Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A training method for SpikeProp without redundant spikes — Removing unnecessary sub-connections during training

SpikeProp, which is proposed by Bohte and extended by Booij, is a type of multi-layer networks of spiking neurons. Our research group has proposed a training algorithm for SpikeProp without redundant output spikes. However, its performance is sensitive to the initial network structure, such as the number of hidden units, the number of sub-connections, and their delays. In this article, we discuss the problem, especially the number of sub-connections. And we propose a method to remove unnecessary sub-connections during training. By simple experiments, we show that the method brings less dependency of training performance on the number of initial sub-connections.
A Novel Algorithm for Estimating Arterial Pressure-Dependent Compliance

The pressure-dependent compliance is being paid more and more attention with the research on cardiovascular diseases, because it provides us a new perspective to understand the relation between the arterial compliance and the blood pressure. Based on previous work, the paper proposes a novel algorithm to estimate human arterial pressure-dependent compliance. The nonlinear differential equation incorporating the pressure-dependent compliance is transformed into a linear equation, from which the optimal parameter of the pressure-dependent compliance is calculated using the least square method. 30-day continuous measurements of the same subject's arterial pressure-dependent compliance have been carried out, the results of which are provided.
A Multivariate Assessment of a Risk Model for Juvenile Delinquency With An “Under 12 Offender” Sample

The predictive validity of a hypothesized model of five factors associated with the development of juvenile delinquency was evaluated with 68 children, ages 6 to 11 years, referred for treatment to a clinic for delinquent behavior. Indicators for the predictors were obtained from information identified in the children's clinical files. The criterion measure, collected from parents 10 months after the pretreatment screening, was the t-score on the Delinquent scale of the Child Behavior Checklist. A stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that aggressiveness and variety of conduct problems accounted for 31% of the variance in delinquent behavior and had the highest relative improvement over chance (RIOC) values. The findings are discussed in terms of practical and policy implications for the early identification of children and youth and the development of early intervention and prevention programs to address the problem of juvenile delinquency.
Strain difference in the timing of meiosis resumption in mouse oocytes: involvement of a cytoplasmic factor(s) acting presumably upstream of the dephosphorylation of p34cdc2 kinase

Summary Oocytes from eight inbred strains of mice were screened for the timing of germinal vesicle breakdown (GVB) in vitro. This characteristic varied between strains, reaching most extreme values in oocytes from AKR and BALB/c mice (3.1 and 1.6h after release from dibutyryl cAMP block, respectively; p<0.0001). The difference between AKR and BALB/c mice was confirmed in experiments in which GVB was induced in vivo by stimulation with exogenous gonadotrophins. Analysis of the rate of GVB in hybrids obtained after fusion of nuclear and cytoplamic fragments of oocytes from both strains suggests that the factor responsible for the difference between AKR and BALB/c mice is located in the cytoplasm of the proghase oocytes. Finally, in oocytes from both strains stimulated to resume meiotic maturation with okadaic acid, an inhibitor of protein phosphatases types 1 and 2A the rate of GVB was the same (2.2h and 2.3h for AKR and BALB/c, respectively; p= 0.48). This suggests that the difference between strains is not related to the amount or quality of the pre-MPF (Maturation Promoting Factor) stored in the prophase oocyte, but to the factor(s) acting upstream of the dephosphorylation of p34cdc2. kinase in the pathway leading to pre-MPF activation.
Sub-families of Baxter Permutations Based on Pattern Avoidance

Baxter permutations are a class of permutations which are in bijection with a class of floorplans that arise in chip design called mosaic floorplans. We study a subclass of mosaic floorplans called $HFO_k$ defined from mosaic floorplans by placing certain geometric restrictions. This naturally leads to studying a subclass of Baxter permutations. This subclass of Baxter permutations are characterized by pattern avoidance. We establish a bijection, between the subclass of floorplans we study and a subclass of Baxter permutations, based on the analogy between decomposition of a floorplan into smaller blocks and block decomposition of permutations. Apart from the characterization, we also answer combinatorial questions on these classes. We give an algebraic generating function (but without a closed form solution) for the number of permutations, an exponential lower bound on growth rate, and a linear time algorithm for deciding membership in each subclass. Based on the recurrence relation describing the class, we also give a polynomial time algorithm for enumeration. We finally prove that Baxter permutations are closed under inverse based on an argument inspired from the geometry of the corresponding mosaic floorplans. This proof also establishes that the subclass of Baxter permutations we study are also closed under inverse. Characterizing permutations instead of the corresponding floorplans can be helpful in reasoning about the solution space and in designing efficient algorithms for floorplanning.
An LMI characterization of polynomial parameter-dependent Lyapunov functions for robust stability

This paper investigates the robust stability of continuous-time, time-invariant linear uncertain systems in polytopic domains. Robust stability is checked by constructing a quadratic parameter-dependent Lyapunov function. The matrix associated with this quadratic Lyapunov function is a polynomial function of the uncertain parameters, expressed as a particular polynomial matrix involving powers of the dynamic matrix of the system and one symmetric matrix to be determined. The degree of this polynomial matrix function is arbitrary. Finsler’s Lemma is used to lift the obtained stability conditions into a larger space in which sufficient stability tests can be developed in the form of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs), which must be verified at the vertices of the uncertainty polytopic domain. Examples illustrate the method, which is compared with similar results in the literature by means of random numerical experiments.
Applicant Reactions in Selection: Comprehensive Meta-Analysis into Reaction Generalization Versus Situational Specificity

This paper reports a comprehensive quantitative summary into applicant reactions to popular methods of employee selection. A detailed search of published and unpublished studies resulted in a final sample (k) of 38 independent samples covering 10 popular candidate assessment methods. Applicant reactions primary studies included samples from 17 countries internationally. Counter to previous suggestions for the situational specificity of applicant reactions, findings showed considerable similarity supporting the reaction generalizability hypothesis. Reaction favorability was structurally similar across countries and revealed a three-tier clustering of overall favorability perceptions –most preferred (work samples, interviews), favorably evaluated (resumes, cognitive tests, references, biodata, personality inventories), and least preferred (honesty tests, personal contacts, graphology). Some differences in applicant reactions to dimension-specific perceptions were found, however. Further analyses revealed strong positive correlations between favorability ratings and their validity and international usage. Implications for future research and ramifications for practice are considered in conclusion.
Teacher Effectiveness in Special Education Programs

The instructional behavior of teachers of mildly retarded (EMR) and learning-disabled (LD) elementary-aged students was used to predict reading achievement gain. Teachers were observed for five 80-minute sessions using the Classroom Activity Recording Form (CARF). The 16 behaviors of the CARF are organized into three major headings; Teacher-Directed Instruction (TDI), Independent Work (IND), and Non-Instructional Activities (NIA). Achievement gain was measured using the vocabulary and comprehension subtests of the California Achievement Test. For both EMR and LD teachers, time spent in TDI was predictive of achievement gain; the single best predictor among the TDI behaviors was time spent in Teacher Questioning (TQ). These results are consistent with previous studies of elementary teachers in which effectiveness derived from an active, questioning approach to instruction. The results are less compatible with findings in special education programs, in which achievement was most closely associated with time reading silently.
Apportioning energy consumption in the workplace: a review of issues in using metering data to motivate staff to save energy

The UK government has set ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions, and lowering energy demand within workplaces is important to help meet these. With the rollout of smart metres and the availability of more fine-grained energy monitoring equipment for the workplace, it is increasingly possible to disaggregate collective energy consumption and apportion this among building users. This article presents an interdisciplinary perspective on the rationale and feasibility of different approaches to apportionment to motivate staff to reduce energy consumption. Our review indicates greatest potential for energy saving when consumption is apportioned to small to medium-sized groups, rather than individuals or entire buildings, particularly when they represent existing communities to which staff members strongly identify. We highlight the complexity of technical, psychological, social and organisational factors that not only inspire, but also often confound, efforts to innovate in this area.
Towards a Deeper Understanding of Training Quantized Neural Networks in inference performance

Training neural networks with coarsely quantized weights is a key step towards learning on embedded platforms that have limited computing resources, memory capacity, and power consumption. Numerous recent publications have studied methods for training quantized networks, but these studies have been purely experimental. In this work, we investigate the theory of training quantized neural networks by analyzing the convergence properties of some commonly used methods. Our main result shows that training algorithms that exploit high-precision representations have an important annealing property that purely quantized training methods lack, which explains many of the observed empirical differences between these types of algorithms.
Towards a linguistic patterns for arabic keyphrases extraction

Keyphrases are defined as phrases that capture the main topic(s) discussed in a document, they offer a brief and short summary of document's content. In fact, they were integrated in many Text Mining Applications such as Document Summarization, Document Indexing, Feature Extraction for Document Clustering and Classification as new Text Representation instead of the Full-Text Representation. This paper presents new improvement of our previous Arabic keyphrases extraction system based on Suffix Tree Data Structure and named the KpST system, by adding linguistic patterns specialized in extracting Arabic noun phrases, and using adapted C-value multi-terms extraction method to calculate the keyphrase relevance and solve the sub-keyphrases problem.
Epigenetic Alterations in Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the major cause of dementia in Western societies. It progresses asymptomatically during decades before being belatedly diagnosed when therapeutic strategies have become unviable. Although several genetic alterations have been associated with AD, the vast majority of AD cases do not show strong genetic underpinnings and are thus considered a consequence of non-genetic factors. Epigenetic mechanisms allow for the integration of long-lasting non-genetic inputs on specific genetic backgrounds, and recently, a growing number of epigenetic alterations in AD have been described. For instance, an accumulation of dysregulated epigenetic mechanisms in aging, the predominant risk factor of AD, might facilitate the onset of the disease. Likewise, mutations in several enzymes of the epigenetic machinery have been associated with neurodegenerative processes that are altered in AD such as impaired learning and memory formation. Genome-wide and locus-specific epigenetic alterations have also been reported, and several epigenetically dysregulated genes validated by independent groups. From these studies, a picture emerges of AD as being associated with DNA hypermethylation and histone deacetylation, suggesting a general repressed chromatin state and epigenetically reduced plasticity in AD. Here we review these recent findings and discuss several technical and methodological considerations that are imperative for their correct interpretation. We also pay particular focus on potential implementations and theoretical frameworks that we expect will help to better direct future studies aimed to unravel the epigenetic participation in AD.
Unitarity analysis of a non-Abelian gauge invariant action with a mass

In previous work done by us and coworkers, we have been able to construct a local, non-Abelian gauge invariant action with a mass parameter, based on the nonlocal gauge invariant mass dimension two operator ${F}_{\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\nu}}({D}^{2}{)}^{\ensuremath{-}1}{F}_{\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\nu}}$. The renormalizability of the resulting action was proven to all orders of perturbation theory, in the class of linear covariant gauges. We also discussed the perturbative equivalence of the model with ordinary massless Yang-Mills gauge theories when the mass is identically zero. Furthermore, we pointed out the existence of a Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin (BRST) symmetry with corresponding nilpotent charge. In this paper, we study the issue of unitarity of this massive gauge model. First, we provide a short review how to discuss the unitarity making use of the BRST charge. Afterwards we make a detailed study of the most general version of our action, and we come to the conclusion that the model is not unitary, as we are unable to remove all the negative norm states from the physical spectrum in a consistent way.
Context-based weighting for vector space model to evaluate the relation between concept and context in information storage and retrieval system

In this paper, we represent the context based weighting scheme for vector space model to evaluate the relation between concept and context in Information storage and retrieval system. A meaning of a word is relatively decided by a context dynamically. A vector space model, generally use a static weighting scheme for term document matrix like latent semantic indexing (LSI), co-occurrence or correlations of terms etc. It is important to weight each element of each vector by a context. It is necessary to understand a concept by not reading one data but summarizing large data. Therefore, the features in the vector space model should be generate from data set corresponding to represent a certain thing. That is, we should generate vectors for the vector space model dynamically corresponding to a context and data distribution. The features of our method are a run time calculation of each element of vectors in a vector space model corresponding to a context. Our method measure the similarity between target concept vector and context vector.
Operational reasoning for functions with local state

Languages such as ML or Lisp permit the use of recursively defined function expressions with locally declared storage locations. Although this can be very convenient from a programming point of view it severely complicates the properties of program equivalence even for relatively simple fragments of such languages—such as the simply typed fragment of Standard ML with integer-valued references considered here. This paper presents a method for reasoning about contextual equivalence of programs involving this combination of functional and procedural features. The method is based upon the use of a certain kind of logical relation parameterised by relations between program states. The form of this logical relation is novel, in as much as it involves relations not only between program expressions, but also between program continuations (also known as evaluation contexts). The authors found this approach necessary in order to establish the ‘Fundamental Property of logical relations’ in the presence of both dynamically allocated local state and recursion. The logical relation characterises contextual equivalence and yields a proof of the best known context lemma for this kind of language— the Mason-Talcott ‘ciu’ theorem. Moreover, it is shown that the method can prove examples where such a context lemma is not much help and which involve representation independence, higher order memoising functions, and profiling functions.
Physical Activity for its Mental Health Benefits: Conceptualising Participation within the Model of Human Occupation

Introduction: The mental health benefits of physical activity are well evidenced yet translating physical activity goals into actual participation can be challenging. Method: This study used a qualitative approach to investigate the barriers and supports that people with depression and/or anxiety have experienced when attempting to participate in physical activity. In-depth interviews were conducted with a small sample of seven participants of a mental health community team who had expressed an interest in physical activity. Thematic analysis was used and correlated with Model of Human Occupation concepts as a means of relating findings to potential practice applications. Findings: The findings confirmed the complexity of factors influencing participation, with those relating to volition being most noteworthy. The participants' negative self-perceptions of their abilities affected their motivation to engage in activities, and other treatments, such as psychotherapeutic and pharmacological, were required. Physical activity was more likely to be used as an adjunct treatment initially but, once mental health issues were beginning to be resolved, its value as an intervention in its own right was increased. Conclusion: Occupational therapists can use the Model of Human Occupation to conceptualise the complexities of engagement. Such understanding is essential before setting physical activity goals and intervention plans for people with mental health problems.
Performance Analysis of FSO Systems over Atmospheric Turbulence Channel for Indian Weather Conditions

Free-space optical (FSO) communication is a line of sight (LOS) technology and has significant advantages and attractive applications. Recently, spectrum slicing wavelength division multiplexing (SS-WDM)-based FSO systems provide improved link range, high capacity, and efficiency. In this chapter, the SS-WDM-based FSO system is proposed with four channels to increase the performance of communication under various wind speed and heights of the buildings. But, atmospheric turbulence fading, scintillation, and pointing errors (PE) are the main impairments affecting the performance of FSO commu- nication systems. Predominantly, the turbulence variation due to wind velocity, refractive index, and height of buildings has been majorly focused and analyzed for Vellore weather conditions. A case study has been experimented on how the height of buildings and the atmosphere around VIT, Vellore campus, affect the transmission of light in free space. The bit error rate of the proposed system is analyzed with distance, received power for various wind speed and different heights of the buildings.
Computed Tomographic Observations on Subcutaneous Fat: Implications for Liposuction

&NA; The anatomy of the abdominal subcutaneous tissues is discussed in the light of data obtained in 20 female patients examined on a modern computed tomographic system. We have shown that the superficial fascia, which separates the superficial and deep layers of subcutaneous fat, forms a continuous circumferential fascial plane. This superficial fascia, contrary to previous reports, does not appear to merge with the deep fascial plane around the external oblique muscle. The fat in the deep subcutaneous layer, bounded by the superficial fascia, is the target for liposuction techniques. The CT data have shown that about 50 percent of subcutaneous fat resides within this deep layer. (Plast. Reconstr. Surg. 97: 387, 1996.)
Time-varying shortest path algorithm with transit time tuning for parking lot navigation

This paper presents a new system for intelligent navigation inside a parking lot. After modeling the parking lot with a time-varying graph, the proposed system applies a time-varying shortest path algorithm and dynamically tunes arc transit times based on planned vehicle routes as well as traffic flow sensor data. In computer simulations for evaluation, the proposed system showed a improvement of about 40% in travel time when compared with a system that only applies the conventional Dijkstra's algorithm.
Evolution-Based Hierarchical Feature Fusion for Ultrasonic Liver Tissue Characterization

This paper presents an evolution-based hierarchical feature fusion system that selects the dominant features among multiple feature vectors for ultrasonic liver tissue characterization. After extracting the spatial gray-level dependence matrices, multiresolution fractal feature vectors and multiresolution energy feature vectors, the system utilizes evolution-based algorithms to select features. In each feature space, features are selected independently to compile a feature subset. As the features of different feature vectors contain complementary information, a feature fusion process is used to combine the subsets generated from different vectors. Features are then selected from the fused feature vector to form a fused feature subset. The selected features are used to classify ultrasonic images of liver tissue into three classes: hepatoma, cirrhosis, and normal liver. Experiment results show that the classification accuracy of the fused feature subset is superior to that derived by using individual feature subsets. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of selecting discriminative features among multiple feature vectors to facilitate the early detection of hepatoma and cirrhosis via ultrasonic liver imaging.
Educational Returns, Ability Composition and Cohort Effects: Theory and Evidence for Cohorts of Early-Career UK Graduates

An increase over time in the proportion of young people obtaining a degree is likely to impact on the relative ability compositions (i) of graduates and non-graduates and (ii) across graduates with different classes of degree award. In a signalling framework, we examine the implications of this on biases across cohorts in estimates of educational returns. In an empirical analysis, we exploit administrative data on whole populations of UK university students for ten graduate cohorts to investigate the extent to which early labour market outcomes vary with class of degree awarded. Consistent with our theoretical model, we find that returns by degree class increased across cohorts during a period of substantial graduate expansion. We also corroborate the empirical findings with evidence from complementary data on graduate sample surveys.