Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Survey on Hand Gesture Recognition Approaches

-Gesture recognition enables humans to communicate with the machine and interact naturally without any mechanical devices. Gesture recognition can be seen as a way for computers to begin to understand human body language, thus building a richer bridge between machines and humans than primitive text user interface or even GUIs (graphical user interfaces), which still limit the majority of input to keyboard and mouse. Gesture recognition pertains to recognizing meaningful expressions of motion by a human, involving the hands, arms, face, head, and/or body. This paper mainly focuses on Hand Gesture Recognition. Hand gestures provide a separate complementary modality to speech for expressing ones ideas. Hand gesture is a method of non-verbal communication for human beings for its freer expressions much more other than body parts. Hand gesture recognition has greater importance in designing an efficient human computer interaction system. This paper emphasis on different hand gesture approaches, technologies and applications. The approaches present can be mainly divided into Data-Glove Based and Vision Based approaches.
Salivary alpha-amylase levels and big five personality factors in adults.

OBJECTIVES Salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) has been utilized as a non-invasive measure of sympathoadrenal medullary (SAM) activation. Little is known regarding the relationship between personality inventories and baseline sAA. This study was designed to examine the relationships between the scores of big five inventory (BFI) factors, age, and sAA in adults (aged twenty to seventy years old). METHODS We assessed 97 participants' BFI scores and sAA. The correlations between the BFI factor scores and sAA were examined. RESULTS We observed (1) a positive correlation between Neuroticism and sAA, and a negative correlation between Agreeableness and sAA and (2) a positive correlation between age and sAA. These correlations between BFI scores and sAA remained significant after controlling for age. After controlling for age, all BFI factors except Conscientiousness were related to sAA. CONCLUSIONS Subjects with high Neuroticism and low Extraversion, Agreeableness and Openness may have high sAA. sAA has been demonstrated to be useful for examining the relationship between adrenergic activity and personality, in a non-invasive manner.
Semidefinite positive relaxation of the maximum-likelihood criterion applied to multiuser detection in a CDMA context

Many signal processing applications reduce to solving combinatorial optimization problems. Semidefinite programming (SDP) has been shown to be a very promising approach to combinatorial optimization, where SDP serves as a tractable convex relaxation of NP-hard problems. We present a nonlinear programming algorithm for solving SDP, based on a change of variables that replaces the symmetrical, positive semidefinite variable X in SDP with a rectangular variable R according to X=RR/sup T/. Very encouraging results are obtained to solve even large-scale combinatorial optimization programs, as the one arising in multiuser detection for code division multiple access (CDMA) systems.
Transcriptional Abnormalities of Hamstring Muscle Contractures in Children with Cerebral Palsy

Cerebral palsy (CP) is an upper motor neuron disease that results in a spectrum of movement disorders. Secondary to the neurological lesion, muscles from patients with CP are often spastic and form debilitating contractures that limit range of motion and joint function. With no genetic component, the pathology of skeletal muscle in CP is a response to aberrant complex neurological input in ways that are not fully understood. This study was designed to gain further understanding of the skeletal muscle response in CP using transcriptional profiling correlated with functional measures to broadly investigate muscle adaptations leading to mechanical deficits. Biospsies were obtained from both the gracilis and semitendinosus muscles from a cohort of patients with CP (n = 10) and typically developing patients (n = 10) undergoing surgery. Biopsies were obtained to define the unique expression profile of the contractures and passive mechanical testing was conducted to determine stiffness values in previously published work. Affymetrix HG-U133A 2.0 chips (n = 40) generated expression data, which was validated for selected transcripts using quantitative real-time PCR. Chips were clustered based on their expression and those from patients with CP clustered separately. Significant genes were determined conservatively based on the overlap of three summarization algorithms (n = 1,398). Significantly altered genes were analyzed for over-representation among gene ontologies and muscle specific networks. The majority of altered transcripts were related to increased extracellular matrix expression in CP and a decrease in metabolism and ubiquitin ligase activity. The increase in extracellular matrix products was correlated with mechanical measures demonstrating the importance in disability. These data lay a framework for further studies and development of novel therapies.
Changes in litter, decomposition, nitrogen mineralization and microclimate in Acacia mangium and Acacia auriculiformis plantation in Mount Makiling, Philippines

The objectives of this study were to examine litter, decomposition, net mineralization and microclimate by two leguminous species planted for the restoration of degraded area. The total annual litter fall in A. mangium site was 11.44±0.59 (mean ± standard error) t ha-1 yr-1and A. auriculiformis site was 8.72±0.57 t ha-1 yr-1. Decomposition constant (k) of A. mangium and A. auriculiformis were 1.27 and 1.12, respectively. Seasonal variation of net mineralization was pronounced, with peak values occurring in September at Acaciaplantation site. Grassland showed higher air temperature, relative humidity and soil temperature as well as a larger variation per hour in these parameters compared to theAcacia plantations. The highest air temperature, relative humidity and soil temperature were measured in April during the dry season. These results showed that planting Acaciaimproved site qualities (litter fall, decomposition, and net mineralization) and microclimate factors (air temperature, soil temperature, and relative humidity) and decreased the variation rate of these factors in the study sites. Therefore, this study suggests that this type of plantation is efficient in improving site qualities. Key words: Decomposition, litter, microclimate, nitrogen mineralization.
Why Does a Method That Fails Continue to be Used?

Abstract As a critical framework for addressing a diversity of evolutionary and ecological questions, any method that provides accurate and detailed phylogeographic inference would be embraced. What is difficult to understand is the continued use of a method that not only fails, but also has never been shown to work—nested clade analysis is applied widely even though the conditions under which the method will provide reliable results have not yet been demonstrated. This contradiction between performance and popularity is even more perplexing given the recent methodological and computational advances for making historical inferences, which include estimating population genetic parameters and testing different biogeographic scenarios. Here I briefly review the history of criticisms and rebuttals that focus specifically on the high rate of incorrect phylogeographic inference of nested-clade analysis, with the goal of understanding what drives its unfettered popularity. In this case, the appeal of what nested-clade analysis claims to do—not what the method actually achieves—appears to explain its paradoxical status as a favorite method that fails. What a method promises, as opposed to how it performs, must be considered separately when evaluating whether the method represents a valuable tool for historical inference.
The Construction of Finite Difference Approximations to Ordinary Differential Equations

Finite difference approximations of the form Σ^(si)_(i=-rj)d_(j,i)u_(j+i)=Σ^(mj)_(i=1) e_(j,if)(z_(j,i)) for the numerical solution of linear nth order ordinary differential equations are analyzed. The order of these approximations is shown to be at least r_j + s_j + m_j - n, and higher for certain special choices of the points Z_(j,i). Similar approximations to initial or boundary conditions are also considered and the stability of the resulting schemes is investigated.
“30 Essential Skills for the Qualitative Researcher” By John W. Creswell

There are many textbooks in the field of qualitative research. This textbook, “30 Essential Skills for the Qualitative Researcher” by Professor John W. Creswell, University of Nebraska, Nebraska, US was published in 2016. This textbook focuses on the 30 essential skills for the qualitative researcher that the writer used when conduct the qualitative studies. This textbook provides a number of benefits to the development of the body of knowledge and skills for qualitative research of researchers in any field. Keywords : essential skill, qualitative research, qualitative researcher 30 ทกษะทจำเปนของนกวจยเชงคณภาพ บทคดยอ หนงสอหรอตำราทเกยวของกบการวจยเชงคณภาพมอยจำนวนมาก แตสำหรบหนงสอ “30 Essential Skills for the Qualitative Researcher” เขยนโดยศาสตราจารย John W. Creswell มหาวทยาลยเนบราสกา รฐเนบราสกา ประเทศสหรฐอเมรกา ไดตพมพเผยแพรเปนครงแรกในป ค. ศ. 2016 เลมน มงเนนการนำเสนอ 30 ทกษะ ทจำเปนของนกวจยเชงคณภาพ ซงผเขยนเองใชในการดำเนนการวจยเชงคณภาพ หนงสอเลมน จงเปนประโยชนอยางยงตอการพฒนาองคความรและการพฒนาทกษะดานการวจยเชงคณภาพของนกวจยในสาขาตาง ๆ คำสำคญ: ทกษะทจำเปน การวจยเชงคณภาพ นกวจยเชงคณภาพ
Mediating Role of Memory of Another Person's Choicein Social Influence on Preference†

We often tend to fit our subjective preference with those of others after merely being faced with what other people prefer. This is known as social conformity. However, it is still unclear how the impact of such a social influence on subjective preference is modulated by the personal characteristics of the other person (e.g., whether the person is trustworthy) and the explicit memory of those personal characteristics (e.g., remembering who evaluated the objects). To clarify explicit memory’s underlying role regarding social influence, we asked participants to evaluate their preference for abstract paintings both before and after observing binary choices made by others whose behaviors could be labeled as trustworthy, neutral, or untrustworthy. The results showed the following: (a) even without explicit memory of who made a choice and which painting was chosen, the participants preferred chosen over unchosen paintings; and (b) such preference changes were modulated by the subjective trustworthiness of others only when they explicitly remembered who made a choice.
Development and validation of the Thai Eating Questionnaire (TEQ)

This paper describes the development and validity assessment of the Thai Eating Questionnaire (TEQ) to assess the healthiness of Thai adolescents’ eating behavior, based on the Theory of Planned Behavior. The TEQ was developed in English according to standard methodology, assessed for content validity index (CVI) by a panel of experts, translated into Thai and back-translated into English. TEQ was piloted with 34 Thai adolescents, then repeated one week later to assess test-retest reliability. It was tested again with 336 Thai adolescents. The TEQ has very good content validity (CVI 0.980), acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha 0.870 and 0.853 with small and large group) and high test-retest reliability (0.900) The TEQ appears to be a valid and reliable instrument suitable for use in further studies of Thai adolescents from both urban and rural areas in Thailand.
Social Studies Education in Turkey and Islam.

Article History: Received 22.07. 2015 Received in revised form 25.11. 2015 Accepted 05.12. 2015 Available online 30.12. 2015 Religion is one of the important factors that affect the human life. The concept of religion has a significant place within the scope of social studies education. Religion is a concept closely related to citizenship and value educations. As for the studies conducted in the field of social studies in Turkey, there have been few studies on Islam. The reason is that curriculum of social studies do not cover Islam sufficiently. However, religious elements are emphasized in the social studies course in many countries including the US. Within this context, the aim of this research is to evaluate the relationship between social studies and Islam. First, the concepts of social studies and Islam were addressed, and then mutual concepts and values of social studies and Islam were discussed. © 2016 IOJES. All rights reserved
Load-Balanced Local Time Stepping for Large-Scale Wave Propagation

In complex acoustic or elastic media, finite element meshes often require regions of refinement to honour external or internal topography, or small-scale features. These localized smaller elements create a bottleneck for explicit time-stepping schemes due to the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy stability condition. Recently developed local time stepping (LTS) algorithms reduce the impact of these small elements by locally adapting the time-step size to the size of the element. The recursive, multi-level nature of our LTS scheme introduces an additional challenge, as standard partitioning schemes create a strong load imbalance across processors. We examine the use of multi-constraint graph and hypergraph partitioning tools to achieve effective, load-balanced parallelization. We implement LTS-Newmark in the seismology code SPECFEM3D and compare performance and scalability between different partitioning tools on CPU and GPU clusters using examples from computational seismology.
GARGOYLE: An Environment for e, Context-Sensitive Active Vision

Researchers in robot vision have access to several excellent image processing packages (e.g., Khoros, Vista, Susan, MIL, and XVision to name only a few) as a base for any new vision software needed in most navigation and recognition tasks. Our work in automonous robot control and human-robot interaction, however, has demanded a new level of run-time flexibility and performance: on-the-fly configuration of visual routines that exploit up-to-the-second context from the task, image, and environment. The result is Gargoyle: an extendible, on-board, realtime vision software package that allows a robot to configure, parameterize, and execute imageprocessing pipelines at run-time. Each operator in a pipeline works at a level of resolution and over regions of interest that are computed by upstream operators or set by the robot according to task constraints. Pipeline configurations and operator parameters can be stored as a library of visual methods appropriate for different sensing tasks and environmental conditions. Beyond this, a robot may reason about the current task and environmental constraints to construct novel visual routines that are too specialized to work under general conditions, but that are well-suited to the immediate environment and task. We use the RAP reactive plan-execution system to select and configure pre-compiled processing pipelines, and to modify them for specific constraints determined at run-time.
Cloud Task Scheduling Simulation via Improved Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

As a distributed parallel computing, cloud computing has an absolute advantage in accessing and processing of huge amount of data. How to assign all these virtual cloud computing resources to the user is a key technical issues, scholars have proposed greedy algorithm, FCFS, and other variety of algorithms to solve this problem. However, the algorithms just build a local optimal solution, there is no global allocation of resources in the cloud computing. In order to solve this problem, we are inspired from the ant foraging behavior and integrated multi-goal match of the secondary distribution, then, we proposed ant colony optimization algorithm. The improved ant colony algorithm combines the traditional ant colony algorithm and the greedy algorithm's advantage. Finally, we use the cloud computing simulation tools CloudSim to do the simulative experiments and embed these scheduling algorithms into a visualization system. From the comparison of the simulation results, it can be seen that the improved ant colony algorithm shorten the scheduling time, implement system load balancing at the same time.
A Pixel Dissimilarity Measure That Is Insensitive to Image Sampling

Because of image sampling, traditional measures of pixel dissimilarity can assign a large value to two corresponding pixels in a stereo pair, even in the absence of noise and other degrading effects. We propose a measure of dissimilarity that is provably insensitive to sampling because it uses the linearly interpolated intensity functions surrounding the pixels. Experiments on real images show that our measure alleviates the problem of sampling with little additional computational overhead.
Better performance bounds for finding the smallest k-edge connected spanning subgraph of a multigraph

Khuller and Raghavachari [12] present an approximation algorithm (the <i>KR algorithm</i>) for finding the smallest <i>k</i>-edge connected spanning subgraph (<i>k-ECSS</i>) of an undirected multigraph. They prove the KR algorithm has approximation ratio < 1.85. We prove the KR algorithm has approximation ratio ≤ 1 + √1/<i>e</i> < 1.61; for odd <i>k</i> this requires a minor modification of the algorithm. This is the bestknown performance bound for the smallest <i>k</i>-ECSS problem for arbitrary <i>k</i>. Our analysis also gives the best-known performance bound for any fixed value of <i>k</i> ≤ 3, e.g., for even <i>k</i> the approximation ratio is ≤ 1 + (1 -- 1/<i>k</i>)<sup><i>k</i>/2</sup>. Our analysis is based on a laminar family of sets (similar to families used in related contexts) which gives a better accounting of edges added in previous iterations of the algorithm. We also present a polynomial time implementation of the KR algorithm on multigraphs, running in the time for <i>O</i>(<i>nm</i>) maximum flow computations, where <i>n</i> (<i>m</i>) is the number of vertices (edges, not counting parallel copies). This complements the implementation of [12] which uses time <i>O</i>((<i>kn</i>)<sup>2</sup>) and is efficient for small <i>k</i>.
An Empirical Study of the Influence of Process Management Capability on IT Application Level

Selecting enterprise IT application level is a process influenced by multi-factor. This research is conducted by constructing the measurement model and using questionnaires that were collected by enterprise interview. Based on empirical model and parameters estimation, this paper has a thorough discussion on influence mechanism which is about how process management capability improves enterprise IT application level. The findings show that process management capability influencing enterprise IT application level is a dynamic process and different process management capabilities lead to different speed of improving enterprise IT application level. And the analysis indicates that enterprise's choice on IT application level must match its own process management capability by paying attention to the cultivation of process management capacity.
A trust-based recommender system for collaborative networks

Collaborative networks are composed by people from all over and all kind of background that meet to exchange common experience. The great challenge lies in finding significant, reliable information in view of the swelling volume of information output. Recommender systems emerged as a solution to reduce the problem of information overload. Collaborative Filtering (CF) technique in particular automates the recommendation process by building on users' opinions of items in a community. However CF has limitations named cold start and first rater. The goal of this paper is to present a model using trust to minimize those problems.
Characterization of the Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequence of Spirometra erinaceieuropaei (Cestoda: Diphyllobothriidae) from China

Sparganosis, caused by the plerocercoid larvae of members of the genus Spirometra, can cause significant public health problem and considerable economic losses. In the present study, the complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence of Spirometra erinaceieuropaei from China was determined, characterized and compared with that of S. erinaceieuropaei from Japan. The gene arrangement in the mt genome sequences of S. erinaceieuropaei from China and Japan is identical. The identity of the mt genomes was 99.1% between S. erinaceieuropaei from China and Japan, and the complete mtDNA sequence of S. erinaceieuropaei from China is slightly shorter (2 bp) than that from Japan. Phylogenetic analysis of S. erinaceieuropaei with other representative cestodes using two different computational algorithms [Bayesian inference (BI) and maximum likelihood (ML)] based on concatenated amino acid sequences of 12 protein-coding genes, revealed that S. erinaceieuropaei is closely related to Diphyllobothrium spp. , supporting classification based on morphological features. The present study determined the complete mtDNA sequences of S. erinaceieuropaei from China that provides novel genetic markers for studying the population genetics and molecular epidemiology of S. erinaceieuropaei in humans and animals.
Vulnerability Testing of Software Using Extended EAI Model

Software testing, throughout the development life cycle of software, is one of the important ways to ensure the quality of software. Model-based software testing technology and tools have higher degree of automation, as well as efficiency of testing. They also can detect vulnerabilities that other technologies are difficult to do. So they are widely used. This paper presents an extended EAI model (Extended Environment-Application Interaction Model), and does further research for vulnerability testing based on the model. Extended EAI model inherits the methodology of anomalies simulation of the original one. In order to monitor and control the process under test, we give an idea of introducing artificial intelligence technology and status feedback into the model, and also try to use virtual execution technology for testing. We use this technique based on the Extended EAI model to experiment on Internet work Operation System (IOS) software, and detect that some services of certain protocols running in IOS software have vulnerabilities. So the experimental results indicate that our method is feasible.
Bayesian generalized linear mixed modeling of Tuberculosis using informative priors

TB is rated as one of the world’s deadliest diseases and South Africa ranks 9th out of the 22 countries with hardest hit of TB. Although many pieces of research have been carried out on this subject, this paper steps further by inculcating past knowledge into the model, using Bayesian approach with informative prior. Bayesian statistics approach is getting popular in data analyses. But, most applications of Bayesian inference technique are limited to situations of non-informative prior, where there is no solid external information about the distribution of the parameter of interest. The main aim of this study is to profile people living with TB in South Africa. In this paper, identical regression models are fitted for classical and Bayesian approach both with non-informative and informative prior, using South Africa General Household Survey (GHS) data for the year 2014. For the Bayesian model with informative prior, South Africa General Household Survey dataset for the year 2011 to 2013 are used to set up priors for the model 2014.