Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Floer homology groups in hyperkähler geometry

In this paper we outline the construction of a hyperkähler analogue of symplectic Floer homology [6, 7, 8]. The theory is a based on the gradient flow of the hypersymplectic action functional on the space of maps from a suitable 3-manifold M to a hyperkähler manifold X. The gradient flow lines satisfy a nonlinear analogue of the Dirac equation and can also be viewed as hyperkähler analogues of holomorphic curves. If the target manifold X is flat the analysis in symplectic Floer theory can be adapted to the hyperkähler setting as explained below. The full details are given in [16]. To extend the theory to the non-flat case one must deal with new bubbling and compactness phenomena. We assume throughout that X is a hyperkähler manifold with complex structures I, J,K and symplectic forms ω1, ω2, ω3. We also assume that M is a compact oriented 3-manifold equipped with a volume form σ ∈ Ω3(M) and a positive frame v1, v2, v3 ∈ Vect(M) of the tangent bundle. Associated to these data is a natural 1-form on the space F := C(M,X) of smooth functions f : M → X defined by
Weighted SIFT feature learning with Hamming distance for face recognition

Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) feature has been successfully utilized for face recognition for its tolerance to the changes of image scaling, rotation and distortion. However, a big concern on the use of original SIFT feature for face recognition is SIFT feature's high dimensionality which leads to slow image matching. Meanwhile, large memory capacity is required to store high dimensional SIFT features. Aiming to find an efficient approach to solve these issues, we propose a new integrated method for face recognition in this paper. The new method consists of two novel functional modules in which a projection function transforms the original SIFT features into a low dimensional Hamming feature space while each bit of the Hamming descriptor is ranked based on their discrimination power. Furthermore, a weighting function assigns different weights to the correctly matched features based on their matching times. Our proposed face recognition method has been applied on two benchmark facial image datasets: ORL and Yale datasets. The experimental results have shown that the new method is able to produce good image recognition rate with much improved computational speed.
Prospects and Challenges of Corporate Governance in Ghana

The relevance of corporate governance principles in the management of corporate organisations cannot be underestimated. The increasing influence of principles of corporate governance across the globe has been greatly linked to the recent corporate frauds and scandals. These frauds and scandals largely resulted from the failure of authorities of countries to effectively implement the legal and regulatory frameworks pertaining to corporate governance. Ghana is archetypal in regards to the failure of authorities to enforce the laws and regulations in relation to corporate governance. During the enforcement of the laws and regulations of corporate governance, some vitally important issues are either overlooked or deliberately deserted. This paper attempts to examine the legal and regulatory framework of Ghana in regards to corporate governance and points out the importance of complying with good corporate governance. It also highlights prevailing issues of corporate governance practice in Ghana. It finally makes some recommendations, which are considered the major contribution of this paper.
Design , Learning , Collaboration and New Media — A CoEvolutionary HCI Perspective

This paper focuses on creating a new understanding of design, learning and collaboration (as fundamental human activities) and their support with innovative computational media and technologies. A coevolutionary HCI perspective explores the dialectical relationship between (a) the unique potential of computational media to create true innovations impacting and transforming design, learning, and collaboration by transcending "gift-wrapping" approaches and (b) how a deep understanding of design, learning, and collaboration creates innovative demands and design criteria for future generations of HCI systems.
From theory to practice: an overview of MIMO space-time coded wireless systems

This paper presents an overview of progress in the area of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) space-time coded wireless systems. After some background on the research leading to the discovery of the enormous potential of MIMO wireless links, we highlight the different classes of techniques and algorithms proposed which attempt to realize the various benefits of MIMO including spatial multiplexing and space-time coding schemes. These algorithms are often derived and analyzed under ideal independent fading conditions. We present the state of the art in channel modeling and measurements, leading to a better understanding of actual MIMO gains. Finally, the paper addresses current questions regarding the integration of MIMO links in practical wireless systems and standards.
Estimation of Hypertension Risk from Lifestyle Factors and Health Profile: A Case Study

Hypertension is a highly prevalent risk factor for cardiovascular disease and it can also lead to other diseases which seriously harm the human health. Screening the risks and finding a clinical model for estimating the risk of onset, maintenance, or the prognosis of hypertension are of great importance to the prevention or treatment of the disease, especially if the indicator can be derived from simple health profile. In this study, we investigate a chronic disease questionnaire data set of 6563 rural citizens in East China and find out a clinical signature that can assess the risk of hypertension easily and accurately. The signature achieves an accuracy of about 83% on the external test dataset, with an AUC of 0.91. Our study demonstrates that a combination of simple lifestyle features can sufficiently reflect the risk of hypertension onset. This finding provides potential guidance for disease prevention and control as well as development of home care and home-care technologies.
Measuring ground displacements from SAR amplitude images: Application to the Landers Earthquake

ERS SAR amplitude images are utilized to map ground displacements from a sub‐pixel correlation method. It yields a ground two‐dimensional displacement field with independent measurements about every 128m in azimuth and 250m in range. The accuracy depends on the characteristics of the images. For the Landers test case, the 1‐σ uncertainty is 0.8m in range and 0.4m in azimuth. We show that this measurement provides a map of major surface fault ruptures accurate to better than 1km and information on coseismic deformation comparable to the 92 GPS measurements available. Although less accurate, this technique is more robust than SAR interferometry and provides complementary information since interferograms are only sensitive to the displacement in range.
NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2006, Volume 21: Do Taxes Explain European Employment? Indivisible Labor, Human Capital, Lotteries, and Savings

Adding generous government supplied benefits to Prescott's (2002) model with employment lotteries and private consumption insurance causes employment to implode and prevents the model from matching outcomes observed in Europe. To understand the role of a 'not-so-well-known aggregation theory' that Prescott uses to rationalize the high labour supply elasticity that underlies his finding that higher taxes on labour have depressed Europe relative to the US, this paper compares aggregate outcomes for economies with two arrangements for coping with indivisible labour: (1) employment lotteries plus complete consumption insurance, and (2) individual consumption smoothing via borrowing and lending at a risk-free interest rate. The two arrangements support equivalent outcomes when human capital is not present; when it is present, allocations differ because households' reliance on personal savings in the incomplete markets model constrains the 'career choices' that are implicit in their human capital acquisition plans relative to those that can be supported by lotteries and consumption insurance in the complete markets model. Nevertheless, the responses of aggregate outcomes to changes in tax rates are quantitatively similar across the two market structures. Thus, under both aggregation theories, the high disutility that Prescott assigns to labour is an impediment to explaining European non-employment and benefits levels. Moreover, while the identities of the non-employed under Prescott's tax hypothesis differ between the two aggregation theories, they all seem counterfactual.
Actual and Potential Returns to Schooling in Spain

The returns to formal schooling in Spain are estimated in this paper. The main difference between this and previous papers on this subject is that, here, a distinction is made between the increase in the worker's potential maximum wage due to schooling and the actual registered increase. This difference (or underpayment) can be justified on the basis of job search theory. We use the stochastic frontiers technique because it allows the estimation of variables (such as the potential wage) that cannot be directly observed. One of the main results of this paper is that formal schooling clearly increases a worker's potential maximum wage. This increase is particularly noticeable for those workers who have completed at least a five-year university program. It has also been estimated that schooling increases the degree of underpayment, which is also quite relevant in the case of long-term university education. In spite of this, the effect of formal schooling on actual wages is clearly positive.
Individual channel tracking and training design for one-way relay networks

In this paper, we propose a time-multiplexed-superimposed training (TMST) scheme and investigate the individual channel tracking problem in amplify-and-forward one-way relay network (OWRN) under doubly selective channel scenario. The individual channels from source to relay and from relay to destination are approximated by finite number of coefficient through the complex-exponential basis-expansion-model (CE-BEM). We develop a two-step estimator for in-BEM-CV: the standard least square (LS) estimator followed by the fast Fourier transformation (FFT) based in-BEM-CV decoupler. The training parameters are also optimized.
Optimal State Estimation: Kalman, H∞, and Nonlinear Approaches

This is a list of errors in the book Optimal State Estimation, John Wiley & Sons, 2006. The main web site for the book is at http://academic.csuohio. edu/simond/estimation. My email address is listed on my home page at http://academic.csuohio. edu/simond. I enthusiastically welcome feedback, comments, suggestions for improvements, and corrections. I also gratefully acknowledge those who have pointed out many of the errata that are documented here: Ali Javadi, Juan Luque, Ibrahim Abdel Hameed, Rick Rarick, Memo Ergezer, David Schwartz, Jeff Gove, Kevin Sharp, Stephan Busch, Yeoh WeeSoon, Michael Haralambous, Ville Kyrki, George Dontas, Felix Monasterio-Huelin, Cagdas Ozgenc, Cheng Zhong, Ning Lei, Roberto Rigamonti, Vincent Sircoulomb, Sami Fadali, Max Medvetsky, Jonathan How, Ismar Masic, Arthur Menikoff, Nedzad Arnautovic, Gabriel Zigelboim, Antje Westenberger, Laurent de Vito, Warner Losh, HunCheol Im, Martin Grossman, Christof Voemel, Bill Jordan, Bruno Stratmann, Philipp Warode, John McFarland, and James Tursa.
Volcano–ice interactions at Prestahnúkur, Iceland: rhyolite eruption during the last interglacial–glacial transition

Abstract Prestahnúkur is a 570m high rhyolite glaciovolcanic edifice in Iceland’s Western Rift Zone with a volume of 0.6 km3. Uniform whole rock, mineral and glass compositions suggest that Prestahnúkur was constructed during the eruption of one magma batch. Ar-Ar dating gives an age of 89± 24 ka, which implies eruption during the transition (Oxygen Isotope substages 5d to 5a) between the Eemian interglacial and the Weichselian glacial period. Prestahnu´kur is unique among published accounts of rhyolite tuyas because a base of magmatically-fragmented tephra appears to be absent. Instead, basal exposures consist of glassy lava lobes and coarse hyaloclastite, above which are single and multiple lava sheets with matrix-supported basal breccias and hyaloclastite upper carapaces. Steepening ramp structures at sheet termini are interpreted as ice-contact features. Interactions between erupting magma and water/ice have affected all lithologies. A preliminary model for the construction of Prestahnúkur involves an effusive subglacial eruption between 2–19 years duration which never became emergent, into an ice sheet over 700m thick. If 700m of ice had built up during this interglacial–glacial transition, this would corroborate models arguing for the swift accumulation of land-based ice in rapid response to global cooling.
Apply two pass aggregation to real-time stereo matching

The stereo-matching algorithm based on adaptive-weight can produce disparity map of high precision. However it is not suitable for real-time application due to high computational complexity. Wang etc apply one pass aggregation to adaptive-weight algorithm and can achieve real-time performance but with a much lower precision. This paper presents a new real-time adaptive weight stereo matching algorithm based on two-pass aggregation: Matching costs are aggregated by row and array in order to reduce the computational complexity, some measures are taken to reduce the accuracy lost; then a fast dynamic programming combined greedy strategy and disparity smoothness constraint is adopted to select disparity. Evaluation results in MiddleBury platform show that the algorithm ranked No.2 among all real-time algorithms in this platform and the average error rate is the smallest. Also this algorithm achieves a good real-time performance.
Monetization of Public Goods Provision: A possible solution for the free-rider problem

We consider a new method of public goods provision: monetization. The government makes a particular public good the specie of money and commits itself to buy the public good at a predetermined nominal price and adjust money supply so that the ratio between the public good reserve and money supply equals a predetermined reserve ratio. In a two-country model, in which one country issues international currency and the other issues domestic currency, we show that if the government that issues the international currency adopts a monetization policy, it can attain both the optimal level of public goods provision and equal cost sharing for the public goods provision between the two countries by choosing the nominal price of the public good and the reserve ratio appropriately. In this case, the international free-rider problem is completely resolved.
Optical near-field effects in surface nanostructuring and laser cleaning

We present a method for directly imaging the undisturbed near field of a particle resting on a surface. A comparison with numerical computations shows good agreement with the results of our experiments. These results have important consequences for laser-assisted particle removal where field enhancement may cause local surface damage and is one of the physical key processes in this cleaning method. On the other hand, the application of near fields at particles allows structuring of surfaces with structure dimensions in the order of 100 nm and even below.
The pH and pCO2 dependence of sulfate reduction in shallow-sea hydrothermal CO2 – venting sediments (Milos Island, Greece)

Microbial sulfate reduction (SR) is a dominant process of organic matter mineralization in sulfate-rich anoxic environments at neutral pH. Recent studies have demonstrated SR in low pH environments, but investigations on the microbial activity at variable pH and CO2 partial pressure are still lacking. In this study, the effect of pH and pCO2 on microbial activity was investigated by incubation experiments with radioactive 35S targeting SR in sediments from the shallow-sea hydrothermal vent system of Milos, Greece, where pH is naturally decreased by CO2 release. Sediments differed in their physicochemical characteristics with distance from the main site of fluid discharge. Adjacent to the vent site (T ~40–75°C, pH ~5), maximal sulfate reduction rates (SRR) were observed between pH 5 and 6. SR in hydrothermally influenced sediments decreased at neutral pH. Sediments unaffected by hydrothermal venting (T ~26°C, pH ~8) expressed the highest SRR between pH 6 and 7. Further experiments investigating the effect of pCO2 on SR revealed a steep decrease in activity when the partial pressure increased from 2 to 3 bar. Findings suggest that sulfate reducing microbial communities associated with hydrothermal vent system are adapted to low pH and high CO2, while communities at control sites required a higher pH for optimal activity.
Two Case St ies in Cost-Sensitive Co cquisition *

This paper explores the problem of learning from examples when feature measurement costs are significant. It then extends two effective and familiar learning methods, ID3 and IBL, to address this problem. The extensions, CS-ID3 and CS-IBL, are described in detail and are tested in a natural robot domain and a synthetic domain. Empirical studies support the hypothesis that the extended methods are indeed sensitive to feature costs: they deal effectively with varying cost distributions and with irrelevant features.
A pilot study of a mobile-phone-based home monitoring system to assist in remote interventions in cases of acute exacerbation of COPD

We conducted a six-month feasibility study of a mobile-phone-based home monitoring system, called M-COPD. Patients with a history of moderate Acute Exacerbation of COPD (AECOPD) were given a mobile phone to record major symptoms (dyspnoea, sputum colour and volume), minor symptoms (cough and wheezing) and vital signs. A care team remotely monitored the recorded data and provided clinical interventions. Eight patients (mean age 65 years) completed the trial. Ten acute exacerbations occurred during the trial and were successfully treated at home. Prior to the AECOPD episode, the combined score of the major symptoms increased significantly (P < 0.05). Following the intervention, it decreased significantly (P < 0.05) within two weeks and returned to the baseline. The score of the minor symptoms also increased significantly (P < 0.05), but the decrease following the intervention was not significant. There were significantly fewer hospital admissions during the trial, fewer ED presentations and fewer GP visits than in a six-month matched period in the preceding year. The results demonstrate the potential of home monitoring for analysing respiratory symptoms for early intervention of AECOPD.
Colour Object Recognition using Biologically Inspired Model

Human visual system can categorize objects rapidly and effortlessly despite the complexity and objective ambiguities of natural images. Despite the ease with which we see, visual categorization is an extremely difficult task for computers due to the variability of objects, such as scale, rotation, illumination, position and occlusion. Utilization of characteristics of biological systems for solving practical problems inevitably leads towards reducing the gap between manmade machines and live systems. Biologically motivated information processing has been an important area of scientific research for decades. This paper presents a Biologically Inspired Model which gives a promising solution to object categorization in colour space. The features are extracted in YCbCr colour space and classified by using SVM classifier. The framework has been applied to the image dataset taken from the Amsterdam Library of Object Images (ALOI). The proposed framework can successfully detect and classify the object categories with a good accuracy rate of about 91.3% for the Cb plane.
Peter Jipsen From Semirings to Residuated Kleene Lattices

We consider various classes of algebras obtained by expanding idempotent semirings with meet, residuals and Kleene-∗. An investigation of congruence properties (epermutability, e-regularity, congruence distributivity) is followed by a section on algebraic Gentzen systems for proving inequalities in idempotent semirings, in residuated lattices, and in (residuated) Kleene lattices (with cut). Finally we define (one-sorted) residuated Kleene lattices with tests to complement two-sorted Kleene algebras with tests.
Monetary Policy Transmission, Interest Rate Rules and Inflation Targeting in Three Transition Countries

In 1991, the rate of inflation in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland was between 35% and 70%. At the end of 2001, it is below 8%. We setup a small structural macro model of these economies to explain the process of disinflation. Contrary to a widespread skepticism, which permeated a large part of previous research on these issues, we show that a simple open macroeconomic model, along the lines of Svensson (2000, Journal of International Economics), with forward-looking inflation and exchange rate expectations, can adequately characterize the relationship between the output gap, inflation, the real interest rate and the exchange rate during the course of transition. We use the estimated models to interpret the main features of monetary policy in each country and identify the channels of policy transmission. We characterize the policy rules and assess the relative importance of the interest rate channel (on aggregate demand) and the exchange rate channel (which affects both aggregate demand and supply) in determining the path of (dis)inflation. In the same context, we also tentatively analyze the consequences of attempting a faster path of disinflation. Finally, we evaluate the appropriateness of the inflation targeting framework which has been adopted recently in all three countries, and discuss to what extent it represents a discontinuity with the past.
IMPROVED QOS AND EFFICIENT RESOURCE ALLOCATION FOR MOBILE LOAD BALANCING IN WIMAX NETWORK AND MANET

The idea behind balancing the system load with resource allocation is to bring the resources (unoccupied frequencies) to where most of the users are located. In resource allocation schemes, a centralized element allocates additional resources to hotspot cells. One example of this is channel borrowing where a congested Base Station can borrow the channel of lightly loaded Base Stations. Channel borrowing requires that the system supports Dynamic Channel Allocation (DCA), which is an enhancement to the traditional Fixed Channel Allocation (FCA). DCA is able to adjust to changing traffic whereas FCA will keep the same frequency assignments irrelevant of the traffic load. Although Mobile WiMAX as well as Mobile Ad Hoc Network provides a flexible way to allocate frequency resources making DCA between BSs possible, DCA won’t be used at least in the early stages of deployment. FCA will be applied for the frequency sets resulting from Partial Usage of Sub-Channels (PUSC) sectorization.
Graph Homomorphisms and Long Range Action

We show that if a graph H is k-colorable, then (kA1)-branching walks on H exhibit long range action, in the sense that the position of a token at time 0 constrains the conÞguration of its descendents arbitrarily far into the future. This long range action property is one of several investigated herein; all are similar in some respects to chromatic number but based on viewing H as the range, instead of the domain, of a graph homomorphism. The properties are based on combinatorial forms of probabilistic concepts from statistical physics, although we argue that they are natural even in a purely graphtheoretic setting. They behave well in many respects, but quite a few fundamental questions remain open.