Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Novel Application of the Classifier DECOC Based on Fingerprint Identification

Human fingerprints are rich in details, here called "minutiae". In this paper, a fingerprint recognition system based on a novel application of the classifier DECOC to the minutiae extraction and on an optimised matching algorithm will be presented. The minutiae extraction has been performed from fingerprint skeletons. To identify the different shapes and types of minutiae, a Data-driven Error Correcting Output Coding (DECOC) has been adopted to work as a classifier. The proposed classifier has been applied throughout the fingerprint skeleton to locate various minutiae. Extracted minutiae have been used then as identification marks for an automatic fingerprint matching that is based on distance, direction and type between two minutiae.
Nonlinear Effects in Cavitation Cloud Dynamics

This paper presents a spectral analysis of the response of a fluid containing bubbles to the motions of a wall oscillating normal to itself. First, a fourier series analysis of the Rayleigh-Plesset equation is used to obtain an approximate solution for the nonlinear effects in the oscillations of a single bubble. This is used in the approximate solution of the oscillating wall problem and the resulting expressions are evaluated numerically in order to examine the nonlinear effects. The frequency content of the bubble radius and pressure oscillations near the wall is examined. Nonlinear effects are seen to increase with increased amplitude of wall oscillation, reduced void fraction and viscous and surface tension effects.
Analyzing the process of installing rogue software

This practical experience report presents the results of an experiment aimed at understanding the sequence of malicious actions following a remote compromise. The type of rogue software installed during attacks was used to classify and understand sequences of malicious actions. For this experiment, we used four Linux target computers running SSH with simple passwords. During the eight-month data collection period, we recorded a total of 1,171 attack sessions. In these sessions, attackers typed a total of 20,335 commands that we categorized into 24 specific actions. These actions were analyzed based on the type of rogue software installed by attackers.
Savion: an interactive cognitive enhancement software for the elderly

Alzheimer's disease is a form of degenerative neurological disease characterized by severe cognitive and psychosocial impairment. Cognitive interventions appear to be a viable supplement to pharmacological management, which has little long-term impact on the progression of the disease. Non-pharmacological interventions, are currently investigated as means to enhance everyday cognitive and adaptive/social functioning. Computer-based programs afford greater ease and reduced cost of administration, features that are often critical for patient enrollment and compliance. Here we discuss potential advantages of such programs for improving quality of life and patient-caregiver daily interactions and suggest optimal procedures to be followed during linguistic and cultural adaptation of the Savion program in Greek.
On the irreducibility of generalized Vandermonde determinants

We find geometric and arithmetic conditions on a finite set of integer exponents and the characteristic of a field k in order to characterize the irreducibility of the determinant of the generic Vandermonde matrix determined by these exponents in the algebraic closure of k. Tools from Tropical Geometry are then applied in order to characterize those determinants that are irreducible over any field k.
Organizational learning in representative Singapore public organizations: A study of its contribution to the understanding of management in Singapore

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore several key issues on organizational learning and their contributions to theory, practice and policy in public‐sector management in Singapore. It also aims to determine the crucial factors and strategies in the development of organizational learning initiatives as a means of keeping competitive with the rapid changing business environment.Design/methodology/approach – Four representative Singapore public organizations were chosen for this study. A total of 24 organizational learning practitioners, including senior management and human resources personnel, participated in the in‐depth interviewing.Findings – It was found that Singapore's public sector is more concerned with the cognitive and behavioral development of individuals, rather than financial results.Research limitations/implications – Although this study is limited by the single geographical context, it offers direction for further research.Practical implications – Data revealed that: The complexi.
Cost-Effective Personal Analytics in Social Media Using Language and Network Structure

Limitations to public access of social media, such as increased rate throttling under the revised Twitter API, prompts rethinking current approaches for a variety of inference tasks in social networks, such as the prediction of latent author attributes. We investigate various novel network construction methods over Twitter users in order to leverage information from different interpretations of a “local” neighborhood, aimed at a cost-effective model for personal analytics. We evaluate our model as a function of the size of the neighborhood, along with the amount of content data (tweets) associated with those neighbors. We show that even when limited or no selfauthored data is available, content from the local neighborhood can provide sufficient evidence for prediction. We demonstrate that data from friends, retweets and user mentions is a stronger signal in this regard than their replies and shared hashtags.
marrow Derivation of 2 categories of plasmacytoid dendritic cells in murine bone

http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary. org/content/105/11/4407.full. html Updated information and services can be found at: (4939 articles) Immunobiology  (3094 articles) Hematopoiesis and Stem Cells  Articles on similar topics can be found in the following Blood collections http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary. org/site/misc/rights.xhtml#repub_requests Information about reproducing this article in parts or in its entirety may be found online at: http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary. org/site/misc/rights.xhtml#reprints Information about ordering reprints may be found online at: http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary. org/site/subscriptions/index.xhtml Information about subscriptions and ASH membership may be found online at:
Time independence of the prognostic impact of tumor cell detection in the bone marrow of primary breast cancer patients.

PURPOSE Tumor cell detection (TCD) in bone marrow is an outstanding prognostic factor in breast cancer. There is only one other study that has investigated more than 300 patients with a median follow-up of more than 5 years (J. L. Mansi et al., Lancet, 354:197-202, 1999). We report data from 727 patients with a median follow-up period of 6.5 years. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN In a prospective study, intraoperatively aspirated bone marrow was screened for micrometastatic cancer cells. We used an immunocytological method (monoclonal mucin antibody 2E11; the avidin-biotin complex method). RESULTS Forty-three percent of the patients were TCD positive. Sixty percent of the patients with distant metastases were tumor cell positive (155 of 258 patients). Forty-nine percent of the patients with positive TCD developed distant metastases (155 of 315 patients). TCD was an independent prognostic factor for clinical outcome after a median follow-up time of 6.5 years. The prognostic impact of TCD and tumor size remains constant with the time, whereas the impact of grading and progesterone receptor on risk seems to decrease with longer follow-up time. CONCLUSIONS TCD remains an independent prognostic factor The impact of TCD does not change with longer follow-up time. TCD is a reliable prognostic factor and provides important information about the process of metastasis.
Loss behavior of an Internet router with self-similar input traffic via Fractal point process

It has been reported that modeling a self-similar network traffic is of key importance for the traffic engineering. Self-similarity or long range dependence causes degradation of Internet router performance. Therefore, it is decisive for an appropriate buffer design of a router. In this paper, we investigate loss behaviour of network router with pseudo self-similar traffic input. We use Fractal point process (FPP) as input process as it generates self-similar traffic. For queueing analysis, input process is Markov modulated Poission process (MMPP), which is fitted for FPP by equating the second-order statistics of counting function. The reason is, FPP is not suitable for queueing based performance evaluation. FPP involves another parameter fractal onset time (FOT) besides Hurst parameter. Effect of FOT on loss behavior is examined.
On planar grasping with snake robots: Form-closure with enveloping grasps

This paper describes the conditions that a snake robot must meet in order to be able to grasp an object with a circular cross-section. The type of grasp is of the enveloping type, and the conditions to guarantee a grasp with form-closure using three contacts, the minimum number of contacts possible, are presented. The first contribution of this paper is the description of the conditions where form-closure is possible, depending on the radius of the object. The second contribution is the description of two workspaces that help to decide whether the object is within reach of the snake robot, and if it is graspable. This analysis is scale and unit independent, therefore, it is applicable to a wide range of scenarios. These results can also be extended to other redundant open-chained robots using enveloping grasps.
Spatially explicit models of dynamic histories: examination of the genetic consequences of Pleistocene glaciation and recent climate change on the American Pika

A central goal of phylogeography is to identify and characterize the processes underlying divergence. One of the biggest impediments currently faced is how to capture the spatiotemporal dynamic under which a species evolved. Here, we described an approach that couples species distribution models (SDMs), demographic and genetic models in a spatiotemporally explicit manner. Analyses of American Pika (Ochotona princeps) from the sky islands of the central Rocky Mountains of North America are used to provide insights into key questions about integrative approaches in landscape genetics, population genetics and phylogeography. This includes (i) general issues surrounding the conversion of time‐specific SDMs into simple continuous, dynamic landscapes from past to current, (ii) the utility of SDMs to inform demographic models with deme‐specific carrying capacities and migration potentials as well as (iii) the contribution of the temporal dynamic of colonization history in shaping genetic patterns of contemporary populations. Our results support that the inclusion of a spatiotemporal dynamic is an important factor when studying the impact of distributional shifts on patterns of genetic data. Our results also demonstrate the utility of SDMs to generate species‐specific predictions about patterns of genetic variation that account for varying degrees of habitat specialization and life history characteristics of taxa. Nevertheless, the results highlight some key issues when converting SDMs for use in demographic models. Because the transformations have direct effects on the genetic consequence of population expansion by prescribing how habitat heterogeneity and spatiotemporal variation is related to the species‐specific demographic model, it is important to consider alternative transformations when studying the genetic consequences of distributional shifts.
New Algorithm with Bandwidth Reduction for Smaller Size Digital Signature

Two drawbacks when using digital signature schemes are extra bandwidth and large file size during transmission. The size of encrypted data is much larger than the size of the original data, thus to produce a cipher text size closer to an original file, digital signature can be embedded into the image as stegano-image, Hence this method can avoid extra file, decrease the size of transmitted file and reduce the bandwidth required for the transmission of the file. LSB algorithm is not highly secure against different attacks. Implementing an encryption algorithm in the LSB steganographic method can be contributed to increasing the degree of security. Hence this method can avoid extra file, decrease the size of transmitted file and reduce the bandwidth required for the transmission of the file. Testing new algorithms showed that its hashed file size is 8.51% reduction of the original file in messages with size lower than 1600 bytes.
Acquiring an Italian Polarity Lexicon through Distributional Methods

Recent interests in Sentiment Analysis brought the attention on effective methods to detect opinions and sentiments in texts. Many approaches in literature are based on resources, such as Polarity Lexicons, which model the prior polarity of words or multi-word expressions. Developing such resources is expensive, language dependent, and linguistic sentiment phenomena are not fully covered in them. In this paper an automatic method for deriving polarity lexicons based on Distributional Models of Lexical Semantics is presented. Given a set of heuristically annotated messages from Twitter, we transfer sentiment information from sentences to words. As the approach is mostly unsupervised, it enables the acquisition of polarity lexicons for languages that are lacking these resources. We acquired a polarity lexicon in the Italian language, and experiments on Sentiment Analysis tasks show the benefit of the generated resources.
Behavioral Biases in the Decision Making of Individual Investors

In earlier research, it has been discovered that contrary to the assumptions and theories of conventional finance, many irrational behaviors related to investment judgment occur in real life. In this paper, we have made an extensive review of various behavioral biases that affect investment decision making of the individual investors. Extant research indicates that individual investor makes his/her investment decision under the influence of some combination of behavioural biases, which mainly include disposition effect, mental accounting, investors’ overconfidence, representativeness, narrow framing, aversion to ambiguity, anchoring, availability bias, and regret aversion. Under the influence of some such biases or combination of the same, individual investors often make irrational investment decisions. And therefore, individual investors, in aggregate, earn poor long-run returns. These aspects have been highlighted in this paper. Potential solutions to mitigate the adverse impact of behavioral biases on decision making of individual investors have also been discussed. Finally, future research direction relevant to such an area has been indicated in this paper.
The Value of Democracy: Evidence from Road Building in Kenya

Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963–2011 period. Guided by a model, it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy under the same president constrains or exacerbates ethnic favoritism. Across the post-independence period, we find strong evidence of ethnic favoritism: districts that share the ethnicity of the president receive twice as much expenditure on roads and have five times the length of paved roads built. This favoritism disappears during periods of democracy. (JEL D72, H54, J15, O15, O17, O22, R42)
Rapid human action recognition in H.264/AVC compressed domain for video surveillance

This paper discusses a novel high-speed approach for human action recognition in H.264/AVC compressed domain. The proposed algorithm utilizes cues from quantization parameters and motion vectors extracted from the compressed video sequence for feature extraction and further classification using Support Vector Machines (SVM). The ultimate goal of our work is to portray a much faster algorithm than pixel domain counterparts, with comparable accuracy, utilizing only the sparse information from compressed video. Partial decoding rules out the complexity of full decoding, and minimizes computational load and memory usage, which can effect in reduced hardware utilization and fast recognition results. The proposed approach can handle illumination changes, scale, and appearance variations, and is robust in outdoor as well as indoor testing scenarios. We have tested our method on two benchmark action datasets and achieved more than 85% accuracy. The proposed algorithm classifies actions with speed (>2000 fps) approximately 100 times more than existing state-of-the-art pixel-domain algorithms.
Hierarchical Text Classification with Latent Concepts

Recently, hierarchical text classification has become an active research topic. The essential idea is that the descendant classes can share the information of the ancestor classes in a predefined taxonomy. In this paper, we claim that each class has several latent concepts and its subclasses share information with these different concepts respectively. Then, we propose a variant Passive-Aggressive (PA) algorithm for hierarchical text classification with latent concepts. Experimental results show that the performance of our algorithm is competitive with the recently proposed hierarchical classification algorithms.
NADPH-diaphorase-, nitric oxide synthase- and VIP-containing nerve structures in the hen oviduct: a histochemical and immunohistochemical study.

The enzyme NADPH-diaphorase (NADPH-d; a marker of NO producing or nitrergic neurons) and the neuropeptide VIP have been detected in the nerve structures of the hen oviduct by histochemical and immunohistochemical techniques performed on cryostatic sections and whole mount preparations. In the upper four segments of the oviduct, i.e. the infundibulum, magnum, isthmus and shell gland, nitrergic and VIP-positive nerve structures were particularly numerous in the intermuscular and mucosal layers, and were represented by fibres and cell bodies showing mainly a perivascular distribution. Functionally, such perivascular structures were related to the blood flow regulation. Different types of nitrergic pyrenophora were recognized in the walls of the shell gland on the basis of their peculiar morphology. In the distal zone of the oviduct, the vagina, nitrergic and VIP-positive nerve fibres were widely diffused in the circular muscle, which was particularly thick in this segment. The source of at least part of such fibres was probably represented by large nerve cell bodies scattered in the layer and containing NO and VIP colocalized. Functionally these cells retained inhibitory motor neurons causing relaxation of the vaginal smooth muscle.
Tag Thunder: Towards Non-Visual Web Page Skimming

Tag thunder is an audio version of a visual tag cloud content representation. Tag thunders aim to bring quick reading strategies, such as skimming, to blind people. Tag thunders vocalize the key terms of a page using concurrent speech paradigm coupled with additional audio effects, similar to visual effects in a tag cloud. In this paper we present our implementation of the tag thunder concept. Our system comprises three modules: page segmentation, key term extraction and tag thunder vocalization. The evaluation results show the viability of the tag thunder concept.
Particle filter-based heading estimation using magnetic compasses for mobile robot navigation

Heading information is critical for the control and/or navigation of mobile devices and robots. To get accurate heading information robustly, we propose a method which combines particle filtering with magnetic compasses. Although magnetic compasses can provide absolute heading angle, they have not been used for indoor applications since serious magnetic interferences are commonly founded in home/office environments. We overcome this difficulty by 1) suggesting statistical calibration of a magnetic compass, 2) deriving necessary conditions of the Earth's magnetic field area, and 3) designing an event-based particle filter based on likelihood calculated from conditional probability. Particle filter is an emerging key technology which can be applied to nonlinear/non-Gaussian model, beyond the limitations of Kalman filter. We take advantage of particle filter to optimally fuse the information from both magnetic compasses and odometry data. Experimental results on mobile robot navigation in indoor environments show reliability and robustness of the proposed method
The Influence of Fe-chelates Fertilizers on the Soft Wheats Quality

The soft wheat (Triticum aestivum) has special importance in the peoplenutrition and is the key raw material in both the milling and the bakery industries. Raw materials of high quality are also necessary to produce products of high nutritive quality. This research is aimed to examine how the Fe EDTA will influence through a soil, foliar and soil+foliar application on Fes concentration in the wheats seed, the flour and on the morphological and production characteristics of the wheat of the type "Treska". The analysis of the Fes contents in the wheats seed is made with blazing atomic absorbing spectroscopy. From among the obtained results it is established the highest concentration of Fe in the seed obtained with a foliar fertilization 65,4 (mg.kgˉ¹), the Fes concentration with the seed obtained with soil+foliar fertilization is 47,1 (mg.kgˉ¹), while the lowest values are ascertained with the seed obtained with со the soil fertilization 40,6 (mg.kgˉ¹) and the seed of control variant 44,8 (mg.kgˉ¹). The analyses of the morphologic and producing characteristics have been conducted by the biometric surveying / measuring. The F-test has shown that there is significant difference as to the stem height and the grains` weight. The hectoliter mass as to the wheat obtained with soil, foliar and soil + foliar application of Fe EDTA has shown a value of 76,05 (kg.hlˉ¹), which is за 0,72% higher than the controls variant of 75,50 (kg.hlˉ¹). It may be concluded that the application of Fe EDTA leads to significant increase of the Fes contents in the whats grain and the flour while which the wheat of the variant 3 is the most appropriate for meal and a meal of high contents of Fe may be produced from the wheat wheat obtained with soil fertilization.
U.S. and Whom? Structures and Communities of International Economic Research

Abstract Most studies concerned with empirical social networks are conducted on the level of individuals. The interaction of scientists is an especially popular research area, with the growing importance of international collaboration as a common sense result. To analyze patterns of cooperation across nations, this paper investigates the structure and evolution of cross-country co-authorships for the field of economics from 1985 to 2011. For a long time economic research has been strongly US centered, while influencing real-world politics all over the globe. We investigate the impact of the general trend of increasing international collaboration on the hegemonic structures in the “global department of economics. ” A dynamic map of economic research is derived and reveals communities that are hierarchical and structured along the lines of external social forces, i.e. historical and political dimensions. Based on these findings, we discuss the influence of the core-periphery structure on the production of economic knowledge and the dissemination of new ideas.