Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Live demonstration: Event-driven high-speed imaging

This live demonstration shows a biology-inspired highly efficient approach to high-speed video data acquisition based on the ATIS image sensor technology. Gray-level image information is acquired pixel-individually and event-driven at a temporal resolution equivalent to thousands of frames-per-second while the data rate is kept at a fraction of the rate encountered with conventional high-speed cameras by means of near ideal pixel-level redundancy suppression. The presented ATIS camera combines three consecutive exposure estimation / measurement steps that apply different trade-offs between measurement speed, accuracy and noise. Early estimates of pixel values deliver between 10 and 100 times faster updates than the eventual full-swing integrating exposure measurement that reaches 1 kFPS equivalent temporal resolution at sunny outdoor conditions. In addition, a miniaturized ATIS camera is demonstrated that constitutes one of the first (if not the first) neuromorphic device designed specifically for application in a commercial medical product.
Global Forum for Physical Education Pedagogy 2012: Recommendations for Community-Based Networking

The Global Forum for Physical Education Pedagogy (GoFPEP) was founded in 2010 as a think tank to reform and reconstruct health and physical education pedagogy. Two major international forums have been implemented: one in the United States in 2010 and a second in Germany in 2012. A third is planned for South Africa in 2014. This paper reported on the activities of GoFPEP 2012, which was held in Velen, Germany, in collaboration with the Willibald Gebhardt Research Institute. Addressing the theme of "Revitalizing Health and Physical Education Through Community-Based Networking," 80 invited delegates from 50 countries focused their discussion on two major questions: (a) What innovative strategies can be employed to revitalize health and physical education pedagogy through community-based networking? (b) Can we build a global network focused on advancing health and physical education pedagogy? This study investigated what strategies might facilitate this activity. Open-ended coding was used to analyze responses from six discussion groups, and 13 core categories were established. Findings suggest three key areas for reform: Greater attention needs to be paid to linking community, physical education, and sport programs together; sharing and supporting the dissemination of technology; and changing the perception of physical education within society and the broader educational community.
Centralized Conferencing in the IP Multimedia Subsystem: from theory to practice

In this paper we present a conferencing architecture compliant with the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) specification. To the purpose, we embrace a practical approach, by describing an actual implementation of an open source centralized video-conferencing system, called CONFIANCE, capable to offer advanced communication experience to end-users through the effective exploitation of mechanisms like session management and floor control. CONFIANCE has been designed to be fully compliant with the latest standard proposals coming from both the IETF and the 3GPP and can be considered as an outstanding example of a real-time application built on top of the grounds paved by the SIP protocol. We will discuss in the paper both the design of the overall conferencing framework and the most important issues we had to face during the implementation phase.
Core Loss Calculation for Soft Magnetic Composite Electrical Machines

Soft magnetic composite (SMC) materials are especially suitable for developing electrical machines with complex structure and three-dimensional (3-D) magnetic flux path. In these SMC machines, the magnetic field is in general 3-D and rotational, so the mechanism and calculation of core loss may be quite different from that in traditional electrical machines with laminated steels in which the magnetic field is restrained. This paper investigates the calculation of core loss in a permanent magnet claw pole motor with SMC stator core. First, core loss models are developed based on the experimental data on SMC samples by using a 3-D magnetic property tester. Then, 3-D magnetic time-stepping field finite element analysis (FEA) is conducted to find the flux density locus in each element when the rotor rotates. The core loss is computed based on the magnetic field FEA results by using the developed core loss models. The calculations agree well with the experimental measurements on the SMC motor prototype.
Features of dural sinus thrombosis simulating pseudotumor cerebri

To characterize dural sinus thrombosis (DST) patients presenting with a syndrome simulating pseudotumor cerebri (PTC), medical records of patients initially diagnosed as having PTC between 1980 and 1995 were analysed. Inclusion criteria were intracranial hypertension (IH) and a normal initial computed tomography (CT) scan. All patients underwent angiography or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance venography (MRV). Patients with IH secondary to a determined disorder were excluded from the study. Forty‐six patients were included, 12 patients had MRI/MRV or angiography findings compatible with DST and the remaining 34 patients had no vascular pathology on neuroimaging studies and were considered to have PTC. No clinical or auxiliary findings differed between the two groups except for younger age, which delineated the PTC patients. Two patients with DST died during the study. Both were agitated, had a relatively rapid course of symptom progression, and a CSF pressure of over 40 cm water. We conclude that DST can be identified in 26% of patients presenting with symptoms and signs typical of PTC. It may be impossible to differentiate between patients with and without DST if MRI/MRV or angiography are not performed in this scenario.
Linking African-Americans to the Workplace

The purpose of this paper is to identify African-Americans as a specific diverse employee group, and to evaluate diversity policies that affect that group in the workplace. An evaluation of current policies based on workplace inclusion theories is presented, and best practices for a diverse workplace will be identified in the existing literature to provide evidence supporting the benefit of collaboration, respect, and dialogue across culturally diverse groups within organizations. Recommendations will aim to fill any gaps encountered, ethical codes will be integrated and standards to improve current policies and to guide the change process will be provided.
IBI at TREC 2018: Precision Medicine Track

Nowadays, the growing amount of biomedical scientiﬁc literature that can be accessed online represents a valuable source of information useful to tailor medical decisions to a speciﬁc clinical case. With this respect, Information Retrieval tools play an essential role in enabling physicians to automatically analyze huge amounts of publications so as to retrieve relevant recent information related to the treatment, prevention or prognosis of speciﬁc clinical conditions and traits. In this paper, we present and discuss the biomedical scientiﬁc Information Retrieval strategy we developed in the context of our participation to the Precision Medicine Track of the Text Retrieval Conference 2018. Given the description of a clinical case, we describe how we retrieve from PubMed a ranked list of scientiﬁc abstracts that discuss medical care that may be relevant for the patient under consideration. To this purpose we rely on the query formulation capabilities provided by Elas-ticsearch, a full-text search engine, complemented by data processing steps useful both to properly build search queries and to reﬁne the ranking of search results proposed by Elasticsearch.
Remittances as insurance for idiosyncratic and covariate shocks in Malawi: The importance of distance and relationship

This paper uses Malawian panel data to show the importance of geography and family relationships when studying remittances. We do not test any hypothesis as such, but instead demonstrate the significance of the source of remittances in testing hypotheses. When remittances are viewed from an insurance perspective, geography matters. Covariate (community) shocks tend to be insured further from home than idiosyncratic ones. When viewed from a motivational perspective, family relationship and culture matter. Furthermore, gift exchange amongst unrelated households can be as important as remittance flows amongst members of the same family in insuring shocks. Inter-household remittances are closely linked to social networks, with business and religious groups being particularly important (perhaps due to trust). Remittance flows are often reciprocal – receiving households often being the main senders, emphasizing their insurance nature.
Identifying Generalizable Effects of Strategic Actions on Firm Performance: The Case of Demand-Side Returns to R&D Spending

This paper provides an approach for assessing generalizable effects of strategic actions on firm performance. We identify five key issues that need to be addressed before one can have confidence in the obtained strategic generalization. In addition, we suggest a methodology for attacking each of these five issues. We then illustrate this framework using the example of demand-side returns to R&D spending. We document two empirical generalizations in this research. First and foremost, we show that demand returns to R&D spending depend on whether the firm has ability and motivation to take advantage of the R&D investment. Thus, only firms with high ability and motivation leverage the R&D investment into monopoly rents in the form of subsequent price increases. Second, we show that the concept of a firm needing both ability and motivation to sustain returns from a strategic action generalizes across strategic actions. We make two other conclusions about empirical approaches to strategy research. First, to pro.
Knowledge discovery by accuracy maximization

Significance We propose an innovative method to extract new knowledge from noisy and high-dimensional data. Our approach differs from previous methods in that it has an integrated procedure of validation of the results through maximization of cross-validated accuracy. In many cases, this method performs better than existing feature extraction methods and offers a general framework for analyzing any kind of complex data in a broad range of sciences. Examples ranging from genomics and metabolomics to astronomy and linguistics show the versatility of the method. Here we describe KODAMA (knowledge discovery by accuracy maximization), an unsupervised and semisupervised learning algorithm that performs feature extraction from noisy and high-dimensional data. Unlike other data mining methods, the peculiarity of KODAMA is that it is driven by an integrated procedure of cross-validation of the results. The discovery of a local manifold’s topology is led by a classifier through a Monte Carlo procedure of maximization of cross-validated predictive accuracy. Briefly, our approach differs from previous methods in that it has an integrated procedure of validation of the results. In this way, the method ensures the highest robustness of the obtained solution. This robustness is demonstrated on experimental datasets of gene expression and metabolomics, where KODAMA compares favorably with other existing feature extraction methods. KODAMA is then applied to an astronomical dataset, revealing unexpected features. Interesting and not easily predictable features are also found in the analysis of the State of the Union speeches by American presidents: KODAMA reveals an abrupt linguistic transition sharply separating all post-Reagan from all pre-Reagan speeches. The transition occurs during Reagan’s presidency and not from its beginning.
A bag-of-bounding-boxes approach to object-level view image retrieval

We propose a novel bag-of-words (BoW) framework to build and retrieve a compact database of view images, toward robotic localization, mapping and SLAM applications. Our method does not explain an image by many small local features (e.g. bag-of-SIFT-features) as most previous methods do. Instead, the proposed bag-of-bounding-boxes (BoBB) approach attempts to explain an image by fewer larger object patterns, which leads to a semantic and compact image descriptor. To make the view retrieval system more practical and autonomous, we do not require pre-trained object detector, but propose a novel technique for unsupervised object discovery, which is based on common pattern discovery (CPD) between the input and a known reference images. Moreover, our CPD subtask does not rely on good image segmentation techniques and is able to handle scale variations, exploiting state-of-the-art CPD techniques. Following traditional bounding box -based object annotation and knowledge transfer, we compactly describe an image in a form of bag-of-bounding-boxes (BoBB). With a slightly modified inverted file system, we efficiently index/search the BoBB descriptors. Experiments with publicly available “RobotCar” dataset show that the proposed method achieves accurate object-level view image retrieval with significantly compact image descriptors, e.g. 20 words per image.
Team-based assessment of professional behavior in medical students

Introduction: Self and peer assessment provides important information about the individual’s performance and behavior in all aspects of their professional environment work. The aim of this study is to evaluate the professional behavior and performance in medical students in the form of team based assessment. Methods: In a cross-sectional study, 100 medical students in the 7th year of education were randomly selected and enrolled; for each student five questionnaires were filled out, including one self-assessment, two peer assessments and two residents assessment. The scoring system of the questionnaires was based on seven point Likert scale. After filling out the questions in the questionnaire, numerical data and written comments provided to the students were collected, analyzed and discussed. Internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) of the questionnaires was assessed. A p<0.05 was considered as significant level. Results: Internal consistency was acceptable (Cronbach’s alpha 0.83). Interviews revealed that the majority of students and assessors interviewed found the method acceptable. The range of scores was 1-6 (Mean±SD=4.39±0.57) for the residents' assessment, 2-6 (Mean±SD= 4.49±0.53) for peer assessment, and 3-7 (Mean±SD=5.04±0.32) for self-assessment. There was a significant difference between self assessment and other methods of assessment. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that a team-based assessment is an acceptable and feasible method for peer and self-assessment of medical students’ learning in a clinical clerkship, and has some advantages over traditional assessment methods. Further studies are needed to focus on the strengths and weaknesses.
Research on K-means Text Clustering Algorithm Based on Semantic

Through research on K-means algorithm of text clustering and semantic-based vector space model, a semantic-based K-means text clustering model is proposed to solve the problem on high-dimensional and sparse characteristics of text data set. The model reduces the semantic loss of the text data and improves the quality of text clustering. Experiments prove that semantic-based text clustering increases by more 6 percent than non-semantic-based one in the final evaluation of the F1 index value.
Capital Markets and Foreign Ownership Restrictions: An Empirical Analysis of Emerging Stock Markets

In the 1990s, the hot issue in international finance was the growing interest of portfolio managers in the emerging stock markets. The interest in the emerging markets gained rapid attention, which is evident from the global trends, towards the opening up of economies and financial markets, free capital flow and the privatisation of financial institutions. Earlier the emerging markets were isolated due to several factors that had posed serious problems for international investors. These markets lacked the depth, regulatory framework, and structural safeguards that had characterised the equity markets in the developed world. Capital markets are called integrated, if assets with perfectly correlated rates of returns have the same price regardless of the location in which they are traded. Alternatively, capital market are called segmented, if financial assets traded in different markets “with identical risk characteristics” have different returns due to different investment restrictions.1 Segmentation may be due to individuals’ attitudes, government restrictions over capital movements or irrationality. In the past twenty-five years, modern finance theory has proved to be a major development in finance, which comprises of portfolio theory, capital market theory and efficient market theory. These modern developments can be traced back to the work of Markowitz (1959); Sharpe (1964); Solnik (1974) etc., which assumes that security prices fully reflect all publicly available information. Due to this information, potential investors can gain benefits through international diversification. The major attraction of forming international portfolios lies in the potential for risk reduction through diversification of unsystematic risk.
Internet Technology and the Extensive Margin of Trade: Evidence from eBay in Emerging Economies

Online platforms such as eBay offer technologies that make it easier for firms to export. This paper dissects a new firm-level dataset that covers sales made through eBay by sellers based in 21 emerging economies to provide a new lens through which to look at the effect of trade costs on the extensive margin of trade. Comparing eBay sellers with “offline” firm-level data from the World Bank's Exporter Dynamics Database allows us to test whether the observed trade patterns on eBay fit with the trade-liberalization predictions of heterogeneous-firm models. We find that eBay firms export to more destinations, suggesting low destination-specific fixed costs on eBay. We then show that the distribution of export destinations across eBay sellers is well approximated by a balls-and-bins model of frictionless trade, suggesting eBay indeed lowers fixed export costs. Finally, we compare the gravity of eBay with that of offline trade and find geographic distance, languages, and trade agreements to matter less for online trade.
Water Consumption Based on a Disaggregated Social Accounting Matrix of Huesca (Spain)

Making use of the social accounting matrix (SAM) of the Spanish province of Huesca in 2002, updated following Junius and Oosterhaven's GRAS method and work by Lenzen and colleagues, we have estimated the water footprint of the region. The water footprint is defined as the volume of water needed for the production of the goods and services consumed by the inhabitants plus the direct consumption in the households. We built an open Leontief model, which gives us the water embodied in the production of goods. The valuations concern the industrial, service, and domestic sectors’ water consumption, the embodied water imported from and exported to other countries, and the agrarian water use. This agrarian sector, clearly the sector that shows the greatest water consumption, is carefully examined, so it is disaggregated for the calculations into 31 irrigation land products, dry land, and 9 livestock classifications. As a consequence, the framework enables the observation of the relationships and flows of water taking place among all the sectors and activities in the economy. Finally, we also make use of the per capita water footprint estimations to get a clear picture of how the responsibility for water use is distributed once foreign trade is taken into account.
Association analysis of intractable epilepsy with C3435T and G2677T/A ABCB1 gene polymorphisms in Iranian patients

ObjectiveThe results from studies investigating a possible association between ABCB1 polymorphism and drug-resistant epilepsy are so far inconsistent. Moreover, recent meta-analyses studies do not confirm any link between ABCB1 C3435T polymorphism and drug resistance. Yet, if patients with comparable clinical status (same type of epilepsy, antiepileptic drugs, epilepsy onset and gender) are evaluated, the link between ABCB1 polymorphisms and drug resistance may be unmasked. We studied the association between C3435T and G2677T/A ABCB1 gene polymorphisms and drug resistance in Iranian epilepsy patients.MethodsTwo hundred healthy subjects and 332 epilepsy patients (200 drug-responsive and 132 drug-resistant) were selected. Genotypes were determined by polymerase chain reaction followed by restriction fragment length polymorphism or the amplification refractory mutation system.ResultsThe risk of drug resistance was higher in patients with a C/T genotype than in those with C/C or T/T genotypes at position 3435 in patients with cryptogenic epilepsy (p=0.01). A higher risk of drug resistance was observed in adult patients with a C/C genotype than in those with a T/T genotype at position 3435 (25.8% vs 15.8%, p=0.01). The risk of drug resistance was also higher in female patients with a C/C genotype than in those with a T/T genotype at position 3435 (26.8% vs 16.3%, p=0.04). No significant association was found between G2677T/A polymorphism and epilepsy drug resistance in the different subgroups of patients.ConclusionIranian adult female patients with a C/C genotype at position 3435 of the ABCB1 gene have a higher risk of resistance to antiepileptic drugs. Replication studies with large sample sizes are needed to confirm the results.
Determinants of Personal Income Taxes for Barbados

The purpose of this study was to identify determinants of personal income taxes in Barbados and, using the Engle-Granger two-step procedures with annual data from 1976 to 2008, ascertain how these variables would impact on the dependent variable in the long and short run. The study showed that in the long run, the variables that would impact upon personal income tax receipts were marginal tax rate, real per capita income, and the rate of unemployment, while in the short run, personal income taxes were affected by current real per capita income in addition to lagged values of real per capita income, the marginal tax rate, and the rate of unemployment, respectively.