Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance of k-means based satellite image clustering in RGB and HSV color space

This paper throws a light on the available clustering techniques and algorithms, k-means is used to cluster standard and satellite image in RGB and HSV color space. Normally satellite images comes with data and noises, in order to extract meaningful information efficiently there is a need of image clustering and performance of clustering based on pixel classification is greatly affected by the color space we selected, because image analysis in terms of Red, Green and Blue components is more difficult as compared to in terms of hue, saturation and value in context of differentiation an object. Our analysis of image clustering in two different color spaces using the k-means technique shows that clustering performance decreases with RGB color space when compared to HSV color space. CHI, DBI and SE indexes are calculated and compared.
Understanding Women's Pathways to Jail: Analysing the Lives of Incarcerated Women

Abstract Some researchers suggest that crime pathways are gendered and that different paths may be revealed depending on the point of contact with the criminal justice system. Drawing from the feminist and age-of-onset literatures, we examine the life experiences of a sample of ‘high-risk’ women to assess whether their offending pathways into jail are consistent with those predicted by earlier research.We find substantial overlaps with feminist pathways, but notable differences as well — differences that may lie with which populations are under study (jailed and awaiting trial/disposition versus convicted felons; by racial composition). Sorting the women by onset age (early, adolescent, and adult), we discover a sizeable group of adult onset offenders (54%). Compared with those who begin offending earlier, these late onset women appear to have distinct risk factors.
A Survey on Black Hole Attacks on AODV Protocol in MANET

Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that dynamically form a temporary network without infrastructure. It has many number of applications mainly in the areas of Sensor Networks (SN), medical, military and rescue operations. Routing is an important component in mobile ad hoc networks and it has several routing protocols, which are affected from different attacks. Ad hoc On demand Distance Vector (AODV) is one of the most suitable routing protocol for the MANETs and it is more vulnerable to black hole attack by the malicious nodes. A malicious node that incorrectly sends the RREP (route reply) that it has a latest route with minimum hop count to destination and then it drops all the receiving packets. This is called as black hole attack. In the case of multiple malicious nodes that work together with cooperatively, the effect will be more. This type of attack is known as cooperative black hole attack. In this paper, we have surveyed and compare the existing solutions to black hole attacks on AODV protocol and their drawbacks.
Proteomics Reveals N-Linked Glycoprotein Diversity in Caenorhabditis elegans and Suggests an Atypical Translocation Mechanism for Integral Membrane Proteins*S

Protein glycosylation is one of the most common post-translational modifications in eukaryotes and affects various aspects of protein structure and function. To facilitate studies of protein glycosylation, we paired glycosylation site-specific stable isotope tagging of lectin affinity-captured N-linked glycopeptides with mass spectrometry and determined 1,465 N-glycosylated sites on 829 proteins expressed in Caenorhabditis elegans. The analysis shows the diversity of protein glycosylation in eukaryotes in terms of glycosylation sites and oligosaccharide structures attached to polypeptide chains and suggests the substrate specificity of oligosaccharyltransferase, a single multienzyme complex in C. elegans that incorporates an oligosaccharide moiety en bloc to newly synthesized polypeptides. In addition, topological analysis of 257 N-glycosylated proteins containing a putative single transmembrane segment that were identified based on the relative positions of glycosylation sites and transmembrane segments suggests that an atypical non-cotranslational mechanism translocates large N-terminal segments from the cytosol to the endoplasmic reticulum lumen in the absence of signal sequence function.
Understanding the entrepreneurial potential of female Saudi Arabian family and consumer sciences students and businesswomen

In an effort to support the Saudi Arabian government’s efforts to strengthen the family unit and economy, this study examines the entrepreneurial potential of female Saudi Arabian Family and Consumer Sciences students and Saudi Arabian women entrepreneurs. Saudi Arabia is a country where the Islamic religion and its values are interwoven into every aspect of society, with family as the basic social institution. Traditionally, male family members made decisions including those regarding the careers of female family members. Using a phenomenological approach, the researcher interviewed 33 Saudi Arabian female undergraduate students and nine businesswomen to learn more about influences and perceptions affecting the realization of their entrepreneurial potential. The study has five chapters.
Market Dynamics Around Public Information Arrivals

I analyze the impact of the arrival of public information on the intraday trading of highly liquid stocks quoted on the Paris Bourse. Using the Reuters alert system, I gather a large sample of firm-specific news and analyze market behavior around news releases. I estimate the transaction cost components around public information releases. I find that there is a disclosure impact on both trading and order flow. I also find that trading around news releases is characterized by relatively small adverse selection and order processing costs, and high order persistence.
SPEAKER NORMALIZATION USING CANONICAL CORRELATION ANALYSIS Lai Tsz Chung Kimo kimo @ cs . ust . hk Human Language Technology Center Department of Computer Science Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Speaker-independent HMMs (SI HMMs) flatten the probability distribution of features and reduce the accuracy of recognition. This is because of SI HMMs ignore speaker's difference and locate every speaker's data in a global observation space. Yasuo Ariki et al. has proposed a method called "CLAFIC Canonical Correlation Analysis method" (CLAFIC CCA method) which can minimize the distance between two speakers data by projection. In this project, I have implemented this method and have completed several experiments. The result shows the accuracy of CLAFIC CCA has been improved rapidly compare to speaker dependent HMMs (SD HMMs). But compare to SI HMMs, the performance is not as good as expected.
FAMILY AND SCHOOL INFLUENCES ON RURAL YOUTH PERSISTENCE TO COLLEGE GRADUATION

The literature presents conflicting views of the rural experience, with one perspective chronicling the deficits associated with growing up rural while the other reveals advantages to small-town community and schooling influences. Adding to the complexities of the rural narrative are the recent demographic and social changes in rural communities—and the increasing number of rural youth migrating out of rural regions in search of brighter futures. Despite an increasing number of rural students enrolling in college, little research exists on understanding their precollege characteristics and college experiences—and the influence on college persistence. The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which rural youth perceive the influences of family and high school on their ability to persist to college graduation. To gain an understanding of the complexities contained with the experiences of participants, a qualitative approach was employed, using semi-structured interviews as the study method. Participants shared positive perceptions connected to school, highlighting the benefits derived from small school size and teacher encouragement and personalized attention. Participants were less satisfied with coursework rigor, dual enrollment access, and financial planning, and discussed how these aspects could have been more beneficial to their efforts to access and persist through college. Strong family connections emerged in participant stories. While consistent and informative messaging regarding accessing college was not as apparent within families as in school, participants clearly felt supported by parents to attend college—and, in most cases, to pursue other higher education and/or career paths if they chose to do so. Participants articulated a clear desire to return to home communities to live and work but expressed concern about finding viable job opportunities. This study’s findings could have important implications for rural youth and their families when considered in concert with the larger body of research related to rural youth persisting through college. Findings from this study could inform further research and practices designed to enhance college readiness and graduation rates of rural youth. In particular, participant stories highlighted the value of maximizing rural youth interactions with family, school, and community.
Social Values and Sustainability: A Survey on Drivers, Barriers and Benefits of SA8000 Certification in Italian Firms

Companies are increasingly required to deal with sustainability issues through the adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices. Among the different CSR aspects, workers securities fulfill a necessary issue. SA8000 is an internationally accepted tool that aims to guarantee decent workplace across all industrial sectors. Italian companies represent more than 30% of certified organizations on a global level. Company size is a key factor in the definition of managerial strategies. A survey that involved more than 600 SA8000 certified companies has been conducted. Company dimension has been used as a parameter to interpret survey results. The aspects analyzed mainly consisted of drivers, barriers and benefits in SA8000 certification pathway. The study showed a high level of homogeneity among firms. According to SA8000 requirements, one of the main issues is the implementation of control and awareness mechanisms addressed to suppliers. Survey results highlight that all respondents recognize the importance of suppliers’ involvement, considered as one of the most difficult phases in implementing certification. However, there were no significant differences among Micro, Small, Medium and Large companies.
Learning domain-independent string transformation weights for high accuracy object identification

The task of object identification occurs when integrating information from multiple websites. The same data objects can exist in inconsistent text formats across sites, making it difficult to identify matching objects using exact text match. Previous methods of object identification have required manual construction of domain-specific string transformations or manual setting of general transformation parameter weights for recognizing format inconsistencies. This manual process can be time consuming and error-prone. We have developed an object identification system called Active Atlas [18], which applies a set of domain-independent string transformations to compare the objects' shared attributes in order to identify matching objects. In this paper, we discuss extensions to the Active Atlas system, which allow it to learn to tailor the weights of a set of general transformations to a specific application domain through limited user input. The experimental results demonstrate that this approach achieves higher accuracy and requires less user involvement than previous methods across various application domains.
Avoidance of wind farms by harbour seals is limited to pile driving activities

Summary As part of global efforts to reduce dependence on carbon‐based energy sources there has been a rapid increase in the installation of renewable energy devices. The installation and operation of these devices can result in conflicts with wildlife. In the marine environment, mammals may avoid wind farms that are under construction or operating. Such avoidance may lead to more time spent travelling or displacement from key habitats. A paucity of data on at‐sea movements of marine mammals around wind farms limits our understanding of the nature of their potential impacts. Here, we present the results of a telemetry study on harbour seals Phoca vitulina in The Wash, south‐east England, an area where wind farms are being constructed using impact pile driving. We investigated whether seals avoid wind farms during operation, construction in its entirety, or during piling activity. The study was carried out using historical telemetry data collected prior to any wind farm development and telemetry data collected in 2012 during the construction of one wind farm and the operation of another. Within an operational wind farm, there was a close‐to‐significant increase in seal usage compared to prior to wind farm development. However, the wind farm was at the edge of a large area of increased usage, so the presence of the wind farm was unlikely to be the cause. There was no significant displacement during construction as a whole. However, during piling, seal usage (abundance) was significantly reduced up to 25 km from the piling activity; within 25 km of the centre of the wind farm, there was a 19 to 83% (95% confidence intervals) decrease in usage compared to during breaks in piling, equating to a mean estimated displacement of 440 individuals. This amounts to significant displacement starting from predicted received levels of between 166 and 178 dB re 1 μPa(p‐p). Displacement was limited to piling activity; within 2 h of cessation of pile driving, seals were distributed as per the non‐piling scenario. Synthesis and applications. Our spatial and temporal quantification of avoidance of wind farms by harbour seals is critical to reduce uncertainty and increase robustness in environmental impact assessments of future developments. Specifically, the results will allow policymakers to produce industry guidance on the likelihood of displacement of seals in response to pile driving; the relationship between sound levels and avoidance rates; and the duration of any avoidance, thus allowing far more accurate environmental assessments to be carried out during the consenting process. Further, our results can be used to inform mitigation strategies in terms of both the sound levels likely to cause displacement and what temporal patterns of piling would minimize the magnitude of the energetic impacts of displacement.
Soft robotic glove for hand rehabilitation and task specific training

This paper presents advancements in the design of a portable, soft robotic glove for individuals with functional grasp pathologies. The robotic glove leverages soft material actuator technology to safely distribute forces along the length of the finger and provide active flexion and passive extension. These actuators consist of molded elastomeric bladders with anisotropic fiber reinforcements that produce specific bending, twisting, and extending trajectories upon fluid pressurization. In particular, we present a method for customizing a soft actuator to a wearer's biomechanics and demonstrate in a motion capture system that the ranges of motion (ROM) of the two are nearly equivalent. The active ROM of the glove is further evaluated using the Kapandji test. Lastly, in a case study, we present preliminary results of a patient with very weak hand strength performing a timed Box-and-Block test with and without the soft robotic glove.
Top-Down Control of Multimodal Sensitivity in the Barn Owl Optic Tectum

We studied the effects of electrically microstimulating a gaze-control area in the owl's forebrain, the arcopallial gaze fields (AGFs), on the responsiveness of neurons in the optic tectum (OT) to visual and auditory stimuli. Microstimulation of the AGF enhanced the visual and auditory responsiveness and stimulus discriminability of OT neurons representing the same location in space as that represented at the microstimulation site in the AGF. At such OT sites, AGF microstimulation also sharpened auditory receptive fields and shifted them toward the location represented at the AGF stimulation site. At the same time, AGF microstimulation suppressed the responsiveness of OT neurons that represented visual or auditory stimuli at other locations in space. The top-down influences of this forebrain gaze-control area on sensory responsiveness in the owl OT are strikingly similar to the space-specific regulation of visual responsiveness in the monkey visual cortex produced by voluntary attention as well as by microstimulation of the frontal eye fields. This experimental approach provides a means for discovering mechanisms that underlie the top-down regulation of sensory responses.
Color Face Recognition Based on Revised NMF Algorithm

Color face image is composed of color information of different channels. Color image provides more information for face recognition task compared with grey scale image. A novel approach coined block diagonal non-negative matrix factorization (BDNMF) is proposed for color face representation and recognition. The approach employs block diagonal matrix to encode color information of different channels. Block diagonal constraint is imposed on the non-negative matrix factorization algorithm to factorize matrices of different channels simultaneously. And block diagonal non-negative matrix factorization algorithm is exploited to extract facial features. Nearest neighborhood classifier is adopted to identify color face samples. Experimental results on CVL and CMU PIE color face databases verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Animation of synthetic faces in MPEG-4

MPEG-4 is the first international standard that standardizes true multimedia communication-including natural and synthetic audio, natural and synthetic video, as well as 3D graphics. Integrated into this standard is the capability to define and animate virtual humans consisting of synthetic heads and bodies. For the head, more than 70 model-independent animation parameters defining low-level actions like "move left mouth corner" up to high-level parameters like facial expressions and visemes are standardized In a communication application. The encoder can define the face model using MPEG-4 BIFS (BInary Format for Scenes) and transmit it to the decoder. Alternatively, the encoder can rely on a face model that is available at the decoder. The animation parameters are quantized, predictively encoded using an arithmetic encoder or a DCT. The decoder receives the model and the animation parameters in order to animate the model. Since MPEG-4 defines the minimum MPEG-4 terminal capabilities in profiles and levels, the encoder knows the quality of the animation at the decoder.
Deep Brain Photoreceptor (val-opsin) Gene Knockout Using CRISPR/Cas Affects Chorion Formation and Embryonic Hatching in the Zebrafish

Non-rod non-cone photopigments in the eyes and the brain can directly mediate non-visual functions of light in non-mammals. This was supported by our recent findings on vertebrate ancient long (VAL)-opsin photopigments encoded by the val-opsinA (valopa) and val-opsinB (valopb) genes in zebrafish. However, the physiological functions of valop isoforms remain unknown. Here, we generated valop-mutant zebrafish using CRISPR/Cas genome editing, and examined the phenotypes of loss-of-function mutants. F0 mosaic mutations and germline transmission were confirmed via targeted insertions and/or deletions in the valopa or valopb gene in F1 mutants. Based on in silico analysis, frameshift mutations converted VAL-opsin proteins to non-functional truncated forms with pre-mature stop codons. Most F1 eggs or embryos from F0 female valopa/b mutants showed either no or only partial chorion elevation, and the eggs or embryos died within 26 hour-post-fertilization. However, most F1 embryos from F0 male valopa mutant developed but hatched late compared to wild-type embryos, which hatched at 4 day-post-fertilization. Late-hatched F1 offspring included wild-type and mutants, indicating the parental effects of valop knockout. This study shows valop gene knockout affects chorion formation and embryonic hatching in the zebrafish.
Police in schools and student arrest rates across the United States: Examining differences by race, ethnicity, and gender

ABSTRACT Implementing police in schools is a common strategy for ensuring school safety, but it is unknown whether, to what extent, and for whom the presence of police in schools affects student arrest rates. Utilizing nationwide data from the 2013–2014 Civil Rights Data Collection (N = 92,620), this study examines how police presence is related to student arrest rates, and whether this association varies by student race/ethnicity and gender. Path models and propensity score matching models show that the association between police presence and arrest rates was stronger for all the groups examined in schools with police, particularly for Black students and boys. This provides support for criminalization theories suggesting that police presence results in more arrests.
An efficient method to reduce the peak transient grounding resistance value of a grounding system

In this paper, an e-cient method is proposed to reduce the peak transient grounding resistance (P-TGR) of a grounding system. By surrounding the lifting line with a material volume, the P-TGR of the grounding system is greatly reduced. The efiect of the surrounding volume conductivity and relative permittivity on the P-TGR is also tested. Second, the rectangular surrounding material volume is shielded with a metallic pipe to reduce the P-TGR further. Third, the shielding metallic pipe is connected to the grounding electrode with thin wire, and the efiect of the number of the wires on the P-TGR is also analyzed. It is demonstrated that the P-TGR of the grounding system has been reduced signiflcantly.
Sparse Representation Classifier Steered Discriminative Projection With Applications to Face Recognition

A sparse representation-based classifier (SRC) is developed and shows great potential for real-world face recognition. This paper presents a dimensionality reduction method that fits SRC well. SRC adopts a class reconstruction residual-based decision rule, we use it as a criterion to steer the design of a feature extraction method. The method is thus called the SRC steered discriminative projection (SRC-DP). SRC-DP maximizes the ratio of between-class reconstruction residual to within-class reconstruction residual in the projected space and thus enables SRC to achieve better performance. SRC-DP provides low-dimensional representation of human faces to make the SRC-based face recognition system more efficient. Experiments are done on the AR, the extended Yale B, and PIE face image databases, and results demonstrate the proposed method is more effective than other feature extraction methods based on the SRC.
Variable Thresholding In Naïve Bayesian Spam Filters

Email has become an essential means of communication for both business and personal use. However, the proliferation of unwanted email advertising or spam has cost organizations millions of dollars and has reduced the effectiveness of email as a communications medium. Recently, spam filters have been widely adopted as a means of combating these unwanted messages. This paper presents a method for better spam detection by combining the classical naïve Bayesian filter with a neural network that analyzes various characteristics of the email body. The results are analyzed and the method deemed effective in conditions where very strong thresholds must be set or where the training data is not exhaustive.