Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Traffic Signs Detection and tracking using modified Hough transform

Traffic Signs Recognition (TSR) systems can not only improve safety, compensating for possible human carelessness, but also reduce tiredness, helping drivers keep an eye on the surrounding traffic conditions. This paper proposes an efficient algorithm for real-time TSR. The article considers the practicability of using HSV color space to extract the red color. An algorithm to remove noise to improve the accuracy and speed of detection was developed. A modified Generalized Hough transform is then used to detect traffic signs. The current velocity of a vehicle is then used to predict the sign's location in the adjacent frames in a video sequence. Finally, the detected objects are being classified. The developed algorithms have been tested using real scene images and the German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark (GTSDB) dataset and showed efficient results.
Multiset-Based Assessment of Resilience of Sociotechnological Systems to Natural Hazards

The chapter describes multiset-based approach to the assessment of resilience/ vulnerability of the distributed sociotechnological systems (DSTS) to natural hazards (NH). DSTS contain highly interconnected and intersected consuming and producing segments, and also resource base (RB), providing their existence and operation. NH impacts may destroy some local elements of these segments, as well as some parts of RB, thus initiating multiple chain effects, leading to negative consequences far away from the NH local strikes. To assess DSTS resilience to such impacts, multigrammatical representation of DSTS is used. A criterion of DSTS sustainability to NH, being generalization of similar criterion, known for industrial (producing) systems, is proposed. Application of this criterion to critical infrastructures is considered, as well as solution of the reverse problem, concerning subsystems of DSTS, which may stay functional after NH impact.
An institutional and sector-wide approach to implement learning analytics

Higher education institutions urgently require policies and strategies for the implementation of the use of learning analytics. Collaborating in research with the Supporting Higher Education to Integrate Learning Analytics (SHEILA) Project, the RAPID Outcome Mapping Approach (ROMA) provided a framework for developing a policy for wide-scale institutional adoption of learning analytics, after an initial exploratory piloting process. This piloting process consisted of the use of learning analytics in five diverse classes across all four faculties, capturing evidence of impact on learning, teaching and student success. This evidence, combined with a wide range of literature, was used to develop the institutional strategy. Additionally, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, Scotland’s (QAA) current Enhancement Theme, Evidence for Enhancement: Improving the Student Experience, has provided a platform to engage with the Scottish HE sector in learning analytics. Through hosting two workshops, we have advanced the understanding and highlighted the sector needs in this area. By providing recommendations to QAA on the areas requiring further understanding, this will be taken forward by collaborative clusters of institutions. This work will be disseminated to and is for the benefit of the whole Scottish sector. In this paper, our institutional ROMA and piloting process will be discussed, in addition to the Scottish sector priorities for learning analytics.
Securing virtual private LAN service by efficient key management

Virtual private local area network service VPLS is a layer 2 service provider-provisioned virtual private network service. Security is one of the key system requirements of a VPLS because it delivers the frames via an untrusted network. Several VPLS architectures are proposed during the recent years. However, many of them do not provide a sufficient level of security. On the other hand, the existing secure VPLS architectures are also suffering from the scalability issues, and they are infeasible to implement in large scale networks.
Female gender is an independent predictor of in-hospital mortality after STEMI in the era of primary PCI: insights from the greater Paris area PCI Registry.

AIMS To determine if female gender is an independent predictor of in-hospital mortality after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). A higher early mortality rate after STEMI has been reported in women before the widespread use of PCI in STEMI. PCI improves the prognosis of STEMI, however, the effect of PCI in women in this setting is controversial. In a large regional prospective registry, we examined the in-hospital mortality after PCI for STEMI. METHODS AND RESULTS The greater Paris area comprises 11 million inhabitants. Data from all PCIs performed in 41 centres is entered in a mandatory registry. In-hospital mortality is recorded in another hospital-based database. From 2003 to 2007, 16,760 patients were treated by PCI for STEMI <24 hours; 21.9% were women. Female patients were significantly older than men, 69.7 ± 14.3 years versus 59.3 ± 13.0 years (p<0.0001). The rate of diabetes mellitus and cardiogenic shock were significantly higher in women versus men, respectively 19.0% versus 15.6%, p<0.0001 and 6.7% versus 4.0%, p<0.0001. The success rate of PCI was significantly lower in women: 94.7% versus 95.9%, p=0.002. In-hospital mortality was significantly higher in women 9.8 % versus 4.3%, p<0.0001 and the impact of gender on mortality was significant only after the age of 75. By multivariate analysis, female gender is associated with higher in-hospital mortality. CONCLUSIONS After PCI for STEMI, female gender is still an independent predictor of in-hospital mortality.
Role of peroxidase in lignification of tobacco cells : I. Oxidation of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide and formation of hydrogen peroxide by cell wall peroxidases.

The two peroxidase isoenzyme groups (G(I) and G(III)) localized in the cell walls of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) tissues were compared with respect to their capacity for NADH-dependent H(2)O(2) formation. Peroxidases of the G(III) group are slightly more active than those of the G(I) group when both are assayed under optimal conditions. This difference is probably not of major regulatory importance. NADH-dependent formation of H(2)O(2) required the presence of Mn(2+) and a phenol as cofactors. The addition of H(2)O(2) to the reaction mixture accelerated subsequent NADH-dependent H(2)O(2) formation. In the presence of both cofactors or Mn(2+) alone, catalase oxidized NADH. However, if the cofactors were absent or if only dichlorophenol was present, catalase inhibited NADH oxidation. No H(2)O(2) accumulation occurred in the presence of catalase. Superoxide dismutase inhibited NADH oxidation quite significantly indicating the involvement of the superoxide radical in the peroxidase reaction. These results are interpreted to mean that the reactions whereby tobacco cell wall peroxidases catalyze NADH-dependent H(2)O(2) formation are similar to those proposed for horseradish peroxidase (Halliwell 1978 Planta 140: 81-88).
Overview of the Measurement of Lipids and Lipoproteins in Mice

Experimental mouse models are widely used for preclinical research on dyslipidemia, atherosclerosis, and cardiometabolic diseases. This unit reports the most commonly used biochemical analysis methods available to determine the lipid and lipoprotein phenotype in the mouse. The discussed methods include: the qualitative and quantitative analysis of lipids, apolipoproteins, and lipoproteins (with a specific emphasis on species‐specificities of mice and humans), and the activity assay of major enzymes involved in lipoprotein remodeling (LCAT, PLTP, and LPL). The unit also discusses the most frequently used functional tests to analyze lipid/lipoprotein metabolism in vivo, including triglyceride metabolism, reverse cholesterol transport, intestinal lipid absorption, and secretion. Curr. Protoc. Mouse Biol. 1:265‐277 © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
JAKARTA CITY TOUR: SIGHTSEEING WITH DOUBLE-DECKER BUS

Tourism is a promising sector for a country, especially in the field of economic and social. Tourism is a benchmark image of a country. Nowadays, industrialized countries, developed and developing countries begin vigorously to fix tourism sector in order to increase existence of the country. Indonesia is one of the developing countries that improves actively in developing tourism. Jakarta as a capital city of Indonesia is not to be outdone to become the icon of Indonesia’s tourism. In 2014, department of tourism launched double-decker bus around Jakarta, and it's called "Mpok Siti", to fulfill tourism needs in Jakarta. In 2015, double-decker bus management was taken over by Jakarta government with PT Transportasi Jakarta and its name turned into Jakarta Explorer Bus. The purpose of writing this scientific study is to know how far tourists are interested to go around Jakarta with doubledecker bus. Then, it also aims to see how this bus can reduce personal vehicle using to many tourist destinations in Jakarta. So, this study was examined by approach of service brand awareness, accessibility and decision-making use. So, based on the research the writers have done; service, brand awareness and accessibility have positive influence on decision making.
Evaluative tools in impact investing: Three case studies on the use of theories of change

Impact investing is becoming one of the largest forces in driving social and environmental change globally. However, how one defines, measures and communicates this impact is not well defined or consistently implemented. This can prevent investors from making well-informed decisions and allows for ‘impact washing’. The evaluation community has many tools that could be adapted and used in the world of impact investing. Theories of change allow for the better communication of impact, identification of indicators to be measured and critical interrogation of logic. The attributes of theories of change could assist in steering the growing force of impact investing towards gathering more investment and achieving greater impact. This paper is exploratory and examines the development and use of theories of change as a tool for impact investing and seeks to identify the benefits of the tool. We qualitatively review three case studies of organisations that have implemented theories of change and identify common key themes. We find that theories of change are a useful tool for the communication of impact, identification of indicators to be measured and for the critical interrogation of logic. However, theories of change do not provide a panacea to the impact challenge; the need to rigorously measure impact is not fulfilled by merely identifying what needs to be measured. Regardless, the use of theories of change adds an advantage in a space where others have not gone to the same length to show their commitment to driving change.
Phase shifts and in-medium cross sections for dressed nucleons in nuclear matter

The dressing of nucleons as embodied in single-particle spectral functions is incorporated in the description of nucleon-nucleon scattering in nuclear matter at a density corresponding to k F51.36 fm 21 . In order to clarify the new features associated with the complete off-shell behavior of the single-particle motion, results involving mean-field particles are also presented with special emphasis on the behavior of the phase shifts when bound pair states occur. Both the 1 S0 and 3 S1- 3 D1 channels exhibit this feature at the considered density for mean-field particles at zero temperature. An important tool to assess the effect of the dressing of the particles is the two-particle density of states. A sizable reduction with respect to the mean-field density of states is obtained. At 2e F this reduction corresponds to z kF 2 , where z kF is the strength of the quasiparticle pole at k F , and it can therefore be as large as 0.5. This reduction has significant consequences for the strength of pairing correlations both in the 3 S1- 3 D1 channel where it leads to a dramatic decrease of the attraction at the Fermi energy and for the 1 S0 channel which no longer shows a pairing signal. Phase shifts and cross sections for dressed particles are determined based on expressions which fold the effective interaction with the dressed but noninteracting two-particle spectral function. This folding procedure yields similar results to an ‘‘on-shell’’ prescription reminiscent of the result for free or mean-field particles, except for cross sections deep in the Fermi sea. Comparison of phase shifts and cross sections to the case of mean-field particles indicates that smaller phase shifts in an absolute sense and considerable reductions of the in-medium cross sections for dressed particles are obtained. It is shown that while in many cases these results imply a weakening of the effective interaction, this is not the case for 1 S0 interactions deep in the Fermi sea. @S0556-2813~99! 06612-1#
An object-oriented shadow generation algorithm for real-time application

Presents a fast shadow generation algorithm for a large number of convex polyhedra (objects) in a 3D scene based on the concept of characteristic views (CVs). The concept of CVs is that the infinite possible views of a 3D polyhedron can be grouped into a finite number of classes which have the same visible polygons from some reference points (i.e. viewpoints or point light sources). The space can be partitioned into subspaces in which all reference points have the same object ordering. Basically, object-precision hidden surface removal algorithms and object-precision shadow generation algorithms are the same except for the reference point. The shadow volume binary space partitioning (SVBSP) tree algorithm is known to be efficient in a static environment in which the point light source can be changed. However, if a scene consists of many objects and each object consists of many polygons, the time complexity for generating and traversing the SVBSP tree increases rapidly because the SVBSP tree algorithm deals with polygons which are components of objects. Furthermore, the SYBSP tree algorithm suffers from polygon-splitting problems resulting in a high cost as the number of polygons increases. Our approach is object-oriented in the sense that an object is used as the basic unit and polygons can be considered as components of the associated object. For all light source positions, the object ordering for shadow generation is determined at the preprocessing stage. At run-time, the shadow detection algorithm is executed and, if necessary, shadow fragments are generated.
Atomic Timekeeping and the Statistics of Precision Signal Generators

Since most systems that generate atomic time employ quartz crystal oscillators to improve reliability, it is essential to determine the effect on the precision of time measurements that these oscillators introduce. A detailed analysis of the calibration procedure shows that the third finite difference of the phase is closely related to the clock errors. It was also found, in agreement with others, that quartz crystal oscillators exhibit a “flicker” or / W -I type of noise modulating the frequency of the oscillator. The method of finite differences of the phase is shown to be a powerful means of classifying the statistical fluctuations of the phase and frequency for signal generators in general. By employing finite differences it is possible to avoid divergences normally associated with flicker noise spectra. Analysis of several cesium beam frequency standards have shown a complete lack of the 1 W I --I type of noise modulation. INTKODI-CTION N ORDISARJ7 clock consists of tn-o basic systems: a periodic phenomenon (pendulum), and a counter (gears, clock face, etc.) to count the Manuscript received September 8, 1965 ; revised November 6, The author is with the National Bureau of Standards, Boulder, 1965. Colo. periodic events. An atomic clock differs fro11’ this only in that the frequenq. of the periodic phenomenon is, in some sense, controlled by an atoniic transition (atomic frequent), standard). Since microwave spectroscopic techniques allo\\frequencies to be measured \vith a relative precision far better than any other quantity, the desirabilit). of extending this precision to the domain of time nieasurenient has long been recognized [l]. From the standpoint of precision, i t would be desirable to run the clock (counter) directly from the atomic frequent! standard. How ever, atomic frequency standards in general are sufficient11 complex that reliable operation over very extended periods becomes somewhat doubtful (to say nothing of the cost involved). For this reason, a quartz crystal oscillator is often used as the source of the “periodic” events to run a synchronous clock (or its electronic equivalent). The frequency of this oscillator is then regularly checked by the atomic frequency standard and corrections are made. These corrections can usually take on any of three forms: 1) correction of the oscillator frequency, 2 ) correction of the indicated time, or 3) an accumulating
Contribution à l'étude des transferts thermiques dans des systèmes complexes : application aux composants électroniques

L'etude concerne la modelisation de phenomenes de transfert dans des systemes physiques complexes. On propose le concept d'"architecture graphique de calcul", base sur une approche originale en matiere de modpelisation numerique, et qui debouche sur la conception et le developpement d'un logiciel d'ingenierie scientifique, thanes. On developpe ainsi une formulation mathematique qui permet l'expression directe, des conditions aux limites traditionnelles ou des echanges lateraux. Les premiers resultats portent sur les composants electroniques, les materiaux composites, les milieux poreux heterogenes, ainsi que sur des travaux d'"homogeneisation numerique" dans des milieux periodiques. Des travaux experimentaux ont ete menes sur la caracterisation thermique de composants electroniques: mesures de resistance thermique, et application de la thermographie infra-rouge (par la methode de correction d'emissivite) a l'analyse de defaillance
Margin Trading and Securities Lending, Investor Sentiments and the Volatility of Chinese Securities Market

Whether margin trading and securities lending transaction help to stabilize the stock market or amplify stock market volatility is a topic that has long been a concern. Based on the perspective of volatility asymmetry, we use event analysis and ARMA-EGARCH-M model to empirically test whether China’s margin trading and securities lending transactions can boost the bull market and aggravate the price decline in bear market. The empirical results show that the volatility of China’s stock market was asymmetric. Margin trading transactions reduced the stock market volatility while securities lending transactions increased the stock market volatility. Since the trading volume of margin trading was much larger than the trading volume of securities lending, the stock market volatility decreased since the launch of margin trading and securities lending mechanism.
Using content-based image retrieval to automatically assess day similarity in visual lifelogs

Today, we witness the appearance of many lifelogging cameras that are able to capture the life of a person wearing the camera, which produce a large number of images everyday. Automatically characterizing the experience and extracting patterns of behavior of individuals from this huge collection of unlabeled and unstructured egocentric data present major challenges and require novel and efficient algorithmic solutions. The main goal of this work is to propose a new method to automatically assess day similarity from the lifelogging images of a person. We propose a technique to measure the similarity between images based on the Swain's distance and generalize it to detect similarity between daily visual data. To this purpose, we apply dynamic time warping (DTW) combined with the Swain's distance for final day similarity estimation. For validation, we apply our technique on the Egocentric Dataset of University of Barcelona (EDUB) of 4912 daily images acquired by 4 persons with preliminary encouraging results.
RNA transfer and its use in dendritic cell-based immunotherapy

RNA is a key macromolecule for the mobilisation and interpretation of genetic information. Research has sought to exploit the inherent properties of RNA, such as the direct production of proteins in the cytoplasm without the need for nuclear translocation. This property makes the delivery of genes into postmitotic cells especially attractive. Recently, RNA transfer into postmitotic dendritic cells (DCs) has emerged as a potential new therapeutic agent in the area of immunotherapy. DCs are the most important regulators of the immune system. Thus, transfecting DCs with RNA allows the specific manipulation of immune responses and, thereby, the treatment of a variety of diseases, such as cancer. Preclinical studies have demonstrated that RNA-transduced DCs efficiently stimulate antigen-specific T cell responses invitro and in animal tumour models. In addition, the clinical data from Phase I and II trials of tumour patients indicate that RNA-transduced DCs represent a promising approach for the development of future vaccination strategies. The use of RNA molecules as therapeutic agents is a relatively new approach in the treatment of diseases, such as cancer, but has received increasing attention during the past decade. Especially in the field of immunotherapy, the inherent properties of RNA molecules in combination with immunostimulating dendritic cells (DCs) are being investigated at present for their beneficial therapeutic effect. Immunotherapy is based on the stimulation of the patient’s immune system to recognise and eliminate infected cells or tumour cells in an antigen-specific manner. Current approaches focus on the stimulation of CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocyte responses, as well as on the induction of CD4+ Thelper cell responses, in order to obtain optimal and sustained immune responses capable of eliminating altered cells. This review mainly focuses on the potential use of RNA-transduced DCs as a therapeutic strategy in the treatment of cancer, as current studies on the treatment of infectious d-iseases are just beginning.
Cardiovascular changes with age and exercise

Various studies report a 0–22% per decade decline in circulatory function (VO2max) with advancing age. Twelve exercising men (E) were followed for 28 years, mean age 43 and 71 years, initial to final measurement, while 12 dropouts (C) detrained for 21 years, with a mean age from first to last measurement of 48 and 69 years, respectively. VO2 max in E changed from 45.9 to 39.4 ml · min−1· kg−1, 5% per decade, whereas C declined from 36.0 to 21.4 ml min−1· kg−1, 19% per decade. Resting blood pressure was unchanged in E, 119/75 mmHg, whereas C rose from 128/85 to 149/90 mmHg. The data suggest that regular aerobic exercise forestalls the usual loss of circulatory function with increasing age.