Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Designing a 3D modelling tool for novice users

We present our design exploration for re-thinking underlying principles of 3D modelling activity on multi-touch tablets for novice users, identifying some of usability problems that often hinder the user interaction. We introduce "1.2 hand input," a specific interaction technique that helps novice users to gain understanding and orientation in interacting with 3D space on a 2D screen, and we derive multiple UI artefacts and techniques that take advantage of the particular characteristics afforded by this technique: a clear separation between the actions of modelling an object and of changing the viewpoint, a reduction of hand occlusion while performing multi-touch interactions by extending the touchable areas around the object model, and an improved access to the user's action history by combining the concept of viewpoint change with past interaction sequences re-shaping how traditionally the undo and redo actions have been done in the modelling activity.
Draft Genome Sequences of the Probiotic Enterococcus faecalis Symbioflor 1 Clones DSM16430 and DSM16434

ABSTRACT The probiotic Symbioflor 1 is a historical concoction of 10 isolates of Enterococcus faecalis. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis revealed two groups: one comprising eight identical clones (DSM16430, DSM16432, DSM16433, DSM16435 to DSM16439) and a further two isolates (DSM16431, DSM16434) with marginally different profiles. Here, we report a comparative analysis of the draft genome sequences of representative isolates.
Introduction to customized occupational safety and health website and its effectiveness in improving psychosocial safety climate (PSC) among police officers

Introduction: The prevalence of stress among Malaysian police is high in which 38.8% polices have severe stress related to work resources and workplace environment. Psychosocial safety climate is one of the indicators that can be used to avoid psychosocial health problems. Objective: This study was conducted to determine the risk factors of psychosocial safety climate and to measure the effectiveness of a customised safety website in improving the safety climate. Methodology: This study involved 105 police officers who were randomly selected from nine different departments in PDRM Bukit Aman. A survey adapted from previous study was used to determine the psychosocial safety climate levels among respondents. Then, occupational safety website was introduced to the respondents and being used for two weeks. Lastly, post survey was done to see the difference of psychosocial safety climate before and after the use of the website. Results and Discussion: Findings showed that team psychological safety (r=0.381, p=<0.001) and physical safety climate (r=0.657, p=<0.001) were significantly associated with psychosocial safety climate level. The means before (36.095 ± 5.6202) and after (37.742 ± 4.7069) the introduction of occupational safety website was good. Still, there was a significant improvement of psychosocial safety climate level after the introduction of occupational safety website. Conclusion: This study showed that psychosocial safety climate level in an organization can be improved by introducing an informative website specific for police.
Adaptive Informative Sampling for Active Learning

Many approaches to active learning involve periodically training one classifier and choosing data points with the lowest confidence, but designing a confidence measure is nontrivial. An alternative approach is to periodically choose data instances that maximize disagreement among the label predictions across an ensemble of classifiers. Many classifiers with different underlying structures could fit this framework, but some ensembles are more suitable for some data sets than others. The question then arises as to how to find the most suitable ensemble for a given data set. In this work we introduce a method that begins with a heterogeneous ensemble composed of multiple instances of different classifier types, which we call adaptive informative sampling. The algorithm periodically adds data points to the training set, adapts the ratio of classifier types in the heterogeneous ensemble in favor of the better classifier type, and optimizes the classifiers in the ensemble using stochastic methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs consistently better than homogeneous ensembles. Comparison with random sampling and uncertainty sampling shows that the algorithm effectively draws informative data points for training.
Describing Images using Inferred Visual Dependency Representations

The Visual Dependency Representation (VDR) is an explicit model of the spatial relationships between objects in an image. In this paper we present an approach to training a VDR Parsing Model without the extensive human supervision used in previous work. Our approach is to find the objects mentioned in a given description using a state-of-the-art object detector, and to use successful detections to produce training data. The description of an unseen image is produced by first predicting its VDR over automatically detected objects, and then generating the text with a template-based generation model using the predicted VDR. The performance of our approach is comparable to a state-of-the-art multimodal deep neural network in images depicting actions.
Does moving from war zone change emotions and risk perceptions? A field study of Israeli students

The current field study uses data collected after the 2009 war between Israel and the Hamas militias in the Gaza Strip ended. The study compares recalled emotions and perceived risks among two groups of students, all of whom were exposed to rocket attacks. Individuals in the “left the war zone” group left the region under attack as a precautionary action, while the “stayed in the war zone” group remained in the region during war. The results indicate no significant differences in the levels of recalled fear and anger between the two groups, while the perceived self-risk from terror was higher among the “stayed in the war zone” group. Yet, a higher level of recalled fear was found among those who left the war zone and whose parents resided in the war zone, compared to those who left the war zone and whose parents resided outside the war zone. In addition, fearful people became more pessimistic about their level of personal risk from terror, but not about the routine risks. We conclude that civilians need attention even if they leave the war zone since leaving the attacked region as a precautionary action may mitigate perceived self-risk from terror but does not seem to eliminate the high level of negative emotions evoked by the terror attacks.
Co-clustering dans un contexte multivues

Dans cet expose nous presentons l'extension de la problematique de la classification croisee, ou co-clustering, au contexte multivues permettant de travailler sur des collections de matrices de donnees. L'approche utilisee repose sur la notion de co-similarite qui permet de capturer les co-occurrences d'ordre superieur entre les donnees traitees. Des exemples de parallelisation de l'approche sont egalement abordes
MR-Less Surface-Based Amyloid Assessment Based on 11C PiB PET

Background β-amyloid (Aβ) plaques in brain's grey matter (GM) are one of the pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease (AD), and can be imaged in vivo using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) with 11C or 18F radiotracers. Estimating Aβ burden in cortical GM has been shown to improve diagnosis and monitoring of AD. However, lacking structural information in PET images requires such assessments to be performed with anatomical MRI scans, which may not be available at different clinical settings or being contraindicated for particular reasons. This study aimed to develop an MR-less Aβ imaging quantification method that requires only PET images for reliable Aβ burden estimations. Materials and Methods The proposed method has been developed using a multi-atlas based approach on 11C-PiB scans from 143 subjects (75 PiB+ and 68 PiB- subjects) in AIBL study. A subset of 20 subjects (PET and MRI) were used as atlases: 1) MRI images were co-registered with tissue segmentation; 2) 3D surface at the GM-WM interfacing was extracted and registered to a canonical space; 3) Mean PiB retention within GM was estimated and mapped to the surface. For other participants, each atlas PET image (and surface) was registered to the subject's PET image for PiB estimation within GM. The results are combined by subject-specific atlas selection and Bayesian fusion to generate estimated surface values. Results All PiB+ subjects (N = 75) were highly correlated between the MR-dependent and the PET-only methods with Intraclass Correlation (ICC) of 0.94, and an average relative difference error of 13% (or 0.23 SUVR) per surface vertex. All PiB- subjects (N = 68) revealed visually akin patterns with a relative difference error of 16% (or 0.19 SUVR) per surface vertex. Conclusion The demonstrated accuracy suggests that the proposed method could be an effective clinical inspection tool for Aβ imaging scans when MRI images are unavailable.
Mammalian Muscle Model for Predicting Force and Energetics During Physiological Behaviors

Muscles convert metabolic energy into mechanical work. A computational model of muscle would ideally compute both effects efficiently for the entire range of muscle activation and kinematic conditions (force and length). We have extended the original Virtual Muscle algorithm (Cheng , 2000) to predict energy consumption for both slow- and fast-twitch muscle fiber types, partitioned according to the activation process (Ea), cross-bridge cycling (Exb) and ATP/PCr recovery (Erecovery). Because the terms of these functions correspond to identifiable physiological processes, their coefficients can be estimated directly from the types of experiments that are usually performed and extrapolated to dynamic conditions of natural motor behaviors. We also implemented a new approach to lumped modeling of the gradually recruited and frequency modulated motor units comprising each fiber type, which greatly reduced computational time. The emergent behavior of the model has significant implications for studies of optimal motor control and development of rehabilitation strategies because its trends were quite different from traditional estimates of energy (e.g., activation, force, stress, work, etc.). The model system was scaled to represent three different human experimental paradigms in which muscle heat was measured during voluntary exercise; predicted and observed energy rate agreed well both qualitatively and quantitatively.
CAD-model recognition and 6DOF pose estimation using 3D cues

This paper focuses on developing a fast and accurate 3D feature for use in object recognition and pose estimation for rigid objects. More specifically, given a set of CAD models of different objects representing our knoweledge of the world - obtained using high-precission scanners that deliver accurate and noiseless data - our goal is to identify and estimate their pose in a real scene obtained by a depth sensor like the Microsoft Kinect. Borrowing ideas from the Viewpoint Feature Histogram (VFH) due to its computational efficiency and recognition performance, we describe the Clustered Viewpoint Feature Histogram (CVFH) and the cameras roll histogram together with our recognition framework to show that it can be effectively used to recognize objects and 6DOF pose in real environments dealing with partial occlusion, noise and different sensors atributes for training and recognition data. We show that CVFH out-performs VFH and present recognition results using the Microsoft Kinect Sensor on an object set of 44 objects.
Power Sharing, Ethnoliguistic Fractionalization and Government Quality

In a method of and apparatus for manufacturing methanol and higher alcohols from natural gas a catalytic area is formed on the exterior of a gas permeable partition. Natural gas is maintained on the interior of the gas permeable partition at predetermined pressure. Relative movement between the gas permeable partition and the water forms sub-micron sized bubbles of natural gas. Electromagnetic radiation is directed onto the catalytic surface to form hydroxyl radicals from the water. Methyl, ethyl, and propyl ions from the natural gas combine with the hydroxyl ions to form methanol, ethanol, and propanol.
IncreasedConcentrationsof Heparin CofactorII in DiabeticPatients , and PossibleEffectson ThrombinInhibitionAssay of AntithrombinIII

We compared concentrationsof antithrombinIll (AT-Ill) in plasma,as determinedby an immunologicalmethodand by a functionalthrombininhibitionmethod, in the presence of heparinin 160 bloodsamplesfromType I diabetics.Although the correlation was highly significant (P <0.001) betweenthe results obtained by the two methods, our data demonstrated that results by the thrombin inhibition assay, 121 (SD 15)%, expressed as percentagesof the resultsfor a normalplasma pool, were significantly (P <0.001) higher than by the immunoreactive method, 104 (SD 15)%, indicating an overestimation of functionally active AT-Ill. Concentrations of functionally active AT-Ill determined by a factor Xe inhibition assay, 105 (SD 13)%, were in the same range as immunoreactive AT-Ill. Addition of IgG antiserum to normal pooled plasma quenched only about 90% of the AT-Ill activity determined by the thrombin inhibitionassay, but all of the AT-Ill activity determined by a factor X5 inhibition assay. These results demonstrate that the factor Xa inhibition assay is more specific for the determination of AT-Ill than the thrombin inhibition assay. We suggest that the high concentrations of hepann cofactor II, 117 (SD 17)%, might have caused an overestimation of AT Ill in this group of patients with diabetes Type I, and should not be overlooked in other clinical situations.
A Discrete Spring Model to Generate Fair Curves and Surfaces

To generate fair curves and surfaces is an important tool in the area of computer graphics (CG), computer-aided design (CAD), and other geometric modeling applications. In this paper, we present an iteration-based algorithm to generate fair polygonal curves and surfaces that is based on a new discrete spring model. In the spring model, a linear spring, which length approximately represents a curvature, is attached along the normal line of each polygon node. Energy is assigned to the difference of the lengths, that is, difference in curvature, of nearby springs. Our algorithm then minimizes total energy by iterative approach. Our algorithm accepts as inputs (1) an initial polygonal curve (surface), which consists of a set of polygonal segments (faces) and a set of nodes as polygon-vertices, and (2) constraints for controlling the shape. The outputs are polygonal curve (surface) in smooth shape. We also describe a method for improving performance of our iterative process into a linear execution time. Our algorithm provides a tool for fair curve and surface design in interactive environment.
An Anatomy of Corporate Governance

Although the traditional notion of maximizing shareholders’ wealth has gained its popularity and is deep-rooted in the business world, it is challenged by the advocates of stakeholder theory. Facing an increasing number of cases of frauds, misrepresentation, scandals and failures of large corporations over the past decade, corporate governance receives greater attention. This paper tries to examine the evolution of the concept and aspects of corporate governance. The growing concerns and strategic issues are also discussed before identifying future challenges.
THE EVOLUTION OF OPERATIONS STRATEGY: AN OVERVIEW OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON COMPETITIVE PRIORITIES

Operations strategy has been a subject of empirical research for 25 years. We analyzed the outcomes of 33 empirical studies on competitive priorities, published between 1983 and 2007, and identified trends in operations strategy since the early 1980s. At that time, researchers mainly emphasized the importance of flexibility in operations; however, we found that quality has consistently been the focus of attention for manufacturing companies since the end of the 80s. In addition, we investigated differences in operations strategy between companies from different regions. Besides quality, North American manufacturing companies focus more and more on delivery and less on flexibility and service. This also holds for European companies, which, in addition, focus on cost reductions. Asian-Pacific manufacturing companies also continuously pursue a quality strategy, and in addition, they increasingly emphasize a low cost strategy. We could not identify a trend in manufacturing companies' emphasis on innovation, due to a lack of data on competitive priorities associated with innovation. Our results show that the
Mapping NPP for a Coniferous Forest in Southern Sweden using data from Terra / MODIS

Net primary production (NPP) is modeled for a coniferous forest in southern Sweden for 2001. The model is based on the light-use efficiency concept where NPP is calculated as a product of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (APAR) and a lightuse efficiency factor (ε). APAR is estimated from the fraction of APAR (FAPAR) multiplied with the daily total amount of incoming PAR. FAPAR is obtained by linear transformation of 250 m NDVI from Terra/MODIS. Prior to the transformation, the NDVI has been seasonally adjusted by fitting local asymmetric Gauss functions to the time series. ε is modeled daily as a function of temperature, latitude and time. The model is evaluated against an NPP time series obtained from flux measurements of net ecosystem exchange (NEE) and measurements of respiration carried out simultaneously at the site (r = 0.78 for modeled and measured NPP). FAPAR is evaluated against measurements 2004.
The Telephone System Aid for the Deaf

This paper presents a computer application that helps people with hearing or speech difficulties to use a telephone. The TSAD (telephone system aid for the deaf) is a system aimed at providing such individuals with a telephone solution. The objective is far from obliterating the existing options, but rather to compliment on the up take for those instances when the telephone becomes the most appropriate method of communication in the world today. TSAD conceptually sits between the two communicating parties and implements two key speech technology concepts: speech recognition and speech synthesis. In order to facilitate a telephone conversation, the system converts text to speech on the out bound and conversely converts incoming speech to text.
Lucigen ’ s electrocompetent cells are very efficiently transformed with BAC clones carrying large DNA inserts

Lucigen's electrocompetent cells are very efficiently transformed with BAC clones carrying large I n t r o duction Introduction of DNA into living cells is one of the most important and widely used procedures in molecular biology. Several methods have been developed to make bacterial cells competent to take up DNA. Chemical preparation of competent cells involves treatment with CaCl 2 or other chemicals (Hanahan, 1983). Recently, electroporation has become a method of choice to transform E. coli and other bacteria (Dower et al., 1988), because electrocompetent cells are very convenient to use and are commercially available at high efficiencies of transformation.
Log-scaling watermark detection in digital audio watermarking

A pitch-scaling modification of a watermarked signal is a severe attack on audio watermarking techniques. In particular, watermarking techniques using a pseudonoise (PN) sequence as a secret key are fragile in the face of this modification because of the desynchronization between the original and embedded PN sequences. We, therefore, propose a log-scaling watermark detection method to cope with this problem. This method is based on a general logarithm operation in the frequency or quefrency axis in the decoding process. This method is also advantageous in that no other modification of the original embedding process is necessary. The validity of the proposed log-scaling watermark detection method is evaluated by employing the time-spread echo method as an example of such a watermarking technique.
The Korteweg–de Vries–Burgers equation and its approximate solution

In this paper, we study the Korteweg–de Vries–Burgers equation with boundary conditions. After making a series of transformations, we convert the Korteweg–de Vries–Burgers equation into an Emden–Fowler equation. An approximate solution in series form is obtained by means of the Adomian decomposition method. The solution is illustrated to agree well with phase plane analysis.
Automatic selection of training patterns to improve the generalization of Multilayer Feedforward Neural Networks

The level of generalization of a Multilayer feedforward neural networks is heavily dependent on the quality of the training data. Very often training set contains redundant or irrelevant patterns. It has been shown that with a careful and dynamic selection of the training patterns, better generalization performance may be obtained. Nevertheless, generalization has to be carried out independently of the novel patterns to be approximated. In this paper, we present a learning method that automatically selects the most appropriate training patterns to the new sample to be predicted. The proposed method has been applied to two different approximation domains. Results have been compared to standard backpropagation using the complete training data set and the new method shows better generalisation abilities. Key-Words: Neural Networks, Backpropagation algorithm, Generalization Capability, Selective Learning.
Effect of p-doping on the temperature dependence of differential gain in FP and DFB 1.3-μm InGaAsP-InP multiple-quantum-well lasers

The temperature dependence of differential gain dG/dn for 1.3-/spl mu/m InGaAsP-InP FP and DFB lasers with two profiles of p-doping was obtained from RIN measurements within the temperature range of 25/spl deg/C-65/spl deg/C. Experiments showed that the change of the active region doping level from 3/spl middot/10/sup 17/ cm/sup -3/ to 3/spl middot/10/sup 18/ cm/sup -3/ leads to a 50% increase of the differential gain for FP lasers at 25/spl deg/C. Heavily doped devices also exhibit more rapid reduction of the differential gain with increasing temperature. The effect of active region doping on the energy separation between the electron Fermi level and electronic states coupled into the laser mode explains the observations. The temperature dependence of differential gain for DFB devices strongly depends on the detuning of the lasing wavelength from the gain peak.
The PCG: An Empirical Study

Process communication graph (PCG) is the visual formalism used in a graph-based visual language (VL) for parallel programming. It combines control flow and data flow graphs into a single visual formalism, and supports different levels of abstraction at which parallel programs are expressed and moves to compositional programming. Empirical studies allow designers to put their designs to test in a direct and intentional interaction with users. For research projects this may be the only way to assess if their goals have been met. The case study presented here was conducted on programmers (students) solving parallel programming problems using the PCG formalism to construct parallel programs. The results of this evaluation indicate that users benefit from visual programming, even at the beginning of the learning curve. ( 2001 Academic Press