Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Publication recommendations for electrodermal measurements.

This committee was appointed by the SPR Board to provide recommendations for publishing data on electrodermal activity (EDA). They are intended to be a stand-alone source for newcomers and experienced users. A short outline of principles for electrodermal measurement is given, and recommendations from an earlier report (Fowles et al., ) are incorporated. Three fundamental techniques of EDA recording are described: (1) endosomatic recording without the application of an external current, (2) exosomatic recording with direct current (the most widely applied methodology), and (3) exosomatic recording with alternating current-to date infrequently used but a promising future methodology. In addition to EDA recording in laboratories, ambulatory recording has become an emerging technique. Specific problems that come with this recording of EDA in the field are discussed, as are those emerging from recording EDA within a magnetic field (e.g., fMRI). Recommendations for the details that should be mentioned in publications of EDA methods and results are provided.
Evolving possibilistic fuzzy modeling for equity options pricing

The correct pricing of financial derivatives plays a key role in risk management and in hedge operations. Besides the Black and Scholes closed-form formula simplicity and good results for pricing European options, several of the assumptions used in the method may be unrealistic and influence the results significantly. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper suggests an evolving possibilistic fuzzy modeling (ePFM) approach for European equity options pricing. The approach is based on an extension of the possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering and functional fuzzy rule-based modeling. ePFM employs memberships and typicalities to recursively cluster data, and uses participatory learning to adapt the model structure as a stream data is input. The model does not require any assumptions about data distribution, it is an effective robust method to handle noisy data and outliers in option price dynamics modeling, and it is also capable to access volatility clustering due to its clustering-based nature. Computational experiments consider the pricing of European equity options (calls and puts) on preference shares of Petrobras (PETR4), one of the most liquidity options traded in the Brazilian derivatives market. The results show that ePFM is a potential candidate for equity options pricing, with comparable or better performance than the Black and Scholes method and alternative evolving fuzzy approaches.
Connectivity‐based segmentation of the periaqueductal gray matter in human with brainstem optimized diffusion MRI

The periaqueductal gray matter (PAG) is a midbrain structure, involved in key homeostatic neurobiological functions, such as pain modulation and cardiorespiratory control. Animal research has identified four subdivisional columns that differ in both connectivity and function. Until now these findings have not been replicated in humans. This study used high‐resolution brainstem optimized diffusion magnetic resonance imaging and probabilistic tractography to segment the human PAG into four subdivisions, based on voxel connectivity profiles. We identified four distinct subdivisions demonstrating high spatial concordance with the columns of the animal model. The resolution of these subdivisions for individual subjects permitted detailed examination of their structural connectivity without the requirement of an a priori starting location. Interestingly patterns of forebrain connectivity appear to be different to those found in nonhuman studies, whereas midbrain and hindbrain connectivity appears to be maintained. Although there are similarities in the columnar structure of the PAG subdivisions between humans and nonhuman animals, there appears to be different patterns of cortical connectivity. This suggests that the functional organization of the PAG may be different between species, and as a consequence, functional studies in nonhumans may not be directly translatable to humans. This highlights the need for focused functional studies in humans. Hum Brain Mapp 36:3459–3471, 2015. © 2015 The Authors Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Internet Addiction or Excessive Internet Use

Background: Problematic Internet addiction or excessive Internet use is characterized by excessive or poorly controlled preoccupations, urges, or behaviors regarding computer use and Internet access that lead to impairment or distress. Currently, there is no recognition of internet addiction within the spectrum of addictive disorders and, therefore, no corresponding diagnosis. It has, however, been proposed for inclusion in the next version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM). Objective: To review the literature on Internet addiction over the topics of diagnosis, phenomenology, epidemiology, and treatment. Methods: Review of published literature between 2000–2009 in Medline and PubMed using the term “internet addiction. Results: Surveys in the United States and Europe have indicated prevalence rate between 1.5% and 8.2%, although the diagnostic criteria and assessment questionnaires used for diagnosis vary between countries. Cross-sectional studies on samples of patients report high comorbidity of Internet addiction with psychiatric disorders, especially affective disorders (including depression), anxiety disorders (generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Several factors are predictive of problematic Internet use, including personality traits, parenting and familial factors, alcohol use, and social anxiety. Conclusions and Scientific Significance: Although Internet-addicted individuals have difficulty suppressing their excessive online behaviors in real life, little is known about the patho-physiological and cognitive mechanisms responsible for Internet addiction. Due to the lack of methodologically adequate research, it is currently impossible to recommend any evidence-based treatment of Internet addiction.
Detecting Concealment of Intent in Transportation Screening: A Proof of Concept

Transportation and border security systems have a common goal: to allow law-abiding people to pass through security and detain those people who intend to harm. Understanding how intention is concealed and how it might be detected should help in attaining this goal. In this paper, we introduce a multidisciplinary theoretical model of intent concealment along with three verbal and nonverbal automated methods for detecting intent: message feature mining, speech act profiling, and kinesic analysis. This paper also reviews a program of empirical research supporting this model, including several previously published studies and the results of a proof-of-concept study. These studies support the model by showing that aspects of intent can be detected at a rate that is higher than chance. Finally, this paper discusses the implications of these findings in an airport-screening scenario.
Minutiae Points Extraction using Biometric Fingerprint- Enhancement

Security mechanisms always insist the wide usage of fingerprints as common biometrics. The various features of the fingerprint like Minutiae points, Orientation, Reference points and arch‟s are always the focus of the concern. However, if the database of the stored fingerprints is hacked; the entire authentication system will be collapsed. Hence, to provide security to the security marks i.e. fingerprints, it becomes essential to encode those by any of the means. One of the solutions suggests working with the combined fingerprint template, which can be built by the fusion of the test fingerprints. In this direction, security researchers try to design crypt complex fingerprint template by extracting features from fingerprints and minutiae structures. In fingerprint combination systems, the feature extraction and its correct orientation is necessary. The preprocessing steps in terms of segmentation, normalization, orientation estimation, binarization, thinning and minutiae points‟ extraction are discussed in this paper.
NoiseBear: A Malleable Wireless Controller Designed In Participation with Disabled Children

NoiseBear is a wireless malleable controller designed for, and in participation with, physically and cognitively dis- abled children. The aim of the project was to produce a musical controller that was robust, and flexible enough to be used in a wide range of interactive scenarios in partici- patory design workshops. NoiseBear demonstrates an open ended system for designing wireless malleable controllers in different shapes. It uses pressure sensitive material made from conductive thread and polyester cushion stuffing, to give the feel of a soft toy. The sensor networks with other devices using the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol, running on a BlueGiga BLE112 chip. This contains an embedded 8051 processor which manages the sensor. NoiseBear has undergone an initial formative evaluation in workshop ses- sions with four autistic children, and continues to evolve in series of participatory design workshops. The evaluation showed that controller could be engaging for the children to use, and highlighted some technical limitations of the design. Solutions to these limitations are discussed, along with plans for future design iterations.
Lactobacillus species as biomarkers and agents that can promote various aspects of vaginal health

The human body is colonized by a vast number of microorganisms collectively referred to as the human microbiota. One of the main microbiota body sites is the female genital tract, commonly dominated by Lactobacillus spp. , in approximately 70% of women. Each individual species can constitute approximately 99% of the ribotypes observed in any individual woman. The most frequently isolated species are Lactobacillus crispatus, Lactobacillus gasseri, Lactobacillus jensenii and Lactobacillus iners. Residing at the port of entry of bacterial and viral pathogens, the vaginal Lactobacillus species can create a barrier against pathogen invasion since mainly products of their metabolism secreted in the cervicovaginal fluid can play an important role in the inhibition of bacterial and viral infections. Therefore, a Lactobacillus-dominated microbiota appears to be a good biomarker for a healthy vaginal ecosystem. This balance can be rapidly altered during processes such as menstruation, sexual activity, pregnancy and various infections. An abnormal vaginal microbiota is characterized by an increased diversity of microbial species, leading to a condition known as bacterial vaginosis. Information on the vaginal microbiota can be gathered from the analysis of cervicovaginal fluid, by using the Nugent scoring or the Amsel's criteria, or at the molecular level by investigating the number and type of Lactobacillus species. However, when translating this to the clinical setting, it should be noted that the absence of a Lactobacillus-dominated microbiota does not appear to directly imply a diseased condition or dysbiosis. Nevertheless, the widely documented beneficial role of vaginal Lactobacillus species demonstrates the potential of data on the composition and activity of lactobacilli as biomarkers for vaginal health. The substantiation and further validation of such biomarkers will allow the design of better targeted probiotic strategies.
Academic achievement of students in dual language immersion

ABSTRACT This article reports on a study that investigated achievement in math of third and fourth grade dual language immersion (DLI) students, building on research that has demonstrated the academic achievement of students who receive content instruction predominantly in the target language. Our study expands the scope and methodology of prior research by including one-way programs in three languages (Chinese, French and Spanish) and two-way Spanish-English programs; and by relying on propensity matching to mitigate possible effects of school and student differences. In our third grade study, we compared students’ math scores in relation to their English Language Arts (ELA) achievement to control for pre-existing differences between DLI and non-DLI students. DLI students who attained the same levels in ELA, and who received math instruction in a target language, performed at the same level as their non-DLI peers in third grade math tests given in English. For the fourth grade study, we compared DLI students to a propensity-matched non-DLI group. DLI students grew more in math than their counterparts not in DLI. The results from this natural experiment indicate that students in a DLI program that has been implemented state-wide were able to succeed academically in math.
Fall detection system using accelerometer and gyroscope based on smartphone

Most of people likes living independently at home. Some activity in our daily life is prone to have some accidents, such as falls. Falls can make people in fatal conditions, even death. A prototype of fall detection system using accelerometer and gyroscope based on smartphone is presented in this paper. Accelerometer and gyroscope sensors are embedded in smartphone to get the result of fall detection more accurately. Automatic call as an alert will be sent to family members if someone using this application in fatal condition and need some help. This research also can distinguish condition of people between falls and activity daily living. Several scenarios were used in these experiments. The result showed that the proposed system could successfully record level of accuracy of the fall detection system till 93.3% in activity daily living and error detected of fall was 2%.
Exogenous Cuing and Perceptual Matching Judgments of Orientation and Motion

A series of experiments is described which uses a perceptual matching approach to study the effect of exogenous visual cues on perception of static and dynamic stimuli. Analogous experiments were carried out for orientation judgments of rotated Gabor patches and for direction of motion of coherent dot motion. Response time effects of cuing were found in all conditions. Cuing was found to improve accuracy of orientation judgments, while the effects on motion judgments were less reliable. Cuing was found to have substantially larger effects on quality of orientation judgments at low contrast levels. Other analyses performed found sequential trial effects and qualitatively different effects of canonical directions on orientation and motion judgments.
Compiler-controlled extraction of computation-communication overlap in MPI applications

Exploiting computation-communication overlap is a well- known requirement to speed up distributed applications. However, efforts till now use programmer expertise, rather than any automatic tool to do this. In our work we propose the use of an aggressive optimizing compiler (IBM's xl series) to automatically extract opportunities for computation communication overlap. We depend on aggressive inlining, dominator trees and SSA based use-def analyses provided by the compiler framework for exploiting such overlap. Our target is MPI applications. In such applications, we try to automatically move mpi_waits as well as split blocking mpi_send/recv to create more opportunities for overlap. Our objective is two-fold: firstly, our tool should relieve the programmer from the burden of hunting for overlap manually as much as possible, and secondly, it should aid in converging on parallel applications which benefit from such overlap quickly. These are necessary as MPI applications are quickly becoming complex and huge and manual overlap extraction is becoming cumbersome. Our early experience shows that it is not necessary that exploiting an overlap always leads to performance improvement. This corroborates with the fact that if we have an automatic tool, then, we can quickly discard such applications (or certain configurations of such applications) without spending person-hours to manually rewrite MPI applications for introducing non-blocking calls. Our initial experiments with the industry-standard NAS parallel benchmarks show that we can get small-to-moderate improvements by utilizing overlap even in such highly tuned benchmarks. This augurs well for real-world applications that do not exploit overlap optimally.
1-1-2007 Trade , Production Networks and the Exchange Rate

This paper examines the effect of cross-border production sharing on trade and exchange-rate behavior. When a country’s exports contain imported components, changes in exchange rates tend to have offsetting effects on imports and exports. Imports may fall, remain unchanged or even rise with depreciation, depending on the share of domestic value-added in exports. The effect of domestic and foreign GDP on imports and exports is also altered by production sharing. These behavior patterns are identified in trade in motor vehicles between the United States and Mexico with the aid of OLS and VEC techniques. JEL Classification: F14, F15, F32
Learning Multi-Level Task Groups in Multi-Task Learning

In multi-task learning (MTL), multiple related tasks are learned jointly by sharing information across them. Many MTL algorithms have been proposed to learn the underlying task groups. However, those methods are limited to learn the task groups at only a single level, which may be not sufficient to model the complex structure among tasks in many real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Level Task Grouping (MeTaG) method to learn the multi-level grouping structure instead of only one level among tasks. Specifically, by assuming the number of levels to be H, we decompose the parameter matrix into a sum of H component matrices, each of which is regularized with a l2 norm on the pairwise difference among parameters of all the tasks to construct level-specific task groups. For optimization, we employ the smoothing proximal gradient method to efficiently solve the objective function of the MeTaG model. Moreover, we provide theoretical analysis to show that under certain conditions the MeTaG model can recover the true parameter matrix and the true task groups in each level with high probability. We experiment our approach on both synthetic and real-world datasets, showing competitive performance over state-of-the-art MTL methods.
Dynamic asynchronous buffer management to improve data continuity in P2P live streaming

In data-driven mesh-based P2P live streaming system, the playback buffer management affects the audiences' quality of experience (QoE) significantly. Due to the instability and heterogeneity of P2P networks, the buffer is not always ready for playback. It is not only associated with the media timestamp, but also with the data availability in its neighbors. So how to manage the buffer synchronization position is very critical for provision of playback continuity. In this paper, we introduce a Buffer Map Matrix (BMM) data structure to describe the chunks availability of each peer and its neighbors. Furthermore we propose a dynamic asynchronous buffer management algorithm, MaxCount, in which the peer synchronizes its buffer window to the position where the maximum amount of chunk could be received. The position is predicted according to the BMM table and neighbors' upload capability. The window shifts to the position where the max amount of chunks in the buffer is available in the neighbors. We carried out extensive experiments with NS-2 simulation. The experiment results show that the MaxCount algorithm has better performances than existing approaches in playback continuity and adaptability in network churn, especially when the aggregated upload bandwidth of the peers is limited.
Infralimbic cortex activation and motivated arousal induce histamine release

Appetitive behaviours occur in a state of behavioural and physiological activation that allows the optimal performance of these goal-directed behaviours. Here, we tested the hypothesis that histamine neurons under the command of the infralimbic cortex are important to provide behavioural activation. Extracellular histamine and serotonin were measured by microdialysis of the medial prefrontal cortex in behaving rats in parallel with a picrotoxin microinjection into the infralimbic cortex. The injection aroused the rats behaviourally, increased histamine release and decreased serotonin levels. Inhibition of the infralimbic cortex with muscimol produced the opposite effects on neurotransmitter release. The behavioural activation induced by motivating hungry rats with caged food was paralleled by an immediate histamine release, whereas awakening induced by tapping their microdialysis bowl increased serotonin, but not histamine levels. In conclusion, picrotoxin injection into the infralimbic cortex produces behavioural activation together with histamine release; in a similar manner, induction of an appetitive state produced histamine release, likely related to increased behavioural activation characteristic of an appetitive behaviour.
An evaluation of the 'Incredible Years' school readiness parenting programme delivered in Welsh schools

Growing numbers of children are arriving in school without the necessary social and self-regulatory skills to engage effectively with the school environment and a lack of these skills can predict low academic achievement and poor relationships with peers and teachers (Chapter 1). Parents play a major role in developing children’s readiness for school. Strong, positive parent-child relationships ensure that children form good relationships with peers and teachers. These relationships help children to settle into school, reduce conduct problems, and lead to good academic attainment. Early intervention in the preschool years is an effective way to prepare children for school and prevent later academic failure. The Incredible Years (IY) programmes are evidence-based, effective programmes for improving child outcomes. Although there are longer IY programmes that address the needs of children with conduct and behavioural difficulties, there is a need for a shorter programme that can be delivered universally to parents as their children start school. The IY School Readiness parenting programme was developed for this purpose, but its effectiveness has never been researched. This thesis reports on the first evaluation of the IY School Readiness programme. The first study provides a review of literature on the concept of schools readiness (Chapter 2), followed by the study protocol (Chapter 3), providing details of the methods of the evaluation. Chapter four presents the development and validation of a new observation tool for evaluating parent-child interactions during child-directed play and interactive reading, the Play And Reading Observation Tool (PAROT). The main programme evaluation is presented as a third study, a comparison of intervention and control families’ outcomes (Chapter 5). The programme was effective in increasing key verbal parenting behaviours in the context of reading and play that are important for children’s readiness for school. The final two chapters include longer-term findings of the programme (Chapter 6) and feedback from parents and schools (Chapter 7). Parent attendance was good and positive feedback was received from the parents and schools involved in the study. The final chapter of the thesis provides a summary of research findings, including implications and future research directions (Chapter 8).