Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High-Resolution Surface-Wave Tomography from Ambient Seismic Noise

Cross-correlation of 1 month of ambient seismic noise recorded at USArray stations in California yields hundreds of short-period surface-wave group-speed measurements on interstation paths. We used these measurements to construct tomographic images of the principal geological units of California, with low-speed anomalies corresponding to the main sedimentary basins and high-speed anomalies corresponding to the igneous cores of the major mountain ranges. This method can improve the resolution and fidelity of crustal images obtained from surface-wave analyses.
Creating ‘buddy partnerships’ with 5- and 11-year old-boys: a methodological approach to conducting participatory research with young children

Building on literature concerning participatory research, this article explores the use of ‘buddy partnership’ as a technique to access the voices of young children. In this study, 5- to 6-year-old boys were paired with 11- to 12-year-old boys, and each dyad was asked to contribute towards the creation of an information DVD that would help teachers and parents understand the factors that influenced children’s engagement with reading. This article reflects on how this research technique addressed some of the methodological concerns of researchers conducting participatory research with young children. In particular, it addresses issues related to the ‘role of the researcher’ and the impact of presence of an adult researcher when researching young children’s views. This study revealed that the use of a buddy partnership with older children was a highly effective method in eliciting the voices of these young children. This article argues that the success of this research technique can be attributed to the cultivation of a strong and unique relationship that was built between the children throughout the duration of the project. It is concluded that the older children played a crucial role in the research, as their empathetic and playful approach meant that they communicated with the younger children in a context that was defined by the existence of ‘shared understanding’, which would not have been possible within an child–adult research relationship.
INTERSUBJECT VARIABILITY OF THALAMIC ACTIVATION DURING GENERATION OF BERGER’S ALPHA RHYTHM

Background: The aim of the present work is to investigate the relationship between spontaneous electroencephalographic (EEG) brain activity at 8–13 Hz frequency (Berger’s rhythm) and thalamus activation. The leading theory of how Berger’s rhythm is generated suggests a thalamo–occipital circuit, but there is still much uncertainty as to the role of the thalamus. Material and methods: We used a Siemens Magnetom 3T Trio scanner and a 64-channel NeuroScan SynAmps2 EEG system to examine 36 healthy young male adults. The study paradigm consisted of 30-s blocks with eyes closed alternated with 30-s blocks with eyes open, both repeated six times. The EEG data was preprocessed as follows: 1) fMRI gradient artifact removal; 2) BCG reduction; 3) 1–20 Hz band-pass filtration. Alpha rhythm segments were marked in the preprocessed data. fMRI data was preprocessed using typical procedures (motion correction, normalization, smoothing), and then a general linear model (GLM) analysis was performed using alpha segments derived from the EEG as events. A modified hemodynamic response function suitable for examining thalamus physiology was applied. Results: EEG data produced a typical spatial distribution of the alpha rhythm, mostly elicited in the parieto–occipital electrodes. Group-level analysis of the fMRI data failed to reveal any activation in the thalamus. However, further investigation revealed three subgroups of patients: 1) those who had a signal decrease in the left medial dorsal nucleus; 2) those with positive activation of thalamic structures; and 3) those where no activation was detected in the thalamus. Conclusions: The thalamus might be involved differently in alpha rhythm generation from one subject to another. The observed intersubject variability might be caused by physiological mechanisms underlying Berger’s rhythm.
Contactless on-bed activity sensing using first-reflection echolocation

A novel system capable of detecting on-bed activity during sleep using first-reflection ultrasonic echolocation is described herein. As is employed in many existing solutions, such activity detection may be utilized in the assessment of sleep quality. Compared to current approaches using either wearable devices or sensors collocated on the surface of the bed, the proposed architecture greatly enhances convenience for the end-user by providing minimal disruptions to his or her standard sleep routine. A series of experiments were conducted in order to investigate the capacity of the system to detect activity during sleep. System performance was benchmarked against both a wrist-worn accelerometer as well as a smartphone application placed adjacent to the subject on the bed. Analysis demonstrates a statistically significant correlation between features computed from the system's output and the filtered activity data produced by the application, with maximum p values on the order of 10-3. Comparison with activity estimates formulated from the wrist-worn accelerometer output suggests stronger agreement, as indicated by increased correlation coefficient values.
Automatic character labeling for camera captured document images

Character groundtruth for camera captured documents is crucial for training and evaluating advanced OCR algorithms. Manually generating character level groundtruth is a time consuming and costly process. This paper proposes a robust groundtruth generation method based on document retrieval and image registration for camera captured documents. We use an elastic non-rigid alignment method to fit the captured document image which relaxes the flat paper assumption made by conventional solutions. The proposed method allows building very large scale labeled camera captured documents dataset, without any human intervention. We construct a large labeled dataset consisting of 1 million camera captured Chinese character images. Evaluation of samples generated by our approach showed that 99.99% of the images were correctly labeled, even with different distortions specific to cameras such as blur, specularity and perspective distortion.
Increase in vastus medialis cross-sectional area is associated with reduced pain, cartilage loss, and joint replacement risk in knee osteoarthritis.

OBJECTIVE Although there is evidence for a beneficial effect of increased quadriceps strength on knee symptoms, the effect on knee structure is unclear. We undertook this study to examine the relationship between change in vastus medialis cross-sectional area (CSA) and knee pain, tibial cartilage volume, and risk of knee replacement in subjects with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis (OA). METHODS One hundred seventeen subjects with symptomatic knee OA underwent magnetic resonance imaging of the knee at baseline and at 2 and 4.5 years. Vastus medialis CSA was measured at baseline and at 2 years. Tibial cartilage volume was measured at baseline and at 2 and 4.5 years. Knee pain was assessed by the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index at baseline and at 2 years. The frequency of knee joint replacement over 4 years was determined. Regression coefficients (B) and odds ratios were determined along with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs). RESULTS After adjusting for confounders, baseline vastus medialis CSA was inversely associated with current knee pain (r = -0.16, P = 0.04) and with medial tibial cartilage volume loss from baseline to 2 years (B coefficient -10.9 [95% CI -19.5, -2.3]), but not with baseline tibial cartilage volume. In addition, an increase in vastus medialis CSA from baseline to 2 years was associated with reduced knee pain over the same time period (r = 0.24, P = 0.007), reduced medial tibial cartilage loss from 2 to 4.5 years (B coefficient -16.8 [95% CI -28.9, -4.6]), and reduced risk of knee replacement over 4 years (odds ratio 0.61 [95% CI 0.40, 0.94]). CONCLUSION In a population of patients with symptomatic knee OA, increased vastus medialis size was associated with reduced knee pain and beneficial structural changes at the knee, suggesting that management of knee pain and optimizing vastus medialis size are important in reducing OA progression and subsequent knee replacement.
Sinus rhythm targeting of channels for ablation of postinfarction ventricular tachycardia.

Scar-related reentry is the most common cause of sustained monomorphic ventricular tachycardia (VT) in patients with structural heart disease. These scars are comprised not only of dense fibrosis but also contain surviving myocyte bundles that support reentry. The separation of myocytes creates a circuitous path (zig-zag conduction) that slows conduction despite the presence of relatively normal action potential upstrokes.1,2 Gap junction remodeling and ion channel alterations may also contribute to slow conduction.3 After myocardial infarction, the scar evolves as part of the ventricular remodeling process, and acute reperfusion favorably influences this process. Article see p 90 Of 689 patients with acute ST elevation myocardial infarction who received acute percutaneous intervention for reperfusion reported by Zaman et al,4 only 17% had a left ventricular ejection fraction <40%, and of these, only 32 (≈5% of the total group) had inducible VT when studied early after the infarction. By 1 year, only 19% of the patients with inducible VT had spontaneous VT. Interestingly, the VTs that occurred spontaneously (a mean of 11 months after the infarct) were substantially slower as compared with those that were induced early after infarction. Thus, it seems likely that the ongoing remodeling efforts result in conduction slowing in or around the channels of surviving myocytes in the infarct that foster reentrant VT. The risk of VT may increase over years. The time between infarction and referral for VT ablation was an average of 16 years for patients who receive acute infarct reperfusion in one study.5 Once VT is clinically manifest, the reentry substrate is relatively stable, such that the risk of recurrence exceeds 40% by 2 years. An implantable defibrillator is protection against sudden death, but recurrent VT is associated with worse outcomes.6 Catheter ablation has an important role in reducing …
Impact Of Leadership Styles On Employee Organizational Commitment

This research study examines the relationship between transformational, transactional and passive/avoidant leadership styles and three dimensions of organizational commitment – affective, continuance, and normative in two subsidiaries of one multinational organization. The research findings revealed that transformational leadership has the strongest impact on affective commitment, although transactional leadership also affects affective commitment. Transformational leadership also has a significant positive affect on normative commitment. Transactional leadership has a significant positive affect on continuance commitment and positive/avoidant leadership has a significant negative affect on affective commitment.
Improving the Precision of Type Inference Algorithms with Lightweight Heuristics

Dynamically-typed languages allow faster software development by not posing the type constraints. Static type information facilitates program comprehension and software maintenance. Type inference algorithms attempt to reconstruct the type information from the code, yet they suﬀer from the problem of false positives or false negatives. The use of complex type inference algorithms is questionable during the development phase, due to their performance costs. Instead, we propose lightweight heuristics to improve simple type inference algorithms and, at the same time, preserve their swiftness.
Transcribing Mandarin Broadcast Speech Using Multi-Layer Perceptron Acoustic Features

Recently, several multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based front-ends have been developed and used for Mandarin speech recognition, often showing significant complementary properties to conventional spectral features. Although widely used in multiple Mandarin systems, no systematic comparison of all the different approaches as well as their scalability has been proposed. The novelty of this correspondence is mainly experimental. In this work, all the MLP front-ends recently developed at multiple sites are described and compared in a systematic manner on a 100 hours setup. The study covers the two main directions along which the MLP features have evolved: the use of different input representations to the MLP and the use of more complex MLP architectures beyond the three-layer perceptron. The results are analyzed in terms of confusion matrices and the paper discusses a number of novel findings that the comparison reveals. Furthermore, the two best front-ends used in the GALE 2008 evaluation, referred as MLP1 and MLP2, are studied in a more complex LVCSR system in order to investigate their scalability in terms of the amount of training data (from 100 hours to 1600 hours) and the parametric system complexity (maximum likelihood versus discriminative training, speaker adaptative training, lattice level combination). Results on 5 hours of evaluation data from the GALE project reveal that the MLP features consistently produce improvements in the range of 15%-23% relative at the different steps of a multipass system when compared to mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) and PLP features, suggesting that the improvements scale with the amount of data and with the complexity of the system. The integration of those features into the GALE 2008 evaluation system provide very competitive performances compared to other Mandarin systems.
Serum levels of MMP9 and MMP2 in patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma.

BACKGROUND Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is the most common cancer in the oral area. Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and especially MMP-2 and MMP-9 are increased in malignancy and lymph node involvement in oral SCCs. We aimed to evaluate the serum levels of MMP-2 and MMP-9 in patients with oral SCC compared to normal subjects and their relation with clinicopathological findings. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this case control study, 20 patients with oral SCC and 20 healthy subjects were included and serum levels of MMP-2 and MMP-9 were compared between groups. Also, the correlation between these markers with clinicopathological findings including grade (T) and node (N) were evaluated. RESULTS Patients with oral SCC had significantly higher serum levels of MMP-2 (p=0.01) and MMP-9 (p<0.001) compared to healthy subjects. With increase in grade T, MMP-2 was significantly increased (p=0.001), but in the MMP-9 case this was not significant (p=0.27). The levels of MMP-2 (p=0.002) and MMP-9 (p=0.01) in cases with lymph node involvement and that of MMP-2 in subjects with smoking history (p=0.001) were significantly high. There was significantly positive correlation between MMP-2 with grade T tumor (r=0.598, p=0.005), lymph node involvement (r=0.737, p<0.001) and smoking (r=0.674, p=0.001) and also between MMP-9 and lymph node involvement (r=0.474, p=0.03). CONCLUSIONS Both markers are significantly increased in oral SCC compared to healthy subjects. However, MMP-2 was better for evaluating lymph node involvement and tumor grade.
The MMPI-2 Antisocial Practices Content Scale: Construct Validity and Comparison With the Psychopathic Deviate Scale

Little is known regarding the construct validity of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory—2 Antisocial Practices (ASP) content scale or its differences from the Psychopathic Deviate (Pel) scale. In 3 studies with undergraduates (TV's = 95, 110, and 100), the ASP scale exhibited convergent and discriminant validity with self-report, interview, family history, and observer measures of psychopathy, personality disorders, and personality traits. The ASP and Pd scales had many similar correlates, but the ASP scale correlated more positively with measures of Machiavellianism and more negatively with interviewer-rated honesty than the Pd scale. The ASP scale demonstrated incremental validity over and above the Pd scale for global indexes of psychopathy and antisocial behavior. Neither scale related highly to the absence of stress and interpersonal anxiety characteristic of psychopathy. The ASP and Pd scales, although overlapping in content, appear to measure somewhat different facets of the psychopathy construct.
LOOTING AND THE WORLD'S ARCHAEOLOGICAL HERITAGE: The Inadequate Response

AbstractThe world's archaeological heritage is under serious threat from illegal and destructive excavations that aim to recover antiquities for sale on the international market. These antiquities are sold without provenance, so that their true nature is hard to discern, and many are ultimately acquired by major museums in Europe and North America. The adoption in 1970 by UNESCO of the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property created a new ethical environment in which museums and their representative associations adopted policies that were designed to guard against the acquisition of “unprovenanced,” and therefore most probably looted, antiquities. Unfortunately, over the past decade, U.S. museum associations have been advocating a more relaxed disposition, and the broader archaeological and anthropological communities are in significant measure responsible since they have met this unwelcome development largely in silence.
Caregivers' Judgments of the Functional Abilities of the Alzheimer's Disease Patient: Impact of Caregivers' Depression and Perceived Burden

Research has demonstrated that caregivers of cognitively impaired patients may misjudge aspects of the patient's functional capacities. The nature and directions of these relationships are not well understood, however. Further, the effects that depression and perceived caregiver burden have on the caregivers' ability to render accurate judg ments of patient's functional abilities have not been addressed. In this study, the primary caregivers of 128 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were administered a questionnaire regarding the patients' functional capacities. These judgments were subsequently compared to actual functional performance ofAD patients on an extended ver sion of the Direct Assessment of Functional Status scale administered in the patients' home environment. A significant proportion of caregivers overestimated AD patients' functional performance in telling time, counting currency, making change for a purchase, brushing teeth, and using eating utensils. Further analyses revealed that self- reported depression, but not perceived burden, was related to the type of caregiver bias errors observed. (J Geriatr Psychiatry Neurol 2001; 14:91-98).
Coping with sales call anxiety: The role of sale perseverance and task concentration strategies

The authors study how salespeople cope with social anxiety during customer contacts and find that two tactics, sale perseverance and task concentration, ultimately reduce dysfunctional protective actions. Both coping tactics, however, are differentially moderated by strength of felt physiological sensations and strength of negative expectations and thoughts. Salespeople experiencing anxiety cognitions should distract themselves by concentrating on their task to free up their thinking in relation to the task at hand. Engaging in behaviors to modify the situation by persevering on the sale, on the other hand, occupies action space and should be the coping strategy of choice for those salespeople confronting physiological sensations in relation to felt anxiety. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of 171 salespersons.
Investigation of Reference Values of Components of Cerebrospinal Fluid

In order to obtain reference values, random samples of CSF from 70 women and 69 men were analyzed for various components, including total protein and protein fractions. Using statistical methods, data were also collected for sex differences and the influence of age. Small variations in the values of total protein, albumin and gamma-globulin between males and females were found, and slightly higher values for the gamma-globulin were found with increasing age.
Assessment of the usability of a nutritional epidemiology computerized system.

INTRODUCTION Epidemiological research has been adhering to new technologies, such as computer systems, and using the Internet as a tool. Usability is a characteristic of a specific product concerning the facility to use it, its speed and the facility to learn how to use it. It should also not present errors, or these must be easy to solve, in case they occur, thus providing high satisfaction to users. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the usability of the "System of health and nutrition monitoring - nutrition of school children" (NUTRISIM). METHODS A sample of 17 Information Technology professionals evaluated the system and answered the "Questionnaire for System Usability", which determines the level of usability of systems by the Fuzzy Logic. The questionnaire contains 30 questions, which are divided into six metrics. The usability of the system determines six usability criteria in a large Fuzzy scale. RESULTS With the exception of the metric "error control", all metrics were analyzed as "very good". The metrics "error control", "efficiency" and "satisfaction" presented medium amplitude, which is a better result in relation to the metrics "easy to learn", "easy to remember" and "effectiveness", which was assessed as "high". CONCLUSION The study showed that the system is easy to be learned and used, but the answers are scattered. The instrument proved to be a useful tool to monitor and evaluate health and dietary intake in epidemiologic studies.
Language Learning Motivation: Expanding the Theoretical Framework

does Mary Ellen want to learn French? What motivates Yu Jia to learn English in China? What is the reason for Maury's interest and effort in Japanese? Why does Louise work so hard at learning Russian? What does Eyhab think he will achieve in studying English in the US? The answers to these questions are important, because motivation is considered by many to be one of the main determining factors in success in developing a second or foreign language (34), both referred to as L2. Motivation determines the extent of active, personal involvement in L2 learning. Conversely, unmotivated students are insufficiently involved and therefore unable to develop their potential L2 skills.
Autonomous acquisition of visual multi-view object representations for object recognition on a humanoid robot

The autonomous acquisition of object representations which allow recognition, localization and grasping of objects in the environment is a challenging task, which has shown to be difficult. In this paper, we present a systems for autonomous acquisition of visual object representations, which endows a humanoid robot with the ability to enrich its internal object representation and allows the realization of complex visual tasks. More precisely, we present techniques for segmentation and modeling of objects held in the five-fingered robot hand. Multiple object views are generated by rotating the held objects in the robot's field of view. The acquired object representations are evaluated in the context of visual search and object recognition tasks in cluttered environments. Experimental results show successful implementation of the complete cycle from object exploration to object recognition on a humanoid robot.