Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seeing bulk topological properties of band insulators in small photonic lattices

We present a general scheme for measuring the bulk properties of non-interacting tight-binding models realized in arrays of coupled photonic cavities. Specifically, we propose to implement a single unit cell of the targeted model with tunable twisted boundary conditions in order to simulate large systems and, most importantly, to access bulk topological properties experimentally. We illustrate our method by demonstrating how to measure topological invariants in a two-dimensional quantum Hall-like model.
Crowd density estimation based on convolutional neural networks with mixed pooling

Abstract. Crowd density estimation is an important topic in the fields of machine learning and video surveillance. Existing methods do not provide satisfactory classification accuracy; moreover, they have difficulty in adapting to complex scenes. Therefore, we propose a method based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The proposed method improves performance of crowd density estimation in two key ways. First, we propose a feature pooling method named mixed pooling to regularize the CNNs. It replaces deterministic pooling operations with a parameter that, by studying the algorithm, could combine the conventional max pooling with average pooling methods. Second, we present a classification strategy, in which an image is divided into two cells and respectively categorized. The proposed approach was evaluated on three datasets: two ground truth image sequences and the University of California, San Diego, anomaly detection dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs more effectively and easily than other methods.
Human resource management practices in Eritrea: challenges and prospects

Purpose – This article seeks to examine the challenges and prospects of human resource management (HRM) in a developing‐country context. It focuses on contextual factors and employee involvement in analysing HRM to provide theoretical insights.Design/methodology/approach – To explore the above theme, on‐site interviews were carried out with general managers, human resource professionals, line managers and union leaders in eight firms. Furthermore, a sample of 252 employees was included, thereby contributing to the generalisability of the findings.Findings – This article provides substantial and current information on HRM knowledge and practices in Eritrea. The paper argues that some contextual variables impose certain challenges to HRM practices. However, evidence also reveals that the concept and knowledge of HRM practices, such as training, recruitment, compensation, employee participation, performance appraisal and reward systems, are in place with some indicators of local influence.Research limitation.
Tracing the earliest medical uses of high dose-per-fraction external beam radiation.

The modern history of the cancer treatment paradigm now known as radiosurgery and, more recently, stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) has been well chronicled [1]. Inspired by Lars Leksell [2], in the 1990s Lax and Blomgren at the Karolinska Institute devised ways to target extracranial tumors stereotactically in a manner conceptually quite similar to what had been done very successfully for cranial tumors [3, 4]. There followed then a cascade of others in North America, Asia, and Europe seeking to expand and refine techniques and patient selection criteria, to include intensified radiation treatment of tumors in the spine, lung, liver, and other sites [5-11]. Suddenly, instead of the old standard conventional pace of RT meted out at a rate of 1.8-2 Gy daily over a six or seven week course of treatment, some patients were receiving daily doses that were an order of magnitude higher and completing entire course of therapy in just 3 or 4 treatments. Initially, the investigators studying this novel strategy adapted their old machinery to the task with an assortment of ad hoc, home-made gadgets that enabled patients to be positioned properly and the beams to be aimed precisely. But to paraphrase the nineteenth century Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, if a better mousetrap can be built, there will be a market for it. Therefore, in the present post-modern era of SBRT, we paraphrase twenty-first century pundit Stephen Colbert and give a tip of the cap to vendors who have caught on to the craze and now produce integrated tumor imaging & treatment delivery systems that wag a finger at the more “primitive” means of giving uber-intense radiation therapy in a very brief course of treatment. It is tempting to assume–mistakenly–that what we are currently doing with SBRT has never been tried or even considered in the distant past, here defined as the pre-historic era prior to 1995. However, since the earliest days of x-ray therapy in the early 1900s, there have been periodic bursts of interest in short course, massive dose-per-fraction external beam RT treatments that foreshadow our fresh fascination with fast. The brief courses of treatment involving the administration of a single dose or perhaps just a few very potent individual doses of ionizing radiation were often inspired by rationales that were quite different from today’s motivations, but perhaps there are a few lessons still to be learned from a review of some of these early forays into pre-SBRT.
New Urbanism and Smart Growth: A Few Words from the Academy

Concerns about urban sprawl are not new. In a 1958 essay titled "Urban Sprawl" that appeared in Fortune, William Whyte warned Americans that their penchant for using five acres to do the work of one was not only "bad aesthetics" but "bad eco- nomics. " In the ensuing years, the movement to contain or mitigate sprawl has grown in fits and starts following cycles loosely correlated with the economy and government administrations. Often, as momentum renews, the battle cries change. Those who once advocated growth control later called for growth management, smart growth, new urbanism, and sustainable development. This issue of the Review contains articles that address two interrelated perspectives on mitigating sprawl: smart growth and new urbanism. While smart growth and new urbanism share much with similar movements of the past and perhaps the future, both have attained a level of legitimacy and currency that warrant new serious scholarly examination of their premises and implications. SMART GROWTH According to the Environmental Protection Agency (2004), smart growth is "development that serves the economy, the community, and the environment . I t changes the terms of the development debate away from the traditional growth/no growth question to how and where should new development be accommodated. " Toward this end, the U.S. EPA established in 1996, and continues to fund, a net- work of advocacy organizations dedicated to smart growth principles. Thanks in large to this network, smart growth is now part of the lexicon of planners, policy makers, and almost everyone with interest in urban and regional development. Though the origins of the term are unclear, the rapid ascendance of smart growth can be traced to three key projects (Burchell, Listokin, and Galley 2000). In the
An Objective Deghosting Quality Metric for HDR Images

Reconstructing high dynamic range (HDR) images of a complex scene involving moving objects and dynamic backgrounds is prone to artifacts. A large number of methods have been proposed that attempt to alleviate these artifacts, known as HDR deghosting algorithms. Currently, the quality of these algorithms are judged by subjective evaluations, which are tedious to conduct and get quickly outdated as new algorithms are proposed on a rapid basis. In this paper, we propose an objective metric which aims to simplify this process. Our metric takes a stack of input exposures and the deghosting result and produces a set of artifact maps for different types of artifacts. These artifact maps can be combined to yield a single quality score. We performed a subjective experiment involving 52 subjects and 16 different scenes to validate the agreement of our quality scores with subjective judgements and observed a concordance of almost 80%. Our metric also enables a novel application that we call as hybrid deghosting, in which the output of different deghosting algorithms are combined to obtain a superior deghosting result.
The Impact of Family Involvement on the R&D Intensity of Publicly Traded Firms

This study examines the impact of family involvement in ownership and control on firms’ R&D intensity, relying on panel data on publicly held firms in Canada over the 2004 to 2009 time period. The literature on the link between family firms and R&D is unclear: although some characteristics may promote R&D intensity in family firms, others factors may have a negative effect. Thus, the authors propose a theoretical framework whereby differences in R&D intensity between family and nonfamily firms are explained based on key conditions, including time horizon, agency costs, resource endowment, or risk-taking behavior. The findings of this study show that publicly traded family firms in Canada record lower R&D intensity compared with nonfamily firms and, therefore, support one side of the previous literature over the other.
Compensating for non-uniform screens in projection display systems

In this paper the performance of screen compensation based on previous work by Nayar et al. and Ashdown et al. and five different camera characterization methods are evaluated. Traditionally, colorimetric characterization of cameras consists of two steps; a linearization and a polynomial regression. In this research, two different methods of linearization as well as the use of polynomial regression up to fourth order have been investigated, based both on the standard deviation and the average of color differences. The experiment consists of applying the different methods 100 times on training sets of 11 different sizes and to measure the color differences. Both CIELAB and CIEXYZ are used for regression space. The use of no linearization and CIELAB is also investigated. The conclusion is that the methods that use linearization as part of the model are more dependent on the size of the training set, while the method that directly convert to CIELAB seems to be more dependent on the order of polynomial used for regression. We also noted that linearization methods resulting in low error in the CIEXYZ color space do not necessarily lead to good results in the CIELAB space. CIELAB space gave overall better result than CIEXYZ; more stabile and better results. Finally, the camera characterization with the best result was combined into a complete screen compensation algorithm. Using CIELAB as a regression space the compensation achieved results between 50 an 70 percents more similar to the same color projected on a white screen than using CIEXYZ (as measured by a spectrophotometer, comparing absolute color difference in CIELAB) in our experimental setup.
A 22-Amino Acid Synthetic Peptide Corresponding to the Second Extracellular Loop of Rat Occludin Perturbs the Blood-Testis Barrier and Disrupts Spermatogenesis Reversibly In Vivo1

Abstract When Sertoli cells were cultured in vitro on Matrigel-coated bicameral units, the assembly of the inter-Sertoli tight junction (TJ) permeability barrier correlated with an induction of occludin expression. Inclusion of a 22-amino acid peptide, NH2-GSQIYTICSQFYTPGGTGLYVD-COOH, corresponding to residues 209–230 in the second extracellular loop of rat occludin, at 0.2–4 μM into Sertoli cell cultures could perturb the assembly of Sertoli TJs dose-dependently and reversibly. This peptide apparently exerts its effects by interfering with the homotypic interactions of two occludin molecules between adjacent Sertoli cells at the sites of TJs, thereby disrupting TJs, which, in turn, causes a decline in transepithelial electrical resistance across the Sertoli cell epithelium. When similar experiments were performed using a 22-amino acid myotubularin peptide, NH2-TKVNERYELCDTYPALLAVPAN-COOH (residues 156–177), no effects on the assembly of inter-Sertoli TJs in vitro were noted. When a single dose of this synthetic occludin peptide was administered to adult rats intratesticularly at 1.5–10 mg/testis, germ cells began to deplete from the seminiferous epithelium within 8–16 days. By 27 days, virtually all tubules were devoid of germ cells. This antispermatogenic effect was reversible, because germ cells progressively repopulated the epithelium thereafter. Treated testes were indistinguishable from normal or control testes by 68 days post-occludin peptide treatment when assessed using histological analysis. In contrast, control rats receiving either no treatment, vehicle alone, or a 22-amino acid synthetic peptide of myotubularin displayed no changes in the testicular morphology at all time points. The occludin peptide-induced germ cell depletion was also accompanied by a disruption of the blood-testis barrier (BTB) when assessed by micropuncture techniques quantifying [125I]-BSA in rete testis fluid and seminiferous tubular fluid following i.v. administration of [125I]-BSA through the jugular vein. These results illustrate that the occludin peptide-induced disruption of the BTB may possibly affect the underlying adherens junctions, which causes premature release of germ cells from the epithelium and reversible infertility.
Consumer Valuation of Short Market Channels for Fresh Food Through Laddering

Abstract Recent developments at the consumer and at the farm level have resulted in a renewed interest in short market channels for fresh food. This paper focuses on consumer valuation of purchasing fresh food from short channels in general and on differences between two distinct types of short channel initiatives, i.e., farmers' markets and food teams as examples of supply- and demand-side driven initiatives respectively. The research methodology builds on the Means-End-Chain theory. Data are collected through laddering interviews with 100 respondents. The general hierarchical value map largely supports classical theories of value structures. “Security” is the predominant value type with “Health” as the major value. Further, a distinct “Hedonism” and “Universalism” cluster are discovered, with the first being built on the attribute “Freshness,” the consequence “Taste” and the value “Pleasure,” and the latter including environmental, animal welfare and regional development concerns. Specific motivation structures dealing with farmers' markets versus food teams are reported. Recommendations pertain to organizational and marketing issues, more specifically product positioning, innovation and communication based on the revealed Means-End-Chains or motivational structures.
On Efficient Tuning of LS-SVM Hyper-Parameters in Short-Term Load Forecasting: A Comparative Study

Power load forecasting is essential in the task scheduling of every electricity production and distribution facility. This paper studies the application of a variety of tuning techniques for optimizing the least squares support vector machines (LS-SVM) hyper-parameters in a short-term load forecasting problem. Clearly, the construction of any effective and accurate LS-SVM model depends on carefully setting the associated hyper-parameters. As a result, available optimization techniques including genetic algorithms (GA), simulated annealing (SA), Bayesian evidence framework and cross validation (CV) are applied and then compared for performance time, accuracy and computational cost. As a measure of effectiveness, the introduced algorithms are trained and tested on historical data obtained from Ontario's Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) for the Canadian city, Toronto. Experimental results show that optimized LS-SVM by Bayesian framework can achieve greater accuracy and faster speed than other techniques including LS- SVM tuned with genetic algorithm, simulated annealing and 10- fold cross validation.
Development and Validation of the Physician—Patient Humor Rating Scale

The purpose of this study was the development of a rating instrument to assess the use of humor in physician— patient interactions, and to compare humor use as a function of patients’ socioeconomic status. The 46-item Physician—Patient Humor Rating Scale (PPHRS) was used to rate 246 audiotaped primary care interactions. Four subscales were reliable and valid, demonstrating correlations with patient satisfaction and reports of physician humor, with physician satisfaction and with separate affective communication ratings. There was a significant difference in use of humor as a function of patient socioeconomic status, such that there was greater mutual trust between physicians and high versus low income patients.
Nonprofit Adaptation to Performance-Based, Managed Care Contracting in Michigan's Foster Care System

Abstract While performance-based and managed care contracting initiatives have become increasingly common in service sectors populated by nonprofit organizations, the impact of these new service arrangements on involved nonprofit agencies has not been fully explored. This study describes the obstacles that nonprofit agencies encountered, and the adaptations they made, as they moved from a traditional reimbursement system to a performance-based, managed care contracting environment in the delivery of foster care services. Based on analyses of telephone interviews with administrators and supervisors across nine nonprofit child welfare agencies, this study suggests that agencies' service delivery patterns, interdepartmental activities, and interorganizational relationships were substantially affected by the transition to this new contracting arrangement. These findings and their implications are discussed.
Partitioning service encounters into touchpoints to enhance quality

Purpose – This paper aims to discuss partitioning an air travel service encounter into touchpoints according to elements and phases, which are depth and breadth, respectively, using the conceptual framework of Le Bel. The empirical findings further the dialogue about the service encounter construct.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 12 distinctive touchpoints within the joining and intensive phases of any air travel service encounter are reviewed for importance using travel purpose and nationality as segmentation variables. Respondents participated through an online questionnaire and face‐to‐face approach from a fieldworker; they were not engaged in an air travel service encounter at the time of the study. Data analysis includes descriptive statistics, independent sample t‐tests and paired sample t‐tests where the latter considered a named airline from the region.Findings – The findings indicate touchpoints to be sufficiently distinctive that partitioning a service encounter provides opportunities f.
Design of 370-ps Delay Floating-Voltage Level Shifters With 30-V/ns Power Supply Slew Tolerance

A new design method for producing high-performance and power-rail slew-tolerant floating-voltage level shifters is presented, offering increased speed, reduced power consumption, and smaller layout area compared with previous designs. The method uses an energy-saving pulse-triggered input, a high-bandwidth current mirror, and a simple full latch composed of two inverters. A number of optimizations are explored in detail, resulting in a presented design with a dVdd slew immunity of 30 V/ns, and near-zero static power dissipation in a 180-nm technology. Experimental results show a delay of below 370 ps for a level-shift range of 8-20 V. Postlayout simulation puts the energy consumption at 2.6 pJ/bit at 4 V and 7.2 pJ/bit at 20 V, with near symmetric rise and fall delays.
Baseline characteristics and the effects of two years of growth hormone (GH) replacement therapy in adults with GH deficiency previously treated for acromegaly.

CONTEXT The effects of GH replacement in GH-deficient (GHD) adults previously treated for acromegaly are not well known. OBJECTIVE, DESIGN, AND PATIENTS: In this single-center, open-labeled, prospective study, 10 consecutive GHD adults with cured acromegaly (A group) and 10 matched GHD adults with previous nonfunctioning hypopituitary disease (NF group) were included. Comparisons were made at baseline and in the responses in body composition, muscle strength, bone mass, and metabolic indices during 2 yr of GH replacement. RESULTS At baseline, upper leg local muscle endurance and serum low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol concentration were more impaired in the A group. The A group contained three patients with hypertension, one with diabetes mellitus type 2, and one with hyperlipidemia. The NF group had only one patient with hypertension. There were no significant between-group differences in the responses to the GH therapy. Body composition and serum lipid pattern improved in both groups without any deterioration of glucose homeostasis. At study end, no difference remained between the two groups in any variable. During the 2-yr treatment, one patient had a myocardial infarction and two had cerebral infarctions in the A group, whereas no vascular event occurred in the NF group. CONCLUSIONS GHD patients with previous acromegaly have an impaired cardiovascular risk profile and decreased local muscle endurance as compared with other GHD patients. Two-year GH replacement eliminated these differences, but vascular events occurred more frequently in the A group. Therefore, GHD patients with cured acromegaly will benefit from GH replacement, but careful monitoring of cardiovascular status is needed.
Exact Coherence Bandwidth of Rayleigh Fading Channels

Determination of the coherence bandwidth for multipath fading channels is of great importance for wireless systems design. However, the calculation of the coherence bandwidth so far has relied on an empirical formula. In this paper, we derive an exact coherence bandwidth formula for Rayleigh fading channels. The use of the new formula is illustrated by numerical results.
Interest Rates and Information

In a lending relationship, a bank learns information on its borrowers. Adverse selection makes the usefulness and value of this information depend on the interest rates the bank charges in the different periods. The optimal intertemporal screening of borrowers calls for a monopolistic bank to smooth interest rates. In a repeated relationship, interest rates are lower than in a one-period setting; furthermore, they are less volatile and the quality of the loans is higher than under competition (with symmetric information). Information sharing may reduce both the probability that a debt will be paid and the sum of banks' and borrowers' profits. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd and The Victoria University of Manchester, 2004.