Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The acoustics of eye contact: detecting visual attention from conversational audio cues

An important aspect in short dialogues is attention as is manifested by eye-contact between subjects. In this study we provide a first analysis whether such visual attention is evident in the acoustic properties of a speaker's voice. We thereby introduce the multi-modal GRAS2 corpus, which was recorded for analysing attention in human-to-human interactions of short daily-life interactions with strangers in public places in Graz, Austria. Recordings of four test subjects equipped with eye tracking glasses, three audio recording devices, and motion sensors are contained in the corpus. We describe how we robustly identify speech segments from the subjects and other people in an unsupervised manner from multi-channel recordings. We then discuss correlations between the acoustics of the voice in these segments and the point of visual attention of the subjects. A significant relation between the acoustic features and the distance between the point of view and the eye region of the dialogue partner is found. Further, we show that automatic classification of binary decision eye-contact vs. no eye-contact from acoustic features alone is feasible with an Unweighted Average Recall of up to 70%.
An Approach for Generating Architectures for Pervasive Systems from Selected Features

In this paper, we present a feature-driven approach for generating pervasive systems architectures. Our approach is based on the methodology for automatic generation of pervasive systems architectures from a predetermined architectural feature set. A set of pervasive systems architectural features relevant to such kinds of systems was researched, and a mapping between such features and relevant component diagrams was established. Based on the selection of features, an automatically generated architecture is constructed through the aggregation of various kinds of components relevant to the selected features. This effort is a first attempt towards the creation of a configurable reference architecture for pervasive systems, and the subsequent specification of a product line supporting the rapid development of such types of systems. Using the Feature Modeling Plug-in (FMP) with Eclipse and the Visual Paradigm for UML, we developed a program in C# that generates pervasive systems architectures. We used FMP with Eclipse in order to generate a feature model for pervasive systems under design. Visual Paradigm for UML was then used to map the different selected features to component diagrams. The component diagrams were then aggregated using known design patterns to generate the architecture in question.
A Ten-Value-Type Framework Associated With Spectator Sports

Prior value studies in sport settings have been focused on participation rather than spectatorship. This study is an initial step in examining the values associated with spectator sports. Interviews and focus groups were utilized in this qualitative study within four progressive phases for triangulation, transferability, and constant comparative assessment. A total of 54 individuals participated in the study. Because values were subjectively perceived at the highest level of abstraction reflecting desirable preference experiences, the interviews were designed to include seven categories of questions: Three categories dealt with observed behaviors and implied metaphors, and four categories including questions comparing spectator sports and sport participation, religion, other leisure activities, and substitutes. Grounded data techniques guided the coding procedure. Using the transcriptions and notes from 26 interviews and three focus groups, five coders were used to provide evidence of interrater reliability. Based on the results of the data analyses, a 10-value-type framework was developed in relation to spectator sports: (a) Enjoyment (pleasure and satisfaction), (b) Sociability (social interaction through sport spectating), (c) Identity (enhancing self-esteem), (d) Status (pursuing social recognition), (e) Moral, (f) Spirituality (inner peace, strength, meaning, and purpose in life), (g) Epistemic, (h) Aesthetics, (i) Ritual (sports spectating becomes a series of formal and serious acts followed regularly and invariably as end-experience), and (j) no or negative values. Different from Kahle’s (1983), Maslow’s (1970a), and Schwartz’ (1992) value theories, the framework was specifically associated with spectator sports and is expected to better predict spectator sport behavior than does a scale measuring motivations of sports fans.
On the optimal reconfiguration times for TMR circuits on SRAM based FPGAs

Unreliable and harsh environmental conditions in avionics and space applications demand run-time adaptation capabilities to withstand environmental changes and radiation-induced faults. Modern SRAM-based FPGAs integrating high computational power with partial and dynamic reconfiguration abilities are a usual candidate for such systems. However, due to the vulnerability of these devices to Single Event Upsets (SEUs), designs need proper fault-handling mechanisms. In this work we propose a novel circuit instrumentation method for probing Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) circuits for error detection at the granularity of individual domains and then use selective run-time dynamic reconfiguration for recovery. Error detection logic is inserted in the physical net-list to identify and localize faults. Moreover, selective domain reconfiguration is achieved by careful considerations in the placement phase on the FPGA reconfigurable area. The proposed technique is suitable for systems having hard real-time constraints. Our results demonstrate that this approach has an overhead of 2 LUTs per majority voter in internal partitions in terms of area when compared to the standard TMR circuits. In addition, it brings down the reconfiguration times of TMR circuits to a single domain and ensures a 100% availability of the device assuming the Single Event Upset fault model.
Television and the Rest of Life: A Systematic Comparison of Subjective Experience

TELEVISION'S IMPACT on American life, according to Robinson s (1969, 1972) studies of time budgets, has been responsible for a greater rearrangement of life activities than the automobile. Not only has the time devoted to television cut into time previously committed to other mass media, but it has absorbed significant portions of time formerly spent in social and other leisure activities (Goldsen 1977); Comstock, 1980). The present research offers a behavioral and experiential account of TV viewing and addresses the following questions: In what combination of activities is television watching typically embedded? How does the subjective experience of watching television differ from other typical activities? How is TV watching related to one's experience of family life? Previous research on how people feel while watching television has been conducted either in artificial laboratory conditions or retrospectively, with respondents relying on their memories (Bower,
Adrenal Bone Marrow Cerebellum Cerebrum Eye Gonad Heart Hippocampus Kidney Liver Lung Muscle Spleen Striatum Spinal Cord Thymus

The AGEMAP project generated an 8932 by 16 matrix of p-values for whether gene i is age related in tissue j of the mouse. For each gene, a meta-analysis is required to pool over tissues, and then a multiple hypothesis testing method is required to control false discoveries. This paper looks at the meta-analysis issues raised in greater depth. The AGEMAP analysis used a test statistic first used by Pearson (1934) designed to be most sensitive to departures that all go in the same direction. Pearson’s statistic has been considered inadmissible for over 50 years. We find that it has the best overall performance in separating age related genes from others in a resampling simulation modeled on the real experiment. We also prove that Pearson’s statistic really is admissible and get a sharp bound for it’s tail probabilities.
Simulating inter-organizational collaboration network: a multi-relational and event-based approach

In this research, we study inter-organizational collaboration from the perspective of multi-relational networks. We develop an agent-based model to simulate how a collaboration network among organizations emerges from organizations’ interactions through another network: the inter-organizational communication network. Our model adds links (or edges) into the collaboration network on the basis of events, which correspond to organizations’ formation of collaborative teams for joint projects. The proposed approach also models the competitive yet non-exclusive dissemination of information among organizations, organizations’ dynamic prioritization of candidate projects, and network-based influence. Applying the model to a case study of the humanitarian sector, we configure and validate the agent-based simulation, and use it to analyze how to promote inter-organizational humanitarian collaboration by encouraging communication. The simulation results suggest that encouraging communication between peripheral organizations can better promote collaboration than other strategies.
A social work study on aggressive behavior among Iranian students

Article history: Received July 15, 2011 Received in Revised form August, 30, 2011 Accepted 30 August 2011 Available online 10 September 2011 Aggressive behavior has many bad effects on people's health care and lifestyle and any attempt to find the main issues influencing aggressive behavior among young students could help setup appropriate programs to control and possibly reduce aggressive attitudes. The proposed study of this paper performs an empirical study to find out the relationship between aggressive behavior and other important factors such as gender, age, etc. The survey uses a well-known questionnaire introduced by Buss and Perry (The aggression questionnaire, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 452-459, 1992). The survey distributes 500 questionnaire consists of different questions based on Likert scale among 250 female and 250 male students. The questionnaire consists of various questions including anger, physical aggression, verbal aggression and hostility. The results indicate that while there is no meaningful difference between aggression attitudes of female and male students (with pvalue<0.001), the aggressive attitudes increases among older male students but this aggressive reduces among female students as they get older. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
The ADP/ATP Ratio: A Novel Predictive Assay for Quality Assessment of Isolated Pancreatic Islets

The current standard assays for islet product release criteria are unable to predict the outcome after clinical islet transplantation. Therefore, establishment of reliable and rapid assays enabling pre‐transplantation prediction of islet potency is warranted. In the present study, we have evaluated the adenosine diphosphate (ADP)/adenosine triphosphate (ATP) test, the glucose‐stimulated insulin release, the loss of islets during the first 24 h in culture, and the insulin/deoxyribonucleic acid as predictive assays for the ability of isolated porcine islets to cure athymic mice with streptozotocin‐induced diabetes. From the results presented, it is concluded that the measurement of the ADP/ATP ratio was the only test that correlated with transplantation outcome. In summary, we propose that the ADP/ATP assay is worthwhile as applied to human islet transplantation and seek to validate it as a rapid and potent predictor of transplant outcome.
Evolution in Political Science: A Reply to Kerr

Peter Kerr (Kerr 2002) recently argued in this journal that evolutionary theories could be of great benefit to political scientists' investigations of change. He is not successful in establishing a case for evolutionary theory in political science due to the misconception that evolutionary theory can have explanatory power without being functionalist. Two options for the use of evolution in political science are set out: firstly, leave the concept at the level of metaphor which might add richness to narratives of political change; or secondly, accept functionalism and construct political science theories along the lines beginning to develop in evolutionary economics. The conclusion is the need for a dynamic approach whilst avoiding functionalism and that political science at this stage should remain agnostic and critical about when and where particular dynamic mechanisms may operate.
A Column-Row-Parallel ASIC Architecture for 3-D Portable Medical Ultrasonic Imaging

This paper presents a scalable column-row-parallel ASIC architecture for 3-D portable medical ultrasound. Through its programmable row-by-row or column-by-column operations for both transmit and receive beam-formation, linear scaling in interconnection, data acquisition complexity, power dissipation, and programming time is achieved. In addition, its per-element controllers can activate fine granularity aperture definition when more functionality is favored over the linear-scaling power and speed efficiency. This front-end architecture is backward compatible to implement existing widely used array aperture patterns, while supporting new imaging apertures and algorithms. It lends itself very well for the combination with integrated or external digital beamforming circuits. A 16 × 16 proof-of-concept ASIC is fabricated and flip-chip bonded to a 16 × 16 capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT). Each three-level pulsing transmitter (Tx) is 46% more power efficient than a traditional two-level version, with high-voltage (HV) multiplexers (MUXs) designed for flexible Tx parallelization. Each low-noise receiver (Rx) consumes 1.4 mW active power and 54 μW sleep power, with optimized source follower stages to combine analog outputs for improved SNR. The transceivers are also fault-tolerant to inevitable defects in transducers, greatly enhancing assembly yield. The system demonstrates 3-D plane-wave generation to implement the coherent compounding algorithm for fast volume rate (62.5 volume/s), high-quality 3-D ultrasonic imaging. An interleaved checker board pattern with Iand Q excitations is also demonstrated for ultrasonic harmonic imaging, which reduces transmitted second harmonic distortion (HD2) by over 20 dB.
A design of DDR-1 solid state drive using PCI-e interface

In this paper, we designed and analyzed high-end DRAM-based SSD storage using DDR-1 memory and PCI-e interface. SSD is a storage device that uses DRAM or NAND Flash as primary storage media. Since the SSD stores and accesses data directly to memory chips, which results in storage speeds far greater than conventional magnetic storage devices(HDD). Proposed SSD architecture has performance of high speed data processing duo to use multiple RAM disks as primary storage and PCI-e interface bus as communication path of RAM disks. We constructed experimental system with UNIX, Windows/Linux server, SAN Switch, and Ethernet Switch and measured IOPS and bandwidth using IOmeter. In experimental results, it has been shown that IO performance and bandwidth of the DDR-1 SSD is better than those of the HDD and Flash-based SSD
In vivo three-dimensional MR microscopy of mice with chronic relapsing experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis after treatment with insulin-like growth factor-I.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to determine the ability of three-dimensional in vivo MR microscopy to depict the treatment effects of insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) in SJL mice with chronic relapsing experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (crEAE). METHODS The experiments were performed at 4.7-T on 10 crEAE mice and on one set of control animals. Five crEAE mice were treated with IGF-I and five were treated with a placebo. RESULTS In the crEAE mice treated with the placebo, in vivo MR microscopy showed areas of abnormal signal throughout the cerebrum, brain stem, and cerebellum. These findings were not present in either the IGF-I-treated mice or the normal control animals. The diffuse alterations in signal intensity in the placebo-treated crEAE mice were not identified on histologic sections of the same areas. CONCLUSION Differences between the IGF-I- and placebo-treated groups may reflect changes in stabilization or permeability of cell membranes and/or of the blood-brain barrier, although other alternative contrast mechanisms could be playing a role. In vivo MR microscopy depicted changes resulting from treatment of crEAE with IGF-I.
New results on adaptive computational resource allocation in soft MIMO detection

The fundamental problem of our interest is soft MIMO detection for the case of block fading, i.e., when the transmitted codeword spans over several independent channel realizations. We develop methods that adaptively allocate computational resources to the detection problems of each channel realization, under a total per-codeword complexity constraint. The new results consist of a new algorithm, a new performance measure, and a thorough complexity discussion.
High diagnostic value of general practitioners' presumptive diagnosis for pyelonephritis, meningitis and pancreatitis.

INTRODUCTION In Denmark, patients referred from the general practitioner (GP) to the emergency department (ED) can be referred with either specific symptoms or with a presumptive diagnosis. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy for various presumptive diagnoses made by the GP in a population acutely referred to an ED. METHODS This was a retrospective cohort study of all registered acute referrals for admission to Kolding ED in 2010. Eight presumptive diagnoses were selected for further studies: meningitis, acute coronary syndrome (ACS), pulmonary embolism, pneumonia, pancreatitis, deep venous thrombosis (DVT), pyelonephritis and intestinal obstruction. The presumptive diagnoses were compared with the final diagnosis on discharge. Sensitivity, specificity, predictive values and likelihood ratios were calculated. RESULTS A total of 8,841 patients were enrolled. The highest and lowest sensitivities were seen for DVT (90%) and meningitis (36%), respectively; and the highest and lowest values for specificity were observed for meningitis (99%) and ACS (30%), respectively. The positive predictive value had a wide range with the lowest value for ACS (9%) and the highest for pneumonia (59%). For pyelonephritis, meningitis and pancreatitis, the likelihood ratio of a positive test was above 10. The likelihood ratio of a negative test was above 0.1 for all diagnoses. CONCLUSIONS Patients referred with the presumptive diagnoses pyelonephritis, meningitis and pancreatitis had a high likelihood of having the disease in question. It is important not to discard any of the included presumptive diagnoses even if the GPs fail to suggest them on admission. FUNDING none. TRIAL REGISTRATION none.
A Comparison of Distributed Data Parallel Multimedia Computing over Conventional and Optical Wide-Area Networks

The research area of Multimedia Content Analysis (MMCA) considers all aspects of the automated extraction of knowledge from multimedia data streams and archives. As individual compute clusters can not satisfy the increasing computational demands of emerging MMCA problems, distributed supercomputing on collections of compute clusters is rapidly becoming indispensable. A well-known manner of obtaining speedups in MMCA is to apply data parallel approaches, in which commonly used data structures (e.g. video frames) are being scattered among the available compute nodes. Such approaches work well for individual compute clusters, but - due to the inherently large wide-area communication overheads - these are generally not applied in distributed cluster systems. Given the increasing availability of low-latency, high-bandwidth optical wide-area networks, however, wide-area data parallel execution may now become a feasible acceleration approach. This paper discusses the wide-area data parallel execution of a realistic MMCA problem. It presents experimental results obtained on real distributed systems, and provides a feasibility analysis of the applied parallelization approach.
In search for the general population’s semen profile: the study of sperm parameters in partners of women with chronic anovulation

Background: Human fertility is linked to sperm quality and therefore the establishment of reference values for normality is mandatory. Aims: The first aim was to establish a reference profile of men in the general population by examining the semen of partners of women with chronic anovulation. The second aim was to determine the prevalence of sperm abnormalities in this patient group. Methods: Sperm samples of 304 partners of patients with chronic anovulation were analysed prospectively. Semen samples were examined according to WHO guidelines, for sperm morphology Tygerberg strict criteria were used. We compared the results of this study with the cut-off values for normality we obtained in a previous study performed in our centre. Results: The mean value was 3.1 ml for volume, 64.7 mill / ml for concentration, 51.9% for progressive motility (grade a + b motility) and 7.4% for sperm morphology. Single parameter and double parameter abnormalities were observed in 42.7% and 8.2% of cases respectively. A normal sperm sample for all three parameters was noted in 46% of cases. Oligo-Astheno-Teratozoospermia was present in 3.0% of cases while azoospermia was found in two patients (0.7%). Conclusion: We believe that the study of sperm parameters in partners of patients with chronic anovulation can be used to study the prevalence of sperm abnormalities in the general population. Our data show that semen abnormalities are not uncommon in partners of women with chronic anovulation, highlighting the importance of a semen examination in every infertility work-up, even in case of obvious female pathology.
An Experimental Field Study of the GOTV and Persuasion Effects of Partisan Direct Mail and Phone Calls

This study examines the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) and persuasion effects of partisan direct mail and phone calls on voter behavior. The conclusions are based on experimental field research from a 2002 state gubernatorial primary election. The study finds that neither partisan direct mail nor partisan phone calls, used independently or together, garner significant GOTV or persuasion effects. It also questions the common usage of self reported survey data as a means of evaluating the effectiveness of these types of communications. The findings in this study extend previous research on campaign communications by examining partisan communications and by looking at both the GOTV and persuasion effects of those communications. The results call for further examination of how to most effectively and efficiently communicate with and persuade potential voters.
Non-volatile 3D stacking RRAM-based FPGA

We demonstrates a novel Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) structure based on Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) system. RRAM is a non-volatile memory device which is compatible to CMOS Back End of Line (BEOL) process with only 4F2 area per cell. We use a 1R system memory for logic element, Look-Up-Table (LUT), with three dimension stacking structure. The proposed 2R memory system is for routing elements, Switch Block (SB) and Connection Block (CB), with Complementary Resistive Switches (CRS) structure. Both three dimension stacking and CRS structure are crossbar-like structure to further improve density of the FPGA. The proposed design is different from modern FPGA with Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) system, RRAM-based FPGA has benefits of non-volatility, smaller area, and flexibility of configuration. A bit-addressable LUT is introduced with function of run-time programming memory cells of LUT, which is also known as Distributed Random Access Memory (D-RAM). Based on our simulation results, 62.7% of area reduction and 34% of delay improvement can be achieved compared to the conventional FPGA.