Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Transition from University to Work in Italy (1998-2011): Over-education and Gender Differences across Fields of Study

With higher education expanding, there is a higher likelihood that graduates are employed in jobs for which their education level is superior to the required one. While previous research has shown that fields of study make a difference in the likelihood of being over-educated in the university-to-work transition, the main novelty of this paper is to take another step forward in the investigation of the mechanisms governing over-education, focusing on whether men and women with a degree in the same field of study run the same risk of being over-educated in their current employment. Using data from the Italian Graduates Employment Survey (1998-2011), the paper applies two adaptations from a methodological point of view. First, it develops a Heckman model to adjust the effect due to the process of selection into the sample of graduate employees. Secondly, it tries to reduce the error in the measurement of over-education by combining two different measures that are usually implemented separately. The results provide evidence that, although the disadvantage of women with respect to men in terms of the probability of over-education has disappeared, gender inequalities endure within specific fields of study.
Frame-to-frame coherent halftoning in image space

We present an interactive technique for generating halftoning animations in image space. We specifically consider a halftoning approach that uses screening methods to achieve shading, brightness, and texture by placing varying patterns. Our technique transports the screening patterns in a frame-to-frame coherent manner according to the velocity of each fragment on the image plane. We show how the algorithm is mapped to programmable graphics hardware to achieve interactive frame rates. Our approach can be used for any screening-based halftoning technique, and therefore different nonphotorealistic image-space rendering styles, including dithering, screening, stippling, and hatching, can be utilized to generate real-time frame-to-frame coherent animations
Prosody Based Co-analysis of Deictic Gestures and Speech in Weather Narration Broadcast

Although speech and gesture recognition has been studied extensively all the successful attempts of combining them in the unified framework were semantically motivated, e.g., keyword co-occurrence. Such formulations inherited the complexity of natural language processing. This paper presents a statistical approach that uses physiological phenomenon of gesture and speech production process for improving accuracy of automatic segmentation of continuous deictic gestures. The prosodic features from the speech signal were coanalyzed with the visual signal to create a statistical model of co-occurrence with particular kinematical phases of gestures. Results indicated that the above co-analysis improves continuous gesture recognition. The efficacy of the proposed approach was demonstrated on a large database collected from the weather channel broadcast. This formulation opens new avenues for bottom-up frameworks of multimodal integration.
Identifying bioentity recognition errors of rule-based text-mining systems

An important research topic in Bioinformatics involves the exploration of vast amounts of biological and biomedical scientific literature (BioLiterature). Over the last few decades, text-mining systems have exploited this BioLiterature to reduce the time spent by researchers in its analysis. However, state-of-the-art approaches are still far from reaching performance levels acceptable by curators, and below the performance obtained in other domains, such as personal name recognition or news text. To achieve high levels of performance, it is essential that text mining tools effectively recognize bioentities present in BioLiterature. This paper presents FIBRE (Filtering Bioentity Recognition Errors), a system for automatically filtering mis annotations generated by rule-based systems that automatically recognize bioentities in BioLiterature. FIBRE aims at using different sets of automatically generated annotations to identify the main features that characterize an annotation of being of a certain type. These features are then used to filter mis annotations using a confidence threshold. The assessment of FIBRE was performed on a set of more than 17,000 documents, previously annotated by Text Detective, a state-of-the-art rule-based name bioentity recognition system. Curators evaluated the gene annotations given by Text Detective that FIBRE classified as non-gene annotations, and we found that FIBRE was able to filter with a precision above 92% more than 600 mis annotations, requiring minimal human effort, which demonstrates the effectiveness of FIBRE in a realistic scenario.
A multiformat HDTV camera head

This paper describes the development of a compact and configurable HDTV camera system for various studio and in-field applications, including flexible dockable configurations. A novel way to capture native 1080P, 10801, and 720P at 16:9 aspect ratio and a CinemaScope aspect ratio in 1080P of 2.37:1 is presented. The architecture of the multiformat HDTV camera head is based on a newly designed frame transfer CCD imager, which enables the availability of the HD-SDI (SMPTE 292M) output at the camera head itself. It utilizes three frame transfer CCDs (2/3 in.) with 9.2 Mpixels each (including overscan). Using a 12-phase system, all the vertical resolutions of the SMPTE 274M and SMPTE 296M standards are possible. These pixels are prearranged into image cells at the CCD by Dynamic Pixel Management software, The image diagonal (11 mm) is independent of spatial resolution and therefore the same for all scanning formats.
Genetic Typing of Candida albicans Strains Isolated from the Oral Cavity of Patients with Denture Stomatitis before and after Itraconazole Therapy

This study determined, by molecular typing of C. albicans species isolated from denture stomatitis patients with a mycological relapse six months after successful itraconazole therapy, whether there had been recurrence of infection with the same strain(s), selection of particular strains or infection with new strains of C. albicans. Forty patients with long-standing Candida-associated denture stomatitis were assigned either cyclodextrin itraconazole solution or itraconazole capsules (100mg b.d. for 15 days). Palatal erythema was measured and imprint cultures undertaken at baseline and at 15 days, four weeks and six months after treatment commenced. Yeast isolates were formally identified and chromosomal DNA was extracted from pairs of isolates from those patients with C. albicans present at baseline and six months after treatment commenced. Southern blotting of EcoRI-digested chromosomal DNA was performed using the C. albicans-specific 27A repetitive element as a probe. Eighteen of 36 patients were infected with C. albicans at baseline and six months after treatment commenced. Overall, 13 genetically different strains of C. albicans were found. However, in 17 of 18 patients, the C. albicans strains isolated prior to itraconazole therapy and six months later were the same. Thus recurrence of denture stomatitis in these individuals was due to re-colonisation by the original strain, rather than re-infection with a different strain. Key words: Genotyping, C. albicans, denture stomatitis.
Common Sense Reasoning

Qualitative Reasoning captures human common sense understanding of the behavior of real world physical systems. Qualitative models use a rich explicit conceptual vocabulary and therefore a qualitative simulation provides an explanation as well as a description of the system’s behavior. These properties make Qualitative Reasoning suitable for use in several application fields like education and ecology. The design of an elaborate, detailed Qualitative Reasoning engine is a complex task. Existing simulators lack reasoning capacities which are required by present day applications, such are extensive use of inequality reasoning and efficient computation of state transitions. This thesis describes an effort to develop fundamental solutions for several problems in such reasoning engines, particularly focussing on the GARP reasoning engine.
Mobile Phone Interaction with Outdoor Advertisements

Outdoor advertisements are increasingly unable to capture the attention of passers-by. Their content is mostly ignored, easily forgotten and cannot convey much information. One way to improve user experience with billboards is to make them interactive. This paper presents an approach to Digital Interactive Advertisement which allows creating digital billboards capable of interacting with people using Bluetooth-capable mobile phones. We present a user-centred approach to designing the system, and discuss the main challenges posed by casual non-expert interaction. Indeed, designing outdoor systems for casual use adds interesting challenges to the design of walk-up and use systems, where there is not a obvious motivation or need to interact with the system. We describe the approaches we took to entice users and maintain interaction and how to increase the amount of information exchanged and made available via the billboard without demanding a high cognitive effort from the users. Preliminary evaluation results with 12 users, while encouraging, point the way to further enhancements and have suggested interesting new approaches. Author
AUTOMATIC RELATIVE REGISTRATION OF SPOT5 IMAGERY FOR COLOR MERGING

An automatic process for relative registering and merging the panchromatic and multispectral images of SPOT5 is presented. The automated hierarchical local registration process makes use of feature information to select tie points from both images. The tie points are then used to refine the sensor model of the multispectral image by method of least squares solution. Both panchromatic and multispectral images are then orthorectified to a geo-referenced coordinate system using the available one kilometre gridded Digital Elevation Models (GLOBE or SRTM DEM). The merged high resolution colour imagery is then obtained by multiplying each spectral bands with a sharpening factor computed from the intensity values of the orthorectified panchromatic image and the corresponding pixels of the orthorectified multispectral images.
Response Bias for Picture Recognition in Patients With Alzheimer Disease

ObjectiveTo investigate whether changing recognition stimuli from words to pictures would alter response bias in patients with Alzheimer disease (AD). BackgroundResponse bias is an important aspect of memory performance in patients with AD, as they show an abnormally liberal response bias compared with healthy older adults. We have previously found that despite changes in discrimination produced by varying the study and test list length, response bias remained remarkably stable in both patients with AD and older adult controls. MethodsPatients with mild AD and healthy older adults underwent two separate study-test sessions of pictures and words. For both pictures and words, increasing study-test list lengths were used to determine whether bias changed as a factor of discrimination or task difficulty. ResultsConsistent with apriori hypotheses, healthy older adults showed increased discrimination and shifted to a more liberal response bias for pictures compared with words. In contrast, despite their higher level of discrimination for pictures, patients with AD showed a similar response bias for both pictures and words. Bias was consistent across varying study-test lengths for both groups. ConclusionsThese results suggest that response bias is a relatively invariant factor of an individual with AD that remains liberal regardless of discrimination or stimulus type.
Live-Cell Imaging and Measurement of Intracellular pH in Filamentous Fungi Using a Genetically Encoded Ratiometric Probe

ABSTRACT A novel, genetically encoded, ratiometric pH probe (RaVC) was constructed to image and measure intracellular pH in living hyphae of Aspergillus niger. RaVC is a chimeric protein based on the pH-sensitive probe pHluorin, which was partially codon optimized for expression in Aspergillus. Intracellular pH imaging and measurement was performed by simultaneous, dual-excitation confocal ratio imaging. The mean cytoplasmic pH measured was 7.4 to 7.7 based on calibrating RaVC in situ within nigericin-treated hyphae. Pronounced, longitudinal cytoplasmic pH gradients were not observed in the apical 20 μm of actively growing hyphae at the periphery of 18-h-old colonies. The cytoplasmic pH remained unchanged after prolonged growth in buffered medium with pH values between 2.5 or 9.5. Sudden changes in external pH significantly changed cytoplasmic pH by <1.3 pH units, but it returned to its original value within 20 min following treatment. The weak acid and antifungal food preservative sorbic acid caused prolonged, concentration-dependent intracellular acidification. The inhibition of ATPases with N-ethylmaleimide, dicychlohexylcarbodimide, or sodium azide caused the cytoplasmic pH to decrease by <1 pH unit. Treatment with the protonophore carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone or cyanide p-(trifluoromethoxy) phenylhydrazone reduced the cytoplasmic pH by <1 pH unit. In older hyphae from 32-h-old cultures, RaVC became sequestered within large vacuoles, which were shown to have pH values between 6.2 and 6.5. Overall, our study demonstrates that RaVC is an excellent probe for visualizing and quantifying intracellular pH in living fungal hyphae.
A second look at overloading

We study a minimal extension of the Hindley/Milner system that supports overloading and polymorphic records. We show that the type system is sound with respect to a standard untyped compositionalsemantics. We also show that every typable term in this system has a principal type and give an algorithm to reconstruct that type.
Solving multi-objective flowshop scheduling problem by Taguchi-based particle swarm optimization

A Taguchi-based particle swarm optimization (TBPSO) algorithm is proposed for solving multi-objective flowshop scheduling problems (FSPs). The proposed TBPSO integrates particle swarm optimization and Taguchi-based crossover. The proposed TBPSO is the use of a PSO to explore the optimal feasible region and the use of the Taguchi-based crossover to exploit the better solution. As a result, the TBPSO exhibits a significant improvement in Pareto best solutions of the FSP. By combining the advantages of exploration and exploitation, the TBPSO provides better results compared to the existing methods reported in the literature when solving multi-objective FSPs.
Efficient and effective transformed image identification

The SIFT (scale invariant feature transform) has demonstrated its superior performance in identifying transformed images over many other approaches. However, both of its detection and matching stages are expensive, because a large number of keypoints are detected in the scale-space and each keypoint is described using a 128-dimensional vector. We present two possible solutions for feature-point reduction. First is to down scale the image before the SIFT keypoint detection and second is to use corners (instead of SIFT keypoints) which are visually significant, more robust, and much smaller in number than the SIFT keypoints. Either the curvature descriptor or the highly distinctive SIFT descriptors at corner locations can be used to represent corners.We then describe a new feature-point matching technique, which can be used for matching both the down-scaled SIFT keypoints and corners. Experimental results show that two feature-point reduction solutions combined with the SIFT descriptors and the proposed feature-point matching technique not only improve the computational efficiency and decrease the storage requirement, but also improve the transformed image identification accuracy (robustness).
Virtual models in online shopping: do they help or hinder customers?

Virtual experience and other technology-dependent methods of describing products online are frequently touted as the way of the future in e-commerce. However, despite the hyperbole, these claims have actually not been tested rigorously on systems used by major online retailers. This paper reports the results of an experiment that assesses user perceptions of the informativeness and ultimate usefulness of systems that use personalization and rich media to enhance the online product evaluation process. Our results challenge the commonly held view that the “high-tech” approach is, in its own right, beneficial to either the customer or the vendor. Key results are (i) the highest levels of informativeness about anticipated (future) experiences were achieved when no personalization systems were used; and (ii) the system that provided the most personalized support was perceived to be least informative about future experience, and least useful overall. Overall, our results indicate that although these systems can improve awareness of some important product attributes, with this enhanced awareness comes a reduced awareness of other product characteristics. At worst, these systems actually appear to make the customer less informed, and result in negative assessments of the retailer.
Minimum Rate of Return Guarantees: The Danish Case

We analyze minimum rate of return guarantees for life-insurance (investment) contracts and pension plans with a smooth surplus distribution mechanism. We specifically model the smoothing mechanism used by most Danish life-insurance companies and pension funds. The annual distribution of bonus will be based on this smoothing mechanism after taking the minimum rate of return guarantee into account. In addition, based on the contribution method the customer will receive a final (non-negative) undistributed surplus when the contract matures. We consider two different methods that the company can use to collect payment for issuing these minimum rate of return guarantee contracts: the direct method where the company gets a fixed (percentage) fee of the customer's savings each year, e.g. 0.5% in Denmark, and the indirect method where the company gets a share of the distributed surplus. In both cases we analyze how to set the terms of the contract in order to have a fair contract between an individual customer and the company. Having analyzed the one-customer case, we turn to analyzing the case with two customers. We consider the consequences of pooling the undistributed surplus over two inhomogeneous customers. This implies setting up different mechanisms for distributing final bonus (undistributed surplus) between the customers.
Modelling of 3 D Cadastral Systems

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 9, 2628 BX Delft, The Netherlands, Tel +31 15 2786950, Fax +31 15 2782745 International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), Hengelosestraat 99, 7514 AE Enschede, The Netherlands, Tel. +31 53 4874523, Fax + 31 53 4874575. Dutch Cadastre, Apeldoorn, P.O. Box 9046, 7300 GH Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, Tel. +31 55 5285695 oosterom@geo.tudelft. nl
A critique of the internal complaints system of the Thai police

ABSTRACT One of the ways in which the police can be held accountable for their actions is through an effective system for handling police complaints and misconduct cases. In this paper, the internal complaints system of the Thai police force is critically evaluated on the basis of an original empirical study. The findings suggest that the system is ineffective primarily because the handling of complaints and misconduct cases lacks impartiality. It is demonstrated that the police cannot be trusted to investigate themselves. Notably, a number of tactics are employed by the police to undermine the complaints-handling process, including the use of financial incentives and corrupt favours. The findings of this study indicate further that the lack of impartiality is exacerbated by the political context within which the Thai police work, the patronage system within and beyond the police force, and the police’s authoritarian approach to law enforcement.
Panic Attack during Elective Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

Background. Esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD) and colonoscopy (CS) can evoke anxiety, embarrassment, and discomfort. These concerns can culminate in panic attacks, which may traumatize patients and significantly decrease their compliance to the procedure. The objective of this study was to evaluate the relationship between preendoscopic anxiety and the possibility of a panic attack during an elective gastrointestinal endoscopy (EGE). Methods. The study population comprised of 79 Greek outpatients. The examination was carried out without the use of conscious sedation. Patients' anxiety levels were assessed before the procedure using the Greek version of the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-Y). Results. Seventy-nine patients were enrolled: 45 EGD and 34 CS. Females had higher state and trait anxiety levels than males (48.14 ± 7.94 versus 44.17 ± 7.43, P < 0.05; and 43.68 ± 6.95 versus 39.86 ± 7.46, P < 0.05). Patients who experienced panic attack had significantly higher levels of both trait and state anxiety, compared to those who were panic-free. There was no significant relationship between panic attacks and sex or type of procedure. Conclusions. Patients who experience panic attacks during endoscopic procedures appear to have significantly higher anxiety levels before the procedure. Administering the STAI questionnaire prior to the endoscopy seems to be a useful screening method for vulnerable patients.
Age trends in musical preferences in adulthood: 3. Perceived musical attributes as intrinsic determinants of preferences

Increased age has been found to be associated with differences in musical preferences in adulthood. In past research, these differences were mostly attributed to changes in the social context. However, these influences were small and a large proportion of variance in age trends in musical preferences still remains to be explained. The aim of this article is to investigate the hypothesis that age trends in musical preferences are related to differences in preferences for some intrinsic attributes of the music in line with the Music Preferences in Adulthood Model (Bonneville-Roussy et al., 2017). Adult participants (N = 481) were asked to rate their preferences for extracts of 51 audio-music recordings (music clips) and musical attributes related to dynamics, pitch, structure, tempo, and timbre. Audio-features of the 51 clips were extracted using Music Information Retrieval methods. Using self-report, we found that the musical preferences of adults were linked with distinct likings for musical attributes, with large effects. We also discovered that self-rated attributes associated with dynamics and timbre moderated the links between age and musical preferences. Using the extracted features, we found that musical preferences were linked with distinct patterns of musical features. Finally, we established that the patterns of preferences of emerging, young and middle-aged adults were increasingly influenced by audio-features of timbre, dynamics and tonal clarity. These findings suggest that age trends in musical preferences could be partially explained by differences in the ways individuals process the intrinsic attributes of the music with age.