Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Surface-from-Gradients: An Approach Based on Discrete Geometry Processing

In this paper, we propose an efficient method to reconstruct surface-from-gradients (SfG). Our method is formulated under the framework of discrete geometry processing. Unlike the existing SfG approaches, we transfer the continuous reconstruction problem into a discrete space and efficiently solve the problem via a sequence of least-square optimization steps. Our discrete formulation brings three advantages: 1) the reconstruction preserves sharp-features, 2) sparse/incomplete set of gradients can be well handled, and 3) domains of computation can have irregular boundaries. Our formulation is direct and easy to implement, and the comparisons with state-of-the-arts show the effectiveness of our method.
The Practice of Economic Action Foreign Direct Investment Attempts in Central and Eastern Europe

While substantial scholarship has advanced a sociological understanding of economic processes and institutions, little attention has been devoted to scrutinizing the model of action underlying this research. Drawing on the evidence of foreign direct investment (FDI) attempts by Western firms in Central and Eastern Europe, I argue that to understand socially embedded economic action in situations of high uncertainty a practical actor model has more empirical utility than the commonly assumed rational actor approach. Empirical evidence shows that decision-making in FDI cases is not merely a matter of rational efficiency maximization but is structured by social forces: business connections, personal ties, cultural conceptions, struggles for power and broader institutional environment. These social forces provide not only the constraints on instrumental rationality but, more importantly, contribute to substantive and procedural variability in action, extending it beyond profit-maximization and means-ends calculation that lie at the core of rational actor assumptions of neoclassical economics. The paper ends by specifying scope conditions for the practical actor model and its empirical utility in advancing our understanding of economic processes.
Phytotherapeutic Information on Plants Used for the Treatment of Tuberculosis in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

The current rate of deforestation in Africa constitutes a serious danger to the future of medicinal plants on this continent. Conservation of these medicinal plants in the field and the scientific documentation of our knowledge about them are therefore crucial. An ethnobotanical survey of plants used for the treatment of tuberculosis (TB) was carried out in selected areas of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. These areas were Hala, Ncera, Sheshegu, and Gquamashe, all within the Nkonkobe Municipality. One hundred informants were interviewed. The survey included the identification of scientific and vernacular names of the plants used for treatment of TB as well as the methods of preparation and administration, the part used, dosage, and duration of treatment. The survey revealed 30 plants belonging to 21 families which are commonly used by traditional healers for the treatment of TB and associated diseases. Of these plants Clausena anisata, Haemanthus albiflos, and Artemisia afra were the most cited. The leaves were the most common part used in the medicinal preparations. Our findings are discussed in relation to the importance of the documentation of medicinal plants.
Testing Situational Action Theory: A narrative review of studies published between 2006 and 2015

This work provides an overview of the current state of research on Situational Action Theory (SAT). Studies that have examined core propositions of SAT within the period 2006 to 2015 are reviewed. The principal aim of this narrative review is to answer the following four questions: (1) Which hypotheses of SAT have been put to the test in empirical enquiries? (2) What does the empirical evidence say about these propositions? (3) Which statements of the theory have received little attention? (4) What are the consequences of the results for future enquiries? An overall finding of this review is that numerous studies have tested selected propositions of the theory using different methods, data and statistical procedures. A majority of these studies found some support for the hypotheses tested, but there are also a few studies that did not back key assumptions of the theory. The reasons for the divergent results are discussed.
Fault Detection Based on Statistical Multivariate Analysis and Microarray Visualization

In this work, a statistical method is proposed to mine out key variables from a large set of variables recorded in a limited number of runs through a multistage multistep manufacturing process. The method employed well-known single variable or multivariable techniques of discrimination and regression but also presented a synopsis of analysis results in a colored map of p-values very similar to a DNA microarray. This framework provides a systematic method of drawing inferences from the available evidence without interrupting the normal process operation. The proposed concept is illustrated by two industrial examples.
Adult student preferences: Instructor characteristics conducive to successful teaching

Purpose This study examined adult students’ perspectives on what characteristics make for successful teaching and learning environments in the adult student classroom. Methodology One hundred and thirty-two adult students (ranging in age from 22 to 70) participated in a mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) survey. Findings Adult students seem to prefer instructors with knowledge and respect for adult learners, applied experience in the fields in which they teach, and those who have clear communication, and are fair and understanding. Participants viewed not understanding or respecting adult students and being arrogant or condescending as problematic characteristics for instructors to have.
Auditory pathway model and its VLSI implementation for robust speech recognition in real-world noisy environment

A robust speech recognition system is reported based on mathematical models of auditory pathway and also their VLSI implementations. The developed auditory model consists of 3 components, i.e., nonlinear feature extraction at cochlea, binaural processing at superior olivery complex, and top-down attention through backward path. The feature extraction is based on cochlear filter bank and time-frequency masking, which is modeled with lateral inhibition in both time and frequency domain. Unlike the popular binaural processing models based on simple interaural time delay and interaural intensity difference our model incorporates hundreds of time-delays for noisy reverberated signals. The top-down (TD) attention comes from familiarity and/or importance of the sound, and a simple but efficient TD attention model had been developed based on error backpropagation algorithm. These auditory models require intensive computing, and special hardwares had been developed for real-time applications. Experimental results demonstrate much better recognition performance in real-world noisy environments.
A Sonic Theory Unsuitable for Human Consumption

The past decade has seen the proliferation of scholarly work on audio culture by philosophers, sociologists, ethnographers, musicologists, anthropologists, and others. There is now a range of histories and ethnographies on listening and on the soundscape, and a proliferation of epistemological, methodological, and cultural investigations of the sonic. At the same time, as John Kieffer notes, sound art is fast becoming “the new kid on the cultural block” (2010). Different writers have engineered different conceptual approaches for studying the sonic. These voices are symptomatic of a body of work that has developed as a way of reacting against the primacy of Cartesian reason, looking for ways of escaping the Western tendency to measure, calculate and represent everything. They offer strategies for defending and resurrecting the nullified senses, like hearing, which must no longer surrender to the tyranny of ocularcentrism. However, the belated recognition of sound as a valid academic object of study and art discipline, often risks fetishizing the sonic and repeating the same ideological separations between sound and image, body and mind. Moreover, refreshing as they may be, they are too often confined within a human-centred position and interested in predominantly addressing the phenomenal experience of sound. This article wishes to discuss alternative schemas daring to go beyond the audiophile anthropocentric angle. It mainly draws on Kodwo Eshun’s unconventional method of ‘sonic fiction’ (1998), in order to argue for the value of developing a sound theory that brings together speculative philosophy, science fiction, and experimental audio art. Ultimately, it attempts to explore how such ‘a sonic intervention into thought’ (Goodman, 2010) can drag us away from the sociopolitical and historical organisation of sound and toward the vicinity of a more ‘unreal state’, where the boundaries between fiction and theory are provisional and utterly permeable.
Team Composition, Distributed Leadership, and Performance: It’s Good to Share

The contemporary work environment encourages new models of leadership that support influential behavior across teams. Leadership shared in this way improves team effectiveness and performance and is of interest to both scholars and practitioners. We examine shared leadership influences in the presence of other characteristics that distinguish teams, namely, team size and sex diversity. Using hierarchical multiple regression tests on information gathered from 241 teams during a strategy simulation exercise, we find evidence of a positive relationship between shared leadership and performance over and above the influence of team size and sex diversity. Additionally, we dimensionalize performance to examine impacts of team characteristics on different desirable outcomes and find that team size has a positive relationship with financial performance but a negative relationship with strategic performance. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Modular concept for fluid handling systems. A demonstrator micro analysis system

A modular planar concept for fluid handling microsystems is presented. The concept is based on a planar Mixed Circuit Board with electrical and fluidic interconnections acting as a substrate for sensor and actuator modules. Several modules realised within this concept are presented, and the design as well as modelling and simulation of the fluidic components and systems is discussed. Furthermore, the general application of this concept in micro analysis systems is considered. Finally, the modular concept is demonstrated by a micro chemical analysis system containing micro-pumps, flow sensors, an optical absorption cell and control electronics.
Motorcortical Excitability and Synaptic Plasticity Is Enhanced in Professional Musicians

Musicians not only have extraordinary motor and sensory skills, but they also have an increased ability to learn new tasks compared with non-musicians. We examined how these features are expressed in neurophysiological parameters of excitability and plasticity in the motor system by comparing the results of 11 professional musicians and 8 age-matched non-musicians. Parameters of motor excitability were assessed using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) together with recruitment of corticospinal projections [input–output curve (IOcurve)] and of short-latency intracortical inhibition (SICIcurve). Plasticity, here defined as change of synaptic effectiveness, was tested by measuring MEPs and IOcurves after paired associative stimulation (PAS), which consists of an electric median nerve stimulus repeatedly paired (200 times at 0.25Hz) with a TMS pulse over the hand motor area. Using an interstimulus interval of 25 ms (PAS25) or 10 ms (PAS10), this leads to long-term potentiation- or long-term depression-like plasticity, respectively. Musicians showed steeper recruitment of MEPs and SICI (IOcurve and SICIcurve). Additionally, PAS25 increased and PAS10 decreased the MEP amplitudes and the slope of the IOcurves significantly more in musicians than in non-musicians. This is consistent with a wider modification range of synaptic plasticity in musicians. Together with the steeper recruitment of corticospinal excitatory and intracortical inhibitory projections, this suggests that they regulate plasticity and excitability with a higher gain than normal. Because some of these changes depend on age at which instrumental playing commenced and on practice intensity, they may reflect an increase in number and modifiability of synapses within the motor area caused by long-term musical practice.
Selecting High Quality Frames for Super Resolution Reconstruction Using Perceptual Quality Metrics

Super-resolution involves the use of signal processing techniques to estimate the high-resolution (HR) version of a scene from multiple low-resolution (LR) observations. It follows that the quality of the reconstructed HR image would depend on the quality of the LR observations. The latter depends on multiple factors like the image acquisition process, encoding or compression and transmission. However, not all images are equally affected by a given type of impairment. A proper choice of the LR observations for reconstruction, should yield a better estimate of the HR image, over a naive method using all images. We propose a simple, model-free approach to improve the performance of super-resolution systems based on the use of perceptual quality metrics. Our approach does not require, or even assume, a specific realization of the SR system. Instead, we select the image subset with high perceptual quality from the available set of LR images. Finally, we present the logical extension of our approach to select the perceptually significant regions in a given LR image, for use in SR reconstruction.
The Evaluation of Transfer Time, CPU Consumption and Memory Utilization in XEN-PV, XEN-HVM, OpenVZ, KVM-FV and KVM-PV Hypervisors Using FTP and HTTP Approaches

In this paper the authors evaluate the CPU Consumption, Memory Utilization and Transfer Time between 5 Hypervisors XEN-PV, XEN-HVM, OpenVZ, KVM-FV and KVM-PV by using FTP and HTTP approaches. All the results are compared with the Real Environment. From the experimental results, the authors have concluded that OpenVZ and XEN-PV have better performance than other hypervisors. The worse performance is for KVM Hypervisor. In our paper we have used some scripts in order to evaluate the performance of these Hypervisors
Firewall Policy Management Through Sliding Window Filtering Method Using Data Mining Techniques

As the number of security incidents had been sharply growing, the issue of security-defense draws more and more attention from network community in past years. Firewall is known one of the most popular security-defense mechanism for corporations. It is the first defense-line for security infrastructure of corporations to against external intrusions and threats. A firewall will filter packets by following its policy rules to avoid suspicious intruder executing illegal actions and damaging internal network. Well-designed policy rules can increase the security-defense effect to against security risk. In this paper, we apply association rule mining to analyze network logs and detect anomalous behaviors, such as connections those shown frequently in short period with the same source IP and port. From these anomalous behaviors, we could inference useful, up-to-dated and efficient firewall policy rules. Comparing with the method proposed in [18], we utilize incremental mining to handle the increasingly changed traffic log data. The proposed method can highly enhance the execution performance in data analyzing. Experimental results show that the execution efficiency of our method is better than that of traditional methods when dealing with large-sized log files.
Disambiguation and Filtering Methods in Using Web Knowledge for Coreference Resolution

We investigate two publicly available web knowledge bases, Wikipedia and Yago, in an attempt to leverage semantic information and increase the performance level of a state-of-the-art coreference resolution (CR) engine. We extract semantic compatibility and aliasing information from Wikipedia and Yago, and incorporate it into a CR system. We show that using such knowledge with no disambiguation and filtering does not bring any improvement over the baseline, mirroring the previous findings. We propose, therefore, a number of solutions to reduce the amount of noise coming from web resources: using disambiguation tools for Wikipedia, pruning Yago to eliminate the most generic categories and imposing additional constraints on affected mentions. Our evaluation experiments on the ACE-02 corpus show that the knowledge, extracted from Wikipedia and Yago, improves our system's performance by 2-3 percentage points.
Estrogen Receptor Signaling and the PI3K/Akt Pathway Are Involved in Betulinic Acid-Induced eNOS Activation

Betulinic acid (BA) is a naturally occurring pentacyclic triterpenoid with anti-inflammatory, antiviral and anti-cancer properties. Beneficial cardiovascular effects such as increased nitric oxide (NO) production through enhancement of endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) activity and upregulation of eNOS expression have been demonstrated for this compound. In the present study, immortalized human EA.hy 926 endothelial cells were incubated for up to 1 h with 1–100 µM BA and with the phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K) inhibitors LY294002 and wortmannin, or the estrogen receptor (ER) antagonist ICI 182,780. Phosphorylation status of eNOS and total eNOS protein were analyzed by Western blotting using a serine 1177 phosphosite-specific antibody. Bioactive NO production was assessed by determination of cGMP content in rat lung fibroblasts (RFL-6) reporter cells. Short-term incubation of EA.hy 926 cells with BA resulted in eNOS phosphorylation at the serine 1177 residue in a concentration- and time-dependent manner with a half-maximal effective concentration of 0.57 µM. This was associated with an enhanced production of NO. BA-induced eNOS phosphorylation and NO production was completely blocked by pretreatment with ICI 182,780, and was attenuated by pretreatment with the PI3K inhibitors wortmannin and LY294002. These results indicate that fast non-genomic effects of ER with downstream signaling through the PI3K/Akt pathway and consecutive eNOS phosphorylation at serine 1177 are involved in BA-induced eNOS activation.
Optimal design of clock trees for multigigahertz applications

With the onset of gigahertz frequencies on clocked digital systems, inductance effects become significant. We investigate appropriate regimes where signal propagation on an IC can be characterized as resulting from transmission line (TL) behavior. The signals propagate at a speed in the proximity of the speed of light in the medium. Our starting points are exact solutions in the time domain to the TL equations. A methodology to evaluate the feasible domains of physical and electrical variables that permit TL propagation is given. We develop fast and accurate computational methods for inductance and capacitance calculations. A general expression of the time delay in the presence of finite rise time and finite load capacitance for TL propagation is derived. We analyze a clock-synthesis method based on sandwiched balanced H-trees consistent with TL propagation. We find the feasible physical domains by solving iteratively two nonlinear equations in a space spanned by two continuous variables, with four parameters. To further assert its applicability we remove common assumptions such as the constancy of the electromagnetic parameters, zero rise time, and load capacitance. The spectrum of configurations is satisfactory at 130 nm and scales well into the 45-nm generation.
The attempt about using image compression method compressed audio

Generally, the image and audio data is compressed separately in multimedia technology, depending on the relevant control module to achieve synchronization. Audio is compressed which using image compression coding algorithm in this paper, the design and implementation of audio / image (image / audio) transformer is completed. The experimental results show this attempt is practicable; a compression scheme based on H.264 is given out.
Predictive Modeling of Network Wide Broadcasting Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks ∗

Network wide broadcasting in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) provides important control and route establishment functionality for a number of unicast and multicast protocols. Simulation is frequently used to assess a broadcast protocol’s performance because the complicated nature of MANETs often makes explicit modeling difficult if not impossible. With application of some simplifying assumptions, however, explicit modeling can be performed. We present models to predict retransmission frequency of three network wide broadcasting protocols using a probability based approach. Our models are able to predict protocol performance within 5% of simulation results when we only consider network layer functionality. ∗This work supported in part by NSF Grants ANI-0073699 and ANI-0208352. †Research group’s URL is http://toilers.mines. edu. ‡Reference for this manuscript: Technical Report MCS-03-05, The Colorado School of Mines, April 2003. 1
Frame Differencing with Simulink model for Moving Object Detection

Visual sensor networks (VSNs) have been attracting more and more research attention nowadays. Identifying moving objects from a video sequence is a fundamental and critical task in many computer-vision applications. One of the simplest techniques for detection is background subtraction (BS) and frame difference, which identifies moving objects from the portion of a video frame that differs significantly from a background model. BS refers to the process of segmenting moving regions from image sequences. Background subtraction is a process of separating moving foreground objects from the non-moving background. In this paper, one of the traditional background subtraction techniques which is frame differencing (FD) algorithm is conducted using Simulink model to detect moving vehicles, pedestrians in urban traffic video sequences etc. The result of moving object detection using FD is not perfect that enable this research to experimental post-processing technique which is adaptive threshold in HSV color space for outdoor environment.