Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hip Osteoarthritis and Osteoporosis: Clinical and Histomorphometric Considerations

Although an inverse relationship between osteoarthritis (OA) and osteoporosis (OP) has been shown by some studies, other reports supported their coexistence. To clarify this relationship, we analyzed the interplay between clinical and histomorphometric features. Bone mineral density (BMD) and histomorphometric structure were assessed in 80 patients of four different age-matched groups undergoing hip arthroplasty for severe OA or OP-related femoral fracture. Harris Hip Score was also performed. Surgical double osteotomy of the femoral head was performed and microscopic bone slice samples analysis was performed by using a BioQuant Osteo software. Bone volume fraction (BV/TV) was lower (P < 0.01) in subjects with femoral neck fracture (20.77 ± 4.34%) than in subjects with nonosteopenic OA (36.49 ± 7.73%) or osteopenic OA (32.93 ± 6.83%), whereas no difference was detected between subjects with femoral neck fractures and those with combined OA and OP (20.71 ± 5.23%). Worse Harris Hip Score was found in those patients with the lowest BMD and BV/TV values. Our data support recent evidences indicating the possibility of impaired bone volume fraction in OA patients, with a high risk of developing OP, likely for their decreased mobility. Further studies are needed in order to investigate biomolecular pathway and/or growth factors involved in bone volume impairment in OA patients.
Querying complex objects by similarity in SQL

Similarity search has received large attention on modern database applications involving complex objects, since the queries executed in such databases are seldom based on exact matches but rather on some specific notion of similarity. However, the SQL query language does not provide effective support for similarity queries. This paper proposes the addition of similarity queries to SQL, including a new set of similarity operators in order to search complex objects stored as sets of attributes in a relation. It also describes a prototype developed to validate and illustrate the concepts and syntax presented.
Comparison of various encoding schemes for tree in Biobjective optimization scenario

To find MST (Minimum Spanning Trees) in complete graph is a classical problem in operation research having network design as an important application. It is possible to solve MST problem efficiently, but its Biobjective versions are NP hard. In this paper, we present a comparison of two encoding schemes for representing tree in Biobjective optimization scenario. The three different instances of Biobjective MST have been solved by using two different encoding methods in the evolutionary algorithms; Pareto optimal front obtained has been taken into account for comparative study. Our evolutionary computation approach involves Biobjective MST problem using NSGAII (Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II) approach. We compare edge sets encoding with Prüfer encoding in evolutionary algorithm for Biobjective MST, we find edge sets encoding outperforms the Prüfer in Biobjective optimization scenario.
Pilot Task Management : Testing an Attentional Expected Value Model of Visual Scanning

ARL 1 ABSTRACT Two models of information acquisition in visual scanning are described. A descriptive model identifies the role of event salience, effort, expectancy and value in influencing where and when people look at different channels to sample information in dynamic environments. An optimal prescriptive model accounts for the role of expectancy and value, as these characterize the properties of channels necessary to serve tasks that may differ in their importance. The prescriptive model is validated against the data from four experiments in which skilled pilots flew a high fidelity visual flight simulator, while engaged in traffic detection with (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) and without (Experiment 2) a cockpit traffic display, and with different forms of data link displays (Experiment 4). All four experiments provided a good fit between model predictions and the percentage of time that pilots spent viewing different areas of interest in the airplane environment. Implications of the model to training optimal strategies, and to possible refinement of training policies are described.
Text extraction for Sri Lankan number plates

Automatic text extraction from number plates is used in most of the countries in present. In this paper a semiautomatic text extraction from Sri Lankan vehicle number plates is presented. There are several number plate types currently available in Sri Lanka. First a set of template was created based on the font used in the number plates for all the English letters and numbers. Number plate first corrected as can be seen from a camera situated in front of the camera. Then the area of the numbers is extracted. Texts and numbers are then separated in to separate images. Finally separated texts and numbers are matched with the original template created using template matching. A data set consisted of 93 number plates is used to demonstrate the usability of the proposed method.
The Learning of Zelda: Data-Driven Level Generation for Action Role Playing Games

The majority of Procedural Content Generation (PCG) research has made use of human authored rules, heuristics and evaluation metrics. Machine learning techniques have gone relatively unused in PCG. We introduce a data-driven level generation approach, and apply it to the of dungeons for Zelda-like Action Roleplaying Games (ARPGs). We use Bayesian Networks (BNs) to learn distributional information about level topology. The learned networks can then be sampled to generate levels that have the same statistical properties as human authored levels.
The network structure of adaptive governance - A single case study of a fish management area

The challenge of establishing adaptive management systems is a widely discussed topic in the literature on natural resource management. Adaptive management essentially focuses on achieving a governance process that is both sensitive to and has the capacity to continuously react to changes within the ecosystem being managed. The adoption of a network approach that perceives governance structures as social networks, searching for the kind of network features promoting this important feature, has been requested by researchers in the field. In particular, the possibilities associated with the application of a formal network approach, using the tools and concepts of social network analysis (SNA), have been identified as having significant potential for advancing this branch of research. This paper aims to address the relation between network structure and adaptability using an empirical approach. With the point of departure in a previously generated theoretical framework as well as related hypotheses, this paper presents a case study of a governance process within a fish management area in Sweden. The hypotheses state that, although higher levels of network density and centralisation promote the rule-forming process, the level of network heterogeneity is important for the existence and spread of ecological knowledge among the actors involved. According to the empirical results, restricted by the single-case study design, this assumption is still a well-working hypothesis. However, in order to advance our knowledge concerning these issues and test the validity of the hypotheses, more empirical work using a similar approach in multiple case study designs is needed.
Empirical Study of the Effect of Participation of Budget in Managerial Performance

This literature study aims to build and construct conception more strongly based on empirical studies that have been conducted so that it can describe how the effects of budgeting participation in improving managerial performance. In this study the author uses a literature study approach based on empirical studies or studies in several International journals relating to budgetary participation with performance. The review of this article can be concluded that budgetary participation can provide a positive role in managerial performance. But budget participation is not the only factor that can improve managerial performance but budget participation can be moderated or mediated with other variables such as psychological capital, Job relevant Information, knowledge and competencies, leadership style, motivation, and others.
The Effects of Simultaneous Prompting and Instructive Feedback For Individuals with Autism

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental delay characterized by significant impairment in many areas including: social communication, academic, occupational, and activities of daily living. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandates that educators use evidence-based practices (EBPs) with individuals receiving special education services. In addition to EBPs, educators should provide the most efficient instruction possible. This study examines the efficacy of two EBPs on the acquisition of spoken category names (i.e., fruit, nut, vegetable, herb): (1) simultaneous prompting – a prompt-fading procedure, and (2) instructive feedback (IF) – a technique in which additional stimuli are presented during a learning trial. IF stimuli (i.e., spoken category names) were presented during listener discrimination training using simultaneous prompting. A multiple-probe single case design was used across three categories and replicated across five participants with ASD. Results indicate that the intervention was effective for Category 1, but was ineffective for subsequent categories, for four participants. The intervention was ineffective for the remaining participant. These findings suggest simultaneous prompting and IF may be effective for individuals with ASD; however, further research is needed to explore how to maintain effectiveness across additional target categories.
Spontaneous Volunteering in Social Crises: Self-Organization and Coordination

This article investigates spontaneous volunteering during the social crisis referred to as the “European 2015 refugee crisis. ” The situation was politically controversial and the vacuum in humanitarian aid was filled by civil society, including large numbers of spontaneous volunteers (SVs). Based on empirical research, we analyzed the responses and the experiences of SVs working under the auspices of civil society organizations and derived management implications. The findings show that the environment of spontaneous volunteering in social crises differs from that in natural disaster situations. SVs partly substitute official response systems and this results in a high degree of self-organization. Thus, “structured self-organization,” that is finding a suitable complementary relationship between self-organization and coordination, is crucial for the efficiency of SVs’ work, and their satisfaction, well-being, and commitment. Structured self-organization requires (a) fluid structures that enable autonomy, (b) orienting framework conditions, and (c) resources for care and coordination.
Block Adaptive Bayesian Wavelet Shrinkage for 2D Signal De-noising

A block adaptive Bayesian wavelet shrinkage is proposed in this paper to accommodate the reduction of a kind of two-dimensionally, signal amplitude-related contamination, which is taken place in some military and biomedical applications. Wavelet shrinkage conventionally works under the assumption of signal-independent, additive Gaussian noise. For the temporally Gaussian but spatially signal amplitude-related noise, its denoising efficiency is depressed. To make use of the merit of wavelet denoising, the signal space is split to blocks and then wavelet shrinkage is conducted in each block, in which the signal amplitude is assumed to vary little. Results from simulation show that the proposed method outperforms the traditional one in signal-to-noise ratio improvement.
Subspace-Aware Index Codes

In this letter, we generalize the well-known index coding problem to exploit the structure in the source-data to improve system throughput. In many applications (e.g., multimedia), the data to be transmitted may lie (or can be well approximated) in a low-dimensional subspace. We exploit this low-dimensional structure of the data using an algebraic framework to solve the index coding problem (referred to as subspace-aware index coding) as opposed to the traditional index coding problem which is subspace-unaware. Also, we propose an efficient algorithm based on the alternating minimization approach to obtain near optimal index codes for both subspace-aware and -unaware cases. Our simulations indicate that under certain conditions, a significant throughput gain (about 90%) can be achieved by subspace-aware index codes over conventional subspace-unaware index codes.
Increasing access to safe abortion in rural Maharashtra: Outcomes of a comprehensive abortion care model

(SOMI), was established with the goal of increasing the ability of rural women to acquire accessible and high quality abortion services. One of its key activities was to develop and implement a comprehensive and evidence-based abortion care model for rural women that addressed both facility-based and community-based barriers to safe abortion, that focused on enabling public sector sites to offer comprehensive abortion care services and simultaneously, to build awareness at woman-and community-levels about the legality of abortion and the availability of safe abortion services in the public sector. The model was developed and implemented by Consortium partner Ipas, in one district of Maharashtra, namely, Aurangabad. The Population Council conducted an assessment of the effectiveness of this model in improving the availability and quality of abortion services in public sector facilities, and women's awareness and experiences with regard to abortion services. This report presents a description of the model and the findings of the assessment. The Population Council is an international, non-profit, non-governmental organisation that seeks to improve the well-being and reproductive health of current and future generations around the world and to help achieve a humane, equitable and sustainable balance between people and resources. The Council conducts biomedical, social science and public health research, and helps build research capacities in developing countries.
NileTMRG at SemEval-2016 Task 7: Deriving Prior Polarities for Arabic Sentiment Terms

This paper presents a model that was developed to address SemEval Task 7: “Determin-ing Sentiment Intensity of English and Arabic Phrases”, with focus on ‘Arabic Phrases’. The goal of this task is to determine the degree to which some given term is associated with positive sentiment. The underlying premise behind the model that we have adopted is that determining the context (positive or negative) in which a term usually occurs can determine its strength. Since the focus is on Twitter terms, Twitter was used to collect tweets for each term for which a strength value was to be derived. An Arabic sentiment analyzer, was then used to assign a polarity to each of these tweets, thus defining their context. We then experimented with normalized point wise mutual information with and without linear regression to assign intensity scores to input terms. The output of the model that we’ve adopted ranked at two out of the three presented systems for this task with a Kendall score of 0.475.
Deep wide-field near-infrared survey of the Carina Nebula

(abbreviated) We used HAWK-I at the ESO VLT to produce a near-infrared survey of the Carina Nebula that is deep enough to detect the full low-mass stellar population. The results of a recent deep X-ray survey are used to distinguish between young stars in Carina and background contaminants. We find that the ages of the low-mass stars (derived from color-magnitude diagrams of the invidual cluster in the Carina Nebula) agree with previous age estimates for the massive stars. About 3200 of the X-ray selected stars have masses >= 1 Msun; this number is in good agreement with extrapolations of the field IMF based on the number of high-mass stars and shows that there is no deficit of low-mass stars. The near-infrared excess fractions for the stellar populations in Carina are lower than typical for other, less massive clusters of similar age, suggesting a faster timescale of circumstellar disk dispersal than in the more quiescent regions, most likely due to the very high level of massive star feedback. Narrow-band images reveal six molecular hydrogen jets. However, none of the optical HH objects shows molecular hydrogen emission, suggesting that the jet-driving protostars are located very close to the edges of the globules in which they are embedded. This adds strong support to the scenario that their formation was triggered by the advancing ionization fronts.
Territorial organization of direction-selective ganglion cells in rabbit retina

The On-Off direction-selective (DS) ganglion cells in the rabbit retina comprise four discrete subtypes that orthogonally code the direction of image motion. This study examined the dendritic relationships between different subtypes of On-Off DS cells, which were identified by their distinctive type 1 bistratified (BiS1) morphology following the intracellular injection of a biotinylated tracer or Lucifer yellow under direct microscopic control. The dendrites of BiS1 cells that had closely spaced somata, which presumably comprised subtypes of On-Off DS cells with different preferred directions, were not randomly superimposed but were fasciculated into loose bundles. By contrast, tracer coupling revealed that neighboring On-Off DS cells of one subtype were highly territorial, providing complete coverage of the retina with minimal overlap. This mirrors, on a larger scale, the territorial organization within the dendritic tree of individual DS cells, suggesting that similar interactions shape both the branching pattern and the spatial extent of these neurons. Moreover, the dendrites at the edge of the dendritic field often formed tip-to-shaft or tip-to-tip contacts with dendrites from coupled cells, thus appearing to form closed dendritic loops that may be equivalent to those found within the dendritic tree. Consequently, the dendrites of one subtype are distributed uniformly and economically across the retina. The resulting plexus forms a strikingly regular scaffold on which the presynaptic interneurons generate direction selectivity.
Mr contrast due to intravascular magnetic susceptibility perturbations

A particularly powerful paradigm for functional MR imaging of microvascular hemodynamics incorporates paramagnetic materials that create significant image contrast. These include exogenous (lanthanide chelates) and endogenous (de‐oxygenated hemoglobin) agents for mapping cerebral blood volume and neuronal activity, respectively. Accurate interpretation of these maps requires an understanding of the bio‐physics of susceptibility‐based image contrast. The authors developed a novel Monte Carlo model with which the authors quantified the relationship between microscopic tissue parameters, NMR imaging parameters, and susceptibility contrast in vivo. The authors found vascular permeability to water and the flow of erythrocytes to be relatively unimportant contributors to susceptibility‐induced ΔR2. However, pulse sequence, echo time, and concentration of contrast agent have profound effects on the vessel size dependence of ΔR2. For a model vasculature containing both capillaries and venules, the authors predicted a linear volume fraction dependence for physiological volume changes based on recruitment and dilation, and a concentration dependence that is nonlinear and pulse sequence dependent. Using the model, the authors demonstrated that spin echo functional images have greater microvascular sensitivity than gradient echo images, and that the specifics of the volume fraction and concentration dependence of transverse relaxivity change should allow for robust mapping of relative blood volume. The authors also demonstrated excellent agreement between the predictions of their model and experimental data obtained from the serial injection of superparamagnetic contrast agent in a rat model.
Viscous fluid model-based non-rigid registration incorporating scale space keypoints

Non-rigid registration of monomodal image often takes an important role in image-guided radiotherapy and surgery. Viscous fluid model is widely used to enforce the topological properties on the deformation, and thus constrain the enormous solution space. Intensity-based method is popular in non-rigid registration, but it is sensitive to intensity variations. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm integrating the intensity and feature of images. The local keypoint information extracted by scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) in scale space is incorporated into intensity similarity measures as the body force of viscous fluid model in a Bayesian framework. Experiments were performed on synthetic and clinical images of CT and MR. It is shown that the keypoint information significantly improves fluid model for non-rigid registration in accuracy.
Collaborative Teams: Teachers, Parents, and Allied Health Professionals Supporting Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder in Mainstream Australian Schools

Abstract The unique traits and behaviours of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often present a range of barriers to their educational experiences and development. The present study investigated collaborative partnerships between 3 stakeholders that often support students with ASD: teachers, parents, and allied health professionals (AHPs). With current literature on collaboration between teachers, parents, and AHPs involved in the education of students with ASD predominantly relating to specific skill or knowledge acquisition, there was an insufficient understanding of ‘collaborative processes’ and the factors that benefit or limit effective practice. In the present study, the researchers explored the experiences, processes, and opinions of parents, teachers, and AHPs supporting students with ASD in mainstream Australian primary schools. A total of 129 responses were recorded (41 teachers, 44 parents, and 44 AHPs) through an online survey, and thematic data analysis was used to qualitatively interpret the open-ended questions. The findings highlight the current opportunities and challenges faced by key stakeholders in this important process.
Multi-Directional Distributed Search with Aggregation

Competition and cooperation can boost the performance of search. Both can be implemented with a portfolio of algorithms which run in parallel, give hints to each other and compete for being the first to finish and deliver the solution. In this paper we present a new generic framework for the application of algorithms for distributed constraint satisfaction which makes use of both cooperation and competition. This framework improves the performance of two different standard algorithms by one order of magnitude and can reduce the risk of poor performance by up to three orders of magnitude. We expect our new methods to be similarly beneficial for any tree-based distributed search and describe ways on how to incorporate them.