Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ordered depth-first layouts for ray tracing

We present an ordered depth-first tree layout for ray tracing. Among two child nodes, a child node with the larger surface area is stored next to its parent node. Hence, the probabilities that a ray accesses to the same cache line increase. Our approach can be easily and widely used for various ray tracing systems with very small overheads, as it is based on existing depth-first layouts.
A 128 X 128 120db 30mw asynchronous vision sensor that responds to relative intensity change

A vision sensor responds to temporal contrast with asynchronous output. Each pixel independently and continuously quantizes changes in log intensity. The 128times128-pixel chip has 120dB illumination operating range and consumes 30mW. Pixels respond in <100mus at 1klux scene illumination with <10% contrast-threshold FPN
AN EVOLUTIONARY LEAP IN CREDIT PORTFOLIO RISK MODELING

PCT No. PCT/GB94/00990 Sec. 371 Date Apr. 1, 1996 Sec. 102(e) Date Apr. 1, 1996 PCT Filed May 9, 1993 PCT Pub. No. WO94/26418 PCT Pub. Date Nov. 24, 1994A super-conducting magnet includes a vessel (8) defining a separation zone through which material to be separated passes. The magnet includes a super-conducting coil (4) located in the vessel and surrounding the separation zone for providing a magnetic field therein. A tube (6) holds the coil and liquid helium to provide a liquid helium reservoir around the coil. At least one radiation shield (12) is positioned between the tube and the vessel. The magnet is a closed system with no helium circulation from the reservoir to outside the vessel and back and the tube is sized to provide a reservoir of sufficient capacity for operation without helium addition for a number of months, preferably a year. A helium reliquifier (46) is positioned in the neck assembly (16), and a non-return valve (49) is located on the neck assembly for release of helium gas from the reservoir.
Locus in Salmonid Fishes Comparative Genome Analysis of the Primary Sex-Determining

Access the most recent version at doi: 2003 13: 272-280 Genome Res. Taggart, Richard Powell, William Davidson and Roy G. Danzmann McGowan, Moira M. Ferguson, Ruth B. Phillips, Jake Stein, René Guyomard, Margaret Cairney, John B. Rachael A. Woram, Karim Gharbi, Takashi Sakamoto, Bjorn Hoyheim, Lars-Erik Holm, Kerry Naish, Colin Locus in Salmonid Fishes Comparative Genome Analysis of the Primary Sex-Determining
Pragmatic Beliefs and Overconfidence

Several studies indicate that humans are overconfident about their own (relative) abilities. We propose a notion of pragmatic beliefs, and show through an example that this concept can shed light on why overconfidence emerges. Through the example, we also shed light on the idea that that ’bounded rationality’ may arise endogenously in a game - without assuming complexity costs.
The Joint Benefits of Observed and Unobserved Punishment: Comment to Unobserved Punishment Supports Cooperation

Laboratory experiments by Fudenberg and Pathak (2010), and Vyrastekova, Funaki and Takeuch (2008) show that punishment is able to sustain cooperation in groups even when it is observed only in the end of the interaction sequence. Our results demonstrate that the real power of unobserved punishment is unleashed when combined with observable punishment. Providing both unobserved and observed punishment strongly enhances cooperation within groups – strikingly, even with less intense sanctioning. This surprising result underlines the importance of the coexistence of observed and unobserved sanctioning mechanisms in social dilemmas.
Joint Training and Decoding Using Virtual Nodes for Cascaded Segmentation and Tagging Tasks

Many sequence labeling tasks in NLP require solving a cascade of segmentation and tagging subtasks, such as Chinese POS tagging, named entity recognition, and so on. Traditional pipeline approaches usually suffer from error propagation. Joint training/decoding in the cross-product state space could cause too many parameters and high inference complexity. In this paper, we present a novel method which integrates graph structures of two sub-tasks into one using virtual nodes, and performs joint training and decoding in the factorized state space. Experimental evaluations on CoNLL 2000 shallow parsing data set and Fourth SIGHAN Bakeoff CTB POS tagging data set demonstrate the superiority of our method over cross-product, pipeline and candidate reranking approaches.
Indirect & Displaced Aggression: The Role of Comparison Based Traits and Cognitive Vulnerabilities

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iii DEDICATION . iv TABLE OF CONTENTS . v LIST OF TABLES . viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION . 1 Indirect and Displaced Aggression . 1 Comparison Based Personality Traits . 4 Contingent Self-Esteem . 4 Dispositional Envy . 5 Cognitive Vulnerabilities . 6 Anger Rumination . 6 Fear of Negative Evaluation . 8 Aggression and Gender . 9 The Present Study . 10 CHAPTER II METHOD . 13 Participants . 13 Instruments . 13 Participant Demographic Questionnaire . 14 vi Dispositional Envy Scale (DES) . 14 Contingent Self-Esteem Scale (CSES) . 14 Displaced Aggression Questionnaire (DAQ). 15 Indirect Aggression Scales – Aggression Version (IAS-A) . 15 Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale – Brief (FNEB) . 16 Anger Rumination Scale (ARS). 16 Procedure . 17 CHAPTER III RESULTS . 18 Data Clean-Up and Preliminary Analyses . 18 Primary Analyses . 21 Variable . 22 Variable . 23 Exploratory Analyses . 24 CHAPTER IV DISCUSSION . 32 Indirect Aggression . 33 Displaced Aggression . 36 Limitations and Future Directions . 38 APPENDIX A Study Questionnaires . 43 Participant Demographic Questionnaire . 43 Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (BFNE). 43 vii Dispositional Envy Scale (DES) . 44 Displaced Aggression Questionnaire (DAQ)) . 45 Indirect Aggression Scale – Aggressor Version (IAS-A) . 47 Contingent Self-Esteem Scale (CSES) . 49 Anger Rumination Scale (ARS). 50 APPENDIX B – IRB Approval Letter . 52 APPENDIX C CONSENT FORM . 53 REFERENCES . 57
On latency estimation in wormhole-switched networks

This paper compares unbuffered wormhole-switched networks and buffered packet-switched networks with respect t o estimation of expected packet latency. Simulation experiments show that the variance of the natural sample-mean estimator is significantly larger i n the wormholeswitched case. An increased estimator variance is an eviden ce of a harder estimation problem. In particular, it leads to larger confidence intervals. The increased variance is attributed to the in-line blocking property of wormhole-switched networks. This property results from lack of smoothing buffers at the switching points. The overall effect is toincrease both the variance of individual latency recordings and also the a mount of serial correlation in the sequence of latency samples. The performance of two frequently used variance estimatorsis assessed in this paper. Estimating variance by assuming independentsamples fails for unbuffered networks. A batched-means method do work provided the batch-size is large enough. However, the sample-size has to be rather large to ensure that the effect of serial correlation is negligibl e. We argue that more sophisticated variance estimation methods, like spec tral-based methods, should be considered for wormhole-switched networks. Keywords—Wormhole-switching, performance evaluation, latency, e stimation methods, simulation
A SECURE BILLING SERVICE WITH TWO-FACTOR USER AUTHENTICATION IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Recently, Das proposed a secure two-factor user authentication scheme based on hash function, which is efficient enough to be implemented on most of the target resource-constrained devices, such as low-computation smart cards and low-power sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). As Das claimed, the proposed scheme can resist attacks and threats such as many logged-in users with the same login identity, stolen-verifier, guessing, impersonation and replay. Unfortunately, we find that Das’s authentication scheme is insecure against attacks of unknown user, password guessing and masquerade. In this paper, based on the framework of Das’s two-factor user authentication, we introduce a secure billing service, and analyze our extended scheme on how to achieve imposter prevention, as well as resist against the drawbacks of Das’s scheme.
Gendered Language on the Economics Job Market Rumors Forum

This paper examines the existence of an unwelcoming or stereotypical culture using evidence on how women and men are portrayed in anonymous discussions on the Economics Job Market Rumors forum (EJMR). I use a Lasso-Logistic model to measure gendered language in EJMR postings, identifying the words that are most strongly associated with discussions about one gender or the other. I find that the words most predictive of a post about a woman are typically about physical appearance or personal information, whereas those most predictive of a post about a man tend to focus on academic or professional characteristics.
A Sweep Line Algorithm for Multiple Nearest Neighbour Queries

We introduce a novel algorithm for solving the nearest neighbour problem when the query points are known in advance, which is based on Fortune’s plane sweep algorithm. The crucial idea is to use the wavefront for solving the nearest neighbour queries as the Voronoi diagram is being computed, instead of storing it in an auxiliary data structure, as the algorithm presented by Lee and Yang does, and then querying that data structure. Although our algorithm is not optimal in terms of its worst-case behaviour, it runs in O(m logm) expected time, where m is the total number of points (sites and query points). Experimental results show that it outperforms the algorithm of Lee and Yang, provided the number of query points does not exceed four times the number of sites.
Proxy Based Parallel Data Transfer Mechanism in Grid Environment

This paper proposes a novel parallel data transfer mechanism to improve the performance of data transfer in grid environment. It utilizes the servers distributed in grid system and selects some of them as the proxy servers. It introduces the method of how to select the proxy server. Then data are divided into several parts and sent through the selected proxy servers with different physical links. By that, it can effectively improve the performance of data transfer.
Efficient location selection for computations of expensive Log-Gabor features using directional enhancement: For robust localization of lane markings in cluttered scenes

Vision-based estimation tasks, such as lane marking localization, can be more robust to noise and false signals when utilizing pattern recognition and machine learning techniques as opposed to only low level computer vision operations. Computationally expensive features like Gabor filter responses can be very robust to changes to illumination and other noise. However, machine learning techniques can also be prohibitively slow for time critical applications if such computationally expensive features are calculated for all pixel locations in an input scene. We describe a method to pick the most likely locations for which to compute robust features in order to identify locations of lane markings in highly cluttered scenes. Locations for which features are computed are selected using a novel iterative directional enhancement and thresholding on the perspective image. This drastically reduces the number of locations for which expensive features have to be computed, thus improving latency while retaining precision of the machine learning method. Our method is thus a cascaded classifier scheme that uses low level computer vision operations followed by pattern recognition techniques. We evaluate the performance of our system by checking the overlap of estimates of left and right lane boundaries and lane midline with corresponding annotations.
Automatic Classification of ECG Signal for Heart Disease Diagnosis using morphological features

An Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a test that records the electrical activity of the heart to locate the abnormalities. Automatic ECG classification is an emerging tool for the cardiologists in medical diagnosis for effective treatments. In this paper, we propose efficient techniques to automatically classify the ECG signals into normal and arrhythmia affected (abnormal) category. For these categories morphological features are extracted to exemplify the ECG signal. Probabilistic neural network (PNN) is the modeling technique engaged to capture the distribution of the feature vectors for classification and the performance is calculated. ECG time series signals in this work are collected from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The proposed an accurately classify and discriminate the difference between normal ECG signal and arrhythmia affected signal with 96.5% accuracy.
Protein Secondary Structure Prediction Using Support Vector Machines and a New Feature Representation

Knowledge of the secondary structure and solvent accessibility of a protein plays a vital role in the prediction of fold, and eventually the tertiary structure of the protein. A challenging issue of predicting protein secondary structure from sequence alone is addressed. Support vector machines (SVM) are employed for the classification and the SVM outputs are converted to posterior probabilities for multi-class classification. The effect of using Chou–Fasman parameters and physico-chemical parameters along with evolutionary information in the form of position specific scoring matrix (PSSM) is analyzed. These proposed methods are tested on the RS126 and CB513 datasets. A new dataset is curated (PSS504) using recent release of CATH. On the CB513 dataset, sevenfold cross-validation accuracy of 77.9% was obtained using the proposed encoding method. A new method of calculating the reliability index based on the number of votes and the Support Vector Machine decision value is also proposed. A blind test on the EVA dataset gives an average Q3 accuracy of 74.5% and ranks in top five protein structure prediction methods. Supplementary material including datasets are available on .
The Effect of Intra-Arterial Angiotensin II on the Hepatic Tumor to Non-Tumor Blood Flow Ratio for Radioembolization: A Systematic Review

Purpose Treatment efficacy of intra-arterial radioembolization for liver tumors depends on the selective targeting of tumorous tissue. Recent investigations have demonstrated that tumors may receive inadequate doses of radioactivity after radioembolization, due to unfavorable tumor to non-tumor (T/N) uptake ratios of radioactive microspheres. Hepatic arterial infusion of the vasoconstrictor angiotensin II (AT-II) is reported to increase the T/N blood flow ratio. The purpose of this systematic review was to provide a comprehensive overview of the effect of hepatic arterial AT-II on T/N blood flow ratio in patients with hepatic malignancies, and determine its clinical value for radioembolization. Methods This review was conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. A structured search was performed in the PubMed, EMBASE and Cochrane databases. Only studies that presented data on T/N ratios before and after infusion of AT-II into the hepatic artery, in human patients with hepatic malignancies, were selected. Median T/N ratios before, during and after AT-II infusion, and the median T/N ratio improvement factor were extracted from the selected articles. All data on systemic blood pressure measurements and clinical symptoms were also extracted. Results The search identified 524 titles of which 5 studies, including a total of 71 patients were considered relevant. Median T/N ratios before infusion of AT-II ranged from 0.4 to 3.4. All studies observed a substantial improvement of the T/N ratio after AT-II infusion, with median improvement factors ranging from 1.8 to 3.1. A transitory increase of systemic blood pressure was observed during AT-II infusion. Conclusions Infusion of AT-II into the hepatic artery leads to an increase of the tumor to non-tumor blood flow ratio, as measured by T/N uptake ratios. Clinical trials are warranted to assess safety aspects, optimal administration strategy and impact on treatment efficacy during radioembolization.
Spontaneous privacy-aware location sharing

We propose a privacy conserving protocol to share location information with groups of trusted agents (e.g. friends) using a mobile device. All information published by the user is cryptographically secured and authenticated. Furthermore, we employ methods to make it hard for third parties to derive a user's relationships from communication patterns. Users can create multicast groups spontaneously and maintain these efficiently. In contrast to previous solutions, our approach does not rely on any dedicated or trusted network infrastructure for coordination or communication. For our prototype implementation messages are pushed to the listening group members with low overhead, by using existing publicly available and accessible communication infrastructure (IRC). Finally, we present a cost and privacy analysis of the proposed protocol.
Comparing the Fears of Children With and Without Significant Disabilities

Although research on children’s fears is available, there is a gap in the literature concerning the fears of children with disabilities. We used the Fear Survey Schedule for Children (FSSC-AM; Burnham, 2005) to examine age, racial, and gender differences of 404 children (ages 7–20), including 50% with disabilities and 50% without disabilities. Significant fear differences were reported across gender, age, race, and disability. For example, children with intellectual disabilities had more fears related to safety. Both younger and older children with moderate to profound disabilities had significantly more fear than their peers without disabilities. This study broadened the examination of fears in children with moderate, severe, and profound disabilities.
Alteration of synergistic muscle activity following neuromuscular electrical stimulation of one muscle

The aim of the study was to determine muscle activation of the m. triceps surae during maximal voluntary contractions (MVCs) following neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) of the m. gastrocnemius lateralis (GL). The participants (n = 10) performed three MVC during pretest, posttest, and recovery, respectively. Subsequent to the pretest, the GL was stimulated by NMES. During MVC, force and surface electromyography (EMG) of the GL, m. gastrocnemius medialis (GM), and m. soleus (SOL) were measured. NMES of GL induced no significant decline (3%) in force. EMG activity of the GL decreased significantly to 81% (P < 0.05), whereas EMG activity of the synergistic SOL increased to 112% (P < 0.01). The GM (103%, P = 1.00) remained unaltered. Decreased EMG activity in the GL was most likely caused by failure of the electrical propagation at its muscle fiber membrane. The decline of EMG activity in GL was compensated by increased EMG activity of SOL during MVC. It is suggested that these compensatory effects are caused by central contributions induced by NMES.
A novel scheme to interconnect multiple frequency hopping channels into an ad hoc network

Frequency hopping radios have very attractive features to be used as PAN links, but their use in ad hoc networking is problematic because of the difficulty to synchronize the channels and coordinate transmission attempts. We propose a novel mechanism to interconnect multiple frequency hopping channels into an ad hoc network based on an adapted version of CSMA/CA. The performance of the proposal is investigated using analytical and simulation tools. By using multiple channels, we achieve significant improvement in aggregate throughput despite the penalty of switching between channels. We show how this performance penalty can be decreased by grouping devices based on the traffic pattern.
Do software categories impact coupling metrics?

Software metrics is a valuable mechanism to assess the quality of software systems. Metrics can help the automated analysis of the growing data available in software repositories. Coupling metrics is a kind of software metrics that have been extensively used since the seventies to evaluate several software properties related to maintenance, evolution and reuse tasks. For example, several works have shown that we can use coupling metrics to assess the reusability of software artifacts available in repositories. However, thresholds for software metrics to indicate adequate coupling levels are still a matter of discussion. In this paper, we investigate the impact of software categories on the coupling level of software systems. We have found that different categories may have different levels of coupling, suggesting that we need special attention when comparing software systems in different categories and when using predefined thresholds already available in the literature.
Topological stacking grayscale thinning for edge detection and real-time applications

In this paper, it is introduced a low computational cost technique for grayscale thinning, being also capable of thinning binary images. The technique uses an iterative procedure that constructs a topological stack of eroded and smoothed images, on which the neighborhood related local maxima pixels are morphologically thinned. For grayscale intensity saturated edges, or binary edges, the topological stacking successfully turns the maximally inscribed pixels into local maxima. This procedure guarantees one pixel wide line-drawing for the skeletons and removes distortions. Tests on Berkeley Segmentation Dataset and Benchmark showed the proposed thinning achieved better scores than its competitors regarding post-processing thinning for edge detection, being suitable for real-time applications.
A new algebraic approach to finding all simple paths and cycles in undirected graphs

Finding all simple paths and cycles in undirected graphs is a generic problem that covers a wide range of research areas. The problem has been discussed only to a minor extent in recent years. This paper investigates the problem and provides a necessary and sufficient condition for simple paths and cycles. With the theory of the semi-tensor product, a necessary condition for simple paths and cycles is then proposed to reduce the search space. Based on the above-mentioned results , a new algebraic algorithm to find all simple paths and cycles in undirected graphs is presented. The algorithm involves only algebraic operations, reduces the search space, and decreases the computational complexity. An illustrative example is finally given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented algorithm.
That Elusive Elasticity: A Long-Panel Approach to Estimating the Capital-Labor Substitution Elasticity

The elasticity of substitution between capital and labor features prominently in several areas of economic research. However, a consensus estimate remains elusive. We develop an estimation strategy that filters panel data in an original way and avoids several pitfalls - difficult-to-specify dynamics, transitory time-series variation, and positively sloped supply schedules - inherent in investment equations that can bias the estimated elasticity. Results are based on an extensive panel containing 1,860 manufacturing and non-manufacturing firms. Our model generates a precisely estimated elasticity of approximately 0.40. The method developed here may prove useful in estimating other structural parameters from panel datasets.