Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Delegated Portfolio Management under Ambiguity Aversion

We examine the problem of setting optimal incentives for a portfolio manager hired by an investor who wants to induce ambiguity-robust portfolio choices with respect to estimation errors in expected returns. Adopting a worst-case max-min approach we obtain the optimal compensation in various cases where the investor and the manager, adopt or relinquish an ambiguity averse attitude. We also provide examples of applications to real market data.
Towards Using NMR to Screen for Spoiled Tomatoes Stored in 1,000 L, Aseptically Sealed, Metal-Lined Totes

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is used to track factory relevant tomato paste spoilage. It was found that spoilage in tomato paste test samples leads to longer spin lattice relaxation times T1 using a conventional low magnetic field NMR system. The increase in T1 value for contaminated samples over a five day room temperature exposure period prompted the work to be extended to the study of industry standard, 1,000 L, non-ferrous, metal-lined totes. NMR signals and T1 values were recovered from a large format container with a single-sided NMR sensor. The results of this work suggest that a handheld NMR device can be used to study tomato paste spoilage in factory process environments.
A Pulse Profile Change Possibly Associated with a Glitch in the Anomalous X-Ray Pulsar 4U 0142+61

We report a glitchlike pulse-frequency deviation from the simple spin-down law in an anomalous X-ray pulsar (AXP), 4U 0142+61, detected by ASCA observations. We also found a significant change in pulse profile after the putative glitch. The glitch parameters resemble those found in another AXP, 1RXS J170849.0-400910, and in the Vela and other radio pulsars. This suggests that radio pulsars and AXPs have the same internal structure and glitch mechanism. It must be noted, however, that the pulse-frequency anomaly can also be explained by a gradual change of the spin-down rate without invoking a glitch.
Toward a Distributed Knowledge Discovery system for Grid systems

During the last decade or so, we have had a deluge of data from not only science fields but also industry and commerce fields. Although the amount of data available to us is constantly increasing, our ability to process it becomes more and more difficult. Efficient discovery of useful knowledge from these datasets is therefore becoming a challenge and a massive economic need. This led to the need of developing large-scale data mining (DM) techniques to deal with these huge datasets either from science or economic applications. In this chapter, we present a new DDM system combining dataset-driven and architecture-driven strategies. Data-driven strategies will consider the size and heterogeneity of the data, while architecture driven will focus on the distribution of the datasets. This system is based on a Grid middleware tools that integrate appropriate large data manipulation operations. Therefore, this allows more dynamicity and autonomicity during the mining, integrating and processing phases
School-based sexuality education in Uganda : a grounded theory approach

Today, 1.2 billion adolescents stand at the challenging crossroads between childhood and the adulthood. Driven by a combination of biological, psychological and social forces, adolescence is a period of “stress and storm” for many adolescents predisposing them to risky behaviours with long term consequences. Adolescence is not only a time of vulnerability; it is also an age of opportunity for investment in sustained health and wellbeing through education and preventive efforts to help them navigate risks and vulnerabilities. Evidence-based sexuality education programmes are a cornerstone in reducing adolescent sexual risk behaviours and promoting sexual health. A qualitative, grounded theory study was undertaken to explore and describe experiences of adolescents, teachers and perceptions of parents of school-based sexuality education (SBSE). An indepth literature review through concept analysis on the phenomenon was conducted to assist the researcher with theoretical sensitivity and theoretical saturation. In-depth Individual interviews and focus group interviews were conducted to generate data. Interviews were audio-taped and transcribed by the researcher verbatim. The direct quotes of participants were coded and arranged into meaning units for analysis. A constant comparison method of data analysis was applied by following a Strauss and Corbin (1998) analysis process of open, axial and selective coding to analyse textual qualitative data until themes, categories and sub-categories were identified and developed. Data analysis revealed that adolescents benefitted from SBSE but the implementation of programme was undermined by challenges at national, institutional, community, family and individual levels enshrined in the physical. There were also challenging contextual factors at various levels that influenced the benefits of the SBSE. It is recommended that there is need to review the teaching and learning resources and to fully integrate sexuality education into the formal curriculum. The ministry of education in Uganda should take a leadership role in fostering engagement and participation of major stakeholders, particularly teachers, parents and other community groups in delivering school-based sexuality education that addresses the needs of the schoolgoing children.
ROS-based remote controlled robotic arm workcell

This paper describes robotic workplace that is being developed at our faculty. It consists of industrial arm Mitsubishi Melfa RV-6SL, gripper Schunk and six Axis cameras. The purpose of this workplace is to serve students for testing algorithms from artificial intelligence and computer vision. It also gives them the opportunity to work with real industrial manipulator and allow them to test things like kinematics and dynamics of the arm. The arm is inaccessible for students so it can be operated only remotely. The software needed for remote controlling and programming is described in this paper.
Geometry-based Computation of Symmetric Homo-oligomeric Protein Complexes

The need to engineer novel therapeutics and functional materials is driving the in-silico design of molecular complexes. This paper proposes a method to compute symmetric homo-oligomeric protein complexes when the structure of the replicated protein monomer is known and rigid. The relationship between the structure of a protein and its biological function brings the in-silico determination of protein structures associated with functional states to the forefront of computational biology. While protein complexes, arising from associations of protein monomers, are pervasive in every genome, determination of their structures remains challenging. Given the difficulty in computing structures of a protein monomer, computing arrangements of monomers in a complex is mainly limited to dimers. A growth in the number of protein complexes studied in wet labs is allowing classification of their structures. A recent database shows that most naturally-occurring protein complexes are symmetric homo-oligomers. The method presented here exploits this database to propose structures of symmetric homooligomers that can accommodate spatial replications of a given protein monomer. The method searches the database for documented structures of symmetric homo-oligomers where the replicated monomer has a geometrically-similar structure to that of the input protein monomer. The proposed method is a first step towards the in-silico design of novel protein complexes that upon further refinement and characterization can serve as molecular machines or fundamental units in therapeutics or functional materials.
A Pseudo Stereo Vision Method using Asynchronous Multiple Cameras

Systems of multiple baseline stereo vision (Okutomi & Kanade, 1993 and Kanade et al., 1997) have been proposed and used in various fields. They require cameras to synchronize with one another to track objects accurately to measure depth. However, inexpensive cameras such as Web-cams do not have synchronous systems. A system of tracking human motion (Mori et al., 2001) and a method of recovering depth dynamically (Zhou & Tao, 2003) from unsynchronized video streams have been reported as approaches to measuring depth using asynchronous cameras. In the former, the system can obtain the 2D position of a contact point between a human and the floor, and the cycle of visual feedback is 5 fps on average. In the latter, the method creates a non-existing image, which is used for stereo triangulation. The non-existing image is created from the estimated time delay between unsynchronized cameras and optical flow fields computed in each view. This method can output a depth map at the moment of frame t-1 (one frame before the current one), not the current frame. We propose a method of pseudo-stereo vision using asynchronous multiple cameras. Timing the shutters of cameras asynchronously has an advantage in that it can output more 3D positions than a synchronous camera system. The 3D position of an object is measured as a crossing point of lines in 3D space through the observation position on the last frame and the estimated 3D position using the previous two frames. This makes it possible for the vision system to consist of asynchronous multiple cameras. Since the 3D position is calculated at the shutter timing of each camera, the 3D position can be obtained from the number of cameras x 30 points. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 describes a method of measuring the 3D position using asynchronous multiple cameras. Section 3 reports experimental result on the recovery of motion when an object is moved in virtual 3D space, and discusses the effectiveness of the proposed method. Section 4 describes some experimental setups and reports experimental results using real images of an object moving at high speed. Section 5 discusses the processing time and enhancement of n cameras. Finally, Section 6 summarizes the method of pseudo-stereo vision.
Object Tracking Based on Visual Attention Model and Particle Filter

A plasma apparatus which generates a radio frequency (UHF or microwave) disk plasma 16 and a hybrid plasma 45 derived from the disk plasma. The microwave plasma acts as a source of excited ion and free radical species and electrons for the second plasma which is hybrid in that it contains species from both microwave and dc (or rf depending on bias) excitation. The hybrid plasma can be used to treat an article 43 with different species than are present in the disk plasma and provides more control in this regard than a single plasma.
An efficient wave propagation model for simulation and analysis of multipath effects of mobile users in indoor and urban environment

In this paper, we present an efficient wave propagation model that supports both urban canyon and urban canyon situated indoor propagation based on a hybrid of the ray tracing and finite volume/finite difference time domain methods. The model is provided in a high-performance compact terrain database (CTDB) format with multi-elevation structure for use in high-resolution dynamic simulators. The effect of multipath propagation on the multiple access methods and the comparison of the WCDMA receiver against that of the UFO receiver in the urban setting is discussed. Simulation includes the bit-error-rate for a given satellite power, and the power needed at the satellite for a given bit-error-rate subject to the maximum beam power, which determines the relative fraction of the total time the signal is acquired for the two models. the simulation results of access control or power control based on urban multipath environment are also presented.
Significance of segmentation in phoneme based Tamil speech recognition system

Over the last few decades speech recognition has evolved and matured enough to be used in commercial applications. The applications include automatic dictation software, voice dialling, voice controlled navigation and simple data entry. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) deals with automatic conversion of acoustic signals of an utterance into text. In this work speech recognition system for Tamil language is developed. Speech recognition requires segmentation of speech waveform into fundamental acoustic units. Word is the natural unit of speech. However, each word has to be trained individually and there cannot be any sharing of parameters among words. Hence, it is essential to have a very large training set so that all words in the vocabulary are adequately trained. Also there is a problem with memory requirement which grows linearly with the number of words. The preferred unit to overcome this constraint is phone unit. It has less number of models and they are well trained. For the current work, phone units such as monophones and triphones are considered. This work highlights the importance of the segmented speech, language model and co-articulation effect which influences the speech production. Triphone is a phone unit which considers the co-articulation effect. Monophone and triphone based speech recognition systems for Tamil are developed and their performance shows the importance of the above mentioned parameters.
Prices and Social Behaviour: Evidence from Adult Smoking in Canadian Aboriginal Communities

This paper provides estimates of tobacco price elasticity explicitly distinguishing between two price effects: the direct effect, reflecting individual reaction to a price change, and the indirect effect, whereby price influences the individual by changing community smoking behaviour. Canada's Aboriginal communities are small and secluded, allowing for plausible identification of reference groups on a relatively large scale. Estimates suggest a 10% increase in price decreases daily smoking by 0.91 percentage points (2.11%), occasional smoking by 1.24 percentage points (8.27%) and average smoking intensity by 0.15 cigarettes per day (2.9%). It is found that the indirect effect almost doubles the response to a change in tobacco prices over the direct effect alone.
Extraction of morphological QRS-based biomarkers in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy for risk stratification using L1 regularized logistic regression

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is an inherited cardiac disease characterized by an unexplained thickening of the heart ventricles. It is the first cause of sudden cardiac death in young adults. No reliable biomarkers for risk assessment have been presented so far, but the electrocardiograms of HCM patients are often abnormal due to structural and electrical abnormalities. The goal of our study was to extract morphological QRS biomarkers in order to discriminate between HCM patients and control patients by analyzing fifty 12-lead Holter recordings (29 HCM - 21 control). Morphological features such as QRS width or slopes from the QRS complex directly and the coefficients of the first four Hermite transform basis were extracted. Classification was then performed using those features in an L1 regularized logistic regression algorithm. Classification between control and HCM patients reached 95.7% of accuracy (sensitivity of 94.96% for HCM and specificity of 96.90%) using only two main features: the percentage of negative regions of the QRS complex with respect to the isoelectric level and the 3rd coefficient of its Hermite fitting showing interesting connections to cardiac electrophysiology.
The Politics of Gun Control

This work offers wide-ranging coverage of the American gun culture, the history and meaning of Second Amendment, the criminological consequences of guns, the policy-making roles of Congress, the presidency, the bureaucracy, interest groups, public opinion and the political parties. New to this third edition of "The Politics of Gun Control" is coverage of the proliferation of concealed-carry laws in cities and counties. The book covers the debate and data on the effect of these laws on crime rates, homicide rates, gun-related violence and accidental deaths. Also included is coverage of guns and school violence, including the shooting at Columbine High (1999) and other schools around the country in 1997-98; the congressional response in the aftermath of these episodes; and the Senate's passing of a historic juvenile justice bill requiring background checks for gun show purchases, tougher penalties for sale to juveniles or to felons, mandatory gun locks on new handguns, and a ban on import of high-capacity ammunition clips.
Effect of Aging Time on Physicochemical Meat Quality and Sensory Property of Hanwoo Bull Beef

This study was conducted to investigate the meat quality and sensory properties of 12 major cuts from 10 Hanwoo bulls (25-32 mon of age) after they were aged at 2℃ for 0, 7, 14, and 21 d. Protein content (%) was between 19.17 and 22.50%. Intramuscular fat content ranged from 2.79 to 8.39%. The collagen content of the chuck roll, chuck tender, and short plate muscles was higher (1.97-2.04%) than that of the striploin muscles (1.48%) (p<0.05). CIE lightness (L*) values increased with an increase in aging days for tenderloin, loin, chuck roll, oyster blade, short plate, top sirloin, and eye of round muscles (p<0.05). Most muscles, except the short plate, showed no significant changes in redness CIE (a*) and yellowness (b*) color values during aging. The tenderloin, loin, and striploin showed significantly higher water holding capacity (58.60-62.06%) than that of chuck roll and short plate (53.86-57.07%) muscles (p<0.05). The Warner-Bratzler shear force values of most muscles decreased significantly as the aging period increased (p<0.05), exception the tenderloin. The chuck tender muscles showed the highest cooking loss, whereas tenderloin muscle showed the lowest (p<0.05). The tenderloin muscle had the longest sarcomere length (SL) (3.67-3.86 μm) and the bottom round muscle had the shortest SL (2.21-2.35 μm) (p<0.05). In the sensory evaluation, tenderness and overall-likeness scores of most muscles increased with increase in aging days. The tenderloin and oyster blade showed relatively higher tenderness and overall-likeness values than did the other muscles during the aging period. No significant differences were noted in juiciness and flavor-likeness scores among muscles and aging days.
Basic Mechanisms Driving Complex Spike Dynamics in a Chemotaxis Model with Logistic Growth

Recently, Wang and Hillen [Chaos 17 (3) (2007) 037108–037108] introduced a modified Keller-Segel model with logistic growth that exhibits complex spatiotemporal dynamics of spikes. These dynamics are driven by merging of spikes on one hand, and spike insertion on the other. In this paper we analyse the basic mechanisms that initiate and sustain these events. We identify two distinguished regimes. In the first regime, a single interior spike drifts towards a boundary. This instability is responsible for spike merging. The same regime further exhibits spike insertion; we identify a fold-point bifurcation which is precursor to spike insertion event. In the second regime, we show that it is possible to stabilize a single interior spike, and we compute analytically a critical threshold which is responsible for spike stabilization. In particular, our calculation characterizes a stable spike in the Keller-Segel model with logistic growth; this is in contrast to the classical Keller-Segel model where the interior spike is known to be unstable.
Intracellular cholesterol transport

Cholesterol can be transported among organelles by both vesicular and non‐vesicular transport. We have used well‐behaved fluorescent sterols, including dehydroergosterol (DHE), to study sterol transport in a variety of mammalian cells. In CHO cells, we have found that approximately one million sterol molecules per second are exchanged between the plasma membrane and the endocytic recycling compartment, mainly by non‐vesicular transport. Other studies have documented non‐vesicular transport between the plasma membrane and the endoplasmic reticulum. We have found that StarD4, a small cytoplasmic cholesterol‐binding protein, can rapidly exchange sterol between liposomes, and in cells it can regulate sterol transport to the endoplasmic reticulum. The role of sterol transport on StarD4 in cholesterol homeostasis in cells will be discussed.
Analysis of a QR Algorithm for Computing Singular Values

We extend the Golub--Kahan algorithm for computing the singular value decomposition of bidiagonal matrices to triangular matrices $R$. Our algorithm avoids the explicit formation of $R^TR$ or $RR^T$. We derive a relation between left and right singular vectors of triangular matrices and use it to prove monotonic convergence of singular values and singular vectors. The convergence rate for singular values equals the square of the convergence rate for singular vectors. The convergence behaviour explains the occurrence of deflation in the interior of the matrix. We analyse the relationship between our algorithm and rank-revealing QR and URV decompositions. As a consequence, we obtain an algorithm for computing the URV decomposition, as well as a divide-and-conquer algorithm that computes singular values of dense matrices and may be beneficial on a parallel architecture. Our perturbation result for the smallest singular values of a triangular matrix is stronger than the traditional results because it guarantees high relative accuracy in the smallest singular values after an off-diagonal block of the matrix has been set to zero.
Differential Diagnosis of Idiopathic Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus from Other Dementias Using Diffusion Tensor Imaging

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Because DTI can provide good markers of white matter pathology, it could be useful in differentiating white matter changes of INPH from those of other dementias. The aim of this study was, by using DTI, to compare the characteristic white matter changes in INPH with those in AD, subcortical vascular dementia, and healthy control subjects. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Sixteen patients with presurgical INPH, 10 with AD, 10 with subcortical vascular dementia, and 20 healthy control subjects underwent DTI. All patients with INPH showed clinical improvement after shunt surgery, and 9 of them also underwent postshunting DTI. Regions of interest were selected at the periventricular white matter, the anterior limb of the internal capsule, the posterior limb of the internal capsule, the genu and the splenium of the corpus callosum, the superior longitudinal fasciculus, and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus. FA and MD were obtained from each region of interest and were compared among the groups. RESULTS: Presurgical INPH showed significantly higher FA than all the other groups in the posterior limb of the internal capsule, which was decreased after shunt surgery. Presurgical MD of the INPH group was higher than that in the AD and healthy control groups but lower than that in the subcortical vascular dementia group in the anterior periventricular white matter, the anterior limb of the internal capsule, and the superior longitudinal fasciculus. In differentiating INPH, the sensitivity and specificity of FA in the posterior limb of the internal capsule was 87.5% and 95.0%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with shunt-responsive INPH showed higher FA in the posterior limb of the internal capsule compared with healthy controls and those in other groups of dementia that was reversible with shunt surgery. With this parameter, shunt-responsive INPH could be distinguished from AD, subcortical vascular dementia, and healthy conditions with high diagnostic accuracy.