Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hedonic Price Indexes for Residential Housing: A Survey, Evaluation and Taxonomy

Every house is different. It is important that house price indexes take account of these quality differences. Hedonic methods which express house prices as a function of a vector of characteristics (such as number of bedrooms and bathrooms, land area and location) are particularly useful for this purpose. I consider here some developments in the hedonic methodology, as it is applied in a housing context, that have occurred in the last three decades. A number of hedonic house price indexes are now available. However, it is often difficult to see how these indexes relate to each other. For this reason I attempt to impose some structure on the literature by developing a taxonomy of hedonic indexes, and then show how existing indexes fit into this taxonomy. Also discussed are some promising areas for future research in the hedonic field. In particular, greater use needs to be made of spatial econometric and nonparametric methods to exploit the increased availability of geospatial data. The main criticisms of the hedonic approach are evaluated and compared with those of the repeat-sales and stratified median methods. The overall conclusion is that the advantages of the hedonic approach outweigh its disadvantages.
Designing a virtual runtime for FPGA accelerators in the cloud

FPGAs can provide high performance and energy efficiency to many applications; therefore, they are attractive computing platforms in a cloud environment. However, FPGA application development requires extensive hardware design knowledge which significantly limits the potential user base. Moreover, in a cloud setting, allocating a whole FPGA to a user is often wasteful and not cost effective due to low device utilization. To make FPGA application development easier, firstly, we propose a methodology that provides clean abstractions with high-level APIs and a simple execution model that supports both software and hardware execution. Secondly, to improve device utilization and share the FPGA among multiple users, we developed a lightweight runtime system that provides hardware-assisted memory virtualization and memory protection, enabling multiple applications to simultaneously execute on the device.
The anatomy and mechanics of the human hand.

It is obvious to all that the human hand represents a mechanism of the most intricate fashioning and one of great complexity and utility. But beyond this it is intimately correlated with the brain, both in the evolution of the species and in the development of the individual. Hence, to a degree we "think" and "feel" with our hands, and, in turn, our hands contribute to the mental processes of thought and feeling. In any mechanism, animate or inanimate, functional capabilities relate both to structural characteristics and to the nature of the control system available for management of functions singly or in multiple combinations. Just so with the human hand. Analysis of normal hand characteristics therefore requires an understanding of both sensory and mechanical features. Of course whole volumes have been written on hand anatomy, and it is not possible in a short article to describe all elements in detail. It is helpful, however, to review the basic construction of bones and joints and of the neuromuscular apparatus for governing motions and forces. Twenty-four muscle groups, controlled by the various motor and sensory nerve pathways, with their rich potentialities for central connection, and acting upon a bone and joint system of great mechan-
A real-time tracking method based on SURF

Two important problems in real-time tracking are: 1) how to discriminate an object from clutter environments, and 2) how to meet the real-time requirement in practical applications. In real-time tracking application scenario, neither priori information about targets nor background model is known, which makes many traditional methods fail. In this paper, we propose an object detection and tracking method based on Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF). A region of interests is set up to reduce computation burden and an adaptive reference library is built and updated by reusing the extracted feature points and past object location. The advantages of this method lies in its robustness while its calculation is light. Our experiments show that our method is robust under camera wobble, background clutter and illumination changes. It can reach real-time processing in various occasions.
Security Analysis on Privacy-Secure Image Trading Framework Using Blind Watermarking

We propose and evaluate a privacy-secure image trading framework using blind fingerprinting technique which embeds a user ID using watermark technique. The framework provides a privacy-secure trading even though there is no confidential relation between a content provider and a user. In a conventional fingerprinting scheme, a content provider offers a user ID embedded image to a user in order to trace a pirated piece and an illegal user when an image is pirated.In spite the fact that privacy protection becomes an important issue along with augmentation of digital content trading,it has not been well considered in a conventional fingerprinting scheme. Some blind fingerprinting techniques satisfy privacy protection by concealing user information using cryptography. Semi-blind fingerprinting is another type of blind technique that is proposed with a concept of blinding information within feasible processing cost. Feasibility is satisfied by avoiding use of cryptography which causes heavy overhead in computation. In our proposed image trading framework, we use semi-blind technique which is well optimized for our framework. In order to establish a robust framework, we carry out security analysis by specifying various kinds of incidents and solutions.
Distributed music classification using Random Vector Functional-Link nets

In this paper, we investigate the problem of music classification when training data is distributed throughout a network of interconnected agents (e.g. computers, or mobile devices), and it is available in a sequential stream. Under the considered setting, the task is for all the nodes, after receiving any new chunk of training data, to agree on a single classifier in a decentralized fashion, without reliance on a master node. In particular, in this paper we propose a fully decentralized, sequential learning algorithm for a class of neural networks known as Random Vector Functional-Link nets. The proposed algorithm does not require the presence of a single coordinating agent, and it is formulated exclusively in term of local exchanges between neighboring nodes, thus making it useful in a wide range of realistic situations. Experimental simulations on four music classification benchmarks show that the algorithm has comparable performance with respect to a centralized solution, where a single agent collects all the local data from every node and subsequently updates the model.
Auditing, Trust and Governance: Developing Regulation in Europe

Auditing, Trust andGovernancewas published under the auspices of the European Auditing Research Network (EARNet). EARNet was formed in 2000 to ‘foster research and exchange ideas among auditing scholars and researchers at a European level’. This book represents a milestone towards accomplishing this objective. Motivation for the book evolved from the major corporate failures in the USA (e.g. Enron and Worldcom) and Europe (e.g. Ahold and Parmalat), and the resulting loss of trust and confidence in financial reporting and the auditing profession. The response by regulators to these events was the passage of the Sarbanes– Oxley Act in the USA and the revised Eighth Directive on Statutory Audit in the European Union. Auditing, Trust and Governance provides a detailed account of how a number of European countries responded to this crisis in confidence. The book contains 13 chapters written by leading auditing scholars. The first chapter sets up the book by presenting a general discussion of the main issues of trust, audit quality, regulation and corporate governance. This chapter was particularly helpful to me in understanding the extent of research on audit quality in Europe. The authors conclude ‘the evidence on audit quality differentiation in Europe is mixed and highly country specific’ (p. 8). The chapter provides a number of areas for future research studies in Europe on audit quality. The next 11 chapters are written from the perspective of each of the following countries:
Learning Tags that Vary Within a Song

This paper examines the relationship between human generated tags describing different parts of the same song. These tags were collected using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. We find that the agreement between different people’s tags decreases as the distance between the parts of a song that they heard increases. To model these tags and these relationships, we describe a conditional restricted Boltzmann machine. Using this model to fill in tags that should probably be present given a context of other tags, we train automatic tag classifiers (autotaggers) that outperform those trained on the original data.
Interaction between plasma fetuin‐A and free fatty acids predicts changes in insulin sensitivity in response to long‐term exercise

The hepatokine fetuin‐A can together with free fatty acids (FFAs) enhance adipose tissue (AT) inflammation and insulin resistance via toll‐like receptor 4 (TLR4). Although some of the health benefits of exercise can be explained by altered release of myokines from the skeletal muscle, it is not well documented if some of the beneficial effects of exercise can be explained by altered secretion of hepatokines. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of interaction between fetuin‐A and FFAs on insulin sensitivity after physical exercise. In this study, 26 sedentary men who underwent 12 weeks of combined endurance and strength exercise were included. Insulin sensitivity was measured using euglycemic‐hyperinsulinemic clamp, and AT insulin resistance was indicated by the product of fasting plasma concentration of FFAs and insulin. Blood samples and biopsies from skeletal muscle and subcutaneous AT were collected. Several phenotypic markers were measured, and mRNA sequencing was performed on the biopsies. AT macrophages were analyzed based on mRNA markers. The intervention improved hepatic parameters, reduced plasma fetuin‐A concentration (~11%, P < 0.01), slightly changed FFAs concentration, and improved glucose infusion rate (GIR) (~33%, P < 0.01) across all participants. The change in circulating fetuin‐A and FFAs interacted to predict some of the change in GIR (β = −42.16, P = 0.030), AT insulin resistance (β = 0.579, P = 0.003), gene expression related to TLR‐signaling in AT and AT macrophage mRNA (β = 94.10, P = 0.034) after exercise. We observed no interaction effects between FFAs concentrations and leptin and adiponectin on insulin sensitivity, or any interaction effects between Fetuin‐A and FFAs concentrations on skeletal muscle TLR‐signaling. The relationship between FFAs levels and insulin sensitivity seemed to be specific for fetuin‐A and the AT. Some of the beneficial effects of exercise on insulin sensitivity may be explained by changes in circulating fetuin‐A and FFAs, promoting less TLR4 signaling in AT perhaps by modulating AT macrophages.
A 2.5 GHz low noise high linearity LNA/mixer IC in SiGe BiCMOS technology

A monolithic low noise high linearity LNA/mixer circuit for 2.5 GHz applications has been fabricated in IBM 47 GHz SiGe production process. The measured performance is 8 dBm input IP3, 1.6 dB NF and 12 dB Gain for a low noise amplifier (LNA), and 2.5 dBm input IP3, 7.5 dB NF and 14 dB gain for a downconversion mixer with a total current consumption of 26 mA for a 2.75 V supply. LNA matching, mixer RF and LO matching and two baluns are all integrated on chip, requiring no critical RF tuning components.
Information fusion for subband-HMM speaker recognition

Previous work has demonstrated the performance gains that can be obtained in speaker recognition by applying subband processing, together with hidden Markov modelling and multiple classifier recombination. Two recombination rules have been investigated: the sum of log likelihoods, which corresponds to the optimal Bayes' rule under certain constraints, and multilayer perceptrons (MLP), which are not subject to these constraints. It was found that for two spoken digits in the presence of a single case of narrowband noise the sum of log likelihoods and MLP achieved comparable performance. In this paper, the previous work is extended in the direction of investigating the robustness of the recognition system to different narrowband noise. Two approaches are taken towards this aim. Firstly, narrowband noise is added at different centre frequencies. Secondly, a Bayesian MLP approach is investigated using automatic relevance determination (ARD) on the subband inputs to the MLP. From this it is possible to assess the relative importance of the subbands to recognition performance. Results for the new noise conditions show that the sum of log likelihoods generally does better than the (average) MLP fusion.
SF CRISPR Comparative analysis of Cas 6 b processing and CRISPR RNA stability

The adaptive immune system CRISPR/Cas consists of an array of clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindrome repeats (CRISPR) and a set of CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins. Spacer sequences that are present between the repeats can be derived from the genomes of mobile genetic elements (e.g., viruses) and are utilized to protect host organisms against recurring attacks from these elements. The activity of the CRISPR/Cas system within the cell is divided into three phases: (1) the adaptation of new spacers, (2) the maturation of small CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) that contain a single spacer sequence and (3) the interference with foreign nucleic acids using crRNAs bound to a Cas protein interference complex. The diverse CRISPR/Cas systems are divided into three major types and at least 10 subtypes. In Clostridia, methanogens and halophiles, the subtype I-B is present, which is defined by the subtype-specific protein Cas8b. Methanococcus maripaludis C5 possesses a single subtype I-B CRISPR/Cas system with a minimal Cas protein set composed of the universal proteins Cas1, Cas2 and Cas4 (proposed to mediate spacer acquisition), as well as Cas3, Cas5, Cas7 and Cas8b, which are presumed to form the interference complex Cascade (Cas complex for antiviral defense). Cas6b completes the set of Cas proteins and was shown to process pre-crRNA in M. maripaludis. Cas6b belongs The prokaryotic antiviral defense systems cRIspR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/cas (cRIspRassociated) employs short crRNAs (cRIspR RNAs) to target invading viral nucleic acids. A short spacer sequence of these crRNAs can be derived from a viral genome and recognizes a reoccurring attack of a virus via base complementarity. We analyzed the effect of spacer sequences on the maturation of crRNAs of the subtype I-B Methanococcus maripaludis c5 cRIspR cluster. The responsible endonuclease, termed cas6b, bound non-hydrolyzable repeat RNA as a dimer and mature crRNA as a monomer. comparative analysis of cas6b processing of individual spacer-repeat-spacer RNA substrates and crRNA stability revealed the potential influence of spacer sequence and length on these parameters. correlation of these observations with the variable abundance of crRNAs visualized by deep-sequencing analyses is discussed. Finally, insertion of spacer and repeat sequences with archaeal poly-T termination signals is suggested to be prevented in archaeal cRIspR/cas systems. SF CRISPR Comparative analysis of Cas6b processing and CRISPR RNA stability
A Survey of Vitamin D Status in Patients with Degenerative Diseases of the Spine

Study Design Descriptive cross-sectional study. Purpose To determine the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in patients with degenerative diseases of the spine about to undergo spinal surgery and the relations between such deficiency and potential risk factors. Overview of Literature Vitamin D has a major role in musculoskeletal system health maintenance. Recently, studies on degenerative diseases of the spine have shown a high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in patients undergoing spine surgery. Methods Serum levels of 25(OH)D were determined by an electrochemiluminescence detection assay. The other variables were determined through relevant questionnaires, and the data was analyzed through analysis of variance, t-test, chi-square and multivariate logistic regression analysis. Results A total of 110 patients were enrolled in the study. The mean serum level of 25(OH)D was 27.45±18.75 ng/mL, and 44.5% of patients showed vitamin D deficiency (25(OH)D<20 ng/mL), with an additional 17.3% of patients having a serum level of 25(OH)D that was insufficient (20≤25(OH)D<30 ng/mL). The prevalence of vitamin D deficiency was significantly higher in the younger age group compared to the older age group (p<0.001) and the ones without a history of taking vitamin D supplements (p=0.013). Compared to men, women showed significantly higher levels of vitamin D (p=0.029). Conclusions A high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency is seen in patients with degenerative diseases of the spine. On the other hand, the conventional risk factors such as old age or female sex alone did not seem to be sufficient in determining the likelihood of deficiency. Thus, it is recommended that vitamin D deficiency prevention strategies comprise a broader spectrum of the population through which such degenerative diseases and their consequences may be prevented or delayed.
Estimating Construction Project Environmental Effects Using an Input-Output-Based Hybrid Life-Cycle Assessment Model

The design and construction industries have an increasing interest in and responsibility for a building’s environmental effects over its entire life cycle. Quantification of all building phases is important in life-cycle assessments (LCAs), especially for the construction phase, which is often disregarded. This research uses an input-output-based LCA framework to create a more comprehensive estimate of the environmental effects of construction processes. The hybrid LCA model is based on Carnegie Mellon University’s Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) tool and combines a new EIO-LCA “hybrid” interface with updated and reformulated environmental effect vectors for EIO-LCA’s 13 construction sectors. Eight construction project case studies modeled on the input-output (I-O)-based hybrid LCA framework demonstrate the model’s broad applicability; gasoline, particulate matter, and global warming potential effects generally increased across all construction sectors and case studies. The I-O-based.
An Authentication Framework for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Based on Online/Offline Identity-Based Signature

Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) is an emerging aircraft surveillance technology with which the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) is being realized in air traffic networks. The future "e-enabled" aircrafts will be equipped with ADS-B devices in order to share precise surveillance and location data among the aircrafts, ground controllers and, possibly, other third parties. ADS-B is expected to reduce air traffic congestion and mitigate Air Traffic Control (ATC) inefficiencies significantly in shared airspace. In order to provide high accuracy and assurance for the ADS-B communications, a secure and reliable authentication mechanism is required. However, this task is challenging in that 1) using regular digital signatures, which was proposed in the literature as an authentication solution, requires management of complex Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and 2) generating signatures for messages exchanged frequently in Aircraft-to-Ground (A2G) and Aircraft-to-Aircraft (A2A) communication modes can create a computational bottleneck easily. In this paper, we take a fresh approach to this problem by introducing a new type of online/offline identity-based signature scheme. Our scheme will resolve the PKI management issues and achieve high level of efficiency that makes possible for e-enabled aircrafts to perform frequent signing generations.
Sexual behavior and its relationship with semen quality parameters in Sahiwal breeding bulls

Aim: The study was conducted at Artificial Breeding Research Centre, NDRI, Karnal, to determine the sexual behavior and its relationship with semen quality parameters in Sahiwal breeding bulls. Materials and Methods: A total of 63 ejaculates were collected from six adult Sahiwal bulls (age ~47 mo and bwt ~466 kg), to study the relationship of sexual behavior and semen quality. The degree of association between different variables was estimated by Pearson’s correlation coefficient method. Results: The results depicted that, sexual aggressiveness showed significantly high positive correlation with libido score (LS) and sexual behavior score (SBS). Reaction time (RT) and total time taken in mounts (TTTM) had a significant negative correlation with LS and SBS. Penile erection score and penile protrusion score (PPS) both had a significant positive correlation with ejaculatory thrust score, mating ability score, and SBS. Results of correlation among seminal attributes and with sexual behavior depicted that ejaculate volume had positive significant correlation with initial progressive motility (IPM), sperm concentration (SCON), head abnormality, total abnormality, hypo-osmotic swelling test (HOST), acrosomal integrity (AI) whereas, mass activity had positive significant correlation with IPM, SCON, non-eosinophilic spermatozoa count (NESC), HOST, AI, RT and TTTM and IPM had positive significant correlation with SCON, NESC, HOST, AI, and TTTM, whereas and HOST had positive significant correlation with AI. Among seminal attributes, SCON had a positive significant correlation with PPS where as head abnormalities had a positive significant correlation with RT and TTTM. Conclusion: It can be concluded that the relationship of sexual behavior and semen quality parameters are reflecting that the sexual behavior of individual bulls is important to harvest good quality and quantity of semen as desired type of sexual preparation can be provided.
Atypical Femur Fractures in Patients Treated with Bisphosphonates: Identification, Management, and Prevention

Osteoporosis is a common condition with significant health care costs. First-line therapy is with bisphosphonates, which have proven anti-fracture efficacy. Around 10 years after the introduction of bisphosphonates reports began to be published of atypical femoral fractures (AFFs) that may be associated with this therapy. These fractures are associated with significant morbidity although lower mortality than the more common osteoporotic neck-of-femur fractures. A case definition has been described to allow identification of this class of fracture. Further work has established a high relative risk of AFFs in patients treated with bisphosphonates, but a low absolute risk in comparison to that of osteoporotic fractures. Proposed pathological mechanisms include low bone turnover states leading to stress/insufficiency fractures. Clinicians should be aware of the risk of AFFs and in particular the high rate of prodromal thigh/groin pain that warrants investigation in a patient receiving a bisphosphonate. If an incomplete fracture is diagnosed then bisphosphonate therapy needs to be stopped and prophylactic surgery may be considered. Due to these rare side effects patients on bisphosphonates require regular review, and this is particularly advised after 5 years of oral or 3 years of intravenous therapy.