Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improvements to the non‐linear principal component analysis method, with applications to ENSO and QBO

Abstract Two improvements to the Non‐linear Principal Component Analysis (NLPCA) method are presented. In the normal application of this method, a non‐linear curve C is found that best fits the data. The method provides a projection function mapping from the data space to the curve C. However, this projection function is faulty in that points in the data space are generally not projected onto their closest neighbours on C. Here, a new projection function is introduced which ensures that the data points are projected onto their closest neighbours on C, resulting in an increase in the amount of variance explained by the NLPCA mode. This is illustrated by an analysis of the sea surface temperature anomaly data from the tropical Pacific, where the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon is manifested. A second shortcoming of the NLPCA method is that the curve C comes with a parametrization which is arbitrary and has no physical interpretation. Here, the curve is re‐parametrized by arc length. This allows the computation of more meaningful time series, which we illustrate through an analysis of the Quasi‐Biennial Oscillation (QBO) in the equatorial stratospheric zonal wind data.
Hooke and jeeves algorithm for linear least-square problems in sparse signal reconstruction

Greedy algorithms are the major algorithmic approaches to sparse signal reconstruction from an incomplete set of linear measurements. All the greedy algorithms involve solving linear least-square problems. This is usually implemented via CGLS. Though CGLS uses a fixed number of iterations, experiments confirm that CGLS costs more than 50 percent of the total running time of greedy algorithms. In order to reduce the running time, we introduce a method called HJLS, which applies Hooke and Jeeves algorithm to solve the least-square problems. As the columns of the measurement matrix are nearly orthogonal, HJLS also converges in a fixed number of iterations. Comparative experiments between HJLS and CGLS show that the number of iterations used in HJLS is fewer and implementing HJLS instead of CGLS reduces the total running time of greedy algorithms by more than 20 percent.
Distributional Study of De Finetti's Dividend Problem for a General Lévy Insurance Risk Process

We provide a distributional study of the solution to the classical control problem due to De Finetti (1957), Gerber (1969), Azcue and Muler (2005), and Avram et al. (2007), which concerns the optimal payment of dividends from an insurance risk process prior to ruin. Specifically, we build on recent work in the actuarial literature concerning calculations of the nth moment of the net present value of dividends paid out in the optimal strategy as well as the moments of the deficit at ruin and the Laplace transform of the red period. The calculations we present go much further than the existing literature, in that our calculations are valid for a general spectrally negative Lévy process as opposed to the classical Cramér–Lundberg process with exponentially distributed jumps. Moreover, the technique we use appeals principally to excursion theory rather than integro-differential equations and, for the case of the nth moment of the net present value of dividends, makes a new link with the distribution of integrated exponential subordinators.
Synergistic Effects of BMP9 and miR-548d-5p on Promoting Osteogenic Differentiation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells

Various stimulators have been reported to promote MSC osteogenic differentiation via different pathways such as bone morphogenetic protein 9 (BMP9) through influencing COX-2 and miR-548d-5p through targeting peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ (PPARγ). Whether synergistic effects between BMP9 and miR-548d-5p existed in promoting osteogenesis from MSCs was unclear. In the study, the potential synergistic effects of BMP9 and miR-548d-5p on human MSC differentiation were investigated. Osteogenic differentiation of MSCs treated with BMP9 or miR-548d-5p was detected with multimodality of methods. The results demonstrated that BMP9 and miR-548d-5p significantly influenced COX-2 and PPARγ, respectively. BMP9 also influenced the expression of PPARγ, but no significant effect of miR-548d-5p on COX-2 was observed. When BMP9 and miR-548d-5p were combined, more potent effects on both COX-2 and PPARγ were observed than BMP9 or miR-548d-5p alone. Consistently, osteogenic analysis at different timepoints demonstrated that osteogenic genes, ALP activity, calcium deposition, OPN protein, and matrix mineralization were remarkably upregulated by BMP9/miR-548d-5p compared with BMP9 or miR-548d-5p alone, indicating the synergetic effects of BMP9 and miR-548d-5p on osteogenic differentiation of MSCs. Our study demonstrated that regulating different osteogenic regulators may be an effective strategy to promote bone tissue regeneration for bone defects.
Fully autonomous hip exoskeleton saves metabolic cost of walking

We have developed a hip exoskeleton for seniors with difficulties in walking due to muscle weakness. The exoskeleton is lightweight and moderate in assistance power compared to other hip exoskeletons in the literature. Its controller estimates user gait phase, walking speed, and ground inclinations to generate assistance torque adaptively. To assess the physiological effect of the gait assistance, we compared metabolic energy consumption for 5 adults for walking on a treadmill with and without the exoskeleton at the same speed: the exoskeleton reduced metabolic cost of walking by 13% (p = 0:0024). The step length and the stride time increased under the assistance. Our analysis for the result suggests that the efficiency of hip exoskeletons on saving metabolic energy can be twice as high as that of ankle exoskeletons possibly because muscle-tendon unit in the hip joint is less energy-efficient than in the ankle joint.
BRIEF TRAINING FOR PERFORMANCE OF A POINT ESTIMATION SONIFICATION TASK

This study examined different types of brief training for a point estimation task with auditory graphs. Participants estimated the price of a stock at a specific times in a 10-hour trading day as depicted in a sonified graph of the stock price data. Forty Georgia Tech undergraduates completed a pre-test, an experimental training session, and a post-test for the point estimation task. In an extension of Smith and Walker [1], a highly conceptual, task analysis-derived method of training was compared to training paradigms that used either prompting of correct responses or feedback for correct answers during training. Two additional groups, one receiving only practice as training and another completing a filler task, were also included. Results indicate that practice with feedback for the point estimation task produced better post-test performance than all other training conditions.
Quantitative assessment of diffuse optical tomography sensitivity to the cerebral cortex using a whole-head probe

We quantify the variability in diffuse optical tomography (DOT) sensitivity over the cortical surface in eight young adult subjects. We use the 10/5 electroencephalography system as a basis for our whole-head optical high-density probe design. The contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) is calculated along with the percentage of the cortex that is above a CNR = 0 dB threshold. We also quantify the effect of including vasculature on the forward model and list our assumptions that allow us to estimate light penetration depth in the head. We show that using the 10/5 system for the optical probe design allows for the measurement of 37% of the cortical surface on average, with a mean CNR in the visible region of 5.5 dB. Certain anatomical regions, such as the lateral occipital cortex, had a very high percentage above the CNR threshold, while other regions such as the cingulate cortex were not measurable. Vasculature blocked optical sensitivity over 1% of the cortex. Cortical coverage was positively correlated with intracranial volume and relative cerebrospinal fluid volume, and negatively correlated with relative scalp volume and skull volume. These contributions allow experimenters to understand how anatomical variation in a subject population may impact DOT or functional near-infrared spectroscopy measurements.
Searching for the Causal Structure of a Vector Autoregression

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are economically interpretable only when identified by being transformed into a structural form (the SVAR) in which the contemporaneous variables stand in a well-defined causal order. These identifying transformations are not unique. It is widely believed that practitioners must choose among them using a priori theory or other criteria not rooted in the data under analysis. We show how to apply graph-theoretic methods of searching for causal structure based on relations of conditional independence to select among the possible causal orders ? or at least to reduce the admissible causal orders to a narrow equivalence class. The graph-theoretic approaches were developed by computer scientists and philosophers (Pearl, Glymour, Spirtes among others) and applied to cross-sectional data. We provide an accessible introduction to this work. Then building on the work of Swanson and Granger (1997), we show how to apply it to searching for the causal order of an SVAR. We present simulation results to show how the efficacy of the search method algorithm varies with signal strength for realistic sample lengths. Our findings suggest that graph-theoretic methods may prove to be a useful tool in the analysis of SVARs.
ddtrace : Rich performance monitoring in distributed systems

Through performance monitoring, application developers and maintainers can find software bugs, performance bottlenecks, and source of tail latency in their applications. In this paper, we develop a general-purpose performance monitoring library, ddtrace, designed to be easy to integrate with messageand Rpc-based systems which issue child requests as part of handling a single client request, such as the RAMCloud storage system. We demonstrate that ddtrace can analyze Rpc performance across multiple machines. The strengths of ddtrace are twofold. • Low overheads. 130 nanoseconds per interval of code measured, 5x faster than the next fastest trace logging library we could obtain and test. • Scriptability. Rich performance monitors can be written in a widely-used language (currently, C++) using the ddtrace API. Furthermore, these scripts are decoupled from the application, so the application is protected from faulty performance monitors and vice versa, and performance monitors can be reused across multiple applications built with ddtrace support.
Management Accounting Standardisation and Beyond: A Case Study of an Internationally Operating Company

The paper reports the results of exploratory research relating to management accounting evolution in an international company. A case study illustrates most arguments advocating an intra-firm convergence. Evidence is presented indicating how the management accounting system (MAS) becomes increasingly standardised. The design and most standard operations of the MAS are being centralized in a Shared Services Centre, eliminating several functions in different countries. This goes beyond standardisation and calls for a new approach to the convergence debate. A strong corporate culture is consistently developed, characterised by a high masculinity, a long-term view and traits of collectivism. The joint effect of a unifying organizational culture and these characteristics, and the masculine dimension in particular, is crucial in the adoption of common systems worldwide. Key-words: Management accounting; convergence; information systems; national culture; organizational culture.
Robust Three Dimensional Delaunay Refinement

The Delaunay Refinement Algorithm for quality meshing is extended to three dimensions. The algorithm accepts input with arbitrarily small angles, and outputs a Conforming Delaunay Tetrahedralization where most tetrahedra have radius-to-shortest-edge ratio smaller than some user chosen μ > 2. Those tets with poor quality are in well defined locations: their circumcenters are describably near input segments. Moreover, the output mesh is well graded to the input: short mesh edges only appear around close features of the input. The algorithm has the added advantage of not requiring a priori knowledge of the “local feature size,” and only requires searching locally in the mesh.
1-Carboxynaphthalen-2-yl acetate monohydrate

In the title compound, C13H10O4·H2O, both the carboxylic acid [Car—Car—C—O = −121.1 (2)°, where ar = aromatic] and the ester [Car—Car—O—C = −104.4 (3)°] groups lie out of the mean plane of the conjugated aromatic system. In the crystal, the organic molecule is hydrogen bonded to water molecules through the ester and carboxy moieties, forming chains along the a-axis direction. The methyl H atoms of the acetoxy group are disordered over two equally occupied sites.
Generalized word posterior probability (GWPP) for measuring reliability of recognized words

To measure the reliability of recognized words in an ASR, we propose a generalized word posterior probability (GWPP) as the sole confidence measure. This measure is computed efficiently via a word graph with the forwardbackward algorithm or directly with the generalized string likelihoods of N-best strings from the recognizer. The GWPP is a modified word posterior probability where a word event, given all the acoustic observations of an utterance, is measured as a conditional probability. Time registration of the starting and ending frames of a hypothesized word is relaxed, similar to the Baum-Welch model training algorithm, and acoustic and language model weights are optimally adjusted to accommodate instrumental but inaccurate modeling assumptions used in implementing those two models. When tested on the ATR Japanese BTEC speech database, the confidence error rates are significantly reduced as much as 25% at various operating points.
Aspects of Multilingual News Summarisation

In this book chapter, we discuss several pertinent aspects of an automatic system that generates summaries in multiple languages for sets of topic-related news articles (multilingual multi-document summarisation), gathered by news aggregation systems. The discussion follows a framework based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) because LSA was shown to be a high-performing method across many different languages. Starting from a sentence-extractive approach we show how domain-specific aspects can be used and how a compression and paraphrasing method can be plugged in. We also discuss the challenging problem of summarisation evaluation in different languages. In particular, we describe two approaches: the first uses a parallel corpus and the second statistical machine translation.
A Pilot Study for the Neuroprotective Effect of Gongjin-dan on Transient Middle Cerebral Artery Occlusion-Induced Ischemic Rat Brain

In this study, we investigated whether gongjin-dan improves functional recovery and has neuroprotective effects on reducing the infarct volume after transient middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAo). Infarct volume was measured using TTC staining and glucose utilization by F-18 FDG PET. Functional improvement was evaluated with the Rota-rod, treadmill, Garcia score test, and adhesive removal test. At 14 days after MCAo, neuronal cell survival, astrocytes expansion, and apoptosis were assessed by immunohistofluorescence staining in the peri-infarct region. Also, the expression of neurotrophic factors and inflammatory cytokines such as VEGF, BDNF, Cox-2, TNF-α, IL-1β, and IL-1α was measured in ischemic hemisphere regions. The gongjin-dan-treated group showed both reduced infarct volume and increased glucose utilization. Behavior tests demonstrated a significant improvement compared to the control. Also in the gongjin-dan treated group, NeuN-positive cells were increased and number of astrocytes, microglia, and apoptotic cells was significantly decreased compared with the control group in the ischemic peri-infarct area. Furthermore, the expression of VEGF and BDNF was increased and level of Cox-2, TNF-α, IL-1β, and IL-1α was decreased. These results suggest that gongjin-dan may improve functional outcome through the rapid restoration of metabolism and can be considered as a potential neuroprotective agent.
Computer Vision-Based Color Image Segmentation with Improved Kernel Clustering

Abstract Color image segmentation has been widely applied to diverse fields in the past decades for containing more information than gray ones, whose essence is a process of clustering according to the color of pixels. However, traditional clustering methods do not scale well with the number of data, which limits the ability of handling massive data effectively. We developed an improved kernel clustering algorithm for computing the different clusters of given color images in kernel-induced space for image segmentation. Compared to other popular algorithms, it has the competitive performances both on training time and accuracy. The experiments performed on both synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.
The Rose by Another Name

From the combination of knowledge and actions, someone can improve their skill and ability. It will lead them to live and work much better. This is why, the students, workers, or even employers should have reading habit for books. Any book will give certain knowledge to take all benefits. This is what this rose by another name tells you. It will add more knowledge of you to life and work better. Try it and prove it.
How to strongly link data and its medium: the paper case

Establishing a strong link between the paper medium and the data represented on it is an interesting alternative to defeat unauthorised copy and content modification attempts. Many applications would benefit from it, such as show tickets, contracts, banknotes or medical prescripts. In this study, the authors present a low-cost solution that establishes such a link by combining digital signatures, physically unclonable functions and fuzzy extractors. The proposed protocol provides two levels of security that can be used according to the time available for verifying the signature and the trust in the paper holder. In practice, this solution uses ultra-violet fibres that are poured into the paper mixture. Fuzzy extractors are then used to build identifiers for each sheet of paper and a digital signature is applied to the combination of these identifiers and the data to be protected from copy and modification. The authors additionally provide a careful statistical analysis of the robustness and amount of randomness reached by the extractors. The authors conclude that identifiers of 72 bits can be derived, which is assumed to be sufficient for the proposed application. However, more randomness, robustness and unclonability could be obtained at the cost of a more expensive process, keeping exactly the same methodology.
Multi-modal front-end for speaker activity detection in small meetings

Small informal meetings of two to four participants are very common in work environments. For this reason, a convenient way for recording and archiving these meetings is of great interest. In order to efficiently archive such meetings, an important task to address is to keep trace of “who talked when” during a meeting. This paper proposes a new multi-modal approach to tackle this speaker activity detection problem. One of the novelty of the proposed approach is that it uses a human tracker that relies on scanning laser range finders (LRFs) to localize the participants. This choice is especially relevant for robotic applications as robots are often equipped with LRFs for navigation purpose. In the proposed system, a table top microphone array in the center of the meeting room acquires the audio data while the LRF based human tracker monitors the movement of the participants. Then the speaker activity detection is performed using Gaussian mixture models that were trained before hand. An experiment reproducing a meeting configuration demonstrates the performance of the system for speaker activity detection. In particular, the proposed hands free system maintains an good level of performance compared to the use of close talking microphone while participants are simultaneously speaking.
The association between behavior and genotype in Rett syndrome using the Australian Rett Syndrome Database

This study compared the behavior profile of cases in the Australian Rett Syndrome Database (ARSD) with those in a British study using the Rett Syndrome Behavior Questionnaire (RSBQ) and then examined behavioral patterns as measured by the RSBQ by genetic status. There were 145 Australian cases meeting the criteria for the first arm of the study and 135 for the second arm. Comparison of the scores obtained from the British and Australian cohorts indicated that the RSBQ was a satisfactory measure for describing behaviors in Rett Syndrome (RS). Overall, there were some differences among the behavior patterns of cases with the well‐known common mutations. Fear/anxiety was more commonly reported in those with R133C and R306C. Those with the R294X mutation were more likely to have mood difficulties and body rocking but less likely to have hand behaviors and to display repetitive face movements. In contrast, hand behaviors were more commonly reported in those with R270X or R255X. We found the RSBQ is an appropriate instrument for measuring behavior in girls with RS. Some behaviors differ according to genetic mutation but there is both inter and intra mutation variation in behavior and there is a need for larger studies involving international collaboration to improve statistical power. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
'Attention, I'm violating a maxim!' A unifying account of the final rise

Declarative sentences that end with a rising pitch in English (among other languages) have many uses. I single out several prominent uses that the literature so far has treated mostly independently. I present a compositional, unifying analysis, where the final rising pitch marks the violation of a conversational maxim, and its steepness indicates the speaker’s emotional activation. Existing theories are reproduced from these basic assumptions. I believe it contributes to a solid theoretical foundation for future work on the semantics and pragmatics of intonation.
Smad proteins exist as monomers in vivo and undergo homo‐ and hetero‐oligomerization upon activation by serine/threonine kinase receptors

Smad proteins are signal transducers for the members of the transforming growth factor‐β (TGF‐β) superfamily. Here we show that, in the absence TGF‐β stimulation, Smads exist as monomers in vivo. Smad2 and Smad3 form homo‐oligomers upon phosphorylation by the constitutively active TGF‐β type I receptor, and this oligomerization does not require Smad4. Major portions of Smad4, Smad6 and Smad7 are also present as monomers in vivo. Analysis using a cross‐linking reagent suggested that the Smad2 oligomer induced by receptor activation is a trimer. Studies by gel chromatography demonstrated that the Smad2–Smad4 heteromer is not larger than the Smad2 homomer. Moreover, overexpression of Smad4 prevented Smad2 from forming a homo‐oligomer. These findings suggest that Smad2 may form a homotrimer, or heterotrimers with Smad4, which are probably composed of two and one, or one and two molecules of Smad2 and Smad4, respectively, depending on the amount of each protein. Gel‐mobility shift assay revealed that the Smad3 homomer and Smad3–Smad4 heteromer constitute DNA‐binding complexes. Transition of the Smad proteins from monomers to oligomers is thus a critical event in the signal transduction of the TGF‐β superfamily members.