Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating Harrell's Optimism on Predictive Indices Using Bootstrap Samples

In aging research, it is important to develop and validate accurate prognostic models whose predictive accuracy will not degrade when applied in external data sources. While the most common method of validation is split sample, alternative methods such as cross-validation and bootstrapping have some significant advantages. The macro that we present calculates Harrell’s optimism for logistic and Cox regression models based on either the c-statistic (for logistic) or Harrell’s c (for Cox). It allows for both stepwise and best subset variable selection methods (and can handle class variables for both methods), and uses both traditional and . 632 bootstrapping methods. In addition, we present and discuss the advantages of using Best Subsets regression for model selection instead of stepwise procedures. The uses of Best Subsets regression and our Harrell_Optimism macro are demonstrated using data on post-hospitalization mortality.
Internationalization and Localization for Cultural Diversity

Software products developed for sale in multinational markets are most successful when they appropriately accommodate culture and language. The design of user interfaces may be either internationalized based on features that are culture-neutral, or localized based on features tailored to regional and local markets. Different levels of localization - no localization, translation only, to complete localization - may be applied depending upon the application type and the net return on efforts. This paper describes a methodology used at Eastman Kodak Company to study and understand users' needs and preferences for internationalized versus completely localized digital imaging products, and to design user interfaces that are efficiently and successfully localized to speak the universal language of photography.
ELDERLY WOMEN’S LIFE STYLES AND LEVELS OF PHYSICAL ACTIVITY: A PILOT STUDY Estilos de vida em idosas e níveis de atividade física: um estudo piloto

O Questionario Internacional de Atividade Fisica (IPAQ) e uma medida padronizada para estimar a pratica habitual de atividades fisicas. A finalidade deste estudo piloto foi analisar as diferencas entre dez praticantes regulares de ginasio (68,60 ± 3,57 anos de idade) e dez estudantes de uma Universidade Senior sem atividade fisica formal (grupo informal) (71,30 ± 5,54 anos de idade). Os resultados mostraram que o dispendio energetico nao depende unicamente da atividade fisica regular e controlada num centro de Fitness, e que a atividade motora funcional, como o transporte ativo e as atividades domesticas e de jardim, resultou em gastos energeticos semelhantes. Sugere-se que programas que combinem dispendio energetico e atividades motoras de vida diaria sao uma boa solucao para a valorizacao da qualidade de vida e uma alternativa a praticas de Fitness mais padronizadas. ABSTRACT The International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) is a standardized measure to estimate habitual practice of physical activities. Because of the specificity of different elderly’s life styles, and, consequently, modes of physical activity, the purpose of this pilot study was to analyze differences among ten regular gym practitioners (fitness group) (68,60±3,57 years of age) and ten Senior University students without gym practice (informal group) (71,30±5,54 years of age). The results showed that energy expenditure doesn’t depend solely on regular and controlled physical activity at a Fitness center, and that functional motor activity, as daily life active transportation and domestic and garden activities, resulted in similar energy expenditure. It ’s suggested that programs combining energy expenditure and daily life motor activities is a good solution for quality of life enhancement, and an alternative to more standardized fitness practices.
Fingerprint Identification System: Non-zero Effort Attacks for Immigration Control

A growing security issue today in Nigeria is the increased occurrence of identity fraud. Research shows that perpetrators of this act are foreigners who enter the country without any document and are employed as security officers, thereby posing security treats to lives and properties. It has been noted that these foreigners device a means of beating security devices put in place at the border. The Nigerian Immigration uses Automated Fingerprint identification system (AFIS) which is minutiae base and it’s less noise tolerant unlike the correlation base approach. This paper therefore proposes a novel fingerprinting method that can help identify identity fraud. The method combines two approaches namely minutiae and correlation approaches, the idea is to see how the shortcomings of one is complemented by the other and the two approaches processes extraction and matching so as to get good and reliable images. Each of the approaches computes the matching score and the mean of the two resulting scores is taken. The mean is compared with the established threshold such that the system provides response by indicating whether the verification is successful or not. It follows that the adoption of this new method by organizations like the Nigerian Immigration Service will drastically reduce, if not totally eradicate, the level of insecurity in the country.
Picturing the past: The Berlin Wall at 25

Although the mass media is an important tool that audiences rely on to learn about the past, the relationship among journalism, history, and memory is still underdeveloped; visual collective memory, like visual studies in other subfields, has received even less attention than written and textual representations of collective memory. To address that gap, this article uses a qualitative content analysis to assess how 15 newspapers commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s opening through photographs. Newspapers from countries that were capitalist and communist in 1989 are compared to identify the ways that different cultures ‘remember’ the same past. Five genres of images emerged: iconic photographs, memorials, metonymic and mythological portraits, metonymic relics, and images of resistance, though these genres were framed differently depending on a country’s political system in 1989. In comparing this cross-cultural collective memory, this study looks at what these visual commemorations reveal about cross-cultural anniversary practices, an area of memory studies that has received little attention.
Supplementary Material to: IMU Preintegration on Manifold for Efficient Visual-Inertial Maximum-a-Posteriori Estimation

This report provides additional derivations and implementation details to support the paper [4]. Therefore, it should not be considered a self-contained document, but rather regarded as an appendix of [4], and cited as: “C. Forster, L. Carlone, F. Dellaert, and D. Scaramuzza, IMU preintegration on manifold for efficient visual-inertial maximum-a-posteriori estimation, (supplementary material, GT-IRIM-CP&R-2015-001), In Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2015. ”
Article Title: Borrelia Recurrentis Employs a Novel Multifunctional Surface Protein with Anti-complement, Anti-opsonic and Invasive Potential to Escape Innate Immunity Borrelia Recurrentis Employs a Novel Multifunctional Surface Protein with Anti-complement, Anti-opsonic and Invasive Potential to Es

This paper is made available online in accordance with publisher policies. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item and our policy information available from the repository home page for further information. To see the final version of this paper please visit the publisher's website. Access to the published version may require a subscription. Abstract Borrelia recurrentis, the etiologic agent of louse-borne relapsing fever in humans, has evolved strategies, including antigenic variation, to evade immune defence, thereby causing severe diseases with high mortality rates. Here we identify for the first time a multifunctional surface lipoprotein of B. recurrentis, termed HcpA, and demonstrate that it binds human complement regulators, Factor H, CFHR-1, and simultaneously, the host protease plasminogen. Cell surface bound factor H was found to retain its activity and to confer resistance to complement attack. Moreover, ectopic expression of HcpA in a B. burgdorferi B313 strain, deficient in Factor H binding proteins, protected the transformed spirochetes from complement-mediated killing. Furthermore, HcpA-bound plasminogen/plasmin endows B. recurrentis with the potential to resist opsonization and to degrade extracellular matrix components. Together, the present study underscores the high virulence potential of B. recurrentis. The elucidation of the molecular basis underlying the versatile strategies of B. recurrentis to escape innate immunity and to persist in human tissues, including the brain, may help to understand the pathological processes underlying louse-borne relapsing fever. Copyright: ß 2009 Grosskinsky et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Coordination Problems and Norms in Heterogeneous Populations

We study coordination frictions, and the importance of contribution norms, in step-level public good games with large equilibrium sets and heterogeneous agents. We show that heterogeneity creates frictions on aggregate. An elicitation task and a questionnaire show that individuals hold, and expect others to hold, well defined yet conflicting normative views of fair contribution rules related to effciency, equality, and equity. Successful groups agree on, and then stick with, normatively appealing allocations with focal properties that can be derived from first principles. Moreover, normative viewpoints and expectations (as elicited ex-ante) predict group behavior, confirming the importance of normative arguments and expectations in complex coordination problems. ∗Stockholm School of Economics, e-mail: mark.bernard@hhs.se †IZA and Columbia University, e-mail: ereuben@columbia.edu ‡CESifo, IZA, and Maastricht University, e-mail: a.riedl@maastrichtuniversity.nl
Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks using ZRP

A mobile ad hoc network consists of a collection of wireless mobile nodes that are capable of communicating with each other without the use of a network structure or any centralized administration. As such, the topology of the network changes dynamically. The nodes of a mobile ad hoc network operate as end hosts as well as routers. Routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks have to face the challenge of frequently changing topology, low transmission power and asymmetric links. Both proactive and reactive routing protocols prove to be inefficient under these circumstances. Reconfigurable Wireless Networks (RWNs) are a special class of ad-hoc networks that are characterized by: large geographical coverage, wide range of nodal mobility and large nodal density. Recently, a new routing protocol for this type of networks was proposed and coined the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP). The main feature of the ZRP protocol is its dynamic behavior – the operation of the scheme is governed by a single parameter, the zone radius, which adjusts the scheme’s behavior from purely reactive to proactive routing. We evaluate and measure through simulations different route maintenance strategies of in Ad hoc networks to cope with these issues using ZRP. Key-Words: ZRP, IARP, IERP, BRP, Ad-hoc networks, Routing
Simulation study of Maximum Amount Shortest Path routing in Wireless Sensor Networks using Ns-3

Spatially unbalanced energy consumption among sensors is the most important issue in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This uneven energy consumption can significantly reduce network lifetime. The use of sink mobility with constrained paths and decreasing the message flood by limiting the flood area can help to improve the energy efficiency in WSNs. Maximum Amount Shortest Path routing (MASP) is an efficient protocol using this idea. MASP is proactive (table-driven) in nature and tries to collect the largest amount of data with least energy. MASP makes use of constrained paths for the trajectories of mobile sinks and divides the deployed sensor nodes into independent zones to construct the routing tables. In this paper we discuss the implementation of MASP and conduct a performance evaluation of it using the ns-3 network simulator.
Stippling by example

In this work, we focus on stippling as an artistic style and discuss our technique for capturing and reproducing stipple features unique to an individual artist. We employ a texture synthesis algorithm based on the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) of a texture field. This algorithm uses a texture similarity metric to generate stipple textures that are perceptually similar to input samples, allowing us to better capture and reproduce stipple distributions. First, we extract example stipple textures representing various tones in order to create an approximate tone map used by the artist. Second, we extract the stipple marks and distributions from the extracted example textures, generating both a lookup table of stipple marks and a texture representing the stipple distribution. Third, we use the distribution of stipples to synthesize similar distributions with slight variations using a numerical measure of the error between the synthesized texture and the example texture as the basis for replication. Finally, we apply the synthesized stipple distribution to a 2D grayscale image and place stipple marks onto the distribution, thereby creating a stippled image that is statistically similar to images created by the example artist.
Sequence of unsharp measurements enabling a real-time visualization of a quantum oscillation

The normalized state | (t)i = c1(t)|1i +c2(t)|2i of a single two-level system performs oscillations under the influence of a resonant driving field. It is assumed that only one realization of this process is available. We show that it is possible to approximately visualize in real time the evolution of the system as far as it is given by |c2(t)| 2 . For this purpose we use a sequence of particular unsharp measurements separated in time. They are specified within the theory of generalized measurements in which observables are represented by positive operator valued measures (POVM). A realization of the unsharp measurements may be obtained by coupling the two-level system to a meter and performing the usual projection measurements on the meter only.
Real-time computer vision-based Bengali Sign Language recognition

This paper presents a real-time computer vision-based Bengali Sign Language (BdSL) recognition system. The system detects the probable hand from the captured image. The system uses Haar-like feature-based cascaded classifiers to detect the hand in each frame. From the detected hand area, the system extracts the hand sign based on Hue and Saturation value corresponding to human skin color. After normalization the system converts the hand sign to binary image. Then the binary images are classified by comparing with pre-trained binary images of hand sign using K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) Classifier. The system is able to recognize 6 Bengali Vowels and 30 Bengali Consonants. The system is trained using 3600 (36×10×10) training images where each of 10 signers performed 10 signs for each corresponding Bengali alphabet and the system is tested using another 3600 (36×10×10) images of 10 signers. The system is achieved recognition accuracy of 98.17% for Vowels and 94.75% for Consonants.
“Ice Cream is Worse, and Joblessness is Not an Option”

A rise in informal labor, characterized by contracted and non-salaried positions, has been observed in many industry sectors including journalism. While opportunities for freelance journalists have increased, the journalism industry has simultaneously experienced mass layoffs. Using a survey (N = 411), with quantitative and qualitative measures, this study assesses freelancers’ experiences in the US context with a particular attention to gender. The study finds that women perceive freelancing, but not full-time journalism, as compatible with raising children. Although there were no differences in perceptions about layoffs and job stability, the women in the sample were more likely to rely on freelancing as the only job and subsequently express concerns over pay. Open-ended responses provide further insight into the state of the journalism industry, full-time employment, and gender dynamics.
Stabilization techniques for high resolution ultrasound imaging using beamspace Capon method

Several adaptive beamforming imagers have been proposed to improve the spatial resolution of medical ultrasound imaging. These imagers employ spatial averaging technique and diagonal loading technique to suppress correlated interferences and to acquire robustness, respectively. In this study, we propose the technique that selects the optimum size for spatial averaging with respect to the measurement depth. We employ a small diagonal loading factor of -40 dB to avoid the deterioration in image quality. In a simulation study, the proposed method succeeded to improve the image quality compared to a conventional beamspace Capon method. The sidelobe level and the -6 dB beam width in the proposed method were -26 dB and 0.27 mm, respectively, where those in the conventional method were -16 dB and 0.40 mm, respectively. The proposed method succeeded to depict the higher resolution image than that of the conventional method.
Opinion Holder and Target Extraction on Opinion Compounds – A Linguistic Approach

We present an approach to the new task of opinion holder and target extraction on opinion compounds. Opinion compounds (e.g. user rating or victim support) are noun compounds whose head is an opinion noun. We do not only examine features known to be effective for noun compound analysis, such as paraphrases and semantic classes of heads and modifiers, but also propose novel features tailored to this new task. Among them, we examine paraphrases that jointly consider holders and targets, a verb detour in which noun heads are replaced by related verbs, a global head constraint allowing inferencing between different compounds, and the categorization of the sentiment view that the head conveys.
Analysing the database for stars in open clusters I. General methods and description of the data

We present an overview and statistical analysis of the data included in WEBDA. This database includes valuable information such as coordinates, rectangular positions, proper motions, photometric as well as spectroscopic data, radial and rotational velocities for objects of open clusters in our Milky Way. It also contains miscellaneous types of data like membership probabilities, orbital elements of spectroscopic binaries and periods of variability for different kinds of variable stars. Our final goal is to derive astrophysical parameters (reddening, distance and age) of open clusters based on the major photometric system which will be presented in a follow-up paper. For this purpose we have chosen the Johnson UB V, Cousins VRI and Stromgren uvbyβ photometric systems for a statistical analysis of published data sets included in WEBDA. Our final list contains photo- graphic, photoelectric and CCD data for 469 820 objects in 573 open clusters. We have checked the internal (data sets within one photometric system and the same detector technique) and external (different detector technique) accuracy and conclude that more than 97% of all investigated data exhibit a sufficient accuracy for our analysis. The way of weighting and averaging the data is described. In addition, we have compiled a list of deviating measurements which is available to the community through WEBDA.
Neuroengineering Original Research Article Optical Imaging of Interaural Time Difference Representation in Rat Auditory Cortex Materials and Methods

We used in vivo voltage-sensitive dye optical imaging to examine the cortical representation of interaural time difference (ITD), which is believed to be involved in sound source localization. We found that acoustic stimuli with dissimilar ITD activate various localized domains in the auditory cortex. The main loci of the activation pattern shift up to 1 mm during the fi rst 40 ms of the response period. We suppose that some of the neurons in each pool are sensitive to the defi nite ITD and involved in the transduction of information about sound source localization, based on the ITD. This assumption gives a reasonable fi t to the Jeffress model in which the neural network calculates the ITD to defi ne the direction of the sound source. Such calculation forms the basis for the cortex's ability to detect the azimuth of the sound source. right ears are separated by a short time delay, the animal can experience an illusion, failing to properly localize the sound (Figure 1). In the present study, we demonstrate that the spatial distribution of sound sources is not only refl ected by cortical activity but also creates patterns similar to a set of moving activated spots, each representing a specifi c azimuth angle toward the object. Imaging was performed in 12 adult rats (Sprague–Dawley, weight 250–300 g, age 2–3 months) that were anesthetized with a mixture of ketamine (90 mg/kg, i.p. Ketalar-50, Parke-Davis) and xylazine (12 mg/kg, i.p., Bayer Corp). Supplementary ketamine hydrochlo-ride (40 mg/kg body weight, i.m.) was injected about 1 h later to maintain a constant level of anesthesia during the experiment (Tsytsarev and Tanaka, 2002). The anesthesia level was determined based on the heart rate, which was continuously monitored using an electrocardiomonitor. At the end of each experiment, the animal was sacrifi ced using an overdose of Nembutal (200 mg/kg body weight, i.p., Bayer Corp.). All procedures were carried out according to the standards of the Animal Care Committee of Kyoto Prefecture University of Medicine. A detailed description of the experimental technique can be found in cited references Bonhoeffer and Grinvald (1996) and Grinvald et al. (2001). The animal was fi xed on the stereotaxic frame using ear bars with channels that allowed sound transduction into the middle ear (Tsytsarev et al., 2004). The skin and muscles of the dorsolateral part of the head were surgically excised and the left lateral wall of the …
Proving Horn Clause Specifications of Imperative Programs

We present a method for verifying the correctness of an imperative program with respect to a specification defined in terms of a set of possibly recursive Horn clauses. Given a program prog, we consider a partial correctness specification of the form {φ} prog {ψ}, where the assertions φ and ψ are predicates defined by a set Spec of Horn clauses. The verification method consists in: (i) encoding the function computed by the program prog (according to the semantics of the imperative language) as a set OpSem of clauses, and then (ii) constructing a set PC of Horn clauses and a predicate p such that if p is false in the least model of PC, that is, M(PC) 6|= p, then {φ} prog {ψ} is valid. We also present an extension of the verification method for showing total correctness of programs. Then we present a general proof technique based on unfold/fold transformations of Horn clauses, for checking whether or not M(PC) |= p holds. We also outline a strategy for guiding the application of the unfold/fold transformation rules and performing correctness proofs in an automatic way. Finally, we show some experimental results based on a preliminary implementation of our method.