Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two View Line-Based Matching, Motion Estimation and Reconstruction for Central Imaging Systems. (Mise en correspondance de lignes à partir de deux vues, estimation du mouvement et reconstruction pour les systèmes centraux)

The primary goal of this thesis is to develop generic motion and structure algorithms for images taken from constructed scenes by various types of central imaging systems including perspective, fish-eye and catadioptric systems. As-suming that the mapping between the image pixels and their 3D rays in space is known, instead of image planes, we work on image spheres (projection of the images on a unit sphere) which enable us to present points over the entire viewsphere suitable for presenting omnidirectional images. In the first part of this thesis, we develop a generic and simple line matching approach for images taken from constructed scenes under a short baseline motion as well as a fast and original geometric constraint for matching lines in planar constructed scenes insensible to the motion of the camera for all types of centralimages including omnidirectional images.Next, we introduce a unique and efficient way of computing overlap between two segments on perspective images which considerably decreases the over all computational time of a segment-based motion estimation and reconstruction algorithm. Finally in last part of this thesis, we develop a simple motion estima-tion and surface reconstruction algorithm for piecewise planar scenes applicable to all kinds of central images which uses only two images and is based on mini-mum line correspondences.To demonstrate the performance of these algorithms we experiment withvarious real images taken by a simple perspective camera, a fish-eye lens, and two different kinds of paracatadioptric sensors, the first one is a folded catadioptric camera and the second one is a classic paracatadioptric system composed of a parabolic mirror in front of a telecentric lens.
Decreased microRNA levels lead to deleterious increases in neuronal M2 muscarinic receptors in Spinal Muscular Atrophy models

Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) is caused by diminished Survival of Motor Neuron (SMN) protein, leading to neuromuscular junction (NMJ) dysfunction and spinal motor neuron (MN) loss. Here, we report that reduced SMN function impacts the action of a pertinent microRNA and its mRNA target in MNs. Loss of the C. elegans SMN ortholog, SMN-1, causes NMJ defects. We found that increased levels of the C. elegans Gemin3 ortholog, MEL-46, ameliorates these defects. Increased MEL-46 levels also restored perturbed microRNA (miR-2) function in smn-1(lf) animals. We determined that miR-2 regulates expression of the C. elegans M2 muscarinic receptor (m2R) ortholog, GAR-2. GAR-2 loss ameliorated smn-1(lf) and mel-46(lf) synaptic defects. In an SMA mouse model, m2R levels were increased and pharmacological inhibition of m2R rescued MN process defects. Collectively, these results suggest decreased SMN leads to defective microRNA function via MEL-46 misregulation, followed by increased m2R expression, and neuronal dysfunction in SMA. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.20752. 001
Improving Quality of Work life for Care Providers by Fostering the Emotional well-being of Persons with Dementia: A Cluster-randomized Trial of a Nursing Intervention in German long-term Care Settings

We tested the feasibility of a nursing intervention (DEMIAN) in routine care and its effects on care providers’ job satisfaction, motivation, and work strain. This cluster-randomized trial was conducted in 20 German long-term care facilities. We randomly assigned 20 facilities to an intervention group (84 care providers, 42 residents with dementia) or a control group (96 care providers, 42 residents with dementia). Intervention group providers received two training days on the intervention; 68 providers attended both training days. Sixty two providers completed both baseline and follow-up questionnaires. Trained providers created individualized mini-intervention plans for participating residents. Control group residents received ‘usual care’. Intervention group providers stated that the intervention was feasible and helped them improve emotional well-being of residents with dementia. We found significantly decreased time pressure and decreased job dissatisfaction for intervention group providers. DEMIAN is an effective and pragmatic contribution to implementing person-centred care in long-term care, with positive effects on providers’ working conditions.
An Investigation on The Impact of Institutional Environment on Firm Growth in Vietnam

This paper investigates the impact of the institutional environment on firm growth in Vietnam. Using a firm-level dataset, the study obtains balanced panel data for 37,788 registered enterprises from a unique data set. It analyzes the effects of institutional factors on firm growth using system GMM analysis. The study finds that in line with recent theoretical literature, institutional factors such as business support service, land access, time costs, and informal charges promote firm growth in terms of both employment and capital. This research also finds that the impact of institutional factors on firms' capital growth is more significant.
Intracellular studies in the facial nucleus illustrating a simple new method for obtaining viable motoneurons in adult rat brain slices

In general, it has been difficult to preserve electrophysiologically viable motoneurons in brain slices from adult mammals. The present study describes a new method for obtaining viable motoneurons in the facial nucleus of adult rat brain slices. The essence of the method was to use a modified artificial cerebrospinal fluid (ACSF) in which NaCl was replaced initially by sucrose; the modified ACSF was used during (1) slice preparation and (2) a 1 hr recovery period. The rationale for the modification is discussed in terms of the proposed acute neurotoxic effects of passive chloride entry and subsequent cell swelling and lysis. The actual recordings were made only after switching back to normal ACSF. Use of this method yielded large numbers of viable motoneurons that were suitable for intracellular recording; no motoneurons survived when normal ACSF (i.e., with NaCl) was used during slice preparation. A survey of some electrophysiological and pharmacological properties of facial motoneurons in this preparation, by means of current‐clamp and voltage‐clamp recording, revealed close similarities to the properties of adult motoneurons previously observed in vivo (e.g., time‐dependent inward rectification, apamin‐sensitive afterhyperpolarization, and serotonin‐induced slow depolarization).
Don't throw rocks from the side-lines: A sociomaterial exploration of organizational blogs as boundary objects

Purpose Social media such as blogs are being widely used in organizations in order to undertake internal communication and share knowledge, rendering them important boundary objects. A root metaphor of the boundary object domain is the notion of relatively static and inert objects spanning similarly static boundaries. A strong sociomaterial perspective allows the immisciblity of object and boundary to be challenged, since a key tenet of this perspective is the ongoing and mutually constituted performance of the material and social. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The aim of the research is to draw upon sociomateriality to explore the operation of social media platforms as intra-organizational boundary objects. Given the novel perspective of this study and its social constructivist ontology, the authors adopt an exploratory, interpretivist research design. This is operationalized as a case study of the use of an organizational blog by a major UK Government department over an extended period. A novel aspect of the study is the use of data released under a Freedom of Information request. Findings The authors present three exemplar instances of how the blog and organizational boundaries were performed in the situated practice of the case study organization. The authors draw on the literature on boundary objects, blogs and sociomateriality in order to provide a theoretical explication of the mutually constituted performance of the blog and organizational boundaries. The authors also invoke the notion of “extended chains of intra-action” to theorize changes in the wider organization. Originality/value Adoption of a sociomaterial lens provides a highly novel perspective of boundary objects and organizational boundaries. The study highlights the indeterminate and dynamic nature of boundary objects and boundaries, with both being in an intra-active state of becoming challenging conventional conceptions. The study demonstrates that specific material-discursive practices arising from the situated practice of the blog at the respective boundaries were performative, reconfiguring the blog and boundaries and being generative of further changes in the organization.
Lean Manufacturing Practices And Their Barriers In Small And Medium Enterprises (Smes)

Although lean implementation has been extensively studied in large companies, research in this area is quietly limited in SME sector. Characteristic of SMEs and large manufacturers are different with respect to structure, policy, resource employee, and culture; therefore, the results of study are significantly different. Lean thinking does not provide easy applications in food industry. This fact raises the question of whether the lean implementation is feasible for companies with different characteristics, such as in food industry, particularly in SMEs. Studies in this area are still evolving and limited; therefore, study investigating lean implementation in SMEs sector is required. This exploratory study attempted to explore lean manufacturing implementation in the context of the SMEs in East Java Province of Indonesia. To collect data, this study used a structured questionnaire. The result of this study showed that lean implementation in food processing SMEs in East Java was quite low. Only 13.3% of SMEs were implementing lean manufacturing practices, and 86.7% of SMEs applied lean manufacturing occasionally. The least lean manufacturing implementation was the use of tools such as statistical process control (SPC) and Full Strategy. The higher barrier to lean manufacturing practice consisted of availability of resources; lack of training; internal resistance; variability in raw materials quality and supply. The barriers encountered by SMEs result from the characteristics of this sector and the characteristics of food processing industry. © 2018 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy. org.UK
Propagation Measurements for Path Loss Characterization of Cantera Walls at UHF in Mexican Historic Buildings

This paper shows the procedure to gather propagation measurements to characterize the path loss of cantera stone for the penetration of RF signals at UHF frequencies in various Mexican historic buildings. It is the first time that such material is tested for RF propagation and since there are many buildings made of this material in many cities in Mexico the results obtained are the base for future research as it is conducted now and will be published in the weeks to follow. The places where the experiment was conducted are: Municipal Government Building in Oaxaca, Benito Juarez Masonic Lodge Building in Oaxaca both buildings made of green cantera stone; Casa del Dean Museum and Tecamachalco Ex Convent in Puebla made of gray cantera stone. The frequencies at which the experiment was conducted were around 900 MHz, in the UHF band.
Management innovations : Their adoption, diffusion and high-fidelity adaptation.

Innovation in the widest sense is, arguably, the only thing that drives organisations and economies forward - as such innovation ought to be a prime concern of decisionmakers, whether in the private or public spheres, but equally of those academics who study organisations. Recent research has also emphasised the importance of management innovation for firm performance, both as a complement to technological innovation (Damanpour et al. 2009) and as an independent phenomenon (Mol and Birkinshaw, 2009) and there is broad agreement that a better understanding of management innovation should be high on the research agenda (Volberda et al. 2013). This research is based on a single fine-grained longitudinal case study that focuses on the chronology as a narrative of a management innovation and uses archival data to explore not only how the case study organisation changes in order to adopt a management innovation, but also addresses research questions linked to the content, deployment approach and performance of that management innovation. It uses the case study to develop and validate a seven phase Intraorganisational Management Innovation Framework that is used to characterise the life-cycle of management innovations and also a Management Innovation Content Typology that is used to characterise their content. It finds that the role and impact of senior leadership and line manager support is consistent with Peeters et al. (2014) findings of fostering of legitimacy of the management innovation and also the actions of internal change agents to be instrumental in maintaining a high level of conformity. Fidelity to the original management innovation is also enhanced by recipients' participation in a global Performance Management System (De Waal, 2004) with its ingredients of a Strategy House, Policy Deployment Matrix and a weekly performance review or Comms Cell.The study also shows an emerging pattern of resistance from individuals to the adoption of the management innovation and it attributes this partly to 'over-zealous' behaviours by the internal change agents linking these to their role and psychological profiles. Rowland and Higgs (2009) describe this as 'shaping' leadership behaviours and a 'directive' approach to change. The study identifies the management innovation as 'hybridised' (Mamman, 2002) with its 'roots' in the existing disciplines of Project Management, Organisational Development and Lean Six Sigma or Continuous Improvement - this is consistent with the Gibson and Tesone (2001) argument that management innovations will morph into other names as time goes by.
Diversity-driven wide learning for training distributed classification models

In order to address scalability issues which are a challenge for Deep Learning methods, we propose Wide Learning --- a model that scales horizontally rather than vertically enabling distributed learning. This approach first trains a repertoire of architecturally diverse neural networks of low complexity in parallel. Each network in the repertoire extracts a set of features from the dataset; these are then aggregated in a second short training phase in a centralised model to solve the classification task. The repertoire is generated using a quality diversity evolutionary algorithm (MAP-Elites) which returns a set of neural networks which are diverse w.r. t. feature descriptors partially describing their architecture and optimised w.r. t. their ability to solve the task. The technique is shown to perform well on two benchmark classification problems which have been tackled in the literature with Deep Learning techniques. Additional experiments provide insight into the role that diversity plays in contributing to the performance of the repertoire. We propose that evolving neural networks by promoting architectural diversity could in future lead to better results in some domains where current approaches have fallen short.
Pattern of Breast Cancer Referral to Palliative Care and the Complimentary Role of a Palliative Care Unit in A Resource-Limited Country

Background: Poor quality of end of life care is an information problem. Information about palliative and end of life care is sparse from developing countries. Only 10 percent of the information in this field of care emanates from developing countries where about 85%of annual deaths due to cancerous diseases occur. We present review of breast cancer patients referred to Palliative unit of our hospital between May 2009 and June 2013. This article demonstrates challenges to palliative care and the complementary role of thepalliative unit to palliative care in developing countries Method: The records of the Palliative unit University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital were reviewed for information about the stage of the disease at referral, performance status of the patients, the support given by the palliative unit and outcome of care.Result: One hundred and one patients were reviewed for breast cancer by the Palliative unit during the study period. Most of the referrals were from one of a general surgery units in the hospital. The number of referrals per year showed no sustained commitment to referral for palliation. The palliative unit provided counselling, home visitation and source of psychosocial and financial support. The median survival duration was 3 months. 59 percent of the recorded deaths were at homeConclusion: This report demonstrated that even though the palliative unit filled a void in the management of breast cancer patients, palliative care is still not widely accepted.
Introgressive hybridization facilitates adaptive divergence in a recent radiation of monkeyflowers

A primary goal in evolutionary biology is to identify the historical events that have facilitated the origin and spread of adaptations. When these adaptations also lead to reproductive isolation, we can learn about the evolutionary mechanisms contributing to speciation. We reveal the complex history of the gene MaMyb2 in shaping flower colour divergence within a recent radiation of monkeyflowers. In the Mimulus aurantiacus species complex, red-flowered M. a. ssp. puniceus and yellow-flowered M. a. ssp. australis are partially isolated because of differences in pollinator preferences. Phylogenetic analyses based on genome-wide variation across the complex suggest two origins of red flowers from a yellow-flowered ancestor: one in M. a. ssp. puniceus and one in M. a. ssp. flemingii. However, in both cases, red flowers are caused by cis-regulatory mutations in the gene MaMyb2. Although this could be due to distinct mutations in each lineage, we show that the red allele in M. a. ssp. puniceus did not evolve de novo or exist as standing variation in its yellow-flowered ancestor. Rather, our results suggest that a single red MaMyb2 allele evolved during the radiation of M. aurantiacus that was subsequently transferred to the yellow-flowered ancestor of M. a. ssp. puniceus via introgressive hybridization. Because gene flow is still possible among taxa, we conclude that introgressive hybridization can be a potent driver of adaptation at the early stages of divergence that can contribute to the origins of biodiversity.
Noninvasive Transmural Electrophysiological Imaging Based on Minimization of Total-Variation Functional

While tomographic imaging of cardiac structure and kinetics has improved substantially, electrophysiological mapping of the heart is still restricted to the surface with little or no depth information beneath. The progress in reconstructing 3-D action potential from surface voltage data has been hindered by the intrinsic ill-posedness of the problem and the lack of a unique solution in the absence of prior assumptions. In this work, we propose a novel adaption of the total-variation (TV) prior to exploit the unique spatial property of transmural action potential of being piecewise smooth with a steep boundary (gradient) separating depolarized and repolarized regions. We present a variational TV-prior instead of a common discrete TV-prior for improved robustness to mesh resolution, and solve the TV-minimization by a sequence of weighted, first-order L2-norm minimization. In a large set of phantom experiments, the proposed method is shown to outperform existing quadratic methods in preserving the steep gradient of action potential along the border of infarcts, as well as in capturing the disruption to the normal path of electrical wavefronts. Real-data experiments also further demonstrate the potential of the proposed method in revealing the location and shape of infarcts when quadratic methods fail to do so.
Role of variability in cultural dimensions across generations in the context of CSR advertising in an East Asian market

ABSTRACT The study examines how, across generations, Korean consumers perceive corporate social responsibility (CSR) ads when various ad appeals (help-self vs. help-other) are employed. The findings show that younger consumers have bicultural orientations compared to older consumers who have collectivistic cultural orientations. The findings showed that younger consumers were more likely to form favourable attitudes toward CSR ads and products when they viewed help-other ad appeals over help-self ad appeals compared to older consumers. Furthermore, the study revealed that variability in biculturalism plays a significant role in viewing CSR ads with help-self ad appeals. Further managerial implications and future study ideas are discussed.
Determinants of Farmers’ Preferences for Communal Spraying for Trypanosomiasis Control among Smallholder Dairy Cattle Farms in Busia County, Kenya

Trypanosomosis is the single most important disease constraining the expansion of livestock in Kenya. Several technologies have been developed to ameliorate the effects of the disease. However, the delivery of these technologies to farmers has been undertaken on trial and error basis without a proper strategy leading to more failures than success and wastage of scarce resources. The main objective of this study was to estimate determinants of preferences for communal spraying for trypanosomosis control among smallholder cattle farmers in Busia County, Kenya. Cross–sectional survey design was adopted and data collected from a sample of 217 respondents using structured questionnaires and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical analysis. Age, experience, and milk income were found to be significant determinants of preference for communal spraying among semi –zero grazers. Experience and expenditure on spraying were on the other hand significant factors determining preference for communal spraying among zero grazers. There is need to develop T&T technologies which are attractive to all age groups. Strategies to boost milk income should be pursued as this would encourage home spraying for T&T control. Kenya’s policy of promoting farming as a business is supported by these findings. Home spraying requires knowledge and skills and therefore farmers need to be properly trained for effectiveness. Agricultural extension service is needed to augment farmers’ experience.
Hybrid bayesian evolutionary optimization for hyperparameter tuning

In this paper, we present a Hybrid Bayesian-Evolutionary tuning algorithm (HBEtune) for tuning machine learning algorithms or evolutionary algorithms, and analyze its performance. HBEtune combines meta-EA and Bayesian optimization techniques. As hyperparameter tuning is a noisy, black-box optimization problem with expensive target functions, practical tuners must aim to minimize the number of necessary samples. In our method, we guide the EA's recombination operator towards more promising samples by employing the expected improvement acquisition criterion commonly used in Bayesian optimization. The expected improvement is evaluated on a surrogate model using a Gaussian process regression. HBEtune shows generally competitive performance when compared with the state of the art irace tuner. Performance is analyzed across a suite of synthetic and real-world benchmark problems.