Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Biofeedback while Immersed in a Stressful Videogame Increases the Effectiveness of Stress Management Skills in Soldiers

This study assessed the efficacy of using visual and auditory biofeedback while immersed in a tridimensional videogame to practice a stress management skill (tactical breathing). All 41 participants were soldiers who had previously received basic stress management training and first aid training in combat. On the first day, they received a 15-minute refresher briefing and were randomly assigned to either: (a) no additional stress management training (SMT) for three days, or (b) 30-minute sessions (one per day for three days) of biofeedback-assisted SMT while immersed in a horror/first-person shooter game. The training was performed in a dark and enclosed environment using a 50-inch television with active stereoscopic display and loudspeakers. On the last day, all participants underwent a live simulated ambush with an improvised explosive device, where they had to provide first aid to a wounded soldier. Stress levels were measured with salivary cortisol collected when waking-up, before and after the live simulation. Stress was also measured with heart rate at baseline, during an apprehension phase, and during the live simulation. Repeated-measure ANOVAs and ANCOVAs confirmed that practicing SMT was effective in reducing stress. Results are discussed in terms of the advantages of the proposed program for military personnel and the need to practice SMT.
Multi-Modal Content Based Image Retrieval in Healthcare: Current Applications and Future Challenges

Modern healthcare environments have become increasingly reliant on medical imaging and this has resulted in an explosive growth in the number of imaging acquisitions obtained as part of patient management. The recent introduction of multi-modal imaging scanners has enabled unprecedented capabilities for patient diagnosis. With multi-modal imaging, two or more complementary imaging modalities are acquired either sequentially or simultaneously e.g. combined functional positron emission tomography (PET) and anatomical computed tomography (CT) imaging. The efficient and accurate retrieval of relevant information from these ever-expanding patient data is one of the major challenges faced by applications that need to derive accumulated knowledge and information from these images, such as image-based diagnosis, image-guided surgery and patient progress monitoring (patient’s response to treatment), physician training or education, and biomedical research. The retrieval of patient imaging data based on image features is a novel complement to text-based retrieval, and allows accumulated knowledge to be made available through searching. There has been significant growth in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) research and its clinical applications. However, current retrieval technologies are primarily designed for single-modal images and are limited when applied to multi-modal images, as they do not fully exploit the complementary information inherent in these data e.g. spatial localization of functional abnormalities from PET in relation to anatomical structures from CT.
Slipping into trance

It has been hypothesized that highly hypnotizable people spontaneously slip into trance when given imaginative suggestions without prior induction of hypnosis. We tested this in two studies. In Study 1, we examined state reports from ten highly suggestible students following the administration of a suggestion for altered colour perception. The suggestion was administered twice, once with and once without prior induction of hypnosis. Students reported equivalent perceptual changes with and without the induction of hypnosis, but reported being in a hypnotic state only when a hypnotic induction had been administered. In Study 2, participants received either a hypnotic induction or specific suggestions to not slip into hypnosis. Even under these circumstances, subjective responding was equivalent in both conditions and behavioural responding was only slightly higher in the 'hypnosis' condition. These data disconfirm the slipping-into-hypnosis hypothesis. Copyright © 2008 British Society of Experimental & Clinical Hypnosis.
Cascading asymmetric linear classifiers

Motivation: Combinations of classifiers have been found useful empirically, yet there is no formal proof of their generalization ability. Our goal is to develop an algorithm to train a sequence of linear classifiers yielding a non-linear decision surface. We believe that choosing asymmetric regularization parameters for each class can yield a sequence of classifiers that approximates arbitrarily the bayes error, modulo the density of the sampling.
Data insufficiency in sketch versus photo face recognition

Computerized sketch-face recognition is a crucial element for law enforcement and has received considerable attention in the recent literature. Sketches of the suspect are hand-drawn or computer-rendered based on a verbal description of the suspect. However, the most popular and the only publicly available dataset, i.e. the CUFS face-sketch dataset, is far from realistic because the sketches are hand-drawn with the artist looking at the photographs to be matched later. After years of effort, researchers are producing nearly perfect results. However, we show that this is not because the problem is solved, but because of flaws in the dataset. In this paper, we empirically show that an off-the-shelf face recognition system for photo-sketch and sketch-photo matching with simple shape and edge features outperforms more sophisticated state-of-the-art approaches even without using training data. We additionally show that just using the hair region gives a 85.22% recognition rate. Based on the empirical evidences we argue that the current dataset available for face-sketch matching purposes is not appropriate and needs to be replaced by a more realistic one for advancement of this field.
Joint generative and discriminative models for spoken language understanding

Spoken Language Understanding aims at mapping a natural language spoken sentence into a semantic representation. In the last decade two main approaches have been pursued: generative and discriminative models. The former is more robust to overfitting whereas the latter is more robust to many irrelevant features. Additionally, the way in which these approaches encode prior knowledge is very different and their relative performance changes based on the task. In this paper we describe a training framework where both models are used: a generative model produces a list of ranked hypotheses whereas a discriminative model, depending on string kernels and Support Vector Machines, re-ranks such list. We tested such approach on a new corpus produced in the European LUNA project. The results show a large improvement on the state-of-the-art in concept segmentation and labeling.
Variation Characteristics of Rainfall in the Pre-Flood Season of South China and Its Correlation with Sea Surface Temperature of Pacific

The characteristics of rainfall variation in the pre-flood season of South China (PFSSC) and its correlation with the sea surface temperature (SST) of the Pacific are studied in this paper. The results show that in the last 50 years, rainfall in PFSSC clearly has interannual and interdecadal oscillations, primarily in the 4a and 8a cycles. Interannual correlation analysis indicate that the rainfall in PFSSC displays a significantly negative correlation with the SST of the warm pool region in January–March and April–June. The interdecadal correlation analysis reveals that the rainfall in PFSSC is negatively correlated to the SST of the warm pool region, but has a significant positive interdecadal correlation with the Middle Eastern Pacific Ocean. For NINO1 + 2 and NINO3 regions, when the background ocean temperature is warm, the SST is significantly positively correlated to the rainfall in PFSSC; however, when the background ocean temperature is cold, there is no significant correlation between the two, even the correlation coefficients are negative. For the warm pool region, the SST demonstrates a significantly negative correlation to the rainfall in PFSSC, which is not dependent on the background SST. It is a remarkable fact that under the different SST backgrounds, the interannual variation of SST will bring different atmospheric response, and it is the reason that under the warm SST background, the correlation is more significant between the SST in tropical Pacific and the rainfall in PFSSC. Under the background of global warming, more attention should be given to study the rainfall in PFSSC and its correlation with the SST in the eastern tropical Pacific.
An empirical analysis of the ECB quantitative easing programme

On 22 January 2015, the ECB finally announced its expanded asset repurchase programme, better known as quantitative easing (ECB, 2015c). In this thesis, we are examining the effect of this announcement on sovereign bond yields in the Eurozone using the event study methodology and by time series forecasting (ARMA). We are particularly interested to see if there have been some abnormal variations (i.e. changes) in yields following the above-mentioned announcement. Furthermore, we also examine the announcement on 4 September 2014, during which the precursor programmes to QE were announced. We found statistically and economically significant abnormal variations in yields for our event study across all investment grade euro area government bonds, i.e. yields have generally dropped following the announcements. The graphs we obtained using ARMA forecasting help illustrate this.
Impact of Path Profile Estimation on Superblock Formation

Many features of modern architectures, such as Performance Monitering Units (PMUs), can be leveraged for efficient program profiling. We present several simple heuristics to estimate path profiles from sampled partial paths which can be collected at runtime. Like recent work [13], we show that we can find 80-90% of the hot paths within a program using these techniques. However, we also find that despite this high accuracy in identifying hot paths, using estimated paths to perform superblock formation does not necessarily yield an equivalent boost in performance. We evaluate how estimated path profiles impact superblock formation in the CASH compiler. In addition, we compare superblocks to hyperblocks and demonstrate that predicate calculation overhead can cause maximal hyperblocks to have inferior performance.
UNDERPERFORMANCE AND PROFIT REDISTRIBUTION IN BUSINESS GROUPS

Business groups are a commonly used organizational form in many countries and play a dominant role in many developed as well as emerging economies. An interesting debate with respect to the existence of such groups is whether they create added value vis á vis non-group firms. This study addresses this issue by investigating the profitability of business groups in India. We find strong evidence that group firms exhibit lower profitability than independent firms. We document that one of the major factors contributing to this lower profitability arises from the influence the controlling shareholders in a group exercise in redistributing profits across affiliated firms. We also show that the profit redistribution phenomenon is more pronounced for larger groups and those groups that exhibit a greater degree of corporate control. The results of the study thus provide support for a profit redistribution explanation for the ‘business group discount’.
A Boiler-Thrbine System Control Using a Fuzzy Auto-Regressive Moving Average (FARMA) Model

This paper presents an application of an online self-organizing fuzzy logic controller to a boiler-turbine system of a fossil power plant. The control rules and the membership functions of the proposed fuzzy logic controller are generated automatically without using a plant model. A boiler-turbine system is described as a multi-input multioutput (MIMO) nonlinear system in this paper. Then, three single-loop fuzzy logic controllers are designed independently. Simulation shows robust results for various kinds of electric load demand changes and parameter variations of boiler-turbine system.
Comparable Entity Mining From Comparative Questions

: — Decision making between couple of things gone turn out critical for human thinking ability. Though, it is not always simple to recognize what to evaluate and what are the alternatives. To tackle this complexity, we explored a novel way to robotically mine equivalent entities from proportional queries that clients kept online. To make sure high accuracy and max recall, we created a weakly-authorized bootstrapping method for proportional query detection and comparable entity mining by leveraging a huge online query archive. The investigational consequences explain our method gets eighty plus percentage of both F1-measures in proportional query detection and in comparable entity extraction. Both considerably do better than an previous state-of-the-art method.
The Hydrophobic Effect Contributes to the Closed State of a Simplified Ion Channel through a Conserved Hydrophobic Patch at the Pore-Helix Crossing

Ion selectivity-filter structures are strikingly similar throughout the large family of K++ channels and other p-loop-like receptors (i.e., glutamate receptors). At the same time, the triggers for opening these channels, or gating, are diverse. Two questions that remain unanswered regarding these channels are: (1) what force(s) stabilize the closed non-conducting channel-pore conformation? And (2) what is the free energy associated with transitioning from a closed (non-conducting) to an open (conducting) channel-pore conformation? The effects of charge and hydrophobicity on the conformational states of a model tetrameric biological ion channel are shown utilizing the amino acid sequence from the K+ channel KcsA as the model “channel”. Its widely conserved hydrophobic bundle crossing located adjacent to the lipid head-groups at the intracellular side of the membrane was calculated to have a 5 kcal/mol free energy difference between modeled open and closed conformations. Simulated mutants of amino acids within the hydrophobic region significantly contribute to the size of this difference. Specifically for KcsA, these residues are part of the pH sensor important for channel gating and our results are in agreement with published electrophysiology data. Our simulations support the idea that the hydrophobic effect contributes significantly to the stability of the closed conformation in tetrameric ion channels with a hydrophobic bundle crossing positioned in proximity to the lipid head groups of the biological membrane.
Theoretical Study of Wideband Antenna Using High Efficiency Impedance Loading Profile

On the basis of Wu-King current distribution, the author extends it to the double exponential current distribution, modifies the inaccurate part of the Wu-King resistive loading profile and deduces a high efficiency non-reflecting loading profile. The electrical properties of the high efficiency non-reflecting loading antenna have been studied theoretically; the concept of lengthening coefficient is created and the optimum parameter design curve of the antenna is provided. Theoretical calculation shows that the maximum bandwidth and efficiency of antenna can be achieved with this kind of loading profile simultaneously. The impedance bandwidth of antenna is as high as 40:1, which is much greater than the 3:1 bandwidth of Wu-King profile when the voltage standing wave ratio is below 3. The efficiency of antenna is about twice of the Wu-King loading antenna.
Multimodal Classification using Feature Level Fusion and SVM

The use of biometrics in the field of enhancing security and authentication in sensitive systems is a rapidly evolving technology. The increasing attacks and decreasing security in unimodal systems have resulted in designing multimodal systems combining different biometric traits. A lot of research has already been done in designing multimodal systems with fusion at rank and match-score level using different classifiers such as Bayesian classifiers, LDA, ANNs and SVMs. In this research work, a multimodal system is designed by integrating face, fingerprint and palmprint based on feature level fusion. Each of the feature vectors are extracted independently using PCA and then fused together to perform classification using a multiclass SVM. The classification is performed on a set of test images taken from both the standard databases and live images captured in biometric lab.
Authoritarianism in an age of democratization

1. The political origins of durable authoritarianism 2. The inception of ruling parties 3. Institutional legacies and coalitional tensions 4. Ruling parties and regime persistence: Egypt and Malaysia during the third wave 5. Elite defections and electoral defeat: Iran during the third wave 6. Confrontation and democratization: the Philippines during the third wave 7. Conclusions.
FOUR LIPS and MYB88 conditionally restrict the G1/S transition during stomatal formation

Consistent with their valve-like function in shoot–atmosphere gas exchange, guard cells are smaller than other epidermal cells and usually harbour 2C DNA levels in diploid plants. The paralogous Arabidopsis R2R3 MYB transcription factors, FOUR LIPS and MYB88, ensure that stomata contain just two guard cells by restricting mitosis. The loss of both FLP and MYB88 function in flp myb88 double mutants induces repeated mitotic divisions that lead to the formation of clusters of stomata in direct contact. By contrast, CYCLIN DEPENDENT KINASE B1 function is required for the symmetric division that precedes stomatal maturation. It was found that blocking mitosis by chemically disrupting microtubules or by the combined loss of FLP/MYB88 and CDKB1 function, causes single (undivided) guard cells (sGCs) to enlarge and attain mean DNA levels of up to 10C. The loss of both FLP and CDKB1 function also dramatically increased plastid number, led to the formation of multiple nuclei in GCs, altered GC and stomatal shape, and disrupted the fate of lineage-specific stem cells. Thus, in addition to respectively restricting and promoting symmetric divisions, FLP and CDKB1 together also conditionally restrict the G1/S transition and chloroplast and nuclear number, and normally maintain fate and developmental progression throughout the stomatal cell lineage.
Not All Rivals Look Alike: Estimating an Equilibrium Model of the Release Date Timing Game

"I develop a new empirical model for discrete games and apply it to study the release date timing game played by distributors of movies. The results suggest that release dates of movies are too clustered around big holiday weekends and that box office revenues would increase if distributors shifted some holiday releases by one or two weeks. The proposed game structure could be applied more broadly to situations where competition is on dimensions other than price. It relies on sequential moves with asymmetric information, making the model particularly attractive for studying (common) situations where player asymmetries are important. " ("JEL" C13, C51, L13, L15, L82) Copyright (c) 2009 Western Economic Association International.
Androgens and energy allocation: Quasi‐experimental evidence for effects of influenza vaccination on men's testosterone

Androgens are proposed to allocate finite energetic resources away from immune function and toward anabolic processes related to reproductive effort. In situations of pathogen exposure, the significant energetic demands associated with mounting an immune response are expected to produce a decrease in androgen levels and commensurate redistribution of energy. We tested the hypothesis that even the mild immune challenge associated with vaccination may cause a decline in men's testosterone. As predicted, men who received an influenza vaccination exhibited a more negative change in testosterone over a 2‐week period than did men in a nonequivalent control group who were not vaccinated. These results suggest that men's androgen concentrations may be finely calibrated to trade‐offs between the energetic demands of immune responses and other life history problems. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Compact low-voltage power-efficient operational amplifier cells for VLSI

Compact low-voltage power-efficient operational amplifiers are described that are very suitable as very-large-scale-integration library cells because of the small die area of 0.08 mm/sup 2/ and the minimum supply voltage of 1.8 V. A key part of the circuit is the rail-to-rail class-AB output stage with folded mesh feedback control that combines power efficiency with operation down to 1.8 V and allows sufficient gain in a compact two-stage topology. A version with rail-to-rail input stage features a rail-to-rail input range for supply voltages down to 2.5 V. The dc gain of the op amps is more than 80 db while driving 10 k/spl Omega/, and the unity-gain frequency is 4 MHz with phase margin of 67/spl deg/ while driving 5 pF. The equivalent input noise voltage is 38 nV//spl radic/(Hz) at a frequency of 100 kHz. The amplifiers have been implemented in a standard digital 1.6-/spl mu/m complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process.
Visualization of comprehensive work tendency using end-point frequency map for human-operated work machines

This paper proposes a framework for visualizing comprehensive work tendency using a frequency plot map of the end-point of a manipulator as a fundamental study of work analysis using long-term data for human-operated work machines. A visualization system requires high generality and commonality to enable to extract various characteristics to be extracted on an arbitrary time scale independently of the work machine specifications, work contents and environment, and machine operator. The proposed framework meets this requirement by first creating a two-dimensional end-point plot map with its origin fixed at the yaw joint of the manipulator to deal with arbitrary usage conditions. It then extracts arbitrary characteristics by using hierarchical feature extraction filters, including binary, quantity, and advanced filters, defined by three kinds of essential data: operation, movement, and load. Finally, it quantifies the filtered map by gridding and normalization to visually grasp its frequency distribution. Two experiments in which the work environments and completion time differed were conducted using an instrumented hydraulic arm. Results indicated that the comprehensive work tendency revealed by using the proposed framework corresponds to the actual work results independently of the various conditions.
MULTIDIMENSIONAL ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM FOR COMPUTER NETWORKS

: The paper proposes a multidimensional encryption algorithm for security in computer networks. The work in this paper is intended to be quite different from the security algorithms used today, like WEP (Wireless Equivalent Privacy), 802.1X and so on. With Quality of Protection (QoP) as a major consideration, the same security effectiveness of former predecessor algorithms can be achieved. The algorithm can be used at different levels of security based on the degree of security required. This degree of security is divided into four levels, three of which are based on block cipher and the fourth is based on stream cipher approach. Since the algorithm is developed based on symmetric key approach, it could also be used for decryption with different and extra complexities.