Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neutrons for scattering : What they are, where to get them, and how to deal with them

In neutron scattering studies of soft matter, a diverse array of methods and instruments are used, providing information on structure and dynamics on various length and energy scales. However, much of the infrastructure needed for neutron scattering is common for many instruments. After a brief historical retrospect of neutron scattering, this chapter introduces the basic infrastructure needed to conduct scattering experiments. This includes equipment that is used to produce, spectrally adjust and purify, and to deliver neutrons to the instruments where scattering experiments are conducted. The basics of the interaction of neutrons with matter is also introduced, as a preparation for the final sections on the different means at hand for neutron detection.
Color Space Considerations for Linear Image Filtering

Filters designed for monochromatic, scalar-valued images are frequently applied to color imagery without considering the vector-valued nature of the data and the effects of nonlinear component values. This paper analyzes the implications of component-wise linear filtering upon the underlying color space and the related chromatic errors that may be unacceptable for high-quality color imaging. It suggests that perceptual uniformity and a careful choice of the working color space are important even for common smoothing filters and similar operations.
Perceptual distortion measured with a gain control model of LGN response

Models for perceptual image distortion are generally designed to capture properties of human vision, such as the spatial frequency dependence of contrast sensitivity, and the masking effects of superimposed oriented patterns. However, the widely-used Structural Similarity (SSIM) index (Wang et al., 2004), is based on a unique construction devised to disregard changes in local luminance or contrast, while emphasizing changes in local structure. Since these properties are evident in the responses of early visual neurons, we wondered whether a more explicit model of physiological responses might provide a more suitable substrate for constructing a distortion measure. We built a functional model of early spatial visual processing (LGNGC) that incorporates known properties of retina and LGN. Similar to the model of Mante et al., 2008, the model includes bandpass linear filtering, rectification, and local luminance and contrast gain controls. The distortion between an original and corrupted image is determined by passing each through the model, and measuring the Euclidean distance between the two response vectors. The model parameters (filter sizes and amplitudes) were fit to a database of human perceptual quality judgments (TID2008 Ponomarenko et al., 2009). We find that the fitted parameters are consistent with measured physiological properties of LGN neurons in the macaque monkey. Moreover, LGN-GC outperforms SSIM, and performs comparably to multi-scale SSIM (MS-SSIM) at predicting perceptual distortions (despite its restriction to a single spatial scale), explaining more of the (cross-validated) variance in the human data (SSIM: 60%, MS-SSIM: 64%, LGN-GC: 67%). Finally, we performed a direct comparison of LGN-GC to SSIM by examining stimuli optimized to differentiate them (known as MAD competition; Wang et al., 2008). This comparison provides evidence that distance as measured by our physiologically-inspired model corresponds more closely with human perception than SSIM.
Start Offer user ’ s action ? Framing Offer Hesitate RejectAccept Framing No Yes Lie ? Lie ? Yes End End Offer No Framing Question

Almost all of existing negotiation systems assume that their interlocutors (the user) are telling the truth. However, in negotiations, participants can tell lies to earn a profit. In this research, we proposed a negotiation dialog management system that detects user’s lies and designed a dialog behavior on how should the system react with. As a typical case, we built a dialog model of doctor-patient conversation on living habits domain. We showed that we can use partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) to model this conversation and use reinforcement learning to train the system’s policy.
Calibration of Automatically Generated Items Using Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling.

4 For complex educational assessments, there is an increasing use of item families, which are groups of related items. However, calibration or scoring for such an assessment requires fitting models that take into account the dependence structure inherent among the items that belong to the same item family. Glas and van der Linden (2001) suggest a Bayesian hierarchical model to analyze data involving item families with multiple choice items. This paper extends the model to take into account item families with constructed response items, and designs a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for the Bayesian estimation of the model parameters. The hierarchical model, which accounts for the dependence structure inherent among the items, implicitly defines the family response function (FRF) for the score categories. This paper suggests a way to combine the FRFs over the score categories to obtain a family score function (FSF), which is a quick graphical summary of the expected score of an individual with a certain ability to an item randomly generated from an item family. This paper also suggests a method for the Bayesian estimation of the FRF and FSF. This work is a significant step towards building a tool to analyze data involving item families and may be very useful practically, for example, in automatic item generation systems that create tests involving item families.
T Performance Analysis of Comparison between Region Growing , Adaptive Threshold and Watershed Methods for Image Segmentation

---Image Segmentation with region growing technique, clustering neighbor’s pixels and similar seed points otherwise adaptive thresholding create fixed blocks and find appropriate threshold values. Using images from Berkeley Segmentation Dataset (BSDS) is BSDS300, including 300 grayscale’s images and 300 color’s images, each of which has 200 training images and 100 testing images. The results are average performance measurement of precision, recall and FScore each of which has 0.437, 0.665, 0.525 for region growing method and 0.30, 0.525, 0.73 for adaptive thresholding method. While using watershed techniques, we obtained following values: 0.258, 0.488, and 0.333.
Randomized testing of distributed systems with probabilistic guarantees

Several recently proposed randomized testing tools for concurrent and distributed systems come with theoretical guarantees on their success. The key to these guarantees is a notion of bug depth—the minimum length of a sequence of events sufficient to expose the bug—and a characterization of d-hitting families of schedules—a set of schedules guaranteed to cover every bug of given depth d. Previous results show that in certain cases the size of a d-hitting family can be significantly smaller than the total number of possible schedules. However, these results either assume shared-memory multithreading, or that the underlying partial ordering of events is known statically and has special structure. These assumptions are not met by distributed message-passing applications. In this paper, we present a randomized scheduling algorithm for testing distributed systems. In contrast to previous approaches, our algorithm works for arbitrary partially ordered sets of events revealed online as the program is being executed. We show that for partial orders of width at most w and size at most n (both statically unknown), our algorithm is guaranteed to sample from at most w2 nd−1 schedules, for every fixed bug depth d. Thus, our algorithm discovers a bug of depth d with probability at least 1 / (w2 nd−1). As a special case, our algorithm recovers a previous randomized testing algorithm for multithreaded programs. Our algorithm is simple to implement, but the correctness arguments depend on difficult combinatorial results about online dimension and online chain partitioning of partially ordered sets. We have implemented our algorithm in a randomized testing tool for distributed message-passing programs. We show that our algorithm can find bugs in distributed systems such as Zookeeper and Cassandra, and empirically outperforms naive random exploration while providing theoretical guarantees.
The Matter of Forensic Psychiatry: A Historical Enquiry

Since antiquity, some men have not been considered accountable for their actions when they transgressed the law, and were exempted from legal penalties, or given lesser ones. Why? The rationale for legal exemption has varied over time. So have the labels assigned to such lawbreakers, and even the personnel involved in the labelling process. For centuries, settling the question of deviant mental states of relevance to the court seemed relatively unproblematic. It was thought that personal acquaintance would easily discover such states of mind and the court could then be notified. It was not until the nineteenth century that western society felt a need to regulate this problematique. As a result, or as a precondition for this process of settling the question of legal accountability, the matter came to be construed in part as a medical problem. Physicians, and later psychiatrists, came to be regarded as possessing specific knowledge in this area which qualified them to judge a person's legal accountability. Personal knowledge of the deranged defendant was supplanted by professional knowledge of sanity and insanity as the basis for authority on the matter of accountability.
Fostering knowledge sharing behaviour among public sector managers: a proposed model for the Malaysian public service

Purpose – This paper aims to propose a conceptual model of knowledge sharing behaviour among Malaysian public sector managers. Design/methodology/approach – An extensive literature review method was used to identify and analyse relevant literature in order to propose a knowledge sharing model. Findings – The authors identified three potential predictor groups of knowledge sharing behaviour among Malaysian public sector managers. The groups are intrinsic motivational factors, extrinsic motivational factors and organisational socialisation factors. The paper proposes organisational commitment as the mediating variable between the identified predictors and knowledge sharing behaviour (knowledge donating and knowledge collecting). Research limitations/implications – The paper offers a number of propositions, which leads to a knowledge sharing model. Future research should validate and examine the predictive power of the proposed model. Practical implications – Upon model validation, the paper could offer prac.
Doppler ultrasound findings in healthy wrists and finger joints before and after use of two different contrast agents

Objective: To examine the effect of contrast agents on Doppler ultrasound findings in the synovial membrane in the wrist and fingers of healthy volunteers. Material and methods: Eleven healthy subjects were included in the study (5 women and 6 men, mean age 38 years, range (20–60)). They had no clinical signs of inflammatory or degenerative joint diseases. A total of 66 joints were examined—6 joints for each subject: wrist and metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joints 1–5—before contrast injection and after Levovist and SonoVue injection with a 30 minute interval. Results: Colour Doppler activity was detected in 10/55 (18%) MCP joints before contrast injection and in 29/55 (53%) and 28/55 (51%) joints after Levovist (p<0.0001) and SonoVue injection (p = 0.0001), respectively. A significant increase in Doppler activity in the radial (p<0.05) and ulnar (p = 0.01) parts of the wrist joint was detected only after SonoVue injections. With spectral Doppler no difference was found in the resistive index (RI) in the vessels measured before as compared with those only detected after contrast injection. Conclusion: The number of joints with colour Doppler activity in healthy volunteers was increased by the use of contrast agents. No changes in RI were detected. The value of contrast agents remains to be demonstrated in inflammatory diagnostics.
Historical Context-based Style Classification of Painting Images via Label Distribution Learning

Analyzing and categorizing the style of visual art images, especially paintings, is gaining popularity owing to its importance in understanding and appreciating the art. The evolution of painting style is both continuous, in a sense that new styles may inherit, develop or even mutate from their predecessors and multi-modal because of various issues such as the visual appearance, the birthplace, the origin time and the art movement. Motivated by this peculiarity, we introduce a novel knowledge distilling strategy to assist visual feature learning in the convolutional neural network for painting style classification. More specifically, a multi-factor distribution is employed as soft-labels to distill complementary information with visual input, which extracts from different historical context via label distribution learning. The proposed method is well-encapsulated in a multi-task learning framework which allows end-to-end training. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art approaches on Painting91, OilPainting, and Pandora datasets.
Yield Performance of Potato Seed Tubers After Storage in a Diffuse Light Store (DLS)

An on-farm trial was carried out at KARI (Tigoni) and in Nyandarua County in central Kenyan highlands to determine the yields of some common potato cultivars following storage in a diffuse light store (DLS) for eight months. The trial was carried out for two consecutive seasons i.e. March-July 2012 (first season) and October 2012 to February 2013 (second season). Eight potato cultivars commonly grown in Kenya and of different maturity periods were used. In Nyandarua, the experiment was carried out in three farmers’ fields while the KARI Tigoni station was meant for comparison. In each site, the experiment was a split-plot with potato cultivars as main-plot factor and storage as sub-plot factor. There were three replications in each site. Planting of tubers after storage in DLS gave significantly (P≤0.05) more yields than planting freshly harvested tubers. This difference was observed both on the farmers’ fields and at KARI Tigoni research station.
Operating a design system in a large software company

Software user interface reusability and consistency, both on design and programming level, have been identified issues since graphical user interfaces became more common in the 1990s. Traditional component libraries, style guides and pattern libraries have aimed to solve these issues, but designer and developer assets have been separated in them and they have not identified the importance of organisational responsibilities. In recent years, a phenomenon called design systems has emerged aiming to solve these issues. The literature review of this thesis studies design systems first asset-wise, comparing it to the traditional component libraries, style guides and pattern libraries. Secondly, the thesis investigates organisational factors, specifically, the distributed model of running the design system, where product teams take the responsibility in contributing assets to the system. The empirical research of this study is a qualitative case study consisting of seven product teams in a large Finnish software company. Three of these teams were observed co-located to them. Among the seven teams, different contexts of utilising the design system were attained. The empirical research generates understanding how the distributed model of running the design system works works optimally in the context of a large, multi-product software company. The thesis states that the success of design system boils down to providing concrete assets – that are the building blocks of everyday designer and developer workflows – instead of only abstract guidelines and patterns; combining these assets into a shared platform where designs are directly linked into code, enabling a single source of truth; and focusing on facilitating collaboration between relevant teams. Communities of practice are one way of organising inter-team coordination: building a culture of sharing where practitioners themselves are encouraged to form groups of knowledge sharing, and engaging only those practitioners that deeply relate to the matter, enable reuse and consistency between teams.
Effect of particle breakage on cyclic densification of ballast: A DEM approach

In this paper, an attempt has been made to investigate the effect of particle breakage on densification behaviour of ballast under cyclic loading using Discrete Element Method (DEM). Numerical simulations using PFC2D have been carried out on an assembly of angular particles with and without incorporation of particle breakage. Two-dimensional projection of angular ballast particles were simulated using clusters of bonded circular particles. Degradation of the bonds within a cluster was considered to represent particle breakage. Clump logic was used to make the cluster of particles unbreakable. DEM simulation results highlight that the particle breakage has a profound influence on the cyclic densification behaviour of ballast. The deformation behaviour exhibited by the assembly with breakage is in good agreement with the laboratory experiments. In addition, the evolution of particle displacement vectors clearly explains the breakage mechanism and associated deformations during cyclic loading.
OF USTC SYSTEM FOR ACOUSTIC SCENE CLASSIFICATION

This technical report describes our submission for acoustic scene classification task of DCASE 2016. We first explore the use of and Gaussian mixture models (GMM) and ergodic hidden Markov models (HMM). Next, we combine neural network based discriminative models (DNN, CNN) with generative models to build hybrid systems, including DNN-GMM, CNN-GMM, DNN-HMM and CNNHMM. Finally, a system combination method is used to obtain the best overall performance from the multiple systems.
The Island of Ireland: Drowning the Myth of an Irish Land-Bridge?

At the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) c. 26 000 calendar years ago, global sea levels were around 120 m lower than present due to the storage of water on land in the form of large, high-la�tude ice sheets. This lowering of sea level exposed por�ons of the modern seafloor surrounding north-west Europe, forming ‘land-bridges that joined Britain and Ireland to the rest of the con�nent. Some�me later, these land-bridges were drowned by rising sea levels as the ice sheets melted in response to a warming climate. Precisely when these land connec�ons were severed has been a subject of debate for several decades, driven in part by the desire to understand the postglacial recolonisa�on of Ireland by plants and animals. The level of the sea rela�ve to the land surface (rela�ve sea-level) results from the interplay between ver�cal changes in both land and sea level. These processes can be simulated by computer models that describe the response of the solid Earth to the loading and unloading of glacial ice (glacial rebound models). In addi�on to simula�ng rela�ve sea-levels, the output from these models can, when combined with bathymetric and topographic data, be used to produce first-order palaeogeographic reconstruc�ons. This paper uses palaeogeographic reconstruc�ons of this kind to inves�gate the loca�on and dura�on of possible land-bridges joining Ireland to Britain. These reconstruc�ons are derived from a recently developed glacial rebound model for Ireland that incorporates an updated Bri�sh-Irish Ice Sheet component and is trained by geological sea-level indicators from around the Irish coast. The resul�ng reconstruc�ons suggest that Ireland was separated from Britain by c. 16 000 calendar years ago, at which �me climate was s�ll cold and local ice caps persisted in parts of the country. No support is found for the idea that a Holocene landbridge was instrumental in the migra�on of temperate flora and fauna into Ireland.
Domain Model-Based Data Stream Validation for IoT Applications

With ongoing digitalisation, more and more devices are connected to the Internet. A lot of these devices are online 24/7 and sending continuous data. Such devices can be in the field for multiple years and, over this period, they must work reliably. This includes not only the hardware but also the processing and storage of data. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to continuously monitor incoming data. This thesis presents an approach as to how a domain model can be used for stream data validation. The used model allows for the definition of properties and functions of a device. These include defining constraints e.g. limiting the range of a value. The developed prototype allows loading this model in a stream processing system and validating structure and constraints in an unbound data stream. In a case study, the presented approach is tested on its ability to detect errors in an existing data set.
Diltiazem enhances the protective activity of oxcarbazepine against maximal electroshock-induced seizures in mice

The aim of the study was to assess the eff ect of diltiazem (a calcium channel antagonist) on the anticonvulsant activity and acute adverse-eff ect potential of oxcarbazepine (a second-generation antiepileptic drug) in the maximal electroshock seizure (MES) model and chimney test in mice. Total brain concentrations of oxcarbazepine were measured with high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) to ascertain any pharmacokinetic contribution to the pharmacodynamic interaction between drugs. Results indicate that diltiazem (at a dose of 5 mg/kg, i.p.) signifi cantly enhanced the anticonvulsant activity of oxcarbazepine in the MES test in mice, by reducing the median eff ective dose (ED 50 value) of oxcarbazepine from 14.25 to 9.87 mg/kg (P<0.01). In contrast, diltiazem at lower doses of 1.25 and 2.5 mg/kg had no signifi cant impact on the antiseizure action of oxcarbazepine in the MES test in mice. In the chimney test, diltiazem (up to 5 mg/kg, i.p.) did not signifi cantly aff ect the acute adverse eff ect potential of oxcarbazepine, and the median toxic dose (TD 50 value) of the studied antiepileptic drug ranged from 74.16-62.91 mg/kg. Moreover, diltiazem (5 mg/kg) did not signifi cantly alter total brain oxcarbazepine concentrations as measured with HPLC. In conclusion, diltiazem ameliorates the pharmacological profi le of oxcarbazepine, when considering both the antiseizure and acute adverse eff ects of the antiepileptic drug in preclinical study on animals. The observed interaction between oxcarbazepine and diltiazem in the MES test was pharmacodynamic in nature; therefore, this favourable combination deserves more attention from a clinical point of view.