Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direction of Arrival Estimation for Reverberant Speech Based on Enhanced Decomposition of the Direct Sound

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for speech sources is an important task in audio signal processing. This task becomes a challenge in reverberant environments, which are typical to real scenarios. Several methods of DOA estimation for speech sources have been developed recently, in an attempt to overcome the effect of reverberation. One effective approach aims to identify time-frequency bins in the short time Fourier transform domain that are dominated by the direct sound. This approach was shown to be particularly adequate for spherical arrays, with processing in the spherical harmonics domain. The direct-path dominance (DPD) test, and a method which is based on the directivity of the sound field are recent examples. While these methods seem to perform well, high reverberation conditions may degrade their performance. In this paper, the structure of the spatial correlation matrix is comprehensively studied, showing that under some well-defined conditions, the DOA of the direct sound can be correctly extracted from its dominant eigenvector, even when contaminated by reflections. This new insight leads to the development of a new test, performing an enhanced decomposition of the direct sound (EDS), denoted the DPD-EDS test. The proposed test is compared to previous DPD tests, and to other recently proposed reverberation-robust methods, using computer simulations and an experimental study, demonstrating its potential advantage. The studies include multiple speakers in highly reverberant environments, therefore representing challenging real-life acoustics scenes.
Exploration for Software Mitigation to Spectre Attacks of Poisoning Indirect Branches

ABSTRACT Speculative execution and branch prediction are techniques that are widely used in modern superscalar processors to exploit instruction-level parallelism. Recently, researchers have discovered a new kind of attacks named Spectre which exploits speculation mechanisms with a side channel. Since speculation is widely used in modern superscalar processors, these vulnerabilities are found in many popular processors. Exploiting the security vulnerabilities, the attacker can leak the host memory from inside a KVM guest. While the hardware providers are trying to fix the issues from the microarchitecture designs in the next generation of their products, software mitigation are always desirable. Retpoline is a pure software fix developed by Google and is claimed to have a negligible impact on performance. In this paper, we look into the details of Retpoline and evaluate it with various workloads. We found that Retpoline does have impact on performance to the existing software but varies depending on how applications interact with the kernel. According to our experiment, it shows more regression on the network I/O than the storage. The more a program relies on the kernel, the greater regression it shows. To alleviate the impact, we propose a method that uses userspace network stack. We verify the proposal using Netmap userspace packet I/O framework. Besides, we observe great performance regression of applying Retpoline in some of userspace applications such as Perl interpreter which is thought to be the targets exploited by the new type of attacks. In the end, we review the experiment results and discuss the potential mitigation of Spectre in future.
Modeling the Switch from Hail Insurance to Anti-Hail Nets

In several areas of the world, hail is one of the most detrimental atmospheric phenomenon for agriculture, causing a significant loss of output and, consequently, of farms’ revenues. Despite being a highly stochastic and localized phenomenon, thus allowing for a sustainable insurance market to hedge against its detrimental effects, this last is often subsidised. The present paper tries to figure out if the promotion of an alternative hedging instrument, anti-hail nets, could help to increase the actuarial soundness of the hail insurance market. In the first part of the paper a simple model is presented showing that the relation between the differential profitability of anti-hail nets versus insurance and the plot specific versus the average expected damage has an inverse U-shape. This implies that incentives to anti-hail nets could cause low risk farmers to exit the insurance market more likely than high risk ones. Such finding is confirmed by the empirical investigation, further showing that higher per-hectare output values and being located in an area strongly affected by hail increase the chance of a plot to be hedged through anti-hail nets.
The cathedral’s ivory tower and the open education bazaar – catalyzing innovation in the higher education sector

ABSTRACT Will open education replace traditional higher education, or augment it? Digital innovation in the higher education sector is fuelling speculation about the transformation of higher education and the future role of universities. Much of the speculation makes questionable implicit assumptions about current and future business models in the higher education sector. This conceptual paper applies an innovation management perspective to critically examine the use and misuse of the business model concept in the context of digital innovation in the higher education sector. Using Raymond’s metaphor of the cathedral and the bazaar which contrasted traditional commercial software development (the cathedral) with open source software development (the bazaar). We analogise this relationship with the relationship between ‘cathedral-type’ business models in traditional higher education (e.g. universities) and ‘bazaar-type’ business models in open education (e.g. open educational resource publishers). Using the historical perspective we now have on the software industry’s evolution we critique the ubiquitous replacement narrative of destruction and disruption of the sector, and propose an alternative narrative of interdependence and mutual innovative catalysis. We predict that higher education ecosystems will be based on synergistic relationships between organisations that represent many gradations on the continuum between ‘cathedral-type’ and ‘bazaar-type’ organisations.
Akut nonspesifik karın ağrılı olguların bir yıllık prognozları, semptom ve bulgularının tanısal doğruluğu

BACKGROUND The aims of this study were to determine the diagnostic value of elements of the disease history, the clinical findings and basic laboratory examinations in differential diagnosis of the patients with nonspecific abdominal pain and to analyze the long-term survey of these patients. METHODS A prospective observational study was performed at the Department of General Surgery Medicine Faculty of Uludag University between November 2001 to November 2002. Based on the diagnosis reasons for abdominal pain, 610 patients were classified as being of specific abdominal pain (n=501) versus nonspecific abdominal pain (n=109). Patients with nonspecific abdominal pain were invited to a follow-up examination 24 hours later and 4 follow-up interviews were conducted on days 8, 15, 30 and at the end of 1 year. Statistical analyses were performed between findings of two groups. RESULTS In logistic regression analysis, presence of a history of similar pain (odds ratio 1.88; p=0.009), nausea (odds ratio 0.46; p=0.001), rigidity (odds ratio 0.24; p=0.024), fever 36.6 degrees C, leukocyte count >8700, age >39 years, respiratory rate >15 in admission and persistent pain 24 hours after discharge.
Blockchain-Based Secure Time Protection Scheme in IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) has been developed rapidly to make our life easier. In many IoT applications (e.g., smart homes, healthcare, etc.), all the IoT devices should be synchronized in time. However, some malicious nodes located in the IoT network can influence the time synchronization, which may interrupt the IoT system and lead to serious accidents. Therefore, it is critical and challenging to guarantee the accuracy and consistency of time during the time synchronization among all the IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based scheme to assure the security during time synchronization in IoT. Specifically, a publicly verifiable ledger is utilized to record and broadcast time, which can minimize many attacks from external environments. The use of multiple time sources can avoid the vulnerabilities caused by the centralized generation of accurate time. Moreover, the decentralized structure of this scheme has the advantage of adapting the changes of network topology. By employing an improved practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus mechanism, time synchronization can be implemented efficiently. At last, the analysis results show that our proposed scheme can achieve the desired security with high efficiency.
Maintaining culture and supporting cultural identity in foster care placements

This article reports on an exploratory study about maintaining and supporting the cultural identity of children from culturally and linguistically diverse family backgrounds in foster care placements. In this study, we spoke with foster carers and caseworkers who respectively live and work with children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in the state of New South Wales. Foster care is one of the most common placement types in out-of-home care where a child or young person is placed with an alternative caregiver on a temporary or long-term basis, usually due to neglect or abuse. The importance of nurturing a sense of belonging through cultural, linguistic and religious affiliations is recognised in Australian curriculum policies that guide teachers in early childhood and school settings. Teachers, however, may not be fully aware of their potential contribution in supporting these children to maintain their connections with their cultural heritage. Our findings provide evidence for extending the public discourse on cultural responsiveness and supporting cultural maintenance in foster care placements. We consider implications for foster care practice and future research involving key stakeholders such as children and young people in care, as well as teachers in early childhood and school settings.
Applying the tgfu model to promote kinesthetic awareness as a means to enhance decision making and anticipation in badminton

Dr Wayne Smith published an article (Smith 2016), that suggested that in looking at teaching 'basics' or 'fundamentals' in games we should think of fundamental movement skills (FMS) and fundamental game skills (FGS) as complementary pairs and that they should be taught in complementary ways at all stages of skill development. He was suggesting that we need not follow the often adopted practise of teaching FMS to young children and only introduce FGS when they were older.
The relationship between, burnout, personality, and emotional intelligence in clown doctors

Abstract Despite increasing interest in healthcare clowning, especially to evaluate its effectiveness in a large variety of settings, no investigations have been oriented toward exploring the potential risks associated with burnout in clown doctors. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between personality traits, emotional intelligence, and burnout and to predict the burnout levels of 160 Italian clown doctors. The multiple linear regression findings showed that the best predictor for emotional exhaustion was neuroticism and for personal accomplishment were consciousness and emotional intelligence, while no correlations were found between the variables taken into account and depersonalization. These findings highlighted how specific personality traits are linked to different dimensions of job burnout and were discussed in the context of clown doctors’ burnout.
Robotic grasping in multi-object stacking scenes based on visual reasoning

Vision is one of the most important ways to solve robotic grasping problem. We propose a framework that can help the robot grasp target object in multi-object scenes based on visual reasoning, which includes two stages: Perception and execution. During percetion stage, our proposed framework includes two parts: Visual manipulation relationship reasoning and robotic grasp detection. In visual manipulation relationship reasoning, Visual Manipulation Relationship Network (VMRN) is proposed to simultainously detect objects and gets manipulation relationships between each pair of objects. We design Object Pairing Pooling Layer to implement end-to-end training of object detection and visual manilupation relationship reasoning in VMRN, which makes the algorithm faster and more robust. In robotic grasp detection, fully convolutional grasp detection network based on oriented anchor box is proposed to implement real-time grasp detection for any object, which is the state-of-the-art robotic grasp detection algorithm on the standard Cornell Grasp Dataset. During execution stage, by combining depth information and perception results, grasp point and grasp vector in camera coordinate are computed first. Then, they are transformed into robot coordinate for robot to execute grasping motion. Experimental results show that our framework can help robot grasp target in multi-object scene in the right order.
Evaluation of the Potential Association of Platelet Levels, Mean Platelet Volume and Platelet Distribution Width with Acute Appendicitis

BACKGROUND: The occurrence and early management of acute appendicitis among children are especially important due to the difficult diagnosis and nonspecific symptoms of the disease. Diagnosis of appendicitis in children is very difficult due to similarity of its symptoms to other diseases, and also its self-limiting nature Platelet indexes such as mean platelet volume (MPV) and platelet distribution width (PDW) have been suggested as a biomarker of inflammation. AIM: Therefore, we examined the association of MPV and PDW with acute appendicitis in children. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 464 patients with suspected acute appendicitis under the age of 18 years referred to the specialised hospitals of the ten studied provinces between October 2014 and October 2015. All data obtained regarding patient’s lab tests, i.e. platelet count, MPV and PDW and also radiological studies and surgical reports were gathered in datasheets and analysed to evaluate the potential association of platelet levels, mean platelet volume (MPV) and platelet distribution width (PDW) with acute appendicitis RESULTS: Our results showed that the MPV was significantly higher in acute appendicitis in comparison to perforated appendicitis as well as acute gangrenous appendicitis. PDW was significantly higher in acute appendicitis in comparison to perforated appendicitis and acute gangrenous appendicitis. The current project indicated that PDW < 10.05 had a sensitivity of 35% and specificity of 75%, platelet count < 229500 had a sensitivity of 24% and specificity of 75% and MPV < 8.95 had a sensitivity of 70% and specificity of 71%. CONCLUSION: Our study suggested that platelet indexes such as MPV and PDW could significantly correlate with acute appendicitis in pediatric patients. Hence, we believe that both MPV and PDW could use as a simple and low-cost lab test for diagnosing acute appendicitis. Also, this study revealed that the MPV lower than 8.95 could be a novel index for diagnosing acute appendicitis with sensitivity of 70% and specificity of 71%.
Misidentification of S. suis as a Zoonotic Agent

BACKGROUND: Streptococcus suis is an emerging zoonotic pathogen. This bacterium commonly causes meningitis in human and is often associated with hearing and vestibular dysfunction. S. suis tends to be misidentified, leading to under-diagnosis. CASE PRESENTATION: A previously healthy 50-year-old man was admitted to one of the district hospitals in Bali Province, Indonesia, due to meningitis. He had a history of consuming homemade raw pork product two days before the onset of illness. Streptococcus mitis was identified from the cerebrospinal fluid culture by using VITEX 2 COMPACT (Biomeriuex) with a 99% probability score. This patient had clinical symptoms and risk factor identical to S. suis infection. Therefore, we performed confirmation tests for the cerebrospinal fluid by PCR (using primer specific for gdh and recN) and sequencing of those PCR products. Both of the confirmation tests showed a positive result for S. suis. CONCLUSION: There are few reports of S. suis infections in Indonesia, but we believe that the cases in Indonesia, especially Bali, are not uncommon. The under-reported cases are perhaps due to the difficulties in differentiating S. suis from other Streptococcus species by culture method, particularly Streptococcus mitis. Therefore, confirmation by PCR is necessary.
Holographic Generative Memory: Neurally Inspired One-Shot Learning with Memory Augmented Neural Networks

Humans quickly parse and categorize stimuli by combining perceptual information and previously learned knowledge. We are capable of learning new information quickly with only a few observations, and sometimes even a single observation. This one-shot learning (OSL) capability is still very difficult to realize in machine learning models. Novelty is commonly thought to be the primary driver for OSL. However, neuroscience literature shows that biological OSL mechanisms are guided by uncertainty, rather than novelty, motivating us to explore this idea for machine learning. In this work, we investigate OSL for neural networks using more robust compositional knowledge representations and a biologically inspired uncertainty mechanism to modulate the rate of learning. We introduce several new neural network models that combine Holographic Reduced Representation (HRR) and Variational Autoencoders. Extending these new models culminates in the Holographic Generative Memory (HGMEM) model. HGMEM is a novel unsupervised memory augmented neural network. It offers solutions to many of the practical drawbacks associated with HRRs while also providing storage, recall, and generation of latent compositional knowledge representations. Uncertainty is measured as a native part of HGMEM operation by applying trained probabilistic dropout to fully-connected layers. During training, the learning rate is modulated using these uncertainty measurements in a manner inspired by our motivating neuroscience mechanism for OSL. Model performance is demonstrated on several image datasets with experiments that reflect our theoretical approach.
Socio-economic factors influencing smallholder farmers’ decision to participate in agro-processing industry in Gauteng province, South Africa

Abstract Smallholder farmers in South Africa have not been linked successfully to sustainable agro-processing value chains. This study aimed to identify factors influencing smallholder farmers’ decision to participate in the agro-processing industry, as well as the extent of their participation in the Gauteng Province. Data was collected through a structured questionnaire that was administered face-to-face to respondents in a randomly purposive selected sample of 102 smallholder farmers. A double-hurdle model was used to analyse factors influencing the decision to participate and the level of participation in agro-processing. The results show that very few (19%) smallholder farmers participate in the agro-processing industry of the Gauteng Province. The results also revealed that factors such as educational level, land tenure, agro-processing training and information have a positive influence on the decision to participate. Distance to market and off-farm income negatively influence the decision to participate. The level of participation is influenced by socio-economic factors such as age, household size, level of education, grain and livestock producers, farm size and access to training. The study recommends that smallholder agro-processing policy instruments be adjusted to facilitate effective participation in the agro-processing industry and participation in other high market value chains. There is a need to build up local agro-processing plants as a strategy of lowering the costs of transportation and storage when farmers take their farm produce to distant manufacturers or processors.
Prevalence of diabetic foot ulcer and its association with duration of illness and residence in Ethiopia: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Diabetic foot ulcer (DFU), devastating complications of diabetes mellitus, is a major public health problem, and one of the leading reasons for hospital admission, amputations, and even death among diabetic patients in Ethiopia. Despite its catastrophic health consequences, the national burden of diabetic foot ulcer remains unknown in Ethiopia. Hence, the objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to estimate the national prevalence of diabetic foot ulcer and investigate the association with duration of illness and patient residence among diabetic patients.We searched PubMed, Google Scholar, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, EMBASE, and PsycINFO databases for studies of diabetic foot ulcers prevalence that published from conception up to June 30, 2019. Quality of each article was assessed using a modified version of the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale for cross-sectional studies. All statistical analyses were done using STATA version 14 software for Windows, and meta-analysis was carried out using a random-effects method. The pooled national prevalence of diabetic foot ulcers was presented using a forest plot.A total of 10 studies with 3,029 diabetic patients were included. The pooled national prevalence of diabetic foot ulcers among Ethiopian diabetic patients was 11.27% (95% CI 7.22, 15.31%, I2=94.6). Duration of illness (OR: 3.91, 95%CI 2.03, 7.52, I2=63.4%) and patients’ residence (OR: 3.40, 95%CI 2.09, 5.54, I2=0.0%) were significantly associated with a diabetic foot ulcer.In Ethiopia, at least one out of ten diabetic patients had diabetic foot ulcers. Healthcare policymakers (FMoH) need to improve the standard of diabetic care and should design effective preventive strategies to improve health care delivery for people with diabetes and reduce the risk of foot ulceration.
Accelerometer-Based Physical Activity Levels Differ between Week and Weekend Days in British Preschool Children

Participation in physical activity (PA) is fundamental to children’s future health. Studies examining the temporal pattern of PA between weekdays and weekends in British preschool children are lacking. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare PA levels between week and weekend days for UK preschool children, using objective measurements. One hundred and eighty-five preschool children (99 boys, 86 girls, aged 4–5 years), from central England wore a triaxial accelerometer (GENEActiv) for 4 days to determine PA. The time (min) and percentage (%) of time spent in light, moderate and vigorous PA (MVPA) was determined using specific cut-points for counts per minute related to 3–5 year olds. Of the sample, none of the children met the UK recommended 180 min or more of PA per day. A significant difference (P < 0.05) was observed between the amount of time that preschool children spent in sedentary behaviours on weekdays (91.9%) compared to weekend days (96.9%). During weekdays and weekend days, 6.3% and 2.0% of time was spent in MVPA, respectively. Therefore, a substantial proportion of British preschool children’s day is spent in sedentary behaviours, with less MVPA accrued during the weekend. Regular engagement during the weekdays provides opportunities to accrue PA, which may not be present on weekend days.