Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Soft assignment of visual words as Linear Coordinate Coding and optimisation of its reconstruction error

Visual Word Uncertainty also referred to as Soft Assignment is a well established technique for representing images as histograms by flexible assignment of image descriptors to a visual vocabulary. Recently, an attention of the community dealing with the object category recognition has been drawn to Linear Coordinate Coding methods. In this work, we focus on Soft Assignment as it yields good results amidst competitive methods. We show that one can take two views on Soft Assignment: an approach derived from Gaussian Mixture Model or special case of Linear Coordinate Coding. The latter view helps us propose how to optimise smoothing factor of Soft Assignment in a way that minimises descriptor reconstruction error and maximises classification performance. In turns, this renders tedious cross-validation towards establishing this parameter unnecessary and yields it a handy technique. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of such optimised assignment on two image datasets and several types of descriptors.
Fixing the Federalist : Correcting Results and Evaluating Editions for Automated Attribution

In the history of authorship attribution, the analysis of The Federalist Papers plays an important role. However, most previous non-traditional (stylistic) authorship studies have been flawed, mainly due to the use of improper editions, as documented by Rudman (2005). Our goal in this work was to perform a correct study by using a revised corpus of the Federalist papers based in large part on Rudman’s critique. We used machine-learning techniques for analyzing the use of lexical features for authorship attribution of the papers. Another goal of our study was to explore how different corruptions of the corpus may affect the accuracy of the classification results, and the differences between them.
Exploiting the Rich Document Structures and Network Topology of Legal Information Systems

The move toward on-line publishing of legal documents in the public domain has made extra information available by way of mark-up for electronic publishing. Legal Concepts that were once implicit in documents are now explicit and further inferences can now be drawn through computation however the quality and extent of this information varies. This paper discusses the application of web techniques to the legal system for the ranking of related legal concepts. We demonstrate how these techniques can be adapted and applied to the legal system and how strategies can be used to optimize the best combination of techniques depending on the quality of the source information. Courts and legislatures create and distribute laws through documents that serve as the primary sources of law within legal systems. With the increase in on-line publishing, these documents are being marked-up with greater quantities of information particularly with links to other related sources within the legal system.
Dynamic renal function testing by compartmental analysis: assessment of renal functional reserve in essential hypertension.

BACKGROUND In essential hypertension, acute haemodynamic changes due to dietary protein load cause patterns of acute changes in renal function that are fundamentally different from changes in normal controls. METHODS Renal clearances of sinistrin, an inulin-like polyfructosan, and p-aminohippurate were determined before and after protein ingestion. These tests were performed in healthy controls and in patients with essential hypertension (mean arterial pressure of 112+/-2 mmHg, age, 52+/-2 years; mean+/-SEM) within a washout period, and after long-term treatment with carvedilol and fosinopril, respectively. RESULTS In 15 healthy volunteers, protein ingestion increased glomerular filtration rate (GFR) from 110.3+/-3.6 to 120. 6+/-4.4 ml/min (P=0.0006; two-tailed pairwise t-test). In contrast, it led to an acute decrease in GFR in 16 hypertensive patients, from 111.8+/-2.9 to 103.6+/-3.3 ml/min (P=0.0010). The eight patients who were randomized to receive carvedilol improved in their renal response to protein (GFR increased from 101.4+/-6.4 to 107.1+/-5.4 ml/min; P=0.04), whereas the eight other patients randomized to receive fosinopril exhibited no change in GFR (final value 105+/-4.9 ml/min). In the patients, the acute shifts in renal plasma flows were not significant. Mean arterial blood pressure of the patients decreased from 112+/-2 to 100+/-3 mmHg (P=0.0015). CONCLUSIONS In essential hypertension an acute protein load induces a decrease in GFR that may normalize under antihypertensive treatment. The acute changes in GFR can be reliably monitored by the here-described compartmental analysis method of renal functional reserve.
Resource Allocation and Interference Management for D2D-Enabled DL/UL Decoupled Het-Nets

In this paper, resource allocation and interference mitigation are investigated for heterogeneous networks where the lowest tier consists of device-to-device (D2D) cells. In order to alleviate dead-zone problem, we first consider downlink/uplink (DL/UL) decoupling user association and quantify its capability on interference management and network-wide D2D performance enhancement. Second, we propose an UL fractional frequency reuse scheme where subband (SB) bandwidths are adaptively determined based on: 1) user equipment (UE) density; 2) e-node-B (eNB) density; and 3) on/off switching frequency of small cells. Obtained results show that the adaptive method significantly reduces the number of outage users. Thereafter, a novel concatenated bi-partite matching (CBM) method is proposed for joint SB assignment (SA) and resource block allocation (RA) of cellular UEs. Numerical results show that the CBM provides a close performance to exhaustive solution with greatly reduced running time. The CBM is then extended to a centralized mode selection, SA, and RA for D2D cells. Alternatively, we develop offline and online semi-distributed approaches where a D2D-cell can reuse white-list RBs (WRBs), which are not occupied by the adjacent small cells. In the former, D2D-cell members are not aware of intra-cell and inter-cell interference and uniformly distribute their maximum permissible power to WRBs. In the latter, we put D2D sum rate maximization into a convex form by exploiting the proximity gain of D2D UEs. Online distributed solution is then developed by message passing of dual variables and consistency prices. Finally, virtues and drawbacks of the developed approaches are compared and explained.
Inverted stereocontrol of iridoid synthase in snapdragon

The natural product class of iridoids, found in various species of flowering plants, harbors astonishing chemical complexity. The discovery of iridoid biosynthetic genes in the medicinal plant Catharanthus roseus has provided insight into the biosynthetic origins of this class of natural product. However, not all iridoids share the exact five- to six-bicyclic ring scaffold of the Catharanthus iridoids. For instance, iridoids in the ornamental flower snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus, Plantaginaceae family) are derived from the C7 epimer of this scaffold. Here we have cloned and characterized the iridoid synthase enzyme from A. majus (AmISY), the enzyme that is responsible for converting 8-oxogeranial into the bicyclic iridoid scaffold in a two-step reduction–cyclization sequence. Chiral analysis of the reaction products reveals that AmISY reduces C7 to generate the opposite stereoconfiguration in comparison with the Catharanthus homologue CrISY. The catalytic activity of AmISY thus explains the biosynthesis of 7-epi-iridoids in Antirrhinum and related genera. However, although the stereoselectivity of the reduction step catalyzed by AmISY is clear, in both AmISY and CrISY, the cyclization step produces a diastereomeric mixture. Although the reduction of 8-oxogeranial is clearly enzymatically catalyzed, the cyclization step appears to be subject to less stringent enzyme control.
Synthesis, antimicrobial and anti-cancer activities of some new N-ethyl, N-benzyl and N-benzoyl-3-indolyl heterocycles

Synthesis, antimicrobial and anti-cancer activities of some new N-ethyl, N-benzyl and N-benzoyl-3-indolyl heterocycles A series of 1-(N-substituted-1H-indol-3-yl)-3-arylprop-2-ene-1-ones (2a, b-4a, b) were prepared and allowed to react with urea, thiourea or guanidine to give pyrimidine derivatives 5a, b-13a, b. Reaction of 2a, b-4a, b with ethyl acetoacetate in the presence of a base gave cyclohexanone derivatives 14a, b-16a, b. Reaction of the latter compounds with hydrazine hydrate afforded indazole derivatives 17a, b-19a, b. On the other hand, reaction of 2a, b-4a, b with some hydrazine derivatives, namely hydrazine hydrate, acetyl hydrazine, phenylhydrazine and benzylhydrazine hydrochloride, led to the formation of pyrazole derivatives 20a, b-31a, b. Moreover, reaction of 2a, b-4a, b with hydroxylamine hydrochloride gave isoxazole derivatives 32a, b-34a, b. The newly synthesized compounds were tested for their antimicrobial activity and showed that 4-(N-ethyl-1H-indol-3-yl)-6-(p-chlorophenyl)-pyrimidine-2-amine (11b) was the most active of all the test compounds towards Candida albicans compared to the reference drug cycloheximide. Eighteen new compounds, namely pyrimidin-2(1H)-ones 5a, b-7a, b, pyrimidin-2(1H)-thiones 8a, b-10a, b and pyrimidin-2-amines 11a, b-13a, b derivatives, were tested for their in vitro antiproliferative activity against HEPG2, MCF7 and HCT-116 cancer cell lines. 4-(N-ethyl-1H-indol-3-yl)-6-(p-methoxyphenyl)-pyrimidin-2-amine (11a) was found to be highly active with IC50 of 0.7 μmol L-1. Sinteza, antimikrobno i antitumorsko djelovanje nekoliko novih N-etil, N-benzil i N-benzoil-3-indolil heterocikličkih spojeva Sintetizirana je serija 1-(N-supstituiranih-1H-indol-3-il)-3-arilprop-2-en-1-ona (2a, b-4a, b) i podvrgnuta reakciji s ureom, tioureom ili gvanidinom, pri čemu su nastali derivati pirimidina 5a, b-13a, b. Reakcijom 2a, b-4a, b s etil-acetoacetatom u prisutnosti baze nastali su derivati cikloheksanona 14a, b-16a, b. Njihovom reakcijom s hidrazin hidratom dobiveni su derivati indazola 17a, b-19a, b. S druge strane, reakcijom 2a, b-4a, b s određenim derivatima hidrazina, tj. s hidrazin hidratom, acetil hidrazinom, fenilhidrazinom i benzilhidrazin hidrokloridom, nastali su derivati pirazola 20a, b-31a, b. Nadalje, reakcijom 2a, b-4a, b s hidroksilamin hidrokloridom dobiveni su derivati izoksazola 32a, b-34a, b. Pripravljeni spojevi ispitani su na antimikrobno djelovanje. Pokazalo se da je 4-(N-etil-1H-indol-3-il)-6-(p-klorfenil)-pirimidin-2-amin (11b) najaktivniji spoj za Candida albicans (ATCC 10231) uz cikloheksimid kao poredbeni lijek. Testirano je antitumorsko djelovanje in vitro osamnaest novih spojeva, tj. pirimidin-2(1H)-ona 5a, b-7a, b, pirimidin-2(1H)-tiona 8a, b-10a, b i pirimidin-2-amina 11a, b-13a, b na tumorske stanice HEPG2, MCF7 i HCT-116. Najaktivniji spoj bio je 4-(N-etil-1H-indol-3-il)-6-(p-metoksifenil)-pirimidin-2-amin (11a) uz IC50 0.7 μmol L-1.
Variants in ABCB1, TGFB1, and XRCC1 genes and susceptibility to viral hepatitis A infection in Mexican Americans

Hepatitis A vaccination has dramatically reduced the incidence of hepatitis A virus (HAV) infection, but new infections continue to occur. To identify human genetic variants conferring a risk for HAV infection among the three major racial/ethnic populations in the United States, we assessed associations between 67 genetic variants (single nucleotide polymorphisms [SNPs]) among 31 candidate genes and serologic evidence of prior HAV infection using a population‐based, cross‐sectional study of 6,779 participants, including 2,619 non‐Hispanic whites, 2,095 non‐Hispanic blacks, and 2,065 Mexican Americans enrolled in phase 2 (1991‐1994) of the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Among the three racial/ethnic groups, the number (weighted frequency) of seropositivity for antibody to HAV was 958 (24.9%), 802 (39.2%), and 1540 (71.5%), respectively. No significant associations with any of the 67 SNPs were observed among non‐Hispanic whites or non‐Hispanic blacks. In contrast, among Mexican Americans, variants in two genes were found to be associated with an increased risk of HAV infection: TGFB1 rs1800469 (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 1.38; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.14‐1.68; P value adjusted for false discovery rate [FDR‐P] = 0.017) and XRCC1 rs1799782 (OR, 1.57; 95% CI, 1.27‐1.94; FDR‐P = 0.0007). A decreased risk was found with ABCB1 rs1045642 (OR, 0.79; 95% CI, 0.71‐0.89; FDR‐P = 0.0007). Conclusion: Genetic variants in ABCB1, TGFB1, and XRCC1 appear to be associated with susceptibility to HAV infection among Mexican Americans. Replication studies involving larger population samples are warranted. (HEPATOLOGY 2012)
Bank Transparency, Loan Loss Provisioning Behavior, and Risk-Shifting

In the process of being revised. Comments welcome. Extended Abstract In addition to public securities markets, banks are a significant source of financing in economies around the world, playing an important role in mobilizing savings, allocating resources, and monitoring firms. An important, unresolved issue in bank regulation involves the importance of informational transparency of banks in promoting market disciplining of banks by outside investors as a fundamental lever of bank regulation that can both supplement and enhance the effectiveness of more traditional bank regulatory practices. In this paper, we complement and extend existing literature by using a large sample of banks domiciled in 28 countries to investigate the extent to which financial accounting information, a central component of bank-specific information sets, plays a significant role in disciplining bank risk-shifting behavior, after controlling for key elements of bank regulatory practices in a country. In particular, we study how the impact of financial accounting information on bank risk-shifting behavior varies with a key characteristic of a country's accounting regime, the extent of earnings smoothing via loan loss provisioning. To capture bank risk-shifting behavior, we exploit Merton's (1977) characterization of deposit insurance as a put option to empirically estimate the equilibrium resolution of the conflict between banks' incentives to increase asset volatility, and deposit insurers' and uninsured creditors' attempts to counter such behavior by disciplining banks to increase capital in response to increases in risk. We posit that earnings smoothing via loan loss provisioning is likely to be a first order determinant of bank transparency, particularly with respect to transparency of bank risk-taking. Loan loss provisioning represents the key accrual accounting choice in banks' income statements and so is likely to have a first order effect on the information properties of bank's earnings. Loan loss provisioning behavior itself is the subject of substantial debate in the current banking and accounting literatures, in particular with respect to whether earnings smoothing increases the information content of earnings by revealing innate fundamentals or whether it obscures fundamentals and reduces information. Also, with the potential to be reflective of the fundamental risk of losses inherent in underlying loan portfolios, loan loss provisioning is a key aspect of bank financial reporting for regulators and outside investors interested in monitoring risk-taking behavior. We provide robust evidence that banks exhibit more risk-shifting behavior in countries where accounting regimes are characterized by higher levels of earnings smoothing. This suggests that earnings …
Secular Trends in Prevalence of Alcohol Use Disorder and Its Correlates in Korean Adults: Results from Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2005 and 2009

The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) has been found to provide an accurate measure for risk of hazardous and harmful alcohol use, as well as possible dependence. Data from 2 representative samples of 7693 adults in the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) 2005 and 6276 participants in 2009 were analyzed. The overall age-adjusted prevalence of alcohol use disorder (AUD) in 2009 (38.8%) was higher than that in 2005 (32.7%), with a difference of 6.1% (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.9%–9.3%; P = .0002). Men were about 7 times as likely as women to meet the criteria for AUD (odds ratio [OR] = 7.16; 95% CI, 6.27–8.17). Current smoking was the most important correlate associated with AUD in both genders (women: OR = 6.03; 95% CI, 4.40–8.27; men: OR = 2.83; 95% CI, 2.29–3.48). Among women, unmarried (OR = 1.76; 95% CI, 1.35–2.31), less than high school education (OR = 2.71, 95% CI, 1.86–3.96), and lowest income (OR = 1.45, 95% CI, 1.06–1.97) were associated with AUD. These findings provide the most updated prevalence estimates of AUD in the Korean population and they highlight its strong association with smoking, gender differences, and lower socioeconomic status in the Korean population.
Worldwide trends in childhood overweight and obesity.

OBJECTIVES Obesity has become a global epidemic but our understanding of the problem in children is limited due to lack of comparable representative data from different countries, and varying criteria for defining obesity. This paper summarises the available information on recent trends in child overweight and obesity prevalence. METHODS PubMed was searched for data relating to trends over time, in papers published between January 1980 and October 2005. Additional studies identified by citations in retrieved papers and by consultation with experts were included. Data for trends over time were found for school-age populations in 25 countries and for pre-school populations in 42 countries. Using these reports, and data collected for the World Health Organization's Burden of Disease Program, we estimated the global prevalence of overweight and obesity among school-age children for 2006 and likely prevalence levels for 2010. RESULTS The prevalence of childhood overweight has increased in almost all countries for which data are available. Exceptions are found among school-age children in Russia and to some extent Poland during the 1990s. Exceptions are also found among infant and pre-school children in some lower-income countries. Obesity and overweight has increased more dramatically in economically developed countries and in urbanized populations. CONCLUSIONS There is a growing global childhood obesity epidemic, with a large variation in secular trends across countries. Effective programs and policies are needed at global, regional and national levels to limit the problem among children.
Building a semantic virtual museum: from Wiki to semantic Wiki using named entity recognition

In this paper, we describe an approach for creating semantic wiki pages from regular wiki pages, in the domain of scientific museums, using information extraction methods in general and named entity recognition in particular. We make use of a domain specific ontology called CIDOC-CRM as a base structure for representing and processing knowledge. We have described major components of the proposed approach and a three-step process involving name entity recognition, identifying domain classes using the ontology and establishing the properties for the entities in order to generate semantic wiki pages. Our initial evaluation of the prototype shows promising results in terms of enhanced efficiency and time and cost benefits.
An adaptive approach to human motion tracking from video

Vision based human motion tracking has drawn considerable interests recently because of its extensive applications. In this paper, we propose an approach to tracking the body motion of human balancing on each foot. The ability to balance properly is an important indication of neurological condition. Comparing with many other human motion tracking, there is much less occlusion in human balancing tracking. This less constrained problem allows us to combine a 2D model of human body with image analysis techniques to develop an efficient motion tracking algorithm. First we define a hierarchical 2D model consisting of six components including head, body and four limbs. Each of the four limbs involves primary component (upper arms and legs) and secondary component (lower arms and legs) respectively. In this model, we assume each of the components can be represented by quadrangles and every component is connected to one of others by a joint. By making use of inherent correlation between different components, we design a top-down updating framework and an adaptive algorithm with constraints of foreground regions for robust and efficient tracking. The approach has been tested using the balancing movement in HumanEva-I/II dataset. The average tracking time is under one second, which is much shorter than most of current schemes.
3D Geometry Compressionand Progressive Transmission

Polygonal meshes remain the primary representation for visualization of 3D data in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, architecture, geographic information systems, medical imaging, robotics, entertainment, and military applications. Because of its widespread use, it is desirable to compress polygonal meshes stored in file servers and exchanged over computer networks to reduce storage and transmission time requirements. In this report we describe several schemes that have been recently introduced to represent single and multi-resolution polygonal meshes in compressed form, and to progressively transmit polygonal mesh data. The progressive transmission of polygonal meshes allows the decoder process to make part of a single-resolution mesh, or the low resolution levels of detail of a multi-resolution mesh, available to the rendering system before the whole bitstream is fully received and decoded. It is desirable to combine compression and progressive transmission, but not all the existing methods exhibit both features. These progressive transmission schemes are closely related to surface simplification or decimation methods, which change the surface topology while approximating the geometry, and can be regarded as lossy compression schemes as well. Finally, we describe in more detail the Topological Surgery and Progressive Forest Split schemes that are currently part of the MPEG-4 multimedia standard.
Reflectivity estimation for SAR image compression

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images suffer from speckle noise that degrades image quality. Also, speckle removal is needed for lossy image compression as such noise increases image entropy. Nevertheless, most lossy compression schemes act as lowpass filters that might not suit multiplicative noise reduction. In order to build a compression scheme that takes into consideration statistics of SAR images, a well-known reflectivity estimator is integrated into an JPEG 2000-like image compression strategy, so that image compression artifacts may be viewed as an adaptive despeckle filter instead of a simple lowpass filter. It yields a compression algorithm that acts in a similar way to the Lee (or Kuan) filter.
The First Principal Component of Multifaceted Variables: It's More Than a G Thing

Ree, Carretta, and Teachout (2015) raise the need for further investigation into dominant general factors (DGFs) and their prevalence in measures used for the purposes of employee selection, development, and performance measurement. They imply that a method of choice for estimating the contribution of DGFs is principal components analysis (PCA), and they interpret the variance accounted for by the first component of the PCA solution as indicative of the contribution of a general factor. In this response, we illustrate the hazard of equating the first component of a PCA with a general factor, and we illustrate how this becomes particularly problematic when applying PCA to multifaceted variables. Rather than simply critique this use of PCA, we offer an alternative approach that helps to address and illustrate the problem that we raise.