip. This paper presents a method for substrate noise immune VCO design. A sensitivity analysis is proposed to investigate and reduce the impact of substrate noise on a 900 MHz LC-tank VCO. The proposed method provides a designer with the necessary insight to control the performance degradation by substrate noise. Impact via the on-chip current reference is explained and solved reducing the overall impact with 10 dB. The VCO on-chip ground is recognized as a major entry point for substrate noise. Guarding is used to attenuate coupling of substrate noise into the VCO ground up to - 90 dB in this 0.18 /spl mu/m design on a lightly doped substrate. In this way a high immunity for substrate noise is achieved.
Automatically characterizing driving activities onboard smart wheelchairs from accelerometer data

Wheelchairs play an important role for people living with locomotor impairments. However, power wheelchair users frequently report both minor and major accidents. The goal of this paper is to advocate for the use of robotic technology, in particular sensor-based detection and automatic classification of activities, to track and characterize activities onboard smart wheelchairs. Experiments were conducted in a clinical setting, in which experienced wheelchair users were asked to conduct a set of typical wheelchair activities. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for accurately classifying these activities from accelerometer data using signal processing and machine learning methods. Our classifier achieved an overall accuracy of around 50% in a more than 25 classes classification problem, compared to less than 4% with a random classifier. We also explored the possibility of discovering hidden patterns of activities using unsupervised topic modeling methods. We demonstrated the power of the inferred patterns with two use cases, namely story telling and hazard discovery. Altogether, this work provides new tools for characterizing the usage of smart wheelchairs with typical users.
Modified Perceptual Linear Prediction Liftered Cepstrum (MPLPLC) Model for Pop Cover Song Recognition

Most of the features of Cover Song Identiﬁcation (CSI), for example, Pitch Class Proﬁle (PCP) related features, are based on the musical facets shared among cover versions: melody evolution and harmonic progression. In this work, the perceptual feature was studied for CSI. Our idea was to modify the Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP) model in the ﬁeld of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) by (a) introducing new research achievements in psychophysics, and (b) considering the difference between speech and music signals to make it consistent with human hearing and more suitable for music signal analysis. Furthermore, the obtained Linear Prediction Coefﬁcients (LPCs) were mapped to LPC cepstrum coefﬁcients, on which liftering was applied, to boost the timbre invariance of the resultant feature: Modiﬁed Perceptual Linear Prediction Liftered Cepstrum (MPLPLC). Experimental results showed that both LPC cepstrum coefﬁcients mapping and cepstrum lif-tering were crucial in ensuring the identiﬁcation power of the MPLPLC feature. The MPLPLC feature outperformed state-of-the-art features in the context of CSI and in re-sisting instrumental accompaniment variation. This study veriﬁes that the mature techniques in the ASR or Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA) ﬁelds may be modiﬁed and included to enhance the performance of the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) scheme.
Basis Vector Model Method for Proton Stopping Power Estimation using Dual-Energy Computed Tomography

OF THE DISSERTATION Basis Vector Model Method for Proton Stopping Power Estimation using Dual-Energy Computed Tomography by Shuangyue Zhang Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering Washington University in St. Louis, 2018 Professor Joseph A. O’Sullivan, Chair Accurate estimation of the proton stopping power ratio (SPR) is important for treatment planning and dose prediction for proton beam therapy. The state-of-the-art clinical practice for estimating patient-specific SPR distributions is the stoichiometric calibration method using single-energy computed tomography (SECT) images, which in principle may introduce large intrinsic uncertainties into estimation results. One major factor that limits the performance of SECT-based methods is the Hounsfield unit (HU) degeneracy in the presence of tissue composition variations. Dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) has shown the potential of reducing uncertainties in proton SPR prediction via scanning the patient with two different source energy spectra. Numerous methods have been studied to estimate the SPR by dual-energy CT DECT techniques using either image-domain or sinogram-domain decomposition approaches.
Modifiable Lifestyle Behaviors Are Associated With Metabolic Syndrome in a Taiwanese Population.

PURPOSE To explore associations between metabolic syndrome and modifiable lifestyle behaviors among the adult population in Taiwan. DESIGN This cross-sectional study analyzed data from a nationally representative sample that participated in the 2005-2008 Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan. The sample (2,337 participants older than 19 years) provided data on demographic characteristics, modifiable lifestyle behaviors, anthropometric measurements, and blood chemistry panel. METHODS These data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, univariate logistic regression, and multivariate logistic regression to determine factors associated with metabolic syndrome. FINDINGS Metabolic syndrome had a prevalence of 25.2%, and this prevalence increased with age. In univariate regression analysis, metabolic syndrome was associated with age, living with family members, educational level, and modifiable lifestyle behaviors (smoking, drinking, betel quid chewing, and physical activity). Individuals with a smoking history and currently chewing betel quid had the highest risk for metabolic syndrome. CONCLUSIONS The risk for metabolic syndrome might be reduced by public health campaigns to encourage people to quit smoking cigarettes and chewing betel quid. Implementing more modifiable lifestyle behaviors in daily life will decrease metabolic syndrome in Taiwan. CLINICAL RELEVANCE Considering that betel quid chewing and tobacco smoking interact to adversely affect metabolic syndrome risk, public health campaigns against both behaviors seem to be a cost-effective and efficient health promotion strategy to reduce the prevalence rate of metabolic syndrome.
Lifestyle clusters for labor force participation, occupation and housing use in integrated land use and transportation modeling Abstract: The California statewide integrated land use and transportation modeling

The California statewide integrated land use and transportation modeling has being developed using the PECAS framework. This paper focus on two goals: a) presenting a framework for identifying household lifestyle clusters, and b) applying them to a spatial economic model system. A household's lifestyle is defined by two sets of dimensions: space use and household wage. Using a two-step clustering algorithm, different household lifestyle clusters were identified. The applicability of these lifestyle clusters for a integrated land use and transportation model was explored.
Comparative Study of Geometric and Image Based Modelling and Rendering Techniques

This is a comparative study of the traditional 3D computer graphics technique of geometric modelling and image-based rendering techniques that were surveyed and implemented.We have discussed the classications and representative methods of both the techniques. The study has shown that there is a strong continuum between both the techniques and a hybrid of the two is most suitable for further implementations.This hybridisation study is underway to create models of real life situations and provide disaster management training.
Quality of life of patients with diabetes mellitus An overview of research in primary health care in the Nordic countries

Objective A review of articles on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) among diabetes patients in primary health care in the Nordic countries. Design Search in PubMed and related sources. Used MeSH terms were: “Diabetes Mellitus”, “Quality of Life”, “Primary Health Care”, and “Scandinavia” or “Denmark”, “Finland”, “Iceland”, “Norway”, or “Sweden”. Results In total, 19 relevant articles were found, 9 from Finland and 10 from Sweden. HRQoL questionnaires used were from the Medical Outcomes Study, i.e. the SWED-QUAL in seven, SF-20 in four and SF-36 in one, NHP in two, GQL in two, GHQ in one, and own questionnaires in two. HRQoL was moderately affected in diabetic patients, with macrovascular diseases, especially coronary heart disease, and non-vascular diseases as the most consistently found and strongest predictors. Weaker predictors were microvascular complications, age, sex, metabolic level, and education. Other groups at higher risk of worse HRQoL were diabetes patients with psychiatric disorders, especially depression, and foreign-born patients. Good continuity of care was associated with better HRQoL. Conclusion Diabetes affects the HRQoL through macrovascular complications and associated non-vascular comorbidity, and also by adding to the total burden of disease. Future research areas include transcultural and ethnic aspects, and effects of lifestyle interventions.
Dense mono reconstruction: Living with the pain of the plain plane

This paper is about dense depthmap estimation using a monocular camera in workspaces with extensive textureless surfaces. Current state of the art techniques have been shown to work in real time with an admirable performance in desktop-size environments. Unfortunately, as we show in this paper, when applied to larger indoor environments, performance often degrades. A common cause is the presence of large affine texture-less areas like by walls, floors, ceilings and drab objects such as chairs and tables. These produce noisy and worse still, grossly erroneous initial seeds for the depthmap that greatly impede successful optimisation. We solve this problem via the introduction of a new non-local higher-order regularisation term that enforces piecewise affine constraints between image pixels that are far apart in the image. This property leverages the observation that the depth at the edges of bland regions are often well estimated whereas their inner pixels are deeply problematic. A welcome by-product of our proposed technique is an estimate of the surface normals at each pixel. We will show that in terms of implementation, our algorithm is a natural extension of the often used variational approaches. We evaluate the proposed technique using real datasets for which we have ground truth models.
EFFECT OF KINESIO TAPE ON ANKLE JOINT POSITION SENSE AND EVERTORS PEAK TORQUE IN FOOTBALL PLAYERS FOLLOWING EXERCISE INDUCED FATIGUE.

Aim: This study aimed to assess whether the application of Kinesio taping (KT) of peroneus longus muscle would maintain ankle joint position sense (JPS), and evertors peak torque (EPT) in football players following exercise-induced fatigue. Methods: Forty football players from 1 st and 2 nd divisions of professional Saudi football leagues volunteered in this study. Volunteers were randomly assigned to Kinesio tape group (KTG) or control group (CG). Volunteers’ ankle JPS, at 10 0 inversion and full range of motion of inversion -5 0 (FROM 5 0 ), and EPT were evaluated at baseline and following fatigue protocol. Volunteers in KTG were taped after baseline evaluation. Results : this study showed that volunteers in KTG recorded a non-significant difference of absolute angular error (AAE) post fatigue compared to baseline for both target angles. While volunteers in CG showed significantly higher AAE post-fatigue compared to baseline for both target angles. Further, KTG showed a significantly lower AAE post fatigue at target angle 10 o inversion compared to CG. EPT was significantly lower post fatigue compared to baseline in KTG and CG. Further, post fatigue EPT was non- significantly different between KTG and CG. Conclusion: KT application might help in maintaining JPS, but not EPT following exercise-induced fatigue in football players.
Human β-Defensins Kill Candida albicans in an Energy-Dependent and Salt-Sensitive Manner without Causing Membrane Disruption

ABSTRACT Human β-defensin 2 (hBD-2) and hBD-3 have potent fungicidal activity in the micromolar range. Although little is known about their mechanism of action against Candida species, some similarities to the antifungal mechanism of salivary peptide histatin 5 (Hst 5) seem to exist. Since hBD-2 and hBD-3 have been reported to cause direct disruption of target cell membranes, we compared the effects of hBD-2 and hBD-3 on Candida albicans membrane integrity. Incubation of calcein-loaded C. albicans cells with a dose of hBD-2 lethal for 90% of the strains tested (LD90) resulted in a maximal dye efflux of only 10.3% ± 2.8% at 90 min, similar to that induced by Hst 5. In contrast, an LD90 of hBD-3 more than doubled calcein release from cells yet did not result in more than 24% of total release, showing that neither peptide caused gross membrane damage. As for Hst 5, killing of C. albicans cells by hBD-2 and hBD-3 was salt sensitive; however, Ca2+ and Mg2+ inhibited hBD-2 but not hBD-3 fungicidal activity. Pretreatment of C. albicans cells with sodium azide resulted in significantly decreased ATP release and susceptibility of cells to hBD-2 and hBD-3. However, hBD-3 killing was partially restored at concentrations of ≥0.8 μM, showing energy-independent mechanisms at higher doses. C. glabrata resistance to Hst 5, hBD-2, and hBD-3 is not a result of loss of expression of cell wall Ssa proteins. The candidacidal effects of hBD-2-hBD-3 and Hst 5-hBD-2 were additive, while the index of interaction between Hst 5 and hBD-3 was 0.717 (P < 0.05). Thus, the candidacidal action of hBD-2 shows many similarities to that of Hst 5 in terms of salt sensitivity, ion selectivity, and energy requirements while hBD-3 exhibits biphasic concentration-dependent mechanisms of candidacidal action complementary to those of Hst 5.
Endovascular Treatment for Ruptured Vertebral Artery Dissecting Aneurysms: Results from Japanese Registry of Neuroendovascular Therapy (JR-NET) 1 and 2

In treating ruptured vertebral artery dissecting aneurysms (VADAs), neuroendovascular therapy (NET) represented by coil obliteration is considered to be a reliable intervention. However, there has been no multi-center based study in this setting so far. In this article, results of NET for ruptured VADA obtained from Japanese Registry of Neuroendovascular Therapy (JR-NET) 1 and 2 were assessed to elucidate the factors associated with favorable outcome. A total of 213 in JR-NET1 and 381 patients in JR-NET2 with ruptured VADA were included, and they were separately analyzed because several important datasets such as vasospasm and site of dissecting aneurysms in relation to the posterior inferior cerebellar artery (PICA) were collected only in JR-NET1. The ratio of poor World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies (WFNS) grade (4 and 5) was 48.8% and 53.9%, and the ratio of favorable outcome (modified Rankin scale, mRS 0 to 2) at 30 days after onset was 61.1 % and 49.1% in JR-NET1 and 2, respectively. In both studies, poor WFNS grade and procedural complication were independently correlated as negative factors for favorable outcome. In JR-NET1, PICA-involved lesion was also designated as a negative factor while elderly age and absence of postprocedural antithrombotic therapy was detected as other negative factors in JR-NET2. The ratios of favorable outcome in poor grade patients were 25.4% in JR-NET1 and 31.3% in JR-NET2, which seemed compatible with the previous studies. These results may provide a baseline data for the NET in this disease and could be useful for validating the benefits of novel devices.
Performance analysis of adaptive modulation in underwater visible light communications

In optical wireless communication systems, the underwater visible light communication (UVLC) systems is becoming more and more popular. However, due to intrinsic properties of water body, the propagating optical channel can suffer from severe degrading effects, namely absorption, scattering, and turbulence. Here, we aim to improve the UVLC system performance. For this, we propose to utilize an adaptive modulation scheme at the optical transmitter based on the channel conditions. The performance of such system using different modulation schemes such as the pulse position modulation (PPM), the digital pulse interval modulation (DPIM) and the dual-header pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM), are demonstrated to prove the effectiveness of our adaptive UVLC systems.
A New Type of Web Graph for Personalized Visualization

Over the past few years, research on web information visualization is focusing on how to present the web information to end users effectively and efficiently. Nevertheless, with increasing size of the information in the web-space, it has become very difficult to visualize information and the inherent relationships among the information. Because of web graphs being messy and large, end users need to allow extra effort to mine interested information from those. Existing web graphs produce relationships among nodes (URLs) based on structural linkage information. As a result, by producing similar visualization to different end users, this approach lacks effectiveness considering diversity of users' need. In our work, we encounter this issue of personalization in visualization of web graph. We propose a different web graph which capitalizes on user interests to develop relationships among nodes of the web graph. Examples show that this web graph can represent web information to the end user for more effective and effortless information search.