Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Approach of safety-related monitoring and analyzing of human motion with limited sources of captured sensory data

Nowadays, many major efforts and interests are focused on providing better services for some elders and patients who have to live alone, while they are exposed to different dangers during their daily life activities such as falling. The necessity to reduce the negative consequences of falling, whether related to physical or psychological health or to financial encumbrances, by providing an immediate help and a continuous remote monitoring, drives a corresponding meaning to develop a reasonable safety-related monitoring and detecting system of the human motion with respect to the privacy and the simplicity. In this paper, a conceptual prototype of safety-related platform for monitoring human activities by mean of limited number of acceleration and rotation sensors is presented. Additionally, the proposed approach that adopts the artificial neural networks to overcome the challenges emerged by reducing the number of motion sensors and to compensate the missing data is also introduced. Moreover, the required procedures for collecting training and testing data are also summarized in the last section.
Is bank lending important for the transmission of monetary policy: an overview

To improve our understanding of the role of banks in the transmission of monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston convened a conference in June of 1995 to consider the question, "Is Bank Lending Important for the Transmission of Monetary Policy? " That banks are an important element in the transmission process is not an issue, because monetary policy operates through the banking sector. However, the description of the exact role played by banks remains hotly disputed, with the debate focusing on the importance of the role for bank lending as a transmission channel (the lending view) distinct from the generally accepted channel operating through interest rates (the money view). > Bankers, economists, and other financial specialists met to discuss whether bank lending should be considered an important component of the transmission of monetary policy. Proponents argued that changes in bank assets as well as bank liabilities influence the future course of the economy. Many economists remain skeptical of the role of banks, however, believing that a focus on interest rates or money aggregates is sufficient for understanding the transmission of monetary policy. This article presents an overview of the papers presented at the conference and the comments of their discussants.
Novel imaging technologies for characterization of microbial extracellular polysaccharides

Understanding of biology is underpinned by the ability to observe structures at various length scales. This is so in a historical context and is also valid today. Evolution of novel insight often emerges from technological advancement. Recent developments in imaging technologies that is relevant for characterization of extraceullar microbiological polysaccharides are summarized. Emphasis is on scanning probe and optical based techniques since these tools offers imaging capabilities under aqueous conditions more closely resembling the physiological state than other ultramicroscopy imaging techniques. Following the demonstration of the scanning probe microscopy principle, novel operation modes to increase data capture speed toward video rate, exploitation of several cantilever frequencies, and advancement of utilization of specimen mechanical properties as contrast, also including their mode of operation in liquid, have been developed on this platform. Combined with steps in advancing light microscopy with resolution beyond the far field diffraction limit, non-linear methods, and combinations of the various imaging modalities, the potential ultramicroscopy toolbox available for characterization of exopolysaccharides (EPS) are richer than ever. Examples of application of such ultramicroscopy strategies range from imaging of isolated microbial polysaccharides, structures being observed when they are involved in polyelectrolyte complexes, aspects of their enzymatic degradation, and cell surface localization of secreted polysaccharides. These, and other examples, illustrate that the advancement in imaging technologies relevant for EPS characterization supports characterization of structural aspects.
MPICH-V Project: A Multiprotocol Automatic Fault-Tolerant MPI

High performance computing platforms such as Clusters, Grid and Desktop Grids are becoming larger and subject to more frequent failures. MPI is one of the most used message passing libraries in HPC applications. These two trends raise the need for fault-tolerant MPI. The MPICH-V project focuses on designing, implementing and comparing several automatic fault-tolerant protocols for MPI applications. We present an extensive related work section highlighting the originality of our approach and the proposed protocols. We then present four fault-tolerant protocols implemented in a new generic framework for fault-tolerant protocol comparison, covering a large spectrum of known approaches from coordinated checkpoint, to uncoordinated checkpoint associated with causal message logging. We measure the performance of these protocols on a micro-benchmark and compare them with the NAS benchmark, using an original fault tolerance test. Finally, we outline the lessons learned from this in depth fault-tolerant protocol comparison of MPI applications.
To Save or Savour: A Review of Wine Investment

It has been argued that adding wine to an investment portfolio provides a diversification benefit. There is not, however, agreement on how the return to wine should be estimated. Nor is there agreement on a standard approach to test for a diversification benefit. By considering different approaches to estimating the return to wine and testing for a diversification benefit it is shown that claims wine provides a diversification benefit should be treated with caution.
A Decentralized Repair Mechanism for Decentralized Erasure Code Based Storage Systems

Erasure code based distributed storage systems provide data robustness by storing encoded-fragments over servers. To maintain data robustness, a repair mechanism recovers a storage system from server failures by repairing encoded-fragments. For decentralized erasure code based storage systems, we propose a decentralized repair mechanism. Our mechanism has the following features. Firstly, an encoded-fragment is replenished by a combination of a number u of encoded-fragments that are randomly chosen. Secondly, the number u depends on the number of the available encoded-fragments and is independent of the pattern of missing encoded-fragments. Thirdly, multiple encoded-fragments are simultaneously replenished in parallel. We measure the communication cost in terms of the number u of required network connections for replenishing an encoded-fragment. We then conducted a numerical analysis by using traces of real systems. We find that our requirement on u is smaller than that from existing methods. Both theoretical and numerical results show that our decentralized repair mechanism outperforms existing ones in terms of the communication cost under the same consideration of efficiency cost for storage.
Study of human perception on body shapes using intelligent techniques

This paper presents a method permitting to determine the relationship between body measurements and human perception on morphology of body shapes, expressed by a set of emotional descriptors and fashion themes. It can be integrated into current garment CAD system for providing personalized design support. Two procedures of sensory evaluation have been used. The first one aims at evaluating abstract fashion themes by means of emotional descriptors. In this procedure, the evaluators, including fashion designers and consumers, will give relevancy degrees between fashion themes and emotional descriptors. A fuzzy cognitive map is introduced to represent the corresponding results. It can be considered as a conceptual model characterizing the cognition level of evaluators on abstract fashion themes. The other procedure aims at evaluating the previous emotional descriptors on human body shapes according to the corresponding body measurements. A set of decision trees have been established to model the relation between the emotional descriptors and the human body measurements. It can be considered as a empirical model obtained from learning data.
Economic Mobility By raJ CHetty

head 55 T he United States is often hailed as the " land of opportunity, " a society in which a child's chances of success depend little on her family background. Is this reputation warranted? And is it especially warranted in some states, regions, or areas of the United States? There is a growing public perception that intergenerational income mobility—a child's chance of moving up in the income distribution relative to her parents—is declining in the United States. Is it really true that opportunity has declined? In two recent papers, we address these questions by compiling statistics from millions of anonymous income records. 1 These data have less measurement error and much larger sample sizes than previous survey-based studies and thus yield more precise estimates of intergenerational mobility across cities and states over time. Our core sample consists of all children in the United States born between 1980–1982, whose income we measure in 2011–2012, when they are approximately 30 years old. We divide our analysis into two parts: an analysis of time trends and an analysis of geographical variation in mobility across areas of the United States. time trends We find that the most robust way to measure intergenerational mobility is by ranking parents by parental income (at the time the child was growing up in the family) and by ranking children by their income when they are adults. For each percentile of parent's income, we compute the average rank of the income of the children when adults. As shown in Figure 1, we find that this rank-rank relationship is almost perfectly linear, with a slope of 0.34. This implies that children growing up in the highest-income families rank, on average, 34 percentiles higher than children growing up in the poorest families. Contrary to popular perception, we find that such percentile rank–based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971–1993 birth cohorts. For example, the probability that a child reaches the top fifth of the income distribution given parents in the bottom fifth is 8.4 percent for children born in 1971, compared with 9.0 percent for those born in 1986. Children born to the highest-income families in 1984 were 74.5 percentage points more likely to attend college than those from the lowest-income families. The corresponding gap for children born in 1993 is 69.2 percentage points, suggesting that, if anything, mobility may have increased slightly in recent cohorts. …
Early Detection and Optimal Corrective Measures of Power System Insecurity in Enhanced Look-Ahead Dispatch

This paper presents a novel algorithm for the early detection and optimal corrective measures of power system insecurity in an enhanced look-ahead dispatch framework. By introducing short-term dispatchable capacity (STDC) into the proposed look-ahead security management (LSM) scheme, the algorithm is capable of predicting and identifying future infeasibilities that pose security risks to the system under both normal conditions and assumed contingency conditions. An optimal recovery plan can be computed to prevent system insecurity at a minimal cost. Early awareness of such information is of vital importance to system operators for taking timely actions with more flexible and cost-effective measures. This, in addition to the economic benefits studied in the literature, demonstrates the advantage of security improvement of the look-ahead dispatch framework. The performance of the proposed algorithms is illustrated in a revised 24-bus IEEE Reliability Test System as well as in a practical 5889-bus system.
Network Coded Rate Scheduling for Two-way Relay Networks

We investigate a scheduling scheme incorporating network coding and channel varying information for the twoway relay networks. Our scheduler aims at minimizing the time span needed to send all the data of each source of the network. We consider three channel models, time invariant channels, time varying channels with finite states and time varying Rayleigh fading channels. We formulate the problem into a manageable optimization problem, and get a closed form scheduler under time invariant channels and time varying channel with finite channel states. For Rayleigh fading channels, we focus on the relay node operation and propose heuristic power allocation algorithm resemblant to water filling algorithm. By simulations, we find that even if the channel fluctuates randomly, the average time span is minimized when the relay node transmits/schedules network coded data as much as possible.
Prom Week: Designing past the game/story dilemma

New player experiences require new game designs – and some designs only become possible with new technology. Emergent narratives are part of existing story games but the game systems are not capable of understanding the stories their players create. If we could capture the enjoyable aspects of player-driven narratives while still keeping the complex dynamism of sandbox games, we could enable a new type of game experience. Creating this experience would require fundamental technical research to enable new kinds of authorial affordances. This paper presents the lessons learned while designing the game Prom Week and AI system Comme il Faut together to produce such an experience — a two and a half year process of researchdriven game design. Prom Week tightly combines player experiences of choice and consequence (as found, for example, in simulation games and combat systems) with experiences of specific characters, histories, language, and narrative conclusions (as found in the non-interactive, or minimally-interactive, fictions of many games). This combination was accomplished by creating novel technology informed by the design problem, experimenting with gameplay approaches appropriate to the technology, iterating on both using player feedback, and finally executing a unique design providing satisfying stories that reflect the player's choices in a wide possibility space.
Blufensin1 Negatively Impacts Basal Defense in Response to Barley Powdery Mildew1[W][OA]

Plants have evolved complex regulatory mechanisms to control the defense response against microbial attack. Both temporal and spatial gene expression are tightly regulated in response to pathogen ingress, modulating both positive and negative control of defense. BLUFENSIN1 (BLN1), a small peptide belonging to a novel family of proteins in barley (Hordeum vulgare), is highly induced by attack from the obligate biotrophic fungus Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei (Bgh), casual agent of powdery mildew disease. Computational interrogation of the Bln1 gene family determined that members reside solely in the BEP clade of the Poaceae family, specifically, barley, rice (Oryza sativa), and wheat (Triticum aestivum). Barley stripe mosaic virus-induced gene silencing of Bln1 enhanced plant resistance in compatible interactions, regardless of the presence or absence of functional Mla coiled-coil, nucleotide-binding site, Leu-rich repeat alleles, indicating that BLN1 can function in an R-gene-independent manner. Likewise, transient overexpression of Bln1 significantly increased accessibility toward virulent Bgh. Moreover, silencing in plants harboring the Mlo susceptibility factor decreased accessibility to Bgh, suggesting that BLN1 functions in parallel with or upstream of MLO to modulate penetration resistance. Collectively, these data suggest that the grass-specific Bln1 negatively impacts basal defense against Bgh.
Geometrical Measures Obtained from Pretreatment Postcontrast T1 Weighted MRIs Predict Survival Benefits from Bevacizumab in Glioblastoma Patients

Background Antiangiogenic therapies for glioblastoma (GBM) such as bevacizumab (BVZ), have been unable to extend survival in large patient cohorts. However, a subset of patients having angiogenesis-dependent tumors might benefit from these therapies. Currently, there are no biomarkers allowing to discriminate responders from non-responders before the start of the therapy. Methods 40 patients from the randomized GENOM009 study complied the inclusion criteria (quality of images, clinical data available). Of those, 23 patients received first line temozolomide (TMZ) for eight weeks and then concomitant radiotherapy and TMZ. 17 patients received BVZ+TMZ for seven weeks and then added radiotherapy to the treatment. Clinical variables were collected, tumors segmented and several geometrical measures computed including: Contrast enhancing (CE), necrotic, and total volumes; equivalent spherical CE width; several geometric measures of the CE ‘rim’ geometry and a set of image texture measures. The significance of the results was studied using Kaplan-Meier and Cox proportional hazards analysis. Correlations were assessed using Spearman correlation coefficients. Results Kaplan-Meier and Cox proportional hazards analysis showed that total, CE and inner volume (p = 0.019, HR = 4.258) and geometric heterogeneity of the CE areas (p = 0.011, HR = 3.931) were significant parameters identifying response to BVZ. The group of patients with either regular CE areas (small geometric heterogeneity, median difference survival 15.88 months, p = 0.011) or those with small necrotic volume (median survival difference 14.50 months, p = 0.047) benefited substantially from BVZ. Conclusion Imaging biomarkers related to the irregularity of contrast enhancing areas and the necrotic volume were able to discriminate GBM patients with a substantial survival benefit from BVZ. A prospective study is needed to validate our results.
A family of real single-tone frequency estimators using higher-order sample covariance lags

In this paper, the problem of frequency estimation of a single sinusoid immersed in white noise is addressed. Inspired by the Pisarenko Harmonic Decomposer (PHD) estimator, which makes use of the sample covariance of the observations with lags 1 and 2, we propose a family of estimators using higher lags p and 2p of the sample covariance. The proposed estimator outperforms the PHD, except for frequencies close to the edges kπ/p. As a means to sidestep this problem, two different estimators with different lags can be appropriately combined. A statistical analysis of the proposed method in terms of the Mean Square Error of the frequency estimate is presented. Computer simulations are included to validate the theoretical analysis of the novel estimator and to compare its performance to that of PHD and to the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound.
A Mixture of Multilayer Perceptron Experts Network for Modeling Face/Nonface Recognition in Cortical Face Processing Regions

Abstract Recent studies in neurobiology and especially in neuroimaging report that a gating mechanism prior to face processing levels of human visual system, facilitates the face/nonface recognition task. In accordance to these biological evidences, we propose aface/nonface recognition model which makes use of mixture of experts network. In order to improve the face/nonface recognition accuracy, the outputs of the expert networks aze combined using a gating network. A novel structure, which is the use of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) in forming the expert networks, is introduced. The learning algorithm is modified to be adapted with the MLP networks. The results reveal that using a mixture of simple MLPs is much more beneficial, in many respects, as it shows more certainty at its output and is also easier to train than a single, but complex, MLP.
Shape-similarity search of three-dimensional models using parameterized statistics

In this paper, we propose a method for shape-similarity search of 3D polygonal-mesh models. The system accepts triangular meshes, but tolerates degenerated polygons, disconnected component, and other anomalies. As the feature vector, the method uses a combination of three vectors, (1) the moment of inertia, (2) the average distance of surface from the axis, and (3) the variance of distance of the surface from the axis. Values in each vector are discretely parameterized along each of the three principal axes of inertia of the model. We employed the Euclidean distance and the elastic-matching distance as the measures of distance between pairs of feature vectors. Experiments showed that the proposed shape features and distance measures perform fairly well in retrieving models having similar shape from a database of VRML models.
Critical exponent of the fractional Langevin equation.

We investigate the dynamical phase diagram of the fractional Langevin equation and show that critical exponents mark dynamical transitions in the behavior of the system. For a free and harmonically bound particle the critical exponent alpha(c)=0.402+/-0.002 marks a transition to a nonmonotonic underdamped phase. The critical exponent alpha(R)=0.441. marks a transition to a resonance phase, when an external oscillating field drives the system. Physically, we explain these behaviors using a cage effect, where the medium induces an elastic type of friction. Phase diagrams describing the underdamped, the overdamped and critical frequencies of the fractional oscillator, recently used to model single protein experiments, show behaviors vastly different from normal.
Predictive Factors for a Kyphosis Recurrence Following Short-Segment Pedicle Screw Fixation Including Fractured Vertebral Body in Unstable Thoracolumbar Burst Fractures

Objective The technique of short segment pedicle screw fixation (SSPSF) has been widely used for stabilization in thoracolumbar burst fractures (TLBFs), but some studies reported high rate of kyphosis recurrence or hardware failure. This study was to evaluate the results of SSPSF including fractured level and to find the risk factors concerned with the kyphosis recurrence in TLBFs. Methods This study included 42 patients, including 25 males and 17 females, who underwent SSPSF for stabilization of TLBFs between January 2003 and December 2010. For radiologic assessments, Cobb angle (CA), vertebral wedge angle (VWA), vertebral body compression ratio (VBCR), and difference between VWA and Cobb angle (DbVC) were measured. The relationships between kyphosis recurrence and radiologic parameters or demographic features were investigated. Frankel classification and low back outcome score (LBOS) were used for assessment of clinical outcomes. Results The mean follow-up period was 38.6 months. CA, VWA, and VBCR were improved after SSPSF, and these parameters were well maintained at the final follow-up with minimal degree of correction loss. Kyphosis recurrence showed a significant increase in patients with Denis burst type A, load-sharing classification (LSC) score >6 or DbVC >6 (p<0.05). There were no patients who worsened to clinical outcome, and there was no significant correlation between kyphosis recurrence and clinical outcome in this series. Conclusion SSPSF including the fractured vertebra is an effective surgical method for restoration and maintenance of vertebral column stability in TLBFs. However, kyphosis recurrence was significantly associated with Denis burst type A fracture, LSC score >6, or DbVC >6.