Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct determination of quasar redshifts

We present observations of 11 quasars, selected in the range z 2.2-4.1, obtained with ESA's Superconducting Tunnel Junction (STJ) camera on the WHT. Using a single template QSO spectrum, we show that we can determine theredshifts of these objects to about 1%. A follow-up spectroscopic observation of one QSO for which our best-fit redshift (z = 2.976) differs significantly from the tentative literature value (z 2.30) confirms that the latter was incorrect.
Prevalence and phylogenetic analysis of canine kobuviruses in diarrhoetic dogs in northeast China

Canine kobuviruses (CaKVs) are newly recognized picornaviruses that have been recently detected in dogs in the U.S.A. , Italy, U.K., the Republic of Korea and Tanzania. To trace the evolution of CaKV strains, a total of 201 fecal samples from rectal swabs of diarrheic dogs, which were obtained from May 2014 to April 2015 in northeast China, were detected by reverse transcription-PCR targeting a partial (504 bp) fragment of the 3D gene. Furthermore, a phylogenetic analysis of the CaKV strains identified in northeast China was conducted based on the partial 3D gene sequence. The results indicated that 36 fecal samples (17.91%, 36/201) were positive for CaKV, in which the co-infection rates of canine coronavirus, canine parvovirus-2 and canine bocavirus were 58.33%, 41.67%, and 11.11%, respectively. Sequence comparison of the partial 3D gene revealed nucleotide homologies of 94.4–100%, 95.6–98.6%, 94.3–97.6%, 94.4–96.3% and 93.3–95.1% within the 36 Chinese CaKV strains, and between the 36 Chinese CaKV strains and four CaKV reference strains from South Korea, Italy, U.S.A. and Tanzania, respectively. A phylogenetic tree revealed that the 36 Chinese CaKV strains formed one specific CaKV lineage with CaKVs that have recently been identified in other countries. The 36 Chinese CaKV strains were closely related to CaKV reference strains from Asia and Europe, but differed genetically from CaKV reference strains from North America and Africa. This study provides evidence that CaKVs circulate in diarrhoetic dogs in China and that they exhibit substantial genetic diversity and high co-infection rates with other enteric viruses.
Database model for taxonomic and observation data

This article describes a comprehensive information model for the recording of taxonomic and observation data from literature, field collecting and other sources. The model is based on an approach using hierarchical decomposition of data areas into atomic data elements and abstraction into an entity relationship model. It encompasses taxa of all ranks, nothotaxa and hybrid formulae, unnamed taxa, cultivars, full synonymy, misapplied names, basionyms, nomenclatural data, and different taxonomic concepts as well as alternative taxonomies to any extent desired. It can help designers of biological information systems to avoid the widely made error of over-simplification of taxonomic data and the resulting loss in data accuracy and quality.
Local Zernike Moments: A new representation for face recognition

In this paper, we propose a new image representation called Local Zernike Moments (LZM) for face recognition. In recent years, local image representations such as Gabor and Local Binary Patterns (LBP) have attracted great interest due to their success in handling difficulties of face recognition. In this study, we aim to develop an alternative representation to further improve the face recognition performance. We achieve this by utilizing Zernike Moments which have been successfully used as shape descriptors for character recognition. We modify global Zernike moments to obtain a local representation by computing the moments at every pixel of a face image by considering its local neighborhood, thus decomposing the image into a set of images, moment components, to capture the micro structure around each pixel. Our experiments on FERET face database reveal the superior performance of LZM over Gabor and LBP representations.
Using the Self-Organizing Map to Visualize and Explore Socio-Economic Development

The socio-economic situation of a country can be measured in a number of ways, often by looking at indicator values describing different aspects of the social and economic reality in the country in question. Socio-economic development can be measured and observed by comparing yearly indicator values. As a large number of indicators are often required to accurately assess the socioeconomic development of a country, the dimensions of the analysis quickly become difficult. Composite variables, such as the Gini-coefficient and the Human Development Index, are often used, but drill-down analysis and visualization of the results reached with these is demanding and may be very laborious. The realm of data mining offers a number of tools for dealing with these problems. This paper utilizes the self-organizing map (SOM), a two layer unsupervised neural network, to observe, compare, and visualize development in 25 transition economies. Using longitudinal (1998-2002), multidimensional (14 indicators) socio-economic data, the paper presents how transition economies can be positioned, and their development tracked, with the SOM. The data is from the World Bank Group’s World Development Indicators (WDI) on-line database. The paper discusses the advantages achieved by using the SOM over simply comparing yearly indicator values, in observing and visualizing socio-economic development. The purpose of this paper is to show how the SOM can be used to observe, compare, and visualize development in transition economies. The paper does not seek to propose a new “correct” model for measuring socio-economic development, but to show, with examples, that the SOM could be a helpful tool in intuitively visualizing and comparing multidimensional socio-economic development.
Description of Preliminary Results to TREC-8 QA Task

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Detecting Off-topic Responses to Visual Prompts

Automated methods for essay scoring have made great progress in recent years, achieving accuracies very close to human annotators. However, a known weakness of such automated scorers is not taking into account the semantic relevance of the submitted text. While there is existing work on detecting answer relevance given a textual prompt, very little previous research has been done to incorporate visual writing prompts. We propose a neural architecture and several extensions for detecting off-topic responses to visual prompts and evaluate it on a dataset of texts written by language learners.
Increased homeothermy during reproduction in a basal placental mammal

Homeothermic endothermy, the maintenance of a high and stable body temperature (Tb) using heat produced by elevated metabolism, is energetically expensive. There is increasing evidence that the earliest endotherms were heterotherms that, rather than maintaining strict homeothermy, allowed Tb to fluctuate with large variations between active and rest-phase Tb. The high level of homeothermy observed in modern mammals is therefore likely to have evolved from an ancestral heterothermic state. One of the hypotheses for the evolution of endothermy is that homeothermy allows for greater energetic output during reproduction (parental care model). We tested this hypothesis by measuring metabolic rates over a range of ambient temperatures in both reproductive and non-reproductive greater hedgehog tenrecs (Setifer setosus), a physiologically primitive mammal from Madagascar. Tenrecs have some of the lowest metabolic rates and highest levels of Tb variability of any mammal and are therefore good models of the ancestral eutherian state. During pregnancy and lactation, there was an increase in metabolism and Tb below the thermoneutral zone, accompanied by a decrease in Tb variability. The lower critical limit of the thermoneutral zone was estimated at ~25°C. However, whereas increases in resting metabolism were substantial below 20°C (up to 150% higher during reproduction), daytime rest-phase ambient temperatures at the study site rarely reached equivalent low levels. Thus, S. setosus provide an example for how relatively low-cost increases in homeothermy could have led to substantial increases in fitness by allowing for the faster production of young. The mechanisms necessary for increases in thermogenesis during reproduction would have further benefited the development of homeothermy in mammals.
No Evidence of an Association between Norepinephrine Transporter Gene Polymorphisms and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Neurobiological and pharmacological research has suggested that dysregulation of the central noradrenergic systems might be involved in the pathophysiology of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Previous studies have demonstrated that the norepinephrine transporter gene (SLC6A2) is associated with ADHD. The aims of this study were to examine the association of the SLC6A2 G1287A and –3081(A/T) polymorphisms with ADHD in Korean children and adolescents, and to determine the relationships of the genotypes of these two polymorphisms with continuous performance test results and the Junior Temperament and Character Inventory profiles of ADHD. In a case-control study, we assessed 186 ADHD probands and 150 normal controls; 109 trios were studied in a family-based association analysis. There were no significant differences in the genotype or allele frequencies of the SLC6A2 G1287A and –3081(A/T) polymorphisms between the ADHD and control groups (p > 0.05). In the transmission disequilibrium test analyses, there was no evidence for biased transmission of any of the alleles of the SLC6A2 G1287A and –3081(A/T) polymorphisms. In the haplotype analyses of these two polymorphisms, the global and individual χ2 tests showed no significant associations between any of the haplotypes and ADHD. There were no significant differences with respect to the continuous performance test results and the Junior Temperament and Character Inventory profiles in the ADHD probands according to the genotypes of the SLC6A2 G1287A and –3081(A/T) polymorphisms. Our findings do not support SLC6A2 as a major genetic susceptibility factor in ADHD.
An Information Retrieval System for FIRE 2016 Microblog Track

This paper describes our approaches to FIRE (Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation) 2016 Microblog track. The main aim of this track was to develop an information retrieval system that can identify relevant tweets posted during a disaster event. The relevance is measured with respect to some predefined topics provide by the track organizers. In this working note we have given the description of the system which has taken part in this year’s FIRE track as well as has analysed the performance of the system.
Cardioprotection Acquired Through Exercise: The Role of Ischemic Preconditioning

A great bulk of evidence supports the concept that regular exercise training can reduce the incidence of coronary events and increase survival chances after myocardial infarction. These exercise-induced beneficial effects on the myocardium are reached by means of the reduction of several risk factors relating to cardiovascular disease, such as high cholesterol, hypertension, obesity etc. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that exercise can reproduce the “ischemic preconditioning” (IP), which refers to the capacity of short periods of ischemia to render the myocardium more resistant to subsequent ischemic insult and to limit infarct size during prolonged ischemia. However, IP is a complex phenomenon which, along with infarct size reduction, can also provide protection against arrhythmia and myocardial stunning due to ischemia-reperfusion. Several clues demonstrate that preconditioning may be directly induced by exercise, thus inducing a protective phenotype at the heart level without the necessity of causing ischemia. Exercise appears to act as a physiological stress that induces beneficial myocardial adaptive responses at cellular level. The purpose of the present paper is to review the latest data on the role played by exercise in triggering myocardial preconditioning.
Tissue characterization using the continuous wavelet transform. I. Decomposition method

In this paper, a novel decomposition of the RF ultrasound signal into its coherent and diffused components is proposed. This decomposition is based on thresholding the energy of the continuous wavelet transform of the RF signal using appropriate wavelets. The two components are modeled separately, and the model parameters are estimated. Previous work (Cohen et al. 1997) required assumptions about the periodicity of the coherent scatterers in the tissue. These assumptions are not necessary in this work. The decomposition algorithm is tested on simulated RF images. The accuracy of the estimated parameters is presented as well as the performance of the algorithm in low coherent-to-diffuse components' energy ratios (SNR).
Binary spectral masking for speech recognition systems

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of spectral masking techniques as a preprocessing step in speech recognition systems. The limits of these masking techniques for different levels of the signal-to-noise ratio are discussed. In general, speech recognition systems have low performance in noisy environments or in the presence of other speech signals. This work presents a blind source separation system based on ideal binary masks to deal with real situations in which speech signals are corrupted by noise, including other speech signals. The main contribution of this work is to analyze the performance limits of recognition systems using spectral masking. We obtain an increase of 18% on the speech hit rate and an average gain of 10 dB in terms of noise level attenuation, when the speech signals were corrupted by other voice signals, with different signal-to-noise ratio of approximately 1, 10 and 20 dB.
Cerebral blood flow changes associated with fluctuations in alpha and theta rhythm during sleep onset in humans

Cerebral blood flow (CBF) is typically reduced during stable non‐rapid eye movement (non‐REM) sleep compared with the waking level. It is not known when in the sleep cycle these changes occur. However, spontaneous fluctuations in alpha and theta rhythm during sleep onset are associated with marked changes in cardio‐respiratory control. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that changes in CBF would occur during sleep onset and would be related to changes in cortical activity. Middle cerebral artery velocity (MCAV) was measured using transcranial Doppler ultrasound, as an index of CBF, in 10 healthy subjects. Sleep state, ventilation, end tidal carbon dioxide (PET,CO2), arterial oxygen saturation (SaO2), mean arterial blood pressure (MABP) and cardiac R‐R interval (RR) were monitored simultaneously. Immediately following the transition from alpha to theta rhythm (the transition from wake to sleep), ventilation decreased by 13.4% and tidal volume (VT) by 12.2% (P < 0.01); PET,CO2 increased by 1.9% (P < 0.01); respiratory frequency (fR) and SaO2 did not change significantly. MCAV increased by 9.7% (P < 0.01); MABP decreased by 3.2% (P < 0.01) but RR did not change significantly. Immediately following the transition from theta to alpha rhythm (spontaneous awakening), increased by 13.3% (P < 0.01); VT increased by 11.4% (P < 0.01); PET,CO2 decreased by 1.9%(P < 0.01); MCAV decreased by 11.1% (P < 0.01) and MABP decreased by 7.5%; fR, SaO2 and RR did not change significantly. These changes in MCAV during sleep onset cannot be attributed to changes in ventilation or MABP. We speculate that the changes in cerebral vascular tone during sleep onset are mediated neurally, by regulatory mechanisms linked to the changes in cortical state, and that these mechanisms are different from those regulating the longer‐term reduction in CBF associated with stable non‐REM sleep.
Permutation Correction in the Frequency Domain in Blind Separation of Speech Mixtures

This paper presents a method for blind separation of convolutive mixtures of speech signals, based on the joint diagonalization of the time varying spectral matrices of the observation records. The main and still largely open problem in a frequency domain approach is permutation ambiguity. In an earlier paper of the authors, the continuity of the frequency response of the unmixing filters is exploited, but it leaves some frequency permutation jumps. This paper therefore proposes a new method based on two assumptions. The frequency continuity of the unmixing filters is still used in the initialization of the diagonalization algorithm. Then, the paper introduces a new method based on the time-frequency representations of the sources. They are assumed to vary smoothly with frequency. This hypothesis of the continuity of the time variation of the source energy is exploited on a sliding frequency bandwidth. It allows us to detect the remaining frequency permutation jumps. The method is compared with other approaches and results on real world recordings demonstrate superior performances of the proposed algorithm.
A New Online Feature Selection Method Using Neighborhood Rough Set

Online feature selection, as a new method which deals with feature streams in an online manner, has attracted much attention in recent years and played a critical role in dealing with high-dimensional problems. In this paper, we define a new Neighborhood Rough Set relation with adapted neighbors and propose a new online streaming feature selection method based on this relation. Our approach does not require any domain knowledge and does not need to specify any parameters in advance. With the "maximal-dependency, maximal-relevance and maximal-significance" evaluation criteria, our new approach can select features with high correlation, high dependency and low redundancy. Experimental studies on ten different types of data sets show that our approach is superior to traditional feature selection methods with the same numbers of features and state-ofthe-art online streaming feature selection algorithms in an online manner.
Robust H2 control of uncertain discrete-time linear systems with periodically time-varying memory state-feedback

This study is concerned with the synthesis of periodically time-varying memory state-feedback controllers (PTVMSFCs) for discrete-time linear systems. In our preceding studies, we have already established a solid theoretical basis for the LMI-based (robust) H∞-PTVMSFCs synthesis, and the goal of this paper is to extend those results to the H2 performance criterion. In the H2 case, the main difficulty stems from the fact that we have to ensure the existence of common auxiliary variables for multiple LMI conditions that are related to the Lyapunov inequality and inequalities for bounding traces that characterize the H2 norm. We can indeed overcome this difficulty and derive a necessary and sufficient LMI condition for the optimal H2-PTVMSFC synthesis. Based on this result, we also consider robust H2-PTVMSFC synthesis for polytopic-type uncertain LTI systems.
Adaptive Restoration Of Images With Speckle

Speckle is a granular noise that inherently exists in all types of coherent imaging systems. The presence of speckle in an image reduces the resolution of the image and the detectability of the target. Many speckle reduction algorithms assume speckle noise is multiplicative. We instead model the speckle according to the exact physical process of coherent image formation. Thus, the model includes signal-dependent effects and accurately represents the higher order statistical properties of speckle that are important to the restoration procedure. Various adaptive restoration filters for intensity speckle images are derived based on different speckle model assumptions and a nonstationary image model. These filters respond adaptively to the signal-dependent speckle noise and the nonstationary statistics of the original image.
Demand/capacity management in health care: An application of yield management

Although the concepts of yield management have been applied successfully to many services such as hotels and airlines, the concepts have not expanded much further. Some segments of health care appear to be logical candidates to apply and benefit from the concepts, and this article addresses that application by examining the implementation of yield management in a health care facility. Not only is the implementation described, but the issues surrounding that implementation are discussed.
Enculturation of user involvement in software development organizations - an interpretive case study in the product development context

It is widely accepted that users should be involved in the interactive systems development. Ho wever, involving the users is often difficult and quite rare in software development organizations, especially in the product development context. We took a culturally oriented approach in the analysis of the position of user involvement in two software development organizations operating in the product development context. We analyzed how user involvement is modified and interpreted in the cultural context. This meaning negotiation - enculturation - process was the focus of empirical examination. Empirical material was gathered and analyzed by employing an interpretive research approach. The results suggest that there exist clear differences in how user involvement, has been encultured in the case organizations. The case organizations employ different approaches to user involvement, and differing strategies for the facilitation of user involvement. As an implication for practice, we emphasize the importance of understanding the cultural context in which the user involvement is to be initiated, and suggest that different approaches to user involvement might be selected in differing cultural settings.