Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transitioning house: a “safe umbrella” from criminal stigmatization?

Abstract Building on prior work on criminal stigma, this article presents empirical findings on how criminal stigma operates within a confined environment: a transitioning house in Chicago. The study adopts an ethnographic case study approach. Empirical data consist of 116 hours of participant-observation, eight interviews and eighteen self-administered surveys. The study investigates whether or not a halfway house provides a metaphorical “safe umbrella” from criminal stigmatization for previously incarcerated individuals. This research includes attempts for and threats to the formation of this “safe umbrella”. Staff members and guest speakers provided structured opportunities (e.g. cognitive behavioral therapy, employment and self-concept coaching) for residents to discuss emotion, weakness and self- reliance as a response to actual or expected stigma from the outside world. However, threats to this “safe umbrella” occurred infrequently. This included the feeling of being labeled by speakers, staff or fellow residents, as well as reluctance in receiving assistance on stigma management. While occasional stigmatization operated within this confined and unique setting, this paper concludes that available services created a safe, welcoming and supportive “umbrella” for previously incarcerated clients.
Agricultural land in the Amazon basin supports low bird diversity and is a poor replacement for primary forest

ABSTRACT The Amazon has a long history of disturbance under subsistence agriculture, but slash-and-burn agriculture is small in scale and has relatively low impact on resident avifauna. More recently, the Amazon has suffered extensive deforestation in favor of cattle ranching and other modern systems of agriculture. Cattle pastures, mechanized agriculture, and even tree plantations have detrimental effects on bird communities, greatly lowering diversity, especially that of primary forest interior specialists. A rising threat to the Amazon is the spread of oil palm plantations that retain few bird species and are not viable alternatives to forest. Embedded within the expanding agropastoral mosaic are forest fragments that have experienced a well-documented loss of diversity. Yet, the matrix can mitigate the recovery of fragmented bird communities depending on the type of secondary regrowth. Connectivity via matrix habitats or forest corridors is critical for the maintenance of forest avifauna. With so many types of land use developing across the Amazon, the “tropical countryside” has potential value for bird diversity. However, evidence suggests that the agropastoral mosaic harbors a small, more homogenized avifauna with few forest species, especially when primary forest is absent from the landscape. For the Amazon Basin's bird life to be conserved into the future, preservation of large tracts of well-connected primary forest is vital. Tropical countryside dominated by agriculture simply cannot sustain sufficient levels of biodiversity.
Monitoring Wound Healing With Contactless Measurements and Augmented Reality

Objective: This work presents a device for non-invasive wound parameters assessment, designed to overcome the drawbacks of traditional methods, which are mostly rough, inaccurate, and painful for the patient. The device estimates the morphological parameters of the wound and provides augmented reality (AR) visual feedback on the wound healing status by projecting the wound border acquired during the last examination, thus improving doctor-patient communication. Methods: An accurate 3D model of the wound is created by stereophotogrammetry and refined through self-organizing maps. The 3D model is used to estimate physical parameters for wound healing assessment and integrates AR functionalities based on a miniaturized projector. The physical parameter estimation functionalities are evaluated in terms of precision, accuracy, inter-operator variability, and repeatability, whereas AR wound border projection is evaluated in terms of accuracy on the same phantom. Results: The accuracy and precision of the device are respectively 2% and 1.2% for linear parameters, and 1.7% and 1.3% for area and volume. The AR projection shows an error distance <1 mm. No statistical difference was found between the measurements of different operators. Conclusion: The device has proven to be an objective and non-operator-dependent tool for assessing the morphological parameters of the wound. Comparison with non-contact devices shows improved accuracy, offering reliable and rigorous measurements. Clinical Impact: Chronic wounds represent a significant health problem with high recurrence rates due to the ageing of the population and diseases such as diabetes and obesity. The device presented in this work provides an easy-to-use non-invasive tool to obtain useful information for treatment.
Young Adult Perceptions of Internet Communications and the Grooming Concept

Research of young people shows a lack of understanding of the term grooming in online communications and that internet risks are taken because internet literacy is poor for this group. However, limited research has investigated the perceptions of young adults in this context. The aim of this study was to understand young adults’ perceptions of risk, their internet behaviors, and understanding of the grooming concept. Furthermore, to understand the types of risk behaviors young people engage in online, whether they perceive these behaviors as risky, and what implications this has for vulnerability to negative experiences. An examination of internet communication perceptions and the grooming concept focused on 10 young males and females aged between 18 and 23 years. Semi-structured interviews were conducted at open access youth organizations in the North West of England, UK, and the duration of each interview was approximately 30 min. The data were transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis. Emergent themes were (a) grooming as a concept, (b) virtual lives, and (c) perception of risk. The findings concur there is limited understanding of the term grooming but that explanations may not be simply confined to literacy. Risks being taken online were not always perceived as risky. Recommendations include the need for a more nuanced definition of the term grooming and that more information is available to children and caregivers. Further work should focus on younger participants’ perceptions of grooming to address wider issues, together with a focus on risk taking behaviors among other vulnerable groups.
Idea Twins: Simultaneous Discoveries as a Research Tool

Nearly half a century after Merton’s description of simultaneous discoveries "as a strategic research site" (Merton 1963), they are hardly ever used by social scientists. Although their promise as a research tool has been established, operationalization issues have hindered their use. Disagreement exists over the appropriate amount of scientific and technological similarity necessary to consider two or more discoveries a multiple. This paper intends to unleash the potential of simultaneous discovery as a research tool. First, we review prior work on the topic and describe the vast theoretical potential of this approach. Second, we propose a new method that uses the literature on the social construction of science to go beyond the old debate of scientific and technological similarity. Third, we present a new algorithm that generated a large dataset of scientific multiples in an automated and systematic fashion. Finally, we describe the resulting sample of 578 recent discoveries made by 1,246 teams of scientists working in a variety of settings around the world.
Integrating the setup planning with fixture design practice by concurrent consideration of machining and fixture design principles

In the conventional setup planning methods, the required fixtures are planned in a sequential order relative to other activities of the setup planning. In the present study, a new approach has been developed and a concurrent method has been proposed for integrating the setup planning and fixture design practice, which paves the way for considering the fixture design principles in parallel to setup planning activities. This eliminates the need to revise the setup plans to remedy the possible conflicts which are common to conventional procedures. The fixture principles have been cast into mathematical relations as a means to developing the proposed method. In the present study, the locating surfaces are determined as the most important step of the fixture system design. The reference faces which cannot be used as locating surfaces are also distinguished, in order for the designer to revise the design of the workpiece.
La habilidad léxico-semántica en la Enfermedad de Alzheimer: Un estudio de la fluidez verbal con categorías semánticas

Language impairments in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) primarily affect lexical and semantic levels, which significantly depend on the speaker’s memory state. Qualitative shifts in semantic memory are due to neurodegenerative processes underlying dementia and give rise to anomia, or the speaker’s inability to access and retrieve lexical units and their conceptual backgrounds. In this paper we aim at studying cognitive and semantic features of anomic deficit in AD and exploring the possibility to apply them in tests for early detection of dementia. For that purpose, we analyze the results from our experimental version of a classical test on semantic verbal fluency (SemVF) with non-pathological aged persons, persons with Mild Cognitive Impairment and persons with AD. The experimental version of the test introduces a division into four 15-minute intervals, in order to find out which processes of semantic access, either automatic or controlled, are impaired in different cognitive states of the elderly. Our results show a correlation between the cognitive state and the lexical-semantic ability of the speaker. Furthermore, they highlight, on the one hand, that the duration of the SemVF test should not be less than 60 seconds, with internal division into 4 15-second intervals, and, on the other hand, that some semantic categories –colours and fruit in particular- are more prone to be affected by cognitive retrogenesis, which caracterizes AD dementia.
Business Process Analysis and Improvement in Selling Process Using Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) at Locarvest

This research is conducted in Locarvest. Established in 2015, Locarvest is an online platform company that selling agricultural products based in Bandung. They see the importance of agricultural products for humans and people who like to shop online as an opportunity for them to sell local agricultural products online. Currently, they have been developing a website to change their selling platform which will be launched soon in the late of July 2019. They assume that the website can create a simpler selling process. However, they do not have their written business process where many companies have become increasingly interested in business processes due to the need for effective and efficient activities (Dave, 2017). In here, the objectives of this research are to analyze and model the current business process of Locarvest and propose a new business process to solve Locarvest’s current problem using the concept of Business Process Management (BPM) and the design is modeled using Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). To model the current business process, interviews with the employees of Locarvest and observation in the office were conducted. The result of this paper is proposing some improvements within the business process by eliminating some activities and create some new activities for Locarvest. The design also has been approved by the employees of Locarvest. Keywords: Business process, Business Process Management, Business Process Modelling Notation, case study, agriculture
Target detection and tracking based on improved HOG-color feature fusion

In the process of constructing the target appearance model, the traditional HOG feature does not take into account the relationship between adjacent regions when the image is segmented in the feature extraction process, resulting in the regional aliasing effect, and the single feature is inefficient in target detection and tracking. An improved HOG-color feature fusion method for target detection and tracking is proposed. Firstly, HOG feature and color feature were extracted from the target samples respectively. During the HOG feature extraction process, trilinear interpolation was used to eliminate regional aliasing effect. Secondly, Bhattacharyya distance is used to select the HOG feature after interpolation, and the appropriate feature is selected as the HOG feature. Then combine the HOG feature after selection with the color feature; Finally, the filter is obtained by learning the kernel correlation filter, and the image is correlated detected with the filter, and the response output is obtained. The experimental results show that this method is superior to the traditional HOG-color feature fusion target detection and tracking method in both tracking speed and tracking efficiency.
Marine Fish Parasitology: An Outline

Part 1 General introduction: forms of coexistence the secondary environment adaptations to the parasitic mode of life invasion pathways parasitic effects in hosts defensive responses to parasitic invasion disturbances in the host-parasite equilibrium ubiquity of parasites in nature specificity of parasites parasites as biological tags phylogeny of parasites economic importance of fish parasites. Part 2 Systematic descriptions: fungi protozoa. Part 3 Fish-borne anthropozoonoses caused by cestodes: antrpozoonoses caused by cestodes anthropozoonoses caused by digenetic trematodes anthropozoonoses caused by hematodes anthropozoonoses caused by acanthocephalans principles of prophylaxis to prevent human infections with fish parasites parasitic diseases of fish in maricultures.
Monitoring of Corporate Culture Formation of Specialists of Social Institutions

The theoretical approaches to define the scientific definition "corporate culture" in the sociological, economic, psychological and pedagogical contexts have been analyzed. The corporate culture of a social institution is understood as a system of collective norms, beliefs, values and traditions of joint activity of employees, aimed at achieving the strategic goals of the organization. Based on the results of using standardized methods, the conducted monitoring research reflects the role of corporate culture for a high-quality social employees‟ activity in general, and helps to determine the level of its formation among specialists who work for social services. The diagnostic study was carried out on the basis of seven city centers of social services for families, children and youth from different regions of Ukraine. The object of the study were 78 employees. The diagnostics of formation of corporate culture was performed using the methodology of Ladanov (1997), as well as methods developed by Cameron and Quinn (2011), Denison, Hofstede (2004), Solomandina. The results of the diagnostic analysis have shown a medium level of corporate culture formation among the employees of social institutions.
Effect of (+) and (-) hydroxycitric acid sterio-isomers present in natural products in counteracting insulin resistance

Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors that include impaired glucose metabolism and obesity. The use of nutraceuticals is an ideal choice for controlling this disorder. The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect (-) hydroxycitric acid present in garcinia fruit rind and (+) hydroxycitric acid present in hibiscus calyx on metabolic syndrome and compare it to that of metformin. Metabolic syndrome was induced in rats by ingestion of high fat high fructose (HFHF) diet for 90 days. Metformin (500 mg/Kg animal b.wt.), garcinia (1000 mg/Kg animal b.wt.) and hibiscus (250 mg/Kg animal b.wt) were orally administered throughout the last 30 days of the HFHF diet regimen. Both garcinia and hibiscus were effective in reducing serum blood glucose and insulin levels. The effect of garcinia on blood glucose was comparable to that of metformin, while the effect of hibiscus on insulin and HOMA-IR was comparable to that of metformin. Both were able to reduce serum leptin level. All treated groups showed a significant decrease in total cholesterol level. Only hibiscus was able to normalize liver function while garcinia failed to reduce the elevated liver function. As a conclusion we would recommend the use of hibiscus over garcinia to overcome the adverse effects of metabolic syndrome.
Structured Sparse Attention for end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition

The Softmax normalization function-based attention mechanism is often employed by End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition (E2E ASR) models to tell the network where to focus within the input. However, this mechanism leads to the attention distribution becoming increasingly flatter as the input sequence length increases, since the output probability of this function is dense and nonnegative, which makes it unable to highlight the important information in speech. In this paper, we present two sparse attention mechanisms for ASR tasks with long utterances, which try to improve the attention mechanism by introducing the sparse transformation. First, we propose to replace the Softmax with the Sparsemax that normalizes the attention weight by finding the closest point in the probability simplex. Then, considering the structured characteristics, the pronunciation has a relatively stable duration. Therefore, we further present a structured sparse transformation that forces the networks to pay attention to a continuous segment of speech by applying the l2 penalty. A noniterative solution algorithm that can be used in the backpropagation is designed here. The experiments show that our methods achieve better ASR results compared to a well-tuned attention-based baseline system on a character ASR task.
VEP Detection for Read, Extempore and Conversation Speech

ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose a novel approach for accurate detection of the vowel end points (VEPs) in any mode of speech. VEP is the instant at which the vowel ends in the speech signal. In this study, we have considered three broad modes of speech, namely; conversation, extempore, and read. The existing methods were explored the VEP detection for read mode of speech, and it may not be appropriate for the VEP detection in extempore and conversation modes. This is due to the acoustic characteristic of read mode is very different from the modes as mentioned earlier. To handle this problem, we proposed a two-stage method for accurately detecting the VEPs, irrespective of modes. At the first stage, vowel onset points (VOPs) are detected in a speech signal using our recent method based on continuous wavelet transform and phone boundary. VOP represents the start of the vowel in the speech signal. At the second stage, phone boundaries are detected using spectral transition measure approach, and then the closest succeeding phone boundary for each detected VOP is considered as detected VEP. Experiments involve TIMIT and Bengali speech corpora. Performance of the proposed VEP detection method is compared with two state-of-the-art signal processing methods. The significance of the proposed method is shown by automatically detecting vowel regions from the TIMIT and Bengali speech corpora. The evaluation results report that the performance of the proposed method is significantly better than the existing methods.
Photoplethysmographic Prediction of the Ankle-Brachial Pressure Index through a Machine Learning Approach

Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death. Several markers have been proposed to predict cardiovascular morbidity. The ankle-brachial index (ABI) marker is defined as the ratio between the ankle and the arm systolic blood pressures, and it is generally assessed through sphygmomanometers. An alternative tool for cardiovascular status assessment is Photoplethysmography (PPG). PPG is a non-invasive optical technique that measures volumetric blood changes induced by pulse pressure propagation within arteries. However, PPG does not provide absolute pressure estimation, making assessment of cardiovascular status less direct. The capability of a multivariate data-driven approach to predict ABI from peculiar PPG features was investigated here. ABI was measured using a commercial instrument (Enverdis Vascular Explorer, VE-ABI), and it was then used for a General Linear Model estimation of ABI from multi-site PPG in a supervised learning framework (PPG-ABI). A Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis allowed to investigate the capability of PPG-ABI to discriminate cardiovascular impairment as defined by VE-ABI. Findings suggested that ABI can be estimated form PPG (r = 0.79) and can identify pathological cardiovascular status (AUC = 0.85). The advantages of PPG are simplicity, speed and operator-independency, allowing extensive screening of cardiovascular status and associated cardiovascular risks.
Study fuzzy variable supplied water temperature control for air-to-water heat pumps connected to a residential floor heating system

Reasonable supplied water temperature of air-to-water heat pump connected to the floor heating system can save energy and improve comfort. Based on the variation of hourly ambient temperature and ambient temperature, the fuzzy control table is established to adjust the supplied water temperature of the air-to-water heat pump. Considering the energy consumption and unsatisfied time in the whole season, the fuzzy control table is optimized by Hooke-Jeeves algorithm by a 100 m2 building in Beijing. Comparing the conventional 45 °C supplied water temperature, the simulation results show that the system energy consumption saved by 11.3% and unsatisfied time saved by 9.0% in the whole heating season.
Remaining useful life prediction via a variational autoencoder and a time‐window‐based sequence neural network

The prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) has attracted much attention, and it is also a key section for predictive maintenance. In this study, a novel hybrid deep learning framework is proposed for RUL prediction, where a variational autoencoder (VAE) and time‐window‐based sequence neural network (twSNN) are integrated. Among it, VAE is used to extract the hidden and low‐dimensional features from the raw sensor data, and a loss function is designed to extract useful data features; by using a sliding time window, twSNN can predict RUL dynamically; meanwhile, it can simplify the network architecture in the time dimension. Furthermore, to achieve higher performance on various failure conditions, long short‐term memory (LSTM) cell and convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) cell are designed for twSNN respectively. A case study is completed with a dataset of aircraft turbine engines. It is found that the proposed frameworks with LSTM cell and ConvLSTM cell have better performance on both single failure mode and multiple failure modes. The results also show that the prediction accuracy is averagely improved by 6.65% for single failure mode and 15.05% for multiple failure modes respectively.