Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Steered-Response Power Algorithm Employing Hierarchical Search for Acoustic Source Localization Using Microphone Arrays

The localization of a speaker inside a closed environment is often approached by real-time processing of multiple audio signals captured by a set of microphones. One of the leading related methods for sound source localization, the steered-response power (SRP), searches for the point of maximum power over a spatial grid. High-accuracy localization calls for a dense grid and/or many microphones, which tends to impractically increase computational requirements. This paper proposes a new method for sound source localization (called H-SRP), which applies the SRP approach to space regions instead of grid points. This arrangement makes room for the use of a hierarchical search inspired by the branch-and-bound paradigm, which is guaranteed to find the global maximum in anechoic environments and shown experimentally to also work under reverberant conditions. Besides benefiting from the improved robustness of volume-wise search over point-wise search as to reverberation effects, the H-SRP attains high performance with manageable complexity. In particular, an experiment using a 16-microphone array in a typical presentation room yielded localization errors of the order of 7 cm, and for a given fixed complexity, competing methods' errors are two to three times larger.
Maxillary and Mandibular Osteosyntheses with PLGA and P(L/DL)LA Implants: A 5-Year Inpatient Biocompatibility and Degradation Experience

Background: This study consists of a 5-year experience with 413 maxillary and mandibular resorbable plate osteosyntheses focusing on clinically apparent foreign body reaction (i.e., swelling, osteolyses, and fistulation), indirect implant degradation (i.e., palpability and radiographic reossification), and direct implant degradation (i.e., molecular weight and crystallinity of explants). Methods: Eighty fracture and reconstruction cases (32 female and 48 male patients, aged 1 to 83 years) were osteofixated with poly(L-lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) copolymer (n = 20) (139 PLGA osteosyntheses) or poly(L-lactide-co-DL-lactide) [P(L/DL)LA] (n = 60) [274 P(L/DL)LA osteosyntheses]. Local revisions (n = 30) were performed during secondary operations at 3, 6, 12, 18, or 24 months. Average clinical and radiographic follow-up lasted 29 months (range, 6 to 63 months). Results: Five patients (6 percent) had apparent foreign body reactions, whereas 75 (94 percent) did not. One P(L/DL)LA mild reaction was effectively treated with cold packs and analgesics, one PLGA and three P(L/DL)LA medium severe reactions were treated with curettage, and one local osteolysis disappeared at 6 months. Implant palpability lasted 12 (PLGA) or 24 months [P(L/DL)LA]. The difference was significant (p < 0.000001). Burr holes reossified at 24 (PLGA) and 36 months [P(L/DL)LA] (p < 0.05). The 85:15 PLGA explants' initial 44,600 molecular weight decreased to 11,000 at 6 months; and scarce powdering granular residuals, too small for molecular weight assessment, were encountered at 12 months. The 70:30 P(L/DL)LA initial molecular weight of 45,000 decreased to 25,000 at 6 months and 8,000 at 18 months and to similar granules at 24 months (p < 0.02). Histology showed macrophages, giant cells, lymphocyte infiltration, little granulocytic infiltration, and minimal bleeding residuals. Conclusions: Both copolymers showed reliable biocompatibility and disintegration. Overall, 6 percent clinically apparent foreign body reactions were controlled conservatively and by local curettage; 85:15 PLGA degraded within 12 months and 70:30 P(L/DL)LA within 24 months, leaving powdering residual granules. Burr holes reossified 12 months later.
Runtime Data Flow Scheduling of Matrix Computations FLAME Working Note # 39

We investigate the scheduling of matrix computations expressed as directed acyclic graphs for shared-memory parallelism. Because of the data granularity in this problem domain, even slight variations in load balance or data locality can greatly affect performance. Well-known scheduling algorithms such as work stealing have proven time and space bounds, but these bounds do not provide a discernable indicator of performance between different scheduling algorithms and heuristics. We provide a flexible framework for scheduling matrix computations, which we use to empirically quantify different scheduling algorithms. By building software solutions based on hardware techniques through leveraging a cache coherence protocol, we develop a scheduling algorithm that addresses both load balance and data locality simultaneously and show its performance benefits.
Organizational paradoxes: Clinical approaches to management

1. Introduction 2. The oblomov threat 3. The organization of emptiness 4. Power and helplessness 5. An alternative view of power 6. Leadership and paranoia 7. Folie a deux 8. The entrepreneurial personality 9. The mid-career crisis: a renewed search for identity 10. Is there life at retirement? 11. Metamorphosis
Trichosetin, a Novel Tetramic Acid Antibiotic Produced in Dual Culture of Trichoderma harzianum and Catharanthus roseus Callus

The dual culture of Trichoderma harzianum and Catharanthus roseus callus produced an antimicrobial compound with a remarkable activity against the Gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus subtilis. Structural elucidation revealed that this compound, which we have named trichosetin, is a novel tetramic acid (2,4-pyrrolidinedione) antibiotic and a homolog of the fungal metabolite equisetin. This compound however, was not produced in the individual culture of T. harzianum or C. roseus callus.
Community Education: To Reclaim and Transform What Has Been Made Invisible

In this article Munir Fasheh discusses the role of education as an agent of hegemony and presents an alternative model of community education that is empowering and suited to the needs of the learners. Munir Fasheh, a Palestinian mathematics teacher, presents a powerful analysis of his formal education and how it limited his ability to see and understand the complexity and richness of his illiterate mother's math. Further, he argues that the development of community education is critical to the empowerment of the Palestinian people and is a necessary development of the intifadeh, which reflects a collective human response to an oppressive situation. Fasheh values the basic message of the human element in any educational, transformational process and emphasizes the "treasure that exists in every individual. " He analyzes the impact formal education has had on the Palestinian community and offers a model of community education that "reclaims people's lives, their sense of selfworth, and their ways of thinkin.
Broadcast news transcription in Mandarin

In this paper, our work in developing a Mandarin broadcast news transcription system is described. The main focus of this work is a port of the LIMSI American English broadcast news transcription system to the Chinese Mandarin language. The system consists of an audio partitioner and an HMM-based continuous speech recognizer. The acoustic models were trained on about 24 hours of data from the 1997 Hub4 Mandarin corpus available via LDC. In addition to the transcripts, the langu age models were trained on Mandarin Chinese News Corpus containing about 186 million characters. We investigate recogniti on performance as a function of lexical size, with and without tone in the lexicon, and with a topic dependent language model. The transcription character error rate on the DARPA 1997 test se t is 18.1% using a lexicon with 3 tone levels and a topic-based language model.
Heat Shock Protein Cognate 70-4 and an E3 Ubiquitin Ligase, CHIP, Mediate Plastid-Destined Precursor Degradation through the Ubiquitin-26S Proteasome System in Arabidopsis[C][W]

Plastid-targeted proteins pass through the cytosol as unfolded precursors. If proteins accumulate in the cytosol, they can form nonspecific aggregates that cause severe cellular damage. Here, we demonstrate that high levels of plastid precursors are degraded through the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) in Arabidopsis thaliana cells. The cytosolic heat shock protein cognate 70-4 (Hsc70-4) and E3 ligase carboxy terminus of Hsc70-interacting protein (CHIP) were highly induced in plastid protein import2 plants, which had a T-DNA insertion at Toc159 and showed an albino phenotype and a severe defect in protein import into chloroplasts. Hsc70-4 and CHIP together mediated plastid precursor degradation when import-defective chloroplast-targeted reporter proteins were transiently expressed in protoplasts. Hsc70-4 recognized specific sequence motifs in transit peptides and thereby led to precursor degradation through the UPS. CHIP, which interacted with Hsc70-4, functioned as an E3 ligase in the Hsc70-4–mediated protein degradation. The physiological role of Hsc70-4 was confirmed by analyzing Hsc70-4 RNA interfernce plants in an hsc70-1 mutant background. Plants with lower Hsc70 levels exhibited abnormal embryogenesis, resulting in defective seedlings that displayed high levels of reactive oxygen species and monoubiquitinated Lhcb4 precursors. We propose that Hsc70-4 and CHIP mediate plastid-destined precursor degradation to prevent cytosolic precursor accumulation and thereby play a critical role in embryogenesis.
Calibrating a VPL DataGlove for teleoperating the Utah/MIT hand

A system able to control the Utah/MIT hand with the VPL DataGlove has been developed. To get the actual joint angles from the DataGlove sensor values, a least-squares fit is used to find the best-fit exponential curve for each sensor, and then the correlation between the sensors is reduced by the iterative correlation elimination procedure. The calibration depends both on the wearer and the particular DataGlove being used. The first level calibration is simple and can be done in under 15 minutes with a little experience. The second level is fixed and requires no adjustments. To control the hand, a mapping from the DataGlove angles to the hand angles is applied, making the hand fingertips follow the DataGlove fingertips. The hand can successfully implement various high-level tasks under the DataGlove wearer's control. <<ETX>>
The Hybrid Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter

AbstractHybrid data assimilation methods combine elements of ensemble Kalman filters (EnKF) and variational methods. While most approaches have focused on augmenting an operational variational system with dynamic error covariance information from an ensemble, this study takes the opposite perspective of augmenting an operational EnKF with information from a simple 3D variational data assimilation (3D-Var) method. A class of hybrid methods is introduced that combines the gain matrices of the ensemble and variational methods, rather than linearly combining the respective background error covariances. A hybrid local ensemble transform Kalman filter (Hybrid-LETKF) is presented in two forms: 1) a traditionally motivated Hybrid/Covariance-LETKF that combines the background error covariance matrices of LETKF and 3D-Var, and 2) a simple-to-implement algorithm called the Hybrid/Mean-LETKF that falls into the new class of hybrid gain methods. Both forms improve analysis errors when using small ensemble sizes and lo.
Chain growth algorithms for HP-type lattice proteins

We describe a novel fast straightforward folding algorithm for HP (hydrophobic polar) t,ype lattice proteins. It, is designed after the concept of unguided, cotranslational folding of a nascent. peptide. It is tlcterminist~ic and runs in O( 17) in the chain length. Acrur-acy of prediction is governed by t,hr searc11 tlcl)th of t,llc, algorithtn that is “looked ahead” at each chain growth st el’. I,ong range interactions are significantly incrcas<~tl and c’rlergy barriers become less prohibitive with increasing search depth. ‘I’tle csfficiency of sequential folding is test& arid rc:sults comparetl to related methods. All characterist its of the HP-motlcl buch as formation of a hydrophobic core and overall compact structures are observed. Sinccl the procrt1ln.c is very fast and flexible we obtain a useful tool to approxirnatt~ t.he sqric-nce t.0 st,ructlire mapping of t)iopotymers in general antI to study the complex interplay of folding strat,rgies, pot,entials and alphabets with large ensembles of random structures.
An open-label randomized comparison of olanzapine versus risperidone in the treatment of childhood-onset schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) is a clinically severe form of schizophrenia, which causes severe impairment to cognitive, linguistic, and social development. There are few prospective and retrospective open clinical trials of risperidone and olanzapine in COS. In this open-label, randomized, prospective study, we compared the tolerability and effectiveness of risperidone versus olanzapine in the treatment of COS patients. METHODS The study population consisted of 25 children with COS (mean age 11.09 +/- 1.55 years). After an evaluation, patients received risperidone (0.25-4.5 mg/day, mean dose 1.62 +/- 1.02 mg/day) or olanzapine (2.5-20 mg/day, mean dose 8.18 +/- 4.41 mg/day) for 12 weeks, with weekly evaluations. RESULTS Both groups showed comparable significant (p < 0.001) within-group improvement from baseline to endpoint (LOCF) in Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS) total and subscale scores. Of the olanzapine-treated children, 11 (91.7%) completed the 12 weeks of the study, whereas in the risperidone-treated children only 9 (69.2%) did. No significant differences between risperidone-treated children and olanzapine-treated children were observed on Barnes Akathisia Rating Scale (BAS) and Simpson-Angus Scale (SAS) rating scales. Both treatment groups showed significant (p < 0.001) increase in weight from baseline to endpoint. CONCLUSION Our open-label, small-scale comparative study suggests that both risperidone and olanzapine appear to be efficacious antipsychotic medications in COS, with a slight nonsignificant advantage of olanzapine in the dropout rate.
Relationship of the Xeroderma Pigmentosum Group E DNA Repair Defect to the Chromatin and DNA Binding Proteins UV-DDB and Replication Protein A

ABSTRACT Cells from complementation groups A through G of the heritable sun-sensitive disorder xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) show defects in nucleotide excision repair of damaged DNA. Proteins representing groups A, B, C, D, F, and G are subunits of the core recognition and incision machinery of repair. XP group E (XP-E) is the mildest form of the disorder, and cells generally show about 50% of the normal repair level. We investigated two protein factors previously implicated in the XP-E defect, UV-damaged DNA binding protein (UV-DDB) and replication protein A (RPA). Three newly identified XP-E cell lines (XP23PV, XP25PV, and a line formerly classified as an XP variant) were defective in UV-DDB binding activity but had levels of RPA in the normal range. The XP-E cell extracts did not display a significant nucleotide excision repair defect in vitro, with either UV-irradiated DNA or a uniquely placed cisplatin lesion used as a substrate. Purified UV-DDB protein did not stimulate repair of naked DNA by DDB− XP-E cell extracts, but microinjection of the protein into DDB−XP-E cells could partially correct the repair defect. RPA stimulated repair in normal, XP-E, or complemented extracts from other XP groups, and so the effect of RPA was not specific for XP-E cell extracts. These data strengthen the connection between XP-E and UV-DDB. Coupled with previous results, the findings suggest that UV-DDB has a role in the repair of DNA in chromatin.
Men's consumption of fitness and exercise: An exploration of motivations for exercise and fitness involvement

Individuals in the U.S. have become increasingly involved in fitness and exercise within the last decade. As health of Americans decreases due to unhealthy diets and stresses of family and career coupled with society’s obsession with attractiveness and physical appearance, more individuals are turning to exercise and fitness to get healthy and enhance the physical appearance of the body (Bordo, 1999). Men, in particular, have increasingly become a target for the fitness industry as more and more men spend money on fitness, diet and appearance products (Dworkin & Wachs, 2009). The purpose of this research was to understand men’s use of exercise, fitness and health club memberships, as well as the meanings behind their participation in these activities. In addition, men’s fitness and exercise behavior as it relates to appearance, body image and the muscular male body ideal were examined. Ten men, who were regular exercisers, were interviewed for this study. The men’s motivations for engaging in exercise centered on health, appearance as it relates to both muscularity and weight management and desire to engage in athletic activities. Participation and involvement in exercise and fitness was very important for participants and was a significant part of their identities and lifestyle. Several related theoretical frameworks including Foucault and the “Docile Body,” Symbolic Interaction (SI) Theory of Fashion, Bourdieu and Social Capital and Postmodernism were used to interpret and provide meaning to participants’ responses.
Object Recognition using Appearance based

In this paper results of object recognition using some appearance based techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Kernel PCA and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) has been presented. Detecting the objects and extracting the features of unconstrained images is a challenging task in Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. High-dimensional data are common in many domains, and dimensionality reduction is the key to cope up with the curse-of-dimensionality. Two benchmark object databases namely Coil-20 database and ORL databases were used for experiment. Principal Component Analysis is a statistical tool used to analyze data sets. PCA is a very popular technique for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction. PCA attempts to find a linear subspace of lower dimensionality of the original feature space in which the new features have the largest variance. The Kernel principal component analysis is a non-linear version of principal component analysis, where the original image space is mapped in to non-linear feature space using kernel trick which produces the symmetric kernel matrix. Linear Discriminant Analysis considers the classes of different objects and it works on the basis of scatter matrix. It considers the scatter within the class and outside the class. In this project, for classification, the minimum distance classifier is used to classify unknown sample. The Euclidean distance measure is used to measure similarity between the trained images and the test image. The results shows that the Linear discriminant analysis has better performance than Principal component analysis and Kernel principal component analysis.
Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered

Conflict and peace studies - setting the parameters theoretical and methodological questions in conflict studies mobilization and the emergence of conflict heterogeneity, power, the discursive mode and conflict roles, institutions and modes of conflict behaviour decision-making, conflict termination and negotiation mediation types and the challenge of track II diplomacy a critical evaluation of the field - towards post-modernist conflict studies.
Proceedings of the 2017 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, Houston, Texas, USA, April 27-29, 2017

Discovering the key structure of a database is one of the main goals of data mining. In pattern set mining we do so by discovering a small set of patterns that together describe the data well. The richer the class of patterns we consider, and the more powerful our description language, the better we will be able to summarise the data. In this paper we propose SQUISH, a novel greedy MDL-based method for summarising sequential data using rich patterns that are allowed to interleave. Experiments show SQUISHis orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art, results in better models, as well as discovers meaningful semantics in the form patterns that identify multiple choices of values.
Factors driving the global decline of cycad diversity

We have entered the sixth mass extinction period where species diversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate. Specifically, cycads are the most threatened plant group in the plant kingdom, and the present study investigated the factors that correlate with the extinction risk of cycads. We identified nine groups of threats; some of them are not randomly distributed along the cycad tree of life, suggesting that closely related species may be exposed to similar threats. We also identified a number of significant predictors of extinction risk linked to the biology and ecology of cycads. Collectively, our results elucidate the pattern of extinction risk in cycads.
On Modeling and Evaluation of Logic Circuits under Timing Variations

This paper presents a methodology to model and analyze the functional behavior of logic circuits under timing variations. In the framework, first a Time Accurate Model (TAM) of the circuit is constructed. The TAM represents the behavior of the circuit in the functional domain under a discrete time model. Afterwards, Variation Logic is inserted to apply the timing variations. Moreover, the circuit TAM is enhanced by Time Control (TC) logic to model the circuit frequency. We apply the proposed methodology to analyze a circuit or an approximate circuit under timing variations as well as to analyze a circuit under timing-induced errors for approximate computing.
Differences in social participation between individuals who do and do not attend brain injury drop-in centres: A preliminary study

Objective: To compare social participation for individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) ≥1 year post-injury who attend brain injury drop-in centres (BIDCs) with individuals who do not attend but were identified as potentially benefitting from attending. Research design: Cross-sectional study with 23 individuals attending BIDCs and a comparison group of 19 individuals not attending. Key outcome measures: Community Integration Questionnaire, Social Provisions Scale and Adult Subjective Assessment of Participation. Main results: The comparison group was found to consist of 12 participants who stated that they would attend a BIDC (‘Yes sub-group’) and seven participants who stated that maybe they would attend a BIDC but for the most part were too busy (‘Maybe sub-group’). The BIDC group was found to have statistically significantly higher levels of social participation than the comparison group and particularly the ‘Yes sub-group’. Conclusions: Findings provide support that attendance at BIDCs may benefit social participation. Future directions for research are suggested.