Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gender-Based Perceptions of the Challenges, Changes, and Essential Skills of the Principalship

This study investigated the role perceptions of principals and whether gender influenced those perceptions. Results indicate that the job of principals has changed significantly during the last 5 years. Internal and external forces have made the position very challenging. Although men and women agree on many of the roles, challenges, and skills required of them as principals, the study found differences in the manner in which these two groups perceive their responsibilities. Women appear to view their tasks more globally than males and think of themselves as leaders of others in a team relationship. Men, on the other hand, approach the job as managers of others. The findings have implications for the identification, education, and selection of principals.
Application of neuromorphic visual processing in pedestrian detection technology

There have been many researches on computer vision for the purpose of vehicle safety applications, making use of diverse methodologies like complex vision algorithms. However, despite its effectiveness, computer vision algorithms sometimes lack the robustness of mammalian visual system for the application in dynamic environments in vehicle driving conditions. We propose that the neuromorphic visual information processing offers an alternative which mimics the robustness and flexibility of the primary visual cortex, based on Hubel and Wiesel's experimentation and Hodgkin-Huxley formalism. The elements of implementation of neuromorphic visual system is introduced with the orientation tuned function of synaptic connections and the spiking neurons. The effectiveness of proposed neuromorphic visual processing system is evaluated for the safety enhancement via the 95% of pedestrian detection rate for electric vehicle's virtual engine sound system.
Recursive Finite Newton Algorithm for Support Vector Regression in the Primal

Some algorithms in the primal have been recently proposed for training support vector machines. This letter follows those studies and develops a recursive finite Newton algorithm (IHLF-SVR-RFN) for training nonlinear support vector regression. The insensitive Huber loss function and the computation of the Newton step are discussed in detail. Comparisons with LIBSVM 2.82 show that the proposed algorithm gives promising results.
Renegotiation in Service Level Agreement Management for a Cloud-Based System

Managing Service Level Agreement (SLA) within a cloud-based system is important to maintain service continuity and improve trust due to cloud flexibility and scalability. We conduct a general review on cloud-based systems to understand how service continuity and trust are addressed in cloud SLA management. The review shows that SLA renegotiation is necessary to improve trust and maintain service continuity; however, research on SLA renegotiation is limited. Of the two key approaches in renegotiation, namely bargaining-based negotiation and offer generation--based negotiation, the latter approach is the most promising due to its ability to generate optimized multiple-offer SLA parameters within one round during renegotiation.
Orange juice–derived flavanone and phenolic metabolites do not acutely affect cardiovascular risk biomarkers: a randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial in men at moderate risk of cardiovascular disease

Background: Epidemiologic data suggest inverse associations between citrus flavanone intake and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. However, insufficient randomized controlled trial data limit our understanding of the mechanisms by which flavanones and their metabolites potentially reduce cardiovascular risk factors. Objective: We examined the effects of orange juice or a dose-matched hesperidin supplement on plasma concentrations of established and novel flavanone metabolites and their effects on cardiovascular risk biomarkers in men at moderate CVD risk. Design: In an acute, randomized, placebo-controlled crossover trial, 16 fasted participants (aged 51–69 y) received orange juice or a hesperidin supplement (both providing 320 mg hesperidin) or control (all matched for sugar and vitamin C content). At baseline and 5 h postintake, endothelial function (primary outcome), blood pressure, arterial stiffness, cardiac autonomic function, platelet activation, and NADPH oxidase gene expression and plasma flavanone metabolites were assessed. Before each intervention, a diet low in flavonoids, nitrate/nitrite, alcohol, and caffeine was followed, and a standardized low-flavonoid evening meal was consumed. Results: Orange juice intake significantly elevated mean ± SEM plasma concentrations of 8 flavanone (1.75 ± 0.35 μmol/L, P < 0.0001) and 15 phenolic (13.27 ± 2.22 μmol/L, P < 0.0001) metabolites compared with control at 5 h postconsumption. Despite increased plasma flavanone and phenolic metabolite concentrations, cardiovascular risk biomarkers were unaltered. After hesperidin supplement intake, flavanone metabolites were not different from the control, suggesting altered absorption/metabolism compared with the orange juice matrix. Conclusions: After single-dose flavanone intake within orange juice, circulating flavanone and phenolic metabolites collectively reached a concentration of 15.20 ± 2.15 μmol/L, but no effects were observed on cardiovascular risk biomarkers. Longer-duration randomized controlled trials are required to examine previous associations between higher flavanone intakes and improved cardiovascular health and to ascertain the relative importance of food matrix and flavanone-derived phenolic metabolites. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01530893.
Efficient Sink Location Acquirement Scheme for Geographic Routing

Geographic routing has been considered as an efficient, simple, and scalable routing protocol for wireless sensor networks since it exploits pure local location information instead of global topology information to route data packets. Geographic routing requires the sources nodes to be aware of the location of sinks. Most existing geographic routing protocols merely assume that source nodes are aware of the location of sinks or can get the location of sinks by some service. How can source nodes get the location of sinks was not addressed in detail. In this paper, we propose an efficient sink location acquirement scheme for geographic routing in wireless sensor networks. Simulation results show that our protocol is significantly superior to other protocols in terms of energy consumption and control overhead.
Using graphically represented ontologies for searching content on the semantic Web

The idea behind the semantic Web is to include semantic information on each Web page, so that machine processing for retrieving relevant information is made easier (Berners-Lee et al., 1997). In order to be able to retrieve relevant information, the user still needs to be able to query the Web in an efficient way to exploit the full potential of semantic Web technology. This work describes an application design for using graphically represented ontologies for searching the (semantic) Web. One of the benefits of this approach is that these queries can be translated to different query languages such as RQL(Broekstra and Kampman, 2001; Karvounarakis, et al., 2001), OWL (Heflin, 2003), XQL (Robie et al., 1998), etc.
Automated detection of fMRI artefacts from Shannon entropy distributions

As the number of subjects in modern fMRI experiments increases, the use of automated analysis pipelines is becoming more popular, leading to less manual inspection of the data. Here we promote the use of Shannon entropy distributions to discover those datasets in large studies suffering from various artefacts. Entropy distributions of 1444 resting state fMRI datasets from the 1000 Functional Connectomes Project are examined and mean distributions found after each of several different preprocessing steps. Empirically derived envelopes are generated so that significantly outlying datasets may be identified. This process of outlier detection may be automated such that those datasets with characteristic shifts in entropy caused by specific artefacts may be flagged for further manual examination or removed from further analysis. We conclude this technique will be a useful quality control method when dealing with data from large studies.
Performance evaluation of Data Mining algorithms on three generations of Intel® microarchitecture

Data Mining algorithms and machine learning techniques form a key part of the majority of computing applications today. They are becoming an inherent part of business decision processes, e-commerce, social networking and social media applications as well as commercial and scientific computing applications. It is becoming increasingly important to provide a high performance computing platform for these emerging data mining applications. In this paper we explore the performance characteristics of the data mining benchmark suite MineBench across three “tock” generations of Intel microarchitecture. Our objective is to study the impact of microarchitecture improvements on the performance of data mining algorithms. We present comparative microarchitecture characteristics between data mining algorithms and SPEC INT 2006 benchmarks. We have proposed a generic cycle accounting methodology to attribute performance improvements to various units of the microprocessor. The proposed methodology helps differentiate the impact on performance due to front-end and back-end microarchitecture improvements.
Strengthened Hardness for Approximating Minimum Unique Game and Small Set Expansion

In this paper, the author puts forward a variation of Feige's Hypothesis, which claims that it is hard on average refuting Unbalanced Max 3-XOR under biased assignments on a natural distribution. Under this hypothesis, the author strengthens the previous known hardness for approximating Minimum Unique Game, $5/4-\epsilon$, by proving that Min 2-Lin-2 is hard to within $3/2-\epsilon$ and strengthens the previous known hardness for approximating Small Set Expansion, $4/3-\epsilon$, by proving that Min Bisection is hard to approximate within $3-\epsilon$. In addition, the author discusses the limitation of this method to show that it can strengthen the hardness for approximating Minimum Unique Game to $2-\kappa$ where $\kappa$ is a small absolute positive, but is short of proving $\omega_k(1)$ hardness for Minimum Unique Game (or Small Set Expansion), by assuming a generalization of this hypothesis on Unbalanced Max k-CSP with Samorodnitsky-Trevisan hypergraph predicate.
Student Monitoring System Of Our Lady Of Fatima University Using Face Recognition

: Face recognition has been one of the most interesting and important research fields in the past two decades. The reasons come from the need of automatic recognitions and surveillance systems, the interest in human visual system on face recognition, and the design of human-computer interface, etc. The rapid development of face recognition is due to a combination of factors: active development of algorithms, the availability of large databases of facial images, and a method for evaluating the performance of face recognition algorithms. The system covers any departments, agencies or companies which require personal identification and security to their employees. The face recognition system covers multiple face photos, matching of faces, head rotations, detects 66 facial feature points (eyes, eyebrows, mouth and nose) and all data are placed in a database. Additional enrolments will be required upon various changes in registered faces. The said system only limits to personal identification which contains certain fields about the registered user, it cannot detect the skin color and age of a person and the system is not a video-based face recognition system. This system does not expect to solve all the issues in face recognition, such as extreme facial expression, wearing on the face, great age discrepancy and extreme lightning condition and without frontal face information.
A model to predict poor survival in patients undergoing transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunts

Transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunts (TIPS) may worsen liver function and decrease survival in some patients. The Child‐Pugh classification has several drawbacks when used to determine survival in such patients. The survival of 231 patients at 4 medical centers within the United States who underwent elective TIPS was studied to develop statistical models to (1) predict patient survival and (2) identify those patients whose liver‐related mortality post‐TIPS would be 3 months or less. Among these elective TIPS patients, 173 had the procedure for prevention of variceal rebleeding and 58 for treatment of refractory ascites. Death related to liver disease occurred in 110 patients, 70 within 3 months. Cox proportional‐hazards regression identified serum concentrations of bilirubin and creatinine, international normalized ratio for prothrombin time (INR), and the cause of the underlying liver disease as predictors of survival in patients undergoing elective TIPS, either for prevention of variceal rebleeding or for treatment of refractory ascites. These variables can be used to calculate a risk score (R) for patients undergoing elective TIPS. Patients with R > 1.8 had a median survival of 3 months or less. This model was superior to both the Child‐Pugh classification, as well as the Child‐Pugh score, in predicting survival. Using logistic regression and the same variables, we also developed a nomogram that indicates which patients survive less than 3 months. Finally, the model was validated among an independent set of 71 patients from the Netherlands. This Mayo TIPS model may predict early death following elective TIPS for either prevention of variceal rebleeding or for treatment of refractory ascites.
Projection and Interaction with Ad-hoc Interfaces on Non-planar Surfaces

Projector-based display systems have been used in area of computer interaction as Ad-hoc interface in recent time. The mobile hand-held projectors are becoming more popular. Many human centric user interfaces with the human wearable computer are being developed. Most of such system uses daily objects for projection and the interaction. But most of ignores the fact that these object surfaces are not planar. Hence such interfaces suffers from the distortion due to non-planar projection surface. Besides this projection quality also suffers from the radiometric distortion as well. Further more the interaction proposed with such interfaces bound to the planar surface only. Hence this paper is targeted to address the geometric distortion free projection of and interaction with such interfaces on non planar surfaces. Kinect is used as depth sensor for 3D scenario acquisition. We use image-per warping to mesh from Kinect. We use colored fingertip gloves for interaction. Here our system aims any day to day object surface for distortion free projection such as human body, curved wall, room corners, curtain's and many more objects.
A 17-kD centromere protein (CENP-A) copurifies with nucleosome core particles and with histones

We have detected and begun to characterize a 17-kD centromere-specific protein, CENP-A (Earnshaw, W. C., and N. Rothfield, 1985, Chromosoma., 91:313-321). Sera from several humans with CREST scleroderma autoimmune disease (CREST: calcinosis, Raynaud's phenomenon, esophageal dsymotility, sclerodactyly, and telangiectasia) bind this protein in immunoblot assays of HeLa whole cell or nuclear extracts. We have affinity purified the anti-17-kD centromere protein (anti-CENP-A) specific antibodies from immunoblots of HeLa nuclear protein. The antibodies react with epitopes present on CENP-A derived from humans but apparently do not recognize specific epitopes in either rat or chicken nuclei. Only human nuclear protein is CENP-A positive by immunoblot. Furthermore, human cells show localization of anti-CENP-A antibody to centromeres by immunofluorescence microscopy, whereas rat cells do not. On extraction from the nucleus, CENP-A copurifies with core histones and with nucleosome core particles. We conclude that this centromere-specific protein is a histone-like component of chromatin. The data suggest that CENP-A functions as a centromere-specific core histone.
Reviewing crisp, fuzzy, grey and rough mathematical models

The aim of this paper is to investigate advantages of grey system theory. A lot of vague concepts like fuzzy sets, grey systems or rough sets has been proposed in the past. However, the unique concept of grey system theory, for example, it is useful under lack of data situation, is still unclear because a few articles discuss and deal with in real application. In this paper firstly numbers, membership functions, operations, crisp conversions and data pre-processing methods of each vague concept are summarized to review with several illustrations. Secondly the uniqueness of grey concept is discussed. It is found that the grey lattice operation and the nominal-the- better of grey generating are unique methods unlike fuzzy- based models or rough-based models. The unique concepts of grey system theory are 'interval data analysis' and 'target-based data analysis', which should add to the existing ones. Given data sets are analyzed strategically in grey system theory from these concepts.
Validity of critical frequency test for measuring table tennis aerobic endurance through specific protocol.

UNLABELLED The aim of this study was to validate critical frequency specific test (critf) for the estimation of the aerobic endurance in table tennis players. METHODS Eight male international-level table tennis players participated of this study. Specific tests were applied by using a mechanical ball thrower to control the intensity of the exercise. The critf was determined by applying three or four series of exercises to exhaustion (Tlim). The critf was evaluated by using lactate steady state test (90, 100, and 106 % of critf intensity). The other specific test was an incremental protocol used to determine the anaerobic threshold (AnTBI) and the onset of blood lactate accumulation (OBLA) using a ball thrower. RESULTS The critf (39.87 ± 3.31 balls·min(-1)) was not significantly different among AnTBI (48.11 ± 7.36 balls·min(- 1)) and OBLA3.5 (49.36 ± 12.04 balls·min(-1)) frequencies and it was correlated with AnTBI parameter (r = 0.78). At frequencies of the 90 and 100% of critf a dynamic equilibrium was verified in lactate concentration between the eighth and twentieth minutes. However, this dynamic equilibrium was not found at 106% intensity. CONCLUSION The data indicate that in table tennis the critf model can be used for measuring the aerobic endurance. Key pointsIn table tennis is need the use of a specific protocol for evaluation of the aerobic endurance.The critical frequency test in table tennis seems to represent the intensity of maximal equilibrium of lactatemia.The critical frequency test can be used for measuring table tennis aerobic endurance through specific protocol.
Export Channel Dynamics: An Empirical Analysis of Changes in the Organization of Foreign Distribution

In this paper we use longitudinal data from a sample of Danish exporters in order to investigate the dynamics of export organization. Building on previous research, we model such decisions as an interplay between various switch inducing (motivators) as well as switch impeding(costs) factors. We extend previous analyses by looking simultaneously at both replacements of foreign intermediaries (within-mode shifts) and integration of the sales function abroad (between mode shifts).
Influence of Pause Length on Listeners' Impressions in Simultaneous Interpretation

We have been attempting to realize simultaneous machine interpretation. However, determining the interpreting utterance timing is as difficult as determining translation units. This remains a major concern for the development of such a speech translation system. It is also crucial for the system’s users that the speech generated by the system is clear and easy to listen to. In this paper, we focus attention on the pauses that partly characterize simultaneous interpreters’ utterances. We attempt to analyze the results of an experiment conducted using 31 subjects on the relationship between listener-friendliness and the length of pauses in speech, using the CIAIR simultaneous interpretation database as the data source. The results generated some knowledge about listener impressions of simultaneous interpretation, which will be helpful for realizing simultaneous machine interpretation.
Robust delay-dependent α-synchronization of a class of uncertain noise-perturbed time-delayed chaotic and hyper-chaotic systems

In this paper, a robust delay-dependent α-synchronization via output feedback for a class of uncertain noise-perturbed time-delayed chaotic systems with unequally perturbed parameters is considered. Based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii stability theorem and linear matrix inequality (LMI) technique, a criterion is obtained to guarantee that the slave system is robustly α-synchronized to the master system, and the effects of noise perturbation on the synchronization error is attenuated to a prescribed level using an H∞ performance index. Finally, numerical simulations on chaotic and hyper chaotic systems are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed synchronization scheme.
Student success and retention from the perspectives of engineering students and faculty

Student retention and success is a complex issue, with many factors that impact an individual student’s retention and these factors varying across all of our students. At the University of Southern Indiana (USI), efforts within engineering, as well as across the college and university, have included intentional academic support services (such as expanded advising and tutoring services) and student development programs and extracurricular activities to foster student communities and a student’s sense of belonging. In addition, evidence indicates that implementing curricular changes across an engineering program and within specific courses, such as implementing active learning, instructional innovations, and high-impact practices, can improve student success and retention. This paper describes a systems thinking approach to gain better understanding of student retention and success from multiple perspectives. Through systems thinking, connections and interdependencies between elements related to the goal of improving student retention and success in engineering can be explored. Framing student retention in this connected and big picture perspective can help identify impacting factors that then inform potential solutions. The process involved engineering students, faculty, and staff in developing systems maps around the question “what impacts your (or students’) success in engineering? ” Systems mapping was used to collaboratively generate graphical representations of the many factors and actions that impact student retention and success and how they are connected through feedback loops and interdependencies. Systems mapping also creates opportunities for reflection of beliefs and assumptions around academic success and retention, interaction with other perspectives, and conversations. Students enrolled in Electric Circuits and Senior Design, which both are required undergraduate engineering courses, and engineering faculty and staff were invited to participate in the systems mapping activities. This paper discusses the results of the systems maps generated, with analysis of the overall set and comparison of the studentand faculty-developed systems maps.