Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
3D spatio-temporal graph cuts for video objects segmentation

In this paper, we present a method to extract moving objects in monocular image sequences. The proposed method is based on graph cuts defined on a spatio-temporal region adjacency graph (RAG). First, we initially over-segment each frame in the video, and take the over-segmented regions as the vertices in the 3D spatio-temporal graph. Second, multiple cues are fused together to extract objects accurately. Finally, accurate foreground/background segmentation are efficiently achieved by binary graph cut. The experimental results showed that the proposed method improved the performance of segmentation with respect to the popular methods.
A Weighted Association Rules Mining Algorithm with Fuzzy Quantitative Constraints

Along with production process automation and development of new products, manufacturing information in large quantity, contains more dimensions, in order to mine useful information from the manufacturing database, monitor and control manufacturing process effectively. A weighted association rules mining algorithm with fuzzy quantitative constraints (FQC-wed Apriori algorithm) is proposed in this paper. First, find association rules after database mining. Then, mine fuzzy association rules with fuzzy query. Last, find frequent item sets with the improved weighted association rules algorithm. Manufacturing process information can be mined and effectiveness of the mining algorithm can be evaluated. The algorithm is applied to manufacturing process information mining in discrete manufacturing industry.
Examining the career plateau among police officers

Purpose – This study aims to examine the career plateau by comparing police officers having 15 or more years of service who had been promoted with police officers having 15 or more years of service who had not.Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 389 police officers in Norway using anonymously completed questionnaires, a 62 percent response rate.Findings – Plateaued officers were younger, had less police tenure and were more educated than were non‐plateaued officers. Plateaued officers also reported less favorable work outcomes and greater cynicism. The two groups of officers indicated generally similar levels of psychological health suggesting that potential negative consequences of the career plateau were limited to the workplace.Research limitations/implications – All data collected using self‐reports raising the possibility of common method bias. Study needs to be replicated in police forces in other countries.Practical implications – Suggestions for reducing the negative effects of .
Efficient linear precoding in downlink cooperative cellular networks with soft interference nulling

A simple line network model is proposed to study the downlink cellular network. Without base station cooperation, the system is interference-limited. The interference limitation is overcome when the base stations are allowed to jointly encode the user signals, but the capacity-achieving dirty paper coding scheme can be too complex for practical implementation. A new linear precoding technique called soft interference nulling (SIN) is proposed, which performs at least as well as zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming under full network coordination. Unlike ZF, SIN allows the possibility of but over-penalizes interference. The SIN precoder is computed by solving a convex optimization problem, and the formulation is extended to multiple-antenna channels. SIN can be applied when only a limited number of base stations cooperate; it is shown that SIN under partial network coordination can outperform full network coordination ZF at moderate SNRs.
Perceiving blocks of emotional pictures and sounds: effects on physiological variables

Most studies on physiological effects of emotion-inducing images and sounds examine stimulus locked variables reflecting a state of at most a few seconds. We here aimed to induce longer lasting emotional states using blocks of repetitive visual, auditory, and bimodal stimuli corresponding to specific valence and arousal levels. The duration of these blocks enabled us to reliably measure heart rate variability as a possible indicator of arousal. In addition, heart rate and skin conductance were determined without taking stimulus timing into account. Heart rate was higher for pleasant and low arousal stimuli compared to unpleasant and high arousal stimuli. Heart rate variability and skin conductance increased with arousal. Effects of valence and arousal on cardiovascular measures habituated or remained the same over 2-min intervals whereas the arousal effect on skin conductance increased. We did not find any effect of stimulus modality. Our results indicate that blocks of images and sounds of specific valence and arousal levels consistently influence different physiological parameters. These parameters need not be stimulus locked. We found no evidence for differences in emotion induction between visual and auditory stimuli, nor did we find bimodal stimuli to be more potent than unimodal stimuli. The latter could be (partly) due to the fact that our bimodal stimuli were not optimally congruent.
Average-Case Performance of the Apriori Algorithm

The failure rate of the Apriori Algorithm is studied analytically for the case of random shoppers. The time needed by the Apriori Algorithm is determined by the number of item sets that are output (successes: item sets that occur in at least k baskets) and the number of item sets that are counted but not output (failures: item sets where all subsets of the item set occur in at least k baskets but the full set occurs in less than k baskets). The number of successes is a property of the data; no algorithm that is required to output each success can avoid doing work associated with the successes. The number of failures is a property of both the algorithm and the data.We find that under a wide range of conditions the performance of the Apriori Algorithm is almost as bad as is permitted under sophisticated worst-case analyses. In particular, there is usually a bad level with two properties: (1) it is the level where nearly all of the work is done, and (2) nearly all item sets counted are failures. Let l be the.
Voxel2mcnp: Software for Handling Voxel Models for Monte Carlo Radiation Transport Calculations

Abstract—Voxel2MCNP is a program that sets up radiation protection scenarios with voxel models and generates corresponding input files for the Monte Carlo code MCNPX. Its technology is based on object-oriented programming, and the development is platform-independent. It has a user-friendly graphical interface including a two- and three-dimensional viewer. A row of equipment models is implemented in the program. Various voxel model file formats are supported. Applications include calculation of counting efficiency of in vivo measurement scenarios and calculation of dose coefficients for internal and external radiation scenarios. Moreover, anthropometric parameters of voxel models, for instance chest wall thickness, can be determined. Voxel2MCNP offers several methods for voxel model manipulations including image registration techniques. The authors demonstrate the validity of the program results and provide references for previous successful implementations. The authors illustrate the reliability of calculated dose conversion factors and specific absorbed fractions. Voxel2MCNP is used on a regular basis to generate virtual radiation protection scenarios at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology while further improvements and developments are ongoing.
Adolescent Perceptions of the Performance and Fairness of the Police: Examining the Impact of Television Exposure

This study investigates the relationship between adolescents' exposure to news, fictional police/crime shows, and reality police shows and their perceptions of the performance, distributive fairness, and procedural fairness of the police and the link with their overall attitude toward the police. Based on the literature, a hypothetical model of media influence is proposed and tested empirically in a cross-sectional survey of 356 Flemish adolescents. Watching reality shows was negatively related to adolescents' perceptions of how fairly the police exercise their authority. Exposure to the news negatively predicted respondents' perceptions of the distributive fairness of the police. Adolescents' beliefs about police performance were not related to media exposure. Exposure to fictional police shows did not significantly predict police perceptions. The results suggest that news and reality police shows play a small but significant role in adolescents' fairness perceptions of the police.
Social and Cultural Capital, Race and Ethnicity, and College Student Retention

This study addresses the role that social and cultural capital play in first-to-second year persistence in higher education and examines how race and ethnicity are associated with initial levels of such capital. Using logistic regression analysis, the results show that social and cultural capital are positively significant for persistence in higher education across all racial and ethnic groups. However, results also show that certain groups, especially Hispanics, have lower levels of normatively valued forms of social and cultural capital than others. The effects for social and educational stratification are discussed, as are implications for higher education retention policies and further research.
Compressive sensing: a paradigm shift in signal processing

We survey a new paradigm in signal processing known as "compressive sensing". Contrary to old practices of data acquisition and reconstruction based on the Shannon-Nyquist sampling principle, the new theory shows that it is possible to reconstruct images or signals of scientific interest accurately and even exactly from a number of samples which is far smaller than the desired resolution of the image/signal, e.g., the number of pixels in the image. This new technique draws from results in several fields of mathematics, including algebra, optimization, probability theory, and harmonic analysis. We will discuss some of the key mathematical ideas behind compressive sensing, as well as its implications to other fields: numerical analysis, information theory, theoretical computer science, and engineering.
TILLING in the botanical garden: a reverse genetic technique feasible for all plant species.

Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes (TILLING) is a powerful technology that employs heteroduplex analysis to detect which organisms in a population carry single nucleotide mutations in specific genes. Genes are amplified by PCR using pooled genomic DNA from several individuals as a template. Following denaturation and renaturation of the amplified DNA, heteroduplexes form if organisms with wild type and mutant sequence are both present in the pool. The heteroduplexes can be detected by cleavage with an endonuclease and resolution of the resulting fragments on a sequencing gel. TILLING can be an effective reverse genetic technique if it is used to screen populations mutagenized with chemical mutagens such as ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS). Since such mutagens induce a diverse array of mutant alleles at a high frequency in any organism without the need of transgenic technology, TILLING is more versatile, universal and requires a smaller mutagenized population than other reverse genetic methods. TILLING can also be used to detect naturally occurring single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP’s) in genes among accessions, varieties, ecotypes or cultivars. These SNP’s can serve as genetic markers in mapping, breeding and genotyping and can provide information concerning gene structure, linkage disequilibrium, population structure or adaptation.
University male students’ responses to female-centred texts: participation and non-participation

Although students equipped with the concept of gender equity may be better prepared to participate in a democratic society, gender is not a given but a construct, formalising a discourse in a non-arbitrary way through a matrix of practices. The study reports how two male Taiwanese university students, Jay and Dick, responded to female-centred texts to construct their concept of gender equity. Data sources include reading journal entries and oral interviews. The results indicate Jay’s inquiry positions regarding gender equity allowed him to re-evaluate himself as a male reader, leading him to changed perspectives and a new understanding about his implicit beliefs toward gender. In contrast, responding to female-centred texts became a site of struggle for Dick, revealing gaps and contradictions within his conventional insights on gender equity. The results also inform us that male and female students need effective ways of constructing gender roles in responding to texts and talk.
Breaking the Barriers Between Middle School and High School: Developing a Transition Team for Student Success

Programs for transition between the home and the elementary school, and between the elementary school and the middle level are readily available in the literature, complete with program design and activi ties. Programs to assist students in moving from the middle level school to the high school, however, are all but nonexistent. This lack of information hampers one of the most crucial moves that students make in their educational careers.
The Tennis Coach Problem: A Game-Theoretic and Experimental Study

The paper introduces a new allocation game, related to Blotto games: each tennis coach assigns his four different skilled players to four positions, and then each team plays all other teams in the tournament. The winning team is the one with the highest total score.The set of equilibria is characterized and experimental behavior in variants of the game is analyzed in light of an adapted level-k model which is based on an appealing specification of the starting point (Level-0). The results exhibit a systematic pattern- a majority of the subjects used a small number of strategies. However, although level-k thinking is naturally specified in this context, only a limited use of (low) level-k thinking was found. These findings differ from those obtained in previous studies, which found high frequencies of level-k reasoning among subjects in various games. Thus, the results illuminate some bounds of the level-k approach.
The Power of Relationship: A study of key working as an intervention with traumatised young people

This paper explores the role of the key working relationship in helping traumatised and characteristically hard-to-reach young people. A grounded theory approach was used to analyse data from 18 semi-structured interviews carried out with both key workers and young users in a community-based, innovative project in Inner London, Kids Company. The following four codes emerged: titrating intimacy, the power of relationship, the therapeutic function of hope and ‘knowing your own ghosts’. As well as supporting the important therapeutic function of the key working relationship, this paper draws on the analysis of the data to outline a three-phase model of intervention (fostering place attachment–homeostatic attunement–disruptive attunement) when working with traumatised and often hard-to-reach young people.
Effects of ergotamine and methysergide on blood platelet aggregation responses of migrainous subjects

Platelet aggregation responses to 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) were measured in plasma from migrainous subjects taking either methysergide maleate or ergotamine tartrate and were found to be reduced. Blood 5-HT levels of subjects free of headache were not affected by these drugs. The results support the hypothesis that methysergide and ergotamine act by occupying 5-HT uptake sites in vessel walls, leaving 5-HT molecules available to occupy receptors concerned with vasoconstriction.
A Coordinated Control for Photovoltaic Generators and Energy Storages in Low-Voltage AC/DC Hybrid Microgrids under Islanded Mode

The increasing penetration of renewable generators can be a significant challenge due to the fluctuation of their power generation. Energy storage (ES) units are one solution to improve power supply quality and guarantee system stability. In this paper, a hybrid microgrid is built based on photovoltaic (PV) generator and ES; and coordinated control is proposed and developed to achieve power management in a decentralized manner. This control scheme contains three different droop strategies according to characteristics of PV and ES. First, the modified droop control is proposed for PV, which can take full utilization of renewable energy and avoid regulating output active power frequently. Second, to maintain the direct current (DC) bus voltage stability, a novel droop control incorporating a constant power band is presented for DC-side ES. Third, a cascade droop control is designed for alternating current (AC)-side ES. Thus, the ES lifetime is prolonged. Moreover, interlinking converters (ICs) provide a bridge between AC/DC buses in a hybrid microgrid. The power control of IC is enabled when the AC- or DC-side suffer from active power demand shortage. In particular, if the AC microgrid does not satisfy the reactive power demand, IC then acts as a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM). The effectiveness of the proposed strategies is verified by simulations.
TranSim: A Simulation Framework for Cache-Enabled Transparent Computing Systems

The growing demand on the performance of transparent computing systems requires good cache schemes in order to overcome the prolonged network latency. However, evaluating cache schemes, especially measuring the performance of a transparent computing system with particular cache scheme remains challenging. This is because neither method is available to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the cache schemes in transparent computing, nor the simulator has been developed to measure the system performance under particular cache schemes. In this paper, we propose TranSim, a full-featured, high-performance simulation framework for transparent computing. For the first time, TranSim introduces a methodology to evaluate the performance of multi-level cache hierarchies in transparent computing under different cache configurations and cache replacement policies. TranSim can also demonstrate the behavior and performance of the entire transparent computing system rather than only the cache miss/hit rate. Using TranSim, the system designer can quickly evaluate the effectiveness of cache schemes along with the system performance. We construct several experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of TranSim. Results show that TranSim can accurately output the performance of both the cache hierarchy and the entire transparent computing system.
Phase recovery from a Bayesian point of view: The variational approach

In this paper, we consider the phase recovery problem, where a complex signal vector has to be estimated from the knowledge of the modulus of its linear projections, from a naive variational Bayesian point of view. In particular, we derive an iterative algorithm following the minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence under the mean-field assumption, and show on synthetic data with random projections that this approach leads to an efficient and robust procedure, with a reasonable computational cost.
The Contribution of Genetic Diversity to Subdivide Populations Living in the Silk Road of China

There are several indigenous ethnic populations along the silk road in the Northwest of China that display clear differences in culture and social customs, perhaps as a result of geographic isolation and different linguistic traditions. However, extensive trade and other interactions probably facilitated the admixture of different gene pools between these populations over the last two millennia. To further explore the evolutionary relationships of the 13 ethnic populations residing in Northwest China and to reveal the features of population admixture, the 9 most-commonly employed CODIS loci (D3S1358, TH01, D5S818, D13S317, D7S820, CSF1PO, vWA, TPOX, FGA) were selected for genotyping and further analysis. Phylogenetic tree and principal component analysis revealed clear pattern of population differentiation between 4 populations living in Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region and other 9 populations dwelled in the upper regions of Silk Road. R matrix regression showed high-level gene flow and population admixture dose exist among these ethic populations in the Northwest region of China. Furthermore, the Mantel test suggests that larger percent of genetic variance (21.58% versus 2.3%) can be explained by geographic isolation than linguistic barriers, which matched with the contribution of geographic factors to other world populations.
Probabilistic text modeling with orthogonalized topics

Topic models have been widely used for text analysis. Previous topic models have enjoyed great success in mining the latent topic structure of text documents. With many efforts made on endowing the resulting document-topic distributions with different motivations, however, none of these models have paid any attention on the resulting topic-word distributions.Since topic-word distribution also plays an important role in the modeling performance,topic models which emphasize only the resulting document-topic representations but pay less attention to the topic-term distributions are limited. In this paper, we propose the Orthogonalized Topic Model(OTM) which imposes an orthogonality constraint on the topic-term distributions. We also propose a novel model fitting algorithm based on the generalized Expectation-Maximization algorithm and the Newthon-Raphson method. Quantitative evaluation of text classification demonstrates that OTM outperforms other baseline models and indicates the important role played by topic orthogonalizing.
Multiple Genetic Modifiers of Bilirubin Metabolism Involvement in Significant Neonatal Hyperbilirubinemia in Patients of Chinese Descent

The potential for genetic variation to modulate neonatal hyperbilirubinemia risk is increasingly being recognized. A case-control study was designed to assess comprehensive contributions of the multiple genetic modifiers of bilirubin metabolism on significant neonatal hyperbilirubinemia in Chinese descendents. Eleven common mutations and polymorphisms across five bilirubin metabolism genes, namely those encoding UGT1A1, HMOX1, BLVRA, SLCO1B1 and SLCO1B3, were determined using the high resolution melt (HRM) assay or PCR-capillary electrophoresis analysis. A total of 129 hyperbilirubinemic infants and 108 control subjects were evaluated. Breastfeeding and the presence of the minor A allele of rs4148323 (UGTA*6) were correlated with an increased risk of hyperbilirubinemia (OR=2.17, P=0.02 for breastfeeding; OR=9.776, P=0.000 for UGTA*6 homozygote; OR=3.151, P=0.000 for UGTA*6 heterozygote); whereas, increasing gestational age and the presence of –TA7 repeat variant of UGT1A1 decreased the risk (OR=0.721, P=0.003 for gestational age; OR=0.313, P=0.002 for heterozygote TA6/TA7). In addition, the SLCO1B1 and SLCO1B3 polymorphisms also contributed to an increased risk of hyperbilirubinemia. This detailed analysis revealed the impact of multiple genetic modifiers on neonatal hyperbilirubinemia. This may support the use of genetic tests for clinical risk assessment. Furthermore, the established HRM assay can serve as an effective method for large-scale investigation.
NON-DESTRUCTIVE MEASUREMENT OF MOISTURE IN BUILDING MATERIALS BY COMPTON SCATTERING OF GAMMA RAYS

A non-destructive method for measuring moisture within porous building materials is presented. It is based on the detection of the backward angle scattered gamma-rays of a Am source, with a LaBr3:Ce scintillator detector. An example of application of this method is given by measuring the moisture in bricks (building material) with various water contents. The method is suitable for the examination of building walls (houses, historical monuments) and of building material samples.