Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INTERACTIONS: IDENTIFICATION AND ESTIMATION

Economists typically use seasonally adjusted data in which the assumption is imposed that seasonality is uncorrelated with trend and cycle. The importance of this assumption has been highlighted by the Great Recession. The paper examines an unobserved components model that permits nonzero correlations between seasonal and nonseasonal shocks. Identification conditions for estimation of the parameters are discussed from the perspectives of both analytical and simulation results. Applications to UK household consumption expenditures and US employment reject the zero correlation restrictions and also show that the correlation assumptions imposed have important implications about the evolution of the trend and cycle in the post-Great Recession period.
Ascorbic Acid Metabolism and Polyol Pathway in Diabetes

It has been reported previously that the plasma concentration of ascorbic acid (AA) is reducedin streptozocin-induced diabetic rats and can be normalized by treatment with the aldose reductase inhibitor tolrestat. This study was designed to investigate further the relationship between the polyol pathway and AA metabolism in diabetic rats. Disturbance of AA metabolism was demonstrable after 1 wk of diabetes. Dietary myo-inositol supplementation was effective in normalizing plasma AA levels, as was treatment with tolrestat. In untreated diabetes, despite low plasma AA concentration, there was increased urinary excretion of AA that was reversed by treatment with either tolrestat or myoinositol. In contrast, AA supplementation normalized plasma AA concentrations while further increasing urinary AA excretion. The abnormality of AA metabolism was less severe in galactose-fed rats, which had normal plasma AA levels and only minor increases in urinary AA excretion. These studies demonstrated a disturbance in the regulation of plasma and urinary AA concentration in experimental diabetes and confirmed the relationship of AA with the polyol pathway. Because AA has many important biological functions, abnormalities of AA metabolism could be important in the pathogenesis of some diabetic complications. The interaction of the polyol and AA pathways suggests that this could be another site of action for aldose reductase inhibitors.
Assessing visitor satisfaction with tourism rejuvenation policies: the case of Rimini, Italy

This paper assesses the appeal of potential interventions on the tourism offer of Rimini, a popular Italian seaside holiday destination, by means of a choice modelling analysis. Tourism can be viewed as a composite good, its overall utility depending on the arrangement of the component characteristics. The discrete choice experiments here incorporate as attributes a number of possible changes to current tourist activities (the subject of public debate), including them in hypothetical alternative holiday packages. The conditional logit analysis indicates that tourists show lesser preference for interventions aimed at protecting the environmental integrity of the beach and greater preference for those, such as the creation of a pedestrianised seafront with late-night opening of amenities and facilities, that are likely to diminish the role of the traditional sea, sun and sand component of the overall holiday experience.
Characterization of imaging performance in differential phase contrast CT compared with the conventional CT--noise power spectrum NPS(k).

PURPOSE The differential phase contrast CT is emerging as a new technology to improve the contrast sensitivity of the conventional CT. Via system analysis, modeling, and computer simulation, the authors study the noise power spectrum (NPS)--an imaging performance indicator-of the differential phase contrast CT and compare it with that of the conventional CT. METHODS The differential phase contrast CT is implemented with x-ray tube and gratings. The x-ray propagation and data acquisition are modeled and simulated with Fourier analysis and Fresnel analysis. To avoid any interference caused by scatter and beam hardening, a monochromatic x-ray source (30 keV) is assumed, which irradiates the object to be imaged by 360 degrees so that no weighting scheme is needed. A 20-fold up-sampling is assumed to simulate x-ray beam's propagation through the gratings Gl and G2 with periods 8 and 4 microm, respectively, while the intergrating distance is 193.6 mm (1/16 of the Tabolt distance). The dimension of the detector cell for data acquisition ranges from 32 x 32 to 128 x 128 microm2, while the field of view in data acquisition is 40.96 x 40.96 mm2. A uniform water phantom with a diameter 37.68 mm is employed to study the NPS, with its complex refraction coefficient n = 1 - delta + ibeta = 1 - 2.5604 x 10(-7) + i1.2353 x 10(-10). The x-ray flux ranges from 10(6) to 10(8) photon/cm2.projection and observes the Poisson distribution, which is consistent with that of micro-CT in preclinical applications. The image matrix of reconstructed water phantom is 1280 x 1280, and a total of 180 regions at 128 x 128 matrix are used for NPS calculation via 2D Fourier Transform in which adequate zero padding is applied to avoid aliasing. RESULTS The preliminary data show that the differential phase contrast CT manifests its NPS with a l/|k| trait, while the distribution of the conventional CTs NPS observes |k|. This accounts for the significant difference in their noise granularity and the differential phase contrast CTs substantial advantage in noise over the conventional CT, particularly, in the situations where the detector cell size for data acquisition is smaller than 100 microm. CONCLUSIONS The differential phase contrast CT detects the projection of refractive coefficient's derivative and uses the Hilbert filter for image reconstruction, which leads to the radical difference in its NPS and the advantage in noise in comparison to that of the conventional CT.
Affirmative dimensions of applied ethics

Gilles Lipovetsky claims that the phrase “age of minimalism” is better suited to the postmodern society than “the society of generalised permissiveness”. The postmodern society is a post-moralist one, at the twilight of duty. Transmodern (“hypermodern” in Lipovetsky’s reading) ethics establishes moral norms based on liberal and pragmatic principles. The preferred focus is on the value of positivism, of cooperation as a source of efficiency, of personal enrichment – be it cultural, spiritual or moral – derived from the access to alterity. Tolerance as an ethical value is legitimised by a utilitarian humanism. The fundamental change proposed by Tel Franklin’s appreciative therapy consists of shifting attention from illness as a state of disorder of the living system to that of implicit order, called “perfect health”. We can view the counselling process as congruence between solving the problems of the human ego and facilitating the functionality of the social networks and systems the individuals is a part of. It is precisely at the level of the functionality of social systems that we can identify the reference space of the affirmative-appreciative counselling. The particularity of this approach is the replacement of the focus on problems with the focus on the individual’s positive experience, on the strategies for “managing one’s own existence” that the subject has successfully applied.
The Impact of External Shocks on Small Open Economies: Evidence from East Asian Countries

In this paper, we investigate whether external shocks originating from the global economy as well as from the U.S. played an important role in macroeconomic fluctuations of East Asian countries during the period 2001-2012. We further check if these shocks lead to asymmetric or symmetric reactions between the considered countries. Using a structural VAR model for 7 East Asian countries, we find that oil prices and U.S. monetary shocks are more important to the variance of domestic variables than U.S. output shocks. Additionally, impulse responses of domestic variables are highly symmetric when these external shocks occur.
Molecular Mechanisms Underlying the Arabidopsis Circadian Clock

A wide range of biological processes exhibit circadian rhythm, enabling plants to adapt to the environmental day–night cycle. This rhythm is generated by the so-called ‘circadian clock’. Although a number of genetic approaches have identified >25 clock-associated genes involved in the Arabidopsis clock mechanism, the molecular functions of a large part of these genes are not known. Recent comprehensive studies have revealed the molecular functions of several key clock-associated proteins. This progress has provided mechanistic insights into how key clock-associated proteins are integrated, and may help in understanding the essence of the clock's molecular mechanisms.
On the Embeddability of Delaunay Triangulations in Anisotropic, Normed, and Bregman Spaces

Given a two-dimensional space endowed with a divergence function that is convex in the first argument, continuously differentiable in the second, and satisfies suitable regularity conditions at Voronoi vertices, we show that orphan-freedom (the absence of disconnected Voronoi regions) is sufficient to ensure that Voronoi edges and vertices are also connected, and that the dual is a simple planar graph. We then prove that the straight-edge dual of an orphan-free Voronoi diagram (with sites as the first argument of the divergence) is always an embedded triangulation. Among the divergences covered by our proofs are Bregman divergences, anisotropic divergences, as well as all distances derived from strictly convex $\mathcal{C}^1$ norms (including the $L_p$ norms with $1< p < \infty$). While Bregman diagrams of the {first kind} are simply affine diagrams, and their duals ({weighted} Delaunay triangulations) are always embedded, we show that duals of orphan-free Bregman diagrams of the \emph{second kind} are always embedded.
AniME : Automatically Generating Anime Portraits

The popularity of anime (Japanese animated productions) has transcended cultural boundaries, resulting in high volumes of fan works such as personalized avatars. However, drawing aesthetically pleasing anime is a craft that takes a long time to develop. AniME (pronounced ani-mee) is a pipeline which integrates computer vision, computational photography, and data-driven frameworks to automatically generate an animestyle portrait from a user given photo. Our approach renders the corresponding lineart using landmark facial annotations, while features such as eye shape and hairstyle are obtained via template matching to a hand-drawn library of anime eyes and hairstyles. Finally, colors of the anime portraiture are determined through simple averaging and clustering of selected image patches. We validate our tool using photos of people of varying genders, ethnicity, and hair styles.
Interference-aware Fair Bandwidth Demand Allocation and Routing in Wireless Mesh Network

In this paper, we consider the problems of routing, end-to-end bandwidth demand allocation and throughput maximization for multi-channel multi-hop wireless mesh network. We assume the end-to-end bandwidth demands of multi-commodity (a set of source-destination pairs) are satisfied by a set of flows in the network. With that objective, we show that routing and end-to-end bandwidth allocation can be formulated under the interference and the well-known maxmin fairness model constrains, where the throughput of commodities is to be improved. We propose two alternative algorithms to solve variants of this problem and we use the numerical results to show the fairness enhancement and throughput improvement after applying our algorithms.
New players in haemostasis and thrombosis

Summary The blood coagulation cascade is essential for haemostasis, but excessive activation can cause thrombosis. Importantly, recent studies have identified factors that contribute to thrombosis but not haemostasis. These include factor XII (FXII), tissue factor-positive microparticles (MPs) and neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). Studies have shown that FXII plays a role in thrombosis but not haemostasis. FXII is activated in vivo by a variety of negatively-charged polyphosphates, which include extracellular RNA, DNA and inorganic polyphosphate (PolyP) that are released during cell damage and infection. These findings have led to the development of nucleic acid-binding polymers as a new class of anticoagulant drug. Other studies have analysed the role of MPs in experimental thrombosis. MPs are small membrane vesicles released from activated or apoptotic cells. We and others have found that tissue factor-positive MPs enhance thrombosis in mouse models and are elevated in the plasma of pancreatic cancer patients. Finally, NETs have been shown to contribute to experimental venous thrombosis in mouse models and are present in human thrombi. NETs are composed of chromatin fibers that are released from neutrophils undergoing cell death. NETs can capture platelets and increase fibrin deposition. The recent advances in our understanding of the factors contributing to thrombosis in animal models provide new opportunities for the development of safer anticoagulant drugs.
Estimation of camera pose using 2D-3D occluded corner correspondence

In this paper, we investigate how camera pose can be estimated from 2D to 3D corner correspondence when vertex of the corner is occluded. We show that the image coordinate of the occluded vertex can be easily estimated from the image edge lines by an analytical method. Then the camera pose parameters can be recovered from 2D to 3D correspondences of the corner and a nonsingular point on it over a single view. A ground truth comparison is made by experiments using controlled scenes, which shows that the method is promising.
A Multi-Criteria QoS-aware Trust Service Composition Algorithm in Cloud Computing Environments

In an open and dynamic cloud computing environment, the randomness of cloud services with unreliable quality leads to low accuracy in service composition. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a global trust service composition approach based on random QoS and trust evaluation, considering the multi-criteria assessment of service quality. Firstly, statistical test is employed to remove the uncertain outliers and to estimate the ideal value of the collected objective QoS data. Secondly, subjective QoS evaluations of providers and users are aggregated according to direct trust and recommended trust. Finally, services are composed through global QoS optimization. Experiments for each stage show that the approach improves the accuracy and precision of service composition.
An Analysis of Islamic Banking Performance: Maqashid Index Implementation in Indonesia and Jordania

The discourse on the presence of Islamic banking in the global era went broadly and extensively. It is because the society has begun realizing the existence of Islamic banking. Islamic banking does able to show its resilience and endurance facing the global financial crisis. A part from its positive growth, there exist a critical issue related to it performance measurement. For the time being, the performance measurement of Islamic banking industries merely uses the financial ratio measurement (shareholder oriented). Indeed, this financial ratio measurement is necessary but unfortunately not sufficient. Therefore, Islamic banking that is different from conventional banking both in theory and practice, needs a shifting paradigm in term of their performance measurement which not only limited to the financial ratios (stakeholders oriented). This paper would like to apply Maqashid Index approach for the measurement of Islamic banking industry performance. The object of this research is Islamic banking industries in Indonesia (Bank Syariah Mandiri and Bank Muamalat Indonesia) and Jordan (Jordan Islamic Bank and Islamic International Arab Bank Jordan)). Using Maqashid Index approach with SAW (Simple Additive The weighting) method, it can be concluded from the first measurement using Maqashid Index that Islamic banking industries in Indonesia which represented by BMI (0.17839) and BSM (0.16190) show better performance in comparison with Islamic banking industries in Jordan, namely IIABJ (0.10295) and JIB (0.08152).
Varied EMG responses of the quadriceps muscle during a Wingate anaerobic test

Introduction: The Wingate Test (WAnT) has been used to evaluate anaerobic performance in cycle ergometer. Objective: The purpose of the present study was to analyze the EMG response of the superficial quadriceps femoris muscles during the Wingate anaerobic test (WAnT). In addition, we investigated the influence of these muscles in performance and fatigue during the WAnT. Methods: For this purpose eight male cyclists performed a 30-s WAnT. Electromyographic amplitude (RMS) and median power frequency (MPF) data of the vastus lateralis (VL), vastus medialis (VM), and rectus femoris (RF) muscles, performance index (mean power, MP) and rate of fatigue (fatigue index, FI) were recorded during the test; and compared along six time points. The correlation between EMG data and performance parameters were made. Results: No significant differences were found in maximal EMG amplitude for all the muscles. The MPF of the VL and VM muscles decreased throughout the test (12% and 13%, respectively), however, the decline for the RF was twice greater (25%). Correlation among MP and EMG amplitude was observed only for VL (r=0.83; P<0.01). There was significant correlation between the FI and the MPF decrease in the RF muscle only (r=0.78; P<0.05). Conclusion: During the WAnT, MPF decrease of RF muscle was significantly larger when compared to the VL and VM. The VL muscle electrical activity was positively correlated with MP, suggesting that VL is an accurate predictor of the performance in the WAnT. The MPF decrease of the RF muscle was positively correlated to the FI. These results may be explained by differences in the fiber type composition, biomechanics and architecture properties of these muscles. Keyword: Wingate anaerobic test, Electromyography, Quadriceps Muscle, Fatigue, Neuromuscular. Corresponding author: Cássia Lopes Teodoro. Faculdade de Educação Física – FEF/DCE, Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP. Caixa Postal 6134. 13.083-970 – Campinas – São Paulo – Brasil. E-mail: cassiars@gmail.com 1 Faculdade de Educação Física, Universidade Estadual de Campinas UNICAMP, Campinas/SP, Brasil. Full list of author information is available at the end of the article. Financial support: nothing to declare submission date 01 February 2017; acceptance date 30 March 2017; Publication date 12 June 2017 http://dx.doi. org/10.17784/mtprehabjournal.2017. 15.458
Clustering based simulated annealing for standard cell placement

The authors present a novel technique for reducing the effective problem size for simulated annealing without compromising the solution quality. They form clusters of cells based on their interconnections, and place them first using conventional simulated annealing. They then break up the clusters, and place the individual cells using another simulated annealing process that does a refinement on the placement. The original problem is thus divided into two subproblems, each requiring much less time. The results of this two-stage simulated annealing have been superior to those with a conventional simulated annealing implementation, with more significant improvements observed for larger chips. For chips with more than 2500 cells, the authors report a factor-of-two-to-three speed-up in CPU time, together with a 6-to-17% improvement in the estimated wire length. <<ETX>>
Chapter 6 Automatic Labeling Affective Scenes in Spoken Conversations

Research in affective computing has mainly focused on analyzing human emotional states as perceivable within limited contexts such as speech utterances. In our study, we focus on the dynamic transitions of the emotional states that are appearing throughout the conversations and investigate computational models to automatically label emotional states using the proposed affective scene framework. An affective scene includes a complete sequence of emotional states in a conversation from its start to its end.Affective scene instances includedifferent patterns of behavior such as who manifests an emotional state, when it is manifested, and which kinds of changes occur due to the influence of one’s emotion onto another interlocutor. In this paper,wepresent the design and trainingof an automatic affective scene segmentation and classification system for spoken conversations. We comparatively evaluate the contributions of different feature types in the acoustic, lexical and psycholinguistic space and their correlations and combination. F. Alam (B) · M. Danieli · G. Riccardi Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: firoj.alam@unitn.it; firoj.alam@alumni.unitn.it M. Danieli e-mail: morena.danieli@unitn.it G. Riccardi e-mail: giuseppe.riccardi@unitn.it © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 R. Klempous et al. (eds.), Cognitive Infocommunications, Theory and Applications, Topics in Intelligent Engineering and Informatics 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95996-2_6 109 giuseppe.riccardi@unitn.it
Long-term outcome of staged versus one-stage bilateral thoracoscopic reduction pneumoplasty q

Objective : In a prospective non-randomized study, we tested the hypothesis that unilateral reduction pneumoplasty followed by completion of bilateral treatment at the reappearance of symptoms might result in more sustained improvements and better survival than one-stage bilateral treatment. Method : Fifty-nine patients undergoing bilateral thoracoscopic reduction pneumoplasty as a one-stage ( n ¼ 33) or staged ( n ¼ 26) procedure were evaluated on. The main indication for staged reduction pneumoplasty was symptom deterioration after unilateral treatment for asymmetric emphysema. Complete clinical assessment was carried out preoperatively and every 6 months postoperatively. Results : The mean length of follow-up was 34 ^ 15 months. Interval time between operations in the staged group averaged 15.2 months. There was no inter-group difference in baseline data. Peak improvements in forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV 1 ), forced vital capacity (FVC) and residual volume (RV) was signiﬁcantly greater following one-stage bilateral reduction pneumoplasty. In particular, D FEV 1 was 0.33 ^ 0.2 l in the staged group and 0.43 ^ 0.2 l in the one-stage group ( P ¼ 0 : 007). At 48 months, FEV 1 , RV and 6-min-walking-test (6MWT) were still signiﬁcantly improved only in the staged group. Four-year survival was 70% in the staged group and 81% in the one-stage group (Cox–Mantel test, P ¼ not signiﬁcant). Conclusion : Durable physiological improvements and satisfactory survival were achieved in this study for up to 4 years following either staged or one-stage bilateral reduction pneumoplasty using thoracoscopic technique. However, while peak improvements in FEV 1 , FVC and RV were signiﬁcantly greater following one-stage bilateral reduction, long-term improvements in FVC and 6MWT were more stable following a staged procedure. We speculate that sequential unilateral reduction pneumoplasty may reduce the mechanical stress in the lung leading to less steep postoperative deterioration of respiratory function. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Limitation and Challenges- Image/Video Search & Retrieval

With the rapid development and advancement in media enable devices and new application digital libraries, news, entertainment etc have emerge a grand challenge that, there is a need for a technique and a framework that can store, manage, search and retrieve the data from the media archive in order to cope with this demand, the researchers are continuously thinking for an effective and efficient multimedia management framework