Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Non-data-aided signal-to-noise-ratio estimation

Non-data-aided (NDA) signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) estimation is considered for binary phase shift keying systems where the data samples are governed by a normal mixture distribution. Inherent estimation accuracy limitations are examined via a simple, closed-form approximation to the associated Cramer-Rao bound which eliminates the need for numerical integration. The expectation-maximization algorithm is proposed to iteratively maximize the NDA likelihood function. Simulation results show that the resulting estimator offers statistical efficiency over a wider range of scenarios than previously published methods.
Recursive 3-D motion estimation from a monocular image sequence

Consideration is given to the design and application of a recursive algorithm to a sequence of images of a moving object to estimate both its structure and kinematics. The object is assumed to be rigid, and its motion is assumed to be smooth in the sense that it can be modeled by retaining an arbitrary number of terms in the appropriate Taylor series expansions. Translational motion involves a standard rectilinear model, while rotational motion is described with quaternions. Neglected terms of the Taylor series are modeled as process noise. A state-space model is constructed, incorporating both kinematic and structural states, and recursive techniques are used to estimate the state vector as a function of time. A set of object match points is assumed to be available. The problem is formulated as a parameter estimation and tracking problem which can use an arbitrarily large number of images in a sequence. The recursive estimation is done using an iterated extended Kalman filter (IEKF), initialized with the output of a batch algorithm run on the first few frames. Approximate Cramer-Rao lower bounds on the error covariance of the batch estimate are used as the initial state estimate error covariance of the IEKF. The performance of the recursive estimator is illustrated using both real and synthetic image sequences. >
Cross-reactivity between C-reactive protein and idiotypic determinants on A phosphocholine-binding murine myeloma protein

Binding of human 125I-C-reactive protein (CRP) to sheep erythrocytes sensitized with pneumococcal C polysaccharide (E-PnC) was found to be Ca++ dependent and inhibitable by phosphocholine, CRP, and HOPC 8. Binding of 125I-HOPC 8 to EPnC was Ca++ -independent but could also be inhibited by phosphocholine, CRP, and HOPC 8. Thus, CRP and HOPC 8, despite a differential Ca++ requirement, share a common binding specificity for phosphocholine. A monoclonal anti-idiotypic antibody (MAB), GB4-10, prepared in A/J mice immunized with BALB/c HOPC 8 inhibited the binding of both 125I-CRP and 125I-HOPC 8 to E-PnC. In addition, both proteins bound to GB4-10 immobilized on polysterene tubes. Interestingly, binding of 125I-CRP to GB4-10 required Ca++. Similar results were also obtained with another MAB (AB1-2) prepared similarly to GB4-10, whereas neither protein bound to a control MAB (EB3-7) against an alpha1 leads to 3 dextran-binding myeloma protein, J558. Binding of 125I-HOPC 8 to GB4-10 could be inhibited by HOPC 8, keyhole limpet hemocyanin-phosphocholine but not phosphocholine but not phosphocholine, and in the presence of Ca++ by CRP. These data indicate that CRP bears antigenic determinants cross-reacting with certain idiotypic determinants on HOPC 8. They also suggest that Ca++ acts as an allosteric effector, perhaps stabilizing the phosphocholine-binding site of CRP.
Counteraction of Trehalose on N, N-Dimethylformamide-Induced Candida rugosa Lipase Denaturation: Spectroscopic Insight and Molecular Dynamic Simulation

Candida rugosa lipase (CRL) has been widely used as a biocatalyst for non-aqueous synthesis in biotechnological applications, which, however, often suffers significant loss of activity in organic solvent. Experimental results show that trehalose could actively counteract the organic-solvent-induced protein denaturation, while the molecular mechanisms still don’t unclear. Herein, CRL was used as a model enzyme to explore the effects of trehalose on the retention of enzymatic activity upon incubation in N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF). Results showed that both catalytic activity and conformation changes of CRL influenced by DMF solvent were inhibited by trehalose in a dose-dependent fashion. The simulations further indicated that the CRL protein unfolded in binary DMF solution, but retained the native state in the ternary DMF/trehalose system. Trehalose as the second osmolyte added into binary DMF solution decreased DMF-CRL hydrogen bonds efficiently, whereas increased the intermolecular hydrogen bondings between DMF and trehalose. Thus, the origin of its denaturing effects of DMF on protein is thought to be due to the preferential exclusion of trehalose as well as the intermolecular hydrogen bondings between trehalose and DMF. These findings suggest that trehalose protect the CRL protein from DMF-induced unfolding via both indirect and direct interactions.
Mediation and Counseling Services: A Viable Partnership

Mediation has become common in many areas of society, including marital dissolution, community disputes, governmental agencies, and business and industry. Though higher education has been slower than society to adopt mediation services, campus mediation is becoming increasingly more common. This article explains why mediation is a viable educational opportunity and offers a rationale for mediation as a branch of counseling services.
Four Functionally Distinct Regions in the Left Supramarginal Gyrus Support Word Processing

We used fMRI in 85 healthy participants to investigate whether different parts of the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG) are involved in processing phonological inputs and outputs. The experiment involved 2 tasks (speech production (SP) and one-back (OB) matching) on 8 different types of stimuli that systematically varied the demands on sensory processing (visual vs. auditory), sublexical phonological input (words and pseudowords vs. nonverbal stimuli), and semantic content (words and objects vs. pseudowords and meaningless baseline stimuli). In ventral SMG, we found an anterior subregion associated with articulatory sequencing (for SP > OB matching) and a posterior subregion associated with auditory short-term memory (for all auditory > visual stimuli and written words and pseudowords > objects). In dorsal SMG, a posterior subregion was most highly activated by words, indicating a role in the integration of sublexical and lexical cues. In anterior dorsal SMG, activation was higher for both pseudoword reading and object naming compared with word reading, which is more consistent with executive demands than phonological processing. The dissociation of these four “functionally-distinct” regions, all within left SMG, has implications for differentiating between different types of phonological processing, understanding the functional anatomy of language and predicting the effect of brain damage.
A Commutative Replicated Data Type for Cooperative Editing

A Commutative Replicated Data Type (CRDT) is one where all concurrent operations commute. The replicas of a CRDT converge automatically, without complex concurrency control. This paper describes Treedoc, a novel CRDT design for cooperative text editing. An essential property is that the identifiers of Treedoc atoms are selected from a dense space. We discuss practical alternatives for implementing the identifier space based on an extended binary tree. We also discuss storage alternatives for data and meta-data, and mechanisms for compacting the tree. In the best case, Treedoc incurs no overhead with respect to a linear text buffer. We validate the results with traces from existing edit histories.
Translation Combination using Factored Word Substitution

We present a word substitution approach to combine the output of different machine translation systems. Using part of speech information, candidate words are determined among possible translation options, which in turn are estimated through a pre-computed word alignment. Automatic substitution is guided by several decision factors, including part of speech, local context, and language model probabilities. The combination of these factors is defined after careful manual analysis of their respective impact. The approach is tested for the language pair German-English, however the general technique itself is language independent.
Trafficking Fraudulent Accounts: The Role of the Underground Market in Twitter Spam and Abuse

As web services such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo now dominate the daily activities of Internet users, cyber criminals have adapted their monetization strategies to engage users within these walled gardens. To facilitate access to these sites, an underground market has emerged where fraudulent accounts - automatically generated credentials used to perpetrate scams, phishing, and malware - are sold in bulk by the thousands. In order to understand this shadowy economy, we investigate the market for fraudulent Twitter accounts to monitor prices, availability, and fraud perpetrated by 27 merchants over the course of a 10-month period. We use our insights to develop a classifier to retroactively detect several million fraudulent accounts sold via this marketplace, 95% of which we disable with Twitter's help. During active months, the 27 merchants we monitor appeared responsible for registering 10-20% of all accounts later flagged for spam by Twitter, generating $127-459K for their efforts.
The postmodern turn: Contingent foundations: Feminism and the question of ‘postmodernism’

The question of postmodernism is surely a question, for is there, after all, something called postmodernism? Is it an historical characterization, a certain kind of theoretical position, and what does it mean for a term that has described a certain aesthetic practice now to apply to social theory and to feminist social and political theory in particular? Who are these postmodernists? Is this a name that one takes on for oneself, or is it more often a name that one is called if and when one offers a critique of the subject, a discursive analysis, or questions the integrity or coherence of totalizing social descriptions? I know the term from the way it is used, and it usually appears on my horizon embedded in the following critical formulations: “if discourse is all there is, …,” or “if everything is a text …” or “if the subject is dead …” or “if real bodies do not exist …? ” The sentence begins as a warning against an impending nihilism, for if the conjured content of these series of conditional clauses proves to be true, then, and there is always a then, some set of dangerous consequences will surely follow. So ‘postmodernism’ appears to be articulated in the form of a fearful conditional or sometimes in the form of paternalistic disdain toward that which is youthful and irrational.
Minority status decreases sense of control and increases interpretive processing

Relative group size consistently affects social perception. This article proposes that minority members lack subjective control over outcomes, so they engage in interpretative reasoning. In a minimal intergroup procedure, participants believed that they belonged either to a majority or a minority group. They then received information and thought aloud about social targets, with whom they anticipated to interact. As expected, compared to majority members, minority members perceived less control over their outcomes, relied less on factual information, and made more dispositional attributions about social targets. Group size affected processing focus and not processing effort. Sense of control mediated the effect of group size on information processing. These findings illuminate the phenomenology of being a minority.
TraSH-SN: A Transport Layer Seamless Handoff Scheme for Space Networks

The Internet Engineering Task Force has developed Mobile IP to handle mobility of Internet hosts at the network layer. Spacecrafts in space are analogous to mobile nodes in the terrestrial network. NASA has been experimenting with Mobile IP to handle handoffs in space networks. Mobile IP, however, suffers from a number of drawbacks such as high handoff latency, packet loss, and interoperability issues with network security solutions. In this paper, we describe TraSH-SN, a new Transport Layer Seamless Handover scheme for Space Networks, to handle handoffs in space networks. TraSH-SN utilizes multi-homing to achieve a seamless handoff of a spacecraft, and is designed to solve many of the drawbacks of Mobile IP. Various aspects, such as handoff, signalling, location management, data transfer, and security considerations of TraSH-SN are discussed, and its application to space networks is also outlined.
Using Differential Item Functioning Procedures to Explore Sources of Item Difficulty and Group Performance Characteristics.

Statistics used to detect differential item functioning can also reflect differential strengths and weaknesses in the performance characteristics of population subgroups. In turn, item features associated with the differential performance patterns are likely to reflect some facet of the item task and hence its difficulty, that might previously have been overlooked. In this study, several item features were identified and coded for a large number of reading comprehension items from the two admissions testing programs. Item features included subject matter content, various properties of item structure, cognitive demand indicators, and semantic content (propositional analysis). Differential item functioning was evaluated for males and females and for White and Black examinees. Results showed a number of significant relationships between item features and indicators of differential item functioning—many of which were consistent across testing programs. Implications of the results for related areas of research are discussed.
Coherent Bump Map Recovery from a Single Texture Image

In order to texture surfaces realistically with texture images (e.g. photos), it is important to consider the underlying relief. Here, a method is proposed to recover a coherent bump map from a single texture image. Different visual zones are first identified using segmentation and classification. Then, by linearly separating the relief into a noise-like small-scale component and a smooth “shape-related” large-scale component, we can automatically deduce the bump map as well as an “unshaded” color map of the texture. The major advantage of our approach, compared to sophisticated measurement techniques based on multiple photos or specific devices, is its practical simplicity and broad accessibility, while it allows us to obtain very easily, via basic bump mapping or displacement mapping, rendering results of good quality.
A mmWave Phased Array for Joint Radar and Communication

To fulfill the capacity requirement of next-generation communication, the mmWave band is the center of attention and a mmWave phased array can provide the necessary flexibility in the hardware. Taking analogies from the monopulse radar concepts, we propose to use a mix of sum and difference patterns in a small planar phased array to collect the direction of arrival quickly. The proposed receiver architecture employs the fast beam-switching feature of the beamforming IC to enhance the unambiguous angular range of the array and thereby making it a promising candidate for joint radar and communication.
Design and implementation of the Smith-Waterman algorithm on the CUDA-compatible GPU

This paper describes a design and implementation of the Smith-Waterman algorithm accelerated on the graphics processing unit (GPU). Our method is implemented using compute unified device architecture (CUDA), which is available on the nVIDIA GPU. The method efficiently uses on-chip shared memory to reduce the data amount being transferred between off-chip memory and processing elements in the GPU. Furthermore, it reduces the number of data fetches by applying a data reuse technique to query and database sequences. We show some experimental results comparing the proposed method with an OpenGL-based method. As a result, the speedup over the OpenGL-based method reaches a factor of 6.4 when using amino acid sequence database.We also find that shared memory reduces the amount of data fetches to 1/140, providing a peak performance of 5.65 giga cell updates per second (GCUPS). This performance is approximately three times faster than a prior CUDA-based implementation.
Improved MVDR Beamforming Using Single-Channel Mask Prediction Networks

Recent studies on multi-microphone speech databases indicate that it is beneficial to perform beamforming to improve speech recognition accuracies, especially when there is a high level of background noise. Minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamforming is an important beamforming method that performs quite well for speech recognition purposes especially if the steering vector is known. However, steering the beamformer to focus on speech in unknown acoustic conditions remains a challenging problem. In this study, we use singlechannel speech enhancement deep networks to form masks that can be used for noise spatial covariance estimation, which steers the MVDR beamforming toward the speech. We analyze how mask prediction affects performance and also discuss various ways to use masks to obtain the speech and noise spatial covariance estimates in a reliable way. We show that using a single mask across microphones for covariance prediction with minima-limited post-masking yields the best result in terms of signal-level quality measures and speech recognition word error rates in a mismatched training condition.
Digital Play and the Actualization of the Consumer Imagination

In this article, the authors consider emerging consumer practices in digital virtual spaces. Building on constructions of consumer behavior as both a sense-making activity and a resource for the construction of daydreams, as well as anthropological readings of performance, the authors speculate that many performances during digital play are products of consumer fantasy. The authors develop an interpretation of the relationship between the real and the virtual that is better equipped to understand the movement between consumer daydreams and those practices actualized in the material and now also in digital virtual reality. The authors argue that digital virtual performances present opportunities for liminoid transformations through inversions, speculations, and playfulness acted out in aesthetic dramas. To illustrate, the authors consider specific examples of the theatrical productions available to consumers in digital spaces, highlighting the consumer imagination that feeds them, the performances they produce, and the potential for transformation in consumer-players.
A new library of structured semidefinite programming instances

Solvers for semidefinite programming (SDP) have evolved a great deal in the last decade, and their development continues. In order to further support and encourage this development, we present a new test set of SDP instances. These instances arise from recent applications of SDP in the coding theory, computational geometry, graph theory and structural design. Most of these instances have a special structure that may be exploited during a pre-processing phase, e.g. algebraic symmetry, or low rank in the constraint matrices.
The Role of Attitudes to, and the Frequency of, Domestic Violence Encounters in the Healthcare Professionals’ Handling of Domestic Violence Cases

Abstract Background Domestic violence is recognized as a public health problem with a high prevalence in the general population. Healthcare professionals play an important role in the recognition and treatment of domestic violence. Hence, conducting research on factors that facilitate or inhibit appropriate actions by healthcare professionals is of the upmost importance. The objective of the study was to examine the relationship between healthcare professionals’ attitudes toward the acceptability of domestic violence and their responses when dealing with victims of domestic violence. Methods The sample consisted of 322 healthcare professionals (physicians, dentists, nursing staff and other healthcare workers; 85.2% female), who completed a questionnaire, assessing their attitudes towards domestic violence, experience, behaviour and perceived barriers in recognizing and treating domestic violence in the health care sector. The study was cross-sectional and used availability sampling. Results The results showed no significant differences in domestic violence acceptability attitudes when comparing groups of healthcare professionals who reported low or high frequency of domestic violence cases encounters. Furthermore, we found that domestic violence acceptability attitudes were negatively associated with action taking when the frequency of encounters with domestic violence cases was high and medium. However, the attitudes were not associated with action taking when the frequency of encounters with domestic violence cases was low. Conclusions The results highlight the important role of attitudes in action taking of healthcare professionals when it comes to domestic violence. This indicates the need for educational interventions that specifically target healthcare professionals’ attitudes towards domestic violence.
Role of Small Conductance Ca2+-Activated K+ Channels in Controlling CA1 Pyramidal Cell Excitability

Small-conductance Ca2+-activated K+ (SK or KCa2) channels are widely expressed in the CNS. In several types of neurons, these channels were shown to become activated during repetitive firing, causing early spike frequency adaptation. In CA1 pyramidal cells, SK channels in dendritic spines were shown to regulate synaptic transmission. However, the presence of functional SK channels in the somata and their role in controlling the intrinsic firing of these neurons has been controversial. Using whole-cell voltage-clamp and current-clamp recordings in acute hippocampal slices and focal applications of irreversible and reversible SK channel blockers, we provide evidence that functional SK channels are expressed in the somata and proximal dendrites of adult rat CA1 pyramidal cells. Although these channels can generate a medium duration afterhyperpolarizing current, they play only an auxiliary role in controlling the intrinsic excitability of these neurons, secondary to the low voltage-activating, noninactivating KV7/M channels. As long as KV7/M channels are operative, activation of SK channels during repetitive firing does not notably affect the spike output of CA1 pyramidal cells. However, when KV7/M channel activity is compromised, SK channel activation significantly and uniquely reduces spike output of these neurons. Therefore, proximal SK channels provide a “second line of defense” against intrinsic hyperexcitability, which may play a role in multiple conditions in which KV7/M channels activity is compromised, such as hyposmolarity.