Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fast Noise Level Estimation from a Single Image Degraded with Gaussian Noise

Noise level estimation is essential for many image processing tasks, especially for denoising, because the estimated standard deviation (SD) of Gaussian noise is used for the restoration of degraded images. Two major methods are proposed for noise level estimation so far: one is based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and the other is based on the median absolute deviation (MAD). However, these methods have some problems, related to computing time or precision of the estimate. In this paper, we proposed a new noise level estimation for Gaussian noise that is achieved by extending the MAD-based method. In the proposed method, noise level is estimated by using a formula that is derived from linear regression. Experimental results show that the error of standard deviations estimated by the proposed method is smaller than that estimated by the conventional method.
Detecting Four-Limb Blood Oxygen Saturation and Heart Rate based on Reflex Photoplethysmography

The study purpose is to construct a reflective Oxygen Saturation (SpO2) and Heart Rate (HR) four-limb detective device, improve transmission SpO2 device only to measure finger, toe and earlobe. Using Silicon Labs Si1143, Arduino Nano, self-calibrated SpO2 algorithm and mobile application software constitute a mobile reflective SpO2 and HR detective device. Static four parts and post-exercise experiment had been carried out to test our device, the result can achieve comparable performance to a clinical device with no significant difference revealed by paired t-tests. This study has applied for clinical trial permission, the schedule will improve the calibration curve and compensation factor of unverifiable body parts by blood draw comparison. Provide clinical staff for immediate local SpO2 and HR information, evaluate the effectiveness of vascular suture and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
The Signaling Effect of Environmental and Health-Based Taxation and Legislation for Public Policy: An Empirical Analysis

The main objective of this article is to examine how taxes affect consumption of commodities that are detrimental to health and the environment: tobacco, alcoholic beverages, household energy and petroleum fuel (petrol) for transportation. Specifically, we examine if a tax increase leads to a significantly larger change in consumption than a producer price change, which is referred to as the signaling effect from taxation. This objective is achieved through an empirical analysis using the Linear Almost Ideal Demand System. The analysis uses aggregated cross sectional time series data and information on major legislation introductions in Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom from 1970 to 2009. We find the main result to be that the signaling effect is significant for “Alcoholic Beverages” and “Electricity” in Sweden, “Electricity” in Denmark and “Electricity and Gas” and “Electricity” the United Kingdom. This implies that tax policy is more effective in tackling consumption of commodities which produce negative public effects (negative externalities affecting the social good such as pollution) than those for negative private effects (negative externalities affecting the private good such as health).
Efficient Assessment on Hierarchical Clustering Algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks

: Wireless sensor networks are composed of large number of power constrained nodes, which needs an energy conservation protocols to reduce the energy consumption as much as possible. Utilizing clustering algorithms is a common method of implementing network management and data aggregation in WSNs. This paper presents a review on the clustering algorithms proposed for wireless sensor networks.
Enumerating Multiple Equivalent Lasso Solutions

Predictive modelling is a data-analysis task common in many scientific fields. However, it is rather unknown that multiple predictive models can be equally well-performing for the same problem. This multiplicity often leads to poor reproducibility when searching for a unique solution in datasets with low number of samples, high dimensional feature space and/or high levels of noise, a common scenario in biology and medicine. The Lasso regression is one of the most powerful and popular regularization methods, yet it also produces a single, sparse solution. In this paper, we show that nearly-optimal Lasso solutions, whose out-of-sample statistical error is practically indistinguishable from the optimal one, exist. We formalize various notions of equivalence between Lasso solutions, and we devise an algorithm to enumerate the ones that are equivalent in a statistical sense: we define a tolerance on the root mean square error (RMSE) which creates a RMSE-equivalent Lasso solution space. Results in both regression and classification tasks reveal that the out-of-sample error due to the RMSE relaxation is within the range of the statistical error due to the sampling size.
Measuring Consumer Environmental Behaviour Influence On Green Purchase Behaviour Using Pls

Currently public concern on environmental issue has improved tremendously and become an interest for government, societies and business provider and also grab the attention of consumer The present study identified the key antecedents of consumer behaviour that influence green purchase intention. The study used self-administered questionnaire distributed to 453 respondents in Klang Valley. Using Partial Least Square, construct validity is employed to analyses the measurement model. Surprisingly, the finding revealed that environmental attitude and environmental behaviour does not contribute to green purchase behaviour while the other six variables is significant and moderately contributed and influences the green purchase behaviour. This indicated that today’s generation is less conscious with environment. With an increase of environmental issue in Malaysia, the government and all organizations should seriously take into consideration on this issue and strive at their level best to induce and support the practice of green purchase behaviour and embedding green behaviour at all tier in ensuring the sustainability of our mother earth.
A Bayesian Approach to Absent Evidence Reasoning

Under what conditions is the failure to have evidence that p evidence that p is false? Absent evidence reasoning is common in many sciences, including astronomy, archeology, biology and medicine. An often-repeated epistemological motto is that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. ” Analysis of absent evidence reasoning usually takes place in a deductive or frequentist hypothesis-testing framework. Instead, I develop a Bayesian analysis of this motto and prove that, under plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Evaluation of Serum Osteocalcin Level in Iraqi Postmenopausal Women with Primary Osteoporosis

Background: Osteoporosis (OP) is a chronic and a progressive disease characterized by low bone mass and micro-architectural deterioration of bone tissue, resulting in an increased risk of fracture. Osteocalcin is a non-collagenous protein synthesized and secreted by osteoblasts. Its main physiological functions are calcium ion homeostasis, maintain the normal bone mineralization rate, inhibit the abnormal formation of hydroxyapatite crystal, and to be involved in bone remodeling through a negative feedback mechanism.Objective: This study was planned to evaluate serum level of bone formation marker osteocalcin (OC) in postmenopausal women with and without primary osteoporosis; and study the correlation between serum osteocalcin level with women’s age.Subjects and Methods: Forty four (44) postmenopausal women were included in this study with age range (51-68 years). Subjects were divided into two groups: group A: twenty three (23) women with primary osteoporosis and group B: twenty one (21) women without primary osteoporosis (serve as controls). Patients were diagnosed as osteoporosis and controls as normal by measuring bone mineral density (BMD), using dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA). In addition, serum calcium, phosphorous and alkaline phosphatase measured by spectrophotometer, while serum osteocalcin measured by enzyme linked immuno sorbent assay (ELISA). Results: Mean serum osteocalcin level in postmenopausal women with primary osteoporosis was significantly higher than controls (P<0.0001) Moreover, a positive correlation between serum osteocalcin level with age for both patients (r=0.86, P<0.0001) and controls (r=0.71, P<0.001). Conclusion: Increasing serum osteocalcin level in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis plays an important role in development of primary osteoporosis.
The effectiveness of layer-by-layer training using the information bottleneck principle

The recently proposed information bottleneck (IB) theory of deep nets suggests that during training, each layer attempts to maximize its mutual information (MI) with the target labels (so as to allow good prediction accuracy), while minimizing its MI with the input (leading to effective compression and thus good generalization). To date, evidence of this phenomenon has been indirect and aroused controversy due to theoretical and practical complications. In particular, it has been pointed out that the MI with the input is theoretically infinite in many cases of interest, and that the MI with the target is fundamentally difficult to estimate in high dimensions. As a consequence, the validity of this theory has been questioned. In this paper, we overcome these obstacles by two means. First, as previously suggested, we replace the MI with the input by a noise-regularized version, which ensures it is finite. As we show, this modified penalty in fact acts as a form of weight-decay regularization. Second, to obtain accurate (noise regularized) MI estimates between an intermediate representation and the input, we incorporate the strong prior-knowledge we have about their relation, into the recently proposed MI estimator of Belghazi et al. (2018). With this scheme, we are able to stably train each layer independently to explicitly optimize the IB functional. Surprisingly, this leads to enhanced prediction accuracy, thus directly validating the IB theory of deep nets for the first time.
Integrating the academic experience: An inter-disciplinary approach to the authentic marketing research experience

This paper describes the evolution of an innovative inter–disciplinary approach to teaching and learning in a University Faculty of Business. Further, it reviews the implementation of a series of unique, integrated and authentic assessments involving units based in the marketing, urban planning and business communication disciplines. The project has used the production of Revitalization Plans for the University‘s campuses as the basis for integrating student teaching and learning. It has championed an approach which moves away from the traditional silo‘ methods of academic assessment to integrated, contextualised learning which develops both generic and discipline-specific skills such as client/consultation roles, business communications and knowledge in marketing, urban planning, and management. The paper concludes by reflecting on the issues involved with the introduction of the interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning with the University.
Collision cross sections for the thermalization of cold gases.

The collision cross section that controls thermalization of gas mixtures is the transport cross section σ(1)η and not the elastic cross section σel. The two are the same for pure s-wave scattering but not when higher partial waves contribute. We investigate the differences between them for prototype atomic mixtures and show that the distinction is important at energies above 100μK for LiYb and 3μK for RbYb and RbCs. For simple systems, both σ(1)η and σel follow universal energy dependence that depends only on the s-wave scattering length when expressed in reduced length and energy units.
Evaluating the effectiveness of a cross-disciplinary genre-focused writing intervention

In tertiary education settings it is imperative for students to move confidently between the academic discourses of a variety of disciplines. Thus, it is merited to aim writing interventions at genres that straddle disciplinary boundaries. Following a survey on preferred genres and text types at the University of Pretoria an essay-writing intervention for second-year undergraduate students was designed and developed. The effectiveness of the intervention was evaluated using a pretest-posttest design. On average the scores of the respondents improved by 7%. The largest improvement was on structure and development (15%), followed by the use of source materials (10%) and academic writing style (7%). An interpretation of the findings, combined with feedback from the respondents, suggested that extensive writing should be introduced soon after the commencement of an essay-writing intervention, and that a series of shorter teaching and learning cycles might be more effective than a single cycle. Furthermore, study units dealing with making and supporting claims might focus more strongly on learning from models than on explicit teaching of a variety of disciplinary conventions and preferences. Keywords: academic essay; academic writing, applied linguistics; cross-disciplinary; genre approach; language teaching
Kinetics of H Atom Addition to Cyclopentene

To provide benchmark information needed to develop kinetic models of the combustion and pyrolysis of hydrocarbon ring structures, we have used the single pulse shock tube technique to study the kinetics of H atom addition to cyclopentene at 863 K to 1167 K and pressures of 160 kPa to 370 kPa. Addition of H to the pi bond leads to the cyclopentyl radical, which rapidly decomposes to ethene and allyl radical. Rate constants for the overall process were determined relative to a reference reaction via post-shock GC/FID/MS monitoring of products. A Transition-StateTheory/Rice-Ramsberger-Kassel-Marcus (TST/RRKM) model has been applied in conjunction with evaluated literature data to convert the primary measurements to a high pressure limiting rate expression for H addition. Results are compared with related systems. Near 1000 K, our data require a minimum value of 1.5 for branching between beta C-C and C-H bond scission in cyclopentyl radicals to maintain established trends in H addition rates. This minimum is consistent with a branching value of about 3 that we determined in previous experiments, but conflicts with much smaller values derived by current computations and those used in recent kinetics models to describe jet-stirred reactor studies of cyclopentane combustion.
Seasonal occurrence and distribution of Bryde's whales in the Hauraki Gulf, New Zealand

The Hauraki Gulf is a large, shallow embayment located north of Auckland City (36°51′S, 174°46′E), New Zealand. Bryde's whales (Balaenoptera edeni) are the most frequently observed balaenopterid in these waters. To assess the use of the Hauraki Gulf for this species, we examined the occurrence and distribution in relation to environmental parameters. Data were collected from a platform of opportunity during 674 daily surveys between March 2003 and February 2006. A total of 760 observations of Bryde's whales were recorded throughout the study period during 371 surveys. The number of Bryde's whales sighted/day was highest in winter, coinciding with the coolest median sea-surface temperature (14.6°C). Bryde's whales were recorded throughout the Hauraki Gulf in water depths ranging from 12.1–59.8 m (mean = 42.3, SD = 5.1). Cow–calf pairs were most frequently observed during the austral autumn in water depths of 29.9–53.9 m (mean = 40.8, SD = 5.2). Data from this study suggest Bryde's whales in the Hauraki Gulf exhibit a mix of both “inshore” and “offshore” characteristics from the Bryde's whales examined off the coast of South Africa.
Significance of bacterivory and viral lysis in bottom waters of Franklin Bay, Canadian Arctic, during winter

Little information is currently available about water column microbial processes or mortality during Arctic winter. To address this paucity, we used epifluorescence microscopy and dilution experiments to determine the abundance of flagellates, bacteria and virus-like particles (VLP) and the rates of bacterial growth, bacterivory and virus-induced mortality in subzero-temperature bottom waters (≤ 230 m) of Franklin Bay during February and March 2004, when ice-covered surface waters were highly oligotrophic (maximum chlorophyll a value of 0.09 μg 1 -1 ). We focused on bottom waters due to the possible importance of sediment resuspension as a source of organic matter. While flagellates were present at low densities (1.5 to 3.1 x 10 2 ml -1 ), bacterial concentrations resembled those from other seasons in the region and increased over the 5 wk sampling period, from 1.4 × 10 5 to 3.0 x 10 5 ml -1 . VLPs were typically an order of magnitude more abundant than bacteria (range of 1.4 to 4.5 x 10 6 VLP ml -1 ) and, like the fraction of particle-associated bacteria (but not total bacteria), correlated with particulate organic carbon concentration (r s = 0.82, p < 0.04, n = 7). Grazing rates, whether measured in dilution experiments or calculated from flagellate abundance, were low or undetectable (maximum of -0.004 h -1 ). Of 3 parallel experiments, 2 yielded substantial virus-induced mortality (-0.006 to -0.015 h -1 ), comparable to or exceeding the intrinsic bacterial growth rate (0.010 h -1 in both experiments) and suggesting viruses were the more important agents of bacterial mortality under these conditions. Using a viral reduction approach, VLP production measured in the water column or ice-moored sediment traps was commonly low (0.3 to 7.7 x 10 4 VLP ml -1 h -1 ) or undetectable, highly variable among replicates and, when measurable, implied viral turnover times between 0.9 and 12 d. In general, our results show that, despite the oligotrophy of Arctic winter, bottom water bacterial communities can remain active and subject to viral predation.
Differential Subcellular Responses in Resistance Soybeans Infected with Soybean Cyst Nematode Races

Early nematode development and subcellular responses in resistant soybean lines PI 88788 and PI 437654 infected with races 3 (R3) and 14 (R14) of soybean cyst nematode (SCN), Heterodera glycines Ichinohe, were compared. SCN R14 nematodes penetrated and developed significantly more than R3 at 5-6 days after inoculation. Both races also penetrated and developed more in PI 88788 than in PI 437654. Syncytia, characterized by cell wall dissolution and cellular hypertrophy, were developed more in PI 88788 than in PI 437654 and more by R14 than R3, for which less necrotic responses occurred in the former than the latter. This suggests that the latter two may be more resistant and less virulent than the former two, respectively. A common structural feature found in each of PI 437654 and PI 88788 in relation to SCN-resistance was the formation of prominent cell wall appositions and nuclear degeneration prior to cytoplasmic degradation in syncytial cells, respectively. Necrosis and cell wall apposition are types of hypersensitive responses occurring at early stages of the nematode infection so that these structural modifications indicate the inhibition of initial syncytial development related to the early nematode development. As soybean cultivars and lines with identical or similar genotypes have the same types of structural features related to SCN-resistance, the structural modifications induced by SCN infection may result from the expression of inheritable resistance genes, of which the information can be used for breeding soybean cultivars and lines specifically resistant to SCN races.
Title Patient Empowerment Programme in primary care reduced all-cause mortality and cardiovascular diseases in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus : a population-based propensity-matched cohort study

Aims: To assess whether a structured diabetes education programme, Patient Empowerment Programme (PEP), was associated with a lower risk of first cardiovascular disease (CVD) event and all-cause mortality in a population-based cohort of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients in primary care. Methods and Methods: A Chinese cohort of 27,278 T2DM patients without prior occurrence of CVD events on or before baseline study recruitment date was linked to the Hong Kong administrative database from 2008 to 2013. PEP was provided to T2DM patients treated at primary care outpatient clinics through community trained professional educators. Non-PEP participants were matched one-to-one with the PEP participants using propensity score method with respect to their baseline covariates. Cox proportional hazard regressions were performed to estimate the associations of PEP with the occurrence of first CVD event, coronary heart disease, stroke, heart failure and death from any cause, controlling for baseline characteristics. Results: During a median of 21.5 months follow-up, 795 (352 PEP participants and 443 non-PEP participants) patients suffered a first CVD event. After adjusting for confounding variables, PEP participants had a lower incidence of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio: 0.564; 95%CI:0.445-0.715; P<0.001), first CVD (hazard ratio: 0.807; 95%CI:0.696-0.935; P=0.004) and stroke (hazard ratio: 0.702; 95%CI:0.569-0.867; P=0.001) events than those without PEP. Conclusions: Enrolment in PEP was associated with reduced all-cause mortality and first CVD events among T2DM patients. The CVD benefit of PEP might be attributable to improving metabolic control through empowerment of self-care and enhancement of quality of diabetes care in primary care. Word Count: 250
The Clinical Outcomes are Associated with Changes in the Ultrasonography Structural Appearance After Platelet-Rich Plasma Treatment for Knee Osteoarthritis

Background– Hyaluronic acid (HA) and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) are two treatment options used for knee osteoarthritis (KOA) but studies comparing the efficacy of the two yield conflicting results. In addition, the association of clinical outcomes of PRP intra-articular injections with changes in the ultrasonography structural appearance of the knee has not been investigated. Aim of the study– To compare the efficacy of PRP and HA intra-articular injections as monotherapeutic options for primary KOA, and to determine whether the clinical outcomes are associated with changes in the ultrasonography structural appearance. Subjects and methods– A randomized clinical trial was conducted on 89 patients with KOA. The patients were given either PRP (n=45) or HA (n=44) intra-articular injections. The patients received three injections in the knee, which was more symptomatic at baseline evaluation, with a 2-week interval between injections. The outcome measures included VAS-pain, international knee documentation committee score, and assessment of synovial hypertrophy, synovial vascularity and knee effusion using ultrasonography. Outcome measures were assessed at baseline and at 3and 6months post-injection. Results– While both PRP and HA injections resulted in the improvement of all outcome measures at 3and 6-months follow up, they were significantly better in the PRP group than in the HA group.