Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A System for Non-Intrusive Human Iris Acquisition and Identification

IPV-I An automated system for the non-intrusive acquisition of images of human irises for the purpose of identity verification is described. This system uses active machine vision techniques, and does not require the user to make any physical contact with the system, or to assume any particular pose except that he stand with his head within a designated calibrated volume. The system integrates a broad range of vision and control algorithms, and hence represents a major achievement in system integration. Currently, the system has been developed to the level of a robust prototype. It has been tested on over 600 people, and the results are impressive. A proposed use of the system is for identity verification at automatic teller machines to reduce the NFOV Camera frequency of fraud. In this paper, the overall control structure of the sys- Figure 1: Schematic of the components of the system is delineated, and each of the algorithmic modules is tem for the acquisition of high-resolution images of described. Preliminary test results are reported and dis- human irises for identity verification. cussed.
Semi-hard c-means clustering with application to classifier design

Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering is the method for partitioning data into clusters by minimizing an objective function. Therefore, it is important to devise an objective function from which a simple clustering algorithm can be derived. An entropy term was introduced by S. Miyamoto in the FCM objective function. We proposed an objective function of the fuzzy counterpart of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) clustering. The objective function is based on Kullback-Leibler divergence instead of the entropy. S. Miyamoto derived a hard clustering algorithm by linearizing the K-L divergence term of the objective function. In the hard c-means (HCM) clustering approach, covariance matrices are decision variables. For quick and stable convergence of FCM-like clustering, this paper proposes the semi-hard clustering approach by constraining the membership in an interval [ab]. The semi-hard clustering result is used for a classifier design. The membership function suggested by the generalized FCM and K-L based FCM is used for the classifier. The values of hyperparameters are searched by particle swarm optimization (PSO). In terms of classification performance on UCI benchmark data, the classifier is comparable to the support vector machine (SVM) and surpasses the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classifier. The computation time of FCM classifier for training a large scale data set is smaller than that of the SVM classifier with decomposition and working set selection algorithms.
Peripheral nervous system function, physical activity and physical fitness in older adults

Peripheral nervous system function (PNS) impairments are often unappreciated as risk factors for major geriatric outcomes. This dissertation aimed to examine the mechanism of these consequences of poor PNS function. The relationships of sensorimotor peripheral nerve function and physical activity (PA), longitudinal physical fitness assessed via endurance walking performance, and the associations with cardiac autonomic function were investigated. Lower-extremity sensorimotor impairments have been linked to poor mobility-related outcomes, while cardiac autonomic impairments are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular outcomes and death. Ultimately, both divisions play important roles in the ability of older adults to be physically active and remain independent. Diabetes-related PNS impairments may present challenges for maintaining PA and endurance, though this work has not been extended to age-related PNS dysfunction. In addition, sensorimotor and autonomic function are rarely examined together, despite being components of the same system. First, worse sensorimotor peripheral nerve function in older men from the Pittsburgh site of the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study was found to be associated with lower levels of self-reported and objectively measured daily PA. In particular, worse amplitude, which indicates axonal degeneration, was associated with lower levels of objectively measured activity. In the Health, Aging and Body Composition Study (Health ABC) sensorimotor peripheral nerve impairments were related to lower physical fitness, evident through slower endurance walking and greater rate of slowing over six years of follow-up. Those with sensory peripheral nerve impairments completed the long distance corridor walk approximately 15 seconds slower than those without impairments, and these impairments had an additional four seconds of slowing per year. Finally, in Health ABC worse lower extremity sensorimotor function was associated with poorer cardiac autonomic function. PNS impairments appear to play major roles in the disability pathway in old age and warrant further study. These findings suggest possible novel mechanisms for these associations, including lower PA, fitness and endurance, and cardiac autonomic function. Helping older adults maintain their health and physical function is a major public health priority. Interventions aimed at promoting PA in those with PNS impairments may be beneficial for reducing poor outcomes in older adults.
Optimizing Reactive Routing Over Virtual Nodes in VANETs

The virtual node layer (VNLayer) is a cluster-based approach to handle communications in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), furnishing an abstraction of fixed geographical regions served by virtual nodes (VNs) as a means to tackle the challenges raised by the mobility of the physical nodes (PNs). Several studies have proved that the VNLayer constructs can be applied to improve the performance of existing routing algorithms, i.e., most notably Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) in general MANET scenarios. In this paper, however, we show that the same mechanisms do not work well in the more specific and demanding realm of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In response to this, we present several enhancements to the reference implementations of the VNLayer and the adaptation of AODV to work with VNs, proving by means of mathematical analysis and simulation experiments that our solutions achieve better performance in terms of overhead, packet delivery fraction, and latencies in VANET scenarios.
Small and Medium Enterprises Facing Institutional Barriers in Kosovo

The purpose of this paper is to study in-depth the impact of formal and informal factors on the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Kosovo, as one of the last countries in transition characterized by difficult social and economic conditions, is used as a case study in this paper. The main institutional obstacles faced by SMEs in Kosovo that are involved in international trade will be analyzed from the perspective of the institutional theory developed by North (1990). The case study is based on in-depth interviews of firms in Kosovo, using an unstructured questionnaire, conducted in 2010. The paper’s key findings show that informal activities caused by low levels of professional and ethics of officials in respective institutions, as well as poor enforcement of regulations, have significant impact on increasing transaction costs, which in turn represents a major obstacle to the further growth of SMEs.
Automatic Segmentation of Coronary Angiograms Based on Probabilistic Tracking

This paper presents a novel tracking method for automatic segmentation of coronary artery tree in the X-ray angiographic images, based on probabilitistic vessel tracking and structure pattern inferring. The method is composed of two main steps, namely preprocessing, and tracking. In the preprocessing step, multiscale Gabor filtering and Hessian matrix analysis are used to enhance and extract vessels from the original angiographic image, leading to a vessel feature map as well as a vessel direction map. In the tracking step, a probabilistic tracking operator is proposed to extract vessel segments or branches, together with a detector to identify vessel structure. The identified structure pattern is used to control the tracking process. By appropriate integration of these advanced preprocessing and tracking steps, the algorithm is able to extract both vessel axis-lines and edge points, and to measure the arterial diameters in various complicated cases. The experimental results were satisfying.
Influence of Maternal and Child Lifestyle-Related Characteristics on the Socioeconomic Inequality in Overweight and Obesity among 5-year-old Children; The “Be Active, Eat Right” Study

It is unclear whether the socioeconomic inequality in prevalence of overweight and obesity is already present among very young children. This study investigates the association between overweight and socioeconomic status (SES, with maternal educational level as an indicator of SES) among 5-year-old children. This cross-sectional study uses baseline data from 5-year-olds of Dutch ethnicity (n = 5,582) and their mothers collected for the “Be active, eat right” study. Compared to children of mothers with the highest educational level, for children of mothers with the lowest educational level the odds ratio (adjusted for demographic characteristics) for having overweight was 2.10 (95% confidence interval: 1.57–2.82), and for having obesity was 4.18 (95% confidence interval: 2.32–7.55). Addition of maternal and child lifestyle-related characteristics decreased the odds ratios for overweight and obesity by 26.4% and 42.1%, respectively. The results show that an inverse SES-overweight/obesity association is already present at elementary school entry, and that watching TV by mother and child, the child consuming breakfast and, especially maternal weight status, are contributing factors in this association. These results should be taken into account when developing policies to reduce inequalities in (childhood) health.
Çocuklar İçin Bilgisayar Oyun Bağımlılığı Ölçeği

Arastirmanin amaci, cocuklarin bilgisayar oyun bagimliligini olcebilmek amaciyla gecerli ve guvenilir bir olcek gelistirmektir. Arastirmanin orneklemini Trabzon ilinde farkli sosyo ekonomik duzeylerdeki ilkogretim okullarina devam eden 460 ogrenci olusturmaktadir. Olcegin gecerlik calismalarinda yuz gorunum gecerliligi ve kapsam gecerliligi icin uzman gorusune basvurulmustur. Yapi gecerliligi icin acimlayici faktor analizi yapilmistir. Yapilan faktor analizi sonucunda 21 maddeden olusan dort faktorlu bir yapi, toplam varyansin %45’ini aciklamaktadir. Olcegin guvenirligi icin Cronbach Alfa ic tutarlik katsayilari hesaplanmistir. Olcegin ic tutarlik kat sayisi . 85 olarak bulunmustur. Bulunan bu degerler olcegin psikometrik niteliklerinin kabul edilebilir sinirlar icinde oldugunu gostermektedir.
Estimating the Continuous-Time Dynamics of Energy and Fat Metabolism in Mice

The mouse has become the most popular organism for investigating molecular mechanisms of body weight regulation. But understanding the physiological context by which a molecule exerts its effect on body weight requires knowledge of energy intake, energy expenditure, and fuel selection. Furthermore, measurements of these variables made at an isolated time point cannot explain why body weight has its present value since body weight is determined by the past history of energy and macronutrient imbalance. While food intake and body weight changes can be frequently measured over several weeks (the relevant time scale for mice), correspondingly frequent measurements of energy expenditure and fuel selection are not currently feasible. To address this issue, we developed a mathematical method based on the law of energy conservation that uses the measured time course of body weight and food intake to estimate the underlying continuous-time dynamics of energy output and net fat oxidation. We applied our methodology to male C57BL/6 mice consuming various ad libitum diets during weight gain and loss over several weeks and present the first continuous-time estimates of energy output and net fat oxidation rates underlying the observed body composition changes. We show that transient energy and fat imbalances in the first several days following a diet switch can account for a significant fraction of the total body weight change. We also discovered a time-invariant curve relating body fat and fat-free masses in male C57BL/6 mice, and the shape of this curve determines how diet, fuel selection, and body composition are interrelated.
Finite-sample optimal joint target detection and parameter estimation by MIMO radars

We consider MIMO radar systems with widely-spaced antennas. We treat the problem of detecting extended targets when one or more target parameters of interest are unknown. We provide a composite hypothesis testing framework for jointly detecting the target along with such parameter estimation while only a finite number of signal samples are available. The test offered is optimal in a Neyman-Pearson-like sense such that it offers a Bayesian-optimal detection test, minimizes the average maximum likelihood parameter estimation error subject to an upper bound constraint on the false-alarm probability, and requires a finite number of samples. While the test can be applied for concurrently detecting the target along with estimating any unknown parameter of interest, we consider the problem of detecting a target which lies in an unknown space range and find the range through estimating the time delays that the emitted waveforms undergo from being illuminated to the target until being observed by the receive antennas. We also analyze the diversity gain which we define as the rate that the probability of mis-detecting a target decays with the increasing SNR for a controlled false-alarm and show that for a MIMO radar with Nt and Nr transmit and receive antennas, respectively, the diversity gain is Nt × Nr.
Functional Analysis of the Cellular Receptor for Urokinase in Plasminogen Activation

Plasminogen activation catalyzed by the urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA) constitutes a reciprocal zymogen activation system, as plasmin can efficiently activate pro-uPA, the single-chain zymogenic form of the protease. We have previously shown that the overall efficiency of this plasminogen activation system is greatly enhanced by its assembly on the cell surface, involving binding of pro-uPA to its cellular binding site uPAR, and the concurrent cellular binding of plasminogen. We have now studied the effect of a recombinant soluble form of uPAR (residues 1–277) on the proteolytic reactions of this system. In contrast to the increased efficiencies of plasminogen activation and pro-uPA activation observed with cell-surface uPAR, soluble uPAR had an inhibitory effect on both of these individual reactions. Soluble uPAR also caused no increase in the low, but discernible, intrinsic activity of pro-uPA. Consistent with the observations on the isolated reactions, the overall activity of the pro-uPA-mediated plasminogen activation system was significantly inhibited. These observations confirm the previous interpretation of the observations made with cell-surface uPAR that the mechanism of the enhanced plasmin generation is due to the catalytically favorable interaction of uPAR-bound uPA/pro-uPA with cell-bound plasminogen/plasmin, rather than direct effects on the properties of uPA or pro-uPA on binding to uPAR.
Psychophysical Scaling of Similarity of Pentagons

Twelve pentagons, which were each variations of a standard pentagon, were rank ordered by 37 university students according to their similarity to the standard. The data were analyzed by a nonmetric maximum likelihood scaling method for rank order data. We proposed various assumptions about the manners in which physical difference measures between two stimuli were defined. The physical difference measures defined were each assumed to be linearly related to the perceived dissimilarity. Fitting this linear function model to the rank order data has revealed (a) that the measure defined on the distance between a pair of curresponding vertices of two pcntagons, using the difference limcn as a unit, after translating one stimulus pattern so that its centroid may coincide with that of the other, works best; (b) that the linear function of this measure is a fairly good account of the data, but that it is not good enough to explain all meaningful variations in the data.
Visual Tracking on the Ground - A Comparative Analysis

Tracking is an important field in visual surveillance systems. Trackers have been applied traditionally in the image, but a new concept of tracking has been used gradually, applying the tracking on the ground map of the surrounding area. The purpose of this article is to compare both alternatives and prove that this new usage makes possible to obtain a higher performance and a minimization of the projective effects. Moreover, it provides the concept of multi-camera as a new tool for mobile object tracking in surveillance scenes, because a common reference system can be defined without increasing complexity. An automatic camera re-calibration procedure is also proposed, which avoids some practical limitations of the approach.
“I am bad apparently.” The role of stand-down to manage behaviour in communities of learners

ix Chapter one: Introduction: Understanding stand-down . 1 1.1 Stand-down explained: definitions, policy and process. 4 1.1.1 Definitions, the legislation and statistics. 4 1.1.2 The stand-down process . 7 1.2 The research project . 8 1.3 The research question . 8 1.4 Overview of the thesis . 9 Chapter two: Review of the literature: Communities of practice in learning communities. 11 2.1 Learning communities: A landscape of practices . 13 2.1.1 The school as a learning community . 16 2.1.2 Peripheral and marginal participation . 21 2.2 Marginalised communities: the construction of the social and conceptual Other . 27 2.2.1 The social Other and stand-down in New Zealand . 28 2.2.2 Equal in theory and by definition but not in fact . 29 2.3 Managing behaviour . 33 2.3.1 We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents . 34 2.4 Conclusion . 42 Chapter three: Review of the literature: The decision to stand-down is not a simple choice . 45 3.1 The right to be safe and the right to learn: not a simple matter of choice . 49 3.2 “There is no truth. There is only perception. ” . 52 3.3 Pressures on the principal: rationalizing recent and traditional conceptual tools . 57 3.3.1 Recent pressures: globalisation and the age of information . 58 3.3.2 Recent pressures: the new right . 60 3.3.3 Traditional pressures: acquiring social and cultural capital. 68 3.3.4 Traditional pressures: What do we mean by acceptable behaviour? 76 3.3.4 Traditional pressures: How close or distant relationships affect decision making.82 3.4 Literature review summary . 87 Chapter Four Methodology . 89 4.
An Outcome Study of Anterior Cervical Discectomy and Fusion among Iranian Population

Background and Aim. First-line treatment strategy for managing cervical disc herniation is conservative measures. In some cases, surgery is indicated either due to signs/symptoms of severe/progressive neurological deficits, or because of persistence of radicular pain despite 12 weeks of conservative treatment. Success for treatment of cervical disc herniation using ACDF has been successfully reported in the literature. We aim to determine the outcome of ACDF in treatment of cervical disc herniation among Iranians. Methods and Materials/Patients. In a retrospective cohort study, we evaluated 68 patients who had undergone ACDF for cervical disc herniation from March 2006 to March 2011. Outcome tools were as follows: (1) study-designed questionnaire that addressed residual and/or new complaints and subjective satisfaction with the operation; (2) recent (one week prior to the interview) postoperative VAS for neck and upper extremity radicular pain; (3) Japanese Orthopaedic Association Myelopathy Evaluation Questionnaire (JOACMEQ) (standard Persian version); and (4) follow-up cervical Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and lateral X-ray. Results. With mean follow-up time of 52.93 (months) ± 31.89 SD (range: 13–131 months), we had success rates with regard to ΔVAS for neck and radicular pain of 88.2% and 89.7%, respectively. Except QOL functional score of JOAMEQ, 100% success rate for the other 4 functional scores of JOAMEQ was achieved. Conclusion. ACDF is a successful surgical technique for the management of cervical disc herniation among Iranian population.
Simultaneous acquisition of microscale reflectance and normals

Acquiring microscale reflectance and normals is useful for digital documentation and identification of real-world materials. However, its simultaneous acquisition has rarely been explored due to the difficulties of combining both sources of information at such small scale. In this paper, we capture both spatially-varying material appearance (diffuse, specular and roughness) and normals simultaneously at the microscale resolution. We design and build a microscopic light dome with 374 LED lights over the hemisphere, specifically tailored to the characteristics of microscopic imaging. This allows us to achieve the highest resolution for such combined information among current state-of-the-art acquisition systems. We thoroughly test and characterize our system, and provide microscopic appearance measurements of a wide range of common materials, as well as renderings of novel views to validate the applicability of our captured data. Additional applications such as bi-scale material editing from real-world samples are also demonstrated.
The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Part 1: The Imagination, Neural Chapter 1. Background, Purposes, and Limitations of the Inquiry Chapter 2. Neuroscience and the Visual Arts Chapter 3. At the Limits of Language Chapter 4. Music and Language in Dream Part 2: The Imagination, Plain Chapter 5. The Three Fields Part 3: Conclusions Chapter 6. Ideas and Values Bibliography Index
A new form of the mole vole Ellobius tancrei Blasius, 1884 (Mammalia, Rodentia) with the lowest chromosome number

Abstract The subterranean mole vole, Ellobius tancrei, with aspecific variability in autosomes (2n = 31–54) and unusual sex chromosomes (XX in males and females), represents an amazing model for studying the role of chromosome changes in speciation. New materials from the upper reaches of the Surkhob River in the Pamiro-Alay mountains resulted in the discovery of a new form with 2n = 30. The application of Zoo-FISH and G-banding methods allowed the detection of 13 pairs of autosomes as Robertsonian metacentrics originated after fusions of acrocentrics of an assumed ancestral karyotype of Ellobius tancrei with 2n = 54. The sex chromosomes (XX, in both sexes) and one pair of acrocentric autosomes are the only acrocentrics in this karyotype, and the set with 2n = 30 possesses the lowest possible chromosome number among populations of Ellobius tancrei.