Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Foreground Extraction by Pseudo-synchronization of Camera and Range Sensor

Existing background subtraction methods often fail to extract a foreground region whose color is similar to that of the background. When we use a co-located camera and range sensor, by which we can obtain both a color image and depth map simultaneously, it is expected to get a better foreground region by integrating the two kind of images. However, it is not straightforward when a moving object is observed because the camera and range sensor do not capture the scene synchronously. In this paper, we propose a novel method that pseudo-synchronize the camera and range sensor and integrate the background subtraction of the color and depth images to realize a good foreground extraction. Experimental results of a walking human show its effectiveness.
Identification of a melanocyte‐specific, microphthalmia‐associated transcription factor‐dependent regulatory element in the intronic duplication causing hair greying and melanoma in horses

Greying with age in horses is an autosomal dominant trait, characterized by hair greying, high incidence of melanoma and vitiligo‐like depigmentation. Previous studies have revealed that the causative mutation for this phenotype is a 4.6‐kb intronic duplication in STX17 (Syntaxin 17). By using reporter constructs in transgenic zebrafish, we show that a construct containing two copies of the duplicated sequence acts as a strong enhancer in neural crest cells and has subsequent melanophore‐specific activity during zebrafish embryonic development whereas a single copy of the duplicated sequence acts as a weak enhancer, consistent with the phenotypic manifestation of the mutation in horses. We further used luciferase assays to investigate regulatory regions in the duplication, to reveal tissue‐specific activities of these elements. One region upregulated the reporter gene expression in a melanocyte‐specific manner and contained two microphthalmia‐associated transcription factor (MITF) binding sites, essential for the activity. Microphthalmia‐associated transcription factor regulates melanocyte development, and these binding sites are outstanding candidates for mediating the melanocyte‐specific activity of the element. These results provide strong support for the causative nature of the duplication and constitute an explanation for the melanocyte‐specific effects of the Grey allele.
Reciprocity and Power Balance for Partially Coupled Interfaces

The interaction of elastodynamic waves with imperfectly coupled interfaces has been investigated by many authors for various situations. Schoenberg [2] introduced the linear slip model for an interface between two elastic media. In this model it is assumed that the particle displacement of an elastic wave at an interface jumps by a finite amount, linearly proportional to the stress at the interface. The stress itself is assumed continuous across the interface. The ratio of the stress and the displacement jump is the specific boundary stiffness. Pyrak-Nolte et al. [1] extended this model with a specific boundary viscosity, which is the ratio of stress and a velocity jump across the interface. Other authors considered imperfect boundary conditions for amongst others, electromagnetic waves in matter and for Biot waves in porous media.
Oligodendrocyte ablation impairs cerebellum development

Oligodendrocytes (OLs) are the glial cells of the central nervous system and are classically known to form myelin sheaths around most axons of higher vertebrates. Whether these cells might have other roles, in particular during development, has not been studied. Taking advantage of a transgenic mouse model in which OLs can be selectively killed in a desired time-frame, we have investigated the impact of OL ablation on cerebellar development. OL ablation was induced during the first 3 postnatal weeks, a time at which cerebellum development is ongoing. Strikingly, OL ablation triggers a profound perturbation of the known cerebellum developmental program, characterized by the disorganization of the cortical layers, abnormal foliation and a complete alteration of Purkinje cell dendritic arborization and axonal fasciculation. This phenotype is accompained by decreased granule cell density, a disorganized Bergmann glia network and impaired migration of interneurons in the molecular layer. These results demonstrate a previously ignored role of OLs in the formation of the cerebellar cytoarchitecture.
Draft December 19, 2001spatevol-03.tex SPATIAL EVOLUTION OF THE US URBAN SYSTEM1

We test implications of economic geography models for location, size and growth of cities with US Census data for 1900 – 1990. Our tests involve non-parametric estimations of stochastic kernels for the distributions of city sizes and growth rates, conditional on various measures of market potential and on features of neighbors. We show that while these relationships change during the twentieth century, by 1990 they stabilize such that the size distribution of cities conditional on a range of spatial variables are all roughly independent of these conditioning variables. In contrast, similar results suggest that there is a spatial element to the city wage distribution. Our parametric estimations for growth rates against market potential, entry of neighbors, and own lagged population imply a negative effect of market potential on growth rates, unless own lagged population is also included, in which case market potential has a positive effect and own lagged population a negative one. Cities grow faster when they are small relative to their market potential. In total, our results support some theoretical predictions, but also provide a number of interesting puzzles.
Single-Laser Krypton Tagging Velocimetry (KTV) Investigation of Air and N2 Boundary-Layer Flows Over a Hollow Cylinder in the Stevens Shock Tube

We investigate the boundary-layer profiles that form over a sharp, hollow cylinder in supersonic air and N2 flows with a Krypton Tagging Velocimetry (KTV) single-laser scheme. The supersonic flows are generated by the passage of the primary shock wave over the model in the Stevens Shock Tube. Eight experiments were performed in two gas mixtures: a) 99% N2/1% Kr at post-shock temperature T2=1300 K and pressure range P2 = 6.0 − 25 kPa; and, b) in 75% N2/20% O2/5% Kr at post-shock temperature T2 =1400 K and pressure range P2 = 2.7 − 19 kPa. This experimental design resulted in unit Reynolds numbers ranging from ≈1e5-1e6 m. This range of static conditions spans those of large-scale, high-enthalpy hypersonic impulse facilities, albeit at lower total enthalpy. The freestream pressure and temperature (but not the velocity) of large-scale facilities were reproduced to demonstrate KTV utility. The KTV data points over the hollow cylinder are mapped to wall-normal locations above a flat plate, enabling comparison with the similarity solution for compressible boundary-layer flow. Agreement between the similarity solution and experimental results is excellent. Compared to two-laser KTV schemes, our single-laser approach is simpler and more cost-effective but has a higher laser energy requirement. Single-laser KTV is implemented as follows. At the 212.6 nm wavelength, the write-laser pulse partially ionizes Kr via a (2+1) resonance-enhanced, multiphoton ionization (REMPI) process. The write step records the spontaneous emission resulting from the two-photon excitation. After a prescribed delay, the read step records the fluorescence resulting from the deionization process. The signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) is sufficient to extract velocity profiles from single-shot, shock-tube experiments.
Detecting objects in internet videos AIMS Project Report

As a result of renewed interest in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for visual recognition following their success in the ILSVRC 2012 challenge (Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton, 2012), along with the surprising representational ability of features extracted from such networks in a wide range of computer vision problems (Donahue et al., 2013; Razavian et al., 2014), there has been a recent rise in object detection methods offering good performance, such as R-CNN (Girshick et al., 2014) and Overfeat (Sermanet et al., 2014). This makes it an attractive proposition to apply such detection techniques to less constrained domains than that of still images, in particular the relatively wild world of online videos found on websites such as YouTube. Our contributions consist of both a lightweight implementation of R-CNN, based on the MatConvnet Vedaldi and Lenc (2014) framework, and a series of experiments investigating various network architectures and training methods. We investigate ways to improve detection on PASCAL VOC 2007 (Everingham et al., 2010) by using different loss functions, and tackle the problem of domain adaptation to video using the youtube-objects dataset from Prest et al. (2012) with the unsupervised domain adaptation method proposed by Ganin and Lempitsky (2015) . A key component of our R-CNN implementation is an open and stand-alone C++ implementation of Selective Search (Uijlings et al., 2013), which is used to generate candidate regions for object detection. This alleviates the complexity which arises from dealing with the non-redistributable MATLAB bytecode provided by the original authors.
Stable ruthenium-contact relay technology for low-power logic

Micro-electro-mechanical relays are of interest for low-power digital integrated circuits, due to their ideally zero OFF-state leakage current. The first relay-based integrated circuits utilized tungsten (W) as the contacting material because of its excellent resistance to physical wear. However, W oxidizes easily so that the contact resistance increases to an unacceptably high level over the device operating lifetime. Ruthenium (Ru) is a promising alternative contacting electrode material because it forms an electrically conductive native oxide. In this work, challenges and solutions for integrating Ru into a relay fabrication process are described. Ru-contact relays with good switching behavior and more stable ON-state resistance than W-contact relays are demonstrated.
INVESTIGATION OF PALM FIBRE-DERIVED ACTIVATED CARBON IN WASTEWATER TREATMENT

Untreated industrial wastewater has high concentration of hazardous pollutants, which will affect human health as these pollutants infiltrate into human basic necessities. Adsorption using activated carbon (AC) is commonly used technique in wastewater treatment for removal of organic and inorganic pollutants. Current AC production from biomass usually use strong acid or alkali as pretreatment agent. This research aims to stud the AC production by using a lower concentration of sulphuric acid (H2SO4) and potassium hydroxide (KOH). Deep eutectic solvent (DES), the reported environmental friendly pretreatment agent for biomass also investigated. The AC produced were characterised by using Brunauer, Emmett and Teller (BET) and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR). Adsorption process on the effect of initial concentration of lead and nitrate were investigated. The maximum micropore percentage of 91% was achieved by DES pretreated AC. All AC samples has similar functional groups as commercial activated carbon (CAC) based on FTIR results. AC undergo DES pretreatment showed the highest removal of NO3 and Pb(II). It removed NO3 and Pb(II) up to 19.85% and 95.29% respectively. The usage of DES as pretreatment agent is not only effective in AC production but also reduce environmental issue, as DES is a less hazardous chemical and reusable.
Literature review on aspects of human consumption of soy

The aim of the present paper is to provide a critical review of the existing knowledge and literature on the characteristics, potential beneficial and detrimental effects, and general knowledge of human consumption of soy products. Many aspects of the review will focus on human soy consumption in general; however special emphasis will be put on isolated soy proteins (ISP), and the textured ISP products of Soy4 you in particular.
Ranking of Web Documents Using Semantic Similarity

1 Abstract—Web Image re-ranking, is an effectual appr oach to recuperate the effective results in web image searc hed by the users with the help of queries. That result has surv i ed by adopting the recent marketable search engines likes Bing, Google, and Internet Explorer and so on. First step is to retrieval of images from the large databases based on the user queries are in the form of Textual Information. And then, users select the images based on their textual queries bu t it is in the form of visual images pool. Those images are re-rank ed in the web from an effective output for other users based on queries. The important challenge in the web images re-ranking is not to predict exact output based on the user queries. To o vercome the above challenge, the semantic signatures proposed f or the effective output in the web images. But it fails to produce the matching efficiencies in the results. In this paper we investigate and to produce output efficiency we propose the key word expansions technique for to describe suggestion cla sses preserve incorporate extra metadata and keep a record of dat moreover the textual and image based features. For example, the co-occurrence in order of keywords or queries given by users is helpful and can be acquired in recorded data. In re gulate to modernize the suggestion classes over time in an ef ficient way. And we also implement Hashing technique in this pap er for matching efficiency in the output results web image s. Our proposed technique is efficient when compared to th e previously proposed schemes.
Performance Evaluation of Chinese Private Enterprises: A Comparative Study of Suning and Gome

In China the current development of private enterprises has encountered the problems of gradually decreased survival rate and the development bottleneck, thus can hardly maintain the truly sustainable development. However, the development of private enterprises plays a pivotal role in the Chinese economy and exerts great influence in stimulating the development of socialist market economy and it seems especially important for private enterprises to develop the core competitiveness and to establish the suitable managing strategy development system. Based on a detailed and critical case study, this paper studies how Gome and Suning deal with the development bottleneck and explore innovative methods through two performance evaluation models Balanced Scorecard and Economic Value Added (EVA), and give three appropriate suggestions for China’s private enterprises on how to develop effective strategic management objectives in order to improve the corporate performance.
Projected finite elements for systems of reaction-diffusion equations on closed evolving spheroidal surfaces

The focus of this article is to present the projected finite element method for solving systems of reaction-diffusion equations on evolving closed spheroidal surfaces with applications to pattern formation. The advantages of the projected finite element method are that it is easy to implement and that it provides a conforming finite element discretization which is ``logically'' rectangular. Furthermore, the surface is not approximated but described exactly through the projection. The surface evolution law is incorporated into the projection operator resulting in a time-dependent operator. The time-dependent projection operator is composed of the radial projection with a Lipschitz continuous mapping. The projection operator is used to generate the surface mesh whose connectivity remains constant during the evolution of the surface. To illustrate the methodology several numerical experiments are exhibited for different surface evolution laws such as uniform isotropic (linear, logistic and exponential), anisotropic, and concentration-driven. This numerical methodology allows us to study new reaction-kinetics that only give rise to patterning in the presence of surface evolution such as the activator-activator and short-range inhibition; long-range activation.
Influence of surreptitious advertising in vlogs on the purchase intention of soft drinks

3 Introduction . 5 Theoretical background . 8 Processing systems . 8 Influence of advertisement on brand attitude and purchase intention. 9 Shift from traditional to new media . 9 Social media . 9 Product placement . 10 Mere exposure effect . 10 Factors influencing effectivity of advertising messages . 10 Credibility of the message . 10 Conceptual Model & Hypotheses . 13 Method . 14 Design . 14 Measures . 14 Procedure . 16 Data-Analysis . 18 Results . 19 Randomization . 19 Control variables . 19 Manipulation . 20 H1:The influence of watching surreptitious Fanta advertisement in a vlog on the purchase intention of Fanta . 20 H2:The influence of watching surreptitious Fanta advertisement in a vlog on the credibility of the advertisement message. 20 H3:The influence of watching surreptitious Fanta advertisement in a vlog on the attention for the message . 21 H4:The influence of the credibility of the message on the overall brand attitude . 22 H5:The influence of the attention for the message on the overall brand attitude . 22 H6:The influence of the overall brand attitude on willingness to purchase . 22 Discussion . 23 Limitations . 25 Strengths of study . 26 References . 27
3-2019 Remote Sensing of Water Use Efficiency and Terrestrial Drought Recovery across the Contiguous United States

Ecosystem water-use efficiency (WUE) is defined as the ratio of carbon gain (i.e., gross primary productivity; GPP) to water consumption (i.e., evapotranspiration; ET). WUE is markedly influential on carbon and water cycles, both of which are fundamental for ecosystem state, climate and the environment. Drought can affect WUE, subsequently disturbing the composition and functionality of terrestrial ecosystems. In this study, the impacts of drought on WUE and its components (i.e., GPP and ET) are assessed across the Contiguous US (CONUS) at fine spatial and temporal resolutions. Soil moisture simulations from land surface modeling are utilized to detect and characterize agricultural drought episodes and remotely sensed GPP and ET are retrieved from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS). GPP, as the biome vitality indicator against drought stress, is employed to investigate drought recovery and the ecosystems’ required time to revert to pre-drought condition. Results show that drought recovery duration indicates a positive correlation with drought severity and duration, meaning that a protracted drought recovery is more likely to happen following severe droughts with prolonged duration. WUE is found to almost always increase in response to severe (or worse) drought episodes. Additionally, ET anomalies are negatively correlated with drought severity and ET is expected to decrease during severe (or worse) drought episodes. Lastly, the changes of WUE are decomposed in relation to its components and the cross-relation among the variables is revealed and a consistent changing pattern is detected.
Influence of Intercropping Maize with Cowpea and Fertilization with Clinoptilolite on Forage Yield and Quality

Maize forage is poor in protein content which leads to low quality and nutritive value. Regarding the high feed costs of protein supplementations, legumes can be used in livestock nutrition for their high protein content, and thus, provide cost savings. In this study, maize (Zea mays L.) and cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L.) were intercropped in different sowing densities and fertilization with clinoptilolite and their monocropping equivalents were tested to determine the best intercropping system on forage yield and quality. Maize was cultivated alone (75,000 plants·ha) and intercropped with cowpea as follows: 75,000 plants·ha of maize and 37,500 plants·ha of cowpea (MC1), 75,000 plants·ha of maize and 50,000 plants·ha of cowpea (MC2) and 75,000 plants·ha of maize and 75,000 plants·ha of cowpea (MC3), in rows alternating with maize. The highest dry matter yield was produced by MC3 (23.8 t·ha), and the lowest by SM (20.7 t·ha) in fertilization with clinoptilolite. All intercropped systems had higher crude protein contents, MC1 (101 g·kg DM), MC2 (108 g·kg DM) and MC3 (117 g·kg DM), than the monocrop maize (84 g·kg DM) in fertilization with clinoptilolite. Intercropping of maize with cowpea and fertilization with clinoptilolite reduced neutral detergent fiber, resulting in increased forage digestibility. Therefore, maize intercropping with cowpea and fertilization with clinoptilolite could substantially increase forage quantity and quality, and decrease requirements for protein supplements as compared with maize monocrop.
Psychological Stress among Siblings of Children with Intellectual Disabilities *

This study aimed to identify the degree of the psychological stress among siblings of children with intellectual disabilities. To achieve the objectives of the study, a questionnaire was developed and distributed to (60) brothers and sisters of children with intellectual disabilities at Najran, Saudi Arabia. The results indicated that there was a low degree stress related to Fears, anger, and sense of insecurity, on one hand and low – degree stress related to other aspects, on the other hand. Families whose members’ were less than five had higher degrees of pressures in the relationship with parents and taking responsibilities aspects. There were no significant differences in accordance to gender.
RIGID ORIGAMI VERTICES : CONDITIONS AND FORCING

We develop an intrinsic necessary and sufficient condition for single-vertex origami crease patterns to be able to fold rigidly. We classify such patterns in the case where the creases are pre-assigned to be mountains and valleys as well as in the unassigned case. We also illustrate the utility of this result by applying it to the new concept of minimal forcing sets for rigid origami models, which are the smallest collection of creases that, when folded, will force all the other creases to fold in a prescribed way.
Dual and Linearly Polarized SIW Series Slot Array Antenna for Ka Band

In this paper, the prototype of a dual and linearly polarized series slot array antenna, using substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology, is proposed. The ±45° dual polarized slot arrays share a common aperture of 62.4 × 55.04 mm. The uniform field distribution and impedance matching are realized by alternating reactance slot pairs at 35 GHz. These radiating slot elements and coupling slots are placed in double-layered substrates having a dielectric constant 3.5 with a thickness of 1.52 mm and 0.75 mm. Moreover, the coordinate systems of radiating and coupling slots are designed to realize in-phase field excitation and eliminate grating lobes for all cutting planes. The proposed antenna can be fabricated using a standard PCB process, such as drilling and etching, for low cost and light weight features. By using the full-wave simulator, CST MWS, we checked the electrical performance, including bandwidth, realized gain, and side lobe level (SLL), with 1 GHz, 24.2 dBi, and −13.6 dB, respectively.
EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE FAMILY HEALTH SUPPORT CENTERS IN CHAPECÓ

Objective: to analyze Evidence-Based Practice in the work of the professionals of the Family Health Support Center team. Method: descriptive study carried out in the municipality of Chapecó Santa Catarina. The study population consisted of 28 professionals working in the centers in the year 2016. Data analysis was performed through descriptive statistics. Results: the professionals highlighted difficulties in converting knowledge needs into research questions, however, reported that they were able to collect scientific evidence and identify the main types and sources of information existing. Among the obstacles to the development of Evidence-Based Practice, they mentioned the high workload and lack of incentives from the managers. Conclusion: the professionals need to appropriate the elements of Evidence-Based Practice, helping the teams in the resolution of health problems.