Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Spin History of the X-Ray Pulsar in Kes 73: Further Evidence for an Ultramagnetized Neutron Star

In previous papers, we presented the discovery of a 12 s X-ray pulsar in the supernova remnant Kes 73, providing the first direct evidence for an ultramagnetized neutron star, a magnetar, with an equivalent dipole field of nearly 20 times the quantum critical magnetic field (me2c3/eℏ). Our conclusions were based on two epochs of the measurement of the spin, along with an age estimate of the host supernova remnant. Herein, we present a spin chronology of the pulsar using additional Ginga, ASCA, RXTE, and BeppoSAX data sets spanning over a decade. The timing and spectral analyses confirm our initial results and severely limit an accretion origin for the observed flux. Over the 10 yr baseline, the pulsar is found to undergo a rapid, constant spin-down while maintaining a steady flux and an invariant pulse profile. Within the measurement uncertainties, no systematic departures from a linear spin-down are found—departures as in the case of glitches or simply stochastic fluctuations in the pulse times of arrival (e.g., red timing noise). We suggest that this pulsar is akin to the soft γ-ray repeaters; however, it is remarkably stable and has yet to display similar outbursts. Future γ-ray activity from this object is likely.
A Survey on Multicast Capacity of Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Studies of throughput capacity of wireless ad hoc networks attracts many attention since the year 2000. In these works, the fundamental capacity limits of wireless networks is studied. These results are of great importance because they are not only critical for theoretical analysis, but also provide guidelines in designing wireless ad hoc networks. Recently, the researches on multicast is proposed, which study the condition when a number of nodes in the networks are interested in identical information. Other related issues like mobility, hybrid networks and energy consumption is also studied in the multicast networks. Although these researches seems independent with each other, there are some interconnections between them and enable us to make a comprehensive survey. In this work, we present the recent works on multicast and the techniques on proving the results.
Looking at underrepresentation of women in high-profile jobs in Iceland from a social identity theory perspective : is gender a liability?

The objective of this research was to explore the various factors that contribute to the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in Iceland where social identity theory was used as a leading theory in the research. Two research questions were put forward in the introduction chapter: RQ1: From a social identity theory perspective, do employers view women as members of an in-group or out-group regarding leadership positions in Iceland? RQ2: What corporate environmental factors lead to women falling behind in attaining highprofile jobs in Iceland? The theoretical review focuses on relevant theories, researches and numerous barriers that women have to overcome. A multiple case study was conducted where ten human resource personnel were participants in various organizations in Iceland. The results to research question one revealed that according to the social identity theory, women are perceived as out-group members when it comes to attaining leadership positions. The results for research question two are similar to existing literature where women in Iceland face comparable barriers as women in other countries. An addition to the literature was developed by the researcher, where developmental opportunities are needed from the bottom up inside organizations to increase the proportion of women in leadership positions. Having more women would work against barriers such as stereotypes and prejudice. Propositions for organizations was mentioned to implement gender equality in leadership positions, limitations to the research was stated with ideas for future research.
A low-complexity tree search based quasi-ML receiver for SCMA system

Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) which is overloaded by carrying more users than its resource blocks, is different from conventional multiple access method. It can improve spectrum efficiency to solve the problem of large amounts of telecommunication data. Conventional message passing algorithm (MPA) receiver has been used in SCMA, but it has a relatively high complexity. In this paper, we propose a new low-complexity quasi maximum likelihood (quasi-ML) receiver to further reduce the complexity. Quasi-ML receiver is improved for the specific characteristic of SCMA. Numerical results demonstrate that the quasi-ML detector achieves significantly less computational complexity than the classic MPA detector, with a little performance loss. The superior performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by theoretic analysis as well as simulation results.
Dendrites of classes of hippocampal neurons differ in structural complexity and branching patterns

Dendrites of reconstructed hippocampal neurons were analyzed for morphometric, topologic, and fractal parameters (n = 32 quantities) to investigate neuronal groupings and growth characteristics with a common set of assumptions. The structures studied included CA1 and CA3 pyramidal cells, interneurons, and granule cells from young animals (71 cells in total). Most of the cells showed no characteristic fractal dimension; rather, the scaling relation could be well represented by a two‐parameter fit, of which one parameter showed a significant difference between cell classes. Other significant quantities that differentiated cell classes were related to the complexity of the dendritic tree (number of branch points and maximal terminal branch order) and the cell's electrical properties such as the mean attenuation between the soma and terminals. Principal components analysis produced combined measures of only slightly greater discriminative power than the best individual measures, indicating that the elementary quantities capture most of the structural variation between hippocampal cell groups. Another finding was that for all cells the mean segment length increased with dendritic branch order, which is consistent with decreasing branching probability as a function of the path distance from the soma. Analysis of another set of CA1 pyramidal neurons from aged animals (n = 15; 22–24 months) showed only a few significant differences than those from young animals (n = 11; a subset of n = 71) of which the most important was a straightening of the paths between terminals and the soma. The quantities analyzed in these reconstructed hippocampal neurons may reflect both intrinsic neuronal characteristics and extrinsic influences. Hippocampal cell groupings (i.e., pyramidal cells as opposed to dentate granule cells and interneurons) were significantly differentiated by most parameters. These differences and parameter values may be critical for understanding and generating synthetic neuronal populations for modelling studies. J. Comp. Neurol. 413:619–633, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Areal word accent variation in and near Dalarna

Do E.A. Meyer’s tonal word accents contours from the Swedish dialects provide a reliable basis for quantitative analysis? Measurements made on acute and grave tone-peaks in a number of dialects spoken in the province of Dalarna suggested that the timing of grave tonal peaks tended to vary systematically from south-east to north-west. The former dialects had relatively late and the latter relatively early tone-peaks. This finding suggests that Meyer’s accent data may be sufficiently accurate to reflect systematic variation within broad dialect areas. Implications for the historical development of the Dalarna dialects are discussed.
Cancer Appetite and Symptom Questionnaire (CASQ) for Brazilian Patients: Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Validation Study

Background Appetite and symptoms, conditions generally reported by the patients with cancer, are somewhat challenging for professionals to measure directly in clinical routine (latent conditions). Therefore, specific instruments are required for this purpose. This study aimed to perform a cultural adaptation of the Cancer Appetite and Symptom Questionnaire (CASQ), into Portuguese and evaluate its psychometric properties on a sample of Brazilian cancer patients. Methods This is a validation study with Brazilian cancer patients. The face, content, and construct (factorial and convergent) validities of the Cancer Appetite and Symptom Questionnaire, the study tool, were estimated. Further, a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted. The ratio of chi-square and degrees of freedom (χ2/df), comparative fit index (CFI), goodness of fit index (GFI) and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) were used for fit model assessment. In addition, the reliability of the instrument was estimated using the composite reliability (CR) and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (α), and the invariance of the model in independent samples was estimated by a multigroup analysis (Δχ2). Results Participants included 1,140 cancer patients with a mean age of 53.95 (SD = 13.25) years; 61.3% were women. After the CFA of the original CASQ structure, 2 items with inadequate factor weights were removed. Four correlations between errors were included to provide adequate fit to the sample (χ2/df = 8.532, CFI = .94, GFI = .95, and RMSEA = .08). The model exhibited a low convergent validity (AVE = .32). The reliability was adequate (CR = .82 α = .82). The refined model showed strong invariance in two independent samples (Δχ2: λ: p = .855; i: p = .824; Res: p = .390). A weak stability was obtained between patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy (Δχ2: λ: p = .155; i: p < .001; Res: p < .001), and between patients undergoing chemotherapy combined with radiotherapy and palliative care (Δχ2: λ: p = .058; i: p < .001; Res: p < .001). Conclusion The Portuguese version of the CASQ had good face and construct validity and reliability. However, the CASQ still presented invariance in independent samples of Brazilian patients with cancer. However, the tool has low convergent validity and weak invariance in samples with different treatments.
Relationship between Mindfulness and Premenstrual Syndrome among Faculty Nursing Students

Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is a complex set of symptoms which include physical, psychological and behavioral changes of varying severity. These symptoms can interfere with the lives of the affected females, as well as their interpersonal relationships. Researches reveal a sound influence of mindfulness on the mind, somatic aspect, and conduct, claiming that educating a further mindful way of being is related to fewer psychological suffering, more optimistic condition of mind, and improved quality of life. Despite the existence of many experimental studies revealing the consequences of cognitive mindfulness-based therapy on the premenstrual tension, few studies attempted to study the relation between mindfulness level and premenstrual symptoms severity among affected women. Objective: Examine the relation between mindfulness level and premenstrual syndrome among faculty nursing students. Setting: The study was conducted on nursing students at the Faculty of Nursing, Damanhour University. Subjects: A sample of 291 nursing students was chosen by simple random sampling method. Tools: Two questionnaires were used namely; Five Factors Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and a modified version of Premenstrual Symptoms Screening Tool for clinicians (PMSST) in addition to socio-demographic data and menstrual history structured interview schedule. Results: Study findings indicated that the only statistical significant relation was present between mindfulness and behavioral symptoms. However, no statistical significant relationships were found between mindfulness and total score of premenstrual symptoms as well as the rest of subscales of premenstrual symptoms. Conclusion: Mindfulness is significantly related to behavioral premenstrual symptoms. Recommendations: Mindfulness training can be used to address premenstrual behavioral symptoms.
Ten Things Lawyers should Know about Internet Research

Updating legal frameworks to accomodate technological advancement of communications capabilities requires first updating other legal frameworks to accommodate empirically grounded research into what we have built, how it is used, and what it costs to sustain. Unfortunately for - and due to - well-intentioned policymakers, our scientific knowledge about the Internet is weak because researchers are typically not allowed access to any data on operational network infrastructure for privacy reasons. This data access problem was recognized long ago for its detrimental impact on infrastructure protection capabilities; many public and private sector efforts have failed to solve it. Public policy intended to protect individual user privacy places the research community in the absurd situation of not being able to do the most basic network research even on the networks established explicitly to support academic network research. Despite the methodological limitations of Internet science today, the few data points available suggest a dire picture of the future. But while the situation overwhelmingly indicates the need for a closer objective look, the only people with measurement capability on publically accessible network infrastructure today are tasked with inferring as much private information on individual users as possible - whether its to target terrorists or ads. The traditional mode of getting data from public infrastructures to inform policymaking - regulating its collection - is a quixotic path, since the government regulatory agencies have as much reason to be reluctant as providers regarding disclosure of how the Internet is engineered, used, and financed. Less surprising with hindsight, the opaqueness of the infrastructure to empirical analysis has generated many problematic responses from rigidly circumscribed communities trying to get their jobs done. As dismal as it sounds though, the news is not all bad - there is a reason everyone wants to be connected to all the world's knowledge, as well as each other, besides its status as the most powerful complex system ever created by man. The Internet's practical promise for individual freedom, democratic engagement, and economic empowerment, is also unparalleled. Moreover, even in the dim light of the profoundly needed but under attended interdisciplinary research into the network, we can ascertain some concrete constraints on the possible range of policy solutions, which all involve increasing the congruity between what we legislate and what we know.
Utterance Classification Using Linguistic and Non-linguistic Information for Network-Based Speech-to-Speech Translation Systems

Network-based mobile services, such as speech-to-speech translation and voice search, enable the construction of large-scale log database including speech. We have developed a smartphone application called VoiceTra for speech-to-speech translation and have collected 10,000,000 utterances so far. This huge corpus is unique in size and spatio-temporal information; it contains information on anonymized user locations. This spatiotemporal corpus can be used for improving the accuracy of its speech recognition and machine translation, and it will open the door for the study of the location dependency of vocabulary and new applications for location-based services. This paper first analyzes the corpus and then presents a novel method for classifying utterances using linguistic and non-linguistic information. L2-regularized Logistic Regression is used for utterance classification. Our experiments performed on the VoiceTra log corpus revealed that our proposed method outperformed baseline methods in terms of F measure.
Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce the Usage of Internet Banking Services among Jordanian Consumers

The study aims to examine factors that influence an individual's intention to adopt internet banking service based on the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA). This theory consists of four factors; two exogenous variables are attitude, subjective norm, and two endogenous variables are behavior intention and Internet Banking Service Adoption (IBSA) (actual behavior). This paper also aims to examine the validity of TRA model on IBSA setting in Jordan. This study uses a survey data of 700 Jordanian public university employees how used internet banking services. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed to examine the reliability and validity of the measurement. The structural equation modeling techniques (Amos 6.0) were used to evaluate the casual model. Results of the study demonstrate the strong predictive power of the original TRA model to explain IBSA in Jordan. Finding this study indicates that the significant relationship between customers attitude, subjective norm and their intention to adopt IBS, moreover this study highlight that positive affecting of customers intention and IBSA.
Arm Swing as a Weak Biometric for Unobtrusive User Authentication

Verifying the identity of a user before granting access to objects or services is an important step in nearly all applications or environments. Some applications (e.g. pervasive environment) may impose additional requirements for user authentication mechanism, such as to be continuous and unobtrusive. The former refers to constant or periodic re-assurance of the identity, while the latter means that the authentication mechanism should be unobtrusive and implicit (without attracting user's attention). Traditional user authentication mechanisms (e.g. passwords or fingerprints) cannot be or is difficult to adapt to fulfill such requirements. This paper studies an unobtrusive mechanism of user authentication based on a new biometric modality. Arm swing, which occurs during gait, is proposed as a weak biometric for user authentication. We collected arm swing of the person by using a motion recording sensor, which records acceleration of the arm swing in three orthogonal directions. Using frequency domain analysis of the arm swing accelerations, we obtained anEqual Error Rate (EER) of 10% based on a preliminary data set including 120 arm swing samples from 30 persons.
Cardiovascular Reactivity to Stress Predicts Future Blood Pressure in Adolescence

Objective This study evaluated the prospective relationship between cardiovascular reactivity to psychological stress and increases in resting blood pressure across a 3-year period among a multiethnic pediatric sample (N = 149). Methods Systolic and diastolic blood pressure; EKG heart rate, pre-ejection period, and mean successive difference of R to R intervals; and impedance-derived measures of cardiac output, stroke volume, and total peripheral resistance were collected during performance of four tasks that elicited different hemodynamic response patterns. Changes from baseline to each task were standardized and averaged to form eight composite scores. Analyses adjusted for time 1 baseline blood pressure and age, body mass index at baseline and change to follow-up, and duration of follow-up. Results Rises in SBP over the follow-up period were independently predicted by SBP (&bgr; = 0.161, p = .009), DBP (&bgr; = 0.132, p = .02), and CO (&bgr; = 0.144, p = .02) composite measures of reactivity. Rises in DBP over the follow-up period were predicted by DBP (&bgr; = 0.292, p = .003, respectively), and MSD (&bgr; = −0.176, p < .03) composite measures of reactivity. TPR reactivity was not related prospectively to blood pressure rises. Conclusions This study adds to the pediatric literature documenting an association between cardiovascular reactivity to stress and subsequent risk for hypertension. It is the first to show that impedance-derived measures of myocardial function during stress are related to future blood pressure levels.
Event Detection Based Approach for Soccer Video Summarization Using Machine learning

Many soccer fans prefer to watch a summary of football games as watching a whole soccer match needs a lot of time. Traditionally, soccer videos were analyzed manually, however this costs valuable time. Therefore, it is necessary to have a tool for doing the video analysis and summarization job automatically. Automatic soccer video summarization is about extracting important events from soccer matches in order to produce general summaries for the most important moments in which soccer viewers may be interested. This paper presents a machine learning (ML) based event detection and summarization system for emphasizing important events during soccer matches. The proposed system rstly segments the
Human Primary Auditory Cortex: Cytoarchitectonic Subdivisions and Mapping into a Spatial Reference System

The transverse temporal gyrus of Heschl contains the human auditory cortex. Several schematic maps of the cytoarchitectonic correlate of this functional entity are available, but they present partly conflicting data (number and position of borders of the primary auditory areas) and they do not enable reliable comparisons with functional imaging data in a common spatial reference system. In order to provide a 3-D data set of the precise position and extent of the human primary auditory cortex, its putative subdivisions, and its topographical intersubject variability, we performed a quantitative cytoarchitectonic analysis of 10 brains using a recently established technique for observer-independent definition of areal borders. Three areas, Te1.1, Te1.0, and Te1.2, with a well-developed layer IV, which represent the primary auditory cortex (Brodmann area 41), can be identified along the mediolateral axis of the Heschl gyrus. The cell density was significantly higher in Te1.1 compared to Te1.2 in the left but not in the right hemisphere. The cytoarchitectonically defined areal borders of the primary auditory cortex do not consistently match macroanatomic landmarks like gyral and sulcal borders. The three primary auditory areas of each postmortem brain were mapped to a spatial reference system which is based on a brain registered by in vivo magnetic resonance imaging. The integration of a sample of postmortem brains in a spatial reference system allows one to estimate the spatial variability of each cytoarchitectonically defined region with respect to this reference system. In future, the transfer of in vivo structural and functional data into the same spatial reference system will enable accurate comparisons of cytoarchitectonic maps of the primary auditory cortex with activation centers as established with functional imaging procedures.
Perceived environmental, social, and policy influences on physical activity in rural midwestern adults

Approved: ________________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ________________________________________ Title and Department ________________________________________ Date 1 PERCEIVED ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND POLICY INFLUENCES ON PHYSICAL ACTIVITY IN RURAL MIDWESTERN ADULTS by Matthew Scott Chrisman A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Community and Behavioral Health in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa