Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parallel Structured Mesh Generation with Disparity Maps by GPU Implementation

The goal of structured mesh is to generate a compressed representation of the 3D surface, where near objects are provided with more details than objects far from the camera, according to the disparity map. The solution is based on the Kohonens Self-Organizing Map algorithm for the benefits of its ability to generate a topological map according to a probability distribution and its potential to be a natural massive parallel algorithm. The disparity map, which stands for a density distribution that reflects the proximity of objects to the camera, is partitioned into an appropriate number of cell units, in such a way that each cell is associated to a processing unit and responsible of a certain area of the plane. The advantage of the proposed model is that it is decentralized and based on data decomposition. The required processing units and memory are with linearly increasing relationship to the problem size. Experimental results show that our GPU implementation is able to provide near real-time performance with small size disparity maps and the running time increases in a linear way with a very weak increasing coefficient. The proposed method is suitable to deal with large scale problems in a massively parallel way.
Does Time Fly When You're Having Fun, or Do You?

When describing the passage of time, people metaphorically assign the agency for temporal change to themselves (e.g., we are approaching the weekend) or an event (the weekend is approaching). Embodiment theory suggests that temporal agency assignments reflect conceptual correspondences between time, motion, and emotion, whereby people symbolically move toward affectively positive events but passively observe the arrival of negative events. This article reports three studies testing these theoretical claims. Analyses of large spoken and written English corpora (Study 1) and solicited accounts of positive and negative experiences (Study 2) indicated that communicators prefer to assign temporal agency to themselves when describing positive events but to events when describing negative events. Study 3 demonstrated that temporal agency assignments have attributional consequences, in that they colored participants' perceptions of a fictitious speaker's affective orientation toward a described event. Implications of these findings for the study of temporal communication are discussed.
Benefit of Adherence With Bisphosphonates Depends on Age and Fracture Type: Results From an Analysis of 101,038 New Bisphosphonate Users

The relationship between high adherence to oral bisphosphonates and the risk of different types of fractures has not been well studied among adults of different ages. Using claims data from a large U.S. health care organization, we quantified adherence after initiating bisphosphonate therapy using the medication possession ratio (MPR) and identified fractures. Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate the rate of fracture among nonadherent persons (MPR < 50%) compared with highly adherent persons (MPR ≥ 80%) across several age strata and a variety of types of clinical fractures. In conjunction with fracture incidence rates among the nonadherent, these estimates were used to compute the number needed to treat with high adherence to prevent one fracture, by age and fracture type. Among 101,038 new bisphosphonate users, the proportion of persons with high adherence at 1, 2, and 3 yr was 44%, 39%, and 35%, respectively. Among 65‐ to 78‐yr‐old persons with a physician diagnosis of osteoporosis, the crude and adjusted rate of hip fracture among the nonadherent was 1.96 (95% CI, 1.48–2.60) and 1.74 (95% CI, 1.30–2.31), respectively, resulting in a number needed to treat with high adherence to prevent one hip fracture of 107. The impact of high adherence was substantially less for other types of fractures and for younger persons. Analysis of adherence in a non–time‐dependent fashion artifactually magnified differences in fracture rates between adherent and nonadherent persons. The antifracture effectiveness associated with high adherence to oral bisphosphonates varied substantially by age and fracture type. These results provide estimates of absolute fracture effectiveness across age subgroups and fracture types that have been minimally evaluated in clinical trials and may be useful for future cost‐effectiveness studies.
Domestic Abuse, Safeguarding Children and Public Health: Towards an Analysis of Discursive Forms and Surveillant Techniques in Contemporary UK Policy and Practice

In the UK, domestic abuse has shifted from the margins to the mainstream, and is now firmly established as an important public policy issue. This paper is concerned with how domestic abuse is constructed in public policy, particularly in the realms of safeguarding children and public health. These issues are examined through a Foucaldian theoretical lens which draws attention to the discursive constructions of social problems and how they are managed under conditions of governmentality, and presents a line of analysis rarely applied to domestic abuse. The paper illustrates how health and social care professionals come to know about domestic abuse affecting women and children through techniques of surveillance; this includes routine inquiry in health care, police notifications to children's social care and risk assessment used by MARACs (Multi Agency Risk Assessment Conferences). The emphasis upon identification has increased awareness of the problem, but questions remain on whether the safety and support of women and children affected by domestic abuse has improved. Moreover, these developments have taken place amidst resource constraints which create a challenging context for delivering effective services for women and children.
The Modified Integrative Weaning Index as a Predictor of Extubation Failure

INTRODUCTION: The extubation period is one of the most challenging aspects for intensive care teams. Timely recognition of the return to spontaneous ventilation is essential for reducing costs, morbidity, and mortality. Several weaning predictors were studied in an attempt to evaluate the outcome of removing ventilatory support. The purpose of this study was to analyze the predictive performance of the modified integrative weaning index (IWI) in the extubation process. METHODS: A prospective study was performed in an ICU in a public hospital in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with 59 adult medical-surgical beds. The final population of the study comprised 153 patients receiving mechanical ventilation for over 48 h who were extubated during the period from February to November 2011. Demographic data and clinical parameters were collected in addition to extubation predictors, including static compliance of the respiratory system, ratio of breathing frequency to tidal volume, tracheal airway-occlusion pressure 0.1 s after the start of inspiratory flow, and modified IWI. RESULTS: Extubation failure was observed in 23 of the subjects (15%). Subjects with greater positive fluid balance, lower hemoglobin levels, and lower levels of bicarbonate presented a higher rate of reintubation. The 3 modified IWI values (the first and 30th minute of the spontaneous breathing trial and the difference between them), as well as the other ventilatory parameters and extubation predictors, displayed poor extubation outcome discrimination accuracy. All indexes presented small areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve, and no accurate cutoff point was identified. CONCLUSIONS: We concluded that modified IWI, similar to other extubation predictors, does not accurately predict extubation failure.
The Development of Intellectual Capability: A Discussion of Stratified Systems Theory

This article addresses the cognitive processes requiredfor individuals to plan and carry out goal-directed activities. The author postulates that different states of cognitivefunctioning exist and that individuals change to different states as they reach different points of cognitive power-measured in time horizons-rather than particular ages. Work is measured in terms of time spans for its completion, and from this the author develops a stratified hierarchy of organization. A "quintave" theory of cognitive development based on four cognitive states-shaping, reflective articulation, extrapolation, and transformation of systemsis presented, with the four states appearing repeatedly in increasingly complex settings in higher organizational strata. The author discusses the maturation of individuals' cognitive power, hypothesizing that everyone does not mature along the same track of cognitive development, with some maturing further along the track than others, and proposing instead a multiple track theory. The author concludes that cognitive development differs from intelligence quotient (IQ), and that it occurs regardless of social and economic opportunities for exercising cognitive power.
A neurophysiological study on probabilistic grammatical learning and sentence processing

Syntactic anomalies reliably elicit P600 effects in natural language processing. A survey of previous work converged on a conclusion that the mean amplitude of the P600 seems to be associated with the goodness of fit of a target word with expectation generated based on already unfolded materials. Based on this characteristic of the P600 effects, the current study aimed to look for evidence indicating the influence of input statistics in shaping grammatical knowledge/representations, and as a result leading to probabilistically-based competition/expectation generation processes of online sentence processing. An artificial grammar learning (AGL) task with 4 different conditions varying in probabilities were used to test this hypothesis. Results from this task indicated graded mean amplitude of the P600 effects across conditions, and the pattern of gradience is consistent with the variation of the input statistics. The use of the artificial language to simulate natural language learning process was further justified with statistically undistinguishable P600 effects elicited in a natural language sentence processing (NLSP) task. Together, the results indicate that the same neural mechanisms are recruited for both syntactic processing of natural language stimuli and sentence strings in an artificial language. Abstract Approved: ____________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________ Title and Department ____________________________________ DateApproved: ____________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________ Title and Department ____________________________________ Date A NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL STUDY ON PROBABILISTIC GRAMMATICAL LEARNING AND SENTENCE PROCESSING
Attractiveness and Height

The relationship between height and attractiveness was investigated using self-reports of dating behavior and subjects' ratings of photographs depicting males and females of different heights. Shorter females were preferred more as dates, were dated more frequently, and were rated as more attractive than taller females regardless of the height of the male subjects. For males, the relationship between height and attractiveness was less clear Females expressed a general preference for dating males taller than themselves and reported dating taller males more frequently but did not rate their tall male dates as more attractive. Moreover, no relationship was found between the height of the male subjects and their self-reported dating frequency. Interestingly, females did rate a photographed male as more attractive when he was depicted as tall than when he was depicted as short relative to an adjacent female.
Come Downtown & Play

Abstract The newly anointed American cities of the late capitalist moment appear preoccupied with the reconstitution of urban space. More accurately, select parcels of urban America have been reconfigured into multifaceted sport, leisure and tourism environments designed for the purpose of encouraging consumption‐oriented capital accumulation. Within this paper, the focus is a critical exploration of the ways in which tangible and intangible forms of heritage have been employed, utilized and exploited within these urban transformations. Through focus on a city emblematic of the processes that have molded downtown cores under US capitalism – Memphis – the paper points to the role of heritage in the reconfiguration of the Memphian ‘tourist bubble’. In particular, discussion centers on the often problematic selection of histories and historical elements, forms and practices within the interests of capital space and thus raises a host of localized questions about whose collective memory is being performed in the present, whose aesthetics really count and who benefits. Conclusions address how such urban space is imbued with power relations, that is, how increasingly leisure‐oriented spaces can be seen as important sites of social struggle in which dominant power relations can be constructed, contested and reproduced.
Asynchronous Event-Based Multikernel Algorithm for High-Speed Visual Features Tracking

This paper presents a number of new methods for visual tracking using the output of an event-based asynchronous neuromorphic dynamic vision sensor. It allows the tracking of multiple visual features in real time, achieving an update rate of several hundred kilohertz on a standard desktop PC. The approach has been specially adapted to take advantage of the event-driven properties of these sensors by combining both spatial and temporal correlations of events in an asynchronous iterative framework. Various kernels, such as Gaussian, Gabor, combinations of Gabor functions, and arbitrary user-defined kernels, are used to track features from incoming events. The trackers described in this paper are capable of handling variations in position, scale, and orientation through the use of multiple pools of trackers. This approach avoids the N2 operations per event associated with conventional kernel-based convolution operations with N × N kernels. The tracking performance was evaluated experimentally for each type of kernel in order to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed solution.
Insurance status influences the rates of reportable quality metrics in brain tumor patients: a nationwide inpatient sample study.

BACKGROUND In 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed to expand health insurance, narrow health care disparities, and improve health care quality in the United States. As part of this initiative, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are now tracking quality metrics. OBJECTIVE To analyze the effects of insurance on the incidence of patient safety indicators (PSIs) and hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) using the Nationwide Inpatient Sample for patients who have brain tumors. METHODS The Nationwide Inpatient Sample was queried for all hospitalizations between 2002 and 2011 involving patients with brain tumors. Because of the confounding age restriction with Medicare, comparisons were made between Medicaid/self-pay and private insurance. To determine which factors contributed to HACs and PSIs, odds ratios were calculated for each risk factor. Logistic regression models were used to assess the effect of payer status on individual PSIs, HACs, and patient outcomes. RESULTS Medicaid/self-pay patients had a higher PSI and HAC incidence compared with private insurance patients. The greater incidence of PSIs and HACs correlated with increased length of stay, worse discharge outcomes, and increased in-hospital mortality. CONCLUSION Variability exists in the incidence of PSIs and HACs in patients with brain tumors based on insurance status. Controlling for both patient and hospital factors can explain these differences. The cause of these disparities should be studied prospectively to begin the process of improving quality metrics in vulnerable patient populations.
An efficient transistor-level piecewise-linear macromodeling approach for model order reduction of nonlinear circuits

Trajectory piecewise-linear macromodeling (TPWL) technique has been widely employed to characterize strong nonlinear circuits, and makes the reduction of the strong nonlinear circuits possible. The trajectory piecewise-linear macromodeling technique linearizes nonlinear circuits around multiple expansion points which are extracted from state trajectories driven by training inputs. However, the accuracy of the trajectory piecewise-linear macromodeling technique heavily relies on the extracted expansion points and the training inputs. It will lead to large error in simulation if state vector reaches regions far away from the extracted expansion points. In this paper, we propose an efficient transistor-level piecewise linearization scheme for macromodeling of nonlinear circuits. Piecewise linear models are first built for each transistor. The macromodel of the whole nonlinear circuit is then constructed by combining all the piecewise-linear models of the transistors together with appropriate weight functions. The proposed approach can cover remarkably larger state space than the TPWL method. By using the complete piecewise-linear models of the transistors, the constructed piecewise-linear models of the nonlinear circuits are capable of covering the whole state space of the nonlinear circuits. More importantly, model order reduction of the proposed transistor-level piecewise linearization macromodel is also possible, which makes the proposed method a potentially good macromodeling approach for model order reduction of nonlinear circuits.
Application of eigen-spaced beamformers for imaging lamina of vertebral arch

Ultrasound (US) has been proposed as a guidance tool for spinal intervention. However, bone structures are often visualized poorly in the standard US images which is based on the delay and sum beamforming method (DAS). In this study, we investigate combination of an eigenspace based beamformer (ESMV) with the phase symmetry (PS) post-processing technique to extract the lamina surface from ultrasound images. Thereby, in simulation, and in-vivo studies we show that an ESMV beamformer with a rank-1 signal subspace, can keep the bone structure and improve the edges, despite some distortion of the speckle pattern. The PS images obtained from this beamformer setup have sharper bone boundaries compared with the DAS ones.
HaploBlockFinder: Haplotype Block Analyses

UNLABELLED Recent studies have unveiled discrete block-like structures of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the human genome. We have developed a set of computer programs to analyze the block-like LD structures (haplotype blocks) based on haplotype data. Three definitions of haplotype block are supported, including minimal LD range, no historic recombination, and chromosome coverage. Tagged SNPs that uniquely distinguish common haplotypes are identified. A greedy algorithm was used to improve the efficiency. Two separate utilities were also provided to assist visual inspection of haplotype block structure and pattern of linkage disequilibrium. AVAILABILITY A web interface for the HaploBlockFinder is available at http://cgi.uc. edu/cgi-bin/kzhang/haploBlockFinder.cgi the source codes are also freely available on the web site.
An Extensible Performance Evaluation Framework for Cloud Computing Systems

As more and more Cloud systems are designed and deployed in business and science engineering areas, how to evaluate and monitor the system’s runtime performance is becoming an important issue. However, few efforts are taken to address such an issue because the resources in Cloud systems often owned by different institutes. In this paper, we present an integrated performance evaluation framework, which is aiming to provide cloud users an easy-to-use toolkit to evaluate their system’s runtime performance, or compare the performance under different resource management policies. The design and implementation of our framework is highly extensible and re-useable in most existing cloud systems. Currently, the prototype of our implementation is examined by a series of experiments, and the results indicate that its configurable feature is very useful when users are conducting performance comparing under different contexts.
"On the (Non-)existence of Convex, Calibrated Surrogate Losses for Ranking"

We study surrogate losses for learning to rank, in a framework where the rankings are induced by scores and the task is to learn the scoring function. We focus on the calibration of surrogate losses with respect to a ranking evaluation metric, where the calibration is equivalent to the guarantee that near-optimal values of the surrogate risk imply near-optimal values of the risk defined by the evaluation metric. We prove that if a surrogate loss is a convex function of the scores, then it is not calibrated with respect to two evaluation metrics widely used for search engine evaluation, namely the Average Precision and the Expected Reciprocal Rank. We also show that such convex surrogate losses cannot be calibrated with respect to the Pairwise Disagreement, an evaluation metric used when learning from pair-wise preferences. Our results cast lights on the intrinsic difficulty of some ranking problems, as well as on the limitations of learning-to-rank algorithms based on the minimization of a convex surrogate risk.
A Framework for Figurative Language Detection Based on Sense Differentiation

Various text mining algorithms require the process of feature selection. High-level semantically rich features, such as figurative language uses, speech errors etc., are very promising for such problems as e.g. writing style detection, but automatic extraction of such features is a big challenge. In this paper, we propose a framework for figurative language use detection. This framework is based on the idea of sense differentiation. We describe two algorithms illustrating the mentioned idea. We show then how these algorithms work by applying them to Russian language data.
Early life experiences and self-compassion: a structural equation modelling / Experiencias en la vida temprana y autocompasión: un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales

Abstract The aim of the present study is to examine the relationships between early life experiences and self-compassion. Sample of the study consists of 268 university students, in Turkey. Participants completed the Early Life Experiences Scale and the Self-compassion Scale. The relationships between early life experiences and self-compassion were examined using correlation analysis and the hypothesis model was tested through structural equation modeling. In correlation analysis, self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness factors of self-compassion were found negatively and self-judgment, isolation and over-identification factors of self-compassion were found positively related to early life experiences. The structural model fitted well (χ2 = 21.92, df = 9, χ2/df = 2.43, p = .00914, AGFI = .93, GFI = .97, CFI = .98, NFI = .97, NNFI = .95, IFI = .98, RFI = .92, SRMR = .047, RMSEA = .073). According to path analysis results, self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness were predicted negatively by early life experiences. Further early life experiences predicted self-judgment, isolation and over-identification in a positive way. This research shows that early life experiences have a direct impact on the self-compassion.