Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pension Freezes and Household Saving over the Life Cycle

Defined benefit (DB) pension freezes in large healthy firms such as Verizon and IBM, as well as terminations of plans in the struggling steel and airline industries, highlight the fact that these traditional pensions cannot be viewed as risk-free promises from the employee's perspective. Indeed, the current turmoil in financial markets and difficult economic outlook for many firms suggest that many more pension plans could be frozen soon. In this preliminary paper we develop an empirical dynamic programming framework to investigate household saving decisions in a model economy with freezeprone DB pensions. The model incorporates important sources of uncertainty facing households, including asset returns, employment, income, and mortality, as well as pension freezes. Applying a compensating variation measure of welfare, we find that pension freezes reduce welfare by a maximum of about $6,000 for individuals with a high school degree and about $2,000 for individuals with a college degree. We close by highlighting a few important issues that are missing from our preliminary analysis, including a labor supply decision and the effects of market-clearing conditions in the labor market. We hope to address these issues in future work.
A Non-midline Spheno-orbital Encephalocele in a Newborn

Basal encephaloceles in western countries occur in 1 of every 35 000-40 000 live births; with an incidence of less than 10% they are the least common of all encephaloceles. Certain subtypes such as transsphenoidal variants may be as rare as 1 in 700 000 live births. These rare encephaloceles are classified into five anatomic types: spheno-ethmodial, transsphenoidal, spheno-orbital, transethmoidal, and spheno-maxillary. Here we present an exceedingly rare variant of a non-midline basal encephalocele of the spheno-orbital type, which was treated by resection of the encephalocele, which contained dysplastic central nervous system tissue, on day four post partum. The patient had no neurological deficits and a six year follow-up showed a normal intellect and a good cosmetic result.
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory RT-04F Diarization Systems: Applications to Broadcast Audio and Telephone Conversations

Abstract : Audio diarization is the process of annotating an input audio channel with information that attributes (possibly overlapping) temporal regions of signal energy to their specific sources. These sources can include particular speakers, music, background noise sources, and other signal source/channel characteristics. Diarization has utility in making automatic transcripts more readable and in searching and indexing audio archives. In this paper we describe the systems developed by MITLL and used in DARPA EARS Rich Transcription Fall 2004 (RT-04F) speaker diarization evaluation. The primary system is based on a new proxy speaker model approach and the secondary system follows a more standard BIC based clustering approach. We present experiments analyzing performance of the systems and present a cross-cluster recombination approach that significantly improves performance. In addition, we also present results applying our system to a telephone speech, summed channel speaker detection task.
Affective evaluation of a mobile multimodal dialogue system using brain signals

We propose the use of affective metrics such as excitement, frustration and engagement for the evaluation of multimodal dialogue systems. The affective metrics are elicited from the ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) signals using the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset device. The affective metrics are used in conjunction with traditional evaluation metrics (turn duration, input modality) to investigate the effect of speech recognition errors and modality usage patterns in a multimodal (touch and speech) dialogue form-filling application for the iPhone mobile device. Results show that: (1) engagement is higher for touch input, while excitement and frustration is higher for speech input, and (2) speech recognition errors and associated repairs correspond to specific dynamic patters of excitement and frustration. Use of such physiological channels and their elaborated interpretation is a challenging but also a potentially rewarding direction towards emotional and cognitive assessment of multimodal interaction design.
Chemical Source Localization in Unknown Turbulence Using the Cross-Correlation Method

Estimating the direction of a diffusive source is a difficult problem, and little has been tried to estimate a chemical source subject to turbulence. Turbulence must be addressed if chemical localizer systems are to be effective. We look at how to quantify turbulence and develop a measure to locate a source in two different types of turbulence, modulated and unmodulated plumes. We show that a plume can be modeled linearly on a small-scale and that a wind measure for a stationary sensor array can indicate the direction of a chemical source with reasonable accuracy and time. This measure can be easily implemented in low-power computational electronics and applied to the detection of chemical leaks and illegal substances
Use of tactile feedback to control exploratory movements to characterize object compliance

Humans have been shown to be good at using active touch to perceive subtle differences in compliance. They tend to use highly stereotypical exploratory strategies, such as applying normal force to a surface. We developed similar exploratory and perceptual algorithms for a mechatronic robotic system (Barrett arm/hand system) equipped with liquid-filled, biomimetic tactile sensors (BioTac® from SynTouch LLC). The distribution of force on the fingertip was measured by the electrical resistance of the conductive liquid trapped between the elastomeric skin and a cluster of four electrodes on the flat fingertip surface of the rigid core of the BioTac. These signals provided closed-loop control of exploratory movements, while the distribution of skin deformations, measured by more lateral electrodes and by the hydraulic pressure, were used to estimate material properties of objects. With this control algorithm, the robot plus tactile sensor was able to discriminate the relative compliance of various rubber samples.
Profiling transcriptomes of human SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells exposed to maleic acid

Background Maleic acid is a multi-functional chemical widely used in the field of industrial chemistry for producing food additives and food contact materials. As maleic acid may contaminate food by the release from food packages or intentional addition, it raises the concern about the effects of excessive dietary exposure to maleic acid on human health. However, the influence of maleic acid on human health has not been thoroughly studied. In silico toxicogenomics approaches have found the association between maleic acid and nervous system disease in human. The aim of this study is to experimentally explore the effects of maleic acid on human neuronal cells. Methods A microarray-based transcriptome profiling was performed to offer a better understanding of the effects of maleic acid on human health. Gene expression profiles of human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells exposed to three concentrations of maleic acid (10, 50, and 100 μM) for 24 h were analyzed. Genes which were differentially expressed in dose-dependent manners were identified and further analyzed with an enrichment analysis. The expression profile of selected genes related to the inferred functional changes was validated using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR). Specific fluorescence probes were applied to observe the inferred functional changes in maleic acid-treated neuronal cells. Results A total of 316 differentially expressed genes (141 upregulated and 175 downregulated) were identified in response to the treatment of maleic acid. The enrichment analysis showed that DNA binding and metal ion binding were the significant molecular functions (MFs) of the neuronal cells affected by maleic acid. Maleic acid exposure decreased the expression of genes associated with calcium and thiol levels of the cells in a dose-dependent manner. The levels of intracellular calcium and thiol levels were also affected by maleic acid dose-dependent. Discussion The exposure to maleic acid is found to decrease the cellular calcium and thiol levels in human neuronal cells at both transcriptional and functional levels. This study reported the first transcriptomic profiling of human neuronal cells treated with maleic acid. It is also the first experimental validation of chemical effects predicted by in silico toxicogenomics approaches. The proposed approach may be useful in understanding the potential effects of other poorly characterized chemicals on human health.
The evaluation of pelvic floor muscle strength in women with pelvic floor dysfunction: A reliability and correlation study

The purposes of this study were: (i) to evaluate the reliability of vaginal palpation, vaginal manometry, vaginal dynamometry; and surface (transperineal) electromyography (sEMG), when evaluating pelvic floor muscle (PFM) strength and/or activation; and (ii) to determine the associations among PFM strength measured using these assessments.
A New Algorithm for Ranking the Transmission Lines with Respect to the Transient Voltage Stability in Multi-Machine Power System

In this paper, we propose a new formula to rank the power transmission lines under the condition of the symmetrical faults occurring in multi-machine power system operation. This new mathematical formula is determined by the values of transient voltage stability estimation (TVSE) which allows estimating the transient state and assessing the transient structures of the power systems concerning the transient voltage stability. Using the proposed algorithm, the transient state variables are calculated, the transient values of relative voltage stability sensitivity (RVSS) could be determined for estimating the impacts of the deviations of function vectors and the controlled variable vectors affecting to the transient state variables of the power systems. Typical examples and results are shown in this paper.
Linear-Time Subspace Clustering via Bipartite Graph Modeling

We present a linear-time subspace clustering approach that combines sparse representations and bipartite graph modeling. The signals are modeled as drawn from a union of low-dimensional subspaces, and each signal is represented by a sparse combination of basis elements, termed atoms, which form the columns of a dictionary matrix. The sparse representation coefficients are arranged in a sparse affinity matrix, which defines a bipartite graph of two disjoint sets: (1) atoms and (2) signals. Subspace clustering is obtained by applying low-complexity spectral bipartite graph clustering that exploits the small number of atoms for complexity reduction. The complexity of the proposed approach is linear in the number of signals, thus it can rapidly cluster very large data collections. Performance evaluation of face clustering and temporal video segmentation demonstrates comparable clustering accuracies to state-of-the-art at a significantly lower computational load.
Advances in understanding chromosome silencing by the long non-coding RNA Xist

In female mammals, one of the two X chromosomes becomes genetically silenced to compensate for dosage imbalance of X-linked genes between XX females and XY males. X chromosome inactivation (X-inactivation) is a classical model for epigenetic gene regulation in mammals and has been studied for half a century. In the last two decades, efforts have been focused on the X inactive-specific transcript (Xist) locus, discovered to be the master regulator of X-inactivation. The Xist gene produces a non-coding RNA that functions as the primary switch for X-inactivation, coating the X chromosome from which it is transcribed in cis. Significant progress has been made towards understanding how Xist is regulated at the onset of X-inactivation, but our understanding of the molecular basis of silencing mediated by Xist RNA has progressed more slowly. A picture has, however, begun to emerge, and new tools and resources hold out the promise of further advances to come. Here, we provide an overview of the current state of our knowledge, what is known about Xist RNA and how it may trigger chromosome silencing.
Human action recognition-based video summarization for RGB-D personal sports video

Automatic sports video summarization poses the challenge of acquiring semantics of the original video, and existing work leverages various knowledge in application domains, e.g., structure of games and editing conventions. In this paper, we propose a personal sports video summarization method for self-recorded RGB-D videos, which became available to the public due to the commodification of off-the-shelf RGB-D sensors. We focus on sports whose games consist of a succession of actions and, unlike previous research, we use human action recognition on the depth sequences in order to acquire higher level semantics of the video. The recognition results are used along with an entropy-based activity measure to train a hidden Markov model of the highlights of different games to extract a summary from the original RGB-D video. We trained our novel highlights model with the subjective opinion of users with different experience in the sport. We took Kendo, a martial art, as an example sport to evaluate our method, and objectively/subjectively investigated the accuracy and quality of the generated summaries.
Hierarchical clustering based facial expression analysis from video sequence

Facial expression analysis from video sequences has been an active research area from the last two decades. There are plenty of algorithms for classification of six prototypic facial expressions from video sequences. In present paper we have proposed a novel method of hierarchical clustering for classification of facial expressions. The optical flow algorithm is used for detection of muscle movement arises due to different expressions. The maximally deformed facial regions (RoI) are extracted. Statistical features in these RoI are utilized for classification. The hierarchical Fuzzy C-Means algorithm classifies the six basic prototypic expression.
Computer Security is Not a Science ( but it should be )

Security research is sometimes referred to as the “Humanities of Computer Science” because, too frequently, “secure” systems are built using equal measures of folklore and black arts. Despite the humorous intention, there is a kernel of truth in this jest— computer security, at least “security in the large”, is not currently a science. This claim may seem unfair, given the progress made in security over the past decades. However, our present tools and methodologies are at most adequate for understanding systems security on a small scale. Cryptography, for example, is perhaps the most thoroughly studied and most rigorously modeled aspect of security. Despite its tremendous importance, cryptography alone is not sufficient for building secure systems. Indeed, the vast majority of all security flaws arise because of faulty software (e.g., the ubiquitous buffer overflow problem). Such security holes cannot be avoided by cryptographic techniques, and despite widely known and accepted solutions to these kinds of software flaws, buggy code persists. Why is security not a science? Some would argue that, by nature, security is fundamentally unscientific: security is hopelessly intertwined with social and economic forces beyond the purview of science. Yet, economists and psychologists have developed testable, scientific theories. What sets science apart from other disciplines is that it produces hypotheses that can be experimentally verified (or falsified). But, despite the large amounts of security-relevant data collected by organizations like CERT and despite our decades of experience building systems, computer security research has produced little in the way of predictive models or experimentally verifiable hypotheses. How can we establish security in the large on a more scientific footing? Over the last millenium, one way that disciplines have evolved into “sciences” is through a period of quantification. For example, Galileo, among others, transformed physics from an Aristotelian philosophy to a Baconian science by describing distance, speed, and time quantitatively, rather than explaining why objects fell, rolled, or flew. Our belief is that the current pre-scientific state of security research is fundamentally due to a lack of reasonable metrics. Furthermore, although there exist a few experimental methods for assessing security (i.e., tiger-teaming [5]), these methods are not yet particularly meaningful in the context of science, where quantitative evaluation—for comparison, modeling, and measurement of achievement—is central. The main questions we are interested in addressing are: Question 1: How could one measure security quantitatively? Question 2: What experiments ought one perform to assess security? Question 3: How can we improve our models using these metrics? We believe that we can eventually achieve a workfactor-like formulation to address the first question. Such a formulation will likely be a composite of a variety of measurements, with imprecise but meaningful weights. As in physics, an approximation that can gradually be refined with experience is very use-
Regulation of sterol transport in human microvascular endothelial cells

In cultured human dermal microvessel endothelial cells, the rate of efflux (about twofold greater than for fibroblasts under equivalent conditions) was coupled to an equivalent high rate of sterol net transport from the cells to the medium. This net transport was linked with esterification via lecithin:cholesterol acyltransferase. Since the use of free sterol by plasma transferase is constant, such increased net transport indicates that endothelial cells are highly efficient, in competition with plasma lipoproteins, in supplying free sterol for esterification. These results indicate the marked ability of endothelial cells to regulate and maintain their sterol balance in the face of high sterol levels to which these cells are uniquely exposed in human plasma.
Effects of Game-Based Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy on Balance in Patients with Stroke: A Single-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial

Objective The aims of this work were to determine whether game-based constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) is effective at improving balance ability in patients with stroke, and to provide clinical knowledge of game-based training that allows application of CIMT to the lower extremities. Design Thirty-six patients with chronic stroke were randomly assigned to game-based CIMT (n = 12), general game-based training (n = 12), and conventional (n = 12) groups. All interventions were conducted 3 times a week for 4 weeks. The static balance control and weight-bearing symmetry were assessed, and the Functional Reach Test (FRT), modified Functional Reach Test (mFRT), and Timed Up and Go (TUG) test were performed to evaluate balance ability. Results All 3 groups showed significant improvement in anterior-posterior axis (AP-axis) distance, sway area, weight-bearing symmetry, FRT, mFRT, and TUG test after the intervention (P < 0.05). Post hoc analysis revealed significant differences in AP-axis, and sway area, weight-bearing symmetry of the game-based CIMT group compared with the other group (P < 0.05). Conclusions Although the general game-based training and the game-based CIMT both improved on static and dynamic balance ability, game-based CIMT had a larger effect on static balance control, weight-bearing symmetry, and side-to-side weight shift.
Comparing Tandem Repeats with Duplications and Excisions of Variable Degree

Traditional sequence comparison by alignment employs a mutation model comprised of two events, substitutions and indels (insertions or deletions) of single positions. However, modern genetic analysis knows a variety of more complex mutation events (e.g., duplications, excisions, and rearrangements), especially regarding DNA. With ever more DNA sequence data becoming available, the need to accurately compare sequences which have clearly undergone more complicated types of mutational processes is becoming critical. Herein we introduce a new method for pairwise alignment and comparison of sequences with respect to the special evolution of tandem repeats: substitutions and indels of single positions and, additionally, duplications and excisions of variable degree (i.e., of one or more repeat copies simultaneously) are taken into account. To evaluate our method, we apply it to the spa VNTR (variable number of tandem repeats) cluster of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium of high medical importance
A District-Wide Study Confirming the Relationship between Professional Learning Communities and Student Achievement in Elementary Schools.

A District-Wide Study Confirming the Relationship Between Professional Learning Communities and Student Achievement in Elementary Schools Joseph Samuel Backman Department of Educational Leadership and Foundations Doctor of Philosophy Researchers have studied professional learning communities for over two decades. Educators have utilized the elements of professional learning communities in their schools to improve instruction and student learning. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence that establishes, describes, and confirms the relationship between professional learning communities and student learning. This study was completed to better understand the nature, strength, and types of relationships between the individual elements of professional learning communities and student achievement. The sample for this study was 26 elementary schools, 439 teachers, and nearly 11,000 students. An analysis of professional learning communities and student achievement data through hierarchical linear modeling indicated that each of the eight clearly defined elements of professional learning communities have a significant relationship with student achievement.
Proposed Usability Heuristics for Testing Gestural Interaction

Heuristic evaluation is a fast and effective method of usability testing. However, usability heuristics framework used for general testing may not be suitable to evaluate gesture vocabulary of mainstream gestural interaction found in touchscreen devices or emerging technologies natural user interface that uses motion tracking. There is a need to do so during early stages of product development. The objective of this study is to create a set of gesture-specific heuristics that would complement existing general usability heuristics for design and testing of new gestural interaction. The method to do so is to review previous studies of gestural interaction design and usability testing. The result of the study is condensed set of four gesture-specific heuristics.