Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of Clinical and Radiologic Results of Mini-Open Transforaminal Lumbar Interbody Fusion and Extreme Lateral Interbody Fusion Indirect Decompression for Degenerative Lumbar Spondylolisthesis

Study Design Retrospective study. Purpose In this study, we compared the postoperative outcomes of extreme lateral interbody fusion (XLIF) indirect decompression with that of mini-open transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF) in patients with lumbar degenerative spondylolisthesis. Overview of Literature There are very few reports examining postoperative results of XLIF and minimally invasive TLIF for degenerative lumbar spondylolisthesis, and no reports comparing XLIF and mini-open TLIF. Methods Forty patients who underwent 1-level spinal fusion, either by XLIF indirect decompression (X group, 20 patients) or by mini-open TLIF (T group, 20 patients), for treatment of lumbar degenerative spondylolisthesis were included in this study. Invasiveness of surgery was evaluated on the basis of surgery time, blood loss, hospitalization period, and perioperative complications. The Japanese Orthopedic Association Back Pain Evaluation Questionnaire (JOABPEQ), disc angle (DA), disc height (DH), and slipping length (SL) were evaluated before surgery, immediately after surgery, and at 12 months after surgery. Cross-sectional spinal canal area (CSA) was also measured before surgery and at 1 month after surgery. Results There was no significant difference between the groups in terms of surgery time or hospitalization period; however, X group showed a significant decrease in blood loss (p<0.001). Serious complications were not observed in either group. In clinical assessment, no significant differences were observed between the groups with regard to the JOABPEQ results. The change in DH at 12 months after surgery increased significantly in the X group (p<0.05), and the changes in DA and SL were not significantly different between the two groups. The change in CSA was significantly greater in the T group (p<0.001). Conclusions Postoperative clinical results were equally favorable for both procedures; however, in comparison with mini-open TLIF, less blood loss and greater correction of DH were observed in XLIF.
Speech enhancement using spectral envelope side information

This paper proposes several methods for noise reduction using deterministic side information about the desired signal as a constraint on the reconstruction. Two forms of side information are considered separately: short-time linear predictive coefficients, and short-time zero-phase impulse response coefficients. We derive general expressions for the ML, MAP and MMSE estimators, and develop algorithms that yield the ML estimators with the above side information for speech corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise. We also explore the use of these methods in the traditional noise reduction problem with no side information.
Variations in Tracking in Relation to Geographic Location

Different countries have different privacy regulatory models. These models impact the perspectives and laws surrounding internet privacy. However, little is known about how effective the regulatory models are when it comes to limiting online tracking and advertising activity. In this paper, we propose a method for investigating tracking behavior by analyzing cookies and HTTP requests from browsing sessions originating in different countries. We collect browsing data from visits to top websites in various countries that utilize different regulatory models. We found that there are significant differences in tracking activity between different countries using several metrics. We also suggest various ways to extend this study which may yield a more complete representation of tracking from a global perspective.
A novel Hybrid CDN-P 2 P mechanism For effective real-time media streaming

In the early years, with the help of high-speed and broadband networking, the content delivery service has been grown up widely. There are a lot of providers for online streaming via Content Delivery Network (CDN), P2P network or hybrid CDN-P2P system. In this paper, we introduce one of new hybrid solution for real time streaming: novel hybrid CDN-P2P mechanism. Different from others, our solution works on the application level by effective management of playing buffer at the peer-side. By divide the playing buffer into 2 parts, we can profit all the advantages of CDN servers and P2P network: the performance of CDN servers and the cheap cost of using peers to distribute media content.
A Search for the Damped Lyα Absorber at z = 1.86 toward QSO 1244+3443 with NICMOS

We have carried out a high-resolution imaging search for the galaxy associated with the damped Lyα absorber (DLA) at z = 1.859 toward the zem = 2.48 quasar QSO 1244+3443, using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the near-infrared camera and multiobject spectrometer (NICMOS). Images were obtained in the broad filter F160W and the narrow filter F187N with camera 2 on NICMOS with the goal of detecting the rest-frame optical continuum and the Hα line emission from the DLA. After point-spread function (PSF) subtraction, two weak features are seen at projected separations of 0. ″16-0. ″24 from the quasar. Parts of these features may be associated with the DLA, although we cannot completely rule out that they could be artifacts of the PSF. If associated with the DLA, the objects would be ≈1-2 h kpc in size with integrated flux densities of 2.5 and 3.3 μJy in the F160W filter, implying luminosities at λcentral = 5600 Å in the DLA rest frame of 4.4-5.9 × 109 h L☉ at z = 1.86, for q0 = 0.5. However, no significant Hα line emission is seen from these objects, suggesting low star formation rates (SFRs). Our 3 σ upper limit on the SFR in the DLA is 1.3 h-270 M☉ yr-1 for q0 = 0.5 (2.4 h-270 M☉ yr-1 for q0 = 0.1). This together with our earlier result for LBQS 1210 + 1731 mark a significant improvement over previous constraints on the star formation rates of DLAs. Dust within the DLA could extinguish Hα emission, but this would require the dust content in the DLA to be much higher than that inferred from previous DLA observations. A combination of low star formation rate and some dust extinction is likely to be responsible for the lack of Hα emission. Alternatively, the objects, if real, may be associated with the host galaxy of the quasar rather than with the DLA. In any case, our observations suggest that the DLA is not a large bright protodisk, but a compact object or a low surface brightness galaxy. If the two features are PSF artifacts or associated with the quasar host, then the constraints on the size and luminosity of the DLA are even more severe.
Tacit Social Contracts for Wheelchairs

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to infer dialogue acts using the notion of tacit contracts. We describe the interpersonal linguistic features that our analysis grammar can identify in uttered texts and present an inference procedure that strictly separates the semantic and pragmatic steps of utterance understanding, thereby meeting a higher degree of modularity, a prerequisite for extending robot functionality.
Voice of the Clinician: the case of an Australian health system

Purpose The Voice of the Clinician project commenced during an era when practitioner burnout, dissatisfaction, and turnover became an increasingly global health workforce concern. One key problem is clinical staff not being empowered to voice their concerns to decision-makers, as was found in this case study of an Australian public health organization. The following research question informed the present study: What is a better committee system for clinician engagement in decision-making processes? The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach The Mid North Coast Local Health District in New South Wales aspired to improve engagement between frontline clinicians and decision-makers. Social network analysis methods and mathematical modeling were used in the discovery of how committees are connected to each other and subsequently to other committee members. Findings This effort uncovered a hidden organizational architecture of 323 committees of 926 members which overall cost 84,729 person hours and AUD$2.923 million per annum. Furthermore, frontline clinicians were located far from centers of influence, just 37 percent of committees had terms of reference, and clinicians reported that meeting agendas were not being met. Practical implications In response to the findings, a technological platform was created so that the board of directors could visually see all the committees and the connections between them, thus creating ways to further improve communication, transparency of process, and – ultimately – clinician engagement. Originality/value The breakthrough idea is that all organizational meetings can be seen as a system of engagement and should be analyzed to determine and describe the points and pathways where clinician voice is blocked.
Web services clustering using SOM based on kernel cosine similarity measure

with the rapid growth of Web services and the need of quickly finding the right services, automatically clustering Web services becomes exceedingly important and challenging. The performance of Web services clustering relies closely on services representation, the similarity measure, and the clustering algorithm. This paper first presents a WordNet-VSM (W-VSM) model for Web services representation which not only enriches the conventional VSM feature vectors' semantic information but also reduce their dimension and sparsity. Then a set of kernel cosine similarity measures are proposed to well estimate the similarity of the Web services. Furthermore, an unsupervised SOM neural network algorithm based on aforementioned kernel cosine similarity measure (KCSOM) is presented to automatically cluster Web services. Finally, the preliminary experiments using real-world Web services demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
Cloning and sequence analysis of desmosomal glycoproteins 2 and 3 (desmocollins): cadherin-like desmosomal adhesion molecules with heterogeneous cytoplasmic domains

Desmosomal glycoproteins 2 and 3 (dg2 and 3) or desmocollins have been implicated in desmosome adhesion. We have obtained a 5.0-kb-long clone for dg3 from a bovine nasal epidermal lambda gt11 cDNA library. Sequence analysis of this clone reveals an open reading frame of 2,517 bases encoding a polypeptide of 839 amino acids. The sequence consists of a signal peptide of 28 amino acids, a precursor sequence of 104 amino acids, and a mature protein of 707 amino acids. The latter has the characteristics of a transmembrane glycoprotein with an extracellular domain of 550 amino acids and a cytoplasmic domain of 122 amino acids. The sequence of a partial clone from the same library shows that dg2 has an alternative COOH terminus that is extended by 54 amino acids. Genomic DNA sequence data show that this arises by splicing out of a 46-bp exon that encodes the COOH-terminal 11 amino acids of dg3 and contains an in-frame stop codon. The extracellular domain of dg3 shows 39.4% protein sequence identity with bovine N- cadherin and 28.4% identity with the other major desmosomal glycoprotein, dg1, or desmoglein. The cytoplasmic domain of dg3 and the partial cytoplasmic domain of dg2 show 23 and 24% identity with bovine N-cadherin, respectively. The results support our previous model for the transmembrane organization of dg2 and 3 (Parrish, E.P., J.E. Marston, D.L. Mattey, H.R. Measures, R. Venning, and D.R. Garrod. 1990. J. Cell Sci. 96:239-248; Holton, J.L., T.P. Kenny, P.K. Legan, J.E. Collins, J.N. Keen, R. Sharma, and D.R. Garrod. 1990. J. Cell Sci. 97:239-246). They suggest that these glycoproteins are specialized for calcium-dependent adhesion in their extracellular domains and, cytoplasmically, for the molecular interactions involved in desmosome plaque formation. Moreover this represents the first example of alternative splicing within the cadherin family of cell adhesion molecules.
Analysis of Divisibility in Thenar Palmprint with Texture Features

Proposed a texture analysis method that based on the combination of the Gabor filters and 2DPCA. Through Gabor filter obtained the multi-direction and multi-resolution Gabor sub-image in the time and frequency domains. The Gabor sub-images were processed by 2DPCA, and extracted the multi-scale and multi-orientation feature vector. Finally using Euclidean distance measure the similarity of different classes. The experiment proved the effectiveness of the method.
The Association between Activity-Based Costing and Improvement in Financial Performance

This study investigates the improvement in financial performance that is associated with the use of Activity-Based Costing (ABC), and the conditions under which such improvement is achieved. Internal auditors furnish information regarding company financial performance, extent of ABC usage, and enabling conditions that have been identified in the literature as affecting ABC efficacy. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling are used to investigate the relationship between ABC and financial performance. Results show that there indeed is a positive association between ABC and improvement in ROI when ABC is used concurrently with other strategic initiatives, when implemented in complex and diverse firms, when used in environments where costs are relatively important, and when there are limited numbers of intra-company transactions. In addition, measures of success of ABC used in prior research appear to be predictors of improvement in financial performance.
HESITA(te) in Portuguese

Hesitations, so-called disfluencies, are a characteristic of spontaneous speech, playing a primary role in its structure, reflecting aspects of the language production and the management of inter-communication. In this paper we intend to present a database of hesitations in European Portuguese speech HESITA as a relevant base of work to study a variety of speech phenomena. Patterns of hesitations, hesitation distribution according to speaking style, and phonetic properties of the fillers are some of the characteristics we extrapolated from the HESITA database. This database also represents an important resource for improvement in synthetic speech naturalness as well as in robust acoustic modelling for automatic speech recognition. The HESITA database is the output of a project in the speech-processing field for European Portuguese held by an interdisciplinary group in intimate articulation between engineering tools and experience and the linguistic approach.
Spacetime in String Theory 1

We give a brief overview of the nature of spacetime emerging from string theory. This is radically different from the familiar spacetime of Einstein’s relativity. At a perturbative level, the spacetime metric appears as “coupling constants” in a two dimensional quantum field theory. Nonperturbatively (with certain boundary conditions), spacetime is not fundamental but must be reconstructed from a holographic, dual theory. To appear in “Spacetime 100 Years Later”, eds J. Pullin and R. Price (2005).
Outage Probability of Cooperative Communication Network with Relay Selection Over Nakagami-m Fading Channel

Cooperative diversity uses relays which assist source destination transmissions to reduce link outage rates in multipath fading environments. In this paper, an Amplify-and-Forward (AAF) cooperative communication system over Nakagami-m fading channel is considered where a source node communicates with a destination node directly and indirectly (through multiple relays). Nakagami-m fading channel works as generalized fading model. The relay selection reduces the amount of required resources. The relay node that can achieve the highest signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) at the destination node is selected so closed form expressions for the symbol error probability and outage probability are obtained from relay selection. Using numerical results, the performances curves are plotted for two values of Nakagami-m parameter which shows the significant advantages of the relay selection in a cooperative communication.
Opening black boxes: using semantic information to combat virtual machine image sprawl

Virtual-machine images are currently distributed as disk-image files, which are files that mirror the content of physical disks. This format is convenient for the virtual machine monitors that execute these images. However, it is not well-suited for administering images because storing images as disk-image files forces administrators to maintain the software on images with the same tools that they use to maintain the software on physical machines. Already, these tools cannot cope with "physical server sprawl"; in the future, because images can be snapshotted and cloned easily, enterprises that migrate from physical machines to images will need tools that scale to cope with the larger problem of "virtual-machine image sprawl. To address this problem, this paper proposes the Mirage image format (MIF), a new storage format that exposes the rich semantic information currently buried in disk-image files. Disk-image files contain a mapping from file name to file content (and file metadata). MIF decouples this mapping into a manifest that maps file names to content descriptors (and file metadata) and a store that holds the content. Each image has its own manifest and a store may contain content for many images. As with disk-image files, images in MIF fully encapsulate application state including all software dependences. In addition, conversion between MIF and traditional disk-image formats is easy. This paper shows, through examples, that MIF makes some typical software management tasks--inventory control, customized deployment, and image update--faster and easier. The general technique is to operate on manifests instead of on content whenever possible. These tasks can be performed without starting images and, because manifests are simpler and orders of magnitude smaller than disk-image files, without accessing large amounts of data.
Complex Exponential Pseudomodes of LTI Operators Over Finite Intervals

In applications including radar and ultrasonic inspection, an observed signal can often be modeled as the output over a finite interval of a linear, time-invariant (LTI) operator having a short-duration impulse response. For processing such as filtering and compression it would be useful to have approximations to eigenfunctions of the operator. It has been shown that discrete-time complex exponentials are asymptotic pseudomodes (i.e., approximate eigenvectors) of sequences of Toeplitz matrices. In this letter we show that complex exponentials over the observation interval are pseudomodes of LTI operators, corresponding to pseudoeigenvalues that are samples from the operator's frequency response, and how the level of approximation depends on the ratio of the impulse response duration to observation interval length. This implies that the Fourier Series basis for the observation interval can be used as an orthonormal set of approximate eigenfunctions.
Translation of Heterogeneous Requirements Meta-Models Through a Pivot Meta-Model

Companies use these different approaches to elicit, specify, analyse and validate their requirements in different contexts. The globalization and the rapid development of information technologies sometimes require companies to work together in order to achieve common objectives as quickly as possible. We propose a Unified Requirements Engineering meta-model (UREM) that allows cooperation in the requirements engineering process between heterogeneous RE (Requirement Engineering) models. In this paper, we explore UREM as a pivot meta-model to ensure interoperability between heterogeneous RE models.
Optimal Combination of Color Components for Skin Detection

This paper proposes an optimal combination of color components that best represent skin across different ethnics. The optimal combination is selected based on the performance of various combinations of color components, namely a combination of a, b and g, a combination of U, V and g, a combination of H, r, g and b, a combination of Hnew, Snew and g, and a combination of Hnew, Snew, H and g, when incorporated with RGB and morphological filters. The methods used to detect the skin are based on threshold-based method. Experimented on three public datasets under various imaging conditions across different ethnics, we found that the combination of H, Hnew, Snew and g outperformed the other combinations.
Improved Approximation Algorithm for Two-Dimensional Bin Packing

We study the two-dimensional bin packing problem with and without rotations. Here we are given a set of two-dimensional rectangular items I and the goal is to pack these into a minimum number of unit square bins. We consider the orthogonal packing case where the edges of the items must be aligned parallel to the edges of the bin. Our main result is a 1.405-approximation for two-dimensional bin packing with and without rotation, which improves upon a recent 1.5 approximation due to Jansen and Pradel. We also show that a wide class of rounding based algorithms cannot improve upon the factor of 1.5.
Correction to “A model assessment of satellite observed trends in polar sea ice extents”

[1] In the paper ‘‘A model assessment of satellite observed trends in polar sea ice extents’’ by K. Y. Vinnikov et al. (Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L05704, doi:10.1029/2005GL025282, 2006) the ice extents retrieved from French IPSL CM4 climate model simulations have been underestimated. They correspond to ice thicknesses of 60 cm instead of 6 cm. Table 1 and Figure 2 below show the corrected estimates of the statistical parameters for the sea ice simulations of this model. The revised Table 1 and Figure 2 should be used instead of those published in the original paper. The authors apologize to the readers for this error and thank Olivier Arzel, Thierry Fichefet, and Jean-Louis Dufresne for pointing it out to us.
The Effect of Disruption of Prefrontal Cortical Function with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on Visual Working Memory

It is proposed that feedback signals from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) to extrastriate cortex are essential for goal-directed processing, maintenance, and selection of information in visual working memory (VWM). In a previous study, we found that disruption of PFC function with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in healthy individuals impaired behavioral performance on a face/scene matching task and decreased category-specific tuning in extrastriate cortex as measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this study, we investigated the effect of disruption of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) function on the fidelity of neural representations of two distinct information codes: (1) the stimulus category and (2) the goal-relevance of viewed stimuli. During fMRI scanning, subjects were presented face and scene images in pseudo-random order and instructed to remember either faces or scenes. Within both anatomical and functional regions of interest (ROIs), a multi-voxel pattern classifier was used to quantitatively assess the fidelity of activity patterns representing stimulus category: whether a face or a scene was presented on each trial, and goal relevance, whether the presented image was task relevant (i.e., a face is relevant in a “Remember Faces” block, but irrelevant in a “Remember Scenes” block). We found a reduction in the fidelity of the stimulus category code in visual cortex after left IFG disruption, providing causal evidence that lateral PFC modulates object category codes in visual cortex during VWM. In addition, we found that IFG disruption caused a reduction in the fidelity of the goal relevance code in a distributed set of brain regions. These results suggest that the IFG is involved in determining the task-relevance of visual input and communicating that information to a network of regions involved in further processing during VWM. Finally, we found that participants who exhibited greater fidelity of the goal relevance code in the non-disrupted right IFG after TMS performed the task with the highest accuracy.