Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Constructive Neural Networks with Regularization

In this paper we present a regularization approach to the training of all the network weights in cascadecorrelation type constructive neural networks. Especially, the case of regularizing the output neuron of the network is presented. In this case, the output weights are trained by employing a regularized objective function containing a penalty term which is proportional to the weight values of the unit being trained. It is shown that the training can still be done with the pseudo-inverse method of linear regression if the output unit employs linear activation function. The degree of regularization and the smoothness of network mapping can be adjusted by changing the value of the regularization parameter. The investigated algorithms were Cascade-Correlation, Modified Cascade-Correlation, Cascade, and Fixed Cascade Error. The algorithms having the regularization of the hidden and output units were compared with the ones having only the regularization of the hidden units and with those having no regularization at all. The simulation results show that the regularization of the output unit is highly beneficial. It leads to better generalization performance and in many cases to lower computational costs when compared to the partially and non-regulated versions of the same algorithms. Key-Words: Constructive neural networks, regularization, generalization, cascade-correlation, classification, regression.
Population structure of pilot whale (Globicephala melas) in Atlantic waters assessed through biogeochemical and genetic markers

The integration of ecological and genetic approaches is a particularly powerful strategy to identify natural population structure and to obtain information on foraging habitat and habits and social structure, over different timescales. In order to investigate the potential occurrence of population segregation in long-finned pilot whales (Globicephala melas) in the North Atlantic, both biogeochemical (fatty acids and stable isotopes) and genetic (mitochondrial DNA) markers were analyzed in animals from four areas within the North Atlantic: Northwestern Iberian Peninsula, United Kingdom, Faroe Islands and United Sates of America. The genetic data revealed strong oceanic and regional levels of divergence, although AMOVA revealed no differentiation between East and West Atlantic. Results from biogeochemical tracers supported previous dietary studies, revealing geographic and ontogenetic dietary variation in G. melas. These results suggest that both ecological and genetic factors may drive the levels of pilot whale differentiation in the North Atlantic. The ecological segregation observed may be related with the exploitation of different foraging niches (e.g. oceanic vs. coastal), which can be highly influenced by prey distributions and/or oceanographic phenomena. Genetic differentiation may result from limited dispersal mediated through the social structure presented by this species. These results from multiple approaches provide preliminary information about pilot whale stocks in the North
Spatializing Timbre With Corpus-Based Concatenative Synthesis

Corpus-based concatenative synthesis presents unique possibilities for the visualization of audio descriptor data. These visualization tools can be applied to sound diffusion in the physical space of the concert hall using current spatialization technologies. Using CATART and the FTM&CO library for MAX/MSP we develop a technique for the organization of a navigation space for synthesis based on user-defined spatial zones and informed by the perceptual concept of timbre space. Spatialization responds automatically to descriptor data and is controllable in real-time or can be recorded for later playback. This work has been realized in recent compositions for instruments, electronics, and sound installation using Wave Field Synthesis and Vector-Based Amplitude Panning. The goal is to place the listener in the midst of a virtual space of sounds organized by their descriptor data, simulating an immersion in timbre space.
Simulation of video sequences for an accurate evaluation of tracking algorithms on complex scenes

As target tracking is arousing more and more interest, the necessity to reliably assess tracking algorithms in any conditions is becoming essential. The evaluation of such algorithms requires a database of sequences representative of the whole range of conditions in which the tracking system is likely to operate, together with its associated ground truth. However, building such a database with real sequences, and collecting the associated ground truth appears to be hardly possible and very time-consuming. Therefore, more and more often, synthetic sequences are generated by complex and heavy simulation platforms to evaluate the performance of tracking algorithms. Some methods have also been proposed using simple synthetic sequences generated without such complex simulation platforms. These sequences are generated from a finite number of discriminating parameters, and are statistically representative, as regards these parameters, of real sequences. They are very simple and not photorealistic, but can be reliably used for low-level tracking algorithms evaluation in any operating conditions. The aim of this paper is to assess the reliability of these non-photorealistic synthetic sequences for evaluation of tracking systems on complex-textured objects, and to show how the number of parameters can be increased to synthesize more elaborated scenes and deal with more complex dynamics, including occlusions and three-dimensional deformations.
Preconception care: a screening tool for health assessment and risk detection.

BACKGROUND Identification of risk factors for adverse pregnancy outcome is a main component of preconception care, but requires adequate time and knowledge. This study compares self-administered questionnaires to history taking by a physician to evaluate the reliability of such a screening tool for prepregnancy risk detection. METHODS One hundred ninety-three women from the outpatient clinic of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the University Medical Center Nijmegen, The Netherlands, were included in a study on preconception care. A Preconceptional Health Assessment form with risk variables pertaining to social, nutritional, medical, infectious disease, medication, reproductive and family history, and two Family History surveys (for the woman and her partner) were completed by 186 couples at home. A physician then orally verified the written answers. Agreement between the written and the oral answers was calculated using kappa statistic. RESULTS An excellent agreement level was found for all sections of the Preconceptional Health Assessment form (overall kappa = 0.88) except for nutritional history (kappa = 0.70). The Family History surveys also showed a high agreement level (kappa = 0.92 for women and kappa = 0.90 for men). CONCLUSIONS The questionnaires are an accurate screening tool for preconceptional risk factors. We advocate their implementation in various settings to facilitate the provision of preconception care.
SOCIOCULTURAL VARIATION IN LITERACY ACHIEVEMENT

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to describe the variations in literacy achievement among native and non-native upper primary school children (grades three to six) in the Netherlands. Various measures of word decoding, reading literacy and writing skill were collected from 1091 native Dutch children, 753 children with a former Dutch colonial background and 580 children with a Mediterranean background. The results showed the non-native children to lag behind their native peers on all of the tasks, although the differences on the decoding and writing tasks were fairly small. The Mediterranean children scored significantly lower than the ex-colonial children on all of the reading literacy tasks but equally high on the decoding and writing tasks. For both the native and non-native children, the same underlying factor structure was found to characterise their literacy achievement. Grade and ethnic status consistently predicted the factor scores for Word Decoding, Reading Literacy and Text Writing. In addition, socio-economic status (SES) predicted Reading Literacy and the variable sex predicted Writing Skills.
Queryable SEPA Message Compression by XML Schema Subtraction

In order to standardize the electronic payments within and between the member states of the European Union, SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) – an XML based standard format – was introduced. As the financial institutes have to store and process huge amounts of SEPA data each day, the verbose structure of XML leads to a bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a compressed format for SEPA data that removes that data from a SEPA document that is already defined by the given SEPA schema. The compressed format allows all operations that have to be performed on SEPA data to be executed on the compressed data directly, i.e., without prior decompression. Even more, the queries being used in our evaluation can be processed on compressed SEPA data with a speed that is comparable to ADSL2+, the fastest ADSL standard. In addition, our tests show that the compressed format reduces the data size to 11% of the original SEPA messages on average, i.e., it compresses SEPA data 3 times stronger than other compressors like gzip, bzip2 or XMill – although these compressors do not allow the direct query processing of the compressed data.
Using Significant Word Co-occurences for the Lexical Access Problem

One way to analyse word relations is to examine their co-occurrence in the same context. This allows for the identification of potential semantic or lexical relationships between words. As previous studies showed word co-occurrences often reflect human stimuli-response pairs. In this paper significant sentence co-occurrences on word level were used to identify potential responses for word stimuli based on three automatically generated text corpora of the Leipzig Corpora Collection.
Loneliness Among People with HIV in Relation to Locus of Control and Negative Meta-Stereotyping

The aim of this research was to examine the relation between locus of control, meta-stereotyping (expectancies about how one's group is stereotyped by another group), and loneliness among people who are HIV-positive. In line with expectations, a survey in the Netherlands among 122 people living with HIV revealed that there are positive and significant relations between external locus of control, meta-stereotyping, and loneliness. As expected, the relation between an external locus of control and loneliness was, at least partially, mediated by metastereotyping. Thus, people with HIV who feel less in control over their lives are more likely to be lonely as a result of negative thoughts that they have about how they are stereotyped as HIV patients by other people.
Contributing Variables to Post Mastectomy Tissue Expander Infection

Abstract: Tissue expander breast reconstruction is a common post mastectomy breast procedure performed by plastic surgeons. The purpose of this study was to define the incidence of breast reconstruction prosthetic infection, relate patient characteristics with increased rate of infection, and analyze the influence of postoperative complications to expander/implant infection. A retrospective, single‐institution chart review of 195 women with post mastectomy tissue expander/implant reconstructions performed from 2006 through 2008 was conducted. Total periprosthetic infection rate was calculated. Patient factors, operative technique, and noninfectious complications were analyzed and related to increased periprosthetic infection rate. A binary logistic regression model was fitted using periprosthetic infection as the dependent variable and 12 patient characteristics as independent variables, followed by a step‐wise model for best fit with a limited number of independent variables. The overall periprosthetic infection rate per patient over the 2 year period was 5.1%. The incidence of periprosthetic infection per reconstructed breast was 3.2%. Odds ratio estimates indicated that the presence of cellulitis increased the odds of periprosthetic infection more than 200 times (p = <0.0001), and inpatient procedures increased the odds 16 times (p = 0.02). Other variables (i.e., age > 65, DM, flap necrosis, smoking, dehiscence, AlloDerm, etc) failed to reach statistical significance (p > 0.05). Postoperative breast cellulitis and inpatient status appear to be significant risk factors for increased periprosthetic infection. No significant increase in periprosthetic infection rate was noted with other variables in this model.
SkyCover: Finding Range-Constrained Approximate Skylines with Bounded Quality Guarantees

Skyline queries retrieve promising data objects that are not dominated in all the attributes of interest. However, in many cases, a user may not be interested in a skyline set computed over the entire dataset, but rather over a speciﬁed range of values for each attribute. For example, a user may look for hotels only within a speciﬁed budget and/or in a particular area in the city. This leads to constrained skylines. Even after constraining the query ranges, the size of the skyline set can be impractically large, thereby necessitating the need for approximate or representative skylines. Thus, in this paper, we introduce the problem of ﬁnding range-constrained approximate skylines. We design a grid-based framework, called SkyCover, for computing such skylines. Given an approximation error parameter (cid:15) > 0 , the SkyCover framework guarantees that every skyline is “covered” by at least one representative object that is not worse by more than a factor of (1 + (cid:15) ) in all the dimensions. This is achieved by employing a non-uniform grid partitioning on the data space. We also propose two new metrics based on the covering factor to assess the quality of an approximate skyline set. Experimental evaluation reveals that SkyCover outperforms the competing methods in both quality and running time.
A theoretical model for obfuscating web navigation trails

Information about consumer's web navigation trails are increasingly being collected, analyzed, and used to target them with advertisements. This information can be quite personal, indicating individuals' likes and dislikes, as well as current and long term needs. While the ability to effectively target advertisements helps keep many sites and services on the web available freely, this practice has also raised privacy concerns. These concerns concern multiple factors: lack of transparency by the data aggregators and lack of control by the consumers. One viable approach that individuals can take to regain control is obfuscation, whereby real user requests are masked via the injection of noisy requests. In this paper, we describe a theoretical model and design for a web browser extension that relies on a trusted third party to generate fake HTTP requests (dummies). The dummy requests are generated as k different users' profiles surfing in parallel with the actual user. The value of k can be adjusted by the user to achieve the level of obfuscation they are comfortable with.
Quantum state model of non-radiative decay for description of superradiance

Description of superradiance (SR) of few quantum emitters with non-radiative decay is carried out in the frame of Schrödinger picture taking into account non-equilibrium bath states. Quantum efficiencies (QE) of SR of two and three emitters are calculated and compared with QE of spontaneous emission of two and three independent emitters. Maximum increase of QE is 9% for two emitters and 16% for three emitters, it is reached at certain relationships between non-radiative and radiative decay rates and at non-equilibrium in baths of non-radiative decay.
LED-Assisted Three-Dimensional Indoor Positioning for Multiphotodiode Device Interfered by Multipath Reflections

Indoor positioning for visible light communication (VLC) has gained significant attentions recently with the popularity of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In this paper, we consider a typical application of VLC by proposing a three-dimensional positioning scheme for a target terminal equipped with multiple photodiodes (PDs). Given the relative coordinates between the target terminal and receiving PDs along with positions of fixed transmitting LEDs, precise location estimation of the terminal device can be achieved via measuring received signal strength (RSS) through line-of-sight (LoS) channels. Moreover, multipath reflections from interior walls are considered as a major interference in non-LoS environment. It is discovered that the positioning error increases linearly with respect to the reflection coefficient of walls, which also verified by simulation results. The positioning error is achieved in millimeter scale under an ideal condition and in decimeter scale with multipath reflections.
Reduction of Thoroughbred racing fatalities at New York Racing Association racetracks using a multi-disciplinary mortality review process

Between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2015, findings of a New York State Gaming Commission–Cornell University postmortem examination program were utilized in a multi-disciplinary mortality review process to review 129 racing fatalities at Thoroughbred racetracks operated by the New York Racing Association (NYRA). Musculoskeletal fractures comprised 79% of the fatalities; cardiopulmonary conditions accounted for 12% of the fatalities. Other causes of death included gastrointestinal (3%), respiratory (5%), and central nervous system (2%) conditions. Fetlock failure represented 50% of the musculoskeletal fatalities. The general distribution of these findings was very similar to that reported by the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System during the same period. These findings, used in conjunction with a comprehensive mortality review process and regulatory reform, have contributed to a significant reduction of the incidence of Thoroughbred racing fatalities at NYRA racetracks during the period of this review.
Micronutrient Status in Female University Students: Iron, Zinc, Copper, Selenium, Vitamin B12 and Folate

Young women are at an increased risk of micronutrient deficiencies, particularly due to higher micronutrient requirements during childbearing years and multiple food group avoidances. The objective of this study was to investigate biomarkers of particular micronutrients in apparently healthy young women. Female students (n = 308; age range 18–35 year; Body Mass Index 21.5 ± 2.8 kg/m2; mean ± SD) were recruited to participate in a cross-sectional study. Blood samples were obtained from participants in the fasted state and analysed for biomarkers of iron status, vitamin B12, folate, homocysteine, selenium, zinc, and copper. The results show iron deficiency anaemia, unspecified anaemia, and hypoferritinemia in 3%, 7% and 33.9% of participants, respectively. Low vitamin B12 concentrations (<120 pmol/L) were found in 11.3% of participants, while 4.7% showed sub-clinical deficiency based on serum methylmalonic acid concentrations >0.34 μmol/L. Folate concentrations below the reference range were observed in 1.7% (serum) or 1% (erythrocytes) of participants, and 99.7% of the participant had erythrocyte-folate concentrations >300 nmol/L. Serum zinc concentrations <10.7 μmol/L were observed in 2% of participants. Serum copper and selenium concentrations were below the reference range in 23% and 11% of participants, respectively. Micronutrient deficiencies including iron and vitamin B12, and apparent excess of folate are present in educated Australian female students of childbearing age, including those studying nutrition. The effects of dietary behaviours and food choices on markers of micronutrient status require further investigation.
Retinopathy and risk factors in diabetic patients from Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Background Diabetes mellitus is accompanied by chronic and dangerous microvascular changes affecting most body systems, especially the eye, leading to diabetic retinopathy. Diabetic retinopathy without appropriate management is emerging as one of the leading causes of blindness. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the early diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy, reduce the risk of blindness, and identify relevant risk factors. Methods This descriptive study was designed to estimate the prevalence of retinopathy and its staging in diabetic patients attending the diabetes clinic at King Fahd Hospital in Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, from 2008 to 2010. Patients completed a questionnaire, underwent a full medical assessment carried out by the treating clinicians, and were examined for evidence of diabetic retinopathy using standard ophthalmic outpatient instruments. Results In total, 690 randomly selected diabetic patients of mean age 46.10 ± 11.85 (range 16–88) years were included, comprising 395 men (57.2%) of mean age 46.50 ± 11.31 years and 295 women (42.8%) of mean age 45.55 ± 12.53 years. The mean duration of diabetes mellitus was 11.91 ± 7.92 years in the women and 14.42 ± 8.20 years in the men, and the mean total duration of known diabetes mellitus was 13.35 ± 8.17 years. Glycated hemoglobin was higher in men (8.53% ± 1.81%) than in women (7.73% ± 1.84%), and this difference was statistically significant (P ≤ 0.0001). Of the 690 diabetic patients, 249 (36.1%) had retinopathy. Mild nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy was present in 13.6% of patients, being of moderate grade in 8% and of severe grade in 8.1%. A further 6.4% had proliferative diabetic retinopathy. Conclusion Regular screening to detect diabetic retinopathy is strongly recommended because early detection has the best chance of preventing retinal complications.
A Large Coverage Verb Taxonomy for Arabic

In this article I present a lexicon for Arabic verbs which exploits Levins verb-classes (Levin, 1993) and the basic development procedure used by (Schuler, 2005). The verb lexicon in its current state has 173 classes which contain 4392 verbs and 498 frames providing information about verb root, the deverbal form of the verb, the participle, thematic roles, subcategorisation frames and syntactic and semantic descriptions of each verb. The taxonomy is available in XML format. It can be ported to MYSQL, YAML or JSON and accessed either in Arabic characters or in the Buckwalter transliteration.