Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of CCSDS compression for high resolution imagery

The future remote sensing missions of India are planning to acquire very high resolution optical imagery which leads to a large volume of data to be transmitted on ground. Earlier missions used DCT based JPEG like compression for transmission of data from onboard to ground. But, for large volumes of data, more efficient compression algorithms are required to achieve a better trade-off between limited bandwidth/transmission speed and image quality. Hence, for future IRS missions, image data compression standard, adopted by Consultative Committee for space data system (CCSDS) can be used for onboard data compression which can satisfy the above requirements. The present paper talks about the application of CCSDS based compression on high resolution remote sensing data and its performance depending on image complexity. The main objective is to study the compression ratios that can be achieved to get the acceptable quality of image. The compressed data is evaluated subjectively as well as quantitatively using quality measures like RMSE / PSNR and edges. In addition, the CCSDS based compression is compared with the state of the art JPEG2000 compression standard for its performance. KeywordsHigh Resolution Data, Compression,CCSDS, JPEG2000, Image Quality, RMSE, Complexity
Sweetening the medicine: educating users about information security by means of game play

Employees of companies are often unable to work securely, because they lack knowledge in the field of Information Security. This paper is based on the premise that a computer game could be used to educate employees about Information Security. A game was developed with the aim of educating employees in this field of study. If people were motivated to play the game, without external motivation from an organisation, then these people would also be motivated to learn about information security. Therefore, a secondary aim of this game was to be self-motivating. An experiment was conducted in order to test whether or not these aims were met. The experiment was conducted on a play test group and a control group. The play test group played the game before completing a questionnaire, while the control group, simply, completed the questionnaire. This paper discusses the research design of the experiment and also provides an initial analysis of the results. The game design will be discussed which also provides guidelines for future game designers to follow.
Mother–Adolescent and Father–Adolescent Relationships After Divorce: Relations with Emerging Adults’ Romantic Attachment

ABSTRACT This longitudinal study examined relations between mother–child relationship quality and father support in adolescence (ages 15–19) and emerging adults’ (ages 24–28) romantic anxiety and avoidance in a sample that experienced parental divorce in childhood (n = 72). A significant interactive effect of mother–adolescent relationship quality and father support on romantic anxiety occurred. High levels of father support protected emerging adults from the negative effects of a low quality mother–adolescent relationship. These results highlight the importance of examining effects of one parental relationship in the context of the other and the role that nonresidential fathers play in influencing their offspring’s romantic attachment.
Multimedia Science Presentations and Teaching Aids

Over the past several years the author, a paleoecologist in the Terrain Sciences Division of the Geological Survey of Canada, has participated in the creation of several multimedia CD productions. All are designed to present large science projects in a manner that is suitable for the layperson as well as useful to the specialist. To achieve this goal, they employ several software applications not often used by scientists, at least not in concert. The approach is unique and because of this has been the subject of an article in one of the trade journals on digital publication The following pages contain sample screens from these presentations as well as examples of how similar multimedia techniques could be used for CD presentations of databases. One of these proposed database presentations– a Digital Pollen Reference Collection–will likely be of special interest to CAP Newsletter readers. Our initial exploration of the potential of the CD medium for presenting large science projects dealt with The Mackenzie Delta Borehole Project, a large multidisciplinary effort involving three deep boreholes drilled in the Mackenzie Delta region in 1992. The longest of the boreholes bottoms out in the mid-Miocene. All three have yielded a wealth of data–too much for reasonable presentation as a traditional paper publication. Our goal was to design a multimedia presentation that allowed All screens shown here are reduced from the 640x480 pixel size of the original and are rendered in grey-scale. This causes degradation in image resolution. The three buttons shown above represent the three boreholes. Clicking on any one of them opens the module dealing with that borehole. In the following screens the Kumak button has been clicked. Buttons respond with a sound and a visual change when selected, providing feedback for the reader. The button labeled Borehole Menu on the button pad at right takes the reader back to the start-up screen where options for viewing the Reports, Contributors and a Tutorial section are available.
Enabling autonomous systems to perceptually detect human performance improvements and their applications

The research on human-robot interaction (HRI) has been an emerging topic of interest for both basic research and customer application. The studies specially focus on behavioral and cognitive aspects of the interaction and the social contexts surrounding it. HRI issues have long been a part of robotics research because the goal of fully autonomous capability has not been met yet. One of the most challenging problems is giving the robots an understanding of how to interact with human beings at the same logical level so that they may function not as passive tools, but rather as active agents that can drive the human interaction, instead of merely reproducing a sequence of movements. Hence, these robots must have higher level cognitive functions that include knowing how to reason, when to perceive and what to look for, how to integrate perception and action under changing conditions, etc. These functions will enable robots to perform more complex tasks which require tight human interaction; consequently, the robots can perform high level interactions such as teaching motor skills to unskilled people. Such functions include the extraction of symbolic descriptions based on the integration of the information coming through the robotpsilas sensors and the analysis of these descriptions to decide the action to be carried out in order to improve the humanspsila performances. In this paper; in particular, some approaches and applications towards enhancing the understanding of the human performance to implement the evaluation module of the proposed general transfer skill system (from robot to human) are described.
Application of the Rasch model in categorical pedigree analysis using MCEM: I binary data

An extension of the Rasch model with correlated latent variables is proposed to model correlated binary data within families. The latent variables have the classical correlation structure of Fisher (1918) and the model parameters thus have genetic interpretations. The proposed model is ﬁtted to data using a hybrid of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and the MCEM modiﬁcation of the EM-algorithm and is illustrated using genotype-phenotype data on a psychological subtest in families where some members are aﬀected by the genetic disorder fragile X. In addition, hypothesis testing and model selection methods based on the Wald statistic are discussed.
A simple scheduled anti-windup technique

This paper presents a gain scheduled, full-order, anti-windup compensation strategy for LTI systems. The paper makes two contributions. Firstly it shows that, given two point-design anti-windup compensators with differing performance levels and associated regions of attraction, it is possible to interpolate between them to generate a family of compensators with intermediate performance levels and regions of attraction. Secondly, it is shown how this family of compensators can be used to construct a gain-scheduled anti-windup compensator that guarantees stability of the closed-loop system providing the initial states of the system are contained within a certain positively invariant set. The resulting gain scheduled anti-windup compensator is simple to construct and straightforward to implement. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is shown through a simulation example.
Securing Web Communications

On my honor as a University student, on this assignment I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid as defined by the Honor Guidelines for Papers in TCC Courses. Preface Succinctly stated, this thesis works towards securing regular web communications such as instant messaging and file sharing. One might ask, is this an exercise in futility? Who is going to spy on instant messaging conversations? Perhaps no one has or ever will. However, this thesis does not strive simply to secure messaging. It presents serious issues concerning information security and privacy in our digitally connected world. Thus, this thesis attempts an exercise in securing web communications so that those reading this paper and I, the author, can learn greater lessons about implementing secure, efficient security solutions for the burgeoning information and privacy problem we face tomorrow. I would like to thank my technical advisor, David Evans, for providing sound mentorship and allowing me to attempt this thesis. Both my TCC advisors, Betsy Mendelsohn and Rosanne Simeone, deserve great thanks as well. They provided unsurpassed writing guidance; without them, my thesis would be incomprehensible. Finally, a thank you to Mark Boyns and Kirill Kouzoubov, their open source software contributed greatly to this thesis.
Scalable Task-Parallel SGD on Matrix Factorization in Multicore Architectures

Recommendation is an indispensable technique especially in e-commerce services such as Amazon or Netflix to provide more preferable items to users. Matrix factorization is a well-known algorithm for recommendation which estimates affinities between users and items solely based on ratings explicitly given by users. To handle the large amounts of data, stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which is an online loss minimization algorithm, can be applied to matrix factorization. SGD is an effective method in terms of both convergence speed and memory consumption, but is difficult to be parallelized due to its essential sequentiality. FPSGD by Zhuang et al. Cite fpsgd is an existing parallel SGD method for matrix factorization by dividing the rating matrix into many small blocks. Threads work on blocks, so that they do not update the same rows or columns of the factor matrices. Because of this technique FPSGD achieves higher convergence speed than other existing methods. Still, as we demonstrate in this paper, FPSGD does not scale beyond 32 cores with 1.4GB Netflix dataset because assigning non-conflicting blocks to threads needs a lock operation. In this work, we propose an alternative approach of SGD for matrix factorization using task parallel programming model. As a result, we have successfully overcome the bottleneck of FPSGD and achieved higher scalability with 64 cores.
Unlinking database entries: Implementation issues in privacy preserving secure logging

This paper discusses implementation issues related to using relational databases as storage when implementing privacy preserving secure logs. In these types of logs it is important to keep the unlinkability properties of log entries intact when the entries are stored. We briefly describe the concept of privacy preserving secure logging and give the rational for it. The problems of using relational database systems as storage is discussed and we suggest three solutions to the problem. Two of the solutions are analyzed and compared and we show that at least one of the solutions is feasible in a real live setting and that the added overhead of the solution is very small.
Meta- and Pooled Analyses Birth Weight, Early Weight Gain, and Subsequent Risk of Type 1 Diabetes: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Previous studies suggest that birth weight and weight gain during the ﬁrst year of life are related to later risk of type 1 diabetes. The authors performed a systematic review and meta-analysis on these associations. Twelve studies involving 2,398,150 persons of whom 7,491 had type 1 diabetes provided odds ratios and 95% conﬁdence intervals of type 1 diabetes associated with birth weight. Four studies provided data on weight and/or weight gain during the ﬁrst year of life. High birth weight ( > 4,000 g) was associated with increased risk of type 1 diabetes (odds ratio ¼ 1.17, 95% conﬁdence interval (CI): 1.09, 1.26). According to sensitivity analysis, this result was not inﬂuenced by particular study characteristics. The pooled confounder-adjusted estimate was 1.43 (95% CI: 1.11, 1.85). No heterogeneity was found ( I 2 ¼ 0%) and no publication bias. Low birth weight ( < 2,500 g) was associated with a nonsigniﬁcantly decreased risk of type 1 diabetes (odds ratio ¼ 0.82, 95% CI: 0.54, 1.23). Each 1,000-g increase in birth weight was associated with a 7% increase in type 1 diabetes risk. In all studies, patients with type 1 diabetes showed increased weight gain during the ﬁrst year of life, compared with controls. This meta-analysis indicates that high birth weight and increased early weight gain are risk factors for type 1 diabetes.
Granular Computing Based Sorting Method in Multi-Objective Optimization

This paper put forward dominance granule based multi-objective sorting algorithm (DGSA). The dominance granule can be obtained by the dominance relation in the information system and granular computing. It is the basis of multi-objective sorting and fitness assignment. Therefore, the dominance granule based multi-objective sorting algorithm is designed and reduces the computational complexity highly.
Comparison of Bivalirudin and Radial Access Across a Spectrum of Preprocedural Risk of Bleeding in Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: Analysis From the National Cardiovascular Data Registry

Background—Bleeding is a common, noncardiac, preventable complication of percutaneous coronary intervention. We compared the relative safety of radial access and bivalirudin in percutaneous coronary intervention. Methods and Results—From CathPCI Registry, we determined the association between the site of arterial access, bivalirudin, and periprocedural bleeding rates in 501 017 patients. Radial access patients receiving heparin (radial group) were compared with those receiving bivalirudin (radial combination group). Femoral access patients who had bivalirudin and a vascular closure device served as a reference group (femoral group). An inverse probability weighting analysis incorporating propensity scores was used to compare groups. The overall rate of bleeding was 2.59%. It was 2.71% in the femoral group, 2.5% in the radial group, and 1.82% in the radial combination groups (P<0.001). When compared with femoral group, the adjusted odds ratio for bleeding was significantly lower for patients with radial combination group (odds ratio, 0.79; 95% confidence interval, 0.72–0.86), but not for radial group (odds ratio, 0.96; 95% confidence interval, 0.88–1.05), unless patients treated with IIb/IIIa were excluded (radial group-IIb/IIIa odds ratio, 0.84; 95% confidence interval, 0.75–0.94). The number needed to treat to prevent 1 bleeding event with radial combination group was 138, whereas the number needed to treat to prevent 1 bleeding event in high-bleeding risk patients was 68. Conclusions—In this observational analysis, the combination of bivalirudin and radial access was associated with reduced bleeding event rate. This benefit was present across the entire spectrum of preprocedural risk of bleeding, with or without exposure to IIb/IIIa inhibitors. These data support an adequately powered randomized trial comparing bleeding avoidance strategies.
When Do Followers Compensate for Leader Silence? The Motivating Role of Leader Injustice

Leaders are important for overcoming silence in organizations, because they can serve as role models and facilitate voice, for example, by being just. However, at times, leaders themselves remain silent. In such instances, trickle-down models of leadership and role-modeling theory suggest that leader silence results in follower silence. Drawing on research on laissez-faire leadership and coping, we challenge these approaches proposing that team members can compensate for their leader’s silence. This compensatory effect, in turn, is proposed to be contingent on followers’ justice perceptions, although in a counterintuitive way: Drawing on the fairness heuristic and collective action research, we propose that perceiving the leader as unjust makes it less likely that followers use their leader as a role model and can motivate followers to overcome fear and resignation, eventually resulting in followers’ speaking up in cases when leaders fail to do so. Results from two studies in organizations support our assumption that jointly considering leader and follower silence can reveal surprising effects and thus inspire new research complementing current approaches to overcome silence and its detrimental effects for organizations and their stakeholders. Additionally, we discuss theoretical and practical implications regarding the role of leaders, followers, and context as antecedents of silence.
Multi-grain coherence directories

Conventional directory coherence operates at the finest granularity possible, that of a cache block. While simple, this organization fails to exploit frequent application behavior: at any given point in time, large, continuous chunks of memory are often accessed only by a single core. We take advantage of this behavior and investigate reducing the coherence directory size by tracking coherence at multiple different granularities. We show that such a Multi-grain Directory (MGD) can significantly reduce the required number of directory entries across a variety of different workloads. Our analysis shows a simple dual-grain directory (DGD) obtains the majority of the benefit while tracking individual cache blocks and coarse-grain regions of 1KB to 8KB. We propose a practical DGD design that is transparent to software, requires no changes to the coherence protocol, and has no unnecessary bandwidth overhead. This design can reduce the coherence directory size by 41% to 66% with no statistically significant performance loss.
Defying the LATE? Identification of local treatment effects when the instrument violates monotonicity

The instrumental variable method relies on strong "no-defiers" condition, which requires that the instrument affect every subject's treatment decision in the same direction. This paper shows that "no-defiers" can be replaced by a weaker "compliers-defiers" condition, which requires that a subgroup of compliers have the same size and the same distribution of potential outcomes as defiers. This condition is necessary and sufficient for IV to capture causal effects for the reamining part of compliers. In many applications, "compliers-defiers" is a very weak condition. For instance, in Angrist & Evans (1998), 94% of DGPs compatible with the data satisfy "compliers-defiers", while 0% satisfy "no-defiers". JEL classification: Instrumental variable ; heterongeneous effects ; defiers ; single index model JEL codes: C21; C26
[Psychometric Properties of the Metacognition Scales about Rumination in Clinical and Non-clinical Turkish Samples].

AIM The aim of this study is to examine the reliability and validity of the Turkish adaptations of the Positive Beliefs about Rumination Scale (PBRS) and the Negative Beliefs about Rumination Scale (NBRS) in clinical and non-clinical samples. METHOD While the non-clinical sample of the study consisted of 455 participants, the clinical sample was composed of 60 major depressive disorder (MDD), 30 panic disorder (PD) and 30 social anxiety disorder (SAD) cases. RESULTS The results of the factor analyses confirm the construct validity and original factor structure of the scales. Findings obtained from internal consistency and test-retest analyses indicated good reliability for the scales. Supporting the convergent validity of the scales, the correlations between metacognitions about rumination and depressive symptoms, rumination, metacognitions about worry, pathological worry, and anxiety symptoms were found to be positive and significant in the non-clinical sample. Hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that both scales have predictive validity for depressive symptoms after controlling for anxiety symptoms. As for extreme group comparisons, it supported the criterion-related validity of the scales. In discriminant clinical validity examinations, although both scales were able to differentiate MDD, PD, and SAD groups from healthy controls, they were unable to differentiate the depressive group from the other anxiety disorder groups. CONCLUSION A comprehensive psychometric evaluation of the scales demonstrated that both PBRS and NBRS are reliable and valid assessment devices that can be used for research purposes both in clinical and non-clinical groups in Turkey.
A Best Practice Model for Cloud Middleware Systems

Cloud computing is the latest trend in computing where the intention is to facilitate cheap, utility type computing resources in a service-oriented manner. However, the cloud landscape is still maturing and there are heterogeneities between the clouds, ranging from the application development paradigms to their service interfaces,and scaling approaches. These differences hinder the adoption of cloud by major enterprises. We believe that a cloud middleware can solve most of these issues to allow cross-cloud inter-operation. Our proposed system is Altocumulus, a cloud middleware that homogenizes the clouds. In order to provide the best use of the cloud resources and make that use predictable and repeatable, Altocumulus is based on the concept of cloud best practices. In this paper we briefly describe the Altocumulus middleware and detail the cloud best practice model it encapsulates. We also present examples based on real world deployments as evidence to the applicability of our middleware.
Prevalence and factors affecting early initiation of breastfeeding in rural areas of Dibrugarh district, Assam

Background: Early or timely initiation of breastfeeding, specifically within 1 hour of birth has benefits for survival and beyond and it is recommended by the World Health Organization. Breastfeeding initiation after the first hour of birth doubles the risk of neonatal mortality. The present study has been conducted to estimate the prevalence and determine the factors affecting early initiation of breastfeeding in rural areas of Dibrugarh, district, Assam.Methods: Community based cross sectional study from May 2017 to April 2018 among mothers having children in the age group 0 to 23 months in the rural areas of Dibrugarh district. The sample size calculated for the study was 360 children.Results: The results were analyzed for 334 children. Prevalence of early initiation of breastfeeding was found to be 54.8%. On multivariate regression analysis the occupation and education of mothers, number of antenatal checkup visits, type of delivery and religion were found to be independently associated with early initiation of breastfeeding.Conclusions: This study reveals that the early initiation of breast feeding is lower in rural areas of Dibrugarh district. The findings clearly highlight the importance of imparting health education to family members and mothers right from antenatal period on infant and child feeding practices.