Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards further development of HRD as an academic discipline : Comparing HRD research published in HRD and mainstream journals

This study reviews 125 HRD-focused articles published in two major HRD journals and ten mainstream SSCI journals across a six-year timeframe (1998-2003). It compares theoretical frameworks and methodologies employed in these different outlets, also looking at differences between US and European articles. Several differences in theoretical perspectives emerged. Methodology in US and mainstream journals was deemed more rigorous than in European and HRD journals. Generally, US/European differences were more prominent than HRD/mainstream ones.
Rising trend and indications of caesarean section at the university of Maiduguri teaching hospital, Nigeria.

OBJECTIVE To determine the trend and indications for the use of caesarean delivery in our environment. METHOD A retrospective review of the caesarean sections performed at University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital from January 2000 to December 2005 inclusive. RESULTS During the study period, there were 10,097 deliveries and 1192 caesarean sections giving a caesarean section rate of 11.8%. The major maternal indications were cephalopelvic disproportion (15.5%), previous caesarean section (14.7%), eclampsia (7.2%), failed induction of labor (5.5%), and placenta previa (5.1%). Fetal distress (9.6%), breech presentation (4.7%), fetal macrosomia (4.3%), and pregnancy complicated by multiple fetuses (4.2%) were the major fetal indications. The caesarean section rate showed a steady increase over the years (7.20% in 2000-13.95% in 2005), but yearly analysis of the demographic characteristics, type of caesarean section, and the major indications did not reveal any consistent changes to account for the rising trend except for the increasing frequency of fetal distress as an indication of caesarean section over the years, which was also not statistically significant (c[2] =8.08; P=0.12). The overall perinatal mortality in the study population was found to be 72.7/1000 birth and despite the rising rate of caesarean section, the perinatal outcomes did not improve over the years. CONCLUSION Trial of vaginal birth after caesarean section in appropriate cases and use of cardiotocography for continuous fetal heart rate monitoring in labor with confirmation of suspected fetal distress through fetal blood acid--base study are recommended. A prospective study may reveal some of the other reasons for the increasing caesarean section rate.
Unbalanced 2 x 2 Factorial Designs and the Interaction Effect: A Troublesome Combination

In this power study, ANOVAs of unbalanced and balanced 2 x 2 datasets are compared (N = 120). Datasets are created under the assumption that H1 of the effects is true. The effects are constructed in two ways, assuming: 1. contributions to the effects solely in the treatment groups; 2. contrasting contributions in treatment and control groups. The main question is whether the two ANOVA correction methods for imbalance (applying Sums of Squares Type II or III; SS II or SS III) offer satisfactory power in the presence of an interaction. Overall, SS II showed higher power, but results varied strongly. When compared to a balanced dataset, for some unbalanced datasets the rejection rate of H0 of main effects was undesirably higher. SS III showed consistently somewhat lower power. When the effects were constructed with equal contributions from control and treatment groups, the interaction could be re-estimated satisfactorily. When an interaction was present, SS III led consistently to somewhat lower rejection rates of H0 of main effects, compared to the rejection rates found in equivalent balanced datasets, while SS II produced strongly varying results. In data constructed with only effects in the treatment groups and no effects in the control groups, the H0 of moderate and strong interaction effects was often not rejected and SS II seemed applicable. Even then, SS III provided slightly better results when a true interaction was present. ANOVA allowed not always for a satisfactory re-estimation of the unique interaction effect. Yet, SS II worked better only when an interaction effect could be excluded, whereas SS III results were just marginally worse in that case. Overall, SS III provided consistently 1 to 5% lower rejection rates of H0 in comparison with analyses of balanced datasets, while results of SS II varied too widely for general application.
StreamRay: a stream filtering architecture for coherent ray tracing

The wide availability of commodity graphics processors has made real-time graphics an intrinsic component of the human/computer interface. These graphics cores accelerate the z-buffer algorithm and provide a highly interactive experience at a relatively low cost. However, many applications in entertainment, science, and industry require high quality lighting effects such as accurate shadows, reflection, and refraction. These effects can be difficult to achieve with z-buffer algorithms but are straightforward to implement using ray tracing. Although ray tracing is computationally more complex, the algorithm exhibits excellent scaling and parallelism properties. Nevertheless, ray tracing memory access patterns are difficult to predict and the parallelism speedup promise is therefore hard to achieve. This paper highlights a novel approach to ray tracing based on stream filtering and presents StreamRay, a multicore wide SIMD microarchitecture that delivers interactive frame rates of 15-32 frames/second for scenes of high geometric complexity and exhibits high utilization for SIMD widths ranging from eight to 16 elements. StreamRay consists of two main components: the ray engine, which is responsible for stream assembly and employs address generation units that generate addresses to form large SIMD vectors, and the filter engine, which implements the ray tracing operations with programmable accelerators. Results demonstrate that separating address and data processing reduces data movement and resource contention. Performance improves by 56% while simultaneously providing 11.63% power savings per accelerator core compared to a design which does not use separate resources for address and data computations.
Tag-based interaction in online and mobile banking: a preliminary study of the effect on usability

In this paper we describe tag-based interaction afforded by a tag-based interface in online and mobile banking, and present our preliminary usability evaluation findings. We conducted a pilot usability study with a group of banking users by comparing the present 'conventional' interface and tag-based interface. The results show that participants perceive the tag-based interface as more usable in both online and mobile contexts. Participants also rated the tag-based interface better despite their unfamiliarity and perceived it as more user-friendly. Additionally, the results highlight that tag-based interaction is more effective in the mobile context especially to inexperienced mobile banking users. This in turn could have a positive effect on the adoption and acceptance of mobile banking in general and also specifically in Australia. We discuss our findings in more detail in the later sections of this paper and conclude with a discussion on future work.
Expatriate failure: time to abandon the concept?

This article reviews the established understanding of the concept of expatriate failure, discusses its associated problems and presents a more sophisticated and comprehensive understanding of the concept. The article argues that it might well be time to abandon the concept of expatriate failure altogether and instead draw on the general human resource literature to analyse problems related to turnover and performance management in an expatriate context.
Evolution Of Adaptive Discretization Intervals For A Rule-based Genetic Learning System

The traditional classi er rules evolved in genetic based machine learning (GBML) systems need a discretization process to handle problems with real-valued attributes. A good discretization procedure is needed to generate a solution with good accuracy because the alternative of a high number of simple uniform-width intervals is bad due to the big search space being hardly explorable in a reasonable time. There exist some good discretization algorithms, like the Fayyad & Irani method [Fayyad and Irani, 1993], but they fail in some problems. The work being summarized here deals with a rule representation with adaptive discrete intervals which split or merge through the evolution process, nding a robust and correct discretization intervals as the learning process is done with a reasonable computational cost.
Detecting trending topics using page visitation statistics

Many applications including realtime recommenders and ad-targeting systems have a need to identify trending concepts to prioritize the information presented to end-users. In this paper, we describe a novel approach that identifies trending concepts using the hourly Wikipedia page visitation statistics freely available for download. We describe a MapReduce framework that analyzes the raw hourly visitation logs and generates a ranked list of trending concepts on a daily basis. We validate this approach by extracting hourly lists of trending news articles, mapping these articles to Wikipedia concepts, and computing the similarity of the two lists according to several commonly used measures.
Energy-Aware Traffic Offloading for Green Heterogeneous Networks

With small cell base stations (SBSs) densely deployed in addition to conventional macro base stations (MBSs), the heterogeneous cellular network (HCN) architecture can effectively boost network capacity. To support the huge power demand of HCNs, renewable energy harvesting technologies can be leveraged. In this paper, we aim to make efficient use of the harvested energy for on-grid power saving while satisfying the quality of service (QoS) requirement. To this end, energy-aware traffic offloading schemes are proposed, whereby user associations, ON-OFF states of SBSs, and power control are jointly optimized according to the statistical information of energy arrival and traffic load. Specifically, for the single SBS case, the power saving gain achieved by activating the SBS is derived in closed form, based on which the SBS activation condition and optimal traffic offloading amount are obtained. Furthermore, a two-stage energy-aware traffic offloading (TEATO) scheme is proposed for the multiple-SBS case, considering various operating characteristics of SBSs with different power sources. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve more than 50% power saving gain for typical daily traffic and solar energy profiles, compared with the conventional traffic offloading schemes.
SurroundWeb: Mitigating Privacy Concerns in a 3D Web Browser

Immersive experiences that mix digital and real-world objects are becoming reality, but they raise serious privacy concerns as they require real-time sensor input. These experiences are already present on smartphones and game consoles via Kinect, and will eventually emerge on the web platform. However, browsers do not expose the display interfaces needed to render immersive experiences. Previous security research focuses on controlling application access to sensor input alone, and do not deal with display interfaces. Recent research in human computer interactions has explored a variety of high-level rendering interfaces for immersive experiences, but these interfaces reveal sensitive data to the application. Bringing immersive experiences to the web requires a high-level interface that mitigates privacy concerns. This paper presents Surround Web, the first 3D web browser, which provides the novel functionality of rendering web content onto a room while tackling many of the inherent privacy challenges. Following the principle of least privilege, we propose three abstractions for immersive rendering: 1) the room skeleton lets applications place content in response to the physical dimensions and locations of render able surfaces in a room, 2) the detection sandbox lets applications declaratively place content near recognized objects in the room without revealing if the object is present, and 3) satellite screens let applications display content across devices registered with Surround Web. Through user surveys, we validate that these abstractions limit the amount of revealed information to an acceptable degree. In addition, we show that a wide range of immersive experiences can be implemented with acceptable performance.
Spatial acoustic cues for the auditory perception of speaker's facing direction

In pursuit of an ultimately realistic human-to-human telecommunication technology, the ability to auditorily perceive the facing direction of a human speaker was explored. Listeners’ performance was assessed in an anechoic chamber. A male speaker sat on a pivot chair and spoke a short sentence while facing a direction that was randomly chosen from eight azimuthal angles or three elevation angles. Twelve blindfolded listeners heard the spoken sentence at a distance of either 1.2 or 2.4 m from the speaker and were asked to indicate the speaker’s facing direction. In separate sessions, the speaker continuously changed facing angles while speaking and the listeners indicated the perceived direction of horizontal rotation (clockwise or counter-clockwise) or vertical rotation (upward or downward). The overall results showed that the listeners’ average response errors were 23.5 degrees for azimuth and 12.9 degrees for elevation. These values were comparable to or better than those obtained in previous studies using a loudspeaker. The average correctresponse rates for rotation direction (either horizontal or vertical) were equal to or more than 80%. To identify acoustic cues that have caused the listeners’ accurate performance, the acoustic transfer characteristics from the speaker’s mouth to the listener’s ears were measured by the cross-spectral method. Finer transfer functions were further obtained in a couple of conditions of particular interest by numerical computer simulation using the finite difference time-domain method. The results suggested that major cues included but were not limited to the overall level and spectral tilt for the front-back or up-down judgment, and the interaural level difference for the left-right judgment.
Exon Array Profiling Detects EML4-ALK Fusion in Breast, Colorectal, and Non–Small Cell Lung Cancers

The echinoderm microtubule-associated protein-like 4–anaplastic lymphoma kinase (EML4-ALK) fusion gene has been identified as an oncogene in a subset of non–small cell lung cancers (NSCLC). We used profiling of cancer genomes on an exon array to develop a novel computational method for the global search of gene rearrangements. This approach led to the detection of EML4-ALK fusion in breast and colorectal carcinomas in addition to NSCLC. Screening of a large collection of patient tumor samples showed the presence of EML4-ALK fusion in 2.4% of breast (5 of 209), 2.4% of colorectal (2 of 83), and in 11.3% of NSCLC (12 of 106). Besides previously known EML4-ALK variants 1 (E13; A20) and 2 (E20; A20), a novel variant E21; A20 was found in colorectal carcinoma. The presence of an EML-ALK rearrangement was verified by identifying genomic fusion points in tumor samples representative of breast, colon, and NSCLC. EML4-ALK translocation was also confirmed by fluorescence in situ hybridization assay, which revealed its substantial heterogeneity in both primary tumors and tumor-derived cell lines. To elucidate the functional significance of EML4-ALK, we examined the growth of cell lines harboring the fusion following EML4 and ALK silencing by small interfering RNA. Significant growth inhibition was observed in some but not all cell lines, suggesting their variable dependence on ALK-mediated cell survival signaling. Collectively, these findings show the recurrence of EML4-ALK fusion in multiple solid tumors and further substantiate its role in tumorigenesis. (Mol Cancer Res 2009;7(9):1466–76)
New adoptive immunotherapy strategies for solid tumours with CIK cells

Introduction : Despite development and introduction of new and innovative drugs, a large number of malignant diseases are associated with unfavourable prognosis. In recent years, considerable progress in cancer treatment has been obtained by the application of cytokine-induced killer (CIK) cells. Areas covered : This review provides an overview and summary of recent advances in adoptive immunotherapy strategies in cancer treatment using CIK cells. A selective literature search has been performed. Expert opinion : The application of CIK cells as adoptive immunotherapy plays an important role in cancer treatment. Combining CIK cells with other conventional and established therapy options represents an innovative approach and will hopefully provide new insight for the future.
Cognitively Motivated Distributional Representations of Meaning

Although meaning is at the core of human cognition, state-of-the-art distributional semantic models (DSMs) are often agnostic to the findings in the area of semantic cognition. In this work, we present a novel type of DSMs motivated by the dual-processing cognitive perspective that is triggered by lexico-semantic activations in the short-term human memory. The proposed model is shown to perform better than state-of-the-art models for computing semantic similarity between words. The fusion of different types of DSMs is also investigated achieving results that are comparable or better than the state-of-the-art. The used corpora along with a set of tools, as well as large repositories of vectorial word representations are made publicly available for four languages (English, German, Italian, and Greek).
Multisensor image fusion in remote sensing: concepts, methods and applications

With the availability of multisensor, multitemporal, multiresolution and multifrequency image data from operational Earth observation satellites the fusion of digital image data has become a valuable tool in remote sensing image evaluation. Digital image fusion is a relatively new research ® eld at the leading edge of available technology. It forms a rapidly developing area of research in remote sensing. This review paper describes and explains mainly pixel based image fusion of Earth observation satellite data as a contribution to multisensor integration oriented data processing.
HArtes: Hardware-Software Codesign for Heterogeneous Multicore Platforms

Developing heterogeneous multicore platforms requires choosing the best hardware configuration for mapping the application, and modifying that application so that different parts execute on the most appropriate hardware component. The hArtes toolchain provides the option of automatic or semi-automatic support for this mapping. During test and validation on several computation-intensive applications, hArtes achieved substantial speedups and drastically reduced development times.
The melanoma‐associated transmembrane glycoprotein Gpnmb controls trafficking of cellular debris for degradation and is essential for tissue repair

Kidney damage due to injury rarely resolves completely, and there are currently no therapies capable of promoting repair. In addition to understanding mechanisms by which tissues are damaged, illuminating mechanisms of repair and regeneration is also of great importance. Here we show that the melanoma‐associated, transmembrane glycoprotein, Gpnmb, is up‐regulated 15‐fold following ischemic damage in kidney tissue and by more than 10‐fold in macrophages and 3‐fold in surviving epithelial cells. Gpnmb‐express‐ing macrophages and epithelial cells were found to contain apoptotic bodies at 3 times the rate of nonex‐pressing cells. Either mutation of Gpnmb or ablation of inflammatory macrophages prevents normal repair of the kidney. Significantly, the kidneys from postischemic Gpnmb mutant mice exhibited a 5‐fold increase in apoptotic cellular debris compared to wild‐type mice. These mice also experienced an 85% increase in mortality following bilateral ischemic kidney. Finally, we demonstrate that Gpnmb is a phagocytic protein that is necessary for recruitment of the autophagy protein LC3 to the phagosome where these proteins are colo‐calized and for lysosomal fusion with the phagosome and hence bulk degradation of their content. Therefore, Gpnmb is a novel prorepair gene that is necessary for crosstalk between the macroautophagic degradation pathway and phagocytosis. —Li, B. , Castano, A. P., Hudson, T. E. , Nowlin, B. T. , Lin, S. ‐L. , Bonventre, J. V. , Swanson, K. D. , Duffield, J. S. The melanoma‐associated transmembrane glycoprotein Gpnmb controls trafficking of cellular debris for degradation and is essential for tissue repair. FASEB J. 24, 4767–4781 (2010). www.fasebj. org
USB RF front-end of the DRM receiver under LabView API environment

DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) system uses software decoding what enables simpler RF front-end. DRM signal is a digital signal for radio broadcast on frequency bands below 30 MHz. The proposed USB RF front-end is designed to work with existing DRM software which uses soundcard as ADC between RF front-end and DRM decoding software. DAC of the decoded digital signal and audio reproduction is realized by PC integrated soundcard, while PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) used for frequency control of local oscillator uses DAC on external USB soundcard. In order to have a single software application, the existing DRM software is embedded in LabView environment which is developed for RF front-end control.
Apoptotic and nonapoptotic function of caspase 7 in spermatogenesis

Recent studies have reported that caspase 7 has an apoptotic and nonapoptotic function. However, the relationship between caspase 7 and spermatogenesis remains unknown. This study aimed to investigate the possible function of caspase 7 during normal and abnormal spermatogenesis. The cleaved form of caspase 7 was detected in testis tissues at different postpartum times (5-14 weeks) by qRT-PCR, Western blot and immunohistochemistry (IHC). Then, the mice models of spermatogenic dysfunction were obtained by busulfan (30 mg kg−1 to further evaluate the potential function and mechanism of caspase 7. qRT-PCR and Western blot results showed that caspase 7 expression was gradually elevated from 5 to 14 weeks, which was not connected with apoptosis. IHC results revealed that caspase 7 was mainly located in spermatogenic cells and Leydig cells. In addition, spermatogenic dysfunction induced by busulfan gradually enhanced the apoptosis and elevated the expression of caspase 3, caspase 6, and caspase 9, but decreased the expression of caspase 7 in spermatogenic cells. However, when spermatogenic cells were mostly disappeared at the fourth week after busulfan treatment, caspase 7 expression in Leydig cells was significantly increased and positively correlated with the expression of caspase 3, caspase 6, and caspase 9. Therefore, these results indicate that caspase 7 has a nonapoptic function that participates in normal spermatogenesis, but also displays apoptotic function in spermatogenic dysfunction.
Appearance-based object reacquisition for mobile manipulation

This paper describes an algorithm enabling a human supervisor to convey task-level information to a robot by using stylus gestures to circle one or more objects within the field of view of a robot-mounted camera. These gestures serve to segment the unknown objects from the environment. Our method's main novelty lies in its use of appearance-based object “reacquisition” to reconstitute the supervisory gestures (and corresponding segmentation hints), even for robot viewpoints spatially and/or temporally distant from the viewpoint underlying the original gesture. Reacquisition is particularly challenging within relatively dynamic and unstructured environments.