Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical Evaluation of Percutaneous Caudal Epidural Adhesiolysis With the Racz Technique for Low Back Pain Due to Contained Disc Herniation

Objectives The authors evaluated the effectiveness of percutaneous epidural adhesiolysis (PEA) in patients with low back pain due to contained disc herniation. Patients and Methods Twenty patients with low back pain due to contained disc herniation underwent PEA treatment with the Racz technique. The patients were evaluated for pain score, medication intake, significant pain relief, and complications. Results At three days, one month, three months, and six months after PEA compared to pre-PEA evaluations, the pain scores and medication intake were significantly decreased. Significant pain relief declined from 95% at three days to 75% at six months. Conclusions PEA for low back pain due to contained disc herniation is a safe and effective procedure. Therefore, it may be considered as an option for treatment before invasive operations are performed.
A Secure-Enhanced Data Aggregation Based on ECC in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation is an important technique for reducing the energy consumption of sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, compromised aggregators may forge false values as the aggregated results of their child nodes in order to conduct stealthy attacks or steal other nodes' privacy. This paper proposes a Secure-Enhanced Data Aggregation based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (SEDA-ECC). The design of SEDA-ECC is based on the principles of privacy homomorphic encryption (PH) and divide-and-conquer. An aggregation tree disjoint method is first adopted to divide the tree into three subtrees of similar sizes, and a PH-based aggregation is performed in each subtree to generate an aggregated subtree result. Then the forged result can be identified by the base station (BS) by comparing the aggregated count value. Finally, the aggregated result can be calculated by the BS according to the remaining results that have not been forged. Extensive analysis and simulations show that SEDA-ECC can achieve the highest security level on the aggregated result with appropriate energy consumption compared with other asymmetric schemes.
Urban surveillance systems: from the laboratory to the commercial world

Research in the surveillance domain was confined for years in the military domain. Recently, as military spending for this kind of research was reduced and the technology matured, the attention of the research and development community turned to commercial applications of surveillance. In this paper we describe a state-of-the-art monitoring system developed by a corporate R&D lab in cooperation with the corresponding security business units. It represents a sizable effort to transfer some of the best results produced by computer vision research into a viable commercial product. Our description spans both practical and technical issues. From the practical point of view we analyze the state of the commercial security market, typical cultural differences between the research team and the business team and the perspective of the potential users of the technology. These are important issues that have to be dealt with or the surveillance technology will remain in the lab for a long time. From the technical point of view we analyze our algorithmic and implementation choices. We describe the improvements we introduced to the original algorithms reported in the literature in response to some problems that arose during field testing. We also provide extensive experimental results that highlight the strong points and some weaknesses of the prototype system.
Non-documentary burqa pictures on the internet

The article analyses non-documentary burqa pictures that have been published on the internet. A burqa is understood in the article to mean a cloak that has a mesh for seeing through and covers almost all of the woman’s body. The burqa is a specific form of veiling, but is distinctly different from most of the other forms of head cover or female dress in Muslim cultures. Pictures of burqas can be found on the internet especially in relation to the defeated Taliban regime of Afghanistan. However, the spectrum of pictures of burqas on the internet is wider than this. The article discusses whether the images reproduce the burqa as a symbol of women’s oppression and subordination and how such meanings are made with the pictorial material. The article focuses on examining non-documentary pictures from such perspectives as representations of the body and relations between the East and the West. The reason for choosing these themes is that whereas the documentary pictures of the burqa on the internet make the body simultaneously nearly invisible, but significant, many of the non-documentary pictures of burqas create an intertextual setting for the pictorial analysis and make the body an object of significance. The embodiment in the pictures of burqas can be interpreted within the context of western gender discourse, to which the concealing burqa is in a troubled relationship. Although the pictures of burqas easily symbolically maintain categorical conceptions of women’s subordination, non-documentary pictures are used in order to criticize western politics and their use of cultural stereotypes. Such pictures are ambivalent and this makes their absolute interpretation troubled, although the symbolism of subordination associated with the burqa may remain unchanged. Unresolved ambivalence of representations opens, however, a space for critical questioning of cultural stereotypes.
Median Filtering in Constant Time

The median filter is one of the basic building blocks in many image processing situations. However, its use has long been hampered by its algorithmic complexity O(tau) of in the kernel radius. With the trend toward larger images and proportionally larger filter kernels, the need for a more efficient median filtering algorithm becomes pressing. In this correspondence, a new, simple, yet much faster, algorithm exhibiting O(1) runtime complexity is described and analyzed. It is compared and benchmarked against previous algorithms. Extensions to higher dimensional or higher precision data and an approximation to a circular kernel are presented, as well.
AFRODiTE: A FluoRescence Lidar Simulator for Underwater Object DeTEction Applications

A FluoRescence lidar simulator for underwater Object DeTEction applications (AFRODiTE) is proposed to generate inelastic backscattering signals returned from a water column both in the presence and in the absence of an underwater object. The simulator models the interaction of the transmitted laser pulse with the water medium, an underwater object, and the bottom. Specifically, AFRODiTE enables simulation of fluorescence backscattering signals for a variety of light detection and ranging (lidar) system characteristics, acquisition geometries, and water environmental conditions. With respect to models for the elastic backscattering lidar signals developed in the literature, AFRODiTE may be used to test and improve not only underwater object detection methodologies based on time-resolved lidar waveform analysis but also object recognition methodologies based on spectral analysis of the object fluorescence spectral signature. Experimental comparison with real signals measured by an advanced prototypal fluorescence lidar in a laboratory artificial water column shows that AFRODiTE is effective at reproducing the inelastic backscattering signals received by a lidar system from an underwater object. Furthermore, simulations of the received signals obtained reproducing immersion of objects in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the North Atlantic Ocean highlight AFRODiTE potential and flexibility for generating fluorescence lidar signals acquired in different operational scenarios on the basis of various system parameters, acquisition geometries, and water environments.
Relations of Moral Reasoning and Vicarious Emotion to Young Children's Prosocial Behavior toward Peers and Adults.

Four- and 5-year-old (primarily) Euro-American children (40 girls, 34 boys) participated in a study of moral reasoning, vicarious emotional responding, and prosocial behavior. Children's prosocial behavior and self-reported and facial reactions of vicarious emotion were obtained in response to 2 peer distress films and 2 adult distress simulations. Moral reasoning was assessed with prosocial moral dilemmas. Children's emotional responses were found to be related to analogous types of moral reasoning and were associated in expected ways with helping of peers and adults. Higher levels of moral reasoning were positively related to prosocial behavior. Children high in both other-oriented moral cognitions and sympathy were most helpful toward peers. The pattern of findings suggested that linkages are being formed in the preschool years not only between other-oriented affect and cognitions but also between those that are self-focused in nature. Affective empathy and higher level moral reasoning frequently have been theoretically and empirically linked with children's and adults' prosocial behavior (Batson, 1991; Eisenberg, 1986; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987). However, despite associations of both to prosocial behavior, neither the relation between empathy and moral reasoning nor their potential role in jointly predicting prosocial action has received much empirical attention. In research on the association of empathy to prosocial behavior, it is essential to distinguish between other-oriented and selforiented vicarious emotional responding. In current developmental and social-psychological work (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1990; Hoffman, 1982a), empathy has been defined as an affecrive response resulting from another's state or condition that is the same or very similar to the other's emotional state (e.g., selfreported or facial indexes of sadness, happiness, or concern). Moreover, empathy frequently may elicit other vicariously induced reactions. When accompanied by a cognitive sense of the other as distinct from the self, empathic arousal may lead to a feeling of compassion or sympathy for the other (e.g., otheroriented self-reports or facial indexes of concern for the other). Conversely, when empathic arousal becomes too intense, it may
A Tagging-style Reordering Model for Phrase-based SMT

For current statistical machine translation system, reordering is still a major problem for language pairs like Chinese-English, where the source and target language have significant word order differences. In this paper we propose a novel tagging-style reordering model. Our model converts the reordering problem into a sequence labeling problem, i.e. a tagging task. For the given source sentence, we assign each source token a label which contains the reordering information for that token. We also design an unaligned word tag so that the unaligned word phenomenon is automatically covered in the proposed model. Our reordering model is conditioned on the whole source sentence. Hence it is able to catch long dependencies in the source sentence. The decoder makes use of the tagging information as soft constraints so that in the test phase (during translation) our model is very efficient. The model training on large scale tasks requests notably amounts of computational resources. We carried out experiments on five Chinese-English NIST tasks trained with BOLT data. Results show that our model improves the baseline system by 0.98 BLEU 1.21 TER on average.
Predicting Institutional Sexual Misconduct by Adult Male Sex Offenders

Although the Static-99R has been found to be a robust measure of long-term risk to reoffend among adult male sex offenders, few studies have investigated the relationship between Static-99R scores and institutional (i.e., prison) behavior. The current study sought to address this gap in the research by testing the ability of the Static-99 and Static-99R to predict five types of institutional misconduct: (a) sexual, (b) violent (nonsexual), (c) nonviolent (nonsexual), (d) drug-related, and (e) any nonsexual. Results indicate that the Static-99/99R may be useful as predictors of institutional misconduct and, therefore, as a risk classification measure for prisons to protect both staff and inmates and improve institutional environments.
Strategies for Improving Fidelity in the National Evidence-Based Practices Project

Background: The National Evidence-Based Practices (EBPs) Project developed and tested a model for facilitating the implementation of five psychosocial EBPs for adults with severe mental illness in the United States. Methods: The implementation model was tested in 53 sites in 8 states. In each site, one of the five EBPs was adopted for implementation and then studied for a 2-year period using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Findings: At baseline, none of the sites had programs attaining high fidelity. Four factors were identified as influencing fidelity: (a) EBP-specific factors, (b) governmental factors, (c) leadership factors, and (d) fidelity review factors. Conclusion: A multipronged implementation strategy was effective in achieving high fidelity in over half of the sites seeking to implement a new EBP.
Three-dimensional potential distribution model in channel of small geometry MOSFET with Gauss impurity distribution

In this paper the original three-dimensional potential distribution model in the channel of a small geometry MOSFET with Gauss impurity distribution is developed. By using the proposed model, simulations were performed. Obtained results are graphically presented and discussed. This model can be used for small-geometry MOSFET parameters optimization.
User action interpretation for personalized content optimization in recommender systems

User interaction plays a vital role in recommender systems. Previous studies on algorithmic recommender systems have mainly focused on modeling techniques and feature development. Traditionally, implicit user feedback or explicit user ratings on the recommended items form the basis for designing and training of recommendation algorithms. But user interactions in real-world Web applications (e.g., a portal website with different recommendation modules in the interface) are unlikely to be as ideal as those assumed by previously proposed models. To address this problem, we build an online learning framework for personalized recommendation. We argue that appropriate user action interpretation is critical for a recommender system. The main contribution in this paper is an approach of interpreting users' actions for the online learning to achieve better item relevance estimation. Our experiments on the large-scale data from a commercial Web recommender system demonstrate significant improvement in terms of a precision metric over the baseline model that does not incorporate user action interpretation. The efficacy of this new algorithm is also proved by the online test results on real user traffic.
Microstructural White Matter Changes in Carriers of the Dyt1 Gene Mutation

We tested the hypothesis that the DYT1 genotype is associated with a disorder of anatomical connectivity involving primarily the sensorimotor cortex. We used diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI) to assess the microstructure of white matter pathways in mutation carriers and control subjects. Fractional anisotropy (FA), a measure of axonal integrity and coherence, was reduced (p < 0.005) in the subgyral white matter of the sensorimotor cortex of DYT1 carriers. Abnormal anatomical connectivity of the supplementary motor area may contribute to the susceptibility of DYT1 carriers to develop clinical manifestations of dystonia. Ann Neurol 2004
Crime Victims and the Social Services: Social Workers' Viewpoint

The aim of this article is to analyse how social workers in the social services describe crime victims and their role in supporting these victims. Based on focus groups with social workers in the social services, it is established that social workers discriminate between a categorical understanding of crime victims and an assessment of individuals in need. The categorical understanding of crime victims is connected to weakness and innocence, and the discussions are constructed with a focus on women and children. However, when the social workers move beyond this idea and describe individual victims of crime they have met, they attribute a more complicated picture and acknowledge the complexity of crime and victimization. The social workers give themselves a vague role regarding support to victims of crime. They consider themselves as able to connect individuals in need with helping resources, but they do not regard themselves as resources in this area. According to the social workers, an individual should not receive support from the social services just because he or she is categorized by them as a victim of crime. One conclusion is that the category ‘crime victims’ has not gained acceptance among the social workers.
Liars and Saviors in a Sentiment Annotated Corpus of Comments to Political Debates

We investigate the expression of opinions about human entities in user-generated content (UGC). A set of 2,800 online news comments (8,000 sentences) was manually annotated, following a rich annotation scheme designed for this purpose. We conclude that the challenge in performing opinion mining in such type of content is correctly identifying the positive opinions, because (i) they are much less frequent than negative opinions and (ii) they are particularly exposed to verbal irony. We also show that the recognition of human targets poses additional challenges on mining opinions from UGC, since they are frequently mentioned by pronouns, definite descriptions and nicknames.
DroidDisintegrator: Intra-Application Information Flow Control in Android Apps

In mobile platforms and their app markets, controlling app permissions and preventing abuse of private information are crucial challenges. Information Flow Control (IFC) is a powerful approach for formalizing and answering user concerns such as: "Does this app send my geolocation to the Internet? " Yet despite intensive research efforts, IFC has not been widely adopted in mainstream programming practice. Abstract We observe that the typical structure of Android apps offers an opportunity for a novel and effective application of IFC. In Android, an app consists of a collection of a few dozen "components", each in charge of some high-level functionality. Most components do not require access to most resources. These components are a natural and effective granularity at which to apply IFC (as opposed to the typical process-level or language-level granularity). By assigning different permission labels to each component, and limiting information flow between components, it is possible to express and enforce IFC constraints. Yet nuances of the Android platform, such as its multitude of discretionary (and somewhat arcane) communication channels, raise challenges in defining and enforcing component boundaries. Abstract We build a system, DroidDisintegrator, which demonstrates the viability of component-level IFC for expressing and controlling app behavior. DroidDisintegrator uses dynamic analysis to generate IFC policies for Android apps, repackages apps to embed these policies, and enforces the policies at runtime. We evaluate DroidDisintegrator on dozens of apps.
INFORMATION-PROCESSING: CHOICE REACTION TIMES OF FIRST-AND THIRD-GRADE STUDENTS FOR TWO TYPES OF ASSOCIATIONS

The primary intent of the study was to investigate the effect of amount of prior experience upon the slope of the function relating choice reaction time (RT) to stimulus uncertainty. This aim was implemented by comparing the performance of firstand third-grade students on a numeral-naming task with size of stimulus set varied. Although reaction latencies for thirdgrade students were significantly shorter than those for first-grade students, for neither group was an increase in the amount of information per numeral associated with an increase in choice RT. An explanation of the latter result in terms of the absence of response competition for numeral-numeral associations is examined.
Architectural Support for Software Transactional Memory

Transactional memory provides a concurrency control mechanism that avoids many of the pitfalls of lock-based synchronization. Researchers have proposed several different implementations of transactional memory, broadly classified into software transactional memory (STM) and hardware transactional memory (HTM). Both approaches have their pros and cons: STMs provide rich and flexible transactional semantics on stock processors but incur significant overheads. HTMs, on the other hand, provide high performance but implement restricted semantics or add significant hardware complexity. This paper is the first to propose architectural support for accelerating transactions executed entirely in software. We propose instruction set architecture (ISA) extensions and novel hardware mechanisms that improve STM performance. We adapt a high-performance STM algorithm supporting rich transactional semantics to our ISA extensions (called hardware accelerated software transactional memory or HASTM). HASTM accelerates fully virtualized nested transactions, supports language integration, and provides both object-based and cache-line based conflict detection. We have implemented HASTM in an accurate multi-core IA32 simulator. Our simulation results show that (1) HASTM single-thread performance is comparable to a conventional HTM implementation; (2) HASTM scaling is comparable to a STM implementation; and (3) HASTM is resilient to spurious aborts and can scale better than HTM in a multi-core setting. Thus, HASTM provides the flexibility and rich semantics of STM, while giving the performance of HTM
Optimizing Routes with Safety and Environmental Criteria in Transportation Management in Spain: A Case Study

The object of logistic management is to optimise the whole value chain of the distribution of goods and merchandise. One of the main aspects of such an analysis is the optimisation of vehicle routes to deliver final products to customers. There are many algorithms to optimise the related vehicle routing problem. The objective function of that problem usually involves distance, cost, number of vehicles, or profits. This study also takes safety and environmental costs into account. Thus, the authors develop variants to traditional heuristic algorithms, in which they include the traditional costs along with safety and environmental cost estimates for real scenarios in Spain. This methodology is called ASEC (Algorithms with Safety and Environmental Criteria). These considerations raise the value of the global objective function, but permit a more realistic cost estimate that includes not only the internal costs involved in the problem but also the related externalities. Finally, real cases are discussed, and solutions are offered using the new ASEC methodology.
A Phasor-Domain Study of Lock Range of Harmonic Oscillators With Multiple Injections

This brief presents a phasor-domain study of the lock range of harmonic oscillators with multiple injections. The intrinsic relation between the lock range of harmonic oscillators with multiple injections and that with a single injection is obtained. We show that harmonic oscillators with multiple injections exhibit a larger lock range as compared with those with single injection if the phase of the injection signals is properly chosen. We further show that the maximum lock range provided by dual injections is twice that provided by a single injection. The findings are verified using $LC$ oscillators with a single injection and dual injections designed in IBM 130-nm 1.2-V CMOS technology.