Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An adult physical activity scoring scheme: its evaluation and application.

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper was to describe the development and evaluation of an adult physical activity (PA) scoring scheme (SS). METHODS SS was based on the 2000 METs compendium and PA guidance. Scoring credit was assigned to moderate (3-6 METs) or vigorous (>6 METs) activities using a 100-point scale. A point designator for evaluation (80.01-100, good; 51.00-80, needs improvement; and <51, poor) was based on guidance to perform 30 min of moderate activity > or = 5 d x wk(-1) or 20 min of vigorous activity > or = 3 d x wk(-1). Activities were scored individually and summed for a final score. PA information was from the Behavioral Risk Surveillance Survey, 2000. Weighted data were analyzed using SAS. Sensitivity and specificity methods were used to evaluate the SS. Fifty-six PA met intensity criteria and were examined for frequency and duration. RESULTS Study included adults > or = 18 yr (N = 173,980). 71.4% of the men and 67.2% of the women reported moderate or vigorous activity, but only 13.1% of the men and 12.8% of the women received a good score. 48.9% of the men and 41% of the women needed improvement and 9.4% of the men and 13.4% of the women had a poor score. The sensitivity of identifying inactivity was 94 and 95% for inactive men and women, respectively; 92% for identifying both men and women needing improvement; and 79% for men and 90% for women with a poor score. The specificity of getting a good score was 57 and 60% for active men and women, respectively. CONCLUSION SS appropriately assigns scoring credit to moderate and vigorous activities. However, assumptions made for mixed moderate and vigorous activities may misclassify active individuals.
Does Horizontal Accountability Work?

This article addresses the accountability deficit of executive agencies. It argues that the acclaimed deficit consists of two elements: the inability of democratic principals to hold autonomous agencies accountable and the insufficiency of hierarchical accountability mechanisms on their own. Horizontal mechanisms for accountability have been developed in which agencies account for their behavior toward stakeholders, boards of commissioners, and professional visitations. This article addresses the question whether and to what extent horizontal accountability mechanisms in practice serve as remedies for the deficit. An evaluative grading system is designed with which 15 horizontal accountability mechanisms of Dutch agencies are assessed. The analysis shows that horizontal accountability is a partial solution for the accountability deficit. It scarcely contributes to democratic control but has promising effects for organizational learning.
Predicting Word Association Strengths

This paper looks at the task of predicting word association strengths across three datasets; WordNet Evocation (Boyd-Graber et al., 2006), University of Southern Florida Free Association norms (Nelson et al., 2004), and Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (Kiss et al., 1973). We achieve results of r=0.357 and p=0.379, r=0.344 and p=0.300, and r=0.292 and p=0.363, respectively. We find Word2Vec (Mikolov et al., 2013) and GloVe (Pennington et al., 2014) cosine similarities, as well as vector offsets, to be the highest performing features. Furthermore, we examine the usefulness of Gaussian embeddings (Vilnis and McCallum, 2014) for predicting word association strength, the first work to do so.
Hybrid Integrated Platforms for Silicon Photonics

A review of recent progress in hybrid integrated platforms for silicon photonics is presented. Integration of III-V semiconductors onto silicon-on-insulator substrates based on two different bonding techniques is compared, one comprising only inorganic materials, the other technique using an organic bonding agent. Issues such as bonding process and mechanism, bonding strength, uniformity, wafer surface requirement, and stress distribution are studied in detail. The application in silicon photonics to realize high-performance active and passive photonic devices on low-cost silicon wafers is discussed. Hybrid integration is believed to be a promising technology in a variety of applications of silicon photonics.
Social Media-Related Geographic Information in the Context of Strategic Environmental Assessment of Municipal Masterplans: A Case Study Concerning Sardinia (Italy)

This paper proposes a discussion concerning the use of social media-related geographic information in the context of the strategic environmental assessment (SEA) of Sardinian Municipal masterplans (MMPs). We show that this kind of information improves, substantially, the SEA process since it provides planners, evaluators, and the local communities with information retrieved from social media that would have not been available otherwise. This information integrates authoritative data collection, which comes from official sources, and enlightens tastes and preferences of the users of services and infrastructure, and their expectations concerning their spatial organization. A methodological approach related to the collection of social media-related geographic information is implemented and discussed with reference to the urban context of the city of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy). The results are very effective in terms of provision of information, which may possibly increase the spatial knowledge available for planning policy definition and implementation. In this perspective, this kind of information discloses opportunities for building analytical scenarios related to urban and regional planning and it offers useful suggestions for sustainable development based on tourism strategies.
Evaluation of Corneal Shape and Biomechanics Before LASIK

The preoperative evaluation is of critical importance for success in laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK). This examination should fulfill 3 main purposes: counseling and educating the candidates, surgery planning, and screening for cases at higher risk for complications. It is critical to interview each refractive patient to assess their individual needs and to provide realistic expectations. A thorough ophthalmologic examination is mandatory, including specific complementary examinations to characterize many aspects of the cornea and the optics of the eye. In fact, it is notable that refractive surgery has motivated tremendous development for advanced diagnostic methods, among many others advancements and innovations in Ophthalmology. One of the most important aspects of the preoperative examination of LASIK candidates is to screen cases at risk for progressive ectasia.
Teacher Perfectionism and Iranian English Language Learners’ Motivation and Achievement

Educational psychology has recently reflected a policy shift from focusing on “what goes wrong” in schools, including psychological, physical, and educational disabilities, to recognizing and promoting strengths and positive aspects of students and their environments. Within this scope, some lines of research have examined the extent to which setting personal high standards influences such positive outcomes as educational achievement and high level of motivation. The present study was motivated by the concern that Iranian English language teachers' setting high standards, i.e. perfectionism, may predict English language learners’ motivation and language achievement. Through cluster random sampling, a total of 30 English language teachers with more than one year of experience and 300 elementary English language learners were selected from English Language Institutes in Fars province, Iran. Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism scale and Motivations Underlying English Language Learning questionnaire were used to measure teachers' perfectionism and learners’ language learning motivation, respectively. The learners' final scores in the English courses were collected as a measure of their language learning achievement. The result of simple regression analysis revealed that the teachers' perfectionism did not predict English language learners’ motivation and language achievement. In other words, Iranian English language teachers' perfectionism did not account for any variance in these two variables of interest. Keywords: Perfectionism, Motivation, Language Learning Achievement
Optimization techniques on reactive electric power compensation in distribution networks

consume reactive power, so the transferred power should consist reactive power in addition to active power. Meanwhile to release the capacity of transmission lines to transfer more active power , its better to produce the reactive power in the load centers while such power in the distribution networks usually provide with shunt capacitors. Generally because of the fact that the distribution networks are radial and the ratio of resistance on reactance is high, led to such condition that design and specifying the optimal capacity of the shunt capacitors in order to loss reduction and voltage control assumed as one often vital aspect of distribution networks optimization . In this respect great deals of studies have been done and various methods represented so far [1-20]. in this paper , the mathematical , heuristic and near-global optimization methods of optimal design of the capacitors in the distribution networks have been evaluated and the evolutions pace , advantages and disadvantages of those methods from 1956 up to 2007 have been described while the optimal and mixed procedure to switch intelligently the shunt capacitors represented as a conclusion .
A Secure Money Transaction Scheme (Identification Scheme) using Elliptic Curves

Identification protocols have an important role for building secure communications amongst two or more entities over the internet. In this paper we introduce a new identification scheme (or money transaction protocol) based on the elliptic curve Diffie - Hellman problem. We show that our protocol meets the security attributes under the assumption that the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem is secure.
Wireless Single Cellular Coverage Boundary Models

To satisfy the requirement of high wireless transmission rate from user terminals, the multi-cell cooperative communication is an important solution for cellular networks. The selection of cooperative cells is usually depended on every wireless single cellular coverage boundary in cellular networks. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of wireless single cellular coverage boundary based on real measured data. Moreover, the alpha-stable processes are first proposed to model the wireless single cellular coverage boundary. Simulation results indicate that probability density functions of wireless single cellular coverage boundary can be fitted by alpha-stable processes with 95% confidence interval based on the real measured data. This result provides a basis for cooperative communications considering the anisotropic fading characteristic of wireless signal propagation in wireless single cellular coverage region.
Energy efficient architectural framework for virtual machine management in IaaS clouds

Cloud computing is a novel computing model, involving resource outsourcing with infinite and flexible resource scalability and “plug and play” provisioning. The recent materialization of this new computing model has radically changed everyone's perception of infrastructure paradigm, development models and delivery of software. Earlier people were reluctant to go for Clouds due to doubt on performance so since its inception main emphasis has been given on performance so that SLA is not violated. So resources were over provisioned to meet peak demands which resulted in underutilization of servers in off peak hours. This resulted in high power consumption, high carbon footprints and high cooling cost. We are proposing an energy efficient framework for Virtual Machine management which will result in minimum no. of servers used which will further result in low power consumption, low carbon footprints and which will make Cloud computing economical for both consumers and providers. Our model differs from others since we have restricted CPU utilization to a threshold limit as it has been experimentally proved that power consumption increases drastically when CPU utilization increases beyond 70%. Moreover it also gives room for scaling up resources during peak hours.
Monte Carlo simulation of the adsorption of phenol on gold electrodes: a simple model

Canonical Monte Carlo simulations, at 298 K, of the adsorption of phenol in a dilute aqueous solution on gold electrodes, at the potential of zero charge, are presented. The results suggest that the process occurs in two distinct and successive steps. Adsorption starts with the phenol oxygen atom pointing towards the gold surface and the aromatic ring in a quasi-perpendicular orientation relative to the surface. This is followed by the reorientation of the aromatic ring to a parallel configuration. The effect of the solvent is analyzed through the calculation of the potential of mean force acting on phenol. Despite the simplicity of the model and the interaction potentials used in the simulations, the results are in good agreement with experimental observations, giving insight into the microscopic details of the adsorption process of phenol at low concentrations.
Frequency-dependent modeling of grounding system in EMTP for lightning transient studies of grid-connected PV systems

The paper adopts a comprehensive modeling technique to investigate the effect of frequency-dependent characteristics of grounding system in a grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system on the overvoltages caused by lightning strikes on the nearby overhead line. In this technique, the frequency response of grounding system is determined using an electromagnetic approach based on the method-of-moments (MoM) solutions of the governing Maxwell's equations. To evaluate the resultant overvolatges on the key components of PV systems, the electromagnetic transients program (EMTP) is used where the grounding system is represented by an appropriate state-space model. The model is derived by approximating the frequency response of the MoM impedance matrix by a rational function based on the vector fitting method. Simulated results obtained for a typical grid-connected PV system show that when a lightning surge hits the grid, the values of overvoltages produced in the PV system can exceed those predicted by the conventional resistive model of grounding system.
The benefits of cholinergic enhancement during perceptual learning are long-lasting

The neurotransmitter acetylcholine (ACh) regulates many aspects of cognition, including attention and memory. Previous research in animal models has shown that plasticity in sensory systems often depends on the behavioral relevance of a stimulus and/or task. However, experimentally increasing ACh release in the cortex can result in experience-dependent plasticity, even in the absence of behavioral relevance. In humans, the pharmacological enhancement of ACh transmission by administration of the cholinesterase inhibitor donepezil during performance of a perceptual task increases the magnitude of perceptual learning (PL) and its specificity to physical parameters of the stimuli used for training. Behavioral effects of PL have previously been shown to persist for many months. In the present study, we tested whether enhancement of PL by donepezil is also long-lasting. Healthy human subjects were trained on a motion direction discrimination task during cholinergic enhancement, and follow-up testing was performed 5–15 months after the end of training and without additional drug administration. Increases in performance associated with training under donepezil were evident in follow-up retesting, indicating that cholinergic enhancement has beneficial long-term effects on PL. These findings suggest that cholinergic enhancement of training procedures used to treat clinical disorders should improve long-term outcomes of these procedures.
A Survey on Face Recognition in Present Scenario

Face recognition has been a quick growing, challenging and fascinating field in real time applications. In the field of biometrics an oversized variety of face recognition algorithms are developed in last decades. In this paper a trial is formed to review a large variety of methods used for face recognition. This includes PCA, LDA, ICA, Batch_ccipca, Ind_ccipca, LibSVM and ISVM. This review investigates include all these face recognition methods with parameters that challenges face recognition like illumination, pose variation, facial expressions.
Using Kinect for face recognition under varying poses, expressions, illumination and disguise

We present an algorithm that uses a low resolution 3D sensor for robust face recognition under challenging conditions. A preprocessing algorithm is proposed which exploits the facial symmetry at the 3D point cloud level to obtain a canonical frontal view, shape and texture, of the faces irrespective of their initial pose. This algorithm also fills holes and smooths the noisy depth data produced by the low resolution sensor. The canonical depth map and texture of a query face are then sparse approximated from separate dictionaries learned from training data. The texture is transformed from the RGB to Discriminant Color Space before sparse coding and the reconstruction errors from the two sparse coding steps are added for individual identities in the dictionary. The query face is assigned the identity with the smallest reconstruction error. Experiments are performed using a publicly available database containing over 5000 facial images (RGB-D) with varying poses, expressions, illumination and disguise, acquired using the Kinect sensor. Recognition rates are 96.7% for the RGB-D data and 88.7% for the noisy depth data alone. Our results justify the feasibility of low resolution 3D sensors for robust face recognition.
Depression and explicit requests for euthanasia in end-of-life cancer patients in primary care in the Netherlands: a longitudinal, prospective study.

BACKGROUND In the Netherlands, many (45%) cancer patients die at home, in the care of GPs. About 1 out of 10 end-of-life cancer deaths is hastened by GPs through euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. However, the relationship between depression and requests for euthanasia has never been prospectively studied directly in primary care. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to assess the prevalence of depression in end-of-life cancer patients requesting euthanasia in primary care, as well as to assess the relationship between depression and requesting euthanasia. METHODS Primary care patients with incurable cancer and an estimated life expectancy of half a year or shorter were interviewed every 2 months, using standardized psychometric instruments. Also, non-recruited eligible patients were monitored. RESULTS Out of 258 eligible patients, 76 patients were recruited, of whom 64 patients were followed up until death. Of these, 27% (n = 17) explicitly requested euthanasia. One patient suffered from major depression. According to the depression subscale of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, 47% of the patients who explicitly requested euthanasia versus 28% of those without an euthanasia request suffered from a depressed mood at inclusion; the difference was not significant (P = 0.2). Corresponding figures for the last interview before death were 40% and 41% (P = 0.6). CONCLUSIONS Major depression was not a major factor in explicit requests for euthanasia in end-of-life cancer patients in primary care. Further depressed mood was not associated with explicitly requesting euthanasia in this patient group, although statistical underpower cannot be ruled out in this small sample.
International Conference on Information ResourcesManagement ( CONFIRM ) 5-2009 Alignment and strategy ; the chicken or the egg ?

Aligning business and IT strategy is a prominent area of concern. Organizations that successfully align their business strategy and their IT strategy, outperform their non-aligned peers (Chan et al., 1997). This paper explores the relationship between business strategy, IT strategy and alignment capability. We found that each business strategy can be supported by all IT strategies, but that certain combinations provide a better fit than others. Regarding business strategy and alignment capability we found no conclusive relationship. Regarding the relationship between IT strategy and alignment capability however, a clear relationship appeared. We explored this relationship further in a dual case study of two organizations having distinctly different IT strategies. One organization sees IT as an enabler for the business processes with mainly an internal impact, whereas the other organization IT sees as a driver for business innovation that can create competitive advantage in the market place. Based upon an assessment of their alignment capabilities we found that the company with the „innovative‟ IT strategy scored a distinctly higher alignment capability than the company with the „essential‟ IT strategy. Although this conclusion may not be surprising, it provides further evidence for the statement that a more „progressive‟ IT strategy pairs with a better alignment of business and IT.
JudgeD: A Probabilistic Datalog with Dependencies

We present JudgeD, a probabilistic datalog. A JudgeD program defines a distribution over a set of traditional datalog programs by attaching logical sentences to clauses to implicitly specify traditional data programs. Through the logical sentences, JudgeD provides a novel method for the expression of complex dependencies between both rules and facts. JudgeD is implemented as a proof-of-concept in the language Python. The implementation allows connection to external data sources, and features both a Monte Carlo probability approximation as well as an exact solver supported by BDDs. Several directions for future work are discussed and the implementation is released under the MIT license.
Approximate bisimulation for a class of stochastic hybrid systems

We develop a notion of approximate bisimulation for a class of stochastic hybrid systems, namely, the jump linear stochastic systems (JLSS). The idea is based on the construction of the so called stochastic bisimulation function, which quantify the distance between two jump linear stochastic systems. The function is then used to quantify the distance between a given JLSS and its abstraction, and hence quantify the quality of the abstraction. We show that this idea can be applied to simplify safety verification for JLSS. We also show that in the absence of internal disturbances, we can pose the construction of quadratic stochastic bisimulation functions as a tractable linear matrix inequality problem
"Footprint" titrations yield valid thermodynamic isotherms.

A central issue in gene regulation is the mechanism, and biological function, of the cooperative binding of regulatory protein ligands to specific sites on DNA. To elucidate the physical-chemical basis of these interactions we have developed a thermodynamically rigorous method for conducting DNase I "footprint" (protection) titration experiments. The intrinsic binding constants and also those for cooperative interactions between various sites can be resolved from the individual-site binding curves determined by this technique. Experimental studies of cI-repressor-operator binding have demonstrated that the method provides an accurate representation of the fractional saturation of a binding site. We present individual-site binding curves for a lambda operator with two competent sites that demonstrate the presence of cooperative interactions between the sites. These curves set a lower limit to the magnitude of the cooperative free energy without comparison to single-site mutant operators.