Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“Give me the purple ball” - he said to HRP-2 N.14

This paper reports current experiments conducted on HRP-2 based research on robot autonomy. The contribution of the paper is not focused on a specific area but its objective is to highlight the critical issues that had to be solved to allow the humanoid robot HRP-2 to understand and execute the order ldquogive me the purple ballrdquo in an autonomous way. Such an experiment requires: simple object recognition and localization, motion planning and control, natural spoken language supervision, simple action supervisor and control architecture.
Regression of symptomatic multiple cardiac rhabdomyomas associated with tuberous sclerosis complex in a newborn receiving everolimus.

UNLABELLED Cardiac rhabdomyoma is the most common primary cardiac tumor, is considered to be a hamartoma of developing cardiac myocytes. Cardiac rhabdomyoma is associated with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) in 50-86% of cases. Mutations in TSC-1/TSC-2 genes result in increased mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway activation responsible for the hamartomatous lesions of tuberous sclerosis complex. Therapy with mTOR inhibitors is currently under investigation as a treatment option for tumors associated with TSC. In this report we present a case with multiple symptomatic rhabdomyomas associated with tuberous sclerosis complex, deemed to be ineligible for surgical removal, treated with everolimus (mTOR inhibitor). CONCLUSION As we observed in our patient, in cases with inoperable symptomatic rhabdomyomas associated with TSC, everolimus, an mTOR inhibitor, may be the treatment of choice, which should be confirmed with additional studies.
What Consumers Value Regarding Water Supply Disruptions: A Discrete Choice Analysis?

In Australia, a series of reforms in the water industry has created a demand from the industry and regulators for objective methodologies to evaluate incremental changes in the customer service standards. In this paper, we explore the use of choice modelling for estimating implicit prices associated with urban water supply attributes. Results from Multinomial Logit (MNL) Models show that increase in annual water bill (bid amount) and the frequency of future interruptions were the most important attributes in the models of choice. Implicit price confidence intervals based on a random parameters logit (RPL) model suggest that people are willing to pay positive amounts to achieve a water supply that is less frequently interrupted. Other attributes, such as the provision of alternative water supplies during an interruption and notification of the interruption, were found to be unimportant to respondents. The range of bid amounts significantly (p<0.01) affected the price sensitivity. Choice modelling proved to be a useful technique and provided the industry and regulators with additional information for standard setting in Australia. Finally, the RPL and MNL models were useful to determine what consumers value regarding water supply disruptions. Increase to water bills and frequency of future interruptions are consistently valued. Acknowledgements: This study was funded through the Water Services Association of Australia and the Urban Water Program of the CSIRO. A Technical Reference Group provided advice throughout the development of the questionnaire consisting of Claude Piccinin (WSAA), Meredith Blais (Water Corporation), Mike Bormann (SA Water), David Heeps (City West Water), Gavin Morrison (Sydney Water), Naomi Roseth (Sydney Water), Xavier Smith (City West Water), Angela Tsoukatos (Sydney Water) and Kevin Young (Hunter Water). Research assistance was provided by (in reverse alphabetical order) Marianne Young, Sharon Rochow, Jan Mahoney, Rosemary Gabell, Ray Correll, Tim Buckland and Christine Buckland. Many thanks go to Stuart Whitten, Sarah Wheeler and David Hensher for answering questions on the fly. Any errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the authors despite all the efforts of all the aforementioned to set us on the right track.
Towards a parts-based approach to sub-cortical brain structure parsing

The automatic localization and segmentation, or parsing, of neuroanatomical brain structures is a key step in many neuroscience tasks. However, the inherent variability in these brain structures and their appearance continues to challenge medical image processing methods. The state of the art primarily relies upon local voxelbased morphometry, Markov random field, and probabilistic atlas based approaches, which limits the ability to explicitly capture the parts-based structure inherent in the brain. We propose a method that defines a principled parts-based representation of the sub-cortical brain structures. Our method is based on the pictorial structures model and jointly models the appearance of each part as well as the layout of the parts as a whole. Inference is cast as a maximum a posteriori problem and solved in a steepest-descent manner. Experimental results on a 28-case data set demonstrate high accuracy of our method and substantiate our claim that there is significant promise in a parts-based approach to modeling medical imaging structures.
Norepinephrine Genes Predict Response Time Variability and Methylphenidate-Induced Changes in Neuropsychological Function in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

AbstractNoradrenergic dysfunction may be associated with cognitive impairments in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), including increased response time variability, which has been proposed as a leading endophenotype for ADHD. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between polymorphisms in the &agr;-2A-adrenergic receptor (ADRA2A) and norepinephrine transporter (SLC6A2) genes and attentional performance in ADHD children before and after pharmacological treatment.One hundred one medication-naive ADHD children were included. All subjects were administered methylphenidate (MPH)–OROS for 12 weeks. The subjects underwent a computerized comprehensive attention test to measure the response time variability at baseline before MPH treatment and after 12 weeks. Additive regression analyses controlling for ADHD symptom severity, age, sex, IQ, and final dose of MPH examined the association between response time variability on the comprehensive attention test measures and allelic variations in single-nucleotide polymorphisms of the ADRA2A and SLC6A2 before and after MPH treatment.Increasing possession of an A allele at the G1287A polymorphism of SLC6A2 was significantly related to heightened response time variability at baseline in the sustained (P = 2.0 × 10−3) and auditory selective attention (P = 1.0 × 10−3) tasks. Response time variability at baseline increased additively with possession of the T allele at the DraI polymorphism of the ADRA2A gene in the auditory selective attention task (P = 2.0 × 10−3). After medication, increasing possession of a G allele at the MspI polymorphism of the ADRA2A gene was associated with increased MPH-related change in response time variability in the flanker task (P = 1.0 × 10−3). Our study suggested an association between norepinephrine gene variants and response time variability measured at baseline and after MPH treatment in children with ADHD. Our results add to a growing body of evidence, suggesting that response time variability is a viable endophenotype for ADHD and suggesting its utility as a surrogate end point for measuring stimulant response in pharmacogenetic studies.
The Postural Comfort Zone for Reaching Gestures

We have proposed a method for objective assessment of postural comfort (Kölsch et al., 2003). We defined comfort as the range of postures that is voluntarily assumed despite the availability of other postures. Designing user interfaces within the limits of comfort zones can avert risks associated with unknown alternative use patters of the interface. Here we report on a user study that investigated the comfort zone for free-hand gestures in the horizontal plane at about stomach height. This space is of particular interest to novel technologies such as gesture recognition and virtual reality. The results are in line with previous studies on postural discomfort, but improve on resolution and are not based on subjective, questionnaire-based data acquisition. This study also serves as an example for how to design studies for comfort evaluation.
The Fidelity of Initial Acquisition of Mutans Streptococci by Infants from Their Mothers

Previous cross-sectional studies using bacteriocin profiles, serotyping, or genotyping suggest that mothers are the principle source of mutans streptococci (MS) to their infants. This study determined the commonality of MS genotypes between mothers and their infants at the time of initial acquisition. Oral bacteria of mothers and their infants were monitored from birth for approximately 3 years at three-month intervals. Genotypes of MS in infants appeared identical to those present in mothers in approximately 71% of 34 mother-infant pairs studied. Interestingly, female infants acquired MS genotypes identical to their mothers' with significantly greater fidelity than male infants (88% vs. 53%). Homology of genotypes between mothers and their infants at initial acquisition strongly suggests that MS strains were transmitted from mother to infant and that this transfer exhibited gender specificity. In no instance did we observe homology of genotypes between fathers and infants or fathers and mothers, further supporting the notion that acquisition of MS in humans follows maternal lines. Although the prevalence of dental caries was low in this young child population (11/34; 32%), we observed that male children who harbored the same genotype as their mothers had a 13 times greater likelihood of having caries than female children who acquired their mothers' strain; this difference was statistically significant (p < 0.01). Although we do not know the biological mechanisms governing fidelity of acquisition between a mother and her infant, our data suggest that caries outcome may be, in part, determined by both the source of MS and the presence of a specific genotype of MS. These findings point to continued studies which will further delineate the interrelation among gender, race, and caries outcome as a function of fidelity of transfer of MS from mothers to their infants.
Dental Care Utilization for Examination and Regional Deprivation

Objectives: Receiving proper dental care plays a significant role in maintaining good oral health. We investigated the relationship between regional deprivation and dental care utilization. Methods: Multilevel logistic regression was used to identify the relationship between the regional deprivation level and dental care utilization purpose, adjusting for individual-level variables, in adults aged 19+ in the 2008 Korean Community Health Survey (n=220 258). Results: Among Korean adults, 12.8% used dental care to undergo examination and 21.0% visited a dentist for other reasons. In the final model, regional deprivation level was associated with significant variations in dental care utilization for examination (p<0.001). However, this relationship was not shown with dental care utilization for other reasons in the final model. Conclusions: This study’s findings suggest that policy interventions should be considered to reduce regional variations in rates of dental care utilization for examination.
Hierarchical relation in simulation models

Hierarchical modeling is a powerful means to handle system simulation model complexity. It can often be loosely defined, however, creating ambiguities in its application to simulation modeling. In order to define hierarchical modeling, different aspects of simulation models are defined. Then four principal model hierarchical relations are defined and discussed: representation, composition, substitution, and specification. Hierarchical relations are then applied to the appropriate model aspects to provide a more complete definition of hierarchical modeling.
Location-aware mobile applications based on directory services

Location-aware applications are becoming increasingly attractive due to the widespread dissemination of wireless networks and the emergence of small and cheap locating technologies. We developed a location information server that simplifies and speeds up the development of these applications by offering a set of generic location retrieval and notification services to the application. The data model and the access protocols of these services are based on the X.500 directory service and the lightweight directory access protocol LDAP since these are becoming the standard attribute-value-pair retrieval mechanisms for Internet and Intranet environments. This approach establishes a smooth migration path from conventional to location-aware applications. The paper presents the location information server concepts, defines its directory data model and access services, and discusses the implementation options of the location information server.
X-Ray Synchrotron Emission from 10-100 TeV Cosmic-Ray Electrons in the Supernova Remnant SN 1006

We present the results of a joint spectral analysis of RXTE PCA, ASCA SIS, and ROSAT PSPC data of the supernova remnant SN 1006. This work represents the first attempt to model both the thermal and nonthermal X-ray emission over the entire X-ray energy band from 0.12 to 17 keV. The thermal flux is described by a nonequilibrium ionization model with an electron temperature kTe = 0.6 keV, an ionization timescale n0t = 9 × 109 cm-3 s, and a relative elemental abundance of silicon that is 10-18 times larger than the solar abundance. The nonthermal X-ray spectrum is described by a broken power law model with low- and high-energy photon indices Γ1 = 2.1 and Γ2 = 3.0, respectively. Since the nonthermal X-ray spectrum steepens with increasing energy, the results of the present analysis corroborate previous claims that the nonthermal X-ray emission is produced by synchrotron radiation. We argue that the magnetic field strength is significantly larger than previous estimates of about 10 μG and arbitrarily use a value of 40 μG to estimate the parameters of the cosmic-ray electron, proton, and helium spectra of the remnant. The results for the ratio of the number densities of protons and electrons (R = 160 at 1 GeV), the total energy in cosmic rays (Ecr = 1 × 1050 ergs), and the spectral index of the electrons at 1 GeV (Γe = 2.14 ± 0.12) are consistent with the hypothesis that Galactic cosmic rays are accelerated predominantly in the shocks of supernova remnants. Yet, the remnant may or may not accelerate nuclei to energies as high as the energy of the "knee," depending on the reason why the maximum energy of the electrons is only 10 TeV.
Traceability between business process and software component using Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis

Business process and software component has relationship on business process execution in the organization or company. Changes in business process affecting the software component. A Method is needed to determine traceability of artifacts between process on business process and software component. The purpose of traceability is to trace the difference between business process of accompany and its software component through the artifacts. The artifacts in business process are identified by sequence of process, while the artifacts in software component are in the form of modules. In the proposed method, there are two main stage, namely modelling of process on business process and software component and document clustering using Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA). In the modelling phase, process on business process and software component are grouped into documents. Then, the documents are processed by separating document into words. In the document clustering, documents are calculated using PLSA. It can be concluded that the document clustering can be done with recall 100% and precision 59%.
Tangent flow estimation based on 3-D gradient constraint

Due to the limitation of the gradient constraint, only the normal flow, which is one of the optical flow components that is in the direction of the image gradient, can be computed directly. Consequently, an additional smoothness assumption has to be imposed in order to compute the optical flow. However, such assumption could yield a mismatch, especially on the boundaries of moving objects, besides the computational complexity issue. To address these concerns, in this paper, a three-dimensional (3-D) gradient constraint is developed and imposed for computing the optical flow without exploiting any smoothness assumption on the motion field. Based on this 3-D gradient constraint, the tangent flow, which is another optical flow component that is perpendicular to the normal flow, could be obtained through our derived closed-form solution at each pixel position. This also means that the standard aperture problem could be efficiently solved. The experimental results show that the proposed approach yields a fairly precise optical flow field with a very low computational load.
Motivation of Sichuan Earthquake Volunteers and Its Implication for Emergency Management

[Purpose] We attempted to explore the unique feature of volunteers' motivation in emergency events. [Method] Firstly, the reliability and validity of Volunteer Functions Inventory (VFI) was tested to confirm its applicability in Chinese participants. Secondly, the differences of motivation between Sichuan earthquake volunteers and other three kinds of volunteers (Beijing Olympic Game volunteers, volunteer teacher candidates and Beijing Paralympic Game volunteers) were found using ANOVA. [Results] The results showed that the most important motivation for volunteers in the emergency events was value. They also had relatively higher motivation in the understanding dimension compared with other kinds of volunteers. [Conclusion] The findings suggested the existence of multi-motivation in volunteers of emergency events and the organizations should pay more attention to volunteers' value and understanding motivation during the process of management. The organizer should provide the opportunity to express volunteers' personal value and to learn and exercise their knowledge, skills, and abilities through their volunteering experience.
Occupational pensions and interfirm job mobility in the European Union. Evidence from the ECHP survey

Discussion of problems posed by defined benefit occupational pension plans to the free circulation of private sector workers in the European Union has been mainly driven by the theoretical arguments, while little attempt has been made to support these arguments with empircal evidence. The paper's main objective is to fill this gap, modelling the role of expected pension portability losses on individual job mobility choices in a sample of European Union Member States with different pension portability rules, and estimating the model with a new longitudinal data set derived from the first two waves of the European Community Household Panel survey. Individual job mobility status is seen as endogenously determined through a comparative evaluation of expected benefits and costs from mobility. Following Heckman's (1979) two-step procedure, we consistently estimate wage equations parameters and individual mover/stayer structural wage differentials corrected for self-selectivity. Maximum likelihood estimatation of a structural probit equation accounting for estimated wage differentials allows the recovering of structural mobility costs parameters. In particular, occupational defined benefit pensions seem to act, through pension portability losses, as a significant impediment to individual labour mobility in all countries but Spain, while evidence for Denmark is consistent with full portability of defined contribution pensions.
Contests for Status

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A principal determines the number and size of status categories in order to maximize output. We first consider the pure status case without tangible prizes. Our results connect the optimal partition in status categories to properties of the distribution of ability among contestants. The top status category always contains a unique element. For distributions that have an increasing failure rate (IFR), a proliferation of status classes is optimal, whereas the optimal partition involves only two categories if the distribution of abilities is sufficiently concave. Moreover, for IFR distributions, a coarse partition with two status categories achieves at least half of the output obtained in the optimal partition with many categories. Finally, if status is derived solely from monetary rewards, we show that the optimal partition in status classes contains only two categories.
Optical spatial modulation with polarization shift keying over atmospheric turbulence channels

We present a novel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) optical modulation method that combines spatial modulation (SM) with multilevel polarization shift keying (MPOLSK). The proposed approach, denoted SM-MPOLSK, offers better power and spectral efficiencies than conventional optical modulation methods. We evaluate the performance of SM-MPOLSK over free space optical (FSO) channels and provide average bit error probability (ABEP) bounds for both uncoded and coded performances. The theoretical derivations are also corroborated via extensive simulation results and comparisons with conventional MIMO-FSO modulation approaches.
Emotion recognition from speech under environmental noise conditions using wavelet decomposition

Automatic emotion recognition considering speech signals has attracted the attention of the research community in the last years. One of the main challenges is to find suitable features to represent the affective state of the speaker. In this paper, a new set of features derived from the wavelet packet transform is proposed to classify different negative emotions such as anger, fear, and disgust, and to differentiate between those negative emotions and neutral state, or positive emotions such as happiness. Different wavelet decompositions are considered both for voiced and unvoiced segments, in order to determine a frequency band where the emotions are concentrated. Several measures are calculated in the wavelet decomposed signals, including log-energy, entropy measures, mel frequency cepstral coefficients, and the Lempel-Ziv complexity. The experiments consider two different databases extensively used in emotion recognition: the Berlin emotional database, and the enterface05 database. Also, in order to approximate to real-world conditions in terms of the quality of recorded speech, such databases are degraded using different environmental noise such as cafeteria babble, and street noise. The addition of noise is performed considering several signal to noise ratio levels which range from -3 to 6 dB. Finally, the effect produced by two different speech enhancement methods is evaluated. According to results, the features calculated from the lower frequency wavelet decomposition coefficients are able to recognize the fear-type emotions in speech. Also, one of the speech enhancement algorithms has proven to be useful to improve of the accuracy in cases of speech signals affected by highly background noise.